A Note on Marilynne Robinson

During my days on the loading dock, my colleagues and I used to comment wryly on the exaggerations and absurdities that routinely appeared in the promotional copy on the books we were checking in. I was reminded of that the other day when I glanced at the blurbs on the back of Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays The Death of Adam. In the first line it's described as a "grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book" that will leave the reader "shaken." That's not the impression I got while reading a few of the essays. To my mind it would more accurate to describe the book as modest, astute, carefully focused, cautiously articulated, thought-provoking, and leavened with only occasional touches of gentle irony. But I suppose such phrases are unlikely to sell many books. Post-modern readers want to be shaken, not stirred.

I heard Marilynne read maybe ten years ago at a book convention. She was soft-spoken, mournful, almost lethargic, yet animated by a smoldering inner fire that kept your attention. I don't remember what she was reading; the passages might have been from her novel Home.

After the event I went up to ask her a question. "You've devoted several essays," I began, "to the connections between Marguerite of Navarre and John Calvin—" Before I had time to come to the point, she said,  in a quiet but strangely troubled and insistent tone of voice, "But why would you be interested in that?" It wasn't a challenge or a put-down, as far as I could tell, but a serious inquiry. To be honest, I wasn't sure what she was driving at. What I might have said in reply was, "I like Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron quite a bit, but have an altogether negative impression of John Calvin. I don't see the connection." I see now that if I had, she might have responded, in a courteous voice tinged with humor, "Well, if you'd actually read the pertinent essays in my collection The Death of Adam, you'd have seen the connection." But there was a line of eager readers forming behind me, and it didn't seem the proper time to elaborate on the sources of my interest.

A few days ago Hilary forwarded to me an article that Marilynne wrote recently about Joe Biden. I liked it so much that I tracked down my copy of The Death of Adam and gave it another look. I read an essay called "Psalm Eight," in which Marilynne describes the role religious feeling played in her childhood.

"I was becoming a pious child, seriously eager to hear whatever I might be told. What this meant precisely, and why it was true, I can only speculate. But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like "faith" or "belief." I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it."

That's a remarkable passage, I think, To which she adds: "I do not remember childhood as happy but as filled and overfilled with an intensity of experience that made happiness a matter of little interest."

From there I turned to a piece titled "Puritans and Prigs." Marilynne likes Puritans, and thinks they've been given a bad rap. She hates prigs, though she sees them nowadays almost everywhere she looks. At one point she writes:

"The way we speak and think about Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective ignorance to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved of." Ouch!

 At another point: 

"For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature—in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag."

These are fine examples, I think, of Marilynne's even-tempered (yet scathing) criticisms of the current state of critical judgment. Meanwhile, she seems to knows a great deal about Puritanism herself, both the Genevan original and the North American offspring. In fact, the thirty-five page essay titled "Marguerite de Navarre" is almost entirely devoted to the career of John Calvin, about which I, for one, knew almost nothing before reading it. It's a long and eloquent narrative, and at its heart lies the notion that divine energy is real and exultation is something valuable to share it. On a more prosaic level, she concludes:

"There are things for which we in this culture are clearly indebted to [Calvin], including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in "the humanities." All this, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva—in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline."

Her assertion that American culture and institutions owe more to Continental than to English precedents is an intriguing one, and it seems to jibe with other treatments of the subject—for example, Guido de Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism.   

Marilynne's judgments are finely put, rather unlike the hysterical tone so common nowadays, and her prose has a kind of purring density that requires close attention. It reminds me more of Sir Thomas Browne than Hunter Thompson. She doesn't use Bible references to "prove" her points, but rather, offers glosses from afar that may, perhaps, alter our perspectives. For example:

"I believe it is usual to say that the resurrection established who Jesus was and what his presence meant. Perhaps it is truer to say that opposite, that who Jesus was established what his resurrection meant, that he seized upon a narrative familiar or even pervasive and wholly transformed it."  

But what about Marguerite of Navarre? Marilynne admits in the first paragraph of her essay that the appearance of Marguerite's name in the title is mostly a deception; readers would be unlikely to take up an essay devoted to John Calvin. And she may be right. Yet the association isn't entirely arbitrary. The two almost certainly knew each other, and Marilynne  makes the case, albeit briefly, that Calvin was deeply influenced by Marguerite's religious poetry, though she doesn't reproduce any of it. Meanwhile, she doesn't think much of Margaret's Heptameron, casually lumping that collection of moral tales in with Boccoccio's much less interesting, though far more famous, predecessor, The Decameron. With that judgment I cannot agree.

I requested a copy of The Grammar of Silence: a Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry from the library. It was the only thing they had that might serve. I expect it will be a scholarly slog that I'll dismiss in a few pages as worthless. But who knows?

 I'll let you know how it turns out.