Literature Archives - To Give a Defense

Fractures well cured make us more strong. [“Repentance” by George Herbert.]

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 27, 2023 • Literature; Liturgical Year

Miserere me, Domine—“Have mercy on me, O Lord”; that’s the 51st psalm. If you pray the traditional Liturgy of the Hours, you pray it every morning at Lauds. You begin every day with repentance, as you begin every Mass with repentance. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I have sinned.” It is good for those to be the first words you say each day. In that spirit George Herbert begins his poem: “Lord, I confesse my sinne is great.” Before a Catholic becomes a full member of the Church, the first thing he or she does is go to Confession. Repentance is first; the Church’s readings for the first Sunday of Lent, Year A—the first of the three-year cycle—begin with the reminder that we all have sinned in Adam. Repentance is first.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun a year or two, but wallowed in a score?

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 22, 2023 • Literature; Liturgical Year; Sacraments

It is wearisome to need to go to confession every week, week after week, but it is more wearisome to go once a year, even once every several years. I don’t know why I have often chosen the latter. The sins pile up like laundry you stare at in denial. That’s my problem this Ash Wednesday: soiled clothes. Maybe it’s my problem every Ash Wednesday. Ten Lents ago, when it was my first year blogging, I spent a liturgical season writing about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. I’ve not done that kind of thing since, so perhaps it’s time again. This year I’m going to talk about John Donne—with a break one week for George Herbert and another week for Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Catholic professor Tony Esolen & Catholic apologist Karl Keating say black female poets are inferior.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • April 14, 2022 • Literature

It all started because Prof. Esolen, living in the pure wilds of New Hampshire, peered out the window of his study long enough to contemplate the decline of Western civilization and work himself into a pique. This time he was upset about Maya Angelou’s black countenance staring at him from a quarter, and he got on Facebook and wrote: “I hear that Maya Angelou (nee Marguerite Johnson) will be gracing the US quarter — or one such, such as we’ve done with the states, and other things. It’s fitting, I guess, because neither the quarter nor her poems are worth two bits. All’s political, and all’s sloganeering.”

Is the novel Protestant? A reply to Joseph Bottum.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • March 8, 2015 • Literature

Of all things in literature, the one that is the most futile and impossible to generalize about is the novel. There are no limits to its form: That is a mark of its strength. No one can agree even on when the novel began; the standard narrative is that the first novel was Robinson Crusoe (1719), but that’s more a myth of convenience — and cultural chauvinism — than anything else. What about the 11th century Japanese Tale of Genji? The 12th century Arabic Hayy ibn Yaqdhan? The “Four Great Classical Novels” of the Ming and Qing dynasties?

On Harper Lee’s new book: Should To Kill a Mockingbird have a sequel?

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 4, 2015 • Literature

Go Set a Watchman may not exactly make Harper Lee look like a “fool.” That might be the self-doubt of a reclusive author talking, or the jadedness of a public that has learned to take a low view of sequels. I suspect that Lee was unwilling to publish anything after Mockingbird for two reasons: (1) she was, as she once said, more like Boo Radley than Scout Finch, and public attention did not suit her; (2) she knew that nothing else she ever wrote, however good, would be To Kill a Mockingbird. She was publicity shy and wrote a book that is just impossible to match.

That life exists and identity: Thoughts on Robin Williams and depression.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • August 18, 2014 • Catholicism & Culture; In the News; Literature

The powerful witness in all of this, in depression, in suicide, in loss, in unbearable confusion and grief and pain, is the witness of life. That life exists. That you are here, and that it matters. The great horror and pain of depression is that it robs you of any sense of self and identity. And that may be why, in a cruel irony, some seek relief from it in self-annihilation. But they value their life, and they do not want it to end. They only want the pain to end. But one of the great joys of recovery from depression is the joy of discovering identity again, and who you are.

Writing negative reviews: A defense.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 27, 2014 • Book Review; Literature

Criticism would be poorer without this gem from Dorothy Parker: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force.” Or this one from Mark Twain: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone.” One admires the passion in those sentences, the evidence of a reader who loves good books so much that bad books are an intolerable offense. If I hate a book, Francine Prose says, “life is too short not to say so.” A critic who is willing to write a negative review is a critic readers will trust when he writes a positive one.

On the rippers of Isabel Allende; or, how the culture of offense ruins literary discussion.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 17, 2014 • Literature

What Allende describes is the kind of thing that has gone on in literature for a very long time. Don Quixote, arguably the first novel, was a send-up of medieval romance. Jane Austen had good fun with Gothic horror in Northanger Abbey. And the examples could be multiplied, from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (a mock heroic) to John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (a parody of the 18th century bildungsroman). But when Allende does this common thing, the lovers of the crime genre are OUTRAGED and want us all to know.

Seven more books that changed my life: 7QT VI, seriatim.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • November 16, 2013 • Literature; Seven Quick Takes

As I am working on some posts that are taking a very long time to write, and since my last post on books turned out to be very popular, I thought I would follow it up with a sequel — though this will end up being the only such. This list was much harder to come up with than the previous one. When you’re talking about books that changed your life, that’s a strict standard; and a total of fourteen — even after half a lifetime of reading — is difficult to conceive. But here the other seven are. They run the gamut from Dante to G.K. Chesterton to Philip Roth.

Seven books that changed my life: 7QT V, seriatim.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • November 9, 2013 • Literature; Seven Quick Takes

The French novelist Jean Malaquais once said, “The only time I know something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.” As it happens, Malaquais was a Communist; which makes me question the truth of the observation. I don’t know whether the statement becomes any more or less accurate if I change it this way: “The only time I know something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of reading.” I like the thought, even if the truth may be less than pristine. I suspect — or at least I hope very earnestly — that there will be libraries in heaven.

The best writing advice I ever got & other quick takes: 7QT III, seriatim.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • October 26, 2013 • Blogging & Writing; Literature; Seven Quick Takes

The only thing I know about writing is this: that you have to work hard at writing the kind of stuff you want to write. It does no good, if you want to write 700 page novels, to listen to others tell you that people only read short stories anymore. Don’t listen to them; if you’re not coming up with short stories, you’re not a short story writer, and the quickest way to stop writing is to spend years trying to learn how to write something you don’t have it in you to write in the first place. Write the 700 page novel. Learn how to do that. Read 700-page novels and learn how they work.

Twelfth Night: We await in joyful hope.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • January 5, 2013 • Literature; Liturgical Year

Today is Twelfth Night. I love vigils of any kind the Church gives us, but this one may be my favorite apart from the Easter Vigil. In an important way each is like the other: At the Easter Vigil we wait for Resurrection — Christ come back to us from the tomb; on Twelfth Night we wait for Incarnation — Christ come to us in the manger and adored by wise men. Christmas begins in Nativity and culminates in Epiphany. We wait for Christ, and we wait, and follow, and at last we behold Him, born or risen. We await in joyful hope. For tomorrow is Epiphany.