"The Screwtape Letters": In Search of Wasted Time

Search for the word “sin” in news stories on Google, and it occasionally has a political connotation. Politicians who have admitted some religious affiliation are asked in Western democracies whether they think abortion or homosexuality is a sin, or whether certain vices may be considered eligible for “sin taxes.” Racism is often referred to as a sin in language that sounds almost evangelical. Each party has its own sins, and can make a sin of the other party’s virtues.

Sin is not necessarily the same thing as breaking a society’s law. Murder is a moral outrage, but a sin may be something less obvious and more sinister, because it testifies to a bent soul. Even someone who does not believe in a higher power uses the word as though a kind of supernatural bulwark has been breached. The Hebrew word has the same meaning as an archer who fails to hit the target – missing the mark. We presume that we know sin when we see it, but we are also aware that we do not always want to recognize it. While we apprehend what it might be within ourselves, we at the same moment justify it as necessary, or even, laudatory. 

 How then to account for the enduring popularity of “The Screwtape Letters,” C.S. Lewis’ novel about the proposed corruption of a new Christian? Written in 1942, it was Lewis’ most popular novel before the Narnia series. No less a figure than David Foster Wallace called it one of the best novels ever written; not presumably, for the cleverness of its construction but because of its presumed truth. He is not alone.  I was amused to learn from one commentary on the book that “Screwtape” offers “a reassurance that there is something in us that is naturally resistant to corruption - and that by being true to ourselves we can succeed in increasing that resistance.”

I was curious about what book this person read thinking it was “The Screwtape Letters.” I don’t think any reading of “Screwtape” bears this particular verdict out. Screwtape’s dialogue with Wormwood suggests endless ways the heart can be willingly corrupted - can even cooperate in its own corruption -and being true to ourselves is one way to allow that corruption. Our truest reflection is a diabolical one.

I think the narrative rules of “Screwtape” are suggested by the Parable of the Sower – one of Jesus’ signature stories and one recounted in all three Synoptic Gospels. (In fact, it is used to illustrate why Jesus taught in parables) In it, Jesus describes a sower whose seeds fall along a path, on rocky ground, among thorns and on good soil. When he explains it later to the disciples, he reveals that the seeds represent people who hear “the word of the kingdom.” Some will not understand it, some believe but fall away at the first sign of trouble, and some hear but do not act on it due to “the cares of this world” or “the deceitfulness of riches.”

The story suggests that the condition of a person’s heart has much to do with whether the Gospel can work on them. The point of the parable is that some people will hear, and “bear fruit,” as that is the point of a seed – it grows into a fruit producing tree. God is interested in fruit - good fruit, and as Jesus later says, a tree is known by the fruit it produces. 

 But what of the novel’s form? “The Screwtape Letters” is, of course, epistolary in nature. The demon Screwtape is writing letters of advice to his nephew Wormwood on the corruption of his charge, the newly converted Christian referred to only as “the Patient.” We do not find out much about Screwtape or Wormwood, or the Patient, other than that he is an Englishman who has a mother he cares for, he becomes involved with a woman, and that the action takes place during a conflict we might recognize as World War II. The Patient’s anonymity is to be expected, as he is simply another victim. Later, the Patient is killed in an air raid and goes to Heaven, despite the best efforts of Wormwood, who proves a comically inept fiend. Satan is “Our Father Below.” When God is referred to, it is as “the Enemy.”

The novel sketches out a design of Hell as a stark, humorless bureaucracy, full of human beings seemingly hoodwinked into an eternity of enslavement through a litany of devices which Screwtape knows well through practiced experience. They are tormented, in life and death, by a cringing bevy of lesser demons devouring each other in a totalitarian maze of deceits, flatteries and lies. There aren’t conventional scenes or dialogue as much as situations and humorous turns of phrase, ironic sentiments that project a negative image. Lewis flirts with having created an elaborate, one-note joke, but he has the good sense to keep moving the pieces and eschews long sermons in favor of short asides. By the time the reader senses his patience waning, the story draws to its hopeful close – hopeful, except for Screwtape and Wormwood.

There is an amusing conflict between what the reader supposes a demon would be interested in accomplishing, and the reality as Screwtape identifies it. Some of this might also be inspired by Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives several examples from the Law of Moses well known to His listeners, but goes a step further in showing that God isn’t just interested in outward shows of virtue. Happy that you don’t commit adultery? Lust is just as bad. Satisfied you haven’t killed anyone? Calling your brother a fool will still get you in danger of Hell.

So many temptations are based not on introducing ideas into the Patient’s mind, but keeping them out. Other temptations have to do with enticing the believer into appropriating ideas that are not his, in hopes of adopting popular attitudes that undermine his authentic spiritual growth. On still other occasions, substitute ideas are switched out with admirable ones in order to give the human second-hand and unsatisfying satisfactions.

The superficial must triumph over the everlasting. Humor is useful so long as it is scornful. The demon is sometimes admonished not to push his charge into threatening behavior as much as keep them frozen in place. Vanity, as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, is often the stuff of life. The demon enjoys it when we pile up waste upon waste, killing ourselves an hour at a time as we kill hours. The trick is to keep us a slave to our appetites, cutting ourselves off in our own conceits and delicacies, foreclosing our interest in the souls around us. And all the time, we congratulate ourselves on the tiny kingdoms we create of our own deficiencies, smug that we believe they are much smaller than anyone else’s.

Perhaps the book remains popular because we sense its truth, and the humor allows us to laugh at the same time we recognize ourselves. The sins it documents are hardly “spectacular.” (This makes for good writing. Norman Mailer’s last novel documents the demon in charge of corrupting Hitler. It’s the kind of book that defies one to read it for pleasure.) For example, time wasting. In Screwtape’s twelfth letter, he diagnoses the uneasiness of the modern man and his avoidance of considering God as “intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt.” The point is not to edge the man toward murder and violence, Screwtape announces, but out into nothing, gradually, a little at a time.

“They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a bankbook. In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when they are over.”

The best thing is moving the contact with the Almighty toward the abstract realm and away from the personal. When God is fashioned into an impersonal force with little care for the individual, when His unending love is unrecognized and unengaged by us, then our actions mean nothing. Thoughts can be focused inward and twisted to the point of exhaustion, until one arrives at the gates of Hell saying, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” And to think – Lewis didn’t have an iPhone or social media or video games or Netflix.

Other sins – substituting causes for faith, suffering annoyances, hopelessness, vanity, chasing after the future at the expense of the now. One might be tempted to think calling these sins a bit priggish. After all, aren’t this just foibles? Don’t we all have rough places in our dispositions? The novel does its own business trying to head this criticism off. We might also be tempted to chalk the novel’s sensibilities up to shifting mores. I wondered how Screwtape’s temptations might have played out to someone in another time or another part of the world. As might be expected, the novel’s demons sound very much like a highly educated professor teaching in an English university in the 1940s.

But Lewis’ Screwtape isn’t interested in inspiring the kind of evil that slaughters other human beings on a grand scale, as useful as that might be. (Remember, that very thing was going on at the moment the book was written, just as it is now.) This is a different kind of “banality of evil” altogether – because it seeks merely to deny God a victory in the life of one man. Hell is as much about misdirection as malevolence. Where one life passes without glorifying God, that means others will be inspired to the same end. Screwtape wants a kind of universal moral paralysis which conforms and infects, cheats and devours, even as it congratulates itself. Hell is filled, like Heaven, one soul at a time. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.

The Many Rooms of Slaughterhouse-Five

One of the mental games I play sometimes with great books is to ask how the story might have played out if it had been written by someone else.

Consider the actual plot of "Slaughterhouse-Five" if it had been rendered by an author schooled in dramatic realism - Billy Pilgrim, a native of Illium, N.Y., survives the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War after being taken prisoner by the Germans. Following the war, he returns to America and is treated for the psychological trauma he experienced (which included the accidental shooting death of his father while Billy was on manuevers). He undergoes shock treatments and is released.

He then begins a successful and somewhat conventional career as an optometrist, gets married and becomes a father of two. He is prone to fits of weeping (for no apparent reason) as he ages, and begins to undergo the inevitable outlines of a midlife crisis when, in 1968, he sustains a head injury during an airline crash in Vermont. He is the sole survivor. His wife Valencia, en route to his hospital, dies of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Billy recovers, but after this series of mind-numbing tragedies, he begins to exhibit signs of severe madness, telling anyone who will listen (including the listeners of a radio program) that he was kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore the previous year and held in a zoo with film ingenue Montana Wildhack. He says he is no longer is conscious of time, experiencing past, present and future simultaneously. He says he knows the exact date and circumstances of his death. His daughter concludes she must institutionalize him for his own good.

But in recounting his weird story, Billy dwells on the tragic wartime death of Edgar Derby, a high school teacher whose character caused him to be elected leader of the POWs during the war. Derby was killed in Dresden, though not by the incendiary bombs. He was executed after a trial for stealing a teapot from the ruins of the burned city. In the greatest conflict in human history, Derby didn't even get a hero's death - instead perishing for a bit of larceny in the midst of the Holocaust. 

Imagine if John Updike, James Jones, Philip Roth or Norman Mailer had written "Slaughterhouse-Five." Imagine the scene where Billy Pilgrim witnessed the execution, or perhaps just the arrest, of Edgar Derby. Imagine the scenes where Billy Pilgrim's children struggle against his madness, and wonder why he seems obsessed with the Serenity Prayer and the obscure science fiction novels of Kilgore Trout. Imagine the black scene when Billy's daughter has to tell her father in the hospital that his wife is dead, only to hear him say, inexplicably, that he already knew she was.

But "Slaughterhouse-Five" was written by Kurt Vonnegut, an actual survivor of Dresden, who puzzled for decades over how to render what he had seen in prose. The magnitude of even mundane experience is sometimes daunting to translate into words. "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time," Vonnegut announces in the first chapter, which serves as a prologue to the story. So his strategy was not to write a book about Dresden, but a book about experience - living a life bordered by time and tragedy, coming to terms with age and the certain knowledge that life is probably half over, and the uncertain feeling that it might mean something but, as yet, has not disclosed that meaning.

Much is made of the novel's "postmodern" feel. Vonnegut breaks so many basic rules of novel writing in this slim book. Often he does not "show" so much as "tell." The characters are names and situations, with the reader left to figure out motivations, thoughts, etc. The action is fractured because we simultaneously live inside and outside Billy Pilgrim's consciousness, so that past, present and future are happening (supposedly) at the same time. This renders the experiences on Tralfamadore as real as those in Dresden. The entertainment value is often burlesque - Vonnegut is not above fart jokes, sex jokes and dirty limericks just to break up the talk of war, tragedy and madness. The refrain whenever a character dies - "So it goes" - is used for the death of Christ (three times) and a champagne bottle going flat. There is little attempt at dramatic tension - as Vonnegut tells you what will happen to Derby and then renders his death in one paragraph in the final chapter. More than 60 million people were killed in World War II - why should you dwell on this one?

Any writer, whether rendering reality or the invented, benefits from the manipulation of time and perspective. The writer calls attention to the detail, speeds up or slows down the action, freezes it for comment, or obliterates it to draw attention to something else. "This is what you need to see," the author says. "This will tell you what you need to know." Sometimes, the writer may even be lying. The writer may only want you to turn the page. That is what makes reading Vonnegut so rewarding. He wants you to keep reading. He'll do practically anything to keep you reading. He gives you the last line of the book, the sound of a bird tweeting, at the end of the first chapter, in hopes you'll stick around to see why it matters. He even announces the strategy when describing the typical Tralfamadorian book, which is a "brief, urgent message":

"There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

He is no hack. When he describes the German reserves who guard the POWs as "violent, windburned, bristly men" with "teeth like piano keys" who take "wolfish bites from sausages," the grime that coats the casual evil of men at war sticks to your fingers from the page. One of the most incandescent passages in "Slaughterhouse-Five" comes when the 44-year-old Billy, unable to sleep on the evening of his daughter's wedding, finds a war movie on TV showing American bombers in action. But Billy is "unstuck in time," so he sees the entire cycle of war and life playing backwards. Bombers do not drop incendiary bombs on German cities - they suck up the flames into canisters which are then transported to America, disassembled, and their parts put back into the earth. War is rendered harmless, and even Hitler is transformed into an innocent baby, and all of humanity taken back to Adam and Eve.

This is another part of Vonnegut's strategy. As he is writing this novel, as a survivor of war in his forties, America is again at war in Vietnam and the tide of opinion is beginning to turn against the nation's war leaders. A country that views itself, rightly or wrongly, as historically isolationist has been in some kind of conflict for nearly 50 years, now on its fourth "shooting war" and its second as part of a larger Cold War with the threat of global annihilation added. Vonnegut, and his surrogate Billy Pilgrim, have nothing more than the power of the witness at their disposals to tell the story: "I was there. (something Vonnegut will occasionally stop to point out.)  This is what war does to a human being, even a war engaged against genocidal fascists. It causes young men to drop bombs on a city, largely made up of civilians, just to burn them up."

The book is called "Slaughterhouse-Five" because that is where Billy was when the bombs dropped - a German slaughterhouse. A killing floor becomes a place of refuge. This may be why Vonnegut returns several times to the image of Christ - specifically, the death of the crucified Christ. Deep within, not mentioned, is the idea of Christ's death as salvation. But Vonnegut's burlesque is more humanistic, because there is no resurrection. In fact, an extended riff from a Kilgore Trout novel, "The Gospel from Outer Space," speculates that the real message of the Gospels is not to be merciful as God is, but not to kill anyone "well connected." Is Vonnegut saying that Christianity is somehow responsible for the firebombing of Dresden?

Perhaps, but human beings were killing each other long before the advent of monotheism, much less the Crucifixion. I suspect what Vonnegut is really against is meaning, of any kind. Within the pages of "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut creates an experience that is unlike the conception that many of his readers would have had in 1968 as inheritors of a western Judeo-Christian worldview as citizens of the United States of America. For them, time is moving forward, with progress perhaps not inevitable but hoped for. The good will be ultimately rewarded. The unrighteous will be judged and punished by a merciful, righteous God. All of this will happen at the end of history. Until then, we are the sum total of the choices we make in reacting to the seeming chaos of the world. We must have faith that good will endure until that day. What we do here matters in time and eternity. God is watching.

No, says the novel, though its jokes, nervous tics, absurd caricatures, stock images and haunting memories of men dying in filth, forced to stand shoulder-to-shoulder on Christmas, locked inside a boxcar headed into a genocidal, dying empire. Time is meaningless and absurd. We live at the nonexistent mercy of largely impersonal historical forces. We have no free will. If there is a God, He is unconcerned with us, as the corpses of Dresden and plane crashes prove. Instead, all events play out at the same time. We are largely witnesses to the spectacle around us. Your life will ebb out much faster than you realize and eventually, you're going to die. Try to do it with dignity and cheerful acceptance. That's the best you can hope for. This is what I did. "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."

"Slaughterhouse-Five" is sometimes referred to as an anti-war novel. That has much to do with the starkness of its vision, and when it first burst into view. But it's more accurately described as an anti-meaning novel - as giving meaning to existence is often what brings on war in the first place. But even that meaning is an illusion, as evidenced by the doomed Edgar Derby, going off to his slaughter "mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and imaginary wisdom." Perhaps the most postmodern thing about the novel is that it gives meaning to a meaningless story to illustrate the meaninglessness of life.

But that figure of Jesus, ever recurring in the book, hanging on the wall before a man named Pilgrim, the Savior's lifeless corpse being pulled down from the cross to the lyrical mourning of his family and followers, taunts that vision with endless, endless meaning.

I previously wrote about Kurt Vonnegut here. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.

The literary legacy of Carrie Fisher

When Carrie Fisher died suddenly on Dec. 27, 2016, there were the predictable tributes to her iconic role as Princess/General Leia in the “Star Wars” movies, the memories of her struggles with addiction and mental illness, and mentions of her career as a novelist and screenwriter. But there haven’t been many examinations of her writing, beyond noting its autobiographical qualities and acknowledgments of her ability to craft memorable, devastating phrases.

I kept thinking about this while watching the film version of “Postcards from the Edge,” when Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep), Fisher’s literary doppelganger, sings “You Don’t Know Me.” In the nature of entertainment, we think we know Carrie, but how much of it is what we know from that readily available biography? Making my way through her fiction, I got the impression that the story is much richer than has been acknowledged. I should point out that I didn’t come to any of Fisher’s works until her death. I had more-or-less avoided her novels for years, thinking they were clever reimaginings of her life with little to draw anyone beyond the fan for whom the films weren’t enough.

Fisher is credited with four novels, three memoirs, and a feature screenplay, all largely mining the details of her famous life. Some of the more memorable lines show up in both the fiction and the reminiscences. The world we inhabit in the novels is Hollywood and New York, the small global village of the entertainment industry. There are “fun and feigning friends,” parties where $10,000 dollars get spent for five minutes of fireworks and a knowledge that somewhere, on the fringes, desperate people are struggling with “an abundance of indignities.” The protagonists are always women who are writers or actresses who have issues of varying seriousness with their resilient mothers. Fisher has a lot of weapons at her disposal to make one laugh – wordplay, puns, ironic variations on familiar phrases, random literary allusions, absurd situations, the value of humiliating the characters, the devastating putdown. Her go-to joke is to say that while something is awful, it’s the best kind of awful one could ask for.

Fisher’s second career as a novelist began in the eighties with “Postcards from the Edge,” the story of actress Suzanne Vale’s slow recovery from drug abuse. The tone is set with Suzanne’s opening sentence: “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?” Immediately, we are introduced to the acidic musings of a woman who is broken, but unbowed.

A reader might approach Fisher’s work expecting an amusing, edgy, somewhat superficial exercise in harmless brain candy, the brash, slightly toasted movie star oversharing her rehab experiences behind a thinly-veiled (Valed?) mask. This changes abruptly when Fisher begins writing from the perspective of Alex, another addict. Over 11 pages, we listen to the internal monologue of Alex, resolved to be clean, as he slowly justifies his unraveling until he is literally passed out on the floor on several different drugs, feeling “like Jesus slipped me in the pocket of his robe, and we’re walking over long, long stretches of water.” It’s a harrowing, terrifying, totally recognizable trip into another mind, and quickly shows us that Fisher is capable of something with serious heft. As I read on in Fisher’s novels, I kept waiting in vain for this sort of thing to reappear.

“Postcards” is the most ambitious and unconventional of Fisher’s novels, as it has only the suggestion of a plot and uses various literary devices to get inside and outside its characters. One of her recurring themes is the artificiality of life – not just in the entertainment industry but in everyday life. Suzanne is obsessed not with being okay, but appearing to be okay. There are billions of people on Planet Earth who attempt this, and most of them don’t work in an industry where every facet deals with appearance. In that world, being broken can be a plus in the long run, because being broken means you’re interesting. To be complicated means you’re unable to process the complications that the world throws at you. With the existential dread in the air, who wouldn’t do drugs? It used to be that the people on the screen just took drugs. Now the people in the audience are in on the act:

“It’s all about distraction, a way of being transported out of your life, of having someone else’s life for a while. Identifying with them. Feeling relief that their predicament isn’t yours, or feeling relief that it is. A way of dreaming outside your head. Tilting your head with the actors when they kiss, thinking, ‘it’s so real.’ The New Real. The New Real was not being real, it was acting real.”

There’s something Biblical in all of this. There is in fact a scene in “Postcards” when Suzanne appraises herself in the mirror as appearing to “have it all together,” yet at the same time feeling she doesn’t. I was reminded of James 1:23-25, where those who are hearers but not doers of the word are likened to someone who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets his appearance. If left to our own, we will inevitably fall for choosing and chasing after the wrong things. Reality demands to be dealt with. Retreat only prolongs the inevitable, or with drugs, ironically hastens it – the inescapability of mortality.

James wasn’t talking about appearance any more than she is. Carrie Fisher wants desperately to know what the meaning of Carrie Fisher is – What is her purpose? What does all this mean?

Fisher later turned “Postcards” into a serio-comic movie with Streep, and Shirley McLaine playing Doris Mann, Suzanne’s old show business trooper mom. Fisher said the movie is only marginally based on the novel since the novel had no discernable plot. That’s not entirely true, though she elevates Doris from the margins and gives her the complete Debbie Reynolds makeover. The film dwells on the dependency between mother and daughter, and how the mother has a talent for one-upping her showbiz offspring. The themes of the novel translate onto the screen – chiefly that same nagging itch for the answer to the question, “Why am I this way?” Suzanne’s struggle out of rehab is basically cut to provide the comic fodder of Suzanne’s attempt to resurrect her movie career.

Knowing the demands of the medium, Fisher allows Suzanne (and the audience) an epiphany when Suzanne, struggling with relapse and frantic over her career, encounters the director of her previous picture, played by Gene Hackman. She’s there to loop dialogue for a movie she barely remembers filming through a drug haze. Hackman’s character reminds her how talented she is, even when she’s barely there. He assures her that she has been spoiled, that’s she’s unable to realize how good she has it. All she needs to do is slow down and appreciate her life. She smiles politely, but we still sense there is something unreachable inside her that will not allow herself to believe this. What does she want? “I don’t want life to imitate art,” she says. “I want life to be art.” We still haven’t heard the last of Suzanne, though. 

With “Surrender the Pink,” Fisher attempted a more conventional “chick lit” novel. This work is supposed to have dealt with her marriage to Paul Simon, and is her exploration of what she calls “The Jewish Thing.” Dinah Kaufman, screenwriter, falls for Rudy Gendler. When their relationship disintegrates, she is unable to deal with it. So she flees Hollywood for the Hamptons – because that’s where Rudy is. Is she trying to rekindle the romance, or reconnoiter? Agonize or antagonize?

While Dinah seems slightly more stable than Suzanne, she is still emotionally fragile, needing the validation of relationships, friendly or romantic. She is “a center of attention who’s drawn to centers of attention.” She is perhaps what Carrie would like to be, alone with herself – a woman assured enough to spy on her ex-husband in an eavesdropping scene that reminded me of similar passages in 19^th century British fiction.

Sex is understood to be the next best thing to a fulfilling relationship, since men cannot be trusted. This book shows Hollywood in the post-60s, post-Sexual Revolution moment when the threat of AIDS hangs over relationships, but the principals still seem happy with temporary connections as long as they are passionately felt. The struggle is against the superficial, both within and without. But the reader understands that Dinah’s feelings, at least to her, are intensely lived, and intensely felt, and somehow, more authentic. The mind struggles, but not against itself.

“Delusions of Grandma” uses the device of having its narrator, Cora Sharpe, (a screenwriter, again) writing letters to her as-yet unborn daughter. The story takes off with Cora becoming a caregiver to her friend William while he is dying of AIDS. William moves in and Cora provides amusement and entertainment to ease his passing. In the process, Cora grows closer to Ray, a quiet man who draws closer to her as the two experience William’s death. Yet Cora grows desperate believing that Ray’s attachment to her will fade once William is no more. Death is a great clarifier, and there is no appeal.

There is a scene in a church for William’s memorial service where Cora takes in the picture of Jesus on the Cross, resembling a survivor of Auschwitz, his head bowed: “the air of exhaustion – of exhausted, exalted peace.” Cora senses at least momentary consolation in the shade of the Ultimate Survivor. This is another aspect of Carrie Fisher’s life – the absolute nature of her friendship, assuming roles to strengthen others when she did not feel strong, paying profound “sympathetic attention” to victims of depression or disease. But not everyone can carry the weight of the world:

“Cora was frequently frightened by the certainty crowded and cheering in her own voice. Hers was a hybrid of her mother’s rowdy sureness and her own efforts to rally herself over the finish line, through the hoop, straight over the astonished heads of the crowd in the bleachers and out of the park. But force of will didn’t always translate into a more festive fact of life.”

This eventually drives Ray away, leaving her feeling like an “overconfident failure.” But he left her pregnant. As Cora’s baby hurtles toward existence, she tries to make sense of her life with the help of…her mother Viv, an ex-Hollywood type with a collection of film memorabilia she plants in a Las Vegas hotel. (Sound familiar?) When Viv enlists Cora in a scheme to kidnap her dementia-addled father and take him back home to Texas to die, it allows us to see three-and-a-half generations take shape. “Delusions” has the most hopeful ending of all of the novels. Through them, we can see her steady maturation through the landmarks of her life – addiction, marriage, motherhood, survival.

The addiction wasn’t just about drugs, either. The novels are concerned as much with the reasons for taking the drugs as what they did to her. Reading the novels or the memoirs, one can appreciate what it was like to be in her skin. She didn’t want for money or attention. She had education and was multi-talented. There were always more than enough people around to sing the praises of her looks and her prospects. But she could never feel completely sure of herself – was it really her, or her roles, or her mother, that they were interested in? She had seen for herself, through the lives of her parents, how quickly fame and satisfaction can disappear. So – why wasn’t she happier? Why was she, as she wrote, obsessed with the “crippling addiction to the idea of better”?

Fisher revisited Suzanne and Doris in what ended up being her final novel, “The Best Awful.” Now Suzanne is dealing with the aftermath of her nervous breakdown when her husband Leland leaves her - for a man. This comes after the birth of their daughter Honey.

The tone is very different from “Postcards,” because Suzanne is dealing with being bipolar. When she sees her story in the pages of the Globe, she calls it “a hearty mix of hilarious and humiliating, like so much of her existence.” Again, she relies on Doris, the trooper, who will persevere “come hell or high daughter.”

But she can’t wallow in any of the old pathos, because of Honey, who needs her. Honey serves as Suzanne’s lighthouse back to sanity and stability. The imperative of the child demands that she claw her way back to reality, which follows after a surreal sidetrip to Tijuana, which is easily the strongest part of the book. For a few pages, the edginess that she began with in “Postcards” returns in horrifying detail.

Suzanne seems more surely Carrie in this novel, as some of these vignettes and one-liners in “Awful” are revisited in her subsequent three memoirs. It shows the same voice as “Postcards,” though older, a bit studied and frequently savage. The narrative is much more focused, and not as experimental as the earlier work, which is a weakness. Suzanne is angry at Leland, who has none of her post-relationship issues, but is more angry at fate, which seems to continually conspire against her. One still gets the sense of a mind that cannot turn itself off – with no filter, no ability to focus or ability to discern the real and discard the immaterial.

It is the nature of autobiographically-inspired fiction that the reader feels compelled to ask what is real in the narrative and what is invented. I had the feeling that Fisher felt she needed a conventional ending for “Awful” that somehow made peace with Leland’s decision in a way that was acceptable to Honey. That ending, where Suzanne and Leland have a platonic and social reconciliation for Honey’s sake, and out of their shared love for each other, felt natural and fine - until Suzanne began to justify it. Then it suddenly seemed contrived and slightly pathetic – with Suzanne “taking one for the team” because it’s the most she’ll probably ever receive from life.

I was reminded of the ending Fitzgerald gave Dick Diver in “Tender Is the Night.” As a reader, I didn’t feel Fisher had earned this resolution in the novel, nor did I feel she arrived at it of her own free will. It seemed to smack of resignation, though that may have been the point of the novel – that the “best awful” was one where Honey still had both of her parents.  

 

It’s also probably worth noting that when Fisher picked up her pen again, it was to make sense of her real life through memoir. Perhaps she was tired of inventing – after dealing with fame, addiction, mental breakdown, the breakdown of relationships, motherhood, shock therapy, and the pressures of existence. To record reality is another way of dealing with it, shaping it, hopefully mastering it. She was constantly doing this, as “The Princess Diarist” makes clear – putting her feelings, thoughts, actions, emotions, justifications, explanations, down in poetry and prose. As she wrote of one of her characters, “She righted herself with words.”

“The Princess Diarist” is also an interesting corrective to the rest of her books, because we see Carrie Fisher before it all. Readers who raced to learn the details of her fling with Harrison Ford during the filming of “Star Wars” may have been disappointed to instead encounter an emotionally-needy 19-year-old in the middle of her first big job, entering a relationship with an older, married man wanting to believe it was more than a fling, trying to mask her insecurities behind humor and silent observation.   

Still, Fisher’s novels, especially “Postcards from the Edge,” show a talented, gifted writer with the kind of personality that endears itself to readers. We root for her. She could easily have been a writer in the mold of Evelyn Waugh or even Austen, cataloguing the lives of what people used to call the Jet Set. Maybe at some point she wanted that, until life intruded. Or maybe the demands of commercial fiction are why her non-Suzanne Vale novels occasionally come right up to the point of breakthrough without stepping over the line completely.

No one reads an author the same way after they’re dead. Passages take on unintended resonances in the author’s absence. They are no longer around to answer questions. The audience is left to its own conclusions. A scene in “Delusions of Grandma” where Cora and friends browse through cremation urns inevitably reminds the reader that Fisher’s ashes rest in a giant receptacle shaped like a Prozac pill.

And it is impossible to watch “Postcards from the Edge” without appreciating a dialogue between Doris and Suzanne, with Doris telling her daughter how her near-death to drugs made Doris appreciate how little time she herself had left, and that Suzanne should therefore appreciate her more. It’s funny and typical – what happened to you is important if it makes you appreciate how much you need me. Knowing the real-life counterparts died about 24 hours apart burns the scene into you with laughter.

This ambles in the direction of another of Fisher’s themes – the fragility of time. We only get one life. We don’t know how long it lasts. We’d better savor it, regardless of what it does to us, and try to find a meaning we can live with, before another is imposed on it by events we will not control. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.