Category: American Literature

The Religious View of the World – Marilynne Robison’s Gilead

For most of us educated Westerners the mystery of faith is the mystery of why anyone would believe at all. At its best, Christianity has rather become the religion of our grandparents or those oddly fanatical young people we may encounter on visiting a Christian Union. At its worst, it is a cruel mockery of all that it once stood for, a motivation for policies and persons that are anything but Christian. Christianity may be the belief that we put down on the census, but churchgoing and active faith are almost without exception relics of a bygone age. If we are still spiritual, our God may look a little like Jesus, but dressed up in our own hopes and ideals. It’s just the way things are.

For me unbelief is something I struggle with. And it’s not just because of Ivan Karamazov’s infamous claim that “if there is no good, then everything is permitted”. When I look at the magnificence of an oak or the radiance of a misty morning, or feel the weight of stars upon me late at night, I can’t help but feel that something is out there. Without God I cannot find any sense in the world, and whatever certain thinkers may say all I get out of that position is despair. Nietzsche et al. would say (probably correctly) that my belief is motivated by the most shameful of psychological urges – a need for comfort, for order, for plan.

Be that as it may, though I am not a churchgoer and am only really a Christian only by default, I feel the rudiments of a real Christian faith within me. And when I look at those who truly believe, whose faith animates them like a fire, underneath my scepticism is a kind of jealousy, a wish that I could believe too.

Gilead

I say all this because Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead is a novel about faith and the loftiest parts of belief – its virtues, hopes, and despairs. To read it is to be brought into a world where God is here, now. He is not visible, but simply present, lurking behind every page and every thought. The story takes the form of a diary of sorts, or a series of letters, written by the seventy-six-year-old pastor John Ames to his seven-year-old son. Ames knows that he does not have long to live, and he wants to leave a testament for the boy, so that through these pages the child may come to know the father he scarcely had. Gilead pulses with Ames’s faith and its greatest merit is the way it makes faith and its value comprehensible to a non-believer. It does not convert, but it shows the beauty of a believing world.

Moments

This beauty comes, first and foremost, as moments. Because Gilead is a diary, Ames’ entries range from paragraphs to several pages. He sits and watches his son, and part of the wonderful intimacy of Gilead is the way Ames constantly refers to “you” while he writes. You did this, or you did that. He describes his son and his wife playing with bubbles:

I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavours. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.

This is just a moment. But seen through the eyes of a dying man, and of a loving man, it takes on a radiance. Life is a collection of such moments, and in our attitude towards them we can transfigure them or turn them into dust.

Reading with Faith

I think one of the difficulties of Gilead is that reading it requires an act of faith in itself. If we go in with scepticism, with an unwillingness to engage with the book’s message, it can seem boring. One of the most common criticisms of Robinson’s work that I’ve read is precisely that – that it’s boring. I actually read Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel, earlier this year. I didn’t get anything out of it, which is why I didn’t write about it here. But I read Gilead differently, over several weeks, and I let it wash over me like a blessing. If we go into a work like this with hostility, then we will only be disappointed. Take, for example, Ames’s comment – “how I have loved this life”. He often says similar things when finishing a note. It is repetitive, and in a way annoying. But it’s also what he feels.

Ames is a man who is blown over by the beauty of the world, and if anything we should be jealous of him for loving it as he does. In the same way, there is a lot in this novel about things that aren’t relevant at all to non-believers – matters like baptism, or blessings, or the Eucharist (the wafer and wine). These things have significance for him, and we must try to feel our way into his shoes to enjoy what he says about them. For in their mystery there lies so much about the redemption of his world.

Fathers, Grandfathers

A great part of Gilead is taken up by the theme of family and the passing of the generations. Ames’s father and grandfather were also priests, and his closest friend, Boughton, is another priest. Ames is haunted by the memory of his grandfather. That man had fought in the American Civil War (Gilead takes place in 1956) and lost an eye. When his shocked family sees his wound his response is simple: “I am confident that I will find great blessing in it”. He is a man who has visions of God and who finally disappears to become an itinerant preacher in Kansas. It is fair to say that Ames struggles with the differences in their faiths – his own faith is quieter, less mystical. He wonders whether that means it is a faith at all.

Ames also struggles with his own role as a father. His unexpected marriage and son so late in life mean that he won’t be able to be a father to his boy for very long. Much of Gilead also centres on Jack Boughton, the wayward son of Ames’ friend, who is named after Ames himself. Ames does not want to forgive the man for something he did when he was younger, though he knows Christ would have wanted him to, and this leads to another tension that is at the heart of the story.

Love

When I think about it, love is at the centre of Gilead. This is perhaps inevitable for a work that is so manifestly Christian. Love for moments, love from fathers to their children, and love of a romantic sort too:

Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”

We are left with a feeling that love, like beauty, is something that can be found in every part of our lives if only we have the eyes to see it. More than once I closed the book, touched by something it had said.

Conclusion

Gilead does have its share of tensions, of intrigues. I had no idea how the novel would conclude and actually it ended up surprising me. But what I am left with is not a story so much as a vision of love and of peace. Here is a world where goodness and redemption are possible for everyone. It presents a version of Christianity at its best. And though not all of its readers will be Christians – or will want to be – there’s enough value and enough compatibility between Ames’s worldview and a good, happy, atheist-or-whatever life that it’s perfectly reasonable to call the novel an inspiration and a source of hope.

I can’t wait to read more Robinson in the future.

Emperor of Novels – John Williams’ Augustus

John Williams’ (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner) final completed novel, Augustus, is quite simply the best book I have read all year. At school, an English teacher whose opinion I value highly once said that we know the best books because as soon as we finish them we want to start again. We have gained so much from them, yet we know that so much more lies within, deeper down. What separates these books from your standard ever-interpretable and unfathomably-deep Literary Classics is that these books seem to speak to us. They leave us a feeling of company – it is as if your soul is touched by another’s. If I didn’t have other books to read and exams to think about, I would read Augustus again right now. And then again, and again. It is simply that good. What follows is simply an explanation as to why that is.

Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus, was the first Roman Emperor and is a man widely considered one of the greatest leaders of all time. In Williams’ novel we follow Octavius, as he is usually called here, from his days as a youth, to his battles against his fellow Roman, Marcus Antonius, to his years of undivided power, when on all sides he faced political enemies who were determined to succeed him. Williams does not focus on the battles or on the violence – though both are here. Instead, Augustus’s struggle is to lead Rome and fulfil his duty. More than once is Rome named his daughter, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he feels he is failing her. Forced into violence, time and again, by the necessities of fate, Augustus retains control over Rome, but he watches his friends die, and becomes increasingly alone.

“It is too dark” – The Kaleidoscopic Form of Augustus

The first time I opened Augustus I closed it again immediately. The first thing I saw was a letter. What could be more boring than a novel of letters? I imagined ridiculous, unrealistic, epistolary novels from the 18th century and gave a shudder. Yet I had the wrong idea entirely. Augustus is closer to those questions we sometimes find on history exams where we are asked to compare and contrast sources. We see an event through many different angles – that of a historian, an eyewitness memoir, perhaps a newspaper report or even a cartoon – and we must evaluate these sources against each other and try to determine what really happened and why. We must check for biases, for concealed information. In short, we must work for our knowledge.

A sculpture of the head of Augustus
A sculpture of the young Augustus. As with the novel itself it tells us something of the man that once was. But filling in the gaps requires our imagination. Aiwok, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Augustus works by the same principle. Williams weaves together truth and fiction, letters and diaries and proclamations and histories from all sorts of eminent Romans, to tell the story of Augustus’ life. As with Conrad’s Nostromo, we never seem to see Augustus himself, except through the eyes of others. We as readers are always having to think about what we read, to work from glimpses, as if through coloured glass, to guess at what the real man is like. Often, all we get is an image:

“I understand that he wants the letter. I hand it to him, and he turns away from us. The ring of officers breaks for him, and he walks down the hill. For a long time we watch him, a slight boyish figure walking on the deserted field, moving slowly, this way and that, as if trying to discover a way to go.”

The effect of this is incomparable. Augustus appears so vitally human precisely because we know him through confusion and uncertainty, just as we know every human being. No narrator will tell us who he is, just as no human being will tell us who they are either, except through their words and their actions. To create him as I read was one of the most exciting things about reading Augustus.

The Roman Touch – Philosophy, Morals and Nobility

I studied Latin at school. While I can’t pretend to have read Cicero, I did stumble through some Seneca and Livy. But anyone who has studied Latin will have a feel for the way that the Romans wrote. That poise, that composure and nobility of style runs through the entirety of Augustus. Not once did I have the impression it was not a Roman’s writing before my eyes. The Roman way of writing in some sense reflects their philosophical outlook. The Romans had something of a disdain for philosophy, compared to their illustrious Greek forbears. Roman philosophy is focused on the practical, the here-and-now questions of ethics much more than anything else. The most famous Roman thinkers, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, were both Stoics. Nobody in Augustus claims to be a Stoic, but all of the characters, whatever their actions, are motivated by high ideals – honour, duty, and patriotism.

It was perhaps a better time. Even Livia, Augustus’ wife, who is determined to secure the succession of her son Tiberius, is far more an antagonist than a villain. Like Cicero, another of Augustus’ opponents, she is a character whose values and hopes go against his. Both of them find value in the older Roman Republic and its ideas of family honour. In part, the tragedy of Augustus is that good people are politically divided because of incompatible values. It is noble – and reasonable – of Livia to write Tiberius such things as “You have a duty to yourself, to your country, to your name”. And there is a more than a hint of heroism in phrases like “Our futures are more important than our selves.” But what she wants necessitates the limiting of Augustus’ power, just as what he wants demands the limiting of her own.

Williams depicts all of his characters with force. They are real people, with their own motivations. Williams, I believe, is speaking when Maecenas writes to Livy against being a moralist. I shall quote it because it gives an idea of the moral tone of the novel:

“it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.”

Just as we need to piece together Augustus’ character from scraps and choice remarks, so too must we piece together judgements for ourselves, instead of relying on the author to tell us what to think. And as a result, it forces us to be active participants in the novel, making our own meaning out of what’s there.

Power and Necessity

No character here is good or evil, least of all Augustus himself. When you rule an empire you are forced, constantly, to act to secure your power against those who would wrest it from you. When those who went against Julius Caesar are finally punished by Marcus Antonius and Augustus, Cicero’s head is brought and placed at the rostrum in the Forum where once he had spoken so eloquently. The son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra is executed also, though he is only seventeen. Even Augustus’ own daughter, Julia, is forced repeatedly into unhappy marriages by her father to secure his political dominance, as are his own friends. All the time, we are faced with the question that Julia asks Augustus as she enters her final marriage:

“”Has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?”

My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has”.”

One of the novel’s perceptive observers writes that “Octavius Caesar is Rome; and that, perhaps, is the tragedy of his life”. His destiny is Rome, is power, and he does not grow corrupted by that power as so many others do. But in his fulfilment of his destiny, he loses the only things that ever gave him joy – his daughter, and his friends. Forced to choose between his private and his public duties, Augustus always chooses the latter, and eventually he is left all alone. When his old friends have died, he is surrounded by only those who lust after power. That is to say, people he cannot trust. And yet his body will not fail him, and he continues to grow old, all alone.

Julia

The story that, according to my copy’s introduction, was the seed out of which Augustus grew, was not Augustus’ own but that of his daughter, Julia. Augustus had no son, but his daughter was given an education in art and philosophy that at the time was reserved for sons alone. Julia is an extraordinary character, a woman whose existence was scrubbed away by history as best it could. Augustus loved her – and this love is truly touching – but perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel is how Julia, in spite of her knowledge and intelligence, ends up herself becoming a piece on the chessboard of her father’s Empire. And unlike him, who managed to survive to the end, Augustus was forced to let her be captured.

In the end, Augustus leaves us with a sense of limitations. Julia at one point says to her father the wonderful line “The power you have… cannot legislate against the passions of the human heart”. And it is true. Augustus cannot control the hearts of his people, whether friend or foe. In the same way, try as he might to bring peace to the Romans instead he is forced, time and time again, to spill their blood. “There is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness”. People fail repeatedly here. After all, we cannot know another’s heart, and perhaps we cannot even know our own. Augustus is a man determined to do good, and he does, but at great cost – to his health, to his friends and family. It is up to us as readers can say whether it was worth it.

Conclusion

I could write more but I will not. Augustus is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect novel I have ever read. I love it with a passion I struggle to put into words. Its nobility, its formal ingenuity, its gripping plot with tragedy and farce and all the rest together, its characters with their forceful existence, all this I love. John Williams’ absolutely stunning prose I love too. Augustus is a novel for now and forevermore. In its questions of power and necessity, in its praise of the value of friendship and love, in its exploration of the obscurity of knowledge and the unfathomability of the human heart, it is incomparable. If ever a post on this blog has proved for you a reason to go out and buy a book, let it be this one. It will blow you away.

For more on these themes, see my review of William’s earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing, and my comments on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Have you read Augustus, and what did you think of it if you have? What do you make of the final section of the work, where Augustus himself speaks? Does it undermine what comes before, or strengthen it?

The World-Ending Fire – Wendell Berry’s Essays

Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer from Kentucky. He’s in his eighties now, but he still works on his land as he always has done, using horse-drawn tools and old methods. The World-Ending Fire collects his essays, ranging in topic from politics to death, books to the environment. They are all tied together by their focus on localism and attachment to place. Without a real connection to your land you will struggle to live a good life, and you will struggle to live a sustainable life. That is his message, repeated over the course of the book in essay after essay. Slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the simple things. It is a relatively fashionable view now, but Berry has been living it and writing it for over fifty years.

Welcome to Kentucky

Berry has lived in the same place for a long time. When he was young, he did travel about, and even briefly lived in Europe, but all that’s behind him now. He has his home, his community in Kentucky. And for Berry it is the most important place in the world. In The World-Ending Fire he is always praising the ideal of community, where people help each other, tells stories, and share things. And here it is convincing where elsewhere it would surely get on my nerves because Berry actually lives this life. In essays like “The Making of a Marginal Farm” and “Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labour Saving” he really goes into some detail about how it is to live a largely self-sufficient existence. Berry writes with a pencil, only during the daylight hours. One of his most famous essays describes his refusal to buy a computer.

A photo of Wendell Berry standing in front of some solar panels.
The man himself. Solar power is, for Wendell Berry, the ultimate energy source, because it is completely sustainable. And a life is a good life where we leave more than just ashes behind us. Photo by Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This simple life is under threat by the industrialisation of farming, by consumerism, by strip mining and plenty of other things. About half of The World-Ending Fire is diatribes against the unpleasant parts of modernity, and about half a paean to the things modernity seems to be trampling – community, responsibility, and kindness. Many of the essays repeat each other, but I find it hard to ignore the validity of Berry’s message. Below I’ll go over a few of its key points.

Scale and Limits

One of my favourite essays here is “Quantity versus Form”, a short piece originally written for a conference. It tells the story of an old friend of Berry’s who sold her things and went to a nursing home. When they meet there, she is at peace and ready to die. But she then stays alive at the hands of her doctors, and when Berry and she next meet, she is but a shell of her former self. Medicine has kept her alive, but for what? Berry’s target in this piece is not modern medicine, but its application. In the past, he argues, there was an ideal of “a whole or complete life”, whereas now we think only of “a long life”. And these two ideas are incompatible, because they carry with them two different views of the world.

The complete life is one summed up by Lord Nelson’s words at Trafalgar, “Thank God, I have done my duty”. It is a life bounded by duty, by obligations – in other words, connected with others. Nelson perceived his duty, fulfilled it, and was happy to die. He felt no need to experience any more, to see any more. He achieved completeness, and that was enough. Berry points out that though few of us will be admirals, almost all of us will – or should – take part in a community, be part of a family, follow one’s calling, and enjoy things like food and drink and company. If we do all of these things, death need not be something worth fearing, because we can rightly be said to have lived properly and need ask nothing more.

In contrast to this limited life, a life searching after length will always be disappointing. There will always be something to miss out on and therefore a reason to hate death. Berry is not against experiences, but he is against a worldview that does not acknowledge human limitations. When we deprive ourselves of a sense of our limits we encourage a similarly laissez-faire attitude towards the world around us. We start to exploit resources as we try to stave off our inevitable passing. And no amount of resources will be enough, because our deaths will always come. If we choose to limit ourselves, to accept death (I’m pretty sure Berry and Heidegger have a couple of things in common on this point), then life will be much more meaningful. We will be able to give it completion and die satisfied.

Memory

There are different types of knowledge, Berry reminds us in “The Way of Ignorance”, and that which is empirically verifiable is only one of them. Time and again Berry makes us think about memory, and what kind of knowledge that is, and what value it might have. In “Damage”, one of the shorter and better essays, he describes the damage he accidentally causes to his land with a bulldozer. It is a terrible thing, he writes, to directly contribute to the destruction of the natural world. But Berry also finds in the scar left by the bulldozer on the ground a positive element – for it has affected him. So long as he remembers about the damage, he will not repeat it. And as long as he takes part in a community, that knowledge of destruction will be common to all – and destruction will be avoided.  

One of Berry’s keenest laments in The World-Ending Fire is the loss of cultural memory that comes from leaving the communities in which you were born and watching the communities disintegrate. Almost all of us know that strip mining is a dangerous process that destroys the landscape, or that farming by insecticides and computers may not be ultimately the healthiest approach. But without participating in a community where that knowledge is experienced, rather than simply known, we do not feel it in quite the same way. And this lack of feeling, stemming from a kind of ignorance, ultimately leaves a space for tolerance: when we do not witness destruction while getting benefits from it (such as the gold circuitry in our phones), we are liable to forget the destruction or else to accept it. In a community, we have shared knowledge of destruction, and cannot so peacefully accept its results.

Reading and Writing

Berry also laments the loss of reading, which he connects with the rise of television. Again and again in The World-Ending Fire Berry comes back to the classics, because the classics are sustainable – unlike modern technology, they are never superseded. And in the classics Berry finds plenty to support his arguments in these essays. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus illustrates a piece on our fossil fuel consumption, while Milton’s Satan makes us think about human limits. Unlike science, which encourages a belief in limitless progress (because so far it has happened, and all it has cost is the destruction of nature and the climate), literature is by nature bounded. A play is just a play, a poem cannot grow new cantos once its author is dead. But just as Berry thinks a life can be beautiful and valuable while lived within limits through using those limits well, so too can literature.

After all, in hundreds of years we have not run out of sonnets to fit into their assigned fourteen lines. The importance of completion, rather than insatiability, is what Berry takes away from many of the works he quotes. In the past, it seems, writers understood that too much knowledge would lead to our destruction. Berry is not against progress, but he is deeply conservative. He’s concerned about the pace of progress, and I think he’s right when it comes to some of his targets.

A Few Points of Dissent 

The essays of The World-Ending Fire were written over a period of about fifty years, and their order in the book is not chronological (I’m not sure what it is, however). The essays don’t need to be chronological, though, because Berry does not appear to change his mind – but then again, the world he attacks does not change much either. I remember reading his essay “Think Little”, about some faults in the environmental movement in America, and being surprised (and a little depressed) when I finished it to see it was written literally fifty years ago and not more recently. The problem, reading The World-Ending Fire, is more that Berry repeats himself quite a bit. His worldview is wonderful, and he defends it nobly, but in his essays he never seems to develop. It does mean that eventually you get a little tired of him.

I’m also not sure that his solutions are as fully explored as they ought to be, either. I have no problem with Berry using a car while avoiding computers – he knows the limits to his lifestyle. What I do have a problem with is the suggestion that everyone can move into the countryside and start farming. There are too many people in the world now for that to be a sensible or effective solution. I do not know about topsoil or any other specifically ecological problems like strip mining, but I do know that while technology may not be able to save humanity, it’s the only thing that has a chance to save us from ourselves. Just moving to the countryside and adopting an agrarian isn’t a workable solution because nobody, Berry included, can convert enough people to that approach fast enough.

A picture of the Kentucky River, Surrounded by trees.
The Kentucky River. “The Rise” takes us down it, while many other essays in The World-Ending Fire reflect on its decline due to pollution. Photo by Schwaltz, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is a frightening path that we are heading down, and I don’t enjoy being young while going down it. But it’s mildly heartwarming to see (as part of an internship I’m doing) just how the companies of the world are reducing their emissions, and how people really are taking things relatively seriously now. We have destroyed so much, and we will destroy yet more in time, but there is a chance that the likes of carbon capture and storage will give us an opportunity in the future to change for the better. At the moment I don’t think Berry’s “alternative” is a solution that has any chance of solving things. We need time, and technology is the only thing short of a higher power that can buy us it.

Perhaps my greatest disappointment with The World-Ending Fire, though, is just how few essays describing Berry’s own life on his farm are included. To his credit Paul Kingsnorth’s essay choices are mostly well considered, but this omission is in no way minor. It amounts to a grave fault in the book’s structure. We spend three hundred and fifty pages listening to Berry praise his life without really getting a sense of what that life is. How can we trust him without that? The essays that I enjoyed most in The World-Ending Fire were not those that told me how to live, but rather showed me how I could live. “A Few Words for Motherhood” is a beautiful rumination on the beginning of an animal’s life, while the final essay, “The Rise”, uses a narrative of canoeing down the Kentucky River as a way of thinking about pollution and limits.

It is these essays that I will remember and read again, and not those that are purely diatribes.

Conclusion

My criticism of The World-Ending Fire does not mean I did not like it. I would not have read the whole book if I hadn’t found such enjoyment in it. Berry is a wise man, and a kind one. His words and values are things that I hold close to my heart, and I think that others ought to hear what he has to say. I will be picking up this book again, not to find something new, but to find something old. I will flick through it in search of a reminder of who I ought to be and how I ought to live.

“Every man is followed by a shadow which is his death – dark, featureless, and mute. And for every man there is a place where his shadow is clarified and is made his reflection, where his face is mirrored in the ground. He sees his source and his destiny, and they are acceptable to him. He becomes a follower of what pursued him. What hounded his track becomes his companion.”

These are powerful words for an unoriginal idea, but they are words I will carry with me going forward as I try to follow my own calling. Nothing in The World-Ending Fire is original, as Berry freely admits. But original or unoriginal, the knowledge contained in these essays is valuable and not known nearly widely enough. It is a guide to a life that is better, more sustainable, more filled with grace. One day I hope to live it.