From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam—and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.
One of Harrison’s most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America’s most memorable writers.
“There is no putting aside Dalva until the time bombs go off, the identities are revealed, and the skeletons almost literally tumble from the closets . . . Dalva is suspended in its own beauty.” —Louise Erdrich, Chicago Tribune
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam—and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.
One of Harrison’s most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America’s most memorable writers.
“There is no putting aside Dalva until the time bombs go off, the identities are revealed, and the skeletons almost literally tumble from the closets . . . Dalva is suspended in its own beauty.” —Louise Erdrich, Chicago Tribune
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Overview
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam—and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.
One of Harrison’s most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America’s most memorable writers.
“There is no putting aside Dalva until the time bombs go off, the identities are revealed, and the skeletons almost literally tumble from the closets . . . Dalva is suspended in its own beauty.” —Louise Erdrich, Chicago Tribune
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802192226 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 999 |
| Sales rank: | 400,674 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
DALVA
Santa Monica — April 7, 1986, 4:00 A.M.
It was today — rather yesterday I think — that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation. I said people don't talk like that in this neighborhood. The fly that flies around me now in the dark is every fly that ever flew around me. I am on the couch, and when I awoke I thought I heard voices down by the river, a branch of the Niobrara River where with my sister I was baptized in a white dress. A boy yelled water snake and the preacher said get thee out of here snake and we all laughed. The snake drifted off in the current and the singing began. There are no rivers around here. Turning on the lamp above the couch I see he's not here either. I can hear a car screeching on the coast highway even at this hour. There are always cars. The girl in the green bathing suit was hit seven times before the last car tossed her in a ditch. The autopsy said California speedball. Her suit was the color of winter wheat as I remember it, almost unnaturally green when the snow melted. It was so nice to have another color on earth other than brown grass, white snow, and black trees. Now between the cars I hear the ocean and the breeze lifts the pale-blue curtains with a sea odor the same as my skin. I'm quite happy though I may have to move after all these years, seven, actually. There is an abrasion, almost like a slight burn, from his mustache on my thigh. He asked if I wanted him to shave his mustache and I said You'd be lost without it. That made him somewhat angry as if his vanity depended solely on something so fragile as a mustache. Of course he wasn't listening to what I said but to all of his imagined resonances of what I said. When I laughed he became angrier and marched very dramatically around the room in his jockey shorts which were baggy in the rear. It was somehow warm and amusing but when he tried to grab my shoulders and shake me I told him to go back to his hotel and screw himself in front of the mirror until he felt he wanted to actually be with me again. So he left.
* * *
I thought I was writing this to my son in case I never get to see him, and in case something should happen to me, what I have written would tell him about his mother. My friend of last evening said, What if he isn't worth the effort? That hadn't occurred to me. I don't know where he is and I have never seen him except for a moment after his birth. I can't go to him because I'm not sure he knows I exist. Perhaps his adoptive parents never told him he was adopted. This is all less sentimental than it is unfinished business, a longing to know someone I have no particular right to know. But to know this son would complete the freedom men of my acquaintance seem to consider their birthright. And then, perhaps, my son is looking for me?
* * *
My name is Dalva. This is a rather strange name for someone from the upper Midwest but the explanation is simple. My father's older brother was a victim of rebellion and adventure magazines, and was at odd times a merchant seaman, a prospector for gold and precious metals, and finally a geologist. Late in the Great Depression Paul was somewhere in the interior of Brazil from which he returned, after squandering most of his earnings in Rio, to the farm with some presents including a 78 rpm record of the sambas of that period. One of the sambas — in Portuguese of course — was "Estrella Dalva," or "Morning Star," and my parents loved the song. Naomi, my mother, told me that on warm summer evenings she and my father would put the record on the Victrola and dance up and down the big front porch of the farmhouse. My uncle Paul had taught them what he said was the samba before he disappeared again.
I just now thought that you can only meet a man at the level of his intentions. When my father and mother met and courted in the thirties the intentions were clear; they were both from fourth-generation farm families and the point was to marry and to continue traditions that had made their predecessors reasonably happy. This is not to say that they were simple-minded people in bib overalls and flour-sack gingham dress. There were several thousand acres of corn and wheat, Herefords, hogs, even a small slaughterhouse that at one time supplied prime beef to certain restaurants in faraway Chicago, Saint Louis, and Kansas City. From scrapbooks Mother has stored there are records of their trips to Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, and once to New York City which was my mother's favorite. From World War II, when my father was a fighter pilot stationed in England, there is a photo of him with three gentlemen in front of the Hereford Registry in Hereford, England. He is in a jaunty hat and looks rather like one of the early photos of Howard Hughes. As Naomi would say, or prate, "Blood will tell," and his unstable streak came out in his passion for airplanes. He was not called up but reenlisted for the Korean War because he wanted to learn to fly jet fighters. So between the ages of five and nine I knew my father, and I have still not exhausted the memories of those years. Beryl Markham said that when she stopped in Tunis on the way back to Europe in her small plane she met a prostitute who wanted to go home, but didn't know where home was because she had been taken from her parents at age seven. She only knew that in her homeland there were tall trees and it was occasionally cold.
But I'm not one to live or subsist on memory, treating it as most do, the past and future as an encapsulated space or nodule we walked into, and then out of, rather than a continuum of the life we have already lived and will live. What was my father, really? Genes provide the fragilest of continuities.
On the farm we had a small plane called a Stinson Voyager. We'd go for Sunday rides when the weather was right. If I had been sick and out of school my father would tell me I'd feel better or be well by the time we landed and I believed him. I liked seeing the water birds on sandbars in the Missouri River, the way they flew up in clouds, then landed again when our immense shadow passed.
* * *
What upsets me is the terrifying and inconsolable bitterness of life; at close range in certain friends, and particularly in my sister who regards her mid-life as an arctic prison though she lives in Tucson. She's never been given much to going out of doors. She lives in a fine home with a gray-and-white interior backed up against the Catalinas though she has never walked in these mountains. I thought of her yesterday at daylight when I walked the beach. Someone had spray-painted the word MENACE on the benches in Palisades Park, and on the steps going down to the beach, and somehow on a highway overpass. I stopped counting at twenty. Fortunately most lunatics don't have the vigor of Charles Manson. I was interested in someone who spent a whole night spray-painting MENACE virtually in the face of the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps this vandal is the flip side of my sister. It is somewhat a mystery to me how the rich can feel so utterly fatigued and victimized. She drifts back and forth without specific density across the line of what she thinks is the unbearable present, but then she surprised me this March, during Easter, when my mother and I visited. I asked her how it was possible to live so thoroughly without nouns. At that moment she was waiting for the single drink she allowed herself each day at six.
"Why don't you save up for six days and have seven drinks on Sunday?" Naomi asked. My mother does not stand back from any of the forms life takes. "You could have yourself a party."
But my sister just sat there looking at the martini she would make last an hour, thinking about nouns as if on the lip of speaking the sentence my mother and I knew wouldn't come. Ruth went to the piano and played a Mozart exercise my mother favored which also served as a signal for me to begin fixing dinner.
"Nouns are a burden to people these days," Mother said. "Maybe they always were. Tell me about your latest fellow."
"Michael is in the history department at Stanford. He heard about our journals years ago and last fall in Nebraska traced me back to Santa Monica. He's about twenty pounds overweight and self-important. He tends to lecture at you and might talk about the history of food over dinner, the history of rain when it's raining. He's an expert at everything awful that ever happened in the history of the world. He's brilliant without being very conscious. He's a bad lover but I like being around him."
"I think he sounds just wonderful. I've always preferred men to be a little goofy. If they're trying to be men in the movies they get tiresome. I had this little fling with an ornithologist because I liked the way he climbed trees, waded up creeks, or into stock ponds to take photos. ..." My mother is sixty-five.
We hadn't heard the music stop and Ruth was right behind us at the kitchen door. Grandfather, who was half Oglala Sioux, called her Shy Bird Who Flies Away. Though Ruth is only one-eighth Sioux she had assumed certain Sioux qualities as she grew older, a kind of stillness that she forced to surround her.
"I think you're right about nouns. Think of 'car,' 'house,' 'piano,' 'food,' 'priest.' '' We were prepared for the rush of words that came not more than once a day when we visited. "We have always been lapsed Methodists but I met this priest and we talk about love and death, art and God, which are all nouns of a sort I believe. He's not a priest in a church but works with a charity for Indians and I know he sees me partly as a contributor. He loves to drive the car Ted sent me for Christmas." Ted is her husband from whom she had been separated for fifteen years, the father of her son, a man who at twenty-eight discovered he was conclusively a homosexual. Ruth was born four years before Father died in Korea, losing the two central men in her life to quirks of history and sexuality. Ted and Ruth met at the Eastman School of Music where theyintended to become famous in the music world, she as a pianist and he as a composer. Instead, she raised her child who apparently doesn't care for her, blaming her specifically for the loss of his father. From my distance the arts always have seemed brutal, with the chances of the work being durable far less likely than had the aspirant tried to become an astronaut. And the failures I know are filled with an indefinable longing and melancholy for a flowering that was stunted in preparation for any number of reasons.
I was studying a Chinese recipe and ignoring Ruth until I heard the word "boyfriend." It was akin to touching an electric fence as a child. I turned to notice that Mother was equally shocked, reaching nervously for the cigarettes she had abandoned years ago.
"Yes, I have a boyfriend. A lover. He's my only lover in fifteen years. The priest is my lover. He's really quite homely. He even told me that one reason he became a priest was because he was so homely. Singly, the features wouldn't be that bad but arranged together as they are, the result is homeliness. Remember our cow dog, the mongrel we had when we were little called Sam who was so ugly? Anyway, Ted sent me some scarves from Paris, then an expensive car from a local dealer a few days later to go with the scarves. I had read about an Indian charity and checked it out with my neighbor who runs the newspaper. So I drove the car down there and met the priest. I gave him the signed title and the keys and asked him to call a cab for me, but he insisted on driving me home. I made him iced tea and he loved all the paintings and prints Ted and I had collected. Then he asked if I'd like to take a ride to the Papago Reservation the next day. He said the head of the diocese was in Los Angeles for a few days and he had never driven such a wonderful car. I was unsure and said I had never met any Indians in Arizona but I grew up around some of the Sioux and they frightened me. That's because Granddad told me he was really a ghost who had never been born and would never die. I didn't realize he probably was kidding. The priest wondered why I'd give a forty-thousand-dollar brand-new car to people who frightened me. I said Because I can read. Remember Grandpa's Edward Curtis books? We had to wash our hands before we looked at them. So the next morning I made a picnic basket and he picked me up. He was originally from near Indianapolis and grew up loving fast cars as boys must do around there. It is a mystery how anyone could be that thrilled by a car. We took the long way, driving down toward Nogales, then across the Arivaca Canyon road through the Tumacacori Mountains. It's a narrow dirt road with many curves and my priest loved the trip, though I thought he drove alarmingly. Nothing would have happened if there hadn't been a sudden, brief thunderstorm. The clay on the road turned to butter and we were caught in a big dip in the mountain road. He said we would be OK when it dried out so we had a picnic in the car and drank a bottle of white wine. Then the rain stopped and the sun came out and it was hot and clear again. I got out of the car, crawled through a fence, and walked down a hill to a spring-fed stock pond. You know I'm not very enthused about nature so it was quite an adventure. The priest was frightened because there were cattle in the pines near the pond, one of them a bull, but I said that Hereford bulls aren't dangerous so he joined me. He said it would take an hour for the road to dry off. I took off my shoes and waded in the pond, washing my face in the spring. I was terribly excited for no particular reason. Maybe I was feeling desire without admitting it. I don't think so. It was just that I was doing something different. Then the priest said I should take a swim and that he had four sisters and bare skin didn't bother him a bit. So I took off my skirt and blouse and dove in the water in my bra and panties. He stripped to his shorts and followed. It was absolutely perfect swimming though he was intensely nervous. I said that God was busy in cancer wards, Africa, and Central America, and wasn't watching him. I got out to sun on a warm rock but he stayed in the water. Finally he said I guess I have an erection. I said You can't stay in the water the rest of your life. He said Don't look, and got out of the water and sat beside me staring straight ahead. I thought I am not going to let him get away so I stood up and took off my bra and panties hanging them on a bush to dry. Then I told him rather sternly to lay on his back on the grass and to close his eyes if he wished. he was shaking so hard I thought he'd fall apart like an old car. So I made love to him."
Ruth began to laugh, then to cry and laugh at the same time. We hugged and patted her, praising her for breaking her drought of affection in such a unique way.
"A splendid story," Naomi said.
"It's a beautiful thing to happen. I'm proud of you," I said. "I couldn't have done a better job myself."
Ruth thought this was very funny because she always has chided me by letter and on the phone for what she calls "promiscuity," while I am lightly critical about her abstinence.
"The trouble was he wouldn't stop crying and that reminded me of Ted and the night he told me about his problems, so I wanted to cry too but knew it was somehow unthinkable. He cried so hard I had to drive back to Tucson. He'd grind his teeth, say prayers in Latin, then weep again. He asked me to pray with him but I said I didn't know how because, not being Catholic, I didn't know the prayers. This at the same time shocked and calmed him. Why did I donate a car to the Catholics if I was a Protestant? I donated the car so it could be sold and the money would be used to help the Indians. But the Indians are Catholics he said. The Indians are Indians before they are Catholics I replied. He said he had felt his soul come out of him and into me and then he began crying again because he had betrayed Mary and ruined his life. Oh for God's sake you fucking ninny, I yelled at him, and he became silent until we got to the house. For some reason I told him to come in and I'd give him a tranquilizer but all I had was aspirin which he took. Within minutes he said the tranquilizer was making him feel very strange. We had a drink and I made a snack tray with the pâté recipe you sent me, Dalva. He quoted me some poems and told me about the missions he had worked at in Brazil and Mexico. Now he was in his thirties and wanted to leave the country again. Brazil was difficult for him because you couldn't avoid seeing all those beautiful bottoms in Rio. He poured himself another drink and said that one night he paid a girl to come to his hotel room so he could kiss her bottom. The tranquilizer is making me say this he said. So he kissed her bottom but she laughed because it tickled and that ruined everything. His eyes brimmed with tears again so I thought fast because I didn't want to lose him. That's what you want to do to me, isn't it? Admit it. He nodded and stared out the window. I think that's a good idea and that's what you should do. He said it was still daylight and maybe it wouldn't hurt because he had already sinned that day which wouldn't be over until midnight. He's quite a thinker. I stood up and started to take off my clothes. He got down on the floor. We really went to town all evening and I sent him home before midnight."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dalva"
by .
Copyright © 1988 Anna Productions.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
BOOK DALVA,
BOOK MICHAEL,
BOOK GOING HOME,
Reading Group Guide
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Throughout her life, Dalva has been alternately haunted, charmed, and driven by a series of men: her half-brother Duane, a half-breed Sioux whose child she bore and gave up for adoption at sixteen; a heroic great-grandfather, who came to Nebraska as a missionary to Indians; a father who died when Dalva was very young; an uncle who comes to be her spiritual mentor; and an alcoholic, self-absorbed Stanford historian who seeks to win tenure by writing her family's history. Discuss Dalva's relationship with each of these men. How does each relationship evolve throughout the novel?
- With Dalva, Jim Harrison presents to readers an unflinching look at the United States' Indian policy over the last two centuries. Through John Wesley Northridge's journals, we are vividly reintroduced to our country's brutal history, and Professor Michael's sodden musings are sprinkled liberally with powerful associations between the genocide of American Indians and the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. Explain the politics and ideology from which Harrison's story emerges.
- Compare the voice of Dalva with the voice of Michael. How does the tone of the novel change when Harrison shifts from one narrator to the other? Discuss the novel's narrative structure.
- Early in the novel, Dalva says, "I'm not one to live or subsist on memory, treating it as most do, the past and future as an encapsulated space or nodule we walked into, and then out of, rather than a continuum of the life we have already lived and will live." How does Dalva's preoccupation with the past -- her painful memories of Duane, her frustratingly dim recollections of life with her father, and her bittersweet memories of her beloved grandfather -- support or refute this statement? Does she not float within the realm of memory for much of the novel? By the end of the novel, to what degree has Dalva come to terms with the past? Is she diminished or empowered by her memories?
- As with Dalva, time and memory are chief preoccupations for Michael as a historian. What is behind his drive to write the history of the Northridges? He mentions his excitement about the acclaim he is likely to garner once the work is published. What do you feel Harrison is saying about the integrity and ethics of scholarship here? Is the art of history a noble and crucially important act of committing the past to the public record, or is it, as Dalva intimates at one point, merely an act of self-serving voyeurism?
- Dalva is a novel about journeys toward home, toward family, and toward a series of painful confrontations with the legacies of the past. Discuss the rich layers of journeys, both literal and metaphorical, which drive the characters and the plot of Harrison's novel.
- What is the significance of the Ghost Dance in Dalva? Through his journals, chart Northridge's crumbling and evolving faith -- from his failed work as a Christian missionary, to his conversion of Sioux beliefs, to his apparent madness.
- How have Michael's views on the Dawes Act, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians changed by the time he has his nervous breakdown? Consider the letters about his Nebraska experience, which he writes to Dalva while his broken jaw is wired shut. Consider also Harrison's senses of humor and irony in literally silencing the novel's historian. What do you make of this?
- "Genes are the fragilest of continuities," Dalva asserts. Explain this comment in the context of Dalva's particular genetic forebears. To what degree is Dalva the spiritual heir of her great-grandfather?
- What do you imagine happens to Dalva after the novel ends? Will her budding affair with Sam Creekmouth continue? How will her relationship with her son progress? Will she stay in Nebraska for the rest of her life? (Harrison's latest novel, The Road Home, continues the story of Dalva.)
- Why do you suppose Harrison decided to write most of his novel in the voice of a woman? Imagine an alternate novel, where Dalva is a man, and the story unfolds instead from the perspective of Northridge's great-grandson. How would the novel be different? Did you believe Dalva? Was Harrison's portrayal successful? Compare Dalva to novels by other authors whose narratives have crossed the lines of gender or ethnicity (e.g.: James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, Carol Shields' Swann).
- In what ways has your perception of America's ambivalent frontier history been influenced, reinforced, or challenged by Harrison's novel?
AN INTERVIEW WITH JIM HARRISON
Q. Most of Dalva, all of The Woman Lit By Fireflies, and a large portion of The Road Home are written in the voice of a woman. What challenges did you encounter as a man writing from a woman's perspective?
A.I just wrote an essay for the NY Times Magazine about how I wrote in the voice of a woman in Dalva, The Woman Lit By Fireflies and The Road Home. The date of the issue is May 16th, 1999. Interested students might look into it. My original title was "Looking for Sister." As a writer, I try to offer myself total freedom and part of this freedom is to temporarily become your narrators. This is not always pleasant. A writer can be thought of as a shaman without portfolio. Of course, it is difficult but hopefully worth it.
Q. Is John Wesley Northridge modeled on an actual historical figure? Tell us about your research.
A. John Wesley Northridge is invented. I didn't keep track but I probably made a dozen trips to the Nebraska Historical Society in Lincoln, plus thousands of miles of driving around the state. Probably more than 100 books were also involved plus collections of old photos. In John Wesley Northridge I wanted to write a character without our own lame irony.
Q. What sort of reparations, if any, do you feel the United States government is obligated to make to contemporary Native Americans?
A. Reparations are always difficult but our efforts toward our own Natives have been slight compared to what we did for Germany and Japan. Rather than drown the Natives with advice which we have consistently done we should give them as much land and money and possible.
Q. Your physical descriptions of Nebraska, Arizona, and the Western frontier of old are wonderfully vivid and detailed. How did you come to be so familiar with these landscapes?
A. I used to take many aimless car trips around the United States for mental reasons. In my teens I wanted to be a painter. I still try to absorb all of the visual aspects of a landscape in addition to its natural history and its Native history, not to speak of what we have done with this landscape. Since I don't teach and I have been a full-time writer for over 30 years, I have the time to absorb what I choose. I am often amazed that my preoccupations are so alien to city people.
Q. Michael's narrative and Uncle Paul's dialogue are both rich with allusions to various works of literature and philosophy. As you wrote Dalva, were you inspired by any particular authors?
A. To a certain extent we are unwilling victims of everything we read. This includes all the great literature but also all the junk. I have recently been studying the human brain for a novella I have been writing and our abilities at recall can be astounding what with 12 billion neurons and 30 trillion synapses. Unfortunately, this also includes newspapers but then we tend to remember best the emotional content of what we read. For instance, no writer ever plumbed deeper tan Dostoevsky or more broadly than Shakespeare. Along with a couple dozen others they dictate many of my feelings as they should. Of course we are responsible for how good we are and we are never as good as we have hoped to be.