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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN October 31, 2004 Issue 
Corpus Christi by Bret Anthony Johnston 
Emily Dickinson Was Right - Time Does Not Assuage Anything In my college days, all the would-be writers and artists I knew dreamed of a future life in Greenwich Village, San Francisco or in Parisian cafes. It was generally assumed that only a literary and artistic milieu could inspire creativity. This assumption was based largely on vague bits and pieces of knowledge about the Greenwich Village life of Edna St. Vincent Millay and her contemporaries, the life of the Beat poets in San Francisco and New York, Hemingway's romantic portrayal of the life of the American expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s in his "A Movable Feast" and on the misconception that Sartre and Co. developed the philosophy of existentialism while sitting endlessly in cafes. That of course was in the late 1960s. Since those days, a generation of new writers and artists has proven that creativity can flow anywhere. Today's writers and artists live in the midst of the subjects for their works. Some work in isolation. Others are on college and university campuses. Bret Anthony Johnston is one of those young and talented writers writing and simultaneously teaching creative writing at Cal State University at San Bernardino. His recently published collection of short stories "Corpus Christi" is a small masterpiece. Johnston writes about the lives of ordinary Americans and the losses they sustain; losses of loved ones, most frequently of children. A couple, divorced for years after the death of their cherished son from meningitis, reunites by accident during a storm. Another couple makes futile efforts to recapture love and the essence of life after the loss of their baby in a miscarriage. "Years later, after Edie left because he reminded her of all she'd lost, " writes the author in the story about this particular couple, "Charlie would see the night as nothing more than coincidence...Maybe such stability had been false at its core; that was not how life happened. Or maybe because it seemed so shatteringly absurd, it was exactly how life happened." This is one of the themes running through all the stories. People sustain lacerating losses but they don't really survive them. They go on with life, but time does not assuage the pain and the memory does not fade. This notion of forgetting and starting over is only an illusion. People hide the pain deep inside and limp through the rest of life emotionally crippled. To me, this book more than anything else, underscores the validity of Emily Dickinson's "They Say That "Time Assuages:" "They say that "time assuages," wrote Emily Dickinson. "Time never did assuage...Time is a test of trouble but not a remedy. If such it prove, it prove too there was no malady." Three short stories - one in the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end - about a son coming home to care for his widowed mother dying of cancer, unite the book and give it a sense of continuity. "Outside the Toy Store," the shortest story is also the best. It is about a man who has lost everything - his wife, his daughter and later, the woman he'd loved after his wife's death. Memory and how we reconstruct reality is also a theme running through the book. The stories are set in Corpus Christi, Texas. How much of a metaphor the name of the city and the feast by the same name are, is academic. The thing what non-academic readers take away from this book is the sense that happiness is fleeting and life for the most part consists of large and small wounds that never heal completely which we only try to camouflage. Reading about all this suffering not brought on by an inhuman political or economic system or by some sort of retribution for the protagonists' bad deeds, put me in mind of the endless philosophical discussions my family had, as new Americans, about "the pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution. To this day my sister and I marvel at it. For us it remains inexplicable and surreal. "Corpus Christi" accentuates that this pursuit of happiness is just as elusive for Americans as it is for the rest of the human race. Bret Anthony Johnston is a remarkable writer. His economy of words and simplicity of expression are his power tools. How did one so young gain this enormous insight into the human heart and understanding of the human condition? Johnston is a graduate of the famous Iowa Writers' program. His stories have appeared in the prestigious "Paris Review" and in various short story anthologies, amongst them "The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002." Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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