Reading Note:
Grace
19 February 2015
Yesterday, I re-read Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, published 35 years ago. All I remembered from the first reading, aside from the colossal buzz — colossal, that is, for a story set in Middle of Nowhere, Idaho — was a flood, some strange (but not at all sexual) relations among women, and a long bridge over a lake. I had no idea of what happened. And, again because of the setting, I had an impression of the surreal, because what could happen way out there? I came to the book a compleat Eastern snob. Ah, yute. Wasted on the &c.
1980 was a busy year for me. Getting out of law school, coming back to New York, studying for (and passing!) the Bar exam, finding a job; living, even, in Park Slope — perhaps I wasn’t equipped to give Housekeeping the attention it deserves. Perhaps it would be better to say that I read Robinson’s novel for the first time yesterday. Anyway, I read it and it was moving and luminous and all that; but I understand why Robinson took so long to produce another novel (Gilead, 2004). It was not so much a matter of craft. Robinson didn’t need to learn anything about telling a story. Nor was it a matter of courage, as I thought when I read each of the three later novels (Gilead was followed in 2008 by Home and in 2014 by Lila). All the courage in the world — in Robinson’s case, the determination to buck the adamant secularism of literary fiction — would not have seen those novels through to publication, much less won the critical acclaim that they received. It was a matter of purification, of concentration. Robinson taught herself, with perhaps a little help from Jean Cauvin (known to us as John Calvin), as well as from William Tyndale and the translators who succeeded him in the production of what became known as the Geneva Bible, to write about her Christian faith with the radical simplicity of Scripture. I can’t imagine that this process of purification could have been sped up by so much as a day.
So I am not going to say very much about Housekeeping. I understand the title now, I think, and it reminds me, of all things, of Wendy Doniger’s insistent way, in The Hindus — now a banned book in India — of calling Brahmins housekeepers, as if there were something wrong with being one. As indeed there is, from the spiritual point of view. I’ll come back to that in a minute. Housekeeping is largely about a grown woman’s lack of interest in domestic matters beyond the raw basics of food, clothing, and shelter. She recognizes these as needs, and does not try to transform them into arts. In the end, when the woman is about to be found unfit, by the community in which she lives, to raise her niece, she flies away, as the niece has expected her to do since her very arrival.
You can see the miracle of Lila beneath the pages, but only because you know that it will happen. Housekeeping does not really foreshadow it. Robinson already makes a connection between hobos, “transients,” vagrants, whatever you want to call them, and Christian pilgrims — Christians, that is, who follow Christ’s call to resist attachment to this world. There is a powerfully homely, one-paragraph account of Jesus’ career in Chapter 10, which is followed by an even more powerful distillation of the relationship between the guardian and her niece. (“She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her — this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.”) But what is missing is precisely what makes Lila the breathtakingly great American novel that it is: the gift of grace. At the risk of being blunt and perhaps tone-deaf, I should say that grace unites love and forgiveness (they are not two sides of the same coin) in a way that connects human beings without attachment. Robinson hints at it, as we might see in retrospect, when she has the niece, Ruth, say that her aunt, Sylvie, “gave almost no thought to me at all,” but as hints go, this is somewhat paradoxical.
Grace, to be extraordinarily specific and personal (I hope), is what keeps a marriage fresh after thirty-odd years, and you must pray for it as best and as ardently as you can. Grace is what keeps a marital vow from taking on the dead weight of duty. It is love — but whose love for whom, I shan’t presume to say. For grace is certainly a mystery.
***
In English, we have a commonsense critical term for domestic mania: we call it playing house. Playing house is of course what children do when they set out to imitate their parents. But it is also what adults do when their housekeeping loses touch with basic needs, and begins to impose conflicting “needs” of its own. Playing house as an adult leads to a failure of the generosity that ought to be housekeeping’s principal virtue. And every housekeeper is a sinner. Good housekeeping seeks to provide the basic human creatural needs in a way that erases the anxiety of need. Kitchens are well-stocked; clothes and bedding are clean and, to make that cleanliness visible, pressed; and houses are kept ship-shape. The overall idea is to make a house inviting. The moment this invitation becomes too fussy, or makes demands upon the invitees, it becomes forbidding, the very opposite of inviting.
The moment housekeeping becomes in any way forbidding, it also becomes a threat to the spirit of those who maintain the house, and a challenge to the spirit of those who enter it. This is the impossible aspect of housekeeping — impossible as love is impossible. For how do you oversee the provision of utterly material goods without becoming attached, not so much to those goods, as to your own ability to provide them? How do you learn not to take personal credit for your own good housekeeping? Wendy Doniger does not think that Brahmins have done a very good job of resisting these credits and attachments, which may be partial explanation of the ban of her book.
And how do you reconcile the requirements of good housekeeping with the needs of people who don’t belong to the household, people who pass by — people who may just be, beneath layers of dirt and grime, Jesus?