Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #36

These two gems, breathtaking in the elegance of their form and expression, represent the great American poet Richard Wilbur at the top of his game. Both poems gave me that rare, goosebump-inducing sensation at the end, when you reach the final lines and just feel their rightness wash over you in a wave of sheer appreciation… which feels strangely close to joy. All the more appropriate in this case, since the themes explored here are the mysteries of God’s boundless, and unmerited, mercy and grace… and the gift of life that blesses us to have a share in them.

(Note on the poem "The Proof": "Stet," for those who may not know, is an editor's/typographer's term... literally, it means "let it stand"... it is written in the margin next to a correction that the editor made but wants to retract -- an indication to ignore what's there and act as if the correction were never made.)

*******

Mayflies

In somber forest, when the sun was low,
I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies
In their quadrillions rise
And animate a ragged patch of glow
With sudden glittering -- as when a crowd
Of stars appear,
Through a brief gap of black and driven cloud,
One arc of their great round-dance showing clear.

It was no muddled swarn I witnessed, for
In entrechats each fluttering insect there
Rose two steep yards in air,
Then slowly floated down to climb once more,
So that they all composed a manifold
And figured scene,
And seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold,
Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they --
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.


The Proof

Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused his work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all his grammar,

I love him that he did not in a rage
Once and forever rule me off the page,

But, thinking I might come to please him yet
Crossed out delete and wrote his patient stet.

TEASER: Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Mutt's novel - no quotes, for Duke's benefit

Note: the following is an unedited, unrevised version of the opening scenes of Chapter 1 of my novel in progress. Hope anyone who sees this digs it. I'm just posting it as a teaser, to give some idea of what it's like. -Mutt Ploughman


I. SWEET MUSIC, PRETTY FLOWERS
Early in the afternoon on his wedding day, June 25, 1924, Walter Brogan stood before the looking glass in the stifling heat in full groom’s regalia, and reflected for the first time that day on his father’s absence. His death in 1920 had deprived Walter of so many things, but nothing had brought with it a sting more acute to the young man than him not being present at the nuptial ceremonies of his only son.
As he would so many other times throughout the rest of his life, staring at his own tall, athletic posture in the mirror, reflecting a strong, confident image, he experienced a nearly overwhelming sensation of self-doubt, a wavering of spirit. It was something he had felt coming, and he recognized it when it was on its way. He knew that despite his harshness, his extreme impatience with weakness and his inadequacy when it came to emotional grounding, Julius Brogan’s presence in the room, or even somewhere nearby the house, would have been a help to him. His great desire to please his father, to assure him that his firstborn was ready for the challenges of the life before him, would have driven such doubts into dormancy somewhere inside of him, so that they would not have risen in the first place.
But Julius Brogan had been gone these four years, and Walter Brogan stood alone. Examining his appearance once again, Brogan had to acknowledge that he was ready. He wore a slender, black single-breasted tuxedo, with a starched white shirt stiff as plywood, a long black cravat pinching at his neck, and a gold watch chain dangling from the pocket of his vest. The pocket watch inside had belonged to Julius; it was the only thing Brogan possessed that had once been his father’s. He couldn’t look at it just now. Brogan’s dark brown hair was oiled for the occasion, a rarity for him, and swept back from the crown of his head like Rudolph Valentino. He wore no moustache or sideburns. A black hat with a 1½ -inch brim was propped on the post of the looking-glass before him.
His skin was prickling in the stuffy air of the room in a manner which told him he was on the verge of breaking into a profuse sweat. Below him, and throughout the house, a cacophony of noises assaulted his ears, mostly women’s voices, chirping here and there along with the clicking of their heels on the hardwood floors. Brogan knew his mother, whose own hyper-emotional state did little to assuage his own nerves, and his two younger sisters were in the house, helping to attend to Greta. Greta’s brother, Peter Heinricks, was also below, no doubt keeping a distance from the women, who were indisputably in command of all events. In fact, Brogan guessed that Peter would be waiting outside of the house on the front steps, possibly with his and Greta’s father, Brogan’s soon-to-be father-in-law, P.G. Heinricks, the owner of the house, the financier of all the events of the day, the watchful eye presiding.
Brogan was standing in one of the two rooms that would belong to himself and his new bride upon their return from French Lick and their brief honeymoon. The room contained a canopied bed, a bureau, two small tables on either side of the of the bed and lace curtains. It connected to a washroom with running water and even a bathtub that the elder Heinricks had had installed for the young couple. The bedroom opened into a narrow hallway that led to a second and even tinier chamber that Brogan and Greta planned to use as a sitting room and living area. It contained two small Louis XIV-style chairs, a cherry-wood table with an electric lamp, and a small bookcase for Greta’s books. They hoped to furnish the room with a radio some time after the wedding if they could afford one.
The young man before the mirror straightened himself one last time, and looked squarely into his own eyes. He could not have known how closely he resembled the younger Julius Brogan at that moment. The wave of doubt passed through as he knew it would. He could almost feel his father’s approval as he firmly settled his mind. He knew his father-in-law was being generous in setting them up in the third floor of his own house, so that they had a place to live while starting out. But staying there long term was not acceptable, to either of them, and Brogan would see to it that they did not stay there long enough to wear out their welcome in P.G. Heinricks’ house. He would prove his abilities, build a house for his wife to call her own, and carry her into it. His father-in-law would approve. Julius Brogan would approve.
Walter Brogan removed the pocket watch with his left hand, released the catch with his thumb, and peered down at the Roman Numerals. 12:05 p.m. In less than one hour, he would marry that young woman below, and lead her on towards a new life. It was both a duty and an honor.



At one o’clock precisely the bells in the tower at St. Joseph the Worker’s Roman Catholic Church in Bentonville, Indiana began to toll, and their august tones wafted on the waves of heat and the occasional lugubrious breezes throughout the serene streets of the township. On 3rd Street, the church’s front doors opened ceremoniously as a shining silver-colored automobile, a new Cadillac model, glided to rest in front of them alongside the sidewalk. The driver’s side door opened and a short, sturdy figure emerged, dressed in a black suit and a rounded, bowler-style hat. The man bounded energetically around the front of the car and opened the back door to allow the bride, his daughter, to embark.
Peter Gerhardt Heinricks, 57 years old and brimming with vitality and pride in equal measure, held up his right arm to accept the hand of his daughter one final time before giving it away to the young man inside the church. Greta Heinricks, stepping out of car gingerly to avoid trampling on her veil, granted her father an appreciative smile, fully composed in spite of her nerves. Inside her crepe white wedding dress she was shaking, but her father did not need to see that side of her today. For him this day was a matter of familial honor, and she would endeavor not to disappoint him, but her true motives were not his pleasure or peace of mind, but those of the groom awaiting her there before the altar. It was to him that her honor would be handed on this day, and for him that she had undertaken to preserve it, as she always had before now.
As she stood, a second car – less grandiose, a black 1920 Chevrolet – pulled in behind Heinricks’ Cadillac, from which spilled out three other young women. Greta’s bridesmaids – her two sisters, Ella and Gertie, and her best friend, Beatrice Owens. They swooped in behind the bride as she emerged from the Cadillac to join her father, scooping up the long train of silk tulle so that it did not strike the ground behind her. The Chevrolet’s engine sputtered momentarily, threatening to stall, but somehow Peter, the bride’s brother, managed to keep it from doing so. He drove the vehicle slowly away to park it along the side of the church.
For Greta Heinricks, 21 years old and her father’s firstborn, clutching his powerful arm in the blazing heat outside of the same church in which she had been baptized and taken the Sacraments, it was a day of wildly conflicting emotions. She felt anticipation, excitement, wonder and intense fear all at once. But more than anything else she felt a tremendous sense of personal independence, and she wanted this more than anything else to be evident to all of those who looked upon her as she crossed through the open doors in front of her. She knew how her parents would appear. Her father would beam and boast with his expression to the townspeople about his beautiful daughter, his jewel and his pride. Her mother would weep and smile gratefully, in her quiet and docile manner, at the appreciative looks and supportive gestures of all of their friends and relatives as they made their procession. It would be all she could do to make it the length of the aisle before collapsing into a pew, spilling over with tears and lamentations related to her little girl’s quiet beauty and rapid growth and the effects of these things on the fragile nature of her maternal heart.
Greta understood her parents well enough to know that these would be their general states as they guided her forward, but coming in between the two of them to the altar on her wedding day was something she was doing strictly out of tradition and honor to their sacrifices for her, and not for any other reason. In her mind, though she came with her parents, she would be walking down this aisle independently, for this was a decision she had made, and the young man at the altar now was her husband of choice. Though she had gained the approval of her mother and father, and was about to receive the benevolent and laudatory reception of the community she had grown up in, none of these things were required. It was a matter of simple dignity. She knew her heart and she knew her mind. She needed the priest at the altar to confer the graces that accompany this Sacrament, and she needed the willful acceptance and commitment of the man she would be marrying, and that was all. Let those who could perceive from observing her expression that this was her conviction know it and believe it well: she was here on her own strength of purpose, and she knew that what she was doing on this day was right.
Before going through the doors of the church, her father held her back momentarily, and she turned to look at him. The three women behind lingered at a respectful distance, still grasping Greta’s train. At five feet, seven inches, she was nearly as tall as he was, and her hazel eyes needed to rise only slightly to reach his own, which matched hers almost exactly. Her father looked at her freely, intensely, the way he regarded everyone; his eyes reflected his personal pride but not the deeper emotion he would not show to her, let alone to the other people inside of the church. Nonetheless she knew what he felt, because she understood him, she could read him now as easily as she had always been able to. What he concealed from everyone at every possible moment, he could not keep from his daughter.
‘Greta,’ her father said, and now he grasped her two slender hands in the coarse palms of his own. ‘You make me very proud today. It is a joy for me to see you here in front of all of our family and this community.’
Greta smiled at him warmly. She loved him, in spite of all of his overpowering qualities, his hard-headedness, his absolute insistence on asserting his own authority within their household, his terrible temper. She loved him because she knew he was a proud man and that he saw her as a part of what made him so.
‘Father, it pleases me to me please you. If you can give me away now and do so with happiness, then this occasion is a blessed one indeed. I only hope my new husband is as pleased with me as you are.’
He brought her hands together now and patted the top of them gently. ‘If he is not, my dear, then his taste will have suffered since we saw him last. Unlikely. No, I believe Mr. Brogan is aware of his good fortune.’

The Audacious Courage of the "Unknown Writer"

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The Secret Thread would like to wish a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to a very special little girl and treasured friend of this blog... CEL, may God bless you on this day and always! Happy 3rd! We love you!

This post is in fact my reply to the previous two posts from my illustrious partner in crime, Mutt Ploughman, concerning the status of what he too-modestly refers to as his "novel." Anyone who has read the posts would, at the very least, agree that at this point Mutt can let go of the beloved lifeline of those quotation marks... it's a bit ironic that in these posts, he's been constantly writing about his (in my view impressive) will to continue on with this project and see it to its fruition, whatever that may be, and yet he still won't call the project by its true name! So first, an open call and challenge to Mutt to DITCH THE QUOTES, and call a spade a spade... declare to the world the reality of this novel-in-progress... even you would have to admit that there's a difference between planning and writing a "novel" and planning and writing a NOVEL.

If you ask me, you're doing the latter. No question about it. As if I had any doubt of that before (after reading the recently-completed first draft of the Prologue), your vivid and interesting imagining of the opening chapter, as outlined in the previous post, dispels the fog around this question entirely. This is a legitimate work-in-progress. You are at work on a NOVEL.

Which brings me to the subject of this short post: the audacious courage of the "unknown writer" (to borrow a phrase from Mutt again, see the end of his Journal #16 post). That is what strikes me most as I read these most recent entries and consider what Mutt is well on his way towards accomplishing. Think about what he is attempting to do: this 30-something, reasonably well-educated (better than me anyway!), extremely well read, semi-life-experienced and still fairly young man is attempting to imagine the life of a father raising children in a time he never lived in, a state and town he's also never lived in, experiencing things he's never known. Walter Brogan's life experience is, I think it's safe to say, almost completely foreign to Mutt's own. He's living within a milieu that has almost totally vanished from the face of the earth. What I'm getting at is: virtually ALL of what Mutt has to deliver needs to come straight out of his own head and heart. Now of course I know, this is always the novelist's task. But that is what I am asking you, reader, to pause and consider: the "audacious courage" that is required to attempt something like this, especially if you haven't attempted anything like it before.

Put yourself in Mutt's shoes for a second. Imagine you have a blank page before you and a pen in your hand... or a blank document glaring at you from the computer screen, your hands resting lightly on the keyboard. You've decided you want to write a historical novel about a man raising a family during the Depression in a different state. Where would you even begin? Think about that for about two seconds and, I would wager, the doubts and fears over your ability to pull off such a task will begin to creep in within seconds. What weapon does the young and unknown would-be writer have with which to fight off such demons?

I submit that it's audacious courage, more than anything else. Others might call it pride or ego, and there's no question there's an element of that in there somewhere... there always is when it comes to creating any artistic work, whether it's merited or not. But it takes genuine guts to take on such a writing project, because what you're essentially saying is, I believe I have it within me somewhere to faithfully convey the realities of this life, this age, and not only so, but make it interesting and compelling and even edifying to others who might read it. I realize that there are other voices saying other things inside the head of the writer, and those other voices cause incalculable conflicts in the writer's mind and soul... see Mutt's previous posts for a pretty accurate account of such struggles. Confidence and courage, more than anything else it seems, are the keys to taking on a writing project of this magnitude. But just to begin in the first place means that you have these qualities within you somewhere. Whether they are there through the writer's own force of will or through Divine intervention is another question, and one that has been debated for a long time (for my money, it's probably some mixture of both). But the notion that they are needed to pull off something like this is, to me, beyond question.

Why am I writing these things? Obviously it's not for Mutt's benefit, because clearly he's aware of it already. Again, his posts, and the writing he's done so far, stand as monuments to his awareness of such things. It's largely from him and from observing his experiences as an "unknown writer" so far that I've learned them myself (though common sense testifies to these things to some degree as well). And it's certainly not because I see myself as a fledgling novelist or anything like that. I suppose it's in part to simply encourage Mutt to keep on writing, that's obvious. But more than all this, it's to testify to the greatness and mystery and importance of the vocation that is fiction writing. The man or woman who attempts such a Herculean task ought to be commended, for what they are trying to do is far more than entertainment or diversion. They are imagining new worlds for us, be they past worlds that already existed or new ones that never did. And when we visit these worlds, we often gain from the excursion some new insight(s) that helps us to live in the real one. Think about it: to want to give such a gift to others, and to believe that one can, through the sharing of one's writing talents is both a commendable and an audacious concept. I can only commend the courage of Mutt, and anyone else, who accepts such a mission. I have no doubt that the honest effort to deliver this gift, when undertaken with the sincerity and passion of one's entire mind and heart, will result in something truly good, and beautiful, and important.

Whether a million people read it, or three, doesn't in any way affect this truth. A lonely wild flower springing forth in the middle of an abandoned field somewhere proclaims loudly the Creator's greatness and glory, regardless if any living soul sees or smells it.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 18

Turn the Hand Crank, It's Time to Get This "Novel" Going

It's only been five days since my last post, but I am going to add another journal entry today anyway, for two reasons: 1) Duke is on life-induced blog hiatus, thanks to busy family life and crushing work pressures, both of which I can relate to, and 2) my last post was short, and things are starting to move slightly on the novel front, and I do mean slightly. But since I am thinking more about where I am going in the novel, that means it's time for another post, which is, after all, just another way of thinking about it.

I am just starting work on the opening chapter of the main body of my novel, which is the story of Walter Brogan. And even though I have written maybe 1 1/3 pages max so far, it is pretty interesting to be doing already. In my opening the young Walter, age 23, stands before the mirror in his wife's father's house on his wedding day in 1924, looking himself over and reflecting on the fact that his own father is not there to witness the event. Below him, relatives bustle around as the rest of the household prepares the bride for the wedding. The house in which they are both preparing is the one in which they will live until they can get on their own two feet, something Walter experiences trepidation over because he's not sure he wants to live in his father in law's house for any length of time.

After working for about two months on the prologue for the book, it is fun to even attempt a page's worth of writing on this part of the story, simply because of when it is set in time, and I have to admit, as I have in several other posts, that I have no idea what I am doing. I have to try to picture Walter standing there in whatever a groom in the 1920s would be wearing to even get past the first few paragraphs of the story. So I have been doing a little bit of research about life in the 1920s, clothes, what people wore, what people looked like, what people had in their homes, etc. The fact that I am going to have to research a lot of the details in this story is going to slow it down to an even more ridiculous pace, but it has to be done. For example, I know now that most fashionable suits for men would have been single-breasted, that he probably would have had a cravat and not a bow tie, and that he probably would have worn a black hat to go with it. I have found out a few other things here and there about the time and what people wore, but mostly I am just winging it, and will try to go back and fix any problems I might find later on. Who knows, but it is fun to try.

That is one thing I am happy about in this early stage of trying to grope out a story for this idea of mine: the fun aspect of imagining a small town in a totally different time from our own and what people and places would have been like. It is an interesting process to attempt and a good creative challenge. I enjoy it.

One advantage to the fact that my dad was born and raised in small towns is that they probably didn't look all that different in some ways back then than they did now. The house my Dad was born in in real life was built in 1915. I've seen that house, because it's still there, so I can base my fictional telling of the house Walter Brogan is standing in in the opening of my story on that house. The surrounding fields probably don't look any different than they did in the 1920s. Certainly the overall landscape can't have changed that much. I can almost picture the scene even though I never lived anywhere close to that time.

The vehicles and roads would probably be different. Where my Dad was born there are today two highways within sight of the street; in 1920 those highways surely were not there yet as most highways were not around then. Some roads were paved by then, but not so many in rural towns. Needless to say the modes of transportation would have been a lot different. I imagine Walter Brogan to have his own car, a black Ford Model T or a 'Tin Lizzie', the kind that requires the user to turn a hand crank to get the thing started (you couldn't get a Model T that was NOT black). The Model T was a standard vehicle by 1924, having been introduced in 1909, but from what i have learned it was basically the same model in the 20s and was still popular, at least until the late 1920s.

Walter's father in law, however, I doubt would be driving a Model T, because it was already starting to become passe by this point. P.G. Heinricks, the father of Walter's betrothed, Greta, is a fiery, risk-taking businessman, whose bottom line happens to be pretty solid in the 1920s because of the dance hall he runs, which is booming. It's the roaring 20s, and people are living it up. The Great War is long over, and the celebration hasn't abated. Nope, P.G. ain't driving no Model T. He's driving a Cadillac, the most luxurious model out there by the upstart automobile company called General Motors, makers of Chevrolets, Buicks, LaSalles, and Cadillacs. Greta Brogan is going to the church in style. Walter Brogan will go, fatherless, in his own beat-to-hell Model T with his mother.

Other characters to be introduced in this chapter will include Peter Heinricks, P.G.'s son and Greta's brother, and Myron Boudreaux, a former classmate of Greta's and friend of the Heinricks family.

So we have before us a wedding chapter, with vows, music, flowers, old cars, tears of happiness, and some rumblings of future events. It's going to be interesting to try to write, but the things I imagine have gotten my juices flowing, and the rest is going to be up to persistence, revision and the willingness to press on through the inevitable down periods when nothing is coming and nothing is working. I hope my vision of who my grandfather was, and to some extent who my own dad is, will be enough to keep me pressing forward, in order to pay some kind of artistic tribute to the people who I descend from. But that remains to be seen.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 17

Well, it has been a while since my last journal post on the "novel" that I am trying to start - my last offering was just an early excerpt from the Prologue on May 23. I may as well admit that I am having a difficult time with the Prologue, which is slow to shape up the way I hoped. So right now I am working on it, trying to decide what to do next: is it better to let the thing alone, knowing it has a lot of flaws, and proceed with the main portion of the story - i.e., Walter's story, starting in the 1920s - or, is it better to stick with the Prologue, rewrite it and revise it again (for the third time) before plugging on with the rest. I can see advantages to both. Working on this Prologue sort of feels like a thoroughbred horse using up all his energy ramming against the stuck gate of that little cage they put him in, wearing himself out before he even gets to the mile & a half race of track ahead, which has to be taken at nothing less than a dead sprint the whole way to have any prayer of getting the glory.

The last post with the excerpt was too short and too bland; I wouldn't blame anyone who may have seen it if they said, "What the hell would be the point of continuing with this story?" And while I hope the entire Prologue doesn't quite come across that way, or it is indeed a failure, it is good to be able to look back on it and know that it doesn't quite work.

These problems, by the way, aren't the worst to have, nor are they necessarily bumming me out or sending me into some kind of writerly depression. If anyone's wondering, I am not giving up this easily. Not a chance of that. This is the sort of challenge that I am supposed to face if I want to write fiction, so the message to me is, You want to do this, then welcome to it. See what you can come up with. The most frustrating things about it for me are two fold: first, the feeling that the Prologue doesn't quite have the mood or tone I want, and the difficulty with knowing how to capture that; second, the itch I have to press forward and try to take on the first chapter, writing about the 1920s, which will probably frustrate the hell out of me even more, and will be the subject of innumerable and tiresome rants in this journal sometime in the near future.

But for now, I do feel an excitement to try to create characters that live in that time, to see if I can. That's what all of this is about, the challenge of it. The story exists already, in my head, mostly my subconscious. The question is whether I can draw it out, cultivate it, write it down, then rewrite it until it is done WELL. I can see at this very early stage that this really is going to take a lot of work. And I get frustratingly little time to do that work, which is one of the problems contributing to the slow progress. But I have to try to make hay whenever the sun shines. Like this last Sunday, I got about 2 hours to spare during the afternoon, so I went over to the library and spent one of the hours taking notes about daily life in the 20s, and another hour revising pieces of the Prologue. It wasn't much, but I felt like I got a little bit done. It's going to have to be that kind of effort, balancing the desire, maybe the need, to write this story with all of my numerous other responsibilities.

This is the plight of the unknown writer, I have always asked for it, so bring it on.....

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #35

This week, a little prose poem from the great Indian poet, novelist, playwright and mystic Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was the first non-Westerner ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), and he was widely admired in both East and West for the great beauty and wisdom of his proilific writings. The Irish Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats was a champion of his work in the West, and wrote a famous introduction to his poetry collection called Gitanjali (which means "song offerings"), from whence this short selection comes. Gitanjali is full of these brief but potent spiritual musings, which seem to speak to the hearts of Christians and non-Christians alike... I was stunned at how many of these poems, which usually take the form of prayers to the Divine, seemed to overlap and complement Christian teaching -- for example, this piece reminded me very much, in spirit and in truth, of Jesus' parable of the rich young ruler -- seems to have a very similar message. And what honest Christian cannot relate to that last line???

Another piece of evidence, for me anyway, that all Truth comes from the same source... At any rate, these little poems are quite profound and easy to swallow in one bite. Take a taste for yourself, and see what you think!

*******

28

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in Thee, and that Thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear, lest my prayer be granted.

From Page to Screen: Duke Altum's Favorite Films Adapted from Great Works of Literature

This post was brought about by my recent viewing of the excellent film version of Stephen Vincent Benet's classic American short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster." The film, made in 1941 and starring Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch (probably the best on-screen portrayal of the Devil I've ever seen -- certainly the most fun!), remains admirably faithful to the original story and is an entertaining, patriotic fable of spiritual redemption and American values. I really enjoyed seeing it and then it got me to thinking of what my favorite films adapted from great literary works might be. It is a notoriously difficult task to adapt a great work of literature for the screen, and the road to success in this venture is littered with the corpses of films that have failed miserably at it. There have been so many stinkers along these lines it would be pointless to try and list them. Much more rare is the successful cinematic translation of a great work of fiction -- however, there are definitely some notable exceptions to the rule.

Here is a list of my own personal favorites... which will serve to recommend both the books and the films to anyone who might care to peruse it. Enjoy! If you can think of any great ones I may have missed, or that you would recommend (and I'm sure there are many), let me know...

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (dir. Gary Sinise)
An underrated modern classic, beautifully directed by Sinise and featuring top-notch performances from both he and especially John Malkovich as Lennie

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (dir. John Huston)
Shamefully unavailable on DVD at the present time, this near-forgotten gem from John Huston's long career captures both the humor and the spiritual gravitas of O'Connor's masterful novel. An amazing performance by a young Brad Dourif as the tormented Hazel Motes.

Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (dir. William Dieterle)
See my comments above. This film is in equal parts entertaining and inspiring.

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (dir. Robert Mulligan)
Somehow this very powerful story of racism and redemption in the deep South loses almost none of its impact in Robert Mulligan's beloved screen version. Saw this one many years ago as a kid, but I have never forgotten it.

Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest (dir. Robert Bresson)
Bresson pulls off a cinematic miracle here, somehow adapting a novel about the interior spiritual struggles of a young priest into an absorbing, powerful film. No one has captured Christian spiritual truths on screen better than Bresson.

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (dir. Roman Polanski as Tess)
This is one of the few titles on the list that I haven't actually read, but I know it is a beautifully-shot, powerful film. Nastassja Kinski gives an outstanding performance (in one of her first major parts) in the title role. You can't go too far wrong with Polanski at the helm.

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (dir. Roman Polasnki)
My favorite film version of Shakespeare's dark and enduring tragedy... it's bloody and raw, but the first-rate acting and photography (the harsh Welsh landscape mirrors the dark and brooding tone of the play perfectly) make this a film to remember.

Stephen King’s The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
This film scared the crap out of everybody when they first saw it. No one will ever forget Jack Nicholson's commanding performance in it... "Heeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!!!" Although King famously disputed how Kubrick adapted the novel (and to this day denounces the finished product!), the film is still visually stunning and chillingly effective from start to finish.

William Shakespeare’s King Lear (dir. Akira Kurosawa as Ran)
The Master films The Master. Kurosawa's setting of the famous tragedy in fuedal Japan during the middle ages makes this one of the most memorable of all Shakespearean adaptations. Gorgeous cinematography and incredible battle sequences abound in this stunning epic.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (dir. Peter Jackson - trilogy)
Movie fans will be talking about Peter Jackson's stunning LOTR trilogy for as long as films are being discussed. Jackson has delivered what will surely prove to be the definitive on-screen rendering of Tolkien's self-made mythology. Visually stunning in every frame and brilliantly cast, these 3 films are among the most thrilling adventure films ever made.

William Shakespeare’s Henry V (dir. Kenneth Branagh)
Branagh's big-screen debut as a director was an incredible success. His performance both behind the camera and in front of it (in the title role) are a triumph, and this authentic, stirring version of Henry V helped to make Shakespeare exciting and interesting for a whole new generation of film fans.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (dir. John Ford)
An American classic as a novel and as a film. John Ford masterfully brings Steinbeck's revered novel to life, and Henry Fonda gives one of his most memorable performances here as Tom Joad. Although the film doesn't cover the entire novel, what is there is first-rate, and a stirring cinematic experience.

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (dir. Ridley Scott as Bladerunner)
Ridley Scott & Co. took a short story from Philip K. Dick and blew it out into one of the greatest American sci-fi/noir films of all time. This dark, brooding thriller is a feast for the eyes -- and ears, thanks to Vangelis' famous synthy score. Captures the ominous, dream-like atmosphere of the original story perfectly.

Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (dir. Liv Ullmann)
Not nearly enough people have read this justly famous trilogy from the Norwegian Nobel laureate Undset, nor seen Liv Ullmann's beautiful film version of its first volume. Ullmann acted frequently under and is a protege of the legendary director Ingmar Bergman, whose famed cinematographer Sven Nykvist also shot this gorgeous epic. It is a classic tale of faith and the longstanding consequences of our moral decisions.

Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (dir. by Spike Jonze as Adaptation)
Ha! A bit of cheating here, since anyone who has seen Adaptation knows that it is not really an adaptation of Orlean's book at all... but I wanted to include it here anyway because a.) it is such a great movie; and b.) it's all about the problem of adapting a work of literature to the screen. Well, that's one of the themes it touches on anyway.

James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (dir. Michael Mann)
Mohicans re-taught millions of postmodern Americans that "the classics" could be exciting stuff. Michael Mann brought his penchant for stupefying action sequences to pre-revolutionary America with spectacular results, buffeted by exceptional performances from the always-reliable Daniel Day-Lewis and especially Wes Studi (whose ruthless Iroquois warrior is one of American cinema's all-time meanest villains). Not perfect, but it thrillingly brings a lost chapter of U.S. history to life.

H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (dir. James Whale)
One of my favorites of the original Universal Studios "monster" series, this innovative and witty film is directed with panache by James Whale, who of course also brought us the classic Frankenstein (another memorable adaptation!) and its even-better sequel, Bride of Frankstein. Claude Rains plays the title role with devilish glee, and the "invisibility" special effects are remarkable even by today's standards.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Rouben Mamoulian as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Another groundbreaking film from the same Universal monster series, this is widely considered to the best of them all, and is a truly remarkable piece of work for its time. Frederic March delivers a stunning dual performance as both Jekyll and Hyde, one that has never been matched in any of the countless remakes. And the cinematography will blow you away, considering the era in which it was made. All this, and it also manages to remain faithful to Stevenson's story. A true classic in every way.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #34

Here's a first in this series... I'm posting not one, but two poems from a poet I've never heard of before and have little idea if many others have either... nevertheless, I came across these on another web site -- an online literary journal called The New Pantagruel -- and really, really liked them. In fact, the main reason I decided to post them here is simply that when I had read them, my knee-jerk reaction was to wish that I had written them myself! (In particular that one on marriage -- man did that take me back to the altar on my own wedding day... Song of Songs references and all... I think it's profoundly right on... it's how I would express my marriage commitment, if I had such eloquence!)

Mike Hickerson is the guilty party in question, the poet who brings some very profound and witty insights to both the cross and to the sacrament of marriage. He's taken on some seriously weighty subjects here with wisdom, humility and a sense of humor... my kind of poet! Kudos and admiration for you Mr. Hickerson, whoever you are! -- these are the real thing as far as I'm concerned.

*******

Passionfruit

My lapsed-Catholic English prof
laughed: “The passionfruit was Eden’s
tree – it was Adam and Eve’s passion
that God forbade!” A silly joke–
original sin and sex and all that–
and she had it wrong besides. The Jesuits
who began this rumor knew
only one passion, and it
was and is the passion of thorns, nails,
betrayal borne by the suffering
Christ, who hangs low on a tree
so that all may taste.


Sonnet

That day our souls were sealed, we spoke a line
Mysterious in holy power, and strong
Enough to push our naïve love along:
“I my beloved’s; my beloved mine.”

We poured ourselves together and drank deep
Of joy and suffering; we emptied our souls
Into a mutual cup that hopes to hold
All future mixtures that we’ll have to keep.

This doubled life sometimes appears far worse
Than singleness: I bear hurt, sorrow, pain
That are another’s burden, yet I gain
A doubled blessing, not a doubled curse:

When simple words do nothing, weakness needs
The strength of tied-together broken reeds.

Interesting follow-up to the last 2 posts...

I came across a short item today that I thought would be worth posting/sharing, as it relates to the last two posts on this blog... it certainly speaks to "the impact of a novel" and the effect one can have on people's thinking or even (as the case may be) a society and nation in general. In addition to that, the novel it speaks of was (and is) famous for its ability to get its readers to think about social justice issues... in this case, the conditions that poor workers sometimes are forced to endure when performing a task that no one else wants to perform, yet we all expect to be done.

The New Atlantis, an excellent journal and science, ethics and technology that I have mentioned on this site before, features the following appreciation of Upton Sinclair's most famous work, The Jungle, marking the 100th anniversary of its publication. I encourage all TST readers to check it out. It's brief, but worth the time.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/12/lb.htm

The Impact of a Novel

Sometimes I find myself wondering why my favorite form of literature to read, above nonfiction, biography, poetry, criticism, plays, and probably even short stories, is and always has been, at least since I've been reading seriously, the novel. I am most attracted the novel as a literary form without any question. And, the truth is, it is the one thing I desire to write the most, although it is a form whose code I have yet to crack in my writing life (I'm trying to change that, as my "journals" on this blog attest to). Early in on graduate school, I tried starting one about 11-year-old twin brothers, but the first chapters got brutalized by my classmates and I couldn't rally the confidence then to persevere. I tried to write another one for my graduate thesis, but I got 300+ pages into it and fizzled out. Later, in 2003-2004, I attempted to write a bunch of stories that would sort of coagulate into one, by some magic that I was waiting for someone other than me to employ, but that never quite happened either, or not to my satisfaction. Now, I am making another attempt, and that, too, is very hard work. If nothing else, I have learned to respect just about anyone who has ever put one together that works, whether the writing is top tier or not.

You'd think this would be frustrating as all hell, and it is. Nonetheless, I continue thinking about writing a novel of my own, as I always have, and I absolutely never waver in my love of the form as a reader. My imagination seems to respond the most to the fictional world, the one that I create in my brain when prompted by the vision of the novelist. In a recent interview I read with the novelist Stephen Wright, whose work I have pumped up here enough times and even reviewed myself, and who also was a mentor of mine in graduate school, he stated his belief that the novel was one of the highest art forms. And anyone who has ever seriously tried to even start one can do nothing but agree. Somehow, the task of creating from nothing an entire world, sometimes similar to our own, sometimes not, and making it first believable; second, consistent to the truth of life as we know it, if not necessarily to the daily substance of life (your novel could be set on Mars); and third, well written, is practically the most daunting task artistically that I can think of attempting. But there are people who can do this, and some who do it extremely well. Yet almost no one thinks of novelists as heroes anymore, capable of changing the world, one reader at a time.

And yet, they are. I was thinking about this recently when I was finishing up a novel which I am now attempting to review, called Seeing by Jose Saramago. Saramago is a Portuguese writer that I have written about on this blog before who is an atheist and a Communist, whose values seem nothing at all like my own and are not in any way consistent with the spirit or the letter of this forum. He’s also a Nobel laureate, having won the literature prize in 1998. He has almost no hope for the future of man, no respect for most of the Western world (particularly the United States), and no faith whatsoever in the Democratic system of government. But he does seem to have a passionate belief in the inherent rights of the common citizen of the world. He made the following remarkable statement in his Nobel lecture, which against all my feelings to the contrary about whether I should respect a guy like this, I could find little to disparage: “We pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.” I do not agree that some unclear ‘universal lie’ has replaced any ultimate Truth, and if I did I would not be a Christian. But it is the authoritative force and intelligence of these words and the powerful human spirit behind them that makes them admirable to me. I am saying that while I doubt if I would agree with Saramago on a lot of things, I would listen to him.

Seeing, his newest novel to be translated into English, is nothing more than a farcical, sometimes hilarious, and also chilling work of fiction. Yet I can honestly say that it has done more to make me think about the democratic system, partisan bickering, the role of governments in the lives of daily citizens of any country and the appalling callousness that some governments sometimes display in employing destructive forces against their perceived enemies than five years of newspaper columns and election stump speeches since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on our country have done. In this novel, the electorate of an unnamed city decides to make a statement when 83% of them cast blank votes on Election Day. The government of the nation, democratically elected, literally panics, and enacts a series of progressively more ridiculous measures to deal with this crisis, which the eventually decide can only be the act of ruthless terrorists bent on destroying the ideals their nation was founded upon. Is this starting to sound familiar?

It did for me, and it grew into more and more uncomfortable reading the more extreme and egregious this fictional government’s efforts to deal with the crisis became. Sure, it’s hilarious when Saramago depicts the cabinet in a big room bickering and hollering at each other in futile attempts to understand what is happening. But it becomes less fun when the government starts honing in on certain citizens that it decides must be behind the ‘terrorism’ and begins to use all means necessary to bring them to some sense of highbrow ‘justice’. As the story shifts from the halls of the entrenched government to the investigations of a likeable police inspector and further on to the private lives of the citizens being targeted for reprisal, for causing events that, needless to say, they have nothing to do with, a sense of dread begins to swell up to immeasurable size, and you know a cataclysm is coming. When it does, as accomplished by Saramago with extraordinary timing and effortless novelistic proficiency at the conclusion of this excellent novel, one can only be impressed with not only his accomplishment, but with the overall power of literature.

Novels can make you think – very hard. Fiction can draw your attention into places you don’t really want it to go. True art, of which the novel certainly is a singular and beautiful form, has the power to change people. I don’t know if I have changed as a result of reading the novel Seeing, and I don’t want to embrace the writer’s overall worldview, but I do salute his excellence as an artist. And I can’t say, having finished his newest book, that I feel anything other than further confirmation that I want to somehow and in some way join in the ranks of people like him who can create these extraordinary works.

Examining the immigration question through literature

I haven't been following the great debate going on currently in this country concerning immigration too closely, but given the fact that there's something about it in newspapers and on TV news shows every day, it's sort of hard to miss. It's one of these "hot potato" topics that cuts particularly close to the American bone, so to speak, since ours is in truth a nation of immigrants and the descendents of immigrants -- it's part of who we are. And yet, leaving our borders wide open so that anyone who so desires can come and live and work here will certainly encourage, if not virtually guarantee, our enemies to come onto our soil and attack us. A few short years ago such an idea would have been laughed away... but as we all know, we live in a different world now since the Towers fell and the Pentagon burned.

Which is why a 1995 novel written by T. C. Boyle about illegal immigrants living and working in America is getting some renewed attention these days. I've had the novel, called The Tortilla Curtain, on my shelf for a while and knew something of what it was about, and with all the talk of immigration swirling around, I thought it might make for some timely reading and give me an additional perspective/input for my thinking on this sensitive issue. I was also curious to read it because I had read many T. C. Boyle stories, but never one of his novels. As Mutt's previous posts on this blog have indicated, Boyle is not very modest about his talents and gifts, and often lavishly praises his own work. We both find this to be a pretty unattractive trait in a writer, and with this novel in particular, he has gone out of his way (even recently, in the media) to trumpet its prescience, even going so far as to call his own work a "modern classic." So I was pretty curious to read it to see if it lived up to its author-generated hype.

I'm going to put aside, if I can, the significant distaste I feel at Boyle's shameless praising of his own work and try to judge the novel as objectively as I can, especially in light of the national conversation going on now about immigration. It is, in all fairness, a well-written, very readable, sensitive and provacative novel. It is well worth reading at this exact time because it raises many interesting questions about illegal immigrants in this country -- what exactly should their place be in this society? How much amnesty and grace should be extended to them? How far should we go to try and understand their plight, the situations from which they are attempting to escape? Where do we draw the line between compassion for the downtrodden and security for the country? How much of our own pool of resources should we be willing to share with them, if they are not here as legal citizens? Should we be paying for their healthcare? Their education? Their housing? The questions go on and on and on. Boyle creates a credible, fictional context within which these and many other questions can be explored.

There is, actually, a rich tradition of fiction in this country that looks at the plight and treatment of immigrants and migrant workers within the fabric of American society. I have been thinking about this while reading Curtain, and have realized that there have been many great and admirable books that have addressed some of the same issues that Boyle is addressing. The books that spring immediately to mind are John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not so much about immigrants per se, but about the treatment of poor workers who migrate from the Dust Bowl regions in the American heartland to California -- many of the moral issues are the same, however) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (about the poor immigrants who work in the Chicago meatpacking plants). Both are bona fide American classics (not because their authors have claimed them as such, but according to the wisdom of the populus and their successful passing of the test of time), and have much that is important to say about the way we treat (and exploit) outsiders and the way we as a society tend to isolate ourselves in communities of those who have and those who have not (and how badly the "haves" want things to stay that way).

But there have been other great works and great writers in this country who have brought these themes to our attention. The lesser-known but pioneering writer Frank Norris wrote a series of novels around the turn of the century (the last turn, I mean, not the most recent one) about immigrant workers both in California and in Chicago proper (this is before Steinbeck and Sinclair ever did), in works like The Octopus and The Pit. A Norwegian immigrant himself, O.E. Rolvaag wrote an epic of Scandanavian immigrants carving out a life for themselves in the Dakota territories called Giants in the Earth that is still in print today (though not very widely known or read). And there's also a strand of this tradition that examines the lives of poor migrant sharecroppers living and working on plantations and farms in the South, as represented by well-known works such as Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the latter is not a novel, but still belongs in this group I think).

What's my point in all this? It's just to remind us that sometimes a good way to approach a moral/ethical issue that may be facing our society is to explore worthwhile fiction that has made an effort to examine such topics from an imaginative standpoint. We Americans tend to see fiction, as we tend to see almost everything it seems, as just another form of entertainment... and while good fiction is almost always entertaining, it can also be morally, or even spiritually, instructive. (This is obviously one of the fundamental principles informing and motivating this blog.) Dr. Leon Kass, the former Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, understood this truth very well, and he raised a lot of eyebrows, both in Washington and in academic circles, when one of the first things he did when he took over the Council was to assign certain classic works of fiction to all of the council members (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous cautionary tale about the excesses of scientism, "The Birthmark"). But he was working from the exact same presupposition that I am speaking of here -- good fiction has something to teach us, something to say.

Does Boyle's novel belong in this long tradition of American writing about immigration and the plight of the poor? I would say it does, although I would be quick to add that Boyle's writing doesn't have either the rich wisdom or moral depth of a writer like Steinbeck, for example. That's a significant point, because these are some of the very factors (most would contend, I think) that actually make a novel a "classic," and since Boyle has repeatedly trumpeted Curtain as such, I think it's only right to judge the book by these challenging criteria. Every serious novel ought to be judged by such criteria! Will this novel continue to have something important to say to readers well into future generations, and help further the national conversation about immigration and how we ought to treat "the least of our brothers"? We'll see. I certainly think it adds to that conversation now, though, and for that it is to be commended. But there are many other challenging and provocative novels within the American canon that can also add to our understanding of these issues, and they should not be neglected "at such a time as this."

Read in order to live.
-Gustave Flaubert

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #33

Of all the great and haunting poetry ever written about war, this classic from the young British soldier Wilfred Owen has got to be considered among the most powerful single poems ever penned. Justly famous, it is a harrowing first-hand description of trench warfare during World War I, which he described as "seventh hell" in a letter to his mother. I first came across it while reading Philip Caputo's disturbing memoir about Vietnam, A Rumor of War.

The poem is bracing and chilling enough in and of itself, but even moreso when you consider the fact that less than a year after writing it, Owen was shot and killed (on Nov. 4, 1918) in the French village of Ors during what turned out to be the FINAL WEEK of WWI... his parents received notification of his death just as the bells of armistice were ringing out in their hometown on November 11, 1918.

Posting it as the POTW this week is not a political statement in any way, although I as much as anybody would like to see our soldiers come home as soon as possible (and see no more killed). Rather, it is a tribute to the courage and bravery of the men and women serving our country overseas... and a sober reminder of the horrible price that has been paid, and is continuing to be paid, for our freedom. We must continually ask ourselves whether such a steep price is worth it.

[FYI: The line dulce et decorum est pro patria mori comes from one of the odes of Horace, and is translated as "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."]


*******

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Mutt's Brief Thoughts on the 'Best of Last 25 Years' Fracas

For some reason after reading Duke's thought-provoking post, I have been having trouble figuring out how I wanted to ring in on this whole question about what's the "best" American novel of the last 25 years, what are the "best" American works, etc. I just can't seem to pick one myself, of course, it's way too difficult. I also don't know if I really see any point to the exercise, ultimately, which is the way at least some people seem to feel. Here's an interesting quote from one critic whose writing I frequently find admirable, who also sometimes writes for the New York Times, Laura Miller. Here, she explains why she did not take part in the selection process after being invited:


"An editor at the Book Review assured me that the list was really a parlor game that I should view in a more cavalier light, like something the obsessive characters in "Diner" or "High Fidelity" might indulge in. But those guys take themselves pretty seriously, and damn if the letter didn't ask for the "most distinguished" American novel of the past 25 years, which sounds pretty sober. I wasn't going to do it as a game when it was likely to be taken in earnest.

"My point in objecting was not just some namby-pamby reluctance to make any relative evaluation about literature, because that really is an important thing that critics do: declare that some books are better than others. I have no problem doing that, but I hate imposing a rigidly, atomistic structure on it. Ultimately, novels are so diverse that once they attain a certain level of quality, they really can't be meaningfully ranked against each other."


I have never seen Diner, but I did read the novel 'High Fidelity', and I like Laura Miller's point about how the guys in the book DO take their lists seriously. They sure do. And I think she is dead right in that last statement, that once a book reaches that plateau of quality, it sort of trascends the rankings: it's a damned good book, and doesn't have to be measured against any other book to make it any more so. That's kind of how I feel about some of the greatest novels I've read, especially in the last 3-4 years. I do get a kind of feeling that is something like, 'This book is just GREAT. No matter how many people read it, no matter what the guy or woman who wrote it thinks or says or what they seem to believe, they wrote a great book. Period.' I got that feeling with a book called 'Independent People' not too long ago, which isn't going to make its way onto any American lists since it's by an Icelandic writer, Halldor Laxness.

I didn't totally blow off the Times' piece, though; I did think it was interesting, and it did inspire me to read Morrison's 'Beloved', which as of this moment I am roughly 20 pages from the end of. And indicentally, I'd put it in the category I discussed above: a GREAT novel. Definitely worth reading for anyone of any race or any gender who cares about literature, and hey, an American wrote it on top of it. When you read 'Beloved', it's obvious that it is a great work of literature. Trust me on that. Or, rather, don't: anyone reading this ought to do what I didn't do for so many years, and read the book.

So anyway, I don't think I can come up with a list of the 'best' American novels, but that doesn't mean I'm knocking Duke's, because he put out there what he found to be "essential" American novels, which isn't necessarily the greatest ones. I thought his list was pretty sensible and it certainly includes 10 great works on it that most people would say represent the finest American literature. Nonetheless, if I were taken hostage and forced to make a list, I'd follow Miller's lead again. This time, she is referring to the National Book Critics' Circle, of which she is a member:

"If I had my druthers, the NBCC would stop at the list of 5 finalists."

I like the idea of coming up with 5 great choices, so the list that appears below ISN'T the 5 Best American Novels in my opinion, it's not the 5 best American novels of this year, but it does represent the TOP 5 MOST INFLUENTIAL NOVELS TO MUTT PLOUGHMAN, PERSONALLY, WRITTEN BY AMERICAN WRITERS. If you don't like that shoe-horn category, well, that's as good as you're gonna get.......

1. "The Grapes of Wrath", John Steinbeck
2. "Moby-Dick", Herman Melville
3. "Going Native", Stephen Wright
4. "On the Road", Jack Kerouac
5. "The Violent Bear it Away", Flannery O'Connor

Debate rages on over the "Great American Novel" question

It's taken us a little while to post on this, but a few weeks ago there was an article in the New York Times announcing the "Best American Novel of the past 25 years," based on the opinions of a wide range of eminent writers and critics (invited to participate by the Times' Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus). Their choice was Toni Morrison's epic novel from 1987, Beloved. Astute TST readers will have noticed from the right-hand column on this page that Mutt has been working his way through the very same novel for the past week or so (not entirely a coincidence, needless to say... although to Mutt's credit, I know that he's been planning on reading the book for a long time -- this just gave him the necessary kick in the butt!).

An announcement like this is bound to throw gasoline on the already-raging flame of debate that swirls around the question, "Is there such thing as the Great American Novel, and if so, which one would it be?" Even if you narrow down the scope to the last quarter-century, the idea of choosing one novel that somehow captures all of the hope and heartache, joy and pain of this great country within its pages is, of course, a fool's errand worthy of the venerable Man of La Mancha. But since this is America, and we do love our polls, Top 10 lists and ranking sheets... why not perpetuate our penchant for rating things, and ring in on this most challenging and interesting of futile questions???

To that end, this post is intended to express my own opinions, but even moreso, to start a conversation. I invite anyone reading this to consider the great tradition of American literature (no matter how familiar or unfamiliar with it you may be), and then to think about what books from within that great tradition have been most important to you. Who are the American writers that you would consider to be the most important, the most relevant in any age? Who are the American novelists that have touched your heart and soul with the most memorable force? What are the “great American novels” you’ve read that you know you will never forget?

If I had to choose one novel to answer the question “What is the great American novel?,” and one to answer “What is the American novel you personally consider to be the most powerful and important?,” I think my answer would be the same for both: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. To me, that is not only one of the most exciting and fascinating novels from any writer I’ve ever read (it’s easily my choice for the most memorable and perfect denouement in any novel ever written), but it also uniquely captures the American story to me somehow, as the crew of the Pequod strive alternatively for adventure, commercial gain, meaning in a relentless and brutal universe, and ultimately, spiritual redemption and the answers to life’s biggest questions.

In my opinion, based of course on my own reading experiences and what I know of their styles and impact, the five brightest stars in the American literary pantheon are Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Take away any of these writers and the entire landscape of American literary history would be permanently altered. As much as I respect other American legends, I can’t say with 100% confidence that this is true of others that might be mentioned in such company… two writers who I would say are very close to making that short list, but not quite there, are Steinbeck and Hemingway. Theirs is certainly an American literature, Steinbeck’s especially... but I don’t feel their work is quite as innovative or important as that of any of the previously mentioned five. (Yet, an argument could certainly be made for The Grapes of Wrath as the quintessential American novel… I’m not saying it is, but I can understand the inclination to nominate it.) Hemingway’s, in fact, strikes me as a tad bit overrated, although I am definitely no expert when it comes to his stuff. It’s obviously had a major impact on the writers that have followed him in this country.

Perhaps a Top 10 Most Essential American Novels of All Time list might look something like this (in no particular order):

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
5. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
6. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
7. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
8. The Violent Bear it Away, Flannery O’Connor
9. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
10. The Sketch Book, Washington Irving (contains American folk tales of enduring popularity such as ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip van Winkle’)

The other work that certainly belongs on this list in terms of its influence (indeed, I would put it on par with Moby Dick and Huck Finn in this regard), but is not here because it is not a novel, is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. No question about that.

Now of course, any time you make a list like this, you are going to end up making choices that others would consider questionable, if not outright controversial. My list is no exception to that rule, I’m sure. Of course it’s MY list, so it’s obviously going to be colored by my own personal opinions and reading experiences. For example, I know a lot of readers would probably consider me nuts to put Winesburg, Ohio on a list of Top 10 most important American novels – but from all I’ve read, it’s one of the most unique and powerful books written about heartland America and its people out there. It’s arguably the finest portrait of small-town America ever written, and the stories had a deep and profound emotional resonance with me that I’ve rarely experienced anywhere else. Even putting Flannery O’Connor on this list would shock some, but to me that’s a no-brainer – her stories and two novels are utterly unique in all of American (hell, WORLD) literature. And though perhaps a writer like Washington Irving is not as widely known and read today, the stories he created have maintained a permanent place in this country’s mythology and psyche... and he was, in fact, the first American fiction writer to achieve wide readership and renown overseas. In a very real sense, Irving put the entire category of 'American literature' on the map!

Of course, there are other great writers that immediately come to mind as American superstars, and many jaws would be open in astonishment in reading my list due to their absence from it… I’m thinking of the work of Henry James, James Fennimore Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Booker T. Washington, T. S. Eliot, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Dreiser, Ayn Rand, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thorton Wilder or Eugene O’Neill. And yes, it is very hard to imagine American lit without any of them… but somehow to me, these don’t seem like the pillars that, if removed, would cause the entire structure to collapse…

When considering the modern era (as the New York Times was), there are other writers that enter the conversation too, whose work certainly cannot be ignored. There are obvious choices, like Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Don De Lillo, Philip Roth and Thomas Pyncheon. But then there are less obvious, but equally worthy, ones, such as Thomas Wolfe, Walker Percy, Stephen Wright, or Raymond Carver. And poets ought not to be ignored either… the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams and Richard Wilbur have made an indelible mark on American letters as well.

What about you? Which writers and works would be on YOUR list? Any article or event that keeps the conversation about, and the reading of, American literature going is worth noting, even celebrating. So hats off to Tanenhaus, A.O. Scott, the New York Times Book Review and its contributors for this interesting project.

May the reading never cease… and may Americans keep rising to their potential as true and unique voices of artistic freedom and integrity, in a world that is ever in need of such shining beacons to guide it along its harried and haunted voyage.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #32

Last week found me in Nashville on business, so I was not able to put up a poem... this is the one I meant to put up. Partially in celebration of the opportunity I had a few weeks' back to see him read live, and partially because his work is always worth visiting and reflecting upon, I give you another great poem from Seamus Heaney.

This one is from his second poetry collection, Door into the Dark, and as you can see it is the poem that provided the book's title. In classic Heaney style, it is a powerful childhood reminscence that carries along with it deeper and more universal meanings/themes. That line, "All I know is a door into the dark," has intrigued me from the first moment I read it (long before I knew what it referred to). I had to good fortune of hearing him read this very poem at the recent evening, which of course, coupled with his fascinating explanation of certain lines, gave it an even stronger resonance with me. The road over which the blacksmith gazes from the door jamb, recalling a traffic sounding with "a clatter of hoofs," was the same road on which, Heaney explained, his younger brother was struck by a car and killed just a few years later (an event explored in the heartbreaking poem "Mid-Term Break" from his debut collection).

*******

The Forge

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil's short pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when the new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music,
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 16

Brief Excerpt

The following is a small excerpt from the Prologue of my "novel", which I would describe as being in the opening stages of development. In this segment, Father Brogan is describing the first evening he encountered a young student journalist, and what happened to him before that encounter. It is only in its first draft and no doubt will experience many revisions in the near future.


The evening our paths first came to intersect fell softly upon the northeastern Pennsylvania landscape one week ago, the second week of May. It was a Friday evening, and I was just emerging from the residence hall where I live with my other Jesuit colleagues, so many of whom have come and gone in the course of the 34 years I have spent here. I had prepared for myself a tolerable supper of baked scrod, vegetable soup from a can and oyster crackers, but had eaten little of it, my appetite no longer bearing much resemblance to that of the young parish priest of the 1950s who thought nothing of retiring to the pubs of Chicago for beer and steaks and theological discourse. Today my appetite is a rabbity, frail creature even in its stronger moments. And on this particular Friday, I could not even bring it to bear on the small repast I had prepared, because of my distraction and, indeed, consternation over the assignment I had been given that very afternoon.
Earlier, I had presided over my last final examination period, and that was not even for my own students. When Brendan Russell, M.A., M. Div., one of our school’s youthful ‘lay theologians in residence’ had had to depart on a family emergency, he had asked me to sit in for him on his final examination. So I had done just that, sitting in the nondescript classroom for three hours while the students of Russell’s celebrated ‘Spirituality and Ecology’ course toiled through their essays on Heaven, earth, sea and sky, and all the connections therein. Far be it from me to weigh in on the possible fruits that all of this very broad, tolerant, far-reaching sort of thought could bear for these young minds. I simply sat mum, collected their exams when they had finished their creative labor, and reflected languidly on the fact that I would never again sit as proctor for my own or for anyone else’s examinations. It didn’t trouble me too much.
Afterwards, I returned to the office I shared with three other theology professors to check my mail box, more out of routine than for any other reason, for I had long since ceased receiving anything of value in the box. No more did young theology students drop off their term papers looking for my comments on their arguments, whether they were my students or another teacher’s. I wasn’t sure if there even were theology students anymore. No more did I receive the more cryptic notes, hand-written by troubled, agitated, or sometimes outright panicked students, asking to meet with me to discuss matters more difficult, perhaps more personal in nature, things that had nothing to do with academics or grades. The notion of approaching one’s priest as a counselor for moral concerns also seemed far in the past. No more did I receive invitations to cocktail parties, retirement parties, and other campus soirees. For many years these things were all frequent occupants of my campus mail box, and how well I remember the days when I felt as though I could not possibly keep my balance with all that I had committed myself to, only to return to the same office after teaching three hours’ straight on Aquinas, my head aching with the effort required to perform such an insane task, to find several more requests for my assistance, my time, my ear, to add to the ever-accumulating pile.
All of these things were gone now, passed into dust, as the Bible promises. Figuratively speaking, of course. So it was without surprise that I found nothing of import in my mail box on this day save a copied letter from the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences formally reminding all professors of the urgency of turning in their final grades on time and a flyer advertising the last session of the semi-popular ‘Theology on Tap’ series at O’Grady’s, the Irish-style pub they had built into the new Student Center on campus. Occasionally, when my frame of mind drifted off of its normal course into more ambitious waters, I had entertained the thought once or twice in the last few years to drop in on one of these sessions to quaff some beers and try to ‘kick it’ with students about theological matters. But this was something that would have appealed to my younger self, perhaps 20 or 25 years in the receding distance. The truth was I was too tired to seriously consider it, never drank beer anymore, and probably would have halted all semblance of amiable fellowship in its tracks just by crossing the threshold into the pub. I still loved the students. You can’t do this without that love. But their territories were clearly marked and their pursuit of liquid pleasure was not an arena in which an elderly priest would be on top of his game, or should be, anyway.
Having nothing left to detain me further in the office – my grades submitted, my small wooden desk from the 1960s mostly cleared of its contents – I passed into the small office where our rotating student intern and the Theology Department secretary, Jane Whittaker, shared some space. I wanted to greet Jane, who had been with the department for eighteen years, and inquire after her cancer-stricken son, a terrible crucible she had been facing for much of the year. But as I approached, admittedly thinking more about my own fatigue and desire to return home to rest than her son’s condition, she saw me coming, and collared me, as it were, with ‘an important message’.
‘You’re to pay a visit to the president,’ said Jane, a portly, gregarious woman whose gray-black hair had been held back by the same jade clip every day for all of those eighteen years. Why I noticed this sea-washed green color every single time I looked at her is something I never could explain. I blinked at her a few times. But there was no doubt that her ‘important message’ was intended for me.
‘The president, Jane? Are you certain you have that right?’ I asked.
‘Of course, father,’ as she insisted on calling me. ‘There’s no mistaking a call from the president’s office.’
‘I’ll take your word for it on that,’ I replied, wondering about this summons. ‘A debriefing, I suppose, although the timing surprises me. I thought young Jimmy would wait until all the pomp was over before giving me the send-off.’
‘Father Brogan. Come off it, now. No one is going to give you a “send-off”, and you know it well. Don’t say that they will. You know Father Chesterfield would let you stay for another thirty years, if you were willing.’
I chuckled reflexively. ‘Even if I were, Jane, I doubt that God is willing to impose that on this community. But one never knows.’ I winked at her, thanked her, and then promptly wandered off, without asking after her son. In another time, before I became this old and so prone to distractions, I would have asked regardless. Yet, in fairness, a summons to drop by to see the president of the Jesuit University of Northeast Pennsylvania was an unusual occurrence indeed, and might have distracted anyone.

A 21st-Century Generation X’er Reflects Briefly on Reading the Venerable Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for the First Time

How’s that for a windy title, boys and girls? Somehow it seems weirdly appropriate though, when the subject matter of the post is an epic medieval poem about a group of travelers making a pilgrimage on foot to a holy site in England, telling wild and wooly stories to pass the time… but who would want to read such a thing in 21st century, postmodern, pop-mart America? And how could such an arcane work possibly be relevant or meaningful to anyone in this day and age?

Well, for starters, this is The Secret Thread after all, and that’s one of the things we do here: dig out obscure and overlooked (or underappreciated) classics, give them a good reading, and mine them for truth and insight that applies to all of us, in any age. That’s not to say we don’t read for the pure enjoyment of the thing – that’s the primary goal and function of fiction reading of any sort, if you ask me, or art in general for that matter! – but on this blog, we try to seek out, share and discuss bits of wisdom and creative expression that have the power to make significant, even indelible, impact on modern lives.

Sorry, but that stuff is always worth repeating… at least, to me. (End of commercial! I'm Duke Altum, and I approve of... ah, forget it!)

Secondly, there is the unique universal nature and theme of this work, which makes it not only credible but meaningful to all people everywhere, at any time. I’d like to expound on that, but the great 18th century poet William Blake has already put it more eloquently and accurately than I ever could... so why reinvent the wheel? Here is what Mr. Blake wrote about Chaucer’s most well-known and beloved work:

“Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his Canterbury Tales, some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves for ever remained unaltered, and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps… Chaucer is himself the great poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and eternize its acts.”

That right there captures the essence of not only of why I wanted to read the book, but why it still very much matters to people of the 21st century, and will likely matter to all people for as long as we’re kicking around on this planet. To put it very, very succinctly: we’re all pilgrims. I know that sounds like a cliché, and perhaps it is, but as in all clichés, it contains a kernel of good old-fashioned truth. For as long as there have been recorded stories and myths, man has continually and faithfully returned again to the metaphor of life as a journey. A line can be traced from the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh to the Odyssey to The Canterbury Tales to The Pilgrim’s Progress to Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine to The Lord of the Rings and beyond.

I would venture to say that most people, no matter what their specific religious persuasion/history may be, tend to look at their lives as a series of steps taken along a certain path. Unless you are a true, dyed-in-the-wool nihilist or atheist who believes that life has no meaning whatsoever and all is random in the cold, unfeeling universe, such a metaphor probably makes sense to you on some level. We can argue endlessly about Who/What may have designed that path, and about whether or not the trail was fixed beforehand or blazed by your ourdecisions and actions… we can even speculate over what might have happened to us if we had taken a turn in a different direction at some key point along the way. But I think we’ve all got a natural inclination to think about our lives in such terms.

Within the Christian tradition of course, the word “pilgrimage” comes loaded up with some significant freight indeed. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path…” The belief in Divine Providence, of a benign God who loves us and desires to lead us home to the Promised Land, is obviously a key concept within this tradition. And then there is the journey Jesus Christ took from the Manger to the Cross… ever since then, Christians have always seen their lives as a pilgrimage, a via dolorosa (“way of suffering”) in which we must atone and do penance, and prepare ourselves to enter into the Kingdom of God. Such concepts are embedded not only within the Christian tradition, but within the entire mindset of Western culture, in one way or another. (The fact that the German word bildungsroman is still used in our vocabulary to describe novels, and sometimes even films, is an interesting case in point.)

And so in using the pilgrimage to Canterbury as his literary device, Chaucer showed forth his literary genius – the trope has meaning for just about everybody, and what better way to describe the "human comedy" in all of its folly and fallenness? A motley crew from all classes and walks of life find themselves together in a country pub, from which they will leave at dawn the following morning for the long walk on foot to Canterbury Cathedral, where a shrine to St. Thomas a Becket is located. Their host calls them together and suggests that, in order to pass the time on their trek tomorrow, they play a game in which everyone relates some kind of tale, and when it’s done they can vote on which is the most memorable of them all. So the rest of the long narrative poem (more accurately, a series of long narrative poems, which are written, interestingly enough, in different styles and meters) consists of each character relating some kind of outlandish tale, and the other pilgrims reacting to it.

And the amazing thing, despite the arcane language and the obviously different social mores and conditions, is how much we can still recognize and relate to in the stories. Other surprises include how hilarious the book can be at times, and also, how bawdy and downright salacious! I continually found myself impressed by how down-to-earth (perhaps even at the dirt level, to some readers!) the humor and the human voices are in this book from 1387. We look down on people from this era (betraying the "chronological snobbery" that C. S. Lewis so often railed against) as being hyper-religious, prudish, superstitious dolts... but Chaucer’s characters display wit, intelligence, sly humor and, very often, a sort of homespun wisdom that, for this reader anyway, gave off the unmistakable whiff of truth.

One final note: most people are immediately put off by the unfamiliar format of a classic like this… we’re not exactly a culture that has much patience for long, narrative poetry. But this is really a very minor hurdle, that is easily cleared by finding a good, readable modern English version (and there are several available). If you accept such a format as a necessary reflection of the times which produced it, and take it as part of your immersion into another time and culture, what you find is that, perhaps against all reason, you come away with wisdom that still applies to this time, this culture… indeed, still applies to that shuffling parade of weary pilgrims currently making its way along the dusty road towards eternity, a procession within which we all have a place.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 15

Slow Going

Work on the first draft of the Prologue for my "novel" in development, as yet unnamed, proceeds at a snail's pace, unfortunately, but at least it is still moving. But it's slow going and none of the progress that I have made on it, maybe 25 handwritten pages or so, has come easily for me at all. Part of it is just the nature of my life at the present moment: two small children, one a toddler, one still a baby; both of whom have been ill recently, although they're getting better; some recent travels; my own bout with a massive cold, etc. It doesn't add up to much time to write, but I try to squeeze in what really amounts to about 30-50 minutes' worth per attempt. That's not very much. It's going to take more sustained effort than that to write a novel, I know that without question; but at the same time, I just take whatever I can get. It's better than nothing, and it sure beats giving up.

Another thing is that it is hard to attempt to create a believable dialogue/relationship between an elderly priest and a young journalist/student who also happens to be female, if you're sitting where I'm sitting. I'm not really in the know as to how an older priest would react to a young female and I'm definitely not in the know as to how a young female would react to an old priest, or anything else for that matter; but then again, this is the job at hand. So I am doing my best with it. What I want to do is create a believable situation in which Father Luke Brogan is confronted with a situation he isn't used to, from a source that throws him off-guard, to his own discomfort, and experiences an unexpected result. The 'unexpected result' to which I refer is the desire to tell his father's story, which will lead me to the novel itself, as yet unstarted.

It will be interesting to try to complete the Prologue and rewrite it a bit. I would say that despite the slow progress, I am about 3/4 done with what I envision to be the Prologue. I don't want it to be very long and it's probably too long now as it is. I am messing around with the idea of posting an excerpt, which my brother and TST founder Duke Altum has suggested that I do, not without some provocation. IF I do that, which is definitely still in question, it will not be long, because I don't want to give it all away and I don't want to be sharing too much if I don't even have the story off the ground. We'll see. I think it is sort of lumbering along, the writing is tentative, and I suppose you might say I don't feel limber yet and don't have much momentum going on this novel idea. That's ok. I just want to persist and see what I can get down. I think if any momentum develops, it is going to be later on. But I know enough to know I have to slog through the tough parts to get to the parts that flow. If you don't hang in there when it's tough, you'll never write anything. In other words, I think I can get to something better than what I am doing now, but there is only one way through it. Persistence is key. I wish I could find a way to put in more time in each session. Sometimes I get ready, set up some coffee, sit down, pick up the pencil, and the baby cries on cue. But this is the way it is, and even a novel doesn't come before your own child. Hell no. So, I am just going to keep making the effort when I can and believe in the possibility of this thing taking off.

Critical Meeting

On the weekend of June 9-11, 2006, I also plan to get together solo with my old man, at a hotel suite in Pennsylvania, strictly to discuss his father and details of his childhood in the Depression. It should be very interesting indeed. I have talked with him a lot about both subjects, of course, but this will probably be - or should be - the most detailed conversation we have on such matters, unless we wander off onto other things. I told my Dad repeatedly that I am going to pick his brain as much as I can. It's a great opportunity for me. My Dad's 75 years old, and while luckily he is in relatively good health, he won't be here forever. This is going to be imporant, first-hand recollections. I wonder exactly how he feels about all of this, because as far as he's concerned there is no real reason to think that all of it will lead to anything, but he seems quite game. I am sure he will be pleased to talk about his father and what he remembers. What father wouldn't want to tell those things? I hope to learn a lot about his day-to-day life in the 30s and 40s - to the extent that he can remember - and about the specific details regarding Floyd Lovell. Hopefully it will help me form a clearer impression of a character that is still pretty hazy in my mind's eye.

Oh, and one other thing. We went around the horn for weeks and weeks trying to find the right dates to get together, and finally settled on June 9-11. And it was only after that that we both realized that June 9 was Floyd Lovell's birthday. Accident??? If he were still alive, he would be 103 on June 9, 2006.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #31

Next week, I am going to do something I've wanted to do for a long time, probably ten years: I'm going to hear Seamus Heaney read in person, from his new collection of poems called District and Circle, in Philadelphia. As I've mentioned in this series before, Heaney is among my literary heroes, and is certainly one of my very favorite poets... you can well imagine that this wanna-be is very excited for the event. Next week's poem will almost certainly be another one from Heaney, to celebrate the experience (which will mark the first time in this series that I've selected a work from a poet already featured once before).

For this week's poem, then, a tribute to the most recent Irish Nobel Prize-winner, in the form of a poem from Ireland's first Nobel Prize-winner: William Butler Yeats. I have no doubt that Heaney would be flattered by the association, which has been made before of course (the great American poet Robert Lowell famously called Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats."). I'm actually not too familiar with Yeats' work, and what I know of it has never appealed to me personally all that much... except for this one, which I have loved from the moment I first read it.

There are some lines in one of my favorite Heaney poems, "Postscript," that contain this breathtaking description of swans on a lake:

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.


For some reason this description has always reminded me of the famous Yeats poem featured here below. I have no idea if the poem was in Heaney's conscious mind or not when he wrote "Postscript" -- without question, it was in his subconscious mind, a permanent resident there -- but I've always connected the two in my head. So, as a tribute to Heaney and to the venerable, age-old tradition of Irish poetry, I present this W. B. Yeats classic... 'Mysterious, beautiful.'


*******

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?