Mea Culpa

The Land Breakers by John Ehle.  New York Review Books.  345 pp $17.95 *****

For six years after my undergraduate career at Duke I lived in Winston-Salem, where I taught at a secondary school and spent every spare moment writing, at first just during vacations, then—beginning in my third year—getting up at 4:50 to write before I went to my job.  Nothing I wrote during those years—including my first novel—was ever published, I told only a few people I was writing, but one of my students told me about a novelist who lived in the city whom I ought to read, or maybe even meet.  In the grand tradition that a prophet is without honor in his own city, I utterly ignored him.  How could somebody who lives in this bourgeois place, I thought, be a good writer.

Imagine my astonishment, all these years later, to find out that man wrote a great novel.

I had heard the name John Ehle in various contexts through the years.  He was a well-known North Carolina writer, married to a famous actress, Rosemary Harris, eventually the father of an actress, Jennifer Ehle.  As a sidekick of our great governor, Terry Sanford, he had been instrumental in creating North Carolina’s School of the Arts, where I had enjoyed numerous performances in Winston-Salem.  Once my writing career got off the ground, I was asked to review one of his novels, The Winter People, and was startled by how good it was.  But nothing prepared me for The Land Breakers, which the New York Review has published as a neglected classic, and about which Michael Ondaatje says, “The Land Breakers is a great American novel, way beyond anything most New York literary icons have produced.”

Ehle was born in Asheville, and continued to have a house there until the end of his life (along with one in Winston-Salem, and one in London); his family went way back as mountain people.  Apparently that is what inspired his series of seven mountain novels, which begin with this book, set between 1779 and 1783.  I own a cabin on some land near Asheville where my wife grew up (the photos on this website are of that land), and have often, as I walked through the woods near our house, wondered at those mountains and trees and the long history they’ve had there.  John Ehle—with a wealth of historical knowledge—takes on the task of imagining the first European settlers.  A man named Mooney and his wife Irma are heading West, looking for land, and they stop in Morganton long enough to meet a store owner who says he owns a hundred thousand acres of land in the mountains (though what that even means in this context I don’t know).  He’ll sell them 1200, along with some supplies.  They walk out past Old Fort, then head up the mountain.

I’m not sure where they wind up.  They’re near a river which I think is the Swannanoa, which would put them close to present day Asheville.  At first they camp, then cut down some trees and build a cabin.  Around that time an older man named Tinkler Harrison comes from Virginia to settle as well; he has a young wife (who is also, somewhat to my surprise, his niece), a son, a few slaves; his no-account brother in law Ernest Plover, who has a large family of girls, also comes along, and eventually a German family shows up, and some other settlers from the East.  All of these people are making a new start, but don’t want to be too isolated.  Life is harsh in this stark wilderness.

One young woman dies of a respiratory ailment, which seems a product of the mountain air in the winter; she starts coughing, then gets weaker and weaker, and dies.  Ernest Plover’s oldest daughter, sixteen and sassy, attracts first this married man, then that one, without intending anything; she’s just living her life, trying to figure things out.  An occasion of childbirth, with one of the slave women as midwife, is harrowing, but completely realistic.  Wolves attack livestock; bears are a constant presence; the whole community tracks a huge bear that has made off with somebody’s pig, and that bear hunt is both astonishing and breathtaking, at a time when a rifle shot might bother a bear, but not bring him down.  A young man dies when snakes invade his cabin, in an incident which makes realistic sense but is as terrifying as anything Stephen King ever wrote.

Somehow John Ehle knew what it took to build a cabin from scratch, to brew liquor, make shoes, weave clothing; all of these things are part of the novel’s fabric but are not obtrusive.  People live on the food that is available (it was nothing to go out and shoot a deer, they were all over the place, and it was easy to bag a turkey as well, something that is still true); Asheville wasn’t as packed with vegans in 1780 as it is today.  People ate cornbread because corn was the easiest grain to grow; they also went without bread for as long as a year because they had none, and salt was a prized possession.  In Mooney’s cabin his sons slept in the loft, just on boards, not even any straw, and had to look around for snakes before they settled down.  Their parents were having sex right below them, in the same room.  But the room was pitch black.  They had doused the fire.

I haven’t even mentioned the writing, which is marvelously vivid and constantly surprising.  All through my reading I found passages I wanted to read aloud to my wife, and on the last night, as the novel drew to a close, I read a soliloquy by the aging—and probably dying—Tinkler Harrison that was as astonishing as anything I’ve come across in a book.  First he talks about a dream where he digs his own grave and makes love to the remains of his wife.  He mentions another dream where he made love to his daughter.  ‘“Does that surprise ye?’” he says to Mooney, who happens to be married to that daughter.

“Yes, it does,” Mooney says.

‘“A man dreams what he dreams, that’s all, and might be anything at all, for he’s all tied up with lies, anyhow, and worries.  My Lord, we come out of a narrow opening in a woman and try to get our eyes to see something, not knowing at all what the world is, or our parents are, or we are.  And now I’m nigh to old-age death and I don’t know yet what the world is, or I am.  I know it’s been a pleasure to be alive for these years, though I don’t know what being alive is.  I might very well die in this chair afore I ever stop looking at that river, but I don’t know what death is.  Some say it’s angels in Heaven, but I don’t have any more use for angels than I have for a lame horse. . . .’

‘“No need to talk as if you’re about to die, Mr. Harrison,’” Mooney said, for he felt he ought to say something like that.

“’In one dream the other night, I was going back through the cord into the belly of my mama.  That’s a sign of coming death, ain’t it?’”

No doubt it is.  This is a novel about the wonder, and the beauty, and the astonishment of life.  It happens to take place in eighteenth century North Carolina.  But it could be anywhere.