The Iceberg

My father’s cousin Ruth Mickelson stood inside her kitchen at her back door once when we stopped in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, 70 miles south of the Canadian border. Her greying hair was pinned up in a braid across the top of her head and her face was full of life. A teacher, she wore a print dress and old-fashioned, sensible shoes.

I was fascinated by how immaculate her stove and her kitchen were, imagining her upright, monkish existence. I was about 19 and at home there were ten of us. I stood listening to her talk to my Dad and vowed that one day I would live that simply and my kitchen would be that clean. These days, left to myself when Don is traveling (often this year), I think of her as I boil water for tea on our gas stove.

My father’s parish was too small to have a hospital, so my mother, awaiting me, her first child due at the end of December, stayed with Ruth Mickelson. Ruth, a second generation Scandinavian immigrant like my father, lived in Thief River Falls her entire adult life, teaching kindergarten for almost fifty years. Born in1899 and dying in 2001, she saw the entire 20th century. When I began my family saga entitled So Are You to My Thoughts, I gave my characters her last name.

Ernest Hemingway famously said, “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.” I did not put any detail about Ruth Mickelson into my family saga, but if you were to read it, you would not be surprised to learn that a rich Nordic culture, exemplified by her, lies behind it.

We all read to learn more about the world, to explore the depths below what is visible. A work of literature is distilled down to the universals the writer considers important, but it is underpinned by oceans of experience, knowledge and history. Scholarship gets at the journals, letters, and contemporaries of great writers, working to excavate the other eight ninths of their lives which reflect on their work. Studying some of this background enriches our reading.

For example, from a book about Virginia Woolf’s relatives, I learn that her grandmother, one of the beautiful Pattle sisters, had a Bengali ancestor. Woolf’s mother was, in fact, born in India, though she came to England at two. Among many other interesting details, I find that Woolf used the experience of her older half-sister Stella Duckworth to make up Eleanor, a character in The Years [1937], who busies herself with committees and charity work. Eleanor is a sprightly, attractive character, The Years one of my favorite books.

In my reading life, there have been four writers about whom I keep circling, and whose lives I have researched heavily so as to understand their work. They are also people about whom scholarship is exhaustive, partly because, by this time, most of their papers have been published. They are Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).

This may look like an odd list, and I have certainly been interested in many other writers and artists. But I confess that these writers, at bottom, have dominated my reading life. It isn’t hard for me to find in them commonality. They all wrote realistic work which tries to get at the truths of our human nature, while keeping their eyes on its dignities and possibilities. I believe they would all fall under a rubric of “natural classicism” as Frederick Turner defines it.

Turner, a Shakespeare scholar, poet and anthropologist, has been trying to define the movement which will supersede postmodernism and defeat the thrall in which the desire for constant newness holds us. Turner defines his outlook over many books of cultural anthropology. In The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit [1995], he writes that natural classicism “is based on culturally universal art forms and genres. Poetic meter, musical tonality and scale, visual motifs, techniques of visual representation, mythical stories, and so on, have deep neurobiologically based grammars, as does language itself, that are common to all cultures. It is only by training in a tradition which activates our innate propensity for these grammars that a budding artist, and a budding audience, can be liberated into their human heritage.”

An early essay defines his reasons. “Art,” he says, “evokes the shared past of all human beings, that past which is the moral foundation of civilization. Sometimes the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past, but sometimes the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present. The Enlightenment and modernism are examples of the former; the Renaissance, and perhaps our time, are examples of the latter.” I don’t see a lot of corroborating evidence of Turner’s ideas, but I very much agree with them.

At any rate, it seems to me that reading is almost as much of an art as writing. When people blithely dismiss books with flippant critique, they are saying more about themselves than about the book. Of course some things resonate more with each of us and others do not. The four authors I have kept track of since early years, along with the Chinese poets about whom I know less, are the strange attractors which resonate with my particular harmonic and whose work I have used to create my inner world.

As a young person I read desperately, looking for information about the vastness of the visible and invisible worlds. Older now, I have reserves of experience which help me understand the bulk of the iceberg. Age gifts us with patience, compassion, and the taste we have educated ourselves toward. I feel lucky also that as my eyes have become more recalcitrant, the array of audiobooks has expanded. Listening to a book read by a gifted voice actor is a different experience than reading, almost more intimate and certainly seductive.

Ruth Mickelson was the daughter of Josephine Anderson Mickelson, born in Oslo in 1872. My father was the son of Josephine’s younger sister, Dagny, born in 1886 in Minneapolis. So Dagny missed out on the voyage to America. The parents all spoke Norwegian, and my Dad and Ruth surely understood most of it. In The Pastor’s Kids I have put in a little Norwegian, part of the human iceberg which lies beneath the book.