The World of Men and Women

New-mown hayfield, Leelanau County, Michigan

The classic Scottish novel, Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is one I had never heard of before, so if I’d gone into a bookstore asking for some specific book, it wouldn’t have been this one, and if whatever book I’d asked for wasn’t in stock and I’d left without a serious browsing session, serendipity wouldn’t have had a chance. But as chance determines the large majority of books I read, good fortune had it that this one came into my hands. The cover was attractive. It was called on that cover “The Scottish Masterpiece.” The introduction by Nicola Sturgeon left me no alternative but to turn another page and begin to read the novel.

 

The story begins in 1911, with a prelude that introduces us to the fictional farming hamlet of Kinraddie and all its folk, a small place of nine households with land leased to farmers carved out of a larger estate. Not on a railroad line or very near a large town, its red clay soil not the easiest to farm, Kinraddie, surrounded by woods and guarded by the nearby Grampian Mountains, has honeysuckle and rabbits and birds, and its fields are worked with teams of horses, wagons of grain then taken to the local mill. The outside world seems so far away it might be on another planet. 

 

Young Chris Guthrie is the novel’s central character. The Guthrie family, John and Jean and their six children, leave the country up by Aberdeen when John loses the lease on his land due to an outbreak of temper against a member of “the gentry,” and the family comes to Blawearie in Kinraddie. Between John and Will, his eldest, whom he drives like a beast, there is no love lost. The girl Chris, Will’s sister (quean is the old Scottish word for girl, used throughout the novel, as a “full-grown, responsible male” is called a childe), discovers the world of books at school and for a while has ambitions to become a teacher and escape Kinraddie, but her dreamy side is also captured by her surroundings, the fields and woods and neighbors and the old standing stones, so that she feels herself two different people.

 

Though her mother's own life hardly seems enviable, Jean tells the girl there is more to life than books. The life the mother loved and misses, however, was the brief period of freedom between childhood and motherhood – “the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you’re neither bairn nor woman.” And so Chris Guthrie finds it, after first her mother dies and then her father and she hires a woman to do the indoor work while she herself works in the fields.

 

Then one New Year’s Eve she becomes Chris Tavendale, wife of Ewan.

 

So that was her marriage, not like waking from a dream was marrying, but like going into one, rather, she wasn’t sure, not for days, what things they had dreamt and what actually done—she and this farmer of Blawearie who could stir of a morning at the jangle of the clock and creep from bed, the great cat, and be down the stairs to light the fire and put on the kettle. She’d never be far behind him, though, she loved even the bitterness of those frozen mornings, and a bitter winter it was, every crack and joint of the old house played a spray of cold wind across the rooms. He’d be gone to the byre and stable as she came down and sought out the porridge meal and put it to boil, Blawearie’s own meal, fine rounded stuff that Ewan so liked. She’d leave it to hotter there on the fire and then bring the pails from the dairy and open the kitchen door on the close and gasp in the bite of the wind, seeing a grey world on the edge of morning, the bare stubble of the ley riding quick on the close, peering between the shapes of the stacks, the lights of the lanterns shining in byre and stable and barn as Ewan feeded and mucked and tended horses and kye.

 

-      Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song

 

Contented and even joyous these two were, working side by side and making love besides.

 

The times, however, as always, bring change. More and more machines appear, on the roads and in the fields. The “Great War” comes, at first something far away that barely seems to concern Kinraddie, but then pushing and pulling on even their quiet rural lives and drawing men away to be killed in faraway France. Rumors of war atrocities and urgings to patriotism pit neighbor against neighbor. Even the appearance of the countryside changes, as to feed the war and the machines the woods are all cut down. New trees will be planted, but no one alive in the second decade of the twentieth century will live to see those trees as a two-hundred-year-old mature forest.

 

Alongside changes, though, some things stay the same, and one of the abiding facts of life is that lovemaking leads to babies. John Guthrie had ever loved his quean’s golden hair, and Ewan and Chris loved each other bodies, too, but without any means of contraception other than abstinence, men’s and women’s choices put them between a rock and a hard place – “nothing but a wife you hardly dared touch in case you put her in the family way….” And so Jean Guthrie ends her own life and that her of last-born, the twins, with poison … and John Guthrie is tempted by the body of his own daughter … and Ewan Tavendale, home on leave from the army and become a coarse stranger to Chris, tells her he might better have stayed in town and spent the night with a “tart.” Some of his anger and hatred came from the war, yes, but between Chris and Ewan also came the hardship of abstinence. It was not to abstain that they had married, after all!

 

Not work in the house or in the fields it was that starved these couples of love but the impossibility of limiting their families. This is not at all a “theme” of the novel or one of its overriding “messages,” so it’s nothing a literary critic would point out, but as a reader in 2022 when reproductive rights are being seriously challenged in the United States, as elsewhere, I see the tragedy of these couples’ lives standing out sharp and clear. 

 

Men and women. The marriage bond. Children can strengthen the bond, if children are desired. Children can also drive apart two people brought together by desire if those children come too fast or too many or before the lovers are ready for them or after they feel their family is complete. 

 

Both couples in this novel came together in love and began married life in love, but the facts of life conspired to make enemies of them. Alternatives were not available to them in the early twentieth century. Are we now to make alternatives once again unavailable and once again turn too many marriages to battlegrounds? My own happy life with the Artist would never have survived six children!

 

Of course there is much more to the novel than pregnancy vs. abstinence. There are the charming place names, Peesie’s Knapp one of my favorites. There are the eccentric locals, from the “dafties” that board with Mistress Munro to the philandering minister of the kirk to the atheist and pacifist, Rob of the Mill. And there is the countryside itself, the beauty of the land that Ewan and Chris both so love.

 

So she went down to the shore, the tide was out, thundering among the rocks, not a soul on the beach but herself, gulls flying and crying, the sun strong and warm. She sat on a seat in the glow of it and shut her eyes and was happy. Below her feet the ground drummed and tremled with reverberations from that far-off siege of the rocks that the sea was making out there by the point of the bay, it was strange to feel it and be of it, maybe folk there were who felt for the sea as last night she had felt in the rain-drenched fields of Kinraddie. But to her it seemed restless, awaiting and abiding nowither, not fine like the glens that nestled and listened high up in the coarse country, or the parks sun-heavy with clover that awaited your feet at evening.

 

Chance. Happenstance. Serendipity. My reading comes as much by these means as any others, and I am glad of it.

I Join Sherman Alexie in Recommending This Novel

In addition to being a brilliant writer, Leslie Marmon Silko is an unusually, almost miraculously patient writer. I finished my first reading (it will not be my last) of her novel Ceremony and have to say that Sherman Alexie did not exaggerate a bit when he called Ceremony “one of the greatest novels of any time and place.”

By calling her patient, I refer to the way she never rushes through a scene but takes time to note each shifting detail of the natural surroundings, along with details of the main character’s thoughts and memories and feelings and imaginings. She backtracks at least as often as she takes her story patiently forward -- backtracks and circles around and circles back again and again, in wider and wider narrative orbits. Thus the story expands and grows deeper it proceeds, and we acquire background as we gradually get to know the main character.

The main character is Tayo. That his mother “went with white men” and that his own unknown father was white is the earliest burden of his life, compounded when she leaves him with relatives and disappears from his life. Even before she dies, he knows he will never see her again.

Tayo’s Uncle Josiah and cousin Rocky accept him from the beginning, but his Auntie never lets him forget that he is not really Rocky’s brother, not her own child, and that his mother brought shame on the family, shame made visible to their village in his very existence.

Then – I am telling this chronologically, not in the order of the novel’s recounting of events – Tayo and Rocky enlist to fight in World War II. In the Pacific, they are captured by the Japanese, and the horrors of that time haunt Tayo on his return, disturbing not only his sleep but also his waking life. Nightmares, flashbacks, and disturbing visions cripple his spirit. Civil and military authorities, as well as his own people, doubt Tayo’s sanity, and he doubts it himself.

To return from the horrors of war to a previous life of normality – can it ever be easily accomplished? Tayo’s fellow veterans seek relief from their wartime memories in alcohol. Periodically Tayo does also, but he wants more of life than a haze of oblivion. He has inherited, in the time before the war, a dream from his Uncle Josiah. Materially, the dream consists of a herd of cattle -- not helpless Herefords, waiting to be brought food and water in time of scarcity and drought, but rangy Mexican cattle that can fend for themselves, like antelope, in an arid land. As Josiah explained the matter to Tayo:

“Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they lose something. Their stomachs get to where they can only eat rolled oats and dry alfalfa. When you turn them loose again, they go running all over. They are scared because the land is unfamiliar, and they are lost. They don’t stop being scared either, even when they look quiet and they quit running. Scared animals die off easily.”

Josiah reads books on the raising and breeding of cattle but is dubious about the practices recommended in  the books. He asks Tayo and Rocky to read them and see what they think.

The problem was the books were written by white people who did not think about drought or winter blizzards or dry thistles, which the cattle had to live with.

The books treated cattle as an abstraction, something apart from the land on which they were to live.

To deal with the effects of postwar trauma, Tayo’s family and Tayo himself turn to traditional medicine men. These ceremonies, both specific and metaphorical, form much of the book’s bedrock. I have emphasized the role of the cattle because that dream and that reality dovetail with the ceremonies. It is the land itself – and the cattle, that belong to the land – grounding those who would not fall victim to the destroyers’ sickness.

Spiritual connections, history, and ideas all have their place in the story, and while many of the themes are universal (“one of the greatest novels of any time and place,” to quote Sherman Alexie once again), the physical features of place are present in loving detail, so clear that someone who has never been to the Southwest might almost see and feel and smell it when reading certain passages. I open the book at random and easily fall on a paragraph of place:

He tied the mare in a clearing surrounded by a thicket of scrub oak. He sat under a scrub oak and picked up acorns from the ground around him. The oak leaves were already fading from dark green to light yellow, and within the week they would turn gold and bright red. The acorns were losing their green color too, and the hulls were beginning to dry out. By the time the leaves fell and the acorns dropped, he would be home with the cattle.

And there is so much more. For instance, almost offhandedly, in a single sentence, Silko gives one of the most original and beautiful analogies of lovemaking I have ever encountered in literature.

He eased himself deeper within her and felt the warmth close around him like river sand, softly giving way under foot, then closing firmly around the ankle in cloudy warm water.

I finished my first reading of Ceremony on Saturday morning, and later that day in my bookstore a customer saw it on the counter and said that he was reading it but was afraid of how it might end. I felt the same way as I saw the remaining pages grow fewer in my hand. And as Sherman Alexie said later in his words of praise for the novel, violence is part of the story, from beginning to end. But “You will be surprised” was all I told the apprehensive reader, and it’s all I’m going to tell you.

Neither, here, am I going to get into the issues of race and racism and brown vs. white and how blame is allocated (if you think it is) by the author. I’ll only tell all readers not to be afraid but to keep reading to the end.

Book clubs and discussion groups interested in exploring American history and issues of race in our country’s literature should not neglect this beautiful novel. Lovers of fiction, give yourself a gift. Read this book.

Wilderness Boyhood with Horses

Where Rivers Change Direction

By Mark Spragg

New York: Riverhead Books

Paper, $16

...I can step my memory onto the backs of the big boulders and hear my boots scuff against the black and rust and corn-yellow lichens that covered them.

When I was a boy ... I lived on the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the forty-eight states. 

-      Mark Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction

As a bookseller who started out (back in 1993) exclusively with used stock, I still gravitate heavily in that serendipitous direction, ready for a previously overlooked or treasure somehow previously missed to take me by surprise. I also maintain that certain words grant magic to a book title. “Rivers” is one of those words. And so it I saw and picked up Mark Spragg’s book. Turning it over, I saw a sentence fragment, “... wrangles horses for his taciturn father,...” and had to start reading. It had me at “Hello.”

I knew that David would enjoy the setting as well as the writing, so I tried reading aloud to him from the first chapter. I didn’t get very far. He was fully attentive. The problem was that I simply could not pronounce aloud, with a steady voice, sentences that had such a powerful effect on me as these:

I knew the horses as I knew my family. ... We caught them, used them, turned them back into the kidney-warm manure cake of the corrals, into the ridden-to-dust round corral. They rolled and stood and shook and milled. When I was separated from them I felt wrong in the world. When I was separated from them I took no comfort in the sound of the creek. I felt chilled without the heat of them. ...

The ranch life is a beautiful but also hard, even brutal. Much of what might sound like “hardship” was intentional, since the family business is a dude ranch in the Yellowstone Plateau, with clients looking to “get away” from civilization. Thus --

No one ever asked why we had no television, no daily paper. They came for what my brother and I took for granted. They came to live the anachronism that we considered our normal lives.

But much larger difficulties, privations, and challenges come with the territory, unsought. At least half the chapters are what a friend of mine (who speaks of certain movies she recommends as “hard to watch”) might call “hard to read.” I winced through much of the chapter titled “Bones,” in which thirteen-year-old Mark accompanies one of the older ranch hands, John, on an overnight hunting expedition for winter meat, looking for an elk to kill. They find and kill the elk, but early in the butchering process John’s hand is badly cut. The description is graphic enough that I won’t quote it but will just say that for most of the chapter that mutilated hand hangs in the balance. And that’s early on, with much more to come.

A gentler chapter is “Wapiti School.” The school is named for the valley, green only two months of the year, the valley where, scattered far from one another, some two dozen ranching households form a kind of extended family.

America was not yet rich enough for the coastal populations to buy up the hinterland and subdivide it into a patchwork of second homes. The Wapiti ranchers worked their land; they did not sell it. It was a life that lined the face, leaned the body, and satisfied. We knew our neighbors.

School days bring the author to his first shy boyhood venturings into the agonizing mysteries of love. He strives to tame his cowlicks and buys his first gift for a girl, but how to declare his feelings?

Then there is my favorite chapter, “Greybull,” the story of the boy’s first trip to the livestock auction, an hour beyond Cody, outside Greybull (population: 12), a trip made with his father in their old truck with the busted radio.

The parking lot is gravel, rutted from a recent rain, grown up at the edges in tire-broken weeds. The pickups are mud splattered, most of them hitched to trailers, their grills and windshields uneven fields of smeared insect body. There is a row of stock trucks. A semi is backed to a loading chute.

In one of the pens, a horse catches the boy’s eye,

... a single dun gelding. His mane and tail, muzzle, and stockings darkened as deeply brown as wet earth. So is the line that dissects his back, from his mane to the base of his tail. His ears are pricked. His face alive with intelligence. He’s well muscled and put together like a cutter.

The boy has eighty-nine dollars in his pocket, a fat, damp roll mostly of one-dollar bills. Reading this chapter, the reader fears not that someone or something might die, only that the boy might not be able to buy the horse.

(“Only”? Did I say “only”? I was in a fever of excitement reading this chapter, excitement similar to my grandfather’s, so long ago, as he read for himself, at my urging, one of my favorite books, The Black Stallion’s Filly, by Walter Farley. When he reached the chapter of the Kentucky Derby chapter, my grandfather gripped the book more tightly and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.)

With Spragg’s book in hand, we know the young boy in the stories will grow up to be a writer and that he will be living back in Wyoming when this book is published. But that road away from the ranch and into the future was not an easy ride. A winter of mountain isolation following college was easier for me to understand than a later sojourn in town, both measured against the backdrop of a wilderness boyhood. His parents’ divorce, reported without explanation, struck me as unutterably sad, and his mother’s death was wrenching. But more than that -- the young boy’s openness to the world and everything in it, his early life with horses, hard and sometimes brutal as that wilderness life could be -- I wanted to turn back time.

In the end, Spragg writes that he fears having lived “a careless life.” I read those words and wonder – asking myself -- does he have horses now? Is it possible to – can anyone -- live a “careless life” with horses?

I claim no objectivity whatsoever for my post today. “When I was separated from [horses] I felt wrong in the world.” I am riveted by that sentence. Since I have been separated from horses all my life, except for whatever stolen hours I could find to be near them, seeking them out, I can’t help wondering how I would have felt in the world if my girlhood horse dream had come true or if, later, I hadn’t allowed myself to be sidetracked away from horses, again and again, by other shiny, glittery objects along the way.

But I should clarify: It is not necessary to be “horse-crazy” to appreciate Where Rivers Change Direction. Don’t expect a series of pretty postcards, that’s all: nature’s power would be cruel if not so completely indifferent. But if you can’t get yourself out to Yellowstone, read this book and you will be well rewarded, seeing things in your reading mind’s eye that you would never see out your car windows. If you’ve been to the wilderness, Yellowstone or any other, you’ll enjoy reliving the freedom of these open spaces.

Spragg’s writing is mesmerizing. The wilderness he experienced half a century ago, beautiful and brutal, makes for a compelling story, and the author's shortest, simplest sentences carry emotion and poetry. I highly recommend this unusual, startling, and vivid memoir. I have copies in stock. Come see me soon.

Horses shown today were photographed in Cochise County, Arizona, in early 2015.

Read more about Mark Spragg here.