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Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Pastoral, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Heroes, Legends, and Myth-Making
Family, Responsibility, and Duty
The Irrationality of Suffering
The Unknowability of Others
American Ideals
Summary
Analysis
It’s the summer of the Watergate hearings when the Swede reunites with Merry. The Levovs have been watching coverage of the proceedings on TV. The Swede’s parents have been up visiting from Florida the past week, but Dawn hasn’t had to worry about entertaining them—they’ve been glued to the TV screen. Lou Levov writes letters to committee members about how they should have known Nixon was crooked all along.
The Watergate hearings took place in 1973 and presented the findings of a U.S. special committee from their investigation into the Nixon administration’s wiretapping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, located in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., and Nixon’s later efforts to hide his administration’s involvement. In American Pastoral and in broader social narratives, the Watergate scandal and hearings represent how disordered, corrupt, and morally degraded American mainstream society had become since the optimism that gripped the nation in the early postwar years.
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The narration flashes back to years before, when during the Vietnam War, Lou started sending Merry copies of letters he wrote to President Johnson, wanting to curb her radical behavior and show her a better outlet to express her anger. Lou, all those years ago, can’t understand why Merry is so radically upset about the war, and he cautions the Swede against letting her express her radical views at school and in public. He worries it would affect her future prospects. Merry resists this passive form of resistance, though, and she argues to her grandfather that his letters to Johnson won’t stop the war. She also tells him that Johnson is doing to the Vietnamese what Hitler did to Jewish people.
Put simply, Lou Levov opposes the war but doesn’t become radically upset by it because it doesn’t meaningfully affect his life. He’s in good financial shape, and no one in his immediate family will be drafted, on account of their age or gender. And though news coverage of the conflict admittedly troubles Lou, with the war taking place halfway across the world, it’s easy enough to turn off the TV, forget the conflict exists, and continue on with his sheltered bubble of a life.
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Lou tries to reason with Merry, arguing that the Levovs all feel the way she does. One need only read the newspaper to become deeply troubled by the state of things these days. But America is a democracy, and Merry can vote and write to her senators if she really wants to change things. When Merry resists this, Lou loses his temper momentarily. If Merry is so unhappy here, then she can go fight for the other side. People have done it, though the country doesn’t look too kindly on traitors.
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Merry and Lou go back and forth arguing about which political figures are and aren’t fascists. When Merry calls Senator William Fulbright—one of Lou’s personal heroes—a racist, though, it’s a step too far for Lou. The Swede steps in to act as moderator. Merry thinks writing letters is futile, while Lou thinks writing letters is at least something. What matters most, the Swede concludes, is that they both think the war is wrong and want it to stop. This satisfies Lou, who proclaims his identity as a “lifetime Democrat.” After Merry’s act of violence, Lou tells the Swede he saw it coming. Lou, not wanting to lose his granddaughter, tried to warn the Swede to interfere with Merry’s growing radicalism, but the Swede would have none of it.
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Back in 1973, the Swede returns home to Dawn and his parents. There are no messages for him from Mary Stoltz. When his mother asks him if he’s going to make a steak, the Swede says yes, with “Merry’s big beefsteak tomatoes.” He meant to say “Dawn’s,” but he doesn’t correct his error. When the Swede goes to embrace his mother (Sylvia), she breaks down. She saw some old photos of Merry and was remembering the phone calls Merry used to make to her when she was a little girl. The Swede urges his mother to stay strong—for Dawn. Lou urges his wife to “control [her]self” and stop asking about Merry, but he loses his temper when the Swede suggests that even if Merry were alive, maybe she wouldn’t want to see them again. “This I refuse to believe!” Lou cries out. If Merry could see them, he maintains, she would.
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Sylvia reminds Lou that “even in ordinary families,” sometimes children go away and don’t want to see their families anymore. Lou angrily insists that the Levovs are an ordinary family. The Swede tells his parents that Merry is not a child anymore—she is 21, and neither of them should get their hopes up about ever seeing her again. Of course, what the Swede knows that his parents don’t is that not seeing Merry again is by far preferable to them seeing her in her present state. They couldn’t handle that. After some back and forth, Sylvia gently agrees to change the subject. She feels a bit better, at least, just talking about it.
The Swede notices how small, old, and frail Sylvia has become over the last five years. She used to be full of energy, and now the smallest thing can bring tears to her eyes. Currently, she’s troubled by a letter she has kept hidden in her purse, written from Lou to Jerry’s second wife, Susan, from whom Jerry has recently separated. Sylvia secretly took the letter before Lou could send it. She knows Jerry’s temper, and she knows he would fly off the handle if he found out about Lou’s having written the note, which contains a large sum of money and instructions for Susan to invest in the children’s future. Lou sent Susan money when she first called weeping about Jerry’s sudden decision to leave her. When Jerry found out, he called his father, enraged. After that, Lou suffered his first chest pains and had to be hospitalized.
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Alone, Sylvia confides in the Swede that she doesn’t know what to do. Lou resents Jerry’s creating a second broken home. She knows Lou and Jerry will get into another fight, and Jerry isn’t above becoming physical: he “doesn’t have your considerateness,” Sylvia tells the Swede. She recalls the horrible fight Jerry and Lou got into after the hamster-skin coat debacle. The girl Jerry gave it to had told her parents. The parents called Lou, who was in turn mortified. He tore Jerry apart over it, and his anger grew as Jerry responded angrily about his so-called “rights.” Jerry’s temper was bad enough then, but now Lou is an old man with a heart condition—a fight could kill him. The Swede tries to console his mother. He tells her to stay out of Jerry’s life. And if Lou has chest pains again, she can call a doctor.
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Later, Lou remarks on how great Dawn looks. He was against her face-lift at first, but he’s changed his mind. She looks like the person she was before “all that she went through.” The Swede agrees. “Erased all that suffering,” he observes of the surgeon’s work. Sylvia isn’t as convinced—it’s clear that Dawn is still waiting for Merry’s return. The Swede tries to get his parents away from the TV to help him prepare food outside, but they refuse. Lou wants to see Nixon brought into the courtroom. The Swede notes the similarity between his father’s energetic hatred of Nixon and Merry’s hatred for Johnson but doesn’t say anything.
In addition to Sylvia and Lou, the Levovs are also having Bill and Jessie Orcutt—Dawn’s architect and his wife—over for dinner. The Orcutts have been neighbors of the Levovs for years, and Bill Orcutt’s family have been prominent lawyers in the area for generations. As president of the local landmarks society, Bill is presently working on keeping Lake Hopatcong free of pollutants. When he learned that his new neighbors the Levovs were originally from the city, he offered to take them on a county tour.
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Dawn declines the invitation. She doesn’t like Bill Orcutt, finding “Ivy League guys” like him pretentious. She thinks he looks down on her, and she doesn’t like this. She insists that the only difference between “them and us” (Protestants and Catholics) is “a little more liquor.” And so, the Swede and Orcutt go on the tour alone. Orcutt shows the Swede the old iron mines and the site of the old mill. He points out the Morris Canal, which the Swede connects not with Morristown, but with Lou Levov’s oldest brother, Morris. At just 24, Morris had opened a shoe store with wife. He died in the influenza epidemic. Every time Orcutt mentions the Morris Canal on the tour, the Swede thinks of the uncle he never knew. It makes him feel so much like his father.
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Later, Orcutt leads the Swede into a Revolutionary War-era cemetery and points out the gravestone of the first Morris County Orcutt, who arrived in 1774 at the age of 20. “Interesting,” the Swede observes aloud. Inwardly, he observes that what’s actually interesting is “he’[s] never met anyone like this before.” Orcutt continues to lead the Swede through the cemetery, pointing out more gravestones of his deceased ancestors, more prominent members of Morristown. Later, though the Swede sings Orcutt’s praises to spite Dawn’s “Irish resentment,” he wonders if it’s true: did Orcutt emphasize all his prominent forebearers just so it’s extra clear to the Swede “just who he was and just who you weren’t?”
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The Swede tries to brush off his doubts about Bill Orcutt—“Jewish resentment could be just as bad as Irish resentment,” after all. All that matters is that Orcutt is fair and respectful to the Swede. He and Dawn have their hundred acres of America—they’ve “done it.” They can live how they like. And it took some doing to get there—a doubtful Lou Levov had tried to pressure them into moving into a suburban development in South Orange.
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When the Swede first mentions moving to the countryside to Lou, Lou warns the Swede it will cost a fortune to heat the hulking, antique mansion in Old Rimrock. And besides, what does the Swede need all that land for? “You’re dreaming,” Lou tells his son. He also reminds him that the Klan used to be active out here in the country. It’s not a place that will accept a Jewish family. The Swede insists that times have changed, but Lou remains unconvinced.
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The Swede refuses to back down and goes ahead with the move to Old Rimrock. He knows Lou is right—prejudice still exists. But Old Rimrock is a civilized place, and religion doesn’t need to come between the Levovs and any of their neighbors. “This is a new generation,” after all.
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As it turns out, the Levovs don’t end up getting all that close to the Orcutts, though the Swede does attend Bill Orcutt’s weekly touch football games on Saturdays. Some of the attendees, like the Swede, are ex-GIs from Essex County. One of these men is an optician named Bucky Robinson. Bucky played quarterback for Hillside High, one of Weequahic High’s rivals. The first time the Swede attended one of Orcutt’s football games, he overheard Bucky bragging to Orcutt about the Swede’s athletic prowess in high school. Normally, the Swede would have felt uncomfortable with these outward display of awe, but he doesn’t mind Bucky’s support in front of Orcutt. Bucky calls the Swede “Big Swede,” a name only Jerry has called him since high school. All his other new neighbors call him Seymour.
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Once, when the Swede gives Bucky a ride to a local garage to pick up his car, Bucky announces that he and his wife are Jewish and have recently joined the Morristown temple. He says it’s “very sustaining” when living in a Gentile town. Since that day, he makes a project out of getting the Swede to join the temple, or at least to join him to play basketball there.
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The Swede thinks back to when Dawn was pregnant with Merry. Sylvia Levov had surprised the Swede by asking if Dawn was going to convert before Merry’s birth. The Swede harshly responded that “practicing Judaism means nothing” to him, which caused his mother to cry. So now, when Bucky Robinson tries to get the Swede involved at the temple, he complains to Dawn, “I didn’t come out here for that stuff.” Even when he was younger, when he would accompany Lou to temple on High Holidays, Judaism never registered with the Swede. He didn’t understand what it meant about “being a man.”
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In Old Rimrock (though it somewhat embarrasses the Swede to admit it) he feels like Johnny Appleseed, who was neither Jewish, nor Catholic, nor Protestant. “Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American.” The Swede recalls how Dawn once saw him approaching the house, a grocery bag in hand, as he pretended to toss seeds from it. She had laughed, asking him what he was “practicing.”
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Bill Orcutt, the narration notes, broke with family tradition and didn’t go to law school after graduating from Princeton. He tried to become an artist for a few years, working out of a Manhattan studio, before marrying Jessie and returning to Princeton to attend architecture school. Now, his work mostly involves restoration of 18th- and 19th-century houses in Morris County and the surrounding area. Every few years, a Morristown frame shop holds an exhibition of his abstract art. The Swede and Dawn attend, and the Swede feel awkward that he can’t make sense of any of Orcutt’s paintings, which are supposedly “influenced by Chinese calligraphy” but only look like grey smudges to the Swede.
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Dawn insists Bill Orcutt’s paintings are thought provoking and buys one—for $5,000. In the house in Old Rimrock, Dawn hangs the new painting, Meditation #27, over the spot they used to have a portrait of Merry that the Swede quite liked. He recalls how the portrait artist they hired to paint it only charged $2,000 and threw in the gilt frame for free. When Lou sees Orcutt’s painting, he’s aghast it cost $5,000—and he assumes the painting is not even finished. Inwardly, the Swede thinks Dawn’s zeal for Orcutt’s art isn’t sincere, but rather her “Irish envy.”
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Back in the present (1973), Bill Orcutt has brought a cardboard model of the new Levov house and presents it to the guests after dinner. Dawn gushes over all the natural light that will spill in through the new house’s many windows. The Swede recognizes it as a slight against the giant trees that shade their current house—trees he has always loved.
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The Orcutts came to dinner early so that Bill and Dawn could go over some issues with the new garage’s design. The two discuss the issue together in the kitchen while Dawn chops and cleans vegetables for dinner. Dawn complains that Orcutt’s proposed solutions to a problem with the new house’s garage are not modern enough for the look she has in mind. Meanwhile, the Swede prepares the barbecue coals outside, looking out into the distance where Dawn’s herd used to graze. With him are Lou Levov and Jessie Orcutt.
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Jessie Orcutt rarely leaves the house these days—she took to drinking after the last of the couple’s grown children left home. Bill Orcutt apparently told Dawn that Jessie is on the verge of a “manic upswing.” Jessie today is a far cry from the energetic, clear-headed woman she was when the Swede first met her. She was a Philadelphia heiress, attended finishing schools, and always wore her hair up in neat braids—she was the last person the Swede would have expected to succumb to alcoholism and depression. Now her hair is unkempt, and she hides her bloated belly beneath oversized dresses.
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Now, the Swede looks on as Jessie rambles on about her history of horseback riding to Lou Levov. Lou interrupts her to clarify some of the terminology, reminding Jessie that she’s talking to a city guy. Jessie frowns when Lou refers to her as “Mrs. Orcutt,” a mocking gesture of deference and a subtle attack on Jessie’s heavy drinking. When she corrects him—“‘Jessie,’ please”—the Swede grimaces at the ugly, artificial smile on her face. Jessie continues on with a story about going away to boarding school and how fun it was, but how homesick she felt. She starts to weep. The Swede knows his father feels only disdain for the pathetic woman before him, but Lou tells her, “That’s all right, let it all out,” and removes the drink from her hand. Lou rocks Jessie as she starts to weep.
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As the scene outside continues, the Swede looks inside and sees Bill Orcutt, in his pink linen pants and gaudy Hawaiian shirt (a style of dress which Dawn earlier called “Wasp extremism”), grinding up against Dawn from behind as she shucks corn at the sink. The Swede can hear Dawn’s lips saying, “Not here, not here…” At once, all of Dawn’s insults about Orcutt make perfect sense: “The unfaithfulness to the house was never unfaithfulness to the house. It was unfaithfulness.”
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