How to Launch a Detective: "The Long Call"

In a foreword to The Long Call (New York: Minotaur Books, 2019), author Ann Cleeves is nervous to start a new series with a new detective, "almost like a teenager bringing a new girlfriend or boyfriend home for the first time." She has concluded her series about detective Jimmy Perez on the remote Shetland Islands; her Vera Stanhope series set in Northumberland is still a going concern. The debut story for Detective Matthew Venn succeeds in keeping us off-balance and engaged. For this reader, it's also fun and instructive to see how an experienced author goes about setting up for future installments.

First, Cleeves sets the place, its geography and its social strata. Her foreword tells us that this novel started when she re-visited her childhood town North Devon [see photo collage]. As this novel progresses, we get to know the windswept beach, the two rivers that converge, the seaside tourist district, and the steep street where the victim lived. "I'd forgotten quite how beautiful the place is," she writes, adding ominously, "but sometimes beauty is skin deep." Exploring the contrasts will give her material for stories to come.

In the same way, she builds contrast into her detective and his associates. He's Matthew Venn, diffident but professional, no longer religious but reared to be a leader in an evangelical sect called "The Brethren," strait-laced but not straight. Venn's husband Jon is sunny, outgoing, confident and competent. Venn's team comprises Jen Rafferty, whose house is a mess, her teenagers resigned to their mother's absence, her psychological wounds from an abusive marriage still sore; and Ross May, cocky and impatient, eager to finish work to get back to his wife, little kids, and rugby team.

The particulars of this story concern a body found near Venn's own home on the beach. The victim is identified as Simon Walden, a short-order cook, sometimes depressed, sometimes addicted, formerly homeless but boarding with two young women. Following leads, the detectives find that he has much more to him than they at first believed. He also worked at "the Woodyard," a community center where, as Venn gradually comes to realize, all the suspects and witnesses are connected, including its founding director, Venn's Jonathan.  Venn feels that's "too close to home" and he's losing grip on the investigation: "Too many people circling around each other, without quite touching."

What's no fun for him is fun for the reader.

Cleeves writes in third person, alternating her chapters among different characters, including sometimes the suspects and witnesses. This way, we know a clue from one character when the next character has no clue, and that's a wicked little pleasure. She writes with sympathy for these people, even those who are pretty unlikable to each other.

In this novel, Cleeves also writes with sympathy and respect about adults with Down's Syndrome and their families. A program for adults with Downs Syndrome, also housed at the Woodyard, emerges as important to the crime. Why did Walden ride the bus to share candy and chat with one of the women during her ride home each day, being as he lived the other direction? Why did he board the bus a block away from the center, out of sight of the people there? Before these suggestive questions can be answered, another woman from the center disappears, hiking a sense of urgency that got this reader's heart racing.

Cleeves also textures her writing with interwoven themes of guilt and faith. Many of the characters have an albatross around their necks. In the opening pages, Venn himself watches his father's funeral from afar. His mother won't speak to him, blaming the father's decline on his son's apostasy and sexuality. The philanthropist who supports the Woodyard's counseling center blames himself for not recognizing the seriousness of his wife's depression before her suicide. Having killed a young girl in a car crash, Walden had an albatross tattooed literally around his neck.

Sign me up for the next installment.

[See my curated list of blogposts about works by Ann Cleeves and other crime writers on my Crime Fiction page.]

Bringing "That Slavery Thing" Out of the Archives

On the heels of blogging about The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.'s novel set among enslaved people (02/18/2021), I found many points of agreement between that fiction and what Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith has found in archived interviews with the last Americans to have been born in slavery. His article "We Mourn for All We Do Not Know" is in the March 2021 issue.

Smith was surprised to find, among the horrific accounts of violence and deprivation that he expected,

stories of enslaved people dancing together on Saturday evenings as respite from their work; of people falling in love, creating pockets of time to see each other when the threat of violence momentarily ceased; of children skipping rocks in a creek or playing hide-and-seek among towering oak trees, finding moments when the movement of their bodies was not governed by anything other than their own sense of wonder.

The accounts of love and wonder resonate with Jones's novel, where flirtation, love, dancing, and horseplay at the stream are all part of the texture of the story. But Smith writes that some members of a black family, reading an ancestor's account of some happy times, were suspicious, because it played into pre-and-post Reconstruction propaganda about how slave life was so sheltered and carefree.

Smith writes that these interviews, conducted in 1938 for the New Deal program the Federal Writers' Project, have long been suspect, for some good reasons:

• Were the memories of people so old be trusted?
• Few of the interviewers were black; living in the Jim Crow South, did elderly men and women say what they thought a white person would want to hear? Did biased interviewers manipulate their subjects?
• The transcripts are written in dialect, e.g., "My mudder...hafter git some food... Us all 'round de table like dat was like a feast"; to what extent were the transcripts altered to be "more authentic?"
• Critics after historian Ulrich B. Phillips (d. 1934), who thought slavery was a civilizing influence, mistrust what black people had to say about slavery because, well, how can black people be objective about slavery?
  

Answering that last one, Daina Ramey Berry, History Chair at U.T. Austin, wonders how white people can be objective about plantation owners.  She told Smith that there's some kind of bias in every source.

Something else that resonates with Jones's novel is something that sociologist Orlando Patterson calls "natal alienation." Patterson observes how black people under slavery and still to this day have been "stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify." Records weren't kept. In The Prophets, the character Isaiah aches to be able to remember his mother and the name she gave him.

Smith interviewed modern-day black historians and genealogists who have searched for their own families in those archives. They tell of strong emotional reactions when they see photos of great-greats that they'd only heard of. Janice Crawford traced her family back to the plantation operated by the Rogers family. 

[Photo: Carter J. Johnson, born in slavery, who raised Janice Crawford's orphaned mother]

Crawford contacted one Rogers descendant who had published an article extolling his family's preaching the word of God through many generations of ministers, but he didn't stay in touch. She wonders how slave owners could commit to slavery while espousing Christian principles; The Prophets features a slave owner who quotes scripture to assuage his momentary moral qualms.

Smith also talked with Gregory Freeland, who grew up on Crest Street near where I lived on the campus of Duke University.  I was never aware that the Crest Street community had originally been its own town established by people emancipated after the Civil War. Freeland, who has done extensive research in the archives, regrets that he passed up the opportunity to ask questions of his own elders when he was growing up. "I was sort of ready to get away from that, that slavery thing," he tells Smith. Now he's working to collect interviews with those who remember the Civil Rights era.

That slavery thing has been left moldering in the archives while white history has wanted to move on.  In the 1980s, when Ken Burns' Civil War documentary ran on TV night after night, I was teaching in Mississippi.  I talked about each installment with friends. We were all college-educated and liberal in our racial views, and we loved the 89 appearances by Mississippi writer Shelby Foote, who had a wry twinkle in his eye as he regaled us with anecdotes from that conflict. While we respected the big-picture commentary by Columbia College professor Barbara Fields, I remember consensus that her 10 or so clips were too many, because, being black, she just couldn't move on from the topic of slavery. But, being white, we didn't think about "moving on" from Lincoln, Lee, and Mary Chesnutt.

Articles like Smith's and writing like The Prophets, along with other books I've read recently -- Bryan Stevenson's memoir Just Mercy and the YA novel Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam (see blogpost 12/2020) -- make me more aware than ever how our desire to segregate "that slavery thing" from the rest of America's life still distorts our teaching of history, our political discourse, our laws, and our communities.

[By coincidence, Clint Smith has popped up in my reading and radio listening three times this weekend. He told Shankar Vedantam on Hidden Brain about his early career teaching literature to mostly poor black kids, and how he learned that averting their eyes from their lives to Shakespeare and fantasy literature was a mistake. He's also represented in a book of essays 400 Souls. I've learned that Smith is also a poet. Here's a photo from a short talk-and-poem on TED talks. His web site is www.slintsmithiii.com

]

News Update from 2015: Obama Honors Sondheim

How did I miss this one? In 2015, President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Stephen Sondheim with these words:

As a composer and a lyricist, and a genre unto himself, Sondheim challenges his audiences. His greatest hits aren't tunes you can hum; they're reflections on roads we didn't take, and wishes gone wrong, relationships so frayed and fractured there's nothing left to do but 'Send in the Clowns.' Yet Stephen's music is so beautiful, his lyrics so precise, that even as he exposes the imperfections of everyday life, he transcends them. We transcend them. Put simply, Stephen reinvented the American musical. He's loomed large over more than six decades in the theatre. And with revivals from Broadway to the big screen, he is still here, 'pulling us up short, and giving us support for being alive.'

That's a succinct and true evaluation of Sondheim's 60 years' of creating musicals. In those few sentences, Obama (and his staff writers) pull together references from (in order): Merrily We Roll Along, Follies, Into the Woods, A Little Night Music, more Follies, and Company. Ah, what a President!

Belated congratulations, Mr. Sondheim.

[For a curated list of links to dozens of posts related to Sondheim, his work, and work of his friends and rivals, see my Stephen Sondheim page]

"The Prophets" by Robert Jones: History and Prophecy

Calling his novel The Prophets and drawing on the Bible for names of characters and titles of chapters, Robert Jones, Jr. invites us to place this historical fiction in dialogue with Christian tradition.

Creation, Sin, Redemption The setting for the story is a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, years before the Civil War. Except for a couple of excursions by members of the slave owner's family, we never leave that plantation. The enslaved characters call the plantation "Empty." They have only a vague sense of what lies beyond its boundaries.

Yet the goodness of creation transcends the brutality of the circumstances. During an ordeal of humiliation and physical pain, the enslaved young men Samuel and Isaiah are still aware how birds, insects, the natural world go on with their lives amid the beauty of field and forest. Forced since childhood to work and sleep among the farm animals, Samuel "the strong one" and Isaiah "the sensitive one" have turned to each other for love and understanding. Their embrace of each other is described rapturously, and their relationship is known and honored throughout the community, at first.

Their world is also suffused with the voices of the ancestors, beneficent spirits who talk to us, speak through elders in the story, and who appear fleetingly to characters, giving encouragement and magically healing. The ancestors laugh at our limited perceptions: "You thought you were the living and we were the dead? Haha" (2). In chapters interspersed throughout the novel, we follow a parallel story of ancestors in a previous century who call a woman "King" and who celebrate the marriage of two young men who are privileged to be appointed "guardians" (187).

The different chapters bring us the voices of different characters, some of them tangential to the story of Samuel and Isaiah. Some of these particular narrators were obscure to me, or just not so interesting. Happily, I remembered a famous author's advice (Virginia? Flannery? I forget) that there's no rule that you have to read every chapter.

What brought me back to the novel time and again was this underlying confidence and joy, suggesting to me that Hebrew phrase from Genesis tov mahov: creation is very good. Love of and between "the two of them" is Edenic in the setting of a stable where the stars shine through a skylight, and the maturing of that love under duress is gripping to experience. The ancestors and the elder women among the community who channel them recall the Bible's "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12.1) and the ministering of angels.

But everything good is twisted by the state of slavery. Under the slave owner Paul, love is reduced to what happens at a clearing known as the "F---ing Place," where he commands couplings with and between his slaves, to rear a new generation of slaves to increase his wealth. Black mothers have borne his light-skinned sons, and his wife Ruth also tries to fulfill her desires with black men.

Paul weaponizes the Gospel. A self-righteous man, sure that his ownership of these people is a sign of God's approval (250), he charges his black disciple Amos to preach the Gospel to the workers with stress on obedience. Paul is appalled when he learns that his young workers Samuel and Isaiah love each other, not just because of passages in Leviticus and Romans that forbid sex between men: Paul had planned for the young men, brought to "the peak state of brawn" by their work in the stable, to sire hardy workers for use and for sale (259). When they don't respond to the women he sends to them, Paul charges Amos to push the community to shun the young men. In the parallel story of the ancestors, it's a cross-brandishing Portuguese captain who introduces the notion that the marriage of the two guardians is unnatural and detestable; the tribe laughs at him.

Under the distortion of slavery, the comfort that the Gospel offers is that of excluding "the two of them" (76). During the sadistic ordeal imposed on Samuel and Isaiah, members of the community jeer, finding "some kind of happiness... in seeing someone else being humiliated for once" (143).

Paul's son Timothy, an artist described as "not a man man," pushes the story to a crisis. We see how he found freedom to express his homosexuality at Harvard and imbibed Yankees' ideas about the wrongs of slavery (202). At home, taken by the beauty of Isaiah and Samuel, he commands them to pose for portraits. He imagines that Samuel and Isaiah will both be flattered and enriched by his attention. He considers that he's doing them a favor when he invites each to his bedroom. Instead, he causes jealousy, hurt, and fury.

"Redemption" in this situation isn't going to be the same thing as a happy ending. There comes with pain a deepening of love (215 ff). Without any spoilers, I can attest that the feeling at the end is of a kind of restoration of wholeness in the embrace of the ancestors. There's also an unforgettable and comforting vision of a man who dissolves into a thousand swirling fireflies (238).

The arc of the story, from creation through sin to redemption, is one that repeats throughout the Bible, and, I believe, in our lives.

Guessing Game

Jones, with his Biblical connections, challenges us to a guessing game: How do the titles fit? The first chapter in the voice of the ancestors he calls "Judges," as in, judges of the story. A chapter that depicts the playful banter between Samuel and Isaiah, that ends with them lying side by side, that deepens into their sharing painful memories, Jones calls "Psalms." Being the songs of David, "Psalms" perhaps recalls the intense love of the youthful David for Jonathan, or the lyrical expressions of joy and pain in the Psalms, or both. The chapter chronicling the ordeal imposed on the young men is called "Babel," perhaps because of the babbling mockery of the crowd; the chapter that follows in which the women heal them is appropriately called "Balm in Gilead." Some of the titles are playful, as when the throwback chapter of two guardians in Africa is called "II Kings."

Likewise Jones's choices of names for his characters. The eponymous prophets would be Samuel, instrumental in ending King Saul's reign, and Isaiah, harbinger of Israel's restoration through the trials of a suffering servant. If we remember that the apostle Paul was also known as Saul, then Samuel's readiness to fight the plantation owner makes the name a good fit. Seeing Isaiah as harbinger of a restoration is harder to do in a literal way. But in his gentleness, unwilling even to make a fist (145), and in his suffering, he may fit the theme of suffering servant.

The other prophet among the characters' names is Amos, known for his call to justice, and that seems ill-applied to the servile character hand-picked to preach. But when we see into Paul's mind, we read how he envies the black man's spiritual visions, causing the slave owner to concede that black people "have souls" (258) and to doubt the rightness his life's work. He finds comfort in Christ's dictum, "Render unto Caesar" and St. Paul's admonition that slaves are to be obedient.

From first to last, however, Jones gives another name paramount importance. Isaiah knows that his mother and father gave him an African name and yearns to know what that is. We already do: the second chapter of the book, called "Proverbs," is a pro- (forward) verb (word) sent out from Isaiah's mother to the son taken from her, whom she calls Kayode. By this name, and the emphasis on Judeo-Christian names, Jones suggests that the spiritual world of the African ancestors is a reality behind and through the one codified in Scripture. I don't take that as a denial of Scripture, but a denial of how the slave owner adapts scripture to his own weaknesses and desires. By extension, Jones indicts the whole white supremacy project.

Social Resonances

In an interview on Atlanta's NPR station WABE, the author said, as if it were common knowledge, that African tribes were far from "binary" in their view of gender. That's news to me, but a cursory look through sources on the internet confirmed what he said, mostly in the context of refuting African regimes that justify brutal persecution of gay men as patriotic push-back against sin brought to their continent by decadent Europeans.

Jones also writes a couple of passages, apt for the time of the story, that encapsulate the mindset and method of white supremacists. When Isaiah sighs, "I get tired. But I wanna live," (301), Samuel thinks:

That was the way of the world as remade by toubab [whites], and Samuel's list of grievances was long: They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage.

In a parallel passage some pages later, Paul's overseer James, resentful to be dressed in raggedy clothes (319) and beholden to his cousin, considers the black people he oversees:

They were of raggedy dress (his anger was fueled by the similarity of their attire and his) and little intelligence. They lived on top of one another, packed into dwellings by their own will as much as Paul's. They were belligerent and smelled of a toil that couldn't be washed away. They ate refuse and their skin bore the curse of wild. It was easier to think of them as animals, not so different from cows and horses, apes of great mimicry that managed to speak the language of humans.

Yet in this same chapter, he recalls his desire for a black woman who resisted him fiercely. How can he reconcile his desire for her with his belief that she was an "animal?" He rationalizes:

The fact of the matter was that they could pass for human and, therefore, trick the loins, if not always the mind. (321)

Prophecy The ancient prophets of Jewish tradition aren't properly thought of as fortune-tellers but poetic truth-tellers. Like pundits and poets who raise their voices today, they tell the powerful the perspective of the marginalized; they foretell where things will go if the listeners don't listen.

Jones, building on Christian and African tradition, telling in a poetic way his story from a different century, is also speaking to our times, and to the future.

In that passage of Samuel's thoughts about his white masters, Jones writes

They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed "CHAOS!" and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.(321)

Probably writing that well before the summer of 2020, Jones could have been looking back on George Floyd's death, the rising up that followed, and the continuing reaction of Trump and his ilk. It also describes the racist attacks in Chicago in the summer of 1919 (see my post about a poet's book 1919 (08/2020).

With the beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and a community, The Prophets also tells of racial injustice and exploitation of all kinds, a story that was and is. How can we ensure that story is not still to be?

Poem and Puzzle: Eliot's "East Coker"

It's a T. S. Eliot kind of day, all in-between:

• Grey, just above freezing, the deck not iced but frosty enough that squirrels shied from the peanut feeder on the slippery bannister;
• Lent starts tomorrow, but I'm fasting now (liquids only; colonoscopy).
• It's break time, but I've no place to break to.
• And Psalm 39 appointed for today expresses something between resignation -- "I am but a sojourner with you, / a wayfarer, as all my forebears were" -- and hope that "I may be glad again / before I go my way and am no more."

The commentary in Forward Day by Day suggested that we read T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" for his meditation on the themes of the psalm. Having time on my hands, I've done just that.

Eliot makes us fight for what we get in his lines. As we do with crossword puzzles in the Sunday New York Times, we look for themes, we haul out the dictionary, and, when we see intersections of words and meanings, the struggle can turn even a commonplace thought into an exciting discovery. No fun if you look up the answers in the back.

So I'm writing before I take a look at any helpful website commentary. In the same way, I got a lot out of "Little Gidding," another of the Four Quartets. See my blogpost "Just a Closer Walk with T. S. Eliot" (05/2014).

I. I sketched a picture of what I think is going on. A wayfarer walks a lane just wide enough for him to squeeze up against the embankment to let a van pass by on its way to the village. Sunrise light casts shadows across the lane. There's an open field where once there may have been houses or a factory.

There's warmth in the air, and the poet slips into archaic language when he tells us that, at midnight in midsummer, "you can hear the music" of "daunsing" and "matrimonie" of villagers in centuries past.

The moment is enveloped in a thought we've heard before, and will hear again: "In my end is the beginning." He elaborates in lines reminiscent of Ecclesiastes: "there is a time for building / ...And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane." Alliteration or rhyme brackets some beginnings and ends, as the ground contains "bone of man and beast," "fur and faecies," "dung and death"; "country mirth... long since under earth."

"Dawn points," he writes, "and another day / Prepares for heat and silence." Are we on the coast? "Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides." I like that one.

II. While the scene seems to be summery, this part begins with a question, "What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring...?" A list of "disturbances" expands quickly from "creatures of the summer heat" to roses to constellations to cosmic cataclysm in fire, and, eventually in ice. Pretty grim. My feeling is, "late November" isn't the time of the year, but the poet's time of life.

After a space, the poet seems to comment on the poetry of the previous stanza. "That was a way of putting it -- not very satisfactory." He "starts again," reflecting that age has not brought the "autumnal serenity" he had expected, and there's

At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment...

That's a wise observation, not an uncommon one, but elegantly expressed.

This little meditation on age slips into another weird midsummer-night's-dream fantasy, like the country dances of Part I, this one about "a dark wood...menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment." Instead of wisdom, old men's "folly" is "fear" of fear itself and of "belonging to another, or to others, or to God."

Ok, what is God doing here? I guess He's been hovering all along, above that vision of the end of the universe and the allusions to Ecclesiastes. Now that God's involved, the aging poet makes an observation that might fit into a Psalm: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

III. Suddenly we're not on a country lane anymore as the poet writes a psalm for modern times. "They all go into the dark," not only "vacant interstellar spaces" but also "the vacant into the vacant," by which he means all those titans of modern life, "The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, / The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers..." and even the "Stock Exchange Gazette." They're all vacuous entities, Eliot says, echoing Ecclesiastes' "vanity of vanities."

Updating Psalm 102, the poet imagines a theatre, lights dimmed between scenes, with "a hollow rumble in the wings" as "the hills and the trees, the distant panorama / And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away."

"Or," he continues, there's that awkward pause in conversation on the London tube "And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about."

A thought about "when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing" becomes a sort of prayer: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" and also without love "for the wrong thing," while "there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting." It feels like we've reached a low point in the trajectory of the poem, and that the poet is receptive to some kind of insight. He pauses to consider his own writing again: "You say I am repeating / Something I have said before."

When he adds, "I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?" I wonder if he's doing some self-parody. There follow the most Eliotic lines of all, paradoxes that kind of make sense but don't do much for me, including, "In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not," which seems to be the unremarkable observation that on a journey you're neither still at point A nor yet at point B. "And what you own is what you do not own" is true in the sense that ownership isn't forever. When we get to "where you are is where you are not," I think of a parody by Broadway writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green (11/2006), who imagined how the author of The Cocktail Party might write a Burlesque sketch, with lines like, "The pants that you are wearing are not the pants that you are wearing."

IV. We're on an operating table under "the steel" scalpel of a "wounded surgeon" probing "the distempered part," which rhymes neatly with the "healer's art" and the "fever chart." There's a nurse, too,

Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

Was all this foreshadowed by the "ether" in the previous section? "The whole earth is our hospital" the next stanza tells us as the rhymes continue to click into place, until a stanza about "dripping blood our only drink" and "bloody flesh our only food" brings to mind Christ's eucharistic prayer just as we reach a surprise rhyme for "blood": "we call this Friday good."

It's Good Friday? We're reading a poem for Holy Week? Are we thinking of Christ's crucifixion? Is there an Easter dawning ahead of us? And why does he call the surgeon "wounded" and the nurse "dying?" By Christ's wounds we are healed, says Scripture, but the analogy doesn't fit, especially when we include the nurse.

V. "So here I am," we read, a poet in middle age between two wars, still learning how to write. Eliot describes so well what agonizes a writer: "every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure." The things one knows how to say are things "one no longer has to say." Picking up on the war reference, the poet has some fun, telling us that every new piece is "a raid on the inarticulate" with "shabby equipment" in the "general mess" of "[u]ndisciplined squads of emotion." It's all been said before anyway, "by men whom one cannot hope / To emulate." I get this stanza more than any other in the poem.

But what happened to Good Friday? The prayer of waiting for hope, love, and faith?

The poet is drawing threads from the whole poem for a conclusion. The final stanza brings us back to the home remembered in Part I, the "pattern" and "burning" of Part II, and the meditation on age from Part III. "As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living." With memory, not just of one's own life, but of generations, there's "a lifetime burning in every moment." "Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter." I like that. Do we have an object for this "love," here? A partner? Self? Humanity? God?

It feels like we're heading to a synthesis, and we are. "Old men ought to be explorers," he muses. "We must be still and still moving" --Ah, one of his trademark incidental paradoxes-- "[i]nto another intensity... a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation." Yes, we all go into the dark. But now it's in a good way.

I did roll my eyes at the so predictable last line. I guess it was inevitable for a poem that begins, "In my beginning is my end."

Checking my Answers From The Poetry Foundation I learn that Eliot's family traced its background to the village of East Coker, so the memories of "matrimonie" centuries before and references to names on stone are connecting him to that place in time. He wrote the poem in 1940. I also read that Eliot did have sonata-allegro form in mind when he composed his The Four Quartets, each poem opening with a meditation on the theme of time, with statement and counter-statement; each poem following a roughly similar arc through its movements as a sonata is supposed to do.

Lisa Ampelman in America: A Jesuit Review adds that the four quartets are suggested not only by four places of importance to Eliot, but also four seasons and four elements. I'm guessing "East Coker" is summer and fire.

The village of East Coker is also where Eliot's buried. In his beginning is his end, indeed.

Richard Blanco's "How to Love a Country": Good Question

How to Love a Country is a collection of poems by Richard Blanco, who rose to national prominence at President Obama's second inauguration when he read the poem he composed for the occasion, "One Today."

"How to love a country?" is also a fraught question.

Is "country" a geological space with geographical borders? In Blanco's "Complaint of El Rio Grande" (9), the river speaks to us as a personal, eternal entity, "meant for all things to meet..."

to make the clouds pause in the mirror
of my waters, to be home to fallen rain
that finds its way to me, to turn eons
of loveless rock into lovesick pebbles
and carry them as humble gifts back
to the sea which brings life to me.

Without wading into partisan politics, Blanco's river persona speaks from a humane place broader than national policy. Another poem "Using Country in a Sentence" (31) begins, "My chair is country to my desk," the desk is country to his chair, and he imagines "A mountain as country to the clouds that crown and hail its peak, then drift...." He describes a classroom map of the US and how he fell in love with "blue stare of the Great Lakes, and the endless shoulders/ of coastlines, the curvy hips of harbors, rivers/ like my palms' lines traced with wonder from / beginning to end" (68).

Is country a culture? Blanco writes a tribute to his Cuban father, "the exile who tried to master the language he chose to master him" (28). To the boy he punched in fifth grade, the poet admits "I ... envied you -- the americano sissy I wanted to be, with sheer skin, dainty freckles...that showy Happy Days lunchbox..." (29).

Is "country" a system of government? Blanco writes how the words Life, Liberty, Happiness for we, the people "buzz[ed] off the page" in school and "into my heart's ear" (68). His "Declaration of Inter-Dependence" riffs off of lines from famous American texts. Such has been our patient sufferance conjures the image of a mother waiting at the checkout line with her three children feeling both "joyful and bruised." After Jefferson's line we have petitioned for redress, Blanco tries to be empathetic to both sides in a violent encounter of a sort all too familiar:

We're a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We're the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We're the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn't shot. (2)

The title "Election Year" for a poem about a garden alerts us to allegory as "overnight, a vine you've never battled" shows up to take it over (6). Why use the screen of allegory to write about Trumpism? He writes of "something we can only / speak of by speaking to ourselves about flowers...tended under a constitution of stars / we must believe in..."

Can "country" include people with a background different from yours? Blanco finds commonality in aspirations. "Staring at Aspens" is subtitled "A History Lesson," as the poet mixes the long history of the Dine tribe through the Long Walk and the subterranean connection between all the aspens in a field, "all born from the same roots they share, [learn] how they thrive as many, yet live as one" (14). Taking on the persona of a daughter from China detained months at Angel Island in 1938, Blanco has her write to her father that she understands why fellow detainees write curses on the cell walls, "But those words never are mine -- /nothing can stop our sun, our moon ... nor what I have dreamed in you..." (16).

And what is to "love" a country? In "America the Beautiful Again"(66) he remembers his mother singing O beautiful, "her Cuban accent scaling up each vowel," and the boy Blanco feeling closer to America's spacious skies at an Independence Day parade when he's lifted up on his father's "sun-beat shoulders." Lamenting the combative shouting that he sees on TV, he exclaims, "How I want to sing again" in "harmony" with his divided country, "beautiful or not," from sea to shining sea.

But love of country is more than nostalgia. "[T]o know a country takes all we know of love," Blanco writes:

to keep our promise every morning of every
year, of every century, and wake up, stumble
downstairs with all our raging hope, sit down
at the kitchen table again, still blurry-eyed,
still tired, and say: Listen, we need to talk.

"What I Know of Country" (68-70)

A big fan of Blanco's earlier collection of poems and his memoir, I was intrigued when I heard Blanco explain on Atlanta's NPR station WABE-FM how he struggled with commissions that came his way after the inauguration. How do you write authentic poetry when entities that commission you to write will expect you to express their visions? Then, invited to write on the theme of "borders," Blanco felt liberated, realizing that borders can be political, personal, and psychological. How to Love a Country is a "mosaic" of poems on that theme.

I admit that I was put off at first by dozens of pages that look like prose essays. But read them aloud, and you appreciate how Blanco the poet plays with language. In the excerpt I quoted from "Declaration of Inter-Dependence," opposites balance to suggest how the black teen has no viable choice, and alliteration propels us from blast and bullet to guilt and grief. Often his poems develop as lists or litanies, thoughts with the same initial word: "Until...." or "Let...."

As in "Declaration," Blanco creates several poems with lines of found text as a matrix. Blanco borrows familiar lines from prayers and scripture (Where there is hatred, let me sow love... A time to rend, and a time to sew... And if I should die before I wake...) for a pair of poems about the Michael Brown shooting and its aftermath in "St. Louis: Prayer Before Dawn" (55) and "At Dawn" (71).. "Poetry Assignment #4: What Do You Miss Most?" alternates passionate lines paraphrased from Blanco's stint teaching poetry writing to prisoners with the dispassionate commentary of the teacher (53-54).

I also cringed at the more blatantly political bits. When Blanco stereotypes upper-middle-class middle-America middle-brow people by their cocktails (1), free-trade coffee, and their green lawns (8), my cringing is mitigated by the fact that he includes himself with them. When he's congratulating himself for playing cultural ambassador to Cuba, his Cuban limo driver, dealing with the Castro regime's impact on his family, blows up at Blanco (23), Why don't you write a damn poem about this?

After living with the book for some months, I appreciate how Blanco finds something personal and universal to grasp even when he writes about subjects that divide Americans.

More of my blogposts about Richard Blanco
• Solace in Blanco Verse for Midlife, Midwinter Blues was what I wrote when some lines by Blanco helped me through a couple of dark hours of self-doubt.
• Review of Looking for the Gulf Motel: Not Grievance but Gratitude.
• "It Takes a Pueblo": Richard Blanco's Loving Memoir (review of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood)
• See a curated list of my posts about Poetry and Secular Psalms.

Paul's Not-So-Requited Love for the Corinthians

After re-reading 1 + 2 Corinthians, what strikes me most is Paul's anguished affection for the church he founded. In our textbook for the program Education for Ministry (EfM), author Mark Allan Powell traces the ups and downs of a relationship he calls "not-so-requited love" (314).

[Image: 2 Corinthians 11.32-33. Paul escapes Damascus in a basket. "If I must boast," he writes to critics who call him boastful, "let me boast of the things that show my weakness."]

Powell describes the city Corinth as a sort of counterpart to Athens. Wanting the prestige of Athenians' elevated culture, wealthy Corinthians spent lavishly on arts and entertainment.

Paul's efforts won Jew and gentile, rich and poor to the church at Corinth. But not long after he left for other missions, concern for status distorted relationships within the church and diluted the gospel message. In Powell's formulation, a faction of the Corinthians "identif[ies] only with the risen Christ, not with the crucified Christ" (297). Paul drives home his message that freedom from judgement under the Jewish law does not mean "anything goes": "all things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial" (1 Cor 6.12). The benefits he means are unity and the glory of God.

Paul keeps writing letters to his beloved church. Though we don't have these other letters, we do have a sense of what they said. Paul refers to one of these in 1 Corinthians, and to others in 2 Corinthians, along with allusions to a disastrous visit in the time between 1 and 2, when a member "did [Paul] wrong" (7.12) and Paul left in anger. Paul refers to his challenge to the church, sent by another letter, "to prove their obedience by disciplining" that member. He admits that he has put off another visit because the prospect of another rejection was too great for him. 2 Corinthians is the letter he writes after hearing from Titus that the Corinthians have done as he asked.

There's another tension between Paul and Corinth. Between letters, a group of traveling preachers seduces the Corinthians with letters of recommendation, superior erudition, some kind of different teaching (a "glory gospel," Powell calls it), and commanding physical presence -- all while mocking Paul for ineloquence, dubious authority, "weak" physique, and boastfulness. Paul answers them with ridicule of his own. My favorite part is where Paul plays "can you top this?" with a list of humiliations he has suffered for Christ. To be so weak and yet so successful, he must have God on his side (12.9-10, Powell 320).

Powell finds evidence of a happy ending. The Corinthians valued the letters enough to copy and preserve them. Then Paul writes in Romans of his success raising funds in Corinth.

Powell likens 2 Corinthians to a Hollywood sequel that doesn't hang together as well as the first. Powell lays out how scholars have accounted for the abrupt changes of topic and mood. The theory is that the missing letters are actually patched into the text of 2 Corinthians. One place is clear-cut, where an impassioned plea for reconciliation cuts suddenly to a section about mixing with pagans (6.14-7.1), then resumes (7.2). Powell gives details with caveats (313). For me, it's an elegant and pleasing way to read the letter.

Powell ends with a wry sequel. 40 years after 2 Corinthians, the Bishop of Rome writes scathingly of factions in the church at Corinth who defy church elders. Powell asks, "Where have we heard that before?"

"Simply Sondheim" Live Stream: I'll Drink to That

Another first for COVID-19: For once during a Sondheim revue, I didn't have to hold back from singing with the actors, because it was live-streamed from a laptop in my kitchen. As the orchestra segued from number to number, I, martini in hand, rode waves of music that I've known and loved for 50 years, and the strong emotions that go with them. Sondheim puts character into the music and the lyrics, giving actors ample opportunity to inhabit their roles and show off their singing chops.

Thankfully foregoing novelty interpretations, this production still held surprises even for this veteran Sondheim fan. I kept a list:

• Two songs about traveling bumpy roads of life pair well to make the opening number: "Merrily We Roll Along" and "Bounce"
• I was delighted to see some songs that I've only heard, "Saturday Night" and "Country House"
• The delight for me of "Now/Soon/Later" has always been in Sondheim's blending of three distinctive songs into one trio, but closeups helped the actors to bring out the erotic tension built into the song
• The actors doing the father and son made "Impossible" from Forum as sweet as funny, joining together on one of my favorite Sondheim couplets (there are so many!) "the situation's fraught, / fraughter than I thought"
• "Poems" builds to a joyous conclusion as two men bond through a friendly haiku competition
• A suite of songs from Passion encapsulated the story, every character's feelings so raw and yet so eloquently expressed
• In "Something Just Broke" from Assassins an assortment of Americans of different times and walks of life sings, "Something just spoke / Something I wish I hadn't heard" and I teared up thinking of the recent assaults on our institutions
• "Finishing the Hat" is a miraculous expression of what it feels like to be an artist wrapped up in your work; the actor made clear the subtle argument of the lyric and the strong feeling behind it, ending with a defiance I didn't expect: "Look, I made a hat -- where there never was a hat!"
• In "The Right Girl," a man sings about the wife he adores who doesn't love him, and about a mistress who, in this interpretation, appears on stage, though he never looks at her when he sings to her -- giving the actress motivation to sing, when he exits, "Goodbye For Now"
• Two songs about obsession overlapped musically for strong combined effect, "Not a Day Goes By" and "Losing My Mind"

Simply Sondheim is live-streaming from Signature Theatre and Marquee TV until March 26. Conceived in 2015 by Eric Shaeffer and David Loud, orchestrated for 16-piece orchestra by Sondheim's longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick, this refreshed version, filmed on stage, is directed by Matthew Gardiner.

The only thing missing is applause.

[See a curated list of numerous blogposts about Sondheim's musicals and about other Sondheim revues at my Sondheim Page]

For Frank Boggs at 94

In 1973, I was a freshman in the Westminster Chorale, directed by Frank Boggs, "Mr. Boggs" to us. We were learning Vivaldi's Gloria. I'd never heard Baroque music; I'd never sung Latin or even seen it; I had no idea what a church Mass is.

When we came to the second movement, Mr. Boggs translated the text et in terra pax hominibus, "and on earth, peace to all mankind." The music was somber and slow. Frank paused rehearsal to ask, "Now, why would Vivaldi choose to set such a joyous message in a minor key?"

I'd never thought to ask why any artist ever did anything. He listened to our theories and never gave a definitive answer. So the discussion continued among us, coming up again even after graduation.

In that one moment, I was learning lessons that have carried me through 45 years' singing in church choirs and 40 years of teaching middle school English and drama:

• how to deepen my faith through music
• how to appreciate the thought behind art, and --
• how to teach!

Happy birthday, Frank. The Lord bless you and keep you.

[This is the text of a message recorded for presentation to Frank on his 94th birthday February 3rd. The photograph is a portion of the photo collage I made for FB's retirement, showing photos of Frank ca. age 50 from my years in his Chorale, 1973-1977. In the lower left is a photo of Frank with wife Doris, taken in Moscow, June 1977.]

Other Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• Echoes of My Teacher's Voice(01/2019)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews of Frank's performances that I've written over the years.