Category Archive: Literature
Books
As I mentioned a few entries back, Tim tagged me for a book thing that’s going around the blog world. It was actually harder for me to do than I might have thought, but here’s an attempt at some answers:
How many books do I own?
I can’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably around 8500, most of which are fiction.
The next question that’s often asked is “Have you read all those books?” I’ve pondered the answers that Umberto Eco suggests in Travels with a Salmon (e.g., “If I’d read them, why would I still have them?” or “No, these are the ones I have to read by next Friday. The rest are in another room”), but my own answer is the one I learned from my seminary professor, Nelson Kloosterman:
“Have you read all those books?””Some of them twice.”
What is the last book I bought?
Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, which I picked up last week at the library for 50 cents. I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be good. Come to think of it, most of my recent purchases have been children’s books.
The most recent non-fiction book I’ve purchased? I suppose it would be The Cruelty of Heresy by C. Fitzsimmons Allison, which I found at Value Village in Red Deer for less than a dollar and bought only because it had a blurb by Geoffrey Wainwright on the back. But at the time, I was more pleased by the trade paperback of Gene Wolfe’s Castleview which Moriah found there.
What’s the last book I read?
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling, which I greatly enjoyed. It’s the best in the series so far. (I know, I know: I’m behind. But I am catching up.)
Prior to that, Greenmantle by John Buchan, one of my favourite authors. This was the third time I’d read this book, the second in the Richard Hannay series, but it had been fourteen years since the last time I had read it.
Before that, I also read Justice by Faye Kellerman, The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley, and Freddy Goes to Florida by Walter Brooks (read aloud to Aletheia before her bedtime).
Currently, though you didn’t ask, I’m reading Rainbow’s End by Martha Grimes (I’ve read this far in the series and I’m less and less impressed; every character is stagnant, none really grows or develops, several of them are depressed, and all are caught in a sort of holding pattern, doing the same things again and again), Theology and Social Theory by John Milbank (which I’m struggling through), the Complete Poems of George Herbert (which I dip into from time to time), The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury (which I’m about halfway through), the Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud (from which I read a story occasionally), and (with Aletheia) Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater (which is surprisingly disappointing: a lazy father who puts his penguins ahead of his family). I’ll be picking a new book for Aletheia soon, too. Recommendations?
What are the five books that mean the most to me?
This is the hardest question for me, and part of the difficulty is knowing what the question is asking. Is it asking which books I’d take to a desert island? In that case, the list below doesn’t answer that question. If that’s the question then the answer would be that, besides the Bible, I’d take my complete works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and some non-fiction, though I’m not sure what.
But I assume what the question is asking is which five books have influenced and shaped me the most. I assume, too, that the Bible is a given. After some thought, here in chronological order is a list of five, though more thought might prompt me to add or delete others.
(1) Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Lion Man. I read this book when I was eight years old and then went on to devour the rest of Burroughs’ books. From then on, as I recall, I was a fan of fantasy and science fiction. I can’t say that this book means the most to me, even out of Burroughs’ whole oeuvre. A Princess of Mars was probably far more significant to me. But this was the first Burroughs I read.
If I were listing fiction books that would be indispensable to me, books I’d hate to be without, Burroughs wouldn’t be on the list today. Buchan and Wodehouse might be. Gene Wolfe and Larry Woiwode would definitely be.
(2) John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. This book was life-shaping for me in more than one way. Not only did it give me a new perspective on theological study, it also showed me the importance of looking at more than one side of a theological question. But more than that, this was the book that God used to convince me of infant baptism. As I finished the section on determining who has the burden of proof, where Frame illustrates his point by referring to debates about abortion and about baptism, I was persuaded. It’s still a book I return to again and again.
(3) James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes. This one, if you know me, should be obvious.
I came to Jordan late, having written him off (stupidly) earlier in my theological journey. There was a time when I was a theonomist of the Greg Bahnsen sort (and if I were listing every book that had a major influence in my life, I suppose I’d have to include Theonomy in Christian Ethics, even though that’s not at all where I am today in my thinking about the law). During that time, I thought Jordan was out to lunch.
Later, having interacted with him on a mailing list for a while and then having plunged in and read some of his works, I began to see that Jordan has an amazing grasp of biblical symbolism and typology. Now his work probably informs most of the sermons I write these days in one way or another.
(4) N. T. Wright, For All God’s Worth. Though this isn’t Wright’s most important work, it was the first thing I read by N. T. Wright, and having read it I went on to devour many more of his works. I can hardly imagine trying to preach the New Testament without consulting Wright. His work is constantly stimulating, even when I disagree with him. Again and again, he challenges me to look carefully at the text of Scripture, to follow the flow of the argument carefully instead of seeing it merely as a prooftext for my theology, to read Scripture eschatologically instead of flattening out the history, and to understand things in terms of their original context and setting. Invaluable.
(5) Jeffrey J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service. I read this first in manuscript form; I haven’t read it in published form. This is by far the best book on the liturgy I’ve seen, let alone the best from the Reformed perspective. Meyers has done more than anyone else (with the possible exception of Jim Jordan, on whom he draws) to shape my thinking about the liturgy.
(6) Peter Leithart, Against Christianity. This book, together with (to a lesser extent) William Cavanaugh’s amazing Torture and Eucharist, has shaped a lot of my thinking about the political nature of the gospel and the church. It’s an amazingly thought-provoking book and it has shaped my thinking on more levels than I can name here.
Well, that’s the list as it stands today. But as I look over the list, I recognize that it hardly gives an accurate impression. It’s not as if most of my development, even in my theology, has come about through reading. It’s true that I’ve learned a lot from books, but most of my learning has been through interaction with others in conversations, e-mails, classroom lectures, and so on.
I understand that I’m supposed to tag three other people now. So I’ll tag Jeff Meyers, Peter Leithart, and Mark Horne. And just for good measure, I’ll tag Gideon Strauss, too (unless he’s already done it).
Recent Reading
While browsing in the public library this past week, I came upon Micah Harris and Michael Gaydos’s graphic novel, Heaven’s War. A glance at the back cover and a quick survey of the contents were enough to convince me to take it home. The story is set in 1938 and involves a bid by Aleister Crowley, the infamous leader of an order devoted to the study of the occult and the practice of black magic, to rule history. Opposing him are the Inklings, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and, in particular, Charles Williams.
The story itself was interesting, though a bit thinner than it could have been and perhaps a bit more dry and didactic than it should have been. The author obviously has done a lot of study, but the reader, unless he has done the same study, is too often dependent upon the annotations at the back of the book. The book’s theology is a bit strange, though Harris is trying to draw on Scripture (as the annotations indicate), but then Charles Williams held some strange views himself. Weaknesses aside, there’s some great stuff here and the storyline is fun, especially if, like me, you’re a fan of the Inklings.
Besides Heaven’s War, I have also recently read Jack Vance’s very enjoyable The Dying Earth (and was struck by the influence of this book on Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun) and G. K. Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades, a collection of not-quite-mystery stories: great fun!
The other evening, I also finished William Kienzle’s The Rosary Murders, the first in Kienzle’s series of mystery novels starring Father Koessler. This one was pretty clearly a first novel and not everything flows as well as it should, but the story was gripping enough to make me want to read more in the series.
Now, I’m reading Rikki Watt’s Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark, John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (still: it’s very slow going), and Vigen Guroian’s Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening. Though I’m not myself a gardener, I do appreciate Guroian’s observations, as he weaves together the Armenian Orthodox liturgy, the church year, and the labors and joys of a gardener.
I have also just started Faye Kellerman’s Day of Atonement, the fourth in her Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series, the first of which I enjoyed more than the second and third. But what keeps me reading the series is not just the mystery and suspense; it’s my interest in watching the development of the characters and in particular watching Peter Decker work out his decision to live as an Orthodox Jew. Some of the differences between Judaism and the gospel of Jesus Christ are obvious here and the more I read the more I delight in the gospel. But it strikes me that there are some parallels between Decker’s sort of conversion to Judaism and his growth as a Jew and a Christian conversion and growth.
I sometimes wonder how Christian readers would react to a novel in which the main characters are new Christians whose sanctification is not immediate (whose is?) and who often fall back into old patterns of sin. Would they think stories like that are sub-Christian, not as “uplifting” as “Christian fiction” ought to be? Or would they say, perhaps with some relief: “At last! Someone who tells the truth about the struggle to follow Christ”? Perhaps Christian writers could learn something from Kellerman.
Last, but by no means least, I’m also reading Michael Bond’s delightful A Bear Called Paddington to our baby in utero, who squirms with enjoyment as I read.
Visitors
Last week, I finished Anita Brookner’s Visitors. From a glance at some reviews of Brookner’s work, I suspect she may get tired of being compared to Henry James. I’ve read only one story by James and it was a while ago, so I can’t say if the comparisons are accurate. If they are, then perhaps it’s time for me to start reading James.
Visitors is by no means fast-paced. It isn’t full of adventure. In some ways, it’s simply the story of a retiring elderly lady whose relatives are throwing a wedding for a granddaughter and ask her to take in one of the one-of-town groomsmen for a couple of weeks before the wedding.
If this were Ruth Rendell, that premise would have been developed in such a way that you would be on the edge of your seat, waiting for something terrible to happen, as it so often does in Rendell’s novels.
But this is Anita Brookner — which isn’t to say that there is no suspense here. There is, but it is suspense of a different sort. Most of the action (to put it that way) takes place in the mind and heart of the main character, Mrs. May, who is forced to cope with what she perceives as a huge intrusion into her home, her routines, her life.
The story moves at Mrs. May’s own pace, slow as that is, and Brookner forces us, as readers, to slow down to that pace, to get to know Mrs. May from the inside. At the same time, she keeps us turning the pages, wondering what is going to happen next, before the whole thing reaches a satisfying conclusion.
Moriah and I both enjoyed this novel. I’m sure we’ll be reading more of Brookner’s novels. Anyone else read her?
Good Books and Great Books
A good story is one in which a sympathetic and three-dimensional protagonist has interesting and unusual adventures against a varied and interesting background. A great story is one a cultivated reader can read with pleasure and later reread with increased pleasure. — Gene Wolfe, “Sun of Heliotrope,” Castle of Days 224.
That’s not a bad definition, though I suppose the word “adventure” may not be the first thing that comes to mind in considering what happens in many stories (e.g., the short stories of Bernard Malamud). Is it necessary, too, that what happens be unusual? I don’t know about that either; it seems to me that it would be possible to tell a good and interesting story about someone who does something quite ordinary.
But I do appreciate the latter half of Wolfe’s definition: a good story may be reread with pleasure, but a great story is one which repays repeated readings. And I’ll add that some readers never appreciate the greatness of a story because they zip through it once and never return to it again.
So how would you define a good story and a great story?
Working Writers
Recently, I’ve been reading and enjoying Gene Wolfe‘s Castle of Days. The first section of the book is a collection of short stories, each one tied to a special day on the calendar. The second section is a collection of essays related to Wolfe’s wonderful The Book of the New Sun, currently published in two volumes as Shadow and Claw and Sword and Citadel. The third section is a collection of essays relating (mainly) to writing.
Here’s a snippet of one essay. Wolfe has been asked how he was able to write such a long and great book as The Book of the New Sun. He responds:
I have a job. In one of his books, Jack Woodford notes that what most people who say they want to write really want is to quit work. I don’t think that situation has changed at all since Woodford wrote, and I have more than a little sympathy for the people who feel that way — an appalling number of jobs absolutely stink; I am extremely fortunate in that I have fallen into one of the few good ones.
Nevertheless, a tolerable job can be an immense advantage for the writer who hopes to produce something better than ordinary commercial yardgoods. Our society often — though not always — pays for quality; but it does so only after the work is done, and generally long after. In the meantime, the writer must have some support for himself and his family (assuming he has one). I didn’t marry money, and I wanted my wife at home to take care of my children. My parents could not and would not have supported me and my family if I had asked them, for which I do not blame them in the least. There are no grants or other philanthropic props for my kind of writer.
My experience at conventions has shown me that fans are somewhat contemptuous, for the most part, of writers who do not support themselves exclusively by writing. Fans can afford that luxury, but I’m not sure writers can. If it means that quality can be measured in dollars, writers ought to reject it out of hand; they must if they hope to remain writers, because it will soon lead them away from writing altogether.
If it means that a writer should produce as much work as he can, and that a writer who does nothing but write should produce more than one who also hoes beans or hawks vacuum cleaners, then I sympathize with it; but it is still fundamentally mistaken. I would be willing to bet that Anthony Trollope, who was an official of the British Post Office, produced more work than any other 19th Century writer of his stature. Many full-time writers have told me that I produce as much or more copy than they do, although I normally write for only an hour or two a day.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a writer who does nothing but write. (Proust, an invalid who could do little else, came close — but only after decades during which he had neither worked nor written.) Dickens lectured; so did Mark Twain. Poe was a working journalist whenever he could get a job. Fitzgerald was an army officer when he wrote his first novel (on Saturday afternoons in the officers’ club) and afterwards made a career of heavy drinking. Hemingway (who also drank heavily) wrote only two pages a day during his most productive periods and took long vacations for travel, hunting, and fishing. Nabokov was primarily a teacher (at one time a boxing teacher!) until Lolita made enough money for him to retire (pp. 219-220).
Wolfe goes on to note that having a job will get the writer out of the house, make the writer’s writing time precious to him so that he doesn’t procrastinate, and support him so that he can take all the time he needs to finish large projects: “By a paradox G. K. Chesterton (another journalist) would have savored, the job confers freedom. I used the freedom mine gave me to write The Book of the New Sun (pp. 221-222).
Best Books In 2005
January is the month of lists, isn’t it? Usually at the end of December and the beginning of January, you are bombarded with lists of the best whatnot of 2005.
So far I’ve given you a reprieve: It’s already the middle of the month and there have been no lists to date. But at last here is a list (alphabetical) of the books I enjoyed the most this past year:
* Elisa Bartone, Peppe the Lamplighter. Perhaps it’s a surprise to see this on my list. It’s a children’s book, after all. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. I am a father, after all, and I’m looking forward to reading to my children. It was C. S. Lewis who said the mark of a good children’s book is that adults can enjoy it, too. This particular book is very brief but it’s gorgeously illustrated and well written: a gem.
* John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps. One of my favourites. I’ve read this one several times and I still enjoy it, as much for the quality of Buchan’s writing as for the narrow escapes and rapid adventures.
* William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ. Quite possibly the book I enjoyed most this past year. A fascinating study of what happened in Chile and how the church learned to respond. Cavanaugh provides a very helpful analysis of torture as an attempt to break down all allegiances and turn people into isolated individuals in order to get them to play a role in the torturer’s script.
The Chilean churches, influenced by Jacques Maritain, believed that the church should deal with “religion” and “the soul” and ended up leaving “politics” and the body in the control of the state and its “experts.” Gradually, however, the church began to develop solidarity, centred on the Eucharist, which binds all of us together as one body. The church, united by the Lord’s Supper, is able to stand against torture and the machinations of a hostile state. Moreover, the church in Chile had to learn, as the church throughout the world has to learn, to ignore the Enlightenment separation of “church” and “politics” and to police its own borders by disciplining and excommunicating those whose policies are not in accord with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
A challenging read. I didn’t agree with everything Cavanaugh said, but this book made me think more (and, I hope, more fruitfully) than any other book I read this year. Highly recommended.
* Avram Davidson, The Avram Davidson Treasury. A great collection of short stories by one of the undeservedly lesser known writers of the past century. Davidson wrote science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries, as well as some stories that aren’t so easily classified. He had a unique style and he’s well worth reading.
* Austin Farrer, A Study in St Mark. A fascinating study of Mark’s Gospel. Farrer pays close attention to the symbolism and the literary structure of the Gospel long before such things were popular among 20th century biblical scholars. I don’t buy all of his conclusions but I do find his observations extremely stimulating.
* Seamus Heaney. Poems 1965-1975. Heaney is one of my favourite poets. These are his first volumes of poetry, but even there Heaney already demonstrates his mastery.
* Peter Leithart, From Silence to Song. Did you know that during David’s reign, there were two tabernacles and that, while the offerings continued to be presented to God in silence at the Mosaic tabernacle, the Davidic tabernacle, where the ark was, was full of music? I didn’t until I heard Leithart lecture on the tabernacle of David a few years back. In this book, Leithart provides some very helpful exegesis, but he does more than that: he also shows the relevance of David’s tabernacle for the church’s worship today.
* Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander. Wonderful. If you’ve only seen the movie (which is loosely based on this and several other O’Brian novels), you really ought to read the books. I love O’Brian’s writing.
* Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins. I’ve read this one a couple times before, but I got far more out of it this time. Great stuff!
* N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God. Superb. I said that Cavanaugh was the book I appreciated most, but this one is a very close second. I can’t imagine preaching the Gospels without reading Wright. He makes me want to preach and his insights have fueled several of my sermons on Mark.
And here are some runners-up:
* Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease. This was Achebe’s second novel and the second one of his I’ve read. (Yes, I’m working my way through in chronological order; it’s a habit I have.) Achebe does a masterful job of showing us Nigerian culture after the coming of the Europeans. This novel, in particular, focuses on the clash between traditional marriage rules and the more “liberated” thinking of the main character.
* Borges, Jorge Luis. The Aleph and Other Stories. This was the first time I’d read Borges and I’m looking forward to reading more. Borges often has a different style, but he’s almost always intriguing. While I was reading this volume, and for days afterwards, I found myself thinking of Borgesian sorts of stories.
* Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. A moving collection of short stories, some better than others.
* Colin Dexter, Death Is Now My Neighbour. Dexter’s mysteries, starring Inspector Morse, are among my favourites. This one was particularly good.
* David James Duncan, The Brothers K. I’d heard this one recommended before and so, when I found in cheap, I picked up a copy. At first, it was just okay, but toward the end I began to enjoy it more and more.
* Karon, Jan. A Common Life. Are the Mitford novels “women’s books”? I received that comment the last time I mentioned one on this blog, but I still don’t agree. (And, after all, I read them first on George Grant‘s recommendation!). I’ve enjoyed all of Karon’s novels, even though they are sometimes overly sentimental. This one, in which Father Tim finally gets married, I read shortly before my own wedding.
* C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. I suppose the number of times I’ve quoted this book on my blog already indicates how much I enjoyed it. But perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that Lewis made me want to plunge back into reading medieval literature.
* Robert Morgan, Gap Creek. Told from the perspective of a tough and determined backwoods woman in nineteenth century America, this novel is the story of the first year of a marriage. Our first year (so far) has turned out to be easier than theirs was.
* Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights. I’ve enjoyed every Potok novel I’ve read and this one was no exception.
* Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides. A lot of fun. And pirates, too!
* Ruth Rendell, Make Death Love Me. Gripping as Rendell’s books often are.
* J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Hard to put down. Who cares what the anti-Potter crowd says? This book was a lot of fun.
* Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology. A valuable discussion of liturgics, especially helpful for his analysis of “mysteriological piety,” which characterized the mystery religions and infected the church (and which I see exemplified in many things in Reformed circles, such as the concern that weekly communion would mean that communion wouldn’t be “special”).
* John Updike, Verse: The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures & Telephone Poles and Other Poems. Many of these poems were light, most of them are fun, and some of them are deep and beautiful.
* Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion. I know, I know: I still owe you a blog entry on this one and on the role of animals in general. I’m planning to write that … someday. All I’ll say right now is: Why did God create animals? He didn’t have to, but He did. Why? Obviously, some of them are yummy, but not all of them were created for food. Nor are all of them good companions. So what are they for? What were they intended to teach us? That isn’t what Williams’ novel is about, but it is something Williams makes you (or me, at least) wonder about.
* Douglas Wilson, My Life for Yours. A lot of good stuff about self-sacrifice and life together in the home.
* L. Woiwode, What I’m Going to Do, I Think. I’ve read this novel before and I still like it. Some of the passages in this novel are magnificent.
* Gene Wolfe, Castleview. King Arthur mixed with modern-day Illinois. Confusing? Yes, at times. Too much going on? Yeah. Fun? You bet. I didn’t understand it all, but I liked it!
* Gnee Wolfe, Storeys from the Old Hotel. A lot of really great stuff (especially “Westwind”).
* N. T. Wright, For All the Saints?. Very good and very well written book. Wright maintains (against Rome and some versions of AngloCatholicism) that all God’s people are saints and that all of them enjoy God’s presence after death, apart from any “purgatory.”
* N. T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer. Very helpful. I’ve used this one often in writing sermons on the Lord’s Prayer.
I also read through and enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novels. Definitely not for everyone, but worthwhile for mature readers. I often found these books deeply moving. I hadn’t read any graphic novels before I picked these ones up and I was struck by their ability to do things that no other medium can.
Poet & Finder
Most medieval poetry is a reworking of older poems and stories and themes, and to many modern readers that sort of poetry might seem less than fully authentic or creative. Hearing that this poem by Chaucer is a rewrite of that story by Boccaccio sounds to our ears like someone saying that this movie is a remake of that one.
“Why don’t they come up with something new?” we might ask. “Why do a rehash of something that’s already been done — especially if it’s already been done well?” Would you want to watch a remake of Casablanca?
C. S. Lewis, commenting on the poetry of John Gower, responds:
Here, as everywhere in medieval literature, we must try to repress our modern conception of the poet as the sole source of his poetry: we must think more of the intrinsic and impersonal beauty or ugliness of matters, plots, and sentiments which retain their own living continuity as they pass from writer to writer. Trouvere as well as maker is the name for a poet (The Allegory of Love 209).
To put Lewis’s point another way (and without using the word “impersonal” which I don’t think gets it quite right): the medieval approach to the older poems and stories and themes was much like the approach jazz musicians take to the standards. There are probably hundreds of versions of “It Had To Be You” or “You Don’t Know What Love Is” or “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
But musicians keep doing those songs. Some versions are better than others, of course. Some sound very close to the original (which is not the same as saying that they are better); others are pretty far out (which is not the same as saying that they are worse). But all of them share the basic melody in common. All are recognizable as variations on the old original tune.
Does that make them mere rehashes of old stuff? If there’s already a good version of “When I Fall In Love,” do we need another one? Of course we do. It may even be better than the original.
There are jazz musicians who think it’s beneath them — a lack of authenticity or creativity — to play the standards. But they’re wrong.
And what is true of jazz is true also, Lewis claims, of poetry. Good stories are worth retelling. Good poets aren’t just poets who invent something new; a good poet may also be a trouvere, a troubadour, a finder who sings the old songs and who does so in a way that is beautiful, creative, and new.
Convalescence
In The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis writes about the Italian poet Ariosto:
The power in which Ariosto excels all poets that I have read is one which he shares with Boiardo — invention. The fertility of his fancy is “beyond expectation, beyond hope.” His actors range from archangels to horses, his scene from Cathay to the Hebrides. In every stanza there is something new: battles in all their detail, strange lands with their laws, customs, history, and geography, storm and sunshine, mountains, islands, rivers, monsters, anecdotes, conversations — there seems no end to it. He tells us what his people ate; he describes the architecture of their palaces. It is “God’s plenty”: you can no more exhaust it than you can exhaust nature itself. When you are tired of Ariosto, you must be tired of the world. If ever you come near to feeling that you can read no more adventures, at that very moment he begins another with something so ludicrous, so piquant, or so questionable, in its exordium, that you decide to read at least this one more. And then you are lost: you must go on till bedtime, and next morning you must begin again (p. 302).
As if that weren’t enough to whet one’s appetite, Lewis later makes this comment about all the great Italian epic poets, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso:
Johnson once described the ideal happiness which he would choose if he were regardless of futurity. My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic — to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day (p. 304).
Perhaps, then, I should be reading Ariosto right now. I’ve had his Orlando Furioso sitting on the shelf unread for many years, and yesterday I was struck by a rather nasty but short-lived flu from which I am recovering. Instead, however, I’ve been finishing Eugene Peterson’s Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, starting George Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholic, and delighting in Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander, the first of his Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin novels, not to be confused with the movie of the same name, which is a hybrid of this and some other O’Brien books.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel well enough to get some work done. But Lewis is right: There is some pleasure in being convalescent after an illness, at least for a time (his “always” I’m not so sure of!). Of course, there’s work to be done but it’ll have to wait till I’m well, and right now all I have to do is rest and read and recuperate.
The Italian Girl
This morning, I finished Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl. It was pretty gripping in places, though I don’t think it’s one of her best novels. In fact, parts of the plot reminded me strongly of her previous novel, The Unicorn, which, since I’m reading her works in chronological order, was the last Murdoch I read.
Murdoch was a philosopher and, if I recall correctly, a Platonist. It strikes me that there’s something fundamentally Platonic about the plots of at least these two novels. The Italian Girl starts in darkness: it’s night and Edmund is returning to his mother’s home after his mother’s death. He meets an odd character, David, who, together with his sister, Elsa, is a catalyst. When Edmund and David collide, it seems that everything ultimately falls apart. Characters begin to understand themselves and their situations, perhaps for the first time. The novel ends with bright sunlight. Now perhaps I’m mistaken, but isn’t that Plato’s cave?
Now I also hasten to add that Murdoch is a better novelist than that. There’s much more than Plato happening in this book. Still, it does strike me that this theme does characterize more than just this one Murdoch novel.
On the other hand, it also strikes me that many novels and short stories hinge on a sort of revelation which takes place toward the end such that suddenly characters understand their own hidden motives or the truth about their situation or something like that. Maybe it’s just that this novel struck me as blatantly Platonic, and perhaps it’s also that the ending didn’t fully satisfy me.
“Saturday Morning”
I’m not at all familiar with this poet, but as I was glancing through some back issues of Christianity and Literature the other day, I came across Penney Oedel’s “Saturday Morning” and thought you might enjoy it, too.
Love
It seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for “nature” is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence. It seems — or it seemed to us lately — a natural thing that love (under certain conditions) should be regarded as a noble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine ourselves trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil, St Paul, or the author of Beowulf, that we become aware how far from natural it is. Even our code of etiquette, with its rule that women always have precedence, is a legacy from courtly love, and is felt to be far from natural in modern Japan or India.
Many of the features of this sentiment, as it was known to the Troubadours, have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to the fact that the most momentous and the most revolutionary elements in it have made the background of European literature for eight hundred years. French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassible barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature. — C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, pp. 3-4 (paragraph break added for clarity).
In the course of his book, Lewis traces the doctrine of courtly love as it was presented in the Middle Ages. Courtly love, Lewis points out, was always adulterous (Lancelot’s love of Guinevere) or illicit in some way (e.g., Troilus’s pursuit of Criseyde). The medieval poets didn’t celebrate married love. After all, in a marriage there’s no more honouring of the wife (or so one would believe from what writers of the time say): the wife is now subject to the husband and there’s no longer any “romantic adoration” of the wife.
Lewis argues that the change in love poetry happened at the end of the medieval period and is fully effected only in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, whose Fairie Queene celebrates chastity and presents married love as the highest and truest love.
I don’t know if Lewis’s history is entirely accurate and I’ll leave it to the historians of medieval thought to debate. I do note that if Spenser and the late medievals began to praise romantic love between husband and wife, they weren’t creating something new (as Lewis sometimes suggests); rather, they were returning to something as old as the Song of Songs.
Still, the history of love (and of allegorical love poetry) which Lewis traces is very interesting, not least because it shows us (as Lewis insists in the quotation above) that the way we think today isn’t simply “natural,” but flows from a lot of other factors in the past, factors which have shaped us without our knowing it.
Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors
In his comments on my last entry, Mason McElroy writes:
I would really like some recommendations for good Fantasy/Sci-Fi novels and short stories. I have read the obvious candidates: Tolkien, Lewis, and a little Gene Wolfe. Other than those I am not very familiar with good Fantasy or Sci-Fi authors. Thanks. (Especially to Mr. Barach since I kind of hijacked his Blog.)
Any suggestions for him?
Here are some of my suggestions: Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith, Avram Davidson, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock. I’m a big fan of Gene Wolfe. I’ve liked some of Neil Gaiman’s work. I’m told that Orson Scott Card (or as Gene Wolfe parodied it once, Oar Scottson Curd) and Vernor Vinge are good, and some people I’ve seen have liked John C. Wright.
Most of that list, I realize, is recent. There are some very good science fiction and fantasy writers from the mid-20th century. I’ve enjoyed stories by C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, Edmund Hamilton, L. Sprague DeCamp, and others. It would take a while, though, for me to put together a list of their really good material since all of those writers wrote some quick and sloppy stuff, too.
But I especially look forward to hearing what some other people recommend. Suggestions?