Angle of Repose

I'm staying busy and preparing to head to Guatemala late this week...  So for now, I just have another book review.  I've listened to this book while in the gym during January.  

Angle of Repose  (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 569 pages (Audible narrator Mark Bramhall, 22 hours and seven minutes). 

It’s the summer of 1970 in California. Lyman Ward is a divorced and retired professor. He has lost a leg to disease. He spends his days with the aid of a neighbor, going through is grandmother’s letters and using them to recreate his grandparent’s lives in the American West. Oliver, his grandfather, was a mining engineer. He married Susan, an artist and author from New York. After moving West, she continues her work while regularly writing letters to her friend in the East.  With her life tied to a mining engineer, she moves all over the West and even to Mexico. The two are always hopeful, but nothing ever works out.  Oliver creates a process for making cement, but doesn’t patent it and someone else develops it. He is honest about the mines he works which leads to problems in a society where many use fake reports to make a killing selling shares in worthless mines.  He has a vision for a massive water project in Idaho, but loses his backing before it pays off.  He trusts an attorney to file his papers for land and then learns the attorney has claimed the land for himself.  His honesty and the trust he places in others leads to disappointment and after disappointment.  While having a few good years, he never makes it big while Susan’s work (illustrations for books as well as articles on the West) keeps the family afloat.  In time, a gap begins to break between Susan and Oliver. She is lured away by Oliver’s loyal assistant, Frank.  Although she declines Frank’s offer, the rift between Susan and Oliver widens. After the accidental drowning of a child, Frank’s suicide, and more separation, the two live out their lives accepting their less than happy estate.

As Stegner bounces back and forth from the 19^th Century to 1970, parallels between Lyman Ward and his Grandparents become apparent. While this is a novel about the West, it is also a novel about families and relationships. However, the West plays a role as the backdrop for the story. It’s a land of promise that often fails to live up to its hype. The Ward’s traveling from place to place in the hopes of hitting it big remind me of Bo and Elsa in Stegner’s first novel, TheBig Rock Candy Mountain which begins around the turn of the twentieth century, a few decades later than Angle of Repose (1870s-1890s). The families of both novels spend their lives jumping around over the West in an attempt to make it big.  But there is a difference in the two men.  Oliver is very honest, where Bo is often operating outside the law.  They both find more trouble than reward in the American West.

Stegner’s prose is masterful as he captures the landscape of the West.  As he did in Big Rock, he often uses the journey across country to describe the differences between the East and West.  There is something about the wide-open spaces that draws his characters back to their home.  Even though Susan resisted becoming a western woman, by the end of the book, she has been lured into the landscape. It may not always be a place where dreams are fulfilled, but it is a place of hope and promise.

The title has to do with an engineering concept about the angle material (such as tailings from a mine) will stabilize and not continue to roll down a slope.  Stegner is able to apply this term to human relationships and it comes up numerous times within the book.

Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for this novel, even though he did have its critics.  For a work of fiction, he does quote letters from a woman whom he modeled Susan Ward afterwards. These letters are extensively quoted throughout the book and provide opportunities for Lyman Ward (the narrator) to speculate about what was going on in the lives of his grandparents.  I enjoyed this book and do recommend it.  Of course, I have spent much time studying mining camps in the West and especially in Nevada, so this book was, as some say, “right up my alley.”  I listened to the book, but had a hard copy which I did some actual reading over interesting sections.  

Landlocked review

I wrote this back in the early summer and never got around to posting it... There's some good poems here. The author has been a part of a writing group that I participate with in Savannah.

Danelle Lejeune, “Landlocked: Etymology of Whale-fish and Grace (Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 107) 65 pages

This is a delightful book of poems with wonderful images of bees, cooking, chores around the farm and home, children, secrets, broken relationships, and new horizons.  Lejeune, the child of Cajun parents, draws from her roots in Louisiana, across the Midwest including time on a hog farm in Iowa where her children were born, and on to the coastal plain of Georgia where she now lives.  Many of these poems are inspired by people: her parents, her children, and her ex-husband.  They capture the difficulty of leaving the past behind. In “What Brings Her Ghost Back,” she tells of the difficulty of exorcising her mother’s ghost which reappears by the way she kneads dough in a manner reminiscence of her mother and how her mother’s laughter is heard in her children. It is evident that Lejeune carefully chooses the stories and words that make it into her tightly woven poems.  “I smile and laugh and pretend words cannot break me,” she concludes the poem, “Monsters and Mouthfeel.” But that’s only a dream as Lejuene demonstrates. Words and memories carry the power to destroy. Yet, words also hold the power to build and the keys to grace.  

I recommend Landlocked: Etymology of Whale-fish and Grace.  The readers will delight in Lejeune’s use of language and metaphor.  This is a book one will want to pull off the shelf over and over again in order to revisit those poems.  Lejeune also works with the Ossabaw Writer’s Retreat.  

Peace In the Heart

I know this is a long book review, but I found much to enjoy from reading it and sadly I doubt few of you will have the pleasure as it is hard to get. On a good note, we've adopted a rescue pup (she's between 2-3 years old and fits right in) so the house is not nearly as quiet as before. She is totally different from Trisket, which is good. I'll introduce her soon.

Archibald Rutledge, Peace in the Heart (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1930), 316 pages, no illustrations

Archibald Rutledge was the poet laureate of South Carolina for forty years. During his long life, he published nearly 50 books, mostly on outdoor life and poetry. He also wrote for a number of outdoor magazines. Born in 1883 in McClellanville, SC, Rutledge grew up on Hampton Plantation. His ancestors included a long list of South Carolina royalty including a signer of the Declaration of Independence. As a child, his father, “the Colonel,” took him hunting and fishing. He attended high school in Charleston and later Union College in Schenectady, New York. Upon graduation, he taught English at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. During this time, he continued to make regular trips back to Hampton, especially during the Christmas break. In the 1930s, he moved back to South Carolina and devoted his life to the plantation and writing. He would live out his life at the plantation, except for the summer months when he headed to the beach or the North Carolina Mountains. Shortly before his death, he sold the plantation and remaining land to the state of South Carolina. Today it is maintained as a park.  

Peace in the Heart was first published in 1927. At the time, Rutledge was still teaching in Pennsylvania. There were a number of editions, the last published in 1947. Sadly it is out of print and hard to obtain. A friend who introduced me to Rutledge and loaned me her copy of this book. Desiring to have a copy for my library, I was able to find copies of this book for sale (but not on Amazon) and with a hefty price tag of  $200 or more! If you want to read it, I would recommend checking libraries.

The book is a structured series of essays that follow the movement of the day and seasons. Rutledge starts at sunrise and spring and ending with night and winter. He finds God’s hand in the cycles of the day and the year.  “[W]e who love Nature sense that all seasons are divinely ordered,” he writes. “God takes our hands gently in spring” (28)

Drawing from his keen observations of nature, Rutledge explores life. An example of his observations is seen in the interest he took in a mud-dauber” (type of wasp) who built his dirt home on one of the beans of Rutledge’s porch.  He kept knowing the dirt off, but the wasp kept rebuilding it.  Each load of sand that the wasp mined near the creek, took him four minutes to obtain and each rebuilding, the sand home took on a redder hue as the wasp increased the portion of clay, hoping to build a stronger home that would last (279-80).

Rutledge professes his Christian faith, but at times I wondered if his faith is more influenced by the natural world than the Word or Bible.  “Face to face with Nature, we are face to face with God; and I for one believe Him to be the God of love as well as the God of law. That I cannot see Him troubles me not.  I find him in His works, in His constant abundant blessings, in the nature of the human soul” (76).  He thanks his Creator for supplying necessities and extras.  Sunlight, air, water, food and shelter are necessities.  Moonlight and starlight along with music, perfumes, flowers and the wind crooning through pines are extras to be enjoyed.  (15) After telling of a friend who had been dying, but gained strength and recovered after hearing a bird sing, he notes how God “does not love us with words: He loves us by giving us everything we need in every way” (16). While acknowledging his own sentimentalism and how nature writers are criticized for being sentimental, he wonders why it’s seen as a bad thing (68).  Toward the end of the book, he reports on how a German scientist came to the conclusion that wild things cannot reason. Rutledge then sarcastically quips, “Well, they get along remarkably in a world in which reasoning men have a pretty hard struggle to succeed” (283).

He finds the natural world so intriguing and peaceful, suggesting that nature plans for life and not death (243). Obviously he overlooks the life and death struggle animals have in the wild. Although a hunter, he doesn’t glorify the killing of animals and in one story in which he went duck hunting but left his gun on a tree by the launch, he muses how he was glad for often a man who takes a gun leaves his heart at home” (110). He finds that by observing natural laws we can keep out of trouble, drawing on how animals know on instinct how to act (51) and that the natural world knows to obey such universal laws and not to attempt to make a bargain with the Almighty (56).  While he has obviously learned much from scientists, he suggests that we other types of questions that the scientists don’t ask.  “What does this mean in terms of the spirit? What does all this beauty and intelligence suggest to the heart?  What can I learn from my own soul by surveying in thoughtful love the sounds of God’s wild children” (253-4).

Moving through the day, he explores storms and issues that arises with high water levels.  He finds that our hearts rise in storms, which is why they can be a blessing (78), while providing us an opportunity to shelter others and “develop our sympathies” (86). After the storm has passed, we can rejoice that we have survived and the peace we find in such deliverance (90).  High water, especially where fresh water pushes into salt water, creates unique situations.  He tells about a beach in South Carolina in which bathers were horrified to see a large alligator, washed out to see in high water, delighting in riding waves in the surf (107).  Interestingly, he did not include a chapter on drought and the unique ways low water levels open up new opportunities to explore.  

A couple of chapters were devoted to two individuals who were influential in his life.  Prince was an African American boy with whom he grew up.  His family had live on the plantation as slaves. After emanation, both of his parents worked at the plantation. His mother was the cook for 40 years and his father brought in the firewood and on the cool mornings would be fires in the hearths throughout the home. In Rutledge’s book, God’s Children, there are more stories about Prince.

The other individual to whom a chapter is devoted is Rutledge’s father. Colonel Rutledge fought in the Civil War and was the youngest Colonel in the Confederate army. He was wounded twice (at Malvern Hill and Antietam). While fighting, he had a slave with him, who saved him at Antietam, at risk of his own life and took him back to safety in Virginia. Rutledge tells of his father visiting him when he lived in Pennsylvania. They had driven down to the Antietam battlefield where a guide was describing the battle to them and mentioned, unknowingly, about the “gallant Colonel Henry Middleton Rutledge” of the 25th North Carolina Infantry.  Afterwards, his father introduced himself to the guide (217-218).  His father was a kind man and would often go to buy groceries and come back empty handed, after have given the groceries away to those in need.  Rutledge in admiration of his father and writes:    

“What a man’s worth is in this world depends on the kind of wake he leaves behind him as he passes.  If my Colonel came home empty-handed in a material way, it was because he had ‘bestowed all his goods to feed the poor.” His riches consisted not on what he brought with him but on what he left behind.” (208)

As for the slave who had saved his life, Rutledge tells his father’s story of a government agent who were visiting African-Americans that may have fought in the Civil War to determine their eligibility for a pension. This former slave told the agent (who was working on commission) that he was in the war all four years, omitting which side he had served during the war. To Rutledge’s father’s delight, he was granted a pension. After his wife died, he married a younger woman and at the time of the writing of this book, she was still receiving his pension (218-219).  

Rutledge seems, however, to be most at home alone in the woods. He has a chapter on solitude and another on worship in the wild.  He talks joy and delight in the world and the animals within it.  He seems much more interested in the animal kingdom than plants, only mentioning flowers and trees in passing.  But with his intimate knowledge of wildlife, he believes that God delights in the world and it’s just another example of God’s love for us.  Although he doesn’t dwell on sin, Rutledge does not that only the human race is able to live “in opposition to his physical instincts” and to act as if he’s immortal (161). However, he does appears to have a concept of the incarnation, suggesting that the knowledge of God’s presence and love should be comforting as it means our foes are already defeated (177).

Like his book, God’s Children, there are also some paternalistic views in this book that would be considered politically incorrect in today’s world.  This comes out mostly when he talks about his father’s friendship with his former slaves.  Writing decades before the Civil Rights movement, Rutledge learned from his father that “while equality is often impossible, brotherhood never is” (210-211). This he appears to have accepted unquestionably, but his views were probably more enlightening than most during the 1920s.

I do recommend this book (if you can find a copy) for I found Rutledge’s views of nature to be much aligned with mine.  I like the analogy he made between water lilies and human beings.  Lilies appear to be floating on the surface, but what we don’t see is that they are tethered to the earth.  We, too, need to be so anchored.

The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

David Whyte, “The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America,” (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 323 pages including notes, bibliography and index.  No pictures.

While attending a poetry workshop on Iona in June, I learned of this book and was intrigued.  When I got back home, I picked up a copy and read it back in August while in North Carolina on a planning leave.  I was pleasantly surprised.  It was better than I expected.  Whyte is a British poet who moved to America and found himself involved with corporations as he attempted to encourage their creativity with the use of poetry.

You’d think that management and poets would avoid each other.   After all, management is attempting to maximize the productivity of employees and poetry does little for the bottom line.  Work is about doing, while poetry is about being (20). However, Whyte suggests that both need each other.  Without poetry (and the arts) corporations becomes soulless, and poetry without the corporate world becomes useless.  Poetry can help businesses have employees who are better-rounded and who are creative.  To tap into the creative process of individuals, souls must be nurtured and emotions understood.  Of course, this begs the question as to what is the soul.  And there are no easy definitions or ways to understand the soul. 

It’s not just poetry from which Whyte draws meaning.  He draws from all kinds of stories as archetypes of our experiences in life and within organizations.   There’s Dante, lost and walking in the dark woods and Beowulf facing not only his fears, but the mother of his fears.  He explores the luring passions of fire around which our storytelling and language began, and the Irish myth of Fionn and the need for mentors to teach a new generation to rise even further.  He draws from the wisdom of Greek myths that point to our need to become elders, and to the English poet Coleridge observing the chaotic yet orderly flight of starlings.  In addition to the above who became major themes within individual chapters, he draws from a host of others throughout this book such as Franz Kafka, St. John of the Cross, Goethe, the Bible, the Gilgamesh, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paulo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Chinese mythology, Robert Burns, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Zen, Native American and African legends, Matt Groening (“Life in Hell” cartoons), among others.   

This is not a how-to book on saving corporate America.  Instead, it is a complex book that invites us to consider stories with ancient truths and how they might help us navigate the complex world in which we find ourselves.  

Whyte sees poetry as a way that corporate America can foster the well-being of the souls of employees and thereby allow them to bring creativity into the organization as they navigate the path between imposed orderliness and chaos.  This book is over twenty years old and I know he has revised a new edition.  I wonder if  he addressed how poetry might address Enron and the current political nature of our society.  

Quotes:

•  The poet needs the practicalities of making a living to test and temper the lyricism of insight and observation.  The corporation needs the poet’s insight and powers of attention in order to weave the inner world of soul and creativity with the outer world of form and matter (9)
•  Corporate America desperately needs the powers historically associated with the poetic imagination not only to see their way through the present whirligig of change, but also, because poetry asks for accountability to a human community, for rootedness and responsibility even as it changes. (10
• “If work is all about doing, then the soul is all about being: the indiscriminate enjoyer of everything that comes our way.  If work is the world, then the soul is our home.”  (20)
• Work is a series of events.  The soul, as James Hillman says, turns those workaday events into experience.  (22)
•  But at three in the morning, when we are alone, our defenses are down, and we cannot sleep, the huge green hand rises from below and drags us into something hitherto ignored, deeper and more urgent (37)
•  The harder point is that the fears are almost always irrational.  You cannot reason them out of existence.  If you could, they would have gone long ago.  What does it take to have the maturity to admit the lake is there and then the deeper courage to slip beneath its still surface.  (46)
• The only real question is not one of winning or losing, but of experiencing life with an ever-increasing depth.  The storyteller says, why not go down… (71)
•  Those circles of fire were the pivot around which our storytelling and language began.   We must have listened to the first stories over the crack of twigs, with our faces warmed by the fire’s heat and our backs chilled by the surrounding dark.  Little wonder that fire lies in the center of what we understand to be alive and engaged. (81)
• I think we all live with the hope that we can put off our creative imperatives until a later time and not be any the worse for it.  But refusing to give room to the fire, our bodies fill with an acrid smoke, as if we had covered the flame and starved it of oxygen. (92) 
• We like the idea of heaven but feel safer when it remains on the other side of existence.  (104)
• But at the crucial moment, just as it is ready to gather its just reward, the older, experienced side of us will watch helplessly as the eternally innocent and inexperienced young fool, blessed by the grace of luck and youth, simply in the right place at the right time, wanders innocently into the clearing and takes the treasure for which we have worked so hard. (168)
•  In a country dedicated to the ideals of personal freedom, there has been endless opportunity to be a numberless corporate clone completely replaceable by another corporate clone.  (213)
• Like a dream, it is astonishingly accurate at taking the measure of our present struggles and indicating the path we are on.  But the impotent thing is not to over interpret the image or the dream.  We place too much burden on it if we are too quick to say it must mean this or it must mean that.  The main point is to live with the image or the dream and let it work its magic on us. (235)
•  Rilke:  “Stop choosing, he says, between chaos and order, and live at the boundary between them, where rest and action move together.  (242)
• Living systems, according to John Holland, a maverick and inspired student of complexity, “never really settle down.”  Holland and his colleagues are finding that the plants and animals that do settle down do not survive for very long.  It is as if life is forever trying to keep itself exquisitely balanced on the edge between chaos and order, always about to fall into the imprisoning forces of an overly ordered world on one side and the seductive calls of complete chaos on the other.  (252)
•  Poets encounter the same problem.  For instance, how to work with the difficult cussed aspects of life without being dragged into a whirlpool of self-pity… Holding on to the gritty particularities of life even as we delve into deeper levels of self-revelation, we reel out the same golden thread Ariadne passed to Theseus to guide him through the Cretan labyrinth.  Attempt to go down without this slight but glowing line back into the world, and we perish, as the self-entangled poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton did, devoured by the minotaur of the self-referential ego.  Their poetry had a riveting intensity, but it did not include a great soul world that could save them from their individual personalities (257-8)
•  Drawing upon the lessons learned from the starlings: Trying to run complex companies, big or small, by imperial command, from the top down, may be the single most unnecessary burden carried by any corporate manager…  It also carries an implicit lack of trust in the essential elements of the system—people. (269)
• Stop treating people as if they are dangerous vehicles about to spin out of control unless you are constantly applying the brakes.  Educate them into everything you know, ask them to learn more than you know.  Show them not only how to find the brake but the accelerator as well.  (272)
• Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat. (287)
•  Without failure we have no possibility of appreciating or praising the life well lived, the work well done, a place well taken care of, or the greater ecology that makes up our home. (288)
•  Preserving the soul in corporate America means reclaiming all those human soul qualities sacrificed on the altar of organizational survival. (295)

My Paddle to the Sea

John Lane, My Paddle to the Sea: Eleven Days on the River of the Carolinas (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2011), 208 pages, no photos, one map.

Having grown up paddling what I considered the rivers of the Carolinas (the Cape Fear and Yadkin/Pee Dee watersheds), I have wanted for some time to take this trip (on paper) with John Lane down the Broad, Conagree and Santee Rivers.  This basin does drain both of the Carolinas, but only a part of the western part of the state.  When I lived in Hickory NC in the mid-80s, I had paddled a couple of rivers that flowed into the Santee basin through the Catawba River. Lane limits his trip to the lessor of the Carolinas (South Carolina) as he stars out on Larson Fork, a creek that flows by the back of his property in Spartanburg, and follows it downriver to the sea.  But he doesn’t begin with this trip, but with a fateful family vacation three months earlier in Costa Rica, where they paddled Whitewater Rivers.  It had been raining and on their last day, there were several fatalities.  Thankfully, the Lane family all survived, but it was a horrifying experience. 

Lane is not the first to paddle this river, nor even the first to write about it.  In his possession, he carried the writings of others who have paddled the river, including a group of students from the college where he teaches (Wofford College), who’d paddled the river in the late 60s.  Although today, much of the river goes unnoticed, in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the railroad, water was the easiest way to travel up country.

Lane is accompanied by two friends.  Venable, a lawyer from South Carolina who found a new and agreeable life in Alaska joins him for the first week.  He a large burly dude that looks like a bit like a John Brown and John Muir mix (139).  Although he sympathizes to environmental causes, he never joined the Sierra Club because he disliked their cup (73).  The man must have spent his time hiking in well watered locations and not had to scoop water from streams or springs that’s only an inch or so deep.  Lane and Venerable paddle through the upper part of the river.  Most of their days are rainy, but they make the best of it as they share stories of their lives and experiences outdoors.  At Lake Marion, Venable heads off to do some turkey hunting before heading back to Alaska.  Steve, a slender but strong paddler, joins Lane as they paddle through coastal plain on the way to the sea. 

The two sections of the river are very different.  The upper part of the river is fast as the water rush off the mountains and foothills.  Along the way, they pass places of history, where water powered industry.  Some of these dams are still present and present challenges for them as they canoe downriver.  This section of the river drains a large amount of the upcountry and even parts of Western North Carolina (through the Warteree/Catawba River system that joins the Congaree to form the Santee. Lane mixes into his narrative history from the region.  This area saw Revolutionary War battles.  In the early 18th Century, they attempted to tame the river for transportation and power.  The river proved especially difficult for transportation and most of the canals were soon abandoned.   However, “the rivers, like the Scots-Irish who settled the upcountry, had proved stubborn and resistant to authority” (117).

In addition to historical insights, Lane shares stories of authors who lived along the river.   Two of the more prominent ones are Julia Peterkin and Archibald Ruthledge.  I’ve not read Peterkin (but she’s now on my list) but I have found the writings of Ruthledge to be soulful.  Although I have a problem with his paternalistic views of African-Americans (but then he was writing in the 30s and 40s), I am moved by the way he describes the land and appreciates the wilderness of the Santee River.  Lane also offers a bit of advice on the art of canoeing and canoe-camping, including a nice description of the “J-Stroke” which the paddler in the stern uses to keep the canoe straight.

The book ends, unsurprisingly, at the sea!  Reading My Paddle to the Seas is an easy and enjoyable float without ever getting muddy or having a sore back from a day of paddling.

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It would probably be a toss-up as to whether I've written more about rivers or trains...  Here are are the books I've reviewed in this blog that deal with flowing water (and I may have missed some):  

The River Home (Waccamaw River)

The River of Doubt (Rio Roosevelt)

Drifting into Darin  (Altamaha River)

The Mekong  (Mekong River)

Goodbye to a River (Brazos River)

My Green Manifesto (Charles River)

Indochina Chronicles (Mekong River)

Rock Me on the Water (Green River)

River Time (Essay on World's Rivers)

The Founding Fish (about Shad and East Coast Rivers)

Trembling Earth (Okefenokee Swamp)

The Cape Fear (Cape Fear River)

Old Man River  (Mississippi)

Porcher's Creek (A coastal creek in SC)

Down the Wild Cape Fear  (Cape Fear River)

Water and Sky (Athabasca & Kazan Rivers, Canada)

Kingdom by the Sea

I hope to finish my posts on Iona this weekend.  This is a book review of a book that I read on the plane ridge to and from the UK.  It is a little dated but there were some good insights, too.  

Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain (1983: New York: Marina Books, 2003), 353 pages, no photos or maps.

In the spring of 1982, Paul Theroux decides that after living a decade in London, he should see the countryside.  He sets out with a backpack and a pair of oiled boots to follow the coastline around Great Britain.  Parts of the coast he travels on foot, other sections, when available, he takes trains.  On a few occasions, he takes a bus.  For three months, while the British are engaged in the “Falkland Business” (no one called it a war), Theroux travels.  Although he’s curious about what the British people think of the war, he agrees with the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, who describes the Falkland War as two old bald men fighting over a comb (39).  By the time he’s finished, Britain has retaken the Falklands from Argentina and the railroads have gone on strike.  It seems to be a fitting end to a wet and miserable (but well described) journey across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

I picked up this book to read on my recent trip to Scotland, and read the first hundred or so pages on the flight over.  Theroux, who was only forty at the time of his journey, bickers as if he was an old man.  This is the seventh book I’ve read by Theroux and I have yet to become comfortable with his style.  He’s not the type of author that makes you want to go out and follow his footsteps and I’m pretty sure that he would be a terrible travel partner.  Yet, I keep reading him because I like how he uses dialogue and how he’s most often talking with common people he meets along the way.  I also appreciate how all his journeys are packed with interesting facts and tidbits of information about the places he visits.  Finally, Theroux is a master of metaphors and similes, using contrast and the ironic to point make his point.   A collapsed castle stands like a set of broken dentures.  (77).  He finds the Isle of Wright so beautiful and it’s train so ugly, that was as painful as it would have been to see a peddlers’ pack on the shoulders of a lovely woman” (69)  In Portsmouth, where the poet Shelly wrote “‘O Darkling Woods, My Sweet Repose,’ one looks up and sees a gas station.” (67)

Early in the book, Theroux describes Brighton as “having the face of an old tart and a very brief appeal.” (53).   Having read this during my overnight flight, I was shocked later that day day when, while eating lunch by the Portobello Beach, my friend Ewan spoke fondly of the time he lived in Brighton.  I laughed and told him what Theroux had written about his beloved city and discovered that Ewan and Theroux were there at the same time (during the Falkland War). Appearance is in the eye of the beholder.

While traveling, Theroux stays in a lot of old small and nearly empty hotels.  He notices that the owners often say that as the summer comes, the hotels will fill up but he never finds that the case.  He often makes fun of the British idea of a “holiday” as they travel to these gray beaches.  This is at a time when Britain is cutting out rail lines.  Surprisingly, as one who has made a good living writing about trains, he doesn’t have much sympathy with the train lovers who lament these cuts.  “Their interest always seemed to me worse than indecent and their joy-riding a mild form of necrophilia” (121).  He challenges another railroad buff who advocates for steam, noting how, like “many other railway bluffs, he detested our century” (175).

Theroux travels takes him out of London and along the southern coast visiting places like Dover (at this point the tunnel under the channel is still talk and Theroux insists a Brit by pointing out the Japanese built a longer tunnel under the sea connecting their mainland to Hokkaido.  He follows the southern coast through Cornwall, then comes up to Wales.  At Cardiff, he notes how he dislikes cities.  “In Britain they were cavernous and intimidating, like the fortresses they had once been.  They seemed to have heavy eyebrows” (141).  In Wales he sees the poverty after the closing of the mines.  He travels over to Northern Ireland where he learns about the troubles there, where they don’t worry as much about the Falklands as there is enough violence of their own.  Then he travels by ferry to Glasgow and makes his way around the Scottish Coast, before coming back down to London.  As he travels, he tells people that he’s in publishing (which only gets him in trouble once when an aspiring writing wants to show him a manuscript) instead of a writer.  However, in St. Andrews, Scotland, a local bookstore owner discovers him! 

In many ways, this book is out of date.  Much has changed in the United Kingdom as well as in the world.  It’s been a while since I read Theroux earlier books (The Great Railway Bazaar and Riding the Iron Rooster), and it was fun to be reminded that he was just as ornery in his early middle ages as he was in the last book I’ve read by him (Last Train to Zona Verde). That and for Theroux unique way of describing the countryside and the people, I am glad that I read it.  

North end of Iona

Columba's Iona

Rainbow over Mull taken on Sunday Afternoon 25 June 2017

I plan to provide at least two more posts on Iona, before I head off to other places in Scotland like Skye and Wick and Inverness. One will be on my time on the island and another will be about an afternoon trip to Straffa (a neighboring island with interesting geology and puffins (birds).

I picked this book up at the bookstore in Iona and read it while I was there and traveling.  For those of you not familiar with Iona, this provides more background to the island and the community.  In addition to  a review of the book, I've added a few personal comments and a few photos for your enjoyment.

 Rosalind K. Marshall, Columba’s Iona: A New History (Dingwall, Scotland, UK: Sandstone Press, 2014) 210 pages plus 24 color plates, 8 black and white plates, notes, bibliography, and index.

One must make a significant effort to visit Iona.  It’s a small island in the Inner Hebrides, just to the west of the Isle of Mull.  Such a trip usually involves traveling by car, bus or train from Glasgow to Oban, a ferry ride to the Isle of Mull, a long journey on a one lane road across Mull, and then a short ferry ride to Iona.  Leaving Glasgow on an 8 AM train will allow one to arrive on Iona just before dinner.  Despite the remoteness of the island, people have been coming to Iona ever since Columba, an Irish monk, supposedly landed there on Pentecost 563.

Marshall’s book, which was commissioned for the 1450th anniversary of Columba’s landing, provides a quick but well researched overview of the island’s history.  She refuses to just recite traditional accounts and is willing to call into question many of the legends that exist about the island.  Was Columba the first missionary to Scotland?  Did he really have 12 monks with him or was this suggested to link his followers with Jesus’ disciples?  Was the real reason for Columba leaving Ireland a burning desire for evangelism or were there political factors that caused him to seek a new place to build a religious community?  She also raises other questions.  Did the carving of large stone Celtic crosses begin on Iona and then spread to Ireland?  Unfortunately, there is little written history to allow us to understand all this.  What was written, such as a biography of Columba by his disciple Adomnan, included fantastic myths obviously written to enhance the saintly status of the abbot.  According to mythology, Columba even chastised the Loch Ness monster after it had eaten a man (supposedly the monster has since found new sources of food).

There are four distinct periods in Iona’s history.  We don’t know much about the early period, except that the community flourished and became a regional center between Ireland and the Islands off West Scotland.  During this era, Iona wasn’t as isolated as today.  In the 6th Century, sea travel was easier than traveling overland on non-existent roads, and Iona’s location played a role in its prominence.  Even the famed “Book of Kell’s” was produced in Iona.  In its second period, Iona’s location led to its demise as the ancestors of Hagar the Horrible (yes, the guy in the comic strip!) sailed down from Scandinavian countries looking for loot.  Churches and monasteries were favorite targets for their treasures. On several occasions, Viking raiders sacked Iona and many of the monks were killed.  Being exposed to the sea made Iona dangerous and its center of learning, along with its treasures, were moved back to Ireland.  However, a few monks continued to remain on Iona and throughout this time, pilgrims did come to the place where Saint Columba died.  The island also became a favorite burial place for Scottish and even some Scandinavian kings.  The “who’s who” of legend include kings MacBeth and Duncan, both immortalized by Shakespeare.

After the Viking threat faded, Columba’s old community was replaced with a Benedictine abbey which contained the stone edifice that still stands (although reconstructed).  Just to the south of the abbey was a Augustinian priory.  In the centuries leading up to the Reformation, these two communities, one male and the other female, existed side by side.  The ruins of the nunnery have been shored up and can be viewed today.  In 1560, the Scottish Church reformed and most priests became Protestant ministers.  The communities slowly ceased to exist and in time the roofs collapsed, leaving only ruins.  Yet, people still kept coming to Iona, including many notable ones:  Joseph Banks, a famous naturalist; Dr. Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott and John Keats, all known in the world of English literature; and the composer Felix Mendelssohn.  Although Marshall doesn’t mention it, Robert Lewis Stevenson may have visited Iona.  In Kidnapped, the ship upon which David Balfour has been enslaved rounds Iona before it flounders on the Torran Rocks, south of Mull.  This area was known to Stevenson as his father had built a lighthouse on the rocks.  That lighthouse can be seen at night from Dun I, the high point on Iona. Throughout this period of time, between the Reformation and the end of the 19th Century, the ruins were owned by the Duke of Argyll.  He allowed a variety of religious denominations to hold worship services in the ruins on the island, but no community existed except for those who farmed or fished there.

The final period for Iona began when the 8th Duke of Argyll sought to protect and restore the ruins.  A staunch Presbyterian, he donated the ruins to the Church of Scotland (a Presbyterian Church) before his death.  The deed was transferred with the stipulation that the site had to be open to worship by all Christian denominations. Marshall does a good job navigating the reader through the political and ecclesiastical minefields as debates were held over how best to handle the properties.  The Great Depression and a series of wars (the Boer War and the two World Wars) complicated matters.  A trust was set up to manage the property and eventually a community was founded by the Rev. George MacLeod, a pacifist Christian Socialist.  The two groups (the trustees and the Iona Community) have not always had the same vision, as Marshall illustrates.  The primary concern of one was restoration.  The other wanted a community that could help build Christian communities.   MacLeod saw Iona as a place to train people to go back into the world to work for peace and for the poor.  He also desired it to be a place where new forms of worship could be tested.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about Iona.  It was the most detailed history available at the Iona bookstore.  The book certainly fulfills the needs of the Trust for a 1450th anniversary book, but personally, I would have liked for the book to have been a little more encompassing and include some of the natural history of the island.  Perhaps such a book will be posted at the 1500th anniversary, if I’m around to read it.

Heather on Iona

God's Children

Archibald Rutledge, God’s Children, 1947  (I read the Kindle edition of this book). 

            I have a love and hate relationship with this book.   Archibald Rutledge had an ability to see beauty and complexity everywhere.  A lover of nature and the beauty of his family’s South Carolina’s plantation, he was able to convey the awe he experienced in nature into words that delight the reader.  Yet, as he was writing in the early 20^th Century, there is a strong sense of paternalism in how he relates to the African American sharecroppers who worked the land.  He claims to love them and credits them for helping him experience the fullness of nature, yet he’s a man of his time.  It doesn’t seem to bother him that he lives in the big house and they live in shacks. 

            However, Rutledge saw himself responsible responsible for the welfare of those who live around his plantation. “The whole business of government, especially the unpleasant details of taxes, is to a plantation Negro a dark and mysterious affair,” he writes.  Then he tells the story about Jim, an African American man who was delinquent on his poll tax and about to lose his land.  Rutledge spoke to the Sheriff who said Jim had to pay the sum or he would have to claim title.  Rutledge paid it, and expected Jim to work his debt off.  But the Sheriff later asked if Jim was over 60 years old, saying if so, he’d be exempt from the poll tax.  Talking with the Jim, Rutledge realized that he had no idea of when he was born.  He asked about things he could remember in order to determine his age.  He remembered being of “good sense” (which would have meant around 6-7 years old) when there was the Great Shake (the earthquake that damaged Charleston in 1886).  This put him over 60 years of age.  Archibald received a refund.  Reading this, I was amazed Jim would have to play a poll tax because I am sure he wasn’t able to vote South Carolina at that time.  Although it was noble of Rutledge to champion Jim’s cause, he followed it up with a joke about how now plantation owners are the slaves, as he noted how they are responsible for the descendants of slaves. I’m sure if Rutledge was writing today and not in 1947, such views would not be published or at least not received well by the general public.

            Yet, there is much wisdom and beauty in his writings.  “[L]ife is enlivened by its uncertainty, as it is made dearer by its insecurity and its brevity.  As the long look of the setting sun lights up the fading landscape (especially an autumnal one) with more tenderness than the morning mysterious glamours…”  This portion of a sentence (Rutledge was no Hemingway as I quoted only half the sentence) captures the wisdom and beauty of his words.  Life everywhere is made up of roses and razor blades, arsenic and azaleas,” displays the paradox Rutledge saw in life.  Writing about the African American cemetery, he says:  “There the mighty pines towered tallest; there the live oaks stood druidlike; there the jasmines rioted freely over hollies and sweet myrtles, tossing their saffron showers high in air.  As children, Prince and I dreaded this place.” His sentence structure is often complex and his words ring of poetry.

            In this book, Rutledge tells of hunting and fishing with his African American friends around the plantation.  Some of the stories are from his youth, such as when he and Prince caught a poisonous water moccasin while fishing and used it to scare the plantation’s cook (I thought of my own experience of almost catching such a snake).  Some of the stories seem a bit fanciable such as Mobile, the huntsman, hunting next to the rice paddies where workers were busy.  His wife was working in the paddy and their infant child was left to sleep on a dike.  When an eagle swooped down and grabbed the child, Mobile took aim and, from a long distance, shot the bird and saved the child.  Another story involved a traveling man with a monkey.  The monkey grabbed a child and took it up on the roof of the house, requiring another heroic and comic rescue.  

            Rutledge shares the plantation folk stories such as the one about the “Walk Off People.”  When Adam and Eve were first created, all wasn’t well in paradise. Adam liked to hunt and fish so much that Eve was bored and threatened to leave him.   So God created more people so Eve would have company, but it was late in the day.  God said he’d come back and put brains in these newly created people, but some of them “walked off” and never got their brains.  This story not only explains those without “good sense” but perhaps also those who move in on a married woman that has played second fiddle to her husband’s interests.

            Rutledge spends most of the fifth chapter writing about the religion of his African American neighbors.  The only place he gives insight into his own beliefs is where he addresses the fundamentalists need to understand how “the worship of nature and God go hand in hand, and that he who worships the God of the universe is usually ready to accept Christ as the Son of that God.”  Earlier in the book, he remarked how the folk saying, “Prayers never gets grass out of de field” illustrated the truth about faith without works! 

            I highly recommend this book, which is available on Amazon Kindle for a minimal cost (I think I paid 99 cents).  But I remember this book with a warning. This was written sixty years ago and recalls stories that are over a hundred years old.  Today, paternalistic views are criticized.  Yet, the reader who understands the world in which Rutledge was writing will appreciate his attempt at honoring those who lived on the plantation as well as the magic of the land. The author grew up on this plantation, then moved north for college and to teach in Pennsylvania.  In the mid-1930s, he moved back to the plantation, to help restore it and lived there until his death in 1973.  He also served for 40 years at the poet laureate of South Carolina and published over 50 books and numerous articles, many about the outdoor life.  Today, the plantation is a state historic site. 

 “There is, I think, no lovelier land than the old plantation regions of the Carolinas—a land of hyacinth days and camellia nights.  Nature there triumphs in giant trees, in great rivers, in lustrous fragrant fields, in an exotic profusion of wild flowers.”   

                                                     -Archibald Hamilton Rutledge. 1883-1973

John Knox (and dreams of Scotland)

I'm heading to Scotland in a few weeks, so it was a good time to read a recent biography of the Scottish Reformer, John Knox.  Here's my review:

Jane Dawson, John Knox, (New Haven: Yale, 2015), 373 pages, index and notes and 8 pages of illustrations.

John Knox, the Protestant Reformer of Scotland, is often portrayed as a dour masochistic preacher and an opponent of Mary, Queen of Scots. In this new biography of the Scottish Reformer Jane Dawson paints a different view of the man. She begins with a description of Knox having his first child baptized in Geneva, while he was exiled.  It was a happy time of life for a man who was often depressed.  But then, Knox had a rough life.  George Wishart, who led Knox into the Protestant fold, was burned at the stake in St. Andrews, Scotland, only six weeks after Knox’s conversion.  After the first attempt to bring reform failed in Scotland, with Mary Guise reclaiming Catholic control of Scotland, Knox found himself chained to an ore in the galley of a ship.  This was a time of physical suffering from which Knox never fully recovered.  After being freed, Knox went to England where he served as a pastor, but as the Catholics began to roll back some of the early reforms in England, he fled to Europe, where he met with John Calvin in Geneva and Henry Bullinger in Zurich.

Knox was always a bit ornery.  He fought against the prayer book of the Anglican Church, a conflict that would continue to haunt him on the continent especially during his tenure with the English congregation in Frankfurt. While in Geneva, he helped produce the Geneva Bible (an English Bible that was considered so anti-royalty that it encouraged King James to call for another translation), the Psalter, and a book on church discipline.  Knox and Calvin had different views of the church.  Calvin felt the true church needed two “marks”: the preaching of the Word and the sacraments.  Knox added a third mark: discipline.  Knox concern for church discipline and the “cleansing of the church,” reflects his black and white views, but also made him less willing to compromise.  Knox could get overly zealous.  When he first arrived on the continent, both Calvin and Bullinger encouraged him to cool down.  His zealous attitude certainly contributed to the willingness for the church to continue to separate and splinter, an attitude that pervades Protestantism. 

Knox later returned to Scotland, having been invited by royalty who were devoted to the Protestant cause.  He would serve as a chaplain for the Lords of the Congregation during their fight against the Catholic forces in Scotland.  This was a troubling time.  Scotland was involved in a civil war.  There was always a chance that France would come to the aid of Catholics in Scotland.  Knox, having spent time in England, had a vision of a united Protestant island (this would come about long after his death).   It was also an interesting time, as religion was not the only dividing issue. There were even Protestants who support Mary, Queen of Scots. Knox had his own battles with the English reformation (especially on the Prayer Book and vestments).  The author points out how Knox’s stubbornness kept the Scottish and English Reformations separate.

Another example of Knox stubbornness was his first book, a tract written against female leadership.  John Calvin warned against publishing this tract, suggesting he might come to regret it.  The tract was primarily directed at the Catholic Marys (there were three and Mary Guise appears to have been more problematic than the better known Mary Queen of Scots).  His harsh language against women leadership was so strong Queen Elizabeth (a Protestant) also detested Knox for it.  It is this tract that normally leads people to consider Knox to be masochistic, but as Dawson points out, Knox actually got along well with women. There were several women whom he regularly solicited advice.  He also loved both of his wives and was in deep grief following his first wife’s death.  (His courtship and marriage of his first wife is interesting, as she came with her mother and her father wrote her out of his will.)

Bouts of depression often haunted Knox.  He was constantly in fear of losing the Reformation in Scotland, a fear that was based on the political reality more than a theological trust in God.   In an era where most sermons were from the New Testament, Knox often preached from the Old Testament.  He saw himself as a modern day Ezekiel.  His favorite book (his anchor) was the Gospel of John and at his death he asked to have the 17^th Chapter of John’s Gospel.  Although Knox’s preaching was strong, criticism of sermons bothered him and he took such comments personally.   Later in his life, his voice was so weak that he struggled to preach (often preaching in the chapel instead of the main sanctuary).   

 In addition to the tons of material available on Knox’s life, Dawson drew upon the papers of Christopher Goodman that have only recently been made available.  Goodman and Knox worked together when they were both exiled on the Continent (working with English speaking congregations in Frankfurt and Geneva) and later in Scotland.  Although Goodman left Scotland for Ireland (Knox even considered joining him there in an evangelical mission), the two remained close the rest of their lives through correspondence.

This book is a great introduction to the life of John Knox and the world in which he lived.  Knox is a complicated man.  There were much to admire in him, as well as stuff to detest.  His view of a "united kingdom," that would eventually come about, was prophetic, but his strict view of the church brought a harshness into Presbyterianism that has been hard to shake. 

The Blood of Emmett Till

Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 291 pages.  Index, bibliography and notes.  

The story is well known.  In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy from Chicago travels to Mississippi to spend the summer with relatives.  He says something to Carolyn Bryant, a clerk in a small grocery store and whistles at her as she goes out to fetch a pistol from her car.  Till is later kidnapped in the middle of the night, brutally tortured, killed, and his body is dumped in a river.  We know so much about this story, compared to other lynchings, because of Till's mother.  She refused to let the story be buried.  She insisted that her son have an open casket funeral.  She contacted Chicago black community leaders who helped spread the word around the world, creating a media event.  Soon, Emmett Till is a well-known name, synonymous with lynchings.  

Much of this story has been told many times.  What is new with Tyson's account is his interview with Carolyn Bryant.  Even after reading the book, we still don't know exactly what happened between Emmett and Carolyn inside that grocery story.  However, in the interview, Carolyn admits he didn't grab her around the waist.  She doesn't remember all what what was said that evening.  There have been so many years and the stories been told and retold, leaving her questioning what was said.  However, one thing she is certain of, "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."(7)

Carolyn's husband and brother-in-law were arrested shortly after Till's body was discovered by a fishermen.  Their trial brought reporters from all over the world along with an African American congressman from Detroit.  The trial became a showcase of life in the segregated South. (They had to have separate reporter tables in the courtroom for African-American press).  Although there were irregularities in the handling of the case, such as the Sheriff visiting a key witness to suggest that he think about what he testifies in court, the trial itself goes smoothly and appears fair.  Yet the jury only deliberated a short time before returning a not-guilty verdict.  Although many expected the verdict, most knew the men were guilty and a few years later, with them safe from another trial, they admitted as much.  Most of the the African-Americans who testified in the trial, in fear for their lives, immediately leave Mississippi and relocated up north.  

In telling the story, Tyson doesn't just show the horrifying conditions of African-Americans in the South.  He tells of the conditions in the North, especially in segregated Chicago, where Till grew up.  There are also questions left hanging such as what happened to the two black men who worked on the plantation Carolyn Bryant's brother-in-law ran, who helped subdue Till in the back of the truck as they rode around in the early morning hours looking for a place to do the terrible deed.

Although the book is well written, it is not an easy story to read.  Yet, it is a story that needs to be told and retold.  This event only happened a little over sixty years ago.  In the Epilogue, Tyson attempts to bridge the events in 1955 with the current “Black Lives Matter” campaigns.   As a member of the dominant culture, this book provides interesting insights into what other have had to endure not that long again.

This is the third book I've read by Timothy Tyson. The first was Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and It's Legacy, which he co-edited with David Cecelski. In 2007, I read and reviewed Blood Done Signed My Name. Tyson seems to have a thing for books with blood in the title, yet sadly much of the racial history of our country is stained with blood.