The Short Fiction of Lawrence Dorr (v)

I can't help wonder whether that robin just outside our door has a problem. He can't seem to get it right--that song he sings over and over and over again, I mean. If I had a piano, I'd tap it for you, or for him (or her), to see if maybe I could help out. On and on it goes, liltingly. Really, I'm not complaining. 

To him (or her) I don't think the repetition is particularly frustrating. After all, this is what he's looking at this morning as a new day rises. What's out east is worth singing about, although "red in the morning," my Coast Guard father used to claim means "sailor take warning."

Maybe that robin's song is a warning. 

Nah. It's what he (or she) does. He sings. Most writers do, I guess, although how well they sing and how successfully is not their office to judge. 

There's something akin to the robin's song in Lawrence Dorr's stories. Like my singing neighbor just outside, the melody Dorr creates seems as much chorus as the robin's, a song he can't get out of his head--or won't. 

Most imaginative literature does what Lawrence Dorr does in his stories because most poets and artists look at the seeming chaos all around, collect what they experience in fragments, in shards of human experience, and try to make it harmonize or rhyme, try to make it sing, endow the world's brokenness with meaning. Art makes meaning out of what seems meaningless.

Like that songster with the orange vest outside my window, those of us who sing in the morning can't ever get it quite right. But that doesn't stop the singing or the song.

Dorr's "Verity Unseen" is set in England, but don't be deceived by change of setting. Britain or not, he's singing the same song. 

A writer and his family are living in England, where his wife is completing a degree. They have a seaside cottage that seems largely unheated to them--they're Floridians after all. He'd sent a collection of his stories to his mother, in Hungary, still under Russian rule, with little confidence it would ever get to her.

But because they're in Britain it did, and she sends a letter back, a letter that aches. "Beloved," she writes, "I do not expect that we will see each other again in this life.. . .I try not to be bitter." Every week, she says, reports surface of people killed while attempting to escape. 

He spirals into a darkness he knows all too well, then turns on the BBC and listens to the story of a California man awaiting execution. 

Once again, halogen lights flash into his past as if from nowhere. "He too had once awaited execution, standing against a weather-beaten carriage gate." Once again he's victimized by the war-torn past, a history which is by no means behind him. 

Images tumble all around him. His kids are at church dying eggs for Easter Sunday. It's all a jumble. Then, without any transition, the reality of Good Friday comes upon him, of visage of Jesus, "his tortured body bent over carrying the upper beam of the heavy cross on his way to Calvary. He would be nailed on with real nails."

It's a vision he can't help seeing. "He beheld the suffering, pain-wracked Man trudging toward Golgotha. He began to cry."

On Easter morning he gets up early, stokes the fire, and marches quietly to the WC, taking in every last image in the world around him--sound of the shingled sea, the "congregations" of wood violets and daffodils, the bleating of the sheep "on the shrouded hills," and "the unbearable majesty of the rising sun."

Once more, he falls to his knees, as he once had, awaiting a single shot from Russian rifle, expecting death. "But instead there was light without any shadows. He closed his eyes overwhelmed by love."

That's the story Lawrence Dorr keeps telling, the song he won't stop singing. It's what he does. Like my neighbor the singer, he too sees the dawn.

The Short Fiction of Lawrence Dorr (iv)

"Risen Indeed," the fourth story in Lawrence Dorr's The Long Journey Home, is no more complex than the title asserts. Very simply, it's a story with a climax that arrives with the refugee's blessed assurance of Christ's resurrection.

Imagine that--a story that banishes the darkness with nothing more or less than than the only truly empty grave in the history of humankind. That's it. It's that simple.

In "Risen Indeed," once again the darkness permeates the refugee's existence with uninvited flashbacks that take him completely out of the here-and-now and leave him feeling stranded in the desolated world at the end of the war. He simply can't forget what he'd rather not remember. There's an empty church in "Risen Indeed," a church he stumbles into when he's trying to stay alive in Salzburg, when he has nothing to eat, when he dreams of Spam (he's seen a picture) and determines to attack an American soldier to get arrested and thrown into an American prison where they actually feed their prisoners. He's that starved.

When he can't do it, he looks for solace in a church the war has destroyed.

The altar was bare. It had been stripped of its linen and candlesticks. The door of the safe behind the altar was open. It was empty. . .He was standing in an empty space where the sound of weeping and crying would always be heard, where hope had ceased forever. There would never be a new heaven and new earth, a new Jerusalem. He cried with dry sobs as if he had been drained even of his tears. He cried for the empty world, he cried for himself. . .

The memory of his own faithlessness is summoned by the tearful confession of a woman who tells him that she feels abandoned by a priest who claims in an article in a church paper that talk of the bodily resurrection of Christ is, well, not only silly but chauvinistic, the empty burden of those embarrassing 19th century missionaries who were carrying cultural imperialism in the name of Jesus Christ. She is mortified. "Without the resurrection I have nothing," she tells the refugee, decades later on a college campus. "You can't imagine the desolation I feel."

Well, she's wrong. He can imagine the desolation because he's lived it. It's her confession that reawakens the horrors he lived through after the war--the empty church and the whole line of dead men and women he witnessed hanging from the goal posts of the soccer field he played in as a boy, those he thought he would himself soon be among.

But it's Holy week now, decades later, and there's Maunday Thursday, the only Royal Feast. 

Then his name was called and he recognized it. It was the voice Him Who cooked fish on a charcoal fire for his friends and said: "Come and have breakfast." It was the voice that made them know that beyhond chronos was the kairos of everlasting life. He looked at the image of Christ the King, at the Easter lilies on the altar, at the cross made of wildflowers, and he cried out with the instinctive cry of the newborn.
"Christ is risen. Christ is risen."
"Risen indeed," the others shouted back.

The story ends with the cry of the newborn in Christ. It ends where real life begins, with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. "Risen Indeed" is a very simple story, and it's not long. 

There's something of a paradox here, I'm afraid. Maybe it's just me. What makes the story difficult--and make no mistake!--it is--is that it's so incredibly simple. The story's remarkable testimony is that the scarred refugee takes the refuge he's looked for so desperately in the only real comfort he knows he can know: "Christ is risen."

That simple truth here is that He is our peace. That's the story of "Risen Indeed."

The Short Fiction of Lawrence Dorr (iii)

The third story in The Long Journey Home, "Stress Test," feels even more like a sketch. We are following the life of a refugee soldier who comes to America, in part because he has no home to which he can return after the Second World War. I'm not sure it's the same refugee in every story, but the man in the middle of all three stories has a painful past in a war that never ends in his mind's echo chamber. America is something of a dream to him, but when he gets to this country he discovers, as everyone does, that streets are not paved with gold in a land of milk and honey. 

Not that he's disillusioned or that America's is some kind of harlot--that's not the nature of his suffering. His heartache rises from a soul still terrorized by the suffering; the heartache is there because some trauma never fully disappears.

He is a victim of PTSD, clinically stated; but he doesn't use the words. Events occur in his life--sitting in doctor's office, waiting--that remind him suddenly of events in his past never quite eclipsed by time or circumstance, like waiting in a similarly small space for the beating his interrogators will give him. In a moment he hadn't anticipated he's right back amid the horror. 

"Stress Test" takes place many years removed from 1946. The refugee soldier is an old man with enough atrial fibrillation to have him thinking, maybe for the first time in years, of his own death. Irregular rhythms have him stressed out. The doctor tells him, however, that what he feels in his chest is neither abnormal nor particularly dangerous. End of story. 

Like Hemingway, to whom he is often compared, Lawrence Dorr's stories are icebergs--there's more beneath the surface.

Much of "Stress Test" is that office visit, closely described from the interior of a mind burdened by history and even present circumstance. Life in America, 21st century, is a burden to someone like himself, someone who takes his faith so seriously. He's clearly tired of endless caricature of Christianity and Christians, he says. 

He longed for a country of his own, where Christians weren't ridiculed on university campuses and superstitious Yahoos because they loved God, where his brethren would not be characterized in mainstream literature, in films and on TV shows as narrow, hypocritical, money-grubbing people whose intellectual integrity was always suspect.

That assertion is followed by the memory of a circumcision ritual to which he was invited, where a rabbi explained to those who gathered that the ritual was "a symbol of the covenant between God and His people, a witness to an act that was initiated by God, not man." His own distaste for the way Christians are portrayed in America reminds him of the grand seriousness that real religious people offer as worship and tribute to a God who is real--and who is God.

Nearly home, he passes a steel building the Baptists, he says, turned into a church and embellished with a sturdy brick facade. "The same love of God that build Chartres Cathedral," he tells himself, "had placed this steel structure--manufactured to store feed and fertilizer--in the middle of a wooded lot and surrounded it with flowering bushes." 

Thus, the Baptists across the street, far removed from France's prized Cathedral, remind him of the seriousness of spiritual commitment among those who confess His name.

Long ago somewhere along the line, I was taught that stories often have two climaxes. One of them is called "technical," the moment in the story when it's clear that the conflict is over; the other is "dramatic," the high point of drama within a narrative. They're not always the same moment.

One of the characteristics of the early stories in The Long Journey Home is the seeming absence of any climax, technical or certainly dramatic. The stories feel like sketches--no car chase, no imperiled damsel on a railroad track; even what description the refugee gives of his torture is at best an outline. It's not hard to feel as if nothing really happens in a Lawrence Dorr story.

Including faith. There's no kumbaya, no wrestling with God, no great sweat-like-blood turning point. But what's always, always there--in "Stress Test" too--is God almighty. He's there in the Baptist bricks across the road, even though, as the refugee says, "this miracle of devotion would not be reported."

Such miracles in a bellicose religious age may seem painfully slight. You might wonder what happened, if anything did. 

But God is always there in Dorr's world. That he is the refugee's personal savior goes without question, but that the refugee would ever use that language seems unlikely because the Almighty is so much greater than someone we dial-up when our hearts go off-rhythm. 

The refugee narrator says he had to see the Grand Canyon to believe the place, "this immensity that could not be captured in its entirety by the powers of art or any optical device." Then, "This was also true of the Far County he barely knew beyond a few short descriptions that had excited his imagination with its endless possibilities."

That's eternity. He's talking about eternity. You might have missed it. 

Don't expect high drama in Lawrence Dorr. Don't expect mountain-top experience. But know--as does the refugee, even if he occasionally forgets--that God is simply always there. Make no mistake about that. We don't live in a world without God.

You just need to remember that the facade on the Baptists' steel building across the street is really just another Chartres Cathedral, laid brick by brick by those who love the Lord. 

Lawrence Dorr suggests that realization will calm your heart's unsteady rhythm and bring peace to your soul.
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Few of us will ever read Lawrence Dorr, but, pardon my moralizing, more should. He really is one of our finest Christian writers. I'm going through his last collection of stories, The Long Journey Home, story by story because he was excellent short story writer  with an incredible personal story. What's more, he was a wonderful human being.  

Lawrence Dorr, whose real name was  Janos Zsigmond Shoemyen, died in December of 2014. He was 93 years old at the time of his own last journey home.