Fall 1969
A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. William Blake Observers of the Church must think it odd that for all…
While it is true that there has been no substantial literary tradition among the Mormons, there are indications that one is beginning. For the first time there is a sufficient number of Mormon scholars and critics who can help establish the climate for a legitimate literature and there are more and more creative writers who are turning their talents to Mormon subjects. Therefore, it is not my purpose to lament the fact that a Mormon literature does not now exist. Rather, I choose to discuss how the literary esthetic can serve religion and how a rebirth of the imagination can and should serve the Church today. For if anything would militate against acceptance of an emerging Mormon literature it would be our continued distrust of the imagination.
Against my better judgment, I have been persuaded to discuss the place of literature in the history of the Mormon Church in the context of this special issue of Dialogue. That the topic is too…
So you want to write a Mormon novel? Great! Here’s a story for you:—
It’s about a Mormon bishop and his family, see, so you can get in all the little inside details about the L.D.S. people. The bishop’s wife is an extremely devoted mother of three children, two lovely daughters and a son who is a genius. The mother is so excessively devoted to her genius son that she drives him into a madhouse. But before he is locked up he has an incestuous affair with a sister which ruins her life, he causes his best friend’s suicide and drives his other sister into an unhappy marriage with a Gentile. His own disintegration causes his father, the bishop, to die of a broken heart.
Dialogue 4.3 (Fall 1971): 42–45
It is tempting, of course, to redress the Book’s limited literary impress by recourse to history, sociology, psychology, and demonology. It is tempting to say that a hundred and forty years in the literary marketplace is too limited a test for such a grand design — but entire literary movements, like the preRaphaelites, have come and gone in the same period
The New York Times article reporting the death of Vardis Fisher in 1968 said, predictably, that Fisher was “perhaps most widely known as the author of Children of God, a historical novel about the Mormons.”[1]…
Nearly fifteen years have passed since I, in looking around for a thesis topic, began to read “Mormon novels.” It seems odd to remember how electrifying were the “forbidden” Vardis Fisher and others I hadn’t heard of: Scowcroft, Whipple, Robertson, Blanche Cannon, even Samuel Taylor. It must be a clue to our culture that a girl could get through graduate school without such an awakening, especially when many of those writers seem so bland today that I wonder along with Sam Taylor “if most of them weren’t mainly victims of bad timing.” What my awakening really consisted of was a refreshing realization that some of those giants from our past were really human beings after all (“saints by adoption”).
For the better part of a month, I was with a group of young Mormons bent on giving the Church a vigorous expression in all the arts. We were not very clear as to just what we would do. We would do something. We felt the Church deserved this. It was such a fine Church, everything considered. And it deserved us. Not in its (then) present state, maybe; but we had faith that it could puff up to us. There was the son of an official sculptor, a yearn ing scientist from Alberta, two or three others who do not congeal into iden tities in the twenty-three-year-old mist I am looking into; and there was me, an ink-stained veteran of a year of writing C to C-plus freshman themes at Weber College. We all met near the end of our term at Biarritz American University in the south of France, the winter after one of the wars had ended.
I remember how icy the alarm clock was that morning when I grabbed it and fumbled under the covers for the button. I didn’t want my mother to hear it and get up too, because…
Dear Sirs: With all the rhetoric in and out of the Church about law and order, I think it wise to get perspective on our objectivity. Thusly, I offer for consideration this statement: “The streets…
A crest of wind runs and rustles through the pinons
Below the butte, and it is evening; the moss-green shade
Glimmers with lancets and gems of the afternoon sun;
The fields beyond glow yellow-gold; and the overcast
Of azure dims pale and like powder in the air
Fails away into the recesses of light and time.
I sit before a candle that tips its flame
From the door, and I write . . .
Dear Mother:
I received a letter from you the 8 of May.
I was very glad to hear from you but I had to wet
The letter with tears. You are a good Mother to me.
Their was a letter came from Father too.
Glimpsed askance through leaves, the sky
looks lapis and ivory;
confronted, blinds and is blinded by
the sun’s incandescence.
Through the thick shadow of a mulberry
a white-wing dove may flute a cool blue call
continuo; and Christ,
In the west door for kings alone swung wide,
the leather-padded wicket, left behind me
stifling a gasp, expired.
No more fresh air:
I had entered the dim, mouldy, hollow hush
of a dead church—the silence of the ‘grave
and reverend’ sirs ghosting it in their gowns—
A landscape lies under the open sky . . .
(Open? The sky’s the limit,
the daylight veil over the illimitable,
withdrawn for revelation from the darkness
beyond of Adam’s first—and longest—nightmare
trying to count quastars telstars from pulstars.
Nth grandson Blaise, a rodent of nocturnal
Let’s see. This morning—since you’ve been gone—
I’ve taken a walk on the beach, naming
And naming and naming, until I can name no more.
Comber, anemone, crab. Will these do?
I talk to myself now—so I’ve found—
As never before, when he’d leave me, often
Now, and now you. I guess I’ll get used
To the feeling. But it’s funny—the way I get thinking
Leaves and fruit were falling
And I only wanted to know
Why this, of all the trees,
Kept alternating greens
And browns and why it dropped
Those ugly pods and stems—
I only wanted to know
Of the roots, the crazy clutch
That broke the ground, the branches
The mass grave here is set with stones
Piled low inside a low rock wall,
And marked for travelers by a sign
That tells us briefly of the murder
Of six score emigrants, whose bones
Lay here and there once—on the plain,
In the gulley—left to the weather
Of almost a century where they fell—
How things really are
we would like to know.
Does Time flow,
or is it atomized
in instants hammered
around the clock’s face?
I brought my daughters to your grave
There in the river’s bend
Not far from where, their age,
I watched you dedicate the monument
To Jim Bridger: trapper, river-searcher.
You lay deep in Utah’s summer
So still they couldn’t imagine
This was their grandfather,
Yourself a monument now
To probing dry country.
My knot, my clot, my Utah,
Good gouty wrinkled nurse
Turned dear disease, insufferable
Sweet scurf, my bloat, my fever,
You’re all the pain I am.
And I’ll prescribe our health:
One general statement can be made about the Mormon novels published since 1940: they are as varied as the attitudes about Mormonism and the philosophies about literature. There are books which pretend to be novels…
At the time of the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in 1830, the religious world generally was antagonistic to the idea of leisure time being spent in any way…
The five volume series in world literature edited for the Relief Society by Professors Bruce B. Clark and Robert K. Thomas of Brigham Young University is a landmark production. Not only does Out of the…
There must be nearly one hundred separate works interpreting the L.D.S. Church for children. A good number of writers, illustrators and publishers turn out these books, and so, while they all aim at teaching the…
