Words Are My Matter

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by Ursula K. Le Guin


  Colin has become a brilliant astrophysicist, ornithologist, and all-round savant with five or six master’s degrees, as well as being an outstanding cook, carpenter, and social misfit. He has total recall of everything that has happened to him since the age of thirteen, but has lost all memory of the years before that, along with his sister and his intrepidity. The almost phlegmatically fearless child has become an anguished, supersensitive, self-absorbed man whose incoherent obsessions are driving him mad.

  Colin’s search for his sister and his sanity are a true Quest, for the well-being of the world is also at stake. Descendant of men who danced and sang on Alderly Edge to keep the stars in their courses and bring the sun back from winter death, Colin is a shaman, heir of the shamans of the Ice Age and ages long before. He needs to find his own balance because his job is to keep the balance of the world. The rocks and caves of a reef of Triassic sandstone in Cheshire are the axis of the balance, the navel of the universe, the center that must hold.

  That center, of course, is also in a cave in Delphi, on an island in the Klamath River of California, in a thousand places on earth, and in the Earth itself as revealed to the astronaut Rusty Schweickart on a walk in space—wherever human beings feel the depth of their connection to the world and take it as a sacred responsibility.

  Yet this universal connection is felt as deeply local. This place is the sacred place. More mythmaker than fantasist, Alan Garner names his chosen, actual landscape minutely, feature by feature, stone by stone, relishing the old place names and the grand vocabulary of geology, weaving the words into a litany of confirmation, the endless repetition that keeps the end from coming, the rhythmic dance on the world’s edge that maintains the world. Alderly Edge is the scene of a timeless ritual that must be reenacted over and over by ignorant and ephemeral mortals. Personal tragedy and redemption are subsumed in the cosmic vision.

  No wonder that the people of his story are less characters than masks, types, archetypes. But as imaginative literature reclaims the territories forbidden it by modernist realism, and moves back from Elfland towards the outskirts of Manchester, it treads on dangerous ground. Readers looking for more than mere adventure expect characters whose behavior and reactions are humanly comprehensible. The child twins Colin and Susan were semi-characterless actors in a fantasy tale. The man Colin is both a severely disturbed radio astronomer and the man chosen from his generation to “look after the Edge”—and how to reconcile these roles in a character in a modern novel? How are the psychic sufferings of a man so anachronistically fated and so emotionally crippled to be made comprehensible?

  The author’s success hinges partly on his division of the character into two—the twenty-first-century scientist Colin and an unnamed Stone Age ancestor. But in the end, his success must depend on the reader’s willingness to be teased through an imaginative labyrinth by allusions, hints, puzzles, and tricks such as unascribed dialogue and undescribed location. The process of Colin’s healing, the stages of therapy, the un-nesting of image within image, is fascinating, but the narration demands that the reader let the author manipulate and control, just as Colin is manipulated by the analyst.

  And she in the end appears to have been a witch or goddess, who disappears in a puff of smoke. In a serious novel, this is risky business.

  Alan Garner can count on the trust and admiration of his readers to see him through it. My trust and admiration, though great, weren’t always sufficient. No rereading has yet given me a clue to the meaning of the first eight lines of Boneland. Well, I’ll get it, one of these days. Is the all-wise, wisecracking, motorcycle-riding psychoanalyst the Witch-Crone or the Moon Mother? Is Susan one of the Pleiades? Well, OK. Is truth, as Garner would have it, not attainable through knowledge, only through belief? Well, maybe.

  Where all the teases and all the risks pay off, for me, is in the shadow story of the man who “looked after the Edge” so long ago, the solitary artist-shaman of the Ice Age. These sections of the book are told in a charged, elliptical, symbolic, highly concrete language: “He cut the veil of the rock; the hooves clattered the bellowing waters below him in the dark. The lamp brought the moon from the blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.”

  You figure out what it’s all about gradually as you go along. It’s not mere puzzle-solving; as with reading poetry, learning another language, learning to see and think differently, the demands and rewards are intense and real. It is this element of the book, in which the obsessions come into focus and a true balance is glimpsed, that will bring me back to Boneland, knowing I’ll find there what no other novelist has ever given us.

  Kent Haruf: Benediction

  2014

  The Colorado of the mind, and the posters, is all peaks and picturesque ski lodges. But if you ever drive into Colorado from the east, you may begin to wonder where they keep the Rockies. The slope of the plains rises imperceptibly, immense, monotonous, with an ugly little town now and then. The American West goes beyond all picturesqueness, and its sublimity is not superficial.

  One of those ugly little towns, Holt, was invented by the novelist Kent Haruf. Readers of his three novels Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction know the place now, street by street, citizen by citizen. I find that Haruf’s characters, like Pierre and Natasha or Huck Finn, inhabit my mind permanently; they’re people I think about. Their conversation is dry and plain, with an easy Western cadence, and the author’s narration is the same. The absence of quotation marks around speech gently emphasizes this continuity. It is a restrained voice, a quiet music.

  The passions of the people of Holt, many of them loners by nature, subject to the repressive conventionality of small-town America and all the restraints of poverty, ignorance, and relentless hard work, break through sometimes in violence, sometimes in acts or attempted acts of outreaching compassion. The violence is common in novels at present, the compassion less so. Haruf handles human relationships with fierce, reticent delicacy, exploring rage, fidelity, pity, honor, timidity, the sense of obligation; he deals with complex, barely stated moral issues, pushing perhaps towards an unspoken mysticism. Occasionally he risks sentimentality, and once or twice, I think, falls into it, but in the Holt novels as a whole, his courage and achievement in exploring ordinary forms of love—the enduring frustration, the long cost of loyalty, the comfort of daily affection—are unsurpassed by anything I know in contemporary fiction.

  Benediction is best read as what it is, the third of three novels linked by some recurrence of characters but chiefly by the extraordinary presence of the town and its countryside, built up incrementally, detail by detail, in each book. They are three different stories, but they have cumulative power. The story of Benediction, like its title, suggests closure. But life in Holt is going to go right on, for the sense of continuity in time is as strong as the sense of location in place.

  The earlier books supplied vivid action and some more conventionally “Western” doings, such as a scene in Eventide of moving range bulls out of a corral. That scene, ending in the death of an old man, carries a shock like the last sentence of the Waterloo chapter in Vanity Fair. Benediction is quieter; in it, too, an old man dies, but it’s a long-drawn-out death, and Dad Lewis isn’t a cattle rancher, just a shopkeeper. He owns the hardware store in Holt. He’s not likable, not very interesting—a narrow, grouchy old guy dying of cancer.

  Memoirs and fictions relating the relentless course of a disease or a dementia are legion these days, and the dismal familiarities are all here; but Dad Lewis’s dying reveals not only the banality and humility of physical suffering, but an unusually open, daylight approach to mystery, and a humor so dry it’s almost ether.

  There’s unfinished business on Dad’s conscience. His ghosts—his dead parents, his lost son—come and sit on wooden chairs by his bed and talk with him. They’re all just as ornery as he is. His father, an old hardscrabble Kansas farmer, says to him,

  Well, you sure got you a real fine nice big house here. You
done all right that way, didn’t you. This is a real nice big pleasing satisfying house you got here.

  I worked for it, Dad said.

  Well sure. Of course. I know, the old man said. Had some luck too, I believe.

  I had some luck. But I worked hard. I earned it.

  Yeah. Sure. Most people work hard. It’s not only that now, is it. You had you some luck.

  Goddamn it, I had some luck too, Dad said, but I earned the luck.

  His bitter, inconclusive conversations with his son—who may or may not be dead, Dad doesn’t know, though he refuses the possibility—reveal the all too ordinary tragedy of their relationship: inexpressible love, unattainable forgiveness. Dad Lewis wrestles with his ghosts as Jacob with the angel, trying grimly, vainly, not to let them go until they bless him.

  The narrative circles out from and back to this central figure, weaving a complex, rich texture of sub-stories, personalities, generations. Haruf writes about girls and women with tenderness and without idealisation, as individuals. He has an unjudgmental sympathy with the agonies of adolescence, and an unblinking eye for coarseness and hypocrisy. His skill at showing affectionate nonsexual relationships, and at describing the relation of parents and children from the point of view of both, is as uncommon as it is welcome.

  Haruf is in fact a stunningly original writer in a great many ways. The quality of his originality goes right under the radar of much conventional criticism. He doesn’t posture or raise his voice. He talks quietly, intimately, yet with reserve, as one adult to another. He’s careful to get the story right. And it is right, it’s just right; it rings true.

  Kent Haruf: Our Souls at Night

  2016

  Writing about the everyday is a tough job. The extraordinary, the thrilling, the transgressive provide automatic glamor, but it takes a brave author to try to describe lives that are so commonplace as not even to be extraordinarily unhappy. And happiness—not sexual satisfaction, not reward of ambition, not ecstasy, not bliss, just day-to-day happiness—has practically vanished from fiction. That may be because we distrust it, seeing it as sentimentality, confusing the real thing with the fake. Indeed, it’s not easy to write about. To ring true, description of even the humblest kind of fulfillment and contentment must be written in awareness of human inadequacy and cruelty and the always imminent possibility of illness, ruin, death. One false word can make it all incredible.

  I don’t think there’s a false word in Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night. Nor, for all the colloquial ease and transparency of the prose and the apparent simplicity of the story, is there a glib word, or a predictable one.

  Ordinarily the circumstances of the writing of a novel aren’t of much interest to me as a reader, but in this case, I am moved, even awed, to consider that the book was written while the author was dying. It is a report from the far edge of life, the edge of darkness, made in the consciousness of responsibility. Haruf is bearing witness. Having gone farther than we have, he wants to tell us what matters there. His knowledge of his situation, and my knowledge of it as I read the book, made me appreciate the rare privilege of being with a person who is past the need to say anything but what needs to be said.

  The voice is quiet. All the darkness is there, but we’re looking at the light. A lamp in a bedroom in a small town in Colorado.

  ——

  Haruf’s novels are all set in that small town, Holt. The first two were fairly conventional. In the third, Plainsong, he found his own voice: profoundly American in its cadences, Western American in its unexpected drollnesses and its calm, dry reticence. Plainsong and the novels that followed it are, like Willa Cather’s, eloquent of the lonesomeness of that vast country, the paradoxical constriction of people’s lives there, and the fragility. Violence, never gloated over as a spectacle, is brief, inevitable, and shocking. Children are always among the characters, drawn with extraordinary realism, compassion, and intensity. The young people are restless, nervy, unguided. Older men do their jobs and keep their defenses up. Women generally keep things running, though now and then one goes to pieces or suddenly runs off to Denver. But there is joy also, hard joy—the pleasure of risk, the pleasure of responsibility. Among these people tenderness is sheltered, cherished like a seedling tree as it slowly puts down deep roots to reach the water.

  Holt is a long way from New York, farther perhaps than London or Prague. To many Eastern Americans, Western America means only cactus and Hollywood, a film set for Westerns, not for literature. Haruf’s fidelity to the glamorless and untrendy Holt may have played into the parochialism of urban critics to keep his thoughtful, subtle, skillful work from the attention it deserves. Perhaps he didn’t mind. Not playing the hunger games of success, not undergoing the mechanical hoopla of the PR celebrity factories, he could go on stubbornly being Kent Haruf, doing his job, keeping his defenses up. He could go on writing about how hard it is to go on doing what you see as right when you aren’t sure how to do it, or even whether it’s right—how hard we are on one another and ourselves, how hard most of us work, how much we long for and how little we mostly settle for.

  This is all solid, satisfying novel stuff, and in this last book something very rare has been added to it. Many novels have been about the pursuit of happiness, but this one is luminous with its actual presence.

  “And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.” So the story begins. Addie, a widow, has come to ask her widower neighbor if he’d consider coming over to her house sometimes to sleep with her.

  “What?” says Louis, naturally a bit taken aback. “How do you mean?” And she says, “I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.”

  So the light comes on in the bedroom on Cedar Street, in Holt, Colorado. And a happiness is very cautiously, courageously, tenderly achieved. Not, however, in the way we might expect, but on quite complex terms, involving quite a few of the other citizens of Holt. Perhaps happiness is less predictable than misery, since it partakes of freedom. Like freedom, also, it’s never secure; it can’t be forever. But it can be real, and in this beautiful novel, we can share it.

  Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver

  2009

  After the enduring and international success of her Moomintroll fantasies, the Finnish author-artist Tove Jansson, in her sixties, began to write realistic adult fiction. It has taken a while for these books to get much attention outside Scandinavia. On the patronising assumption that books for children are nice—i.e., morally bland and stylistically infantile—critics, reviewers, and prize juries often dismiss those who write them as incapable of writing seriously for adults, a prejudice which, transferred to painting, not incidentally plays a part in the plot of The True Deceiver.

  Anyone familiar with any of Tove Jansson’s works knows it would be unwise to dismiss or patronise her work on any grounds. Her books for children are complex, subtle, psychologically tricky, funny, and unnerving; their morality, though never compromised, is never simple. Thus her transition to adult fiction involved no great change. Her everyday Finns are quite as strange as trolls, and her Finnish village in winter is as beautiful and dangerous as any forest of fantasy.

  If a transformation has taken place, it is in the nature of her writing. The language is more than ever lean, taut, minimalist. These adjectives, however, describe a good deal of modern narrative prose—the modishly anorectic style, well suited to thrillers, police procedurals, and the existential noir, but very limited in range. Jansson’s range, though effortlessly controlled, is great. Her spare exactness can express not only tension and stress but deeply felt emotion, expansion, relaxation, and peace. Her description is unhurried, accurate, and vivid, an artist’s vision. Her style is not at all “poetic,” quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order. It is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promis
ed treasures. The sentences are beautiful in structure, movement, and cadence. They have inevitable rightness. And this is a translation! Thomas Teal deserves to have his name on the title page with Tove Jansson’s. He has pulled off the true translator’s miracle.

  I wish I could quote whole pages; a paragraph must do:

  If it got really cold, it didn’t make sense to go on working. The shed wasn’t insulated, and the stove was barely able to warm it enough to keep their hands from stiffening. They locked it up and went home. But on the seaward side where the boats were launched, the doors had a latch that was easy to open. Mats would go out on the ice with his cod hook and when no one was in sight he’d go into the boat shed. Sometimes he’d go on with his work, usually details so trivial that no one noticed they’d been done. But most times he just sat quietly in the peaceful snowlight. He never felt cold.

  The main characters are Anna Aemalin, a successful illustrator of children’s books, and Katri, whose only love and ambition is for the younger brother left in her care, Mats, a shy, slow, gentle fellow. Then there are honest Liljeberg the boat-builder, the wise Madame Nygard, the malicious storekeeper, a little horde of village children, and Katri’s dog. Nameless, silent, and yellow-eyed, the dog is yellow-eyed Katri’s creature. And she flatters herself on her own wolfish superiority to other people: “My dog and I despise them. We’re hidden in our own secret life, concealed in our innermost wildness.”

  No one in the village seems to be married, and the relationship that will form between the two solitary women, Katri and Anna, is not sexual, though it is intensely passionate, fiercely unstable, destructive, and transformative.

 

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