Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "ruth-benedict"
The Jungle Book
“He got business here. Or so he say. There ain’t no man a delegate to this convention who stays his own boss.” “That’s right,” Bell agreed. “That’s why I fly solo.” Pullman Porter was waved away by another marcher then, he nodded goodbye to Bell, and Bell double-checked the other notes he was keeping in his breast pocket, too, the ones from his morning telephone talks. Hawaii, correct. The Knickerbocker. That was north of this sidewalk, by two good miles; nearer to the Drake and the California delegation. If only Rocky could see him now. Gone ahead to scout the terrain, with feathers and hatchet in hand.
One of the pleasures of writing is reading; doing the research. And GATE CITY required more than just straightforward historical work (yes, Hawaii really was staying at the Knickerbocker in Chicago in 1960). It also involved learning anthropology. Because after all, Jack Mercer was his agency’s depth man; he himself was an amateur anthropologist.
But just as Thomas Kuhn’s work ran like water through SPLIT THIRTY, references to anthropological classics pop up everywhere in GATE CITY, and not just when dealing with Mercer himself. A non-exclusive list: Baby Robert is found hiding behind a cottonwood tree by his mother; just like Ishi, last of the Yahi, was found by sheriffs upon his entry to white society in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi In Two Worlds. Mercer prods Bell to accept the dictates of party hierarchy and feels like committing hari-kari when Bell turns him down; one of several sly references to Ruth Benedict’s work on Japan. Stanley Fishbein leavens his critique of capitalism with thoughts borrowed from Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (Goodman wrote that book on contract for Governor Rockefeller, no less; Rocky did not care for the results) (ha!). And upon landing in Chicago with work to do, for which he only has his own two hands, Bell feels “like a handyman, surrounded by engineers,” one of the central metaphors in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.
If I had to pick out one book as the most important for an in-depth reading of GATE CITY, in fact, it would have to be that last one. One particular bit of Tristes Tropiques saddened me when I read it, though, and did not make the cut: his description of the coldness of his family’s synagogue, as remembered from his childhood. It seems to have been written without much sympathy. It seems to have been written by a young man.
Selma actually pays a visit to two synagogues in GATE CITY; a big one on Wilshire and a small one in the valley. And though they differ from each other in many respects, neither qualifies as cold. These are also places she goes, however, to connect with the past. And perhaps only in Judaism does that connection so signify warmth and love. And perhaps only Judaism has that as its central problem in the modern age, too: that people no longer wish to connect with the past. I don’t know what to do about that as my wife and I raise our son, except to show him how such bonds have meaning and beauty to me.
One of the pleasures of writing is reading; doing the research. Consider that to be a holy task, and your story comes alive.
One of the pleasures of writing is reading; doing the research. And GATE CITY required more than just straightforward historical work (yes, Hawaii really was staying at the Knickerbocker in Chicago in 1960). It also involved learning anthropology. Because after all, Jack Mercer was his agency’s depth man; he himself was an amateur anthropologist.
But just as Thomas Kuhn’s work ran like water through SPLIT THIRTY, references to anthropological classics pop up everywhere in GATE CITY, and not just when dealing with Mercer himself. A non-exclusive list: Baby Robert is found hiding behind a cottonwood tree by his mother; just like Ishi, last of the Yahi, was found by sheriffs upon his entry to white society in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi In Two Worlds. Mercer prods Bell to accept the dictates of party hierarchy and feels like committing hari-kari when Bell turns him down; one of several sly references to Ruth Benedict’s work on Japan. Stanley Fishbein leavens his critique of capitalism with thoughts borrowed from Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (Goodman wrote that book on contract for Governor Rockefeller, no less; Rocky did not care for the results) (ha!). And upon landing in Chicago with work to do, for which he only has his own two hands, Bell feels “like a handyman, surrounded by engineers,” one of the central metaphors in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.
If I had to pick out one book as the most important for an in-depth reading of GATE CITY, in fact, it would have to be that last one. One particular bit of Tristes Tropiques saddened me when I read it, though, and did not make the cut: his description of the coldness of his family’s synagogue, as remembered from his childhood. It seems to have been written without much sympathy. It seems to have been written by a young man.
Selma actually pays a visit to two synagogues in GATE CITY; a big one on Wilshire and a small one in the valley. And though they differ from each other in many respects, neither qualifies as cold. These are also places she goes, however, to connect with the past. And perhaps only in Judaism does that connection so signify warmth and love. And perhaps only Judaism has that as its central problem in the modern age, too: that people no longer wish to connect with the past. I don’t know what to do about that as my wife and I raise our son, except to show him how such bonds have meaning and beauty to me.
One of the pleasures of writing is reading; doing the research. Consider that to be a holy task, and your story comes alive.
