Quote of the Day (Jerome Charyn, on a Book-Loving Lady Robber)

“[Prudence Miller] wasn't willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn't steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She'd had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn't appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that's what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn't out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.”—American novelist-film critic Jerome Charyn, “White Trash,” in Bronx Noir, edited by S. J. Rozan (2007)

The image accompanying this post, of Jerome Charyn at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, was taken September 6, 2015, by fourandsixty.

Quote of the Day (Jerome Charyn, on King Saul)

“He is a king without issue, a kind of walking shadow, a ghost boy who hides in the baggage. Saul is constantly with the night….Saul’s constant night turns him into a metaphorical man. He’s the king of a ‘dark’ nation that will flower under David. He lives in a dark time, without voices or visions. He serves as a sacrificial bridge that connects a primitive, warlike people with many gods and many tribes to a nation that serves one Lord, one God, with a continuous line under King David.”—Jerome Charyn, “1 Samuel: Meditations on the First Book of Samuel and King Saul,” Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, edited by David Rosenberg (1987)

Has anybody out there seen that new NBC show, Kings, starring Deadwood’s Ian McShane? I haven’t, but from what I hear, they’ve set the story of Saul in the contemporary world, except that here he’s called King Silas, leader of Gilboa, only he still has a young David in the background who, the leader fears, will supplant him.

The series is garnering some interest, and even decent reviews. Give the producers credit for knowing a good story when they see it.

The news about this show sent me scurrying to dig out my copy of Congregation. It’s quite a varied anthology revolving around close readings of chapters in the Hebrew Bible by 37 leading American novelists, poets, and critics, including Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mordecai Richler, Phillip Lopate, Harold Bloom, Francise Prose, and Cynthia Ozick. (Well, maybe we should call them North American—Richler, after all, was Canadian.)

The Charyn essay on King Saul (the image accompanying this post, is, of course, by Rembrandt, with the young David playing the lyre) is particularly perceptive, capturing how this first king of Israel, thrust into power without any particular bond with his people or God, became subject to the dark forces in his nature, finally undone by his obsession with threats to his position—a dark parable for all leaders.

The Rembrandt painting, based on 1 Samuel 18:10, renders one of these dark moments—the “evil spirit” inducing the moody king to thrust his javelin at the young musician, driving him from his presence—through characteristically expert use of lighting, particularly on the mouth, with its tight expression indicating the mood that has stolen over the uneasy monarch.