Witchcraft versus Sorcery

Another tidbit from Peter Somerville-Large's Irish Eccentrics:

'The distinction between witchcraft and sorcery seems to be one of degree; sorcery is the more sophisticated pursuit, since its practitioners seem to be rather masters of the devil than his slaves. Of course, the advantage is only temporary.'

So remember that the next time a winged man-goat offers you wealth, success, and eternal life for a nominal fee.[Woodcut from Life.com.]

Irish Saints and other Human Oddities

In the course of researching my new novel--(what a terrible thrill I just got when I typed that!)--I came across a delightful book called Irish Eccentrics by Peter Somerville-Large. The chapter on "Miracle Makers, Rhymers, Witches, Giants and Oddities" is especially weird and entertaining:There were ten speckled saints and eleven leper saints. Others more fantastical had attributes connected with ancient fertility beliefs. Many were prolific, like the female saint, Darerca, who had seventeen sons and two daughters. The sons all became bishops while the daughters remained virgins. A bisexual like Mochue Cicheach had remarkable breasts which 'fed babies of future eminence.' Other saints had three and even four breasts. Others were odder still, like Fer Caille, who had buttocks like cheese, one arm and one leg and a long enough nose to be looped around the branch of a tree.(No, I'm not making this up.)More excerpts to follow...

The Art of Kissing

"Arrange it so that the girl is seated against the arm of the sofa."Back in high school I came across The Art of Kissing, a reproduction of a booklet first published in 1936, and seeing as it's Valentine's Day I thought I'd dust it off and blog about it. As the following passage will show, it has very little to offer in the way of practical advice:"For a kiss can never be absolutely defined. Because each kiss is different from the one before and the one after. Just as no two people are alike, so are no two kisses alike. For it is people who make kisses. Real, live people pulsating with life and love and extreme happiness."Gotta love that florid old-school prose, especially when applied to the subject of "osculations"; we are also provided with a very illuminating definition of the word tumescence. Every time I rediscover this book I wonder about the author, 'Hugh Morris.' Debonair man-about-town, or middle-aged pervert hunched over a typewriter in a terrycloth bathrobe? (Two guesses and the first doesn't count.)"Different Sizes of Mouths Require a Different Technique in Kissing."Morris quotes liberally from the love poems of Catullus, Horace, and somebody named Sir John Suckling, but as you might expect from a pamphlet published in 1936, misogyny is the overarching theme: "It is, therefore, necessary that the man be taller than the woman" because a man "must always give the impression of being his woman's superior, both mentally and especially physically."(Good God, am I glad I was born at the right end of the twentieth century!)It gets worse--the author stops just short of condoning out-and-out rape. "If she flinches, don't worry. If she flinches and makes an outcry, don't worry. If she flinches, makes an outcry and tries to get up from the sofa, don't worry. Hold her, gently but firmly, and allay her fears with kind, reassuring words. Remember what Shakespeare said about 'a woman's no!'"Oh, but he's just warming up: "However, if she flinches, makes an outcry, a loud, stentorian outcry, mind you, and starts to scratch your face, then start to worry or start to get yourself out of a bad situation. Such girls are not to be trifled with...or kissed. It is such as they, in most cases, who still believe the story of the stork which brings babies because of the consequences of a kiss."What an absurd little man you were, Hugh Morris! No doubt you concocted all this dangerous nonsense simply because every woman you encountered was much too smart to be snogging the likes of you.I sat down to make fun of this thing and look what came out. Sorry about that. I think I'll go eat some candy hearts now.(Thanks to eliz.avery on Flickr for scanning all the delightful illustrations. Check out her photostream, there's plenty more where that came from.)

Bizarre Love Pentangle

I have had an official request for more fun witchy things, in anticipation of the publication of Petty Magic in October. So here's a gem--I rediscovered this newspaper clipping from 2007 in my notes, from a newspaper Ailbhe brought with her when she came to New York for the Mary Modern book launch.* * *How to win over an Elizabethan woman with a frog, an ant hill and a ringDaily Telegraph, 26 June 2007As a sure-fire way to win a woman's love, it lacks credibility and could lead to a charge of animal cruelty.An incantation that surfaces at an auction next month in a unique handwritten manuscript of magic spells advises late-Elizabethan males: "Take a frog and put him in a pot and stop it fast."The anonymous author then advises the love-seeker to bury the pot in an ant hill at a crossroads for nine days. Then the two bones remaining should be put in running water."One of them will float against the stream ... Make thee a ring, and take the part that swum against the stream and set it in the ring, and when you will have any woman put it on her right hand ... she shall never rest till she hath been with thee."The obscure "manuscript grimoire", written between 1590 and 1620, contains a vast range of conjurations, incantations, signs, portents, spells and folk remedies. It was found among the effects of the artist Robert Lenkiewicz, who died in 2002, aged 60.The painter once faked his own death and kept the embalmed body of a tramp in his studio for 20 years.Now the slim volume, which includes angelic seals with coded messages, is expected to fetch up to £12,000 at a Sotheby's literature sale in London on July 13.Dr Gabriel Heaton, a manuscripts specialist at Sotheby's, said yesterday: "This is a richly illustrated Elizabethan anthology."Much of the text is set within a Christian framework - but there are also signs of an older and darker tradition in the use of blood rituals and, on one occasion, a reversed pentangle."

Great Book #69: Suite Française

I remember the literary hubbub surrounding the English-language publication of Suite Française in the summer of 2006: the trade paperback was stacked on the front table of every bookstore I walked into, with that melancholy tinted black-and- white cover photo of a couple --in a crowded city square, a single suitcase at their feet--who clearly have no idea where they'll lay their heads tonight.Irène Némirovsky was a Parisian Catholic (of Russian-Jewish extraction) who died at Auschwitz in August 1942 at the age of 39, and this unfinished novel wasn't discovered until the author's daughter started going through her notebooks in the 1990s. I've been listening to the audiobook while I knit, and I understand why the critics have called it a masterpiece: the prose is beautiful, clear and unaffected, and it's remarkable that Némirovsky could cast such cool, keen eye on something so horrible that was happening in real time--the story reads like it was written with the benefit of many years' hindsight.Most of the characters are intensely unlikable, and in their flight from Paris they resemble rats on a sinking ship. Only the Michauds--humble, hardworking, and sick with worry over the fate of their son--are characters we can get behind. The Michauds are the only men in the book who don't trample on others to save their own skins; unlike the other men, Maurice Michaud doesn't consider himself irreplaceable.Yet there are occasional moments of grace: a refugee crouching in a ditch during an air raid notices a white butterfly flitting among the wildflowers; a mother holds her child so tightly it seems as if she wants to put the baby back into her womb, the only safe place; a young woman tends to a wounded soldier during "the summer they were 20, in spite of everything."These moments are rare, however. The book is divided in two (the "suite" being unfinished): "A Storm in June" follows a bunch of miserly, hypocritical Parisian snobs as they flee the city, and "Dolce" observes a community of superstitious farm wives, including two young women locked into cold and loveless marriages. The novel's prevailing attitude can be encapsulated by Hubert Péricand, who leaves his family a foolhardy teenager eager to see battle, and returns to them a cynical young man:

The people around him, his family, his friends, aroused a feeling of shame and rage within him. He had seen them on the road, them and people like them: he recalled the cars full of officers running away with their beautiful yellow trunks and their painted women, civil servants abandoning their posts, panic-stricken politicians dropping files of secret papers along the road, young girls, who had diligently wept the day the armistice was signed, being comforted in the arms of the Germans. "And to think that no one will know, that there were will be such a conspiracy of lies that all this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France. We'll do everything we can to find acts of devotion and heroism for the official records. Good God! To see what I've seen! Closed doors where you knock in vain to get a glass of water and refugees who pillaged houses; everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity and ignorance! What a wonderful race we are!"

Living (and dying) the way she did, witnessing all that she did, it's no wonder Némirovsky's characters are either selfish bastards or misanthropes. From the preface to the French edition: "She had absolutely no illusions, not about the attitude of the inert French masses--'loathsome' in their defeat and collaboration--nor about her own fate." She refused to stop writing even when the rest of the French publishing industry were rolling over for the Nazis, and she knew they would eventually murder her for it.There is a violent act towards the end of "A Storm in June" that disturbed me so much I had to stop listening for a couple of months (I started the book in early October). I don't want to tell you what happened that so turned my stomach, in case this novel is on your list, but suffice it to say my mother will not be reading Suite Française. The passage in question is one of the most shocking things I have ever read.I get that war is hell and it brings out the very worst in people, but doesn't it also, if only occasionally, bring out the very best? There were plenty of people who didn't wish to survive at the cost of their humanity; not every person in France was apathetic, not everyone was a collaborator; just because the word "heroism" is grossly overused doesn't mean there are no heroes. We see virtually none of that in Suite Française because that wasn't the author's experience; but I imagine it's rather difficult to give your characters a happy ending when you know your own will be anything but.

Sinkhole Alley (First Month's Free!)

I haven't had all that much to say lately; most of my knitting projects are for Christmas and therefore top-secret, and I'm still stalled on my reading list thanks to an incredibly disturbing scene in Suite Française. (Yes, it is a book about war, but this scene horrified me for a different reason. I'll persevere, and tell you more about it once I've finished.)My research reading is going swimmingly, however, and I thought you might enjoy this excerpt from Chapters of Dublin History:

Close by Old Church Street on the west were three streets worthy of some notice. The first was the Hangman's Lane, a name naturally not much relished by the inhabitants, and consequently corrupted into Hammond Lane, which it is still called.In the same way Bumbailiff's Lane, off New Street, on the south side, became the meaningless Fumbally's Lane. There was another Hangman's Lane from Kimmage to Dolphin's Barn, where Tom Calvin, the hangman of '98, is said to have lived. It is now called the Dark Lane. Dublin also contained such names as Cutthroat Lane, Murdering Lane, Cutpurse Row (Corn Market), Hell, near Christ Church, flog Hill (St. Andrew Street), The Common Lane (Watery Lane, now Brookfield Avenue), Gallows Road, Gallows Hill, Gibbet Meadow, Dirty Lane (Bridgefoot Street and Temple Lane South), Dunghill Lane (Island Street) and Pinchgut Lane. Some 18th century street-names were even coarser; yet, they were the recognised official names, figuring in postal addresses, and found in maps and directories. The age of refinement was yet to come, and it has already reached its extreme point in renaming Dublin streets and lanes.

How'd you like to live on Dunghill Lane?? It was actually on the map--that's what really gets me!

Too Many Hobbies?

After spending my childhood drawing and painting, I feel that part of me has atrophied—I may be a published author, but in another sense I still feel creatively unfulfilled. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was a kid, which probably has a lot to do with why I'm so obsessed with knitting now.

Last spring (thanks to Margaret) I discovered Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider, which is one of those great books on craft and practice that can change your life, if you let it. But one of the passages that struck me most concerns everything that isn't writing or reading: the concept of too many hobbies. Schneider proclaims, "I gave up sewing forever," and rather implies that there is no room in a writer's life for any other creative endeavor. I don't know that she meant to say this, but that's the impact it had on me, and naturally I have to disagree.

To a certain extent I think the practice of diverse arts can enrich and inform, like creative cross-pollination; but there's no denying there is such a thing as too many hobbies, leaving one feeling scattered and unaccomplished in the few activities that matter most. There never seems to be enough time to do everything because there isn't enough time to do everything. A couple of recent posts on the Unclutterer blog have driven this home for me (Saying farewell to a hobby, part 1; part 2). (Update, 2024: have removed the links since this blog is defunct.)

The trouble in giving these hobbies up, though, is that on some level we all think we can be Renaissance women and men—if we only devote enough time to each thing in which we think we ought to excel, then we will, and in the process we will become better, more "well-rounded" people. I "ought" to speak at least two foreign languages, play the guitar, sew my own sundresses, knit all my own sweaters, paint and read and write. But we can't all be Leonardo da Vinci, and if you've ever read his biography you'll know that's actually a good thing.

I have a left-handed Fender acoustic guitar in my closet that hasn't come out of its case in years. I guess I should find it a better home. I know I'll never be as good a painter as I am a writer, even if I do take it up again. But I'm not really talking about jettisoning the hobbies you aren't AMAZING at—if you love to do it, it doesn't matter if you aren't "good enough" to do it along with the pros.

Maybe it comes down to this: if you're truly passionate about it, you're already doing it. What do you think?

Yet More Spookery

Right now I'm reading a biography of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu—my favorite writer of ghost stories, as you know—and the following passage, from a letter to the author's mother, was just too deliciously creepy not to share. It concerns a vision his wife, Susanna, had shortly before her death in 1858 at the age of 34.

...she one night thought she saw the curtain of her bed at the side next to the door drawn, & the darling old man [i.e. George Bennett, her father], dressed in his usual morning suit, holding it aside, stood close to her looking ten or (I think) twelve years younger than when he died, & with his delightful smile of fondness & affection beaming upon her, I think she also said that his hand rested on the bed clothes as he used to place it. The words were as you say 'There is room in the vault for you, my little Sue', & with the same tender happy delightful smile he moved gently away as if he were going softly out of the door letting the curtain fall back. She lighted a candle & got up in the hope, if I recollect rightly, of seeing him again, & little Ellen who slept on the sofa & is easily woken, was so...

I have examined her [i.e. Ellen] since I wrote the above as to her recollection & she says that the words were, when he placed his hand on the bed, 'Ah, little Sue, you are very poorly', & she replied 'Oh! no, I am pretty well' & then he said 'there is room in the vault & will you win the race & get there first'...little Ellen too is quite clear that she told her that her attention was first attracted by a sound as of the door opening & that this had startled her as she knew it was locked. She told little Ellen that she was certain it was not a dream. 'I think', she said, 'it was a sort of vision that God sent me, to prepare me.' In the morning having told it to me she said 'it is my warning'. She cried a great deal but not in agitation or grief, but with a sort of yearning, as it seemed to me, after the darling old man, & she dwelt with delight upon the beaming smile of love with which he had looked on her all the time...

I suspect Susanna might have lived had her father stayed inside Mount Jerome where he belonged, but I guess we'll never know.

Get Psyched for Halloween (#2)

Here are six things guaranteed to spook you:1. Happy Birthday, Mr. PoeRecounts a sighting of the ghost of you-know-who.2. Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan BennettNo ghosts, per se, but this is one of the most haunting books I've ever read. Finished it more than two years ago and I still get the willies whenever I think about it.3. Real Vampires with Brad SteigerEpisode #106 of the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold. Apparently 'real-life' blood-suckers are far more terrifying than their Hollywood counterparts.4. Let the Right One In, based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.An exquisitely disturbing vampire film I watched at Seanan's house the last time I was in Tipperary. I have yet to read the book, but I hear it's amazing.5. "A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" by Sheridan Le Fanu. I know I've posted this one before, but gosh, is it good. (Or listen to it at Librivox.)6. A Voice in the Attic, another gem from Castle of Spirits. I've posted this one before too, because it is seriously frightening.

Get Psyched for Halloween (#1)

One of my favorite travelogues is H.V. Morton's In Search of Ireland, published in 1930. Here's a short excerpt on the spooky St. Michan's Church in Dublin, where you can descend into the vaults and see for yourself:

Coffins lie stacked one on top of another almost to the roof...the weight of the dead pressing on the dead has caused the coffins to collapse into one another, exposing here a hand, there an arm, a leg, or a head. The idea of dead men pushing their ancestors from their coffins is worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. But what does startle and horrify is that these men and women, many of whom have been dead for 500 years and more, have not gone back to the dust...

'Yes, they do tell a ghost story about it. It's about a thief who went down one dark night to take a ring from a lady's finger, and, as he was working away, the lady sat up in her coffin and stepped out over the side and walked away. Yes, she did! And they say she lived for years after. But that's all blarney, sir...'

Great Book #86: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Julie at Forgotten Classics has recently finished her reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, that seminal novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Legend has it that upon meeting Mrs. Stowe, President Lincoln exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war!"Stowe's characters--the Christ figures of Uncle Tom and little Eva; runaways Eliza and George, Cassie and Emmeline; and everyone Tom encounters as he suffers through a succession of owners--illustrate in all-too- human terms what Condi Rice has called our country's congenital defect (and no doubt that's the only thing Dr. Rice has ever said that I can agree with!) The novel doesn't merely demonize the slaveholders (that would be too easy, and anyway not all of them are depicted as such; some are weak men with good intentions). Stowe emphasizes that just because Northerners didn't own slaves didn't mean their consciences were unstained by the evil.Anyway, if you enjoy audiobooks, you should definitely listen to Julie's podcast in lieu of reading Uncle Tom in book form, since she provides so much insightful commentary in addition. I just love the reader's note, with which she begins each set of chapters:

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to expose the inhumanity of treating human beings as things. Former slaves agreed that her examples were true to life. Thus, some of the language and attitudes in this book are offensive because they reflect an ugly history. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The reader does not wish to be responsible for dooming anyone by censoring either history or literature. Therefore the book will be read as it is written, offensive language and all.

Julie's reading sometimes brought me to tears, but I don't feel the urge to write a long post on this book. It's an important work-- melodrama and all--and everyone (American or not) should read it at some point.

Love only what you do, and make.

When I applied to Yaddo a few months ago, I wasn't thinking too much about my chances. It was something proactive at a time when I needed to be thinking about the future, so I felt good just dropping the application in the mail. As the day of judgment approached, though, I half-convinced myself I couldn't get in, despite the warm encouragement of Jonathan Santlofer (former Yaddo board member, artist, author, and all-around awesome guy).But I did get in! I got the letter on Friday. This is a tremendous honor and opportunity, and I intend to suck the marrow out of the whole experience. So many 20th-century American heavyweights have stayed at Yaddo--Truman Capote, Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and on and on--it's very humbling, to think of them.Of that list of luminaries, Sylvia Plath's is the name that resonates most with me, though I feel a little guilty admitting it. Not that she wasn't a brilliant poet, but her work is the stuff you live on when you're nineteen and hopelessly misunderstood (or such is your belief at the time). I picked up a copy of The Unabridged Journals when I was in college, and naturally I had to go back and read the entries she wrote at Yaddo in the fall of 1959. She sketches ornate old furniture and wall sconces, describing photographs and engravings in minute detail, and frequently doubts the quality and importance of her work:

I feel a helplessness when I think of my writing being nothing, coming to nothing: for I have no other job - - - not teaching, not publishing. And a guilt grows in me to have all my time my own. I want to store money like a squirrel stores nuts. Yet what would money do. We have elegant dinners here: sweetbreads, sausages, bacon and mushrooms; ham and mealy orange sweet potatoes; chicken and garden beans. I walked in the vegetable garden, beans hanging on the bushes, squash, yellow and orange, fattening in the dapple of leaves, corn, grapes purpling on the vine, parsley, rhubarb. And wondered where the solid, confident purposeful days of my youth vanished. How shall I come into the right, rich full-fruited world of middle-age. Unless I work. And get rid of the accusing, never-satisfied gods who surround me like a crown of thorns. Forget myself, myself. Become a vehicle of the world, a tongue, a voice. Abandon my ego.

Try a first-person story and forget John Updike and Nadine Gordimer. Forget the results, the markets. Love only what you do, and make. Learn German. Don't let indolence, the forerunner of death, take over. Enough has happened, enough people entered your life, to make stories, many stories, even a book. So let them onto the page and let them work out their destinies.A 27-year-old acclaimed poet, bemoaning her wasted youth! (Also, of course, ridiculously ironic given the manner in which she died.) But I love what she's getting at in the second paragraph: it isn't about you, it's about the story. You have nothing to prove, and everything to tell.

Newes from the Dead

Mary Hooper's excellent YA novel Newes from the Dead is based on the true story of Anne Green, a 22-year-old servant seduced by her employer's grandson and unjustly hanged for infanticide in December 1650. Anne lies in her coffin--paralyzed, not dead--and thinks over the choices that led to her tragic fate (supposing herself in purgatory), as a team of Oxford physicians prepare for her dissection. The two narratives converge quite elegantly, as Anne is restored to life and hailed as a miracle of divine justice.The historical detail is vivid and often horrifying, but I kept thinking as I was reading that Anne speaks more like a Victorian lady than a 17th-century illiterate drudge. In all fairness though, if Mary Hooper had written a more 'authentic' narrative, most readers would have found it pretty much impossible to get through. Anne's naiveté and weakness of character are the very things that lead to her near-demise--she forsakes her sweetheart, John Taylor, because she believes Geoffrey Reade (an out-and-out scoundrel) when he promises to make her lady of the house someday. She suffers appallingly for her foolishness and inability to protect herself and her unborn child; but then comes her redemption, and the reader is left with the definite sense that Anne will live her life quite differently from now on.Here's my favorite passage, in which Anne recounts her last moments on the scaffold:

...my eyes alighted on John Taylor, and for a brief moment my heart again leaped with joy, for his face was neither accusing nor vengeful but was filled with compassion. This gave me some small peace, for it told me that he'd forgiven me and that, at some passing time, he had even loved me. I smiled at him, though my head was swimming and I felt as if I was in a strange daydream, for 'twas the most curious thing to think that in a short moment I would cease to exist.

Beside the gibbet stood the hangman, wearing heavy clothes and a blanket against the weather, also a leather facemask so that he would not be recognized after. He was big and burly, looking very like the bogeyman that your ma tells you will come after you if you sin. And so he had.Those last two lines give me willies! It never occurred to me that a hangman wore a mask so he wouldn't be harassed in the street afterward; I always assumed it was because hangmen were sadists and so wanted to look as demonic as possible.

The day I became a writer

It was May 1, 1996. My 9th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Gaffney, was out sick, and the substitute brought us to the library and told us our assignment was to pick one of the prints on the walls above the bookcases and write a story about it. It was busy work, but an easy 20 out of 20. I chose a picture of an old farmhouse at dusk, and decided to write a story about a girl listening to her grandmother telling stories on a porch in the twilight--the time of day being, of course, a metaphor as light as an anvil.At the time my grandmother was very, very sick, but I wasn't thinking much about her as I wrote. This was fiction. Where my narrator's grandma told fanciful stories that made her granddaughter doubt if she was 'all there,' mine was still living very much in the present--and was as reluctant as ever to tell any stories about her life. Why did I write that stupid story instead of actually calling my grandmother to tell her I loved her? It was the last night I'd ever have the chance to do it.But I didn't. I printed the two-page story, tucked it in my notebook, and turned it in to Mrs. Gaffney the following day. And that afternoon, on May 2nd, my grandmother passed away.A few days later--I can't remember if it was before or after the funeral, which was on May 5th--my teacher passed back our graded writing assignments. I had forgotten all about it, of course, but I felt sick when I remembered what I'd written. The horrible irony of it!But as if that wasn't bad enough, there was a secondary indignity that pretty much lit the fire under me: Mrs. Gaffney had given me an 18 out of 20. An A-. Mind you, this was the type of assignment we always got 20 out of 20 on. And mind you, I wouldn't have cared if this had been any other day, or any other assignment. I went up to her after class and asked her why she'd given me a lower grade, and she said something to the effect of creative writing being subjectively graded (looking at the print-out right now, it occurs to me that it might have had something to do with the obnoxious font I used). Anyway, I don't think I told Mrs. G. the real reason why I was so upset (there were a ton of overachievers at Mo-town, so complaining about A-minuses happened all the time), but when I got home that night I opened a new word processing document and typed, "I'm going to show Mrs. Gaffney! I'm going to be a writer."And I did show Mrs. Gaffney, who hightailed it home from her golf tournament one day in July 2007 to hear me read from Mary Modern at the local Barnes & Noble. I've never told her what a big part she played in making me a storyteller, but there it is.

Great Book #16: Death Comes For The Archbishop

This book--the physical book--is quite special to me. My grandmother was a voracious reader, but she owned very few books; the public library was her library. Death Comes For The Archbishop is one of the few books she kept a copy of (writing her name on the fly), and I distinctly remember her saying that Willa Cather was one of her favorite writers. I would have been too young to read her then, but I'm certainly appreciating her now. Willa Cather wrote my all-time favorite ghost story, and I've enjoyed Death Comes For The Archbishop almost as much.I imagine it is extremely difficult to write A (Good) Novel In Which Nothing In Particular Happens (the only other example I can think of is John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun). A story without a plot (or an episodic plot as in this case) has to compensate in other ways, with memorable characters and an extraordinarily vivid sense of time and place.This novel follows the life, work, and travels of Father Jean Latour in 19th-century New Mexico. Death Comes For The Archbishop continually reminded me of Georgia O'Keeffe--but Cather paints the American Southwest with words, from the perilous mountains and ravines the priests must traverse to the eerie mesa towns perched high above the desert floor. Take this sublimely simple description of dusk:

They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin cup, keeping the pot near the embers. The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.

And like her landscapes, Cather is brilliant at nailing a character in just a few words:

Don Manuel Chavez, the handsomest man of the company, very elegant in velvet and broadcloth, with delicately cut, disdainful features--one had only to see him cross the room, or to sit next him at dinner, to feel the electric quality under his cold reserve; the fierceness of some embitterment, the passion for danger.

The electric quality under his cold reserve. Gives me chills! Conversely, here's a splendid encapsulation of the Bishop's assistant, his dear old friend Father Vaillant: He added a glow to whatever kind of human society he was dropped down into.The other remarkable aspect of this novel is its abiding respect for Catholic missionaries. Desert life is a constant hardship, yet the Mexicans to whom Father Latour administers lead richly spiritual lives. They may have only the plainest, most serviceable clothes to wear to Mass, but they take great pleasure in arranging what little finery they have on their Madonna statues. Cather writes admiringly of their complete lack of materialism and the strength of their faith in the midst of unthinkable cruelty, so it's quite difficult to believe the author wasn't a devout Catholic herself (she was born a Baptist and later joined the Episcopal Church). My grandmother was a devout Catholic, but I'm sure that's only a small part of why she loved this novel.Here are a few more of my favorite lines (I'm not giving anything away--it is in the title, you know!):The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."During those last few weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life--some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left...only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.

The Moon-Spinners

I picked the perfect book for my weekend trip to Florida: The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart, which I discovered by way of Forgotten Classics (click the link to hear Julie read the first two chapters). Nicola, a 22-year-old English girl working at the British embassy in Athens, is on her way to the tiny Cretan village of Agios Georgios for a holiday with her cousin Frances when she gets mixed up in the aftermath of an attempted murder. Nicola is smart and capable, like all Stewart's heroines so I hear, and you have to wonder at how poorly her new friends Mark and Lambis would have fared without her intervention.I've never read a novel quite like this one--it's romantic suspense crossed with a vivid and beautifully written travelogue. The descriptive passages got me very nostalgic for my Greek adventure with Aravinda back in September 2006 (which I'll retro-blog next month...lots of gorgeous photos and funny stories to share!) This is not a romance novel though; the blossoming relationship between Nicola and Mark is all subtextual, which makes it all the more satisfying. But speaking of vivid descriptive passages, here's my favorite:

You might, in a simpler world, have said it was magic. There was the illuminated rock of the sea bed, every pebble clear, a living surface shifting with shadows as the ripples of the upper sea passed over it. Seaweeds, scarlet and green and cinnamon, moved and swayed in drowsy patterns so beautiful that they drugged the eye. A school of small fish, torpedo-shaped, and barred like zebras, hung motionless, then turned as one, and flashed out of sight. Another, rose-colored, and whiskered like a cat, came nosing out of a bed of grey coralline weed. There were shells everywhere.I lay and gazed, with the sun on my back, and the hot boards rocking gently under me. I had forgotten what I had come out for; this was all there was in the world; the sea, the sun hot on my skin, the taste of salt, and the south wind...

Go buy the book off Amazon marketplace for a penny. You'll be glad you did.

The Tenth Man

Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory is #47 on my 100 Great Books list. I'm quite excited to read it now, because this week I came across a copy of The Tenth Man, a novella with an unusual history: Greene originally came up with the idea as a treatment for an MGM project before the war, and had the opportunity to novelize it many years later.A rich lawyer, Chavel, is imprisoned by the Nazis along with twenty-nine other Frenchmen. They're told that one in ten of them must die the next morning, so they draw lots. The rich lawyer is chosen, but offers his home and fortune to any man who will take his place. A sullen young clerk (who's probably dying of TB anyway), Michel Mangeot (called Janvier), takes Chavel up on his hysterical offer so that his mother and sister can live comfortably. Janvier is executed along with the other two men, and when Chavel is eventually released, he returns to the dead man's childhood home because he has nowhere else to go. Janvier's twin sister Thérèse offers him a job, and naturally he takes it. (Thérèse tells Chavel, who is now calling himself Charlot, that she will spit in Chavel's face if he ever returns. She's expecting him any day, so how can she not realize he's the very man she's confiding in? Even when she remarks on his familiar handwriting! But that's my only quibble.)The Tenth Man is the first Graham Greene I've read, and I love it--spare but incisive. I don't mind bleak stories so long as there's a point to the bleakness, and this story is beautifully so.

The darkness had long enclosed them both and now the last light slid off the ceiling of the cell. Men automatically turned to sleep. Pillows like children were shaken and slapped and embraced. Philosophers say that past, present, and future exist simultaneously, and certainly in this heavy darkness many pasts came to life: a lorry drove up the Boulevard Montparnasse, a girl held out her mouth to be kissed, and a town council elected a mayor; and in the minds of three men the future stood as inalterably as birth--fifty yards of cinder track and a brick wall chipped and pitted.

And look how he pegs Janvier's mother:

She was like an old weatherworn emblem of wisdom--something you find in desert places, like the Sphinx--and yet inside her was that enormous vacancy of ignorance which cast a doubt on all her wisdom.

This line impressed me as well, but for a different reason: When you reach a certain age you don't care about the future: it is success enough to be alive; every morning you wake with triumph. Greene may have come up with the original idea for The Tenth Man in the late '30s, but he was eighty years old by the time he was writing this novella.I'll leave you with one more gem:

She said, "You can't tell me he was unlucky. It's as you say. That thing happens to everyone once. All one's life one has to think: Today it may happen." It was obvious that she had brooded and brooded on this subject, and now at last she brought out the result aloud for anyone's hearing. "When it happens you know what you've been all your life."

Great Book #77: The Little Prince

Back in high school one of my friends gave me a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince as a birthday present. I remember her giving it to me with a certain air of momentousness, as if the book had changed her life and she wanted that experience for me. I'm ashamed that it took me so long to read it, but now that I have, I see why she felt that way.The narrator is a pilot who has crashed in the Sahara and needs to fix his engine before his water supply runs out. A mysterious 'little man' with a head of golden curls appears out of nowhere, and asks him to draw a sheep. The little prince answers none of the narrator's questions about who he is or where he came from, but he always seems to know what the narrator is thinking, and the narrator eventually finds out that the little prince lives on an asteroid with three volcanoes (one extinct, but you never know) and only one flower, of which the prince is very fond. His planet is so small you can watch the sunset dozens of times a day just by going for a walk.In his interstellar travels the prince meets several adults, each on their own tiny planet, and each engaged in something completely pointless. I tend to think of myself as an overgrown child, but I'm certainly not immune to the grown-up absurdities the prince points out. But above all, The Little Prince is a fable about love, loneliness, and letting go. He meets a fox who begs to be tamed: "Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." Of course, the little prince must eventually part with the narrator, too--the scene is poignant but not overly sentimental.What's all too poignant is the fate of the author, which you can't help ruminating on as you look at his watercolors. Saint-Exupéry was a World War II pilot who was shot down during a reconnaissance mission in 1944, the year after The Little Prince was published.

--

He cried out, then:"What! You dropped down from the sky?""Yes," I answered, modestly."Oh! That is funny!"And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.

--

When I was a little boy, the lights of the Christmas tree, the music of the Midnight Mass, the tenderness of smiling faces, used to make up, so, the radiance of the gifts I received.

--

"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend."

Great Book #40: Man's Search For Meaning

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl: I can't overstate how brilliant, how useful, how life-affirming it is. In a sentence, this slim book is about "saying yes to life in spite of everything"--the author was an innovative psychiatrist and neurologist from Vienna who survived Auschwitz and three other Nazi death camps. The first section describes his experiences in the concentration camps, and the second outlines Dr. Frankl's form of psychotherapy, logotherapy (from the Greek logos, "meaning"), in very practical terms. Dr. Frankl's psychiatric training made him uniquely equipped to observe his own behavior and those of his comrades in the death camps with a sort of 'cold curiosity.' He served as camp doctor, and had a chance to escape at one point, but decided not to abandon his typhus patients. He does not hold himself up as some example of 'the right way to suffer', however: "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles--whatever one may choose to call them--we know: the best of us did not return."

Actual survival was, in a sense, irrelevant. To keep ever-present in his mind the faces of his loved ones (his wife in particular) and a vision of his future life, to retain his dignity and human impulses without denying the horrific reality of the concentration camp, marveling at a beautiful sunset even as his friends went 'up the chimneys'--he did all this, but without the intervention of blind chance at crucial moments he might not have survived. Dr. Frankl writes of emaciated prisoners exchanging recipes over hard physical labor, planning a post-war dinner party they knew full well would probably never happen. But that's beside the point. It's not about when you die, but how you've lived.

There are so many moving and insightful passages I want to share with you here, but I'd end up transcribing most of the book! So here are just a few of the parts I underlined:

"'Listen, Otto, if I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.' Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together? Did you find your wife again? And do you remember how I made you learn my will by heart--word for word--in spite of your childlike tears?"

"...Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become."

"To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions."

"A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25 percent showed a more-or-less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 60 percent." [And this was written in the 1950s!]

"...We watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions."

"...You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to 'saints.' Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best."

This is one of the very best books I have ever read. Enough said, right?

Ghost Hunters

Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters is quite deceptively named--the subtitle, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, is more apt. The book follows the life's work of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research--Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, and Henry Sidgwick--along with their American colleague, Harvard psychologist William James (brother of Henry). These scholars were caught between the charlatans of Lily Dale and the hardboiled skeptics of the scientific establishment, whose knee-jerk ridicule of psychical research seems just as dogmatic as those religious leaders who had pooh-poohed the theory of evolution only a few decades before.There are poignant stories aplenty here: images from a dream used to locate the body of a missing teenager; the sad cases of mediums whose early promise dissolved into fakery and alcoholism; and a man obsessed with contacting his long-dead lover, whose golden memory eclipses the presence of his living wife. But the reader finds the scarcity of concrete 'proof' downright frustrating, so just imagine how those tireless researchers of the British and American Psychical Societies must have felt. It's all too fitting that these scholars should ultimately provide the most compelling evidence in the book--that is to say, their own after-death communication.After the extraordinarily dedicated Australian researcher Richard Hodgson died of a heart attack on the handball court, he spoke to his old friend William James via the Boston medium Leonora Piper:

I am happy exceedingly difficult to come very. I understand why Myers came seldom. I must leave. I cannot stay. I cannot remain today.

The spirits of Gurney and Myers expressed this frustration in the cross correspondences experiment, which is the only one I found truly convincing. Several mediums separated by hundreds (or thousands) of miles, with no contact at all between them, came up with the eeriest corresponding messages using automatic writing. This "unlikely kind of chain letter from the dead" seems way too eerie for coincidence, really fascinating stuff. Anyway, I found it amusing how the spirits of the former psychical researchers sometimes took on the tone of short-tempered schoolmasters when talking to the mediums:

"Back in the old despondency," read one passage, taken down by Alice Fleming and signed 'Edmund Gurney.' "Why don't you write daily? You seem to form habits only to break them."

Mrs. Fleming told Alice Johnson that the complaint spilled out after she had been too busy to spare time for automatic writing. "If you don't care to try every day for a short period of time, better drop it all together. It's like making appointments and not keeping them," the Gurney message continued. 'You endanger your own powers of sensitiveness and annoy us bitterly."Some of the messages signed by Myers seethed with frustration: "Yet another attempt to run the blockade--to strive to get a message through--how can I make your hand docile enough--how can I convince them?"The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulties of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass--which blurs sight and deadens sound--dictating feebly--to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary."A terrible feeling of impotence burdens me."

Ghost Hunters reinforced for me Jim Harold's belief that the paranormal of today is merely the science of tomorrow--or, put another way: "the unbelief of the educated classes...will be found by succeeding ages, to have been nothing better than unreasoning and unreasonable prejudice." That's from a Mr. Joshua Proctor, one of the correspondents quoted in Catherine Crowe's The Night-Side of Nature--a bestselling collection of supposedly-true ghost stories first published in 1848. I'll be blogging about that book next.