Absolution: The Power of Words

"The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper.  He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, absolution, like the breaking of a barrier.  He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words."

~ from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Nevil Shute's Little-known Classic: A Town Like Alice

Nevil Shute was born 115 years ago today. While most people have not heard of him, he remains one of Britain's most acclaimed and revered writers. His was born Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 - 12 January 1960) and rose to become a popular novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer. He described in the in an anonymous epigram in one of his books how engineering and design could improve human life: "An engineer is a man who can make something for five bob that any bloody fool can make for a quid!"

He adopted the name Nevil Shute as his pen name and wrote several novels including On the Beach and The Rainbow and the Rose. He his best known for his novel, A Town Like Alice (1950), a World War 2 novel set in Malaya and Australia. The protagonists Jean Paget and Joe Harman are based upon people whom Shute met, both of whom suffered heroically as prisoners of war and who later fell in love redeemed their lost years.

Herbert James "Ringer" Edwards,
real-life inspiration for Joe Harman

Shute based the character of Harman on Herbert James "Ringer" Edwards, an Australian veteran of the Malayan campaign, whom Shute met in 1948 at a station (ranch) in Queensland. Edwards had been crucified for 63 hours by Japanese soldiers on the Burma Railway. He had later escaped execution a second time, when his "last meal" of chicken and beer could not be obtained. Shute appropriates both episodes in the novel.

The novel was ranked in 1998 by the Modern Library ranked 17th on The Reader's List of the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the novel contains the earliest known use of the word dicey: "He.. made a tight, dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare."

Shute possesses a steady narrative voice and drives the plot relentlessly forward, though his plots are often complicated. His magic makes them plausible and wrenching.

Bryan Brown and Helen Morse in Masterpiece Theatre's
wildly successful mini-series (1981) A Town Like Alice

From A Town Like Alice [the narrator as an old man remembering his friends in Australia]:

 "I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf Country, dreaming of blazing sunshine, of poddy dodging and black stockriders, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection."

Writing Advice: Accept the Pacing ~ Umberto Eco on Staying the Course

By Wendy Murray

Umberto Eco, born January 5, 1932

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers: Italian novelist, Umberto Eco (born1932; he is 82 today). Among other things, he wrote the dazzling mystery novel set in an abbey during 14th-century Italy titled The Name of the Rose.

At the end of the book,  the author included personal advice about both the writing process as well as the reading:

". . . . after reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to the enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he [or she] had to accept the abbey's own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone doesn't like them, so much the worse for them. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away."

Rare Footage of J.R.R. Tolkien Talking About LOTR Happy Birthday!

J.R.R. Tolkien was born on this day in 1892. 

Tea with Frederick Buechner

By Wendy Murray

Fred Buechner, photo by Wendy Murray

On Rupert Mountain, Vermont, in May 2002, Frederick Buechner is serving tea, no cream, no sugar. I ask him what he means when he writes frequently about God's silence.

I have traveled to Vermont to meet with him in order to write an article for Christianity Today magazine. We have been chatting for about an hour when he decides it is time for tea. He hands me mine and takes his, settling back into his chair.

He says, "It was John Updike who said God saves his deepest silence for his saints. Some people might say, 'The hell with it.' His silence throws me back upon myself and I must search my own depths. I'm still searching, aren't you?" He bobs his tea bag. "If we're not searching, we're dead."

I tell him his novel The Storm left me sad.

"Oh, I disagree," he says. "I think it ends upbeat."

I say, "It feels like [the protagonist] Kenzie Maxwell simply gives up on his dreams and resigns himself to a life of mediocrity."

He replies, "Why, at the end, all these people come together. The brothers are reconciled. Kenzie stops writing his letters to his dead lover."

“But," I say, "at the end of the book Kenzie is lying alone in his bed, wondering about the crazy saints and if what had driven them crazy was their endlessly trying -- as he was -- to find where they really belonged." -- "Has Kenzie found where he belongs?"

"Maybe not," Buechner says. "But he's come a long way."

The Storm's narrator says (of Kenzie): "He thought of himself as a man who wrote because he couldn't think of anything else to do with his delusions." I ask Buechner what he meant.

"I wish I had said 'illusions'," he says. "Kenzie is a self-deprecating illusionist."

I ask, "Which of your novels would be your seminal work? Godric is as close as you've come to writing in your 'life's blood,' as you say. But I believe you could come closer."

He doesn't disagree. Then he adds, "All of my fiction was written with my life's blood."

Charlotte Brontë's Unmet Longing

Charlotte Brontë’s signature melancholy narrative voice in Jane Eyre belies a hidden hopefulness she once exerted, if only briefly.

Her longings came into stark clarity when a little-known story she had written in French at the age of 25 emerged in Belgium long after her death. Titled L’Ingratitude, the story was written for her tutor, a married man with whom Bronte had become infatuated. It was unknown for many decades following her death and was published for the first time in Feb 2012. (Her novel Villette is said to be based upon it.) In it her love was unrequited.

Her despair and general melancholy is matched by the losses she incurred in her short life:

•     Her mother, Maria Brontë, died in 1821: Charlotte was 5
•     Her oldest sister, Maria, died in 1825 (age 12): Charlotte was 9
•     Her next sister, Elizabeth died a month later (age 11): Still 9
•     Her brother Patrick died (age 29) in 1848: Charlotte was 32.
•     Her sister Emily (of Wuthering Heights) died the same year (age 29)
•     Her younger sister Anne, died in 1849 (age 27): Charlotte, 33.

(The Brontë sisters from left; Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte.)

Her first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell (who knew her) wrote:

"I am struck afresh by the absence of hope, which formed such a strong characteristic in Charlotte … . Miss Bronte never dared to allow herself to look forward with hope … . She had no confidence in the future; and I though, when I heard of the sorrowful years she passed through, that it had been this pressure of grief which had crushed all the buoyancy of expectation out of her."                          The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë kept faith, though she was unsentimental. She did what she needed to do to reconcile life’s ravages with the possibility of hope.

She died at the age of 38 in 1855.

Listen to Gillian Anderson read L'Ingratitude.