An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir

Elizabeth McCracken (Little Brown, 2008)

I’m a long-time fan of Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, and I’ve had this on the to-read shelf for a while; now I see what may have held me back. The subject is perhaps the saddest subject possible, a pregnancy that goes to full term and ends without a live baby; on that ground alone, I can’t universally recommend it. On the other hand, perhaps there are people who should be required to read it, including anyone who wants to treat pregnant people, or make laws about them.

You can tell early on, however, that McCracken is going to present to us all kinds of emotions. “As for me, I believe that if there’s a God–and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible–then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.”

McCracken and her husband, Edward, are both writers. In their early marriage, which is to say, their mid-thirties, they lived between Europe and the US, as teaching jobs or whim might dictate. For economy’s sake, during her pregnancy, they moved to the countryside in Bordeaux. It was a preposterous house, enormous and cold, which had once housed unwed mothers and their offspring. “The house was surrounded by farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others, and a vast patio off the summer kitchen…” But all that is lost now, put away with the grief. It’s as if, she says, time forked as in science fiction; on one track, she and Edward can remember this as a happy time, and share its memories with their little boy; “on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France.”

Edward and Elizabeth moved to England for the summer of 2006, then back to the US, and had a second child just fifty-three weeks after the first, complicating the bifurcated track all over again. He’s an eldest child, who had an elder brother once. She wrote this book while he was still a baby, while her memory was fresh, but after it had begun to gel into a comprehensible shape. It’s a writerly response to the nine months that are now missing from her life, because they were so happy when they happened, and then their meaning flipped. McCracken doesn’t want to turn the first child into an angel, nor to erase him completely, so we have this book.

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine….I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.” That makes sense to me, though I tend to do my traveling in books.

She went to New Orleans eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, when she was seven months into the new pregnancy, where her sorrow had a sort of family reunion. Not just the orange tattoos on the buildings, but a woman who says to her, “My first child was stillborn, too.” There’s a sort of kinship, mostly invisible, like a very large club you never asked to join.

Obviously, I’m sorry about the death of little Pudding, who acquired this rather Dickensian moniker in his first days as an embryo. I’m happy for the birth of his brother, who must be about to graduate from high school. I’m happy that all that is so far in the past, though, of course, we’ve all had new sorrows to be going on with, and new joys. 

 

Jan 1 2024 

The Worst Hard Time:

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan (2006, Mariner Books)

            Maybe if they hadn’t changed the name from the Great American Desert, those settlers would have known what they were getting into. Early surveyors of the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase found “a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude” in what would become the northern Panhandle of Texas, the no-man’s-land Panhandle of Oklahoma, the southeastern corner of Colorado, and the western half of Kansas. 

 

            After the Civil War, though, an optimistic rebranding as ‘the Great Plains’ went some way to concealing how inhospitable the land actually was. High and flat, with terrible extremes of weather, it had sustained bison and Native Americans, especially after they acquired horses; in fact, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 promised Comanches, Kiowas, and their kin hunting rights west of the 100^th meridian. You can picture how long that lasted. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Texas slaughtered bison in order to drive the native people out, and liberate the land for cattle ranching. There was plenty of grass: twenty million acres of it in the Texas Panhandle alone, home of the palatial XIT Ranch. The flaw in that program was that while bison can stand the extremes of temperature that the desert offers, cattle are not so hardy. “Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hail-storms, flash floods, and tornadoes tormented the XIT. A few good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many horrid years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups, making shareholders wonder what this cursed piece of the Panhandle was good for anyway.”

            According to the Federal government, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was good for homesteading. Wells powered by windmills could reach the Ogallala Aquifer, though it might take a hundred feet of drilling. “The pumps broke down often, and parts were hard to come by. But nesters were convinced they had tapped into a vein of life-giving fluid that would never give out.” The soil under the grass seemed like another endless resource, as the Great War made wheat farming a can’t-miss enterprise. For a few years, every acre of sod busted with a plow meant a twenty-fold return, and there seemed no end to it. There were also a couple of boom years at the end of the next decade, and then, coincident with the stock market crash of 1929, it all came to an end. Though every city had starving people, prices for wheat were so low in 1930 and 1931 that piles of it rotted next to the railroad tracks.

            And then the wind began to blow, and bring the dust with it. And in short order, the dirt, as well. The duster was a completely new meteorological phenomenon, rolling along the ground picking up more dirt. There were no dwellings air-tight enough to resist the blowing dirt, even assuming the wind didn’t break the windows, or carry the whole house away. The storms also carried stunning amounts of static electricity, enough to short out a Model T’s motor or blight a watermelon vine. From time to time, they headed east to New York or Washington, D.C., and then on out to sea; more often, they carried Nebraska’s soil to Texas, and right on back again. People kept shovels in their cars to dig out of drifts on the roads, in the intervals between storms that darkened the world too much to even try to drive.

            The Dust Bowl was the worst ecological catastrophe of the twentieth century, but I don’t recall ever hearing much of its history before. Egan bases his telling on small-town newspapers, weather reporting, and interviews with a few hardy survivors, and he does a fine job of seeing both the human scale and the grand expanse. We meet the high schoolers whose class play is cancelled because the school gym has been turned into an infirmary, because so many people are down with dust pneumonia. We meet the tarantulas and the black widow spiders, the rabbits and the grasshoppers. We meet the photographers who left us images of desolation, and federal agents who promulgate their theories of land reclamation as part of the New Deal.

            It’s a captivating story, even when it reads like the Israelites in Egypt; we’re still living in its aftermath, and we forget it at our peril.

Any Good Books, December, 2023

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America

Paul Kix (2023, Celadon Books)

       When you think of Birmingham in the spring of 1963, perhaps you recall a striking photograph: a policeman has 15-year-old Walter Gadsden’s shirt in one hand, and the leash of a police dog in the other. Gadsden looks weirdly peaceful for someone whose flesh is about to be torn by snarling teeth. “Despite the ferocity of the assault, his body was relaxed and erect. His arms remained at his side…It was as if he were giving himself to the German shepherd–and to posterity.” The picture appeared across three columns of the New York Times’s front page, and in papers around the world, where it took the Birmingham civil rights protests to a new level of national urgency.

       Paul Kix turns his fascination with that picture to the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and how the SCLC decided to go to Birmingham and challenge the beast in its own lair. A white man with a Black wife and children, he has some skin in this game. He narrows his focus to ten weeks of that spring, and perhaps a dozen consequential characters, so that he can turn history back into a story. It’s a gift for his sons and daughter, to fortify them against the horror and despair that keep entering their home through the television set.

       We begin in January of 1963, at a secret meeting of the inner circle of the SCLC. Wyatt Walker, the group’s executive director, handed out an eight-page plan for “a campaign unlike any other. ‘I call it Project X,’ Walker said. Because X marked the spot of confrontation.” Walker had Martin Luther King's trust, and his backing. Everyone present was well aware of what a run of failure the SCLC had been experiencing, particularly in the previous year’s miserable Albany campaign. Albany’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had rendered the SCLC’s protests ineffective by using non-violence of his own, arresting people gently and courteously.

      In going to Birmingham, Walker was making a very reasonable bet that Bull Connor would not do likewise. As Commissioner of Public Safety, Connor had a well-deserved reputation for making Birmingham’s Black residents far less safe, at any sign of their trying to exercise basic rights. And so it would prove, though Wyatt’s careful blueprint relied on some assumptions that didn’t exactly hold up, such as how many marchers he could attract through King’s oratory. James Bevel, who had been part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Nashville sit-ins in 1960, regarded this plan as another example of an arrogant SCLC parachuting in and dictating what local people could or would do, and it was this, Bevel thought, that had led to all those failures.

     As it happened, later that spring, it was Bevel who found the marchers who made the difference: teenagers, who weren’t putting their jobs and their families’ livelihoods at risk, as adults would have done. Bevel led training in non-violence, as he had in Nashville. He devised ways of spreading word of plans, including finding a DJ who could work coded instructions into his radio patter between R&B hits. In a short time, there were thousands of young marchers, whom Bevel could send out of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in organized squads. So many were arrested that some were housed in animal pens at the state fairgrounds; uncomfortable and frightening, to be sure, but also a sign that they were winning, because the jails were full and the world was noticing.

       Two of the most consequential events of that spring actually took place in New York City. The first was a March 31^st fundraiser hosted by Harry Belafonte at his palatial apartment on West End Avenue, where wealthy and influential New Yorkers were attracted by the chance to find out what Martin Luther King, Jr., would do next. They wound up ‘investing’ some $475,000 for expenses and bail money. 

       The second was on May 24^th, at an apartment on Central Park South, which belonged to Joseph Kennedy. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was trying to shape the government’s response to the crisis developing in Birmingham, and he called James Baldwin(!) to ask for a secret conversation with Black leaders. He got more than he bargained for, in anger and in hard truths; after some reflection, it caused him to go to bat for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

        Kix makes use of the whole range of sources we have now, after sixty years of study; not just Bearing the Cross, David Garrow’s history of the SCLC, and Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter’s magnificent book on Birmingham, but memoirs and biographies of Harry Belafonte, Robert Kennedy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and many others. And so on: newspaper files, oral history interviews, and FBI dossiers. But that’s all end notes, which would serve admirably as the syllabus for a class on the civil rights movement. 

      Don’t worry about that, unless you want to. Read it for the story.

Rules of Civility; The Lincoln Highway

 Two novels by Amor Towles:

Rules of Civility (Penguin, 2011)

The Lincoln Highway (Penguin, 2021)

         Katey and Eve start 1938 literally without two nickels to rub together. They have gone to a dive bar to hear some gloomy jazz, when in walks a handsome, well-dressed man, who winds up sitting at their table. The young women have no social standing whatever, but their new friend Tinker Grey is a banker of some kind, and a resident of a fancy apartment on Central Park West. Rules of Civility is Katey’s reminiscence, from thirty years on, of the eventful year that follows.

       1938 finds New York still mired in the Depression. Katey and Eve share a room in a boarding house and scrape an entry-level living; Katey because she has no family left, and Eve because she’s unwilling to accept help from her family in the midwest. The next eight months will find Eve travelling in the south of France, and Katey maneuvering her career into a track with a future. Katey’s social life takes a commensurate turn for the richer, involving wild parties in the Hamptons and a ‘camp’ in the Adirondacks. In general, though, it’s a New York life, lived in coffee shops, offices, taxicabs, and the occasional club.

       The Lincoln Highway occupies a much wider canvas. It begins in a tiny town in Nebraska, where Emmett Watson is coming home from eighteen months in a Kansas prison for juveniles. It’s 1954; his father, a failed farmer, has died, and Emmett is now responsible for his eight-year-old brother, Billy. They are planning to take Emmett’s car, and the ready money that remains, and head for California. But here comes trouble: two other young men have slipped away from the reformatory by stowing away in the trunk of Emmett’s ride home.

        Duchess is mad enough to avail himself of such a chance. His father is a traveling actor, the spiritual heir to the king and the duke in Huckleberry Finn, more than half a con man. Duchess is a wily kid with a talent for picking up things that don’t belong to him; and while he hasn’t had much practice with assault and battery, he picks it right up when he sees a need for it.

        He has brought along Woolly, who’s a few bubbles off plumb. According to Duchess, “[H]e’s always running about five minutes late, showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the conversation is pulling out of the station.” Woolly has had some advantages in life, but he’s temperamentally unsuited to make the most of them: how do you get kicked out of three of the most exclusive boarding schools in New England? How do you mess up so badly you wind up in Kansas? He’s fundamentally a kind fellow, though, and he makes friends with Billy, who is both smart and knowledgeable far beyond his years.

        Agent of chaos that he is, Duchess takes off in Emmett’s car, headed in the wrong direction. He and Woolly have business in New York, involving some money that belongs to Woolly, which is in a safe at his family’s camp in the Adirondacks. Emmett and Billy follow by train, no small feat as most of their money departed with the light blue Studebaker. How in the world will Emmett find his friends, his car, and his money?

        The Lincoln Highway is full of wonderful tangential stories. It reads like something Charles Portis might have written, in contrast to the earlier book’s overtones of Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, and Charles Dickens. Towles has a precise control of his characters’ voices. Here’s Duchess, on the notion that clothes make the man: “Gather together a group of men of every gradation–from the powerhouse to the putz–have them toss their fedoras in a pile, and you’ll spend a lifetime trying to figure out whose was whose. Because it’s the man who makes the fedora, not versa vice. I mean, wouldn’t you rather wear the hat worn by Frank Sinatra than the one worn by Sergeant Joe Friday? I should hope so.”

        The books are connected, in fact, in a way that gave me particular delight: that camp in the Adirondacks is the same family place in both books; one character in Rules of Civility appears offstage in The Lincoln Highway. They also share an ethos: when you need help, look for the forgotten man, and listen to him. Emmett gets the right train to New York with the aid of a panhandler in a wheelchair. Katey gets a beautiful cache of journalistic gossip from doormen and elevator operators.

        The characters Towles loves most have a sense of wonder. Tinker’s brother praises Tinker’s this way: “Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don’t mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I’m talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine.” That’s the kind of wonder these books can leave you with.

 --

Codicil - the family that crosses the two books is actually part of my own; Woolly is called that because his middle name is Wolcott. The family consorts with Roosevelts in part because their second cousin married TR's first cousin - viz., my great grandparents. Wild!

 

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz (2010, Harper Collins)

To err is human; it’s also distressing, discouraging, and sometimes downright humiliating. None of us is perfect, just as none of us is immortal. Kathryn Schulz’s book is onto this right from the beginning: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us. Accordingly, when mistakes happen anyway, we typically respond as if they hadn’t, or as if they shouldn’t have: we deny them, wax defensive about them, ignore them, downplay them, or blame them on somebody else.” All true, all familiar; we are, personally and as a society, terrible at simply acknowledging error.

So here’s a whole book about what Schulz calls ‘wrongology,’ treating error both as an idea and as an experience. Philosophers have thought about error for pretty much as long as there have been philosophers. Thomas Aquinas adhered to the pessimistic view, that error was a terrible defect, because people had a natural faculty for truth. William James was more accepting, says Schulz: “[I]f you believe that truth is not necessarily fixed or knowable, and that the human mind, while a dazzling entity in its own right (in fact, because it is a dazzling entity in its own right), is not reality’s looking glass–if you believe all of that, as James did, then error is both explicable and acceptable.”

Both of those views have their appeal, and they remain in tension. It seems a worthy pursuit to narrow the distance between ourselves and truth, or perfection. That would seem to entail trying to eliminate errors; but “to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth–a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves could be wrong. Thus the catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.” Or else, inevitably, we’d commit new errors in the process.

Modern science, since the seventeenth century or so, has turned that likelihood into a tool for truth-seeking. “These thinkers [Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes] weren’t nihilists, nor even skeptics. They believed in truth, and they wanted to discover it. But they were chastened by the still-palpable possibility of drastic error, and they understood that, from a sufficiently distant vantage point, even their most cherished convictions might come to look like mistakes.” The scientific method, the practice of devising testable hypotheses and testing them, has brought the search for truth a very long way.

Soon enough, Schulz comes down from these dizzy conceptual heights. She tells stories from all over the map, about people who have made life-changing mistakes; or rather, had their lives changed by understanding themselves to have been mistaken. (‘I was wrong’ is a common enough sentence; ‘I am wrong’ is almost unheard of.) Some cases are rare, like the Klansman who recognized that his perceived adversary had all the same problems he had; others are as ordinary as a divorce lawyer’s waiting room.

This is really my kind of book: abstract, extensive, and wise. How about this: “When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with aporia: with a sense of doubt, perplexity and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt.” Allow me to wish you a life of doubt, perplexity and awe.

 

 

Any Good Books, September 2023