“The wise men always return to the
soil,” wrote Henry Miller in an essay on Thoreau, published in the 1962
collection Stand Still Like the
Hummingbird. One only has to think
of the poets, sages, artists in every land and in every generation to realize
how deep this need is in every man. What
Miller observed fifty years ago is still largely true of America
today: It is a vastly unpopulated
country. Having made my annual
pilgrimage to the Pine Barrens of South Jersey and, thanks to an adventurous
husband, continued south through Delaware and rural Maryland to the islands of
Chincoteague and Assateague and home along byways that wend round the hills and
hollows of West Virginia, I share Miller’s vision of America as a land
abounding in forests, streams, lakes, mountains, rivers, and fields—“where a
man of good-will with a little effort and belief in his own powers can enjoy a
deep, tranquil, rich life—provided he go his own way.”
To reconnect to the spirits of hard
scrabble ancestors is why I return every summer to the Pine
Barrens, preferably during blueberry season. Since before the Revolutionary war, they
smuggled goods off British sloops and transported them through the woods to Philadelphia. Some dug bog ore out of the swamps for the
iron furnaces that manufactured cannonballs for the war effort; some were
pioneers in the glass-making industry; others raised cranberries and when they
got the blight experimented with cultivated blueberries bred from wild
stock. There was a line of watermen who
built boats, harvested salt hay in the marshes along the Mullica, dug clams;
and their sons operated tug boats and built piers in Atlantic City. They knew the environment intimately, worked
with what was available, and stuck together.
When I was growing up, my mother took me and my siblings “home” four or
five times a year, and I envied that extended family life lived up and down
Pleasant Mills Road: a farm, a sawmill, a one-room school teacher, a railroad
engineer, an alcoholic storyteller.
Everyone had a role. Everyone had
value. It was clear to me when I was
very young that life is best lived in a network of symbiotic relationships, and
I grew up envying my mother’s life and memorizing her stories.
But every woman must go her own
way. I learned this lesson when I tried
to copy my mother’s life, volunteering at the age of 12 to spend the summer
packing blueberries for my uncle (a job that migrants have done for the last
sixty years). Up before dawn and still
working after dark, I felt dejected and lonely.
The life of a farm girl was too hard for a spoiled, bookish subdivision
girl. I became an academic, but one who
works hard in her own field, turning over and over Shakespeare’s blank verse,
tending the seeds of my ideas, and gleaning the insights that other scholars
have unearthed. I do believe there is a
profound connection between farming land and farming ideas (especially in
relation to Shakespeare) that is quintessentially American. This thought received surprising support by
the end of our family trip.
The last leg of our June journey
(after Jersey and the wild ponies at Chincoteague) was to be an abbreviated
version of the eighth grade field trip to Washington
D.C. for our fourteen-year-old
daughter who is aggressively disinterested in anything remotely interesting to
us. “I just want to go home,” she’d
whine and flat out refuse to visit museums or see monuments. Modifying selfies is an activity she prefers
to watching egrets, hummingbirds, or ponies let alone taking pictures of the
stone effigies of Lincoln or Jefferson.
“Kat, check out the view,” says my husband driving the Chesapeake
Bay bridge. “I AM LOOKING,”
she states angrily.
Somehow we make it into D.C., drive
around the Supreme Court, find a very tight parking spot on Capitol Hill, and
drag her into the Folger Shakespeare Library.
“Let’s just see what they have on exhibit; it won’t take long,” I
cajole. Katya is relatively
knowledgeable about Shakespeare, having played Hamlette in a school adaptation,
and she resigns herself to putting up with another “boring” museum.
The exhibit, America’s Shakespeare, is an eclectic display—something for
everyone. Most fascinating to me were
the ways early Americans (from the colonial period through the Civil War)
alluded to Shakespeare to express political views: “To taxt or not to taxt,” read the headline
in a colonial newspaper. A British
political cartoon presents the rebellious colonists as the rabble-rousers, led
by Jack Cade, in Henry VI, Part 2.
Even more fascinating were the ways
that Shakespeare was used during Lincoln’s
presidency by Lincoln, himself, by John Wilkes Booth, and by the grieving
nation. I had known of Lincoln’s particular interest in Macbeth, and, I had taped an
advertisement for Michael Anderegg’s new
book, Lincoln and Shakespeare, to my
refrigerator so as not to forget about it.
Lincoln
was prone to depression and his wife, particularly after the deaths of several
children, believed (like many “Spiritualists” of the time) that it was possible
to make contact with the dead. Many
facets of Lincoln’s
life predisposed him to connect with the play.
One week prior to his assassination at Ford’s Theater, Lincoln had a disturbing premonitory dream
that “has got possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.” Scholars cite this dream as proof that Lincoln identified with
Macbeth, but they disagree in their readings of his identification. Some believe Lincoln like Macbeth was ambitious. Most suggest that Lincoln felt the blood of civil war deaths sticking
to his own hands. My guess is that Lincoln identified with
the sensitive moral soul of Macbeth, whose first words in the play (coming
fresh from a stunning battle victory) are “So foul and fair a day I have not
seen.” Macbeth feels deeply the moral
ambiguity of all political action. After
the civil war was over, Lincoln visited Richmond, the devastated
capital of the Confederacy. According to
witnesses, his mood oscillated between “hearty
bonhomie and sad introspection” and, on a steamer up the Potomac, he
read passages from the play that describe the mental anguish that is an
immediate consequence of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan.
What hands are
here? Ha: they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clear from my hand? No: this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas
incarnadine,
Making the green one
red.
Lincoln may have been ambitious to
perform great deeds but Anderegg finds no evidence that he ever believed his
ambition was responsible for the carnage, however grieved he was by its extent. My own work on the play links Macbeth with
Israel’s first doomed king, Saul, and suggests that there is something
inherently tragic about monarchy and perhaps politics in general (which always
makes “the green one red”). And the
tragedy of politics would have been felt acutely by men raised in Nature—men
like Saul who would rather push a plow than be king and Lincoln, the
frontiersman, who found in Macbeth powerful, imaginative expressions of pain
and loss that echoed his own feelings.
One of the most stunning pieces of
documentation in the Folger exhibit is a newspaper advertisement, printed after
Lincoln’s
assassination with quotations from Macbeth that would assist the nation in its grief. Lincoln’s love
of Shakespeare was recognized and honored in the imaginative identification of
him with the saintly Duncan who, "Hath borne his faculties so meet, hath been / So clear in his great office."
After leaving the Folger, we dragged
Katya through the Library of Congress and headed back to the car after treating
her to a Monster energy drink. We wanted
to see the Lincoln Memorial but got pushed by the steady traffic onto a highway
that took us over the Potomac and toward Arlington
Virginia and posh suburbs of
horse farms and fox-hunting courses. We
pressed onward toward West Virginia
where things became much poorer almost as soon as we crossed the state line. We ate pizza in Romney, a small town so
crucial during the civil war that it changed hands 56 times. After dinner, we stood outside a local
history museum watching a father and two kids try to catch lightning bugs. Paul was remembering tidbits relating to John
Wilkes Booth. Apparently, after shooting
Lincoln and
jumping from the balcony, he yelled “Sic simper tyrannis” (“Thus always to
tyrants”). “You must be kidding!” I said
and wondered aloud if Booth imagined himself as Malcolm who gathers an armed
force to rid Scotland of Macbeth, who, by the end of the play, has become a
brutal tyrant, killing friends, women, and children. When Shakespeare wrote the play in 1606,
pitching it to King James I’s pet interests (in witchcraft and biblical
kingship), tyrannicide was a hot topic.
James, a staunch proponent of divine right kingship, believed that no
matter how bad a king was, subjects could not challenge him. But federalist thinkers believed it was the
duty of magistrates to remove kings who were not living up to their covenant
obligations to God and to their subjects.
By staging an armed resistance to monarchy, Shakespeare (a lowly
actor/playwright like Booth) was doing something very risky.
Later that night in our hotel suite,
while Katya took a whirlpool bath, I skimmed portions of Anderegg’s discussion
of John Wilkes Booth’s escape from Washington
through the swamps, rivers, and farms of eastern Maryland.
He carried a pocket diary with him in which he recorded his own feelings
about his act, likening it to the deed that “Brutus was honored for.” A bit later, he made another indirect but
likely Julius Caesar allusion,
writing of what he saw as “a country groaned beneath this tyranny.” Wilkes Booth was one of three actor brothers,
who—believe it or not—acted together only once in a single performance of
Julius Caesar at New York’s Winter Garden Theater, a fund-raiser for a
Shakespeare statue to be erected in Central Park.
Shakespeare—an
actor and playwright—throughout his career expressed revolutionary political
views, but he did so very subtly, challenging the status quo through subtext
and allusion. That Wilkes Booth used Julius Caesar as pretext for a mad
political act was nothing new. The Earl
of Essex paid Shakespeare’s company to stage Richard II (a regicide play) on the eve of his attempt to overthrow
Queen Elizabeth. The attempts and not
the failed deeds are stunning because they express a faith in the power of art
to unsettle and express an other kind of politics. Wilkes-Booth’s deed insured that actors would
be victimized in the search for scapegoats in the days after Lincoln’s death. A minister in Philadelphia condemned theaters as “dens of
pollution, these synagogues of Satan”—language that sounds exactly like that
used by anti-theatricalist writers of the early-modern period. One minister even intimated that Lincoln got what he
deserved for going to see a play on Good Friday.
The real gift of the trip came
somewhere in Virginia when I was sitting in the co-pilot seat, studying the map
and looking at the zigzag line of Route 50, imagining the road as a series of
snake turns through dark mountains. Just
south of highway 50 near a settlement called Antioch
was a red square marking the birthplace of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother. “We have to check it out, Paul—tomorrow
morning.” The serendipity of events seemed
to prove something I read in bright morning light as we drove through the
peninsular fingers reaching into the Chesapeake: “to understand what is real as real, and what
is living as living, we have to know it in its own primal and individual
community, in its relationships, interconnections and surroundings.” Perhaps I could learn something about Lincoln’s habits of mind
and ways of reading Shakespeare by seeing where his mother was born. Macbeth asked the witches to look into the
seeds of time to see which grains would grow, and that is exactly what I hoped
to do—belatedly.
The morning sun lit up the wet grass
as we sped past places with biblical names—Canaan Valley, Pisgah Road, Good
News Gospel Church. The road followed
the curve of Saddleback mountain and ran next to a stream. The birthplace is not well marked but we
found it, parked the car, and walked up the gravelly road, ducking under a metal
fence to deter cars and protect creatures like the doe and fawn, fresh from a
morning drink, walking high on delicate legs and leaping away when they saw
us. The cabin, although not the original birthplace, dates from the early nineteenth century and was moved from another site. There is only one explanatory
placard, and it obscures Nancy Hanks in the verbiage of West Virginia senators, anxious to prove
their Union loyalties by writing a paean to motherhood. Lincoln’s
simple statement—that everything he is he owes to his mother—is far more
touching. Nancy Hanks’ family didn’t
stay in this one-room cabin for long. In
her day, people bought land cheap, cleared it, sold it for a profit and moved
on. These hard-working nomads moved from
what was then Virginia, to Kentucky,
and onward to Indiana.
I look in the window and try to
conjure up the legendary image of the self-taught young Abe reading by
firelight. Imagination fails me. Much has been made of Alexis de Tocqueville’s
claim in Democracy in America (a
guide to life in the United
States in the 1830s) that there was “hardly
a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” But how many log cabins did de Tocqueville
visit? As much as I would love to
believe Nancy Hanks introduced her young son to Shakespeare, I don’t see it.
But I read in Wikipedia that Nancy
Hanks Lincoln was “superior” to her husband, a strong personality who taught
young Abraham his letters as well as the extraordinary sweetness and
forbearance he was known for all his life.
Nancy
was also described as “a bold, reckless, daredevil kind of woman, stepping on
the very verge of propriety” with a melancholy expression and intellectual
inclination. She sounds fascinating, and
Abe lost her when he was nine years old—whittled the pegs for her coffin. She died homesteading, age 34, at Little
Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana. No one knows for sure what killed her: milk sickness (drinking milk from cows that
had eaten white snakeroot), tuberculosis, or cancer.
If you read my first post, you will
understand that in the last few weeks I have been trying to reclaim my own life,
and have found consolation in a circle of female friends. Some of them are real, but most are biblical,
fictional, and historical. All of them
were “ruined” in some way and pushed out to labor in the wilderness. I am thinking of Hagar, Tess of the
d’Urbervilles, and Nancy Hanks. I have
wondered at the intense and original intellects of hardworking rural women—a
focus of Thomas Hardy’s novel. We don’t
need books and universities to teach us to think. All we really need are our senses at play with
Nature which, as Emerson wrote, “conspires with spirit to emancipate us.” When a beautiful rose dies, beauty does not
die because it is not in the rose.
Beauty is an awareness in the mind.
It is a mental and emotional response that we make. Hardy’s narrator describes Tess as being “of
a piece with the element she moved in” and “at times her whimsical fancy would
intensify natural processes around her till they seemed part of her own
story. Rather they became part of it;
for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they
were.”
Mothers who learned to think and
feel by working closely with Nature and with others have a wide vision
unobstructed by manmade things and gifts of sensibility that they pass on to
their children. Tess, for instance, has
great sympathy for animals—the horse, Prince, who she is partly responsible for
killing, the cows she milks, her siblings, and fellow dairy maids, less
physically beautiful but with equally passionate hearts. Tess is immune to contempt and remains open,
porous, alive, and responsive. It is no
wonder that my own mother—a Jersey farm girl who milked 7 cows before going to
school every day of her life—raved about Tess
ever since I can remember. I finally
read her book.
To lose such a mother is to lose a
whole world. It only makes sense, then,
that Lincoln
would have found a mother surrogate in Shakespeare’s capacious dramatic
worlds. Shakespeare never lectures,
doesn’t dictate. Rather, he whispers, he
hints, he engages, he charms, and finally wins us, through mesmerizing figures,
into a deep and dedicated covenantal relationship—one on one—that rewards labor
and original thought. Anderegg thinks
that Lincoln
preferred reading Shakespeare to seeing the plays staged: I do, too. Seeing the cabin where Nancy Hanks was born
and thinking about Lincoln’s
early experiences—it makes sense that he didn’t try to be an expert reader,
didn’t strive to read every play but pored over those he loved and, most
importantly, needed to live. “Throughout
his life,” writes Anderegg, “Lincoln
adapted Shakespeare to his own needs and desires, selecting a speech here or a
passage there, fitting the playwright’s works into his own worldview.” He farmed the verse. Even if Nancy
could not give him Shakespeare, she opened his eyes and mind to the wide
world: emancipating him, she (and
Shakespeare) prepared him to emancipate us.
