Four Novels

Four Novels: A Personal Record
Summaries and Discussions

The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost

Christopher Stebbins heard somebody laughing. Wheeling, he spied a pair of skinny brown legs poking from frazzled dungarees and rolled-down lady’s silk stockings. A fishing rod appeared, and then, popped around from behind an uprooted tree that was lolling branches in the river, a wizened face with unlidded eyes came up gleaming. It was the little old Indian man.

The image of a boy who encounters an Indian at a river first appeared in a sketch I published in my school’s literary magazine when I was seventeen. Far from home – the school was in Massachusetts – I was traveling in imagination back to the Eno River which runs through Durham County, N.C., a few miles from my hometown of Durham. Why an Indian appeared in the sketch, I do not know. I do know that psychic landscape, or the spirit of place, is a writer’s angel.

“The Golden River,” my first short story, the one published in New York in 1956, begins with the same image, as does my first novel, The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost. Invisible feathers of eagle-bonnets had been drifting across my mind since boyhood.

Centuries ago, the Occaneechi Trail snaked alongside the Eno. A trade route stretching from present-day Virginia into Georgia, this trail linked tribes as diverse as the Catawbas and the Cherokees and brought the Mississippian mound-building culture into contact with the Southeast. Strategically located on the Roanoke River, the Occaneechi tribe controlled the fur trade. Then in 1676 Nathaniel Bacon, infuriated because the governor of Virginia profited from that trade, assembled a militia and led a rebellion against the Virginian government. He attacked the Occaneechi’s island stronghold as well. The tribe, defeated by Bacon, fled south along the trail to an area near present-day Hillsborough, N.C., and established a community near the Eno River. Hillsborough is only a few miles from Durham.

Genocide against Amerindian and Mesoamerican peoples has haunted me for most of my adult life.

Wars, too, have haunted me. My Louisiana grandfather’s grandfather was involved in Indian wars. Family members fought on both sides during the Civil War. The aforementioned grandfather served on General Pershing’s staff in France during the First World War. His son was a pilot during the Second World War and remembered how his co-pilot was beheaded while they flew over Belgium (a detail in Kitty Pentecost). When Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia, the family huddled around the Philco radio to listen to Lowell Thomas’s reports from Africa. Soon we were listening to Edward R. Murrow reporting from London about the Blitz. At Yale two of my roommates were veterans. I served in the Army during the Korean War. The war in Vietnam had escalated by the time I was writing Kitty Pentecost late in 1965.

Only a dwindling number of us remember what it was like to witness the explosion of an atomic bomb. The one I saw on October 29, 1951, at Yucca Flat in Nevada was the equivalent of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The protagonist of Kitty Pentecost is a war veteran who suffers from psychological and moral injuries. Similarly stressed-out veterans will appear in all my novels.

And then there was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

I was at the university in Philadelphia that day. The professor in American Literature had asked me to serve as invigilator while his graduate students were sitting an intense examination. At one point someone whom I recognized as the professor tapped on the pane of glass of the classroom’s door and beckoned for me to join him in the corridor away from students. After telling me what had happened in Dallas, he instructed me not to show students emotion. When a student handed me his or her paper, I was to follow him or her out into the corridor and there, calmly, break the news. I returned to the classroom. For two hours I pretended to be as inscrutable as a statue on Easter Island.

Kitty Pentecost, from the beginning, is an investigation into the sources of violence, this side, to be sure, of the mystery of iniquity.

Title

An Army Air Corps pilot with an old-fashioned upbringing in a tradition of honor returns from war with a profound sense of dislocation only to realize that the girl he left behind is burdened with a long history of violence, deceit, and inhumanity.

Time and Place

Although the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is alluded to – a professor who has visited the Soviet Union for scientific purposes is murdered by government agents – “cold war” as a metaphor suggests frozen relationships past and present and also active aggression by individuals empowered by a corporate state.

Synecdochism, in which a part stands in for a whole, may explain why Poe’s Hill, where most actions take place, is a world-stage and why Kitty Pentecost, a minor character, nevertheless opens the story in back of present-time actions in 1962 (Part I) and on June 7, 1965 (Parts II-V). Poe’s Hill “poses” as something larger than it is and by reference to Edgar Allan Poe points to Gothicism everywhere, not just in the South. Although there are approximately 90 place-names in the novel, most scenes occur in three places in or near Poe’s Hill: 137 Cornwallis Street, Watauga Street, and Bermuda Farm, each place associated with a family cluster, Pentecost, Branch, and Stebbins.

Poe’s Hill is a fictionalized Durham with a few recognizable sources: Gloria Avenue (Cornwallis Street), Duke University, East Campus (South Atlantic University, Henry Memorial Building), Washington Duke Hotel (Bright Leaf Hotel), statue of the Confederate Soldier near the Court House (the same), Guess Road (Old River Road) and the Eno River (Tuscarora River). Segregation’s vestiges abound in schools and in Durham’s black community, “Haiti,” here named “Vinegar Hill.” Things are changing: Mary, acculturated as black, is a regular customer at Mrs. Zabriski’s diner; Manny, her son, may be considered for a basketball scholarship at a recently desegregated college; Jackson, part-black, part-Indian and an ex-convict, is treated on equal terms by a professor. The Old South is giving way to an industrialized New South.

Altogether, there are more than 70 characters in the novel, most of them with names. The ten characters listed as the dramatis personae spin the plot, and yet it is insufficient to discuss the novel at the level of plot alone.

Dramatis Personae

Max Stebbins (MAX), a college professor
Virginia Stebbins (GINNY), his wife, an aspiring actress
MRS. PENTECOST, a fundamentalist
Katherine Hasbrouck, née Pentecost (KITTY), her second daughter
Tom Driver (TOM), Kitty’s illegitimate son, a college student
Dr. Adam Hasbrouck (HASBROUCK), a millionaire oligarch
Wesley Jackson (MR. JACKSON), a mixed-blood ex-convict
Mary Branch (MARY), Mrs. Pentecost’s first daughter and servant
Emmanuel Branch (MANNY), her teenage son
Epifania McPherson (FANNY), Hasbrouck’s goddaughter, a physician

Backstory

Because Kitty Pentecost is structured as an investigation, the truth of the past is gradually revealed through multiple points of view of characters whose motives have been masked or of characters who are actively investigating. Backstory described in chronological sequence displays exposition and complication out of the order in which they dramatically appear.

1.

During the colonial era a black slave is brought from the West Indies to work on a plantation in the Waccamaw River region of coastal Carolina. Eventually his mixed-blood descendants “pass” as whites and are integrated in society in Charleston, S.C. One of these descendants is a man named Ball.

2.

Major Ball has served in both the Confederate Army and the U.S. Army, notably in the West in the late 1880s. Following a slaughter of Indians, he “saves” an infant who is of mixed Indian and black heritage, gives him the name of Wesley Jackson, and returns with him to Charleston. The boy grows up in the same household as Major Ball’s daughter, Katherine Coligny Ball (later Mrs. Pentecost).

3.

Kate Ball, born about 1890, loses her mother and is raised by Major Ball who at some time during her teens rapes her. She becomes his compliant partner. When about 1910 she becomes pregnant, she goes to Chicago and there gives birth to Mary. Out of loyalty to Kate, Wesley Jackson takes the infant girl as his own, marries, and resides with his family at a cabin on Edisto Island, S.C. Mary Jackson’s “mother” dies, leaving her to relatives. She thinks she is black even though her pigmentation is white.

4.

About 1924 Kate marries Rev. D. D. Pentecost, a veteran of the First World War and evangelical minister. They go to Kurdistan in northern Iran as missionaries. After a miscarriage on the journey, she gives birth to Kitty in 1926. Still a little girl when she plays with an Arab boy, Kitty is abused by Mrs. Pentecost, forced to swear she will be “the bride of Christ.” In 1934 the Pentecosts come to live in Poe’s Hill. Not long afterwards Major Ball rapes and murders a young girl in stables behind his house in Charleston and has Jackson arrested for the crimes as soon as Mrs. Pentecost comes and plants evidence that will convict him. She also gives perjured testimony at Jackson’s trial. He is sentenced to life in prison at hard labor.

5.

Mrs. Pentecost summons Mary to Poe’s Hill to serve as both a cook and a companion to Kitty. With the United States at war after Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, an Army Air Corps pre-flight school is established at South Atlantic University and an Army camp near Poe’s Hill. Late in 1942 Kitty meets a married officer at the camp. After their brief affair, he is sent overseas, and she discovers she is pregnant just as Lt. Max Stebbins from the pre-flight school comes for dinner with the Pentecosts and falls passionately in love with her. Kitty, though she returns his love, tells Max nothing about her predicament in spite of Mary’s urgent plea for her to elope with Max before he is sent overseas. When he leaves, he and Kitty promise to write each other.

6.

As soon as Kitty is delivered of Tom, he is given to the Driver family, neighbors, for adoption. Threatening Mary with exclusion from the family and return to poverty, Mrs. Pentecost employs her to intercept and destroy all correspondence between Kitty and Max. Secretly, Mary keeps the letters. When the flow of letters ceases, Max in particular believing he has been rejected, Mary marries Sgt. Branch with only a few days to spare before he is sent overseas where he will sacrifice his life for his men. At her home on Watauga Street she raises Manny, their son.

7.

Between 1945 and 1962 a flurry of events cools relationships. These are as follows. (a) Discharged from the military at the end of the war, Max, emotionally floundering in New York, is elated when Kitty suddenly shows up and agrees to escape with him to Colorado beyond Mrs. Pentecost’s reach. Or so they believe. Mrs. Pentecost actually has them tracked down by police as far as Kansas. Kitty’s dread of her mother, as well as her guilt about Tom, causes her to lose her nerve – and Max. (b) Kitty returns to Poe’s Hill and at some time begins an addiction to drugs. (c) Hasbrouck, who has spent years in India “studying” sexual behavior for perverted reasons, returns to the States in the early 1950s, is tenured as a psychiatrist at the university in Poe’s Hill, and marries Kitty, whereupon Mrs. Pentecost, now a widow, leaves her Cornwallis Street house to them and takes up residence at a retirement home. (d) Back in New York, Max, a graduate student, meets and marries Ginny, who is fifteen years his junior, in 1952. Three years later their son Chris is born, Max receives his Ph.D., and he accepts a position as an English professor at the university in Poe’s Hill. They settle, to Ginny’s dismay, at Bermuda Farm on the outskirts of the city by the Tuscarora River. (e) Jackson, paroled, lives with Mary and Manny and likes to spend days fishing in the river. (f) After the Drivers die in an accident, Tom Driver, lying about his age, joins the Army and is sent to Vietnam. Upon completion of his tour, he returns to Poe’s Hill to enroll as an art student at the university and will soon marry one of Max’s students. (g) At some point Kitty leads her husband, Hasbrouck, to believe that Max is Tom’s father. (h) Financed by Hasbrouck, Fanny comes to Poe’s Hill to begin medical studies at the university. She and Carlos Brodie, who is estranged from his wife, live together and plan to marry.

Plot

Although the sense of the past would seem to overwhelm the narrative’s present times, the story that evolves from 1962 to June 7, 1965, is eventful enough to accommodate “war” within the boundaries of a pastoral tragicomedy. With Kitty’s death at the beginning of the narrative proper, the puritanical and paranoid darkness of American history exemplified by Mrs. Pentecost begins to loosen its hold. Now compassion is civilization’s measure. However, it is threatened by a moral void (“apathy”) subsequent to the unleashing of nuclear terror and imperial power.

Adam Hasbrouck is a perverted American Adam, a narcissistic, protofascist, and corporatist product of the moral void. He is obsessed with Max Stebbins because, he thinks, Max fathered a child on Kitty and abandoned them. Hasbrouck’s vendetta against Max, which is formulated after Kitty’s death, is merely a warm-up for what he is really after with his penchant for obscure language and for makeshift control over other persons’ lives.

It is 1962. Kitty dies. Mrs. Pentecost is ravaged with grief. Hasbrouck uses the occasion of a wake in honor of his wife to plot a rebellion against the university’s administration and, weeks later, to use information gathered about Fanny’s affair with Carlos Brodie to take control. Within a year Hasbrouck, with all his wealth, is éminence grise behind the new administration and also behind, on a grandiose scale, surveillance activities of the government in Washington. Also in 1963 Hasbrouck, in return for sex, promises to make Ginny a star on Broadway. Although Max discovers what is going on, he still feels too powerless to act either then or in 1964 when she leaves him for New York, taking Chris with her. By 1965 Hasbrouck has set in motion several schemes by means of which he expects to tighten the noose around Max’s neck. First, by threatening to have Fanny’s father in California extradited for a “murder” in India, he enlists her to seduce Max. Second, he enlists students to have Max trapped in an “orgy” at the beach. Max, publicly exposed by another non-event and subject to being fired from the university on the basis of “moral turpitude,” will then, third, be arrested and possibly assassinated by government narcotics agents who will find him in possession of a large amount of cocaine, this to be planted at Bermuda Farm by Ginny, herself.

Meanwhile, a long meditative vigil – in effect the climax of the novel for its protagonist – releases Max from his demons and fortifies him for the assaults to come against his integrity and well-being. Further strengthening him in his resolve is Fanny’s love, for she, already in 1965 a physician, despises Hasbrouck and holds cards for his downfall. In a swift denouement she, Max, and Jackson turn the tables on Hasbrouck and his accomplices; Tom rejoices in fatherhood; Mrs. Pentecost dies in a kind of religious ecstasy; and Manny Branch sets forth to join “the brotherhood of the puny planet.” It is not Max but Manny’s lawyer, Buck McKay, whose words open up a vision of the future:

The voice of Buck McKay was communicative in a reserved way. “Extending sympathy with the mind is easy, and it’s not enough. Besides, it can be dangerous to liberty. But, as for the other, extending sympathy with the heart, the glacier-slow movement of man toward some frail kinship with his kind – kinship of his own desiring and making from love and hope and sacrifice – it also may well not be enough. Nevertheless it is now the only movement in which his liberty has meaning. What is needed is a change in the human weather, atonement, compassion. But what we are likely to have instead is a kind of spiritual Stone Age in which whatever fire first stirred in whatever brutish and fetid cave our nearer ancestors to cherish and to fear the new god of themselves will be extinguished and finally forgotten, and then our cold, lonely, unsupported souls shall be set adrift, like the planet itself, among myriads of unknown stars.”

Sources

Memories of Durham and the Carolinas are the major source for materials in Kitty Pentecost. One literary source stands out: Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the Arden edition edited by Frank Kermode in 1964. The prototype of pastoral tragi-comedy with its opposition of Nature and Art (man’s power over the created world and over himself), The Tempest has Prospero, a model for the character of Max, summon “noble reason ’gainst. . . fury.”

*

Suddenly a Mortal Splendor

Title

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy, life is good,
be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
Shine, perishing republic.
-- Robinson Jeffers

Discovered as man’s meaning in a world of ruthless tyranny, of abused and exploited children, of disappearances, and of planetary dread is the human capacity for love, one which may compel us to carry out acts of sacrifice.

Dramatis Personae

The names and identifications of main characters are listed so that minor characters associated with them are indented under them.

Paul Szabo (PAUL), a pre-adolescent Hungarian freedom fighter, a refugee adopted into an English family, later a U.S. Regular Army veteran of the Vietnam War

Terézia Szabó, Paul’s mother, a sometime prostitute

Attila Szabó, alias Comrade Oszkar, Paul’s father, a poet and musician enslaved by Fascists, then a teacher of Communist ideology

Roman Malakov, a Russian commissar in Budapest

Günter (GÜNTER), Malakov’s unacknowledged son, Paul’s school friend, later “Coronel von Albensleben” in Pacífica under General Scarpio, Pacífician dictator

Beatrice Jay Biddegood McQueen (BLUEJEAN), Paul’s wife, Woolpack’s mistress, a sentimental revolutionist

Barry McQueen, her father in Connecticut, CEO of Biddegood Brothers Silk Mills

Christina Woolpack (TEAPOT), her daughter, Woolpack the biological father, Paul the stepfather

Mr. Bodger-Jones, Australian dentist in London whose family Bluejean serves as au pair girl

John Woolpack III (WOOLPACK), outcast, pacifist, ecologist, graduate of Cambridge University, financially dependent upon his wife
J. Byron Woolpack, Woolpack’s grandfather, founder of Earthco, a multinational corporation

John Woolpack, Jr., Woolpack’s father, heir to Earthco, eventually its CEO with headquarters in New York

Grace Littlehale Woolpack (GRACE), Woolpack’s English wife, a virago, beneficiary of the Woolpack Trust, Paul’s “Mum” and eventually Günter’s wife and financier of General Scarpio

Mr. Simonini, Paul’s Latin teacher and coach

Virgil Warbonnet (VIRGIL), Paul’s brother-in-arms, later a Navajo social worker in Gallop, N. Mex.

Hosteen, Virgil’s father, an ex-Marine code talker

Txó, Virgil’s wife

Little Horse, Virgil’s baby son

Slim Derryberry, a homeless Navajo

Chavez, a prison warden

Teresa de las Golondrinas (TERESA), a neuroscientist, later Paul’s second wife

Don Augusto, her “Papa”

“Mama”

Enrique, her brother, a cab driver

Willy, another brother

Archbishop Mendoza and JUANITO, a priest, using their Vicariate of Solidarity to account for “disappeared” persons and to send volunteers, e.g., Bluejean, to care for orphans

Padre José, a priest in the copper-mining district

Time and Place

Paul is first-person narrator and protagonist whose story takes him from Budapest to a refugee camp near Vienna, to a home in London, to the United States and foreign countries as a soldier, and to Chile, which he, himself, fictionalizes as “Pacífica” out of fear of repercussions from secret agencies. A terrifying dystopia, one where freedoms are curtailed and widespread economic deprivation is experienced, is primarily anchored by three historical events: the 22 October 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet domination since the end of the Second World War in 1945; the U.S.-sponsored military coup d’état against the elected Chilean government in October 1973, with General Pinochet installed as president and employing “disappearance” of political dissidents and others; the Act of Congress, also in the ’seventies, whereby Navajo Indians in Arizona are forcibly relocated from ancestral lands (by any definition an act of genocide). A fourth historical event in 1979 occurs at Church Rock, N. Mex. went virtually unreported even though it represented, I believe, the largest radioactive spill of nuclear waste in history up to that time. Contamination reached the Little Colorado River in Arizona and was carried from there to Hoover Dam, thence to California. Actions in Splendor are locked in to these events.

The novel is structured so that the following places appear in a slightly scrambled order: Colorado Springs, Colo., Manitou Springs, Colo., San Luis Valley, Colo.; Budapest; Traiskirchen, Austria, Vienna; London; Colorado Springs again; Santiago de Chile (Cuidad de Pacífica), a mountain village in Chile (Pacífica); Northern Arizona including a ranch near Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon; Gallop, N. Mex., and the Arizona ranch again. The description of places is drawn either from memory or from reading. The same is generally true of languages, histories, cultures and geographical and urban settings.

Backstory and Plot

1.

When Woolpack is in 1928 still a little boy who lives at his family’s home, Paradise Ranch in Arizona, his grandfather takes him to the Grand Canyon ostensibly to admire the view – which he does with a deep and abiding love – but actually to impress upon him the necessity of fulfilling an imperial dream of damming the Colorado River and converting the desert into an oasis civilization. J. Byron Woolpack’s torture tactics – he swings the boy in circles above the abysm and tries to coerce him into acknowledging capitalist opportunity (the Turner Thesis) – so frighten the boy he is speechless, taken to be a sign of moral weakness. An enraged John Woolpack, Jr., banishes the boy (called “Boy) and his tuberculous mother (called “Woman”) to England for the purpose of strengthening his character and preparing him to become heir to and CEO of Earthco, a mining enterprise already destined to expand from helping to build the Hoover Dam to a multi-national corporation worth billions. In England, Woolpack’s mother dies, and Woolpack, a disturbed schoolboy, at first exhibits the sort of brutish and boorish behavior that seems, in the eyes of his father back home in New York, proof of a “manly” and correctly desensitized fitness for leadership in business.

2.

Following the strength of his own convictions about nonviolence and the conservation of nature, Woolpack in England becomes a conscientious objector during the Second World War and is sent to a hard-labor camp in Scotland. For John Junior, his father, and now CEO of Earthco, Woolpack’s behavior is so outrageous that only systematic humiliation may finally bring him to his knees – and senses. When, after the war, Woolpack returns to and graduates from Cambridge University, then marries an English woman, Grace, John Junior sees an opportunity to put his scheme into effect. He summons the couple to New York.

What happens there – the scene is not dramatized but its result becomes the key to the novel’s plot – is that Grace is made initial beneficiary of a fabulous Trust Fund. As long as income from the trust goes to Grace, Woolpack will depend upon her totally for support. If Woolpack fathers a child, that child at the age of eleven becomes not only beneficiary of the trust but also, eventually, heir to the fund’s capital, the entire estate, and directorship of Earthco, Woolpack as guardian actually coming to power. In the meantime, if Grace dies, everything goes to charities. John Junior has taken the measure of his son, an idealistic dreamer, and daughter-in-law, a games-player out for the main chance. By threatening to commit suicide, Grace gets Woolpack to avoid divorce proceedings; at the same time, to hedge her bets, she will “adopt” a boy and, in time, pass him off as Woolpack’s child. As for Woolpack, since he just might come into an inheritance he can control, he will presumably do whatever his wife wants him to do. He is obsessed with hopes for influencing the global peace movement.

At the time of John Junior’s death in the early 1950s, Grace and Woolpack are still married, and there is no child. Early in 1957 Grace will “adopt” Paul Szabo, little expecting that he will fly the coop at the age of eighteen. Moreover, she, as John Junior before her, underestimates Woolpack’s character, for he is determined to have a child of his own with Bluejean, a girl twenty years his junior. Their child, as it turns out, will attain to the age of eleven on Christmas Day in 1973.

3.

Enter Bluejean. When she is six, living in Connecticut at the home of wealthy industrialists, her father rapes her. When she, because she has cancer at the age of fifteen and has a leg amputated, inadvertently reveals to medical staff that she has been a victim of this incestuous rape, she is made a ward of court and sent, as her influential father demands, to England, there to be under the guardianship of Major Sipe, United States Air Force, at an airbase near Oxford. The Sipes are loving people. Bluejean admires them. However, when Major Sipe crashes and burns in his fighter jet – he has swerved to avoid hitting a village schoolhouse and its children – Bluejean goes to live alone in London with just enough money from the McQueen family to enroll at the American School in Grosvenor Square. One day at the school she listens with rapt attention to a lecture by Woolpack, whose credentials as a participant in Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament impress her. The essence of the lecture and in a sense of the novel itself is as follows:

Face to face with the death of Earth, we had no choice but to recognize that we no longer belonged to a tribal cluster but to a single world culture; and that the way to peace was to allow love to expand, like the ever-widening ripples on a pond, to include the mutual humanity of all peoples here and now and to come.

Tracking Woolpack down after the lecture, Bluejean impulsively declares her love for him, an unconditional passion. He without hesitation agrees to the affair, to all appearances the very scoundrel Paul believes him to be. Shortly after their affair begins, Woolpack comes and takes revenge on Mr. Bodley-Jones, an Australian dentist who has attempted to rape her, his wife’s au pair assistant. Had Bluejean gone to the police, she might well have been deported. She has reason to believe that the spokesman for nonviolence cares enough about her to beat her assailant up, which he does. Unlike everyone else, she has faith in him and is resolved to stand by him in future.

4.

Paul as a child has been psychologically and morally injured. His native land has suffered under totalitarian regimes, first that of Nazi Germany, then, after his birth, that of the Soviet Union. His father had disappeared into slave-labor camps. His mother, desperate to save him, has sacrificed herself to prostitution. Suddenly, when he is only five, he is taken from her and incarcerated in an institution where he and other boys are indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist ideology. The meaninglessness and emptiness of his life is by a stroke of luck relieved when his father, disguised as a Party official, subverts the curriculum by teaching the boys to think for themselves, to puncture illusions and confront reality, and, above all, to cherish freedom. So this father-son relationship, soon to be replicated on a national scale in the revolt of the young against Soviet oppression, prepares Paul to grow as an individual. At ten he escapes from the school only to discover that his mother, in order to have him protected at school, has become the mistress of a Russian commissar who actually controls what goes on at the school. While the illusory liaison allows a measure of safety for Paul as well as for Commissar Malakov’s unacknowledged son, Günter, there is no doubt, when the 1956 revolution breaks out, that Malakov must be killed before any escape to Austria can be contemplated. Paul, twelve, tries and fails to kill Malakov, but his mother succeeds in doing so. At the Austrian border Paul’s mother is gunned down. An orphan, a homeless refugee, and a “freedom fighter,” Paul begins in earnest his quest for the humane in humanity. Günter, meanwhile, is damaged almost beyond repair. Altogether lacking in familial and social formation, he invents for himself an illusory personality as scion of an aristocratic German family. When Paul encounters him later in their lives, Günter, easy prey for those with power and money, is a secret agent and executioner for the Pacífican dictatorship.

5.

Grace “adopts” Paul and takes him from the refugee camp at Traiskirchen in Austria to her luxurious house in London; she spoils him so much he considers her as his “Mum.” Since Woolpack has his own flat on Cheyne Walk and lives openly with Bluejean, Paul takes pride in Grace’s tolerance and pities her for the lonely life she leads, never suspecting that the tuition she pays for his schooling and the gifts she lavishes upon him hide an ulterior motive: she is grooming him to become her lover (and her “son” by Woolpack) as soon as he comes of age, or sooner than that. When he is eighteen, prepared for college and presented with a luxury automobile, she has her seduction of him planned. At the same time, however, Bluejean, pregnant, shows up in his life and awakens his yearning to have a family of his own and to become or serve as a father. Humiliated and infuriated, he discovers that an Italian woman who has tricked him into lying with her is in the dark of a bedroom none other than Grace, herself, whereupon he persuades Bluejean to marry and take flight with him to America that they may raise Bluejean’s child together.

6.

Paul’s wisdom about the veneer of idealism by means of which Communist totalitarianism flourishes does nothing to modify Bluejean’s sentimentality. Almost twelve years into the marriage she is still blind to political and economic realities presented to a submissive population by the corporatist state as a desirable culture of illusion. For her sake Paul devotes himself to her little daughter, accepts his role as complacent cuckold, and stifles the resentment he harbors for Woolpack, whom he regards as a feckless, narcissistic playboy without scruples and out for the Earthco fortune. And yet he shares in their vision of freedom, love, and sacrifice even though he is unable to believe in it wholeheartedly without manifestation of proactive examples to glorify and be led by.

Suddenly upon returning from combat in Vietnam he finds his home in Colorado Springs empty. Just as the military coup is taking place in Pacífica, Bluejean has absconded with Teapot, his “life,” and flown to Cuidad de Pacífica for another rendez-vous with Woolpack. Woolpack has never relinquished parental rights. Moreover, Paul has a terrifying experience of synchronicity whereby he apperceives the murder of Bluejean. For someone who has since childhood feared the disappearance of all supports, Bluejean’s “disappearance,” a cynical political term for extermination, leads him to fear what might be in store for Teapot.

7.

With focus kept upon children, the plot of Splendor comes down to sacrifices made for them by Bluejean and Woolpack. Upon arrival in Pacífica, Bluejean goes to the Vicariate of Solidarity and volunteers to serve as a temporary supervisor of an orphanage in a mountain village from which miners and their union leaders have been taken away and executed. Bluejean, too, is murdered, but Teapot, rescued, is united with Woolpack at the Earthco Building in the city. Later, just as Paul, his newly-met love and soon-to-be his second wife Teresa, and Woolpack are at the airport expecting to be joined by Teapot, Günter, motivated by Grace, who is leaping to revenge on Woolpack for divorcing her, has the child kidnapped, the terms for ransom and her safe return to Paul in Arizona spelled out so harshly as to seem beyond realization: Woolpack must die. To Paul, whose experiences in combat with Virgil Warbonnet have taught him to understand how one can be another’s person’s life, there seems little chance of a man of Woolpack’s character sacrificing himself.

In 1979, six years after the kidnapping, the miracle happens. Woolpack has wandered the West as a lost soul, an alcoholic bum with a penchant for exposing himself to danger in risky jobs but otherwise showing little sign of caring and remorse. When Navajo children are reported as playing in highly radioactive river water, without hesitation he comes and flings them to safety – and falls in the river himself. Thereafter afflicted with painful cancers for which he refuses treatment, he accepts his fate cheerfully as if he, too, has long been waiting for conscience to rule his behavior. After his death, after a beautiful young lady, Christina, no longer “Teapot,” is released from Pacífica and returned to the care of Paul and Teresa, the question remains as to the origin of Woolpack’s mortal splendor. To find an answer to the question Paul, guided by Virgil Warbonnet – the Virgil in Dante’s Inferno is a spiritual guide – visits a rim of the Grand Canyon and reconstructs the moment when a little boy repudiated his family out of love for the beauty of the Earth. It is this sacred view of nature that has converted Woolpack to a compassionate father and steward of the Earth. By implication the scene from the past becomes the culminating point in the present for Paul’s quest for a father.

*

Six years were to pass before Virgil Warbonnet and I stood on a bald rim of the Grand Canyon and scattered Woolpack’s ashes to the wind. . .

Dying from cancers, he had dragged himself from the bed in his room at Paradise Ranch and stumbled outside in sub-zero weather in order to freeze to death. When I came home from Flagstaff, I picked up his trail in the snowpacked hills north of the ranch. The boots left inverted cones in the snow in a zigzag pattern. He wasn’t drunk, I’m sure. During the five months he had lived with me and Teresa at the ranch, after he drank radioactive water, he had refused alcohol and pain relievers of any kind. And it had to be north, the direction he was headed. The Canyon lay in that direction about a hundred miles as the crow flies. As I followed his trail, I found places where he had fallen and rolled, vomiting blood in the snow. A blizzard was obliterating the higher elevations when I found his clothes piled neatly as if to mock forever the illusion of accommodated life, and then I found the emaciated body naked and prone in a drift, already stiffened with what was probably a kind of smile on blue lips.

I know now from everything Woolpack confessed to me about his life that he was coming full circle and that he went into the snow at last as if to close his life where it began, his life having begun not with a date but with an occasion half a century before.

Once in September of ’28 a boy named Woolpack and called Boy visited the Grand Canyon. Most of the way he slept in the saddle behind his grandfather, hour after hour in the hot dry air amidst the steady clatter of hooves on a rocky trail, scents of sagebrush and piñon mingling with J. Bryon Woolpack’s strong odor, Boy lulled in and out of sleep. Boy’s coming with me to see the dam, Grandpa had announced to John Junior and his wife, the silent woman called Woman, the peremptory tone echoing among timbers of the Scottish-baronial Great Hall on the walls of which buffalo, elk, and moose eyes gleamed. Dishes being washed by Chinese servants rent the silence and were sealed off again. Cigar smoke curled between lozenges of the chandelier above the eighteenth-century Jesuit Mission refectory table where the family had eaten. Now the silence was broken by Woman’s racking cough. After the coughing, Boy’s father rasped, Time he did, the blue eyes bulging unblinkingly as they had ever since the gas-green woods of the Ardennes entered them. Make a man of him. Boy hadn’t any idea what to expect. He was going to the Canyon, he knew that, just as he knew that Grandpa’s cold blue eyes and handlebar mustache had taken the measure of men and the mountains when Arizona was still a Territory, just as he knew that his mother was dying of tuberculosis. But Grandpa didn’t know how Boy would make a man. Only Boy knew that. Then he was wakened by the snorting of the horse to his presence on a rim of light-gray limestone but a few feet away from a chasm of appalling depth in which clouds drifted in the belly of the wind and flat-topped mesas floated like an archipelago. He slid to the ground. Grandpa vaulted from the saddle, tethered the horse, came and took Boy to that rim of what seemed the outermost and innermost sublimity.

Grandpa pointed vaguely southwards to masses of color – purples, reds, yellows, blues – above abysmal black through which a river ran. “See there, Boy!” Grandpa’s voice, for once, could not contain exuberance. “That’s where we’re putting her, by dom and thunderation! Four times higher than the Empire State with more stone in her than all the pyramids, more steel than all the naval vessels of the world! She’ll make the wonder of the ages! Far as the eye can see – water, blue water, Lake Woolpack, greatest man-made lake in creation – an ocean, Boy, an ocean right here lapping at your feet! And down a ways further, by dom, we’ll excavate so much the Panama Canal will dry up with envy. We’re taking water to the cities, Boy. One day, tens of millions of folks will wake up in a tropical paradise instead of a dom furnace and say to themselves one word of regeneration like a god’s!” He paused and gripped Boy by the back of the neck. “What d’ye think the word is, Boy?”

Half a century in the future we stood on the awesome height, Woolpack and I. He spat blood and answered his grandfather’s question as his soul might have done in childhood could it have spoken: “No! The word was no. Not only no, but Hell, No!”

Back then, Boy speechless and Grandpa standing and staring like Moses on the Mount, a clap of thunder burst below them and reverberated through the Canyon, a giant’s mad dance on a drum. Bolts of lightning slashed pinnacles and spires.

“What’s the word, Boy?”

He had to answer, but Grandpa answered for him. “Opportunity,” he muttered and sucked upper lip until its smacking sound exploded. Then Grandpa seized Boy’s wrist in a vise-like grip and dragged him to the rim. “Opportunity, Boy. Look around you.” He swept his free hand across the sky, like an eagle’s wing “All is open to the shrewdest and the boldest. . . We’re building here the greatest dam the world has ever seen, me and John Junior,” he went on in a kind of rapture, then frowned and lowered his voice. “Soon’s we get the capital, of course. But we’ll get it by hook or crook, by thunder and lightning we will! And that’s where you come in, Boy. If you grow up man enough. . . I may not live to see Woolpack Dam and Lake Woolpack. John Junior may not live to see them. You will. You’ll  be rich. You’ll build her. Huh? What d’ye see out there? Tell me, Boy. What d’ye see?” Grandpa tightened his grip with one hand and pointed with the other. “Water! Water, water everywhere! Look there, look! Water!”
All of a sudden Grandpa swooped and, after seizing Boy’s other wrist, began to swing Boy in a clockwise circle of centrifugal force, each 360-degree turn becoming faster and more unsteady than the previous one, Grandpa shouting, “Say water! Say you see water!” and Boy saw, like a strobe light going berserk, the abyss illuminated by spiderwebbed lightning, high and multicolored buttes blurred unto a phantasmagoria of titanic upheavals and subsidences. “Say water, ye dom fool!” Boy neither spoke nor screamed. The last thing he remembered before he fainted, he fell in a world of white light. The first thing he saw when he woke in the cactus where Grandpa had flung him was a face peering down, black with the poison of its lunacy. “Disgrace!” the face said.

Disgrace, Grandpa would later be saying to John Junior in the Great Hall. I saw water right away, didn’t I, Pa? John Junior said. Never thought a son of mine would be a weakling. Send Boy with the Woman back to England. But get him out of my sight. . .

Not long ago on that bald rim of a Golgotha that drops off into the unimaginable layers of the Earth’s evolution – seas become mountains, mountains become seas, over and over – Virgil and I pondered Woolpack’s circular journey in life. Longhaired Virgil answered in silence the question I had not even uttered: Why. Because the answer was already woven in a Joseph’s coat of rocks, already orchestrated for the point-counterpoint of man and the earth when destiny had been fulfilled, Woolpack born to the imperative of beauty, faithful in his radiant ashes to the soul of a boy’s unspoken imperative of love, repudiating everything that his father and grandfather had dreamt of and worked for in their ecstasy of profanations.

Sources

Suddenly a Mortal Splendor emerged primarily from memories of places I have visited or actually lived in such as Colorado Spribgs, London, the American Southwest, including Northern Arizona and the Grand Canyon, and Santiago de Chile. I visited Chile in the summer of 1978 when the military government of General Pinochet was at the height of its power. The scenes in Budapest are imaginary but to some degree based upon extensive reading of works translated from the Hungarian. The original image out of which the novel would eventually evolve is that of a little boy who is kicking a soccer ball out in the snow on Christmas Day, 1956, at the Traiskirchen camp for Hungarian refugees. Teaching in London in October of that year when the revolt against the Soviet Empire occurred, I made plans to spend Christmas in Vienna, there to volunteer my services with the International Red Cross. As soon as I was free, I packed a small kit, dressed warmly, grabbed my Olympia typewriter, bought a third-class rail ticket, London-Vienna. I arrived in Vienna on Christmas Eve in the midst of a snowstorm. Loudspeakers blatted out “Stille Nacht” while I trudged through the streets looking for a hotel that hadn’t been shelled and machine-gunned by retreating Russians. I found a hotel room, price three dollars, communication in fractured French. Christmas day, I took a trolley car to the camp at Traiskirchen near the Hungarian border. What happened at Traiskirchen and for several days in Vienna I later wrote down at a hostel in Innsbruck on my way back to London. The piece would be published in a Durham newspaper a few weeks later, as follows:

Innsbruck, Austria. Winter arrived early in Vienna. The cypress trees stood clipped and swollen in the parks, and far-off birchflanked hills marched down the sky. On Christmas morning it snowed. Across the boulevard from the dark Imperial Palace some Hungarian boys huddled near a small fire. When the police came the boys stamped out the fire and jumped on a tramcar wheezing and shimmying toward the Opera.

Hungarian refugees are everywhere. They live in the hotels and wait to go to America. They are always waiting. In the cold outside the Kino they wait to see James Dean’s last picture or the luxury of a celluloid Las Vegas. If money remained after the Communist official took his bribe, then they wait to see the striptease at the Lido or the Moulin Rouge. If money is wanting, they linger all day in espresso bars or, simply, lounge in the hotels listening to lusty German voices over the radio.

The Rakos family is waiting in a cheap hotel in Praterstern in the former Soviet sector. Everywhere in the Soviet sector a sense of futility clings to bullet-pocked buildings and auto-empty streets. The Rakos family have been here for six weeks.
“So. You are American. Is right?” asked Mrs. Rakos in French.
“Yes.”
“It true, then, you have an automobile in America?”
“It is true.”
“You are a very rich man.”
“No, I am not rich.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Rakos sighs, “How much longer we must attend going to America?”
Rakos himself was a weaver in Budapest. He is anxious to work. He did not fight the Communists. One day his brother came to say he should flee, so Rakos, his wife and ten-year-old daughter followed his brother that night through the frozen swamps at the border.

Mrs. Rakos once heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” over Radio Free Europe. She begs you to sing it. After you sing it, everyone shakes hands. Next morning the police come to the hotel to talk to Rakos. There is no word yet from the American Consulate.
Most of the refugees are poor and do not live in Vienna at all. They live in the sixty camps scattered throughout Austria. The poor ones are waiting too.

Traiskirchen, about thirty miles from Vienna, shelters 4,000 Hungarians in an old army barracks formerly used by the Russians. The bunks, tables, benches and glass windows were taken by the Russians. Heat for the cold winter is supplied by a variety of rusty, potbellied stoves. Sometimes as many as forty men, women and children sleep together in rooms suitable for ten. During daylight hours many refugees sleep or stare at the ceiling. In the mess hundreds more loaf long after the noonday meal of chocolate and goulash. The young people crowd into a reading room to peruse old torn newspapers or listen to the single radio. Usually a few men and boys can be found playing football in the courtyard with the camp’s sports equipment: a half dozen rubber balls.

Stefan is thirty years old and was once an architecture student. His face is gaunt and leather-skinned. He spent six years in Communist prison for conspiracy. He learned to speak English in prison. When the revolt came, he decided to take his three-months-old child to freedom. The night he escaped he walked fifty kilometers with the child in his arms. At the border Soviet troops filled the darkness with hissing magnesium flares. Each time a flare exploded Stefan fell to earth clutching his child. Now he hesitates to go to Australia. If he doesn’t like Australia, may he later go to America? Perhaps, he thinks, he may wait for the volcano in Hungary to erupt again. He would return to fight.

An American girl with teaching experience in New York slum areas has started a school for the hundreds of children at Traiskirchen. “How can you have a school, “ she despairs, “without books, pencils, crayons, paper or toys?” The children cluster about her knees quietly – too quietly.

Josef is an old man. Before the Nazis came he bred racehorses on his own lands. Years of imprisonment under the Nazis and Russians have wasted his tall manly body, and from his scarred, gaptoothed face only the blue eyes shine still with the fierceness of youth. Released from prison a broken man, he was put to work grooming twenty plough horses at a collective farm. Every day the well water they needed he drew up with cramped, freezing hands.

Like many old men Josef talks. But he does not talk of the days of his youth. He talks of Hungary, and as he does so his eyes flash. He talks of Hunyady who stopped the Turks at Nandorfchevvar in the fifteenth century, of Kossuth who led the revolt against the Empire, of all the violent heroes who have made Hungarians proud.
“But why?” he pleads with his bent body. “Why did America not come when we needed her?”
What is the use explaining the dilemma to Josef?
“We showed you that the Soviet will go when you force him. Ah, always it is Hungary who must sacrifice her body before the invader so that the West may prosper in science and the arts.”
“The world will not let you down.”
Josef shakes his head. “You are American and young. But I am glad I meet you. You have made me calm.”
In time you leave Vienna, Traiskirchen and the refugees far behind. Winter, early and cruel for them, seems paradise to you in the Tyrol. Little villages snuggle in the valleys between incredible peaks, and the bulbous cupolas of the Tyrolean churches lance the air like brass Victorian bedposts. Skiers criss-cross on the slopes and soar birdlike into the air. But you do not forget the Rakos family, Stefan and the American schoolteacher. Most of all you do not forget Josef, who still waved his hand from the platform as your train stole into the night. (Emphasis added)

 

Almost forty years later the little boy who had been in the group which was playing soccer appeared to me in a vision and said, Tell my story.

*

The Voice of the Children in the Apple Tree

Title

“Little Gidding,” the last poem in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quarters, was written during the London Blitz, and so a theme of recovery of innocence came to him in a mystical moment of insight. In a regenerated Garden-of-Eden apple tree the voice of children is half-heard. The Voice of the Children in the Apple Tree explores this theme through the enduring love of a couple impelled by conscience to confront the Atomic Age and emerge in the vanguard of a coming world of consciousness.

Dramatis Personae

Of more than seventy named characters fewer than a dozen are involved in advancing the story. Its focus is on two of these, Trinc and Aeneas, the Caldwells. Since the novel ends in 1947, it is, as it were, left to their son William to write it on the basis of letters and other documents which were entrusted to his keeping when he was still a young man. A historian later in his life, “Billy” threads his way through these materials and uses his intimate knowledge of characters and events to provide a continuous narrative.

H. Dexter Heartwell (GRANDPA DECK), Billy’s great-grandfather and Trinc’s grandfather, is patriarch of the Heartwell clan of Orford Parish, Connecticut, and CEO of Heartwell Brothers Mills

Ednah (“Granny Ah”), his wife
Augustus, his butler
Bruno Rancis, his coachman and henchman
Jim, a young African-American chauffeur

Dr. William Nathaniel Knight (UNCLE DOC), who is related to the Heartwells through marriage to “Auntie Em,” has been physician to President Theodore Roosevelt and at one time president of the American Medical Association. In that organization he attempted to introduce a national health service for elderly people. After his retirement as head of a New York hospital, he employs Jun Takamatsu (JUN) as handyman. JUN will become a decorated hero in the Second World War

Susan Heartwell DeRoman (TRINC) emancipates herself from family influence, becomes a nurse, marries a college professor and, at novel’s end, a leader in the International Red Cross

Gayle DeRoman (COLONEL), Trinc’s father from New Orleans, a Wall Street lawyer, and in the First World War a judge advocate on General Pershing’s staff. His marriage to Trinc’s mother (Helen Heartwell DeRoman or “Hen”) ends in divorce; he is second-married to Amelia Jay Ford DeRoman (AMELIA). Gayle DeRoman, Jr., his and Amelia’s son, is a playboy who dies as a fighter pilot in the Pacific

During nurses’ training, Trinc’s adventures involve two probationers, Dora Downey and Mallie Devine, Dr. Nicovich, a Russian surgeon and alcoholic, and Dr. Troy Turner (TURNER), a psychopathic killer who has escaped arrest

Aeneas Caldwell (AENAS), a nuclear physicist, veteran of the First World War, college professor, member of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, husband of Trinc, father of Billy and Diana Caldwell

Floride Caldwell, his grandmother, a Civil War widow and author
Calhoun Caldwell, his father, a potter and Indian trader
Elizabeth Van Dyke Blumberg (MA-BETTY), his mother, an artist of Taos, New Mexico, first married to Calhoun, then to Phillips Blumberg, artist

Tabitha Van Dyke Playfair (TUBBY), his cousin, Trinc’s schoolfriend, later married to Professor Playfair of Cambridge University. Karl Playfair (KARL) is her son by Dr. Karl, a German psychiatrist, New York

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project director
Blevyn Skye (BLEVYN), third-generation Japanese American, graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, an aspiring artist, briefly married to a Nisei engineer, Hayakawa

Minnie Skye, her mother in Los Angeles, widow of Brigadier General Hampton Bygie Skye
Tanaka, her grandfather, an immigrant worker from Japan
Archibald Skye (“Archie”), Blyvyn’s grandfather, a retired insurance agent from Columbia, South Carolina
Flora Skye, Blevyn’s grandmother, formerly a concert violinist, has Alzheimer’s Disease

Places

New York: New York, Poughkeepsie; Louisiana: New Orleans; Connecticut: Orford Parish, New Haven; North Carolina: Poe’s Hill, Pine Barrens; South Carolina: Columbia, Cherry Grove; Oklahoma Territory; New Mexico: Taos, Santa Fe, Chimayo, Los Alamos, Chaco Canyon, Trinity Site; California: Los Angeles, Needles, Tule Lake; France: Paris, Brunoy; England: Cambridge; Switzerland: near Lausanne. “Orford Parish” is an original name for South Manchester, Conn., and “Poe’s Hill” a fictional name for Durham, N.C. Pine Barrens is a name for a region associated with Moore Country, N.C. in particular Jugtown and Carthage. Trinity Site is so-named for the place where the first atomic bomb was detonated in August 1947. The scene in which President Roosevelt goes hunting occurs before Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907.

Synopsis

Trinc DeRoman knows herself as the unwanted child of self-centered parents and as the privileged captive of a feudal aristocracy of New England industrialists, the Heartwells. Only Uncle Doc, personal physician to Teddy Roosevelt, understands her yearning for affection and for an independent life. When she is seventeen, at boarding school away from the iron rule of the Heartwells, she meets Dr. Aeneas Caldwell, a junior physics professor at Vassar who mirrors the moving spirit of her life, as she, his. But he suddenly disappears. Only gradually does she learn that the patriarch of the Heartwells, Grandpa Deck, had discovered the affair and attempted to have Aeneas castrated; further, that Aeneas had enlisted in the Army, survived the war in France, had gone to study the new physics in Cambridge and had not, after all, been permanently maimed.

Can their love be salvaged? Should she try, without his knowledge, to seek to effect his cure? While nursing victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, she discovers her vocation, then with Uncle Doc’s help defies the family and undergoes nurses’ training in a despotic New York hospital. She proves competent in spite of slim odds. Briefly she dates Dr. Troy Turner, an easy-going surgeon, but there is something sinister about him that reminds her of Grandpa Deck. She turns her attention to having Aeneas cured by a spiritual healer in Switzerland; the cure is successful, he returns to America, they marry, and the marriage prospers for fifteen years as they raise a family in a North Carolina city where he is employed at a university.

Aeneas Caldwell is determined to rise above an unpromising background: his father has been an improvident potter and religious fanatic who uprooted the family in the Carolinas, removed it to rural New Mexico, abandoned it there and committed suicide in Chaco Canyon. Aeneas’s love of science accordingly has a missionary aspect, for he believes that science must have the noble aim of setting humankind free. At first, the discovery of nuclear fission seems to promote such an ideal, and so he buries himself in secret work for the development of an atomic bomb. But he neglects Trinc. Taking their two children with her to New York, she resumes her career, little suspecting that she is precipitating in Aeneas the infamous mid-life crisis. He becomes infatuated with a beautiful young Japanese American artist, Blevyn Skye Hayakawa, only to be “saved” by a tragedy when she is herded into a concentration camp in California. Shortly thereafter he is recruited to work in Los Alamos.

In the period, 1943 – 45, a contrite Trinc moves to New Mexico, works as a public-health nurse, and is reconciled with Aeneas. Realizing at last that the scientists have lost control of the bomb project, he wishes to register his protest by quitting it. But a vindictive Troy Turner, now an intelligence officer at Los Alamos, threatens, if he quits, to have him blacklisted at all American universities because of his alleged affair with Blevyn, an “enemy alien.” Trinc agrees that Aeneas must follow his conscience. After the bomb is tested at Trinity, he resigns from the project, comes home in time to prevent Turner’s rape of his daughter, and in the struggle may lose his life – but Trinc arrives on the scene, kills Turner with Uncle Doc’s revolver, and, in effect, redeems her family’s honor.

They go into voluntary exile in Cambridge, England. Although he is dying of leukemia caused by over-exposure to radiation at Trinity, when Aeneas fixes his gaze upon the inspiring statue of Sir Isaac Newton, he feels certain that he has upheld the integrity of science and, in doing so, expanded the power of love in ever-widening circles. Trinc will devote her services to work with the International Red Cross, having come a long way in declaring independence from a puritan and excessively masculine society. Blevyn, too, has flourished through the power of love. Following her release from concentration camp, she finds success as an artist in New York and will marry Uncle Doc’s former chauffeur, Jun, a decorated hero of the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Plot with Themes

            The Voice of the Children in the Apple-Tree is the story of three families, the Heartwells, DeRomans, and Caldwells, with focus upon the unity of two protagonists, Aeneas Caldwell and Susan Heartwell DeRoman, later Mrs. Caldwell, whose nickname is “Trinc.” All of the characters with the exception of President Theodore Roosevelt and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who make cameo appearances, are fictional. Considered collectively over several generations, the lives of these characters span the twentieth century from the late Victorian to the Atomic Age and are spatially distributed, so to say, from New England and New York to the mid-Atlantic South, the Deep South, the Southwest and the Far West.

The novel may be read, if one wishes, as two novels, the first of these concentrated upon Trinc and culminating in her engagement to Aeneas, the second concentrating, after an interval of fifteen years, upon Aeneas and culminating in his voluntary exile to England. Read as a single novel, however, structural duality is fused together thematically, the constants being of a moral and spiritual nature, the shared conscience and intrepid compassion of Trinc and Aeneas revealing the interconnectedness of life and the refuge of a new world of consciousness.

Both characters are in revolt, Trinc against a patriarchal aristocracy of wealth, Aeneas against a militarized aristocracy of intellect. The novel is rooted in personal experiences which kindled in me a resolute devotion to old-fashioned American rectitude. First, there was the remarkable trajectory of my own mother’s life. Defying her family, she became a nurse and married a college professor. Her spirit of independence called for considerable sacrifice. Here, then, is the origin of the story of Trinc. Second, when I was an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. I was sent to Nevada to participate in a tactical maneuver involving detonation of an atomic bomb. So here is the origin of the story of Aeneas, a physicist at Los Alamos. He, as did many scientists and generals, repudiates the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. He upholds the honor of science and free inquiry, sacrifices his life for his country, and has thoughts only for others. In addition – and I admit to a prejudice in his favor – he believes that usurpation of the energy of the Sun must inevitably lead to destruction of the Earth unless a reverence for nature and a humanity-centered evolution of consciousness emerge in the nick of time. If Aeneas’s stance lends to Voice of the Children a polemical edge, so be it, but the solution therein proposed for our epoch lies in psychology rather than in politics. Planetization, Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of an envelopment of our sphere by love, sums up the proposal.

I hope I may be forgiven for writing a love story in which world culture is implicated. Trinc and Aeneas reflect the real-life romance of Héloise and Abélard. In both pairs passion comes into conflict with society. Héloise’s uncle has Abélard castrated, and Abélard has Héloise locked away in a convent. The deity of society is nowhere near her heart. He is the moving spirit of her life, the cruel neglect notwithstanding. What began as Eros has evolved into a transformative power, its potential in modern times fictionalized in the characters of Trinc and Aeneas. How else explain the duration of their passion? Seemingly a matter of a few hours of mutual desire, it endures in spite of obstacles. What has happened is this: the couple are united in a dimension of timelessness, one in which all humanity exists in an atonement, literally at one. 

Sources

The “Afterword” to Voice lists primary sources from family archives and in addition an extensive bibliography of works consulted, especially in relation to Los Alamos and the making of the atomic bomb. The scene at Trinity Site in 1945 is based upon source material added to my experiences in October 29, 1951, when I participated in the testing of an atomic bomb in Nevada. My description of that explosion is based upon personal experience.

I had been flown in a twin-engine plane of the Flying Tiger Line to Las Vegas and from there taken by bus about seventy-five miles to Camp Desert Rock. There, about 6,500 troops were soon gathered in tents to await the “shot” at Yucca Flat. Due to poor weather conditions there was a delay of several days. Amazingly, a convoy of trucks loaded with cases of Scotch whiskey was dispatched from Las Vegas, and this “gift” was distributed to us soldiers. We were, after all, about to be dutifully radiated. Early one morning we were driven by carriers to the proving ground and assembled on a mesa six miles from Ground Zero. Before dawn we could see that bunkers, gun emplacements, and fox holes had been arranged to simulate a defensive position a mile from Zero. In the bitter cold before sunrise, we were excited to be among the first troops ever to witness a 21-kiloton shot airdropped with a burst altitude of 1,417 feet. Here from Voice is a description mixing my personal experience with sources in reading, these latter concerned with the Trinity Site:

 During the next hour he passed tine by consuming three more breakfasts, stuffing his pockets with French toast for later snacks. He decided to cycle down to the Command Center. If today was the time for an apocalypse-crisis, he might as well have a ringside seat only 10,000 yards from Zero.
   Emaciated, pale, and apprehensive, Oppenheimer leaned against a post as a 5:25 siren signaled five minutes to go. He looked like a lost shade waiting for the next ferryboat to Hell. Kenneth Bainbridge and George Kistiakowsky, both of Harvard, had put into operation a timing mechanism. Joe McKibben and Don Hornig were throwing switches. Sam Allison of the University of Chicago had begun counting over a loudspeaker.
   When Kistiakowsky announced that he was leaving in order to observe events from the earth mound that covered the Command Post, Aeneas followed him, taking with him a plank in which dark welder’s glass had been inserted. Presently he was lying on the ground with his feet facing in the direction of the blast and with his eyes shielded by the welder’s glass.
   In the slate-gray dawn Allison counted the final seconds over the loudspeaker: “. . . minus 45. . . . minus 40. . . . minus 10. . . . . 3. . 2. . . 1.”
   Dark horizon is streaked with the first faint rays of dawn. In the darkness of dawn, in the silence, suddenly there is light.
A billion searchlights have been turned on simultaneously and directed into your eyes.
A billion oxyacetylene torches have been simultaneously ignited and directed into your eyes.
A billion magnesium flares have been simultaneously exploded.
It is light as it must have been at the beginning of the world.
Twenty suns have been switched on.
Brightlightflash fuses earthsky.
It is light as it must be at the end of the world.
The world stays lighted.
Had the thermal nuclear transformation of the atmosphere actually occurred?
He counted five seconds, dropped the welder’s glass, and spun himself around to see Zero.
The sky has turned red.
The Oscura Mountains are bright as day.
There is a ball of fire. It is about a mile in diameter and changes colors from deep purple to orange to greenish chlorine yellow.
The fireball is the snaky head of a luminous Medusa. She swells over the sweep of desert, bathing it in her brilliant glow. A tidal wave of dust erupts from her loins.
Men were cheering jubilantly over the PA system as the detonation wave hit. Kistiakowsky went sprawling in mud.
Blast-thunder growls and reverberates in an awesome roar.
The earth shakes, rumbles.
A cloud like a gigantic mushroom billows upward. It spreads in a “z” form.
He had a sensation of heat on his face and realized it had been “sunburned” in thirty seconds.
“God-a-mighty!” he muttered under his breath.
He used binoculars to pan across the Jornada. A herd of antelope burst from concealment, silently galloped just in front of the dust storm. Dawn was breaking.
It is dark again.

*

The Door of the Sad People

Title

The title for this novel arrived to me during a brief visit to Granada in Spain. Inés and I, having toured the Alhambra, medieval palaces of caliphs, went for a walk in streets below the cliffs and stopped for refreshment in a small plaza. From where we were seated I could see a sign over a bodega: LA PUERTA DE LOS TRISTES, translated as “The Door of the Sad People.” Whatever the words meant, they brought me up with a start, and I exclaimed almost breathlessly, “That’s my title!”

And so it became. I would change the name of Trinidad, Colo., to “Los Tristes.” But I would have to ask Tree Penhallow, the artist who narrates the novel, his interpretation of the title as a whole, and it appears on page 329 of the published novel.

Dramatis Personae

Dr. Rountree Penhallow (DADDY), Director of the Sun Palace TB sanatorium in Colorado Springs, Colo., born in London out of wedlock (his father Woodbridge, alias St. John Beauchamp), adopted by the Penhallow family
Irene (GRANDMA IRENE), his mother, secretly supported by a “rich American” (i.e., Woodbridge) at a mental hospital in London
Mr. Waffling, his lawyer in Colorado Springs
Anna Maria Dautremond Penhallow (MUM), an heiress, Penhallow’s wife until his death, second married to Dare
Colonel Rufus Obadiah Dautremond, her father, a slave trader in New Orleans, a Confederate officer, after the Civil War a slave trader in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, murdered there by fugitive slaves
Lucy Dautremond (GANNY), her mother, married to Dautremond while still a girl, initially inherits his fortune, raises Anna Maria in New York
Ruby, Mum’s African-American housekeeper in Colorado Springs and confidante.
Rountree Penhallow, Jr. (TREE), only child of the Penhallows, born in Upstate New York, raised in Colorado Springs in the “upper” middle class North End, a bookish prodigy allowed to roam in the mountains but not to socialize with children and others in the city.
Captain Kyle Deville Dare (DARE, nicknamed “Kill Devil”), a secret labor organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), then District Supervisor for UMWA in Southern Colorado, born in France, raised on Homesteader’s Ranch in Los Tristes, a veteran of the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Philippines
Dr. Randolph Dare, his father, a physician in France until the death of his French wife, thereafter a rancher in Los Tristes
Pia Dare (PIA), his wife, a coalminer’s daughter, mistress first of Dr. Penhallow, then of Woodbridge
Dawn Antelope, caretaker of Homesteader’s Ranch, from Taos Pueblo, N. Mex.
Private Salvatore Riccatone, an army recruit under Dare’s command in the Philippines
Witness Hall, a mountain man, operator of a funeral parlor in Raton, N. Mex., keeps a weapons depot for UMWA
Lieutenant Fredson Shiflit (SHIFLIT), Dare’s subordinate officer in Cuba and the Philippines, Woodbridge’s coachman, security guard, would-be future Chair of Corporation, officer in Colorado National Guard, Scampy’s biological father
Solomon Shiflit, his polygamous father in Utah
General Case, his CO in the Colorado National Guard, a Denver dentist.
Alpheus Woodbridge (WOODBRIDGE), a billionaire, Chair of Corporation in New York, an orphan from Ireland adopted by the Woodbridge family, educated at Yale
Elizabeth Eliot Woodbridge, his “society” wife, New York
Alpheus Woodbridge, Jr. (“Alphie”), his son, later incarcerated in a mental hospital, Upstate New York
Felixine Woodbridge (SCAMPY), fathered by Shiflit, marriage to Shiflit annulled, later a trained nurse
Hamilton Eliot, Vice-President of Corporation, Woodbridge’s “brother” in Skull & Bones Society at Yale, Scampy’s maternal grandfather
Luz Medina (DOÑA LUZ), schoolteacher, then wife, mother, and manager of Medina “hacienda” with miners as boarders, Los Tristes vicinity
Don Fernando, her husband, a patron turned miner, self-taught artist dying of black lung
Golondrina Medina (GOLLY), her daughter, college student in Denver who marries Woodbridge, after his death a New York philanthropist
Carmen, daughter, married to Orlando
Mr. Jefferson (TÍO CONGO), ex-slave from Virginia, labor organizer, factotum for Luz
Adonio (“Nono”) and Aladino, sons and miners
Coal miners: Glass-Eye Gwilym, Old Neddy, Andy, Huw, Sean, Louis the Greek, Rusty, Curly, Milenko, Nick, Kiki, Orlando, Willito
MOTHER JONES, scolder of the nation, a profane Joan of Arc. Born seven years before Queen Victoria ascended to the throne and less than fifty years after the end of the American Revolution, she was alive when Andrew Jackson was President, and she sometimes quoted from speeches she heard Lincoln make. As an adult, she lived during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the First World War. She died on the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Historical Background and Backstory

Fictionalized as “Los Tristes,” Trinidad, Colo., is listed here either as it is or as a location on the Purgatoire River.

Story as Theme

The vehicle of The Door of the Sad People is the struggle of people everywhere against the tyranny of the corporate state. The tenor of the novel is the triumph of the human spirit.

The Door of the Sad People is a coming-of-age story that takes place against the background of the Colorado mining wars long-remembered for the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. Young Tree Penhallow escapes an abusive father and an attempted murder but finds a surrogate father in “Kill Devil” Dare, a friend in Mother Jones, “the miners’ angel,” and a home in a loving, once-patrician Hispanic family now eking out a hardscrabble life through farming and mining. Then his adoptive family is almost entirely exterminated by militia during a strike, a spiritual “door” opens, confirming for Tree the eternal truth of compassion, how it holds humanity together. Tree matures into an artist and hero who confronts the violent and perverse powers of evil.

Sources

Technically, Sad People is pigeonholed as a historical novel. In actual effect it is a novel that grew out of – and in a sense away from – history, albeit history is the original inspiration, one based on a reading of Out of the Depths by Barron B. Beshoar. Here from page ix of that biography, published in 1957, of a Union leader, John Lawson, is Beshoar’s perspective:

It was on the field of Ludlow, where the blood of strikers, their women and children, was shed by a subsidized soldiery, that labor finally established its right to share in such basic American principles as those of religious and political liberty, free speech and free assembly, and economic freedom. The 1913 – 1914 strike was a not purely Colorado matter as the state was merely the testing ground for two divergent principles of life. On the one hand, firmly entrenched and in full power and strength, were those who hold to the theory that all benefits properly trickle down from above, and on the other were those who devotedly maintain the democratic proposition that men and women who toil with their backs and hands are entitled to share in the fruits of their productive labor.

I’d been living in Colorado for more than thirty years before I learned that the bloodiest civil strike since the Civil War had erupted on the prairie just a mile from a old whistlestop named Ludlow about fifteen miles north of Trinidad. Where Interstate-25 passes the site there was a sign by an off-ramp, “Ludlow Massacre.” On my many travels between Colorado Springs and Northern New Mexico, however, I had lacked the curiosity to inspect this UMWA business. Like most Americans I’d been indisposed since childhood to question the propaganda about labor unions; those who did so in American literature were called “muckrakers” or worse. As Ralph Ellison once wisely said, “Much of what gets into American literature gets there because so much is left out”, quoted in Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1976), 74.

After reading, more or less accidentally, Out of the Depths (a title from the Bible), I took one afternoon the off-ramp, drove westward for a mile, got out of the car, Inés with me, and looked around. Within a fenced-in area the size of a tennis court stood a statue commemorating the “black hole” where men, women, and children were suffocated to death when militia burned down the UMWA tent colony. Strikers and their families had been driven out of company towns and had been living peacefully in the colony for many months. I swam my gaze over the prairie, once home to more than a thousand people, now just buffalo grass and long-eared, hopping jackrabbits. The sight of this emptiness overwhelmed me with sorrow. I turned to Inés and said, “I’m going to write a novel about this.”

So I would write about peoples, finding my way through a history to hearts. A large percentage of the miners in those days were immigrants who spoke twenty different languages, many of these immigrants having come through Ellis Island to a Promised Land. I had read and loved Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley and struggled through Emile Zola’s Germinal, but I knew from the start that coal mining in itself would not be – and could not be – my main subject.

My main subject, it has turned out – because I was not conscious of a special influence until the manuscript was almost finished – was already spelled out in the fifth century B.C. in Sophocles’s play Antigone.

The play presents a struggle between demands of “divine” law, upheld by Antigone, and man-made law, represented by the tyrant Creon. His arbitrary and intolerable decree forbidding anyone on pain of death from burial of her brother’s body she defies by sprinkling soil upon it. Her motives are voluntary and compassionate. Her reasoning is, their parents being dead, her brother is irreplaceable, unique. Perhaps to a modern audience, one wary of divinity, this is sophistry, and yet the idea that all human beings are related is nevertheless valid, not specious. The Creons of our world try to justify the suffering they inflict upon people. We recognize in our Antigones and their gestures every individual’s unconquerable dignity when she or he resists a social order that is losing or has lost its humanity.

Lieutenant Shiflit of the National Guard has brutally murdered Mr. Jefferson, the former black slave who at Quivira is leading the strike against Corporation. The body, left by railroad tracks separating soldiers from strikers, occasions Shiflit’s decree that anyone who attempts to bury it will be summarily executed. When a freight train comes to a stop on the tracks, Tree dashes to the body of Mr. Jefferson and drapes over it an American flag. This Antigone-gesture represents the culmination of Tree’s spiritual growth, as indicated here:

   In a time that is no time I go from the Black Hole of Quivira to the body of Mr. Jefferson, having ghosted through an open door into a bright light beyond the sad people. Mr. Jefferson’s skull has been crushed. Bullets have entered the back of his head and exploded, removing his face. I unfold the flag and drape it over Mr. Jefferson. I am shrouded in golden light.
   Time was returning to me.
   Train whistle shrieked.
   Freight cars clanked. Not ten feet away from me steel wheels screeched. The train of the Colorado & Southern, gliding over rails, announced its departure, la-lump la-lump la-lump beginning to come in ever shorter intervals, creaking cars beginning to speed past me like a curtain being drawn aside, bringing in realization of my exposure and immanent execution.
   I felt myself leafing out in my soul.
   I collected heavy rocks, placed them on the flag to keep it from blowing away. Suddenly Scampy was beside me, again having alighted in the field of mortals. She gripped my hand. Our fingers were intertwined.
   Then there he was, Shiflit, not twenty paces away on the stage that was the other side of the tracks. Rigid his posture, right arm stretched out and clutched in the right hand a .45 caliber revolver aimed directly at us.
   I wanted life and the life I wanted was beside me, holding my hand.