American Ghosts
by David Plante
Beacon Press. 288 pages, $24.
I SAT DOWN to read American Ghosts with high expectations. Here, after all, is the personal story of David Plante, author of fourteen books, including the famed Francoeur Trilogy, The Ghost of Henry James, The Catholic, Difficult Women, and The Family. Here is Plante’s story about growing up in a small Rhode Island French Canadian district, an area so Canadian in manners and mores that I had a hard time believing it was Yankee New England. The book begins with Plante as a toddler entranced by the French nuns in their huge black veils. It then details his immersion into the ways of his Indian grandmother, a woman steeped in the customs and superstitions of her Crau ancestors. It is this relatively isolated and protected childhood that would lead him into the world of his own imagination and mystical longings. And it’s from this point that the author finds his beginnings as an artist.
Plante is a strange boy who worries that his dead Blackfoot grandmother—“her cheekbones high and sharp edged, and her jaw square”—would appear to him at night with “her white hair in a long braid rolled up with hairpins at the nape of her neck.” The easily frightened boy begins life obsessed with his French ancestry. Questions about life and death predominate. When his Aunt Cora tells him about a prayer handed down to his father that has the power to heal burns, his curiosity about Blackfoot lore intensifies. “Some Indians did knock before they came in and, thinking this was what always had to be done to open a door, also knocked before they went out,” he writes, explaining that his great-great grandfather, “who recognized certain Indians by their footsteps, went to sit with the one who was waiting behind the stove, and there they smoked, forehead to forehead.”
This idyllic beginning is promising, and Plante’s imagery is that of winter smoke around a fireside hearth. But then he overhears his mother, having just had a fight with his father, say: “I don’t want to die in this closed-in house. I want to know the outside world.” This became a call to arms for Plante, who soon left provincial Rhode Island for sophisticated Boston, before gallivanting over to Europe, where his life would change forever.
Plante’s world as recorded here is a world of no action, of digging deep into the mundane to find treasures usually overlooked. Like Plante’s fiction, American Ghosts is about non-events, the minutiae that fill up most of life. But it’s also about the author’s conflict with belief in God, the hereafter, and ghosts—and it all begins with his mother: “Like my mother, I did not believe in ghosts, but I remained frightened of their appearing to me even as I grew into adolescence, and I remained particularly frightened of the ghost of a large, dark woman, a Mother, appearing to me.”
He does and does not believe in God; he does not believe in ghosts but is afraid of them nevertheless. There may be a God—on second thought, no, there can’t be. Still, what is this mystery of sound, color, substance, and sensation? The exploration of these themes would carry him into adulthood, although by the end of the book he still draws no firm conclusions.
As a college student, he’s able to posit: “All reason could do was to bring you along a road up a mountain to a deep gap, but to leap across the gap to God required an act of faith, which was beyond reason, and so beyond law and authority. This was where freedom was.” Reading Saint Thomas Aquinas made him almost want to leap “over with an act of faith, for this God would allow me freedom.” But that never quite happens. Plante, like James Joyce at the bedside of his dying mother, never quite kneels down to pray, though he’s much better than Joyce at going through the motions. However far he extends himself metaphysically in his contemplation of images and objects, he stays put over the chasm of belief and unbelief, like Popeye’s Olive Oyl clinging to the sides of two cliffs with her long, skinny legs. Plante runs the gamut in both directions, seeming to embrace one while at the same time overlapping and touching its polar opposite.
In college, with his roommate, there’s a touch of the sensual as he observes how “my roommate Bob crossed his delicate, long fingered hands across his chest as he slept in the bed across the room from me.” We sense what’s coming, but it’s only a smoke signal. That dam would not break until Plante journeyed to Europe, now that he had concluded, “If I couldn’t have a God who blessed me in my senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, I didn’t want a God.” America, after all, “was a country of enforced laws under the American God who took away freedom.” It would not be the same way in Europe.
He left for Europe in 1959 at the age of nineteen. By then he had concluded that only the tangible world existed. In that world were foreign languages, gleaming knives, wine glasses lit up by café lights, bowls of dense yellow butter, women smoking thin cigars, antique shops, and bookshops. On the ship from New York he met Gloria, “the most lawless person I had ever met,” and through Gloria he met an embodiment of God in Oci, a Spaniard with close-cropped hair and black eyes. The meeting changed his life, as the young mystic was no longer preoccupied with metaphysics: “Now I had to leave everything else to Oci, and I had to because I was frightened that if I did anything more—if I got up and approached his bed, invisible to me—he would, laughing, say I had misunderstood him, and this most daring moment of my life would be the all-defeating moment of my life.” Plante recalls getting up and going toward the open window and smelling Oci’s body as it “warmed of a pungent odor,” and then pressing his nose into Oci’s shoulder “to smell the odor more deeply.”
The love odor would soon fade, but not before adequate internal tribulation. In the meantime, their short affair would be punctuated by Oci’s ritual of going to Sunday Mass. “If we were both Catholics, we were different kinds of Catholics, because his Catholicism allowed him, after a night of lovemaking, to receive Communion, and mine didn’t.” The demon of the American God interfered, the feeling of perpetual unworthiness that plagues Plante throughout the book.
Like most doomed first loves, Oci drifts away, but Plante begins a quest to recapture what was lost. In the aftermath he goes home and revisits his old church where a young pastor now says Mass and preaches sermons filled “with the teachings of the Church on contraception and abortion.” Metaphysical angst returns with a flourish. “Because God did not exist, I was unable to call it a longing to be with God. It had to be a nameless longing.” That longing leads him to Niko’s door, a young Greek who eventually became Plante’s life partner.
Here the memoir essentially ends. There follows a series of chapters on Plante’s ancestry culled from historical archives and Internet searches. Not content to list the names of the long lost Plante tribe, he imagines what the lives of his ancestors must have been like by composing short stories that seem a bit of a precious distraction to accompany this otherwise beautiful memoir.
Thom Nickels has two books forthcoming, Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture, both scheduled for publication in 2005.
