I can't tell you how many times I had similar feelings when I was raising children. Not so much about the nightly news and similar things, which we never watched, but about the news/entertainment industry in general.

I first came upon the name Madison Jones ten or so years ago while reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters. In a letter to “A” dated July 6, 1963 Miss O’Connor says that she was currently reading Jones’s new book, and goes on to say “It’s a shame about his books. They are excellent and fall like lead clear out of sight the minute they are published.” Trusting her judgment, I got a copy of his first novel, The Innocent, and jumped in. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Jones, born in Nashville in 1925, was almost an exact contemporary of O’Connor, the two of them born within days of each other. Jones attended Vanderbilt, where he studied under Donald Davidson, one of the Fugitive poets and “Twelve Southerners” of I’ll Take My Stand fame. He went on to get his Master’s at the University of Florida under Andrew Lytle, another one of the twelve. Jones had several short stories published in the 1950’s, but his first novel did not appear until 1957. He had in the meantime become a friend and correspondent of O’Connor. Jones went on to write eleven more novels over the next 50 years, his last one appearing in 2008. He also taught writing at Auburn from 1956 to 1987. He died in 2012.

Although he received several major writing awards Jones largely flew under the radar of the contemporary literature scene. One can probably mark this down to several things, including his conservative Southernness and the stark traditional morality apparent in his writing, neither of which tends to get you positive attention from the literary movers and shakers. Critical attention to him is therefore largely lacking, and only one book on him has appeared, a collection of essays by various hands published by the University of Southern Denmark (!). In any case, Jones does write excellent books as O’Connor said, and they are well worth reading.

Of the twelve novels that he published I’ve read nine. Often he reads like something of a cross between O’Connor and Mauriac – he’s got some of the “Southern gothic” imagination of the former combined with the psychological insight of the latter. But he’s more readable than Mauriac in my opinion, and his plots and characters aren’t as outré as O’Connor’s sometimes are. He wasn’t a Catholic, but a Calvinist, and although his work isn’t often explicitly religious, there is a deep sense of the understanding of original sin present in all his works. Many of the books follow a roughly similar plotline: a man makes a moral error, usually involving either a woman, money, or both, and we watch him unravel as he tries to justify and/or cover up his sin. His great theme seems to be, “What you sow you shall reap,” and where he is masterful is when he shows the interior effects of this on his characters.

A good example of this theme is his short novel An Exile (1967). A small town sheriff, bored in his marriage, has an affair with the much-younger daughter of a local moonshiner. In order to protect this secret he begins having to steer police attention away from her father, causing him to lie to his fellow officers and misuse his police power. Things rapidly go out of control, and his attempts to fix things just make it all worse. (This book was made into an okay but not great film with Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld, I Walk The Line. The title song by Johnny Cash is much better known.)

Two of his better known novels actually veer away from these themes, however. Nashville 1864, which won the Shaara Award for Civil War fiction in 1998, concerns a young boy searching for his father in the aftermath of the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. And A Cry of Absence, set in 1957, has as its protagonist a middle aged woman who comes to believe that her son may have committed a terrible crime. When it appeared in 1971 it was hailed as one of the great recent novels about racial issues. But the rest of the books that I’ve read tend to follow that rough “sowing and reaping” template. One might think that this would get monotonous or predictable from book to book, but Jones always manages to make things interesting, and his characters come across as real people, not just cutouts to fit the template.

Jones’s prose style is straightforward but well-crafted; his writing doesn’t draw attention to itself, but particularly good sentences or paragraphs nevertheless often jump out at the reader. In the main, however, the writing serves the story in an almost perfect balance.

For the newcomer to Jones I’d recommend The Innocent, A Buried Land, or A Cry of Absence. Or for a good shorter introduction you can go with An Exile, which runs to about 130 pages. The combination of great craftsmanship with a strong moral sense and profound character insight makes Madison Jones a unique and appealing figure in late 20^th century fiction.

 —Rob Grano has a degree in religious studies which he's put to good use working on the insurance side of the healthcare industry for the past 20 years.  He's published a number of book and music reviews, mostly in the small press, and sometimes has even gotten paid for it. He lives outside of Pittsburgh, Pa.

Janet is kicking off the 52 Saints series at her blog. See this post and sign up!

There are a number of YouTube versions of this song, most of them featuring images of the things the song talks about. But for me the lyrics are quite enough.

It is a very windy document. It would have been much better at half the length. It's repetive, and consciously so. From the opening chapter:

Although each chapter will have its own subject and specific approach, it will also take up and re-examine important questions previously dealt with.... These questions will not be dealt with once and for all, but reframed and enriched again and again.

I'm not so sure that was a good idea. I found much to applaud in the first half or so, but long before I reached the end I was impatient and felt that little was being added. 

As we all know, the most immediately notable thing about the encyclical was its highly politicized reception: the left was jubilant, far too many on the right dismissive and even contemptuous. Both did it a disservice. The left immediately wielded it as a weapon against the right, which naturally encouraged the right to find fault with it. Now that I've read it, I have to say that many of the more strident critics on the right look like fools. There are plenty of specifics here that one might argue with, but to dismiss its principles is wrong for Catholics, and a mistake for anyone. And by the way, it explicitly invites debate, so a Catholic needn't feel hesitant to disagree with it on matters of fact, or about the wisdom of this or that specific proposal. Daniel Mahoney, writing in National Review, has the best reaction from a Catholic conservative that I've come across, though I'm sure there are others--which doesn't mean that I agree with everything he says.

Mahoney says that Chapter 3, "The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis", is the strongest part of the encyclical, and I agree. To do it justice would require quoting long stretches, but here's a small sample:

It can be said that many problems of today's world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. 

I have to wonder if some of the noisiest people on both sides have even read it. The thing that's gotten the most attention is its commitment to the cause of combating "climate change." But that's really quite a small part of the whole, and an unessential one; that is, you could remove every mention of climate change without in the least diminishing the force of its call for environmental responsibility, for which it makes a case very persuasive on both religious and common-sense grounds.

My biggest reservation about it is that it doesn't really connect physical ecology and cultural ecology very effectively, especially the moral ecology involving sex and the family which has been clear-cut in the past fifty years or so. The passage quoted above, for instance, would seem to lead naturally in that direction, but is in fact followed by a caution that the "model" described "[shapes] social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups." Perhaps, but I think the more significant and powerful shaping is toward a general preference for ease and comfort over more substantial goods. I am less worried about "certain powerful groups" than about the character of people in general.

The encyclical says some strong things about the connection between environmental damage and greed (though I'm not sure it uses the word "greed"), and about the folly of believing that man's power to manipulate nature is absolute and unlimited. And it does connect these errors with the decline of the family and related questions. But that connection is not emphasized or elaborated upon. Of course I recognize that one document can't treat every question, and this one is explicitly about the environment (a phrase which I always want to put in quotes because it seems clumsy. and to admit in the very nomenclature of the debate a view of nature as an object separate from ourselves). But I think an opportunity was missed. 

And because it was missed, the actual impact in the U.S. and Europe seems likely to be a strengthening of the anti-Christian forces with which we're all familiar. There really is not much here to challenge them, and what there is will be easily ignored, as demonstrated in something Marianne posted in a comment last June:

As if on cue to prove your point, Mac, here's Hillary Clinton with two back-to-back Tweets:

@Pontifex is right—climate change is a moral crisis that disproportionately harms the neediest among us. We need leadership, not denial. -H

Welcome news: The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled to protect women's ability to access safe & legal abortion throughout the state. -H

The greatest impact of the encyclical--and I hope I'm being too pessimistic--may be in its renewal of the protections provided by the "seamless garment" doctrine elaborated by the late Cardinal Bernardin, this time at the papal level. This idea, while not in principle incorrect, gave, in our cultural context, cover to Catholic politicians and others who promoted the sexual revolution and other pathologies; as long as there was some cause under that garment they agreed with, they felt themselves to be relieved of the obligation to support others that were and are more fundamental--and not only not to support, but to attack. It established moral equivalence between matters of politics and matters of principle, so that support for a job training program was a license to support Planned Parenthood. 

So, for instance, Catholic colleges that have felt themselves to be in tension (at best) with the Church, can, without changing anything, now claim magisterial approval. As long as they support environmentalism, which of course they already do, they can, for instance, leave students to navigate the wilderness of the sexual revolution with no guidance beyond the amoral what's-right-for-me sort. It is a safe bet that at many of these environmentalism will get more classroom attention than the Catholic faith.

Is it that the pope doesn't understand what Christianity in the West is up against in the utopian left, that the natural aim of the latter is to render Christianity marginalized and impotent as a cultural force? Or that he does understand and is attempting to disarm and perhaps convert the opposition? I suspect it's the former but I hope it's the latter. 

I don't know anything about Canadian politics or the real significance of the newly-elected premier. But this piece by David Warren says some insightful things that are as applicable to our political culture as to our neighbor's.

Perhaps I should explain what I mean by “drivel.” I could write, “lies,” but these are only possible to those who have criteria for the truth. Drivel is what people talk who have no such criteria. “Bullshit” is the interchangeable term. The fact that what they’re saying may be true, or untrue, is of no significance to them. It is enough that it sounds plausible. The truthful man knows when he is lying; the post-modern neither knows nor cares. He can believe himself “good,” as drivellers will do, because truth doesn’t come into it.

The old-style politician told knowing lies. The new-style politician does not know what “lies” are. He uses the term rhetorically, against anything he does not want to hear. The old-style politician would back down when confronted with the truth. The new-style politician does not know what you are talking about. He assumes you are only trash-talking him.

 

Hopkins ranked with Yeats among the poetic enthusiasms of my college years. This was in part the result of the influence of my roommate, who was a couple of years older than I, and of a teacher for whom we shared a great admiration. At the time it meant nothing to me that Hopkins was a Jesuit; I could not have told you coherently what the word meant. It also meant nothing to me that he was a late Victorian convert, and thus in continuity with the movement from Canterbury to Rome which had attracted so much attention a generation earlier, most prominently in the person of John Henry Newman, who crossed over to Rome in 1845, the year after Hopkins was born, and in 1866 received the twenty-two-year-old Hopkins into the Catholic Church. I did at least understand that he was a Christian, but I was not particularly interested in that fact.

What I was interested in was the special intensity, the almost ecstatic quality, of his poetry, which was the result of (among other things)

• an unnatural compression of meaning (unnatural in the sense of being far from ordinary speech, even by the standards of poetry), often involving the use of short, forceful, archaic, or arcane words and invented compounds;
• an exaggerated music which uses alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme well beyond what would generally be acceptable, going right up to the edge of the ridiculous, but made effective by precision, and by mastery of the whole;
• stressed and contorted syntax;
• an irregular but highly controlled meter which he called “sprung rhythm”.

These effects are easier illustrated than described. Here is stanza 26 of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:

   For how to the heart's cheering
      The down-dugged ground-hugged grey
   Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
      Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way,
      What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

Among Catholics a few of his poems have become fairly popular, for me to the point of over-exposure. “God’s Grandeur” (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God...”) is probably the best example, and then perhaps “Pied Beauty” (“Glory be to God for dappled things...”). Supposing that most of my readers will be familiar with those, I’ll include here one not quite so well-known, but which, if my memory serves, was the first of Hopkins’s poems to impart to me something very much like the sensation described in the last line.

Hurrahing In Harvest

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Hopkins’s technique is at the service principally of two subjects: an intense religious devotion, and an equally intense love of nature which tends to focus on precise individual details captured as precisely as possible. Individuality—”all things counter, original, spare, and strange”--was both an aesthetic and a theological matter for him, and are nowhere better expressed than in this poem, left untitled by the poet but generally known by its opening phrase:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Hopkins didn’t write very much. Given his technique, it’s hard to see how he could have. Moreover, he died young (in 1888, at 44). And upon entering the Jesuits at the age of 22, he gave up poetry entirely, as being incompatible with his vocation, and wrote nothing for seven years, until a superior expressed the wish that someone would write a poem about the deaths of five Franciscan nuns in a shipwreck. Taking this as permission, Hopkins produced a striking, even astonishing, classic, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I would like to be able to say something like “He burst upon the literary scene...” with this poem, but in fact the only publisher that saw it, a Jesuit monthly, turned it down, apparently because it was too strange—and it is strange. After this a little less than fifteen years of life remained to him. In that time he produced, in obscurity, the few dozen poems that, when finally published in 1913 by his friend Robert Bridges, left open only the question “whether he is a great lesser poet, or a lesser great poet.”

At one time I would have not hesitated to choose the second of those characterizations. I’m not quite as enthusiastic as I once was about some of these poems as poems only. I now find myself a little impatient with the obscurity and compression of the poems that are less than entirely brilliant, or are so obscure that I’m still puzzled by certain passages (and a few whole poems). And in encouraging those qualities on the part of 20^th century poets, I think Hopkins’s influence was not 100% for the best; this has retroactively, and quite unfairly, colored my view of him.

Nevertheless: the best of these poems are among the best ever written. There’s pretty general agreement on that, and I’d still say “lesser great” rather than “great lesser.” And if one share’s Hopkins’s faith, the enjoyment and appreciation naturally go much deeper than for one who does not: we read his poems not only as elegant verbal artifacts unfortunately attached to an obsolete “belief system,” but as expressions of truth. We feel something of what he feels, not as a moment of openness produced by the poem, but as an aspect of our relationship to the real world. This is not the usual experience of a Catholic with the art of the past couple of centuries, and it’s pleasant not to have in the back of one’s mind a voice saying “Of course one can’t take his philosophy as-is...”, which I at any rate often do.

The joyful contemplation and adoration encountered in Hopkins’s most popular poems was not the whole of his work, just as it is not the whole (to say the least) of ordinary Christian life. There is a set of poems written fairly late in his life which are know as “the terrible sonnets” because of the desolation they describe. He had difficulties with his vocation (of course). And the work he was given, and the places where he was required to do it, were sometimes ill-suited and uncongenial to him. It’s hard to imagine him as a parish priest. I believe some of these poems were written while he was in Ireland, where he apparently found himself at odds even with his fellow Catholics over Irish-British politics.

I had intended to include one of them here, but they are so dark, and so intense, that to toss one in to be read casually seems wrong, to both reader and poet. So I’ll give you a link to No. 42, “No worst, there is none...” and suggest that you read it at leisure

W.H. Gardner’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose gives the non-specialist all the Hopkins he will need in a single volume: all the completed poems, significant fragments, and a selection of prose from journals and letters. Gardner’s introduction is an excellent brief biography and a sympathetic view of the poetic and theological matters with which the poet was concerned, and of the tension between his vocation-by-grace as Jesuit and priest and his vocation-by-nature as artist. Wisely, and happily for the reader weary of contemporary obsessions, he notes the likelihood that Hopkins was troubled by sexual tensions (as most celibates naturally are), but declines to speculate further. I could have used a bit more help with some of the obscurities in some of the poems. Hopkins said “Obscurity I do and will try to avoid so far as is consistent with excellences higher than clearness at first reading.” He certainly sacrificed nothing to that latter consideration.

If even after a couple of readings you're baffled, or half-baffled, by certain poems, my advice is to give up on them for the moment and try them again now and then at long intervals. That seems to have worked for me, at any rate. It's a concession to my laziness, I admit, but there is a point in struggling with a poem where frustration overpowers enjoyment, sometimes fatally for the moment. In that case I find it better to let it go for a while, and to read it again occasionally without making any great effort at puzzling it out. The words sink in, and on one of those subsequent readings come together. I recall years ago finding "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, and of the comfort of the Resurrection" more or less unintelligible, except for the last two lines. Then a decade or so ago I heard it read by a Jesuit expert on Hopkins whose name I can't remember now, and it made perfect sense.  

—Mac is the proprietor of this blog.

More Chris Rea, who is very under-rated. I admit I don't really understand what this song is about. The artwork shown in this video is relevant in part because the album cover has one of the same artist's pictures, and also because in the full version of the title song there is a sort of sound-effects intro in which you hear someone walking back and forth across a garage (or so it sounds), opening a door, saying he's "Just popping out," closing the door, and starting a car. Also, Rea is into race cars.

There is an official video for this song, which is shorter, dropping not only the non-musical intro but the long slow instrumental intro. I'm including it here because it is so extremely weird, and seems to have so little to do with the song. You wonder if they thought "You know, music videos are basically a dumb idea, so let's just do something completely silly."

I wonder if that little girl (I think it's a girl) is his daughter. Rea seems to be something of a family man. I don't know whether he actually got himself one of those Stainsby girls or not, but he married someone "with whom he has been in a relationship since they met as 16-years-olds in their native Middlesbrough." There's a song on the same album as "Stainsby Girls" (Shamrock Diaries) called "Josephine," which I always assumed to be a basic love song ("Josephine, I'll send you all my love..."), but which is actually to his daughter. And there's a song, I can't remember which one now, in which he denounces the people who've made the world a place where his little girl has to be afraid. 

Here's some clarification as to the song's meaning. You've probably heard "Road to Hell", but here it is in case you haven't.

When Craig Burrell wrote about Thomas Mann for Week 32 of the 52 Authors series, I decided that the next fiction I read would be Doctor Faustus. I had been irrationally prejudiced against Mann, somehow imagining his books to be very dull novels of not very interesting ideas. But Craig made him, and especially this book, sound interesting, and I thought I ought to at least make Mann's acquaintance. 

Well, I was completely wrong about him. This book is not dull, and although it is among other things a novel of ideas, they are very interesting ones. I'm having a busy week, and so am not going to make much of an attempt to explain why I'm saying this, but will just say it: this is one of the great novels of the 20th century. It's great in the way that Dostoevsky is great, in that it brings together abstract ideas (including theological ones), the movements of culture, rich characters, and a powerful story. In fact I'll say that by the measure of simple enjoyment it's better than Dostoevsky, though that may only be because Germany is less foreign to me than Russia. 

It will probably be a while before I attempt one of Mann's very large novels (Faustus is a modest 500 pages), but I will surely do so. If the others are in the same class as this one, he is certainly one of the Nobel Prize winners who truly deserved the award.