2013 Book Survey

Here's a silly survey sort of thing, but it gives me a chance to reflect back on some of my reading last year--even though I'm a few days late. A lot of my reading didn't make it on here, because it consisted of articles, poems, short stories, textbook material, and books I read around in for research, but didn't go straight through.

1. Best Book You Read In 2013?

I'm probably supposed to say Hamlet here, but I think I'll go for The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fall of Arthur is startlingly good; I didn't know Tolkien could write such great poetry, or such a powerful female character, or something so strong outside his Legendarium. You can review my reviews of it via this post.  
Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers gets second place: it is the best psychological exploration of marriage I've ever read. I wouldn't recommend taking it out of order; read it where it belongs in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, if that's your thing.

2. Book You Were Excited About and Thought You Were Going To Love More But Didn’t?

Ender's Game by Orsen Scott Card. I am a sucker for compelling narrative fiction, especially with a fantasy, sci-fi, or dystopian twist, but this was a creepy story. Eek. 

Also Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. I adore her stories, but this novel felt like all the darkness of her tales drawn out way too long without any light to relieve the darkness.

3. Most surprising (in a good way!) book of 2013?

A Myth of Shakespeare by Charles Williams. You know how crazy I am about Williams's writing, but that doesn't mean I always find his books easy or even enjoyable to read, especially his early works. This is an early play in verse, and I was prepared for it to be difficult and dry. Not at all! It's a very lively imagined biography of Shakespeare's life, with lots of scenes from Shakespeare's plays cut-and-pasted in. It's quite performable; if you've got connections to a theatre company, I recommend it.

4. Book you read in 2013 that you recommended to people most in 2013?

The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien. I think I'm going to mention this one most in answering these questions.

5. Best series you discovered in 2013?

The Legend of the Redeemer series by Richard Berrigan. It's also the only series I discovered this year, so.

6. Favorite new author you discovered in 2013?

Brenton Dickieson and/or Richard Berrigan (wait, am I allowed to mention friends of mine?). I readA Stone’s Throw Away by Brenton Dickieson and The Legacy of Kings (the first volume of the Legend of the Redeemer series) by Richard Berrigan. Brenton is a fellow Inklings scholar; I had only read his academic work before this, but loved his novel (which he wrote in three days). Richard is a co-worker and member of my local artists' fellowship. Check out Brenton's work on C.S. Lewis on his blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia, and check out Richard's author page on amazon.

7. Best book that was out of your comfort zone or was a new genre for you?

A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon. Of course, I read tons of academic stuff (the sorts of things that you don't read cover-to-cover, so they don't get mentioned here), and I've read some film theory and books about particular page-to-screen adaptations, but I hadn't read a work specifically about the theoretical concepts behind translating a book into a movie. I learned a lot from it, and also from The Tolkien Professor's Riddles in the Dark podcast, in which he applies his own theories of adaptation to Peter Jackson's Hobbit films.

8. Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2013?

Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James. All decent murder mysteries are “unputdownable” (don't we have a better word for that?), but this one, while remaining thoughtful, literate, and disturbing, was also compelling enough that I read it in flash.

9. Book You Read In 2013 That You Are Most Likely To Re-Read Next Year?

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I'll probably reread it again next year before the final installment of Peter Jackson's adaptation. (You can read my reviews of the first two Hobbit films here, here, and here.)

10. Favorite cover of a book you read in 2013?

I read almost every one of these on my Kindle, with the exception of the Williams books, that are all in a nice but fairly boring imprint from Apocryphile Press, the Inklings Heritage Series (I'd better be careful what I say, as I'm scheduled to contribute a book to that series this year!). Even though it's plain, I really loved the cover of The Fall of Arthur.

11. Most memorable character in 2013?

I reread most of the Hornblower books by C. S. Forester this year, and I'll never forget Captain Horatio Hornblower, especially as played by the gorgeous Ioan Gruffudd in the TV adaptations.

I finally met Poirot this year, too, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. I wonder if that's the one that fooled the Doctor?

2. Most beautifully written book read in 2013?

The Fall of Arthur (sorry to sound like a broken record). 
 Measure for Measure and Hamlet by William Shakespeare aren't bad, either (although I think Hamlet is a mess of a play, it's got some good lines....)

13. Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2013?

Not to be boring, but the real answer is The Fall of Arthur again, since I am now practically staking my professional career on my ability to squeeze an academic book out of it.... But That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis also continues to hit me hard, every time I read it. I got to teach it for the first time ever, this past spring, and the result was surprisingly good. I had a classroom full of ordinary Penn State students defending CSL's conservative views of marriage and gender roles. That was unforgettable. 
Speaking of that Humanities class at Penn State, the anthology that we used, Being Human edited by Leon Kass, also had an enormous impact on me. It's a collection of literary selections organized around the “big questions” of life, death, human nature, suffering, and so forth. I found it very powerful.

14. Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2013 to finally read?

The Masque of the Manuscript, The Masque of Perusal, The Masque of the Termination of Copyright, The Silver Stair, Windows of Night, Outlines of Romantic Theology, and the Arthurian Commonplace Book by Charles Williams. I'm supposed to be a Williams scholar, and there are still many of his books I have yet to read straight through. I hope that next year will find me with an even longer, more embarrassing, list of his works that I have finally read.

I guess Ender's Game belongs here, too, because I read the first chapter more than twenty years ago and have been meaning to finish it ever since.

15. Favorite Passage/Quote From A Book You Read In 2013?

Maybe this poem from The Silver Stair:. Sonnet XXXIII, “Of Love's Enemies—The Cross”:

In sight of stretched hands and tormented brows
How should I dare to venture or to win
Love? how draw word from silence to begin
Tremulous utterance of the bridal vows?
Or, as the letter of the law allows,
If so I dared, how keep them without sin,
While through our goings out and comings in
That Sorrow fronts the doorway of our house?


It is the wont of lovers, who delight
In time of shadows and in secrecy,
To linger under summer trees by night.
But on our lips the words fail, and our eyes
Look not to one another: a man dies

In dusk of noon upon a barren tree.

16. Shortest and Longest Book You Read In 2013?

That's a dumb question. Who cares?

17. Book That Had A Scene In It That Had You Reeling And Dying To Talk To Somebody About It?!

Well, since most of the books here that would fit that description were assigned in classes I teach, I did get to talk to somebody about it right away. 1984 by George Orwell and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton would have fit this category when I first read them, years ago, as would That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.

There were several startling scenes in She by H. Rider Haggard. Many vivid, visual, gripping scenes. And I haven't found anybody to talk to about it yet.

18. Favorite Relationship From A Book You Read In 2013 (be it romantic, friendship, etc).

That would have to be Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers. 
I also read something or other by P.G. Wodehouse with Jeeves and Wooster in it; they're hilarious. 
And Tommy and Tuppence from Secret Adversaries by Agatha Christie are, as I said, sparkling. 
There's also a fantastic relationship between the angelic character and the demonic character in the first chapter of The Ball and the Cross by G.K. Chesterton.

19. Favorite Book You Read in 2013 From An Author You’ve Read Previously

I assume you mean that I've read something else by this author before but haven't read this particular book? Well, then The Fall of Arthur by Tolkien, followed by A Myth of Shakespeare by Williams.

20. Best Book You Read In 2013 That You Read Based SOLELY On A Recommendation From Somebody Else:

I don't know about SOLELY (and what's with the caps?); there are many factors that influence anyone's reading: time, energy, cost, availability, connections... But anyway. 
Ender's Game, recommended by Marian (a member of my artist's fellowship).

I also read three biographies of C.S. Lewis, for my job as book review editor of Sehnsucht: the C. S. Lewis Journal. Does that count as a recommendation, when they get sent to me by the publisher to review? I didn't know where else to queeze them in. They are: C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alistair McGrath, A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis by Devin Brown, and C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Friendship by Colin Duriez. My review will appear in the next issue of Sehnsucht. In short, McGrath's was excellent, Brown's was good, Duriez's you can skip.

21. Genre You Read The Most From in 2013?

Fantasy.

22. Newest fictional crush from a book you read in 2013?

I don't have one this year. Any recommendations in this category for next year? Peter Dalgliesh is very admirable, and I reread most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, but I already had a crush on Sherlock (of course) and my admiration for Dalgliesh is not of the romantic kind.

23. Best 2013 debut you read?

Legacy of Kings in The Legend of the Redeemer series by Richard Berrigan

24. Most vivid world/imagery in a book you read in 2013?

The Hobbit, in the context of the larger legendarium and all the other Tolkien bits and pieces I read this year.

25. Book That Was The Most Fun To Read in 2013?

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. It was totally hilarious and such a surprise. It was quite unlike anything I've read by Christie, a side-splittingly funny genre parody. The characters are delightful: they really sparkle.

26. Book That Made You Cry Or Nearly Cry in 2013?

Uh... I'm very hard-hearted. I think I saved all my crying for Doctor Who this year. Plus there were a lot of re-reads, so the initial shock was gone from many of the plots.

27. Book You Read in 2013 That You Think Got Overlooked This Year Or When It Came Out?

Anything by Charles Williams. All his works are under-rated.

5-Minute McGrath

I'm reviewing three new Lewis biographies for Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal. Here are selections from my thoughts on the last of these. 

Alister McGrath's book C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet is by far the most academic of the trio. Its style is objective and authoritative. Its content is extensive, covering public, private, personal, theological, and professional aspects of Lewis' life. There are a few noteworthy moments in this book that call for brief examination. 
 

First, there is the much-discussed topic: McGrath provides a new chronology for Lewis' conversion. Many Lewis scholars and fans have been weighing in on this topic online; a google search for “McGrath Lewis conversion” will reveal insightful, detailed discussions about the dates Lewis records (in his letters, Surprised by Joy, and elsewhere), the dates McGrath offers, and evaluations of the two. Here is one by The Pilgrim in Narnia that clearly explains the situation. 
 

Second, McGrath focuses a little more than other biographers have done on Lewis' Irishness, discussing this topic heavily at the beginning of his volume. He positions Lewis in historical context far more fully than either of the others, discussing social class, politics, economics, and war just enough to provide a robust understanding of the world into which Lewis was born.

Third, McGrath includes much material about Mrs. Moore and about Charles Williams, analyzing each of these influences sufficiently. 
 

  His approach to one episode has, however, generated criticism. McGrath is very harsh towards Joy Davidman, Lewis' wife. He claims that Joy purposefully set out to “seduce” Lewis (323). He refers to (but, frustratingly, does not publish or quote from) “forty-five sonnets, written by Davidman for Lewis over the period 1951-1954” (323). Some of them, McGrath claims, “set out in great detail how Davidman attempted to forge that relationship [with Lewis]. Lewis is represented as a glacial figure, an iceberg that Davidman intends to melt through a heady mixture of intellectual sophistication and physical allure” (323). How strange, then, that McGrath does not quote any lines at all from these poems to support his controversial interpretation. Instead, he refers in his footnotes to Don King's forthcoming study, Yet One More Spring. We will have to wait, then, to see how much evidence there is to support McGrath's reading of Joy Davidman as a money-grubbing, sexually motivated, American predator. 
 

Even more surprising than McGrath's negative interpretation of Davidman is his failure to balance this ugly portrait with the image of the woman who brought passionate, comforting, companionable love to Lewis in his later years and the writer who inspired several of his last, best books. Had she done nothing else, Joy's role as midwife to Till We Have Faces alone would have earned her a place worthy of praise. Yet she did far more. 
 

Finally, McGrath is also critical of one other character in this story: Lewis himself. McGrath takes a refreshingly objective approach to the man and his work. His is no wimpy paean of watery praise for St. Lewis. Instead, he takes the philosopher and apologist seriously, analyzing each of Lewis' arguments and pointing out their weak spots. This is exactly what Lewis needed, and what he liked in his friends. He loved a good argument. He would have been delighted to sit down with McGrath and thrash out these points. 
 

Perhaps the most telling critique is his attack on the famous “trilemma”: the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord proof about Christ's nature. I have long thought that this lovely, elegant argument simply does not work as an evangelical tool, because it functions on Christian presuppositions—which are exactly what the listener presumably does not accept! McGrath takes the same approach, albeit much more thoroughly and professionally than I have done. He points out: “the main problem is that this argument does not work apologetically. It may well make sense to some Christian readers.... Yet the inner logic of this argument clearly presupposes a Christian framework of reasoning” (227) and ignores several alternatives that non-Christians may propose, such as “that Jesus was a well-loved religious leader and martyr whose followers later came to see him as divine” (227). One can imagine other possibilities, such as a universe in which god lies, or in which there are so many gods that anyone can truly claim godhead, or (the most plausible postmodern option) a universe in which “truth” and “lies” have no meaning-content. 
 

In short, McGrath's critiques of Lewis are good. They are necessary, in a publishing world glutted with Jacksploitation and hagiography. They are apt, opening cracks that should be further explored. And in spite of his harsh treatment of Davidman and less-than-idolatrous treatment of Lewis (or perhaps because of them), this is one of the most intelligent biographies on the market.

Charles Williams Summary #3: "Poems of Conformity" (1917)

Poems of Conformity is Williams's second volume of poems.

It contains more variety of forms than his first book, The Silver Stair, which was a sequence of 84 sonnets. He still uses fairly conventional meters in this second volume, but handles them deftly. In fact, the more I read these early works, the more I like them simply as poems. (The less I like some of their content, but that's a different story). Anyway, until now I have agreed with scholars who have pretty much dismissed these early books. In fact, I wrote in a paper recently:

His early volumes (beginning with The Silver Stair in 1912 and culminating with Heroes and Kings in 1930) are frequently called “pastiche” (see, for instance, Dunning 113), and employ rigid, archaic, juvenile rhyme schemes and metrical patterns. 

 Well, now I'm not so sure. These are fairly skillful poems. They are not wildly original, and when one compares them with what T. S. Eliot was writing at the time—this is the year “Prufrock” was published—Williams does not come out looking very good. Sure, there are hints of Shelley, Herbert, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, but there is a fine line between imitation and allusion. I think this collection is more on the side of allusion.

It was published in the same year that he got married and that he joined the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. However, I do not have the exact chronology of these events precisely mastered. Here is what I know:

• February 1915: CW tells Alice Meynell that he can't write poetry 
• May 1915: Harold Eyers killed in action 
• 20 May 1915: CW writes a poem memorializing Eyers 
• 12 April 1917: CW marries Florence “Michal” Sarah Conway 
• June 1917: Ernest Nottingham killed in action in France 
• July 1917: Poems of Conformity published 
• 21 September 1917: CW joins A. E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross 

But what's missing is the chronology of the writing, compilation, and revision of Poems of Conformity. Hadfield tells us that he submitted the MS to the publisher Elkin Matthews, who had turned it down. (Hadfield narrates, interestingly, that “In a temper, Charles threw it aside and marched out of the office at five-thirty”—but neglects to say on what day this particular 5:30 tantrum occurred; Hadfield 25). Then Fred Page (CW's office mate) sent it to OUP, who took it up. But Hadfield does not tell us when this happened.

Nowadays, publishing takes a long time. I finished a first draft of Caduceus in October of 2009; it was rejected all that spring, then I resubmitted it in the fall of 2010, it was accepted in March of 2011, and the book was finally published in February of 2012. But I don't know if a similar schedule applied in the 19-teens—or, quite probably, that since CW worked for OUP, they may have rushed his book through on a fast track. And I also don't know how much revision he may have done between rejection and acceptance, and then again after acceptance.

Why does it matter when he wrote the poems, when the book was first rejected, then accepted? Well, because of the relationship of the interpretation of these poems to the date of deaths and a wedding.

There are several major themes in this book: War, Romantic Theology, the City, and True Myth.

Williams had to write about war: World War One was raging at the time, and Harold Eyers and Ernest Nottingham, mentioned above as killed in action, were two of his closest friends. The poem entitled “20 May 1915” is clearly meant to memorialize Harold. But the chronology of the writing of the book would also determine whether he had time to memorialize Ernest as well. I'd like to know that.

ROMANTIC THEOLOGY 

The concept of Romantic Theology is very highly developed in this volume, which is dedicated to “Michal.” What's more, there are poems that clearly describe sex, especially the series of Sonnets on pp. 36-41. How about these powerful lines:

What Love indeed doth us inspire,
What doth our shrinking bodies fire
Till half a sacrifice and half
A triumph, all a sobbing laugh
Teaches how sacrifice may be
It own exceeding ecstasy;
How shall achieve the final Deed?
(“Churches,” p. 69). 

And yet he occasionally calls her a “virgin” (p. 47) or a “maid” (sorry, didn't note the page number). This suggests that the book contains poems written both before and after their wedding—I remember coming across something somewhere in Hadfield that Williams was a “self-described virgin at 30” when he got married.

Well, who cares about the private sexual life of this author? Really, I agree—except that Williams made a religion out of his private sexual life, and it is impossible to interpret his writings correctly without an understanding of that religion, which he called “Romantic Theology.” We'll soon be hearing about his book Outlines of Romantic Theology (published only posthumously) and later about one of his final masterpieces, The Figure of Beatrice. These are the two works in which he explicitly laid out the early and late forms of this system, although it is implicitly present, arguably, in all his works.

What is this Romantic Theology, and by what logic does it work? I have attempted to chart its progress in The Chapel of the Thorn, The Silver Stair, and Poems of Conformity, and hope to continue tracking its later developments. Here is what I have put together, speculatively:

• In his 20s, Williams seems to have gone through a crisis of faith. Specifically, he seems to have questioned the exclusive claims of Christianity. I put forward this suggestion based on the syncretism of Chapel of the Thorn, while I fully realize the dangers of biographical criticism based on a reading of poetry. 
• Somewhere, sometime around 1912, it appears that he decided “No one can do more than choose what to believe,” and chose to believe in Christianity. 
• Then he faced another dilemma. Given the exclusive truth of Christianity and its moral injunctions for how to live, he had to choose between the two traditional Ways of honoring God: the Way of the Affirmation of Images and the Way of the Negation of Images. Williams was much more naturally and temperamentally suited, it seems, for the Negative Way. He was “born under Virgo” and thought at times that maybe he had the gift of celibacy and should remain single (according to Hadfield). Thus, the theme of The Silver Stair is renunciation. 
• However, he got married. So at some point between 1912 and 1917 he chose the Way of Affirmation. He then committed himself to being a kind of prophet of this Way, although he really strove to balance the two Ways all his life. 
• The essence of the Way of Affirmation is that created objects and pleasures—and people—legitimately reveal something about God, and can be used not as objects of worship, but as objects of joy and pleasure such that our worship kind of passes through the object up to the Creator of that object. People are, indeed, the best “objects,” or icons, of this sort, because only humans are specifically said to be made “in the image of God.” 
• Well, then, the best way to get to know Someone invisible is to look at an image of Him. Based on this, Williams went on to say that the absolute best earthly object of this kind of “secondary worship” (that's what he calls it later, secondary worship) is the Beloved Woman. 
• Side note: how obnoxiously phallocentric of him. One assumes that women can do the same via using the Beloved Man as icon, but I haven't come across anything where he says that. Humph. 
• So, then, specifically in 1917, Williams was using Florence “Michal” Sarah Conway Williams as his Object of Secondary Worship, as the icon of his Romantic Theology. By affirming—praising, enjoying, delighting in—her excellences, he was taking steps up the ladder towards God, he believed. 

That, so far as I can make out, is the logic of Romantic Theology. I would be glad of corrections, additions, disagreements, etc.

This kind of iconic use of Michal, then, comprises the largest portion of Poems of Conformity. Here are lines that could be taken up as an epigraph of Romantic Theology:

How, though I know him full of grace,
Should I before the God's young face
Dare kneel or gifts unfurl?
Only I bring them all to thee
Who still, Adored! hast need of me,
Being but a mortal girl!
(“Epilogue,” p. 126). 

I wonder if even Dante was ever so explicit! At moments in this volume, the narrative voice seems shocked by how powerful sex is, by how much her physical presence changes him. And yet the longing, the sense of loss even during possession, is also present—as I believe it must be with every thoughtful pair of lovers. Who has not felt, during a kiss or an embrace, the heartbreak and horror of the future time when you will be torn apart? Who does not gird oneself for future grief even in the moment of first vows? As Williams puts it, in the context of remembering Christ's sufferings even while enjoying the delights of love, “Dear, / Livelong be our entreaty this, / To feel the sword in every kiss” (“Presentation,” p. 46).

It is also in this book that Williams starts to move from from a narrative microcosm to a diagrammatic microcosm—which requires quite some explanation. Let me pause to explicate what I believe are the two central poems, and what I mean by this use of “narrative” and “diagrammatic” should then become clear[er].

The most important poem in this book for the concept of Romantic Theology is “The Christian Year” (pp. 72-77). In this poem, Williams develops even more clearly an idea that he first put forward in The Silver Stair. This is the idea that each human marriage follows the narrative pattern of Christ's life on earth. In “The Christian Year,” Williams goes through the following incidents:

• Annunciation 
• Conception 
• Mary's Pregnancy 
• Nativity 
• Adoration of the Shepherds 
• Adoration of the Magi 
• Flight to Egypt 
• Return to Nazareth 
• Presentation in the Temple and Simon's Prophecy 
• Crucifixion 
• Burial 
• Resurrection 
• Road to Emmaus 

...and in each description, he makes clear that this event is being re-enacted in the lives of the lovers. For instance, in the Crucifixion and Burial sections, two voices converse, thus:

“Surely his death had end when once he died?”
“Always, in all men, is he crucified!”
“Of old he rose: shall he not rise in us?” 

and later:

“Estrangèd grow our hearts; cold, cold our will.”
“Aramathean Joseph felt that chill.” 

Perhaps most beautifully, here are the lines about marriage vows matching up to the Nativity:

...the Child brought forth within
This silver-lanterned shelter of our skin,
Where whispers rustle like heaped straw; our hands,
Serving that Innocence for swaddling-bands,
Clasp the invisible Immanuel thus:
Lo, the Lord's glory is come in to us! 

Whew. This seems crazy.

I mean, who thinks that Jesus gets born in them when they fall in love? And what if you fall in love more than once? (Williams had to face that problem later). And what about if you fall out of love—not just in the normal way, when every marriage has to transition from an erotic power to serious companionship and mutual labor, but in a fatal, divorcing kind of way? These are serious problems. Of course, the potential charge of idolatry is also a serious problem. But I've written enough (for now) about that elsewhere.

Another place Williams may have gotten this idea of Romantic Theology as Way of Affirmation was, possibly, from his reading in the Occult. There is a Hermetic principle, formulated in the “Emerald Tablet” that was not written by Hermes Trismagistus, called the principle of Correspondence. In Madame Blavatsky's translation, this principle is: “What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of the one thing.” In short, “as above, so below.” As in Heaven, so on earth. Or, vice-versa, then, what is on earth reveals what is in heaven. Especially one's girlfriend.

It seems likely that Williams would have encountered this principle already, because he had certainly been reading books by A. E. Waite at this point. Indeed, only two months after the publication of Poems of Conformity, Williams joined the FRC.

OK, so what did I mean by moving from a narrative microcosm to a diagrammatic one? Well, the narrative microcosm is the idea that each pair of lovers re-enacts Christ's life. The diagrammatic idea is just in its infant form in in The Chapel of the Thorn, The Silver Stair, and Poems of Conformity. It's the concept he would develop later, in which each part of the human body matches up to a country on the map of Europe, and all of those match up to certain virtues or qualities of God's kingdom on earth.

The other central poem, “The Repose of Our Lady: A Dirge” (pp. 106-110) is not so much about Romantic Theology. Instead, it is about that other fascinating topic, True Myth. But Williams (characteristically) goes about the whole True Myth thing in an odd way. He makes Mary into a fertility goddess.

I kid you not:

To her more made than to Demeter suit;
In the ploughed field the busy corn struck root
By Her; with great fish seas grew populous,
And little ponds with stickleback and newt.
. . .
...barnfowl and herd she blessed
With chick and calf, and the wild beast with cubs.
. . .
She is the mother of flocks and corn heaped high,
She is the mother of all fertility...
. . .
Sunshine her smile, her spread hand rainfall gives:
But on her deep breasts Love that ever lives,
Refreshing all worlds, making all things new,
Throve, who eternally and ever thrives. 

Seriously. Charles, will you never cease to surprise and amaze?

4th Review of CADUCEUS

M.E. Hitchcock has graciously reviewed Caduceus on amazon. Here is the complete review:

A book worth reading more than once

This beautiful little book is completely full of love. There is a love of words and of learning, a love of place and family, a love of myth and legend, of love itself, of symbolism, and most importantly (to me) a love of presence and (most importantly to the author) a love of God.

There is a lot to see here in this deceptively thin volume. I read through it one sunny Sunday and was moved by so many images. I let it sit for a few weeks and two images haunted me still: a sexy drop of oil poised to drip and end bliss, and climbers dwarfed by then killed by the earth and the ice and the winds and the Voice of God which has made them.

But haunt isn't the right word either. These images persisted and lived in me. They became part of me somehow. I have remembered them not as something I read, but as something that happened to me. There is no higher praise I can give a poem.

The prologue promises and the book delivers on a wide variety of voice, subject, and complexity. there ought to be at least one poem in here that just instantly makes sense for each reader. And each poem is of a very high level of craft, so whatever specific one grabs you, you can be sure that the others are just as good, if you've a will to understand them.

The epilogue is a beautiful little offering of humility to both Higgins' God and her art. This is a humility that is in each poem and thus this is an author that does not get in her own way at all.

Five-Minute Runyan

I'm reviewing Tania Runyan's new book of poetry, A Thousand Vessels, for Curator magazine. Here is a taste of a few points: 

From the Greek epic to the haiku, the tragic drama to the sonnet, poetry has spanned the history of literary scope as well as of social and linguistic change. In general, Americans are not writing epic poetry. Our poetry is tiny, isolated, incidental, and possibly insignificant.

Tania Runyan's A Thousand Vessels is in between the two ends of the scale of size. The book as a whole sweeps across thousands of years of Biblical history, from “Genesis” to “The Empty Tomb.” This volume gives voices to women from the Biblical narrative—Eve, Sarah, Dinah, Ruth, Esther, Mary, the woman at the well, Martha, Jairus' daughter, and Mary Magdalene. And we are also numbered in the Thousand Vessels.

Runyan is at her best with the intimate details of mothering, and the overwhelming effect of her book is to take away the differences between ourselves and Ruth, Boaz, Jairus, Mary Magdalene. The sad side of these stories haunts her verse. The "thousand vessels" are women: the fragile vials for holding tear drops, cups for wrath, vases for grief, all the way down to today when Runyan and I add our crystal agony to the shelf.

There are surprising turns in these poems, nice endings, and memorable individual lines. Her greatest strength is bringing ancient women to life through an impassive narrative voice, giving stories and characters a different color than they ever had before. And there is a large scope packed into these tiny poetic vessels.

Five-minute Wallace

I have just finished reading The Blind Contessa's New Machine by the young, beautiful, and intrepid Carey Wallace. I had the privilege of meeting Carey at an International Arts Movement event back in February (on which I reported here).

WOW.

This is the novel of the decade, folks. I'm serious. It is the most beautiful thing I've read in ages, and masterfully executed. It has the poise and control usually belonging to a much older writer, coupled with the heartaching beauty of any age that's often associated with the young.

The prose is tight and clean. The characters are sparely drawn, yet live the more fully for all that. It feels like how Hemingway would write if he were young, in love, embittered, and enamored by a nostalgic kind of taste for beauty. It has a touch of "Ever After," which was a lovely film. It's full of reflections, stars, inventions, lemon blossoms, darkness, and dreams. A book made of jewels.

Go read it!!!!!!!!!!!

Five-Minute Ray

Here's another "five-minute book review"; I have piles of books I'm supposed to review on this blog, but very little time in which to do it. So, I'll just write my first thoughts about the book really fast now and then and share them with you.

Enjoy!

“Five-minute” review

American Masculine by Shann Ray


This collection of ten short stories is astonishingly powerful. I give it the highest praise I can think of: it is real literature.

Shann Ray feels like a male Flannery O'Connor from the American West. His sense of place is impeccable, his plots brutal and gritty, his prose unique. The forms of his stories are experimental, deftly manipulating fluid chronologies for maximum emotional impact.

Then men and women in these stories are seriously broken -- addicted to drugs, sex, porn, alcohol, violence -- and still beautiful. In their deaths, their grief, and their slow groping towards a love so strong it will break and remake them, a realistic redemption just barely shines through. These stories are hard.

Well, the volume starts out really hard. Violent, ugly, painful. Then it gets softer. A women plans an affair, but ends up going home to husband and baby. A rock-hard rodeo man softens, terrified, towards marriage. People are going to make a go of it in these stories. And we desperately hope they will.

And they are us. These stories are sad, but as I read them, I was uplifted into that kind of piercing mental exaltation that great literature brings, whether comic or tragic. And that's how I knew Shann Ray has what it takes. This is real writing.

Read it!


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James Shapiro wrote Shakespeare?

Take a look at the cover of the book and you'll see what I mean. :)


Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So far, this book is amazing! It purports to be a balanced view of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and presents the case for Francis Bacon, then the Earl of Oxford, then Shakespeare. The beginning, however, is a remarkable survey of early Shakespeare scholarship (late 1700s), tracing the lines that laid down the kinds of thinking that made the authorship controversy possible. I highly recommend it.


. . .

Now, after finishing this book, I still highly recommend it! It's excellent. It is not unbiased, but a long immersion in postmodernism has taught us that objectivity is impossible anyway. So, it's a lovely, lively survey of (not the authorship question itself, but) WHY people question Shakespeare's authorship. It has a great cast of characters: forgers, lunatics, spiritualists (one guy held seances in which his medium called up Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare to get from them the whole story. He did get the whole story of who wrote what, and even got a couple of lousy sonnets out of them. Funny that guys write better when they're alive than when they're dead), philosophers, psychoanalyists (Freud was an Oxfordian), novelists (Mark Twain was, too), feminists, historians, politicians.... It's well-written, quite readable, and (in the end) quite persuasive that Shakespeare of Stratford was the guy after all.

If you're going to go see "Anonymous" (don't know why you'd waste your money, really), read this first!



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5-minute Glyer

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is one of the most important Inklings studies in the last few years (the others are Planet Narnia, C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier, The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams & His Contemporaries, and C.S. Lewis & the Church). If you had to pick just two, I would recommend this one and Planet Narnia. This is a lovely, lively, fascinating study of the many ways that the Inklings influenced one another. As a writer in community myself, I found it very encouraging.



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Five-Minute Wolfe

Here's another "five-minute book review"; well, not really a review, since I'm officially reviewing this book for Books & Culture. So, this is more of a quick explanation and recommendation. Enjoy!

“Five-minute” review Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age
by Gregory Wolfe
(a recent "Where Are We Now?" interviewee)

This is a collection of essays that Wolfe has written throughout his career as editor of Image Journal. While they cover a variety of topics from theoretical aesthetics to autobiography to literary reflection, they are bound together by the theme of Christian Humanism. This is the concept, which Wolfe sees in resurgence, that imaginative and beautiful cultural products are perhaps the best way to communicate truth and goodness in our postmodern times. This is not a book you need to read straight through, although it is excellently well organized and makes most sense that way (introductory ideas, theoretical/autobiographical chapters, then chapters on individual writers and artists). You can just pick you the chapter, say, on Shūsaku Endō and learn a lot that way. This book is packed with recommendations of authors to read. There's also a subtext that recommends conversion to Roman Catholicism, since the majority of the artists and writers studied have done just that. Indeed, Wolfe makes a subtle but persuasive case that it has been Roman Catholics who have stewarded the arts in America (and elsewhere) while Evangelical Protestants have locked their doors to sing horribly cheesy and poorly written songs and look at ugly clip art. You know, he's got a point there. He's got a lot of points. But go and read it for yourself and see what the rest of them are.

Man the easels!

"Beauty is a salve for a wounded culture"
"we cannot dine on the dust of the past"
"Art must come to grips with the tragedy of life in a fallen world"
" 'All truth is God's truth,' says Augustine, and the same goes for beauty"
"go knee-deep into the messiness of God's world and make beauty of it"

"we seem to be in the midst of a renaissance of Christian humanism"
writes Brian Dijkema in his review of two new (well, one new and one new-ish) books on faith and culture:



1. Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age, by Gregory Wolfe (a recent "Where Are We Now?" interviewee)

2. Making the Best Of It: Following Christ in the Real World, by John G. Stackhouse.

As Brian explains, Stackhouse's book is basically a new look at Reinhold Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture, whose categories can still, with some modifications in their application, help structure and guide Christians' thoughts about engaging with the larger world of art and all those human products collectively known as "culture."

In his comparison of the two writers, Brian also asks a question relevant to my recent article about church patronage of the arts, in which I advise arts not to compromise theological truth for originality. Brian writes that Wolfe implicitly raises: "the question of whether or not it is easier for [Roman] Catholics—for whom theological orthodoxy is given from on high and communally—to exercise the freedom necessary to grapple with the messiness of human life, than for the Protestant who must work with art individually while also being concerned with doctrinal rightness is something worthy of further exploration. Perhaps it is not just a latent sense of Puritan pragmatism or iconoclasm which plagues Protestant artists—perhaps ecclesiology also matters?"

As a side note, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Brian discusses, is also President of the Charles Williams society--so there's another interesting connection to my perennial interests.

I've put all three books in my amazon.com shopping cart and plan to purchase, read, and review them as soon as I can scramble up the $$ and time from other projects. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, if you read them yourself, I'd love to know your thoughts.