Teach-in 1965

One of the most interesting of the many forms of protest during the Vietnam war era was known as a “teach-in”. It was started at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in March, 1965. Faculty members were angered that Lyndon Johnson had ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, when many of them had helped him get elected. They thought he would be less apt than the hawkish Barry Goldwater to escalate the war.

But when Johnson went ahead, faculty members decided it was time to act. They planned a strike, but as some state retaliation was certain, a brilliant compromise was reached. Faculty decided instead to teach their classes as usual, but focus on Vietnam, its history, culture and the current US intervention. Once this was agreed upon, many more faculty joined the group and the University administration supported the event, allowing the use of auditoriums and public address equipment.

Student support for the event was overwhelming. Three thousand students attended, packing auditoriums. After evening sessions on March 25, and a midnight rally, faculty and students broke up into discussion groups and 600 students were still there at 8 a.m. the next morning. US policymakers both for and against the war spoke.  Discussion continued throughout the weekend, including information not provided by news media.

Arthur Waskow of the Institute for Policy Studies said, “This teach-in is in the true spirit of a university where students and faculty learn from each other and not from the calendar.” The teach-in was quickly adopted as a model for sharing information and ideas at other universities, and on May 15, university professors from across the country staged a national teach-in in Washington DC that included members of Congress and State Department officials.

The March 1965 teach-in helped focus the energies of young people. Bob Moses, the courageous black leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said “Justice and peace are twins, just as war is the twin of racism. To win peace, you’ve got to fight for justice.” When Students for a Democratic Society president Paul Potter asked, “How will you live your life so that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values?” 20-year-old Bill Ayers found the question “rattled in my heart and my head for years to come.” [Quotes are from Fugitive Days: a Memoir, by Bill Ayers, 2001]

Universities played a vital part in opposition to the Vietnam war, giving the movement a respectability that previous anti-war protests lacked. This broadened mainstream opposition, leading eventually to the denouement of an “unwinnable” war. In 1965, Line is also 20, Marty 19. Line is attracted to many forms of activism, and in moving to Chicago, finds herself in the thick of it. Protest of any kind is slower to foment in Marty, but she too is inexorably swept into a decade of discussions of rights, racism, imperialism, education and quality of life.

Fit Company for Oneself

I finished a first draft of Fit Company for Oneself, the second book in my series. The title comes from the proverb: Education makes one fit company for oneself. The book is set from about 1960 through 1966, a time of growing ferment in the external world. Major breaks with their cultural traditions affect each of our protagonists too, as they struggle to match inner and outer selves.

Line finishes as much secondary education as she can handle and goes on to work in Chicago, meeting her match in Stephen Cohen, a young sociologist caught up in SDS and anti-war work, and getting a little closer to what her own life’s work might be. Marty graduates from Wittenberg College and plans to go to Oxford, England, the following year as an au pair girl for an American family. Paul finishes high school and wants to pursue his education somewhere no Mikkelson has gone before. For each of them, the pressure of becoming a unique individual mounts as they come of age.

Celebration, as with many people, was expressed in food and drink! A fire in the fireplace with its crackling warmth and companionship. (Don wasn’t home that evening.) A perfect Bartlett pear, blushed with salmon and orange tints, a delicate floral smell and tasting as cool and fresh as, well, a pear! A glass of crisp, tangy Kenwood Sauvignon Blanc from the nearby Sonoma County appellation. And chestnuts. I tried boiling them, but they were just as hard to peel as when I roast them! (Hint: They must be really hot when peeled.) It was worth it, though. I love the earthy, sweet taste of chestnuts with butter, salt and pepper.

The rest of the year, I’ll be working on editing this book, so I can hand it over to others to go over with a finer tooth comb than I have. And by about this time next year, it will probably be ready to go out. It is good to let a book sit, I find, gestating, gathering time and further thought.

And next year? Next year’s book is called With One Hand Waving Free. In which our protagonists begin to turn up in California and Alaska. I know what happens in it, in a general way, but working out chapters and incidents, making up the book, is some of the most fun a writer can have! Virginia Woolf writes in her diaries about wandering over the downs in the afternoons, making up her books in all weathers. It’s an image I love. With me, it happens everywhere, doing the dishes, walking to the market, waking in the morning. One is never not writing.

The Pastor's Kids

Gentle Readers, it is time to send The Pastor’s Kids out into the world. I am hoping to find a commercial publisher or independent press which will love them. By way of introduction, my wonderful husband Don Starnes helped me make a video. It isn’t quite what Don would have liked. He wanted to use actors to play the kids, but I didn’t feel I had the time that would take. So we made a two-minute video using black and white photos of the period to suggest the kids and their world. Should I be successful in finding a home for The Pastor’s Kids, you may be sure I will let you know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS4MU47EWFM&feature=plcp

Mid-century Heroes

In the early 1960’s it was a lot easier to have heroes than it is now. Partly, there was a lot less information around. Mysterious heroes, invested with our own desires, are easier to worship. The cornucopia of information we have now, about everything under the sun, was just beginning. But, those we make into heroes may change our world for the better, or spur us to do it ourselves.

Spread glossy photos of someone across a few magazines, give us a few intimate details of their lives and we long for them. We think we know them better than we do our friends. We want to be like them. Modern heroism requires that mysterious grace under the relentless focus of the camera, without which the media turns away and the beauty, courage or heroism might never have been.

During the first half of the 1960’s, when Line, Marty and Paul are teenagers, their heroes are filtered mostly through television, a few glossy magazines and the growing awareness college gives them. Paul, at home, finds baseball players, astronauts and songwriters to emulate. At college, there is only one television for a whole dorm full of students, and Marty and Line see very little. Marty is focused on studying and several of her early heroes are writers, but Line manages to get out into the world and meet heroes face to face.

Mercury Seven Astronauts during Survival Training, 1960

From the time they are first selected in 1959, Paul loves the original Mercury Seven group of astronauts. Information about them abounds and knowing about their rigorous training helps Paul as he undergoes painful reconstructive surgery on his legs. The career of the young Harmon Killebrew, who comes to Minneapolis with the advent of the Twins in 1961 at 25, matches Paul’s greatest interest in baseball. Paul thrills to his powerful hitting record, worries about his injuries and loves the fact that Killebrew is a quiet person from Idaho.

By 1965, the Beatles have played several times in the US, but most of the national coverage doesn’t individuate them. They are simply the Fab 4, and, in Paul’s world, it is hard to know what each of them does or take any of them seriously. [I have a letter from my mother, written to me at college, which asks, “Did you see the Beadles last night?” She went on to tell me that the audience reaction was the most interesting part!] Of those on the Hootenanny television show, Paul likes Ian Tyson’s guitar playing and the harmonies he sings with Sylvia, as well as the lyrics of the Smothers Brothers and the Chad Mitchell Trio. He has no knowledge of Bob Dylan, who refuses to be on the show because Pete Seeger is blacklisted, though Dylan's songs are everywhere.

For Marty, few images of beauty top the many wonderful photographs of Mrs. John F. Kennedy from the early 1960’s. She is portrayed as intelligent and tasteful, as well as a loyal wife and thoughtful mother. From early foreign films which she sees at college, Marty finds Jean Seberg fascinating in Goddard’s Breathless and Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, but it is writers who are most real for her.

Marty conceives such a love of Dr. Tom Dooley, whose books The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain tell of his work in Laos and Cambodia up until his early death, that she longs to be a doctor, despite the fact she faints at the sight of blood. Hemingway’s books and persona loom large in the early 1960’s, with Marty being much affected by his spare, powerful writing. But it is the fate of Boris Pasternak, whose poetry and book Dr. Zhivago earn him a Nobel Prize which he cannot accept, which most moves her during this time.

Because she rooms with an exchange student from Spelman College in 1963, Line is told about the unique group of professors and students there who participate in the civil rights movement, including Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Alice Walker and Vincent Harding (who led Mennonite House in Atlanta, one of the few places blacks and whites could meet). By the time Line goes to Spelman herself in 1964, they have all moved on, except for Ruby Doris Smith, who has returned to get her degree. Line doesn’t talk to her, but she certainly knows who she is and of her importance to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.

Line doesn’t feel useful enough in the semester she is at Spelman, but marches, to the extent allowed, from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965. She hears the powerful Martin Luther King speech in which he states that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." By the summer of 1965, she is at an SDS convention in Kewadin, Michigan (unbeknownst to her parents), where Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby and other activists leading anti-Vietnam war protests meet.

Some of this experience was mine, but much was not. Putting my characters in a real world is terribly exciting and I love the research which has been required to do so. No small part of it is understanding the access they had to culture heroes of the time. It may be surprising, but it took a while for the doors to the 1960’s to open. And of course, it is a time when Line, Marty and Paul’s experiences begin to vary widely.

"Good sense, innocence ..."

“Good sense, innocence cripples mankind,” went the lyric from 1967 in a song by the bubble-gum pop band Strawberry Alarm Clock. It is one of the deep tenets of recent generations that knowledge of evil is better for you than ignorance, in the sense of naiveté or lack of sophistication. Those who don’t know, suffer. This is what’s behind our insistence that our children, very early, know everything there is to know about expletives, sex and all kinds of drugs. It’s behind the extraordinarily promiscuous culture we have right now, and our toleration of obscene language and pornographic images to a high degree.

The Boomer generation grew up in relative silence. Their parents, known as the “Silent” generation, were born during a time of crisis which fostered consensus, loyalty to institutions, and an ethic of personal sacrifice. Reacting against this, the Boomer generation expanded into individualistic freedoms, trumpeting its ideas loud, clear and proud, exploring many of the darker corners of the world.

My book club is reading two British Boomer generation writers in a row, and it struck me that the theme is still there. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, tells the story of two members of the “Silent” generation on their wedding night. As explicitly as only a Baby Boomer could, the book explains how the two failed each other sexually and drove each other apart in their innocence, despite their great love for each other. In A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, the narrator reflects back on his frustration with one of his first girlfriends, his love and respect for a school friend who fathered a child and committed suicide, and his own possible implication in these events. Remorse and regret hang over these books, in which early experiences are more meaningful than the rest of life.

My book club had good discussions of these books (yay! for book clubs), and I believe that in On Chesil Beach, McEwan was trying to show that ignorance keeps us from happiness. Knowing, lack of innocence about the worst aspects of humanity, is still valued. One reader says, “I like reading dark and disturbing books, things that force me to feel something.”

But I would like to say that, for the narrators of both books, the early experiences perhaps meant the most because they happened to young, fresh, innocent hearts and minds. Dwelling on the evil that men do can lead to jaded, tired hearts, protected by brittle shells of certainty. Without some innocence and freshness, we become afraid to listen to our deep selves, which, in great humility, try to speak to us. Surely children too need time and space, protected from the unsavory aspects of life, in order to grow into whole selves.

It is freshness and simplicity I look for in books, in music, in art and in people. Culture itself can cripple us, with its stereotypical memes and analyses laid over the burbling life which wells up beneath it. But we will certainly stay young and fresh longer if we nurture the ability to hear this anthem, this music in our hearts and in the heart of the world.

The Wilderness Bug

I define “the wilderness bug” as the case when a person finds inspiration and contentment most commonly far from the constraints of people living together, in places were the culture of people has made the least inroad upon the natural world. My fictional character Paul definitely has the “wilderness bug.” He’s a kid right now, and part of what leads him into reverence for the wilder side of nature is the fact that he had polio. As with Teddy Roosevelt, ill health leads to a great desire to triumph over it. For at least the middle of his life, Paul is strong and capable. He searches out places and experiences in which he can enjoy the wild, becoming one with trees, animals and the weather.

Though we are every day reminded that our fragile planet is endangered by human occupation [seas of plastic in the Pacific, global weather disruption, heavy pollution], America was fortunate to have people who loved wilderness fight for it early enough to protect what they could. In California, John Muir is the patron saint of environmentalism. We have much to thank him for. The national park bill was passed under his advocacy as early as 1890.

Two powerful Midwestern writers have contributed to the modern understanding of relationships between men and nature. The Sand County Almanac [1949] is Aldo Leopold’s musing on a lifetime of forest and wildlife management while specific to a patch of land he purchased in central Wisconsin. Seeing a place even for predators in the biotic community, he helped found The Wilderness Society in the mid-1930’s.

Sigurd Olson lived most of his life in Ely, Minnesota near the boundary waters between Canada and the U.S. He, more than anyone I’ve read, had the “wilderness bug”. In his book The Singing Wilderness [1956], he described his belief that in the silence and solitude of wilderness, people can connect to their evolutionary heritage and get a sense of the sacredness of all creation. He was president of The Wilderness Society in the 1960’s and was instrumental in preserving wild and beautiful areas in California, Alaska and northern Minnesota.

Olson’s biographer, David Backes, compares the two, saying that if Leopold is an Old Testament prophet, then Olson is a New Testament evangelist. “Where Leopold invokes the God of power and wrath, preaching proper ethical behavior toward the land and prophesying doom if society disobeys, Olson invites his readers to experience the God of love, as made manifest in nature.”

As the U.S. population increases [63 million in 1890, 149 million in 1949, 169 million in 1956 and 314 million today], wilderness only becomes more precious. Education in ecological ethics is crucial. I am happy to see the “Leave No Trace” organization [http://lnt.org/] so active in our country. It is the obvious corollary to the wilderness areas set aside by the work of so many diligent people. I recommend the poetic writings of Muir, Leopold and Olson as witness.

Not being terribly gutsy, I prefer situations where there is at least modest human support; and I wouldn’t be a novelist if I didn’t think people weren’t part of the natural order. But I also love places where I can enjoy an untrammeled experience of woods, water, sky, birds and animals. As I write, a spectacular sky, blue studded with drifts of pink and gold clouds, exhibits itself behind the dark pine tree and the Hawaiian wedding tree, the further oaks and sycamores, outside our study window. My sunset is mediated by screens, framed by windows. But I suspect my enjoyment of it is enhanced by whatever “wilderness bug” I inherited from my nature-loving parents.

The Reader

One night a week, I shelve books at our local library. It’s hard work, standing on a stool to lift things up to the top shelf and then bending down to the lowest one. Books can be heavy! But they are wonderful, a technology which has allowed us to share thoughts with people who lived as long as two thousand years ago. More if you count cuneiform tablets. (Glad I don’t have to shelve those!)

As I shelve, I am always thinking about the readers who have read the books now being returned to the shelves. It stretches my understanding to know what people are reading. In many ways, readers drive book publishing. Readers seem to wait for thick new books by James Patterson, Catherine Cookson, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Debbie Macomber, David Baldacchi, Danielle Steel and many others. These romance and thriller writers, like the mystery and science fiction writers, churn out one book after another. These are the writers who give readers puzzles to solve or predictable stories to while away time. The writers who come up with the right formula, use it again and again. And the publishing world bows to this best-selling readers’ market.

Outside genre fiction, it isn’t so easy for writers. Nevertheless, despite the competition, recent times have been the era of the writer. Poets and Writers magazine publishes page after page of ads for writing workshops, MFA programs, fellowships, and writing contests of all kinds. Workshops explain how wonderful it is to write for all kinds of reasons, to feel more human, to find out what you think, to share your experiences and what you learned from them. Anyone who wants to can keep a blog or publish a book, and books are certainly not the only media where writers are found. Everyone writes!

But all writers must consider their readers. In a New York Public Library discussion, Jeffrey Eugenides earnestly told Salman Rushdie that in his writing process he progressed from focusing on the sentence, to working with the plot, and that now his main interest was the character. The masterful Rushdie rejoined that in his work, his point of view had moved from that of the writer to that of the reader. “There may be a perfect way to tell a story. In that case you must ask yourself, what does the reader need to know? You must become the reader.”

My cousin Helen Frost [http://www.helenfrost.net/], who has been writing books long enough to see her readers criss-cross the globe with recommendations of her work, also recently said, “Sometimes I think writers get too much credit for what happens in the experience of a book.” Just yesterday at lunch, someone who says she doesn’t read very much, told me how moved she had been by Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, how every sentence got down to reality. I’ve never read it, and I find there is some controversy about whether Hemingway would have published it, had he been alive. But I wanted to run right out and get it! And when I do read it, you may be sure I will think of Mary, readership in common being one of the many pleasures of reading.

Norwegian America

I count myself lucky to know quite a lot about my heritage, with three American-born Norwegian grandparents, and one grandparent an immigrant from Denmark. One of my Norwegian great grandparents took the name Kronlokken (the name of the farm he lived on, belonging to the Crown) to distinguish himself from all the other Pedersons nearby. I am often asked if it is a Finnish name, but no, pure Norwegian.

Norwegian Americans were among the first ethnic groups to preserve their pioneer history by beginning to collect the artifacts related to their journey soon after Norwegian immigration peaked in the 1870’s. Many of these are now preserved in a wonderful museum, Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum [http://vesterheim.org/index.php] located in the northeast corner of Iowa, at Decorah. “When Norwegian immigrants wrote back to Norway about Vesterheim, their western home, they spoke for countless others from many cultures who helped build a nation in the New World,” according to the museum website.

Norsvin Mill

Among the items available for viewing (during the summer months) is a group of twelve historic buildings. During the mid-1960’s, three of these buildings were located on a grassy, wooded hillside just behind the dorms at Luther College. Two of the small cabins had been a school and a home. They were locked and we could only look through the windows. But one was a mill, with huge millstones which had been brought from Norway. During summer school, the mill was my favorite place to bring books and notebooks and read and write, hidden on a bench just inside the door opening. When it rained, I remember sitting inside, dry and happy, listening to the mild summer rain drumming on the roof. (I don’t think it had grass on it at the time.)

Phyllis and her Sweater

I haven’t been able to visit Vesterheim in a long time, however a friend had a delightful experience of it recently. Phyllis, who is not Norwegian but lives in St. Paul, wanted a genuine Norwegian sweater. She joined the museum and was totally surprised when, in the middle of December last year, a cookie elf visited her! Phyllis wrote, “Turns out they had a cookie raffle last week and I won. A wonderful sweet woman and her sister made me dozens of Norwegian cookies (they are so good -- no nuts or chocolate or anything except butter and sugar) and they drove all the way up and hand delivered them. So sweet.” The cookies were a memorable part of Christmas for Phyllis and her housemates.

When Marya, from Cleckheaton, England, read The Pastor’s Kids this year, she told me she wished a map of the places it describes had accompanied the book. Over tea and biscuits, she suggested that I emphasize the sociology of this interesting time and place, the Eisenhower years as experienced by third and fourth generation Norwegian Americans in the Midwest. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew there was quite enough ethnography in the book already! But it did remind me that, though most European immigrants in the U.S. get lumped together, they have many different cultural backgrounds.

The New Rebels

It is impossible to read literary critique today without running into the ghost of David Foster Wallace, acknowledged as the most energizing, polarizing and influential voice of his generation. While I cannot read his work, as I managed to escape the zeitgeist from which he writes by being a bit older, avoiding television and not going to graduate school in English, I have begun to think he is onto something and points the way out of a slough in which many people, not just writers, have bogged down.

In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace says: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. … The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’”

The corner which Wallace was trying to turn can be understood as the difference between sincerity and authenticity, as described by Lionel Trilling [Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 1972]. Ensuring the truth of oneself to others was a salient characteristic of Western culture for 400 years, suggests Trilling. But in the 20th century, the ideal became one of authenticity. Though Trilling goes into great detail, roughly, in his terms, sincerity places emphasis on communication with others, whereas authenticity sees truth as something inward, personal and hidden, with a goal of self-expression rather than other-directed communication.

For most of my life, assessment of inner truth, or authenticity, has been the criterion by which literature, politics and people have been judged. But Orlando Patterson, a respected Jamaican-born sociologist, describes what happens to public discourse when individual insistence on inner truth trumps tolerance and civility. Divisive identity politics and prejudices are upheld, among other things. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/opinion/26patterson.html]

Several critics have pointed out that Wallace may have wanted to “eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue,” but that he could not overcome his own ironic ambivalence. In his novels, he tries to be “at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth.” [A.O. Scott] David Foster Wallace did not want to lose what had been gained by our relentless focus on authenticity. I think of him when I run into the young hipster culture. As some have told me, “hipster” can be defined, but the person defining it is never referring to himself. Wallace would be pleased to find, as he believed, that “cynicism and naïveté need not be mutually exclusive”.

Both sincerity and authenticity reflect wholeness to the inner self. But I don’t think this is just a semantic tempest in a teapot. In public life, we must begin to behave with civility and tolerance while negotiating the authentic beliefs each of us hold dear. We must trust each other’s cordial gestures to have been offered sincerely and find common ground upon which we can all stand as humans.

In art, I would love to see work which opens to the world validated. Works which value the senses and allow the spirit present in things to emerge. Works of observation celebrating and exploring life itself. I think we’ve seen enough of the dark interiors of various people’s minds! We know now that the observer affects what he sees and thus, we must triangulate through many works to get a clear picture of truth. But why not? It is the work of being human.

David Foster Wallace was demonstrably trying to step back from pure self expression toward an ethos which valued the other, the reader, in his work. At present, I do not see widespread movement to what has been called “the new sincerity.” But I do identify with his idea of the new rebels. I quite expect yawns and rolled eyes where my writing is concerned, and I am more interested in what the reader needs than in self-expression. My characters are offered sincerely, in a spirit of civility and tolerance, finding common cause with the 90% of humanity that we all share, rather than in the narrow, hidden aspects in which we differ.

An Uncarved Block

Despite the expense and my gratefulness at being able to go to college at all, I look back on the years I spent at Luther as rather painful. A more empty and open 17-year-old you could seldom hope to find. I was being asked to give up my place in a close family and become an individual, the particular person I was meant to become. The process was long, slow, not without rewards, but not easy either.

To begin with, I got a major in Latin, simply because my mother had! Three years were spent desperately trying to intuit vocabulary, declensions, tenses and masculine and feminine endings, in the bright and expectant face of Dr. Orlando Qualley. A master teacher who had taught both my mother and father and had been with the school almost fifty years, his intensity, but also his kindness, inspired us to learn. Nevertheless, the tension, occasionally the terror, of sitting directly below him as he tried to pull the answers out of our blank faces was a memorable feature of college. My attempts at translation fared not much better.

My real love was, and still is, literature and the deep culture, history and philosophy which lie beneath it. Many fine literature, history and philosophy professors intrigued my mind at college. But several things made study difficult. One was the pressure to finish quickly. I had seven younger brothers and sisters, all of whom wanted higher education as well. I completed my B.A. in three years, graduating by the time I was 20, only a bit less callow than I had been when I entered! I would love to have taken more time to read thoroughly and enjoy what I read, but that didn’t begin to happen until after I got out of school.

The times were tumultuous, though in our northeastern Iowa milieu we mostly heard it in the distance. I entered school a couple of months before John F. Kennedy was killed. No matter how you cut it, the processes of desegregation, of American imperialism in other countries and of questioning most of our institutions were divisive and anguished in the Sixties. Despite this ferment, I wanted nothing more than to become a typical well-educated Luther lass, a helpmate to some worthy man whom I would presumably meet at college, as my mother had.

Though I remained near the top of my classes, I learned pretty quickly I was no scholar. In classes with students who would go on to graduate school in English and philosophy, I watched their faces and how they interacted, without being able to pay any attention to the bright play of their analytic minds. I was selected for the only creative writing class, taught by a man who published under the name of Brad Steiger. I enjoyed it but I didn’t see how it would help with the pressing problem of making a living. I got a teaching credential, which might.

It could have worked out, except that I was not to become what my background led me to expect. In no other way can I explain how my subsequent adventures took me to Europe, to the West Coast, where I have resided since 1969, and into Asia as far as Chengdu, a three-day’s train journey into southwest China.

The last summer I studied at Luther College, I roomed with the widow of a remarkable Chinese missionary, N. Astrup Larsen. The Larsens had spent the years 1913 through 1927 in China, a time of famine and political turmoil. According to Peter Scholl in “The Conversion of Missionaries in China: The Case of N. Astrup Larsen,” ASIANetwork Exchange, Vol. XV, No. 3, Spring 2008, after Larsen’s years in China, he “became a prominent advocate for ecumenism and the greater involvement of his church in social and economic issues.”

I am sorry to say I had no ability at the time to ask the lively Mrs. Larsen useful questions about the life in China which must have made her, as it did her husband, an “internationalist.” But it was during this final summer, for various reasons, that I began to feel I was getting my bearings. My own bearings, that is.

My personal journey to the West was, strangely, a stabilizing factor. The experiential knowledge favored by Asian philosophers over analysis turned out to be the Way I was seeking. According to Deng Ming Dao, “different schools have different methods, but all of them agree that the body and mind are part of a continuous whole … the body is the gateway to the profound.” Since first enthralled by Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry in high school, I have read a great deal of world literature. In English translation, I admit. I am still no scholar.

The Liberating Arts

When Line and Marty went off to college in the mid-Sixties, work towards the Bachelor of Arts degree was very general, without much in the way of specific professional courses. At college, in-depth history, literature and philosophy courses would widen their horizons. They also had a chance to explore the arts and sciences. They did not expect to learn anything beyond the realm of Western civilization, but hoped to deepen their understanding of their own origins and traditions.

Information was much less thickly distributed at the time. In order to use reference material deeper than a dictionary or an encyclopedia, one must go to a college or university library. Television had bonded people together pretty well by this time. Almost everyone knew what each other was talking about because they all watched one of three networks, which fought to cover national news like the space race or presidential campaigns. In addition, the post-war egalitarian climate extended toward making everyone’s work and ideas valuable.

But, those with hankerings to become citizens of the world wanted the broad intellectual background of the liberal arts. Line and Marty’s mother had a B.A. degree, which made her unusual. Often the only people with degrees of any kind in small towns were teachers and pastors. Knowledge was valued and so was being able to go to college. Like Line and Marty, those at the fictional Wittenberg College were already a privileged bunch. Still very monocultural, Caucasian, Lutheran and mostly of northern European ancestry, students distinguished themselves by their interests, in music, art or science, rather than by economics or class.

Core courses had been laid out which coordinated history, literature and religion into time periods so that one could get an overview and see how one affected the other. St. Augustine, who had a huge influence on the early church, studied the Greeks. Thomas Acquinas synthesized the Greek rationalism of Aristotle and Judaeo-Christian doctrines into what came to define the Catholic (universal) church. Later Renaissance scholars again went back to Greek culture to find a new emphasis on humanism, searching for realism and human emotion particularly in art. At the same time, reformers including Martin Luther questioned church doctrine and practice, in a period called the Reformation. In terms of the Modern, Wittenberg College dealt with Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead.” The Death of God by Gabriel Vahanian, stating that our secular culture had lost any sense of the sacred, was published in 1961.

Line and Marty discover they are not scholars. Line is much more interested in people and action. Marty, though she loves books, cannot follow critique and analysis of them and doesn’t want to. Learning these things takes a long time. But no one wonders if they have gotten their money’s worth from their studies. At the very least, they received:

• An understanding of the philosophical place upon which they stand.
• A brief look into the cyclical nature of history.
• The ability to distinguish the figurative from the literal.
• The ability to weigh opinions and not believe everything they hear.
• Some assurance of excellence in written and verbal expression.
• The chance to test themselves in various disciplines to see where they might fit.
• A belief that physical and mental health balance each other in a well-rounded person.
• A general background in the arts and sciences so as to see how they fertilize each other.
• An ability to take themselves seriously, to know how to use and enjoy their precious lives.

The word “education” comes from the Latin meaning “to lead or draw forth.” An education in the liberating arts is just the beginning, and it is certainly true in Line and Marty’s lives, as we shall see.

Moving Forward

The second book in my series, “Fit Company for Oneself,” has 28 chapters. This week I put the eighth chapter up as a Google document where my “early readers” can get at it, teasing it out of many half-formed ideas onto the page. Once again, it doesn’t feel like writing. It feels like I’m sitting with the work, listening, opening myself to what it can tell me. When I begin, I know what I need from a chapter, what I want to work with, but I leave it wide open, inviting in what comes. “Writing,” working with sentences one at a time, comes later.

This openness happens whether I’m in front of a blank page or not. While I’m doing the dishes or on my way to the market, things that are important to a chapter surface. It means that nothing is ever finished, that it can always be made better, of course. But somewhere along the line, it takes form. Last year’s work on “The Pastor’s Kids” is currently gestating. It will get another vigorous edit in August and September this year, based on the comments its readers give me, before I finally try to find an agent to assist in its publication.

My sister Solveig said to me, in a recent phone call, “I didn’t feel little when I was little, and now I don’t feel old.” I certainly have that feeling as well. The nub of our selves which we are given to work with doesn’t change much. That bit of consciousness of our selves gets more comfortable, adapts to situations and makes itself a home somewhere, interpenetrating the consciousness of “others” around us as we grow older.

But as kids we know a lot more than we can express. We watch things happening around us and wonder about them, often having only part of a picture that will sharpen later. Our understanding of the reality around us must ripen, in some cases become fruit. The questions and wonderings raised by the times we live in, the experiences we go through, the culture that surrounds us become the work of our lives. Doing this work, finding the meaning in our lives makes us into grownups.

Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson must leave what Auden called the “closed society of tradition and inheritance” for “the open society of fashion and choice,” one hundred years after Poe and Baudelaire, in whom Auden first discerned the Modern Age. It took that long for it to penetrate the pocket of Scandinavia in the Midwest, wrapped in cotton wool like an old-fashioned Christmas ornament, where the Mikkelsons grow up. The material elements of their lives are shared with post-WWII Americans everywhere, but the culture, tradition and inherited values came direct from an earlier century.

The transition for my characters happens in about 1966, in this book, “Fit Company for Oneself”. Line, Marty and Paul make the leap each in their own way, though it is many years before the painful change is assimilated. Born close in age, in 1944 thru 1948, they are dragged into the Twentieth century in the turbulent wake of their peers. It is not insignificant to their development, however, that they come from whole cloth. An intact nuclear family, a large extended family, a religious and intellectual culture which, though torn and much patched, retains its value and usability. Throughout their lives, the Mikkelsons can reach back and feel its sustenance as they move steadily forward.

Tea

“I thought this was a blog about writing,” you say. “What’s all this about tea?”

But does anything really get done without tea? Or, in your case perhaps, coffee? I have a simple tea ritual, which goes on throughout the day, using oolong tea during the week and a smoky lapsang souchong on weekends. I pour boiling water into two teapots, dump it out and then put the day’s tealeaves into one of the pots. Then pouring just boiling water over the leaves, I quickly strain the brewed tea into the second pot, allowing the water to sit on the leaves less than 30 seconds for oolong and less than a minute for lapsang souchong. Stewed tea very quickly gets bitter, and we have found this quick brewing gives us the flavors we like.

We drink tea out of tiny Chinese porcelain cups, pouring more as we drink it so the tea is always hot. Don likes cooled tea and we save anything that we don’t drink for him to drink later. But I only like it hot.

The weekday tea is an oolong, fermented under the sun. I’m not sure of its exact provenance, but we buy it in bulk from Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and it bears the responsibility for the health benefits I expect from green tea. Our first brewing is for breakfast, but the same tealeaves with the water poured off them, sit all day in a teapot. During the day I heat more water and pour it over these same leaves, having understood from my sister Naomi’s naturopath partner, Priscilla Skerry, that as you re-use tea leaves, caffeine lessens and the polyphenols necessary to health increase.

On weekends, we use a black lapsang souchong tea. Norwegians like smoky tasting things, fish, cheese, toast and tea! The leaves of lapsang souchong are smoke-dried over a fire. I’ve been drinking lapsang souchong for many years, purchasing it in Chinatown, or again, at Rainbow Grocery. The caffeine is a bit strong, so I only use it on weekends. Thankfully, Don likes everything and never insists on one or other. He drinks whatever is in front of him with gratefulness, letting me be the tea mistress.

Tea is perhaps best shared, but it goes well with everything! Friends, cookies, a good book, your journal. Few things are not enhanced by the addition of a good cup of tea!

The literature regarding tea is vast and I cannot hope to add to it. But one of the questions for my work is where, precisely, do body, mind and heart meet? To many philosophical questions in the Buddhist tradition, the reply is “Have a cup of tea”! As John Blofeld, a renowned writer on Eastern traditions says, this means “There is no possible way of dealing with your question in words, but the Way is all around and within you, for you to experience by direct perception.” It may be that to my question too, there is no better answer than a cup of tea.

Characters That Lift Off the Page

Molly Friedrich, a top notch New York literary agent, says, “First of all, is there anybody out there who doesn't know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that's kind of stuck in the middle is character.” To my mind, the reason to write a story is to become the witness to its characters. What lives on after you finish a book isn’t the plot. Voice, that of the writer, the narrator of the story, may be extremely important. But once I put down a book, what I take away is indelible characters. If I don’t care about them, I am not going to remember their story.

There is an objective criteria for great work, work “that may interest people in 2052,” as Irene Nemirovsky says. But it doesn’t mean that I am going to read every single great book. I’m going to read the ones that answer my questions, that have characters I can love and ponder, that point me in the directions I need to go. Thus, in my case, I will read Colette, whose most important character is Sido, her mother. But I am probably not going to read Slaughterhouse Five, no matter how important Billy Pilgrim’s life and death are deemed by all.

Often the main character is the author himself. Just as, in meeting people, presence quickly tells you who someone is, good books lead you quickly into the presence of the author. The love they lavish on their characters becomes what we feel. Who doesn’t long after Caddy Compson, as her brothers Quentin and Benjy do in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, though we are never allowed to hear her voice. I loved the passionate character Aksinia in Quiet Flows the Don, as Sholokhov must have. Whenever I go back to his books, I skip everything except the parts in which she is found.

James Salter

Don and I are reading Light Years together, the luminous prose of James Salter. I don’t think he meant the character of Nedra to take over the book, but she does. The book becomes Salter’s homage to a beautiful, fully alive woman. She is partly imagined, but he also knew a woman upon whom the character is based. In Burning the Days, his memoir, he says of the woman he knew, “I loved her, her frankness and charm, the extravagance and devotion to her children. I never tired of seeing her and listening to her talk. She smoked, drank, laughed raucously. There was no caution in her. … Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things. Despite all I had written about her, there was more.”

I don’t claim anything for my characters at the moment, except that I know and love them. Line, Marty and Paul begin their lives in The Pastor’s Kids and, Deo volente, continue into several other books. To achieve great characters, one must give oneself to them, but also have the craft with which to do so. We shall see, as the Norwegians say.

Where is John Bayley When We Need Him?

Most people know John Bayley, if at all, as the husband of Iris Murdoch, portrayed in the movie Iris based on his memoir of her. Because of my early involvement with Pasternak and other Russian writers, I knew him long before that from his criticism, with a special affinity for the Russians, published in the New York Review of Books. A professor at Oxford University, he has spoken for over 50 years with great authority on the vast subject of world literature. He comes to it with a perspective which I find both instructive and validating.

For instance, in an essay on Czeslaw Milosz published in the NYRB, 1981, and reprinted in The Power of Delight, his collected essays, he points to what seems unique in Milosz: “the reality of the thing, the return of the thing … Things, in the sense in which the nineteenth-century novel both assumed and created them have not been central to the American literary consciousness. In their place have been legends and ideas and consciousness itself.” He goes on to note that American artists seek relief from freedom, but that in Milosz, who survived youth in Lithuania/Poland during World War II and was later a professor at UC Berkeley for almost 40 years, ideology had died a natural death. “Life itself, and the reverence for it, becomes then the precious thing to be explored and celebrated,” writes Bayley.

Bayley returns again and again to the significance of Pasternak. In 1967, he sees him as the natural heir of Tolstoy. He writes in Tolstoy and the Novel “Pasternak shares with Tolstoy the power of transforming and humanizing the actual and the terrible, not by shutting himself away from it but by remaining unexcited by it. Neither has an ambiguous relation to violence, or gives way to the novelist’s temptation to dispense it as an earnest of truth. … The main thing about Zhivago is not that he is a doctor or even a poet, but that like Pierre and Levin, he is a good man – a good man buried alive in an age in which men have ‘come to themselves half-conscious and with half their memory gone’. It is his task to show how they can be made whole again.”

I could go on quoting Bayley! His insights are expressed so clearly and are so appropriate to the discussion of literature in contemporary America. [We have a Brazilian student staying with us, and Don reminds me that American may mean much more than a citizen of the United States. Camila says, however, that Brazilians also use “American” to mean “coming from the United States.”] Garth Hallberg brings up the question “Why Write Novels at All?” in an essay in the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/why-write-novels-at-all.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=garth%20hallberg&st=cse] which points to the writers currently holding sway here, and their ambiguity about what they are doing. He finds it rare to find characters that acknowledge the existence of others, that “require me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.”

Bayley brings all sides of the question into his capacious critique. During the time he has been writing, the totalitarian governments of Russia and the Slovakian countries have been a foil for Western literature, and these are what he knows best. In 1990, Bayley reflected on the paradox of Pasternak’s art, which “is at once totally popular and totally narcissistic.” He thus discriminates, considering Pasternak’s poetry better than the novel Doctor Zhivago. But he also says, “the novel, as D.H. Lawrence saw, is ‘incapable of the absolute,’ and gains in its own ways from its lapses and imperfections.”

We are struggling out of a cultural trough, I believe, looking for the wave that will next crest. The search for the self which Western literature developed in art, now indeed seems like a prison. Bayley notes that Milosz “is not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.”

See what I mean? Bayley points us in the right direction.