The Impossible Dream -- The Great American Novel

 

This post grew out of a speech I gave to my luncheon club three weeks ago (by Webex.)

“To dream the impossible dream” – do American authors still dream of writing the Great American Novel?  

The phrase was coined in 1868 by John William De Forest in a review of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  It quickly became such a cliché that Henry James, in 1880, acronymed it (may Tom Johnston, my Hamilton English Prof, forgive me) to GAN.  19thC critics had it easier than today’s to catalog and nominate the GAN; the usual suspects back then:

• Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
• Melville’s Moby Dick
• Twain’s Huckleberry Finn  (I gave my superb 2nd edition copy to a granddaughter who revered the book.) 
• Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage

 As some of you know, my usual reading is of non-fiction – history, biography, science, politics and civic affairs.  Thus far this year, I have read only seven such.  The Pandemic perhaps is to blame for my turn to fiction for escape and for a hunt for meaning rather than facts.  It started with diving again into Tudor England by re-reading Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in preparation for The Mirror and the Light, finale of her trilogy of ambition, rise from humble beginnings, power, overreach and fall, Shakespearean in its universality.  Then came La Peste, naturally, (curious, the feminine) followed by more Camus and Celine; then more English and Canadian and Columbian, finally to re-reading and reading anew American fiction.  I’ve been lost in it for the last several weeks.

 The last time I was on a fiction binge was during my first wife’s illness – those periods of chaos and crises.  Perhaps that is what drives me into fiction, which has the power to expose and engage human meaning in a way non-fiction cannot.  You can read all the studies you want of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but the truth of it is revealed by Tolstoy in War and Peace  just as is the truth of the revolution’s survival by Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.

 Is any in what I’ve immersed myself the Great American Novel?  Not likely; not likely that there is any such thing. A GAN should have breadth of scale and scope; it should explore the American character and reveal truths about us, about what makes us uniquely American.  The problem for an author, of course, is that the essence of America is change; no novel can keep up.  One is a GAN only for a specific era, a passing through.   

 Here are possible 20^thC GAN’s:

• Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
• Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street
• The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
• Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
• Dos Passos’ USA
• Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom
• Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
• Steinbeck again: East of Eden
• Kerouac’s On the Road
• Heller’s Catch 22
• Ellison’s Invisible Man
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
• McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
• Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
• Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
• Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
• Roth’s American Pastoral
• Malamud’s The Natural
• Updike’s The Rabbit Quartet                      
• Morrison’s Beloved 

In my humble estimation, those would make a Great American Library –especially if you add Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River collection of short stories.  But you, no doubt, would nominate many more.

My friend Roger, whose Dancing on Their Tails has a touch of greatness in it (a story of male bonding, of sensitivity and empathy hiding behind a facade of crude, chauvinist machismo) notes that Vonnegut, whose Slaughter House Five he favors, and Heller and Salinger really had only one good novel in them.  Is that PTSD of WWII? he asks.  Is the great Viet Nam novel yet to come? I ask.  

It’s impossible to encompass in any one book this ever-evolving, ever-changing country – America more in constant change than Britain or France or Russia from which great novels have come. The Great American Novel can only be the GAN for a period, an era, a passage of time – but the moral of each must be timeless.

 My nominees, for universality and relevance to us in this now of economic, health, and political angst:

Uncommon sense and the Presumption of White Superiority

Irreverence and Freedom of Youth

Piety and Hypocrisy

 

Blackness and Coming of Age

Relentless Search for Better

Idiocy In and Of War

Hardship of Migration

Indelible Legacy of Family

:

A Brief Political Announcement

BYEDON

Not original: saw this today during our four mile walk, followed by beer and fried onion rings at the Roanoke (effectively undoing all the good done.)

Ann and Fletch Got Away

After 112 days of very social isolation, despite Zooming and patio-apart cocktails with friends, we were ready to be out of this house. Inslee finally granted partial release: we took off Tuesday for five days on San Juan Island, as close to travelling to a different country as we were allowed – and those “foreigners” speak English.

Years back we’d sailed into Roche Harbor to check-in with customs on return from Canadian waters and had spent a couple of weekend get-aways in Friday Harbor, but today, the inland island was still terra incognito. What a revelation: San Juan’s is a rolling countryside rising to 1,000’, a mix of second growth forests and open meadows, lovely valleys dotted with freshwater lakes, ponds, barns, rugged cliffs above empty beaches, wild flowers abundant, all anchored by the two tidy albeit touristy harbor towns, Roche and Friday.  An altogether charming place.

We based ourselves in-between the two, at Lakedale Resort.   Swimming beach, fishing and all sorts of floating craft on offer plus lots of land activities – Ann and I played a mean, late afternoon Bocce match before adjourning to our private deck for cocktails.  Our lodge room was well furnished, a great king bed and roomy bath, a fireplace to toast off the morning chill.  Despite the masking and separation regimen, staff were pleasant, personable and proficient; they remembered our names and we theirs. 

Lakedale

Some eighty acres encompassing three private lakes, centered on a lovely, ten room lodge B&B, and offering a wide range of family vacation options – log home rentals, clusters of well-furnished yurts, and lakeside camp sites.

   

Twenty-five years ago, I had consulted with NBBJ on land use plans for development of Roche Harbor, the old ramshackle lime kiln port, and restoration of the turn of century Haro Hotel but it all fell apart when the would-be developer got into an expensive divorce. Rich Komen and Saltchuk picked up his vision.   It is a hip, special place.

A bit of the new Roche

I was astounded to see the restored hotel flanked by Craftsman-style homes, wonderful landscaping throughout the village, good restaurants and bars, expanded marina and maritime amenity and service businesses.

We dined one night on the deck shared by Madrona Bar and Grill and McMillan’s Dining Room (that’s Komen).  Delightful. An island specialty is fried calamari, of course, but these are mantle steak strips lightly battered, succulent and sweet.  We watched the sun set and were bemused at the kitschy flag lowering ceremony complete with recorded Sousa, a cornet Retreat, and Taps. Ann got dewey-eyed.  Trump would have loved it, except they honored the Canadian Maple Leaf alongside the Stars and Stripes which would have made him crazy (bad grammar: crazier.)

   

Roach Harbor boasts the San Juan Island Sculpture Garden.  Now any Northwesterner knows to be wary of "sculpture gardens" for most are populated by chain saw totem poles, chain saw patriotic eagles and chain saw bears sporting fishing poles.  Not so here. What a surprise!: twenty acres of lawn, meadow, forest trails, and ponds siting over 150 sculptures from the Northwest’s preeminent sculptors (including  my mentor, coach, teacher Sabah al Dhaher.) The sculptures are for sale, ranging from a couple thousand to over $60k, with the median, I estimate, somewhere around $9k. This is serious stuff.

Peppered among them are 57 epigrammatic, witty poems from Catching Thoughts by islander D M Jenkins, a retired Smithsonian zoologist with a soul. His insights make one pause, reflect and contemplate. The not-for-profit Sculpture Garden is a must-see; a voluntary contribution for entry; beautifully laid out and maintained; worth at least an hour if not two. We have visited the Hirshhorn, the Vigeland Park in Oslo, the Walker in Mpls, and of course, SAM’s sculpture park, and the San Juan is the best.

English Camp and American Camp National Historic Parks tell the tale of the Pig War and the amicably dual occupancy of the ownership-disputed island. 

English Camp: blockhouse and formal garden

In 1872, the dispute was arbitrated in US favor by Wilhelm the 1^st, of Germany. Too bad his grandson, Kaiser Willy, didn’t profit by the example of not-a-shot-fired arbitration when his turn came in 1914.   

Between English Camp and American Camp, we lunched at Westcott Oyster Farm, shucking our own on the lawn and watching the oysters frolicking in their tide-drenched bags. An employee explained they have to cycle in and out of the water regularly to exercise their muscle.  (Not mussel. Sorry; I couldn’t resist.)  We were shucking and slurping down three-year olds. (In a third-grade pet show, I won best in class with Frisky, a Chesapeake Bay oyster my mother helped me keep alive in a salt-water aquarium. With an eye dropper, you’d squirt a bit of red dye at one end of Frisky and a few minutes later, out he’d squirt it from his nether end.  Vastly amusing. Frisky didn’t survive three years.)

Shuckin' and Slurpin'

South Beach out to Cattle Point

South Beach, Cattle Point, Lime Kiln Lighthouse, Mount Dallas – there are so many picturesque scenes and places, just what the house-bound Ann and I needed.  We saw no whales this time, saw deer and seals but no foxes, and right off our deck, watched a barred owl capture and chow down on a snake as long as he was.

Speaking of Eating . . .

. . ., “restaurants” – what a treat! Places where people actually bring food to your table – we’d forgotten.  And we hit four good ones.  Would highly recommend Duck Soup and Downriggers.  Avoid lunch at the Blue Waters unless your people-watcher gene is dominant over your epicurean one.  The highly rated Coho is just too precious for words.  They try so hard to impress: “mushroom dust”, za’atar spiced carrots”, “ancient grains risotto”, “almond dust”, “beet braised onion petals” and other such nonsense.  Really, the food is quite good, well prepared and artfully presented. If they would just relax and stop trying so hard, they might well live up to their hype.

San Juan Island: if I were 25 years younger, i.e., only 60 and Ann fifty-something, we’d buy a house at Roche and take summer and fall ferry-ride breaks from Mercer, one island swapped for another – if only.

57 Years Ago Today . . .

. . . George Wallace, then Governor of Alabama, in a publicity stunt to dramatize his inaugural promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" stood in a doorway on the campus of the University of Alabama to block two African American students from entering the sacredly white University. President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard. Guard General Henry Graham flanked Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the two commanded Wallace to step aside.  He did.

That evening of June 11th, President Kennedy addressed the nation in a "Report to the American People on Civil Rights." His words read today, fifty-seven years later, are still as pertinent, unfortunately, as they were then. What he said led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which but for his assassination might never have been passed. 

JFK: 
“. . . it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.

It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color.

In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case….

...This is not a sectional issue…Nor is this a partisan issue…This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone. It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and new laws are needed at every level, but law alone cannot make men see right.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is — whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. Whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free….

...It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality…”

(To relive Kennedy's address click here. https://www.com/watch?v=7BEhKgoA86U)

Today, in 2020, Kennedy’s words sting; too often, for half a century, too many of us have done nothing, "inviting shame as well as violence." 

This is not a police problem. This is not a voter suppression problem or an sentencing equity problem or a no-knock warrant problem. This is a moral problem "as old as the scriptures" and as "clear as the American Constitution."

I write to ask what will it take? Must we again suffer the trauma of seeing a leader's blood spilled to move the nation forward?  Is not the blood of George Floyd and JT Williams and Manuel Ellis and Ahmaud Arbery and tens of others more than enough to make us see, care, speak, and act? Let us stop being “those who do nothing”, those who, in the words of my daughter, stand "wringing their hands in dismay and clutching their pearls."  It is past time “to act boldly”, to “recognize right as well as reality” and to create lasting change.

Let us take President Kennedy's words into our marrow and begin anew, now.  

Defund? Dismantle? How About Mission and Zero-based Budgeting?

To stir up the base, shout memorable, action verbs: Defund!  Dismantle! Both sides do it: Hit'em Hard!  Send In The Troops! Trouble is, it also gives handy handles to the other side with which to arouse, parry and attack. 

Adrenaline pumps. Blood rushes to muscle. Brains empty. Conversations cease.

When it comes to setting priorities and restructuring, borrow a couple of management tools from for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises: mission-driven planning and zero-based budgeting.

What is the mission of a police department?  What long-term goals does that mission entail?  Given where we are, what strategies do we adopt to move us toward achievement of each goal? What are the short-term steps in each strategy, e.g., for this biennium or this fiscal year? What does each step cost? If too much, which steps do we downsize or set aside or shift to another department in whose mission it fits (like social services or school youth counsels?)

A board or perhaps a citizen's group or a council sets the goals. Staff, the pros, suggest the strategies, the steps for this period, and the costs and trade-offs.  Then back to the board or council for approval and authorization of resources (of which there are only four: time, money, data and wo/man power.) 

I know: I make it sound easy.  It ain't.  But it works better than shouting meaningless action verbs, waving fists in the air, tweeting on end and cancelling out thought.  And it forces conversation -- the universal solvent.

Enough already; time to go to work.

A Prediction

To predict is to run the risk of ridicule should it not come to pass.  To revert to an "I should not be surprised if . . ." earns no medal of honor but only a ribbon of participation.  And to hedge with an "odds are against it, but it could happen that . . ." is gutless; after all anything can happen in politics.

So, go for it, Fletch; what do you predict?

I predict that between now and October, He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (for he so loves to see his name in print [as if this impudent gesture were to be seen: you wish, you dope]) will start a war, i.e., a small-scale military adventure despite the War Powers Resolution.  After all, everybody else has gotten away with one.

Here's why he will start a "war:"

• He is falling behind in the polls and needs a patriotic rallying cry to divert attention from slow economic recovery, faltering coronavirus response, and religious leaders' expressions of doubt after watching their Bible being waved upside down in front of a church in which he has not prayed.
• His love of military stuff: if they won't give me a parade, how about an invasion?  Granada worked for Ronald Reagan.
• His need to quiet the chorus of retired Admirals and Generals; what better way than to rouse their automatic support of troops put at risk?
• His need for an act to quell rising questions about whether his tough guy talk is just tough guy talk.
• His need to cow foreign leaders who have begun to see him (and the US) as a toothless tiger.

Pity the poor little country the bully selects to pick upon.

Anyway, there it is; stay tuned.

Skin to Skin

Bed is my refuge.

My buddy a comfort.

Skin to skin is key;

she reaches for my hand,

I spoon into her warmth,

flank to flank we lie,

sometimes quiet, 

sometimes talking,

sometime giggling

imagining what our children

would think of us

withered teens cuddling in the night.

Fletch, you are blessed

to have such a chum

and such a place -- 

your hideout from the world.