A recent email to me from LDS playwright Tom Rogers mentioned that "Jack Harrell's story in the last 'Irreantum' was perhaps the most profound and one of the most brilliantly crafted pieces of Mormon fiction I've yet encountered."

I asked him if I could forward his message to AML-List, for the appreciation and enjoyment of those who read and/or work with Irreantum. He agreed, and sent as well the following.

Jonathan Langford


Tom Rogers comments:

I'd be pleased to have you share my comments with the "Irreantum" folks. In fact, I should also share with you (below) the fuller response I shared with both Bob Rees and Cherry Silver after reading Harell's story....

What are good friends for? Among other things, to enrich our horizons. Thank you both for putting me on to what I believe is the most brilliant if not one of the most profound Mormon short story I can ever recall. Eileen Kump's, though much simpler, run a close second. This is of course in addition to the fine work by the Petersons, Bennion, Thayer, and Filerup--all excellent.

Didn't Jack Harrell also publish a novel some time back? If so, I must read it. What more can you tell me about him? His age, etc.?

As such, his story is superbly crafted-- a gripping, suspense filled nightmare journey and ambiguous enough to keep the reader curious and guessing to the end. It is also dissident in an ultimately positive sense--which may be why it is so effective. (Flannery O'Connor would perfectly approve and understand.)

Here is a running account of my thoughts as this morning I made my way through it--even (I confess) as others around me were singing the standard hymns:

--The brain tumor may or may not be literal, but it made me think of Gene England (who also suffered for the courage of his convictions)

--The ultimate form of testing--when the otherwise decent and righteous turn against an apparently innocent victim;

--Jerry's and Lucy's responses--citing scripture--remind me of Jackson (originally named 'J.C.'!), the gardner, former professor, and incestuous offspring of the elderly brother and sister Burt and Flo (who also claims to have been ravished as a young girl at the Alhambra by a tour guide with the Spanish name Jesus) in my play, "Charades." (I find that revelation shocking by the way but somehow still feel that it has to be!)

--The entire story is a powerful metaphor for the circumstances under which one is seriously and universally misunderstood as well as the victim's consequent suffering and state of mind. On a naturalistic level, for instance, Jerry's erratic verbal responses at the school, etc. and even even his culpability regarding the pornographic images (if he's not being set up) might well be attributable to the tumor--otherwise to pranksters, even actual demons: a wonderful enigma and source of uncertainty for the reader.

--The notion of God here is akin to that in Hinduism--that He/She/It is both Creator and Destroyer and ultimately indifferent to our welfare. I'm put in mind of Mrs. Moore's experience in the Marabar Caves in Forster's A PASSAGE TO INDIA, which drives her insane; of Moby Dick's whiteness; Kurtz's epiphany in "The Heart of Darkness," and the judge in Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN. (Also, see Professor Lal's provocative third tale in the BYU publication, THE LITERATURE OF BELIEF.) Brother Lucy's (Luciferr's?) "predatory look" is here particularly telling. Such writing could lead one to Bill Maher's sign off in a recent interview with Larry King: "Remember, there is no religion. There's only love." (Later, as suggested below, I have to qualify this initial reaction.)

--I'm too much a pragmatist, possibly insufficiently fervent to see in this story an instructive moral--at lest not for me personally, though there are surely others to whom it might apply. (Again, later, I have to qualify this impression--sensing the tale's greater universality--a compliment to the author's subtlety.)

--Jerry (and we with him) is here confronted with a virtual Abrahamic Test that most of us are spared--though not imaginatively: the safe and saving grace of fiction. It reminds me of the time, as a reviewer of submissions to DIALOGUE, I rejected a story by Bela Petsco and, I suppose, made him my enemy for life. It dealt with a young early nineteenth-century Mormon missionary whose voice was so beautiful that he connived the deaths of his companions and others in order to be asked to sing at their funerals. For me, the notion was too far fetched and demeaning and too devoid of needful respect vis-a-vis the missionary calling. (But I think that, by now, I would look at it differently--atypical as its bizarre plot surely is.)

--There is a parallel here with the plight and response of Alexander in Tarkovsky's final final cinematic masterpiece, "Sacrifice." A reverse and more universal analogue: the way the Church studiously avoids denigrating other faiths, while other churches regularly deride us, as in the story everyone views Jerry. One is also reminded of our common finiteness as so simply yet moving portrayed in the medieval "Jedermann."

--I'm not aware that the 'calling and election' ordinance is still enacted. If it is, this seems somehow a fitting test of those so appointed (or is that a covetously vengeful thought?).

---The symbolism of the scene in the pond is clear enough, resembling a sort of baptism. Later, as well, that of Jerrry's cleaning the floor in the temple's lavatories, wiping away urine at the base of urinals--like that most humbling sacred ordinance, the washing of feet. Here, as elsewhere, Harrell brilliantly does what Dante did so audaciously yet effectively--conflating heavenly imagery in his descriptions of Hell and in turn the Ovid's naughtiness in his depiction of Paradiso.

--The saving grace of the tussle in the water and mud is that Jerry and his wife stay together. Besides his spouse, what Jerry manages to hold on to is his integrity. There is in this response, on the author's part, an appropriate orthodoxy.

--It's a choice irony that the tale's protagonist and victim is one of the Church's professional spokespersons, one of our 'Jesuits,' a seminary teacher.

--Is Brother Lucy not, like Satan, at least helping fulfill in our behalf his foreordained role in God's plan of salvation? Are we not in the process reminded of all to which we become attached but need to be free of--both a rather neo-Buddhist notion yet equally reconcilable with the Sermon on the Mount? The ambiguities are, again, both daring and marvelous!

--Bill Maher's notion again, but correctly understood--"Even your goodness is your enemy" (thought not, like the 'natural man,' an 'enemy of God').

--This story poses the dilemma that, as we institutionalize our spiritual life, is there not at times a certain gap or disconnect that produces unavoidable tension and conflict? I can see for instance why it has personal significance for those who tend to do much good "of their own free will" rather than "be commanded in all things"--like Bob in behalf of our gay members and Barnard in behalf of members at the prison.

Question: Is the Mormon readership generally up to such sophisticated fare? I wish they were but doubt it.

Tom