Christal
Cooper 2,321 Words
*If the Sun Should Ask Witch Doctors,
Proverbs, and Parables, (http://www.amazon.com/If-Sun-Should-AskParables/dp/0983841225/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414015567&sr=8-1&keywords=if+the+sun+should+ask)
published by Twiss Hill Press this past February, is Wayne Latner’s (http://waynelanter.com) most recent book to date. The prolific Lanter has also written numerous
books on poetry, non-fiction, and fiction.
If the Sun Should Ask, a blockbuster of 434 pages, features
memoir, auto-biography, biography, historical fiction, and poetry-divided into
four sections: “At The Edge Of The Farm,”
“Freeburg, Illinois,” “Poetry and Prose,”
and “Photos,” all interspersed within the book – for example, entries from “At
The Edge Of The Farm” are on pages 1, 26, 45, 51, 62, 84, 106, 122, 132, 142,
147, and 164. The book has a flow like
music bringing all of the sections together like a symphony; sometimes
presenting the reader with a surprise of a poem, photo, or narrative.
In this blog, one excerpt from each
section is presented, in addition to the Introduction, where Wayne Lanter
discusses the origin of If the Sun Should Ask and the
process of writing If the Sun Should Ask via narrative, history, fiction, memoir,
autobiography, and poetry.
Guest Blogger Wayne Lanter:
If the Sun Should Ask
A
Note on the Writing
Sometime during the summer of 2002 four
of the Muses, the Hoeflinger sisters, Dorothy, Betty Jane, Carol Jean and
Patricia, suggested that the LePere cousins, the grandchildren of Louis and
Emma LePere, have a reunion (there were sixteen of us), and further, that each
write a piece relating his or her memories of Grandparents LePere’s farm where
many of us spent a good bit of our childhood time. The suggestion seemed pleasant enough and in
the weeks that followed I produced sixty or so pages of my memories of the
farm, laced with scattering of anecdotes and narrative ramblings. At the reunion that fall I presented a copy
of the manuscript, entitled “Language at the Edge of the Farm,” to each of
those in attendance.
In the months following the October
reunion, at idle moments, I added a few pages to the chronicle, and then in
2009, rereading the manuscript, decided the “journal” might contain a
worth-mentioning narrative of growing up in the rural Midwest at a time when
the country was shifting from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, as
well as something about the people caught in the shift. I envisioned a possible extension or
supplement to Hamlin Garland’s Boy Life on the Prairie and Carl
Sandburg’s Prairie-Town Boy, maybe mixed with a bit of Ole Edvart
Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth.
Then, too, I had in mind bits and pieces of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon
River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and E.W.
Howe’s The Story of a Country Town.
This then, If the Sun Should Ask, is the result of the 2002 suggestion –
the extension and the mix.
To delve into and write about what might
be considered one’s personal past often invites the wish or hope, from writer
and reader, that the probe or report be somehow separate from fiction, even
historical fiction, and be bound in memoir or autobiography. And while these hopes and desires may lend
themselves to better classifying the writing, and hanging the narrative out to
dry, to give it a place, so to speak, they can also demean and mask the reality
of the story being told.
Most often, even when agreement is
sought, not two individuals will agree on the facts, or on what the facts
mean. Past events appear to us as
Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at Blackbird,” each and every “way” arrange somewhat differently by
an individual human mind. The past of
memoir, autobiography, fiction, history – the bits and pieces used to
manufacture the telling or writing – are dipped from a steaming caldron of
already registered, gathered, or reaped material. In reality, memoir, autobiography and fiction
or historical fiction or history – as facts and reported events collected and
recorded with a specific, individual point-of-view- are barely distinguishable
from one another.
Of course, there is here, in If
the Sun Should Ask, some thing of a memoir (memory, as faulty as it may
be), of autobiography (if you can imagine the writer decades later to be the person
he is writing about - when clearly he is
not), as well as something of history (in recording bits and pieces of times
and places often chosen randomly by the writer) and also, certainly, of fiction
(giving structure and drama to the story that events themselves did not
provide). Stephen Blair, Department of
Classics, Princeton University, has written, “. . . no historical account can
entirely mirror reality because history is narrative and an event is not. To write history, a historian must prioritize
clarity over chronology, emphasize causal connections, and suppress
irrelevancies. Even in unbiased
historical, privy to flawless information, will compose a story that, though it
may be inspired by a particular event, isn’t a true account of it (The New
Yorker, The Mail, “Narrative History,” January 6, 2014). But so it is with my narrative.
If the Sun Should Ask is a personal
narrative of witch doctors, proverbs, and parables, of facts and events, of
pictures and poems, to which I had access – of simply sitting around the camp
fire or in the living room offering my impression of something of life in the
American Midwest during the middle part of the twentieth century, with the hope
that it not be forgotten, too soon.
Although, and maybe because we were out
at the edge of things where our lives were necessarily isolated, we were always
eager for information, gossip, stories, about other people. After all, it is human curiosity that makes
drama and fiction and poetry fascinating – as with all stories.
In folk cultures women tend to be the
purveyors of the language parts of the ethos.
For the most it is the women who tell the stories, sing the songs, and
create proverbs. Folklorists have noted
that most folk proverbs involve the kitchen or what can be seen from the
kitchen window.
In passing on her share of the
language-culture, Mom not only read to use and introduced us to games, but
supplied us with plethora of proverbs and folk sayings. For Mom things dead were not just dead, but
for emphasis, they were “Dead as a doornail.”
When she did not like the people I was hanging around with, to admonish
me, since she knew that I knew that she thought they were either uncivilized,
“white trash,” uncouth, or even worse, maybe “woodchoppers,” she would remind
me that “birds of a feather flock together”.
Of course “every dog smells his own dirt.” “A stitch in time saves nine,” and “A watched
pot never boils.” “Many hands do light
work make,” and a woman nearing the end of a pregnancy was always “Big as a
house.”
Mom reminded us that “Only the good die
young,” and “Everything works out for the best,” which is a
stoic-precept/corollary of “Everything is just the way it is supposed to be,”
if only because it worked out that way, somehow, and not another way. Of course, “You can’t teach an old dog new
tricks,” and, “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
If one is warm in the winter, she is
“Snug as a bug in a rug” or “Snug as a pea in a pod.” And when I was particularly recalcitrant
and/or stubborn, Mom was quick to point out that I was being “Stubborn as a
mule,” or worthless as “A bump on a log.”
Dad added to the list on occasion reminding us that our unattended
demands and requests were common the world over – that “People in hell want
ice-water, too.”
Grandma LePere believed that, “Fools’
names and fools’ faces always appear in public places.” Also passing on a bit of family lore,
possibly autobiographical, she noted that when beginning a family, “The first
one can come any time, the second one takes nine months.”
Excerpt from If the Sun Should Ask
“Edge of the Farm” section
Pages 26-27
Copyright granted by Wayne Lanter
Several months after we took up residence with
the Cokes a house around the corner on Belleville Street, owned by Ed Wolf,
became available for $35.00 a month. The
Wolf house was strategically located at an angle behind the shop, with St
Paul’s Evangelical and Reformed Church across the street and St. Joseph’s
Catholic Church across the alley. So we
were, as e.e. cummings wrote, “…literally surrounded (but not defeated) . . . “
by the saints, their deities and clerics, and their plangent bells and
sanctities.
St. Paul’s was on the south side of Belleville
Street at a slight angle from and facing our house. This meant that on warm Sunday mornings I
could lie in bed with the bedroom window open and listen to the congregation
gathering for 8:00a services and be glad that I had not yet to get out of bed.
The Protestant parsonage was next-door to the
north of us, our yards separated only by the narrow ribbon of a weed-centered
rock driveway. At the time it was
occupied by the Reverend Hayward Kiel and his family.
Reverend Kiel was a small, emaciated man with a
pock-marked face, a hooknose, and thin hair.
Years later, when I saw the film Nosferatu, Count Orlok (Max Schreck)
reminded me of Reverend Kiel.
I remember talking with the Reverend twice – once
when I was in high school and reading about the Protestant Reformation. I realized that I had a chance to get it
straight from “the horse’s mouth” and knocked on his door and asked him about
it. The session was informative. I sat for two hours and listened as he
explained the corruption of Catholicism that he claimed led to the revolt.
The second encounter came one June afternoon
when sister Judith, who was always fussing with cats, and I were out in the
backyard burying one of the wounded she had befriended that had not made it
back through the door. The Reverend Kiel
stepped across the narrow driveway to recite a few last words for the deceased
before we added a scoop of dirt to the hole in the ground. I did not ask which of the nine feline
spirits he had recommended to rest, or which of the cat gods had showed up to
consider the recommendation. At any
rate, we were glad for assistance.
Looking the other way, St. Joseph Catholic
Church backed on the alley behind our house, as did one part of the Catholic
grade school playground. The St.
Joseph’s parish priest at the time was Herman J. Freese, a fractious and
disgruntled old man who “married ‘em and buried ‘em,” but not without grumbling
and who occasionally lectured the grade school students on their Catechism. He also thundered from the pulpit plangently
each Sunday to entreat the parishioners with the assurance of damnation did
they not cough up dollars and cents to further sate the church coffers.
In years to come H.J. Freese would solicit Dad
to repair or service the tower mechanism that drove the large bells that struck
the hour and quarter hours for the St. Joseph’s church clock.
Several times I accompanied Dad into the belfry
to make clock repairs. By then I had
read Victor Hugo’s The hunchback of Notre Dame, and crawling around in the
accumulated dust of the tower with H.J. standing below giving directions to
things about which he knew absolutely nothing, his silhouette among the
shadows, among the dust motes riding the shafts of what little sunlight was
coming in, the thought came to me that with his potbelly and sagging jowls and
weak eyes he would have fit very well with the grotesqueries of medieval
Paris. And I’m not talking about who
might, in the end save Esmeralda.
Clearly he would have been Quasimodo’s capitalist nemesis. And that, too, was an epiphany.
As far as I know Dad was never compensated for
these services. I asked him about it
once and he just shook his head and smiled as if to say, “Well, what do you
expect?” Neither did his services
relieve him of the Freese-frozen-imposed obligation of weekly contributions or
pew rent – though it always seemed strange to me that one might have to pay
admission to get into and/or sit down in the house of an all-good god, to pay a
fee to appreciate the halo of stained-glass and wonder.
Excerpt from If the Sun Should Ask
“Freeburg, Illinois” section
Pages 210 – 213
Copyright granted by Wayne Lanter
When asked what the Jesuits taught him, James
Joyce is reported to have said, “They taught me to order and to judge.” Implicit in this is an admonition to avoid
equivocation and to look at things in their most elemental sense – to find the
order. The good sense of thinking
insists that we not miss any meaningful detail, or the relationship between the
details. This is what we need to judge,
to say this is good, but this is better – throughout the physical and moral
order of things. For four years Austin
Mulkey guided me through that maze.
Coach
Rock-ribbed, Republican, a withered leg,
an unyielding Puritan, he encouraged
others where he could not go. How often
do those without feet become cobblers?
Beneath the summer sun he required
little beyond an honest day’s labor,
the seasoning with which work and work
will brand the soul. Knowing probability
and failure, he tallied each achievement
so in the evening shade success
would be gauged by surviving the day
in a dignity of what cunning
and strength could be crafted,
what competence earned exploiting
natural gifts while weathering contradictions
of the incomprehensible. His nights
were quiet and mostly without light
with which to find release from
the terrifying restrictions of nature.
Poem excerpt from If The Sun Should Ask
“Poetry and Prose” section
Pages 423-424
Copyright granted by Wayne Lanter
Photo
Description and Copyright Information
Photo
1b
Wayne
Lanter in Greece
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granted by Wayne Lanter
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2a
Jacket
cover of If the Sun Should Ask
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3
"Landscape
with Farm Building," by the Philadelphia artist Cecilia Beaux, oil on
canvas.
Courtesy
of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Public
Domain
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4c
Hamlin
Garland
October
1981
From
the
Writer: A Montghly Magaizne and Help All
Literary Workers printed in October 10, 1891
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Domain
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Jacket
cover of Boy Life on the Prairie
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Carl
Sandburg
1955
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to Al Ravenna
Library
of Congress
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York World-Telegram & Sun Collection
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cover of Prairie Home Boy
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Ole
Edvart Ralvaag
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Use Under the United States Copyright law
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cover of Giants In the Earth
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Edgar
Lee Masters
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cover of The Spoon River Anthology
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Sherwood
Anderson
November
29, 1933
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to Carl Van Vechlen
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of Congress
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Jacket
cover of Winesburg, Ohio
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E.W.
Howe
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Wayne
Lanter writing in Paris, France.
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Wallace
Stevens
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Painting: Laura Litwa Holden
Typography: Dave Bell
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Stephen
Blair
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20
Painting
of a woman preparing food in the kitchen
1800s
Attributed
to Thomas Hicks (1823-1890)
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Domain
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21
Woman at the Window
Oil
on canvas
1822
Attributed
to Frauam Fenster
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Domain
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22r
Woodcut
of interior of a kitchen
16th
Century
Attributor
unknown
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23s
Mildred
Nellie LePere
1935
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granted by Wayne Lanter
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24t
Mildred
Nellie LePere
1949
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Studio
photo of peas in their pods
July
7, 2011
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to Bill Ebbesen
CCASA
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Jacket
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27v
ee
cummings
November
13, 1953
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to Walter Aberth
Library
of Congress and Photographs Division New York World Telegraph and the Sun
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Saint
Paul Joseph’s Catholic School
1950
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Movie
poster for the silent film Nosfergtu
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Max
Schreck as Count Orlok in Nosfergtu
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Domain
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Print
shows Luther burning papal bull of excommunication with vignettes from Luther’s
life and portraits of Hus, Savonarola, Wycliffe, Cruciger, Melanchton,
Bugenhagen, Gustav Adolf, & Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimer.
1874
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Wayne
and sister Judy in 1946
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of St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Freeburg, Illinois
1842
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Willard
Lanter
1944
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Victor
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1876
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Still
from the 1923 movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Lou
Chaney as Quasimado
Patsy
Ruth Miller as Esmeralda
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James
Joyce in 1918
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Austin
Mulkey
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