Charles Péguy, _Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc_

 I'M NOT SURE why I never read this before, as I have a long-held interest in literary works about Joan of Arc, but somehow I had not. I've known about it since grad school, but it took Bruno Dumont's film Jeannette to motivate me to read it. I'm happy to report that it is every bit as strange as Dumont's film.

It presents itself as a play--that is, the text is arranged as speeches for characters, with details about the setting and stage directions in italics--but it is hard to imagine the play being performed uncut. For one thing, it is long (over 150 pages in the Pléiade text). There are only three characters, but no action to speak of--the whole play is speeches about God, faith, and grace, some of which run for pages. 

One of the characters is Joan (here, Jeannette) at age thirteen, right before she has begun hearing her voices. As the play opens, Joan delivers and then at some length dismantles the Lord's Prayer, asking God for an explanation why, 1400 years on, the kingdom still has not come. Jeannette's friend Hauviette enters, trying to persuade Jeannette to take it down a notch, just be a good parishioner and not make waves. Jeannette's not having any of that, thanks.  Hauviette exits to make way for Madame Gervaise, who seems to be a former teacher (maybe? not sure about this point) who has become a nun... or perhaps she was always a nun but has withdrawn into seclusion. 

Mme. Gervaise's counsel to Jeannette makes up most of the rest of the play. She too, like Hauviette, is trying to gather Jeannette back into orthodoxy, but Mme. Gervaise shows considerably more insight into Jeannette's misgivings as well as greater theological depth. 

This sounds as dry as a bone--but Péguy lends Mme. Gervaise's disquisition the intensity of a fever dream. Rhythmic, repetitive, obsessed, it seems more like an incantation than a sermon, especially in its hallucinatory depiction of Jesus's Passion, which pays special attention to Mary as witness. Among the passages that struck me is this one, a memorable depiction of Jesus as disruptive healer:

Jusqu'au jour où il avait commencé le désordre.
Introduit le désordre.
Le plus grand désordre qu'il y ait eu dans le monde.
Qu'il y ait jamais eu dans le monde.
Le plus grande ordre qu'il y ait eu dans le monde.
Le seul ordre.
Qu'il y ait jamais eu dans le monde.

Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc appeared in 1910 during a particularly turbulent era in French letters. The Dreyfus Affair had polarized writers (and the society as a whole), the poles roughly definable as secularist-socialist-universalist on the one hand and Catholic-monarchical-nationalist on the other hand. Plenty of cordial hatred on both sides (not unlike USA in Trump times, though I don't think Trump has many littérateurs on his side).  Péguy had been a socialist dreyfusard for most of his career--did Le Mystère mean he had changed sides, given Joan's connection to Catholicism and militant French patriotism? It did not, but in the context of the time, the question of whether Péguy had switched sides dominated response to the work. I'd like to learn more about this.

Of particular interest to me is the Yeats connection. Iseult Gonne (Maud's daughter) read Le Mystère to him in Normandy in 1916, translating it as she read I suppose. It made enough of an impression on him  that he noted it a key essay of his from 1919, "If I Were Four-and-Twenty." The final part of the play, where Jeannette angers Mme. Gervaise by insisting that the men of France would not have abandoned Jesus during his trial and execution as the apostles did, particularly impressed him. 

That Yeats would have connected to Jeannette's/Joan's passionate advocacy for her countrymen always made some sense to me, but now that I have read the whole play, it's hard to imagine his sitting through a reading of it, even by the young and lovely Iseult Gonne. His appetite for Catholic theology was small, I think, and he was not really all that interested in Jesus. Perhaps he appreciated Iseult's appreciation of it. 

Barry Hannah, _Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories_

 A POSTHUMOUS COLLECTION, but only by half a year or so--Hannah died in March 2010, and this came out in December of that year. It may have already been in the works when he died...indeed, seems like it must have been, given how large a project it is (456 pages), but no one is listed as editor, and no information is provided on the production of the book save a perfunctory acknowledgements page.

Hannah was a Mississippian, and most of the book's stories are set in the South, mainly among men. Lots of alcohol and firearms, lots of hunting, lots of music, lots of military service. Not my usual kind of thing, to be honest, but Hannah's prose is so surprising, so idiosyncratic, so tangy that that I enjoyed the stories even though I would move away fast if I encountered any of his characters in public.

Some random samples:

The yard was shaggy.

My love for Felice went on belligerently, sullenly, for a month. 

The streets of the town were a long heart attack themselves to Smith.

When Boléro was over, the audience stood up and made meat out of their hands applauding.

There is usually not a lot of plot to the stories--sometimes they feel more like character studies--like Chekhov's "The Darling," say. Like that story, they often unfold over a longer time than a lot of modern short stories do, over years sometimes. Once in a while, you would swear the story is about someone Hannah knows and has known over a long time (especially "Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other," which seems to be about William S. Burroughs).

By and large, I found the stories vivid, funny, and distinctive. They tended not to have much emotional punch, for me, except for the previously uncollected ones at the end of the book. I'm not sure why those four felt different--a heightened vulnerability, maybe? Those are the stories that felt deep as well as dazzling.

Brandon Som, _Tripas_

 THERE ARE ENOUGH young American poets working through the complexities of their identities that another volume of poems "built out of a multicultural, multigenerational home" (as the back cover puts it) would not necessarily get me to plop down $19.95 and start reading... but this one got a strong review from Stephanie Burt in the LRB, and that makes a difference. If Stephanie Burt says, "plop down your $19.95 and start reading," I am likely to say, "well, okay."

And Stephanie Burt is right again--this is a fine book. 

For one thing, Som's identity is complex in a relatively unusual way. He has a Chicana grandmother who worked the night shift at a Motorola assembly line until the factory was moved to Mexico, and Chinese-American grandparents who ran a corner store. Each strand, on its own, conjures up a relatively  familiar kind of story, but the interaction of the two has a particular twenty-first century fizz to it, a different poignancy (see, please, "Close Reading"). 

That one grandmother's job involves circuitboards generates a cluster of electronic imagery that becomes a way of talking about how poems come into being:

Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau's Orpheus
copies the broadcasts from a netherworld for verses--

his muse a circuitry my grandmother inspected

nights at Motorola. Before her shift, she put me to bed,
laid down beside me and smoked Parliaments--

each drag like a tower light to planes overhead. ("Antenna")

Electricity makes a useful figure for how poetry moves through the  world, if you think about it--operating in some boundary between the material and the immaterial, both controllable (circuits) and uncontrollable (lightning), powerful but visible only in its effects. (see also "Resistors.")

Som's inwardness with the grain of language is what really keeps the book moving. In "Tattoo," someone tells of the word "maseros" tattooed on her brothers' hands, which is not exactly "mesero" (waiter) or "masera" (a kneading trough) or "macero" (a mace bearer)--but what is it? does it "sound a resistance"?

               Addendum or 
annotation, their maseros revised
the sentence written on their body.
I carry that archive--what's stored
without inventory: a leaf, an aleph;
a casita in husk; a feminine eye inside
hoja: maize, maíz, masa--a maze
on fingertips. Hear the word again--
at its center a gristmill of cicada,
a mesquite both vessel and wishbone.

Maya Angelou, _I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings_

 NOT SURE WHY it took me until 2023 to read this. It came out when I was in high school and became a classic almost instantly, but somehow, this was among my roads not taken, until this summer.

Easy to see why it became a classic, though. Partly in urban settings, partly in small town or rural ones, it blends pastoral scenes with some city grit. The voice and angle of vision are mainly youthful and fresh, but there is more than enough weighty material--sexual abuse, lynching. The narrative is briskly paced, the scenes memorable, the characters distinct and compelling. 

Got me thinking--if I were to construct a reading list for a class in the great American autobiographies, what would we read? 

Most of what I think of as the great American autobiographies I would not actually assign to an undergraduate class these days. I think Whittaker Chambers's Witness is in that category, for instance, but it's seven or eight hundred pages, and the story of becoming disenchanted with the Communist Party and then deciding to blow the whistle on people who stayed enchanted...I don't see that going over. The Education of Henry Adams? How many undergrads today are going to get behind the self-examination of an over-privileged, over-educated straight white male? Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs? Forget it. Benjamin Franklin? Nope.

You may as well just stick with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  and Malcolm X. 

Is Jennifer Moxley's The Middle Room still in print? That might work. 

Mathias Svalina, _Wastoid_

 MAY AS WELL devote my 1001st pots to Mr. Svalina as well. I strongly suspect that people will still be reading him a hundred years from now—my Svalina collection (currently nine items) will be housed in the rare book room of a university library, their pages turned by gloved hands under soft lights…that is, if the humanities survive, if universities survive, if libraries survive, if reading survives, none of which I ought to take for granted. Maybe nothing will be left but, as with Sappho, a few priceless, cherished fragments.

Wastoid was published in 2014, but I wondered as I read whether some of the poems were composed during Svalina’s time here in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the middle 00’s. The poems refer to such local landmarks as Wilderness Park and the Sunken Gardens, and the volume’s title pays homage to a notable local band of the era, Wasteoid (with an “e,” n.b.). 

154 prose poems, each titled “Wastoid,” most with an opening sentence about love or “my lover” or “my beloved,” after which just about any topic at all might come up, much as in the dreams of the Dream Delivery Service. It’s as though the Songs of Songs was written by Oulipo.

My lover is so sincere. When he enters a room, fathers unpop their boys’ collars & conceal their comb-overs. Bad art hides from him. Each day is an elaborate eulogy. Everything he does or is deserves an encore. I am an unfinished statue of Atlas, the earth never added to my shoulders.

Hard to explain, and I am not going to try, how poems as random as these end by seeming funny, or poignant, or melancholy, or wise, or all four at once, but so they do.

The final poem in Wastoid ends with the sentence, “O my lover, cunning lover, feeble lover, do not fear, fire cannot burn you.”  The book’s publisher decided to put this sentence, all by itself, on the back of the book in a 17th-century-looking font. Much as I admire the sentence, I imagine people reading it, saying “Awww,” and buying the book only to be non-plussed by the references to GQ calendars, Vin Diesel, and Au Bon Pain. But maybe I underestimate them.

I am retired from teaching, but the book got me fantasizing about a course in which we began with Sappho and the Song of Songs, moved on to Rumi and Mirabai, took in Petrarch, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, maybe Berryman, then maybe Margaret Millner’s Couplets, then this. 

Would they love it or want to lynch me? 

In a hundred years, they will love it.

Mathias Svalina, _America at Play_

 THIS IS MY 1000th post, I believe. So I am pleased to be writing about an excellent book by one of my favorite living poets, Mathias Svalina. 

The anodyne title of America at Play is perfectly chosen, given how unnerving, sometimes terrifying the book is. It's a handbook with instructions for playing several dozen invented games for children--not the old familiar ones, like "Red Rover, Red Rover" or "Freeze Tag," but "Everything Costs $20," "Bury the Shards of the Broken Light Bulb Where No One Will Ever Find Them,"  and "Massacre." 

The strength of the book lies, first, in its insight into the American assumption that even even childhood fun should be put to good purpose by incorporating valuable life lessons; second, in its insight into what life lessons would best prepare a child for its eventual entry into the devouring maw of capital. 

Take "Cat and Rat." Two children are chosen for the titular roles, and  the rest form a circle, doing everything they can to help the Rat and frustrate the Cat. "When the Cat catches the Rat it makes the children angry. No child likes the Cat. But one child must be the Cat." A lesson best learned early!

That, from p. 15, is dark enough, but eventually get to the "War Games," such as "World War," "for 6,600,000,000 players or more," in which "every child is at war with every other child."

Kudos to Trident Press of Boulder, Colorado, for bringing this out.

Catherine Grace Katz, _The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War_

 KATZ HAD A nice book idea here. The Yalta conference, as you probably know, was a summit meeting among the Allies in February 1945, an attempt to agree on certain questions about the final phases of the Second World War and plan for the post-war world. Stalin was present--on his home turf, as Yalta in on the Crimean peninsula (apparently he would not have agreed to any site that involved his leaving the USSR). FDR was there, even though he was in poor health (he died a couple of months later). Churchill was there. And a few other key players as well, e.g., Averell Harriman, US ambassador to the Soviet Union. And Alger Hiss--but that's another story.

Turns out the daughters of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harriman were there, too, with non-negligible roles, as they were in close attendance on their fathers and serving as confidantes, sounding boards, assistants--not necessarily in official roles, but still close to the center of things.

The Yalta conference was historically important in a number of ways, but using the perspective of the daughters, who were outside and inside at the same time, so to speak, gives the book the grain of a novel, full of personal detail and the stuff of lived experience, at the same time that it tells the story of weighty and consequential high-level negotiations. 

The Yalta conference was not a great diplomatic success for the West. FDR was so keen on getting Stalin's promise of cooperation in the about-to-be-created United Nations that he gave Stalin much more leeway with Poland and eastern Europe than was wise, much to Churchill's dismay. Judging from the epilogue, the post-Yalta lives of the daughters were not so happy, either. 

The book is certainly a success, though--highly focused on a period about two weeks long, but deeply revealing of the era and of its epochal war.

Katherine Chen, _Joan_

 THIS WON'T DO, for me at least. I have a longtime fascination with Joan of Arc, so this novel caught my eye at the bookstore. The cover was off-putting--a glamorous model in a chainmail coif--but there was a ringingly positive blurb from Hilary Mantel, so it seemed worth a shot.

Turns out Chen is really interested in Joan only as a fighter and military tactician. Chen's Joan does not hear voices, for instance. She's pious, but not a mystic.

She is not particularly patriotic, either. She fights less for king and France than out of a desire to avenge an attack on her hometown (this did happen) and the rape of her sister (this, so far as anyone knows, did not happen).

Chen's novel effectively ends with Joan's capture--during which, according to Chen, she kills a few Burgundians and then bites the Duke of Burgundy (who was not present at her capture, actually). 

Joan's trial and martyrdom--in the course of which, it seems fair to say, she was at least as brave and strong as she was in any battle, and without the benefit of armor, weapon, or companions--is entirely omitted from the novel.

This is Joan? If you like the idea of Joan of Arc as Xena the Warrior Princess, maybe. 

Sanora Babb, _Whose Names Are Unknown_

AMAZING BACKSTORY TO this novel.

I assume you are familiar with John Steinbeck and his novel The Grapes of Wrath. I always thought of it as a good counter-example to regrettable appropriations like Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt. Steinbeck was not an Oklahoma hardscrabble farmer driven by dust storms to become an exploited migrant laborer in California, yet by telling that story in The Grapes of Wrath, he gripped the conscience of the nation and created an American classic. Everyone wins, right? But then I learned about Sanora Babb.

Sanora Babb was, indeed, from an Oklahoma farm family, and she did move to California in 1929. Later in the 1930s, she did volunteer work in a migrant labor camp, where she began collecting stories and making notes, with a view towards writing a book. The camp’s manager, Tom Collins, was so impressed by the notes that he asked her to make a copy of them for another writer who had been visiting the camp. That writer was John Steinbeck.

Babb did draft a novel and sent it to Random House in early 1939. They were interested, but before Babb could revise her book, Viking published The Grapes of Wrath, which instantly became a bestseller. Random House decided that the book-buying public would not go for two novels about Okies in California in the same year, and so turned down Babb’s book, despite their initial interest. She tried several other publishers, but without success. The lane, so to speak, was occupied. Her novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, was finally published in 2004, when she was 97. She died the next year.

 Is the novel any good? Actually, yes. It's very good. Convincing characters, effective evocations of place, excellent prose, swift pacing, moral urgency...it's excellent, even.

Is it as good as The Grapes of Wrath? Tough question. I would certainly say it has aged better than The Grapes of Wrath. The Tolstoyan ambition of Steinbeck's novel feels creaky these days, while Babb's novel, at just over 200 pages, feels just right. She keeps the exposition minimal and instead zooms in on a few crucial episodes. Steinbeck often seems to be observing the Joads from the outside, but Babb takes us right into the center of the Dunnes--we get a sense of their marriage, their relationship to their kids, their relationships with their friends. They seem real rather than an archetype. We get a lot more of women's perspectives in Babb than we do in Steinbeck, and even some of the Black workers' perspective when the strike comes (I can't remember whether Steinbeck addressed this at all--Babb knows that the crackdown on the strikers is going to fall heaviest on the black workers.) It provides much more explanation of what caused the Dust Bowl than Steinbeck does, and gives a much more immediate sense of living with an environmental disaster.

All in all, if I were to choose just one of these novels for a syllabus, I would go with Babb. In a lot of ways, it seems like it could have been written recently. It's not a classic, of course--but I could see it becoming one.

Timothy Donnelly, _Chariot_

 I REVIEWED THIS for a blog of much greater legitimacy than this one, so I will be brief: Donnelly is four books in after twenty years, and not a dud yet. I'm not prepared to say this is actually better than The Problem of the Many, but it may be, and as an extended exploration of a closed form (every poem, save one adaptation from the Irish, is in five four-line stanzas) it is unique in Donnelly's oeuvre. 

Besides being a thorough exploration of form, the book continues the engagement with public and political concerns that we saw in The Problem of the Many. The first of two poems titled "Chariot" hits upon a Donne-worthy conceit that captures the book's mindful relation to both poetry and the world: the poem is the chair that carries the world as the world is the chair that carries the poem. 

New books from Donnelly and Robyn Schiff in the same year? Hail, 2023, for bringing us these gifts amongst the lumps of tsuris.