Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

As you might have found, I have a penchant for picking up books abandoned in cafes, especially if they seem to be written by lunatics.  My latest such find was, I am surprised to say, rather brilliant. Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, first published in 1915 is a dark and blunt assessment of the inner life of a small town. This book is a collection of short poems in the voices of the dead, lying side by side in the town cemetery, giving voice to their sorrows, jealousies, regrets, and, occasionally, joys, most of which are deeply lodged in their life on earth rather than there unclear place in an ill-defined afterlife.

The cemetery holds rich and poor, powerful and outcast, bankers, publishers, poets, prostitutes, drunks, thieves, and a few murdered, all lying in repose beneath its old trees. Each of the graves is marked with a monument, many of which were carved by the aptly named Richard Bone.  His jaundiced view arrives about half-way through the collection, by which time its message has already become clear:

When I first came to Spoon River
I did not know whether what they told me
Was true or false.
They would bring me the epitath
And stand around the shop while I worked
And say "He was so kind," "He was so wonderful,"
"She was the sweetest woman," "He was a consistent Christian."
And I chiseled for them whatever they wished,
All in ignorance of the truth.
But later, as I lived among the people here,
I knew how near to the life
Were the epitaths that were ordered for them as they died.
But still I chiseled whatever they paid me to chisel
And made myself party to the false chronicles
Of the stones,
Even as the historian does who writes
Without knowing the truth,
Or because he is influenced to hide it.

I don't read much poetry written after the thirteenth century. I have little tolerance for nostalgic tones or soft focus. This collection has neither, just hard-hitting, bald truths, and the odd moment of brilliant light.  Part of the fascination comes from piecing the stories together -- a husband thinking fondly of his loving wife might be followed a few pages later by the same wife, speaking with love and lust of another man. A murder and his victim provide two sides of the same event. Beloved and respected figures admit their hypocrisies, now that they are dead and mute.

A convenient online edition links the gossiping characters to one another.  This was all quite shocking in 1915, when the myth of the happy small town was quite robust.  It is still a mainstay of political speeches, though thanks to Masters -- and 100 years of history -- we know better, now.

Jack Black, You Can't Win

"If you live with wolves, you will learn how to howl."

Jack Black spent the better part of the first two decades of the Twentieth Century in prison, on the run, riding the rails in boxcars, robbing homes and businesses, sleeping beneath bridges, frequenting gambling houses, befriending hookers, and keeping his word.  After receiving surprising leniency from a prosecutor and judge, Black gave up the life, settled down, and wrote this memoir, which is more gritty and true than all the hard-boiled detective stories and gangster tales that seek to recreate the world in which he lived and, several times, nearly died.

Black is an unrepentant criminal, and walks the reader through his schemes. I learned a great deal about how to rob safes from small towns, though only if it is 1915.  I also, though, learned a great deal about prisons and about the brutality of police and corrections officers, and this information seems depressingly relevant. It seems that I can't open the news without being greeted by a tale of police violence or another of the horrors of incarceration.  Black is flogged in one of his several stints in prison, but the focus is not on the act itself. Instead, he pivots immediately to the effect it had on him:

I don't know to this day whether the law contemplates flogging as a punishment as a deterrent, or partly both. As a punishment it's a success; as a deterrent it's a failure ... The flogging just hardened me more, that's all. I found myself somewhat more determined, more confident, and with a feeling that I would play this game of violence to the finish.  I had taken everything they had in the way of violence and could take it again. Instead of going away in fear, I found my fears removed ... I got up and went my way with the thought that I had got more out of that prison and its keepers than they had got out of me.

It takes, instead, an act of generosity to drive Black out of his career in crime, a bit of surprising faith in him by a state system that seemed hellbent on his destruction:

I wish I could sift out a few grains of wisdom from my life that would help people to help prisoners, and help prisoners to help themselves, but I can't find them. I don't know. All I can say with certainty is that kindness begets kindness, and cruelty begets cruelty. You can make your choice and reap as you sow.

The surprise of the book is how likable Black is throughout.  He is not self-aggrandizing or melodramatic, like so many fictional versions of such lowlife characters and denizens of underworlds. He comes across as honest, direct, and a sharp observer of human nature. This coming year, our campus book in common will be Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.  I think we might have chosen this hundred-year old book, instead, since it not only brings many of the same issues to the surface, but because it also shows us how old and intractable these problems are.