Writing Pains, Part I

This post moves away from the puritans and onto the process of writing. After all, the goal is to write about Anne Bradstreet as well as research her life, though (historian that I am) I could spend the rest of my sentient life researching. Research is fun.

Writing is work. I decided this week to give myself a simple task: describe the countryside of 17th-century southern Lincolnshire, where the story opens. I thought I'd start with a sunrise. Simple enough, eh? It's dark -- the sun comes up -- it reveals the countryside that I want to talk about. And since the countryside is marshy and flat, I decided on a nasty rainy day as a background.

So after another delightful hour of research (did you know that the average temperature in Lincolnshire at the height of summer is only 70? Or that polecats live in forests and not marshes?) I set about my task. And that's when I ran into trouble.

How many ways can you say, "It was dark out?"

It was dark out

Darkness covered the land

Black night ruled over all

The darkness was so thick that it . . . something something

Dark night still covered every stone and pool

It's night, d#*@it!

And on and on

OK, so there's a lot of ways to say, "It was dark out." But I want to say it in some way that is actually fun to read, does not sound like every other "It was dark out" that has been written since Gilgamesh was a pup, and doesn't sound like I'm working way too hard ("Velveteen darkness like a hand of death lay suffocatingly" blah blah).

And that's the problem with describing a sunrise. It is so common, and it is so commonly described in literature of all kinds. There are no surprises for the reader when you're on about a sunrise. Now, what the light reveals might be a surprise, but my lucky readers would be getting a swamp with a noisy moorhen, and that's about it. No body in the pool. No shifty-eyed stranger or preternaturally lovely girl.

I suppose that makes it a fairly decent writing exercise. And the purpose was to fix the setting in my own mind, not write the Great American Paragraph. But I found that it is much easier to write something like this blog than it is to write a believable, interesting sunrise.

Puritan Democrats?

When a group of pioneers writes down charters and laws for their new government, they inadvertently set down for all time their understanding of human nature, of how society works, and of their own values. The New England puritans did the same thing when they set up shop (governmentally speaking) in 1630. Though they were still technically under the authority of the King of England, they didn't have any royal authorities tagging along with them on the voyage -- no surprise there, given how often colonies failed -- so they could run things pretty much as they pleased.

The government of Massachusetts Bay is often described as a "theocracy" -- literally, "rule by God," but practically, rule by the ministers, or rule according to religious standards. This is because only male church members could vote and hold office, and ministers were among the most influential men in the colony. But if we take another look at this system and judge it by seventeenth-century standards, another picture begins to emerge. Far from some kind of religious dictatorship, the puritans set up what was likely the most representative government in the world at that time.

We have to deal with some of our biases first. First of all, the male-only voting thing: women could not vote or hold office anywhere. They could not vote in England or in any of the colonies. So we don't want to hold the puritans to standards that did not yet exist by criticizing them for not enfranchising their women. But the suffrage picture in this era was even bleaker than that. In England (or anywhere), not even all men could vote or hold office. These were privileges, not rights. You had to attain to a certain standing in society -- usually, you had to own a certain amount of land or have a certain income -- in order to participate politically in society. This made perfect sense in a society that believed that government should come from the Best Men -- the men of superior social standing, or at the very least the ones who had shown they had the smarts and talent to succeed financially. No one believed in democracy, except maybe a few crackpots.

The puritans chose a different standard by which to determine who could hold political power. Ever distrustful of human nature, ever aware that anyone with political power could be tempted to use it corruptly, they put their trust in the place where God dwelled -- the hearts and minds of His chosen people. Christians, in other words. Church members. Could they be corrupted? Sure. Would some be? Of course. Puritans had no illusions about the potential darkness of the human heart. But it was the best of the available choices.

So how many men in Massachusetts Bay were church members? In those early years, almost all of them. They came to escape an aggressive king and maybe coming judgment from God on England, and passion for God was high. We don't know for sure, but likely over 80% of men who were of age were church members and therefore eligible to vote and hold office. This was a far higher percentage than back home in England, or in Virginia, their colonial neighbor to the south.

And those early puritan leaders did not have to do this. The charter on which they based their government -- the charter they got from the king, that they had to have before they could leave -- gave the ruling committee authority to retain the power in their own hands. They chose not to do so. Instead, they opened it up to everyone.

It was a smart move, as well. They were a long way from royal authority, and settlers always are more cooperative with the local strongmen if they have a stake in the system. Even worldly Virginia, which was motivated by profits and not Protestantism, found that out.

The puritans also kept a political rein on their ministers. If you were an ordained minister, you could not hold political office. Back in England, these people had suffered at the hands of bishops with political power who used it against them. That was not going to happen in New England.

We don't want to go too far with this line of reasoning and say, "And from thence sprang American democracy!" It sprang not from thence. The story is a little more complicated than that. The puritans were not democrats. They were themselves: ardent 17th-century Christians, seeking to live out the Bible, and struggling to determine how to do that on the template of laws and charters.

For the above insights I am indebted to Edmund Morgan's fine book, The Puritan Dilemma. And thank you, Dr. Breen, for assigning it way back in that colonial history class. As a brief, well-written history of the puritan migration, there is no better.

How Pure Were the Puritans?

How pure did you have to be to be a puritan? Just how did they practice their faith?

I pointed out in my last post that "puritan" referred to their desire to "purify" the Anglican Church of all Catholic influence. It did not mean that they were ascetics or kill-joys. HL Mencken once defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." No, no, no, people. Puritans definitely took a more serious view on life, but they -- well, they had their jolly side, too.

Take partying. Puritans loved good food and good drink. They were not teetotalers; Prohibition came via crusades in the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth. These guys were not Victorians -- they were Elizabethans (plus a generation) and had no ethical problems with tipping a mug. They lived in a hard-drinking age, too; the bar bills for events like weddings and even ordinations is impressive. Now, they were firmly opposed to drunkenness; that would bring you to the attention of the authorities. But drinking itself? It would not have occurred to a puritan to not drink.

It would have also been almost impossible to abstain, as well. Beer was the standard drink for all meals, for all members of the family, since the water was often contaminated. Rum was more of a man's drink, but everyone drank beer, even at breakfast. Coffee and tea did not make their appearance until around the 1660s.

But it was the food that they really loved. Puritans were always cautious about enjoying the pleasures of the world -- they knew how easily they could go from enjoyment to an excess that pulled their heart's devotion from God. But it seems that they worried less about the dangers of really enjoying food. Some of the most voluminous diarists of the New England puritans devoted pages to describing feasts. They observed days of fasting and prayer, but they also involved days of giving thanks -- and like our Thanksgiving, those days involved lots of food.

Now, if we picture a group of puritans at a party, with a plate in one hand and a rum punch in the other, can you really imagine they would be solemn and stern? Of course not; such things don't go together. I would guess that a puritan party never got to "raucous." Standards of behavior still applied. But was it fun? Did they laugh and relax? Sure.

Puritans were also huge supporters of marriage. It was the medieval Catholics, not the Protestant puritans, who glorified celibacy. Like all Protestants of their century; puritans defined themselves away from Catholics sharply on this subject. Marriage was ordained by God, they said; that is clear in the very first chapters of the Bible. It was meant to provide children, but it was also for the comfort and support of both husband and wife. Married sex was not simply for procreation; it was one of God's good gifts to humanity. Now, I suspect that even in the bounds of marriage, there were certain boundaries that puritan couples observed. But in affectionate, loving marriages -- and there were many of them in New England -- likely the bed was not cold.

Those Puritanical Puritans

Yessirree, folks, it's time to talk about just what a "puritan" is. As you see above, Anne Bradstreet was a "puritan poet," but what does that mean? She was super-religious? She never drank and thought sex was icky?

Would she have been someone you'd want to go out to coffee with, or was she one of those people who would spend the whole time obliquely critiquing your every word?

Puritanism was a religious movement in seventeenth-century England, so a "puritan" was a variety of English Christian, like a Pentecostal would be today. Puritanism came about as a result of the rather unsatisfactory way in which the English Reformation unfolded.

King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and the Catholic Church would not grant it, so he divorced his nation from the Catholic Church instead. And so England became a Protestant nation, following in the steps of other nations in northern Europe. Now: the Reformation in those other European nations -- in places like Germany and Switzerland -- was at its heart a deep evaluation what Christianity was really all about, and how it should be properly practiced. It resulted in churches that operated much differently than the Catholic church. But Henry VIII wan't that into church reform. He just wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and have some sons -- and maybe get ahold of some of that prime church land, and make some reform-minded (but powerful) clergy happy. The church he founded -- the Anglican Church -- was very Catholic in its services and structure. And some folk in England thought that was a problem.

It was too Catholic. It was full of practices that had no basis in the Bible. The cry of the Reformation was "sola scriptura" -- Scripture alone. Many in England called for the "purification" of the English church of all Catholic influences, of all practices and doctrine that do not have their source in the Bible. In time, those who set themselves to that task were given the name "puritan." It was a derogatory name even then, given by their critics. Puritans called themselves "nonconformists."

So this was not a geezer's movement, not a movement of geriatric church-goers railing against modern life. This was a young man's movement, and a young woman's movement. It was full of zeal and passion. It was an educated person's movement. Certain universities were hotbeds of puritanism. You would send your son to college he might come home a white-hot puritan, and you'd be about as thrilled as more modern parents were when their college kids came home anarchists, or flower children, or Packers' fans.

None of this answers our question about Anne's drinking habits, but we'll get there. One last note, though: I intentionally do not capitalize the word, "puritan" for a reason: it was a movement, not a denomination or a statement of doctrine. Within its borders was a general agreement on certain important issues, but there was disagreement and variety in the ranks as well. Hopefully you're getting that from my clever use of the lower-case.

I take it all back

I take it all back.

Awhile ago, I posted something to the tune of, a historical novelist's job is so cool because, where a regular historian has to just shrug and say, "we don't know the details about this or that," a novelist can gleefully fill in the blanks about events or people in the past. And so -- here I am. Pen in hand, I prepare to fill in the blanks on Anne Bradstreet -- her marriage, perhaps, or her opinion about the other women around her. But then my inner historian starts screaming.

"YOU CANNOT EMBELLISH THE HISTORICAL RECORD!" she says.

Historians record history -- sort of. We assemble whatever is left over from a life or a place or an era, and try to make a coherent whole out of it. We don't like to consider the possibility that much, too much, has been lost -- hidden, destroyed, or deemed not worth saving, Instead we build with what we have, hoping (but never sure) that it gives us a true picture. We make leaps to connect the dots, connect the spaces between firm evidence, but we try to leap cautiously. We back our extrapolations as well as we can -- with material evidence, logic, science, the cultural background -- so there is reason to suspect that This Is How It Was.

But we would never invent a girl's birthday. We'd never say her smallpox scars were on her cheeks and chin but not her forehead unless we knew. But if I'm going to write a novel about Anne, I have to do that, and it really bothers me -- or at least, it bothers my Inner Historian. And I have to go further. I have to (for instance) invent out of whole cloth her mother's personality, because we know almost nothing about her, except that she was a model wife and mother (yawn).

And I have to decide what her relationship with her father was. Likely he was one of her mentors in her craft as a poet, but Thomas Dudley was an irascible, difficult man as well. Was his relationship with his daughter a great exception in his life -- here he was nurturing? Or was their relationship more tumultuous? It's my call.

Folks, this is going to be hard for me. It's going to take grit to override my Inner Historian and fill in these blanks in ways that simply please, or that tell a better story. I feel like I'm not being true to History, or to Anne. But if I want to tell a story, instead of write a biography -- this is the task.

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My work on Anne Bradstreet has slowed recently. I have been trying to get very familiar with Stuart England (or Early Modern England, as it is so poetically called), so I understand Anne's context. I've plowed through a couple of tomes, but wonder if I've learned anything useful to my purposes. My kids are home for the summer, and I'm teaching a couple of courses at a local university, which limits my time. My students don't realize that if they post a comment to this blog, I'll give them a few extra credit points.

World's Longest Camping Trip

I was camping all last week at an especially rustic Boy Scout camp and inevitably I was thinking about Anne Bradstreet's experience in the New World.

We figure most American pioneers must have known a little something about farming and animals before they left home. But this group of Puritans were different. They were from the solid middle class, most of them -- professional people, not farmers. A few were even from the upper class, like the Lady Arbella, a daughter and sister of earls, who was on the boat there with Anne Bradstreet. Anne's father was the steward to one of those earls, which meant he was a high-level manager. He and his family lived in the earl's mansion and were taken care of by servants. Anne was educated with the earl's siblings and spent much of her time reading, and from there her poetry was born.

But could she boil water? I honestly don't know. Did she know how to cook when she got on board the one-way trip to the wilderness? The house cooks had done all of that back home. Did she know how to milk a cow? It seems unlikely, unless she and her mother and sisters took milking lessons from the earl's (no doubt) sniggering milk maids.

How did they build their houses, these middle-class businessmen and gentlemen? Historians say blithely, "So and so built a house on the river," but of course he didn't, if he was a lawyer from London. Sure, they must have brought along the appropriate sort of people to build the houses. Or did they go all "Pa Ingalls" and do it themselves? Maybe they did. Anne's father's house turned out rather drafty -- perhaps the sign of a beginner carpenter. He was accused of being overly fancy-shmancy when he added wainscoting to his rooms, but he claimed it was just to keep out the wind.

Well, my reading list for this project includes the diary of John Winthrop, longtime governor of Massachusetts colony, and I will probably tease out the answer from there. But I often imagine that moment on the beach, when these gently-raised men and women gazed up at the marches of trees (beautiful and pristine we'd call them, as we never had the need to farm where they stand) and dug down deep to that faith in God that had led them there in the first place.

Blame it on the Record

I’ve been thinking recently about how annoying it is to write history. All of our understanding of the past is based on whatever happens to have survived on paper or fabric, or on the walls -- and it’s amazing what has not survived. We have to piece a lot together from little scraps and made a picture. “And that’s the fun of history!” we say bravely. But it’s also a really good way to get a situation completely wrong.

Let’s take Thomas Jefferson, who lived relatively recently (from the perspective of thousands of years of recorded history) and who was a literate man living in a literate culture. He wrote about his times, and people who knew him wrote about him. We should know everything there is to know about him, yes? Well, ole Tom was a little reticent on the subject of his love life. An oral tradition survived that Jefferson had taken a slave mistress, Sally Hemings, and had several children with her. Some of Jefferson’s political enemies made the same charges during elections.

For years his historians denied that he had kanoodled in Sally, and not simply because they wanted to protect their hero (though there was that). Jefferson had written on the subject of blacks and whites copulating, and his opinion was – don’t do it. It is against nature for the two races to mingle. It was disgusting. So historians have had to decide who to believe: Jefferson’s dispassionate written opinion, or a family story and some political mudslinging? Most chose the former.

You know the story: along comes DNA evidence, and we learn Sally’s children had a Jefferson father. We were led astray by the historical record. We got lucky this time; science was able to give a definitive answer (though theoretically Sally could have been kanoodling with someone else with a Jefferson Y chromosome, and not Tom, though that is less likely).

Most of the time, we’re not so lucky. We have to extrapolate. Maybe we know that John Smith from New Hampshire fought in the Civil War. Did he fight for the North or the South? Maybe we don’t have a record that tells us for sure. But since we know that the vast majority of New Hampshire men fought for the North, we make an educated guess (a syllogism, actually) and say that John Smith did, too. C’mon, what are the odds of a New Hampshire boy fighting for the South?

C’mon, what are the odds of Jefferson overcoming his disgust of black women and having a long-term affair with one? Welllll – when the black woman in question was the half-sister of Jefferson’s much loved, dead wife . . . “it’s complicated,” as we say over on Facebook. Maybe Sally (who was only one-quarter black and very light skinned) looked like Jefferson’s late wife. Maybe she talked like her. And the children of that union passed for white to such a degree that Jefferson apparently helped them leave slavery and to blend into white society. They married white and never told a soul the truth about themselves – not to their spouses, not to their children. It’s complicated. Isn’t that the human experience – complication? Maybe it’s complicated for our hypothetical New Hampshire soldier, too. We just don’t know.

The historical writer stands on that shore where solid evidence ends and inference begins. The things that drive professional historians crazy are truly the fun parts for the writer. I am writing about a seventeenth-century woman. We have a better understanding of her life than we do for almost all other seventeenth-century women yet I do not know her birthday for sure. I have committed myself to be true to the historical record and even (mostly) to the historical syllogisms of “the best guess.” But you see how much wiggle room that gives me, for surely it was complicated at times for Anne Bradstreet, too.