Midwestern loneliness: the novels of Jon Hassler.

Loneliness depends upon one's sense of place. To light up this assertion with respect to the novels of Jon Hassler, I first want to look at two brief snippets from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both excerpts are from the first chapter, where the schoolboy Stephen Dedalus writes down a formula and his friend Fleming writes him a short poem. Both are efforts to establish Stephen's identity in the larger frame of things. First Stephen writes:

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College 

Sallins

County Kildare 

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe. Shortly thereafter Fleming writes this quatrain for Stephen:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwelling place

And heaven my expectation.

The first excerpt evokes the kind of hierarchical placing many of us have attempted, not necessarily in our childhood. It is essentially a secular ladder showing both the writer's uniqueness and his insignificance, depending upon which end of the ladder one starts from. The individual is both singular self and insignificant speck.

The quatrain is also hierarchical, but it moves from the secular to the sacred and thereby proffers a real difference from the first ladder. Indeed, the whole Christian promise is implicit in these few lines, which suggest to Stephen, as a Catholic, not only that he has temporal and eternal places, but that he matters in the omniscient view of things.

So where do these two jottings get us on the subject of loneliness? The first excerpt suggests that loneliness can be a sort of cosmic isolation that inevitably attends upon us unless we can independently convince ourselves of our own value. I think here of a recent memoir of E. B. White, wherein Linda H. Davis reports that White spent his last year having his own writings read to him "The Man on the Swing," the New Joseph Hynes teaches modern literature at the University of Oregon. His publications include The Art of the Real: Muriel Spark's Novels I 988) and Critical Essays on Muriel Spark (I 992). Yorker, December 27,1993). The second excerpt suggests that "long loneliness" which, according to Dorothy Day, is our lifetime of working and waiting to reach heaven and the creator of our assured human worth.

Joyce, then, offers these two extremes: me here and now versus me now and forever. Most of us, of course, fall somewhere between these extremes. We either try to accommodate secular and sacred, or we work for secular significance in the realm of other people only.

Hassler is a Minnesota Catholic who writes about Stephen Dedalus's extremes of place and thus about a range of loneliness. Very much like J. F. Powers, his colleague at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Hassler develops plots and characters concerned with both Joycean goals, which obviously are not always mutually exclusive. Like Powers, in such books as Morte d' Urban and several collections of stories, Hassler usually builds fictions around his Catholic faith, though not exclusively around priest-protagonists. And because the human condition, however perceived, assures some measure of displacement and loneliness, these qualities occur in Hassler's books.

In fact Hassler makes it tough for his characters to avoid loneliness. Although, for example, his priests are good priests, they are placed in drab locales with hardly a soul to confide in. Father James O'Hannon, in both A Green Journey (1985) and Dear James (1993), writes letters from his village parish north of Dublin to the spinster Agatha McGee in Staggerford, Minnesota. They are both in their sixties and plainly eager if not desperate to find soulmates. Instinctively, James conceals from Agatha the fact of his priesthood. Although their correspondence is perfectly in keeping with his promise of celibacy and with anyone's sense of propriety, Agatha inevitably builds more into the friendship than it will bear, and is deeply hurt when she discovers the truth of James's vocation. Eventually the bridge is repaired and these two establish a genuine friendship. She sheds bitterness and again functions as a charitable Staggerfordian, while he goes on the road to preach peace between the two Irelands.

Agatha and james manifest both of Joyce's excerpts. On the one hand, they sometimes grow tired of their small-town environnents, concerning which Hassler pulls no punches. On the other hand, they are both content in the end with exactly those places. What enables them to be contented with (not blind to) their small towns is their open acceptance of the truth of who they are and the hands they v been both dealt and chosen. As a result their secular activities are again in sync with the Christian goals they had permitted, in their temporary self-absorption, to become a bit rusty.

In North of Hope (1990), Father Frank Healy, another provincial Minnesotan, is also tested. Healy, in his forties, has spent twenty years teaching in a seminary. When it closes, he is assigned to the chancery office. After a few months he realizes that for the entirety of his priesthood he has never known the day-to-day work of a parish priest. In other words, he thinks that his vocation has never been tested. He's right. The book tests his celibacy and his ability to back up his academic abstractions with some hands-dirtying, one-on-one attention to the spiritual and material needs of an Ojibway reservation and his town parish. Such involvement removes his sense of being cut off in loneliness and convinces him he's chosen the right line of work. He also learns that friendship with a woman--just as in the case of Agatha and James--can be consistent with his celibacy.

Even where priestly celibacy is not an issue, however, we may note that heterosexual relationships--the only kind Hassler gives us--are few in number and range from virtually nonexistent to difficult to peripheral. Thus, loneliness is just that much more likely and prominent. For example, Miles Pruitt, the central figure of Staggerford (1977), Hassler's first novel, is a bachelor high-school teacher in his mid-thirties, and he seems content with his smalltown lot. His two romantic interests have married other men, one of these his brother, and the woman currently pursuing Miles is impossible. He is a virtual orphan, without family or intimate friends, and for ten years he has not practiced his religion. Yet, at the time of his shockingly sudden death he has made a first move back to Catholicism and has quietly earned the respect and gratitude of the community for his dedication to his students, in and outside of school.

Miles's notebooks, to which only he and the reader are privy, modestly but clearly show a man who cares about others irrespective of what happens to himself or of the religious belief that supports him. The notebooks in fact make sense of his otherwise incomprehensible comment to the thickheaded football coach that "a tie is as good as a win." This assertion really clarifies a great deal in Hassler's books and it means at least two things: (1) works without faith can help others and make your life count; and (2) if you can just hold your own against all the stuff coming down on your head, that's victory enough.

Obviously, the Lombardi-like coach won't sit still for a suggestion that kissing one's sister is emotionally adequate, and Hassier's sense of humor is off and running. But as the notebooks show us, teaching high-school students and working unobtrusively to empathize with them, constitutes Miles's way of beating loneliness and the temptation to think exclusively of himself. In short, whether or not at the end of his life Miles was recovering his faith, he conquered apparent loneliness in his very small town by giving himself to others-in the manner of an unordained priest. If Staggerford is not a comedy in the usual generic sense--if it does not lead to a happy ending on society's own terms--that is because Hassler's premises, like those of Joyce's quatrain, go beyond the usual comic range. Some people only seem to be lonely.

Similar observations inform Simon's Night (1979). Simon Shea, at seventy-six, is long-retired from his locally distinguished career as a poet and professor of English at Rookery State, near Staggerford. His life, and the relevance in it of Joyce's excerpts, can be laid out on parallel tracks. On the track analogous to Joyce's hierarchical ladder, Simon has enjoyed success and gained at least statewide fame as teacher and writer. His brief married life was interrupted about thirty-five years earlier when his wife ran off with another man. Neither Simon nor his wife has sought a divorce--she out of indifference and he out of his Catholic conviction of the permanence of marriage. About twenty years ago Simon had a brief idyllic affair with a former student, but has otherwise remained celibate. He rents out his rural cabin and moves to a retirement home in town, afraid that he's losing his grip and may not be able to manage any longer on his own. The book's title describes his demoralized condition.

On the parallel track--denoting Joyce's quatrain--Simon has remained a Catholic believer all his life, and consistently reads himself and events from this overarching point-of-view as well as from a secular stance. Indeed, one of the creative joys of the novel is Simon's praying. The manner is always that of personal conversations with God as both superior and friend. Simon is alternately grateful, loving, needful, contrite, puzzled, and inquiring. Notably, he is not angry, maudlin, despairing, self-pitying, or demanding. That is, he believes in God and feels close to him, but knows his own place as creature. To pull this off without being cute or slavish or drippingly pious seems to me one of Hassler's remarkable achievements. Hassler brings his parallel tracks to a comic terminal in this instance. His title derives from some Wallace Stevens lines used as epigraph:

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night.

Stevens's night and his -yes" and "no" are strictly secular, while Hassler's (and Simon's) bring to mind the Christian's fanmilar dark night of the soul. Some new friends enable Simon to see that he's not past it, that life and people are still interesting and worthwhile, and that he can still be profitably involved and creative. His wife, successful but bored, decides to come back, thus terminating an instance of coitus interruptus that broke endurance records set by Molly and Leopold Bloom and even by Penelope and Odysseus, and Simon sets out to write the autobiography his publisher has long requested of him. Simon says "yes" and society's track one coincides with Joyce's track-two. Curiously, loneliness can be next to godliness.

Sometimes, of course, this juxtaposition is more difficult to find or effect or be assured of. Grand Opening (1987) in many ways comes closest among Hassler's novels to Joyce's ladder. In the last year of World War II the Fosters--Hank, Catherine, their twelve-year-old son, Brendan, and Catherine's father--move from Minneapolis to the town of Plum. They hope to revive a small grocery store they have bought and to establish roots in the community. Catherine years for Minneapolis and detests Plum.

The loneliness in this novel is not exclusively Catherine's. It is to be found as well in three young men not of her family. One of these is Paul Dimmitburg, who is experiencing trouble with his Lutheran seminary study, because he cannot understand how God can put up with the denominational bickering and meanness, the lack of charity, on view in Plum. Thus he's taking some time off to confront this loneliness--the kind of doubt touched on in Joyce's quatrain.

The second young man is Dodger Hicks, Brendan's contemporary and a waif in the Dickensian mold. Dodger is, like Miles Pruitt, a virtual orphan and is befriended by the Fosters, on whom he comes to depend for life and hope. His loneliness is prominent and heart-wrenching.

Wallace Flint, about twenty, is the third young man. He is indirectly responsible for killing Dodger, whom he hates because the Fosters like Dodger. Wallace is eaten up with bitterness and hatred toward everyone because his epilepsy has induced his mother to keep him home in Plum when his need is to go to college on the scholarship he has earned. The smallness of the town merely heightens his lonely malice toward anyone who has what he cannot have.

Surrounding all this provincial battling are the concluding events of World War 11 in 1944-45. Young Brendan, as the novel's central intelligence, registers events near and far, and the book's title, Grand Opening, reflects not only the grocery store's big moment but Brendan's moral awakening, his initiation into the problem of evil. And indeed this is where Hassler once again carries concern with loneliness beyond a narrow sense of place and into Joyce's quatrain.

Obviously, moving to the anonymity and cultural richness of the big city and signing global peace treaties to end a war will not solve the problem of evil or answer Job's Why?" Bright lights, college courses, economic development, advances in science and the arts-these are among the good things traditionally and understandably sought by protagonists of Bildungsromane, whether set in Minnesota or elsewhere. But achieving such good things cannot begin to address the problem of evil--why it persists beyond our awareness of degrees of separation, and how it might be solved. As Paul Dimmitburg knows, the local institutional churches seem to contribute to this problem rather than strive to cope with and perhaps alleviate it. The events of the year serve as a rite of passage for Brendan, who will have to think about such formidable things as sin, faith, and grace as he readjusts to the city.

If, as Stephen Carter argues, we live in a "culture of disbelief," some readers are perhaps more at home with Hassler's The Love Hunter (1981) than with his other books. For this is a novel wherein religious and theological issues matter only in the breach. This is a book rooted in Sartrean existentialism and situation ethics, and it explores what we can or must do when making moral choices in a milieu where disbelief is as normal as cholesterol.

Chris MacKensie, a divorced loner, forms a genuine triangular friendship with Larry and Rachel Quinn. Both men work at Rookery State College until Larry's multiple sclerosis forces an early retirement. Even as Chris continues to befriend Larry and visit with him faithfully, Chris and Rachel fall in love with each other. When Larry declares his wish to die before his multiple sclerosis becomes more pronounced, Chris decides to take Larry duck-hunting in Canada and to kill him there. Chris justifies this decision on the ground that he is thinking of Larry rather than of any subsequent benefits for himself and Rachel--whom he does not tell of his reasoning and decision.

In the event, Larry is revitalized by the trip and Chris is truly glad for him: thus Chris's original choice would seem to have been authentic, in Sartre's terms, rather than selfish. But the book nevertheless stresses how strangely "distant' Canada feels to Chris, who is clearly on his existential own in confronting his choice and its possible consequences. In the end we and Chris have to wonder how Chris's unfulfilled determination will influence any future relationship with Rachel, especially in light of the novel's epigraph from Othello: "That death's unnatural that kills for loving." Whose death? Larry's or Chris's?

As in The Love Hunter, so in Hassler's current novel, Rookery Blues (1 995), there is not a religious bone in any character's body. Novel-time is 1969, at Rookery State, seemingly the sad-sack member of the Minnesota State College system, and indeed the omniscient narrator glances incidentally at Simon Shea, Larry and Rachel Quinn, and 'an academic counselor named Mackensie" (now sporting a lower-case "k"), all of them encountered in previous visits to this Hassler campus.

The action, however, focuses on five other faculty members in their connections to the book's title and to one another, a musical quintet. Peggy Benoit (sax and vocals) teaches music while trying to get over her brief marriage and her disappointment at not teaching at Brown or Middlebury. Connor, whose first name never appears, plays bass, displays genius as a painter while he fights off alcohol, tries to adjust to a wife who hates him and a daughter who loves both him and her mother (but on her own terms), and anguishes with Peggy over what to do about their passionate affair. These two are perhaps first among equals. The others are Neil Novotny (clarinet), who teaches English badly and whose novel-writing is even worse; Leland Edwards (piano), whose teaching of English is dedicated if uninspired, and whose musical skill makes him the leader of the Icejam Quintet; and Victor Dash (drums), whose courses in business English barely divert him from his efforts to organize a faculty union and inspire a successful strike.

Hassler offers a range of student abilities and townee quirkiness, the 1960s faculty problem of how to cope with marginal male students whose failure will mean a trip to Vietnam, and an intimate look at domestic and departmental campus politics. The heart of the book, however, is the interrelationships of the quintet as manifestations of the book's title and five song-title section-headings: "These Foolish Things," "I'll Get By," "Mood Indigo," "Don't Blame Me," and "My Blue Heaven." To weight this blues" theme, Hassler writes an italicized four-or-five-page biographical bit for each member of the quintet, thereby implying how he or she got to be this way--usually a sad and needy way.

In the end the strike fails, Connor reverts to the better job he had left, Neil leaves academe to write grocery-store romances, Victor joyfully resigns (before he is fired) to become a union organizer, Peggy and Leland stay at Rookery State as a duo with hopes of adding new musicians, and Connor and Peggy share beds in two locales while Connor's marriage persists nominally and his daughter's future worries him.

The book, then, is not one of Hassler's comedies, but one of his bittersweet ironies, wherein things merely go on as well as they can. Still, his humor helps things along (as always), for characters and readers alike, even as the quintet's playing both embodies and transcends their miseries. The humor shows up, for example, when the Signage Committee (sic), resenting its silly mission, selects as the institution's motto these words: "Rookery State College/ Paul Bunyan's Alma Mater." Leland's mother weeps with laughter and asks "What sort of student was Mr. Bunyan, I wonder. What was his major?"

"I can have Mrs. Kibbee [his secretary] look it up for you," said the dean, causing a hush to fall over the room. He wondered why everyone including his wife was suddenly gaping at him as though he'd said something brilliant. "It's not fair to the alumni as a whole to single out one in particular who's become famous," he said.

All of Hassler's books enmesh their protagonists in the questions, "Who am I?", "Where am I?", "Where am I going?", and "What does it mean to be lonely?" And ironic wit and charity keep loneliness in its place in a world shown to be a vale of both tears and laughter. Of these eight novels only The Love Hunter and Rookery Blues decline a distinction between being -in" the world and being "of" the world. The two regard this world as the fullness of reality. Hassler's other fictions clearly or implicitly make the "in"-vs.-"of" distinction as they balance the two Joycean excerpts and make life merely qualifiedly lonely, sometimes more meaningful, sometimes simpler, usually more complex, and always morally mysterious.

Despite the sometimes funereal tone of these remarks, I want to sound the concluding note that a dominant mystery about Jon Hassler is how he can be one of the funniest serious writers alive. This fact doubtless accounts for his popularity as he goes about the serious business of grappling with our abiding loneliness.