The Ricochet Podcast - A Swirl of Joy Beyond All Deserving

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Ricochet presents a special Yuletide episode featuring Joseph Bottum, author of Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy. In under an hour, he and Peter cover crammed cities and the rural expanse, crime and charity, the written word and the reader's mind—all with thoughts on the Christmas spirit in a contemporary setting. 

Peter Robinson Welcome to a special Christmas edition of the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Peter Robinson. Born and raised in South Dakota, Joseph Bottom, or as his friends know him, Jody, spent a decade and a half back East, first as an editor of the Weekly Standard, and then as editor of First Things. And then Jody returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota. He is a writer and poet, and he has a daily poem with commentary on a sub stack called Poems Ancient and Modern. But we today are going to be discussing Jody's spectacularly, heartbreakingly beautiful new book, Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh, A Christmas Crestomathy. Three beautiful and engrossing short stories and 12 really luminous

essays. And if you think I'm going over the top because Jody is an old friend, that's not true. I've said many nasty things about him behind his back. But what I'm saying now, I believe every word of this. The book, in fact, the book is so good that all his friends hate him for having been able to produce such prose. Jody, welcome. Jody Oh, thank you, Peter, for having me. Peter Okay, listen, why on earth would you use a highfalutin word such as Christomathy? Let's just get this cleared up right away. Christomathy in the title.

Well, it's ancient Greek. It's an ancient Greek word for a collection. And I only know it, Peter, the same way you should know it, because H.L. Mencken, whom every writer secretly wants to be, used it in the name of one of his collections of selected essays, a Mencken Christomathy. And I think he ran across it in a dictionary somewhere. You know, he was a kind of word maven or word hoarder or something, and he ran across it somewhere and thought,

well, what the hell, I have to use that. And there we are. And all of my writer friends know this word solely because of Behnken. Sully because of Behnken. All right. So, you're working within a tradition. Speaking of working within traditions, the title of the book is Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh, which I think reverses, as I think of the three is frankincense gold and myrrh which i think reverses as i think of the three

wise men from school i think we ordinarily say gold frankincense and myrrh is there some reason for the order in which you place those words or am i overthinking this one perversity of course you know the desperate attempt to be different, matched with just the rhythmic sense. If you say gold, frankincense, and myrrh, you have two stresses in a row in gold and then frank. And if you say frankincense, gold, and myrrh, you get a nice kind of trochaic falling rhythm that sort of holds up, you know. But I think that is an example of overthinking. Well, all right. But it shows our listeners, if you can put that kind of thought into three words, imagine what the man does with a paragraph, let alone a story. Let's start with

the stories. Three stories. Part one of the book is called The Gifts of the Magi, Three Christmas Tales, and the tales are Wiseguy, Nativity, and a town in the far upper Midwest, which has a French name, and I don't know how, I imagine since it's in the Midwest, it has an anglicized pronunciation, Porte de Grasse? How is it pronounced properly? Probably, of course, there is no such town. It's an invented town. Oh, it is? Of course, there is no such town. It's an invention. Oh, it is! Oh, you see how good you are!

You made me! I was thinking to myself, one of these days I have to drive through this place. That's how much it lives in my head. But the details are all drawn from my experience of Minnesota and that world up in northern Minnesota, where Bemidji is a southern town to these people who live on the northern shore there, that point that

goes out into the lake. But I imagine, you know, I grew up in a town called Pier, Pier, South Dakota. The capital of South Dakota, isn't it? Well, yeah, but you know, we say it like a, uh, fishing pier or a jury of your peers. Um, whereas outlanders are easily identified because they say Pierre. Um, and so all of those Des Moines, all of those old French names in the Midwest and the West get twisted. My favorite, of course, is the Texas-Arkansas River that the French explorers called the Purgatory River, reduced somehow in that twang to the Picket Wire.

I wasn't aware of that one. But that's how these French names get warped. I think they'd probably say Port de Grasse. Okay. All right. Well, since you invented it, you get to choose the pronunciation. The first and last of these stories,

Wise Guy and Port de Grasse, are crime stories. Jody, crime stories for Christmas? By the way, they really are crime stories. Now, the criminals are lovable criminals, and one really does fall in love with them. The first, the tavern where it opens and the big scene toward the end takes place in a tavern, and you really feel you could walk into the tavern and sit down and have a drink with these people, and that you'd like to, but they're criminals at the end as they were at the beginning. These are not stories of penitence

or turning around or redemption, exactly. So, how do they fit in with Christmas? Well, maybe there's some redemption in them, but also kind of hint that they weren't as bad as they thought they were. They do come together. The young hapless would-be criminal in the last story is turned into a national hero, you know, just by happenstance. I think, though, the model here, I once said to our mutual friend Andy Ferguson, right, that every writer wants to be Damon Runyon and write the kind of stories that Damon Runyon could write. Andy said, well, maybe, but you know what else? Every writer, every male writer secretly wishes that he had published in Sports Illustrated. And, you know, he does politics or literature, but what you really, you know, what years ago, Amazon had started this series that they were publishing called Kindle Singles. Yes. Christmas. Do you have anything? And I wrote that first story kind of in a Damon Runyon way, you know, lovable gangsters. This is Guys and Dolls territory. Right, exactly. And, you know, all meeting at Lindy's for coffee. And I wrote it for him. And

then I thought, well, that's kind of a wise man tale, hence the jokey title, Wise Guy. Yes, yes. So the next year I wrote a second one, and then life intervened, and I never wrote the third one. Also, the editor changed, and you always lose gigs as a writer when the new editor comes in and wants his own people. And I was going through a rough time in my personal life at that point and just never wrote the third story. And then this year, last fall, last spring rather, my poetry publisher said, you must have a lot of Christmas pieces. Because I've written two or

three of them for magazines like the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, and the rest, two or three of them a year for 30 years. And they actually add up, you know? So I said, yeah, you know, I could put together an anthology or selected ones. And then I thought, this is an excuse to write that third story and close this trilogy of wise men's stories. So this summer, I wrote the Port de Grasse, the third and completing story of these, kind of picking up links from the other stories. So the first story, an independent thief is compelled by the local crime lord to recover 12 bags of lost heroin.

Merry Christmas, everybody. And the first house he actually burglarizes belongs to a rich man. These packages of heroin were sent by mistake to an old Christmas mailing list out of a shipping center. So they're scattered across town. And one is to a rich man's house named Michael Stuyvesant. The very first burglary is at Michael Stuyvesant's house. That ends with some resolution of his problem and a real Christmas spirit. The second story follows that rich man who was not at home when he was burglarized.

As he's trying to drive to Denver, he's an ill man with his cancer's return, and he's trying to get to Denver to visit with his children while he still feels well enough to do that, and has a series of misadventures across the Midwest. And then the third story is following the hunting down of the 12th bag of heroin, which was the one that wasn't sent anywhere nearby, the thieves, but was sent to a little Minnesota town called Port de Grasse. And a would-be thief who's not actually very good is sent off to try and retrieve it because the sophisticated wise guys in the big city think, oh, it's just a little town in Minnesota,

it won't be any problem. And those of us who've been to the Midwest know that, you know, there are a handful of sophisticated people who live out there. And he runs into trouble, but again, it all works out. Jody, we've talked about this long enough. Let me just give you, give our listeners just the two opening paragraphs of the very first story. It all starts, but then where does anything start? Back at the first moments of creation, maybe, or down in some long-ago legend, its meanings and purposes faded now into the darkened past. Every story's opening is a little arbitrary one way or another. Every beginning is a small lie. Still, since this particular story concerns a thief named Bart Sagan, we should probably begin where he did,

the afternoon of December 18, a week before Christmas, when he fought his way through the icy winds that sliced down High Street to meet a friend at the Evergreen Tavern and ask her for some help. Hatch a quick plan with her, in other words. Plot a little crime. That is so beautiful. I hate you for being able to write so wonderfully. So how do you work? Characters first? Setting first? A line or two that comes to you. How do you do this? I can't write, Peter. I mean, I envy people who can just sit down and write. Oh, I'm so happy to hear you say that. You mean it's hard for you too? I said writing is just like working in a coal mine, except you have to do it by yourself. And, you know, it's a hard thing.

But, you know, I remember I was close with Bea Crystal, Gertrude Himmelfarb. And she wants, we were having lunch, and she launches into this complaint about her husband, Irving Crystal. On the grounds that he has an idea, and he sits down and writes it. And three hours later, the piece is done. That's just not how writing works for anybody but Irving, who just could sit down and do it. Now, Irving was no high stylist, but he had a plenty good style, that plain style. And he knew how to weight his leads with the new piece of information. He knew how to snap an article closed. The famous essay he wrote on

Joe McCarthy, he said, the one thing it ends, this commentary piece from years ago in the 50s, he ends by saying, there's much to dislike about McCarthy, but one thing Americans know is that he is against communism. About his opponents, they know no such thing. Yeah, beautiful. And, you know, so he could do that. Yes. But, you know, here is Gertrude Himmelfarb, author of 14 books and innumerable

essays complaining about, you know, people who find it easy to write. May I offer you a return story? Sure. My return story is Dinner One Evening Out on Long Island with Tom Wolfe. Tom Wolfe. And we sat down and I did, I don't know what came over me because of course you should never do this with any writer. But I said, Tom, how did the writing go today? And his face fell. And his wife next to him, I was seated, I was seated across from Tom, but I was seated next to Sheila. And she stiffened just slightly. And I mean,

what a stupid thing to say to her. But I must admit that my heart leapt. And I said, Tom, you too? And he said, it's just as hard as it ever was. The only thing that has changed is that now I can look up from my desk across to a bookshelf that's filled with books with my name on the spine and say to myself, Wolf, you did it before. You must be able to do it again. Yeah, I, you know, I've always thought. But how do you, how do you work? Now that we've talked about, talked our way in circles around other writers.

Oscar Wilde was staying in a country house and someone asked him, you know, how did the writing go at dinner? How did the writing go, Mr. Wilde? And he said, this morning I put a comma in, this afternoon I took it out. That's the expression. But, you know, I just sort of fiddle around. I can't write unless I have a lead. And this came from really my very early writing. One of the first pieces, non-academic pieces I ever wrote, was a review of a biography of Jerzy Kaczynski for, I can't even remember who now, the New Statesman maybe, or one of the journals of that day, right?

And I wrote, you know, I just just wrote it and the opening was something like jersey kaczynski is a polish american author who you know achieved some fame with the painted bird and i i set it aside and i went to sleep and i got up in the next morning and i wrote on the top of it there's just no getting around the fact that Yersey Kaczynski was a toad. Oh, there you have it, of course. And I thought, oh, if I can get the lead, then the rest flows from that. Then you've caught the audience, right? Yes, yes. And you have their goodwill or their anger, you have their attention. You have their attention.

For the next couple paragraphs. They may be giving it to you grudgingly, but you have it. Right, exactly. And that's when I sort of formed this habit of being unable to move on until I have the lead. And he's that way too, I think, isn't he? Is he? I think he is. I think he is. We should, well, the three, well, let's do, we'll do another podcast with the three of

us and we'll all moan about writing together. How's that? Jody, you and Christmas, you and Chris, but I, okay, so you get the lead. I do, I do want to know, I really, I can't, there's nothing that I want from you except your continued friendship. So I'm not for our listeners. There's no reason I'm sucking up to you. If you were Elon Musk, I might flatter you. Here, I'm just telling the truth. The characters, even the minor characters, are just so completely present. They just present themselves to you and you write them. How does it work,

the characters? How do they work? Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, fiction is relatively new. I've probably only written a dozen short stories in my career. But our friend Mary Eberstadt once accused me of writing nothing but fiction. Not in a bad way, that I was somehow telling lies, but in the sense that my descriptions of people and scenes were always using the devices of narrative fiction. Yes. And I don't think she's wrong, but you start to form a character and then sort of details from people you know start creeping into them. And then the fully formed character emerges from these borrowed bits of 10, 12 different people. I mean, I'm not like Saul Bellow, who, you know,

would really try and understand a character by, or a person he knew, by casting him as a fictional character. You know, and that went until the end. This is Ravelstein with

Alan Bloom, you know, is the central, the renamed Alan Bloom. Or Thomas Mann, who had every literary gift except plot. I mean, literally every literary gift at the level of a Nobel Prize winner. He could do anything with prose except think up a story, which ruined his children's lives because he basically plundered them for stories. Because he couldn't think of a story, so his children would be going through some breakup, and he would like, oh, a story for me. How interesting, yes. Not an ideal parent. But I think fiction is strange and interesting, and the poets said, never lie, because they do not speak the truth. There's some realm in which art lives that aims to be more true than reality by being actually less true.

Jody Bottom and Christmas from your introduction. I write about Christmas so much because that's where I perceive the thin place to be, the moment in which I sense most clearly the spiritual crossing over into the physical, the supernatural sneaking into the natural, the arrival of the divine in the mundane is the central and most outrageous claim of Christianity. The thin place, Jody. We live, Peter, in such a naked world. I mean, I take Matthew Arnold to be speaking the truth here, that the world as it is, to human perception, is, you know, the naked shingles where ignorant armies clash by night and there is no help for pain, no grace, no meaning. It's just existence.

And we clothe that. In Dover Beach, Arnold uses this language of girdling, of clothing, that the sea of faith once covered this naked shingles of the shore, you know, of the world of reality. And the trouble is that perhaps a saint could, but for most of us, we need a shared experience. We need shared ideas, shared symbols, shared feelings to clothe reality, to make it decent. We need morality for that. We need something more than just physical reality. And we strip that away in modernity as much as we can. But one place, it has always seemed to me, where one time where the division between the numinous and the physical, or the social, you know, which is so thin now and tebescent and weak, that there's

one place where it still kind of leaks in, where we still have a little bit of a cultural and emotional feeling that the world is clothed, decently arrayed, and that's Christmas. And my struggles with the modern, my, you know, which I, the very first piece I published was called Christians and Postmoderns, and I actually praised the postmoderns for at least

seeing that modernity was a problem, right? That, you know, that something had gone out of the world with that. Took 300 years to work out what that was, but we arrive at a place that is so stripped of meaning. I want the world to be almost sacramental. I want the grass to be singing songs of the fact that it's created. I want this, and I don't often have it. And I don't think any of us often have it, except for the handful of, handful is even too large a number, for the saints we may have met in our lives. I think

the vast majority of us don't have that, except Christmas. Except Christmas. Christmas is a chance where the numinous and the divine leak through, and we see the world in a clothing light. It makes things look better. Now, I could have reversed the metaphor and said it reveals things as they really are. But, you know, my own sense is that it's the same stuff we see every day. It's the same feelings we have every day. They are just bathed in a golden light. They feel meaningful at Christmas.

Acts of charity feel more meaningful at Christmas. Our love of our families feels more meaningful in Christmas. Not more real, more meaningful, more connected to a world of symbols and greenery and care for the poor and all these metaphors that accrete around Christmas. So, this is one of the great themes that comes through Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh. Another, we turn now to part two of the book, which is called Twelve Christmas Thoughts, which is twelve nonfiction essays. And another of these is a really specific, particular sense of place from the first essay, Dakota Christmas. Quote, If you've never seen the South Dakota country in winter, you have no idea how desolate land can be. I once asked my grandmother why her family had decided to

stop their wagon trek in what became the prairie town where she was born. And she answered in surprise, I didn't know, because that's where the tree was. The tree. All right. You had, it's something like a dozen or 15 years on the East Coast, divided between the most cosmopolitan of lives in Washington as an editor with the now deceased, alas, but at the time with it and hopeful and buoyant publication, The Weekly Standard, and then up to New York where you edited, I think I can say this, well, somebody will write a note contradicting me if he wants to, but the most important journal of religion and politics, religion and public stayed there ever since. And I am enough of a coast dweller. I grew up in the shock area, the blast area of New York, and I now live in California. That I mean, I would ask you this if I were an interviewer or live next door, but since I live on the coast of California, this is to me a staggering thing.

Why did you go back? And why do you, what is it that, you love it. Desolate as it is, you love it. Well, you know, Balzac has a line, a great short story, about a man who's trapped in a waterhole in the desert, an oasis, with a lion, a female lion. And this becomes a metaphor for male-female relations and all kinds of things, because Balzac always has several things that he's juggling. But it ends with someone misunderstanding and saying, well, I don't get it. What's the point of the story? And the narrator says, or the narrating first-person narrator says,

ah, you see, there in the desert, God is there, man is not. And there is a kind of burnt-over purity to the snow on the prairie. It's like white ash,

you know? This world seems purer sometimes. But also, you know, I'm native to the soil and I don't know, Peter, you know, this has kind of been in my mind. My daughter is in

New York right now. Well, do I know it? Faith Bottom, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, and has her father's ear. How you managed to pass it along, I do not know, but she has your ear. Lots of beatings. Lots of beatings.

But she boasted. You know, last year sometime she said, well, you know, we lived in New York, we lived in Washington, we had a summer house out in the Black Hills, and then moved out there full-time, and now I'm back in New York. And so I've lived in rural settings and small towns, and I've lived in the middle of big cities. At least, she said, I can say that I've never had to live in the suburbs. And she said it with such distaste.

And I thought, how did I give her that? That was not the lesson that you were supposed to take away from all of this, honey. You know, we had friends, PJ, O'Rourke, loved the suburbs. Wrote about them, you know, marvelously, comically, of course. But I think it's not, and I think Tom Wolfe had an appreciation of the suburb, too. And the aspirations of middle-class life. I didn't really like hearing my daughter say this you know um but uh there is a truth there that we've never lived in suburban america right it was always small town or big big city and it gives you a picture of of america that i don't know it's truth anymore i mean, you know, I don't know how true this is of the American idea that

there's the country and the city. I think the vast majority of people actually have an entirely different experience of life in this country. But I will say, it does create in one, Peter, an appreciation of eccentricity. G.K. Chesterton once said, the gospel urges us to love our neighbor, and the gospel urges us to love our enemy, probably under the assumption that they are often the same person. And there's this, you know, because you've got to live with these people. And I like that. But also, you know, our friends and my daughter and family are urging me now that, you know, my situation has changed and my wife is gone. She slipped away last year, that I should return this house to the summer house and go back to Washington, you know, where we have friends. I would say California, except Peter, you were the exception to an experience that many of us in the old conservative world had, which is whatever I have to sell, whatever we had to sell, it only sold east of the Mississippi.

You know, out of those hundreds of talks and panels and everything that I've done over the years, maybe three, four, five have been in the state of California. But you flourish out there. Well, we've done, we've, yes. Thank you. But back to you. Another of your essays. This is called, actually, it's the closing essay of the book. It's called Christmas and the Boy Reader. There were always books for Christmas, mounds of them, flurries of paperbacks, drifts of presentation copies inscribed in the unreadably copperplate hand

of maiden great aunts, avalanches of books on chess and manuals of do-it-yourself chemistry experiments. Christmas was books, and books, Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea. Was it such a bad way to grow up? The answer, of course, is that it was a wonderful way to grow up. And how much are you and I permitted to, if it is an indulgence, indulge in despair when we see, Faith Bottom was, of course, far too fine and intellectual to do this, but when we see our children or their friends pouring their lives into iPhones or on video games. Let me just give you a specific example.

This will take only a moment. I think it's worth it because it makes a point. When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I stayed on one summer to work reunions. You could make good money. And my job was to sit in a dorm from something like six in the evening until two in the morning. And because in those days, dorms had keys that opened. I would take the key from the alumni as they would go to their dorm room where they were staying for their 30th reunion. And I would hand them the key when they went back. That was all I had to do, sit there and hand out keys and take them back. And I read a book a night.

And then I went back for my 30th reunion. And there was still the same job. But the kid was watching movies on a laptop instead of reading books. And I thought to myself, oh, something has been lost. Am I a dinosaur? Am I a fool? Well, we have to be careful, or I have to be careful, because I am prone to what I sometimes call the old man's disease. That the sky was bluer, the grass cleaner, and the girls prettier.

And we had to walk to school uphill both ways. But there's a loss here, the loss of the physicality of books, the necessary engagement, the slow pacing of reading. There's an extraordinary video I mentioned, I would recommend to you, Peter, of Marshall McLuhan and Frank Kermode. Frank Kermode was a name to conjure with in literary circles once upon a time. And they're on some Canadian 60s talk show, you know, where they would have, you know, endless space and nobody's watching.

Remember Michael Kinsley's famous headline, Most Guaranteed to Make You Not Want to Read the Article? And the headline was the New York Times headline of worthwhile Canadian initiative. But there they are. And, you know, Kermode is trying to understand why Marshall McLuhan is taking off as a figure, as a cultural figure, which soon petered out. And I think he's undervalued now, after having been overvalued. But he's starting to take off, and Kermode's trying to understand that. And McLuhan says brilliantly, I think, or at least really thought-provokingly, that the virtues of the American founding, the virtues of the Bill of Rights, the sense that

all those young lawyers had at that moment as the revolution is going on and then we build to the Constitution, that the virtues they had in mind were the virtues of readers. Yes. And the Bill of Rights is sort of fundamentally directed at readers, at protecting readers from the government. And he said, if you think what you have when you have readers, you have a very slow pace for the transfer of information, as opposed to nomadic tribes, which are trying to read whether there's a leopard in that tree or not, right? They have to

condense information with myth. They have to condense it with memes. They have to process very, very quickly. And they develop storytelling techniques and language techniques to do that processing very quickly. Reading is much slower conveying of information. It requires time, which only really modernity brings to the masses, at least to the middle class. And I thought, what a really thought-provoking thing to say. And then I looked at the challenges that are emerging to the Bill of Rights, the fact that very near a majority of undergraduates today want to abolish free speech. And I think- It's unthinkable. Not just a minority position when we were in school.

Unthinkable. Unthinkable. Well, what's changed? They've ceased to be readers. They don't see the need for it. And it seemed to me a small confirmation of McLuhan's thought. And so I worry very deeply about the disappearance of reading. Not just on, you know, the attention spans formed in adolescence from watching Instagram and TikTok all the time,

which I think is very destructive of unformed mental pathways that really don't emerge into maturity until 18 or 19. But even more, I think it's dangerous to our republic. By the way, do you remember, goodness, I think he just died two or three years ago at an extremely great age, 100 or 101, Bernard Bain, the great Harvard historian. And his work, it's a classic book, and of course, I can't remember the name just now. But Balin, who if I understand things correctly, came along at a time when he was reacting against the Marxist rereading of the American founding and the Marxists saying, oh, no, no, the Constitution is just cover for economic interests of various kinds. And Balin read the documents. He pulled together all the

pamphlets and all the articles and all the little town newspapers across New England and down into the South. And he discovered that what you had here was an intensely literate society in which reading and writing were taking place all the time, and a serious exchange of ideas, and that far from being cover for underlying economic interests, you just could not conclude other than that they had read and written themselves into real belief." Okay, so this is a compliment to the Marshall McLuhan comment. Yeah. And it's why I think we should worry about young people not reading. There was a recent article in The Atlantic that talked about declining reading lists in college courses.

And one professor from Georgetown, I think, which is my alma mater, saying she notices that her students at Georgetown can't read a sonnet with attention. They lose track in 14 lines of what's going on. So they can't think, oh, that's where he picks up this symbol, right? track in 14 lines of what's going on. So they can't think, oh, that's where he picks up this symbol. They can't read 14 lines with attention. I think she's

probably exaggerating, but on the other hand, maybe not because it has not been demanded of them. By the way, I want to interject for our listeners. The name of the book is Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh. It's three stories and 12 essays. And I'm repeating all this just now, because if you buy a couple of copies and leave them around the house, teenagers pick them up, and Jody's first sentences, let alone his first paragraphs and first pages, are enough to tempt, I think, even an adolescent male into setting down his phone and sticking with the book. Frankincense, Golden Myrrh, do it for your children.

Okay, Jody, a couple of last questions here. If I'm reading Frankincense Golden Myrrh at all correctly, of course, we've just discovered this. One of the themes is your love of Christmas, and the other, which we've discussed in a way when we talked about the Midwest. Actually, what is South Dakota? It's too far west to be the Midwest, but it's not really a Rocky Mountain state. What do we call where you live? Yeah, I have a friend, actually a wonderful South Dakota historian who writes on the Midwest all the time, had a popular book recently, John Lauk. And John has this quip, that the West begins about 20 miles east of the town of Chamberlain, South Dakota, because that's when the river hills start rising, then you get the

Missouri, and you're in the Midwest up till that point. So, eastern South Dakota is basically Iowa, western South Dakota is basically Wyoming. Okay, all right. All right. So, we'll say you're in the West. And you love the West because you love American life. In some ways, you love those towns because that's American life at its most distilled, its most American. All right. From your essay, Beyond the Bleak Midwinter, quote, one sentence, I've always thought depressed people understand Christmas best. Close quote. Jody, explain that one. Your love of Christmas, ordinary American life, and then you introduce depression. Well, you know, I'm a melancholy man, and so there's some self-defense in there. Look, I understand Christmas really well. Look at the book.

But also, when things are going really well for you, I don't just mean financially, although that surely has something to do with it, and in your family, and in your mental health, it's easy to think, oh, Christmas. It's when you're depressed, and Christmas makes you more depressed. Yes, it can be a very sad time of your career. You see what Christmas is.

Sad people understand how much Christmas matters, how it changes the world. They're further saddened by the fact that they're not getting it, but they see it, was the point I was trying to make there. And, you know, Christmas asks us, one of the carols I wrote, I've written several Christmas carols, and in one of them, I put this line in that I felt had really personal application and bears on that bleak midwinter essay, which is a title taken from Christina Rossetti's great Christmas poem. But there's a couplet in there, we will escape the sadness. There comes now grace and gladness. And grace and gladness was the phrase that this Nashville studio took as the kind of album title the whole Christmas feeling, it has to be an answer to something.

One of the reasons I think that some of our people fall away is they forget what the question is to which Christ is the answer. Or they lose track of it. It doesn't seem important anymore question is to which Christ is the answer. They lose track of it. It doesn't seem important anymore to think, we're going to die. We live in a world whose's strange and bleak and manic. And it is to those things that Christ is the answer. And in the same way, Christmas needs an answer or a question.

You and I are of an age that when we took our English classes whom we were raised, whom we studied as, when we studied our English. And I was thinking as I was reading your book, I can only think, now you being you will be able to name 12 more, but don't, because I want to come,

the point of this is you. I can only think of one American author who embraces the modern, who embraces modernity in her prose and uses and produces modern novels, although we're talking about mid-century, second half of the 20th century now, while insisting on remaining explicitly, not overbearingly, but explicitly Christian. And that is Flannery O'Connor until Jody Bottom comes along. I can see, no, you see, I said you being you, you're thinking of a dozen other authors who fit that narrow bill. But your middle story, Nativity, you've already explained it's about a rich man. What you've left out is that this rich man who's dying on this adventure, which is thwarted because of, because of course, we're in the upper Midwest and he's thwarted by a snowstorm.

The drive to Denver becomes impossible. He has to pull over and he rescues a manic, crazy, chatterbox young woman, who, however, is pregnant. That's enough. If you want to know how the story ends, read Jody's book. But let me quote a paragraph. This is Michael Stuyvesant, of whom you were speaking a moment ago. By the way, do you remember that old, it never appeared on the masthead, but it was one of the greatest newspaper mottos ever. The New York Daily News, in the old days when it was still known as New York's Picture Newspaper, in the newsroom, the word was, or what they would tell a new hire was,

tell it to the McSweeneys, the Stuyvesants already know. Isn't that wonderful? An old New York there. All right. But this is Jody. This is Jody Bottom. His family had always been Episcopalians, but Anne, this is writing about his late wife, Anne was a Catholic, something of a to-do in the family at the time of their marriage. He remembered her explaining to him that all pregnant women are beautiful because they are signs, visible reflections of the Blessed Virgin Mary in all her future joy and all her future pain and sorrow." Now, you didn't have to do that. That doesn't exactly advance the plot. But you do do it, and of course it's right. I don't want to say you're introducing an extraneous note, but that's you. Why do you do that? If you'd just

been a little more skeptical, Jody, you'd have been so much easier to sell. There was this moment in the late 1940s, early 1950s, when it looked like the pieces, the fragments of conservatism were going to cohere into a fundamental statement of the glory of Western civilization against the communists. This would have been the new critics, and this would have been T.S. Eliot's poetry, and this would have been Richard Weaver's ideas have consequences. there was a world out there that looked for a moment like it might cohere. And it didn't. But I mention that simply because, Peter, I think we have a responsibility, you and I, to make the pieces of ourselves fit.

That there has to be some kind of unity. That we have to reject any doctrine of double truth. That, oh, there are these truths of physics, and then there are truths of religion and poetry, and they don't go together. But that's okay, because they live in such entirely different worlds that we don't have to make them go together. I Flinch every time I hear someone say my truth

Yes, yes, because truth is truth and we have a responsibility We're not going to succeed At making the world whole making the universe of truth one. God does that. But we have a responsibility to hold the pieces together as best we can. And I am a believer, and I want to be an artist, although I usually fail at it. And I want to know things, Peter. You know, that schoolboy hunger just to know? It never left me. I still have it. You know, I was listening to a lecture on quantum mechanics,

thinking, I don't understand any of this, but by God, I should. And because, you know, I still have that schoolboy hunger for that, and all that has to cohere. And sometimes around Christmas, I feel like it does. Jody, would you take us out, if you would, by reading a passage from one of the essays, Angels I Have Heard on High. I want our listeners to hear this prose in the voice of the man who composed it. Let's see. So the passage you picked out was this.

I love the Santas with their bells, the Salvation Army's call to charity on the sidewalks of American cities. I love the stores with displays of candy canes and sleigh bells. I love even the Muzak carols in the elevators and the municipal trees and the over-sweet candies from the neighbors and the fruit cakes like depleted uranium and the school children's nativity plays and the advent calendars and the trips to the food bank and the season's goose. For Christ's sake, why not be happy? So much around us shouts reminders of the cause for Christmas joy. A sinner, corrupt, and soul-sick, heart-sore and muddled in my thoughts, I sometimes wonder what this world

looks like to the saints. The universe must glow every day a holiday, a holy day, like the blinding sunlight off the clean snow and sharp swirls of sparkling ice. But it needs no individual grace, no special sanctity, to feel the life of the Christmas season. Portions of the wall are tumbling down, and through the breaches anyone can discern some of what we ordinarily keep hidden from ourselves, Christ himself in the faces of the poor and battered, the treasures that charity lays up in heaven, the supernatural beauty of nature, the joy of creation in the objects all around us, the almost sacramentality of everything real. This December I heard the angels singing, actually heard their voices high in the wind

across a western meadow frozen stiff and covered with the fallen snow listen and you'll hear it too down from the hills and the cold trees ponderosa pine and black hill spruce along the icy stream bed through the brush and over the rocks all those voices caroling, praising, rejoicing, a swirl of joy beyond all deserving.

Jody, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Peter. The book again, Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh, A Christmas Christomathy, by Joseph Bottom, available on Amazon. Do yourself a favor, buy the book and read it, and leave a copy around for your kids. For Ricochet, I'm Peter Robinson.