The Secret Place -- ii

The Secret Place is only partially about Jennie Van Engen (in all his books, "Engleking"). It's all about the wild boy she married, a man who I knew Fred himself admired, even held up as a hero. Gerrit Van Engen, in Manfred's mind, was a kid who could have played in the majors if he hadn't been born into a brood of dour Calvinists who couldn't play ball on Sunday. He was hot, a rebel with a cunning irrefutable smile and splendid grace for a farm boy from rural Iowa. At least that's the way Gerrit's little cousin saw him as the two of them, Gerrit--a decade older--and Feike, growing up through a madcap Doon boyhood in the earliest years of the 20th century. 

The first time I’d ever heard of this novelist named Fred Manfred was in a dorm room, when some local guys were talking about this long, tall novelist from just down the road, a man who wrote dirty books. I could not have been more interested, nor skeptical.

But when I went home to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, there, front and center in a bookstore I frequented stood The Secret Place, a novel by a name I remembered from that dorm room session. They weren’t making things up.

I was home for Thanksgiving, my first semester of college. I bought that novel. After all, how many dirty books from Dutch Reformed writers existed in the mid-60s?

Reading that novel changed my life. The Secret Place became the subject of my very first literature term paper, even though Manfred’s novels were behind the desk at the Dordt College library and you could get them only by asking, the kind of request that meant some kind of guilt bath. For the first time in my life, I studied that little novel in the way that English majors, trying to excavate motives, its moral compass or core. 

What did I know about such things? Very little. What I did know was that I wanted to understand this tall man, this novelist from just down the road--I wanted to understand him--to wit, how and why he told the story he did, the story of Gerrit Engleking.   

When I say reading that novel changed my life, what I mean is that reading The Secret Place made me an English major, which, subsequently, made me a teacher. I’d never tangled with a text like I did with the yarn of that novel, never attempted a survey of major themes in anything. Studying a third-rate novel by a local novelist honestly gave me a profession and a passion. 

Just as significantly, The Secret Place made me want to write. What I recognized in that novel was characters I knew, characters who made it clear to me that I didn’t have to have a New York address to write novels. A tall guy from Siouxland could write about people and things you knew and still be a writer.

What's more, a believer didn't have to be a Sunday School teacher, a writer whose soul passion was bringing others to Jesus. Amazingly, I was taught--hold your breath!--that the truth about us, about our lives, about our dreams and nightmares was the territory of story, of fiction. 

Doon, Iowa, wasn’t forever changed by the publication of The Secret Place, even though Fred pulled quite a catch out of his boyhood neighborhood to write it. What people couldn't help but recognize was a sad story that, back then, no one talked much about but just about everyone knew—how a community hot shot got two young ladies pregnant (not at the same time) and then lost, big-time. Jennie, the one he married, is the one I speculated was buried beneath that grave--that Jennie Engleking died in childbirth.

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There's a little more to say here about all of this. I hope you'll bear with me. Tomorrow, the story of the town sign.