The Hammer of God

There have been many responses to the greatest fictional character ever created, perhaps none as eccentric as this clergyman and amateur detective.  He is the brainchild of a British man of letters whose massive figure and intellect were the blueprint for another fictional detective.  This may be the only instance in the annals of literature when a serious writer used a colorful and offbeat character as a foil to one literary detective and, for his trouble, was bestowed immortality in the shape of another.  A bizarre story, and one befitting both Father Brown and his genial creator, G. K. Chesterton.

Every serialized character must endure certain conventions that signal to his readers that they are indeed savoring the genuine article.  We have been over this conceit with regard to Holmes and his continuing adventures, and Chesterton’s priest is no different.  He turns up in the oddest places, usually in England and France, and stays in the shadows until the last possible moment at which point he reveals, in an understated and almost embarrassed way, the solution.  Our first taste of the protagonist is normally cloaked in a casual description: “the priest was personally insignificant enough, with plain and rather expressionless features" ("The Doom of the Darnaways"), “the face of one with the harmless name of Brown” ("The Head of Caesar"), “a figure .... [who] looked like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat” ("The Miracle of Moon Crescent").  Holmes is invariably described as very tall and unhealthily thin, the center of attention in every room he enters, a master of disguise and a bit of a fop when normally garbed, and a person who, if not unbelieving in things supernatural or beyond his great ken, is totally uninterested in non–scientific explanations or those based solely on swift character judgment.  A more polar opposite could not be devised.

The Hammer of God takes place in a village called Bohun Beacon, whose Presbyterian priest is the brother of the town’s biggest lout.  That the two now middle–aged men emerged from the same womb seems to baffle the omniscient narrator, adding that it is to the priest’s credit that he has veered off the path of his ancestors, who “rotted in the last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates.”  When the weight of this world feels precisely like some Thor–like hammer, the man of the cloth retreats to his church to pray in silence for long periods of time.  Having been informed that some villagers understand his solitude as stemming from “a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God,” we are then told that this is the typically “ignorant misunderstanding” of those who need others to make themselves feel better.  Whatever the case, before the brothers, who have been enjoying a drink together in the local inn, are to part for the evening, the priest warns his rakish sibling to keep away from the blacksmith’s wife, apparently a woman of rather staggering beauty.  The brother, who is also a colonel, “a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair startlingly yellow,” pays no attention to such admonitions and proceeds on his merry way with a touch of lust in his eye.  Shortly thereafter, he is discovered gruesomely bludgeoned by a blunt object that suggests the employment of gargantuan strength.  And who is it among the villagers that boasts Herculean muscles and a hammer that could serve Hephaestus?  Just one person, it turns out.  That person is Simeon Barnes, a massive slab of fire–and–brimstone rhetoric who gives the story its title, although we should know better than to suspect the one person with both a motive and the raw power to pulverize a man’s skull into blacksmithereens.  It does not help to dissuade the onlookers that the victim was wearing a metal helmet to protect himself from precisely such an attack.  Curiously enough, the murder weapon appears to have been a small hammer, one which would be a matchstick in the hands of Barnes.  "So who would use a little hammer," asks one of the characters taking a look around the forge, "with ten larger hammers lying about?"  "Only," says Brown, "the kind of person that can’t lift a large hammer," a remark at once plain and cryptic but without Holmes's flair or theatricality.

If you are not sure of the morals of these stories, you might be better off.  Chesterton has an unabashedly determined agenda to follow, and even the uninitiated will feel drawn into a world where fair play and redemption are not exotic concepts.  This adds to the pleasure of the text, although an unconfident reader who wishes to experience art without an agenda (or, at least, without an overt agenda since all art does have a program) may swim away from Chesteron's glorious lighthouse.  Indeed, his touch for detail and conveying the essence of a human soul in a few short sentences has few peers in English literature, and the quaintness of the settings bereft of vulgarity, of sensationalism or of lurid detail is welcome in the face of our modern mores.   And Father Brown himself has nothing of an allegory or stick figure in him.  He is whole and flawed and beset by human frailty, as he states: "I am a man, and therefore have all devils in my heart."   And he knows exactly which devils may be able to make a hammer do godlike things.   

Silver Blaze

Although this marvelous story derives its name from this lordly animal set to race in this region of England, its most famous line involves another four-legged friend who "did nothing in the night–time."  My edition boasts that this line is the source of the expression, "the dog that didn't bark."  If this is truly the origin (I will not even dignify it with a search, either online or off), then the future of mankind is indeed in troubled hands.  It would be hard to believe that, after thousands of years of cohabitation, we would need an emaciated and neurotic sleuth to tell us that there is something amiss about a guard dog who chooses not to fulfill his duties.  Wait until someone publishes a story featuring a cat who doesn't sleep (again no search, this cat must be out there somewhere) and decides to watch over its owner, and we may coin an even more telling idiom about human nature.  In Silver Blaze, a beautiful silvery steed from this legendary British stock is missing and its trainer John Straker is dead.  Since the horse can rightly be viewed as a sort of piggy bank – or as we say in our waggish slang, a cash cow – it seems logical to assume that the horse has vanished for the sake of the money that will be earned betting against it. 

This gambit has long since been one of the favorites of sports stories: it is just before the biggest competition of the horse's or athlete's career that the prize participant either gets injured or disappears without too much of a trace.  The team or trainer cannot believe the poor timing with which all this has occurred (although, if you're a betting man, this is the only time for this type of thing to occur; we are witnessing this even now before the largest American sports event of the year), and panic and goldfeverish speculation set in.  The investigation, narrated by the faithful and jubilant Dr. Watson (one of the steadiest and most optimistic narrators in literary history), has all the usual components for a great Holmesian tale.  There is the unique locale, either Victorian or early Edwardian London or one of England’s innumerable moors, tors, or hamlets; the somewhat overtasked police force; a handful of potential culprits who all immediately respect or fear the legendary detective; and the impossible crime itself, which in this case begets one of Holmes’s more ingenious solutions.  Apart from the missing horse, the dead trainer, a band of gypsies, a rival stable, a curious late–night visit, some curried mutton, and a set of diverging tracks, the clues are more than peculiar: a box of matches, two inches of a tallow candle, a brier–root pipe, a pouch of sealskin with that particular cut of tobacco called Cavendish, a silver watch with a gold chain, a fistful of dollars (that is to say, these products from the Royal Mint), an aluminum pencil case, a few papers, and a small, delicate knife with an ivory handle.  “A very singular knife,” remarks Holmes.  His medical companion agrees: apparently, such knives are only used for the finest of surgical incisions.  But such a knife could not possibly have been employed as a murder weapon, since Straker was bludgeoned by nothing less than a large blunt object. 

Unlike other adventures in which Holmes abandons Watson for a few pages to gather data or question informants offstage, very little detail is not made available to the reader.  Holmes’s people skills, which he can turn on and off like electric current, are displayed in their fullest form, and his charm and patience have never proven to be more effective.  And there is also that now–immortal dog who decides not to bark on the night of the murder, even though we suspect he might have every motivation to do so.  Had he barked, of course, we would hardly know of him now.  Yet perhaps one day we will instead remember Silver Blaze for Holmes’s revelatory statement that it was, “in the carriage, just as we reached the trainer’s house, that the immense significance of the curried mutton occurred to me.”  Surely, we think, there must be some aspect of human nature that can be embodied by the spiced meat from two-year-old ewes.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

"You're badly sunburned?  Didn't  you use that jar of Bronze I put in your bag? I put it right —"
"I used it.  I'm burned anyway."
"That's terrible.  Where are you burned?"
"All over, dear, all over."
"That's terrible."
"I'll live."

Considering that the name of this story's protagonist is a homophone of  “see more glass,” and the young girl Sybil on the beach has quite a history behind her name, it would make sense to analyze the name of Seymour's wife, Muriel.  In Hebrew, my research tells me, Muriel means the myrrh of God (as in one of the gifts from the Magi), which is appropriate.   But in Gaelic it is even better: it means the open sea itself.

The story has two perfect halves, then a small postscript.  The first half has Muriel speaking on the phone to her mother.  Her mother, like all mothers who give a damn, is worried about her.  More specifically, she's worried about whether Muriel should have waited out the war for her fiancé, now husband to return.   This husband, a fluttering and empty creature we only meet in the story's second half, has been doing strange things since his discharge.  Apparently he's rammed a car into a tree, tried something fishy with the chair of Muriel's grandmother and said disconcerting things about her plans for death, insisted that Muriel read a book of German poetry, although she cannot read German, and otherwise behaved with no regard for society, its mores, and how normal, unshellshocked people go about their day.  Muriel's mother understands all this, and sees it as rightly tragic.  But maybe Seymour should not have been released from the military hospital (her mother calls this "a perfect crime") in the first place.  He is, after all, as fragile as glass.

We find this fragile Mr. Glass on the beach, where you can also find this strange phenomenon.  He is approached by a little girl whom he has befriended, and when she first addresses him, he lets "a sausaged towel fall away from his eyes."  He himself is no longer much older than Sybil, although he has seen more horror than she could ever think possible.  He takes Sybil to the ocean with a floating toy and proceeds to talk to her about bananafish, fantastic creatures who lead "a very tragic life":

They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in.  But once then get in, they behave like pigs.  Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a bananahole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas.

Some might see a sexual connotation here, especially since Sybil's mother refers to her by a playful children's name that also happens to be a naughty adult word and Seymour kisses her foot at the end of their playtime (perhaps the same foot used when Sybil "stopp[ed] only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle," a line that this author calls one of the best he has ever read).   But Seymour kisses her because she is innocent, and he is not.  He kisses innocence because he can make up stories like a child, he can shun responsibility and tact like a child, but his childhood is lost forever under a heap of bombs and bones, and he will never recover.  Those bananafish are young men, and they become pigs when they are told to go kill other young men.  Upon their return from battle a general might ask them whether they are in good health, whether they used the protection that the army gave them.  They did, but they became pigs nonetheless, roasted pigs burnt all over.

An allegory of war chock full of signs and symbols is easy enough, yet Salinger actually goes a step further: it is an allegory of an allegory.  Soldiers, some barely out of their teens, return to their civilian lives and become little boys again without the one trait that always distinguishes a child from an adult, innocence.  What would a fallen child be like?  What would he say and do? How can a child not be innocent?  Perhaps he "won't take his bathrobe off"; perhaps he will pretend to remember the number of tigers in a children's tale (as children love to pretend to know something they don't), the same number of bananafish that Sybil supposedly espies (as children love to imitate and one–up).  So when Seymour finally does remove his robe he is as pale as Muriel is burnt, and then we realize he is not pale but empty.  An unfilled vessel that can never regain its color.  And the color would be yellow, the color of Sybil's swimsuit and the color of the fish Seymour makes up to compete with her yellow swimsuit, just like any child would.     

The postscript reflects both perfect halves: Muriel, the sea, the scent of God, eternity, peace, and love that survived a war; and Seymour, glass crunched into sand particles and scattered onto a beach with millions more who have died for nothing or who have gone on living while already dead.  And when Seymour tells the woman in the elevator that he notices she's been looking at his feet (the part of Sybil he kisses in celebration of her innocence), we know that his own feet have walked through fields of abject destruction.  And we also know that bananafish, like all fish, have no feet.

The Dead

He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the head of his hearers .... they would think he was airing his superior education.

How likely are those gathered for Christmas dinner in this famous tale to comprehend Gabriel Conroy's postprandial speech?  In his opinion, not at all.  How can he talk about something which doesn't interest him to people who are so obviously not on his cloudy plateau of learning?  What could he possibly do or say that would put both him and his audience at ease?  Since they have nothing in common, he will either betray his own truth or the truth of those around him.  But Gabriel's day is governed by untruth and the harsh odor of an undying passion, and no aspect of his existence is left sacred or undisturbed.  Until his wife's confession he remains, however, the only true orator in the story; that will change with mention of the curious immortal Michael Furey.

Gabriel believed, or at least was willing to say, that "literature was above politics" (a quote repeatedly attributed to Joyce himself), and for that splendid reason, kept his name and newspaper column unassociated and this important principle unuttered.  With Miss Ivors, for example, he "could not risk a grandiose phrase" because it would presumably come off as insincere.  His love for literature naturally propels him towards the richer European traditions and their languages, and, subsequently, he resents what he sees as Irish parochialism and the insufficiency of being monoglot.  Like Joyce, he is  tired of simply being Irish, and deposits truth in distant, foreign lands.  The term "West Briton" stems from his work at The Daily Express, but the fact that Miss Ivors reiterates it following his praise of Europe and disparagement of Ireland shows her keen psychology: she will not accord him his desired status, that of a "European."  He fears he might never escape this despicable parochialism.  When Gretta asks him "what words" he had had with Miss Ivors, he responds: "no words ... no words ... only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland."  Gabriel's tribute to his aunts is perhaps fake, or perhaps he takes pains to mention nothing save their so-called 'admirable' qualities.  Otherwise, they were "only two ignorant old women."  After the spinster Julia's rendition of "Arrayed for the Bridal," Gabriel seizes her hand in congratulatory ecstasy, "shaking it where words failed him," and offers compliments on her performance:

I never heard your voice as it is to-night.  Now!  Would you believe that now?  That's the truth.  Upon my word and honour that's the truth.

The truth is that he couldn't care less about his batty aunts' modest capabilities, and it is no coincidence that his speech is directly preceded by the story of the monks of Mount Melleray.  These monks never speak because they seek to atone "for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world."  Hardly an original concept, this "outside world" of "sins" and lies, and an inner world of truth, silentium est aureum, and so forth.  And Gabriel, unlike his creator, is hardly an original.

The speech itself is laden with pious observations.  "We are living in a sceptical and ... thought-tormented age," Gabriel says, then adds that the past days, "might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days."  He has just held forth on "genuine warm-hearted courteous  Irish hospitality," and fearlessly so; his truth has nothing to do with custom, it is in fact the shunning thereof, the break with the expected that evokes his anti-patriotism.  The "thought-tormented age," the present climate of doubt and revolt, does not dovetail with the romantic quirks he reveals near the narrative's end, where his speech becomes an almost purely rhetorical construct tinged with vindictiveness towards those who might dare question his interpretation of values.  When he mentions "those dead and gone, great ones whose fame the world will not let willingly die," he is taken to mean the idols of his aunts and their generation.  But he is really thinking of his own masters, such as Browning.  As he does to the living, Gabriel accords to the dead a certain hierarchy, what can be loosely termed an aesthetic index, by which he measures those around him.  And so he would never imagine a scene like the story's ultimate, because Michael Furey is supposed to be lost in oblivion.  Someone like Michael Furey, or any trivial, rustic aspect of life cannot possibly be true.  "Unless he tells a lie," this simple or parochial emphasis on true things (a predilection for honesty in contrast to the current "sceptical" times), could very well summarize the falseness in Gabriel's discourse.

The Lass of Aughrim dominates the last third of the story, but initially Gabriel reminisces about his love for Gretta.  His passionate letters contain quotes such as, "why is it that words like these seem to me dull and cold?  Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"  The truest part of Gabriel in The Dead comprises his tender inner thoughts that invariably flow towards his wife, and, if one allows Gabriel's voice or at least a great part of his consciousness to seep through Joyce's lines, the discourse in these pages is lyrical and strong.  His inability or unwillingness to verbalize his relationship with his wife provides two effects: he retains his luster within him, and he fails to understand Gretta's own passion.  While he fretted about his speech, "the indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his," and yet Michael Furey is unquestionably "delicate."  Gretta turns out to be "country cute" as Gabriel's mother had warned him, and this "overeducated"  Irishman now sees himself as

a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts ... a pitiable fatuous fellow.

His own repository of truth, his wife, proves itself to some extent a lie, and its cause is a part of culture he has hitherto denounced openly.  The immortal power of the silent dead, and their famous equation with the living in the story's final line, indicates the vacuity of bold and learned words when compared to the few, small and perhaps simple passions, much like those of a child, that linger forever in memory.