Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 35

Spring Forward




I am now at work on Chapter 4 of my novel. It comes as a bit of a surprise that it feels a little different than working on the Prologue or the first three chapters. There are a few reasons why this might be the case, as I think about it more. One is that for some reason I have always thought of the first three chapters as a kind of personal watershed and that if I got past them, I would be more or less on my way to completing the novel. I don’t know if I would say that I feel that way now that I am past Chapter 3 of the draft, but it does feel like a solid beginning. Which is definitely something to hold on to. But I have to admit I don’t feel quite as sure of myself as I thought I might after getting this far. For me, this is nothing new. Insecurity is a long-time companion, and my writing life is no exception. However, I try very hard to overcome it and will continue to do so with this novel.

Another reason why things feel different now that I am writing Chapter 4 is that the story has finally moved on in time. The first three chapters were set in 1924 between the summer and the fall; this chapter skips forward three years to September 1927. This is very significant. A lot has happened in between that is important to my story and my characters. For one thing, the Ku Klux Klan, which is at the absolute zenith of its power in Indiana when my third chapter ends, is all but finished when Chapter 4 picks up. The entire structure has imploded following the arrest, trial and conviction of its leader, D.C. Stephenson, for rape and murder in 1925. As for my characters, Peter Heinricks, Greta’s brother in law, has moved from Oklahoma to Texas with the oil man Pops Wheeler, who is prospecting for the one big dig that will make them all rich. He has wandered even further astray, one might be tempted to comment. Meanwhile, a young attorney named Myron Devreaux, who was a recent Valparaiso Law grad looking for a start in the world in Chapter 2, has moved back to his hometown of Bentonville in Chapter 4, and soon encounters his old flame, Greta Heinricks, in a grocery.


As for Walter Brogan, he is beginning to find out that having outlasted one threat to his happiness and security, i.e. the Klan, he only faces more difficulties. As we move into Chapter 4, we find out that Brogan is actually doing pretty well in his job running the gas station his father-in-law owns. He has hired a second man to work with him and he has formed good relationships with many men of the town and some important business contacts. He does not have a formal education nor is he a practied businessman, but he has charm and a natural gift that makes common folk like him. The problem is that his job takes a lot out of him, and his home life is a harder thing to maintain than he anticipated. He feels pressure to get his wife situated in a house of their own, instead of living at her father's; three years in he has still not been able to make this happen. At the same time Greta is naturally impatient to start a family, and Brogan feels pressure in this sense as well even though his wife tries to minimize it. This leads to difficulties in their relationship, and as well as he relates to other men, Brogan does not do well when it comes to communicating his true feelings to women, including his own wife.


This situation is leading me straight into a place I was not sure I wanted to go, but I feel like I must to make this story authentic: the Brogan's bedroom. I have no plans to be explicit or unnecessarily descriptive, but I feel like I have drawn up for myself the largest challenge of this novel so far. I have to demonstrate that the pressures of their situation and the inability to talk about it easily has made it difficult for them to conceive a child. Talk about painting oneself into a corner! I have absolutely no idea how the intimate relationship of my paternal grandparents must have looked, sounded like, or felt like. But it seems to me that the difficulties they have at this stage of their lives are essential to describe in some way in order to establish a pattern for the rest of the story. So I must, in the modern parlance, 'go there'.


That is the crux of this new chapter. It will in some way describe the demise of the Ku Klux Klan and perhaps briefly touch base with Peter Heinricks' life. Myron Devreaux will come back into play, not necessarily as a 'temptation' element but more of a standing reminder of an alternate life, a sort of 'what if' figure for Greta Heinricks. Time and the rest of the story will let us know if Greta made the right choice in ignoring one man's attentions in favor of another's.


Nonetheless, the main element of this part of the story is the Brogans, their relationship, and their desire to bring someone else into the world. This will eventually lead to their son, Luke Brogan, who ends up becoming a Jesuit priest.


The working title for Chapter 4 I can now say is "A Chance Encounter, Overdue". But this is subject to change, and probably will.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #53

**Happy 4th birthday to C. E. L. tomorrow -- 7/22/07!**

I recently read a famous short story from Delmore Schwartz called "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," and was very struck by it (highly recommended!!)... this got me reading up a little bit on him, and I found that he is most highly regarded for his short stories and, equally, his poems.

Schwartz, a lifelong New Yorker, used to hang out in the famous White Horse Tavern in Greenwich village, drinking with other dream-addled writers like Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac. Not bad drinking company there (well, perhaps they were actually, in retrospect!). Mutt and I, along with our two other brothers, shared a beer there once "among the living and the dead" (apologies to James Joyce).

Anyway, I read a few of his poems online and this one in particular -- a sonnet about New York City -- struck me as powerful and interesting. I thought it would make an interesting entry in the series. I especially like the first stanza -- that's evocative stuff!

*******

Sonnet: O City, City

To live between terms, to live where death
has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto's catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tyranny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.

What Has Happened to the Short Story?: A Brief Response from Duke

After reading Mutt's interesting and provacative post from a week or so ago ("What Has Happened to the Short Story," 7/6/07) I was moved to post a comment or two of my own, but then I thought it might be worth responding more thoroughly, with a few short reflections along the same vein.

First off, I should say that I agree with Mutt's basic premise that something in fact has happened to the short story -- that is to say, to paraphrase an old cliche, "they don't make 'em like they used to anymore." Of course this is a generalization, but I know that Mutt does a better job than anyone I know of keeping up with contemporary fiction, and he's digested quite a few new stories in the past several months, as well as read thousands of them from authors both long gone and very much alive. He is an avid student of the craft, you might say. And he and I have discussed this very topic on many occasions, after he's told me about yet another story from the New Yorker that has left him cold and wanting.

It hit me after reading his post that a reading experience I have recently had confirms his bleak but truthful diagnosis. Several months ago I picked up for $1 a beat-up hardback, jacketless book called "Great American Short Stories," something that might have been cobbled together and published by Reader's Digest 20 or 30 years ago. I didn't read the entire thing by any stretch, but I did read many of them, and was stunned by the power and originality of almost every single story I chose. The names are familiar, and the ones you would expect to find in any collection of writings by great American authors -- Fitzgerald, London, Wharton, Hemingway, Bret Harte, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Hawthorne, Walter van Tilburgh Clark. But each story seemed to be more impressive, and surprising, than the next. These were stories that gleamed and glinted, with the beauty and precision of cut jewels. But even more importantly, they struck me, and with force. Either in the sheer artistry of their prose or the seriousness of their themes (and very often, both), they lingered in my mind and rang in my imagination like fire alarms. Who can ever forget the vivid description of slow freezing and palpable desperation depicted in Jack London's "To Build a Fire" once they have read it??

Stories today just don't seem to have an impact like that, by and large. They seem to be smaller somehow, or more mundane. Less concerned with the most important questions and more concerned with everyday minutiae. I mean, recently the New Yorker ran a story by a woman writer (whose name I can't now recall) called "Playdate," and it was about exactly that -- two cosmopolitan, New York women get their kids together after school, and have a playdate. The end. There was nothing remarkable at all about the prose, nothing really compelling about the story. No illumination at the end that might cast the entire narrative into a different and more revealing light. Maybe I'm just unhip and ignorant, but... who cares?? But to reiterate Mutt's dumbfounded question: this is what makes it into the New Yorker these days? This is the best stuff America has to offer? It seems very hard to believe.

Of course I don't have any answers to why this might be the case either, but I can say this, based on recent and past reading -- if this is, in fact, the best we got, we have certainly fallen a long, long way in a relatively short time. The glory days of O'Connor, Cheever, Updike in his younger years, Welty and Faulkner seem like an age long since hardened into layers buried deep under the accumulated crap of American culture.

Naturally I realize how this all sounds, and I realize too that I am not really qualified to judge these things -- but here's the real test. Go to the New Yorker web site and download a bunch of their short stories, and then, find an anthology of classic American short stories (by such as the authors I have cited above). Read them all, and then, you tell me if anything has "Happened to the Short Story."

Journal of a “Novel”-Entry 34

Chapter 3 Finished, Tough Road Ahead Gets Even Tougher

It took almost seven months, but I finally completed Chapter 3 of my novel, “The Fiery Cross, Revelations”, at least as complete as it is going to get, for now. It was a hard chapter and it was made a lot tougher by the move of my whole family and life in those months. It’s hard to tell if I lost a lot of critical momentum or not; surely I did for a while but I don’t know if it has long-term consequences. Time will tell. But I would say generally that the more I work on this manuscript the harder it gets to write and research and ‘get right’, and I have no idea if I am even getting it right.

Do I enjoy trying to write this novel? I do and I don’t. On the whole, I do, otherwise there wouldn’t be much point, but it’s very, very difficult, and there’s nothing like your own experience to teach you that I suppose. Everything I’ve ever read that was written by successful writers about writing novels has said that it is a hard thing to do, so I can’t say it’s a big surprise that it is hard. But I would call writing a novel something that falls into that clichéd category of ‘If it’s not hard it’s not worth doing’ or something to that effect. In other words, it’s good that it takes a lot of effort, and you hope that the effort is worth the time and stress that it costs. Therein lies the problem of course.

Here I am about sixteen months in to the writing of this novel with four chapter-length sections (a Prologue and Chapters 1-3) to show for it and about 180 pages of double-spaced prose. That’s not too bad of a show of progress, especially considering my track record of writing novels, which is nonexistent because I haven’t written any. I did write about 325 pages of an attempt at one in 2000 called The Faith and Fire Within that I used as a thesis to obtain my M.F.A. in Creative Writing, but it was a miserable attempt, overwrought and directionless and fizzled out quickly like a tracer round from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that fails to strike the target downrange (Duke will appreciate the lame simile).

The problem is the longer the story goes the more I feel like I have to write, the less time I have to write it in (it seems), and the more difficult it seems to be able to make a reasonable commitment to getting the book written. If it took me 16 months to write 4 chapters, and I see it as at least a 15-chapter book with an Epilogue, we’re looking at 5 years of writing. That’s a long time. I will be somewhere around 41 when it’s done if I work at that rate and keep it up. On the surface, I don’t mind if it takes 5 years to write my first novel, it takes many writers as long or longer to do so. It took Gustave Flaubert 5 years to write Madame Bovary, his first novel. My problem is that I wonder if I will have the will to keep it up, the discipline to work on it that hard for that long, or even the means to. My family grows, work increases along with extracurricular stuff, and the financial burden is heavier all the time, so it’s hard to devote time or resources into getting this done. If I do pull it off, it will be without question the most impressive thing I have ever accomplished - even if no one but me knows the effort, time and discipline that it required.

Nonetheless, no one is holding a gun to my head and saying I have to write a novel or perish, so I’m not complaining. I am rather just speculating openly on where this is all going, where it needs to go, and what it is going to take to get it there. If I am going to finish this novel I must look at it as my life’s work. It’s that simple. If I do finish it, somehow publish it, and go on to produce other books in the future, so much the better for me, but I can’t see future books as my life’s effort; I must think of only this one in those terms. If I don’t tell this story, nobody will, and that very well could be the final result of all this. I have innumerable doubts about the novel, whether it’s boring, or historically inaccurate, or badly written, or some combination of all of the above, and the progress on it is so slow that it seems like it’s insurmountable at times. But, there’s something that compels me to do it and the same thing has been working on me since at least 1999, and I don’t know what you call that thing, but I am trying to listen to it. Perhaps it’s a sense of calling, a belief that this is why God sent me here, to write this story and write it as well as I can.

I’m not much of a quick study, and I never have been. In high school I was a weak student but I finally learned in college how to apply myself and get good grades. At 36 going on 37 I am too old to be a phenom or a prodigy. All through my life if I have succeeded at something it has been after more time than it takes an average person. I only have a small measure of literary talent, but I believe I own that small measure. It’s all I have to work with, but it’s mine. I got it from God, and He wants me to use it. A few people have published my writing, enough for me to think that if I work hard enough at it I can put together some good sentences. The only possible way for me to finish this novel is little by little by little and by unglamorous, dogged persistence. It is a very long and difficult road and literally the only way to get down it is to drag myself there inch by inch.

Thus, on to Chapter 4. Right at the moment, whenever that moment arrives, I am conducting some additional research on ‘the Black Giant’ oil field in Texas that was discovered in 1930, and I am going to do some more reading and note-taking on the ever-thrilling subject of the history of Township Trustees in the civic Government in Indiana. For now the only hints I can give are in bullet form since the writing hasn’t even started yet, but in this chapter I am hoping to include the following:

- a jump ahead from 1924 (finally) to 1925-1927, heading toward the conception and birth of Luke Brogan
- more about Peter Heinricks’ adventures in Oklahoma and East Texas
- the fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana
- Myron Devreaux and his efforts to make his way into local politics

We’ll see how much of that actually ends up in the story. Back to the grind, as they say……

The British (Literary) Invasion

I'm using this space to make an announcement in my upcoming reading schedule, knowing full well that this is of interest to all of two people at the most: myself, and my partner in crime, Mutt. But then again why not? We don't set many rules for ourselves posting on this blog, and as long as it's somehow related to literature and/or the spiritual life, I say it's fair game.

Recently many of the conversations about great books Mutt and I have been having (and we're having them all the time, even while living in different states -- via cell phone, e-mail, occasionally in person) have hit upon classic works of literature coming from England. These conversations have woken me up anew to something I've been surpressing for a long time and have always meant to come back to and try and address: that is, my absurd lack of familiarity with Great Britain's awesome literary tradition.

Oh, I've read some of the great stuff from England -- some Shakespeare, a few Dickens novels, Keats, Graham Greene, etc. -- but the more I thought about it, the more amazed I was at how many of the famous, endlessly quoted and referenced writers and works I am NOT familiar with.

Jane Austen? Never read her. Thomas Hardy? Never read him. George Eliot? Never read her. E. M. Forster? Never. Kipling? Never. Lawrence? Never. Pound? Never. Byron? Never. Samuel Johnson? Nope. You get the idea.

This is downright embarrassing.

Therefore, I have hereby decided that I am now going to do something about this glaring deficiency in my literary education. Beginning soon and lasting for at least a few months (and possibly longer), I have decided that every other book I read is going to be a classic work of British literature. It is time to catch up with the rest of the world and get a taste of some of the most refined and elegant prose the human race has to offer.

I have even selected the first three works I am going to read, interpersed between other books I decide upon. They are, in the following order:

Middlemarch, George Eliot

The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

I look forward to reporting back in this space at some point to share some of what I have learned and experienced.

Rule Britannia!

What Has Happened to the Short Story?

For most of the last 20 years I have had aspirations to write (and hopefully publish) fiction. I have produced numerous short stories over the last 15 of those years and have published none of them. Not virtually none of them or almost none – literally, none. And it’s not for lack of trying. I send them out routinely. I’m not complaining about this, although I wish it were different; it’s just the truth. The only reason I bring it up is to concede the point in advance that for me to write the following post is a not a little presumptuous. Fine, I do concede. But I still want to make some observations about the current ‘state’ of the short story. And I do so as a reader if not as a writer of stories.

Last Christmas my mother got me a subscription to The New Yorker, which I wasn’t sure I would like because I am not always so fond of their elitist tone/vibe or their left-leaning political slant, but as it turns out it has been a superb gift. I really enjoy reading many of the articles, and have been pleasantly surprised in general by how much I get out of the magazine. But the main thing I am interested in is their short stories, which they publish one of every week (more on rare occasions). The New Yorker is justifiably famous for their stories; for better or for worse, they represent more or less the gold standard for writers of short fiction. If you publish a story in The New Yorker, you have truly arrived. Perhaps The Paris Review and a short list of other magazines have similar heft, but for my purposes I consider stories I read in this magazine to be representative of what the people who ‘run’ the literary world think are the ‘best’ stories around today.

Which is where I find myself scratching my head. For most of the last year I have been reading The New Yorker. I make sure that I read every single story that comes my way. It’s a weekly magazine, so there have been many. I really enjoy the anticipation and the actual experience of reading these stories – but I am finding that most of the short stories I am reading leave me, in a word, flat. The more time goes by, the more New Yorker stories I read, the more I find myself asking the question, ‘THESE are the best short stories being written today? This is the best fiction in the world?’ Because the simple fact is, no matter how big the name of the writer is (and not all of them are instantly recognizable), most of them don’t seem that remarkable to me. They don’t blow me away. They strike me in most cases as better than I can do, but I expect more from The New Yorker – I think, if these guys are the very top of the tier, then each story should be a stunner. But most of them aren’t.

I realize it’s an objective thing, and tastes vary from person to person. But there should be some ineffable whiff of the very highest quality that comes through in New Yorker stories, if you consider their status and reputation, and I don’t get that from many of them. Obviously, there are exceptions. Just in the last year I have read what in my opinion are truly exceptional stories in the magazine – “A Tranquil Star” by Primo Levi (but he’s been dead for 20 years), “See The Other Side” my Tatyana Tolstaya, “Hanwell Senior” by Zadie Smith, and “Bravado” by William Trevor are some examples.

Nonetheless I have just come off of a run of reading numerous stories from the magazine – in part because I moved and missed a bunch of weeks’ worth of issues, which of course all came in one shot later on – and have been disappointed again and again by the stories, some by famous writers, some not. When I received the magazine’s annual fiction issue, I was terribly excited. They published four stories in that issue, and I figured there had to be something good in there. But I read all four, and they were all boring, terribly depressing, or generally pointless, or all three.

The best of these was Denis Johnson’s “1966”which was about a guy during the Vietnam Era in Hawaii getting involved with the wrong crowd, but the ending came up a little short, and the writing was fine but not the greatness I expected based on Johnson’s reputation from feted books like Jesus’ Son. A story by Miranda July, who has just published a book of them called No One Belongs Here More Than You, was about a woman who meets someone very, very famous on an aircraft, which I think was supposed to be some kind of riff on the celebrity-obsessed culture, but seemed to be more of that pointless and boring variety I spoke of. And anyway, the celebrity-obsessed culture is a boring thing to riff on. Nothing much happened, except the woman in the story at the end seems to regret that nothing much happened. Then there was ‘debut fiction’, a story by a young writer who had never published a story before. This must have been a big deal for him, a young man named David Hoon Kim; I laud his accomplishment, but again wasn’t impressed with the story. I was impressed with the fact that there were at least three different languages that played into the story, and evidently the young man who wrote it is of Korean descent but grew up partially in France and Denmark, lived in America, and has worked (logically) as a translator. But the story itself was very close to Haruki Murakami, another highly lauded contemporary writer whose greatness escapes me, and had a tragic ending that seemed almost like it was there because that’s the way most stories seem to end, badly.

Which brings me to another point (I don’t even remember the fourth story in the fiction issue, by the way, try as I might). As Duke and I have frequently observed in conversation, short stories in the ‘big’ magazines are almost always bleak. Why is this? Is it anyone’s experience that all stories are sad ones? Or maybe only the ones worth telling are? Why do we seem to have this fascination in contemporary literature with sadness and melancholy, as if these were the only themes? A great example again is a recent New Yorker story by Colm Toibin called “One Minus One”, which was a truly sleep-inducing tale about a guy who loses his mother and otherwise muses on how miserable his life is after some failed relationships. Not only is this depressing, but it’s everyone’s story – everyone's trash - for who hasn’t had failed relationships? THIS IS THE BEST STUFF??!!

Or again, consider the British writer Helen Simpson’s recent short story “Homework” in the magazine, in which a woman and her thirteen-year-old son sit in a kitchen together and she helps him to ‘write’ (or take down) a fabricated essay for school about one of the most important moments in his life. For reasons we’ll never know or understand, the woman, who seems resolutely dissatisfied with being married and having a son, tells him to write about the devastation of his parents’ divorce and the havoc it has wreaked in his life, even though it has never happened. The boy is confused, but he plays along; he’s thirteen and just wants it over with. I guess this is the woman’s way to play out some kind of fantasy about what she feels she might have done but didn’t have the guts to do, and maybe some women can relate to that. But whatever it is, it’s bleak, it’s depressing, and it’s boring. Another story I just read last week by a contemporary German writer named Maxim Biller was notable for its brevity and its un-American feel, but it was still about a relationship that seemed to be falling apart, which is more of the same. It ended with an inexplicable mutual decision that seemed totally incongruous with the previous events, as though the characters decided to do the opposite of what they obviously needed to for no other reason than martyrdom.

As I established in the beginning, I am certainly no expert, but it seems to me that the world of short fiction has to be better than this. My favorite story writers all seem to be dead ones, with a few exceptions like the great William Trevor. I have never seen anything in The New Yorker that comes even close to the work of Flannery O’Connor in terms of humor, details, or sheer impact. John Cheever’s stories may seem highly dated now but they were richly detailed, carefully crafted and bore the distinctive mark of one steeped in the great literature of the past. Raymond Carver’s stories were not exactly inspiring or optimistic but they were at least exquisitely crafted and seemed more concerned with being honest about humanity than trying to sound smarter or cleverer than everyone else, or more irreverent.

I can’t come up with any firm conclusion or overall diagnosis, but I will say that the above reflections have been in my head for some time and it makes me want to undergo some kind of mission to find the truly great stories in the world, from dead writers or current ones that remain undiscovered (to me). It strikes me that very few short stories really blow me away, and I want to find more stories that do that and see if I can determine why they do, and whether or not those writers achieved that level of excellence consistently or only on rare occasions. I think what I am going to try do is devote a good chunk of my reading for the rest of this year to short stories to see what I can discover.

I also think that because I have tried and failed so many times to write a legitimately good short story, right up to my most recent story “In the Throes”, I want to find more stories that are clearly of a high quality and try to examine them closely. I could take it as encouraging that so many other writers seem to be failing too, except they’re getting published in The New Yorker and I’m not. In any case, the short story is truly a difficult art form to master, and it’s obvious to me from my experience in the last year with the New Yorker that no matter how a writer goes about successfully placing one of their stories there, it by no means indicates that the story itself is a great one or even a good one. And if that is true, I guess success at writing fiction may come down to ‘who you know’ after all.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #52: DRINK UP!

The latest POTW comes from the noted Irish writer Flann O'Brien, known for his witty, satirical novels such as The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds.

It is so hilarious I don't want to muck it up with any more words, except to say this: only an Irishman could have written this. Makes me tear up just thinking about it...

Bottoms up!

*******

The Workman's Friend

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

UNSHELVED: 'Tobacco Road' by Erskine Caldwell

I didn't plan it this way, but the second installment in my fledgling UNSHELVED series features another Southern fiction classic: Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. Both the book and the author are new to me, although I had heard about them for years, and the novel has been on my list of must-read American classics for a long time now.

When I was younger I used to wonder where the whole "Southern Gothic" tradition came from (being far from "Southern" myself!)... but the older I get and the more fiction I read from that region, the clearer it becomes to me. These writers, quite simply, are obsessed with death. Now why that is is a complicated subject I am sure -- no doubt William Faulkner would attribute it at least in part to the "South's original sin," slavery, hanging like the sword of Damocles above their collective heads -- but nevertheless, you don't have to look very far for examples. The aforementioned Faulkner (just think of that most "gothic" of all Southern classics, As I Lay Dying), Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Ann Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider... hello!?!), Walker Percy... and the latest, most celebrated and perhaps bleakest exemplar of the tradition, Cormac McCarthy (who recently was quoted as saying, "Death is the only subject.").

Another hallmark of these writers is that they seem to have a knack for mixing a witty, regionalized gallows humor (often sparked and exacerbated by that other Southern obsession, "old time religion") in with their musings about death, which often makes for gut-busting, if not unsettling, reading. I've noticed this in works from all of the writers mentioned above, with the exception of Porter (although I've only read the three stories from her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, so I can't really comment on her work as a whole). McCarthy's early novel Suttree reads almost like a master's thesis in how to mix the above ingredients together into your own weirdly potent, haunting brew. There is certainly dark humor sprinkled over the pages of Faulkner, if you have the mind and the patience to look for it. And then of course there's the peerless work of Flannery O'Connor -- you can't find fiction that's much funnier, and yet more deadly serious (outside of Shakespeare perhaps), than hers is.

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road fits neatly into this venerable tradition. I doubt very much if that's what he was aiming for (nor if he was even aware of the "tradition" itself), but nevertheless, this is a very funny and yet, very bleak book that deeply unnerves (I would even say, saddens) you, even while it is tickling your funny bone. I can think of very few books that delve so deeply into the lives of the poorest of the poor -- the kinds of people so easily and so callously dismissed in this country, at least nowadays, as "white trash" or "hicks." In this way (and in others), Caldwell's book was considered somewhat pioneering, as it portrayed the hardscrabble ways of poor white sharecroppers who, even in Depression-era Georgia, are so far down on the social ladder that even the negroes make fun of and persecute them. (Not that the "negroes" should be low down on that ladder, but considering how they themselves were treated in that place and time, it's almost unthinkable to imagine anyone more hard off than they were!) One of the remarkable aspects of the book, then, is how Caldwell manages to portray these people with some degree of sympathy, even as he presents a very unadorned and unromanticized portrait of them -- they prejudices, their lack of education, their meanness and especially, their ignorance, passed down from one generation to another.

Plot Synopsis:
Tobacco Road tells the story of the Lesters, a dirt-poor family of sharecroppers living on a dusty farm in rural Georgia (outside of Augusta) during the Great Depression. And when I say "dirt-poor," I mean they have nothing at all, not even any food: the darkly comic opening chapters depict a ridiculous brawl between Jeeter Lester, the pater familias of the family, and his neighbor "Lov" over a 50-cent sack of turnips (though that 50 cents represented half of Lov's daily wage!). Lov has married Jeeter's 12-year-old daughter Pearl, but keeps complaining of his inability to consummate the marriage because the young girl refuses to touch, or even talk, to him. Jeeter's response is, essentially, "Hell, she's your problem now."

The Lester family, to put it mildly, is a mess. Obviously illiterate and ignorant towards most of what goes on in the world, they seem to have lived lives of thankless labor, cruelty and greed, and have very little to show for any of it. Jeeter and his wife Ada have spawned nine children, but most of them have run off to Augusta and want nothing to do with them anymore. Only their youngest son, Dude, and an 18-year-old daughter with a harelip, Ellie Mae, remain living with them. Jeeter is supposed to be working the fields to provide an income for them, but he can't afford any of the equipment or fertilizer necessary to do so any more, so he occasionally attempts to sell firewood for pennies... otherwise, they have no income, which is why they are more or less starving. One of his older sons is rumored to be well-off now in Augusta, and Jeeter keeps vowing to go and visit him to ask for some help financially, but of course he never does.

Jeeter's mother, referred to only as Grandma Lester, lives with them too, but she moves eerily around the house and property like a ghost, ignored by everybody and mumbling to herself. At every turn, Caldwell makes sure to point out that no one listens or pays the slightest attention to her at all. You get the feeling she has long since gone senile and that her mind is completely addled, but no one bothers to try to help her in any way. For me, she added a disturbing and creepy element to the story, especially as she is involved in the book's terrible, tragic climax.

Another character, Sister Bessie, enters the scene and forces herself into the Lester's sad existence. Sister Bessie is a traveling preacher, affiliated with no church but insistent upon the importance of her "ministry," which she inherited, she says, from her first husband when he died. She insists that the Holy Ghost has told her she was to marry Dude (16 years old) so that she could make him a preacher to help her "do the Lord's work." She entices Dude to marry her by saying she would buy him a new automobile, with the money she received after her husband's death. All Dude cares about is driving the car, so he agrees to marry Sister Bessie without really knowing what he's agreeing to. It should be noted that Sister Bessie has a facial deformity as well: she is missing a bone in her nose, so her nostrils are facing straight out and can be peered into, like a pig's. For some reason (and this is one of the oddest and most unsettling quirks in this strange, morbid novel), Caldwell makes a big deal of these facial deformities, drawing the reader's (and the other characters') attention to them again and again, as if these were proof of the depravity of the people he's portraying.

As this description may reveal, there are many elements in the story that reminded me strongly of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. It's interesting to note that Caldwell's novel preceded all of her writing -- the mix of dark humor, grotesque elements and untethered, Bible-thumping religion makes the comparison almost inescapable. And yet, whereas O'Connor famously allows her characters graced moments of genuine revelation, Caldwell seems to be wallowing in the iniquities and ignorance of his, and is at pains to show their inherent selfishness, avarice and lust. In fact, Tobacco Road could almost be read as a road map across the Seven Deadly Sins -- save gluttony, perhaps... although even there, the characters' obsession with finding food, though understandable considering the circumstances, bears some ugly fruit as well by the time the tale is told.

At any rate, the remainder of the novel follows Dude and Bessie around as they go and purchase a new car, drive it around the countryside and into Augusta, get married (Bessie performs the ceremony herself of course, being filled with the Holy Ghost and all), crack up the car several times and finally return to the Lester farm, where Jeeter proceeds to covet both Dude's new car, and his new wife. This dark, twisted farce ends on several tragic notes, without a trace of redemption for anyone in sight.

Surprises:
I've already noted several aspects of the book that struck me, but here I'd like to point out something that will seem totally at odds with everything I've written above: the book has a grim, morbid sense of humor that had me cracking up more than I'd even like to admit! Part of this is subjective, of course -- I just happen to find portrayals of zealous, evangelical Bible thumpers particularly hilarious. I don't know what it is exactly; maybe it's as simple as Flannery O'Connor's response when asked why she, a devout Catholic, didn't feature Catholic characters in her fiction: "The Protestants make better fanatics." Regardless, I found the dialog between the characters, especially Jeeter's constant griping about everything and Sister Bessie's absurdly self-righteous proclamations, hilarious.

I think the other thing I didn't expect about this book is how frank it is in portraying the sexual lusts of its characters, and the violence in it as well. Neither of these seem all that shocking by today's standards when you read them, but at the time, it must have been quite alarming to readers. Also, the fact that there are no consequences even discussed, let alone portrayed, for the two unexpected killings in this novel (both carried out with the automobile!) surprised me as well, and made me wonder what Caldwell was trying to say. Were the poor sharecroppers of the time so hard up for food and so stuck on their own concerns, that all sense of right and wrong went out the window? By portraying the brutal deaths of two of the society's weakest and most inconsequential members, was Caldwell trying to make some kind of statement about the neglect of the helpless in the rural South? Who knows. What can be said is that these deaths are put forth without sympathy in the narrative, and hardly even noticed at all by the characters themselves. It creates a chilling effect.

Reasons it's worth reading (or re-reading):
I don't know if I'm doing a good job "selling" this book or not. I'm not fully convinced I even want to sell it. And yet, it does seem like a pioneering book in some ways. It is an unflinching look at the spiritual, moral and physical depravity of a people whom the world had long since turned its back on -- who, in the most trying circumstances, reveal the corrupted heart of man in all of its ugliness. It is a story of lust, greed and ignorance. It has comic elements, but it ends on a very somber, even despairing, note. One wonders why Caldwell would want to write such an unredeeming story, especially since he doesn't seem to have grown up in such horrible conditions. Satirizing the self-made, hellfire, home-brewed religion of Southern Protestant hillbilly preachers is one thing, and for me it makes for hilarious reading. But showing us the poorest of the poor and the things they do to destroy each other, and how little they care about it, leaves you wondering what the ultimate point was. As Caldwell again and again draws your attention back to details like physical deformities and incestuous longings, you can't help but think he's making a statement about the ultimate worth of man -- and it's not a positive one. Like some well-executed horror movies, this novel leaves you morbidly fascinated, but underneath that, strangely sad.

Journal of a “Novel”-Entry 33

Struggleville

I was astonished to find out that it has been over four months since I last posted a ‘Journal’ entry here on this blog. I wish I could say it is because I have been hammering away at the ‘novel’ I was working on, but it isn’t. As we have noted here a few times before, both Duke and myself, life has a way of intervening, and it certainly has in my case. The process of searching for a first house, buying one and moving my entire life (and my family’s) from one state to another was a massive one that is only now pretty well settled in my rear view mirror. I was openly hopeful on this blog that it wouldn’t deal a deathblow to my fiction writing, and over the last few months some of those fears have been borne out in the form of a stalemate in the third chapter of the novel I am working on. Getting back in the swing of writing has been a difficult job and in all honesty I am still trying to get my hunger for it back and find the resources within to provide me with the required effort and persistence.

I did write one short story since I made my move, called ‘In the Throes’, whose brief life was briefly catalogued here in previous posts. But I only showed it to one reader and was oddly unhappy with the ultimate result: I thought it had some of the strongest writing I have ever done in it, but on the whole I am not sure of the story’s success, and definitely unsure of its potential to find itself into print. The craft of short-story writing continues to baffle me and I am not sure I am cut out for it. The harder I work at it the less I seem to really progress towards writing a good one myself. Having said that, however, I seriously doubt that I have made my last attempt.

All of this has caused me to think a lot about my writing life lately. I have been trying to learn how to be a writer for the last 17 years, since around 1990. I was 19-20 years old then and in college and now I am 36 with a wife and two daughters, but I still don’t have much writing to show for it that’s worth showing. Part of me is tired of trying. Part of me thinks I am only just getting started. Part of me wonders if after all of the false-starts, lame stories, semi-autobiographical essays, years and years of journal writing, lyrics, and attempted novels, do I even know what sort of writing I want to do? Am I a fiction writer or not? I got a Master’s degree to tell the yawning world that I am educated in fiction writing, but haven’t published any fiction. Where the hell is all this going???


Persistence

Over the years I have always tried to tell myself to persist in my writing efforts because of the fact that 1) I enjoyed doing it, 2) I wasn’t hurting anyone by doing it, and 3) it meant not giving up on my dreams. At 36 with debt and responsibilities, I don’t know to what degree I can really afford to hold on to my dreams. But I hold on to them nonetheless, somehow. If I am not hurting anyone by trying to write, I am not helping anyone either, least of all myself, and yet I still do it. I don’t even know why, except for a feeling I have that I need to and that’s part of who I am and what I do.

And it’s that feeling, I suppose, more than anything else, which makes me determined to continue writing the novel I started, which has been languishing in its third chapter for more than six months. I have lost the momentum on it that I had, I don’t have a great feeling for the story right now, and I don’t feel that great about it in general, but I’m not going to give up on it yet. Over the last two weeks I have suddenly pulled out the manuscript again and taken a few shots at picking up in Chapter 3 in an effort to finish it and revise it so I can move on to Chapter 4. And it has come on only in spurts. But I think I will be able to get Chapter 3 done. It is a long chapter – long by my standards, even – but I think it will be fairly cohesive and at least goes along with what has come before. The hard part is going to be going on from here.

At the end of Chapter 3, Walter Brogan, my protagonist, attends a meeting of the Knights of Columbus, which his friend Cal Wittenburg, a farmer and Fourth Degree Knight of the same organization, has invited him to. While he is there he reveals what happened at his wedding reception, which is detailed in Chapter 1 of the novel. This is the first time that the information that the Ku Klux Klan has operated within the town of Bentonville has ‘gone public’, and that, coupled with the knowledge that the Klan’s hand-selected candidate, Edward Jackson, has just been elected the next governor of Indiana, creates a heightened tension over the breadth and duration of the Klan’s ‘reign’ in the state.

However, at the outset of Chapter 4, the timeline of the novel will have advanced a few years, to roughly 1927, and by this time the Klan’s influence and power will be severely diminished in Indiana. I have to find a way to ease the reader into the next phase of the story without letting them down from the heightened expectations that might have been set at the end of Chapter 3. My idea was never to write a novel of ‘little guy versus the Klan’. It has always been to show what Walter Brogan has to go up against in a lifetime’s worth of struggle against negative forces, and the Klan is only one of those forces. So for me the challenge lies in moving the story along without creating any letdowns from what has gone before. The fact is that Brogan will have nothing to do with the demise of the Klan; he won’t have to. The Klan will bury themselves, which is exactly what they did in real life in Indiana. But, the fact that Walter Brogan told the members of the Knights of Columbus what happened at his wedding without ever telling his wife or his extended family is going to create tension in Brogan’s own household and, more importantly, his marriage, and that is the crucial element that has to come across. Following that, I will have the further challenge of moving the story forward into the next series of challenges that may lie in store for Walter Brogan.

Stay tuned, then, for what I hope will be increased reportage on the evolution of this novel in progress.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #51

I realize it's been a while since I've posted, what can I say. You've heard all the excuses before anyway. In fact, almost all of them are probably neatly catalogued across the annals of this site!

This blog is never far from my mind, however; and even though it may take me a while to get back to it, I always have new posts planned, and definitely intend to continue the virtual conversation here for as long as I can. Soon I hope to throw up here a second entry into my fledgling UNSHELVED series (see April 2007 archives for the inugural entry on Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird).

For now, another POTW entry, and this one from an unlikely source. Peter Kreeft is certainly one of my favorite authors and Catholic thinkers, but he is not a poet -- at least, is not known as one. Yet I recently came across a very rare poem by the Boston College philosopher, which I thought was both fun and profound. In fact, it reminded me very much of some of the bits of poetry that are found sprinkled liberally throughout the Lord of the Rings book -- not just in style, but also in substance, in a way. Like those poems, which are usually in fact song lyrics, this one has a steady rhythm and cadence to it. And yet, also like those fragments in J. R. R. Tolkien's work, it also contains deep and lasting truths. Kreeft himself I am sure would be honored by the comparion to Tolkien, since he has both written and lectured extensively on the treasure of his language and his imagination.

Come to think of it, another well-known hero of Kreeft's (and, as it happens, of mine), the incomparable C. S. Lewis, was also an academic who dabbled in poetry more or less for fun, but came up with some profound lines from time to time in the process.

At any rate... here is one to both enjoy and, perhaps, meditate upon. When you do, you will discover that like a verbal Trojan Horse, this light verse is sneaking some pretty heady insights into your soul!

*******

The Philosopher's Stone

The care with which he cut the jewel
Was sharper than his cutting tool.
The love with which he shaped the stone
Outweighed, outlasted and outshone
All diamonds and rubies; but
Until a greater Jeweler cut
The diamond mind of darkened man,
None but the mystic ever can
Measure care's weight with fallen mind
Here on this planet of the blind
Unless that greater Jeweler turn
The facets of Mind's jewel to burn
With his reflected fire alone
And thus produce a wisdom stone.

A Prose Excerpt from Halldor Laxness

This was my favorite chapter from Laxness' semi-autobiographical novel, The Fish Can Sing. It contains all of the hallmarks that makes Laxness such a unique and enchanting writer -- his love of nature, his respect for the old traditions and values of a culture, his preference for life experience over classroom learning, and most of all, his Icelandic heart. He was truly THE great literary ambassador for his tiny but incredibly imaginative country.

To set up this passage, the narrator was abandoned by his mother at the modest village home of his grandparents, a place called Brekkukot. He has been raised by his grandmother and grandfather, and this chapter describes his idyllic life with them and the moment in time when he realized he could not stay there and enjoy their company forever. With beautiful prose (even in translation), a keen eye and a penetrating human wisdom, Laxness captures the wide-eyed magic of youth, and the pain that comes when one realizes that one can't remain a child forever.

*******

Chapter 19:
Morning of Eternity: and End

Late in the winter, my grandfather Bjorn started calling me at six o'clock every morning so that I could help him to see the lumpfish-nets in Skerjafjordur. These mornings have always remained fresh in my memory.

What happened? Nothing really happened, except that the sun was getting ready to rise. The stars are seldom as bright as they are in the morning, either because one's eyesight is clearest just after waking, or because the Virgin Mary has been busy polishing them all night. Sometimes there was also a moon. A tiny light had been lit in a cottage on Alftanes; probably someone was going out fishing. Often there was frost and frozen snow, and the ice creaked in the night. Somewhere out in the infinite distance lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like the babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb.

My grandfather had a large boat, and a small one. The small boat was used for lumpfishing; it was beached at the high-water mark in front of a shed in which we kept our gear. The boat was easy to launch; it went practically of its own accord if the rollers were placed correctly. And so we rowed out among the rocks and skerries to where the nets lay. Sometimes the gulls followed us in the moonlight. Lumpfish-nets are not normally hauled in; you row alongside them and gaff the fish, or else just grab them by hand, wearing mittens. I kept one oar out and held the boat in position while grandfather used the gaff.

My grandfather was always in a good humor and always reasonably cheerful, but never exactly jolly. He could be mischievous in an innocent sort of way, and enjoyed trying to out-row me. He also laughed if some of his snuff were blown into my eyes when he was taking a pinch, probably because he did not think it was manly to show if one's eyes watered. I never knew what he was thinking about, because he talked mostly in stylized phrases, both about the weather and about the fish. But I somehow felt that in this man's presence, nothing untoward could happen. I often thought to myself how good the Savior had been to send me to this man for protection and help, and I made up my mind to stay with him for as long for as long as he lived and always to catch lumpfish with him at the end of the winter. And I hoped to God that he would not go from me before I myself was well on the way to being as old as he; and then I would find myself a little boy somewhere and have him row out with me to the nets early in the morning when the stars were still bright at the end of the winter. In the moonlight, the gulls seemed to have golden breasts. If you looked down over the gunwale you could see the lumpfish gliding among the seaweed, feeding; occasionally they would even turn their pink-shaded bellies upwards in the water.

Sometimes we would fill both the hand-cart and the wheelbarrow with this fat fish. And just when the stars were really beginning to pale, we would cart our catch homeward straight across the Sands. Grandmother would give us coffee, and then we would go down town to sell the catch just as people were getting up. Grandfather would stop with his hand-cart somewhere in the square, and people would come along with money to buy lumpfish while others just came to greet him and discuss the weather. I was often sent with a string of lumpfish to bring to the regular customers; usually the maid came to the door with the money and took the fish, but sometimes the lady of the house herself would be there, or else, for some incomprehensible reason, the daughter of the house...

These mornings when we were seeing to the lumpfish in Skerjafjordur (and they were really all one and the same morning) -- suddenly they were over. Their stars faded: your Chinese idyll ended.

My grandfather had given me a sign to ship the oars. The boat came to a rest with its bows on a shelf of rock, and the red clusters of seaweed eddied around the prow in the calm sea as the sun rose. It was almost spring. Grandfather took a careful pinch from his snuff-horn, and then said,

"Your grandmother has been talking to me."

I kept silent, and waited.

"She says that according to Helgesen, the teacher, you can learn. We want you to have an education."

"Why?" I asked.

"Her people in the past were all educated men," he said.

"Then what will I be made to do?" I said. "Will I not be allowed to come out fishing with you again?"

"We were thinking of sending you to school, my boy, and making you learn what they call Latin. The idea is that you start in the autumn, if you are accepted. I went to see Pastor Johann; we have got a university student from Copenhagen to prepare you. There was some talk of you starting tomorrow."

I asked, "Are you then not going to wake me tomorrow morning to go fishing?"

He replied, "Your grandmother wishes you well, my boy. And so do I, even though I am ignorant."

And with these words he put out his oar and we pushed off from the rock and rowed ashore.

In Stephan G. Stephansson's biography it says that when the poet was a foster-child up north in Skagafjordur he saw some young men riding over the mountains on their way to school in the south one autumn. He was so deeply distressed by his own misery at not being able to go to school himself and become an educated man that he threw himself down on the heather out there on the moor and wept for a whole day. I have always found it difficult to understand that story. The thought of becoming a Latin scholar had never once occurred to me. I had never been impressed by seeing schoolboys walking around with their tattered books under their arm, nor had I ever wanted to be in their shoes. And now that I had been informed that I was to go and start learning Latin, I inwardly felt as if my grandfather had told me to become an organ-grinder or a scissors-sharpener -- the sort of riffraff that sometimes came over from Denmark during the summer.

It came like a thunderclap out of a clear blue sky. All my plans for eternal life at Brekkekot were destroyed. My joy in existence was shattered. The Great Wall of China, within which I was the Son of Heaven himself, was breached -- and not at the blast of a trumpet, but at a word. How bitter that it should have been my grandfather who spoke the word that ruined for me our turnstile-gate at Brekkukot. I broke down. I had not cried since I was small, because we did not cry at Brekkukot. I felt that nothing could ever console me again. I rowed and rowed with all my strength to keep pace with my grandfather, and cried and cried.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #50

"Let's do the math," as Eminem once rapped (with admirable honesty)... hmm, 50 poems of the week, and this blog has been going for coming on two years... 52 weeks in a year... maybe "Poem of the Week" has become something of a misnomer? Maybe I should be calling this series "Duke Altum's Poem of Every Other Week"!?!

Well guess what folks, I ain't changin' it at this point... the original name has a nicer ring to it, inaccurate or not! I'll put it this way: the word "week" doesn't necessarily mean every week, it only refers to that week in which it appears! How's that for a contorted justification?

Anyway, this week's poem is noteworthy for the amount of freight it carries in just a few short verses... in these fascinating lines, the forces of poetry, science and politics combine to create a brief but powerful meditation on the turmoil and uncertainty of the created world we live in. Several aspects of Miroslav Holub's background as a poet/immunologist living in the Czech Republic come through in this short poem -- the fascination of peering at complex organisms under high magnification; the imagination of the poet's heart ("dreaming landscapes"); echoes of the political upheaval and physical/spiritual violence of war so common to Eastern Europe. Through the dual lenses of scientific observation and creative imagination, Holub presents to us an entire universe in microcosm, in all of its beauty and pain.

*******

In the Microscope

Here too are the dreaming landscapes,
lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses,
tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
who lay down their lives for a song.

Here too are cemeteries,
fame and snow.
And I hear the murmuring,
the revolt of immense estates.

Memory and the Loom of Fiction

Below are five isolated strands of my actual memory. In other words, they are true events, unless I am forgetting or misrepresenting details due to the passage of time, etc. In honor of this blog, we’ll call them threads. They seem unrelated, but as we will see below, they are linked, or have recently become linked, in a process I find interesting.

Thread #1: When I was growing up, there was a younger, dynamic priest named Father Frank Delia in the parish I attended with my family who was a very talented homilist, and who used to close out his homilies from time to time by sitting down at a piano and belting out a song before the congregation.

Thread #2: Years ago, maybe 12 or 14 years back, I went on a weekend trip to the beach with some friends. One night we were just goofing around and a group of us decided to go out and take a walk on the boardwalk. While we were out there we saw some young boys with these long, harpoon-like lances standing on the pier. When we got closer we saw that they were actually fishing for miniature sharks. They would wait until they had a ‘shot’, then spear them with the lances and toss them onto a pile on the pier. I remember staring at this pile of bleeding, semi-dead sharks at night near the ocean.

Thread #3: In 1996 as I was closing out my career in the US Army, I was in the process of leaving Fort Benning, Georgia, after 4 years of living in that area. My Dad came down to help me with the transition. While he was there we went for a weekend in a facility in Alabama, a very quiet, isolated Retreat Center in a town that was called Holy Trinity. This was way in the backwoods. One night while we were at this retreat house, I couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night I wandered out from my very Spartan little room into the common area of the facility. There was an indoor grotto with a little pond and a statue of Mary in that area. I remember sitting there in absolute silence in the middle of the night. I wasn’t even praying, I was just sitting there. I guess it was some sort of awareness that my life was in a major transition and that I knew nothing about the road ahead of me. After a while I just went back down the hall and went to bed. Nobody ever knew I had been awake.

Thread #4: My mom always had this very old looking, beat-up breviary, a kind of old-fashioned guidebook that people used to bring to Catholic Mass to follow along with the prayers. It was jacketed in black leather and had an antiquated appearance. Later, I found out that it had once belonged to her father and she kept it as an heirloom and a reminder of him. She still has it.

Thread #5: About two or three years ago I was visiting with some friends of ours who were (still are) married with two children at the time (they have three now). In this marriage the husband was a ‘cradle Catholic’ from Boston and the wife was an evangelical Christian who had gone through the RCIA program so they could get married in the Catholic Church. I always had the sense from her that she did this reluctantly, but it’s hard to say. I do know his family highly encouraged it. He was the quintessential Boston Catholic boy. And yet when the sex abuse scandals hit in 2002, and one must remember they hit worst in the Boston area, he lost his fidelity to Catholicism. It also came out that one of the clergy involved in the scandals had been a part of the RCIA program that the wife had been through when she converted. Because of all these things, they both left the Church; her after a short stint, him after a lifetime. When I talked to him, he had no regrets; in fact, he was adamant that the Church, not him, had changed. ‘It’s just not the Church I grew up in any more,’ he told me. ‘It’s all based on nothing.’ I disagreed then and I still do. But I didn’t go through what he went through, and the words stuck with me like a splinter.

Why do I bring all these unrelated memories up here? Because they have all come together somehow in a short story I’ve just written called “In The Throes”. As I have been revising and re-thinking the story I realized just how many different elements of it – some of which are ancillary and some are crucial to the tale at hand – came from these random memories from very different times in my life.

It’s fascinating how the medium of stories – writing fiction – works with the material that is already there in your life. A lot of writers have argued that one of the keys to writing fiction is going out and living a very full and wide-reaching life, and that experience is the only teacher. Therefore you have to accumulate a lot of it. But this is the counter-argument, that one can also find the elements of (hopefully) good fiction within one’s own experience. Emily Dickinson comes to mind, as well as a host of others.

The point is not to draw comparisons, but to reflect on how interesting it is that by sitting down and attempting to write a short story or a poem or novel, you come into that process with these loose threads of memory and experience hanging around, and it can be like sitting down at a loom. You just start weaving, toss in a few made up threads, and before you know it you have created a tapestry. Whether the pattern or colors or design of the tapestry are any good is another matter. But creative writing – fiction, in my case – is the loom. You need the structure and the form of it to create your art. How well you weave depends on your talent and your effort.

This story I have just written may turn out to be one of my better ones, it may not. But I was surprised to see that it had brought together these unrelated fragments of my memory in a way that I never anticipated it would. I love this about the writing process; it’s why I do it. It gives me a way to mine my own experience, arrange the pieces, see what I can make out of it. It’s a way to mirror God’s ultimate act of creation that was to bring all that we see and know and experience to life out of an empty void. To create something where originally there was nothing is a hardship and a gift, a struggle and a joy, a means and an end.

MuttRolls

Blog readers: I am back. After weeks of a lengthy hiatus from the blog to attend to personal matters, namely moving my whole family of four from one state to another and all of the various “Muttrolls” associated with that, I now return to The Secret Thread where I will hopefully resume making quasi-regular posts on matters related to literature, spirituality, film, etc.

Meanwhile, props are in order for the efforts of my man and co-blogger Duke Altum, who has mightily carried the torch while I was off doing the above. Since I make up for roughly 30% of the entire Secret Thread readership, maybe the whole of his contributions to the blog in recent weeks has not been fully appreciated. But if anyone has taken the time to read his last two posts, his insightful essay on children, innocence and the film The Spirit of the Beehive and his new Unshelved feature on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, you will know that he has been dishing out the content for any starved TST readers to lap up hungrily. Hopefully some were nourished by these noble servings. Since I have recently caught up on them I can tell you they are worth checking out.

Now then. Mutt rolls.

A lot has gone down for me lately in the new experiences related above. I’m now living in a house I own for the first time in a new state, and there are a lot of new demands on my time and resources. I have two young children who started branching out into new experiences almost immediately, and that sure isn’t going to slow down. I have not been able to do a lot of the literary work that I like to do very consistently in the last few months (this blog included), so it would seem that some of the projects I like to mention here might have taken a hit.

Reading-wise, I have not slowed much. Duke has kept the books on the right well updated. No time or real need to go through everything, but I will say this: I have been starting to read through Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series, and so far I have read two of seven volumes. When I finish that series I was planning to do a blog-only essay encompassing my overall thoughts on whether that series has any merit. I have long been curious as to whether this drawn-out series of fantasy books is worth the time it takes to read them or if they belong among the finest of that very popular writer’s expansive canon. He seems to hold these books dear. I am curious about their effect as one long story, and I plan to capture some of my conclusions here in the future, hopefully before the end of the year.

Recently I have been reading more cryptic fiction – I’m on my third fairly difficult book in a row, beginning with Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass, The Camberwell Beauty by V. S. Pritchett and now with Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch ­– which may be considered something close, if there is such a thing, to a South American Ulysses. All three of these books, while being very different in form, structure, tone, and just about everything else, have been challenging reads, but they are all immensely impressive and they are all written by acknowledged masters. Gass is an esteemed novelist and philosopher; Pritchett was one of the masters of the short story in English and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and Julio Cortazar was a visionary and experimental genius who has been a tremendous influence on a bevy of writers from around the world.

Lastly, on my own writing, things have taken an interesting turn. I more or less stopped writing my novel a few weeks before we moved because of the difficulty of working on something like that while trying to relocate. But I found that I was still feeling a desire to be working on something. So I plugged that time with two smaller pieces that I did not expect to write. The first was a tribute to one of my literary heroes, the novelist Ron Hansen. Simply titled, “Ron Hansen: An Appreciation”, I thought the piece turned out well and I tried to sell it to three magazines. But each rejected it. I’m running out of places to send it, but I am glad I tried. Incidentally, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish Hansen’s novel Exiles on the life of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 2008 and I am looking forward to that with great enthusiasm.

Then, still wanting to write but living out of boxes by that point, I sat down and wrote a new short story which is now in the revision process. This was a surprise to me. The story is called “In The Throes” and it is a fictional response to the sexual abuse scandals of 2002 in the Catholic Church. It is a kind of bleak story, but it comes out of some of the comments I have heard others make after it all went down, my own ruminations on the fallout and what it all means, and a semi-subconscious but potent concern I have for my daughters’ futures. The story is about a seventeen-year-old girl whose life is upended when her parents decide to abandon the Catholic faith they raised her in, thereby casting her adrift on the spiritual seas. As a result, she makes a decision that could have long-term consequences. It has been an interesting story to write and edit and I am not totally sure about the story’s success.

The only thing about all this is that with the mental investment involved in writing those two pieces, it leaves me in a curious and unclear spot with regard to the novel I was writing since March. I am pretty sure I want to stick at it but it feels distant to me at the moment and I have had some doubts about how well it was ‘working’. I figure the only way to find out what is what here is to attempt to dive back into it as soon as I can after I finish “In The Throes” and send it out to a couple magazines. That is what I will do, which is well and good, but right now I have no idea what the prognosis is for it. We’ll see. And as it becomes clearer I will report on it in my ‘Journal’ on these pages.

Ergo, like I said: Mutt rolls.

The Weapons of Childhood (Part I)

Sometimes it feels like we're living in a culture that is at war, whether it's fully realized or not, against the very idea of childhood. Everyone laments publicly how quickly kids grow up these days, and yet when you look at the culture, especially the media (its main engine), everything is geared towards faciliating exactly that which we moan and wail about. Now that I'm fully immersed in the wonderfully challenging task of raising my own children (sons, in my case), I am realizing to my chagrin how difficult it is to "just let your kids be kids" in a world that is constantly forcing them to grow up faster and faster -- bombarding them with violent and sexual images, giving them games that put them into adult situations they should never even be thinking about in real life, showing them films that are supposedly safe for them but loaded with all kinds of innuendo, etc. The list could go on and on.

Even within one or two generations, the length of time one can enjoy "just being a kid" and not contending with adult situations and adult worries seems to have been radically reduced. For example, I am a child of the 70's, a decade which had its own problems and proclivities of course, but I cannot remember ever being worried about being gunned down at school, or being blown up on a PATH train to New York. Now, just a generation or two later, these are (sadly) very real threats against our children, and they're very much aware of them at younger and younger ages. And then there's just the ubiquity of information -- unfiltered information -- that everyone, including young children, is constantly being subjected to. When the recent Virginia Tech shootings occurred, it was indeed a national tragedy and it's understandable that a national conversation about it took place. And yet, you could not walk into a grocery store or a doctor's office without CNN hitting you with "amateur video" of running people, gun shots being fired, SWAT teams, etc. In just a few minutes of waiting in my doctor's waiting room, my three young sons were treated to a eyewitness description (in graphic detail) of the carnage in the classroom on that campus, and a clip of someone's cell phone footage that had captured a constant tatoo of gunfire from just outside the hall where the violence occurred. "Is that guy shooting people Dad?" was my four-year-old's eminently reasonable question. All I could do was tell him yes, and watch the implications of that thought work themselves out across his face.

Another quick example of what I mean: recently, we had a "grand opening" (what's so "grand" about another convenience store competing for our business in town is, of course, an open question) of a Royal Farms gas station and food mart -- one of these big, shiny, new Wawa-type stores that tries to offer you everything and ends up specializing in nothing. Except maybe gas. Anyway, a good friend of ours went in to check out the mini-store with her family (husband, son aged 7, and daughter aged 4), and when walking down one of the aisles was confronted with an entire rack of pornographic magazines, mostly uncovered, about 3 1/2-4 feet tall. Why give the height, you ask? Well, the way they are set up, just about all of these magazines fall right smack in line with the eyes of small kids. First of all, aren't there regulations about where such magazines can be displayed in these stores anyway, if we must have them at all (i.e., behind the counter, under wraps, where young kids won't ever look?)? And even if there aren't, why in the name of all that's holy would you set up an entire rack of these magazines right at the eye level of smaller children?? Our friends were dumbstruck first, then angry right after -- especially when they were forced to answer their daughter's question about why those two women were kissing each other on that page.

Well, all of this is sort of a long preamble to what I really wanted to post about here, which is movies. More specifically, movies that feature young children retreating from the ugliness and brutality of the world being presented to them using the only "weapons" they really know how to wield -- innocence and imagination. I've just gotten through a whole series of them -- unplanned, but afterwards I realized the common theme. I've seen no less than four movies in the last several months that are built around this central motif. The films are, in chronological order (not in the order I saw them): Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973); Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987); Terry Gilliam's Tideland (2005); and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006). I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast the way each of them handles this intriguing theme.

The idea of children retreating into the realms of fantasy and imagination, rather than deal with the terrors of the "grown up" world, is of course nothing new in the arts. These films are, to a large degree, entering into the stream of a much larger, and older, storytelling tradition -- call it the Alice in Wonderland school of fiction. And in each one, the central character, a child (happens to be a young girl in three of the four mentioned), is dealing with forces and realities in their "real lives" that are quite beyond their comprehension, and are far too complex and terrifying for their young and innocent minds to process. Like my four-year-old son in that doctor's waiting room, the horrors they are forced to contend with are thrust upon them at far too early an age, and they simply don't have the tools yet to deal with them. So, they make use of the only "weapons" they have: those that are inherent to childhood, and thank God for it. I mentioned them before -- innocence and imagination. But as these films seem to be positing, these weapons are a lot more potent than we often give them credit for. And yet, you also wonder when watching these films: are they powerful enough to overcome the traumas these children are facing? Most of the movies leave this as an open question.

The least known of these among the general movie-watching public is probably Erice's fascinating The Spirit of the Beehive. I just saw this the other night for the first time (once again, I find myself thanking heaven for the mere existence of the incredible Criterion Collection!), and part of the reason I wanted to watch it was I heard it in an interview with del Toro that it was one of the films that inspired him. I had seen and loved Pan's Labyrinth, so any film that played a role in the formation of the imagination that created it I thought would be well worth checking out. The 1973 Spanish film is a treasure for many reasons. One thing that strikes you about it right away is its amazing cinematography: it delivers a long series of stunning images, almost like paintings, that stay burned into your memory well after the film is over (I suspect they will be with me for a long time). If you appreciate at all the craft of movie-making, you can't miss Beehive for that reason alone. The final scene in particular has an eerie, quiet beauty that is like the cherry on top of a very rich sundae. It is one of those "last shots" in a film that you see and immediately realize it couldn't have ended any other way. And in this scene, and many others, the influence it must have had on Pan's Labyrinth is as clear as a mountain stream.

The story of this quietly mesmerizing film revolves around a young girl growing up in rural Spain during the time of Franco, just after the horrible Civil War (the trauma is which is almost palable throughout). The opening scene features an old truck lumbering along the dirt road into town, being mobbed by children when it stops in front of what you quickly realize is something of a makeshift movie theatre. What is being delivered to the small town are large, metal reels of film that will be cobbled together to show James Whale's Frankenstein, and the entire town (it seems) crams into the smoke-filled, dirt-floored room to see what Hollywood hath wrought. Erice brilliantly shows us the original introduction to the film, in which the producer walks out onto a lit stage to "warn" the moviegoing audience about the shocking nature of the film they are about to see (an idea which seems so quaint and archaic to us now, but at the time may actually have been necessary, as Whale's film set a new standard for realism and shock-value at the time!). I say "brilliantly" because it almost serves as an introduction to Beehive as well -- not that the movie is so shocking, but it does have a lot to say about the power of film to influence the imagination. Certainly Ana, the protagonist (an adorable little girl of about 5, I'd say), won't be the same after seeing it.

Erice shows us the famous scene in which the monster meets up with a little girl on a river bank, who is playing with a doll and thowing flowers into the water. Most will remember what comes after this scene: we are not shown the actual act, but the monster, thinking it is all part of the game, reaches out for the little girl, and the next thing you see is the girl's father, walking somberly through town with the soaked girl hanging limply in his arms (obviously drowned). We see Ana's intense eyes take in the scene, and can feel her bewilderment as she turns to her sister, asking, "Why did he kill that little girl?" Her sister explains to her impatiently that it's all fake since it's a movie, but adds that the spirit of the monster is real, and sometimes inhabits human form. She even claims to have seen him once at a rundown farmhouse outside of town, and tells Ana that she can invoke this spirit whenever she wants to by just closing her eyes and whispering, "It's me, Ana. It's me, Ana."

Of course Ana's sister, Isabel, takes her to see the abandoned old farmhouse with a well outside of it, and Ana returns there on her own often, obviously obsessed with the idea of seeing the spirit of the monster for herself. One day she goes there and runs into a wounded revolutionary soldier who's obviously hiding out there from the law, and she is convinced that he is incorporating the spirit she seeks. The rest of the film follows her increasingly bold efforts to confront the "monster," which is obviously her way of escaping from not only the doldrums of her everyday life in the hardscrabble town, but also from her uninspiring home life, with her eccentric father (who tends bees and works all night writing extended philosophical descriptions of their activities) and disengaged and lonely mother (who we see writing to and burning letter from an ex-lover of hers in France).

Erice's finely-crafted film is a beautiful and intriguing example of what I love about these stories that immerse us into a child's mindset in the midst of disturbing circumstances: they take seriously the power and, yes, wisdom of innocence. None of these films go so far as to imply that this innocence is ultimately going to protect or save their main chararcters from the world's evils, but they show an all-too-rare (these days) respect and appreciation for this under-valued, and under-cultivated, quality. There's a reason why stories that feature children escaping into fantasy worlds that may or may not be "real" often achieve classic status and are loved by many generations running: they have something to say that strikes right at the heart and soul of all but the most hardened and skeptical readers. They also remind us of a quality most of us had at one point in our lives -- the ability to look upon a world of wonders and accept the mystery of what we see at face value, not try to analyze it or excuse it away as mere illusion or, worse, delusion.

Since I am running out of time and this post is growing rather long, I will cut this off now and make it a two-parter... for I would still like to say some things in appreciation for the other films I mentioned. For now, I hope that anyone who reads this and is interested in the subject will make an effort to find and watch The Spirit of the Beehive. It is a true work of art, and though it seems slow at times when you're watching it, the overall effect of the film is powerful indeed. I can almost guarantee you'll be thinking about it for a long time after you've seen it, and you may, if you're lucky, never forget it.

"The Golden Grains of Truth"

Duke here, reporting in after a hectic week of work travel, followed by a weekend helping this blog's co-founder, Mutt, move into his new house... on behalf of everyone at the TST, I would like to congratulate Mutt on his provision of a magnificent new home for his family. I know Mutt is very happy and proud -- and he has every right to be, as he's worked damned hard to get there. It don't come free, and no one knows that better than he does... but it if you're blessed enough for it to come at all, it is indeed sweet in the tasting.

At any rate, to work: I have a passage I wanted to share with readers of this blog, mostly because of its relevance to the subject matter at hand... not so much about literature per se, but the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful in whatever form it can be found. This is from a fantastic book I am reading called The Spirit of Catholicism by Fr. Karl Adam, who was a German priest living and writing in the early part of the last century.

One of the things I love most about the Catholic faith is its insistence on a proper balance of both faith and reason in the life of the believer. Here, Fr. Adam expresses this aspect of Catholicism with both eloquence and wisdom. These are profound words revealing even more profound truths. I found them to be very inspiring, and thought others might too.

The catholicity of the Church is manifested not least in this, that she does not allow knowledge and faith to be separated and set in an unhealthy antagonism, but conjoins them in intimate harmony, making knowledge accessible to faith and faith accessible to knowledge. Her greatest minds, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas and Newman, made it their life's task to establish this synthesis of faith and knowledge. Nor do the theologians of our own day know of any more important task than that of making modern knowledge fruitful for the faith. Catholicism lays its hand on every branch of knowledge, seeking everywhere the golden grains of truth, that it may adorn its sanctuary with them...

...such is Catholicism: an affirmation of values along the whole line, a most comprehensive and noblest accessibility to all good, a union of nature with grace, of art with religion, of knowledge with faith, "so that God may be all in all."

Not a bad manifesto for a life that is truly Catholic (and catholic!), huh???

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #49

Galway Kinnell is a very Catholic, and catholic, poet. I am growing to love his poetry because it seems to always be about the stuff that really matters: faith, family, friends, human suffering and loneliness, and... God. His is a very sacramental poetry. He speaks unabashedly of death, of dirt, of sights and smells, of skin, of sex. Rather than shy away from the puzzle of our existence here, he embraces it in its totality. I love the large, looming presence of family life in almost everything he writes. And, even now in his 70's, the distinguished poet still writes lovingly about his children, remembering when they were young and appreciating them now that they're older. I like that.

Here is a wise and wonderful poem about nothing less than the mystery of life itself. See what you might hear in it.

*******

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Introducing UNSHELVED: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Harper Lee

That's right folks, it's time to unveil a new feature here on The Secret Thread: a new and occasional series of posts I am calling Unshelved. Each Unshelved post will feature an old and, either on a personal or even a national basis, forgotten classic that I have pulled off of the shelf to read (or re-read, as the case may be), so that I can then report back on what I got from the experience, if anything. There have been series' like this in other publications of course, from The Washington Post Book World's "Second Reading" series to Paste magazine's "Dusted Off" column -- the latter of which, coincidentally, will be featuring a review from TST's own Mutt Ploughman in an upcoming issue (his review of Philip K. ####'s novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, which was posted here in January: see the Archives section, right hand column to read it!). But none of those other series will have the special Secret Thread touch that millions of you have come to depend upon...

Um, right. OK. Without further ado, let's get started with the series... shall we?

To kick off TST's Unshelved series, I have selected a book I recently finished listening to on audio (I confess, occasionally I listen to rather than read books, but with an hour commute each way to work every day, I can't think of a better way to use that otherwise dead time!): Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. I first read this classic and beloved story in my sophomore year of high school, and I hadn't touched it or even thought about it much since. It was one of the very few assigned books in high school that I actually read (William Golding's Lord of the Flies is another one, which had much more of an impact on me at the time, I recall, which makes sense given its shocking subject matter), and I remember enjoying it at the time, but that's about all I could remember. So in picking it up now in my mid-30's, it was almost like coming to it fresh. At any rate, I'm going to do these Unshelved entries in a bit more structured, less rambling way than I usually do in my posts, so let's just get right into it:

Plot Synopsis:
As just about everybody knows, To Kill A Mockingbird is a sort of coming-of-age tale about two young children who are being raised by their father (having lost their mother) in a small town in rural Alabama during the Depression years. The novel's memorable narrator is young Scout (Jean Louise) Finch, daughter of Atticus Finch, the town's one lawyer, and kid sister to Jem (Jeremy) Finch. Scout is a precocious five years old at the beginning of the story, and probably reaches the age of 6 or 7 by the story's end. The novel recounts the adventures of their youth growing up in this very small Southern town with its inherent charms and prejudices. All seems idyllic and nostalgic -- until Atticus is assigned to defend a poor black man who's been charged with raping a white woman, and in doing so exposes the flaws in our legal system and not-so-hidden bigotries that thrive just under the surface in the hearts of the townspeople. The story is a beautifully told, poignant tale of innocence lived and lost... and Lee's charming prose, authentic dialog and clear-eyed, non-sentimental insight into human nature establish the book as a bonafide American classic.

Surprises:
There were several things that struck me upon re-visiting this tale as an adult. First, how funny it is: I don't remember this aspect of the novel from tenth grade, probably because I was too much an ignorant moron to get most of the jokes (I'm only slightly less ignorant and foolish now, of course, but maybe enough to help in this case!). Much of the genius and enjoyment in this book comes from Lee's inspired narration of events through Scout's inimitable tomboyish perspective -- she goes from crawling into her Daddy's lap and asking questions in one minute, to whooping some smaller boy's butt in the playground in the next... and sees both as natural as sunlight! And as her brother grows up and starts to distance himself from her a bit, she begins to realize the differences between the sexes -- both in terms of natural fact and artificial, societal expectations. Her refusal to accept either provide for some amusing and poignant moments.

I was also pleasantly surprised upon this second reading to discover what a wise book To Kill A Mockingbird is. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the fact that I'm a father to three young children of my own now -- for in the character of Atticus Finch, we have a father who loves his children and does the best he can to raise them with integrity, humility and a sense of morality, while always admitting his own flaws and weaknesses. He is a towering figure in the lives of his children for all the right reasons -- and as they witness him defend the defenseless in the face of almost universal opposition and bigotry from the rest of the town, they are provided with a priceless demonstration of integrity and compassion that, you sense, will be with them forever. And the fact that not everything comes up roses in the end -- by a long shot! -- seems to only strengthen and intensify the goodness and moral strength of Atticus' actions.

Reason it's worth reading (or re-reading):
Besides all of the above, this is simply a great story, told with wit, wisdom and a winsome spirit. Lee was clearly inspired in its telling, because its endurance in both popular and academic circles as a canonical work of American fiction continues on and appears to have no end in sight. It is not so much in the tale itself as in its telling -- somehow, even though you were likely not born in nor lived in such a place, the book makes you feel as if you were reliving your own memories of life in the rural South, and that things as rendered are precisely as you remember them. I realize that sounds strange, but Lee just seems to get all of the details right -- the descriptions of local characters, the buildings, the school, the churches, the sound of people's voices, the town traditions -- so much so that you can picture the Radley's dilapidated house, the good Southern ladies' gossip sessions-disguised-as-prayer-meetings, the wooden, non-air-conditioned one-room courthouse, or the ramshackle black Baptist church as if you'd been there yourself. I suppose if I had to choose one word to describe the key to Lee's success in this book, that word would be authenticity.

But more than anything else, what struck me about To Kill A Mockingbird, and what would make me recommend it to anyone, is its enduring moral message -- which is delivered in a totally unassuming, non-preachy way. This message is more or less embodied in the character of Atticus Finch, whose humble, world-weary yet hopeful servant leadership of his family is achieved through his actions, not his words. I was moved by his obvious love for his children, but also by his unwillingness to hold their hands through every little trial of life -- they are responsible for their own actions, and when they violate or neglect those responsibilities, Atticus does not shield them from the consequences.

Finally, Lee's triumph is to almost perfectly capture the emergence of a social conscience and the loss of innocence in the life, and voice, of a young child. Think about it: how difficult would it be to describe, even in your own life, the gradual dawning of a realization that people will try to hurt other people, that folks aren't always honest, or that sometimes justice is not served despite every indication to the contrary? (I was severly tested in this regard recently, as my eldest son, only 6 years old, came up to me at random one day and, picking up on something he had heard at school, asked : "Dad, why would somebody strap a bomb to themselves and then blow themselves in front of a bunch of other people?" Scrambling for an answer he could understand, I realized anew how incredibly difficult it is to explain the evil that exists in our world to young hearts, still blessedly protected by the fragile but beautiful armor of innocence...) Many books attempt to do so -- the "coming of age" tale is a cliche in its own right -- but hardly any in the last 100 years or so are as successful in the venture as this one is. All of this combines to explain why the book stays in your memory for long after you've read it, and why its lessons feel like truths that have been sleeping peacefully in your own heart for as long as you can remember. Like all great works of art, Harper Lee's timeless novel awakens those truths from their slumber, allowing you the chance to get re-aquainted with them all over again.