Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (64 page)

Ian would be staring at the traces of a lesson plan, trying to learn what he needed to know—while there was only her blurred mouthing, only the spoor of the sentence she’d thought and no blackboard and no chalk and nobody there to nudge him with the answer. Still, he picked it up. He lip-read, thought-read, read without reading; if only he’d been half the student in school that he’d been of her manners’ schooling, Hattie said, why then he’d be adept at fractions and geography and penmanship also. He learned degree and size.

She yearned for him. She was, she told herself, in love. It wasn’t a term she much liked. It was attended by guitars. It had meant
crush—
some hero’s sock stolen from the basketball court, and treasured, rolled into a totem in her top right drawer. Later it meant four-leaf clovers proffered as they walked through fields, and later the wine bottles shared. So love became a pawing intensity—and the terms were making out, then making it, then mak-ing love. Later still it meant submission. It meant Billie Holiday singing “Hush Now, Don’t Explain”—the whiskey seams in her voice come unstuck, a fiddler using nerve and hair ends for her strings.

It’s not as though these passages strike me as poorly written—just that they seem excessive and at least a little ponderous. I was flexing verbal muscles then that now seem over-exercised; my guiding principle throughout the revision was, in effect, Less is more. In several instances (particularly from Possession) I excised entire scenes. I cut, for example, memories of Judah’s grandmother, of Ian’s escapades abroad, and Maggie’s trip to Los Angeles since they failed to advance the tale’s action—or were a gravitational side-drag upon it. Dialogue, too, went on too long, and I cut exchanges that seemed merely to mark time:

“That’s nice,” she said. “That’s complimentary.”

“It’s the way I meant it.”

“Men do yoga too. The world’s best athlete is a ballet dancer.”

“Who says?”

“
Time
magazine,” she said. “And they must be right.”

“I didn’t call it sissy work. Just woman’s.”

So, to spite him, she had kept at it. She taught Ian to sit in the lotus position.

“Judah”—she would summon him—“what kind of tree is that?”

“A birch tree, grandma.”

“Yes. What kind of birch?”

“A silver birch.”

“What other kind would it be?”

“A silver bitch,” he’d mutter, and she strained to hear.

“What?”

“A white birch maybe, but it isn’t. It’s a silver birch.”

She’d have her notebook out, and wet the pencil stub.

“Beech, did you say beech?”

“No.”

“Hattie knows the answer. She could tell.”

He put his hands in his pockets. He balled his fingers to fists.

“Fess up, Judah, you said beech—that’s a penny less this morning. That cancels out the elm.”

“
Birch
, I said. Silver birch.”

“You got the popple,” she would say. “You got the cottonwood.”

“Do it again,” he’d ask her.

“Why?”

“It’s fine to watch.”

So she’d pick the limp lengths up again and turn her back to him and work her arms and then turn back with magic entanglements, fanning out and in. He wanted her to try with tinsel, but it wasn’t long or strong enough. So he fashioned her, one Christmas, a tinsel necklace and bracelet and earrings and said, “They’ll hold. You wear them,” and she was his glittering creature lit by the Christmas tree lights. They made daisy chains from Reynolds Wrap, and Maggie said, “Imag-ine. There’s country where it’s warm enough so you can find real daisies in December.” He imagined that.

I began with the assertion that I’d always thought of three as one; that is not quite the case. When I first tried to people the landscape of North Bennington, I started with a phrase—or, more precisely, tableau. For some time I had been thinking of the story of King David, and the great biblical description of that warrior-poet’s old age. Fading, cold, and failing, he is offered the company of Abishag the Shunammite in his tent at night. But her body’s warmth cannot rouse him. The Old Testament’s indelible description reads: “And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not” (1 Kings 4). That last phrase engendered
Possession
and remains embedded in it still.

More generally, I had the image of a funeral pyre erected at a tribal hero’s death. This is the sort of procedure collectively attested to in Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon legend, Indian suttee, ancient burial rites and so on: the king lies arranged on a high pile of wood, ringed by wives and serving girls and soldiers and armor and chattel, the regalia of his eminence. Then the whole is set on fire in an all-consuming blaze. If there is water he sets out to sea, and the boat bearing him off too must burn, from keel to topmast: flame. It was the image with which I began and the first scene I wrote.

The manuscripts of my Vermont trilogy (as well as other, early papers) reside now in the Abernethy Room of the Middlebury College Library in Middlebury, Vermont. I have not consulted them. But somewhere in those cartons is the scene of Judah Sherbrooke, lying on a hay bale in the middle of his hay barn in the middle of his property and, by extension, the world. He sets himself afire and, operatically, dies. I wrote and rewrote till it seemed letter-perfect; even today, more than half my life later, I remember the satisfaction of that “pyrotechnical” prose and those funerary rites. The scene was, I was sure, triumphal: a set piece to make Faulkner or Lowry or even James Joyce proud. But I can praise it so unreservedly because it’s in an archive and never exposed to the harsh light of print; in the event I cut those pages out.

Judah’s elements indeed consist of fire and earth (his young bride’s are air and water), and there are leftover traces of the language in Hal Boudreau’s drunken fiery accident at the end of
Sherbrookes
. Too, at the end of
Possession
, the old man lies down on his pallet of hay and strikes a match or three. But by the time I’d lived with him and was fully engaged in writing the book, I knew this particular character would not burn down the house. He’s too much of a skinflint, too property-proud and retentive to set the world ablaze. Instead, Judah brushes himself off, shambles up and down the street, then back into the kitchen to share a cup of coffee with his wife. It’s a much less dramatic—even an anticlimactic—conclusion, but a more truthful one. During the process of composition I had come to understand that, far from destroying himself, this flinty old Vermonter would keep on keeping on.

And that’s when I conceived of a second volume and why he does not die. Or, rather, he dies
between
the first two books and not at the end of
Possession
, just as Hattie dies at the end of
Sherbrookes
and Maggie leaves at
Stillness’s
end. It’s a technical challenge, of sorts; the protagonist of Book One must be a presence in but not central to the action of Book Two; a central character in Two is absent from the action of the third installment. In that sense, these three books are not sequels but sequential, and that’s when I understood I’d not be finished at Possession’s close but needed to resume the story. As Conan Doyle discovered when he tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes and was forced, by an avid public, to bring his hero back to life, it’s best—if you do plan to continue—to keep characters alive. In my end was my beginning, therefore; when I scrapped the scene of Judah’s death the trilogy proper commenced.

In Book Two the focus shifts; in Book Three it does so again. A single long novel would not perhaps be built this way, but no single figure here is
Sherbrookes’s
sole protagonist; rather, it’s a collective and family history with—counting down from Daniel “Peacock” Sherbrooke—five generations in play. It’s difficult if not impossible to ask a reader to shift focus and allegiance text by text; the boy who’s wholly absent from Book One, for example, is wholly present for Book Three—while his father, Judah, who was thoroughly corporeal in the first book is, by the third, a ghost. I tried to justify all this in part because the narrative concerns itself with parents and their children, the presence of the past. And in part by having Ian Sherbrooke—the surviving son of his mother and father’s fierce union—write the whole thing down.

The long middle chapter of the middle section of the final book—(which details Ian’s romantic history and his attempt to write a play about his parent’s intimate wrangle—is my favorite chapter in
Stillness
. (In
Possession
I’m most partial to Part II, section IV, which begins with the phrase; “Judah met her first, in 1938,” and in
Sherbrookes
I like best chapter XIV, describing Maggie’s emblematic visions: “Images afflict her; she cannot keep them from coming.”) This is, of course, only one man’s opinion, but the recapitulatory nature of Ian’s rehearsal of what went before does seem to me a successful attempt to lend shape to the whole. It’s a tip of the cap, I suppose, to the metafictional and self-reflexive strategies that were so common in the 1970s—an attempt to meld the modern and the more traditional mode. At any rate, when Ian summarizes his family’s history (as well as, it happens, this novelist’s previous publications) I knew that the book neared its end. Andrew Kincannon—that outlier—is meant to provide a kind of perspective to the goings-on in the Big House; when he and Maggie and Jane drive off at the end of Stillness, the ongoing agon is over and Ian’s work truly begins.

A thing that surprised me, rereading, is the inadvertent way in which these pages have become “historical.” It’s strange to see that what one wrote when young is today a period piece and equally strange to read what proved predictive—how these character’s imagined future has since come to pass. There are no cellphones in
Sherbrookes
, and certainly no iPods or computers; when people write to each other they write letters, not emails or text messages; when they need to make a call they find a phone. I’m struck, in Stillness, by how Andrew Kincannon has to dial the weather number (WE6-1212) in order to get information on the forecast storm, and how he—generously, for the time—hands the garage attendant a dollar. Things change. In these three books, and even when pregnant, everybody drinks and everybody smokes. When Maggie
does get
pregnant at the age of fifty-two she’s a medical anomaly; now that would be a bit less startlingly the case. The Packard Ian drives (and Judah purchased for his wife) is a conscious anachronism; the Plymouth Volare has become one also, but wasn’t intended as such. Maggie reminds herself that “these are the facts of inflation, not value,” but the price of a stamp or housekeeper’s wages or psychoanalytical session has increased exponentially. Her sister-in-law is outraged that soda water costs thirty-five cents a bottle, plus deposit; we’d all be glad of that now.

By contrast, however, most of the geopolitical concerns remain pertinent—or have today surfaced again.
Sherbrookes
spans the years 1976 to 1980, but its characters discuss the price of oil and the possibility of boycotts or an OPEC embargo; they worry about global warming and the infrastructure’s collapse. Many of the speeches about the trouble with and in America have, alas, the ring of current truth.

The thematic oppositions of Maggie and Judah—their ways of living in the world—have dulled a little, however, and lost some of their contemporary sheen. The novels deal with the then-much-more-vocal contrarieties of “flower power” and cultural conservatism, the ideals of liberation—particularly, here, in terms of gender—and the straitlaced desire to preserve what went before. I never really saw my heroine as wanton or promiscuous, but it’s true enough that, by the standards of the time and place, she was a kind of revolutionary. Perhaps I should have been explicit about the clash of values and the way this specific family was supposed to embody the general national case; it’s not an accident that Judah is seventy-six years old in our bicentennial year. At any rate I took for granted, and possibly more than I should have, the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the emergence of a drug culture, and the generational wrangle which put Ian and Judah at odds.

Other aspects of the story, though I here attempt to retrieve them, have been lost. Those years at Bennington were made vivid for me by the presence of John Gardner; we were close colleagues and friends. I showed him the manuscript of Possession, for example, and we argued over the spelling of Sherbrooke—John insisting that the final “e” was an instance of my Anglicisms and should properly be cut. He came up with a bottle of Sherbrook Whiskey in order to buttress his point; that bottle appears in this book. (The town of Sherbrooke, near Montreal, does have a final “e” attached, and therefore I retained my own preferred orthography.) John, who wrote at warp speed then, preceded me into print with a novel called
October Light
, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1976. In it, he has his Vermonters joke about mine; his villagers tell tales about the goings-on in the Big House and mock old Judah Sherbrooke and his “bare-nekkid wife.”