ex DF (F 2760 e Mormon Letters Annual 1987Foreword Herewith the Association for Mormon Letters presents its sixth and final volume of studies in Mormon literature and the Mormon literary tradition to be published in the current series. Like earlier volumes in the series, it includes a selection of essays of both broad appeal and scholarly merit, All of them were originally papers pre- sented at the various symposia sponsored by the Association. The volume, though, is not to be regarded a6 proceedings of those gatherings in that no attempt at com- pleteness has been made but rather should be thought of as a sampling~perhaps capricious and arbitrary--of what took place. Two of the essays were presidential addresses: Edward A. Geary’s given at the ¢ighth annual symposium held at Brigham Young University in 1985 and Edward 1. Hart’s at the ninth symposium held at Weber State College in 1986. Richard H. Cracroft’s essay, "Nephi, Seer of Modern Times: The Home Literature of Novels of Nephi Anderson was delivered at the AML conjoint meeting with the RMMLA in Provo in 1985. The papers by Veda Tebbs Hale and Herbert Harker were part of a panel discussion at the 1985 symposium in Provo at which authors discussed the role of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in their fiction. Bruce W. Jorgensen presented his study of two of Douglas Thayer's stores at that same symposium. "Perceptions of the Mormons in Science Fiction: The Writings of Robert A. Heinlein" by Bruce and Julie, Westergren was read at the AML conjoint meeting with the RMMLA in Denver in 1986. Appreciation is expressed to all of these authors for their willingness to make their papers available for publication in this volume. Gratitude is also expressed to the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Com- parative Literature at Brigham Young University, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and John . Tanner for help with the preparation, production, and distribution of this volume. Steven P. Sondrup Executive SecretaryOf Mormon Poesy: An Essay! Edward A. Geary To the reader: The drift of the ensuing discourse, written in the country without the help of books or advice of friends, was chiefly to set forth some views of the nature and possibilities of Mormon literature in the light of recent work. It is tentative and incomplete, the limits of space, and of the author's wit, and the smaliness of the raft precluding a more comprehensive survey. It happened on the afternoon of the Old Folks’ Day outing, held that year at Turner’s Grove, that several members of the Cedar Gully Literary and Elocutionary Society sipped away from the crowd and strolled together under the cottonwoods to the banks of the Slough, where they discovered amid the cattails a rude raft, con- structed by some of the town boys from heavy planks nailed to bleached’ logs. Eugenius suggested that they go rafting, a proposal eagerly seconded by Lavinia, ever ready for a lark. Brutus, who had come down just the day before from the sheep camp up past Gooseberry, broke off a dead sapling to serve as a pole, and the party clambered one by one onto their awkward craft. When Ricardo stepped aboard, the raft tilted, whereupon Neander expressed some apprehensions as to the vessel's Seaworthiness, but Eugenius reassured him by saying that he would give it a blessing if it should begin to sink. Propelled by Brutus's pole, they moved slowly across the dark water, while from time to time the sound of laughter drifted over from the grove, where Woodruff Thomson was telling Sanpete stories. 1No manageable system of documentation would enable me to register accurately both the words I have taken from the mouths (or pens) of others and those 1 have put into their mouths. The perspicacious reader may, however, recognize fragments of the thought and style of Lavina Fielding Anderson, Richard H. Cracroft, Eugene England, John B. Harris, and Bruce W. Jorgensen--not to ‘mention John Dryden.2 AML Annual 1987 “At least we have ket away," said Johannes, "before old Brother Rasmussen started remembering the Black Hawk War." _ "I must confess,” replied Eugenius, "that I am sorry to miss his stories. I like their intuitive sense of significant detail and forthright revelation of self even if they are unsophisticated and lacking in the formal graces.” so.¥Go" sald Lavinia, “they are much to be preferred to the cheap and easy fiction that constitutes the majority of works published for the Mormon audience-- the pray. romances, the cute tales of cute adolescents, and the melodramatic his- torical fiction.” Brutus said, "The recipe for selling the Mormon market does seem to call for a large dose of saccharine: sweet, non-nutritious, and possibly carcinogenic.” He gave the pole another shove. "Our popular authors have a gift for remaining resolutely shallow, even when wading into deep water.” "Well, gentlemen," said Johannes, "you may speak your pleasure of these authors; but though I and some few more may give you a peaceable hearing, yet assure yourselves, there are multitudes who would think you malicious and them injured: The Mormon reading public-or at any rate the book-buying public--prefers them a hundred to one to the elitist writers you people see as the hope of Mormon literature.” "Don’t call me an elitist," said Ricardo, "Where literature is concerned, I am a goumand, not a gourmet. There is room in my good book diet for a broad variety of dishes." “If we are going to talk of breadth," said Neander, "my waistline will match yours. But I maintain that we must make a distinction between a substantial main- Course dish and an appetizer or dessert. As Henry James said, the first requisite of any work of art is that it be one. Otherwise it is foolish to prate of its representa- tive character.” "But what is a work of art?" demanded Eugenius. "Must we be limited by post- Jamesian formalism? As a Latter-day Saint, I believe that there are values not always intrinsically bound up in the formal perfections, and a literature such as ours, which may be inferior in form to that conventionally recognized as great but which is superior in content and vision, shows to best advantage in those genres charac- terized by personal witness to faith and experience, ones in which the truth of actual living and of direct confession is at least as important as aesthetic or meta- phorical truth.” "Please spare me the standard panel discussion on Mormonism and the arts,” Johannes protested. "Somebody will make the solemn pronouncement that a great renaissance of Mormon literature is about to begin and that we will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. Then somebody else will say no, we can’t have great art because the Church will not tolerate the independence of the true artist. We have been over this ground a thousand times, but I have never found anyone who could name me one Mormon work that could legitimately be studied in a mainstream ‘American literature course. Aren't we, really, just playing a game? I am remindedGeary: Of Mormon Poesy 3 of the old joke about the new arrival in heaven who found great open expanses there and multitudes of the saved. But over in one small corner there was a walled- off space where a little group were going about their business with no apparent off spats of the larger scene. "Who are those people?’ asked the neweomer, and Sr Peter replied, Oh, those are Mormons. They think they're the only ones here.” "That was the celestial kingdom,” said Ricardo. "They really were the only ones there." Neander said, "Many of the great works of literary modernism initially circu- Jated among a group smaller than ours.” "But they didn’t stay there,” Johannes replied. “Why should we measure ourselves against American literature anyway?” Ricardo asked. "We are a world church." "In a minor way, perhaps," said Neander. "But hardly a world literature. Indeed. there is no world literature. Literature is national, or ethnic, or regional Yor us regional. Cedar Gully is the center of the universe, as good a center as any other.” “Everybody to his own omphalos," said Johannes. ‘I'll take London, thank you, or Paris, of Florence, I wouldn't want to be a provincial writing for provincials on provincial themes.” "The worst provincialism,” Evgenius said, "is that which arises from a fear of being provincial.” Mormon writers have at their disposal all of the great universal themes plus the special insights of our own theology. We can, if we will, nurture imagination with the most challenging and liberating set of metaphysical pos- es and paradoxes I have been able to discover in all human thought.” "Then we haven’t done much with our materials,” said Johannes. "More than you think," replied Eugenius. "But no--we have hardly scratched the surface. That is why I believe that criticism has a dual function at the present time in Mormondom. On the one hand, it needs to open the canon to the lite known and insufficiently appreciated expressions of personal faith in our tradition, works that remind us that true religion is more important than great books. But it also needs to discriminate the best Mormon works of their kind and measure them against the masterpieces. We should be comparing Clinton Larson's best poems with Emily Dickinson's, or examining Doug Thayer's stories in the light of the greater Romantic lyric.” "I am all for that,” said Ricardo, "as long as we don't lose touch with what is uniquely our own. But our peculiarity is always going to set us apart 1 would be happy to see Mormon poetry in the anthologies, Mormon novels on university reading lise Mormon plays tunning on Broadway. But I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon, and I don't think it is essential. The Mormon writer is going to be, ouside the thainstream of modern literary fashion in the same way that the Latter-day Saint World view is outside the dominant humanistic existentialism of the modern world. We are a believing people. How can that help but set us apart from the secular a4 AML Annual 1987 mainstream? To be sure, we have more in common with the minority of contem- porary writers who are working in other traditions of genuine religious faith, but they too are outside the mainstream--or are accepted within it for reasons having litte to do with their faith. And even from them we are separated by the unique claims of Mormonism, by our knowledge that this is the only true and living church. In my view, a Mormon writer is--or should be-a Latter-day Saint writing, and that inevitably means writing main for other Latter-day Saints. In essence, I agree with Orson F. Whitney: "The Holy Ghost is the genius of Mormon literature.” "As if the wind bloweth not where it listeth," said Brutus. "And with his pro- nouncement Elder Whitney ushered in the dreary age of Home Literature--in which I can find neither the Holy Ghost nor the spirit of true art. As a critical stance, Ricardo’s position seems impractical to me. Exactly what are the thematic or sty- listic characteristics of the Holy Ghost? Is there any distinction to be made be- tween literature and scripture? I must confess that J have little confidence in my ‘own ability to detect the presence of the Holy Ghost in a poem or a short story, and little more in Ricardo’s. I would rather begin with the assumption that Mormon literature is that written by authors whose background is Mormon and then try to proceed to some tentative discriminations. ‘That seems more reasonable than to begin with the author’s condition of belief--of which, usually, 1 have either no evidence at all or only those external signs that give no more certainty than the evidence Cotton Mather and Hawthorne might call ’spectral.” "You are construing me too narrowly,” said Ricardo. "I can also appreciate a wide range of work reflecting not only the Mormon experience but the diverse experiences of Mormons. But our greatest need right now is for good work that is in harmony with the Latter-day Saint ethos. Correct me if 1 am wrong, but I don’t know of a single work that has achieved any significant Sepree of acceptance outside the Church that has seriously affirmed the validity of the Latter-day Saint world view. The literary ’mainstream’ will tolerate Mormon literature only if it is a litera- ture of disaffection from Mormonism. And no work of disaffection will ever be accepted by readers within the Church. Wallace Stegner has a perceptive comment on this in his recent book. He argues that Western American writers might well use their provineialism as a springboard to universal meaning, as, for example, Jane ‘Austen did. But he makes an exception of the Mormon writer. Stegner writes, One of the problems of Mormon fiction is precisely that Mormon society is so special that a Mormon writer can't project outside of it. He has to write his fiction from within, for a purely Mormon audience, or else he has to treat it as if he were a tourist, a foreign visitor coming to see the strange aberra- tion. I think Stegner is right. That is why I have proposed that we develop an inside literature, ‘hat we write to one another and try to raise the level of literary ap- preciation within the Church, And I don’t think we can do that by looking down Pee cnoses at popular Mormon fiction. If we are to have a full literary culture inside Mormonism, there must be popular literature as well as serious literature: Mormon adolescent fiction, Mormon romances, Mormon mysteries, the whole works. And if we get people reading, then we can try to elevate their tastes--but we won't do that by attacking the faith they believe in." |Geary: Of Mormon Poesy 5 “What about A Woman of Destiny?” Asked Neander. "I don’t see disaffection there.” "A fine achievement," said Ricardo. "One I would be happy to award a prize. But it really proves my point. It is a Mormon novel that had to pretend not to be one in order to be lished. I don’t know how it impressed the non-Mormon pec sewives who bought it at the supermarket bookrack on the basis of its cover. I suspect that most of them stopped reading at about the point where Dinah Kirkham is baptized. And a Relief Society president would be embarrassed to take it to the checkstand.” "| grant that Scott had to make some compromises to publish outside the Mor- mon circuit,” said Neander, "but the in-grouy publication you recommend exacts at least as high an artistic rice. Consider Zinnie Stokes, Zinnie Stokes. The Relief Society presidents evidently love it, and so do thousands of others within Mormon- dom. I enjoyed it myself, until I began to consider what Don had sacrificed in order to have a Mormon best-seller: all of the satiric bite that enlivens The Rummage Sale and Frost in the Orchard, all of the insight into the deep pain and frustration of marginal lives, all of the comedy, the wonderful evocation o! Utah names and folk- ways, And the final irony is that this best-selling Mormon novel has scarcely any; thing distinctively Mormon about it. Berkley Books should have published it, and Deseret Book should have published. A Woman of Destiny.” "That'll be the day," said Johannes. “Why do you keep picking on Relief Society presidents?" asked Lavinia. "Is it because bishops and high councilmen don’t read anything at all--good or bad?" "I am sorry to insult either the brethren or the sistren," said Neander. "I guess my point is simply that serious writers cannot allow themselves to worry about pularity. It must nice to earn a little money in return for all the hours of fabor, and nicer still to know that somebody cares about what you have done enough to read it. But the artist’s chief reward has to be the conviction of having made a good thing.” _, “That is what I admire about Doug Thayer and Eileen Kump and Levi Peterson,” said Brutus, "The fruit of dedicated and patient craft is quality.” __ Neander said, "I keep coming back to those lines of Yeats: "Out of the quarrel with the world we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with the self we make poetry.” "Out of the quarrel with the self," said Brutus, “Levi Peterson made The Can- yons of Grace." ___ “And raised the Mormon short story to a new level of artistic excellence, ‘id Ricardo, "but he didn’t express the Mormon ethos. His grace is Augustinian, or Calvinist, or purely secular, but not LDS.” Brutus asked, "Can we only express the Mormon ethos by mirroring the bland surfaces of ordinary Mormon experience or replicating the happily adjusted manne- quins of Church PR? Levi may be the first Mormon fiction writer in this generation to grapple seriously with Mormon theology. His stories refract some of the potent ee re6 AML Annual 1987 and threatening shapes of our submerged Psychological and spiritual tensions. They utter things we might rather not know, and that makes them dangerous, but that also means that they are carrying out what R. P. Blackmur calls ’the true business of iterature.”” ‘I agree that Levi has succeeded in giving fictional voice to the deep religious conflicts that some Mormons face,” said Eugenius. "But it is a one-sided representa- tion. The protagonists are appealing in spite of their being Mormons, not because of it And there is nothing of the deep ravishment of sincere Mormon faith, the com- Prehensible joy as well as utterable anxiety God's presence can bring.” "A perfect balance is hard to achieve,” said Lavinia, "but I can see the signs of an emerging literature of intelligent affirmation, not of alienation. I call it ‘spiritual realism,’ and I see it to some extent in Levi's work, and in Doug Thayers, and Eileen Kump's, and Herbert Harker's, and Marilyn Brown's, among other works publi shed and unpublished.” "How can realism be spiritual?” asked Neander. Brutus added, "And why should spiritual insight choose the realistic mode? Is God a realist? Does Mormon fiction have to close its eyes to three generations of artistic experimentation?" ___,'I do not propose spiritual realism as the only suitable mode for Mormon fic- tion," Lavinia said. “But I think it has Breat promise. In spiritual realism, the conflicts that a character may encounter in his or her social settings are primarily important as they provide information about the interior spiritual life of that per- son. The experiences move the person toward a greater understanding of the am- biguous nature of human good and human depravity. They affirm or challenge the reality of God. They illuminate by recording those perplexing moments when prayers are not answered and the equally perplexing ‘moments when they are. They shoulder the burden of a community with a vision of holiness and unity that stand in contrast to its inevitable pettiness and cruelties of daily living. They attempt to make sense out of a large picture of human interaction that includes the values of faith, com- mitment, deepest doubts and anger focused on a seemingly uncaring God and swelling rejoicing and gratitude focused on a seemingly loving and watchful God.” “That sounds good to me," said Ricardo. "I only wish I could see the develop- ment as clearly as you do. Where is a representation of mature faith to set along- side Peterson’s representation of doubt? Boug Thayer is obviously trying to probe the Mormon psyche from a position of faith, but so far he has only dealt with inno- cents." "Perhaps all Mormons are innocents,” said Neander. "Look at us, a bunch of middle-aged literati afloat on stagnant water in a rickety raft.” "A perfect image for Mormon literature," said Johannes. "It's an image of the human condition," said Eugenius, "and we must endure it to the end."Geary: Of Mormon Poesy 7 Neander was on the point of launching into further discourse, but Brutus, who had fished his repeater out of his bib pocket, announced, "Chore time, fellers.” ‘The company were all sorry to separate so soon, though a great part of the day was already spent. Brutus poled to the bank, where they sloshed ashore and stood ‘while looking back on the water, upon which the slanting sunbeams played, and made it appear like floating quicksilver: at last they went up through the Old Folks Day crowd, who were dancing a Virginia reel to the music of Charlie Grames’s fiddle. Walking thence together to the edge of the grove, they parted here; Eugenius and Ricardo to some pleasant appointment they had made, and Lavinia, Brutus, Johannes, and Neander to the waiting milk cows in their several corrals.Writing: The Most Hazardous Craft Edward L. Hart T greet you today as practitioners of the most hazardous craft known to humankind-- that of ‘writing; and I salute your intrepidity. Any kind of writing is dangerous enough, but to be a Mormon writer is to face double jeopardy. I have to confess, first of all, though, that I am not sure what a Mormon writer is, It may be a Mormon who writes, or it may be a writer who happens to be a Mormon. (You will notice in the Preceding sentence how skillfully I avoided sexist language by referring to the writer as it instead of he, while at the same time avoiding the tediousness of he or she. This is one of the lesser hazards of the craft.) I suspect that it makes a difference whether a person is a Mormon who writes or a writer who is a Mormon. I imagine, further, that both kinds may be Present; and for fear of offending one kind or the other (another hazard) by any definition I might come up with, T bequeath that task to my successor, John Tanner, along with all the other equally valuable perquisites of office. I speak in all seriousness when I say that writing, if it is done seriously, is dangerous. Any time the imaginative forces of the mind are released and given free rein (and they have to be given free rein or they do not work) there is a danger, because the imagination leads into the exploration of new worlds. Ariel had to be teleased by Prosper in order that the creative imagination could function unham- pered by the dull pall through which the conscious mind sees everything But the question of what may lie ahead if the imagination is freed is as puzzling to the would-be writer as was the prospect of the next world to Hamlet. We simply don’t know what lies beyond. To explore the beyond is compared to the exploring of the dark side of the moon by my friend Radcliffe Squires, a Utah poet though he teaches at the University of Michigan. His essay, appropriately called "The Dark Side of the Moon," was delivered originally at a function honoring our former teacher Brewster Ghiselin on his retirement, and the essay is now, at least in part, in The Norton Reader.' I want to summarize some of his ideas. When the imagination is turned loose, says Squires, "We neither can keep an Sewanee Review 82 (Summer 1974):511-17; reprinted in Eastman, Arthur The Norton Reader, 4th ed, (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 370-76. iHart: Writing: The Most Hazardous Craft 9 unconscious solution to a problem from arising nor can we force it to arise” (p. 512). There is, in short, no guarantee as to what will happen when we begin to write imaginatively. We may not like at all the solution that arises. Squires con- tinues: The act of creation in the arts . . . involves really two processes or aspects that are at war with each other but which must nevertheless be made one. One of these aspects concerns the release of an anarchistic, quite feral voice, and it quarrels with the other aspect, a voice that is formal, debonair, and legal. The formal and legal side is so terrified of the feral that it seeks to cover it, to hide it away. (p. 516) As the process of composition continues, says Squires, the rational mind tires of its censorship, and then "the wilder faculty makes some kind of composition and in so doing gives point to reason and depth and beauty to formality.” But what if that accommodation to each other is not made? "When, for reasons that are always obscure, the cooperation fails and the task is not performed, then the artist is in Hell. He may in fact by such stoppages be driven mad” (p. 517). I recommend the reading in its entirety of Squires’s essay. Yes, writing is hazardous to your health and probably should bear a warning label from the Surgeon General. “Those who fear the imagination and who would therefore banish creativity perceive correctly that it is a potential threat to the established order. But to follow their advice and give up creativity leads us into another danger, worse than the perils opened upon us by creativity; and, of course, that new danger comes from being uncreative. Lack of creativity leads to another hell--the hell of stagnation. According to Proverbs (29:18), "Where there is no vision, the people perish." And surely, falling back for a moment into Radcliffe Squires’s language, a creative act that "gives point to reason and depth and beauty to formality” is one form of vision. The would-be writer who has followed me to this point faces Hamlet's dilemma: to be or not to be creative. Logically, the choice of not to be leads to a certain death, the hell of stagnation, whereas the other choice, the option to be creative, though potentially open to failure (as every course in life is) offers an equal hope for success. No oddsmaker could fail to recommend the way that at least has a chance of winning. Assuming, then, that we have made the choice to be creative writers, we have nothing to lose and a great deal to gain by facing the hazards squarely. Let us assume that a young Mormon has decided to try to write and wants to project, in written words a unique experience. I suppose almost the first thing any writer discovers is that it is impossible to transtorm any living experience directly into words. The reason is that words have a life of their own; na ance they have been called into play, they lead the mind that brought them forth into avenues and nu- ances of thought and feeling that didn’t exist before the writing started. T. S. Eliot talked about "finding an ‘objective correlative” that should serve as a "formula" for a particular emotion (in "Hamlet and his Problems"), but Eliseo Vivas inted out the fallacy in the assumption that there can be any A=B correspondence tween the words of a finished work and the original emotion that prompted the writing of it. Vivas uses the examples of Garcia Lorca writing about the death of a10 AML Annual 1987 bullfighter in the ring. Says Vivas, "The emotion originally felt by Garcia Lorca . , | . was transmuted into something quite different as he began to produce the poem.” | He concludes that Garcia Lorca had to discover the precise meaning of the poem | through the act of composition.? | | The would-be writer has thus discovered the impossibility of simply taking an experience out of the mind and putting that precise same experience onto paper. But let us not be discouraged by this state of affairs. There is hope in it if we look closely. ‘Though we cannot, in effect, take a picture of an experience and hold it up for examination, we can do something better: we can transform the experience * through the creative imagination and in the process, if we are lucky, discover its meaning--which almost surely we didn’t know before we started to write. I said "if we are lucky," because there is always the chance that our effort won't succeed. There is always the chance, also, that the meaning we discover may be disturbing- since we took that walk into the unknown with no guarantee of what we'd run in to. What I have jst said applies to all writers, of course: not just to Mormon writers. I also said, near the beginning, that the Mormon writer faces double jeo- pardy--a second hazard in addition to those that face every creative writer. at second hazard is the risk of being misunderstood. The writer’s attempt to express a new perception may be mistaken for rejection or rebellion. Chaucer is still mis- takenly thought by some beginning students to be attacking the whole Catholic Church when they read about the Pardoner and his relics, failing to see that in the whole context, including the treatment of the Parish Priest, Chaucer was motivated by love of the institution he was attempting to cleanse. Similarly, Jonathan Swift was a devout believer in the Church of England, though he was misunderstood even by Queen Anne, whose influence kept him from becoming a bishop. Those insights produced by the most devoted Mormon creative writer may not be immediately appreciated by other people in the Church--or even by members of the family. In the connection, I refer to a letter sent to me as president of the Association for Mormon Letters by Virginia Sorensen Waugh, who praised the Asso- ciation for providing the kind of support for writers that they are not likely to receive otherwise. ‘Phe letter happened to come ust as I had arrived at this point in the preparation of this paper, and it fits so well that I'm going to read a relevant section: During my years of trying to say what I felt about my childhood-T still ty, though age and infirmities limit the product sadly-I felt deeply the lack of thy Tout home” and perhaps rather more deeply, the booing. Even the famlly-only "Can't you let Grandma lie in peace?” When I hoped to give her a kind of eternal life! (10 Jan. 1986) I do not say what I have been saying to frighten anyone away from the attempt to be creative. I can think of no legitimate grounds for doing that. President Kimball called upon Church members to become new Miltons or Shakespeares. 1 heartily concur with that aspiration. But at the same time, I have to say what I 2ethe Objective Correlative of T. 8. Eliot.” American Bookman 1 (Winter 1944): 7-18; reprinted in Robert W. Stallman, ed. Critiques and Essays in Criticism 1920-1948 (New York: Ronald, 1949), pp. <Hart: Writing: The Most Hazardous Craft 11 have said: that creative expression may be misunderstood and that that misunder- standing may lead to an alienation of the kind that was the last thing the writer wanted upon embarking on a career. ‘What, then, if anything, can be promised the beginning writer who wants to be creative and who, at the same time, wants to keep a faith intact? For one thing, such a writer cannot be promised immunity from the perils that universally beset al humankind. No one can provide that promise for any pursuit. I think I can promise this however: that the kind of thing one discovers in the process of creation will depend a great deal on what was deep inside to begin with. A person has, after all, the control over the process to insist that it does not stop at the first level but goes deeper and deeper to the point where one recognizes one’s truest self. In the full light of all the possibilities and problems, I still conclude that creative writing isa way of expression not to be withheld from even the most devout Mormon, If the faith is eal and based on genuine conversion to principle, fand if one survives the hazards and delves to the Tichest and deepest sources of being, there will be no loss, but rather an enhancement-in the discovery of that deeper self in the context of the deeper truth.Nephi, Seer of Modern Times: ‘The Home Literature Novels of Nephi Anderson Richard H. Cracroft I Nephi Anderson, known primarily among late-twentieth-century Latter-day Saints as the puthor of Added Upon (1898), attempted, in that widely read ambitious failure, to encompass “all things in heaven and earth within, 140 pages.? BH. Roberts wrote this statement in admiration, but I assume ‘Anderson knew better--at least, if he didn't then, he would later, when he came to be a much more accond lished ‘writer. fefowed ¢s he was with a fine narrative gift, a rich imagination, and a keen sense of appreciation for literary style, Anderson subsequently attempted two major revi- oF appr cdded Upon in a futile effort to transform his wooden tour de force into a lively novel on par with his nine later works. Inevitably and sadly, Anderson has been dismissed--or heralded--on the basis of this first novel, when in fact he would be better served by study of his nine Jater--and alwa} better--novels. Unfortunately, the nine later works are now generally unavailable and thus virtually ignored, Yand Anderson, if discussed at all by modern Mormon critics, is dismissed as a onenovel, one-failure author. ‘The truth is otherwise, As an examination of Anderson's ten novels four additional books, forty various articles, and at least forty-eight identified” short additions) pookapressvely evident, Anderson was a vital and positive force in stories -the-century Mormon letters. "His unparalleled contribution was 10 combine a Temarkably fervent faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ and in the teachings, history, aoe ea etd mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with @ Single-minded devotion to establishing a Mormon literature ‘which reflects this faith sae not his popular success among the Latter-day Saints is recorded in the The fact ditions bis many works enjoyed~and which Added Upon stil enjoys. ‘This essay was published in BYU Studies 25 (Spring 1985): 3-1. 2B, H. Roberts quoted by Nephi Anderson in Deseret News, 13 August, 1921, Sec. 3, II]. In announcing the eighth edition of Added Upon, Nephi Anderson said that "Elder B. H. Roberts of the Improvement Era in reviewing said that 1 had encompassed all things in heaven and carth within 140 pases” I have been unable to find a review by B. H. Roberts in which be makes this statement, Taeigh Roberts does state, very easly, that Added Upon is doubiless his {Anderson's} chief work, judged in the way of permanency’ (Improvement Era SANs. 1902]: 808). eeCracroft: Nephi, Seer of Modern Times 13 But while Mormon critics have generally dismissed Anderson’s works without ining more than his first and weakest effort, Anderson's remaining body of writing is of interest to Mormons in the mid-1980s not only because they reflect fin- de siécle LDS and American values and concerns and not only because Anderson has made the most important, sustained literary effort to date in attempting to fashion a significant didactic literature from the stu of Mormon belief and a practice, but also because many of the literary questions he confronted continue to challenge Mormon writers, critics, and readers. Tl Christian Nephi Anderson was himself a thoroughgoin product of the Mormonism he so fervently professed. Born 22 January 1865, in Christiania, Norway, to Latter-day Saint parents Christian and Petronelle Nielson Anderson, ep as he always signed himself, emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1871, when he was only six years old. The family settled in Coalville and later, Ogden, where Nephi's father worked as a painter and paperhanger, a trade which Nephi also learned but soon left for a career in education. Married at sixteen to Asenath Tillotson, Nephi received his education in Ogden schools and at the University of Utah. In 1892-1893, he interrupted a career of teaching in Box Elder and Weber counties to serve an LDS mission to his native Norway. ‘After his return from Norway, Anderson again taught in several schools in Quen and Brigham City and was named Superintendent of Schools in Box Elder County, where he served from 1900 to 1903. Soon after the death of his wife, in January, 1904, Anderson was called on a second mission, this time to Great Britain, where his renown as a writer on LDS subjects led to service under mission president Heber J. Grant as editor of the Millennial Star. Following his release in 1906, Anderson made an extensive tour of Europe, after which he returned home to Salt Lake City, where for three years he taught as an instructor of English and missionary course teacher at LDS High School. “In June 4908, Anderson married Maud Rebecca Symons, and in July 1909, he was again called, along with his family, to serve a mission in the Central States. Headquartered in Independence, Missouri, Anderson edited the Liahona, the voice of the Church to the central United States, until the fall of 1910, when he was recalled in order to serve as editor of the Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine, replacing Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, who had just been called to the Quorum of the Twelve. Anderson served in this ‘post until his untimely death on January 6, 1923, at age fiftyeight, from peritonitis which developed following emergency surgery. Besides being a missionary and a prolific writer, Anderson was a dedicated Church leader, In 1910 he was called to the General Board of the YMMIA, where he remained until his death. He also served on the General Priesthood Committee of the Church and prepared several courses of study for the Church priesthood quorums. He spent much of his time during his last years travelling among the LDS stakes giving instruction in genealogy, for which he became a major force in the Church. A was he who prophesied, in October 1911, that the small genealogical library in ny14 AML Annual 1987 Salt Lake City would one day be “the largest and best equipped .. .in the world.”* The esteem in which Anderson was held by Church leaders is attested to by his funeral held in the Salt Lake City Tenth Ward on 10 January 1923, at which ae George Albert Smith and Elder Joseph Fielding Smith of the Quorum of the Twelve spoke, as did Elders Anthony W. Ivins, Rudger Clawson, and Heber J. Grant, of the irst Quorum of Seventy, all of whom spoke of his noble character and his efficient work in the gospel, cate. Resolutions from many of the stakes of the Church poured into Salt Lake City praising Anderson for his "genius and his skill” in teach- ing and in writing for the Latter-day Saints. i It is in his "genius and his skill" as an author in the Home Literature tradition that modern scholars are most interested, for Anderson stands at the head of the Home Literature movement in Mormon letters, that movement which also included such influential figures as Susa Young Gates, Orson F. Whitney, Emmeline B. Wells, BH. Roberts, Josephine Spencer, and Augusta Joyce Crocheron. : Home Literature--fiction, drama, poetry, and essays written by faithful Mormons to instruct other Latter-day Saints in Mormon truth, Mormon faith, Mormon standards and Mormon commitment--rose to importance over the space of a single decade, 1888-1898 (the latter the year of Added Upon) and has continued to be a force in Mormon letters ever since. From the earliest days of the Territory of Deseret, the leaders of the Latter-day Saints had little use for fiction, particularly of the dime-novel variety then flooding the country. Indeed, George Q. Cannon blamed novel reading for "many of the evils which prevail in the world.’> It was only after the monolithic strength of Mormon isolation began to be threatened by the influx of gentles and their accompanying gentile values that Church leaders, notably Orson_F. Whitney, Susa Young Gates, and Emmeline B. Wells, suggested that the Church fight the fires a pervasive popular fiction with a fiction and a literature lit at the torches of values. In 1888, Bishop Whitney, in a major address directed to the youth of the Church, called on Mormon writers to produce a literature for home consumption, a “home Literature,” "pure and powerful," centered in Mormon themes and reflecting Mormon ideals, a Kterature which would one day enable the Mormon culture to produce "Miltons and Shakespeares of [its] own.” 3Added Upon (1898; reprint, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1973, 34th printing), foreword. 4*Nephi Anderson’ (obituary), Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 14 (April 1923): 65. S*Editorial Thoughts,” The Juvenile Instructor, 4 (Jan. 8, 1870): 5. in Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert, eds. 4 6Qrson F. Whitney, "Home Literature,” 1974), pp. 208-10. Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints (Provo, Utah: BYU Press, ee"Cracroft: Nephi, Seer of Modern Times 15 Responding to this challenge, Nephi Anderson wrote and ublished, to wide though, not uncritical Mormon acclaim, Added Upon (1898), a novel based on an idea which he had begun to formulate in 1893, following his return from his mission to Norway. Excited about the TS of a Mormon literature, and by the success of this first book, Anderson exclaimed in "A Plea for Fiction," an essay published in the first volume of The Improvement Era, “What a field is here {in Mormonism] for the pen of the novelist.” And he called for promotion, in the stakes of Zion, of "the good, pure, elevating" kind of literature.” In Added Upon, and in the nine novels which would periodically follow, ‘Anderson attempted to achieve just that. He worked with imaginative vigor to express his appreciation for the impact of the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on his life and the lives of all who had been, like him, caught in the gospel net. ‘Anderson's literary theory is therefore similarly singleminded and focused. In his short story, "At St, Peter's Gate,” published in The Improvement Era (1917), ‘Anderson tells of a painter, a singer, a writer of books, a physician, a businessman anda merchant, applying for entrance to Heaven. Each of them, however, had Gntered in life only to the wealthy--none of whom was present in the Heavens to festily in the petitioners’ behalf. The author, when asked if he had taught his readers great ideals, replied, "I never had patience with ‘purpose’ stories.” _Conse- quently, the, writer, Anderson leads us to believe, went straight to the Telestial ingdom--with the rest of the gifted but selfish artisans and businessmen.* “By all means let us have in literature, as in all else, ‘Art for Art's sake;” he wrote in "Purpose in Fiction’ in 1898, "only let us understand what art is.” And art, for him, meant purpose, for "Art deals with love, and God is love, Art deals with truth, and God is the source of all truth.” In "Purpose in Fiction,” Anderson succinctly states his literary creed and the central tenet of LDS Home Literature when he insists that "a good story is artistic preaching,” and that "a novel which depicts high ideals and gives to us representa tions of men and women as they should and can be, exerts an influence for good that is not easily computed" (p. 271). He concludes that the main object of litera- ture is not to provide amusement. "He who reaches the people," he writes, “and the story writer does that, should not lose the opportunity of ’preac! The process of change and self-realization through the gospel lies at the center of each of Anderson's novels and short stories. Since missionary work is the vehicle for preaching Mormonism and effecting such dramatic changes and insights, Anderson wrote about it, more or less, in all of his novels and stories. “Teaching the gospel to receptive minds is the keenest joy of missionary life," he writes in A Daughter of 74 Plea for Fiction,” Improvement Era 1 (Jan. 1898): 186-88. ®t St. Peter's Gate,” improvement Era, 21 (Nov. 1917): 45-50. Purpose in Fiction,” Improvement Era, 1 (Feb. 1898): 269-271.16 AML Annual 1987 the North; and in Romance of a Missionary he writes, in a typical passage: The missionary spirit burned within him, and drove out all fear. If the door was slammed in his face, he simply hummed softly a song . . . and then went to the next door. . After a time he declared that he would rather hold a good street meeting than to eat one of Sister McDonald’s splendid meals. There was Something exhilarating to the soul to have a large company of people stand and listen to the message which he was sent to deliver.” Anderson’s missionaries, sometimes weak and often vulnerable, grow mighty in the work long before the "long-sleeved envelope” of official release sends them back to their patiently waiting Utah sweethearts. But his missionaries are, after all, only catalysts for broken and contrite hearts; thus Anderson portrays, again and again, the pattern of truth-seeking, acceptance, trial, change, and gratitude. Harald’s father, in The Castle Builder, speaks for many ee characters when he says, "Thank God, thank God, the truth has come at last.” Such change is the dynamic force in all of Anderson’s plots and follows hard on the inevitable temptation and trial-whether after the irate parent has disinherited the young convert, or after the bewildered (and handsome) gentile lover has severed his felatonship with the newly baptized young woman. ‘The character must then undergo the agony of doubt and the consequences of his new Mormonness. But the hero or heroine inevitably triumphs over self, never to waver again. They change their lives, shed Babylon, and embrace the supposed loneliness of Mormonism only to be "surprised by grace” and the blessings which follow conversion-often in the form of material and romantic recompense. Despite this purposeful, didactic heresy, Anderson developed into a craftsman whose integration of the gospel message into his stories was increasingly subtle and skillful. Though dated, his novels are still generally readable, occasionally charming, often moving, and always faith promoting. ‘They are not as good as we would hope; but they are much better than some critics have led us to expect, reminding the reader, on occasion, of the works of such contemporary novelists as William Dean Howells, Edward Eggleston, and Winston Churenill. But the difference between ‘Anderson and other turn-of-the century writers remains profound: his novels are permeated with Mormonism, which he explores in unprecedented ways, He became the first Latter-day Saint to attempt a literary fusion of life, modern fictional modes, and Mormonism--a fusion which continues to challenge Mormon writers. As ‘Anderson’s ten novels attest, he grew increasingly adept at making that difficult fusion. 14 Daughter of the North (Salt Lake City: De Utab-Nederlander Publishing Co., 1917), p. 85. ‘Romance of a Missionary (Independence, Mo.: Zion’s Printing and Publishing Co., 1919), p. 25. 127he Castle Builder (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909), p. 192. <Cracroft: Nephi, Seer of Modern Times 17 Vv Nephi Anderson's first attempt at integrating Mormonism and realistic literature is a failure~a failure which has moved several generations of Mormon teenagers. In NAdded Upon (1898), Anderson attempts to follow Signe and Rupert and their friends “eth pre-morta'life and earth-life into the spirit world, through the millennium, and , into exaltation (with which he chose to deal in blank verse). The best antiions of the novel are those concerning earth-life, wherein Anderson prefigures his real strength--telling a good story. Even in these mortal sections of Added Upon, however, Anderson fails to pay attention to transitions, to necessary detail, or to logical character development. His protagonist, Rupert, moves from Norway to the American Midwest and West, through Proeeel success and failure and loss of his true love, only to find, at the point of Suicide, happiness in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ as taught to him by Signe, hom he ‘marries, and with whom he moves west once more, only to die in a construction accident. The story then continues to follow the couple--Signe laboring in mortality and Rupert in the spirit world--until they are reunited, resurrected, and eventually glorified. ‘Anderson’s avowed purpose, of course, is to demonstrate Mormon teachings (and some individual views) concerning relationships between the living and the dead, the Snbom and the living, and the importance of vicarious ordinances in behalf of the dead-concerns similarly underlined in such modern spin-offs of Added Upon as ‘Saturday's Warrior, Star Child, and My Turn on Earth. Often impatient and awkward with the vehicle of fiction at this early stage in his career, Anderson frequently stumbles in his ener to combine story and ser- mon. It is to his credit, however, that his section on the millennium shows imagina- tion and insight--and perhaps some indebtedness to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Back- ward (1888) and William Dean Howells’s A Traveller from Altruria (1894). Anderson depicts, for example, a visit to the Celestial City by the King of Poland, who is conducted on a tour and taught the Lord’s laws of social equality, economics, jovernment, and, of course, theology. The king learns that it is truly a blessing to ive in the holy city when George Washington, Martin Luther, and Socrates arrive, to pes to the children about history. The trio have been, the guide points out, "at the school of the prophets all morning, and now they come from the high school yonder. You see what advantages today's students of history have," he adds (p. 188). Evidence of artistic growth is abundant, however, in his second novel, Marcus King, Mormon? (1900). More tightly focused, with fewer characters and a smaller canvas, this novel follows Marcus King, a young minister, through his conversion to Mormonism, his rejection by his fiancee Alice Merton, his betrothed, because of his conversion, and his exodus to Utah, where he meets and eventually marries Janet Harmon, but not until he converts Alice to the gospel, nurses her until her death, and returns to Utah, Janet, and a temple marriage--to both of his loves, living and dead, ‘a deus ex Mormonia ending which appears in several of Anderson’s novels and short stories. 13Marcus King, Mormon (1900; reprint ed. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1916).18 AML Annual 1987 Marcus Mormon is occasionally clumsy in its execution, notably in King’s unnecessary confession at the end that he is the author but has written in third person because of modesty--a point of view which then forces him to explain lamel that passages written in praise of his character have been sneaked in by his wife Janet without his prior knowledge. Still, in Marcus King, Mormon, far superior to and far more readable than Added Upon, Anderson makes an interesting attempt to examine personal sacrifice on an individual and a collective level. In The Castle Builder (1902)! Anderson’s experimentation with technique continues, and with even greater success as he turns to Norway for his setting and relates the fortunes of Harald, a kind of Norwegian Horatio Alger who rises from rags to Mormonism, and his lovely Thora, a wealthy lass who eventually renounces all for Mormonism and Harald. __ Anderson’s developing technigue is seen in his obvious but sustained use of unifying symbolism--in a number of rose and castle-building images, for example-as well as in his soaring, romantic descriptions of Norwegian landscapes, which he attempts, often successfully, to parallel with beautiful gospel inscapes. “The Castle Builder, though sometimes overwritten, becomes Anderson's first real novel, and he manages to mute gospel preaching and underscore the realities of human psychology as his hero. and heroine make important accommodations in their lives because of ir new faith, In his fourth novel, Piney Ridge Cottage (1912), published a decade after The Castle Builder, Anderson sets the story in Utah and attempts to deal directly with the importance of marrying within the faith. Julia Elston, a cultivated and beautiful Mormon girl who rea e¢ Atlantic, Harper’s, and Ladies Home Journal--and the Church magazines-has her certain future with Glen Curtis temporarily disrupted when her handsome adopted half-brother, a confirmed and tenacious gentile, arrives from Chicago, falls in love with her, is softened by association with the Latter-day Saints, and is taught the gospel. The question throughout, however, is whether the gentile, Chester Lawrence, is converted to Julia or to Mormonism. Julia opts, after great internal turmoil, to marry Glen Curtis, who is called on a mission. He goes, of course, as "refusal [of a mission call]," Anderson teaches, "never enters the mind of a true Latter-day Saint" (p. 192). Chester, spurned, eventually leaves as well, heart- broken but true to his new-found faith. All ends well when Julia receives a belated but comforting spiritual witness that she has done the right thing. In Piney Ridge Cottage, Anderson portrays human psychology by dealing, with inner turmoil. He demonstrates clearly, and with a sophistication uncommon in Home Literature, that even when one lives a righteous life decisions are not always easy. It is only after Julia’s struggle and decision that she receives her spiritual confirma- tion. In this novel, Anderson also manages to use a passable dialect and to portray a mission: farewell party with such effective local color that the reader is reminded of Bret Harte and even Sarah Orne Jewett. The gospel, while integral to the book's fabric, is often made subsidiary or tangential to the drama being enacted in the misunderstandings and decisions of the major characters. The Castle Builder (1902; reprint ed., Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909). \Piney Ridge Cottage (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1912). aCracroft: Nephi, Seer of Modern Times 19 Piney Ridge Cottage has a weak sequel in The Story of Chester Lawrence (1913); in which Anderson takes the story of gentile cum saint Chester Lawrence to its fanciful but not very satisfyi conclusion. Trying to heal his wounds, Chester, while travelling by ship to d, meets and falls in love with the lovely but frail Lucy Strong. ester converts Lucy to Mormonism, much to the discomfort of her adopted minister father, who, it turns out, is Chester’s father. After some Greeks in England, Lucy, terminally il, is hastened homeward on an unseaworthy ship, which sinks. While the ship is and Anderson is taking utmost advantage of vate Lusitania anguish, Lucy dies of natural causes. Chester nobly gives the last place in the last boat to the Reverend Mr. Strong, who goes sorrowing to. Utah, where he joins the Church and will have the temple sealings performed in behalf of Lucy and Chester. The Story of Chester Lawrence, not nearly as successful as either The Castle Builder or Piney Ridge Cottage, is literarily one step backward, flawed as it is in its very conception. But there are successful moments as well, scenes which demon- vee that Anderson was still growing in his technique. He handles, for example, the various settings of Ireland, "England, Paris, and Lucerne in vivid prose and also ves his readers their first taste of Mormon proselytizing, as Chester, during his Fondon stay, accompanies the missionaries in their endeavors. ‘Throughout the book ‘Auierson eiso crafts an internal unity through the Lucy leitmotif. He also suggests very sublly the symbolic relationships between Chester's voyaging and his life. One of the greatest evidences of Anderson's development as a writer comes, however, in his next novel, A Daughter of the Non (19% ), clearly one of his best. "A Kind of reversal of The Castle Builder, A Daughter of the North examines the effects on Atelia Heldman, a lovely, wealthy, talented and nationally renowned Nor- Wegian boat-racer, of her conversion to Mormonism. Atelia, finding she cannot embrace both Mormonism and her beloved Halvor Steen, is tempted to recant, but remains firm and passes the conversion agony to Halvor, who eventually joins the Church after proving to himself that his conversion is genuine. The couple rejoice in their new-found Church and emigrate to Utah where they are sealed in the Salt Lake Temple. ‘A Daughter of the North, full of internal character turmoil, lovely settings, and believable conversation and plot, is an exciting novel. It is packed with several adventures, including fire and shipwreck, all set against the backdrop of Norway's spectacular fjords and painted on a Mormon canvas, not, merely sprayed with a Mormon veneer, Anderson's characters are real, as is their misery, their joy, their love, and their impatience in waiting for the happiness they eventually achieve. A Daughter of the North still reads well, and might be favorably compared with such second-ranked American novels as Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware or Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster. With John St. John (1917), however, Anderson suffers from a failure of focus and art, selling his simmering pot of fiction for an epistolary mess of Mormon his- 16The Story of Chester Lawrence (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1913). john St. John (Independence, Mo.: Zion’s Printing and Publishing Co., 1917).20 AML Annual 1987 tory. Like Marcus King, John St. John leaves a life of ease and wealth to inves- tigate Mormonism’s claims. He joins the Saints in Missouri, is converted, and in a long series of letters to his believing mother and his inane and lifeless fiancee, Dora, John relates the highpoints of LDS Church history through the Missouri and Nauvoo pero Dull Dora and her lovely sister Jane visit John and his mother in Nauvoo, it Dora continues to resist the faith while Jane becomes converted to Mormonism--and to John. This fragmented re-telling of early Church history is followed by a rushed postscript in which Anderson boggles the reader's mind by revealing that John St. John, prosperous and middle-aged, is now the husband of both pores ¢ dull and unbending gentile, and the vivacious, charming and believable jane. John St. John, while it depicts some notable scenes, is an artistic failure in which Anderson attempted to create in fiction that which he had already better accomplished in exposition in his A Young Folks’ History of the Church (1898).!® In his next novel, The Romance of a Missionary (1919), Anderson successfully follows Elder Willard Dean through his first faltering steps as @ missionary into a brief flirtation with English Saint Eisa Fernley, who reciprocates, causing him to flee the city and to come of age as an effective and mature missionary through his work among the lower classes in industrial England. Toward the end of his mission, Elder Dean helps send Elsa to Utah, where she marries Willard’s best friend. At the end of the book, Willard, still on his mission, is assured in a well-crafted prophetic daydream of a bright future with Grace Wells, his Utah beloved. In The Romance of a Missionary Anderson skillfully treats the English rural and urban contrasts and portrays several of his characters with a richness previously found only in A Daughter of the North. His missionaries have frailties as well as strengths, and among his Englishmen are authentic portraits of poor and distressed human beings, as well as believable portrayals of the middle class. Anderson weaves into the story a subplot involving a young woman cousin whose life has been bligh- ted by her lover’s alcoholism. Elder Dean is able to effect reform and conversion in the young man and eventual reconciliation with his fiancee. But Anderson is full of surprises. His ninth novel is totally different from his earlier works. The Boys of Springtown (1920) is a pleasant summertime idyll about William Wallace Jones, a young English convert to the Church sent to live with his aunt in Springtown, Utah, while his mother saves enough money to transport herself to the American West. Anderson unfolds, in a spritely and entertaining style reminiscent of the works of the Yorgason brothers, a number of adventures among the lively Mormon boys of Springtown.The book, lighthearted and charming, its Mormonness remarkably subtle, still reads well and continues to be read and appreciated (where it is available) as a kind of Mormon Tom Sawyer or Penrod. 184 Young Folks’ History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1898; reprint ed., Salt Lake City: Deseret Sunday Schoo! Union, 1916). 197he Boys of Springtown (Independence, Mo.: Zion's Printing and Publishing Co., 1920).Cracroft: Nephi, Seer of Modern Times 21 ‘Anderson caps his literary career with Dorian (1921) probably his best, and certainly his *Boldest novel. Dorian is the story of Dorian Trent, a small-town Mor- mon boy with intellectual abilities which have been fanned to white heat by Uncle Zed, the town philosopher and an avid disciple of Orson Pratt. Dorian, a reader of Dickens, Thackeray, Huxley, Ingersoll, and Thomas Paine, is sobered by the death of his first love, Mildred Brown, which turns him more fervently to p llosophy and away from practicality or any awareness of the unwavering love of his attractive neighbor, Carlia Duke. Dorian is first shaken into realization of his own feelings for Carlia by the attentions paid her hese Lamont, a traveling salesman with an automobile and dubious background. When Carlia disappears for several months, Dorian undertakes a search for her, only to learn that, months earlier, Jack had drugged and seduced Carlia, who had given birth to an illegitimate child, born dead. Dorian also discovers that Carlia, ashamed and fearful, remains in hiding. He eventually finds her and attempts to answer to himself the question, "Could he let his love for her overcome the repulsion which would arise like a black cloud into his thoughts?” (p. 190). Gradually he finds he can love her without qualification. Without revealing to Carlia that he knows of her baby, he takes her home, where she eventually confesses her fall, only to find that Dorian has known all along, having learned the lesson of the book: one must not only leam but also live the tenets of the theology one studies. ‘As the book ends, a year later, Carlia has nearly completed what Anderson calls a "period of purification’; and, after discussing their future plans for education and temple marriage, the sadder but wiser pair walk on, “hand in hand,” writes Anderson symbolically, "down into the valley of sunshine and shadow" (p. 223). Dorian is Anderson's mature novel, and it is generally a success. Artistically, ‘Anderson has come a long way. Gospel discussions among the characters continue to be important to the book, as in all of Anderson’s works, but in Dorian they often form a counterpoint with the ongoing life of the valley and are obstacles to Dorian’s real understanding of Carlia and life. The novel is real: in the foreground are serious human dilemmas and problems. Carlia’s victimization and Dorian’s ability to see beneath conventional disapproval and eventual willingness to marry her in the temple suggest a maturity and wisdom in Anderson’s final novel which makes it the success it generally is. Dorian recalls Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But unlike Angel Clair, Dorian demon- strates his owd Christion capacity to forgive. Carli is real she pouts, frets, grows angry, despairs. Dorian is real: he becomes angry, fights, swears, and irritates the reader in his short-sightedness regarding Carlia’s plight. All of this tempers Dorian’s Superior intellectual powers and genties him to believabiliy. His triumph comes in his struggle to harmonize his knowledge of science and Mormonism and in his accepting relationship with Carlia. Dorian also underscores a maturity not only in Anderson, but in his readers--or at least in Anderson's respect for his teaders--and fosters hope for a more sophis- ticated LDS Home Literature. With Anderson's untimely passing, however, such promise was left unrealized, for in the next half-century Home Literature, conforming to the enervating policies of the Church magazines, would fall far short of the Dorian (Salt Lake City: Bikuber Publishing Co., 1921).22 AML Annual 1987 promise to which Anderson had pointed at the end of his career. v Karl Keller proclaims that "literature cannot be theological tracts, with dogma abstracted, ideas preached, [and salvation] harped on,” and he insists that "Literature is seldom written, and can be seldom written, in the service of religion." Nephi Anderson, and unable as he was to separate creed from experience or art from belief, would strongly disagree. Still, while his work falls short of modem critical expectations, Anderson moved steadily from writing the dogmatic didacticism which Keller attacks toward more subtle portrayals of life as experienced by a man whose meat and drink and air were Mormon. His accomplishments should be instructive to modern Mormon writers, for, like many present writers, he was fascinated by the “flood subjects” of missionary and conversion experiences and by the old verities of repentance, personal worth, love, pride, humility, and spirituality. He attempted to deal with such themes in a way which is at once artistic and orthodox--a challenge which many current Latter-day Saints, captivated by Babylon, discuss, but few attempt, and fewer succeed in meeting. Unable to separate Mormonism out from the fibers of his art, Nephi Anderson tried very hard to turn his positive Mormon experience into significant art. In Anderson's successes and failures, in his steady progress from artless dogma to gently dogmatic art are lessons to be learned by modern Mormon readers, critics, and a whole new generation of writers. Additional Readings Anderson, Grant, "Added Upon: An Interpretation.” ‘Typescript. Americana Room, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. "Nephi Anderson" (obituary). The Improvement Era 26 (1923): 373-375. 21 “On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature.” Dialogue 4 (Autumn, 1969): 16.A Modern Stigma: "Cobwebs" Veda Tebbs Hale In a church and culture that places great emphasis on a person’s genealogy, where some refer to "chosen bloodlines,” John D. Lee’s descendants have walked in the shadow of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, learning not to flinch as it touches tender places. I am a great, great-granddaughter of John D. Lee and his first wife, Agatha Ann Woolsey. I'm not sure when I started thinking about writing a novel using the effects of this tragedy unto the fourth generation. For a long time, that backdrop has asked to be hung behind my life. I had felt predictable trauma when the mas- sacre was dealt with in Utah history and seminary. But in Panguitch, a fair per- centage in my class were also related to Lee, and I was in good company. fy grandmother, Hilda Prince Henrie Cammeron, lived to be ninety-one~and lived much of that time with heartache because of her grandfather. I have heard her tell about feeling shunned by certain teenage friends and their parents, and about how she felt on her mission when she had as a first companion Wilford Wood- ruffs granddaughter. This friendship caused so much unrest in Grandmother's mind it was only the tact and wisdom of a wise mission president that kept her from going home. In addition to such painful contrasts, her own father was known to say, when- ever tragedy came to the family, that it was "that damn Lee blood." I’m not sure how serious he was when he said such things, He could have had a personal resent- ment toward John D. Lee, however. He had been a poor boy dating John D.’s daugh- ter, and didn’t feel very welcome in the Lee home. This daughter, Louisa Evaline Lee, was supposed to marry a prosperous Salt Lake City polygamist, but she resisted the arrangements her father was trying to set up, so disgusting him that, when her poor, young suitor came to call, he stood them up before him and married them on the spot, predicting that they would always be poor. Louisa Lee Prince, was always loyal to her father, however. I realized that a few children were not when I moved to Kamas and met another John D. Lee grand-24 AML Annual 1987 daughter of my grandmother's age who never knew about any connection to John D. Lee until a few years ago when her daughter started doing genealogy. This woman was related through an older daughter who hadn’t gone south when the Lee family did and perhaps could never relate to conditions as they had been. The children who were close to their father through that challenging time passed on to their children and children’s children their conviction that John D. Lee was a good man. _ When I was first married, we lived in Japan, where my husband worked for a private company contracting with the government. It was a sophisticated, rich society, very foreign to my sheltered Mormon one. Once when my husband was in Korea, I was invited by the vice president, a well-educated man from San Francisco, to have dinner with him and his wife. Knowing I was from Utah, the man said he wanted to talk to me about my background. lere it is," I thought. "My chance to tell them about the Church.” Boy, was I ever going to have a good missionary story to tell! I went and was somewhat surprised to find myself the only guest for dinner at this long, graciously set table. "So you're from Southern Utah? I'm interested in ‘Western history, a buff of sorts. Tell me what you know about the Mountain Mea- dow Massacre.” That was all he wanted to know. The rest was a polite effort to keep his true opinion of the Church hidden. Disappointment? I was twenty-one and very naive, but I knew something about what he asked--from my grandmother. Her point of view was one that tried very hard to keep a good feeling about her progenitor, a strange combination of love, shame, resentment, and rationalizations, a view that was later greatly aided by Juanita Brook’s excellent book, Mountain Meadow Massacre, her editing of John D. Lee’s journals, and her biography of him. I had none of these resources at the time. I did my best with what I knew, and I'll always be glad I had the courage to admit my connection to John D. Lee, though I was tempted not to. But I was shaken by the experience. Three years ago I was thinking seriously about a novel using conflicts a fourth generation Lee descendant could have because of this tragedy, a tragedy big enough fo still be echoing. About the time I was ready to start work, my returned-mis- sionary-straight-arrow son, Glen, came home from BYU, took me aside, and confessed that he’d been going through a terrible time, that his testimony of the Church was being ‘Challenged, "A law student, and a boy who has always been concerned with justice, he was taking a Western history class and had been particularly put off by ow the teacher handled the massacre. That and other hard-to-take-facts from Church history had him in a frame of mind affecting his happiness and social life. Well, that all-too-close-to-home situation gave me the setting and at least a prototype ‘of one of the characters for my novel, “Cobwebs,” still unpublished. None Pr them, except the protagonist's old pickup truck, parallel anything or person alive today, though | have a hard time convincing Glen of that. ‘The title was originally “Cobwebs of Yesterday." a quotation by Joseph Smith: “Try the motions and actions of an eternal being by a thing that was conceived in ignorance, and brought forth in folly-a cobweb of yesterday! Angels would hideHale: A Moder Stigma: "Cobwebs" 25 their faces"! Perhaps I twisted the meaning to fit my purpose, but I like the words. ist, Raymond Lee, is a fourth-generation descendant of John D. Lee through te ines, A feted missionary at BYU, he has always been an obedi- following the counsel of his leaders diligently. Ripe and ready for love ! sat, Mormon, fol eternal marriage, he falls in love with a Gescondant of Brion Young but feels eon to pursue her. It’s unlikely he would have connected his insecurities with his genealogy, except for two things. ‘The first is an unusual roommate, Jacob Spinnerovich (Spinner), son of a Mor- mon mother and a Jewish father, very bright, very intellectual, and planning on a career as a psychoanalyst. He loves controversy and paradoxes, demanding that | Raymond and the other two roommates, Raymond’s cousins, face them head on with H him. He needles Raymond about being "brainwashed" and compels him to face the ambiguities of his background. The second pressure on Raymond is his Western history class, which brings him face to face with the massacre and other historical facts uncomplimentary to the Church. This week had been bad. Studying the Utah war of 1857 unavoidably led to the Mountain Meadow Massacre and John D. Lee. Crazy that a great, great- grandfather could reach out of the dust to make such a difference. But he did, and it mixed shame and doubts in a hot mudpot, burp-burping cynical negatives at his testimony. Brother Wasping’s words from the front of the amphitheater methodically tapped at his forehead, but he refused to let them in until they suddenly developed spikes. "And probably more than half of John D. Lee’s descendants are still bitter and inactive in the Church today . .." Raymond came upri How does he know? And if it’s true, that’s not | fair. Okay if God, Brigham Young, whoever, sacrifices one man, but half a huge posterity lost to the gospel because of it? How come I was missed? Or was I? He dropped his head in his hands. But why now? I don’t need this, And he thought how he used to think he was doing fine--moving right along. Eagle Scout, honor student, morally clean, mission~straight arrow, right up the ‘ol narrow path the prophets lay out, Next step temple marriage. ... Why couldn’t it be someone like Cheyenne? Why not Cheyenne? He thought about the girls he usually dated. Not quite Cheyenne’s class. What was it about him? What were the hang-ups Spinner said he had? Was it fair to blame them on background? Clothes, personality, whatever, he often felt left out and lonely. A mission had helped. ‘Oh that sweet certainty! Darn Spinner anyway! .. + Emotions sloshed back and forth, the secure, stable feelings of high school and the mission field being eroded by these tense new facts. "Brother Wasping? I have a question.” Raymond saw the irritating hand po up again—-Albert Neilsworth—-always interrupting, needling. Brother Wasping, ely hiding his annoyance, nodded permission to speak. "Well sir, if the Church is true, how could the proj hets and other leaders make all those speeches urs ing the people to resist? ft sure spoiled a lot of people's lives, making them thi they had to kill.” "Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1938), p. 203. be26 AML Annual 1987 Raymond pursed his lips and furrowed his forehead. Good question from Albert--for a change. Brother Wasping smiled, shook his head and looked at the floor. Then he looked up. "Do you think the apostles and prophets are always, in every in: Stance, right? Isn't that Mormon brainwashing? Maybe the people who made the true church’s history didn’t do everything so smart or even good. The words bung in the air like frozen shrapnel. The knot in Raymond's stomach doubled. He kneaded it with his fingers. Why didn’t they? It was God’s church. d had he been brainwashed? Spinner thought so. He leaned his face in his hands and looked at the floor.2 Later Spinner spells out the challenge: "Here a church’s-for the time being let's say the true church’s~tangle of circumstances challenging a trying-to-be-good man’s interpretation of loyal and obedience, and you wonder where the godly influences were when he need. ed them most.” "Yeah there’s that to wonder about." Then Raymond remembered some- thing he'd read in the special collections room and now repeated it quietly. “John D. said the heavens seemed turned to brass. Maybe that’s significant.” "Probably is,” Spinner agreed, then went on with his own thinking. “It’s a religious discipline contributing to a tragedy because it dares deal forcefully with the tangible world. And--now don't throw a fit over this one--it also has elements that remind me of the Nazis." “Nazis? How could... ? "Hang on there. Don’t you see? The Nazis were committed to an ideo- logy, too. ‘And they also interpreted it literally." "No way! That’s too much, Spinner.” "Okay. But ugly as it is, I still see some similarities. Frustrating circumstances, invasion of a people’s turf, unquestioning loyalty and obedience to authority--ideas for the salvation of a people--even a better-someone-die- -a-whole-nation perish precedent.” . .. Raymond groaned again and turned his face toward the window. "Okay, that’s all. Don’t you think we can wade out of this all right? Come on. Where’s your faith?” Jerking upright, Raymond almost shouted. "All you're doing is turning over a cowpie and counting uglies." Spinner laughed. "And breaking up your cowpie could make things grow greener, thicker. And the sun will kill the uglies." "Okay. Let me get this straight," Raymond emphasized. "You want me to 30 with you to the site of the Mountain Meadow Massacre, and you want help Because you're not happy being so loaded with traditions of your fathers. You think somehow helping me unload my family's tragic baggage will help you. 1 really don’t get it, you know.” ; "Yeah .. . well... it’s like I said. I want to see the gospel making a difference. You know. Be bigger than any family background or traditions, See? I'm asking" (p. 35). This philosophical /theological sparring is one thread in the novel. The other is Unpublished manuscript, p. 14.Hale: A Modern Stigma: "Cobwebs" 27 the romance between Raymond and Cheyenne, who, despite her impeccable lineage, is a simple country girl from a cattle ranch, dealing with her own PorPlexities and fears at BYU. ¢ massacre, Raymond’s relationship to John D. , and the in- securities Spinner argues are connected with his heritage can be seen as obstacles that must be overcome before a satisfying romantic conclusion ends the book. Hardly Harlequin! Raymond reaches his separate peace to find a purely religious answer, finding in the power of Christ’s atonement a way of moving beyond the debris deposited in his life from his past. He also intellectually works through a personally satisfying answer for why God permitted the massacre. At Mountain Meadows, he challenges Spinner’s skepticism: "How is it? What do you mean, how is it? Look, Spinner, maybe I don’t know exactly how, but i’s‘all right. What do you say we just open up the gospel and, without all the questions answered, use our free agency to pick up and set ourselves smack dab in the middle of it? That's the fast lane, pal, past any dreary consequences of the past.” "It sounds like you did get some answers." "Answers? Not the kind you'd probably like to package up and take home. I simply chose to keep aiming for the heart--to hang in there, no matter what." ‘Spinner’s laugh was crisp-cynical. "No more questions, huh? Place geting to you? Making you like your granddaddy?” aymond thought he knew what Spinner meant and a discord slipped into the delicate balance. He picked pa stone and raised it to throw out across the field. "Ah, come on, man.” en before he released it, he turned and stared at Spinner. What's the matter?" Spinner laughed. “You see ghosts after all?” "Ghosts? No. I’m just letting something sink in. What happened here didn’t stop the Church. But it helped deflect it, and maybe it needed it. 1 mean... look man, look at what happened after this. A bad time, but the Church let go of some literal interpretations--practices even--polygamy, talk about blood sacrifices, United Order, isolationism--things that could have kept it from becoming the world church it is today. Spinner didn’t interrupt. Raymond went on. "A restoration of all things had to happen. But then . . . I don’t know. Maybe there just needed to be a slight change in direction and something pretty big and awful had to happen to help bring it about. You know, like war opening up a country to missionary work." __In this way, Raymond sees his ancestor, who had devoted so much of his life to being a kingdom builder and who, on first analysis, appeared to have ended it creat- ing a bitterly difficult time for the Church, as actually having helped events take place that changed Church emphasis, allowing it to survive and grow to be a world- wide church, His spiritual reconciliation with the facts of his past and his own insecurities comes when he and Cheyenne are sitting in church together: The Sunday School teacher used the allegory of the olive tree from the fifth chapter of Jacob in the Book of Mormon to show that God took care to preserve the children of Israel. Raymond listened in a detached way. Sudden-28 AML Annual 1987 ly, another meaning sprang out of the allegory. He could hardly wait for the break between meetings so he could share it with Ch ne. y "It’s so simple,” ¢ told her as they walked down the hall to the water fountain. "Didn't it take a lot of grafting and pruning to keep the original Olive tree root alive and producing good fruit? And you can't pick up the pruned off limbs and make a judgment about the worth of the root.” Cheyenne’s eyes shown. "So you're saying if some of the Church's history doesn’t seem to fit today’s standards then you see it as a pruned-off limb?" "Yes, that’s what I see," he whispered. “The root is always good. I feel we've come along a littered path, and now the way is more clear.” Did she sense all that he meant? ‘During sacrament meeting, he let the allegory expand until it shredded the hard-to-take facts from the past and let them burn with his joy. It was a time of a tense spiritual lift, and he opened his Pearl of Great Price and wrote in the margii By abe Thirteenth Article of Faith, "burn away the prunings. Seek the good." Wasn’t the Church now a better church? Free from some of the branches grafted in when the root was young and weak? He partook of the sacrament with thanksgiving and deep reverence (p. 92). A year ago, I went to a Lee reunion held at Lee’s Ferry. It was hosted by the John Amasa Lee branch, interesting because John Amasa was the child blessed speci- fically by his father, John D. Lee, to be the protector of the family name. Descen- dants of this man ‘have largely stayed in the Church and now feel that a family effort should be made to do missionary work among other branches to try to bring all of John D. Lee's descendants back. They have established the Lee's Ferry Foundation with the of encouraging the perpetuation, and preservation places associated with Lee, especially Lonely Déll hear Lee's Ferry in Arizona, ey’ve already arranged to work with the Forest Service to help make the Lonely Delf ranch into a living museum, where Lee artifacts can be displayed and where the family can hold reunions--working reunions. While there, I was impressed with how many bore strong resemblance to John D. Lee-the sober, angular face, the thick steel-gray hair. But more than the physi- cal resemblance, I was deeply moved by the kinship of tough spirits, particularly that of ninety-three-year-old Aunt Effie Richardson who read the keynote address. She could have had someone else do it. She wore a patch over one eye because of cancer, had a cataract on the other, had a son on each side to hold her up, and a grandson to shine a powerful camp lantern on the paper. But with the help of a great magnifying glass, her brave old voice rang out above the winds of the canyon. I thought of one of the toughest Mormons and colonizers there ever was, this woman's grandfather and my great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, standing near that same spot, chastising a group of Mormons for not having enough gumption to go on into Arizona and secure the land for the Church. fter having been over that desolate land that day and having read about what he and his brave wives and children accomplished amid hardships hard to fathom, I thought, "Good for you, Aunt Effie." A ninety-three-year-old-body, cancer, and cataracts wouldn't have stopped John D. either, not if he felt it was his responsibility. I just hope I've inherited some of that gumption. That's part of the tragedy, that characteristics so admirable and needed forHale: A Modern Stigma: "Cobwebs" 29 eat accomplishments, were used to trigger and carry through a diabolical massacre. ie paradox is tormenting. John D. Lee went through it after being resigned to the facts. He did it the way he dealt with every other obstacle of his life, with deter- mination and practicality. Had it not been for that impossible predicament, his name would likely have been as tly revered as Jacob in’s, and his descendants would have had help building more financially and emotionally secure lives. But they've survived well in spite of it. And now for the third, fourth and fifth genera- tions, that very tragedy might help weld us together into a strong family organiza- tion unique in the Church today.A Distant Influence: Tum Again Home Herbert Harker Up through the soles of our feet, in through the light of our eyes, from the scrolls of our brain, gush mysterious, unrelenting, sometimes atavistic tides that carry our lives this way and that. Their origin no one knows, but they are manifest to us in nameless dreads, inexplicable longings, intimations ‘of lost tradition, flashes of in- spiration, fable, myth, and prantom memory. Some of these forces may be genetic, so deeply imbedded in us that, even while we obey them, we have no idea that they exist. An example might be the way my younger brother has of standing slightly stooped over, with his hands behind his back, in a way very like my grandfather used to stand--a man who died before my brother was born. Some of these forces may be historical or handed down from father to son. In my own case, there is the matter of ice cream cones. My father considered it unseemly to lick an ice-cream cone--you bit it, whether it hurt your teeth or not. And so, if I wanted an ice-cream cone, I didn’t lick it, I bit it. ‘The result is that to this day, in spite of years of patient instruction by my wife, I still don’t know how to eat an ice cream cone, and always end up with messy hands, and ice-cream dripping off my elbow. (The fact that I stil kind misplacing responsibility for the mess each one’s life is in.) (If'I can’t blame iny father Pil Blame humanity) lame my father is I suppose, another example of human- We try to shift the burden, to get out from under, to disconnect. But we can’t. The threads are there, already in place. Trying to disconnect ourselves from the past is like a child with honey on its fingers trying to get rid of a feather. If you pull one of the threads in South America, a leaf twitches in Outer Mongolia If uu drop a shoe in 1066, its thump is heard in 1944. Can we doubt that, if joreau had died in his youth, Ghandi might have lived another ten years? Truly, no man is an island. You never have to ask for whom the bell tolls, or for whom the birds sing, or the battle rages, or the planets collide. They collide for you. And you brush your teeth for them. Picture an equatorial sea. Place a ship in the middle of it, about the size of a silicon chip. From horizon to horizon nothing else is visible. As we approach, we see that the sails hang slack, unrufiled by either wind or current. Now we canHarker: A Distant Influence 31 make out the sailors lying about the deck, dead or dying of thirst. One young lad, seareely more than a boy, manages a final prayer, and to his startled ears there comes an answer: "Let down the bucket where you are.” With his last scrap of strength he lowers the bucket, and brings up, sloshing in its bottom, a couple of inches of water. He dips his fingertips and licks them. The water is fresh, To the sailors, it is a miracle. To you and I, who have heard the story before, the miracle was no more than the Amazon River, almost two hundred miles away, emptying into the ocean. Imagine a river, flowing into the ocean with such ponderons force that two hundred miles from shore it maintains its purity and still has power to save a dying sailor. These are the kind of currents I speak of, that miles or years from their source, seem to flow out of nowhere, and lap against our hearts. I was raised in the Church, but I was over thirty years old before I heard of Mountain Meadows. A Catholic friend told me about it, with smug satisfaction. From that small crack of information the door gradually swung open, until when I finally read the book by Juanita Brooks, the ghastly event stood naked before me. I was horrified. I felt a black tide rising inside me, and the taste of the Amazon in my mouth. One of my first thoughts was gratitude that none of my people had been in- volved. That was followed by a moment of shock--though I was born in Canada, all my grandparents had come from Utah. I didn’t know that none of them had been involved. In fact, I couldn’t know it. I would never know it. Finally I realized that it didn’t matter whether a blood connection existed between me and Mountain Meadows--If they were not my family, they were my people. They were elders in the, Church; their faith was my faith; their God was my God--their guilt was my guilt. Did I suppose that my own grandfather, in the same circumstances, would not do the same thing? My own father, for that matter? I almost felt as if I had been there: as if I had carried a gun and "done my duty." And I tried to imagine the unendurable crush of circumstance that would have driven me, or John D. Lee, to the extremity. If there is one thing that fiction writers share, it is the impulse to deal with the terrors of their life in a fictional way. Ross Macdonald compared his detective hero, Lew Archer, to a welder’s mask that enabled him to deal with dangerously hot material. As the unwanted knowledge of Mountain Meadows sank deeper and deeper into my consciousness, I knew that someday I would try to deal with it by writing about it imaginatively. Tum Again Home was not originally conceived in response to this decision, however. e first draft contained nothing about the massacre, nor much of any- thing else, as it turned out. I needed some unifying force or incident, and it was only in later drafts that Mountain Meadows became a part of the book. Still, it can be considered an effort to reach some accommodation--to bring Mountain Meadows into a manageable perspective, where I can look at it and not wince. It proved to be a palliative, not a cure. But let me read a passage which I think contains the32 AML Annual 1987 essence of my atte A few years after the turn of the century, Alma, a man who has been hounded by vague demons all his life, disappears on his fevenny-seventh birthday, | His youngest son, Jared, undertakes the search for his father. He is unsuccessful, but he does expose ‘some of the dark secret his father had tried to keep. Circumstances lead him unknowingly into the home of Hickory Jack, the man who had murdered his father; he even marries Hickory Jack's daughter, Kelly, and fathers his grandson, John. One night Hickory Jack is left to care for John, but he gets drunk and vio- lent. The little boy runs away and, for a time, is lost. Now, at last, Jared has learned that Alma is probably dead, and that Hickory Jack probably killed him. With John riding behind his saddle, he hurries into the mountains to find Hickory Jack and take his revenge. Jared rode south across the empty land of the Indian Reserve, his small son clinging behind the saddle. He felt as if he could not rest until his work was done. Then there would be time enough to rest--years of it; eons, perhaps. Today's sun was almost gone. Riding through the trees as they approach- ed the pasture, they passed through intermittent light and shadow. fared Tested his hand on the pommel of the saddle as if that pressure were enough to mute the sound of the horse walking through the grass. He seemed to start inwardly each time her hoof clicked against a branch or stone--why, he couldn't say. He wasn’t trying to sneak up on Hickory Jack, at least not in a piysical sense. ‘As they approached the camp Jared saw the old man bent above the fire, stirring his supper with a wooden spoon. He looked back across his shoulder when he heard them, then raised himself, turning. “Praise the Lord," he breathed, looking at John. Jared stopped his horse. His senses all rushed to the surface; coolness came, control, er--and a keenness of vision that enabled him to look into the depths of Hickory Jack’s soul. The pond of guilt had laid there putrefying all these years, and he had never seen it before--never even sensed it. "Supper’s ready,” Hickory Jack said. Leaving the spoon in the kettle, he came over beside them and raised his hands to lift John down. Jared turned his horse so her rump shoved Hickory Jack away, then swung down and lifted John to the ground. Jared couldn’t eat. Despair and misery clogged his throat, his whole body felt distended with hate. Hickory Jack was silent. He didn’t even ask about Jobn--where he’d been or where they’d found him. When the boy had finished his supper Jared made a bed on the ground and tucked him in. For a while then, he and Hickory Jack sat on opposite sides of the fire. "Sunset," said Hickory Jack, looking at the sky. "Best time of day. Work all finished. Chores done. Nothin’ ahead but sleep." He looked at Jared. "I know what you’re thinkin’. And I guess you're right. I’m the wust grandfather in creation.” I can’t even remember what I done." He looked at his grandson’s face turned toward the fire. "Look at him-asleep already. Rosie, I'd dig out my good eye ‘fore I'd hurt that boy, you know that. I had a thousand devils in me that night.” Jared didn’t reply. ; ae "I been drunk before, but never like that. That liquor had nails in it. He waggled his head. "I ain’t never gonna touch the stuff again.” Jared said,"I know what happened to my father.” “Well, I’m glad that’s settled.” "I didn’t say it was settled.”Harker: A Distant Influence 33 "No, you didn’t.” Hickory Jack took out his pocket knife and began to dig into the bowl of his pipe, shaking the ashes out onto the ground "What hap- pened to your pa, anyway?” "You ought to know." “How would I know?” "You killed him, didn’t you?" . Hickory Jack stoked his pipe, lit it, and sucked until the bow! glowed red. “Why would do a thing like that?" "You don’t deny it?” “That means I'm guilty? Rosie, if I could kill a man, do you suppose I'd gag ona little fib?” . , . "No." His spirit seemed to descend through his rage into a cool merciless plateau. "Just tell me one thing: where did you bury him?" would I want to kill your pa?" Sitting on the log, Jared took the six-gun from his boot, and as he straightened he pointed it at Hickory Jack. "Remember this gun?" ‘The old man whistled. "Where did youput my father’s body?” Hickory jack hitched at his belt and drew his shoulders back. “You gonna shoot me, Rosie? I don’t think you got the mustard.” "Don’t count on it." "Takes a special breed to be able to kill a man.” “A breed like you, Hick?” “It’s hard. You'll find out. You think you're all worked up to it, but when the time comes, it’s hard." “Then you admit it?” “There’s only one thing. Bein’ as how it is hard, a feller has to be sure of his facts. Dead certain. If he ain’t, he could never do it." "P'm certain enough.” "What do you know? That your daddy and me were in the same township when he took off? Fish, you might as well hang the mayor." "You're forgetting the gun. Father had it with him when he disappeared. ‘And then one night you get drunk and haul it out from under your bed, and start shooting,” "Maybe I traded your pa--a cow for a gun. Kid, you don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. You couldn’t send a blind nigger to the workhouse on evidence like that." "That's the advantage I have," Jared told him. "I don’t have to prove a thing. _ The gun was heavy. Jared noticed its muzzle beginning to droop. He raised it with fresh resolution. Hickory Jack went on. "I hope you don’t make a career of this, Rosie. You wouldn’t last a week." The smoke puffed from his lips like silent cannon fire. "Would you like some good advice?” “Not from you.” "Never start somethin’ you can't finish. Ain't nothin’ harder on your self- respect. You're not some green kid any more, you know. You're a man, or supposed to be." Jared stared into the darkness. He seemed to be part of it, made from the same substance, a heavier lump that had settled to the bottom of the night. Perhaps if he sat there long enough, he would dissolve and his particles slowly drift upward among the stars.34 AML Annual 1987 “Forget the whole thing," Hickory Jack said. "You take my advice, you'll forget it. What chance have you got, after seven years? Whatever happened to your pa, you can’t help him now." "Did you kill him, Hick?" Hickory Jack sighed. "Kid." For a long time he didn’t say any more They sat across from each other in the light from the fire. ¢ old man shrugged. "Go ahead. Shoot me." en it really was you?” "You see. You don’t know. And there is no way for you to ever find out. Give it up, Rosie.” He smiled, but sadly, without humor, and slowly shook his head from side to side. "You'll never know. That’s what I keep telling you. You've got to forget it.” | "I can’t forget it.” "Not your father-I don’t mean that. Forget what happened to him Forget this mystery.” “Am I getting too warm for you, Hick?" “You still don’t understand, do you? Even if you kill me, you won’t know. You think you can bull your way ‘head and find out what you want by plain Strength and orneriness. “It doesn’t happen that way. You have to draw back and watch. Don’t touch anything. Watch." aaicty what?" "Everybody. Everything. I had a father too, you know.” | "You're not making any sense, Hick." a “Before we left Missouri, he said to me .. ." Hickory Jack stopped. It was as if a sudden gust hit Jared’s memory, and his mind turned like a weather vane. "You never told me you lived in Missouri.” "Yah. I was a kid in Missouri.” "What did your father tell you?" "It doesn’t matter. I can’t remember what I was talking about." Hickory Jack stood up and started to break up a board. Jared looked at the six-gun, turning it so he could see the handle in the fire- light. The crude image scratched into the walnut handle was of a long-legged, short-necked cat. “Missouri Wildcat," Jared muttered. . Hickory Jack was making a lot of noise, stomping on the board and twis- ting it. "Eh?" he said. "Where did this gun come from, Hick?” “How would I know? It’s your pa’s gun, you said.” "But before that?” "Why ask m "You killed him with it, didn’t you?" Jared pulled back the hammer. He felt the trigger emerge from its recess in the handle, hard and cold against his finger. Killing was such a simple thing. Just squeeze his finger-how far? Less than half an inch. Hickory Jack swung the board and knocked the gun from Jared’s hand. It glinted with firelight as it tumbled through the air, hit the ground and bounced Into the grass. Both men dived for it, but met halfway and tumbled over and over, each trying to hold the other back. Hickory Jack was surprisingly quick and strong for an old man with a wounded arm. ; “T've got it!” he huffed suddenly, and pulled away, Jared saw the shine of metal in his hand. Hickory Jack rose and backed toward the fire, the gun barrel as steady asHarker: A Distant Influence 35 a bridge, pointed at Jared, "Now the shoe's on the other foot, kid. I told you to forget it, but you wouldn’t listen.” jared sat upon the Fass. *] like you, Rosie. You're the father of my grandchild.” You did do it," Jared breathed. "You see that spot yonder, back under the trees where the grass is a little longer? That’s your pa.” ‘Jared stumbled over and knelt beside the hump of grass. A shudder passed through his body. He felt hollow. Until now, nothing had struck him with the sense of loss that this lonely grave did. He tried to remember his father. It was amazing how quickly fife’s ashes cool, once the fire is out. He could remember times, events, even conversations ‘shared with his father, but he could not regain the living pulse of that ‘companionship. Worse, he discovered that in jis mind’s eye he could not remember his father’s face. He felt a sense of. guilt and shame. He whispered, "He was just @ harmless old man. How could you kill him?" “| was like you.” "What do you mean?" tWalth, Ptold you. Watch everybody. Everything. That's what I did for nigh on saty years, Every day watching, watching ..." "Watching what?” "Everybody. Everything. Watchin’. Listenin’. One day in Salt Lake City, I heard a man call your daddy *Alma,” Ain't too many Almas in the world. I followed him to Canada, watching’ all the while, see if he was the right one.” Hickory Jack had slowly lowered his hand, until his arm hung straight, stretch- td at his side by the weight of the gun. He turned away from Jared and Jooked at the flames. ‘Jared said, "I don’t understand what you're talking about.” *[ was at Mountain Meadows,” Hickory Jack said. "You've heard of Moun- tain Meadows?" There was a Tong silence. "See, I was just_a little kid. Not much older’n John there. I couldn't remember your appy's face, but I knowed re ame. Aima. I'd never forget that. But how could f tell he was the right one? I didn’t know. I got me a ranch, and I watched." Like a man ina dream, he took his seat on the log. "I had to be sure- if I wasn’t sure, the right one would get away." He turned toward Jared. "Cold, kid? Come on. Set a little closer to the fire.” Jared didn’t move. ‘After a minute Hickory Jack looked back into the flames. "I was just a little kid. How did I know what was happening? These men seemed so friend- ly, comin’ to save us. ‘When they started to take us out of there, I near fell ty blubberir’ Twas so happy. You ever been in an Indian fight?" "No," Jared said. "I got in the wagon with the other kids, and I even prayed to God--I thanked Him we was safe at last.” Hickory Jack pressed one palm against his face and lifted it, as if blotting up the heat from the flames. "Suddenly they started to shoot. First they shot the wounded men in the wagon. Then the Indians came and started to kill the women and the older kids. I got out of the wagon and ran back to my pa, He was fighting with one of the men. 1 tried to help him, but the other man got the gun and shot hi shot him with his own gun, Then he turned and ran, carrying the gun in his hand. I heard somebody call him--‘Alma!” Jared didn’t say anything.cr ell 36 AML Annual 1987 “They loaded us kids in a wagon and took us to a ranch somewhere. Some of the kids went to live with Mormons. I never did. I ended up in an or phanage in St. Louis. As soon as I was old enough, I came back to Utah and started to look." ‘After a long while Jared said, "How did you find out it was him?” ‘When I saw the gun." Hickory Jack held the pistol on his open palm. “It was my pa's " “Your father was one of the Missouri Wildcats?” "That day at the birthday party, when I saw the gun, I knew your pappy was the one. I knew, at last.” Jared sighed, a sort of spasm that worked its way up his throat, *Sixty years!” “Hickory Jack shook his head. “Sixty years with my gut ful of bile and eyes dry, watchin’." Jared stood up. His rage seemed to create a new sense in him compound: ed of all the others, as though sight and sound and feeling had melted down fato a single nerve end that moved ahead of him, searching out its victim. "What happened to the horse, Saratoga?” "I took him across the line and sold him.” With a roar Jared leaped straight through the flames at Hickory Jack. The old man raised his arm as if to shield himself. When the gun went off, its flash was pointed upward. The force of Jared’s charge knocked the gun from Hae ory Sack’s hand and the young man dived for it, grasped it, rolled, and pointed it at the other. He pulled back the hammer. Hickory Jack stood over him, motionless, looking down. A thrill ran through Jared, a strange, exultant wave. Across the sight of the gun-only a nick of bright metal in the firelight-he could see Hickory Jack’s face, see the pores inside the pockmarks on his cheeks. He fixed his sights on the middle of at face. ‘His hand wavered slightly. His body throbbed with dread. Still he was determined; he was capable. He drew down on the gun with both hands, steadying it. ‘A voice said, "Daddy.’ Hee ohn, wakered by the shot and sitting up in his bed on the ground. "Daddy. What are you doing?” One of the continuing questions about Mountain Meadows is whether Brigham Young ordered it, encourage it, forbade it, or knew nothing about it until later. In the same year my book was published, a new historical work by a non-Mormon writer appeared which concluded that Brigham Young had ordered the killing of the emigrants. Many of us think otherwise, and ty 10 prove it. In our search for | exoneration we clutch at straws, as if, could we but show that Brigham Young had nothing to do with the massacre, that would somehow make it all right. It won't Work, of course. Brigham's standing as a prophet does not depend on his role in Mountain Meadows, nor does his involvement or detachment have anything to do with the horror of the massacre itself, No insights can mitigate that horror. It remains, Ser everything else has been explained away. There can be. no explanation; the best we can do is try to understand, however imperfectly, and pity the people caught on both sides of that terrible encounter. ‘Jum Again Home (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 234-41. eelRomantic Lyric Form and Western Mormon Experience an oupias Thayer's "Under the Cottonwoods’ ‘and "Opening Day" Bruce W. Jorgensen The place of Mormon fiction in either the proad tradition of English and American literature or the narrower regional tradition of Western American literature may Mteranwe more than minor; yet a place it is ‘and in this essay I mean to take at least a first few tentative steps toward mapping it. It can ‘be maintained that before the 1970s there was 10 viable, visible, literarily serious traditon in Mormon short fiction, so that in the mid1960s, when a tevitalized BYU Studies and the nascent Dialogue began to offer ‘Mormon-oriented but ‘ron-Church-supervised outlets for ‘serious Mormon fiction, a pioneer generation of writers such as Douglas H. Thayer, Eileen Gibbons Kump, and Donald R. Marshall began to create such a tradition out of eaeen wn experience as Utah Mormons, their pererstanding of their peculiar reli- gious heritage, and those elements of their larger literary heritage that spoke most deeply ‘D their private sense of experience, that interpreted it and offered ways of working with it. Douglas Thayer in particular seems to have done this, whether consciously or not, by adapting @ major form of Romantic lyric poetry to Western Mormon ex- Ren nce and consciousness, but in ways that also uestion and undercut this form. jayer's characteristic strategy in the stories of Under the Cottonwoods which is te Dilow the introspective and retrospective processes ‘of a character through some brief, decisive interval in his life, seems to me @ fairly clear translation of what M. H. Abrams has called "the greater Romantic lyric’? into the terms of the short story, usually handled called jirg-person limited-omniscient or “central consciousness” point of view. ‘Under the Cottonwoods and Other Mormon Stories (3977; reprint ed, Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983). Dgtructure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 201-229.38 AML Annual 1987 This strategy, which may derive most directly from such a story as Irwin Shaw’s "The Eighty-Yard Run" (which Thayer admired and often taught in short story courses in the sixties), so consistently operates in Under the Cottonwoods as to become a sort of signature or hallmark that some readers have found irritatingly re- petitive-here’s another "Thayer story." Insofar as all the stories in the volume do play variations on that strategy, such a response is valid; but perhaps it is also rather like a partially trained listener’s reaction to a series of string quartets: large similarities of structure and treatment may seem to outweigh subtle texture, key, motif, which only patient re-hearing may disclose. differences in For me, Thayer’s use of the Romantic strategy raises two somewhat more serious literary questions: First, does the essentially lyric mode Thayer has adapted get in the way of narrative? Thayer's Mormon religious heritage commits him to a Strong belief in personal agency, hence (one might infer) to a strongly dramatic or narrative sense of experience, and hence to a conviction (declared more than once in public) that Mormon fiction will emphasize strong plots; with Aristotle, he might hold That “fife consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is their actions that they are happy or the reverse." Yet the action of most stories in Under the Cottonwoods is almost entirely mental, internal, as if in trying to pursue the subtle motions of agency into its subjective recesses, Thayer had lost sight of how and where it issues into light, into actual changes in space, time, and relation. Second, does the Romantic form, which, though partly derived from the "spiritual exercises" of Jenatian meditation, Tests on a secularized and psychologized interpretation of the fall and redemption,* obstruct Thayer's use of the potent religious mythos of fall and redemption that is central to his theological heritage? Two stories, "Under the Cottonwoods" and "Opening Day," reveal how Thayer both adapts Romantic lyric as a usable part of his literary heritage and, because of his Mormon heritage, subverts it. Thayer's use of Romantic lyric form is most apparent in the title story of the volume, whose mood is very close to what Romantic poets called “dejection,"S and specifically close to the mood of the first strophes of Wordsworth’s "Ode: Intimations ot Immortality,” and whose structure could readily be described in the language M. H. ‘Abrams used to define "the greater Romantic lyric." Such poems, Abrams has written, present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on ... . a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene .... The speaker begins with a descrip- tion of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a | varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which Temains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this medita- 3Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (New York: n.p., 1895), V1:9-10. ‘thi, pp. 225-28; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supematuralism (New York: Norton, 1971), chs. 1, 3, & Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 24-39. 5 Abrams Natural pp. 123, 328, 329, 335, 420, 442-48, and Abrams, “Lyric,” p. 225.Kr <—_oO3<_ © Jorgensen: Romantic Lyric and Mormon Experience 39 tion, the lyric speaker achieves an. insight, faces up to 2 tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotion: problem.* Further on, Abrams cites Wordsworth’s device of "two consciousnesses,” in which "a scene is revisited, and the temembered image (‘the picture of the mind’) is superim- posed on the picture before the eye; the two landscapes fail to match, and so set a Problem ('a sad perplexity’) which compels the meditation.” "Under the Cottonwoods’ fits this paradigm remarkably well, if we allow that the protagonist has already begun his meditation as he approaches his revisited scene. Paul, a successful West Coast dentist, stops at an interstate highway rest area near the Provo River, close to a spot where he used to swim as a boy; but since his boyhood the river channel has been. dredged for flood control, the swimming hole is one, and the present landscape will not oa ich the recollecied one; the mismatch re ee the outward sign and incitement of the inward "sad perplexity” which com- pels Paul’s meditation. As Paul approaches on the highway, he remembers how "The cottonwoods were like a great green tent, the river making everything cool in spite of the hot Utah desert gun. And they swam, dived, swung out 02 their rope swing, had water fights, layed tag, their brown naked wet bodies flashing in the sun like metal when they ne the shade” (p. 160). The almost ecstatic rhythms of the prose tell us, before Paul stops the car and consciously reflects on it, that "he had been ‘alive there under the trees, full of a kind of freedom, Sensation, and pure careless joy he had never Knoun afterward, a sense of being" (p. 161). His wife Beth protests the stop. She is “five months pregnant” and “counting, miscarriages, it was her seventh pregnan in the nine years they had been married” (p. 155), and she wants ‘to clean up the kids before they drive into ‘Provo to Paul’s parents’ home. But Paul. squeezes be ween the chainlink fence and the bridge abutment, crosses the dry river channel, goes under the freeway bridges and across a hayfield to the place where the big cottonwoods still stand, “some of them six OF coven feet thick and eighty feet high,” though "the hundred-yard-wide band of Seven cand trees along both sides of the river was Bone except for the big trees” (p. 161). ‘Under the cottonwoods, where he finds that “with the water gone the teal cooler ras gone 100" (p. 162), Paul seems to feel, as does Wordsworth’s lyric speaker, that ‘There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, ‘The earth, and every common sight, "To me did seem ‘Apparelled in celestial light, ‘The glory and the freshness of a dream, (lines 1-5) S Lyric,” p. 201. TBpid., p. 206.40 AML Annual 1987 but that now, in sad contrast, “the things which I have seen I now can see no more" 9) and “there hath ‘away a glory from the earth” (1. 18). Like Wordsworth’s , of many, one" (I. 52), Paul’s cottonwoods "speak of som that is gone” (I. 54). What we are most immediately aware is gone for Paul is a joyously con- nected by "sensation all over" (p. 162) to water, to light and heat, to ihe trout the boy fished for. More precisely, it is an embodied self that in innocent consciousness was at one with itself and its world, at one in that "sense of being.” As Abrams remarks, the “scene revisited" often "evokes in memory the lost self of the speaker's youth’; and the meditations generated by the disparity of Now and Then “often turn on crises--alienation, dejection, the loss of a ‘celestial light’ or ‘glory’ in experi- encing the created world.” _,, Romantic "dejection” is a rather secularized and chologized version of the Biblical fall of man; and Paul’s dejection, while profoundly Romantic in tone, is quite specifically Wasatch-front Mormon in nature and origin: his lost self became lost partly as a result of suppression for the sake of the abstract ideas of “perfection” and of "being an example"--which Paul now judges was regarded as "more important than being a person" (p. 157)--and partly out of a religiously conditioned fear of erotic connection with nature, a fear that has left an agonized vacuum that no grace offers to fill, at least none that Paul can recognize. . Whether these motives operate in parallel or in some logically necessary series, they constitute what might be termed a "Puritanical" strain in Mormonism--distrust of nature and displacement of piety by work ethic or success ethic--which the story portrays as spritually devastating. Taught by his mother that "everything you do is a reflection of yourself" (p. 164), Paul has "spent his life trying to achieve the happiness and perfection his mother wanted for him, and now he was doing it for Beth” (p. 160). He has believed that "work was moral" and has become “frantic about time," measuring it by "money earned and things accomplished, Boy Scout and priesthood awards and badges wor! (pp. 164, 165); he has accepted as his own the upward-mobile aspirations of Provo's good Mormon mothers for their sons, and has constantly worked to achieve success as they defined it, has striven to be an example-first “for his younger brothers and aiiere) then for the neighborhood boys. for his. classmates" (p._ 196), then in_the army, then on his mission, then in dental school, and "now in the Palo Alto Ward he had to be an example for all of the Stanford students; he and Beth were what they wanted to become" (p. 157). But what Paul is is a man’ who cannot "remember being 2 boy" (p. 158) after thirteen or fourteen; who has "done and would do all of those things he was expected to, but [whose] whole life seemed so ordered, predetermined, rushed, tense,” that “at times he felt like a robot, had little sense of controlling his own life, being individual" (p. 158); who now, as ‘much as he loves his wife, finds it “hard to talk, to tell her what was inside, what he really felt," because he doesn’t “want to hurt her or lessen her opinion of him, suggest that perhaps he had not been or was not all that she had thought, hoped, imagined” (p. 169). The story’s narrative analysis of Paul's self-loss is reflected in at least three bolic images: the gutted riverbed, which reduced Paradise to pragmatic function @. 160), much as Paul replaced his’ boyhood with work and exemplary living; the 8 Ibid., pp. 211, 227.Jorgensen: Romantic Lyric and Mormon Experience 41 contrasted pigeons with "the flash of their wings in the sun when they wheeled” (p. 158) and gulls, which "worked" and "were heavy slow birds’ that "never seemed to be. flying” (p. 166), and the ‘German brown and rainbow trout whose “gold and jeweled” Dodies "faded white” (p. 169) after Paul took them home for his mother to fry. Of these, the trout is the most complex: as hallic symbol it suggests Paul's erotic capacity; as a synecdoche for nature, it his intense sensory connection to the physical world, his "sense of being’; and by extension from these, it symbo- lizes Paul's fully embodied, vital self. As ‘with the change in the river and the con- trast of pigeon and gull, the trout’s transformation underscores Paul’s loss, a self- mutilation and self-immolation. Mormons, like most Christians, accept and repeat the saying of Jesus that he who loses his life shall find it (Matt. 10:39; Luke 9:24); but something has gone terribly wrong for Paul, who knows only the loss, and who has betrayed and deso- Jated an authentic self, and that self’s authentic joyous connection wit the being of the physical world, which has equal ontological status with the spiritual in Mormon theology,’ in the name of a dubious abstraction. Whereas in both the gospels cited Jesus qualifies his, paradox with “for my sake," Paul's self-sacrifice appears, in effect, a kind of idolatry: he. has made his Own’ self-wrought "perfection" or "example" an idol, and his mother its high pries- tess~he would sacrifice anything for her belief tn that, even himself" (p. 168). (What this story says about "mothers in Zion” and their subversion by a destructive patriarchal model may offer a grimly satisfying recognition to Mormon feminists and P disturbing challenge to dominant institutional habits of thought.) For the Romantics, the primal estrangement from nature is a “fall” into selt- conscious awareness of the division between consciousness and the other, a fall into self-observation;)° and that is one aspect of Paul’s estrangment: Something else happened there that summer he was fourteen which helped to stop his boyhood. He became aware of his body and through it his inner self. His body had always been for sensing water, sun and air, and all of his re- sponses were spontaneous, not observed. (p. 166) But Paul’s. observation of his body and his "inner self" is intensified by his religious inheritance of distrust of the body’s erotic capacity. Becoming aware “finally that he was male,” Paul "waited for a voice to explain to him the chemistry of his pound- ing blood” but found no answer in the disjunction between the "folklore of sex" and the Church's teaching that "the body was sacred, an instrument for the purposes of God and not his own" p. 166-67). Because for him "sex wasn’t freedom, delight, or interest, but already obligation, a topic he couldn't talk about with other boys because he had to an example, be Perfect Paul “turned inward on himself to watch his every emotion," discovered “hate, lust, vanity, jealousy, and rage," and "became preoccupied with his own guilt” (p. 167). D&C 93:29-35; Joseph Smith, “The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text,” ed. Stan Larson, BYU Studies 18 (1978): 203-5. Abrams, Natural, pp. 181-82.42 AML Annual 1987 Again Paul’s consciousness seems Puritanical in centering on the sinfulness of the “inner self" rather than on outward acts of sin. (I assume it is not merely autho- tial reticence but rather deliberate literary choice that omits mention of specific acts such as masturbation, cursing, fightin or whatever.) Paul’s self-willed perfection has required self-willed abstinence from ‘bodily leasure and an obsession with physical cleanliness that cost him “all delight in his f. 169). In Paul's mind, “all the commandments that hung over him like a net, fell, and he grew silent, stabbed his sins alone” (p. 167). As his sins seem purely mental, so does his penitence. We might call it penitence without repentance and without actual sin; and if it is that, it may represent not only a rejection of the flesh and its susceptibility to sins, but also, and more problematically, a refusal of the biblical fall in its personal dimension. To be perfect, the logic of Paul’s Mormon adolescence taught him, you must not sin, must keep your sinful impulses inside, flagellate them privately. But "perfection" means a "making whole,” a completion; thus to refuse to be broken or to acknow- ledge that you are flawed or incomplete may be to preclude the possiblity of ever being made whole. In short, for a Mormon as presumably for any Christian, refusal of the Fall in its personal actuality may entail refusal of the Atonement, hence a kind of self-engineered estrangement not only from being but potentially from God as ground or plenitude of being. Such in fact may be the symbolic import of the story’s most poignant recol- lected moment, which in Paul's retrospection immediately follows his solitary stabbing of sins, "What's the matter, Paul?’ his father asked him one Sunday that summer after dinner. ’Something wrong?” (p. 167). Something is terribly wrong: Paul is sick to the core, most of all in being unable, because of his idolatry of his own perfec- tion, to admit he is so. "His father took’ him swimming one evening after that’ (p. 167), but what might have become symbolically a baptism and actually a communion with’a possible source of understanding, guidance, and healing did become a near~ miss. Paul’s father seems to have integrated the child and adult selves that Paul cannot: "His father laughed, shouted, splashed, got up on the ledge once to nin and dive in, all the time telling him how much fun he had had on the river as a boy" (p. 167). The episode goes on: Once in the darkness their bodies touched. "Sorry, son.” [The quiet apology seems to signify, besides culturally conditioned fear of contact, an intuitive cognition of Paul’s frantic guilt about his body, even as it asserts the deep bodily reality of paternal-filial relation.] But then under the cottonwoods in the dark water shaded from the moon, his father became silent, the only sounds the crickets and frogs, the splash of a heavy fish in the next hole. His father was silent when they got out to dry themselves with towels. (pp. 167-68) They leave the river, stop for malts on the way home, his father offers Paul a second which he declines, they sit "silent in the booth for a moment," then as they leave, "his father put his hand on his shoulder as they walked to the car" (p. 168). Paul’s father is very human, very much a twentieth-century American Mormon father in his baffled attempt, cumbered with distrust of the flesh, to reach and help his son without forcing it, without overstepping the boundary of his son’s emerging selfhood and agency; but his attributes, his tentative yet clear gestures of concern and accessibility, his kindly, weighted silences, all sufficiently figure forth the tragi- cally loving God of a non-Calvinistic universe in which grace can be resisted, inJorgensen: Romantic Lyric and Mormon Experience 43 which a person’s agency limits even God’s will to make him whole. That, as I under- stand it, is the universe of Joseph Smith's theology, which may lie even deeper within the structure of Douglas Thayer’s story than the Romantic lyric strategy whose buried outlines I have traced in it. For as I see it, drawing back now to try to hold the entire story in mind, Paul's dejection is defined by the story in Christian and Mormon terms, and the Romantic lyric strategy of his reverie by the dried-out watercourse will not suffice to lift him out of it. have come to view the story’s disquietingly ambiguous ending as one sign of this. Paul’s meditation under the old trees ends with the desire "to find his body, take back the responsibility for his own life so that he could begin to love out of himself" (p. 170). Admirable sentiments; but Paul’s furious sense of "responsibility for his own life” in adolescence has led him finally to his present aridity, so that may not be the solution he needs. Nor does it appear that Beth’s efficient ministration to his old passion for physical order and cleanliness (she has tidied up the car, gives him a clean diaper to mop his sweat, a clean shirt to put on) will help much. Nor, prob- ably, will "the old surge of joy he always felt at coming home" ®. 171) lead him again to a sense of being whole; the entire story so far has implied the futility of nostalgia, except as a way to self-analytic insight. What Paul ends with is a wish, the anticipation of a gesture. That evening, standing on the porch with his younger brother Mark, whose wedding he has come home for, Paul asks if Mark wants "to go fishing up on Straw- berry one evening before he (gets) married’ (p. 172). After Mark’s enthusiastic "Sure," it is as if he were not there; we shift again into Paul’s private musings as he imagines the fishing: In the darkness he would stand in the thigh-deep cool water, cast out into the lake, slowly troll the fly in, every second expecting a strike, see the beautiful silver rainbow trout leap shining in the moonlight. Mark and his father would kill the trout they caught, clean them, leave the entrails on the shore for the patrolling gulls the next morning. But he wouldn’t. After he had fought a trout, felt the movement and pull, the heavy pulse coming up through the line and rod into his hand and arm, seen it in front of him in the water, he would free it. He would hold the rainbow in the net to see it shining rose-silver, pull the hook from the lip, then release it, see the trout hover then flash back into the deep water, vanish. (p. 172) Assuming this is not just wishful thinking, that Paul will do it, will this small ges- ture of refusing the expected signify that Paul has begun to take control of his life? We have already discounted self-determination as cure; but if it were, how much would it depend on such refusals, and how far might those refusals extend? Or will the gesture signify that Paul has finally faced up to his loss and is at last actually ready to let go, to relinquish his futile and enervating nostalgia for Nature, for unreflective connection with it, for a dead self that has burdened him too long?44 AML Annual 1987 ___A “healthy-minded"" _ readin; might have it that such a relinquishment will signify at last Paul's maturation. But what of the symbolic link of the course of Paul’s life with the nearly dry riverbed, suggesting his lack of living water? A “twice-born"? reading (perhaps somewhat Jungian-tinged) might have it that lettin go the trout, letting the lost and ravaged self sink into the dark unconscious, could Prepare the way for psychic renewal. But can the gesture simultaneously mean both self-repossession and self-relinquishment? __At any rate, where Romantic lyrics often (or at least preferably, ideally) end by spiralling up into restored consciousness, reintegration of the divided psyche on a higher level incorporating both innocence and experience,! this story ends with a protagonist unable to restore himself to joy through lyric exercise. Perhaps its analogue is not Wordsworth’s "Immortality Ode* with its resolution to find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human sufferings In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. (lines 182-88) Perhaps, rather, Coleridge’s "Ode to Dejection,"” in which the lyric speaker, unable to recover his own joy or ‘shaping spirit of imagination," wishes that blessing on the poem’s female addressee. is not quite it either: Paul wishes the freedom of the trout, a creature sentient of threats to its life, capable of reflexive struggle to evade, but not, we presume, conscious as we are, not aware of its own grace and beauty, its own supposed wholeness of being, its belonging-to-the-whole, which Romantic poets typically yearn toward and fear because it seems to mean the extinc- tion of at least verbal or symbolic consciousness if not of consciousness entire. Romantic recovery normally involves an act of the imagination--is in fact in the broadest sense an “apocalypse by imagination," as Abrams puts it, citing among other texts Coleridge’s "Dejection,” which laments loss of imaginative joy as "the spirit and the power, / Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower / A new Earth and. new Heaven" (lines 67-69). Paul's last mental act in the story is an act of imagination, and one that indeed anticipates a sort of “wedding” in the erotically rhythmic con- nection of man and trout; but the point to insist on is that this act of imagination MWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, rpt. (New York: New American Library 1902), lectures 4, 5. Uypid,, lecture 8. BAbrams, Natural, pp. 183-87. ‘Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 47-61, esp. 49, 52. Abrams, Natural, pp. 338-39. a ——Jorgensen: Romantic Lyric and Mormon Experience 45 does not suffice in itself but, as the ctation of experience, must await fulfill- ment in action. So what then does Paul’s wish signify about Paul, about Paul’s fate? No answer from the story, which vanishes at the point following its last word. And a reader might well be ambivalent about this ambiguous ending: does it weaken the story by failing to clearly resolve @ major tension? or does it strengthen by deepening toward mystery what we supposed was an almost relentless analytic clari- ty? One response might ‘be this: the wish cannot begin to mean clearly and positive- y ‘until imagination becomes fact, not a thing conceived or wished or hoped but a 1g done, an action with consequence. But all that lies ahead, in the world the ist and the fiction imagine as possible but do not attempt to make. protagonist an Thus, "Under the Cottonwoods,” finally, may well be a far subtler, more sophis- ticated story than it may have first appeared, than its maker consciously knew--a critique not only of the Wasatch-front Mormon culture’s distortion of Mormon theo- Togy and religion, but also, from the ground of that theology, a critique of the story’s own Iterary strategy, and perhaps, in the ‘end, of fiction itself. In his form, his adoption and subversion of a dexterous engagement with Romantic lyric literary strategy, Douglas Thayer has cleared one way that Mormon fiction might go, a way that, whatever its limitations, has already proved itself both provocative and instructive to younger writers. Yet this story reaches an impasse, perhaps for the writer as well as for the protagonist; it does not solve the problem of narrative, answer the question of action that I posed at the outset. Thayer addresses that problem more directly in "“Open- ing Day,” the only first-person story in the book, the ‘only one which presents much overt action, in which in fact meditation counte1 joints and supports narrative rather than replacing it, and the one in which the conflict between the "western" and the "Mormon’ in Thayer's experience is most sharply actualized. ___ Troy, the narrator-protagonist of “Opening Day," has been thoroughly initiated into the western ethos of the hunt by his father: Even before I was old enough to buy a license for anything or even shoot, he took me hunting, He helped me make my bows and arrows, bought me a BB-gun, my Browning 22, and my Winchester 70. For my birthdays and Christmases he always gave me something for hunting, ‘although I had bought my own knife when I was eight. (p. 19) “Eight” is the Mormon “age of accountability" when Troy would have been baptized and confirmed a member of his Church, enjoined by “the laying-on of hands" to "receive the Holy Ghost’; thus these two initiations, western and Mormon, define the poles of conflict in the story. In Troy's youth, the western initiation “took” most strongly and deeply. He his father and his father’s companions "dreamed about the ridge” where thunted: (Early drat of he 22) wi fed "The Ridge," and the change 10 mere ambiguously symbolic title suggests how the story.) “In his dreams Troy "shot med too that we jumped five and six all of the thrill, cut \Trayer's intentions clarified as he worked at running bucks,” and "drea- yh, and it was like a battle’, ood spreading out through and shot, killed the bucks in one buncl he "wanted to fee! he throats, the bl46 AML Annual 1987 ae ee ee up to the others how big the bucks were, how many points on the ‘The evening of his sixteenth birthday-the day his father gave him his .270, the age when he would be ordained a Priest in his Church~Troy tells us, “in the sitting nosition on my bed, left arm tight in the sling, I aimed at the pictures of bears, ‘ons, and deer on my walls, and later out the windows at cars and people passing below on our street, centered the cross hairs” (pp. 22-23). Possession of the gun seems to endow Troy with a terrifying potency for vio- lence, a potency whose undertones are rather erotic--"That night after I showered I got the 270 out of the case again to hold it against my body" (p. 23)-or perhaps autoerotic: "I liked to take my .270 out of our gun cabinet just to hold it and work the action, wipe it clean with an oiled cloth" ®. 23). On the opening day of the story, Troy’s father remarks, "I hope you nail a big one first thing” (P. 24), a state- ment which picks up this sexual undertone in "nail" and joins it to an audible hint of crucifixion, also present in “cross hairs.” But before this opening day, besides his initiation into Wasatch-Front macho bloodsport, Troy has also undergone what could be a Mormon youth's most strenuous rite de passage: having been ordained an elder and endowed in an archetypal temple Titual with promise of the redemptive power of Christ, he has served. a two-year proselyting mission for his Church~and at that, in a Germany which still bears the marks of battles. There, "Two years, of knowing that I would probably be drafted and sent to Vietnam, hearing the older Germans talk about World War Il, and every day preach- ing the gospel of Christ changed me” (p. 18). He has recognized "that 1 funted because 1 liked to kill,” that "a mule-deer buck . . . had a being all its own," and "to kill was to deny the influence of the Holy Ghost, which I wanted to continue to develop” (p. 19). In the stock phrases that express Troy's new conviction (perhaps 2 sr oP what Flannery O'Connor called the difficulty of making "belief believable,"’) Formon readers will probably detect a precarious naivete, corroborated in Troy's ambition to "get a doctorate in sociology" and "teach at B.Y.U. and help people to live together in peace and harmony" (p. 21). So, because his mission had been "planned so that [he] would have the deer hunt to look forward to when (he] got home" ®. 19), and because he has not been able to explain in letters his decision not, to ill, nor to disappoint his father by backing out on the hunt, Troy has decided "to hunt the opening day" (p. 20) but not shoot, and tell his father Sunday. Thus, on the ridge above Blind Canyon, still feeling "the old excitement" . 1) of this revisited place ‘but’ now overlaid with memories of scarred and maimed Ger- Crane and with bis untried resolve, Troy engages in a version of the “integral proces: of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene" that, for Abrams, characterizes “the greater Romantic lyric.” But Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, 1970), p. 201. Mabrams, “Lyric,” p. 201. es ——~fhJorgensen: Romantic Lyric and Mormon Experience 47 in this ike most others in the volume, lyric process is subsumed in narra- ae by ‘the’ slpeniee of the hunt, and Troy must solve the "sad perplexity” of the disjunction between his accustomed and nascent selves not in thought or imagination but in action. i s resolve is tested three times: he has three good chances to shoot the ae i Renee repetition of his first kill at age ixeen, ‘when he had actually "prayed for a big four-point,” got a chance at a “little two-point” and “killed him with @ perfect heart shot," and been “hugged” by his father (p. 32) as if in welcome to the ranks of full manhood. This time, "body tight, blood pounding” he, {slowly raised the 270 and centered the cross hairs over the little buck’s heart fighting “the desire to ease down into the sitting position, tighten into the sling, squeeze the trigger slowly," wanting "to hear the explosion, feel the .270 kick, see the little two-point hump and drop, feel that satisfaction again" (p. 24). But the’ deer slip "back into the pines as quiet and smooth as gliding birds," and “glad [he] hadn't shot" (p. 25), he lowers his gun. In Troy's second chance, his “choice” not to shoot is even more clearly com- Promised by his bloodlust: Warned, my heart pounding in my throat, I half raised the 270. Another rifle Slanted. | Then I saw the big buck moving through the high scrub maples, head down, going smooth like a cat, not making the big ten-foot bounding jumps. But when T jammed the .270 into’my shoulder, got the cross hairs on him, he wae already blundering, crashing into the brush. (pp. 26-27) Another hunter has beat Troy to the shot. The "But" Suggests he meant to take this one, though "breathing deep" and trying "to stop trembling," he seems not to know whether he would have fired or not. Between this and his third chance, which comes late in the afternoon during “the last drive before we went down the ridge" (p. 34), Troy has considerable time for memory and reflection on the terrain of his youthful kills and for seco again the "still perfect" beauty of a fresh kill: "He still seemed alive, still had that eauti- ful grey live symmetry, as if he might suddenly jump and ron, Bending, I ran my hand over the hard antlers, along the neck and Onto the heavy shoulders" (p. 32). Thus when his father and companions give him "the best spot in the basin at the head of West Draw" (. 35), meditation and narrative action have together brought his conflict to a pitch of quiet intensity. This last chance, four bucks in clear sight is too much, and Troy’s resolutions of sanctity are overbalanced by the habit of violence: Bent forward, breathing deep, the blood beginning to pound in my ears, I held the scope to'my eye hey were beautiful. I just wanted to watch them, prayed nobody would make it to the edge of the pines in time for a shot. The uucks stopped to look back, started moving again, the big buck leading now. Slipping my arm into the sling, I got into the Sitting position to steady my trea 1 bucks were nervous but still walking. Beautiful, Biting my lower lip, I shifted the cross hairs back uj to the big buck. The antlers were Perfec- tly matched on each side. My pounding blood sounded like rushing water in my48 AML Annual 1987 ears, louder and louder. Beautiful. I closed my eyes against the feeling, gripped harder, breathless. The, .270'slammed my shoulder, the explosion part of my feeling. Hear shot, the big buck humped and went down. (p. 37) And in a frenzy he kills the other three. In the first shot, immersed in the "rushing" of his excitement, Troy himself doesn’t know what is happening, and it is finally mysterious~a “choice” maybe, yet not fully conscious; something as inevitable, after a point, as orgasm, and fusing two kinds of erotic feeling, contemplative and violent. ‘The story swiftly closes after this point, as Troy rushes to finish his kills: "Oh no," I said. I cut the big four-point’s throat last, my knife and hands red with blood, his antlers thick at the base where I grabbed them with my sticky hands. "No, no." Still trembling, I knelt down by the big buck’s head. - His pooled blood started to trickle down through the oak leaves. "Oh, Jesus, Jesus," I whispered. (p. 38) Troy's newly asserted faith has seemed dangerously pinned to abstract platitudes and pethaps too consciously selfwilled, and bere it has been weighed and found wan- ting, His utterance in the last line of the story, "Oh, Jesus, Jesus,” is at once a profane burst of joy in killing, a horrified self-judgment at having "nailed" Christ, and perhaps the most earnest prayer he has ever made, in the "opening" recognition, where he had imagined sanctity could be “earned” (p. 28), of radical dependence on grace. His “trembling” now may be that in which St. Paul says salvation must be Worked out, and his whisper a plea for the answering breath of the Spirit he once supposed he could “develop.” To end the story at so high a narrative pitch is to leave a good deal hangin (though it’s not untraditional: Poe at the end of "Ligeia," Maupassant at the end of "The Necklace"); and of course Troy as narrator of his own story must know what happened next, and next, and next. But from this moment of intense undifferentia- tion, when profane and’ sacred fuse in one word, when ambiguities augment one another and converge on a central mystery, how go on? If you are the author, how imagine that next instant? If the protagonist-narrator, how suffer and tell it? In some ways, I think, better than any other story in Under the Cottonwoods, "Opening Day" displays a masterful deliberation, a balancing and judging, of the western and Mormon strains in Thayer's experience, and it does so by turning Romantic lyric form back toward the sacred narrative sequence of fall and redemption that it once derived from. So doing, it achieves also, in its rising action, its climax on the ridge, its precipitous denouement, the classic contour of story.Perceptions of the Mormons in Science Fiction: The Writings of Robert A. Heinlein Bruce and Julie Westergren Without a doubt, one of the most gifted and influential science fiction writers of the fwentieth century is Robert A. Heinlein, “The winner of fee. Hugo awards and one Nebula Grand Master award (the highest honors the ‘ice fiction community can bestow), Heinlein is the author of over forty novels a mentee: of nonfiction articles and books, and two screenplays. In this mass of printed material, it is interesting to note the number of times the Mormons manage to infiltrate the Story line: out of Heinlein’s forty-two novels {o late, twelve of them, or 28 percent, make mention of the Mormons. This paper Wil Giscuss Heinlein's use of Mormons and their belief tec Passing mention to analysis of Havel eration, into the plots. The paper will ‘conbiahe eye a brief analysis of Heinlein’s view of the Mormons.! devices. Such an incidental reference 1s seen, for example, in his short story “The Menace From Earth." In this tale, a teenage girl tone ain raised in the lunar colonies, acts as a tour guide in Luna City for a visiine Peon Earth. To reach the in to the authors, March 15, 1985. Original in the written after the Heinleins had a chance to review this Possession of the writers,) However, a letter (Letter from Mrs. Virginia Paper acknowledged that the conclusions made here were basically correct Heinlein tothe authors, January 4, 1987, Original in possesion of che authors.)50 AML Annual 1987 tourist’s hotel, they must pass the Mormon temple built on the moon? In another novel, Citizen of the Galaxy, Heinlein introduces a spaceship named "Joseph Smith,” completely owned and manned by Mormons? Heinlein also names an independent domain in the American West the State of Deseret, in the novel Friday.4 Humorous asides are seen in such works as Glory Road. When the protagonist is faced with the necessity of accepting a seemingly impossible event as fact, he tells his travelling companion to go ahead and try to convince him; however, she might as well try to make the Pope a Mormon’ Three examples illustrate Heinlein’s use of Mormonism as a point of compari- son. In the story "Lost Legacy," Joseph Smith is used as an example of a prophet in world history who has brought divine messages from high places.® In Stranger in a Strange Land, Joseph Smith's religious practices are compared to those of the fic- tional Fosterite Church. Joseph Smith, says one character, was lynched for much less than what the Fosterites were getting away with.’ In Double Star, the main character of the novel is adopted into the nest of the most influential native clan on Mars. The details of the adoption ceremony, represented by a row of asterisks in the text, ae explained as similar to the LDS temple ceremony, which ‘nonmembers are not allowed to participate in, and which members do not discuss outside of the 2Robert A. Heinlein, The Menace From Earth,’ in The Menace From Earth (New York: Gnome Press, 1959; New American Library, 1962), p. 94. ‘The text reads as follows: “She [the tourist} decided to go to her hotel first. The regular route to the Zurich [Hotel] is to slide up and west through Gray's Tunnel past the Martian Embassy, get off at the Mormon Temple, and take a pressure lock dowa to Diana Boulevard. . 3Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957; Ballantine, 1978), p. 145. ‘Robert A. Heinlein, Friday (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1982), p. 131. For other references to the Utah arca, see Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast (New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1980), pp. 21, 46, 98; and Time Enough For Love (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1973), p. 451, SRobert A. Heinlein, Glory Road (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963; Berkley Medallion Books, 1970), p. 127. The passage is as follows: "But" I shut up and rode in huffy silence. Presently a slender hand touched my forearm, caressed it. "Such a strong sword arm,” she said softly, *Milord Hero, may I explain?” “Talk ahead," I said. "If you can sell me, you can convert the Pope to Mormonism. I'm stubborn.” 6Robert A. Heinlein, "Lost Legacy,” in Assignment in Etemity (New York: Fantasy Press, 1953; New American Library, 1954), p. 141. Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1961; Berkley Books, 1968), pp. 314, 315. as ~~Westergren: Perceptions of the Mormons in Science Fiction 51 temple. Both rites are inaccessible to outsiders, and insiders would Prefer not to share the details of their experiences.® ree Heinlein novels demonstrate a more direct influence of Mormon ideas in lot delopane In The Day After Tomorrow, the author pictures the United Brates as conquered by the PanAsians, a multi-national group made up of Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian populations. After the conquest, the United States Army consists of a half dozen scientists and assistants, hiding in a secret laboratory in the mountains of Colorado. The group creates a series of new secret weapons but needs an effective method to infiltrate and attack the enemy. Major Ardmore, the base commander, decides to establish a new religion and then use the churches as Staging and supply areas for the coming revolt. The PanAsian policy of allowing conquered races to keep their religious practices assures noninterference. Following the successful establishment of a con; epation in Denver, the major ordered a lieutenant to set up a congregation in Salt La e City. Ardmore explained that the rpanizational talents of the ibs Church and the Mormon lay missionary Program will give their movement the edge they needed in that part of the country.? In another book, Heinlein Puts the United States under the control of a Te- ‘Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star (New York: Doubleday, 1956; New American Library, 1957), P. 58. Here the speaker says: Frhat dine of astercks represents the adoption ceremony. Why? Because it is limited to mem- bers of the Kkkah nest. It isa family matter. Put it this way: a Mormon may have very close gentile fiends.-but does that friendship get a gentile inside the Temple at Salt Lake City? It never has and it never will] han oc ‘more right to tel fhe details of the adoption ceremony than a lodge brother has to be specific where ritual outside Robert A. Heinlein, The Day After Tomorrow (New York: Gnome Press, 1949; New American Library, 1951), p. 96. Ardmore explains his intentions in the following dialogue: “Just a minute. Why Salt Lake City? “Because I think it’s a good spot for recruiting. Those Mormons are shrewd, practical people and 1 don’t think you'll find a traitor among them. If you work at it, I think you can convince their Elders that the great god Mota is a good thing to have around and no menace to their own faith. We haven't made half enough use of the legitimate churches; they should be the backbone of the move- ment. Take the Mormons--they run to lay missionaries; if you work it Fight you can recruit a number of them with such experience, courageous, used to organizing in hostile territory, good talkers, smart Get it ‘Tget you. Well, I'l sure try," “You can do it...Now you go take Salt Lake City.”52. AML Annual 1987 ligious dictator known as "The Prophet." An underground resistance movement includes some highly placed officers in his own organization. John Lyle, a young recruit into the Prophet's private guard, becomes involved in the rebellion for romantic reasons. He is in love with one of the Virgins~young women who administer to the Prophet. She falls into official disfavor and is about to face the Grand Inquisitor. To rescue her, Lyle turns to the rebel Cabal for help. The group rescues both Lyle and the girl, who are inducted into the group as full members. During the course of his work for the Cabal, Lyle is sent as an intelligence courier frows ins base inthe Midwest to the Cabal's headquarters in Phoenix, Ari zona. Pursued by the Prophet’s counterintelligence agents, Lyle is forced to abandon his airship over Provo, Utah, He feels relatively certain the Mormons will not turn him in, since they hate the Prophet for closing down their temples and churches. Lyle steals a farmer's jetcopter and completes his mission without directly contacting any Mormons. In the final battle around the Prophet's stronghold in the American Midwest, one of the participating units is the "Mormon Batallion,” who sing their long-forbid- deh cuthent "Come, Come, Ye Saints" Long suppressed under the Prophet's reign, the Mormons are only too happy to join in the attack in hopes of regaining their lost churches and the Salt Lake Temple,” The, strongest use of Mormonism in Heinlein's plot development is found in Stranger In A Strange Land. A human being by the name of Valentine Michael Smith is rescued after being marooned on the surface of Mars for twenty-five years. Originally, the party consisted of a team of eight scientists who were travelling to Mars to establish a colony; Smith was born in transit. Their spaceship crashed on landing, and all of the party, except th infant Smith, was killed. He was raised by native Martians, who taught him their religion and philosophy. ‘When a rescue ship lands on Mars and finds Smith, the Martians decide he should go to his home planet and familiarize himself with Terran culture. Smith studies the Koran, Bible, Book of Mormon, and the Earth religions, none of which Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt In 2100 (Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 1953; New York: New ‘American Library, 1954). Some parallels might be drawn between Joseph Smith and Heinlein's “Prophet.” This is especially true in view of comments made by the writer on pp. 191, 192 of this book. Here he cites Joseph Smith's Nauvoo and a few other religious communities as being dictatorial regimes such as the one portrayed in the novel. Joseph Smith, however, comes to be viewed more sympathetically in later works, ‘pobert A. Heinlein, Revolt In 2100, pp. 69-70; 120. Page 13 includes a reference to the Prophet being ‘scaled’ to a multiple number of wives (Deaconesses"). It is also interesting to note that the Prophet’s stronghold was in the Missouri area, which, according to Mormon theology, will on¢ day become the center of government for the Lord and His church during the Millenium. Tobert A. Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1961; Berkley Books, 1968). mSWestergren: Perceptions of the Mormons in Science Fiction 53 are like his Martian philosophy. He wishes to spread the transcendental teachings be had learned on Mars but needs to do so through methods that familiar to ings. He gains a following by starting a Martian language school, and with re- cruiting techniques borrowed from the Fosterite Church, among others, he establishes f church of his own and gains a great number of converts. At the height of his popularity with his followers, he is assassinated by suspicious Earthmen who cannot comprehend his strange new doctrines and teachings. ‘There are a number of parallels between Heinlein's Valentine Michael Smith and Joseph Smit, here. summarized briefly. First, Heinlein’s Smith introduces to the Worl a new’ set of religious and philosophical doctrines that he receives from a higher source on Mars. "The Prophet Joseph Smith also ‘brought new doctrines and weetices from a higher source; received from conversing with the Father and. the Ron in the Sacred Grove, visits of the Angel Moroni and Other messengers, and from translating the Book of Mormon. Heinlein's Smith, to make his teachings. more palatable to the public, uses the doctrines from major religious works, creating an Prganization known as the Church of All Worlds. This similarity may stem from the popular idea that Joseph Smith borrowed from the Bible and other sources when Erkting the Book of Mormon, and then using his “natural genius,” refashioned these concepts popular in his time and place into a new religion different from any other Chureh® Some of the more lurid sex scenes in Stranger in a Strange Land may Seflect the popular notion many people have had about the Mormon practice of olygamy and ritual orgies which were supposed to have taken place in the Salt Lake emple. ‘Another item of interest in Stranger in a Strange Land is the annual ceremony of the Incarnation of the Prophet, a televised pageant that presented the current Prophet being transformed, through the use of special effects, into the form of Nehemiah Scudder, a nineieenth-century evangelist who was considered, the First Prophet of the church. After the pseudo-Scudder had delivered his annual blessings ‘on the body of the church, his form would fade and be replaced by the current Prophet. Through the use of this ceremony, the members of the order could be sure they stili had the blessings of their First Prophet for the coming year. This ritual is reminiscent of those members who heard Brigham Young speak with the voice of Joseph Smith and assume his form when he addressed the first conference dealing with succession following Smith’s assassination. Through this means, the Latter-day Saints at Nauvoo learned whom they should follow as their current prophet. Finally, and most poignantly, Heinlein’s Smith is killed by a mob who hated and feared him, his church, his power and influence, and his teachings, Here again is a close resemblance with Joseph Smith—both sacrificial lambs on the altar of public 13see Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975). Her main argument has been that Joseph simply incorporated a number of different beliefs from the various churches in his area and formed a new religious synthesis out of them, made up the Book of Mormon to give the church an authoritative source of scripture, and then, because of his charismatic character, managed to win a large number of converts. Heinlein may have had Brodie’s version of Joseph in mind when he created Valentine Michael Smith for this novel. | j 4 i | i i } i54 AML Annual 1987 sentiment, When Joseph was killed in 1844, be was mayor (or dictator, as many of his detractors considered him) of one of Ilinois’s largest and most powerful cities, whose charter made it virtually a state unto itself; he was Lieutenant General of the Nauvoo Legion, an excessively large militia unit; and he was actively campaigning for the Presidency of the United States. In addition, Joseph had introduced contro- versial doctrines into the Church such as polygamy, then a poorly kept secret. It is little wonder that Joseph found so many enemies during the Illinois period. However, the Church he left behind at his death was able to move to the Great Basin and continue its expansion from there. __ Like Joseph Smith’s followers, Valentine Michael Smith's followers did not dishand in spite of the loss of their beloved leader. Instead, they continued to actively proselyte and make converts among all the nations of the earth. The ultimate fate of these two religious figures implies a major theme for this novel: the hatred and fear of humanity for new, different, and possibly threatening ideas and practices, even if these practises might really be harmless or even bene- ficial; and the willingness of humanity to destroy those responsible for those ideas and practices in favor of maintaining the status quo. In looking at the use Heinlein has made of the Mormons over the years, one gets a somewhat ambivalent feeling for his perceptions of the Church. “His work seems to run the gamut from the contradictory view in Revolt in 2100 to the por- trayal of the Mormons as a freedom-loving people in The Day After Tomorrow and the sympathetic view of Joseph Smith in er in a Strange Land, with all sorts of sidelines along the way. For example, Revolt in 2100 pictures the LDS people as a group willing to fight for its freedom; however, the Prophet's evil, dictatorial church bears a striking resemblance to the LDS Church in its ractices of plural marriage, titles of officers, and tithes and offerings, as well as having their head- quarters in the Midwest near the land of the Mormons’ own Zion. In reconciling the apparent conflict between Stranger in a Strange Land with the more sympathetic views found in some of Heinlein's other books, it is necessary to keep in mind the author's overwhelming passion for maintaining the rights and liberties of the individuals against any sort of government, secular or religious. Heinlein consistently maintains the right of the individual to do anything he or she leases as long as such acts are not socially irresponsible. Governments should rule Benevolently with as little interference as possible in people's lives. When trans- gressions against society are made, however, retribution on the part of the state should be quick and appropriate."* M4For examples of the author's philosophical bent, see Robert A. Heinlein, “Coventry,” in Revolt In 2100, pp. 129-170, and "Concerning Stories Never Written: Postscript,” in Revolt In 2100, pp. 189-192. See also Beyond This Horizon (New American Library, 1948); Famham's Freehold (New Fork: Berkley Medallion Books, 1964); Starship Troopers (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1959); The Number of the Beast (New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1980), p. 377. For samples of Heinlein's belief in the right of the people to topple offensive regimes, see The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1966); and Red Planet (New York: Charles Seribner’s Sons, 194; Ballantine Books, 1976). Revolt In 2100 and The Day Afier Tomorrow also reflect this same theme. rs, "TSWestergren: Perceptions of the Mormons in Science Fiction 55 Keeping these premises in mind, it would seem that Heinlein's fundamental view of the Mormons is modeled after an image of Joseph Smith as a religious tyrant who held Nauvoo under his steel grip during the last five years of his life and who also introduced strange and immoral practices into the Mormon community. This image seems to bother Heinlein greatly, since he views such tyranny as a violation of basic ights and civil freedoms. However, in spite of his apparent disagreement with formon practice and policy, he nevertheless feels that Mormons as individuals should be extended the right to worship as they choose, no matter how strange it may seem to outside society. Bs : ; i i 1 i | i i