“My life doesn’t count, except as something for Dirk to use. I’m done with anything else.”

Oh, Selina.  There’s a particular brand of martyrdom that she seems to specialize in—the pointless, wallow-in-self-pity, abdicate-responsibility-for-happiness kind.  Selina’s hardly unique….I’m sure we’ve all encountered people who see the world in this way.  I can’t deny it’s gotten her and Dirk through some rough times.  But if she’s going to help her son, she can’t just reject her own happiness at every turn.

While they’re poor and starving, several people offer to help them, but Selina has too much “dignity”.  Is she right that it’s undiginified?  Furthermore, when you and your child need food, does it make any sense to turn down offers of help because you don’t accept “charity”?  There’s a remarkable amount of pride here—her desire to do nothing but help her son herself is the sort of thing that leads to trouble, both in a larger sense of where she’ll get food, and on a deep internal level.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I find that kind of self-rejecting pity a really dangerous thing.

In fact, I’d say she sets her son up for failure.  By the time he reaches eighteen, she’s so cared for his every whim that he doesn’t seem fully independent.  He could have been Georgie Minafer, but thank goodness Ferber pulls him back from that abyss.  He’s just insensitive to the middle-aged woman  student he befriends (and casts aside) at college.  He doesn’t believe in himself enough to stand up to peer pressure. I worry that this latter half of the book will show a real turn for the negative—an exploration of how mild riches and comfort can spoil a young man.

There’s more to say, but it’s late.  I’ll just note that there’s a lot of interesting stuff about college ca. 1910, as we follow Dirk through those bright years on campus, and that he’s headed back East to what I can only assume is the conflict that will set the last stages of the plot in motion.

“To her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

It’s nice to be back at my Pulitzer readings: Selina DeJong continues to be a plucky character, and someone I find it easy to cheer for.  As the above quotation rightly notes, there is something unsinkable about her—I don’t know if it’s true to say that the ability to find beauty in simple things is sufficient insulation against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, but it’s an attractive thought.  Selina certainly doesn’t seem to give in to despair very easily.

And this is a woman with plenty to despair about.  Her marriage to Pervis DeJong was a mistake from the beginning—he loved her, true, and she loved him.  But neither of them knew how to show that love in ways the other would understand, and both of them seemed to think of the other as a sweet but naive person in need of “looking after”.  Love may conquer all, but not this kind of love.  We deceive ourselves too easily.

Pervis’s death is expected (the book begins, after all, with Selina alone with her son, Dirk “Sobig” DeJong), and not particularly sad.  It’s not that he’s a villain; he’s just an obstacle to the plot, and he’s cold enough outwardly that it’s hard to feel a connection to him.  I find his farm as isolating as Selina does, and I am as reluctantly relieved as she is to think that her world will become larger.

It’s a scary world, though, that she steps out into.  She has to figure out how to get goods to market and make sufficient sales to stay alive.  This is a world that doesn’t respect women in such a role, and the road to Chicago is long and dark.  No one will buy from her, and she and her son sleep out in the cold.  It’s fascinating to look at the Haymarket through her eyes–a chaotic flood of peddlers and maids dahsing about buying fresh produce.  It hasn’t struck me before how profoundly supermarkets have changed our lives, but I’m certainly thinking about it now.  This was a tough experience, though, watching Selina sink deeper into the mire and believing that there would be no way out of disaster.  A delightful and somewhat unexpected discovery, though, clutches her out of danger, at least for the moment.  I’m hopeful that the story’s taking a good turn for her and little Dirk—this is a story where I’d be really glad to get a happy, storybook ending.  We’ll see if I get it.

Update: Where I’ve Been (And Where I’m Headed)

Hello all—thanks for dropping by this holiday weekend!  I’d say I’m sorry I didn’t post something new for you to see (or a poem this Friday), but that would require me to be sorry for a wonderful weekend away from the Internet and just about all forms of media/communication on Whidbey Island, and I’m definitely not sorry about that.  Good food (much of it cooked by yours truly), nifty little towns to visit, and a wee bit of hiking around Deception Pass.  I didn’t make any headway on the Pulitzers, I’ll admit, devoting my time instead to reading a collection of Connie Willis short stories, all focused around Christmas (in general).  Willis is a fantastic writer and perhaps the most decorated short story author in sci-fi/fantasy history, but I’ll admit this collection is a bit uneven.  “Epiphany” is excellent though, and, as the last story in the collection, finished it well.

I’ll be back on track soon, I assure you, but the pressures of grad school may slow me down a smidge over the next few days.  Still, I’ll have posts soon on Ferber’s intriguing novel, and I know my winter break is going to be a little sprint to see how much headway I can make into the Pulitzer list before 2009 runs out the clock.  Thank you all for coming along for even a small part of this odd journey I’m taking—I hope you had a great Thanksgiving (for those of you in the USA), and I wish all of you a wonderful holiday season in the weeks ahead (whether you observe Advent and Christmas, as I do, or whether you’re involved in Chanukah, Kwanzaa, the Solstice, or any of a number of other winter festivals whose names I have forgotten or never learned).  See you again soon!

“You can’t run away far enough. Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”

Maartje Pool, for an overworked and thoroughly task-focused farmer’s wife, offers a very philosophical perspective to Selina on the eve of her wedding.  A true one, too, I’d say.  Selina’s sudden panic at the thought of tying herself to farm life in High Prairie forever is certainly understandable, but the heart has its reasons, I suppose.

In all honesty, I can understand her heart’s reasons in this case, as she prepares to marry the sturdy and kind Pervus De Jong.  He steps in to spare her embarassment in public in a surprisingly sweet way, and then pays her for reading lessons.  He’s a simple man, whose run of bad luck (whether we consider crop failures, the deaths of his first wife and their only child, etc.) is shockingly consistent.

I do like Edna Ferber’s work to keep the story grounded in reality. The courtship of Selina and Pervus is a bit too easy, but even there, Ferber offers a lot of context (especially in the attitudes of the Pool family, including Roelf, the 13 year old boy who is not-so-secretly in love with Selina) that keeps it from being a fairy tale.  And Selina’s life after the wedding is the rough, exhausting, never-ending drudge of a life that every woman in the community seems to lead.  These Great Lakes farms do not bear the storied amber waves of grain…they are lucky if good cabbages can be produced.  And Pervus is never lucky.

He refuses to take his wife’s advice on planting—her experience in it is all book learning, of course—preferring to trust the same techniques and practices his father used (and perhaps his father before him).  But he’s not a monster.  Pervus is exactly who he always was—a simple, kindly man who sincerely loves his young wife (and their newborn son, Dirk), but someone who has no concept, even, of the life that Selina wants to lead.  She is desperate to go back to “culture” and “society”, but she can’t even get Pervus to repaint their wagon.  They may be in love, but this was a poor match.

I don’t know if the tale is intended to be cautionary, but it certainly serves that purpose.  Selina, a young thing and full of passion, thinks that the rapid beating of her heart when Pervus is near will be enough.  I don’t think it will.  Even if she is loyal to him, and he to her, they will never really fulfill each other’s needs.  He will never be interested in the books she reads (let alone read any himself, for them to talk about), and she will never be the homemaker that Maartje Pool is.  I hate to be a downer about this…to say that love isn’t the all-conquering force that pop music and Hallmark want us to believe it is.  There’s no other way to account for the reality of relationships, though.

Oddly, this book is titled So Big, which, as noted before, is the nickname young Dirk De Jong gets as a toddler (his mother asks him “how big Baby is” and gets that stock response).  So, where will Selina, our central character for the book’s first 110+ pages, disappear to?  I know that novelists play with the idea of which character is the real protagonist; an idea perhaps most famously stated in the opening line of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”).  But given the otherwise straightforward nature of this book’s plot, it’s hard to see why and how Dirk “So Big” De Jong will supplant his mother—and honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine being able to transfer my emotional investment in her to him unless it’s done really skillfully.  We’ll see.

Oh, and I have to mention that the brief passages we get of her schoolteaching (before she’s married) are horrifying.  Maybe all teachers at the time really did demand their students to “parse” (or “diagram”) sentences on the fly.  But it strikes me as a rotten way to teach—people reminisce about the good old days, sometimes, but educationally, I ‘d say it appears to me we should be glad to get well clear of 1890s public education (at least in rural areas).

Poetry Friday: 1925

I’ve been looking forward to this year in poetry.  1925 is a great year for literature in general—The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, Carry On, Jeeves, and J.R.R. Tolkien publishes his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I could go on.  But as far as modern poetry goes, for my money, you can’t beat the unimaginatively titled Poems, 1909-1925 by an American poet who had lived so long in England that he was on the verge of becoming both Anglican and an English citizen: T. S. Eliot.  And among the poems in that collection is perhaps my favorite poem to use as a class discussion—I looked forward every year to putting this poem on the board and simply letting my A.P. students wrestle with it until they had won some meaning out of it.  I really encourage you to do the same: to pick anything that stands out to you, that reminds you of something, that seems to make sense (even if only for a moment), and share that thought in the comments.  Let’s make some sense of this poem together, not by relying on “commentaries” or “criticism”, but simply by letting the words speak to us, and reflecting on them.

T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

Mistah Kurtz — he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

“There was pork for supper. She was to learn that there always was pork for supper.”

It’s tough times for our little Selina, whose gambler father was killed by a stray bullet fired by a jealous wife, as she heads off into the prairies at the age of nineteen to teach in a one-room schoolhouse and live with a Dutch immigrant family.  Well, “tough times” is a bit of an exaggeration.  Selina, whose imagination always runs away with her (“It was after reading Pride and Prejudice that she decided to be the Jane Austen of her time.“), had envisioned a life as a sort of transplanted Katrina von Tassel in a Midwestern version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  As it turns out, life among Dutch farmers has a lot more to do with dried blood fertilizer and cabbages than it does Gothic horror/romance (at least for now).

It’s a fun little book…we’re still light-years away from the title character, Dirk “So Big” De Jong, who is as yet not even a twinkle in Selina’s eye.  Still, I’m happy following her around in this light little story.  I can’t pretend that Ferber is breaking new ground with the plot—naive young schoolteacher from the big city comes to the farmland to find that there is much her sophisticated education hasn’t taught her…gee, do you think these simple rural folk will grow to love and accept her, and that one of their strapping young lads will sweep her off her feet in rugged yet sentimental fashion?  But Ferber is good at other things, particularly creating believable and interesting characters, and writing decent dialogue.  She manages to write fractured English for these Dutch immigrants that sounds very believable (not like the faux Scottish brogues that Margaret Wilson slathered all over her novel….which I have to stop talking about, or my blood pressure will never drop back down to normal), and makes them quaintly amusing without (quite) turning them into caricatures.

It’s another book whose real point is obscure at the outset.  I’d suspect the simplistic plot I mentioned above, but that’s clearly only going to be enough to get her married off.  How does she end up a washerwoman back in Chicago, raising a ten year old boy (apparently alone)?  Ferber’s given me just enough to pique my interest, and not enough yet that I can connect the dots.

What’s odd to me is that the family doesn’t speak much Dutch at home, as far as I can tell.  I’ve heard that immigrant parents were pretty militant about enforcing English on their children to hasten assimilation, which makes sense in a diverse urban environment, but was it really also the practice out in a rural community where seemingly most of the inhabitants share a common ancestry?  Perhaps I need to read a bit more about this prairie society before jumping to any conclusions.

At the risk of overcrowding an already crowded sidebar…

…I’ve added a couple of things.  First of all, I’m not sure what a normal # of visitors / # of comments ratio is, but I feel like a lot of folks aren’t even really aware of the comments–the text for the link to the comments page is small but I don’t know enough about the page layout to alter that.  So I’ve added a “recent comments” section to the sidebar, hoping to encourage folks to engage in a little more conversation…although I certainly recognize that forgotten ’20s fiction isn’t exactly barn-burning stuff, I’d love it if we interacted a bit more.

And my social conscience was awakened a bit when I realized there was something built into WordPress that would allow blog visitors to support charities.  You can see it at the bottom of the sidebar.  Basically, if you follow the link, you’re asked to do silly things (click on little boxes, send someone an e-card, etc.) which basically just expose you to advertising for Colgate toothpaste, etc.  You get credit for doing this, and more credit if you post what you did on Facebook or Twitter.  And those “credits” go to support education for impoverished young women in Africa.  I chose the charity (from the list of charities that WordPress works with) because I wanted something as closely aligned with literacy as possible.  I hope you’ll give it a try–it’s an experiment, but I figure at the worst (if it proves so weird and clunky that none of us click that link regularly), we’ll have provided a small contribution to a good cause.

And in general, if the blog seems weirdly designed, let me know.  I don’t know how much I’m going to tinker with it, but I’ll probably keep experimenting with it a bit.  I’m conscious of not wanting a sidebar that goes on forever, but I also want to provide links to the sorts of things that are useful.  If you feel strongly, tell me (a comment here is easy, or on really any page) and I’ll certainly consider your ideas seriously.

Thanks for your patience as I settle into a comfortable blog layout and routine.  A So Big post should appear soon (tomorrow, if all goes well).