Homelessness and Hope: Marilynne Robinson’s Lila

I had a dream last night about Jack, the prodigal son of Reverend Boughton who plays a major role in the events of Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home. This is quite extraordinary – I cannot think of another time I have ever dreamed of a literary figure – and it goes some way to suggest the sheer power that Robinson’s novels have over me. Jack does not feature in Lila, the third novel of the series, except in conversation, but his presence hangs over the book just as it does in the previous two. Instead, Lila is the story of Reverend Ames’s wife, a woman who we learned in Gilead just turned up one day in Ames’s church seeking shelter from the elements, later marrying him, in spite of his old age and their many differences.

Lila, like Jack, is an outsider. Through Lila’s memories the novel juxtaposes the story of her childhood and youth to the story of her courtship and marriage to Ames. As with Robinson’s other works, Lila can be accused of being boring – it is slow, often tender, and infused with wonder – but despite that, it is a very different novel to either Home or Gilead, though they mostly share the same small pool of characters. Here, the main questions are about the trust and the loneliness that can lie at the heart of existence.

Beginning

Robinson’s language is quite extraordinary. I remember being disappointed by her style while I was reading Housekeeping, her first novel, but I have never had that feeling with any of her other ones. What is true is that it is deceptively simple – Robinson does not use words that send us to the dictionary; rather, she uses words in combinations that send shivers down our spine. Take our encounter with Lila on the first page:

“The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping.”

“all cried out” – how simple the phrase, but how easily it captures the abjection of her situation! A little later we read how the people inside her house “fought themselves quiet” – Robinson makes her own language brutal, direct as the fighting itself. How much less powerful the phrase would be if it were “fought until they were quiet”. And the “themselves” is excellent too, hinting at the futility of the fighting – these people are only hurting themselves, they are destroying their own community, their own home.

Lila, aged about five, waits outside, where she is “saved” by Doll, an older woman, and taken away. Away from the family that does not care for her, Lila and Doll eventually join a group of roving workers, a ragtag bunch of rough young men and women. But first she gets a name – at home she had only learned to swear. At the time when Doll takes her away, she is so weak that she can barely walk, and the two of them stay with an unnamed woman, working for her until Lila begins to get her strength back. The woman suggests the name Lila: “I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.”

“I got nowhere to be”

Lila’s life is not pretty. Lila meets Ames at the end of the 1940s, but her youth was spent during the years of the Great Depression. Where earlier the group she had gone with had managed to get by, once work dries up the group splits up and many turn to crime to survive. Doll, who acts as Lila’s mother, manages to get her a year at school, where Lila learns to read and write, but it is the only formal education she has. After working outside, she also spends time in a hotel and, terribly, a brothel. Lila’s time in the brothel is the most challenging section of the book to read, so soaked in despair is it. We have a real sense of just how trapped the women are there – financially, emotionally. Most significantly, they lose their names. Once again, Lila seems to have lost herself.

John Ames gives Lila a name – his own surname. She drifts into Gilead and takes shelter from a storm in his church, where she sees him performing baptism on a small girl, “wearing a white dress that spilled down over his arm”. Instead of leaving Gilead, Lila finds herself attacked by kindnesses, as Ames uses his position to give her work and support. Lila is almost feral when she arrives, so little of kindness has she received in her life. Doll is out of the picture by the time she reaches Gilead, so the only other memory of goodness is a school report she once received: “she has made remarkable progress”. Lila teaches us to look even at the “strays” as people deserving of love and affection by showing how these provide the water that helps people grow and flourish.

Lila, eternal drifter, ends up married, ends up pregnant. Yet the great tension in the novel is over whether she will truly stay. Although she grows under Ames’s care, and comes to love him and almost, perhaps, to trust him, still we are left questioning whether she can truly change her nature.

“Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.”

We know, of course, that she decides to stay, because Lila is set before Home and Gilead. We have a feeling of the truth of it too, thanks to the beauty and joy and belonging that Robinson lets Lila feel – “if there was one thing she wished she could save from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him”. At the same time, there is always a “but”. We do not know what will happen once Ames – aged 76 in Gilead – passes away. But we do know that Lila has grown, that the hardness of her heart has started to soften. There’s an extraordinary moment in Home where Jack is in agony at feeling his own wretchedness and damnation and it is Lila, the quiet one, who speaks up to tell him that people can change, that he can change. Lila does.

“Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous”

Lila is wonderful in the truest sense of that word. As with her other novels, Robinson’s descriptions of nature are particularly lush, as if divinity is hiding behind the tree trunks: “There is a way trees stir before a rain, as if they already felt the heaviness”. The growing love and tenderness of Lila and Ames’s relationship is also something that is extraordinary. I kept sending the most ridiculous and sentimental messages to my friends while I was reading Lila. Robinson has a way of getting to me, of making the world so obviously imbued with religion that one feels silly not to agree with her, and embarrassed at one’s eyes whenever they do not reveal the beauty incarnate in every living thing.

Yet here is a review that is rather more critical of Robinson’s use of religion, and worth reading for that reason. I think Robinson’s fiction is amazing because it makes clear to an audience of non-believers or half-believers why religion can and should appeal to them. It has a clear sense of good and evil, of Man’s fallenness and of his potential redemption. The character of Jack is, as my dream indicates, a particularly special creation. For Robinson is aware that the world stretches beyond Gilead. One particularly impressive moment in Lila comes when she says to Ames that he doesn’t mind thinking about hell because he doesn’t know anybody who would ever go there. And it’s true – what can a man who has barely left his small town know? On a similar note, one thing I loved about Home was its treatment of race and racial politics.

Robinson, it might be said, is guilty of choosing her world sneakily, so that only the positive aspects of religion are emphasised. But this is not quite the aggressively closed world that Wendell Berry loves. One cannot say that Robinson is ignorant of religion’s complexities, or of the world’s. Doll kills a man, perhaps Lila’s own father. Lila works in a brothel. At one point we encounter a young man who believes he has killed his father. It is not that there is no damnation in Robinson’s world, so much as that for anyone with an ounce of good, redemption is always possible.

And so it should be.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I find myself struggling to write about Lila. There are many things I don’t feel qualified to talk about, most of them religious. As in Gilead, for example, there is a lot of discussion of baptism. The novel’s themes – the loneliness of Lila’s life, and her shame and guilt, are all better experienced than read about in my review. It is of course a book I recommend, but less so than the other two novels. There is a lot of bleakness here that is quite difficult to read, whereas a work like Gilead is more dominated by wonder. Home, I think it is fair to say, is the masterpiece – balancing wonder and bleakness together so perfectly. I am sure to read Jack itself, so you will not doubt here my thoughts on that a bit later too.

I can only hope that Robinson will continue writing, and that the inhabitants of Gilead will continue to grow.

The “Free” and Fragile World of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

Iris Murdoch is often considered one of the best English novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and The Bell is one of her best-known works. I bought it because I liked the idea, about a community of religious individuals living beside an order of nuns. These individuals are people who are disappointed with the world in one way or another, and yet are unable to withdraw from it completely, as have the nuns. (A little like your own blogger, in fact). Instead, they live in this fragile, liminal space, attempting to keep their lives in order. As newcomers arrive this space’s stability is put to the test. Rather than spoil the plot as I usually do, in this piece I will discuss the ways that the community crumbles from within, and comment on the question of freedom, as it applies to Murdoch’s characters.

Introduction to the Characters

At Imber Court, an old country house in Gloucestershire, there lives a lay religious community. It is lead by Michael, a closeted homosexual. Other members include James, his second-in-command, Nick, a man who once was dangerously close to Michael, and Catherine, Nick’s twin sister and an aspiring nun. The guests include Toby, a young man looking for a spiritual retreat before he starts at university, and a married couple, Dora and Paul. Paul is older, rich, and intellectual, while Dora is younger, cheerful, and trapped in a horrible marriage that she keeps running away from, unsuccessfully. Between all these people plays out a tragic drama, as past and present collide in the vulnerable space of Imber, which at first glance appears to offer a kind of isolated utopia, and yet in reality finds the world left behind much closer than at first anyone had assumed.

Shaky Foundations

Murdoch is good at showing the subtle ways that utopia fails to escape the old world. On the very first page of The Bell we are told that Dora comes from a “lower middle-class London family”, making us aware, unconsciously, that nobody is without background, even here. James and Michael, the leaders of the lay community, get on well not just because of their characters, but because both of them have “a certain clannish affinity” stemming from a shared upper middle-class background. Indeed, the utopia, where everyone lives in a rundown great country house and grows vegetables all day is only possible because someone owns that country house – Michael. Even as the community tries to emphasise equality – everyone addresses each other by their first names, for example – it is founded thanks to privilege, and within it a certain hierarchy still sees the well-bred and intelligent at the top.

Technology and Squirrels

Just as class undermines the community, so too do the differing conceptions of it that its members have. Michael thinks back to conversations with the Abbesshe had had before The Bell begins. She describes the people, “disturbed and hunted by God”, who can “neither live in the world nor out of it”. These people, who are looking for a way to make their “spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish”, are disappointed by the growing bureaucratised, technological world that was becoming ever more dominant in the years after the Second World War. They head to the lay community as an act of flight. It’s not clear what they want, so much as what they don’t want. For example, many of them see farming in much the same way as does Wendell Berry, aiming to use only horses and the simplest tools to provide for their own sustenance.

Michael, meanwhile, wants to purchase “a mechanical cultivator”. He doesn’t understand why they cannot make use of the good bits of the outside world – the technology – while avoiding the bad. For many of the others, the work loses its dignity when a machine is involved. Another argument breaks out of the squirrels and pigeons of the community. These and other pests have been eating the crops and fruits of the garden, and Nick and others have been shooting them. Long before tractors were invented, farmers defended their wealth from winged and furry intruders. But the community is divided yet again – Catherine does not want to see any of the animals getting hurt. Although they all want a bounteous garden in their utopia, nobody can agree on how to achieve it. They are united more than anything else by their desire to escape the world. Murdoch asks if that is truly enough.

Christianity – various interpretations

Murdoch was not a Christian, but she was, from what I gather, what we might term “spiritual” these days, and she has a lot of sympathy for the religion of the majority of the characters depicted in The Bell. At the same time, it is religion that must also bear part of the blame for the fragility of the world of the novel. Just as people retreat from the world for different reasons, so too do they believe completely differently in the same religion. This is exemplified in the two sermons recounted in the story, one by James and one by Michael. James’s sermon talks of the need to “live without any image of oneself” in order to achieve the good life. Personality, he thinks, gets in the way of goodness. James’s vision of the community is one of order and – for some, stifling – conformity.

Michael’s sermon, given later, essentially says the opposite. His speech, as introduced, begins just as James’s had, with the phrase “the chief requirement of the good life”. But Michael argues that the secret is that “one should have some conception of one’s capacities”. Instead of destroying personality, we must work within it, using it to better live according to God’s wishes. Michael’s view is influenced by his actions earlier in the novel, in particular by his guilt over his love for Toby and Nick. He convinces himself that God would not have made him the way he is without a purpose, and that in his love there is a great value, however wrong the love is.

Bells themselves help make clear to the reader the conflicting interpretations of Christianity that Michael and James offer. Each of them uses the image of the bell in their sermons, but reach a completely different result thereby. Photo by I, Randal.J. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both sermons sound, at least to a layperson like myself, sufficiently Christian. And both I think have merit too – for anyone who has found the evil in themselves will inevitably oscillate between these two views about how to exorcise it, through the destruction of the personality that contains the evil, or through the transformation of that evil into good through force of personality. Yet these two sermons make it clear that Christianity, at least as most of us understand it, is full of contradictions. Dostoevsky, at this moment, would step up and say that that is the point. Only Christianity is capable of offering a way of life that can deal with human contradictions, thanks to its own contradictions – any other ideology will inevitably disappoint. However we look at it, though, within the context of The Bell religion has an ambivalent role, being another site where a supposedly united community divides.

Are Murdoch’s Characters Free?

I remember reading a comment from James Wood, a critic I like, that although Murdoch “again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist … her own characters never have this freedom”. There are some excellent things in The Bell, but I cannot help but agree with Wood’s assessment. Murdoch’s characters are intelligent, they have their own personalities, but they are not at all free. Not in the sense that they are bound by external forces, like class – that kind of unfreedom is de rigueur for a realist novelist. Nor are they unfree in the sense that Bakhtin thinks Tolstoy’s characters are unfree – that they all, consciously or not, reflect Tolstoy’s way of thinking and force the reader into it. Murdoch’s characters are unfree in the sense that they do not escape her.

In preparation for this piece I watched an interview with Murdoch that I enjoyed a great deal, but one thing that struck me was the way that she emphasised just how much planning goes into her novels. The whole book is planned in great detail, even on the level of chapters and dialogues, long before she begins to write. It is perfectly reasonable to plan things, but I think that in this lies the unfreedom of her characters. They always feel incapable of spontaneity, even if they are supposed to be spontaneous, because any spontaneous actions have been meticulously planned out already. Whatever freedom they have is structurally insincere, and we feel that, reading the book. Murdoch is hostile to things like the “machinery of sin and repentance” that govern the characters’ personalities, but she seems to have overlooked the machinery of control that her own writing places upon them.

Conclusion

That her characters feel unfree is not, however, as big a criticism as it might seem. There are fewer free characters in fiction than it seems at first glance. It is only when characters claim to be free – as they do here – but are not, that we have a problem. Murdoch’s planning does so much good for The Bell that I do not want to seem like I am criticising it. The work is extremely intelligent, at times funny, very well written, worthy of analysis, and – what is far more important anyway – worthy of thought. Whether or not the characters are ultimately free and real is secondary to this. It deals with these simple, but rather important questions – of how we should live, what we should believe, and how to be good and free – in such an effective manner that I do not mind its one, rather small, fault.

The Bell is a novel I can certainly recommend, from an author I know I will read more of.  

Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

What is attractive about Ludwig Wittgenstein is that he was a real genius. I did not gallop through Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius because I wanted to know about Wittgenstein’s philosophy – I did it because I wanted to know about the man. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language are worth knowing about, sure, but certainly not near the top of the pile of philosophies I want to have a grasp of. Though Monk’s biography gave me some sense of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, the focus here was more on his life. This approach works because, for me at least, the parts of Wittgenstein’s thought that are most interesting are precisely those that came from his life – such as the way the mystical sections of the Tractatus came from Wittgenstein’s experience in the First World War.

Rather than summarise a summary of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, I thought I’d note here the parts of his life that struck me as particularly entertaining, saddening, or interesting. Being such a unique personality, Wittgenstein provides plenty of all three.

The Briefest of Biographical Summaries

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna to one of the richest of all Austrian families and had an extremely privileged upbringing. But the Vienna he was born into, at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s life, was not a happy place producing happy people. I counted at least five suicides in the first chapter of Monk’s book alone – three of them Wittgenstein’s brothers. Our hero moves to England for his studies, meets a number of philosophers including Bertrand Russell who all eventually come to consider him a genius. He spends time in Norway and as a soldier, works as a teacher and gardener, goes back to Cambridge to teach, helps out in the Second World War behind the scenes, and finally dies. Given that the lives of most philosophers are little more interesting than that of Immanuel Kant, who never left his province, Wittgenstein’s life of action is rather exciting.

Genius and its Duty

One thing making Wittgenstein interesting is that he was not a scientist and did not see philosophy as scientific. Instead, he approached philosophy creatively. At one point he shocked the boring old gits of the Vienna Circle of philosophers by recommending they read Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He also lectured primarily using the power of inspiration, standing in the lecture hall or else pacing until a thought came to him, and then announcing it to enraptured onlookers. Most importantly, Wittgenstein’s whole character was artistic. Monk quotes Russell here:

“His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair.”

At another point Russell had Wittgenstein pace up and down his room for three hours in silence before Russell finally asked: “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” “Both,” Wittgenstein replies, and continues his pacing. 

The language of sins is surprising to people who like me think of Wittgenstein as a boring logician. In reality, Wittgenstein was of a decidedly religious sensibility. His major influences appear to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – Hadji Murat and The Brothers Karamazov are just two of several books by the authors that Wittgenstein adored and passed out among his friends. Acquaintances compared him to Levin from Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin from The Idiot. Though he was raised a Catholic, Wittgenstein did not believe in the Church’s dogmas, even as he believed in a kind of God and definitely believed in his own sinfulness.

Sin, for Wittgenstein (as it was for Tolstoy), was determined by his own conscience: “The God who in my bosom dwells”. What Wittgenstein feared most of all was judgement – “God may say to me: “I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.”” He was never happy with himself. He expected nothing less than perfection from himself, that beautiful but impossible congruence between one’s thoughts and one’s actions. At one point he made a confession to all of his friends in an attempt to rid himself of his pride. Instead, he just annoyed them. Few were interested in listening to all of his minor failings.

But Wittgenstein believed that he had a duty to be perfect – the duty of genius that Monk uses as his biography’s title. By perfect I do not mean in conduct so much as in the sense of squeezing out of himself as much philosophy as possible, by any means possible. At one point Wittgenstein was struggling from overwork, but rather than take a break as his friends suggested, he decided to try hypnotherapy to help him concentrate even more successfully. At another point he decides to abandon the world to live in a hut in Norway and write philosophy.

Russell, ever sensible, warns him against it:

“I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)”

Wittgenstein does not listen. He does not listen to anybody at all. In many ways he reminded me of Tolstoy, who like him was sceptical of doctors and medicine, and had an all-consuming desire to be perfect: “How can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

And Wittgenstein is miserable as a result: “My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.”

As he gets older Wittgenstein mellows in some ways, thanks in part to his loves, male and female. The sheer obstinacy of his youth is less visible, and there is less of the humorous, if sad, determination to ignore everyone else’s opinions or suggestions. 

A photo of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Rather than reading this piece one should really just stare at this face for five minutes or so. I cannot be alone in thinking that Wittgenstein’s gaze pierces into the soul.

The Dark Side of Genius

Wittgenstein’s perfectionist demands upon himself were ones that affected everyone around him, and rarely positively. He shows a remarkable lack of concern for others’ feelings and emotions, especially those of his partners. Even though when asked how to improve the world he declared that all we could do was improve ourselves, his attempts at self-improvement rarely seem to improve either him or the world. He loses friends at every turn – including Russell himself. His vaguely Tolstoyan ideal of a good life – working with one’s hands while developing spiritually – is not one he himself follows, stuck in Cambridge, but is one he forces on others, including Francis Skinner, one of his partners.

When Wittgenstein actually encounters “the common man”, said man rarely proves the best of us. Wittgenstein dislikes his soldierly comrades in the Austro-Hungarian army, and during his years of teaching in the mountains of rural Austria he ends up being a dreadful teacher for anyone lacking ability. Wittgenstein preferred to use fists to ensure mathematics got into his pupils’ heads, rather than patient and repeated explanations. At one point he even knocks a poor child unconscious, for which he is taken to court.

As for the intelligent people in his life, they are rarely treated by Wittgenstein to any greater kindness or concern. Of one friend he said: “he shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.” When another writes to him, wishing him well in his work and social endeavours, Wittgenstein responds especially pleasantly: “It is obvious to me that you are becoming thoughtless and stupid. How could you imagine I would ever have “lots of friends”?” And indeed, after reading such a letter, how could we doubt his social abilities?

Wittgenstein’s determination to destroy himself in the name of perfection ruined any chance at happiness, even though he thought that perfection would be what would finally provide him with it. In this Wittgenstein is no different from many other depressed people, your blogger included, who set themselves impossible tasks and achieve nothing but their own misery thereby. I found one moment particularly amusing in connection with this. Wittgenstein finally sees a doctor for some exhaustion and pain he was suffering from and gets given some vitamins. Once he takes them, he immediately recovers and returns to work. Rather than lying in his moral failings, perhaps his inability to work could have just lain in his poor health. However, in his determination to see everything through the lens of his own sinfulness, Wittgenstein obviously never considered the possibility that he might just need to live a little more healthily, eat well and sleep.

Conclusion

Wittgenstein wrote that “the way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear”. It’s a good idea, but Wittgenstein clearly chose the wrong way to live. Clearly? Wittgenstein achieved a great deal, his work revolutionised philosophy, and on his deathbed he was able to request that his friends be told he’d “had a wonderful life”. Alas, his life rather epitomises that dreadful, unbridgeable divide between happiness and achievement. The best happiness demands limited goals, while the greatest goals demand the sacrifice of (at least) part of our happiness. We may read Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and say that Wittgenstein really just needed some good meds and some CBT for his OCD and other problems, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Would he have been able to work so well if he did not have this way of life, this drive? Wittgenstein was a genius – he had a self-appointed duty to destroy himself in the quest for a better way of philosophising. What is important is that Wittgenstein could squeeze more philosophy out of himself. Can we, depressed perfectionists, really hope to achieve that much more by destroying ourselves, or should we just cut our losses and be sensible, care about ourselves and the world, and eventually find that thing that others talk so lovingly about – happiness?

I don’t know.