Christopher Tilghman

In the early 1890s, childhood friends, now newlyweds Beal Terrell and Thomas Bayly, leave their native Maryland for a new life abroad. Their displacement would be unremarkable, except that Thomas’s father owned the extensive farm and peach orchards on which Beal grew up, as the child of former slaves.

Since interracial marriage is illegal in Maryland — and dangerous anywhere in the United States — the couple has chosen France. Or, rather, Thomas has. Beal, though she loves Thomas and show more has agreed to the plan as the most practical, sensible way to have a life together, hasn’t chosen anything, and therein hangs a tale.

Thomas and Beal in the Midi offers an unusual twist on interracial marriage. Between the two participants, race causes no rifts. Other people construct what they will about the Baylys, often to indulge their bigotry, but their reactions leave no scars.

The real problem is that the two exiles have married young; their inexperience makes for growing pains, specifically Beal’s difficulties being a beautiful woman. She’s tired of having men tell her who she is or must be, which is perfectly understandable, especially because that would put her in their power. But Thomas doesn’t do that, so when she lets herself be put upon or even drawn to other men who do, it’s perverse.

True, Thomas does decide, after a few months’ research in Paris, that they'll move to Languedoc and grow grapes, and, as the man of the couple, he’s expected to be the planner. But the way Tilghman portrays his protagonists, Thomas would like nothing better than to share his enthusiasm, and Beal acts as if she couldn’t care less.

Consequently, her rebellion — if such it is — takes the form of permitting approaches from precisely those men who look upon her as an object for their own admiration, a self-defeating and hurtful choice all around.

To be fair, Thomas has a certain reserve about him, a delicacy that keeps him from assuming too much. It can be maddening and charming, both, and one thing about Beal’s secret admirers, they’re not shy about talking. Meanwhile, Thomas has a mild flirtation of his own, looking for the intellectual passion Beal withholds, so the wrong doesn’t go only one direction. But he’s more honorable, with a firmer conscience. I find him far more sympathetic than his wife, who acts like an immature ninny, at times. That’s why I like the novel less than I wanted to.

For all that, though, it’s a beautiful piece of writing. Tilghman has a terrific eye for emotional nuance, which finds unexpected meaning in small moments and fills the spaces with tension in this less-than-busy plot. In fact, the last part of the narrative seems rushed, a little, as though a quicker resolution had to happen, even at the expense of a confrontation or two that need to happen before the reader’s eyes. Nothing like destroying a climax before it starts.

Aside from the marvelous prose, I also like the symbolism. Thomas’s grape-growing experiment comes on the heels of an agricultural disaster, the invasion of phylloxera, an aphid that laid waste to much of France’s grape rootstock.

To keep his vineyards alive, he must therefore graft resistant American stock on to what already grows, while uprooting the one hardy local varietal that makes insipid wine, and whose market is glutted. Since Thomas’s father’s peach orchards died off from blight (symbolic of the slavery that existed there), you can take the grafting metaphor in any direction you wish — Beal and Thomas’s marriage; America and Europe; Thomas repairing his father’s mistakes; a rebuilding of tolerance; new life in general.

I could have happily read more about the wine business. But Thomas and Beal in the Midi is an unusual love story, and there’s much to admire in it. show less

"In a Father's Place," Christopher Tilghman's debut collection of short fiction, was widely praised upon its publication in 1990. Reading it again after many years, it is astounding and heartening to discover how well this book has held up. More than just a very good collection of stories, it strikes this reader as an important milestone in American fiction, a book to which others must bear comparison. Tilghman's stories, set primarily in and around Chesapeake Bay, depict family members show more struggling to connect with one another and deal with the often conflicting demands of contemporary life. Each story constructs its own subtle moral drama, in which fathers and mothers and sons and daughters test each other's vulnerabilities, grow together and apart, and sometimes discover that the needs of the family do not always serve the individual. Tilghman's prose, supple and plain as day, is filled with the kind of evocative detail that brings the world in which his characters reside clearly into focus. You close this book with the sense that you have experienced something rare and timeless and elemental, and absolutely essential. "In a Father's Place" sets a standard that few contemporary novels and story collections can match. show less

Christopher Tilghman's second collection of short fiction compares well to his first, In a Father's Place, published nine years earlier. Mining the same territory (geographical and emotional), Tilghman presents husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters in situations that require of them a candid re-evaluation of family relationships that have been fraught or tenuous. Tilghman is masterful at probing beneath the immediate surface of his characters' motives, show more characters who are occasionally at serious odds with their lot in life, who are searching for a way to fix what is broken or to make a final break. Many of his characters are tentatively exploring the soft edges of a new reality. Some are surprised to find themselves seeking to make peace with a family they left behind for reasons they now find inadequate or mistaken. Landscape plays a huge role in these subtle dramas--Tilghman uses American geography like no one else, giving texture and depth to the lives of people who are in all respects ordinary. Like those collected in his first book, the stories in The Way People Run reward subsequent readings with new revelations about language and what it means to be human. show less

I heard Christopher Tilghman speak at this year's L.A. Book Festival. He was on a panel about families with Janet Fitch and Julie Otsuka. The prequel to Mason's Retreat had just been published and it sounded wonderful, but I wanted to read the first book first. I just finished it and now I can't wait to read The Right-Hand Shore.

Mason's Retreat tells the story of the Mason family, from 1936 to 1939. Edward and Edith had moved to England soon after their marriage in the 1920s. They have two show more sons, Sabastien 13 and Simon 6, who have never lived in the United States. The family has suffered financial reversals due to The Depression. Edward decides they should move to the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he has a large family farm called Mason's Retreat. Edward Mason is a complex and potentially-tragic protagonist. He has failed at just about everything he has undertaken. Mason's Retreat offers him a second chance. On the surface he is doing fine, but his wife Edith sees the signs that he's getting ready to "take bold steps," "to make forthright decisions," which always lead to disaster for Edward and his family. Edith and the boys love it there, but Edward has some notable failures as a farmer. The foreman and hired man really don't need his "help." Soon the farm is running well enough to support the family in Maryland and himself in England, so Edward leaves his family for what turns out to be two years. As England prepares for war, Edward's factory regains its solvency and he wants the family to join him in England.

Tilghman is simply a wonderful writer and the longer I read this book the more I loved it -- the characters, the setting, and the author's writing style. He employs several characters as narrators, often beginning an incident as told by one character, then switching to another, and finally another. They are not telling the same story over again, but picking it up from another perspective and moving it forward. This technique imparts a fullness to the narrative, giving it sweep and motion. The primary narrators are Edith, Sebastien, the black hired man Robert, and -- to a lesser extent -- Edward and his grandson Harry Mason, who begins and ends the novel. For me, the book really took off about halfway through, when Tilghman begins writing about sailing. I have not sailed in decades but Tilghman brought back the experience for me as if it were yesterday.

"The noise of the sails and the shouting and the wind rose until, with a delicate hand on the wheel, Hazelton caught the wind and suddenly there was not a sound but the warm creak of stretching Manila and a gravelly scraping of bubbles on the hull below" (p. 155).

Tllghman also portrays homelife beautifully, both at Mason's Retreat and in Tuckertown, the nearby settlement where the black families live. Although Mason's Retreat is dilapidated and without electricity when the Masons return, the black servants Loretta and Valerie also arrive the next morning to begin reviving the place. Life for the women and children centers around the kitchen:

"The room was now full of voices, from the pure ring of Simon's soprano to the husky and milky roll of Loretta's exultations, the food and the lessons mingling, the day passing, the sounds of study and the smells of cooking all speaking of some kind of promise" (p. 112).

Robert is a sad and lonely character, who remembers Tuckertown in better times; I love the rhythm and the evocative nature of this passage:

"Everyone had work, everyone had food. The air in Tuckertown was always filled with the scents of baking and roasing; the buttermilk up from the springhouse was so cold it hurt your eyes to drink it. There was time to visit in the summer, plenty of wood to burn in the winter. Robert's memories came to him like the red taste of whisky, alive and smooth. Tuckerman was Jerusalem, and all of them, the Gales, the Morrises, the Goulds, were the chosen" (p. 178).

My copy of the this book is filled with little post-it flags marking favorite passages. I found myself reading slowly, to savor the language and prolong the pleasure of reading Mason's Retreat. From the beginning, I sensed a tragic ending and when it came it was heartbreaking and believable. Now, on to The Right-Hand Shore. show less