In Perelandra, the most appealing temptation turns the Lady’s desire to give herself into suicide. She was to take the fault for everyone else, become Joan of arc, accept that her gift was so great, so wise, that no one would understand it – which was itself the greatest sacrifice of all.
Charity Lang falls in to that trap. The final movements of Crossing to Safety center on her scramble for control in the face of metastasized stomach cancer.
Greater than faith, greater than hope, is Charity, who believes digging in and leaving no room for naysayers will prevent anything from going contrary to her ideas about it.
The writing is stellar. Stegner is caught between Walden Pond and Delphi, and comes to the conclusion that they aren’t so different after all. I love the shop talk— teaching, poetry, classics, weather, long drives, the overt symbolism of wondering through the dark wood. He has something to say about everything and doesn’t miss the opportunity to say it in a way that makes you feel better for reading his opinion.
But this is still a story – and a tricky one at that. He knows when he says non-fiction is truth telling lies and fiction is a lie telling truth. This novel is fiction set as non-fiction. It aims at the complicated tangle of life at discovers that people are, well, complicated. Is this a lie that comes out as a truth?
Everything is Everything
The imagery is on the nose. He is not hiding – he talks about the serpent in paradise, Paradise Lost, the paradise of their little pond. This is an idiom story. And Charity is the fallen ideal - she is cursed. Her desire is for Sid and she dominates him - to her own grave. Larry sees it, and once he knows the end, he sees it as a factor in every story. Charity tries to make some thing of her husband and as a result makes him impotent.
Like Adam in the garden, he has an option to not take the fruit has wife offers him, but he would rather chose death with her than life dealing with the serpent in her.
It does catch the power of the stories we tell about others. If we lie about others to ourselves, we make a story into them that is not true. We can only hurt them and ourselves. This makes you wonder what kind of story Larry is trying to make his friends be. Or, if giving himself Satan’s view on his friends nakedness in the woods, he is noting that he could be doing the same to their lives’ nakedness.
Tradition
Back to Delphi, Sally seems to symbolize the old tradition, the Greek readers, and she’s the lover that sings Homer. She has to be loved. She’s the old world and thrives there. It is in Larry’s thesis struggles and teaching, and the chasing of tenure that she’s nearly killed, twice. Sid – Thoreau or Adam – whisks her away - also twice. It is only when she is inextricably linked to Larry, where she breathes into, edits, and protects his work, that his writing sings.
Charity parallels the mechanistic modern industrial school as well, driving her husband towards the tenure track and acting as if, when the checklist is finished, it would produce a tenure. That she is wrong seems to show Stegner’s hand a bit on what kind of world they are in.
Sally Beyond the Story
I don’t like this book but I’m resting in the upheaval. Because I think Stegner as Larry is imaginatively constructing their lives like Charity did their days. He settling everything in narrative like Charity did with her list — Down to every declared image and defined connection. Sally cannot be crushed by it because she’s outside and beyond it; she is the editor here. She receives Larry’s work and sends it back to him to improve. She did not fix it. Charity never received her husband‘s work. It’s always her idea, her measuring stick with a crack over the knuckles when Sid stepped out of line.
These are two well matched women and in my earlier analogy of the larger woman providing the mead for everyone else to drink, it seems obvious everyone is drinking Charity’s Kool-aide until they are in Italy free. Then all the Italians adore Sally, and resonate with her.
Or these are two small ladies loving in a wider world where they provide their own cup to whoever is around and it is either life or death.
In the end Charity drinks her own brew and sees clearly what she has done.
I will keep this novel, and even follow my husband around the house to read the long road trip after summer term aloud, but the ending makes me sick.
Further Up and Further In
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