Hildegarde

So.  Yesterday I had nothing to do, and the way that works,  I got absolutely nothing done. Except this:  I went to the grocery store.  That may seem like a small thing, and it may seem even smaller when you realize that I did not have any big shop to do.  I was just picking up enough to make sure my older son had something when he came back for vacation on Saturday, and  a few necessities for the week-end in general.  I won’t shop for  Christmas until next week.

But as it turns out, this was a very big deal, and a very big thing, because we have a nor’easter moving in today.   For those of you who don’t live in New England, the real problem with nor’easters is not the storms themselves, but what happens right before the storms:  everybody rushes to the grocery store and buys fifteen or sixteen bags of potato chips.

I am not making this up.  New England eats more potato chips and chocolate than any other region in the United States, and when it snows we want potato chips.  I bought potato chips, too, because I want to make a big tub of clam dip for Matt, and when  I say “big tub” I’m not kidding.   But I did it only in the hope that I’d be able to sleep in today and get some correcting done, and not because I’d been paying any attention to the weather news.  So  I can’t congratulate myself on my foresight.

That said, I’m sitting here at the computer with my customary really enormous (forty ounce) heavily steeped (two tea bags, twenty minutes) cup of tea, and I don’t know if I can face corecting today.  I’ve just about finished the Hawthorne biography.   I’ve got a couple of pages, and then  I want to read through the notes.   The description of the funeral was depressing in a way I had not thought it would be, but then that’s a lack of foresight, too.  It’s not that the rest of the book hadn’t given me enough hints.

Hawthorne died of a disease we aren’t sure of, but that sounds a lot like some kind of stomach or intestinal cancer, not only because of the symptoms but because two of his uncles died of  what looks like the same thing with the same symptoms at the same age. 

And at his funeral there was  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franklin  Pierce (the ex-president),  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James  Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Bronson Alcott, the Peabody sisters (his wife was a Peabody)–it was a gathering of the New England Renaissance.  Only Thoreau and Margaret  Fuller weren’t there, and they were both dead.

I don’t have much use for the illustriousness of funerals.  It isn’t that that strikes me in the list of mourners.  It’s that right here, in the middle of the Civil War, men and women who had largely been friends since childhood remained friends.  Elizabeth Peabody did not refuse to attend Hawthorne’s funeral because Hawthorne was a copperhead (a “peace Democrat,” who did not believe the Union should fight to keep the South, and who did not support abolition). 

Hell, she came even though Franklin Pierce, the biggest copperhead of them all, was sitting with the Hawthorne family.

i’m getting back to something here that ought to be commonplace but today is not.  Given our present climate, young up and coming man with political aspirations would have been very careful not to be in that church, not to give the impression that he “approved” of Hawthorne’s views on race, or slavery, or secession. 

And Hawthorne had the kind of views that were repugnant even at the time, when there was far less stress on the utter moral unacceptability of racism.  Someone e-mailed me the other day and in the course of the message gave a sort of throw away comment on Agatha Christies xenophobia, which the writer thought of as an imperial trait.   I tend to think of British xenophobia as an insular one, instead, but the comment made me think of why that trait in Christie never really bothers me much, and I came up with the realization:  there’s no malice in it.

Christie’s xenophobia was reflexive, not thought out, and it did not spill into her personal life as far as we can tell.  She traveled widely, and counted as friends people of many nationalities, whom she admired and praised publicly with no sense of irony.  What’s more, in those of her books where she’s actually thinking about it, the xenophobia is not only tempered, it’s often completely reversed.  Think of Dumb Witness, one of my favorite of the Poirots, where we spend the entire book being treated to the snide contempt for the Greek husband (sure to be the killer–he’s a foreigner!), only to have the book end with the revelation that he’s just fine, thank you very much, intelligent and generous and well-meaning and kind, it’s his Very English Lady Wife who’s a selfish, conniving, homicidal bitch.

The problem with  Hawthorne was that there was malice in it, a lot of malice, and racism of a kind that far outstripped anything around him.  He was not, after all, a child of the South.  He was born and raised in New England, and if his views on race and equality had been merely a matter of going along with the flow, they would have been much different than they were.  

I’m not saying that people like Elizabeth Peabody and  Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David  Thoreau were free of racially discriminatory ideas, as we would define that today.  They weren’t.  But compared to the kinds of things Hawthorne thought, and wrote, and respected, they were paragons. 

And yet they went on talking to him, all their lives.  They were good friends to him, as he was to them, all his life.  Even when forty thousand dead lay on the field at Gettysburg, they did not repudiate him.

And he did not repudiate them, even though they supported John Brown, an  American radical who makes Bill Ayers look like a hot fudge sundae. 

I tried to talk about this in a former post somewhere, and felt as if I didn’t do as good a job with it as I could.   But if there’s one change I can’t help but recognize with the start of the new  American dispensation–a change that comes with the end of  WWII and starts with the McCarthy period–it’s this demand that our public figures, political and otherwise, cut their friendships to only those that can be presented as politically acceptable.  Bill  Ayers!   Jerry Falwell!   Totally anathema!

I don’t know what I think of the invitation to Rick Warren to give the innaugural invocation.  I am convinced that we elected Barack  Obama to be president of the United States not because of any particular policies he might have, but because he came to us declaring that it was time for this crap to be over, it was time that we all understood that we are all Americans together, and that all the other things, the policy disagreements, even the moral disagreements, have to be secondary, if we are to be a country.

I’ve watched the transition with increasing fascination over the last few weeks.  I find this latest move completely flabbergasting.

But even so–and even though I disagree with Rick  Warren on practically everything, and most especially on gay rights–I hope Obama doesn’t get stampeded into changing his mind.

Because I think it’s vital right now that we start to learn, again, how to be All  Americans  Together. 

And to do that we have to learn that in a pluralistic society–which we have created, and which we claim to be very proud of –some of those Americans we’re together with are going to hold views and support policies that we find morally and politically reprehensible.

A world in which we are all neat different colors but complete conformists inside our heads–what I think of as the rainbow sprinkles version of diversity–isn’t really diversity at all.   It’s a monocultural society with a superficial paint job.

Barack Obama is a very interesting man.  I don’t think he should repudiate either Wright or  Warren. 

I do think I’d give a lot to live in a time when personal commitments–love and friendship and everything that goes with it–were not calcuated on their potential to look politically palatable to any particular group of people.

I’m blithering again.