Halloween Reading

At left is one of Fillius's Halloween pumpkins. This is actually last year's vegetal creation. This year's is currently in progress and probably won't be ready for a photo until evening -- because you just can't rush good art. Fillius does not restrict himself to pumpkins; last year his Jack-o-Lanterns were made out of potatoes in honor of the Irish side of the family.

Today I'm wearing my WWAKD tee shirt, so I'm officially in costume. The tee shirt and my skirt are both black, so we're all very seasonal around here.

This morning I was reading a post written by Fr. Dwight Longenecker (former Anglican clergyman, now a Catholic priest) after one of his children asked him if witches were real.

In my experience witches are very real indeed. I've never met one with green skin, a pointed nose with a wart on the end, nor have I seen them fly on a broom or heard them cackle like a demented crow. However, when I was an Anglican priest in England I served in a parish that was home to a witches coven, and not just any witches coven . . .

There was a negative feeling in the town and a string of unexplained tragedies and scandals within the church community. As a priest I was called out to a surprising number of low level hauntings, psychic disturbances and disturbed personalities. Once I learned who actually lived in the parish I was concerned. I was also concerned that the other clergy in the town simply laughed at the King of the Witches and dismissed the whole thing as so much nonsense.

Read Witches and Wizards to find out which weapon he and his friends decided to employ and how the conflict was resolved.

On a lighter note, while shelving books at the library this week, I chanced upon California Demon by Julie Kenner. I was in the mood for a frivolous book, so I checked it out. (That's one of the interesting things about being a library aide -- I get a chance to have look at how the other half reads. For instance, I had no idea that Danielle Steele wrote so many books!) California Demon is one in a series of novels about Kate Connor, retired demon hunter who's spent the last 14 years in the equally demanding profession of suburban housewife and stay at home mother.

However, as she explains at the beginning of the novel, "I'd been drawn back into active duty after a demon attacked me in my kitchen, setting off a whole chain of events which (as you can probably guess) pitted the forces of good against the forces of evil in one final, cataclysmic battle." (That's a reference to the previous novel, I presume.) After the dust settled, she found herself back on active duty as a Level Four Demon Hunter unbeknownst to anyone except her best friend, Laura who has her own amazing super powers. (". . . she's the woman who'd successfully returned outfits to Nordstrom despite the huge 75-percent Off, No-Return, Clearance-Final Sale signs plastered all over the store.")

So far, it's been a fun read, and I'm hoping that the light, humorous tone is an indication that it won't get too icky for me. As you may have guessed, I don't read books (or watch movies) in the horror genre. My life has had enough scariness in the past ten years that I've never felt the need to go in search of more as a form of amusement. So I don't really know whether or not some of Kenner's story elements are showing her individual creativity or just her ability to make good use of the genre's conventions.

For instance, in Kate Connor's world incorporeal demons usually can't do much except enviously watch human beings. They long to be human, and occasionally a demon will manage to hijack the body of a living person. But possession is pretty rare. Usually the best a demon can do is to reanimate the body of a person who's just died. So all those amazing stories you hear about people who die on the operating table and then come back to life; people who are trapped underwater for ten minutes but live to tell the tale; and those who walk away from a horrendous auto accident despite a massive blow to the head are not tales of miraculous survival, but the result of very determined demons.

I found that an interesting bit because I'd just read something similar in an entirely different sort of book, The Darkness Did Not by William Biersach. It's the second in a series of novels about Father John Baptist, a former cop turned Catholic priest in a Los Angeles very much like the real one. Father Baptist is on the outs with his bishop because he kept a low profile while in the seminary and only showed his true colors after ordination. He's an orthodox, traditional Catholic who, now that he is a priest, is committed to offering only the traditional Latin Mass.

In retaliation, his superiors put him on extended leave. But Father Baptist cashes in his pension from the police department and buys a tiny run down church, St. Philomena's, which the diocese had decided to close down and sell off. As it's his private property, he is free to offer the Latin Mass there and he's soon ministering to an unofficial parish of "rad-trad" Catholics including the arthritic Martin Feeny who plays Watson to Father Baptist's Holmes.

As in Biersach's previous book, the police department asks for Father Baptist's help in solving a murder case which has occult overtones. This time a serial killer is preying on beautiful young women who had previously shown an interest in the subject of vampires. The police are skittish because each murder victim was almost completely drained of blood, and there were no marks on the bodies except a curious neck wound. Is the murderer really a vampire?

For that matter, what is a vampire? In Biersach's novel, vampirism is the lowest form of demon possession because the demon merely takes possession of a corpse. But it's a hellish thing for all that.

As Father Baptist explains, "The vampire is an unholy amalgam of demon and dead flesh -- evil spirit and coarse matter, if you will -- which is the satanic mockery of the Incarnation in which the Son of God took on human flesh." The demon's reanimation of dead flesh is also a mockery of Christ's resurrection. And isn't that the jealous sort of thing that demons would do? Because Satan himself can't come up with anything original; he can only imitate and distort. Suddenly, because the author began to show a way in which the topic might fit into a Catholic worldview, vampirism became a story element I could take more seriously, and for the characters (in my mind at least) the stakes suddenly became higher. At this point, if it had been a movie, I probably would have been shouting, "Hey, guys! Don't go anywhere without your scapulars!" And I would have been serious, not sarcastic, because the universe of this novel is the same universe I live in -- one in which sacramentals are an incredible conduit of grace.

It's only fair for me to mention that Biersach has a writing style that will annoy many readers. The narrator, Martin Feeny, has a florid style of writing which doesn't bother me as much as it ought to, probably because I'm such a big fan of Victorian novels and children's books. But he also has other stylistic quirks that drive me up the wall. One, which was more frequent in the first novel, is his tendency to attribute volumes of meaning to Father Baptist's glance, followed by a terse remark. An example:

He stared upon us with penetrating eyes that seemed to whisper determined but fearfully, "Considering all that has happened, gentlemen, and is soon to transpire, do you really expect me to offer any comfort other than the same sufferings for which I admonished you to prepare?" But all he said was, "Nearly there."

In the previous novel he did this sort of thing over and over and over. It's not as frequent in this book, but I still shudder each time I encounter it. And accents are not his forte. He has an Eastern Rite bishop who talks just like Yoda! And the ethnic accents of other minor characters are just embarrassing.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book despite its limitations. For one thing, I enjoyed the Catholic geekery, though the author does get a little too self-indulgent at times. After all those segments with Monsignor Havermeyer practicing the rubrics for the Latin Mass (he's a former modernist priest who has seen the error of his ways), he should have had an important, Latin speaking role to play in the final confrontation. But no. As much as the author may have enjoyed writing some of the geekier segments, they ought to have been pruned if they were not significant to the plot.

Unlike some reviewers, I didn't mind the long liturgical descriptions. In fact, I loved the author's description of Benediction -- especially the part where Martin, despite the sublimity of the liturgy, finds himself becoming hopelessly distracted. The way his mind was jumping from subject to subject, despite his best efforts, was all too familiar. And I loved the Knights Tumblar, a Chestertonian group of men in evening dress, who gad about town drinking champagne when they're not kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament in all night prayer vigils. They are Father Baptist's back-up troops and true knights.

Well, I started this post early in the morning, and now it's so late that it will soon be All Saints Day. So while I still can, I will wish you a Happy Halloween and will close with one of the quotations which C.S. Lewis placed just before the preface of The Screwtape Letters:

"The devill . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked." -- Thomas More

Did I Expect Angels?

Did I Expect Angels? by Kathryn Maughan, iUniverse, Inc., 2007, 172 p. (ISBN: 978-0595402595)

Don't let the weird cover put you off. Had I originally seen it in a bookstore, the vehemence of those scratch-out lines would have aroused such a negative reaction that I never would have picked up this novel. Fortunately, I first met it online. And after sampling some excerpts on the author's website, I knew I'd want to read the rest of book.

The story of Did I Expect Angels? is told by two protagonists, Jennifer and Henry. Though widely disparate in age, background, and economic status, both have experienced loss and crushing grief. Unexpectedly, their lives and stories intersect.

Jennifer is a young, grief-stricken widow who cannot seem to recover from the unexpected death of her husband Jack. Despite the help of her loving mother-in-law and the support of her friends and colleagues, Jennifer cannot stop her downwards spiral into clinical depression, a condition for which she had been treated in an earlier period of her life. But now she refuses treatment -- refuses even to acknowledge her condition. So when she finally recognizes the extent to which her self-absorption has blinded her to her daughter's needs, her anguish becomes unbearable, and she makes a grim decision which she intends to be an unalterable. But she didn't take Henry into account.

Henry, a slight acquaintance, is an elderly greeter at the local discount mega-store. He emigrated from Costa Rica forty years ago. He has known poverty, hardship, betrayal, and loss. But with the help of his own unexpected "angel," he has passed through them to a serenity which Jennifer can scarcely grasp. He recognizes the depths of her devastation and decides that the time has come to tell Jennifer his story.

Their stories intertwine in a series of flashbacks inter cut with the immediate present until . . . Well, it's hard for me to write as much as I'd like to about this novel without lapsing into spoilers. I'll only say that this is a story of faith that will not repulse a secular readership.

This is not a Catholic novel, nor even an explicitly Christian one. (If I had to guess the religious affiliation of Jennifer and Jack, I’d have to peg them as some plain-vanilla, nondenominational, Protestants. Or perhaps Unitarians. ) Yet the author has placed them in a universe that is compatible with a Catholic worldview which, to me at least, gives a stronger sense of reality to the novel.

For each of us, as a member of the mystical body of Christ, is linked to every other member, lifting them up or pulling them down by our actions. In that sense, we are all angels at one time or another to those whose lives we touch or who touch ours. And the more I thought about this novel, the more "angels" I began to see in it -- including characters who are unaware of their angelic roles. Even Jennifer herself might be said to have briefly been an angel, when she finally says some things that really need to be said to her sister.

Yet this novel also has a subtle supernatural aspect. At least I think so. Who is that mysterious, yet strangely familiar, man whom Jennifer glimpses in the prologue -- an incident which is reprised near the end of the book? Yes, there is an active human angel who intervenes in Jennifer's affairs, but without the man in the green sweater, would he have made contact with her in time?

Unlike many self-published books, Did I Expect Angels? is very well written, having benefited from a long gestation and multiple rewrites. The story of how it came to be written and published is itself an interesting story which can be found here,

One of the things that I most enjoyed about the novel is that the stories of the two protagonists are recounted in their own distinctive voices. I particularly liked Henry's segments. In the novel he's described as having "a strong Spanish accent . . . untouched by forty years of speaking English." The author does not write his narration in dialect, but she captures the cadence of a native Spanish speaker who would naturally be mixing little Spanish phrases into his English, an English which would be unconsciously superimposed onto his native Spanish grammar.

Maughan described her technique to me:

I initially wrote much of Henry's part in Spanish, and then had my mother (a Spanish professor) correct it. She noted a few things, like false conditional: in English, we can say "I would go to the store a lot when I was young," but in Spanish they don't do that. This made me realize that he would have problems with "would" and "could" and "should" and the related tenses. So after the corrections I translated it very literally. I didn't do this with his entire portion, just about 15 pages of it. Once I had done that, I was into the rhythm enough myself that I could "hear" him speaking and compose in his voice.

This process gives an incredible feeling of authenticity to Henry's segments. Though Hispanic, I am not myself a native Spanish speaker. But I have studied the language, and I have enough experience of the sort of English spoken by some of my older relatives to realize that Maughan did a very good job. (Okay, so I'm a language and writing geek! Yes, I got excited when I realized that bits of Henry's English phrasing indicate that he is thinking in the subjunctive, a tense that is common in Spanish but almost extinct in English.)

You can sample the voices of the two main characters by reading the excerpts posted here and here. Then perhaps, like me, you too will be eager to read the rest of this book which is conveniently available from Amazon.com

On a Tear With Charlotte, or One Book Leads To Another

I've been reading a lot of Charlotte Bronte lately.

It all started in April when I had to drive my mother to the emergency room. The previous day she had attended a birthday picnic, hosted by one of my cousins, where most of the attendees contracted food poisoning. My mother, who is 78 years old, was so ill she had to go to the hospital. I drove her there, and since one never knows how long a visit to the emergency room will take, I made sure to bring a book.

I wanted something dependable and small, so I grabbed my Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Eyre. At 3.5" x 6", it's smaller than most paperbacks and fits nicely in my skirt pocket. I've read Jane Eyre many times before, but it never fails to engross me. Judy Abbot, the protagonist of Daddy-Long-Legs, summed it up for me when she described her first reading of this novel, ". . . as for the mad woman who laughs like a hyena and sets fire to bed curtains and tears up wedding veils and bites -- it's melodrama of the purest, but just the same, you read and read and read." And so I did.

My mother was in the hospital for several days, so I spent a good deal of time there too. And whenever she was dozing or undergoing tests, I buried myself in Jane because, as we all know, time moves slowly in a hospital, but reading is a hyperspatial by-pass through tedium.

Frequently, when I read a novel like Jane Eyre, I'm so wrapped up in the story that I pay scant attention to the author's technique. But this time I was more aware of how Bronte achieves her effects. I was particularly struck by her use of present tense narrative when the heroine is facing an important turning point. It gives the reader a sense of immediacy, but also conveys the character's feeling of mental distance or dislocation -- that numbing daze when Everything Has Just Become Too Much and one feels cut off from both the future and the past. When Jane narrates in the traditional past tense, you have in the back of your mind the assurance that she has survived her adventures and is looking back on them. But when she switches to present tense you are with her right at that moment, dazed and uncertain.

Well, my mom recovered and returned home. So did I, still reading Jane Eyre. And when I finished I was in the mood for more Bronte. So I checked out Villette from the public library (which I had never read before) and then reread The Professor as a chaser.

I decided I'd like to know a bit more about Bronte so I looked her up in the Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia. According to the latter, "her novels are marked by anti-Catholicism." Jane Eyre doesn't really show any signs of it. (Just the bit about her creepy, selfish cousin becoming a nun.) I originally read The Professor many, many years ago and didn't recall much anti-Catholic sentiment -- no more than you'd expect from any British author of that time period. As a bit of a lark, I decided to mark the most egregious anti-Catholic sentiments with Post-it notes.

I think that the examples in The Professor simply reflect the English dislike and distrust of foreigners and foreign ways. Of course the natives of Belgium are dull and stupid. Of course the French are sly and devious. So what else can you expect from Catholics? They haven't had the moral advantages of being upright English Protestants. (As I read the book, the refrain Song of Patriotic Prejudice by Flanders & Swann rang through my mind: "The English, the English, the English are best: I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!"

But the anti-Catholicism in Villette is downright virulent.

Religous issues aside, Villette is a real downer that should not be read by anyone having even the slightest tendency to depression. The heroine is lonely, hopeless, starved for affection, suffers from apparent visitations of the spectre of a murdered nun, has the meanest, most devious boss in the world, and teaches horrid school girls. During the summer vacation she goes through a period of clinical depression that is almost psychotic. The author allows her a brief moment of happiness when she is finally allowed to fall in love with a professor who teaches at her school. But no sooner has she accepted his proposal than his scheming (Catholic) relatives who oppose the marriage, have finagled him into traveling overseas to take care of business concerns, separating the lovers for several years. And then the author whips up an ocean storm to drown him on his return. Actually, at the request of her father, Bronte rewrote the ending to make it just slightly more ambiguous than her original version. If Pollyanna read this revised version she might, just possibly, come away with the impression that the hero could have survived the waves and would yet turn up. But I doubt it. In Villette Bronte has drawn a heroine who has schooled herself to reject hope, and has placed her in circumstances which vindicate that rejection.

By contrast, The Professor was a light hearted romp -- though it is a sedate novel compared to Jane Eyre. It was interesting to discover that Bronte wrote it before Jane Eyre. She wanted to portray a realistic hero in a novel that did not indulge in romantic excess. Alas, no publisher would take it, having instead "a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and thrilling -- the strange, startling, and harrowing . . . ."* So she went off and wrote Jane Eyre, and it was commercial success.

One thing which the two novels have in common is that the hero is first attracted to and falls in love with the heroine's mind. Both heroines are intelligent, and captivate their beloveds with their pert wit. Both are described at times as a vexing fairy or elf. And both preserve a special companionship with their husbands after marriage. In The Professor, Frances teaches in her own school. And she requires her husband to also teach there an hour a day because, as she says, "people who are only in each other's company for amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together." Jane also works with her husband. She becomes Mr. Rochester's eyes, seeing for him, reading for him, and generally being his right hand. And talking with each other all day long -- ah, what bliss! And how I miss it -- since my late husband and I, like the Rochesters, could say that "to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking."

As a girl I loved the descriptions of these two marriages. Perhaps they gave me hope that I too would someday find romance -- I was certain no one would ever marry me for my looks!

Instead of reading Shirley, I detoured into Mrs. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Fascinating. (But I won't talk about it now. This post is already too long.) And then I felt the need to read one of Gaskell's novels. Mary Barton is the only one in our public library, so I'm working my way through that right now.

===============
*from Bronte's introduction to The Professor.

A Second Look at YA

Sartorias recently hosted an interesting discussion at Oached Pish about YA fiction. Apparently, YA fiction is booming and is being read by adults as well as young people. Sartorias asked, "If you read YA, tell me what you read, and why."

The reasons varied. Some people like coming of age stories. Some prefer YA's shorter length or find it easier to read because the stories tend to be more focused and to include less description or other digressive elements. A few prefer YA because they don't care for the graphic sex scenes that can be common in genre fiction for adults. (Though I think YA today is less "safe" in that respect than it was when I was young.) And some felt that YA was just better written and more interesting than most fiction published for adults.

I found this discussion interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I've always been one for reading outside of my age group. Ever since I was young, if it was printed I'd have a go at it -- regardless of the target audience. Popular Science, Boy Scout magazines, my mom's parenting magazines, anything I could get my little hands on. (Okay, I really was too young for Moby Dick though the bits about cutting up whales were kind of interesting.)

But as I got older, I was never embarrassed to go down the age group ladder. A new Dr. Seuss title? I'm checking it out! A new Beverly Cleary? I'm on it! I think my parents might have been embarrassed, or perhaps just puzzled. "But you're a good reader!" they'd say. "You shouldn't be reading children's books. You could go on the adult side of the library."

The problem was that I'd already been there. And the books in the general fiction area seemed pretty uninteresting. Judging from their novels, it seemed that adults were only interested in sex and money. Boring! (I realize now that I was probably just unlucky in my selections. Or perhaps literature as such was filed under its Dewey Decimal classification.) In the meantime, there were loads of new books in the children's and YA sections and I had yet to read them all.

I gave up reading YA in the mid-seventies when it became depressing and problem oriented. Suddenly, it seemed like every new book was relentlessly hammering out a universe of hopelessness: drugs, divorce, depression, disease, and doom. Disfunctional families were now the norm, and adults were presented as uniformly incompetent and untrustworthy. It's not that I wanted books that were all sweetness and light, but it seemed to me that growing up could hardly be worthwhile, given such nihilistic worldview. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the universe was actually better than it was being painted.

Since many of the commenters on Sartorias's blog mentioned liking YA because it was hopeful, optimistic, and interesting, it might be time for a second look. I decided to take down author and title recommendations and see if I could find a few of them at our local public library. Many of the ones I wanted were not available, but I got these:

• The New Policeman by Kate Thompson
• The Stones Are Hatching by Geraldine McCaughrean
• The Book of Changes by Tim Wynne-Jones (This was an accidental grab as I was intending to get any book by Diana Wynne Jones, and the author's first name was not on the spine.)
  
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
  

Feel free to put further recommendations in the comments box. Our library is closing for the summer for remodeling, but they'll let you check out 50 books to tide you over until they reopen in September. So this might be a good time to borrow a massive chunk of YA.

Brideshead Revisited -- Again

Since my husband's death two years ago, I've lived a relatively sequestered life. I haven't subscribed to a newspaper, watched television, or perused news magazines except in doctors' waiting rooms. But I do haunt the Catholic blogsphere, and sooner or later everything I really want to know about turns up there.

According to Amy Welborn at Charlotte Was Both, the trailer for the new Brideshead Revisited movie is out. You can read her opinion of it in her post, Teddy Bears Optional. Her criticism, aside from poor casting, is that the movie appears to be a heated power struggle between Charles Ryder and Lady Marchmain. And that's not what the book is about. As one of her commenters, Fr. Steve, puts it

. . . at the heart of Waugh’s book was Charles Ryder’s relationship with God, in regards to which his relationships with the Marchmains were expressions of his resistance to God, and ultimate reconciliation with God. The richness of Waugh’s insights is that they are powerful insights into the theological as well as the interpersonal. Charles Ryder is being remade in a crucible of both transcendent and immanent realities. One might say that the most interesting character in Waugh’s novel is actually God, whose presence permeates every scene, and yet never speaks a word directly, prefering to use secondary causes to effect Charles conversion.

My own criticism of the trailer is that it strongly implies that Sebastian is homosexually in love with Charles and that Lady Marchmain is forcing Julia to marry Rex -- neither of which is true in novel. And if that's what the movie is about, then it's just not the story that Waugh wrote.

The problem is, if you gut its religious aspect, Brideshead the novel is not unlike the chapel at Brideshead after it's been decommissioned. (The description is Cordelia's.)

[The priest] took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.

I suspect that this would be the key difficulty with with any dramatization of Brideshead Revisited: if you suppress the essential heart of Bridehead, it will, like the chapel sans the Eucharist, be merely "an oddly decorated room." And the decorations are indeed odd.

However, I suppose it's not fair to premataurely judge even this movie by its trailer since, through the judicious selection of music and clips, trailers can be crafted to appeal to any demographic without reflecting their movie's actual content -- as is ably and amusingly demonstrated by Scary Mary, a recut trailer of Disney's Mary Poppins.

Daddy-Long-Legs

A few weeks ago, for no discernible reason, I got to thinking about Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. So I took it with me the next morning when I went to sit with my dad while my mother went to Mass. (My father had just been released from the hospital after having suffered another stroke. The physical therapists didn't want him to be home alone yet.) It's a small book bound in navy blue cloth which, according to the penciled price on the fly-leaf, I bought for fifty cents. It's one of my Woolworth books and therefore very dear to me.

We moved to Azusa when I was in the sixth grade. In those more innocent days my mom wasn't afraid to let me walk all by myself to the local shopping center which was about a mile and a half away. I loved the freedom of those solitary expeditions, especially browsing at Woolworth's where the merchandise was within my means and ranged from live goldfish and turtles to tiny Whitman Samplers and the sort of jewelry that children buy as gifts for their mothers.

On one of my visits to Woolworth's I discovered an enormous pile of used, hardcover books. For me, this was like stumbling upon El Dorado. You have to understand that there were no bookstores in our immediate area. (This was long before chains like Borders or Barnes & Noble.) My only source of books was the Scholastic Book Club at school which only offered paperbacks. But here, piled in profusion, were real books, i.e. hardcover books with the authority of age, official books such as might be found on the shelves of a real library.

And, mirabile dictu, I could buy them and take them home! But how long would that pile of books be there? And how many of them could I buy, with my carefully hoarded, minuscule allowance, before they disappeared?

I don't remember how many books I ended up buying, but I made many trips to Woolworth's and spent hours sifting through that pile as I weighed the merits of one book against another. I know I got my copy of Tom Sawyer there and my copy of Jane Eyre. And I'm pretty sure that's where I got my Robinson Crusoe. (Only 25 cents! Though that was a whole week's allowance at the time.)

But getting back to Daddy-Long-Legs. . .

Eighteen year old Judy Abbot, an inmate of the John Grier Home, receives the astonishing news that one of the institution's trustees has offered to pay for her college education based on a humorous (and somewhat irreverent) composition which she wrote for her high school English class. Her beneficiary wishes to remain completely anonymous and in return asks only that she write him a monthly letter describing the progress of her studies and the details of her daily life. He intends her to become a writer, and "he thinks nothing so fosters facility in literary expression as letter-writing." The only thing Judy knows about her benefactor is that he is very tall, so she dubs him "Daddy-Long-Legs." The novel consists of her letters to him written throughout her four years of college and the summer after graduation. By the end of the novel, Judy has published her first book, found true love, and discovered the identity of Daddy-Long-Legs.

When I originally read the book, I was fascinated by the author's description of college life and by Judy's efforts to become a writer. In later rereadings I found it interesting to compare her experiences at a women's college circa 1912 with my own in 1970. But what struck me this time was how much of Judy's education took place outside the classroom and how successfully she followed Mark Twain's dictum that one should never allow one's schooling to interfere with one's education.

As a freshman, she is very conscious of her status as an escapee of the John Grier Home and her diligent attempts to "pass" as an ordinary girl are both funny and poignant.

You know, Daddy, it isn't the work that is going to be hard in college. It's the play. Half the time I don't know what the girls are talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. It's a miserable feeling.

Part of her "language" difficulties consists of a lack of cultural literacy.

You wouldn't believe, Daddy, what an abyss of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself. The things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of. For example:

I never read "Mother Goose" or "David Copperfield" or "Ivanhoe" or "Cinderella" or "Blue Beard" or "Robinson Crusoe" or "Jane Eyre" or "Alice in Wonderland" or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn't know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn't know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn't know that R.L.S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the "Mona Lisa" and (it's true but you won't believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it's fun! I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an "engaged" on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch and light the brass student lamp at my elbow and read and read and read. One book isn't enough. I have four going at once. [N.B. A girl after my own heart!] Just now they're Tennyson's poems and "Vanity Fair" and Kipling's "Plain Tales" and -- don't laugh -- "Little Women." I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on "Little Women." I haven't told anybody though (that would stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month's allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I'll know what she is talking about!

In fact, in her first semester she ends up flunking both mathematics and Latin prose in her autodidactic efforts to catch up to the other girls.

I'm sorry if you're disappointed, but otherwise I don't care a bit because I've learned such a of things not mentioned in the catalogue. I've read seventeen novels and bushels of poetry -- really necessary novels like "Vanity Fair" and "Richard Feverel" and "Alice in Wonderland." Also Emmerson's " Essays" and Lockhart's "Life of Scott" and the first volume of Gibbon's "Roman Empire" and half of Benvenuto Cellini's "Life" -- wasn't he entertaining? He used to saunter out and casually kill a man before breakfast.

So you see, Daddy, I'm much more intelligent than if I'd just stuck to Latin.

Amen!

Sequels, Prequels, Fan Fiction

Despite my bibliophilic tendencies, I am seldom in bookstores these days. I live on a rather tight budget, so I follow this simple economic maxim: If you don't go into stores, you won't spend money. But the other day we had some time to kill between our meeting with the tax guy and a medical appointment. So we slouched into a nearby Borders to do a bit of browsing. While Fillius Minor disappeared into the science section, I worked my way through the new releases and the bargain books.

I noticed the new 100th anniversary edition of Anne of Green Gables. It's main virtue is that it is a facsimile of the 1908 edition, and it's illustrations can help the modern reader to imagine how readers of the time might have pictured the characters. (When reading old novels my mind's eye is sometimes oblivious to period details, such as what life is really like without central heating, the actual level of illumination in a room without electric lighting, and the fact that in certain periods the hero of a novel probably would almost certainly have had a beard.)

Sitting right next to it was Before Green Gables, a prequel written by Budge Wilson, a Canadian author. I hate it when they do that! But I can also understand the longing to catch a further glimpse of a beloved world. But such simulacra never satisfy when what you crave is not simply the author's characters, but her style which is her very essence.

I will admit that I have read and enjoyed some fan fiction, particularly when based on a movie or a television series. Perhaps that's because these genres are collaborative in origin -- they have no single author. (I am very fond of Barbara Hambly's Ishmael, which merges the original Star Trek with a lesser known '60s series, Here Come the Brides.)

But in the case of works by individuals, such as Montgomery or Jane Austen, I feel that the original author is being violated. And that goes double for living authors -- though I know that some writers accept fan fiction as a sincere and flattering effusion of their reader's enthusiasm.

I think that derivative fiction works best when one is not actually trying to duplicate the style of the original author. A parody? Yes. A pastiche? Sure. But no one can be Jane Austen except Jane herself. So if you're going to write in Jane Austen's world, it helps if you don't try to sound like her and it helps if you also have some original or clever twist to contribute. I suppose that's why I somewhat enjoy Jane Fairfax by Joan Aiken. The author uses her own voice and she turns the story inside-out, making Jane the heroine and viewpoint character. She also manages to make explicable Jane's engagement to Frank Churchill who, upon my first reading of Emma, seemed scarcely better than a lighthearted cad. (Okay, maybe cad is too strong a word, but he definitely didn't seem to deserve Jane. Subsequent readings of Emma have brought more nuance to my perception of him.) In Jane Fairfax Frank is plausibly presented as a more likeable fellow without doing any violence to the original novel.

One exception to my feelings on this subject are the Oz books. Perhaps it's because I was never that emotionally that involved with them; or because the Oz books are read for incident, not style; or because Oz has made its way into our American folklore that I don't mind a bit when other authors write works set in Baum's universe. (Baum only wrote about 14 out of the 40 canonical Oz books. I did like his best though.)

Miracle Fiction?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided to have a go at The Song of Bernadette. It's another one of those books that I've always heard of but have never actually read. Since I'm on a tight budget, I borrowed a copy from the public library. They had the 1989 edition from St. Martin's Press. According to the introduction, it was the first book to be published in their new "Religious Miracle Fiction Series."

Naturally I was intrigued. Most of what passes for religious fiction is very badly done. But I'm always on the look-out for the rare exception. This series was to consist of "reissued classic books that bring back the well-known works of popular religious writers of the twentieth century." So what other novels had they published under this imprint? Possibly none -- since both Amazon and Google searches turned up no references except to Song of Bernadette. (If anyone does know of further books in the series, please let me know.)

Why did they attempt this series?

According to the editor, the approach of the new millennium would see both a revived belief in eschatology and "a fervent faith in the arrival and occurrence of religious miracles" which he defines as "often totally inexplicable events, that will be interpreted as saving us from our rational, destructive selves." Huh? Our rational selves are destructive? I thought that was the job of our irrational selves. He also seems to be buying into the assumption that religion and reason have nothing in common. Okay, Mr. Editor, I can tell right now that we are not simpatico.

I'm in the same camp with G.K. Chesterton who says, in the person of Father Brown in "The Blue Cross, "I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason." That's how Father Brown unmasks the thief Flambeau who has been masquerading as a priest. "'You attacked reason, ' said Father Brown. 'It's bad theolgy.'"

Not counting the brief Y2K frenzy, did either of the editor's predicitons of emerging religious themes come true? I don't think so.

Oh, wait a minute. Didn't those Left Behind novels come out around 1995? Shoot! Not that I ever read them. I tried to read the first chapter of one while standing in front of the book display in Costco, but I just couldn't manage it. It was soooo badly written. (And not my cuppa theology, either.) Their popularity boggles the mind. But I suppose that if you really like a novel's message, you'll forgive a lot in the way of bad writing.* Which is probably, as I said earlier, why most religious fiction is so badly done.

I'm two thirds of the way through Song of Bernadette. So far my response to it is fairly positive -- with one major reservation. More details when I'm finished.

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*Is that why Da Vinci Code did so well?

The Song of Bernadette

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, another one of those festal days sprinkled throughout Advent, the celebration of which helps to remind us that we are the party-church. Since we were homeschoolers, I always gave my kids a day off on December 8th, and of course we went to Mass. And we probably had a special dessert. (Someday I'll write a book called The Role of the Stomach in the Assimilation of Catholic Culture.) But unlike the Feast of St. Nicholas, we never had a special book which we always read in honor of the day.

I was thinking about this today when it occurred to me that I had never read The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel. The author of this fictionalized account of St. Bernadette was neither a Catholic nor a Christian. He was a Jewish playwright whose satirical plays lampooning the Nazi regime were a hit in Vienna, so he had to flee to France when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He found refuge in the town of Lourdes where various families took turns sheltering him and his wife. It was there that he heard the story of Bernadette Soubirous and her visions of a Lady who identified herself only as "the Immaculate Conception." In gratitude, he vowed that if he and his wife escaped to safety he would write Bernadette's story as a novel. The book was hot stuff when it was published in 1942. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for over a year and was made into a movie in 1943.

It's one of those books I've always heard of, but have never actually read. So just to be seasonal, I think I'll give it a try and will let you know what I think.

In the mean time, have a blessed Advent and "Party on, dudes!"

Halloween Reading

I've always loved Halloween. One of the many advantages of being the oldest child is that as long as you're willing to supervise younger siblings, you're allowed to go trick-or-treating long past the age when you might reasonably be expected to give it up. (Though, nowadays it seems that great big hulking teenagers with, little pretense of a costume, turn up on one's doorstep with an open pillowcase in shameless expectation of treats. And I'm not going to argue with those big guys.)

When you have small children, trick-or-treating is going to take up most of the evening. But our family also had a tradition of holding a Halloween Read Aloud party. Everyone had to bring a short story appropriate to the season and read it aloud to the group. Sometimes this party consisted only of ourselves; sometimes it included our adult friends and their children. The only rule was that outright horror was prohibited in deference to those of tender years and Catholic Bibliophagist (who finds enough to scare her silly in real life without even trying).

I thought I would share some titles with you even though it's really too late for you to go out and find any of these in time for tonight.

"The Accountant" by Robert Sheckley, - A nice middle class family of wizards discovers that their 9 year old son Morton has bound himself to a more sinister profession. In the anthology Tomorrow's Children, ed. by Isaac Asimov.

"The Perfectionist" by Margaret St. Clair - Aunt Muriel was a tender hearted and generous old lady. Drawing was her new hobby -- but her model had to remain absolutely still. In Stories of Suspense, ed. by Mary E. MacEwen.

"Swept and Garnished" by Zenna Henderson - How wonderful to be free of the obsessive fears that used to haunt her! Then Tella discovered something even scarier. In Holding Wonder by Zenna Henderson.

Oh, dear! Time for me to leave. Fillius2 and I have a long trek to the dentist's office this morning. I'll try to finish after class tonight.

I'm Not Dead Yet

I haven't posted here since October 2nd which, in the blogiverse, is probably equivalent to about an eon and a half. What can I say? Sometimes life happens. A lot of mine has taken place in hospitals or emergency rooms in the company of elderly relatives. And then we lost our phone service (and therefore email and Internet access) for a day and a half.

So while I catch up with things I am posting a link to Heros in Storytelling, Barbara Nicolosi's notes for a talk which she gave to the San Diego Christian Writers Guild. She surveys the contemporary audience's perception of and attitude towards heroes. She asks why we should care if there are no heroes. She talks about what a hero is -- and about what things are not heroic. Her field is movies, but I think her observations are applicable to the writing of any kind of fiction.