Category Archive: Literature
Avram Davidson
Speaking of stories, I just finished The Avram Davidson Treasury. Avram Davidson was an amazing writer. He’s generally billed as a fantasy and science fiction, though he also wrote a fair number of mysteries as well as a lot of stories that don’t fall easily into any category.
Of the stories in this treasury (and a treasurey it is indeed), the ones I most enjoyed include
* The Golem
* Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper
* Now Let Us Sleep
* Or All the Seas with Oysters
* Take Wooden Indians
* Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?
* The Sources of the Nile
* The Price of a Charm; or, The Lineaments of Gratified Desire
* Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman
* And Don’t Forget the One Red Rose
* Crazy Old Lady
* The Last Wizard
But all of Davidson’s stories are rich. Davidson loved words. He loved the way words sound together and the way one word reminds you of another. He appears to have been quite learned, but his scholarship is never heavy handed. Above all, his stories are fun to read (and to read out loud).
It’s just too bad that he is routinely ignored in academic settings. You won’t usually hear him mentioned in short story classes, though he’s frequently compared to Saki, John Collier, and others whose work is mentioned. But that’s fine. Universities may not have discovered him, but I have. I greatly enjoyed this Treasury, and I’ll be reading more Avram Davidson in the future.
And now I’m reading Gene Wolfe‘s Pandora by Holly Hollander and occasionally dipping into the stories of Bernard Malamud.
Stories
Children need to hear stories. The reason is that they must learn to interpret stories, and they must do this so that they will come to understand the story of their own lives. The gospel story is of course the center of this process. But we learn to understand this story the same way we come to understand the language of Scripture. We learn language, and because of this, we can hear the language of God in Scripture. We learn stories, and therefore we learn to hear the gospel as a story.
When children are steeped in stories, they learn that they are characters in a story as well. This kind of wisdom is the result of hearing countless stories: Bible stories, fairy stories, family stories, stories about work, short stories, humorous stories, serious stories, and many more. When children come to see themselves as characters, they then come to that wisdom which asks the really profound questions. “Am I a Peter? A Eustace? An Edmund? Am I Samwise? Lucy?” In short, they learn to ask what kind of character they are in the story being written all around them. — Doug Wilson, My Life for Yours, p. 110 (paragraph break added).
“The Faith of Shakespeare”
One of my favourite writers, Larry Woiwode, has an article entitled “The Faith of Shakespeare” in the latest Books and Culture.
Literature
Thought Question:
Name some great Reformed/Presbyterian writers of literature (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction), writers whose works repay careful study. Now name some great Roman Catholic or Anglican writers of literature whose work repays study. Why is it easier to think of people in the second category than in the first? Or, to put things another way, why aren’t there more Reformed writers whose work is rich with symbolism and maturity and depth?
I’ve been thinking about that question for several years now, and it came to mind again as I listened to Doug Jones lecture on typology in fiction at the recent Christ Church Ministerial Conference (about which more later). I have some ideas of my own about the answers to these questions, but I’m interested in hearing what you think.
Recent Reading
Frequently on this blog, I mention things I’ve been reading. It’s been a while since I did that. I still want to say something about Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion and about Alexander Schmemann‘s Introduction to Liturgical Theology, and maybe I’ll get to that in a little while.
More recently, I read David James Duncan’s novel The Brothers K, which, for the most part, I enjoyed greatly. It’s largely the story of the four Chance brothers, Everett, Peter, Irwin, and Kincaid, and most of it is narrated by the youngest, Kincaid. The story spans several years, from 1956 to 1980, but the bulk of it takes place in the sixties.
I said that I enjoyed the book for the most part. The Chance boys’ mother is a strict Seventh Day Adventist, and the Adventist church doesn’t come off too well in the book. Now perhaps Duncan gives an accurate portrayal of this sect at that time (or even today), but at times I suspected he was straying across the border into caricature. As well, there are places in the book in which the narrator’s voice is too didactic (even places where the narrator declares that he isn’t going to draw moralistic conclusions and then goes on to do just that).
But the story as a whole is very good and there are passages which are deeply moving. It’s well worth reading, and I’ll probably track down some more of Duncan’s work.
After Duncan, I went on to read Ramsey Campbell’s The Darkest Part of the Woods, which was a bit of a letdown: the suspense toward the end of the novel didn’t make up for the overwriting all the way through. Campbell wants us to get the sense that there’s something wrong and even evil about the woods near his main characters’ home, but he tries to give us that sense of impending doom by describing the woods over and over again and by comparing everything to some aspect of the woods (e.g., the hands on a clock are like twigs). “Enough already!” the reader cries. “I get the picture. There’s something spooky about the woods.”
And now I’m reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at Hazelwood, along with Doug Wilson’s My Life for Yours, Jakob van Bruggen’s Jesus the Son of God (which surprisingly has no interaction whatsoever with N. T. Wright‘s work on Jesus), and The Failure of the American Baptist Culture, edited by James Jordan. The latter is from the early ’80s and some of the essays are tiresomely Reconstructionistic, but a few of them do look helpful. Oh, yes: I’ve also been dipping into short story collections by Avram Davidson, P. G. Wodehouse, and most recently Bernard Malamud.
There. That’s what’s in my reading pile these days. What’s in yours?
Leithart on Wobegon
Peter Leithart hasn’t mentioned it on his blog, but Touchstone recently printed his article “The Real News from Lake Wobegon.”
Castleview and Beyond
Last week, I galloped through Gene Wolfe‘s Castleview. It was a very enjoyable read, but I can’t say that I’ve figured everything out yet. Not by a long shot. In fact, it’s one of the more mysterious Wolfe novels I’ve read.
Most of the story is fairly straightforward: a family moves to the town of Castleview and rapidly gets caught up in strange events with another overlapping world, the world of the castle, all of which has something to do with the King Arthur story.
But then the questions start. If the book were by another writer, I might conclude that it was simply full of odd plot holes, but this is Gene Wolfe, the lover of puzzles and the guy who, by his own testimony, gives a clue only once. Which means that these things probably wouldn’t seem like holes if only I had caught all the clues.
The book was a lot of fun. And now I’m on to Chaim Potok’s The Book of Lights. I’ve always loved Potok’s ability to draw his readers into the world(s) of Judaism, and this book is no exception.
“Gift”
The latest issue of The Atlantic contains this beautiful poem: “Gift” by Brooks Haxton. (Thanks to Gideon for the link!)
Walker Percy & Dante
The other day, I glanced at the opening paragraph of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, which I’m contemplating rereading soon. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Hmmm…. I said to myself and went and looked at the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno. Here it is in Mark Musa’s translation:
Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off the straight path.
Or, in Dorothy Sayers’ older translation:
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
where the right road was wholly lost and gone
Is there an echo of Dante’s waking to find himself in a dark wood in Percy’s narrator’) coming to himself in a grove of young pines? Is there perhaps a hint in Percy’s intro that it’s the whole of Western society that has wandered off the straight path?
Perhaps I’m only seeing things. Still, it might be interesting to see if there are other parallels with the Inferno in Love in the Ruins. Unfortunately, I’m not well enough acquainted with Dante to carry out such a study.
The Music School
Last night, I finished reading John Updike’s The Music School, a collection of his short stories, published in 1967. I particularly enjoyed “A Madman,” “The Bulgarian Poetess,” and “The Family Meadow.” There were several other stories I appreciated and a few that fell flat.
But what struck me about many of these stories, including some that I enjoyed, was that voice in all of them was distinctly Updike’s. I don’t mean that Updike himself necessarily talks the way he tells a story. I mean, rather, that the narratorial voice is almost always the same. Even when we’re supposed to be seeing things through the eyes of a character and even when it’s a character in the story who is telling the story, the voice stays pretty much the same. For instance, in the story “The Morning,” not one of my favourites, we have this line:
He realized within himself the intricate scaffolding of mechanical connection and chemical cooperation that upheld his life, and felt its complexity as a terrible tenuousness.
Or this, from “The Hermit,” the final story in the book:
Stanley felt the green and scurvy mass around him as so infinitely divisible that the thickness of a veil was coarse in comparison; Nature, that sturdy net of interlocking rapacity, dissolved for him in its own unsayable exactness, and ceased to exist, or existed merely as the description of something else.
Now perhaps that’s just how Updike’s characters are: they see things that way (even Stanley, who, Updike tells us, dropped out of school in Grade 11). That’s possible. But it sounds more as if we’re viewing things through John Updike‘s eyes, not Stanley’s or any of the other characters’.
And that strikes me as a flaw in these stories. Updike seems to want that kind of language to draw us into the character, to help us feel what he’s feeling. But he doesn’t express it the way the person himself would and that may serve, unintentionally, to distance us from the character and, given the complexity of the language, often to bog us down and distance us from the story. Style is great, but in Updike’s case I wonder if style doesn’t get in the way of story.
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
On Thursday night, I finished Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quin. It’s quite different from her Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple mysteries, something like a cross between O. Henry and The Sandman. Sentimental as parts of it were, I rather enjoyed it.
Coverings
The latest issue of the Valparaiso Poetry Review contains “Coverings,” a poem by Doug Jones.