WORK RUNS IN A FAMILY

QUOTES FROM Richard Manning’s newest book, a memoir called “It Runs in the Family.”

“The sagas and tales are full of work.  Action takes place in a context of sheep-herding, horse-breeding, weaving, cooking, washing, building, clearing land and expanding holdings, trading by ship with mainland Europe and the British Isles.”  Jane Smiley

“This [writing about work] is an almost subversive, anti-elitist element that thrived in written literature from the beginning.  Mostly, early written English was a tool of religion and of kings to propagate and glorify both.”  Richard Manning

“Each one, man and woman, justified their space taken on the planet by the work they did.  I understood this viscerally, even as a very young child . . .  Theirs was a work ethic so deeply ingrained it was not an ethic any more than breathing was.  Accordingly, we were never schooled or instructed in the ethic: we were simply turned loose among men and told to keep up.”  Richard Manning

You might not recognize roping cuffs.

The material culture of hands-on work is deeply appealing to me: the leather, canvas, and denim of clothes and gear meant to be protective; the tools of ax, hammer, vise and saw with handles worn by many grips to directly do the work of muscles before there were power tools; the useful hats (straw, wide-brimmed, hardhats, ball caps) and boots (laced-up, high-heeled, high-top, steel-toed).  There’s a dark side to this: when I was with Bob Scriver I kept crowding him out of his own clothes and gear.  I wore his army arctic jacket with the fur trimmed hood; his jeans, his khaki Dickies shirts and even his terry bathrobe.  In self-defense, he bought me my own, but they didn’t smell and feel like him, didn’t have his form imprinted in them.  (I even wore his aftershave.)  The review of my book about Bob, “Bronze Inside and Out,” that really got it was a video from Cinematheque in Paris who accompanied their images with the song, “Honey, can I put on your clothes?”  It made so strong a connection with those young men that it has never broken.

This wasn’t a cross-dressing thing.  I was still a woman who desired men, but on THEIR terms, and with their power to do work.  I’ve said the closest I can come to explaining was the way a young boy feels about his powerful older relatives: the ones who can hunt, ride a horse, drive a truck, build houses, and in our case cast bronze, pour cement, run wiring and plumbing, and operate a photography dark room.  I didn’t have the physical strength to do all those things, but wanted the emblems, and I wanted to be close to the work and workers.  Around here boys -- and sometimes wives or dogs -- ride shotgun with competent men so they can fetch, carry, and provide a little feedback.  “What did that guy say?”  The man picks up the bill.

After I left Browning, Montana, I wore my own uniform as an animal control officer (same as the county posse deputies, including badge and mountie hat), handled a different sort of chains and leather, drove a truck with a crew of barking dogs in the back, but had no one to ride shotgun except the radio attendant.  Electronic connections weren’t there yet, so it was do-it-or-lose-it, the same as any man.  When I left that job, I went into my head and stayed there at Divinity School and after.  But the matrix for writing had already been established.  The feel of a keyboard is nothing like the easy handling of reins, but it feels a little the same in my head.  The long prairie landscape and the logic of finding gates is not different from constructing an essay.

The Oxford material culture of BBC mystery series like “Inspector Morse” or “Inspector Lewis,” is very much like the University of Chicago: stone quads, labyrinth libraries, long talks over public tables -- and always the sidekick who is learning but also providing a slightly different take on the world.  As an academic sidekick (grad student) I loved it, but there was always the missing element of being “in the field,” or in a loft making something.  In fact, Christian imagery (which is not the same as dogma) is often work imagery:  shepherds, fishermen, tentmakers.  My dean was always talking about tentmakers, which was a common skill for early evangelists as well as being a decent metaphor for community building.  For him, it was only a metaphor.  For me, who had helped make tipis, it was a sensory reality.  

The work of children is to take into themselves the sensory reality of where they are.  Then as artists they can create new realities.  This is at the very core of being human, the understandings we can bring to each other in our relationships, including those of work.  It gives us freedom and effectiveness.

Strangely, the most interesting contexts in cities are often the decaying railyards, factories, industrial cadavers now broken and rusting, leaking their body fluids into rainbow-filmed puddles.  There are elements of danger, which can cause children to be excluded -- as if one could ever exclude children even in military combat zones.  Boys and dogs can infiltrate almost as skillfully as rats, for the same reason: the constant exploring, shuttling, feeling for gaps, looking for places where connections are broken.  Cultures try to prevent girls from doing such things.

But they don’t always succeed.  I remember in the Sixties stepping into a huge crumbling Browning building through a place where a board had disappeared.  I was standing in what -- I’m sure from reading since -- was built as Gobert Hall, not formally named but called by the name of the builder, who probably nailed it together himself.  It was for entertainment: basketball, traveling shows, and the like.  It’s last use was as a movie theatre.  The projector, those rattling, jerky, smoking-hot, smelly machines that I used to know how to thread, was missing but the stand was there and thrown around on the ground were the cans and reels -- none with film: the long silky slippery tapes of story were gone.

Up at the front was still the asbestos fire curtain with its depiction of a dam breaking, water rolling towards the audience.  Gobert Hall, built in the early years of industrial engineering, reflected the fascination of being able to control rivers -- almost.  To Bob as a boy, the image was intense, near-reality and he worried that the water might escape the mural and overwhelm the audience.  By the time I saw it, all the seating but one broken section had been sold and removed.  I flipped the wooden seats up and down to hear the sound of them.  Pigeons, who go everywhere like boys and rats, flew out the spaces in the roof.

In those days I wore galoshes with felt liners an inch thick, the kind with flip-over latches on the front, but I never fastened them so I jingled when I walked.  Old Indians would stop me to say,  “Sister!  You must fasten your shoes!  They will trip you!”  Danger lurks everywhere but if you worry about it all the time, you’ll never get anywhere.  Try to keep up.

“You cannot change the reality that the world is a dangerous place. So it is an illusion to think that we can be secure. We would be much better off if we'd simply give up that illusion and say, "I am going to die, I could die at any moment—now I'm going to get on with enjoying life."    Richard Manning