Podcast with Marilynn Robinson and Christian Wiman

I value Commonweal, a monthly magazine I’ve read of and on since the 1970s. This Saturday afternoon I listened to a Commonweal podcast with Marilynn Robinson and Christian Wiman, a poet I’ve long admired, whose articles appear frequently in the magazine.

After the podcast, I located one Wiman book in my library but could not find the other. He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art. Where is the book, I wonder?

Yet inside My Bright Abyss, I found two thick articles from Harper’s, a short piece from the WSJ, plus a letter I’d written to Wiman at Yale University about a Commonweal piece he wrote on a poet & prisoner. (I’ve mentioned before that my filing system is in books!)  And what was on the back cover of My Bright Abyss? A Marilynn Robinson testimonial:

“The thing that is exceptional about My Bright Abyss, aside from its intelligence and language, is the quality of theological reflection. It is lucid and not at all simple, a book in the great tradition of truly serious thought.”

Which is to say, the day before Easter, I listened to thirty minutes of serious thought between Marilynn and Christian. I learned that Wiman read Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, in his youth (1980s) and felt the influence of its beauty. The novel presents a whole world, alive with the mysterious and divine, in ways not easily understood. If you haven’t read Housekeeping, its setting is a remote Northwestern town (Fingerbone) on three glacial lakes in the 1950s.

During the podcast, Wiman said he approaches the Bible as poetry, or otherwise he finds scripture a stumbling block. In contrast, Robinson reads the Bible for instruction, feels its authority, and says that whatever she does not understand… only makes her read more. “Though not as a rationalist,” she said.  Her latest book is on Genesis, and she hopes to complete another on Exodus. She reveres the Bible for its recurrent questions, its beautiful literature, and for the abiding safety she feels from trusting in Providence. Yet Robinson asks, “What will end God’s patience?”  I could answer this question with a quip related to last week’s blog on the Inferno and Fraud. But I won’t!

I do recommend a review of Robinson’s Genesis in The New Yorker’s March 11, 2024 issue. “Had to Happen,” is by James Wood, a fine literary critic, who does not share the paradoxes of Robinson’s religious tradition, especially regarding John Calvin (think Predestination).  But Wood regards Robinson as a great novelist. At the end of his review, he says of her: “This is one miracle that, having seen it with my own eyes, I’ll happily believe in.”

If you have not read Robinson’s literary quartet of Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack, the four novels are worth reading, and more than once.  

Next week I’ll begin writing about a writer I love, the late Wallace Stegner, and the subject of my May course.

Fraud as the Eighth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno

This week I would like to revisit an earlier blog about the first book of The Divine Comedy, which Dante Alighieri completed early in the 14th century. By the time of his death in September of 1321, he had completed the third part, Paradiso, published posthumously.

Are you wondering how this is relevant in 2024? I can only hope you watched an amazing PBS two-part presentation (two hours each night) of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If you missed it this past week, search PBS Passport. It is an enactment I want to see and to read again. (Do put on the captions!)

The following words were ones I wrote in 2023 to the delight of some and the outrage of others.

Have we not heard ‘fraud’ lately, this word with its origin in Middle English? Hasn’t the word resonated outward from New York City? The legal F word as it were. But only D words for the deplorable, despicable, disreputable, disgraceful man on trial for fraud. A demon with a Sharpie, not the sword of Dante’s demon who perpetually circles Scandal and Schism in the ninth ring of the 8th circle. After the 8th, the 9th circle leads to the Pit (or Well) of Hell. What a place it is, with its four rings, all named under the title, Treachery, about traitors to homeland, political party, guests, and benefactors.

Please understand that I’ve skipped the first seven circles of Hell. But I will name them. Limbo, The Lustful, The Gluttonous, The Avaricious & Prodigal, the Wrathful & Sullen, and The Violent. The latter ring includes murderers & tyrants, and those against neighbors, themselves (suicides) and possessions (squanderers).

It is the 8th circle titled Fraud that interests me. Yet the name given to it, which takes in all its rings, is Malebolge. Word 11 does not recognize this word, though the OED does. This word describes the 8th circle of hell as consisting of ten rock-bound concentric, circular trenches. As used in the past, malebolge meant a hellish place or condition. Maybe we ought to bring the word back as an apt description for Congress. Take a few minutes and study the list of those in the 8th circle of Hell. We recognize all of them, don’t we? Maybe not Simonists from Dante’s time, and the selling of ecclesiastical privileges. But think of the Big D selling presidential pardons. Look at each of the ten rings and get a visual image to match them. I see fraudulent counselors down there in Georgia admitting their guilt. I await Rudy sweating more dark dye. Falsifiers of Metals, Persons, Coins, and Words makes me think of Sam the Bit Coin Man! Please share with me some of your thoughts after seeing this diagram of the Inferno.( I enjoy messages from readers.)

Oh, Dante Alighieri, I won’t forget being in Ravenna in the early 1980s and standing in the crypt that contains your remains. Forget bones. You left us The Divine Comedy, and I mean to read it all this time, beginning with the Inferno by Allen Mandelbaum, whose translation is called, “The English Dante of choice.”  

Until next week and thoughts on Marilynn Robinson’s latest book.

Marilynne Robinson Writes Again

Current issues of The Atlantic, Commonweal, and The New Yorker have articles on Robinson’s latest book, a non-fiction work on Genesis. 

Marilynne Robinson

Call me Ms. Antiquated: I still subscribe to fine magazines and periodicals like the London Review of Books. But I’ve not forgotten the early winter of 2005, when three months of mail arrived from Lima, Peru, Mike’s last State Department posting. My happiness then, on a bitterly cold day, was seeing back issues of The Atlantic. This is when I first heard about the writer, Marilynn Robinson.

At the time I was alone in a tiny cottage in the Northern Neck of Virginia, husband Mike in Indonesia for U.N. work after the devastating late December 2004 Tsunami. Given our household goods were in State Department storage, and I was without my library, I unwisely accepted an assignment with Americas (OAS magazine) for an article on a Peruvian sculptor, Carlos Runcie Tanaka. 

Carlos Runcie Tanaka

A terrible idea because language was as frozen in me as the ice-covered ground outside the cottage. Yet I had three issues of The Atlantic. That’s when I read about Marilynn Robinson’s new novel, which after her two-decade-plus absence from fiction, was big literary news. Why had I not heard of this writer and her Pen-Hemingway award-winning novel, Housekeeping? I suppose because I had been in West Germany from 1980-83 and read only the International Herald. 

That January day in 2005, I learned Robinson’s second novel had been published, an epistolary work called Gilead. Given I believe ardently in life’s Three C’s, I was not surprised what happened that same day. I decided to visit the Northumberland Library in Heathsville. What did I see when I walked in? A small section of used books for sale. What was there in hardcover, still wearing its book jacket? Housekeeping! 

I paid one dollar for it, filled out a form for a library card, then returned to the cottage. I opened the sofa bed and began reading. When early darkness came, I turned on lights, finished the novel, then turned to the first page and began again, reading slowly, hearing each word of this writer’s lyrical prose.  I thank Marilynn Robinson for reopening a closed gate, which allowed me to write the article on Carlos and one on adopting a roadway for my father, which won more than one writing award. What are the fragments for except to be rejoined, which is what Carlos in Lima did with shards of pottery.

Robinson’s narrator, Ruth, asks: “What Are All These Fragments For, If Not to Be Knit Up Finally?”

The first four words of Housekeeping are, “My name is Ruth.” She asks this question years after she leaves Fishbone, a remote Northwestern town, located on a mysterious, glacial lake.  I should say a holy trinity of lakes, and a town with floods out of Genesis, not to mention a passenger train sliding off the town’s bridge into the lake like a weasel, leaving behind a mystery, like so much in Robinson’s first novel.  It is one to read multiple times, as is her quartet: Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack. 

Ilona, my film-savvy webmaster, says the movie of Housekeeping is not one to see.  But I await a series, something as fine as Brideshead Revisited, of Robinson’s characters in Gilead, Iowa, and other locations from her literary quartet.

Next week: Reflections on a March 20th Marilynn Robinson podcast from New York City