by Brian Doyle
Which is a pretty good point, actually.
My friend also says look, the whole point of a poem is to jazz your perceptions, to send you sideways mentally and emotionally for a moment, to stimulate you to see things in a slightly different and ideally refreshing way, so really he is doing readers and editors a subtle service in presenting a poem that you can read in lots of different ways depending on what sort of paper or screen it is appearing on, and the typeface, and the time of day, and who you are when you read it. If you think about this carefully for a moment, he says, I am turning the whole dynamic around, so that the poem is the same but everything else is different; in a sense the poem is no longer the lines on the page or screen, but the whole panoply of things that are different each time the poem appears in a new magazine or journal or review or webzine. The poem is everything else except the lines on the page, get it?
This is a pretty interesting point, actually, but every time he explains this slowly and carefully to me with that glint in his eye I am not sure if he is making a brilliant and subtle point about poetry and art and perception and metaphysical existence or if he has gone over the edge altogether and I am being sold a pile of nuts. So, in classic editorial fashion, I will leave this question to you, the reader, and tiptoe gently out of the end of this essay, leaving you to ponder this metaphysical conundrum on your own while I get a lovely dry ale.
Seantences
It is only after a book of mine is published that I can sit quietly and think What was that all about?, for during the headlong writing of it I am thinking only about what happens next, and then what I have to cut, and then about all the tiny mistakes (I have the odd habit of mixing up the names of my characters, which makes my editor moan helplessly), and then about what parts might be good to read aloud, and then about how to explain the mistakes, which I cheerfully blame on the Tea Party. But then there comes a time when I can ponder, for a while, the unconscious urge that drove the book — the dreams, the inchoate inspiration, the subconscious energy. And this morning, staring at a novel I wrote about the sea, I realize that this novel began when I was a boy growing up near the ocean, fascinated and frightened by it, absorbed and thrilled, mesmerized and scared. I can remember puttering in the surf with my brothers at age four or so, and even then being riveted by the endless of it, the way that it had no confinement, the way that even its horizon was an illusion, the way that it was reputed to be filled with astounding creatures beyond our counting and our ken.
The allure of the sea only grew as I became a reader, and fell headlong into Kipling’s Captains Courageous, and Jack London’s The Sea Wolf and The Cruise of the Snark, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and In the South Seas, and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, and Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, and Melville’s Typee and Omoo, and C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, Conrad’s Typhoon and Youth, and Robert Gibbings’ Over the Reefs and Far Away, and the terrific Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy by James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff, and every other book I could find in the Merrick Library with blue covers that smacked of sun and salt and spray and storms and sailing and battles at sea and sea-life and voyages on the Mother of All Things.
Though I never went to sea, and do not fish, and am still scared to be more than waist-deep in the ocean, my utter absorption with the sea never did end, and I have happily read hundreds of maritime books over the years, most recently the excellent Richard Bolitho novels of Alexander Kent and the vast 20-volume masterpiece that is the story of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, by the late Patrick O’Brian; and on the pile of books to read by the bed at home I find not one but two books by James Norman Hall about the South Seas (Under a Thatched Roof and Lost Island); and so I sit here this morning smiling, for now I see that the novel I thought took two years for me to write took more than fifty, and may well be said to have begun on a bright beach long ago, as a boy of four gazed out at the biggest entity on earth, a vast story that never ends.
Catholic Journalism: a Note
Before the age of Catholic magazines as I have known them for forty years vanishes altogether into a blizzard of bells and digits, and Catholic periodicals assume their future form as shining holograms arising not unlike angels from your computer screen, let us remember and celebrate some of the sweet wild insane moments of the past, so that our children’s children will know that once there were small giants like Robert Burns of U.S. Catholic magazine, whose suit was always gray and whose face always a shining rosy color especially when he lost his temper, and Peggy Steinfels of Commonweal magazine, who looked cherubic and warm but who was eight times more acerbic than any nine bishops, and the Reverend George Hunt of America magazine, whose opening essay was so lyrical and funny and eloquent that I knew a man who subscribed to America only for George’s essay, which he cut from the magazine with a steak knife, sliding the rest of the issue into his parakeet’s cage, where he said Jesuit philosophy would for once for God’s sake be useful.
And there was Father Louis Miller of Liguori magazine, a brief cheerful energetic soul whose secret dream, I think, was that his beloved Redemptorist order would convert all of Latin America and then move slowly and surely north to reclaim the Lutheran enclaves of the upper Midwest; and there was Father John Reedy of Ave Maria magazine, who sailed across the campus of Notre Dame accompanied by a black dog the size of a municipality, on which, no kidding, you could have easily placed five small children with room to spare; and there were the harried editors of Franciscan and Maryknoll and Dominican and Paulist and Marianist periodicals, whom I met occasionally at conferences; I could never remember their names, as they seemed silent and bedraggled, and had been sent to the conferences, which were always held in rooms painted orange, to recruit advertising which they knew would never come their way; and so they went home after the conferences on long silent buses, clutching their melancholy satchels; I made a point of watching them board the buses, the poor creatures, always in a gentle rain, or a graying snow, if we were north of Kentucky.
Then there were the editors of diocesan newspapers, another harried and slender bunch; they were always hungry, and would attack the breakfast buffet with grim intent, storing away muffins in their satchels, and drinking so much orange juice their skin grew brighter as the conferences went on; it seemed to me they were not paid by their bishops in money so much as in promises or prayers, and the magazine editors generally would quietly take up a collection for them, or sometimes arrange for a second spread of muffins — an act of kindness I never forgot, and have often remembered as a specific example of the gospels in action in our lives today.
Finally there were the editors of newsletters, and these were men and women so nearly transparent as to be veritable wraiths and hallucinations; if by rare chance there was a brief burst of sunlight at a conference center, the newsletter editors would very nearly vanish, and only the glint of their free pens and coffee cups would give away their presence in the meeting room. Nothing could be done for the newsletter editors, who well knew that not a single soul ever read any of their issues, not one; but it was cheering to visit their sample tables, and paw through their shining eight-page productions, and see them weep silently in joy at having been briefly apprehended. As my career as a Catholic journalist went on I made more and more of an effort to visit the newsletter editors’ sample tables, initially just to hear their gentle twittering, not unlike the fowls of the air, but later in something like empathy; an editor’s worst fear — indeed such a dark fear that we do not often voice it aloud — is that no one will read or even skim that which you have so assiduously labored upon, argued with the publisher about, and poured your heart into. There is so much work unwitnessed in the world at large, that to fail to witness just the small sea of Catholic journalism in my time would have been a sin, however small; but I tried to see it, and now you have too. Bless you for that.
Review: Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories, by Brian Doyle
I have been reviewing books for ne
wspapers and magazines for twenty years now, and in the course of those years I have written gibbering elegies for extraordinary books, polite insults for selfish books, courteous evasions for poor books by terrific writers, selective paeans for books in which there are nuggets of glory amid a sea of muddle, and other such endless angles on what is, it seems to me, really an interesting sub-genre itself of Literature, a sub-genre with its own masters, the late Christopher Hitchens, for example, not to mention the late John Updike, who was a far better writer about novels than he was a writer of them.
But in my entire reviewing career, such as it is, I have never read such a peculiar and maddening book as Bin Laden’s Bald Spot and Other Stories, which (a) only has about two entire paragraphs in its 140 pages devoted to His Late Murderousness’ epic bald spot; (b) has a cover featuring a woman in red shoes with an American flag umbrella, though red shoes and a flag umbrella never appear anywhere in the book; (c) contains some sentences that go on for weeks at a time; (d) insults the late great Gregory Peck on page 2, without subsequent apology anywhere; (e) contains a story about the late Joseph Kennedy which never once mentions Mr Kennedy’s name, leaving the reader floundering as to whether the story is about Howdy Doody or James Boswell or what; (f) contains a story that avidly and repeatedly insults His Eminence Bernard Cardinal Law, former archbishop of Boston, calling His Eminence the Patron Saint of Rapists, and a criminal, and a slime, and a coward, and a fool who ought to be sentenced to cleaning bathrooms twelve hours a day, and other terrible things like that; (g) contains three hilarious basketball stories that sure seem to be totally true, and how can you call true stories fiction, is that allowed?; (h) contains a story about a ten-kilometer road race in which all the runners are cuckolds, as if that could ever happen; (i) contains a story about a man changing his automobile insurance from American Automobile Association regular coverage to American Automobile Association plus coverage, which seems awfully like a plug for the American Automobile Association; (j) contains a story in which Leonard Bernstein is said to have been the size of a poodle, which sounds vaguely insulting, not that there’s anything wrong with poodles; (k) contains a story in which apparently the ampersand is the hero of the story, which is confusing; (l) contains a story in which a man boards a bus on which the only other passengers are former boyfriends of his wife, as if that could ever happen; (m) contains several stories that are only two or three pages long, so that just as you get into the swing of things they end, which hardly seems fair; (n) contains a story that looks suspiciously like a one-act play; and (o) some other problems which I cannot remember because I am fixated on the fact that in the course of 140 pages this author manages to insult Gregory Peck, Leonard Bernstein, and Bernard Cardinal Law. Has he not heard that there are women on this planet also? Are there no women suitable for insulting in even such a slim volume as this? Could he not have devoted even a line to the preening of Sarah Palin or the egotism of Ayn Rand? And where is any sort of attention to diverse insult? In the space of 25 stories was there no room at all for insulting the arrogance of the Reverend Al Sharpton, the maniacal narcissism of the late Hugo Chavez, or the prim lowercaseness of bell hooks? How hard would it have been to tease bell hooks by simply typing Bell Hooks? But no.
I have read each of Mr Doyle’s other books carefully, and I can say without fear of contradiction that there are some passages among them that are not altogether bad; he is a decent essayist; his nonfiction books about wine and hearts are, at least, diverting, and excellent bathroom reads; and his novels, while headlong, can certainly be said to be among the best million novels ever published in our estimable country. But of this new fictional direction of his I can say only this without fear of contradiction: it’s better than a stick in the eye.
On Failing to Properly Return a Terrific Book by Jan Morris
Went to return a book to the library the other day and it refused to go in the BOOKS ONLY slot. Odd. I tried again several times, thinking perhaps I had suddenly aged beyond belief and could not muster the muscle to cram it through the wall, but no, it was the book itself, adamant, recalcitrant, bristling and ruffling indignantly, that would not allow itself to be returned.
This was a conundrum unlike any I had known before, and o dear lord have I known conundra. I could tell you stories all day and night and most of Tuesday.
I tried the return bin in the library parking lot, a steel tank big as a refrigerator where I have seen many unusual things, among them a small boy climbing into the bin to see what it was like inside, people tossing books at the maw of the bin from moving cars, and a man with a ball-peen hammer attacking the bin for reasons that remain murky.
But again the book refused to be returned.
I should perhaps note that this was the first volume of Jan Morris’s magisterial Pax Brittanica trilogy, Heaven’s Command, an unbelievably great book, the single best-written history I have ever read, and this includes William Manchester’s glorious first two volumes about Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, which remain superb even though I cannot forgive Manchester for dying on me before he finished the third and concluding volume. The nerve of the man.
I tried the AUDIOVISUAL ONLY slot in the adjoining gaping steel bin in the parking lot, to no avail, and then tried the AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL ONLY AND WE MEAN IT slot by the front door, looking around carefully to see if there were any slimy little kids who would rat on the strange man stuffing books into the wrong slot, but there weren’t any, not even the usual ubiquitous Girl Scouts with their rickety card tables and boxes of howling sugar and those evil laser glares they deliver when you say airily that you bought fifty boxes yesterday, they can smell lies, you know, like wolves do, and did you know there are ten million Girl Scouts worldwide, try to think of that without a shiver of fear as you crawl into bed tonight.
I thought about just heaving the book at the door of the library and shuffling away briskly, pretending to scour the heavens for falcons and rockets, but that would be a disservice to the holy librarians, and it was a moist day also, and no man in his right mind would leave a genius like Jan Morris out in the rain, so I tried to stuff the slot one last time, this time with as much of a manful effort as I could muster, which wasn’t much, which made me think ruefully of the Girl Scouts again, so I sat down to ponder.
There was a powerful temptation to blame Jan Morris for this turn of affairs, but she’s Welsh, and you can’t insult such a heroic muddy nation, and she’s the finest writer in the world, not to mention by all accounts the absolute soul of gentle courtesy, and then I thought about blaming the Girl Scouts somehow, but then it occurred to me to wonder why the book was so adamant about not being returned.
Because I am afraid no one will ever check me out again, said the book suddenly. I was wondering when you would ask. Because I am not stupid and all this talk about the whole world going utterly digital gives me the roaring willies. I don’t want to be kindled. I don’t want to be electrified. I like the heft and thud and thump of me, the smell and substance. I like traveling in cars and planes. I like beds and couches and beaches. I like hands and bellies. I like kids poking into me by accident. I like the cheerful mind who made me. I like that she scribbled me in inks of various colors in notebooks of various shapes in more countries than she can remember. I like that they printed thousands of me with paper and type and glue and thread and cloth. I like the crumbs and coffee people spill on me. I like the way people flitter their fingers along my shelf-mates and alight on me and pull me down and flip me open and get absorbed and have to hustle to borrow me when the librarians bark the time. I liked being borrowed and not downloaded. I like being in the trunk of your car and being read in pubs and hotels and dens. I like kids’ voices in the other room from where I am being read. I like being stacked by the bed with Pico Iyer and Silver Surfer comics and the Bible. I have lived in this library for forty years and I’ll be damned if I will go back in there to molder until the revolution converts me and my friends into digital bits. I know what I a
m about, and if the British Empire stood for anything it stood for making dreams real by force of will and character, and I dream of being held by hands and heads and hearts until my pages melt in the rain and the words in me dissolve into dust. Any questions?
I sat there dumbfounded, as you can well imagine, and then I went home and did the only sensible thing to do, which was to write to Jan Morris. She replied immediately, the soul of gentle courtesy. “Try returning it at the same time as you donate my newest book,” she wrote, which I did, and this worked, which is something to think about, and so we come to the end of this essay, carefully looking both ways for Girl Scouts.