Margotlog: Oh, the Struggles That Were Ours

Margotlog: Oh, the Struggles That Were Ours

Nothing like a trip far north, to the shores of Lake Superior, where you can almost see the earth curve, to clear the mind of minutiae and pour in new food for thought. Waking at 5 a.m. with the sun just blushing over the rim, sends the mind looping far and wee (lifting a tiny phrase from ee cummings). And I'm in South Africa in the 1950s and 60s when the struggle against apartheid sends a white, British/South African couple, the Bernsteins, fleeing across a barbed-wire frontier into Botswana. Or I'm in Nantucket--the New England Island off the coast of Cape Cod, one of the strangest hooks in world geography. It's the 1850s. Several abolitionist white families are hiding an African-American couple escaped from slavery in the U.S. south. The escaped slaves have been living in the "Guinea" island community for several years before slave owners with a U.S. marshal come after them under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

The Bernsteins' story was told by the wife, Hilda, in a book republished recently by Persephone, dedicated to reprinting forgotten modern British classics. "The World That Was Ours" recounts an extraordinary South African family who function in many ways as ordinary citizens: husband an architect, wife a journalist, four children who romp in a swimming pool, resist going to bed, learn to read. The Bernsteins have joined the Communist Party, she explains, because it is the only party that bring blacks and white together as equals. I stop for a moment and contemplate this: Communism in the United States was so tainted in the 50s by the McCarthy witch hunt and the Cold War that many Americans lost an awareness of its earlier, wider appeal. Many prominent American intellectuals joined the Communist Party before World War II because it was a world-wide organization that stood for equality and economic justice among all peoples.

In South Africa economic and political justice were essentially the same thing: The Afrikaner government trampled black workers' economic rights by segregating them into all-black communities, then sending police to dispossess families of their homes (often what we'd call shacks) and herd male workers into camps where the food and living conditions were substandard and the pay abysmal. Many protesters, including Randy Bernstein and Nelson Mandela, were held in solitary confinement for 90 days without a hearing, before these trials. Though the case against Bernstein was not made sufficiently to keep him in prison--there was actually a rather dispassionate judge--Bernstein was immediately apprehended again, but released on bail. Mandela's sentence of life-imprisonment was confirmed. Escape for the Bernsteins was a desperate last-act, fraught with the possibility of recapture as they waited in parched Botswana, having left their younger children with their oldest, married daughter. In Botswana, the Bernsteins were still dependent on the alert care of strangers to snatch them from capture by the Gestapo-like South African police.

In South Africa under apartheid, many whites remained apathetic, fearful, and uninvolved. It was dangerous, as the Bernstein's story discloses, to act on behalf of a group of people whom the regime of Dutch-South Africans was systematically determined to reduce to slavery in all but name. Likewise in the Nantucket of the 1850s, many god-fearing and law-abiding residents upheld the Fugitive Slave Law and delayed integrating public schools (despite a legal ruling by state courts against segregation). The local mail carrier delivered the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator with tongs. He would not touch it.

I find it very salutary to revisit the controversy around fugitive slaves who had escaped from slavery and moved to states where blacks were not immediately impounded into slavery. Reviewing some of this history points out for me the enormous divide not only between slave-owners and non, but between those who used religion (often Quakers and Unitarians) to resist enslaving other human beings and those (almost all Christian denominations in the slave-holding South) who used religion to support slavery. Looking back also emphasizes that the battle for freedom was also fought in the courts: The Fugitive Slave Law allowed a slave owner to "track down" with the assistance of a U.S. marshal any so-called slave reputed to have escaped. It opened up to capture many freed slaves who had moved North. Then, the Missouri Supreme Court got into the conflict, ruling in 1850 that any slave, voluntarily transported by his or her owner into "free territory" was free. This was eventually overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War.

Nantucket because of its enormously important whaling industry attracted many black men who escaped slavery, but didn't care to try their freedom by living on American soil. They took to the sea, where as Herman Melville's richly evocative novel "Moby Dick," 1850 makes plain, the crews of whaling ships came from around the globe. In fact, Ishmael, Melville's main character, signs on as a whaler from Nantucket. With this wind-swept history, far from shore, it's not surprising that many fugitives from slavery found a supportive black community, nor that well-to-do white ship-owners, merchants, and retired seamen chose to black people who were plagued by the Fugitive Slave Law.

As we struggle through a period of intense partisanship, economic trouble, and extreme political behavior, I muse about how often in our history appeals to "higher laws" have come from both sides of a debate, how the path to change almost always has occurred through wide swings among divergent positions, and how individuals with courage and commitment to equality and a broad definition of human good have ultimately made an enormous difference.

Margotlog: A Young Oceanographer

Margotlog: A Young Oceanographer

Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, we built huge drip castles with moats and added draw bridges of shells. On the edge of the foamy tide, we raced and felt the ridges in the sand with our bare feet. Our father stood with his trousers rolled and cast his line with its reel spinning into deeper water. I don't remember he caught anything. We caught a love of ocean and wide horizons, pelicans skimming the waves, little sandpipers racing with incredibly speed in and out of the foam.

Now, midcontinent, I'm trying to impart that love of ocean to my husband's first grandson. Let's call him Jules, for the fun of it. He's a wild, adorable lad, born early and fast to catch his father and grandfather's love of sports. Among the T-ball kids, five and under, Jules is the only one who understands to race toward a base after hitting the ball.

But sports get you only so far. He needs another passion or two. It helps that he's been swimming since before he could walk. So the love of water is there. After our winter trip to Sanibel Island, off the western coast of Florida, I brought him home a bag of purchased shells from around the world, plus a sandy mix from the shell beach on Sanibel. A few months ago we hunkered down in my Saint Paul back yard and washed the shells in a dish tub. We named some we could, we counted and recounted, we chatted about the ocean. "I want to go to the ocean," said Jules, and I said, "Ok, when you're 8 and your younger brother is five." Nope, not soon enough. "When I'm five and Noddy is three." That's soon, that's next winter. Hmmm. This is a passion, I thought.

Next time around, we washed a handfull of shells that were lounging in a corner of the basement. Jules kept holding one up and asking, "Is this a scallop? Is this a clam?" I thought maybe so, but wasn't sure. My shell-naming days are long gone. So a shell book was crucial.

Now a detour for a movie review. In the scalding heat of midcontinent yesterday, husband and I took ourselves to the air-conditioned movie theater to see "Tree of Life." It has gotten good reviews, though with the comments that it's hard to know, moment to moment, what the film is up to. After minutes of rather cardboardy characters, with drifty sadness on their faces, and even longer minutes of exploding volcanos, undersea caverns, and who knows what else, we got up and left. Too "trippy" said husband. Too vague, said I. Characters too indistinct. We have no history, no reason to feel their sadness with them.

Ok, now what. We were near Half-Priced books in Highland. Picking our way through panting groups at Highland Fest, we found the kids books section where I sat on the floor before the nature books. There were fancy "pull-out" books and bigger busy ocean and seashore books. Husband found a true-blue shell identification book with pictures on one page and scientific names on the facing--perhaps too adult. We'd take it but keep it at our house for perusal together. For Jules, I put aside the "pull-out" fancy books, thinking a kid would learn two things, to pull and to look. Not enough. Give me the busy books with lots to search and learn, time after reading time. We are now considering how to incorporate this young nautical explorer on our next Sanibel get-away, enough time with him, then enough time alone to restore ourselves from the winter blahs. If those ever come again.

Margotlog; Shakespeare on the Mississippi

Margotlog: Shakespeare on the Mississippi

The Mississippi Flyway, it's called--that rather wide band of north-south air traffic from the top of Lake Superior down the Minnesota and Wisconsin watershed to the huge Mississippi delta, including its many tributary deltas like the Yazoo, home of Eudora Welty's delicious Mississippi creations, starting with her first novel "Delta Wedding." Last summer, in the agony of the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I watched loons swimming in Lake Superior and hoped against hope that they'd not get fouled by oil in their winter sojourn.

I don't know much of the Mississippi Flyway south of our northern tier, but I was fascinated a few days ago to find white pelicans congregated on sandbars below the dam at Red Wing where the Mississippi (joined by the Minnesota River at Saint Paul and the Saint Croix at Hastings) spreads out into huge Lake Pepin. We were on our way down the flyway, crossing over the Mississippi at Hastings because of bridge repair to follow the river on the Wisconsin side. Our destination: Winona, Minnesota, named after the Dakota word for "first born girl."

Views from the Wisconsin side are even more spectacular than from the Minnesota: high bluffs framing bright shining waters, pierced by long tongues of green islands and dividing into various channels--a river glory such as Mark Twain describes in Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi.

Stopping at an artsy town named Stockholm, after its Swedish settlers, we ate incredibly rich pie in two varieties, coconut cream and peanut butter chocolate, giving tongue to Garrison Keillor's song about "pie, pie, pie," the Midwestern rural dessert par excellence. Licking our chops, we stood outside a long overhang outside the pie shop and watched swooping parent swallows bringing bugs to their huge family tucked under the eaves: three babies still perched on the nest and two others already hopping a few inches along a supporting beam. "Which are the parents and which the offspring?" one of our party asks, as we can't immediately tell fledglings from parents. "The babies' mouths are rimmed with white," I answered, proud of myself for this observation.

Imagine us as a band of rustics clustered under that rural proscenium, enacting a tale of love and woe, "Pyramus and Thisbe," based on Ovid's tale from the Metamorphoses. That tale within a tale we were soon to enjoy in the Great River Shakespeare production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It is my favorite Shakespeare play, partly because it's set in the summer woods, and its magic is bestowed on the rustics by Oberon, king of the fairies, and his goodfellow Puck. This makes for amorous and amusing entertainment, when Nick Bottom, the weaver, acquires long delicate donkey ears, which the Fairy Queen wakes to adore. By this time, we are stiffling our hilarity to see what magic fairy dust will enact next.

It's the human love quarter who are next twined and tormented as they race through the woods, only eventually to be set right by Oberon and Puck. Nick's ears are whisked away and he and his fellow players perform the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, only to have that tragedy of star-crossed lovers pre-empted by "Wall," a rustic personifying the lovers' impediment. The players' seriousness of feeling almost trumps their absurdity. Tears of laughter and something else are running down my cheeks. The rustics are applauded, human lovers joined as they should be, and as we walk out into the night, as balmy as bath water, we hear on the radio that fairy dust has impregnated the stalemate between governor and legislature, and for better or worse, our state government will soon be working again.

All's Well that Ends Well.

Margotlog; Pilgrimage and Conquest

Margotlog: Pilgrimage and Conquest

What are the two most powerful human impulses--after food and sex? I'd vote for motion. Let's try pilgrimage and conquest. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales gives voice, certainly for the first time in English, to the charm of communal travel toward a benign goal. Then there's conquest.

I read the Canterbury Tales in the midst of one of my own most significant relocations, from the east coast of the U.S. to the midwest. We were settled briefly in Atlanta where my then husband received training in public health, his alternative to going to Vietnam. In a warm but not sweltering upstairs suite--bedroom, bath, and small sitting room--I sat at a battered desk and read Chaucer. My favorite tale was of chickens: Chantecleer and Pertelotte, sexy and wise--I was, after all, a young married. I still like birds.

Then, every evening on TV, conquest bashed us through dinner. U.S. troops invading Vietnam, scorching trees and villagers, with the "chop-chop" of helicopters. We like to think our technological advances have made war and pillage more deadly, and who could argue with Agent Orange or the atomic bomb. But for sheer, on-the-ground destruction, the 14th century was our match.

Barbara Tuchman's vivid and intensely peopled history of the 14th century, A Different Mirror, portrays both French and English knights in the 14th century, with their huge retinues of squires, etc., as pillaging for years at a time. The Black Prince from England wore out a troop of knights traisping through the south of France for 18 months or so, stealing food, burning fields and villages, sending peasants into the walled cities for protection, and eventually exhausting themselves so thoroughly that half his force of men and horses were dead of starvation. The Sieur de Coucy, Tuchman's "hero," was commissioned by Charles V of France to lead hoards of brigands (mercenaries without purpose or leader) into Switzerland, there to attempt conquest. This force, repulsed by the stalwart Swiss, returned accomplishing almost nothing except depopulating France of a dangerous, lawless class.

What with the Black Death reducing the population of Europe by half, with its recurring scourge, during the 14th century, these endless wars in the name of chivalry, along with the crusades against the "infidels," represent that era's world wars. It's no wonder that English peasants revolted in 1381, or that the last crusade of the century to oust the Turks ended in stalemate or exhaustion, and the imprisonment and death of the Sieur de Coucy.

A student of mine has just written a readers theater about women whose "men" as part of the Minnesota National Guard were deployed to Iraq for 18 months. Listening to the voices of these women reminds me of the female portion of the 14th century who, outside Chaucer's tales and a few outstanding writers, had almost no voice, lived often fiercely attenuated lives, dying of seven childbirths at age 28, a French princess married into the English nobility. It's nice to think that perhaps hermits and nuns lived longer because they renounced sex, but reading Chaucer puts that notion down. His religious women are often as lusty as their secular counterparts. Thank heaven for antibiotics and birth control, I say, and heaven help us from flood, famine, and pestilence, not to mention war.

Margotlog: One of Us

Margotlog: One of Us

What happens when a country girl who's lived and worked for years in the city returns to the country? Recently just such a girl (really she's a woman) gave a report: "'You're one of us, you're family,' my uncle and aunt told me. 'Whatever you need, let us know.'" She's talking about a small town an hour southeast of Minneapolis/Saint Paul, a community of small rolling farms and winding roads. Of Czech and German heritage, with an occasional Irish thrown in for good measure. Largely Catholic.

The city woman had found a job at a nearby college and, with no desire for a long, round-trip commute, she relocated to this town where her mother was born and grew up, the town where she was still recognized as family. "You're Irene and Jacob's daughter. You're one of us." It didn't matter that her uncle and aunt barely knew her or that her orientation had been to music and literature, politics and causes not normally espoused by these country relatives. "Whatever you need, let us know," they said and meant it.

"When I think of how their affiliations work," she said, "I see them as linear--family family family, rising up into the sky for many generations. Mine are more horizontal, across similar interests and passions to find soul mates. They privilege family. I've privileged shared points of view, political, literary, cultural." But, of course, her relatives also assume shared interests and political views--it's just that by putting family first, letting family be their touchstone, they assume that blood trounces anything learned or envisioned.

The divide occurred with her mother. As a little girl, she would leave the farm house and walk to a rise in a nearby field. From the top she would see the huge woods to the south, the silos of neighboring farms, and the haze of the Twin Cities to the north. Her parents, waiting for her to return, would ask, "What do you do up there?" A touch of fear was in their voices. She replied, "I look around." Is it any surprise that as soon as she graduated from high school, she left for the Twin Cities and never returned except for short visits?

My mother grew up in a different direction, straight west from the Twin Cities, just over the border in North Dakota--a far greater distance than the hour my friend travels to reach her family. My mother, too, glimpsed wider horizons--her mother took her for shopping trips and cultural experiences into Minneapolis where they lunched at the "Fern Room," in what was, I believe, Young Quinlan. After this very shy young thing graduated from high school--so terrified of thunderstorms that she couldn't deliver her high school commencement address-- she too went to the University of Minnesota, and though every few years, she put us, her two daughter, on the train with her for the long haul from Charleston, South Carolina, to North Dakota, there was never any thought that she would return to live in her hometown.

She had her sights set on "the East" and on Europe, on the romance of more ancient cultures, on opera, the fine arts, on literature and and travel. Her family had a more shallow setting in the Dakota small town than the young woman I've mentioned above. My grandfather had come to North Dakota from Wisconsin. There weren't aunts and uncles to welcome my mother after he was gone. Now, sixty years after his death, no one of her family still lives there. This will not be true of my friend, I suspect. Her rural relatives will remain because their tribe has deeper roots.
Aside from the interest of this personal history, I'm also thinking about its political implications, during these strained political times. I'm imagining that my friend's uncle and aunt have little awareness of urban needs. Nor do they think much about the large influx of immigrants of color into the Twin Cities over the last century, starting with African Americans from the Southern U.S., then Hispanics from Mexico, and more recently Asian and African immigrants.

Surely they understand poverty--rural poverty can be as deep and debilitating as urban. But with their narrow definition of belonging, they might not feel the need to befriend, educate and aid people with vastly different histories from their own, people who are part of the human family, but hardly blood kin. I think it's time for our governor to make a circuit of the state, to talk to communities removed from our major urban areas, and to discover what they need, and what they resist, first hand. Whether the current Republicans in control of our legislature represent these rural people, I don't know, but if the governor can speak for them, and tailor his objectives to make them palatable to a wider range of residents, he may be better able to strike a compromise, stepping away from those politics that don't touch on deep definitions of family and find purpose and plans based on those that do.

Margotlog: American Salvage

Margotlog: American Salvage

Bonnie Jo Campbell's short story collection titled American Salvage recently caught my attention because a friend of many years and few actual visits recently drove me through rural Michigan where many of the stories take place. My friend Irene (not her real name) is a social worker who's patrolled this Lake Michigan segment almost straight west from Kalamazoo. It's scrubby land, dotted with small houses, so small that in South Carolina where I grew up, we'd call them shacks. The land is good for growing blueberries and cranberries in bogs, and for boiling meth.

It's been almost twenty years since Irene and I saw each other. That previous visit we met at the Art Institute of Chicago. She took the train down from Kalamazoo, the same train that's brought me up from Union Station and will take me back. I was staying near Chicago at Ragdale, lucky to have several weeks of a writing residency. It's one thing to meet among marble pillars and Impressionist paintings, the clink of glassware and buzz of art talk; quite another to roll along through depressed territory, with Irene telling the fates of families boiled in meth.

I've occasionally had a college writing student trying to kick an addiction to meth. It's evidently one of the hardest addictions to shake because the high that comes from ingesting methamphetamine increases libido, boots performance of all kinds, and bestows boundless confidence. Yet over time, it leads to psychosis, bad teeth (sort of laughable after psychosis) and other problems. I remember my students looking worn down, probably from constant highs which didn't allow them to rest. American Salvage as a title suggests salvaging a life after such extremes, but it also suggests that these people are like metal salvage littering yards along such stretches of two-lane road--hoping someone or something would come along and find a use for them.

Irene told how meth addiction affects several generations, a parent becoming addicted, losing jobs, spouses, but stuck with children who grow up in the corners of rooms, subsisting on potato chips and pop, watching a parent run ragged into despair, hallucinations, and eventual collapse. After such a childhood, one's rather disconnected except to pop and chips, the only sure things in a wasted world.

This reminds me of the dirt-poor, share cropping families James Agee so eloquently and famously depicted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their possessions so few as to create iconic images in Walker Evans' photographs, the women worn out by 30, the men haggard or if still handsome, yet with a hunted look in their eyes. With so little and no hope of anything else, it was the rare one who grew up to other forms of possibility.

If current conditions are any clue, we will be looking at a lot more families reduced to this kind of rural poverty, subsisting if not on bread and molasses, then on pop and chips. According to my Michigan friend Irene, Bonnie Jo Campbell treats the meth families of Michigan with humor and realism. I have to read her book.

Margotlog: Pink Slips and Governing Principles

Margotlog: Pink Slips and Governing Principles

During July 4th, our national day of celebration, it was good to remember what principles guided the nation over the years. Plus, with Minnesota government shut down, it's also salutary to consider human limitations and what we need most from our joint efforts.

With that lofty opening, here are some down and dirty suggestions to our governor and legislators:
1. The two most elementary principles that government serves are sustaining joint needs. In other words, keeping the government operating in modest and meaningful ways. And two, using our resources to our best advantage. According to the state economist, shutting down the government costs Minnesota in lost revenues millions of dollars every day. Without fees from state parts, racetracks, pay lanes on highways, we lose state revenue; with state workers on furlough, we pay unemployment benefits for work not being done. With highway projects on hold, the summertime clock still keeps ticking. This is not California. Winter will come, my friends, and we will have to drive on highways still torn up. Imagine that mess when you calculate the costs of a stopped state government.

2. PINK SLIP TIME: My friend who is disabled and relies on aides to help her get up in the morning, cook, clean, shop, plus do the life-sustaining exercises which keep her mobile and relatively pain free lay awake nights as the lack of compromise ticked to a stalemate. In her anguish, of course, she talked to friends. Some who work for a care agency, helping those at the low end of the economic scale, saw PINK. They concocted pink slips with the following message on the front:
Dear Legislative Leaders:
Due to the lack of performance we hereby inform you that your services are no longer
needed. In other words, "You're Fired!" This is your official Pink Slip.
Signed, Minnesota Voters.

On the flip side of each slip was a story of someone in dire straits because of the government shut down. Here is one such story:

To Whom It May Concern:
We are a two-parent family with three children. My husband lost his employment money. I take a bus to work at my part-time job. With our lack of income we are facing eviction. My lack of bus fare is also causing problems with my job as I miss work. We use our local food shelf whenever we can, but they are also getting low on food. What will happen to my family if the state programs shut down? Please help us!

No one who's been paying attention to local and national budgetary problems argues against the need to bring government expenditures in line with income. But if reductions are too steep and income not advanced to plug holes, those like this family above will suffer the most. They live on that razor sharp divide between staving off hunger and homelessness and falling into the pit.

This is a time for compassionate austerity, and compromise. I note that compromise includes the word "promise." We elect officials who promise to work together. A functioning government is the first promise they must fulfill. At this point, they have broken that promise. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, they can shake off partisan wrangling and join hands to embrace us all.

Margotlog: How to Translate "Corporea?"

Margotlog: How to Translate "Corporea?"

In Italian "corpo" suggests the human body and a body of work; so in English we overlap the same ideas. Our bodies give birth to our work. The best poetry tilts the mind toward the body's corporeality. In Florence, recently, friends gave me a copy of a 2009 anthology titled "Corporea," a collection of poems written by iconic feminists like Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and others writing in English, familiar and equally widely known. Italian translations on the right face the English originals on the left.

Yes, I tried to appreciate the translators' skill, but ultimately I returned again and again to the originals, thrilling to the razor edge of insight and anger, the efflorescence of modern American feminism.
Marge Piercy, "Missoula Rape Poem"
There is no difference between raped
and being bitten by a rattlesnake
except that people ask of your skirt was short
and why you were out anyway...

Josephine Miles, "Conception"
Death did not come to my mother
Like an old friend.
She was a mother, and she must
Conceive him....

Lucille Clifton, "Homage to My Hips"
...they don't fit into little
pretty place, these hips
are free hips...

Adrienne Rich, "The Floating Poem"
Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine -- tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests...

I love the directness with which the writer faces the reader. There is no skirmish with fancy dancing at the border of communication. Empowerment takes up its staff and walks firmly ahead, breaking unspoken rules, praising what is often derided, entering into league with those intimacies that make so many squirm. It's what I want for my own writing, but sometimes draw back from achieving, when I seek again that shroud of interior half-lights that make a poem dense and requiring many more than a first glance to penetrate.

Why would I aim for this? Three reasons present themselves, not exhaustive, nor necessarily definitive but powerful: One: hiding is protective and I've found that feminists themselves are not always to be trusted. Human, after all, and in the real world, defensive. I've had reason to avoid placing myself too fully in their company.

Next, my mind works in a glancing, reflective, associative way which is sometimes obfuscating, sometimes intriguing. I sometimes give myself permission to take what comes to me because if I don't, I have nothing. Three, like any intense ideology (and mid-century to the 1980s feminism was both a practice and an ideology) the feminist point of view leave out lots of experience. It does not ask, for instance, right off the bat, what in the name of heaven has brought the rapist to this horrific deed. Because, of course, when Marge Piercy and other women were writing poems against rape, they were bringing to light the awful fact that women in that period were blamed for being attacked. They had to insist on the reality from the woman's point of view because that reality had been entirely obscured with blame.

Reading this wonderful collection has started me thinking about what is happening to feminism today, when my daughter and step-daughter, my women students and younger colleagues are trying to make their way. Meanwhile I applaud the Italian feminist poetry collective that has brought out this anthology, and wish with a loss bordering on anguish that we, too, in the United States could still inhabit this exciting period of breaking open.

Margotlog: Untidy Fiction

Margotlog: Untidy Fiction

As our government process gets messier and looser and more unpredictable, I've been considering the messiness of fiction. Poetry, back in the ages, had the rhythm of oral declamation, almost like singing. Each line or "period" was shaped by the rise and fall of voice, the need for mneumonic devices to help the speaker remember oral links. Later, tighter forms came into being: consider the sonnet. What could be more precise? Fourteen lines, either divided into eight and six, or three quatrains and a couplet? With linked rhyme schemes.

But fiction, especially the long ruminative 19th century novel--think Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--and its 20th century counterparts--think Faulkner's The Hamlet--all meander, lose characters for a time, only to pick them up later, insert set-pieces that are later anthologized as marvels of prose, when in fact the real shape of the novel is like a grab bag. It's hard to tell from one chapter to the next whom we'll be visiting next or what twist of plot the characters will endure.

Almost all literary efforts play with form--tighter, looser, wider, shorter, etc. I'm not fond of long poems except Dante's The Divine Comedy and those wonders of voice and action attributed to Homer--The Iliad and The Odyssey. Otherwise, if a writer is going to ask me to sign on for a long voyage, let it be in prose, let it be fiction.

As I say this, Dickens' Oliver Twist rises into memory. I'm with the boy as he stumbles awake after being beaten and left for dead. He approaches a door where he's terrified of being once again attacked...

Or the opening of last year's Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, where in the opening chapter, a boy in the era of Henry VIII is being beaten and thrown about a sodden, stinking yard by his drunken father.

Or back to Anna Karenina, which opens with a dandified husband/father waking to remember that his long-suffering wife has forbidden him their bedchamber. She's finally acknowledged what's been under her nose for months--he's having an affair with the governess.

In the case of young Twist, as Dickens is fond of referring to Oliver, or of the errant husband in Tolstoy's saga, the trials mentioned above will each lead to new and crucial characters. In Oliver's case his saviors; in Tolstoy's novel, the arrival of Anna herself as a looked-for savior of this marriage. Later, she herself will torture the institution of marriage until it writhes in the dust.

What is so wonderful about all the examples mentioned above is a combination of credibility, sympathy, and the power of language to evoke scene, yes background, to suggest a whole world. Suddenly we're plunged with all the senses quivering into a time and place we couldn't have imagined, stroked out of the air by language that does not insist on itself--that would be poetry. But instead is the vehicle for evoking inner and outer life, the presence of subsidiary characters (think trees, a lane, a particular type of window or door, a bedchamber, a morning routine), and finally the forward or backward movement of event, the thrilling unfolding.

It's trickier than it looks. Hilary Mantel's truly magisterial evocation of Henry VIII's court stumbles with this first scene because it's too crowded, too abrupt, too shifting in perspective, and finally (this is magic) because it seems even at this outset contrived simply to shock. Looking back from the midsection of the book, when Thomas Cromwell has been established as an adult, as the king's sympathetic controller of mind, purse, and wooing, I find it hard to see what the book gained by showing us Tom like a yelping pup being kicked around in the dust. We don't really know him except as a punching bag. Nor does the novel pay close attention to what brought him to his adult sanity and worthiness. In other words, the violent opening seems tacked on, to shock and (this is the intention, I imagine) to grip us with the need to read on. For me, it had the opposite effect. If I hadn't been at leisure in a wonderful B&B in Port Townsend, Washington, I probably would have put the book aside and not picked it up again.

That's one of the sorrows and joys of writing and reading fiction: it's possible, even necessary to pause. The form is too long for one sitting. It's possible to walk away from the characters and never come back. This is not so likely with a poem of fourteen lines. We read it, we approve, we even memorize. Fiction must draw us back again and again. It's that tantalizing promise of finding out what will happen next. What twists of character or plot the author has up her sleeve. The chance to inhabit an alternative life that pretends to be as long and engrossing as our own.