“A Blockaded Family” by Parthenia Hague

Parthenia Hague was a young woman living with her family near Columbus, Georgia, at the start of the Civil War. She was hired by a plantation owner near Eufaula, Alabama, to be a teacher for his daughters. Except for a couple of trips home to visit family, she spent the war years in southern Alabama.

The area of Eufaula was left physically untouched until the very end of the war – no nearby battles, no raids by federal troops, no forces of occupation. But the war increasingly left its mark on the plantation and the family. Daily life began to change. Certain common, everyday items became increasingly rare. Ingenuity replaced what had previously been taken for granted.

Twenty-three years after the end of the war, Hague published A Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War. It’s remarkable in that, rather than focus on the events of the war, the work instead describes daily life on a plantation, a life that was changing and one that would soon be swept away forever. 

The account can often seem almost tedious, such as the in-depth descriptions of how the women of the family had to “make do” to sew their clothes. And while it’s easy for a modern reader to become impatient with all of the details of sewing, one slowly realizes that, in its own way, this was the daily reality women experienced while husbands, sons, and brothers were away in the army. 

Because of the Union blockade, coffee becomes prohibitively expensive and then completely unavailable. The alternative – the closest thing that tasted like coffee – was okra. Salt, used to season meat like pork, was recycled. On the rare occasions when new cloth was available, every scrap was used for something. And everyone worked, even the teacher, because everyone had to.

Only toward the end of the account, as Hague reaches the end of her story, does the war directly intrude. And that’s because federal troops are coming closer. Rumors sweep the area; valuable are buried and hidden and prize horses are taken off to the swamp. As it turns out, the Union army forces took another road, bypassing the plantation where Hague was living. Those plantations and farms in the army’s way did not fare well.

A Blockaded Family is something of a rose-colored glasses account; the accounts of the family’s slaves suggest all were happy and content, with a few even given to playful pranks that the family loved. Still, the story does offer a view of “the war back home,” and how women and children improvised with intelligence to “make do.”

Photograph: A plantation home in Alabama.

Poets and Poems: Mischa Willett and “The Elegy Beta”

Poet Mischa Willett is exploring the elegy. And more than exploring it, he’s modernizing it.

You reach a certain age, and you begin to understand why the elegy is an enduring poetic form. Its history stretches as far back as the Greeks and Romans. Typically associated with death and funerals, an elegy can be almost any poem that’s a serious reflection. Traditional elegies (think Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”) make full use of rhyming couplets. Contemporary elegies generally drop the rhyme, but they retain the concept of seriousness and solemnity.

The title poem in Willet’s new collection, The Elegy Beta, fits that contemporary understanding. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Between Two Millstones" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In February 1974, writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was expelled from the Soviet Union. After years of his writings being published in the West, the triggering event for the Soviet government was the publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s highly detailed account of life in the Soviet prison camp system. 

The writer was flown to West Germany, beginning an exile that would last until 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the restoration of his Russian citizenship, and his eventual return. But in 1974, his wife and young children had to be allowed to leave, his rather large archive of research materials, notes, and other documents had to be smuggled out, a place to live had to be found. He also had to navigate life in the West, survive the machinations of unscrupulous people disguised as helpers, and deal with a news media he found horrific.

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978 is the first of two volumes on the 20 years he spent in the West. Translated by Peter Constantine. The account provides a story of an internationally famous author bewildered by Western culture and society. He was at first embraced by the Western news media and intellectuals; he was something of a problem and embarrassment for the Richard Nixon / Henry Kissinger plan for détente with Soviet Russia. 

The media the intellectual elites soon discovered, however, that Solzhenitsyn was not the Western-style liberal they expected; he was first and foremost a Russian, and a conservative one at that; the man actually worshipped faithfully in the Russian Orthodox Church. He learned quickly to distrust the news media in all of its forms

Solzhenitsyn must have kept meticulously detailed diaries or have a phenomenal memory, or both. The memoir covers an almost daily account of his first five years outside of Russia. He had to give countless interviews. He had to find a place to live, considering Switzerland, Norway, and Canada before finally deciding on Vermont in the United States. He had to deal with the constant propaganda efforts of the KGB, the Soviet counterpart to the CIA. And he had to gather together his archives, visit universities and research centers, and somehow find time to help his wife raise their children.

Solzhenitsyn and his three sons about 1975

It’s no wonder he often felt caught between what he called two millstones – the millstone pf the Soviets and the KGB, and the millstone of unending pressure from elements of Western culture, and Western culture itself. 

I have read most of Solzhenitsyn’s works (including all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago) and his two earlier memoirs, The Oak and the Calf and Invisible Allies. I had believed that his falling out with the Western news media and intellectual elites stemmed from his 1978 Harvard commencement speech, published as A World Split Apart. More than one pundit observed that Solzhenitsyn had done something at Harvard that no one ever had done anywhere before – he gave a commencement address that was remembered a year later.  What Between Two Millstones makes clear, however, is that the falling out between the writer and western news media happened much earlier, almost as soon as he arrived in Germany.

Solzhenitsyn in 1974.

The memoir also provides a deep understanding of Solzhenitsyn experiences as he began to write his fictional account of the rise of the Bolsheviks and how they seized power in 1917. Doing research at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, he’s shocked to learn that the first revolution of 1917, in which the tsar abdicated and Alexander Kerensky took over as national leader, was not the glorious moment he and many other Russians had believed it to be. In fact, that revolution was just as much responsible for the eventual tyranny of communism as the second revolution of 1917, that in November that was celebrated as the founding moment of Soviet Russia. 

Between Two Millstones is for admirers of Solzhenitsyn, for critics interested in his writings, and for historians who want to understand a short five years that, in their own way, contributed to the ultimate dissolution of Soviet Russia.

Top photograph: Solzhenitsyn at his home in Cavendish, Vermont.

Platform

After Romans 2:8

Build it, nurture it,

feed it, grow it,

it’s what they all say,

it’s what you do,

what you have to do,

construct it, strengthen it,

reinforce it, water it,

fertilize it, or no one

will listen, no one

will follow, no one

will share, no one

will comment or

retweet, and that is

the worst sin, that is,

until the day comes,

the day of wrath,

the day of fury,

the day of tribulation,

the day of distress,

tomorrow.

Photograph by Austin Distel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When the Story Is Not What You Think It Is

I suppose you could call me a Les Mis fan. I’ve seen the stage version of Les Misérables twice. I’ve seen the movie twice. I’ve watched the anniversary specials on PBS (the ones they show during fundraising months). I know the words to the big songs. I am deeply enthralled with the character of Jean Valjean. My heart breaks for Fantine. I laugh at and secretly adore watching the comic and grasping Thenardiers.

What I haven’t done is read the book by Victor Hugo. Perhaps it was the size – 1,222 pages of the “complete and unabridged” edition we have. Perhaps it was my wife telling me, as she read it, “There must be 300 pages describing the sewers of Paris. It goes on for page after page about the sewers.” Eewww. She surprised me when she said she loved the book.

Last year, I spotted a book at the local bookstore, and only saw the title on the spine first: The Novel of the Century by David Bellos. Ah, I thought, a book about David Copperfield, or Great Expectations, or Vanity Fair. Uh, no. It was subtitled “The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables.” That book about sewers. Perhaps watching the movie version yet again would suffice; the sewer scene in the movie is the vastly abbreviated version of what the book contains.

The Grace of Les Misérables by Matt Rawle has changed my mind. And it did early on, as in the first two chapters. I’m a Les Mis fan, so I know that Jean Valjean (chapter 1) and Inspector Javert (chapter 2) are point and counterpoint, hero and villain, grace and justice, good and bad. Hold up, says Rawle. That’s not what Hugo did in the novel. 

Matt Rawle

The author provided a much more nuanced characterization of the two primary characters. Jean Valjean isn’t instantly converted to good when the priest lets him get away with stealing the church silver. It takes a considerable period of time and numerous events for Valjean to embrace grace. It’s a journey, not a one-time event. And as for Javert, the book presents him as an extraordinarily capable and resourceful police detective. He is a man whose very competence and experience will lead him to disaster.

I read what Rawle writes, and I’m reminded of so many times at work when people resisted doing something differently because “this is the way it’s always been done,” “this is what the boss wants,” and “it’s always worked before.” I watched one organization sail into disaster because of people’s incredible competence and experience – and an inability to change. Call it a “Javert moment.” It’s a very different view of Javert than what I understood. 

And I never realized that Valjean struggles for most of the book to be the man he will ultimately become. The priest shows him unmerited grace, and Valjean promptly turns around and steals a coin from a boy. He accepts his punishment in court, and then immediately escapes from jail so he can rescue Cosette. He almost leaves Marius to certain death because of jealousy. This isn’t the brave, noble soul we see in the play and the movie.

There it is. Victor Hugo’s sprawling saga of revolution in 1830s France isn’t a historical novel at all. It’s a novel of realism, with an understanding of human nature and the promise and perils of the human condition. It’s a novel for the times in which it was published, the 1850s, and it is a novel for the times of the 2020s. Works like Les Misérables that grasp the essential reality of the human condition are timeless. They endure because they speak to generation after generation.

I have to cast my identify as a Les Mis fan aside. I have to read the book. I have to struggle with Jean Valjean, and I have to see Inspector Javert for the complete character he is. I have to see myself in both of them.

I’m now steeling myself for 300 pages about sewers.

(This post originally appeared at Literary Life.)

Saturday Good Reads

As Coronavirus (or Covid-19) seizes hold of the world’s imagination, and fear, a number of writers are asking questions, specifically about what should Christians do? David Beauchamp at Mere Orthodoxy asks that precise question. Terry Mattingly notes that, during times of panic and plague, priests do what they are called to do (and, it should be added, we are a priesthood of believers). Matthew Hosier at Think Theology in the U.K. reminds us that we have been here before. Eric Geiger looks at the 180-degree-different responses from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and has some words of advice for church leaders. Andy Crouch has even more words for church leaders. And Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper puts a human face on the virus, with a poem about a Washington, D.C.-area Church rector.

In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the world dealt with what was called “the sweating sickness.” It was a strange illness in that it was particularly a problem for the upper classes, who presumably had better diets and health. Most people died with 18 hours of coming down with it. Henry VIII’s older brother Arthur was likely a victim of it. Ann Boleyn apparently survived it. Mortality rates are estimated to have been as high as 36 percent. Kaushik Patowary at Amusing Planet has the story.

It’s a question that drives progressive Christians, Washington Post columnists, and a number of my Facebook friends crazy: why would conservative Christians vote for President Trump? Andrew Walker at National Review offers one of the more insightful explanations. It isn’t about who they’re voting for as much as what it is they’re voting against. 

More Good Reads

Writing and Literature

Flannery O’Connor vs. the Marvel Universe – Jessica Hooten Wilson at Church Life Notre Dame.

Life and Culture

Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang – Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Classical education is countercultural. It’s time to bring it back – Matthew Walz at America Magazine.

Missing the Heart of the Story – Andrew Bunt at Think Theology.

Call Me Lucifer – Matt Stewart at Front Porch Republic.

Poetry

Snowdrops – Martin Rizley at Society of Classical Poets.

The Deep Power of Joy: On Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' – Glenn Arbery at The Imaginative Conservative.

Let Us Tune Our Instruments – James Matthew Wilson at Benedict XVI Institute.

To J.R.R. Tolkien – Donald T. Williams at An Unexpected Journal.

Faith

Train hard, fight easy – Andrew Roycroft at Thinking Pastorally.

What I Didn’t Learn in Business School – Ken Eldred at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

A Psalm of David, When He Fled From Absalom His Son – Dan King at BibleDude.

American Stuff

George Washington on Religious Liberty versus Religious Tolerance – Dr. Daniel Dreisbach at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics. 

Autumn in Banff

Painting: A Reading Girl by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). 

Bank on it

After Romans 2:1-11

Those comments, 

those asides,

those bits of snark, 

those sly statements,

those slicing words,

those knowing thoughts,

thought vicious insights,

all of them are

money in the bank,

stored up, saved

for the day

the account is

opened, revealed,

publicized, judged. 

He with the smallest

account wins.

Photograph by Matthew Guay via Unsplash. Used with permission.