The Books: “Certain Women” (Madeleine L’Engle)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Next book on the shelf is Certain Women by Madeleine L’Engle.

Now this is really bizarre. I obviously read this book – because I see my tell-tale markings in the margins – but I remember almost NOTHING about it. What I do remember is that it is about a man named David Wheaton – a beloved American stage actor – who is now dying, and his daughter Emma (also a successful actress) has come to be with him. David has decided to die on his boat – the Portia – and so most of the book takes place on this boat. Emma sits with her father, and he reminisces, and we go back and forth in time, and blah blah, but … why am I supposed to care? The whole device of the book is that David Wheaton is based on King David – and there’s an unfinished play he is haunted by – a play about King David – written by Emma’s now ex-husband. David Wheaton always had a dream of doing that play with his daughter. David Wheaton had 8 wives and 11 children. The book is a little bit too heavy-handed in the ol’ Christian subtext for my taste. L’Engle tries to make it subtext (meaning: subtle, felt but not stated) but she does not succeed. It’s a preachy book. I hate preachy books. So … I honestly don’t remember much about it. Wheaton looks back over his long life – his many many marriages – and Emma, who has her own problems to deal with (her own divorce) sits beside him, listens to him reminisce, adds her own details to the stories he tells … The book is also set up so that each of King David’s wives (Bathsheba, Ahinoam, Maacah, etc.) has a contemporary counterpart – and each chapter is set up so we get to know a different wife.

I almost feel like this would have been a better book if it had not been a novel- but if she had made it like her Genesis Trilogy books (And it was Good, A Stone for a Pillow, and Sold Into Egypt) – a rumination on the story of King David, a look at each of the wives and what they have to teach us, the lessons L’Engle herself has drawn from those stories in the Bible … I love those Genesis Trilogy books – but to try to wrench that stuff into a novel is difficult indeed, and you can’t be too obvious about it. This is one of L’Engle’s only “obvious” books … and it suffers for it.

Also – it features yet another one of her adult heroines who seems more like a teenage girl. L’Engle’s forte is not adulthood. It’s just not. Her best filter is to show us adulthood through the eyes of a teenage narrator. Any time she has an adult as the star (except for A Severed Wasp, in my opinion) – it seems like that adult is suffering from arrested development.

One thing I will say about this book: it’s wonderful to read a book about the world of theatre where the author seems to get it right. L’Engle was an actor in her 20s – touring with Chekhov and Shakespeare and Moliere – this was how she met her husband. She worked with some of the greats – Eva Le Gallienne was one of her mentors, who gave her her first break. L’Engle wrote her first novel while doing her first big show, sitting backstage scribbling in a notebook, in between her scenes. Writing eventually took over – but her husband remained an actor, and a very successful one, until the day he died. She is showing us that world – which is also a world that no longer exists – the world of Broadway in the 20s and 30s, when there were true giants of the stage working – when theatre was IT, when movies looked to THEATRE for its inspiration, as opposed to the other way around.

So. Certain Women. Should I read it again?? Anyone else read it out there who can comment?? I obviously read it once but retain almost none of it.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter.

Excerpt from Certain Women by Madeleine L’Engle.

David had met Ben one year when he dropped anchor at Whittock Island, where Ben and Alice had grown up. Ben had come out onto the beach to see whose boat was nosing into his small bay, and invited David in for coffee and conversation, and thus began what was to become an enduring friendship, which was cemented the year David arrived at Whittock with an agonizing pain in his belly. Ben had taken one look at David, moved to the wheel of the boat, and had run, as fast as the little craft would go, to Prince Rypert, where Alice had taken out an appendix ready to burst. And David, who had thought never to marry again, and Alice, who had thought never to marry at all, had fallen in love. “It was crazy,” Alice said. “I was set in my ways, much too old for romance, and there I was, like a silly schoolgirl.”

The year after David and Alice were married, and Alice had uprooted herself and moved to New York, Ben shattered his right femur, alone, fishing for salmon. How he got the troller into dock no one ever knew. The leg was set inadequately, and the bone knit slowly, and not well.

So it was natural for Ben to take over the Portia when David could no longer manage it and Ben, with his lame leg, could not spend weeks alone on his troller, fishing. He kept the house on Whittock Island, but the Portia became his real home. Normally, he slept in the forward cabin, where he had his odd collection of books: Shakespeare, the Bible, Water Prey and Game Birds, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Thoreau’s The Maine Woods … Emma could see them from her bunk, contained in a high-lipped shelf with an elastic cord.

Ben’s lack of formal education did not bother him. He had an unselfconscious but firm self-esteem. He was a good fisherman. An adequate logger. He was also perforce a navigator, meteorolgist, astronomer, electrician, carpenter, mechanic, shipwright — there was nothing Ben could not do, Emma thought. Occasionally he came up with plans for a kelp farm. The Pacific Northwest was in his blood. He was not happy anywhere else. Nor did he feel the need to be anywhere else. He had married when he was in his mid-twenties and within a few years his young wife had died of cancer. After her death, his life had been solitary and, ultimately, contented. He was nearly fifty now, but he looked younger.

“Emma, Emma,”David said. “I’m glad you’re here, glad we can share memories. I’ve hardly had time to give Alice my memories, my stories, and I want her to have them.”

Emma looked around at the white salt-washed stones of the shore, the dark green of firs predominating. She looked with loathing at the brown scars, acres of land where the trees had been indiscriminately logged, with only a small fringe of evergreen left at the waterline to disguise the carnage. David was indignant, pointing out ways that logging could bring in good living and not unbalance the precarious ecology. Some of the scars, Ben had observed calmly, were not man-made, but had come from slides, great roarings of trees and rocks and mud, started by wind and rain. Nature can be as brutal as her creatures, Ben said.

After dinner, they sat in the pilothouse with David, letting the long twilight wash over them like water, listening as David talked about his life in the theatre, until he was ready for sleep. Alice could mimic the call of a loon, and sometimes she was ansered, the long, lovely sound carrying across the water. David sipped a cup of vervain, watching the shadows of the great Douglas firs on the nearby islands deepen and darken. This was the time when he was most ready to talk, to unburden himself to the two women and Ben.

“The world changes,” he said. “Behavior which is taken for granted now, in the sixties, which is socially acceptable, would not have been tolerated when I was a young man.”

Emma sat in the revolving chair by the wheel and swiveled so that she could look at her father.

“If I’d had affairs, rather than marrying, I’d have been just another immoral actor. Because my wives were legitimate, I get a lot of grief that I could have avoided if I’d merely bedded instead of wedded. Not to excuse myself. I have been an immoral actor.”

Alice was sitting beside him on the bunk. She put his hand lightly on his knee. “Not an immoral actor, Dave. You have been a most moral actor.”

He laughed again. “An immoral man, then. Self-indulgent. Living all my fantasies instead of being satisfied with acting them on the stage. If I’d just had affairs, it would have been more practical as well as – in some cases – more honest. Forgive me, my dears, I maunder.”

Ben folded the chart table to its closed position against the wall. “Tell us more theatre stories, Dave. When did you get your big break?”

“I don’t think I had a big break,” David said. “I worked into my career gradually. My first featured role was in a series of French one-act plays when Existentialism wasn’t even a word. I played a very young Cyrano de Bergerac who didn’t much resemble Rostand’s hero except in the size of his nose. But the plays made a modest splash and so did I. Some critical acclaim but not very good box office. I met Meredith, who was to be the first of my wives, at the opening-night party. She wanted to know what had happened to my nose. I spent a long time explaining makeup to her, not just how I put the putty nose on and off. She was considerably older than I and had that strange kind of assurance that comes with being born very, very rich. She thought I was adorable, and I didn’t understand that she saw me as some kind of exotic animal she could buy and keep on a leash. I loved the clothes she bought me, especially the wildly expensive Chinese robe I still wear in my dressing room. I didn’t realize that the clothes came with the purchase, the way some women buy diamond-studded collars for their poodles.”

Then he laughed. “But I exaggerate, as usual. We were in love like two animals. No, that’s not fair, either. It is a human tendency to rewrite the past. What is true is that after we were married Meredith wanted me to leave the theatre. She had more than enough money for us both, she told me. I could not make her understand that I wasn’t an actor for money. For money I’d have stayed in Seattle and worked in my father’s bank.”

He handed his empty cup to Alice, who put it on the wide shelf above the bunk, and continued, “If Meredith couldn’t understand why I was an actor, I didn’t understand that, for people in her social class, acting was still unacceptable work, but she liked to be avant-garde. We were obviously not suited, but Meredith was a stickler for the proprieties, so she took me to the altar. I was young and didn’t know what I was doiong. My mother, bless her, your Bahama, Emma, begged me not to marry so hastily, to wait. My father threatened. They were right, but I was impetuous and thought I knew everything. Poor Meredith. She had too much money. Her family was terrified that I was going to try to get some of it when we divorced. She never married again.” He yawned. “I’m tired now, my dears.”