The Tree of Man by Patrick White

At the time Stan Parker was torn between the images of gold and ebony and his own calm life of flesh. He did not wish to take his hat from the peg and say, Well, so long, I'm off to see foreign places. This did not bring the sweat to the backs of his knees. He had a subtler longing. It was as if the beauty of the world has risen in a sleep, in the crowded wooden room, and he could almost take it in his hands. All words that he had never expressed might suddenly be spoken. He had in him great words of love and beauty, below the surface, if they could be found.

But all he said was, again, 'The Gold Coast, eh?' And reached for the bottle.

"The soul remains anchored," Patrick White writes in The Tree of Man. "It is a balloon tied to a branch of bones. Still, it will tug nobly." Life, real life, is an event that happens within, not without. It's for this reason that people are not really admitted into each other's lives, which are inaccessible, even people on the most intimate terms, like a husband and wife, like Stan and Amy Parker, the two protagonists of the novel. The novel begins when Stan inherits a piece of property in the Australian bush, on which he builds a rudimentary home to bring his new bride. Both Stan and Amy are what you might call "simple" people, and they live a "simple" life, but a complex life rages within them that they are unable to share with each other, or their children. Our lives, White says--I'm remembering here, because I've lost the page--do no join, only touch.

That seems sad, and it is, but in White's novels, the mysterious and incommunicable life within is also that which is susceptible to visions. It's that life that touches God. It's there, for instance, in the piece of crimson stained glass, held by little boy rescued by Stan from a flood, who saves it to look through and see the world transformed, and then disappears. It's there when Stan saves a rich and beautiful woman from a burning house--the flood and the fire being both symbols that link the raw bush to Eden, symbols of God's destructive power as well as his obscure guidance.

The most White-like symbol of all is a series of grotesque paintings, done by the husband of the postmistress, who reveals them to Amy only after he has hanged himself. The postmistress' husband is a cousin to Alf Dubbo, the aboriginal painter who is one of the title characters of White's novel Riders in the Chariot, whose art is an attempt at recording the moment of divine vision. The paintings are grotesque: a brutalized Christ, a naked woman, but they reveal to Amy the divine in simple things, too, as White shows with what I think is dry humor: "So also a bottle can express love. She had never before seen a bottle of adequate beauty. This one tempted her to love her neighbour."

Do the paintings work? Do they communicate the ineffable? The man's suicide may be a clue. But they are attempts, at least, of the kind that the Parkers fail to make over and over. Amy tries to make a gift of a blank notebook to her dissolute son, Ray, then to Stan, and then to her grandson--also Ray--but each of them is unable to think of anything to write. Stan, a farmer of few words, feels that he has "great words of love and beauty" in him, and yet the notebook remains blank, even to the end of the novel. It's no wonder that his children and their children can't find the words either, but there is something poetic in the getting and raising of children, too, a propagation of the "green shoots" in the title "tree of man."

There's always something uniquely sad about novels that stretch the bulk of a character's whole life. They confirm, I think, what we sometimes suspect or fear: that life is shorter than we realize, and perhaps adds up to less. (If you can fit a life between the covers of a book, what is it, really?) Children ease that worry a little, which is what makes it so difficult for Stan and Amy to grapple with Ray's bitterness and criminality. Toward the end of his life, reflecting on how poorly Ray has turned out, Stan says what might be the most poignant line in the whole book: "What else are we intended to do if we have failed in this?" (He conveniently forgets that the Parkers also have a daughter, Thelma.)

But White suggests that the last stages of life really may offer the vision that Stan and each in his or her own individual soul have been searching for. When an evangelist comes by the house to convert Stan in his failing age, Stan spits on the earth and says about the spittle, "There is God." The evangelist takes this as an insult, but it's not: what Stan has recognized is that God is in that life within, the "balloon tied to a branch of bones."

The Guarded Gate:  BigotryEugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent

 

 

We like to say that we are a nation of immigrants and liberals treat Trump’s cruelty, his cages and his wall, as an anomaly, an attack on America’s tradition of welcoming outsiders.  In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent, a journalist and historian, puts the lie to that line of thinking.  It tells the story of how anti-immigration activists partnered with eugenicists in the first third of the 20^th century to pass the most comprehensive and effective ban on immigration in American history, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.

 

There has, of course, rarely been truly free immigration to the United States.  Even before Asian immigration is barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Asians are widely discriminated against in employment and housing, as well as being denied the chance to become citizens and prevented from serving on juries.  But in 1894, the Immigration Restriction League is formed in Boston to lobby for an end to all immigration.  Of course, this movement is acting in response to changes to the demographic makeup of the immigrants.  Northern Europeans are coming less often, while Jews and Italians, and Southern and Eastern Europeans more generally become the majority of the passengers on ships that pour into New York, Boston and every port on the East Coast.  This history is well known, but Okrent does a formidable job of highlighting the basic racism of the anti-immigration movement.  They are attempting, in the words of the head of the Census Bureau, to keep out “beaten men from beaten races.”

 

At the same time that Henry Cabot Lodge and others are working to cut off immigration, Charles Davenport gets funding from the Carnegie Institute to set up a lab at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island to study the relationship between genetics and human development.  Davenport is an openly racist crackpot who sets out to prove that virtually all human character traits are genetically – and therefore ethnically – based.  The shallow nature of Davenport’s “research” is itself shocking.  He develops a list of 3,500 character traits that go beyond physical details like hair color, eye color, height and bone density, to include things like the ability to arrange flowers, forgetfulness, emotional frigidity, geniality, honesty, criminality, short-temperedness Through brief interviews conducted by college girls who volunteer, he claims to trace these character traits across generations, relying on details like someone’s memory of their long-dead grandparents.  His work conveniently finds negative traits are prevalent in the very groups of immigrants that the IRL and others are trying to keep out.

 

The story of their partnership, its victory on immigration and the at least partial defeat and discrediting of eugenics is long and involved.  What seems most pressing is the number of familiar and respected names that are in one way or another, at one time or another, supportive of both eugenics and racist immigration restrictions.  A short list would include The New York Times and their owners the Sulzburgers, Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, George Eastman, Edgar Lee Masters and Maxwell Perkins.   Perkins, for example, not only edits the novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe, but edits several of the many prominent books that promote eugenics and racialized science, including Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, which Fitzgerald mocks in The Great Gatsby.  His publishing company, Scribners, is associated with eugenics for more than a generation.

 

In fairness, for many of these boldfaced names, the association with eugenics is brief and somewhat youthful.  The Roosevelts, for example, are brought up in a world where racial hierarchy is assumed and all three of them come to reject it and embrace a broader view of humanity.  

 

However, Cold Spring Harbor has for a century been one of America’s leading research laboratories and has supported the work of 8 Nobel Prize winners.  Yet for its first quarter century it was the main engine behind the scientific justification of racism.  Its primary funder, Margaret Harriman, was a key figure of New York society and the father of Governor Averill Harriman (and the donor of the land that became Harriman State Park).  Margaret Sanger may not have been a true believer in racism, but as eugenicists support family planning, she supports policies that call for sterilization of undesirables. Perhaps more shocking, the Museum of Natural History was run by one of eugenics chief voices, Fairfield Osborne, and for some 40 years was essentially the headquarters for the eugenics movement.  On more than one occasion, Osborne closes the museum and removes regular displays to host international conferences devoted to ideas that would later be admired, and copied, by Nazi Germany, including the forced sterilization of undesirable genetic types.  Carl Brigham, who developed early intelligence testing and the forerunner to the SAT, was also a committed eugenicist (for a time – in the 1930s he disavowed much of his early work).

 

Some of the power of the movement is lost when immigration is cut off in 1924 by the Johnson-Reed Act. That law sets strict quotas for each nation, limiting their immigration to a small fraction of what it had been in the past.  The law further reduces the influx of certain nationalities by basing these qutoas on the census of 1890, before the tide of immigration drastically shifted to Italy and Eastern Europe.  However, it is the rise of Nazi Germany and the advent of World War II that more fully discredits eugenics.  Even then, change comes largely because the heads of the two important institutions, the Cold Spring Harbor Lab and the Museum of Natural History are forced to retire and are replaced by more qualified scientists.  Much of the damage is already done and Okrent concludes by discussing how the Johnson-Reed Act prevented Jews from escaping the Holocaust.

 

Some of the “science” described here is comical.  Madison Grant, who is the key mover behind the development of the New York Zoological society and the Bronx Zoo, spends some time twisting logic and evidence out of shape to establish that there are several races within Europe – chiefly the Nordic, the Alpine and the Mediterranean, that the Nordic is superior to the others.  That is merely shocking.  It becomes more comical when the existence of outstanding figures from non-Nordic countries must be explained.  Nordics pop up in unusual places – according to eugenisists,  Jesus, Christopher Columbus, Dante and Leonardo DaVinci are all clearly Nordic.

 

Of course, much of this rings relevant today.  “beaten men from beaten races” is more elegant than “shithole countries,” but the effect is the same.  The denial of science is the same.  In the not too distant future, the periods of relatively open immigration, the stories of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the burst of new immigration of the last 30 years, may seem like incongruous interludes in our history of restriction and racism.

 

Okrent is a lively and smooth writer.  He has done an admirable job of taking scholarly-level research and packaging it in a popular history that virtually anyone can read.  His style is marred at times by a love of drama – he likes to hint at famous names for a paragraph or two before shocking the reader with a practiced reveal.  He is also overly concerned with convincing the reader that he condemns the ideas and practices he is describing.  While scholarly neutrality would be abhorrent given the topics he discusses, we do not need to be reminded quite so often that these men are dangerous and ignorant.  The first half of the book is less dramatic, as the early ideology of immigration restriction and of eugenics are spelled out.  It is with the start of WWI and the immense increase in nationalism it causes that the story takes off and Okrent’s writing quirks become less frequent and less annoying. 

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

I will be her witness.

That would translate sere su testigo, and will not appear in your travelers' phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.

Here is what happened: she left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first; she let him die alone. She lost one child to "history" and another to "complications" (I offer in each instance the evaluation of others), she imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande, a tourist. Una turista. So she said. In fact she came here less a tourist than a sojourner but she did not make that distinction.

"I think I have never known anyone who lead quite so unexamined a life," the narrator of Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer, Grace Strasser-Mendana says about Charlotte Douglass, who was "immaculate of history, innocent of politics." The two women met in the Central American nation of Boca Grande, where Grace is the widow of a tinpot dictator--and in control of the copra mines which are the country's only major resource--and Charlotte was a turista, fled to Boca Grande to--to, well, what, exactly? The book is an attempt to find out, and Grace--an anthropologist as well as a copper baron--writes it in order to make sense of Charlotte, whom history and politics both seem to have caught in the end.

The events that lead Charlotte to Boca Grande, as detailed by Grace, are remarkably convoluted. They begin with the discovery that Marin, Charlotte's daughter, has committed an act of international terrorism and disappeared. In the aftermath of Marin's crime, Marin's father, a primo asshole named Warren who may be dying of cancer, turns up to wrench Charlotte away from her current husband, an aloof bureaucrat named Leonard. Charlotte and Warren drift through the United States for a time, alienating every country club buddy Warren ever made, before Charlotte flees to Central America on her own, eventually settling in Boca Grande.

What draws Charlotte to Boca Grande seems not to be a connection of logic--there's no indication, for example, that the terrorists Marin is tied up with are related to the local guerilleros--but of spirit. Charlotte, with her tremendously selective attention, is unable or unwilling to see the way history manifests in her own life, and Boca Grande is a place where history never happens. The beautiful new capital planned in the jungle is never built, the streets planned on the map never materializes, and every year or two a new round of guerilla warfare shuffles control of the country between one or another of Grace's in-laws, all perfectly spoiled banana republicans.

Everything here changes and nothing appears to. There is no perceptible wheeling of the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length of days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only the amniotic stillness in which transformations are constant. As elsewhere, certain phases in these transformations are called by certain names ("Oldsmobile," say, and "rust") but the emotional field of such names tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones. At the equator the names are noticeably arbitrary. A banana palm is no more or less "alive" than its rot.

But things tend not to happen right up until the point that they do, and Charlotte, just as she's mugged by history in the case of Marin, is mugged by history in Boca Grande, where the latest revolucion turns out to be a bit more permanent, or at least a bit more violent, than the last. Grace's obsession with understanding Charlotte, who refuses to understand anything, becomes quite explicitly a quest to understand herself, one that yields entirely unsatisfactory results. For me, too, something about the lives of Charlotte and Grace eludes understanding; it's never clear why, for instance, the distraught Charlotte absconds with Warren, or why she leaves him in the end. The war in Boca Grande has no recognizable cause; its aims are false even though the "hardware" is real and the intrigue as complicated as that of a Graham Greene novel. 

"Maybe it is just something that happened," Grace says, speaking about the portion of Charlotte's life she describes, but she might be talking about her own life as well, and history and politics in general. When Grace, finally put face to face with Marin after Charlotte's death, says, "I didn't understand your mother," Marin replies, "Try a class analysis." That's part of it, of course--both Charlotte and Grace are inoculated from history by their money--but it's so insufficient to explaining Charlotte's life it makes Marin, blinkered by the narrowness of her ideological perspective, doubly tragic. Maybe A Book of Common Prayer is a book about the way history and politics intrude even on those of us who don't think about them. Or maybe it's just something that happened.

 

How To Be Gay by David Halperin

 

Halperin is a classics scholar who teaches cultural history and literature in the English Department of the University of Michigan.  He became somewhat notorious in the early 2000s when he taught a class at UM with the title “How to be Gay.”  The class was an examination of gay culture, but was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who claimed it was an attempt to convert straight students and Halperin became a target of right-wing ire.  This volume combines the vision of gay culture that he was teaching in that class with a good deal of personal history and storytelling.  The analysis of what gay culture is, where it comes from and why it is important is full of fascinating observations about sexuality and its relationship to culture.  He is upfront about the limitations of his study – he is almost entirely focused on white gay men and understands that his work has little of any specificity to offer black men, trans people or lesbians.

 

Halperin’s chronological story actually begins a decade earlier than the Limbaugh story.  He describes himself as a young professor eager to use the new freedom the Stonewall rebellion had afforded him.  In the mid 90s, he offered a course in gay literature, to offer young gay men the chance to see themselves within the confines of the literature classroom.  The class had a large enrollment and there seemed to be universal excitement around the class’s purpose.  Halperin was surprised over the next few weeks to discover that the students were bored with the discussion and did very little of the reading. (He does not supply a syllabus from that class.). However, he noticed that there was a great deal of interest among these young men around the career of Joan Crawford and her 1945 movie Mildred Pierce.

 

Up to that time, Halperin was of the opinion that the stereotypes around gay culture – that gay men loved Hollywood musicals, opera, and the careers of certain women including Judy Garland and Ms.Crawford – had become irrelevant with the gay rights movement and the sexual revolution.  Young gay men of the 90s were no longer forced to hide their sexuality and seek out coded ways of expressing themselves.  They could have relationships and pursue sex openly rather than sublimate through old movies or home furnishings.  The reaction to his gay lit class made him rethink those assumptions and the relationship of gay men to pop culture.  His insights are fascinating:

 

According to Halperin, being gay is not simply a matter of sexual object choice.  Despite what Halperin sees as a concerted effort on the part of the gay marriage movement to portray gay men as the same as other men in all ways except their choice of sexual partners, Halperin argues that none of us, gay or straight, is a sexual being in a vacuum.  All of us develop our sexuality within families and within the culture as a whole.  Straight people are not simply responding to their hormones as children and adolescents – they are responding to the messages about how to pursue romance, relationships, sex and partnership that permeate the music they listen to, the movies and TV shows they watch and all of the other methods the culture has of sending messages.  Straight people, in other words, learn how to be straight.  The obvious problem is that gay boys and young men also learn how to be straight.  They must find a way to express their sexuality within a straight culture.  As Halperin puts it, “Before they have sex, they have genre.”  

 

His argument is that young gay men need to find aspects of straight culture that offer them the chance to express their place within the culture before they can begin to come out or develop relationships.  Those aspects must offer both legitimate avenues of emotional expression and a critique of pop culture’s modes of cultural expression – a way for gay men to be both inside and outside the culture, to use it and also critique it.  Two of these avenues are camp and melodrama.  Much of drag, according to Halperin, is camp, giving gay men a chance to both express emotions and mock the stereotype of women as emotionally overwrought.  Certain pop culture figures have become gay icons (he focusses on Joan Crawford) because they are at once authentic and mockable.

 

The need for a complex approach to culture carries on as gay men form relationships.  Halperin points out that for straight people, falling in love is at once passionately spontaneous, marking them as individuals separate from the mass of society and  totally conformist, fulfilling society’s very well-communicated expectations of them.  For gay men (and, presumably, lesbian women), falling in love can only fulfill one of these purposes – it is a passionate, individual expression that marks them as outsiders, incapable of conforming.  He argues that even the expanded inclusion of gay characters within pop culture – in movies, music, TV, etc, simply mark gay men’s extreme minority status.  He argues that there will always be a need for gays, lesbians and trans people to mediate their relationship to mainstream culture – in his words, to “queer” the culture.

 

Halperin’s title refers to the importance of this process and of gay culture to gay adolescents – boys and men her refers to as “proto-gay.”  Each gay youth does not have to find his own way of managing this relationship to the culture on his own.  Finding a gay community is often accompanied by an introduction to aspects of gay culture.  He recounts his own introduction to Broadway musicals as part of his transition to an open life.  This view of gay culture may be based on stereotypes, but, Halperin argues, those stereotypes not only contain some truth, but carry some purpose and value.  

 

Part of his argument is that the post-Stonewall has ignored the importance of this culture.  His generation, and those younger than him, act as if the availability of sex is all that mattered, that  the elimination of the closet eliminated the need for gays to manage their relationship to the culture.  He argues that there is more to sexuality than sex, that there is more to being gay than sex.  Gay culture expresses how gay men relate to mainstream culture and, Halperin believes gay men will always need to find a way to queer that expression.

 

The book was published in 2012, before gay marriage was legalized nationwide.  Much has changed in the culture since then, and it remains to be seen how Halperin’s observations will be changed as mainstream culture makes more and more room for gay life.  Certainly, ten year old gay boys are managing their relationship to a very different mainstream culture than they would have in 2012.  However, it seems to me that Halperin’s arguments may be more universal than he realizes.  He discusses the fact that gay boys are taught how to be straight men by their families and by our culture and need to find a way to manage the ways that they are different than the straight role models they are offered.  Of course, straight boys are also taught to be straight men and need to manage the ways that they are different than the role models they are offered.  To the extent that those role models are narrowly athletic, emotionally limited, perhaps overly macho – or to the extent that the role models offer an unrealizable ideal – straight boys will also need a way to queer that experience:  to find ways that their individuality fits within the culture that pressures them to conform.  Perhaps gay youth are not the only ones who should be open to gay culture.

Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry

The sea! My God, what it may suggest to you! Perhaps you think of a deep grey sailing ship lying over in the seas, with the hail hurling over her: or a bluenose skipper who chewed glass so that he could spit blood, who could sew a man up alive in a sack and throw him overboard, still groaning! Well, those were the ancient violences, the old heroic days of holystones; and they have gone, you say. But the sea is none the less the sea. Man scatters ever father and farther the footsteps of exile. It is ever the path to some strange land, some magic land of faery, which has its extraordinary and unearthly reward for us after the storms of the ocean.

Dana Hilliot, the Norwegian-British sailor of Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, is not quite a sailor. He has shipped off on a yearlong voyage aboard the Oedipus Tyrannus for reasons that are obscure, both to the reader and himself: they have something to do with proving himself to his girl at home, Janet, and something to do with "gaining experience," and something to do with a cargo ship called the Oxenstjerna that he and Janet have seen appear and reappear on the horizon like a mystic vision. But as it turns out, sailing is hard work, and Hilliot is bad at it. He's widely hated by his fellow sailors and tortured by the temptations of shore, anxiously obsessed with keeping faithful to Janet, who has yet to send him a letter. He's two months into a yearlong voyage, and the remaining ten months look less like "experience" and more like purgatory.

The parent-rival on the Oedipus Tyrannus is the chinless cook, Andy, who is the ringleader of the anti-Dana sentiment on board. Hilliot seethes under Andy's contempt even as he craves, in a deep dark way, his approval. When Hilliot at last ventures to shore in China, he gets roaringly drunk and lets himself get entangled with a Russian prostitute named Olga, only to leave and return to find--as is obviously required by the Oedipal metaphor at work here--her deep in the arms of Andy. Experience, as always, is mixed up with sex, and Hilliot's virginity becomes a torture; his love for Janet requires him both to be a true, pure virgin and an experienced man.

Lowry is the only author I've ever read who comes close to what James Joyce does with stream-of-consciousness. As in Under the Volcano, the real story in Ultramarine is in the psychosexual drama that roils inside the protagonist. And as in Under the Volcano, the real movement of the mind is best captured when the protagonist is roaring drunk, when the mind is at its most honest and most disordered. I think Ultramarine was more successful, to me, because it's about half the length of Under the Volcano, which became at length cryptic and suffocating. In Ultramarine, the eddies of Hilliot's mental anguish are punctuated with the earthy voice of the other sailors, interrupting each other with anecdotes, and dashes of strange humor: the Oedipus Tyrannus, we discover, has been charged with carrying a whole circus of elephants, tigers, and other exotic animals from China. (It's almost like the novel shifts from an Oedipus story, about a man tortured by his own sexual inadequacy, to a Noah's ark story--perhaps one in which Dana really does get to start his new life on the tip of Mt. Ararat.)

Some of Ultramarine is inscrutable. People's minds really are sometimes, I guess, so it only makes sense. But there's enough of work, of dirt, enough of booze, of the sea, to balance out the maziness of the novel and make it worth reading.

Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

Rumors swirled. Servants talk, of course. The floorboards creaked as I paced and spoke alone. The hallway went sharp with the scent of burning ink. Did I cook up incantations? They sounded half afraid. Pacing, yes, reciting my favorite lines. My mind was elsewhere, halfway to the moon. If atoms are so small, why not worlds inside our own? A world inside a peach pit? Inside a ball of snow? And so I conjured one inside a lady's earring, where seasons pass, and life and death, without the lady's hearing.

Danielle Dutton's Margaret the First is a biographical novel about Margaret Cavendish, a 17th century polymath and author who was the first woman permitted to speak before the Royal Society of London. Cavendish's The Blazing World is often considered one of the first works of science fiction, and she published several natural philosophy books that were admired and condemned--largely because she was a woman--in equal measure. She was famous for her eccentric outfits and what was perceived as strange behavior; diarist Samuel Pepys noted that obsessed crowds called her "Mad Madge."

How does one become "Mad Madge?" In Dutton's novel, Margaret's character is produced by several species of exile: a literal exile on the continent for Margaret and her husband William Cavendish, a royalist, during Cromwell's Protectorate, and a figurative exile from the company of learned men like Robert Boyle, Christian Huygens, and Robert Hooke, whose scientific and philosophical debates Margaret longs to enter. Margaret has a sensitive mind and a powerful imagination; as a child she dreams of "Bubble-worlds" filled with "Bubble-people" who "fell in love, bore children, and died, their bodies decomposing into a fine foamy substance that was then reintegrated into the foamy infrastructure of the world as the Bubble-children grew up and bore children of their own and died and were integrated into the sky and air and water." It's the fantasy of a child who wants the world to be livelier, more fantastic, than it really is; is it any wonder that the adult Margaret, expelled from home and locked out of the world of men, still relies on these fantasy worlds?

You can imagine a version of this book written in a simulacrum of Margaret's voice, with its winding 17th century sentences and non-standard spelling, but what Dutton does here, I think, is find a modern analog that perfectly captures the perspective of a brilliant, disaffected woman: sharp short sentences, flitting from one thought to the next, and intensely metaphorical. Margaret wears a hat, for instance, "like petals falling through empty space." It allows her, too, to move effortlessly at the book's halfway point from the first-person point of view to the third, as if Margaret's mind itself becomes a thing enclosed, an exiled world.

Dutton manages to puncture the "Mad Madge" myth: yes, Margaret can be unusual, as when she attaches a pair of black velvet stars to her face, but it's easy to see how these "eccentricities" develop from a sense of placelessness. (To make things worse, Margaret and William are unable to have children, robbing Margaret of the one socially sanctioned identity that might be left to her.) But Restoration society, like our own, is not kind to women who stand out. Despising Margaret is an activity that cuts through class lines, from the Queen, enraged at Margaret's audacity to show up to a ball with a dress with a train, to the crowds that scream "Mad Madge." But a select few, like Huygens and a portion at least of the Royal Society, are able to see Margaret for the brilliance of her imagination and the power of her ideas. As Margaret writes in the prologue to The Blazing World, if her writing has satisfied any reader, "I shall count myself a Happy Creatoress; if not, I must be content to live a melancholly Life."

Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Watson

But wind is different.

For a start, it is invisible. It can creep up out of nowhere and tickle the back of your neck, or throw you flat on your face. It has no shape, size, smell, taste or sound of its own. All its properties are borrowed, all our experience of it comes at second hand. We have nothing to work with but indirect effects. It is big enough and strong enough to tear the largest living things on Earth out by their roots, and yet it can seep through a hairline crack. Wind is elusive, shifty, fugitive, difficult to define--and impossible to ignore.

The wind may seem like a strange thing to write about. It might seem like writing about nothing at all, since wind itself is so ephemeral and substanceless. But wind, as described by naturalist Lyall Watson, may be the only thing worth writing about, its effect on our lives is so important. Without wind, there would be no birds, who rely on it for their migrations. There would be no plants, except perhaps at the margins of oceans and rivers--the interiors of our continents would all be desert. There would be no trade or communication between civilizations, without the wind to push boats across the sea. There would be no weather of any kind, because weather itself is wind, the movement of cold and hot masses of air around the world. And perhaps, even if these other things were true, we would lack spirits, or souls, those mysterious parts of ourselves that people of all civilizations have equated with wind or air.

Watson separates Heaven's Breath into five sections, each each matched to a different relationship: "Wind and Earth," "Wind and Time," "Wind and Life, ""Wind and Body," and "Wind and Mind." When Watson writes about the hard sciences, as in the explanation of the production of trade winds in "Wind and Earth" or his description of the way spiders migrate on wind-driven threads of gossamer in "Wind and Life," he seems to be highly knowledgeable and gifted in the skill of communicating complicated concepts in clear, engaging terms. Heaven's Breath might be one of the most readable non-fiction books I've ever read. Watson's prose, like the wind itself, is full of life: one of the most surprising arguments here is that the air itself is a kind of biome in which innumerable small creatures live by right of nature, not just here in the troposphere where we--gulp--breathe them into our lungs, but even moving about by the billions in the outer reaches of the atmosphere.

When Watson turns his attention toward human beings--in "Wind and Body" and "Wind and Mind"--Heaven's Breath surprised me by outlining my own relationship to the wind. Did you know, for instance, that your feet are typically 15 degrees Centigrade--or 60 Fahrenheit--cooler than your body's core? Or that the "wind chill factor" measures how wind whips your own "aura" of body heat away from your body? The human body, as Watson describes it, is incredibly sensitive to the vagaries of the wind, and so is the mind. He argues that times in which we often feel bad or anxious are really subliminal responses to the shifting of winds, which are themselves related to the magnetic fields of the earth. (One thing I learned from this book is that the human heart has its own magnetic field.) In extreme cases, Watson says, this relationship turns disastrous, as in the hot, dry fohn wind of the Alps that drastically drives up suicides. It's no wonder then, Watson argues, that many of the origin stories of human beings in core mythologies begin with wind.

I really enjoyed Heaven's Breath, although perhaps it needs a little updating since it was published in 1984. In one truly breathtaking passage, Watson acknowledges the possibility that carbon pumped by human industry into the atmosphere will likely lead to an increase in the world's temperature, but holds out optimism for the consequences:

Dust raised by human and natural volcanoes may be cooling Earth's brow, but everything else seems to be working toward a warmer world, one destined to be at least 2 [degrees] Centigrade hotter before another century has passed. If so, it will be warmer than the Early Medieval epoch between AD 1150 and 1300, which was one of the best in post-glacial times and seemed, with the lifting of storm winds and bitter winters, to give the whole world a rush of blood to the head.

Watson goes on to write about the wonders of the Medieval warm period: Viking colonies in Greenland, cathedrals in Europe, flowers in the Sahara. Even "People grew bigger and lived longer." This is, of course, amazingly wrong: climate change threatens to curtail human lifespans on an enormous scale, not increase them. But you have to give Watson credit for recognizing the possibility of global warming before many others, and despite the Pollyanna-ish optimism, Heaven's Breath is still worth reading in the era of climate change, because it understands how closely linked our lives--our bodies, our minds, our ecosystems--are to the weather.

Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Della was speaking to him sometimes in his thoughts, or she was quiet, simply there at the edge of his vision. In her gentle way she was making everything easier. What would she find becoming him? That was what he did. And by putting himself in the way of survival, not to put too fine a point on it, he was doing as she had asked him to do, so forthrightly. Can these bones live? Oh, Lord, you know. But for you, Miss Miles, I am eating this sandwich, for you I am smiling at this stranger, for you I am trying to sleep. He could not imagine an occasion when she might acknowledge any of this. No matter. Their lives were parallel lines that would not meet, he knew that, he would see to that. But they defined each other, somehow. Equidistance was like silence. It had to be carefully sustained to exist at all.

Few books have disappointed me as much as Marilynne Robinson's Home. Coming after the mystical Housekeeping and the elegiac, ruminant Gilead, it felt maudlin and suffocating, even as it covered some of the same ground as Gilead. The problem, I think--or one of them--was that its prodigal son, Jack Boughton, was never quite prodigal enough. The entire novel is constructed around the question of whether Jack can be forgiven and reintegrated into the life of his father's home, but Jack himself never seemed like a problem: he was too weepy, too philosophical, to really push the limits of forgiveness convincingly, despite whatever misdeeds were in his past. When I heard that Robinson was returning to the character of Jack in this new novel, I was both apprehensive and optimistic: it might be another bore, but it might also be a chance to make Jack's travails more convincing.

Jack follows the title character in the events just prior to Home (and Gilead, I think?), a period in which he's bumming around St. Louis. He meets a black schoolteacher named Della, and they fall deeply in love, having principally in common the fact that they both talk like an essay by Marilynne Robinson. But Jack's love for Della is dangerous, even illegal; it means not only gossip and approbation but the possibility of being dismissed from her job at an illustrious school for black students and a break with her family, led by her father, a black separatist bishop from Memphis. Jack, whose history, as we know, includes the "corruption" of a young girl in Iowa with whom he fathered a child, has committed himself to "harmlessness," and his love for Della is anything but harmless.

For me, Jack succeeds where Home largely failed. It provides a convincing portrait of Jack as a someone who thinks very little of himself and a great deal about others, but who seems to bring chaos to their lives even still. At times this quality even takes on a kind of comic aspect, as in a strange moment when he agrees to put on the uniform of a cemetery gardener, only to realize later that the gardener is on the lam and trying to frame him for some obscure misdeed, or when he gets thrown in prison for having stolen property in his pocket--dropped there by a pickpocket panicking at the sight of the cop on the corner. These episodes are droll, but they are intimations of the darker facts of Jack's life, in which is good intentions have all turned sour. Though Jack's love for Della and his love for her are never in question, Jack spends much of the novel pursuing and abandoning her, unable to overcome the quite reasonable belief that his love is a threat or a poison.

I'm actually not surprised that Jack was notably panned in the New York Times this week by Dwight Garner, who finds Robinson's prose "airless." She has a love for abstract nouns that seems to me uniquely Protestant, insofar as Protestantism must construct a faith without the material comfort of the real presence; in Robinson's novels drama works less on the street or in the mind than in the soul, which is the realest thing there is, as Della tells the atheist Jack:

"We all have souls, true?"

He laughed. "Please go on."

"We do. We know this, but just because it's a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But once in a lifetime, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You've seen the mystery--you've seen what life is about. What it's for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be sad about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it."

The other side of this quality is that the novel can seem spectral when you want most for it to be down to earth. It's a novel, after all, about an interracial relationship under Jim Crow, and it's set across more than one black church across the urban heartland of America. Robinson gives the reader numerous black churchmen and churchwomen, tenderly and thoughtfully written, including Della's father, who is gracious to Jack even as he tells him that he will disown Della if she marries him, and yet something of the possible immiseration and violence--the real material stakes of the decision Jack and Della are making--seems just beyond the novel's grasp.

Actually, maybe what the novel is missing most is a sense of anger: why should Della and Jack, two perfectly matched people, not be permitted to be together? I'm reminded of the long digression in Gilead about the Reverend Ames' ancestor who fought for abolition. But that's a different family, and not so much like this pair of dreamers, whose challenge is to accept that the promise of love can outweigh the fear of ruin. Jack's character and situation are unique, but we all must embrace the fact that to love another person grants the power, not always voluntarily wielded, to harm them. Though Jack never quite captures the drama of the soul as powerfully as Gilead or Lila, it is compassionate and a little sweet.

Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono

He made her come to life, no longer as a woman sitting beside a man on the top deck of the Bristol mail but as an absolute ruler of the weather; he made her come alive in her own domain. She could plainly feel that he was granting her his own world. She realized that when he was mute and unable to move (as he was yesterday), when he was apart from her (yesterday, for example, when she didn't know him yet, when he was keeping quiet up there, and she was all alone down below in the coupe), when he wasn't in touch with anyone else, he still saw the world in the same way he was seeing it and naming it now. He could summon the rain for himself alone.

Now he'd summoned the rain for himself and for her. He was enabling her to share his private world, which, in a completely natural way, became her world. Her own world, so private to her that she often blushed at everything this man seemed to know about her: the whole of her secret life. She remembered rash impulses, from her girlhood, that had never escaped the confines of her heart, and here, he--a man unknown to her yesterday--was talking to her about them.

While working on the first French translation of Moby-Dick, the writer Jean Giono wrote a fictional narrative of Melville's life. Intended at first to be an introduction to the translation, Melville: A Novel seems to have taken on a life of its own: Giono imagines the the writer in London, dropping off the proofs for his novel White Jacket, and cripplingly bored. On a whim, he hops on a mail coach to the country, which he turns out to share with an Irish revolutionary named Adelina White. They fall in love, if that's a sufficient term for it; their brief meeting illuminates both of their lives.

Giono's account of Melville seeks to answer the question: how did a writer of middlebrow seafaring adventures end up writing what might be the 19th century's greatest novel? The first half of Melville finds its protagonist wrestling with a literal angel, a constant companion who is urging Melville to take on the greater challenge of writing Moby-Dick: "While he's been hunched over his manuscript, alone in his writing room, the angel has often leapt onto his shoulders from behind and grabbed hold of him. Grabbed hold of him with the terrible kind of grip that suddenly twists your neck with a merciless sort of cruelty."

But it's Adelina that gives this Melville a reason to actually write the novel. During their few days together, Melville shows her the English countryside in a way she's never seen. He shows her a break in the clouds the shape and color of a bay leaf, and then the leaf itself, and with his words he shows her what 19th century thinkers would have called the sublime, a recognition of the size and grandeur in the natural world that expands the ego that is capable of seeing it. Adelina's work is opposite of Melville's: radicalized by the Irish famine, manufactured by the English, she must live her life in praxis. But through her Melville comes to understand that his purpose is to continue illuminating the world for others; it's for her that he writes Moby-Dick.

This whole story is completely invented, of course. It's funny; Melville is almost like fan fiction: Giono was clearly so enamored with the Melville he'd invented while reading Moby-Dick that he had to put him on the page. The real Melville, as far as I understand, was more Bartleby than Billy Budd; the swaggering, barrel-chested Melville of this novel captures the spirit of his writing more than it does the man. And even that version reads to me more like Whitman--obsessed with the intersection of the soul and the natural world, ecumenical and dogmatically democratic--than it does the Melville of Moby-Dick. On top of that, situating Melville in the undramatic landscape of the English countryside clearly reflects Giono's perspective on the natural world and not Melville's. But it's hard not to feel enamored with Giono's lively and spirited Melville, accurate or not. Like the best fan fiction, Melville stands alone.

Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) by Christina Stead

"Work, work," she muttered, "dear work, it is my lifeblood." She sat on the edge of her bed. "I must think this out. Yes, I am a woman first, a real female. I must have the experience of love, marriage, children. The lust for life has been my trouble; I have avoided the easy paths. I must marry and then life will be an open book, not chewed-over stories from magazines."

My favorite scene in Christina Stead's Miss Herbert comes at the very beginning. A young Eleanor Brent, along with her friends in a young women's club, are asked to name their first sexual experience. One woman describes kissing her stepbrother goodbye as he sails to Canada, another separating two mating beetles, which gave her a "horrid but hot feeling." (A penciled note in this used copy remarks: "That beetles all!") One woman describes a game called "Butcher's Shop" where she, as a three-year old, is undressed by her cousins who pretend she is a slab of meat and slip off imaginary chops with a stick. Not all of the examples are so outrageously pointed about the relationships between men and women, but they all do the trick, signifying that this is a book in which women's sexual and romantic feelings develop in ways that are stunted by the expectations of men.

Eleanor (Herbert is her mother's maiden name, which she'll take after her divorce) is free spirited as a young girl, experimenting in romance and sex with men by the dozens, even while a vaguely considered fiance strings her along for years. She enjoys these escapades, and the breathless style of the novel's early pages reflect the whirlwind of a youth well enjoyed, but the promise of marriage lingers in her future like a certainty. Eleanor, who is not flighty as these chapters might suggest, but hardworking and egalitarian, finds the same kind of joy in throwing herself into work: she's not above being a charwoman, but the work she loves best is writing. She has some minor success with a novel co-written by her father, but work always seems like a distraction from the real life of husband, house, and home, a promise which, for Eleanor, is never really actualized.

If The Man Who Loved Children is a fictionalized version of Stead's childhood, then Miss Herbert reads an awful lot like a fictionalized version of her adulthood. I don't think you have to know anything to pick up on it: the torturous life of a writer, her inability to break through the cloistered gates of the literary world, and the novel's general sagginess--it has that "this happened, then that happened" quality of fictionalized biographies--suggest it. But I did read that Stead herself married an Estonian-American man who changed his name from Blech to Blake, which must be the paradigm for Eleanor's husband Henry, who changes his name from Heinrich. Henry is the novel's best character: an embarrassed foreigner who transforms himself into a priggish Tory. He loathes Eleanor's egalitarian streak and is scandalized by her willingness to bring a cup of sugar to the neighbors, who are beneath him even though his wealth and theirs are by necessity equivalent.

He alienates himself from Eleanor, sending her and her children to live with her parents on their farm. While they're separated he carries on numerous affairs, but sends letter after letter blaming Eleanor for the breakup of their marriage, inventing new reasons she's made him unable to love her. Eleanor, for her part, is unable to chuck Henry once and for all, even though she is in other ways headstrong: her obsession with a happy marriage won't allow her to let him go. What might Eleanor have been, or been able to do, if she had been able to throw herself at the work she loved, rather than commit herself to a life she'd been told to want? These are old questions, and maybe obvious ones, but Stead brings a frenetic wit to them, and a recognition that the answers are always muddled, and that love is inextricable from the cultural pressure to love.

I thought that Miss Herbert covered a lot of ground covered better by Letty Fox, a bigger and more imaginative book. I wonder if Stead's own life didn't get into this one a little too much. With The Man Who Loved Children it shares an understanding of how people's most innate and selfish desires are sublimated into ideologies. Henry is one example: he creates out of his selfishness a whole worldview, an ideology about nationality, race, and masculinity that he uses to cudgel Eleanor over and over. But Eleanor, too, intellectualizes what Letty Fox calls "the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the human mystery." Why do we want marriage? Stead wonders--is it really what we long for, or is it a longing dressed up in a different guise?