The Ninth Hour, What About the Baby?

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

Alice McDermott (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Ninth Hour

Alice McDermott (2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

     Alice McDermott has taught fiction writing for decades, and written eight well-received novels. I read her book about writing fiction alongside her recent novel, to the benefit of both; What About the Baby shed considerable light on why The Ninth Hour worked so well.

      The novel is set in Irish-Catholic Brooklyn, mainly in the early twentieth century. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross wield a great influence because they show up for the sick and needy. They are, themselves, dependent on money collected pennies at a time, or raised from "idle Catholic women married to successful men." In the first scene of the book, Annie is widowed under awkward circumstances, and Sister St. Saviour is right on the spot. Her efforts to have Annie's husband buried in consecrated ground come to naught, but she's able to conjure up a job for Annie in the basement of the convent, helping with the laundry. Her daughter, Sally, grows up a little sister to the Little Sisters.

      Sister Lucy and Sister Jeanne cobble together a friendship for Annie with Elizabeth Tierney, who lives down the street, and the women stroll out together in the mornings. Sally will not grow up to be a nun, though she'll flirt with the idea, and she'll inherit her father's depressive streak. Instead, she'll grow up and marry one of the Tierney boys; their children provide the narrative voice in some chapters. Sister Jeanne will remain in all their lives, a friend for generations.

      One of McDermott's principles is that fiction "ought to contain, consistently, characters who, if they don't shine with the light of their uniquely individual souls, shimmer at least with that soul's unplumbed or as yet unillustrated possibilities." On this account, she's successful. Each of the nuns has her characteristic ways, including little disagreements with the other nuns, and episodes of irritation or envy. Mr. Costello, the milk-man, is tidy and dutiful, though his wife, an invalid, "was childish, sometimes churlish."

      The characters, she says, have to inhabit a specific place. Everything they eat or drink, sit on or wear, has to come to us in words, and they have to be the right words. Mr. Costello, for instance, "does as much dusting as a man could be expected to do: the top of a bureau, but not the legs; the base of a lamp, but not the shade." Mr. Tierney's Aunt Rose is remembered with "a velvet hat and a pale broadcloth suit, rose-colored perhaps, and maybe the smell of rosewater about her..." Knowing how things feel and smell brings the action to life, even more than a movie would.

      That scent of roses appears in other places, including the deathbed of Sister St. Saviour, though there's room for debate as to whether that was the odor of sanctity, or just an open window. McDermott commends to writers the habit of weaving in connections from one chapter to another. "I am not making a pitch for artifice, manipulation, or trickery, but rather for discovery." The extended description of the convent's laundry, early on, will resonate over and over through the story. Sister Illuminata keeps the nuns clean and starched, of course. She also washes the soiled linens generated by nursing. With Annie's help, she sorts, washes, and mends the neighborhood's castoff clothing, and we're not surprised to see little Sally wearing it.

      McDermott credits a rereading of Middlemarch with identifying a principle theme of her work. George Eliot describes Saint Theresa, whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life." But how many lives, especially women's, never reach that ideal? McDermott says, "I wanted to write about these women, these Saint Theresas who longed for but missed the epic life, who were foundresses of nothing. I wanted to say something about them."

        The Little Sisters of the Sick Poor are destined to die off faster than they are replaced, and the bishop will probably take back their fine house. They are woefully ineffective against certain cruelties of the world, especially those that arise from men. But the work they have done matters, nonetheless, down to the last cup of tea, and the crumbs swept up afterward. McDermott's work matters, too. The creative life of fits and starts being what it is, thirty-five years elapsed between that dip into Middlemarch and this novel, which, "...it might be said, is indeed about women 'whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed...' "

 

 

 

Any Good Books, by mail October 1, 2021

 

The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968

 

The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968

George Howe Colt (Scribner, 2018)

         Of all the thousands of college football games that were played in the 1960's, the 1968 Harvard-Yale game seems to be uniquely memorable. This isn't even the first book to be written about it: George Howe Colt was inspired to write it after seeing the masterful documentary, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, which has its own companion book. There was also, already, an older book about Harvard in the 1968-69 school year, by E. J. Kahn, Jr. It's called Harvard: through change and through storm, which was Kahn's working title even before he experienced the anti-war protests and other uproars and perturbations of his year in residence.

        That is to say, these were interesting times. The Vietnam War had gained new salience on both campuses because, in July 1967, the rules of the draft had changed. It was no longer possible to extend one's college deferment by sticking around for a master's degree, nor to take time off from college without becoming eligible for military service. "Now that there was a very real chance they'd have to fight the war themselves, many more students felt the urgent need to stop it. The ranks of the SDS swelled." In October of '67, the Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society picketed a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Company, occupying the chemistry building for some hours. Other students were still participating in ROTC, in order to pick up some spending money, and to qualify to serve as officers when the military called them.

        The football team at Harvard included both SDS and ROTC members, who somehow forgot their differences when they crossed the Charles River to practice. There was even a Marine veteran playing for Harvard, who had enlisted after getting into academic trouble in his sophomore year. Pat Conway had not only been in Vietnam, he had spent the winter of 1968 in Khe Sahn, the last couple of months under North Vietnamese bombardment. Two-a-day practices weren't really such a big deal after that.

      On the Yale side, there were a few legitimately famous athletes, like the quarterback, Brian Dowling, and the halfback Calvin Hill. Hill was just as good a passer as Dowling, but he was too useful all over the field to play him at quarterback. Both went on to play in the NFL, though Dowling never achieved the success his college glory had seemed to promise. The 1968 team was featured in bull tales, the Yale Daily News strip that gave rise to Doonesbury. The fictional B.D. took on a life of his own, over the years, but the original was the star quarterback they called 'God'.

        As Colt profiles these players and a dozen or so more, he also walks us through the season, in which both Harvard and Yale beat every team they faced. Not without close calls, at least for Harvard, and not without injury. Although the players were smaller in those days, football may have been even more dangerous than it is now, because it wasn't yet illegal to tackle headfirst. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the two teams met in Harvard Stadium, before a capacity crowd that included fourteen-year-old George Colt, whose father was a Harvard administrator.

        Yale dominated, as had been expected. Late in the first half, the Bulldogs were up by twenty-two points when Harvard's coach sent in Frank Champi, his second-string quarterback, who managed to hit a second-string receiver for a touchdown before the half ended. Even though hobbled by fumbles and a few unfavorable calls, Yale held a comfortable advantage of 29-13 with forty-two seconds to go. "By now it was getting dark....The word gloaming would appear in the accounts of several Boston sportswriters the following morning." Fans from both sides had been leaving the stadium in a steady stream when Harvard scored, made a two-point conversion, and recovered an onside kick. Harvard's offense had first and goal with three seconds to go, and scored on a broken pass play. Two point conversion? Yes! Final score, 29-29. This was before overtime rules came in, so both teams went undefeated on the season, and shared the Ivy League title. Harvard, understandably, saw it as a victory for the ages.

       Calvin Hill met his future wife at a party that night, a Wellesley student who, you guessed it, roomed with Hillary Clinton. A Vassar sophomore named Meryl Streep had a boyfriend on Yale's team. Piquant as all that is, it's really worth our while to hear about the boys from greater Boston for whom athletics made a profound difference in their educational and social prospects, boys from factory towns like Everett and Haverhill whom Harvard wouldn't have looked at otherwise.

       You'll probably enjoy this book more if you like football, at least a little, but if you'd simply like to time-travel back to when our world was young, it's a good ride.