“The book of books” is a newly re-discovered monicker for the Bible. A lit instructor, in the early 1950s, a gaunt, knowing World War II vet, enthusiastically parsing John Steinbeck’s rightfully famed “Grapes of Wrath” for a class of unread, if eager students, used the term referring to the King James Bible.
When surely the poorest read of these students asked about this after class, the instructor glanced up from his burgeoning briefcase with an assessing, faint grin. “Do you know Steinbeck’s work?”
“Well, in our family my mother was the reader of ... I guess you’d call it serious fiction.”
“No,” he said with a smile. “I’d call it literature. Did you look at anything she was reading?”
“Yes. A book with drawings by John Groth, the magazine artist. It was a Hemingway book of short stories called ‘Men Without Women,’”
“Great stuff in that collection.”
The lit instructor grinned and nodded. “Well then, there you go. His great novel, ‘The Sun Also Rises,‘ has two epigraphs; the one Hemingway took most seriously – despite the misunderstanding of his use of Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation,‘ reference – is from Ecclesiastes in the King James Version of the Bible. That’s where he went to get that fitting ‘Sun’ title. He used Genesis in ‘The Green Hills of Africa,’ and found, and learned, a lot of good from that version of the Bible. And the novel we’re studying, Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes,’ has a lot of the Bible in it. Take a careful look at them both.”Indeed, we all should. And Christmas time is a good time for that – except most of us will be intently distracted during the days theoretically devoted to marking Jesus’ birth.
But after holiday fevers have retreated, the connection between the Bible and books makes for some adventuresome and enlightened reading.
American literature was most influenced by England’s King James Version of the Bible, not particularly because it was a product of the Founders‘ homeland, but because of its splendid prose/poetry. That Bible was celebrated in various parts of the world on its 400th birthday last year. It appeared at a good time for the English language, in 1611. As one profound consequence of this timing was the works of William Shakespeare, that could not have been ignored by the 47 scholars assigned to produce a bible “as consonant to the original Hebrew and Greek versions” of what was seen as the “true original material” with which they would work. They asserted in the Bible’s preface that “the former Translations of the Holy Scripture (were also) diligently compared and revised ...”
Of course, many famed works of lasting literature have been inspired by various used translations of the Bible. Fydor Dostoevsky’s great novel “The Brothers Karamazov,” published in 1880, is one of those. In the fifth chapter, Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov are debating politics, rebellion and the creation of an ideal society. This discussion prompts Ivan to recite his prose poem of the “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is set in 16th Century Spain when a young man appears in the street, healing the sick and the lame. An elderly priest sees people begin to flock around Him, and orders Him arrested.
That night the Grand Inquisitor visits the young man and upbraids him for “returning,” and interfering with the church’s work. He should never have “burdened” humans with free will, with that immense freedom. At the end of this outburst of accusations and condemnations, the young man goes to the Grand Inquisitor and kisses him gently on the lips. Both shocked and moved, the Inquisitor, tells Him never to return again, and sets him free. At the end of this story, Alyosha crosses to Ivan and kisses him on the lips. Ivan cries out in delight. The brothers then go their separate ways. It is that well-made chapter that stunned readers of the time and made it famous ever since.
In the United States, one writer who was drawn to the drama of the Bible was William Faulkner, the man whose work inspired a generation of Latin American writers, particularly those who laid the foundation of the 1950‘s Latin American literary “boom.” Faulkner’s influence reached well into that boom, inspiring such authors as Mexico’s famed novelist Carlos Fuentes and Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In a glancing view of some of the themes selected by Faulkner – also a winner of Nobel Prize for Literature(1950) – such an author may seem an unlikely candidate to gravitate to the Bible as fertile ground for his story material and protagonists. Yet, his early novel – often considered his best – “The Sound and the Fury” deals with a 33-year-old idiot, with a three-year-old’s mind, as a Christ figure in the daily care of an African-American servant, Dilsey.
He is murmuring and disruptive as he accompanies Dilsey to her tiny black church. A minister has been brought in for the occasion. His sermon seems incoherent – at first – no more than splinters of speech, except to his present congregation. They so know his way of speaking that their perception “is beyond the need for words.” That seems to echo Paul’s notion that when “prayer is insufficient,” Faulkner explains: “... the Spirit intercedes with groanings and with sighs too deep for words.” Talking in a black Southern idiom, in a patter and meter that for his worshipers form a worshipful language, the preacher bundles the long Egyptian captivity together with countless generations that have come and gone as the earth patiently awaits a renewal. He cups the tender experience of Jesus‘ childhood with all infancy, and together with the massacre of the innocents and the Crucifixion.
It all comes together and the uneducated Dilsey, and the congregation, understands that. When she says “Ise seed de first and de last,” and “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees the endin,” she is saying an assenting, understanding “Amen.” The articulation of Revelation. Faulkner’s groaning, prattling Benjy reaches beyond this Southern hamlet to Russia, animating for us Dosoevsky’s gentle kiss, a message that Benys of the world are – not metaphorically, but metaphysically (as many readers say) – in fact the same immanence, the one understood in the Bible as telling us that as Dilsey cares for the Benjy, dragging and muttering behind and beside her, she cleans and clothes, as the preacher says, “de thief en de murderer en de least of dese.”