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(05/07/14 8:15pm)
Cindy Lee wakes up at 3:15 a.m. five days a week and drives 45 minutes to work at the laundry room in Freeman International Center (FIC). She starts off her day with emails and bookwork. Around 9:30 a.m. the truck arrives full with bags of dirty laundry from the three dining halls and any other catered events on campus. The bags can weigh 75 pounds, so it takes two people to lift each one off the truck. The staff then refills the truck with the previous day’s laundry and throws the first loads of towels in the washers as quickly as possible. It then takes the staff 45 minutes to an hour to sort through the rest of the laundry, checking all the uniform pockets to make sure nothing unusual gets tossed in the wash.
A typical day includes six to eight washer-loads, each of which is divided into two to three dryer loads and then put through the press and folded. Lee skips lunch so she can get off work at 1:30, in time to pick up her two sons from elementary school.
“It can be a very monotonous job,” Lee said. “Especially when you’re standing at a press for five to six hours, just putting flat sheets in — white flat sheets — or table linen, or napkins that just take forever.”
But then every day brings also its surprises; depending what the truck brings in the morning, the staff might be overloaded with dirty laundry, or face an easier day ahead with time for straightening up the storage or someone from a department outside of Dining Services could call in last minute with an order for linens. It is nearly impossible for Lee to plan a day ahead of time.
“I don’t think there’s ever a day that’s the same,” she said. The constant changes can be stressful, but Lee appreciates these constant shifts. “When the unexpected happens, it kind of breaks up the routine,” she said; she enjoys being taken out of the monotonous rhythm and forced to problem-solve.
Up until 2003, Middlebury College Dining Services rented all their uniforms, aprons, towels and linens through Foley Services Inc., who picked up dirty laundry at the end of the day and brought back a clean batch in the morning. In 2003, the College decided to begin buying their own uniforms and linens, and Lee, who was then 35, applied and was hired to help out serving in Ross Dining Hall and washing the laundry onsite.
The laundry service was a very new program, Lee said, and the College did not totally understand what it would involve when they started. Though they hired Lee to work both in the dining hall and in the laundry room, she rarely work in the dining hall. She had her work cut out for her washing all the aprons, uniforms and linens for Ross using one washer and dryer and a “little tiny press” in a storage closet inside the student laundry room in LaForce.
Within a year, Lee worked with Dining Services to turn over all three dining halls to the College’s newly bought uniforms and linens, moving one building at a time. She worked at first completely by herself, with some help from the dining hall staff during the busiest stretches of graduation, reunion, and commencement. Lee hired a part-time helper for a few years who eventually became full time, and added another part-timer as the program continued to expand.
Five years ago, the job became a lot bigger as Lee was given the added responsibility of washing all the bed linens, towels, and bath mats for the summer language schools and Bread Loaf School of English. With that responsibility came a move to FIC, where she would have the use of a large (approximately ten-foot long) press that pre-folds larger linens part-way, as well as three washers and four dryers, including “Betsy 1” and “Betsy 2,” the original washer and dryer from the storage-closet days in Ross. Lee now supervises a staff of four, and a much larger staff in the summers, including high school and college students, to deal with the heavy load from Commencement and Reunion through the language schools and Bread Loaf programs. Having built up the program from scratch, Lee said she is “very happy with where it’s come.”
Lee had never worked with laundry, except at home, before applying to work at the College. When she moved to FIC and took on laundry for language schools, “it was all new to us,” she said. The staff would ask her how to do something, “and I’d be like, ‘I don’t know!’ I didn’t know how to fold a fitted sheet for the life of me!” she said.
I have also felt clueless throughout my life as to how to fold fitted sheets and usually end up rolling them into a ball, which was also Lee’s technique at home until someone from facilities taught her how to do it. The technique, which she shared with me is in fact amazingly simple, and comes out perfectly flat and square.
Lee said the learning process has been continuous throughout her eleven years supervising laundry services. She makes suggestions to her supervisors that make the job safer and more manageable, such as switching to a smaller bag for dirty laundry so that it could even be possible for her staff to lift the full bags off the cart. Still, the job is constantly changing. Each year she is asked to take on a little more work.
But then again, as Lee said, “life changes on a daily basis, so you just have to go with it. I never get too comfortable because I never know what’s going to be brought!”
When Lee moved to FIC, she hired three fifteen-year-old high school students — including Elise Biette, who is currently a freshman at the College — all of whom stayed with her for four years. Lee said she works to keep the job fun so that her high school and college student workers come back year after year. She keeps a white board that anyone can draw on in the press area (when I came to visit it was covered with Disney figures representing each of the staff’s personalities) and always keeps music playing. In the summertime, the music gets “quite loud,” Lee said, and she has little competitions between the staff to see, for example, who can fold a certain number of napkins the fastest.
In the summer, it can get very hot in the work area, and the workload can be intense, especially at the beginning, when the staff has to turn over all the linens from graduation for reunion two weeks later, which also happens to fall at the same time as the Young Writer’s Conference at Bread Loaf.
“It gets pretty hectic,” Lee said, “turning over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of linens within a week and a half. At the end of language schools is another rush, as her staff washes 2,100 blankets, sheets, mattress pads, towels and bath mats.
It takes about a month to wash all the language school linens. The bags of dirty laundry fill almost the entire dance floor of the Bunker in a seven to eight foot high mountain, as well as a walk-in cooler which the staff piles full all the way up to the fire extinguisher sprinklers on the ceiling — “as high as is legal.”
“It does get crazy in here,” Lee said. She’s had staff cry feeling so overwhelmed by this month of work. She tells her staff to “take it one day at a time; we’re only here, we’re only human, and we’ll do the best we can … there’s nothing else we can do.”
“If we’ve been really stressed,” Lee said, “and I’m looking at people, and it’s like slow-mo, and it’s hot in here too on top of that, I’ll be like ‘field trip!’ And I’ll take everybody outside for five to ten minutes just to get away from this.”
Lee calls a field trip a couple times throughout the summer, and every time, she does, the staff cheers.
When Lee’s three high school workers left her to go on to college last year, she cried to see them go, after she’d been sort of their “mother hen” for the past four years. But she is happy for her students that are now “spreading their wings”; they all stay in contact with her, and they are doing “really well” in college.
Nowadays, Lee finds, high school and college students don’t always possess the same drive as past generations.
“I was brought up differently,” she says, but today parents tend to be more indulgent — “and I treat my kids the same way, you know, I give them everything, so I’m feeding into what I don’t like!” But Lee finds that she has been “really lucky” with her young staff. They have been “really hard workers, really well-rounded students,” both at work and outside, and “good people” all around. Lee has had her share of challenges with some staff-members, “but of the eleven years,” she would say, “it’s been more positive than not.”
When I asked if she foresees working in laundry services for a long time into the future, she said she has “mixed feelings.” She is 46 years old, and this job — lifting the bags of dirty linens off the cart, sorting through eight loads of laundry, switching the loads as quickly as possible in the summer to keep the washers constantly running, standing at the press for five hours at a time — takes a physical toll.
“I would love to stay here and retire from the College,” Lee said, “because I like this job.”
Though the pay is similar to what could be found elsewhere, the benefits for College staff are unmatched in the region. When Lee’s nine- and twelve-year-old sons are old enough for college, they could attend Middlebury at a discounted rate, or receive credit to attend another school. The question, however, Lee said, is whether she will be physically capable of working with laundry services until her retirement.
“What will my body be like in ten to fifteen years?” she asked. “I’m hoping to [retire from the College], yes, but only the future knows that right now.”
Laundry Services is always open — seven days a week, all year long. And, hopefully, for many years into the future, Lee will be there, playing her music at top volume.
(05/07/14 3:14pm)
Ali Smith’s unusual new novel Artful, published in 2012 by Penguin Books, begins with a poem, a Child Ballad from the early fifteenth century: “The wind doth blow today, my love, / And a few small drops of rain; / I never had but one true-love, / In cold grave she was lain. / I’ll do as much for my true-love / As any young man may; / I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave / For twelvemonth and a day.”
Then Smith’s writing begins, carrying the poem right into the present narration: “The twelvemonth and a day being up, I was still at a loss. If anything I was more at a loss.”
This beginning is indicative of the book as a whole, which blends art into life into art, again and again. The novel — or whatever we choose to call it, as it isn’t quite a novel, and isn’t quite anything else either — began as four lectures for the Weidenfeld Vising Professorship in European Comparative Literature at Saint Anne’s College in Oxford: “On time,” “On form,” “On edge” and “On offer and on reflection”. The lectures draw from literature as a massive, global whole, tying Charlie Chaplin to Flaubert to W. G. Sebald, and Edwin Morgan (a contemporary poet) to Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens and Horace. The lectures tumble from one eloquent thought to the thought to the next, and always remain — at least in my experience — one step ahead of the reader, so you feel like you’re always almost grasping the meaning but always just missing it.
But the narrator of the novel seems to find, as she rifles through these lectures, that grasping the meaning is not the point. The point is the elusiveness, the in-between spaces that literature dances along — not here, not there, between the lower classes and the upper, between the physical page and the wild imagination, between the dead and the living. And there is a potential to defy time in literature, and also to preserve it; there is a selfishness and an act of giving and also a potential for redemption, in reading and in writing. And so much more, of course, that goes beyond what I could describe.
The narrator of the book is not an expert of literature. She (or he — we are never quite sure) is a biologist, reading through the lectures on the desk of her husband (or wife) who was an expert in literature, and who has died. The writing of these narrated segments is like a conversation; so vividly real, and also sometimes so strikingly beautiful. We learn very little about the two characters, except for short moments of their current and remembered days, and then the insights into how they see trees, and how they read books — which speaks so deeply to their characters, and to (I think) the nature of life and loss itself, that we do not want anything else.
In my sophomore year at Middlebury, I remember sitting in a senior thesis carrel that I’d stolen in the upper mezzanine, furiously speed-reading Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which is, I have to admit, a very difficult book, and feeling utterly lost. I went to Professor Stephen Donadio’s office in Hesselgrave House, which is lined with shelves of books on nearly all the walls, and asked if he could just maybe tell me what was important in the book, what I should look for, because I was a little sophomore and didn’t understand. He told me that there is no answer, and that I should never to let anyone try to answer that question for me.
I should pay attention to whatever it was that struck me at this reading, he said, and years later, I would come back to the book and find that different pieces of it would now speak to me, and the book would be new again, and that is how we should read. We should read personally, I guess. We should let the book speak to us directly. That advice has always stuck with me.
There were times reading Artful, when I felt that maybe I wasn’t smart enough to understand it. But I don’t think Ali Smith meant for any of her readers to put all the pieces logically together. The character that the book is named after, the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, is a character who eludes us. When Dickens lists off the fate of all the characters at the end of his novel, Smith’s narrator notes, he never mentions the Artful: “it’s like the Dodger’s not just given the story the slip, but given Dickens the slip too”.
That is the beauty of great literature, of course. It can’t quite be pinned down. And somehow, still, at each reading, it speaks straight to us, and it opens up a window for us to see the world, at least for a little while, in a new light. Smith’s novel touched me in this way. Reading it this week was like a beautiful culmination to my four years of studying stories at Middlebury — hopefully a beautiful beginning to a whole life of studying stories too.
(04/11/14 6:51pm)
Forgive me, psych majors, if I am wrong in this, but I seem to recall learning in my Psych Disorders class two years ago about several studies which proved that the life-outlook of individuals suffering from Depression is, in fact, not overly pessimistic, but rather fairly realistic compared to the realities of probability. Psychologically “healthy” individuals, by contrast, tend to be overly optimistic in their predictions for the future. That is, if depressed individuals and not-depressed individuals were asked to predict whether or not they would get a job in the first year out of college, according to these studies, the depressed individuals would be more likely to be correct.
Whether or not this is, in fact, true, we could certainly make a case for all the terrible things happening across the world everyday which we choose to ignore, as well as the terrifying existential questions which we usually put out of our minds, and say that on the whole, day to day, most of us are choosing to live in blissful ignorance. We could, of course, make the case in the other direction—that on the whole, day to day, we ignore most of the beauty and the miracles of life (I mean, I am not a science major, so the fact that our brains can heal from trauma and that plants know to grow upwards out of the soil and not downwards into the soil and that the universe is expanding and folding in on itself at the same time— all of that feels like a miracle to me, but call it what you will).
However, Ben Marcus, author of the new short-story collection Leaving the Sea released this January by Knopf Publishing, is most certainly of the former opinion. A narrator in his story “Watching Mysteries with My Mother” notices that the families of individuals with terminal illness insist that their loved one is “a fighter”; she will be the one to “beat the odds.” But “odds should be odds, and they should never be beaten,” he writes, “If they are, then the odds are incorrect and should be changed.” Later he recognizes that his mother’s odds of dying are increasing at every moment as she ages. “Right now, sleeping in her bed, she has never in her entire life been in greater danger of dying.”
The moral, I guess, would be that life is often more arbitrary and unpleasant than we would like to think, which is possibly the only certitude standing behind the characters of Marcus’s stories, fifteen middle-aged male protagonists who seem painfully aware of the fact that their lives are not at all turning out as they would have hoped. Marcus, the author of three novels including The Flame Alphabet and the winner of three Pushcart Prizes, finds his own place among such bleakly sardonic storytellers as Kafka, Beckett, and the Coen brothers. His characters are often pathetic, utterly failing to communicate, and disgusted with the shortcomings of language and of their own bodies. If they happen to fall in love, it is “through several mutual misunderstandings.”
The stories begin in a familiar and disappointing modern world—a divorced dad finds his cubicle at work overtaken by interns, a middle-aged son watches British mystery-dramas on PBS and cannot forget about his mother’s mortality. Marcus’s voice feels grippingly vivid and current; he doesn’t try anything fancy with his sentences (save for one sentence which goes on for six pages—and yet miraculously manages not to be annoying). Here and there, Marcus points out small sensations of daily existence which we might never before have noticed.
As his stories progress, the recognizable world and the forms of language themselves begin to dissolve, and the characters waver between struggling to survive and wishing to disappear. The reader is left alone without sign posts, only grounded in the recurrent rhythms of the stories, and in the glimpses of suggestion which make these wildly violent dystopias seem strangely similar to the reality we swim in every day. “We know nothing about the future,” the characters of one story remember from a sort of gymnasium cum bomb-shelter—we know very little for sure at all.
The reader is as lost as the characters, and often frustrated and exhausted by the tediums of the everyday and by the devastating awareness that human life might be nothing more than a mistake. “I would have gills,” thinks one of the narrators, “if I were something better that had never tried to leave the sea.” But one keeps reading, I think, because every so often, even as Thomas inches for what feels like a thousand years worth of over-wrought anxiety down the office hallway towards the beautiful, indifferent colleague at the coffee cart—every so often, one miraculously finds a moment of peace.
(03/19/14 5:06pm)
Tammy Iffland, first cook in Atwater Dining Hall, is perhaps one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.
“My job is fun,” she told me. “We love making you guys happy.”
Iffland’s day starts around 7 a.m., but Atwater opens even earlier, with dry goods arriving on trucks from Burlington Food Service starting around 5 a.m. All the food comes in through the loading dock behind Atwater, where the trucks back in through giant garage doors. The dock is heated “so we’re not freezing to death while we’re taking all the freight off the trucks,” Iffland said.
“There’s a lot that goes on, you know, that you guys don’t see,” she said. “A day in my life … it’s getting here, make sure we have enough food, make sure the food that I’m counting on was ordered and is coming on the truck …”
Sometimes the trucks can be unpredictable, and Iffland has to wait until 8 or 9 a.m. for some of the produce she needs to cook that day.
On a typical day in Atwater, there are anywhere from five to seven staff members who Iffland “look[s] after,” and who look to her for answers. They all stock the store rooms shelves and three walk-in refrigerators in the basement of Atwater as food comes in off the trucks. Then, Iffland tells the chefs to “gather what we need for the day,” and all the produce and ingredients are brought upstairs in their elevator.
Chopping vegetables, fabricating meat, assembling sandwiches and like tasks happens in the back prep-kitchen upstairs. The prep-kitchen can get pretty busy with everyone working around one another. All the food is then cooked in the open kitchens behind the two lunch-lines. Chefs have to be careful to stay professional in the open setting of these kitchens.
“We’re not ghosts back here,” Iffland said. “You can hear what we’re saying, just as well as we can hear what you’re saying!” But she has never had problems with the professionalism of her staff.
In the back prep kitchen especially, “it’s very friendly,” Iffland said. She thinks her team works very well together, which is important.
“It’s like any relationship, doesn’t matter if it’s personal or professional,” she said, “you’ve got to really work at it” to collaborate. The chefs in Atwater spend eight to ten hours a day working next to one another.
“Sometimes you see these guys more than you see your own family. I enjoy working with each and every one of these guys,” said Iffland, and it is clear from seeing her camaraderie with the chefs that they enjoy working with her too.
Iffland first realized that she wanted to cook at age 14 when she was working for a catering company, washing dishes and watching the grand production around her.
“I loved the tedious stuff, you know like the little pastries and little tea sandwiches, and the beautiful spreads that they put out. I fell in love with it … So I’ve spent the rest of my career learning all that stuff.”
Iffland got a degree as a pastry chef and later went to culinary school in New Hampshire, where she met her husband Rick Iffland, who is a cook in Ross Dining Hall. For four years, before coming to Atwater, Iffland served as the private house cook for President Liebowitz’s family, where her kitchen had to separate utensils and dishware for meat and dairy to follow the kosher dietary laws. The Liebowitz family meals were not especially fancy, according to Iffland; “they eat like you and me.” The family loved salmon cakes, empanadas, whole-wheat dough pizza and salads.
Iffland also helped to run Otter Creek Bakery in town for eight years, and has run bakeries in multi-million dollar operations in Phoenix, AZ, which gave her plenty of experience for the managerial side of being a first cook. Alongside Darren Zeno, the other first cook in Atwater, she has to know accounting, plan menus, order food, implement recipes and calculate how much food to cook.
Atwater serves between 800 and 900 students a day, which has posed a challenge for finances since the economic downfall. Iffland works hard to avoid over-production and plans menus to “stretch that dollar,” “make things sustainable” and “use things that are grown here, things that are made here,” as opposed to importing produce. In the spring and summer especially, Atwater uses large amounts of produce from the organic garden.
The 800 to 900 students also pose challenges for seating; there are only 265 seats in Atwater. “We try to turn those seats as quickly as we can,” Iffland said, hence the two lunch lines to speed up the process.
“I actually feel bad when we run out of seating,” Iffland said. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Atwater’s busiest days, the dining hall often fills at the 11 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. rushes, and sometimes again when the next class gets out at 1:30. Students sometimes go back to sit at the chefs’ break table behind the vegetarian line, which is ok according to Iffland.
“We want you to enjoy the food, and we’re proud of what we do.”
In the near future, Iffland says, dining halls are planning to coordinate their menus to make food costs more efficient. This means that “you’re going to see probably the same menus in every dining hall,” and Iffland will no longer decide the dishes cooked in Atwater.
“I think that’s fine,” she said. “We just want to make sure we can make food for everyone, and that everyone’s satisfied with their experience here.”
The food matters a great deal, of course, but Iffland believes the experience of being a student at Middlebury “is just as important.”
(03/06/14 2:20pm)
Robert Stowe, Head Baker, will retire this spring after a long career in the basement kitchen of Proctor. “According to human resources, it’s 49 years. Which is fine with me,” Stowe said. “That’s long enough.”
Stowe began working summers before starting high school when Proctor was still new — the dining hall was built in 1959.
“And then I just kind of stayed on,” he said. “Went into the service for a couple years, came back … and the rest is history.” Stowe’s friend Charlie Sargent joined the kitchen after high school, working with Stowe in a back room then called “the meat shop,” where all the meat was processed. Today, Sargent is the Purchasing
Manager for dining services and still works alongside Stowe, 39 years later. The two share an office outside the Proctor bakery.
Campus Editor-in-Chief Kyle Finck ’14 and I arrived at 7:00 a.m. last Friday to speak with Stowe. It felt very early to us, but Stowe had been there since five and had already baked corn muffins with cranberries, cooked the filling for the berry cobbler for dinner and put double chocolate chip cookies in the oven. He took us with him to wash the 60-gallon pot from the berry cobbler, called a trunion because the whole thing can tilt to pour out whatever is inside. Stowe wielded a hose to wash out the enormous pot: “See, this is just like home!”
According to Stowe, 99.9 percent of the breads and desserts at Proctor are baked the same day that they are served.
On this Friday, he and Jim Logan, another baker, worked alone to prep and bake everything between the two of them, although most days the staff totals four. On the busiest days, Stowe arrives at work at 4:00 a.m.
Logan was pulling the first pans of double chocolate cookies out of the oven when we walked over. They would end up doing 30 to 40 sheet pans, totaling between 12,000 and 16,000 cookies.
Years ago, the dining hall used ready-made cookie plugs. “But these cookies are made from scratch,” said Stowe, “And I assume the kids say they’re ok.”
Stowe would guess that today 95 percent of the baked goods are made from scratch.
“We’re lucky,” I said.
“I’d like to think so,” said Stowe.
Everything gets baked in an oven that fits four cookie sheets across on four shelves, which rotate inside the oven. An alarm and a strobe light, inserted when two hearing-impaired bakers worked in the kitchen several years ago, go off when the cookies are ready, but Stowe says you can tell when they’re almost done by the smell.
Only once that he remembers did the oven start to smell too strongly, when Stowe forgot to take out one of the four racks of biscuits, but they weren’t too hard to send out anyway — luckily, because the dining hall needs every pan that gets baked.
The biggest disaster in Stowe’s memory (which might give some insight into how smoothly the bakery runs) was a cabinet of diplomat cream for Napolean’s that he was wheeling into the cooler at the end of a busy week when a wheel caught, and the whole thing tipped on its side.
“All this diplomat cream — inside, it was terrible. But I was lucky enough that what I had made, there was enough to carry us through.” The diplomat cream was just a bit thinner that day.
The kitchen has changed pretty drastically since Stowe first arrived. For one thing, there isn’t a meat shop anymore; all the meat arrives pre-processed, like what you’d find at a grocery store. When Stowe started, the menus consisted of meat, potatoes and a vegetable every day, with some sort of baked good and either fruit cocktail or, on two days of the week, ice cream for dessert.
During the time of the hearing-impaired bakers, all the hotdog and hamburger buns where baked from scratch — “just murder” on the two bakers. They also made their own yoghurt, jams and jellies, in addition to all the breads, rolls, and desserts.
“These guys were pretty much nonstop, you know,” said Stowe. “I guess that’s where I got some of my work ethic from, was watching these guys. I mean I don’t hold a candle to what these guys did!”
The two bakers worked in Proctor for “the longest time.” Stowe still misses them. “They were a good bunch to work with.” When they left, the economy was tanking, and the bakery had to do with what they had, so Stowe moved up to head baker. Stowe describes himself as pretty resistant to change, “but I guess there isn’t any reason I should be, because the only thing constant about food service is change. It’s, I mean, change here and change there,” said Stowe, “so I guess that’s it.”
Stowe looks forward to a small change to the routine this week: “I’ll be on vacation!” He will take a few days off to sugar his maple trees with his wife and grandchildren. “When you’re a sugar-maker,” he said, “you have to take off when the sap’s running or you miss the boat.”
Of the bigger change looming in this coming May, Stowe said “I think you have to embrace it and go with it.” He is looking forward to “the quiet times” in his retirement.
“I mean, some days its o.k. in here and other days it’s like … the noise. I think the older you get, the more you don’t like it,” said Stowe. “Not that I’m ancient, I guess.”
He and his wife plan to travel, if not this year then the next. “We went out and purchased an RV, so we’re definitely hitting the road at some point,” he said. “We’ll do summer around here and then expand and go further and further. We’d like to travel and see the country some, see what it’s all about.” Stowe’s dream would be to travel across Asia, into the Black Sea, and then into Europe along rivers.
It will certainly be different, though, not to spend each morning with his colleagues in the Proctor bakery after 49 years.
“You know, to work this many years next to somebody, you know what they’re thinking, and they know what you think,” said Stowe. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but nonetheless … that will be missed.”
(12/05/13 3:20am)
I have to admit that it took me nearly until the end of “See Now Then”, Jimaica Kincaid’s controversial new novel and the first she has published in ten years, to learn how to read it. At first I was in awe of Kincaid’s lovely long sentences, weaving together disparate snatches of time and landscape, voice and personality, into the small and yet richly complex life of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet in the Shirley Jackson house in Bennington, Vermont. One can fall comfortably into the tumbling, unending rhythm of these sentences, as Kincaid gently carries Mrs. Sweet’s narrative voice in a wondering search for understanding of life’s joys and sadnesses and lifts all her characters into the airy realm of the epic and then grounds them in Gap overalls, a bunk bed from Crate & Barrel and a garden battle between the shy Myrmidons and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collected from McDonalds’ happy meals.
One of the reasons we love poetry, I think, is that it can fit tragedy into a gently rocking rhythm; it can make life seem comprehensible, or at least beautiful, even in its deepest darknesses, and we might think yes, it is all worthwhile; yes, it is all part of a greater whole. But Kincaid jerks us out of that serenity. Suddenly life is far from comprehensible — suddenly hatred is a part of love, and Mr. Sweet wishes to find his wife’s decapitated head on the kitchen counter and to cook his baby son into a soufflé or a cut of meat that he could serve to her on a platter. I felt lost in the center of “See Now Then”, and it is not a very long book. I felt frustrated that this vein of sickness could lie at the center of so much beauty. I felt that Kincaid was torturing me; I did not want to watch Mrs. Sweet naively, happily knitting her socks and blankets as Mr. Sweet imagines killing her, and I was sick and tired of time circling around madly and repeating itself, and of moments of near-understanding getting mixed up and interrupted by trivialities — and all this in exhausting, mile-long sentences. It was too much.
I was so caught up in my anger with Jamaica Kincaid that I failed to notice I was at the wrong gate at the Atlanta airport and almost missed my flight back to Middlebury. After sprinting from concourse E to C fifteen minutes before takeoff, I made it to my seat on the plane with my hands trembling and finally decided to start again. As our plane circled in the air around snowy Burlington and finally gave up and diverted to Albany, I tried to read “See Now Then” more slowly and patiently, pausing often for breath — especially at the colons, for just when Kincaid seems ready to be perfectly straightforward with us, “the young Heracles had no other way to understand this except in this way:” she is sure to launch into a whole new jumble of images and impressions and memories.
Whether the novel itself becomes clearer as it reaches the moment of crisis, or whether I had only finally learned how to read it, Kincaid’s images became piercingly real to me. Her writing might, at times, become a bit high-flown (Mrs. Sweet’s children are named Heracles and Persephone and her deceased neighbor was named Homer), but the mythical mother comes into focus as her children’s very current, teenage voices weave into the narrative and all of their pain and love feel vibrant and somehow new, just as the family cracks into pieces.
Many critics have pinned Kincaid’s novel as an autobiographical work of revenge on her ex-husband Allen Shawn, a reading which, though technically accurate, would reduce the work as a whole. Mr. Sweet does come off horribly in the novel, for in the end he only loves dead trees. He is afraid of the process of life itself, the constant cycle of growing and dying through the seasons, whereas Mrs. Sweet “found this process a joy, its inevitability a mystery, unexpected, unimaginable.” Still, Kincaid compassionately imagines her way into Mr. Sweet’s mind to comprehend the agony of living trapped within a marriage that one does not want. Her novel strives to understand both Mr. and Mrs. Sweet’s constant internal battle between giving themselves wholly to their family and reserving themselves within their solitary, artistic corners of the house to seek out their “one true selves.”
If Kincaid’s writing does not resolve our greatest questions, it gets at the center of the elusive, circuitous, incomprehensible substance of time, which distorts and rewrites our impressions (half of the memories in the novel could not be real), and yet, in brief moments, glints into focus. Kincaid’s writing mirrors the at-times-beautiful, at-times-bewildering experience of living — which, like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, is tricky to get through. But I think, like Woolf and Stein, Kincaid is doing something new and remarkable with words, and we owe it to her to read carefully and patiently. I, for one, sat in wonder for a moment after finishing the book on the plane, then immediately turned back to the first page to begin reading it all again.
(11/14/13 1:19am)
I cannot imagine anyone — except perhaps a fanatic of the history of hot-air ballooning — who could pick up Julian Barnes’ new novel Levels of Life in a bookshop and find the first few pages compelling. The first pages read like a collection of museum captions, alternatively describing three historical ballooning flights in sentence-paragraphs of incisive detail, which leave the reader without any sense of character, plot or imagery to hold onto — only ample space, between the brief blocks of text, in which to feel puzzled. It is perhaps the blessing of an acclaimed author of twenty books, including Flaubert’s Parrot and the Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending, that Barnes’s reputation runs ahead of him, and he might count on the reader’s patience as he delicately integrates, between dates and facts and block quotes, a layered view of two eventually dramatic (and partially true) stories of balloonists and bohemians in late nineteenth century France and England. The tale follows the life of the “flame-haired” Félix Tournachon, who soared above France in balloons and, for the first time in history, photographed it from above, as well as the brief, life-altering romance between the “balloonatic” world traveler Colonel Fred Burnaby and the tiny, superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt, which never managed to lift off from the ground.
We could say that Barnes’ novel begins at the height of Tournachon’s photographs, which allow us “to look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective.” From this height, one can recognize the patterns of human existence, though it is hard to know why they matter. From this height, as Barnes later writes, our planet looks “beautiful,” but also “irrelevant.” Intricately, but impersonally, Barnes begins by drawing out the lines of overlap between his stories: there are three balloon rides, three “luxorious” lovers (Tournachon, Burnaby, and then Barnes himself) and three occasions upon which life brings together “two things that have not been put together before,” leaving the world, or at least the characters’ worlds, forever changed as a consequence.
Even as real emotion begins to permeate the stark and concise narrative, and as the tightly organized paragraphs of the first two sections descend into the messier regions of the human soul in the torrent of the author’s personal grief at the death of his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, Barnes still grasps for a sense of the logical ordering of the universe. It is what he has instead of God. The old patterns therefore return, though they become, like so many “clear and solid concept[s]” we try to apply to death, “fluid, slippery, metaphorical.”
“You put together two people who have not been put together before,” Barnes begins, repeating the formula of the first two sections, but the equation devolves into something beyond logic.
Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible, but it is emotionally possible.
When life — and death, which is a part of life — is not viewed from the objective distance of a hot-air balloon, when it is viewed up close and in present tense, it does not make much sense.
“It is all just the universe doing its stuff,” Barnes repeats to himself. He also contemplates suicide and talks aloud to his deceased wife years after she has been buried.
Aesthetically, the first sections of the novel are remarkable in their combination of simplicity and specificity, and gradually, as the story lowers to ground level, one feels a dull affection for the characters and their lost potential for love. But it is only in the final section that the novel reaches out from the ink and grabs you and shakes you and will not let you ignore the extreme heights and depths of joy and grief, of understanding and confusion, of television banality and operatic emotion. And thus it is these very extremes, despite the heartache they bring with them, which make human life on earth — that distant black-and-white photograph from a hot-air balloon — once again relevant.
To give form to life without reducing it — and to do so in a new way — is, I believe, the mark of a great novel. And in 128 pages, Julian Barnes reaches to encompass the whole of human experience in three chapters and three “levels of life,” as the novel travels from the soaring balloons of the first section to a grave six feet underground in the last, from the sense of a patterned universal to the chaos of the intensely personal, from the height of hopefulness to the depths of despair — and back again. The characters’ lives are, in turns, frustratingly small and wrenchingly tragic, but Barnes suggests that all we have are these extremes, and perhaps they are enough.