"On Reading Well" by Karen Swallow Prior

It was my great blessing to have had excellent English teachers from seventh grade through college. They each had a gift of teaching, but they each also had a passion for what they were teaching. They took me behind the story so that I could see it was a story, yes, but it was also a lesson about life, an inspiration, a pathway of imagination, a structure through which poured ideas, beliefs, assertions, and principles.

And this was fiction I’m talking about.

I saw courage and struggle in The Old Man and the Sea. I found basic ideas of good and evil in Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I learned about pride and ambition in Julius Caesar. I was taught about people and race in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I fought against impossible odds and experienced what it meant to be the odd man out in Don Quixote. And I read in The Canterbury Tales that human nature was the same in the 20^th(and 21^st) century as it was in the 14^th.

My English teachers have an heir. Her name is Karen Swallow Prior. She teaches at Liberty University in Virginia. She’s published several works, including Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (2014). And she’s just published On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Saturday Good Reads: Books

If you’re looking for recommendations for a good book to read, it doesn’t take long to run into a multiplicity of resources on the internet. And I’m not talking about Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or Good Reads. No, I’m talking about the independent bookstore version of book recommendations – the blogs of people who love books.

I see a lot of these, and it’s hard to resist the recommendation – there are so many good things to read. Here are two:

Sherry at Semicolon Blog reads more than anyone else on the planet, I think. A book review a day is not unusual, and sometimes more than one a day. On Saturdays, she features a link-up – people can post links to reviews they’ve done during the previous week. It’s fascinating to go down the list and see what people (mostly Christians) are reading. You might be surprised.

It was at Semicolon Blog than I kept seeking links posting by Ink Slinger. One day I followed the link back to his blog (I assumed it was a “he,” and I was right) and discovered that he was not only a book reviewer, but he was also a movie reviewer. And a writer. And all of about 17-years-old. In addition to his reviews, he regularly publishes what’s on his bookshelf, and it ranges from C.S. Lewis and Ayn Rand to Homer.

Those are two examples; there are more, but I particularly like these two because what becomes clear as you read their reviews and posts is that they love books.

If you need a good reason to read books, you should take a look at an article posted this past week by Tim Challies in Informing the Reforming: Four Good Reasons to Read Good Books.

If you need a reason to read poetry, you should read Karen Swallow Prior’s article posted this week at Her-Meneutics, published by Christianity Today. Entitled “Have We Forgotten the Power of Poetry,” it tells a story of Afghan women who must speak what’s in their hearts, even at great personal risk. Karen is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, which was the book discussed in January over at The High Calling.

I loved Karen’s book. I have to confess that I was asked to read a chapter of the book in early manuscript form, and I told the publisher that “this was the kind of book I would read.” When I read the finished book, I loved it even more.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

John Donne and Marriage

Karen Swallow Prior tells us in Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, that it was poet John Donne who taught her about marriage. 

If you’re not familiar with the English poet John Donne (1572-1631), you will at elast have heard of some of his more famous liens and poems – “Death be not proud;” “No man is an island;” and “Ask not for whom the bells toll; they toll for thee.”  

Born to a Catholic family when being Catholic could be a dangerous thing, Donne converted to Anglicanism after this brother died in his prison for his faith. Donne attended Oxford and Cambridge. He was appointed private Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, falling in love with Egerton’s niece, Anne, and secretly married her. Egerton, when he found out, was not pleased; he had Donne briefly imprisoned and provided no dowry.  

Eventually Egerton accepted the marriage, and Donne eventually found himself running in royal circles. King James I told him to become an Anglican priest, which he did, and served as royal chaplain until the King’s death. In 1621, Donne was appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Donne’s poetry (and he wrote a considerable amount of it) is considered among the best of the metaphysical poets, a group that included George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. 

Donne was deeply in love with his wife. They had 12 children; she died in childbirth at 33. He had written a fair amount of love poetry to her, and some of fairly erotic, but he never wrote another love poem after her death. And he never remarried. Their marriage was an expression of their faith, and that expression included spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical love. 

Prior’s reference to the marriage ceremony in The Book of Common Prayer, which Donne would have been intimately familiar with, reminded me of something I did in my novels. I found a facsimile of the 1928 version while we were on vacation in Williamsburg a few years ago, and I read it cover to cover. A chunk of Dancing Priest that didn’t make it into print was the wedding ceremony for Michael and Sarah, the two main characters; it followed the Book of Common Prayer ceremony almost exactly. 

True confession: I used elements of Donne’s life in the character of Michael Kent. 

Come August, my wife and I will have been married 40 years. We have children and grandchildren. We manage to hide (most of) our gray hair. We have been times of plenty and times of need, fat years and lean years, good times and bad, hard times and easy times. We have been through life, and we are still going through life. 

We’ve now been married longer than my own parents, and almost as long as her parents. We have lived with each other longer than we have lived with anyone else, including our parents and our children. I love my wife as much as I did when we married. No, that’s wrong. I love my wife more than I did when we were married. I can say that only because of the grace of God.  God has blessed us in our marriage.  

His blessing hasn’t meant our marriage would be easy. But it did mean it would be true, and lasting fort however long we’re physically alive, and even after that. And it meant that we would be bound together as one. 

Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” was written to his wife, not when she had died, but when he was leaving on a trip. And I understand it. 

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   "The breath goes now," and some say, "No." 

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined

   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

We’ve been reading Booked at The High Calling, and today is the final discussion. It’s a marvelous book, totally delightful in so many ways, and I highly recommend it. If you love great literature, Booked will take you back to high school and college. You can read the final posting at The High Calling.

“Gulliver’s Travels” Answers a Question

I was interviewed last week by the book editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about A Light Shining. The book was to be highlighted in a regular feature on the book page – Penned in St. Louis, which is a short interview (usually three questions).

However, we talked a lot longer about all kinds of subjects than the printed interview might indicate. And she asked one question that I had to think about at length before answering.

“Did you,” she asked, “have a purpose in writing this story?”

“No,” I finally answered. “I didn’t. It was simply a story to tell.” There was no motive, or goal I wanted to achieve, or hidden meaning I wanted to convey. Or, if there is one, it wasn’t intentional.

And yet.

Pastor Ron Edmondson of Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, told me a couple of weeks ago that Dancing Priest (A Light Shining’s predecessor) was one of the best explanations of relationship evangelism he had come across, and in a novel, no less. Surprised, I went back to Dancing Priest, and discovered three significant scenes and one shorter one in the book that supported his statement.

I had no idea. I think. How did that happen?

Then I read three chapters in Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior, which we’re reading this month over at The High Calling. Chapter Six is about Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. The chapter answered my question about Dancing Priest.

I first read Gulliver’s Travels in high school. I was 15, and like any other 15-year-old boy might be, I was more impressed with how Gulliver extinguishes the fire in the royal palace of Lilliput than the overarching themes of the book (and to think Swift was an Anglican clergyman in the 18^th century!).

I read it again in college (I took English Literature with the English Lit majors while most everyone else took American lit). that’s when I fully understood that Gulliver’s Travels was a satire, a rather barbed commentary on society, practices and culture of early 18^th century Britain. Swift skewered society and even barely disguised individuals, and I suspect he had great fun  doing it. But the work represents far more than a satire.

“Gulliver’s Travels reflects the holistic worldview of its author,” Prior writes in Booked, “a man who could see how one idea ripples toward another, how one false notion can lead to disastrous consequences, and how one aspect of human experience touches the whole.” In the so-called Age of Enlightenment, she says, Swift knew just how limited man’s rationalism really was.

And still is.

One of the things my Christian faith has allowed, sometimes forced, me to do is to understand life is all of a piece, an entire entity, and not a collection of compartmentalized boxes that I participate in depending upon circumstances.

What this means, albeit imperfectly, is that my life at church on Sunday is my life at work Monday through Friday is my life with my family seven days a week – and is what I write in novels. My faith allows me to be the same person in all of these circumstances. It doesn’t mean I pull it off all the time; the key word is “allows.” My faith allows my life to be whole. I don’t have to wear masks; I don’t have to be a different person at work than I am at church.

When I wrote those scenes in Dancing Priest, I was drawing on my own experience. How the heroine, Sarah Hughes, is introduced to faith is almost exactly what happened to me; in fact, it’s the only deliberately autobiographical part of the entire book. The stories I write reflect my Christian faith, in its attempted wholeness.

It’s how Jonathan Swift experienced life – in wholeness.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading and discussing Booked. This week’s discussion is on the chapters covering Gulliver’s Travels, Death of A Salesman by Arthur Miller, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Related:

My Great Expectations

How I Came to Read “Little Women”

My Great Expectations

The first book by Charles Dickens that I read was A Tale of Two Cities. Actually, I didn’t read the book. I first read the Classics Illustrated comic book version of A Tale of Two Cities, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and that was after reading We Were There at the French Revolution, checked out from the local library. A couple of years later, I read the full novel by Dickens.

Then, in ninth grade, I encountered Great Expectations. It was required reading for my English class, taught by Miss Roark. The all-boy class generally looked at the book with trepidation – it was long. And we couldn’t read the Classics Illustrated version, and you could get an F if you were caught with the Cliff Notes for the book.

So for most of my class, it was an ordeal, and far less fun than, say, writing our own James Bond spy stories, which we were allowed to do for one assignment. James Bond was big; if I recall correctly, Thunderball had hit the movie theaters that summer, recruiting an entire generation of American adolescent boys into the espionage services. Poor Dickens had to compete against Sean Connery. Not to mention the female roles in the movie. Estella, as pretty as she might be, was no match for James Bond’s girlfriends.

Nevertheless, we had to read it, and we did. Early on, I was hooked. Great Expectations had everything – an orphan, a convict, a deranged old lady roaming around in a wedding dress like a professional ghost, her young and beautiful adopted daughter, heroes, villains, and an exciting story. I loved it, the whole unabridged, full-volume, complete novel with small print and no illustrations (I had a cheap paperback version).

As she describes it in Booked: Literature for the Soul of Me, Karen Swallow Prior also met Great Expectations in middle school via an abridged version, and she was hooked as much as I was. And, if forced to admit it, Prior would say that it’s her favorite novel. She’s read it numerous times, she says, and each time learns something new.

For me, it was a life-changing book. It introduced me to a world that is still very much with me today, the world of literature. It showed me the magic of story. And, like Prior, I found it to be totally realistic.

“What I love most about Great Expectations,” writes Prior, is its sheer magic. Dickens has a way of presenting both plot and characters that are enchanting enough to set the imagination aflame but at the same time realistic enough to reflect life as it really is, or might really be, at least.”

When you grow up in New Orleans, as I did, and you have a very large extended New Orleans family, and almost all of your friends come from large, extended New Orleans families, some with exotic Spanish and French names, you will likely meet every character ever created by Charles Dickens in real life. Including the deranged Miss Havisham in her wedding dress. And the convict.

And Pip, the hero. When I read Great Expectations, I became Pip. I was 14 years old and imagining myself an orphan in 19^th century England, falling in love with a beautiful girl and knowing it would end badly, dodging villains, and trying to find my place in the world. I became Pip, I was Pip, and I was at the center of a wild rocket-ride of a story.

The next year, my English class would tackle David Copperfield, and while I like it enormously, it didn’t hold the same magic for me as Great Expectations. That novel oriented my head, and my heart, toward reading and writing in a way that nothing else has before or since.

I think it’s time to reread it.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Booked. Please visit the site to see what others are saying about the three chapters being covered today, on Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Tess of the D’Urbevilles.

How I Came to Read “Little Women”

Karen Swallow Prior had Mrs. Lovejoy. I had Miss Roark.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me. Technically, we should be posting on Mondays. I did post Monday, on how literature has helped me make sense of the world, but I also posted last Wednesday, fascinated with the origins of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution noted by Prior in the book.

The fact is, I could likely get as many blog posts out of Booked as there are chapters, and likely more than one a chapter. We’re covering about three chapters a week, with our discussion leader (Laura Boggess) aiming to finish the book at the end of the month.

But chapter 4 – oh, my goodness, it’s all about one of my all-time favorite books, the one that set me moving in the direction of writing (more on that next Monday). And it’s all about middle school, not one of my all-time favorite educational experiences.

Mrs. Lovejoy, says Prior, was her seventh and eighth grade English teacher (middle school – did you hate it as much as I did? ). I had Miss Roark for ninth grade English, and ninth grade was part of middle school in my school district. And middle school wasn’t called middle school – instead, it was known as junior high school. It was a strange set-up – we actually graduated from eighth grade, ceremony and all, and then came back to the same school for ninth grade. High school didn’t start until tenth grade.

Miss Roark was a native of Alabama, with a soft southern accent and a mind that was razor sharp. She endeared herself to me from the beginning of the school year over our choices for research papers. We had to do two – one on an English author and one on an American author. She wrote the names of 32 English and 32 American authors on the blackboard. One by one, and in alphabetical order, the 32 of in an all-boys class had to walk up to the board and select our authors by erasing their names.

Guess who was last alphabetically? Which meant I would have the two authors no one else chose.

After everyone but me had selected, left on the blackboard was William Shakespeare (everyone else decided he was too hard to read) on the English side, which was okay. But on the American side, there was the name of Louisa May Alcott. A 14-year-old boy was going to have to read Little Women and Little Men, and 31 other boys in the classroom knew it.

Yes, I was ready to die.

The class started laughing, and all the comments started. And then Miss Roark erupted, and said if another person said anything about it at all, in or out of class, they would have to switch authors with me. That shut down the catcalls and insults. Immediately. And permanently.

Personally, I thought she had demonstrated the wisdom of Solomon.

I did my projects, and they turned out fine. I read the Alcott novels. I liked Shakespeare better. But the Alcott books were okay. It turned out to be a great year for English.

The next year, when I was in high school, I sent her a Christmas card, which I think shocked her. She called on the phone, which shocked me. And we talked. I sent her a card the following year, too, but she had left the area. I don’t know if she went back to Alabama or somewhere else. I never saw or heard from her again.

When I first walked into her class, I already loved to read. By the time I left her class, I loved literature.

Related:

Faith, Fiction, Friends: Making Sense of the World

Faith, Fiction, Friends: Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?

The High Calling: ‘Booked’ by Karen Swallow Prior

Making Sense of the World

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me, and reading some of the same things that many, if not most, of us were read – nursery rhymes: Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Little Boy Blue, Little Bo Peep, Mary Had a Little Lamb. My mother read (and recited) them to me, and when it wasn’t nursery rhymes it was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Without my realizing it, those readings defined how I understood poetry – a short story or song told in rhyme.

As I got older, my understanding of poetry grew more complex. In grammar school, I can remember poems like “Hiawatha,” “Evangeline,” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” In high school, it included “Thanatopsis,” Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Less Masters.

I read many of these same poets in college, in greater depth and breadth of their works. The poems that stick out include “Beowulf,” Malory’s “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (the emphasis on the English poets reflects my English literature courses).

What reading and studying  poetry had the effect of accomplishing was helping me make sense of the world. For me, poetry and fiction did this in a way that non-fiction could not. This is likely why the reading of poetry and fiction (and now the writing of both) has remained an important part of my life.

In Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, Karen Swallow Prior notes this ability of poetry: “I had come to see that poetry was not a means of escape, but rather an art of reconciliation. For poetry is made in the discovery of resemblances. It seeks likeness, even amidst the strangeness of differences.”

This resonates strongly with me. What she calls “reconciliation” is what I call “making sense,” and they are the same thing. Literature affords the opportunity to understand how others understand the world and express truth, and to find the likeness for ourselves.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Prior cites the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), the English poet who wasn’t known as a poet until after his death. During his lifetime, he was known as a Jesuit priest. He was also a man who struggled with his own demons, and he had actually burned all of the early poetry he had written and turned away from it. It was the Church, in this case, the Catholic Church, that convinced him to return to it.

His poetry had been out of fashion for a time, but it’s been making something of a comeback. Prior discusses his poem “Pied Beauty” and it’s a fine poem. My own favorite is “Myself Unholy:”

Myself Unholy

Myself unholy, from myself unholy

To the sweet living of my friends I look –

Eye-greeting doves bright-counter to the rook,

Fresh brooks to salt sand-teasing waters shoaly: --

And they are purer, but alas! not solely

The unquestion’d readings of a blotless book.

And so my trust, confused, struck, and shook

Yields to the sultry siege of melancholy.

He has a sin of mine, he its near brother;

Knowing them well I can but see the fall.

This fault in one I found, that in another:

And so, though each have one while I have all,

No better serves me now, save best; no other

Save Christ: to Christ I look, on Christ I call.

He’s speaking about reconciliation, about making sense of the world, and what he sees as his compass. That compass is how he finds direction.

We all have a compass, some kind of direction-finder that we use to seek understanding and reconciliation. The compass Hopkins used is also mine, which is likely why I’m drawn to his poetry again and again.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Booked each Monday in January. To see what others are saying, please visit The HighCalling.

Related: Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?

Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?

I didn’t learn this in journalism school.

Yes, I have to admit that my undergraduate degree was in journalism. LSU had an official School of Journalism at the time, so my diploma actually reads “Bachelor of Arts in Journalism.” It wasn’t just any B.A. degree, but a B.A. in Journalism. It helped journalism graduates feel superior to the rest of the graduating class who had plain B.A. and B.S. degrees; we needed to feel superior to something. Anything.

I took the perfunctory (and required) history of journalism course, and it was actually interesting and challenging. I had a good teacher, a particularly demanding teacher, and I was so impressed with him and liked him so that I also had two independent study classes with him. One was about the late 19^th century publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, a man named Henry Grady, who coined the phrase and articulated the philosophy of the “New South.” The other study course was about Vice President Spiro Agnew’s speeches attacking journalism and journalists.

The history course was quite detailed, and focused almost entirely on journalism in the United States. So we learned a lot about John Peter Zenger and the American Revolution, the rise of the “penny press” and yellow journalism, and the impact of modernism on journalism (think Walter Lippmann, and “objectivity” and “balance” as guiding principles; much has changed since I was in journalism school).

What we didn’t learn from our journalism history book was where the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came from, the one that includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Those particular freedoms weren’t originally theorized after the American Revolution. And they didn’t all come from the famous libel trial Zenger found himself involved in. The ideas had been around for a long time.

I learned where they came from in my English literature course, not my history of journalism course. And I learned about it because one of the required readings was a small little paperback called The Areopagitica.

The Areopagitica is a speech by John Milton (yes, the far right fundamentalist wacko who worked for Oliver Cromwell!) (yes, the poet and Puritan intellectual who wrote Paradise Lost). It was a speech addressed to Parliament, and it’s on the importance of liberty for unlicensed printing. It’s a speech in which Milton argued that bad ideas shouldn’t be suppressed; that the only thing that couldn’t effectively counter a bad idea was a good idea; that truth would eventually prevail.

And he was religious. A Christian. His defense of unlicensed printing runs in a straight line through the Zenger libel trial in the 1730s through the American Revolution to the adoption of the First Amendment (and the other nine) half a century later.

I would argue that Milton’s defense of freedom of the press reflected his Christian beliefs, just like the fight to end slavery in Great Britain was led by William Wilberforce and other believing Christians. There’s much to consider there, and much to reflect upon.

I was reminded of The Areopagitica because I started reading Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior. Starting next Monday (Jan. 7), Laura Boggess will be leading a discussion of Booked at The High Calling, covering the first three chapters. The discussion continues each Monday through Jan. 29.

Booked is about (surprise) books, but it is also part personal memoir, part discussion. It’s thought-provoking and even funny in parts. But most of all it’s about the importance of books in a life.

I identify with that. Books have been important in my life. So have speeches, with speechwriting having been a large chunk of my professional career. I’ve read a lot of speeches over the course of four working decades, one of them being The Areopagitica. It’s an important work. It had a lot to do with what we know today as journalism, the good and the bad, not to mention publishing in general.

And to think it came from John Milton.