The horn and the harmonium
A review of Joshua Hren’s Blue Walls Falling Down, out now with Angelico Press.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
Thus the second stanza of Yeats’ “Long-Legged Fly,” which, with its Caesar and its Michael Angelo and its woman-child echo of Helen, has come often to mind as I have read, at speed, Joshua Hren’s deeply pleasing Blue Walls Falling Down. This loose sequel follows Stella Tesknota, erstwhile fiancée to Blake Yourrick, the holy fool of Hren’s Infinite Regress, from a teaching post on Chicago’s south side through an affair, a conception, a birth, and a return to her parents’ Milwaukee home as Peter Clavier, her son’s father, goes to Washington and the fight for racial justice.
Intensely contemporary, the book probes the events of the Covid-19 pandemic and the January 6th riot as deeply as it plumbs Stella’s psyche and P.C.’s past. It is a book of carnage, blood, dissolution, madness, a book to meet the perils of a Gallic campaign, a Trojan War, a Renaissance. And like the long-legged fly, the narrative proceeds along the surface of this chaos, sustained by the book’s sprawling reticulum of references to Shakespeare, Dante, Millet, Miles Davis, Chopin, Nirvana, and the rest of a host of luminaries, deviants, and horn men who people these pages.
The book’s language, at the level of the word and of the narrative’s controlling metaphors, is that of music, and it is in its musicality that the text finds its great strength. From cover to cover, Hren’s prose distinguishes itself by melodic strains echoed and re-echoed in harmonic complexes reminiscent of the classical and jazz masterpieces the book so often recalls. A representative instance is to be found in the description of “Stella by Starlight,” which P.C. plays on loop from a jukebox during the couple’s first date at Charon’s Kitchen: “…the ivory keys unfurled like tiptoes trying the waters before they ran down the ascending pier and dove into the frigid liquid and swam, frenzied, as much to keep warm as to get to the other side, where they entered a lighthouse with a wood-crackling fireplace which she snuggled up close to as he came back…” Hren’s prose has been called comedic in the divine sense, and here, between the jazz and the infernal ferryman, we find the description apt.
The total effect of the book’s musical structures is the reclamation of time. By lyrically winding the flux of narrative around the consciousnesses of Stella, P.C., and others, Hren invites the reader to attend at all times to the whole of the text, just as Chopin invites the listener to engage with his nocturnes not simply with the ear but also through memory and anticipation. We happy readers are given to live in the past, the present, and the future, and while this prompts our joy, it also bids us live upon the Cross, with Christ who bore all time’s burden.
Such technical effects are not without their risks. In places the language employed by Stella, P.C., and other characters such as Blake, Regan (Stella’s father), and Stella’s beloved Nonna, can appear so similar as to be indistinguishable. Likewise, monologues both spoken and thought indulge in exuberant wordplay which, especially by way of frequent rhymes, can distract the reader from the vortical onrush of the plot. Such shots of verbal energy, not unlike the continual use of allusion, run the danger of jarring the reader’s sensibility off course.
That said, one can readily see how such renderings of speech and thought can incisively comment upon, if not always approximate, the kind of homogenization of language and allusive bombardment which have become staples of life in the age of the internet. In the Twitterverse, everyone sounds the same, and we are all constantly leaping from stone to stone of thought and image.
In the plenitude of its engagements with the tradition, the text can at times become overwhelming, yet herein lies a rich field of possibility for the reader, who is set free to explore those chords of intertextuality which most keenly resonate with him.
One is taken almost immediately, for instance, by echoes of Joyce’s Ulysses. Stella is in her way a Stephen Dedalus, living in her Chicago apartment as Dedalus in his tower, teaching, half heartedly but with deep sympathy, such students as can hardly be made sharers in the peculiar agonies of her own inner life. Likewise Stella’s father, whose presence greets us at the outset of the second half of the book, leans over a burnt pan of oatmeal as Leopold Bloom once labored over that pork kidney which brought a tang of urine to his palate.
Then, too, Stella recalls Stella Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire. The parallel accents the piquancy of Stella’s relationship with P.C., who shares with Stanley Kowalski both his minority and a tendency toward a “wall-hole-making” violence which leaves both sidereal women in fear.
More intricate still, perhaps, is the allusive fabric of P.C.’s being. Peter Clavier brings to mind the great Jesuit Peter Claver, who spent his life in service to slaves arriving in Cartagena. Then, too, through P.C. looms Wallace Stevens’ “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” with its lyrical meditation on the life of Susanna, and thus in turn that Quince of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the director of the play within the play. Stevens gave us the mighty Harmonium. Hren has given us Stella, who can only coax from her own harmonium a troubled wheeze.
In Peter–whose uncle Cedric, a jazz phenomenon and a preacher, insists that Peter is meant to mount the pulpit–one sees the runaway prophet so integral to the fabric of Scripture and to the novels of the last two centuries. If Peter is a Jonah, he is also an Ivan Karamazov, a Binx Bolling, and, most fittingly, from the editor of Wiseblood Books, a Hazel Motes.
Peter is within and without. He exists between racial, religious, musical, and psychological worlds, and in this he is an elaboration, in Hren’s way, on Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. The long struggle of his liminality is the one into which the reader, along with Stella, is plunged, and it is through the pain of Peter’s existence therein that the book eludes the propagandizing instinct so typical of texts taking up the problems of the day.
As the narrative, having wound itself to a screaming readiness, takes off in the last third toward and through its climactic moments, we are made to plunge into the lone Atlantic of the great questions which continue to petition America for response, questions taken up by Baldwin and Faulkner, Morrison and Melville. The latter, recalled with special piquancy by a description of Blake working one of his fingernails into his palm, as once Ahab crucified himself in the fury of his sleep, is particularly instructive in our encounter with P.C., Abraham Lincoln, and the plight of a nation in constant tension with its sinful self. And while this segment of the story might have presented the gravest dangers to the teller, Hren has not only handled them deftly but in such a way as at last to inspire in the reader a deep love for his characters. P.C. and Stella, Blake and Jason, Uncle Cedric—who appears at last like a new Father Mapple—all invest us with a touch of the Ahabian agony which, demoniac with loss, must cast off for there where deep calls out to deep. In knowing them, we feel we have come to know ourselves a little better, and to know what we must do if we would become what we are.
This is a book for the moment in which America now finds itself. But it is only so because it is a book which, having peered deeply into the tradition, descends with profound generosity into the lives of its characters, arriving, through their particularity, at a vision of the everlasting man. Not without a touch of self-consciousness or the passing musical indulgence, it is nonetheless a text which demands a prominent place in the public eye and on the private shelf. It is a call to embrace the body brought down from the Cross. It is a call to abide in the music which restores us to ourselves, a music touched on by Stevens in the voice of Peter Quince at his clavier:
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
