The Spirit and the Baroque Sensibility: Clinton F. Larson, Part 1
**Clinton F. Larson picked up the main themes of Elder Whitney and Merrill Bradshaw’s thinking about art and carried them some steps further. (As with Elder Whitney and Brother Bradshaw, I am drawing here from my 1978 master’s thesis.)
**Professor Marden J. Clark, in whom Brother Larsen privately expressed great confidence as an explicator of his work and his intentions, observed in his foreword to The Mantle of the Prophet and Other Plays (Deseret Book Company, 1966), a collection of five of Brother Larson’s poetry dramas, that through all of the plays in the collection “run the constant, if not the dominant, themes of the nature of prophecy and the transmission of the power of prophecy,” and further: “Beneath these themes and supporting them, stands a simple and surprisingly orthodox faith that provides a larger, more sublime theme: that Jesus is the Christ, the Redeemer of Mankind. On this familiar Christian and Mormon ground Dr. Larson stands without equivocation, using his art to explore and bolster and define both the faith and the fact” (p. viii). Clark continued: “From this standpoint all five plays are didactic, in purpose as well as fact. Dr. Larson makes no apology for this, though he lives and writes in an age when didacticism is belittled as never before in the history of art. The artistic defense of such didacticism as Dr. Larson’s, however, is simple enough: (1) Nearly all art is didactic in effect, and (2) this work is not merely didactic” (p. viii).
Clark explained:
**“Any work that gets involved with meaningful moral and ethical spiritual problems (and what significant works do not?) must sooner or later take an attitude toward those problems. As soon as the work does so and then employs the techniques of persuasion, i.e., rhetoric, to support its attitude, it becomes didactic—whether its author wills it to be or not. We need hardly worry about this. All the way from Aristotle through Sir Philip Sydney to Shelley and even the later T. S. Eliot, critics have defended literature precisely on its ability to please and instruct. It is, the argument runs, an even better teacher than history or ethics because it gives concrete form to abstract ideas and precepts, and hence teaches by involving us emotionally in those ideas and precepts. No student of Mormon literature, I dare say, will ever read those last chapters of Ether or Moroni with quite the same emotional response after he has wholly experienced Dr. Larson’s Coriantumr and his Moroni” (p. vii – ix).
**Now, I need respectfully to interject here some dissent from what Brother Clark has said. I reject, emphatically, the idea that the work of the creative artist is to start with an abstract idea or precept and then seek to give it concrete form. Rather, the creative artist’s work is to start with the raw, inchoate data of experience and find in them possibilities of order and thus meaning, which his society then may or may not then espouse as embodying positive or negative value. Abstract ideas and precepts presuppose and refer to the holistically grasped construct that is the product of the aesthetic faculty. The allegorist may do something like what Brother Clark described, but even then, if the work is to be called creative art (as, for example, The Pilgrim’s Progress can be called), the artist has discovered in his material something that even he did not know was there until, in Eliseo Vivas’s words, “the labor of the file is finished and he can discover his intention in his composition” (Creation and Discovery, p. 104). I quote as apropos this statement from Vivas’s essay “The Two Dimensions of Reality in The Brothers Karamazov”: “The error of some of the efforts to interpret the meaning of Dostoevski’s novels lies in the assumption that there are ‘doctrines’ or ‘views’ to be found in them—systematic structures of abstract thought involving major affirmations and denials—when what they contain is a dramatic organization of life, which includes characters most of whom are deeply interested in life” (Creation and Discovery, p. 50). “A dramatic organization of life,” not the statement of abstract ideas and precepts, is the proper business of the artists as artist. Certainly there are uses for a purer didacticism, and a Restorationist artist, who by my definition will be serious about his covenant of consecration, may turn his craftsmanship to producing such works when called upon by ecclesiastical authority to do so, but he, at least, will know the difference between that and true creativity, and in the long run (and I stand by this) the truly creative work will be read, viewed, or heard in Zion long after the merely didactic has been forgotten, for it is, in the long run, far more valuable. To put that more bluntly, I foresee that, five hundred years from now, the novels of Dostoevski will still be read in Zion, but that most of the fiction and verse published in the Church magazines of our time will be forgotten, for the former will continue to reveal something profound about the nature of the mortal life of God’s children, and the latter will not. That said, on with Brother Larson.
**Further on in his foreword, Brother Clark said: “To make us aware of the spiritual through beauty—this is the task Dr. Larson sets himself, as he has defined it to me” (p. x). Larson himself acknowledged his didacticism while qualifying it, as he was quoted in an interview: “All poetry has a moral, and all poetry should teach, but it’s the idea of the parable—tell a story, tell it the way it is, then give the reader an opportunity to come to his own interpretation of what has happened. Don’t tack the moral on by any means—that ruins it. Christ gave his parable, simply told a story, and then walked away. He wanted it to rest in people’s minds and hearts so they would develop something on their own” (in Douglas Airmet, “Mormon Poets talk about Their Craft,” New Era, 5, no. 8, 1975, p. 46).
**He said in another interview:
**“I am concerned that we do not lose [the] tradition of love of language and the great verbal ability…that was invested in the early brethren of the Church. Not that this ability has been completely lost, but sometimes we adopt opinions that seem to negate its importance. We get rather doctrinaire rather than affective in our use of language. Mormons should cease sounding like medieval schoolmen, to whom religion became an abstract adjustment to religious theories; rather, we should leave most doctrinal matters to the latter-day oracles and then convey testimony and religion in the actualities of art and life” (“A Conversation with Clinton F. Larson,” Dialogue, 4, no. 3, 1969, p. 75).
**Brother Larson saw a danger in what he viewed as the Church’s characteristic ignoring of the power of artistic teaching in favor of doctrinaire teaching: “The doctrinaire teaching characteristic of the Church is simply inappropriate for certain kinds of people; chief among these are artists. Artists ordinarily do not respond to doctrinal discussions. They respond to spirituality when it is artistically conveyed. They are temperamental, antithetical people. You cannot expect them to alter their personalities so that they can accommodate the doctrinaire style exclusively. It is axiomatic that the Church reach out with compassion to all men, not simply to a single middle-class stratum” (“Conversation,” p. 77).
**Brother Clark warned in his foreword that, although Larson’s plays are didactic in effect and purpose, the reader ought “not to expect any literal transcription of historical events in these plays”:
**“For one thing we have no detailed historical record of most of the events he depicts. But even for those which we do have a record, the events of The Mantle of the Prophet, for example, Dr. Larson’s primary concern has not been historical accuracy. We hardly worry when reading Hamlet or experiencing it in a production that Shakespeare sends his young Catholic hero to a Protestant university at Wittenburg which had not even been established at the time the historical Hamlet lived. Not factual, historical truth, but ideal, spiritual truth is the aim of the poetic imagination. It siezes upon object or event and tries to body it forth, to give it an ideal form, to catch it in its physical and emotional and spiritual essence—not as it actually existed or happened but as it must have existed or happened in its essential significance” (pp. ix – x).
**(I point out in passing that that point is developed at length by Northrop Frye in The Great Code as he discusses the problem of the literal historicity of the Bible and suggest that what Frye says there and Brother Clark says above be factored into the current agonized and agonizing discussion of the work in progress that is the sacred history of the Restored Church.)
**Larson’s didacticism is something like the idea of the poet as prophet. He suggested that: “One of the finest things we have is our notion of spirituality. A transmutation of God and the Holy Ghost into poetry would be a real achievement” (in Airmet, p. 45). In “Conversation,” he said: “Take, for example, the great prophet-poet Nephi, who in Second Nephi indicates his great love of books. He claims that he is a poor writer, but to my mind he is a fine symbolist poet. He used the branch of the olive tree as a viable figure of speech. He had the same vision that his father Lehi had, a vision which involved profound metaphors and the affective interpretation of metaphors. Nephi’s expression was, of course, for the benefit of Laman and Lemuel and the whole family. But Nephi repeats the metaphors again and again to convert Laman and Lemuel to the truth, which is the method of the artist” (p. 74). A little further on he said explicitly: “It seems to me that without question poetry is the principal language of the spirit. And I think this is generally agreed upon by the modern poets. There is plenty of precedent for this view: for example, the Apocalypse and Isaiah. In the Bible the tradition of poetry is a spiritual matter” (p. 80).
**Brother Larson (and I concur) did not, like Elder Whitney, virtually equate poetry with prophecy; he merely saw the possibility of the poet’s writing by the spirit of prophecy, and he distinguished carefully between the prophetic function of the poet and that of the General Authority: “[The artist’s] work is his gift and witness; only the General Authorities have the power to speak for the whole Church. These positions should not be confused” (“Conversation,” p. 78).
**Brother Larson emphasized the importance of respecting the individuality of the poet. This is part of the meaning of his stress on the his in the remark just quoted. He said:
**“I see the possibilities of a range of contrasting styles that can be used for the expression [pardon me, Brother Larson—I would prefer to say the exploration] of Mormon ideas [and I would prefer to say experience]. For example, S. Dilworth Young has a kind of sinewy, pioneer-like style; it is somewhat hard-bitten and stoical, and I think he does very well to capture this aspect of pioneer life, of Mormon life. But I think there are other avenues that can be explored stylistically, with the idea of creating a flexibility in the Mormon spirit as it exists today. In other words, we should not be hide-bound by one prosaic or poetic style in the Church. For the artist, this individuality comprises the stewardship of his talent as it applies to the Law of Consecration” (“Conversation,” pp. 76 – 77).
**And also:
**“The chief [problem for the artist in reaching the members of the Church] is that too much power is vested in committees. Committees are able to perform only in certain ways. Whenever a committee gets together and decides something, there is a compromising of creative intent in favor of democratic purpose. The committee by its very nature is antithetical to the nature of art, which has to do with the aristocracy of talent. And in the Church we have, as you know, a great many committees that decide on cultural matters. Everyone has his own voice, and as a result the significance of the artistic work or performance is minimized or negated, along with individuality, artistic distinction, and style. The negative aspect is almost always minimized by a committee. They seem afraid of it, not realizing the value of the individual integrity of a work of art. Committees ought to extend a spirit of trust to artists and accept them as conveyors of individualistic truth” (Conversation,” p. 78).
**It was perhaps that keen sense of the Mormon artist’s responsibility to convey his individual testimony of spiritual truth that underlay Larson’s own refusal to lower his own artistic and intellectual standards to please an audience or to make his work more easily understood by an audience. He said:
**“A great many poets are interested in being clear, but I get a little uneasy when they come on this way because it seems to me that they have a definite audience in mind. My standard is accuracy…. To be honest, you have to be faithful to impressions and images, which manifestly will not be clear, particularly to those of us who don’t understand the processes involved. I personally write from the point of view of a number of voices—the personae—trying to be accurate in my perceptions. Some things I write are lucidly clear (I write for children) and other things are not so clear, depending on the voice I’ve taken. I like to think of myself as a dramatic poet. So audience? I’m interested in an audience if that audience is interested in accuracy” (in “Earth and Sky: A Dialogue between Two Poets,” Century II, 1, no. 1, 1976, p. 55). (I once heard Brother Larson say, “There is no such thing as the ‘simple’ gospel—as soon as you put it into the English language, it’s not simple anymore.”)
**That the refusal to compromise “accuracy” for an audience did not mean that Larson was arrogant toward audience or that he was unconcerned about reaching an audience is evidenced by his answer to the question, “For whom should the Mormon writer write?”: “Everybody. This is a missionary church. We have an obligation to deal with various styles and ethnic groups in their terms. If you really think your way into the lives and hearts of people, then you can show the connection that is necessary for their spiritual transformation” (“Mormon Poets,” p. 47).
**Despite his wish that the Mormon poet might succeed in speaking to all men, Larson did not expect that this will always be possible. He pointed out that Nephi’s attempt “to communicate spiritually through symbolic language…failed,…because of Laman’s and Lemuel’s intransigence regarding the Lord’s will” (“Conversation,” p. 75). In a guest column in the Daily Universe he presented an excerpt from one of his plays in which he interprets the love and hope of Joseph and Hyrum as being “open, free, and full of light” and asked rhetorically: “Would New York audiences respond appropriately to these qualities and, also, to references to modern-day Zionism and to intimations of the spirit of prophecy?” He also presented from one of his plays a lyric spoken by Joseph to Emma and asked, again rhetorically, “Would New York audiences accept references to celestial marriage?” (“Guest Column,” p. 18). He then asked: “Is it not true that any meaningful play about Joseph Smith must involve direct and indirect appeals to an audience to be incisive in dealing with human conscience and to accept the God of the Land? Can a play intended for general popular appeal successfully make these demands?” (“Guest Column,” p. 20). Clearly, Larson believed that the answer to those questions was “probably not.” Undoubtedly for that reason, he decried what he viewed as a populist philosophy prevalent in the Church: “One thing that stands against the development of art in the Church is populism. Populism is the idea that if a lot of people agree that the work is good then it must be good. It is the use of consensus gentium as a critical criterion. Only in the long historical view does this position have value. The thing that is popular in the football stadium, in other words, may not be the best work of art” (“Conversation,” p. 79).
**An important theme in Larson’s thinking was a form of Keats’ “negative capability,” the Mormon writer’s obligation to be what Larson called a “dramatic poet,” to “think [his] way into the lives and hearts of people.” He spoke of the poet’s obligation not only to “express himself, but to think and feel himself into another person’s position” (“Mormon Poets,” p. 44), since, after all, “the Lord understands all experience and has a relationship to it” (“Earth and Sky,” p. 61). He was disturbed that “many people in the Church don’t understand that literature deals with the totality of life, and that in life there is opposition in all things…. The negative aspect is as necessary in literature as it is in life” (“Conversations,” pp. 77 – 78) [I interject: if literature is to illuminate life, and I want it to; and also, more fundamentally, because in order to be literary art it must necessarily reconcile opposites into a unified whole].)
**One of the most powerful instruments, in Larson’s view, for exploring various points of view is style. And that is the topic for the next installment.
**Thoughts?