Book of the Month: The World My Wilderness February 1, 2025February 1, 2025 One of the things I do in terrifying times is read books about how other people navigated terrifying times. As the inauguration approached, Shakespeare & Company had Dorian Lynskey on their podcast to discuss his book Everything Must Go, an exploration of apocalypse stories from Revelation, through Mary Shelley, to nuclear war, climate change, AI, and the robot apocalypse. I ordered the book and found it enormously comforting. The world has always been ending, and yet, we are still here. Both things are true. It’s not that “everyone was wrong” all those times and the world didn’t end. Worlds end all the time. Each of us is a world, and life can be so hard — we lose the people we love, we struggle to get by, we watch as our beloved home is overrun by tourists and bought up by rich people. And of course, our current political nightmare with all the cruelties it entails, the very real damage we’ve done to our planet. And yet, here we are, alive in the world on a day like this one, where I’m sitting in the wee greenhouse room Chuck built for me from the discarded door/window units he replaced on a rich guy’s house, the sun is shining, the potted Meyer Lemon is blooming, and the sky is that deep gorgeous blue of a Rocky Mountain winter. The world is always ending, and yet it is also always here. It’s all true at the same time. Read moreCrushWhich brings us to The World My Wilderness, a book in which characters are so often both/and: cruel and loving, masculine and feminine, intelligent and blind to one another. One of the things I admired the most about this book is the way it condemns no one, while also not letting anyone off the hook. The World My Wilderness was Rose Macaulay’s penultimate book. Long out of print, it was brought back by Virago Modern Classics in 2018 and seems to have been building a steady kind of buzz for a couple of years. It’s an interesting book for our times — set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it’s the story of two young siblings, exiled from their home in the South of France and sent to London “to be civilized.” They’ve run feral through the war, junior members of the maquis, resisting both the Germans and the Vichy, skipping school, defying adults on principle. The maquis is both a physical place, the scrubby hillsides and forests surrounding their parents’ home in Collioure, on the Spanish border, and shorthand for the resistance forces, an organized group with whom it is possible to connect, who provide not only instruction on resistance, but companionship and care. However, with the death of Maurice, the father of Raoul, the stepfather of Barbary, it is decided that the children are getting too old to run wild, that they need to be “civilized,” brought into the folds of respectively, their proper French and proper Engish class positions. “They seem [to be] anarchists;” says their mother Helen to her oldest son Ritchie, come from London to collect his younger sister Barbary and her stepbrother Raoul, “they are against all authority and used to hiding bombs about the place and derailing trains. It seems to have become an instinct.” So much so, that when they find themselves in London, the two take to the overgrown ruins of what is now the Barbican complex, acres of destroyed buildings, overrun by fireweed and vining plants, inhabited by other feral souls like themselves: deserters and petty thieves, mad priests and small animals rustling in the undergrowth. I found this book via Olivia Laing’s recent The Garden Against Time (a book I also want to talk about in the next few months). From our particular moment of social and climate crisis, Wilderness fascinated me — it’s playing across all the dualisms that plague us: women and men, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization, Christianity and the Greeks, Catholic and Protestant, anarchism and capitalism, collaboration and resistance, autonomy and propriety. Macaulay, like many of the modernist women writers of the early decades of the 20th century, was deeply invested in exploring ideas around androgyny and sexual identity, twinned boy/girl pairs show up in many of her books, and like Virginia Woolf, she was deeply committed to the idea that men needed to develop the gentler “feminine” sides of their characters, while women needed to develop their autonomous “masculine” sides. A tall, slim woman who spent most of her childhood “as a boy,” and who throughout adulthood wore her hair short, excelled at sports, and never married (though she did have a 25 year relationship with a married man, a former Jesuit priest and her sorrow at his death just before the writing of this novel informs it), Macaulay’s work is often concerned with questioning received truths, poking to see where the fault lines are in those ideas we take to be self-evident. One of the things I found most interesting about Wilderness is that all these binary choices throughout the book are usually triangulated in some way, vexed by a third option, perhaps the one not taken, perhaps the one that could have been if circumstances had allowed. It’s a book that shows a deep generosity toward its characters. For each of these characters, the world has ended in some fundamental way. Helen, the goddess-like mother at the heart of the story, divorced from Richie and Barbary’s father not out of animosity, but because, it seems, she got so fundamentally bored with life as the wife of a prominent and successful London lawyer that she bought a house in the south of France with money she won gambling and took off with Barbary. There she met her second husband, Maurice Michel, a ribald and jolly widower, a man she loved dearly, a man with whom she had another baby and built a deeply fulfilling life in the idyllic Villa des Fraises. This was, of course, scandalous. Her husband never got over it. His second wife, Pamela, a very “jolly hockey sticks” sort of younger woman, has built her entire identity as a wife and mother around not being the scandalous first wife. Maurice, Helen’s second huband, was the mayor of Collioure, as was his father before him, and while he collaborated with the Vichy government on a business level, he never denounced anyone, and in fact sheltered soldiers and others escaping through Spain. Helen’s son Richie was one of them. But in the aftermath of the war, when the Resistance forces were taking their revenge, they drowned Maurice one morning in the bay outside his house. For Helen, the blow was devastating, even if she didn’t show it outwardly, “Her want of Maurice grew no less; it hungered in her night and day, engulfing her senses and her reason in an aching void.” That Barbary and Raoul may have had a hand in the death of Maurice is a shadow that lies between them all, and although the excuse for sending Barbary to London is that she needs to “be civilized,” the true reason is that her mother cannot forgive her. Barbary is sent to her father, to a house not without warmth and love, but a house where she’s exiled from the sun of her mother’s attention, and where she is expected to conform to the proprieties of her class. For Barbary, the world ended with the death of Maurice, when her mother pulled down the shutters on her love. Barbary arrives in London, “small and slight, in her travelling coat and crumpled frock, her limp hatless locks hanging round her pale, immature face,” her father “did not see much change in her from the queer elf of seven years ago. … she had been the pet of both parents, a harlequin, a vagrant imp who took her father amicably for granted, but would kiss her mother’s shadow on the wall.” Barbary, with her habits of resistance, rejects her father’s new baby, despite liking babies, out of loyalty to the brother she’s left in France, refuses to acknowledge her stepmother’s place in the household, and refuses to accept that this move is permanent. They enroll her at the Slade art school, where her facility carries her through, but she’s less like an adolescent on the verge of womanhood, than like the much younger child who left London at ten. If, as Simone de Beauvoir posits: “One is not born, but becomes a woman,” then Barbary’s resistance efforts extend to this project as well. She appears at her father’s dinner table, when they have guests “having cursorily washed some of the dirt of ruined London off her hands, but not changed either frock or shoes” and rejects entirely his contention that she must “try to become a normally civilized young woman.” There is a lot of commentary on how she refuses to curl her hair, or care about clothes. She annoys them all by her seeming inability to understand that she must grow up, that her mother is never coming back, that her parents will not reunite, and that she is to live, full time, in London. She quietly exudes the attitude that they can make her live in exile, but she’ll never concede to their terms. What no one, including it seems, her stepbrother Raoul knows, is that during the war, Barbary was not simply running around creating mischief, but was at some point captured and “made to talk”. Her memories of enter the narrative only as fragments, but it seems that there was a blond German soldier, there was the infliction of pain to make her talk, and there were three sexual encounters, none of them consensual. After the third one, the soldier was shot, though it’s unclear by whom, and whether Barbary was present. Barbary seems far more ashamed of being “made to talk” than she does of being raped, and she fends off men in the London wilderness with a simple declaration that she’s not interested “in all that.” Barbary does not ever seem to have been a child who chattered, who told her parents her thoughts, but in the aftermath of the war, in the aftermath of her exile, she is nearly mute. The only character she reliably talks to is Raoul, as the two of them, knocking around in the ruined churches of London, try to work out their feelings about God, and sin, and atonement. She envies Raoul, raised a Catholic, for whom confession is an option, and claims that for “heretics” like herself: “we others can’t be forgiven, because we sin only against people, and the people stay hurt or killed or whatever it is we have done to them.” She is a character for whom introspection is not a natural state, she’s all instinct and reaction, but this does not mean, as both her parents seem to think, that she’s stupid, or willfully obtuse. For her, the wilderness of bombed out London “had familiarity, as of a place long known; it had the clear, dark logic of a dream; it made a lunatic sense, as the unshattered streets and squares did not; it was the country that one’s soul recognized and knew.” Barbary’s devotion to resistance, her deep conviction that any concession to normal life is “collaboration” leads her into a cul de sac from which she cannot escape. Fleeing her uncle’s country estate, she notes of the Scottish countryside that “Here was a maquis, for anyone who had a mind to take to it.” This maquis though is unknown to her, “she had no contacts with them. She must go, she knew, to another margin, another maquis, to the flowering wilderness and broken ruins that she knew.” Her father follows her to London, and he is not harsh, and even offers to take her off somewhere, just the two of them, for a holiday so they can get to know one another, but Barbary cannot accept because: “there were too many things between them; he was clever and knew about everything, she was stupid and knew about nothing; he had taken Pamela instead of her mother, she was for ever her mother’s; he stood for law and order and the police, she for the Resistance and the maquis, he for honesty and reputability, she for low life, the black market, deserters on the run, broken ruins, loot hidden in caves. All the wild desperate squalor of the enfants du maquis years — would he even believe it if she told him? His clever, cultured, law-bound civilization was too remote.” Barbary is at a dead end. She cannot find her people. There is no maquis with whom to connect, and she and Raoul are not enough to sustain a true Resistance force. There is no one she trusts to give her instructions, or provide her care. She cannot reconcile herself to life with her father and Pamela, cannot become the “civilized young woman” they want her to be. But Barbary’s not the only one in the wilderness. Helen’s mourning has made her itchy, she can’t shake it, she can’t do anything with it, and so she takes Richie and baby Roland to Monte Carlo and goes on a destructive gambling jag. Barbary’s father Gulliver returns to Scotland without her, desolate with worry that she would never “qualify as salvage, would remain drifting with the wreckage, drifting beyond his reach.” And because she cannot reconcile herself, Barbary goes further into the London wilderness, substituting petty thievery for real Resistance. She’s not very good at it, and suffers a life-threatening fall while being chased by the police, a fall that requires all these lost souls to gather in one place, to return to the family home Helen abandoned, and to come to a solution. Early in the novel, Helen and her son Richie were talking about religion. Richie’s response to his war experience is a flirtation with Catholicism. Like the tiresome current batch of “TradCath” converts, Richie claims “I like their traditionalism; their high Toryism, the stand they put up against the tide. All tides I mean.” Nails on a chalkboard to post-Vatican II liberation theology Catholics like me, but, it’s a novel, and this is absolutely indicative of Richie’s character. Helen replies: “I can’t think, if people want gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and entertaining companions. Capricious of course, but helpful, unless one offended them.” Helen has consistently been described as resembling a Greek goddess, and when she descends on London to rescue Barbary, it’s all a bit deus ex machina. However, if we think of this book as a series of conversations between cultural dualisms, then Helen, the formidable force of feminine intellect, beauty and autonomy invading her ex-husband’s home, the very seat of English propriety, and doing battle for the soul of her daughter is a pretty engaging conversation. It is a battle that all takes place at the level of conversation. Barbary recovers, and Helen promises to take her home, however, technically she “belongs” to her father, who as was common in those days, got legal guardianship in the divorce. Children were the property of their fathers. And Gulliver refuses to let Barbary return to “Your France. The France of the comfortable collaborators and the disreputable maquis. The France of the rich opportunists and the lawless criminals with which you let our daughter mix.” Helen appeals to his kindness, and to the best interest of their daughter, who is clearly failing to thrive in London, and even floats a light proposal of ongoing sexual relations, but Gulliver, retreating to his most upright fortress of being, refuses, categorically to let Helen take Barbary back to France. And so, Helen is forced to break him, to “play her last card” and, like the Greek goddess in disguise that she is, undermines the entierty of “the sign of the Father” (as the psychoanalytic theorists would call it) by confessing that Barbary is the result of an affair she had one summer in Spain. “I never meant you to know. But I can’t lose Barbary, and have her made unhappy. She is my child, and I am responsible for her. Iv’e done enough harm to her already, heaven knows.” And like that, the spell is broken. Gulliver washes his hands of them all, horrified. “My poor Gully and his honour,” thinks Helen. “If that cracked he might break up altogether, I suppose.” If the central question of the novel is what does it mean to collaborate and what does it mean to resist, if the central question is whether the petty proprieties of “ordinary decency” are the bulwark against barbarism, or whether they’re necessary collaborations one must accommodate themselves to in order to grow up, then it’s Raoul who gets the last word. Raoul who is being left behind in London, tells Barbary that “For me, the underground is finished. One cannot carry it on by oneself … I shall collaborate. That is to say, I shall observe the laws, go daily to school, obey my uncle and aunt, attend mass on Sundays, keep out of the way of the police. Then they will perhaps let me visit you in France next year.” And this is why, for me, in this historic moment, The World My Wilderness seems germane. How will we engage under political duress? What are our bright lines, those that once crossed, deposit us in the wilderness, leave us among the ruins, stranded among untrustworthy and if dishonest, at least openly dishonest companions? We’re all about to find out a lot more about ourselves, I suspect, than most Americans have ever been forced to confront. Who will we protect? How? Who will we let down and why? Will we be able to restore the damage after the crisis has passed, or will we have broken things irreparably? For me, this is the glory of fiction, especially in difficult times. None of us can know how we’ll behave in a crisis until it arises, but thinking through the possibilities, thinking through the eyes of other characters, can help us imagine the unimaginable, and perhaps if we’re lucky, prepare ourselves a little.
Anthropocene Crush June 9, 2024June 10, 2024 Hello! I’m still here. What happened? May is gone? We’re well into June? At any… Read More