A Midrash Memoir: A review of Robert Clark’s “Bayham Street: Essays in Longing”
“In vain have you acquired knowledge if you do not impart it to others.” Deutronomy Rabba Midrash
Perhaps, because I write in the genre of creative non-fiction I have little patience for most contemporary memoir. However, I have just finished reading Robert Clark’s “Bayham Street” for the second time and recommend his book without reservation. These are essays elegantly crafted, a writing that is deceptively simple in appearance but contain a myriad of quiet layers. Clark’s (he is no relation) stylish and intelligent prose comes as no surprise; he is the author of multiple non-fiction and fiction books. His previous efforts often employ quirky or non-standard paths to tell stories but are always inscribed with a careful and precise language. As I read these essays, often about episodes recounted in previous work (particularly his memoir “My Grandfather’s House”), I sensed I was being taken deeper, past familiar places and into a more confusing yet richer territory, as if I were looking at a Rembrandt painting’s background, brushed expanses whose multiple paint applications allow the patient observer to see a near infinite number of hue differences in what might, at first blush, appear to be a monolithic dark tone.
Clark writes about issues that have engaged his interest for the majority of his adult life. As a member of Clark’s generation, his essays concerning growing up with Dave Garroway, divorce, J. Fred Muggs, “West Side Story,” and coming to adulthood in the Age of Aquarius richly engaged my memories. However, to others this subject matter might superficially suggest yet another baby boomer cultural indulgence, but this would be too thin a reading. Writing lyrically into these well-known cultural markers, Clark explores what he remembers, what he thought, and what he now thinks about photography, religious belief, sentimentality, vocation, F. Scott Fitzgerald, relationships, historical synergy, and the writing enterprise.
As a writer, reading Bayham Street in some places left me with a sense of deja vu, ideas about writing craft and writers that had been dropped into my manuscripts by readers, editors, or teachers as small digestible snippets of wisdom. Of course, from previous reading many of the events that form rallying points for Clark’s explorations were not new but considered as elements in the “Bayham Street essay collage” seem examined with a wide-angle lens or from multiple vantage points. This is the “slanted” or “collaged” or “lyric” approach to essay championed by many contemporary writers including David Shields–Shields is one of three to whom Clark dedicates this volume. This more modern essay approach is far harder to implement but is successfully used here. The author subtly imparts to the reader a far greater “understanding” at the end of the collection than the sum of the parts.
I especially appreciated Clark’s courage to reassess previous judgements. Indeed, I heard a mature voice, a comfortable voice, a voice that was remarkable thoughtful but without cant or agenda. Rather than writing in a binary or changed syllogism style (“I believed this absolutely but because of new data I now think this.”), the prose has the reasoned pliability and paradox of rabbinical Midrash. That is, a writing containing a constant respect for history, an honoring of previous experience and interpretation. Yet, Clark has applied an imaginative lens to the present–what new insights or meanings or understandings can I discover for my current life’s experience in light of my previous interpretation?
Philip Lopate, in describing Bayham Street, had difficulty precisely placing Clark’s “Bayham Street” into a category suggesting it was neither, “. . . a memoir nor a collection of personal essays.” I quite agree and why I consider this collection of essays best as a Midrash Memoir. Like the practice of midrash on sacred texts, understanding Clark’s essays cannot be accomplished by a kind of “drive by reading. His are not essays meant to be the grist for the next HBO special. Rather, these are thoughtful and considered words that once read need to be re-read, mulled, wondered about in light of the past, and only then carefully and provisionally interpreted for the present.
THE OCCASIONAL READER–WHY YOU SHOULD READ “DIFFICULT” BOOKS
Why you should read difficult books
Reviews of All the Pretty Horses; author Cormac McCarthy and The Cat’s Table; author Michael Ondaatje
I can hear the screams already, “Clark, get your blankity blank story straight. Last summer you recommended we read for whimsy—reading books not because we should but for the pure fun of it. Now you think we should read difficult books. Which is it?
Well, to tell the truth, I think you should do both.
I confess that there are times in life, when I need the comfort of reading predictable and comfortable books, like finding an open McDonald’s at midnight when you are starving or downing that second glass of “not half good” house Pinot. After a tough week I’ve consumed more than one of Susan Grafton’s Alphabet murder mysteries—with relish. But, there are also times you don’t want the same boring experience—think, paella instead of a burger.
To be clear, when I say difficult books I’m not talking about wasting precious time on badly crafted fiction, long Russian titles found some college professor’s literary bucket list, or those thick philosophic or political diatribes disguised as fiction.
Rather, the books I suggest as good but difficult novels are first of all, great stories. These stories may be occasioned by sweeping world events or the smallest mundane moments but are always tales that entice or propel us past the known or expected, provoke disturbing doubts or questions, and if the reader is fortunate will leave a sense wonder.
But, the kind of story I’m describing in this second and more positive sense also requires the reader to do more. Just as creating great cuisine requires more time, effort, and attention to detail than popping a frozen dinner in the microwave, great stories make demands on the reader. Difficult books always require increased concentration or patience; a willingness to suspend skepticism or judgment; and a taste for dwelling in the messy, uncertain, and frequently unresolved issues of the human heart.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses—a novel written twenty years ago and made into a mediocre movie starring Matt Damon and Jennifer Cruz—is, on the surface, a cowboy story that contains elements of both a “coming of age” or “quest” story. However, when the sixteen year-old John Grady Cole and his side-kick Rawlins leave their West Texas Ranch and cross into Mexico, the story morphs into a much thicker narrative about love and justice and place.
This is not a novel that can be described as a “feel good” read. As with all his novels, McCarthy has written a book teeming with unexplained suffering and awful evil like Cole and Rawlin’s unjust imprisonment in a hellish Mexican jail, a Dante-like inferno with unrestrained inmates bent upon killing them. At times these events are so profoundly disturbing as to be the stuff of horror films or our worst nightmares.
McCarthy is also a contrarian who writes novels that defy most standard grammar rules. But, I rarely notice this flaw because Cormac McCarthy is a master storyteller. Like a great movie, this novel moves adroitly from vivid scene to vivid scene, images stack one upon another, linked together and evoked by beautiful description and pitch-perfect dialogue. But unlike a film, the novel uses reflection and summery to provide a thicker story, more fully developed and three dimensional than is possible in a movie.
All the Pretty Horses remains, even after twenty years, a distinctly counter-cultural novel. In an era that favors positive thinking and TV dramas solved within 41 minutes or less, McCarthy has written of a journey through pain and evil and disillusionment—a modern tragedy that does not posit a solution or redemption. This is a captivating but unsentimental story that challenges our imagination without providing a tidy ending or certain answers. “All the Pretty Horses” is, at the core, a novel about the human heart and a story that renders a truthful and painful prose portrait of good entwined with evil, the mixture we encounter in our raw and beautiful world, a mixture we know is found in deep in every heart.
While All the Pretty Horses could be considered difficult reading because of McCarthy’s non-standard grammar or because we don’t read much tragedy these days, I think the principle reason may be because I do not wish to consider the subject of evil, especially the notion that evil lurks in me. I can close my eyes, struggle to deny or discredit or ignore John Grady Cole’s story, but this narrative retains true images of humanity, images that we know contain shards of our own stories. It is not often an author creates a novel showing such powerful close-ups of the human heart. This novel will haunt my thinking and perhaps my dreams for a long time.
Michael Ondaatje, author of the novel The English Patient and the memoir Running in the Family, has recently written another novel, The Cat’s Table. This new novel describes the 21-day sea voyage of an eleven-year old boy traveling from Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) to England. The Cat’s Table was the slang title given to the dining room accommodation farthest from the prestigious “Captains Table.” The twelve disparate and low status diners at the Cat’s Table are the novel’s principle characters.
Although Ondaatje claims this story to be fiction, his previous memoirs relate a similar story. The author left his native Sir Lankan grandparents by steamship to meet his divorced English mother and attend English boarding school. The novel’s story is told from the perspective of a boy on his own for the first time and like All the Pretty Horses, is superficially another “coming of age” kind of tale. The Cat’s Table contains all the signatures of the excellent writer: thick character studies, vividly drawn action scenes, and precise dialogue that not only imparts information and advances the plot, but adds detail to the characters portraits.
However, it Ondaatje’s management of time that gives The Cat’s Table a unique voice and can also disorient the reader. The first half of the novel is straight forward, all the scenes located on the ship. In the novel’s second portion, the narrator’s voice alternates between speaking as an eleven year old and as a grown man some 35 years later. This kaleidoscope of added reflection, summation, and changing perspectives allows the reader a much thicker insight to the characters who dined at the “Cat’s Table” and a better understanding of the dramatic events that occurred during the original trip.
Ondaatje uses these abrupt and sometimes unheralded time shifts to create an “other worldly-like” confusion. The careful descriptions of an ocean voyage, a trip that did not encounter land for weeks, often experiencing storms or fog that obscured even the sight of ocean and sky, provided an “atmosphere” that amplified the author’s dizzying time shifts. These surreal and isolated landscapes produced a perplexing magical realism in which the reader is sometimes not sure what is fact and what is simply imagined.
C.S. Lewis in his essay “Stories” suggests that successful fiction writers create a net of events. That is, stories are a series of linear time-constrained events: “this happens to the protagonist” and then,” this happens” and then, “the protagonist acts,” and then, “something else happens.” Each story event compounds and interlinks like the crisscrossing lines constructing a fishing net. If the story net is crafted well, according to Lewis, it will catch “bigger less time-constrained ideas” like the nature of death or ego or love without actually having to explicitly discuss or summarize or argue.
McCarthy’s story All the Pretty Horses creates a net that “catches,” issues such as finitude, evil, and love (or its absence). Ondaatje crafts a novel that “catches,” without formal discussion, bigger non-event ideas like the ephemeral and fugitive memory, the nature of the “emigrant experience,” and persistent colonialism.
Some readers might protest, reasonably suggesting that reading about “big idea” topics is more efficient in the non-fiction format. While perhaps more efficient, not reading great but difficult” fiction would, I think, provide a much thinner experience and in the end, less meaning and understanding.
A major element stunting contemporary imagination and creativity is the tyranny of sameness. This is a sameness caused by surrounding ourselves exclusively with people and words and ideas that agree with our own. In politics, this homogeneity of opinion produces an inability to see an opponent’s point of view, while in the reading project the ability to predict how a book might “be or end” produces comfortable boredom. However, by choosing to read “great but difficult” novels we are allowed, sometimes with an element of unease, to imagine unconsidered circumstances and events and ideas, finding conclusions or solutions that previously might have lain fallow.
Author D.G Myers said of reading fiction, “Fiction demands that you either identify with the character’s decisions or distance yourself from them, and this has a powerful effect. In doing so you shape your own moral experience.” It is true that reading difficult but great books will make you less boring at the next social event. However, the most compelling reason to read these more difficult novels is the process will spawn a more robust imagination, and that is an outcome we all need.
Why I’m Reading Cormac McCarthy For Lent
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still
From T.S Elliot Ash Wednesday
This year I’m re-reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy as my Lenten reading. During past Lenten seasons I read Jaroslav Pelican’s excellent book, Jesus Through the Centuries and Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in addition to the traditional Lenten practices of confession, prayer, and fasting. The choice of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic fiction, narratives containing scant mention of God, an emphasis on hopelessness, and the absence of anything resembling redemption could, I suppose, seem an odd choice or even arouse concern about my faith commitments by those more “positive thinking” Christian friends. Lent, despite our cultural trivializations that denigrate the time as a brief elimination diet or an excuse for Friday night fish-fry fund raisers, has traditionally been a time Christians acknowledge that their lives are in disarray. To a culture inebriated by painless success, nice perfection, and personal affirmation this self-interrogation seems both unnecessary and perhaps even detrimental to “good mental health.”
I grew up in a devout Protestant home and am old enough to remember public school being closed during Good Friday Services. However, I spent the time on those Holy Friday afternoons, times when my Catholic and Lutheran friends were forced to attend the three hour Good Friday services, playing baseball with my Baptist and Presbyterian friends. Lent and Good Friday were unnecessary even primitive “rituals”, obviated, according to my pastor, by Christ’s victory on Easter morning. My quick agreement to this explanation at age ten had little to do with a precocious study of theology. It was not until much later in life that I questioned the dismissal of Good Friday and Holy Saturday and began to attune my life to the rhythms of the Church calendar.
The short Lenten season is nothing if not a a time to acknowledge that we live lives in a false cocoon of fragile illusion and destructive habits. As Brian Volick points out, “the traditional practices of Lent—prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—were never meant to make good people better.” I am coming to think that Lent, a season that starts with a proclamation of my sure and certain death, a time consecrated in ashes, immersed in bitterness, and engulfed by failure is also an emotional landscape Cormac McCarthy understands. Lent is a season proclaiming my I-Pad, nanotechnology, and paper wealth are without redemptive power and the spiritual religiosity and comfortable materialism I enjoy is, in God’s economy, a barren and parched poverty. Perhaps, I could do worse this Lent then spend time “counting the cost” with an author who has spent a lifetime imagining what my life and this world would look like if Easter is a sham and whatever God we humans imagined really has deserted us.
Were I to attempt a single metaphor to describe McCarthy’s characters in the three novels of the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain), they are a people who eat the forbidden apple of knowledge and as a result understand life’s dreams and hopes are illusions. To be clear, McCarthy’s characters are not post-modern academics pontificating about the “plastic nature of truth,” but are a practical sort. These are cowboys, shop owners, ranchers, and mothers, people who live close to the earth on the starkly beautiful but harsh southwest desert plateau, can-do folks for whom actions and tangible results speak while words, long term goals, and theory remain silent embellishments. McCarthy’s narratives detail the varied paths these people take after tasting the bitter apple, paths riff with violence, pain, and evil, paths that lead to the territory “east of Eden” just beyond the closed garden gate. Failure of hope is more than a fact to these characters, it is a presence that once inhaled, produces a dangerous knowing, a toxic knowledge that eliminates joy and putrefies possibility. Worse, McCarthy’s protagonists experience this knowledge without understanding except to know in some organic way they are condemned to an irrevocable path: “earth to earth and dust to dust.
But, I’m not like McCarthy’s characters. I believe in a creator God, the crucified and risen Christ, and the redemption of “every square inch” of God’s good creation. John Grady Cole’s adventure in All the Pretty Horses is situated in the year I was born and would seem to have nothing in common with my life as a successful academic physician. In some ways I represent success in our land and culture defined as it is by self-determination and self-definition and self-fulfillment. But as I grow older and at least at times become more self-interrogating, less carried away by personal myths, and more willing to look honestly at past and present, I first image my life in terms of accomplishment and failure, but then probing my heart more deeply, find a roiling caldron containing evil and good; disappointments and triumphs; self-interest and hate.
Like John Grady Cole, my passage to understanding the present is painful. Cole could not redeem his relationship with Alejandra and I, despite science, despite technology, despite even my heightened knowledge and sensitivity, hate to admit that I “can’t always make things right.” I do or fantasize almost anything to avoid accepting this fact: despite my best efforts and often because of them, love will be lost, relationships crushed, the earth’s beauty destroyed, and evil will abound. It took a murder and Alejandra abandoning him before Cole accepted this hard truth coated in his blood, the ashes of false hopes, and hate of Alejandra’s great aunt. Like Cole, I hold tenaciously to the myth of my control over my life. Because I live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, I purposefully avoid the some of the physical deprivation experienced by McCarthy’s characters. Cole’s salvation from his near death stabbing and prison came as an uninvited and unexpected gift. However, the gift had appalling consequences, like the tasty bite of apple in the Garden of Eden story, Cole’s physical reprieve represented the opposite of grace or love, it was an evil that permanently sealed his heart from love.
McCarthy’s stories, although containing what seem “larger than life” stories of twisted and evil lives, also provide snap shots of my own less savory motivations, motivations I want to keep hidden. These tales strip away husks of fragile self-imagining, my self-serving abstractions about love and honor and grace. McCarthy confronts the reader with a blunt choice: a world without love or become like King Lear, pursuing any myth including madness in order to maintain an illusion of love. But even the worst of McCarthy’s characters, those lives seemingly consumed by evil strike a true if fearful note in our imaginations. Although often his stories are horrific, they oscillate with an ugly reality we have witnessed or know exists.
Despite breathing the air of American mythology during the rest of the year, Lent is a season when I am called to admit to my failure to be faithful, my impotence to change my destructive ways, and admit I cannot undo the damage I have done—I have no choice but to be silent and wait upon God. Cormac McCarthy’s characters would, I think, understand. John Grady Cole’s thoughts at the end of All the Pretty Horses, a story that starts and ends with a funeral: “[He] turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment held out his hands as if to steady himself. . . Or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.” Cole then returns to southwest desert where McCarthy passes an eschatological benediction: “The indians [imaginary?}] . . .stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish. . . .Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.”
McCarthy’s vision seems so bleak to us in part because it does not posit a future. The lack of a future tense in All the Pretty Horses is much like the 17th Century Japanese culture described by Shusaku Endo in his book Silence. Endo’s argument, that the Japanese culture’s lack of belief in a life after death—a belief making impossible the imagining of an eschatological future—made that 17th century feudal culture immune to the person and mission of Christ as articulated by the Jesuit missionaries. McCarthy, in similar ways, seems to suggest the American “superstitious” belief that goodness and evil is located within human agency is a similar cultural blockage to the imagination, a block preventing Americans from imagining evil as an independent, “thing. . . Walking around with its own legs.”
However, the reason some reject the bleakness of McCarthy’s fiction may also be the same reason some Christians reject the bleakness of Lent: sentimentality has impaired the imagination. Sentimentality has been defined as, at a minimum, unearned emotion. I most easily recognize this kind of effort when advertisers attempt to manipulate my emotions and desires . The deliberate cultivation of emotion that does not square with reality or truth is perhaps less obvious with many contemporary films. The wildly popular and film, The Bridges of Madison County, proposed a four day affair was an adequate basis for a lifetime of love and pushed viewers to near melancholia by the thwarted love. The popularity of CSI and other cop dramas posit that the bad guys always receive their just deserts, a sentimental feel good belief that perfect justice is possible in this life that makes it difficult to imagine a life containing innocent suffering and deliberate injustice. These shows make no claim to being fantasy like say,, Harry Potter, but rather hold themselves out as reality. A less obvious manipulation of emotion exists with horror films. Instead of manipulating me to have positive feelings, these films do precisely the opposite—create fear and terror out of proportion to any reality or fact. If, as Donald Drew suggests, every film (or by inference every art artifact) presents a particular “image of man,” then I should ask if my choices of stories allow me to expand my imagination concerning the truth nature of things or does this portrayed “image” allow me to live in a sentimental illusion.
Towards the end of All the Pretty Horses Cole has four individual encounters that shape his thinking.(with Chavez, Alejandra, the Duena, and the Judge) During the encounter with Chavez, the mysterious prisoner/Godfather figure Cole meets in prison, suggests Cole needs to believe that, “somebody runs the show,” but that this, “gives a false impression. As if things are in control.” Cole counters, offering that every man has at least the control to choose if and what his “price” will be. Chavez isn’t buying this explanation. Determining a man’s price he points out is only the agency needed to die well but not for living.
In his poem, Ash Wednesday, T.S. Elliot, like McCarthy’s fictional portraits, imagines a world without love or control.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice
Elliot goes on to declare the possibility of God’s love while Cormac McCarthy’s fiction suggests only that our world is beyond our devising or comprehension. Like Elliot, McCarthy implies human discomfort becomes most acute when we stop our motion and try to understand the “system.” McCarthy forces us to contemplate or imagine a system that is not scaled to ourselves, is not constructed by our myths and desires. His fictional world reads like the Old Testament narrative in Isaiah: The nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales.(Is:40:15). In McCarthy’s world, like Elliot’s world in Ash Wednesday, and Endo’s feudal Japan, all empirical evidence points to a world without a future tense, a determined world in which we need to “get over” our myths of human agency and stop attempting to find love or banish evil. If there is a God presiding over McCarthy’s imagined world, this God is not modeled on humanity. A God, perhaps more like the one that spoke to Job out of a whirlwind, not answering man’s demanding questions with answers but with another question: “Where were you when I created the world?”
I have often wondered at the lack of interest in observing the Lenten season by many of my fellow Protestants. While this seeming indifference to Lent is changing, I can’t help but wonder if the root cause is a sentimental imagining of redemption. Such sentimentality, as Bonhoeffer said, is a “cheap grace” that ignores current suffering, denies present realities, and obscures my personal culpability. Reading McCarthy during lent is an antidote for such a falsely imagined and sentimental view of the world. I believe the bleak and nihilistic outlook found in McCarthy’s prose is, in the end, not the final word. I’m not sure it was McCarthy’s only word. Rereading the text I found achingly beautiful descriptions of the land, the love and care for horses, and the goodness of fresh water and food, and scattered random acts of kindness by the “those who had the least.” (Think of the peasants who hauled Cole onto the cart when he was too weak to do so). Even as the author passes his final deterministic blessing, it is delivered amidst a beautiful red desert sundown described in extensive visual detail and ends with a seemingly irrelevant aural detail: “chirping birds.”
I love the last stanzas of Elliot’s poem:
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
Elliot does not want, as I think McCarthy would not, to “Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.” Hope is a fragile thing and does not tolerate lies. McCarthy and Elliot write their words to a sentimental modern culture that lies to itself and places hope in false gods. They wrote stories and poems that force us to imagine a different world than the one we wish existed. A physician friend says of Christian belief, “if Christ is not risen from the dead then I want as far away from this stuff as possible. Because, if it is not true, Christianity is the most dangerous of things offering me nothing but false hope and lies.”
But to imagine hope dead requires enough imagination to believe true hope possible. On Ash Wednesday we wear the ashes to lean into our frailty, our failure to be God, our failure of imagination even when surrounded by the beauty of creation. We wear the ashes in silence hoping that the whisper of the coming Christ is true and not another self-deception. We wear the ashes with a tenuous faith because we have lost hope in ourselves and all others of our kind. We wear the ashes in confession only grudgingly given that our lone and last hope rests in Christ.
“Suffer me not to separated. And let my cry come unto Thee.”
On the last page of “All the Pretty Horses” McCarthy puts Cole and me in the place to choose, we must either cry out to God we can hope is there or silently turn our face away from God. McCarthy leaves that conclusion to us.