This Forlorn Land at the Edge of Everywhere
Some -- okay, many -- thoughts on Gene Wolfe's Peace.
Every October for many years now, I have reread Gene Wolfe’s novel Peace.
Peace is a great book. In fact, I’ve come to think of it as a Great American Novel. I first wrote the Great American Novel in that sentence, driven by the exaggerating hot-take instinct that infects all of us who spend too much time with our magic mirrors, but—of course the Great American Novel isn’t Highlander. America is multiple and strange and queer, there is not and could never be only one novel of it any more than there could be only one story of it; but also I struggle to think of a novel that says what Peace says about what it calls “this forlorn land at the edge of everywhere,” in quite the directly indirect way it comes around to saying it. Or not saying it, as the case may be.
It may be more accurate to say that Peace plays the game of the great American white novel—its concerns and core matter substantially different than those of, say, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, though it does engage with race rather than retreating before it altogether in the way Ellison himself takes Hemingway to task for in, I believe, the title essay of Shadow and Act. But that qualifier would still require us to wrestle with that other, much longer book about whiteness—among other things—and a whale… To escape the Pequod (as the Pequod herself could not manage), we might call Peace a Great American straight white novel? (That added modifier conveniently classing out many other heavy-hitters in the broader category…)
Peace is, at any rate, a book concerned, deeply and directly, with the phantasmal self-image of the particular piece of America that thinks of itself as the America, and offers a troubled, troubling look at its destiny and beauty and pain and crime, a vital and necessary perspective.
The trouble lies in discussing how, and what, and why.
It’s hard to talk about Wolfe, because—as I think I’ve said before—reading Wolfe reminds me of the way Pratchett described playing games with God: you’re playing poker in the dark with a dealer who smiles all the time. Wolfe more than any author I can think of writes puzzle-books, where the truth hides beneath and behind a surface story, or perhaps even beneath and behind the thing that’s beneath and behind the surface story, which you previously thought was the real story until this most recent re-read. Wolfe also breaks kayfabe less than any author I can think of. He rarely if ever tips his hand. There are no answer keys. This isn’t Encyclopedia Brown.
And yet there is a truth down there somewhere in the text. Wolfe is not playing purely postmodern games—his stories aren’t Paul Auster yarns, fuzzing out until the most you can be certain of is that you have been reading a book, and perhaps not even that—nor are they sprawls like Infinite Jest where the rest is silence, and left as an exercise to the reader. There is something real there. There is a point, a truth. It’s your job to find it. Good luck.
This makes Wolfe-reading an intellectual exercise appealing to the sort of brain that gets its buzz from puzzle-neepery—and at times from stunting on other readers who have not neeped the puzzle with sufficient depth. Wolfe discussion forums, at their most intimidating, resemble a kind of Dark Forest, where anyone presentation of a clear interpretation of a text stands vulnerable to a devastating attack from the shadows by someone who has read more deeply. “You fool! It’s obvious that this character is in fact the dead conjoined twin of another character in another reality who never appears in the book!!” So what I’m about to do feels risky. I’m not completely confident in every point I’m about to make. For much of what I’m saying here I have textual support. Some of what I’m doing amounts to putting Wolfe on a hand. It’s a hand that explains his line of play, I think, but I could quite easily be wrong. And there are a few deep puzzles in the text which I have yet to neep to my satisfaction.
But what I can see compels me, and I’ve been wanting to write about it for years now, so I’m going to try.
I’m about to spoil Peace. To be specific: I’m about to provide a (limited, fallible) answer key for the book, or at least for what I’ve been able to make of it. Peacing together (sorry) Wolfe’s meaning is one of the great intellectual joys of the field; doing this feels a bit like destroying a stained glass window (to steal a phrase). But otherwise I’d have to say, “go read this book, then read it one or two or three more times, then come find me at a con sometime and we’ll have a chat,” which is a high barrier to entry, and leaves the reader in the Dark Forest. Still: if you like, close this essay, go read the book, and read it again, and come back. This essay isn’t going anywhere. And it’s quite long.
Or: find me at a con sometime.
On its surface, Peace is the memoir of Alden Dennis Weer, often called Den. Den has had a stroke, and perhaps a heart attack. He is old and he is alone in his sprawling mansion. As he wanders its many rooms in search of mementos of his youth, and in search of a good place to rest, he remembers his childhood, boyhood, and manhood in a young America, in the Midwestern town of Cassionville, as it grows and changes from a place of farms and rolling fields to a place dominated by the industry of producing imitation orange juice made from potatoes (think Tang). Den’s memories leap through time in a Proustian fashion—indeed his consciousness itself accompanies his memory, permitting him, at times, to question and confront figures from his past, to be observed observing by the particularly gifted or clairvoyant, even to possess his younger self. Den’s boyhood is full of magic and strangeness and light and wonder of classical Midwestern Americana, with brass band concerts and birthday parties and picnics and hikes and weddings and treasure hunts, afternoons with his Aunt Olivia and her suitors, with the fanciful adventures of childhood and the first stirrings of romance. Den’s memory reflects the golden light of childhood in a Bradbury story. Remembering, of course, that for all its wonder and glory, nostalgia in Bradbury is often a trap (“The Third Expedition” in The Martian Chronicles), and children can easily be monsters (“The Veldt”), and attempts to reclaim or cling to childhood past its time are often dangerous or malevolent (Something Wicked This Way Comes).
In its most general outline, Den’s memories show us a comparatively affluent and comfortable childhood, first at home with his parents, then with his beautiful young Aunt Olivia after his parents have left to tour the Continent. While Den lives with Aunt Olivia (sometimes “Vi” in the text), he meets her four suitors, and through her association with them Den learns much about the history, present, and future of Cassionville, and about human society and relationships in general.
Other people weave through Den’s life in a twisting, slippery fashion arriving before they are introduced, their names transfigured by marriage and their natures by event: his childhood crush Margaret Lorn appears as first as a married woman who gives him the cut direct (subtly and unremarked) in a doctor’s office on page 12, then (over a hundred pages later) as a child on their first meeting. In this manner many people come and go (talking of Michaelangelo?). It’s not always easy to mark their exits. Den has a tendency to lose people.
After his childhood, Den’s adult life is, to our surprise on first read, as destitute and lonely as a noir—he’s a mid-level employee in a dirty two room flat, his rising comprehension and agency matched by an ebb of fortune, family, and enchantment; then we meet him again a decade or so later, to find that his fortunes have reversed again. He has become the chairman of the imitation orange juice factory that has simultaneously enriched and desiccated the former farm community of Cassionville even as it has enriched and desiccated Den himself, to the point that he lacks any stories of his own to tell.
And then we circle back to Den as an old man after a stroke, sifting through his life as he faces the end of it, searching for meaning. In its silhouette at least, the novel reminds us a bit of another remark of Pratchett’s: “Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
Den’s life, age, and death are twinned in his own mind and in the text with the much broader and more communal lives, ages, and deaths of his family, his town of Cassionville, and his country of America. It is Den’s relationship with the dream and realities of the nation, ranging from the contemplative to the fetishistic, that give Peace much of its “Great American Novel” character. Den is aware of his country as a thing in time and out of time, a dream and a reality, something rich and strange and vulnerable and doomed.
In his earliest prominent memory, Den, at his fifth birthday party, stands at the top of the attic stairs, barring the door before the rise of the dreaded Bobby Black. Behind Den, the attic holds apples (with their echoes of pie and Americana and the knowledge of good and evil), and a painting: the only surviving likeness of Den’s uncle Joe, who passed away when he was about Den’s age. (This correspondence having symbolic echoes, of course, in Dorian Gray.) Joe, idealized, dressed outlandishly, immortal in oils, stands within a fanciful landscape which adult Den, looking back, recognizes as a Tuscan garden.
“That garden, with its marble faun and fountain, its Lombardy poplars and its beeches, has impressed my mind always far more strongly than poor dead Joe, whom none of us except my grandmother and Hannah had ever seen, and whose little grave in the cemetery on the hill was tended mostly by ants that had built a city upon his chest. Now, when I sit alone by my fire and look out at the wreck of the elm revealed by the lightning flashes, confused and ruinous as a ship gone aground, it seems to me that the garden—I mean little Joe’s garden, basking forever in the sunshine of its Tyrrhenian afternoon—is the core and root of the real world, to which all this America is only a miniature in a locket in a forgotten drawer; and this thought reminds me (and is reinforced by the memory) of Dante’s Paradiso, in which (because the wisdom of this world was the folly of the next) the earth stood physically central, surrounded by the limbus of the moon and all the other spheres, greater and greater, and at last by God, but in which this physical reality was, in the end, delusive, God standing central in spiritual truth, and our poor earth cast out—peripheral to the concerns of Heaven save when the memory of it waked, with something not unlike an impure nostalgia, the great saints and the Christ from the contemplation of triune God.
True; all true. Why do we love this forlorn land at the edge of everywhere?” (15-16)
Bobby Black’s coming imperils “core and root of the real world.”Bobby, Den knows, will seize up the apples and pelt Den with them; fragments of apple will strike the painting and walls and floor rot. Den will be blamed when the damage is discovered. The option of cleaning up is unthinkable to him. So he mounts a desperate defense:
“I stand at the top of the stair, inferior in strength and size but superior in position, silent, my eyes nearly closed, my face contorted, ready to cry, and I defy him; he jeers at me, knowing that if he can make me speak his battle is won; the others look over my shoulders and between my legs—my audience, not my allies.
At last we close, grunting, each grasping the other’s pudgy body like wrestlers, red-faced and weeping. For a moment we sway.” (17)
Den fights viciously for this ideal he cannot grasp (and, he admits, to protect himself).
Den holds a dual sense of this dream-America, this ideal garden as wonderous and frail. Its mortality and its magic haunt him, manifesting in flights of fancy and imagery depicting America as something special that may—that will—go away.
“And as if by magic—and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ingrown, our women ready to haunt as lamiae the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor—it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe only by the thread of smoke from the stove.” (38)
Frequently this rumination on the passing-away of things reach an apocalyptic pitch, as in this conversation between Aunt Olivia and her suitor, Professor Peacock, overheard when Den is roughly eight or nine.
“‘You misunderstand me, Vi. I am on Alden’s side, and we mean \[that the bones of Aunt Olivia’s Pekingese dogs will be discovered, and remarked upon by archaeologists, in\] thousands and thousands of years.’
‘There won’t be anyone then,’ my Aunt Olivia said. She was pulling herself up the slope, and Professor Peacock stopped to give her a hand. We were nearly at the top.
‘You don’t know that,’ he said.
‘It’s not difficult to guess. You know the history of species. Each starts as an obscure new animal, inhabiting a small area, and rare even in that. Then, for some reason, conditions become favorable for it—it spreads and spreads and spreads and becomes the most common creature of all. If it is a grazing animal like us, it will increase until the plains are black with its kind.’” (70)
And what then? We were nearly at the top. The fall is left as an exercise to the reader.
The book’s (and Den’s) apocalyptic dream-imagery is mirrored with a meticulous attention to to the transformation of the heavy, substantial material culture of his youth into the unreal abundance and simulacra of the flashy, modernized age, often with distinct mournful New Agrarian notes —the invention of the garbage disposal leading to households treating the sink as a sort of trash bin (an observation which always leads me, after reading it, to shy away from using my disposal for a week or two), or this bit on Den’s childhood boy scout knife: “Unlike the blades of boys’ knives to come, all these were of high-carbon steel and rusted if they were not kept oiled; but they would take and hold a good edge, as the bright and showy blades will not.” (41) Later, when Den becomes president of the fake orange-juice company, he gets rid of the old president’s desk, “a heavy, old-fashioned affair with carved legs and front and side panels… The decorator had replaced it with one shaped like saliva on the sidewalk, a blob of walnut.” (284)
Den’s youth is an aristocratic world of difficult upkeep and expensive materials, of land and people and things; by his adulthood this world has given way, though some relics survive (his Aunt Olivia’s old house becomes the town library); by Den’s old age “all that is solid melts into air”—wealth has been transformed to capital and the dry earth of markets. This arc is particularly easy to observe in the case (and body) of the wealthy Stewart Blaine, one of Aunt Olivia’s suitors. Blaine is introduced as a vision of aristocratic prosperity, a man who talks to his car (with its dashboard all of Russian leather) as if it were a horse, who invites Den and Olivia to his mansion with its dogs and its stables, and its marble fireplace so meticulously scrubbed (by his groundskeeper Doherty) as to bear no trace of soot. When adult Den visits Blaine some decades later, he finds the mansion and the groundskeeper and the dogs and the horse and the marble fireplace gone, exchanged for a subdivision lying on what used to be farmland. “The house was timber and plaster now, in the style that is called Tudor. Two stories and what appeared to be a finished attic, but nothing to the glory that had been Blaine’s old house.” (223)
Yet while Blaine’s house has dwindled, along with Blaine himself, now wheelchair bound on the second floor—“I have never been more aware of the skull underlying a man’s face than I was of Blaine’s then” (225)—Blaine’s wealth has magnified beyond belief. In his own words: “The Depression made us, just as it made about every bank that didn’t go under. We didn’t go under, though we had to lock the doors twice. We were picking up farms for a song, picking them up left and right. Fertile land. Of course there was no market for it then. The other banks were going crazy trying to sell what they had. Sell at any price. We hung onto ours, told the former owners we felt sorry for them, would let them stay there, keep working on their places; we’d only take half, and hint that perhaps eventually they could save enough to buy the places back. Some of them moved out and we gave their land to the others—gave them more land to work, you see. And we took over their marketing. A bank that represents fifty farms can do a lot for the price of produce.”
And where will these riches go? This process of turning others’ livelihood into capital, where does it end? Blaine asks Den:
“‘Have you any children?’
I told him I had never married.
‘Nor have I. No son. When I’m gone, this whole town will revert to the Iroquois—did you know that? Determination Blaine bought it, and it was to belong to him, and to his sons, for so long as the moon rose. The fact that the sons were included in the wording shows that it was actually a lease of indefinite length—one that was to remain in effect as long as the line endured.”
We have seen this lease before—or more precisely, the absence of it. In Den’s earliest memories, his mother and the other high-placed women of Cassionville sit on the lawn at his fifth birthday party, calling one another by mock Indian names as they work to produce a copy of the supposed agreement by which the local Indians sold Cassionville to white settlers. The original treaty has rotted away. What did it say? Is Blaine’s account accurate? Who knows; his memory is faulty. The birthday party forgers are working without reference to the original, which rotted away. Now only the forgery remains.
As for Blaine, he claims that his legacy will be his collection of rare and valuable books, to be endowed as a library and left to the local university. But unbeknownst to Blaine, the most recent book he has acquired (and who knows how many others?) is a fake, produced by the forger Louis Gold.
White settlers’ claim to the land (and by extension the entirety of Blaine’s wealth, based on the conversion of land into capital) will evaporate upon Blaine’s death—but that claim is founded on a vanished document, its contents attested only by Blaine’s failing memory, its only enduring copy an utter fabrication made by Den’s family without reference to the original. Blaine has no heir save his books—which are themselves fake. It’s all fake, except the money.
We do not see Blaine’s death. We do see Den reach a similar place of mixed wealth and poverty, perhaps twenty years later. Den has become the president of the fake-orange-juice company started by his Aunt Olivia’s husband Julius. (“Orange Julius” among the novel’s leavening of textual jokes, like the seer in the fairy tale wrapped in wolf-skins, or Wolfe-skins as the case may be.) Both Olivia and Julius are dead now, and Den is alone—he has no siblings, no surviving family. His closest personal connections are his employees and his secretary, Mrs. Birkhead, and toward the novel’s end Mrs. Birkhead herself passes on.
In the novel’s final chapter, President Den accompanies a reporter who’s working on a piece about the juice factory. The factory itself is a marvel of modern plant engineering (drawing on Wolfe’s own experience in the field), but in the reporter’s interviews we find again and again the depiction of a modern life of sterility and simulacra and mass consumption, of life-out-of-balance. The fake orange juice product is gamma-irradiated to prevent fermentation, that is to say, to remove the possibility of continuing life. The rot of rotlessness is now everywhere. For instance, this conversation with a typist:
“’What do you do here?’
‘Type and file. Keep the records of the warehouse—you know, how many boxes in and what lot, how many out and what carrier took them.’
‘How many cartons of juice would you say you’ve booked in and out since you’ve been here?’
‘I haven’t any idea. A jillion, but I really haven’t any idea.’
‘Can’t you make a guess?’
‘I don’t know. I could try to figure it out, but it wouldn’t make any sense. Have you seen where they unload them off the conveyor? I go in there sometimes when there’s a message for one of the men—his wife’s sick or something. Or where they put them on the railroad cars or the trucks. There’s a hundred cans to a box, and so many boxes you can’t believe it, and it goes on like that all day long. I don’t know what they do with it, but people can’t be drinking it all—they just couldn’t be.’
‘I’ve been to other factories,’ the reporter said. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘You think of a woman with a family—she goes to the supermarket, and how many does she buy? One or two cans, maybe five if everybody in the family drinks it for breakfast every day. That’s what I think. Then I stand by the conveyor and watch them unload, and I try to think of all the families and there aren’t that many people in the world. Just while you stand there—you know, while you say which one’s John Boone and somebody says the man in the checkered shirt and you say Mr. Boone and he says just a minute and you say you’ve got to come to the office, they want you on the phone, it’s an emergency—just in that time they load enough for the whole city of Chicago.’
‘Do you buy the juice yourself? … Does your family like it?’
‘There’s just my husband and me.’
‘Does he like it?’
‘He’s used to it. You know. I don’t think he thinks much about it.’
…
‘Do you plan to have children?’
‘That’s funny. I mean, excuse me for laughing, but it is funny. No—not this late. We wanted some at first but I don’t think we’ve talked about it for four or five years.’
‘Suppose you had a child, a daughter. What would you want for her?’
‘I don’t know. A real nice childhood.’
‘After childhood. … Would you want her to live here? … Do you think this is a good place to bring up children?’
‘Well, it’s not any worse than anywhere else. I mean, it’s not good, no.’
‘Can you elaborate on that?’
‘Well, when i used to think about children I used to remember how nice Hylesport was when I was little but that’s terrible now, since the refinery came in. My mother used to tell about growing up on a farm. They didn’t have much money, but they weren’t poor. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘They didn’t have much money, but they didn’t need much—you could even pay the doctor in chickens then. They had land and plenty to eat, and they didn’t need fancy clothes. For Thanksgiving her father used to kill a deer. That was one of the things my mother always used to tell when she talked about the farm, her father shooting a deer for Thanksgiving. I put little paper turkeys on the table for Joe and I, and I get a turkey out of the freezer.’” (306-7)
The symbolic argument being made in this excerpt is natalist in a way that sits uncomfortably on my soul, but I think the point is not to tie the value of any individual life with the presence (or absence) of children in it—but to highlight the inhumanity of a world that has, quietly and slowly, made the existence of children unthinkable, even for those who want to have them.
Soon after, the reporter has a conversation with an aging local farmer that would not be out of place in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter:
“‘You’ve seen a lot of changes, then,’ the reporter said.
‘And been against every one of them—is that what you want to hear?’
‘No, I was just thinking that this area must have been very different fifty or sixty years ago.’
‘Some ways, yes. Some ways it’s more like it was then than it used to be.’
‘That’s interesting. How is that?’
“Well, there wasn’t so many people then—that’s one thing. Now the town’s a whole lot bigger, but when once you get outside it, there’s a lot less. Farms are bigger, and there’s a sight of land in soil bank and so on that’s not used and no need to live there. Even so, I could show you a many a farm a man was proud to own thirty years past, not in the soil bank, where nobody’s living on the place now, and the meadows all growing up in trees. Naturally one reason is the streams don’t run like they used to. This place here (the factory)—and the others like it up and down the whole valley—pump the water up out of the ground; you do that and the streams don’t run. Farther back south and east it’s mine tailings. Colors the water red and kills everything. My own farm—when I’m gone it’s gone. Had three boys and none of them want it.’
‘Where is your farm?’
‘Over towards Milton. When I was a boy, there wasn’t anything anybody could have that was better’n a farm, and we felt sorry for anybody didn’t have one. If a doctor or a banker could marry a widow that had a good one , they’d stop what they was doing and work it. I tell you I loved my dad, but when he died I had a hard time to cry, just thinking at the funeral that the farm’d be mine now. But the boys—don’t none of them want it. You know what did it? Those.’
‘Potatoes?’
‘This here plant opened up and the price went right through the top of the silo, so everybody growed them to sell here. Well, the first thing that did was to turn what had been an interesting business into one that wasn’t. And the second thing was that people didn’t have gardens anymore, or keep chickens, but just bought what they needed with potato money. Then they started to go down, as any fool could have told they would, but people wasn’t used to growing anything else, and wasn’t set up for it anymore, and was a little bit afraid they’d forgot how to do it, so they stuck with potatoes. Naturally when everybody grows the same thing, and on all their land, you have a lot of disease—but then that brings the price back up, and so they stick with it. I guess I haven’t explained myself, but it’s my observation that when a boy grows up watching all that, he don’t like what he sees.’” (310-11)
Here there may be children, but the children do not inherit—they see nothing worth inheriting, and the father sees little enough to pass along. This is the mechanism of the ending of the world. We don’t know what exactly pushes us over the edge after we’ve reached the top, but it doesn’t matter. The rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis follow, and even those become no more than earthen mounds. We’re standing by the Once-ler’s shack, in the bleak expanse of what once was good land, squeezed out and sucked dry. Juiced.
The world has moved on.
In the novel’s final episode, president and CEO Den asks one of his employees, Dan French, to tell him a story—a story told by Dan’s grandmother, the “old Kate” who we have encountered in other slips through time. Kate’s is a tale of old Ireland, of the sidhe Dierdre and her two brothers transformed by their father into a flock of geese, in hope that, as a flock, they will be able to endure wild and free past the ending of the old world and the coming of modernity as no single creature might. But as ages stretch on, the geese themselves begin to fade, dwindling until just one remains. That last goose seeks advice, winging over the land in search of someone with the second sight, “but all such were long since gone from Ireland.” At last she comes to the cottage of a hermit. Since he’s the best she can find, she asks him how it can be that even her immortal flock has gone away.
“‘Little there is that I can do for you,’ the hermit said. ‘Why did you suppose your father, who could not save himself, could save you? The time of the sidhe is long past, and the time of the geese is passing. And in time men, too, will pass, as every man who lives long learns in his own body. But Jesus Christ saves all.’” (315)
The hermit baptizes the last goose, and she transforms, and “there stood before him Deirdre and her two brothers; but time had had his way with them, and they were bent now and old, and though their cheeks were red as apples, their hair was white as frost, for they had far outlived their time.”
So are left in the novel’s last lines with a story of memory, of nostalgia, of mourning for the inevitable passing of things, of our hope for salvation as the night draws near, a hope kept alive by stories handed down. A tree against the storm.
The novel’s first line reads: “The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the Judge’s daughter, fell last night.”
Okay, so: that’s how it looks on the surface.
This is your last chance to go read it yourself.
Remember: I re-read this book every Halloween.
Here’s what I’m quite sure of. Alden Dennis Weer, as of the novel’s first line, is quite dead. Long dead. Dead and buried and forgotten. Eleanor Bold, the judge’s daughter, is one of those characters who slip through the novel; the significance of the tree she plants is explained on page 251 in the Orb edition. Weer’s voice, as an older man in his office:
“Bill Batton has been scratching his head, crossing and uncrossing his legs as he sits on the red leather couch beside the bar in my office. ‘What was that all about?’
‘Mrs. Porter? You heard her—she wants to plant a tree on my grave when I’m gone. That’s her hobby: she plants trees of endangered American species on the graves of her friends.’”
Ah, but who’s Mrs. Porter? Well, back on page 99, as Den’s Aunt Olivia is trying to finagle an introduction to the Lorn family, who have on their farm an egg of antique Chinese porcelain that Olivia, a devoted sinophile, would very much like to buy for herself, Aunt Olivia’s friend the judge’s daughter Eleanor Bold takes the, at the time, if you’ll forgive me, bold step, of accepting the invitation of a man named Dick Porter to the Approved Methodist’s Sunday picnic.
The conversation between Den and Bill, in the future, continues:
“‘Yes, but what it’s all about?’
‘Why do I bother with her, you mean? She was a close friend of my aunt’s when I was a boy. She was a beautiful woman then, a blonde.’” (251)
Adult Den’s environment is casually dismissive of women in just that way, and with Den there’s more at work—we’ll get to that. But the description only matches Eleanor Bold. So Mrs. Porter is Eleanor Bold. She plants endangered American trees on the graves of her friends. The ‘elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the Judge’s daughter,’ is described as immense: “by the size of the trunk there must have been a terrible crashing.” According to the USDA’s Silvics of North America page, the American Elm has an average lifespan between 175 and 200 years.
Den died. The tree was planted. It grew, and now it has fallen. We are a century at least past the old man’s end. It is his ghost that turns its gaze back on the past. The house he wanders is the house of memory. At one point late in the novel, to set our minds on the right trail I think, Wolfe includes an excerpt of a horror story from a forged copy of what is undoubtedly HP Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, about an ancient man summoned back from beyond death:
“His eyes were no more; their sockets seemed dark pits, save that there flickered behind them a point of light that moved from one to the other and often was gone from both, and appeared just such a spark as is seen at night when the wind blows a fire that is almost gone, and perhaps a single spark, burning red, flies hither and thither in the black air. From what the spirit, that mighty one, had whispered to me, I knew this spark for the soul of the dead man, seeking now in all the chambers under the vault of the skull its own resting places.” (281)
It’s hard not to see this as a portrait of Den, wandering through his memory-house, seeking his rest, in Peace.
So Den is gone, and I’m pretty sure America has gone with him. Den’s meditations on the apocalypse, on the passing of America and what comes after, are not promises or prophecies. They are factual. Look back at that line about how America is the land of magic and see how deftly Wolfe slides through “we now past Americans” in the subordinate clause.
Here’s another thing: Den is a killer. He kills many people throughout the pages of Peace—people he hates, people he loves, people whose deaths would be convenient for him. I feel coy in having refrained from mentioning this for so long, but in this I have reflected the text. Den’s killings never occur on the page. He never takes responsibility for his actions; his memories skip past his own deeds and their moral weight, or touch on them slantwise. It is quite possible to read this book and miss even the most obvious of killings. At least one print reviewer confesses to having done just that on the book’s release. These deaths can be read in light of the pun in Den’s name and the name of his author, “Weer+Wolfe = Werewolf.” (Also, he is a kind of Wolfe-Den…) But I think this is a bit of a false trail, or only helpful in part. The deaths are literal, the werewolf metaphorical.
Den shrinks, in his own memories, from what he has done. At times he feels sad for the absence of his victims, he remembers them with great sensitivity and love and compassion—but never guilt, and rarely with conscious awareness of the part he played in their deaths.
Den’s first killing occurs at his own fifth birthday party. Bobby Black dies as a result of that wrestling match on page 17, beneath the immortal gaze of dead uncle Joe in his perfect garden.
“For a moment we sway.” But we do not learn the outcome for another forty pages: “Bobby Black died, in time, from the spinal injury he suffered on my grandmother’s stairs.” (57) His death took three years; Den is now eight. Den’s narration here avoids any mention of his own part in Bobby’s injury. “The Blacks were—understandably, no doubt—bitter and troubled, and the social situation must have been quite tense.” (57) Understandably, no doubt? Must have been quite tense? “The spinal injury he suffered on my grandmother’s stairs,” not “when I pushed him down my grandmother’s stairs.”
We could read Den’s reticence as a flinch from pain. He did not mean for Bobby Black to die. He only meant to stop Bobby, if he could, from entering the attic, from defacing the painting—and leaving Den to be blamed for it. Bobby’s injury and death was a tragic accident involving two unsupervised children who did not yet know that death was real. But there is no personal remorse in these pages—even from Den’s ghostly vantage point, we detect at best a sort of vague mono no aware, an awareness of the sadness of things in general. Kids die when they fall down stairs. What a shame. It happens.
Nor does the town seem to react to Bobby’s death as it might to an ordinary tragedy. The Blacks (‘understandably, no doubt’) are bitter and troubled, the social situation ‘quite tense.’ Perhaps there’s no other way it could be—but I sense that alongside the sheer awfulness of the event there was something missing, some social contract violated. Did the young Den express any more remorse or contrition, any more guilt or responsibility, than the old Den has? It’s hard to imagine. This is the point where close reading veers into theorycrafting, but I read between the lines a sort of unnatural coolness in Den’s own reaction to the event as a child—which might explain why Den’s parents leave their only son, age eight, to live with his with his aunt, and go off to tour Europe for “half a year or more.” Den is “judged too young to go,” a transparent excuse. Something has unnerved Den’s parents. They don’t want him around. Though both young, they have no further children.
Den’s most vividly rendered emotion in this moment? Not grief at Bobby’s death, but sadness about his parents’ departure. While staying with his aunt, he returns from time to time to stare in through the shuttered windows of his family’s house. “I was mocked mercilessly for this by my aunt whenever she discovered me, and I have seldom felt more abandoned and alone than I did then.” (58)
I might be over-reading a grown ghost’s avoidant description of a defining childhood guilt. But in this light some of young Den’s more morbid fantasies assume a distinctly sinister character. For instance, when walking with Aunt Olivia and her dogs:
“‘Aunt Olivia, if Ming-Sno dies, or Sun-sun, can we bury them here?’
‘What a thing to say, Den. They’re not going to die.’
‘When they get real old.’ Actually I would gladly have killed them on the spot for the fun of the funeral. Sun-sun, who had been sniffing at a woodchuck hole, had dirt on his nose already.” (69)
Or, later in the same scene, after Aunt Olivia half-jokingly suggests Den cut the rope her suitor Professor Peacock is using to rappel down a bluff: ‘You didn’t really want me to cut the rope, did you, Aunt Olivia?’
‘I don’t suppose I really cared a great deal whether you did or not, Den, but I would have stopped you if you’d tried—or didn’t you know that?’
If I’d been older, I would have told her I did, and I would—after the fashion of older people—have been telling the truth. I had sensed that cutting the rope was only a joke; I had also sensed that beneath the joke there was a strain of earnestness...” (73)
If this were Den’s only killing, I might excuse these asides as the morbidity of a boy who has been involved in the death of a playmate, without the resources that might help him navigate his grief and guilt. I don’t get the sense there are many child psychologists in Cassionville, and while Den’s world includes many churches we never see a pastor, or an example of pastoral care.
But then we come to Lois Arbuthnot.
Appearing in chapter 4, “Gold,” Lois is the town librarian when Den is a grown man, forty-five (Lois mentions that the fake Indian treaty was made ‘forty years ago’ and we know it was forged during Den’s fifth birthday party). Den, at the time, is working as an engineer for the fake-orange juice factory. When we first meet Lois, narrator-Den (the ghost) cannot remember her name—an odd lapse in an otherwise excellent memory that should make us prick our ears up, considering how we have already seen Den hide guilt behind a wall of forgetfulness and silence. Lois is pretty and smart and Den, as an adult, is lonely, living in a small apartment with no surviving relatives and no social life outside work, his family’s fortune gone. Lois and Den become close, and almost sleep together; she enlists Den’s help in determining the authenticity of a 19th century journal that seems to hold the clue to the location of the buried treasure of the Confederate guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill.
Den and Lois go digging together, having identified, so Lois thinks, the precise location of the buried treasure. Den digs. His shovel strikes a stone. Our only image of the scene is folded inside another, in a memory. “In a spot of moonlight, I had seen the glint of metal in Lois’ hand. I had taken it from her—a little, nickled .25 caliber Colt automatic—when she bent down to see what I had found. She had said she had been afraid I would try to keep everything for myself.” (263)
That’s our last chronological trace of Lois Arbuthnot. We never see her again. Den comes back from the treasure-hunting expedition alone. With Lois’s gun.
A few pages later, the sixteen year old girl Sherry Gold (we’ll get to that), after sleeping with Den (yep), asks:
“‘Do you always keep a gun in your bed?’
For a moment I did not know what to reply.
‘I felt it. When I was lying with my head on your shoulder. I was looking for a good place to put my arm—there’s never anything to do with the arm you’re lying on when you’re like that—so I slipped my hand under your pillow. it was just a little gun, but it was a gun. Do you always keep a gun in your bed?’
‘It was a twenty-five caliber automatic. No, only for the past couple of weeks; I think I’ll get rid of it tomorrow.’” (266)
We can read “I had taken it from her” in a consensual way—Lois handing the gun to him to hold on to—or in a non-consensual way—he disarms the gun when he sees it in her hand. We can believe that Lois meant to kill Den, if they really found treasure, so she didn’t have to share it; we can believe that she felt she needed protection if she was going into the woods with a strange man and possible riches on the offer.
But we do not have a shred of evidence that Lois survives the treasure-hunting expedition.
We would have to strain our imagination to view this as a case of self-defense—Den certainly behaves as if he has committed a crime. He claims that Lois has ‘moved away,’ and he hides the murder weapon. He freezes, guiltily, when Sherry Gold asks him about the gun.
So that’s two killings. Bobby Black and Lois Arbuthnot. Neither apparently premeditated, both convenient to Den. He feels, or anyway discusses, no guilt for either.
Den is a poor man at forty-five or so, when he leaves for the treasure-hunting expedition. He’s a rich man at fifty. The treasure-hunting expedition is the only obvious pivot point in the text.
The funny thing is: the treasure-hunting expedition found no treasure. At least, not directly. The diary Lois was reading was a fake, a forgery made by Louis Gold for sale to the Cassionville Library. Den confronts Louis about this forgery on page 258-9, and threatens to expose him. It’s this threat which prompts Gold’s daughter Sherry to come and, in Den’s own telling, take off her clothes and offer him a deal: “If you don’t tell, I won’t.” (265) (I promise, we’ll get to this.)
So why did Den kill Lois? Simply because the gun was there—because she’d brought it and might have shot him? There would be no need; Lois without the gun poses no threat. Lois with the gun posed very little, apparently.
But—in not finding treasure, Den has found something valuable. He has found an excellent forger, whom he has the ability to blackmail. We are told, in chapter 4, that Den, at 40, does not stand to inherit any stock in Julius’ fake orange-juice company. At fifty, he is the President, and wealthy. We never hear how this happens. Perhaps Den works his way up. Perhaps.
We never hear from the Golds again, after chapter 4. Lois Arbuthnot and Louis A. Gold (the name resemblance is suggestive) both disappear; so does Louis’ wife, his son Ron, and so, though somewhat more belatedly, does Sherry.
It’s funny how that happens.
Lois’ death has no motive unless Den wants to keep Louis’s forgery skills a secret. And if Den uses Louis’ forgery skills to gain some advantage—say, to forge Julius Smart’s will and inherit his company—then Louis would have a powerful hold over Den. Can’t have that. Obviously.
This is connect-the-dots, of course. The thing about dots, is that you can connect them in all sorts of ways. But we’ve already seen that if we’re to look for any sort of culpability in Den, we have to look between the lines. How carefully? How deeply?
Why, after all, is Den penniless and alone at forty-five? Perhaps his family lost everything in the Depression—that would be reasonable, though he never mentions it, and neither does Stewart Blaine, who would know. Even if Den’s family money was squandered or spent by parents out on the Continent, his Aunt Olivia, who served for a long time as his guardian, is married to Julius Smart, prosperous founder of the fake-orange juice company. Den is present, as a child, at their introduction, and goes to their wedding. He lives with them for years after their marriage. By all accounts Julius is a loving husband to Aunt Olivia. Even after Aunt Olivia’s death, we might imagine him taking care of her sole surviving relative, the closest thing she had to a child…
Wait. After Aunt Olivia’s death, you say.
When, exactly, did she die? And why?
Den has a problem with women. This part is going to go to some ugly places; brace for fatphobia, discussion of stalking and sexual assault, and sexual relations with a minor.
Let’s start with Sherry Gold. Many readers of Peace believe that Den’s depiction of Sherry Gold’s “deal” is a willful misremembering, that Den in fact threatens Sherry’s father with exposure to pressure Sherry into sex. I have a hard time approaching Wolfe’s text this way. The book is already so slippery that when I start to believe that narrated scenes are lying outright—that people did not say the things they are presented, in quotation marks, as having said, for example—the entire sweater begins to unravel. (There are a few marked exceptions with Wolfe, such as “Seven Nights in America”, but Peace is not among them for me.) If I doubt this, why not doubt everything?
I find Sherry Gold’s character on the page interesting and somewhat consistent. I can see how the world looks through her eyes. But the moral response of a man in his forties to the proposition of a high school girl is not “yes.” No matter if (yikes) “her young hair was so fragrant that I might have been thrusting my face among the boughs of a blossoming tree.” (265) (ugh)
I do very much think Wolfe knows Weer is being grotesque here, that he means us to feel it. Earlier in that same graf, “she had on that cheap rayon underwear sold to girls considered to be socially, though not sexually, immature”, the double hit of ‘girl’ and ‘immature’ (and the triple hit of ‘young’) undermining the fragrant boughs of the blossoming tree; some of the poignancy, for me, of Sherry’s character lies in the contrast between the front of maturity and agency she projects, and her actual experience, and with it her degree of control: she claims she has been with ‘a boy in school three times. Two boys, really.’ (265)
Den seems comfortable enough having sex with a teenage girl, but when propositioned by his peer Lois Arbuthnot, he makes no move. Admittedly, Lois is drunk at the time—so is Den—but alone in his small apartment afterward, unable to sleep, he ponders this: “Desire is a strange, wayward thing: when I had been in Lois’s apartment, I had felt little for her. Now I was several times on the point of dressing, or of telephoning her. I thought of the two of us tramping through the hills south of the river, remembering my aunt Olivia and the professor. I don’t believe my aunt ever yielded to her other lovers before her marriage, but I am certain that on those hiking expeditions she often gave herself to Professor Peacock.” (249)
Which brings us back to Aunt Olivia.
Rather than acting on his own sexual desire for Lois, Den displaces it onto his memories of Aunt Olivia and Professor Peacock. I see little evidence for Den’s claim that Olivia and Peacock were having sex, but this isn’t the only place he makes the claim; elsewhere Den states as fact that after their marriage Julius Smart forgave Aunt Olivia’s continuing affairs with Peacock and with James MacAfee. Whether or not these took place (or were physical), Den’s interest in Aunt Olivia’s sexuality and physicality reaches the point of fixation. Here, in fact, is Den’s last chronological memory of Aunt Olivia—the last scene in which she appears in the novel.
“She had grown plump within a year of her marriage [to Smart], eating [their cook] Milewczyk’s cooking instead of her own, buying new clothes each month until she was a comfortable size 14 (or 16—I am guessing), visiting Macafee’s and staying sometimes, for an hour in Mr. Macafee’s brown, wooden office, where there was a leather-covered couch…. I have sometimes wondered…. if Mr Macafee had ever been able to explain to himself why my aunt, who had been impossible of access before her marriage, had become so easy after, and if he connected it, as I did without knowing why, with her increasing corpulence.
In the evenings … my aunt soaked in a hot tub, and she often called me into the bathroom to fetch her a new book, or to bring her writing board, pen, and notepaper. The water was opaque with scented oil and foamed with lilac-scented bubble bath, from which her breasts rose and sank with the energy of her conversation. Originally small and pointed, they waxed, in the two years that passed between her marriage and my parents’ return, to globes, while her upper arms grew thick as the knees she sometimes thrust above the steaming water.” (234-5)
There’s so much to unpack here. (In passing, a 1940s size 16 is a modern size 8-12, hardly ‘corpulence’.) The shift from the intellectual awe in which boyhood Den holds Olivia, to a fascinated mixture of disgust and arousal: ‘so easy after’, the ‘leather-covered couch’, the waxing of her breasts. This is, again, the last narrated scene with Aunt Olivia in the book, the last time we see her alive either chronologically or textually, this markedly sensual bathing image. The scene ends abruptly just there, with “the knees she sometimes thrust above the steaming water.”
How old is Den when Aunt Olivia “often” calls him into the bath? He’s about nine and still living with her when she meets Julius; when they marry, Den’s parents are still traveling abroad—his father is in Istanbul (179). Den’s parents do not return until two years after Olivia’s marriage (having abandoned Den for three or four years; we never learn, I think, how they die)—so here he is perhaps eleven or twelve, likely just starting puberty. As Louis Gold observes, “Many men retain a lifelong interest in the things that stirred them as children” (273).
Den is interested, certainly. And where does his interest lead?
How does Aunt Olivia die?
When Den’s talking with Lois as they cross the street “just a little way up are the better shops—where the department store is, and so on”, he remarks that “as we talked, my mind had been filling with images of my aunt Olivia, who had been killed one and a half blocks from where we stood.” (234)
‘Had been killed.’ How? By whom?
Far back on page 59, Den says of Aunt Olivia:
“She subscribed to intellectual and scientific periodicals that would never otherwise have been seen in Cassionville, and when she had read them gave them to the library, so that a stranger to the town—a drummer, say, just disembarking from a train and seeking an hour’s innocent reading before a night spent at Abbott’s hotel—would have thought the town to be a very hotbed of intellectuality when the fact was that you might have killed it all, if you were so fortunate as to possess a motorcar, on any spring day when it proceeded, with pansies and lily of the valley on its small hat, from Macafee’s Department Store diagonally across Main Street to Dubarry’s Bakery.” (59-60)
We might pass over this oddly specific and morbid image on first read, but Aunt Olivia having been in fact killed “one and a half blocks from where we stood”—that is, “where the department store” (that is, Macafee’s) “is, and so on”, raises our suspicions. Killed by whom? Someone ’so fortunate as to possess a motorcar’? We know Stuart Blaine has a motorcar. We know James Macafee has a motorcar.
And we know Den, as a young man, ‘was so fortunate as to possess a motorcar.’
“I bought a car during my third year at college, and brought it home with me when I graduated.” (222)
The precise timing is tricky to nail down, because many of the key dates and intervals are presented conversationally in Chapter 4, and subject to rounding. Lois’ ‘forty years ago’ figure for the forging of the treaty (and thus Den’s age of 45 in “Gold”) may be approximate. So might Den’s timing for Aunt Olivia’s death. (“(Julius) hasn’t spoken to me since my aunt’s funeral, and Aunt Vi has been dead now for twenty-five years.” - 207.) But let’s say Den is 45 and Aunt Olivia died when he was 20. We don’t know when Den left for college, or when he graduated. He’s a bright kid. He might well have gone early, or graduated early. Many people with customary academic timing are twenty at some point in their third year of college. Or, allowing for rounding, Den might easily be 47 in “Gold,” having returned home with his car at the age of 22. Just in time to run over Aunt Olivia as she “proceeded… from Macafee’s Department Store diagonally across Main Street to Dubarry’s Bakery.”
In the “Gold” chapter, Louis Gold’s wife Sally offeres him cookies from Dubarry’s. “I’m afraid,” he replies, “I don’t care for their baked goods.” (276)
Am I going mad? Perhaps this sounds like I’m going mad. Grasping at straws. This is one of the things reading Wolfe does to you. A man may buy a car without having murdered his aunt. And yet: for Alden Weer there is an odd alignment of coincidence, a mixture of the erotic and the fatal. He wants Lois Arbuthnot—though he cannot process that desire in the moment. He kills Lois Arbuthnot. He wants his Aunt Olivia—he knows she can’t be his, and as he wakes to puberty an obsession creeps in, with her affairs, with her flesh.
His Aunt Olivia is killed.
In the text, immediately after that scene in the bathroom, “the knees she sometimes thrust above the steaming water,” the scene breaks. Den’s composure slips.
“You must excuse me. I can write nothing more now about the trip Lois and I made to Gold’s, or our search for the buried treasure. Everything we do is unimportant, I know; but some things are, if not more important, at least more immediate than others, and so I must tell you (writing alone in this empty room, my pen scratching on the paper like a mouse in a wall) that I am very ill. Sicker, I think, than I have ever been before—sicker, even, than I was this winter, before Eleanor Bold’s tree fell.” (235)
He is sick.
As his memory of his aunt reaches an erotic fever pitch, Den cannot continue. He knows that he is sick. What has he done? What did his obsession with his aunt lead him to do?
Aunt Olivia dies. Den works in Julius Smart’s company for twenty-five years. Julius never speaks to Den after the funeral.
What sort of event would so estrange an apparently decent man like Julius from his wife’s nephew, who lived in his house as a boy for years—almost a stepson—yet still allow, even require, him to keep the boy on as an employee in some distant corner of his organization?
Well. What if his wife had been killed in a tragic automobile accident by her nephew, the only surviving member of her family? You might never be able to forgive such a person, might never be able to look them in the eye again. You might also recognize that inability to forgive as a flaw, even a sin; you might do what you could to take care of them, so long as you never had to speak to them again.
And what of Margaret Lorn?
Den’s first crush does not die. At least, she does not seem to have been killed within the pages of the story. After their first meeting as children, Den’s interest in her grows; as teens they spend long idyllic hours wandering the countryside together, taking walks by the river, liberated from the judgmental eyes of convention by the freedom of the bicycle. Den mentions that, as a young man, he expected to love Margaret and for them to grow old together.
So where are they when Den is forty-five?
“It was Saturday again; Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried) and there was the rest of the day to get through, and Sunday as well. … Sometimes when I felt this way, I called Margaret Lorn; sometimes her husband or one of her children answered; sometimes she. I never spoke, but if she answered she tried, occasionally, to get me to talk, asking what my name was and why I called her, sometimes angry, more often cajoling. I think she actually enjoyed the calls, enjoyed knowing that she had an admirer somewhere. Once I sent her flowers without a card. When we met on the street—which we did less often than might seem possible in a small town—we were polite and formal.” (260)
Again, we have to read through Den’s diction to what he’s actually describing. At forty-five, his current relationship with his childhood sweetheart is that he calls up her house occasionally, anonymously, and… breathes heavily on the line.
He thinks she enjoys the calls.
He thinks she enjoys the calls.
Remember in the first chapter, when Den visits the doctor, and Margaret Lorn marches out of the waiting room? She does not acknowledge his presence; she goes in to see the doctor before the nurse summons her. When Den says they encounter one another “less often than might seem possible in a small town”, we must allow this to be not a coincidence, but the result of her agency. She’s avoiding him.
What happened on those long walks by the river? Was Den, perhaps, compelled to imitate his fantasies of his aunt with Professor Peacock? “Many men retain a lifelong interest in the things that stirred them as children.” How did Margaret react? What did Den do?
Speculation. Speculation.
Bobby Black imperils the portrait of Den’s uncle, Den’s impression of all that is real, of Heaven itself as a Tuscan garden. Den kills him. Aunt Olivia, by gaining weight, by marrying, by achieving a kind of carnal reality and becoming the subject of Den’s adolescent desire, endangers a piece of his childhood, a self-image of something perfect and pure and immortal. He kills her. Lois Arbuthnot’s existence and her death endangers Den’s vision of himself as a good man, his security and fortune, if he does in fact intend to use Gold’s skills to forge Julius Smart’s will and take over his company—he kills her, and “no matter how hard I tried” he can never “eradicate her from my past.”
He does try. He even manages, briefly, to forget her name.
Louis Gold disappears, too. So does his son Aaron, his wife Sally. Weer sees Sherry at the doctor’s office on page 12, when she’s sixteen still. She tells another man in the waiting room that, “I have…” and whispers, and the man responds, curtly, “We’ve all got problems.” What does she have? Does it have anything to do with her night with Den? And what happens to her? (On this reading I wondered if she’s the ill-fated “Doris” described in the letter on page 285—a girl who, after her father’s death, seeks refuge with a former lover of his in the circus, only to be harassed to suicide—but the timing presents some difficulty; by the time the letter arrives Sherry Gold would not have been a ‘girl’ any more, and the timing of her death is linked with Weer’s stroke, when he’s roughly sixty.)
The pattern spins so densely at this point that I start to slip into an assumption that every person who exits the novel is in fact killed by Weer. What about his parents? Or Blaine? Professor Peacock dies of a heart condition, but there are poisons that can induce heart conditions. If my fanciful theory about the will-forging is correct, could it have somehow been uncovered by Weer’s secretary, Mrs. Birkhead? Could that be the reason for her sickness and abrupt death (313)? After all, Weer observes, on hearing of her death, that she was very proud to have been the secretary of J.T. Smart, the founder…
So what does it all mean? If we have been reading the golden reminiscences of a multiple-murderer drawn to destroy those he desires in the service of his idealized dream version of his world—why? Simply for the intellectual game of it all? Was the surface story, of the passing-away of Cassionville and of America, all a front? A bit of fancy patter to distract the reader from the sleight of hand through which all this murder and deranged desire was accomplished?
I don’t think so.
I said, far above, that I think of Peace as a Great American Novel.
Weer is the ghost of a man who has done terrible things, wandering the halls of his past, in search of rest. He has nothing left but memory—but when he looks back on his life he cannot bear to see the suffering he has caused. And so he unsees it. He hides it in margins, between lines. He far prefers the dream.
As Weer, so his nation.
There is a genocide in Peace. Could it be an American story if there weren’t? It hides between the lines and in the margins but it is present in the text as it so often is not in the fiction of white Americans. Determination Blaine stole the land of Cassionville from the Indians. (From the Iroquois, Stewart Blaine says, though we are not required to trust his memory.) Indians survive in Cassionville only in stories, and in the mock names of Mrs. Weer’s little circle of forgers at Den’s birthday party. At the very instant Den is about to kill Bobby Black to preserve an idealized false past, his mother is down on the lawn, helping forge a Native American treaty selling Cassionville to white settlers—which even Stewart Blaine thinks is not actually what happened, as we see when he describes the transaction as a lease of indefinite term. “Stolen by treaty” is what Lois Arbuthnot says—before Den kills her. The only living Indian family near Cassionville we encounter in the text exists in the memory of Hannah Mill, Den’s childhood cook, who remembers her father taking her to trade with Indians when she was a girl. The family they trade with consists of a man and a woman living alone in a hut, and their child. The child, Hannah believes, was dead.
Nor does Peace commit to the false absent-Indian historiography I remember from my elementary school, where we learned about the Trail of Tears and various purges and wars as things that were tragic and awful and, above all, over. There are still Indians, Lois objects when Den wonders what it would be like to be the ‘last Indian’ (215): “There are still Indians—perhaps not around Cassionville.” A great injustice has been perpetrated between the lines.
Cassionville is solidly Midwestern, rural, and white in Den’s memory. The only identified Black character I spotted on this re-read—and his race is remarked upon, so I feel more confident in making this assertion than I would otherwise—is the coachman who retrieves Den and his mother from the train station when they travel south to visit her family for Christmas.
Again, look for the elisions. Look for the absence.
The Civil War folds neatly into the book’s universe. There is a Union monument on the town green, where Den and Aunt Olivia attend concerts in the summer. And William Clarke Quantrill, the Confederate guerrilla and perpetrator of the Louisville Massacre, is a key figure in Louis Gold’s forged diary—it’s his supposed treasure that Den and Lois Arbuthnot search for, before Den kills Lois. Quantrill is even identified as having been born “near here” (252), which means Cassionville is close to Dover, Ohio.
I remember the relief of learning American history in Union states as a child, compared to how it felt to learn it in the South—“oh, this wasn’t us, we weren’t the bad guys.” As if the Boston molasses industry wasn’t enmeshed in the Triangle Trade. As if there is more than one economy.
Of course, it does matter who fought for what, and whose side who ended up being on. But there’s something resonant, to my mind, between Den’s fortune built on a forged tale of Confederate treasure, and the rise (not long before Den himself is born) of Lost Cause revisionism, its own sort of idealized past, the “states’ rights” narrative purveyed over the objections of living Confederate veterans, who (I’m told) argued fiercely in the years after the war that the war had been in fact and absolutely about slavery.
It is hard to look at our own crimes, or the crimes that made us possible. A kind of golden light, of gentle retrospection, covers over all manner of sin.
And then there’s gender.
The question of gender in Peace deserves (all of these issues deserve) an essay of its own. I don’t feel I’ve yet comprehended it with the depth it deserves—the divergence between the women we meet in this book, people with agency and history and meaning, whose ambitions and tactics are shaped by their circumstances and by the affordances of their age but whose particular character shines through, on the one hand; and on the other the way the world, and history, Den in particular and the masculine office culture world of the plant in the novel’s final chapter, treat them. Women are vanished and consumed, even as Den erases them (with the mechanized glories of the age, the nickel-plated .25, the motorcar—even in a way the bicycle that enables those long riverside walks with Margaret Lorn). As women in Peace live their lives and shape their careers and choose their paths they are judged on their attractiveness—dismissed when they lack it and embarrassed or threatened or hurt when they possess it. They die off-screen. Aunt Olivia defines an age of Cassionville, and Aunt Olivia is forgotten. (Though Den remembers her—and being forgotten does not mean she never was.) Margaret Lorn’s mother, is a Murchison, descendant of a missionary family that spent much time in China in the 19th century (their mission had a side-business in opium sales—there, again, the margins)—time that so defined the family that they still drink tea rather than coffee generations later—but she is a Lorn now and then she’s gone. What came of Sherry Gold’s desire to see the world? I wonder if that’s part of the significance of Den’s Aunt Bella’s published ghost story—under her maiden name, Arabella Elliot—which quite rapidly follows the bathroom scene with Aunt Olivia, and has always seemed to sit oddly in the book. The writers escape in a way, and the storytellers, and the witches—the old Kate, and perhaps even the Banshee of her first story, who foretells the coming of the anti-Christ.
And then there are questions of disability, yet another essay: on Den after his stroke, the limp that haunts him through time, the circus, on society that simultaneously others and dismisses and casts out and yet fetishizes the disabled. The farmer whose sons refuse to inherit—he walks with a limp. (Is he another instance of Den, traveling through time? Or is this a case of how “the murderers and their victims, if they are both evil, become in death one devil”? (256)
As the reporter tours the fake orange-juice plant in the novel’s final chapter, he asks about possible wage cuts in the recession the valley’s industry is now suffering. “The union wouldn’t permit it,” Den says. (294) “We’d have a strike on our hands at once if we tried to make a wage cut.”
“What about nonunion employees?”
“We’ve reduced salaries and fringe benefits there somewhat, yes. … As little as possible, of course. They know it’s for the good of the company—we couldn’t survive today without it.”
“Your own salary, too?”
“Not yet. The president’s salary is set by the board of directors, and I haven’t been able to obtain their consent to reducing it. I hope to soon.’
“I see.”
And so we do. Later, when the reporter asks to interview one of the canning line operators, Den responds:
“‘I doubt that you can. Most of these women today are Latin Americans. They don’t speak much English.’ As I spoke, they were watching me with dark Indian eyes, and I wondered if they could understand what I was saying.
‘Puerto Ricans?’
‘And Mexican-Americans.’ …
‘Why can’t you hire local people?’
Dan said, ‘Lazy. Just plain lazy. It’s too hard for them, sitting on a stool watching one of these machines.’” (308)
“Indian eyes” ties us back in with the discussion of Indians above; I also wonder, very much, how many of these non-English-speaking canning line employees are unionized, and if this has anything to do with the plant’s shift away from local labor.
The world has moved on. Sure, okay. Who moved it? The valley is dying. Who killed it? Who bought up the farms in the Depression? Who built the plant, who drained the water, who changed local farming from a substance culture to an industrial process? Who underpaid the workers, who paved over the farms, who poisoned the rivers, who broke open the mountains? Who did all this?
Den was part of all these crimes. But he didn’t do it alone.
There is a description, in Peace, of Heaven, and a description of Hell. One of Louis Gold’s forged books tells that “Heaven is…. a land of hills and terraced gardens, with cold, blue freshwater seas; that it is shaped like an angel—or rather, like many, for (like Hell) it repeats itself over and over again, always different and yet always the same, for each angel Heaven is Perfect, as each is Unique; and that the various angel Heavens touch one another at the feet and wingtips, and so permit the angels to pass from one to another.
And again that Hell is a country of marshes, cindery plains, burned cities, diseased brothels, tangled forests, and bestial dens; and that no two devils are of the same shape and appearance, some having limbs too many, some limbs too few, others with limbs misplaced or with the heads of animals, or having no faces, or faces like those long dead, or the faces of those whom they hate so that when they see themselves reflected they detest the image. But that all of them believe themselves handsome and, at least compared to others, good. And that murderers and their victims, if they were both evil, become at death one devil.” (256)
With “blue freshwater seas”, “hills and terraced gardens,” and perhaps even amber waves of grain. I’ve never thought of America as being shaped quite like an angel but you can imagine a sort of butterfly silhouette.
And yet, what do we see when we look at Hell but ourselves? Marshes, cindery plains, burned cities. “All of them believe themselves handsome, and, at least compared to others, good. And… murderers and their victims, if they were both evil, become at death one devil.”
In Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Jaffe Ryder says, in San Francisco: “It’s both Samsara and Nirvana we’re in now.”
Forgetting has long been a part of being an assimilated white-passing American, of being admitted into the dream of America: forgetting where we came from, and what has been done—what we have done, what has been done to us—to get us here. It has been made far more comfortable to seek a dream-past again and again than to reckon with where we are in fact, to see our reflection honestly, to make confession and perhaps amends—to move forward, for no travel back is possible.
But the comfort of forgetting, the golden light of the perfections of a vanished age, when we were children and the world was perfect—it soothes us, traps us, damns us. We cannot seek absolution for what we cannot remember.
Remember the old Kate’s final story, in Dan French’s telling. There is no immortality. All things pass away. The only promise we have is that “Jesus Christ saves all.”That there is in the fullness of being some salvation, offered to us though (and in fact because) we do not and cannot deserve it. You need not be a Christian to hope for this, though Gene Wolfe was. People have expressed this hope in many times and cultures, in the languages they knew: a yearning for liberation, an awareness of the incompleteness of our souls.
But what is required for salvation?
If my conspiracy-web of threads is at all accurate, Weer has done many evil things. As has his country. He cannot face them. Of course not. The attempt is too painful: even the first conversation about it drives many of us mad. When Weer tries to make a complete accounting of his life, to trace his own biography (biographies, he remarks at one point, are often fictional), he is drawn to beauty and sentiment, to the golden glow of nostalgia, to first loves, to the dream of his life; but even in that distinctly American dream, we can see the sins concealed by margins, by scene breaks, by forgetfulness. We understand the mechanics of his character. They are all too familiar to us. Who would want to linger on the hurts they have caused, the depth of suffering they have meted out, the injustices they have perpetrated or allowed to endure for this or that common-sense reason? Who can face their own grotesquery? It is so much easier to believe ourselves handsome and, at least compared to others, good.
Of course, there has been much good and much wonder. There were, there are everywhere, even in the lives of the most depraved, moments or great spans of kindness, of grace, of love. But there is the other stuff, too. It would be so much easier on our hearts if it were all one way or the other.
There is no hope but salvation. We are none of us worthy of it, but it is offered. Can there be salvation without confession? Without repentance and confrontation and even recompense? Can we be saved if we cannot even wake to the evils we have done, or become part of?
Or will we repeat the pattern, over and over again, unseeing the very things we must see, if we are to—not save ourselves, not return to an imagined past, for all things come to an end and that past was itself not real, was a dream of our childhood, but at least—to wake up? To understand where and what we are, and what is called of us now?
To wake and find, perhaps, some true and lasting peace?
The novel’s final words come to Den in his imagined office, as he plans for a future that will never come: the same words that found him as a child, when he lingered too long in fairy tales before bed.
Aunt Olivia asks: “Den, darling, are you awake in there?”
Well: are we?
Happy Halloween, y’all. Thanks for reading this, if indeed you have.
If you’re eligible to vote in the United States, please vote, as early as you can. And see if you can get one more person to vote, too.
Take care of one another out there. And work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Yesterday, I learned that Patrick Stewart passed away: an aching loss leaving behind a majestic life and body of work. He was and always will be my Captain of the Enterprise. I wrote a little bit about what that meant to me on Bluesky. You can read that thread here if you like. I’ll write more.
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I (intentionally) did not read all of this , but I did read enough to convince me I should read Peace (tempted to say give Peace a chance, sorry not sorry). Happy Halloween!
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