Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  At the age of twenty-four, I moved to southwestern Vermont. There, teaching at Bennington College, I fell under the spell of the landscape and dreamed a deep-rooted dream. Instead of change, I came to value constancy; instead of geographical variety, I wanted to write about those who stay put. Staring up at the Green Mountains, I grew vegetables and a beard, learned to ski and rototill, and began to think myself, if not a native, at least sufficiently immersed in it to focus on New England. I still can remember, and clearly, the day I decided to try.

  It was 1975. I had joined the faculty of Bennington in 1966 and would remain there for ten further years. My wife and I were living in a farmhouse on the grounds of the Park-McCullough house, a large and imposing Victorian structure in the village of North Bennington. I walked the trails and meadows daily and knew the property well. At a certain point on one of those walks—a fork in the road in a wood, as it happens, with a gate overlooking a pasture—I understood this was the place I had come to call home, not Greece or France or London or New York or Timbuktu. I can remember telling myself there was no point pretending otherwise; I was an American writer and needed to set a book here. Before all else, therefore, I knew my novel’s location; it came prior to the story line or characters or any conflict between them. And since I knew the owner of the Park-McCullough mansion, I asked his permission to use the locale.

  He gave it. His family had been retentive; they kept laundry lists and letters and records of business transactions from the nineteenth century, and he provided me with access to an attic full of documents. There were thousands of pages in boxes; I read and read. At some point in that process, however, I came to understand that these figures from the distant and the recent past failed to fire my imagination; they seemed—not to put too fine a point upon it—dull. To the degree that this is an historical novel (as in the letters of Peacock Sherbrooke, his daughter, and his grandson), that early research may have left its residue, but the generations of my family are each and all invented. So I began with two imperatives: use the landscape of southwestern Vermont, and people it with people who have been made up.

  Here is how I put it in a prefatory note to the first of the volumes, Possession:

  The author wishes to thank John G. McCullough for his generosity in making available the files of the Park-McCullough House. The location of this novel more or less accurately describes the locus of that house—but I wish to make it clear that the characters within it are wholly invented, not real. It would be a poor return for kindness indeed if any reader were to confuse my imaginary Sherbrooke tribe with the residents of the Governor McCullough Mansion, present or past.

  I would like, in the pages that follow, to provide a kind of gloss on what I believed I was doing and what I believe I have done. The Sherbrookes trilogy (Possession, 1977; Sherbrookes, 1978; Stillness, 1980) was a major project for me and, though I’d published seven previous books, felt like the end of a learning curve. When the third of those three texts was done I’d cut my eyeteeth as a novelist and was no longer a beginner. It’s simple truth, not boastful, to say those books were widely reviewed and well received; by 1980 I could fairly claim to have finished my apprenticeship and entered in the guild. Yet more or less coeval with completion of the trilogy, I lost my bearings in the longer form and would not publish a novel again for fifteen years. I kept my hand in, as it were, and wrote short stories and non-fiction, but the well of the novel went dry.

  So the opportunity to reconsider these old efforts is a welcome one. For openers, I’m now much closer in age to the seventy-six-year-old Judah Sherbrooke, the protagonist of Possession, than to the age of the writer who invented him; from my present vantage it has been astonishing to see how much I knew then and how much I failed to know. The British boy who impersonated a Greco-American and resident of Southern France next borrowed the garb of Yankee settlers and the accents of New England. But what was I up to, and why?

  When John O’Brien (the publisher of Dalkey Archive Press) kindly offered to bring the trilogy back to print-life, there was a choice to make. Most authors, including this one earlier, are glad for the chance to reissue old texts and leave well enough alone. At worst, the errors of juvenilia are simply that; one fixes a comma or adds a footnote and the book exists anew. It’s a record of a time and place, not something one should tamper with. Painters and composers often revisit their previous work and offer, as it were, variations on a theme. Some authors—famously Henry James in the New York Edition of 1909 or, more recently, Peter Matthiessen in his rewritten trilogy—do undertake a full-fledged overhaul of what they wrote before. But the majority of writers seem content to say, Here. What’s done is done.

  In my case, however, the three books were one, and I had conceived them as such. The structure of Possession, for example, mirrors that of Stillness—with Sherbrookes as a kind of second movement and pastoral interlude. The first and third book’s actions transpire in a single day; the second deals with gestation and plays out over months. The seventy-six-year-old Judah whom we meet on page one has his birth attested to by a doting father at the end of Book Three. All along I’d hoped to publish them as a single volume, or a kind of triptych, and when invited to do so it seemed the right way to proceed.

  Yet certain issues if not problems came immediately clear. First, volumes two and three contained passages of recapitulation—in order tell a new reader what happened in previous texts. (Judah dies in the interstices of Possession and its sequel, Sherbrookes; his sister Harriet drowns herself at the end of the second installment; and the reader of the third book, Stillness, would have to be aware of this. Secondary characters such as Samson Finney and Lucy Gregory make what seems like a debut appearance in Stillness, but have in fact been introduced some hundreds of pages before.) These repetitions felt redundant and could be edited out. This I did. But once I began with red pencil and scissors I found it hard to cease cutting; the entire text—sentence by sentence and paragraph by page—could be, it seemed to me, pruned. In the aggregate I cut roughly seven percent of the whole: nearly ten percent of Possession and less of the subsequent two installments. The book now comprises some 200,000 words—a long novel by any reckoning but not, I hope, bloated.

  The simplest way to put it is this: I changed nothing important in Sherbrookes—retaining the second book’s title as the title of all three. I added nothing of note. The characters and conflict and action and tone stay the same. The thematic matter (of which more later) is constant, as is the order of scenes. But no single page of prose escaped my editorial intervention; I’d written the sentences long ago and could rewrite them now. Why not, I asked myself, improve what needed improving; why leave a phrase intact when it could be with profit rephrased? The good news is—or so I told myself—that I’m a better writer now than when I started Possession. The bad news is the same. The youthful exuberance of Delbanco’s prose troubled the older Delbanco, who has learned to admire restraint. Someday perhaps some scrupulous someone may compare the trilogy with this single volume, but at the present moment I’m the “sole proprietor” of the territory of Sherbrookes and can alter its property lines.

  A few examples may suffice of what and how I revised. I bowdlerized the text a little and simplified it a lot. Some of this was a necessary consequence of present-day technology. My books were composed on a typewriter, not computer, and no previous word-document exists. So the pages all had to be scanned. That process has become increasingly precise, but there were many errors of transmission—“lit” for “hit” and “nickering” for “flickering” and, routinely, “r” and “n” conjoined as “rn” where the original letter was “m.” Some passages were missing; others were reproduced twice. In effect, I was required to copyedit Sherbrookes more than thirty years after it came into print, and I worked my way through the three volumes with a proofreader’s eye. Having done so, now, six times, I feel more or less confident of exactness—but in the process of such tinkering I could not keep from changing words as well as co
rrecting their spelling: from fixing, as it were, the language as well as the text.

  For example I substituted “the day after Judah’s funeral” for “ten days after Judah’s death,” when Ian calls his mother at the beginning of Sherbrookes. It seemed wrong for him to wait the longer period; he was conflicted over his duty to his dead father, not to his living mother. This is a small editorial intervention only, but it does register change. And I cut the last line of Sherbrookes, since it seemed over-explicit; we do not need, as readers, to be told: “They huddle together, as once they would with Judah, and are well.”

  The process of revision could be as simple as the substitution of “She said she’ll write you it’s her own idea to come” for the original “She said she’ll write you that it’s her idea to come.” Or the alteration of the phrase “not to waste this time” to “not to enjoy this time”; the word “waste” seemed less clear than “enjoy.” Or the substitution of “with glass and gauze between them . . .” for “with glass and gauze intervening . . .” I did try to fine-tune a character’s diction: “Who knows your reasons, lady?” becomes, in Hattie’s voice, “Who knows your reasons, missy?”

  To this older writer’s eye the younger writer over-ascribed dialogue; I cut perhaps a hundred usages of “he said” and “she said.” These had been more a function of rhythm than necessity; in the first published version I used “he said” and “she said” as taglines throughout the spoken discourse, and they could be—with no loss of clarity—removed. At that period I had (still have, no doubt) an excessive fondness for semicolons and that often needless word, “that.” Too, I used to love to turn nouns into adjectives by means of a hyphen; this seemed a habit to break. So by using an added conjunction I could substitute the phrase “comfort and temptation,” for the invented compound word “comfort-temptation.” To my present ear, this seems an improvement and slightly less mannerist prose.

  Repetition is another habit I did try to break. When, for example, I had Judah both “triumphant” and “triumphing” in a single page of text I cut the former usage. And sometimes I would cut a phrase I liked because it called too much attention to itself: “. . . the farthest twig of the outermost branch of Sullivanian analysis,” became “. . . the farthest wing of the renegade branch . . .”—which is more accurate as a description if less engaging as trope.

  The bulk of what I excised was sheer rhetorical excess. I was too fond of metaphor and the abstract generality—or so I now believe. William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry were my masters then; these days I’m more committed to power in reserve. A phrase such as the following seemed a candidate for cutting, with nothing but verbiage lost: “the past is as the present’s shadow, shortening and lengthening and mutable in the terms of perspective, changing with sightlines or on hillsides or pavement or light—yet truly immutable, fixed.”

  Or, “He is haunted by flesh, not fleshlessness, and he twined his limbs’ decrepitude around his young wife’s limbs. She does not fade or stale; she took lovers twenty years her junior, as he had taken her. She tempts him now continually, even in decrepitude, and is not dead but quick.”

  For the adept at variora, here are some examples of what has been cut:

  There are those who train with horseshoes and can throw and ring the horseshoes as part of their performance. There are those, Maggie knows, who can drop one orange or Indian club yet not break their juggling rhythm. Some jugglers can stack cups on saucers without shattering the cups. She herself is more agile than most; she has kept a close inventory of relatives and lovers and the patterned arc they make, from throwing hand to catching hand, suspended.

  He cannot remember her out of the wind, now Judah comes to think of it, or ever less than airy light for all the years’ stiffening additions—and remembers now the nursery rhyme about the oak tree near the ocean, and reeds: how everything is leveled in the last big wind but bending reeds, how roots and all mean nothing when the hurricane and thunder come.

  So she kept doing and talking aloft. Things hung there suspended an instant, in perfect opposition to the force of gravity—only rotating, not rising or falling, and for that perfected instant she could keep three men convinced they were her only man, or persuade two aunts in the same room that they were her favorite aunt. At such times, she told herself, she could persuade a Catholic with seven children to embrace the right to choose, or vote for George McGovern since he’d bring the boys back home.

  Ian would be staring at the traces of a lesson plan, trying to learn what he needed to know—while there was only her blurred mouthing, only the spoor of the sentence she’d thought and no blackboard and no chalk and nobody there to nudge him with the answer. Still, he picked it up. He lip-read, thought-read, read without reading; if only he’d been half the student in school that he’d been of her manners’ schooling, Hattie said, why then he’d be adept at fractions and geography and penmanship also. He learned degree and size.

  She yearned for him. She was, she told herself, in love. It wasn’t a term she much liked. It was attended by guitars. It had meant crush—some hero’s sock stolen from the basketball court, and treasured, rolled into a totem in her top right drawer. Later it meant four-leaf clovers proffered as they walked through fields, and later the wine bottles shared. So love became a pawing intensity—and the terms were making out, then making it, then mak-ing love. Later still it meant submission. It meant Billie Holiday singing “Hush Now, Don’t Explain”—the whiskey seams in her voice come unstuck, a fiddler using nerve and hair ends for her strings.

  It’s not as though these passages strike me as poorly written—just that they seem excessive and at least a little ponderous. I was flexing verbal muscles then that now seem over-exercised; my guiding principle throughout the revision was, in effect, Less is more. In several instances (particularly from Possession) I excised entire scenes. I cut, for example, memories of Judah’s grandmother, of Ian’s escapades abroad, and Maggie’s trip to Los Angeles since they failed to advance the tale’s action—or were a gravitational side-drag upon it. Dialogue, too, went on too long, and I cut exchanges that seemed merely to mark time:

  “That’s nice,” she said. “That’s complimentary.”

  “It’s the way I meant it.”

  “Men do yoga too. The world’s best athlete is a ballet dancer.”

  “Who says?”

  “Time magazine,” she said. “And they must be right.”

  “I didn’t call it sissy work. Just woman’s.”

  So, to spite him, she had kept at it. She taught Ian to sit in the lotus position.

  “Judah”—she would summon him—“what kind of tree is that?”

  “A birch tree, grandma.”

  “Yes. What kind of birch?”

  “A silver birch.”

  “What other kind would it be?”

  “A silver bitch,” he’d mutter, and she strained to hear.

  “What?”

  “A white birch maybe, but it isn’t. It’s a silver birch.”

  She’d have her notebook out, and wet the pencil stub.

  “Beech, did you say beech?”

  “No.”

  “Hattie knows the answer. She could tell.”

  He put his hands in his pockets. He balled his fingers to fists.

  “Fess up, Judah, you said beech—that’s a penny less this morning. That cancels out the elm.”

  “Birch, I said. Silver birch.”

  “You got the popple,” she would say. “You got the cottonwood.”

  “Do it again,” he’d ask her.

  “Why?”

  “It’s fine to watch.”

  So she’d pick the limp lengths up again and turn her back to him and work her arms and then turn back with magic entanglements, fanning out and in. He wanted her to try with tinsel, but it wasn’t long or strong enough. So he fashioned her, one Christmas, a tinsel necklace and bracelet and earrings and said, “They’ll hold. You wear them,” and she was his glittering creature lit by t
he Christmas tree lights. They made daisy chains from Reynolds Wrap, and Maggie said, “Imag-ine. There’s country where it’s warm enough so you can find real daisies in December.” He imagined that.

  I began with the assertion that I’d always thought of three as one; that is not quite the case. When I first tried to people the landscape of North Bennington, I started with a phrase—or, more precisely, tableau. For some time I had been thinking of the story of King David, and the great biblical description of that warrior-poet’s old age. Fading, cold, and failing, he is offered the company of Abishag the Shunammite in his tent at night. But her body’s warmth cannot rouse him. The Old Testament’s indelible description reads: “And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not” (1 Kings 4). That last phrase engendered Possession and remains embedded in it still.

  More generally, I had the image of a funeral pyre erected at a tribal hero’s death. This is the sort of procedure collectively attested to in Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon legend, Indian suttee, ancient burial rites and so on: the king lies arranged on a high pile of wood, ringed by wives and serving girls and soldiers and armor and chattel, the regalia of his eminence. Then the whole is set on fire in an all-consuming blaze. If there is water he sets out to sea, and the boat bearing him off too must burn, from keel to topmast: flame. It was the image with which I began and the first scene I wrote.