PROSE
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
Why this book?
Published in 1980, Housekeeping is not only Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, many readers regard it as her masterpiece. It is certainly a magical read and below we quote some feedback from one of our Paris Salons to give a sense of why we have chosen it for the LitSalon Challenge.
‘I have been meditating for years to loosen those boundaries we mentioned last night between real and imagined, (maybe to transubstantiate ????) and this was the first time all of it seemed to come up in a book.’
‘What a rollercoaster ride! Sometimes I felt as if Robinson took us so far under (or upside down) that we wouldn’t be able to come up for air.’
‘First a thousand thanks for the reading of that extraordinary book . . . I did want us read out aloud the following, which I felt was one of the most extraordinary – in every sense of the word – and highly significant passages in the book . . .’
‘During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, ’That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,’ the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drop them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance.’
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (chapter 4)
The story
Housekeeping tells the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphaned sisters, growing up in Fingerbone, a small and remote lakeside town in Idaho.
The sisters eventually find themselves in the care of Sylvie, their dead mother’s enigmatic sister. Through Ruth’s narration we learn more about the impermanence of things – people, places, home – and watch her struggle to adulthood with the awareness that nothing stays in place. Sylvie tries to guide Ruth, but cannot break the habits of transience: crackers in her pocket, coat always worn inside, shoes under her pillow. Ultimately the home they share welcomes the outdoors – leaves rattle in the corners, birds nest in the cupboards. There is a freedom found here – and this book reveals profound possibilities in a spare world. Robinson’s gift is to expand our ideas about the deepest moorings of our being.
The writing
Each line in this book is carefully crafted and ice-sharp. Marilynne Robinson challenges us to re-imagine the paradigms of safety and security we hold dear. Is it possible to consider the rejection of home heroic? What if the narrator was a boy growing into manhood, would his ‘striking out for the territory’ cause us less anxiety?
There is much here to be unpacked: Robinson is asking us to consider the ways we shape grief and relationships and self – without offering truths but going more deeply into the depths. And while we are at it, what’s with all the water? Think about the many roles of water and consider how we must accept its life-giving as well as its life-taking character. How do – or don’t – we understand the very ground we stand on? What lies below? Where do the ghosts live in this book? Where do they live within us? How is darkness a solvent?
The reading
Everyone who has been following the LitSalon Challenge since January will know by now that we are advocates of slow reading. This is what Doris Lessing wrote about Housekeeping:
‘I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly–this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.’
Doris Lessing
Notice, as you are reading, the various portrayals of home or house (for those up for the game, there are at least five). Consider what tone or shading connects these various house images? What does the idea of home represent in a cultural context and how might this idea be inverted? What kind of freedom may this book be suggesting? How is this unexpected?
As you read, note the passages that seem to hold some truth that may not be immediately accessible on the first read. The paragraph, for example, that starts:
‘Lucille would tell this story differently . . . Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition . . . the nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother . . . And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among the flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, undervalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent.‘
Mark or post-it other passages to help piece together Robinson’s metaphysical questions (see also ‘How we read‘). She does not provide answers but sometimes, through the text, offers directions towards illumination.
Be aware of and perhaps note any (barely submerged) literary and cultural references you spot (e.g. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the Bible, Emerson and Thoreau, Huckleberry Finn, some Faulkner and the Heroic Cycle as it turns up in the Odyssey). But don’t worry, we are all doing the best we can and sometimes just reading the book is what we can offer! We will provide more suggestions to support you later in the month.
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers, Salon Director/facilitator & Sarah Snoxall, Salon facilitator.
POETRY
Robert Frost – Birches
When he wrote Birches in 1913, Robert Frost was living in Beaconsfield in England, far away from the New England woodlands of his childhood. Saying “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” Frost claimed never to have started a poem the ending of which he already knew.
This poem manages to be many things at once: a celebration of joyful childhood play, an interrogation of memory and a technical tour de force with a cascade of images rendered in iambic pentameter that comes very close to the sound of everyday speech.
Birches, one of Frost’s most widely admired and anthologised poems, can be read online here. To develop a deeper understanding of the poem we recommend repeated readings, including reading it aloud (whether to an audience or just to yourself).
Some things to consider while reading (suggested by poet and Salon facilitator Caroline Hammond)
Symbolism: In writing about trees, Frost is connecting to one of the most powerful symbols in literature, religion and philosophy. The Tree of Life, The World Tree and the Biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil are all part of the symbolic meaning we’ve give to trees throughout human history. Frost wrote about woods and trees in some of his most famous poems and it is a theme he revisited again and again. For me, the fact that trees are so much larger than us and live so much longer than we do has something to do with our fascination and desire to link ourselves to them, both in literature and in our lives.
Poetic meter: Although in some ways we can think of Frost as a modernist poet, he rejected the idea of free verse (in typically pugnacious fashion he compared it to playing tennis with the nets down) and wrote mainly in iambics – whose woods these are I think I know. However, in describing his approach to poetry he stressed the importance of something he called ‘the sound of sense’. His idea is that in the natural cadences of speech we are are able to detect meaning that goes deeper than the individual words. Frost’s favourite example was the experience of hearing a conversation on the other side of a closed door. We are able to tell the difference between an argument, someone giving instructions or expressing happiness, even if the words are not clear. This sound of sense is important to poetry because a line of verse can communicate tonally as well as through the literal meaning of the words. This pattern of feeling is something that the meaning of the line may work together with, or jar against, but must never be ignored in the composition of the poem.
“If one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skilfully breaking the sound of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the meter. Verse in which there is nothing but the beat of the meter furnished by the accents of the polysyllabic words we call doggerel. Verse is not that. Neither is it the sound of sense alone. It is resultant from those two. ”
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was born in San Francisco, but moved with his family to Massachusetts in 1884, following his father’s death. His ancestors had originated in New England and, later in his life, Frost was celebrated for poetry that often engaged with New England places, themes and identities in his search for meaning.
It took time for Frost’s work to be appreciated and published widely in his home country. In 1912, discouraged by constant rejections, he took his family to England where he found greater success in getting published. Having established a reputation with publication of two books in Britain – A Boy’s Will in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914 – he was able to return to the United States in 1915 as a celebrated and sought-after literary figure.
Frost became highly regarded and honoured during his lifetime. He remains the only poet to have received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. In 1961 he was named poet laureate of Vermont.
