Succoring Us in Our Infirmities: From Alma to Anne Tyler
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

Recently I watched an interview on television with Donny Osmond, who described years of suffering from an anxiety disorder so severe that it threatened the course of his career. Convinced that people were laughing at him, he became more paralyzed with every performance of his hit Broadway musical. A therapist worked with Osmond, assigning him tasks that caused him to face his fears, and one day she had him return two shirts he had purchased and ask for a refund. This famous, successful star shed tears as he tried to explain how difficult this simple task was for him, and the elation he felt when he was able to accomplish it. His poignant story brought to mind a great passage in the Book of Mormon that describes the ways in which the Savior will take upon himself the sins and the pains and afflictions of mankind, concluding with this fascinating insight: .He (Christ) will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” (Alma 7:12)

What an interesting word, infirmity. Webster defines it as “shaky, unstable, or frail,” and the Oxford English Dictionary gives it as “weakness, want of strength, or the lack of power to do something.” This passage seems to say that beyond the power to forgive sins, the Savior has to power to “take upon himself” or enter into our weaknesses, frailties, fears and failures and “succor” us in them, succor being defined as “to aid, assist or relieve.” This is a comforting thought, since so many of our struggles in life have more to do with weakness than wickedness. We fear, we falter, we fail, and we suffer the consequences. It is important, therefore, to understand not only right and wrong, but also something about weakness and infirmity. It is here that a great novelist like Anne Tyler can help us. She is less interested in the wickedness of the world than the weaknesses of people like us. Consider, for example, her careful, compassionate description of a man paralyzed by fear. Jeremy, the protagonist of Celestial Navigation, is a talented artist and a gentle, kind man, yet his fears cripple his ability to live a normal life:

These are some of the things that Jeremy Pauling dreaded: using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on electrical appliances. (Celestial Navigation, 86)

There is something incredibly moving about this list for me. This long paragraph describing his difficulty with nearly every aspect of life concludes with Jeremy’s conviction that “other people seemed to possess an inner core of hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born without it.” (87) Jeremy is a study in fear, and the rippling, damaging effect it can have. He appears to be the very definition of infirmity.

Mary, on the other hand, is a study in strength, bearing child after child and handling everything with aplomb. Her fatal flaw is a kind of selfishness that leaves her unwilling to share her parenting relationship with a man, though she relies upon one after another for support. She must own the children; she protects them from their respective fathers and trusts no one to enter the circle she creates for herself and her brood. The climactic moment in the novel is the birth of the fourth child (or fifth, we lose count) when Mary goes to the hospital without Jeremy. He is finally completely excluded from everything but the conception of the child. Every mother understands the sweet circle of two that is formed when a new baby arrives, which then opens to admit the father and complete the family unit. Mary cannot take that step, turning her mothering into a kind of emasculation of the males in her life. Jeremy sees what needs to be done but lacks the power to step up and act. Mary sees that she needs help yet lacks the humility to admit her weakness and let her husband be strong. They need each other, yet cannot reach across the divide and create a true married relationship. In the end they are truly only pretending to be married.

All of this comes to us in the interesting narrative structure of this novel, through the voices of the inmates of Jeremy’s home, which is let out to renters. The boarding house, with its odd combination of individual lives that bump into each other now and then in communal spaces, feels like one of those dollhouses we played with as children, with the front wall missing from all the rooms. We enter first one room, then another, observe the inhabitants, and see how they interact. Miss Vinton, a connecting link through the tale, describes their situation and reveals Tyler’s underlying theme:

If you want my opinion, our whole society would be better off living in boarding houses. I mean even families, even married couples. Everyone should have his single room with a door that locks, and then a larger room downstairs where people can mingle or not as they please. (141)

By using the boarding house as a metaphor for the larger world, Tyler shows us that we do, in fact, co-exist in much the same way as the inmates of the Pauling home. Our triumphs and failures are interconnected. Jeremy and Mary live out their lives in a confined space, yet many are affected by their actions. Their story does not end happily, yet somehow there is a hopeful element in their domestic woes. Though in the long run Jeremy and Mary are unable to create a stable, happy life together, they do create a family. They have children, they go forward, and they overcome some of their fears and weaknesses while succumbing to others.

The Artist as Outsider

Anne Tyler brings the perspective of an outsider to her observations. Raised in a Quaker commune and home schooled by brilliant parents, Tyler entered public school for the first time at the age of eleven. She had never used a telephone, could strike a match on the sole of her bare foot, was acquainted with home farming, Appalachian crafts and already deeply immersed in the classics. Her early years in the commune gave Tyler what she calls “my sense of distance.” One rarely has a sense in Tyler’s novels of the hustle and bustle of place and time; in fact, most of her books could take place anywhere. Instead, one notices the workings of the inner lives of ordinary folk. This sense of distance, the disciplined quiet of the Quaker upbringing, and the pull of the land are evident in her settings, her characters and her plots. “Daydreaming,” she declares, “is the most useful activity I know of, but until now it’s been almost universally frowned upon.” (Anne Tyler as Novelist, p. 5) There is a dreamy quality about her books that sets Tyler apart from the plot-driven, sensational literature that crowds the bestseller lists today.

Tyler has something to teach us about our infirmities, our weaknesses and our fears. She also invariably has something hopeful to say about the human spirit. Though Jeremy fails at relationships, his art expresses something he is unable to say in language. Though Mary is unable to sustain a marriage, she is a strong, nurturing mother. Even childless spinsters like Miss Vinton have a vital role to play as they lend support to this struggling family. In Tyler’s world, few people are really evil, and everyone is good for something. Small victories, like the day when Jeremy walks seven blocks to see his daughter’s play, are celebrated with quiet grace. As Miss Vinton says, “There are other kinds of heroes than the ones who swim through burning oil.” Her characters may be full of infirmities, but Tyler believes in them. As we come to understand their struggles we may receive a little help in conquering our own fears, and kind of succor that lifts us and draws us closer to those we love and seek to understand.

Readers Comment on Celestial Navigation

Our book club members offered a variety of comments on Anne Tyler’s novels and on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Here is a sampling:

I have to tell you Anne Tyler has been one of my favorite authors ever since I saw her recommended in an article written by an English professor from BYU. Her characters have helped me understand some people in my life that have been hard for me to deal with. I always wondered if she read her husband’s files on his clients. – Sherri

I finished reading Celestial Navigation yesterday. I could hardly put it down. One place highlighted in my book is page 85 “Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning; lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stoke.” A sad thought I feel, but it gives a feeling of how negative one can become.

I was very interested in Mary. She got married young. Was an only child, and loved children? I was the same way and we even had the same number of children, six. Because of divorce, I also had to raise them alone for a while. How lost one can feel. From there on our lives were different and made me realize how much I have to be thankful for. Already I have gone back and re-read some passages. I had never heard of this book. Probably will end up reading through the book again. – Donna

This is a book about despair in all its guises. Despair in its final form is the absence of hope, and in this book the only person who has come to terms with it is Miss Vinton, who acts as the prop for all the rest of the characters in their various plights. The book portrays the final lesson that despair in its ultimate form is largely self-induced. There were times in the book when I wanted to grab Jeremy by the scruff of his neck and kick his rear end from here to eternity. Mary’s solution to her problems was to stop the world and get off for w while and she managed to do this successfully at least three times, until at last she succeeded in unwittingly destroying those that loved her, Jeremy, Brian and the rest. I am not sure whether I enjoyed the book or not. It teaches and powerful lesson; that you cannot quite on yourself, and if you do, you damage many other lives and your own as well. – Phil

One of the qualities I admire in good writing, and this is very prevalent in Anne Tyler and most definitely in Shakespeare, is what I call character integrity. Some writers create characters for their fiction and then twist them around to suit the plot. In my estimation, when a real, rounded character is created, the writer has to craft the plot to accurately reflect the fictional person. There are certain traits and actions a character will follow and to have them do something otherwise just to make a “good” story is to betray the individual. It immediately sets a jarring note when an inconsistent action is taken by a character. I tend to see this a lot on television but it also appears in fiction writing. Tyler’s people may be quirky, and heaven knows they are, but they follow their own patterns of quirkiness and are true to who they really are in the context of the novels. Shakespeare’s creations are also consistent, if in a larger, more dramatic scale.- Cindy

Thank you for your wonderful email. I also think Ken Branagh’s Othello is a brilliant video. I was lucky enough to see him at Stratford in Henry Vth when he was just taking the English stage by storm and then later when he had formed his own production company in a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Just a tip your readers may consider. I did my degree in Elizabethan Theatre and studied many of the Bard’s plays. I always found it really useful to get a childrens version of whatever play I was about to study -this would get the plot and all the main characters clearly into my head! The milk before the meat I guess. – Kim

Shakespeare is a remarkable meld of enigma, buffoonery, and profound thought, and he does it in a very studied way in order to appeal to his audience at the particular moment. The profound matters that Shakespeare talked about were completely familiar to his audience; they experienced them every day. The enigma can only be described as sheer beauty, and it is astonishing but refreshing that he gave these great lines to minor characters, viz: the narrator’s lines in the opening of Henry V “think, when we speak of horses, you see them printing their proud hooves into the receiving earth” or Caliban’s lines from the Tempest ” this island is full of twanging and sweet sounds that hurt not…. and when I wake, I cry to dream again” and so on.

I am not sure I agree with your conclusion that Shakespeare would have loved the great sprawling film productions of today, although I have to confess that I enjoyed every one of them, particularly Richard lll with Olivier. Maybe this is a typically 20th century viewpoint. There is an intimacy about Shakespeare’s work and it’s production in the late sixteenth, early seventeenth centuries; hence its universal appeal; there are no cast of thousands, and much of the play(s) consist of only a few characters on the stage at any time, and in almost every case the great profound moments are confined to a single individual. I very much like your interpretation that Shakespeare’s concentration was putting across the individual character and it’s reaction to moments of great stress. – Phil

Thanks to all who sent comments and read along with us. In April our book is Silas Marner, by George Eliot, a beautiful little tale about the redemptive power of love. Join Meridian’s Best Books Club for extra updates and information, and to share your insights as you read.