Picking the Brains of History: Ruth Moore's A Fair Wind Home

As someone -- Rousseau, isn't it? -- says, it's a funny world.  Just when it gets to the state where it seems as if the river were the only way out, some little thing will go and happen, and you are immediately convinced that whatever [is,] is right, and everything happens for the best in this best of all possible universes.*

"And then," as Dorothy Parker continued after listing various theatrical atrocities of 1921, "just when you are wondering if death by gas is really as painless as they say it is," you pick up another of Ruth Moore's novels, A Fair Wind Home (Morrow, 1953), and "you instantly feel that we are undoubtedly put here for a purpose, after all, and there is a very good chance of there being a hereafter."

What turned Parker's mood around was The Robbery a one-act play by Clare Kummer; for me it was starting to read A Fair Wind Home. Almost immediately a wave of relaxation swept over me as I returned to Ruth Moore's world.  This one is a departure from the novels I've read by her: it's an historical novel, set in the mid-1700s between the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution.  She warns the reader in a brief introductory note that

an historian might find that liberties have been taken, and that little attempt has been made to reproduce accessories of the period.  Those who wish battles and massacres may imagine them as taking place when and where they did; but there were times when people worked and built, and this is the story of three men of peace who lived in one of those piping times.

This stretches things just a bit, to my mind: there's a marvelous sequence about a third of the way through in which a rigidly honest woman tracks down a pirate to return money her son had stolen from him, and there's a small battle at its climax, which mostly takes place in the novel's peripheral vision.  But it's there.  I was afraid for a moment that Moore was going to write a much more violent book than any I'd read by her before, but she handled this element well: enough to be disturbing without letting it take over the story altogether, and with some sharp comedy thrown in.  The book would make a great PBS miniseries up to that point at least (I'm only about halfway through right now).  As usual, I love Moore's writing, her evocation of place, and her characters.  I've been needing the feeling of home, seen lovingly but critically, that she provides.

Looking for biographical information on Moore today, I noticed again that she hated the word "regionalist" when it was applied to her.  I understand why she felt that way -- "regionalist" was commonly used to diminish and dismiss the value of work by the authors it was applied to -- but I think it would be better to reclaim the word.  Not only have some major, critically respected writers been regionalists, but every writer worth his or her salt will have to do something with locations; it's just that setting a novel in New York City and its suburbs is not seen as "regionalism," just as the very English writer isn't seen as "ethnic."

Jennifer Craig Pixley, in a 1996 article on Moore I found online, wrote: "Moore does locate her novels and her poetry specifically on the coast of Maine. This is the geography of her childhood and the memorized terrain in which she is most at home. This is the location that she dreams of, even when she is not there, but her images of this locale are not sentimental."  True enough, though I don't think "not sentimental" goes far enough; as I've pointed out myself more than once, Moore was very critical of provincialism whether in her Maine fisherfolk or in the summer people who hired them as caretakers and housekeepers.  For me, as much as I enjoy her depiction of the Maine coast and its small towns, which don't seem all that different from other places anyway, it's her characters and their interactions that are memorable.  That someone like Ruth Moore lived, and wrote, as she did doesn't cause me to believe in the hereafter, but that there are human beings with sense out there in the world.

Dorothy Parker, "The Primrose Pathology," Ainslee's, May 1921.  Reprinted in Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918-1923 (iUniverse, 2014).

Those Who Talk, Don't Know; Those Who Know, Don't Talk

It's funny how books chosen almost randomly can seem to interrelate.  So, for example, I recently decided to read April Sinclair's 1994 novel Coffee Will Make You Black because Dorothy Allison mentioned its "furious, charming adolescent" lesbian (okay, bisexual) protagonist in an essay in her collection Skin.  I'd heard of Coffee Will Make You Black before, but had never gotten to around to it because I hadn't realized it had a gay character, and then the e-book went on sale for a couple of dollars, so I went with it.

And I'm glad I did.  The story, which appears to be at least partly autobiographical, takes place in the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s.  It follows the African-American narrator, Jean "Stevie" Stevenson, from junior high to high school, against the backdrop of the political and cultural changes of the time.  But it also traces her own changes, and those of her peers: one kid begins as a scrawny, goody-goody nerd (as Stevie and some other girls see him, anyway) and metamorphoses into a Black Power militant, organizing actions in their high school.  Stevie comes from a mixed family: her dark-skinned mother has middle-class aspirations, but married a lighter-skinned man who never had or perhaps lost such ambitions early on.  He's a manual worker, drinks too much, and is constantly being corrected by his wife for grammar and other class-related infractions.  But they soldier on.  Stevie is good in school, but also wants to have friends.  Her best friend moved to another neighborhood a year or two before the book opens, and Stevie hasn't found anyone to replace her.  She's drawn into hanging out with some less ambitious girls, to her mother's anger and frustration -- and fear, that peer pressure will lead Stevie to get pregnant and drop out of school.  This doesn't happen (spoiler?), happily.

Stevie's emerging racial consciousness is encouraged by her grandmother, also dark-skinned, who has her own business, a successful fried-chicken restaurant.  She drops her g's and says "ain't," but she knows her own worth despite her daughter's chiding, and she's a lovely if somewhat stereotypical character, who gives Stevie the affection that Stevie's mother finds it difficult to express.  For whatever reason, Stevie seems to have a core self-approval that allows her to be friends with girls whose lives will take them in different directions than hers without surrendering herself altogether.  I kept worrying that she was going to cave in, but she never did, which was a relief after reading (not to mention knowing) about kids who go along with the crowd until they're damaged and find it much harder to repair themselves.  Sinclair followed Stevie to college in her second novel, Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice, which I'll probably read before this year is out.

As soon as I finished reading Coffee Will Make You Black, I picked up Ruth Moore's first novel from 1943, The Weir.  I've read and discussed two of Moore's later books here before.  The Weir is an impressive debut, I thought, though I wasn't happy with the ending, which seemed forced onto the story rather than developing out of it.  Still, Weir had her command of small-town and island life in Maine from the start, and overall I enjoyed the book as much as I did the other two I've read; I'll continue reading her novels.

Something struck me, though, almost immediately.  I noticed that the family constellation in The Weir was very similar to that in Coffee Will Make You Black, with a crusty grandmother, conflicts and worries about the children's future, and so on.  At times during the first fifty pages or so I had to stop and remind myself that I was reading about 1940s Maine rather than 1960s Chicago.  This was mainly because both 1960s Chicago blacks and 1940s white Maine fishermen had what looked to me like similar ambivalences about education, manual work, money, and relations between insiders and outsiders.  Can black folks / islanders trust white folks / summer people (or "foreigners"), make friends with them, intermarry with them?  Can our kids move on to better lives without despising their roots?  What should be done about those kids who aren't interested in finishing high school, let alone going to college?  What about those who could move on but choose to stay?  I often have the feeling that many of the differences that people see between their group and other groups are illusory.  Of course that may not be because the differences don't exist in reality, or that there are no differences; it may just be that writers of fiction tend to rely on similar themes and models, regardless of whom they're writing about.  Still, moving from one novel's environment to the next, I felt more continuity than difference.

I began reading Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Spiritual Memoir by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, originally published by Skinner House Books in 2000, before I read either Coffee Will Make You Black or The Weir.  I decided to give it a try because I was intrigued by the subject, an avowedly bisexual woman's quest to integrate her religious life and her sexuality.  I got bogged down about a third of the way through, however.  For whatever reason -- autobiographical accuracy, literary convention, "spiritual" convention that requires that the seeker hit bottom before finding enlightenment / salvation -- I found Andrew an unrelieved drag.  I am being too mean there, I know; not everyone has an easy life, and as someone who spent much of his youth in a haze of self-pity I am in no position to condemn her.  But as she tells it, her childhood and adolescence had no positive aspects at all, not because of poverty or racial or class oppression, not because of her family, not because of her peers, not because of abusive religious teaching -- but because she seems to have suffered from what someone (Angelo D'Arcangelo, maybe) called a "spiritual vitamin deficiency" that kept her drooping well into adulthood.

Again, this is not a condemnation: I'm talking about temperament, not anything that is her fault.  It's not her fault that she felt alienated from her female body, which made adolescence unpleasant.  Still, Stevie Stevenson (who, as I said, appears to be as much her author's autobiographical projection as Andrew is in her memoir) has a harder time of it: severe monthly cramps, nausea, for a couple of days during each period.  (Compare too, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which addresses similar bodily alienation in adolescence with more insight and richness.)  Yet Stevie's much more interesting to read about than Andrew, with more going on in her head.  As for her sexuality, Andrew appears to have come of age sometime in the 80s, in a liberal religious and political environment, not in the early sixties before the Women's Health movement, women's spirituality, and other cultural upheavals changed the way women and girls saw their bodies.  Yet Swinging on the Garden Gate begins (in the twenty-first century?!) with an adult Elizabeth Andrew still depressed about her body and her bisexuality and hoping to advance spiritually in a retreat environment.  You'd think that the LGBT Christian and other religious trends hadn't already been active and influential in such circles for three or four decades by then.  Yet (as of page 52 out of 175 or so) no awareness of these possibly helpful resources was evident to me.

Speaking of spirituality, I found a strange dissonance going on in Andrew's account of her spiritual development.  On the one hand, as a child she's somehow closer to God as children stereotypically are, she knows better than the adults around her who are tangled in the coils of Organized Religion and its confining traditions and rituals; on the other, she feels almost a vocation and wants to be part of the rituals and traditions of her Organized Religion.  On yet another hand, she's ignorant about God and his plan for her, being naïve and ignorant and undeveloped, but she still somehow knows better than anyone around her what God wants and expects.  Maybe all these stances can be reconciled, but I don't think so.  It seems to me that if God did exist as a vaguely paternal superior being, he could have been more helpful as Elizabeth Andrew trod hopelessly through her slough of despond.  For that matter, I wonder if the adults around her were as unhelpful and clueless as she makes them seem, or if she shut them out herself, as many kids do.  Self-pity is one thing; self-righteousness is another; the two combined are downright toxic.

It's true, you got to cross that lonesome river by yourself, but at the same time you never really do it alone, especially in a time and place (she's not living in Afghanistan under the Taliban, for heaven's sake) where so many other people are walking the same paths and have had a lot to say about their experiences.  This seems to me of a piece with the isolating individualism of the Culture of Therapy, which I wouldn't criticize so much if it worked better, if it produced more positive outcomes instead of fostering an ongoing dependency on leaders, workshop leaders, life coaches, and such people.

Maybe I should try to clarify what I mean by "spiritual"; I'm an atheist, after all, and I don't believe in spirits.  I agree it's not the best word, but I don't know of a better one, and fussing over specific terminology for abstract concepts is often a way to waste lots of time.  When I use the word "spiritual" I'm thinking by analogy of the difference between mind and matter, melody and invidual notes, rhythm and individual beats, the individual frames of a movie and the illusion of motion that succeeding frames produce.  Neither in itself is bad; only trying to isolate them and rely on one to the exclusion of the other.  So, "spirituality" means attending to the continuity, the connection, between individuals and the different components of their lives, but also of the continuity between themselves and society and the world.  "Spirit" in this metaphorical sense is the illusion of wholeness, connection, as opposed to the illusion of separateness and isolation.  We are at the same time discrete individuals and inseparably part of the whole, without which we couldn't exist. That's probably not an adequate explanation, but I hope it will do for now.

According to her website, Andrew is now a "spiritual director" as well as a writer and writing teacher.  I thought I found more genuine spiritual insight in The Weir and Coffee Will Make You Black, though neither book has pretensions to such, than in Swinging on the Garden Gate.  (I also kept thinking of the passages I quoted in this post as I struggled to read it.)  I intend to finish Andrew's book, but I found it offputting enough that it may be some time before I continue.  I'd generalize from that: with a few exceptions, I've found more spiritual insight and value where they aren't advertised or promised than where they are.  But that's just me.

Having Her Canuck-ance

I finished reading Ruth Moore's Speak to the Wind today, and enjoyed it thoroughly.  The title is a bit misleading, it seems to me; it sounds sentimental and melodramatic, in the tradition of Gone with the Wind and Written on the Wind, not to mention "Dust in the Wind."  I can't see how it connects to the book I read.

When I wrote the previous post I didn't know where the narrative was going; soon afterwards I learned that the Chin Island community was going to be divided by a self-destructive feud that hastens the decline of the already fading old ways.  But Moore doesn't indulge in nostalgia.  Her character Eliseo MacGimsey, when told that if he and his partner sell out their struggling business, it will be the end of the town, replies:

"No.  It wouldn't.  Things'd be different, change hands, be owned by different people.  All these places here could be sold like a shot, if old Wynn bought the wharf and breakwater, made them into a yacht club and swimmingpool, whatever, the way he wants to.  At least, he'd repair the old buildings, save them from rotting down, which is more in the living God's world than you and I can do. It wouldn't end the town at all.  It'd just mean different people owning it" [270].

A number of passages struck me funny, even made me laugh aloud; too many to quote here.  Moore wasn't sentimental about her Maine islanders, and Elbridge Gilman, whose viewpoint dominates the book, is, along with his wife Jess, critical and even cynical about the stubborn truculence and pride of their neighbors -- while recognizing that they share those traits, Elbridge more than Jess.

I was particularly moved by the long section at the end where Miss Greenwood, a "summer person" who'd settled on the island year-round with her elderly mother, reflects on her efforts at self-sufficiency.

From the first, she had found to her astonishment that the simplest of practical tasks, as, for example, putting up a stovepipe, involved complicated technical procedures which took the men who did it a long time, and seemed to be secrets as closely guarded as the secrets of a guild.

She had, at first, asked for simple information,. and had found that any such information received would be either unusuable to embellished with detail indubitably incorrect.  Such as Mr. Luther MacGimsey's arguments against putting her cottage out on the point, or Mr. Willard Lowden's on cow-dressing.  Mr. Lowden had told her that cow-dressing, hauled in small quantities in a wheelbarrow, lost all its virtue in transportation.

"To get the good," he said, "you have got to haul it by the wagon-load.  You expose it to sun and air, and all the virtue passes right out of it.  Don't ask me why.  Cow-dressing's chancy stuff, my grandfather always told me." 

... Over in the village, she saw again and again, people wheeling manure in barrows, when it seemed to be the thing to do for a small garden ... While it was wonderful to have help, still, she and Mama had to be most economical ...

There were other things -- the stovepipe which Mr. Bill Lessaro replaced in her kitchen cost a good deal and took a full day to put up.  Mr. Lessaro said an elbow was hard to find, and once you found one, most difficult to fit.

Yet, later on, she had been calling on Mrs. Gilman, and Mr. Gilman had been putting up her sitting room stove for the winter.  He had a new pipe, with an elbow that looked exactly like the one in her own kitchen, and when she had congratulated him on being able to find one, he had said absently, "Oh, an elbow's an elbow, Miss Greenwood.  Buy 'em by the dozen, anywhere."  At the same time, he put up the stovepipe in about ten minutes.

So she had gone home and had climbed on a chair, had dismantled her kitchen stovepipe and put it back up again.  She decided she would not need help for this particular job again -- Mr. Lessaro's bill had been twenty dollars, the cost of the pipe, plus, he said, five dollars for his labor.  It seemed too much to be paying, paricularly since she knew now she she could have done the work herself.  She had, of course, asked Mr. Lessaro if he thought she could.

"Oh, mercy, good grief, dear lady, no!" he had said.  "It will take me all day, likely, and I know the ins and outs of it.  Not to speak of it's an awful dirty job.  Don't make no difference if I get smut all over me."

They were so gallant, such nice manners [296-8].

This was published in 1956, remember, before the feminist Second Wave encouraged women to learn to do for themselves, learning carpentry, plumbing, auto repair and other unladylike skills.   Women had acquired those skills before, of course, and during World War II had made inroads into industry that are celebrated now.  After that war, they were driven out so that their jobs could be given to returning male veterans, but that rationale wasn't enough: the expulsion had to be justified with propaganda about women's incapacity and the necessity of separate spheres.  Ruth Moore was writing against the tide here.

Beyond that, I remembered something that had made me uneasy when I read David F. Noble's Forces of Production, as much as I love that book.  Labor resistance to automation was justified, but Noble tended to ignore how organized labor had worked to exclude women, along with men from various ethnic / racial groups.  (Though I also remembered the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who reportedly complained that in making a film about his wife giving birth, Stan Brakhage had "permitted men to see what they're not supposed to see."  Many men agreed with her; I've often heard about men who fled screenings of "Window Water Baby Moving" or other films that showed childbirth.)  Often it's difficult to distinguish between defense of one's interests and aggressive blocking of others' interests.

A Good Fight'll Help Us Get Through the Winter

I've begun reading another novel by Ruth Moore, whose The Walk Down Main Street I liked so much.  Speak to the Winds, originally published in 1956, takes its time getting started.  I'm only a hundred pages in (out of 300 or so), and I'm not sure yet where the story is headed, but I'm still glad to be back in Moore's world.

The book is set on rocky Chin Island off the coast of Maine, which was colonized in the early 1800s by a couple of stonecutters.  Their business flourished against all expectations, given the lack of a harbor and other features that would have made their job easier; but if such features had been present, someone else probably would have beaten them to the place.  By the end of the century hundreds of people lived and worked there:

Schooners hauling granite down the coast had crews who might be Yankee, or Greek or Negro or Portuguese.  Some stayed, brought families, or married on the island.  The children had strange combinations of names: Eliseo MacGimsey, Nikolaides Pumlow -- not strange at all when it was shortened, as it soon was, to Nick [12].

Eventually the decline of the stone industry and the deaths of the founders whose vision had made Chin Island work led to an exodus of most of the population.  By the time the novel properly opens, the island's economy is sustained mainly by "summer people."  The main character is Elbridge Gilman, the grandson of one of the founders, who keeps reflecting critically not only on his neighbors' foibles, but on his own.

Speak to the Wind is also a philosophical novel, with reflections on common sense and human nature.  Some of the summer people have decided to live on Chin Island all year round, notably Miss Roxinda Greenwood and her elderly mother.  Even after eighteen years, the Greenwoods are still "foreigners."

Elbridge grinned a little to himself, thinking of this anomaly.  Except for [his wife] Jess, Miss Greenwood was the best cook he ever saw in his life -- maybe, with some things, she was even a little better than Jess.  She could put a brown on a pair of chickens or a turkey that a man would fairly leave home for.  At her Christmas and Easter parties, the ladies had a chance to sample this cooking and they liked it, judging by the way they stuffed it down.  But let the subject come up at any time, and the thought was automatic -- someone would be sure to express it, too -- the summer people were helpless, they didn't know how to wash or clean or any of those things that really capable people knew how to do.  Like anything said over and over often enough, people would believe it, no matter how much proof to the contrary stared them in the face.  Like still thinking of Miss Roxinda as summer people, an outsider.  You did, and she was, and would be, if she stayed forever [60-1].

Moore also touches on religion:

In those days of mighty trees, no one thought it remarkable that these planks [for the church pews] should be an inch-and-a-half thick, fourteen feet long and twenty-five and thirty-five inches wide, all clear pine.  They were, merely, what was practical.  They did not have to be joined to make the seat wide enough or the back high; they wouldn't sag under the weight of a tall man, his substantial wife, and eight or nine children.  They were probably the most uncomfortable seats ever devised anywhere, the planks at stiff right angles to each other.

"But people went to church not to be comfortable but to hear the good rewarded and the sinners fry," said [Grandfather Robert] MacKechnie.

The walls were whitewashed between the tall, narrow windows, which were clear glass below the meeting rails and arched at the top, with small, colored, leaded panes.  The pulpit was a tall box, like a coffin, of black walnut; and behind it, two Sundays in the month, oftener if he could get over from the mainland and spare the time, the Reverent Archie Snow gave forth a remarkably blazing brand of hell-fire and brimstone.  It was said of him that when he really himself go, his breath would light the kerosene lamps across the church under the gallery [14].

This led me to reflect on the widespread fantasy that hellfire religion was in some way imposed by unscrupulous priests in order to control We the People. That may be true sometimes, but it seems to me, looking at the history of religion, that many people want theirs to be harsh, unforgiving, and punitive.  (Many people who reject religion are also harsh, unforgiving, and punitive, but that's another issue.)  The least flexible believers especially enjoy forcing their mores on their fellows, and the priests are their creatures, the product rather than the source of the harhsness.  Reactionary religion doesn't come from nowhere: people invent it, embrace it, and impose it on their children when they can.  The fanatical streak of Christianity that swept the Roman Empire, for example, was not imposed by the imperium; the Christians who promulgated it had no political power and no cultural prestige, and they continued to enact holy violence even after Christianity had been recognized as the official religion of the Empire.  Their version of Christianity survived and spread because it appealed to significant numbers of people.  Dismissing them as dupes, while surely comforting to many liberals and non-believers, doesn't explain anything.

Moore also explores deep questions of identity, as when Elbridge Gilman's partner Eliseo MacGimsey frets over the necessity of killing his pig Uncle Sylvester.  "They went through this every year.  Liseo liked a pig, personally.  After he'd raised one, he had trouble bringing himself to kill it" (65).  Elbridge, who's already done with his butchering for the year, offers to do the job for his friend.  Then he goes farther:

"How'd it be if you and I was to swap pigs, anyway?  Elbridge asked.  "Let Uncle Sylvester hang till Jess can't tell the difference in the meat, then I'll harness up the team and we'll shift pigs.  Our folks'll eat Uncle Sylvester, seeing we haven't got any sentiment about him, and you folks eat mine.  No difference in pigs to me, Liseo" [67]

Liseo agrees, though he's nervous about being found out and being made fun of if the switch is found out.

So, like, who are we really? What's the difference between one pig and another, one man and another?  Are we alike or are we different?  Mary Midgley, who likes to draw on literary examples for her philosophical writing, should read some Ruth Moore; she's deep.  And fun.

Around Cape Horn at Seventeen

Last week I read quite a good book.  In fact I think Ruth Moore's The Walk Down Main Street (William Morrow, 1960) is one of the best books I've read this year.

I found out about The Walk Down Main Street from a mention in one of May Sarton's late journals.  Sarton also lived in Maine for many years, but she apparently didn't know Moore or her work until she picked up this one near the end of her life.  Sarton said she "had not been so taken by a novel in ages."  By the time I finally got around to the book, I'd completely forgotten why Sarton's description had appealed to me.  It is, she said,

about the wreckage in a small town when the basketball team in the local high school wins a local championship and goes on to a bigger test, how the boys become arrogant and obsessed, and the men take to betting on the game and become more and more involved, a corrupting process.

This accurately describes the occasion of the novel, but doesn't really do it justice.  Certainly the novel's criticism of basketball hysteria has a lot to do with why I enjoyed it -- it fit in my comfort zone -- but it has more going on than that.  While Moore is unsparing about Boy Culture, it's not only "the men": the women in the town are also gaga over the team's success.  They're pushed to the sidelines, but they give what support their role allows them.  There are exceptions in both camps, of course: the science teacher, for example, who is more concerned with getting his students into college for academic reasons than because of success in sports; and the chief protagonist, a widow whose son has become the star of the team when he runs a hot streak in one game, along with a knee injury that the local doctor (another booster) treats with novocaine so that the boy can continue to play while aggravating the tissue damage.  It's also not the basketball fever that is responsible for the corruption, arrogance, and betting; rather it's an outlet for them.  Moore shows that they've always been present in the community.

The widow I mentioned, Susie Hoodless, married a sweet but rather feckless Coast Guardsman from Arkansas, who drowned in a pointless accident at sea.   The town, and her father Martin in particular, has never really forgiven her for marrying a "foreigner."  (Ironically, Martin himself had married a real foreigner, a Swedish woman.)  Racism is pervasive among the townspeople: the science teacher, also a "foreigner," is Jewish, and there's a lot of eagerness to classify all "foreigners" as black, either by blood or by mystic essence.  There's an extended flashback about Susie's honeymoon with her husband Brant, when they traveled to Arkansas so she could meet his family.

[Brant's father] said nothing at all.  He stood there, looking at Brant; his hands on the rifle might have been carved out of wood.

Brant said, "I got married.  This here's my wife."

The old man didn't move his head, but the slits of his eyes flicked a little, flicked over Susie, flicked back to Brant.

"Whar she come from?" he said.

"She come from where my Base is," Brant said.

"What to hell kind of foreign country is that to come from?" said Brant's father.  "She white?"

Susie couldn't help it.  It was so exactly like Martin Hoodless, here she and Brant had crossed practically the whole United States to listen to the exact same thing.  Susie laughed.

She said, choking, "When Brant and I got married, Mr. McIntosh, my father said, 'Where's Arkansas?  Who ever heard tell of it?  What to hell kind of foreign country is that to come from?'"

The old man didn't even look at her; he was looking at Brant, and Brant's face was wooden.

"You ma'ied a Yankee," the old man said [90-91].

On the trip back to Maine, Susie realizes that the immiserating poverty that at first shocked her in Arkansas is also present at home, though its familiarity there had kept her from noticing it before.  I noticed that small-town Maine is not importantly different from the small-town Indiana where I was growing up when The Walk Down Main Street was published.

Susan's father Martin is another holdout from the basketball fever, but for different reasons.  He wants to keep his family, including his basketball-playing grandson Carlisle, at home and under his control.  (We're told that all his daughters save Susie married and moved far away from him as soon as they could.)   There's an amusing exchange between Martin and one of the town fathers, who objects to Martin's saying that Carlisle can work his way through college:

"What's the sense of that?  Why put a young kid that far behind the eight-ball?  You work him too hard, you'll warp his whole future.  Why, a young kid, he ain't ready for too much rugged stuff, Mart."

"Hell's pink-whiskered, blistered bells!"  Martin said.  "Carlisle's great-grandfather took a vessel around Cape Horn when he was seventeen."

"Different time, Mart, different times.  Nowadays, thank God, a kid don't have to get out and hustle.  I wouldn't want my boy to have to work the way I did, the way his grandfather did.  It don't make sense.  What I want for him is the best there is, and in this world, Mart, thanks to you and me, there's some pretty good things.  By gum and by gosh, my kid wouldn't take a ship around Cape Horn.  Be damned if I'd let him!"

"Well, another thing," Martin said.  "Your kid couldn't."

A slight flush came into the pale skin over Jed's temples, but he went smoothly on [261].

Moore knows all the cliches of reactionary bullshit, but she plays around with them for her own purposes.  On the next page Martin reflects:

If there was any reason, he thought, for an educated man to talk like a hick, it was just to show you that he was on your side, he was a hick, too.  On jury duty, which Martin had had a good many times, he had run into the same thing, and it had always annoyed him.  The lawyers, addressing the jury, at times would drop so far into countrified speech that the jury themselves had difficulty in understanding them.  Jed was an educated man, a college man.  Why in hell didn't he talk like one? [262]

If he did, Martin would despise him for that, of course.

Moore subtly but clearly depicts school and town politics, and treats all of her large cast of characters with empathy if not sympathy.  The town "eccentrics" provide some comedy, as usual in regional fiction, but they also have some complexity and surprises in store.

To add an extra fillip of pleasure, though I didn't learn this until after I'd finished the book: Moore's longtime companion from 1940 until the latter's death in 1981 was Eleanor Mayo, also a novelist.  Were they lesbians?  I have no idea, but clearly they weren't heterosexuals as we think of them today.  I just got hold of another of Moore's novels, Speak to the Winds, published in 1956, and will probably track down the rest of them.