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The World and the Bo Tree
By Helen Bevington Duke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7874-7
CHAPTER 1
1980
"What is this world? What asketh men to have?"—Chaucer
In the New Yorker cartoon a couple is sitting before the television screen on New Year's Eve. He says, "You know something? I'm already tired of the eighties." The following week the wife in the cartoon says, "Then what about the nineties?"
James Reston writes in the New York Times: "Let me fill you in: it is clearly not going to be a Happy New Year"—not with inflation, soaring prices, more unemployment, more crime, the fuel crisis, a presidential election, revolution in Islam, and threat of war with Russia. Reston gives his newborn grandson some advice about becoming a member of the human race: "Stick with the optimists, Niftie; it's going to be tough enough even if they're right."
President Carter says in his State of the Union message: "We must face the world as it is." Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, predicts war in the Persian Gulf, with Russia's goal world domination: "The Russians are on the march toward the oil spigot. We are facing today the most serious crisis the world has ever faced."
There are the Creationists and there are the Survivalists. The one defines the beginning of the world and the other the end, which is said to be near.
The Creationists, in growing numbers in the South, call it Scientific Creationism, or pro-Creator as opposed to no-Creator. They agree with Dr. John Lightfoot who in 1642 published his observations on Genesis that heaven and earth were created "all together in the same instant" on October 23, 4004 B.C. at 9:00 A.M. The Archbishop of Armagh disputed this claim, said it happened the day before at 6:00 P.M., but at the Scopes trial of 1925 William Jennings Bryan affirmed October 23 to be the right date. The Creationists reject Darwin, seeking to assure schoolchildren God did the entire work in six days and made man in his image. They deny that God resembles an ape.
The Survivalists or Catastrophists build fallout shelters and survival homes, storing food and weapons against the coming of the apocalypse or doomsday. This movement of the 1980s differs from the making of bomb shelters in the 1950s after World War II, when people dug their own little holes in the backyard and furnished them with canned goods and bottled water. Now bands of citizens prepare secret hideouts like fortresses in the mountains, build underground concrete bunkers, and dig foxholes to China. They say we're headed for annihilation, not only from nuclear war but from economic collapse. Any outsiders who beg for admittance will be shot.
Meanwhile, spring returns to North Carolina:
Monday headline: "Time is ripe to fertilize"
Tuesday: Performance-tested Bull Sale
Wednesday: Trellised Tomato Growers Annual Meeting
Thursday: Regional Swine Conference
Friday: Beekeepers Meeting to discuss "Packaged Bees"
Saturday: Weed Control Workshop. Blueberry Council. Potato meeting
When we moved to Durham, N.C., in the 1940s, it was a sociable world with an extraordinary number of club activities: garden clubs, book, travel, dining, bridge, newcomers clubs, League of Women Voters, and the Needlework Guild. Impressed by the happy bustle and stir, I wrote a verse, "Faculty Wife," to say, "She joins a club to read a book ..."
Presently we have the pick of Overeaters Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous (Brown Bag Group), Narcotics Anonymous, Parents Anonymous (who abuse their children), Parents of Gays and Lesbians, Mothers of Twins, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Abused Wives, Coalition for Battered Women, Women for Sobriety, Women in Action for Prevention of Violence, Parents without Partners, Singles Unlimited, Impotence Support Group, Survivors Group, ToughLove, Mended Hearts Inc., Compassionate Friends of Wake County, La Leche League (breastfeeders), and the Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists.
We moved here from New York, not having been south of Virginia before. On arrival we found the man next door was named Love. Mr. Love quickly presented himself to offer whatever we might be in need of.
"I'm Love," he said, holding out his hand.
"It's love," I said, "we're looking for."
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
Today I read in the paper of the death of Love.
The towhee cries, "Drink your tea-ee!" of a summer afternoon. I've found two other ways to survive the July heat and melancholy hoopla of the Republican convention in Detroit, where the reigning Reagan conducts a crusade to be president and "make America great again." George Bush calls him an aged ham.
One way is to read Dr. Lewis Thomas, who in The Lives of a Cell reminds me I'm lucky to be alive. "Never kiss a buzzsaw," he says, if you want to go on living since by chance you happen to exist:
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.
It's a pleasure to violate statistical probability. Of a million million spermatozoa, said Aldous Huxley, one of them might have been another Shakespeare, Newton, or John Donne. "But the one was me."
The other way is to thank God I wasn't Captain Cook's wife.
Poor lady. She was Elizabeth Batts of Shadwell, wife for seventeen years to one of the greatest navigators and circumnavigators the world has known, Captain James Cook, whom she saw at rare intervals because he was more or less continuously at sea. On his last expedition, when he discovered the Sandwich Islands, 1779, and was murdered by the natives, Captain Cook was fifty-one. Nothing in his well-kept logs under sail revealed he had a family, a private life, joys or griefs or a longing for home.
They had six children, who in their brief existence hardly saw their father. Mrs. Cook, a dutiful wife, bore them and buried them. Two boys died in infancy, one whom Cook never saw; Elizabeth died age four. Nathaniel at sixteen went down with all hands aboard the frigate Thunderer in a hurricane in 1780. Hugh at seventeen died of a fever at Christ's College, Cambridge. A few months later James Jr., commander in the Royal Navy, was drowned.
Boswell mentioned meeting Captain Cook's wife with her husband at dinner at Sir John Pringle's in London: "It was curious to see Cook, a grave steady man and his wife, a decent plump Englishwoman, and think he was preparing to sail around the world." With his loss and the loss of all six children, Mrs. Cook retired at thirty-seven to mourn in Clapham, where she lived in a house full of mementos from his voyages. "I remember her as a handsome and venerable lady," Canon Bennett described her in old age, a sea captain's widow dressed in black satin, wearing a ring with her husband's hair in it. She said she couldn't sleep on stormy nights thinking of men at sea.
When she died at ninety-three, keeping her faculties to the end, she had outlived Captain Cook by fifty-six years. Unaware of his greatness and extraordinary accomplishments, she had destroyed his letters. The truth is she didn't know him very well.
This November the country was thrown into hysteria over having to choose between Reagan and Carter for president, between a second-rate actor turned seventy and a smalltime Georgian found guilty of inconsequentiality. During their one public debate, Carter spoke of his daughter Amy as his consultant on nuclear missiles. Reagan said when he was a boy there was no race problem! The National Council of Teachers of English named Reagan the winner of the Doublespeak Award for deceptive assertions during the campaign. Carter won second prize. Reagan claimed Alaska has more oil than Saudi Arabia. He said he had serious doubts about the theory of evolution. Carter claimed the failure to rescue the American hostages in Iran an "incomplete success."
James Reston wrote: "In the twenty years since 1960 we have had five presidents. Kennedy was murdered. Johnson was destroyed by the Vietnam War. Nixon was run out of Washington. Ford was rejected in the election of 1976. And now we are savaging Jimmy Carter, who has the lowest popularity rating in the history of the polls, and mocking his potential successor, Ronald Reagan."
Disenchanted or not, the country voted for Reagan, unwilling to endorse Carter who wept when he was told. Losing no time, Reagan came to Washington bringing Nancy and a jar of jelly beans. She said the White House needed instant redecoration and new china. He said he felt humility and humbleness.
I am by habit an end-of-year list-maker, inventory-taker, lover of categories. It's a vain search for order, to itemize the goods on hand, survey one's waning resources.
What extravagance this tidy habit can lead to is revealed by Irving Wallace's Book of Lists, a collection of orts and sweepings. He collects the nine breeds of dogs that bite the most, the ten birds that can't fly, the names of people who never went to college, never married, are left-handed, red-haired, one-eyed, have hemorrhoids, syphilis, vasectomies, or snore. He lists the shoe size of twenty famous men (Warren G. Harding, size 14), and the degree of flatulence caused by beans.
My list consists of eight men I admire and the reason why:
Memling for purity of his blues and purples
Vermeer for placidity
Thoreau for simplicity
Chaucer for gentilesse
Monet for waterlilies
John Donne for defining love
Wallace Stevens for defining a necessary order
Montaigne for knowing how to live and how to die
of having been alive
On December 8 John Lennon was shot in New York at the entrance to the Hotel Dakota where he lived. Like the death of Elvis Presley, it shook the world. A policeman said, "It's as important as the death of John F. Kennedy." When Presley died in August 1977, to the wild grief of millions, President Carter said, "He was unique and irreplacable. He burst on the scene with an impact that was unprecedented and will probably never be equalled." Billy Graham said, "I believe I will see him in heaven." The press called him a Culture Hero who made the American dream a reality, Elvis the Pelvis who affected history by changing hair styles, popularizing rock and roll, and, the claim is, bringing on the sex revolution.
Yoko Ono, Lennon's wife, asked for a ten-minute silence around the globe on Sunday "to pray for John's soul."
CHAPTER 2
1981
From the Chicago Sun-Times: "Had 1980 been a play, most of it would have been a tragedy. 1981 looks even worse." It was a year of failure to keep up with inflation, invasion by Russia of Afghanistan, war between Iran and Iraq, international terrorism, a year when Mount Saint Helens blew up, and revolution erupted in San Salvador.
But what cheer? On January 20 two extraordinary events happened within minutes of each other, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as our fortieth president "so help me God," and the fifty-two hostages in Iran were freed, ending 444 days of captivity that began when Iranian students raided the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
It was a melodrama with a cast of fifty-two survivors and Reagan as leading man, an extravaganza out of Hollywood. The inauguration ceremonies began with a gala masterminded by Frank Sinatra, with Marie and Donny Osmond singing "Ronny Be Good," Ben Vereen, a black man, doing the cakewalk in oldtime minstrel blackface. The ten inaugural balls cost a record $15 million, the most expensive blowout in American history, the opposite of the Carters' modesty and restraint. Called putting on the dog.
With the flowering of spring, two months later, came the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan. Young John Hinckley, with the face of a schoolboy, fired six shots outside the Hilton in Washington, one piercing Reagan's left lung an inch from his heart, another all but fatally injuring his press secretary Jim Brady. Badly hurt, fast losing blood, Reagan walked into the hospital and said to his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck." The country said in horror "Not again?" Hinckley said he did it for love of the actress Jodie Foster, who said "I never met the guy."
Walker Percy, in his novel The Second Coming, writes of the demented and farcical times we live in. Here we are, growing nuttier by the hour in North Carolina where everyone, Percy says, is a Christian and finds unbelief unbelievable. Will Barrett of N.C., a widower of fifty-five living a death-in-life, goes into the Lost Cave to await a sign of the existence of God. Putting the matter to the test, he prepares to die from an overdose of sleeping pills if no sign is forthcoming. Instead he gets a fearful toothache, stumbles out of the cave, and falls into a greenhouse where Allie, a young girl escaped from a mental institution, is holed up waiting for answers herself. Naturally they fall in love, a fine pair of loony innocents. What the Second Coming is, for them or for me, Percy must know—he calls it a happy ending.
Modesty in our authors:
Gore Vidal: "I've just finished reading Henry Esmond for the first time and much as I like the unfashionable Thackeray I couldn't help but think how much better I do that sort of book than he does."
Truman Capote: "I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius." (Verlaine, announcing himself a while ago on a visit to England: "Paul Verlaine, alcoholic, syphilitic, pederast, and poet.")
Cyril Connolly declaring the books he didn't write were better than the ones other people did.
B. F. Skinner, behaviorist, when asked why he wrote his autobiography: "In order to make people love me."
"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."—Susan Sontag
JOURNEY TO SOUTH AMERICA Mr. Utley, my yard man, the only yard man I know who owns a Lincoln Continental, drove me to the airport, saying "Are you going by boat?" Inside the terminal a breathless boy rushed up to ask "Is this a hospital?" On the plane the pilot strolled down the aisle to the cockpit, telling the hostess, "You're beautiful in a C bra." Undeterred by these omens, my friends Betty and Ted and I checked our luggage to Rio de Janeiro and flew nonstop to Miami.?
The Cranfords, Lois and H. C., who are conducting us to South America, arrived with twenty Carolinians and a stray couple from Bangladesh—a group of seasoned travelers, most of whom have followed the Cranfords around the world in past years. They know what to expect: the delays, the mishaps, the unquestioned pleasure that outweighs the rest—just as Peter Fleming learned such accommodation in Brazilian Adventure: "I learnt the necessity of resignation, the value of resignation, the psychology of resignation, everything except resignation itself."
At Rio's international airport, Betty's luggage was missing. We were driven to the Othon Palace, a thirty-story hotel on the Copacabana. My room has a view of encircling mountains and a store of Brazil nuts beside a refrigerator stocked with mineral water, Brahms beer, Coca Cola, vodka, Scotch, rum, and gin, which since we are told not to drink the water I would like to think the hotel hospitably provides free of charge (this is not the case).
On a lemon-bright day, June at home but December in Brazil, the temperature is 70°. There is no winter in Rio. We three walked on the beach, its curving length lined with an unbroken wall of hotels and four lanes of traffic to cross in one's bikini. We strolled alone except for the pigeons, though why not seagulls you wonder. It's said to be bad manners to drown in front of your hotel, but no swimmers attempted it today in the crashing surf. Nor were the muggers out after us, despite the warnings to beware of thieves who snatch purses, wrench earrings from ears, tear necklaces from throats, and are never caught. Don't drink the water. Don't wear any jewelry. Don't walk alone. They want you to feel right at home.
At dinner Lois introduced us: the Rotarians and their wives on their way to an international meeting in São Paulo, like Dr. Kahn and his wife Buri from Bangladesh; the retired executives; May Babson, a peripatetic widow; Doris Bouse, an art critic. Ted was identified as a distinguished professor of history, Betty as a teacher of music, I as writer-in-residence, a charge I'll have to live down.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The World and the Bo Tree by Helen Bevington. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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