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A bigail Santamaria's Joy is the first comprehensive biography of Helen Joy Davidman in a generation—Lyle Dorsett's still reliable And God Came In: The Extraordinary Story of Joy Davidman appeared in 1983. As such, Joy benefits from 30 years of critical reflection. In her introduction, Santamaria sets the overall tone of her biography, arguing that "most [previous] accounts of [Davidman's] life seemed glazed with a kind of hero worship." Perhaps Santamaria has in mind the 1993 film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger. However, that film claimed only to be based upon a true story—at best it is a docudrama. Dorsett's earlier biography of Davidman is respectful but clear-eyed; he certainly does not suggest she was a saint. Moreover, C. S. Lewis's most able biographers, George Sayer and Alister McGrath, have little good to say about Davidman. Regardless, Santamaria adopts a critical lens through which to view the details of Davidman's life.

Santamaria deserves much praise for her careful research and her success in gaining access to heretofore little known or closed primary sources; in doing so, she advances in great detail matters of Davidman's life that up until now were only outlined. For instance, Dorsett pointed out that Davidman's early home life was shaped by her domineering and perfectionist father, Joe. Santamaria fleshes out the background of Joe's personality, noting that in his role as a junior high school principal "he was such a tyrannical bully that in a single year, twenty-two members of his staff requested transfers, including his own former seventh grade teacher." At home with Joy and her younger brother, Howard, a similar iron discipline was applied. If Joy brought home a less than perfect grade, her father would slap her. When Joy's second semester grades at Hunter College were a mixture of B's, C's, and D's, Joe slapped her face. This time, however, "Joy flung herself forward and scratched his face with her nails. Joe never touched her again." Given the tension of her relationship with an overbearing, demanding, and controlling father, it is little wonder that she rebelled against Joe and everything he stood for.

Other aspects of Davidman's life that Santamaria plumbs in depth include her years as a devoted member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), her six-month tenure as screenwriter in Hollywood, her work as an editor for New Masses (the semi-official magazine of the CPUSA), her involvement in the leftist writers organization, the League of American Writers, the early life of her first husband, William Lindsay Gresham (Bill), their marriage and subsequent fascination with L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, and eventually her gradual disaffection for Gresham and the breakup of their marriage. Readers interested in discovering more about these elements of her life have much for which to thank Santamaria.

Once Santamaria begins to concentrate on Davidman's desire for a relationship with Lewis, the tone of the biography takes on a noticeably critical perspective. Santamaria suggests Davidman pursued Lewis with pathological intensity. Determined to seduce him, Davidman was rendered "beyond self-control and reason." In her obsession, Davidman sailed for England with "urgency," abandoned her motherly responsibilities, knew that in her absence an sexual affair would occur between Bill and her cousin, Renée, spent money recklessly (thus unfairly burdening Bill), threw herself at Lewis, fantasized about a future with him, played the innocent victim, consistently engaged in self-deception, and fabricated the details of how her marriage to Bill fell apart—it was "a myth made of half truths, exaggerations, omissions, and self-pity—facts and fictions cast into a land of shadows."

In part, Santamaria's account of this sequence of events is based on her reading of the sequence of 45 love sonnets Davidman wrote to Lewis.[1] I believe it is fair to read these sonnets at least in some ways as biographical; in fact, I think the sonnets served Davidman much as a journal would for other writers. Although each sonnet is complete in itself—telling its own little story—it is easy to discern a larger story or narrative as we read through the sequence. Accordingly within the sequence many of the sonnets are "conversational"; that is, sometimes Davidman is speaking to herself, sometimes to Lewis directly or indirectly, sometimes to God, sometimes to former lovers, sometimes to no one in particular, and sometimes to several of these at the same time. Throughout the sequence, Joy's narrative tone or mood vacillates between despair and hope, anger and resignation, desire and shame, longing and self-denial, scheming and confessing, plotting and humiliation, eros and agape, passion and reason, the flesh and the spirit, a fierce desire to possess and a frustrated acquiesce to give up, and desperation and resolution.

Santamaria's tone softens after there is an established relationship between Davidman and Lewis. She points out that Davidman became something of a literary confidante, particularly via her work on his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (she typed out the complete typescript): "Jack now trusted Joy implicitly with his manuscripts. As Surprised by Joy proceeded through production, he directed his editor to discuss the proofs with her directly." Santamaria traces the way Lewis became more and more comfortable with Joy's integration into his life, and she charts effectively how Lewis's feelings of friendship for Davidman moved him to marry her in a civil ceremony on April 26, 1956. Once Davidman's bone cancer was discovered, Santamaria chronicles to great effect the way in which Lewis came to realize how much he loved Davidman. At one point he wrote a friend: "You could hardly believe what happiness, even gaiety, there is between us." Phileo moved on to eros, and eventually to a second, bedside ecclesiastical marriage. Joy concludes poignantly by covering the three years of happiness Lewis and Davidman shared before the cancer returned and took her life.

Readers may quibble with some of Santamaria's interpretations of events in Davidman's life. For example, she argues that the breach in Davidman's relationship with Bill can be traced to her conviction that he had been sexually unfaithful with Phyl Haring, a lesbian friend of the couple. Yet when Davidman sailed to England in 1952, she stayed in Haring's London flat. It seems inconceivable that Davidman would have stayed with the woman she believed Bill had slept with. Another instance is Santamaria's contention that Davidman knew Bill and Renée would have an affair while she was in England. Yet if that was the case, why was Davidman apparently so heartbroken when she learned of the affair?

Such quibbles aside, Joy is an earnest, well-researched portrayal of the woman who captivated the heart of C. S. Lewis. Perhaps it is best to give Davidman the last word. Her poem "A Sword Named Joy," written on February 23, 1953, intimates how deeply she longed for his love:

If you love me as I love you,
No knife can cut our love in two!
On Christmas Day I gave my lord
An old and wicked Persian sword
To cut his finger on; and he
Did cut it most obligingly,
But would not let me kiss it well.
On Christmas morning it befell,
And all the bells of Oxford then
Were crying goodwill unto men!
O it was very bad indeed
To bring a gift that made him bleed,
It was unchristian and inhuman;
But still, the creature's name is woman—
A knife is a true lover's gift,
Old poets say; and so with thrift
She saved her pennies, had no rest,
Till she had found of knives the best,
Curved as sweetly as her breast.
And he has hung it on his wall,
And yet, he loves her not at all.
If you loved me as I love you,
No sword could separate us two!

Don W. King edited the letters and the poems of Joy Davidman. His most recent book is Yet One More Spring: A Critical Study of Joy Davidman (Eerdmans).

1. See A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis and Other Poems (Eerdmans, 2015), pp. 282-307.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

So. The poet Mary Oliver was coming to town—or to the local university, rather—and the head of their arts and lectures series, Roman Baratiak, called me up and asked if I would introduce her at the reading. Would I ever. An honor, I told him. Her lithe and lovely stanzas of encounter with the natural world, stair-stepping down the page, were among my very favorite moments as a reader, moments in which I often forgot to envy her skill and simply sank into the words—words which made me more of the kind of grateful and attentive person I wanted to be. And that's what a good poem is for, right?

Roman told me to arrive a half hour early so that Mary Oliver and I could chat a bit before she went on. "To establish some rapport," he said. So I got to the lecture hall by 7:30 p.m., intro in hand, eager for my little chat. But the stage manager came out and told me that our guest poet was still at dinner, would get here soon—that I should have a seat in the house and someone would get me when she arrived. So I took a seat near the front as the large hall began to fill.

At a quarter of eight she still hadn't shown. Then ten to eight. Then five to eight. The lecture hall was full by now, ripe with the noise of expectation, and no one had yet come for me. What, in that moment, was I to do with my one wild and precious life? What I did, sans summons, was get out of my seat and find my way backstage to the green room, which was brightly lit but entirely empty. Eight o'clock now. I could still hear the buzz of the crowd. In the huge mirror that crossed one side of the room I practiced my three-minute introduction, punching the laugh lines, slowing down for the passages of earnest appreciation.

At five after eight, Roman Baratiak and Mary Oliver came sweeping through the back door from the parking lot. Roman graciously introduced us, and Mary was particularly warm and personable in the way she took my hand. This was a relief to me, for when I had first heard her read in this very hall four years before, she had been out of sorts—quirky, grumpy, and aloof. With a shapeless stocking cap pulled all the way down to her eyes, she had communicated in almost every way that she did not want to be there. I believe her partner had just died; to be on the road and reading in public must have held little joy. Now, however, her thick gray hair was swept back like the wings of an angel.

Noting the lateness of the time, Roman made light of it. "We're fine," he said. "We're just fine."

"So," said Mary Oliver. "I've got time for a cigarette, right?"

Roman was clearly not counting on this response, but he said that would be okay, except she would have to go outside. "Not in here," he said.

So the two of us slipped out the door into the dark parking lot, where Mary Oliver calmly lit a cigarette and gave me a rundown on her day. Her plane from San Francisco had been two hours late, so she had gone directly from the airport to a class, and directly from the class to dinner, and directly from dinner to here, with no chance to check in or freshen up at the hotel.

"Are you feeling frazzled?" I asked.

"Nah," she said, and waved her hand dismissively. "I save that for later."

"You really are a pro," I said. And she laughed.

She explained that this was the fourth of five readings. The last would be the next day, in San Luis Obispo. She wanted to know how to pronounce Obispo, and I told her: "O-bis-po."

She tried the word after me and said she liked the sound of it. "What does it mean?" she asked.

I didn't know.

She said there was a priest from the mission there who would be here tonight. And then she talked about a certain bishop of Massachusetts who had her take part in a service. "I take part," she said, "but I never preach. That's my rule—I never preach."

Good rule, I thought. The one time I had ever been asked to preach a sermon, an entire week of preparation had produced only ten minutes of material. When I got to the church, the water pipes had burst, so we had to hold the service out on the patio. But a fire was raging some miles away, and the blistering air was thick with smoke. So the elders came to me and said, "We're awfully sorry, but given the conditions, it might be best if you could keep your sermon to just ten minutes."

"I think I can manage that," I said. After all, poetry is the art of compression.

But I didn't tell this story to Mary Oliver, even though she was just starting to ask me about my own work as a poet in our community. For at that moment Roman appeared from inside and said we really should get going—that Mary Oliver did not have time to finish her cigarette after all.

By now it was maybe a quarter after. Roman ushered us into the wings, from which we could see a brightly lit podium on the stage. On the far side of the podium were a coffee table and two soft chairs. I wondered whom they were for.

"Okay," said Roman. "I'll go out and welcome everyone and introduce you, Paul. Then you come out and introduce Mary. Then, Mary, you come out and read for fifty minutes. Then, Paul, you come back up to the stage and sit with her at the coffee table and just converse, using the two boom mikes, while I collect question cards from the audience. After about ten minutes, I'll hand you the cards, and then you can ask her some of those questions for another ten minutes. You got my message about doing this interview part, right?"

I had not. And I was suddenly conscious of the 700 people out there, a packed house, at $35 a head. But I swallowed and said, "Sounds great, Roman." What I felt like saying was, "So I've got time for a cigarette, right?"

So Roman introduced me, and I introduced Mary, and Mary gave me a great big kiss and then gave everyone a marvelous reading. The audience was hair-trigger with appreciation. They were a sort of wave that any surfer could ride—even someone like me who had never really been surfing before, who had never before interviewed a well-known poet.

During the reading the house lights were completely dark. By the pale glow of my wristwatch I scratched out a few notes and questions and then, during the lengthy applause, found my way back onstage and plopped down into one of the chairs by the coffee table while Mary Oliver took the other. To my surprise, she looked a bit nervous. She had carried the reading with warmth and poise, but by now, I think, she needed another cigarette. But somehow, her evident nervousness made me calm. It would be a complete waste of time for me to be nervous as well. It was my job to put her at ease. To ride the wave. So after the stagehands wrestled the podium into the wings, we began. I asked her about her time as a young woman on the farm of Edna St. Vincent Millay, about what Millay meant to her as a poet. This, for her, was an easy ramble. She had simply written a letter to Edna St. Vincent Millay's surviving sister and asked to help out on the farm—and she ended up helping out with Millay's many manuscripts. This is what she did instead of going to college—for her, a perfect education.

I asked her about her frequent use of multipart poems in her reading, about what these structures allow her to do. They allow her to change voices, she said. I told her that each part sometimes felt like a bird flying into a plate-glass window, then backing up and flying into the window again. She repeated the simile aloud and said that she liked it. I said it seemed to me that we keep trying to enter the ineffable without quite getting there—though a good many of her poems were in fact fairly "effable."

I asked her whether she had seen an increase in public interest in poetry during her lifetime.

"Yes," she said—"except Congress still doesn't like poetry."

"You are not," I asked, "an unacknowledged legislator of the world?"

"No," she said.

"So," I said. "Poetry makes nothing happen."

"POETRY SAVES LIVES!" shouted someone from the audience.

Mary Oliver smiled and said, "Yes, we would die without it."

It was about this time that I noticed, as I sat with my legs crossed, that the change in my pocket was slowly shifting. If I sat back any further—indeed, if I moved at all—a cavalcade of quarters and nickels would soon be hitting the floor.

But turning my mind to matters at hand, I then asked her about her ten years of teaching and, given her rather caustic comment during her reading that some of her students had actually learned to write a sentence, I asked in particular if she had been displeased with her students. Not with her students really, she said. It was just that she would give certain things away to her students in flashes of discovery that she could no longer give to a poem. "You can only give something away once," she said, "and if it's given to the students it's no longer available for the poems."

Then the index cards with questions arrived, and I took a deep breath, straightened up, and felt my change roll firmly back into the proper depths of my pocket. And in response to these questions in hand we did find out, among other things, that Shelley's "To a Sky-Lark" ranks among her favorite poems, and that "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" is among her favorite lines—"the naked power of metaphor," as she put it.

To Mary Oliver's relief, I ended our conversation when, by the glow of my trusty wristwatch, twenty minutes had elapsed. To my surprise, I did not regret a single fumbling word I'd said. And, to my un-surprise, I treasured each and every word that Mary Oliver had uttered. Afterward, people told me, "You looked so spontaneous up there!"

Well, duh.

And I still haven't washed the smoke from my jacket.

Paul J. Willis is professor of English at Westmont College. His most recent book of poems is Say This Prayer into the Past (Cascade).

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As well as the centenary of the births of Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller, 2015 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot. If Bellow and Miller were two of the most significant Anglophone practitioners of prose and drama in the 20th century, then Eliot was surely the torchbearer for poetry. His legacy was some of the most artistically unique and widely read poems in the English language. Frustratingly, he also left behind a will that prohibited biographers from quoting from his works (a hamstrung Peter Ackroyd and a hobbled Lyndall Gordon had to resort to paraphrasing), and a diligent second wife who kept most of her late husband's archive under lock and key.

Since Valerie Eliot's death in 2012, the Eliot Estate has relaxed its grip, and a wealth—some might say a surfeit—of material has been made available to doughty biographers. Robert Crawford, a Scottish poet, professor, biographer of Robert Burns, and—crucially—an Eliot aficionado has stepped up to the plate. Young Eliot is the first volume of what looks set to be a definitive biography. Crawford covers Eliot's formative years up to and including the publication of The Waste Land. Previous biographers, with precious little to go on, were forced to sketch those early years. With free rein to quote, and access to new interviews, letters, and hitherto undisclosed memoirs, Crawford explores this period in great depth, revealing along the way the scale of Eliot's considerable achievement and the substantial emotional cost involved.

Crawford starts as he means to go on by getting up close and personal and calling his subject "Tom." His opening chapters take us from Eliot's birth in 1888 in St. Louis to his strict but cossetted upbringing. Eliot's parents were prim, bookish, and prosperous, with ancestral links to Nathaniel Hawthorne and presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. "Few squealing infants have had quite so much to live up to," Crawford writes. In his account, Eliot takes some time to come out of his shell, his lack of confidence fueled by his sticking-out ears and the truss he must wear after being born with a congenital double hernia. He retreats into the world of books, devouring Poe, Kipling, and Dickens, and from the age of ten immersing himself in Milton and being haunted by Lewis Carroll's wily verbal cadences. Sherlock Holmes becomes his childhood hero. When he embarks on "the usual adolescent course" of 19th-century Romantic poetry, he finds himself drawn to verse that fuses sexual longing with religious sentiment.

Although an interest in the roots of religion and theological argument would be a continuing preoccupation, Eliot eventually broke away from the family religion. "Unitarianism is a bad preparation for brass tacks like birth, copulation, death, hell, heaven and insanity," he said in adulthood. As Crawford adds, "His adult poetry likes to puncture romantic illusion with a sharp application of brass tacks."

After various spells at different schools Eliot gets into Harvard, where for his first couple of years he loses himself in extracurricular reading, receives average grades, and makes few friends. When he does acquire "frat mates," he impresses them with scatological and at times misogynistic poetry. In counterpoint to these frivolities he discovers Dante and Laforgue. Only toward the end of his time there does he put an end to his "stylish loafing," pull his socks up, and knuckle down.

Post-Harvard, Eliot heads to Europe, desperate to loosen his ties with New England. In Paris he becomes a committed Francophile. In Munich he finishes his first masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." On returning to America he throws himself into more disciplined study, adding Sanskrit and Pali to his armory of languages and widening the scope of his philosophical reading. "No other major twentieth-century poet was so thoroughly and strenuously educated," notes Crawford. However, when Bertrand Russell meets Eliot he recognizes an incredibly cultivated man who is nevertheless "lacking in the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything."

Eliot's pivotal "Oxford year" of 1914-15 enabled him to channel that talent. Preferring the bright lights of London ("Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead"), he makes significant contacts at the heart of the city's avant-garde, chief among them the "pugnacious painter and novelist" Wyndham Lewis and future cheerleader and fine-tuner Ezra Pound. He also meets Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom, after a quick courtship, and to the consternation of his parents back home, he marries.

Settling down in England, Eliot tries to write poetry in earnest while juggling several other jobs—lecturing, editing, and banking to make ends meet. The balancing act tires him; his wife's infidelity and illnesses exhaust him. He puts on a brave face in public (which Katherine Mansfield called "the bluff"), mixing with Pound's Vorticists and Imagists as well as with the sometimes catty, aesthetically daring Bloomsbury set. Crawford's riveting final chapters show Eliot working flat out to finish and refine what started out as "He Do the Police in Different Voices." A sneak-preview of Ulysses ("superb") galvanizes and confirms his artistic technique; a nervous breakdown and therapy in Switzerland halts his progress. Finally, and with a changed title, The Waste Land appears and establishes Eliot's genius. Pound proclaims it a "series of poems, possibly the finest that the modern movement in English has produced."

A more modern admirer of the poem is Robert Crawford. "The Waste Land is a musical astonishment," he gushes in his introduction. On the very first page of Young Eliot he calls his subject "the most influential and resounding poetic voice of the twentieth century." On the second we get a declaration: "Like most people to whom his poetry matters, I fell in love with the ineradicably insinuating music of Eliot's verse." Crawford has published a critical work on Eliot before and has taught him since 1989 at the University of St. Andrews. He clearly has the credentials to take on Eliot, but does he have an objective lens to see him through?

Fortunately, it becomes manifest early on that Young Eliot won't be a fawning character study, a profile presented as panegyric. Crawford states that he is not "in sympathy with all of Eliot's ideas." Eliot, while clearly a hero, "was no saint." As a result, Crawford's "close-up view" constitutes a candid warts-and-all portrait. Offsetting Eliot's intellectual sophistication we glimpse flashes of naïveté, torturous bouts of low self-confidence, casual sexism, and of course an inherited and ingrained streak of anti-Semitism (his mother having confessed to "an instinctive antipathy to Jews").

Crawford alternates between highlighting—or rather refusing to conceal—Eliot's flaws and singing his praises. His close readings of Eliot's work are uniformly excellent, whether The Waste Land, the shorter poems, or seminal critical pieces such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent." As with the best literary biographies, he demonstrates how life informs art. The Waste Land is, in part, a collage of lived experience, from the images of Eliot's childhood summers on the New England coast that went into the first draft, to the details of his Lloyd's Bank days and his night-school teaching that made the final cut. We learn how Eliot transmuted "his own hurts" and observations into artistic material but also how he benefitted from and indeed depended on his "appropriative poetic ear." However, it was from his voracious reading that he appropriated most, and Crawford's pages seethe with books that made an impact on Eliot's verse and authors, such as fellow "transposed American" Henry James, who shaped his identity.

Crawford opens Young Eliot with a quip—"T. S. Eliot was never young"—but then attempts, wherever possible, to chip away at this calcified impression, to revamp the image of this stiff, starchy "bankerly poet." It feels like an uphill struggle. Young Eliot quickly became Old Possum. "I grow old … I grow old …" wails Prufrock, but it might as well be his creator. "Here I am, an old man in a dry month," he writes in "Gerontion." Virginia Woolf described him as a man in "a four-piece suit," while e. e. cummings, who also considered him "immaculately dressed," remembered him as "a snob, cold" and "aloof." Crawford rallies to Eliot's defense by reinterpreting his purported arrogance as a continuation of his schoolboy shyness, his froideur as plain fear. Still, the biographer fails to convince us that for all Eliot's "po-faced, born-venerable persona, there was an elusive, wounded and sometimes mischievous identity." If there was, it doesn't come across here.

Crawford explains at the outset that his challenge is to "humanize this dauntingly canonical poet." While he doesn't always manage to render Eliot humane, he succeeds marvelously at making him human. In addition, he leaves us in no doubt as to why Eliot's work matters. For a first installment, Young Eliot is perhaps more detailed than it should be (Eliot's Harvard years are eked out over three chapters), but not once does it drag. Moreover, it does what we expect of it: encourages readers less familiar with Eliot's work to discover it, and everyone else to return to it. This is a searching and compelling biography and one which leaves us hungry for the next volume, for old Eliot to become even older.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The plot of Death Comes for the Deconstructionist centers on the alleged murder of a prominent academic, just after he has given an award acceptance speech at a meeting of the Modern Language Association. Coincidentally, I have finished reading Daniel Taylor's splendidly crafted novel for the second time just as the MLA is having its annual meeting a few miles away in Austin. I am happy to report that the novel is not only more interesting than almost anything likely to transpire at that distinguished gathering but mercifully more accessible than its title and setting might suggest. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess to being a member of the literary tribe by training; I have given just such academic speeches, happily without being murdered for it. But I am glad for many less dramatic reasons to have been home today in my armchair, away from the jostle of politics and posturing proceeding apace just over an hour's drive away. (Cum grano salum, I think re-reading a good novel is almost always a better investment of time than listening to a few more academic papers and speeches.) Yet for me the worst part of the MLA isn't the tendentiously titled papers, mind-numbing as they may be. It comes in between the sessions, seeing the faces of hundreds of anxious graduate students there for job interviews—jockeying for attention, yet with confusion and disillusionment all too visible in their eyes—and realizing that you can't help. Worse still, these harried souls are only a fraction of those who came to graduate schools to pursue their love of literature, "burning with bright hope," in Byron's phrase. Many of their peers have already dropped out, before or during the dissertation, depressed.

In Death Comes for the Deconstructionist, we meet just such a former graduate student, Taylor's protagonist Jon Mote. His dissertation chapters having been repeatedly rejected by his supervisor for being too old-fashioned (i.e., for referring to literary texts more than theorists), he eventually stopped trying. A decade or so later finds him pretty much aimless, trying to make ends meet by doing freelance commissioned research work for lawyers, when suddenly he is asked by the widow of his murdered former professor to be her amateur private investigator into a crime on which the police have made little progress. Haunted by his failures, beset by reflexive incompetence and diminishing psychological stability, but also needing the money, Mote reluctantly agrees. He tries his best to act the part so he can collect the money, but early on is stumped. At an impasse in his search for the murderer—or even a plausible motive—he retreats to the university library:

And so I do what I often do in this situation. I decide to read. Books were an early lifeline, and I turn to them regularly with a certain desperate hopefulness. People talk about reading as an escape from reality—I tend to think about it as an escape into reality. Books aren't an escape from trouble. There's more trouble in novels—and most other books—than anywhere else. Books aren't even an escape from your own particular troubles, because a good book always makes you think about your own life while it pretends to distract you from it.

Here Mote the failed English major pauses to gather his breath and residual sanity for a minute, then adds:

It's just that books suggest the possibility that trouble can be survived, if you know what I mean. Or at least named. Books are more real for me than the rest of my life because they light up more parts of me than the rest of my life ever has. I mean, you can be little more than a damned cartoon figure and get along quite nicely in life—maybe even become president.

As we learn, the primary agent in Mote's being driven away from his early passion for literature is the very professor whose murder he is now trying to solve, Professor Pratt the deconstructionist. It isn't that Pratt had no affection for literature, but rather that he used it primarily for self-gratification, as a means to power. In Mote's description, his old professor loved literature "more like a mistress than a wife." As one might expect, Pratt has had a parade of graduate student mistresses, including one who became his second wife; she tolerated his subsequent serial affairs and now seems genuinely to grieve the death of her husband. That doesn't prevent her from being herself a suspect, along with two department colleagues, and two former graduate students, one of the latter his current mistress, among others. There are complexities to the case that would challenge Chesterton's Father Brown.

It seems to me a risky thing to introduce more than five pages of dreary academic posturing into a novel, yet Pratt's MLA speech is given by Taylor at length. The professor's hackneyed imitations of Saussure and Derrida once might have thrilled much of his audience, but now they're simply bored—they've heard it all before. "Literature," Pratt intones, "is not a testimony to successful communication between lonely creatures. It is the mausoleum of the Logos, the totalitarian word that would organize the universe." Yet if we're ready to dispense with our illusions, ready to "acknowledge that literature offers us neither wisdom, nor love, nor courage, nor home—our nostalgia for them notwithstanding—then we can allow the writer to float freely on the winds of language, taking us everywhere and nowhere." For veterans of the literary discipline in the last four decades, this prattle is only mildly parodic; even Pratt's conclusion that, as a result, "there is no meaningful difference between The Divine Comedy and The Wizard of Oz" will scarcely turn a hair, except perhaps in admiration that discourse so difficult to parody has been captured rather neatly by Taylor. I say "parody" because straightforward imitation would be far too much to induce willing disbelief in 99.9 percent of readers. To give a sample of what now passes for actual academic discourse, here is a passage from a current leading light in the guild, from her book A Manifesto for the Humanities (University of Michigan Press, 2015), for comparison:

Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy.[1]

Taylor's gentle parody is still a risk, I think, but successful in this novel in part because Pratt and his particular twaddle are not the actual subject, despite the academic glamor, attractive wife, pleasant ex-wife, many mistresses, and mysterious murder he has gotten thereby. Taylor's real subject is one of Pratt's more thoroughly crushed victims, our demon-haunted, procrastinating, scapegrace narrator, the hopelessly un-professional private detective Mote, especially as viewed through his relationship with his Down syndrome sister Judy. It is Judy who emerges as the novel's actual light-bearer, the foil to Mote's own species of darkness, and it is her "presence—maybe with a capital P," as Mote admits, which sustains him against his psychotic inner "voices," demons more frightening in some ways than those of Christopher Marlowe or St. Luke. We begin to suspect self-destruction will quite possibly culminate in another death long before Mote's unlikely quest is over.

That said, Professor Pratt's faintly ridiculous trophy speech is important as a moral litmus. One person in his audience erupts in the midst of it, shouting out in protest. She has to be escorted from the room. Later on Verity Jackson, a middle-aged black teacher of writing, tells Mote that what she objected to was Pratt's destruction of life-sustaining stories

by killing words … by denying the ability of words to capture our experience and explain our lives to ourselves. If words are such weak and self-destructing things, then there is no truth, and if no truth there is only power, and we, of all people, know what it is like to be on the receiving end of power.

Her words are echoed by Pratt's colleague and another former teacher of Mote, the still respected though now out-of-fashion Professor Abramson, a childhood survivor of the Nazis in Hungary. Abramson is a man who knows something about the consequences of the demise of truth; his comment on the state of the profession book-ends nicely with that of Verity Jackson: "I have lived under circ*mstances that make one believe in the categories of true and false, good and evil. Wiping away such categories serves oppression and death." Later he will add, "We have never been so opposed to talking about the moral dimensions of literature, and yet we have never been more moralistic and judgmental."

Taylor is deadly serious about this point—that the self-serving cleverness of academic discourse actually imprisons rather than liberates both perpetrators and their captive audience. He finds this abuse akin to the self-serving distortion of Scripture by wicked fundamentalists like Lester, Mote and Judy's uncle and erstwhile guardian, and the monstrous murders of innocent blacks in the rural South, an instance of which figures prominently in this narrative. Long before his detective work is finished, Mote knows—intuitively if not empirically—a crucial truth about the ethos and subculture created by Pratt and his ilk. Their clever dissembling is NOT just about the kind of linguistic correspondence that canny postmodernist academics try to subvert for fun and profit. Rather, this is about a far deeper and darker moral truth Mote failed fully to grasp while still a student, namely, that underneath the clever game of classroom subversion there is often intellectual cowardice and nihilism—that particular form of self-induced misery which seeks adulatory company and takes its cruel delight in emptying out the possibility of meaning in life for others. Pratt's adolescent participation in a horrible lynching, discovered eventually by Mote (and not only by him), is not Pratt's only wickedness, just his most socially unforgivable one. His cowardice and self-serving complicity in that evil act is spiritually predictive, however, of the intellectual path he will follow.

What Mote gradually learns is that while what Pratt preaches, namely that everyone is to some degree self-deceived, is indeed the case (duh!), some actively predatory people (teachers, preachers, and politicians among them) self-consciously deceive others by manipulation of this universal susceptibility (of which all of us are to some degree conscious and accordingly insecure). This is their MO as con-artists. For a rhetorically proficient academic like Pratt, this is no triumph of genius; it is like taking candy from a baby. Yet theft of the possibility of meaning not only kills joy; repeated, it kills hope, and kills it as dead as the chicanery of smoke-and-mirrors religious preaching or the foul predation of an evil hypocrite like Uncle Lester, who has raped Judy. As we learn of Pratt's sexual predations, we begin to see that Pratt and Lester are two sides of the same coin. They pose as shepherds, they act as wolves, preying upon lambs. To kill hope in the young, at the age they most need it, is a horrible violation: there can hardly be a millstone big enough. That, it seems to me, is a truth in this book which survives the question-begging con-games of academe entirely unscathed. While the reader will need to read the novel for herself to find out "who-dun-it," let me hint: the final exposé of Pratt's death scene would not embarrass Sophocles.

Now here comes a bigger surprise, and for many readers it may be the novel's saving grace. This is not a tragedy. Taylor is a master of humorous monologue and dialogue to put in the company of Mark Twain (an obvious influence, by the way, on both Taylor and his narrator). Such deft humor, its pacing and timing, are obtained only by great skill and a thoughtfully light touch. In fact, this is a very funny novel. The witticisms of Mote, his hilarious self-deprecating humor and satirist's eye for absurdity in the general culture, are all razor-sharp, lifting us up in laughter beyond the searing moral judgments of the story to a hope of better things at last, even for really messed up people. The conclusion is brilliant, entirely counter-cultural, embarrassingly redemptive. It is hard to believe this is a first novel, so masterful is the craftsmanship. You'll want to read it twice.

David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at the Honors College at Baylor University.

1. Sidonie A. Smith is Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan and Director of Michigan's Institute for Humanities.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, idealistic Isabel Archer gets into an argument with her more worldly companion, Madame Merle, about clothes. Madame Merle is of the opinion that, when you get down to it, people are their clothes. This doesn't sit well with Isabel, who objects: "I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me." When Madame Merle points out that Isabel takes some care over her appearance, Isabel says she is living under a standard imposed on her by society. Madame Merle asks Isabel if she'd prefer to walk around naked. So ends the conversation.

Madame Merle turns out to be a conniving backstabber, but her opinion has mostly carried the day: fashion as self-creation sells products on websites from Ask Men to Man Repeller. The last two sweaters I've purchased were called "The Audrey" and "The French Girl." Dress for the waif-like self you want! But though I bought the sweaters, I don't buy the argument. Clothes may hold many meanings, but they signal membership (whether real or aspirational) more than they express or generate a self. In this sense, dress is always political. Your black turtleneck indicates that you consider yourself an intellectual; that suit is a lawyer's; this is the habit of a nun; my long wool skirts told my classmates in college that I was "like, super-religious." Or, if I were a young man in the '60s with long hair, you could reasonably assume that I opposed the Vietnam War.

For dress can be political in the partisan sense too, though it hasn't functioned this way in American politics for some time. Documenting some of its political past is Betty Luther Hillman's task in Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Representation. As Hillman records, for some, clothes could be a way of embodying opposition to societal norms. But for others, clothes were a way of reassuring political opponents. While some young men were growing their hair long to protest the Vietnam War, an anti-war politician like Eugene McCarthy was making sure his volunteers were getting "clean for Gene" by cutting their hair and keeping clean-shaven.

Not every fashion trend in the '60s and '70s was meant to overthrow some corrupt social value, but even apolitical fashions could become loaded with political significance. The miniskirt became a symbol of sexual liberation. Unisex pantsuits and Nehru jackets seemed to herald the arrival of an androgynous age. So (in some eyes) did the Beatles: "Now come the Beatles," Hillman quotes one reporter as saying, "the bushy-haired boys whose sex is not immediately apparent."

Meanwhile, various movements argued over whether it was better to push the envelope through one's clothes or use clothes to signal a desire for respectability. Black civil rights organizations divided over natural hair. For some gay rights groups, drag was a tool to undermine gender norms; for others, it was holding the movement back. "Each of us has to decide just what kind of image we will present to the photographers during the Gay Day parade," Harvey Milk warned in an editorial. Though he "did not explicitly single out drag queens," Hillman notes, "his message was implicitly understood."

Feminists, too, were split. Certainly, no use of clothing for political protest is more famous than the protest of the Miss America Pageant of 1968, where bras (along with high heels and copies of Playboy) were tossed in the trash (and, in legend if not in reality, burned). But it was a problem if feminism seemed to be more concerned with clothes than with achieving legal gains for women. It was also a problem, however, if feminism led some women to reject beauty norms completely: Betty Friedan worried in 1969 that some young feminists "were trying to push [the message] … that to be a liberated woman you had to make yourself ugly."

For some women, though, the argument that you did have to make yourself ugly was persuasive. Hillman includes a photo spread from Lesbian Tide, showing two women, before feminism and after. Before feminism: sexy clothes and makeup. After feminism: sensible pants and loose jackets. Before: individuality is repressed; after: individuality restored.

Even as some of the arguments documented by Hillman induce a cringe—"long hair is our black skin," says one hippie—there's something undeniably winning about this whole scene and the seriousness of these arguments. But the image that really ends up summing up these debates isn't drag queens, getting clean for Gene, or the comfortable women of Lesbian Tide. And it's not, much as I regret it, the bra-trashers.

Instead, the really representative picture is of a protest led by FADD (Fight Against Dictating Designers). A woman has just cut off the bottom of a below-the-knee skirt to create a miniskirt. This was a protest not about any of these political questions, but about consumer choice: designers wanted the miniskirt out, and women still wanted it in. (If the slogan "Dictating Designers" seems a bit overstated, remember that before the miniskirt there was the sack dress.)

While I was reading Dressing for the Culture Wars, I was also reading Women in Clothes, a collection of interviews and essays spearheaded by the Canadian novelist Sheila Heti. (Some of the answers to the survey are collected in the book, while others are hosted on the book's website.) To read these accounts from disparate women is to be reminded, if anyone was in doubt, that our relationship with clothes remains fraught—but not quite in the same way that Hillman documents. One of the survey questions is "do you address anything political in the way you dress?"; looking through the answers, it becomes rapidly clear that the answer, for many, is no. Or, to quote one answer: "Not since the 60s." (But issues involving clothes for Muslim women, where political and religious concerns are intertwined, are increasingly prominent in North America as well as in Europe.)

Though Hillman focuses on tensions between respectability and radicalism, there's another tension at work in these arguments about clothes, and it has to do with that idea of clothes as a form of self-expression. The fashions themselves became political actions, creating selves directed toward better ends. But anyone can wear pants, give up makeup, grow out their hair or cut it short. And anyone did.

Whether the fashions Hillman discusses were political intentionally (like long hair) or accidentally (like the miniskirt), all ended up becoming simply one choice among many. Young men who went to court for the right to wear their hair long would see long-haired men allowed into the kind of high-end hotel that had once kicked them out the door. The look had become fashionable. Its meaning, accordingly, changed. For unless clothing is tied to the kind of membership that can be granted or revoked—such as (for instance) that nun's habit, mentioned above—its meaning is ultimately in the hands of other people, not in yours. That is the limit of any self-expression undertaken through fashion, whether you're trying to harness it for political ends or just to impress others.

In the end, long hair on men could not express a coherent position. It became fashionable and then went out of fashion again. Unisex fashion, too, has mostly fallen by the wayside. And, as it turns out, Betty Friedan need not have worried that women would embrace ugliness in the name of feminism: the miniskirt endureth forever. There's something inevitable about the way that everything eventually became a question of choice and self-fulfillment. Clothes simply don't have that kind of political or moral power. But there's something a little sad, too.

Clothes, like food and furniture, represent a compromise all of us must make with the world. Since you have a body (prone to chill, hunger, and weariness), you will need to care for it (with a coat, a little soup, and a mattress). This will end up involving some degree of taste and the more-than-purely necessary. Taste ends up involving morality; other people end up involving politics. That's even before you get into the material side of clothes—where they come from, who made them, how much those people were paid and under what conditions.

The more they are contemplated, in fact, the more political and moral problems clothes generate. All the same, you have to wear something. Unless you supervise every part of your clothes from planting the cotton to sewing the seams, you can't opt out. That's clothes.

Even if the activists in these movements were mistaken about the self-fashioning power of their clothes, at least they were trying to fashion a self that was directed toward a kind of virtue. And there's always something a little tragic about watching any idealistic cause—no matter how mistaken—become simply another way to sell you something. Clothes can't mean anything, it's true. But wouldn't it be nice if they did?

B. D. McClay is associate editor at The Hedgehog Review.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Editor's Note: Susan Wise Bauer decided to take a break from writing the history of the world (three volumes to date), so she took on a light subject: The Story of Western Science: From Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory. One of these days, or so I fondly hope, she will write another novel. Meanwhile, here's a guest column from the farm and publishing complex she presides over with her husband, who pastors a rural congregation in Virginia.

A decade ago, John Stackhouse sounded weary. "Aren't we 'done' with gender?" he wrote, in the preface to his 2005 study Finally Feminist. "Haven't all the relevant issues been raised, all the texts scrutinized, all the alternatives arrayed?"

In the newly revised and expanded edition of that same study, Stackhouse doesn't just sound weary; he's begun to sound slightly desperate. "Instead … of immediately consigning our opponents [in the gender debate] to the lake of fire," he implores, "let's remember Jesus. Let's remember that we love Jesus. Let's remember that we're trying to understand Jesus, and worship Jesus, and obey Jesus, and become like Jesus, and share Jesus the very best that we can … . Far too many discussions of gender have disappeared almost instantly down … slippery slopes into hellish excommunication." It doesn't help, he adds, to call each other "wicked or witless" or "immoral morons" (which suggests to me that his email over the last ten years has been less than edifying).

This is the context in which Finally Feminist has become the newly-titled Partners in Christ (InterVarsity Press); and even as he ably (and graciously) re-presents the core argument from Finally Feminist, Stackhouse seems to be showing the wear and tear of the last ten years of inter-Christian sniping.

That core argument, which I discussed in some detail in my 2007 Books & Culture review of Finally Feminist, has not changed. Scripture, Stackhouse writes, presents an intentional doubleness whenever the "radical freedom" that is ours in Christ ("freedom from law, freedom from social divisions, freedom from religious tradition, freedom even from the world, the flesh, and the devil") collides with social norms that have not been redeemed. In Christ, women have complete freedom to pray, preach, and otherwise serve the kingdom of God; but there are times and places in which the full exercise of this freedom might actually hinder the advance of that very kingdom. And in those times and places, Scripture suggests that we willingly curtail the exercises of our God-given liberties for the greater good: "[F]or the Christian church," Stackhouse concludes, "the question of gender is not just about gender … . It is about the kingdom of God—because everything is first and finally about the kingdom of God. And because everything is about the kingdom of God, then questions about gender need to be asked in this one, primary context: What will best advance the kingdom of God, here and now?"

In the patriarchal culture of the Roman Empire, the church had to be prudent about allowing women to exercise their freedoms: a temporary accommodation to an "unhappy reality," carried out to avoid unnecessary scandal and "for the greater good of spreading the gospel." But now, in a society which is "at least officially egalitarian," this temporary accommodation is no longer necessary. In fact, the church causes greater scandal and damage to the gospel by holding on to the gender roles of the past:

I am arguing that there no longer remains any rationale for the woman to remain in the once-expected role of dependence and submission … . When, under the providence of God and the ongoing, spreading influence of kingdom values, society opens up to the abolition of slavery or the emancipation of women, then Christians can rejoice … . The dark irony remains today … precisely in Christians lagging behind society and still requiring a submissive role for women—a posture that now is a scandalous mirror image of the scandal that egalitarianism would have caused in the patriarchal first century.

John Stackhouse is certainly not the only theologian making this argument, but he makes it well. Partners in Christ is clear and readable; the pattern of doubleness throughout Scripture is well developed in a series of chapters dealing with the entire biblical witness, from Genesis to Revelation; and Stackhouse addresses a comprehensive series of conservative counter-arguments, ranging from "Egalitarianism violates the pattern set for us by the Trinity" to "If women don't stay home, children will be neglected."

In fact, these conservative counter-arguments have apparently multiplied since 2005; they occupied a single chapter in Finally Feminist, but they sprawl across most of the entire second half of Partners in Christ. Which is where the wear and tear begins to show. Despite the repeated assertion that Western Christians now live in an egalitarian culture where the kingdom values of equality and freedom can be more openly displayed, Partners in Christ strikes me as a book that is digging itself back into a foxhole.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Stackhouse's apparent rejection of the term feminist, a word he boldly claimed back in 2005. "I here set forth," he wrote in the preface to the original book, " … a single, coherent paradigm that amounts finally to a Christian feminism." This passage is missing entirely from the current reworking. Instead, in a newly added passage, Stackhouse muses, "I wanted to be a feminist back before feminist became the 'f-word' that no decent person would use in public."

The f-word that no decent person would use. Clearly Stackhouse has his tongue more or less in his cheek, but just a few pages later, he uses the term yet again:

[T]he "f-word" … has become odious not only among many Christians but also among many people in society at large—even, and sometimes especially, among young women who might be presumed to be feminists … . [T]he word evokes now an ugly stereotype of lesbian misanthropes or perhaps wickedly alluring sexual predators who threaten the integrity of the family, sexual purity, masculinity, and yes, civilization itself, in the eyes of the most frightened. Many of my own university students could easily agree with almost any standard set of feminist tenets but would horrifiedly eschew the label. "I don't hate men!" a few have confided in me. "I'm no feminist!"

To do Stackhouse justice, he does his best to explain that feminism is not a choice between man-hating and man-eating. But his assumption that so many young women consider feminism a dirty word smacks of someone who has spent the last twenty years within the evangelical enclave—presumably fending off attacks from opponents who call him an immoral moron for his egalitarian stance.

Which is, perhaps, why the book has been renamed: from Finally Feminist to Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism. Stackhouse is no longer arguing, with the same fervor, that Christians should "celebrate any sort of feminism that brings more justice and human flourishing to the world—more shalom—no matter who is bringing it, since we recognize the hand of God in all that is good." Instead, he appears to be writing to conservatives—social conservatives, patriarchal conservatives—and in attempting to make himself heard, he has chosen (to some extent, at least) to accommodate their terms, their prejudices, and their definitions.

In that way, Partners in Christ seems like a retreat from Finally Feminist. I would be happy to pass the latter on to an unchurched friend who knows nothing about Christianity and doesn't understand why Christians are still talking about "women's roles"; Finally Feminist opens up the church's struggle with gender in a way that illuminates the Christian hope in the final triumph of the kingdom of God. Partners in Christ is a better fit for a Christian acquaintance who is staunchly patriarchal and believes feminism is a pathology. That's fine. We need to have conversations with both sets of folks. I just wish that we were all spending more time talking to the first group, instead of repeating ourselves to the second.

—Susan Wise Bauer

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Brett Foster, who died in November 2015 at the age of forty-two, started teaching in the English Department at Wheaton College in the fall of 2005. During Brett's first year at Wheaton, Alan Jacobs told me he had a new colleague I should get to know. I almost always follow up on Alan's suggestions, but sometimes it takes a while, and it wasn't until the following year that Brett and I met. His first contribution to Books & Culture, a poem entitled "The Little Flowers of Dan Quisenberry," appeared shortly thereafter, in our March/April 2007 issue.

We began to meet regularly, usually on Monday mornings at the Starbucks near my office. Brett worked there a lot (and at other such places, too), grading papers, preparing for classes, working on a paper he was going to give at this or that conference. (He loved to travel, even from one coffee shop to another.) He'd often have a course text on the table (Spenser's Faerie Queene, for instance, or a Shakespeare play) along with a couple of scholarly volumes he'd received via interlibrary loan. I soon discovered that he loved books as much as I did—to excess, some might say—and we took many jaunts together, into Chicago and throughout the suburbs. Brett had in his head a map with all the places where used books were sold, and he also regularly consulted schedules for library sales. (He and I shared a fondness for libraries, too, in their infinite variety.) It was good to hear, at a gathering shortly after Brett's death, that just a couple of days before he died, he made a brief foray to an outlet of Half Price Books with his English Department colleague, lifelong friend, and fellow poet Jeffrey Galbraith.

Brett wasn't interested in everything—fiction, for instance, often failed to stir his blood—but it seemed that he was. And when a particular subject grabbed his attention, he would plunge into it with ferocious intensity, writing thousands of words (and sending me emails after midnight). The pieces he wrote for B&C, both for the print magazine and for the website exclusively, suggest but do not begin to encompass the range of his attention, from the NFL to the drawings of Bronzino. He loved to report from the road (a conference on "The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination," held in Southern California; a series of "London Letters"; a visit to F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthplace), and he had a genius for collaboration, writing about the great Shakespeare actors with Mark Lewis, the Director of Theater Programs at Wheaton College; about the new Seminary Co-op bookstore with theologian Wesley Hill, a Wheaton alum; about a multimedia tribute to T. S. Eliot with art historian and Wheaton colleague Matthew Milliner; about the pleasures of Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas with the artist David Hooker (also a Wheaton colleague). And for every collaboration that came to fruition, there were three or four more that he proposed.

I learned early on that Brett always had many pots bubbling at the same time. I knew that many of the pieces we talked about—already taking form in his mind as we drank our coffee—would not get written. I couldn't even predict, with any reasonable degree of accuracy, which ones were likely to get into print, with the exception of a few that we both regarded as essential—his brilliant, long-gestating piece on the playwright Conor McPherson, for instance, which appeared in our May/June 2014 issue, which appeared just before Brett got the out-of-the-blue diagnosis of the cancer that eventually killed him.

In this piece ("Stumbling Around in the Light"), Brett notes that one way to think about McPherson's work is to divide it into two phases: the first consisting of "the plays fueled by drink," the second by "those that emerged from sobriety." He elaborates:

Alcohol had long been central in McPherson's plays. One early introduction concludes, "See yas at the bar!" and he attributed some of his early success as a writer to "doomy gloomy hangover energy." The blackout-drinker's tale in Dublin Carol proved to be a dark personal prophecy. On the night of the London premiere of his next play, Port Authority, in 2001, McPherson collapsed and faced a ten-week hospitalization for pancreatitis, so thoroughly had drink wrecked his body. The plays that would follow, and that are now collected in Plays: Three, were experiments of sorts. McPherson said he was not at all sure he would be able to write effectively without alcohol's inspiration … . "I was one of those guys who stumbled around in the dark for a long time," he said of his drunken past in a 2008 Chicago Tribune interview. "Not that I'm stumbling around in the light now."

And yet, as Brett proceeds to show, the evolution of McPherson's work, even since that interview, suggests that he may indeed be "stumbling around in the light."

A couple of months later, Brett surprised and delighted me by asking if I would be interested in a long retrospective on the African American poet Robert Hayden, along the lines of his piece on the poet Jack Gilbert ("The Severe Sensualist"), which was posted on the B&C website in February of that year. Brett's essay "Revisiting Robert Hayden" was published in our Nov/Dec 2014 issue.

Near the end of that essay, Brett discusses the impact of Hayden's Bahá'í faith on his work (regarded as damaging by many critics). Hayden had abandoned the rather harsh Baptist Christianity with which he was raised; when he married, he accepted his wife's commitment to Bahá'í. Brett concludes thus:

This Bahá'í commitment … gave meaning to poetry-writing for Hayden. Writing, he declared in one preface, was a "spiritual act, a form of worship" that required no distinction between "religious" and "secular" art. Efforts to master form and technique "are in themselves a kind of prayer." He hoped his poetry would "serve God and affirm and honor man," and be a "prayer for understanding and perfection." Elsewhere Hayden's definitions of poetry sound less assured and serene. He calls it a "species of Primal Scream," for instance, or a way of "gazing upon the Medusa without being turned to stone, the poem being his mirror shield." Poems are places, in other words, where dangerous nemeses are contested, and where, despite that, survival remains possible. This sense of poetry's purpose or protection surely informs Hayden's habit of intermingling beauty with horror, as in the following image: "A tawny / butterfly drunkenly circled / then lighted on offal." In "Monet's 'Waterlilies,' " news from Selma and Saigon contrasts with "the serene great picture that I love," while "The Night-Blooming Cereus" (the title poem of his 1972 volume) turns that desert plant into a suitable container for these oppositions: "It repelled as much / as it fascinated me // sometimes—snake, / eyeless bird head," but also "imminence / of bloom."

Maybe Hayden arrived at an ideal middle ground, as far as definitions of poetry go, when he dreamed of future poems displaying forms and techniques he had not yet attempted. He hoped to find "something patterned, wild, and free."

A theme that recurred in conversations in the days after Brett's death was his gift for friendship, shared with so many as if poured from a magic cup that never needed refilling, even as he was fully present with Anise, his beloved wife, and Avery and Gus, their dear kids. This gift for friendship rhymed with Brett's profligate gifts as a writer—testimony to the unaccountable and utterly gratuitous generosity of the God he loved, in whose embrace he is now secure.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

i.m. (1953-1998)

I've had so many good things
happen to me.
So why not me?

And why not there, in that relic-worthy skull, where his good-willed
thrust and parry with the local press existed in its jocular fullness?

I think Christ
would do it that way. Or
Steve Garvey.

Hardly a laureled Hall of Famer, but saintly in the modern sense, still hero
enough, emblazoned on my place mat, his submarine curveball thrown.

No man is worth more
than another, and none is worth
more than $12.95.

He'd be clutch in the ninth, seal the game after afternoon bullpen slumber:
those summer double-headers in the grim bubble of the Metrodome:

I don't think there are any good uses
for nuclear weapons, but this
might be one.

I-70 World Series that year, whole state euphoric, that autumn of '85.
Was a Royals victory "God's will"? Of course! Their winning meant I'd be assertive.

God is concerned with hungry
people and justice,
not my saves.

New boy in Cardinal Country, I crowed and wagged my mouth and galloped
to class wearing a plastic batter's helmet. When last bell rang I got my ass whipped.

I'm here! It's Merry Christmas!

There are toys
in my locker. Gloves and bats and balls.

Friend of Dad's swore Quiz was a neighbor, single men in suburban apartments.
He gave me a signed ball (real? maybe? doubtful now) for a birthday present.

I have seen
the future, and it's much like the present,
only longer.

No idea where that ball went. For ten years I've been reprobate, estranged
by boredom from the mediocre Royals. The game never changes, but people change.

—Brett Foster

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Echocardiogram

I am laid on a table, half-naked and uneasy,
a supplicant for truth. Tethered in place with
electrodes, flipped on my side, my left breast
smeared with cool gel, my torso penetrated by
a seeing eye at the end of an intelligent probe.

On a flat screen the habits of my essential organ
gleam; I meet my interior in a heart-to-heart
—my heart watching itself, its echoes, its peaks and
plains, this revelation in dark and light,
my lifelong intimate, I its co-dependent.

The screen pulses with inscrutable signals,
valves undulating like petals, caught in the winds
of blood. Fingers on a keyboard induce
sudden colors to fly across the screen, like
tropical birds. Crimson, indigo.

Without warning the machine growls in rhythm,
filling my ear with harsh gulps. This is what it always
sounds like, you realize, when you listen
deep enough. You have to know how to hear.

A heart wants to be heard, to tell its truth.

I have been uneven all my life. Is there a drug
for that? What of my other heart, prone to
fibrillations of impatience or inconstancy? What kind of
surgery do I pray for? In what operating theater?
What cardiologist God, wearing scrubs?

Fugitive

You were a nimble word, agile enough
to leap off the page and separate yourself
from the pedestrian prose.

You, embedding yourself in my brain,
demanding to be pondered. Nothing
terribly arcane, but with possibilities.
I think you began with O, a letter
I particularly like, suggesting
robustness and eternity.

So, O. Oh, what word were you, you who
seduced me with your ripeness, you,
a plum ready for the plucking?
I should have made a note.
Verb? Noun? No. But so silky and muscular.
Obelisk? Obsidian? Odalisque?

You are driving me crazy.

Or were you a Q?

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Rod Serling’s iconic television series The Twilight Zone has unique staying power. In addition to continual syndication, marathons of the show have become a holiday ritual since the 1970s —a preview of our current binge-streaming culture.

It’s hard to watch most shows over the span of hours, but The Twilight Zone’s central conceit makes it particularly apt for long-range watching: its characters are stuck in a dimensional halfway-house, where they suffer and struggle before achieving transcendence or eternal torment. The settings change, but the stakes are always eternal.

Marathon viewing of The Twilight Zone also reveals the deep melancholy of the series. Serling’s particular vision of melancholy nears the theologically contested idea of purgatory that appears in various forms in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, and some Protestant traditions.

St. Augustine described purgatory as “the time intervening between a man's death and the final resurrection,” when “the soul is held in a hidden retreat, enjoying rest or suffering hardship in accordance with what it merited during its life in the body.” French theologian F. X. Schouppe notes that according to some Christian legends, when souls residing in purgatory appear to the living, they have a “sad countenance and imploring looks, in garments of mourning, with an expression of extreme suffering.” They often “betray their presence by moans, sobs, sighs, or hurried respiration and plaintive accents.”

The marriage of the concepts of a “hidden retreat” and wailing souls match the narrative structure and storytelling of many episodes of the series. Characters in The Twilight Zone often feel torn between literal and spiritual planes. Not only have they been thrust into unfamiliar settings, they often experience amnesia. They are bodies without identities, souls without direction and grace.

In “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (1961), an Army major (William Windom) awakens disoriented in a high-walled, circular room without doors, windows, or a ceiling. The major soon notices a clown (Murray Matheson) in the room, who mocks the major’s fear over their circ*mstance. The major tries to understand where they both came from, but the clown responds “there is no circus, there is no war,” and points to the three other characters: a ballerina (Susan Harrison), a tramp (Kelton Garwood), and a bagpiper (Clark Allen).

An obvious parallel is Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), although there are important distinctions. In Sartre’s play, the three characters are clearly in hell, and their punishments are each other: “Hell is other people.” Although the players in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” occasionally mock and jab each other, they are ultimately united in their confusion. They experience no corporal suffering: no hunger or thirst, no cold or discomfort. Questions like “Who are you?” and “How long will we be here?” become recursive in the script. Serling’s narrative commentary is particularly grim: “We will not end the nightmare, only explain it.”

The episode begins to more resemble the absurd theater of Eugène Ionesco than Sartre’s scene. The clown sings a threnody—“We're here because we're here because we’re here”—while the tramp is more blunt: “We're dead, and this is limbo.” When the major describes their round room as a dungeon, the ballerina tries to be optimistic, wondering, “Perhaps there are a lot of dungeons like this. . . . Perhaps they are for the unloved.”

But there is no time for a love interest in this episode. The major rallies his troops to action, convincing the others their only chance for escape is to climb out of the room. They stand on each others’ shoulders, and the major manages to climb over the ledge. He screams, and then falls into heavy snow. The camera backs out, and it is revealed that the five characters are merely toy dolls dropped into a barrel, a charity drive for orphans.

Viewers new to The Twilight Zone often think of those twists as contrived, but to those watching episode after episode, Serling’s shifts become more trope than trick. The melancholic strand to The Twilight Zone is the sneaking suspicion that all hope is fleeting in these purgatory scenes. We feel for the characters not because they are simply trapped, but because we know their door to escape is locked—and the key is nowhere to be found.

It should not be surprising that The Twilight Zone dramatizes purgatory. “Where is Everybody?” (1959), the show’s pilot, introduced this narrative approach. Serling’s narration of “The place is here. The time is now. The journey could be our journey” establishes that this series is meant to tease our own existential anxieties. The episode begins with a man (Earl Holliman) in a military-like jumpsuit walking down a road toward a café. The restaurant is empty, but coffee is brewing on the stove. The man’s monologue runs throughout the entire episode; in one scene, he speaks to himself in a mirror, inviting the viewer to answer.

“There’s some question about my identity,” he says. “I’m not sure who I am.” He walks throughout the empty town and laments, “Literally, there hasn’t been a soul.” The man’s rambling and rushing around town becomes repetitive, and the episode’s revelation—that his experiences are hallucinations, and he is an astronaut preparing for the sensory deprivation of space travel—make for a convoluted episode.

The Twilight Zone only improved from its first offering, but embedded in the episode is an essential concept: the ultimate fear of the characters in the series is that they will be alone for all eternity.

From a husband and wife with hangovers who awaken in a strange bedroom in “Stopover in a Quiet Town” (1964) to a raccoon hunter who drowns but later walks among the living in “The Hunt” (1962), The Twilight Zone hypnotizes us by blurring the lines between life and death, between finality and eternity. Although the show is best known for its clever twists, quotable lines, eccentric characters, and memorable performances, Serling's moralizing narration offers a whisper of the divine into the series.

If we understand the show’s arc as operating within the idea of purgatory, then its consistent melancholy makes perfect sense. The characters of The Twilight Zone are halfway between heaven and hell. And its viewers are drawn to the struggle.

Nick Ripatrazone is a staff contributor for The Millions, and has also written for The Atlantic and Esquire. His newest book is Ember Days (Braddock Ave, 2015). He tweets@nickripatrazone.