Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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Meeting the Author of “Matisse at War”

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On Nov. 4, I had just finished reading Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France by Christopher Gorham when I received an email from the St. Louis Art Museum. In partnership with the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival, the art museum would be hosting a lecture by Gorham on Thursday, Nov. 6. 

I loved the book. When news of its publication first happened, I pre-ordered the book. I suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that a book about art, World War II, Nazis, Vichy France, and Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Last year, we had seen an exhibition at the art museum on Matisse and the Sea, and many of the paintings would have been completed in the period leading up to the war.

I didn’t need convincing. I bought my ticket for the lecture.

Christopher C. Gorham

I arrived at the art museum early, to walk through Sculpture Hall to get a quick view of the five massive paintings featured in the new Anselm Kiefer exhibition on Becoming the Sea. (Obviously, the art museum, like the rest of us. is fascinated by the sea.) I was finally making my way down the hall’s big stairs when I realized that Christopher Gorham was walking right in front of me, accompanied by an art museum staffer. No, I didn’t interrupt them to introduce myself. 

I had an excellent seat in the theater, equivalent to orchestra center at the symphony or a play. The audience had about 150 people. After introductory remarks by representatives of the art museum and the Jewish Book Festival, Gorham spoke for about 45 minutes.

For 45 minutes, he told the story in the book and of the book. If you hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t realize that he was giving an oral summary of the entire book, and his talk was just as fascinating as the book itself. He added a few details, like elaborating on the Degenerate Art Show organized by the Nazis which toured Germany in 1937 and 1938, and which included a few of Matisse’s paintings. There was much about Matisse’s art that the Germans and the Vichy French hated.

Allied invasion of Nice and Provence, 1944

Gorham also tracked several of Matisse’s famous scissor “cut-outs” with both events in his personal life and developments in the war. His famous “The Wolf” (or “Le Loup”) was completed about the time his ex-wife Amelie and his daughter Marguerite were arrested by the Gestapo for involvement in the Resistance. He also described the “second D-Day” in France, when the Allies bombed and invaded Nice and Provence. Increasing danger from the war prompted Matisse to move to a country house about 10 miles from Nice. Nice itself was bombed, with 500 people dying in the raid.

He pointed out the just passed Monday, Nov. 3, was the 71st anniversary of Matisse’s death.

After the lecture and a question-and-answer period, Gorham signed copies of the book just outside the main gift shop next door to the theater. I’d brought my copy with me but didn’t intend to get his autograph. As I was leaving, the signing was just getting underway, and only one person was in line. I thought, “Well, why not?” and joined the line, which quickly filled up after me.

I told Gorham how much I’d enjoyed the book. We chatted for a minute or so, and then I mentioned I’d had no idea how important Pierre Matisse had been to the art scene in New York City until I read the book.

Pierre Matisse, about 1942

“Pierre essentially started modern art in New York,” Gorham said. “And much of it had to do with the artists who’d fled Europe for safety in the United States. Otherwise, they would have been killed outright or sent to a death camp. Instead, they created an art movement in America, and Pierre Matisse was at the center of it.”

Pierre did more than simply organize exhibitions of these artists’ works. He found apartments for them, often paying their rent. He paid them stipends so they could feed themselves and their families and still paint. He helped them establish their names and reputations. 

Matisse’s daughter Marguerite put herself in personal danger. She carried coded messages, including one to Brittany in the spring of 1944 that provide information to the Resistance about the coming D-Day invasion. That was when she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned, tortured, and then deported by train to a camp in Germany. Miraculously, she survived the war.

Gorham’s lecture was every bit as fascinating as the book. I loved the book (my review posted today at Faith, Fiction, Friends), and I’m glad I made time to attend the lecture. The author expanded my understanding of both the book and its subject. And I learned a little about the history of modern art in America. 

Forgetting All the Illustrations I Studied for a Non-Illustrated Book

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My historical novel Brookhaven has no illustrations. I spent an estimated third of my research time hunting for them.

The novel is set in two different time periods – the Civil War and immediately after, and then 50 years later, in 1915. From the beginning of the first draft, I quickly learned that I had to see both periods. I had to see what people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, what their homes were like, what their streets and communities were like, and more. 

From early on, I had to spend far more time looking than reading, and vastly more time looking than writing. Thos 50 years were some of the momentous in American history – rapid industrialization during the war and after, wagons and carriages giving way to automobiles, the advent of flight, the rapid spread of newspapers supported by wire services like Associated Press, rapid changes in the position of women in society, and mechanized agriculture becoming the rule rather than the exception.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.

Illustration: Men’s golfing fashions in 1915.

“A Słowy Dying Cause” by Elizabeth George

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It helped to have heard Elizabeth George speak in early October at the St. Louis County Library. She was doing a promotional tour for her new novel, and among many other things, she noted that Inspector Thomas Lynley would show up late in the story.

And Inspector Lynley does indeed show up rather late for story billed as “A Lynley Novel.” A Slowly Dying Cause, the twenty-first in the Inspector Lynley series, doesn’t even mention him until about page 120, and he and his detective sergeant, Barbara Havers, don’t really start assuming a significant role until about the middle of the book. 

The novel is 640 pages. The reader is well past the halfway point before Lynley learns there’s even a murder. Havers’ mother has died, and Lynley drags his DS with him when he has to go to Cornwall to attend to a leaking roof at the family estate. Lynley is an earl, even if he work for the Mtropolitan Police in London. He steps into the investigation almost accidentally, but once he’s there, no one doubts who’s really in charge.

It’s the local police who investigate the murder of a tin and pewter workshop named Michael Lobb. Potential suspects abound – the dead man’s ex-wife, whom he divorced to marry a woman abrely older than his own children; his children, both of whom need money; his brother, who owns 40 percent of the business and property it sits on; the young wife herself; the hired help, a man and his adult son; the hired man’s two daughters (one of whom is a former lover of Lynley in London); and the wife’s brother, who happened to be visiting from South Africa and opposed his sister’s marriage from the start.

Elizabeth George

The story is not a straight narrative. It includes the account of the murder investigation, interspersed by the story told by the dead man himself. Add to that the story of Lynley’s estate and its needed repairs. George writes mystery novels, yes, but she also writes novels that just happen to have a mystery as one of the story lines. 

I was 200 pages from the end when I realized exactly who the murderer would turn out to be, and more to the point, what the murderer’s motive was. Yet George is nothing if not an enthralling, compelling author; even when I knew (or guessed, correctly, as it turned out), I kept reading to see how it would all tie together. And George pulls it off. A Slowly Dying Cause is more of a novel than a mystery novel.

In addition to the Lynley novels, George writes a young adult series, set on the island in Washington State where she lives. She’s received numerous awards and recognitions for the Lynley novels, which have been adapted for television not once but twice, with the new Lynley series having started this year. 

Related:

Just One Evil Act by Elizabeth George.

An Evening with Elizabeth George.

Top photograph: Cornwall coast with tin mining tower by Danilo D’Agostino via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” by Wendell Berry

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Andy Catlett, whom we first met as a boy in an earlier novel by Wendell Berry, is now an old man. As old men are wont to do, he’s looking backward – at his life, his parents’ lives, and even earlier. And what he sees, far more clearly than he would have seen in his youth, is what shaped four generations of Catletts, including himself and his own children.

It is a story, a story that happened to his grandfather, Marce Catlett, a story that happened in less than 24 hours but lasted more than a century. And it shows every sign of continuing to last. 

Marce Catlett and his good friend and neighbor Jim Stedman travel together by horse and train to Louisville. Their tobacco harvests are finished for the season. Now comes the time when the crop is auctioned in Louisville. 

Marce and Jim both have an unspoken apprehension about the auction. Both know what they need to make a profit and continue to farm. And both know there is one bidder at the auction – the agent of James Buchanan Duke, who controls a near-monopoly on the U.S. tobacco business. 

When the auction ends, both Marce and Jim leave to return home. Their profit might cover the cost of their train tickets. 

In a few short words, Marce will tell his family what happened. Fear enters the home. Fortunately for the Catletts, they won’t starve; they have livestock and some diversification of crops. But tobacco is the lion’s share of the family income. 

Even then, however, that is not the story. The story is what Marce does next. He begins to make his plans for next year’s tobacco crop. 

Wendell Berry

That resilience in the face of financial disaster, what can only be called theft by monopoly, is what propels the family forward. Marce’s youngest son Wheeler will go on to become a congressman’s aide, an attorney, and the force behind the creation of the tobacco farmers’ cooperative to ensure farmers could make a decent profit. It will propel Wheeler’s son Andy to become a professional writer and then a farmer and writer. And it will influence Andy’s own children.

That’s the heart of Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Berry’s most recent novel and what feels like the last. Berry’s Port William novels are not precisely autobiographical, but they are clearly shaped by Berry’s own experiences. Marce Catlett reads like a summing up, not only of the series of novels but also of Andy Catlett’s, and Wendell Berry’s, life. The front and back inside covers suggest that as well – the front being a chart showing the relationships of the Feltner, Coulter, Beechum, Wheeler, and Catlett families, and the back being a map of Port William and its environs. 

The map is just as important as the genealogy. Together, they are two sides of the same coin – family and geography. The story that lies between them is the resilience that binds them together.

Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky. As he should.

Related:

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

Wendell Berry and the Land.

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry.

A World Lost by Wendell Berry.

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.

The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry and Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023.

Remembering by Wendell Berry.

Top photograph: Broadleaf tobacco field by Rusty Watson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

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The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

It’s a wonderful issue.

Related:

A playlist for the autumn edition, Fidelity, of Cultivating Oaks Press.

“Brookhaven” and the Pearl River Lumber Company

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A reader of Brookhaven sent n email, asking if I modeled the McClure Lumber Company in the novel on the Pearl River Lumber Company. A great-grandfather had worked there, the reader said, and she wondered.

That I had to research the Pearl River Lumber Company to respond to her should answer the question. Or, more briefly, no. 

The company was founded in 1899, building a large mill on the outskirts of Brookhaven, Mississippi. A community grew up around it and was called Pearlhaven. A rail line was built, appropriately named the Brookhaven & Pearl River Railway, and extended from Brookhaven to Monticello in the next county to the east. Coincidentally, int he novel this is roughly the road or direction that the young Sam McClure travels to reach home some months after the Civil War has ended. I even mention Monticello by name in the book. 

The lumber company was eventually acquired by the Goodyear Syndicate, and the rail line was sold to the Illinois Central in 1910. The mill was closed that same year. The rail line operated for another 18 years, finally shut down in 1928. 

In Brookhaven, from the 1850s Sam McClure’s family has been operating a grain mill, a lumber mill, and the general store across from the railroad depot in downtown Brookhaven. The grain mill, facing consolidation in the industry because of the growth of the big milling conglomerates like General Mills, was eventually closed and the property converted to racing racehorses. The lumber mill continued to operate, and the war in Europe increases demand for lumber and wood. I included a short scene about British and French representatives signing a contract with Sam, a contract which would lead to a major expansion of lumber operations. 

The Illinois Central deport in Brookhaven about 1903.

But I didn’t know anything about the Pearl River Lumber Company or the associated railroad operations. The genesis of including a lumber yard in the story came from the fact that Brookhaven is part of the Great Piney Woods of Mississippi, and natural resources like wood and lumber would come to characterize the “New South” after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South had enormous natural resources, and while agriculture would remain the major industry, it was industries like lumber that helped pulled the South out of post-war economic devastation. 

While the novel had been published, the reader’s question took me back into research. I was rather tickled to discover what little I knew actually aligned very closely with the real story. 

Top photo: Operations at the Pearl River Lumber Company.