AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD – Peter Matthiessen

I was in Europe, with the Army, when At Play in the Fields of the Lord came out. In 1965. I paid it no heed. My literary tastes at the time had drifted from academic to more popular influences—Mailer, Baldwin, Ellison, James Jones, Eugene Burdick...—writing I considered edgier or maybe more accessible, or a mix of the two, than the classics seemed to offer. I vaguely remember reading about At Play when it hit the reviews, and I vaguely remember thinking, nah, not for me. And that was that. Never looked back.

Until a couple weeks ago. Once again my literary adviser, Fictionaut.com's Kitty Boots, rescued me from the obscurity of going to my grave without having given a well-worthy novel at least due glance. At her subtle invitation I glanced and glanced some more and soon got yanked into the maw of Peter Matthiessen's masterpiece which I suspect by then already had entered the Valhalla of classic literary works availing precious few alibis to self-respecting literati.

It was perhaps opportune that I had come down with a particularly virulent strain of flu when I started reading At Play. Or maybe not. My fevered nightmares and the drug-drenched interior raves of Lewis Moon were jibing, either accidentally or the book was deliberately leaking psychic chemistry into my blood. I had to lay off awhile until I could be sure which mental state was in charge. Coherence remained obscure in both venues, but in the one, Matthiessen's narrative artistry did promise to get me over the jungle wall and out of immediate danger without a pillow soak. The following might describe the nightmare of either of us, the other being Lewis Moon, half-breed soldier of fortune experiencing the start of a life changing epiphany among a primitive tribe of Indians he was being blackmailed to drive out of their home in the Amazon jungle—with bombs and machineguns if necessary. The catalyst is an Indian concoction with powerful hallucinogenic properties:

The bottle stood upon the sill; he drank it to the bottom.

He felt like crying, but did not. He had not cried in twenty years—no, more. Had he ever cried? And yet he did not really feel like crying; he felt like laughing, but did not. [...]

He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world without, and far away he heard them coming, the marching of huge nameless armies coming toward him, and once again his hands turned cold. He felt very cold. On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing. It palpitated gently; he could hear the palpitations, and the spots were growing. And there was a voice, a hollow voice, very loud, and very far away, calling through glass, and there were hands on him and he was shaken violently. The voice rose and crashed in waves, rolling around his ears; it was getting dark. […]

...colors rich and somber now, and shapes emerging; the shapes flowered, rose in threat and fell away again. Fiends, demons, dancing spiders with fine webs of silver chain. A maniac snarled and slavered, and rain of blood beat down upon his face. Teeth, teeth grinding in taut rage, teeth tearing lean sinew from gnarled bone. Idiocy danced hand in hand with lunacy and hate, rage and revenge; the dungeon clanked and quaked with ominous sounds, and he kept on going, down into the darkness…

I banished my demons eventually with a Z-pak and prednisone. Lewis Moon stole an airplane in the dead of night, flew over the jungle, and parachuted into a village of savages who received him as a god.

Sound familiar? The horror, the horror? I never read much Conrad, either, back in the day. I'm drawn now irresistibly to that master of dark. Because of the magic. The magic that one critic claimed is missing from At Play. In his whiny New York Times review, Eliot Fremont-Smith starts out with such effusive praise one might expect he and Matthiessen wore identical fraternity rings. Then, after presumably allowing a disdainful sniff, he unloads this: “...at every page, one is interested, admiring, agreeing even--but not transported, not engrossed. It's like reading Conrad, but without the magic (I have no other word for it). Because of the book's many obvious qualities and because passion is there, powerful though fixed, one's disappointment at being less than absorbed is keen and eventually overriding.”

Speak for yourself, Fremont-Smith. At Play absorbed the bejeebies out of me. At the same time I'm curious about “the magic” that apparently elevates Conrad to a sublimity only the most cynical, tenured lit. professor might deride. No swoons in this class!

But I cannot agree to such a rigid division, with “magic” on one side and “merely explainable” on the other. Not in the New York Times, anyway, where one expects literary reviews to be, well, literary rather than metaphysical. Unless Fremont-Smith found himself in a deadline hurry and used “magic” as code for “too subtly artistic to try to explain here given my space/time limitations,” or “Conrad gives me acid flashbacks.”

Then again, allowing different toques for different bloques, I can easily say the subtle artistry Matthiessen employs throughout At Play insinuated itself so deeply into my psyche it summoned a long-buried bummer or two from my days of deeeep breaths and tightly constricted exhales. The kind of hypersensitivity that focused on minute nuances—a loaded glint in the eye, lethal tone or emphasis of a distinctive syllable, a word projecting all of its connotations at once with one in particular aimed directly at your deepest insecurity. All but you laughed, secretly, it seemed. You felt the sweat in your armpits. Paranoia, we called it before the California argot took over.

Peter Matthiessen

 Matthiessen endows his characters with this extreme acumen to the extent it lends credence to theories that explain ESP in purely physical terms. Hesitation or movement at the wrong moment, a barely perceptible change in pitch of voice, timing of a facial expression, a bead of sweat can give people away, offer glimpses into character. Here's a scene that illustrates the sudden shift in dynamics between the two mercenaries, Moon and Wolfie, flying over the jungle with a crate of bombs they're intending to drop on the Indians. The longtime friends are tense. They're not agreed over the mission. Wolfie suddenly pulls his knife and draws blood from Moon's throat over a perceived anti-semitic slur (Wolfie's Jewish):

Moon glanced at him quickly; he caught the faint humorous flicker before Wolfie could suppress it. “Not that that’s the only reason,” Wolfie snarled.

“Did you see that guy shoot an arrow at the plane?” Moon considered knocking Wolfie’s arm away and throwing the plane into a roll. But though he had little to lose by this maneuver, he had nothing at all to gain; Wolfie would kill him with the first reflex. Then he heard Wolfie’s voice again, and from its tone he knew that he had won.

“That’s a reason not to bomb? Are you outa your mind, Moon? You really mean you’d cop out on our only chance because some lunatic of a Indian is nutty enough to shoot an arrow at us?”

And though this was exactly what Moon did mean, he now turned his head and gazed coldly at his partner. He was sorry that he had pleaded, however obliquely, and now that he had gained an edge, the knife point at his chin infuriated him.

I found Moon and Wolfie the most interesting of a small ensemble cast of characters. A close third was Father Xantes, a clever, sardonic Catholic priest competing evangelically with two Baptist missionary couples. Ironies abound. I could almost hear the Kingston Trio plinking and harmonizing throughout with their version of Sheldon Harnack's Merry Minuet: “They're rioting in Africa...and I don't like anybody very much.” The protestants in At Play hate the Catholics, and can't get along with each other. The Indians hate all of the white interlopers, and can't get along with each other.

All of the characters are carefully and realistically drawn. At times I wanted to slap one or another of the Baptists, and I kept thinking of Claude Rains playing Father Xantes in the movie, reprising his role of Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca. Probably some sort of chemical flashback.

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

 

A VIEW OF THE CHARLES -- Con Chapman

A recovering addict of the defunct TV series Boston Legal, I was hoping Con Chapman's cast would include at least some of the usual suspects in a Boston law firm - the nutty but lovable aging partner, the silver-tongued courtroom lion, the stuffy senior partners, feisty young turks, bimbos, serious babes and minor, backstabbing office politicos.

      Happily A View of the Charles does have them all - except the silver-tongued courtroom lion. Well, maybe it does at that, but we never get to see Gil Finnerty in a courtroom because A View of the Charles is the first of many books about lawyers I've read that never sets foot in a courtroom.

      A View of the Charles approaches the subject of lawyers and their fears, joys, quirks, suspicions, hopes, fantasies, lusts and resentments with such knowing subtlety (Did I mention Chapman's a lawyer?) that we conclude from the following brief conversation between two lawyers who are not close - Finnerty and Jared Berger - that Finnerty likely would fill quite admirably the role of silver-tongued courtroom lion:

      Berger: "I've got a couple of disputes that are going to end up in court soon and I need someone who's a real asshole."

     There was silence for a moment as Finnerty absorbed this last comment.

      Finnerty: "I didn't know you felt that way about me, Jared. Thanks--I really appreciate it."

      Berger: "No problem. You're one of the best."

      Finnerty: "You can be a real asshole too, you know."

      Berger: "Coming from you, that's high praise."

      Finnerty: "Well, I mean it."

      Berger: "Thanks."

Chapman - a real...Boston lawyer

      I can almost see the two of them sipping brandy and smoking cigars, enjoying the evening view of Boston from a veranda outside Berger's office after a tough day of litigation. Two assholes and damned proud of it. 

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

EMOTION AS MEANING: The Literary Case for How We Imagine – Keith M. Opdahl

My recurring nightmares about college seem to be tapering off—even the most frequent and most lucid one. It involves the only class I ever dropped. I was a third-semester sophomore at the U. of Wis., freshly released from the Army and eager to redeem the academic shame I’d brought upon myself and my parents four years prior by flunking out three times.

I’m the only character in this dream. I’m wandering alone on campus worrying that I might have forgotten to officially drop the course, which I imagine will destroy any chance I might have of ending up some day with a decent GPA. Problem is, I can’t find the place where the records are kept, where maybe I can clear up what at the moment is the biggest worry of my life. All the while I’m thinking maybe I can still officially drop out before it’s too late, or, if not, return to the class and try to catch up from where I’d left off. I’ve not yet awakened screaming from this dream, but I’m always relieved when consciousness returns to banish the imaginary long ago dread, at least for the moment.

Were there another character in the dream it would be Opdahl, instructor of the tormenting class, which was also the only writing class I’ve ever tried to take. Despite its fraction of a flicker on the timeline of my conscious memory, I could take you to the exact spot—at a crosswalk on Bascom Hill--where Opdahl and I met by chance half a century ago within an hour or so after that illusion-dashing session. Then, with what I took to be casual disgust at a piece I’d turned in, he had critically wounded the aspiration that prompted me to enroll in his course. It was the first assignment he’d given us. It was either the first or second time that term the class had met. He’d wanted a page or two devoted to describing someone, anyone.

I knew most if not all of the others would do the lips like squirming worms, eyebrows arching lewdly toward the rafters, nose not even a mother could love…what I’d assumed was the usual sort of literary thing. I knew this from hearing their coded bragging after Opdahl’d introduced himself. Things like “Can we get credit for stories we’ve published,” delivered in confident, sophisticated voices intended to impress Opdahl while collaterally intimidating smalltown hicks like me. It worked, at least on me, the first step toward the door of no return.

At some point while coming of age I developed an iconoclastic nature. Not sure how this came about. I’ve never considered myself a smartass, and my approach to Opdahl’s assignment most definitely was not intentionally disrespectful. From the vantage of retrospect I wonder now if he took it as some sort of cocky, deferred rejoinder to the “published” students’ challenge. He had no way of knowing I’d never been a gamer, unless you count the passive aggressiveness I learned watching the family cat lure the family dog to a blitz-clawed nose surprise. And maybe that is what I was doing, or trying to do: while all the “smart” kids went one way I’d sneak around behind the target and surprise everyone. If that’s what I was thinking to do I failed, miserably, explaining during our brief meeting on Bascom Hill what I felt was an ingenious approach to his assignment. He didn’t bother trying to see it that way, although I like to think a fortuitous seed might have embedded itself in his mind at that very moment.

The only words I recall verbatim during our miniscule conversation--both spoken by me--were “Mr. Opdahl” and “Mathew Paust.” I remember making an effort to articulate that my intention with the assignment was, instead of describing graphically someone’s physical features, to suggest a sense of the person by his actions, the way he walked, moved, what he did with his hands, that sort of thing. I have precious little recollection of what I did write. I remember feeling this cross-walk talk was a final appeal of sorts, and that Opdahl was the appellate judge. My impression of his response is that he regarded me in the same vein he might have someone trying to panhandle or hand him a religious tract. He brushed me off like a fleck of dandruff from his collar. I never saw him again.

Keith Opdahl teaching at DePauw University

To be fair, I know now my mastery of the writing craft was barely incipient, and that one of the aspects of developing as a writer is to be able to create a detailed picture with words, using such tools as metaphor and simile—squirming-worm lips, rafter-reaching eyebrows--just as a graphic artist must master basic drawing skills before progressing to abstractions. I might well have been trying to skate around my inexperience, and Opdahl might well have seen this plainly. If this were so, I can say now, with no malice, he might have tried a little harder to be a better teacher.

I pretty much forgot about him over the years, to the extent he never appeared in my recurring nightmare about his class. His unusual name did stick in my craw, though, so that it about choked me a year ago while I was reading a collection of Saul Bellow’s letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor. One of Bellows’s letters was addressed to “Keith Opdahl,” who, I quickly learned, had authored The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction. A bit of Googling followed, which assured me the late Keith Opdahl had indeed taught writing at U. of Wis., from 1961-67. My searching also turned up another book he’d written, Emotions as Meaning: The Literary Case for How We Imagine. Were I French, or the kind of dilettante to affect worldly chic with occasional French expressions, I might have shouted “Sacre Bleue!” or “voila!” Instead, alone in the apartment, I most likely gaped and wondered if my suddenly noticeable pulse was throbbing from excitement or from the midday Ritalin kick.

Bought the book, struggled diligently through the academic linguistic abatises and felt my suspicion blossom into unmitigated certainty that either my unacceptable paper of yore or my fumbling explanation on Bascom Hill had unimaginably sparked alive a worm of interest in Opdahl that grew over the decades into his theory that provoking a reader’s imagination is an essential element of the literary author’s craft. Were I of a litigious bent and had he not died on New Year’s Eve three years prior, I just might have...oh, non, mais j’arrive pas!

At this late date I’m quite content to enjoy the irony and a certain sense of vindication.

In his book Opdahl employs several literary classics in examining his theory. He starts out with a single paragraph from Ernest Hemingway’s story Big Two-Hearted River:

Nick drove another big nail and hung up the bucket full of water. He dipped the coffee pot half full, put some more chips under the grill onto the fire and put the pot oil. He could not remember which way he made coffee. He could remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he had taken. He decided to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that was Hopkins's way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins. While he waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a small can of apricots. He liked to open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the Juice syrup of the apricots, carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the apricots down. They were better than fresh apricots.

--Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”

“We do not simply translate Hemingway’s words into ideas,” Opdahl says. “Instead we embody the meaning we read, constructing a model of the author’s world so tangible that we can imaginatively enter it...when we look closely at Hemingway’s prose, we discover that he leaves out a great deal.

“Do we...know what Nick looks like or where he positions himself? Do we know what kind of opener he uses? Does he brace the can on his knee or work between outstretched legs? Hemingway does not tell us.”

“Big Two-Hearted River” was published in Hemingway’s collection of stories titled In Our Time sixteen years before I was born. Even a smalltown hick like me with the vaguest literary ambitions should be familiar with those stories, if not all of Hemingway’s work, by the time he or she sits down in a college writing class. I had read several of Hemingway’s novels, but not his stories. I had read him mainly for atmosphere, wasn't looking for fine points of craft. In fact, I barely had any concept of craft at the time, and no doubt this omission—this gross ignorance—came through with herald-trumpet clarity in my attempt to try “something different” in Opdahl’s class.

It is to weep (to bastardize Leonato’s comment in “Much Ado About Nothing”). To weep for my embarrassingly callow younger self. To weep for a man with a brilliant academic mind who lacked the chops for teaching when it mattered most to at least one student. To weep for joy time and accidental coincidence at last managed to breach that unimagined gap.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

A SEPARATE PEACE – John Knowles

I’ve never liked coming-of-age novels. Not sure why. Maybe because I was coming of age myself when I tried those that I tried. I was probably pre-high school when the first one I remember, Catcher in the Rye, appeared on my radar. I might have read it. I know I read some of it. I recall not liking the snarky voice nor empathizing with Holden Caulfield.

I might have felt he was so cool I could not identify with him. A few times in later years I considered reading it to see if I might respond differently. Haven’t done it, yet.

Then came The Adventures of Augie March, assigned in my freshman English class at U. of Wis. Hated it, narrator way too smart for me, reminded me painfully of my Midwest smalltown hickness. Haven’t tried it again, although recently I’ve read Bellow’s more mature work and liked it despite its informing me my hickness, alas, will be evident to anyone who cares to look for it as long as I live. But I believe it also helped me reach a sort of peace with it--oy, what a clever aging boyhick am I!

A Separate Peace. I doubt I would have liked it had I tried to read it nearer the time it was published, 1959. For one, its language was too fine, too nuanced for my callow hickness. Nor would I have had the incentive of the publicity blast Catcher caught eight years earlier with its catchy (groan) title and forbidden-fruit flavor aimed at rebellion-itching adolescents. I’d seen references to it over the years, always with praise if not outright awe, and believe I might have bought a copy awhile back--quite awhile back--intending to pursue the promised enlightenment. I did pursue enlightenment during those days, and continue to pursue it (and hope to chase it to the end of my cognizance), but somehow neglected to seek it in John Knowles’s debut and universally acclaimed coming-of-age novel. The “coming-of-age” aspect might have been off-putting had I known of it. I realize now I had no idea at all what A Separate Peace was about.

I read it last week on the trusted recommendation of my literary adviser, the Fictionaut poet Kitty Boots, and I can say with unequivocal enthusiasm her record with me stands intact. So I bought the Kindle version, and right off felt vindicated for my Catcher distaste by this endorsement from the British newspaper The Independent:

“A coming-of-age tale set in a New England boarding school, it bears immediate comparison to its better known contemporary The Catcher in the Rye but is an altogether gentler, more quietly brilliant book. . . . Reading this novel will feel like unearthing a forgotten gem.”

So I scrolled down to the first paragraph:

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before. It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more perpendicular and strait-laced, with narrower windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat of varnish had been put over everything for better preservation. But, of course, fifteen years before there had been a war going on.

Hooked. Right at the git-go. The low-key, careful mix of memory and observation easing me into a narrative I still had little idea where it would lead. Two paragraphs down some gentle intimation of dread ahead:

Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

I felt fear’s echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky.

At this point I was a captive of the Kindle app on my laptop, interrupted only by breaks for eating and using the—as Knowles presumably would have written—facilities. There’s a ‘50s gentility in his language, despite it’s near-decade gain on Catcher with its brat vernacular, somewhat shocking as I recall, in its day.

Knowles used language to conjure atmosphere, its nuances of beauty, dread, joy, and subtler, more civil irreverence than Caulfield’s. As to beauty, this scene took my breath with its quiet drama as well the incidental irony of reading it while getting snowed-in here in Hampton Roads, Virginia:

Not long afterward, early even for New Hampshire, snow came. It came theatrically, late one afternoon; I looked up from my desk and saw that suddenly there were big flakes twirling down into the quadrangle, settling on the carefully pruned shrubbery bordering the crosswalks, the three elms still holding many of their leaves, the still-green lawns. They gathered there thicker by the minute, like noiseless invaders conquering because they took possession so gently.

What am I forgetting? Oh! Of course! Plot, character, theme, that sort of thing! As we know, A Separate Peace was set against a background of World War II. Military thinking was influencing the school to arrange its priorities to prepare teenage boys for soldiering, toughen them up—bodies and spirit. The principle character, Finny, in one aspect is the ideal candidate. He’s far and away the toughest of heart, best leader, and best athlete on campus. Problem is, he’s the worst candidate temperamentally, taking great delight in disrespecting authority and breaking rules. Finny’s roommate and best friend is Gene, an introvert and the school’s best student, academically.

An odd couple. Their mutual devotion was one leap of faith I was never quite able to make. Much speculation has arisen over the years of a homoerotic thing between the two. For the record, there is no sex, described or implied, between or among any of the people in the novel. Noted gay author David Levithan (Boy Meets Boy) in a retrospective to the Kindle edition, quotes a comment by Knowles addressing this question in an interview twenty-eight years later: “Freud said any strong relationship between two men contains a homoerotic element. If so in this case, both characters are totally unaware of it. It would have changed everything, it wouldn’t have been the same story. In that time and place, my characters would have behaved totally differently. . . . If there had been homoeroticism between [Finny] and Gene, I would have put it in the book, I assure you. It simply wasn’t there.”

Levithan’s own reaction concurs with Knowles’s explanation, but he adds, “But when it comes to what the story means to me, so much of what Knowles writes gets to the heart of what it would have been like to be gay at that time— and what it can still be like to be gay now.”

Perhaps A Separate Peace tickled my Midwest smalltown prejudices a tad, keeping me from engaging fully in the special friendship of Finny and Gene. I did find the incident leading to the death of one of them the most realistically rooted in male competitiveness, from my experience.

As to theme, as it relates to the novel’s title, I have a quibble. This, from one of the two protagonists, would seem to sum it up: “I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.”

The following quote from the book seems to challenge, I believe unintentionally, the previous notion, that one can kill the evil in one’s heart simply by understanding it. To me this quote is nearer the truth: “It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

Ignorant or malignant, take your pick. It can be tiny, almost unnoticeable, but no matter how seemingly insignificant or how eloquently one can rationalize its presence, it can sprout evil when the conditions are ripe, without a moment’s warning. It’s known in criminal law as “irresistible impulse.”

This was the unforgettable, horrifying lesson I took from A Separate Peace.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]