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An American Scholar
An Interview with Marilynne Robinson

By Regan Good

Marilynne Robinson says she did not intend to write a novel when she began trying her hand at extended metaphors. She began with an image of a grandfather finding a watch on a lake shore; then came a grandmother hanging laundry on a line. There were people in these descriptions and the passages were firmly connected to place, namely the wild, deep woods and darkly vegetative lakeshores of rural Idaho. One of the earliest metaphors she worked on was the image of a passenger train sliding silently off the tracks of a trestle bridge and slipping wholesale into the lake below. It is this image that begins Housekeeping. The accident, from which there are no survivors, occurs decades before the action of the book takes place, but the train functions as an uncanny anchor throughout the novel. The children of Fingerbone swear they sometimes rub their feet on the train's windows while swimming in the lake. Winter skaters invariably think of the iron locomotive under their bladed feet as they etch circles on the ice. A reader can unpack the image in a seemingly endless proliferation of metaphysically profound ways, which is exactly what Robinson intended.

Marilynne Robinson was thirty-five years old when she published Housekeeping in 1980. The novel was an eccentric piece of work by any standard, a kind of nineteenth century novel written in the twentieth. The prose was Old Testament-rich, composed of long sentences and dense metaphorical passages verging on Melvillian grandeur. The critic Anatole Broyard wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "It's as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration." Take this passage for example:

Imagine a Carthage sewn with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need for slaking. For need can blossom into the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as alike as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.

The book follows Ruth—a solitary child who feels different from her striving sister and the starched and pleated citizenry of Fingerbone, Idaho—as she begins to determine who she is. When their aunt Sylvie arrives to take care of the girls after their grandmother's death, Ruth cleaves to the woman, feeling inexplicable sympathy with Sylvie's wordless reveries and mysterious disappearances. The novel ends with Sylvie and Ruth burning down the family house and forming a rootless, hobo society of their own invention. Flap copy for the original hardcover indicated Robinson was at work on another novel, but then she seemed to vanish. But what some readers missed is that Robinson did publish two more books after Housekeeping, both works of nonfiction: Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution in 1989, and then The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought in 1998.

Mother Country was a decidedly strange follow-up to such a literary literary debut as Housekeeping, and announced Robinson as a moral thinker and an environmentalist (albeit one who rarely leaves her house). The book was nominated for a National Book Award despite pointed criticism over her research methods by scientific reviewers. Ten years later came The Death of Adam, a book of essays on Puritan culture and the sixteenth century Protestant church reformer, John Calvin, as well as essays in which Robinson seeks to dismantle the thought of major Modernist figures like Darwin and Nietzsche. God is, in her estimation, far from dead.

Since 1990, Robinson has taught fiction at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Today she is a self-proclaimed Calvinist and has been studying Calvin's massive Institutes of the Christian Religion for over a decade. As a regular churchgoer, Robinson occasionally delivers sermons to her Congregational Church. In these sermons she radiates moral certitude, theological scholarship, and a great deal of indignation at how the Calvinist inspired ideas that founded this country have been abused or misunderstood.

In September 2000, Marilynne Robinson and I had four conversations over as many days in her living room in her home in Iowa City. Despite the insane September heat, Robinson was a prodigious talker. Questions triggered answers of perfectly composed paragraphs of nuanced thought, made up of complete complex sentences in which words like "toothsome" and "mirth" were used without self-consciousness. Recently we spoke again by phone. We spoke off-the- record about the novel she is currently working on about a dying Calvinist preacher in 1955 writing to his very young son about the world and his understanding of its mysteries. We spoke on-the-record about postmodernism, Wallace Stevens, Moby Dick and, of course, John Calvin.

Regen Good: Can you tell me about writing Housekeeping?

Marilynn Robinson: I was an American literature major in college and I became very interested in the nineteenth century's use of extended metaphors. I felt as if that needed to be explored and that people had stopped using metaphor in that incredibly ambitious way for no particular reason. I felt that metaphor was no longer being used as a way of envisioning the world. I was working on my dissertation and people told me if you did critical work you couldn't do creative work. So I would write what to me were extended metaphors-I would write them and then put them away, and when I read them again I realized that they cohered and that they were the basis of a fiction. But I hadn't been writing them with the idea that they would be one.

RG: I read that you literally wrote the book in the dark?

MR: I wrote a lot of Housekeeping in France. I wrote in a little dark room at the back of the house while trying to hide from the neighborhood children fascinated by this American family living in their midst. I was trying to remember when I was in Idaho. I hadn't spent any time there for years, except for brief visits home. I was trying to remember the water and the air and the vegetation and so on. And at first it seemed undoable and then I began to realize that if I gave my mind time it would discover things. It knew things that I would never anticipate it knowing and so there was this whole rising out of the sea of this remembered landscape which was a strange experience in itself because it was a discovery of mind about my mind that I would never have otherwise have made.

RG: You've said before that Housekeeping was not autobiographical, though you grew up spending a lot of your time in Idaho's lonelier landscapes at your grandparents' ranch, I believe, in Sandhope, Idaho. But the description of Ruth's solitary nature and feeling of being different seems to be an echo of your own solitary nature. Do you see yourself in Ruth?

MR: Well, I was interested in what she was interested in, namely the persistence of things that perish. That fact that they reconstitute themselves, that they yield things in the mind, in the consciousness, and that the being of anything of significance cannot be said to have an end. I was trying to make the argument that there's a supersaturated quality to experience, that it doesn't happen once and then cease-that in a certain sense it reinvests itself continuously with a significance that rises again and again.

RG: Does it surprise you that Housekeeping can be found on many postmodern literature course syllabi? It actually appears on one scholar's timeline alongside Blondie's Call Me as a major postmodern work.

MR: Well, I just received an essay in the mail from someone who was saying Housekeeping was postmodern. I felt very chic. But the thing is, I have been teaching Moby Dick this semester which must be the great articulation of the problem of knowledge. When you show people how the novel works, they say, 'well, that's postmodern.' But in fact, the nineteenth century writers just knew a great deal about the problem of knowledge. I talk lot about Calvin in my classes because that psychology is the product of Calvinistic theology. You know, for them the world is this amazing, dazzling phenomenon seen through a glass darkly and so on. For the nineteenth century writers it becomes an experiment in what the human consciousness is and what experience is, which is a very beautiful question for them. People say. 'Oooo, those people were so clever, they are almost as smart as we are.' And that leads to the conclusion that people who are writing now don't understand that they are dealing with old, or relatively old, ideas. It seems to me the difference between the nineteenth century Americans and the postmodernists is that rather than feeling they were participating in something astonishing the postmodernists say, 'Well, we can't know the truth, we know we can't know it. All we can is cut and paste,' or something.

RG: You studied with John Hawkes as an undergraduate. What kind of teacher was he for you?

MR: He did exactly what I aspire to do as a teacher-he made me sensitive to the times I was writing well. It's very difficult when you are starting out because you have the strange abstract idea of what it would be like to write without having an experience of yourself writing. So you do all kinds of crazy imitative stuff or whatever. He was always very careful to mark out for me when I was writing well and when I was doing something that was derivative or unimaginative. Even then I had a long sentence style. It has always been true for me that often I know what a sentence should sound like before I know what it should say. I wasn't particularly aware of that. He made me aware of the virtues and pitfalls of the long sentence.

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