In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes her time living roughly on Lummi Island as she wrote a "difficult book". I'm assuming that was this book, and as difficult as it may have been to write, it is also difficult to read. Not in the sense that it's too deep or incomprehensible, but in the sense that it's unlike other books, as though Dillard was inventing the form as she went along.
I listened to the audiobook of The Living and may have therefore lost many opportunities to stop and reread passages, but there was one benefit: the narrator spoke in a flat tone, matter-of-factly describing scenes of violence and hardship and senseless deaths, and while this may sound like a drawback, I don't think it was accidental. The characters in this book are accustomed to loss and hardship and take it all in stride:
How was it possible to endure the losses one accumulated just by living? Sentiment based on fact was the most grievous sort, she thought, for the only escape from it was to shrug off the fact -- that babies died, say, or that people lost lands they loved, that youth aged, love faded, everybody ended in graves, and nothing would ever again be the same. She pounded herself to tears with these melancholy truths, as if to ensure that she would not betray herself by forgetting them -- which, however, she knew full well that she would, as all other grown persons have done, to their manifestly improved mental balance.
It was curious to me that Dillard spent more time in describing the hats worn by every last character than in describing the thoughts contained in those hat-wearing heads. When Rooney collapses in the bottom of the well, Ada doesn't start screaming for help or collapse with grief. Her immediate and sole reaction:Without knowing she did it, Ada pressed both hands to her jaws. When her neighbour George joins Rooney, in the well and in death, she and Priscilla both stand mute. And at the funeral for their men:The Lummis wailed, but this was not the way of the settlers, who tried for impassivity. This impassivity is a hallmark of The Living and I think it contributed to my disconnection with the characters. Had Ada started keening and wailing at the sight of her dead husband, I was prepared to join in. Because her reaction was foreign to me, the situation remained foreign.
Although there were instances when characters did react strongly to their situation, I can't recall a single time when the narrative was being told from that person's point of view. When the surveying crew find the Skagit impaled on the stake, it is the immature perspective of the young John Ireland that is related, not that of the grief-stricken Yekton. Later, when John Ireland is watching the expulsion of the Chinese immigrants, he seems to lament more the death of his fondly held socialism than truly empathising with his fellow men. When Minta loses first her husband Eustace and then her two youngest children, her immediate reaction isn't shared at all. Hugh, about whom it has already been revealed is a person of particularly strong and private emotions, never shares his feelings about the accident that he caused. Throughout The Living, emotions are flat or never revealed. If this was meant to illustrate the acceptance and stoicism necessary to survive pioneer life, it contrasts with Susanna Moodie's true life experiences in Roughing It In The Bush-- of course life was hard, the work was hard, it was a struggle just to eat at times, but losing people wasn't borne in silence.
The exception to this emotionless life occurred repeatedly when young people met and fell in love:
When, over the following months, Minta Randall found that Eustace apparently reciprocated her profoundest and most secret feelings, she thought she had never lived before, or knew what life could hold, or what absolute power one heart could exert upon another. She perceived no trace, fossil, or echo of this wild sensation anywhere around her, and concluded that she and Eustace had invented it together, which would be, she thought, just like them.
All the more reason, I would think, that Minta would have been given a scene of public grieving at his death. On this subject of love, I was amused by how many hard-fought courtships ended with regretted marriages. Glee worked very hard to win Pearl, only to "despise" her in the end. Anyone would think that John Ireland had a happy homelife with June, yet all the while he wished he could be a hermit off on some island.
The historical aspects of The Living were fascinating: the transformation of Whatcom from a clearing in an immense forest to a proper town; the daily routines; the booms and busts; the opening of the West through railroads; and the slow evolution of the locals from people who would let newcomers sleep in their own homes until they were on their feet to business-minded folks who were looking to make a buck off every claim-jumper who passed through. This latter is done without resorting to idealising the times past-- the rise of individualism and capitalism is accompanied by advances in education and medicine and governance. By the end of the story, Whatcom has produced in Hugh and Vinnie the ideal of young man and woman. He has gone to study medicine at university and can roll up his sleeves to pitch in at the farm when at home. She has spent her life excelling at school, helping in the family store, watching over a constant stream of siblings, and with her stunning good looks and charm, has developed a graceful manner for declining marriage proposals. That they have found each other bodes well for the town as the story ends:
Hugh held the lantern aloft and saw it illumine the stiff boughs of trees; he set the lantern down. He stripped to his union suit, and somebody handed him the heavy, knotted rope. He could feel Vinnie low beside him, shivering and excited in the dark. Her wide skirts and many petticoats nudged his bare ankle once, then twice, and a pang ran through him. Before his eyes in every direction he saw nothing: no pond, no ocean, no forest, sky, nor any horizon only unmixed blackness.
"Swing out," the voices said in the darkness.
"Push from the platform, and when you’re all the way out, let go."
When? he thought. Where?
The heavy rope pulled at him. He carried it to the platform edge. He hitched up on the knot and launched out. As he swung through the air, trembling, he saw the blackness give way below, like a parting of clouds, to a deep patch of stars on the ground. It was the pond, he hoped, the hole in the woods reflecting the sky. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
And so, ultimately, we the living all pitch ourselves into the void, hoping for, but never guaranteed, the safe landing. I wanted to love The Living, but it just didn't work for me. I thought that the business with Clare and Beal was going to redeem the whole thing for me, but I couldn't understand the motivations or reactions of either of them. In the end, this may well be a masterpiece, but I was never moved.
A few nice lines to end with, because the words and sentences themselves are fully glorious throughout:
--The shore looked to Ada as if the corner of the continent had got torn off right here, sometime near yesterday, and the dark trees kept on growing like nothing happened. The ocean just filled in the tear and settled down.
--How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.
--From deep in the bay he could see Mount Baker in the east, holding the sunset aloft like a cone of coals after the stars came out.
--Mabel and her cousin Nesta, and flat-nosed Cyrus Sharp, and his youngest brother, Horace, were tying each other to a tree. They had found a length of line and were tying each other to the cottonwood tree. Clare watched from the kitchen. He had forgotten this piece of information: children tie one another to trees. Children find wild eggs, treasure, and corpses; they make trails, huts, and fires; they hit one another, hold hands, and tie one another to trees. They tied Horace Sharp to the tree; he cried. They tied Mabel to the tree; her flat beret fell off, and she could not break away.
Clare had looked out past the pie safe. Here is a solid planet, he
thought, stocked with mountains and cliffs,where stone banks jut and deeply rooted trees hang on. Among these fixed and enduring features wander the flimsy people. The earth rolls down and the people die; their survivors derive solace from clinging, not to the rocks, not to the cliffs, not to the trees, but to each other. It was singular. Loose people clung in families, holding on for dear life. Grasping at straws! One would think people would beg to be tied to trees.
Added two days later: And this is why I enjoy magical thinking: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/24/i-5-bridge-collapse-caused-by-truck-hitting-span/ If I hadn't read this book, I wouldn't have a mental picture of the geography of "Skagit Country". This bridge collapse nicely illustrates the consequences of the hubris of those who thought to bridge the unspannable distance through the rough terrain to Canada. (And I am, of course, only enjoying this irony because no one was hurt)
