Friday Links, June 18, 2021

+ A novel of Caryll Houselander, mystic practitioner of the art of suffering well, soon to be republished

+ Raymond Chandler on captivating readers with emotion and well-placed adjectives, in a review of a book of quotes from his letters

+ Simone Weil on what it takes to write about imaginative evil without causing evil

+ A rabbi on creativity and serving God

+ A review of The Five Wounds, which, according to Amazon was “Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 by Oprah Magazine, The Week, The Millions, and Electric Lit”

+ Joshua Hren writes about artful irony that “gives a damn.”

A Mystic for Moderns: Caryll Houselander and the art of suffering well

Katy Carl, Dappled Things Editor in Chief, recommends the above-linked article, which is Liked also by Fr. Michael Rennier, DT Web Editor, and DT Associate Editor, Rosemary Callenberg. In the thought-provokingly titled article, Joshua P. Hochschild at Commonweal Magazine writes about how his acquaintance with this undeservedly unknown writer was begun with a blow to his head by one of Houselander’s books—fallen providentially (as it seems) from the upper shelf at a bookstore where he was browsing soon after his reception into the Catholic Church. The article came to Katy Carl’s attention when Catholic University of America Press posted a link writing, “An interesting article from Commonweal on Caryll Houselander, whose novel 'The Dry Wood' we will be publishing as part of our Fall/Winter list!”

Cover from the first edition, published by Sheed & Ward in 1947, for sale at Amazon for $908.81! The CUA Press reprint is bound to be more affordable.

Asked for a recommendation for what to read by Houselander, Katy Carl replied, “A Rocking-Horse Catholic is her spiritual autobiography and is really good!” For the sake of research, I downloaded it from the Internet archive, read the first page, and got happily absorbed in it for forty-five more pages before I could break away and return to this task at hand.

Cover of a new copy of the 1991 edition from Sheed & Ward, for sale at Abe Books for US$ 255.99. Other used copies are much cheaper. And there’s always the Internet Archive—for free.

She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound

The linked article is suggested by me and Liked by Rosemary Callenberg. Written by Shaun Usher at Letters of Note, the article has an interesting quote (included further below), one of several from letters of Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s approach to writing contradicts common advice to avoid describing emotion, concentrate on nouns and verbs that forward the action, and avoid adjectives—as in the maxim “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.”

As a mystery genre writer, Raymond Chandler is not considered by most to be a great writer, but actually his work was admired by some acknowledged greats.

“[T]he fascination Chandler's books hold for people with rarefied tastes is remarkable. T. S. Eliot, for one, was floored by them, and so was W. H. Auden, who said the adventures of Philip Marlowe ‘should not be judged as escape literature but as works of art.’ . . . Albert Camus cited him as an inspiration, and Anthony Burgess said no account of American literature could be complete that failed to offer Chandler a central place. Evelyn Waugh, in the late 1940s, wrote flatly that Chandler was "the greatest living American novelist."—Andrew Ferguson in “SLUMMING CLEARANCE Why Raymond Chandler Endures” at the Washington Examiner from the Weekly Standard Archives.

Come to think of it, isn’t classic writing the kind that endures because it is enjoyed?

“A long time ago when I was writing for pulps I put into a story a line like ‘he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.’ They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialog and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just couldn't push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.”—Raymond Chandler | Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen, 7 May 1948 | Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler

The (Writer’s) Struggle is Real

The quote from Simone Weil in the above meme generated a bit of interesting discussion.

One recommendation for writers who struggle to portray sinful humanity without leading readers—and perhaps even the writer him or herself—into sin is to purify the source. Carrying the idea even further, to portray evil without causing evil may actually require the writer to be a mystic. (One of the chapters in Joshua Hren’s How to read (and write) like a Catholic is titled, “Only a Mystic Can Be a Complete Novelist.” Weil goes even further than that. She posits that a writer can escape from writing immoral literature when portraying evil human activity only through the power of art—and only genius can do that.

Katy Carl’s response “It's exactly that ‘passing over to the side of reality through the power of art’ that is our task as artists, isn't it? -- whether we are geniuses or not. Weil is often right but, frequently, also almost too demanding for humanity at times.”

Me: “I suspect she is right that it takes genius to transfigure Immorality.”

Katy Carl: “Maritain's take is that the artist may, even must, depict whatever takes place within the range of human experience, but that performing this responsibility well requires us to consider the ‘altitude,’ or perspectival distance, at which we engage. He also says that the relationship between the artist's practice of art and the artist's practice of morality is too delicate and complex even for him to treat in full: I don't dare rush in where Maritain fears to tread, certainly not on the level of theory, but I can report from practical experience that it's a constant struggle, which O'Connor describes as being like Jacob wrestling with the angel.”

ON CREATIVITY AND SERVING GOD

Katy Carl recommends the above-linked article by Rabbi Shalom Carmy at First Things.

“ The creative person is regularly judged as deviating from the common path. And even (especially) the most idealistic of us are anxious about devoting our lives to activities that may not yield benefit to others when there is so much constructive work that surely needs to be done: healing the sick, helping the destitute, teaching the ignorant, or just showing up for an “uncreative” everyday job. . . . I want to suggest that several of the assumptions commonly made about the nature of creativity are dubious. If we clear them away, creativity becomes more difficult but also more necessary and more universal than is often thought.”

Love's Wounds: Both a Gift and a Challenge

Katy Carl also recommends this review by Jessica Hooten Wilson at Church Life Journal of The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade. According to Amazon The Five Wounds was “Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 by Oprah Magazine, The Week, The Millions, and Electric Lit.”

“We experience others’ failures, label them as toxic, and cut them out of our lives (offline and online). We all know people who seem intent on destroying their lives with mistake after mistake, warning after ignored warning, who cannot seem to hold on to a job, a relationship, a home—they may even be us. My mother has always said that these friends or family members teach us how to love. It is easy to love people who are loveable, but how do you love people who wound you? The Five Wounds asks that question again and again from various characters’ perspectives.”—Jessica Hooten Wilson

“The Worship of the Five Wounds”(c. 1525). By Simon Bening. From the Prayer Book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, Flemish, now at the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100.

Irony That Gives a Damn

Katy Carl also recommends the above-linked essay by Joshua Hren at The Public Discourse. As part of his explication of how modern literature has to avoid moralizing—but should not avoid showing the results of sin, Hren take us through Michael Chabon’s New Yorker short story Along the Frontage Road as an example of irony that gives a damn. The story begins “with a deeply sensed description of a father gutting a pumpkin” and builds into a subtle portrayal of a man dealing with his four year old son, while the boy is conflating the picking of a pumpkin for Halloween at a pumpkin patch with his emotions about the recent abortion of his seventeen-week-along sister.