Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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A Trailer for “Brookhaven”

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I was at the grocery store, doing the weekly shopping, when my phone buzzed with a notification. TS Poetry Press, the publisher of my historical novel “Brookhaven,” had produced a trailer for the book. And what a trailer! It succinctly summarizes the story line, and it communicates the “feel” I intended for the story. There I was, in the produce aisle, looking over bags of cherries, when I viewed a video summary of my book. I was so moved I should have been by the onions to give myself an excuse.

“Brookhaven” and the Battle of Shiloh

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For a very long time, no one in my father’s family – father, aunts, uncles, grandmother, or cousins – knew why the family Bible contained a death notice. The name was Jarvis Seale; the only thing the listing had was the date of his death. Who was this person? Why was he considered so important that my great-grandfather, who’d penned every entry in the records, had included him. My father guessed Jarvis might have been a distant cousin, or a close friend.

It was only in the years I’d been doing reading and research for my historical novel Brookhaven that I discovered the answer, and then it was simply by happenstance. The key was the date of his death.

I was reading about the two-day Battle of Shiloh, and something about the dates – April 6 and April 7 of 1862 – reminded me of something. The dates were familiar, but in some other context. Where else had I seen those dates? At some point, I made the connection. It was the family Bible, and the mention of the mystery man. His death was listed as April 6, 1862. 

I turned to Family Search. I pulled up my great-grandfather’s listing and checked his sisters. And there he was – the husband of an older sister, Martha. The had had five children – a boy and four girls. Family mystery solved. 

Last week, specifically April 6 and April 7, marked the 164th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh. Up to that point in the Civil War, the war had something almost romantic. But over the course of those two days, the reality became apparent. This wasn’t some romantic story of dashing horsemen rattling their sabers. This amounted to almost wholesale slaughter – more than 23,000 men (both sides combined) died during those two days, and many more were injured. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed. The Union has emerged victorious but had almost lost the battle on the first day. General Ulysses S. Grant was vilified in the northern press. The Union had won, but the cost was horrific.

Shiloh National Military Park one of the Confederate mass graves.

The Confederate dead – more than 10,000 – were heaped into nine mass graves. The Union dead were given individual graves. One of those mass graves contained the body of Jarvis Seale. As I was writing Brookhaven, it wasn’t difficult to image the grief of Jarvis’s widow and five children. Not only had they lost a husband and a father, they would also never know which mass grave contained his body. One daughter later married and moved to northern Texas. In the local cemetery, she had a memorial stone erected in her father’s memory. It’s why Find-A Grave identifies the cemetery as his burial site, but it’s only a memorial, not a grave.

The Battle of Shiloh eventually played a role in the birth of Decoration Day, which eventually was named Memorial Day. in 1866, women from the former Confederacy decorated the mass graves at Shiloh with floral tributes to the dead. Unexpectedly, they also decorated the graves of the Union dead. Northern women took notice and soon duplicated the practice at the sites of battles in northern states. Foes in life had joined together in death.

Related: 

A flood of memories: How rising water imperiled Shiloh wounded – John Banks’ Civil War Blog. 

“White Week and Other Stories” by Wojciech Chmielewski

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The Polish writer Wojciech Chmielewski isn’t exactly a household name in America, and for a very good reason. Up to now, none of his writing has been published in English. Wiseblood Books has changed that with the publication of White Week and Other Stories, translated by Katarzyna Bylow. 

Chmielewski is best known in Poland for his short stories, which have won awards in his home country. But he’s also an essayist, literary critic, and playwright for Polich Radio Theatre. This collection of stories, many previously published in Polish literary journals and anthologies. Re largely about Warsaw, a Warsaw that is there and the city that used to be. (Much of the city was destroyed during World War II and then rebuilt under communist rule.)

The stories are, in a word, haunting. The opening story is about the area near Grzybowski Square, with its church on one side and construction underway nearby. We see scenes of a marketplace, a boy selling strawberries (“Polish strawberries…all freesh”), an alleyway full of peonies, a group of drunken men arguing, a young woman waiting for someone, and the empty park with its playground. The story contains no named characters or dialogue; the character is the urban landscape itself. Slowly the reader comes to understand that this area was once part of the Warsaw Ghetto, which tens of thousands of Jews were confined before deportation to Auschwitz.

And so the stories go. Chmielewski will return to this theme of the Warsaw Ghetto, but along the way we’ll experience a religious procession (with a man dreaming about snakes), a woman working on her new novel (with some of the characters becoming parts of other stories), a man with an unfaithful wife who finds solace in eating dog food, a village that exists beneath the sand of a beach area, a man who pays a visit and seems to enjoy reading in a madhouse, conversations in a restaurant during a rainstorm, a saint awake in the dark, a young man in love with a girl whose face experiences allergic reactions, the title story about remembering a religious confirmation celebration, and others.

Like that opening story of the visible landscape not seeming to remember the history, all of the stories have that sense of “missing the context.” We’re there, but we don’t understand. We undertake our daily life, but we’re ignorant of what these streets and buildings have seen, what’s come before us, what has shaped this landscape just as it’s shaping us. 

Yes, haunting is the operative word for these stories.

Top photograph: A scene of Old Town Warsaw by Victor Malyushev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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. 

“Your Accent! You Can’t Be from New Orleans!”

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When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on.

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Footsteps at St. Bride’s

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During a recent trip to England, we took advantage of our trip coinciding with London Open House, two successive weekends where citizens and tourists alike can view many buildings usually closed to the public, or take walking tours, or get behind the scenes views of many places that are open to the public. 

One of the places we visited was St. Bride’s Church on Fleet Street, known as “the journalists’ church.” Fleet Street as the home to Britain’s big newspapers is a memory; the newspapers and the journalists moved to other parts of the city decades ago. But St. Bride’s remains, and it’s still known as the place where journalists worshipped. 

A church has stood on this spot since the late Roman / early Briton period. It gets its name from St. Bride, or Bridget, a nun who lived in the late fifth century but who may never have visited London or England.  Several church buildings have been erected on the site. The old medieval church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and then rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren. It was destroyed again, on December 29, 1940, during an incendiary raid by German bombers. But it was rebuilt as close to the Wren building as possible and reopened in the late 1950s.

It’s a beautiful church. We were able to descend through 2,000 years of history to see the crypt, with its old Roman wall, the nameplates found on old coffins, and two chapels, including a small medieval chapel whitewashed and made into an intimate worship space. 

I had some to time to sit in that chapel, and I did. And it was there that I thought I could hear footsteps above and around me. 

Footsteps at St. Bride’s

I hear footsteps here, overhead
and around, echoes of Celts.
and around. echoes of Celts
and Romans, Britons and
Saxons, Vikings intent on loot
and pillage. And the builders
and architects, bricklayers
and monks, whispering of
the Irish saint inspiring it
all. Footsteps become
louder, years passing,
building and tearing down,
rebuilding and reconstructing,
and footsteps running,
accompanied by screams
and the roar of fire. And more
rebuilding, with the Architect
himself stacking the spire
like tiers of wedding cake,
standing in splendor over
the newspapers of growth
and empire so pervasive they
defined generations. I hear
more footsteps, first those
running from the bombs and
then those running to fight
the fire, but above me is ruins.
Yet new architects and
new builders return, workmen,
intent on recreating what
was once there. Newspapers
move on, but the footsteps
remain. They never go away.