It’s the beginning of the semester again, which means that in my Mormon Literature class, I’m making a halfhearted attempt to look at historical Mormon letters, which basically means anything written before I was born. After 1970, there’s lots of material to choose from, but before that time, we find sermons, poems set to music, biographies, journals and faith promoting stories, along with the occasional epic poem and the even rarer novel (thanks, Nephi Anderson, for representing). There’s plenty of fiction written about Mormons (usually the Mormon in question is an evil polygamist eager to kidnap or convert young virgins and spirit them off to Utah), and even quite a lot of literary fiction written by former Mormons or people familiar with Mormonism, but not a lot of fiction of enduring quality written by Mormons.
I know that part of the reason is that throughout the 19th century, novels were seen as a waste of time, or worse. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg called novel reading “one of the most pernicious habits to which a young lady can be devoted. When the habit is once thoroughly fixed, it becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium.” Brigham Young definitely bought into the idea of novels as a waste of time, condemning all novels as “nonesense, trifling, arising from foolish fancy, vain imaginings and the spirit of lying that will subvert the readers until they do at last find themselves in hell.” In letters to his sons, he even compared reading of novels to swallowing poisonous herbs. However, he seemed to embrace theatrical presentations, saying, “If I were placed on a cannibal island and given a task of civilizing its people, I should straightway build a theatre.” I haven’t been able to find examples of dramatic productions dating from the pioneer era in Utah (are there any?), so I wonder if most of the plays were either informal or brought in from outside.
I also wonder about the amount of leisure time the early saints had. When I talk to my students about why there aren’t very many remaining examples of what we would call literature from the early Mormon period, I tend to make generalizations and say things about how it’s hard to write literary fiction when you’re concerned about mobs breaking down your door or starving to death. But I haven’t had that confirmed by any outside sources– it’s mostly just assumption on my part. The things we do have, including a rich tradition of hymns (which could have been sung while people worked or walked) and letters and journals (Brigham Young wrote over 29,000 letters during his lifetime) tend to show the priorities of the people. But I feel a little bit like I’m trying to analyze negative space by looking at what we don’t have and why we don’t have it. This week in our class, for example, we are reading two pioneer journals (Eliza Lyman and Jane Manning James, since they introduce polygamy and the priesthood ban– themes which seem to recur in Mormon literature), as well as looking at a sermon and Nephi Anderson’s Added Upon (and I know all of you think we should be reading Dorian instead, but Added Upon is more famous and it’s available for free, and it’s nice to have one free book in a class where the cost of books adds up quickly. Besides, I do like to watch a little Saturday’s Warrior when we read Added Upon).
So I guess I’m putting this post out there to get some ideas from all of you. Does it seem fair to spend one week out of fourteen looking at the first hundred and forty years of Mormon letters and the other thirteen looking at the last forty years? If I had to guess, I would say that in terms of output, there’s probably at least ten times as much of what we would traditionally consider literature written by and about Mormons during the last forty years as there was in the preceding 140, but it feels like a bit of a cop out. I know the newer stuff better, and I like it more, so I teach it. If you were teaching Mormon Literature, what would you include that would round out the early years of Mormon letters a bit more?
Mahonri Smith has a good section on early Utah theatre in his introduction to the anthology Saints on Stage, drawing heavily on Ila Fisher Maughan’s Pioneer Theatre in the Desert (Deseret Book, 1961–a copy of which I inherited from a friend who died).
Parley P Pratt’s “A Dialogue Between Joe Smith and the Devil” is a must-read, and readily available online–would be interesting to compare with, say, Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” You can find a lot of good stuff at mormontextsproject.org. Cracroft and Lambert’s A Believing People is also a good source.
If you go back a bit farther than 40 years, say 70 or 80 you get to the Lost Generation, with Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, Virginia Sorensen’s memoir of Manti, Where Nothing is Long Ago. Mary Bradford published an interview with Sorensen, and one of her stories, “The Train,” I think, in Dialogue. Samuel W. Taylor is worth a good look. I would search on Dialogue’s website for his classic essay “Peculiar People, Positive Thinkers.” Richard Cracroft published a Sunstone essay (also online) “Freshet in the Dearth” on Taylor’s comic novel “Heaven Knows Why.”
For a survey of the Lost Generation look up Ed Geary’s essay in Dialogue or Sunstone.
I appreciate this list as well. Thank you.
In the mid-1800s, poetry is king. That’s the key form, and everybody is writing it. Some of it is just in journals, some of it is in newspapers, and a very small amount gets published in formal collections.
There was a presentation at the last AML conference by William Brugger about poetry by British saints that got published in the Millennial Star. A lot of it is about the choice to gather: pretty interesting stuff. You might contact him about recommendations of poems you could teach in the future. And of course there’s Eliza R. Snow and all the other poetic voices we know as hymnwriters: you might pick a piece or two students are likely to know from hymns and a few others by the same writers they won’t know.
It occurs to me right now that jokes are also a form that appears in newspapers which somebody ought to do something with. In Nauvoo, it’s hard to tell which jokes/funny stories are original and which (most) are reprints from other papers, but I’d guess that in Utah there would start to be more jokes/funny stories that are clearly local and Mormon. Again, I don’t know of an easy to use secondary source with samples, but that’d be another great way to introduce people to the frontier period.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Young Woman’s Journal published a fair number of short stories. The Relief Society magazine did too. I’d recommend contacting Lisa Tait and Ardis Parshall about ones that might be accessible to modern students and pick one or two for a survey course. You might also ask them about articles and blog posts you could share with your students that would help give them context for what’s going on at the time.
Incidentally, Jane Manning James does not have a journal. What you are probably using is the oral history E. J. D. Roundy wrote down for her late in James’s life. If you want to think of oral history as a valuable literary nonfiction genre, there are some other great pieces you could use. There’s an early 1900s article, for example, about recollections of old Nauvoo-ers, based on stories they shared during testimony meetings.
Anyway, that’s my thinking at the moment. It’s true that there are more short works–poems, short stories, jokes, articles, and oral histories–than long literary-minded works, but there’s a lot you might draw on. Somebody should do another anthology now that research on all this stuff is so much easier and so many more people are involved, but you could cobble something nice together in the meantime if you think it’s worth the energy. And I suspect that for some students getting a glimpse into the more distant Mormon past is worth a great deal.
Great contributions James and Harlow! (And now I’m off to see a corpse flower in our local college greenhouse…)
James beat me to the point about Mormon poetry. Everyone was writing it and reading it–so much so that I’m no longer convinced by the too-busy-pioneering-and-surviving argument. I think the larger issue is that we don’t pay much attention to it these days because it hasn’t aged well…and we don’t know how to talk about it without apologizing for it.
The “best” free collection of early Mormon poems is John Lyon’s Harp of Zion. I put best in quotes because I think Lyon’s are the most polished poems of the era. I also like Orson Whitney’s angry poems from the 1880s. Eliza R. Snow’s poems are in a nice collection published by BYU and she provides a lot of poems on a wide range of topics and themes.
All of Nephi Anderson’s books are free online, although The new Dorian edition is worth the price. Piney Ridge Cottage is his best novel and foreshadows a lot of late Mormon romance fiction. Added Upon is good, though, and is probably essential reading.
Anderson’s short stories are not as good, but they can be interesting from a historical perspective. He has a great story about the dangers of venereal disease.
(BTW, if you’re interested in a guest lecture on Nephi Anderson, I’d be happy to talk to your students about him. I’m his greatest living fanboy.)
I’ve heard many times that one of the — if not the the actual — first major construction project in Salt Lake City was a theater. This article seems to support that notion.
http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/saltlaketheatre.html
At the Ceter Street Theater in Orem, run by the Nauvoo Theatrical Society (over a dozen years ago), we had a poster of a play that was produced in Nauvoo back before Joseph and his brother were killed. I don’t know what happened to that poster, and I don’t remember much about it (like the title of the play) but there are two things about it I DO remember. One, Brigham Young had a role in the play. Two, admissions was fifty cents for adults and tens dollars for babes in arms.
I truly do need to edit before I post (sigh).
Make that Center Street Theater.
Pizarro. At the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, April 1842. Brigham played the Incan High Priest. https://www.lds.org/ensign/1975/10/discovery/also-starring-brigham-young?lang=eng
.
Al my good ideas have already been expressed at least as well as I would have expressed them. I want that poster though, if anyone puts a replica in their Etsy shop.