John Connelly, the sage of Regis High School in New York City, once told a class of 30 sixteen year-olds, “Gentlemen, the culture wars are over. We lost.” The class’s discussion was emphatically not about any number of “hot button” social or political issues of the day. In fact, the reading assignment we were discussing described the way nineteenth-century German scholars came to define academic curricula, about what counted as “classics,” and whether literary works written in modern languages were worthy of study. At the time, these seemed to be recondite matters, worthy of academic study, perhaps, but not the sort of thing to keep me up at night. But I’ve come to realize that the discussion those German scholars had was more influential than even they realized. Our entire education system owes a lot more to nineteenth-century Germany than it does to laws written in state or local capitols or to popular magazine rankings. If the culture wars are over, that’s largely because we’ve largely forgotten how history influences who we are.

At least, most of us have. There are people like Brian Daley, SJ and Frank Oakley who haven’t, and we should all be thankful that their scholarly work helps keep alive cultural possibilities that most of us never knew existed. Both scholars have been on my mind lately, and I’ll discuss Daley’s work in this post and Oakley’s in a subsequent post.

Last weekend Pope Benedict XVI awarded Daley and the French historian of philosophy Remi Brague the Ratzinger Prize, which has been described as the “Nobel Prize” in theology. During the ceremony, the Pope said, “Father Daley and Professor Brague are exemplary for the transmission of knowledge that unites science and wisdom, scientific rigor and passion for man, so that man might discover the [true] ‘art of living’.” The Pope also said “It is of precisely such people who, through an enlightened and lived faith render God credible and close to the man of today.” Although some Catholic news services have mentioned the story, I don’t think it has quite gotten its due. (You can see a short article on the prize here, and you can see a video of the awards ceremony here.) Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent post, Dominic Preziosi described how delightful reading James Wood’s reviews in the New Yorker can be. I’m a huge Wood fan, too, and I love many of the things that Dominic seems to love: the “mini-tutorials on fiction,” the clever turns-of-phrase, the joy of seeing Wood size up and then take down an overpraised writer (in this case, Tom Wolfe). What Dominic doesn’t mention, however, is how infuriating it can be to read Wood, even for a fan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some months after the fact, The New York Review of Books is running an essay by Allan Gurganus to mark the occasion of John Cheever’s one hundredth birthday, which fell on May 27 of this year.

There’s not much that’s new in the piece, which is a mixed bag of anecdote and reflection. Gurganus, long since identified as an object of Cheever’s late-in-life infatuations, shares some tales on that topic, while delighting in the fact that “John Cheever wore size-six Weejuns.” The author, he also says, was “selfish and ruined. He was a child, he was a genius. He was a scamp, he was a man.” Dualities, in other words. Or maybe multitudes. To some degree or another, this has all been documented–in the journals and letters of the man himself, in the memoirs of his children, in the biographies from Scott Donaldson and Blake Bailey, and even, infamously, in a Seinfeld episode.

As for the work, Gurganus notes as many have before him that “Cheever’s fiction celebrates daylight as a form of salvation,” then follows with the observation that, “of course, his pages creating brilliance had to be offset by a contrasting ink-jet blackness, as dark as the pitchiest corner of a Goya masterpiece.” Cheever also “had to believe in God because he knew the devil.” More dualities, which leads Gurganus, perhaps predictably, to conclude by citing the famous final lines of the story “Goodbye, My Brother,” the one in which the narrator, after violently attacking his brother, watches his wife and sister, “naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace…  walk out of the sea.”

Granted, it’s unfair to demand a specific kind of tribute. Gurganus is a gifted and successful writer and, after all, he knew Cheever well. But there’s nothing wrong in seeking something that delves a little deeper, that more compellingly explains why people should still read Cheever today. Something like this, maybe, from Ralph C. Wood. Even though it’s taken from a larger piece published thirty years ago in the Christian Century shortly after Cheever’s death, it’s worth resurrecting in the centennial of his birth:

It lies beyond the province of art, I believe, to announce God’s own glad reconciliation of the world unto himself. But Cheever’s restrained and compassionate kind of humanism can provide at least a distant echo of the gospel. At its best Cheever’s fiction serves magnificently to enlarge our lives by giving renewed witness to the primordial human truths, yet without pretending that they are sufficient to deliver us from evil. And in his extraordinary presence as a companionable and forgiving narrator, Cheever offers a literary parable of God’s own unstinted grace. Ours is an era of harsh righteousness among many religionists, and of shrill alarmism among many secularists. Against such alternatives, John Cheever’s modest and charitable humanism is admirable indeed.

“I don’t want to beat it and I don’t want to leave him here alone, and so I quickly do the only thing I can think of and put my arms around him, pull him close to me and hold him tight. Very tight. . . . Arvid loves his father. It has never occurred to me. . . I don’t know if I dare let him go. If I do, I will feel naked and cold and lost in this world.”

An adolescent awkwardly attempts to console a friend devastated by his father’s humiliation at the hands of young thugs. He is unable to express himself, shocked by the profound expression of love; he is vulnerable, cold and without place in the scheme of things should his ferociously tenuous grasp fail. The voice is Audun Sletten’s, the first person narrator of Per Petterson’s It’s Fine By Me, a coming-of-age story set in Oslo in the late sixties and early seventies. Readers unfamiliar with Petterson should note that this is an early work, written twenty years ago, preceding Out Stealing Horses which won Petterson such deserved praise in 2006. His publisher is releasing translations slowly; the present book is the third issued in the intervening years.

Petterson is an author whose voice immediately opens to a distinctive world –  A dark world for the most part in which the chief character most often struggles against family and fate to achieve some sort of respectable life, one that offers a resolution born of resilience..

The author deals elliptically with time, but the foci of the ellipsis anchor the narrative: the death of Audun’s younger brother and the brutality of his terrifying father. His mother puzzles him with her weakness and permissiveness; yet in the end, Audun can accept the man whom she is to marry. He finds extraordinary surrogates, an aged farmer and his wife, who provide the one respite that cushions his wariness.

The sole break in the first person account offers a sudden and disturbing view of the father, ranging as a hunter through the Norwegian woods – a loner, predatory and self-sufficient. His reappearance at disparate times shocks Audun into defensive reaction. Yet he cannot contain the drunken energy (His father has a pistol which he too easily uses.) that this chaotic presence threatens. These scenes are grotesquely unforgettable – a drinking buddy delivers Audun’s father to their home in the bucket of a front loading tractor. Audun retreats as the father rears from his drunken sleep in anger.

Audun’s one friend, Arvid, mentioned above, shares his left wing politics and rebelliousness, demonstrating this in the raising of an outlawed flag in the school yard. The two boys share intrigues and novels, discussing “purple prose” as well as the Vietnam War, and inevitably their dysfunctional families that teeter about them.

Audun’s steady determination, his innate good sense, sees him through the awkwardness that he seems perpetually to court: a terrible beating for the support he gives Arvid, his friendship with an old man to whom he delivers newspapers, his rejection of the advances of a middle-aged woman on that same route.

The novel reaches a hectic peak in the scenes that surround Audun’s work in a printing factory. In the company of his much older workmates, he begins to find a place as he develops real skills in the handling of the dangerous presses.

At every stage, the dialogue, even in translation, is thoroughly  convincing. I could not but be engaged by Audun’s daily struggles and the breadth of what should be the narrow compass of his life. One can only wonder at the delicacy of Petterson’s rendering of the pains of coming of age.

I don’t think that there is a “best place to start” if you haven’t read Petterson. The strength of the writing will inevitably lead you from one book to another. He is remarkable indeed.

Exelon

Hilary Mantel fans already know the news: The author of Wolf Hall and other novels has won the 2012 Man Booker Prize, for Bring up the Bodies (becoming only the third writer, and first woman, to win the award twice). But do they know she also wrote for Commonweal? See her piece from our Summer Reading issue of 2001 here.

I listen to audio books daily. I find them, in part, a type of ear-blinker, a vocal filter for the noise about. They (almost) replace (almost all of the time) the voice of the monologist inside my head – but inadvertence, a disturbance like a falling leaf or an acorn dropping on my shoulder, can muffle the sound track and cause me to try to walk in reverse, as if to play back the narration I have missed. Yes, I listen while I walk: exercise and diversion, along back roads in the tangles of suburbia.  I can associate fiddle head fern with Anna Karenina’s leap into oblivion. Staring at the verge of the road as the novel screeches to climax produces strange links: I walk and think: that is where Anna died, just there by the granite rock blocking the run-off in a dry wash.

In reaction against a surfeit of audio fiction, I chose one of the local library’s Great Courses: Timothy Luke Johnson’s Greco-Roman Moralists, largely because I recognized the lecturer as a frequent contributor to Commonweal. I was not disappointed and now find signals of Cicero’s “On Duty” and Plutarch’s Moralia among the shedding beeches and fallen oak leaves.

To struggle up a steep hill conscious of the puffing effort needed to mount the summit has all the more relevance when set against classical admonitions to practice, repeatedly, virtuous acts and so approach a moral summit.  Professor Johnson lectures enthusiastically, declaring at one stage that he is more a follower of Epictetus than of any other philosopher – and he makes a strong case for the moral vision and practice of his mentor. Perhaps more striking are the lectures on Plutarch in which he contrasts the world view of this thinker, especially as regards the conduct of the virtuous life, with the vacuity of so many of us who blindly follow the promptings of modernity. The concluding lecture, “The Missing Page in Philosophy’s Story,” makes an interesting case for the role of philosophy in later antiquity (stronger than at any other time, before or since in the West) and discusses why so few university courses in philosophy mention Musonius Rufus, Dio Chrysostom, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch or Philo of Alexandria – the focus of his study. Modern courses in philosophy and the history of philosophy are about ideas and theories, not about living the just life. Professor Johnson’s authors directed their attention to daily life and the cultivation of virtue. That they were so prolific, and that they were representative of many more such writers, indicates the popularity if not the influence of their moral treatises.

I wish only that I could retain the information he presented if not follow the moral guidelines he reviewed, so clearly, in these ancient writings.  Twelve hours of lecture contain a great deal to grasp, so I was again pleasantly surprised when someone suggested that I follow the course with reading Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy, a work that treated similar themes.

This is not an academic study but a knowledgeable book that wears considerable learning lightly; de Botton poses various crises in life and considers the “consolations” philosophers might offer. He is particularly strong on Epicurus, redeeming the much maligned philosopher from charges of excess and luxury – this a helpful complement to Johnson’s treatment.

By far the greatest warmth in his consideration is generated in the discussion of Montaigne. de Botton quotes so liberally from his sources that his text takes on the liveliness of his (translated) original. The one image I shall always keep is that of Montaigne’s ceiling, whose beams were decorated by painted apothegms. The fifty-seven succinct  warnings that he had inscribed testified to the limitations of philosophy and the pretension of human reason. Stern antidotes for one who was so learned in the classics.

I have to reflect on the strange and wonderful woodland company I keep, as I try to avoid reckless pickup trucks and precarious road shoulders. The disconnect between the lively discussions I am graced to hear and the at times threatening environment in which I walk proves happily symbolic: the path of virtue and the vicissitudes of life. If so simple an exercise as a morning walk could be the just way.

Among the pleasures of reading James Wood in the New Yorker are the mini-tutorials on fiction woven into his critiques. A case in point is his piece on Tom Wolfe’s new novel, featured in the current issue. It’s highly entertaining as a review (it really is), but the take-down also comes with instructive examples and a warning on the danger, in fiction, of trusting too much in the power of fact.

Of course, many novelists have done research, or have simply slipped chunks of witnessed or remembered reality into their books. But often their swerves away from research are more interesting than their fidelities… .

The important details, the ones that make fiction’s intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up off the sidewalk. Tolstoy, praised as a realist by Tom Wolfe, took the germ of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ from an actual story about a judge in a nearby town who had died of cancer; but one of the most beautiful moments surely came from Tolstoy’s imagination—or rather, from his patient loyalty to Ivan’s invented reality [emphasis added]. I mean the moment when Ivan Ilyich, lying on his couch, in great distress and loneliness, remembers ‘the raw and wrinkly French prunes of his childhood, their special taste, and how his mouth watered when he got down to the stone.’

Too much faith in the force of reality, says Wood, “results in weak fiction and forceful facts.” Information is imparted, but little else—only “the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt.” But the French prunes, Wood says, “come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus….”

It’s not just about selecting the right detail. It’s also about resisting the impulse to flood the page with data (the make and model of the cell phone, the vital stats—height, weight, hair color—of the protagonist) in the mistaken belief that it will ensure authenticity or verisimilitude, and that by simple abundance will something essential be conveyed.

Wood’s “singular surplus” sounds a little like Flannery O’Connor’s belief in the power of a properly chosen object to function at both the literal and symbolic levels, “in depth as well as on the surface,” and how just such an object “increases the story in every direction.” She also advised on how to dispense information: “To say that fiction proceeds by the use of detail does not mean the simple, mechanical piling-up of detail. Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you.”

That purpose apparently isn’t evident in Wolfe’s novel, which is set in Miami. But let Wood make the point himself: “It is useless to feature Russians in your novel, just because they exist in Miami, if this is how you render their speech: ‘You vant to share zees studio?—eet’s yours, my fren!’”

The most recent Commonweal features an article by Professor Joseph Amar about the fate of Syrian Christians in the current violence in that country. In a short space, Amar discusses the political situation of contemporary Syria and the relationship between the Syriac churches and the West. Amar also gives a brief introduction to St. Ephrem the Syrian, who is arguably the greatest Syriac poet and theologian and one of the greatest of all Christian poets and theologians. (Only Gregory of Nazianzus and Dante can claim to be as important as theologians and poets.)

I was introduced to Ephrem and to the Syriac language in graduate school, and so I thought I might offer a few things for those intrigued enough by Amar’s article to learn more about this vital Christian tradition.

First, here is a brief video of Professor Sebastian Brock, the foremost authority on Syriac literature in the English-speaking world. Here Prof. Brock discusses some aspects of Syriac theology and spends some time talking about Ephrem and St Isaac the Syrian.

Sebastian Brock on the Syriac tradition

Second, I hope that Verdicts readers will want to pick up a volume that Prof. Brock translated, St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise. This volume is part of St. Vladimir Seminary Press’s Popular Patristics series, which is edited by the very talented Prof. Fr. John Behr, himself an Orthodox priest and expert on second-century Christianity, especially Irenaeus of Lyon. These volumes are pocket-sized and relatively inexpensive, and they somehow thread the needle between being resources for scholars and laypeople alike. Each volume is, in its own way, a spiritual treasure.

That is certainly the case for Hymns on Paradise. The volume contains fifteen hymn-homilies that Ephrem gave on Genesis 2-3. In these hymns, Ephrem links creation to judgment, the old covenant to the new, and Adam to Christ. As Prof. Brock notes (and this is a point Prof. Amar made in his article), “because Ephrem’s theology is not tied to a particular cultural or philosophical background, but rather operates by means of imagery and symbolism which are basic to all human experience … his theological vision, as expressed in his hymns, has a freshness and immediacy today that few other theological works from the early Christian period can hope to achieve” (p. 40). Brock’s introduction to the volume offers an excellent introduction to Ephrem’s theology, his verse, and his context.

Let me offer just a taste of one of Ephrem’s homilies. (This is the second stanza of the first homily in the volume.)

I took my stand halfway
between awe and love;
a yearning for Paradise
invited me to explore it,
but awe at its majesty
restrained me from my search.
With wisdom, however,
I reconciled the two;
I revere what lay hidden
and meditated on what was revealed.
The aim of my search was to gain profit,
the aim of my silence was to find succor. (p. 78)

The space between awe and love is the space that all Christian theology should inhabit. Ephrem’s theology has much to teach contemporary Christians about how they can respond to the invitation that comes from yearning for Paradise. Thanks to this volume, we can learn from Ephrem’s meditations, profit from his search, and find succor, not in his silence, but  in his words.

Condition of England novels were a recognized genre in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Works such as Hard Times captured the social tensions of the country, sampling the spectrum of class, industry, education and mores. The subtitle of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, is tellingly, “State of England.” Amis presents the novel in the tradition of Dickens, Gaskell and Disraeli. The title character, the monstrous Lionel Asbo, appears in hyperbolic form as the state of English society and culture. His life’s history and his interaction with authority, upper classes and particularly the media propel a satiric and raucously funny attack on modern Britain.  He is the monster “other” by which we know what we are and are not.

By chance, as I was reading Lionel Asbo., I found myself starting another new English novel The Facility by the author Simon Lelic. As is Lionel Asbo, the book is a satire, but in the Orwellian dystopian mode with, as a cover blurb notes, a mixture of Kafka. The monster in this story is the state, a repressive near-future regime which has through legislation, careful monitoring, and thuggish brutality, scuppered human rights and the free press. There is no lightness or humor in the work, only an ending that pulls away from the punch of final despair.

Two visions, two perspectives, and two very different experiences in reading: one drives with a comic energy into and through grotesque dissipation (Lionel wins 140 million pounds in a lottery), the other questions anxiously and paces towards answers that are never sufficient. One world ends in a bang, the other in a whimper.

In Amis’ work, the target of the satire is the loss of heritage, the overweening importance of money and the rapacious attacks of a sensationalist press. Once Lionel is made infamous by wealth, he attracts the paparazzi and the deference of his titled lawyer and agents. In the fluidity of such social evaluation, Lionel seeks the security of prison where he knows where he is and who he is. Internment then is an affirmation of the self in a system that all too often knows no boundaries.

The Facility however uses prison as the great threat to individual identity, the last stop before obliteration of the self for the “good of the state.” Arthur Priestley, a divorced dentist, is suddenly and inexplicable arrested, beaten in interrogation, and then interned. The menacing “Facility,” holds people who like Arthur have been snatched, drugged and transported to this hospital-come-prison.  Their crime is infection, or supposed infection, by a virus much like HIV but more virulent and with no known treatment. The remnants of public accountability for the actions of the state (and a lapse of secrecy) insure that there are no survivors to testify to ill treatment. Warders and “patients” alike succumb.

Both works focus on the innocence of children and their threatened victimization: Lionel seeks to take vengeance on the child of his nephew Des for the incestuous relationship Des had with Lionel’s mother ; Philip’s son narrowly escapes death in an arranged accident intended to stop investigation of Philip’s disappearance.  The waywardness of society directly exposes the next generation to danger; we abandon our future.

Jonathan Swift once quipped that satire is frequently most appreciated by those whom it targets (and never improves). One can enjoy Amis’s energy, invention, and impossibly clever dialogue (What language does Lionel speak?) but Lelic seems to stagger a reader with the force of his conspiracy theory. There is no simple draw to the call: are we to be done in by runaway indulgence that is guaranteed by fame and money, or are we to lose what individuality we have through abuse of government power? Amis’ book has the strength of energy and comic invention that might suggest the gallows laughter that is never quite heard in The Facility.

Standing back from both works, I have to wonder which recent novels by American authors might offer readers something like the “Condition of the United States”? Any suggestions for a reading list?

It’s been a while since I left a movie theater scratching my head but The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest product, did it for me. This movie has received a lot of plaudits for the two central performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Master himself and Joaquin Phoenix as the alcohol-raddled victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who somehow blunders into the closed family world of Lancaster Dodd (the Master) and is taken on as an evidently pro bono project. The film also looks beautiful and I didn’t find the two and a half hours dragging much if at all. But the question you’re left with is a big one: what is The Master about? Is it indeed a thinly-veiled account of the early life of L. Ron Hubbard whose Scientology cult had and has much in common with “The Cause,” as Dodd and his family refer to their movement? Or is it primarily a look inside the mind of Freddie Sutton and the futility of all the efforts, his own or those of others, to help him rejoin society? At the beginning of the story we see him in the Pacific theater of war, already sick from the deadly mix of various alcohols that he distills and imbibes, and part of a group of similar casualties who are being told by an officer that they will be helped to take up a useful role in society in some humble capacity or other. The next thing we know he boards a pleasure boat which just happens to be where the Master’s daughter is about to be married and Dodd and Sutton strike up an acquaintance, though how it came about we never actually see. Some of the details of the story incline us to think that it is all a fantasy in Sutton’s head, and surely some at least of it is. But then, why would a drunk’s delirium produce a convincing version of an L. Ron Hubbard-type religious charlatan? Some at least of this part of the story seems like a superior kind of bio-pic. Then there is Dodd’s wife played chillingly by Amy Adams. But why is she seven months pregnant for most of the movie and then in England at the end of the movie, no longer so? And why in the odd English castle that Dodd seems to have made his headquarters do the students appear to be a mix of schoolchildren and policemen?
[Spoiler alert!]
I don’t mean to be carping about a movie that holds your attention by the sheer power of the two principal actors, though I suspect that there is either a little sloppy editing or, more likely, some unfair obfuscation. In the end, perhaps, the story itself is less interesting than the interactions between the characters. It draws a fine picture of a cult, with that enticing mixture of extreme religious baloney on the one hand and a warm and supportive camaraderie on the other, but this has been done before. It also suggests that some battlefield trauma may just be too difficult to overcome entirely, though Freddie seems to make some progress. How much or how little may be indicated in the final scene where, having sex with a compliant English woman he has picked up in a pub he interrupts their pleasure to put her through a little verbal therapy he recalls from the techniques of the Cause. He’s going to cope, maybe, but he’s never going to be normal. Dodd on the other hand, whom Hoffman plays as a kind of Hemingway character complete with shotgun and handgun and motorcycle and beard, copes only too well in his tightly-wound persona, at times ingratiating and at others full of rage. In the end he gives Freddie the choice of going or staying. Perhaps I’ll stay in the next life says Freddie, and walks out a free man. Mostly.