This is the steel of working-class, Mid-Western America described by a poet. What the story lacks in hope is counteracted by the beauty of the author’s narrative, which captures a fine balance of collective suffering and individual bittersweet memory.

The story is a series of personal narratives, each describing the emotional knot of experience that holds three generations of the Tollman family together. Through one family’s experience, the book catalogues the salient historical events of twentieth-century America: The Depression, WWII, Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, the advent of the civil rights and Black Power movements.

This is Coulson’s first novel; it follows three published books of poetry and a play, A Saloon at the Edge of the World, which was produced in San Francisco. The bleakness of the story resides in suffering without reward, most poignantly in the case of Jessica, the story’s matriarch, who loses two children, her home, her husband, and finally her sight. Her painfully sad life ends without fanfare. She is disdained by her class-conscious daughter-in-law, and her grandchildren prefer not to see her because she smells of “urine and disinfectant.”

Coulson’s narrative is poetic in both style and content. The youngest narrator, James, remarks how there were “no lilacs in the spring of 1968.” The author reinforces this motif: “April arrived like a car on fire. Television and magazines showed pictures of the dead: soldiers and civilians in Vietnam; Martin Luther King in Memphis. Not even the gardens along Lake Shore Drive had lilacs that year.”

Describing The Great Depression, Coulson uses language and memory to soften a brutal reality: “Fear swept through Cleveland like a grass fire. Banks closed and soup kitchens opened. Small business collapsed in a flurry of pink slips.”

Hope appears towards the end of the novel with the youngest generation, in James’s narrative section as he tells of the end of the Vietnam War and his brother’s reprieve from the draft: “The poor were surrounded by friends. The air was empty of fear. No other news mattered.” It is a brief moment of bounty, but it nevertheless provides the reader with a glimmer of hope that James’s generation will not suffer so much as the last.

The different narrative perspectives, along with Coulson’s detailed social and historical referencing, give this story authenticity of character and context. The choice of multiple narrative voices also lends itself well to the subject matter in creating a kind of collective voice of generic, working-class America.

 

2005

The Great Depression of the 1930s brought the industrialization of this country to a halt. The twentieth century was awash in progress, propelled into a fast-moving future, indulging in opportunities never before available to the working class. Children left family farms to move to the prospering cities, flocking toward factories and beginning a gradual erosion of the family unit. It all collapsed for the American working class, who were thrown into unemployment, forced from their homes and left to wander in search of work.

Coulson sets his novel in those desperate years, following the troubles of one family, the Tollman’s. Forced by greatly reduced circumstances to leave their home in Cleveland, the family sets up a tent in the country for a year, frozen by winter’s chill, drenched by spring rain and anxious to save enough money to return to the city. This is a pivotal time for Phil and Stephen, the two oldest boys, as they wander the ice-crusted fields, climbing the barren trees of winter, burdened by the weight of a family touched by recent tragedy. By the time they return to Cleveland, their mother has gone blind for lack of an operation and their father has faded into a reclusive stranger.

The dark and brooding Phil and light-haired, sensitive Stephen both fall in love with a vital young woman, Katherine Lennox, a pianist and social activist with an enthusiasm for life that draws both young men to her like moths to flame. Their fated triangle plays out, permanently changing all of their lives.

Phil bludgeons his way through the following years, desperately unhappy with the choices he has made, while Stephen, a confirmed bachelor, remains in his brother’s shadow, both emotionally supportive and frequently taunting his older brother. Their love-hate relationship is founded on affection, the brothers tied inextricably to their past. They struggle through five generations in the story, an enigma to Phil’s sons and disquieted by their own failings.

This poignant novel of a family coming-of-age is defined by the tragedy of the early years. The weightiness of the plot is redeemed by its poetic vision of the innocence of two young boys who long to protect their mother and siblings from ever encroaching poverty. The emotional trauma of living through the Depression has ill-prepared these young men for life’s future challenges, crippled by old resentments yet dedicated to one another since boyhood.

Coulson balances the heartbreak of reality with scenes of unearthly beauty, the tenderness and passion of first love and the impulsive yearning of young men for a world that has a place for them. The fully-fleshed characters serve to remind us that the stories of our ancestors may be obscured by time, but are no less relevant today, that once they knew the bright promise of you

 

The distinction a great sage drew between make-believe secrets and real secrets is uniquely applicable to Joseph Coulson’s first novel, The Vanishing Moon. A make-believe secret, the sage said, depends on concealment, and it stirs interest only as long as its core is hidden. When the core is revealed, the secret loses its fascination – as in the case of a stage magician. Once the mechanics behind the trick become known, the act loses its magic.

The elements that make for a real secret, however, can be apparent to the naked eye. They can be seen by everyone, traced, turned inside out. Yet, the more closely they are examined, the more mysterious the source of the spell they cast as in the case of Coulson’s novel. Start it, and you become unaware of the hours passing by while you read it. Finish it, and you silently wonder why you still care so much about a certain character in the novel whom you came to known and live with in your reading.

The things that are very clear about the structure of this book include the interplay between the fate and freedom of three generations of Tollmans – a working class family in Cleveland and Detroit – some of whose members pursue illusion that end in the shock of disillusions, while others pursue realistic hopes in defiance of the possibility that these hopes, in the end, will be snapped like matchwood. They also include the dynamic between the private lives of the Tollmans and the course of American economic, political, and cultural experience from the Great Depression to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is not quite accurate to call this a work of historical fiction; rather, Coulson has skillfully woven into the plot references to public events that seem designed to appeal in a personal way to readers; he has created benchmarks where the reader can locate him or herself in time and say, “Yes, I know that about Jessica, or Phil, or Stephen, because I was there”

Other things are very clear. The transcendent figure in the novel is Jessica Tollman, the mother, who without whimpering or striking heroic poses, suffers the loss of two children, her home, her husband, and her eyesight – and whose grandchildren prefer not to visit her in a nursing home because she smells of “urine and disinfectant.” Jessica’s one reliable source of comfort throughout her adult life is Lethea Strong, a mulatto who acted as a midwife at the births of all the Tollman children. Among these children, the one who serves as the point of departure and return for much of the action in the novel is Phil, the oldest, whose animal charm and bright, hell’s bells bravura as a young man is overtaken later in life by cynicism, belligerence, and drunkenness.

There are several clear voices that touch and retouch the story from various perspectives, depending on the dictates of selective memories and views of their own roles as participants in the drama. The voices are those of Stephen, Phil’s restrained younger brother; Katherine Lennox, who matures into a celebrated jazz musician, but as a young woman was seduced and abandoned by Phil and loved but never attained by Stephen; and James, one of Phil’s sons and the carrier of a promise that his education could make him a fortunate mutant in the Tollman family cycle of pain.

What is the secret source of this novel’s power to haunt? Several suggestions, not answers, seem right. First as the author of three published books of poetry, Coulson brings to his narrate e a mature poet’s respect for the integrity of words – where each word, in relationship to those next to it, is summoned to stand as one with the reality it is meant to describe, whether that reality is an emotion, an idea, a physical gesture. All this, applied to the characters, makes them so vascular and alive that if you were to cut into a page on which they appear you would half expect the page to bleed.

Second, Colson has absorbed into himself the attitude of classical dramatists, who never denied their characters – even the most odious – the right to their own inconvenient humanity. In Coulson’s hands, you are led to hope that even the most broken characters will somehow make the right choices leading to their redemption, and you want to cry out to them, “For God’s sake! Wake up! Can’t you see where you are heading?”

Finally, one more suggestion applies to The Vanishing Moon – what Joseph Conrad had to say in The Mirror of the Sea; “There is something beyond – a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art – which is art.” So it is in this case. Coulson’s novel partakes of a real secret, in which, over time, key elements laid bare contribute to an aesthetic experience that accumulates – rather than loses – its power to evoke the reader’s wonder.

 

I live in the city where my brother and I grew up, where we made our choices, and choices were made for us,” laments the no-longer-young narrator of Joseph Coulson’s first novel “The Vanishing Moon,” which will be published next month by New York City based Archipelago Books. “I go to the old places to make peace with what happened there, but then memories take hold of me and I twist and turn my body, trying to keep the past at arm’s length, trying to shake it off, feeling a grip that is strong and absolute,” Coulson’s working class narrator Stephen Tollman relates. A literate, if unpublished short story writer and chronicler of the Tollman family misfortunes from the depths of the Great Depression to the end of the 1970s, he has traded in the romantic dreams of his youth for the security of a job as an assembly line supervisor at a General Motors plant in Cleveland.

Novels about the struggles of working class American families are increasingly rare in the current literary marketplace, but Coulson—who lived in Buffalo while earning a Master’s degree in Writing and Poetics and a Ph.D. in American Literature at the University at Buffalo in the 1980s—has never been particularly constrained by literary fashion. In addition to three chapbooks of poetry, he has co-authored “A Saloon at the Edge of the World,” a full length play about William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler’s disagreement over how to adapt “The Big Sleep” as a screenplay that was produced and staged in San Francisco in 1996. More recently, he has been Editorial Director, Chief of Staff, and Senior Editor of the Chicago-based Great Books Foundation, where he oversaw not only GBF’s publications, but also its community based discussions of selected Great Books, including Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” which was the topic of a GBF sponsored event here in Buffalo in 1999. As “The Vanishing Moon” (which has already been selected by Barnes & Noble Books for its “Discover Great New Writers” program) went to press this fall, Coulson was teaching American literature in Paris as sponsored by the University of Toronto.

Set against the backdrop of 20th century American politics and popular culture, the novel follows the tribulations of three generations of Tollmans—a Cleveland, Ohio family cast into poverty, homelessness, and personal tragedy during the Depression of the 1930s. As a consequence of sacrifices made and not made, of foolish and shortsighted decisions, the family’s dislocation permanently scars and alters all its descendants.

More particularly, the narrative focuses on the relationship of two brothers—Phillip and Stephen Tollman—whose strikingly different responses to their father’s abandonment and the subsequent disintegration of the family leaves them full of inarticulate rage and mournful regret, respectively. Even as their lives and fortunes change in the relative prosperity following World War Two, their restiveness seems almost congenital.

By way of contrast, the novel introduces us to a succession of strong and fiercely independent women, including its most compelling narrative voice Katherine Lennox—a political activist turned jazz pianist who is beloved but unattainable by one brother, seduced and abandoned by the other. One evening a stranger in a tavern tells Stephen that the greatest talent of women in general is their “capacity to spend endless amounts of time with dull men. To spend it without being bored, or at least without minding that they are.” The comment echoes like a revelation to him, like an indictment of a still salvageable life.

For James Tollman, Phillip’s youngest son and a college-bound intellectual in the making who narrates the Viet Nam era portion of the novel, “Irony is the only faith in a fallen world,” but the house he inhabits is still ruled by retrograde emotions like guilt, fear, and self-loathing.

Despite the use of multiple narrators and a protagonist—Phillip Tollman—constructed entirely through the accounts of others, “The Vanishing Moon” opts for a traditionalist approach that will remind readers of classic authors like Steinbeck and Zola, or perhaps such contemporary masters of wounded male pride and self-doubt as Raymond Carver and Russell Banks.

 

The Vanishing Moon is a good old-fashioned novel. “Old-fashioned” in the best sense of the word: a compelling story, interesting and well-rendered characters, and great writing. Told in three voices, the book concerns the Tollman family, beginning with a middle brother Stephen as a child during the Great Depression. Jessica Tollman, his mother, is going blind as Eddie, his father, loses his job and cannot pay for the operation she needs. The family, with three [sic] sons and a daughter, loses their home and is forced to live in a tent. Eddie, depressed and overcome by guilt over a business venture gone bad, abandons his wife and children, leaving Phil, the oldest child, with a resentment that deepens into bitterness. The story shifts to the voice of Katherine, a free spirit and talented pianist in the town, as Phil and Stephen, both enamored of her, approach adulthood in the years just before World War II. In the 1960s, James, Phil’s younger son, picks up the narrative and the reader comes to see the Tollman family—and particularly the now middle-aged Phil and Stephen—through his eyes. The novel comes full-circle with Stephen’s voice. The Vanishing Moon is a beautifully told story about family bonds, love, loss, and the power of memory over our lives. This is Joseph Coulson’s first novel, and I hope not his last.

 

Joseph Coulson

2004-01

The Tollman children—spitfire Phil, the eldest; musing Stephen, his shadow; charming but doomed Margie; and stuttering Myron—adore their lovely, competent mother and cannot forgive their lackluster father for allowing her to go blind. So destitute are they at the worst of the Great Depression that they end up living in a tent outside Cleveland’s city limits, where life is as brutal and sporadically transcendent as the moody Midwest’s meteorologic extremes. Assured and purposeful, first-time novelist Coulson infuses each surprising and evocative moment with great feeling and mythic resonance as he leapfrogs forward in time, subtly tracing the impact of the Second World War, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War on his emotionally damaged characters. Shifting between Cleveland and Detroit, and among several points of view, including that of Katherine, a brilliant pianist with whom both Phil and Stephen fall madly in love, Coulson writes with surpassing clarity and dignity about grief, anger, sexual passion, the need for art, brotherly love, and the resilience of good women, creating a somberly beautiful family saga.

 

If the words “first novel” and “arrival of a major American Talent” appear on the front flap of a dust jacket, you can almost be sure that the picture on the back flap will depict some impossibly lovely product of good breeding and expert dentistry, a sloe-eyed or square-jawed recent graduate of one of the top-tier creative writing programs, with a face made up to hide the blemishes of acne scars not too distantly inflicted. Big-time publishing is now as enamored of youth as every other aspect of the culture, and aspiring writers seem to be losing their virginity at ever younger ages to an industry that came rather late to the realization that sex can sell mediocre books as well as it sells anything else.

It’s something of a surprise, then, to come upon two first novels written by balding guys in their 50s. In addition to this superficial similarity, both books explore the dislocations forced on families touched by tragedy during the Great Depression. Though neither Waterborne nor The Vanishing Moon is without flaws, each is an ambitious effort that heralds the arrival of an intriguing pentagenarian talent.
[…]

Joseph Coulson’s The Vanishing Moon is a sadder, quieter and more affecting work. It follows a Midwestern family through three generations of failed ambition and romantic blunders, and at its best it explores human frailty with the simplicity and directness of haiku. Composed of four discrete sections, narrated in turn by different characters, the novel at times achieves the quiet beauty of William Maxwell’s finest work—generous, episodic, elegiac but not sentimental.

In the long first section, told in the voice of Stephen Tollman, Coulson seems to want to bring Faulkner to Ohio. Phil Tollman, Stephen’s older brother, arrives in the world with a smoldering rage at the death of his stillborn twin. The family lives in Cleveland until Stephen’s father loses his job at a radio repair shop at the onset of the Depression. They set up camp in a canvas tent in the woods, not far from a dark little shack occupied by an old man whom the children take to calling Wormwood. A haunting figure who dresses all in black. Wormwood watches the four Tollman kids from afar, focusing most intently on Margie, a pubescent nymph with the unselfconscious beauty of a Rust Belt Lolita. Mr. Tollman stands haplessly by while his wife slowly goes blind; the children roam the woods, amusing themselves with daydreams and games.

We’ve seen this show before, I’m afraid. It’s a simple game of either/or. Will Mr. Tollman cling with pathos and guilt to the wife he can’t afford to take to the eye doctor, or will his shame force him to abandon the family? Will Wormwood be revealed as a dark prince of cunning and violence, or a spooky but misunderstood saint? When Margie dies in ambiguous circumstances after a visit to Wormwood’s shack, I couldn’t help but feel a bit befuddled by the lack of vital details; only later is the reader directly told the truth of what happened, and the gap between the death and the confirmation of its cause feels like a narrative trick.

Coulson’s most convincing narrators are two post-adolescents who share the middle portion of the book. One of them, Katherine, tells of her affairs with the brothers Tollman—first with Stephen, and then, when he proves too dull for her tastes, with the darker and more dangerous Phil. This is one instance in which the sex does sell us something worth buying. Coulson’s treatment of youthful lust is erotic in the best sense of the word—a perfect blend of candor and discretion. Katherine, a talented pianist and great beauty, a communist with progressive parents, is the most alluring—in every sense of the word—character in the book.

Later, Phil’s son James takes the narrative baton. We’re now in 1960s Detroit. Phil and Stephen work at General Motors. Stephen, still mourning the loss of Katherine’s love, remains unmarried, while Phil rages drunkenly at the woman he married after leaving Katherine to join the army. Here Coulson connects his characters to a whole range of American subjects—World War II and Vietnam, fast cars and baseball, racial tensions and industrial decline—but he does it obliquely, as a backdrop to the family drama. “My father disliked the fact that his sons were musicians,” James says of the garage band he forms with his brother. “He believed that rock’n’roll led to muscle cars, loud stereo systems, strange politics, and general irresponsibility”—a sad development for a guy whose most passionate affair was with a communist piano player.

When James’s girlfriend begs him to accompany her to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he begs off. Like many middle-class children of the time, James and his brother only caught the televised version of the revolution. In retellings of the 1960s—whether historical, personal or fictional—the story of kids like them has often been elided in favor of the colorful antics of the Yippies, or the fierce struggles of SNCC and SDS and the reactionaries who opposed them. Coulson brings a whole demographic—and the attitude—that ultimately triumphed by its example of self-absorbed passivity. Consider this, a passage that begins as a gentle hymn to first love and baseball:

I loved the smell of the ballpark, a sweet mix of dirt and grass and steamed hot dogs and beer. I loved the grit beneath my feet and the stickiness of the chairs. I loved the short left-field wall and the impossible depth of center fields. I loved that Maria had fallen in love with me here and that I’d fallen in love with her. I loved the scent of her skin, the way she whistled, the way she walked and talked and watched. I loved the excitement of our bodies melding with the excitement of the game. I loved the way she kissed me when our team took the lead.

There were times at Tiger Stadium when we felt safe, when we felt a certain kind of hope for Detroit and for ourselves. Baseball, we knew, followed its own tragic cycles. Great players faded into bitter legends of injury and dissipation. Others betrayed the game itself or were betrayed by it. But in those days we ignored the changing seasons. Always we returned to the ballpark, the satisfying geometry of field, fence, and foul line. It stood as a bulwark against losses we could not imagine. Losses we could not understand. Somehow we felt that the world would make sense only as long as we stayed in our seats.

This subtle swivel between the personal and the apolitical is so deft you could be forgiven for missing it. We ignored the changing seasons. The world would make sense only as long as we stayed in our seats. The Tollman family, so entranced by familial dramas, so averse to public displays of passion and collective endeavor—at least outside a ballpark—lets the world go by without grabbing hold of it. Their tragedy is, in many ways, the tragedy of American life in the latter part of the twentieth century; we spend more time in our seats than ever.

After his early flirtation with elements of prairie gothic, Coulson serves up that tragedy without a hint of sermonizing. This is as real as realism gets.

 

Appearing for the first time in English, Giono’s 1933 work is essentially an extended prose poem with no traditional narrative, the action occurring obliquely or by insinuation. Yet a compelling mood engulfs the reader, who tacitly and willingly accompanies protagonists, shepherds on their drive in idyllic southern France. Poetic images abound, especially in reference to the sky and sea, and each sentence practically stands by itself. In the novel’s culmination which is especially unusual and poetic, the herders perform an allegorical “shepherds’ play” with the cast representing such primal forces as the Sea and a Mountain. An exercise as intellectual as it is aesthetic, the book shares with Giono’s other works, especially the classic The Man Who Planted Trees, and ecological obsession. Not for every taste but a reward for those with patience and sensitivity. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.

 

Most people believe, not illogically, that a sunflower described on the page is never as tangible as the actual plant. Jean Giono’s book declares the opposite. Written in 1933 and translated for the first time into English with impassioned language that only a poet could pull off, this novel is an open door into the natural world. When Henry Miller read this book he wrote: “It is a land in which things happen to men as eons ago they happened to the gods. Pan still walks the earth. The soil is saturated with cosmic juices. Events transpire. Miracles occur.”

Perhaps the greatest miracle is how Giono makes nature tangible to the reader. His surreal language, fantastic stories, and descriptions of the gnarled hands of the shepherds in the great Sans-Bois wilderness make his fervent words believable. He harnesses with language the spirituality of the Earth and the sea. You may read this book in an office (“a prison of four walls and a cemetery of books”), but you too will became part of its world: “Those walls draw apart, open, like a huge flower, and a deluge of sky crashes down inside there.”

He writes in a way that doesn’t seem contrived, and his storytelling seals the deal. While many of his Surrealist compatriots were deconstructing the established forms of art, they also were tearing down necessary structure. Giono stays away from this anti-aesthetic pitfall by going back to oral tradition;The Serpent of Stars is, essentially, a modern creation myth, with poetry, art, and nature woven throughout. With its fresh perspective, poetic language, and love of the Earth, this short novel could have been written a thousand years ago or, possibly, yesterday.

 

Jean Giono was born on March 30, 1895 and lived for most of his life in the small Provençal town of Manosque, about 50 km north-east of Aix-en-Provence. His father was a cobbler, his mother a washer-woman in Manosque, and together they exercised an enormous influence over their son as he was growing up, helping to instill in him an unshakable love for the people, the geology, and the ecology of the region. When Giono began to achieve success as a writer (following the completion of his Pan trilogy in 1930) it would have been natural for him to consider a move to Paris, but he had no interest in the French literary “scene.” Giono’s love for his family and for the landscape of his birth is expressed in most of his novels, first among them the autobiographical Jean le bleu (translated as Blue Boy), with its vivid evocation of the decaying, rat-haunted family home in Manosque. In many of Giono’s novels the Provençal landscape is itself a character, no less alive than the human protagonists. In To the Slaughterhouse, for example, Giono describes how, as “the wind sprang shrieking over the Alps, […] the almond trees moaned freely from the depths of their trunks, [and] the pine tree roots growled and bit into the rocks” like sentient things. In this pagan and primordial setting you sense that the gods could—and do—take any form, and at times Giono’s writing reads like a 1930s-modernist updating of ancient Greek fables.

The closest present-day equivalent to Giono that I can suggest is John Berger, whose Into Their Labours trilogy movingly documents peasant life in the villages of the French Alps. Both writers express a genuine compassion for the common man—peasant, laborer, farmer—who is often at odds with a fast-paced, increasingly mechanized world.

Praise from André Gide was instrumental in getting Giono his first book publication, and Giono’s work continues to be readily available in French (his Oeuvres Complètes is published in eight volumes by Gallimard). English translations, though, have been difficult to locate over the years. Viking commissioned translations of Giono’s major novels beginning in the 1930s, but Henry Miller decried the slow pace of their translation and publication in his essay on Giono, which was included in The Books In My Life, Miller’s 1952 collection from New Directions. In the early 1980s, Berkeley-based North Point Press began to reissue some of these translations in nicely designed paperback editions printed on acid-free paper, bringing Giono’s work to the attention of another generation of English-language readers. When North Point went under in 1991 (the name and some of their backlist being sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux) these titles once again became unavailable, until the phoenix-like emergence of the Counterpoint imprint, which now offers a few Giono titles in their list. Enthusiasts of Giono’s work have been able to augment their library with a small selection of additional titles from UK publishers (such as Peter Owen), who have a much better track record of publishing translations from the French than do North American houses.

In recent years a number of smaller publishers have emerged, specializing in translations, and we can thank them for the publication of two of the three titles which are reviewed below. Giono was a prolific writer, producing (according to one source) “over fifty volumes of fiction, poems, and plays&rduo; during his lifetime, which means that there are still dozens of his works awaiting translation by these—or other—English-language publishers, something I hope to encourage by drawing attention to this fine author, whose writing has a way of working itself by way of the senses into your soul.

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Jean Giono’s To the Slaughterhouse (Peter Owen Modern Classics) opens on “a thick August night smelling of corn and horse-sweat,” as another trainload of conscripts departs from the station of a nameless Provençal village for the front. There is a sense of gathering dread as the distant war makes itself felt even in this remote community, and the most minor of events—a freshly-split boulder in the hills; the smell of “too much corn” in the air —become freighted with hidden meaning for those who are left behind—the elderly, the women, and the very young—as they become overwhelmed with uneasiness about the future. “What are we going to do, that’s what I’d like to know,” one asks. “We’re no race of warriors, that’s for sure.”

In alternate chapters we experience the mindless brutality of war through the eyes of Joseph, a conscript from the village, who watches in horror as many of his fellow soldiers are blown apart into so many fragments of meat and bone. Giono’s outrage is palpable as he describes the effects of the distant conflict upon the villagers, who want nothing more than to continue living the same simple life that their fathers and grandfathers lived, tending their livestock and eking a living from the land. When one young soldier returns home missing a leg, we see him through the eyes of Julia, a village girl:

[A] soft, sallow man [who] had lost that redness of men in the sun. He had the white, fat hands of those who are served their meals and have no effort to make except open their mouths. They fatten in their chairs like sacks. Julia had not forgotten what a handsome worker he was before, slim and tough as an old bean.

Giono fought as an infantryman in World War I and the experience left him a confirmed pacifist, one who was imprisoned for his views at the start of World War II. Giono wrote of his war experiences in Refus d’obéissance (Refusal to Obey), speaking out against war, conscription, and bearing arms, and he concludes one vehement passage with the anti-nationalist declaration that “there is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: in being alive.” To the Slaughterhouse is fairly described by the publisher as “one of his finest novels [and] one of the most affecting accounts of war ever written.”

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The Solitude of Compassion is a collection of twenty shorter pieces by Giono. It was first published in French in 1932, immediately after To the Slaughterhouse, and appears in English for the first time in this slim paperback volume from Seven Stories Press, which—in a nice touch—also includes Henry Miller’s extensive homage to Giono as a foreword. Together these pieces give a vivid portrait of Provençe as Giono saw it, during a period well before Peter Mayle’s bucolic accounts of living as an expatriate in that region brought floods of pasty-skinned Britons south in search of their own piece of southern France.

Giono was a romantic, of course, and his characters often seem to have stepped out of myth or fable, with a connection to the land that makes them appear as equals to the rocks and trees. In “Jofroi de Maussan” Giono tells of Fonse, who buys an orchard from another villager, Jofroi, who is now too old to tend his land. But when Fonse goes to take down some of the trees in order to sow wheat he finds Jofroi confronting him with a gun, defending the trees which he still remembers buying as saplings “at the fair at Riez, in ‘05,” carrying them home from the fair on his back, carting manure to each of them, and nursing them though freezing nights. In “Joselet” the narrator observes how the local healer derives his power by “eating” the sun, and learns from him that everything in the world is connected: wheels turning within wheels “so that when one turns the others turn also.”

As noted above it is one of Giono’s ongoing themes (found in almost every one of his books) that the world itself is alive, just as its human inhabitants are alive, and this philosophy finds its clearest expression in “Song of the World,” the piece which closes The Solitude of Compassion:

For a very long time I have wanted to write a novel in which you could hear the world sing. In all of today’s books they have given, in my opinion, too big a place to small-minded people and they have neglected to make us perceive the breathing of the beautiful inhabitants of the universe. The seeds that are sown in books, they all seem to have been purchased from the same granary. […] I know that we can hardly conceive of a novel without people, because they are part of the world. What is needed is to put man in his place, not to make him the center of everything, to be humble enough to perceive that a mountain exists not merely as height and width but as weight, emissions, gestures, overarching power, words, sympathy. A river is a character, with its rages and its loves, its power, its god of chance, its sicknesses, its thirst for adventures. Rivers, springs are characters: they love, they deceive, they lie, they betray, they are beautiful, they dress themselves in rushes and mosses. The forests breathe. The fields, the moors, the hills, the beaches, the oceans, the valleys in the mountains, the lost summits struck by lightning and the proud walls of rock on which the wind of the heights comes to disembowel itself since the first ages of the world: all of this is not a simple spectacle for our eyes. It is a society of living beings. We only know the anatomy of these beautiful living things, as human as we are, and if the mysteries limit us on all sides it is because we have never taken into account the earthly, vegetable, fluvial, and marine psychologies.

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In The Serpent of Stars (originally published in 1933) the narrator begins by describing how he meets a potter named Césaire Escoffier while at the Laragne fair, and is invited to visit him at his home up in the “jostling rush” of the Provençal hills, near a small village surrounded by “such waves of earth and spray of trees as far as the eye could see.” He finds himself compelled to go even further into the hills, in search of the shepherds who spend entire seasons tending to their flocks up in the high pastures, far from the outside world. What the narrator (a writer, who, like Giono, happens to make his home in Manosque) discovers among the shepherds is a revelation. More used to “a prison of four walls and a whole cemetery of books,” he finds that “sometimes, those walls draw apart, open, like a huge flower, and a deluge of sky crashes down inside there like a rush.”

The narrator sets out with Césaire to find an annual gathering of the shepherds’ community, rumored to take place each year on the night of the summer solstice, on a high plateau overlooking “the distant chasm of the Durance [River].” There he hopes to witness a performance of “an improvised Shepherd’s Play—a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man, and The Mountain.” They fail during their first attempt, but the narrator’s obsession with his quest compels him to try again the following year, when he sets off once more into the hills as a sailor sets sail on the broad back of the sea.

The Serpent of Stars is the most mystical and myth-like of these three early books by Giono, yet it is surprisingly contemporary in the way that it anticipates many of the environmental concerns of our present day. Archipelago Books offers this haunting story in a clean, clear translation by Jody Gladding, presenting it in a lovely little paperback edition that features French flaps and an attractive interior page design. I’d love to see them continue their fine work with further as-yet-untranslated works by Giono, such as the autobiographical Noé (which Giono lists as his favorite work), or Un Roi sans divertissement, the first of his historical Chroniques.