Books: In Search of Immortality the Tree of Life

The English novel was born in forgery. Robinson Crusoe never existed. Neither did Lemuel Gulliver or Pamela Andrews. Yet they all left detailed accounts of their lives and adventures, thanks to the intercessions of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Richardson. As readers grew more sophisticated, authors in England and the U.S. felt less obliged to offer fiction in the guise of fact. But the tradition of the imaginary autobiography has continued to attract notable writers from Dickens and Twain to Salinger and Bellow. In the right hands, the old trick of the sham document can still inspire belief and wonder. The Tree of Life comes from the right hands.

Author Hugh Nissenson’s fifth book and second novel purports to be the private diary of one Thomas Keene, 42, a widower who has settled in Richland County, Ohio, on the rim of the then unsettled wilderness. His first entry, on July 1, 1811, is an inventory of his credits and debits, including the $304 he owes the federal land office for the purchase of 160 acres of farmland. If he knew he were writing a story, Keene might decide to begin it with something more exciting than a ledger sheet. But he has no idea, of course, what shape his book will take. He is innocent of the events that await him.

As the days and entries multiply, both Keene and the people around him assume increasingly interesting shapes. He sets up a still to tide himself over the first year of farming and is soon selling 80 proof corn whisky at 32 cents a gallon. He is one of his own best customers. “Drunk” becomes a steady, solitary refrain during the fall and winter. He also struggles with carnal desires. He reads and translates erotic passages from Juvenal. When these sessions succeed, he writes: Masturbatus sum. Shortly after he arrives, he develops a crush on Fanny Cooper, the daughter-in-law of the local Methodist preacher, whose husband then providentially dies of a rattlesnake bite. As the diarist’s history slowly emerges, he becomes that quintessential hero of American literature, the self-exile on the run from his past.

“I took you months ago for an educated man,” the Rev. Cooper tells Keene, correctly. For the new settler has kept quiet about his Harvard education and the Protestant flock he once ministered to in Blue Hill, Me. The loss of his wife, whom he did not love, cost him a creed that he did not trust: “In whisky veritas. When Abby died, I was left alone with the Juvenal. Fearing I had been delivered into Satan’s hands, I denied my faith rather than face God’s wrath.” He confesses to himself: “Within a year, I learned I could live without God.”

Frontier life proves a stern test for believers and infidels alike. The only serene person in the tiny settlement is John Chapman, who is a disciple of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and labors under an angel’s commandment to plant apple trees. He will later enter American legend under the name Johnny Appleseed, but for now he serves as a useful emissary between the whites and the nearby encampment of Delaware Indians. The local chief has made a treaty of peace, but he may not be able to restrain his warriors. It is 1812, the British are massing on the Canadian border, and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh has called for all Indians to arise against the settlers. Trapped by this turmoil is Lettiece Shipman, a freed slave from Kentucky who had hoped to go to Canada. In the meantime, she does laundry and sells sexual favors to Keene in return for booze, which he prudently waters beforehand. Betrothed to Fanny and trying to kick his addiction to liquor, Keene fantasizes about the time when he will enjoy both a white and a black woman in his bed.

What happens instead is a burst of violence that would seem incredible were | it not for Keene’s matter-of-fact transcriptions of what he has seen or heard. He and a scouting party find three friends massacred: “Martha’s breasts were skinned. They are made by Indians into bullet pouches, says Beam.” That juxtaposition of horror and information perfectly captures the genius of this imaginary diary. For Nissenson has created an apparently loose, formless work that is poetic in its artful selectivity. Scarcely a word is wasted. Hardly an aspect of the struggle to found a new civilization remains untouched. The Tree of Life dramatizes, sometimes with almost unbearable intensity, the American dream and its attendant nightmare. There is the heroism of embattled migrants, some motivated by greed or propped up by drink, others spurred on by a vision of their God’s imperative. There is also the tangled, hopeless enmity between the invaders and the natives and between the whites and the blacks who have been made slaves.

Nissenson, whose previous fiction (My Own Ground, A Pile of Stones) dealt almost exclusively with Jewish subjects, extends his range with this novel. He never steps out of character to make any of its burdens explicit. Keene does not know the meaning or historical import of the events he jots down in what he calls his “Waste Book.” No longer able to believe in heavenly salvation, he does think of his journal as “my hope of Immortality.” It will take a few decades to reach a firm verdict, but a first reading of The Tree of Life strongly suggests that Keene will get his wish.