Book It: Interview with Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

Bostonist: Obviously you had to focus on Boston because the Massachusetts Bay colonists settled there, but was there another reason for doing so? Or anything particularly interesting that you learned about Boston in your research?

Vowell notes, "usually in my writing I do a lot of traveling and tourist stuff and Boston doesn't have a lot of that stuff... and I realized it's because Boston was successful as a city" and doesn't have to rely solely on its history. She relates that "the Winthrop Building was the first skyscraper in Boston and I just thought that was such a perfect picture of Boston, that his house would be the spot of the first skyscraper and not a museum to his memory." At least we still have Paul Revere's house in all its glory.

She continues, "I'm a Westerner so Boston's so [chock full] of history, it's just so giddy to me to go there because it's just so concentrated and varied… Coming from Montana we basically have spread out history that's just all Indian wars and old age copper baron greed. To any American child, New England sort of… looms large just because of Thanksgiving pageants and all that." Vowell describes many a televised Thanksgiving pageant in her book, from Happy Days to The Brady Bunch, and analyzes the historical misrepresentations of each.

You talk in the book about the strong sense of community the Puritans put forth, being members of the same body and all that. But isn't it a very conditional community that can vanish instantly, or even result in ears getting cut off?

Vowell likes "John Winthrop's model of Christian charity, laboring together and suffering together [as] members of the same body knit together with the ligaments of love," but adds, "On the other hand, it costs something, especially for people who refuse to agree to agree... The sense of community is enforced through browbeating," as with the banishment of Roger Williams from Massachusetts.

Vowell says, "The tension between freedom and community is the subject and theme I'm drawn to whenever I write about anything … but especially American history because there's that tension between 'we the people' and 'pursuit of happiness' and if you really think about each person pursuing his or her own… happiness sometimes that gets in the way of your neighbor's pursuit of happiness." This tension is "always interesting to me and it's just a rich topic especially in the founding of Massachusetts. The thing I love about the founders of Boston and its environs is just how argumentative they were… all their bickering and how feisty they all were. Especially researching Winthrop it seems like they're just trying to hold this rickety group of bickerers together and there always on the verge of arguing themselves into oblivion." Apparently there's something to the strict regulation of community--without it, things might have fallen apart!

Vowell finds "something so beautiful about [Winthrop's image, members of the same body, very Christlike," but "On other hand I'm a 21st-century American woman so obviously I always eventually side with the individual. But I do love Roger Williams' insistence on sticking up for his own beliefs and being willing to trudge through the snow to live the way he wanted and Anne Hutchinson's insistence on not shutting up even though it cost her her home. I guess I always tend toward siding with the weirdo freak, but I understand the enormous appeal of the sense of community and brotherhood."

One of the most interesting aspects of Shipmates was your exploration of Roger Williams' Key into the Language of America, a dictionary of Indian languages. Could you talk a little more about that?

Williams "wrote [the book] on a ship when he was going back to England to get a charter for Rhode Island. " The Key is basically "a souped-up dictionary where [Williams] gives phrases he learned" and Vowell looks at it "as a chronicle of his banishment from Massachusetts and how he was so welcomed by the Narragansett" as well as Williams' description of Narragansett culture. The Indians "offered food and shelter and comfort" to Williams, and his account of their language "reads almost like Winthrop's sermon come to life, you know, in the sense of rejoicing and mourning together, obviously without the Jesus component." Williams is "very indebted to [the Narragansett] for taking him in."

Not only did the Indians offer Williams assistance, they also took him along with them on adventures. Vowell says "Narragansett hunts required canoe skills [Williams] didn't have," but "his Narragansett friends would reassure him, 'If you fall out you won't drown, we'll save you, we'll take care of you'"--a less conditional type of community than the Puritans', perhaps.

Williams' depiction of the Narragansett is "not completely rosy... he does describe their homes as filthy smoky holes and he's clearly completely horrified by native religious ceremonies, which are to him out-and-out devil worship."

Still, "out of everyone in New England in the 17th century he's the most open minded toward the native population, the least judgmental." He "believes in Europeans getting native permission to settle the land" and also, remarkably, "sees the Indians in his midst as people, which means he thinks they're as horrible as anyone else and almost all [of them] are going to hell just like almost all the whites are going to hell. He doesn't really differentiate between the two groups." This kind of negativity is thus ironically representative of notable fairness on Williams' part.

Despite seals about "helping" the Indians, the Puritans don't seem to have done much evangelizing to the Indians. Why was that?

One of the "stated goals of immigration to America" is converting the natives. The Puritans "say they are [evangelizing] and even Williams says that's one reason why he's writing a [language] key for future missionaries, but they don't really get around to doing it too much. Some do, like John Eliot, who translated the bible into Algonquin. He was probably the most famous of the 17th century missionaries, and he converted a lot of Indians to Protestantism. There even were towns of 'praying Indians'." But converting the Indians "just wasn't a priority in reality," according to Vowell--guess the Puritans had more important stuff to do. Like read the Bible themselves, perhaps--they were pretty into that.

Barbara Ehrenreich's recent op ed in the New York Times says we should be more pessimistic, like the Puritans. What do you think of this idea?

"It's an interesting argument and I probably more or less agree… [pessimism] is a Puritan trait but it's also just a kind of one of basically two world views... it's basically glass half empty or full. But I actually think the Puritans' pessimism is something that recommends them, especially like with Winthrop and that model of Christian charity. And his hope that New England shall be as city on a hill and how that got passed down as a beacon of hope... but to Winthrop and his shipmates, to be a city on a hill meant that everyone's watching and they might watch you fail. And how much more horrible is it to fail in plain sight of the whole world? To [Winthrop], this wasn't something that spurred him on to greatness… everyone's watching, we're totally blessed, we could reach this height and be this beacon of hope, and if we're not, everyone will know it and we'll be a huge failure and embarrassment and it will be a black mark on our name." There's a "fear of reckoning" that the Puritans had, Vowell says, and "We sort of lost that [fear] and that fear of failure is a great motivator."

Relating optimism and pessimism to current politics, Vowell says "A pessimist can't get elected president." Vowell cites Mario Cuomo's speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, in which he dissected Reagan's use of "city on a hill" rhetoric and introduced the notion of "a tale of two cities" (one privileged, one disadvantaged), saying "Cuomo [was] so dead on... so clear eyed and so true [but] his party won one state that year, so clearly that doesn't work with the American people." Still, "understanding a problem is how one solves it, and a little pessimism couldn't hurt." Vowell even wonders if we shouldn't call "for a little more of that [pessimism] based on the way things are going with the economy and various wars."

Barack Obama spoke of America as a "beacon on a hill" in the first presidential debate. What do you think of his use of the concept?

"He actually mentions American exceptionalism in some of his interviews. He uses those words and something is on his mind, but I do like how he seems to understand certainly, in slightly more Puritanical terms, just what I've been talking about: that America has this responsibility to live up to its ideals... He's in favor of it and still questions it, sees it as a responsibility."

Is there anything interesting you found in your research that you weren't able to fit in your book?

"Normally answer to that question is no, but… I was going to do a lot more on the English Civil War and it's a book where I just kept boiling that down because I don't think anyone would really care and it was just a distraction. A friend of mine who lives in London discovered… there was an assassination attempt on Oliver Cromwell and one of the guys who tried to kill Cromwell was a schoolteacher in London and his name was Peter Vowell. So someone with my last name, clearly a royalist, was hanged at Charing Cross for trying to assassinate Oliver Cromwell. A purely trivial tidbit. The juicier bits got in [the book]."

Any new projects on the horizon?

"The next one might about the history of Hawaii. Your great state will figure prominently in that history as well, what with your missionaries and whalers. I think of it as kind of a sequel."

Hawaii, Massachusetts, and whalers! Oh my. We look forward to this next book, which we recommend calling Puritan Hula. Aloha!