Book Awards – 2020

This year began with my son and grandkids living with us for a month. It ends with the exlibrismagnis book awards. Between those wonderful extremes, things were mostly pretty crummy. And I’m not even talking about coronavirus or the economy or political news. But. Hey! Book awards!

Mentor Who Is Always Standing in the Spirit at My Elbow: Charles Dickens
This year I read David Copperfield for the fourth time and only now noticed just how many struggling authors populate the pages. I also enjoyed the new film version of DC starring Dev Patel. (I’m still not sure whether I love or hate the postmodern ending of Dora’s story arc.) I read A Christmas Carol aloud to my family for the first time in many years. And I was introduced to some delightful farcical plays by the Great Man, one involving an astrologer who thinks he knows the day and hour at which his daughter will meet her future husband, and another involving mistaken identities in a hotel – complete with a hallway of doors hastily opened and shut by characters who many times narrowly miss seeing each other and ending the confusion. How can anything beat that? Fortunately for other authors, like John Larroquette with the Emmys, the father of David Copperfield long ago asked that he not be considered for an award at these ceremonies.

Best New Read in History: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought
I talked to everyone in my family about something or other in this wonderful history every day I was reading it and for many days afterwards. Every story – Jackson’s Bank, the Mexican War, the invention of the telegraph – was familiar, and yet Howe provided nuances that gave each a new shape.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories, book I
Cyrus takes Croesus from the burning stake to ask him about the wisdom of Solon – and then keeps the conquered king around as a political advisor. Why is Cyrus known to us today and Croesus all but forgotten?

Best New Novel: John Galsworthy, White Monkey
The skewering of modernism and consumerism was delicious. But the best part of the book involved a subplot reminiscent of Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” involving the Bickets, who are nothing like Galsworthies.

Best Reread Novel: Frank Norris, The Octopus
TV Series Must Be Made.

Best Theology: Cyprian, Treatise 7
How to show faith and love during a pandemic!

Best Poem: C. S. Lewis, “Dungeon Grates”
No, it wasn’t Coleridge. It was Lewis. And no, it wasn’t one of his Christian poems. It was a dark brood about life as a prison. And yet there are grates . . . .

Book Most Changed on Rereading: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Having read longer versions of some of the stories, The Silmarillion now sounds very much like a summary. But still, the heartache and beauty and goodness and truth of this constructed mythology is unmatched in my experience. This time, I was especially struck by Tolkien’s wisdom in making the Noldor the tribe that rebels against the Valar. The Vanyar stay close to the angelic beings and sing to them constantly. The Teleri don’t even travel all the way to Valinor but stay offshore, just enjoying the light of the Blessed Realm shining through a gap in the mountains. But the Noldor make their home in Valinor and build a city and make jewels. Aren’t the troublemakers always the ones who make a good show but end up thinking they can improve on God’s work?

Best Play: Tom Morton, Speed the Plough
Every character, every scene is funny, and the farcical plot builds smoothly and coherently. How is this play not still known, staged, and loved?

Best Short Story: Dorothy L. Sayers, “Murder in the Morning”
I had come across Montague Egg in Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries before. But to see him and his confident, rhyming sales pitches take the center spotlight was a treat indeed. And, what do you know? Even without the intense efforts of his more famous sleuthing buddy, Monty can also solve murders!

Well, that’s it for 2020. Tomorrow, we’ll all wake up, everything will be better, and I’ll start reading the books for year 5 of my current Reading Plan. May we all have a Happy New Year (and quickly get over the Crummy Old One)!

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2020

Most years around this time, I’ve shared some thoughts about the words to some of my favorite Christmas carols – which is to say, some of my favorite things in this world. (Click here to see posts from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018.) I thought of devoting this whole post to my strong preference this year for versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” that use the line “Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.” But why focus on muddling at this blessed time? Instead I’ll just say a few words about the O antiphons.

These seven advent antiphons seem to have been around since the time of Boethius. Perhaps from that time, but certainly starting as early as the Middle Ages, they were used to introduce the singing of the Magnificat. (All antiphons were used as introductions, endings, and even interpolations for biblical songs: primarily the psalms, but also for the canticles such as Mary’s song, the “Nunc Dimittis” of Simeon, and so on. They worked much as do the new choruses inserted into old hymns by worship composers of our time.) The seven O antiphons all begin with the word “O” as a marker of address, and are directed to Jesus, Who is called by seven names drawn from various portions of the Bible. Here are the texts:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before Thee kings will shut their mouths,
to Thee the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
Thou openest and no one can shut;
Thou shuttest and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which Thou didst fashion from clay.

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

I’m struck this year especially by the multiple layers of meaning in so many of them – multiple meanings of the texts themselves as well as of objects depicted in the texts. In the first antiphon, traditionally sung on December 17, we recognize wisdom as the Word of God, as the order in all created things, as our teacher, and as the prudence that we can fit into our little human heads. A common casual prayer says, “From your lips to God’s ears.” This antiphon prays that what comes from God’s lips will enter our ears.

In “O Adonai,” for December 18, we acknowledge that only the One Who gives the law that convicts us of sin can redeem us from that very sin. The Root of Jesse, addressed on December 19, stands as a sign, but of what? It seems the sign means different things to different readers. It makes some shut their mouths, while it opens the mouths of others. The Key of David shows its multivalence clearly: a key both opens and shuts. But the main prayer for December 20 is for opening, because who prays to be put into prison?

Now on December 21, the darkness of the prisoners is again mentioned. So are we praying here for the ones who have not yet escaped the prison house? Or do the souls who have left prison still dwell in darkness? Yes and yes. And they need both the sun and the morning star.

On December 22, we sing to the “cornerstone making both one.” Hmm. Both what? A cornerstone marks the place where two straight lines join to determine a two-dimensional space. Perhaps God as King of the nations and God as desire of the nations represent two dimensions: truth and mercy have kissed. In any case, we who are made one out of two elements – clay and the spirit that needs saving – desire that King.

Finally, on December 23, we ask Emmanuel – “God with us” – to come to us. If God is with us already, why do we ask Him to come? Because Christ is the true light that perpetually comes into the world. We can never be done welcoming Him.

When Augustus called for his census, everyone apparently had to travel to the traditional city of their ancestors. That requirement explains why there was no room at the inn for Joseph and Mary. All the descendants of David had descended at once on tiny Bethlehem: a whole town full of frustrated heirs to the throne of Israel. So while all the folk who thought they were hot stuff slept snugly in their clean beds, the holy parents went to the barn and laid their new son in the feeding trough for the donkeys. Be a manger. Ask Emmanuel to come to you.

Long Futile Searches Through Chesterton

I’ve made several confessions of mental ineptitude recently. I’ve talked about my inability to stop boring my wife by rehearsing every detail of a history book I’m reading. I’ve admitted my susceptibility to distraction by emotions and by flies. And I’ve exposed my hitherto almost total ignorance on the number of existing sequels to one of my favorite novels.

Today I have to continue the streak by admitting a mistaken notion about one of my favorite authors that has deluded me for years. (The notion deluded me, not the author.) The story starts in 1982 at Baylor University. As a new master’s student, I eagerly checked out the library soon after my arrival in Waco. What led me to G. K. Chesterton, I don’t know. I had heard of him and had possibly read The Everlasting Man at that point. Whatever the reason may have been, in addition to books on music (I fell in love with the works of Donald Tovey at that library), I also checked out a book by GKC called Tremendous Trifles, a collection of weekly essays written for the newspaper.

I was instantly transported! These were the first British essays I had ever read, so I have to say first that I was enthralled by the form of these pieces. No direct context-setting introduction here. No outlining of three main points to be detailed in later paragraphs. Here was the classic British elliptical entrance, and I loved it. But I loved everything else about these essays as well: their clear prose, their logical twists (never actual paradoxes!), their respect for authors I treasured, and their forthright denouncement of modern vacuities that I previously had thought only started causing trouble in the 1960s. (Uggh. I only had learned what the Middle Ages were the winter before I started at Baylor, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t know anything about the history of modernism in thought.)

I read other sets of essays from the Baylor library including Alarms and Discursions. I enjoyed them so much, I actually drew a tick mark in the tables of contents next to the titles of my favorite essays. I’ve passed Waco on I-35 many times since then, and afterwards, I’ve always wished I had stopped, visited the library, and checked to see if my marks were still there. I’ve forgotten most of them and would probably have a lot of fun seeing what I thought especially noteworthy in 1982. Among the gems I do remember very well were “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises the variety in the look of overcast days, and “On Cheese,” which began “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.”

Some ten years later, I discovered that Ignatius Press was publishing the complete works of Chesterton in several volumes and that one could subscribe to the project. The subscription service never worked well, but I ended up with about twenty of the project’s thirty-odd volumes, including all of the essays from The Illustrated London News. I read sporadically in this bookshelfful of prose, but somewhere in the second Ten-Year plan, I started reading one year of essays from the ILN every year. By the end of that reading plan, though, I still hadn’t read any essays that pulled up dusty memories. For the Third Decade, I started reading two years’ worth of the newspaper columns every year (Chesterton wrote for the paper for a very, very long time!) with the vision of finally discovering and rereading “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and finishing all the essays by the end of the decade.

But this year, I looked through the table of contents of the assigned years and still saw no titles that sounded familiar. I picked up the remaining volumes of ILN pieces and searched their ToC’s. I went through all the ones I had already read to see if I had previously found “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and just forgot. But these titles were nowhere to be found. So I did some internet searching and found two disconcerting and embarrassing facts. (1) The collections I had read at Baylor were taken from the Daily News, a paper to which Chesterton contributed before he joined The Illustrated London News. (2) Ignatius Press had no plans ever to republish these earlier essays. So that’s several years, three feet of bookshelf, a lot of dollars, and a lot of reading time spent on an impossible quest. *sigh* The collections I read forty years ago are on Gutenberg, and I’ve changed my Plan to alternate between the familiar chestnuts and the remaining ILN volumes on my shelf. I’m sure I’ll have something to say in these posts about cloudy days and cheese sometime in the next few years.

While I’m confessing, I have to say it isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, and coincidentally, the other incident also involved G. K. Chesterton. A girl I knew in high school (and just after) told me that I would like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. (I think this is where I first heard of Chesterton. So for that, at least, I’m grateful to this girl.) She told me as an example that one involved a man who escaped from a prison using a rat that he trained to carry messages through the sewer opening in his cell. Several years later I finally got around to reading Father Brown. Again, I read a few stories each year for a while and then finally made a big push to the end, enjoying the stories greatly, but wondering when I would at last reach the story about the rat. But that rat never showed his head. It turns out “The Problem of Cell 13” was written by Jacques Futrelle, so naturally it had very little chance of showing up in a collection of stories by Chesterton. Alas, the misleading lead was not the only mistruth that girl told me. And that’s a story you will not see me blogging about in the next few years. Or ever.

Achieving the Grail

Everyone knows King Arthur had something to do with the Quest for the Holy Grail. Any one reading this blog probably knows that Galahad succeeded in the Quest. But what exactly did Galahad do with regard to the Grail in order to succeed? What was the goal of the Quest? To discover it in some forgotten dungeon? To bring it to Camelot? To save it from destruction? To pick it out from among a tableful of grails so Sean Connery can drink from it?

Having just finished Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur for the second time in five years, you’d think I would know the goal of the Quest. But this point isn’t really very clear to me. Malory often uses the phrase “achieving the Quest of the Holy Grail” or simply “achieving the Grail,” but he doesn’t ever explain what the phrase actually means. Part of the problem is that Malory tried to collate all the French stories on Arthur that he could find, even where they contradicted each other. For instance, at one point he reports that King Pelles is the Maimed King. And yet, when Galahad gets to Castle Corbenic, Pelles brings out another king altogether and asks Galahad to heal the grievous wounds in his thighs. So having placed odd mistakes like this one in the crucial story, it isn’t surprising that Malory didn’t give us a crystal clear picture of what the goal of the Quest for the Holy Grail actually was. Maybe the sources just couldn’t be reconciled on the issue.

One interpretation is that the goal of the knights on this Quest was simply to see the Grail. Certainly when Lancelot gets close to the Grail in Corbenic, his only desire is to lay his eyes on the sacred vessel. He pays no heed to the warnings that a sinful man should come no closer, though, and falls down in a stupor that lasts twenty-four days, one day for each year of his sinfulness. When Galahad, righteous enough to get closer than his father, reaches the Grail, he sees a vision of the Crucifixion coming out of it and hears a voice from Heaven telling him that he is witnessing some of the secrets of Jesus. So again, it seems that simply seeing the Grail (or the visions inside it) is the point of the Quest. This theory poses two problems, though. First, the Quest is begun when the Grail appears to the knights of the Round Table in Camelot. So they’ve already seen it. How is seeing it a second time more special than seeing it a first time? Second, even though it eventually takes Galahad a couple of years to find the Grail, it’s in a castle all the time that many knights are familiar with, and it’s seen every day by King Pelles and his daughter Elaine, people whom Lancelot has known for quite some time (in the case of Elaine, known in the biblical sense).

Alternatively, maybe the Quest is simply a matter of following the Grail to the home of the Maimed King (whoever he might be) so that Galahad, the only knight pure enough to perform the miracle, can heal his dolorous wounds with the blood of Christ still lingering on the spear of Longinus, the soldier who pierced his side on the cross, and end the curse on the Waste Land. But then if healing the Maimed King is the true goal, why, when the Grail appears at Arthur’s feast, do all the knights depart on the quest when they all know that Galahad is the only one worthy of handling the holy blade?

The thing is, the tale of the Holy Grail is that rare story actually made better by its plot holes. How do the knights know that the appearance of the Grail is a call to go on a Quest? They just do, and our lack of understanding only speaks to the power of the Grail and the holiness of the Quest. Why do they all leave when they know Galahad is the only one who can achieve the Quest and when they know that the mass departure means the end of the Fellowship of the Round Table? They just do, and the lack of explanation only tells us that had we been there we, too, would simply have understood that a futile search for the mysteries of Christ was worth the loss of everything that was good about Camelot. Why does Galahad take two years to find a castle the location of which is known? He just does, and the geographical mystery makes the reader feel the sacred nature of the Quest since no noble act should be done lightly and quickly.

So Malory may have left these gaps because, as in the case of the identity of the Maimed King, he tried to fit in too many contradictory sources and just left out everything that caused problems. And he might have left mysteries unsolved because he knew the story would then resonate with more awe. But I can mention a third possibility. He may well have skimped on explanation only as a matter of established tradition. Earlier versions of the Grail story have their own prominent lacuna. In some of the prior forms, King Pelles tests the worthiness of each knight who reaches the castle that houses the Holy Grail by telling the knight that he is allowed to ask one question and that it must be the right question. Only Percival, the knight who achieves the Quest in the earliest manifestations of the story, satisfies the Alex Trebek of medieval romance by coming up with the right question. We learn the questions asked by several of the knights who arrive before Percival: How did the Grail get here? Who stabbed the Maimed King? Is that really Christ’s blood on the spear? What am I supposed to do now? Is Elaine seeing anyone? If Monty Python had been in charge of the story at this early date, these lame attempts would have gotten their respective knights rightfully tossed into the canyon. I may have remembered some of those questions incorrectly. But what I haven’t forgotten is that Percival’s question isn’t revealed to us; we only read that he is told that he has asked the right question and proven himself worthy of bearing the spear and healing the Maimed King. Movie critics made a huge deal out of Bill Murray’s inaudible words to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation, as if such a thing had never been done ever before in the history of storytelling. I’m here to declare that Percival’s unreported line, tantalizingly hidden from readers eight hundred years before Sofia Coppola ever knew how to hold (or withhold) a pen, is exactly twenty-one times more interesting than Bill Murray’s whisper.

Now, when I write my own enduring and beloved version of the Arthurian legends (you can read about another of my ideas for this grand project here), I plan on restoring the test of the question. Galahad will be the one who achieves the Quest in my book; the story of Lancelot stumbling into Corbenic and of Pelles knowing that a son of Lancelot’s named Galahad is destined to heal him so that he must cast a spell on his daughter making Elaine look like Gwenevere and enabling her to entice Lancelot to beget the destined child within her is just too weird and wonderful to pass up. Twenty years and many chapters later, it won’t be enough that Galahad has been mystically led by the Holy Grail to the home he doesn’t remember, that Pelles now sees his grandson for the first time since he was a baby, that Elaine sees her son grown into the greatest knight in the world, or that Merlin has created a magical seat at the Round Table that offers in glowing golden gothic letters the message “This Is The Dude You’ve Been Waiting For” when Galahad places his pure rump in it. Pelles will still have to make sure he has the right guy by instructing Galahad to ask one question. And I will have it happen this way because I know the question Galahad asks!