by Susan Gubar
Apparently, Josephine Miles’s wheelchair had been knocked over by a waiter and the poet along with it. After helping her back in, the waiter returned with a red rose. When she eventually left the restaurant, Josephine Miles wheeled herself out, to the applause of her companions and many of the other patrons, the long stem of the rose in her mouth.
Silver Threads among the Gold
“TURN ON THE TELEVISION,” my friend Shehira shouted into the phone. “It’s terrible, terrible. First Beirut, now Paris.” It was the day before my mother’s birthday. She would have been one hundred. With the flying geese neglected on my lap, I watched the replayed scenes of slaughter: explosions at a sports stadium, bloodbaths in restaurants, outside bars. Then the so-called analysis: talk of suicide bombers and gunmen with assault weapons, counterattacking police troops and triage teams. Then the mounds of flowers and the civic grieving. We had seen it before and we would see it again. Shehira, who had recently returned from Paris, worried that her son might be there, though his family was secure in the Dordogne.
“Just because you wander in the desert doesn’t mean there is a promised land.” Where had Paul Auster written something like that prescient sentence? Would American hucksters of hate seize on this tragedy to preach a xenophobic doctrine nearly as toxic as the ideology of ISIS, whose name desecrates the Egyptian goddess? When Shehira and I became friends back in 1973, a month or two after Sandra and I arrived in Bloomington, she showed us pictures of the Egyptian god Horus—he looked like a falcon—and recounted the myth of Isis gathering the torn body parts of Osiris to reunite and restore him and to bear their divine son. In the somber days that followed the attack, we did not dwell on Don’s muscle spasms or the oddly returned envelope containing the check for our real estate taxes.
It was Zak who caught our attention when, during a visit, he relinquished his usual jokey manner to hammer home the need to begin repairing the Inverness for sale in the spring. There was mold in the basement, a telltale bowing of beams in the garage that meant structural stress on an external wall, cracks in the foyer, and bubbles under the paint over the door to the back porch: maybe water damage. Tuck-pointing should be done on the brick in the back, and did we realize that the storm windows were broken? Yes, Don conceded. Last summer, the screens had been put in, but the storms never raised. Who knew that youthful Zak—he cultivated a sort of punk hilarity—could be so meticulous and demanding and depressing?
“We should keep the house, make the kids in Boston and New York move their families out here; it could be a safe haven,” I said.
“We’d be sitting ducks, if someone came out here,” Don said. Then he added, “Who would want to come out here?”
I had no idea if he meant the kids or the terrorists or both, but I wanted to contain the violence while honoring the middle of the country; so I returned to the pellucid prose of Marilynne Robinson. Undoubtedly, there was something robotic or neurotic about my binging on another text. Verbomania, graphomania, bibliomania—better, I suppose, than clinomania (the acute craving to stay in bed) or gamomania (the compulsive issuing of odd marriage proposals) or drapetomania (the obsessive desire to run away from home). But there was something missing in the secular works I had studied so far. They exclude the role of late-life love in deeply religious people like the faithful characters in Marilynne Robinson’s books.
Would I find a way to raise my spirit in response to such a serious author, to pay homage to the gift given? Yes, I would, for there is a balm in Gilead that helps me transcend the sorrow, anger, and fear, if only for the silent minutes of following words on the page . . . and then putting the book down to ruminate before resuming. Robinson’s prose instills the sort of slow reading that poetry often requires and that moves me as close to prayer as I am likely to get. Writing serves a purpose similar to that of praying for the novel’s clergyman narrator: “You feel that you are with someone.”
Marilynne Robinson emphasizes deepening spiritual and familial commitments in an aging character so high-minded that it is hard to picture how he engendered the child he adores. At seventy-six years of age, Reverend John Ames composes a diary-like letter to his young son whose birth he experienced as an unforeseen grace, but whose maturation he does not expect to see. The child of old age is “unspeakably precious,” because an aged parent can no longer hope for more children, and also “because any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness.”
Diagnosed with a heart condition, Ames does not expect to live long enough to tell his history to the boy. He needs to record the “begats” of his and the child’s ancestry: tales of his volatile abolitionist grandfather, who fought with John Brown in Kansas, and of his pacifist father, also a minister; stories of his own dutiful evolution in the pastoral profession and his long friendship with Robert Boughton. Within Ames’s poignant awareness of his limitations as a father—he has neither the life expectancy nor the money to protect the boy’s future—his devotion intensifies while he seeks to convey his reverence for the values his genealogy has bequeathed, for the sacraments he offers, for the plains he inhabits, and for the child’s mother, Lila, whose appearance in his church on a rainy day seemed miraculous because at sixty-seven he had resigned himself to an empty house.
As in other accounts of autumnal romance, Gilead depicts the loneliness preceding an unanticipated encounter that leads an older person to a second chance: “Not that I hadn’t loved people before. But I hadn’t realized what it meant to love them before.” A fine distinction: of course we have loved before, but without the realization of what it means to love, which may deepen in the breeding ground of loss or isolation. Robinson’s characters associate loneliness with looking into the lighted windows of other people’s houses.
After the early death of his first wife and of their baby girl, Ames walked the roads of his small Iowa town, covetous of other families, especially the large family of his best friend Boughton. From Ames’s youthful widowhood until his sixty-seventh year, his solitude made it seem “as if every winter were the same winter and every spring the same spring.” Only upon meeting Lila did he feel that “in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing.”
Throughout the meandering retrospection that constitutes John Ames’s letter to his son, the scene of Lila taking shelter in his church recurs until, toward the end of the book, he describes how, during the brief period of their early acquaintance, he felt “as if my soul were being teased out of my body”—an experience that enlarged his understanding “of hope, just to know that such a transformation can occur.” Mindful of his age, afraid of making a fool of himself, he nevertheless undertook “a little experiment with hair tonic” and read the Song of Songs. When she came to him seeking baptism, he was struck by the solemn purity of her request. After this unschooled woman began tending his garden and he asked how he might repay her, “she said, ‘You ought to marry me.’ And I did.”
But this proposal, nine years before the novel’s present time of 1956, constitutes the back story of Gilead, not the subject of its most intense inquiry. The suspense of the narrative, if such a pacific meditation can be said to contain suspense, springs from the eruption of John Ames’s distrust when his godson Jack Boughton arrives back in town after twenty years away. I thought of Ames’s suspicions about his namesake, his best friend’s son, as I went to a FedEx store to photocopy handouts for Don. John Ames worries that he should warn his wife and child, that he should protect them by revealing Jack’s sordid past. Especially when he realizes that his godson helped Lila lift and carry his desk, chair, and books down to the ground-floor parlor (to save him from physical exertion), he feels old, mistrustful, and anxious. Later, glimpsing Jack, Lila, and his child seated in his dilapidated church, Ames thinks that they look “like a handsome young family.”
When Zak came to pick us up to take us to Windermere Village, I shared Ames’s unease about Jack’s wrongdoings and his motive for returning to Gilead. But the overridi
ng mystery for me: how does Ames ends up loving Jack as much as his friend Boughton wants him to? By means of what enigmatic process does Ames’s hostility toward his ne’er-do-well godson transmute into late-life love?
Those were still my perplexities the day after Zak showed us a condo only two blocks from Kroger’s, though you would never know it because the so-called village was on a hill shielded by trees and shrubs. With all the rooms and even the laundry on the ground floor and with a walk-in shower, the place seemed negotiable. The identical cottages looked somewhat similar to those at the Trace; however, this was not a retirement community. There was no “big house” for communal dining, no rehab center, no nursing home. And the brick façades as well as the long windows reminded us of the Inverness. Maybe we could deal with the dark living room by putting in a skylight? We really did have to get out of the Inverness while the getting was good.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I heard Don hissing in his ground-floor study. He was angry at dropping papers on the floor, at the weird fonts appearing on the computer screen, at the outdated password no longer connecting him to the Wells Library, at the glasses slipping off his nose or lost on his desk, at being unable to kneel down to reach a lower shelf where he might have stored the Tin Pan Alley sheet music I needed to return. Both copies of the popular early twentieth-century song “Silver Threads among the Gold” were lodged near the handmade book Judith had given him.
In Gilead, Lila asks John Ames a question that he has also asked himself: “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”
“I’m sorry you’re getting old,” I said, picking up the sheet music.
“I put it off as long as I could,” he said.
Judith’s book was the best birthday present Don had ever received. Digging Up the Dog and Other Stories features a picture of a shovel on the cover. At the top, Judith had centered a banner: “Acclaimed NYT Bestseller #1 Amazon Sales Ranking.” On the back cover were (equally fictitious) blurbs, including one from the local paper: “Brilliantly argued, urgently needed, highly comic and deadly serious—precisely what Bloomington has been waiting for.” It was a blank book, except for the table of contents: a list of the anecdotes Don had recounted in her hearing.
My favorite was the title story, which the existence of the book inspired Don to type up. In it, he tells about a time—maybe he was seven—when he had been shipped to his grandparents’ house, where he was informed that his dog, Fella, had been hit by a car and killed. On the way home, he cried. After his father explained that he had buried Fella in the backyard, Don decided to dig up the dog. With a couple of tries, he uncovered a patch of fur: “That was enough. I scraped the dirt back over the body, and told no one what I had done.”
Why the attempted exhumation? He had not doubted that the dog was dead. “Nor do I think that my curiosity was sponsored by some precocious reach for sublimity, a wish to confront death, to see what it looked like. I think that I simply wanted to see what Fella looked like dead.” He learned something “about the finality or irrevocability of death”: “It would have been possible, I knew, to dig up the body, but not, maybe I learned, to dig up the dog.”
Composed with his usual understatement, Don’s last sentence illuminates the horror of the Beirut and Paris massacres, and also the significance of all the burying and unburying that goes on in Gilead and why its characters’ faith in an afterlife that they keep on reimagining feels alien to me. John Ames tells many tales of townspeople of his grandfather’s generation digging tunnels on the Underground Railroad and of his father’s generation burying and unburying hymnals and shirts, letters and sermons, guns and charred Bibles . . . objects they need to relinquish but cannot bear to destroy. As John Ames’s ancestors dig up and tamp down the earth, he burrows into his past. Only toward the end of the novel do Ames’s conversations with Jack disinter the reason for Jack’s return to Gilead, which in turn unearths the tragic racial history buried in American soil.
After Ames looks at a photograph of Jack with his “colored” wife and his “light-skinned colored” son, Jack reveals that he has returned to town in order to determine whether he could relocate his family to Iowa, a state he sardonically calls “the shining star of radicalism.” Ames minimizes the hostility behind the disappearance of Gilead’s black population, but the burning of its only black church justifies Jack’s irony. Although Jack has lied to his wife’s family and disappointed his wife, the fact that the buried history of slavery continues to contaminate the country becomes apparent as he alludes to the anti-miscegenation laws still operative in the 1950s. They have made his cohabitation with people of color impossible or impossibly painful.
Don was standing by the door, clutching a stack of papers; so I carefully took the two sheaves of old sheet music, encased in cellophane wrappers, out of his hands and placed them on the back seat of the car. I would return them to Carrol after Emeriti House and our trip to the courthouse. She had thought their illustrations would be perfect for a study of later-life love. “What’s a book without pictures?” she had laughed. It was a cold day, overcast, with spits of rain in the air, the sort of weather Don’s mother had called “dravis.”
I left Don on the corner across the street from the sizable family house that had been refurbished into Emeriti House, found a reserved space behind it, parked, made it up the steep back stairs, and met him inside. A dozen or so retired faculty were seated in a comfortable living room, including Shehira, who beckoned me to sit by her side. But I wanted to puzzle out Gilead’s ending—how did John Ames come to love such a thin-skinned man as Jack? So I waved, mimed apologies, and made my way upstairs to an empty office.
Gilead addresses the mystery of John Ames’s late-life love of his unlovable godson through the parable of the prodigal son. Like the young man in Jesus’s parable, Jack left his father’s house, squandered his inheritance in dissolute living, and was welcomed back by old Boughton with joy as abundant as that of the father who exclaims over the prodigal son’s return, “He was lost and is found!” (Luke 15:24). Old Boughton’s love does not alter in finding alteration, but rather multiplies in excess of worthiness. However, like the older brother in Jesus’s parable, Ames—a dutiful son who never left home—initially feels resentful that undeserving Jack receives his father’s rewards. Jesus’s parable hints that abundant divine love need not and cannot be deserved or comprehended.
What about human love? As Ames scrutinizes his qualms about Jack, he eventually learns that “Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” He is considering agape, which, unlike eros, does not respond to the merit of its object but rather endows its object with value. The biblical parable conflates sacred with secular realms, as does Gilead throughout its pages. John Ames often startles at revelations of a sanctified physical world: “great taut skeins of light suspended” between “a full moon rising just as the sun was going down.” At the root of honor, he knows, “is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.” The extravagance of creation means that “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.”
Grounded in scripture, Ames’s reverence for nature and human nature cannot be conflated with the tradition M. H. Abrams called “natural supernaturalism,” but it reminds me of it: literature praising miracles latent in the natural world. Abrams’s death, after his long and productive life establishing the Norton anthologies, marked the end of a formidable chapter in scholarship. When he helped Sandra and me with our anthologizing of women writers, he called her “Cookie,” maybe because she had been his student. She wanted to create a musical comedy with a chorus line of elderly men singing, “Hello, Cookie,” and a chorus line of girls belting back, “Hello, Sir.” For many of Abrams’s authors, as for Ames, “Existence is the essential thing and the holy thing.”
The miracle of Ames’s passage from resentment and suspicion to love hovers over the ending of Robinson’s novel, for like the prodigal son, Jack has
not expressed remorse, contrition, or repentance. Late-life love contributed to the dissipation of Ames’s hostility, I decide, as it had to its inauguration. Learning that his godson wants what he had longed for—a wife and a child—softens Ames to forgive Jack his trespasses. He relinquishes resentment and suspicion when he realizes that his jealousy was a groundless and regrettable by-product of his attachment to Lila and their son. Ames has wronged Jack in the present, just as the boy Jack wronged his father and Ames in the past.
Only after a series of mutually bruising conversations does Ames appreciate in Jack “the beauty there is in him.” His religion enables Ames to see in undeserving Jack his own undeserving nature, human fallibility, and the impoverishment of our understanding of each other. He channels his grandfather’s wisdom: “To him who asks, give” and “Judge not . . .”
Ames doubles his benediction by returning to old Boughton and testifying about a love that constitutes a healing practice, rather than a spontaneous or personal emotion. We never learn what it means to old Boughton that Ames spoke well-worn words from the Hebrew Bible over Jack. “The Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” These were phrases I had heard at the end of every Saturday morning service I attended as a child at Beth Emeth. Repetition lends them enormous power.
Love in Gilead is not an escape from the fallen world but a mode of engagement with it. Later-life love, according to Robinson, abounds in the beneficence of agape, the amiability of philia, and the loyalty of storge. As I start to hear chairs and feet moving around downstairs, as I imagine Ames sitting by the bedside and speaking into the ear of his sleeping friend, I envy the intimacy of an old friendship. Earlier in Gilead, Ames had explained his overuse of the word “old,” which sets apart something regarded with habitual affection or suggests hapless vulnerability: “I say ‘old Boughton,’ I say ‘this shabby old town,’ and I mean that they are very near my heart.”