Book of Sound, Book of Silence

I’ve just finished reading two books, both very different, polar opposites actually, yet with some interesting commonalities. Both are nonfiction, both new.  Both were written by friends.  Both move with compelling and provoking intelligence.  But they are indeed dissimilar.  One is by a man, one by a woman.  One is about noise, sometimes sacred noise, sometimes profane; the other is about silence, sometimes profound silence, sometimes terrifying.  I want to begin with the sound and fury.

Hal Crowther was a fraternity brother of mine at Williams College, part of a band of unsavory brothers.  The Deltas in Animal House would have felt right at home with us.  Hal’s book is titled Freedom Fighters and Hell Raisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners (Blair); except for the southerner stuff, it could have fit right on top of our fraternity composite.

FFAHR comprises essays on nineteen southerners, now all deceased.  The categories include writers (e.g., Molly Ivins – the source of Hal’s title – James Dickey), activists, often religious (Father Thomas Berry, Anne Braden), musicians (Jesse Winchester, Eubie Blake), politicians (Jesse Helms, George Wallace).  He admires most of these, although the politicians have some special vitriol reserved for them.  Jesse Helms was a “huge old pit bull, useless and vicious, that sits in its own mess at the end of a tow-truck chain and snarls at everything that moves.”

A couple of them were known to me outside of the book.  Kirk Varnadoe, the late curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was a year behind Hal and me at Williams, and Jesse Winchester was in our same class of 1966.  Jesse – Jim, as we knew him then – wrote and sang some wonderful southern folk-rock songs, such as “Yankee Lady,” “Biloxi,” and “Rhumba Man.”  When Vietnam fell upon us like a Jesse Helms pit bull, Jim moved to Canada, where he became a citizen, and did not return until after Carter’s amnesty was proclaimed.  He was a shy but deeply focused man.  Anyone who doesn’t know him should listen to him sing “Sham-A-Ling-Dong-Ding,” and watch Neko Case, sitting beside him, start to cry.

As the above example implies, Hal’s title requires us to do a bit of readjusting of the term “hell raiser.”  He describes his subjects as “lives that affected or intrigued me, in most cases, and lives that were misunderstood or overlooked.” “Freedom fighters” could fit easily to a number of this gallery’s members, but not many seem like hell raisers, such as our old schoolmates Jesse Winchester or Kirk Varnadoe.  However, up in Canada Jesse’s music was overlooked, at the start of his career, anyhow, and when Kirk came to MoMA, he took a lot of crap from the art establishment, which didn’t understand what he was up to.  Still, both of them, in their ways, turned out to be hell-raisers and freedom fighters.

Hal is a brilliant, sharp-edged writer.  A master of the zinger, he is a spiritual descendant of H. L.Mencken, and it’s fitting that in 1992 he won the Baltimore Sun’s Mencken Writing Award for his syndicated column.   In his piece on Lance Corporal Brian Anderson, an African-American soldier from Durham, NC, who was killed in Iraq when the truck from which he was operating a .50-caliber machine gun rolled into low-hanging power lines, Hal writes, “White generals earn their stars on the backs of men like Brian Anderson.”

All this brings up one more observation.  The total number of hell raisers in this book is actually twenty, not nineteen.  On every page, there’s Hal, the old Phi Gam, number twenty, raising hell with every word.  Makes me proud to be a brother.

I met Jane Brox, the author of Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), when she read from her first book, Here and Nowhere Else, about her family’s farm in Dracut, MA, at the bookstore in nearby Andover, where I taught English.  I was bowled over by her writing, and was able to lure her to my nonfiction writing class to meet my students and talk to them about the craft of writing.

Silence is an exploration of that most mysterious phenomenon and how it variously affects people.  She begins, not with religious ascetics (hold on, she’ll get there) but with a chilling description of what’s left of the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, PA. Begun in 1822, the institution lasted in some form or other until 1970.  Originally it was constructed of stone with cells designed to provide a world of utter silence for its inmates; they were completely isolated, unable to see even the jailers that brought them food.  Given the execrable conditions of prisons in those days, the designer, Benjamin Rush – a friend of Benjamin Franklin – believed that this arrangement would promote an opportunity for an inmate to reflect on his bad behavior and undergo reformation.  Well…. Nice try.

Jane describes the first prisoner of Eastern State, Charles Williams, an 18-year-old African American farmer convicted of breaking into a house and stealing $25 dollars of booty.  Records are scant, but she reconstructs his life in prison as best she can.  The ruins of the prison still remain inside today’s Philadelphia, set apart as a monument, and she walked about them, matching them to the writings and descriptions that remain.

In the next section of the book she moves to the religious followers of silence, focusing on perhaps the most famous American monk, Thomas Merton, a Trappist, who wrote the best-selling Seven Storey Mountain in 1948.  The contrast is clear. She essentially poses the question, what is the difference between a voluntary life of silence – as for religious reasons, for example – and an involuntary one like that of Charles Williams? Jane explores both.  She is of course deeply interested in how a long period of silence changes the lives of both sorts of people.  Charles Williams disappeared after his incarceration of two years so we cannot know his answer, but others have survived years of solitary confinement and have written about them.  For example, Eugenia Ginzburg was imprisoned in Russia during Stalin’s great purge for ten years.  After her release she wrote a memoir about her experience in silence, Journey into the Whirlwind.  Jane quotes from one of her poems:

The night grows wider

And the dreams more bitter.

How much silence

Is there in the world?

One question Jane skirts in the book is precisely what is silence, anyhow?  It’s not total absence of sound, for that state is reserved for the profoundly deaf – at least that’s what I imagine profound deafness to be like.  It seems silence in this book means the absence of human sound, talk, music, even percussion, such as Morse code. Wind, raindrops, even birdsong: these do not break silence.  Does sign language?  Unclear, for that medium was forbidden in prisons, but permitted in monasteries.

Sometimes, for prisoners, long periods of solitary confinement were fatal. Some prisoners became so desperate in their isolation that they committed suicide by running as hard as they could into the stone walls of their cells, head first.  The monks were alert to this danger, and thus they wrapped their silence in their community, feeling the support of each other as they found the quiet space to meditate and to pray.

Readers of my blog know that in 1976 I rode alone across the United States on a 10-speed bicycle.  For long periods I heard only rushing air and the clicking of ratchets, occasional cars passing – but no sound that carried human meaning. (Well, when I heard psssss! I knew that meant something to me; time to fix a flat.)  Often I slept under a bridge with a river running beside me and I thought of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the protagonist sitting by his river listening to Omm, omm.   Until I read Jane’s book, I did not realize I was experiencing silence during my trip, but now I do.  And I feel that the fact of living in that silence changed me, like the time I got caught in a storm in the Bighorn Mountains.  There was a noisy silence.

An absolutely transcendental moment occurs toward the end of Silence, when the prisoners and the monks are brought together.  Shirley, MA, is the site of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution where one inmate – while placed in solitary – discovered a copy of Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation hidden under his mattress.  It blew his mind, and eventually “he and another prisoner formed the forty-first chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society.”  Jane notes that it comprises “perhaps one of the largest collection of Merton’s work outside of Bellarmine University in Kentucky, where his papers are kept.”

As I reflect about these two books, it occurs to me that, different as they are, they show that both Hal Crowther and Jane Brox have stood side-by-side, exploring the widest range of human experience – the good, the bad, and the ugly, as Clint Eastwood might have put it – discovering ways that these various categories can intersect.  Both Jesse Winchester and George Wallace can raise hell; and both monk and prisoner can move through silence.  I recommend both books and both writers with all the enthusiasm I can summon.