MIDWESTERN LONELINESS Loneliness is our universal lot Through his characters, novelist Jon Hassler explores how some conquer their displacement and others don't Serious, but not grim; often very funny
Hynes, Joseph
NIDWESTERH LONELINESS The novels of Jon Hassler Joseph Hynes Loneliness depends upon one's sense of place. To light up this assertion with respect to the novels of Jon Hassler, I first want to...
...The manner is always that of personal conversations with God as both superior and friend...
...Obviously, moving to the anonymity and cultural richness of the big city and signing global peace treaties to end a war will not solve the problem of evil or answer Job's "Why...
...Of these eight novels only The Love Hunter and Rookery Blues decline a distinction between being "in" the world and being "of" the world...
...On the one hand, they sometimes grow tired of their small-town environments, concerning which Hassler pulls no punches...
...The heart of the book, however, is the interrelationships of the quintet as manifestations of the book's title and five song-title section-headings: "These Foolish Things," "I'll Get By," "Mood Indigo," "Don't Blame Me," and "My Blue Heaven...
...As Paul Dimmitburg knows, the local institutional churches seem to contribute to this problem rather than strive to cope with and perhaps alleviate it...
...Although their correspondence is perfectly in keeping with his promise of celibacy and with anyone's sense of propriety, Agatha inevitably builds more into the friendship than it will bear, and is deeply hurt when she discovers the truth of James's vocation...
...Hassler's other fictions clearly or implicitly make the "in"-t>s.-"of' distinction as they balance the two Joycean excerpts and make life merely qualifiedly lonely, sometimes more meaningful, sometimes simpler, usually more complex, and always morally mysterious...
...Even where priestly celibacy is not an issue, however, we may note that heterosexual relationships^-the only kind Hassler gives us-are few in number and range from virtually nonexistent to difficult to peripheral...
...The quatrain is also hierarchical, but it moves from the secular to the sacred and thereby proffers a real difference from the first ladder...
...When it closes, he is assigned to the chancery office...
...In the last year of World War II the Fosters-Hank, Catherine, their twelve-year-old son, Brendan, and Catherine's father-move from Minneapolis to the town of Plum...
...This is a book rooted in Sartrean existentialism and situation ethics, and it explores what we can or must do when making moral choices in a milieu where disbelief is as normal as cholesterol...
...Catherine yearns for Minneapolis and detests Plum...
...In other words, he thinks that his vocation has never been tested...
...Peggy Benoit (sax and vocals) teaches music while trying to get over her brief marriage and her disappointment at not teaching at Brown or Middlebury...
...The individual is both singular self and insignificant speck...
...These two are perhaps first among equals...
...Whose death...
...Very much like J. F. Powers, his colleague at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Hassler develops plots and characters concerned with both Joycean goals, which obviously are not always mutually exclusive...
...Wallace is eaten up with bitterness and hatred toward everyone because his epilepsy has induced his mother to keep him home in Plum when his need is to go to college on the scholarship he has earned...
...In North of Hope (1990), Father Frank Healy, another provincial Minnesotan, is also tested...
...Healy, in his forties, has spent twenty years teaching in a seminary...
...Joyce, then, offers these two extremes: me here and now versus me now and forever...
...On the track analogous to Joyce's hierarchical ladder, Simon has enjoyed success and gained at least statewide fame as teacher and writer...
...Thus, loneliness is just that much more likely and prominent...
...They hope to revive a small grocery store they have bought and to establish roots in the community...
...As a result their secular activities are again in sync with the Christian goals they had permitted, in their temporary self-absorption, to become a bit rusty...
...For example, Miles Pruitt, the central figure of Staggerford (1977), Hassler's first novel, is a bachelor high-school teacher in his mid-thirties, and he seems content with his smalltown lot...
...Some people only seem to be lonely...
...The action, however, focuses on five other faculty members in their connections to the book's title and to one another, a musical quintet...
...Some new friends enable Simon to see that he's not past it, that life and people are still interesting and worthwhile, and that he can still be profitably involved and creative...
...And indeed this is where Hassler once again carries concern with loneliness beyond a narrow sense of place and into Joyce's quatrain...
...It is to be found as well in three young men not of her family...
...After a few months he realizes that for the entirety of his priesthood he has never known the day-to-day work of a parish priest...
...If Staggerford is not a comedy in the usual generic sense-if it does not lead to a happy ending on society's own terms-that is because Hassler's premises, like those of Joyce's quatrain, go beyond the usual comic range...
...Shortly thereafter Fleming writes this quatrain for Stephen: Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation...
...In fact Hassler makes it tough for his characters to avoid loneliness...
...and "What does it mean to be lonely...
...In short, whether or not at the end of his life Miles was recovering his faith, he conquered apparent loneliness in his very small town by giving himself to others-in the manner of an unordained priest...
...That is, he believes in God and feels close to him, but knows his own place as creature...
...To pull this off without being cute or slavish or drippingly pious seems to me one of Hassler's remarkable achievements...
...She sheds bitterness and again functions as a charitable Staggerfordian, while he goes on the road to preach peace between the two Irelands...
...Sometimes, of course, this juxtaposition is more difficult to find or effect or be assured of...
...But achieving such good things cannot begin to address the problem of evil-why it persists beyond our awareness of degrees of separation, and how it might be solved...
...Yet, at the time of his shockingly sudden death he has made a first move back to Catholicism and has quietly earned the respect and gratitude of the community for his dedication to his students, in and outside of school...
...Kibbee [his secretary] look it up for you," said the dean, causing a hush to fall over the room...
...His life, and the relevance in it of Joyce's excerpts, can be laid out on parallel tracks...
...On the parallel track-denoting Joyce's quatrain-Simon has remained a Catholic believer all his life, and consistently reads himself and events from this overarching point-of-view as well as from a secular stance...
...And ironic wit and charity keep loneliness in its place in a world shown to be a vale of both tears and laughter...
...So where do these two jottings get us on the subject of loneliness...
...His two romantic interests have married other men, one of these his brother, and the woman currently pursuing Miles is impossible...
...The humor shows up, for example, when the Signage Committee (sic), resenting its silly mission, selects as the institution's motto these words: "Rookery State College/ Paul Bunyan's Alma Mater...
...Stevens's night and his "yes" and "no" are strictly secular, while Hassler's (and Simon's) bring to mind the Christian's familiar dark night of the soul...
...The first excerpt evokes the kind of hierarchical placing many of us have attempted, not necessarily in our childhood...
...Hassler is a Minnesota Catholic who writes about Stephen Dedalus's extremes of place and thus about a range of loneliness...
...Father James O'Hannon, in both A Green Journey (1985) and Dear James (1993), writes letters from his village parish north of Dublin to the spinster Agatha McGee in Staggerford, Minnesota...
...The notebooks in fact make sense of his otherwise incomprehensible comment to the thickheaded football coach that "a tie is as good as a win...
...For this is a novel wherein religious and theological issues matter only in the breach...
...Similar observations inform Simon's Night (1979...
...Surrounding all this provincial battling are the concluding events of World War II in 1944-45...
...Novel-time is 1969, at Rookery State, seemingly the sad-sack member of the Minnesota State College system, and indeed the omniscient narrator glances incidentally at Simon Shea, Larry and Rachel Quinn, and "an academic counselor named Mackensie" (now sporting a lower-case "k"), all of them encountered in previous visits to this Hassler campus...
...He also learns that friendship with a woman-just as in the case of Agatha and James-can be consistent with his celibacy...
...Wallace Flint, about twenty, is the third young man...
...Although, for example, his priests are good priests, they are placed in drab locales with hardly a soul to confide in...
...As in The Love Hunter, so in Hassler's current novel, Rookery Blues (1995), there is not a religious bone in any character's body...
...Curiously, loneliness can be next to godliness...
...Both men work at Rookery State College until Larry's multiple sclerosis forces an early retirement...
...Larry's or Chris's...
...Agatha and James manifest both of Joyce's excerpts...
...The first excerpt suggests that loneliness can be a sort of cosmic isolation that inevitably attends upon us unless we can independently convince ourselves of our own value...
...Like Powers, in such books as Morte d'Urban and several collections of stories, Hassler usually builds fictions around his Catholic faith, though not exclusively around priest-protagonists...
...What enables them to be contented with (not blind to) their small towns is their open acceptance of the truth of who they are and the hands they have been both dealt and chosen...
...Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation...
...He rents out his rural cabin and moves to a retirement home in town, afraid that he's losing his grip and may not be able to manage any longer on his own...
...I think here of a recent memoir of E. B. White, wherein Linda H. Davis reports that White spent his last year having his own writings read to him ("The Man on the Swing," the New Yorker, December 27,1993...
...His loneliness is prominent and heart-wrenching...
...Simon Shea, at seventy-six, is long-retired from his locally distinguished career as a poet and professor of English at Rookery State, near Staggerford...
...If, as Stephen Carter argues, we live in a "culture of disbelief," some readers are perhaps more at home with Hassler's The Love Hunter (1981) than with his other books...
...He is a virtual orphan, without family or intimate friends, and for ten years he has not practiced his religion...
...Both excerpts are from the first chapter, where the schoolboy Stephen Dedalus writes down a formula and his friend Fleming writes him a short poem...
...Neither Simon nor his wife has sought a divorce-she out of indifference and he out of his Catholic conviction of the permanence of marriage...
...This fact doubtless accounts for his popularity as he goes about the serious business of grappling with our abiding loneliness...
...Leland's mother weeps with laughter and asks "What sort of student was Mr...
...Still, his humor helps things along (as always), for characters and readers alike, even as the quintet's playing both embodies and transcends their miseries...
...Simon is alternately grateful, loving, needful, contrite, puzzled, and inquiring...
...Despite the sometimes funereal tone of these remarks, I want to sound the concluding note that a dominant mystery about Jon Hassler is how he can be one of the funniest serious writers alive...
...Simon says "yes" and society's track one coincides with Joyce's track-two...
...He wondered why everyone including his wife was suddenly gaping at him as though he'd said something brilliant...
...Young Brendan, as the novel's central intelligence, registers events near and far, and the book's title, Grand Opening, reflects not only the grocery store's big moment but Brendan's moral awakening, his initiation into the problem of evil...
...First Stephen writes: Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe...
...I can have Mrs...
...His wife, successful but bored, decides to come back, thus terminating an instance of coitus in-terruptus that broke endurance records set by Molly and Leopold Bloom and even by Penelope and Odysseus, and Simon sets out to write the autobiography his publisher has long requested of him...
...Miles's notebooks, to which only he and the reader are privy, modestly but clearly show a man who cares about others irrespective of what happens to himself or of the religious belief that supports him...
...All of Hassler's books enmesh their protagonists in the questions, "Who am I?", "Where am I?", "Where am I going...
...About twenty years ago Simon had a brief idyllic affair with a former student, but has otherwise remained celibate...
...Eventually the bridge is repaired and these two establish a genuine friendship...
...He is indirectly responsible for killing Dodger, whom he hates because the Fosters like Dodger...
...Bunyan, I wonder...
...Notably, he is not angry, maudlin, despairing, self-pitying, or demanding...
...Grand Opening (1987) in many ways comes closest among Hassler's novels to Joyce's ladder...
...Most of us, of course, fall somewhere between these extremes...
...Indeed, the whole Christian promise is implicit in these few lines, which suggest to Stephen, as a Catholic, not only that he has temporal and eternal places, but that he matters in the omniscient view of things...
...If s not fair to the alumni as a whole to single out one in particular who's become famous," he said...
...Hassler brings his parallel tracks to a comic terminal in this instance...
...and (2) if you can just hold your own against all the stuff coming down on your head, thaf s victory enough...
...Both are efforts to establish Stephen's identity in the larger frame of things...
...The events of the year serve as a rite of passage for Brendan, who will have to think about such formidable things as sin, faith, and grace as he readjusts to the city...
...The loneliness in this novel is not exclusively Catherine's...
...Indeed, one of the creative joys of the novel is Simon's praying...
...and Victor Dash (drums), whose courses in business English barely divert him from his efforts to organize a faculty union and inspire a successful strike...
...The others are Neil Novotny (clarinet), who teaches English badly and whose novel-writing is even worse...
...Chris justifies this decision on the ground that he is thinking of Larry rather than of any subsequent benefits for himself and Rachel-whom he does not tell of his reasoning and decision...
...His brief married life was interrupted about thirty-five years earlier when his wife ran off with another man...
...Obviously, the Lombardi-like coach won't sit still for a suggestion that kissing one's sister is emotionally adequate, and Hassler's sense of humor is off and running...
...He's right...
...No was the night...
...Bright lights, college courses, economic development, advances in science and the arts-these are among the good things traditionally and understandably sought by protagonists of Bildungsromane, whether set in Minnesota or elsewhere...
...On the other hand, they are both content in the end with exactly those places...
...Leland Edwards (piano), whose teaching of English is dedicated if uninspired, and whose musical skill makes him the leader of the Quintet...
...It is essentially a secular ladder showing both the writer's uniqueness and his insignificance, depending upon which end of the ladder one starts from...
...The book tests his celibacy and his ability to back up his academic abstractions with some hands-dirtying, one-on-one attention to the spiritual and material needs of an Ojibway reservation and his town parish...
...One of these is Paul Dimmitburg, who is experiencing trouble with his Lutheran seminary studies because he cannot understand how God can put up with the denominational bickering and meanness, the lack of charity, on view in Plum...
...To light up this assertion with respect to the novels of Jon Hassler, I first want to look at two brief snippets from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
...To weight this "blues" theme, Hassler writes an italicized four-or-five-page biographical bit for each member of the quintet, thereby implying how he or she got to be this way- usually a sad and needy way...
...Dodger is, like Miles Pruitt, a virtual orphan and is befriended by the Fosters, on whom he comes to depend for life and hope...
...In the end we and Chris have to wonder how Chris's unfulfilled determination will influence any future relationship with Rachel, especially in light of the novel's epigraph from Othello: "That death's unnatural that kills for loving...
...The second young man is Dodger Hicks, Brendan's contemporary and a waif in the Dickensian mold...
...They are both in their sixties and plainly eager if not desperate to find soulmates...
...Hassler offers a range of student abilities and townee quirkiness, the 1960s faculty problem of how to cope with marginal male students whose failure will mean a trip to Vietnam, and an intimate look at domestic and departmental campus politics...
...This assertion really clarifies a great deal in Hassler's books and it means at least two things: (1) works without faith can help others and make your life count...
...The two regard this world as the fullness of reality...
...But the book nevertheless stresses how strangely "distant" Canada feels to Chris, who is clearly on his existential own in confronting his choice and its possible consequences...
...Even as Chris continues to befriend Larry and visit with him faithfully, Chris and Rachel fall in love with each other...
...The smallness of the town merely heightens his lonely malice toward anyone who has what he cannot have...
...The second excerpt suggests that "long loneliness" which, according to Dorothy Day, is our lifetime of working and waiting to reach heaven and the creator of our assured human worth...
...And because the human condition, however perceived, assures some measure of displacement and loneliness, these qualities occur in Hassler's books...
...Thus he's taking some time off to confront this loneliness-the kind of doubt touched on in Joyce's quatrain...
...Connor, whose first name never appears, plays bass, displays genius as a painter while he fights off alcohol, tries to adjust to a wife who hates him and a daughter who loves both him and her mother (but on her own terms), and anguishes with Peggy over what to do about their passionate affair...
...Such involvement removes his sense of being cut off in loneliness and convinces him he's chosen the right line of work...
...We either try to accommodate secular and sacred, or we work for secular significance in the realm of other people only...
...In the event, Larry is revitalized by the trip and Chris is truly glad for him: thus Chris's original choice would seem to have been authentic, in Sartre's terms, rather than selfish...
...In the end the strike fails, Connor reverts to the better job he had left, Neil leaves academe to write grocery-store romances, Victor joyfully resigns (before he is fired) to become a union organizer, Peggy and Leland stay at Rookery State as a duo with hopes of adding new musicians, and Connor and Peggy share beds in two locales while Connor's marriage persists nominally and his daughter's future worries him...
...But as the notebooks show us, teaching high-school students and working unobtrusively to empathize with them, constitutes Miles's way of beating loneliness and the temptation to think exclusively of himself...
...His title derives from some Wallace Stevens lines used as epigraph: After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends...
...The book, then, is not one of Hassler's comedies, but one of his bittersweet ironies, wherein things merely go on as well as they can...
...Chris MacKensie, a divorced loner, forms a genuine triangular friendship with Larry and Rachel Quinn...
...The book's title describes his demoralized condition...
...Instinctively, James conceals from Agatha the fact of his priesthood...
...When Larry declares his wish to die before his multiple sclerosis becomes more pronounced, Chris decides to take Larry duck-hunting in Canada and to kill him there...
...What was his major...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 19
