Review by Helen Faye Rosenblum of The Cleveland Plain Dealerof the novel THE CHRYSANTHEM GARDEN by Joseph Cowley Willa Cather once observed that “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” In his touching first novel, The Chrysanthemum Garden, Joseph Cowley distinguishes himself not for disproving Ms. Cather’s truism, but for affirming it in a virtuoso display of delicate insight and deceptively simple storytelling. The tale he offers boils down to boy-meets-girl, then lives on in some permutation of happily ever after. Boy and girl have both, as the novel opens, attained what might tactfully be called deep middle age, yet Mr. Cowley depicts their romance as a voyage of discovery every bit as consuming and fresh as the affaires de Coeur that regularly afflict adolescents in residence, youthful public figures, and once and future kings. From Kremer vs. Kremer back beyond Nora vs. Torvald, memorable women in literature have forsaken apparent security to seek the fortunes of their souls. In The Chrysanthemum Garden, Morna Franklin raised a family, borne loss, and lived out nearly sixty years of a comfortable married life before she reared up, one day, and “walked out of her home in Scarsdale and left her husband scowling down into his morning bowl of Shredded Wheat” At last, and not at all easily, Morna has determined she refuses to succumb to the undifferentiated malaise that sends her prowling through her house alone in the midnight hours. She will squander no further energy in the expensive process of resentment. Hopeful that she will be able to find, or manufacture, a direction for herself, Morna enrolls in a twice-weekly poetry course at the New School in Manhattan. She starts out as a commuter, and realizes before long that her exit from the velvet shackles of suburbia must entail more than a symbolic departure. Advancing from a part-time pied à terre to a full-time life outside her former world, Morna cultivates a breed of passionate courage that she never dared test at twenty or thirty. Her steady emergence contains Mr. Cowley’s confident theme: In the great cosmic lottery it’s never too late for another chance at passion and progress, if only one dares the named and nameless risks. Morna finds an increasingly significant motivation in the inspiration of the poet who teaches her course. Denison McArdle, 70 years old and widowed seven years from a stormy but solid marriage when Morna enters his life, wears celebrity well. He is vastly renowned in his art, but good-naturedly unimpressed with his own stature. The world labels him a genuine artist. More importantly, he is a genuine human being. Morna grows increasingly attuned to “Denny’s” vibrant presence and special vision. “By the end of May,” Mr. Cowley tells us, “at the time of their last poetry reading, in Central Park, where they sat on blankets on the grass eating out of picnic baskets and sharing their poems on a Saturday afternoon, she knew she was in love.” Shortly thereafter, Morna and Denny embark upon a love affair and form a household that will fill the dozen or so years until his death. Morna emerges in the end as a saddened but tempered woman, permanently enriched for having gambled security to gain intimacy. By choosing with infinite care between what he economically reveals and what he leaves unsaid, the author describes volumes. In a single, terse paragraph, for example, he paints whole decades of Morna’s life and marriage: “After Martha was born, they looked for a house in Westchester, and found one in Scarsdale. Gallantly, Frank carried her over the threshold. When she emerged thirty years later carrying a book of poetry, her hair had turned gray.” What a stunning précis! With a stroke, Mr. Cowley lays bare the aspirations and commitments and values of an entire generation. Just as swiftly, he sketches in the graphic reminder that things are seldom what they seem, even in the person of a calm, reliable, gray-haired lady of a certain age. Morna stands at that same threshold twice, and what Mr. Cowley does for her is to reverse completely the presumed order of life’s expectations. In disorienting her assumptions, he places many of the same responsibilities on the reader. He requires involvement. The same moral imperatives that impel people to sustain loyalty in cherished friendships come into play in our reactions to these characters. We are denied the easy outs of flashy emotion or magisterial responses to cataclysmic events. If many of Morna’s and Denny’s decisions come about by default, so do many of our own. The writer displays a mature courage of his own when he refuses to counterfeit operatic tragedy, where tragedy on the human scale quickens character and produces agony just as efficiently. The Chrysanthemum Garden offers a great deal of wisdom and beauty, for its slender size and economy of language. The haunting mood pervades, but the ultimate effect is to communicate optimism. The carefully observed moments bespeak eternities. Like the judiciously employed metaphor, the lives of these people are imbued with a pungent sometimes spiky tenderness, and a beauty that lingers beyond all expectation. If The Chrysanthemum Garden is just another repeated human story, Joseph Cowley has repeated it with memorable delicacy, insight, and wisdom. From a 60-year-old first novelist, that’s no small accomplishment.

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Moby Dick

This is a quotation from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James with which I very much agree. Herman Melville has written some great fiction (among them Billy Budd and some of his short stories), but Moby Dick is a boring attempt to overachieve that not only doesn't make it, which is bad enough, but which is excruciatingly boring, and that's a sin.

"...there was a period of my early life which I did actually occupy with getting through Moby-Dick. Perhaps spoiled in childhood by the narrative flow of Captains Courageous, I found Melville's ocean clung like tar. I wish I could believe that it was a masterpiece I wasn't ready fo. Whoever said 'Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds' was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them. It's not so much that I find his language contortedly and wilfully archaic: more that I find it makes a meal of itself, as if foretelling a modern critical age in which it is fated to be more taught than enjoyed."

BOOKS

Books are in a sad way these days. It's especially sad to think that this major way of communicating with other minds has dwindled to a point where it does not have the significance it hadwhen we were young (and just think how important the printed word was in the 19th century).

Books on the mid-list, for the intelligent and the literary have really taken a beating. However, we can get our books out through self-publishing, and due to the internet and digitalization they will be there forever so that those who want tofind them can find them.

Saul Bellow said many decades ago that in the future those who read literature will be a small group like those who read Latin, and maybe form clubs to discuss books. But it has reallyalways been that way, with the best-sellers supporting the mid-list,and the mid-list paying off over time.

The agglomeration of the book industry has meant that short-term pay-offs have replaced the investment in good books for the future of the company. And while serious book readers have always been a very small percentage of the population, the debasement of what is published is what is thesaddest. The sharing of great minds cannot take place on TV, not evenin discussion programs; unless viewed as history.

People who write will always write, because that is what we do. We write. No matter what. But at least the delusion so many have that money can be made writing serious fiction will fade, as it should, and we will havefewer books by the less serious, at least in the literary world.

Ah,well, acceptance is the key to all my problems. Neither of us is going to be around long enough to really see the loss of the book's importance to the growth of humanity.

Books

SOME FEW ODD BOOKS I HAVE ENJOYED

BUTCHER'S CROSSING by John Williams. Williams only published three novels in his life-time. But this is one, dealing with the last days of commerical buffalo hunting, that you will not be able to forget.

THE DYNAMICS OF FAITH by Paul Tillich has been another seminal book for me. In it Tillich explains the difference between faith and belief. Faith is something we have that is largely undefinable, though we do attempt it, while belief involves statements that are arguable. We go to war over beliefs, but not over faith (this, of course, is my own addendum). But read the book: a truly intellectual approach to the subject, which you rarely get from "believers."

THE TRUE BELIEVER by Eric Hoffer. What a wonderful little book. It's about the fanatic. Hoffer was a stevedore, I understand, who published this one book when he was in his sixties. But I would guess he had made notes on the subject for years, and finally, after much reflection, finally published them.

VALUES IN A UNIVERSE OF CHANCE: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Edited by Philip P. Wiener and published by DoubledayAnchor in 1958 is an important book for me in as much as the philosophical values and beliefs it contains are pretty much those I also have come to after much reading of philosophy.

The first 50 pages of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes, the part that takes place on the island before the kids leave withs the pirates.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole. Such a marvelous sense of humor. Too bad that, turned down by 8 publishers, he committed suicide. His mother, who is marvelously caricatured in the novel, persisted and got it published after his death.

CARDS OF IDENTITY by Nigel Dennis. Wonderful spoof on Communism and the Church of England in the 50s. Probably out of date now.

THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes. Such a seminal book for me! I always wondered why history only began about 4000 BC; this book answers the question -- at least to my satisfaction.