Sea Room, by Adam Nicolson

            In the summer of 1937 Adam Nicolson’s father, Nigel, bought the Shiant Isles from one Colonel Macdonald for the sum of 1400 pounds.  Nigel eventually bestowed the three Hebridean islands on his son Adam, and Adam plans in turn to gift them to his son, Tom.

            I use the word, “gift,” rather than “give,” purposefully here because the islands represent far more than three pieces of real estate just off the coast of Lewis.  They are weighted with history, memory, and the kind of holiness that comes only with an intense love of the land.  Like the Viking torc found in the Shiant seas, the gift of these islands carries a wish for an alliance and a connection — a hope that Adam’s son and the visitors who are always welcome there will see in the islands what Adam sees and cherish them in part for the reasons he cherishes them.

            The book, Sea Room, is, in kind, Nicolson’s gift to the reader.  It is an exploration of the interwoven dimensions of the islands, from their botany, ornithology, and geology to their habitation, legend, and archeology. The book, however, is far more than a travelogue or description of place.  It is a meditation crafted with such skill and thoughtfulness that each time I have read the work, I have taken at least a month to read it….  Time must be spent in rereading passages that seem so right that I wonder why I’ve never thought to view things in just that way.  Time must be spent gazing inwardly — picturing the sheep hunkering in the driving rain, or the “branched orchids” and “stars of tormentil” hedging thick in the summer grass.

            As with most gifted writers, Nicolson is a man you have mental conversations with.  Turning the pages of Sea Room, I imagine myself sitting with the author before the fire, discussing how it is possible to know a place so well that its stones and rivulets and sounds seem a pattern in the blood.  “I have felt at times,” Nicolson says in his opening paragraphs, that there is “no gap between me and the place.  I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have had no existence apart from it.  I have been shaped by those island times….”

            “Me too!” I would exclaim.  “I knew the high mountain ranges where I spent the first twenty years of my life in that same way.”  And then I’d say, “Remember where Tennyson says ‘I am a part of all that I have met/Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades/Forever and forever when I move…?’”

            What makes Sea Room so special is that Nicolson, as he lays each aspect of the islands over another, moves from the particular to the universal so easily.  He provides an arch through which the reader may review and reassess his own experiences.

            One of my favorite parts of the book is where Nicolson describes the puffins with their “stiff and predictable” sociability and ritual “dance of stamping feet.”  Another favorite is the place where he muses about the ship builder John MacAulay.  His “austerity,” Nicolson says, “lay like an acid on the page.”  It “was a guarantee of his seriousness.”  Nicolson has MacAulay build a ship for him so that , rather than being ferried to the Shiants, Nicolson can sail to them himself.   For “an island,” he says, “can only be known and understood if the sea around it is known and understood.”  This makes perfect sense to me.

            In its comprehensive approach to the Shiants, to island life and a way of perception and recollection, Sea Room is an enrichment and, I think, a contemplative experience that the reader will long remember.

            — For a link to Adam Nicolson’s Shiant webpage, please see "Sites I Visit" further down on the blog.

Nothing So Absolute as Hope: A Consideration of Kay Boyle

Years ago I made a bargain with myself that I would only consider troubles that I had the power to address.  The larger issues in the world where people were starving, and dieing in the abattoirs of genocide, I set aside.  I wrote the occasional letter and contributed when I could to worthy organizations that I hoped would fight in my place for decent living conditions and the right to live without terror.  I joined Amnesty International.  I gave money whenever anyone asked me for spare change, and protested for peace when the protest wasn’t too dangerous or too far away.

            This bargain that I made was an uneasy one, and I finally recognized the deception and convenience of its strictures upon reading the short stories and novels of Kay Boyle.  Kay Boyle, in her writings, takes a moral stance, and in full recognition of all the bewildering currents and complexities of daily living, forces the reader to make a choice.  She assaults our sleep, said William Carlos Williams in early recognition of Boyle’s capacity to block off all routes of evasion.  “And for that reason,”  Williams said, her stories would “not succeed in America; they [would be] lost, damned.”

            While it is true, however, that Boyle is not as frequently read as her contemporaries, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce, those readers who do find their way to her works, whether through happenstance or recommendation, are invariably changed.  Through an almost dogged persistence, Boyle makes us step out of the boundaries of who we are.  This is not to say that her stories are simplistic.  If they were, they would not have the power to affect us.  Rather, through the juxtaposition of metaphor and counterpoint, she leads the reader to a dilemma and then trusts him to see the ramifications of failing to consider.

            Because there is so much brutality in the world (brutality that Boyle witnessed in pre-war France and post-war Germany), brutality runs like a bright red thread through her stories.  Because those who do see are often stymied by the enormity and complexity of the problems, Boyle’s protagonists are often ineffectual.  Take for instance, the teacher in “Life being the Best,” who proffers biblical stories to combat the injustices in a peasant boy’s life.  Take the administrator in  Generation without Farewell who wishfully believes that creating a place where soldiers can listen to Beethoven will heal the scars of occupied Germany.  There is “nothing so absolute as hope” in Kay Boyle’s stories, but there is a thoughtfulness and a determination not to look away.

            Perhaps Boyle’s stance is best revealed in her story, “Seven Say You Can Hear Corn Grow.”  Here, a boy named Dan recounts a newspaper story to his mother, relentlessly forging on even when she tells him she wants him to stop.  A horse being transported in an airplane has gone berserk.  He is rearing in terror, striking the enclosure with his hooves.  The pilot cannot quiet him, and he fears the horse will bring the plane down.   So he takes an axe and….  The mother breaks in and tells the boy that she doesn’t want to hear it.  “You have to hear it,”  the boy says.  “If you don’t know whether you’re on the side of the horse they killed or on the side of the pilot, there’s no sense trying to work out your life.  You have to decide first.”

            Boyle’s early heroes were Eugene Debs, Lola Ridge, and Upton Sinclair, all strong champions of social causes, people who worked to give a voice to those who otherwise would not be heard.  In her turn, Boyle covered the Nazi war criminal trials for the New Yorker, marched for civil rights, and protested the Viet Nam war.  She led a turbulent life, transitioning from living in a spare one room apartment with her first husband, to having an affair with a poet dieing from tuberculosis, to living in Raymond Duncan’s commune.  She was one of the “lost generation” in 1920s Paris and participated in all its excess and jaded dissolution.  She was married three times and had six children and two step children.  In her later years, she taught creative writing at San Francisco State College, though she, herself, had never had any formal education.  Throughout all of these changes in direction, she never lost her direction.  She never stopped asking the questions.

Travels with Charley and Ghost Dancing

Travels with Charley In Search of America.  By John Steinbeck

First Published: The Curtis Publishing Company, Inc. 1961

Currently available:  Penguin Books. pb., 214 pp. $15.

Blue Highways A Journey into America. By William Least Heat-Moon

First Published:  Little Brown and Company. 1982

Currently Available:  First Back Bay pb., 429 pp.  $14.95

            The travel narrative in America has a lustrous provenance.  Early visitors like Thomas Harriot and Rene de Chateaubriand, explorers like John Powell and Stephen Long, and adventurers like Jack London and Everett Ruess have all left their imprint on our national consciousness, have helped us form our thoughts about who we are and where we’re going.

            John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways are both thoughtful representatives of this genre which not only describes but which, at its best, references a larger gestalt of meaning.  Both men set out to explore the back roads of America.  Both writers regard their journey partially as an escape and partially as an exploration.  Both are well aware that the one person the traveler cannot leave behind is himself, and that what he sees and describes is characterized as much by his own personality as by chance encounters in the places he visits.

            The condition from which Steinbeck is retreating during his three month trip around America, is the encroaching infirmity of old age.  In 1959 he suffered a series of small strokes, and by setting off alone, accompanied only by a large, blue poodle named Charley, he is proving to himself that he can once again take charge of his life.  It is a gesture of courage.

            Significantly, Steinbeck names the three-quarter-ton truck that he outfits with a cabin for his expedition, after Don Quixote’s horse, Rocinate.  For, twenty-one years after its publication, the writer of Grapes of Wrath now sees Americans as obsessed with material things.  He feels that the nation has lost its way, but that the issues are too big, too complicated and amorphous for any clear solutions to present themselves.  Hence he is the idealistic Don Quixote throwing lances at windmills, and his dog Charley serves as the foil Sancho Panza for comic relief.

            In a series of fugue-like essays distilled from his experiences, he mulls over the plasticizing of  America, the disappearance of regional speech, the advent of mobile homes, free-floating anxiety over nuclear capability, and a bleak environmental future (yes, even then).  Interspersed between these musings are some wonderful descriptions which are indelibly Steinbeck’s.  He describes people, for instance, who “are folded over their coffee cups like ferns,” and a place where the “darkling water seems to suck up the light.”  Like any good travel writer, Steinbeck makes us want to go where he has been.  His haunting characterization of Deer Isle had me hunched over my computer for hours looking at beaches and driftwood and wind-blasted trees.  I’d rent a cabin on the isle in an instant, based on nothing more than Steinbeck’s recommendation.

            An idea may grow hidden in the mind until an event or trauma gives it compelling impetus.  As a young man in the navy, William Least Heat-Moon had read Steinbeck’s best-seller, Travels with Charley, but it wasn’t until sixteen years later, with only some gasoline credit cards and $454 dollars to his name, that Least Heat-Moon left home to follow in the spirit of Steinbeck’s journey.

            Least Heat-Moon had just learned that he had lost his job teaching college English and that his estranged wife was living with someone else.  Partly in flight from the upheaval of his “cancelled expectations,” and partly in a quest to define what he, himself, values,  Least Heat-Moon hits the road on the vernal equinox of 1978 to circle the nation on its back roads, the roads represented by the blue lines on the maps of America.  The vehicle that he chooses is a half-ton van that he names Ghost Dancing.

            As with Steinbeck’s Rocinate, this choice of names for his vehicle is significant, representing for Least Heat-Moon a past beyond redeeming.  But against the author’s expectations, the journey changes and renews him, and the reader, along for the ride, is treated to some of the most exquisite prose in the English language.

            Right off, in the beginning of his narrative, Least Heat-Moon recalls his father’s observation that “a man becomes his attentions.”  What Least Heat-Moon pays attention to is the geography and the history of a place and how they form or erode the individuals within it.  He is interested in what motivates people, from a former policeman turned Trappist monk, to a couple building a boat by hand, to a man who carries a live bullet in his breast pocket.  He is interested in why a road pike is called a pike and how the number of calendars hung on a café wall may be used to predict the food quality, and how towns like Babylon, Decoy, Bear Wallow, and Remote got their names.  Most of all, he is interested in the finely crafted sentence, and it is his skill with language which allows William Least Heat-Moon to rivet the reader right there with him following “a curve so long” that you cannot “see the bend.”