Friday, January 25, 2008
Life Never Finishes: Robert Lowell
History
History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--
O there's a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.
Robert Lowell, Collected Poems
Thursday, January 24, 2008
John Milton's 400th Anniversary b. 1608
The year 2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton in 1608 in Cheapside, London. He was the second child of John Milton Sr. and his wife Sarah. His childhood home was the Spread Eagle on Bread Street, where his father conducted his business as a scrivener (notary, moneyleader, and investment banker). John Milton Sr. was disinherited by his family for converting from Roman Catholicism and though Puritan in sympathy he was a great lover of literature and music (he was an amateur composer).
At the age of sixteen he composed translations of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi. By the age of 21, as he was graduating from Christ's College Cambridge, he already possessed the genius and craft realized in "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity".
We will leave off here for now - basking in Milton's early major achievement (I read it every Christmas Season). The Contemplative will post at least 2 blogs a month dedicated to John Milton: one on his life and development and the other on Paradise Lost - 1 Book per month for all 12 books. For a taste of the coming post on Paradise Lost, below are three images from the 1674 edition.
THE ARGUMENT
This first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac't: Then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many Legions of Angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep. Which action past over, the Poem hasts into the midst of things, presenting Satan with his Angels now fallen into Hell, describ'd here, not in the Center (for Heaven and Earth may be suppos'd as yet not made, certainly not yet accurst) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest call'd Chaos: Here Satan with his Angels lying on the burning Lake, thunder-struck and astonisht, after a certain space recovers, as from confusion, calls up him who next in Order and Dignity lay by him; they confer of thir miserable fall. Satan awakens all his Legions, who lay till then in the same manner confounded; They rise, thir Numbers, array of Battel, thir chief Leaders nam'd, according to the Idols known afterwards in Canaan and the Countries adjoyning. To these Satan directs his Speech, comforts them with hope yet of regaining Heaven, but tells them lastly of a new World and new kind of Creature to be created, according to an ancient Prophesie or report in Heaven; for that Angels were long before this visible Creation, was the opinion of many ancient Fathers. To find out the truth of this Prophesie, and what to determin thereon he refers to a full Councel. What his Associates thence attempt. Pandemonium the Palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of the Deep: The infernal Peers there sit in Councel.
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of EDEN, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of CHAOS: Or if SION Hill
Delight thee more, and SILOA'S Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' AONIAN Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who first seduc'd them to that fowl revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his Peers,
He trusted to have equal'd the most High,
If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battel proud
With vain attempt.
[A useful chronology of Milton's life can be found: http://www.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton/chron.html ]
At the age of sixteen he composed translations of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi. By the age of 21, as he was graduating from Christ's College Cambridge, he already possessed the genius and craft realized in "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity".
We will leave off here for now - basking in Milton's early major achievement (I read it every Christmas Season). The Contemplative will post at least 2 blogs a month dedicated to John Milton: one on his life and development and the other on Paradise Lost - 1 Book per month for all 12 books. For a taste of the coming post on Paradise Lost, below are three images from the 1674 edition.
THE ARGUMENT
This first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac't: Then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many Legions of Angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep. Which action past over, the Poem hasts into the midst of things, presenting Satan with his Angels now fallen into Hell, describ'd here, not in the Center (for Heaven and Earth may be suppos'd as yet not made, certainly not yet accurst) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest call'd Chaos: Here Satan with his Angels lying on the burning Lake, thunder-struck and astonisht, after a certain space recovers, as from confusion, calls up him who next in Order and Dignity lay by him; they confer of thir miserable fall. Satan awakens all his Legions, who lay till then in the same manner confounded; They rise, thir Numbers, array of Battel, thir chief Leaders nam'd, according to the Idols known afterwards in Canaan and the Countries adjoyning. To these Satan directs his Speech, comforts them with hope yet of regaining Heaven, but tells them lastly of a new World and new kind of Creature to be created, according to an ancient Prophesie or report in Heaven; for that Angels were long before this visible Creation, was the opinion of many ancient Fathers. To find out the truth of this Prophesie, and what to determin thereon he refers to a full Councel. What his Associates thence attempt. Pandemonium the Palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of the Deep: The infernal Peers there sit in Councel.
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of EDEN, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of CHAOS: Or if SION Hill
Delight thee more, and SILOA'S Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' AONIAN Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who first seduc'd them to that fowl revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his Peers,
He trusted to have equal'd the most High,
If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battel proud
With vain attempt.
[A useful chronology of Milton's life can be found: http://www.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton/chron.html ]
The Loon's Cry Across the Water
For sometimes, when our world is not our home
Nor we any home elsewhere, but all
Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold
We suddenly may seem in paradise
Again, in ignorance and emptiness
Blessed beyond what we thought to know:
Then on sweet waters echoes the loon's cry.
Howare Nemerov, "The Loon's Cry"
Howard Nemerov, Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Nor we any home elsewhere, but all
Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold
We suddenly may seem in paradise
Again, in ignorance and emptiness
Blessed beyond what we thought to know:
Then on sweet waters echoes the loon's cry.
Howare Nemerov, "The Loon's Cry"
Howard Nemerov, Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Theological Reflection on the Beautiful
"In a world without beauty - even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it - in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evident of why it must be carried out. Man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative evil... In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency."
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: I Seeing the Form (Ignatius Press, p. 19)
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: I Seeing the Form (Ignatius Press, p. 19)
Remembering Larry Brown's Lyrical Realism
Meeting Joe, Meeting Larry Brown
In 1991, after his masterful collection of stark, humorous, and fierce stories, Big Bad Love, Larry Brown released his second novel, Joe: A Novel. More so than his first novel (Dirty Work), Joe brought together the great themes and the rich environment that would typify this work: The struggle with poverty or barely making your way from job to job; the struggle between decency and outright evil; and, the inner struggle to resist the forces to implode in furies of self-destruction.
In Joe, Brown has fully formed his unique lyrical and spare voice and has breathed life into characters that are so real the reader leaves the novel with the impression that they have met Joe Ransom, Gary Jones and know low-down dogs like Wade Jones, Gary’s father. We recognize in Wade, like Faulkner’s Anse Bundren, the father-figure whose whole being is bent on an entirely selfish objective that is typically achieved through the exploitation and destruction of their children. Whether after teeth, a wife, alcohol, or money, the unsuppressed desire of the father sets both Faulkner’s and Brown’s novel into action.
We are first introduced to the chronically homeless and fleeing Jones family, Wade, Mama, Fay, Gary, and Dorothy wondering from Oklahoma to Florida back to Mississippi through highways and country by-roads in sojourn to an old familiar place that Wade remembers from his younger years. As his family suffers from excruciating depravation, Wade’s unchallenged desire for alcohol is pathetically apparent. As they walk the highway, Wade finds a couple unopened can of Budweiser and joyfully/miserly hogs them to himself. The chapter ends with the industrious Gary finding an abandoned house/cabin that quickly becomes the residence of the Wade Jones Family.
In the next chapter, we are introduced to the Joe Ransom, a forty something ex-convict whose job entails poisoning trees (clearing the land) for a lumber company. Joe’s wife left him after years of living with his gambling, drinking, and carousing. He has got a couple of children whom he rarely sees; drives a broken down truck; keeps a pit bull to guard his house; has a girlfriend, Connie, roughly the age of his own daughter; and has an ongoing feud with several of the degenerate locals (chiefly Willie Russell). His independent mentality of self-reliance and suspicions of the local authorities comes through as an ‘authority complex’ that repeatedly threatens to have him return to prison. But, his outlook also promises the hope of redemption because of his awareness of his limitation, faults and sense of right or order.
The intersection of Joe and Gary forms the stories central understanding of the relentlessness of evil and the hope of redemption in sacrificial caring for another person. In between Wade steals, connives, and even kills as he embarks on a perpetual quest for another jug of liquor and a pack of smokes. He dominates by terror the entire Jones family with such violence that the eighteen-year-old daughter, Fay, flees the house and family to seek a life (Fay: A Novel). Gary stays with his Mama and Dorothy out of a sense of misguided loyalty. Though he cannot read or write, Gary becomes the primary wage earner in the family and begins working for Joe poisoning trees in the woods. A bond in formed between Gary and Joe, between a form of innocence and a dreaming or longing for innocence in the form of making things right by doing something really right for someone unable to save themselves; redemption.
As the novel draws to the showdown between Wade and his radical exploitation of everyone, particularly his family, to satisfy his basest desires and Joe’s vicarious salvation through his ennobled protection of Gary, the world of moral ambiguity is quickened and solidified against the violence against innocence. Joe’s sense of what is right and what must happen propels him to be found with the power and justification of a ‘fated’ act. He acts not from a place of puritanical moral purity, but from the grayness of his own moral compass that allows for complete clarity as he sees the lives of Gary and Dorothy threatened with a violence of grotesques magnitude.
Joe ends as it began. Nothing is resolved. No one has escaped the pain of life or even the pain inflicted by individuals bent on their own desires without consideration or care for those around. Wade, a master of the art of using people as a means toward his own end, poisons people at their roots or base so that he can control them in their weakness. Like the poisoned trees, everyone has been damaged and will not stand long. Fay has fled, Gary returns to his Mama with a traumatized Dorothy, and Gary is left to settle matters in violence. All that is innocent is damaged. All that is free is bound. All that is withheld is taken by force, violated and destroyed.
Larry Brown’s Joe stands at the beginning of his amazing and too brief career as a gateway to the moral complexity and flawed realism of the world we inhabit. No one’s motives are pure. No act is without self-service or self-gain. Even Joe’s sacrifice is framed within the larger context of a countdown to his return to prison due to his anti-authoritarian mentality. One knows, doesn’t one, that Joe was going, eventually, back to prison. Yet, his decision ennobles and redeems him nevertheless. Brown reaches for no easy solutions or convenient resolutions. Joe’s painful realism, which depicts characters as flawed, struggling agents of their own lives, disallows anything but authenticity and integrity in understanding actions and consequences. We are the wiser who benefit from Brown’s deeply philosophical novel whose moral complexity reads like a Camus of the American South.
______________________________________
This review of Joe: A Novel and the "Biographical Profile of Larry Brown" below were originally published in the Southern Literary Review: March/April Edition, 2007.
______________________________________
A Biographical Profile of Larry Brown
His work evokes the sounds, smells and sensations of the land, people and world of the rough south. No parlors or doilies, no society dances or church picnics, Larry Brown wrote of the events, troubles and hopes of everyday people whose world is fatally realistic. It was his world he evoked and reflected through a mirror of discernment, care and empathy. Larry Brown wrote fiction with flesh and muscle - that breathes deep and sweats. Life lived in his fiction, and that life began in 1951 in Oxford, Mississippi as one of six children. His father relocated the family when Larry was only three to Memphis, Tennessee to work in at the Fruehauf Trailer Company. They returned to Oxford in 1964 where they were to remain. At the pivotal age of sixteen, his father died. Larry did not fare well in school and joked ironically in later years that he flunked senior English.
During the Vietnam war era, October 1970, Brown joined the U.S. Marine Corps, but was stationed at Camp LeJune and never saw action. This experience and the people he meet while in the Marines became the rare material of his first novel, Dirty Work. After his term in the Marines was over, Brown returned to Oxford and married Mary Annie Coleman and became a Firefighter (experiences that were memorialized in On Fire).
While working as a Firefighter in 1980, Brown began teaching himself how to write fiction. He had worked for the Fire Department for seven years and knew that he did not want to do this for the rest of his life. He intuitively knew that learning to write was work and that if he worked hard enough at it he could learn to write well. And so he wrote five novels and between eighty and ninety stories (eight years of writing) before he published his first book. During this literary apprenticeship, of an auto-didactic nature, Brown read writers William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, and Raymond Carver.
What happened next is the stuff of legend around the Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Shannon Ravel read of story of Brown's while looking for new material for her New Stories from the South. She loved what she saw ("Facing the Music" the second story Brown had published) and wrote Brown to see if he had any more stories, he replied about a hundred. His first collection of stories was published, Facing the Music, was published in 1988
Brown’s first novel, Dirty Work (1989) about the struggles of two injured veterans won the Mississippi Library Association's Award for Fiction. It was followed by a collection of short stories Big Bad Love (1990) depicting the struggles and tensions between holding onto relationships (husband, wife, and friendships) and being true to yourself (particularly while dedicating the time, energy and focus necessary to be writer.) In 2001, Arliss Howard directed a screenplay adaptation of Big Bad Love written by Jim Howard where he played the role of Leon Barlow with Debra Winger co-starring as his ex-wife, Marilyn. Brown appears in the film in the role of Mr. Barlow, father of Leon, uttering his words of wisdom to his son, “Take the high road son.”
His next novel, Joe: A Novel (1991), a story of redemption and ruin as two unlikely characters discovery and fulfill a shared need in each other, won the Southern Book Critic's Circle Award for Fiction, was named a Notable Book of 1991 by the American Library Association, and was a Best Book by Publisher's Weekly. Joe (named for Joe Ransom) introduces readers to the Jones family, Ward (the father), Gary, Fay, Calvin and Dorothy and is the first in a proposed trilogy that was to include novels on Fay and Gary and resolve the questions about the fates of Fay, Gary and Calvin.
Brown’s third novel, Father and Son: A Novel (1996), won the 1997 Southern Book Award. Here Brown addresses the core questions in the struggle between good and evil without either falling into cliques or simplifying the complex motives and drives of each character. As in his other fiction, characters are portrayed at their most vulnerable or base, in full light of their weaknesses and make their way, for better or worse, toward their fate.
In 2000, Brown released Fay: A Novel, the second installment of his proposed trilogy. It takes up the questions left open in Joe regarding the fate of Fay Jones. Writing in the first person in the voice of Fay, this novel records her life from immediately after she had fled from the sexual advances of her father, Wade, a man who had traded his son Calvin for a car and pimped his youngest mute daughter for a few $20s. Not since Faulkner’s Light in August has a narrative struggle of a young woman reached this epic proportion. In recognition of his accomplishments he received the Artist's Achievement Award given by the Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts.
Brown changed publishers for his novel Rabbit Factory: A Novel in 2003 from Algonquin to Free Press. In many ways Rabbit Factory reminds one of the stories in Big Bad Love with the significant difference that Brown has successfully woven these stories of broken, self-destructive, long-time losers in and around Memphis, Tennessee. It is the most sophisticated formal experimentation with fiction that Brown had yet achieved. Experience and proximity are the glue that holds these stories together. Each character is absorbed in their lives were violence is as familiar as their own face. In these stories, the main character is the absurdity of each thought and action as played out in a world in which it appears normal; in which the absurdity of a reformed, thoughtful pit bull setting out to become helpful to other animals makes equal sense.
On Fire (1993) and Billy Ray's Farm: Essays from a place called Tula (2001), together gather Brown’s published non-fiction prose. Each draws from his life and interaction with the people, places and animals he cared about most. They provide the most vivid written portrait of Brown available. This portrait was enhanced in 2002, when director Gary Hawkings made a documentary, "The Rough South of Larry Brown" that dramatized some of Brown's stories, including "Boy & Dog" and featured an interview with both Brown and his wife, Mary Annie.
Larry Brown died tragically on November 24, 2004 at his own near Oxford, from a heart attack. Those surviving him include his wife, Mary Annie Coleman Brown, three children (Billy Ray, Shane Michael, and LeAnn), and two granddaughters. His lose is deeply felt by the literary community and by readers who eagerly awaited each new volume. His example of a self-made literary giant stands tall for all who would learn from him the lesson of hard work and perseverance on the path to becoming a writer.
His last novel, A Miracle of Catfish, was published by Algonquin on March 20, 2007. It contains all chapters that Brown finished plus the notes for its conclusion. The novel recounts the story of Cortez Sharp, a widower, who decides to build a catfish pond on his land in Mississippi and that of a young nine-year-old boy, Jimmy, who lives down the road. You will have to read his book or upcoming reviews to find out more.
Another significant addition to the Brown corpus is the collection of interviews edited by Jay Watson, Conversations with Larry Brown published by the University of Mississippi Press in March of 2007
In 1991, after his masterful collection of stark, humorous, and fierce stories, Big Bad Love, Larry Brown released his second novel, Joe: A Novel. More so than his first novel (Dirty Work), Joe brought together the great themes and the rich environment that would typify this work: The struggle with poverty or barely making your way from job to job; the struggle between decency and outright evil; and, the inner struggle to resist the forces to implode in furies of self-destruction.
In Joe, Brown has fully formed his unique lyrical and spare voice and has breathed life into characters that are so real the reader leaves the novel with the impression that they have met Joe Ransom, Gary Jones and know low-down dogs like Wade Jones, Gary’s father. We recognize in Wade, like Faulkner’s Anse Bundren, the father-figure whose whole being is bent on an entirely selfish objective that is typically achieved through the exploitation and destruction of their children. Whether after teeth, a wife, alcohol, or money, the unsuppressed desire of the father sets both Faulkner’s and Brown’s novel into action.
We are first introduced to the chronically homeless and fleeing Jones family, Wade, Mama, Fay, Gary, and Dorothy wondering from Oklahoma to Florida back to Mississippi through highways and country by-roads in sojourn to an old familiar place that Wade remembers from his younger years. As his family suffers from excruciating depravation, Wade’s unchallenged desire for alcohol is pathetically apparent. As they walk the highway, Wade finds a couple unopened can of Budweiser and joyfully/miserly hogs them to himself. The chapter ends with the industrious Gary finding an abandoned house/cabin that quickly becomes the residence of the Wade Jones Family.
In the next chapter, we are introduced to the Joe Ransom, a forty something ex-convict whose job entails poisoning trees (clearing the land) for a lumber company. Joe’s wife left him after years of living with his gambling, drinking, and carousing. He has got a couple of children whom he rarely sees; drives a broken down truck; keeps a pit bull to guard his house; has a girlfriend, Connie, roughly the age of his own daughter; and has an ongoing feud with several of the degenerate locals (chiefly Willie Russell). His independent mentality of self-reliance and suspicions of the local authorities comes through as an ‘authority complex’ that repeatedly threatens to have him return to prison. But, his outlook also promises the hope of redemption because of his awareness of his limitation, faults and sense of right or order.
The intersection of Joe and Gary forms the stories central understanding of the relentlessness of evil and the hope of redemption in sacrificial caring for another person. In between Wade steals, connives, and even kills as he embarks on a perpetual quest for another jug of liquor and a pack of smokes. He dominates by terror the entire Jones family with such violence that the eighteen-year-old daughter, Fay, flees the house and family to seek a life (Fay: A Novel). Gary stays with his Mama and Dorothy out of a sense of misguided loyalty. Though he cannot read or write, Gary becomes the primary wage earner in the family and begins working for Joe poisoning trees in the woods. A bond in formed between Gary and Joe, between a form of innocence and a dreaming or longing for innocence in the form of making things right by doing something really right for someone unable to save themselves; redemption.
As the novel draws to the showdown between Wade and his radical exploitation of everyone, particularly his family, to satisfy his basest desires and Joe’s vicarious salvation through his ennobled protection of Gary, the world of moral ambiguity is quickened and solidified against the violence against innocence. Joe’s sense of what is right and what must happen propels him to be found with the power and justification of a ‘fated’ act. He acts not from a place of puritanical moral purity, but from the grayness of his own moral compass that allows for complete clarity as he sees the lives of Gary and Dorothy threatened with a violence of grotesques magnitude.
Joe ends as it began. Nothing is resolved. No one has escaped the pain of life or even the pain inflicted by individuals bent on their own desires without consideration or care for those around. Wade, a master of the art of using people as a means toward his own end, poisons people at their roots or base so that he can control them in their weakness. Like the poisoned trees, everyone has been damaged and will not stand long. Fay has fled, Gary returns to his Mama with a traumatized Dorothy, and Gary is left to settle matters in violence. All that is innocent is damaged. All that is free is bound. All that is withheld is taken by force, violated and destroyed.
Larry Brown’s Joe stands at the beginning of his amazing and too brief career as a gateway to the moral complexity and flawed realism of the world we inhabit. No one’s motives are pure. No act is without self-service or self-gain. Even Joe’s sacrifice is framed within the larger context of a countdown to his return to prison due to his anti-authoritarian mentality. One knows, doesn’t one, that Joe was going, eventually, back to prison. Yet, his decision ennobles and redeems him nevertheless. Brown reaches for no easy solutions or convenient resolutions. Joe’s painful realism, which depicts characters as flawed, struggling agents of their own lives, disallows anything but authenticity and integrity in understanding actions and consequences. We are the wiser who benefit from Brown’s deeply philosophical novel whose moral complexity reads like a Camus of the American South.
______________________________________
This review of Joe: A Novel and the "Biographical Profile of Larry Brown" below were originally published in the Southern Literary Review: March/April Edition, 2007.
______________________________________
A Biographical Profile of Larry Brown
His work evokes the sounds, smells and sensations of the land, people and world of the rough south. No parlors or doilies, no society dances or church picnics, Larry Brown wrote of the events, troubles and hopes of everyday people whose world is fatally realistic. It was his world he evoked and reflected through a mirror of discernment, care and empathy. Larry Brown wrote fiction with flesh and muscle - that breathes deep and sweats. Life lived in his fiction, and that life began in 1951 in Oxford, Mississippi as one of six children. His father relocated the family when Larry was only three to Memphis, Tennessee to work in at the Fruehauf Trailer Company. They returned to Oxford in 1964 where they were to remain. At the pivotal age of sixteen, his father died. Larry did not fare well in school and joked ironically in later years that he flunked senior English.
During the Vietnam war era, October 1970, Brown joined the U.S. Marine Corps, but was stationed at Camp LeJune and never saw action. This experience and the people he meet while in the Marines became the rare material of his first novel, Dirty Work. After his term in the Marines was over, Brown returned to Oxford and married Mary Annie Coleman and became a Firefighter (experiences that were memorialized in On Fire).
While working as a Firefighter in 1980, Brown began teaching himself how to write fiction. He had worked for the Fire Department for seven years and knew that he did not want to do this for the rest of his life. He intuitively knew that learning to write was work and that if he worked hard enough at it he could learn to write well. And so he wrote five novels and between eighty and ninety stories (eight years of writing) before he published his first book. During this literary apprenticeship, of an auto-didactic nature, Brown read writers William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, and Raymond Carver.
What happened next is the stuff of legend around the Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Shannon Ravel read of story of Brown's while looking for new material for her New Stories from the South. She loved what she saw ("Facing the Music" the second story Brown had published) and wrote Brown to see if he had any more stories, he replied about a hundred. His first collection of stories was published, Facing the Music, was published in 1988
Brown’s first novel, Dirty Work (1989) about the struggles of two injured veterans won the Mississippi Library Association's Award for Fiction. It was followed by a collection of short stories Big Bad Love (1990) depicting the struggles and tensions between holding onto relationships (husband, wife, and friendships) and being true to yourself (particularly while dedicating the time, energy and focus necessary to be writer.) In 2001, Arliss Howard directed a screenplay adaptation of Big Bad Love written by Jim Howard where he played the role of Leon Barlow with Debra Winger co-starring as his ex-wife, Marilyn. Brown appears in the film in the role of Mr. Barlow, father of Leon, uttering his words of wisdom to his son, “Take the high road son.”
His next novel, Joe: A Novel (1991), a story of redemption and ruin as two unlikely characters discovery and fulfill a shared need in each other, won the Southern Book Critic's Circle Award for Fiction, was named a Notable Book of 1991 by the American Library Association, and was a Best Book by Publisher's Weekly. Joe (named for Joe Ransom) introduces readers to the Jones family, Ward (the father), Gary, Fay, Calvin and Dorothy and is the first in a proposed trilogy that was to include novels on Fay and Gary and resolve the questions about the fates of Fay, Gary and Calvin.
Brown’s third novel, Father and Son: A Novel (1996), won the 1997 Southern Book Award. Here Brown addresses the core questions in the struggle between good and evil without either falling into cliques or simplifying the complex motives and drives of each character. As in his other fiction, characters are portrayed at their most vulnerable or base, in full light of their weaknesses and make their way, for better or worse, toward their fate.
In 2000, Brown released Fay: A Novel, the second installment of his proposed trilogy. It takes up the questions left open in Joe regarding the fate of Fay Jones. Writing in the first person in the voice of Fay, this novel records her life from immediately after she had fled from the sexual advances of her father, Wade, a man who had traded his son Calvin for a car and pimped his youngest mute daughter for a few $20s. Not since Faulkner’s Light in August has a narrative struggle of a young woman reached this epic proportion. In recognition of his accomplishments he received the Artist's Achievement Award given by the Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts.
Brown changed publishers for his novel Rabbit Factory: A Novel in 2003 from Algonquin to Free Press. In many ways Rabbit Factory reminds one of the stories in Big Bad Love with the significant difference that Brown has successfully woven these stories of broken, self-destructive, long-time losers in and around Memphis, Tennessee. It is the most sophisticated formal experimentation with fiction that Brown had yet achieved. Experience and proximity are the glue that holds these stories together. Each character is absorbed in their lives were violence is as familiar as their own face. In these stories, the main character is the absurdity of each thought and action as played out in a world in which it appears normal; in which the absurdity of a reformed, thoughtful pit bull setting out to become helpful to other animals makes equal sense.
On Fire (1993) and Billy Ray's Farm: Essays from a place called Tula (2001), together gather Brown’s published non-fiction prose. Each draws from his life and interaction with the people, places and animals he cared about most. They provide the most vivid written portrait of Brown available. This portrait was enhanced in 2002, when director Gary Hawkings made a documentary, "The Rough South of Larry Brown" that dramatized some of Brown's stories, including "Boy & Dog" and featured an interview with both Brown and his wife, Mary Annie.
Larry Brown died tragically on November 24, 2004 at his own near Oxford, from a heart attack. Those surviving him include his wife, Mary Annie Coleman Brown, three children (Billy Ray, Shane Michael, and LeAnn), and two granddaughters. His lose is deeply felt by the literary community and by readers who eagerly awaited each new volume. His example of a self-made literary giant stands tall for all who would learn from him the lesson of hard work and perseverance on the path to becoming a writer.
His last novel, A Miracle of Catfish, was published by Algonquin on March 20, 2007. It contains all chapters that Brown finished plus the notes for its conclusion. The novel recounts the story of Cortez Sharp, a widower, who decides to build a catfish pond on his land in Mississippi and that of a young nine-year-old boy, Jimmy, who lives down the road. You will have to read his book or upcoming reviews to find out more.
Another significant addition to the Brown corpus is the collection of interviews edited by Jay Watson, Conversations with Larry Brown published by the University of Mississippi Press in March of 2007
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Loved & Beloved: Merrill, St. John of the Cross & Marc Chagall
...Now come days
When lover and beloved know
That love is what they are and where they go.
Each learns to read at length the other's gaze.
James Merrill, "A Poem of Summer's End"
I abandoned and forgot myself;
Laying my face on my beloved;
All things ceased; I went out from myself
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
St. John of the Cross, "The Dark Night"
James Merrill, Collected Poems (Knopf, 2001)
St. John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. (ICS Publication, 1991)
When lover and beloved know
That love is what they are and where they go.
Each learns to read at length the other's gaze.
James Merrill, "A Poem of Summer's End"
I abandoned and forgot myself;
Laying my face on my beloved;
All things ceased; I went out from myself
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
St. John of the Cross, "The Dark Night"
James Merrill, Collected Poems (Knopf, 2001)
St. John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. (ICS Publication, 1991)
Milosz: An Honest Struggle
Sunday, January 13, 2008
E.A. Robinson, "CREDO"
Edwin Arlington Robinson has long been acknowledged by the likes of James Wright, Donald Hall, Donald Justice, John Hollander, Robert Faggen and others to be a sadly under-valued poet. His poetry is remarkable for its integrity to life experience. While the majority of his verse is about the lives of 'ordinary' people, his poem "CREDO" is a spare-expression of his engagement with a life of tragic potential that nonetheless refuses to shut its eyes to the night/darkness in knowledge that the light is coming/come.
"CREDO"
I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unawares,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.
No, there is not a glimmer , nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all - above, beyond it all -
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
In this poem (and in his work) he pre-figures both T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. He is arguably our first Modernist Poet. Of notable interest in "CREDO" is the capitalized 'L' of Light, while the night & black remain in lower case letters - joined with the Biblical & Theological phraseology of "Glory of the Light" & "Glory of the Lord" and the imminent, incarnational and eschatological "coming... of the Light" creates a poem that is grounded in the secularized version of the hiddenness of God as in the eschatological / incarnation or presence of that coming in the here and now - i.e. in the dark, in the night the Light is already present in its coming. Robinson does not blink at the night, though he fears it, he welcomes in fear the night and its chaotic demeanor - though its chaos is already defeated by the law/order of the presence of the "coming" of the Light in its glory. It is the modern person who has no sense of the wondrous miracles of a star that might guide him to the Manager or an answer - the night is "shrouded" - veiled the opposite of unveiled - or revelation. He depends on a tradition-ed sense of knowing that has the character of a message sent from far away through history and through the course of humanity's story. This revelation is time-bound and tied up with human history and the human story and its struggle with the night/dark. The message comes like music, a "bar" of music, faintly heard - joining those past ("dead leaves") to those present ("garlands") who struggle for hope ("where no roses are".) By any standard, this is simply amazing poetry. Read him.
E.A. Robinson, The Poetry of E.A. Robinson. Ed. with Annotation by Robert Mezey (Modern Library, 1999)
E.A. Robinson, Robinson: Poems (Everyman's Pocket Poets). Ed. Scott Donaldson. (Everyman Library, 2007).
Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life. (Columbia University Press, 2006)
"CREDO"
I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unawares,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.
No, there is not a glimmer , nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all - above, beyond it all -
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
In this poem (and in his work) he pre-figures both T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. He is arguably our first Modernist Poet. Of notable interest in "CREDO" is the capitalized 'L' of Light, while the night & black remain in lower case letters - joined with the Biblical & Theological phraseology of "Glory of the Light" & "Glory of the Lord" and the imminent, incarnational and eschatological "coming... of the Light" creates a poem that is grounded in the secularized version of the hiddenness of God as in the eschatological / incarnation or presence of that coming in the here and now - i.e. in the dark, in the night the Light is already present in its coming. Robinson does not blink at the night, though he fears it, he welcomes in fear the night and its chaotic demeanor - though its chaos is already defeated by the law/order of the presence of the "coming" of the Light in its glory. It is the modern person who has no sense of the wondrous miracles of a star that might guide him to the Manager or an answer - the night is "shrouded" - veiled the opposite of unveiled - or revelation. He depends on a tradition-ed sense of knowing that has the character of a message sent from far away through history and through the course of humanity's story. This revelation is time-bound and tied up with human history and the human story and its struggle with the night/dark. The message comes like music, a "bar" of music, faintly heard - joining those past ("dead leaves") to those present ("garlands") who struggle for hope ("where no roses are".) By any standard, this is simply amazing poetry. Read him.
E.A. Robinson, The Poetry of E.A. Robinson. Ed. with Annotation by Robert Mezey (Modern Library, 1999)
E.A. Robinson, Robinson: Poems (Everyman's Pocket Poets). Ed. Scott Donaldson. (Everyman Library, 2007).
Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life. (Columbia University Press, 2006)
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Gerard Manley Hopkins - Against the Inner Darkness
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night ! what sights you, heart, saw ; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas ! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
"No Worst"
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
.... Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
"Carrion Comfort"
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist slack they may be these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can.
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock ? lay a lionlimb against
me scan?
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there ; me frantic to
avoid thee and flee ?
Why? That my chaff might fly ; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems)! kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy,
would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling
flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him ? which one ? is it each one?
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God) my God.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night ! what sights you, heart, saw ; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas ! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
"No Worst"
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
.... Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
"Carrion Comfort"
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist slack they may be these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can.
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock ? lay a lionlimb against
me scan?
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there ; me frantic to
avoid thee and flee ?
Why? That my chaff might fly ; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems)! kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy,
would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling
flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him ? which one ? is it each one?
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God) my God.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Hart Crane: Simply Making Something Beautiful
"... try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful, - something that maybe can't be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment - which is what real work is.... I only ask to leave behind me something that the future may find valuable... I shall make every sacrifice toward that end." Hart Crane in a letter to Clarence Arthur Crane (his father) January 12, 1924.
Hart Crane Complete Poems & Selected Letters. (Library of America Press, 2007)
Hart Crane Complete Poems & Selected Letters. (Library of America Press, 2007)
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Emily Dickinson - Profound Interiority
For many, all too many, there lingers a false perception of Emily Dickinson as a wall-flower poet - of quaintness and prettiness - of flowers and dainty things. Harold Bloom is far more accurate when he wrote in the introduction to the American Religious Poems (Library of America), "Her conceptual originality surpassed even theirs [John Milton and William Blake], and is dwarfed only by Shakespeare's, of all poets in the language." Despite the breadth for her work, she remains best known for poems like:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!
This is an amazing poem, unfortunately we read it so often in our basic education and it is so often represented as the exemplar Dickinson poem we forget its profundity. If we delve deeper into her amazing body of work we find poems of the soul and intellect that express the full range of human experience. I have regularly referred her poems to a niece of mine who fancies herself to be 'edgy'. She has dismissively brushed off this suggestion with a condescending 'her, I don't think so." Poets as different as Hart Crane, Paul Celan and Eugenio Montale have looked to her as a great, profound poet (both Celan and Montale translated her work). How anyone could not perceive her stature as a major poet is a failure of the American Educational / Cultural system, but also of the American religious / contemplative arena which responds with ambivalence to her religious and intellectual independence.
Emily Dickinson is the American contemplative par excellence. I offer as proof of her depth the follow poem of darkness and understanding:
There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As one within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone.
If anyone can read this and think that she is anything other than the American poet of Contemplation, then they should stop reading poetry altogether. She should be read as many read St Teresa of Avila or St John of the Cross & as many read Auden, Eliot, Milton & Blake. Pick-up her work, stay with each poem, linger over it. I wish that each poem was printed only one per page to aid the lazy reader who might be tempted to fly through her work as if it were prose. She requires time, meditation and contemplation, and rewards the disciplined who find in her a poet of profound interiority.
Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed. R.W. Franklin (Belkap Press, 1999)
American Religious Poems: An Anthology. Ed. Harold Bloom (Library of American, 2006)
Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. (Random House, 2001). [Habegger has an excellent discussion of the discovered albumen photograph of the more mature Emily Dickinson.]
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!
This is an amazing poem, unfortunately we read it so often in our basic education and it is so often represented as the exemplar Dickinson poem we forget its profundity. If we delve deeper into her amazing body of work we find poems of the soul and intellect that express the full range of human experience. I have regularly referred her poems to a niece of mine who fancies herself to be 'edgy'. She has dismissively brushed off this suggestion with a condescending 'her, I don't think so." Poets as different as Hart Crane, Paul Celan and Eugenio Montale have looked to her as a great, profound poet (both Celan and Montale translated her work). How anyone could not perceive her stature as a major poet is a failure of the American Educational / Cultural system, but also of the American religious / contemplative arena which responds with ambivalence to her religious and intellectual independence.
Emily Dickinson is the American contemplative par excellence. I offer as proof of her depth the follow poem of darkness and understanding:
There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As one within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone.
If anyone can read this and think that she is anything other than the American poet of Contemplation, then they should stop reading poetry altogether. She should be read as many read St Teresa of Avila or St John of the Cross & as many read Auden, Eliot, Milton & Blake. Pick-up her work, stay with each poem, linger over it. I wish that each poem was printed only one per page to aid the lazy reader who might be tempted to fly through her work as if it were prose. She requires time, meditation and contemplation, and rewards the disciplined who find in her a poet of profound interiority.
Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed. R.W. Franklin (Belkap Press, 1999)
American Religious Poems: An Anthology. Ed. Harold Bloom (Library of American, 2006)
Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. (Random House, 2001). [Habegger has an excellent discussion of the discovered albumen photograph of the more mature Emily Dickinson.]
Sunday, January 6, 2008
The Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's Notebooks is a very different experience than reading those of Henry James, Steinbeck, Thomas Mann (Diaries), Robert Musil or even those published by Reynolds Price. Their self-mannered awareness that the future will prize their "private" thoughts and ideas is completely absent from Hawthorne. These were truly private workbooks. Hawthorne writes in full voice as someone for whom communication is vital and difficult. Open this work anywhere and read what sounds like the inner voice of someone practiced at concealing his thoughts publicly. Expansive, suggestive, and illuminating for all those who would like to know more of the deep thought and artfulness that went into his major works.
Some of his working ideas for stories sound absolutely modern. One story idea develops the possibility of having two men talking and discussing their difficulties while waiting and waiting for someone who never comes. They don't know what to do, so they continue to wait and discussing the one who never comes. Sound familar? A little like "Waiting for Godot"? If you love great literature and if you love Hawthorne, then run to a library / order it from Amazon.com / but get a copy of this magnificent book and stay with it. It will stay with you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centenary Ed. Works Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. VIII, The American Notebooks.
Some of his working ideas for stories sound absolutely modern. One story idea develops the possibility of having two men talking and discussing their difficulties while waiting and waiting for someone who never comes. They don't know what to do, so they continue to wait and discussing the one who never comes. Sound familar? A little like "Waiting for Godot"? If you love great literature and if you love Hawthorne, then run to a library / order it from Amazon.com / but get a copy of this magnificent book and stay with it. It will stay with you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centenary Ed. Works Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. VIII, The American Notebooks.
Hawthorne, Hester and the Blessed Virgin Mary
While re-reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a novel I first read as a 14 year old, I was struck by the many references to Hester as a 'saint', 'sister of mercy' type along the lines of the Virgin Mary. Hawthorne writes,
"Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich: a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling." (Scarlet Letter, p. 257)
and again, Rev. Dimmsdale call out to Hester,
"O Hester, thou art my better angel!" (Scarlet Letter, p. 292)
"... the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness." (Scarlet Letter, p. 258)
These among the many other references (particularly in the concluding paragraphs were Hester's thoughts of a Prophetess, an angel and apostle, of a "new relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness" shows her self-consciousness sacred aspect) recount the saintly or divine aspect of Hester and invites the reader to speculate on how Salem would have received Mary whose pregnancy was conceived outside of wedlock and how Joseph would have responded had he been placed on the judgment block of Puritanical Society.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, might have been forced to wear a 'F' (fornicator) had she been transplanted to 17th Century Salem as has Hester/ Jesus' earliest memories could have been of the Salem's women urging for a more severe punishment (death) on both Mary and Joseph (an odd negative of the plan of Herod). Instead another time called her Theotokos, mother of God. Perhaps as Hawthorne is without challenge as the first American artist - novelist, Hester is our mother of virtue, our mother of charity - embodying a new virtue that we have yet to follow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. From Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (Library of America)
"Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich: a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling." (Scarlet Letter, p. 257)
and again, Rev. Dimmsdale call out to Hester,
"O Hester, thou art my better angel!" (Scarlet Letter, p. 292)
"... the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness." (Scarlet Letter, p. 258)
These among the many other references (particularly in the concluding paragraphs were Hester's thoughts of a Prophetess, an angel and apostle, of a "new relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness" shows her self-consciousness sacred aspect) recount the saintly or divine aspect of Hester and invites the reader to speculate on how Salem would have received Mary whose pregnancy was conceived outside of wedlock and how Joseph would have responded had he been placed on the judgment block of Puritanical Society.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, might have been forced to wear a 'F' (fornicator) had she been transplanted to 17th Century Salem as has Hester/ Jesus' earliest memories could have been of the Salem's women urging for a more severe punishment (death) on both Mary and Joseph (an odd negative of the plan of Herod). Instead another time called her Theotokos, mother of God. Perhaps as Hawthorne is without challenge as the first American artist - novelist, Hester is our mother of virtue, our mother of charity - embodying a new virtue that we have yet to follow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. From Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (Library of America)
Friday, January 4, 2008
"Mercy clothed in light" - Poetry of Jane Kenyon
"Notes from the Other Side"
I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.
Now there is no more catching
one's own eye in the mirror,
there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course
no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing
of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.
The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.
Jane Kenyon
Collected Poems (Graywolf Press: St Paul Minnesota, 2005)
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