Summer's Bounty

Having finished a first draft of Chapter 12 this week, in a book (A Moon Every Night) with 25 chapters, I feel justified in claiming that I am almost half finished. A minor milestone. When this book is finished, only one will remain in the series So Are You To My Thoughts. Since my method is to try to stay close to the time about which I’m writing, I am sometimes surprised by what gets into the book. In this one, in particular, I am impressed at the cultural richness, matched of course by family depth, which I find in the lives of the Mikkelsons.

Line moves to Edinburgh, as her historian husband is doing a lectureship and research at the university for two years. The interest in gardens, herbs and healing is even greater in Scotland than what she found at home in Santa Cruz, California. Her daughter Fern is caught up in archaeology and the subtle drama of the dig. Line’s other kids are all developing their own passions, Christy for politics, Heather for viticulture and winemaking and Ivy for textiles. Pleased by these young adult involvements, Line and Stephen follow as best they can. Poppa, Stephen’s father, lives in Santa Cruz and runs a film club, which a local theater supports.

Marty has immersed herself in the practice of tai chi. Master Liu, who comes out of a powerful Chinese lineage, is developing teachers who continue to study with him and also have their own students all over the world. She is learning many sets, including weapons sets and two person applications in a setting which supports a complex social network as well. She is introduced to the five arts of the Chinese gentleman, poetry/calligraphy, music, medicine, martial and painting. Marty continues to work at a large architectural firm in San Francisco, and falls in love with a winemaker, learning the all-consuming poetry of wine.

The charms of the North Woods do not disappoint Paul. He and his wife live and work in Ely, Minnesota, at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. His many family ties bind Paul, to Mother in particular, who is getting on in years. And to Marie’s daughter, who marries and has five kids in quick succession! Living near the Mikkelson home base also ties Paul to his sisters: Hanna, whose partner Faith, runs a cheese-making operation in New York; Ellie, the eldest, who teaches English in St. Paul; and Kristen, a nurse married to a farmer. He finds he must also pay attention to his legs, since he had polio as a child and has been active all his life.

At our house in San Rafael there have been lots of things to watch this summer. One day recently I found the mother mourning dove and her two scrawny fledglings sitting on a fence not five feet from my front door. We’ve been aware of them, as the nest was in a gutter at the edge of the roof. Last night I walked up the hill a little ways with the doe and her two fawns we’ve been watching just ahead of me. The fawns still have their spots! I saw a jackrabbit, with its incredibly large ears at the edge of a stand of manzanita, which pleased me. I hadn’t seen one for a while. We also love the crickets, who begin to sing in the middle of July and continue into November. A few owls are around too, as the moon comes into its fullness.

I’ve been re-reading the entries Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard selected from her voluminous notebooks and published in 1954 as A Writer’s Diary. In late November of 1932, she conceived what she first thought of as an essay-novel and finally became The Years. She was terribly excited by it, wanting to write into it some of the things she felt about women. “It’s to take in everything, sex, education, life etc: and come, with the most powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices from 1880 to here and now. That’s the notion anyhow, and I have been in such a haze and dream and intoxication, declaiming phrases, seeing scenes, as I walk up Southampton Row,” she writes. It is a wonderful book and has been of much inspiration to me.

Mentored by Writers

Not uncommonly, I think, for a young person who moved around a lot, I chose books and their writers as my chief window on the outside world. Narrative writers to begin with, though these writers were profoundly involved with reality. Later they were poets, essayists, those who told their own story. Using strict criteria, including having read most of their books, being involved with each over a long period of time and continuing interest in their work, I’ve come up with a very odd list of six writers. It surprises even me! Each of them commands my continuing attention, though there is little about their lives I do not already know.

From the time I was seven and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books were coming out with the Garth Williams illustrations, her prose has sounded in my head. The family she described closely mirrored my own, with a father and mother and four girls (soon to be more), as did their life on the plains, though Wilder described a pioneer girlhood 80 years previous to mine. Pa’s quest for a life lived in nature and Ma’s desire for education and civilization have been the twin sides of my own family’s values. The Ingalls family, even now, is as real to me as any I knew.

When I became aware of Ernest Hemingway’s direct, sensuous prose, I read as much of it as I could get my hands on. Even during the long period after his death when he was denigrated and I understood some of the damage he had caused, I never wholly let go of my fascination with Hemingway’s writing, his desire to be great. Lately this has been somewhat vindicated by reading the comic True At First Light, the book his son Patrick was able to carve from the “Africa book” Hemingway was working on. And, in the wonderful Hemingway’s Boat, Paul Henrickson quotes Archibald MacLeish as saying Hemingway was “the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creature I have ever known.”

I read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the summer of 1966 in the very first room I ever had of my own. I was struggling to get past Christianity, and this story of a poet at odds with Russia’s Bolshevik revolution helped. He wrote to his cousin in 1946, “The atmosphere of the work is my Christianity, slightly different in its breadth from Quaker or Tolstoyan belief, deriving from other aspects of the Gospel in addition to the moral.” I spent years reading everything Pasternak had ever written, as well as many biographies. As John Bayley writes, “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.” I have still not penetrated all that Pasternak was able to say about 20^th century life.

Woolf by Gisele Freund, 1939

In the 1970’s, biographies, diaries and letters began to come out by and about Virginia Woolf. I have not read all of them, but I read a great deal, and was especially moved by her great novels To the Lighthouse and The Years. I loved learning how The Pargiters, an attempt to set social history essays against a narrative, became, finally, The Years. Her life, the gritty details of it, is no less interesting than the novels. Records of Woolf’s unusual family, her partnership with her husband Leonard, the creation of the Hogarth Press and the lively life she lived among her Bloomsbury contemporaries are all chronicled and published by this time. In March 1941, having retreated to the house she shared with Leonard in East Sussex as their London house had been bombed, she wrote: “And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” Of course I agree with her.

James Salter by Joe Tabacca, 1997

I must have picked James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime off a bookstore’s shelves some time in the early 1980’s. Quickly reading the other novels I could find, especially Light Years, he is a mentor for me in insisting on the beauty in real life. In 1990 he said, “My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy.” Somewhat hampered by his class (in my eyes), I don’t find his work consistently wonderful but I understand him and re-read him often. When I saw him speak (at least twice), I was impressed by his reserve and his dignity, though I believe, to a California audience, it looked like pretension. He died in June this year. I look forward to the biographies that will follow.

Gary Snyder is the most important living writer I know. I read all of his early collections of essays, took a workshop with him and enjoyed his attempts in poetry to put down “the flat, concrete surface of things, without bringing anything of imagination or intellect to bear on it.” Like Salter, he has never been at the center of the American stage, perhaps because he has never seen people as the epitome of creation. But wherever his words or his presence appear, the authority of his life and work is in no doubt. Peter Coyote quotes Snyder in The Rainman’s Third Cure: “Today the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.”

I have had many other mentors along the way. It is hard to know where to draw the lines, but the influence of these writers continues.