We are saddened to hear of the passing of Tom Plummer, an emeritus BYU German professor and personal essayist, at the age of 83. Here is his obituary.
Tom had four books of personal essays, many of them very funny, published between 1998 and 2002.
Eating Chocolates and Dancing in the Kitchen : Sketches of Marriage and Family. Shadow Mountain, 1998 (Winner of the 1998 AML Personal Essay Award).
Don’t Bite Me, I’m Santa Claus. Shadow Mountain, 1999.
Second Wind : Variations on a Theme of Growing Older. Shadow Mountain, 2000.
Waltzing to a Different Strummer. Bookcraft, 2002.
Tom’s wife, Louise Plummer, is a notable Young Adult Novel and essay author. Her novel A Dance for Three is on the AML 100 Works of Significant Mormon List.
We are republishing this extensive review of two of Tom Plummer’s books, written by the late Laraine Wilkins, which appeared in Irreantum, Autumn 2002.
The Double Life of a Mormon Essayist: Tom Plummer Writing For or About Mormons (But Not Both)
A review of Tom Plummer’s Second Wind: Variations on a Theme of Growing Older (Shadow Mountain Press, 2000) and Waltzing to a Different Strummer (Bookcraft, 2002)
Reviewed by Laraine Wilkins, Irreantum, Autumn 2002.
With Second Wind: Variations on a Theme of Growing Older (2000) and Waltzing to a Different Strummer (2002), Plummer has published four books of personal essays to date. The first, Eating Chocolates and Dancing in the Kitchen (1998), won the AML’s award for personal essay; the second, Don’t Bite Me, I’m Santa Claus (1999), appeared only a year later. At the rate of almost a book a year now, one might expect to see a dozen works from him in the next decade. What those works look like could be different from the humor that has marked the quality of Plummer’s writing thus far. In considering 
these two works together, I detect a shift in tone from the witty to the contemplative. Perhaps Plummer is just interested in writing something a little different. But whether by author’s choice or publisher’s decree, the audience for these works seems to be part of the shift. The change raises some interesting questions about the status of the personal essay in Mormon literature, which I hope will be addressed by the end of my review.
In Second Wind, Plummer assembles a highly readable assortment of personal essays that weave together stories and observations about life at various stages. The overriding tone of the stories is funny. These are the kinds of stories that even my prepubescent daughter can laugh at. From the perspective of a small child to that of a middle-aged man facing his mid-life crisis, from the view of a man approaching his retirement years to observations about his father’s untimely death, Plummer explores the theme of aging from multiple perspectives. He achieves a tone that reflects the kind of wry exuberance that one might expect from an academic who’s looking back at his life and has figured out he has nothing to prove any more—it’s just time to laugh about everything and celebrate a little.
Second Wind is organized in four parts, reflecting different stages in the process of growing older, plus an introduction. The introduction is written by Louise Plummer, award-winning author of young adult literature and Tom’s wife. The bulk of the book that follows plays like a symphony that achieves a rhythm quite extraordinary for such a casual work. With a mix of personal essays short and long, lists, letters, conversations, and even a recitation, Plummer achieves no small feat in a small space. Although some essays border on sentimentality, and a few end a little too abruptly, the book manages to transform everyday experience into something quite profound. “Signs and Symptoms” begins with anecdotes about shoes: the Doc Martens store he shops with his son, and the slippers he unwittingly wears to go out to eat. He shows the practical applications of knowing the works of dead white males by quoting Goethe and his contemporary, the German philosopher-writer Jean Paul, on the status of old men. The next piece switches gears in the form of “a list compiled by Tom and Louise and Al and Ginny over light supper at the Urban Bistro.” Such a smorgasbord of styles is never irritating; it’s underplayed and helps keep things fresh. Part two is “Separation and Reunion” and includes one piece with the titillating title “You Aren’t Supposed to Smell the Same.” One of my personal favorite pieces is in Part 3’s “Lamentation and Defiance—A Lament for Two Aging Voices.” It is a sort of poem meant to be read aloud, “preferably by two people in their mid-fifties or older.” It recites a litany of ailments from A to Z, with banal cries of woe punctuating the scientific prose from a medical handbook. It’s the perfect piece for a ward or family reunion talent show. Another of my favorites is “Reflections on Conducting My Virtual Funeral.” I’ve never thought about my own funeral—perhaps it’s a guy thing (girls dream about their perfect wedding).
In spite of the unflagging delightful humor, Plummer is also able to write poignantly. One of the most memorable prose moments for me is in the essay about a singing canary from Tom and Louise’s graduate school years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Living with Reality” tells the story of Fang, the bird that failed to thrive once he arrived home from the pet store. After Louise lost interest in the bird that refused to sing, his talons began to fall off one by one as Tom watched the bird slowly fade from life. Plummer continues: “One morning I awoke to silence. Fang was not thumping around as usual. I found him on his back, stumps up. I gently put him in a brown lunch bag and buried him at the corner of the apartment building just behind the sandbox. Then I went to Louise, who was still in bed. ‘Fang died,’ I said. ‘I buried him out by the sandbox.’ My voice broke. Louise held me for a while until I felt better. She didn’t cry though.” The image of the short-lived pet bird on its back with stumps in the air continues to stay with me. It’s the author’s tender moments of vulnerability, like this one, that lend the book its greatest appeal.
The strongest single piece of the book is in the fourth and last section, “Conciliation.” The essay “Above the Canopy of Stars” is the longest in the collection and suitably appears next to last. It is the most overtly religious, and it affirms faith in a way that highlights the purpose of the book as a whole. Plummer begins with stories of old people who reassure him of the resilience of the spirit that is possible in later life. But he also recounts story after story of grief and pain, of his own distress in mid-life and the way out he found through a New Testament scripture. Finally, Plummer summarizes the power stories and words hold for him: “I cling to their story and others like it. I cling to the story of the man who begs Jesus to fill in the gaps of his unbelief. I cling to the words of Job: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ (Job 19:25). I cling to these because I know that when I face the last moments of my life, I will be weak.” Unwittingly, perhaps, Plummer describes the power of his own book. The craft of storytelling is his forte; his are stories to cling to.
The more poignant storytelling is continued in Waltzing to a Different Strummer. Plummer has his reasons for maintaining a more serious mood in this tome, explaining that it was an answer to a friend’s question posed in 1992. In the face of a brain tumor, Plummer inevitably began to take stock of his life and make changes. The friend’s question was this: “How do you manage to stay changed?” Plummer’s short answer is this: “I’ve had to reeducate myself.” More overtly religious than Second Wind, this book is an account of the searching that brings him to a process of “reconnecting with ancestors; locating past friends; putting [him]self in harmony with God and his world; laying anger to rest; [. . .] striving to become one with God, his children, and his world, and becoming whole with [him]self, coming to at-one-ment.”
The essay that follows, “Do You Just Laugh All the Time?” suggests that it is not necessarily the brain tumor that has Plummer writing more soberly. It is the need for variety. He explains: “It’s clear to me that if we just laughed all the time, we would laugh while we ate, spitting food all over the table; we’d laugh when we brushed our teeth, drooling toothpaste down our chins; and we’d laugh ourselves sick at funerals.” Of course, his desire for a bit of sobriety is expressed in rather humorous terms, but he successfully makes the shift by quoting Nietzsche: “‘Inverse cripples,’ the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls them: people who get so attached to doing one thing, who are so locked into a routine, so accustomed to using one hand, one foot, one ear that the whole body becomes that one part—a hand or a foot or an eye.” Making the connection to Paul’s discourse in Corinthians about the body needing all its various parts would be almost predictable at this point. But Plummer restrains himself. Instead he tells stories about his students, his fishing buddies, and invokes eating as a metaphor of achieving a necessary variety in life. The discussion of Paul doesn’t appear until a much later essay, “They’re My Gifts, I’m Afraid.” The choice to quote from the unfamiliar translation in the New English Bible lends a wonderful touch. But it also forges a tie to the earlier discussion of Nietzsche and lets the attentive reader consider the connections between “inverse cripples” and the Christian community.
With these essays, Plummer achieves a pathos that is not quite so available in his earlier work. I cried more than I laughed. The essay “Finding Paths to At-one-ment” reminded me of my own guilt in neglecting those who have previously found reason to connect with me, especially older relatives. And in “Christ’s Love for Each Person,” the story of Patrick, the difficult teenaged son of some friends, who decided to go on a mission but returned early in a state of frustration and anger, is particularly heartwrenching. His unexpected reunion with his family tells something of the reconciliation of children estranged from heavenly parents. This is perhaps the overriding theme of this book, for it ends with the essay about Tom’s reconciliation with his own sons in “The Hearts of the Fathers.” The experience of an unexpected encounter with the dentist on the same day as his son Sam leads him to consider the symbolic connection with his father through the unlikely object of a razor. Passing on the razor from one generation to another becomes a symbol of reconciliation for him.
The essays in Waltzing could be sacrament-meeting talks. One would be hard-pressed to use the essays from Second Wind in church meetings, mainly because of their humor. But the effacement of Mormonism in Second Wind leaves me wondering about the possibilities for achieving broader recognition of the Mormon experience with an audience that appreciates the experience of the divine as well as of the comical. There could be a certain value in being a “fool for God,” but Plummer does not want that playfulness to be associated with his Mormonism. Perhaps this is more a function of the publishing company. Shadow Mountain Press is billed as “the national trade publishing and music imprint of Deseret Book Company” that produces books of general interest. Perhaps this explains why Plummer never uses the word Mormon in his more humorous work, in spite of the fact that he mentions growing up and later settling in Salt Lake City, taking trips across the country to Utah for conference, attending the University of Utah, and working at Brigham Young University as chair of the humanities department.
I find this effacement technique to be downright irritating. It allows Mormon readers to be self-congratulatory at knowing the tradition behind the experience, while at the same time allowing them a peek at how Mormons might appear to “outsiders.” I’m not sure “outsiders” would be receptive to a style that refuses to explain; it comes off as patronizing. Let me cite an example. Plummer’s humor is particularly well wrought in the touching, hilarious story about the woman whose sister died and was about to be buried without her having a chance to say good-bye. The confusions of the funeral attendees might have been more readily explained if a slight but significant difference in traditional Mormon services had been described as specifically Mormon rather than as generically “different.” If Plummer is serving as the woman’s “clergyman,” why not call it a Mormon bishop? Such examples abound in Second Wind. Plummer told me himself one time that it’s a good idea not to let people know you’re Mormon, or at least don’t wear it on your sleeve; he could tell stories. However, it seems to me that effacing one’s Mormonness in stories of a personal nature is at least unnecessary, at worst confusing. And if you have stories to tell, why not do it here? If Plummer mentions Utah, he may as well mention he’s Mormon. He can still reach a wider audience. Besides, it could be fashionable to be Mormon these days—just ask Mitt Romney fans.
Waltzing, on the other hand, is designed to reach an exclusively Mormon audience. Published by Bookcraft, the arm of Deseret Book aimed for Mormons, the book also doesn’t mention Mormonism but is full of Mormon-specific language. References like “bishop,” “home teaching,” “President Spencer W. Kimball,” “Ensign,” and “Satan’s plan” can, if left unexplained, only be understood by Mormons. These are clearly essays for the insider. But perhaps these texts can have universal appeal. Such a reaching for a broader audience would require some explanatory remarks. Perhaps the editors were too weary over the idea of including a massive section of footnotes. Figuring out which terms need explanation and which don’t might be even more wearisome. But Plummer seems close to achieving it in Second Wind, in the essay that most closely resembles those of Waltzing. His best essay in Second Wind, the most overtly religious, is also the most touching. In it, he manages to explain that a mission is what brought him to live in Europe for thirty months, though this fact was omitted in an earlier piece in which he describes traveling with his provincial parents when they came to pick him up after his long stay in Austria. Can there be room to be playful as well as profound in recounting the stories that come out of religiously motivated experience? I hope someday someone will be brave enough to try it more consistently from a Mormon point of view.
Plummer is perhaps forging new paths for the personal essay in Mormon literature. If I had to make a choice, I would say that the essays in Waltzing are much stronger. But Second Wind is downright hilarious and would probably make a better gift for members of my family. If Eugene England was ponderous and Mary Lythgoe Bradford confessional, then Plummer falls somewhere in between, with a distinctive sense of humor thrown into the mix. Elouise Bell might have been his tutor on the humor front, but she seems to operate more in the function of cultural critic; more likely his wife Louise influences his style. Perhaps the more restrained manner in Waltzing is a defensive gesture; Plummer may want people to know he has other sides to him as well. But somewhere in between his humor and his religion, there may be a collection of essays waiting to be born that manages to reconcile both dimensions of his writing to show the wider world that committed Mormons can write simultaneously for the outside world and for their own.
Laraine Wilkins lives in the Boston area with her thirteen-year-old daughter and is in a Ph.D. program for German literature at Harvard University. She earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Brigham Young University and is interested in film and media studies. Idaho Falls, Idaho, is her hometown, but she expects to return to Salt Lake City when graduate school has finished with her. [Laraine Wilkins, then the editor of Irreantum, passed away in 2006.]