Faith Filled Friday: September 11

Yesterday was the 13^th anniversary of that horrible day.  One day I will write an account of my experiences of that day.  I remember the whole day and into the next as if it were recent.  It’s hard to believe thirteen years have passed.  I still haven’t gotten over it.  It’s all a mix of anger and sadness.  Profound sadness.  I found this prayer specifically for the occasion.  It seems to come from a Catholic Church in Massachusetts, St. Charles Borromeo.

Jesus,
beloved Savior,
in remembering
these terrible events,
we recognize our great need
for Your guidance and protection.
We have painfully learned
that our country is vulnerable
and that violence can disrupt
both individuals and nations.
We pray then for healing
for all the people whose lives
were shattered in the attacks.
We pray for those
who defend our freedom.
We pray for wisdom
for our national leaders.
We pray for peace,
for our country and our world.
Jesus, beloved Savior,
as we remember,
hold us in Your loving hands.
Amen

Please, don’t ever forget.

Short Story Analysis: “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor, Part 1

The best way I think to approach an analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf” is to initially disengage the surface narrative (the present time sequence of events) from the back story.  The total story comprises the surface narrative and the backfilled events, details, and personalities that give context to the surface narrative.  The surface narrative here comprises of finding a stray bull on Mrs. May’s property, trying to get the bull off the property, and then finally killing the bull in the story’s dramatic and contorted climax.  (I personally never feel anguish from spoiling endings, so, beware, I will eventually divulge it.)  The back story is a study of contrasts, a contrast between families, that of Mrs. May and her boys against Mr. Greanleaf and his family and a contrast in values.  Let’s start with the back story and understand the context, and then move to the surface narrative, and its relationship to the back story, and then finally understand and assess the climax, which I can’t quite make up my mind as to its worthiness.  Perhaps as I write this, I will reach a decision.

The most distinguishing difference between the May’s and the Greenleaf’s is notion of class.  Mrs. May considers herself to have come from a higher class.  Her husband was a businessman, which in the milieu of the south during the first half of the twentieth century carried the implication of someone more well-to-do than your average Southern white laborer.  And given the South’s consciousness toward gentility, the May’s were probably gentry if not quite patrician, since her husband still worked for a living.  That is, until her husband died, and if I do the timeline, he died premature, since Scofield, the eldest son, would have been twenty-one.  If May’s are gentry then the Greenleaf’s are lower class, “scrub-human” as Mrs. May refers to them.  Mr. Greenleaf is a hired hand, and not particularly an ambitious person.  When the bull first woke her up in the middle of the night, she was tempted to get dressed and go to the Greenleaf’s house to get Mr. Greenleaf.

Weighing it, she decided not to bother Mr. Greenleaf.  She returned to bed thinking that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one would have had him.  She had had Mr. Greenleaf fifteen years but no one else would have had him five minutes.  Just the way he approached an object was enough to tell anybody with eyes what kind of a worker he was.  He walked with a high shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward.  He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him.  She had not fired him because she always doubted she could do better.  He was too shiftless to go out and look for another job; he didn’t have the initiative to steal, and after she had told him three or four times to do a thing, he did it; but he never told her about a sick cow until it was too late to call the veterinarian and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out.  And of the wife, she didn’t even like to think.  Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.

If there is anyone who is the complete contrast to Mrs. May, it’s Mrs. Greenleaf, a “large and loose woman” who’s “yard around her house looked like a dump and her five girls were always filthy; even the youngest one dipped snuff.”  Contrast that to Mrs. May’s skinny, wiry frame and obsession to keeping her property cultivated and proper.  The contrast is acute, a country gentlewoman versus a junkyard mongrel, prim versus unwashed.    

Not only is there a class distinction, but Mrs. May has an obsession with the rising of the under classes to supersede her station.  As it turns out Mr. Greenleaf’s twin sons, E.T. and O.T, have risen in life.  Yes, they have their parent’s lower class idiom, but through work and good luck they have built up a farm that has surpassed Mrs. May’s. 

The Greenleaf boys were two or three years younger than the May boys.  They were twins and you never knew when you spoke to one of them whether you were speaking to O.T. or E.T, and they never had the politeness to enlighten you.  They were long-legged and red-skinned, with bright grasping fox-colored eyes like their father’s.  Mr. Greenleaf’s pride in them began with the fact that they were twins.  He acted, Mrs. May said, as if this were something smart they had thought up themselves.  They were energetic and hard-working and she would admit to anyone they had come a long way—and that the Second World War was responsible for it.

They had joined the service and, disguised in their uniforms, they could not be told from other people’s children.  You could tell, of course, when they opened their mouths but they did that seldom.  The smartest thing they had done was to get sent overseas and there marry French wives.  They hadn’t married French trash either.  They had married nice girls who naturally couldn’t tell that they murdered the King’s English or that the Greenleaf’s were who they were….They had both managed to get wounded and now they both had pensions.  Further, as soon as they were released from the army, they took advantage of all the benefits and went to the school of agriculture at the university—the taxpayers meanwhile supporting the French wives.  The two of them were living now about two miles down the highway on a piece of land the government had helped them buy and in a brick duplex bungalow that the government had helped them build and pay for.  If the war had made anyone, Mrs. may said, it had made the Greenleaf boys.  They each had three little children apiece, who spoke Greenleaf English and French, and who, on account of their mother’s background, would be sent to the convent school and brought up with manners.  “And in twenty years,” Mrs. May asked Scofield and Wesley, “do you know what those people will be?”

“Society,” she said blackly.

One has to take with a grain of salt all of the apparent gratuities the government has provided the Greenleaf boys.  This was all told from Mrs. May’s point of view, and you can tell she feels a certain anxiety to events stacked against her life and stacked for others.  Obviously the French wives found something attractive in the men.  It’s also hard to imagine the government giving all those benefits.  The point is that Mrs. May feels a suspicion—a conspiracy—that fate is working against her and for them.  But the Greenleaf boys both ended their military service as “some kind of sergeants” while Schofield, Mrs. May’s eldest son ended as a Private First Class, and Wesley didn’t serve at all due to his poor health.  Those facts aren’t part of any conspiracy.

If the Greenleaf boys flourish, there is something stunted about the May boys.  Both are in their thirties—Scofield thirty-six and presumably Wesley a few years younger—unmarried, and lead somewhat dysfunctional lives.  Scofield is a business man similar to his father, but one reduced to selling insurance of the kind “that only Negroes buy.”  It must be an inexpensive type, but what’s significant about it is he’s fallen a rung on the ladder of society when compared to his father.   What concerns his mother is that “nice girls” are just not interested in him.  We don’t quite understand why.  He is personable and has a broad smile, but there is just something creepy enough about him that must turn nice girls off.  On a number of occasions we see a sense of humor that cuts to the bone, a mean spiritedness. 

If Scofield is creepy, Wesley is downright macabre.  He is “an intellectual,” teaching at the local university.  He had rheumatic fever as a child, and this apparently had altered his personality, at least according to his mother.  He too has problems with women.

Scofield only exasperated her [Mrs. May] beyond endurance but Wesley caused her real anxiety.  He was thin and nervous and bald and being an intellectual was a terrible strain on his disposition.  She doubted if he would marry until she died but she was certain that then the wrong woman would get him.  Nice girls didn’t like Scofield but Wesley didn’t like nice girls.  He didn’t like anything.  He drove twenty miles every day to the university where he taught and twenty miles back every night, but he said he hated the twenty-mile drive and he hated the second-rate university and he hated the morons who attended it.  He hated the country and he hated the life he lived; he hated living with his mother and his idiot brother and he hated hearing about the damn dairy and the damn help and the damn broken machinery.  But in spite of it all he said, he never made any move to leave.  He talked about Paris and Rome but he never went even to Atlanta.

I think the undercurrent to the May boy’s personalities can be summed up with the word, sterility.  They are a dead end.  There is no fruitfulness to their lives.  Their jobs are monotonous; their love lives are perverse; their happiness is nonexistent.  Compare that with the Greenleaf boys who prosper at their farm, marry interesting women, and each have a flock of children. 

But the contrast of families goes even further.  Despite the initial poverty and the lower class outlook habits which cause derision, the Greenleaf family is a harmonious one.  Mr. Greenleaf is always ready to express pride in his sons, and even his wife, who is rather odd, and of which I’ll get to in a moment.  O’Connor suggests this by making the two boys twins, and they work together as a harmonious unit.  Even their names E.T. and O.T are just a blur of a letter.  They are indistinguishable.  What is suggested is a brotherhood of men who help each to form one family.  In contrast, the May family is dysfunctional.  The two boys are “as different…as night and day.  The only thing they had in common was that neither of them cared what happened on the place.”  Not caring what happens on the place is the same as not caring for their family.  At one point the two boys torment their mother by jesting they are not really her sons.  At another point, in response to Mrs. May claiming she prevented the boys from getting up early and milking cows for the household, Wesley turns to her and says, “I wouldn’t milk a cow to save your soul from hell.”  If the Greenleaf’s represent a brotherhood of men, the May’s represent a family at war.  The jokes between them are not harmless fun.  They aim to cut and to hurt.  The family doesn’t bond; it pulls apart.  The scene where Scofield and Wesley physically altercate indicates a division of brothers.

 What these individual contrasts lead to is a more general contrast of approaches to life.  Mrs. May has tried to control her life, at least since her husband died, but probably before that too.  As a widow who was not left good finances, she put her situation in order and built the farm.  “Her city friends,” we are told, “said she was the most remarkable person they knew, to go, practically penniless and with no experience, out to a rundown farm and make a success of it.”  She’s the one who controls Mr. Greenleaf; she’s the one who arranged for her sons to not have to work the farm; she’s the one who fights the elements, fights the “conspiracies,” and, more importantly, fights fate itself.

“Everything is against you,” she would say, “the weather is against you and the dirt is against you and the help is against you.  They’re all in league against you.  There’s nothing for it but an iron hand.”

Her life is lived by that “iron hand,” which is to say she lives by force of will.  Scofield loves to ridicule her “iron hand.”

“Look at Mamma’s iron hand!” Scofield would yell and grab her arm and hold it up so that her delicate blue-veined little hand would dangle from her wrist like the head of a broken lily.”

Notice the difference between the reality of her little delicate hand versus her metaphoric iron hand.  The reality is that she’s not in as control as she thinks she is.  Then in a moment when her sons ridicule her for thinking about their future when she’s dead, her will tightens.

For some time she sat where she was, looking straight ahead through the window across the room into a scene of indistinct grays and greens.  She stretched her face and her neck muscles and drew in a long breath but the scene in front of her flowed together anyway into a watery grey mass.  “They needn’t think I’m going to die any time soon,” she muttered, and some more defiant voice in her added: I’ll die when I’m good and ready.

Not only is she trying to control her sons’ lives after she dies, but she thinks she can control her own fate, which is ironic given her unexpected death at the story’s conclusion. 

The Greenleafs on the other hand “lived like lilies of the field.”  The phrasing is striking.  Mrs. May’s hand is like “broken lily” while the Greenleafs are compared to flourishing lilies.  That’s actually a biblical allusion and worth quoting since it characterizes both the May’s and the Greenleafs, albeit in opposite directions.  From the Gospel of Matthew (6:25-34, NASB), my emphasis in bold, Christ says,

“For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.  So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

In contrast to Mrs. May putting her trust in her will, the Greenleafs put their trust in God.  They have setbacks; they’re not rich.  Yes they prosper, through work as seen with the two sons, but they don’t obsess over things and fate has a way of working out.  None of the Greenleafs ever show anxiety, even with an escaped bull on the loose.  They don’t try to control.  And they thank God for their good fortune.  “I thank Gawd for ever-thang,” Mr. Greenleaf “drawled” once to Mrs. May, and he meant it.  On the other hand Mrs. May is a “good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”   The Greenleafs, poor as they are, have seven children, which suggests lack of forethought; Mrs. May has two, which suggests regulation.

And then there is Mrs. Greenleaf, a woman completely antithetical to Mrs. May.  Unlike Mrs. May’s controlled bearing, Mrs. Greenleaf goes through daily charismatic prayer, and by charismatic one means a complete emotional loss of oneself into the divine.  She performs daily prayer healing.

Every day she cut out all the morbid stories out of the newspaper—the accounts of women who had been raped and criminals who had escaped and children who had been burned and of train wrecks and plane crashes and the divorces of movie stars.  She took these to the woods and dug a hole and buried them and then she fell on the ground over them and mumbled and groaned for an hour or so moving her huge arms back and forth under her and out again and finally just lying down flat and Mrs. May suspected, going to sleep in the dirt.

And later, apparently waking up, “out of nowhere a guttural agonized voice groaned, ‘Jesus!  Jesus!’  In a second it came again with a terrible urgency.  ‘Jesus!  Jesus!’”  And later we see Mrs. Greenleaf fall “back flat in the dirt, a huge human mound, her legs and arms spread out as if trying to wrap them around the earth,” an embrace of the supernatural.  Later Mrs. May would tell Mr. Greenleaf that his wife “has let religion warp her.”  And Mr. Greenleaf responded, “She cured a man oncet that half his gut was eaten out with worms.”  O’Connor’s point isn’t that this sort of simplistic understanding of religion is fact but that such faith is beneficial as it permeates the Greenleaf’s lives.  Such trust in God washes away class distinction, builds a brotherhood of men, nourishes lives, and flourishes with fertility.  The Mays are arid and barren.  One of the most significant moments in the story comes when Wesley who, after being lectured by his mother on being practical, turns to her and says, “Well, why don’t you do something practical, Woman?  Why don’t you pray for me like Mrs. Greenleaf would?”  

Lines I Wished I’d Written: The Greenleaf’s Farm from “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor

I’ve been putting my thoughts together to analyze Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf,” but in the meantime I’d thought I post a particular passage that struck me.  The story centers around an older woman, Mrs. May and her hired help, Mr. Greenleaf.  Mrs. May is very class conscious and has this angst of the lower classes rising above her station.  In the passage below O.T. and E.T. are Mr. Greenleaf’s sons, who have been rising in the world.  A bull has gotten loose and has been on Mrs. May’s property for days now, and she has recently learned that the bull belongs to O.T. and E.T.  The story takes place in the deep South, probably O’Connor’s home state of Georgia, and the two Greenleaf sons both married French women who they met during their service in WWII.  Here Mrs. May has driven over to tell the Greenleaf sons to get their bull back.

It was mid-morning when she turned into O.T. and E.T.’s driveway.  The house, a new red-brick, low-to-the-ground building that looked like a warehouse with windows, was on top of a treeless hill.  The sun was beating down directly on the white roof of it.  It was the kind of house that everybody built now and nothing marked it as belonging to Greenleaf’s except three dogs, part hound and part spitz, that rushed as soon as she stopped her car.  She reminded herself that you could always tell the class of people by the class of dog, and honked her horn.  While she sat waiting for someone to come, she continued to study the house.  All the windows were down and she wondered if the government could have air-conditioned the thing.  No one came and she honked again.  Presently the door opened and several children appeared in it and stood looking at her, making no move to come forward.  She recognized this as a true Greenleaf trait—they could hang in a door, looking at you for hours.

“Can’t one of you children come here?” she called. 

After a minute they all began to move forward, slowly.  They had on overalls and were barefooted but they were not as dirty as she might have expected.  There were two or three that looked distinctly like Greenleafs; the other not so much so.  The smallest child was a girl with untidy black hair.  They stopped about six feet from the automobile and stood looking at her. 

“You’re mighty pretty,” Mrs. May said, addressing herself to the smallest girl.

There was no answer.  They appeared to share one dispassionate expression between them.

“Where’s your Mamma?” she asked.

There was no answer to this for some time.  Then one of them said something in French.  Mrs. May did not speak French. 

“Where’s your daddy?”  she asked.

After a while, one of the boys said, “He ain’t hyar neither.”

“Ahhhh,” May said as if something had been proven.  “Where’s the colored man?”

She waited and decided no one was going to answer.  “The cat has six little tongues,” she said.  “How would you like to come home with me and let me teach you how to talk?”  She laughed and her laugh died on the silent air.  She felt as if she were on trial for her life, facing a jury of Greenleafs.  “I’ll go down and see if I can find the colored man,” she said.

“You can go if you want to,” one of the boys said.

“Well, thank you,” she murmured and drove off.

The barn was down the lane from her house.  She had not seen it before but Mr. Greenleaf had described it in detail for it had been built according to the latest specifications.  It was a milking parlor arrangement where the cows were milked from below.  The milk ran in pipes from the machines to the milk house and was never carried in a bucket, Mr. Greenleaf said, by no human hand.  “When you gonter get one?” he had asked.

“Mr. Greenleaf,” she had said, “I have to do for myself.  I am not assisted hand and foot by the government.  It would cost me $20,000 to install a milking parlor.  I barely make ends meet as it is.”

“My boys done it,” Mr. Greenleaf had murmured, and then—“but all boys ain’t alike.”

“No indeed!” she had said.  “I thank God for that.”

“I thank Gawd for every-thang,” Mr. Greenleaf had drawled. 

You might as well, she had thought in the fierce silence that followed; you’ve never done anything for yourself.

She stopped by the side of the barn and honked but no one appeared.  For several minutes she sat in the car, observing the various machines parked around, wondering how many of them were paid for.  They had a forage harvester and a rotary hay baler.  She had those too.  She decided that since no one was here, she would get out and have a look at the milking parlor and see if they kept it clean.

She opened the milking room door and stuck her head in and for the first second she felt as if she were going to lose her breath.  The spotless white concrete room was filled with sunlight that came from a row of windows head-high along both walls.  The metal stanchions gleamed ferociously and she had to squint to be able to look at all.  She drew her head out of the room quickly and closed the door and leaned against it, frowning.  the light outside was not so bright but she was conscious that the sun was directly on top of her head, like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain.

I find that to be a min-climax to the story.  Here is her epiphany, a burst of light before her as she sticks her head into the room, that the Greenleafs have made something of themselves and have risen above her in station.  There is so much more to the story though, and the climax comes with the killing of the bull.  I’ll get into an analysis in the coming week.

Personal Note: Fractured Ankle

Please ignore the ugly toes, but yes that’s my foot in the soft cast.  All I did was twist my ankle.  I was going down a short set of stairs—five or six in total—and I thought I was on the last step but there was one more, and my foot twisted as I misjudged the landing.  I think that happened on Wednesday of last week; if not it was Thursday.  I didn’t think anything of it at the time.  Other than that initial twinge it didn’t really bother me.  I can’t even recall the exact moment it happened, just the location, down the side steps into my mother’s garden.  And then Friday night it started aching and swelling, especially on top of the ankle.  I hobbled into bed and it hurt all through the night.  By morning the pain was excruciating and I could not put any weight on it.  I told my wife I had to go to the emergency room. 

She took her time about it.  She got Matthew breakfast, had her breakfast, and took care of a few things while I bellyached about the pain.  After all she had banged her foot a few days before; it had swelled and turned black and blue, and she had hobbled, and other than asking about it I had not made much of it.  So she was in no mood to pamper me on my foot.

We decided to go to a local Urgent Care facility that had recently opened in the neighborhood.  I guess these things are popping up around the country to ease the burden off emergency rooms.  We thought it might be faster and whatever was wrong with my foot wasn’t of dire consequence.  I was pretty sure it wasn’t broken.  I scooted on my tush down the stairs from our upstairs, wrapped an ace bandage around the ankle, put on my wife’s slippers since I couldn’t fit into my sneakers, and we were off.  Matthew was saying, “I hope they don’t use the bone-a-tron.”  If you don’t remember what that is, read here.  Hmm, did he predict this?  Is he psychic?  That was just a week or so before.  “I hope not,” I said.

We went to the Urgent Care, they took x-rays, and I guess the process took a whole two and a half hours, which I guess might be a little faster than a hospital ER.  I have to say I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the doctor and nurses, who all seemed young.  I wondered at how many short years they all were from high school.  If it weren’t for the x-rays the office visit might have been faster.  They actually had to send the digitals out to India for a radiologist to read, and they said it could take two seconds or two hours.  I can’t believe we’re actually outsourcing reading x-rays, but I guess the cost of medicine has come to that. 

What they found was a chip fracture on top of the ankle bone.  That’s not the right anatomical term but I don’t remember what the term was.  It looked like a piece of bone had been chipped off.  I said, how could that be since I didn’t bang my foot or have some other physical trauma?  The doctor said the tendon probably pulled the piece of bone off.  So they put a soft cast on, a medical shoe to go with that, and gave me crutches, of which I had no ability to coordinate.  They were kind; they tried to teach me; I was spastic.  I was told I needed to follow up with an orthopedist.

When I got home I dumped the crutches.  The cast had hardened and its structure took the load off the ankle.  By the end of the day it felt decent, and the next day, Sunday, I was even able to drive to church, in my loosely tied sneakers of course.  On Monday I didn’t even put the cast on at all, and the ankle felt very good, though by evening it was beginning to feel sore.  Rest seems to help.  I’m debated with myself whether I need to follow up with the orthopedist.  If I hadn’t seen the chip in the x-ray, I would just call it a sprained ankle and moved on with it, feeling lucky that they didn’t have a bone-a tron to take the bone out.  But I made an appointment.

Today was the orthopedist visit.  The ankle had been slowly getting better with each day.  I had the digital x-rays from the urgent care on a disk and he looked at it.  Then he felt around my ankle, tested the range of motion (it was full range), and asked me where it hurt, pinching down on the sore spots.  “I don’t know what they’re talking about.  You’re foot seems fine.”  I told him about the chip and we pulled up the x-rays and I pointed to the spot that was identified to me.  “That’s nothing.  Who knows how long that’s been there.  It’s not a fracture.  It’s just a sprain.”

So that was it.  I asked if I could get back to the gym, and he said absolutely.  “If it doesn’t hurt, get back.”  So much for the new Urgent Care.  So much for outsourcing radiology to India.

Matthew Monday: Fifth Birthday

Normally the Matthew Monday posts come out in the morning but I’m squeezing this in this evening because today was Matthew’s fifth birthday.  This morning Matthew woke me up as usual on days I’m home (the Labor Day holiday today) by coming over to my bedside.  As I opened my eyes, his first words were, “I’m five years old.”  I guess he remembered his mother’s last words from the evening before as he was put to bed when she said, “Go to sleep.  When you wake up you’ll be five years old.”  She said it as if there was some magic behind it.

 When I hugged Matthew this morning he felt warm, and sure enough he had a mild fever all day.  Even now as he’s been put to bed his fever is up.  But we had planned a little get-together birthday (mom, dad, the two grandmothers, an uncle) and he was well enough to have that.  Fever and all he was still energized, and he probably would have been uncontainable if he had not been slowed down with an abnormal temperature.

The theme for this year’s party was Batman!  He is absorbed in everything Batman.

We had Batman napkins and cake plates.

  

And my wife baked and decorated the Batcake!

Matthew blowing out the five distinct candles.

Holy smush, Batman.  He liked the Bat frosting.

He even got a few Batman oriented gifts, a Batcave set.

And a hood jacket that comes with a built in mask.

Perfect for a Halloween costume.

Lines I Wished I’d Written: The Tool-Shed from Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar”

Last year I started reading the short stories of H. H. Munro, otherwise known by his pen name, Saki.  Saki’s short stories are typically five or so pages long and in some cases three.  It takes real talent to write such short shorts.  I am continuously amazed at how much information he packs in.  Sharp wit, deft eye for the exact detail, diction that accentuates the sarcasm under his tone, Munro is a satirist exploiting the foibles and arrogance of upper class Edwardian England, an England that was at the height of its empire.  Last year I read his story, "Esmé" and thought it a minor classic.  I just read “Sredni Vashtar,” and though I don’t think this rises to a classic, it’s still a fine story.  Perhaps others might elevate this to a classic; it has its own Wikipedia entry.    

This is the story of a sickly, ten year old boy, Conradin, apparently an orphan and being raised by his cousin, a Mrs. de Ropp.  Conradin hated his cousin as only a boy could hate a matronly overseer, and in his imagination exacted some sort of pleasurable enmity.  It is implied, though never stated, that the boy lives in his imagination because of his illness.  The passage I quote below is where he establishes a hideaway in a garden shed, sharing it with a Houdan hen and a ferret, elevating the ferret into a deity, and setting up a shrine. 

In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction.  The few fruit-trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of that kind of blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce.  In a forgotten corner, however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral.  He had peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history and partly from his own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood.  In one corner lived a ragged-plumaged Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet.  Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars.  This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all, into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver.  Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession.  Its very presence in the tool-shed was a secret and fearful joy, to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the Woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin.  And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion.  The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon.  Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.  Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman’s religion, which as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction.  And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of the hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the nutmeg had to be stolen.  These festivals were of regular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event.  On one occasion, when Mrs. de Ropp suffered from acute toothache for three days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that Sredni Vashtar was personally responsible for the toothache.  If the malady had lasted another day the supply of nutmeg would have given out.

Notice the irony here.  A sickly orphan is a child one typically feels compassion for, and we presume Mrs. de Ropp has indulged in just that, but it’s that very coddling to his illness that he grows spiteful against.  And so he creates this sort of evil god, gives it some sort of exotic Hindu name, and performs some sort of black worship service to spite “the Woman.”  There’s a certain boyish misogyny in that term.  The boy seems to feel a sense of powerlessness, and so tries to gather power in his ritual.  The scene is rich with psychological depth.

You can read "Sredni Vashtar" on line at the Literature Network.  It's a short read.  You can read and listen along with this reading by a Tom Baker.

Music Tuesday: “Ode to Joy” by Ludwig van Beethoven

Is Beethoven greater than Mozart?  When you’re dealing with the greatest of the great of any artistic medium, it’s impossible to say one is greater than another.  It becomes a matter of preference.  At the catholic blog, Inebriate Me, Pascal-Immanuel Goby wrote a post titled “Beethoven > Mozart.”    The “>” symbol signifies “greater than.” 

I like Goby’s blog, though it can be more philosophical than my tastes run in reading about Catholicism.  But he’s got an interesting, out of the box, yet still traditional take on things.  I like his perspective on economics and Catholicism.  Most Catholic bloggers don’t understand economics, but Goby does.  I never refer to him in my head as Goby.  From writing literary essays I’m trained to use last names but the way I think of him is by the first half of his name, Pascal.  He seems to share a number of things with the famous Pascal: an intellectual Catholicism and that he’s French.  I know he lives in France, but he does write in English, so if he’s not French, then his parents were certainly Francophiles to name him Pascal.

In “Beethoven > Mozart” Goby wonders bemoans that theologians prefer Mozart as their favorite composer, while Goby clearly believes that Beethoven is the greatest.  Why this this preference for Mozart over Beethoven.  Here’s part of what he wrote:

We need more theologians who love Beethoven. (We need more theologians who love Led Zeppelin!)

I love Mozart. Truly. He had access to the Forms. However…

We have many theologians who love Mozart. Balthasar and Barth connected (in part) on their shared love of Mozart as the greatest composer in history. Ratzinger, as is well known, is a devotee of Mozart. All good.

But, but, but.

No, Mozart is not the greatest. Mozart is not the greatest, because for all his attempts to move beyond, all his pathos, he remains the classical composer par excellence. Mozart is the Parthenon. Mozart represents art understood as submission to, and fulfillment of, form.

No. This is not the full truth of art. The full truth of art must have as its primary impulse the expression of human subjectivity (an expression of subjectivity which only through its embrace of itself can then point to universality), even as it incorporates, uses, and in its fullness, transcends, aesthetic rules. And here we are talking about Beethoven. Mozart expressed the fullness of humanity within the classical rules. Beethoven expressed the fullness of humanity by transcending (through incorporating) the classical rules.

Beethoven is not afraid of being off-balance. Mozart raises the mind to contemplation, Beethoven grabs you by the throat. Mozart is Aquinas, wonderful Aquinas, building angelic cathedrals. Beethoven is Paul, frustratingly unsystematic, cajoling, browbeating, repudiating, pleading, ordering, crying on the page.

The comparison of Aquinas to Mozart, Beethoven to St. Paul is kind of apt.  But I don’t see why that would make Beethoven greater than Mozart.  Here’s my comment to his post.

Mozart is not the greatest because he died too young. Had lived another twenty years he would have been the greatest. I agree it would be great if more theologians loved Beethoven as they do Mozart (I'm surprised they don't) but I think you're being silly with Led Zeppelin. Bach is probably the greatest of them all. Where I disagree is with how you value aesthetics. It's not that Beethoven is greater because he is subjective in his art or because he is off balance. Neither of those makes art greater or lesser. They are just different approaches. Greatness comes from how well you create and how well your vision is represented aesthetically. We are still under the guiding force of Romanticism, so off balance appears to the general person to be of greater aesthetic quality. If and when we return to a neo-classical zeitgeist, Beethoven might appear to be ugly, or I should say uglier. Is Dante's Divine Comedy any lesser because of its balance and interconnectiveness and rational form? I would argue that Dante is closer to Mozart than Beethoven. And then perhaps one could say that Shakespeare might be closer to Beethoven than Mozart, though perhaps that's arguable. Dante and Shakespeare, as Mozart and Beethoven, have different approaches. It's not the approaches that make them greater or lesser.

Goby never replied to my comment; he usually does, but I sense he’s been busy lately.  Another person replied to me and we had an interesting conversation about Led Zeppelin, so you can go over to check that out if you wish.  Goby’s central thesis is that Christian theologians are too neo-classically oriented and lack the passion of Romanticism.  He does end his post with this summation: “We need, in other words, Appasionnata theology, we need Hymn to Joy theology, we need 5th and 6th symphony theology.”  The “Hymn to Joy” allusion is actually a reference to Beethoven’s concluding Ninth Symphony movement where Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” is set in a choral.  I’m sure people here know of it.  

And just a few days after reading the Goby post, I came across in almost divine guided happenstance a post written by Stephen Klugewitz at The Imaginative Conservative, titled “Did Mozart Write the “Ode to Joy”?”  Klugewitz’s claim is that Beethoven took the theme from Mozart.

Only a few pieces of music in the Western canon rival the fame of the “Ode to Joy” theme: the opening chords of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony, “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” the first notes of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, to name a few. The “Ode to Joy,” however, seems to stand above these, due to its hymn-like, sublime character and its elevated call to universal brotherhood. It will be forever associated with Beethoven’s name, and alone would ensure his legacy as one of the greatest composers—in the estimation of many, THE greatest composer—who ever lived.

The problem is that the “Ode to Joy” theme is not entirely Beethoven’s. He borrowed the main part of it from none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In 1775, at the age of nineteen, Mozart composed the “Misericordias Domini,” K. 222, a six-minute sacred work that is little recorded and seldom performed today, yet which constitutes a minor masterpiece. Mozart employs what became the germ of the “Ode to Joy” theme three times throughout the work

You can read the rest of Klugewitz’s thoughts there and here Mozart’s “Misericordias Domini” side by side to Beethoven’s fourth movement.  Tell me if they sound similar.  They do to my ear.  What Klugewitz doesn’t show is that Beethoven was aware of this little known Mozart piece.  It’s quite possible that it coincidental.  But after listening side by side I tend to agree; I think Beethoven stole it!  Even the arrangement is similar.

For Music Tuesday I offer Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” section of the fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony, here conducted by the late, great Leonard Bernstein.  The actual “Ode to Joy” theme starts at about 3:50; the chorus stats at 7:55.