Spirited Men: Story, Soul, and Substance - Softcover

Doyle, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1561012580 ISBN 13: 9781561012589

Publisher: Cowley Publications, 2004

Synopsis

This recollection of essays offers resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine. His work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Harper's, Christian Century, Commonweal, and America. His previous collections include Leaping and Saints Passionate and Peculiar, and he is the editor of God Is Love: Essays from Portland Magazine.

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Introduction

Where Holy Lives

This book is a collection of resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men.

I wanted to bring these men back to public life, in most cases, or closer to the public eye, in others--to draw them from the shadowy corners of the room and beam a grinning light on them, to sing their stories, to see them fresh and new; and to see them too as very often men of immense spiritual substance, prayerful fury, enormous grace, wonderful attentiveness to miracle: in other words, devout men, in the most real and serious and smiling sense. Men very often concerned in their work and lives with the moral grapple, with the sinuous crucial puzzle of love, with the wonderfully mysterious ways that song and story stoke and spark the heart; which is, as you know and I know, where holy lives.

Why men? Why not women? Or children? Or herons or sea otters or damselflies or holy oaks?

Because I am a man, and absorbed by the idea that somehow I might learn how to be a good man, maybe even a great man, before I shuffle off this mortal coil, and something about each of the men in these pages teaches me about being a man: William Blake’s relentless eye for the holy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s passion and mercy, Van Morrison’s endless journey toward wonder and rapture, Paul Kelly’s enduring empathy for the ragged brokenness of his fellow human beings, Rider Haggard’s idea of honor and friendship as forms of love, Plutarch’s insistence that each man has moral greatness within him like a divine seed.

Each of these troubled talented extraordinary artists fascinated me enough to commit an essay about their lives and works. Maybe in another book I will commit such misdemeanors about Annie Dillard and Flannery O’Connor and Rosemary Clooney and Bonnie Raitt and Willa Cather and the great modern Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who hardly anyone has heard of but whose wild honest lusty poems buckle my knees. That would be yet another way to learn about being a good man, if you consider, as I do, that one very fine way to learn about men is to study women studying men.

I’d guess that half the readers of this book are men interested in the shifting threads of greatness in other men, and the other half are women, even more interested in the rich mystery of the characters of men.

Look: We are all, male and female alike, absorbed by what we might be at our best. We are all chasing after the mysterious nutritious song of the Creator. We are all riveted by art, by how human beings mill their unique and idiosyncratic talents into stories and songs and paintings and dances and sculptures and photographs and plays and films and moments that break your heart, make you howl with laughter, make you sense, for a brief and stunning moment, how brave we are, how foolish, how brief, how holy.

So this is a book of resurrections and resuscitations of ten men from the vast soup of human beings before and concurrent with you and me. To my mind these are men of eye-popping accomplishment and character who are overlooked, half-forgotten, sentenced to hagiography, or stashed lifeless in the canon rather than seen as very much alive, very much the sorts of people you’d happily sit and talk with over a pint of good ale. If the reader feels a spark of increased affection or respect or fellow-feeling for the subjects here after reading my accounts of them, I will be delighted. I have spent many happy days and nights in their company, chatting gaily with Stevenson over a bottle of Bordeaux, arguing about the nature of character with Plutarkos, talking at length with Jim Kjelgaard about the intricate lives of weasels and mink, watching Mister Blake’s flashing eyes as he talks of his visions of Christ, listening to Mister Morrison’s roaring holy poetry, listening to Paul Desmond tease gently about the memoir that he may or may not have written, and on and on.

The one profile subject here you would have no occasion whatsoever to know is the late Bob Boehmer of Oregon, but Bob was the most literary and devout man I ever met, and a really wonderful storyteller, and I include him here because he was my dear friend, because I miss him ferociously, and because I’d really resurrect him if I could. I can’t do that, so I tell you something of his hilarious and sweet story, as a sort of prayer for his soul, now traveled beyond my ken.

Bob also seems to me a very fine example of the millions of quiet men and women who are great brave fascinating kind-hearted colorful funny hard-working hard-praying tale-tellers, and by sharing some of his long story I want to celebrate and sing so many who live and die and pray generally unremarked by the world.

We are all storytellers, after all--that, and the headlong pursuit of love, which is the holiest thing of all, and the greatest gift, and the most eloquent proof of God, is what makes us human beings, capable of greatness.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cowley Publications
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1561012580
• ISBN 13: 9781561012589
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 148