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Sarah Vowell’s ‘Wordy Shipmates’: Learned, funny
People have wielded the term “Puritan” as a pejorative for years. If you’ve ever tried to accuse someone of being straight-laced and sexually cloistered, chances are you’ve resorted, without thinking twice, to the P word.
In her pop history “The Wordy Shipmates,” Sarah Vowell wants to inspire you to think again. “I’m always disappointed when I see the word ‘Puritan’ tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys,” she writes. “Because, to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
Despite the prevalent stereotype that they were stodgy, simplistic moralists, the Puritans were an intriguing and, at times, contradictory lot. These brave pioneers suppressed radical individual thought yet represented the first golden age of America, reading and writing with a voraciousness that would put most of us to shame. They annihilated native cultures in their dogged mission to the New World while trumpeting the virtues of idealized communal living. And they were rather passionate about sex … as long as it was between two people bound by a marriage contract.
From her first book, 1997’s “Radio On,” a critical diary of American radio (on which she has since become a major player, thanks to her work on public radio’s “This American Life”), to 2005’s “Assassination Vacation,” which detailed a road trip she took to excavate the history of presidential assassinations, Vowell has proven herself to be a thoughtful and sarcastic writer who struggles openly with the glory and shame of American cultural and political history, not to mention its present state.
In “The Wordy Shipmates,” she spotlights not the Separatist Pilgrims who rode the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth — they of elementary school plays — but the Nonseparatist Pilgrims who left England 10 years later, in 1630, to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rhode Island.
The Puritans of Vowell’s work felt the Church of England had become almost indistinguishable from the Catholic church. But instead of berating the church and starting a full-fledged war (like the ones then raging in continental Europe), they humbly bowed their heads and gathered for a brutal journey to a new land in hope of purifying their parent church and starting anew.
Vowell admits that the differences between Separatists and Nonseparatists borders on nitpicking. She confesses that her interest in the latter comes from the fact that, unlike the Separatists, who abandoned the Church of England, the Nonseparatists hedged their bets.
“(I find their) qualms messier and more endearing,” Vowell writes. “They were leaving for the same reasons the Pilgrims left, but they had either the modesty to feel bad about it or the charitable hypocrisy to at least pretend to. Maybe it’s because I live in a world crawling with separatists that I find religious zealots with a tiny bit of wishy-washy, pussy-footing compromise in them deeply attractive.”
That passage shows Vowell at her best, finding humor and nuance in people and ideas that are often painted with broad strokes or ignored.
Beyond her love of their neuroticism, Vowell feels sympathy for the Puritans because she believes history has overlooked their thirst for knowledge, writing and reading — a passion seemingly shared by the author’s gang of public radio and McSweeney’s mates, although to entirely different ends. After forming the Massachussetts Bay Colony under the guidance of John Winthrop, the Puritans, whose pamphlets, speeches, sermons and letters serve as the primary source material for Vowell’s book, established Harvard in order to give their sons a place to “receive proper, orthodox theological education grounded in the rigors of studying Hebrew and Greek.”
Still, Vowell hardly whitewashes their history. “Certainly the Puritans believed and said and did many unreasonable things,” she writes. “That kind of goes with the territory of being born before the Age of Reason.”
Vowell ably ties several of the ideas of 17th-century New England to many of our modern predicaments, namely the idea that the people of Massachusetts Bay intended to help the American Indians much in the same way that the Bush administration has attempted to spread democracy in the Middle East. Additionally, we see how history repeats itself, sometimes perversely, when Winthrop’s claim that the Puritans were establishing a “city on a hill” in America popped up in the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
“(Kennedy) boils down the two phrases from ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ that mean the most to him: ‘We must always consider, (Winthrop) said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,’ ” Vowell writes.
“I fall for those words every time I hear them, even though they’re dangerous, even though they’re arrogant, even though they’re rude,” she continues. “(Kennedy) does not mention that the whole world is staring in America’s direction because we have a lot of giant scary bombs, but I am guessing that is partly what he meant.” It’s a tribute to Vowell’s open-mindedness that she can regard such historical ironies as at once chilling and seductive.
The book’s only weakness is its nonlinear structure, which ultimately undermines its coherence. Unlike her previous three books, “The Wordy Shipmates” isn’t broken into vignettes or individual stories. Instead, Vowell tries to weave a complex narrative that begins on the coast of England in 1630 and ends in modern America. The constant back and forth between the 17th and 21st centuries can be dizzying.
Thankfully, the bits and pieces that make up “The Wordy Shipmates” are engaging and informative. Unlike the Puritans, Vowell is no judgmental killjoy. But like them, she is never boring or stupid.
Sarah Vowell at BookPeople
Tuesday, October 28
7 p.m.
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