Chapter 7: In Which I Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About What We’re Not Supposed To Talk About

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest. 

 

Some books are more uncomfortable to read than they should be, and while I acknowledge the typical therapist’s command to “own my feelings,” I can’t help believing that it’s not just me this time.

The 1930 Pulitzer Prize went to Laughing Boy, a novel set almost entirely in the early 20th century universe of the western Navajo nations. It’s a generally unremarkable coming-of-age story involving the titular young man, a man with a penchant for horses, jewelry making, and the occasional interesting wager. At a days-long tribal event he meets another young Navajo, Slim Girl, and the attraction soon grows. Slim Girl, though, isn’t quite the type one brings home to amá. Having been taken from her tribe as a child and raised in one of the American-run “Indian schools,” she remains ensnared between the proverbial two worlds, a situation which drives the novel’s central conflict. (Such schools, by the way, are historically accurate. Pioneered by Christian missionaries, the idea of removing the “native” from Native Americans soon bore the imprimatur of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and lasted, sadly, until the 1970s.)

Laughing Boy ebbed from the pen of Oliver La Farge, an uppercrust-ian born in New York and raised in Rhode Island. Oliver’s father was an architect, his grandfather claimed fame for stained glass, and the family tree was not without the occasional Commodore, Governor, and Plymouth Colony resident. Oliver unsurprisingly graduated from Harvard. Twice.

When I first picked up Laughing Boy I had what I imagined was a relatively conventional thought: Is this going to be just another pseudo-ethnographic novel written from a decidedly white point of view?  One that, because of the time and culture in which it is set, I might even find slightly embarrassing?

I then did something I can’t imagine ever having done a couple of decades ago: I checked the author’s bona fides. I realized even while checking that it was an odd thing to do, but also realized in the same instant that today’s world demands that we think this way; if a white male wants to write a book about a different culture, we wonder immediately whether he has the right to do so.

And then came the important thought, the one we’re not even supposed to think (though many do), a thought much less conventional: Is it just me, or have we reached a point where a white male can’t discuss anything non-white without his point of view called into question?  

I’m pretty sure it’s not just me. In fact, I’m damned sure of it. I recall having a discussion following George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. At the time I was part of an online media team that focuses on political and social issues. The team was “diverse” (to use the modern and, to my mind, somewhat cryptic, terminology) and there were a variety of opinions. The part of the discussion that most adheres, however, came from an African-American in the group, who informed me that I “couldn’t possibly understand” what Trayvon Martin had gone through because I “wasn’t black.” While my ability to understand might suffer restriction, in reality his comment wasn’t at all about that; it was a way of shutting down my opinion, a way of telling me that not only were my opinions automatically invalid, but that I should perhaps reconsider even having an opinion in the first place. And If I did, I should at least have the decency to refrain from speaking it aloud.

Where does one take a conversation from there?

Examples abound: Men are routinely chastised for having an opinion on abortion or wages; heterosexuals for not having lived in constant fear of being outed; whites for never knowing what it feels like to be followed around a convenience store. And if someone does attempt a cross-cultural thought? Well, such people may suffer instruction, commanded to “check their privilege at the door.”

Laughing Boy isn’t the only Pulitzer book that’s made me feel this way. I also recently read The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s brilliant epistolary novel. Reading it wasn’t a totally comfortable experience, though, since modern culture has implanted a sadistic homunculus, one that suggests I might not even have the right to enjoy it or, if I do, that I’m probably enjoying it for all the wrong reasons—as if such a thing were possible. In some ways my experience with The Color Purple was even worse than with Laughing Boy because Alice Walker is black, female, and bisexual, a constant meta-reminder that I am so very much not any of those things. So even if I think I understood her book, how can I know if I did, or if she would think I did, or even if my thoughts are any longer valid on this inevitably larger social scale?

I get that I am, inarguably, privileged. I know this. As Pearl Jam once wrote in an otherwise forgettable song about white, male Americans, I “won the lottery" when I was born. But this idea that I need to somehow “check my privilege” (and, no, I’m not making up that phrase), or that my opinions and emotions are irrelevant because of it, strikes me with the greatest irony; those who dismiss me with such simplicity are merely exerting their own privilege, one self-proclaimed and, worse, one that builds walls.

There’s another unintended consequence here, one that is subtle yet impactful, one that accepts—in fact, relies upon—that a reading experience exists in the space between the reader and the author. Given that those spaces have changed—culturally, historically, politically—it is fair to say that the book, too, has necessarily changed. Were I Native American (or, perhaps, the even more au courant “First Nation”), the experience of reading Laughing Boy would be different than it is for me now.  Were I living in 1929 and reading the book’s first edition the experience would again be different. 

This has always been true, of course. Anyone who has gone back to a favorite book decades later knows that even personal histories change a book’s meaning. But it feels different, amplified somehow, to enter a reading experience with these changes foisted upon you by others.

I much prefer the days when I could sit down to read a book without having all those ghosts in the room with me, but I fear they’ve settled in for a good long stay….

 

Read since last post:

• The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)
• Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge (1930)
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2007)

Currently reading:

• The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk (1952)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, H.L. Davis (1936)

Count: 29 read; 58 to go

 

Chapter 6: In Which I Admit I Never Liked My Name, Provide a Bit of Russian History, and Recall a Certain Ice Cream Store

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

 

The story-cycle is one of the rarer genres, not quite flora nor fauna. It doesn’t require from readers the dedication a novel demands, yet isn’t quite the unconnected series of tales that makes short story collections so easy to pick up and put down.

 

 

Some of our most powerful works are formed in this way: The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and Dubliners are ones that immediately come to mind. More recent examples include Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. Perhaps the iconic American example is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Published in 1919, it was eligible for the 1920 Pulitzer Prize but surprisingly failed to make its mark (losing, sadly, to “no award”). Perhaps its non-traditional structure was simply too modern for the still staid Pulitzer committee members. Fortunately, the committee mindset evolved over the years, in plenty of time to recognize Olive Kitteridge, a story cycle from Elizabeth Strout that won in 2009.

*****

Here is one of the stories that formed me:

In 1881, in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, (pronounced Ignaty Grinevizky) a member of the People’s Will movement, threw a bomb at the feet of Tsar Aleksandr II. The explosion removed parts of both legs and ripped open the Tsar’s stomach. Later that day, in the confines of the Winter Palace, the leader who had twenty years earlier freed the serfs, died. His heir, Aleksandr III, did what many others had done before him: he blamed the Jews.

My birth name, I should tell you, is not Charney, but Schuchman, a name I never much liked. With its odd yet rhythmic spelling (S-C-H/U-C-H/M-A-N), the obvious opportunity for vulgar rhymes, and the alphabetical guarantee of rear-row seating assignments all through my school years, I always felt the name hung uncomfortably, like a too-large t-shirt.  In my early twenties, when I formed one-half of a musical duo that trudged around the San Francisco Bay area, I decided to change it and, with a sentimental nod to family history, chose “Charney.”

My great-grandfather and his brother were two of the millions of Jews threatened by the new Tsar’s policies, policies that led to a decades-long series of pogroms and the eventual removal of some two million Jews. I don’t know precisely where my great-grandfather was from, but I do know that the family’s last name was Charney and that it was a time when travel (or escape) for any Jew was exceedingly difficult. Pursuing a tactic more common than history tells, the two brothers acquired the identification of two men from a Russian Orthodox family, men who had recently died, men whose last name was close to the name I was born with. The two brothers somehow made it out of Russia and wound their way through parts of Europe where they managed poor passage to America. They came through Ellis Island, eventually making their way to Jersey City. Both soon married and, by the time of my grandfather’s birth in the 20^th century’s earliest years, had settled into the lives of ethnic Americans.

I thought my name change would be a charming homage. And it might have been, except that the family legend wasn’t true. It was, instead, homemade, something invented to amuse a small child who one night refused to fall asleep. And yet, imagine: with just this simple story comes a changed life.

*****

Story cycles makes us uncomfortable because of their inherent incompleteness, their requirements. They leave wide spaces between the lines and we’re expected to fill them in, sequencing where no sequence exists, finding patterns and hidden pictures and missing pieces like we did all those times as kids while sitting in a doctor’s office with half-torn Highlights magazines. We strive, whether knowingly or not, to make sense of broken narratives.

But isn’t that life?

*****

Here’s another one:

In the summer of 1972 I went steady for a very brief time with an incredibly attractive girl named Stephanie. (“Going steady,” for those too young to remember, was a bit like today’s “friends with benefits,” only you were more than friends and there were almost no benefits.) She and I would meet at the Gardner Park pool a few days a week to swim, meet with friends, and occasionally sneak behind the hot dog stand for a few chaste kisses. It was a time of early exploration but not much more, and five or six weeks later it was over. No drama, no scene. We were just two kids who bounced off each other briefly then went our separate ways.

Then things changed.

Steph’s family, the Geller’s, owned a local Baskin-Robbins store, one that I and my friends frequented and that my step-father patronized at least twice a week in order to replenish our freezer’s ever-diminishing supply of Jamoca® Almond Fudge. I showed up to school on just one more ordinary day to find Evy, Steph’s sister, glaring at me. “Stop calling the store. It’s not funny,” she said. “Calling over and over like that. We don’t like it. So just stop, okay?”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

A couple of days later I stopped for ice cream on the way home from school. Steph wouldn’t even look at me. Her parents refused to serve me. Someone had apparently decided to make prank calls to the store using my name, calling repeatedly, two or three times a day, and for weeks.  Nothing I could say or do would convince them it wasn’t me, and I was never allowed in the store again.  My stepfather asked me about it because the Gellers had asked him about it. I think he believed me only because I pleaded with him, and because he knew I wasn’t a very good liar.

I never found out who had made the calls, and the Gellers—mother, father, and daughters—never returned to my life after high school. I moved away, and the friendships were never close enough to expend any effort. They are a story: setting, plot and characters requiring no resolution. Yet here I am, nearly forty years on, and the story sticks with me. It must have had an effect or why would I remember it? Perhaps, recursively, this incomplete story, this incomplete accusation, drives my compulsive need for completion, for answers, to everything I begin, everything I question. But even if that’s so, is the story remembered because of the way I am, or has the story created the way I am, and so forces its own remembrance?

*****

Our lives are built that way, though, aren’t they? Built like story cycles, with characters arriving and leaving, many without proper exposition, barely threaded into the weave. Many, like Pirandello wrote, in search of an author. With answers lost and found, and resolutions (when we can find them) built from loosely coupled suppositions. If we left those stories alone we would find our lives untidy, and so we build from them the novel we’d prefer we were, the one filled with interesting characters spread over long years of narrative arc, alternating tension, joy, and sorrow in equal amounts. But it isn’t that way. It’s erratic and gap-filled, written in pencil, and with more blank pages than we know.  

We ourselves are story cycles. Our lives. Our friendships. Our careers. Mostly we will be forgotten. Mostly we are the spaces between what’s written. Yet all the meaning we have—of ourselves and of others—comes from those stories and spaces. We attempt narrative, cementing the cracks, filling the holes with whatever we can. We would much prefer the neatly clean and unidirectional, the hero’s tale that, while perhaps not epic, is a tale well-enough told when we tell it to ourselves. And so that’s what we do, but that’s not who we are.

Read since last post:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

·         The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1967)

·         Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (2009)

Currently Reading:

·         The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 26 read, 61 to go

Chapter 5: In Which I Wonder what all Those Words Mean and Find Myself Mulling the Personally Universal

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

I think I’ve just read a book, but I can’t be sure. I know I read all the words, and in the right order, but I couldn’t tell you what the book was actually about.

It wasn’t because of the vocabulary, though a few words sent me scrambling for the OED, a tome of miniscule type that still beats Google every time. (I looked up defalcate, for example, which as it turns out has nothing to do with bodily functions.) And it wasn’t because the plot was overly convoluted; it’s not like there were seven kingdoms and an iron throne, after all, or a mobius of characters invented by Keyser Söze. And nothing at all was timey-wimey.

If you've never had this feeling before, then permit me this analogy: Have you ever found yourself behind the wheel of a car having suddenly wondered where you were for the last fifteen minutes or so? You know you’ve been driving, but all you know for sure is that you have a subtle but unimpeachable sense of something passing you by.

That’s how I felt after turning the last pages of Faulkner’s A Fable.

Faulkner is a tough read, certainly, but not James-Joyce tough; he doesn’t just string letters together and pretend they’re words and, while some passages are riveted with run-ons and semicolons, there’s nothing like, say, the “Penelope” section that closes Ulysses. It also wasn’t my first foray into Faulknerian territory; I had read, though many years earlier, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom, all of which, if memory serves, I understood.

Admittedly I began handicapped. My copy wore no jacket, and therefore no inside flap’s brief summary. Nor was there an erudite introduction scribed by some English professor fighting for tenure at a mid-list Iowa university. None of that bothered me much, though. I knew a Faulkner novel required easing into.

After about twenty pages I re-checked the book see if I’d missed something, a blurb on the frontispiece perhaps, or a brief afterword—anything that might give me some hint at a plot. Other than knowing the book was set in France during World War II, I had nothing.

I cheated, heading to Wikipedia (the twenty-first century version of Cliffs Notes) and read the brief description: The book takes place in France during World War I and stretches through the course of one week, it began. Ah… so I didn’t even have the right World War. And there were only two to choose from. Not an auspicious beginning.  I continued reading:

It tells the stories of "Corporal Stefan", who is representative of Jesus. The Corporal orders 3,000 troops to disobey orders to attack in the brutally repetitive trench warfare. In return, the Germans do not attack, and the war is simply stopped when the soldiers realize that it takes two sides to fight a war. The Generalissimo has the corporal arrested and executed; he is representative of leaders who use war solely to make themselves stronger (he invites the German general over to discuss how to start the war again). Before he has him shot, the Generalissimo tries to convince the Corporal that war can never be stopped because it is the essence of humanity.

Not the cleanest summary. In fact, it feels like this particular Wikipedian had some trouble with the book, too.

At least I now had some idea about what was going on and, given the book’s title, I could at least watch for any relevant metaphors. Several soon emerged: Corporal Stefan had a team of twelve, one of whom is later paid thirty coins for information; Stefan also seems to have some relationship with an ex-prostitute named Mary who just happens to hang out with a woman named Marthe.

But what do I do with the seventy-odd pages used to describe the world’s fastest three-legged horse as it parades around the southern United States? Or the corpse-hunting widow who can’t decide whether to eat her only piece of bread or wield it uselessly as a weapon?

At this point I was hoping for any kind of…wait for it…epiphany. Something to open the skies, light the burning bush afire, part the seas. Instead I’m left with a gnawing concern, the strangest feeling that a part of my mind has peeled away like sunburnt skin. I wonder if it’s me, after all, that’s the problem, that if, somehow, having entered the tail end of my fifties, I no longer have the ability to comprehend a novel so dense. I imagine that if I’d read A Fable back when I’d read those other Faulkner novels I would have had a much easier time of it, might have experienced the sudden flash of understanding and awareness that all difficult but wonderfully written books give. It never came, though, not this time, and thinking that years ago it might have, gives me the eeriest feeling, one of those small quivers that often generate larger quakes.

We all know that as we get older some faculties necessarily fade. My eyes struggle both near and far now, and my ears, battered by years of heavy metal and progressive rock, aren’t what they used to be. It takes me longer to do a crossword puzzle than it used to, and the witty riposte is too often now slightly out of reach. And as I age, so do those around me, and what seems self-evident surprisingly strikes: a father, an uncle, a friend from high school, each a little grayer, each one step slower. You notice first the additional wrinkles, then the occasional misspeak or a need to repeat what is no longer clearly heard. Then you look into your own mirror in the morning and wonder at the gap between the face before you and the ageless adolescent internally (and eternally) embraced. But the mirror is accurate and the memory is only that; you realize that the greying and the slower step describe you, too. The person inside you wants only to take the many, many steps remaining, and more, but you, the real you, aren’t just taking steps, but counting them, an unwelcome admission that there are only so many left.

Books are meant to make us think, but when I picked up this one I never expected to mull my own fading senses.  What my difficulty with A Fable has surfaced in me is a sense of mortality and of time—Time and how much of it remains. Time and how best to enjoy it. Time and the one-way stream of it in which we live. I find myself clawing at the embankments of memory now, wondering what happened to people I almost knew decades ago, people I’ve imagined into importance; or trying to recall the poems and lyrics that moved me once; or what it felt like to enjoy mowing the lawn.  Wondering when I’ll trade Faulkner for obituaries. I spend more time holding hands with my wife these days. More time petting my remaining dog. More time attempting to understand, hoping that, like any good fable, the moral waiting at the end makes it all worthwhile.                                                       

Read since last post:

·         A Fable, William Faulkner (1955)

·         Death in the Family, James Agee (1958)

·         Tales of the South Pacific, James Michener (1948)

Currently Reading:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 23 read, 64 to go