The Garden of Words: the Gift of Marilynne Robinson's 'Lila'

            Lila is a wild child. Not wholly, but in some important ways. The people supposedly taking care of her have put her out of the house, and the cats have scratched her because she sometimes picks them up by their tails. The house's inhabitants, we're told, would "fight themselves to sleep." The child is 4 or 5, long-legged, underfed. She is scooped up by a woman with a scarred face named Doll, who keeps her safe, and fed and alive in a hand-to-mouth existence dependent largely on migratory farm labor. The child, Lila, has no knowledge of any member of her family until, years later, Doll apparently kills one with her prophetically sharpened knife. Lila has no last name. The loneliness, the oddness, the separateness of this kind of life seems impossible to imagine, but that's exactly what novelist Marilynne Robinson does in this novel, the third of her books set in a tiny Iowa town called Gilead. It's just a great piece of writing.

            Lila follows Doll's advice: keep to yourself, don't trust nobody; churches just want your money. Even later in life when -- to her own enormous surprise -- she is about to marry a considerably older minister in Gilead, she counsels herself, "I've got to keep away from people."

            Despite her stranger's exile from civilized life, Lila is a sensitive soul with a poetic appreciation of days spent in wild fields and meadows, camping besides streams to drink from and wash in. In town, she cries at movies and thinks about the stories she's seen on the screen all week. When she loses Doll, after the latter's disastrous knife fight, and lands in a St. Louis whorehouse, she falls in love with the only young man around, but he's exactly the type to play with and mar the innocence of someone whose slight experience has not built up any of the most basic defenses. His mere presence in the same part of town causes her to give up a room-and-board cleaning job in a hotel and accept a stranger's ride to just anywhere. She ends up on a country road in Iowa, inhaling a beauty familiar from her wandering days and looking for dandelions, nettles, berries, roots, fish in a stream. One thing she knows how to do is keep herself alive in a fertile country in growing season. She finds an abandoned cabin to sleep in.

            But to the minister whose church she walks into to get out of the rain -- whom she thinks of as "a beautiful old man," white-haired, gentle and congenitally well-meaning -- she is simply a gift from God. We learn much more about him, the Reverend Ames, and his soulful wrestling with the problem of existence in Robinson's first book on this part of the world, the Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead. A widower who lost his wife in childbirth when both were young, here he wrestles with an unexpected late-in-life blessing. Lila sometimes sees herself as a chess piece in a game of doubt and revelation played by Ames and his God; and she sometimes concludes that the best move for her is out the door, but she never makes it. Ames candidly admits he can't answer any of Lila's real questions about life: "Why are things the way they are?" But he wants the opportunity to keep trying.

            As they try to learn how to talk to one another, Lila, who knows how to read and write but has seldom had the opptorunity to read anything -- no room for books in a life where you seldom own much more than the clothes on your back -- has taken to copying out passages from the Biblical book of Ezekiel. Ames can't always explain these visionary passages either, some of which sound to her like the prophecy of her own life. But together they try to work out some understanding of the afterlife -- the Christian belief in Resurrection, the miracle of the grace of God, the meaning or value of a life that is bound to disappear. Meanwhile a child moves in Lila's womb and the snows of the Midwestern winter reduce life to bare essentials.

            There are passages in this book, almost every other page or so, I wish I could remember, or "keep" in my mind in some way, but of course I won't be able to. Nevertheless here are a few sentences, chosen almost at random near the end of the book when Lila is once again trying to make sense of life. (Trying to make sense of life is what Lila does):

            "Can a soul in bliss feel a weight lift off his heart?... So it couldn't matter much how life seemed. The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either. Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn't try. Things happen the way they do..." And in eternity, Lila decides, "any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his mother happy."

            She has worked her way to the doctrine of "Universalism," not a term she has ever encountered: Everyone is saved. In my own view that's also the best way to answer the question "why are things the way they are."

            Through the device of a character who faces life without most of the ordinary comforts and the kinds of security most of us enjoy (such as a home, a family), Marilynne Robinson finds a way to show us the beating heart of this life of ours.

Hyde Park: The Garden of History

            Springwood, the family manse in Hyde Park, N.Y., where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born and lived (whenever he was 'home') throughout his life is not a great mansion by the standards of the Gilded Age. It's certainly nothing like the plutocratic Newport castles. Considering the history packed into it, the house is practically compact. FDR himself drew the plan to double its size to provide bedrooms and school rooms for his and Eleanor's children. The two wings he added have fieldstone walls from the area of the Hudson River. The older central part has a facade of stucco replacing the original wood.

            Roosevelt was nervous about fire. The rooms at Springwood have period fire extinguishers, but the handicapped access ramps on the building today were never there in his time. FDR made few concessions to the inconvenience of his inability to  walk under his own power after polio paralyzed his legs. And no sign of disability was allowed to tarnish the public image of the nation's President, especially at a time when for so many the President stood for strong, benevolent leadership.

              We visited there recently -- three Knox siblings, three spouses. To see the house you have to pre-register for a tour and can expect that on the weekends you will have plenty of company. My sister-in-law Terri made the reservations, sister Gwen brought her dynamite lasagna, Anne made her signature Thanksgiving sweet potato casserole, and my brother John led the caravan to Hyde Park. 

           Inside the doors of the house we were greeted by FDR's collection of sketches, prints and caricatures -- early, wildly verbose attempts at political cartoons -- from the War of 1812. We learned the President was a great collector -- the world's largest stamp collection, coins, rare books and ship models -- in addition to Naval paraphernalia. The first and second story rooms have original furnishings: FDR's study with his desk; his bedroom; a room for Eleanor (which by all accounts she did not much use); his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt's bedroom, which by similar accounts remained throughout her lifetime within smother-mother distance of her famous son's quarters.

            The "pink room," the guest bedroom used by England's King George VI and his Queen Elizabeth. Sara wanted to get to know the king since he might be an important ally if and when the US entered the Second World War, and so she said, 'why don't you come over and stay with us?' Not a retreating figure.

            The Presidential Library on the estate grounds, the first such institution, established by FDR himself and opened in 1941, is more of a historical learning experience. In case they didn't see the Ken Burns documentary, or otherwise know these things, visitors to the Hyde Park estate are first shown a 20-minute film of newsreel and other filmed highlights from the career of the President who served longer than any of the others, saved the nation from the despair and potential disruption of the nation's deepest economic crisis, the Great Depression, pioneered the revolutionary domestic legislation that still governs many aspects of our social and economic life we take for granted, and rallied the nation to defeat the demons of the 20th century, the empires of racial superiority that threatened the world.

            Today the library is a history museum: informative panels and displays, photos, film, telephone-like devices to hear Roosevelt's "fireside" radio chats -- FDR's invention of direct Presidential mass communication with the citizenry at large. Teddy Roosevelt, FDR's uncle, had used newspapers to gain public backing for his own agenda. But FDR shared his voice and his personality with the nation: welcome to the age of mass media. We're still in it. We don't know where it will lead.

            The library holds the draft of the speech, the first inaugural address, in which FDR assured a panicky nation "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." You can see the cross-outs in the typescript.

            It reminds us that he also made statements such as:

	No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

            The library gives us lots stuff about Eleanor as well, "the First Lady of the World," and the last First Lady to carry her own luggage through an airport (as a period photo shows us). She wrote thousands of newspaper columns, visited wounded soldiers all over the world, fought for the needs and rights of the "underprivileged" -- another of those terms invented when power sought contact with the public. She was the epitome of an era that gave the world the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

            Franklin Roosevelt, in my opinion, was the last President to make a crucial difference in the nation's history. There would have been no new nation without George Washington. No 'one nation' without Lincoln. And no enduring democracy without FDR. We'll be lucky if we have anyone like them step up in the next big, now totally predictable crisis.

            I put some further reflections on our Hyde Park visit in a poem, titled

"The Hyde Park Three-Way: A Reason to Believe"

Franklin Roosevelt

kept fire extinguishers in every room,

but no ramps for his disability

Walking without legs through the heart of our century

Eleanor, the unpetted child,

Adopting a country's neglected souls

Who in the end are the beautiful ones?

His mother, Sara Delano,

kept a guest room fit for a king

When she wanted to know one

she invited him, and Queenie, to stay

George Six, who made the speech, and Lady Elizabeth,

who lived a century plus two

Posters from the War of 1812

Billy Tar, and Johnny Yank

caricatures of the final parting of the ways,

the cousins' war

Only a lover of all things Naval would cherish these

The King found them piquant,

Had relish with his 'hot dogs'

While Harry Hopkins brokered truces among the warring parties

Franklin built a cottage for Eleanor

who needed to get away

but in the end her lovers got away from her

Sara lasted into Franklin's third term

So the cousin-wife had her husband to herself

for his last four years...

But by then the war had everyone

Franklin built swimming pools at Warm Springs

Added wings to his father's house

Turned 30 Hyde Park acres into a cool 1,500

That sharp eye for property

Saw the second war coming,

Gave himself to his country and the world's crying need

No great immortal presence in the family plot

His monuments were a couple of country-wide, world-class dams

The gift of light and power for Walker Evans's miserables, Agee's un-famous men

Jobs, meaning, self-respect for multitudes

A childhood for their children, workplace protection

He built a government for nations

Security for society's many casualties of commerce's wars

A bond between the poor man and woman

-- who in their millions wrote the President seeking a coat for the winter,

food, milk for babies, justice for the humbled of God, man, or godless drought--

and their President

A contract of trust

between citizens and their government  

it took two generations

to tear down again

A reason to believe

A banking system that saved the nation's wealth

Though the sticky-fingered robber barons hated him for it

The rights of the working men, a childhood for the poor

Forests, highways, bridges, post offices, parks

art museums, seawalls, flood control, dams and light for the Tennessee Valley

Almost nothing for the descendants of slaves

A library to show himself to the future

We are the future

It's there to read, to refresh the heart

And remember who we are

 

Writing Poetry Again: A Garden of Verses

            I'm writing poetry again.

            Three of my poems from a group written in the last couple of years are being published in this month's issue of an online poetry journal called "Verse-virtual." 

            Poems, or ideas for poems, began visiting me a few years ago, a return I associated with both the progression of life towards its later stages and the amount of time I began spending outdoors close to the ground, often on it, getting to know the lives of plants.

            At least the plants, and the activity of trying to grow them, provided the material to write about, draw from, or allude to. And the act of gardening, and the garden itself, provided a small army of metaphors.

            Here's the link for the published poems:

            http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html

            The first poem, "The Tiny Beak the Flower Bends," comes from an encounter with a hummingbird that for some reason did not notice me standing on the patio bricks and so hovered very close by. I must have been standing still for some considerable time, the reason for which I cannot recall. How else to explain why I looked to the tiny, active, and generally highly suspicious bird like a stunted tree? In any event it felt perfectly secure in examining the nearby flora at its own pace. I have a feeling that the penny dropped at some bird's-eye instant, and then my my rendezvous with the winged creature the size of an overfed wasp bearing a characteristically aggrieved expression in its avian eye was abruptly terminated.

            However, the close encounter left its impression.

            The poem "At Wollaston Beach" attempts to sum up an hour when it seemed almost the whole span of Greater Boston urban life was present on a July evening on the strip of sidewalk that abuts Shoreline Drive on one side and the state's sandy beachfront on the other. For a complex of reasons people spend more time walking, biking, hanging out, staring at their phones and people-watching on the walkway at this 'beach' than they do on the sand. The seawall invites sitting. The clam houses across the roadway provide a good shoreline ambiance, particularly fried seafood smell, and a diversity of ages and stages of life are generally represented.

            Verse-Virtual's journal's editor, Firestone Feinberg, was very kind in preserving some odd punctuation I whipped up to slow the pace of the poem's concluding lines. 

             The third poem, "'My Little Girl' Dreams," does follow from a series of dreams that, to the best of my conscious recollection, featured the image of a little girl. Some of the imagery of the poem, however, comes from my highly grown-up daughter Sonya's account of a birthday party thrown for her, mixed up -- in an airy milestone anniversary confection -- with memories of things we did together in her childhood.

            Many other poets have work appearing in this issue of Verse-Virtual. If you have the time and the inclination, this online journal rewards attention.