FALL 2002 • VOLUME
7, NUMBER 2
BY
LAURA PURDOM
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BEN
BARNHART
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Brad
Leithauser, Emly Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities
and avid observer of nature, teaches course in composition,
fiction writing, modern European fiction, and light verse
at MHC. |
Obsessed with tropical
butterflies, mild-mannered Russel Darlington will go to almost
any length to capture a rare "miracle on the wing" and make his
name as a lepidopterist. This fictional turn-of-the-century Hoosier,
whose accomplishments never match his soaring ambitions, is the
unlikely hero of Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse (Knopf, 2002),
by Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities
at Mount Holyoke. Just as unlikely as its unromantic protagonist
is the novel's seemingly daunting form--the three hundred-page
book is composed entirely of irregularly rhymed ten-line stanzas.
Yet it is this combination of a prosaic champion and a story told
in verse that makes Leithauser's novel "utterly absorbing and
impossible to put down." So says Donal O'Shea, Mount Holyoke's
dean of faculty, whose praise is echoed no less fervently by critics
farther from home, among them John Updike, who calls Darlington "an
amazing merger of art and science, verse and narrative."
In shaping Darlington,
Leithauser, the author of five previous novels and four volumes
of poetry, married his skills as a storyteller and poet with his
passion for natural history. Given to epic feats of research,
the author spent seven years writing the novel, during which time
he devoured scores of natural history books, visited museums around
the world, interviewed entomologists, and even learned how to
mount butterflies. In an effort to understand the focus and landscape
of Darlington's obsession, Leithauser journeyed to the haunts
of tropical butterflies in South America's Amazon Basin and twice
to the Micronesian island of Pohnpei (formerly Ponape).
Chasing down multifarious
facts delights Leithauser, but it was another quest that led him
to write Darlington in verse: the pursuit of "little lyrical moments."
Citing authors such as Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Cheever, who are
"constantly yearning to wax lyrical," Leithauser says he wanted
to have the opportunity in Darlington to "let fly." Says Leithauser,
"With poetry more allowances are made. You want to go now for
twenty lines describing a jungle or an Indiana cornfield in winter
or a train crossing the Rocky Mountains? All of these are images
from Darlington, and all of them are moments where I really had
fun, independent of the story."
In Updike's view,
as well as the views of other critics, Leithauser's decision to
write the story in verse was inspired. "Prose," says Updike, "could
not have provided a narrative so richly embroidered, so darting
and animated in its impulses and inspirations, so glitteringly
exact in its evocations of nature." Writing for publications such
as the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Christian Science
Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal, critics have unanimously
praised Darlington's verse. In the New York Review of Books, W.
S. Merwin applauds Leithauser's "virtuoso handling of the stanza
he has chosen for his story: the authority and grace with which
he fulfills and varies it, the apparent ease and tact of the rhymes,
and not only the pace but the underlying awareness of how that
pace can be used to draw the reader's attention forward into the
narrative."
Leithauser's lyric
stanzas paint a cast of compelling characters, among them Russel
Darlington's wealthy, world-weary father, perpetually shrouded
in smoke, and the misanthropic Professor Schrock, Russel's horribly
disfigured mentor. Characters emerge from Leithauser's verse with
pristine clarity and generous wit--characters such as the housekeeper
Mrs. Houlihan, "A woman who, in her surpassing rectitude,/Daily
contends with a host of enemies:/Dust, drunkenness, idleness,
seafood,/Underdone meat, mold, uppity tradesmen, dirty hands,/Waxy
ears, women with no sense of shame, dungarees,/Dogs, dumbbells,
do-nothings (the list expands)."
As a novel in verse,
Darlington is not a novelty, but it is a rarity. Since the end
of the Victorian era, verse narratives--a form as old as storytelling
itself--have been few, though a handful of other writers, such
as Derek Walcott, have bridged the narrative-verse divide. Still
rarer are artistic collaborations between brothers, the type of
partnership that led to the drawings that illuminate Darlington's
chapter headings. The author's brother Mark Leithauser, chief
of design at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,
created twelve graphite drawings that provide a gothic counterpoint
to the novel's nineteenth-century atmosphere.
A family connection
informs Leithauser's next book project as well. Turning as he
did in Darlington to the Midwest of his childhood, Leithauser
will set his next novel (in prose) in post-World War II Detroit.
It will be "a re-creation of my parent's world--the world before
me," says Leithauser, who was born in 1952. This time the hero
will be a man obsessed not with science, but with science fiction.
As with Darlington, meticulous factual investigation will inform
every detail of the book. Leithauser--poet, novelist, and marathon
researcher--is looking forward to visiting Detroit's historical
society and revisiting his favorite sci-fi classics. No doubt
Leithauser's next book will display the same passionate attention
to detail as does Darlington. As Leithauser says in a note preceding
Russel Darlington's tale, "If the people are fabrications, I'd
like to think the insects are genuine."
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