"Resurrection Fiction" and "Believing Stevens"
“Resurrection Fiction”
During radiation treatments, I was waking up every hour at night and attempting to urinate. I’d seen advertisements for erectile dysfunction remedies. ED seemed a minor ailment compared with urinary dysfunction, feeling the urge to urinate but unable to do more than dribble a few drops. Your physician assures you that you will not die from this apparent blockage, but it seems to you that you die a little with each failure. I’ll spare you further details but will say that during those sleepless hours—a night stretched out like a week--I needed something to read, imaginative worlds not Otherworld.
In half a coincidence, I picked up from the library new bookshelf two novels about resurrection right here on Thisworld. “Half” because I’d read reviews of Lorrie Moore’s death-defying I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, the other half because I’d read about the author, Elliot Ackerman, who had received the Purple Heart. Ackerman’s Halcyon is counter-factual fiction: Gore won the 2000 election and supported an experimental program that brought back to life dead citizens, one of whom, Robert Ableson, is the central figure of the novel, a Gatsby to Ackerman’s Nick Carraway-like narrator, the historian Martin Neumann. Even less believable (but much better written) than the sci-fi of Halcyon is Moore’s Southern Gothic story of her narrator’s transporting his lover—back from her suicide and burial but still decaying—to a burial ground in Tennessee.
Some years ago, I published an essay about Zombie fiction: bad books or bad passages coming back to haunt—be remembered by and embarrass--their authors. I was being figurative. The literal resurrections in the novels by Ackerman and Moore sent me further out into the sleepless figurative: all books are potential resurrection stories. The most influential, of course, is the New Testament: narratives about a resurrection that are still read millennia after the authors’ deaths. More modestly is any book read after its author’s death. The book, if not the author, is brought back to life. The past speaks to the present, lives in the reader’s mind. Resurrected by enough readers through the ages, the book—and maybe now the author—are termed immortal.
The narrator of Halcyon is a Civil War historian attempting to revive the reputation of another historian, the now dead Shelby Foote. The historian is also involved in a controversy about the removal of a Confederate monument. Intercut with the main travel narrative of Homeless are letters written by a Southern woman who survived the War and, it appears, killed John Wilkes Booth--who either escaped the burning barn or effected another resurrection. These historical components literalize within the novels the past surviving into the present and support my notion that books can be resurrection devices like monuments and letters. Moore’s narrator generalizes the motive for the past’s persistence: “not one person he ever saw depicted from the past looked happy. They seemed to gaze out of their pictures with a deep wish for time travel and resurrection.”
Although the authors suggest the possible detriments of bodily resurrection, I think that—perhaps not unconsciously—they have long-term hopes for their books. Moore’s title is enigmatic. Perhaps the “I” in the title is the author who thinks of her book as her home. “Halcyon” is the name of the grand home to which Ableson returns. After his disappearance, it burns and is rebuilt. When the authors are dead, their books may find homes in the future—on the shelves or in the minds of readers to come.
These novels make me wonder if I’ve been doing resurrection work all along with my run of five novels about Michael Keever. Once I realized I was in a way competing with Updike’s four-book sequence about his athlete Rabbit, did I keep bringing back Keever to create a similarly ambitious project that might gain respect, if not in the present then from future critics and readers? The Passing series has one more book than the Gospels. Updike killed off Rabbit. I have kept Keever alive but thinking about committing suicide. A critic in 2124 can announce that “Keever lives,” in my fictions, in the mind of the critic and his or her readers. Too late for any royalties for the dead author, but perhaps this kind of possible resurrection could give a mortal writer some solace in a dark time.
Not Keever. In Passing Away, Keever’s terminally ill brother, Pat, worries that no one will remember his service as a policeman and believes that Michael will achieve some kind of immortality with his books. Michael disagrees: “I explained that sports autobiographies and memoirs like mine are passing fancies, never remembered beyond their season unless the author assassinates a president or becomes one.” Jotting the fragments that make up “Passing Lane,” Keever hopes mostly to sell his story to the AARP magazine.
No solace for me either. I don’t hope for any more fiction readers than the few I already have or had. What does give me solace are the physical books I’ve written, recently returned to me from storage--perhaps partly because they have experienced a mini-resurrection. Them I don’t have to imagine. They will presumably last as objects for a while, even if not “brought to life” in some readers’ minds. I don’t mind thinking of them that way, as unread things. In “The Living End,” Stanley Elkin has his God destroy the world because he never found his audience. I think Elkin went to his grave angry about not achieving the fame he expected, perhaps even the fame of his neighbor and friend William Gass.
Despite my cancer diagnosis and my deflating experience of Otherworld, I fall back on my luck. I feel I was damned lucky, given my background and late start, to have written and turned into physical objects eight novels. My radiated brain doesn’t have to remember them; they are there lined up on the hearth. At the end of Passing Away, Keever uses the last word of Rabbit at Rest: “Enough.” It turned out that novel was not enough for me, so I wrote Passing Again. Maybe it’s—again—the cancer diagnosis affecting me, but now I accept that these fictions are “enough” for this lifetime. No hope to write another. Literary resurrection not imagined.
Bodily resurrection not imagined either, but I have to admit it fascinates me as a concept. I wonder how the belief originated and wonder why it is not enough for Christians to believe in some afterlife of souls without athlete’s foot and tooth decay. Those airy souls must be joined by bodies at the end of time. Ableson is resurrected as a creaky old man who must endure his younger wife’s death. The woman Lily in Moore’s novel returns wearing clown shoes and expressing all her previous unhappiness. What age would my resurrected body be? Could there be upgrades—better vision, more spring? Could my soul be reunited with my body before it “useta be” a legend? I “Mock on, Mock on,” as mystical William Blake says to freethinkers Voltaire and Rousseau, and yet resurrection of the body exerts a mysterious appeal for the devout athlete. That is, the athlete devoted to the body in Thisworld.
“Believing Stevens”
In the cold days of my February radiation on Otherworld, I sometimes think about Wallace Stevens’ “Snow Man” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” because I have recently discovered a fact about Stevens’ last days. For a long time, the poems have been an existential touchstone for me, brief statements of epistemological heroism and secular pleasure. I wouldn’t say Stevens was a god, but I believed in him as an emperor.
I grew up in a snowy and frigid Vermont where I had only one living grandparent, a man who cut down and sawed up trees for a living. With his third-grade education, Hugh Spaulding was a simple man, a prototypical Yankee, even more close-mouthed than our Plymouth homeboy Calvin Coolidge. My grandfather had little to say and that little was always literal, practical. After I graduated from college, he asked me, “So what do you know about plumbing now?” I could have said, “A lot more about plumbing texts than I did before I left Plymouth,” but the play would have been lost on him. My father told me the only joke he’d heard my grandfather make: they were driving on an interstate highway and passed a huge boulder that seemed out of place close to the highway. My father said, “I wonder who left that rock there?” My grandfather replied, “Everybody.” He knew the characteristics of every tree in the forests he owned and how many board feet of lumber any one of them would produce, but nature was in no way symbolic for him. Since God was abstract, not concrete, my grandfather never attended the church just a few hundred yards from where he lived. My father—though not my mother—thought her father a hard man, a cold man.
I went to Boston College and its Jesuits, who were sometimes called “logic-choppers” and were noted for the severity of their intellectual operations. My freshman year I and everybody else had to take logic the first semester, epistemology the second. Much better educated than my grandfather, the Jesuits taught constant objective rigor—until, as I remember it now, they snuck God in at the end. There were five proofs of God’s existence, but this logic newbie didn’t accept his teachers’ premises. Sent to B.C. to bolster the faith of my Irish Catholic father, I lost it there after practicing what Stevens calls—and my grandfather possessed--“the mind of winter.”
“The Snowman”
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I can’t say I knew Stevens’ “The Snow Man” as an undergraduate, but when I ran across it I thought of my grandfather and recognized that the poem articulated the kind of consciousness I decided to have when in college: cold and lucid and without any fallacies, pathetic or otherwise. I wanted to be “nothing” myself, purified of the everything I had been taught before the Jesuits. I wanted clarity of vision—and I wanted to be courageous enough to live in a world without inherited belief, in what the Jesuits probably would have called “the nothing.” If I now have a quibble with “The Snow Man,” it’s with those last four words, which my grandfather would have found fallacious, an abstraction imported into a poem celebrating an almost inhuman way of living in the concrete world, even when its detail is reduced or hidden by snow as my world was in winter Vermont. No more comforting anthropomorphism for me.
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
I think I found “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” in graduate school. When writing about John Barth’s fiction, I read a study of his work called Cheerful Nihilism. I liked its seeming contradiction, its relevance to my dissertation about Black Humor and its relationship to me, a man obsessed with joyful play without meaning—the game of basketball. “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” continued the frigid consciousness of “The Snow Man” but went further into objectivity and introduced the antic. Even to death one should “let the lamp affix its beam”—perceive as a “Snow Man” might—and yet still take pleasure in the concrete, in an unconventional playfulness. I read “Let be be the finale of seem” as “let being without illusion be the end of seeming,” in this case traditional funeral arrangements that seek to hide the cold fact of death. With their connections to religious rites, these arrangements imply God and, perhaps, immortality, preparation of the body for its resurrection. But as Stevens believed and I had come to believe, the only “god” is the human creator of pleasure, a temporary emperor who will return to his job of rolling cigars. If the poem seems nihilistic to believers, it’s also cheerful, playful in its sounds, its diction, and its reversals of convention. The body is “cold” but so is ice cream, and, Stevens suggests, we would do well to believe in and live the pleasures of this world.
At about the same time that I received my cancer diagnosis, I discovered that the militantly secular Stevens converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. I was disappointed in one of my intellectual and literary guides, and I began to wonder if I—who used Stevens as a bulwark against returning to my Catholic upbringing—would one day in the future on Otherworld return to the faith of my father. Some years ago, a very good friend of mine was dying from ovarian cancer for weeks in a hospital. She, too, was raised as a Catholic but didn’t practice and sometimes railed against the priesthood. But a few days before she died, she called in a priest to hear her confession.
I wonder if Stevens’ conversion and my friend’s reversion are factors, among others, that make a quick and no-second-thoughts exit from this world attractive to me. Perhaps I fear an extended ending because I might lose the courage of non-belief on Otherworld and ultimately take up Pascal’s wager, Stevens’ consolation. To whom would it make a difference if I found a Jesuit to absolve me? Perhaps my three children. As infants they were baptized as Catholics, but their mother and I did not carry through with even basic religious instruction. If we had, perhaps they would have accepted faith, as I did not—faith that would give them solace at the ends of their lives. Because I gave my children no encouragement to believe as their grandfather did, I feel that I owe it to them to accept going down to my end as a Stevens believer.
Of course, if my children have the time and inclination before they die to find Jesus they could do so, yet I still feel guilty. But maybe my children will inherit a bit of my luck, even if it’s merely “mere.” If I remember correctly my catechism, their baptism in all probability does give them a spot in limbo—and a leg up on salvation. But, the theologians say, those who are only baptized would not “earn” salvation without taking the other sacraments. My children would have to depend in the future on--be subject to--God’s freely gifted, mysteriously awarded grace. Rely on God’s grace and their luck. The emperor of ice-cream is not the only ruler who governs by fiat.