Memoirs, by Neil Simon—This is a fascinating read by a distinguished playwriter/screenwriter, one that gets you into the fabric of the “industry” and his take on what constitutes the life well lived. So much I could say about this or that wrinkle in or observation about his personal and professional life. For one thing, it was interesting to see how he played off his experiences in creating a dramatic world, e.g., Biloxi Blues, based on his service in the military. 

One episode would seem unlikely on the face of it—the time he had to join in firing Robert De Niro because the actor wasn’t measuring up to a part. The movie was to be called, Bogart Slept Here, and De Niro wasn’t delivering the comedic touch they needed. A consummate professional, he spent a day picking out just the right earing he thought the character should wear. But he was overdoing it, adding to the impatience mounting in director Mike Nichols and the Warner Brothers executives. Simon had written the screenplay, and his wife Marsha Mason was playing opposite De Niro, but it just wasn’t clicking. So they scrapped the project, and Simon wrote an entirely new script, this time for The Goodbye Girl, starring Richard Dreyfuss opposite Marshal Mason.

Essays: First and Second Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson—In Mrs. Etta Gray’s 7th grade English class at L. M. Goza Junior High in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, we were assigned Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” with the memorable and misleading-at-best lines, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines . . . To be great is to be misunderstood.” Whatever that may mean, today’s problem is the reign of illogical, blithely inconsistent folks who are perfectly understood to be dolts and blackguards who’ll say most anything to gain or hold on to power. Still, I found Emerson’s writing engaging. Along with fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, he espoused a “free thinking nature boy” sort of life, a literally damnable path for your soul to take, but, again, an interesting read. And with an occasional insight. (As they say, “A blind hog can find an acorn now and then.”)

When I flipped through this volume, I came across an essay entitled, “Nominalist and Realist,” and thought immediately of something I’d just read in Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. He argued that the decline of realism (which “holds that the essence of a thing is built into its existence by God, and its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order”) and the ascent of nominalism (wherein we presume to establish meaning by our human designations) have been disastrous. I thought immediately of the metaphysical dispute between realists and nominalists over the status of numbers and mathematical formulae. Are they entities and truths, co-eternal with God, such that he couldn’t make 2+2=5? Or are they elements of a formal system we invent, on the order of deciding definitions, such as ‘bachelor’= ‘unmarried man’? But Dreher wasn’t getting into that ontological thicket. He was just talking about whether, as Plato put held, the essences of justice and knowledge and love are fixed, in place even if there is none of it on earth. For the realist (and the conceptualist, who locates them in the mind of God), they are not subject to human adjustments.

And, sure enough, the “nominalism” I found in Emerson was the sort Dreher was lamenting. It’s reflected in this statement by Emerson: 

I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns, and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats [?]; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground, and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms.

The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir, by Michele Harper—Back in 2020, I signed up for the Vanderbilt alum book-discussion club, run by the university. We pitch in by responding to the moderator’s questions, to each other’s postings, and to comments on Zoom calls. Here’s my contribution to the discussion string:

As for the book so far, I’ve gotten whiplash. I thought it was going to be a rich story of one woman’s climb out of a rough childhood into a life-or-death arena, full of fascinating details. Yes, there’s that. But now I see it more as an ideological rant piggybacking on a medical story, one in which the star is unfailingly wonderful and many others are deplorable. Tiresome stuff.

I see that one of the commentators had a very bad experience with a husband/pastor, so I hope my work as a pastor, with conservative biblical perspective, won’t disqualify me. But I can’t help picking up on the signposts of contempt for the deliverances of Scripture—from speaking of God as a goddess, on p.28 (Never mind that we’re to pray, “Our Father . . .”); her indifference toward marriage, p. 68, and her enthrallment with the spiritual answers in yoga. (My wife does yoga for the physicality, not the spirituality.) She finds opportunities to explode over race, p. 105 f (tying her current upset to the Tuskegee Study and Emmett Till) and gender, p. 152 (smearing the military for “institutional misogyny and toxic masculinity”). She deflects inclinations to think there’s a particular problem with black violence by saying that most spree killers are white male. Yes, but the numbers are way out of proportion. Let me speak from 17-years of life in Chicago. Though black serial killer Andrew Crawford killed 11 in Chicago, white John Wayne Gacy killed 33 in the burbs, a number which is matched in a month of gunshot killings in the Windy City, most of them black on black on the South and West Sides. She doesn’t address that sort of problem. It doesn’t fit her narrative. As for the military, I served 28 years in the Guard and Reserves and my Marine son served two tours in Iraq. I’ve served under the authority of women in the Pentagon and he shared a tent with both men and women in the push up from Kuwait to Baghdad. Though, of course, abuse happens, as it does on university campuses, we’ve found a great deal of decency among the sexes in our tours of duty. 

And those “toxic males” with their “institutional misogyny” have been the ones who have overwhelmingly spilled their blood through the centuries, insisting that women not be conscripted to hit the beach at Normandy, fly near-suicide B-17 missions over Germany (as did my father-in-law), pry Saddam Hussein from his Tikrit hidie hole, or take out bin Laden in Abbottabad. Of course, there’s a push to end that division of labor, to make gender fungible in the combat forces. The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service has recommended to Congress that Selective Service registration be extended to women. But us toxic males would have “held our manhoods cheap” back in the 1960s if, when the lottery was instituted, we’d not objected to the guy who said, “Hey, you wouldn’t have drafted me if you’d taken the women too. You’d have never gotten to my lottery number.” (BTW, I got to testify against drafting women, our panel covered on C-SPAN2). Oh, well.

Libertie, by Kaitlyn Greenidge—And here’s my end-of-book posting on another VU alum reading club book: One of the discussion threads formed up around the question of a memorable quote. I’ll just pitch in on that here. On page 102, we read, “I’ve raised you wrong,” Mama said to her reflection. “I’ve raised you all wrong if some white folks being cruel is s surprise to you.” I felt my face go hot with anger again. “I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama,” I said. “I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it’s the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”

As I worked on through the book, I was struck that Libertie’s problem was not with pressure to never mention it, but her inner compulsion to always mention it, a problem that drives so many today. 

As I said to my Zoom subgroup on this book, I think we’ve pretty much covered race-and-color-based sensitivities in this series. I know this is a huge topic in society, but I think our book selections have made it huge enough to cover that. And there’s so much else to talk about. My two cents worth on that.

That being said, some observations on Libertie:

1. It’s always enjoyable to peer into a culture or historical moment to pick up on new items, e.g., the materia medica remedy lists on 38 and 39; the celebration of Pinkster (63-66); “Friendship albums” (89); Tom Thumb weddings (173). 

2. In aesthetics, the aptness of some senses to bear propositional truth (the sound of the spoken word; the visual evidence from a closed-circuit TV) sets them apart from the “dumber” senses (smell/olfactory, taste/gustatory, touch/tactual). Writers, both fiction and non-fiction, put greater weight on dialogue and scenes. Greenidge certainly does work with those, but she gives a lost more attention than most to the other three, “Not a bad smell, just the heavy murk of young men . . .” (121); “Her breath was murky with the smell of tea and sugar . . . the stairway was clammy (156); “ . . . the smell of damp lace and pine sap . . .” (186); “They left a stinging stickiness . . . I lifted my open palm to my mouth and licked it clean, each finger carefully, the bitter taste of flowers on my tongue” (199-200); “. . . stinking of petrified fish” (206).

3. I do think the novel develops well the theme of external freedom’s not insuring internal freedom. So much bondage of the soul extending beyond whatever social bondage there might be in one’s circumstances. Indeed, this is Liberties’ plight, and the author grinds it into us page after page. Speaking as a longtime pastor and Christian college/seminary prof, I see a huge disconnect between all the church stuff Libertie gets and the woefully sub-Christian spirit she exhibits. She hates. She keeps detailed (and exaggerated) records of all the wrongs she’s suffered, nursing her resentment, uncharitable in so many ways. She can quote scripture and recount sung spirituals, but she seems spiritually oblivious to the counsel of Philippians 4:4-7 and countless other passages, such a “beam in your own eye, speck in the other” and “forgive 70 x 7.” She’s relentlessly self-absorbed and resentful. And, by the way, as with so many novelists and filmmakers, the church and ministers come off as duds or creeps. So tiresome. A cliché.