EDEN WAS NO EDEN

PARADISE IS ALWAYS LOST

— 1 .

WHAT ILLUSIONS ARE U SMILING UNDER? —

. . . when I was in 2nd grade, Mr. Denman, the only male teacher I had until high-school, — whose rollicking fury would blood his face purple like a grape, we were certain one day, we’d make his head POP, — gave us an assignment to interview our parents.

I brought my assignment sheet home: there was nothing new to learn about my parents. How could there be? Sat my mom down at the kitchen table, filling out all the questions before she even answered. Got to the surprisingly invasive, “have U ever been married before?” I was like, “NO, obviously,” knowing my father was the only man she ever loved.

She said, “Harold, I have to tell U something.” And she told me about her first husband, a tremendous story about brutality, disappointment, & courage,

“Sense from spirit flies away — subterfuge is done. When that which is & that which was apart — intrinsic — stand, — and this brief drama in the flesh is shifted like a sand. When figures show their royal front & mists are carved away — behold the atom I preferred to all the lists of clay.”

There was real mystery in the world: I hadn’t known. The defining problem of human life: I have to somehow convey the unimaginably teeming verdant complicated private experience of ME to U, — and U have to trust that what I am telling about ME is TRUE. Every moment of experience with other people becomes an act of imagination.

And failing the imagination of others is the first & truest crime; ME or U can pull the wool over my eyes, but the result is the same: my REALITY was not real!

“My father hates turnips. He always did. Never came from anything. Turnips make him mad, real mad. One time my mother was—well, huffy, and she made a casserole of mashed turnips with lots of pepper and cheese and it got all brown on top. My father ate half a dish of it before he asked what it was. My mother said turnips, and he threw the dish on the floor and got up and went out. I don’t think he ever forgave her.”

— In East of Eden (1952) everybody is constantly having to re-accommodate their REALITY to fit new information; the defining moment of Adam Trask’s childhood is when he finds out his father, — who has built an identity around epaulets & heroic tales of war, — is a liar,

“Adam found his father out. It wasn’t that his father changed but some new quality came to Adam. . . And the same click in the brain told Adam that his father was not a great man, that he was, indeed, a very strong-willed and concentrated man wearing a huge busby. Who knows what causes this—a look in the eye, a lie found out, a moment of hesitation?—then god comes crashing down in a child’s brain.”

The SELF U were was competent before, but now there’s something awkward in the fit: U must shed & grow. — In the Garden of Eden the first act of coming into consciousness is when Eve eats the apple. But the second, more important SHOCK: Adam discovering that Eve is a fucking transgressor. Not his sweet, innocent, golden-tressed slave like he thought.

How the hell do U get over that?

— 2 .

WHO IS ACTUALLY THE DEVIL? —

. . . U would think Adam Trask would wise up after this first disappointment, especially since he hits the road, spends years as a soldier, then vagrants around the country, hopping trains, eating slop, serving prison sentences in chain-gangs; but gullibility is no accident: it’s a shell grown to protect our turtley softness from REALITY.

But Adam is not ready when Cathy shows up; he has the self-deceiving weakness of her parents in him,

“Cathy’s father was a covered man. He rarely told the thoughts in his mind. He wouldn’t have dared to expose himself to the gaze of his neighbors. It was better if he didn’t know anything, safer, wiser, and much more comfortable. As for Cathy’s mother, she was so bound and twisted in a cocoon of gauzy half-lies, warped truth, suggestions, all planted by Cathy, that she would not have known a true thing if it had come to her.”

Cathy despises her parents. In fact, she kills them in a fire & flees town; but they aren’t the first corpses marring her record: her high-school Latin teacher committed suicide after he fell in love & was rejected by her: but there was no prick on her conscience: she laughed.

When she shows up bloody & mangled on Adam’s doorstep (where he’s living with his brother Charles): Adam is in trouble; he falls in love,

“It’s my duty to take this thing of yours and kick it in the face, then raise it up and spread slime on it thick enough to blot out its dangerous light. I should warn you to look closer until you can see how ugly it really is. I should give you Othello’s handkerchief. If I did my duty well, I could give you your old life back. . .”

— Steinbeck set out to write a book about his county & himself. Before he wrote East of Eden, his second wife, the mother of his two children, confronted him with details of her various infidelities: they divorced.

Cathy is a portrait of this wife: Gwen,

“There are monsters born in the world to human parents. Misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? Cathy Ames was not like other people, never was from birth.”

Adam drags Cathy to California; she’s pregnant (probably from his brother Charles). She doesn’t wanna go: she keeps telling him that; she doesn’t want children. She tells him she’s gonna leave as soon as she gives birth. But Adam refuses to listen: he is trying to build his Eden; her submission is an essential part of his paradise.

Not unlike how Gwen describes Steinbeck in her memoir,

“Like so many writers, he had several lives, and in each he was spoilt, and in each he felt he was king. From the time John awoke to the time he went to bed, I had to be his slave.”

Adam cannot SEE what Cathy actually wants: he doesn’t actually give a shit,

“Cathy spoke very quietly. ‘Adam, I didn’t want to come here. I am not going to stay here. As soon as I can I will go away.’ ‘Oh, nonsense.’ He laughed. ‘You’re like a child away from home for the first time. You’ll love it once you get used to it and the baby is born. Don’t say silly things like that.’ ‘It’s not a silly thing.’ ‘Don’t talk about it, dear.’”

Adam thinks he’s YHWH: shaping clay & making paradise as a plaything; but Eden necessitates curtailing FREEDOM: thus the enterprise is DOOMED from the start: freedomlust is too strong.

Like Satan & Eve, Cathy is exemplarily human: she wants desperately to be free. But FREE to do what?

Adam can’t see REALITY for what it is; Cathy gives birth to twin boys, shoots Adam in the shoulder, and runs away.

What does she want?

What catastrophes are they passing on to the next generation?

— 3 .

WHAT WOULD U SACRIFICE FOR FREEDOM?

. . . to me, the most tragic & shocking story in American history is the relationship between Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson; it was first made known to the public by James Callender in 1802,

“IT is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. By this wench Sally, our president has had several children.”

Jefferson never responded to the allegations. Until DNA evidence unequivocally proved it in 1998, the story was vigorously DENIED by Jefferson scholars, — even though the historical evidence was overwhelming, as demonstrated by Annette Gordon-Reed in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (1997).

But what would it do to our IMAGINATION of Jefferson, the revolutionary hero, symbol of AMERICA, the champion of Life, Liberty, & the pursuit of happiness to know that in 1787, when he was in Paris, traipsing around mademoiselley, — after his wife died, and he swore to her he would never marry again, — a young slave from Monticello arrived, — accompanying his daughter— : Sally Hemings.

She was 15. Thomas Jefferson was 44.

Sally was not just a regular slave from Monticello: she was a Hemings: they were the most illustrious enslaved family on the plantation: for generations, the women had been having the Masters’ children, — growing an enormous shadow family.

Sally was the half-sister of Jefferson’s dead wife!

So much of the historical erasure of their relationship rests on vituperating Sally awfully: she was an ugly whore, a slave! Jefferson wanting her is as likely as him falling in love with a horse!

But Sally was extraordinarily beautiful, — Dashing Sally, they called her. She was smart. She was 7/8th white. And she looked like his dead wife.

— Barbara Chase-Riboud imagines their affair stunningly in Sally Hemings (1979),

“Her voice was low, true, with a lilting sweetness that was unforgettable. Her appreciation of beautiful things gratified him. She had even begun to speak her native tongue differently, and her French was perfect. He possessed something he created from beginning to end, without interference or objections or corrections. In a way he had birthed her. He had created her in his own image of womanly perfection, this speck of dust, this handful of clay from Monticello.”

Jefferson created his perfect woman, — who could not say no. . . . Sally got pregnant when she was 16. She could’ve stayed in Paris & been free. But Thomas Jefferson promised her he would free all her children when they turned 21.

Why did she go back? Maybe because she was 16, — how many 16 year olds are strong enough to start a new life in a new country alone? — and intoxicated by the great man’s promises,

“How did it matter that he was master and I slave? That he loved me and risked much for me? My hand was taken in his. I let it lie where it had been placed. The future and our happiness, like Marly, stretched out before me, total and shoreless. The surrounding fragrance drugged me, and made me careless of what awaited just beyond my view.”

From the time they went back to Monticello, until his death, Sally Hemings was the only woman in Thomas Jefferson’s life. She belonged to him completely for 38 years, bore six of his children; children who were, by his psychotic racial calculations, actually WHITE, who could be citizens of the United States; but that he kept enslaved.

Imagine the surreal nightmare of her life: she was as white as anybody who walked thru the doors of Monticello, she had more intimate contact with Jefferson than anybody in the world, she was the mother of his ONLY sons! sons who looked just like him! and yet, she & her children were his SLAVES. Imagine how she dreamed of her two years in Paris, the beautiful gowns, the smell of revolution in the air, she could’ve been free. . .

Monticello was his EDEN: Sally was one of the many lives he sacrificed for that idea; a man who lived a life committed to FREEDOM, who wrote about King George III,

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold,”

waged cruel war against the humanity of the people closest to him: the woman who was functionally his wife, — impossible, given their power dynamic: the most horrifying manifestation of the Eve problem: how could U ever KNOW, truly, what is on the mind of Ur slave? — his children; and the historical record denied it for over a century to preserve the man’s imagination of himself, — all because PARADISE was too attractive to resist. . .

At his death, Monticello, his Eden, was a debt-saddled nightmare, and he bequeathed a legacy of misery to his children. . .

— 4 .

WHY DOES CAIN KILL ABEL? —

. . . when Cain & Abel emerge on the scene in Genesis, it’s easy to forget they’re not characters in a new story, they’re Adam & Eve’s adult children; in Paradise Lost there’s a nearly happy ending, when they walk out of the garden, holding hands & crying, Adam forgave Eve, he did the hardest & most essential thing a person can do:

the rug was pulled completely out from under him, instead of completely crashing out, he made peace with his new REALITY & tried to move forward, but obviously something irrevocable has happened because when a son kills another son, it’s the parents’ tragedy: something went horribly wrong.

Cain killed Abel because of something Adam & Eve did.

The baton of human misery gets passed from one relay runner to the next. . . — After Cathy shoots him & leaves, Adam Trask is a mess. He got these two sons he don’t even think about; his life is torpor & depression,

“The monotonous sound that had been there all along was the cry of the twins, wanting their dinner. He had forgotten to feed them.”

The kids get raised by the brilliant & remarkable Lee, — Adam’s Chinese servant: who U think is about to be Steinbeck’s racist caricature but turns out to be the philosophical backbone of the whole book.

The twins don’t even get a name (Adam shirking his duty to name) until Samuel Hamilton, — a portrait of Steinbeck’s grandfather & one of the few characters in the book one would actually want to BE, — literally knocks some sense into him.

Adam, Sam, & Lee exegete the Cain & Abel story,

“This is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. It’s the symbol story of the human soul. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. Everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.”

Maybe the darkness makes us human; resisting the impulse to monstrosity, tyranny, violence, cruelty; or succumbing to the impulse and try to move forward differently, more kindly, realizing we are weak and making amends; or else we become Cathy; maybe the truth of the book is that when Steinbeck said he was writing about himself, he wasn’t Adam, he was struggling with the fact that maybe he WAS Cathy.

Cal, — Adam’s son who is marked C for Cain, — is worried he IS Cathy, who changed her name to Kate when she ran away; he finds out who is mother is, follows her to the whorehouse where she works,

“Cal spoke happily. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’m going now. It’s all alright. What Lee said was true.’ ‘What did Lee say?’ ‘I was afraid I had you in me,’ Cal said. ‘You have,’ said Kate. ‘No, I haven’t. I’m my own. I don’t have to be you.’ ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded. ‘I just know. It just came to me whole. If I’m mean, it’s my own mean.’”

I don’t have to be U: — HOPE any so-called curse is a myth. . . .

But Cal does end up responsible for his brother’s death because of their father’s failure. What do we make of that?

Were these FREE people? Or did they have their paths carved out for them?

I don’t know. — But there was a completely unrelated moment that moved me most in East of Eden. Steinbeck freewheels his narration, sometimes veers off into completely irrelevant moments, like when he tells a story about his mother, Olive Hamilton. Who raises so much money for the World War I effort she is rewarded with a flight on a military plane.

She’s terrified; she hardly believes planes are real; but she knows it is her duty to accept the prize, especially since her sons want her to so badly, but she thinks she’s going to die,

“Olive made her will. Then she opened her rosewood box wherein were the letters her husband had written to her in courtship and since. She built a fire in the grate and burned every letter. They were hers, and she wanted no other human to see them. She bought all new underwear. She had a horror of being found dead with mended or, worse, unmended underclothes.”

She burned all her letters; there was a part of her her children would never know; here is Eve, choosing freedom for herself, but unselfishly. . . a generous, generative freedom that still hoards something private. . . and we have to accept & respect the fact we might never know even the people we love most. . .

The plane goes off, flies around, and then starts loop-de-looping MADLY; turns out, sitting in the back, Olive had a miscommunication with the pilot; he thought she wanted him to do stunts. She was smiling at him, thinking they were gonna crash, not wanting him to be afraid when he hit the ground,

“She smiled and nodded again. At the end of each stunt he looked back, and each time she encouraged him. Afterward he said over and over, ‘She’s the goddamest woman I ever saw. I tore up the rule book and she wanted more. Good Christ, what a pilot she would have made!’”

Fated or free. . . maybe U just have to take REALITY on the chin. . . and smile. . .

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