Those blasted bells

It was published in 1934, which means no adult reading it at the time would be alive today. Nonetheless, you don't need to be clairvoyant to know that Cobie De Lespinasse's novel, The Bells of Helmus, went over down Main in Orange City like a fart in church, as they say. 

It's an odd book really, all about faith or the lack of it, or the spirit of it, or the simply hideous results of it when carried along by mean-spirited bumpkins far more conscious of the mote in your eye than the log-jam in theirs. Ms. De Lespinasse (Les pin' awesee, or something like that) is the granddaughter-in-law of a unique character in a brand new Dutch-American colony the author calls "Helmus." Be ye not deceived; she's talking about 1875 Orange City, the citadel of Dutch Reformed-ism in a newly homesteaded corner of northwest Iowa, the town in which she was herself born and reared. 

Fred Manfred's "hometown" novels consistently called Orange City "Jerusalem"--and with good reason. Orange City was, after all, the county seat (once righteous Dutch burghers strong-armed the county records from Calliope/Hawarden, where the gangsters who ran the place kept it under lock and key. . .or tried). Inasmuch as Orange City was the seat of political power in the region, it was also home to most all the bright and uppity folks, frontier doctors and lawyers and judges, not to mention the academics who gathered once the town had reared its own Academy. 

Sioux Center long ago surpassed Orange City in sheer business acumen, which is to say, the business of hustling; but even today, the tulip capital of the county with the highest percentage of Dutch-Americans remains the only burg named after Dutch royalty.

In many fictions about the Dutch Reformed, we come off as self-righteous fusspots too full of their own hot air. To mangle an old line from Mencken, we are grim-faced, haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time, dour, no-fun-on Sunday workaholics who register zero tolerance for the sinners who mow their lawns on the Sabbath. 

In those novels, insiders have little to do with outsiders; they are unreasonably clannish and unwelcoming. Because we have so little to do with others, we pick fights with our own, forever igniting petty quarrels to cut each other to shreds if there's even a hint of something unorthodox somewhere close. During the fifties, people hid television antenna in their attics, rather than mount them on the roof for all the world to see.

All of that is in The Bells of Helmus, and in spades, which would be, back then, a shockingly worldly usage for someone like me to employ, "in spades," suggesting I played with "the Devil's cards." 

Card-playing is one thing; the seventh commandment is whole different world of sin and repression. No Dutch Reformed writer of the 20th century, none at least that I know, hasn't written something somewhere about a scandalous violation of the Seventh Commandment--and with good reason: for the most part, "thou shalt not commit adultery" was, after all, verifiably and embarrassingly public and therefore the only commandment of the Big Ten on which the church, the real authority in old-line Dutch Reformed communities, lowered the righteous boom. There were no scarlet letters, but most people my age or older can remember a time when some winsome pregnant girl, unmarried, stood in front of church to take a score of public licks for love. 

And so it is here in Bells of Helmus. The centerpiece of a plot structure that rotates between protagonist characters is a sweet little Dutch maiden in pigtails named Jeannie, who, in all innocence (seriously!) gets herself pregnant by the apostate doctor's wonderful son. Trust me, there's not a word about how that immaculate conception was accomplished; one of the unanswered questions of the story is how on earth the deed got done. We're simply to assume it did. The story is that Jeannie is pregnant, and that, in her time, she delivers a darling little boy, out of town of course, but not out of mind.

She's in Oregon when the precious bundle arrives, where she's being cared for by the town's only medical doctor, who got up and left town because he simply could not handle the insistent militancy of those d___ed  church bells ringing from both sides of Main Street. What drives him batty and eventually out is the overbearing religiosity of the people, demonstrated in a spirituality that grows like poison hemlock out of their own manifest boerishness. Besides, it's his own son who got poor and beautiful Jeannie in the family way. 

There are untold prototypes in the novel, especially if you know the real story of Ms. De Lespinaase's grandfather-in-law, Orange City's first doctor, a cultured gentleman among the rubes, who practiced his brand of humanism via a creed that he'd say had only one commandment--to love people, a creed that makes the thorny Dutch Reformed pietists roll their eyes.

Strangely enough, quite startlingly, in fact, Bells of Helmus is a religious novel, suggesting that Cobie De Lespinasse was somehow herself incapable of escaping her own religious tradition as the whipping she gives Orange City's mega-religious folks in the novel would suggest. The good humanist doctor has his own come-to-Jesus moment late in the novel and thus gives up his secularism in exchange for a level of spirituality he would have disparaged earlier in his life.

It's a bizarre novel meant to carry fiery arrows into the fort Orange City once may have been. But it also insists on rewriting the old creeds. If the novel weren't about us, I'd say, "Don't waste your time." But it's bigger than its obvious limitations. If offers more to consider than its author ever intended, both about her and about us. I don't think I'll write an opera based on the Bells of Helmus for next year's Tulip Festival Night Show. I'm quite sure it wouldn't go.

Bells of Helmus conveys a jaundiced view of what it once meant to be Dutch Reformed or Dutch Calvinist out in the hinterland, and while I can imagine Ms. De Lespinasse had her own good reasons to carpet bomb her hometown, this 73-year-old reader can't help but believe she's not all wrong about how things were or may have been.  

A wonderful thing about novels--about books--is that sometimes they teach you far more than their authors may have ever intended. So 'tis with The Bells of Helmus.