"Crossing to Safety"

[fiefoe]

Its self-awareness makes this novel by Wallace Stegner feel very modern, despite the bygone way of life the protagnists led. As with any longitudinal study of marriages and careers, there are dull patches in the book, but the finsh lands in a fitting place. Coincidentally, both Madison and Cambridge are places I've lived before.

• In fact, if you could forget mortality, and that used to be easier here than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.
• Long-continued disability makes some people saintly, some self-pitying, some bitter. It has only clarified Sally and made her more herself. Even when she was young and well she could appear so calm and withdrawn from human heat and hurt that she fooled people. Sid Lang, who is by no means unperceptive, and who was surely a little in love with her at one time, used to call her Proserpine, and tease her with lines from Swinburne:
  Pale, beyond porch and portal / Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
  Who gathers all things mortal / With cold immortal hands.
• From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.
• We never kidded ourselves that we had the political gifts to reorder society or insure social justice. Beyond a basic minimum, money was not a goal we respected. Some of us suspected that money wasn’t even very good for people—hence Charity’s leaning toward austerity and the simple life. But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life.
• I give headroom to a sort of chastened indulgence, for foolish and green and optimistic as I myself was, and lamely as I have limped the last miles of this marathon, I can’t charge myself with real ill will. Nor Sally, nor Sid, nor Charity—any of the foursome. We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
• They all seemed to have come from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The Harvards and Princetons wore bow ties, and the Yalies went around in gray flannels too high in the crotch and too short in the leg. All three kinds wore tweed jackets that looked as if apples had been carried in the lining.
• Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth, but it has a certain distance about it, it is under control, you can see her head going on working behind it. This other one, a tall young woman in a blue dress, had quite another kind. In the dim apartment she blazed. Her hair was drawn back in a bun, as if to clear her face for expression, and everything in the face smiled—lips, teeth, cheeks, eyes.
• Despite my disillusion with some of my bow-tied colleagues, I was ready in 1937 to believe that the Harvard man was the pinnacle of a certain kind of human development, emancipated by the largeness of his tradition and by the selective processes that had placed him in it from the crudeness of lesser places. He had looked on Kittredge bare, he had been where John Livingston Lowes loved and sung, he had read in the enchanted stacks of Widener and walked in thoughtful conversation along the Charles. Certain eastern women’s colleges, in their separate but not quite equal way, produced female variants of the same superior breed.
• She, and presumably her husband as well, represented the cultivation, good manners, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and brightness of mind and dedication to high thinking that were the goals of outsiders like me, dazzled western barbarians aspiring to Rome.
• I thought Charity blushed, and in the circumstances I thought blushing was another evidence of the civilized sensibility and modesty of her kind. It had just struck her how something that she took for granted would sound to our ears. “He didn’t do anything. Nothing to get him fired. It was just that the government had changed. He was Ambassador to France.”
• But she had to get in her brag, confession, whatever it was. She needed something on our side to match that Paris wedding and those camel rides.
• “I feel we’re going to be such friends!” Charity said, and hugged Sally and gave my hand a hard squeeze and climbed into the driver’s seat and irradiated us with that smile. “Start keeping notes!” she said to Sally. Ox-eyed Sally, she of the Demeter brow, she had no residue of impatience at having been pried at, as I did. She hadn’t been bothered by Charity’s curiosity. She had invited it. She had poured us out like a libation on the altar of that goddess.
• I never heard of anybody’s life but ours being changed by a dinner party.
  We straggled into Madison, western orphans, and the Langs adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull and made moons of us and fixed us in orbit around themselves.
• What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. Reading my way out of disaster in the Berkeley library, I had run into Henry Adams. “Chaos,” he told me, “is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.”
• I have the insufferable confidence of a small success.
  But he won’t talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive?
• Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and right now I realize that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand. {interesting narrative choice here}
• What she is doing now is reading Hiawatha. She is fond of Longfellow, whose house is a landmark on Brattle Street hardly a block from her own,
• These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.
• But in our society (she means Cambridge), men (she means men of education and culture) no longer work with tools or use weapons. Girls can still imitate their mothers, but a man-child finds little in his father’s activities that he can make games of. Women must therefore provide models for both girls and boys, and steer them into paths they might not find for themselves, and above all encourage them in the strenuous use of their minds.
  About the abdication of male authority she is, of course, right. A quarter of the male population of New England escaped during the California Gold Rush. Another quarter vanished into the Civil War, and either died or kept on going. Those without the vigor to be Argonauts or warriors stayed to see their work taken over by the Irish, Portuguese, Italians, and French Canadians. They lost some of their political power but kept most of the status.
• New England women, left behind, had few men to pick from except the Irish, Portuguese, Italians, and French Canadians, all of them religiously, economically, and socially unacceptable. Some women turned mannish and assumed roles that their men had once performed. Some espoused causes, affiliated themselves with Abolition or Susan B. Anthony or the antivivesectionists, marched in parades, got themselves arrested, wrote strong letters to the press, addressed meetings, and generally became characters without ever forgetting they were ladies. Even those who found mates among the reduced numbers of New England men found themselves doing things unfamiliar to their grandmothers. These matured as matriarchs, the others as old maids. The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.
• On Innisfree:
  “Oh, pooh, Sid! That’s a splendid poem, but it’s not a plan for a life. It’s defeatist, it’s total retreat. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can’t have a by-product unless you’ve had a product first. It’s immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.”
  “You can get your hands dirty in nine beanrows.”
  “Yes, but what are you doing? Feeding your own selfish face. Indulging your own lazy inclinations.”
• “Let me get you straight. You think poetry isn’t communication on any significant level, but you think teaching is, even if the teacher is teaching poetry. It’s okay secondhand, but not firsthand.”
  “All I’m saying,” she said to Sid alone, “is that poetry-making isn’t the basis for a full life unless you’re an absolutely great poet, and forgive me, I don’t think you are, not yet anyway, and won’t be until you find something to do in your life so that the poetry reflects something. It can’t just reflect leisure. In this world you can’t have leisure unless you cheat. Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organizations.
• And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
• I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.
  Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run.
• But one thing, I don’t think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he’s himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don’t let me have an agenda every time I’m with him.”
• we never looked up from it except when rallies for the Spanish Loyalists ruffled the waters of the university and upset the state house, or when Governor Phil La Follette made some alarmingly fascist-sounding proposal, or when Hitler’s frothing voice over our radio reminded us that we were on a bumpy gangplank leading from world depression to possible world war.
• Twisting the cord of the blind, he watches me, and I read him. He is at once disappointed to have got only a continuance, and miserable to have been continued while I have been rejected. It shocks his whole system of values to think that he should have been preferred over someone he likes and admires. He takes prosperity harder than anyone I ever knew.
• There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According to this belittling and demeaning theory, gratitude is a festering sore. Maybe it is, if it’s insisted on. But instead of insisting on gratitude, the Langs insisted that their generosity was selfish, so how could we dislike them for it?
• I could imagine them there in their rustic outpost of culture like colonials being British in a far land. I was homesick for those people before I ever met most of them. Some things that astonished Sally—hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry—could not dispel the impression I got of a simplicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished, a naturalness as artificial as the Petite Trianon, and a social life that was lively, hectic, and incessant.
• It seemed we all outranked our host. Though he loved discussion and in other circumstances would pursue an argument for hours, at table he had the modest function of the rabbit who sets a fast pace for the first quarter or half so that others may run their four-minute miles.
• The possibilities are diverse, for friendship is an ambiguous relationship. I might be attracted to Charity. She is an impressive woman—though I can’t quite imagine myself smitten by her, or her by me. There are other possibilities, too: Sid with me, Charity with Sally. We could get very Bloomsbury in our foursome. Anything to get this equilibrium of two-and-two overturned.
  Well, too bad for drama. Nothing of the sort is going to happen. Something less orthodoxly dramatic is. Nevertheless there is this snake, no bigger than a twig or a flame of movement in the grass. It is not an intruder in Eden, it was born here. It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.
• He drips poetry as Pavlov’s dog salivated, on cue. No Folsom Hill sunset or druidical old maple or green pocket of woods is safe from him. Here, at the very least, I should hear about Alph, the sacred river, running through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
  But within two seconds I realized that it was my mind, not his, that Coleridge invaded. After all, we had been programmed in the same system, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the best that has been known and said in the world during man’s long struggle upward from spontaneity to cliché. That was one of the things we had most in common, and I learned something about us both during the minute or two we stood looking. We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket.
• It felt like a purification before the next fateful, hopeful chapter of our lives. Up to our chins in the water that foamed through its marble bowl, tiptoeing the smooth bottom to keep our noses above the surface, the light wavering and winking down on us and flickering off the curved walls, trees overhanging us and the sky beyond those, and all around and through us, a soul-massage, the rush and patter and tinkle of water and the brush and break of bubbles. It was a present that made the future tingle.
• “Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?” I said. “We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.”
• There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?
  The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time. They have been able to buy quiet, and distance themselves from industrial ugliness. They live behind university walls part of the year, and in a green garden the rest of it. Their intelligence and their civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities, and passionate errors that pester and perturb most of us. They fascinate their children because they are so decent, so gracious, so compassionate and understanding and cultivated and well-meaning. They baffle their children because in spite of all they have and are, in spite of being to most eyes an ideal couple, they are remote, unreliable, even harsh. And they have missed something, and show it.
  Why? Because they are who they are. Why are they so helplessly who they are? Unanswered question, perhaps unanswerable. In nearly forty years, neither has been able to change the other by so much as a punctuation mark.
• —So who was wonderful? I was just a crippled thing that had to be made to want to live. They made me—Charity especially, but both of them. I had to live, out of pure gratitude.
• “Market carts, I guess. Bringing in the zucchini and carciofi .”
  “They’re beautiful! How did you know about them?”
  “I didn’t. I heard their hoofs going tickety-tickety.”
  “Isn’t it a nice sound. Like Ferde Grofé.”
  “Better than the farm trucks banging in toward Faneuil Hall.”
• We thought them luckier. They had had only a war to damage them, and war’s damage is, when it isn’t fatal, likely to be stimulating rather than the reverse. Living through a war, you have lived through drama and excitement. Living through what we had been given to live through, we had only bad luck or personal inadequacy to blame for our shortcomings.
• Like Frost’s farm couple who went from house to wood for change of solitude, we sometimes let our afternoons be guided by whim and association, but most of the time they were guided by Charity.
• “When you remember today, what will you remember best, the spring countryside, and the company of friends, or Piero’s Christ and that workman with the mangled hand?”
  She thought a minute. “All of it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be complete or real if you left out any part of it, would it?”
  “Go to the head of the class,” I said.
• Her face says she is unconvinced by memory and unpersuaded by wishfulness.
• All her life she has been demanding people’s attention to things she admires and values. She has both prompted and shushed, and pretty imperiously too. But she herself never needed or accepted prompting in her life, and she is not going to be shushed, not even by cancer. She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.
• Sally is far less cowardly in these situations than I am. Also, she had more at stake. Charity and I like each other well and somewhat warily. Half of our pleasure in each other’s company comes from resisting each other. But Charity and Sally are stitched together with a thousand threads of feeling and shared experience. Each is for the other that one unfailingly understanding and sympathetic fellow-creature that everybody wishes for and many never find. Sid and I are close, but they are closer. Apart from Mrs. Fellowes and myself, Charity is the only person Sally ever willingly allowed to help her up or down or to the bathroom, the only person besides the two of us that her disability is comfortable with.
• It was her death. She had a right to handle it her own way. But I felt sorry for Sid, a reluctant stoic,
• “She’s dividing herself like some inexhaustible Eucharist. She’s going around to everybody she loves, saying. ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’ ”
  “She’s trying to do it right, she says.”
  “Sure.” The quick glint of his glasses was eloquent with a kind of helpless derision.
• Then the doorway filled again, and there, hobbling and lurching, helpless to help or even keep up, shrunken and warped out of shape, came Sally—no part of the dance, but harder to watch than any of it.
  The vision of her floundering in the wake of the concentrated helpers and their feeble charge turned my distress into outrage. Not at any of the helpers, not at Charity’s willfulness, not at the solidarity of women collaborating in what only they could do as well, while excluding male intrusions. No, at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was. What she had missed, how much had been kept from her, how little her potential had been realized, how hampered were her affection and willingness and warmth. The sight of her burned my eyes.
• One of the peculiarities of polio is that its victims, once they have recovered from the virus and settled down to whatever muscular control it has left them, live a sort of charmed life. Crippled as they are, they are rarely ill, they are surprisingly tough and durable, they astonish their sound companions with their capacity to endure... But that is not forever. There comes a time in the life of every such patient when the whole system—muscles, organs, bones, joints—begins to fall apart all at once, like the wonderful one-hoss shay.
• Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is. He tells me what under other circumstances would infuriate me— that he takes some satisfaction in my ill luck, that it gives him comfort to see someone else in chains. He says too that he would not be unchained if he could, and he knows I wouldn’t either. But what he doesn’t understand is that my chains are not chains, that over the years Sally’s crippling has been a rueful blessing. It has made her more than she was; it has let her give me more than she would ever have been able to give me healthy; it has taught me at least the alphabet of gratitude.

EASTER HYMN

If, in that Syrian garden, ages slain
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.