Welcome to a special Christmas edition of the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Peter Robinson, born and raised in South Dakota. Joseph Bottom, or as his friends know him, Jody, spent a decade and a half back East, first as an editor of the Weekly Standard and then as editor of First Things, and then Jody returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota. He is a writer and poet, and he has a daily poem with commentary on a substack called Poems Ancient
and Modern. But we today are going to be discussing Jody's spectacularly, heartbreakingly beautiful new book, Frankinson's Gold and Myrr, a Christmas Chrestomothy three beautiful and engrossing short stories and twelve really luminous essays. And if you think I'm going over the top because Jody is an old friend, that's not true. I've said many nasty things about him behind his back, But what I'm saying now I believe every
word of this the book. In fact, the book is so good that all his friends hate him for having been able to produce such prose. Jody, welcome, Oh thank you Peter for having me. Okay, listen, why on earth would you use a high falutin word such as christomathy. Let's just get this cleared up right away. Christomothy in the title.
Well, it's ancient Greek. It's an ancient Greek word for a collection. And I only know it, Peter, the same way you should know it because h O Menkin, whom every writer secretly wants to be used it as the name in the name of one of his selected collections
of selected essays named Mencan Christomathy. And I think he ran across it in a dictionary somewhere, you know, he was a kind of word maven or word order or something, and ran across it somewhere and thought, well, what the hell I have to use that?
Uh? And there we are.
And all of my writer friends know this word solely because of.
Bancon solely because of Bancoann. All right, So you're working within a tradition. Speaking of working within traditions, the title of the book is Franken, Sense, Gold, and Murr, which I think reverses as I think of the three wise men from school, I think we ordinarily say gold, Franken, sense, and murr. Is there some reason for the order in which you place those words or am I thinking this one perversity?
Of course, you know, the desperate attempt to be different, matched with just the rhythmic sense. If you say gold, frankensense and murr, you have two stresses in a row, in gold and then frank. And if you say frankinsense, gold and murr, you get a nice kind of trochaic falling rhythm that sort of holds up. You know. But I think that is an example of overthinking.
Oh well, all right, but it shows our listeners. If you can put that kind of thought into three words, imagine what the man does with a paragraph, let alone a story. Let's start with the stories three stories. Part one of the book is called The Gifts of the Majeaw Three Christmas Tales, and the tales are Wise Guy, Nativity, and a town in the far upper Midwest which has a French name. And I don't know how I imagine, since it's in the Midwest, it has an Anglicized pronunciation
porte decas. How has it pronounced it? Probably?
Of course there is no such town.
Oh it is. Oh you see how good you are? You made me? I was thinking to myself, one of these days I have to drive through this place. That's how much it lives in my head.
But the details are all drawn from my experience of Minnesota and and that world up in northern Minnesota, where Bamidge is a southern town to these people who live on the northern shore. There that point that goes out into the lake. But I imagine, you know, I grew up in a town called Pierre. Pierre, South Dakota, like.
The capital of South Dakota, isn't it.
Well yeah, but you know, we say it like a fishing pier or a jury of your peers, whereas Outlanders are easily identified because they say Pierre. And so all of those des Moine, all of those old French names in the Midwest and the West, it twisted. My favorite, of course, is the Texas Arkansas River that's called that The French explorers called the Purgatoire, the Purgatory River reduced somehow in that twang to the get wire. I wasn't aware of that, but that's you know, that's how these
French names get warped. I think they'd probably say Porto Grass.
Okay, all right, well, since you invented it, you get to title it, you get to choose the pronunciation. The first and last of these stories, Wise Guy and Port de Grass are crime stories, Jody crime stories for Christmas.
By the way, they really are crime stories. Now the criminals are lovable criminals, and one really does does fall in love with them, and the first the tavern where they it opens and the big scene towards the end takes place in a tavern, and you really feel you could walk into the tavern and sit down and have a drink with these people, and that you'd like to. But they're criminals at the end, as they were at the beginning. This is these are not stories of penitence
or turning around or redemp exactly. So how do they fit in with Christmas?
Well, maybe there's some redemption in them, but also kind of hint that they weren't as bad as they thought they were. They do come together, the young, hapless would be criminal, and the last story is turned into a national hero, you know, just by happenstance. I think though the model here. I once said to our mutual friend Andy Ferguson right that every writer wants to be Damon Runyan and write the kind of stories that Damon Runyan
could write. Andy said, well, maybe but you know what else, every writer, every male writer, secretly wishes that he had published in Sports Illustrated. And you know he does politics or literature. But what you really, you know, what would really make you as a writer, was what Sports Illustrated was in those old days. I think Damon Runyon too, you know it. And part of it of the very
first story, which came out some years ago. Amazon had started this self publish or this series that they were publishing called Kindle Singles.
Yes, and I knew.
An editor there, and he called me up and said, we don't have anything for Christmas? Do you have anything? And I wrote that first story kind of in a Damon Runyon way, you know, lovable gangsters, this's territory right exactly, and you know, all meeting at Lindy's for for coffee or and and I wrote it for him. And then I thought, well, that's kind of a wise man tale, hence the jokey title wise Guy. And so the next year I wrote a second one, and then life intervened
and I never wrote the third one. Also, the editor changed, and you know, you always lose giggs as a writer when the new editor comes in and wants his own people, and I was going through a rough time in my personal life at that point and just never wrote the
third story. And then this year, less Full, lest Spring. Rather, my poetry publisher said, you must have a lot of Christmas pieces, because I've written two or three of them for magazines like the Weekly Standard as the Wall Street Journal, and the rest two or three of them a year for thirty years, and they actually add up, you know. So I said, yeah, you know, I could put together an anthology or selected ones. And then I thought, this is an excuse to write that third story and close
this trilogy of wise men's stories. So this summer I wrote the por de Grass, the third and completing story of these, kind of picking up links from the other stories. So the first story, an independent thief is compelled by the local crime lord to recover twelve bags of lost heroine. Merry Christmas, everybody, and the second house, or the first
house he actually burglarizes, belongs to a rich man. These packages of heroine were sent by mistake to an old Christmas mailing list out of a shipping center, so they're scattered across town, and one is to a rich man's house named Michael Stuyvesant, the very first burglaries of Michael Stevenson's house that ends with some resolution of his problem and a real Christmas spirit. The second story follows that rich man who is not at home when he was
burglarized as he's trying to drive to Denver. He's an ill man with his cancer's return and he's trying to get to Denver to visit with his children while he still feels well enough to do that, and has a
series of misadventures across the Midwest. And then the third story is following the hunting down of the twelfth bag of heroin, which was the one that wasn't sent anywhere near by the thieves, but was sent to a little Minnesota town called Poor de Grass, and a would be thief who's not actually very good is sent off to try and retrieve it because the sophisticated, wise guys in the big city think, oh, it's just a little town
in Minnesota, it won't be any problem. And those of us who been to the Midwest know that, you know, there are a handful of sophisticated people who live out there. And he runs into trouble, but again it all works out.
Jody We've talked about this long enough. Give you give our listeners just the two opening paragraphs of the very first story. It all starts. But then where does anything start? Back at the first moments of creation maybe, or down in some long ago legend, its meetings and purposes faded now into the darkened past. Every story's opening is a little arbitrary, one way or another. Every beginning is a
small lie. Still, since this particular story concerns a thief named Bart Sagan, we should probably begin where he did the afternoon of December eighteen, a week before Christmas, when he fought his way through the icy winds that slice down High Street to meet a friend at the Evergreen Tavern and ask her for some help hatch a quick plan with her. In other words, plot a little crime that is so beautiful. I hate you for being able to write so wonderfully, But so how do you work characters? First?
Setting first, a line or two that comes to you. How do you do this?
You can't write, Peter, I mean I envy people who can just sit down and write.
Oh, I'm so happy to hear you say that.
You know you mean it's hard for you too, I said, writing is just like working in a coal mine, except you have to do it by yourself, and you know it's a hard thing. But you know, I remember I was close with be Crystal, Gertrud Timilfhard and she wants we're having lunch, and she launches into this complaint about her husband, Irving Crystal, on the grounds that he has an idea and he sits down and writes it, and
you know, three hours later the piece is done. That's just not how writing works for anybody, but Irving, who just could sit down and do it. Now, Irving was no high Silas, but he was plenty. He had a plenty good style, that plain style, and he could. He knew how to wait his leads with the new piece of information. He knew how to snap an article close. The famous essay he wrote on Joe McCarthy, he said the one thing it ends, this commentary piece from years
ago in the fifties. He ends by saying, there's much to dislike about McCarthy, but one thing Americans know is that he is against communism. About his opponents, they know no such thing. Beautiful And you know, so he could do that, yes, But you know, here is Gertrude Him, author of fourteen books and innumerable essays complaining about you know how people who find it easy to write?
May I offer you a return story?
Sure?
My return story is dinner one evening out on Long Island with Tom Wolfe. Tom wolf and we sat down and I did I don't know what came over me, because of course you should never do this with any writer. But I said, Tom, how did the writing go today? And his face fell, and his wife next to him. I was seated. I was seated across from Tom, but I was seated next to Sheila, and she stiffened just slightly. And I mean, what a stupid thing to say to her.
But I must admit that my heart leapt and I said, Tom, you too, and he said, it's just as hard as it ever was. The Only thing that has changed is that now I can look up from my desk across to a bookshelf that's filled with books with my name on the spine and say to myself, wolf you did it before, you must be able to do it again.
Yeah. I you know, I've always thought, but how do you?
How do you work? Now that we've talked about around other writers?
Oscar Wilde was staying in a country house and someone asked him, you know, how did the writing go at dinner? How did the writing go, mister Wilde? And he said, this morning, I put a comma in. This afternoon I took it out. That's the ex question. But you know, I know, I just sort of fiddle around. I can't write unless I have a lead. And this came from
really my very early writing. One of the first pieces, non academic pieces I ever wrote was a review of a biography of Ersy Kazinski for I can't even remember who now, the New Statesman may be, or one of one of the journals of that day, right, uh and uh, And I wrote, you know, I just wrote it, and the opening was something like, Ersy Kazinsky is a Polish American author who you know, achieved some fame with the
Painted Bird. And I set it aside and I went to sleep, and I got up in the next morning and I wrote on the top of it, there's just no getting around the fact that Ersy Kaczynski was a toad.
Oh, there you have it, of course.
And I thought, oh, if I can get the lead, then the rest flows from that. Then you've caught the audience, right, yes, yes, and you have their goodwill or their anger, you have their attention, you have their attention for the next couple periods.
And maybe giving it to you grudgingly, but you have.
It right exactly. And that's when I sort of formed this habit of being unable to move on until I have the lead.
And Andy's that way too, I think, isn't he is he? I think he is? I think he is. I wish it well, the three, Well, we'll do another podcast with the three of us and we'll all moan about writing together. How's that? Jody? You and Christmas? You and Christmas? But okay, so you get the lead. I do. I do want to know, I really I can't. There's nothing that I want from you except your continued friendship. So I'm not for our listeners. There's no reason I'm sucking up to you.
If you were Elon Musk, I might flatter you here. I'm just telling the truth. The characters, even the minor characters, are just so completely present. They just present themselves to you and you write them. How does it work? The characters? How do they work?
Yeah? I think you know. I mean, fiction is relatively new I've probably only written a dozen short stories in my career. But Mary Eberst our friend Mary Eberstat once accused me of writing nothing but fiction, not in a bad way that I was somehow, you know, telling lies, but in the sense that my descriptions of people and scenes were always you know, using the devices of narrative fiction. Yes,
and and I don't think she's wrong. But you know, you start to form a character, and then sort of details from people you know start creeping into them, and then then the fully formed character emerges from these borrowed bits of ten twelve different people. I mean, I'm not like Saul Bella, who you know, would really try and understand a character by a person he knew by casting as a fictional character. You know this, and that went
till the end. This is Ravelstein with Alan Bloom, you know, is the central the renamed Alan Bloom or Thomas Mahn, who had every literary gift except plot, I mean literally every literary gift at the level of a Nobel Prize winner. He could do anything with pros except think up a story, which ruined his children's lives because he basically plundered them for stories. I see, because you couldn't think of a story.
So you know, his children would be going through some breakup and he would like, oh, a.
Story for me. How interesting?
Yes, exactly not an ideal parent. But I think fiction is fiction is strange and interesting. And the poets that said never lie because they do not speak the truth. There's some realm in which, you know, art lives that aims to be more true than reality by being actually less true.
Jody Bottom and Christmas from your introduction, I write about Christmas so much because that's where I perceive the thin place to be, the moment in which I sense most clearly the spiritual crossing over into the physical, the supernatural sneaking into the natural, the arrival of the divine in the mundane is the central and most outrageous claim of Christianity. The thin place, Jody, we live, Peter.
In in such a naked world. I mean, I take Matthew Arnold to be speaking the truth here that the world as it is to human perception is you know, the naked shingles where ignorant armies clash by night and there is no help for pain, no grace, no meaning, It's just existence. And we clothe that in Dover Beach. Arnold uses this language of girdling of clothing, that the sea of faith once covered this naked shingles of the shore,
you know, of the world of reality. And the trouble is that perhaps a saint could, but for most of us, we need a shared experience. We need shared shared ideas, shared symbols, shared feelings to clothe reality, to make it decent. We need morality. For that, we need something more than just physical reality. And we stripped that away in modernity
as much as we can. But one place, it has always seemed to me where one time where the division between the newman and the physical or the social, you know, which is so thin now and tabscent and weak, that the there's one place where it still kind of leaks in where we still have a little bit of a cultural and emotional feeling that the world is clothed, decently arrayed.
And that's Christmas and my struggles with the modern my you know which I The very first piece I published was called Christians and Postmoderns, and I actually praised the postmoderns for at least seeing that modernity was a problem, right that you know, that something had gone out of the world with that. Took three hundred years to work out what that was. But we arrive at a place that is so stripped of meaning, and I want the world to be almost sacramental. I want the grass to
be singing songs of the fact that it's created. I want this, and I don't often have it, and I don't think any of us often have it. Except for the handful of anvil is even too large a number for the saints we may have met in our lives. I think the vast majority of us don't have that except Christmas, you know, except Christmas. Christmas is deep, is a chance where the numinous and the divine leak through and we see the world in a clothing light. It
makes things look better. Now, I could have reversed the metaphor and said it reveals things as they really are. But you know, my own sense is that it's the same stuff we see every day. It's the same feelings we have every day. They are just bathed in a golden light. They are they feel meaningful at Christmas. Acts
of charity feel more meaningful at Christmas. Our love of our families feels more meaningful in Christmas, not more real, more meaningful more connected to a world of symbols and greenery and you know, care for the poor and all the things that all these metaphors that accrete around Christmas.
So this is one of the great themes that comes through Frankinson's Gold and myrrhr another. We turn now to part two of the book, which is called Twelve Christmas Thoughts, which is twelve nonfiction essays, and another of these is a really specific particular sense of place from the first essay Dakota Christmas quote. If you've never seen the South Dakota country in winter, you have no idea how desolate
land can be. I once asked my grandmother why her family had decided to stop their wagon trek in what became the prairie town where she was born, and she answered, in surprise, I didn't know, because that's where the tree was.
The tree, all right, you had. It's something like a dozen or fifteen years on the East Coast, divided between the most cosmopolitan of lives in Washington as an editor with the now deceased to last but at the time with it and hopeful and buoyant publication, the Weekly Standard, and then up to New York, where you edited. I think I can see this. Well. Somebody will write a
note contradicting me if he wants to. But the most important journal of religion and politics, religion and public thought first things, and then you back and have stayed there ever since. And I am enough of a coast dweller. I grew up in the Shock Area, the Blast area of New York, and I now live in California. That honest, I mean, I would ask you this if I were an interviewer. I live next door, but since I live on the coast of California, this is to me a
saggering thing. Why did you go back? And why do you what is it that you love it? Desolate as it is you love it?
Well? You know. Bollsac has a line in great short story about a man who's trapped at a water hole in the desert an oasis with a lion, a female lion, and this becomes a metaphor for male female relations and all kinds of things, because Ballzac always has several things that he's juggling. But it ends with someone misunderstanding and saying, well, I don't get it. What's the point of the story, And the narrator says, uh, or the you know, the
narrating first person narrator says, uh. You see there in the desert, God is there, Man is not.
Uh.
And you know there is a kind of burnt over purity to the snow on the prairie. It's like white ash. You know, this world seems pure sometimes, but also you know it's I'm native to the soil, and and I don't know, Peter, you know, this has kind of been in my mind. My daughter is in New York right now.
Well do I know it? Faith Bottom, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and has her father's ear. How you managed to pass it along, I do not know. But she has your ear.
She writes lots of beatings, lots of beatings, all right, but the uh. But she boasted, you know, last year's time. She said, well, you know, we lived in New York, we lived in Washington. We had a summer house out in the Black Hills, and then moved out there full time. And now I'm back in New York. And so I've lived in rural settings and small towns, and I've lived in the middle of big cities. At least, she said, I can say that I've never had to live in
the suburbs. And she said it with such distate, and I thought, how did I give her that that was not the lesson that you were supposed to take away from all of this, Honey. You know, we had friends. PJ. O'Rourke loved the serbs, wrote about them, you know, marvelously comically, of course, But I think you know, it's not And I think Tom Wolfe had an appreciation of the suburb too, and you know, and the aspirations of middle class life.
I did really like hearing my daughter say this, you know, but there is a truth there that we've never lived in suburban America, right. It was always small town or big, big city.
And it gives you a.
Picture of America that I don't know it's truth anymore. I mean, I think, you know, I don't know how true this is of the American idea that there's the country and the city. I think the vast majority of people actually have an entirely different experience of life in this country. But it will say it does create in
one peter an appreciation of eccentricity. G. K. Chesterton once said, the Gospel urges us to love our neighbor, and the Gospel urges us to love our enemy, probably under the assumption that they were often the same, right, And there's this, you know, because you've got to live with these people, and I like that, but also you know they're our friends.
And my daughter and family are urging me now that you know my situation has changed and my wife is gone, yeah, she slipped away last year, that I should return this house to the summerhouse and go back to Washington. You know where we have friends, I would say California, except Peter, you were the exception to an experience that many of us in the old conservative world had, which is, whatever I have to sell, whatever we had to sell, it only sold the east of the Mississippi. There you were.
You know. Out of those hundreds of talks and panels and everything that I've done over the years, maybe three four five have been in the state of California. But you flourish out there.
Well, we've done that, we've yes, thank you. But back to you. Another of your essays, this is called actually it's the closing essay of the book. It's called Christmas and the Boy Reader. There were always books for Christmas, mounds of them, flurries of paperbacks, drifts of presentation copies inscribed in the unreadably copper plate hand of maiden, great ants, avalanches of books on chess, and manuals of do it
yourself chemistry experiments. Christmas was books and books. Christmas in those days, now mostly washed down to the cold sea. Was it such a bad way to grow up? The answer, of course is that it was a wonderful way to grow up. And how much are you and I permitted to And if it is an indulgence, indulge in despair when we see faith Bottom was of course far too fine and intellectual to do this. But when we see our children or their friends pouring their lives into iPhones
or on video games. When when, or let me just give you a specific example. This will take only a moment. I think it's worth it because it makes a point. When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I stayed on one summer to work reunions. You could make good money, and my job was to sit in a dorm from something like six in the evening until two in the morning. And because in those days dorms had keys that opened
the I would hand. I would take the key from the alumni as they would go to their dorm room where they were staying for their thirtieth reunion, and I would hand them the key when they went back. That was all I had to do, sit there and hand out keys and take them back. And I read a book a night. And then I went back for my thirtieth reunion and there was still the same job. But the kid was watching movies on a laptop instead of reading books. And I thought to myself, Oh, something has
been lost. Am I a dinosaur? Am I a fool?
Well?
We can, we can.
We have to be careful, or I have to be careful because I am prone to what I sometimes called the old man's disease. Well that the sky was bluer, the grass cleaner, and the girls prettier, and we had to walk to school uphill both ways. But the but there's a loss here, the loss of the physicality of books, the necessary engagement, the slow pacing of reading. There's an extraordinary video I mentioned I would recommend to you Peter
of Marshall, mccluan and frank Kermode. Frank Kermode was an aim to conjure with in literary circles once upon a time and they're on some Canadian talk sixties talk show, you know where they would have, you know, endless space, and nobody's watching. Remember Michael Kinsley's famous headline, most guaranteed to make you not want to read the article, and the headline was a New York Times headline of worthwhile
Canadian initiative. But there they are, and you know, Kramote is trying to understand why Marshall mccluhan is taking off as a figure as a cultural figure which soon petered out, and I think he's undervalued now after having been overvalued, but he's starting to take off, and Kimote's trying to
understand that. And mccluhan says, brilliantly, I think, or at least really thought provokingly, that the virtues of the American Founding, the virtues of the the Bill of Rights, the sense that all those young lawyers had at that moment as the revolution is going on, and then we build to the Constitution, that the virtues they had in mind were the virtues of readers. Yes, and the Bill of Rights is sort of fundamentally directed at readers, a protecting readers
from the government. And he said, if you think what you have When you have readers, you have a very slow pace for the transfer of information, as opposed to nomadic tribes which are trying to read whether there's a leopard in that tree or not. They have to condense information with myth, they have to condense it with memes. They have to process very very quickly, and they develop storytelling techniques and language techniques to do that processing very quickly.
Reading is much slower conveying of information. It requires time, which only really modernity brings to the masses, at least to the middle class. And I thought, what a really thought provoking thing to say. And then I looked at the challenges that are emerging to the Bill of Rights, the fact that very near a majority of undergraduates today want to abolish free speech, and I think unthinkable, not.
Just a minority position when we were in school, unthinkable, unthinkable.
Well, what's changed they've ceased to be readers. It doesn't they don't see the need for it. And it seemed to me a small confirmation of mccluan's thought. And so I worry very deeply about the disappearance of reading, not just on the attention spans formed in adolescence from watching Instagram and TikTok all the time, which I think is very destructive of unformed mental pathways that really don't emerge maturity till eighteen or nineteen. But even more, I think it's dangerous to our republic.
By the way, do you remember Goodness? I think he just died two or three years ago at an extremely great age, one hundred or one hundred and one. Bernard Balen, the great Harvard historian and his work. Oh it's a classic book. And of course I can't remember the name just now, but Balen, who, if I understand things correctly, was It came along at a time when he was reacting against the Marxist rereading of the American Founding and the Marxists saying, oh, no, no, the Constitution is just
cover for economic interests of various kinds. And Balen read the documents, He pulled together all the pamphlets and all the articles, and all the little town newspapers across New England and down into the South. He discovered that what you had here was an intensely literate society in which reading and writing were taking place all the time at a serious exchange of ideas, and that far from being
cover for underlying economic interests. You just could not conclude other than that they had read and written themselves into real belief. Okay, so this is a compliment to the Marshall McLuhan comment.
And it's why I think we should worry about young people not reading. There was a recent article in The Atlantic that talked about declining reading lists in college courses, and one professor from Georgetown I think, which is my alma mater, saying she notices that her students at Georgetown can't read a sonnet with attention. They lose track in fourteen lines of what's going on, you know, so they can't think, oh, that's where he picks up this symbol, right,
they can't read fourteen lines with attention. I think she's probably exaggerating, but on the other hand, maybe not, because it has not been demanded of them.
Right right, by the way, I want to interject for our listeners, the name of the book is Frankinson's Gold and murr It's three stories and twelve essays. And I'm repeating all this just now because if you buy a couple of copies and leave them around the house, teenagers pick them up and Jody's first sentences, let alone his first paragraphs and first pages, are enough to tempt I think even an adolescent male into setting down his phone and sticking with the book. Frankinsense Golden Murr. Do it
for your children? Okay, Jody? A couple of last questions here if I'm reading Frankinson's Golden Merrh at all correctly. Of course we've just discovered this. One of the themes is your love of Christmas. And the other which we've discussed in a way when we talked about the Midwest, Actually, what is South Dakota. It's too far west to be the Midwest, but it's not really a rocky mountain state. What do we call where you live?
Yeah, it's I have a friend, the actually wonderful South Dakota History, and he writes on the Midwest all the time. Had a popular book recently, John Louck and John Says has this quip that the West begins about twenty miles east of the town of Chamberlain, South Dakota, because that's when the river hills start rising. Then you get the Missouri and you're in the Midwest up till that point. So eastern South Dakota is basically Iowa. Western South Dakota is basically Wyoming.
Okay, all right, all right, So you're in the We'll say you're in the West, and you love the West because you love American life in some ways, you love those towns because that's American life at its most distilled, it's most it's most American, all right. From your essay Beyond the Bleak Midwinter quote one sentence. I've always thought depressed people understand Christmas best. Close quote Jody explain that one your love of Christmas, ordinary American life, and then you introduce depression.
Well, I you know, I'm a melancholy man, and so there's some self defense in there. Look, I understand Christmas really well, look at the book. But also when things are going really well for you. I don't just mean financially, although that sually has something to do with it, and in your family and in your mental health, it's easy to think, oh Christmas. You know, it's when you're depressed and Christmas makes you more depressed.
Yes, it can be very sad to see.
What Christmas is. I mean sad people understand how much Christmas matters, how it changes the world. They're further saddened by the fact that they're not getting it, but they see it was the point I was trying to make there, and you know, the Christmas asks us one of the carols I wrote. I've written several Christmas carols, and in one of them, I put this line in that I felt had really personal application and bears on that bleak mid Winter Essay, which is a title taken from Christina
Rosetti's Great Christmas poem. But there's a couplet in there we will escape the sadness. There comes now grace and gladness. And grace and gladness was the phrase that this Nashville studio took. Is the kind of album title for these carols that I had written when they recorded them. But you know, grace and gladness the message of Christ, the whole Christmas feeling. It has to be an answer to something.
One of the reasons I think that some of our you know, people fall away is they forget what the quest question is to which Christ is the answer, and they or they lose track of it. It doesn't seem important anymore to think we're going to die. We live in a world that has you know, whose intrinsic meaning is is invisible to us. We live in a culture that's strange and bleak and manic, and you know it
is to those things that christ is the answer. And in the same way Christmas needs an answer for a question.
You and I are of an age that when we took our English classes, we were reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and all the cool kids were skeptics. Christianity did not enter in to the the fizz pop whiz bang of the twentieth century on whom we were raised. We studied as when we studied our English. And I was thinking, as I was reading your book, I can only think now you, being you, will be able to name twelve more, but don't because I want to come
to the point of this is you. I can only think of one American author who embraces the modern, who embraces modernity in her prose and uses and produces modern novels, although we're talking about mid century or second half of the twentieth century now while while while insisting on remaining explicitly, not overbearingly, but explicitly Christian, and that is Flannery O'Connor until Jody Bottom comes along. I can see no you see, I said, you being you, you're thinking of a dozen
other authors who fit that narrow bill. But so that your middle story, Nativity, you've already explained it's about a rich man. What you've left out is that this rich man who's dying on this adventure, which is thwarted because of because of course we're in we're in the Upper Midwest, and he's thwarted by a snowstorm. The drive to Denver becomes impossibly. He has to pull up, and he rescues a manic, crazy chatterbox young woman, who, however, is pregnant.
That's enough others. If you want to know how the story ends, read Jody's book. But let me quote a paragraph. This is Michael Stuyvesant, of whom you were speaking a moment ago. By the way, do you remember that old It was never never appeared on the masted, but it was one of the greatest newspaper models ever The New York Daily News in the old days, when it was
still known as New York's picture newspaper. In the newsroom, the word was, or what they would tell a new hire was tell it to the McSweeney's The Stuyvessants already know, isn't that wonderful and old New York there? All right? But here this is Jody. This is Jody Bottom, his family. His family had always been Episcopalians. But Anne, this is writing about his late wife. Anne was a Catholic, something of a to do in the family. At the time
of their marriage. He remembered her explaining to him that all pregnant women are beautiful because they are signs, visible reflections of the blessed Virgin Mary in all her future joy and all her future pain and sorrow. Close quote. Now you didn't have to do that. That doesn't exactly advance the plot, but you do do it, and of course it's right. I don't want to say it's you're introducing an extraneous note, but that's you. Why do you
do that? If you've just been a little more skeptical, Jody, it'd been so much easier to sell.
There was this moment in the late nineteen forties early nineteen fifties when it looked like the pieces the fragments of conservatism we're going to cohere into a fundamental statement of the glory of Western civilization. Against the Communists, and this would have been the new Critics, and this would have been T. S. Eliot's poetry, and this would have been Richard Weaver's ideas have consequences. And there was a world out there that looked for a moment like it
might cohere, and it didn't. But I mentioned that simply because Peter, I think we have a responsibility, you and I to make the pieces of ourselves fit. That there has to be some kind of unity, that we have to reject any doctrine of double truth, that oh, there are these truths of physics and then there are truths of religion and poetry, and they don't go together, but that's okay because they live in such entirely different worlds that we don't have to make them go together. I
flinch every time I hear someone say my truth. Yes, yes, because truth is truth, and we have a responsibility. We're not going to succeed at making the world whole, making the universe of truth. One God does that, but we have a responsibility to hold the pieces together as best we can. And I am a believer and I want to be an artist, although I usually fail at it, and I want to no things, Peter, you know that that schoolboy hunger, just to know, yes, it never left me.
I still have it. You know. I was listening to a lecture on quantum mechanics thinking I don't understand any of this, but by God I should, And because you know, I still have that schoolboy hunger for that and all that has to cohere, and sometimes around Christmas, I feel like it does.
Jody, would you take us out, if you would, by reading a passage from Angels, from one of the essays Angels I have heard on high I want to hear. I want our listeners to hear this prose in the voice of the man who composed it.
Let's see, so the passage you picked out was this. I love the Santas with their bells, the Salvation armies call to charity on the sidewalks of American cities. Love the stores with displays of candy canes and sleigh bells.
I love even the musact carols in the elevators, and the municipal trees, and the oversweet candies from the neighbors, and the fruitcakes like depleted uranium, and the school children's Nativity plays and the advent calendars, and the trips to the food bank, and the seasons goes for Christ's sake? Why not be happy? So much around us shouts reminders of the cause for Christmas joy. A sinner, corrupt and soul, sick, heartsore and muddled in my thoughts, I sometimes wonder what
this world looks like to the saints. The universe must glow every day a holiday, a homely day, like the blinding sunlight off the clean snow and sharp swirls of sparkling ice. But it needs no individual grace, no special
sanctity to feel the life of the Christmas season. Portions of the wall are tumbling down, and through the breeches anyone can discern some of what we ordinarily keep hidden from ourselves, Christ himself, and the faces of the poor and battered, the treasures the charity lays up in heaven, the supernatural beauty of nature, the joy of creation, and the objects all around us, the almost sacramentality of everything real.
This December, I heard the angels singing, actually heard their voices high in the wind across a western meadow, frozen stiff and covered with the fallen snow. Listen and you'll hear it too. Down from the hills and the cold trees, Ponderosa pine and Black hills spruce, along the icy stream bed, through the brush and over the rocks. All those voices caroling, praising, rejoicing, a swirl of joy beyond all deserving.
Jody, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. Peter the book again, Frankinsens, Gold and Murder, A Christmas Christomothy by Joseph Bottom, available on Amazon. Do yourself a favor, buy the book and read it, and leave a copy around for your kids. For Ricochet, I'm Peter Robinson.