King Arthur when he was The Wart.

Is it true that children no longer read The Sword in the Stone?  A friend of mine with kids says so.  Between dystopias, vampires, diseases and monsters, kids are skipping the fantasy that stood the  Arthurian legend on its head and that makes me sad.  Almost two generations of readers have come of age with no idea of White beyond a Disney movie or a Broadway show their grandparents talked about.  Forgive them, Merlin, they don't know what they've missed.

For one thing, they skip on a wonderful story with a  delicious sense of humor.  Malory  wrote about Arthur's birth in Le Morte D'Arthur but we never get to see the young prince grow up; he goes from infant to sword-puller in less than a thousand words and there's no guessing what happened in between.  T. H. White invented all that by mixing modern sensibilities with chivalric legends and he did it with a sense of humor.

One good example (a disgusting one but good) is the subject of fewmets, something the roaming King Pellinore knows a good deal about.  His sole object in life is to chase after the Questing Beast and a required part of the hunt is to collect fewmets, droppings of the beast pursued, so the hunter can track it.  This is an honest-to-God Medieval English term, but as Pellinore says, it's an unsanitary habit.  Between his hunting dog's tendency to wander and the mess he has to make scooping fewmets, the poor king becomes quite discouraged and would rather the Questing Beast chased itself.   Well, you can see the poor man's point.  Only T. H. White could find an ancient hunting practice, turn it into a bathroom joke and use that to develop a character.  Another joke at the end of the book is that once the new King has proven his heritage by pulling the Sword from the Stone, he's covered up with requests to help unstick doors, open bottles and fix other domestic emergencies. I love imagining the letters (Begging your pardon, Your Highness, but you must be fair strong, having pulled that pig-sticker from the Rock.  Could you open a jam jar for me?)  There's a lot of laughter in this book.

There's also a lot of natural history.  T. H. White had a keen interest in the natural world  and he  shows it off in The Sword in the Stone by having the young Arthur (known to everyone as Wart) temporarily transformed into various animals by his tutor, Merlyn.  It's a marvelous education.  The Wart learns about the corruption of power from the strongest fish in the moat, the effect of regimentation from ants, democracy from geese and the significance of mankind from a badger.  They're wonderful lessons and a good reminder that mankind, for all of our smarts and power, is just one of many species on this earth.  That's a lesson we often forget.

Well, T. H. White's books may be gathering dust right now but his influence is certainly felt.  A lot of the Wart's open, honest character and his unseen destiny can be traced to Neil Gaiman's Timothy Hunter and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter.  And some books return, like the seasons.  Watch and be patient and someone will rediscover the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, Archimedes, Robin Wood and the Wart.  Someone else will mention The Questing Beast and we'll all be off again, laughing about fewmets, talking about T. H. White and rereading The Once and Future King.  And I'll be sitting in a corner with Archimedes the Owl, nodding and saying, "I thought so."

My Favorite Outsider: Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

I'm a fool for those that make me laugh.  If you want me to endorse a candidate, follow a flag, babysit kids or be nice to your Mama, make me giggle.  That's been true for a long time and that's why I champion Florence King.  I've never met the lady, don't expect to meet her and I don't endorse many of her positions but she has my undying devotion (and I read whatever she writes) because she tells a story well and her stories can make me laugh.   

Florence is the ultimate outsider,  She comes by it genetically, according to her memoir, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.   Her mother, Louise, was the anti-Southern Belle who cursed, competed with men and avoided flirting like it was the plague.  Her father was a self-educated cockney musician who didn't follow any of the practices associated with a Gentleman of the South. These two oddballs got along by accepting each other's differences and their only child was Florence.  That girl puts them both in the shade.

Imagine, if you will, a beautiful child who goes off to school wearing pinafore dresses and Mary Janes.  Her favorite beverage is black coffee, she already reads, writes and knows more about British history than the teacher and, oh yes, she doesn't like other children.  Can't stand the immature, drippy little sots.  (For some reason, they don't care for her either.)  Little Florence said she honestly surprised to be classed in with these proto-human beings.  Until first grade, she never realized she was a child.  She just assumed she was short.

Luckily children eventually mature and you'd think she'd be happier in adolescence.  Nope, Florence discovers she's gay.  Remember this is the 1950's when everyone is expected to conform.  It was the Era of The Closet and Florence is expected to like boys.  Well, boys aren't bad but it's a girl that really speaks to her soul and Florence is still outside mainstream culture and watching the rest of the world.  At least she's getting used to being uncomfortable.

Move to the 1960's and 70's when things are getting a little more tolerant, at least if you are left wing.  Did I mention Florence is politically conservative?   This may go back to her dislike of groups (It's hard to find any groupier group than the Kym-By-Ya-Yahs of that period) but either way, she's out in the cold.  The GOP can't tolerate her private life.   The Daughters of Sappho can't stand her public views.  (Last I heard, she was lambasting the Tea Party as a bunch of publicity seeking, spoiled TV brats - that's our Florence, dissing anyone who behaves badly. Reality TV must leave her exhausted)

Because Florence is, in the end, a Southern Lady, even when she fails the course.  She may not gush over people or serve in the Junior League but she does believe in treating others with respect; the same respect she'd like to receive.    I think I can manage that, if I watch my grammar and avoid her presence.   May she live as long as she wants to and enjoy her life as an outsider.  And if it's possible, I hope she writes some more.  I don't have to agree with her when she makes me laugh.

The Halifax Explosion

Everyone has obsessions:  mine are centered around entertainment and art but my husband is obsessed with disasters.   There's history in these tales and often the tragedy of hubris and the indelible courage of the fallen and the survivors.  Disaster stories are all about humanity at our best, how we recover from the worst and I think that's why my husband likes them.  Consequently, I'm always on the lookout for a disaster story he may not know.  A few years ago, I learned of the Halifax Explosion and found the book Shattered City.   If disaster tales are your cup of tea, this is a book for you.

It was December 6, 1917, ninety-seven years ago last Saturday, and two ships were both in a hurry.  The Imo, a French ship was late leaving Halifax's harbor with relief supplies for Belgium while the SS Mont Blanc was trying to get into port with a full load of explosives.  They collided and spilled fuel on the Mont Blanc set that ship on fire.  The crew abandoned ship and the Mont Blanc drifted, unmanned, toward the town.

In those days, the fanciest houses were set close to the water and they got a view of the burning Mont Blanc.  It was early morning and as the explosives on board started to burn, sparks shot into the air, making the Mont Blanc look like a floating 4th of July display.   Crowds gathered at the wharf and the town's only fire engine showed up, expecting to protect the wharf-side buildings.  Then, at 8:45 the ship exploded.

Sixteen hundred people died immediately and every building within a mile and a half radius was wiped out or horribly damaged.  The water was momentarily blown out of the harbor and the rush back created a tsunami.  The force blew the injured Imo to the opposite shore and Mont Blanc's anchor two miles inland through the air.  Until the atomic bombs, this was the biggest explosion on record.

The Halifax survivors must have thought they'd been sent straight to hell. Remember it was December and all the houses had stoves and furnaces going to keep out the cold.  The blast knocked over all of those stoves and the collapsed houses began to burn. Because the entire fire company had died at the edge of the wharf (with their fire engine) no one could put out the fires.  All the window glass blew out, blinding and maimng people who thought they were watching from a safe distance.  Then, in a final insult to injury, Halifax got hit with a blizzard.

The book Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery  covers all this and more, from the little girl who survived fire and cold because an ash-bucket landed on top of her to the rumors of a German attack that filled the city after the disaster.  (Remember, WWI was still going on then and Halifax knew they might be a target)  The fallen are remembered as well as the group of people who did everything they could to heal the survivors and the town.  It's a really good story.

It's good to remember why things go wrong as well as when things go right.  It's the least we can do for the victims and it can teach us where we need to take care.  Shattered City is a book well worth reading on these cold December nights.  It's pays respect to the lost souls of Halifax.

An alternate reality for book nuts: The Eyre Affair

I used to listen to the Book Radio Channel.  This as a 24/7, 365 internet channel where books and radio serials were read aloud to the subscribers and I liked it.   Instead of the same 250 songs in rotation, I got stories.  Some were familiar and loved but often they were something new and either way, I was entertained.  Imagine, a channel whose programming targeted my special interest!  Evidently that interest was too specialized to be profitable because they closed the channel down but not before I found another book worth keeping.   Trust Book Radio Channel to read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair out loud.   This fantasy is a bibliophile's dream.

The Eyre Affair is one of those alternate-universe stories but one where Readers are the Cool Guys on Campus.   Seriously.   Writers are treated like rock stars.  The populace likes watching Shakespearean plays (In one place, "Richard III" is watched and performed nightly by a group of  Rocky-Horror type devotees) and the Baconites go around witnessing like Mormons.  There are other, less-startling ideas like a time-traveling guard and a Crimean war that lasts longer than a century but nothing compares to a public that cherishes books. The security force for all this bibliophila is the agency LiteraTec.   And LiteraTec's top agent and narrator here is the incredible Thursday Next.

In many ways, Thursday is a standard fictional detective.  She has tragedy in her past, (PTSD from her own service in Crimea as well the sorrow of a lost brother and injured fiance) she has to fight her superiors in the service almost as much as the bad guys and (oh yeah) she's as resourceful and cool as James Bond.   She doesn't see this, but we do.   And she's the only one who can save great published literature from the arch-villain, Acheron Hades.

"How can anyone hurt a published novel?" I hear you cry.   Well in this universe, an author literally creates another reality when writing fiction and someone with an original manuscript and the right skills or technology  can breach the novel's reality and change the story.  When the original manuscript is changed, all of the subsequent printings change to match it.  (Now imagine if this was true. They'd have to lock up the Harry Potter manuscripts to keep people from leaping into Hogwarts.)  Acheron Hades acquires this technology and murders an incidental character in Martin Chuzzlewit.  Great Britain goes nuts.  Then, he's threatens Jane Eyre.

How Thursday goes after the bad guy and solves a few other problems is the rest of the story and I can promise Jane Eyre fans a delightful twist but I won't reveal the rest.   Give The Eyre Affair a try if you like fantasy or books in general and if you like it, there are more in this series.  At least you'll see a world where literacy is Cool.   A place where Book Radio is King.

Our cozy southern sister in crime

I miss Anne George.  During the early 1990's, when I was settling into life as an adult, Anne was one of the literary lights in Birmingham, Alabama.  She was a local girl who taught for years and wrote poetry and short stories on the side.  After retiring from education, her literary career swung into high gear and she made readers and booksellers happy until that day in 2001 when she died, most unexpectedly, during heart surgery.   Her passing broke a lot of hearts, including my friend J.'s, who appreciated her as a friend as well as an author.  Anne's poetry was good but what I miss most are her Southern Sisters mysteries.  Anne turned Birmingham into the setting for her Southern cozies.

Cozies are that sub-set of mysteries that are uncomplicated fun.   Any violence is usually off-stage, the detective is normally an amateur and there's a minimum of grit or grime.  Jessica Fletcher is a good example of a cozy's detective, although the first must have been Miss Jane Marple.  Normally, I like mayhem in my mysteries and angst running through all of the characters (hurray for Val McDermid!) but I love Anne George's Southern Sisters mysteries because she wrote about the world I live in.  And she wrote about it well.

For example, let's take my favorite in the series, Murder Makes Waves.  The central characters, Mary Alice and Patricia Anne, are known to the world as Sister and Mouse.  (Six feet tall and 250 pounds means Mary Alice is a presence in any room.  At five foot one and 105 lbs., Patricia Anne can get overlooked).   These sisters are driving down to Destin with an adult daughter when they stop to see the sights along the way.   Every place in that road trip exists, from the Peach Butt water tower of Chilton County  and Priester's Pecans to the House of Turkey and the Hank Williams museum.   Stopping at each of these does turn a four hour trip into eight, as Anne observes, but it's part of a trip to the coast.   Not stopping would make a vacation feel incomplete.

Anne George wrote about the sweet foibles of life here, from the perennial battle to cover the Vulcan Statue's behind (he stands there on top of Red Mountain wearing nothing but an apron and mooning the city of Homewood) to our addictions to college football and barbeque.  This is trivial compared to the rest of Birmingham's history but it's nice that someone noticed the small things, the fun and silly things that also add to our lives.  Anne enriched as well as documented our world with her poetry and cozy mysteries.  Birmingham owes her a debt of thanks.

The Soul-Tugging Need for the Prairies: O Pioneers!

Siblings always surprise you.   When you are young, siblings are your competition for the limited resources known as Mom and Dad.  They are part of the family woodwork and it's hard to see them outside of their family roles, at least while you're sharing a bathroom.  I'm not sure when I first saw my sister as a grown individual but it probably started when she told me she loved Willa Cather's, O Pioneers!  I noticed this because I had been avoiding Cather's work for years.

Cather is, of course, the novelist of the Great Plains and since we grew up in that area, I had avoided her just to be contrary.  There are other prairie writers but Cather usually leads the pack with her stories about the European settlers that came to the Plains and remade their lives on that alien land.  The feeling the settlers develop for this land is central in Cather's O Pioneers! and my sister acknowledged as much when she discussed it.  "I read it," she said, "when I'm homesick."  I decided to give the story a chance.  Now it's a "read-every year" book for me.

On the simplest level, O Pioneers! is the story of Alexandra Bergson and her family.  In the beginning, Alexandra's father has begun the work of a sod buster but he is not successful.   The land is hard to cultivate, the weather is harsh and his own life is ending.  A perceptive father, he instructs his sons to defer to Alexandra in business decisions because she has the shrewdest brain in the family and tells the children to work toward keeping the family together.  Years later, the family thrives financially as the prairies change to tillable farmland but harsh words and innuendo force the siblings apart.  Alexandra loses people she loves dearly before her future becomes clear.

The book also looks lovingly at the first wave of immigrants that broke ground on the Plains while it points out the pomposity of the next generation.   There's poor Ivar who weaves wonderful hammocks and treat livestock as knowledgeably as any vet.  Nevertheless, the younger adults threaten him with the insane asylum because he prefers to go barefoot.  (His reasoning is a little odd on this subject but there's no harm in the man).  Then there is old Mrs. Lee who has to sneak around her grown children if she wants to wash in a little tub or wear a nightcap to bed.  She's a sweet soul with three teeth, a Swedish accent and happy attitude.  While the younger adults worry about appearances and gossip, these two and Alexandra focus on enjoying life and being kind to others.

Of course the book has its love stories but the great beloved here is the land.  There's the shaggy, untamed winter land that inspires feelings of freedom and loneliness.  There's the tilled land of summer that gives itself in full measure to crops.  The Earth is always there for Alexandra, through division and heartbreak, and it is her great comfort when someone dies.  For others, the land is a source of wealth and power.  For Alexandra, it's love and life itself.  To her, the land is home.

A bit of that feeling comes to folks who grow up on the Plains and it doesn't goes away if you leave.  My sister and I both live in states far away and we've both put down roots where we live.  But I suspect some part of both of us is tied to the grass and endless sky and it waits for the day we come home.  Like Cather, neither one of us still live on the prairie but the prairie lives on in us and O Pioneers is an express ticket back.

An improbable work of genius: A Confederacy of Dunces

I thought I read a lot until I met J_,  We were working in the same law firm and introduced to each other as great readers.  But J__ leaves me in the dust.  For example, when we first met and ran over lists of our favorite books she added, "And of course, I love A Confederacy of Dunces."  That brought me up short.  I hadn't even heard of A Confederacy of Dunces.  If you haven't, get ready.  This isn't one great story, it's two.

The story behind the story is incredible.  This young guy, John Kennedy Toole, writes a comedy novel during the late 50's and early 60's while he's serving in the army.   He comes home to his native New Orleans, starts teaching and finishes the draft of the book.   He finishes the novel and ships it off to one of the best publishing houses at the time, and the editors indicate they are interested in publishing it.  (This rarely happens to a first-time novelist).  The book needed work, they said, but they're interested.   So Toole goes back and revises.   And revises.  And revises.  After almost a decade of rewrites and revision, the publisher turns the book down.   All that work, for nothing.

Mr. Toole tried to keep going but his other work wasn't picked up and the rejection and symptoms of mental illness began to eat away at his life.  He lost his confidence, fought with his folks and dropped out of his Ph.D. program.  One January, he ran away from home.  In March, he took his own life.

Mr. Toole's mom was one of those overwhelming, indomitable Southern Women.   Armed with her son's comic manuscript and a will of galvanized steel, she made the lives of publishing executives hell during the 1970's, showing up in their offices and demanding they publish her dead baby's masterpiece.  Eventually she ran into Walker Percy, (probably literally) that great southern writer, who was teaching at Loyola at the time.  She coerced him into reading the pages. The college's press published the book, A Confederacy of Dunces, in 1980.  It won the Pulitzer Prize in '81, (something unheard for a posthumous work)  and has been studied, translated, loved, celebrated and adapted ever since.  How about that for a back story?

Now for the book itself:  ACOD has one of the most unlikely anti-heroes in American Literature, Ignatius J. Reilly.   This 30-year old New Orleans native is a self-absorbed, lazy, fat, slob who plays the lute, pontificates about his bodily functions to anyone and hates everything about the modern world, especially the idea of supporting himself.  He sponges off his mother  and spends his days criticizing the world and telling his mama what to do.   When somebody asks Ignatius what he does to help around the house, he has this to say:

"I dust a bit...in addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century.  When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."

To him, this is sufficient.   To the rest of the world, it is not.  Eventually his mother develops enough of a backbone to insist her college-educated son get a job, any job, to help out with the family finances and Ignatius manages first to get a clerical position in a pants factory (how someone can cause that much trouble while avoiding even the semblance of work is amazing) and afterwards, the chance to sell hot dogs from a push cart in the French Quarter.  Pity the owner of the pushcart.  Ignatius returns the cart at the end of the day, sans hot dogs and sans profits but with some new aromas around his person.  Can you guess what happened to the hotdogs?

I haven't mentioned half of the incidents in the book or the wonderful supporting characters (I love Myrna Minkoff, the beatnik activist who lives to be arrested and is the closest thing Ignatius has to a girlfriend) because I don't want to spoil it.  But I will say the book is acknowledged as a masterpiece and one of the few works of literature that really captures New Orleans.  I'm not surprised.  The town seems to me to be a lot like our hero here: strange, eccentric, a bit fool-hardy, not of this world and despite all efforts, unbeatable.  Ignatius and NOLA are made for each other.

So follow me and J__ and open the pages of A Confederacy of Dunces or take a walk in the City That Care Forgot .   Pick up some wine-cakes from the bakery in D. H Holmes and remember to tie up your box with a lute string.  But  watch out for any Oliver Hardy lookalikes under the clock outside the store, especially if they stand beside a food cart.  Those guys can turn your world upside down.

When Forgiveness is Not enough: Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe

I love the work of Anne Tyler.  Her prose is open, direct, kind and she writes about the people I know.   Her characters are the Americans I grew up around, people from the working and upper-middle class who lives are usually defined by geographical boundaries and aspirations.  These are not the folks who dream of learning a second language, becoming famous or climbing Everest.  These are the middle-class, middle-income, middle everything Americans.  (God love us, we can be so boring at times.)  Anne sees our faults and our fears and still loves us (especially those from her native Baltimore) but her novels tend to disarrange our neat little worlds.  Underneath her open sentences are some serious ideas and I like the way she displays them.  Most readers know her more famous books, Breathing Lessons and The Accidental Tourist but my favorite has, I think, the quintessential Anne Tyler title: Saint Maybe.

Set in the early 1960's, the Bedloes are convinced they are the prototype of a American family.   They are an established family in a well-settled neighborhood and their youngest son, Ian,  seems the most well-sorted of all.  His looks, brains and sports ability are all better than average, though not extraordinary.  His girlfriend and his college match as well.  Nothing about Ian or life should change.   Except they both do.

Death comes to the Bedloe family and Ian is sure he's the cause.  Despairing from the guilt he carries, Ian finds The Church of the Second Chance and discovers the idea that forgiveness is possible only with atonement and an effort to repair the damage.  Ian's choices and what happens after that rewrites this family's story  more than the losses they sustain.

The novel's twin themes are choices and grace and how we deal with unexpected results.  In the end, we make choices that alter our futures and how we deal with the results gauges the joy in our lives.  Do we sigh or regret?  Do we run?  Do we make lemonade?  Or, like Miniver Cheevy, do we pretend and keep on drinking?    Most of us, I think, accept our outcomes  and eventually see the burdens we resented become the structure in our lives.   And so we live, we ordinary people, graced with choices, results and cares.  Do those cares make us saints once we carry them well?  Perhaps in the world of Saint Maybe.

What a difference 12 Steps can Make: The Shining and Doctor Sleep

I came late to the Stephen King party.   His books first hit the national consciousness when I was a teenager and at the time, I decided they were bad.  Not because of the subject matter; I've been terrifying myself with stories since I first picked up a book.  No those early stories were poorly written, in my opinion, fiction man-handled onto a page by someone without subtly or regard for language.  Except for the film adaptations, I ignored the man's output until 1999 (which is a separate tale in itself) when I found the author everyone else had been yakking about for decades.  I am sure some of Mr. King's writing skill improved through sheer practice and I hope he's had help from the best editors in the business but I'd guess the single greatest factor that improved the man's work is his sobriety.  His later books have a focus that was missing in his earlier work.. Nothing shows the change more than comparing the two stories of Danny Torrence: The Shining and Doctor Sleep.

The Shining is, of course, the account of the Torrence family's tragic adventures in the Overlook Hotel.  Jack Torrence tries to turn his life around by abstaining from liquor while he takes care of the closed hotel and writes a new work.  Danny is the precious child who can "see" the malevolent spirits that inhabit the Overlook.  Unfortunately, Jack's sobriety  and anger are contained solely by his internal resolve and those disintegrate under the pressure of the hotel's supernatural forces.  Jack's death is the last merciful gift he can give to his son.

Doctor Sleep is more about the problems of sobriety: how do you grab it and how do you keep it.  By the time Dan (formerly Danny) Torrence reaches the age his father was when they saw the Overlook, Dan is sleeping under a bridge.  The compulsion to drink is part of what drives Dan but another part is self-medication:  booze puts a damper on the visions he still gets from "the shining".  Caught between the misery he's made of his life with the bottle and the horrible visions that still come visiting, Danny takes the chance his father never really grabbed on to.  Dan finds a sponsor and a support group and starts the long grind of learning how to exist without booze.

Dan has a long road to travel both with his sobriety and with his visions but it's shorter on drama than The Shining.  Getting sober is a choice made moment to moment for millions of moments at a time but a lot of those moments are quiet.  There's not a lot of ongoing drama.  Oh, King has a reasonable horror plot to keep the reader interested and it has ties into Danny's sobriety but it doesn't have the inexorable draw of the Overlook.  The "Big Bad" is not as central to the story.

Judged side by side, The Shining is the stronger story. There's enough in the novel (forget the Kubrick movie) to make you like the Torrence family and hope that they survive.  Jack's wife, Wendy, isn't a complete nebbish and Jack's anger, in the end, is not his own.  This decent little family, already stressed by disease, has no chance against the monolithic hotel.  What they achieve is against great odds and that makes a compelling story.

Still, I reread Doctor Sleep more than The Shining because it's a pleasure to read.  I'm not counting cliches on the pages or waiting for the plot to coalesce.  Danny's journey may have less drama than his father's but Dan is easier to understand and relate to, shining powers not withstanding.  At the end of the famous novel, I pitied Jack Torrence; I trust his grown son, Dan.

Part of this is due to skills Mr. King has polished in the thirty-six years between these books but most of it must be from his own sobriety.  With a less linear story, King manages to build a compelling tale in Doctor Sleep and keep a balanced narrative that lets the reader follow multiple plots until the point they converge.   That takes a bit of doing.  The author that loves pop references and slang is still here but the vernacular doesn't overwhelm the prose. And the writer's insights are clearer in Doctor Sleep.  In execution, the sequel is better.

In the end, it doesn't matter which the reader prefers, the early book or the later one.  But it matters when any human being was able to face a life-threatening compulsion and step away from it, one day at a time now for decades.   As the old saying goes, "where there's life, there's hope."  And where's hope, there's creation.  Enough creation and eventually you may find art.

The Necessity of Redemption: A Moon for the Misbegotten

I nearly forgot I said this is a place to discuss, books, plays and short stories.  As long as I'm finally getting around to plays, I'd like to start out with a favorite: A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Every person has life-changing experiences.  Some of these are obvious turning points like marriage or the death of a parent, some are not.  One of mine was a play I saw at age fifteen, a modern drama.  At fifteen, I couldn't say why I identified with the characters or why it moved me so (other than it was a great performance) but the work and the author got under my skin for the rest of my adolescence.  It is still a singular piece though now I understand it a bit more.  It was written by Eugene O'Neill and it's called "A Moon for the Misbegotten."

Few people outside of the theatrical world understand the impact of O'Neill but, to put it simply, he made American Drama human.  Theatrical plays written in this country before O'Neill were either broad comedies or melodramas.   I'm sure they were lots of fun to watch, containing virtuous heroes and dastardly villains but there was nothing an audience member could recognize as their own feeling or experience.   It was all Grand Gesture; no humanity.  Eugene O'Neill changed all that by writing about people, their successes and failures, their generosity, anger and flaws.  And he wrote about his family, usually in code because his father was well-known and because they all had secrets.   Secrets he needed to tell.

These days, the O'Neills would be described as a dysfunctional family because the males had a thirst for booze and the mother was hooked on morphine.  Back and forth the four of them went for years in a tango of substance abuse.   From functional use, to collapse, through withdrawal, white-knuckle abstinence, fights, slips and relapses the four of them went, trying, crying, fighting and lashing out at each other when they weren't hanging onto hope and affection.  Of the four O'Neills, the playwright and his mother eventually found a measure of sobriety (Years before the creation of the 12-step programs, O'Neill's mother got well by treating her addiction was part of a crisis of faith.  It was an amazing insight.) and the father's drinking mostly impaired his personal life.  Eugene's elder brother Jamie, on the other hand, never really grew up or gained independence, never really found sobriety and died in an insane asylum, of cirrhosis and the DTs at age 45.  Eugene grieved for all of his family and wrote most directly of their lives in "A Long Day's Journey into Night."  But even that great play could not release him from thoughts of Jaime.

Eugene loved his brother's charisma and kindness as much as he hated what his brother became whenever Jamie picked up the bottle and he hated Jaimie's death.  So, in his last produced play, O'Neill re-wrote Jamie's ending.  He couldn't save his brother from alcoholism or an early death (he wasn't writing fantasy) but instead of a strait jacket and blindness, Eugene gave his brother a wistful romance with a woman who understood the damage of demons and granted Jamie the love and peace he needed as well as the grace of redemption.

Redemption.  It's a big concept, central to Christianity and creative writers and Eugene O'Neill was both (well, he was a failed Catholic).  Redemption is what so many of us need, to feel forgiven and loved despite our past errors and sins.  It's a new lease on life and a pardon we don't deserve.  Redemption and peace is what O'Neill grants his brother in that play and it moved me although I knew none of the back story at the time.  Now that I understand it more, the technical achievement moves me still.  These days, someone like the playwright O'Neill would have a plethora of information and support available if he needed help resolving the confusing conflicts he had about family.  These days there would be rehabs and half-way houses and kind people discussing detachment and enabling.  Without any help, Eugene O'Neill synthesized his experience and pain and created a solution that not only gave him some peace for a lost brother; he made that brother immortal.

My family did not match the haunted O'Neills, although we had our ups and downs, as James Goldman wrote in "A Lion in Winter".  But Eugene O'Neill's plays spoke to me when I had trouble understanding my folks and wished for a life with less drama.   And that is ultimately what modern creative work is supposed to do. It creates a vision of  the human experience and through viewing, gives the audience a greater understanding of self.  And if that redeems us or helps us to act a little better in the future, so much the better.  That's Modern Drama, courtesy of Eugene O'Neill.