Page 1256 – Christianity Today (2024)

Happy May Day (and International Worker's Day)! I'm very pleased to feature this conversation with Alexia Salvatierra, a pastor and key national leader for immigration reform in the United States. Her work over the past 30 years, including with the Evangelical Immigration Table, has influenced national policy and intersected countless lives at the local level. Watch for an upcoming article from Alexia to be featured in Leadership Journal, advancing the ministry/immigration conversation. -Paul

Paul: Stereotypically, what are the biggest evangelical misconceptions about immigration? How can we educate around those?

Alexia: Evangelicals often share the same misconceptions of the general public. Most people who don't have regular contact with the immigration system assume that it is similar to the system which was in place when many of our grandparents arrived. Until 1924, there were no immigration quotas and few restrictions. We were the land of opportunity for many young people seeking for freedom and a better life. Now, only very specific and limited categories of people can apply to immigrate. The vast majority of people interested in immigrating to the United States have no line to stand in. This is particularly true for young people who were brought to this country as small children. Even if these young people fit into a qualifying category (e.g. immediate relatives who are American citizens), they are affected by a law passed in 1995 which mandates that anyone who has been in this country without legal status for more than a year must return to their home country for 10 years before being considered for immigration.

The categories determining immigration eligibility are often illogical. For example, over the history of the U.S., we have imported the vast majority of our agricultural workforce. (Slavery was a giant program to import agricultural labor.) However, since 1995, we only allow 5,000 visas per year for all unskilled labor, including all agricultural labor. (In comparison, in 1910, 5,000 individuals, primarily low-skilled workers, entered per day.) As Richard Land, former president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) says, we gesture "come on in" with one hand and "stay back" with the other.

Another common misconception is that undocumented immigrants are a drain on our economic system. The Social Security administration estimates that 75% of undocumented immigrants use a false social security number. The withdrawals from those numbers are placed into a special account (an average of $8 to $12 billion per year) which then goes back into our Social Security system. Those who use the false numbers will never be able to collect on any of the funds deducted from their paychecks—even if they later obtain legal status. The IRS has special income tax-paying options for undocumented workers as well as small business owners. Immigrants start small businesses at nearly double the rate of native born citizens. National Academy of Science's classic 1997 study reported that the average immigrant will contribute $80,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits. The only government benefits available to undocumented families are public education and emergency health care. Public education is an investment in children and youth which equips them to contribute more effectively to our society. Emergency health care is often the most expensive form of health care but is often the only option available to families living in the shadows.

Evangelicals are legitimately concerned about colluding with acts of disrespect for the law of the land.

The major concern that evangelicals have about illegal immigration is not strictly a misconception. We are legitimately concerned about colluding with acts of disrespect for the law of the land. Undocumented immigrants have violated the law and should receive some sort of penalty. However, many evangelicals are not aware of the arbitrary and often unreasonable severity of current penalties. For example, if an undocumented individual uses a false permanent resident card, the legal consequences are relatively minor. However, using a false birth certificate is a felony which results in a lifetime bar to immigration without the possibility of waivers or appeals—even if the immigrant in question is married to a U.S. citizen. In most states, immigration violations are the legal equivalent of parking tickets or income tax fraud—but the penalties are far different. Immigration judges currently have very little flexibility in the sentencing process. The bi-partisan immigration bill passed last year in the Senate (but not in the House of Representatives) would have restored judicial discretion.

The evidence which counteracts the misconceptions is simple, clear, and factual. The challenge is not the presentation of the evidence but rather the willingness of the public to pay attention. Non-immigrants often become truly interested in the issue only when they hear stories of anguish and unfairness first hand from immigrants whom they know and trust.

So often, this issue divides "conservative" and "progressive" Christians. What's the best common ground to move forward for people of conflicting opinions?

Christians have been critically important to our national progress on this issue to date precisely because we have been able to call believers on both sides of the aisle to focus on the common good—to place our allegiance to Jesus above our political loyalties.

Immigration has not always been a partisan issue. The comprehensive immigration reform bills proposed in 2007 and 2013 were designed and sponsored by equal teams of Republicans and Democrats. Both progressive and conservative think tanks have proposed similar models for a sane, effective, just, and humane immigration system. The recent Republican legislative retreat in the House developed principles for immigration legislation that echo the Senate legislation. Of course, there are differences between the proposals but they are not far apart and both sides have expressed the willingness to compromise. The primary barrier to immigration reform is neither the analysis of the problem nor the content of the solution; the obstacle is merely political maneuvering. Christians have been critically important to our national progress on this issue to date precisely because we have been able to call believers on both sides of the aisle to focus on the common good—to place our allegiance to Jesus above our political loyalties.

Speak to us as a pastor for a moment. How is the church uniquely poised to welcome and serve immigrants?

In 2007, the McCain-Kennedy proposed legislation for comprehensive immigration reform was submitted to a CBS national survey. Over 70% of the respondents supported the proposed legislation. However, the legislation failed because the calls to legislators were 50-1 against. The average American never calls their legislator unless it affects them directly; the suffering of immigrants just doesn't affect the majority of Americans directly enough to move them to call. The only reason why we have come this far towards reforming our broken immigration system is that the only group in our society who is mandated to care passionately about the wellbeing of people who are not us has stepped up to the plate. The national Evangelical Immigration Table has powerfully demonstrated the love of Jesus to the nation. When immigrant and non-immigrant Christians come together to respond to the suffering of immigrant families, we have an Ephesians 2:14-18 experience. The wall of hostility that we see in the secular world is torn down. There is an exchange of hope and passion—non-immigrants awaken to the need and immigrants feel hope because they learn that they are not alone. The result is John 17:21—the world knows that Jesus has come because of the unity of his followers.

The witness of the church from the beginning has been rooted in our welcoming of those whom the world rejects—outsiders and sinners.

Of course, the unique role of the church involves more than just advocacy for immigrants. Advocacy must be the outgrowth of a full and vital response to the needs and opportunities presented by immigrants. Immigration brings the mission field to our doorsteps. When we respond to the opportunity with all our hearts, souls and lives are saved. We could even say that hospitality is at the core of the Gospel. Jesus paid the ultimate price in order to be able to welcome us into the kingdom. His call to his disciples to follow in his footsteps is uncompromising—"I was a stranger and you welcomed me" (Matthew 25:35). The witness of the church from the beginning has been rooted in our welcoming of those whom the world rejects—outsiders and sinners.

Any learned wisdom from your own ministry that other pastors can benefit from?

We in the U.S. need, in many ways, to receive the ministry of immigrants.

First, it's important to recognize that ministry to immigrants is not a one-way street. Hebrews 13:1-2 reminds us that when we welcome strangers, we may be receiving angels in disguise. The biblical words translated as "angels" refers to more than just celestial beings. Angels in Scripture are messengers of God come to bring a blessing. We in the U.S. need, in many ways, to receive the ministry of immigrants. From family values to the readiness to sacrifice, believers from other cultures are bringing gifts that our country desperately needs. If you humble yourself and open your eyes and heart, you will receive inspiration and support from the immigrants in our midst.

We need to pray as fervently for our leaders as we do for the sick if we want our communities to be healed.

Secondly, it's important to practice public policy advocacy in a way that is fully biblical. The Evangelical Immigration Table has developed programs that allow us to minister well to our legislators, calling them to do what God has called them to do. Roughly 88% of our Congress claims Christ. They need discipling and encouragement. They need chaplaincy on the field of the battle for justice—the process of giving moral and spiritual courage to those on the front lines. We need to pray as fervently for our leaders as we do for the sick if we want our communities to be healed.

What is one thing that local church leaders can do to serve immigrants in their neighborhood?

First, partner with immigrant pastors and congregations. In most places in the country, immigrant pastors are serving their flock faithfully but they could really use the resources and support of their non-immigrant brothers and sisters. It's a healing balm for immigrants to experience real respect from non-immigrants, as immigrants are often wounded by discrimination and prejudice.

Immigrant leaders will let you know what they need—but the most common needs that you could prepare to serve are for "bridges." Immigrants need English as a Second Language, help with parenting children who are being exposed to U.S. culture, assistance in understanding and navigating our system, access to reliable service providers (such as lawyers), and opportunities to contribute their gifts.

You've represented our Christian community well at the highest levels of national leadership. What have you learned about being a voice of faith in public dialogue?

We so easily become functional atheists when we enter into the public arena. "Professionals" aren't supposed to speak as if God is real or pray informally in public. When Rev. Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech, he quoted Isaiah—and the nation resonated with the spiritual power in the words even if they were unfamiliar. We must not be afraid to be who we are; in fact, that's the only way that God can accomplish his full will through us. Of course, we must be both bold and humble at the same time. Humility is an accurate response to human limitations. I keep in mind the moment when Martin Luther stood before the Pope and said "Here I stand. I can do nothing else. God help me." That vulnerability and honesty makes it possible for people to hear the power of the Word coming through us—so that any offense is the offense of Christ and not the offense of arrogance.

What has your work in this area taught you? How has your own spirit grown from your work with the immigrant community?

I was born in Los Angeles and so were my parents. My grandparents were the immigrant generation in our family. Working and ministering with immigrants has connected me more deeply to my roots, which has helped me to draw nourishment from my roots. It also constantly reminds me that we are all migrants on this earth which helps me to hold more lightly to the things of this world and to honor with gratitude the temporary gifts that come our way.

Paul Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal.

Kenyans have many approaches to marriage, and in March their government consolidated types under one law that went into effect this week. One change has drawn the lion's share of attention: legalizing polygamy for men—even if the first wife protests.

Africa has a so-called "polygamy belt" that stretches from Senegal to Tanzania. A 2009 government survey indicated that 13 percent of Kenyan women were in polygamous relationships.

The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya (EAK)says the law will erode recent gains against HIV, and lead to more divorces and court fights over inheritances. "We are promoting an old practice in a modern context, which is like putting new wine in an old wineskin," said David Oginde, leader of Christ Is the Answer Ministries. "It will burst."

But Samuel Chepkonga, former chair of Kenya's Scripture Union, is among the Christian lawmakers who helped Muslim politicians pass the bill. He even led the effort to remove a clause that let a woman veto her husband's effort to take another wife.

"Not all Kenyans are Christians," said Ken Okoth, a Christian politician who represents Kibera, a poor, largely Muslim community on the edge of Nairobi. "If church leaders want to completely outlaw polygamy, they should propose a bill. [But] that's impossible under our constitution." Approximately 4 in 5 Kenyans are Christians, but that leaves 4 million Muslims who tolerate polygamy.

"I am surprised that Christian politicians don't stand for Christian values," said Wellington Mutiso, former leader of the EAK. "It is very unfortunate. Maybe it is a failure on the part of the church to disciple its members so that they can stand for its values."

Joseph Obwanda, pastor of Lavington United Church, thinks the bill goes too far. "Respect of dignity as the premise of covenant relationship is lost," he said. "Scripture grants man a senior position in marriage as the head of family. But seniority is not superiority."

Martin Wesonga, who heads an Anglican seminary in Mombasa, supports the bill, in part noting Old Testament acceptance of polygamy. And while the New Testament is clear that polygamy is unacceptable for Christian leaders, he said, it does not explicitly condemn it in all contexts for everyone. "The bill defines Christian marriage, which is monogamous," he said. "Those who want to be polygamous will not go for Christian marriages."

James Fenske, an Oxford economist who studies African polygamy, thinks church leaders needn't worry. The law will have little effect since polygamy has been declining in Kenya for decades, he said. "I see no reason to expect this trend to reverse."

In an author’s aside from La Rouge et le noir, Stendhal preemptively chides his reader: “Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral!” More than once accused of carrying around such immoral mirrors in his pack, John Updike would often cite the passage in his own defense. He claimed to write with a precise, innocent realism that portrayed the full range of human experience.

Most of all, Updike relished the mirror’s arbitrary details. He once summed up a strain of American painting that depicted, in a phrase lifted from Jonathan Edwards, “the clarity of things.” The clarity of things certainly inspires Updike’s own painterly flair for embellished description. Yet it is not merely the blameless exactitude of Stendhal’s mirror that distinguishes Updike’s realism: he carries his mirror down the road. It moves. Motion characterizes Updike’s prose as much as mimicry.

First, his sentences seem to flow unhindered. They are often described as elegant or effortless, in part because of how smoothly they appear to roll from word to word in a faultless tumble of consistent pacing. Their rhythms convey the motion of an eye’s roving gaze or a hand skimming across surfaces. In one of Updike’s best early stories, “The Happiest I’ve Been,” the young John Nordholm careens down the Pennsylvania turnpike only to discover a landscape so abundant with meaning it brooks no punctuating period: “There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life.” The sentence spreads itself out with sharpened em dashes gleaming, ready to slice through its own airy element.

Second, Updike’s characters themselves are on the move, perpetually leaving or struggling to return. The eponymous story of his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears, combines the leaving with the returning. It begins as the narrator leaves home for a woman, describing the tears his father shed at that parting, and ends as he rushes back, now with his second wife, while his father lies dying in the hospital. All the running around, the lust and the leaving, is tethered to the single still point of his childhood home, for “I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.”

Leaving and then returning to Pennsylvania is a consistent theme in Updike’s work. He thought of his novel Rabbit, Run as an ethical response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, juxtaposing the responsibilities of one’s home state against the liberation of leaving. Updike’s love of things in motion takes on a peculiarly spiritual quality in the novel. Its epigraph comes from Pascal: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circ*mstances.” One of the various ways the novel explores the “motions of Grace” is in the graceful movements of Rabbit’s all too corporeal body.

Famously, the novel opens with the ex-basketball star stopping by a playground and joining in a pickup game with schoolchildren. However pathetic a figure this adult trying to relive his past might be, Updike delights in describing Rabbit’s play: “He’s a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell.” This may be part of a blatant bid for Updike’s readers to say the same about his writing, but it is also an attempt to render as seamlessly as possible the beauty of an athlete’s instinctual graces.

Updike thought of adding the subtitle “A Movie” to Rabbit, Run, his first of four prize-garnering novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The prose assumes an overtly cinematic quality in its present-tense narration and quick perspectival shifts. Mirroring the moving picture with language is just what Updike is trying to achieve—cutting from one frame to the next, rearranging what is in the frame and where, zooming in and out, restlessly gathering the action into a three-dimensional panorama of domestic despair.

In that opening playground scene and throughout the novel, Updike simulates the movie camera’s capacity to move through space with lenses switching focus. If we are to compare Rabbit, Run to On the Road, as Updike invites us to, their different ethical registers evoke the different visual effects of the camera’s movement: whereas Kerouac’s visual descriptions pan with confident appraisal across whole landscapes, Updike’s arc with gentle affection around the objects they describe. They strive to create with words something like a visual caress.

John Nordholm offers an example of that caressing lens when he and his friends play a game of circular Ping-Pong. He concludes a catalogue of images from the game with one last flourish, when an “earring of Ann’s flew off and the two connected rhinestones skidded to lie near the wall, among the Schumans’ power mower and badminton poles and empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles. All these images were immediately lost in the whirl of our running.” John Nordholm may have lost the images, but John Updike stored them away. That “twice punctured by triangles” is the classic Updikean touch—the apparently capricious detail that continues the movement of the two sliding rhinestones with two punctured triangles and evenly completes the whirl of the sentence.

The story behind Updike’s nostalgia for his nondescript hometown of Shillington, Pennsylvania, and his equally fierce desire to leave it, is told with unfussy aplomb in Adam Begley’s new biography. Updike is no exhaustive scholarly study, but it provides a coherent account of a long and diffuse literary career in need of summation and, truth be told, a spirited retrieval. As a new generation of readers begins to reassess Updike’s achievement, Updike will likely be their guide to the man Begley warns us was, in spite of his notorious affability, “a potentially dangerous individual.”

The biography begins with an extensive portrait of Shillington and the young Updike’s self-effacing father and domineering, if fawning, mother. Linda Updike was an aspiring writer who would ask her son, as a ten-year-old, to edit her autobiographical stories about family dynamics and small-town life. As familiar as those subjects would become in his own fiction, the young Updike’s ambitions were first ignited when his aunt, then Edmund Wilson’s personal secretary at The New Republic, gave them a subscription to The New Yorker as a Christmas present when he was just 12 years old. The budding artist soon began regularly mailing the magazine his cartoon sketches and light verse. He eventually received an acceptance nearly a decade later, during his final year at Harvard. The charmed life of literary success that Updike led—nearly all his short fiction first appearing in The New Yorker, with Alfred A. Knopf publishing each new novel—was in fact built on ten years of rejections.

One of his stories, “Flight,” details the conflicted emotions both Linda and John experienced as she urged him to fly from their small town. Does Allen Dow want to flee? Will his mother actually let him go if he does? Allen longs for both the security of the familiar and the thrill of escape. This and several others of Updike’s short stories provide intimate glimpses into the psychological dramas of his personal life, and Begley is content to rely heavily on their exposition. Happily, he never succumbs to unwarranted speculation. In fact, inasmuch as he provides helpful glosses on Updike’s most clearly autobiographical writing, the best way to read Begley’s biography is in tandem with the Library of America’s recently published two-volume Collected Stories.

Though Updike’s Rabbit novels constitute his most ambitious accomplishment, he attains the height of his powers in the short stories. The genre’s limited frame fits his penchant for descriptive epiphanies of feeling. Taken together, their documentary content provides a remarkably close account of the moves that partitioned out his life. First from charmed Shillington to his exile on the Plowville farm, then from Harvard tenderfoot to a newly married New York sophisticate, and finally from his suburban fatherhood to his divorce and remarried retreat to stately Haven Hill in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.

Begley draws our attention to a critical turning point when Updike switched editors at The New Yorker. Katherine White (spouse of E. B. White) advised Updike early on to steer clear of small-town nostalgia and disillusioned ex-basketball players. In response to this criticism, he wrote “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the first of his Maples stories. Then, when William Maxwell began to edit Updike’s stories, he encouraged Updike to return to Shillington for his best material. If White played a role in launching the Maples, we have Maxwell—who became a lifelong friend—to thank for Rabbit Angstrom and the Olinger stories.[1]

In addition to the felicities of Updike’s long and fruitful relationship with The New Yorker, Begley offers snapshots of his literary friendships. Following the year of Philip Roth’s scandalously uproarious Portnoy’s Complaint, Updike published a book of poems about middle age, Midpoint. He had his publisher print a special copy to send to Roth—Poor Goy’s Complaint. We also hear John Cheever, whom Updike would help out of more than one drunken debacle, refusing to blurb Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair: “His eloquence seems to me to retard the movement of the book and to damage his control.” It would become a familiar refrain with Updike’s detractors.

Sometime prior to Cheever’s slight, Updike had left his full-time position at The New Yorker and quit the city altogether, explaining in a letter to his mother that staying would seal his fate as an “elegant hack.” It was a worry Updike had held for some time. His freshman-year roommate, Christopher Lasch (“The Christian Roommates” gives a wonderful portrait of the two soon-to-be-famous writers, though its title does not refer to them), wrote home using the same noun to describe the gap between his roommate’s talent and ambition:

He writes poetry, stories, and draws cartoons and sends all of these to various magazines. He has even had a few things accepted. He is more industrious than I, but I think his stuff lacks perception and doesn’t go very deep. He is primarily a humorist. As he himself admits, he is probably a hack.

Updike, a “hack”? In retrospect, the young Lasch’s judgment—like Updike’s worry—seems ludicrous. And yet, perhaps his preternatural fluency was a curse as well as a gift. Once he moved to the small town of Ipswich, a far-flung suburb of Boston, he kept up an extraordinary level of production, writing 67 books between 1958 and 2009—more than a book a year. Once he remarked with nonchalance that he wrote faster than he read.

While living in Ipswich, Updike became known as the preeminent chronicler of an emerging “adulterous society.” He was writing with new levels of sexual candor about the moral maelstrom of a new era. Couples, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel about his set of Ipswich friends, showcases Updike’s ability to turn personal circ*mstances into the emblems of social change. Decades later, the novel is still disorienting in its lyrical celebration of the immorality it ostensibly sought to condemn.

Perhaps his eloquence had damaged his control. Perhaps it had become too habitual to turn the gaudy parade of life into an evanescent sparkle of words. Yet his final book of poems, Endpoint, describes his own deathbed in that same glossy style. Its joyful tone intimates the passionate, unwavering conviction he sought to adorn with words. Following the doctor’s decree that his death is certainly imminent, he closes the series of poems:

The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
Saying, Surely—magnificent that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

Though the novels kept steadily appearing—including a triple tribute to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and S., as well as a magnum opus stretching across the entire 20th century with In the Beauty of the Lilies—Updike slowly slipped into the backseat of contemporary literature as the century came to its end and another began. Terrorist sold well, but was largely panned. A rising generation of novelists, led by David Foster Wallace, drew more inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinth-like plots than from Updike’s lyricism. Yet regardless of literary fashions, Updike stands alone in his ability to imbue the ordinary with a wonderful thrill. All those syntactical pirouettes embody a sensibility determined to praise.

Updike’s fidelity to both the beauty and moral mess of creation amounts to a carefully considered theology of sensation. While he is suspicious of asserting any secular ethic in his fiction, it resonates with gratitude for the gift of physical experience. Amiably coaxing us to pay attention, he celebrates reality’s textures and tastes, its obdurate plenitude. Updike may lack heavy-hitting ideas, as his critics have protested; he may traffic too often in stereotypes; but who else in all of American literature repeatedly returns us so vividly to the sensorium of everyday worship?

The peculiarities of embodiment transfixed him. As one of Updike’s more odious seducers (a character type he stole from Kierkegaard but put to brilliant use), the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, writes in A Month of Sundays, “Generalizations belong to the Devil; particulars to the Lord.” How could the Devil be in the details, as the saying goes, in a religion with an Incarnate God? To lavish a lily or a sparrow with rapt attention merely follows the Creator’s lead.

As wayward as his adulterous characters are, Updike’s descriptions cannot help but bear witness to the profundity of all human experience—however familiar. Both the faithful spouse’s and the tempting lover’s bodies are described ecstatically; the clutter of domestic drudgery and the freedom of the open road receive the same exultant hymns to material splendor. The radiant blessings Updike renders ubiquitous betray his adulterers’ actions as foolishly superfluous. Joy is a quality of attention, a gift of the Spirit; no change in circ*mstances can bestow it.

If Updike seems too reticent to judge what his mirror shows, keep looking. For the mirror keeps moving and its sheer accumulation of images is saying something. There is always some thing.

1. The Collected Stories are missing both the Maples stories, featuring a married couple unashamedly based on John and his first wife, Mary, and the Bech stories, starring Updike’s tongue-in-cheek Jewish alter ego. These stories will appear in a future volume from the loa.

Scott Dill is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Although their populations have mostly forgotten it, and their politicians hate to admit it, most of the nations of Europe are relatively modern creations. Their borders rarely correspond neatly to linguistic or ethnic boundaries, and both ethnic and linguistic categories are arguable anyway. (When does a dialect, like Scots, turn into a language, like Portuguese?) These uncertainties, which have all too often led to shooting wars and which have by no means vanished from the European political scene, led especially in the 19th century to attempts to reinforce many a shaky sense of national identity by centering that identity on a national epic. Such an epic should be as old as possible, should celebrate the virtues which a particular nation would like to ascribe to itself, and so anchor modern identity in medieval language.

The new German state, coming into being all through the 19th century, thus made a fetish of the “doomed-heroes” Nibelungenlied, rediscovered in 1807. The French had their Chanson de Roland, first edited 1836; Spain had El Cid (1779); Finland had above all its nation-creating Kalevala (1835); and so on. Nations, or sub-national groups, were not above faking an epic to suit, as very definitely with the Frisian Oera Linda Boek (1872), and much more furiously denied (its one manuscript has gone missing, thought to have been burned by Napoleon’s troops) the Russian “Lay of the Raid of Igor” (1795). Some would say that Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” (1855), very clearly modeled on the Kalevala, was an American attempt to assert old identity likewise.

In this welter of claims and denials, one omission was particularly sensitive: there was no evident candidate for the role of national epic of the Low Countries, or the Netherlands, which is to say (but already the terms and boundaries are confused) what English speakers call Holland and Belgium. The need for this was felt especially strongly in Belgium, a country still split between its Flemish-speaking and French-speaking populations, and one which owed its 19th-century existence—as Joep Leerssen has pointed out in his splendid work National Thought in Europe (2007)—to a riot in Brussels triggered by the performance of an opera with an aria sung to the tune of the Marseillaise.

This need for a Dutch or Flemish identity, with an epic to match, led to one of the stranger episodes of 19th-century philology, the vossenjacht, or “fox-hunt.” One medieval work which had never quite dropped out of educated knowledge was, in various forms, the sequence of comic tales about Reynard the fox. Reynard was in some ways very suitable as a small-nation self-image: cunning, resourceful, always using his superior intelligence to outwit the brute strength of his neighbors like Ysengrim the wolf.

The trouble was, the best-known version of the cycle of stories about him was in French, the Roman de Renart. This was almost as unsatisfactory as Beowulf (first edited 1815), which on the face of it was disqualified as the English national epic by never mentioning England, the English, or anyone born in England.

Mere facts, however, have never stopped a philologist fixated on national identity, and Jacob Grimm of Grimms’ Fairy-Tales, possibly with his eye already on “proving” that the Dutch were really deutsch, pointed out that the very names of hero and villain, even if preserved in French, could not be French in origin but must be Germanic: Renart from Regin-hart, Ysengrin from Eisen-grim, both typically old Germanic two-element names like Reginald or Isambard. The French, in other words, had hijacked someone else’s poem as they had under Napoleon snatched so much of other people’s territory. Now, where was the missing, hypothetical epic?

Jill Mann’s splendidly accessible edition and translation of Ysengrimus, based on her earlier but little-known edition of 1987, goes a long way to settling the matter in a way which might even have been acceptable to the furious partisans of the 19th century. There probably was an old folktale tradition of fox-and-wolf stories along the lines of the much earlier Fables of Aesop. Ysengrimus is, however, a learned poem, over 6,500 lines long, telling stories of the wolf’s constant defeats by the fox and other animals. It’s in Latin (alas for the partisans of Germanic language origin). But it was almost certainly written in Ghent, by a Fleming (and so cannot be claimed for France).

It can also be dated with great accuracy to between early 1147 and August 1148. The disaster in its background, which accounts for some of its savagely satirical intention, was the failure of the Second Crusade, preached by Pope Eugenius III in 1145: both French and German armies were all but wiped out. Eugenius was a monk of the Cistercian Order, and in the last book of Ysengrimus the sow Salaura, who has just led the other pigs to devour Ysengrimus, laments that “One feeble monk has overthrown two kingdoms!”, and repeats the claim that the pope sent his armies by the land route because he had been bribed to keep them away from Sicily.

But the anonymous author’s satire is directed against monks in general—the modern world has forgotten how unpopular monks became in the Middle Ages, from the wealth they accumulated by endowments and their efficiency (being able to read, write, and keep records) as landlords. In episode 7, Ysengrimus is persuaded to enter a monastery himself by the fox’s account of the splendid rations available there. He opens up all the wine-barrels in the cellar, and is beaten savagely by the other monks, led by one “more vicious than a tail-bearing Englishman,” which of course is saying something. They also put him through a mock-consecration as bishop—for, the author insists, monks who become bishops are as bad as monks who become popes. Look at Anselm of Tournai! Other shepherds shear sheep of their fleeces, but he shears his flock “down to the living flesh.”

Jokes (?) about flaying in fact run through Ysengrimus—its humor is much more “Itchy and Scratchy” than “Tom and Jerry.” Ysengrimus is skinned by Bruno the bear, and skinned again by the lion. The bloody flesh after his pelt has been ripped off is sarcastically likened to the scarlet robe which a monk-bishop wore over (not under) his monastic habit. But the poor wolf also has his tail frozen to the ice after he’s been persuaded to use it as a fishing-line, loses it to an old woman with an axe, is kicked by the horse, charged by the sheep, cuckolded by the fox, and finally eaten by the pigs.

Sic semper tyrannis, the author might have said. But the crazy comedy of the beast-epic gave it an international influence which lasted long after the poem itself had been forgotten, and which made it much more successful long-term than any narrowly national work. The Roman de Renart borrowed from it, and both were followed by medieval versions in Flemish, German, and Italian. Geoffrey Chaucer retold one of its episodes (the fox and the rooster) in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” and although the medieval Scots poet Robert Henryson called his set of beast-fables “The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian,” the best of them are not Aesop at all, but Reynard stories. The author of Ysengrimus “invented a whole literary genre,” claims Professor Mann.

Hers is a brilliant edition, exceptionally easy to read, both in Latin and in English, carefully but lightly annotated and introduced. This reviewer cannot help reflecting, sadly, how much better his Latin would be if he had been started off on an edition like this, of a poem like this, instead of that wretched Aeneid.

Tom Shippey is the author of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Mariner Books).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When Robert Frost died in January 1963, he had been America’s Poet for half a century. Such was his fame that his correspondence with two of his old friends, John T. Bartlett and Louis Untermeyer, was published within the year. The following year his “official” biographer, Lawrance Thompson, edited The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, which, until now, has been the standard edition. These and later volumes of Frost’s letters introduced readers to the man behind the poetry.

Not everyone liked what they saw. Thompson’s own animus was revealed in his introduction to the Selected Letters, where he charged that Frost “was never as natural as he seemed,” a man who hid behind “dramatic masks” in order to “protect his excruciating sensitivities.” The publication of Frost’s letters, Thompson hoped, would help to unmask him, revealing his “gloom, jealousies, obsessive resentments, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages, and vindictive retaliations.”

The index to the Selected Letters, where we find such keywords as “Ambition,” “Cowardice,” “Fears,” “Masks and Masking,” and “Self-Indulgence,” only confirmed Thompson’s dislike of his subject. The question is whether Thompson’s bias influenced his selection of Frost’s letters. Did he pounce on the most damning letters while ignoring others that might have created a more balanced impression of the poet? Possibly not, although he chose to publish fewer than a third of the 1,500 letters he examined.

The letters Thompson omitted—along with those that were not collected until after 1964—will soon be available in one place, thanks to Harvard’s decision to publish all of Frost’s letters in a three-volume scholarly edition. The publication of these volumes promises to be an event in American literary scholarship, like the publication of Emily Dickinson’s letters in 1997 (also by Harvard). Whether they will serve to correct Thompson’s distorted portrait of Frost will depend on their use by future biographers.

Prior to 1912—the year he moved to England—Frost struggled to put bread on the table and get his verse into print. Many of the letters from this early period are addressed to Susan Hayes Ward, the poetry editor of The Independent, who in 1894 published “My Butterfly”—the first poem to earn Frost a little pocket money. The Harvard editors have added only a letter or two to Thompson’s selection from this period, which suggests that Frost’s other early letters have been lost or remain in private hands.

From September 1912 to February 1915, Frost lived in England, where he published his first two books (A Boy’s Will and North of Boston) and established his reputation as a poet. Thompson’s volume contains only a few of the letters Frost wrote during this period to his new British acquaintances. The Harvard edition contains more letters from British sources, including one Frost wrote to the British poet Lawrence Binyon, who had criticized certain lines in one of Frost’s poems (probably “Mending Wall”). “I experience a curious satisfaction,” Frost replied, in having hit on “Oh just another kind of outdoor game” and on “But it’s not elves exactly.” Such “accents of the practical,” he wrote, “are part of my venture.”

In 1915, Frost returned to America to reap the fruit of his labor. Among the gems not found in Thompson’s volume is a letter Frost sent to the novelist Willa Cather on January 15, 1916. In December, Cather had written to congratulate Frost on A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. In her letter—which the Harvard editors helpfully quote in a footnote—Cather confided that Frost’s books “contain the only American verse printed since I began to read verse, in which I have been able to feel much interest—the only verse of highly individual quality.” She went on to confess her lack of enthusiasm for the “new poets,” declaring that “if Ezra Pound and [Edgar Lee] Masters are poets, clearly you are none.”

Before he answered Cather’s letter, Frost wrote a brief note to Louis Untermeyer (omitted by Thompson). “Will you tell me who Willa Sibert Cather is?” he asked Untermeyer. “Is the name a man’s? That’s what I want particularly to know. Is he (or she) some poet I ought to have read?” Frost can be forgiven for not knowing Cather’s early (and only) collection of poems, April Twilights. As for the Prairie Trilogy that made her reputation as a novelist, O Pioneers! had been published while Frost was living in England.

Evidently Frost got the information he wanted, for his letter to Cather begins, “My dear Miss Cather.” He approved of Cather’s sharp distinction between his verse and that of Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology had made a splash the previous year. “You for one see that I am not only not a free-verse writer,” he agreed, “but not a free-thinker nor a free anything.” Indeed, Frost and Cather were alike in this regard, finding their freedom as writers and thinkers within the traditional constraints of form and creed.

In 1917, Frost took a teaching post at Amherst College, where his silhouette now communes with Emily Dickinson’s in front of the Frost Library. That April, President Wilson asked Congress to approve his declaration of war against Germany. In May, Frost was invited by Hermann Hagedorn, the leader of “The Vigilantes,” a group of prowar poets, to contribute to an anthology of war poetry. As his letters reveal, Frost was no pacifist: he had been an ardent supporter of England’s war effort from the beginning. But he declined Hagedorn’s invitation in a letter (not found in Thompson) that is vintage Frost.

“I’m of no earthly use,” he informed Hagedorn, “except to write about a stray cow or collar now and then when I’m least expecting to. If you let me alone,” he continued, ” … theres [sic] a bare possibility that I might happen to write a poem about the war … . But I sha’n’t [sic] write it if I’m billed to write it. So don’t bill me, will you?” In Frost’s rigorous aesthetic, poetry and ideology did not mix. More broadly, poetry and intention did not mix. A poem must come as a surprise to the poet, or it is not a true poem.

The first volume of the Harvard edition of the letters ends with Frost’s resignation from Amherst in early 1920. Granted, only a handful of Frost scholars will read it cover to cover. Many of the letters concern the mundane details of a poet’s life—publication, speaking engagements, and the like. Others—especially those to Untermeyer—are written in a sort of code language that most readers will not bother to decipher. But for every two unimportant letters, there is a third that sheds light on Frost the man or Frost the poet.

The Frost who emerges from his letters can come across as vain, defensive, ingratiating, stubborn. Thompson was not entirely wrong about that. But what redeems Frost is his acute awareness of his own deficiencies of character—along with his lively sense of humor. Like his poems, his letters can be playful and teasing. Others read like drafts of lectures, in which he tries out his ideas about poetry. They take us back to an era when letter-writing was the next best thing to a conversation beside the fireplace.

Frost meant his letters to do what Horace said poetry should do—please and instruct their readers. Thanks to the labors of Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert fa*ggen, they can now please and instruct us as well, even though we don’t write letters anymore.

Mark Walhout teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Early in the morning, amid thunder and lightning and steady rain, a great rumble shook our house. Something—maybe it was the semicoherent prayer I uttered as the timbers creaked—reminded me of Scott Cairns’ Idiot Psalms, a new collection of his poems recently published by Paraclete Press. (The physical book, by the way, is gorgeous; I feel as if I should have one reading copy and one simply to pick up and admire now and then, pristine.) Scott is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and I’m proud to say that one poem in the title sequence, “Idiot Psalm 6,” was published in Books & Culture in 2010 (then it was titled “Idiot Psalm X“), though, alas, this isn’t noted in the acknowledgments.

A couple of weeks ago, Wendy and I drove to Indiana Wesleyan University for an event in the President’s Author Series. I interviewed Mary Ann Glendon (whom Wendy and I were meeting for the first time) in a public setting, with students and faculty from the John Wesley Honors College at IWU. Mary Ann and I talked about her splendid book The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt, and students from the Honors College asked her some very good questions. On our drive back to Wheaton the next morning, Wendy and I listened to Parable, a cd featuring Scott Cairns reading 26 poems, with musical interludes by Jeff Johnson, Roy Salmond, and Wendy Goodwin. (The cover of the cd is a detail from a painting by Bruce Herman.) Some poets are terrible readers of their own work; some are passable; and some (like Scott) allow you to hear their poems in your head forever after.

(On that drive home, lest you think us impossibly high-minded, Wendy and I also listened to a tasty two-CD compilation of cumbia and then shifted to the Brother Cadfael audio book we currently have going, The Rose Rent, written by Ellis Peters and narrated—as they say—by the incomparable Patrick Tull.)

Over the last few years, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre has written a remarkable series of books—not a “series” in the sense of a single multivolume project but unified by a distinctive angle of approach. These books are fresh, concise, not quite fitting in familiar genres, informed by scholarly learning and literary study but not “academic.” It must give her great joy to write just the sort of books she wants to write, and that joy is contagious. Her latest, from Eerdmans—What’s in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause—is a slim volume of brief meditations, each one triggered by a very brief passage from the Bible. Put this on your bedside table as soon as possible.

I had been reading McEntyre’s book when the latest issue of Comment arrived. The theme for this issue, “Faithful Compromise,” couldn’t be more timely. James K. A. Smith’s editorial introducing the theme begins with a quotation from Oliver O’Donovan: “Faithful witness is an abstract ideal, which can take no form in the world as it is; compromise, therefore, is the law of our being, and no-one, not even Jesus himself, can get by without striking bargains.” Smith twice refers to O’Donovan’s “provocative claim.” It’s too bad that “provocative” has been so often and so carelessly deployed that the word has lost much of its force, but this opening sally is indeed a provocation. (That “not even Jesus himself,” taken by itself, is explosive.) You should read Smith’s editorial to see how he unpacks what O’Donovan means, and then turn to Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s essay “The Grey Area Is Holy Ground: Practicing a Compromising Faith.” (There’s a good deal more in the issue, too, that’s worth your time.)

Yesterday morning, I got an email from Rome:

We live in an amazing world constantly reminded of imago Dei, and the need for fellowship with our Creator and his creation. Now the internet opens doors to friends from afar. I’m reading your Books & Culture newsletter here at Rome’s Minerva hotel, which casts it shadow for half the day on Bernini’s elephant obelisk statue, a hundred yards or so from the back of the Pantheon.To my left sits George Costanza and his son, but I’ll not interrupt them to chat about Seinfeld; it’s a blessing to see any father and son spending time together on what is likely a vacation. And for me, I’m suddenly preoccupied with a friend’s newsletter and finding myself digitally reminded of a network of colleagues part of the great dialogue or, as might be appropriate with B&C, the greatest of dialogues.

What a lovely way to start my day. Two days earlier, a card came from another one of our writers:

After weeks of interrupted attempts, I finally have time to write and let you know how much I’m enjoying the . As I read, I find myself standing in the streets of Turin with mad Nietzsche, fleeing gangs in Cape Town, and sitting in a sanctuary with [Richard] Rodriguez, reciting the Lord’s Prayer … . I know B&C has gone through some tumult of late, and with that in mind, I’m so grateful the magazine survives. It’s a gift to all of us, your readers.

I’m also glad that the magazine survives—and thankful for such encouraging words. I’m thankful, too, for the generous response from all of you who have contributed to our support. Since the start of the year, we have been receiving donations fulfilling pledges made last fall to support B&C in 2014. Thanks to all of you who have already done so. We continue working toward our goal of securing funding for 2015-18.

In the meantime, Jennifer McGuire, our art director, and I are ready to start working on the July/August issue, which will include a piece by Mark Noll on persecution against Christians.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

An author who knows her stuff and applies it level-headedly is a rare delight nowadays. Martha Bayles, in exploring how America projects its image, both favorably and unfavorably, reaches not only into the detailed modern history of American foreign relations but also into broad cultural matters, and she has a knack for prodding honestly against the weak spots. I’ve never come across, for example, such a succinct and deadly critique of American optimism as this:

This “religion of progress,” as historian Christopher Lasch [in The True and Only Heaven (Norton, 1991)] calls it, saw scientific expertise as the key to the perfected future, not just in technology and medicine but also in human affairs, including politics. Yet this vision is an odd amalgam. Mainly, it is not scientific. Claiming the objectivity of science, it expects only positive outcomes.

In researching her book, Bayles also went to distant but important sources, including Islamists, foreign media professionals, and diplomats across eleven countries, and she delivers the hard news: We are presenting ourselves very badly abroad—especially now that commercial products are filling in for any concerted information policy on our government’s part; normal life here, including our cohesive and idealistic institutions, gets little coverage out there, and many foreigners call the trashy backwash of our popular media on their shores a threat to their traditions and social stability.

In addition, Bayles, a conservative expert on American pop culture (her previous book was entitled Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music), is large-minded about our potential for good influence. In her prologue to Part 1, she sets the scene in a McDonald’s in Shanghai, where, to her initial distaste and embarrassment, an articulate and cultivated Chinese video artist has arranged to meet her for an interview. But Bayles herself is good at what she lists as an essential part of public diplomacy—listening—and she quickly understands why her informant is genuinely attached to the place, having often studied there as a teenager (“Our families’ houses were cold and dark, so we loved the warmth and brightness, the light music, everything so clean and friendly”).

An entertaining tour of exotic McDonald’s operations follows: the kosher and halal ones, the ones with alcohol and curious local dishes—but never, by this account, with the most competitive qualities rendered negotiable. Our lowest common denominator in eating out can raise standards elsewhere. McDonald’s has even taught hygienic food preparation as an outreach, and effectively campaigns for American-style retail courtesy in many places where it’s needed. A friend of mine who spent eight years in China tells of a shop sign that testified to the very low consumer expectations that preceded a fuller opening to the West: “We do not beat or curse our customers.” Is it imperialist swashbuckling to demand improvement on that? With her usual meticulous documentation, Bayles traces the origins (an American novel, as it happens) and vagaries of the “ugly American” stereotype, but natural and thoughtful questions that her book helps raise are “Ugly how?” and “Ugly compared to what?” and “Ugly sometimes, for sure—but when is there some use in that, and when is it just destructive?”

Accordingly, I recommend the book heartily as an orientation for debate about U.S. foreign policy, because our image in the world and the role media exports and other cultural contacts play in shaping that image are hardly to be discounted.

In 1989, while taking part in an international study program in Yugoslavia, I roomed with a translator from Erfurt, in what was still East Germany, and she was a loopy fan of Dirty Dancing. To this day, I don’t know what in this Hollywood fare appealed to her so much. Maybe, having been raised under totalitarianism, she was thrilled at the story of a girl finding love and glamor in defiance of social restrictions. In any case, the movie gave her real joy and helped make her friendly toward me, probably at some risk to herself. (Her government must have kept good track of her, as a career traveler.) We continued to correspond, and she came to see me three years later, at my apartment in (the former) West Germany.

Similarly—and this is not really a digression, because Bayles treats American missionary outreach too—I’ve marveled over connections made through religious arts and culture, as recorded in Yale Divinity School’s magnificent missionary library. Out of an array of Bible stories translated in booklets and offered to the public at a church-sponsored event in colonial-era China, why on earth was the Parable of the Prodigal Son mobbed, why did so many exclaim over its touching beauty, even though (at the literal level) it rejects the indispensability of filial piety in favor of parental love and forgiveness? Or was that what the Chinese crowd wanted, an alternative?

But living for almost a decade in Africa taught me to be extremely careful about offering foreigners alternatives. My mental title, in retrospect, for that time isn’t the elegiac Out of Africa but what Abbott and Costello named one of their movies: Africa Screams.

What was desired from me wasn’t, alas, my own opinions or my own writing. A letter to the editor condemned my first book (of poetry) because a “white American poet” had written it, accused a prize jury of racism, and instructed me to enjoy the prize “in silence.” In microcosm this wasn’t fair, but as a response to nearly five centuries of brutally exploitative regimes imposed and supported by the West and seconded by a loudmouthed and self-satisfied American cultural invasion of which I was part, it was understandable.

I am, on the other hand, even now prized in South Africa as a purveyor of Michael Jackson CDs and DVDs; one is on my desk here in Connecticut, ready to ship to a close friend who has also worked as my assistant. She doesn’t like to hear or read me analyzing world affairs (or versifying about them), but merely loves to dance along with MJ—as, incidentally, the Methodist Society at Yale did for one year’s Div School Idol competition, in which they placed second.

The prevailing inability to control American culture’s isolated successes abroad, and the growing resistance to an American leadership role in anything, make the prescriptive parts of Bayle’s book far less useful than, say, her acute report on McDonald’s in China. Certainly, it would be good to revitalize agencies that are underfunded, demoralized, or lacking any direction, so that we communicate better in our foreign relations; and some services, like high-quality local-language news broadcasts into authoritarian countries, where internal reporting is stifled, seem to be no-brainers. But in most of her recommendations, Bayles has not only missed the train but is standing out in the countryside watching it roar past at 250 mph (let’s say it’s a French TVG), and she never had a ticket in the first place.

I wasn’t even sure I understood correctly her views of media’s power to make the rest of the world see us the way we want to be seen, until I came to her conclusion and read this:

Why, then, does US public diplomacy remain feeble? I have argued that it was a serious mistake to cut back on government-sponsored diplomacy and entrust America’s reputation to the entertainment industry (and to the various nonprofits analyzed in Chapters 8 and 9).

Excuse me! In the aggregate and over time, we create our reputation through what we do; and if we pile on top of offensive acts a floorshow of our unique virtue, we only worsen resentment, as if I were to give certain acquaintances in South Africa, who reasonably consider themselves insulted or betrayed by me, not a commitment to emended behavior, but my family photo album, to show what a great person I am.

Bayles assumes that we can purvey our culture selectively and not be frustrated, first of all, by what is wrong at home; she warns, for example, about exporting our culture wars. But essential in whatever we purvey must be an affirmation of foreigners’ right to know the truth. We do have culture wars, and hardly should—we hardly could—be working through them in secret. (Bayles does, to her great credit, eschew censorship as a U.S. foreign policy.)

What’s more, I question just how distorting of our national character our media exports are. More than half a century ago, in the essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell showed the distinct sad*stic strain in our popular culture, and toddlers’ beauty contests are just one example of our striking tendency toward exhibitionism and sexualization, at least when contrasted with British and European norms. These traits are not arbitrarily depicted; instead, they are at home in our society at large.

What would look—and be—quite arbitrary would be a campaign protesting, “We’re not like that! We’re like this!” An official attempt to depict any American subculture as exemplary—rather than just to tell the truth, that we are, in general, wildly pluralistic and tamely tolerant—would be a disaster. I can picture the congressional hearings into how this group (or groups, a few out of our myriad subcultures) came to be selected and advertised; and I’ve experienced how foreigners tend to absorb examples of American nonconformity, no matter how carefully presented. A set of images (of the Amish, say) from here but distorted over there may be aimed back at us, and the issue can readily become why Americans, if we know what we’re doing, put up with these people.

This suggests another major problem in the book: Bayles overlooks foreigners’ sheer tough-mindedness. To potent effect, the nonaligned and developing world inherited the survival struggle from us and Europe and Britain, and in Europe and Britain that struggle looms well within living memory. To give Americans interviews of the strictest accuracy and sincerity is at the bottom of the to-do list in all of these places.

“If only you didn’t send us so much sex and violence, materialism and idiocy!” is a ready plea to a like-minded American passing through (especially since Americans are almost always viewed as able to summon life-changing favors at whim). Tragically, in the developing world the plea is likely to hide realities Americans do not want to hear about, which I summarize as the following: “You mainly insist that we institute real democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, but we can’t. Our majority is illiterate and backward and so poor that they would sell fifty years of our collective future for the next meal. They cheer on the thugs who rule over us. We are just trying to fudge it and hold things together some way or other, and to throw you off track we complain about your media—knowing that you haven’t had a good look at ours and vetted it for outright pedophilia, near-psychotic misogyny or sadism, horrifying anti-Semitism, or just a trashiness that would make Ricki Lake burble with shock.”

There are, in short, two principal reasons for the worst of our media finding a ready market overseas. The first is that many people there like that kind of thing. There was nothing weird about Bin Laden’s p*rn stash. The second is that they don’t like us much; in public, they can readily pass off predilections shared with us as an imposition by the corrupt West. I’d bet anything Bin Laden rationalized his p*rn-grubbing that way. What most of them would not like, and wouldn’t do unless you strapped them down, is to listen to classic jazz and uplifting oral histories of the great nation from which it sprang.

The following is, as I see it, the there-and-here gist of our incapacity to give a new impression of ourselves. We would be hard put to work against certain things that have already happened, and against certain situations on the ground overseas—and Bayles does note many. But our government didn’t just lay down important public-diplomacy functions, some of which it could pick up again (not, alas, the large, well-stocked, quite open reading rooms attached to U.S. diplomatic complexes in countries like Turkey and Egypt); we also, in quite solid ways—legal, political, cultural—devolved so many resources and so much latitude onto multinational corporations, that foreigners look to these (when they don’t look to our military) to say who Americans “are.” Public policy has little or no control over what is projected as our “soft power,” and government efforts to project something else can look puny and ridiculous, when people notice them at all.

On a trip to Poland, where I stayed in Protestant churches and visited a minister’s family in their home, I found America’s popularity channeled mainly into delight with new Mac products. The minister and his children wanted to know which ones I had, and to share the ones they had, and they exclaimed over the hope and opportunity that these devices stood for in their world; America was a unique, wonderful country to have evolved them. Had I suggested, however, anything about the inspirational character of American family life or arts or music, or about the historical sacrifices we have made in the name of self-determination, my hosts would have struggled not to laugh in my face. A group of ministers, in fact, was almost speechless with alarm when I told them of small children subjected to the “people pass” in American stadiums. I could see in Reverend Semko’s eyes a nightmare of his son tossed from one stranger’s hands to another’s, away from his devoted care, up the steep seating towards the sky, and in a few polite words he said how awful that would be.

What foreigners seem most enthusiastic about in our cultural exports is our attacks on our own cultural pretensions. I attended the weekly cut-rate movie event in Goettingen, Germany, for many months, but I never heard a louder roar of approval at the announcement of the night’s feature than for Addams Family Values. The biggest laughs I ever heard in that cinema went to the film’s joke that the Girl Scouts peddle cannibalism; and to Wednesday and company’s being forcibly brainwashed by syrupy American shows such as The Brady Bunch—but soon rebelling and turning a Thanksgiving pageant into a denouncement of American racist imperialism, and then into mayhem.

In South Africa, I have seen the unpopularity of the U.S. expressed in quite an unexpected way in the treatment of McDonald’s. As part of economic sanctions against the apartheid government—a series of moves that hurt blacks worst, and, it appears, irreparably—McDonald’s withdrew from South Africa. Into the fast-food vacuum, with an attitude of “Watch this, Americans!”, came imaginative and charming options, such as Nando’s roast chicken, with its rich spices and hilarious commercials, and Spurs, with its luscious burgers, lightly breaded fried onions, and salad bars with breads and soups to be taken seriously. These restaurants grabbed convenient locations, trained their staffs with the usual South African zeal for hospitality, and kept prices down through almost comprehensive local sourcing. When MacDonald’s came back after the first multiracial elections, it was to hopeless competition, and a customer in a nearly empty restaurant might wait many minutes for an order, sit at a dirty table, complain only to be snapped at, and judge the fries to be not as good as elsewhere. Despite vigorous promotion, franchises winked out like fireflies in a cloud of poison gas. The chain became a local byword for America’s failure in endeavors on which our country normally prides itself: the application of political and social ideals to business; imaginatively flexible mass production and mass marketing; and strict and detailed organizational accountability. If McDonald’s (Gazillions Served!) is a hostage to history to that degree, what chance does the United States Information Agency have?

My irritation with Bayles became personal—since I create intellectual property for my (increasingly precarious) livelihood—when I reached the following:

One could also anticipate further dissemination through illegal downloading and knockoff DVDs. While not officially approved by the US government, such pirated distribution would likely reach a broad audience—and perhaps the lawyers would be mollified knowing that versions dubbed in foreign languages would have little resale in English-speaking markets.

You know something? I mean, beyond the suggestion that the U.S. no longer model the rule of law in the treatment of its own media industries? This would cause civil unrest at the grassroots, that’s what. Most of us creators can’t afford the lawyers who might be “mollified” when the government turned from defending our property to collaborating in its theft by the terabyte and saying, Don’t worry—in the forms into which it’s been altered without your consent, it’s not worth anything to you anyway.

But though my reservations about Through a Screen Darkly range from the slums of Cape Town to my checking balance at the credit union down the road, I still commend the book for its useful overview and many astute points.

Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Brown University. She recently finished translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf early in 2015.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Say “Cultural Studies” and what comes to mind is abstract, ironic analysis, heavy with the jargon of initiates. But by the time Peter Bacon Hales at the pinnacle of his brooding tale has got Jimi Hendrix atop Mount Pisgah singing “All Along the Watchtower,” mere irony has been left way behind. Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now reads our past three-score-and-ten years as a spiritual journey lodged somewhere between Genesis and Revelation. It’s a journey Hales recounts and recasts with a pathos not only biblical but, as he himself describes it, evangelical.

He doesn’t mean “evangelical” in any theological sense. Rather, Hales, the director emeritus of the American Studies Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has in mind a distinctive mode of apprehension and engagement, that of a self thrust outward and inward at once, keyed to “immersion, tactility, sensuality” but dedicated to a deep, sweeping redemption, both personal and social. It’s evangelicalism as virtue, as necessity; it’s America at its best, trying to become America. And it’s above all an America that has reached and over-reached and is now threatened, once more, with grand failure, stuck in its historic “dance between triumphalism and terror.”

A spiritual restlessness afflicts us, then, as we gaze with Hendrix from the watchtower into the Promised Land, a portentous wind howling, sharpening our senses, reclaiming our memories, memories of a calling to embody a new way before a watching, weary world. John Winthrop hovers over the entire book; Hales at its end brings him down, into the text. “We are a culture beset by the very fears” Winthrop etched at the end of his Arbella sermon, Hales suggests, fears of exile from this “good land,” the land we crossed a “vast sea to possess,” as Winthrop reminded his friends and companions. And so, threatened by that sea, “we reenact the myths and menaces of our histories,” says Hales. “We yearn for something.”

The conclusion of World War II could hardly have made for a stranger circ*mstance for this peculiar people, buoyed by a power that, paradoxically, threatened its existence. Hales launches his story with a series of set pieces that place the postwar rise of suburbia against the backdrop of Hiroshima, acres of tiny cape cods backlit by a brilliant, ominous mushroom cloud. We dealt with the disquieting scenery through the artful, willful invention of “the atomic sublime, in which terror is translated to beauty and danger is always at arm’s length.” But this was only art, politically useful art, finally unable to mask the unbearable, unbelievable truth: that we were now living on “a globe facing universal destruction by human technology.”

Still, construct narratives we did, sublime narratives born out of desperation and cunning and naivetÉ, born of the kind of innocence James Baldwin so enduringly exposed in his 1963 essay The Fire Next Time, where he describes, among other descendents of slave owners and slavery defenders, the “Cub Scout faces” of New York City’s policemen. “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” judged Baldwin, and Hales would seem to agree. His chapter on Miracle on 34th Street deftly takes up the 1947 film he calls the first of the “suburban idylls,” in which the dreams of an entire culture are carried by one jaded, war-weary little girl longing for a home beyond the city, beyond the landscape of catastrophe that had so decimated the world’s cities in the previous two decades. If in this story Kris Kringle is the efficient cause of a timely deliverance, he is backed up by a prime-moving wartime economy ready to translate its terrible efficiency into a consumer paradise. And so suburbs like Levittown became an updated “image of utopia for the postwar years.”

Yet here Hales is far from cynical. In fact, he tends toward the lyrical, inspired in part by the remarkable response he received when soliciting artifacts and testimonies from Levittown’s former residents. He discovers, for instance, that the residents of Levittown tended to stay put, recalling with fondness what Hales can only call “celebratory community” as they, relieved to be done with war and depression, acted out their republican ideals with gusto. Hales, a photographer as well as a historian, brilliantly takes us into a study of the Levittown landscape. Here the evidence for a kind of spatial democracy—he calls it “a socialism of children and dogs”—backs up the testimonies he gathers of genuine fraternity.

Paradise was not exactly found, though. Until 1954 Levittown excluded African Americans, and even six years after that prohibition fell only fifteen of its 15,000 families were black. More structurally, as the postwar economy motored on, homes were transformed by the constant pressure of technological invention and accretion, until suburbanites found themselves falling apart in ways that would prove hugely consequential. Beginning in 1950, Levittown houses came with televisions (when only nine percent of the U.S. population owned them). As the television colonized more and more space, that former queen of the rancher, the radio, transmuted from centerpiece to traveling companion, the creator and carrier of new, diverse subcultures, in precisely the way the television had become the forger of the new postwar monoculture.

And in the story as Hales tells it, that monoculture is the enemy—the “dominant consumer-consensus culture,” the creation in the main of the evolving corporate order, government and business working in tandem to manipulate the citizenry in world-historical fashion, as they together pursued survival in threatening times. Hales renders the efforts of what in 1961 Eisenhower deemed the military-industrial complex as tragicomic, especially the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to increase nuclear strength while assuaging fear of imminent cataclysm. It’s not exactly farce Hales is writing; he sees ours as too much a collective quandary for that. But his sympathies are altogether with the counterculture that arose in the mid-Sixties through the world of radio, not television, in a way that (in his account) seems organic, an outgrowth of the natural order of things.

This notion of the organic emergence of the counterculture only partly reflects a kind of ontological commitment on Hales’ part; in another sense he sees it as a deeply historical, almost mythical movement. He notes that “never once” in these decades “did America waver in its conviction that it must take itself seriously, choose its mission properly, follow its path responsibly.” This was our calling, our identity, “the American myth, gift, and peril that all Americans shared, even those most marginalized and disenfranchised.” And so the counterculture (which Hales, far more lumper than splitter, treats as a monolith), guided by a “fundamental conservatism,” sought America’s redemption.

Most of America, of course, did not elect the counterculture’s vision of redemption—at least at first—but Hales downplays the extent to which this rejection was rooted in fundamental religious conflict. For Hales, the heroic “apostasy” of the counterculture wasn’t its “hedonism” so much as its refusal to believe the Cold War narrative of American virtue versus Soviet villainy, of our prosperity versus their poverty. The counterculture wished to recover a truer vision of prosperity, of democracy—”to seek some individual happiness, some harmony with the land given us, some concord with our neighbors, some connection to the larger forces of God or gods.”

They longed, these latter-day evangelicals, for “sacrality,” for nothing less than the “miraculous occupation of a divinely granted place of beauty and promise.” And yet, for all of Hales’ siding with the counterculture, his judgment is unbending: upon “retreating to utopia” these idealists experienced a “near endless string of disasters” as the shallowness of the broader culture played out in its own distinct ways among those who, innocently, believed themselves to be transcending it.

In Hales’ expansive narrative, Jimi Hendrix is the great gospel-singing preacher, seeking “a new language that liberated rather than limited human imagination and desire.” But it is Dylan who rises in this story as the seer of the age, he whose quiet and eerie “All Along the Watchtower” Hendrix reinvented with evangelical verve. Dylan’s stance was not so evangelical. His sense of the times had taken a dramatically dystopian turn following the assassination of Kennedy, and Hales is nowhere sharper than in his intricate interpretation of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and John Wesley Harding (1968). On the former, Dylan revealed what the “death of American innocence” meant to the still innocent, most devastatingly in the album’s nearly 12-minute final song, “Desolation Row.” Here we see an “America without enabling myths,” a nation populated by “mythic figures” who have become, alas, “freaks,” subject to “a formalism of alienation, in which the conditions that created loss, marginalization, impotence, exile, and disenfranchisem*nt became the raw material for a new culture.” What was this culture in formation? “Postmodern America stripped of progress and its corollary utopian promises.”

And so, as the Sixties dissipated, we continued our search for self-invention, now defined in part on the counterculture’s terms—evidence, Hales believes, of its at least partial triumph. You might suppose that Hales would be finishing his story on this note. But in his last, long chapter, he takes a surprising turn, leaving behind house plans, photographs, and song lyrics to zero in on Pong, Doom, and Fall Out, the computer-generated worlds that have in fact made “the virtual present a protean mash-up of Cold War dramas and a dynamic repository for the very symbols and myths that only seemed useful until the Cold War ended.” In games like Fall Out, nuclear disaster, tellingly, still creates the conditions for whatever adventure is left for us, while cozier worlds like The Sims promise suburban normalcy for those who yearn for stability amidst the roiling contingencies of this age. The digital revolution, Hales suggests, is nudging us toward a “posthuman identity.”

Meanwhile, what of the dream of America, and Americans themselves, we Winthrop-haunted souls on Desolation Row? Not surprisingly, Hales is of two minds—reflecting, one senses, his own conflicted soul. In “the seductions of the virtual” he senses danger, as we learn to “meld [ourselves] to the imperatives of the machine.” With “the collapse of the American narrative,” many, but especially young men, “began to game”—but not in a way that is “playful, joyous, or redemptive.” Rather, it’s a kind of gaming that takes our “radical individualism” and twists it toward “sociopathic survivalism.” It’s an allure Hales himself knows well, he confesses, mentioning briefly but poignantly his own battles with addiction to gaming. “The grail of the virtual world,” he warns, is “immersion in a seemingly infinite alternative realm from which you could not bear to escape”: a word in season if there ever was one.

Yet Hales, almost startlingly, does not, as this long, satisfying book achieves its conclusion, give up on the old idea of America as a haven and model, though his sense of our promise is far from the wan exceptionalist version of our politicians and punditry. “We are something more complicated,” he writes, more “tenuous and fragile”—and yet capable, he hopes, of rediscovering the landscape that will recall us again to a truer way.

However Winthrop may hover over Hales’ story, his own vision and hope are most decisively inspired by the classic Emersonian ideals: the spontaneous discovery of an inward connection to a greater reality; a harmonic convergence of self and society; above all, a religious confidence that The Self Knows, and that our true enemy is the enemy of the self. Will these ideals be enough to save us from the mighty surges of history Hales with such acuity uncovers? Many of us, still poised at that watchtower, listening to that howling wind, find ourselves looking for rescue from another direction.

Still: Read this book.

Eric Miller is professor of history and the humanities at Geneva College. He is the author of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Eerdmans) and Glimpses of Another Land: Political Hopes, Spiritual Longing (Cascade).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When Jenifer Ringer, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet, gave birth to her first child in 2008, she chose not to receive treatment for the pain because “being a dancer, I wanted to be able to feel what my body was doing and to experience it all, even the discomfort.” Not surprisingly, professional dancers pay more attention to their bodies than most people do—how they feel, how they look—since they use them to make art that makes their living. Critics, in turn, are paid to judge those bodies within a particular context—onstage, during a performance. Central to Ringer’s memoir, Dancing Through It, is how she drew on her maturing Christian faith as her body and mind went awry, and how that healing was threatened when the most influential dance critic in America pronounced her fat.

Ringer wondered why she was cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy on opening night of the company’s 2010 run of The Nutcracker, the only performance that typically draws reviewers. She was a principal dancer—the highest rank—but she was not an obvious choice for the role, at least in her mind. Nevertheless, she and her “Cavalier,” Jared Angle, felt they danced well, and the next morning she hurried through Alastair Macaulay’s review in The New York Times, searching for her name. Near the end of the lengthy article, she found it: “Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many.” The assessment embarrassed but did not devastate her, as it might have 15 years earlier when she was cycling through periods of uncontrollable eating and self-disgust. Moreover, readers of the Times began lambasting Macaulay online, and the contretemps led to Ringer’s defending her womanly shape and discussing eating disorders on Today and Oprah. In retrospect, she discerned God’s hand in all of it—her suffering, the casting, and the opportunity to reach others with similar problems.

The chapter entitled “Sugar Plumgate,” however, proves the least satisfying part of Ringer’s book. Curiously, she quotes only the first half of Macaulay’s controversial sentence, which in full reads: “Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.” Macaulay’s sharper rebuke of the male dancer drew hardly a peep from Times readers, which raises a broader array of questions concerning the boundaries of dance criticism than Ringer chooses to address. Moreover, she dismisses rather than engages with a well-reasoned apologia that Macaulay later published, and instead spends a giddy five pages recounting her trip to appear on Oprah.

But she is, after all, a ballerina, not a philosopher, and her memoir expresses the soul of a servant-artist. The perfectionism that led to compulsive overeating also created a lovely performer who strove to please audiences and choreographers alike. She is generous to family and colleagues and even casts a warm glow over the notoriously nasty Jerome Robbins as she describes one rehearsal of Dances at a Gathering, a work of his that she loves. She explains that since his pas de deux usually concern “some relationship or dialogue or experience shared between the two people onstage,” he insisted that she and her partner maintain eye contact constantly, to the point where they could not dance the steps correctly. Only then was Robbins satisfied. “It dawned on me that this was a lesson,” Ringer recalls. “Jerry didn’t expect us to actually dance the pas de deux this way. We were dramatically distorting the choreography in order to look into each other’s eyes. But he wanted the feeling that we would never take our eyes off of each other.”

Ringer’s portrait of the powerful and moody Peter Martins, artistic director of the New York City Ballet, is mixed, for he in a sense personified all that is good and bad about professional ballet at its highest level. Ringer surmises that at one point she was about 50 pounds overweight and concedes she was “unusable” in the company. After a probationary period, Martins fired her, and her heartbreak (even in recollection) is palpable: “I had failed at everything that had been important to me in my entire life.” While she does not blame Martins for her downfall, she does not credit him with her recovery either, even though he later takes her back. Rather, new habits and supportive friends helped her rekindle her love for dancing and her Christian faith, and she began seeing herself the way God sees her—as his beautiful and redeemed daughter. Transformed, she returned to the New York City Ballet, but it no longer wielded the same power over her that it once did.

Her re-ordered priorities—plus marriage and motherhood—brought a welcome sense of normalcy back to her life. The quiet pleasure of Ringer’s memoir, in fact, lies in the mundane rather than extraordinary experiences. She mentions praying with her mother as a teenager on long drives to ballet lessons, for example, and details her two hours of preparation for each performance, including 30 minutes devoted to make-up alone (applied, in order: concealer stick, stage base, loose powder, two colors of blush, eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, more pencil, more shadow, false eyelashes, lipstick, done!).

It is a ritual, alas, that she no longer undertakes. She retired from the New York City Ballet on February 9, performing in her beloved Dances at a Gathering for the final time. Tributes from colleagues and the audience made clear just how much she will be missed.

Sharon Skeel is a ballet historian currently at work on a biography of 20th-century American choreographer Catherine Littlefield.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Sometimes unevenness in an author’s collected volume can be a sign of great accomplishment. Take the third volume of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s collected works. Two of the plays, The Birds and The Dance of Death, feel less central to the McPherson canon because they are adaptations or translations (of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story and August Strindberg’s play, respectively). McPherson says in the foreword to The Birds, “I like it because it really feels like someone else wrote it.” A third play, The Veil, is a work that seems very much “against type” for the Irish playwright, known for his small casts of mainly male characters in contemporary settings, and often in the mode of extended monologue. Conversely, The Veil is set in an Irish manor house in 1822, as social instabilities erupt. It is a period piece with a large ensemble and prominent female roles. In the foreword to Plays: Three, McPherson admits that it was met with a “certain incomprehension” when it premiered at the National Theater in 2011.

With a séance scene, a “Big-House Gothic” setting, and a general atmosphere of the occult, The Veil does fulfill one central expectation for a new work by McPherson—a fresh, often startling handling of a supernatural presence or visitation. The ghosts or spirits that often haunt this writer’s plays become at one level little parables for the powers of theater, where a willingly believing audience encounters a conjuration of sorts, imaginative and yet embodied by actors, a dream in a little room. The supernatural, for McPherson, should also remind us of a human being’s place in this world—we are, he says in one interview, “animals who can talk, and think because of that they know everything.” McPherson attempts to present on stage “the magic of being alive, the magic of being conscious, the mystery and the miracle of that, the complete unknown aspect of all of that which is so necessary to live our lives.”

Three plays—two adaptations and a puzzler. So far, so average, a suspicious reader might say. I would promptly invite such a reader to consider the first two plays collected here, Shining City (2004) and The Seafarer (2006). Then tell me what you think. Here’s what I think: as a regular playgoer, I will simply say that performances I have been fortunate to see of The Seafarer (in a celebrated production by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater) and Shining City (in a surprisingly powerful staging by a local Chicago theater company) are two of the most pleasing, thrilling experiences I’ve had in any theater in the past decade. Both plays enjoyed strong openings in London before transferring to New York for successful Broadway stints. Both received Tony nominations for best play that year, and the actor Jim Norton (a McPherson regular) won a Tony Award for playing the blind old man Richard in The Seafarer. Both plays also received high praise from the New York Times’ Ben Brantley and other prominent drama critics. Late last year, Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal identified The Seafarer as the “best new play I’ve seen in the past decade.”

If this were not impressive enough, McPherson often directs his own plays as well, saying his work benefits from the give-and-take between director and actors. McPherson seems to be an actor’s playwright—one sensitive to both the struggles and the promises and possibilities of those who bring his characters to life onstage. Similarly, interviews suggest that McPherson is unusually open-handed and flexible when it comes to the ongoing evolution of his script during rehearsals.

Plays: Three, then, presents a precocious playwright (McPherson is not yet 43) who has roughly a dozen important plays behind him and, in this collection, two plays that display a writer in his prime: Shining City and The Seafarer can look forward to many future stagings and revivals, and it is hard to imagine these plays not coming to mind fairly immediately whenever McPherson and his peculiar powers as an artist will be discussed. If they ensure that the collection as a whole feels like a rattlebag of sorts, then fine—most of us would kill for such unevenness.

If Shining City and The Seafarer characterize this third collection of plays, his first two collected volumes can be differently summed up. Reread today, Plays: One now looks like an “apprentice” collection, featuring a handful of early plays pointing toward better things. The volume concludes with St. Nicholas (1997), a two-act monologue spoken by a self-hating theater critic (!), rancid from alcoholism and wracked by love, who encounters and eventually comes to serve a company of London vampires. Plays such as Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief reflect the lacerating language and underworld settings of David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino, two early influences, and overall they reflect the “lad culture” prominent in British drama of the 1990s. A final play, This Lime Tree Bower, was expanded and adapted into the film Saltwater, one of a handful McPherson has made as both writer and director.

In the subsequent collection, Plays: Two, we find McPherson rising to full confidence in his early phase. The hallmark play here is The Weir, whose huge success in London’s West End in 1997 conferred upon him an international reputation. The play begins with a series of awkward interactions between characters in a far western Irish pub, but soon they are telling one another increasingly potent, emotionally dizzying ghost stories.

This second collected edition boasted two other formidable plays. The first is Port Authority (2001), again featuring male characters, three speakers each of a different generation, and again in unapologetic monologue mode. (The stage direction basically says the men are speaking in a darkened theater.) No other McPherson play feels as saturated in regret and missed connections as Port Authority—at least until one reads the adjacent play, Dublin Carol (2000). Haunted by its Christmas Eve setting, which McPherson would soon use in The Seafarer to brighter effect, Dublin Carol demonstrates the lonely terrors of the alcoholic: how such a compulsion inevitably destroys everything, including every relationship the addict holds most dear, and the “sickening disgust” that results. This play also displays McPherson’s characteristic blending of careful attention to realism with supernatural or theatrically estranging elements. For example, one stage direction sets a scene with great specificity—”office on the Northside of Dublin, around Fairview or the North Strand Road”—and yet works its Christmas setting and its symbolically named characters (Noel, Carol) toward what Ian Walsh calls a secular version of Everyman and other medieval allegorical plays. Overall, Karen Fricker’s description of the characters’ monologic performances in Port Authority applies just as well to John in Dublin Carol: “stories of men trapped by their own self awareness, too weak to be good in their lives but smart enough to know how bad they are.”

Walsh’s and Fricker’s essays are among the many readable and informative critical studies in the first such collection devoted to the playwright and his works, The Theater of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond.’ Those wishing to know more about McPherson will find here two essays treating St. Nicholas, no fewer than four showing exclusive or partial attention to The Seafarer, at least one or two essays apiece on The Weir, Dublin Carol, Port Authority, Shining City, The Veil (co-editor Eamonn Jordan’s essay on The Veil was particularly illuminating, helping me to appreciate better the contemporary national dimension to this perplexing recent play), and The Birds, and also a handful of essays devoted to his films, including his production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. In early interviews, McPherson often expressed indebtedness to Beckett, both dramatically and philosophically. In the current collection’s interview, however, which concludes the volume, the interviewer states, as if it were a piece of conventional wisdom, that McPherson’s later plays evince a “deeper metaphysical engagement.”

This essay collection will be an essential book for anyone interested in McPherson, to be set alongside Gerald Wood’s monograph Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief and an excellent interview with the playwright in Jody Allen Randolph’s Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland. Though he is still relatively young, McPherson is old enough to have a sense of his own growth as a person and a writer. “Youth is great place to be, where you have no fear of the consequences of your life,” he says in the collection’s interview. “I had no insight into myself or the world.” Sober and a new father now, he finds himself in a world quite different from that of his early writing days in Dublin and London. Those with knowledge of McPherson’s personal life may be inclined to mark a further division in his career, roughly dividing it in half: the plays fueled by drink and those that emerged from sobriety.

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. In a related remark in the foreword of this present book, McPherson says that good writing requires a recklessness, whereas self-consciousness is the “enemy of art.” On the other hand, he seems always to have had a rather humble view of how he, and we, manage to get through our lives. “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.” Likewise, the Tribune theater critic Chris Jones has nicely summarized McPherson’s characters in Port Authority as “familiar with the difficulty of holding it together.”

The Weir‘s ghost stories put McPherson on a path toward a more direct, sustained engagement with the supernatural in his plays. In Shining City, a fiftysomething businessman, John, visits a therapist following the death of his estranged wife in a car accident. We soon learn that John feels unhinged because he is convinced that his wife’s ghost remains present in their home. As he works painfully toward a self-reckoning, it becomes clear that the counselor, Ian, an expriest, is also concealing his own histories and mysteries. The second meeting between the men is a gorgeously written scene, with John’s resistance to the session itself and his struggle to narrate—to come to terms with, to find terms for—his marital failings and his resilient guilt. Here is an early exchange between client and counselor:

JOHN:
Pause.
You know, when you’re young. And you’re told about … what to expect I suppose. It is kind of happy ever after. But it’s … you know, it’s weird to accept what happiness really is, you know, or what it is … nothing is ever like anyone expects, is it, you know? Like, it’s not a fairy tale … I mean, it has to be just kind of ordinary, you know? A bit boring even, otherwise it’s probably not real, you know?

IAN: … Yeah … ?

JOHN: No, it’s, it’s just that … we probably had it, you know? I mean when I think of it, really, we … we had it all, you know? But it’s, it’s hard to … accept … that this is it. You … you go … searching, not searching, I wasn’t going anywhere searching for anything, but, I think I was always slightly … waiting … you know?

This tentative recounting soon rises to a pitch that is searing, a word I regularly find myself using when describing McPherson’s dramatic powers to others. Eventually John describes to Ian how, as his marriage was disintegrating, he rounded on his wife: “And I … grabbed her by the shoulders and I shook her. I shook her so hard. I could feel how small and helpless she was. It was a terrible feeling.” Don’t you dare speak to me, he erupts.

And she just cowered down on the floor—nothing like this had ever happened between us before, you know? And she curled herself up into a little ball there down beside the bin. And the sobs just came out of her, you know? Just the total … bewilderment, you know?

Yet even amid such hard-to-watch scenes of disclosure, admission, and regret, there is often the prospect of better understanding or even healing hovering just above. Pondering his wife’s ghost at the end of this scene, John asks out loud if she is trying to hurt him, but then wonders if he has it all wrong. “Maybe she’s … maybe she’s just trying to save me, you know?”

In The Seafarer, there is a similar struggling search for healing, for finding a way to be at peace with oneself amid a pile-up of failings. The title alludes to the well-known Anglo-Saxon poem of exile: “Oppressed by cold my feet were bound by frost / In icy bonds, while worries simmered hot / About my heart, and hunger from within / Tore the sea-weary spirit.” The characters here are wanderers, too, haunted by mistakes and running from responsibilities. At one point, Richard says that his younger brother Sharky has a “recklessness in his heart that is the undoing and ruination of his whole life.” That flare of paired words, “undoing and ruination,” like something from a 17th-century treatise, illustrates well McPherson’s frequent poetic flourishes. Generally, though, the language is crisply boisterous and coarse, befitting a group of men on the fringe who speak so bluntly to their friends that they sound like enemies.

The story takes place in Baldoyle, outside Dublin, in Sharky’s and Richard’s dumpy basem*nt apartment that is, as the stage directions explicitly tell us, “a kind of bar in its appearance,” complete with pub artifacts and passed out or hungover hosts and visitors. The brothers are joined by Ivan, a bumbling friend trying to escape his marital troubles, and Nicky, an abrasive friend who has awkwardly taken up with Sharky’s ex-wife. Sharky, the play’s protagonist, becomes infuriated, to comic effect, when he sees Nicky driving his old car around the neighborhood. Throughout the first act, the Christmastime festivities seem to be a last-gasp stay against each character’s situational desperation. And this intensifies toward the end of the act when Nicky arrives at the brothers’ poker game accompanied by a well-dressed new friend, the wonderfully named Mr. Lockhart, who turns out to be the Devil.

For this diabolical card game, played with Sharky’s soul in the balance, McPherson drew upon legends of the Hellfire Club, 18th-century aristocrats who would meet to gamble in a ruined estate in Wicklow Mountains. Stories also circulated about “The Devil at Binn Eadair,” featuring a card game during which one player drops a card and, upon bending down to retrieve it, notices that another of the players has cloven hooves. The Devil then disappears with a thunderclap. McPherson has said that he was always disappointed to find the story ending just when it was getting interesting, and so he extends the narrative in The Seafarer‘s second act. Lockhart heightens the dramatic stakes by telling Sharky, and the audience, who he is and why he has come. “You think you’re better than me? Pig. Well, think again. Because we’re gonna play for your soul and I’m gonna win and you’re coming through the old hole in the wall with me tonight.” Sharky’s Faustian sense of pending doom electrifies the poker game and the drunken conversations that follow.

We soon learn that the Devil, this fallen angel, is merely inhabiting a human form: “I hate these stupid insect bodies you have,” he says. Lockhart is a tragically compelling character in his own right. McPherson gives him some of the strongest language in the play, including lengthy descriptions of hell and heaven that feel in performance like little arias. He introduces the isolating maritime language of the “Seafarer” poem to get across hell’s unimaginable alienation. Heaven, a place now lost to him, is described gorgeously as a place of stunning concord:

At a certain point each day, music plays. It seems to emanate from the very sun itself. Not so much a tune as a heartbreakingly beautiful vibration in the sunlight shining on and through all the souls. It’s so moving you wonder how you could ever have doubted anything.

Without giving too much away, I can say that the play achieves a winning ending. Christopher Murray, in his essay in The Theatre of Conor McPherson, describes it well: “good fellowship or ordinary humanity is more powerful in its frailty than the terrible representative of the forces of evil.” Lockhart is outwitted by the weak. The men are not quite fools for Christ, but fools who come to enjoy, at the last minute, a most improbable triumph. They appear to receive, all the more powerfully for their not even knowing it, the benefactions promised by the gospel. Relaying this message becomes of one Lockhart’s last actions: “Somebody up there likes you, Sharky. You’ve got it all.” This powerful moment reminds me of the disguised Edgar’s comment to his blinded father, Gloucester, in King Lear: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Or, as the sharp-tongued Richard tells his brother, “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

When Richard says this, a small red lamp beneath an oleograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus flickers. It is a common Irish icon of generations past, and a delightfully quaint, unsubtle symbol throughout the play. Its presence may have something to do with the fact that McPherson always lit a candle when he was writing this play, which is the only time he has done that. The tapping of this lamp pays homage to a similar scene in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Payco*ck, and The Seafarer has other sources as well. It most obviously invites comparisons with Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, with Lockhart paralleling the character Hickey. McPherson has also said that the film The Exorcist made a huge impression on him when he was young. That storyline of a “dark visitor” appearing is a popular one, appearing onstage now in American playwright John Patrick Shanley’s new play set in Ireland, Outside Mullingar.

These days have all of the makings of another McPherson Moment. Last year ended with two different McPherson plays running in Chicago. Although the show closed in early January, the small Seanachai Theatre Company put on The Seafarer. One specific directorial choice was noteworthy: in past productions, Lockhart stood in prosperous contrast to the other men, arriving in Richard and Sharky’s basem*nt flat dressed smartly in a camel-hair overcoat. Wearing a suit and with hair slicked back, he might be called the Wolf of Grafton Street. In the latest Chicago production, however, Lockhart appeared to be as struggling and marginalized as the men he challenged to cards. The choice supported the Devil’s impatient, slightly desperate demeanor, and added a poignancy (think likewise of Milton’s Satan) to his great speeches of diabolical loneliness.

(An acquaintance who teaches at University College Dublin, McPherson’s alma mater, reported to me that in the original Dublin production of The Seafarer, Lockhart spoke with a prominently northern English accent. Was this a postcolonial wink from an Irish playwright? She explained that it was more complicated; whereas the Irish connection to the United States is often discussed, there is also a strong emigration history between Ireland and northern England. “You should see all of the Leeds football jerseys in Ireland!” she said.)

Meanwhile, the Writers Theatre on the North Shore has been staging a production of Port Authority, which has garnered national attention; reviews have been invariably strong.

Finally and most prominently, McPherson’s latest work, The Night Alive, which he wrote and is directing, is playing on Broadway following a London run earlier in the year at the Donmar Warehouse, a part of that company’s season-long attention to McPherson. (Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater will stage a production this fall.)Because of McPherson’s stature, the script of The Night Alive was published in the UK practically simultaneously with the play’s London premier. TCG’s American edition is scheduled for publication in May. After the divergences of The Veil, McPherson in many ways returns to pure form in The Night Alive. The play focuses on Tommy, a fiftysomething slob living in failure-to-launch squalor in a room in his Uncle Maurice’s home. One night he encounters a twentysomething prostitute, Aimee. She is bloodied, and Tommy awkwardly brings her back to his place to give her aid, as best as he can. The cast is filled out by Doc, Tommy’s odd friend.

And finally there is Kenneth, Aimee’s boyfriend or pimp, who shows up at Tommy’s, too. (One critic has said that a brief but shocking scene involving Kenneth may be the most terrifying moment he has ever seen on a stage.)

Ciarán Hinds plays the lead role, and does so splendidly, with his out-of-shape bearing and rubbery face. (For a small taste of his and McPherson’s magic together, check out a short clip of Hinds in character.1) Hinds also played Mr. Lockhart in The Seafarer‘s Broadway production, and is the star in McPherson’s most recognizable, accessible feature film to date, The Eclipse (2009, available on Netflix), which features a heady brew of deceased spouses, troubled romances, supernatural hauntings, and shocking visual moments. The film adds supernatural elements to a more realist short story by Billy Roche, McPherson’s co-writer. (McPherson also directed.)

The Night Alive once again features McPherson’s gritty language at its best. These are characters who virtually breathe expletives but sometimes seem frustrated by their own limitations of expression or compassion. Yet there are moments of great peace and tenderness in this play, too. And once again, we have a Christmas setting. At one point Doc says, “Will I tell you the good thing about Christmas? No one can turn you away. You see that light in the window. You go on in.” Toward the play’s end Doc reports a dream he has had, about an “old chap,” whom he identifies matter-of-factly as one of the three wise men, and who proceeds to give Doc a surprising lesson on black holes, timelessness, and the existence of God. Another moment from Doc’s dream recalls Lockhart’s description of heaven in The Seafarer:

DOC: Yeah, apparently, when you die, you won’t even know you’re dead! It’ll just feel like everything has suddenly … come right, in your life. Like everything has just clicked into place and off you go.
TOMMY: Oh well, that’s good, isn’t it?
DOC: Yeah!

The rather audacious ending of The Night Alive (which I won’t disclose) has divided audiences. The theater critic of The Guardian, Michael Billington, wrote that he would have given the play four stars rather than three if it had ended with the penultimate scene. McPherson, for his part, seems perfectly steady in the defense of the bolder conclusion, saying in an interview that he ended it that way “because that’s the lovely possibility of theater.”

For me, an even more memorable scene occurs at the play’s midpoint, when Tommy, Aimee, and Doc go in for some impromptu dancing, sweetly if clumsily. Soon Uncle Maurice is thumping on the ceiling from upstairs. The moment called to mind the dancing that ends Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, where the movements become grace notes for human connection and the order of the universe and history’s strange linkages, something more than coincidence. There is no such uplift here, but the scene is nevertheless moving. The trio is dancing to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” Tommy’s comment makes him sound like a down-and-out Hamlet. His words represent well McPherson’s earthy characterizations, and his abiding interest in the big questions of our existence, our trials and comforts, and the meanings of those things:

TOMMY: Old bollocks would give you a pain in your arse. (Raises his mug to his poster of Marvin Gaye.) Marvin, you said it there, man. What’s goin’ on? That is the question. What in the name of Jaysus is goin’ on? The man who answers that one will … (Raises his mug to whoever will answer that question.)

Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first book of poetry, The Garbage Eater, was published in 2011 by Northwestern University Press. A second collection, Fall Run Road, was awarded Finishing Line Press’s 2011 Open Chapbook Prize, and appeared in 2012. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review, The New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Yale Review.

Books discussed in this essay:

Plays: Three, by Conor McPherson (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013).The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’, edited by LilianChambers and Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012).The Night Alive, by Conor McPherson (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013/TCG, 2014).

1. artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/in-performance-ciaran-hinds-in-the-night-alive/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

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