Fiction, Reviews

‘Foundational Laminate,’ by Jay Maynard

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This book was promoted on Instapundit. I suppose it must have qualified because of certain libertarian elements in the story. Personally, although I finished Jay Maynard’s Foundational Laminate, I’m a little ashamed of myself for doing so.

We begin with Alex Sullivan, a young man who’s been arrested and convicted of punching out a cop during a street demonstration. He got a pretty good deal – a couple weeks of jail time, plus probation – on the condition that he undergo therapy at the Laminatrix Mental hospital in rural Missouri. This hospital’s novel approach is to encase the patient (as well as the therapist) in a latex suit, which is then encased in a crystal sphere. The two, each in their suit and sphere, then engage in intense conversation over a period of weeks – through telepathy – as the patient is helped to re-process their old traumas, gaining perspective and clarity.

How is this possible? Through magic. The hospital is run by a sorceress whose legal name is “The Laminatrix.” She invented the latex suits, which fully support all physical needs and remove waste. Full-time employees at the hospital are permanently sealed in their suits, voluntarily becoming fully committed, lifetime caregivers.

The story then continues, telling how Alex himself decides to become a caregiver, surrendering his face (all suit-wearers are masked) and his name (he becomes Red 24, after the color his suit and his hiring sequence). We follow as he eventually encounters a patient who, unwittingly, will round out his personal story. And we also follow as the state of Missouri discovers, to its horror, that there’s an institution here they haven’t figured out a way to regulate, so they diligently try to find a way to get it on a legal leash.

First, in fairness, I should state that Foundational Laminate is pretty well written. The prose was professional, the grammar and punctuation good – something fairly rare these days. Characterization was all right – though Maynard is one of those annoying authors who avoids almost all description of characters.

What I did not like was, first of all, that we’re dealing with a false gospel here. It’s the Freudian belief that all our problems come from unconscious traumas, and that if those are solved, we’ll become fully virtuous. I believe our faults go much deeper than that, and that a man without neuroses may still be a wicked man. Therapy has its place, but we have deeper problems.

Secondly, the suits creeped me out. We’re talking about a latex suit with a masked helmet. A life without faces and names is presented here as in some way superior. I like seeing people’s faces. I like names better than numbers, too. (Call me old-fashioned.) Also, the suit-wearers cannot procreate.

What’s more, we’re told that these suits are genuinely skin-tight – so tight as to show all details of the body. More like body paint than a wet suit. The suit wearers, even as they lose their faces, shed all sense of bodily shame. Not only that, but much is made of the tubes that the suits magically insert into all the body’s orifices. This struck me as a little perverse.

In other words, Foundational Laminate reads a lot like a sex fantasy in which a latex fetishist imagines saving the world through his kink.

That may be unfair. But it looked that way to me.

I can’t recommend Foundational Laminate.

Music, Poetry

Sunday Singing: All Flesh is Grass

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Today’s hymn is another one William Cowper (1731-1800) that you won’t find in your hymnal. In fact, I don’t have a tune for it. I found it in The Churchman’s Treasury of Song from 1907. It’s a portion of his larger work The Task, published in 1794. In The Churchman’s Treasury of Song, it’s given as a devotional hymn for the third week after Easter.

The Poetry Foundation described Cowper as “the foremost poet of the generation between Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth. For several decades, he had probably the largest readership of any English poet. From 1782, when his first major volume appeared, to 1837, the year in which Robert Southey completed the monumental Life and Works of Cowper, more than 100 editions of his poems were published in Britain and almost 50 in America.”

This hymn focuses on mortality and ultimate truth.

“I, I am he who comforts you;
who are you that you are afraid of dman who dies,
of the son of man who is made like grass,
and have forgotten the Lord, your Maker,
who stretched out the heavens
and glaid the foundations of the earth . . .” (Isaiah 51:12-13 ESV)

All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades
Like the fair flower dishevell’d in the wind;
Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream.
The man we celebrate must find a tomb,
And we that worship him ignoble graves.
Nothing is proof against the general curse
Of vanity, that seizes all below.
The only amaranthine flower on earth
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.
But what is truth? ‘Twas Pilate’s question put
To Truth itself, that deign’d him no reply.
And wherefore? will not God impart his light
To them that ask it?—Freely—’tis his joy,
His glory, and his nature to impart.
But to the proud, uncandid, insincere,
Or negligent inquirer, not a spark.
What’s that which brings contempt upon a book,
And him who writes it, though the style be neat,
The method clear, and argument exact?
That makes a minister in holy things
The joy of many and the dread of more,
His name a theme for praise and for reproach?—
That, while it gives us worth in God’s account,
Depreciates and undoes us in our own?
What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy,
That learning is too proud to gather up;
But which the poor, and the despised of all,
Seek and obtain, and often find unsought?
Tell me—and I will tell thee what is truth.

Reading, Uncategorized, Writing

‘Troll Valley’ and Dalebu Jonsson

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Finished reading Chapter 19 of Troll Valley today for the audiobook iteration. Chapter 19 was a bear. It took three days (one-hour sessions) to record, edit, and master the whole thing. I was a little fuzzy on the concept of chapter length back when I wrote the book, and I let that one get out the barn door and off across the pastures into the corn. I start it with Chris, our hero, in the fictional town of Tuscany, Colorado, getting a visit from his brother Fred. Then Fred takes him to the ghost town where their father has settled down for a hermit’s life, and they have quite a lengthy reunion, getting to know each other better than they ever did back home in Minnesota, and revealing some secrets. Then Fred, who’s now an outlaw, has a confrontation with a lawman, after which he must go on the run again. Then Chris says goodbye to his father, has a couple supernatural experiences that change his personality, and gets in a fight in a brothel, in which he is injured. After recovering from his wounds, he heads home to Epsom.

If I were writing it today, I’d make that at least two chapters. Possibly three. But in spite of that, I have to admit that – contrary to my expectations – I think Troll Valley isn’t a bad book at all. I was pretty young when I wrote it, and I’m sure I’m a better artist now, but it’s still a good book. There’s stuff in there I’d completely forgotten about, and it mostly works. If somebody else had written it, and I were reading it for review, I think I’d recommend it.

At one point, when the Anderson boys are gathered with their father, they sing the song posted above, a Norwegian folk song called Dalebu Jonsson. It’s about a man who kidnaps a princess, then singlehandedly fights off 7,000 warriors her father sends to rescue her. Finally the king is so impressed that he agrees to let him marry her – “You can have little Kjersti; you are worthy of her.” (Or words to that effect.)

I know the song from a recording by a male Norwegian group called “Vandrerne,” which no longer exists. They did it in a very rousing style, sort of like an Irish drinking song in spirit. When I got to the part of the text where I include the first verse, in Norwegian, my full intention was to just read the words straight. But as I was reading, I found myself sliding into music, so I ended up singing it. I translated that verse, “Oh, Dalebu’s love was a beautiful maid; he won her with steel and sharp iron blade.” (Which I think is a jolly translation; not literal, but it nails the spirit of the thing.)

The arrangement embedded above is nothing at all like the song as I know it, but I couldn’t find a better one and I thought somebody might be interested.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightshade,’ by Michael Connelly

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Catalina Island must be a nice place. Mystery writers seem to like to set stories there, and it sounds like a beautiful, laid-back community, where people tool around in golf carts and the weather is almost always nice.

Michael Connelly has created a new detective character and set him down on Catalina in his latest novel, Nightshade. “Stilwell” (no first name given) works for Los Angeles County, and used to operate in LA itself. But a beef with another detective ended with Stilwell drawing the short straw and getting exiled to the island. Only he was surprised to discover that he quite likes it there. He’s starting to feel at home, and has a new girlfriend.

Then one morning a yacht maintenance man reports what seems to be a body in a garbage bag on the harbor bottom, weighed down with an anchor. Stilwell dives down to check it personally, and finds it to be a woman – with a distinctive purple streak in her dark hair.

The woman proves to have been a server at an elite local fishing club, one who has a reputation as a gold digger. No matter – for Stilwell (as for Harry Bosch), a murder is a murder. Everybody matters, or nobody matters.

The trail will lead to the highest levels of California society, and to the lowest depths of civic corruption. It will bring him into conflict with his colleagues and superiors. Before he’s done, Stilwell will risk losing, not only his career, but the life of someone close to him.

I must admit I didn’t like Nightshade as much as I had hoped I would. Stilwell is no Harry Bosch. To me, he was kind of one-dimensional, with only three clear character traits – he is passionate about solving murders, he cares about his girlfriend, and he thinks he’s always right. This last trait seems most prominent – when Stilwell gets orders that are inconsistent with his detective instincts, he just ignores them. In the world of the story, he’s usually justified – but in the real world, there are usually reasons for the rules. And cops who make their own rules tend to go very wrong.

But the book was all right. It moved right along, and the writing was good, as you’d expect from Connelly. The usual cautions for language and mature themes apply.

Religion, Uncategorized

Spittoons, and my day job, plus a heresy at no extra charge

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In my ongoing project of audiobooking Troll Valley this morning (I’m about 80% through it now), I came on a mention of a spittoon, and it got me thinking…

But first, let me tell you about my day job. I’ve already declared that I won’t describe exactly what I’m doing (temporarily), but let me speak in general terms.

Imagine you’re a teacher. In Middle School, say. (The horror! The horror!)

And imagine you’re grading English essays. (I suppose some of you may have experienced this trauma in real life.)

And imagine (implausible as it may sound) that those essays aren’t very good. That the same mistakes are made over and over. You’re not even getting original mistakes.

And imagine the pile of essays is about ten feet high. And it never seems to diminish.

That’s what my temporary, online job is like.

Thank you. Now that’s off my chest.

So, there was a brief appearance by a spittoon in today’s chapter of Troll Valley. And that reminded me of something.

A while back, a pastor I know, who at one time served my home congregation, asked me, “Do you remember anything about spittoons in the back of Hauge Church? Somebody told me they used to have spittoons back there. The ladies let them have them, just in that section, but the men who used them had to clean them out themselves.”

And it seemed to ring a bell (no doubt a brass bell). This would be part of my very earliest memories – and with memories that old, I’ve learned that I’m highly suggestible. So I’m not at all sure here. But I have an idea I may have seen the spittoons back there, in the rear alcove of our church, next to the entryway, where my family always sat when I was little. There were warm air registers in the floor, I’m pretty sure, and I think I recall a spittoon sitting on top of one. I may have asked about it when they disappeared, too.

Or maybe not.

We Haugean Lutherans had a weird (I was tempted to say “fraught,” but I hate the way people use that word these days) relationship with tobacco in the old days. I remember discussing sin with my saintly grandmother one day, confidently asserting that drinking and smoking were both sins, but drinking was worse.

A pastor I knew years ago always used to link Haugeans to cigars. Somebody had told him that all the Haugeans back home had smoked big cigars, and that was all he knew about us, or cared to know. (I suppose it had something to do with the prosperity of some of the Haugean merchants back in Norway.)

Dad recalled how his grandfather was forced, by the two unmarried daughters who kept house for him in his old age, to always go out on the porch to smoke his pipe. (I incorporated this into Troll Valley.) Dad felt that was demeaning to the old man.

I saw a short video recently – think it was by Rory Sutherland – in which he was asked what secret, heretical views he held. And he said he thought tobacco was good for you, and will make a social comeback in time.

I’d almost welcome it. I know, there are lots of people who find the smell revolting, and some even get sick from it.

But I grew up in a world of ubiquitous tobacco smoke. I always kind of liked the smell, myself.

And it is an appetite suppressant. We were all a lot thinner back when we were lighting up rather than munching on chips all the time.

I think my rooting in secret for tobacco, though, mostly rises from my instinctive dislike for everything that’s fashionable.

Just don’t chew it. Spittoons are nasty.

Reviews

Film review: ‘The Accountant 2,’ plus some whining

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I saw The Accountant 2, on Amazon Prime, and my purposes tonight is to write about that.

But first, a little about my aches and pains. Because I’m old, dadgummit, and I find the spectacle of my personal deterioration endlessly fascinating.

And since I’m such a transcendent wordsmith, it must surely fascinate you, too.

What I mean to say is, yesterday I was moving around in considerable pain. The pain was in my lower back. I felt like I’d fallen and bruised it (I hadn’t), or I’d strained a muscle (not to my knowledge), or I’d overworked myself lifting and carrying heavy things (ha ha ha).

I had done none of those. Sunday was a quiet day for me, and I’d spent it mostly reclining on my couch or (for a touch of variety) on my bed.

The point is, I did nothing.

And the following day I felt like Sisyphus on one of his bad mornings.

To put it another way – I am now at a point in my life where I can hurt myself by doing nothing at all.

And behold, a great fear came upon me, yesterday. “This affliction befell me for no reason, in the manner made popular by Job the patriarch. So if it came from nothing, maybe there’s no way to get rid of it, either. Maybe this is my new normal. I’m old. Anything can happen!”

But I’m better today. Stiff, but I can walk sort of normally, and I went to the gym. Which is a great relief to me, as well as to all my legions of admirers.

Just needed to get that off my chest.

Anyway, The Accountant 2.

I liked the first Accountant movie very much. I seem to respond well to any story about autistic characters, which leads me to suspect I’m probably on the spectrum myself.

But not like Christian Wolff, our hero (Ben Affleck) is. Christian can do the most complex math in his head. He lives a strictly regimented life, dwelling in a surgically clean and neat Airstream trailer (though he’s fabulously rich), eating precisely the same foods every day, wearing precisely the same clothing. He craves order and peace, but happens to be a deadly martial artist. (Just another way of ordering chaos.)

He makes his living doing the books for various illegal enterprises – criminal gangs, drug smugglers. He seems to have no conscience about such matters, but does feel strong bonds of loyalty to old friends, and to his brother Braxton – though he never calls him and does not miss him in his absence.

As the movie starts, an old friend of Christian’s is murdered, in an incident involving a mysterious female assassin, Anaïs. He is called in by Marybeth Medina, director of the FBI division FinCEN, to help her find the murderers. Christian in his turn calls on his brother Braxton, who’s a professional assassin. We get to observe a lot of amusing sibling dynamics as these two strange men revert to childhood patterns. Braxton, who is relatively “normal” (for a killer), is frustrated by his brother, but also protective of him.

The partnership with Marybeth has to be ill-fated – being a good Fed, she has lines she won’t cross in an investigation. Christian isn’t even aware of such lines. They then proceed on separate paths, until they reconverge in a confrontation with vicious human traffickers and the mysterious Anaïs, who carries a dangerous secret.

I enjoyed The Accountant 2 fully as much as the first film. (Ben Affleck was born to play an autistic character.) But I have ambivalent feelings about the story, from a moral point of view. Here we have a character who seems to possess no moral sense – only a personal sense of order. And we pair him with another character (his brother) who’s almost equally deadly and has suppressed his conscience. Yet both are intensely sympathetic and relatable – I suspect we’re all growing a little autistic in the modern world, which is what makes these movies so compelling.

Interestingly, there’s a scene in The Accountant 2 that mirrors one of the most memorable scenes in Gregg Hurwitz’s latest Orphan X novel, Nemesis. Both scenes involve an autistic person getting into Country line dancing, and finding themselves unexpectedly in happy synch with other humans. Both scenes work very well, though they come out differently.

So, in conclusion, I’m not sure what to make of The Accountant 2 in moral terms, but I sure had a good time with it. Especially recommended for the socially awkward. Cautions, needless to say, for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Small Favor,’ by Jim Butcher

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I kept wondering, as I read Jim Butcher’s Small Favor, the 10th volume in his Harry Dresden urban fantasy series, why I don’t like these books more. I’d read one before, and wasn’t over the moon about it. But I watched the short-lived cable series loosely based on the books, and found that amusing, so when a deal came up, I figured I’d try another one. Alas, no joy. It just didn’t work for me. And yet everything’s there – good writing, vivid characters, plenty of action, and even a palpable penumbra of Christianity (fairly explicit in this book).

In Small Favor, Chicago wizard Harry Dresden gets a call from his female cop friend Murphy, who asks him to consult on yet another bizarre crime. This time the front has been knocked off a downtown building, presumably by supernatural means. Harry soon realizes that the building had contained a magical safe room – a place for a wizard to hide from spells and powers – yet some unimaginable force has pried the safe room open. Its occupant, Chicago gangster and magical hanger-on “Gentleman” Johnnie Marcone, has vanished.

This constitutes a crisis worthy of a meeting of the Wizard’s Council, of which Harry is a member. Action must be taken. The Enemy here is sinister enough that Harry is called on to rescue Marcone. For help he turns to his friend Michael, a member of the Knights of the Cross.

As an added complication, Harry has offended some powerful Faeries, who send a weird iteration of the Three Billygoats Gruff after him – no laughing matter.

There’s nothing wrong with the Harry Dresden books. I recognized, even as I read, that I was dealing with quality material. And yet, somehow, I couldn’t get into it.

First of all, I guess wizardry just doesn’t appeal to me. Gandalf’s all right, because he’s essentially an angel and does most of his wonders through his words alone. But more than that, pentagrams and sigils and spells, those things just creep me out.

Also, the level of action was Tom Cruise movie high. Harry caromed from one deadly peril to another, each more dire than the last, with only a few pages in between for rest and character development.

That kind of story just wears this old man out. I like a more sedate pace.

But your mileage is very likely to vary. These books are highly popular, and if you like this sort of thing I think you’ll like Small Favors a lot.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Muus vs. Muus,’ by Bodil Stenseth

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It must have been the biggest news story to ever come out of the community where I grew up. Perhaps it says something about our spirit of reconciliation that I never heard about it until I was an adult.

A group of my surviving high school class members gathered for an informal reunion back in (I think) 2010. We were at the home of one of my classmates, in the township of Holden, just north of town. I was standing in the yard, looking over at the church a little to the east, and a friend came up beside me and said, “You know there was a big scandal with the pastor in that church, back in pioneer days.”

“B. J. Muus?” I asked. I knew that Pastor Muus, the founder of St. Olaf College, had been the original pastor there.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something about his wife suing him for divorce.”

Later on, I was told that the house where we were meeting that evening had been the home of the local doctor, who’d been accused of having an affair with Mrs. Muus.

After that, I started reading up on the story, which turned out to have been a big deal back in 1880. But I didn’t have the full story until I read Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America, by Bodil Stenseth. I had had the impression that adultery was at the center of the scandal, but the real bone of contention turned out to be the one that remains the most common cause of marriage breakups today – money.

Bernt Julius Muus (pronounced “Moose”) and Oline Pind were not your average Norwegian immigrants. They did not come to America because of hard economic necessity; they came from privileged families. He felt called to minister to Norwegian Americans in the new country, and Oline felt called to be his helpmate.

They settled on the virgin prairie of Goodhue County, Minnesota, in the tiny settlement of Holden. Bernt, a hard man and a preacher of fiery sermons, worked tirelessly, not only to build his own congregation, but to plant churches all over the upper Midwest. In time he rose to be the first president of the Minnesota District of the conservative Norwegian Synod. Oline worked hard too, keeping the house, raising their children, filling in for her husband in practical matters of the congregation during his frequent absences.

Then, in 1879, she dropped a bombshell. She sued her husband for the money she had inherited from her father, which he had taken into his possession under Norwegian law. But they were in the U.S. now (though both Oline and Bernt remained Norwegian citizens) and she felt she should be able to control her own money as U.S. law permitted.

The matter might not have become a cause célèbre, though, if a document called “the Complaint” hadn’t been appended to the legal text. This document accused Pastor Muus of mental cruelty, neglect, and a stingy refusal to spend money on basic household necessities, to the point of damaging her and their children’s health.

Critics of the Norwegian Synod found this story irresistible. My people, the pietist Haugeans, who considered the Norwegian Synod papist and aristocratic (and were much more open to feminism than the Synod men), saw Bernt Muus as a power-hungry ecclesiastical tyrant. The men of the Lutheran Free Church, whose successors I worked for many years, supported Mrs. Muus after the divorce was finalized. Norwegian-American freethinkers, like Marcus Thrane whose comic opera “Holden” was performed in Chicago, used the case to attack orthodox Christianity itself. And nativist Americans were shocked by the bizarre goings on in an immigrant community which had so far made little effort to assimilate.

I was impressed with Muus vs. Muus. The story was well-told, and the translation very good. I expected a lot of heavy-handed feminist theory, but in fact (though the author’s sympathies are hardly concealed), the book does a pretty good job of being even-handed. I was impressed with the way the Holden congregation – within the strictures of its church rules, which did not allow a woman to address the congregation – went out of its way in many cases to be fair to Mrs. Muus.

I was also interested to see a lot of last names, like Finseth, Langemo, and Huset, that I knew well during my childhood in the area.

The book was marred by a mandatory, hypocritical land acknowledgement embedded in the editor’s afterword. But all in all, I was highly impressed by Muus vs. Muus. I recommend it for that (small, I’ll admit) audience interested in Norwegian-American history, especially church history.

Religion

What is the Word?

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Picture credit: aaronburden. Unsplash license.

Here’s a quotation that shows up on my Basefook feed from time to time:

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, which is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for curiosity or controversy) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

[From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III, p. 246.]

Of course the person who posts this snippet feels that they’ve laid down a trump card – look here, you Bible-thumper! Even your hero C. S. Lewis didn’t think the Bible was the Word of God! What do you say to that?

All right, let’s talk about it.

First of all, I already knew Lewis wasn’t an inerrantist. This is not news. As I’ve often said, when a man is ten feet away from you, it makes all the difference in the world whether he’s walking toward you or away from you. Ten feet is almost here for the first, almost gone for the second. I think Lewis was walking toward me (us). That’s my subjective opinion, but a pretty well-informed one.

And of course, in an important sense, Lewis is entirely right. Christ is and always has been the uncreated Word of God, a Person of the Trinity: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1, ESV)

But I don’t think Lewis would have ever claimed that Christ was God’s Word in an exclusionary sense – that God could not also speak words that weren’t the Son. I’m pretty sure Lewis accepted that God had spoken all kinds of words – to the prophets, to visionaries, to the evangelists and apostles. I don’t think he’d have denied that the canon of Scripture is the inspired Word of God, while being distinct from the Person of Christ.

The question I always ask when I read this passage is, “Who is this Christ that you think you can find anywhere else than in the Bible?” If you quote the Lewis passage to argue that you have a Christ of your own who’s a little different than the one the Bible shows us, I think, frankly, that you’re worshiping yourself. And I suspect Lewis would agree.

If you spend time in the Bible, does it bring you closer to Christ, or further away? What better place is there to draw near to Him?

Now, Lewis was a sacramentalist (as I am, being a Lutheran). We believe that Christ is especially present in Holy Communion – that He comes to us in a physical way in and under the bread and wine. So I’ll stipulate to that as a place where we meet Him truly.

And Christ Himself emphasizes that we can also meet him in our neighbor – especially our neighbor who’s poor and sick and suffering. “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

So that’s most certainly true as well.

But where do I learn these things?

I learn them from Scripture.

It is my experience, and my observation, that any “Christ” that people talk about, who is separate from the Christ of Scripture, does not come from God.

Authors, Fiction

Another forgotten bestseller: Harold Bell Wright

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Well, I’m still moving slowly through the book I’m reading, my time monopolized by work, so I’ll follow up on last night’s post about Rose O’Neill with the story of another famous creative American who’s almost entirely forgotten today – and who also hung around Branson, Missouri. In fact it was this guy, Harold Bell Wright, who made Branson a center of tourism. Not intentionally.

Harold Bell Wright grew up in difficult circumstances, losing his parents at 11, and ended up in Ohio, working at various jobs. He studied for the ministry, and became a pastor in the non-denominational, non-creedal Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), taking a call in Pierce City, Missouri. He later served churches in Kansas and California.

He wrote a serialized story in 1902 that got printed, though he hated it, in a denominational magazine. His parishioners loved it, however, and so it was published as a book. His second novel was his breakthrough. The Shepherd of the Hills, set in the Branson, MO area, which he’d visited for his health, was published in 1907. It became a blockbuster bestseller – the first American novel to ever earn a million bucks. It has since been filmed four times, most notably with John Wayne starring in 1941. Other novels of his have also been turned into movies, notably The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) with Ronald Coleman and Gary Cooper.

But today, chances are you’ve never heard of the man or his books. The reason for that is simple – he wasn’t a very good writer. (Owen Wister called one of his novels “a mess of mildewed pap.”)

Now as it happened, I acquired a copy of Shepherd of the Hills on my trip with my parents to Branson long ago, and I read it. As I recall, I found it entertaining and even inspirational, though a little stiff, as old books tend to be. However, it should be noted that my critical sense in those days was almost nonexistent. I aspired to be a writer, but I definitely wasn’t ready, because I couldn’t tell good writing from bad.

The Shepherd of the Hills is a highly moral tale. It tells a complicated story of mountain people who hold long-time grudges, which they are prepared to settle with blood until their hearts are softened by the spirit of forgiveness. In forgiveness they find peace.

Which is nice, as far as it goes. But it’s not a Christian tale in the sense of talking about Jesus or grace. It is assumed that the blessings of forgiveness flow from the world of the spirit in some sense, but it’s a matter (if I remember correctly) of people achieving their true moral stature rather than of their dying and rising again in Christ.

Wright’s church body was and is a pretty tolerant one in terms of doctrine, but still Wright quit the ministry (to make a much better living as a writer), declaring most congregational life hypocritical. His emphasis was on good works. That was well suited to the rising culture of America at the turn of the 20th Century – an emphasis on progress and self-help, with a sprinkling of Christianity on top, to taste.

I’ve seen the John Wayne movie of The Shepherd of the Hills. Its plot is radically altered and simplified from the book (it would pretty much have to be). It amused me that the film climaxed with John Wayne in a shootout – I guess the writers couldn’t resist that, though it’s not at all in the spirit of the book.

But, who cares? It’s not like the original material was a work of priceless art. Harold Bell Wright toiled in his time, and pleased most of his neighbors, and made a pile of money. His legacy is not his forgotten book, but the tourist mecca of Branson, Missouri, which he fathered unintentionally.

I wonder if he ever hung out with Rose O’Neill in Branson.