The Life of William Cowper: The Musical...."Pity and Shame" by Ursula K. Le Guin

The world loves to pander to the nostalgia of my generation, at least while my generation currently comprises the top earners in America. One of the products of this pandering to our nostalgia has been the proliferation of musicals based on the greatest hits of bands people my age tend to like. There's been Steppin' Out, featuring the works of Mr. William M. Joel, Head over Heels, featuring the works of The Go-Gos, Mamma Mia!, and, oh, just a ton of so-called "jukebox musicals."

They aren't good. They wouldn't get green-lit if people my age weren't such saps, but we are. We're indulgent of things that make us sentimental.

If you write great literature over a long lifetime, maybe one day you will have an idea that isn't that great. Something like, "I'll take some key lines from the poetry of William Cowper, then try to work a story around that." And, if you've had a truly exceptional career, like Ursula K. Le Guin has, Tin House will publish your bad idea, because the magazine is about to go out of print, and it's the last thing you wrote after not writing for a long time, and everyone wants another chance to hear from you before you die. Which you will do in early 2018.

Tin House will publish your story a few months after you die, and then the year after, still full of nostalgia, Best American Short Stories editor Anthony Doerr will pick it, even though there were doubtlessly more deserving stories published during the period in question. But you know what, you're Ursula K. Le Guin, and you've earned a little indulgence.

So I'm going to treat the story with the same indulgence. It's too long, has at least two dull expositional blocks, and it uses the word "pity" six times and "shame" or "ashamed" eight times, just in case you missed what the title was. It's August one minute, and then it's July (I can prove it), and not because we flashed back. But there's something worth cherishing at the bottom of this story.

Necessary background

One of the two main characters is William Cowper. Not the British poet of the 18th century, although his work is often quoted and the character is deeply aware of Cowper's works, but a William Cowper in California at some undetermined period late in its gold mining boom. William gets smashed by a cave-in at the mine, and he spends a lot of the story hallucinating. 

While hallucinating, he drifts into some of the poetry of the British Cowper. In particular, he is thinking of "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity." The poet Cowper was temporarily put in an asylum, during which he wrote of feeling like he was sinking beneath the Earth. In the poem, the poet Cowper alluded to Abiram, which brings us to another key allusion in the story. In Numbers 15, Abiram challenged Moses, and Moses basically asks God to make Abiram and his entire family sink into the Earth to show how mad God is that they challenged Moses and God. God obliges. Hence linking Abiram to the feeling of falling frighteningly beneath the Earth.

Finally, there are references to Cowper's "Light Shining Out of Darkness," from which we get the oft-quoted phrase that "God moves in a mysterious way." The first two stanzas of that poem go like this:

                  God moves in a mysterious way
                  His wonders to perform;
                  He plants his footsteps in the sea
                  And rides upon the storm.

                  Deep in unfathomable mines
                  Of never-failing skill,
                  He treasures up his bright designs,
                  And works his sov'reign will.

Now you pretty much have the soundtrack Le Guin is going to work into a story, including turning those "mines" into literal gold mines.

Pity and Shame...and pity and shame and pity and shame

The story never touches on another Biblical moment, the story of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but it could have, because that is the original moment of shame and pity mingled. Adam and Eve eat the fruit and are suddenly ashamed. God becomes angry and casts them out of the garden, but not before he takes pity on them and clothes them to cover the very nakedness of which they have just become ashamed. There is, perhaps, an intricate link for humans between these two emotions, with shame on behalf of one person engendering pity in the other. 

As I've already said, the text does not let the reader forget either the title or the thematic core of the story, as both "pity" and "shame" are written many times each. When the ideas appear, they are typically paired. That's the way it is from the beginning. Rae is nursing William Cowper and comforting him when he has night terrors, when William is still not able to understand what has happened to him. Rae is pitying him. Meanwhile, he hears himself crying, but cannot even tell what the sound is. "He heard something whimpering like a dog. It made him ashamed."

When Doc hires Rae to care for William, he tries to tenderly bring up the subject of how she will have to help him use the chamber pot, meaning she'll have to deal with his genitals. Doc gets embarrassed, and Rae's reaction is measured because of this: "She might have been angry or embarrassed except that he was embarrassed..."

We tend to think of pity as a terrible consolation prize for someone when they are in love and hoping to be loved in return. But Rae discovers that pity can be a stronger emotion than passion: ""...holding and handling the hurt helpless man all the time, she was as close to him as she had ever been to Pete, but in a different way. There was no shame in it. There was no love in it. It was need, and pity. It didn't sound like much, but when you came to the edge between life and death where he was, and she with him, she saw how strong pity was, how deep it went."

She then realizes that when she was making love to Pete, her bum of a man who mercifully takes off, leaving the story free of him soon after William shows up, the infatuation made her care less about other things. But pity makes her care more.

Moreover, pity for William has driven shame away. She has felt shame for much of her life because her mother spent some time as a prostitute. But with William, her pity for him has taken away the sting of shame. She actually loses track of her shame too much, and flaunts in front of one of a nasty visitor to William that although she had been living with Pete, but wasn't married. She gets all red, and thinks that "it didn't make any difference if she wasn't ashamed. Other people were. They were ashamed for her, of her, that she lived among them. They blushed for her. Their shame was on her, a weight, a load she couldn't get out from under." (SEEEE!!! It's like Cowper's load that buried him!!! Parallelism!!!))

We get some sections from Cowper's point-of-view, and he's feeling a lot of the same things about pity and shame: Much of what she had to do for him was embarrassing to him, shameful. It would have been unbearable if she'd felt the same way about it. She didn't. She took necessity for granted. She was grown up."

Somewhere in this onslaught of observations about pity and shame, we get introduced to the final allusion." MacIver first mentions the "God moves in mysterious ways" idea, although he's not aware of it coming from Cowper the poet. It's just something he says when he hears Cowper's life story.

But Cowper the miner is intimately familiar with Cowper the poet. He's got his book of poetry in his chest, along with a copy of Dickens' Little Dorrit. Rae reads Dickens one night, because they're tired of her reading from the Biblical story of Abiram, which brings on one last shame/pity pair as the doctor falls asleep listening to Rae read to William, then cusses as he wakes up.

Oh, also, somewhere in there Rae feels guilty for having looked in William's trunk, although she did it for good reasons, but her shame makes William feel "pity so sharp, so urgent, pity like a knife stab." Just to make sure everyone knows why the story was named thus.

The story comes to a close as William hears the local church singing hymns on Sunday morning. He can't stand it, so he sings Cowper's "Light Shining Out of Darkness" to a tune of his own devising.

What to make of all this pity, all this shame, God working mysteriously, and gold, gold, GOLLLD?

It's clear the story wants to say something about pity and shame. And why not? They're both incredibly strong human emotions. Shame, in particular, doesn't get enough credit for being socially useful and an unbelievable motivator. When asked why they didn't run away under fire, most Civil War soldiers gave some version of not wanting to feel ashamed as their answer. And pity is very close to empathy, which is quite possibly the single most basic human emotion, without which no other emotion worth having is possible.

But I'm not sure what the story wanted to say or make us feel about pity and shame. The story felt like it threw a bunch of strong elements into a stew and hoped they'd make the reader feel something. The most obvious passage where I felt this was when William was thinking about the mine collapse that maimed him: "Men dug tunnels after gold, he thought, but they didn't build them right. If they'd take pity on each other and themselves, they'd build right. At least shore up their ratholes with timber you could count on." This was a rather awkward attempt to bring together disparate elements in the story: gold and God's mines, pity, the mysterious ways of God, etc.

In the end, this is a story with three very skillfully drawn and likable characters, characters who interact in some way and think thoughts about pity, shame, and God's will. It gives us a happy ending, as if to agree with the notion that God is working all things out according to His will for the good of those who love Him.

I don't know if it was an earned ending. But it was an earned ending to a career and life for Le Guin. This story would never have seen the light of day if it had been written by an unknown, but I'm willing to accept it as the imperfect last attempt of a great mind to say what was still unsaid as the end drew near. Pity, shame, empathy, strong binds that seem to apply even when we meet strangers...there's something there, and if we don't get a story that quite unearths the gold of what that something is, we can at least enjoy knowing that treasure exists somewhere.