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February 14, 2020
Clare Beams' Playlist for Her Novel "The Illness Lesson"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Clare Beams' debut The Illness Lesson is a brilliant, inventive, and evocative debut.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections."
In her own words, here is Clare Beams' Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Illness Lesson:
My first novel, The Illness Lesson, is about an episode of mass hysteria at a newly founded school for girls in 1871 Massachusetts. The protagonist is Caroline Hood, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Transcendentalist philosopher who’s outlived his fame and who’s trying, now, one more venture to win it back: establishing a girls’ school that will show the world women’s true capabilities, and, of course, Samuel’s own. The Trilling Heart School (named after a flock of strange red birds that has recently descended) opens, and Caroline begins to teach alongside Samuel and his protégé David, despite misgivings about the whole enterprise. But Trilling Heart’s first students quickly begin to develop mysterious symptoms, and soon Caroline does too. The teachers then have to decide how to handle this strange and sudden plague.
When I made a playlist for my debut story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, in 2016, I wrote that I need silence to write well. This continues to be true (and now I have a second child—my girls are now six and three—and so such silence is even harder to come by). But I do continue to use music as a sort of warmup, to get myself into the mental space where my fiction lives. Some of the following songs and pieces were part of that warmup as I wrote The Illness Lesson; all of them feel like part of my characters’ mental weather.
“Poets”
The Tragically Hip
This song captures something of the propulsive rage that’s fueling Caroline for a lot of the novel. The line that starts its chorus, Don’t tell me what the poets are doing, is something I often feel Caroline thinking: she’s spent her life hearing about Vast Cosmic Truths from her father (a truthteller with the best of them), and it all seems to her to have gotten her nowhere especially useful. She loves him deeply and loves the intellectual world he’s opened for her, but she’s found it open only partway in the end—she’s still tending his life, really, instead of living her own. This to me is the root of her anger as the Trilling Heart School opens. She’s meant to be its poster child, the shining example of the kind of education it will provide, and yet she doesn’t feel her father has thought through, even now, what he has and hasn’t given her, what the actual dimensions of her life have been.
Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, MA, 1840-1860”; III. The Alcotts
Charles Ives
Charles Ives was born and began composing not far from where I grew up in Connecticut. He’s from an era later than the fictional world I’m writing about in this novel—the Concord piano sonata was written between 1911-1915 and published in 1920—but he’s often calling back to and commenting on earlier times, the way he’s doing here, taking traditional New England music and twisting it a little. This piece feels to me like a hymn that gets stretched and pulled into discordance. While my Hoods are fictional, the Alcotts (Louisa May and her idealistic, sometimes misguided father Bronson) were important underpinnings for my invention of them, and I love this musical portrait. In a way that’s just right, it feels like an idyllic form that can’t quite hold.
“Colossus of Rhodes”
The New Pornographers
This song makes me think of a vast thing, toppling—apart from the title and lyrics, the music itself seems full of a destructive rhythm already set in motion. When I hear it too I always think of the Sylvia Plath poem “The Colossus” and its powerful portrait of the tending of a fractured, mythic, and enormous father, from the perspective of the daughter (“I crawl like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow / To mend the immense skull plates and clear / The bald, white tumuli of your eyes…”). That plight has shaped my Caroline’s life.
“Heartbeats”
Jose Gonzalez
Another force at work within Caroline, as the Trilling Heart project unfolds, is a kind of tragic longing for David, her father’s protégé and their co-teacher at the school. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that this is a longing that’s doomed from the beginning to be unfulfilled in most of the important ways; Caroline herself has this sense even before she learns of the particulars that doom it. “Heartbeats” captures for me that mingled sweetness and sadness of wanting a thing you know you can’t really have.
“White Winter Hymnal”
The Fleet Foxes
While I was in the thick of reworking The Illness Lesson, I listened to this song every day. It’s such a delicate work of menace. There’s something wonderfully ominous in that suspended moment at its start, those swirling lines, “I was following the / I was following the / I…”, which keep looping back on themselves without arriving at an object. Following the what? we wonder, with increasing anxiety. And then when we do arrive it’s in such an unsettling place: “I was following the pack, all swallowed in their coats / With scarves of red tied ’round their throats / To keep their little heads from falling in the snow...” These lyrics make me picture, every time, the pack of students in my novel (snow and the color red both come up a lot in The Illness Lesson). There’s the sublime creepiness too of what comes after, which takes gorgeous, rich harmonies and pastoral imagery and coopts them into violence: “you would fall and turn the white snow red / as strawberries in summertime.” This song always brought me back to the feeling I was hoping my novel would create for the reader.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Third Movement
The Transcendentalists loved Beethoven. Emerson wrote that his music “labor[ed] with vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has ever attempted before”; Margaret Fuller that “Beethoven, towering far above our heads, still with colossal gesture points above.” For these thinkers, striving for the infinite was the noblest pursuit possible. Beethoven’s music was first brought to Boston, Transcendentalism’s epicenter, in 1842—the Fifth Symphony, which I’ve drawn from here, and the sunny Second—and this was the period in which my fictional Samuel Hood’s fame would have been flowering. This third movement recalls the ultra-recognizable dun-dun-dun-DUN from the first movement but turns it more regimented, march-like, in a way that for me captures something of Trilling Heart’s momentum. Once Samuel’s students arrive, they begin to experience on their own terms what he has envisioned for them, and the vision begins to change in ways the teachers can’t control.
“Measuring Cups”
Andrew Bird
I love the eerie lilt of this one. And the classroom imagery (“Get out your measuring cups / And we'll play a new game / Come to the front of the class / And we'll measure your brain”) feels connected to the kind of classroom-mood I wanted for The Illness Lesson. Foundational to the education that Samuel and David want to provide is their misguided assumption that, with the right tools, the full selves of their students are comprehensible, measurable.
“Starwatcher”
The Decemberists
Like so much of The Decemberists’ music, this song is so richly narrative and somehow almost 19th-century in its sensibility (“calamity”! “a-shambling”!)—and I adore it. “Starwatcher” is about the process of trying to decode omens of catastrophe, which is what Caroline finds herself doing for much of The Illness Lesson. In watching Eliza, the students’ ringleader, grow in power and influence, she often feels she’s watching the first signs of impending doom, like the “poison in the well,” the “rider on the road,” the “lady on the stair” here.
“Little Talks”
Of Monsters and Men
This song takes the form of a dialogue in which the female singer’s experiences are repeatedly, insistently reframed by the male singer. She expresses a fear or a complaint (“The stairs creak as you sleep; it’s keeping me awake”) and he explains that fear/complaint in a way that’s meant to comfort her (“It’s the house telling you to close your eyes”). Except comfort of this kind seems only so comforting, hinging as it does on questioning and correcting her judgment (“Some days, I don’t know if I am wrong or right / Your mind is playing tricks on you, my dear”). This dynamic is the lifeblood of my novel: what happens when you’ve been made to trust someone else’s understanding more than your own, even about the truths that live inside your own skin.
Finale, The Firebird
Igor Stravinsky
Before we had kids, my husband and I used to play in the second violin section of a community orchestra, and one of my favorite memories from that time is of playing The Firebird. I love the whole thorny ballet, but I think there’s something particularly gorgeous about this finale and its emergence out of all the chaos and agony that came before. There’s something of that trajectory in Caroline’s story. She makes her way to a very hard-won kind of power by my novel’s end—a power that’s shaped but not diminished by what she’s experienced.
Clare Beams and The Illness Lesson links:
The ARTery review
BookPage review
Kirkus review
New York Journal of Books review
New York Times review
Publishers Weekly review
San Francisco Chronicle review
Largehearted Boy playlist by the author for We Show What We Have Learned
The Rumpus interview with the author
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