"Brilliant Magical Realism"

Crystal Hubbard, a former student of mine from John Burroughs School in St. Louis who has done a good deal of writing of her own, was kind enough to give a boost to my Jonathan Evans books, Rough Magicke and Like a Noise in Dreams, on her own Facebook page, responding to a post on mine. It's actually not too long to quote, but it is a bit embarrassing--nonetheless, here's one bit I was particularly happy with: "This is brilliant magical realism with absolutely no contrivances or elementary tropes." See the rest here: https://www.facebook.com/CrystalHubbard/posts/10209409461304151 

A Poem in First Draft

I spent last Friday afternoon at Longwood Gardens, a few miles south of here, and have been picking away at this since then. I'm not quite sure I've gotten to the end, and other bits of it could still be polished, I suppose. But I guess it's cleaned up enough to go out in public.

Lines Composed at Longwood Garden, Late in Lent

“The woods are set to burst,” my old friend says,

As full of energy as if his ninety years

Were only nine or ten. There’s not that much

In bloom—a snowdrop here, some cherries there—

As we walk past the black, expectant, beds.

And yet the air’s already scented, thick

And sweet, at intervals throughout the park,

Until we reach, with some deliberateness,

The great Conservatory on the hill.

Within, it’s color more than scent, at first:

We’ve come for Orchid Month, and everywhere

One’s gaze alights, extravagant displays

Of epiphytic and terrestrial

Exoticism challenge vividly

The pallid palette of the preconceived.

But there’s a rich, dark, loamy undertone

Beneath the warring perfumes of those blooms,

In part the melded odors of the plants

In longer-term displays—there’s one whole wall

Of deep-green ferns and mosses, on our right—

In part the smell of warm damp earth itself,

Its age-old promise, urgent now, of life.

                “It saddens me,” he says, “to think we’ve lost

The sense of being festive. And I don’t just mean

My peers who’re dozing in Death’s waiting room:

It’s younger people, too. They celebrate,

They have their holidays, they send

More birthday messages than ever, but—”

              “ . . . There’s something lacking,” I suggest.

                                                                                                     “Well, yes,

But I was going to say, they’re still somehow

Alone, wrapped up in ‘authenticity’

So thickly that they almost can't conceive

Of how the larger culture might provoke

A universal un-ironic joy,

One great delight that runs through everyone.

A universal grief can still, I think, be felt,

But even there, the cynics will be heard.

The winter holidays are just one case:

It’s not just Christmas having slowly changed

To ‘Merchandising-tide,’ to coin a phrase.

Quite honestly, I think this stronger sense

Of self before society would keep

A person at arm’s length from V-E Day!”

(Which he remembers proudly: when we drive

To lunch, he’ll steer me to the space reserved

For veterans, though he’ll protest that he

Could walk much farther if he needed to.)

“The disenchanted world?” I ask—last year

His Christmas gift was Charles Taylor’s book

On how the world became so secular,

And I’ve been marching through it, bit by bit.

              “Exactly so. And it is cultural:

I don’t think you or I can look at this”—

He stoops and peers a bit to read a tag—

“Paphiopedilum in quite the way

That Wordsworth would have done; there’s beauty here,

We know that well enough, but can it reach

‘Into the purer mind . . . Till we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things’?  I doubt

It can; I doubt our world can feel his sense

‘Of something . . . That impels all thinking things,

All objects of all thought.’ I wouldn’t have

His pantheism if you gave it me,

But even for the Christian of today,

I think that sense of Spirit as a ground,

A source of self which lies outside ourselves,

Is something that we say more than we feel.”

              “You don’t sound very happy.”

                                                                         “No, I’m not.

But is there some alternative?”

                                                            “I hope

There is, but hope is not an argument,

As you’re about to tell me yet again.”

              He smiled and nodded, as we skipped the turn

That led off to the Palm House and went on,

Past ranks of Phalaenopsis, toward the sound

Of falling water coming from the room

Of emerald bromeliads. The path

Was just a little slick, and for a step

Or two he took my arm to supplement

His cane; but back on dry and level ground,

He struck off independently again

Into the desert room.

                                           “All right,” I said

At last, “Let me try this: If we can say

We’re even ill at ease with what you’ve said,

Much less if we can wish it weren't true,

Then doesn’t that conception in itself

Imply that we can stand outside that frame

Of thought? I mean, however much I try,

I can’t desire the sun go round the earth,

Although I can imagine it, or say

The words as if they might be true. If some

Great shift of paradigm has really changed

The way we think about ourselves, deep down

Among our axioms, it shouldn’t be

So easy to desire that it has not.”

              “Or else,” he answered, “it has changed so much

We can’t tell what we’re not imagining.”

              “You wouldn’t have to throw up obstacles

To everything I say.”

                                        “If not me, who?

It’s pretty much my job. But go ahead.

I’ll listen while I smell the roses here.”

They were arranged in several ranks, each one

Stretched out for thirty feet or more:

For him to sniff at just the bottom row

Would offer time enough and more for what

Few further thoughts I had.

                                                         “Well, I admit

I don’t react to nature as I think

That Wordsworth did, or as he says he did;

And if I say like Keats that beauty’s truth,

Truth beauty, I suppose that there’s no way

To know for sure that either of us means

The same thing as the other one, much less

The same thing as Plotinus. But I’m still,

By my own standards, moved by all of this,

And even if I’m not drawn off into the heights

Of transcendental union with the One,

I don’t think they were either, day by day.

When Augustine and Monica look out

The window of their room in Ostia

And work their way up from the garden view

To something like the face of God, I think

The point is that they’d had the view before,

But not that same sublime experience.

In fact, now that I say that, wouldn’t he

Insist that the experience derives

Not from the beauty of the scene, but from

The grace of God, who opens up the path

For one brief moment from the garden there

To Paradise?”

                             “So then you’d want to say

That even if our axioms of thought have changed,

Have isolated our conceptions of ourselves,

That’s only one more obstacle, which is to say,

No obstacle at all, to grace. That’s pretty good.

I’m not persuaded, mind you, but it’s good.”

              He gave up on the roses and we passed along

Beneath the huge banana plants (not trees,

But rather more like grasses, as a plaque

Explained) into the great east room, where walks

With borders of some fiery Kalanchoe

Surrounded spotless swathes of perfect lawn:

And so at length we came out to the pool

And that great arch of orchids which had first

Confronted us when we arrived. We took

Advantage of a bench set up nearby

To catch our breath before the walk downhill.

Conveniently enough for us, one huge

Division of the grounds was closed, so we

Were spared the challenges of walking it.

              As we heading back, the carillon

Began to play some tune I didn't know.

My friend was drawn to it, and thought it worth

A modest detour to the conifer

And oak collection, up a gentle knoll,

But closer to the bells.

                                           We took our time,

And as we reached the tree-lined crest, we both

Came to a startled stop, as did the pack

Of selfie-stick and phone encumbered guests

Who’d passed us as we climbed.

Beneath the trees,

As far as one could see, there stretched a field,

A thick-laid carpet, of bright daffodils.

              “They’re not as big as Wordsworth’s would have been,”

I said.

              “I don’t suppose they are: but still,

They do show something’s trying to break through.”

                                                           

We make the WSJ

My old friend, colleague, and collaborator from St. Louis's John Burroughs School, William Ames Bascom, has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal today. It's a hilarious tale, and he managed to work in a reference to our book, Falconry and Other Poems, as well.

Local Coverage of _Like a Noise in Dreams_

Mr. Jeff Kenney, editor of the town paper back home, The Culver Citizen, has written a very kind piece about Like a Noise in Dreams. My thanks to Jeff and to Plymouth Pilot-News Managing Editor, Diona Eskew, for permission to reproduce here the article, which originally appeared in both the Citizen and the Pilot-News [Copyright (c) 2015 by The Pilot-News. All rights reserved.]

Houghton's New Novel Places Pieces of Culver in England

By Jeff Kenney

Citizen editor

It's been a decade since the Rev. Dr. John Houghton's first novel, which was set in a fictionalized version of Culver, and -- perhaps somewhat to his own surprise -- several characters from that book are back in "Like a Noise in Dreams," which was just released this fall.

A bit ironically, "Dreams" -- a novel featuring Culver characters set in England -- arrives the same year as a novel featuring English characters but set in Culver ("No Place to Hide," by British best-selling novelist Susan Lewis) was released to much fanfare.

Houghton, who was featured in a Culver Citizen article last year focusing on his editing work on a tribute book to the most preeminent scholar of the writings of "Lord of the Rings" novelist JRR Tolkien (and who has written many columns for this newspaper starting in the 1970s and picking up in the past eight years), grew up in Culver, attended Culver Military Academy, and earned degrees from Harvard, Yale, Indiana, and Notre Dame Universities, specializing among other areas, in Medieval history and Tolkien. When "Rough Magicke" was released, he was still fairly new to his role as an Episcopal priest (a role in which he serves at the Hill School in Pennsylvania, where he also teaches, a role he's been familiar with for decades).

"Magicke" was deeply steeped in Culver lore, past and present, from the fictional name of the town itself, Annandale, which was borrowed from a blockbuster novel set in Culver from 1905, "The House of a Thousand Candles," to a litany of familiar references to Culverites in location, people, and traditions (in fact, Houghton has, for the new novel, updated the fictional website for Annandale Military Academy he created during the "Magicke" days, at www.annandalemilitary.com).

"Rough Magicke," as was noted by some who reviewed it, was something of an "occult thriller" undergirded by an unusual blend of magic and Christianity and with a partial boarding school background (another part of it was set in Michigan City, then the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana).

From 'Magicke' to 'Dreams'

The new novel, "Like a Noise in Dreams," like its predecessor, draws heavily from Houghton's own experience, in this case most pointedly from his experiences teaching at American summer camps in Oxford, England.

Says Houghton: "What I've done is imagined Culver had a summer camp in England," which is not, on the surface, such an unusual idea since Culver Academies does indeed have summer camps, even if the England part is purely imaginary.

The author also weaves parts of Southern England, where his Houghton ancestors hail from, into the story as well. Michigan City turns up in a third part of a book he describes more as "three novellas than a single novel" proper.

"It was fun sort of trying to take the general experience of this camp I've worked at and reimagining it being an American military school in Oxford...and then sort of playing with the same kinds of concerns of schools and magic that we're playing with in earlier volumes. It's sort of contemporary world fantasy."

The core cast includes narrator Jonathan D. Mears (with enough real-life parallels not to see him as something akin to a fictionalized version of Houghton himself) and his niece and nephew by marriage (the nephew having been a principle character in "Rough Magicke," carried over) and another Culver (or, officially, "Annandale Military Academy") cadet from the same generation. There's also a new cast of cadets and English characters as well ("There are not quite as many background characters as a Dickens novel, but..." Houghton chuckles).

In the years since his first novel, the narrator has become the Episcopal bishop of Michigan City, attending what is actually a real-life every-decade meeting of bishops in England during the summer of 2000.

"The lead character has some of the magic things attached to him," adds Houghton. "There's a kid at the summer camp who has connections both to Annandale and this Oxford colony."

A key locale in the novel seems to be haunted by a great aunt, a connection made more intriguing by her connection with founding the college itself.

"In the 1920s to early `30s there were several new institutions founded at oxford that actually became colleges in the 1960s, so this is pictured there," Houghton explains. "There's a lot in it about the interest in spiritualism going on -- there was a time between 1900 and 1930 when otherwise orthodox Christians were involved in these ideas about spiritualism; even ideas like 'spiritual radio.'"

The novel gives considerable time to debates within Christianity about the role of magic, with undertones of the work of one of the best-known of Christian fiction writers, C.S. Lewis, whose characters engage in forms of magic, or something referred to as such within the context of some of his books.

"There's a certain influence of (Medieval-themed fantasy novelist) Katherine Kurtz novels," says Houghton, who adds there was some influence as well from Charles Williams, a novelist who formed part of the Oxford "club" of Christian novelists known as The Inklings, which included Lewis and Tolkien as well.

"Tolkien was notoriously reluctant to have magic used much in his stories," adds Houghton. "There's that whole discussion that happens at one point, or which things do we call magic that aren't, necessarily."

All of these matters might beg questions as to the moral framework of "Like a Noise in Dreams," something Houghton says is evident, "though I don't want to be too pretentious. Somebody has to respond to (an evil magician character in the novel) at some point, so that's another angle on it."

A hint of Culver across the pond

The Culver and Lake Maxinkuckee area, of course, have arguably inspired more than their fair share of novels, from the higher profile entries mentioned above, to lesser-known regional works, and while this book perhaps does not properly fall into the same category as Culver-set fiction such as recent novels by Richard Davies, Marcia Adams, and David Girard, to name a few, it "has a flavor of Culver," says Houghton.

"There's a lot of (Culver) Academy stuff -- an officer in charge, teenagers in uniform running around Oxford."

That, and those important Houghton ancestors from Southern England who formed part of the cadre of settlers who first arrived here in 1836, something Houghton managed to allude to in the novel as well.

That said, Houghton actually hadn't conceived "Rough Magicke" as having a sequel when he first penned it, though there is the possibility now hanging in the air of a third entry in the ongoing adventures of both novels' characters ("It may turn out there's some human instinct towards doing things in threes," he smiles).

"Like a Noise in Dreams" is instead the result of "fiddling around with the idea of whether I could set anything in England (and) under what pretext could I get these people to Oxford."

And that idea in fact came about during Houghton's faculty days at Culver Academies when, in the winter of 1975-76 he was sitting around a dining hall table at the school with the faculty's then-resident Brit, John Chadwick, and other faculty "with a high-end British real estate magazine...and the idea was kicked around that Culver could have an overseas camp and Oxford was the logical place to put it. So in a sense that nearly half-century old idea, as well as my experiences in England (were an inspiration)."

"Like a Noise in Dreams," published by Unlimited Publishing, is available online at amazon.com.

A sonnet from last winter

Frost in February

It’s winter, still, outside, the sullen snow

Still draining all the world I see of warmth.

I wonder, in these frigid shortened days,

When darkling sentiments begin almost

To crowd aside the memory of light,

What depth of frozen ground has overlain

The insubstantial seeds of hope, what frost

Now inches downward toward still hidden life.

              The sleeping groundhog underneath my porch

Might stir to promise Spring, some early burst of green,

An easy resurrection: but we know

Enough of hate to say this icy death

Will not pass quickly, that it never does,

But lingers in the heart where love has blazed.

Where credit is due

In the course of posting some snapshots of locations from Like a Noise in Dreams over at the Annandale Facebook page (about 35 of them, in all),  I noticed that the photographer who took the picture of the bust of Serapis used on the cover, had, in the process of releasing the image to the public domain, asked nonetheless to be identified, as a matter of courtesy. So I hasten to do so: the photographer is Marie-Lan Nguyen, and the image is posted on Wikimedia.

"Paperback Writer"

The paperback version of Like a Noise in Dreams appeared on Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1588322378)  a week ago tomorrow (October 22), and attracted a kind review from John David Cofield the next day. So it is off and running. An e-book version will follow in a couple of weeks, though for various technical reasons it will reflect the state of the text immediately before the last few revisions--which feels like a very medieval-manuscript development for a digital text. I'll post a list of corrigenda on the AMA website, www.annandalemilitary.com, which already has various other bits and pieces that might be of interest (including, self-referentially, a copy of this blog).