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!