The Wordy Shipmates

The publishers of Sarah Vowell's new book forwarded an advance copy to me to read, along with this lovely top-quality image, rather than my usual mellow-mood-lit photograph of the book.

I have read Vowell's three previous books--Take the Canoli, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, and Assassination Vacation, which were published in that order. Vowell's first two books were structured in vignettes, and had a stronger bent towards the memoir style (the reason that the bookseller recommended Vowell to me in the first place, when I was buying a David Sedaris book). They were also generally looser books. Take the Cannoli doesn't have any unifying theme, beyond the subtitle of "Stories from the New World." The topics range from her father's gunsmithing to staying at (and interpreting the cultural significance of) the Chelsea Hotel to attending a fantasy rock camp. Vowell's second book is much more focused on Americanness manifest in U.S. politics and history, with a few (very few) pop culture detours that still communicate how Vowell thinks of her status as American. The stories involve less memoir, too, although they still emphasize Vowell's personal take on the material, and how her experiences influence her thinking process. That sounds drier than I meant it too, espeically when the point of her approach to these topics is that she isn't writing dry punditry or pseudo-objective history. The stories are very engaging, and Vowell's own biases and personality are crucial to understanding her conclusions.

Of Vowell's first three books, Assassination Vacation was the one I liked best; it abandons the vignette structure and instead focuses on the theme of presidential assassinations--those of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Vowell is still a strong presence in the narrative, given her compulsions as a tourist of history, but her writing style benefits from the narrower theme that enables--but also limits--tangents from the central point.

The Wordy Shipmates is written very much in the same style as Assassination Vacation, and if I liked it a little less than the previous book, it's nothing to do with the writing, and more to do with the subject matter. Assassinations are inherently a little more thrilling than 17th century colonial American settlements. Vowell herself acknowledges the problems of the attractiveness of her subject matter, noting that

I was often asked at parties by my fellow New Yorkers the obvious question, "What are you working on?" When I would tell them a book about Puritans, they often would take a swig of the beer or bourbon in their hands and reply with either a sarcastic "Fun!" or a disdainful "Why?" (Page 51 in the Advance Copy)

On the same page, she acknowledges her own "fondness for sermons as literature," which is a bigger stumbling block for me than the Puritan subject matter; I am not convinced that I ever got through one of the most popular sermons-turned-literature, Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," when it was assigned for my Intro to American Literature course. Because Vowell's subject is early Puritan settlers (settlers who predate Edwards by about one hundred years), a "wordy" lot given to documentation of their spiritual status, their sermons, and the basic accounting necessary to keep a new settlement afloat in the Americas during King James's reign, Vowell ends up quoting a lot of material direct from the pens of those wordy settlers. Much of that material derives from sermons, including the much-cited "A Model of Christian Charity" by John Winthrop. It sounds awful, when I say I have trouble focusing on messages of Christian Charity, but it's a plain fact: I am a much less than ideal reader of sermons.

This thorough and consistent use of primary materials from the likes of Winthrop and Roger Williams means that Vowell-as-participant-in-her-narrative plays a much smaller role in this book than in any of her previous books. She is still in the book of course, even if she weren't choosing which passages to quote where, but her description of her own experiences simply has less of an impact on the material of Puritan colonial history. Vowell herself did not grow up on the East coast, so that colonial history was never a factor in her surroundings as a child. At one point, she explains "as a child I learned almost everything I knew about American history in general and British colonials in particular from watching television situation comedies" (AC 17). Nor does colonial history have as visceral or an immediate impact on her consciousness of her family, as demonstrated in her discussion of the Trail of Tears elsewhere--the displacement of the Cherokee from their own territory included her own ancestors. She does enter the narrative in her trips to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and to Plymouth's various tourist attractions, but such trips supplement the main point, rather than form the core of the book the way they did in Assassination Vacation. The Puritan history that interests Vowell is in texts rather than in (ersatz) artifacts, especially when modern Boston and Providence now loom on the spots that formed the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island.

Vowell's voice is also downplayed slightly in light of all the input direct from the Puritans themselves. Her voice is still there, however, as when she notes

Winthrop writes down instructions for making gunpowder, putting up a chimney, and building a small boat. He makes lists of the provisions for the voyage, including thirty bushels of oatmeal, forty bushels of peas, two wooden bowls, tow barrels of cider, the equivalent of ten thousand gallons of beer, and "11 Ferkins of Butter," a ferkin (or firkin) being a "unit of capacity," according to my dictionary, "equal to half a kilderkin." (That clears that up). (AC 82)

It's kind of an obvious joke, but I like it because it indicates the difficulties she must have come up against in researching this book. She includes a "Note on Language" at the end of the book to acknowledge that she has had to normalize spelling; some of the original documents she dealt with may have been hand-written, and some of the books may have used old and surprisingly difficult to read orthographic conventions like the long S. The writing style of some of her sources may have left much to be desired. She mentions twice that Roger Williams referred to his own writing as difficult--desnse and over-packed. The above quote indicates that English writers had not yet gotten over the habit of detailing certain quotidian processes in excruciating detail (a habit still in evidence in Daniel Defoe books set on boats, which take periodic breaks to catalogue all of the edibles taken on board ship, before resuming the narrative).

Little lines like Vowell's reference to the dictionary suggest just how much work she has done to make an interesting story accessible, out of the pile of (often dull or difficult) material on the subject. The book doesn't draw attention to her work very often, but it's certainly there, and in the end I probably would not have read a text on this topic if Vowell weren't the author.

That said, if the book starts a little slowly (for someone who's not a fan of sermons, remember), it gathers steam throughout the book, culminating in a rather intense description of the trade-related wars that errupted among the English, Dutch, Pequot, Mohegan, and Narragansett--and how the actions undertaken during that war reflect on the Puritans' consciousness of their status as the Chosen and as sinners. Again, it's maybe not subject matter than I would have chosen to read, but I wasn't regretting reading this (despite getting a little bogged down on the sermons now and then). Vowell's gift is making sometimes difficult history and historical relationships accessible and comprehensible.