PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

In what I believe to be Trevanian's finest novel, his thriller The Summer Of Katya---which combines a love story, an old mystery involving rape and murder, and a haunted garden, or dovetailing into the life of a young French medical student in the summer of 1914, just prior to the declaration of the hostilities that became Wolrd War I.  Trevanian, which is the pen name of the late academic scholar, Rodney Whitaker, is, in my opinion, one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century; and Katya, again my opinion, is the pinnale of his verbal artistry, surrounded, in the sum total of his authorial career, by other excellent novels.  I have never read a book (or the handful of short stories) by Trevanian with disappointment; but I have almost always read with a sense of awe,  Katya is unique, in my reading experience, for . . . spoiler alert coming . . . its use of two endings (the first, set in the novel's main timeline of 1914, gut-wrenching; my knees weakened, when I first read it in December, 1990, and the rush of emotion was almost nauseating), the second, set in the mid-thirties (the era in which the medical student, now a successful physician, is recalling the first and only great love of his life), is both chillingly harsh and eiminently satisfying.  His solution to Katya's problem from her past, which had haunted him for another two decades, was elegantly efficient,

In all of Trevanian's books, the narrator (rather one of the characters, as in Katya, or the authorial voice of the novelist) speaks in asides to the reader.   In Katya, Trevanin writes about his arrogance, as a young medical student, in questioning the ethics and medical practices of the elderly physician who has hired his services for the summer; and, in the vicinity of the clinic where he is employed, the young medical student encounters Katya.  His contempt for his employer, Doctor Gross, is both petulantly insubordinant, and, as regards some of Gross' decisions and solutions, both ignorant and disrespectful.  The narrator, in 1914, is unwilling to recognize that his employer is also his superior, in both education, experience and just plain common sense.  Near the end, the two reconcile---and one realizes (spoiler alert) that the narrator is now the same age as Doctor Gross had been in 1914, and that the narrator is now the proprietor and operator of the clinic.  The narrator recognizes that, in 1914, he lacked the practical experience and wisdom to do anything more than treat superficial wounds and carry Doctor Gross' medical bag.  And (another spoiler) his elegant solution to the unsolved problem that haunted Katya in 1914, and has haunted him for two decades since, is well worthy of the finesse that Doctor Gross has, throughout the novel, attempted to impart to him.

In all of his novels, Trevanian is a master of metaphor and simile.  In Katya, one of his most artistic and eloquent metaphors is in the narrator;s statement about two kinds of artists and two kinds of dilettantes or dabblers or wanna-be's:  he speaks of the reader of Poetry who believes himself qualified to write Poetry, and the gourmand who believes that his taste in food qualifies him to be an executive chef.  With adroit precision, Trevanian points out the silliness of these positions, and the arrogance of those who cannot recognize that they are in, and are maintaining, such positions.

Trevanian's point about the poetry reader and the gourmand chowing down iat his table is about the failure to recognize that one's opinions are not necessarily qualified to carru any authority, and, in most cases, lack authenticity when and where real practical experience is lacking.

I am a Christian.  I came to Faith in a Baptist chapel, in 1994, and twenty years later, I was chrismated into the Faith of the Orthodox Church.  The two are not contradictory, as the Orthodox Church recognizes the validity of my conversion and subsequent baptism, and the privilege of chrismation was granted to me on that foundation of a valid conversion and baptism.  No one who is not a practicing Christian as the right, or the moral and spiritual authority, to counsel, advise, or even question my private practice of the Faith; in the same way that the reader of Poetry is not necessarily a qualified Poet, and the eager gourmand may not know his way around the kitchen.  In my own example, I love the stars, and have written much about them in my poems, but, admittedly, I cannot even find the ecliptic in any given night sky.  Do I seem the least bit qualified to question or advise a credentialed and experienced astronomer where and how to aim his telescope?

Today, on another site where my poems also appear, I received a comment from a hayseed who advised me to seek less "expensive" words, so that (as he put it) "good folks are not required to seek the assistance of a dictionary."  This person has been a poet for, oh, about five years.  I have been reading Poetry since spring of 1973, and have been writing it since early autumn of 1994.  In what possible way is that person qualified to say one thing to me about "expensive words" and "good folks" who have to consult a dictionary.  I also believe, and I am very militant (in the arm-chair way) about this, that no one who is not a practicing Christian has even the least shred of moral or spiritual authority and authenticity to question how, where, when and in qhat way I practice or express my Faith.  And to deny the authority and validity of the Christian Scriptures, and then quote those same Scriptures to me in the form of a rebuke, is, to me, the supreme summit of rank hypocrisy.  

In his poem, "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service," which I first read during my freshman undergraduate year, the great Poet, T. S. Eliot uses the word . . . polyphiloprogenitive.  Do you know what that means?  Neither did I; I had to look it up.  And was I, as a mostly unread, callow, inexperienced and still unpoetic freshman, qualified to complain that the great Poet had used an expensive word that forced good folks like me to resort to a substantial dictionary?  If I had raised that complaint in the literature course which I subsequently attended, I would have been laughed right off the campus.  (By the way, it it said to mean "liking to have many children" or "make many babies," although with the placement of the prefix "poly" first, it has also been interpreted to mean "having much liking of making babies," which, to me, makes more sense.)  

When T. S. Eliot arrived in London, right out of Harvard University and with only one poem ("Prufrock") to his credit, he was praised by another poet, Ezra Pound, who bragged that Eliot had "modernized his reading all by himself."  Between 1973 and 1994, I read voraciously in as manhy forms and sources of Poetry as I could find; and this reading was not directed, even at college, by any scholars or mentors:  I did it all on my own.  Yes, I consulted with them, and I learned from them how to explicate a poem and figure out the way its inner components work and work together.  But the motive of my reading was not to fulfill an academic requirement or obtain a degree:  it was to pay my dues so that I, too, could serve the Muse of Poetry and, more than five thousand poems later, I believe I have been able to do that.  I do not say this with arrogance, if you would at least extend me that credibility.  I say it almost in disbelief.  

And no one except another Christian is qualified to advise me how to practice my Faith, or to tell me where that practice fails or falters.  And here is the comical paradox:  that person who has previously rebuked me does not feel bound by the ethical duties established and explicated by Jesus Christ; and, also, my rebuker, who is so vociferous to question my morality, does not seem to remember that Christ Himself instructed His followers to remove the log planks from their own eyes, before attempting to remove a mote from the eyes of another believer.  I have never met a perfect Christian; a perfect Christian may even be a contradiction in terms, since at least two of Christ's followers who contributed to the New Testament asserted that sin and failure and fallacy are present realities from which, in this life, we cannot ever entirely escape.

Trevanian's narrator in Katya was not qualified to operate a clinic simply because he had attended the required anatomy classes at his University; he was not qualified to write poetry just because he like to read it; and he was not qualified to prepare elegant food just because he liked to eat it.  Therefore, no clodhopper or hayseed has any grounds (yes, pun intended) to advise me to avoid "expensive" words so that "good folks" will not have to seek knowledge in a dictionary; and no one, according to Jesus Christ Himself, has the right to pluck a mote from my eye, or instruct me how to pluck it, while carrying a couple of planks in his or her own eye sockets.  The holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostle Paul wrote, in Romans 14:4, Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth (underscore of two words is my own emphasis).

Thank you for reading this.

Starward