reviewed by Kent Chadwick
If books were excursions, The Living, Annie Dillard's best-selling first novel, would be a three-week backpack through the Cascades. It sharpens your vision, strengthens your heart and puts the Northwest in proper perspective. Now, in its paperback release, it fits in your backpack.
Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a nonfiction meditation on the valley where she lived in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a clear-eyed, yet mystical view of the natural world's terrible beauty.
That same year, Dillard moved to Bellingham to teach at what was then Western Washington State College. During the next five years, she turned her absorbing, idiosyncratic gaze on Whatcom County, Washington and the San Juan Islands: "I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly," Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine."
The Living puts Dillard's trivia machine to good use, for it is an intricately detailed novel of the European-American settling of Bellingham Bay from 1855 to 1897. Dillard has successfully shifted her style from the detailed facts of prose to the factual details of fiction, and has blended her meditations with great acts of imagination.
Structured not as a generational saga but as a kaleidoscope of life, The Living moves in and out of characters' fields of vision - their thoughts, their work, their memories, their wisdom or ignorance, their vanities, their very vocabulary - creating a textured mosaic with historical depth.
In the solid tradition of Willa Cather, and more recently of Ivan Doig, Dillard has written a pioneer story freed of American mythology. She understands with historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, the author of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, that "the history of the West is a study of a place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences."
Dillard captures in lucid prose the booms and busts; the rivalry of new towns like Whatcom, Seattle, Tacoma, each lobbying for a railroad terminus; the early, hard-scrabble lives, which ring as true as the historical accounts a scholar like Susan Armitage records in The Women's West.
Ada Fishburn and her family form the first design in the story. Her losses start early - her favorite boy is crushed by their family's wagon on the overland journey - and continue as she loses another child and outlives two husbands.
Her first, Rooney Fishburn, lays claim to 320 acres in the dark forests they find so oppressive, and begins the settlers' self-appointed task : "to crack the dome of shade and help the sunlight down."
Her son Glee takes to salmon fishing, courts the niece of a notorious Seattle madam for two years, wins her, then sickens of her and sails "away every possible day."
Her son Clare enjoys "enjoyment." He is the settlement's Everyman, confident in the belief that "he would do, succor, conquer, succeed." But a death threat at the center of the story cracks his blissful unconsciousness and teaches him that, "he had lost the fight with vainglory, and the fight with ignorance, for what he now guessed must be the usual reason: he had not known there was a fight on."
Dillard's technique draws wonderful ironies from the cultural misunderstandings between native Indians and immigrants. When Chowitzit, the Lummi chief, is reluctant to receive treatment for his illness from Lura Rush, the settlement's doctor, nurse, dentist and surgeon, Ada Fishburn thinks to herself how, "To prevent pneumonia [Lura] plastered rib cages with chopped-up onions. For measles, she fed her patients a roasted mouse, and Ada herself had seen it work in Clare and Glee both. It was a pity Chowitzit was superstitious."
The Living is a novel of death: the harsh destruction of the Lummi and Nooksack world; the use and abuse of Chinese men as immigrant laborers; one character's quest to draw power from death; the way death "mowed the generations raggedly and out of order" so that "the world just disappeared from your side ... the people you knew were above the surface one minute, and under it the next, as if they had burst through ice."
It builds upon Dillard's earlier paradox in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me ... The words are simple, the concept clear - but you don't believe it, do you? Nor do I. How could I, when we're both so lovable?"
In facing death Dillard's characters stumble their way towards life lessons. In the same way, through the magic of art, The Living, so chock full of death, becomes food for the soul. Old Ada Fishburn, before she takes to the family parlor to die with time on her hands, scatters the town crowd as she takes one final, stride-legged, bareback gallop down a moonlit beach.
Kent Chadwick, lives in Florence, Ore., with his wife Cathy and their son Luke.
Reliving Washington's Prohibition Hangover
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Prohibition and Social Change in Washington by Norman H. Clark University of Washington Press, 1988 332 pages |
reviewed by Doug Lauen
Although never big sellers at bookstores, a social history in the hands of a good writer can give you ample ammunition for all those awkward situations at cocktail parties.
For example, say you've read The Dry Years, Prohibition and Social Change in Washington, by Norman H. Clark. You're in the food line and you mention to the person beside you that until 1960 the word cocktail could not be used in advertising in the state of Washington; that it wasn't until 1980 that a drinking establishment was allowed by the State Control Board to include the word saloon in its name. You go on to say that until the early '60s, you were not allowed to drink while standing, carry your drink away from the table or bar and that women were not permitted to sit at the bar (only tables).
Now if that isn't enough to start a conversation, either you have the social skills of Bob Dole or you should rest assured that the person you've been trying to engage just isn't worth it.
Washington outlawed liquor and beer in 1914, four years before the rest of the country in an initiative that drew 94.6 percent voter turnout. No election, initiative or referendum has ever surpassed this figure. While this certainly shows how strongly people in Washington cared about this issue at the time, I also think it indicates that liquor - and the prohibition and regulation of it - is an issue crucial to understanding the American consciousness.
It seems like this was Clark's hunch as well when he set off to write The Dry Years. He was caught up, as most of the country is, in the gangster mystique of the bootlegging 1920s. He initially wrote a chapter on the exploits of Roy Olmstead, the most famous rumrunner in the region, but eventually decided to follow the trail of Prohibition all the way back to the early 1800s when fur traders began exchanging pelts for liquor with the local Indians. Clark's chapter, titled "The Rumrunner," remains in the final product but is significantly different in tone from the rest - more like a story than a history.
Clark is at his best when analyzing the period from 1880-1914. Here he lays bare the relationship between abolitionist fervor and social class, what is essentially the thesis, or finding, of his study: that prohibition was a victory of the newly-emerging middle class, searching for respectability and trying to differentiate itself from the proclivities of the "lower classes." Clark documents the dogged determination of the temperance forces to rid their cities and neighborhoods of the scourge of alcohol.
This class conflict lives on and was quite evident during the fight to save the Blue Moon Tavern in the U-District in 1990. (Walt Crowley's book about the tavern, Forever Blue Moon would be a perfect 18th chapter to Clark's Dry Years.)
Clark's book will give readers the social and historical context to deconstruct a controversy like this. The book provides readers with a slew of information about the history of prohibition through a number of methods - anecdote, political analysis, sociological research and quotes from temperance speeches and newspaper editorials.
Throughout, Clark's commentary synthesizes his research while allowing the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. The Dry Years also gives us a hint why it is easier to get cafe lattŽ than beer in Seattle. The Rev. Mark A. Mathews, one of the early 20th century's most eloquent and influential temperance evangelists, preached that liquor
takes the kind, loving husband and father, smothers every spark of love in his bosom, and transforms him into a heartless wretch, and makes him steal the shoes from his starving babe's feet to find the price for a glass of liquor. It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot.
In place of saloons, Mathews proposed coffee houses:
The coffee house substitute for the saloon is not intended as a hoboes' resort nor a pauperizing institution. It is a legitimate, respectable place for any man who desires to enter, read the papers, study the magazines, inform himself on current literature and write a letter home to his aged mother, who anxiously watches the footsteps of the coming and going postman for some tidings of her lost boy.
Doug Lauen, editor of Seattle Arts, the Seattle Arts Commission newsletter, is a Seattle area writer and critic.
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Contents on this page were published in the September , 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1993 WFP Collective, Inc.