Creer Chee, Creaca Chee

GREAT LITERATURE, it has often been pointed out, does not come out of great events. Rather, it comes from the happenings in the lives of everyday people. Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and the like could not have written good novels--much less great ones--about Jerry Ford or Dick Nixon. And any attempts in that direction have failed miserably--see Philip Roth's The Gang or any of the unmemorable fictional treatments of Roosevelts and Rockefellers, Trumans and Truman Capotes for proof positive.

Yet the reason for snubbing the famous is elusive. Perhaps these people do not contain enough of the Jungian common elements to be easily recognizable to us. Then again, the reason might be that the author has a conscious desire to reach the masses, the vast majority of people who pick up very few books. It could be that the novelist wants to get back to his own grass roots. Possibly the author is attracted by something as mundane as the sheer numbers of the common people or the ease with which one can fantasize about them.

Whatever the case, precious few really good novels are written and the reason might well be a forgetfulness on the novelist's part. Too many modern novelists are too concerned with sophisticated characters and slick with. But modern society's search for basics leads directly to Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall and his truly commonplace characters and settings. Few things are more ordinary than North Dakota and Illinois, farmers, plumbers and schoolteachers, solid parents and curious children. Yet Woiwode has taken the universal elements in these common people, places and things and made them into strong, well-defined characters. Woiwode does not give births, deaths, movings and social activities of the characters a heightened dramatic effect; on the contrary, they might be boring prattle if the writing were not so good.

OFTEN SECOND NOVELS do not measure up to first works; they are plagued by novelists who try too hard or experiment too much in order to match their first success. Sometimes they are written by people who said it all the first time around. Woiwode's novel is not one of these. Woiwode's first novel, What I'm Going To Do, I Think, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the "most notable first novel" of 1969. This feat would not be so noteworthy if the similarities between Woiwode and Faulkner were not so striking. Woiwode's story of the lives of a family in the Midwest, told from different points of view and from different narrative modes, is at times a haunting reminder of The Sound and the Fury. In many respects, Woiwode's story of the Neumiller family, beginning with great-grandfather, and continuing through three more generations to the contemporary great-grandchildren, recounts the disintegration of a family in the Midwest. The great-grandfather made his living as a farmer, his son was an honest farmer, and whenever members of the succeeding generations lose touch with themselves, they return to the land and the honest work there.

Woiwode's captures the flavor of Midwestern life and dialogue. The language is simple, often slow and deliberate, reflecting the pace of the farmer's life.

"How many kids, altogether, did you say you have?" Jones asked. "Or did you? I've seen quite a number at your place."

"Eight," Martin's father said.

Jones whistled. "Say, you folks aren't Catholic, are you?"

"Yes."

"I should have realized. You don't seem a fool, like me. I've got seven." Jones sat on the edge of the tank. "How do you do it?"

"What?" Martin's father asked.

"Keep them all in food and clothes?"

"I do repair work and carpentry in town. I might take a job as the janitor of the grade school this fall."

Although much of the dialogue is of this simple nature, the stream of consciousness and diary passages of the novel are very elegant in their prose, though occasionally a little too literary. The diary of Alpha, a primary school teacher who married Martin Neumiller, discusses the philosophy of religion along with her new school marm duties. Yet the portrayal of women is highly sensitive and the pattern of symbols in the novel, particularly in the discussions of time and the land, is rich and complex.

The addition of children and their own narratives compounds the problem of narration. As in Faulkner, it is sometimes difficult to know who is speaking and what he is talking about. One poignant example is found in a chapter entitled "The Basement." The beginning of the two-page chapter talks about the children and their mother, Alpha, in the third person; and this chapter, which points out the importance of the house and land to the children, ends in a rather Faulknerian ambiguity: "And this place our mother didn't mind one bit, or so it seems now, or was then, once, or is so forever in our present-day eyes."

The shortcomings of the book almost naturally spring from the different narrative techniques. In the middle of a long, sensitive description of Charles Neumiller's burial of his father, Faulkner's style intrudes: "Clarence carrying o'clock twelve." The more experimental parts of the book are far from perfect. At times there are too many lists of food and too many clumsy attempts at representing noises in onomatopoeic form--for example, "creer chee, creaca chee, creesh shee" to convey the sound of shoes on a sidewalk. At other points in the novel, the symbols are too apparent. The silver dollars which Charles uses to cover his dead fathers eyes later roll around floors and are found in desks and awarded as prizes in running races throughout the book. The Faulkner habit of naming different members of the family with the same name is also used here with dismaying consistency; Alphas and Charleses abound.

PERHAPS THE MOST annoying flaw in the novel is the interjection of Orson Welles as a former resident of one of the towns in which the Neumillers lived. The reference is too often repeated and certainly unnecessary, save for the fact that it shows the fascination of the characters with the rich or famous.

The novel is too long, and the problem of superfluous sections is evident. Occasional poems and the section from a journal of "One of the first English-speaking explorers to enter North Dakota" do not fit into the context of the novel. But the prologue which tells of a man, lying beside his wife in bed, remembering a childhood race, is one of the most vibrant ever written. The symbols of the book are carefully introduced, but the reader, after finishing the book, is left uncertain as to whether the prologue is Woiwode's autobiographical note or the true end of the novel, to be read after the author's last chapter, "L'envoi."

Beyond the Bedroom Wall is poignant and its people alive, believable. More importantly, they tell a universal story. When Charles Neumiller, of the youngest generation, is dying in childhood, he confesses, "I'm never happy any more." His statement is true for him at that point and for almost anyone at some point. In many ways, the common people of this book are like those of The Sound and the Fury. There is a real feeling of perpetuity in their lives and in the lives of the people around them. Their commonness and their universality make them real to us; like Dilsey, the Compton's maid, "they endured," and they will endure.