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Encounter With an Angry God: Recollections of My Life With John Peabody Harrington
xxii + 190 pp., 8vo.
Hardcover
First published October 28, 1975
3 people are currently reading
123 people want to read
About the author
Carobeth Laird
8 books1 followerCarobeth (Tucker) Laird (July 20, 1895 - August 5, 1983) is known for her ethnographic studies of the Chemehuevi people of southeastern California and western Arizona. Her book, The Chemehuevi, was characterized by ethnographer Lowell John Bean (1985:5) as "one of the finest, most detailed ethnographies ever written."
Carobeth Tucker was born in Coleman, Texas. In 1915, she took a course in linguistics at San Diego Normal School that was taught by John P. Harrington, an extremely productive and eccentric linguist and ethnographer. Harrington was impressed by her natural linguistic abilities, and they were married the following year. She assisted him in his field work and learned ethnographic skills from him, but his eccentricities proved fatal to their relationship. Later in her life, Carobeth accounted her relationship with John P. Harrington in her book "Encounter with an Angry God." They were divorced in 1922. Later, Carobeth married George Laird, her principal Chemehuevi informant.
During the period prior to George Laird's death in 1940, Carobeth Laird collected extensive information on the Chemehuevi, particularly concerning language and mythology. She came to the attention of the scholarly world in the early 1970s, when she was "discovered" by students of Lowell Bean. Her ethnographic studies were published in two books, The Chemehuevi (1976) and Mirror and Pattern (1984), as well as several articles in the Journal of California Anthropology.
Carobeth Laird also published an account of her marriage with Harrington, Encounter with an Angry God (1975), which received some critical acclaim, and Limbo (1979), a description of her experiences in a nursing home.
(from Wikipedia)
Carobeth Tucker was born in Coleman, Texas. In 1915, she took a course in linguistics at San Diego Normal School that was taught by John P. Harrington, an extremely productive and eccentric linguist and ethnographer. Harrington was impressed by her natural linguistic abilities, and they were married the following year. She assisted him in his field work and learned ethnographic skills from him, but his eccentricities proved fatal to their relationship. Later in her life, Carobeth accounted her relationship with John P. Harrington in her book "Encounter with an Angry God." They were divorced in 1922. Later, Carobeth married George Laird, her principal Chemehuevi informant.
During the period prior to George Laird's death in 1940, Carobeth Laird collected extensive information on the Chemehuevi, particularly concerning language and mythology. She came to the attention of the scholarly world in the early 1970s, when she was "discovered" by students of Lowell Bean. Her ethnographic studies were published in two books, The Chemehuevi (1976) and Mirror and Pattern (1984), as well as several articles in the Journal of California Anthropology.
Carobeth Laird also published an account of her marriage with Harrington, Encounter with an Angry God (1975), which received some critical acclaim, and Limbo (1979), a description of her experiences in a nursing home.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 4, 2018
This is an astonishing book.
I read it to learn more about J P Harrington. Although he's not a household name for most people, he is familiar to anyone who has done linguistic work on California Indian languages. Harrington collected hundreds of thousands of pages of data about these languages across the first half of the twentieth century and for many languages that have since gone extinct, his data provides almost all the information we have. Harrington was also a uniquely terrible person, or so I had heard, and wanted to find out more by reading this book by the woman who was married to him for seven years, about their time together.
So this book is not quite an autobiography; it's more like insider history of a very strange relationship. It does deliver on the original promise: the book examines Harrington's genius, and his incredibly weird personality, in detail. Laird describes the endless hours he worked and his gift for languages; she also tells about how he wanted to raise children without ever exposing them to human language, as an experiment to see how their language would develop. (A plan he dropped only due to the difficulty of executing it.) Harrington's deeply ingrained miserliness comes through in many stories: his wearing shirts until (and after) they had split down the back; or his berating Laird for cooking eggs and failing to scoop out the remaining whites inside the shells with a tea spoon. She describes his paranoia about other linguists stealing his work or working with his informants (mentioning at least one informant whose contract with Harrington stipulated that they would never work with any other linguists) - as well as his scheming efforts to steal information from other linguists. For the most part Harrington comes across not as a nasty person so much as an alien in a human body, whose only purpose on earth was to gather linguistic information and who could not understand any human motivation or emotion that was not connected with that. (That said, a few of his other flaws are unfortunately all too human and familiar, such as his rabid anti-Semitism and ideas about racial purity.)
This book is more than just that, however. The reader learns a little more about the author, about her many children, and about the man she left Harrington for. Even more interesting is the way Laird recounts her experiences in an America that is out of reach and almost unimaginable now, before mass media, national mobilization for war and interstate highways had created a much more unified national culture and identity. She recounts meeting an old woman in West Virginia and asking for directions to a town five miles away; the woman gave a vague answer because she had never travelled to "furrin parts." She describes travelling the country on pullman cars and crossing the continent in a Ford Model T. Prohibition and Spanish flu are new events that affect the unfolding of the narrative. And of course she describes the life of Indian communities in California and the Southwest at a time of great poverty and intense oppression - as well as surviving links to traditional culture, many of which have since been lost. She describes the taboos and practices that still shaped the lives of many Indians she worked with (e.g. their unwillingness to tell her Coyote stories during the hot months when rattlesnakes are active).
The book is a quick read and honestly quite compelling - I think it would be even for someone who had never heard of Harrington. One of the blurbs on the back of my copy says that if it were fiction it would be a great American novel and I think that's true. It really does make you feel like you can touch or at least perceive the contours of life in some parts of this country a hundred years ago. My only major complaint is that the book could have used an editor with a firmer hand. Some stories are sketched or skipped over entirely too soon; others drag on a little too long. Some lacunae are hard to ignore - we hear so little about Laird's children even when she brings the narrative up to date through the rest of her life after her time with Harrington. Still, there can never be another book like this, and it's worth a read for anyone interested in this linguistic or sociological history.
I read it to learn more about J P Harrington. Although he's not a household name for most people, he is familiar to anyone who has done linguistic work on California Indian languages. Harrington collected hundreds of thousands of pages of data about these languages across the first half of the twentieth century and for many languages that have since gone extinct, his data provides almost all the information we have. Harrington was also a uniquely terrible person, or so I had heard, and wanted to find out more by reading this book by the woman who was married to him for seven years, about their time together.
So this book is not quite an autobiography; it's more like insider history of a very strange relationship. It does deliver on the original promise: the book examines Harrington's genius, and his incredibly weird personality, in detail. Laird describes the endless hours he worked and his gift for languages; she also tells about how he wanted to raise children without ever exposing them to human language, as an experiment to see how their language would develop. (A plan he dropped only due to the difficulty of executing it.) Harrington's deeply ingrained miserliness comes through in many stories: his wearing shirts until (and after) they had split down the back; or his berating Laird for cooking eggs and failing to scoop out the remaining whites inside the shells with a tea spoon. She describes his paranoia about other linguists stealing his work or working with his informants (mentioning at least one informant whose contract with Harrington stipulated that they would never work with any other linguists) - as well as his scheming efforts to steal information from other linguists. For the most part Harrington comes across not as a nasty person so much as an alien in a human body, whose only purpose on earth was to gather linguistic information and who could not understand any human motivation or emotion that was not connected with that. (That said, a few of his other flaws are unfortunately all too human and familiar, such as his rabid anti-Semitism and ideas about racial purity.)
This book is more than just that, however. The reader learns a little more about the author, about her many children, and about the man she left Harrington for. Even more interesting is the way Laird recounts her experiences in an America that is out of reach and almost unimaginable now, before mass media, national mobilization for war and interstate highways had created a much more unified national culture and identity. She recounts meeting an old woman in West Virginia and asking for directions to a town five miles away; the woman gave a vague answer because she had never travelled to "furrin parts." She describes travelling the country on pullman cars and crossing the continent in a Ford Model T. Prohibition and Spanish flu are new events that affect the unfolding of the narrative. And of course she describes the life of Indian communities in California and the Southwest at a time of great poverty and intense oppression - as well as surviving links to traditional culture, many of which have since been lost. She describes the taboos and practices that still shaped the lives of many Indians she worked with (e.g. their unwillingness to tell her Coyote stories during the hot months when rattlesnakes are active).
The book is a quick read and honestly quite compelling - I think it would be even for someone who had never heard of Harrington. One of the blurbs on the back of my copy says that if it were fiction it would be a great American novel and I think that's true. It really does make you feel like you can touch or at least perceive the contours of life in some parts of this country a hundred years ago. My only major complaint is that the book could have used an editor with a firmer hand. Some stories are sketched or skipped over entirely too soon; others drag on a little too long. Some lacunae are hard to ignore - we hear so little about Laird's children even when she brings the narrative up to date through the rest of her life after her time with Harrington. Still, there can never be another book like this, and it's worth a read for anyone interested in this linguistic or sociological history.
August 21, 2010
This is the passage I remember from when I read it 20+ years ago:
"sorrowful and monotonous, the last weeks of january blended into February. There were gray skies above and dirty gray snow underfoot, alternately thawing into slush or freeing into icy ridges. On one of these dark mornings, Harrington having departed, I came out to find George lying on his cot, dressed but unshaven. He did not speak or move, or acknowledge my presence in any way, and merely made a slight negative motion of the head when I asked if he was sick. I knelt beside him, frightened, bewildered, almost heart-broken, because I thought I must have given offense. he did not respond to my touch. But when I began to cry, eh said without great effort, his voice coming from some far off, dismal place, "I get this way sometimes." This was my first experience with one of his rare seizures of melancholy. These recurred at long intervals and with lessening force during the years of our life together, and ultimately, towards the end of that time, disappeared or became unnoticeable. At the time I lacked the empathy to perceive the roots of this sadness. I now believe, that , like his ironic sense of humor, it was bound up both with racial heritage and personal history. He had lived from the time of his grandfather, Black Turtle, when the ways of the People were vivid in memory and sometimes still practiced, on through a time of forced acculturation. The slightly older companions of his adolescence had fought skirmishes with the Mohaves and had been familiar with ancient rites and skills. Now these young men were long since dead of imported diseases or of the malaise that accompanies loss of identity. He himself had never been allowed to use his considerable ability to fully compete in the white man's world, and had at last accepted settlement on a reservation which was dominated by the Mohaves. His white father had spoken to him of the world of desert rats and mountain men, but this world too had quickly vanished. His sisters had accommodated themselves to the ways of Mexican settlers, but even this alien culture would soon be dominated by the arrogant newcomers who called themselves Americans. What Ruby Eddy had told me of George was true: he spoke fluent Chemehuevi, Mohave, Spanish and English. And it was also true that his life experiences had bounced like a pingpong ball between these four diverse cultures and the equally diverse cultures of the earliest pioneers."
[p 153-154:]
I had given it to my brother to read, who just loved the book. It is rather striking to me that I remember this, versus the very vivid description of Harrington (who was a nut, as well as a classic case of an Aspie).
"sorrowful and monotonous, the last weeks of january blended into February. There were gray skies above and dirty gray snow underfoot, alternately thawing into slush or freeing into icy ridges. On one of these dark mornings, Harrington having departed, I came out to find George lying on his cot, dressed but unshaven. He did not speak or move, or acknowledge my presence in any way, and merely made a slight negative motion of the head when I asked if he was sick. I knelt beside him, frightened, bewildered, almost heart-broken, because I thought I must have given offense. he did not respond to my touch. But when I began to cry, eh said without great effort, his voice coming from some far off, dismal place, "I get this way sometimes." This was my first experience with one of his rare seizures of melancholy. These recurred at long intervals and with lessening force during the years of our life together, and ultimately, towards the end of that time, disappeared or became unnoticeable. At the time I lacked the empathy to perceive the roots of this sadness. I now believe, that , like his ironic sense of humor, it was bound up both with racial heritage and personal history. He had lived from the time of his grandfather, Black Turtle, when the ways of the People were vivid in memory and sometimes still practiced, on through a time of forced acculturation. The slightly older companions of his adolescence had fought skirmishes with the Mohaves and had been familiar with ancient rites and skills. Now these young men were long since dead of imported diseases or of the malaise that accompanies loss of identity. He himself had never been allowed to use his considerable ability to fully compete in the white man's world, and had at last accepted settlement on a reservation which was dominated by the Mohaves. His white father had spoken to him of the world of desert rats and mountain men, but this world too had quickly vanished. His sisters had accommodated themselves to the ways of Mexican settlers, but even this alien culture would soon be dominated by the arrogant newcomers who called themselves Americans. What Ruby Eddy had told me of George was true: he spoke fluent Chemehuevi, Mohave, Spanish and English. And it was also true that his life experiences had bounced like a pingpong ball between these four diverse cultures and the equally diverse cultures of the earliest pioneers."
[p 153-154:]
I had given it to my brother to read, who just loved the book. It is rather striking to me that I remember this, versus the very vivid description of Harrington (who was a nut, as well as a classic case of an Aspie).
July 7, 2012
This book was recommended to me by my boss almost a decade ago and I still remember it. I worked at the natural history museum in Santa Barbara so I would frequently see works by and about John Harrington. To learn about this man's personal life was amazing. Such an odd story about a crazy genius.
October 1, 2016
At first I thought this was going to be an ethnography of some of the cultures that Carobeth and her notoriously eccentric and prolific anthropologist husband, John Peabody Harrington, lived with in Mexcio and the American Southwest. But really, it's an ethnography of their own marriage and of a man who, although made a living observing and writing about people, was utterly and completely incapable of seeing himself. Manipulative, emotionally vapid, and obsessed with his own mother, Harrington and Laird's marriage is a case study in being married to a narcissist. When Laird falls in love with one of their informants, she's finally able to see her relationship for the farce that it is and move on.
January 3, 2016
I found this interesting because it evokes the 1910s Southwest and I grew up in the area in the 1960s. I was especially interested in the descriptions of early Ventura county. Laird does a good job with her descriptions. Her marriage with Harrington was something like the marriage in George Eliot's Middlemarch between Dorothea Brooke and Edward Causaubon. A young woman is too impressed by a little bit of scholarship found in a college instructor and doesn't see the warning signs. Harrington is shown as a man who is more concerned with his studies than with his marriage. I hope more of his work in Native American languages was uncovered than is indicated here.
June 3, 2018
How much can you expect from a biography written by someone's ex-wife? More than this! Although the description of Harrington's odd personality and work habits rings true based on what I have read about him, so much of Laird's recollections are vague: maybe we went there once, maybe twice; I don't remember who else was there; or what year it happened... You get the idea. Were these hints to her editor to crosscheck her facts?
Plus the last quarter or so was about the strange transition from Harrington to her second husband. Yawn.
If you're interested in Harrington or American Indian language documentation, read journal articles instead.
Plus the last quarter or so was about the strange transition from Harrington to her second husband. Yawn.
If you're interested in Harrington or American Indian language documentation, read journal articles instead.
July 9, 2024
My MIL gave me this book to read and I am grateful. A fascinating look into a woman's life when she was married to an eccentric anthropologist in the early 1900s. I liked the author's honesty about what she could remember and not quite remember. I was amazed at the way she just dropped little matter of fact statements about her life that I would have thought were outrageous in that time period (having a child out of wedlock, her mom raising two of her kids while she was off researching as two examples). It would have been even better if I was better acquainted with the southern CA locales she was traveling through and living in - just from my little knowledge it was so interesting to compare to those places now. Of course, her account of how she fell in love with Harrington and then discovered what type of man he was in her marriage were incredibly interesting and make a good cautionary tale for young women who are attracted to smart men without taking account of their ability to care about other people.
December 16, 2019
This book was highly recommended to me by a local historian friend in Gilroy, CA. I enjoyed her personal experience being married to a true eccentric, but more interesting were her experiences as a field linguist in Southern California in the early 20th century. A great piece of cultural history.
March 20, 2020
A fascinating little tome about a young woman helping her emotionally abusive anthropologist husband collect data on Native American linguistics in the Southwestern and Western states. Ultimately she becomes a anthropologist herself.
April 18, 2020
I loved this book for the love story.
August 28, 2022
The sad true story of what it's like to live with a brilliant, driven, emotionally absent partner. Unlike the fictional but insightful narrator of Norman Rush's novel MatingMating, Laird tamped down her abilities as a critical observer during her courtship and marriage. So although the relationship she depicts is harrowing, her account is relatively short and restrained. Most illuminating, I suspect, for anyone familiar with Harrington's obsessive, impressive body of work.
June 30, 2012
An interesting account of a Poway woman and her marriage to an Indian.
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September 7, 2018
The author details her time with an anthropolgist who was a bit difficult to live with. I think most of us have dated someone at some point that has exhibited these charactaristics. It shows how a person can be brilliant in one area of life but utterly inept in another area. The author finally ends up happy with someone less driven.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews