Idylls and Loss

I spent this last week reading Richard Llewellyn's novel, How Green Was My Valley. I seem to remember it being included on a reading list in one of my high school English classes, but I was never drawn to it. The title seemed to suggest a certain degree of sentimentality, and indeed "sentimentalizing" is one of the charges laid against it, along with misrepresentation of Welsh life and an insular outlook on certain topics. What I think it does most memorably is present a portrait of a close-knit family, and that was what sustained my interest. Regardless of any of its shortcomings, I wanted to find out what would happen to the people.

This is an instance of a book that doesn't deal overtly with mythological characters but has at its center a mythic theme, the loss of paradise. The narrator mentions Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the garden several times, seeing in that story the source and foreshadowing of his own early experiences with sexuality. This narrator, Huw Morgan, the youngest son in a family of nine children, recognizes the loss of innocence that comes with the first fumbling knowledge of adulthood, but the entire novel is preoccupied with the archetype of loss.

From repeated descriptions of the ways in which the valley's beauty is being eroded by growing slag heaps to the narrator's experience of adulthood not being quite what he had bargained for to the eventual parting of the ways of family members, the novel is full of reminders of an original state of grace that can't be sustained. Early in the story, various family members, particularly the boys, leave home only to return, or if they go for good, don't go far, perhaps to the next valley or the farm over the mountain. When several of the boys, at odds with their father over their views on unionizing, leave the house to take lodgings down the road (followed by their younger sister), the episode becomes a poignant illustration of the mother's role in holding the family together. Eventually, though, forces of change in the valley, along with the characters' own inner callings, break up the idyllic home life.

Much of the novel is taken up with accounts of Huw's education, both at home and at school. The family has high hopes for the future of their intellectually gifted youngest son, and there is an assumption that he will eventually win a scholarship and go off to university. I have to admit to feeling disappointed in Huw when he decided to follow his father into the colliery. While various family members and friends try to dissuade Huw from becoming a miner, his mother is all in favor of keeping him at home. At that point, I confess, the warm family life started to feel a bit claustrophobic, despite my liking for the characters. My assumption (which would be shared by most readers, I think) was that Huw would leave home to become something else and return as a teacher, a doctor, or a man of letters. But even his fateful decision does not stave off the changes that economic forces, disappointed love, and death eventually bring to the family.

Is the novel a tragedy? Yes, probably, but only in the same way all family stories are. The novel made me think about a conversation I had with my aunt about how connected our family used to seem when my grandparents were still alive and how far apart everyone has grown since then (I'm not talking about an idyllic family, just one that got together regularly). She told me that the death of parents had the power to change relationships among even the closest siblings, something I wasn't quite sure I agreed with. The story of the Morgans, however, illustrates ways in which separation is inevitable and possibly even desirable. Whether the Morgan children leave the valley to pursue their dreams, find their fortunes, or merely to flee thwarted hopes, they're now in a position to begin new stories of their own.

Huw acknowledges that his brothers were right to leave the valley before tensions among the miners intensified, tensions in which they would undoubtedly have been caught up had they remained. Perhaps the breaking of family ties provides some insulation for those who have begun to build new lives elsewhere. Or perhaps not--for a family as close as the Morgans, there would be no forgetting their early happiness, especially if their later lives proved disappointing. About individual fates, however, the end of the novel is largely silent.

I have wondered sometimes whether or not an idyllic family life, if there is such a thing, is an advantage or a disadvantage. Sometimes it seems to me that having a less-than-ideal home life might actually be helpful in some ways, making the inevitable break with home easier. Perhaps most people, regardless of the kind of family life they've had, are happy to leave home when their time comes, and the Morgans are an exception. I've never known a family quite like them, though certain aspects of their story seemed familiar. I remember big family meals, with everyone crowded around the table, and good food.

Aside from that, I'd still like to see Wales, regardless of whether there are any Morgans there or not. Apparently, it is still quite green and is still fertile ground for myths and legends of all kinds, as it has been for centuries.

File This One Under "Hestia"

Have you ever asked yourself: I wonder what a mytho-writer does in her spare time? Well, I can answer that. There's not that much going on this week, except that I have been having lots of fun with my Halloween cookie pan. For the last few years, I've made gingerbread at Halloween, but this year, I wanted something different. Just as I got tired of pumpkin pie a few years ago, I've grown a little weary of gingerbread cookies after enjoying them for several years. As an alternative, I hunted around on the Internet for a ginger snap recipe and recently found one that sounded like it would work in my cookie pan.

The recipe I decided on calls for freshly cracked black pepper, which I think is probably the key ingredient in giving the cookies the right amount of heat. They were nice and crunchy, too. Oh, I parceled them out over a period of days, but I finally finished them off last night, and since today was rainy and cool, I decided more cookie-making was in order. Tonight, I mixed up a batch of Chocolate Sweet Hearts (described here, in rapturous tones, in a previous post) and pressed it gently into my Halloween molds; I'm happy to say the cookies came out lovely without benefit of cooking spray. They popped out of that pan chocolate-y and perfect as you please, cheerful little ghosties and haunted houses and bats, and were just great as an after-dinner treat with milk (as were the ginger snaps). I have been excited to discover that I can do without cooking spray, as that is one less thing to buy (a frugal baker is a happy baker).

Other than that, I braved the rain to take the trash out and check the mail (I told you not much was going on). For that, I had to put on my rain cape, which hasn't gotten much use this year. For a long time, I kept forgetting it was reversible, but tonight, in honor of the season, I turned it inside out so that the black was showing on the outside and the red became an accent visible only inside the hood. It occurred to me that it might do as a witch's cape if I needed a Halloween costume, but since I don't plan to dress up, I'll just have to be on the lookout for rainy days. If you see me coming in it, don't worry (or if to worry, not to worry unduly, as Katharine Hepburn's assistant used to say). If I have any magic, it's mostly the little domestic type that helps out in the kitchen and on cleaning days.

I will also admit to getting a kick this afternoon out of a photo feature I saw on the Internet of various pets dressed up in Halloween costumes. It looked like some of them had submitted to it more graciously than others, and some of the outfits were a little cringe-worthy (like the "dog-being-eaten by an alligator" costume), but it was all in good fun, I think. A week or two ago, I saw another photo essay of the type that usually appears around this time of year, candid photos of groups of people taken as they passed through a haunted house attraction. One feels more inclined to laugh at grown-up people looking really, really silly than at little animals looking bored, so I did, I laughed until I almost fell off the couch. The pictures were that good. (If I were goofy enough to go through a haunted house, I'm sure I'd look silly, too.)

Well, getting back to the cookies--today's Chocolate Ghoulies won't last forever, so I'll probably end up getting out the pan for another batch of something before Halloween. I don't know whether it will be ginger snaps again, or chocolate chip shortbread, or something else, but I've got all the molasses and cocoa and brown sugar and eggs I need and am pretty much ready for anything with a reasonable ratio of fat and calories to deliciousness. You may be thinking, gosh, you must be popular in your building, with all those good baking smells. Do you ever give any of those cookies away? 

Well, bless your heart! Where have you been? The answer is no, of course not. Are you kidding me? Neighbors like these, and you think I'd be giving them cookies? A kick in the pants, maybe, but never cookies. If you'd like to take them under your wing, you're more than welcome to pick up the lot and cart them off. It would improve the surroundings immensely. I'm too busy looking for recipes that don't use shortening, considering pie options, and trying to keep my apartment clean. And treating the occasional water stain, of course.

The Soul and Three Cities

Last night, I picked up a book I've had for a while on psyche and the life of cities. I read two or three chapters some time ago and laid it aside; last night it happened to be sitting in a pile of books near at hand when I was looking for something to read. I started with the chapter on San Francisco, which I apparently hadn't gotten to before, since none of it seemed familiar. I picked the chapter out of curiosity, since I've visited the city a number of times and wanted to see what the author, a long-time resident and psychoanalyst, had to say about it.

A recent incident helped prompt my curiosity. I sometimes look at apartments and places to live in other cities, just for fun; I like to see how much things cost and to consider possibilities. I rarely look at San Francisco, but one night, in an idle moment, I did a search for apartments in an area of the city that I rather like. I did the search, pulled up some results, and looked at a couple of apartments; I was looking at one with a lovely view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge when I was hit by a feeling of claustrophobia that nearly amounted to revulsion. I had the sudden conviction that I couldn't see myself ever living in San Francisco, and the strange thing was how strong the feeling was.

The author of the San Francisco essay confirmed my feeling rather than dissuading me from it, despite the fact that he obviously loves his city. His essay suggested to me that it might be hard to feel grounded in San Francisco, that the distance between people in that city of people in pursuit of themselves could make meaningful connections difficult. The writer describes an unusually high degree of self-preoccupation there, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It may be unavoidable for the people who are drawn to live there, since the city's famous openness, as he tells it, almost demands that residents make a project of their individuality. It left me feeling, though, that San Francisco might be quite a lonely place, and a tenuous one, too.

I agree with the author that San Francisco is lovely to visit and has great physical charm; I also agree with his observation that the city probably doesn't reveal its inner life readily to a visitor. You could go to San Francisco for a week or 10 days and enjoy every minute of it as a tourist, but what you're seeing tells you very little about what it would be like to live there. This is true to some degree of most places, I think, but perhaps even more so of San Francisco. The author attributes this to a high degree of introversion among its residents, something a casual visitor wouldn't be likely to notice.

After the San Francisco chapter, I turned to the section on London, another city I have spent time in. It was, oddly, rather a relief to turn to this chapter, though the author's designation of the color red as the city's signature color, a provocative idea to start with, got to the heart of something I noticed when I was there. One of the fascinating things about London, as he points out, is the way its long history is layered so visibly in its buildings, layout, monuments, and place names. He pointed to the double nature of the color red, emblematic of life and vitality but also of death, a reminder of the many centuries of struggle and upheaval the city has endured.

I remember my long-ago first visit to London's Westminster Hall and the almost physical feeling of the weight of years that hit me while I was standing inside. I'd never had a sensation like that before, a feeling of being buried under layers of history, as if all the events that had ever taken place were still present in the room. It wasn't a pleasant feeling and was actually rather frightening, though that was the only time I really experienced it that way. As I got used to finding my way around, I was increasingly fascinated by the way pieces of the past were embedded in the present, sometimes subtly, so that you had to know they were there--a piece of Roman wall visible through the window of a basement, for instance, if you bent your head and looked.

After reading the London chapter last night, I found myself thinking: if I had to choose whether to spend six months in San Francisco or six months in London, which would it be? London appealed to me more. Somehow, London seems more definite and less ghostly to me than San Francisco does, strange though it may seem to say it. Even as an American, I think I could find my way around London more easily than I could around the Bay Area, which says more about me, of course, than it does about the merits of either place. I'm not saying the same thing would or should be true of anyone else.

This afternoon, I read the book's chapter on New York City, a place with which I have very little personal experience. I used to find the idea of New York positively overwhelming, but lately I've begun to feel that I wish I knew the city better. Maybe sometime I'll get the chance. In any event, I learned more about New York, its history, and its layout (which has always been a source of complete mystification to me) in just two hours than I've managed to pick up in decades of hearing about it and seeing it on television and in the movies. The author of the piece made no assumptions, as others sometimes do, about a reader's prior knowledge of the city, providing not only a pictorial overview but also a succinct summation of history and geography that helped give it shape in my mind.

I'm not sure why I've always been content to have such a pleasantly vague notion of New York, to hear about Central Park, Greenwich Village, the Hudson River, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side without really having any idea of how they relate to one another. Curiosity finally seems to have kicked in, perhaps due in part to the many novels I've read in recent years that have managed to convey some sense of the city's allure, leading me to think that, while it's a tough place, it has its own magic. Why I have derived such a feeling for the city from reading fiction rather from seeing it in movies or on TV is a bit of a mystery. I do think that since 9/11, many Americans have developed a more protective feeling toward New York. The psychic wound created there still affects us all, and that may be another reason I feel drawn to the city.

After reading about New York, I posed myself another choice: "OK, what if you had to choose between San Francisco and New York?" A very interesting psychic exercise, to be sure, because there was a time I never would have said this (or even thought it), but New York appealed to me more. I wouldn't go so far as to say I can picture myself as a New Yorker, but if I had to choose a place for a longish visit, I'd pick New York. How strange that hard-edged, fast-paced New York should end up seeming more human to me than San Francisco, swathed in its fogs and soft hills, but that does seem to be the case. Again, this isn't a statement of absolute value but rather a reflection of a psychic shift on my part.

If you're interested in reading about the ways Jungian analysts describe the psychic life of their cities, the book I've been referring to is Psyche & the City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern Metropolis, edited by Thomas Singer. You may agree or disagree with the way a particular writer sees things, but Jungians are unusually sensitive to the inner life, distinctive rhythms, and peculiarities that give a place character, and this is reflected in their writing. Their intimate knowledge of the cities they live in may provide insight (or rebuttal) for experiences you've had as a visitor (or even as a resident) but couldn't quite explain. I'm still in shock over the way my psyche has rejected San Francisco (the home, after all, of Ghirardelli Chocolate--think about it!), but John Beebe's chapter on the city helped me to see some of the reasons why this may have happened.

Listening to the Road

This week, I finished Neil Gaiman's novel, American Gods, which I decided to re-read after a recent conversation with a friend about some of my travel experiences out west. In particular, I was trying to describe the oddly discomfiting experience of driving east on I-80 through Wyoming. She mentioned a friend who'd had a similar experience once, and the conversation then shifted to Mr. Gaiman's book, in which the main character undergoes many peculiar adventures in a series of road trips. One of the novel's conceits is that roadside attractions in America often disguise places of ancient power, places where people feel compelled to stop without knowing why.

In my case, the drive through Wyoming, a harsh landscape with (to my Eastern eyes, anyway) remarkably few people, was punctuated by road signs referring to a place called Little America, which seemed to be the Western version of Stuckey's, those gift shops (famous for peanut brittle) one used to encounter off the interstate on trips to Florida. I couldn't quite make out what Little America was known for, though it seemed to be a kind of inn. It may have been a trick of the winter light or tired eyes, but all the signs I saw were a bit on the oafish side, as if the advertising agency had a strange sense of humor. I later read on someone's blog that Little America is known for ice cream, admittedly not a big draw in winter.

When at last I came up to Little America, it was on the opposite side of the road, and--as happened frequently on my trip across Wyoming--there wasn't a person in sight, just a sort of sprawling building. I hurried past it, but that wasn't the only time that day that I passed some small town or other and wondered, "Where are all the people?" Often, these tiny burgs had the look of ghost towns or movie sets, a phenomenon that persisted across much of Colorado and Kansas. I stayed on the road rather than spend the night in any of these places--so I actually had the opposite experience from the tourists in Mr. Gaiman's book.

I wasn't really sure re-reading American Gods would give me insight into my experience, but I was mildly curious to see what Mr. Gaiman made of the American road trip. It's been many years since I first read American Gods, and I didn't remember it well. As it turns out, the book I read this time was not even the same book, not entirely, since Mr. Gaiman put out a revised author's preferred edition some time ago, and that's the one the library had. I'm not even sure where the differences are, though the preface mentions that the preferred edition is longer than the original. The experience of revisiting a familiar book after a long period of time to find it utterly changed is compounded in this case by the fact that the text actually has changed. So, that's one thing.

I remembered American Gods as being offbeat and strange but humorous; this time I found it much less funny. When I first read it, I hadn't yet made a formal study of mythology but was interested in any story that incorporated mythological characters. Mythology is quite trendy these days, but when I first read the book there didn't seem to be that many people doing it, or doing it well; I found American Gods to be wildly imaginative and original. I still think that, though I am somewhat surprised not to have realized back then that the genre of the book isn't really fantasy but rather horror. It's one of those stories that are hard to categorize, and I believe it has won major awards in several categories, but still--it's a horror story more than it's anything else.

The novel is complex and sprawling, with a large number of characters, and Mr. Gaiman seems to be doing several things at once. The protagonist, a man named Shadow, becomes entangled in the plot of a character called Wednesday (actually a god) to round up all the old gods of culture and religion, living in American under assumed names and disguises, for an epic confrontation with the new gods of media and technology. His ostensible purpose is not his true one, and Shadow realizes this in time to foil Wednesday's ultimate design, though his own life has in the meantime completely unraveled--due, it turns out, to Wednesday's machinations.

Much is made in the novel about America being "a bad place for gods," which is not perhaps surprising, since most of the gods in the story are transplants from other cultures, arriving here in the minds and hearts of immigrants from those lands and trying to make a go of it on foreign soil. One implication seems to be that American culture is too shallow to support them, that Americans are too taken up by television, pop culture, and other diversions to give proper consideration to the sacred. While recognizing that pervasive materialism is a fact of American life (though not the only fact), I'm much less convinced this time around that most of these gods deserve any pity. Their main raison d'etre is a constant need for attention and adoration, which becomes the excuse for all kinds of bloody-mindedness and cruelty. If we're supposed to think it's a tragedy that they've been diminished, I must say I came away with the opposite feeling.

Shadow is a curious kind of a hero. Though he ostensibly saves the day by averting the war between the old gods and the new, he takes the ruin of his own life with much less bitterness than you might expect. It's not clear in the end that he himself is still human . . . he seems to have gone at least partially over to the other side. He solves the mystery of what has been happening over the years to the children who have disappeared from the small Wisconsin town he settles in and in the process reveals the crusty town father to be just another murderous divinity in disguise. After so much death and destruction at the hands of these folks, you might think Shadow would be delighted to get away from them for good, but it's not entirely clear that he feels that way. It's a bit like Chaucer's narrator disavowing, at the very end, all the bawdy stories he's repeated in The Canterbury Tales. You suspect him of being disingenuous.

The name "Shadow" could be taken as an indicator that the character, largely unconscious of what is happening around him in the beginning, is much less so by the end of the story. It might be going too far to say that he's an "Everyman," standing in for the average American consumer who lives in a shallow, material world and grows in consciousness by getting in touch with the ancient powers both around him and within him--but there are some indications that this is the point. It's less clear what Shadow has actually accomplished. There are many images of suffering and death in the book, and much gruesomeness, and it all seems rather gratuitous after a while. I finished the book with the feeling that I had something on the bottom of my shoe that needed to be scraped off.

Mr. Gaiman mentions some roadside attractions that are apparently quite real, though Little America isn't one of them. There is a scene in which some mysterious characters temporarily imprison Shadow in a cell until he is freed by his wife, who's been turned into a zombie (don't ask if you don't want to know). When he escapes, he realizes he's been on a train parked in a remote area. Coincidentally, I noticed a freight train out in the wilds of Wyoming, the only thing moving in the whole landscape aside from the vehicles on the interstate, and wondered where it was going in all that remoteness. It might have been the train to nowhere and would easily have fit into Mr. Gaiman's story. The bleakness that adheres to many of Mr. Gaiman's locales matched what I saw through my car window, though I suspect my experience might have been different under different circumstances. If I ever revisit that area, I may try a Native American blessing--maybe that would frame things differently.

Next time I'm trying to put my own travels in perspective, I'll have to remember not to turn to a horror story. Things are bad enough without that. I feel sure there are other narratives out there, other ways to look at the land that neither sugarcoat the past or excuse it but allow us to see it for itself. If Mr. Gaiman's book is a map of a certain kind of journey, I feel sure it's not the only one available. It certainly isn't one I want to take.