Now in November (20 page)

Merle, the youngest sister, is in many ways Kerrin's opposite in late adolescence. At peace with herself, “she did not fight half-heartedly with faceless shadows, masked forms she was afraid to name,
but knew things for what they were and twisted them apart” (
p. 71
). She is able to forget what has hurt her, and not sour her happiness. Marget characterizes Merle as having the courage to live by her beliefs, and distinguishes Merle from herself, repeating a theme of the novel, and of Johnson's short stories and poetry. Merle, Marget says, “seemed to deny in her living what I had always found true—that love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love then the greater fear is” (
p. 71
). It is not surprising, then, that it is Merle the father loves most, Merle whom he declares “would have made a good boy” (
p. 63
), and Merle to whom Grant is attracted. It is Merle who has the luxury of saying blandly, “Men are all like each other . . . They're like as ponds. Seem to think that just being born sets them apart as gods!” (
pp. 86–87
). And then when Grant volunteers to help her with women's work—the wringing out of newly washed shirts—it is she who can modify her view: “Maybe just being a man isn't all the excuse you need for living” (
p. 88
).

But it is in Marget herself that the theme of late adolescent waiting is most beautifully and deeply realized. It is through Marget that Johnson works out the personal philosophy that will emerge
matured, but essentially unchanged, in her work in late middle age. Marget is wise enough in her waiting to see the grand difference between men and women, but to see individual men as well. She can differentiate between her embittered, distant father and Grant who is hard too, but in a different way. And it is Marget who struggles and finds an enduring way to understand and sustain herself: her connection to the world of nature. Marget asks the grand scale, philosophical questions we associate with the college years: in church, she wonders, “why the people were here and if God was here” (
p. 136
) and she asks, “if in what I knew and had heard of their lives there was any plan or patterns that could answer their being here” (
p. 137
). In bed at night, she worries about the taxes on the farm, about a new shed and the recipe for a cake; these she places in the category “daily living” and to them she opposes “the meaning of all these evident things that still stayed hidden” (
p. 127
). Like many late adolescents, she yearns for a faith and yieldingness like her mother's, but feels “often on the threshold of some important and clarifying light, some answer to more than the obvious things,” but always, on the verge of discovery, truth is “shut away” (
p. 127
). As the drought closes in around the farm and Grant
turns more obviously to Merle, and Kerrin grows more grasping, more nearly mad, Marget characterizes herself fully as a late adolescent: “I wished I were ten years younger, or ten older! If I were younger, [the burdens] would not exist; and older—I could learn to accept them” (
p. 108
).

“We were added to by the shadow of leaves
. . . .

We were the green peas, hard and swollen.”

For Marget (and for Johnson too), the sustenance, if not an answer to the grand questions, is found in nature. It is the use of nature and the language of nature that allows us to place
Now in November
in a second literary category: the pastoral. Like
My Antonia
, Sarah Orne Jewett's
The Country of the Pointed Furs
, and more recent works such as John Berger's trilogy in progress,
Into Their Labors;
like the poetry of Amy Clampitt and A. R. Ammons, in some ways like Emily Dickinson and Thoreau, the Nature of Johnson's work is much more than a backdrop for action or an ornament to the passing show of human foible. Nature is more than land to be worked and food to be produced. Nor is nature only loveliness; it is that and more. Unlike Annie
Dillard, Johnson is no humble pilgrim worshiping at Tinker's Creek. In
The Inland Island
, she declares, “I am a bird watcher—a deeply interested observer, not a bird-lover. Their beaks are too sharp and their round eyes cold” (p. 11).

Now in November
begins a strand of Johnson's work, culminating in
The Inland Island
some thirty years later, which takes nature two ways simultaneously: realistically and metaphorically (as a language for mirroring and explaining human nature).
⁷
It is the combination of these two, along with the country/city contrast discussed below, that makes this a pastoral. Like the naturalist, Johnson describes literally and in minute detail grasses, flowers, the leaves of trees, the scales of snakes' skin; but, additionally, for Johnson, human activity has meaning through nature. Human nature
is
nature; and the natural world reflects back to human sensibility the only acceptable, meaning-making pattern of experience to be discovered.

Johnson works with nature in several distinct but intertwining ways. Descriptive passages ground the novel. A reader can map the land, draw the rutted road, situate the orchards and field, paint the apple blossoms of spring and the shriveled leaves of August drought from the novel's careful description.
Then, in seemingly effortless and exquisite simile and metaphor, Johnson uses nature's language to describe human beings—their identity, growth, emotions, their outward appearance. (I think it is her talent for the stunning metaphor [“We were the green peas, hard and swollen” (
p. 59
)] that led critics to compare her with Dickinson, but Dickinson is not particularly helpful in understanding Johnson's prose. Dickinson has a far more oblique relation to nature, a pessimism and fragility absent from Johnson's work.) And, finally there is Johnson's ability to draw sustenance from nature, to take it as a force of healing. It is worth pausing to look closely at Johnson's prose in several illustrative instances.

Even in the most “routine,” utilitarian description of the Haldemarne farm on the first page of the novel, the human, seeing eye/I endows her observation with a special perspective derived from the meaning of things in the month of March. Without declaring herself in a heavy-handed way, the narrator selects a month on the cusp of change—no longer winter and not yet spring when hope is at its peak. In the passage below, this moment of anticipation is captured in the contrast between the bare hills from which the remnants of winter have been
swept away, the ledges with their “white teeth” and the orchard, which to the trained, observing eye is full of promise.

The hills were bare then and swept of winter leaves, but the orchards
had a living look
. They were stained with the red ink of their sap and the bark tight around them as though
too small to hold the new life
of coming leaves. . . . The land was stony,
but with promise
, and sheep grew fat in the pastures where rock ledges were worn black,
white like stone teeth bared to frost
. (
Pp. 3–4
, italics added)

In these first paragraphs, too, Johnson establishes her easy intimacy with nature as a language for human nature, using freshly and extending later in the novel the metaphor of humans as having “roots.” Of the Haldemarne family, the narrator declares, “The roots of our life, struck in back there that March, have a queer resemblance to their branches” (
p. 3
). Later, Johnson uses the metaphor again to describe Kerrin: “She carried the root of her unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and
found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted” (
pp. 45–46
). And again of herself and Merle: “From the beginning we had felt rooted and born here, like the twin scrub-oak trees that grew together in the north pasture and turned lacquer-red in fall, and whose roots were under the white ledgestones” (
p. 58
). And again as an abstraction revealing the pattern into which Johnson has put human life—the combination of cyclic and linear movement: “Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth” (
pp. 69–70
).

But it is the sustaining and healing of nature that in the end brings together the adolescent's philosophical questions and the harsh facts of her daily life; and it is this nature that stands in contrast to the differently problematic world beyond the farm—a conventional pastoral theme I discuss below. Increasingly troubled in her silent love for Grant, in her sister's madness, in the farm's withering crops, Marget is still rendered speechless, feels as if her heart will break because of the earth's unbearable, clean beauty (p. 114 ff.). At night she wanders out seeking some way of putting herself “beyond pain” (
p. 217
) and finds a kind of peace in the “whiteness”
of the moon's light and the night wind” (
p. 218
). What she sees in nature is not perfection, but “beauty in all its twisted forms, not pure, unadulterated, but mixed always with sour potato-peelings or an August sun” (
p. 226
). It is this then that gives nature its sustaining force—that it mirrors what, according to human judgment and philosophy, might be good and evil, but renders all in order of things. Even the tragedy that envelopes the family can have its edge blunted when placed in the neutral context of seasonal growth, death, and renewal. In an early prefiguring of the book's tragic end, Kerrin finds a shrike in the crab branches that she characterizes as “a cruel thing, impaling the field-mice and birds on locust thorns so that their feet stuck out stiff like little hands” (
pp. 10–11
). Already able to reject this view as sentimental, Marget says presciently, “I didn't think they were cruel things though—only natural. They reminded me of Kerrin, but this I had sense not to say aloud” (
p. 11
). The assignment of the label “natural” to human happiness, daily toil, and tragedy—even the tragedy of Kerrin's madness and its aftermath—is the foundation of Johnson's philosophy.

“Life's lonely enough and isolated enough without the thick

wall of kind to make it go even darker.”

For at least twenty years now, scholarship on women—particularly in anthropology—has struggled to make sense of the question of women's place in the continuum of nature and culture. Sherry Ortner's now classic 1974 article, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” posed the question and modified the usual opposition that identified women with nature and men with culture. Ortner suggested that women are seen “merely as being closer to nature than men, and that culture recognizes that women are active participants in its special processes.”
⁸
In this formulation, while women have a greater affinity for nature—they bear children, live within the domestic circle, and are socialized to the female experience—they are also, for example, the civilizing force that “tames” the wildness in children and makes them fit to live in the world of men. They are mediators between nature and culture. Ortner and others are interested in this question because in it lies one explanation of female subordination. If mastery or transcendence over nature, the production of artificial “constructs” rather than reproduction of
human beings, is “higher” in value than continuity with nature, then either women must change or we must change our valuing of women's position. While I put this program of change too simply, indeed, in the last twenty years both kinds of changes have been put in practice. Women are living more in the public world of men, and there is a significant movement—called variously ecological feminism and cultural feminism—to enhance the value of women's closeness to nature, to insist that male dominance of nature is responsible for dehumanization of our living communities and destruction of our environment. While Johnson was, of course, too early for ecological feminism, she would perhaps have found it attractive. Prescient for her times, Johnson sees humans' relation to nature in gendered terms and accentuates gender difference along with poverty as the most compelling forces shaping identity and the circumstances of daily existence. Indeed, Johnson's women are sustained in their closeness to nature, and male transcendence over nature, while treated with sympathy, appears a regrettable evil.

The men in the novel—the father, Max, Grant, Rathman, and Ramsey—have a relation to nature
born of economic necessity. They hold the overwhelming responsibility for the family's ability to eat and sleep sheltered, yet nature has the unpredictable power to prevent them from fulfilling that responsibility. The father's life is defined as a “fierce crawling to rid us of debt” (
p. 35
), and the land represents his only resource. He must tame or civilize it, make it yield on his own terms. And for this work, a dogged resistance to “the natural” is required. Woods must be turned into field, wildflowers into forage. Grant, the gentler, more yielding of the two men, also fights with the land—it is an antagonist not a friend—and things made by men he chooses over nature. He cannot tell time by the sun, and, off in the fields one day, searching for his lost watch with Marget's help, he says, “Don't trust anything natural . . . Only the little wheels” (
p. 103
). The adult women are too worn down from a life spent serving men and preserving the household to hear or see nature for themselves. Mrs. Rathman lived “between table and stove” (
p. 18
) and Mother “lived in the lives of other people as though they were her own” (
p. 16
). Indeed, the mother is a shadowy figure in this book, an actor only when mediating between Kerrin and the father. While
her husband plows and tends the livestock, she cooks, preserves, bakes, cleans, and is sustained by a faith her daughter envies.