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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  The manuscripts of my Vermont trilogy (as well as other, early papers) reside now in the Abernethy Room of the Middlebury College Library in Middlebury, Vermont. I have not consulted them. But somewhere in those cartons is the scene of Judah Sherbrooke, lying on a hay bale in the middle of his hay barn in the middle of his property and, by extension, the world. He sets himself afire and, operatically, dies. I wrote and rewrote till it seemed letter-perfect; even today, more than half my life later, I remember the satisfaction of that “pyrotechnical” prose and those funerary rites. The scene was, I was sure, triumphal: a set piece to make Faulkner or Lowry or even James Joyce proud. But I can praise it so unreservedly because it’s in an archive and never exposed to the harsh light of print; in the event I cut those pages out.

  Judah’s elements indeed consist of fire and earth (his young bride’s are air and water), and there are leftover traces of the language in Hal Boudreau’s drunken fiery accident at the end of Sherbrookes. Too, at the end of Possession, the old man lies down on his pallet of hay and strikes a match or three. But by the time I’d lived with him and was fully engaged in writing the book, I knew this particular character would not burn down the house. He’s too much of a skinflint, too property-proud and retentive to set the world ablaze. Instead, Judah brushes himself off, shambles up and down the street, then back into the kitchen to share a cup of coffee with his wife. It’s a much less dramatic—even an anticlimactic—conclusion, but a more truthful one. During the process of composition I had come to understand that, far from destroying himself, this flinty old Vermonter would keep on keeping on.

  And that’s when I conceived of a second volume and why he does not die. Or, rather, he dies between the first two books and not at the end of Possession, just as Hattie dies at the end of Sherbrookes and Maggie leaves at Stillness’s end. It’s a technical challenge, of sorts; the protagonist of Book One must be a presence in but not central to the action of Book Two; a central character in Two is absent from the action of the third installment. In that sense, these three books are not sequels but sequential, and that’s when I understood I’d not be finished at Possession’s close but needed to resume the story. As Conan Doyle discovered when he tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes and was forced, by an avid public, to bring his hero back to life, it’s best—if you do plan to continue—to keep characters alive. In my end was my beginning, therefore; when I scrapped the scene of Judah’s death the trilogy proper commenced.

  In Book Two the focus shifts; in Book Three it does so again. A single long novel would not perhaps be built this way, but no single figure here is Sherbrookes’s sole protagonist; rather, it’s a collective and family history with—counting down from Daniel “Peacock” Sherbrooke—five generations in play. It’s difficult if not impossible to ask a reader to shift focus and allegiance text by text; the boy who’s wholly absent from Book One, for example, is wholly present for Book Three—while his father, Judah, who was thoroughly corporeal in the first book is, by the third, a ghost. I tried to justify all this in part because the narrative concerns itself with parents and their children, the presence of the past. And in part by having Ian Sherbrooke—the surviving son of his mother and father’s fierce union—write the whole thing down.

  The long middle chapter of the middle section of the final book—(which details Ian’s romantic history and his attempt to write a play about his parent’s intimate wrangle—is my favorite chapter in Stillness. (In Possession I’m most partial to Part II, section IV, which begins with the phrase; “Judah met her first, in 1938,” and in Sherbrookes I like best chapter XIV, describing Maggie’s emblematic visions: “Images afflict her; she cannot keep them from coming.”) This is, of course, only one man’s opinion, but the recapitulatory nature of Ian’s rehearsal of what went before does seem to me a successful attempt to lend shape to the whole. It’s a tip of the cap, I suppose, to the metafictional and self-reflexive strategies that were so common in the 1970s—an attempt to meld the modern and the more traditional mode. At any rate, when Ian summarizes his family’s history (as well as, it happens, this novelist’s previous publications) I knew that the book neared its end. Andrew Kincannon—that outlier—is meant to provide a kind of perspective to the goings-on in the Big House; when he and Maggie and Jane drive off at the end of Stillness, the ongoing agon is over and Ian’s work truly begins.

  A thing that surprised me, rereading, is the inadvertent way in which these pages have become “historical.” It’s strange to see that what one wrote when young is today a period piece and equally strange to read what proved predictive—how these character’s imagined future has since come to pass. There are no cellphones in Sherbrookes, and certainly no iPods or computers; when people write to each other they write letters, not emails or text messages; when they need to make a call they find a phone. I’m struck, in Stillness, by how Andrew Kincannon has to dial the weather number (WE6-1212) in order to get information on the forecast storm, and how he—generously, for the time—hands the garage attendant a dollar. Things change. In these three books, and even when pregnant, everybody drinks and everybody smokes. When Maggie does get pregnant at the age of fifty-two she’s a medical anomaly; now that would be a bit less startlingly the case. The Packard Ian drives (and Judah purchased for his wife) is a conscious anachronism; the Plymouth Volare has become one also, but wasn’t intended as such. Maggie reminds herself that “these are the facts of inflation, not value,” but the price of a stamp or housekeeper’s wages or psychoanalytical session has increased exponentially. Her sister-in-law is outraged that soda water costs thirty-five cents a bottle, plus deposit; we’d all be glad of that now.

  By contrast, however, most of the geopolitical concerns remain pertinent—or have today surfaced again. Sherbrookes spans the years 1976 to 1980, but its characters discuss the price of oil and the possibility of boycotts or an OPEC embargo; they worry about global warming and the infrastructure’s collapse. Many of the speeches about the trouble with and in America have, alas, the ring of current truth.

  The thematic oppositions of Maggie and Judah—their ways of living in the world—have dulled a little, however, and lost some of their contemporary sheen. The novels deal with the then-much-more-vocal contrarieties of “flower power” and cultural conservatism, the ideals of liberation—particularly, here, in terms of gender—and the straitlaced desire to preserve what went before. I never really saw my heroine as wanton or promiscuous, but it’s true enough that, by the standards of the time and place, she was a kind of revolutionary. Perhaps I should have been explicit about the clash of values and the way this specific family was supposed to embody the general national case; it’s not an accident that Judah is seventy-six years old in our bicentennial year. At any rate I took for granted, and possibly more than I should have, the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the emergence of a drug culture, and the generational wrangle which put Ian and Judah at odds.

  Other aspects of the story, though I here attempt to retrieve them, have been lost. Those years at Bennington were made vivid for me by the presence of John Gardner; we were close colleagues and friends. I showed him the manuscript of Possession, for example, and we argued over the spelling of Sherbrooke—John insisting that the final “e” was an instance of my Anglicisms and should properly be cut. He came up with a bottle of Sherbrook Whiskey in order to buttress his point; that bottle appears in this book. (The town of Sherbrooke, near Montreal, does have a final “e” attached, and therefore I retained my own preferred orthography.) John, who wrote at warp speed then, preceded me into print with a novel called October Light, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1976. In it, he has his Vermonters joke about mine; his villagers tell tales about the goings-on in the Big House and mock old Judah Sherbrooke and his “bare-nekkid wife.”

  My own wife and I make a cameo appearance in the pages of October Light, and—like many other authors—I had been written about, flatteringly or unflatteringly, as a character before. Bu
t to have a creature of my invention be referred to in another’s book did seem a kind of testimonial to the power of the written word, and I returned the compliment by having my townspeople in Sherbrookes gossip about James Page, Gardner’s protagonist, as an “old fool” stuck up in a tree. This cheerful back-and-forth was noticed by a critic in, if I remember correctly, Newsweek, who complained about it as a form of literary incest, but the lines still make me smile.

  Less happily, I took the title Stillness—having asked him for the use of it—from a manuscript of Gardner’s he assured me he’d abandoned and was not planning to publish. (Other working titles for the third of my three novels were “Shoreline Certainties” and “Boats in Bottles” both of which appear as phrases and of which John disapproved. He was, I’ve no doubt, right.) After his death in a motorcycle accident at the age of forty-nine, it devolved upon me as his literary executor to usher into print the unfinished text of Shadows, the manuscript on which he had been working when he died. We paired it with his novel, Stillness, and there’s an echo in these titles—though my own book appeared before Gardner’s—which now sounds more mournful than glad.

  So what, in my seventh decade, would I change and how revise—beyond the ways I’ve detailed here—these books? The models for my minor figures were sometimes not-so-distantly based on people I knew (Apollonius Banos and Junior Allison were portraits of, respectively, a college friend and a North Bennington taxicab driver), and sometimes an amalgam of townspeople; Elvirah Hayes, Hal Boudreau, and Sally Conover all had their distant counterparts in local village folk. The Old People’s Home is an actual structure; the bank and library and grocery store exist. The pavements of North Bennington were marble once; no more. John G. McCullough is long since dead; so is his older sister (who bore scant resemblance to Hattie); the Toy House and the Carriage House and Big House now operate in fact as a museum and may be rented out for concerts and wedding receptions. When our younger daughter got married, it was in that very house.

  In the way most writers, magpie-like, choose to line their nests with scraps of past experience and fragments of encounter, I borrowed attributes of men and women I knew or observed for the central quartet of characters (Judah, Hattie, Maggie, Ian). Yet this is no roman à clef or private code to crack. It is an amplification of that begetting image of a funerary pyre and the phrase about King David and Abishag the Shunammite: but the king knew her not. The countryside does play, I think, as large a role as I at first envisioned; the trees and stone walls and snow-covered meadows retain a kind of “stillness” on the page.

  What emerges for me now, rereading, is how absolute these figures are, how uncompromising in their argument. Judah burns the piano Maggie played on, sells the truck she had incised a heart on in the fender’s dust, and never goes to visit when she asks. Jeanne Fisk is much more a relativist, a modern woman caught between allegiances who tries to eat her cake and have it too. At its best this book does capture two ways of behaving and—though all this seems more clear to me as reader than decades ago as writer—the clash between the clenched fist and the open hand. The thematic matter of Sherbrookes consists, I think, of a young man’s puzzled effort to come to terms with commitment: which lines to draw in what sand. It is a book about landscape and the lasting nature of love.

  The language of the letter-writers (Peacock, Anne-Maria his daughter, and Judah’s father Joseph) looks a little too elaborate today: more representative, I think, of the eighteenth century than the nineteenth. But this I largely left alone, since I hoped for a declension in the generations, and I used their rhetorics to mark the march of time. The language of the Vermonters (paradoxically the more so when they speak at length than when they go “Ayup ayup”) is pretty close to the mark. Or at least it feels as near as I could come then and now. I did, I believe, a creditable job of describing Judah and his octogenarian sister, but overstated his sexual appetite and understated, a little, the old man’s need for sleep. Maggie’s behavior when depressed in Stillness feels more persuasive to me than her exuberance in the first two books, but that’s no doubt a function of this reader’s present age. And the character of Ian—closest, I suppose, to a self-portrait in these pages—appears to me more successfully composed today than I thought then; his efforts at self-definition seem more a function of personality than a failure of precision on the author’s part. He’s a beginner, our Ian, who grows up at novel’s end.

  His creator did so too. Not much happens in these pages: men and women live and die. They grieve and cleave together; they eat and argue and are selfish or selfless and cantankerous or kind. Yet (three decades after finishing the Sherbrookes trilogy) it has pleased me to revisit these old haunts and walk, as it were, those old meadows and trails. And, sentence by paragraph by page, to revel in the view.

  NICHOLAS DELBANCO is a British-born American who received his BA from Harvard and his MA from Columbia University. He currently directs the Hopwood Awards Program and is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan. An editor and author of more than twenty-five books, Delbanco has received numerous awards—among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.