Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (65 page)

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 how 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. John G. McCullough is long since dead; so is his older sister (who bore scant resemblance to Hattie); 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 eat her cake and have 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 eighteenth century than the nineteenth. 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.

NICHOLAS DELBANCO
is a British-born American who received his BA from Harvard and his MA from Columbia University. He currently directs the Hopwood Awards Program and is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan. An editor and author of more than twenty-five books, Delbanco has received numerous awards—among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.