From Tradition and Away From Tradition

I have been nibbling away for some time now at a slim volume of poetry entitled From Tradition and Away From Tradition, by Andrew Huntley.  Huntley’s work has appeared in these pages a handful of times, and four of those offerings are present in this collection of poems from 2001 to 2014.  Born in Fiji to Australian parents who moved the family back to Australia when Andrew was 12, Huntley is a convert to Roman Catholicism.  Not surprisingly, given the title of this collection, his devotion to the Church’s more traditional wing is on display herein.

That devotion expresses itself beautifully in such poems as “On Praying for All Those Who Have Died Lonely Deaths,” a profound meditation on both the state of souls in Purgatory and God’s existence outside of time, and the lengthy (autobiographical?) “The Plough & The Cross,” which closes out the volume; and even where one might not expect it, such as a poem bearing the title “Lament for the Latest Female Backpacker Murdered.”

Yet other poems slip into didacticism, and lose their artfulness; “The ‘Spirit of Vatican II’ Exit March” is about what one might expect from the title, while “Against Certain Catholic Fantasts” oddly contrasts Pius IX unfavorably with Abraham Lincoln, whom Huntley sees as clothed in “the cope / Of Heaven, as he wrought to make men free.”  (Lord Acton, who famously opposed Pius’s promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, would nonetheless likely find this comparison beyond the pale, since he understood far better than Huntley what was at stake in the American Civil War, as his postwar correspondence with Robert E. Lee makes clear.)

Despite such clunkers, this handsomely typeset and well-bound volume has much to recommend it, including my favorite of Huntley’s poems, “Closing Tolkien,” first printed in these pages in August 2004.

First published in the June 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Ties That Bind

I bought my wife tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert for Christmas.  This may sound like the stereotypical man-gift—a present a husband bestows on his long-suffering spouse because he wants it for himself, like a riding lawn mower—but Amy really did want to see The Boss in concert again.  Twenty-eight years ago, in our sophomore year at Michigan State, we and several friends sat—or rather, danced, since the crowd rarely left its feet at any point in the three-plus-hour concert—to the side and slightly back of the stage in the Joe Louis Arena on the Detroit stop of the Tunnel of Love tour.  Springsteen has always performed for the entire audience, and seats behind the stage are often cheaper and closer (and the sound is less deafening).  When I saw that we could get such seats in Milwaukee on the current tour celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of The River, I bought the tickets on my iPhone, as we were waiting in Rockford’s Coronado Theater for Cheap Trick to take the stage.

This was Amy’s second Springsteen concert and my third; as we filed with thousands of other fans into the BMO Harris Bradley Center on that cold March night, I did not yet know that it would be my last—but probably not for the reason you are thinking.

Born in the U.S.A., with its iconic cover of a white T-shirted Springsteen, red baseball cap tucked into the rear pocket of his blue jeans, all silhouetted against a larger-than-life American flag, was the chief introduction to Bruce for my generation.  Not for this country-music fan, however: That came several months later, in the spring of my junior year in high school, when my friend Andy Craig gave me five cassettes that he had copied off of vinyl (or as we called them back in those pre-hipster days, “records”)—Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and (sprawling over two cassettes) The River.  Even those who didn’t listen to rock couldn’t avoid Born in the U.S.A.—if only because of the controversy over the Reagan reelection campaign’s naively unironic use of the title song at campaign rallies in 1984, which evoked a sharp rebuke from The Boss—but Merle Haggard was more my style than the driving rock tempos and electronic keyboards that have made the album one of the highest-selling of all time.

But those cassettes—that was something different, and especially the 1978–80–82 trio of Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, and Nebraska.  To have released Darkness and Nebraska over the course of four years would have been impressive enough, but Bruce had thrown in the double album of The River for good measure.  (And there were enough outtakes, bootlegged for years and finally released in 2015 as one disc of The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, for another double album.)

Back in the mid-80’s, after the rise of the bluegrass- and western-influenced “New Traditionalists” such as Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Randy Travis, and George Strait, country-music fans liked to say that the thing that most set country apart from the various forms of rock was that you could hear the lyrics, and those lyrics told a story.  Not surprisingly, then, what initially drew me to Springsteen were his lyrics.  The River, in particular, became something like a soundtrack to my life, and unlike a generation brought up on digital downloads, I never listened to just a single song, or to any of the songs out of order.  Once I pressed Play on my knock-off Walkman and heard the opening drum shot of “The Ties That Bind,” the music never stopped until the haunting final chord of “Wreck on the Highway” faded away.

That was how Springsteen intended The River to be heard, as a single work of art, and on the current tour Bruce and the E Street Band have led off with “Meet Me in the City” (one of the outtakes from The River) before playing every song in the order in which they are found on the original double album, without taking a single break.  By itself, that set list would challenge a much younger man and band, but as the applause is still rising at the end of “Wreck on the Highway,” the largely sexagenarian crew launches into the first of a dozen more songs from every era of The Boss’s career, for a solid three-and-a-half hours’ worth of music every night.

I have listened to The River countless times in the 30 years since I first heard it, but there in Milwaukee, I had the sense of hearing it again for the first time.  At 17, my connection to the album was inchoate; even a bright teenager is a bundle of emotions who can’t begin to understand what his life means, which is one of the reasons why rock ’n’ roll appeals so strongly to the young.  At 47, though, the words that Springsteen used that night to introduce “The Ties That Bind” ring true to experience:

The River was my coming of age record. It was the record where I was trying to figure out where I fit in. I’d taken notice of the things that bond people to their lives . . . the work, commitments, families. I wanted to imagine and I wanted to write about those things—figured if I could do that, I might get closer to having them in my own life . . . I wanted to make a record . . . that felt like life . . . I wanted the record to contain fun and dancing and laughter and jokes, good comradeship, love, sex, faith, lonely nights, and of course teardrops. And I figured if I could make a record big enough to contain all those things maybe I’d get a little closer to the answers and the home I was trying to find . . .

Springsteen had originally planned to name the album after that first track, and even now, it’s hard to say it wouldn’t be a better title.  For all of the classic rock themes of rebellion, the deeper theme running through every song on The River is the web of connections to those closest to you, of the experiences and the places you share, that you cannot tear apart without doing damage to yourself.

Yet, when we’re young, we’re constantly finding the horizon of our little world to be insufferably close, and too often all we can think about is ripping that web apart, trying to go it alone.  For a 17-year-old boy in a Midwestern village of 2,000 souls, Independence Day could not come soon enough, though the recognition of what he would lose when it did come would take much longer to arrive.  Thirty years later, I was looking at life in the rear-view mirror as Bruce introduced the song in Milwaukee:

“Independence Day” was the first song I wrote about fathers and sons. It’s the kind of song you write when you’re young, and you’re first startled by your parents’ humanity, you’re shocked to find out that they have their own dreams and their own desires and their own hopes that maybe didn’t pan out exactly as they thought it might, and all you can see are the adult compromises that they had to make, and you’re still too young to see the blessings that come with those compromises, so all you can feel is the world closing in, closing in, closing in, and I know when I was young, all I could think about was getting out, getting out, getting out.

Among the things I can see in that rear-view mirror is how Andy’s gift of those tapes led to me and one of my many freshman roommates greeting the first balmy day of May 1987 by throwing open the windows of A206 Bryan Hall and blasting (from start to finish, of course) The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.  The girls in A106 were not fans, and they introduced themselves by banging on their ceiling with the handle of a broom—which, of course, only encouraged us to crank the music up.  A conciliatory blender full of strawberry daiquiris and the better part of three decades and eight children later, Amy and I will celebrate our 24th anniversary this July.

My children, of course, have been listening to The Boss from birth, and I shared my second Springsteen concert, at Wrigley Field in September 2012, with my two oldest boys.  My girls and my youngest son have been impatiently waiting their turn, which now, alas, will never come.

I could not care less about Bruce Springsteen’s politics; what drew me to his music is what it shares with all real art—the glimpse it gives us into the truth of human life.  The National Review writer who damns the “cheap sentimentalism” of “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Youngstown,” “My Hometown,” and the title tracks of Born in the U.S.A. and The River misses the point as badly as the Trump supporter who wants to make Springsteen into the poster boy for economic nationalism.  Those songs are so powerful because each captures something that we recognize as true to human life.  To the extent that art becomes slave to ideology—any ideology—it is no longer art.

And yet, just a month after The Boss stood on that stage in Milwaukee and explained his entirely nonideological reasons for creating The River to an arena full of people who were there not in support of, or in spite of, his politics but because his music has meant something to them, he enslaved his own music to his political views.  It makes no difference to me if Springsteen wishes to follow in the fake-farmwife footsteps of Sissy Spacek and volunteer to testify in the North Carolina statehouse against the injustice of preventing a self-proclaimed “woman” with a penis from using the same public restroom as a five-year-old girl.  But in canceling his April 10 tour stop in Greensboro, North Carolina, he did not “show solidarity for those freedom fighters” who think that the best way to treat the mentally ill is to indulge their fantasies.  What he did was to ruin the evening of the husband who gave his wife tickets to that concert because they share a story like Amy’s and mine; of the young man who was planning to use the event to propose to his girlfriend; of the son who is headed toward an Independence Day of his own, but whose memory of this night spent with his father might someday have helped to draw him back home again.

Everyone who had tickets to that concert in Greensboro has a story about why he was going.  And if Bruce Springsteen hadn’t canceled the concert, each would have had a story about what that night meant to him.  None of those stories may have been earth-shattering; they may all have been mundane; but in the hands of a true artist—say, the man who once wrote the lyrics to The River, before his imagination was clouded by ideology—they might have become a work of art.

Call it The Ties That Bind.        

First published in the June 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Learning as I Go

The writing of Jeff Minick should be familiar to Chronicles readers; he has appeared in these pages dozens of times over the past 15 years or so.  His name, however, was not always attached to his work.  Under the nom de plume Joe Ecclesia, he wrote our Letter to the Bishop column for the better part of a decade, and those articles constitute a majority of his Chronicles pieces (though that majority is getting slimmer with time).  His more recent letters from Uncle Samuel to his nephew Hobson have borne his own name.

For a couple of years now, I have had Jeff’s Learning as I Go sitting on my shelf, constantly disappearing under stacks of other books, waiting for life to slow down enough so that I could savor its contents.  But life doesn’t slow down unless we make it do so, and I finally decided to force its hand by picking up this 300-plus-page volume.  What a delight it has been to revisit the letters of both Joe and Samuel, and all of the other pieces that Jeff published in these pages up until 2013, and to read for the first time others that appeared elsewhere.  Most of the pieces in this handsome and elegantly typeset volume are only four or five pages long—a perfect length when your eyes need a rest from your computer screen, and your mind needs a rest from the inanities of the modern world.

First published in the March 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A Walk in the Woods

Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a much-older Bill Bryson (he is 35 years older than the author was at the time Bryson hiked the trail), optioned the rights back in 2005, with the idea of casting Paul Newman in the role of Bryson’s childhood friend, Stephen Katz, who accompanied him on most of the hike.  Newman’s death in 2008 prevented the reunion, which is just as well, because the movie would have been very different, and not for the better.

A Walk in the Woods was the expatriate Bryson’s first book to garner a significant American audience.  His earlier book on the United States, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), was written for a British audience, and Bryson’s jabs at his native land were not so much biting as bitter.  (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, published in 2006, covers much of the same material, but through the eyes of a more mature writer who has made peace with his roots.)  Both the book and the film versions of A Walk in the Woods have increased interest in the Appalachian Trail—a good thing in a nation that values its natural and cultural resources far less than it should.

It hardly matters whether one reads the book first or watches the movie; they are two very different works, and not simply because the plot had to be changed to account for Redford’s age.  Anyone who says that Redford does not look his age is simply star-struck—at 79, he could easily pass for 80 or older.  There’s a scene where Redford and Nick Nolte (playing Katz), having departed the trail for a few nights in a town, walk across a road.  As my father-in-law noted, it requires a suspension of disbelief just to convince oneself that Redford would make it to the other side, much less hike any distance on the Appalachian Trail.  Indeed, while Katz is supposed to be the unfit one, I suspect that the rotund and red-faced Nolte would survive longer on the trail than Redford.  (While the credits were rolling at our local multiplex, an elderly lady behind me said to her companions, “I wonder how many miles of the trail they actually walked?”  My guess is that the distance could be numbered on two hands, or possibly even one; the trail portions were filmed entirely at Amicola Falls State Park in Dawsonville, Georgia, at the southern terminus of the trail.)

Bryson can, on occasion, be ribald, and there are passages in A Walk in the Woods that one might skip while reading it to children (as I did several years ago).  But the fact that the film, with some mild sexual humor, no nudity, and no violence, is rated R for a few “F-bombs” speaks volumes about the uselessness of the ratings system.

In the end, my wife and I both enjoyed the movie, though the Emilio Estevez/Martin Sheen production The Way (2010) is a much better film about a man coming to grips with mortality while hiking a trail (in that case, the Camino de Santiago).  But whether you like the film or not, read the book, and pick up some of Bryson’s other works as well (especially The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and A Short History of Nearly Everything).

First published in the November 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Wayward Pines

How does an author sell over a million copies of his novels without ever learning how to write a convincing line of dialogue?  Welcome to the world of Amazon Publishing and self-published direct-to-Kindle ebooks.  Price your work cheaply enough and enable One-Click™ purchasing, and you may be the next Blake Crouch.

So why did I read not one, not two, but three of Crouch’s excruciating “novels” set in a fictional town in Idaho?  Crouch’s books were the inspiration for the recent FOX television show Wayward Pines.  Compared initially by reviewers with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the M. Night Shyamalan-produced series caught my attention with the very first episode.  It had, as they say, “great potential,” as did the central idea of Crouch’s trilogy.  Part nostalgia, part science fiction, part post-Edward Snowden surveillance-state paranoia: In different hands—say, Ray Bradbury’s—this story could have been a delight.  (Indeed, something about the premise calls The Martian Chronicles to mind.)  Instead, it feels like a missed opportunity, because no one will now be able to take this particular twist on a postapocalyptic world and do it right.  (Shyamalan had a chance, but he diverged from his source material only in frustratingly inconsequential ways, and hewed closely to it whenever he shouldn’t have.)

The only thing to be said for Crouch’s dialogue is that it is no worse than the other elements of his writing—plotting, pacing, grammar, spelling.  Amazon.com has pitched its direct-to-Kindle imprints as the future of publishing; if Crouch’s trilogy is any indication, that future looks about as bright as that of the residents of Wayward Pines.

First published in the September 2015 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.