Peter de Vries' The Blood of the Lamb (#1961Club)

"as I saw myself, a sort of reverse Pilgrim trying to make some progress away from the City of God."

Don Wanderhope is born to a Calvinist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago before World War I. Both his parents were born in Holland. His uncle is a minister, but his father Ben's faith in God is shaky. Ben Wanderhope delivers ice; later when that's no longer a viable job, he switches to picking up garbage. Don Wanderhope intends to achieve a different sort of life.

Don's beloved older brother Louie is a student at the University of Chicago. Though the UofC was founded as a Baptist institution, it's already a hotbed of free-thinking, and Louie's faith has gone well beyond shaky to outright disbelief. But then Louie gets a severe flu, and the family gathers round to pray. His mother asks:

"You have no doubts, have you, Louie?"

"No doubts on my part."

Those were Louie's last words. You will see the ambiguity in that statement. Mrs. Wanderhope takes it one way; young Don Wanderhope in exactly the opposite way. Even dying, wise-cracking Louie probably meant the ambiguity.

 

It's the first of several out of sequence deaths, often having to do with lungs, in Don Wanderhope's life. The last is that of his daughter Carol from leukemia. What is faith in the presence of such blows? How can one accept God or even this world?

Peter De Vries, (1910-1993) like Don Westerhope, was born in Chicago to family of Dutch Reformed immigrants. He went on to become editor of Poetry magazine for a stretch and then after World War II, a staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote twenty-plus comic novels, a couple of which were made into Hollywood movies. This novel, too, is funny--one chapter is a parody of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain:

"Thus were banished my visions of a sanitarium as a place were one sat on benches philosophizing in the sun in the manner of The Magic Mountain, or contracted imprudent passions in the music room."

But then the sanatarium does have two old men philosophizing, and a notorious libertine, who unlike Mynheer Peeperkorn, isn't Dutch. And Wanderhope does contract an imprudent passion.

So the novel is funny--just not in a guffawing way. I've read other novels by de Vries, though a long time ago, and I remember them funnier. But this is a dark subject, and it was inspired by the death from leukemia of de Vries' own daughter in 1960. So: moving and thoughtful, and not without humour.

It's the week of the 1961 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. Thanks to them for hosting!

 

 

 

1961 Club Candidates

 

Monday begins the week of Kaggsy and Simon's year club, and this spring the year is 1961. I piled up some candidates, because who doesn't like to look at a pile of books? (Right? You do agree, don't you?) In case the picture is hard to make out that's:

Nicholas Blake/The Worm of Death (Mystery)

Peter de Vries/The Blood of the Lamb (Comic, Chicago)

John Hawkes/The Lime Twig (Experimental) 

Iris Murdoch/A Severed Head (British, Literary)

Freya Stark/Dust in the Lion's Paw (Autobiography, Travel)

Constantin Stanislavski/Creating a Role (Acting manual)

Frantz Fanon/The Wretched of the Earth (Political)

Charles Olson/The Maximus Poems (Poetry)

 

Naturally...I won't read them all over the next week, though I have already finished two (and will have posts early next week). I hope to get through one or two more.

 

Alas, the Olson is probably aspirational: I've been reading that for a year, and I'm about a hundred pages in... 

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jane Welsh Carlyle

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jenny kissed me when we met

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

  Say health and wealth have missed me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

 

-Leigh Hunt

 

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is better known as an essayist, but also wrote poetry. The story goes that in 1838, Hunt, just recovered from a bad illness, visited Thomas and Jane Carlyle at their home, and Jane Carlyle was so happy to see him recovered, she kissed him. That portrait doesn't make Jane Carlyle look like the jumping up and kissing type, but I guess you never know...

 

I pulled Virginia Woolf's The Second Common Reader off the shelf for its essay on George Gissing, and one of the other essays is about Jane Carlyle and how she is one of the great letter writers in English. That got me to thinking about the only other thing I know abot Jane Carlyle, which was this poem.

 

Hunt called the poem a rondeau, though if so it's a simplified one. It starts with a refrain that's half the first line, and ends with that refrain occupying only a half-line. But a writer of the true French rondeau would have 'Jenny kissed me' as a half-line at least once more in the middle of the poem.

 

Not that it has much relevance to all that above, but I can't resist, while I have the Virginia Woolf off the shelf, quoting the final words of the last essay, 'How Should One Read a Book?'

"...the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have been reading.'"