Click here for Part I
I wouldn't say that all my reading in high school was of a lesser quality. I can thank Mrs. Goodpasture for that. The Odyssey, The Illiad, and Dante's Inferno all had a positive impact on me. Romeo and Juliet intrigued me, but Hamlet made me appreciate the Bard. Hiroshima and The Good Earth took me to Asia and back again. A Farewell to Arms led to my bidding farewell to reading any more Hemingway. Perhaps I should give that dead bastard another chance. Twenty-five years is probably too long to hold a grudge.
If you are a reader then you know that there are moments in your life when you discover a piece of fiction that impacts you in such a way that it affects your reading life going forward. I had such a moment at the University of Kansas, thanks to a graduate teaching assistant. [As an aside, I must say that I had a series of fantastic English GTA's at KU that were just as good as any tenured professor.] I couldn't tell you that GTA's name, but she assigned the class Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.
Greene's "whiskey priest" traveled across 1930s Mexico performing his priestly duties despite the government having outlawed the Catholic religion. As I read this book, I not only became enthralled with the story, but began to experience a religious awakening that was quite unexpected. How funny that it took a Catholic communist writer to connect me closer to my Protestant religion! After finishing this book, I began to tear through Greene's oeuvre. I would read 16 of Greene's novels while in my 20s. I particularly enjoyed The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case, both of which featuring an Englishman living in Africa. My fascination with the idea of the white man out of place in Africa would lead me to a number of non-fiction travel memoirs featuring that theme. One book always leads to another. Eventually, as I made my way through Greene, I found his communism to become more and more obnoxious and untenable. His later books were particularly infused with Marxist claptrap. It was sad ending to such a distinguished writing life.
During my senior year at KU I found myself in the happy position of having fulfilled virtually all my requirements for graduation. Thus, I could search the course catalog for classes that merely piqued my interest. One such course was Fiction Writing I, with Prof. Chester Sullivan. In his course, virtually the only thing we did was write short fiction and then analyze each other's writing. It was the best class I ever took. I wrote a piece about a Pied-Noir who left Algeria for the Caribbean. I shared it with the class and Prof. Sullivan and was quite proud of myself. A couple days later, at the beginning of class, Prof. Sullivan tossed a book at me and said, "Your piece reminded me of this." It was the 1930s comedy Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh.
Coincidentally, like Greene, Waugh too was an Anglo-Catholic. Waugh was a much better Catholic than Greene, and nothing close to a communist. His work is hilarious and I tore through it like I had done with Greene. Waugh's Brideshead Revisited showed great insight into aristocratic England, while his great WWII trilogy Sword of Honour gave the world a great character named Guy Crouchback. And one author leads to another...thanks to Evelyn's work, I discovered his older brother Alec's travel memoir Hot Countries.
Starting my senior year at KU and throughout my 20s, I began to make my way through the literary classics. Albert Camus' The Stranger and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment intrigued me with the view into the mind of the murderer. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness fed into my fascination with Africa. Nabokov's Lolita shocked me with its portray of Humbert Humbert. I delved into black heart of Soviet communism thanks to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I shivered thanks to James' The Turn of the Screw, and I reveled in the insanity of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
My life in fiction would take a few more turns in my 30s and 40s...
TO BE CONTINUED...
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