Nicholas Delbanco | February 2011

“My Old Young Books” is adapted from an “Afterword” for Sherbrookes, which Dalkey Archive Press will reprint as a single revised volume in August 2011. The trilogy was first published by William Morrow & Co. as Possession (1977), Sherbrookes (1978), and Stillness (1980).

 In the late 1970s, while living in Vermont, I wrote three books about the region: Possession (1977), Sherbrookes (1978), andStillness (1980).Collectively known as The Sherbrookes Trilogy, they were rooted inthatlandscape—specifically the Park-McCullough House, a large and imposing Victorian structure in the village of North Bennington. And since I knew the owner of the property, I asked his permission to use the locale.

He gave it. His family had been retentive; they kept laundry lists and letters and records of business transactions from the 19th century. There were thousands of pages in boxes; I read and read. At some point in that process, however, I came to understand that these figures from the distant and more recent past failed to fire my imagination; they seemed—not to put too fine a point upon it—dull. To the degree that this is an historical novel (as in the letters of Peacock Sherbrooke, his daughter, and his grandson), that early research may have left its residue, but the generations of my family are each and all invented. So I began with two imperatives: use the landscape of southwestern Vermont and people it with people who have been made up.

When John O’Brien (the publisher of Dalkey Archive Press) kindly offered to bring the trilogy back to print-life, there was a choice to make. Most authors, including this one earlier, are glad for the chance to reissue old texts and leave well enough alone. At worst, the errors of juvenilia are simply that; one fixes a comma or adds a footnote, and the book exists anew. It’s a record of a time and place, not something one should tamper with. Painters and composers often revisit their previous work and offer, as it were, variations on a theme. Some authors—famously Henry James in the New York Edition of 1909 or, more recently, Peter Matthiessen in his rewritten trilogy—do undertake a full-fledged overhaul of what they wrote before. But the majority of writers seem content to say, Here. What’s done is done.

In my case, however, the three books were one, and I had conceived them as such. The structure of Possession, for example, mirrors that of Stillness—with Sherbrookes as a kind of second movement and pastoral interlude. The first and third books’ actions transpire in a single day; the second deals with gestation and plays out over months. The seventy-six year old Judah whom we meet on page #1 has his birth attested to by a doting father at the end of book #3. All along, I’d hoped to publish them as a single volume, or a kind of triptych, and when invited to do so it seemed the right way to proceed.

Yet certain issues, if not problems, came immediately clear. First, volumes two and three contained passages of recapitulation—in order to tell a new reader what happened in previous texts. (Judah dies in the interstices of Possession and its sequel, Sherbrookes, his sister Harriet drowns herself at the end of the second installment, and the reader of the third book, Stillness, would have to be aware of this. Secondary characters such as Samson Finney and Lucy Gregory make what seems like a debut appearance in Stillness, but have in fact been introduced some hundreds of pages before.) These repetitions felt redundant, and could be edited out. This I did. But once I began with red pencil and scissors, I found it hard to cease cutting; the entire text—sentence by sentence and paragraph by page—could be, it seemed to me, pruned. In the aggregate, I cut roughly seven percent of the whole: nearly ten percent of Possession and less of the subsequent two installments. The book now comprises some 200,000 words—a long novel by any reckoning but not, I hope, bloat.      

 
The simplest way to put it is this: I changed nothing important in Sherbrookes—retaining the second book’s title as the title of all three. I added nothing of note. The characters and conflict and action and tone stay the same. The thematic matter (more of which later) is constant, as is the order of scenes. But no single page of prose escaped my editorial intervention; I’d written the sentences long ago, and could rewrite them now. Why not, I asked myself, improve what needed improving; why leave a phrase intact when it could be with profit rephrased? The good news is—or so I told myself—that I’m a better writer now than when I started Possession. The bad news is the same. The youthful exuberance of Delbanco’s prose troubled the older Delbanco, who has learned to admire restraint. Someday perhaps, some scrupulous someone may compare the trilogy with this single volume, but at the present moment I’m the “sole proprietor” of the territory of Sherbrookes and can alter its property lines.

***

A few examples may suffice of what and how I revised. I bowdlerized the text a little and simplified it a lot. Some of this was a necessary consequence of present-day technology. My books were composed on a typewriter, not computer, and no previous word document exists. So all the pages had to be scanned. That process has become increasingly precise, but there were many errors of transmission—“lit” for “hit” and “nickering” for “flickering” and, routinely, “r” and “n” conjoined as “rn” where the original letter was “m.” Some passages were missing; others were reproduced twice. In effect, I was required to copyedit Sherbrookes more than thirty years after it came into print, and I worked my way through the three volumes with a proofreader’s eye. Having done that several times, I feel more or less confident of exactness—but in the process of such tinkering, I could not keep from changing words as well as correcting their spelling: from fixing, as it were, the language as well as the text.

For example, I substituted “the day after Judah’s funeral” for “ten days after Judah’s death,” when Ian calls his mother at the beginning of Sherbrookes. It seemed wrong for him to wait the longer period; he was conflicted over his duty to his dead father, not to his living mother. This is a small editorial intervention only, but it does register change. And I cut the last line of Sherbrookes, since it seemed overly explicit; we do not need, as readers, to be told, “They huddle together, as once they would with Judah, and are well.”

The process of revision could be as simple as the substitution of “She said she’ll write you it’s her own idea to come” for the original “She said she’ll write you that it’s her idea to come.” Or the alteration of the phrase “not to waste this time” to “not to enjoy this time”; the word “waste” seemed less clear than “enjoy.” Or the substitution of “with glass and gauze between them…” for “with glass and gauze intervening…” I did try to fine-tune a character’s diction: “Who knows your reasons, lady?” becomes, in Hattie’s voice, “Who knows your reasons, missy?”

To this older writer’s eye, the younger writer over-ascribed dialogue; I cut perhaps a hundred usages of “he said” and “she said.” These had been more a function of rhythm than necessity; in the first published version I used “he said” and “she said” as tag lines throughout the spoken discourse, and they could be—with no loss of clarity—removed. At that period I had (still have, no doubt) an excessive fondness for semicolons and that often-needless word, “that.” I used to love to turn nouns into adjectives by means of a hyphen; this seemed a habit to break. So by using an added conjunction I could substitute the phrase “comfort and temptation,” for the invented compound word “comfort-temptation.” To my present ear, this seems an improvement and slightly less mannerist prose.

Repetition is another habit I did try to break. When, for example, I had Judah both “triumphant” and “triumphing” in a single page of text, I cut the former usage. And sometimes I would cut a phrase I liked because it called too much attention to itself: “…the farthest twig of the outermost branch of Sullivanian analysis,” became “…the farthest wing of the renegade branch…”—which is more accurate as a description if less engaging as trope.

The bulk of what I excised was sheer rhetorical excess. I was too fond of metaphor and the abstract generality—or so I now believe. William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry were my masters then; these days, I’m more committed to power in reserve. A phrase such as the following seemed a candidate for cutting, with nothing but verbiage lost: “the past is as the present’s shadow, shortening and lengthening and mutable in the terms of perspective, changing with sightlines or on hillsides or pavement or light—yet truly immutable, fixed.”

Or, “He is haunted by flesh, not fleshlessness, and he twined his limbs’ decrepitude around his young wife’s limbs. She does not fade or stale; she took lovers twenty years her junior, as he had taken her. She tempts him now continually, even in decrepitude, and is not dead but quick.”      

***

For the adept at variora, here are some examples of what has been cut:

There are those who train with horseshoes and can throw and ring the horseshoes as part of their performance. There are those, Maggie knows, who can drop one orange or Indian club yet not break their juggling rhythm. Some jugglers can stack cups on saucers without shattering the cups. She herself is more agile than most; she has kept a close inventory of relatives and lovers and the patterned arc they make, from throwing hand to catching hand, suspended.

He cannot remember her out of the wind, now Judah comes to think of it, or ever less than airy light for all the years’ stiffening additions—and remembers now the nursery rhyme about the oak tree near the ocean, and reeds: how everything is leveled in the last big wind but bending reeds, how roots and all mean nothing when the hurricane and thunder come.

So she kept doing and talking aloft. Things hung there suspended an instant, in perfect opposition to the force of gravity—only rotating, not rising or falling, and for that perfected instant she could keep three men convinced they were her only man, or persuade two aunts in the same room that they were her favorite aunt. At such times, she told herself, she could persuade a Catholic with seven children to embrace the right to choose, or vote for George McGovern since he’d bring the boys back home.

Ian would be staring at the traces of a lesson-plan, trying to learn what he needed to know—while there was only her blurred mouthing, only the spoor of the sentence she’d thought and no blackboard and no chalk and nobody there to nudge him with the answer. Still, he picked it up. He lip-read, thought-read, read without reading; if only he’d been half the student in school that he’d been of her manners’ schooling, Hattie said, why then he’d be adept at fractions and geography and penmanship also. He learned degree and size.

She yearned for him. She was, she told herself, in love. It wasn’t a term she much liked. It was attended by guitars. It had meant crush—some hero’s sock stolen from the basketball court, and treasured, rolled into a totem in her top right drawer. Later it meant four-leaf clovers proffered as they walked through fields, and later the wine bottles shared. So love became a pawing intensity—and the terms were making out, then making it, then making love. Later still it meant submission. It meant Billie Holiday singing “Hush Now, Don’t Explain”—the whiskey seams in her voice come unstuck, a fiddler using nerve and hair ends for her strings.

It’s not as though these passages strike me as poorly written—just that they seem excessive and, at least a little, ponderous. I was flexing verbal muscles then that now seem over-exercised; my guiding principle throughout the revision was, in effect, Less is more. In several instances (particularly from Possession) I excised entire scenes. I cut, for example, memories of Judah’s grandmother, of Ian’s escapades, and Maggie’s trip to Los Angeles since they failed to advance the tale’s action—or felt like a gravitational side-drag upon it. Dialogue, too, went on too long, and I cut exchanges that seemed merely to mark time:

“That’s nice,” she said. “That’s complimentary.”
“It’s the way I meant it.”
“Men do yoga too. The world’s best athlete is a ballet dancer.”
“Who says?”
“Time magazine,” she said. “And they must be right.”
“I didn’t call it sissy work. Just woman’s.”
So, to spite him, she had kept at it. She taught Ian to sit in the lotus position.

“Judah”—she would summon him—”what kind of tree is that?”
“A birch tree, grandma.”
“Yes. What kind of birch?”
“A silver birch.”     
“What other kind would it be?”
“A silver bitch,” he’d mutter, and she strained to hear.
“What?”
“A white birch maybe, but it isn’t. It’s a silver birch.”
She’d have her notebook out, and wet the pencil stub.
“Beech, did you say beech?”
“No.”
“Hattie knows the answer. She could tell.”
He put his hands in his pockets. He balled his fingers to fists.
“Fess up, Judah, you said beech—that’s a penny less this morning. That cancels out the elm.”    
“Birch, I said. Silver birch.”
“You got the popple,” she would say. “You got the cottonwood.”   

“Do it again,” he’d ask her.
“Why?”
“It’s fine to watch.”

So she’d pick the limp lengths up again and turn her back to him and work her arms and then turn back with magic entanglements, fanning out and in. He wanted her to try with tinsel, but it wasn’t long or strong enough. So he fashioned her, one Christmas, a tinsel necklace and bracelet and earrings and said, “They’ll hold. You wear them,” and she was his glittering creature lit by the Christmas tree lights. They made daisy chains from Reynolds Wrap, and Maggie said, “Imagine. There’s country where it’s warm enough so you can find real daisies in December.” He imagined that.

***

I began with the assertion that I’d always thought of three as one; that is not quite the case. When I first tried to people the landscape of North Bennington, I started with a phrase—or, more precisely, tableau. For some time, I had been thinking of the story of King David, and the great biblical description of that warrior-poet’s old age. Fading, cold, and failing, he is offered the company of Abishag the Shunammite in his tent at night. But her body’s warmth cannot rouse him. The Old Testament’s indelible description reads: “And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.” (I, Kings, 4.) That last phrase engendered Possession and remains explicit in it still.

More generally, I had the image of a funeral pyre erected at a tribal hero’s death. This is the sort of procedure collectively attested to in Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon legend, Indian suttee, ancient burial rites, and so on: the King lies arranged on a high pile of wood, ringed by wives and serving girls and soldiers and armor and chattel, the regalia of his eminence. Then the whole is set on fire in an all-consuming blaze. If there is water he sets out to sea, and the boat bearing him off too must burn, from keel to topmast: flame. It was the image with which I began and the first scene I wrote.

The manuscripts of my Vermont trilogy (as well as other, early papers) reside now in the Abernethy Room of the Middlebury College Library in Middlebury, Vermont. I have not consulted them. But somewhere in those cartons is the scene of Judah Sherbrooke, lying on a hay bale in the middle of his haybarn in the middle of his property and, by extension, the world. He sets himself afire and, operatically, dies. I wrote and rewrote till it seemed letter-perfect; even today, more than half my life later, I remember the satisfaction of that “pyrotechnical” prose and those funerary rites. The scene was, I was sure, triumphal: a set piece to make Faulkner or Lowry or even James Joyce proud. But I can praise it so unreservedly because it’s in an archive and never exposed to the harsh light of print; in the event I cut those pages out.

Judah’s elements indeed consist of fire and earth (his young bride’s are air and water), and there are leftover traces of the language in Hal Boudreau’s drunken fiery accident at the end of Sherbrookes. At the end of Possession, the old man lies down on his pallet of hay and strikes a match or three. But by the time I’d lived with him and was fully engaged in writing the book, I knew this particular character would not burn down the house. He’s too much of a skinflint, too property-proud and retentive to set the world ablaze. Instead, Judah brushes himself off, shambles up and down the street, then back into the kitchen to share a cup of coffee with his wife. It’s a much less dramatic—even an anticlimactic—conclusion, but a more truthful one. During the process of composition I had come to understand that, far from destroying himself, this flinty old Vermonter would keep on keeping on.
And that’s when I conceived of a second volume and why he does not die. Or, rather, he dies between the first two books and not at the end of Possession, just as Hattie dies at the end of Sherbrookes and Maggie leaves at Stillness’send. It’s a technical challenge, of sorts; the protagonist of Book #1 must be a presence in but not central to the action of Book #2; a central character in #2 is absent from the action of the third installment. In that sense, these three books are not sequels but sequential, and that’s when I understood I’d not be finished at Possession’sclose but needed to resume the story. As Conan Doyle discovered when he tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes and was forced, by an avid public, to bring his hero back to life, it’s best—if you do plan to continue—to keep characters alive. In my end was my beginning, therefore; when I scrapped the scene of Judah’s death, the trilogy proper commenced.

In Book 2 the focus shifts; in Book 3 it does so again. A single long novel would not perhaps be built this way, but no single figure here is Sherbrookes’ sole protagonist; rather, it’s a collective and family history with—counting down from Daniel “Peacock” Sherbrooke—five generations in play. It’s difficult if not impossible to ask a reader to shift focus and allegiance text by text; the boy who’s wholly absent from Book 1, for example, is wholly present for Book 3—while his father, Judah, who was thoroughly corporeal in the first book is, by the third, a ghost. I tried to justify all this in part because the narrative concerns itself with parents and their children, the presence of the past. And in part by having Ian Sherbrooke—the surviving son of his mother and father’s fierce union—write the whole thing down.

The long middle chapter of the middle section of the final book (which details Ian’s romantic history and his attempt to write a play about his parent’s intimate wrangle) is my favorite chapter in Stillness. (In Possession I’m most partial to Part II, IV, which begins with the phrase; “Judah met her first, in 1938,” and in Sherbrookes I like best Chapter X1V, describing Maggie’s emblematic visions: “Images afflict her; she cannot keep them from coming.”) This is, of course, only one man’s opinion—but the recapitulatory nature of Ian’s rehearsal of what went before does seem to me a successful attempt to lend shape to the whole. It’s a tip of the cap, I suppose, to the metafictional and self-reflexive strategies that were so common in the 1970s—an attempt to meld the modern and the more traditional mode. At any rate, when Ian summarizes his family’s history (as well as, it happens, this novelist’s previous publications) I knew that the book neared its end. Andrew Kincannon—that outlier—is meant to provide a kind of perspective to the goings-on in the Big House; when he and Maggie and Jane drive off at the end of Stillness, the ongoing agon is over and Ian’s work truly begins.

***

Something that surprised me, in rereading, is the inadvertent way in which these pages have become “historical.” It’s strange to see that what one wrote when young is today a period piece, and equally strange to read what proved predictive—how these characters’ imagined future has since come to pass. There are no cellphones in Sherbrookes, and certainly no iPods or computers; when people write to each other they write letters, not e-mail or text messages; when they need to make a call they find a phone. I’m struck, in Stillness, by how Andrew Kincannon has to dial the weather number (WE6-1212) in order to get information on the forecast storm, and how he—generously, for the time— hands the garage attendant a dollar. Things change. In these three books, and even when pregnant, everybody drinks and everybody smokes. When Maggie does get pregnant at the age of fifty-two, she’s a medical anomaly; now that would be a bit less startlingly the case. The Packard Ian drives (and Judah purchased for his wife) is a conscious anachronism; the Plymouth Volare has become one also, but wasn’t intended as such. Maggie reminds herself that “these are the facts of inflation, not value,” but the price of a stamp or housekeeper’s wages or psychoanalytical session has increased exponentially. Her sister-in-law is outraged that soda water costs thirty-five cents a bottle, plus deposit; we’d all be glad of that now.

By contrast, however, most of the geopolitical concerns remain pertinent—or have today surfaced again. Sherbrookes spans the years 1976 to 1980, but its characters discuss the price of oil and the possibility of boycotts or an OPEC embargo; they worry about global warming and the infrastructure’s collapse. Many of the speeches about the trouble with and in America have, alas, the ring of current truth.

The thematic oppositions of Maggie and Judah—their ways of living in the world—have dulled a little, however, and lost some of their contemporary sheen. The novels deal with the then-much-more-vocal contrarieties of “flower power” and cultural conservatism, the ideals of liberation—particularly, here, in terms of gender—and the strait-laced desire to preserve what went before. I never really saw my heroine as wanton or promiscuous, but it’s true enough that, by the standards of the time and place, she was a kind of revolutionary. Perhaps I should have been explicit about the clash of values and the way this specific family was supposed to embody the general national case; it’s not an accident that Judah is seventy-six years old in our bicentennial year. At any rate I took for granted, and possibly more than I should have, the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the emergence of a drug culture, and the generational wrangle which put Ian and Judah at odds.

Other aspects of the story—though I here attempt to retrieve them—have been lost. Those years at Bennington were made vivid for me by the presence of John Gardner; we were close colleagues and friends. I showed him the manuscript of Possession, for example, and we argued over the spelling of Sherbrooke—John insisting that the final “e” was an instance of my Anglicisms and should properly be cut. He came up with a bottle of Sherbrook Whiskey in order to buttress his point; that bottle appears in this book. (The town of Sherbrooke, near Montreal, does have a final “e” attached, and therefore I retained my own preferred orthography.) John, who wrote at warp-speed then, preceded me into print with a novel called October Light, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1976. In it, he has his Vermonters joke about mine; his villagers tell tales about the goings-on in the Big House and mock old Judah Sherbrooke and his “bare-nekkid wife.”

My own wife and I make a cameo appearance in the pages of October Light, and—like many other authors—I had been written about, flatteringly or unflatteringly, as a character before. But to have a creature of my invention be referred to in another’s book did seem a kind of testimonial to the power of the written word, and I returned the compliment by having my townspeople in Sherbrookes gossip about James Page—Gardner’s protagonist—as an “old fool” stuck up in a tree. This cheerful back-and-forth was noticed by a critic in, if I remember correctly, Newsweek, who complained about it as a form of literary incest, but the lines still make me smile.

Less happily, I took the title Stillness—having asked him for the use of it—from a manuscript of Gardner’s he assured me he’d abandoned and was not planning to publish. (Other working titles for the third of my three novels were “Shoreline Certainties” and “Boats in Bottles” both of which appear as phrases and of which John disapproved. He was, I’ve no doubt, right.) After his death in a motorcycle accident at the age of forty-nine, it devolved upon me as his literary executor to usher into print the unfinished text of Shadows, the manuscript on which he had been working when he died. We paired it with his novel, Stillness, and there’s an echo in these titles—though my own book appeared before Gardner’s—which now sounds more mournful than glad.

***

So what, in my seventh decade, would I change and revise—beyond the ways I’ve detailed here—these books? The models for my minor figures were sometimes not-so-distantly based on people I knew (Apollonius Banos and Junior Allison were portraits of, respectively, a college friend and a North Bennington taxicab driver), and sometimes an amalgam of townspeople; Elvirah Hayes, Hal Boudreau, and Sally Conover all had their distant counterparts in local village folk. The Old People’s Home is an actual structure; the bank and library and grocery store exist. The pavements of North Bennington were marble once; no more. The Toy House and the Carriage House and Big House now operate in fact as a museum, and may be rented out for concerts and wedding receptions. When our younger daughter got married, it was in that very house.

In the way most writers, magpie-like, choose to line their nests with scraps of past experience and fragments of encounter, I borrowed attributes of men and women I knew or observed for the central quartet of characters (Judah, Hattie, Maggie, Ian). Yet this is no roman-à-clef or private code to crack. It is an amplification of that begetting image of a funerary pyre and the phrase about King David and Abishag the Shunammite: but the king knew her not. The countryside does play, I think, as large a role as I at first envisioned; the trees and stone walls and snow-covered meadows retain a kind of “stillness” on the page.

What emerges for me now, rereading, is how absolute these figures are, how uncompromising in their argument. Judah burns the piano Maggie played on, sells the truck she had incised a heart on in the fender’s dust, and never goes to visit when she asks. Jeanne Fisk is much more a relativist, a modern woman caught between allegiances who tries to have her cake and eat it too. At its best, this book does capture two ways of behaving and—though all this seems more clear to me as reader than decades ago as writer—the clash between the clenched fist and the open hand. The thematic matter of Sherbrookes consists, I think, of a young man’s puzzled effort to come to terms with commitment: which lines to draw in what sand. It is a book about landscape and the lasting nature of love.

The language of the letter-writers (Peacock, Anne-Maria his daughter, and Judah’s father Joseph) looks a little too elaborate today: more representative, I think, of the 18th century than the 19th. But this I largely left alone, since I hoped for a declension in the generations, and I used their rhetorics to mark the march of time. The language of the Vermonters (paradoxically the more so when they speak at length than when they go “Ayup ayup”) is pretty close to the mark. Or at least it feels as near as I could come then and now. I did, I believe, a creditable job of describing Judah and his octogenarian sister, but overstated his sexual appetite and understated, a little, the old man’s need for sleep. Maggie’s behavior when depressed in Stillness feels more persuasive to me than her exuberance in the first two books, but that’s no doubt a function of this reader’s present age. And the character of Ian—closest, I suppose, to a self-portrait in these pages—appears to me more successfully composed today than I thought then; his efforts at self-definition seem more a function of personality than a failure of precision on the author’s part. He’s a beginner, our Ian, who grows up at novel’s end.

His creator did so too. Not much happens in these pages: men and women live and die. They grieve and cleave together; they eat and argue and are selfish or selfless and cantankerous or kind. Yet (three decades after finishing the Sherbrookes trilogy) it has pleased me to revisit these old haunts and walk, as it were, those old meadows and trails. And, sentence by paragraph by page, to revel in the view.

AWP

Nicholas Delbanco is the author of twenty-five books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novel is The Count of Concord (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), and his forthcoming book of nonfiction is Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (Grand Central Publishing, 2011). He has served as editor for, among others, The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation and Literature: Craft & Form (w. Alan Cheuse), both published by McGraw-Hill. He directs the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, where he is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English.