Book Briefs: April 22, 1988

Tolstoy’S “Heavy Competition”

Joshua, by Joseph P. Girzone (Macmillan, 271 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Katie Attdraski, a poet living in Belvidere, Illinois. She is the author of When the Plow Cuts (Thomtree Press).

In the past five years, two publishing phenomena have come out of Albany, New York. First, William Kennedy’s Ironweed won a Pulitzer Prize and achieved both literary and popular success. And an unlikely second, Father Joseph P. Girzone’s Joshua, has sold 100,000 copies since it was published by Macmillan last September—and that does not include the 50,000 sold as a self-published hardcover edition.

Joshua has sold mostly by word of mouth. People sent copies to friends who, in turn, bought copies for their friends. According to Girzone, one skeptical man read the book and ordered 100 copies for his friends. The book circulated from another man through NATO headquarters, the European Parliament, several multinational corporations, and several embassies.

After the local manager of a Waldenbooks store read a self-published edition, he told Girzone that he had “heavy competition with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This book is a classic.” The manager delivered a review to all the managers of the region. They bought 50 copies. And sold out. Then they bought a hundred and sold out. Eventually, the book took its place on Waldenbooks’ best-seller list.

If Jesus Came Back

Girzone wrote Joshua because there was “something not quite right about religion. As a parish priest I never saw the peace that Jesus came to give people. There was such terrible, terrible guilt.”

When he retired in 1981, Girzone studied the Gospels in depth—and found a Christ very different from the one taught in seminary. First he considered writing a theological treatise. But since such a book would be read by only a limited number of people, he settled on the novel in which he asks, “What would happen if Jesus came back today?”

So Jesus comes back as Joshua, a woodcarver who settles in a cottage on the outskirts of a small town that could be Everytown, U.S.A.

Joshua’s unusual practice of attending the synagogue and a different church each week catches notice. As does his criticism of current church practice and religious leaders. “It is their endless rules and their rituals rather than love of God and concern for others that occupy the people’s attention.” Joshua challenges folks to a new way of thinking about their faith: “If a person is not open to the inspiration of the Spirit, because it goes beyond what priests allow him, then even the Holy Spirit cannot work in him and he remains stunted.”

Joshua angers the leaders of the Catholic church. They send him to Rome where he confronts the hierarchy and the Pope. Soon afterwards, he disappears as mysteriously as he came.

At this point, Girzone’s plot seems implausible; Joshua is not a member of the Catholic church. Why should Rome single him out among the many who espouse ideas the church does not like?

Refinding The Father

There are miracles: a deathly ill child is healed, a man with a broken neck comes back to life, and a storm at sea is quieted. But the parallels between Jesus and Joshua are not all that close. Jesus talked about himself as the sacrifice for men’s sins. Joshua says nothing about his own death. He claims God made people with imperfections and wants them to strive to be better.

Despite such differences, some of which the author attributes to the fact that he “wrote a novel, not a complete compendium of Christian doctrines,” the book offers a fresh perception of Jesus as a man who “accepted people just as they are. His greatest concern was to help them refind their heavenly Father and to enjoy being his children.”

Joshua is a bland, pleasant book that is finding its audience. Like Thoreau’s Walden, it espouses the simple life and simple beliefs.

In addition, the book scratches the same itch romance novels touch—but on a spiritual level. Here we have flawless, uncomplicated characters. The villains who disturb their lives are straight selfish. And Joshua is the perfect hero, responding to every situation in just the right way. The reader is wooed to fall in love with Joshua. The resistance to his mission serves to strengthen the reader’s identification with him. We, too, feel we have suffered at the hands of our religious leaders.

In the Gospels, Jesus often spoke in parables, satire, and even poetry. He used characters, images, and allegories to make his point. But Joshua speaks mostly in abstractions. It is remarkable that such a book—mainly about ideas and without literary pretensions—would sell as well as it has.

There are books that are beautifully written, sophisticated, and they find an audience—sometimes a big one. There are also books—such as Joshua—that are not so well crafted. But like the loaves and fishes, they can feed thousands with God’s blessing.

The God Of The Beautiful

George MacDonald, by William Raeper (Lion Publishing, 410 pp.; $26.95, cloth). Reviewed by Philip Yancey.

“I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer … to the Spirit of Christ Himself,” said C. S. Lewis about Scottish preacher and novelist George MacDonald, whose Phantastes Lewis credited with stimulating his own “conversion of imagination.” Lewis also admitted, “I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.”

Given the shelves of recent books in tribute to Lewis, it is about time someone filled in the gaps of knowledge about the man he freely acknowledged as his “master.” This attempt, the first major biography since 1924, portrays a Victorian thinker who, in a time of great divisions, achieved a striking balance and personal integration.

For George MacDonald, there was no split between the “natural” and “supernatural” worlds. Recalling his youth, he confessed, “One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God had made.” Instead, he discovered “God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian.” Such Christian naturalism enriches the sensory descriptions in his novels.

MacDonald admirably combined a “secular” life as a novelist and man of letters with his original calling as a preacher. He counted such notables as Thackeray, Dickens, Arnold, and Tennyson among his friends, as well as many of the pre-Raphaelite painters. On a trip to the U.S. in 1873, he packed lecture halls and made the acquaintance of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Stowe. He even discussed coauthoring a novel with Twain in an attempt to circumvent the transatlantic copyright piracy both of them were experiencing.

“To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology,” MacDonald once said. And those who knew him saw what it meant to know Christ. MacDonald had a sunny, playful disposition. He fathered 11 children, then adopted 2 more when their mother found herself in dire financial straits. His household was filled with the laughter of children and the lively conversation of endless guests.

Optimistic Fatalism

Biographer William Raeper, secretary to the George MacDonald Society, has mined a wealth of information. We learn such trivia as MacDonald’s major in college (chemistry!) and the fact that at age 73 he took up the study of Dutch and Spanish. Raeper’s careful reading of his subject’s work shows in the skillful way he blends key events from MacDonald’s life with the settings of his novels.

Yet, unfortunately, the book offers mainly a compendium of facts for those already interested in MacDonald. This is a term-paperish, old-fashioned biography, beginning with the ritual disinterment of the family lineage. It fails to provide much illumination on MacDonald’s two main areas of contribution: literature and theology.

Concerning MacDonald’s literary worth, Raeper kindly concludes that “the sum of his work is greater than its individual parts.” Of the 26 novels, Phantastes and Lilith stand out as the most enduring. But Raeper’s analysis pales next to the convincing literary profile offered by Lewis in a foreword to his MacDonald anthology. Lewis valued MacDonald not as a stylist—like many Victorians, he suffered from a syrupy didacticism—but rather as a myth maker. And, to Lewis, the spiritual insights seen fleetingly in the novels but plainly in MacDonald’s journal and collected sermons were unsurpassed.

Raeper’s chapter on MacDonald’s theology is perhaps the least satisfying in the book; Rolland Hein gave a far more concise summary of the issues in brief introductions to recent compilations of MacDonald’s sermons (Life Essential and Creation in Christ). Early in MacDonald’s career, parishioners forced him from the pulpit for teaching a variety of universalism: He believed that hell serves as a kind of purgatory leading toward the ultimate reconciliation of all creation. Church authorities also questioned his belief that animals would have a place in heaven and worried about the influence of German idealism on his theology.

By the end of his life, however, MacDonald had survived such controversies and became a well-loved speaker welcomed in many British churches. Reacting against the strict Calvinism of his youth (like his character Robert Falconer, he was “all the time feeling that God was ready to pounce on him if he failed once”), he presented God as a loving, merciful Father. An idyllic relationship with his own widowed father fed that image.

MacDonald said about God, “It cannot be that any creature should know Him as He is and not desire Him.” Confident that the goodness of God would one day spread throughout the entire universe, MacDonald practiced an “optimistic fatalism.” It shows, for example, in a letter he wrote to console his wife on a private grief: “Well, this world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better.”

Although this long-overdue biography leaves room for further exploration, it gives much essential background for understanding MacDonald’s life and thought. His powerful words on grace, freedom from anxiety, and the inexorable love of God give little hint of his daily life. For years he wandered penniless around London looking for a job. He suffered constantly from tuberculosis, asthma, and eczema. Two of his children died in their youth. Further, MacDonald proved unsuccessful in landing a university teaching post, and the large sales of his novels rarely translated into financial rewards—too many of the copies were pirated editions. His family resorted to staging productions of Pilgrim’s Progress as a way to pay bills.

Those facts shed lioght on the buyoant faith of a great devotional writer. Phantasts end with the leaves of tress whisperng. A great good is comming is copmoing is coming to thee Anodos Grorge Mac Donald believed that with all his heart.

Moscow Memoirs

Winter in Moscow, by Malcolm Muggeridge (Eerdmans, 252 pages; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by K. L. Billingsley, author of The Generation That Knew Not Josef.

On October 6, 1932, Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent of the London Guardian, wrote in his diary: “I thought today that I’d write a book called Winter in Moscow, pointing out that the only thing not true of Russia is that any single liberal principle of tolerance or reasonableness is observed there: that Christianity is ruthlessly suppressed, private liberty non-existent, forced labor common, the population poorer, worse fed, worse housed than in any other country in Europe.” Fortunately, he did more than think about it. Winter in Moscow was first published in 1934, after Muggeridge left the Soviet Union at odds with both the Communist regime and his employers, primarily for his reporting of Stalinist genocide. As he explains in the foreword, he “took a great dislike to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and its imbecilic foreign admirers.” Winter in Moscow takes them both on.

Though Muggeridge is not a superbly polished stylist in his few works of fiction, he succeeds at the most difficult tasks of the novelist—to tell the truth and to dramatize the struggles of the soul. Through the author’s keen journalistic eye, one sees the military parades, the omnipresent pictures of Stalin, and the endless construction projects. Consider this description of Lenin’s tomb: “The atmosphere in the tomb was damp and stale. It smelt like a cloakroom in an elementary school on a wet day. The head inside its glass case was fungoid: fresh and vivid like a fungus growing in darkness; unwholesome like a fungus, dark and poisonous.”

Innocents Abroad

Many foreigners came to the USSR in the 1930s to admire and help the great experiment launched by Lenin, and these pilgrims are Muggeridge’s principal subject. Squads of utopian intellectuals, pro-Soviet clergymen, and progressive statesmen jostle and harangue in these pages. This roman à clef was much prized by old Moscow hands such as A. T. Cholerton, who called it the “great anticant bible” of the Soviet Union. The dialogue rings true, and occasional laughs lighten the heavy themes. There are even snatches of typical news stories: descriptions of happy, productive workers in a land flowing with milk and honey while, in reality, the people starved.

The key to the cast of characters is in Muggeridge’s autobiography, The Green Stick, and his diaries, published under the title Like It Was. The American journalist named Jefferson is really Walter Duranty of the New York Times, a shameless defender of Stalin who later became one of President Roosevelt’s experts on the USSR.

Wraithby, the central character, represents Muggeridge himself. As it happens, Muggeridge went to the USSR as a comrade, with the intention of staying there, but the awful realities of the regime quickly changed his mind. He arrived with no clear moral outlook, but quickly discovered the existence of evil, as he explained in his diary: “Evil is the only apt word. Evil because there is no virtue in it: and because it has utterly failed. In a Marxist state, evil and failure are the same.”

Similarly, Wraithby finds the ebullience of a massive social experiment not only coexisting with great suffering, but also causing it. Accordingly, “all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out. It was a vision of Good and Evil. Heaven and Hell. Life and death. There were two alternatives; and he had to choose.” At one point, Wraithby wanders into a church, where “a melancholy, passionate service” is taking place. Among the believers, “Wraithby found their stillness hopeful: even exhilarating.” Religion was “a refuge from the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” This vignette clearly marks a turning point in the author’s spiritual journey. From that point on, he sought no earthly kingdoms.

As Michael Aeschliman points out in an excellent introduction, this book has been unjustly neglected and out of print for years. In 1965, British historian A. J. P. Taylor called it “probably the best book ever written on Soviet Russia.” While that judgment would be revised, primarily by the author himself, Winter in Moscow seems particularly relevant now that a new and dynamic leader and his policy of glasnost have made admiration of the Soviet Union fashionable again.

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