260 Years Ago: The French and Indian War

William Fowler, the director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, tells us why we should care about the French and Indian War.

Reading the Novel as a Catholic

In our club, not only do we read novels as intelligent, informed young people, but we are also attempting to read them as Catholics.  What exactly does this mean?

We are people who know that we are not just quirks of chance, but created by God to know, love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next.  We celebrate this in our families and in our Catholic community.  God created us as creatures with human natures, totally unlike the rest of the "natures" that you find on this planet.  Our natures are like the blueprints for being fully and happily human.  If we do what our natures require, we thrive.  If we act against our natures, we languish.

So, this awareness of the divine is an extra layer of meaning that Catholics find in the interpretation of works of the imagination.   We do not impose our worldview upon a novel, but we understand more deeply a dimension of the way things really are, and works of literature help us identify it.   

So, how do we identify this deep dimension of human living in the novel?  We can ask ourselves five basic questions to get us started as we read:

1. What is the moral universe that the characters inhabit?  Their culture may be atheistic or Christian, hostile or helpful to being fully human.  It may be difficult or easy to have a good ethical life, given the habits and prejudices of the novel's moral universe.
2. What is the author's view of human nature? Our characters may see themselves as bound to the ethical rules of our nature, or not.   The author may approve of his characters or not, especially when they make moral choices to do good and avoid evil (or the opposite).  
3. What is the author's view of God?  God may be openly discussed, ridiculed, or simply ignored.  Clergy may be praised or mocked.  Religious people may be genuine or false, true servants of God or devils in disguise.  Religious symbols may be woven throughout, or noticeably absent.
4. Is there some hope of redemption in the novel?  Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest says of her novel, "The good ended happily and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means."  This is meant to be a joke, or course, because life, and the novels that reflect life, are never so perfectly just.  However, as Catholics, we have faith and hope that the human story has a happy ending.  Not a pat ending, or a simplistic one, but one in which evil is eventually overcome, pain has a purpose, and grace operates in every life.  Look for these qualities even in the darkest dystopian novel, because the way an author conveys the darkness of life may not be to approve of it, but to warn of it.
5. What is the standard in the novel for something being bad or good?  Julia, in Brideshead Revisited described her husband as "A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole."  This is not a flattering description!  What makes a good person, or a bad person?  What are the moral rules that make us whole, or make us a person who is missing a vital part of what its like to be human?  When we find these rules, are they consistent?  Do they strike you as authentic and universal?  Are they arbitrary or hypocritical?  Simplistic or naive?  These are the rules of the fictional moral universe, and they can be assessed according to our Catholic ideals of what is Good, Beautiful, and True.  These ideals are not so very complicated, but have been distilled for us very simply by Jesus:

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Happy reading!

Mrs. S.

Our 2015-16 Book List

Fresh off the presses, ladies and gents, I bring to you our survey of Great American Novels!

October:      True Grit, Charles Portis  (Irlbecks)
November:  The Last of the Mohicans,  James Fennimore Cooper (Hammonds)
December:   The Great Gatsby,  F. Scott Fitzgerald (Williams) 
January:       Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather (Spurgins)
February:     Delta Wedding, Eudora Welty (Parmenters)
April:           The Europeans, Henry James (Skinners)
May:            To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (Stirlings)

These seven great books are a thoughtful sampling of American literature, both in the way they reflect regional culture and cover a wide variety of time periods.  The Great Gatsby is well placed, because the Roaring 20's will be the theme of our Christmas Party this year.  So, be on the lookout for jazz-age flapper fashions and bowler hats!  It will be the cat's pajamas.  Or the bee's knees!

You will note that we are skipping March as a meeting month this year to allow for Spring Break and Easter Week following directly upon it.  Also, Pirates of Penzance will be performed during that time.  All meetings are on the third Friday of the month.

Please pass this list to old or occasional members so that they can drop in on a favorite book!  We'll see you on October 16 when we head to Arkansas to discuss True Grit.

Happy Reading!
Mrs. S.
www.snacksbookclub.blogspot.com

The Very Shy Charles Portis

True Grit, Odd Wit: And Fame? No, Thanks

By CHARLES McGRATH ,DEC. 19, 2010, in the New York Times

The arrival of the Coen brothers’ movie “True Grit” on Wednesday is likely to bring Charles Portis a new surge of attention he has no use for. Mr. Portis, the author of the 1968 novel on which the new film is based (as was the 1969 John Wayne version) is allergic to fame.

He’s not a Pynchonesque recluse, exactly. He is occasionally spotted in Little Rock, Ark., where he has lived for 50-odd years; he even went to a gala sponsored there recently by the Oxford American, a literary magazine, and consented to receive a lifetime achievement award, though he sat in the 14th row, or as far from the stage as he could. But Mr. Portis doesn’t use e-mail, has an unlisted phone number, declines interview requests, including one for this article, and shuns photographs with the ardor of a fugitive in the witness protection program. He hasn’t published a novel in nearly 20 years.

 

The writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron, who got to know Mr. Portis in the early ’60s, when he was a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune, recalled that back then he was more sociable. “Charlie was just charming, the life of the party almost,” she said. “But he was a newspaper reporter who didn’t have a phone. The Trib had to make him get one. So even back then the pattern was there.”

   

A photograph of the camera-shy Charles Portis, left, with John Wayne during the filming of the first “True Grit” (1969). Credit Paramount Pictures

His elusiveness has only enhanced his status as a cult writer’s cult writer, cherished by a small but devoted following. He has published four novels besides “True Grit” (all five have recently been reissued in paperback by the Overlook Press), and for years those in the sect have been pressing them on new readers like Masons teaching the secret handshake. The journalist Ron Rosenbaum, the unofficial grand vizier and first hierophant of Portis admirers, has called him “perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.”

“True Grit,” Mr. Portis’s second novel, which was serialized by The Saturday Evening Post and appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks, is actually a divisive matter among Portis admirers. There are some, like the novelist Donna Tartt, who consider it his masterpiece, a work comparable to “Huckleberry Finn.” Others, like Mr. Rosenbaum, resent “True Grit” a little for detracting attention from Mr. Portis’s lesser-known but arguably funnier books: “Norwood” (1966), “The Dog of the South” (1979), “Masters of Atlantis” (1985) and “Gringos” (1991). The writer Roy Blount Jr., an old friend of Mr. Portis’s, suggested recently that Mr. Portis himself was a little embarrassed by the success of “True Grit.”

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“I think that’s why in his next book, ‘Dog of the South,’ he set himself the challenge of a funny book written by a boring narrator,” Mr. Blount said. “That’s why other writers love him so much.”

“True Grit,” the story of the 14-year-old Mattie Ross, from Yell County, Ark., who with the help of the one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn sets out to avenge the murder of her father by a drunken hired man named Tom Chaney, is not unfunny. It’s simultaneously a thoroughly satisfying western and a parody of one. But unlike Mr. Portis’s other books “True Grit” is a period piece — the story takes place in 1873 but is recounted decades later, when Mattie is by her own description a cranky old spinster — and the narrative voice is a feat of historical ventriloquism.

Mattie’s prose is stiff, formal (a quality lovingly captured by the Cohen brothers), a little pious and platitudinous, given to scriptural quotation and fussy quotation marks: “I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious ‘claptrap.’ My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33.”

Mattie is lovable in her way, and though grit is what she admires in Rooster, she is hardly lacking in that department herself. But she is also humorless, righteous and utterly without either self-doubt or self-consciousness. She has no idea how she or her words come across on the page, nor would she care if she did.

“The Dog of the South” and “Gringos” are also written in the first person, and the two others might as well be. The voice in all them is loose and informal, even a little digressive, with a noticeable Southern quality. Mr. Portis’s friends say he talks much the same way, and to judge from “Combinations of Jacksons,” a memoir he published in The Atlantic in 1999, his nonfictional style isn’t much different from his fictional one: in both he is a great noticer, always alert to the odd but telling detail.

What the other novels have in common with “True Grit” is their deadpan quality. Most comic novels — think of anything by P. G. Wodehouse, say, or Ring Lardner — are fairly transparent: they unabashedly try to be funny and let the reader in on the joke. The trick of Mr. Portis’s books, especially the ones told in the first person, is that they pretend to be serious. They’re full of odd events and odd people with names like Norwood Pratt, Raymond Midge and Dr. Reo Symes, inventor of the underappreciated Brewster Method, a miracle cure for arthritis. But these are presented without a wink or a nudge, or any sense that slapstick touches like smooth-talking midgets, bread-fondling deliverymen or elderly gents wearing conical goatskin caps are at all unusual.

   

Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges in Joel and Ethan Coen’s version of “True Grit,” which opens on Wednesday. Credit Lorey Sebastian/Paramount Pictures, via Associated Press

Mr. Portis evokes an eccentric, absurd world with a completely straight face. As a result there are not a lot of laugh-out-loud moments or explosive set pieces here. Instead of shooting off fireworks the books shimmer with a continuous comic glow.

Unlike the tightly plotted “True Grit,” the other books are all shaggy-dog stories of a sort. In “Norwood” (which was made into a 1970 movie starring Glen Campbell) Norwood Pratt travels all the way to New York from his home in Ralph, Tex., to collect a $70 debt and winds up engaged to a girl he meets on a Trailways bus. In “The Dog of the South” Ray Midge drives to Mexico from Little Rock in search of his wife, who has run off with her first husband and Ray’s Ford Torino. “Masters of Atlantis” is about two guys who create the Gnomon Society, an esoteric, Rosicrucian-like sect based on wisdom from the lost city of Atlantis. And in “Gringos” an American expat in Mexico falls in with some U.F.O. nuts and archeologists searching for a lost Mayan city.

But in one way or another the subtext of all these novels is the great Melvillean theme of the American weakness for secret conspiracies and arcane knowledge, and our embrace of con men, scam artists and flimflammers of every sort. In Mr. Portis’s pantheon of tricksters, moreover, writers rank pretty high. There’s John Selmer Dix, author of “With Wings as Eagles,” an inspirational manual for salesmen, whose admirers rank him higher than Shakespeare; the hack writer Dub Polton, author of “Hoosier Wizard,” a political biography that pretty much makes everything up; and Lamar Jimmerson, compiler of the Codex Pappus, the sacred Gnomon text, which deliberately includes a lot of obfuscation to “weary and disgust the reader” and put him off the track.

All these texts, you can’t help noticing, are in their way not unlike Mr. Portis’s books in the degree of devotion and enthusiasm they evoke in their readers. They’re not self-parodies but, rather, warnings about the dubiousness of reputation and about the dangers of taking the cult of authorship too seriously.

“Talking about himself is something that would feel false and strange to him,” William Whitworth, the former editor of The Atlantic and his old friend, said of Mr. Portis. “It would be like asking him to stand up and sing like Frank Sinatra, or be on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ ”