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The Maytrees tells
the story of the life-long love of Toby Maytree and Lou Bigelow, beginning
early in the twentieth century in Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod. Toby
is a carpenter and poet who 'hauls lines of poetry like buried barbed wire
with bare hands', whilst Lou is an Ingrid Bergman look-alike who speaks very
little. and whose creativity finds its outlet through painting. After they
marry, they live together in his family's shack in the sand dunes, where they
live out their love 'as if they were two halves of one brain', and have their
only child, Pete, 'his milk teeth separated neatly like unripe corn on the
ear'. Throughout their marriage Lou feels 'their skin as double sided',
whilst Toby comes to realise that 'her face was his eyes' home'. He sleeps
'with a long leg flung over her, as a dog claims a stick'. The novel is
beautifully structured and paced, the characters and story are wonderfully
rendered, and the language is individual and revelatory. An unconditional
treat.
Toby and Lou's closest friend, Deary Hightoe, plays a central role. Deary
holds the theory that every time you injure yourself 'you learn how that
patch of you feels. It wakens. Until it heals, you're aware of these nerves...
then when you have hurt every single place on your body, you die! Once you
have felt every last nerve ending, at least on your skin, then you have lived
in full awareness'. This awareness is not only experienced and lived out by
the characters, but it is also one lived by the author herself: this novel is
written with tenderness and an outstanding attention to the details of the
real world as well as the details of language. Deary also holds the fabulous
belief that 'If you slice a rock thin enough, and splice the slices serially
in frames, you have a documentary film. The film displays the long history of
the world from that rock's views. Together the world's rocks hold a visual
record of all time... It all badly needed film editors'. Time, geology,
universal forces, and the play of human lives between them, bind this novel
together.
Toby and Lou's other friends, all delightfully named and various, include
Reevadare Weaver, 'a henna-haired old Provincetown woman,' who has married
and divorced eight times, 'un peu superbe, who wore wax-fruit-elongated hats' and whose
humped back, 'which she named Surtsey', grows higher than her head. There is
also Cornelius Blue, with his 'walrus mustache and Walt Whitman beard'; Jane
Cairo, 'a wild-haired schoolgirl'; Slow Sykes 'who wore green shoes and held
down third base'; Ruby Hightoe, 'glaring and calm' who steers her 'red
alligator-skin high heels around a pile of cord net that seaweed and beer
bottles fouled'; Sooner Roy, the carpenter; the cook Flo Proto, 'splay legged
in her wobbling kitchen', who 'cooked on the woodstove a slumgullion to feed
the crew'; Loopy Devega who scatters crematorium ashes from his airplane; and
a whole supporting cast of nonconformists Ð an extended network of other
'people who wrote, people who painted, people who taught, people who carved
or welded sculptures, and poets, barefoot, lefty, and educated to a feather
edge'.
Deary advises Lou to keep her women friends as 'men come and go', although it
is ironically Deary who whisks Toby away from Lou in an illicit affair that
lasts some twenty years, and which forms the central conflict of this novel.
After fourteen years of marriage, Toby and Deary run off together to an
island in Maine. Toby loves Lou, but also Deary. Lou loves them both.
Somewhere within this tragic little triangle the characters discover
redemption and the humanity to carry on; what Dillard calls 'getting a grip
on letting go'. Through their inter-relationships she explores her
understanding of love, intimacy, and till-death-us-do-part. 'Why can love,
love apparently absolute, recur? And recur? Why does love feel it is Ð know
for certain it is Ð eternal and absolute every time?' How love, a force for
'good' can 'drop one like a mantrap into lies?'
The clue to Lou's acceptance of Toby's running-off with Deary, is that she
loves him beyond reason ('Why use strength of mind to fight love?') and that,
whatever happened to her, she 'longed for the life she already possessed'. In
truth, Lou has 'no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a
fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found
herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love's long line alone'.
Her task is one of overcoming self-centredness and, in that realisation, she
is able to forgive. 'With those blows, she opened her days like a pi–ata'.
In the end, Deary becomes sick and, following a bad fall which renders Toby
incapable of looking after the dying Deary, Toby calls on Lou to look after
her. 'He would appeal to Lou'. And he knows that she will accept the call to
nurse Deary and to finally take him back. 'Of course she would take them in.
Anyone would'; Lou's reasons of course being love, friendship, and losing
self-centredness: 'Her solitude always held open house. When was the last
time anyone needed her? She was eager to do it, whatever it was'.
If male-female love ('What we have together') forms the central concern of
this novel Ð what men need from women and do not get, 'The quality of being strong
to be loved'; and what women need from men that they do not get, 'Courage
would be nice' Ð then the novel is also about other forms of love: familial
love; love for friends; the love of parents and children. Love of place.
(And, for Dillard the author, love of language too). Pete, the son, also
tries to 'master himself' in the way his mother attempts to overcome
self-centredness. 'Just as few men love their wives so much as their
daughters, few, if any, women love anyone so much as their children'. Lou's
love for Pete is explored throughout the novel; Toby's love for his son (the
son he betrayed by leaving) comes to fruition after twenty years when Pete
goes to visit him in Maine. And, for all of the characters, the redemption of
love is realised with time: for Toby and Lou, their stories end with the
realisation that 'in compassion they bore between them their solitudes, each
the size of the ravelled globe. Everything looked better since they were
old'.
The other big love in this exquisite novel is love of place. The dunes, the
shore, the sea; its flora and fauna; its minute changes and its elemental
sweeps, all are intricately detailed here in vocabulary that surprises, and
phrasings that twist and turn like the sea itself: 'Near the great second dune's
foot he felt with every plantar nerve for the slim berm of clay, or the hard
sand beside it, that would lead him round the swale. He found it and hazarded
the swale's bog. Cranberry patches felt good underfoot but meant he was off
course. Dried grass stalks bloodied his insteps'. Passages like these remind
me a little of the toings and froings in some of Woolf's prose, or the
exquisite sentence-making of Carol Shields, whilst remaining utterly fresh
and Dillard's own. Dillard also has a sensational way with similes, my
favourite of which goes: 'The lines at his eyes' edges splayed like the
comet's tail in the Bayeux tapestry'.
If the simile seems far-fetched, it absolutely is not, for stars and other
heavenly bodies feature strongly as a central images throughout this novel,
from myths of the Nauset tribes and a more generalised pre-history, to the
comet itself which, as a portent, is just one of a number of figures derived
from skywatching. Toby, Lou and Pete spend their evenings lying on their
backs in the dunes, star-gazing: 'for a second on the blanket between his
parents and watching the stars, Petie knew he was alive'. They watch 'the
Milky way tangle Mars in its slack nets'; they see 'Ursa Major swing on its
moorings as if tide loosened it'; they learn the names of the constellations
and realise their own small, but essential, human roles beneath those stars.
They awaken to their own small worlds and the limitless world to which those
belong.
The flip-side of love, Death, is also a necessary part of this story. Dillard treats it unsentimentally.
After Lou takes both Toby and Deary back, to nurse Deary in her final weeks
of life, Deary herself is seen to be 'charring and buckling like a leaf', as
the life leaves her body. In the end it takes 'eight days for unconscious
Deary to die her death', an idea as commonplace as 'living our lives' but all
the stranger for rarely being voiced in this way. Other deaths come when Toby
recalls the men from his village drowning in a shipwreck just off the shore. When
Toby himself dies, Lou notes simply how 'He had enjoyed what the Brits call
good innings. He had seen downy feathers on eggs. He saw auroras from the
dunes. Once he saw a fireball'. The details of a life, big and small,
personal and universal; there is little more to humanly do than bear witness
to those. And, after his death, 'Lou wondered where his information would go
when he died. Would filaments of learning plant patterns on earth? Would his
brain train the sinking plankton to know their way around the seafloor from
here to Stellwagon Bank? Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all she
had learned topside. Which was not much, she considered, nor anywhere near
worked out. Bacteria would unhook her painstakingly linked neurons and fling
them over their shoulders and carry them home to chew up for their horrific
babies'. Lou of course does die, and is found by Jane Cairo 'prone on the
bed... blue on her low side Ð ventrally Ð like a boat with fresh bottom paint.
She was white above the waterline... Jane tried to close Lou's eyes. In the end
she covered them with scallop shells from the windowsill. Already blowflies
walked into Lou's nostrils. Greenbottle flies slipped under the scallop
shells to find here eyes; one bluebottle fly worked a lip's corner'.
If this matter-of-fact wondering in the face of death sits in one of the
weighing pans, then the scales are balanced by Humour in the other. 'Short of
burning cash, there was no more expensive way to light a room than burning
candles,' Lou notes at one point. 'Lucretius,' we are told, 'declared that
love was only a shudder mammals used to procreate'. Lasting love 'makes no
scientific sense after the kids can hunt and gather' is another wry comment
on the central theme. And then there is the character Sarah Smithers whose
'Irish-immigrant parents had so many children that he and Deary privately
called the offspring, collectively, Smithereens'. Toby's death itself
contains the funniest bit of dialogue in the whole: '- Doc says, You have
three minutes to live. - Anything you can do for me, doc? - Well, I could
boil you an egg'.
Dillard treats all of human experience in her discriminating and gorgeously
rendered short novel. Unputdownable.
© Andy
Brown 2008
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