婚姻何尝有止休

Another unthinkable Pulitzer winner, am I losing my senses? Selected as the November book for a book club I signed up, with its big name winning tag, this book was depressing double-sided: a 60-year marriage in shattered pieces, and the awareness of my increasing distaste. That’s right, stories – one of the past and another of the present. The present was about the narrator, a retired history professor with an amputated leg and a strong head. It has long been my belief that a human being will compensate the loss another way, very much like we have a third eye above our forehead to balance our body when our inner vision calls for it. In his case, Lyman Ward's case, the pain of his lost leg sent a reminding signal every minute to his head that he could live just the same. As a result, he crippled in both ways. Meanwhile he was struggling from day to day to sort out a past story. The past story was about the narrator's grandparents – Oliver and Susan Ward. They were among the pioneers in the wild wild west in America – an engineer and an illustration artist. They wandered from New Almaden California, to Leadville Colorado, then to Oregon, Mexico, Idaho, finally settled down in California. Different from gypsies because they had jobs and houses, or shacks, to live in. Better still, they grew a rose garden and kept up a small lawn in a barren canyon. They lived in an era and leading the era themselves through the mining industry, dessert irrigation system experiments, geographical surveys of the west. Their story is far more attractive to me than that of narrator's, for its unpredictable landscape, for the rise and fall of dreams, for the endurance and resentment. Ultimately, it is about a marriage in the hardship. It didn’t sink, but sailed through with hidden scars and remorse.

 

As we all know, the wild west of America eventually was conquered and bloomed after generations’ exploration. Oliver and Susan's life was a prelude of the blooming chapters. It was rather unfortunate because they paid dear. The other side of the coin was they led legendary lives and inspired their descendants. Had they both seen the back side of the coin 100 years ago, they would have been much happier. But I can’t blame them. How many failures can you go through yourself before you got knocked out flat? How long can your faith sustain in poverty, uncertainty and isolation? They were shattered because their dreams were lost one after another, not to the competence, but more to the politics and business insatiability. As if their suffering was not enough, they withdrew from each other and grew apart -- we have to admit it is naturally due to happen in many ill-fated families. Isolation among isolation, silence in silence, they aged. In modern days, tons of ideas to deal with lonely hours. In times when they found no radio no television no car no telephone no department stores and in places where trains wouldn't reach and they saw no churches no galleries no movies few educated people, Oliver turned to work and alcohol sometimes, and Susan resorted to books and letter writing. Her drawing and writing was very beautiful and fruitful, it was bothering that her husband was never mentioned to appreciate her talent. The wife was lucky to have a dear friend, however far, who was ready to receive and listen with all ears. It was sad to find them speak so little to each other while they did have so much to say, to others. Is this being repeated, in us, today? No doubt.

The massive source information was scattering in Lyman’s childhood memories, newspapers, drawings, correspondence letters, and imagination. I am not against imagination, not when the author attempted a semi-biography. I wanted him to do more, matter of fact, so the scattering pieces could be coherent. My annoyance is the stitching of two stories made the incoherent story of the past broken more. The author tied the two loose ends into one, finally in the last 80 pages or so. But think about it – I was irritated all the way through the first 550 pages! My other book club members didn’t finish the book, they dropped the last 100 or 80 pages and determined that they were done. As the only “survivor” of the dragging reading among the club, I am reluctant to go back to persuade anyone to finish the remaining 80 pages, the ending simply was not strong enough to make up the previous unpleasantness. Is it snobbish of me or the same with everyone that you expect a great view or unforgettable experience after you were made to climb hard and long? Not the book I darted doubts at, it is the prize I seeded with questions. In recent years Pulitzer literature winners discontented me so often that I began to stay away from it, except for strong recommendations.

Neither tragedy nor comedy, the story has the true history touch. In the western expansion, the road to civilization was a path of many fallen stones. Oliver and Susan laid their lives on that path, without reaching their destination. Instead they settled at a perfect angle of repose and stayed that way thereafter.

 

What I do not understand/hate about the story:

• Lay the blame on one person. After all, her shoulders were smaller than his, and he was the one asked for her hands to join him in the west. What would he and the place he chose offer her the artistic life and social air she needed to swim in, to stay live? If he failed to see their differences in the beginning, and he did not do much later to make the gap smaller, what right did he have to turn into stone to her?
• Susan's affair was a direct result of Oliver's shutdown to her. How did he not see it coming?
• Contradictory about money. Oliver was too poor to provide his bride train fare, and was too proud to borrow from anyone. Worse still, he didn’t offer a single word, leaving the puzzle for his beautiful young wife to figure out. That left Susan no choice but to use her own money to find her married half. Keep in mind, it was husband who was fully responsible to provide for the family, world wide 100 years ago. Later, he fought the idea several times of using her income earned from book illustrations when he lost his job or low in salary. Started the seed and later rebelled, his pride and action did not talk well. 
• Susan was very vocal, but why couldn't she speak out and talk about their problems? I do not know what Victorian marriage was supposed to be. Her affair was platonic and was not an affair by today's definition. Her guilt blocked her vision and somehow accepted the way their life as was. 

What I do not understand/hate about the writing:

• Their marriage in early years appeared very happy, all the way to the Leadville years. The transition to the unhappy and problems was not clear. A broken knot. The author used the jump between two stories to separate the up and sudden down. Very convenient.
• Her dis-satisfaction was apparent, but his was absent. Her guilt was implied, but never his. The angle of repose, an engineering terminology, is always symmetric. However, such symmetric was not found in the writing, so the angle was not reached in their world. But the author claimed twice they did. The writing failed me. Or, worse, I failed the writing.

 

What I like most about the writing:

• Desperate and loneliness implication. Check out the book cover -- a mountain, a river, rocks and a sitting man having all the vastness to himself.
• The gentility against the harsh life.

All right, the loneliness and gentility. If you hear ice cubes dropped from the refrigerator in the small hours, nearest freeway hummed in the air, a passing truck sent muffled bumping vibration through the windows, pages turned with alarming noises…..time to be at peace.

 

 

Quotes:

• The camps all but doffed their caps to Susan Ward, as if she had been a lady from a castle instead of from a cottage. (p.139)
• She had dwelt not on the harsh life at those insecure edges they lived, but on their grace, their dark and speaking eyes, the elegance of their dancing, the attractiveness of rebozo or mantilla over their hair, the feminine gentleness of their gestures and postures. In her indignation she almost wished those blocks back, so that she could send in their place something closer to the truth of mining camp lives. Yet how would she get close to those lives to draw them? She has lived in New Almaden nearly a year and has seen only its picturesque surface.
• It seems to her that she has already traveled a great distance from the still waters that had produced her. What stretches unbroken from her great-great-grandfather, who has built this house, to her father, who would die in it, was cut short in her. (p.309)
• I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull. (p.422)
• [The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.
• Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
• Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
• Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
• [T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
• She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
• You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
• Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
• You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
• Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.
• You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
• It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
• No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
• Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
• His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.
• Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
• There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
• There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.
• What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.
• A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

 

2016.12.06. USA