"Not Man Apart": George Dennison and Edwin Muir

Robinson Jeffers, a disagreeable poet but unquestionably a great one, spent much of his life hectoring a dwindling audience that human beings need to stop being concerned so exclusively with their own affairs, and turn their attention instead to "the wholeness of life and things" -- the natural world of sea and rocks and animals that Jeffers described so beautifully. Love that, he wrote, not man apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

I have read two books recently that show, in very different ways, what this sense of wholeness might look like. One is the autobiography of Edwin Muir, a Scottish poet and translator (you may have seen his name on early editions of Kafka); the other is George Dennison's novella Shawno about his life in rural Maine with his family, his neighbors, and his dog Shawno.

The first hundred pages of Muir's biography describe his childhood on the Orkney Islands in a largely self-sufficient farming community. The narrative drifts through early memories: family songs and first scraps of text, walking through the legs of the cows in the field, the butchering of a pig, and the boats that went from one little island to another.

Eventually, when rents go up, the Muirs have to leave for Glasgow, a move that brings about the collapse of their family. As the Orkney section of the book comes to a close, Muir reflects for the first time on the value of the life they had to abandon:

I cannot say how much my idea of a good life was influenced by my early upbringing, but it seems to me that the life of the little island of Wyre was a good one, and that its sins were sins of the flesh, which are excusable, and not sins of the spirit. The farmers did not know ambition and the petty torments of ambition; they did not realize what competition was, though they lived at the end of Queen Victoria's reign; they helped one another with their work when help was required, following the old usage; they had a culture made up of legend, folk-song, and the poetry and prose of the Bible; they had customs which sanctioned their instinctive feelings for the earth; their life was an order, and a good order.

I wouldn't trust a statement like this if it was not preceded by a hundred pages that describe, with great specificity, the elements of this order, from sowing seeds to salting pork. The writing is often beautiful, but its most impressive quality is a sense of truthfulness. As T.S Eliot wrote in his introduction to Muir's poems, "Utter honesty with oneself and with the world is no more common among men of letters than among men of other occupations. I stress this unmistakable integrity, because I came to recognise it in Edwin Muir's work as well as in the man himself."

Dennison's work, to me, gives off a similar feeling of honesty. Even though Shawno is technically fiction, very little of it feels invented, and it hews pretty close to the facts of Dennison's life. After many years in New York, he moved with his family to the little town of Temple in the Maine countryside, and his later works all take place in this setting. Today, he is best known (if at all) for The Lives of Children, a wonderful book about teaching in a free school in New York for poor children. Dennison devoted the rest of his life to fiction, and produced much good work before his early death from cancer.

Unlike Muir's Orcadian childhood, which could just as easily have taken place centuries ago instead of the early 20th century, Shawno is firmly set in the modern world. The family drives to the grocery store to get food and occasionally watches TV at night. But there is, throughout, a sense of community that seems to belong to an older world. This community includes not just the people of Temple but all of the animals, tamed and wild, that share the town with them. Everyone who grows food keeps a dog or, as Dennison writes, "the woodchucks take it all," and these animals, including all of Temple's deer and finches and porcupine, keep crossing paths with each other and the town's human residents.


The book has a meandering quality, moving from descriptions of the creek to the general store to a flashback describing Shawno's days in New York. It is only at the end that a reader realizes how skilfully Dennison has gone about providing the knowledge needed to understand the story's conclusion.

One of the wonderful things about the human characters in Shawno (mostly Dennison's country neighbors, as well as a few other dislocated artists) is the feeling of competence that comes off of them. Today, when all most of us possess is an ephemeral competence involving the manipulation of gadgetry and the navigation of arbitrary man-made procedures, the characters in Shawno can drive posts for a cabin, hunt, replace shingles on a roof, and sugar the maples on their land. Their knowledge grows out of a life lived close to natural cycles, and increases their sense of connectedness with the world rather than drawing them further into themselves. They can also fiddle and draw and sing, the sort of skills that come from generating art and entertainment for yourself instead of always having them supplied to you.

Dennison describes all of this work and play with care and respect. One character sketch, of the man who runs the town's general store, contains a line that I think helps locate the achievement of both of these writers.

Of the men in the village he was certainly the least rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish, play poker, drink whiskey, and swap yarns. But he had gone away to college, and then to business school, and had worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous, lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he couldn't make a go of things in the city but because he loved the countryside and sorely missed the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs. When I met him his three children were away at college. We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his forbearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed by his wit, and by his kindliness, as when he would allow certain impoverished children to cluster for long, long minutes before the candy rack, blocking his narrow aisle; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still alert and lively. He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work.

"A bedrock of contentment" -- like Muir, Dennison is always searching for this sense of rightness, and the vision of a good life that underlies both of these books goes beyond the narrow circle of human concerns to include our relationship with the natural world, and some sense of our proper place in the "good order" that Muir found in the Orkneys.

As you can probably tell, neither writer has much sense of humor, and Dennison's writing in particular is sometimes stiff and high-toned (I usually prefer my "impoverished children" to be old-fashioned poor kids). There are parts of his other books -- Luisa Domic, for example, about a Chilean refugee from the Pinochet takeover -- where I find him sort of insufferable. There is, though, a seriousness and dignity in these two writers that is a much more valuable quality than irony, which is easy enough to find elsewhere. Muir is simply a great artist, and everything I have read by him, from essays to poetry, has been illuminating. I think Shawno is the best fiction that Dennison ever wrote, and along with Jimenez's Platero y yo is probably the best book I have read about a man's relationship with an animal.

It is depressing but in some ways unsurprising that both of these books, along with Muir's poetry, are entirely out of print. As a society, I think we are a little scared of what they have to tell us. Search them out, though. If we want to understand why our civilization keeps absorbing more and more resources while generating less and less human satisfaction, these are the visions we will have to confront, and learn from.

Shopgirl, by Steve Martin

I didn't really like this book (or even think it was an interesting failure), so normally I wouldn't bother writing about it, but it presented an interesting comparison with Guinevere, which I wrote about a week ago. Both are about relationships between young, shy, confused girls (early 20s) and much older men in their 50s. Both girls eventually have artistic ambitions, both older men go after younger women compulsively and exclusively. But one was worthwhile and thought-provoking while the other was largely dishonest and, especially towards the end, truly awful. Also (not to imply any connections) one is set in San Francisco and the other in L.A., and one was written and directed by a young woman and the other by an old man, Steve Martin.

I picked up Shopgirl -- the audiobook, as read by the author -- because I like Steve Martin (see for example my review of Pennies from Heaven, which was apparently made entirely because of his support for the project) and because I thought it would be a good book for a long car ride. The book begins with a portrait of Mirabelle, who works at the glove counter of a fashionable department store in L.A. She is fairly solitary despite being attractive, because she is rather shy and suffers from chronic depression. The descriptions of how she experiences her depression, even while on medication -- the feeling of having the emotion moved and immobilized a small distance from her, but still always present somehow -- felt convincing. Martin has a feeling for prose, and sentence for sentence the book is never less than competent.

The book begins well enough. Mirabelle is incompetently courted by a slacker named Jeremy. There is a farcical scene of sex between them after Mirabelle calls him over simply to feel a body next to her at night. Martin pushes the jokes too far occasionally, but I can forgive this impulse.

Soon, unfortunately, Mirabelle's elderly admirer appears at the glove counter, and the book begins its long decline. It is never really funny again, but it does get a great deal nastier and increasingly unconvincing. The man, Ray Porter, courts Mirabelle and they go on a date. He is nice to her and takes her to fancy restaurants, which she appreciates. Something strange starts to happen right around here. The book had started from Mirabelle's perspective, but begins to focus more and more on what Ray Porter is thinking. Mirabelle, in fact, basically vanishes as a thinking person from the middle of the book. I knew that something was going haywire the first time the two of them have sex. No relationship can take place between people of drastically different ages without both of them having some thoughts about what time has done to each of their bodies. Guinevere tackled this obvious issue directly, but the author of Shopgirl decided that he would, instead, provide a rapturous description of Mirabelle's fine ass. She never seems to have any thoughts at all about the fact that Ray is more than twice her age.

Ray Porter in fact sleeps with younger women constantly and never has the slightest trouble with stamina or performance, despite the novel's single (honest) mention of the popping of his aging joints as he sits down on Mirabelle's futon. One gets the feeling that the author, for whatever reason, does not quite want to broach this subject. Instead, all we get are beautiful young women desiring desperately to sleep with Ray Porter, for reasons that are unclear. The novel is an excellent example of sentimental misogyny, where all the women in a novel can be depicted in the most humiliating and insulting fashion as long as a single deep female character exists to be respected. This is not quite the same thing, by the way, as the old virgin-whore mindset, because there is not a woman in this book who is not sexually available.

Here are some of the marks of this attitude. Every lovely woman we encounter who meets or hears of Ray Porter wants him, and their reward is not just rejection but humiliation. A woman trying to fellate Ray Porter cannot simply be turned away; she must be drunk and fall flat on her face as she goes for the belt buckle. The strange thing is that Martin reads these scenes with rather disturbing relish, in much the same way he describes the "twat" of another bimbo character who accidentally sleeps with the wrong man in attempting to get to, who else, Ray Porter. Sentimental misogyny (which, by the way, is far from limited to male authors) also prevents the single "deep" female character from seeming at all authentic. After the beginning of the book, Mirabelle vanishes as a person. When she actually starts getting lines again towards the end of the book, as in her speech on what makes an effective lie at a dinner party, they seem strange and out of nowhere.

The book is rather essayistic in style and contains several assessments of everyone's character and development, but it ignores every implication or plot development that might be less than consoling to the audience or the author. Everyone gets what they want, people change in huge ways for no particular reason, love and maturity are found in a paragraph or two. And as I reached the last tape of this novella, it struck me how a certain kind of sensitivity can be just another manifestation of vanity. Martin's exploration of Mirabelle's character finally seems less like an honest attempt to get to know her than a desire to show himself as an observant, sensitive man. It is like a seduction guide that shows you how to present yourself as deeply interested in someone's life purely as a means of getting your subject undressed.

My Mortal Enemy, by Willa Cather

I've read three of Willa Cather's books - My Ántonia in middle school, and again recently; A Lost Lady in college; and The Professor's House a few months ago - and liked all of them. They were all basically written at a stretch, it turns out, between 1918 and 1925. I will need to verify this further, but after reading My Mortal Enemy, I suspect that after this period she was lost to art; the shift that takes place is the sort that writers do not recover from.

My Mortal Enemy was written in 1926, a year after The Professor's House, and a few of the elements that appear briefly in that book - a fascination with Catholicism, for example - become the focus of this one. There is also something that I can only call a massive grudge against life as it is actually lived. In The Professor's House, this grudge seemed somehow legitimate - it was a dramatization of the compromises that very few people can avoid without dying young. When I finished the book, I thought of an Empson quote from Some Versions of Pastoral: "the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."

Alongside this sense of loss, though, there was a deeply unforgiving strain that I felt entered Cather's work for the first time. I wrote down a long passage from the section narrated by Tom Outland, the book's unspoiled ideal of life as it ought to be lived. He remains pure to the end because he gets killed in WWI (don't worry, I am giving nothing away) before he has to muddy his hands with marriage and moneymaking and other such messy realities.

When he is walking around Washington, D.C. (my former home) he rents a room from a low-level bureaucrat and his wife. Here are some representative passages: "How it did use to depress me," he writes, "to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big building at sunset! Their lives seemed to me so petty, so slavish." And later: "Thousands of them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery, who ought to be free..."

Now, these passages struck rather deep, because I have been one of that mob and felt, as who does not, what a poor sort of life it is. But I also wanted to protest, because there was more to my life than Tom is willing to grant - and more to the lives of pretty much everyone else I knew who succumbed to that routine. Outland portrays the couple he lived with as concerned only with money and maintaining their wretched social status. How does this boy - depicted elsewhere as so generous - decide that these other clerks are "all more or less like" them? This thought clearly belonged to Cather more than Tom, and it is an unfair one.

A realistic novelist, I think, has to at least make an attempt to see people as they see themselves, and none was made here. Part of these passages' power comes, I suppose, from their unwillingness to see the entire truth - it is the rare novel that is fair to everyone that walks through its pages. In any case, Cather wisely understands that she has no real interest in these people, and focuses on the ones whose virtues she can see; the clerks take up only a few pages. Which is why The Professor's House is still a great book. In My Mortal Enemy, on the other hand, this bitter side of Cather's worldview has taken over, and instead of the simple, heroic human virtues that she once wrote about, there is only a vague longing for the spiritual communion found in the Catholic church.

The book is a portrait of a long marriage - one something like the couple that she depicted in the Outland story - with every drop of joy taken out of it. The husband works all his life to support his wife, Myra, and she gives up her inheritance and her rich uncle to marry him - and for reasons that are never clear she later wishes that she had not done so. They are never truly happy, and at the end of the book she says that her husband has been, in a way, her mortal enemy.

Why? I don't know. Maybe because when Myra left everything behind for her husband she started to expect more than he could ever give her. But Myra also seems to have voluntarily and inexplicably poisoned her marriage with unfounded jealousy and needless hate. Cather seems to believe that this is somehow the hidden truth of all marriages. At the end, the narrator says that whenever she sees "the bright beginning of a love story" or "a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination" (the emphasis is mine) she remembers Myra's words about her husband.

God help someone that feels this when they see a young couple in love. Maybe our philosopher is right to be suspicious of such emotions, but I would recommend that she stop writing novels. The real problem is not that this observation is useless or necessarily false - I suppose I could see a poisonous but still honest novel built around it - but Cather has failed to produce anything like a flesh-and-blood marriage to dramatize her observation. The book is still as well-written as the books of hers that I love, and as well put together, but it is all in the service of an inhuman - anti-human - argument.

When I finished the book, I started to wonder: what is it about an attraction to Catholicism that brings out such a bitter view of human nature? You would think that the religion would foster kindness and forgiveness, and it seems to actually produce the opposite - at least in prose writers like Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene. (Who else? Burgess, maybe?) Maybe people who already have an intensely pessimistic outlook are drawn to religion, since only a god could redeem a world that looked so horrible. In any case, I can admire the craft shown in Greene and O'Connor's books (and in this one as well) and still feel a profound revulsion for them. They strike me somehow as the products of diseased imaginations.