Page 3365 – Christianity Today (2024)

Andy Crouch

The Who Boys, the Beastles, and the Bible.

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The first swift kick to my youthful idealism was delivered—not so surprisingly, in retrospect—by the Beastie Boys. In the late 1980s I took a year off from college to work at a retreat center in the mountains of north Georgia, hosting youth groups that drove up from the Atlanta suburbs. They would tumble off church buses dressed in Hard Rock t-shirts, well-scrubbed teenagers steeped in the New South’s blend of genteel religiosity and upward mobility. In those days before the iPod, they came laden with Walkmans and bulging pouches of cassette tapes. These were mainline Protestant kids, mostly Methodists and Presbyterians, and their musical choices seemed largely to have escaped parental oversight. No self-respecting Baptist would allow their child to go off to church camp with a box full of Black Sabbath and AC/DC tapes, but these youth showed up with unapologetically secular collections—heavy metal for some, Celine Dion for others. They spent their free hours in the still, green Georgia mountains sitting on the porches of the cabins, plugged in to the sounds of home.

Youth ministry in America, at least since the rise of youth culture (which is to say, since the invention of youth ministry), requires continual recalibration of the axiom “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Popular culture is hard to beat. After a few months of watching groups while away their hours praying along with popular music (as the crocheted wall hanging in our staff quarters said, “To sing is to pray”),

I decided I couldn’t convince kids to put away their Walkmans. But maybe I could get them to think about what they were hearing. The Pop Music Workshop was born.

The Pop Music Workshop would probe the deeper meanings of the music kids already had in their Walkmans. It would encourage youth to critically examine the music they were hearing, and yet it would do so not in a spirit of condemnation but of sympathetic attention to the yearnings and fragmentary solutions offered by the artists of the day. (I would later learn an evangelical phrase for this— “engaging the culture.”) Until each group showed up in the conference room at the appointed hour, where I was waiting with a tape deck and a sound system, I had no idea what music they would bring. We’d pop in a tape, listen to the song, and then, aided by a whiteboard and some notes I had scribbled while listening, talk about what it meant.

At first, the workshop was a success. It was an exhilarating kind of speaking, interactive and improvisational, and I took delight in seeing youth pay attention to the lyrics of popular music, often apparently for the first time, and correlate them with the gospel. Critics of contemporary worship music sometimes gripe that Christians have simply borrowed and baptized the language of pop romance, and there’s something to that, but it always seemed to me that pop songs were borrowing from religion more than the other way around. “I’m forever yours, faithfully,” Steve Perry sang during one memorable slow dance of my high school years; even then, with my arms around a girl who consumed every ounce of my attention and desire and whose name I cannot now recall, I had an inkling that eternal love was too much to promise or expect from another mortal, and that the longings I felt could only be satisfied somewhere else.

Such were the conversations I had with church kids from all over Georgia for the better part of the year, and more often than not, unpredictable and risky as the format was, there were small and large epiphanies, kindled by the tinder of popular music in teenage hearts.

But at least one time every session, a teenager would hand me a cassette that made me blanch. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” maddening not so much because of its sexual innuendo but because of the crass commercialism of the same. Anything by the later Depèche Mode, whose lead singer sang all too convincingly, and seductively, about depression and addiction. I think it was after a particularly difficult segment trying to tease out, and implicitly refute, the lure of suicide in Depèche Mode’s synth-laden netherworld that a smirking twelve-year-old in an Oliver North for President t-shirt handed me a cassette of License to Ill, by the Beastie Boys.

Sigh. The Beastie Boys. Somehow I had never got around to listening to the Beastie Boys. Well, how bad could it be? I fast-forwarded the tape to the requested song—”Fight for Your Right to Party.” My whiteboard was ready. Marker in hand, I pressed play.

Noise filled the room. Not just musical noise—semantic noise. The lyrics, declaimed in the rudest possible white-boy hip-hop fashion, made the astonishingly stale and puerile claim that adult hypocrisy and authoritarianism were stifling the youth of America. “You’ve got to Fight—for your Right—to Par—ty!” It was Holden Caulfield after several tokes of weed. It was Kerouac on crack. It was stupid. It was useless. I pressed stop. The twelve-year-old and his buddies grinned nervously.

“Why do you listen to this?” I said. I did not succeed in softening the edge in my voice.

” ‘Cause it sounds cool,” one of them offered.

“Do you have any idea what they’re saying?”

“Naw, we just like the beat.” The beat could best be described as hip-hop-metal-thrash. It was kind of cool. But the words—there was nothing there but stupidity. The Beastie Boys were stupid. Kids who would listen to music like this were stupid.

The premise of the Pop Music Workshop, you must understand, was that we would not prejudge the music. We would allow it to speak to us. We would assume that every human endeavor, no matter how cut off from relationship with the Creator, had some quality that could be redeemed.

In the harangue that followed I violated every premise of the Pop Music Workshop.

The adult leaders politely requested that I not join the group for the remaining sessions that weekend. I did apologize to the youth the next day, but the damage was done. The twelve-year-old flinched when he saw me in the dining room.

I led the Pop Music Workshop once or twice after that, but my heart wasn’t in it. It was a surprisingly short trip from seeing pop as laden with meaning, however misplaced, to seeing it as the crassest form of cynical exploitation. Soon I left Georgia and the world of youth group retreats. My musical diet reverted to Bach and Bruce co*ckburn. Grunge came and went. Hip-hop swept across America. Madonna revived her career two or three times. I ignored most of it. It was junk.

A few months ago, my friend Charlie Park sent me a link to a website called “The Beastles.” “You might want to write an article about this,” he said. The Beastles, the work of a Boston DJ who goes by the moniker dj BC, was the latest example of the growing musical genre called mashups. Rooted in the beat-mixing skills of dance club culture and inconceivable before the digital age, mashups take advantage of audio editing software like Pro Tools and Apple’s Garage Band to remix familiar (or unfamiliar) songs into new musical works.

Mashup artists place a premium on unlikely combinations: the Who Boys combine British hard-rockers the Who and California surf-poppers the Beach Boys. The most celebrated mashup, DJ Dangermouse’s 2004 The Grey Album, layers the spoken-word lyrics of rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album over instrumental riffs from the Beatles’ The White Album. The Beastles follow in the footsteps of The Grey Album, but this time the rappers are the Beastie Boys. Their white-trash lyrics, as brash and shallow as I remembered, are juxtaposed with lyrical snippets of Paul McCartney’s piano, George Harrison’s guitars, and Ringo Starr’s laid-back beats. After one track I was entranced; after two tracks I had started downloading all seven songs. The Beastles have been in heavy rotation on my iPod ever since.

Take the mashup “Mother Nature’s Rump,” which begins with the placid, chorused guitars of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son.” The hip-hop drums of the Beastie Boys fade in and take the center of the sound stage, but the guitars continue to play under the Beastie Boys’ strutting and preening (“Got more rhymes than Jamaica got mango!”). At intervals the Beastie Boys’ show is interrupted altogether by John Lennon’s meditative humming. The juxtaposition is just startling enough, and just funny enough, to underline the humor in anticlimactic boasts like, “Running from the law, the press, and the parents.” The Beatles are the quintessential parents’ music, yet here the Beastie Boys are under their supervision—and the perfect alignment of the Beasties’ beats with the Beatles’ suggests that the Boys are still driving their parents’ car. Suitably deflated, their music becomes just plain fun—and the more you listen, it becomes clear that it was never as stupid as they wanted you to think it was.

In one sense mashups simply continue the eternal musical tradition of quotation and imitation. Hip-hop was built on samples, whether of beats or riffs or melodic snatches, from revered musicians past and present. What distinguishes the mashup from hip-hop sampling is the extent to which it is an extended meditation on the underlying songs. The best mashups reflect a painstaking attention to the tunes they are mashing.

So the beginning of dj BC’s “Hold It Together Now” includes a clip of Tonight Show host Jack Paar introducing “a feature taped for us in England by”—and here he pronounces each name with a precision tinged by now inconceivable unfamiliarity—”Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison.” Between each Beatle’s name, dj bc interposes clips from “Hold It Now—Hit It” of the Beastie Boys introducing themselves, rap-star fashion (“Mike D!” “King-Ad Rock!” “MC Adam Yauch!”), and throws in his own name, sampled from who knows where, for good measure. Underneath runs a loop of McCartney’s bass hook from “Come Together.” The result is a short course on the suddenness of fame, the evolving nature of celebrity (measured in the distance from Paar’s measured, almost stentorian introduction to the Beasties’ in-your-face party crashing), the genealogy of pop, and the totemic power of five sliding bass notes that are indelibly imprinted on the memory of anyone under sixty. Not bad for seventeen seconds.

The mashups from the Who Boys are equally if not more ambitious, mixing the Who and the Beach Boys into a mind-bending (and often pitch-bending) electronica that’s one crucial step short of soup. The Who Boys’ blender is set to a considerably higher speed than dj BC’s—rarely do we get more than a snatch of a phrase or a riff—but the result is compelling, if less appealing in large doses. “Who Vibration” plucks Brian Wilson’s single word “I” from the beginning of “Good Vibrations”—its falling, lilting quality evocative of adolescent desire and laid-back surf culture—and that song’s reverb-laden, pizzicato-like Hammond B3 tones. Into the mix go early synthesizer arpeggiations and stutter-step drum beats from the Who. Stripped from their conventional context, the samples locate both the Beach Boys and the Who in a longer story of sonic experimentation. The Who were rapping and scratching before those words were invented (“talking ’bout my g-g-g-generation”); the Beach Boys were looping and sampling back when that meant cutting tape. Suddenly the history of pop seems tighter, less random, and we realize that behind the snarl of the Who and the grin of the Beach Boys was musicianship of considerable seriousness.

Indeed, this is one of the paradoxes of the mashup: as the mashup artist busily deconstructs pop’s history, plundering beats and verses from hither and yon, somehow he is putting that history together. After you listen to a few mashups you start to feel not so much that the music has been stolen from its original place as reunited with its story, rescued from the atomized world of pop singles and the segregated landscape of decades-based radio (“Oldies of the ’50s and ’60s!” “Today’s hot hits!”). The Beatles and the Beastie Boys get to play together. How cool is that?

Well, some might reply, it’s rather humiliating for the melodious, harmonious Beatles to be forced to play backup for the Beastie Boys. It’s easy to write the history of popular music as a one-way devolution, a cultural meltdown that moves inexorably from talent to posturing, harmony to cacophony, music to noise. Such a history has to ignore the anthemic harmonies of the world’s current biggest and arguably greatest band, U2, as well as the lyrical wonders of hip-hop, not to mention the counter-currents of influential bands, from Wilco to Radiohead, that offer as much beauty and complexity as has ever been heard in popular music. But no one can fully discount the rising tide of distortion, both literal and figurative, that has twisted rock’s original promise of a hard-edged, redemptive encounter with reality into mere fetishization of the ugly. And if you’re looking for culprits, as I discovered in that fateful session of the Pop Music Workshop, the Beastie Boys are the self-proclaimed poster boys, with their fuzzed-up, perpetually haranguing vocals and their stunted lyrics that never stray from the geography of immaturity.

And yet this is exactly what makes the Beastles such a revelation. By reuniting the Beastie Boys with their musical past, dj bc rescues them from their own trash heap. By showing how thoroughly they fit in a long musical tradition, he suggests that they were always smarter than they let on. Today, with their youngest member 38 years old, the Beastie Boys are looking less boyish and less beastly than in their heyday, but it takes a DJ with a keen ear and a sharp hand on the mouse to show us that no matter how much they would have hated to admit it, the Beasties were always grown-ups. As any 38-year-old, even a Beastie, knows, you can run from your parents, you can run from history—you can even run from music—but ultimately you can’t hide. The music is too deep inside. Even trash tells a story.

Mashups at their best may be redemptive remixes that bring popular music to its senses, but there is one little problem: they are illegal. Every time dj BC samples Paul McCartney’s bass hook for the “Hold It Together Now” mashup—which I estimate he does seventy times in under five minutes—he is borrowing McCartney’s musical genius, and benefiting from the vast and not inexpensive industry that brought that genius to a worldwide audience, without paying a cent. The mashup, almost by definition, is a work of art consisting entirely of stolen goods.

Thanks to copyright law’s exemption for fair use, this is not a problem for the legions of teenagers creating mashups in their bedrooms, if they purchased the source material legally. (That is a huge if—a latter-day Pop Music Workshop would have to account for the likelihood that most of the music kids have on their iPods is stolen. And not just kids. I once shared a car ride with a fellow participant at a conference for “emerging Christian leaders” who passed around his iPod packed with an eclectic, intelligent collection of music from Stravinsky to Sinatra to Snoop Dogg. All illegally downloaded, he cheerfully admitted.) Once you have purchased a recording, courts have sensibly ruled, it is yours to do with as you like—play it, alter it, mash it—as long as you do not redistribute it. In practice the music industry has even extended the principle to include “mix tapes” shared among friends; exactly how many “friends” you are allowed to have is a bit of a gray area.

But the moment you make a mashup public—by, say, making it available for download by anyone on the Internet—you leave the gray area of fair use. dj Dangermouse’s Grey Album, 3,000 copies of which were actually pressed, was legally speaking not gray at all, as lawyers for EMI soon made abundantly clear. In early 2004 it was available on dozens of websites, before “cease & desist” letters began arriving. To find it in June of 2005 I had to resort to one of the Internet’s less reputable protocols, BitTorrent, the mere use of which can be enough to bring admonishing letters from the cable company. Most mashups are available for download from obscure websites where they cannot easily be traced to their original producers, who in any case delight in their pseudonymity. Surprisingly, the Beastles site is an exception, linked directly from Bob Cronin’s webpage, with a legal disclaimer (“These mash-ups were made for fun, and as a demonstration of my remixing abilities … “) that would deter determined lawyers for about as long as a picket fence would deter a Sherman tank.

Consequently, the low-voltage thrill of participating in an underground movement has become integral to the mashup culture. Mashups circulate on file-sharing sites and irc channels (an even more disreputable venue than BitTorrent) like musical samizdat. When EMI’s lawyers started cracking down on The Grey Album, more than 400 websites participated in “Grey Tuesday,” a day of protest slathered in the rhetoric of free speech. (Organizers claim that 100,000 copies of The Grey Album were downloaded from participating websites that day, cease and desist letters notwithstanding.) Hip academics have lauded mashups as harbingers of the rise of “semiotic democracy” and, in the words of one scholar, “a newly emergent field of resistance to the dominating, centralized, bureaucratic control that is characteristic of the oligopolistic recorded music industry.” Try mashing that.

Musicians are more ambivalent. But some are giving their blessing to the mashup culture. The Grey Album was made possible, or at least much easier, by the authorized release of an a capella version of The Black Album—and unlike the Beatles, Jay-Z, who can also afford plenty of lawyers, has done nothing to stop its use in mashups. David Bowie has solicited mashups of his songs from fans. Last year Wired magazine distributed an entire CD of tracks, including one from the Beastie Boys, explicitly designed for mashing.

Where exactly the legal dust will settle is unclear, as with many questions related to intellectual property in the digital world. As a practical matter, it seems likely that the Lilliputian ingenuity of the mashup artists will overwhelm the Gullivers of the music industry and mashups will flourish, as long as they remain noncommercial. djs who want to sell their mashups, like hip-hop artists who want to use samples, will have to negotiate with the owners of the original recordings. Since some of the best source material—like the Beatles—will almost certainly never be licensed (often because, as with the Beatles’ recordings, the owners are no longer the musicians themselves but corporations with an ironclad responsibility to make money), the best mashups will be free. And this raises the possibility that one of the most creative movements in popular music will be sustained by amateurs, even if they are borrowing the talent of professional musicians and using Pro Tools. Created by amateurs, circulated freely and anonymously, eventually, perhaps, massaged and remixed and remashed themselves—mashups could be the 21st century’s technological folk music.

In the days of the Pop Music Workshop, it disturbed me that teenagers could listen to so much music and think so little about its meaning—could say they “just liked the beat” and never consider the message the songs were delivering. I had an unreflective suspicion of music without a message, even though I was trained as an instrumental musician. I certainly couldn’t imagine that music itself—the sonata form, jazz chord structure, the twelve-tone scale, or the two-verse, chorus, bridge form of the pop song—had something to say. The clue was there in that disastrous encounter with “Fight for Your Right to Party”—there was something primally compelling about the music, even though the words were utter folly—but it wasn’t until I read Jeremy Begbie’s masterful book Theology, Music and Time that I began to pay attention.1

Begbie, an oboist and conductor of some distinction as well as a systematic theologian, has done more than anyone to awaken Christians to the theological resources provided by the practice of music. In Theology, Music and Time he considers two major musical phenomena (and comments perceptively on many more along the way): the way that much Western music moves through a directional sequence of tension and resolution, and the practice of improvisation found in jazz (and once practiced, now all but lost, in classical music as well). Though I am not aware that he ever puts it this way, Begbie’s is a theology of natural law, grounded in the physical realities that condition the eminently physical activity of music-making. By examining the way that music structures time, he suggests, we may find our way out of knotty problems conceptualizing time. By examining the way improvisational musicians both respect and play with the cantus firmus, we can work out ways of understanding the role of tradition, innovation, and authority in Christian faith.

Reading Begbie forever changed the way I listen to music. Without reading Begbie, even the discovery of the delightful Beastles might never have caused me to notice that “Fight for Your Right to Party,” for all its protestations of revolution and resistance, stays compliantly within the song structure of pop music (not to mention the rhyme structure of conventional English poetry): verse, chorus, verse, chorus, all in eight-bar chunks. The form speaks louder than the shouted words—the Beastie Boys are meeting their listeners more than halfway, granting them the same tension and resolution that you’d find in a classical sonata, acquiescing to their expectations of a popular song. They are loud, distorted, raucous conformists. And the more I listen to them, with the assistance of dj BC, the more I think they knew that all along.

Do mashups have something to contribute to theology? What Begbie does for theology, Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat seek to do for biblical interpretation in their recent book Colossians Remixed.2 “There is a sense in which this book is an ‘anti-commentary,’ ” they observe. Although the authors are scholars, Colossians Remixed has some of the underground vibe of a bootleg tape, and not just because of the frequent references to edgy pop music. Walsh and Keesmaat provide a provocative reading of the book of Colossians: following N. T. Wright and others, they see it as an extended effort in subverting the dominant narrative of the Roman Empire and, by extension, more insidious forms of empire in our day. But they also introduce a skeptical reader who regularly interrupts their exegesis with questions. “I guess I’m just a little hung up on the liberties that you take with Scripture,” this reader objects after Walsh and Keesmaat have offered up a paraphrase of Colossians 1:1–14 that includes a reference to “this monolithic culture of McWorld globalization.”

Like the Beastie Boys in the Beastles, Walsh and Keesmaat, with their boisterous rereading of Colossians, ultimately get more airtime than the polite, Beatles-like traditionalist. But the introduction of a less-than-compliant reader is a brilliant device that enables us to hear Walsh and Keesmaat’s claims more clearly. So are the “targums” throughout the book that retell Colossians’ argument in contemporary language, “McWorld” and all, and the imagined “Epistle from Onesimus the Slave to Paul the Apostle” near the book’s end. Far from detracting from the authors’ argument, the multiple voices—sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant—strengthen it. Not every reader will be comfortable with this mashup—Walsh and Keesmaat’s riffs on globalization can be as facile as the Beastie Boys’ rhymes—but with any luck, neither Colossians nor ponderous old commentaries will ever seem quite the same.

Remixed or unmixed, the Scriptures have been on my mind as I listen to the Beastles, the Who Boys, and DJ Dangermouse. Snatching sources from the grasp of powerful interests that seek to limit their use, mixing genres with abandon, taking apart and putting together a long history, correlating the most familiar with the most surprising, redeeming chaos by remixing it with harmony—this is not just what happens in a DJ’s basem*nt studio. It’s the story of the Bible, especially the dramatic reinterpretation of the Old Testament that takes place in the books of the New. Matthew does it, with his astonishing claims that events in the life of Jesus “fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet”—cutting, pasting, and sampling from prophetic passages about young virgins, weeping in Ramah, donkeys and colts. Paul does it, remixing audaciously in Ephesians 4:7. In that mashup of a verse, Psalm 68:18‘s “You ascended the high mount, leading captives in your train and receiving gifts from people” becomes “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people,” leading into a poetic riff on Christ’s ascension and the nature of spiritual gifts. In Colossians, Paul does it with pagan sources too, taking the songs of the Empire, the language of supremacy and pax Romana and even the word “gospel” itself (the gospel, or euangelion, being the message of imperial success in battle), and deconstructing them to the beat of Christ crucified and risen. The writer to the Hebrews does it, with his catena of scriptures in Hebrews 1 and his mashup about faith in Hebrews 11. John the Revelator does it, sampling the weirdest tracks from Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and more, punctuated over and over by the one word that sums up the Psalms: “Hallelujah!”

The mashed up quality of Scripture, so easy for us to miss after twenty centuries of reverence for its inspiration, was obvious to the Jewish authorities, custodians of the texts being appropriated by the Jesus movement, who cast that movement’s members out of the synagogue. It was obvious to the Roman authorities who saw just how subversive it would be—so subversive they labeled it “atheism.” It became obvious to me as a third-year student of classical Greek when I first read the gospel of Mark in the original language. Written by an author who had not had the benefit of an Athenian education, it sounded as ugly in comparison to Homer or Herodotus as the Beastie Boys do in comparison to the Beatles—and yet it overwhelmed me with its power in a way that lovely Homer never did.

And the genius of the Christian movement is that thanks to writers like Walsh and Keesmaat, the mashups continue, drawing the myths of our time into the groove of the ancient text, pitilessly and mercifully revealing their folly and their beauty, inviting our age to sing along. It is possible to pray along with the Beastie Boys—maybe even with Celine Dion. You just have to mash it up with the gospel, mash it up good.

This is the good news of the mashup:

It will all be taken apart. It will all be put together. Even the trash will tell a story.

Andy Crouch is editorial director of the Christian Vision Project. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

1. Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

2. Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (InterVarsity, 2004).

- More fromAndy Crouch

Andy Crouch

Mark Noll

Dilemmas at the center, insights from the margins.

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This country is, as everybody knows, a creation of the Bible, … and the Bible is still holding its own, exercising enormous influence as a real spiritual power, in spite of all the destructive tendencies … “1 These words, spoken 102 years ago, came from an unexpected source. Yet as part of an address delivered by Solomon Schechter at the dedication of the main building of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, they echoed what was then a common assertion about the biblical character of the United States. Much more frequently, of course, similar words came from Christian commentators and with specific reference to the Christian character of the Scriptures.

Thus, only a few years after Schechter’s address, the governor of New Jersey addressed a crowd of about 12,000 in Denver on the subject, “The Bible and Progress.” The occasion was the 300th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version. In his speech, Woodrow Wilson called Scripture “the ‘Magna Carta’ of the human soul,” and he summarized the burden of his remarks like this: “The Bible (with its individual value of the human soul) is undoubtedly the book that has made democracy and been the source of all progress.”2 What Schechter and Wilson wanted to say is that without full consideration of the Bible, no adequate account of American national history or of American national ideals was possible.

A century and more later, much has changed. Political, social, legal, and cultural developments have altered the practice of religion, and of everything else, in American life. Yet despite manifold changes, reading of the Bible, reverence for the Bible, reference to the Bible, and debate over whether and how to use the Bible continue as constant features in American public life—evident most recently in the Supreme Court decisions regarding whether and how to display the Ten Commandments in courthouses and other public spaces.

In this ongoing negotiation, two notable Americans provide examples of perhaps the most effective use of the Bible ever in our nation’s public history: Martin Luther King, Jr., in the speech he delivered from the east steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Civil Rights, and Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, which he delivered from the east side of the Capital Building on March 4, 1865.3 Beyond cavil, the extraordinary force of these addresses owed much to their anchorage in Scripture. Yet the two speeches were quite different and so serve to illustrate the various ways that the Bible has been put to use in American public life.4

First, we can see in them a rhetorical or stylistic echoing of Scripture, where speakers, in order to increase the gravity of their words, employ a phraseology, cadence, or tone that parallels the classic phrasing of the King James Version. The most dramatic example in our entire history of such a biblical tone may in fact be King’s speech in August 1963, which was filled with biblical-sounding phrases: “the Negro … finds himself in exile in his own land … ; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice … ; Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred … “; and more.

A second usage of the Bible may be called evocative, where speakers put actual Bible phrases to use, but as fragments and jerked out of original context in order to heighten the persuasive power of what they are trying to say for their own purposes. Lincoln used the Bible in this way during his Second Inaugural when he took a phrase from Genesis 3:19 to say it was “strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”

Third, in political deployment of Scripture the Bible is quoted or paraphrased to make a direct assertion about how public life should be ordered. The difference from merely rhetorical or evocative use is the speaker’s implicit claim that Scripture is not just supplying a conceptual universe from which to extract morally freighted phrases, but that it positively sanctions the speaker’s vision for how public life should be ordered. Thus, King, toward the end of his great speech, quoted Isaiah 40:4 in order to enlist a divine sanction for his vision of a society free of racial discrimination: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, the crooked places shall be made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln did something similar when he combined resignation before the workings of providence with an indictment of the ones who had asked God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. For that combination of opinions a quotation from Matthew 18:7 was Lincoln’s clincher: “The prayers of both [sides] could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!'”

Political use of Scripture is at once more dangerous and more effective than the rhetorical or evocative. It is more dangerous because it risks the sanctified polarization that has so often attended the identification of a particular political position with the specific will of God. It can also be dangerous for religion. In the telling words of Leon Wieseltier, “the surest way to steal the meaning, and therefore the power, from religion is to deliver it to politics, to enslave it to public life.”

Yet political use of Scripture can also be remarkably effective. When a specific political position is successfully identified with the purposes of God, that position can be advanced with tremendous moral energy. With these two speeches, strategic quoting from the Bible played a significant part in reassuring many Americans that Lincoln’s opposition to slavery and King’s opposition to racial discrimination really did embody a divine imperative.

Finally, after rhetorical, evocative, and political usages, there is the theological deployment of Scripture, where the Bible is quoted or paraphrased to make an assertion about God and the meaning of his acts or providential control of the world. In American public life, this use of the Bible is by far the most rare. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural may represent its only instance. What he said pertained not primarily to the fate of the nation, and not even to a defense of his own political actions, but to the sovereign character and mysterious purposes of God. For that statement, a quotation from Psalm 19:9 provided the last word:

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

As one of those “believers in a Living God” whom Lincoln referred to here, I am convinced that only his public articulation of scripturally derived theological principle about the sovereignty of God can explain the unprecedented humility that followed in the Second Inaugural’s peroration. In other words, without a scriptural theology concerning the righteousness of God’s ultimate judgment, there would have been no proclamation of “malice toward none” and “charity toward all.”

The orations by King and Lincoln were unusual because they brought a panoply of biblical testimony to bear on circ*mstances of great public moment at times of evident national crisis. King’s dramatic address underscored a turning point in the nation’s moral history when, nearly a century after the end of the war to end slavery, the United States was moving haltingly to confront the bitter realities of racial discrimination. For Lincoln, an unexpectedly calm meditation near the conclusion of an unexpectedly violent war became the occasion for profound reflections on the inexorable costs of justice delayed, the counter-intuitive blessings of charity for all, and (supremely) the unfathomable mysteries of divine providence. In both cases, the Bible was indispensable for shaping what the speakers said.

But now, long after Lincoln applied his words to bind up the nation’s wounds and more than a generation removed from King’s appeal to let freedom ring, we inhabit a cultural and political landscape in which it is considerably more difficult to draw on the resources of Scripture as Lincoln and King did. The difficulties concern both more narrowly religious and more broadly political factors.

In the first instance, since World War II the Bible has shrunk to a smaller place in the American cultural landscape. The issue may not be primarily a decline in the distribution of Scripture, since Bible sales continue to be very strong, so much as a consequence of incredible expansion in the distribution of other media. Bible content can hold its own in an age of proliferating media, as evidenced by the considerable success of products like The Jesus Film, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, or the children’s programming provided by Veggie Tales. Bible content cannot, however, dominate in an entrepreneurial age of democratic media in the way that the King James Version once provided a conceptual canopy for the entire English-speaking world.

Reference to the once dominant place of the King James Version draws attention to the good news-bad news constituted by the proliferation over the last half century of new Bible translations. The good news is that modern translations present the Bible as an open, accessible book in a way that it was ceasing to be when the archaic King James prevailed as the Bible of the English-speaking world. The bad news is that no one of the new translations comes anywhere near to the broad linguistic and conceptual currency that the King James Version once enjoyed. When Lincoln in 1858 spoke of a “house divided” or in 1865 of “judging not that ye be not judged,” almost all educated people who heard him recognized not only that he was citing the Bible, but that he was using the very words of Scripture that they themselves had also read, heard, and inwardly digested. The gain in accessibility that the new translations all genuinely offer is matched by a loss in familiarity that the King James Version once provided for the culture as a whole.

Difficulties in the public use of the Bible caused by the multiplication of modern media and the proliferation of contemporary translations are, however, puny when compared to difficulties caused by contemporary political realities. Part of this difficulty is structural and, for traditional Christian believers, nicely ironic. The United States may be today the most religiously pluralistic nation that has ever existed on the face of the earth.5 It has become so, at least in part, because of political values encouraged by the American democratic appropriation of teachings derived from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. With the religious pluralism resulting from an explicit policy of religious freedom, it risks misunderstanding, if not also offense, for leaders to employ the Bible as if the Bible necessarily spoke to and for the citizenry as a whole.

Yet difficulties with the public use of Scripture arising from American religious pluralism are not what spring most easily to mind today. Rather, it is the clamor of partisan political polemics. Naturally in such a climate extreme voices attract the most attention. On the one side we hear rhetorical, evocative, and political use of the Bible on behalf of partisan national or political goals. Thus, in one well-reported kerfluffle from late 2003, a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence was reported as delivering speeches before local churches in which he proclaimed that the real enemy in the battle against el Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was “a spiritual enemy … called Satan,” and that America as a “Christian nation” needed to “come against its enemies in the name of Jesus” in order to achieve military success.6 Such sentiments were intended to do what Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. had done with similarly biblical rhetoric, but this effort was so clearly advanced to promote a contested moral position and to combat domestic opponents of the war that its striving for biblical authority fell flat.

On the other side we hear partisan panic about how public invocation of Scripture heralds the dawning of a theocratic Dark Age. Thus, in a recent issue of The American Prospect, an author introduced a consideration of President Bush and his supporters with a fusillade of fearmongering: “History judges religious zealots harshly, particularly those wielding state power. The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.”7 Apart from a loose grasp of historical fact, assertions like these betray an incredible confidence in the moral power of merely secular norms, which in actual historical situations have never lived up to the claims made for them.

The combined result from recent changes in the religious landscape touching the translation and circulation of the Bible, and recent changes in the political landscape touching polemic uses and polemical resistance to Scripture, is a series of dilemmas. These dilemmas can be expressed as a vicious cycle:

the more religiously plural the nation becomes, the less it is natural for the citizenry as a whole to grasp the significance of the Bible;
the less it is natural for the citizenry as a whole to grasp the significance of the Bible, the more it is likely that the Bible is used to appeal to only some of the citizens;
the more it is likely that the Bible is used to appeal to only some of the citizens, the greater the likelihood of partisan and therefore superficial use of the Bible;
the greater the likelihood of partisan and therefore superficial use of the Bible, the more the Bible loses its integrity as a public force;
the more the Bible loses its integrity as a public force, the more irrelevant it looks in a religiously plural nation;
but the more irrelevant or partisan or superficial the Bible becomes in a religiously plural nation, the less likely that leaders can use Scripture for the self-sacrificing, altruistic, or prophetic purposes for which Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., put the Bible so dramatically to use.

So, what is to be done? At this point, I am more than happy, as a historian, to hand this series of dilemmas over to pundits, political theorists, and theologians. But as a historian, there is more that can be said, especially by shifting attention away from these dilemmas that now are so obvious at the center of power. If we move to the margins—that is, to voices or groups with strong opinions about the American use of the Bible but with little standing in American public life—we discover a set of engaging observations and perhaps even intimations of a way forward. And so I would like to draw attention to four such perspectives from the margins, which I will treat in order from far away to closer at hand. First are the opinions of European Catholics before and during the American Civil War. Second are the opinions of French Catholic Quebec nationalists during the last part of the 19th century. Third are the opinions of Jewish immigrants to the United States, especially from the start of the 20th century. And fourth are the opinions of African Americans up to the era of World War I.

Foreign Catholic commentators on the Civil War paused often to note the prominence of Scripture in debates that led up to the outbreak of conflict and that transformed the conflict into a religious war. What struck foreign Catholics most forcibly was the moral confusion that resulted when a fervent trust in Scripture was exercised democratically.

For Southern whites, and a substantial number of Northern moderates and conservatives as well, it was obvious that the Bible in some manner or other legitimated slavery. Thus, at a fast day sermon in December 1860, a Presbyterian minister, Henry Van Dyke of New York, examined the many New Testament passages that simply accepted Roman slavery as an incontestable fact of life. Van Dyke’s conclusion spoke for a wide swath of American opinion. To him, it was obvious that the “tree of Abolitionism is evil, and only evil—root and branch, flower and leaf, and fruit; that it springs from, and is nourished by, an utter rejection of the Scriptures.”8

But, of course, for many abolitionists the Bible spoke just as clearly in opposition to slavery. For them, biblical passages like the Golden Rule as recorded in the gospels (“therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,” Matt. 7:12) or the egalitarian mandate of Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free … : for ye are all one in Christ”) completely ruled out the practice of slavery.

From abroad, this division in interpreting the same sacred text drew sharp criticism. The Paris politician Augustin Cochin (1823-1872), who was one of the leading liberal Catholics of his generation, published in 1861 a substantial tome with the straightforward title, L’abolition de l’esclavage, which mounted one of the era’s most thorough biblical, theological, and historical attacks on slavery. But this book’s abolitionism differed from American efforts by including a strong defense of Roman Catholicism, especially with respect to Scripture: “The manner in which men find in the Bible all that their interest desires fills me with astonishment, and I thank God once more for having caused me to be born in the bosom of a Church which does not abandon the Holy Books to the interpretations of caprice and selfishness.”9

Of all foreign Catholic attention to the American Civil War, it was a substantial journal edited by Italian Jesuits, La Civiltà cattolica, that made the sharpest criticism. To the Italian Jesuits, all of American history was tied in knots because of problems arising from biblical interpretation. American religion began with the Puritans who tried to found “a new social and political life on the basis of their own religious doctrine.” The result was “an extensive despotism” over every detail of life. But then in reaction to Puritan despotism, the United States lurched to the other extreme by setting up an absolute separation of church and state. This separation did offer unprecedented liberty, but so great was this liberty that it undercut the Protestants’ professed desire to order all of life by the Bible: “the sacred text is explained by each one according to his own will and under the influence of a rationalistic philosophy.” These circ*mstances explained why Americans were constantly founding new churches on the claim of “new effusions of the Holy Spirit.”10

Civiltà cattolica‘s interpretation of the Civil War tied the break-up of the United States as a political entity to its history as an experiment in Protestant public order. The Jesuits expressed mingled admiration and humor in finding that “suddenly both parties have become theologians, the one side quoting the Pentateuch to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it.” While the Jesuits found much to praise in American religion, they nonetheless saw a “great mistake,” a “missing principle that is dissolving a great union.” That missing element was “religious unity.” Reconciliation, so the Jesuits thought, would elude the Americans, “because they are divided on a moral question, and moral questions are fundamentally grounded in religious dogma.” But if Americans understood the true character of religious authority, then it would be possible to use Scripture with greater effect. If the Americans lived where their rights and their trust in Scripture “were assured by an authority respected by both parties, then the Bible could come into the conflict not as a play-thing, but as in a contest of truth over against falsehood.” Such an authority, which obviously meant the Roman magisterium, could exercise “an almost invincible strength over the two parties, so that one would surrender or that both would be reconciled to each other.” As it was, however, “Their independence makes it impossible to find a solution to their quarrel, both because they lack a central religious authority and because they lack moral honesty, which is itself a consequence of not having a central religious authority.”11

A conservative Roman Catholic solution to American problems in the use of Scripture hardly seems like a solution that could be promoted today. To make it work, a massive campaign would be required to convince Americans both that the Bible should be regarded as an authoritative norm for public life and that interpretation of the Bible should be guided by one particular Christian authority. Yet to contemplate a situation in which, as the Italian Jesuits put it, the Bible could be used “not as a play-thing, but as in a contest of truth over against falsehood,” deserves, at least for citizens who believe in the beauty of truth and the peril of falsehood, a moment of calm reflection.

A very different kind of commentary on the American use of the Bible arose in the second half of the 19th century when Quebec Catholic leaders developed an extensive scriptural interpretation of their country. Here the commentary on the United States was indirect, but no less thought-provoking. These Catholic Québécois knew very well that many in the United States looked upon their own nation as, in Solomon Schechter’s words, “a creation of the Bible,” but they were not at all impressed with this American conceit. Rather, to them it was French Canada that deserved to be considered the cynosure of Providence and the antitype of biblical narrative.

This view, that “French America was nothing less than the new Israel of God,” was promoted for the better part of fifty years by a number of prominent clerics and provincial authorities.12 Their number included Mgr. Louis-Adolphe Paquet, who in 1902 delivered a memorable address to the Société-Jean Baptiste in which he applied Isaiah 43:21 (“This people have I found for myself; they shall shew forth my praise”) to the French Canadians.13 Especially prominent in promoting a providential history of Quebec was the third bishop of Trois-Rivièrs, Louis-François Laflèche (1818-1898), who in 1865 and 1866 published a series of 34 articles in his diocesan paper that were then collected as a book entitled Some Considerations on the Connections between Civil Society and Religion and the Family.

Laflèche is particularly relevant for American examination because of how thoroughly he employed Scripture in setting out his conviction that “our mission … [is] the extension of the Kingdom of God by the formation of a Catholic people in the Valley of the St. Lawrence.” In making such assertions Laflèche ranged far and wide in Holy Scripture. By his public use of the Bible, Laflèche hoped to provide not only an inspiring vision for Quebec nationalism, but also a practical antidote against what he considered the gravest threat to Quebec society. That threat he called “la fièvre de l’émigration” to the United States, which he described as an “an epidemic no less terrible in a sense than the typhus attack of 1848.”14

The theology driving Laflèche was an interpretation of Scripture that saw nationhood as the direct product of divine action. In his view, God’s call of Abraham as described in Genesis chapters 12 and 13 provided a norm for all of human history: “each nation has received from Providence a mission to fulfill and a determined goal to reach.”15 Biblical history as well as secular history showed, in addition, that God blessed or judged nations depending on how they fulfilled the mission given by God. In Laflèche’s understanding, the exemplary record established by the founders and early martyrs of French Canada—Jaques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, the pioneering Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf, and Canada’s first bishop, François Montmorency de Laval—had verified the sacredness of Quebec’s destiny. On the basis of this scriptural theology, Laflèche then urged his readers to do their duty by not emigrating to the United States, as well as by supporting God-given authorities in family, government, and church. In presenting these opinions, Laflèche was a master in using the Bible evocatively, as also in salting what he wrote with a persistent biblical rhetoric shaped by both the Latin vulgate and the authorized French Catholic translation of the Bible.

For Americans, there should be great benefit in observing Laflèche and his French Catholic compatriots as they read the history of Quebec out of the sacred text. Serious internalizing of biblical narratives and themes has always been a multinational phenomenon. The conclusion that the Bible speaks directly to an individual nation’s political history has flourished at different times in Poland, Ireland, South Africa, Russia, and several other nations, as well as Quebec and the United States. At the least, realizing that such usage has taken place might key Americans to the fact that, what they have seen in the Bible about themselves, other nations—with less power and apparent influence—have just as easily found about themselves. At the most, putting the United States’ own history of Bible usage in the context of other nations’ having done the same thing might raise questions about the consequences of entertaining such interpretations. In the case of Catholic and French Quebec, the belief in a scripturally defined destiny would seem to have done less for good but also far less for evil than when the same convictions have been entertained in the United States.

To move from Quebec Catholic opinion to the opinions of American Jews is to remain at a margin defined by ethnicity and religion but to relocate the margin geographically closer to the American center. Jewish organizations do certainly continue to be understandably nervous about efforts to define the United States as a Christian nation, Jewish voters shy away in droves from appeals by the Republican Party featuring “biblical values,” and influential Jewish spokespersons regularly protest against any trespassing of the divide between church and state. At the same time, it is noteworthy that from the founding of the nation, a prominent strand of Jewish opinion has embraced the proposition that the United States can be identified as an unusually biblical nation. Thus, David Gelernter recently wrote in Commentary to praise what he calls “Americanism” and to claim that “the Bible is not merely the fertile soil that brought Americanism forth. It is the energy source that makes it live and thrive.”16

More often, however, ambiguity has prevailed in Jewish assessments of the Bible and American life. Thus, in the 1850s, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise of Cincinnati spoke out against the practice of requiring readings from the King James Bible in the public schools, but Wise also in 1854 published a book, History of the Israelitish Nation, in which he suggested that American principles of democratic republicanism had been adumbrated in the Hebrew Scriptures.17

The tension between Jewish identity and American identity also defined the context in which Solomon Schechter expressed the opinions with which we began. Commentary from Schechter is especially interesting, since his wide range of experience before coming in 1902 to the United States and the Jewish Theological Seminary included birth and early years in Romania, education in Poland, Austria, and Germany, teaching assignments at Cambridge and the University of London, and much esteemed work on ancient biblical texts in Egypt. The great impression made on Schechter by reading Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as a youth in Foscani, Romania, perhaps in a Yiddish translation, may have influenced his later views, for Schechter reported that when he contemplated the sentences of this address that I quoted earlier, he could “scarcely believe that they formed a part of a message addressed in the nineteenth century to an assembly composed largely of men of affairs.” Instead, Schechter imagined himself “transported into a camp of contrite sinners determined to leave the world and its vanities behind … , possessed of no other thought but that of reconciliation with their God.”18

A fuller account of what Schechter had to say in defending the biblical character of the United States is particularly pertinent, since his words from 1903 were spoken when Schechter himself was actively supporting Jewish efforts to end Christian Bible-readings in New York public schools, when he was working to establish an independent network of private Jewish day-schools, and when he was offering full support to the Jewish Publication Society’s efforts at producing its own translation of the Hebrew Bible.19

Given these activities, Schechter’s willingness to assert that “this country is, as everybody knows, a creation of the Bible” deserves careful attention.20 First, he suggested that it was “particularly the Old Testament” that gave the United States its biblical character. Then he expanded upon problems he saw when Americans took such a conviction seriously—including an “excess of zeal,” a spate of “caricature revelations,” and the presence of “quacks” who “create new Tabernacles here, with new Zions and Jerusalems.” Schechter was using a Jewish vocabulary, but students of America’s churches could describe all of these excesses, and more, in any fair-minded account of how American Christians have expressed their zealous attachment to Scripture.

Yet though Schechter was willing to acknowledge problems in the Biblio-centric character of the United States, even more did he want to defend that character. He was, thus, pleased that trust in the Bible was standing up well against what he called “all the destructive tendencies, mostly of foreign make.” And he was convinced that, despite genuine difficulties, “the large bulk of the American people have, in matters of religion, retained their sobriety and loyal adherence to the Scriptures, as their Puritan forefathers did.”

Schechter’s final point in praising the biblical character of the United States came back, however, to the Bible rather than to America. For his audience in New York City in 1903 he wanted to stress that they were celebrating the foundation of “a Jewish Theological Seminary.” As he explained what such a foundation meant, Schechter spelled out in great detail how it would be appropriate for ancient Jewish teaching to adapt to the American context—by, for example, respecting American democratic traditions. Yet, in the end, Judaism was more important than America: “Any attempt to confine its activity to the borders of a single country, even be it as large as America, will only make its teachings provincial, narrow and unprofitable.” Rather, the point of a Jewish theological seminary must be “to teach the doctrines and the literature of the religion which is as old as history itself and as wide as the world.” An American setting for studying Judaism was important precisely because of how much Bible had gone into the shaping of the United States. But because the study of Judaism took in all of history and implicated the whole world, it, rather than the United States, had to remain the highest concern.

To those who downplay the importance of scriptural grounding for the American experiment, Schechter would appeal for a more positive assessment of what biblical convictions have contributed to American history and American ideals. To those who focus only on excesses of Christian imperialism in American history, he would claim—as a Jew—that this Christian heritage has provided an unusually commodious home for Judaism to thrive. But to those who equate the Bible and America, he would assert that because Scripture embraces all of history and all of the world, it must be able to assess, evaluate, and even judge the United States rather than the reverse.

When now we turn to African American understandings of the Bible and public life, we come much closer to the center. Yet because of the particular circ*mstances of African American existence, we are also approaching the most persistently marginalized of major American populations.

The great national confusion that bore down upon African Americans with special weight was once well described by David Brion Davis: “In the United States … the problem of slavery … had become fatally intertwined with the problem of race.”21 Quite apart from its devastating impact on economics and politics, the confusion spotlighted by Davis between race and slavery profoundly affected Christian interpretations of Scripture during the first decades of nationhood. From the early 1830s onwards a great flood of authors labored intensively to interpret the many scriptural passages that seemed simply to take slavery for granted as a natural part of society. By contrast, far less attention was devoted to what the Bible affirmed, also in many passages, about the equality of all races and peoples before God.

For African American Bible believers, the result was doubly unfortunate. On the one hand, they could see more clearly than any of their peers that studying what the Bible had to say about slavery could never illuminate the American dilemma unless the Bible was also studied for what it had to say about race. On the other hand, because of the racist character of American public life, including prejudices about which publications had to be noticed and which could safely be ignored, the considerable writing that African Americans produced on the Bible and slavery received almost no general attention.

Despite this disadvantage, black Americans in the antebellum decades regularly offered their own forceful arguments arising from a universal application of scriptural teaching. As an example, the Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the World by David Walker, a free black from Boston, which was published in 1829, used the Bible extensively in crafting a powerful manifesto. In one of the many contrasts Walker drew between the universal teachings of Scripture and its particular use by Americans, Walker referred to the “Great Commission” from Matthew 28:18-20, where the resurrected Christ sent out his followers to “teach all nations … to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” Walker berated his white readers with a challenge: “You have the Bible in your hands with this very injunction—Have you been to Africa, teaching the inhabitants thereof the words of the Lord Jesus?” No, far from it. Americans “entered among us, and learnt us the art of throat-cutting, by setting us to fight, one against another, to take each other as prisoners of war, and sell to you for small bits of calicoes, old swords, knives, etc. to make slaves for you and your children.” To Walker, such behavior was a direct contradiction of Scripture: “Can the American preachers appeal unto God, the Maker and Searcher of hearts, and tell him, with the Bible in their hands, that they made no distinction on account of men’s colour?”22

A particularly intriguing example of African American biblical interpretation that followed in the train of David Walker by appealing to the universal norms of Scripture came early in the motion picture era, more than half a century after the constitutional prohibition of slavery. The huge success of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915 as a cinematic version of the Rev. Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, posed a particularly compelling challenge to African Americans and a small number of whites who agreed with them that this film represented an egregious example of the worst kind of public racism. Several times in The Birth of a Nation biblical words or images were used to make a point about the degeneracy of African Americans and the triumph of the noble Ku Klux Klan over the despicable regimes of Reconstruction. Most dramatic was the movie’s closing scenes that mixed visions of civilized whites triumphing over bestial blacks with apocalyptic images of Jesus coming to establish a millennial reign of joyful peace.

In response to these provocations, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People promoted plans with other interested parties to produce their own film to counter what had appeared in The Birth of a Nation. Out of this effort eventually came a movie directed by John W. Noble, entitled The Birth of a Race, which was released in 1919. While neither an artistic nor commercial success, this film did offer a very different understanding of the Bible and its teachings.23

Like The Birth of a Nation, The Birth of a Race eventually made a series of grand statements about American patriotism. But most of the film—70 of its 90 minutes—was devoted to four biblical episodes: the creation of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, and the life and passion of Jesus. Throughout, the Bible was referenced as the charter of “Equality” for all humanity. Thus, Noah’s family, which for many Americans had provided the source for a racist exploitation of the Curse of Canaan, was described in this film as living together harmoniously; Moses was given the movie’s greatest block of time as the one who called for “the liberation of his people”; and as head shots of listeners from Africa, the Far East, and Europe flashed on the screen, Jesus was portrayed as teaching “all races … Christ made no distinction between them—His teachings were for all.” Christ’s passion, moreover, was portrayed as Roman retribution against Jesus’ effort to teach “equality instead of slavery.”

The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot s Contemporary Prose

T. S. Eliot (Author), Lawrence Rainey (Editor)

304 pages

$43.44

Revisiting "The Waste Land"

Lawrence Rainey (Author)

224 pages

$25.73

T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (American Critical Archives, Series Number 14)

Jewel Spears Brooker (Editor)

Cambridge University Press

644 pages

$256.99

The Waste Land, in my estimation, has aged well. It’s true that we don’t feel the frisson of its apocalyptic manner the way early audiences did—as Frank Kermode has pointed out, we have been having “apocalypse for breakfast” for many decades now—but The Waste Land still speaks to us, because we still live in its wasted world.

More precisely, The Waste Land does not speak to us—as Tennyson or Wordsworth or Milton do, directly and authoritatively—so much as it invites us to participate in the making of meaning, allowing us to hear our own voice speaking along with Eliot’s, both of them tentative and searching.

At least that’s what I tell my students. I am, in the interest of full disclosure, a lit prof, and therefore a keeper of poetry, especially of difficult, even arcane modernist poetry. I am not much of a scholar, certainly not an Eliot expert, but I first read The Waste Land almost forty years ago and I have taught the poem every year, sometimes two or three times a year, for most of the last thirty. That is to say, I have lived with this big poem and have gone out of my way to introduce it to others.

And it is a poem that certainly needs introduction. Scholars have been trying to housebreak The Waste Land since its first appearance, but it still intimidates and befuddles first-time readers. It certainly did in 1922. Nothing even in avant-garde circles adequately prepared a reader (though one Ezra Pound poem and the newly appearing Ulysses might have helped) for a poem that in 433 lines, as David Perkins points out, alludes to dozens of other works of literature, art, and music (often obscure works themselves), quotes passages in six foreign languages (including Sanskrit), and encompasses much that was in the air in both the intellectual avant-garde (especially the humanities and social sciences) and the world at large (angst deriving from World War I, urbanization, collapse of old paradigms, and the like).

Pound, in fact, called The Waste Land “the longest poem in the English landwidge.” It implicitly includes within itself everything it alludes to, and those works and events come from far and wide in time and place. (I have fantasized about organizing an entire course around this single poem and its allusions.) If Pound is right in defining an epic as “a poem which includes history,” then The Waste Land is an epic indeed. And one of its important themes, conveyed by the many allusions, is that waste lands are not only a modern phenomena.

My students have patiently followed me not only line by line through the text but even to London, where I have rousted them early in the morning to get to London Bridge so they could experience Eliot’s commute as he describes it in part 1 of the poem: “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” I wanted them to see people dressed in their dark winter clothes, echoing Dante’s newly dead, plodding to their killing work in the City. Never mind that many of the commuters instead wore brightly colored synthetic jackets and seemed quite chatty (another failure of life to cooperate with art). I assured my students there was a tormented Eliot figure somewhere in the crowd.

If readers of The Waste Land have always been somewhat overwhelmed, there have also always been people around to help, especially the professor-priest. I tell my students they can understand large hunks of The Waste Land without laborious explanations—Eliot’s or the scholars’ or mine. And I mostly believe it. At the same time, fuller understanding requires a lot of digging.

Few have dug more furiously than Lawrence Rainey, whose two newest books—published together by Yale University Press this spring—are both devoted to Eliot’s big poem. The Annotated “Waste Land” with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose includes a history of the composition and publication of the poem; a new textual version of the poem, with a collation of variants (all minor to miniscule) from all versions printed up to 1936; all the essays Eliot wrote while composing the poem; the most extensive annotations yet of its allusions and quotations; and a helpful selected bibliography.

In short, this volume provides the raw material for a reader to make his or her own assessment of the poem’s meaning and method. Most of this material can be found here or there in existing books or periodical collections, but Rainey has provided a significant service in pulling disparate information together in one place. He goes beyond the usual citation of a line or two from a source Eliot used, giving instead long passages from the original that make clearer the source’s significance in The Waste Land. One finds, for instance, not only the title and date of “That Shakespearian Rag” that is running through the husband’s head in part 2 of the poem but also the entire score with lyrics (making it possible to hum the tune to yourself next time you are in a stressful conversation with your own spouse).

I have sometimes required groups of students to track down allusions and to report to the rest of us how Eliot is making the allusion work in his own poem. Students, for all their groaning, seem to enjoy the riddle-solving quality of the assignment, something Rainey’s book makes obsolete. And perhaps it’s just as well. A great poem is not a riddle to be solved but an experience (intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and even physical) to be shared. Still, this holistic experience depends at least in part upon a minimum measure of understanding. Over the years readers of The Waste Land have needed help, and even though Rainey worries about teachers and written guides that make the poem “as tidy as a schoolboy’s lunchbox,” I, like Rainey, give my students what help I can without apology.

I have found that the most helpful approach is not to attempt an exhaustive account of Eliot’s allusions but rather to explain the underlying poetic strategy of The Waste Land (and of much modernist literature and art), and then to show how that strategy gives rise to a handful of recurrent themes and moods in the poem. This strategy is essentially the one Pound later called the ideogrammic method, and it is central to The Waste Land in part because Eliot himself had been using a milder version of it since “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and in part because Pound intensified the strategy during his famous editing of the poem.

The essence of the ideogrammic method is placing side-by-side significant but seemingly unrelated concrete details or scenes without explanation or transition in such a way that the reader is invited not to receive a predigested message but to participate in the creation of meaning. In part 2 of The Waste Land, for instance, we are given a scene of a distressing non-conversation between a husband and wife in an opulent London bedroom. It is followed, without transition or explanation, by a scene involving two working-class women discussing sex and abortion in a London pub. The reader is asked to decide what the relationship is between these two scenes and what light that relationship sheds on the poem as a whole.

Similarly in part 3 we are asked to establish the relationship, if any, between a description of polluted (physically and spiritually) contemporary London, the rape of Philomela in Ovid’s tale, the courtship of Elizabeth I by Leicester, Tiresias of Greek legend, and two famous passages from Augustine and Buddha regarding lust (not to mention allusions to Spenser, Psalm 137, Marvell, The Tempest, John Day, Verlaine, the recent slaughter of Christians in Turkey, Homer, Goldsmith, Wagner, Dante, and Eliot’s earlier poetry and private life).

On the most general level, what all of these scenes and references add up to is a picture of spiritual emptiness, paralysis, and disease, and their consequences in human lives and societies. Whether it is a rape in ancient myth playing off a soulless sexual encounter in contemporary London, or a warning from Eastern religion against the lusts of the flesh echoing against a confession from the Western church father Augustine of his own foolish lusts, or the collation of Israelites weeping in exile in Babylon with Eliot weeping beside the waters of Lake Leman where he finished his poem, all these disparate but significant fragments (Pound called such things “luminous details”) vibrate against each other to create the possibility for meaning.

But it is only a possibility. The modernist strategy is dangerous. It increases the potential for personal engagement and multiple layers of meaning, but because it requires the active participation and continued patience of the audience, along with some timely help, it runs the risk of readers throwing up their hands in exasperation and turning to other things. And many do—in 1922 and in my classroom today.

The two big questions for the earliest readers of The Waste Land, in fact, were: did the poem have a recognizable and effective form, and what, if anything, did it mean? As we have seen, the two questions go together. Any answer to the question of meaning requires, as Eliot himself taught us, an answer to that of form.

These two issues are, if anything, more contested now than they were initially, as Rainey’s second book, along with another by Jewel Spears Brooker, makes clear. In T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, Brooker has helpfully collected the contemporary reviews of each of Eliot’s books—poetry and prose—throughout his career. These reviews are often remarkably insightful at the same time that they reveal divergences that continue to the present.

The negative reviews of The Waste Land, as Brooker points out, had three recurring complaints: it was too allusive (requiring too much learning), it was incoherent and fragmented in form, and it was excessively negative in tone. Louis Untermeyer hit on all three, calling the poem “a pompous parade of erudition” lacking “an integrated design” and “cryptic in intention and dismal in effect.” The Times Literary Supplement, in contrast, while admitting the poem was “a collection of flashes,” argued that it still had a coherent form and discernible meaning: “there is no effect of heterogeneity, since all these flashes are relevant to the same thing and together give what seems to be a complete expression of this poet’s vision of modern life” (which it described, presciently, as “purgatorial”).

One is tempted to say that the anonymous reviewer for the TLS (and critics like Edmund Wilson and Gilbert Seldes) saw early what most everyone in time was to come to see. (Eliot said in 1956, “These things …. become easier to people with time. You get used to having The Waste Land, or Ulysses, about.”) But in fact the argument over form and meaning in The Waste Land continues to the present, as Rainey’s Revisiting “The Waste Land” illustrates.

In Revisiting, Rainey offers an even more thorough analysis of the chronology of composition of the poem (there is a disconcerting amount of repetition both within and between his two books), a detailed discussion of its publication, and an overview, using contemporary reviews of the kind collected in Brooker, of its initial reception. There is an impressive, one is tempted to say depressing, amount of scholarship in this book. Rainey consulted the originals of more than 1,200 pages of Eliot letters and pages of Waste Land manuscripts from many places, analyzed watermarks and other distinguishing characteristics of each page, compared the paper used to write dated letters with the paper used to create undated manuscripts, analyzed which of three different typewriters were used to type both letters and manuscript fragments (and solved the mystery of the disappearing typewriter—don’t ask). He presents his findings in pages of achingly detailed tables and listings, all to arrive at his main conclusion: contrary to what some have believed, parts 1 and 2 of the poem were written before part 3. This is perhaps exciting news to a few dozen Eliot scholars, but one wonders if it is not an instance of diminishing returns.

Rainey’s two books are actually good examples of the pros and cons of contemporary humanities scholarship. He illustrates the eclectic approach characteristic of our time, moving between textual, historical, biographical, cultural, feminist, deconstructive, and even New Critical criticism. He is most helpful when working with the raw material of annotation and chronology and biography and considerably less so when offering close readings and cultural analysis. He rides, for instance, through page after tedious page on a personal hobbyhorse involving his contention that typists are important figures in the literature of the period (suggesting moreover that only misogynists fail to see this figure in the carpet).

More significant is Rainey’s aggressive but unconvincing attempt to demonstrate that The Waste Land has no coherent underlying form. He begins with the plausible, and not new, suggestion that the infamous notes Eliot provided for The Waste Land, largely in order to make it long enough to publish as a book, suggest a much clearer organizing “plan” to the poem than is apparent in the actual experience of reading the poem without the notes (which were not included in the first periodical publications). This, I think, is clearly true, and it reminds me of my early teaching experience of being asked where exactly are the Arthurian references in the poem and finding that I could only come up with a handful. But Rainey slides from arguing that Eliot didn’t have a pre-established plan in mind as he composed the poem (few good poets do) to arguing that the poem, in its final form, is largely incoherent.

Rainey takes as his whipping boy Cleanth Brooks, the mid-century critic so important to the New Criticism and one who influentially argued in the late 1930s and after that The Waste Land was “a unified whole” in which myriad details contributed to a discernible meaning and effect. In an oddly ad hominem argument, Rainey contends that Brooks only believed this because he was Christian, Southern, and nostalgic, and hence particularly vulnerable to the recurring human temptation to impose order on an intractable reality. Rainey identifies himself, contrariwise, with “critical paradigms that stressed not the wholeness and unity of the text but its dividedness, the contradictory impulses at work beneath the surface of all language.” He seems not to recognize that, following the logic of his critique of Brooks, this fashionable insistence on discontinuity and the “free play” of interpretation could be dismissed merely as a product of its time.

Rainey’s postmodern skepticism carries over to his response to the ongoing question of whether there is any kind of progress or hopefulness by the end of the poem. He tacitly sides with F. R. Leavis’ well-known assertion that “the thunder brings no rain to revive The Waste Land, and the poem ends where it begins,” a position on the poem’s ending that many still take. I find it hard to believe they are reading the same poem I am.

Clearly the emphasis of the poem is on decay, paralysis, fragmentation, and disintegration: of individuals, of whole societies (including post-World War I Europe), and of Eliot himself. In a kind of inversion of Pound’s seminal call to Make It New, Eliot is searching throughout history and cultures, not for what is vital and helpful to the present, but for ever recurring waste lands of which the current one is just the latest example. He is much more convinced at this point in his life of the inevitability of decay than he is of the likelihood of renewal.

Having said that, how one can fail to see increasingly overt signs in the poem that at least allow for the possibility of a hopeful glimmer amidst the debris? Some of these signs are, by themselves, tenuous at best: the protective red rock offering shade in a parched land in part 1; Augustine’s recognition, in part 3, that there is a higher power who can and does rescue him from his desperate circ*mstances. Some signs can be interpreted either negatively or positively. Is the drowning of Phlebas in part 4 simply another record of loss, or might it be an allusion to baptism and to a death to self that is necessary before a regenerative new birth?

If these and other clues are indirect at best, the positive references in part 5 are, it seems to me, almost undeniable. How can Leavis think it definitive to cite the line “dry sterile thunder without rain” when almost fifty lines later, after the quester finds the chapel empty, the co*ck crows and “Then a damp gust bringing rain.” The empty chapel on the surface suggests failure in the quest, but in Arthurian legend the moment of greatest despair is the necessary moment that precedes the discovery of the Grail, and, of course, in the Easter story the despair of finding an empty tomb is followed immediately by the joy of discovered resurrection.

There is nothing as explicit as the joy of resurrection in The Waste Land, but there are three very significant words and a rather insistently positive ending. The three interpretations of the sound of thunder from the story in the Upanishads—give, sympathize, control—are signposts for a possible way out of the waste land. Not guarantees, not preachments or bromides, but signposts nonetheless. Each suggests a getting beyond the obsessions of self, something Eliot struggled with his entire life, as a first step toward personal and societal renewal.

And this momentum toward something at least mildly hopeful is completed by the “Shantih shantih shantih” that concludes the poem. This word, Eliot tells us, is feebly translated as “The Peace which passeth understanding,” the latter a reference to God’s shalom as manifested in Jesus Christ (Phil. 4:7). Bitterly ironic? Perhaps. But more likely a note of beleaguered yet genuine hopefulness, waste lands notwithstanding, for his own life and for ours.

Having lived with this big poem for forty years, I still find it strange and powerful and unsettling. I do not find it either incoherent or unrelievedly grim. When the speaker says in the conclusion, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” many readers see an admission of defeat. I am not so sure. Eliot’s life was horribly fragmented at this time. His poem too is a near-desperate collocation of fragments from all over the world and from contemporary London. But it is, nevertheless, a shoring, a building up of something for protection.

If the ideogrammic method is a craft strategy to wring meaning from disparate particulars, perhaps it can also teach us something about how to live in a hostile and broken world. Many of us find ourselves, like Eliot, shoring up our lives with bits and pieces from here and there, far and near (including with certain writers and poems). Within five years of the publication of this poem, Eliot would announce his conversion to Christianity. We should not read The Waste Land through that future event, but it is reasonable to suggest that even here Eliot was searching for a way to Make It New.

Daniel Taylor is professor of English at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author most recently of In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands (Bog Walk Press).

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Susan Wise Bauer

Bret Lott’s The Difference Between Women and Men.

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In 1999, Oprah anointed Bret Lott a Real Writer by selecting his novel Jewel for the Oprah Book Club. Freed from financial worries, the previously unsuccessful Lott could now spend his days at his desk, struggling to make sentences out of “words swirling about him in absurd order, words lined up like drunken soldiers, like harlots with painted lips slurring just as drunkenly as those soldiers he’d thought up.”

The Difference Between Women and Men: Stories

Bret Lott (Author)

208 pages

$21.35

The stories in Lott’s new book, The Difference Between Women and Men, from which those swirling words are taken, depict a world full of women and men who are deeply estranged. In “A Way Through This,” a husband insists to his wife that they can get through their difficulties together. He thinks that she agrees with him: “He smiled, astonished at his luck, at the blessing of a wife who could see alongside him the way through this.” Meanwhile she is imagining a world without him: “And above everything hung a bright and huge morning sky, a brilliant sky filled with limitless possibilities. … He was gone, vanished into thin air, and she smiled, astonished at her luck, at the blessing of a husband who knew when to leave.” Words are incapable of reconciling these drastically different versions of reality. In the title story, a desperate wife responds to her husband’s demand that they discuss “the difference between women and men” by silently stacking all of the bedroom furniture in one corner of the room, a symbolic gesture which reduces him to mystified speechlessness.

Actually the gesture mystifies me too. Lott’s prose is so apocalyptically awful that it resists interpretation. Here, for example, is the heroine of “Rose,” who has just given her unfaithful husband a postcoital glass of bourbon with poison in it: “She had reached to him, taken the glass from him before he might drop it and spoil these sheets, desecrate them with alcohol when they had been so blessed with the beginning of love only moments before, the two still beneath these sheets as all who have loved with a love as deep as she had begun to know ought still to be.” (Lott should probably try reading his sentences out loud, a technique I recommend to my freshman comp students, not that they ever actually do it.) And then there is the unnamed narrator of the story “Postscript,” who is trying to write even though his wife keeps interrupting him. He just cannot “get these lost and swirling words in line before him in some sort of order so that they might bow to him, might surrender to him perhaps a moon over a midnight lake, that lake flat and black and clean, the surface so smooth that next there might come a second moon just beneath the first, a moon descending into its own black sky, this lake, the higher its sister moon rose over this lake of words he wanted smoothed for him.”

Unsnarling these syntactical tangles isn’t easy, but the reader who persists will see a pattern slowly emerge. Almost every story involves the kind of disasters common to this fallen existence: car crashes, heart attacks, overdue mortgages, bankruptcy, accidental electrocution (well, that last is probably not so common). But the true catastrophe in Lott’s fictional universe is that husbands and wives are always at odds, warring with each other even as their lives collapse around them. The battle of the sexes is the center of his world’s fallenness. And if men and women could simply put their differences aside, a new world might dawn.

Consider the story “An Evening on the Cusp of the Apocalypse.” The narrator drives home one evening, gloomily contemplating the looming bankruptcy of his company, and finds that his lights and water have been cut off. The family credit cards have been cancelled. The bank has put a lien on the house. And his wife—madly packing a suitcase in the bedroom—tells him that she’s having an affair.

But redemption is near. His wife suddenly collapses into regret: “‘I was lying. I’m not having an affair,’ she wept. ‘I would never do that to you. I just want you to cherish me.'” He holds her and whispers, “I cherish you.”

With that, the apocalypse begins to unspool itself. The credit card company calls, apologizes for having made a mistake, and promises to restore their credit. The bank reverses the lien. The narrator is filled with a sudden peace: “Water flowed, light fell. What more could he ask?” Get rid of the hostility between men and women, and the world moves decisively toward redemption. It’s an attractive idea, but there’s one problem with it: Lott has his evil in the wrong place.

Compare Lott’s story “Everything Cut Will Come Back” and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” to which it pays homage. (The blurb at the front of Lott’s book tells us that his stories have “echoes” of Flannery O’Connor, lest we miss the connection.) In “Everything Cut Will Come Back,” the unnamed narrator finds himself brought face to face with the inexplicable evil of his parents’ death in a car crash. He looks at his wife, sitting in his living room, and thinks that he must get away from her in order to make sense of the catastrophe. So he starts his car and drives for hours. Finally he realizes that his only hope of surviving the disaster is to go back. “I saw [my parents],” he muses at the story’s end,

saw their hands together, and saw, too, love. The road lay before me, a narrow violet ribbon through the hills … and I knew that whatever way I went, whichever turn I took, that road would lead me home. I just had to be careful, to stay awake, to let the road be the road, and me the traveler on it, though there was in this realization no lesson from my parents’ having lost their lives by leaving the road. Only that mine wasn’t over yet, that the road before me was ready to take me where I was loved, and where I loved. And I drove.

The persistent reader, having disentangled this particular knot of commas and gerunds, will realize that Lott is again offering a vision of sin and redemption; his narrator can dig in his toes and remain in a warped relationship, where his wife is no comfort to him, or he can find peace and understanding by returning to love.

Flannery O’Connor, who has apparently understood Genesis, realizes that the battle of the sexes is a symptom of the fall rather than its source. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a white mother and son ride together on an integrated bus line. The son, Julian, is resentful of his mother and embarrassed by her racism. He watches her give a small black child a penny, and then laughs when the child’s mother turns in fury and shouts, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” As the black woman stalks away, Julian lashes out at his own mother:

“That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. … The old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.”

Shocked and frightened, the old woman has a stroke. Julian runs for help that he cannot find: “His feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.” The surface conflict in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is between man and woman, mother and son; but the real evil is in Julian’s own soul. His eyes are opened to his own sin, the self-righteousness which is as filthy and destructive as his mother’s hateful racism.

Paradoxically, Lott’s less drastic vision of sin makes the relationship between the sexes that much more fraught. If the hostility between the sexes is at the center of life’s fallenness, then the relationship between men and women must be endlessly policed. The recent screaming and yelling over Lawrence Summer’s relatively mild suggestion that women might be hardwired differently from men reveals just this mindset. If hatred between men and women is indeed the original sin, anyone who tries to insist on fundamental differences between the sexes is inching close to heresy.

O’Connor’s pitiless analysis of the sin within each soul opens the way for supernatural redemption. All that Lott’s stories offer me, in contrast, is the forlorn hope that the mess will straighten itself out, if we can just learn to get along.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Norton) and is working on a four-volume history of the world, also for Norton.

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Lauren F. Winner

The unobtrusive perfection of Charlotte’s Web.

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“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” Those are the concluding sentences of E.B. White’s Newberry Award-winning, much-beloved children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web. Their unobtrusive perfection exemplifies the writerly virtues that White and his coauthor, William Strunk, taught in The Elements of Style. Even so, at first glance, the enduring fame of White’s books for children seems incongruous. After all, White was best known to several generations of readers as The New Yorker’s most winsome essayist. A Cornell alum, he had begun writing for the self-consciously urbane magazine in 1925—his first piece was a lighthearted satire about a copywriter’s gearing up for a spring ad campaign—and no one was more influential shaping its tone and outlook than White, who, among other things, oversaw the “Talk of the Town Section,” wrote taglines for many of the heralded New Yorker cartoons, and contributed innumerable essays and poems to the magazine over the years.

White would continue to write for The New Yorker for the rest of his life, but in 1938 he made two moves: he started contributing regularly to Harper’s, placing 55 essays there between 1938 and 1943 (at which point he resumed more-or-less-full-time writing for The New Yorker); and he left Manhattan for a farm in Maine. And it was on the farm that he took up children’s writing. Stuart Little, the story of a mouse born to human parents, was published in 1945. Four years later, White began Charlotte’s Web.

The outlines of the story are fairly simple: Fern Arable is an eight-year-old farm girl whose daddy raises pigs. One day, a new litter of piglets arrives, all perfect and pink and healthy except for one, who is small and weak. Papa Arable, sensible man that he is, prepares to kill the runt, but Fern begs that Papa spare the piglet’s life. (Opponents of Peter Singer might want to note Fern’s speech: “The pig couldn’t help being born small, could it?” she demands. “If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me? … This is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.”) Papa relents. If she is willing to care for the piglet, he can live. Fern, rejoicing, christens him Wilbur.

That might have been, actually, the end of the book. The story thus far has all the components that middle-school English teachers demand: introduction, rising tension, climax, dénouement. But of course Fern and Wilbur’s story constitutes only the first two chapters of the novel. In fact, Fern’s opening scene didn’t appear in White’s first drafts. He had a very hard time coming up with a good beginning to the book. In one version, the novel started with Charlotte the spider. In another draft, White led with Wilbur, a “small, nicely-behaved pig living in a manure pile in the cellar of a barn.” A third draft opened with a poetic ode to life in the barn. A fourth version began with the farmer walking out to the hoghouse at midnight, counting the litter of newborn pigs. Only after many such false starts did White latch onto Fern—and one of the best opening lines in American fiction: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?”

But no matter how long it took White to nail the beginning of Charlotte’s Web, the narrative arc of those first two Fern-and-Wilbur chapters is crucial to the book. The opening scene encapsulates in miniature the action at the heart of the novel: the threat to Wilbur’s life and his rescue by a loving female.

So Fern gets to keep Wilbur. Under her tender nurture, he grows into a fine, big pig—and Papa Arable, seeing that Fern can no longer adequately take care of him, insists she deliver Wilbur to the Zuckermans’ farm. Once there, Wilbur learns the horrifying news that he is being fattened up because the Zuckermans plan to slaughter him. Wilbur panics. He doesn’t want to die. He wants somebody to save him. And somebody does: a spider named Charlotte A. Cavatica. (Araneus cavaticus is the Latin name for the common barn spider. The spiders in the Araneidae family spin the orb-shaped webs you see on posters at Halloween time.)

Charlotte, who lives in the Zuckermans’ barn, befriends Wilbur and declares that she will save him. Then the rub comes—she has to figure out how to save Wilbur. Charlotte thinks on it and thinks on it, confident that, in point of fact, fooling the humans won’t be that hard. She decides to use her weaving skill and her tremendous vocabulary to trick the Zuckermans into thinking that Wilbur is super-duper-special. (Or perhaps trick is not the right word. Maybe Charlotte is not tricking the human beings, but just helping them to see something they ordinarily wouldn’t notice.)

Charlotte begins to weave messages about Wilbur into her web. The first message is simple, but startling nonetheless: when the Zuckermans head into the barn one morning they see the words “Some Pig!” embroidered into the spider’s web. The human beings, of course, fall for Charlotte’s cunning in a second. The whole town turns out to see this special pig, and only Mrs. Zuckerman thinks to suggest that perhaps it is not the pig, but the spider, who is extraordinary.

Charlotte knows that one slogan is not enough, so she gathers together all the barnyard animals for a brainstorming session. “I called this meeting in order to get suggestions,” says Charlotte. “I need new ideas for the web. People are already getting sick of reading ‘Some Pig!’ If anybody can think of another message, or remark, I’ll be glad to weave it into the web. Any suggestions for a new slogan?” A lamb suggests “Pig Supreme,” but Charlotte says that sounds too much like “a rich dessert.” When the goose offers “terrific,” Charlotte decides that’s a keeper, though she needs someone to spell it for her. (Wilbur protests that he is not terrific, and Charlotte says that doesn’t matter—most people believe anything they read.)

Templeton the rat is drafted to go through the trash heap, hunting for scraps of paper with compelling phrases—he turns up a soap box emblazoned with the phrase “with new radiant action.” (The barnyard community, it turns out, is undertaking something of an advertising campaign—shades of that first piece White wrote for The New Yorker.) Templeton also produces a newspaper clipping with the word “humble.” That completes Charlotte’s oeuvre. Like a movie marquee, her web proclaims that Wilbur is terrific, radiant, and, finally, humble. And that is enough to save him from the slaughterhouse. Not only do the Zuckermans determine to keep Wilbur alive, they are going to display him at the county fair.

During her campaign, Charlotte begins to flag. She is tired. The weaving seems to be wearing her out. But she pushes on, and eventually her efforts come to fruition. The fair is a moment of triumph—but also of sadness. Charlotte won’t be retuning to the barn. She lays a sack of eggs, and then stays at the fairground to die, alone. Wilbur is devastated. When he realizes he can’t stay to attend Charlotte’s death, he decides at least to get her egg-sack back to the barn. Unable to carry the sack himself, Wilbur recruits Templeton to help out. “Use extreme care!” he said. “I don’t want a single one of those eggs harmed.”

Back at the barn, Wilbur guards the eggs vigilantly, waiting and watching, until one day Charlotte’s 514 children emerge. They hang around (literally) for a few days and then, one morning, they begin to fly off:

“Wait a minute!” screamed Wilbur. “Where do you think you’re going?” … Wilbur was frantic. Charlotte’s babies were disappearing at a great rate.

(I have to admit, this scene moves me to tears every time I read it.) One baby spider stops to explain that they’re moving on the warm updraft, following the wind wherever it takes them. Wilbur, beside himself with grief, cries himself to sleep. He is still moping around the next day when he hears a small voice shouting “Salutations! I’m up here!” Wilbur looks up. Three of the babies—Joy, Aranea, and Nellie—have decided they like Wilbur and they like the barn, and they are staying.

And that brings us back to the famous last lines of the book. Wilbur, White tells us, lived a long and happy life in the barn. He loved Charlotte’s children and grandchildren, although they never took the place of Charlotte in his heart. For “it is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

That Charlotte is a good friend is pretty obvious. She is a friend who sacrificially loves Wilbur. She saves his life even though spinning all those words in her web wears her out and probably hastens her death.

But she is also a good writer. Curious, that, for Charlotte seems to suffer from writer’s block. After her first web-message, “Some Pig,” Charlotte seemingly can’t generate the, um, text-messages by herself. “Terrific,” “radiant,” and “humble” are all words suggested by her barnyard neighbors. And, as critic John Griffith has pointed out, Charlotte never wrote anything else: “Her entire literary canon consists of … five famous words in her web.” So, in what sense is she a good writer?

For starters, in E. B. White’s sense: White, as The Elements of Style makes certain, valued simplicity, clarity, and economy of words above any rococo flourishes. (If you remember only one line from The Elements of Style, it should be “Omit needless words.” Or maybe “Make every word tell.”)

But Charlotte is a good writer in another sense, too. She models the individual focus that writing requires, and she shows the vital role that community plays in writing.

Writing is typically regarded as the most solitary of activities. (Take me, right now: I am typing these words alone in my house, wearing my pajamas and earplugs. A solitary undertaking if ever there was one.) And Charlotte, of course, does the actual weaving herself. She must focus her whole being on the mechanics of writing the words in her web. White devotes an entire paragraph to her creation of an “R” in “TERRIFIC”: “Now for the R! Up we go! Attach! Descend! Pay out line!” Children—at least those who, in this computer era, are still schooled in cursive writing—will relate to Charlotte’s focus: Learning how to make an R is no small thing. And grown-up writers will relate, too, thinking not so much about the struggle to shape a letter but rather about the struggle to shape a text. The words literally come out of Charlotte’s body—a jarring and apt summary of how it feels, sometimes, to write.

And yet it would be sheer hubris for me to imagine that my writing starts when I sit down at the computer and stops when I press the save key. To the contrary, almost everything I do feeds the act of writing (for good and for ill). White knew this. He knew that the act of writing wasn’t encompassed by what he did at his desk in Maine. Nor is Charlotte’s writing encompassed by her costly weaving. Her writing begins when she calls all the animals together for a brainstorming session. They come up with the web-content together.

One does wonder if Charlotte really needs the input of the other animals. She has the best vocabulary on the block—she regularly peppers her speech with words like languishing and magnum opus. Perhaps she calls her barnyard meeting not just because writing can be a communal task, but because self-sacrificial love is, too. Charlotte calls the meeting, perhaps, not because she needs help with diction, but because she wants to include the rest of the animals in her heroic saving of Wilbur.

And so they should be, for ultimately all the love and thought and savvy that goes into Charlotte’s weaving is undertaken by the entire barn. And that, too, is an apt summary of how it is to write.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God (Algonquin/Random House) and, most recently, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity (Brazos).

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Brooke Allen

Ogden Nash and the lost tradition of light verse.

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Light verse used to be a vital part of American culture, high and low. It was by no means the exclusive turf of “real” poets: anyone could, and did, turn their hand to it. A birthday, wedding, or anniversary was always an excuse, if excuse were needed, for enthusiastic amateur versifying.

Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood

Jon M. Sweeney (Author)

Brand: Paraclete Press

173 pages

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What brought this charming custom to an end? My grandmother, born in the late Victorian era, was an avid practitioner of the art; so were many of her friends and contemporaries. Nowadays the only person I know who still cranks out the occasional humorous ode or epithalamium is my 82-year-old uncle, who has an ear for an eccentric rhyme. (“I’ll have a scotch; sit down with Cammy; / And watch Green Bay take on Miami.”) Even children, who used to be encouraged to mark holidays and public events with celebratory poems, have succumbed to the minimalistic William Carlos Williams red-wheelbarrow aesthetic, forsaking the rhymed doggerel of the past—though I was pleased to see that in a recent issue of The Chronicle of the Horse where little girls were invited to eulogize their ponies, they did so in a decidedly retro fashion: one poem, I remember, began with: “My pony, Snickers, is snobby and rude / And he has a very bad attitude.”

The high priest of this sort of fun was of course Ogden Nash (1902–71). He took the mere wit of much light poetry and consistently raised it to the level of true wit, in Alexander Pope’s formulation: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” As a young and enthusiastic reader of poetry, good and bad, he had reflected that “if someone who knew the rules of versification, began writing bad poetry deliberately and consciously instead of unconsciously” it might “turn out to be fairly amusing.” The result was stuff like the following (from “Spring Comes to Murray Hill”): “I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue / And say to myself You have a responsible job, havenue?”

The difference between Nash’s version of bad poetry and the real thing was his thorough internalization of rhythm. F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed this out in a letter to his daughter, who had been attempting some Nashian verse of her own. “Ogden Nash’s poems,” he told her, “are not careless, they all have an extraordinary inner rhythm. They could not possibly be written by someone who in his mind had not calculated the feet and meters to the last iambus or trochee. His method is simply to glide a certain number of feet and come up smack against his rhyming line.” Thus a couplet like the following: “I wonder if the citizens of New York will ever get sufficiently wroth / To remember that Tammany crooks spoil the broth.”

When the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative Nash stamp on the poet’s hundredth birthday, it was nice to see that he looked exactly as one would have wanted him to: droll rather than handsome, clever eyes glinting from behind outsized spectacles. Now, with the publication of Douglas M. Parker’s new biography, I find that he lived, too, as one would have hoped: he was decorous, exceedingly gentle and polite, a loving family man thoroughly imbued with the Protestant work ethic. If one sometimes detects a faint odor of melancholy both in his poems and his letters, this aberrance is always kept strictly under control, for in the WASP ethos to which Nash faithfully adhered, melancholy is a symptom of self-indulgence and not an artistic treasure trove to be cultivated or explored.

Nash came from a family that was distinguished and well-to-do. His great-great grandfather had been the Revolutionary governor of North Carolina, and the family gave its name to the city of Nashville. Nash spent his childhood in Savannah, Georgia and on a large estate in Rye, New York, but the family had to give this up after the business collapse of Nash’s father. He attended St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, where he came under the influence of at least one wonderful teacher, Arthur Roberts: Roberts’ grounding in correct usage enabled Nash, he later wrote his former mentor, to “hit upon the conscious employment of incorrect usage for my own devious ends,” and it was “the love for the mother tongue that you instilled in me which enabled me to tease it and flirt with it to the limits of decency.” Nash dropped out of Harvard after a single year and returned briefly to St. George’s as a French master.

In 1922, with the Jazz Age in full swing, Nash arrived in New York, still with no inkling that he could make a living by writing. His first job was as a bond salesman; after a year and a half on the job, he had still sold only one bond—to his grandmother. He next turned to writing streetcar advertising, which he stuck with for a full two years. Believing that children’s literature would offer the best possibility of actually getting into print, he and his roommate Joe Alger collaborated on a story called The Cricket of Carador, which was accepted for publication by Doubleday, Page & Company. Dan Longwell, the head of Doubleday’s advertising department, took a shine to Nash and offered him a position as his assistant. Nash moved up in the ranks, becoming an editor of a Doubleday subsidiary called the Crime Club, and eventually a higher-level editor.

Nash focused his poetic experimentation during this period. He quickly decided that he did not have the makings of a serious poet. “There was a ludicrous aspect to what I was trying to do; my emotional and naked beauty stuff just didn’t turn out as I had intended.” Possibly; then again, one suspects that the sort of self-exposure involved in writing serious poetry was completely inimical to Nash’s guarded character. Inspired by light poet Samuel Hoffenstein and by a volume of animal verses by Roland Young, Nash tried his hand at the form. His success was immediate, as testified by a very early verse: “The turtle lives twixt plated decks / That practically conceal its sex. / I think it clever of the turtle / In such a fix to be so fertile.”

Nash’s development as a poet was intimately entwined with his courtship of Frances Leonard, whom he met late in 1928 and married two-and-a-half years later. It was a love match and a happy marriage, but possibly not always very easy: Frances could be dauntingly chilly and moody. Reading Nash’s letters to his wife (collected by his daughter, Linell Nash Smith, and published in 1990 under the title Loving Letters from Ogden Nash: A Family Album), one gets the impression that Nash usually approached his wife hat in hand, anxious to please and propitiate. His brilliant little poem “A Word to Husbands” contains, as well as the best general matrimonial advice ever given, a clear enough picture of his own home life: “To keep your marriage brimming,/ With love in the loving cup,/ Whenever you’re wrong, admit it,/ Whenever you’re right, shut up.” In one of his rare non-humorous poems, Nash celebrated his wife’s changeable temper:

Praise the spells and bless the charms
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing ever true—
I love April, I love you.

Fair enough, but reading between the lines one suspects that March might have been the more appropriate month to have chosen. Parker has written his biography with the cooperation of the two Nash daughters, so it’s easy to understand why he doesn’t venture very far in this direction.

Nash’s long association with The New Yorker began in January, 1930, when they published “Invocation,” a satirical jab at Senator Smoot of Utah, who in his earnest effort to protect the American public from imported p*rnography had assembled an impressive personal collection of the banned items:

Senator Smoot is an institute
Not to be bribed with pelf;
He guards our homes from erotic tomes
By reading them all himself.
Smite, Smoot, Smite for Ut.
They’re smuggling smut from Balt. To Butte.

Nash is not widely thought of as a political writer, but he frequently produced pointed rhymed commentary on current events and outrages, much as Calvin Trillin does today. (Another gem of a political poem from that period is “Peekaboo, I see A Red”: “The results of the activities of the D.A.R. might not be so minus— / Were the ladies not troubled by sinus. / Alas, every time they try to put people who don’t agree with them on the stand as defendants / They find themselves troubled by the sinus of the Declaration of Independence.”)

Nash’s long association with The New Yorker was of course an extraordinarily fruitful one; not only did the magazine help to shape his style, but he personally did a great deal to define the tone of the magazine as it developed: Ogden Nash was as integral a part of Harold Ross’ New Yorker as James Thurber or Dorothy Parker. But it is possible to wonder whether Nash’s talents might have developed rather more broadly if he had not been kept within the perimeters of the New Yorker sensibility by his editors. Katharine White, who was to be his principal editor at the magazine until her final retirement in 1958, rejected an early Nash short story, “Preface to a Wedding Trip”—which Dorothy Parker thought the best story she had read in years—because she found the characters and situation too vulgar. She also turned down his poem “Are Sects Necessary,” which makes fun of the fastidious Protestant contempt for Catholicism: “Their righteousness runs too high a steeple; / I prefer the purple papal people.” “Mr. Ross says he really just can’t come out so wholeheartedly for the Catholic church,” commented Mrs. White. “I wonder if you couldn’t change the poem, making it against all sects and anti-everything.” (Nash declined that suggestion, and included the original poem in his first collection.) All this emphasizes the fatal flaw in The New Yorker, a sort of prissiness and gentility that limited its aesthetic and limited, too, Nash’s growth.

The poet’s relationship with the magazine heated up when Ross, having run into Nash in a speakeasy, offered him a position as managing editor. Although Nash was not aware of it at the time, the job was essentially un-doable: no one ever measured up to Ross’ impossible demands. Colleagues at the magazine referred to each successive occupant of the post as “the new Jesus”; by most counts, Nash was the twenty-fifth “Jesus” in six years. Nash was under no illusions about his own qualifications for the job, as he later related to Thurber. “I don’t need to tell you that in many ways [Ross] was a strangely innocent man and he assumed that my presence in a speakeasy meant that I was a man about town. He was, I believe, still in mourning over the departure of [Ralph] Ingersoll, who had apparently been the ultimate in men about town, and was looking for a suave and worldly editor. He hired me practically on the spot.” Nash lasted three months in the job, then moved on to an editorial position at Farrar and Rinehart.

Eventually Nash’s success enabled him to leave office work and make his living as a freelancer. The money he made from poetry was augmented, occasionally, by his forays to Broadway and Hollywood. His most gratifying showbiz venture was as the lyricist for the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus; after this triumph he was bitten so hard by the theatrical bug that he tried several more stage ventures, all of them more or less disastrous, while as a contract screenwriter in Hollywood he underwent the degrading treatment, mindless assignments, and eventual depression that was the lot of all first-rate literary writers who tried to peddle themselves to the studios. He would later say that his stint in Hollywood “almost destroyed” him.

Other projects that supplemented the income he earned from his more than two dozen volumes of poetry (much of it originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, his major outlet aside from The New Yorker) included giving lectures, writing verses for Hallmark cards, limericks for Playboy, and advertising copy: he would sell just about anything but drew the line, he said, at writing a jingle for a constipation remedy. “If they want anything on pellagra, leprosy or syphilis I’m their man, but I’m afraid constipation is eliminated, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms.” He was especially brilliant on the subject of the countless petty irritations of modern life: Clifton Fadiman aptly dubbed him the Laureate of the Age of Friction. (“Progress was all right once,” Nash remarked, “but it went on too long.”) How much further he could have taken this theme if he had survived into the computer era!

Nash’s verse may look ageless and timeless from the perspective of the 21st century, but that was not the case during his own lifetime: like so many writers who achieve a certain age, he lived to see himself go out of date. With the death of Harold Ross in 1951 The New Yorker was taken over by his deputy, William Shawn, whose sensibility was very different from that of his predecessor. By 1970 Nash was writing to his agent that the most recent rejection letter “really drives me up the wall. Maybe we should sign the next offering Donald Barthelme and see what happens.”

Nash died in 1971; he did not have to undergo the indignity of slipping further out of fashion, and his final poem was published posthumously in The New Yorker, along with a memorial tribute. The obituaries were adulatory, with the Washington Post describing him, succinctly and truly, as a “serious man who wrote funny.” With Nash as with most of the world’s great funny men, humor was not a pure substance but a composite one, a colorful mass of striations in which we can pick out not only comedy but pathos and even a sense of tragedy. But let Nash say it himself. Humor, he believed,

is not brash, it is not cheap, it is not heartless. Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. … How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don’t have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.

Parker has done a tremendous service by writing this readable and workmanlike biography—the first biography of Nash, amazingly enough. His tale, within the inevitable constrictions attendant on writing an “authorized” life, is well told. But he and Dana Gioia, who has written the introduction, fail in their effort to persuade the reader that Nash was in some way “a product of modernism,” a “populist modernist.” To try to squeeze him into this category along with such uncongenial peers as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay seems, in the end, pointless. Almost perfectly free of influence and the anxiety that comes with it, he was what he was. And isn’t that enough?

Brooke Allen is the author most recently of Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior (Ivan R. Dee).

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C. Stephen Evans

The life and art of P. G. Wodehouse.

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Evelyn Waugh, in a tribute to P. G. Wodehouse delivered on the BBC on July 15, 1961, zeroed in on a theological ground for the unmatched appeal of Wodehouse’s fiction:

Wodehouse: A Life

Robert McCrum (Author)

530 pages

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For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no “aboriginal calamity.” His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr. Wodehouse’s world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

A deeply Catholic novelist such as Waugh knows what sin is and notices its absence. The first time I read this often-quoted praise, I immediately thought, “Of course,” and I understood why Wodehouse is a writer who is not merely enjoyed but deeply loved.

I had for many years been a Wodehouse lover, beginning with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, moving on to Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings (a pig) and the Blandings Castle stories, and experiencing sheer bliss when I discovered that Wodehouse had actually written some golf stories. For several years I struggled with a phobia about flying, and there were many times when the only way I could get myself to board a plane was to walk onto the jetway clutching an unread Wodehouse novel. Waugh had it exactly right; to enter the Wodehouse world is to enter a world with no sin, and no real horrors. In that world no planes fall from the skies.

I am certainly not alone in my love of Wodehouse. According to Robert McCrum’s biography, there is a long roster of distinguished admirers in addition to Waugh, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Balfour, Hilaire Belloc, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Eudora Welty, Ogden Nash, John le Carré, and Salman Rushdie. Incredibly, all of Wodehouse’s books—of which there are more than 100—are still in print. How does one explain this level of devotion towards a writer of comic “light fiction,” who viewed his own work (at least initially) simply as a way to make a living that would be more satisfying than working in a bank?

Like many Wodehouse readers, I knew little about the man behind the books, and so, when given a copy of McCrum’s highly praised Wodehouse: A Life for Christmas last year, I dove into the book with much anticipation. McCrum’s biography was not a disappointment, unless one measures it by the pleasures obtained from one of Wodehouse’s own works.

McCrum has done his homework, and knows how to tell a tale; his version of Wodehouse’s life contains many fascinating vignettes. Guided by McCrum’s authorial governance, Wodehouse moves before our eyes from what appears to be a sad and lonely childhood, through the experiences of a typically English “public school” (Dulwich), to the crushing news that he would not be allowed to go up to Oxford as he had thought, but would have to enter the “real world” of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. As a young man of about 21, Wodehouse courageously quit his day job and resolved to make a living with his typewriter, churning out light verse, short stories, lyrics for songs in musical comedies (both in London and on Broadway), and of course comic novels.

McCrum gives a balanced treatment of perhaps the saddest episode in Wodehouse’s life: his tragic decision, after being captured and interned by the Nazis during World War II, to give some radio broadcasts over German radio to be aimed at his American readers. (The United States was not yet in the war.) Though politically naïve, Wodehouse was absolutely not a Nazi sympathizer, and the biggest mistake of his life is best explained by Wodehouse’s innocent—yet somehow still culpable, if innocence can be culpable—inability to see that his desire to thank his American audience for their continued loyalty would be used by the Nazis for their own ends. The broadcasts themselves are hilarious in the typical Wodehouse manner:

Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, “How can I become an Internee?” Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.

These broadcasts, then, for which Wodehouse would pay dearly, since he was never again able to return to England, are attributable to the same innocence that Waugh finds in Wodehouse’s prose and that almost everyone who knew Wodehouse personally found in his character. Even when captured by the Nazis, Wodehouse appears to live in Eden.

The basic goodness of Wodehouse comes through in McCrum’s volume in many ways: the great loyalty Wodehouse showed to his friends (secretly providing financial support to some less successful than himself), his long and happy marriage to Ethel (already twice widowed), his devotion as a father to Ethel’s daughter from a previous marriage, his lifelong joy from animals (particularly dogs), his many years of hard and honest work as a writer who honed his craft industriously, and the satisfactions he took from simple pleasures in the great outdoors such as walking and swimming. However, though McCrum sheds light on many puzzling and interesting details in Wodehouse’s life (I had no idea how involved Wodehouse had been in musical theater), there remains an element of mystery in the attraction of Wodehouse’s work: Why should books replete with silly characters and contrived plots produce so much admiration and love from so many readers? The fact that the books are genuinely funny hardly seems an adequate explanation. Or am I here making the same mistake so many critics contemporaneous with Wodehouse made, treating him as a lightweight because he is a comic author?

After all, as many a stand-up act has confirmed, dying is easy; comedy is hard. Why do we humans laugh anyway? Why do we sense that humor, at least some humor, points to something deep about the human condition?

Theologian Tom Oden has recently published The Humor of Kierkegaard, which not only contains many of Kierkegaard’s funniest jokes and stories but also argues that Kierkegaard is hands-down the funniest philosopher in Western history. Some might think the competition for this prize was not too challenging, but Kierkegaard is genuinely funny; he not only writes wittily but also offers some provocative reflections about the place of humor in human life and its relation to religious existence. I think that some of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on humor may shed some light on the appeal of Wodehouse and the insight that lies beneath the Waugh tribute.

Kierkegaard affirms, contrary to the common stereotype of the religious believer as dour and overly serious, that there is a close connection between humor and religion, a connection that is especially tight in the case of Christianity, which Kierkegaard calls “the most humorous view of life in world-history.”1 Kierkegaard affirms that the character he calls “the humorist” lies on the border of true religiousness, and even that humor constitutes the outward disguise or “incognito” of the genuinely religious person.

All humor, on Kierkegaard’s view, revolves around an experience of what he calls a “contradiction,” but which might better be described as an incongruity. We smile at the “contradiction” between the upward gaze and downward ascent of a comedian doing a pratfall; we laugh at a German-Danish clergyman who intones from the pulpit that “The Word was made pork,” being fooled by a false cognate between the German Fleisch and the Danish Flæsk. (These are both Kierkegaard’s examples.) Humor in general strikes us as “deep” because it points to the fundamental incongruity or contradiction that lies at the heart of human existence, which is a never-completed “synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal.” Human life is a continual attempt to realize in time ideals, such as justice, which as ideals are timeless. However, when we look at the gap between our ideals and our achievements we cannot help but laugh or cry.

But which do we do? According to Kierkegaard, the fundamental contradiction that is human existence can be experienced as either tragic or humorous, depending on our perspective. To smile at life (or anything), we must be able to occupy a “higher perspective,” which makes the “contradiction” painless. This is surely why so many situations that are painful at the time can be funny in retrospect; the person remembering the incident is beyond or above the contradiction, and this distance is a necessary condition for humor. Thus, to view life itself as humorous, to vary the metaphor, we must have a way of escape, “know the way out.”

It is here that religion and specifically Christianity come into the picture, because a religious life view typically offers just such a “way out.” The Christian, for example, knows the tragedy of the fall, but also knows the good news of God’s grace and forgiveness. According to Kierkegaard, the character he calls the “humorist” lies on the boundary of the religious life because the humorist has somehow acquired a “knowledge” of these religious insights. The humorist fails to be genuinely religious because this knowledge is a kind of merely intellectual appropriation of those insights; the humorist does not really take these religious convictions into the core of his or her own existence. If we shift focus from religion in general to Christianity in particular, perhaps humorists can be viewed as people who help themselves to the solution Christianity offers to the problem of human life without fully plumbing the depth of the problem itself.

I think that Kierkegaard’s description of the humorist fits the case of Wodehouse precisely. We love the world of Wodehouse because it is paradise, a world without sin. Of course Wodehouse has villains and intimidating aunts, but they are amusing rather than genuinely evil. We love the world of Wodehouse because it is the world we were born to live in, and it is a world in which we would love to dwell. Yet, as Waugh himself clearly said, Wodehouse’s world is a world to escape to, not a world we aspire to find or create. It is not paradise regained but paradise never lost. Sin has here not been defeated; it has never really appeared.

One might object that such a theological reading of Wodehouse must be off the mark, since McCrum assures us repeatedly, as if he needs to reassure himself, that Wodehouse did not have much interest in religion, remaining “strenuously agnostic.” I could respond by citing Kierkegaard’s claim that humor can in some cases be the outward disguise that covers a genuinely religious “inwardness.” However, there is much evidence in McCrum’s own book that agnosticism is not the whole story when it comes to Wodehouse’s life view. Wodehouse was certainly not conventionally religious or a regular churchgoer, and he probably lacked settled religious convictions. When asked about his religious beliefs, Wodehouse said that “it was ‘awfully hard to say’ if he had religious beliefs. ‘It varies from day to day. Some days I have, and other days I haven’t.’ ” To me that sounds like a man who finds religious questions deeply interesting, but who cannot find his way to a settled faith. Wodehouse was agnostic to be sure, but an agnostic who was concerned about religious questions, a hypothesis that is confirmed by his deep interest in and actual involvement at times with spiritualism.

In any case it is not necessary to see Wodehouse as conventionally religious in order to recognize him as fitting Kierkegaard’s category of the humorist who has a knowledge of the religious life but has not been transformed by it. In fact, Wodehouse fits this description perfectly. He was brought up in a Christian environment; parish priests are as much a natural part of his fictional world as are earls and good-for-nothing aesthetes. He effortlessly absorbed what we might call the stored-up capital of Christianity, and drew on those stores without drawing undue attention to the source. Wodehouse embodies what William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, calls the “once-born” type of religiousness, the religious person who confidently trusts in the basic goodness of the world and the self.

How could a Christian like Waugh express love for a writer who ignores the reality of sin? If Wodehouse attempted anything like realism, his fictional paradise would indeed be a snare and a delusion. But despite its colorful and concrete locations in London and the English home counties (and occasionally New York), Wodehouse’s world is obviously one that does not and cannot exist on this earth. Indeed, it draws us in by powerfully expressing our desire for a different world, one which the Christian knows cannot be entered by escaping time but only by embracing the God who himself entered history. After all, in Wodehouse, not even golf is frustrating—and no golfer will be tempted to confuse this world with the one we actually live in.

C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Baylor University. He is the author most recently of Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. SØren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), Vol. 2. Entry 1681.

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Virginia Stem Owens

I did not want to make life-or-death decisions for my mother.

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The day my mother was released from the local hospital where she had been treated for a hemorrhagic stroke, we transferred her to the rehab wing of a “skilled nursing facility”(read “nursing home”) where physical therapists would work to restore her mobility, coordination, and speech. Medicare would cover 45 days of these treatments.

I had little hope, however, that they could restore my mother’s gait, her command of language, or her capacity to reason. Those powers had already dropped away, step by gesture, word by syllable, syllogism by premise, over the past few years.

I knew too that my mother would not be leaving the nursing home at the end of the 45 days. This was not the first stroke she had suffered, only the latest and worst. Their effects, combined with her advanced Parkinson’s disease and increasing dementia, made it impossible for my father and me to care for her safely at home any longer.

Before her illness, denial had never been part of my mother’s nature. She was a woman who believed in facing up to facts, especially unpleasant ones. Among these was the fact that we all die. She was fond of quoting Psalm 90: The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Ever since she’d attained three score and ten, she’d often professed her willingness to depart this life anytime the call came.

She was well on her way to the outer limit of the biblical fourscore years that day I engineered her removal to Fair Acres. Years ago she had taken every precaution to prepare for the day she would fly away, including updating her will and pre-paying for her funeral. But neither of us had prepared for the long slope of physical and mental decline.

My mother had watched both a younger sister and her closest friend die of breast cancer after suffering through agonizing radiation and chemotherapy. “I don’t want that,” she had told me, long before her own illness overwhelmed her. “It’s too much pain for only a few more months of life.” She little knew then how long her own private purgatory would last, nor how much pain it would cost.

For my mother, death, though an unpleasant fact to be faced, was “natural,” and natural was the moral peg on which she hung decisions about her body. She had refused hormone-replacement therapy to alleviate her osteoporosis. To her, estrogen after menopause went against the natural order. A woman’s body stops producing estrogen for a reason—so you won’t go on having babies beyond your ability to care for them. Keeping her hormones at the level of a 20-year-old’s was not in line with what she saw as nature’s intent.

My mother had worked for decades as a medical secretary, absorbing whole dictionaries of Latinate terminology, yet “natural” remained a metaphysical issue for her. In her own private lexicon, “natural” referred to the created order, which by and large expresses God’s purposes for the world. Health comes from working within that order. We violate its boundaries at our peril. But live long enough, and your bones will thin, your arteries plug up, your pancreas shut down. It’s nature’s way of showing you the door. Keep asking “what’s natural?” long enough, and the answer, eventually, is death.

Facing this fact served my mother well enough for more than seventy years. She had done everything right. She was never overweight, ate a balanced, healthy diet, exercised regularly, took her vitamins, brushed and flossed. This temple of the Holy Ghost had been maintained in topnotch condition. Her only adult illnesses had been colds and flu. Then she developed Parkinson’s disease.

A small bundle of tissue located in the middle of her brain, the substantia nigra, simply decided to die. And like thousands suffering from this degenerative disease, she wanted to know why.

If she had committed no sin against her own body’s health, she began to wonder if perhaps she had erred in some other way. In her darker moments, she suspected she was being punished for some moral or spiritual lapse. That mere random chance should pick her out for this indignity was a notion she struggled against. She would rather be guilty than live in a lottery universe. Personal liability, after all, is the price you pay for believing that order rules the world. “Natural” means there has to be a reason, cause-and-effect, a cosmic quid pro quo.

But as the cells continued to die, and the strokes began, her capacity for rational thinking dwindled. With each assault on her brain, what we learned to call my mother’s “confusion” grew. The world became for her a terrifying place. Danger lurked in every corner and under every bed. Gangsters lived in the attic. Buddhists were building heathen temples in the woods behind their home. Wild Indians danced on the front lawn at night.

To humor her, my father, who had already achieved fourscore years and was still recovering from bypass surgery, climbed on the roof to drive off marauding aliens, wedged chairs under doorknobs, and suffered her accusations of his drug trafficking, if not gladly, at least patiently. My attempts to keep him from patrolling the attic and roof top were ignored. “If it keeps her happy …” he said forlornly.

After spending the morning packing up my mother’s belongings from the hospital room and engineering her transfer to Fair Acres, reputed to be the best nursing home in our town, I am sitting with my father on one side of a highly polished conference table reserved for the admission consultation. On the other side sits the staff member who handles the procedure. This meeting will turn out to be the only significant conference our family will have with the staff during the five years my mother will live here.

The woman on the other side of the table leans forward and passes, one at a time, a series of papers for my father and me to sign. To move the process along, she summarizes in a few words the content of each. Neither of us reads the documents. My father is already beginning to flag and is often in tears. He has long ago delegated the decision-making to me.

A few years earlier, both my parents had given me Durable Power of Attorney for Healthcare so that, in the event of their inability to make medical decisions for themselves, I would take on that responsibility. They had also signed “living wills,” sometimes called “directives to physicians.” These documents stipulated in a general way that, should two physicians certify them to be in a “permanent and irreversible condition” from injury or disease, and if “life-sustaining procedures would serve only to artificially postpone” the moment of death, then those procedures should “be withheld or withdrawn,” and my mother and father should be “permitted to die naturally.”

Those directions had seemed pretty clear to me at the time. But now the woman on the other side of the table says as she hands me yet another form, “You need to check off the measures you do not want us to use for your mother.”

I glance at the form. It lists medical interventions in order of decreasing complexity. I do not show this list to my father. Its specifics would undo him.

It almost undoes me. Until I saw this list, most of my understanding of what we have come to call “end of life issues” I’d gleaned from movies—those scenes of the supporting actor lying unconscious, swathed in pristine sheets and hooked to a panel of gently beeping monitors. The document I now hold is uncomfortably specific. It breaks down those “life-sustaining procedures” my mother’s Directive to Physicians had only mentioned generically.

At the top of the list are machines that artificially stimulate the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe. I instantly check those off. The next choices are a bit harder. Feeding tubes stuck directly into the stomach in the event the patient is unable to swallow. Ventilators. Artificial breathing devices.

“Does this mean oxygen tanks?” I’ve seen people in supermarkets hauling around their portable green cylinders. Those people were obviously not in imminent danger of dying. The woman assures me that oxygen tanks are not included in those “breathing devices.”

That marks the end of the easy choices. After that, the list gets down to “life sustaining medications.” Chemotherapy, for instance. Antibiotics. Intravenous drips. Blood transfusion, tracheotomy, intubation. I suddenly don’t know what to do, what I want. What my father wants. What my mother would, in her right mind, want for herself.

I close my eyes and recall her sitting beside me on her front porch two summers ago. She is having a particularly good brain day and is scanning with narrowed eyes the tops of the tall oaks for the mockingbird we can hear but not spot.

“I just pray I don’t lose my mind,” she says. “I think I could bear anything but that.”

Yet that is the very condition that has befallen her. Her worst fear has, in a final irony, defeated the willpower that has seen her through every other disaster of her life.

My mother’s family is famous for its willpower. When I was a toddler, before technology made it possible to keep badly injured or desperately ill people alive, my great-grandmother, a blind and frail octogenarian, had died at home. She simply refused to eat any longer. At 91, my maternal grandfather broke his hip and refused to get up again following successful surgery to repair it. My mother brought him to her house to die, a feat he accomplished in less than two weeks.

But my mother did lose her mind and with it her resolve. The person she had been on that fine spring day we searched the oak branches for the mockingbird would have rejected her current diminished existence. But the person she has become can no longer choose what the earlier version of her self surely would desire.

So, as her designated surrogate, what is my responsibility? What is my right?

I ache for my mother, who hasn’t been left with any understanding of her condition or any choice about how to face it. In the end, I check off only the top items on the list, despite what my mother, on one of her last lucid days, had told me she wanted. Instead, I go by what I believe my father would reasonably agree to, were he not so worn down that I dare not even read the list of choices to him.

On that morning, both my father and I believed that my mother would not live to see another birthday. Nevertheless, time would reveal her body’s resolve to keep itself alive, no matter the condition of her brain. One thing I learned over the course of these years is that the body has a mind of its own. She would make several more trips by ambulance to the local hospital until finally a hospice doctor certified that she had no more than six months of life left in her.

As it turned out, with the extra care provided by hospice my mother lived for almost another year, though for the last few months she could neither see, speak, nor swallow solid food. On the last day, I stood beside her, stroking her arm. I realized she was gone only when the flesh grew cold to my touch.

This question of when and how life ought to end has no easy answer. In fact, it most likely has many answers. Just like the meaning of life. A generic reason for human existence, even the one learned in the Shorter Catechism—to love God and enjoy him forever—doesn’t show us exactly how we are to fulfill our individual destinies. Everyone’s life means something different. And we can’t really know what that meaning is until that life is finished, complete. Sometimes not even then.

I did not want to make life-and-death decisions for my mother. Or for God. I am still haunted by doubts about the decisions I did make. Should I have brought her home rather than admitting her to a nursing home? My father and I visited her daily, he in the morning, I in the afternoon. She disliked Fair Acres in the beginning, but the terrors she suffered at home never assailed her in the nursing home. The nature of her fantasies changed there. When I arrived in the afternoon, she would tell me about the places she had been that day, to church or shopping, and the people she had seen, some of them long dead. She never walked again and could not even maneuver her wheelchair.

Nowadays, thoughts about my own dying run something like this: Okay, so I know I’m going to die some day. And though I’m willing to cooperate with possible cures for most diseases, some are either incurable or the cure at some point becomes worse than the alternative. I have a right, maybe even a duty, to accept the inevitable and refuse more treatment. To my mind, this doesn’t mean active suicide. Just the option to say “No thanks, I’ve had enough. Don’t try to help me any more.”

I pray too that when I come to my own last extremity, that it won’t stretch itself out as long as my mother’s did. I dread that end as much as she, in health, did. Having learned the hard way the catastrophic financial cost of nursing homes, my husband and I bought long-term care insurance. But I have not told my daughters under what conditions I do or do not want to live, when or where they should “pull the plug.” I’m not even sure what I would do should I have to make such decisions for my husband.

We have recently had a flurry of funerals at our church, and the service for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer is becoming particularly well-thumbed. I’ve found that one of its petitions answers my need to be honest with God: Help us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand, to believe and trust in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection to life everlasting. Maybe someday—Judgment Day?—l’ll find out if I did the right thing, made the right decisions. But in the midst of things, I take comfort in the mercy of those words.

Virginia Stem Owens is a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her most recent book, written with David Clinton Owens, is Living Next Door to the Death House (Eerdmans).

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Culture

Review

Russ Breimeier

Christianity TodaySeptember 1, 2005

Sounds like … several of the biggest names in Christian pop and rock, offering songs inspired by the beloved fantasy novel from C.S. Lewis, soon to become a major motion picture.

Music Inspired By: The Chronicles of Narnia – The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe

NARDIA

September 2, 2024

At a glance … the artists do not disappoint musically, offering songs in step with their styles and best-known material, but half of the contributors fail to specifically evoke the book/film that supposedly inspired them.

Track Listing

Waiting for the World to Fall—Jars of Clay
Remembering You—Steven Curtis Chapman
Open Up Your Eyes—Jeremy Camp
Hero—Bethany Dillon
Stronger—Delirious?
Lion—Rebecca St. James
New World—tobyMac
I Will Believe—Nichole Nordeman
Turkish Delight—David Crowder Band
More Than It Seems—Kutless
You’re the One—Chris Tomlin

Remember when movies typically generated soundtrack albums, either the original score or a collection of songs featured in the film? Nowadays “inspired by” albums seem more the norm, offering songs thematically related to the film, though not necessarily in it. And since this particular film doesn’t even release until December 2005, it generally means the contributing artists wrote and recorded their material several months in advance without having seen the final production. But the Christian music industry is even keener on the concept of albums inspired by best-selling novels, and this particular book is imaginative and beloved enough to inspire any songwriter.

So while Music Inspired by The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe certainly looks like a movie soundtrack, it’s really a collection of songs inspired by the C.S. Lewis classic, designed to market the much-anticipated film adaptation to Christian audiences. Emphasis on the word “market,” but that shouldn’t automatically deem an album as “bad.” Look at this project as a good excuse to release an album of all-new material from 11 of Christian music’s most popular recording artists—and truth be told, there isn’t a bad track on it.

However, the project could fall short depending on your definition of “inspired by.” If this album was a class assignment in which students were asked to write songs (or poems) inspired by a given book, all 11 would certainly pass. But half the class would lose points for failing to accurately follow the assignment, assuming the expectation is for the work to clearly reflect the themes or imagery of the novel. Though not inappropriate, you wouldn’t try to represent Romeo & Juliet with “My Heart Will Go On” or “I Will Always Love You,” right?

Similarly, six of the tracks handle the source material a little too broadly. Jars of Clay‘s “Waiting for the World to Fall” is a fine return to the melodic pop/rock of their Eleventh Hour album, though it’s really a song about wonder, discovery, and the pursuit of meaning—it could be about Narnia, but it could also be about a lot of things. The same is true with “Remembering You,” another soaring, string-drenched pop anthem from Steven Curtis Chapman that stacks up to similar hits from his most recent albums. Sure, one could generally interpret it as the Pevensie children reminiscing over Narnia, but the song more naturally characterizes itself as a “God manifested in nature” piece.

Two songs were written with the character Edmund’s misguided perspective in mind, but neither is specific enough. It’s still nice to hear Jeremy Camp write beyond his usual vertical focus in “Open Up Your Eyes,” and while Chris Tomlin‘s “You’re the One” is essentially another catchy worship song from him, he delivers it with a more rocking sound than he’s known for. Bright and catchy “Hero” is Bethany Dillon‘s second Narnia song after “New” on her Imagination album, and though applicable to the Christ-like Aslan, the lyrics break character with specific reference to God. And “Stronger” is a wonderful Brit-pop worship ballad from Delirious, on par with their other songs, but what exactly does it have to do with the story?

Hard as it might be to write about Narnia, five artists remain true to the spirit of the book. Rebecca St. James offers a love song to Jesus in the guise of “Lion,” yet the dark Euro pop richly plays into the mystery and duality of Aslan/Jesus with more poetic lyricism than expected from this artist: “Feels like I’m living in the lion’s mouth, but the lion is an angel.” Nichole Nordeman‘s “I Will Believe” presents alternative pop stronger than most of her Brave album, using the differing qualities of the Pevensie children as examples of hope amidst adversity. “New World” is the rapcore rocker you’d expect from tobyMac, deftly intertwining faith and fantasy with clear references to the book. Kutless does similar with their well-produced rock anthem, “More Than It Seems.” But the prize for most inventive offering goes to David Crowder Band‘s “Turkish Delight,” a quirky disco number about sinful temptation that cleverly captures a key scene in the book—exactly what this collection needs more of.

The album is nevertheless enjoyable throughout, and despite the variety of producers, Chris Lord-Alge keeps it consistent with top-notch sound mixing. Fans of any of the contributing artists will not be disappointed by the music—it’s all in step with successful past material in every case. But there was a missed opportunity here to explore new musical territory, expressing key themes pertaining to Lewis’s book with specific references to the story, or at least simply evoking the fanciful imagery. Some of the artists deliver, but too bad more didn’t step up to the challenge of writing outside their comfort zone. In short, the album is safe … but it’s also good.

- More fromRuss Breimeier

Culture

Review

Russ Breimeier

Christianity TodaySeptember 1, 2005

Sounds like … quiet and gentle acoustic pop/folk in the same family as Dan Fogelberg, Wayne Kirkpatrick, Michael Card, John Michael Talbot, Paul McCartney, and James Taylor

At a glance … though low-key and not particularly compelling in its content, the soothing sounds and texts of Solace may well be a comfort to the suffering, or those simply looking for some quietly inspirational music

Track Listing

Psalm 90
God Our Protector
Remember Me
Burning Ember
Shepherd of Life
How Long
Dark Night of the Soul
Moon Over Birkenau
Ever Present Need
Wings of an Eagle
Hear Our Prayer
Deep Calls to Deep
For the Journey
Hymn Medley

Although the latest album from Canadian singer/songwriter Steve Bell compiles songs from the albums he’s released over his fourteen-year career, it is most certainly not intended as a greatest hits anthology. Instead, it comes in response to a letter from a fan and friend dying of cancer, suggesting that Bell release a collection of his most peaceful and comforting songs for others coping with suffering and death. Turns out he wasn’t the only fan who found consolation in the music either.

Thus Bell’s commitment to release Solace—For Seasons of Suffering, an album intended for people in need of palliative care for the last stages of their life. Since Bell’s ailing friend submitted a recommended track listing, the songs all come from previously released albums dating back to 1989, though five of the most dated sounding tracks are newly recorded. It’s a collection of the veteran artist’s most softly acoustic tracks, demonstrating strong musicianship all around and Bell’s gentle tenor vocal, all reminiscent of Dan Fogelberg, Wayne Kirkpatrick, Michael Card, and John Michael Talbot.

Among the highlights of the collection is “Shepherd of Life,” a bluesy folk/country take on Psalm 23, and “How Long,” which sets Psalm 13 to a bouncy folk/country feel reminiscent of Paul McCartney covering Chet Atkins. Both “Dark Night of the Soul” and “Ever Present Need” feature gorgeous melodies and are based on thoughtful poems by St. John of the Cross and St. Francis of Assisi, respectively. One of Bell’s more poetic originals is “Burning Ember,” which offers a striking metaphor for the source of our faith: “Burning ember, I remember love’s first light in me/I was cold then like a stone when I saw your flickering/Oh what beauty as you draw near me, I could scarcely speak/Somehow I knew I would be new in your glowing.”

That said, while the album is indeed beautifully done, it’s not necessarily artfully compelling or uniquely comforting. A few songs, like “Wings of an Eagle,” feel overlong and repetitive, and the album can be a bit tiresome two-thirds of the way through. Individually, most all of these are good songs; collectively, it can be a bit of a bore. Then again, since I’m not yet (to my knowledge) in the last stages of my life, I’m not exactly the intended audience for this album. Since it’s targeted to the sick and the infirmed, sonic consistency is actually the intent, not variation or eclecticism.

Still, is there really anything about Solace that’s uniquely comforting to listeners? Musically, it’s straightforward folk/pop. A number of other Christian artists are doing it just as well, and while instrumental tracks like “Moon Over Birkenau” and “Hymn Medley” are pretty, they aren’t necessarily any more soothing than Phil Keaggy, George Winston, or Jim Brickman. Lyrically, half of the album comes directly from the Psalms, which have also been mined by artists like Shane & Shane and the recent The Message: Psalms compilation to equally comforting effect. It makes me admire an album like Andrew Peterson‘s The Far Country all the more for exploring the subject of death and heaven with comforting and creative songwriting.

Some will find Solace comforting, and others will prefer a good hymns album, or perhaps something less conventional. It still comes down to what you think of Bell’s music at its most tranquil and innocuous. But what does set Solace apart from other quietly tempered albums is its inspiration and intent—and that’s reflected in a bonus CD that’s included in the package. That disc is a sample of an hour-long audio magazine that Bell used to host called Listening In, similar in style to some of the programs on NPR. This particular issue featured several interviews and reflections pertaining to suffering and loss in relation to God’s will, and it generated a strong response among listeners. Conversational and reflective in tone with a few songs sprinkled in between, it’s a solid companion to the other disc, together making a thoughtful devotional and even a useful pastoral resource.

Though I wouldn’t recommend Solace as an introduction to the music of this gifted and underrated songwriter, it’s all in all a better than average album of inspirational music created with musical excellence and a genuine heart to serve the suffering.

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