Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Literary Life

About Those 10 Books

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There was a thing last week, I think somewhere on Substack, about “10 books that changed my life.” I tried to find the specific article again, but Google produced an abundance of listings about 10 books, 37 books, 100 books, 20 books, 23 books, 77 books, 25 books, 40 books, well, you get the picture.

I asked myself the question. Could I identify 10 books that had changed my life?

My answer was no, I couldn’t, at least, not in the sense of some transformational change from what I was before reading the book and what I was after reading the book. But I could identify 10 that had influenced me, in some cases profoundly.

I first read four of the books in high school: Great Expectations and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and Don Quixote by Cervantes. The two by Dickens were both class assignments (9th and 12thgrades, respectively). I’d read Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 11th grade American literature, and I bought Four Quartets to read on my own (I even remember where I bought it — the long-gone Dolphin Book Shop at Lakeside Shopping Center in suburban New Orleans). 

Don Quixote was also a class assignment, but we had the option of reading the abridged or unabridged version. Two of 30 in our all-boy English class decided to bite the bullet and read the unabridged version – me and Jesse Stephenson. Our teacher said it was the kind of book you should read three times in your life – when you were young, middle-aged, and old. I read it was I was 17; I read it again when I was 35, and I discovered it was not the book I remembered it to be. I’ll have to wait a few years to read it when I get old. 

Version 1.0.0

I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings four times, and each time I’ve been blown away by the story. My first reading was in high school – the pirated Ballantine editions. After college, I read the official family-approved versions. Some 25 years later, I read the whole saga again, in anticipation of the Peter Jackson movies. And then, a few years ago, I reread the entire series.

The 1970s were the period that shaped my reading the rest of my life. I read the crime novels Dashiell Hammett, like The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, and loved his writing style. A friend at work introduced me to Flannery O’Connor, and I read everything she wrote. In high school in the 1960s, I read the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, and Cancer Ward, and I was more than ready for the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 (ordered from Cokesbury Bookstore, downtown Houston, Texas).  Reading John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was like going back to my roots; no one before or since captured the New Orleans accent as precisely as he did. October Light, a novel by John Gardner, remains one of my favorite works of fiction.

I’d previously read The Screwtape Letters and Surprised by Joy, but what really opened my mind to C.S. Lewis was They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, published in 1980 and edited by Water Hooper. The letters formed their own kind of biography, from the time the two were boyhood friends to near Lewis’s death in 1963.

In 1986, in the middle of my master’s program at Washington University, I took a seminar in the Latin American novel. The assigned readings for me were one wow moment after another. I was so blown away by Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World that I did my seminar project on his Conversation in the Cathedral, not the easiest work to read, and discovered the intricate underlying structure. A later course in the history of the early Christian church found me reading Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown, which is still one of the best, if not the best, biographies I’ve ever read.

Two recent influential books I’ve read fundamentally changed my understanding of the Civil War. I read them as research for a historical novel project (more on that later), but together they stripped away any notion of romance about the conflict. Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil Wars Final Campaign in North Carolina (2022) by Ernest Dollar describes the barbarism of the last spasm of the war, one in which neither side covered itself in glory. Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (2023) by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant estimates that about 10 percent of the soldiers on both sides were under the age of 15.

That’s my list of influential books. As important as they’ve been to me, there’s nothing like writing a book that will change your life. That’s a story for another day.

The Poetry of the Best Job You Ever Had

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It started with a phone call from a friend. “Did you see the job ad in the paper?” he said.

“What job ad?” I said.

“The city school district is looking for a communications director. You’d be perfect.”

“Do you hate me or something?” I said.

The city school district was indeed looking for a communications director. The district was in organizational chaos. A reform school board had brought in a management consultant firm from New York to reorganize the district. Schools had been closed. Central office staff had been laid off – some 800 people. Management of cafeterias, school buses, and other services was being outsourced. The management firm was doing what had to be done, but the district was so strangled by its own politics and so intertwined with city politics that it was impossible to try to make the changes from within. 

To give some scope to the problem: the district was staffed and resourced for 100,000 students. Officially, something slightly less than 40,000 attended. The real number was closer to 30,000. The day the management firm arrived, it was learned that the district was so in spending deficit that bankruptcy might be required.

And this was the organization I would be perfect for? Not to mention the ongoing issues, problems, and violence associated with virtually all urban school districts?

I ended up applying for the job. I ended up getting the job. It was the best job I’d ever had. It was also the worst. I was living the opening of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was performance poetry. It was improv poetry. It was epic and it was free verse. Everyone knew exactly how communications had to be run. 

I received daily phone calls from the mayor’s office, giving me instructions on what I was supposed to do each day. I ignored them, every single time. 

Poetry at Work

I learned about police radios and how the news media used them to track district news, like when a school board member threw a pitcher of water on a district official because she had seen The Wizard of Oz and knew that water melted witches. 

School board members leaked each other’s emails. 

My budget – which the previous year had been $1 million with a staff of 12 – had been cut to $20,000 and a staff of 1/2, and the budget had already been spent before I arrived. I had to invent communications out of whole cloth, with no money. 

There was never a work day without multiple crises. The work followed me home at night and on weekends – I once did a television interview on a Saturday outside the car dealership where my car was being serviced. I did another one in my family room. I did interviews at schools, meetings, on sidewalks, at lunches, in hallways. I was on television so much that a crazy anomaly developed: an aging, white male Baby Boomer became the public face of an urban school district. 

I was there almost nine months, the most tumultuous nine months of the district’s history, my career, and even my own life. I left because I could sense I was burning out; no one could handle communications in constant chaos. 

I did get to see and experience the best and worst of human behavior – and sometimes from the same people. I was personally tested for what I could handle, and I knew I had not been found wanting. I loved and hated that job, and I would never do it again. But I was thankful that I’d done it. 

From Poetry at Work:

First day on the job 

It’s only 9 a.m.
Channel 5 is waiting, cameras
filming in expectation
of a statement, any statement,
it doesn’t matter what it says;
school board members 
are leaking emails on each other,
the teacher on the phone 
is correcting my pronunciation;
the newspaper uses police radios
to follow the school district news
while the consultant is calling
about “a better brand for the schools”;
the parents protest is scheduled
for 5:30; the mayor’s office
is sending PR instructions
and I’m told the teachers have 
a sick-out today because they
can’t bank sick days anymore
and it’s only 9 a.m. and 
my first day on the job. I’m
going to love this place.

Top photograph by Mesh via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Speechwriting

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The most solitary job in corporate America is not the position of CEO. It’s the position of the CEO’s speechwriter. It can be the loneliest job as well.

I spent about two thirds of my career in speechwriting. Forty years ago, no one aspired to be a corporate speechwriter. You would find people who wanted to be presidential or political speechwriters, but most people who ended up in corporate speechwriting did so by accident. In my own case, I was 25 years old and assigned to a huge issue threatening to disrupt the company. The executive in charge of marketing needed a speech on the topic. The regular speechwriters are unavailable, so I was asked to do it. My strength was, in this case, knowing the subject matter. I had written speeches for myself; I had taken a course in American speeches in college. But I hadn’t written for someone else. 

The speech went well. After the speech, the executive said, “I thought the audience was going to be jumping up and down on the tables. They told me that no one had explained how an issue in Washington, D.C. affected them and their businesses before, at least in language that made sense.” From that point on, he wanted no one else to write his speeches. I was moved to the corporate speechwriting group. 

Later, I was hired by another company to do general PR work, not speeches. But the VP for my division was unexpectedly put on the speaking circuit by the CEO. No one else in our group had experience in speechwriting. My career was becoming known as “speechwriter by accident;” it wasn’t long before I was moved to the corporate speechwriting group. The same circumstances repeated themselves for my next two jobs, until I was put in charge of corporate speechwriting.

Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

Most communications people don’t like speechwriting, and it’s no surprise. Someone else always gets the credit for your work, unless it goes badly; then it’s your fault. You often find yourself dealing with temperamental CEOs and occasionally being yelled at. The hard work of writing a speech never happens in teams. What happens in teams is various vested interests wanting control or wanting to insert a favored program or idea. You don’t win popularity contests by refusing to cite someone’s pet project. It takes a long time, but eventually, if you’re good at what you do, people come to respect and rely on your judgment. Usually.

A speech is unlike any other kind of communication. It’s created on paper or on a screen, to be read or referred to, for people to hear it and understand it. You write for the eye to be read by the voice to be heard by the ear. It’s tricky.

I attended a number of speechwriting seminars and workshops, but nothing helped me like reading and reciting poetry. The best speeches have a quality of poetry about them – the rhythm, the cadence, the pace, the ideas coming at you in orderly but unusual ways. I relied heavily on three modernist poets – T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. They were my guides and mentors. When I had trouble with writing, I turned to Four Quartets or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

I started writing key sections of speeches – the critical emotional parts – by hand, and often in free verse form. The best-known speech I ever wrote was first written almost entirely in free verse form. It helped make the executive famous and turned an industry on its head. Seven years after it was first given, four years after the executive had retired, requests for copies of the speech were still being received by the company. That’s unheard of in most speechwriting circles, including political; it remains unique in corporate circles.

And it was poetry that infused that work.

From Poetry at Work: “Speechwriting is a solitary profession, devoted largely to reading, writing, search, and study. It may be the closest thing we have today to the monastic life outside the monastery, except that at critical stages, the whole world seems to step in. Speechwriting requires ongoing interaction with executives, content experts, librarians, academics, PR people, attorneys, outside consultants, and even other speechwriters. To do it well, the speechwriter must manage all of those people and not let them get in the way of what the executive has to say.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Alem Omerovic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Heart of Darkness: All This Stuff Happens in the Middle

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Someone forgot to tell Joseph Conrad. 

When you write fiction, you’re supposed follow the rule of thirds. The first third is the introduction of the characters and the development of the conflict. The second third is the development of the narrative, providing a deeper understanding of the characters and conflict. And the last third is the heightened pace of action leading to the climax and resolution of the conflict.

In Heart of Darkness,, after the first third of the short novel, Conrad threw the rule book out the window. All this stuff happens in the second third, offering no respite for the reader.

Marlow has located his boat and fixed it, and he’s now sailing upstream. On board are pilgrims. Also on board are some interesting members of the crew. They’re cannibals. He thinks they’re exercising great restraint or perhaps they’re just not hungry. 

At one stop, he finds a ruined reed hut. Inside is a book, An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship, written by a master in the British Navy. The book is filled with marginal notes. To Marlow, the notes look like code. He takes the book with him.

He continues to learn more about Mister Kurtz, the object of his journey.

There’s an attack on the boat from shore. A key crew member is killed. It’s looking grim for all concerned when the pilgrims (the pilgrims!) open fire on the jungle, scattering the attackers. Amid all the chaos, Marlow becomes seriously worried that, if the local population has started attacking, then Kurtz must be dead. 

He reads a report written by Kurtz for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, finding the writing to be eloquent. He sees a small note written by Kurtz at the end: “Exterminate all the brutes!” So much for eloquence.

He meets a Russian dressed like a harlequin. The book found earlier turns out to belong to the Russian, and the “code” on the margins is actually notes written in Russian. Like everything else around him, the book and the notes contribute to the sense of unreality (Marlow uses the word “absurdity”).

Expecting at least some calm, the reader, like Marlow himself, is instead whipsawed at every turn of the river. The action does not stop, especially for the rules of writing fiction. There’s no nice, slow development of the narrative here; this is more like Raymond Chandler’s advice for writing: “When in doubt, have two men come in the door with guns.”

As he ponders Kurtz and the man’s writing, Marlow makes one of the most profound statements in Chapter 2 and in the entire book. Learning about Kurtz’s diverse family background, Marlow says, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

And there it is: Marlow’s statement about Kurtz, about Europe, and about Africa, all wrapped up in one concise sentence. He hasn’t even found or met Kurtz yet, but he already knows the meaning of Kurtz’s life.  Heart of Darkness isn’t a story about Africa; it is a story about European behavior in Africa.

Perhaps Chapter 3 will allow us to catch our breath.

This month at Literary Life on Facebook, we’re studying Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in an edition that includes an extensive study guide by Karen Swallow Prior. 

Top photograph by Peter Oswald via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Heart of Darkness: “One of the Dark Places of the Earth”

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Five of you – friends, business colleagues, and the boss – are meandering your way down a river. It’s an early evening get-together, and you’re enjoying the company and the beverages. The sun has just set. It’s that early moment of dusk when the world becomes shades of gray. You’re feeling a bit mellow; it’s a bit of an escape from work and life in the city you just left behind.

Suddenly, you hear this: “And this also has been one the dark places of the earth.” No one responds, except perhaps for a raised eyebrow or a slight roll of the eyes. The one who said it is known for such things. He’s also known for telling long stories, and you suspect you’re in for one. 

You’re right; you are. It starts with a brief discussion of how the area you’re sailing through was first settled hundreds of years before, and what those first settlers – soldiers – experienced so far from home, right there on the edge of civilization. From that perspective, the area was a dark place. But from the perspective of the story you are about to hear, the real point of that sudden, startling, original comment, you will find yourself confronting the idea that it is still a dark place. This home you know so well, with its skyscrapers, museums, opera houses, art galleries, find neighborhoods, paved roads, medical facilities, and so much more is actually a dark place? 

And because you’re going to tell me a story about Africa? What?

I had the misfortune (or good fortune) of not reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad in high school or college. Instead, we read Lord Jim by the same author. The two books, originally published a year apart (1899 and 1900, respectively), have similar themes. But Lord Jim seems somewhat easier to read, and its narrative concerns the act of a disabled passenger ship by its crew. Heart of Darkness centers on the search for a man in the jungles of the Congo, Mister Kurtz, but it takes a while for the reader to figure that out, and a bit longer to learn that it’s about something else entirely. 

Joseph Conrad

Embedded in that first bit of dialogue, “one of the dark places of the earth,” is the theme of Heart of Darkness. As we read on, that statement seems to haunt the narrative. The narrator, a sea captain named Marlow, will describe how he had the desire to pursue such a career, how he gained the help of relatives, how he went to city that always reminded him of “whited sepulchers” (another kind of darkness), and how he gained a commission to captain a steamer on the Congo River, in that continent both stereotypically and forever known as “darkest Africa.” 

Arriving at his destination in the “dark continent,” Marlow discovers he will have to travel through the Congo to reach his boat. And he is struck of the sharp contrasts between the well-dressed Europeans and the Congolese people who are native to the region. Light, tailored clothes and rough, minimal clothes. Light skin and dark skin. Civilization and its seeming lack. 

The contrasts in Heart of Darkness are often so marked that the reader begins to understand something: Conrad might be suggesting that the contrasts may actually not exist. And if they don’t exist, the idea of darkness surely does, so where does it come from? And you go back to the first dialogue, “And this has also been one of the dark places of the earth.” Don’t forget the “has been” here; Marlow doesn’t say “was” but “has been,” implying that it still is. That the story of a jungle river journey is being told in the context of a leisurely sailing trip near London underscores that the darkness isn’t just in Africa.

And this is what Marlow is going to discover, as he begins his journey to find his boat and to find Mister Kurtz, the man whose name is on everyone’s lips, the European agent who seems to be the source of all wisdom and knowledge in this region of darkness. Marlow is going to learn that the darkness does not come from a place, a condition, or a situation, but that it resides in the human heart.

This month at Literary Life on Facebook, we’re studying Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in an edition that includes an extensive study guide by Karen Swallow Prior. This post is a discussion of Part 1 of the short novel.

We All Know a Boo Radley

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I was all of 21, in my first job after college graduation. I’d been hired as a copy editor on the news desk of the Beaumont (Tex.) Enterprise. Production at the Enterprise was just becoming automated, at least in what we called the “backshop.” Reporters still used typewriters, typing up their copy, handing it to editors (including new ones like me) and hoping we didn’t slaughter their peerless prose when we edited.

Most reporters, like most writers, required editing. I quickly learned who the better reporters were – the ones whose copy didn’t need much editing. Some needed a lot. One rarely if ever needed any – and he was the newspaper’s staff mystery.

I’ll call him Joe. He was in his 50s, and he covered local government. When Joe turned in his stories, he would mumble, almost as if apologizing. I don’t think anyone understood the mumbles. The mystery was how he did his job – he was never seen at a city council or other government meeting, and yet his stories reported exactly what went on. No one knew how Joe did it. Even more mysteriously, no one knew where he lived. He received his mail at the newspaper, and that was his legal address. One staffer followed him in his car one night, and all Joe did was drive around Beaumont for more than an hour until his lost the tail. 

Joe was the stuff of legends at the newspaper. People had all kinds of stories about him, some of which might have been true. New staffers right out of college were especially gullible about the stories. Slightly feared and always a mystery, he was like the Boo Radley of the Beaumont Enterprise.

Bood Radley and Scout in the 1962 movie version of “To Kill a Mockingbird”

In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Boo Radley is the character that stays mostly in the background but on whom a good portion of the story centers. He’s the bogeyman for the children of the town of Maycomb. He’s never seen, but the children know he’s there, in the Radley home. He’s the stuff of Maycomb legends, and the children try to think of all kinds of ways to lure him outside. The Radley house is the one you run past, or the one you’re dared by your friends to knock on the door.

Jem and Scout Finch live three houses down from the Radley residence, and Boo occupies the children’s minds. They try to draw him out. They play games, enacting stories about the Radley family. Then they begin to notice small items left in a tree, almost like breadcrumbs. The items could be gifts, or clues, or even invitations. But slowly the children’s understanding of Boo begins to change. 

Discovering who Boo is will ultimately save the Finch children’s lives. While the adults are dealing with all of the implications of the Tom Robinson trial, itself rocking long-held racial prejudices, the children are finding out about the real Boo. When the two narrative streams converge, in the wooded way home on Halloween night, it is Boo who intervenes to save the children from a murderous Robert Ewell. 

I was a young teen when I first saw the movie, but I still vividly remember the scene of Jem in bed with his broken arm, Scout sitting nearby, and behind the bedroom door is Boo (played by a young Robert Duvall), saying nothing, still watching over the children. Scout has a moment of utter realization when she recognizes who the man must be. “Hey, Boo,” she says. Atticus Finch tells his children to “meet Arthur Radley.” And he tells Boo that he owes him the lives of his children. 

Boo Radley is a legend, a legend comprised of mostly fearful or fanciful stories. Those who might know the truth won’t trouble themselves to tell it. The children retell and exaggerate the stories. But even after Boo emerges from the shadows as a real character, there is still much the children (and the readers) don’t know. As Matt Rawle points out in The Faith of a Mockingbird, “Harper Lee never lets the readers in on Boo’s true story, so we are left to make our own conclusions and opinions about Boo’s reclusive behavior.” 

You can make up your own mind about what, or who, Boo might represent, but he can be a God-like figure, the God we all hear stories and legends about, some awfully scary. We can’t say that we see him much, but he leaves little breadcrumbs for us to find. And when times are bad, he’s the mysterious figure carrying us through the woods, like Boo carried the injured Jem. And when the scales on our eyes fall off, and we finally recognize him and see him, suddenly we, too, say “Hey, Boo.”

I left the Enterprise before ever finding out if anyone solved the mystery of Joe. Perhaps it was sufficient that I learned that he was a good reporter and a good writer, even if he was never seen at events he wrote about. I can still see him shuffling into the newsroom, nodding at us at the copy desk, and finding his way to his desk and typewriter, typing yet another completely accurate story about what happened at the city council meeting. 

We all know a Boo Radley. 

Top photograph by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen via Unsplash. Used with permission.