What Resonates Through Time?

On Thursday October 3, my course, The Personal Essay, began; and students read a short piece, “Asthma,” by Seneca. Imagine this Stoic philosopher’s voice resonating from Rome, more than twenty-one centuries later.

In class the other day, Seneca’s piece and another by the late Russell Baker, made me recall the first “personal” essay I ever wrote. (I’m not talking about essays in high school and papers in college.)  The essay I wrote was for a class at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1970s during the decade I lived in the Napa Valley.

A requirement in Overcoming the Fear of Writing was to mail an essay to the professor weeks earlier. I assumed the class would be small if the teacher wanted an essay from everyone. But what to write? When to write it? My life was the “full catastrophe”: High school English teacher, lesson plans, papers to grade, two children under five, house & garden, my mate a U.S.A.F. pilot. Yet when I saw this class in the U.C. Extension catalogue, a voice said, “Write for your Life, Gail.” 

That Saturday in Cal Berkeley’s Sproul Hall were 100 students, if not more. Had the professor read an essay from each of us?  She arrived a bit late, wiry, wild-haired, and ready to get our pens moving. And move they did until she said we would have an hour for lunch to recharge our batteries. Before dismissal, she asked to see two students. My first thought when I heard my name, “What did I do wrong?”  The other student was a dapper looking older man. I had typed my essay on erasable bond paper, which the professor held in her hands. I could see that print had begun to disappear. I must have thought I would be told to use different paper. She talked to the gentleman first. He turned out to be a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The teacher had wanted to meet him. He had taken the class because he was “blocked” writing a book under contract, one on Emperor Norton of San Francisco fame. Then she turned to me and said my essay should be published. What’s more she was willing to help me. I looked again at “Yellow Shoes.” Above the title in huge letters, she had written, RESONANCE.  I recognized the word but did not understand what it meant related to my essay. (I had to wait until I returned home that day and checked an unabridged dictionary.)  That day in Sproul Hall the journalist kidded me about being special and said he would buy my lunch.  I did not return home and say to Mike, babysitter for the day, that I ate lunch with a journalist from The Chronicle.  But because of that day, I became a writer.

What was my first personal essay about?  An extended metaphor about shoes and what they revealed about the direction my life had taken. Humorous, heart-felt, and resonant. “Yellow Shoes” was not published.  But two years later, Redbook Magazine selected my “Young Mother’s Story” from hundreds of submissions.  All because of that one day in Sproul Hall in the 1970s.

What resonates through time?

Your voice, my voice, the written voice, the human voice.                                    

Taking Leave of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison

I’m holding a circular fob attached to a USC key chain; and on the small white circle is a cheeky quote from the infamous Oscar Wilde.

“If one cannot enjoy reading a novel over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

I would amend this to say that a good book club discussion of a novel requires a second read. Which is why I gave Toni Morrisons’s Beloved that second read last week, not counting the time I read her novel in 1988 when it won the Pulitzer Prize.

This past week I read about Morrison’s life. It interested me that she wrote her M.A. thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, two famous & earlier postmodernists. I also learned her Nobel Prize was awarded for “postmodern shifting narration.” This characteristic of her writing is understandable given her M.A. work on both Woolf and Faulkner.

Last Thursday at the book club meeting, I was glad to hear from those who appreciated Beloved more than I did. This is how book clubs should be, with novels read carefully and members speaking from having given serious attention to the literature.

Yet I will admit that after seeing the three-hour movie of Beloved, I thought about skipping a second read. Yet how could I do that when I expect the members to read each novel twice?  My copy of Beloved is 274 pages in three parts. Near the end of the second, Morrison shifts from an observing third person narration to first.

“BELOVED, she my daughter.  She mine.”

Then another segment, “BELOVED is my sister.’

A third begins, ‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’ This one has white spaces within the writing.

A fourth begins, ‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’ This page is without white spaces. But it also ends with, ‘She is mine.’ Next are three pages of a prose-poem. “Oh, please, Toni” I wrote in the margin. The next chapter returns to the third person narrator: “It was a tiny church no bigger than a rich man’s parlor.”

The critics were kind to Toni Morrison and Beloved.  But the black critic, Stanley Crouch, noted that Morrison “perpetually interrupts narrative with maudlin ideological commercials.” This claim rings as demeaning. I wonder if Stanley watched the movie instead of reading the novel.  It’s fair to say (!) Beloved was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Stick to your talk show, Oprah.  But then… who am I to judge because I do not watch horror films! Which is what it was, as well as corny and mawkish, and very very long. (I shun qualifiers, but they apply here.) Okay, different works and different flicks for different folks! 

What will the book club be reading in November? 

Two novels with the same title of Snow: one by the masterful John Banville, who combined forces with his ghost writer, Benjamin Black, for an Irish mystery under Banville’s name. The second Snow is from the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, who won the Novel Prize in 2006. His novel is long. Banville’s can be read in one sitting. Who can stop reading this mystery? I couldn’t.

I leave you this Sunday with two lines from a Jorge Luis Borges poem, “Boast of Quietness,” as a tribute to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.

“Writings of Light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors”

&

“My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.”

Back in two weeks… Gail and Ilona

Today a blog on William Faulkner in Genius

Early this Sunday morning, I pulled Harold Bloom’s Genius from a shelf in my study. Bloom devoted six pages to William Faulkner in this work. Bloom, the late great Yale professor, “America’s prominent literary critic,” had by the time Genius was published in 2002, already written 26 books. The sub-title for Genius is, “A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.” All in 814 pages!

On my shelf with Genius, are three other books by Harold Bloom. The 2005, Jesus and Yahweh, the 2019 Possessed by Memory, and from 2020, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles. This book’s subtitle is, “The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death.” I had two or three other Bloom books but gave them to an orthopedic surgeon in Richmond. Sir William, who saved me from a Sea of Arthritic Troubles, expertly provided two new knees. Ah, the joy of running at age 81!

I will admit, however, that without tennis from age 10, and given my love of literature, I could be as large as Harold Bloom was, from a sedentary existence of reading.

In Genius, Bloom with a photographic memory, gave four of six pages to Faulkner’s Light in August. What famous novel precedes Bloom’s discussion of Light?  Mark Twain’s brilliant Huckleberry Finn. Bloom calls it “a book loved alike by religious and irreligious.”

A statement possibly untrue today in our black book milieu. Would that I had matched Huck with Light, instead of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But that’s for next week.

Bloom wrote that literature of genius like Faulkner’s is our best path for reaching wisdom, which he believes is “the true use of literature for life.” But he says this path “depends upon deep reading.” In the book club I started for the local community college, we agree to read each novel twice before we meet to discuss two novels, as we will this Thursday, September 19th.

From the long list of novels that William Faulkner wrote, Light in August is Bloom’s second favorite.  His first is As I Lay Dying. The book club read this novel last year. Bloom also declares that “Faulkner is incontestably the major North American novelist since Henry James.” I am pleased to say we read Henry at our last meeting. All, I believe, appreciated The Master, Colm Tóibín’s fictional story of Henry James. But most of us were less enthusiastic about Henry’s What Maisie Knew.

Bloom asks a question, which is one I will ask on Thursday. Does the tragedy of Joe Christmas in Light in August, hold up in the United States of 2024, rather than as it did in 1932, when the novel was published?

Next week:  An answer to this question, plus the movie version of Beloved.