Crossing to Safety Part III
Hello Fellow Readers,
I am writing this early in the week because we have a very busy weekend. But you shall be reading it Saturday morning so happy Saturday. You made it to the weekend, I hope you get a chance to relax between house chores and kid activities and whatever else your weekend holds. Part of the reason that I am writing this early is because I will be on a retreat this Saturday and I am very excited to get a few hours of quiet and rest. I hope you can set aside some time for quiet, prayer, reading, and friendship as well, even if it isn’t a formal retreat. We all need those things all of the time, but especially during busy seasons (and May always seems like one of those).
Today I will give you some “final” thoughts on Crossing to Safety, peer pressure you into starting or joining a book club, whet your appetite for the new book list, and give you a schedule for The Remains of the Day. Keep reading for all of that…
If you are following along with my reading schedule then you finished Crossing to Safety this week. I just finished last night and wanted to get my thoughts “on paper” while they were fresh. I have to say, I really love this book (which I guess is obvious since I picked it). It is a book that I’ve now read three times and I think it opens itself up more with each reading. I love Stegner’s prose. I think the musings on memory and reality are so interesting. And the characters themselves are compelling and lovable as well. I am looking forward to chatting with some of you further about these topics and many others at our in person meetings coming up.
Part III Chapter Musings
I noticed that there is a pattern in these chapters. Every other chapter is all four friends, then Sid and Larry alone. So we start with chapter one when all the friends are together (for the first time in the “present”). They start with small talk, then get into the real talk, and then Charity gives them all a pep talk. Charity has decided exactly how her death will go and Sid is not cooperating by being the stoic she is asking him to be. Larry’s thoughts about Charity’s timing of their meeting make me wonder if he is echoing the same strategy in his narrative, and if so, does he know it?
I wondered why she had held off this meeting through the whole empty morning….Letting us rest, I supposed, whether we wanted to or not. Lie down, you’re tired….If she wanted to heighten this fatally late reunion with a little deliberate dramatic delay, who lost by her theatrics? I didn’t feel anything false, I didn’t feel manipulated… (276)
We find out that Lang has also married a professor who has failed to get promoted because he didn’t publish. What is the significance here? The generations seem to repeat themselves, maybe this is another way of showing the non-linear time that Larry was musing about in the beginning of the book.
I cannot help noticing how many times Sid’s glasses and eyes are mentioned. Are they a mask? Do his true feelings come out when he takes them off? Larry feels “a jolt that was like running into a door” when he looks him in the eye.
Charity is still teaching her sundial theory of art and life. She is going to force everyone to do it her way, but even we can see that the suffering is not cooperating with her theories.
I like that Larry compares Charity’s death to a play. It is another reference to Larry and Charity’s similarities. Larry is writing a memory novel about his friends, Charity has written them a play to perform in. Does Larry realize this or is Stegner asking the reader to intuit this?
Some of the reflections at the end of this chapter are so revealing…
Pitying and shaken as I was, I had to admit she was the same old Charity. She saw objectives, not obstacles, and she did not let her uncomplicated confidence get clouded by other people’s doubts, or other people’s facts, or even other people’s feelings. (285-286)
Charity had mastered him, but she also supported him. She not only ran his life, she was his life.
I didn’t like to think what would happen to him with her gone. His resistance and resentment were only expressions of his dependence. Sally resented her crutches, too, but without them she would have been hardly more than a broken stick with eyes. (286)
In chapter two we move to a conversation with Larry and Sid (Sally and Charity are also conversing, but we only hear about that through Sally later…and even then not the details). Sid and Larry are packing the car for the picnic and I was getting a lot of flashbacks to the camping trip and then Larry went and actually mentions the hampers that were the cause of so much drama back then. This has me wondering if Charity is going to barge in and mess it up again? He almost makes a joke about it and stops himself.
There is a lot of Eucharistic imagery in this chapter. First with Larry saying that Charity is basically God and Sid is the priest performing the rites of the picnic like the Mass. Then we get Sid comparing her last days to her being the Eucharist…
“She’s dividing herself like some inexhaustible Eucharist. She’s going around to everybody she loves, saying. ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’”
…”And if we won’t eat it, she’ll cram it down our throats. God, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
I don’t think the mention of God is an accident here. There was a section at the end of Part II about similar themes. My new theory is that Larry has some issues with God because of Sally’s suffering and this comes out with his issues with Charity.
Sid’s glasses and appearance are mentioned so many times throughout the novel and this chapter again. Here Sid even says that he’s “not so stupid (he can’t see (his) own situation.” He then goes to detail how he knows his marriage is a bondage, but it’s one he can’t live without and he tells Larry that his marriage is a bondage too, but reversed. And then he asks the question that I think is supposed to help us interpret the whole book…
“She couldn’t survive you. Could you survive her?” (298)
I really think we might finally have the answer to Larry’s problem with Charity. She has so much control over her life to seem almost godlike (kind of like Larry himself), but he couldn’t stop Sally from getting sick and inevitably dying early too. I think our question as we read the rest of the book should be: Will Sid (and therefore Larry) survive? Will they cross to safety? I am open to other interpretations, but this was my thought process on this read.
In chapter three we are back with both couples again. Charity tells them that she isn’t going to the picnic and Sid immediately sees through the plan. She is going to sneak away to the hospital to die. She will not allow Sid to go with her. She says that’s always been their plan…
“I never agreed to that! That’s your plan, not mine. How would I know when it’s time, as you put it? You never tell me honestly how you feel. You keep it a secret from me, how long you…You think it’s time now, and you want to send me out on a picnic?” -Sid (303)
Do we think Charity is sending Sid away because she can’t handle the emotions he carries with him? If Larry’s “origin story” is right then this has been true from the beginning.
Sid takes his glasses off for good and it tells us a lot. His emotions are the most raw here, but so are everyone else’s. Which kind of proves Charity’s point, that his emotions will break down her stoicism.
Once again, as if he needed it for a brace, he put his shaking hands on the footboard. He leaned on it, the tears streaming behind his glasses so that he raised his hand and ripped the glasses sideward and off. They fell somewhere below and beyond. Without protection or disguise, his naked face hung contorted at the foot of her bed. (304)
Before Sally and Larry escape from this awkward situation they see that Charity is really experiencing pain…
Her eyes, to my fascinated imagination, were like the eyes of Piero’s gloomy Christ- a painting that she had once, wanting to count no hours but the sunny ones, affected to repudiate. (307)
I love that we get Sally’s words of wisdom at the end of this (and a lot of other ) chapter. She is so much more gracious than Larry. She has let her suffering make her more human, something I think Charity is missing. Sally sees Charity in the most charitable light.
“…And she’s so brave about it she makes me feel proud. It’s a sort of privilege.” (310)
The other thing I am just noticing now that I am writing about these chapters is that we get a little bit of Sally at the end of each so far. And now I am looking to see if this is true in the last chapter as well.
And finally chapter four we are just with Larry who is looking for Sid and following along a trail he has made. This is so significant in light of Sid’s question at the end of chapter two.
Larry’s musings on time passing are great. He feels like “lifetimes must have passed” since this morning when he woke up and because of the way the book is written so do we. Craft wise this is great. Because he is by himself in this chapter we get so much of Larry’s inner life, which we have been getting the whole time, but it seems more honest in this chapter.
It is the kind of evening that calls for meditation, nostalgia, vague religious thoughts, remembered lines of poetry. But I am not meditative. I am anxious. I have exhausted myself to no purpose, and my mind frets itself with worry and obligation. For I have not found Sid, and I do not know what to do next.
That paragraph feels like a microcosm of the whole narrative. Then we are drawn to Sid’s glasses again when Larry says, “he must have gone blindly walking.” There are so many significant thoughts Larry has as he walks around the property. We see Charity’s playfield that was so well intentioned but actually not used at all because it is too hard to get to.
Then Larry comes back to the house to see Charity’s “play” in the empty doorways, which reminds me of the doorbell musings back at the first dinner party. Larry says that if he was Sid he “could not have borne this.” And then right after he sees Sally walk through the door and it makes him angry…
The vision of her floundering in the wake of the concentrated helpers and their feeble charge turned my distress into outrage. Not at any of the helpers, not at Charity’s willfulness, not at the solidarity of women collaborating in what only they could do as well, while excluding male intrusions. No at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was. What she had missed, how much had been kept from her, how little her potential had been realized, how hampered were her affection and willingness and warmth. The sight of her burned my eyes. (315)
This I think reveals the struggle Larry has really had with Charity (and life and God) through the book. And it is interesting to me that Larry doesn’t see how the suffering has actually not “hampered her affection and willingness and warmth.”
We do get a little bit of Sally in the middle of this chapter and she brings wonderful perspective as always. She makes another reference to Sid and Charity being connected because Charity actually does break down, “having done that to him, she found she’d done it to herself” (320).
Larry even meditates that this could be the last conversation he ever has with Sally. So all of the undertones I have been picking up in these chapters really come to the forefront here. He then tells the story of the drowning mouse in the pool which is an objective correlative for Sally’s health…
Survival, it is often called. Often it is accidental, sometimes engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
He does finally admit that Sally’s crippling has been a blessing. And he realizes that Sid understands more about his marriage than others. He meditates a bit on what other people they know have done with their lives.
If we could have foreseen the future during those good days in Madison where all this began, we might not have had the nerve to venture into it.
We do not get Sally at the end of chapter four and I think we are supposed to feel that loss and lack of closure. Sally won’t always be there. Larry is going to have to follow Sid’s path as well.
And then finally Larry finds Sid…
And now I see the figure, dusty-gold in the moonlight, coming steadily up the road from the stable. It is blurred, its shadow encumbers its feet, but it comes without pause, as if timing itself to meet the family come down from the hill.
“Sid?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
This may seem like an abrupt ending to the book, but I think Sid is telling Larry yes, they can survive their wives.
Yes, they can cross to safety.
And I will leave you with the poem from the beginning of the book…
I could give all to Time except-except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have cross to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.-Robert Frost
I would love to hear your thoughts on these chapters as well so be sure to leave a comment or get on Slack and get the conversation going!
Join a Book Club (or Start One)
Speaking of Slack, we had some fun conversation over there this week in the comments section of last week’s Substack post! So please message me if you’d like to get in on that! And remember, as much fun as I have on the Substack and on Slack, my biggest priority is reading books together in community. So if you have been thinking it might be time to start or join a group, consider this a little nudge in the right direction! If you aren’t sure about starting one in your physical community I think a virtual one with friends could be a real possibility as well. I would love to help you brainstorm.
Homework
Some questions and thoughts to consider before your book club meeting
One quote, scene, or question for the group to chat about…
Discuss what you think the book is about…
Which character do you like or relate to the most?
Which character do you judge the most?
Did you like or dislike the book and why (with specific examples)?
What should we do with the ending? Was it satisfying for you?
Discuss the title and the significance for each character
*please feel free to post more discussion points and questions in the comments…also feel free to disagree with me and/or the podcast hosts on anything, that’s what makes the conversations so fun. I love how books speak to different readers in different ways! Podcast Links are below and here are the other Substack posts for this book…
Crossing to Safety Part I:1-7
Crossing to Safety Part I:8-13
Crossing to Safety Part II
Close Reads Podcasts for Crossing to Safety
Here are the Close Reads HQ podcast episodes again. I listened to the Part II episodes last weekend after I finished writing and I cannot recommend them enough. In the first episode of Part II David, Heidi and Angelina have a wonderful conversation about what makes a book great or good and how to discern what the “soul” of a book is. Their thoughts about this book in particular are helpful, but I found the bigger conversation to be very educational!
I am planning to listen to Part III and the Q & A right after I finish writing this!
Part I: 1-4
Part I: 5-6
Part I: 7-10
Part I: 11-13
Part II: 1-3
Part II: 4-5
Part III
Q&A
Book Drop Day
Don’t forget that Book Drop Day, our annual holiday for book lovers, is coming up on May 18th! I have finalized the book list and am working on getting some previews of all the books written up (with some special guest writers as well).
Other Things I’m Enjoying
I was reminded of this essay (Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God) by Simone Weil the other day while continuing to read The Power of Silence and thought some of you might enjoy it.
I started Howard’s End by E.M. Forester this week and I am loving it so far! The Literary Life Podcast did a series on it earlier this year and I am enjoying catching up!
I enjoyed this interview about children’s mental health with Abigail Shrier.
That is all I have for you this week. I hope you enjoyed (or are enjoying) Crossing to Safety and that you get to enjoy some leisure, relaxation, and maybe some other books too this weekend!
Enjoy your reading until we meet again!
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not the pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
-Jane Austen
A Few Reminders
If you haven’t taken the survey for this year yet, please do so here!
Next up we have The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro scheduled for June. Here is the schedule for how I will be reading and posting:
May 25th: Prologue and Day One (pgs 3-44)
June 1st: Day Two (pgs 47-126)
June 8th: Day Three (pgs 129-201)
June 15th: Day Four and Day Six (pgs 205-245)
Then to finish up the year we have East of Eden and Pride and Prejudice!
If you are reading along but are not part of an in person group, please message me and we can chat about getting you set up to start one! You are more than welcome to follow along virtually, but we value in person community so much that I would very much encourage you to have a group!
If you are part of a group, but you’re not on our Slack page, please contact me. That is where people share thoughts and logistics for each in person group.
Book lists from previous years can be found here.
We are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (with links to Substack) in order to spread the joy of the reading life to more people...if you want to like or share with any friends that want to start their own groups (or follow along virtually) please do!
*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. The few cents(literally) earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) go toward the time and effort it takes to keep Literature Book Club running and I appreciate it!