Eucatastrophe Reader

"She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

My Antonia by Willa Cather REVIEW

‘Optima Dies Prima Fugit’ – Virgil ("Our best days are the first to leave us")

“The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.”

There is a certain irony to the fact that Willa Cather thought that the bareness of Nebraska prairie might erase her when she first arrived.

In a 1913 newspaper interview Cather described her response to this desolate landscape:

“I shall never forget my introduction to it. We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfather’s homestead one day in April. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding onto the side of the wagon box to study myself – the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal is if we had come to the end of everything – it was a kind of erasure of personality.”

The paradox is that in breaking people down, Nebraska is what allowed people to remake themselves (I suppose one might say this of any hardship that they have experienced in life … or of God). Willa Cather was one of those people who found Nebraska a place to die and be reborn. Her novel My Antonia is a celebration of the agent of destruction (Nebraska) and the people who she saw courageously reforming themselves there (not all did). “Winter lies too long in country towns,” she says in My Antonia,

“hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”

 In a sense, Nebraska became for her a country of “Velveteen Rabbits” – people who, either by choice or by necessity, were stripped of pretense and allowed to become who they actually were. “We agreed,” she writes in the introduction,

“that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”

In My Antonia, the landscape is a character. It is a living breathing shaping agent that peels away the outer shell of civilized pseudo-selves and, if they will accept the pain of it, re-sculpts them. Needless to say, not all the characters allow themselves to be made more human. Many of them, indeed, retain all the templated sameness of the places from which they came. But these people, it seems, are the ones that suffer without ever receiving the redemptive gift of that suffering (the reborn self – the life in harmony with themselves as real people). They live and die miserable (I am thinking here of the Cutters). Cather returns again and again to the image of a living – almost divine – landscape; loving, caring, revealing, pruning.

 “Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping...”

“The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.”

“When Spring came after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.”

In some ways, the harsh shaping beauty of the prairie becomes God personified.

“We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.”

The word for this sort of light is “crepuscular.” It is the sort of light that makes one believe that God lies lurking barely hidden behind the clouds. Cather’s experience of being absorbed into the vast prairie sunsets seem, on the surface, to be akin to the experience of mystics throughout history (Rumi or St. Theressa of Avila for example). “At any rate, that is happiness;” says Cather in My Antonia, “to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

By the time that Willa Cather arrived in Nebraska as a nine year old girl, she was already finding it difficult to live up to the expectations of a mother who wanted nothing more for her than to be a Victorian era woman. The beauty of Nebraska for Willa Cather was that it was a place new enough to allow some people some freedom to redefine themselves. “All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn,” says Jim Burden (the voice of Cather),

“The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again.”

“I could choose my own way.” And that is exactly what Willa Cather did. Her principle way of “chosing her own way” is reflected in the life of Jim Burden in the novel. He consistently resists the tendency of the people of Black Hawk to civilize him and mold him in the image of their “back east” expectations. Jim Burden rebelliously decides to like the “wrong sort of people.”

Like the hired hands:

“They were both of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.”

Like Mrs. Harding

“There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.”

Like the country girls that stay out late to dance.

“The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.”

“People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.”

“Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative gave a favourable interpretation to everything. When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.”

And primarily, like Antonia.

“Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!' she used to sing joyfully. `I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.' She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm.”

“We all liked Tony's stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.”

“If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters' gate softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Antonia! I looked with contempt at the dark, silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!”

“Antonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.”

“`Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.'”

“About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.”

“It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

Jim Burden wearies of the people who work simply to get back to who they were before they came to Nebraska. He discovers that even on the frontier, the spirit of pioneerism can often only be found among the foreign immigrants and it is to them that he gravitates. “They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood,” he says of the houses in Red Cloud (and no doubt of its inhabitants),

“with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all.”

What Cather sets out to do is to capture those glorious moments of her childhood before America could “Americanize” the souls that Nebraska hardships uncovered for her to meet. One suspects that the older she got, the fewer of these precious “original souls” she could find and the more she treasured her memories of the ones that she had found. Several times in the novel, she comments on how scarcity makes things precious. It was true of trees in Nebraska according to Antonia,

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

It was true of color according to Jim:

“In the winter bleakness a hunger for colour came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar. Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting, shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude reds and greens and blues of that coloured glass held us there.”

And it was true of memories as well

“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

It is these memories – memories that Jim (and Cather) think they own that eventually come to own them. Perhaps we are all “owned” by the places where we were first loved and where we first loved. The Medieval Persian poet Rumi writes:

Once a beloved asked her lover: "Friend,
You have seen many places in the world!

Now - which of all these cities was the best?
He said: "The city where my sweetheart lives!"

Cather’s Jim loves Nebraska for many reasons but primarily it is because Nebraska is where Antonia lives and where he came to love her. And if s/he is to stay alive (one almost needs to be in love to be alive, do they not?) then one must at least stay within the neighborhood “of where the sweetheart lives.” That seems to be what Cather (Jim) decides to do when s/he decides to write about his/her Nebraska childhood. In My Antonia, Jim writes about his teacher, Cleric, and how he was inspired to put his memories of his childhood down on paper.

“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.”

“I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the `Georgics' where tomorrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee. 'Optima dies... prima fugit.' I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. 'Primus ego in patriam mecum... deducam Musas'; `for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.' Cleric had explained to us that `patria' here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little I country'; to his father's fields, `sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.' … We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at my book, the fervour of his voice stirred through the quantities on the page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.”

In book III, Chapter III, Jim tells us about going to see an opera in Lincoln with Lena. He liked going to plays with Leena ha tells us,

“Everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.”

The play that he talks about is called Camille. Cather assumes that the reader will know the play and does not explain it when telling us about her response to it. It is a story based on a novel by Alexander Dumas about a Parisian courtesan who comes to love a young man by the name of Armand. She is about to leave her exotic lifestyle as the kept woman of the rich for him but is dissuaded from doing so by Armand’s father who fears that the scandal will compromise the chances of Armand’s sister to marry well. Camille sympathizes and understands that allowing Armand to pursue the relationship further would only harm him and his family and leaves the relationship, leaving Armand to assume that he has been left for another man.

In My Antonia, the play leaves Jim sobbing throughout (as it does Leena). He does not explain why but we are left to understand that in some way, they understand that their family’s expectations for them will forever keep them from loving the people that they love. It is not difficult to understand how many layers of story there is to this story for Cather.  

My Antonia  provokes deep questions. As blissful as fond memories can be, is there a danger that if we go there too often and drink too deeply that we will not be able to get back? “I felt the old pull of the earth,” Jim says of his return to Red Cloud twenty years later, “the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.” His meeting with Antonia and her many children and her husband makes him wonder if he can ever feel anything but dislocated in his present life.

“I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!”

Memory can be a like a Venus fly-trap, can it not?

Question for Comment: What would it mean for you to “bring the muse into your country?” What part of the world; what part of humanity? What human experience would you give others a window into if you could?

“The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor”

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O’Brien REVIEW

Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice takes us on a journey through the life experiences of Willa Cather and how they led eventually to the writing of her novel O Pioneers. It is a journey through her roots in Virginia, her experience of transplantation to the Nebraska frontier as a nine year old, her early education, her years at college at the University of Nebraska, her work as an editor of McClure’s magazine, and her apprenticeship in writing.

It becomes clear that it took Willa Cather many, many years to give up trying to fit into the pre-formatted roles that the menu of her early years gave her to choose from and to make her own (both as a woman and as a writer). Her ability to break ground as a non-conforming woman eventually, gave her the ability and fortitude to break new ground in her writing as well. People come into the world on a spectrum with respect to femininity and masculinity and though born a girl, Willa Cather identified with (and chose to be identified with) boys from the time she was a youngster. If her mother dressed her up for a picture in a frilly dress, she had the picture taken with a bow and arrow in her hands. O’Brien recounts the following anecdote to illustrate how Willa Cather defied her mother’s attempt to feminize her.

“An early memory, which became a story Cather recounted to Edith Lewis, records what must've been a typical skirmish between rebellious daughter and imperious mother. One day an elderly judge was visiting Willowshade [Cather’s family home in Virginia]. Adopting a courtly, paternalistic manner toward Willa, he began stroking her curls and talking to her in the playful platitudes one addressed to little girls. But Willa refused to employ the playful platitudes with which little girls were supposed to flatter Southern gentleman. Throwing away the script, the daughter horrified her mother, Edith Lewis recounts, by exclaiming, "I's a dang'ous nigger, I is!"

Cather later wrote in a review of George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss in 1897:

“Haven't we all had pretty prim little cousins like Lucy Dean, whose hair curled naturally, and who were always neat when we were dirty, and mannerly when we were rude; who never tore their frocks nor dropped their fork at the table; whose China blue eyes grew wide with astonishment at our tomboyish proceedings? And haven't we all just ached to push these immaculate cherubs into the mud – just as Maggie did? And haven't we all felt bitterly that our mothers secretly suffered from our plain brown faces and stubby noses and wished we were pretty like other children?"

It is interesting that Cather’s favorite female authors had both taken the name George (George Sand and George Elliot). “The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor,” Cather wrote. From a young age, she identified with the boys in the stories that she read and generally despised the roles that she saw girls being assigned. She loved heroes and the heroic. At heart she had a romantic belief in the powers of the individual to change history and it seemed so rare that women got to play those parts in literature. By laying around waiting to be rescued, kissed, or married, female characters seemed to be falling woefully short of their potential. They were not actualizing their highest purpose. In Willa Cather’s My Antonia, you cannot miss the way that the narrator (Jim Burden) disparages most of the girls in Black Hawk, Kansas (Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud) and later at University. It is only the “manly” girls (even if they are pretty) that summon Jim Burden’s interests:

“That was before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.”

It is only the undomesticated girls that Jim can find worthy of his interest. Cather does not imagine a boy like Jim Burden. She inhabits him. These are not Jim’s views. These are Willa Cather’s. According to O’Brien, Willa Cather changed her name to “William” in high school (after her ancestor William who had fought and died in the Civil War), cut her hair short, took male parts in plays, took up vivisection and science as her primary academic interest, and set out to be a doctor. In her most famous works, O Pioneers! and My Antonia, Cather focuses her attention on the Edenic state of childhood. For her, children like her were damaged when they were forced to “pick a side” and fill a role that society handed them to play. For people like her, there was no place in society that could fit her particular wiring. O’Brien writes,

“In her fiction, this Edenic state is lost when the hateful distinction between the sexes arrives and the adolescent must enter the fallen world of adult sex roles and repress the part of the self then assigned to the other gender. The Fall – her metaphor for the loss of childhood – is thus a decent from unity to fragmentation as well as from freedom to restriction.”

“Failing to question the culture's polarization of gender, "Billy Cather" could reject the female role she found limiting only by continuing to repudiate her sex. Her need to differentiate herself from the mass of ordinary females is evident in her college journalism, where she frequently expressed her contempt for women in tones ranging from amused dismissal to bitter condemnation.”

When she was forced to start becoming “a young lady” Cather opted not to even try. She must have known that though she could never succeed at being William Cather, she would be better at it than she would be at being Wilella (her real name). Consistently, just as Cather admired women (like Antonia Shemerda) who were strong, tough, a bit wild, and more capable of doing a man’s job then men were, she also could only find men admirable who inhabited the furthest reaches of masculinity. O’Brien relates how impressed the college-aged Cather was with the men who played football and with the testosterone drenched writing of Rudyard Kipling. When Kipling got married and moved to Vermont, Cather expressed a concern that marriage and civilization would “ruin” him. “She would rather have heard that he had taken to opium or strong drink or that he had married a half caste woman and was raising vermilion hades out in India.”

“Finding Kippling a soldier to be reckoned with on the literary battlefield, a writer more at home with mangy dogs than ruffled collars, Cather liked the worship of force she found his work,” O’Brien writes. “If the climate is not good for Mrs. Kipling then remember that you were married to your work long before you ever met her,” Cather wrote Kipling after his marriage and move to Vermont, “Alas! There were so many men who could have married Mrs. Kipling and there was only you who could write Soldiers Three.” O’Brien notes how Cather took to the burgeoning interest Americans were developing in the sport of football.

“Writing in the Hesperian [University of Nebraska newspaper] in 1893, Willa Cather made what might seem an unlikely connection for a woman writer between art and athletics. She compared Homeric epic and football, the bone-crushing sport which, as we have seen, she praised as a rousing cure for “foppishnes,” “chappieism,” and Eastern effeminacy.

After conceding that the sport was “brutal,” she went on to say:

"So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they like appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all their old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we ever shall! The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left. The only way poetry can never reach one is through one's brute instincts. Charge of the Light Brigade, or How They Brought Good News to Aix, move us in exactly the same way that one of Mr. Shue’s runs or Mr. Yont's touchdowns do, only not half so intensely. A good football game is an epic.”

Ironically, it would be only in the writing of her novels many years later that she would come to understand how one might combine masculine and feminine into a moderated “third way”- Cather’s fictional pioneer women take on a manly task (civilizing a wild frontier) but they do so as women – and as women that men can (and should if they were smart) love as women. Indeed, the title for Cather’s novel, O Pioneers! comes from the poem Pioneers, Oh Pioneers! by Walt Whitman. The poem is a celebration of manly frontier machoism in many respects and Cather seems intent on taking over Walt Whitman’s role as the literary director of pioneer life and modifying his vision to include a greater role for the feminine. Read the entire poem HERE.

Here are just a few stanzas to give you the gist of just what a machismo-laden, militaristic, testosterone marinated work of conquering it is.

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call--hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!--swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

What Cather has done in her novel O Pioneers! is demonstrate that the Whitmanish “manly” work of acquiring a continent can perhaps be done better by - can it be? - by women. Women who are more womanly because they are more manly. Cather’s women are better than “ideal women” because they have not eviscerated themselves of all that is within them that is manlike. Cather’s men are men because they have not accepted the notion that women must remove all that is masculine from themselves to be lovely and loved by men. Cather’s men are capable of feminine traits (they appreciate natural beauty for example. They read poetry. They dance.) At the end of My Antonia, the heroine has lost some of her teeth but none of her zest for taking on the challenge of life on the prairie.

“Whitman thus celebrates what Cather condemns,” writes O’Brien,

“the masculine urge to subdue and to violate: his land is to be tamed by pioneers brandishing the guns that Cather, like Ivar, would like to exclude from her territory. And so in her novel she offers another vision of the taming of the land, one erasing the polarities and hierarchies in the Whitman poem; male/female, culture/nature, subject/object.”

In many ways, Cather’s relocation to the prairie from Virginia saved her. In Virginia, it is not likely that she could have found the sort of women that she could see herself becoming. O’Brien insightfully comments that the Nebraska landscape was exactly what Cather’s young soul needed. It was a space yet to be defined. It was a place where a woman could rethink what it meant to be a woman. It was an unformed world where new templates could be forged. “Dorothy Canfield rightly observes,” says O’Brien,

“an imaginative and emotional response to the great shift from Virginia to Nebraska is at the heart of Cather's fiction. Not her rootedness in Nebraska, but her transplanting from one radically different landscape and community to another at a formative, impressionable age powerfully affected her writing.”

In Nebraska, Cather found “no protective mountain ridges, and few marks on the land.” In Nebraska, there was space to define the self rather than merely choose from a menu of provided options. Needless to say, the move to a place where nature ruled and humans had yet to civilize was scary. In a 1913 newspaper interview Cather described her response to this desolate landscape:

“I shall never forget my introduction to it. We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfathers homestead one day in April. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding onto the side of the wagon box to study myself – the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal is if we had come to the end of everything – it was a kind of erasure of personality.”

“I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been jerked away from all these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron. I had heard my father say you had to show grit in a new country but I thought I should go under.”

“For the first week or two on the homestead I had that kind of contraction of the stomach which comes from homesickness.”

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, people were taken, almost like soldiers into boot camp, and broken down to nothing. And once their Virginia and Boston and Bohemian identities were erased (if they could survive that painful experience - some didn't), they began to rebuild themselves.

“Although he is erased, blotted out, Jim [Burden] confronts a land of possibility seemingly beyond man's jurisdiction where a new self can be fashioned from the material out of which countries – and selves – are made. .."

"The new country lay open before me," Jim exults. "I could choose my own way over the grass uplands."

“In Virginia the road from Winchester to Romney was clearly marked, as with the behaviors required of little girls; In Nebraska, where the signs of roads were faint, there was more possibility for choice.”

Fortunately for us, Cather soon began her life’s work, collecting and assimilating and articulating the voices of the men and women who created, through experimentation, a new definition of what it meant to be male, to be female, to be American, to be human. In her late thirties, Willa Cather discovered that she had a great treasure in her childhood memories of these pioneering families of Nebraska. “Virginia had its writers and historians,” writes O’Brien,

“but Nebraska was open land for the pen as well as the plow. Except for some of the people who lived in it, Edith Lewis writes, I think no one had ever found Nebraska beautiful until Willa Cather wrote about it.”

Cather set out to do what her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett had recommended that she do; Capture the people she knew. In her 1925 Preface to Jewett’s  The Country of the Pointed Furs, Cather praised Jewett’s ability to duplicate in prose the rhythms and idioms of colloquial American speech:

“She had not only the eye, she had the ear. From childhood she must've treasured up those pithy bits of local speech, of native idiom, which enrich and enliven her pages. The language her people speak to each other is a native tongue. No writer can invent it. It is made in the hard school of experience, and communities where language has been undisturbed long enough to take on color and character from the nature and experiences of the people. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech – it is a gift from heart to heart.

Clearly, this is what Cather herself would set out to do. Cather’s mission was to do what her literary hero Virgil had done, to “be the first to bring the Muse into her country.”

“primus ego in patrimony me umm ... De ducat Musas” ( "For I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.")

“Few of our neighbors were Americans,” Cather said in an interview about her literary work and its source in pioneer women’s kitchens,

“ – most of them were Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Bohemians. I grew fond of some of these immigrants – particularly the old women who used to tell me of their own country. I used to think them underrated, and wanted to explain them to their neighbors. Their stories used to go round and round and my head at night. This was, with me, the initial impulse. I didn't know any writing people. I had an enthusiasm for a kind of country and a kind of people, rather than ambition.”

Later, Cather would called this power 'memory,' as when she told Elizabeth Sargent that her creative life began “when she ceased to admire and began to remember.” O’Brien emphasizes that Cather really only became a great writer when she stopped trying to write and started allowing her life and her memories to use her to write.

“Cather uses the word 'home' several times to describe her discovery, and return to, her own material. The material with which Cather felt at home was not only childhood memories of Nebraska, however, but any experience – whether real or imagined – that marked her deeply.”

All stories that we write because we are pretending to be someone else when we write are, what Cather would call “external stories.” And though they may sell well (indeed they usually outsell their original counterparts in their own place and time), they do not last. “There is a time in a writers development when his life line and the line of his personal endeavor meet,” Cather wrote in the Preface to her story, Alexander’s Bridge in 1922.

“This may come early or late, but after it occurs his work is never quite the same. After he has once or twice done a story that formed itself, inevitably, in his mind, he will not often turn back to the building of external stories again.”

“The young writer must have his affair with external material he covets; must imitate and strive to follow the masters he most admires, until he finds he is starving for reality and cannot make this go any longer. Then he learns that it is not the adventure he sought, but the adventure that sought him, which has made the enduring mark upon him.”

Cather’s characters are not simply pioneers because they chose to move to a frontier. Her characters are pioneers because when they arrived there, they forsake much of what they had been told it meant to be human and opted to forge their own unique identities. The more they did so, the more Willa Cather celebrates them. And the more, I think, she would celebrate us today were we to do the same.

Questions for Comment: Do you think you would have to move away from your present life to become a more authentic self? How have you responded to the cultural forces that have told you what you need to be to be a man or woman? Do you think that there are “original people” anywhere in America any more? Or have we all been mass produced by the media we consume?

"Grind de meal, give me de husk: bake de bread, give me de crus."

Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers by Richard S. Newman

"Shuck corn, shell corn, carry corn to mill, grind de meal, give me de husk: bake de bread, give me de crus." – Slave Song

Every great social movement has someone who failed to get a good idea off the ground the first time but who deserves credit for being the first to try. If having at least one failed attempt is a prerequisite for eventual success, America owes a debt of gratitude to Philadelphia’s Bishop Richard Allen’s efforts to build a multi-racial society in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. Allen did much for the cause of abolitionism in the face of dark forces that opposed it or stood by apathetically while it worsened. He started a new church and created a new denomination of American Methodism. He wrote and published articles in defense of black equality. He led civic movements in the face of natural epidemics and British invasions of Philadelphia. He supported petitions and initiatives that set out to break stereotypes and oppressive policies. He supported the movement to re-colonize Africa, to set up a black nation state in Haiti; to assimilate into Canadian society and prove to Americans the mistake of African American oppression from there. Maybe more than anything, he served as a living example of the arguments he articulated.

“Afro American freemen, Alan lectured, had to live by the Golden rule: treat others as you would be treated. Liberated black Christians could not seek to settle scores with cruel former masters through violence; rather, they had to exemplify Christian charity and forgiveness. In this manner, he believed, African-Americans would move from outsiders to fellow believers to equal citizens. Allen's was truly a theology of inclusiveness.”

Richard Allen insisted that free blacks had a responsibility to prove with their lives that arguments against the wisdom of abolition were unfounded. He understood that whites needed to see functioning contributing black citizens and that slavery would only become intellectually untenable when free blacks constructed moral lives and functioning societies. He was committed to his church and to the many fellow Americans of African descent who had not yet achieved their freedom.  

“For example, in 1817 he helped draft a petition against the American colonization Society that firmly asserted northern black leaders intimate bond – intellectually and ideologically – with southern slaves. "Resolved, that, we never will separate ourselves voluntarily from you," the petition told enslaved people, "for you are our brethren." The document quickly assumed an iconic status in black communities, underscoring racial unity across lines of status, geography, and condition.”

What is interesting about this biography of his life is just how flexible he was over time as he sought to achieve his ultimate goals. At one point in his life, Allen believed in the possibilities of an America that regarded all men (regardless of race) as equal. When this proved impossible, he pulled out of the church that discriminated against him and his people, and started his own, writing published articles to the wider white community to chastise it for forcing black people to disengage from them. In this respect, his story is much like that of the earlier American story of the Pilgrims and Puritans. He bears their same ambivalent attempt to reform the society they belong to while leaving it. When the example of a functioning church failed to convince Americans that black people were every bit as capable of being citizens as whites, he began to consider the possibilities of Haitian emigration. When this failed, he advocated the possibility of emigrating to Canada.

“By the late 1820s, however, as slavery grew both demographically and geographically, and as northern racism intensified, Allan grew pessimistic. At the 1830 free black convention, he emphasized the need for a black safety valve beyond American shores.”

“If white citizens could not hear his commanding words in Bethel Church, they must read them in pamphlets, newspaper articles, and broadsides. For Alan printed protest created a potential bridge to white leaders and citizens. He would use that connection to claim equality and justice for all.

Allen was up against the deeply held prejudice that insisted that black people freed from oppressive conditions would act like savages. Over and over, he insisted that this was a mistaken prediction and he sought to create a church community that testified to how mistaken. “test your hypothesis,” he seemed to keep demanding.

“This idea led to Allen's black abolitionist mantra: freed slaves could become valuable citizens if educated and treated equally. Released from the shackles of slavery, African-Americans would rise as a thinking – not just a working – class. "We believe if you would try the experiment of taking a few black children, and cultivate their minds with the same care as you would with your own children," he challenged, "you would find them upon trial not inferior in mental endowments to whites."

What this biography reveals is that the choices of oppressed people are always difficult. Black people in Philadelphia had to pursue multiple lines of resistance without knowing which, if any, would work. They could stay within society and fight or they could distance themselves from it and let their new institutions speak for themselves. They could try to prove themselves loyal citizens. They could try to organize economic boycotts. They could openly oppose the law and help slaves escape. They could seek economic stability in so far as they could achieve it. They could pursue education. They could move to the North. They could move back to Africa. They could move to Canada. They could move into the deeper South into the face of oppression. They could defend themselves in print. They could live and let their lives defend them. No matter what they did, they had to keep believing that God was on their side and that justice could not therefor be denied forever.

Question for Comment: When you are part of an organization or institution that needs to be changed, do you find it more beneficial to leave it and work to change it from the outside or do you stay within it and work from within? Why?

"Forgotten wounds can't be healed."

Five Broken Cameras REVIEW

I finally got to finish Five Broken Cameras yesterday. Nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars, the film “witnesses” the experience of Palestinian protesters resisting the expansion of an Israeli settlement on what they regard as “Palestinian land.” In many ways, it is a bit like watching the French-Indian War within a different context. History does not repeat itself but it usually rhymes.

A caveat; I am pretty sure that there is a good deal of footage left out in this documentary and it would be interesting to see what sort of documentary might be made by Israeli settlers with that footage. The film has its share of Israeli soldiers shooting at protestors but it does not eliminate entirely the shots of Palestinians throwing rocks at soldiers. That said, the director has not completely eviscerated the film of kindness and restraint on the part of Israel soldiers either. HE allows for the existence of decent conscientious people in the army. Still, they are the maintainers of what they regard as “law and order” as Israelis see it. Accept the premises upon which the Israeli state claims land in the west Bank and it is not difficult to accept the means the Israeli army uses to back those claims up (I have never breathed tear gas or been hit by a rubber bullet mind you). "Healing is a challenge in life," the film says,

"It's a victim sole obligation. By healing, you resist oppression. But when I'm hurt over and over again, I forget the wounds that rule my life. Forgotten wounds can't be healed."

The introduction of cameras into this “war” is likely to both help and hurt the cause of peace I suspect. One side will “plant” protestors to throw stones so that they can “justify” their own retaliations. Cameras and camera wielders will find themselves shot like combatants (as is the case of the man who takes the footage in this documentary.)

At the heart of the conflict in the village of Bel’in is the whole murky question of land ownership and the legitimate prerogatives of a people acting in “self-defense.” I suspect that the Israeli position is that since Jews cannot be guaranteed safety anywhere in the world besides Israel, whatever they do to provide security in Israel is acceptable. By the same token, they would argue since Palestinians can find security in other places in the world if they choose to go there, they have less a claim on rights that grow from legitimate survival concerns. Israel finds itself having to defend itself from threats real or imagined and needs a population that can defend it against them. These people must live somewhere and unoccupied Palestinian land (I use the word “unoccupied” because the land in question is usually agricultural land that is occupied by things like olive trees) fits the need perfectly so far as they are concerned. The fact that Palestinians might need that agricultural land to survive is regarded as incidental when in effect, it is not. In a way, taking agricultural land is a bit like saying “we are not going to kill you but we are going to appropriate your lungs.”

Israel clearly asserts that it is doing nothing illegal by building a security fence (Palestinians would call is an Apartheid wall); That it is simply defending itself.

Naturally, when that fence bleeds into land in the West Bank, objective viewers are likely to raise eyebrows. How is this an attempt to diminish violence rather than exacerbate it? The wall seems to conflict with fundamental Geneva conventions.

Article 49 (1) states

"Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."

Article 49 (6) states

"The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

Israel claims that since there was no sovereign power claiming the land before they moved into it, different rules apply.

To the people who live there, this is distinction without significance. They live there. Occupation feels exactly the same whether or not they ever were a sovereign power before the said occupation.

I just wish the Holy Land could be turned into a bunk bed so that two civilizations could sleep soundly on the same spot.

Question for Comment: If you were an Israeli teenager about to go into the Israeli army, how would seeing this film affect you? Should the Israeli government show the film in its schools? Why or why not?

 

“I’m crippled”

The Glass Menagerie REVIEW

“The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”

“The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”

-          From the stage directions for Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie

Thus, if you watch the Glass Menagerie, you are not seeing things as they happened. You are seeing them as they are remembered. These are not always the same thing. The characters in the play never see life as it is but only as they can cope with it. These are never the same things. Indeed, neither memory nor imagination will provide a good foundation for building a good life in so far as they wander from the actual. I think of Machiavelli here telling his readers that he writes a book of advice for political leaders living in the world as it is.

“Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.”

The Glass Menagerie seems to me to be a play about the way that we all relate to reality (or avoid it). The subject of the play is a dysfunctional family although one might to choose to look at the Wingfields as wounded rather than dysfunctional. Mr. Wingfield’s absence hangs like a presence over them all. The reality is that the central character of the play never speaks a line because he is gone and his status as fugitive has left a gaping hole and a wound in each of the lives of his bereft family. That hole in each present character is his character in the play. This is the unalterable reality that each of the remaining characters has to deal with or confront. This gap; This wound; This abandonment is what forces each of the other members of the family into some form of abandonment of reality themselves. Because he could not deal with reality and left, they must all follow suit in some way. In the Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams confronts the reality of his own life. He is, in many ways, the main character (Tom). The reality is that his family was never able to recover from the loss of its central player (as he recalls) and each character goes into some form of denial (or alcoholism or even insanity) to cope.

Amanda Wingfield (the mother in The Glass Menagerie) retreats into her memories of the past (the world before the Civil War changed everything) and into vicariously living through her children. Laura retreats into her glass animals and isolation, adjusting to a life where men can be assumed to either ignore or abandon you (it is easier to assume this and retreat into a shell than to risk testing the theory and get hurt). Tom tries to pretend that he can both take over his father’s job as family breadwinner in a job he detests AND pursue the life of a writer (he really can’t). They are all, to use a word that Amanda despises but eventually uses, “crippled.” They all, to use my own metaphor, “walk with a limp” as though they are missing not a father but a leg (perhaps all of us who have been in some way, abandoned do?) I think this is what makes this play so sad. None of the characters ever completely recovers from their “dead-beat dad.”

“I’m crippled,” Laura insists. She seems to be the only one of the three that will simply admit that.

It is for this reason that we are tempted to see Mr. Wingfield as the “villain” in the story. The central question that the plot revolves around is this: Will the members of the family recover from his decision to jump ship? But I am inclined to believe that Mr. Wingfield had his reasons (by the way, the name Wingfield is interesting because it combines two ideas – the idea of flight and the idea of stability).

It seems obvious from the way that Amanda Wingfield “sets a trap” to try and “capture” Jim O’Conner (the gentleman caller) for Laura, that she probably did something similar to Mr. Wingfield. She connives; She lies; She camouflages; She distorts; She inflates (quite literally in the case of Laura’s bosom); She charms; She – lets face it - manipulates to “get her man.” And if her treatment of Tom is any indication of what her treatment of her husband was like, as soon as she “had him” she began the work of reshaping him into some version of her girlhood fantasy. She does not seem like the kind of woman that would have ever been satisfied until her man died leaving her a large inheritance (and this during the Depression). Amanda Wingfield asserts that her son drinks too much, smokes too much, goes to the movies too much, earns too little, cares too little, achieves too little. We can imagine that she thought the same of Mr. Wingfield. And thus, it is no surprise that he “skipped the light fantastic out of town.”

When it comes time to teach the play to literature students, it seems like this question of how literature can help us either face reality or avoid it should be central. “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket,” says Tom in his role as narrator,

“I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

Students should examine how Tom lives vicariously through his movies and how Jim tries not to let himself have that luxury. They should examine how Laura lives in her art (“There is a tinkle of shattering glass. Laura cries out as if wounded.”). Amanda lives in her retelling of “Glory Days” and she sells romance literature to women like her who can find so little of it in their real lives.

Students should be able to read Jim’s critique of vicarious living and comment on what role literature, art, film, computer games, or fantasy role playing plays in their own lives:

“All of those glamorous people - having, adventures - hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them!”

Students should be able to comment on the irony in Amanda Wingfield’s criticism of Tom,

“You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!”

They should be able to reflect on how literature (like alcohol or drugs) can be used as a method of “blowing your candles out” a phrase that I suspect means “dulling your senses to losses that you cannot overcome.”

I can see asking them to write essays on the relationship between the Glass Menagerie and Oscar Wildes’ Picture of Dorian Gray. In both works, the authors explore whether or not immaginitive life is essential to our mental health or destructive of it.

A second key learning outcome from the study of this play might be a study of the way that Tennessee Williams uses symbols. Glass, roses, coffins, the fire escape, light, and the gentleman caller all serve a function in the play and students should be able to identify them. Here is Tom using the image of a coffin as a metaphor for his life as family breadwinner:

“But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without rernoving one nail, [He has come inside.] There is a trick that would come in handy for me - get me out of this 2 by 4 situation ! [Flops on to a bed and starts removing shoes.]”

“You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”

What is he asking here? The central question of his life really. How do I get out of a commitment that I never chose without hurting people that I still feel some measure of responsibility for? Tom has obviously been drafted to fill the role that his father left. His mother is constantly cementing him into that role. (“We can’t say grace till you come to the table.”). She is constantly screwing him into the position on “the team” she needs him to play, turning him into her own breadwinner and Laura’s father. “I've had to put up a solitary battle all these years,” she says to Tom, “But you're my right-hand bower! Don't fall down, don't fail!”

When Tom talks about getting out of a coffin without removing one nail, he is really wondering how he can do what his father did (take off) without throwing Laura (who needs him) under a bus. His mother’s suggestion that he finds “somebody to take your place” presents itself as the solution. And thus “the gentleman caller” is the Cinderella’s prince of the story; The essential piece.

In the end, Tom abandons them. The reality is that he cannot stay. He cannot live out his life in a shoe factory. The reality is that he cannot leave either. The fact is, he cares for his sister and feels the need to play out his role as surrogate father to her. His father essentially let Tom deal with the situation he (Mr. Wingfield) wasn’t man enough to deal with. Some responsibilities cannot be ignored; Only delegated. Tom’s father said to him in effect, “You be the father. And Tom was deputized without volitionally choosing to be.

“Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” Tom groans in conclusion,

“I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger -anything that can blow your candles out!”  

Today is Fathers Day.

Thanks to my dad for always being there.

Question for Comment: If you look at your life and find some essential relational need missing, what do you do? Try to force someone who does not want to, to fill it? Turn to fantasy, literature, movies for temporary “fixes”? Learn to stoically seal off the pain of it and simply compensate? Sit around hoping that God will bring someone into your life to fill it? Find some numbing agent to anesthetize you from suffering? Move out into the world to actively fill the spot?

“Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The Great Gatsby REVIEW

The 1920’s were one of those periods in American History where American culture fragments over why it is here. During the war (WWI), all had been harnessed to the task of making the world safe for democracy. Americans had enlisted to “go over there” and make the European world as progressively “right” as they were in the process of making America. Americans had accepted the rationing of their food, the voluntary conscription of their earnings (with the help of the war bond sales program and higher taxes), and the surrender of their freedom of speech (under the Sedition law). Of particular importance to understanding the wealth of Jay Gatsby, they had also surrendered their right to make and sell alcohol (legally). The years of the war involved the surrender of all that was personal to the needs of the collective. The 1920’s following were those years of want and deprivation, revenged. With the winning of the war, the American mission fractured into a million particles of self-interest.

President Harding wanted a return to “normalcy” – life as it was before the Progressive reformers had started reforming (and forming). Some people wanted a return to the original spiritual calling – Winthrop’s Puritan city on a hill. Thus, the 1920’s brought about a fundamentalist challenge to pre-war cultural and moral liberalism. Some saw America’s redemption as a more ethnic, rather than moral, cleansing. The KKK and the White Leagues and the Eugenicists and the anti-immigrant movement all collaborated to bring about their vision of a whiter (and thus better, in their minds) America. The character of Tom Buchanan represents this essential bigotry. Others wanted to take the top off any and all restrictions, setting their sights on maximizing American liberty into the social realm. They wanted music without scores and games without end and dancing without shame and drinking without hangovers and material goods without debt limits and profits without work and religion without hell and dress codes without boundaries and parties without sleep. Robert Bork would have seen the 1920’s generation as a “vertical invasion of the barbarians.” These were the years when self-sacrifice gave way to self-indulgence. After all, what had sacrifice really obtained for anyone really anyway? Boundaries were there to be broken.

F.Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is an insider’s look into the psychology and sociology of excess. The world of “East Egg and West Egg” Long Island is a world of amoral materialism and shallow consumerism where crass connections not character is the coin of the realm. PEople drink against the law and commit adultery with similar disregard for tradition. “Benny McClenahan arrived to Gatsby's parties always with four girls, says Nick.

“They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”

Fitzgerald’s America is a place where we Americans have achieved unlimited potential and blighting ennui synonymously. “Here in America right now,” the author seems to be saying, “it is easy to pursue any dream we want … and almost impossible to find and settle on a worthy one.” Everyone in The Great Gatsby has their eyes glazed over in the pursuit of something that their souls will never find satisfying. All their goals seem illusory or dangerous. Usually, that something has to do with money, status, or sensual intoxication of some sort. Sometimes it rises slightly higher to something that they would at least regard as love. One gets the impression that Nick Caraway, the narrator, has come to despise the emptiness and amorality of the crowd that Jay Gatsby collects at his house for regular parties (though he himself partakes). But he admires Gatsby, and even thinks him “great” because ultimately, his vision is not one of sensual indulgence for its own sake so much as the recapture of a lost love. Jay Gatsby may be infatuated just as the rest of his peers are. And he may use people for his ends. But his heart is at least set on something that even Nick, I think, silently longs for: a relationship with a person worth loving. Even if Nick deems Daisy to be less worthy of Gatsby’s efforts than Gatsby thinks she is, he admires someone willing to do anything for love (even if it does involve bootlegging or perjury).As Gatsby shows Daisy around his mansion, Nick observes,

“He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”

Nick suspects, I think, that there are no partners worthy of what Jay Gatsby is willing to do to win Daisy’s heart back. But he can’t help but support someone who is trying to find them.  Gatsby is great if only for his ability to hope. “[Gatsby had] an extraordinary gift for hope,” Nick says, “a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

In one of the books more famous passages, it describes this optimistic character trait of Gatsby’s in the following words,

"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

When Nick first sees Gatsby, the latter is staring across the water and Nick is unimpressed. Later, when Nick discovers that Gasby is staring at her house across the sound longing for her, his estimation of his neighbor is markedly improved.

“Then it had not been merely the stars to which he aspired on that June night. He came alive to me delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor."

Gatsby is not someone who is simply stuffing his soul with opulence. He is on a mission to win someone’s love again. The opulence is merely a means to an end which, if not worthy, should be. This, to Nick, is the first worthy goal he has seen anyone pursue since he came to New York. This optimism, this hope that a person can find a person to love worth loving is, I think, the nameless but great thing that Nick sees in Gatsby. “Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality,” says Nick of  Gatsby’s romantic quest,

“I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

Gatsby wants to believe that people are better than they are. He certainly believes Daisy to be better than she is. Indeed, he believes that she not only loved him but that she still does. Even more, he insists that she must never have loved anyone else (how ridiculous, right?).

“He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five years ago.”

Gatsby wants to go back in time and find the precious moment of his first love and make it live again. He wants the past to throw off its grave-clothes and regain its pristine luster. He wants the past to be returned to him unaffected by anything that has happened since. This is Gatsby’s dream. And Nick “gets it” even if he thinks that Gatsby’s love for Daisy is a Don Quixote love for Dulcinea and that Gatsby is expecting too much. The two argue about whether such a past love can even be re-incarnated in the following climactic moment.

“"I wouldn’t ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can’t repeat the past."
"Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
"I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She’ll see.”

Perhaps we can all relate to what Gatsby wanted – to find a moment in our lives when we were supremely happy and uncontrollably in love and to resuscitate it. “. . . But now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail,” Fitzgerald says of Gatsby’s first affection for Daisy.  “He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free,” Nick says.

“He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s muse for the character Daisy is a woman by the name of Ginevra King who he had fallen in love with at the age of 18 (Genevra was 16 and well out of Fitzgerald's socio-economic circle.) “[Ginevra] saw Fitzgerald for the last time in 1937 in Hollywood.” Writes Merrell Noden,

“She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect,” he wrote his daughter, Scottie, shortly before the planned meeting. “I don’t know whether I should go or not.”

http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW03-04/04-1105/feature1.html

In  The Great Gatsby, Nick worries that Jay Gatsby is setting himself up for disappointment by doing the same (trying to keep the illusion of Daisy perfect). Indeed, he may wonder if it is ever a good idea to insist that memories of the past be kept inviolate and uncorrupted by the truth. Both Nick and Fitzgerald wonder if we are too prone to become addicted to that which we never let ourselves see in a flawed state.  The novel closes with these thoughts.

“And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

Perhaps Fitzgerald is making a comment about Gatsby's Romantic hopefulness or perhaps Nick's or perhaps his own, or perhaps all Americans or all humans. We were once in the Garden of Eden. Surely, we can find a way back. We had perfection once. Surely, it can exist again. Surely, if we will but put reality in a headlock and beat it, it will conform itself to our memory. Nick wants to believe in such things. He must admire those who can.

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

Why does Nick hope against hope? (Why do we?) Because in the end, he wants to believe as well. He wants to find what Gatsby thought he had found. He wants to believe it is there, if not in New York than back in the Midwest. As he tells us in his introduction,

“Reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope.”

If one must surrender their hope in perfection, one should at least do it, like Jay Gatsby, after a fight.

“Then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”

Poor Gatsby.

““Oh, you want too much!” [Daisy] cried to Gatsby. “I love you now — isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once — but I loved you too.”

Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed

“You loved me too?” he repeated”

“. . . He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”

Nick suggests to us that things "came out alright" for Gatsby in the end, though clearly in the novel this is not so (Gatsby is shot in his pool). We can only infer that things came out alright for Fitzgerald. And indeed, he as much as says so in one of his letters where he speaks of Genevra.

“It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out all right for a different person.”

Are we able to choose our goals in life wisely? Can we avoid the pitfalls that waylay the characters in the Great Gatsby? Are we all doomed to pick infertile soil for the happiness seeds we were each given to sow? Zelda Fizgerald, F. Scott’s wife thought that the odds were against us. “By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction,’ she wrote,

“the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.”

Those of us who have been burned are cautious but “Reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope.”

Question for Comment: “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes,” says Nick,

"and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

What are you giving up in the course of hanging on to some dream? Is it worth it? Are those who are “too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age” the wisest? Is there any good reason really to nurturing hope for the return of something that may never be again and that some say maybe never was? Was that love ever real? Could it ever have perished if it was?

And “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The "invisible hands" of the "right wing conspiracy"

Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan REVIEW

Kim Phillips-Fein sets out to understand how the conservative movement survived the New Deal and returned from its place on the margins of American life to power by the time of Ronald Reagan. Invisible Hands is not so much a book about the politicians who returned conservative ideas to a place of dominance (although there are some) as it is a book about the hundreds of businessmen (and some women) and academics and economists and think tank leaders and magazine publishers and educational reformers who kept the ideas of classical conservatism alive in the face of the crushing disillusionment brought on by the Great Depression.

 In a way, the study of the return of conservatism reminds me of the Spanish invasion of the Aztecs. One cannot help but ask themselves when looking at the outcome “How did so few manage to take over so many?” And ultimately, the answer has some similarities. Eventually, all human systems fail – they collapse under the weight of their own unfounded assumptions and abuses of power (regimes on both the Left and Right are vulnerable for neither seem to ever encompass all of what it means to be human into their fundational understandings of the world). All it takes is someone with the organizational skill to bring together enough disparate sub-populations of the dissatisfied. For Cortez, he built an alliance of people groups who did not appreciate the taxes and human sacrifice demands of the Aztecs. For conservatism, there was a similar broad-based alliance of people who found themselves uncomfortable with just how much the State had taken over their lives in trying to help them. By the 1970’s the economic problems of liberal economic policies (I would say "Keynsian but I am not sure that John Maynard Keynes would approve of everything that went on in his name) were manifesting themselves at just about the same time as social problems stemming from liberal moral and social experimentation were emerging. Reagan was able to capture the center with the help of many of these disaffected constituencies.

Among the panoply of characters and institutions Phillips-Fein highlights, we see a number of elitists, hacks, and whackos but on the whole, she tells the story of American conservatism in a level balanced voice. She does not hide the flaws of the conservative movement but neither does she draw them in where they do not exist. On the whole, most of the individuals and institutions that she introduces the reader to, believed that conservatism was something good for a community and not just a few who sat at the top of it. Her book is not a polemic against nor an endorsement of the ideas of the people she writes about.

This is the actual story of the “vast right wing conspiracy.” Surprisingly, we find that the “invisible hands” that kept American conservatism alive are not stained irrevocably with the blood of peasants. They are simply believers in a way of life that leans towards the individual and away from the collective.   

Some of the organizations mentioned:

American Enterprise Institute
American Liberty League
Amway
Brookings Institution
Business Roundtable
Cato Institute
Chamber of Commerce
Christian Broadcasting Network
Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
Freedoms Foundation
Heritage Foundation
Hoover Institution
John Birch Society
Manion Forum
Mont Pelerin Society
Moral Majority
National Association of Manufacturers
National Review
Olin Foundation
Ripon Society

Some of the people mentioned:

William Baroody
Lemuel Boulware
Patrick Buchanan
William F. Buckley
George H.W. Bush
Richard DeVos
Dupant Brothers - Irene’ Lamott, Pierre
Jerry Falwell
Milton Friedman
Barry Goldwater
Alan Greenspan
Frederick Von Hayek
Jesse Helmes
Bob Jones Jr. III
Jack Kemp
Arthur Laffer
Tim LaHaye
Joseph McCarthy
Clarence Manion
Roger Miliken
Lewis Powell
Ayn Rand
Ronald Reagan
Leonard Read
Phyllis Shlaffly
Antonin Scalia
Richard Viguerie
Ludwig Von Mises
Paul Weyrich

Question for Comment: As I was reading this book, I was reminded of those frogs that are capable of turning their blood into antifreeze so that they can survive Arctic winters as frozen frog-bricks awaiting summer thaw. Do you ever feel like you are a minority in the world, a holder of ideas that the world you live in has rejected? Do you ever wonder if your beliefs will ever be mainstream again?How do you survive the winter of oppressed dissent?