Some Eyes
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
One of those novels of a time and a place, what does this one tell us not only about the past but about life? It says that life is hard, unbearably so. That there are no consolations.
No arguments here.
It says that people are by turns worse than you would believe and on occasion a good deal better.
That’s something of a non-answer.
And it says that those things in which people put their faith — family, church, the eternal — are impermanent and chancy — salve only for momentary problems of conscience. It doesn’t directly say any of these things, of course. But they are what this book implies.
Take a look as one occasionally must at the worst possible side of life. People freed after slavery endured by them and their immediate ancestors, but not free. Sat around in squalor, doing their best to farm, to trade, to prosper as merchants. But not wholly living, not wholly being, not seriously doing.
All the men of great vulgarity, certain they now are big guys in need of status. Their children imitate their puffed up postures. Their wives acquire in hurtful words and bruises that cements some memory of what people of that kind do to those who suffer around them.
And the floods and the diseases and the terrible pitiable actions of fate, cruel fate. And the pointlessness of it all. We know all about that by the end.
Books like these have certain qualities which so little fiction appears to be capable of copying one wonders. Even to read books like this is, in a way, a great pity, more than it is a pleasure. This book is quite brief, it covers a good deal of time. (It is not six-hundred pages, as something written by a modern MFA graduate assuredly would have been. It was not a collection of half-essays, half-memoir called something like Indefinable Thing I Once Heard or, by contrast, slave/G.I.R.L. There’s no need for such theatrics.)
It does not have all that much sitting around and thinking — in the author’s voice pretending to divulge the contents of a character’s mind — about the injustices and the great gaping wounds and the bitternesses of a particular period in history and a particular type of people.
After all, suffering and misery are universal. And in illuminating particulars, in telling specific stories, so long as we do not pretend they are beyond compare, we may express quite a lot that is broad and general about this vale of tears.
The style of this book also deserves some comment. It is extraordinary easy to read, despite its being just under ninety years old. No pomposity can survive in a style like this. It’s vernacular, it’s naturalistic. It’s how people actually spoke in the past with no degree — that I can see at least — of condescension.
Kipling, who died not long before this book was published, could not do that. Some commentators in his own day said all they ever read were the books of Kipling, that those works put great light onto parts of life they had not thought of before. But Kipling wrote about the poor, the working classes, the private soldiers, in ways that few who were twenty-first century versions of those things would recognise.
‘I only want some heggs for my hofficers,’ a working class cook or batman was said to have told, in the First World War, some foreigners who wanted to surrender the city of Jerusalem to him as the nearest British soldier to their position. To anyone reading that born after, say, 1960, such a line is not just inaccessible; it’s incomprehensible.
Hurston does not sound those false notes. It all seems true and true to life.
Briefly, one or two thoughts about Hurston and the nature of her talent. Latter-day commentators love to save writers from obscurity. It makes them feel discerning; it makes them feel like humanitarians. And so a lot of pure gibberish has been said about Hurston as if she ever really went away. But I don’t believe she ever did. No talent of that kind and of that magnitude ever disappears. Some people just affect not to have noticed it, for their own reasons. Reasons that do not survive the tests of history.