Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

I want to talk to you this morning about a writer who has had to go so far, work so hard, just to begin to have a life of her own, to write, to leave a world she was born to, tied to by children, by a (good) husband, by her own family. From the first pages, the narrator gives the reader a sense that she is drowning, suffering life rather than living it, without quite knowing what is wrong, wanting more, wanting a voice, but having no idea how to say or understand what she needs, and feeling a tremendous guilt simply for wanting more.

I am talking about Judy Blunt and her tough little memoir, Breaking Clean. Just writing this book is a task and a triumph far beyond what most of us will ever achieve. Blunt grew up in the fifties and sixties, but in a place few of us would even recognize. None of the conveniences that we now see simply as necessities were a part of the life she knew in the super-rural ranching and farming community of northern Montana. No television, no inside bathroom or plumbing, no books or music. Her early life sounds a lot more like what we imagine farm life at the turn of the century to be than the world we have known. Certainly, a hard life for anyone trying to live it, but hard for girls and women in ways that it was not for boys and men. At least the boys who remained had the dubious right to inherit the hard scrabble land they ranched and farmed, and escape from the scene during their teens was a distinct possibility. The girls were likely to be claimed, to be married with children of their own when still children themselves, at least in the eyes of most of us city livers. Indeed, one of Blunt’s only ways of rebelling, of insisting on being a person on her own, was to choose a man in his twenties when she was fifteen. The act of rebellion gets her away from her judging mother and stern father, but only to a life even more lonely than what she leaves and locked, for life it seems, in a world where all the rules are made up by men.

It is feminism that saves Blunt, though a feminism that is tempered and formed by the incredibly hard lives of the women around her, but let me have Blunt speak for herself.

I grew up admiring a community of women whose strength and capacity for work I have yet to see equaled, true partners in the labor of farming and ranching. Where the occasional man fell short, whether drunken and reckless or merely selfish and careless, his wife maneuvered carefully to make up the deficit. To be accused of ‘wearing the pants’ remained the worst form of insult. In public she held steadfastly to the role of silent partner. I saw this quiet endurance as a choice women made, one that made them secretly superior. Men did not drop what they were doing to tend to women’s work, nor did anyone imagine they might. Only women did it all.

As a young ranch wife, I wed my sixties style feminism to a system of conflicting expectations and beliefs only slightly altered by a century of mute nobility. My brand of feminism celebrated strength through silence. A woman could do anything, so long as she did it quickly, quietly and efficiently. It never occurred to me then that silence looked passive from the outside, or that the two served the same purpose of not making waves, maintaining the status quo. It would take me ten years of doing it all to finally get it. The work we do isn’t the issue. Work is the tool that wears us down, draws us to and keeps our eyes on the next two steps ahead. The issue is power. And it’s the silence that kills us.

This book would be well worth reading for the politics in it, the clear vision of what powerlessness does, of how whole lives simply are worn down and disappear. And while that certainly is a message Blunt wants to make with her memoir, the beauty of the book is in the incredibly careful and painful description of day to day life on this hard but beautiful land. As I was reading it, I was also reading a good little book by Alison Lurie, The Last Resort, and originally I had thought to compare the two. Lurie’s book is clever, almost staged in order to make some important points about feminism and homophobia, and the writing is accomplished, polished. My first thought was to compare Lurie’s facility with language with the much flatter, bare bones style of Blunt. But the further I got into Breaking Clean, the more I saw the raw beauty of Blunt’s prose, the ways in which the lives she describes mesh so well with the language she uses. Her writing is in no way crude; it is simply the language of a woman born to this landscape and chiseled by the forces of nature. It is, in the end, beautiful writing, though sometimes the events described are difficult even to read about.

Blunt simply wants to understand the world around her and to carve out a place for herself in it. She is not bitter, and if she is angry, it is a righteous anger directed at systems of power, not at the men and women with whom she worked and sweated and grieved. If ultimately she had to escape from her husband and family and even the land she loved and hated, it was out of a need to be, to have a sense of self. Indeed, had she cared less for her husband and family, it would have been easier to leave. His being a good husband simply made the struggle harder. Indeed, in her first move away from her childhood farm, a move required in order to attend school beyond eighth grade, she feels even more displaced, more foreign, than in her own community. With farms too spread out to make busing to school possible, when it came time to go to high school, it meant moving into a small nearby town, and instead of feeling liberated, she felt somehow even odder, more out of place. Again, letting Blunt speak for herself:

I would never be cute or giggly. I also fell short of those pleasant virtues by which plain girls are forgiven, that sweet and gentle interior that redeems beauty. I’d been tailored to fit one particular family in one isolated community. Outside it, my ground-covering stride became ungainly, my brand of strength unnecessary, or even worse, I discovered, inadequate. Outside my community, only one course made allowances for this puzzle of androgynous traits, and that was women’s liberation. In the course of the next four years, I allowed the movement toward feminism to adopt me. But still, like my mother, like the ranchwomen who peopled my childhood, I would not spout ideology or argue theory. Strong women roared in silence. We roared by doing.

Blunt is tough, and the land from which she came is austere, unforgiving, almost uninhabitable. But the prose she wields to describe her life to us and to describe her emancipation, her birth as a writer, is grand and beautiful. This may be her first book, but I’m sure it will not be her last. She has found her voice, and it is a voice well worth hearing.

Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy

I want to talk to you today about a not so new novel by Barbara Gowdy entitled Mr. Sandman. However, before I do that, let me say a few more words about Carol Shields whose new novel, Unless, I talked to you about last month. I had no idea as I reviewed her book and spoke of her as being at the very height of her wisdom and talent that she had died just a few weeks before, on July 16. She was only sixty-eight, which seems very young to me. All in all, she wrote ten novels, three volumes of poetry, three collections of stories, four plays, a biography of Jane Austin, a book of criticism, and co-authored several anthologies. I have read almost all of her novels, and would recommend to you especially The Stone Diaries, The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Larry's Party, and Unless. I think she was a fine author and an astute feminist and social critic. Do yourselves the favor of honoring her life by reading some of her books.

Turning now to the Barbara Gowdy book, I first discovered her years ago with a book that I have remembered quite well ever since entitled Falling Angels. Everyone who has responded to me after reading that volume has agreed that it is a powerful if somewhat disturbing book about coming of age and about dysfunctional families. I was so impressed with this book that I tried to use it almost immediately in a philosophy in literature course, though it was already out of print. (It has been reissued since, and I recommend it highly.) I picked up Mr. Sandman mostly because of the author, though I have to admit I was struck also by the cover and the title. As I began to read it and laugh, I thought it would be a funny and outrageous read, but I expected little else from it. The bit of cover reviews that I allowed myself to read concentrated on the comedic aspects of the book and praised it as a funny, outrageous book, bordering on lunacy.

I suppose that I read it simply as a lark for the first hundred pages or so. It certainly is outrageous and intentionally unbelievable, but I think Gowdy is doing much more with this book than simply trying to amuse us. For starters, this is one of the only books I can think of that tries to be honest about teenage sexuality. In my experience, the sexuality of teenagers is either denied completely, or exploited in the worst of ways by the sickness of pornography. I remember years ago when I read Jane Lazarre's On Loving Men, a memoir about growing up and growing into sexuality, being struck and humbled by her honesty in describing her own early sexuality as well as her powerful statement as a feminist defending her love of men. I also remember very clearly how in my own early teens my sexuality was ignored or cutified or outright denied by adults, all of which simply reinforced my suspicion about adults and their worldviews. So, in spite of the outrageous and often knee-slapping events described in Mr. Sandman, I found myself impressed by Gowdy's understanding of both the reality and semi-innocence of early sexuality.

Just this aspect of the book would have been enough to keep me reading, but an even more powerful theme began to emerge in the book. the book is ostensibly about a sort of idiot savant miracle child who does not talk at all, is considered mysteriously beautiful but brain-damaged, and yet sits down at a piano at six and begins to play Bach and sophisticated jazz riffs. And this child, Joan, continues to occupy an important role in the book. But I see her role as being primarily a hook to catch and even stun the reader, while the important social/political themes are being played out by other members of the family. Although a bit of a miss-description, I'll call the two main characters the parents of this girl. It takes the reader a bit of time to discover that both parents, Doris and Gordon, are in their deepest natures homosexual, though they have been living the lie that society has demanded of them for many, many years, each doing her/his best to hide this devastating fact from the other.

I remember many, many years ago querying a gay friend about why gay men behaved in what to me were such peculiar ways, and I meant by that sex with strangers, sex in steam rooms, in parks, etc.. He was so much wiser than I and so patient with me as he tried to explain that it was the dominant culture, the heterosexual culture, that determined (at least to a very large extent) the behavior of gays and lesbians. If I were called on to name the main plot in this little book of Gowdy's, I would say that it is an exploration of just this phenomenon. The guilt and the necessary hiding (especially in the past) of homosexuality is a direct consequence not of any perversion among them but, rather, on the sickness of the dominant culture.

In the end, peoples sexuality will out, though if it is repressed enough, hated enough, it may take some pretty bizarre and self-destructive courses. I don't want to give away much more of the book than I already have, but let me have Gowdy speak for herself by quoting a few passages from the book. The longer I think about it, the more clever and revealing I think the book is. If it is a comedy, it is certainly one with socially important punch lines.

Gordon, the homosexual husband worrying as usual about how he is damaging his wife and child muses:

He has been fretting that she is on to him. That everybody is on to him. He hasn't had a lover in over three years but the desire is like a compounding debt. Like owing the Mafia, there's no getting around it, cough up or die. Who can't see the cocks in his eyes is what Gordon would like to know.

Loving his wife and child as he truly does, he cannot let himself enter into a friendly, meaningful relationship with a man, so he tries to bottle the feelings, the drive, only to feel humiliated and shocked when they spill over in quite unfriendly and distorted ways.

In this mood, washrooms are where he lives. He masturbates non-stop, but his erection repels him. It should be shot. He studies his lips in mirrors for syphilis sores, he presses under his ears for swollen glands ... in this mood he believes himself to be a venereal sewer. He weeps for his daughters, because he's already dead—or ruined and behind bars—so that makes them orphans.

And of course as he worries and frets and hates himself both for what he does and what he doesn't do, his wife Doris is also steeped in guilt and regret for the laughably few times when she acts on her desires for women.

Oh who knows? 'You haven't touched me in over ten years" was what she intended to throw at Gordon if he ever found out, and you bet it was a good excuse but it wasn't the reason. Her yearning for Gordon and her yearning for women ran on two separate tracks. That much she had always felt, and occasionally she felt the delicacy and the imperiousness of the division, a bit like the reminder when you choke on food that you breathe from one place and swallow from another. The only thing she was sure of was that loving women was dangerous. Don't think she didn't fight it.

Always the lack, the sense of guilt, the shame, and then the choosing (or being chosen by) the wrong person, the wrong time. Anyone who simply laughs at this book, has, I think, missed the point. It is much more a tragedy than a comedy. Even if her critics don't see this, Gowdy does. She is funny, she is outrageous, and I'm convinced she has important things to tell us, especially those of us who are straight.

Unless by Carol Shields

I want to talk to you this morning about a novel written by an author who is at the very height of her powers. The author is one whom you have probably read before, Carol Shields (The Stone Diaries, The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Larry’s Party) and the book is entitled Unless. Although I never even bother to review novels that I think are mediocre or worse, I have often talked to you about novels that are worthy of mention more for their promise than for immediate content. I say this in order to set this novel apart from any whose authors are still struggling to find their voice or their message. If this is not a great novel, it has more to do with the acuity of the novelist and the ambitiousness of her project than any failure of perception. Indeed, the story-line here is secondary, it is what the author feels she must tell us that is paramount.

In many ways, Shields plays with her readers in this book. The heroine is a novelist who is, surprise surprise, writing a novel as she speaks to us. And she is not only a novelist, she is also a translator, from French to English, of one of the leading feminists of the day in Canada. Thus, she is able to talk about the novel as a political form compared to the much clearer and more direct essay. Shields lets her readers worry along with her about just how difficult it is to write a novel, to create believable characters whom the reader cares about, and to do something more than simply divert readers from the ugliness and complexity of the real world. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, our writer heroine is also struggling to recover a lost daughter and to come to understand just why she is lost. Indeed, if the novel has any weakness, it is that the story-line takes second place to the ‘message’.

So, we have a novel about writing novels that contains as well an aesthetic theory, and to add one more ‘little’ enterprise, a treatise about goodness, what it would mean to be good in this nasty, big world we live in. Our novelist heroine’s name is Reta, her lost daughter’s Norah, and the famous old feminist whom she translates, Danielle Westerman. Via the character of Danielle, Shields is able to ponder what it must feel like to have dedicated a life to political causes, especially feminist issues, and to have seen so little real change as the world spirals to ecological and economic chaos. Through Norah, the lost daughter who sits on a street corner with a one word sign around her neck, “Goodness”, she is able speculate about why a young woman who really cares about good might decide finally that the only course open to her is spiritual and literal resignation.

But if Norah chooses resignation and asceticism, Shields certainly does not. If the ship is sinking, Shields will be one of the last and loudest and most articulate voices to sound alarms and point to causes, and at the very least, to stew and stew and stew about solutions. I find myself simply amazed at how much Shields knows about people and relationships, how artfully and doggedly she struggles against the awful temptation to give up given the apparent impotence of good people to change the course of greed and economic imperialism. In a series of humorous black comedy letters to famous people of the day (and in response to essays she reads in current periodicals), Reta asks these famous and influential men how it can be that no women ever appear on their lists of the noteworthy or in their essays—essays about authors, painters, political writers, simply people of worth. As funny and clever as some of these written but rarely sent letters are, they are also deadly serious and heartbroken, spiritbroken. Lucky for us that Shields is stronger and more resilient than her heroine.

But instead of continuing in this attempt to capture the cleverness and insights of this novel, let me have Shield’s, via Reta, speak for herself.

In her last years Danielle [the feminist essayist] has become cranky, even with me, her translator. She suspects I’ve abandoned the ‘discourse,’ as she always calls it, for the unworthiness of novel writing. She has a way of lowering her jaw when she skirts this topic, and her eyes seem freshened with disappointment. She is such a persuasive force that I often find myself agreeing with her; what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes?

Novels help us turn down the volume of our own interior ‘discourse,’ but unless they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they’re just so much narrative crumble. Unless, unless.

Unless is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence ....

Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re clear about your sexual direction, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair. Unless provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough. Unless keeps you from drowning in the presiding arrangements.

And these are only a few of the unlesses; Sheilds goes on to articulate the many ways that unless you happen to live in the wake of an affluent country (affluent at the expense of the majority, the poor and miserable of the world), you are already in the darkness, already in the despair. Unless you are white, unless you are male, unless you have a job, a house, a doctor ... then you are in the condition of the many and not the few.

Perhaps Kate Chopin’s lead character responds to her impotent despair by walking into the ocean, and perhaps Reta’s daughter Norah will choose, in her search for goodness, infinite resignation, but not Carol Shields. Though she may question the effectiveness of writing novels as the unjust world burns around her, her voice is strident and clear. At the very least, she must sound out a warning. Not a warning, but a siren-song of warnings. “We only appear to be rooted in time. Everywhere, if you listen closely, the spitting fuse of the future is crackling.” Shields listens carefully, and she writes with clarity and thunder.

It may be tempting to withdraw into the self, to search for the causes of world-weariness from within. But the answers are out there, in the arena, in the unjust world. And goodness, if it is to found at all, is only to be found and practiced there. Along with Murdoch who takes Socrates to task for his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, Shields urges her readers to get off their collective asses and enter the struggle. “The examined life has had altogether to much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air.” For the novelist as well as the person in the street, the challenge is to change the nasty world we find ourselves in.