Dickens and grace

My dear children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived, who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in anyway ill or miserable, as he was.

Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord

Charles Dickens wrote The Life of Our Lord not for general circulation but for the sake of his own children. He was more subtle in his novels and stories, yet the same gospel message can be found there, as well. Sin, grace, compassion for the sick, poor and needy — all can be found in abundance in his work.

To prove that point, Gina Dalfonzo, editor of Dickensblog, has assembled a number of excerpts from his work for a new book called The Gospel in Dickens. It is one in a series of similar books from Plough Publishing House highlighting the Christian message found in the work of such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Dickens novels are often critical of Christians, something Dalfonzo describes in her introduction as "policing his own side." Dickens had no problem with Christianity, just with those hypocrites whose own actions do not conform with their supposed beliefs. And Dickens counted himself among those hypocrites. His own actions toward his wife and family hardly matched the Christian ideal, and he knew it. At the core of the Christian faith, however, is not so much righteous living as grace for flawed living. This idea is perhaps most famously illustrated by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, when miserly Scrooge discovers both grace and joy. If God can forgive Scrooge, then why not Scrooge's creator?

Dalfonzo mines for gospel gold in the writer's best-known books, such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, as well as in some lesser-known stories, such as The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. She divides these excerpts into three categories: Sin and Its Victims, Repentance and Grace and The Righteous Life. Out of context, these excerpts do carry the same impact they have when reading the novels themselves, although the editor does a good job of explaining the situation in each case. In all there are 36 excerpts from Dickens's fiction, as well as two letters the author wrote.

In all the book makes a good case that Dickens, whatever his own sins, had the gospel of Christ on his mind while writing his enduring stories.

Misunderstandings

 That's the goal of using language — to communicate ideas and desires in the clearest way possible.

Ross and Kathryn Petras, That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

That seems obvious, doesn't it? When we speak or when we write, we want to be understood. Yet it is amazing how often we misunderstand others and others misunderstand us. We seem to spend a good part of our lives clearing up misunderstandings or living with the consequences of those misunderstandings. How many people haven't spoken to each other for years because once one misunderstood another?

The presidential debate last week provided a number of examples of misunderstandings, not all of which were deliberate. When President Trump spoke of coyotes bringing children across the border from Mexico, he was using a fairly common slang term for human smugglers, yet many people, including some in the media, pictured animals dragging children across the border.

Was Joe Biden, the former vice president, just using imprecise language when he spoke on other occasions of ending fracking or on Thursday night of phasing out the oil industry? In both cases there have been attempts to clarify what he actually meant.

There are many reasons why language can be misunderstood. Here are just a few:

1. We tend to hear (or read) what we want to hear (or read). This is especially true in the political arena where everyone wants to interpret the other side's language in the most negative way possible, yet all of us are guilty of this from time to time.

2. Instead of simple, easily understood words, some of us tend to favor more pretentious ones, especially in our writing. Not everyone understands pretentious words.

3. One frequent consequence of the above is that we choose words that, as Ross and Kathryn Petras say in their book, don't mean what we think they mean. Thus we might say assure when we mean ensure or ensure when we mean insure or insure when we mean assure.

4. We are ambiguous when we should be specific. If on Wednesday you tell a friend, "I'll see you next Friday," should that friend expect you in two days or on Friday of next week? Just because something is clear to you, doesn't mean it is equally clear to the other person. I once showed up at a restaurant a week early for dinner with my sisters because of this very kind of misunderstanding.

5. Sometimes we simply mishear or misread what someone says. Even plain talk can be misunderstood by someone. Sometimes we don't give the spoken or written word our full attention.

6. Some comments made in jest are taken seriously, while other comments made in earnest can be taken as jokes.

7. Some statements are deliberately ambiguous. But this is a topic for another day.

The prince on the case

British mystery writer Peter Lovesey is best known for his long Peter Diamond series of novels and, to a lesser extent, his initial series of mysteries featuring Sergeant Cribb. In between, however, he wrote a brief but delightful series of Victorian mysteries with Albert (or just Bertie) the Prince of Wales as his protagonist.

The first of the three books, Bertie and the Tinman (1987), explains in Bertie's words that he has a talent for solving mysteries but because of his royal position he cannot expose himself to the publicity. His mother, Queen Victoria, would certainly not approve. Thus his account of his first case will be sealed away for 100 years, or until 1987.

Because no one will read it until long after his death, not to mention his mother's death, he feels free to speak freely about his exploits, not just those about solving crimes but also those about romancing women other than his wife.

The death that turns a prince into a detective is that of his favorite jockey, Fred Archer, nicknamed the Tinman. Archer has committed suicide, and it is in fact a suicide. Still the official explanation seems suspicious to Bertie. There must be more to the story than just temporary madness. His investigation leads to an actual murder and a serious threat to his own life. How he solves the case, while keeping his name out of the papers and preventing his mother, not to mention his wife, learning his secrets, make for an enjoyable  reading experience. The other two books in the series — Bertie and the Seven Bodies and Bertie and the Crime of Passion — are no less entertaining.

Finding family

Our  magnificent lake is practically overhead. What curious geography. A lake in the sky.

Mary Hogan, The Woman in the Photo

In The Woman in the Photo (2016), Mary Hogan weaves three stories into one. These three threads include Lee, a contemporary California woman who has long known she was adopted as a baby but knows nothing about her birth parents. On her 18th birthday she is given a glimpse at an old photograph that shows two women, one of whom may be her ancestor. This starts her on a quest to discover what she can about the women in that photo.

Another thread, and for much of the novel the main thread, is Elizabeth Haberlin, a spoiled rich girl from Pittsburgh who is the daughter of the personal physician to that city's wealthiest families. In 1889 she is about the same age as Lee is now and about to make her debut, when she is expected to have her pick of some of the wealthiest young men in western Pennsylvania. And there is even a handsome young Englishman who is charmed by her.

The third woman — the third thread — is none other than Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross.

What brings these three together in one story is one of the great American tragedies, the Johnstown Flood, which tore so many families apart. Elizabeth is one of the privileged few who spends summers at the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in the mountains above Johnstown, Pa. For their pleasure, a mountain stream has been dammed to create an artificial lake just outside their mansion-like cottages. When heavy rains cause that dam to give way, a tidal wave of water pours over Johnstown, killing more than 2,200 people.

The flood brings Clara Barton to Johnstown. And when Lee finally identifies her in that photo, she is on her way to identifying that other woman and, in time, find a family she didn't know she had, right there in Johnstown. Meanwhile two of the three women find true love, poor Clara remaining a spinster. How all this happens makes a good story, even if it sometimes seems a little too neat and Hogan's language at times inflated. Yet this latter fault might be excused by the fact that part of the story has a 19th century narrator, a time when inflated language was customary.

Mystery lessons

In the United States, most of us know very little about Iceland, either about its history or its culture. It is a mystery few of us even care to solve. Yet Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason, whose books are widely read in the U.S., helps solve this mystery with his mysteries.

His novels are set in Iceland, but at various points in the 20th century, thus giving readers a feel for what was going on in that island nation at the time. In The Shadow Killer (2018), it is the middle of World War II when the body of a man is found in another man's residence with a swastika carved in the forehead. A cyanide pill is found nearby, suggesting that either the dead man or Felix, the man in whose home the body is found, might have been a Nazi spy. But where is Felix? And is he the killer?

Indridason gives us not one but two investigators, each pursuing a different line of inquiry. One is Flovent, a relatively new man in Reykjavik's Criminal Investigation Department. The other man is Thorson, a man with Icelandic family ties, who works for the U.S. Military Police, the Americans now having a number of troops stationed in Iceland. The two men work independently, while meeting occasionally to compare notes.

While one man pursues the espionage angle — there are rumors that Winston Churchill might be coming to Iceland, suggesting the murder might somehow be connected — while the other investigates whether the murder might be a domestic crime, perhaps involving an attractive woman, Vera, with a habit of pitting one boyfriend against another.

I didn't find The Shadow Killer as compelling as most Indridason mysteries I've read. The pace seems a bit slow. Still it is a worthy read, as well as another fine lesson in Icelandic history and culture.

Inventing childhood

Writing about Little Women in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, Thomas C. Foster comments about "a thirty-five year period that invented childhood." During this period in literary history, Lewis Carroll published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), Mark Twain produced The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and L. Frank Baum gave us The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Each of these books is now regarded as a classic in children's literature, although not all of them were intended for children when they were written. Twain thought he was writing Tom Sawyer for adult readers, for example. It was supposed to be a nostalgic reminder of the days of youth.

Foster's point, however, is that these books gave readers, both adults and children, a different way of thinking about childhood. Earlier Charles Dickens had given readers greater sympathy for children in such novels as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, showing how they were so often put to work at a young age or neglected in orphanages or mistreated in schools. These later novels, building on Dickens, elevated "childhood to a state of grace, touched by safety, adventure, comfort, love, play, and even magic, qualities about which a great many children of that era dared not even dream," Foster writes.

Today it seems difficult for most of us to conceive of a time when children were widely regarded as just miniature adults, capable of making their own way in the world. Once children routinely worked in factories and brothels, were sent to sea or enlisted to beat drums on battlefields. In some places such things may be still be happening, but these novels helped change society in those parts of the world where they have been read.

That old Russo magic

Suddenly it was as if his dead parent, his living one, his old profession and his boyhood self were all clamoring for attention.

Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic

Never mind not being able to go home again, there are so many of us who are unable to ever leave home in the first place. Or perhaps more accurately, our childhood home, our parents, our youthful experiences (especially the more traumatic ones) never leave us.

Such is the case with 57-year-old Griffin, the central character in Richard Russo's 2009 novel That Old Cape Magic. His life is in a state of upheaval. He is separated from his wife, his daughter is getting married and he has yet to decide what he really wants to be when he grows up. Does he prefer to be a Hollywood screenwriter, less secure but more exciting, or a college professor like his parents?

Even after death, his parents seem to want to dominate his life. For a long time he carries his father's ashes in the trunk of his car, then his mother dies and her ashes join them. Both wanted their ashes spread on Cape Cod, though in separate locations, but Griffin can never seem to find the right spots for them. Perhaps, despite spending his entire adult life trying to stay away from them, he doesn't really want to part with them.

His snobbish parents both taught at a college in Indiana, but each summer they would take their son to Cape Cod, where they could pretend to possess a higher social status than they ever actually achieved. His mother in particular thought they deserved to be professors at some Ivy League school, or almost any college on the East Coast. Being stuck in Indiana seemed shameful to her. But at least they could vacation on Cape Cod and enjoy what they called "That Old Cape Magic."

Does the Cape have any magic left for Griffin? Can he leave his parents behind, both literally and figuratively, and confront his current problems as a grownup?

Russo, as usual, uses wit to address serious human issues, making a reader laugh between the tears, or cry between the laughs, whichever the case. There's a wedding rehearsal dinner that turns into a disaster worthy of a Laurel and Hardy movie. His various characters are wonderfully drawn, so real you can almost see them. This is a novel that itself contains a bit of magic.

What determines literary excellence?

I think all the enduringly excellent books began, in fact, as immediately excellent, whether they were noticed at the time or not. Their special quality is to outlast the moment and carry immediacy, impact, meaning, undiminished or even increasing with time, to ages and people entirely different from those the novelist wrote for.

Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Enduringly excellent literature versus immediately excellent literature is a distinction many of us have made, but Ursula K. Le Guin gives us vocabulary for that distinction. Some books are immediately excellent but, for whatever reason, never become enduringly excellent, meaning they are not recognized as excellent by the generations that follow the generation in which the books were written.

Some books are not regarded at the time of their publication as being immediately excellent, yet in years to come are hailed as enduringly excellent. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick provides a fine example, one mentioned by Le Guin. The novel got little attention during the author's lifetime, both readers and critics of his day preferring his shorter, more adventurous stories. Only much later was Moby-Dick recognized as a work of genius. The point Le Guin makes is that books like Moby-Dick were immediately excellent whether they were recognized as such or not.

Of course, one could also argue that some books are enduringly excellent whether they are recognized as such or not. Yet in the end, greatness requires someone to recognize that greatness.

To be either immediately excellent or enduringly excellent a book generally needs certain things to happen:

1. It must be read. Not necessarily widely read. It need never become a best-seller. But someone with the power to influence opinion and focus attention on that book must read it. 

2. It must be talked about and written about. Literary critics and scholars carry much weight. When they say a work of literature is great, others may believe them. Even obscure, long-forgotten books can gain a second life if someone writes a notable biography of the author, for example, or writes an article about the book for an important literary journal.

3. It must be taught by literature professors. This may be the most significant of all because when a novel is taught in a college classroom, students are likely to regard it as a significant work of literature whether they actually liked reading the book or not.

I can recall taking a class in contemporary literature in the 1960s. The professor assigned such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Ginger Man, Catch-22 and A Fine Madness. We students made the assumption that these books were at least immediately excellent and had the potential to become enduringly excellent. Have any of them reached that potential  after the passage of more than a half century? Catch-22, perhaps. It depends greatly on whether there are any professors still teaching these books. Because they were all written by white men, perhaps not.

4. It must actually be excellent. Excellence, like beauty, tends to lie in the eye of the beholder, but Le Guin attempts to give excellence a narrower definition. She speaks of excellence in terms of "an art that embodies the moment." It speaks to those beholders about their lives and their times. Those books that embody the moment of today are immediately excellent. Those that embody the moment of tomorrow and of endless tomorrows have a chance to become enduringly excellent.

The science of staying alive

People tend to think of military science as strategy and weapons — fighting, bombing, advancing.... I'm interested in the parts no one makes movies about — not the killing but the keeping alive.

Mary Roach, Grunt

Hollywood is not likely to make a movie based on Mary Roach's Grunt (2016), but if it could make one as interesting and as amusing as her book, it could be a box-office smash.

As a young girl Roach must have read one of those books with titles like Science Is Fun and believed every word of it, for all her books, with titles like Spook and Bonk, take science seriously, but not all that seriously. This time her subject is military science, not better weapons but better ways of protecting American soldiers or, failing that, helping them recover from their wounds.

She writes about the science of camouflage, noting that the Navy uses a blue camouflage that looks like water. She quotes one anonymous officer as wryly observing, "That's so no can see you if you fall overboard."

She notes that soldiers can now wear underwear popularly termed Blast Boxers that, while hardly bombproof, can guard against contamination of wounds in that area from fungi and bacteria.

Elsewhere she comments that the fittest soldiers are often those most likely to suffer from heatstroke, simply because they are the ones most likely to push themselves hardest in hot climates.

She writes too about ear protection in the extreme noise of war, genital transplants and medical maggots. Even in peacetime, she notes, sailors aboard nuclear submarines are kept so busy that there is little time for sleep. Thus a submarine might leave port with a thousand pounds of coffee aboard to keep everyone awake. She also observes that the most dangerous part of a submarine voyage is coming to the surface, since it can be extremely difficult even with today's technology to know what might be directly above.

Like Roach, one does not need to have any interest in battles, weapons or military strategy to find all this fascinating — and despite the serious subject matter, often very, very funny.

That tingle in the spine

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

Vladimir Nabokov

In those four sentences Vladimir Nabokov breaks down the reading experience into four aspects — the mental, the emotional, the physical and even the spiritual. Interestingly he rates the emotional as the highest, more important even than reading's intellectual component. We read with our minds, he says, but we feel with our spines. That feeling, he suggests, is reading's greatest reward.

Nabokov's subject is the challenging Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, not just any book that might be at the top of the current best-seller list. So we might wonder if the great novelist, the author of Lolita, would expand his comment to include just any sentimental romance or edge-of-the-seat thriller. Perhaps he would, for whatever we might choose to read, the payoff, if there is one, usually comes through our emotions. We want books to excite us, move us, thrill us, amuse us, inspire us, whatever. Otherwise we are likely to put them down and forget about them.

Interesting facts, profound stories or sound intellectual arguments are all well and good, and for some readers this may be all it takes to stir an emotional response, but for most of us readers it takes a tear, a laugh, a burst of anger or perhaps just that tingle in our spine.

2020 vision just like 1995 vision

I am 25 years late reading Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed (1995), yet his main points could have been written yesterday. That's because what he terms the "vision of the anointed" hasn't changed, not just since 1995 but for hundreds of years.

By anointed he means those people — mostly in government, academia, the arts and the media — who consider themselves not just smarter than the common rabble but on a higher moral plane, as well. Those who disagree with them, Sowell writes, "are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin." If you disagree with them you are not just wrong, but evil.

Thus democracy, in which their votes count no more than those of ordinary people, is viewed as an error in need of correction. To accomplish this requires a crisis of some kind. Almost anything will do — a pandemic, climate change, racism, poverty, forest fires, whatever happens to be handy.

Often, Sowell points out, problems are already in the process of correction when the anointed identifies them as crises. Then they advocate corrective measures that tend to make these problems worse, not better. Powell mentions Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, which came at a time when poverty in the United States was shrinking. The Great Society programs led to significantly more poverty, a trend that continues to this day. More recently the furor over racism in the country came at a point when racism was less evident than at any time in history.

Despite their presumption of intellectual superiority, both facts and logic mean little to the anointed, Sowell says. In today's world, the anointed preach the importance of following science, while ignoring any science that conflicts with their vision.

Sowell says the anointed speak of solutions, while more sensible people speak of trade-offs. Attempting to correct one problem can cause another, something the anointed refuse to accept. Any new problems just create new crises for the anointed, in their wisdom, to solve. And something new to blame on somebody else.

The anointed, the author writes, focus on what he calls mascots and targets. The mascots are those, such as women, blacks or transexuals, whom the anointed choose to patronize, while the targets are those they choose to blame.

Perhaps the statement Sowell makes in 1995 that most sounds like it could have been written in 2020 is this one: "Those who have most consistently undermined the police and other elements of law enforcement are among those most shocked by the escalation of crime and violence."

True readers

Not all readers are created equal. For some, reading is a high point, perhaps even the high point, of a day. Others read when they can. Still others only when they have to. In his book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis mentions four traits that separate true readers from all others. Here they are (paraphrased), with my own comments, as well as my own self-analysis.

1. They love to re-read books they've already read.

The traits Lewis mentions do not focus on the kinds of books one reads (he seems to assume the reading of serious literature), but I think may apply here. There are plenty of people who read constantly, a book every day or two, but who would not qualify as true readers by his definition. That's because they mostly read mysteries, thrillers, romances or adventure tales. These are books very few people would consider reading a second or third time. Once you know who the killer is, how two people find true love or how the hero or heroine survives a harrowing experience, there is little incentive to dip into the same book again, at least not for a number of years. With a book like Pride and Prejudice, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, knowing the ending is not a disincentive to reading it again. How the story is told, more than the story itself, is what makes such a book worth rereading. This is no less true with nonfiction.

I probably reread often enough to qualify as a true reader, though I certainly do not reread as much as I would like or as much as some others do. There are still so many books I have yet to read the first time. Yet I have read at least twice such books as Moby Dick, Walden, The Sun Also Rises, Henderson the Rain King, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Franny and Zooey and all of Thomas Hardy's major novels. And you could add some books by C.S. Lewis to that list.

2. They value reading as an activity, not just as a last resort.

I have already alluded to this trait. There are some people who save a book, one they say they want to read, for a weekend at the lake, a vacation at the beach or a plane ride across the country when there will be plenty of time and few other distractions. Yet there are always other distractions for those who want to find them, and such people usually do. True readers make reading a regular part of their day in the same way they set aside time for eating meals. doing necessary chores or watching favorite TV programs. For them, reading becomes a pleasant habit.

I read each afternoon with few exceptions (such as Sundays during the football season) for two or three hours. After dinner I usually return to my favorite reading chair for a shorter session. I normally read at mealtimes, as well. In this way I can usually read eight to ten books a month.

3. They think of reading certain books as a life-changing experience.

"Their whole consciousness is changed," Lewis writes. "They have become what they were not before." This probably doesn't happen by reading an Agatha Christie mystery, so again the kind of books one reads is a factor. I suspect life changes are most often experienced in one's youth. After a certain age life changes become more difficult, a wee have already become what we are, for better or worse. But young people, at least those who are already true readers, encounter The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird or some other important book, and they do feel profoundly changed.

Two books that gave me a profound jolt in college were J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey and Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis himself. Paul Tournier's The Strong and the Weak also had an impact.

4. They continuously reflect on what has been read.

A book, or at least a good book, doesn't necessary end when the last page has been read. Even if a book doesn't change your life, it can at least give you something to think about for, at least, days afterward. Even a thriller might do this, but a great work of literature even more so. True readers think about the books they read.

This blog, I guess, offers evidence that I meet this criteria. I read books, I think about them, then I write about them. Then I usually think about them some more.

I suspect that when Lewis was making his list of the qualities possessed by a true reader he was thinking about himself as a model. He was one of the truest of readers.

Women for horses

Suppose the U.S. government under President Grant, in order to promote peace with the Indians, traded a thousand white women, all volunteers, to the Cheyenne for a thousand horses. This never happened, but in his 1998 novel One Thousand White Women Jim Fergus makes you believe that it could have happened.

The novel takes the form of a journal kept by one of these volunteers, an attractive young woman named May Todd. May comes from a prominent Chicago family, but she makes the mistake of falling in love with the wrong man and having two children. Embarrassed, her family sends her to an insane asylum, where she expects to spend the rest of her life. Volunteering to become an Indian bride offers her a means of escape. Other women have their own reasons for volunteering. Their numbers never come close to reaching a thousand, and so the deal is probably doomed from the start.

In a western fort just before she and the other women are turned over to the tribe, May falls in love with the fort's commander, a man already engaged to marry someone else. Their affair is brief, but it colors the rest of the novel.

May is chosen by Little Wolf, the tribe's chief, and she comes to love him, too. Like most of the other white women, she soon finds herself pregnant. Will the many halfbreed children help bring peace between the whites and the Indians? Fat chance, it turns out, especially when gold is discovered in the Black Hills and all the land promised to the Indians forever gets reclaimed by the U.S. government. May's former lover in blue is among those under orders to rid the area of hostile Indians. That term now includes May herself.

This makes riveting reading, and it's easy to see why after more than two decades the novel continues to draw readers.