The Wordy Shipmates. By Sarah Vowell. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Pp. 254. $25.95 cloth.)
It is not often that reviews appearing in the New England Quarterlyjoin a conversation about a book that already includes a savage takedown in the New York Times, and a largely positive notice in Bust, a feminist pop culture magazine. However, this is the conversation that is taking place around Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates.The New England Quarterly is neither “America’s newspaper of record,” as the New York Times, is reputed to be, nor “the magazine for women with something to get off their chests,” as Bust claims. It is, rather, “A historical review of New England life and letters.” Vowell’s latest book brings her populist approach to the first generation of English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay. I am confident that there are already far more copies of The Wordy Shipmates in print than there will ever be of all of the rest of the books reviewed in this volume of the NEQ. As such, it is worth considering here what impact a book like this might have on what non-specialists are likely to think and to know about colonial New England.
Sarah Vowell rose to prominence as a contributor to Ira Glass's NPR series This American Life. In 1997, she published Radio On: A Listener's Diary, followed in 2000 by Take the Cannoli, a collection of essays. In 2002, she established her version of popular history genre with The Partly Cloudy Patriot, followed by Assassination Vacation in 2005. As the titled of the first of these popular historical essays suggests, her approach is to offer personal and quirky reflections on historical documents and events. She readsThomas Paine's The Crisis, and expresses her ambivalent but passionate patriotism with a riff on Paine's famous rebuke to "Summer Soldiers and Sunshine Patriots."
This approach has garnered her fans, as well as detractors. Her style is polarizing, in the manner of a musician like Lyle Lovett -- if you like one of Vowell's books, you will enjoy them all, but if you don't care for the first, there is not much point in reading on. Vowell's casual style (one is tempted to say "irreverent," but she is frequently at pains to inform you that she does take American history very seriously) can obscure the more significant stylistic quirk of this book -- it is a 250 page personal essay, with no chapter breaks. For what she's doing, the effect is more readable than it sounds. Rather than chapters on, say, Winthrop, Williams, and Hutchinson, this book is a reflection on what this past means to her. The downside of this approach is that the book reads as if it could be either much longer or much shorter than it is without an appreciable effect on the impact it makes on the reader.
Vowell’s informal approach to a topic most writers treat more gravely has the potential to open this field up to new readers. I cannot object to the pop cultural references, or to a broader effort to liven up the narrative of colonial New England. If calling Anne Hutchinson the Puritan Oprah (208) makes her charisma legible to readers who will never read David D. Hall’s documentary history of the Antinomian Controversy, that’s not a bad thing. However, there are too many moments where the point of the exercise seems to be to illustrate Vowell’s cleverness, at the expense of her subject. John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” is the touchstone for her project, but she claims a relationship between Winthrop’s sermon and Ronald Reagan’s speech that is akin to the relation between Dolly Parton’s original recording of “I Will Always Love You,” and the more famous version recorded by Whitney Houston. (59) If Ronald Reagan had performed a lushly orchestrated recitation of Winthrop’s sermon in a film about a romance with Kevin Costner, the comparison might make sense, but as he did not, the comparison is misleading at best.
Unfortunately, Vowell is also casual with the actual details of her subject. To her credit, she appears to put in her time with her primary sources,but scholars of early American literature or history will not have to look hard for cringeworthy moments. Vowell refers to Williams composing A Key Into the Language of America as “by a rude lampe,” rather than Williams's account of drawing “the Materiallsin a rude lumpe." Referring to the same work, she mistakes a long s for an f, and refers to a “favor of civility” (125) rather than the Key’s “savor of civility.” (Key, p. 10)She also misspells the title of Roger Williams’s rejoinder to Cotton’s The Bloudy Tenent Washed, rendering it as The Bloudy Tenent Yet more Bloudy, instead of the actual The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody. (But she does manage a joke about the The Bloudy Tenent: Attack of the Clones.) Finally, she writes: “John Cotton, in a letter to Williams, rolls his eyes at this logic, cracking, “We did not conceive it is a just title to so vast a continent to make no other improvement of millions of acres in it, but only to burn it up for pasture.” She may be correct about the eyerolling, but she is wrong about the quotation, for Cotton actually wrote “burn it up for pastime.” See (John Cotton, Bloudy Tenent Washed, Part II, p. 28)
These errors are unlikely to bother a reader who is not already familiar with Williams and Cotton, even if these slips belie the kind of lack of attention to detail that caneventually bring discredit to an historian. Vowell is fortunate that early Americanists are not likely to give this book the kind of going-over that Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America got from Second Amendment enthusiasts.However, the question of this book’s success or failure as history is beside the point. Like Vowell’s other books,The Wordy Shipmates is autobiography in the form of history. The subject of this book is not so much 17th century New England, but the impression that the people, texts, and events of 17th century New England make on Sarah Vowell. She underscores our sense of this focus by narrating her turning to Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” for comfort after the attacks of September 11th, 2001. (52) There is nothing wrong in this approach, but the degree of success it achieves depends upon the level of interest a given reader has in Sarah Vowell.
The larger question this book raises, as much by its very existence as by its text, is what a book like this is for. It is a book that people who enjoy books by Sarah Vowell will enjoy. More generally, though, it’s not clear if it accomplishes what one might hope for from a popular history. One hope might be that people who read The Wordy Shipmates will find the stories Vowell tells so compelling that they run out and read The Journal of John Winthrop, and Glenn LaFantasie’s edition of Roger Williams’s correspondence, inaugurating a new era where people talk about the Antinomian Controversy in the grocery checkout line, and dress up as John Winthrop for Halloween. I would not bet on it, however.
If anything, the combination of Vowell’s super-casual style and the traditionally forbidding subject of seventeenth-century New England suggests that without Vowell’s intervention, this stuff is just too much for the lay reader. The merit the Bust reviewer, Emily McComb, found in this book lay in Vowell’s “brilliance” at “making history accessible to the general public through her considerable charm and humor.”In the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan, finding less humor and charm in Vowell’s charm and humor, argues that we are in “a golden age of popular narrative history,” and that the work of writers like Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough suggests that the general public can handle its popular history without TV and pop music references.
Ultimately, the status of The Wordy Shipmates as popular history depends on how we understand the word “popular.” If we use it in the sense that it modifies music – “popular music” is music lots of people like,” then its statistics (as of 16 January 2009) as #1 in the Amazon.com category of United States History: New England, and #3 in the category of United States History: Colonial Period indicate that it is a success. If we take “popular” to mean “of the people,” as in “popular vote,” the verdict is not as rosy. Vowell discusses at some length episodes of the situation comedies Happy Days and The Brady Bunch that had episodes set in or referring to seventeenth-century New England. Ultimately, The Wordy Shipmates reads like an episode of the Sarah Vowell Show that just happens to be set in seventeenth-century New England.
Jonathan Beecher Field is an assistant professor of English Literature at ClemsonUniversity. His Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London is coming out from University Press of New England in 2009.