Review
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Title: Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays
Author: Mary Bradford
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Personal Essay / Memoir
Year Published: 2015
Number of Pages: 185
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 978-1-58958-742-7
Price: $20.95
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
“I once read a whole collection of poems on the death of JFK, but none reached me as did this classical stanza from Marden Clark:
‘Dante rode Virgil’s back down those mighty haunches
Through the ice past zero gravity of being
And began the purgatorial climb.
We might make the same journey
With inverted boots and an empty saddle
On a riderless black stallion—the same journey
Alongside seven whites marching with death.'”
–Mary Bradford, DIALOGUE: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 13:3, 141-2
It must have happened around the time the morning session of kindergarten let out, because I was still there in the kindergarten room. I remember someone announcing it to us. Was it the teacher? The principal over the intercom? Mostly I remember feeling helpless, the same helpless feeling I felt four and a half years later at the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. I remember making a joke, “How do you know it’s an election year? The Democrats and Republicans are shooting each other.” I didn’t think those murders were committed by partisan political enemies, but I knew politics was involved–whatever I thought politics meant at the time.
How about a sunnier memory of school, an image of going to grade school, not being in school, mind you, being in transit. Hundreds of students coming down a series of tree-named streets that come out on a long curving road, curving around the park and pastures east of the Wasatch Elementary. The road follows the curve of one of Provo’s irrigation ditches, the one running through Heritage Halls. Fences along the ditch funnel the students toward a foot bridge. After that they run down a gravel path toward the school building. They live less than two miles from the school, so no bus picks them up, these hundreds of students streaming towards the school.
“Yes, and the snowdrifts were 5 feet deep and it was uphill both ways,” my niece says.
“That didn’t happen till we went to Finland, and the piles were 10 feet high, left on the sidewalks by the plows.”
Or I could have mentioned driving to Batavia, New York, with some other missionaries through roads that had been plowed with such high sides it felt like being in a bobsled run. She lives in Ithaca now, so she’s had some experience with deep snow.
But the memory about walking to school wasn’t a comment on hardship, nor was my niece’s retort. Our sense of how childhood is or should be comes from our own childhoods, not from someone else’s memories that may be fallible, or selective, or inexperienced.
Wouldn’t it be useful if there were some way the older generation could convince the younger that we were once human like they are, and for the younger to show the older that they feel and think deeply and passionately about the world around them?
Mary Bradford poses this question in her essay “Diary Chains,” a title that suggests her answer, and provides a motif that comes up repeatedly in “Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays,” where she quotes several times from diaries, including missionary diaries from her daughter and son.
But diaries are not the only way we proclaim our humanity. The book could have been subtitled “Personal Essay Chains,” as witness the first essay, “I, Eye, Aye, a Personal Essay about Personal Essays.” I have remembered that threefold definition of the essay for more than 30 years and thought about it often, but had forgotten that it was written as a survey of the Mormon personal essay at the time. The essays mentioned make good reading, very good. Give yourself a treat and search some out online.
I have much enjoyed Mary Bradford’s essays and was pleased a while back to find her 1987 collection “Leaving Home” on the library sales table, which I had missed, having left home for the wilds of Seattle a few years earlier. I put it on my read-these-next shelf, and when I heard about “Mr. Mustard Plaster” I thought, “Two collections. I’ll read them together. What a treat.”
No such luck. Mr. Mustard Plaster is a reprint, with a few essays added to bring things up to date. So I read several of the essays in this book when they were first published. I say that not for nostalgia’s sake, but to consider all that has happened in Mormon literature in the short time since the essays in “Leaving Home” were written, collected, then reprinted. Our literature has gone from Greening Wheat and Tending the Garden to prepare for Harvest to a Fire in the Pasture to prepare for another harvest, yea, even a Dispensation of fine writing. (It is a little sobering to consider that people just starting to write when I was an undergraduate are now the older generation. Indeed, my friend Maggie who grew up in the other ward and grew Young as Margaret just turned 60.)
So the personal essay chains this book forms for me relate partly to the 1980s. An essay like “Yesterday the Ward House” echoes things my father wrote about the North Morgan chapel as the center of religious life in his ward, and my own experiences with the double chapel on 9th East I grew up attending, with the carnival out in the parking lot every year. (Which I didn’t realize at the time was the stake’s budget and building fund fundraiser.)
The title essay reminded me of a characteristic I noticed in Leslie Norris’s stories. He gave me a couple of his books as a wedding present, and I started reading them on the way back to Seattle. Like Willa Cather he loves/loved to weave smaller stories into the narrative. Most of the stories in “The Girl from Cardigan” begin with a series of anecdotes the narrator tells us before getting to the main story, the anecdotes being things we need to know to understand the emotional landscape of the main story, which is sometimes just a sentence or two.
Similarly, “Mr. Mustard Plaster” begins as a nostalgic portrait of life in Salt Lake, then shows what that kind of life means when it comes into sharp contrast with another way of life, which transforms what could be a nice little humorous anecdote into something deeper, or transforms what might be a comedy about naïve small town people into a comment on the falsity of cosmopolitan living. (Ignore my comments, just enjoy the stories and how they come together.)
Mary Bradford says this book is the closest she’ll come to writing an autobiography, so the essays are arranged roughly chronologically, with an essay drawn from her Master’s thesis on Virginia Sorensen representing the academic part of her life. “Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant” inspired a trek to the used bookstore around the corner, and yes, they still have that copy of “A Little Lower than the Angels.”
The essay reminded me of how much I enjoyed “Where Nothing is Long Ago,” and my delight, listening to a recording of “Miracles on Maple Hill” to find a children’s novel about a shellshocked veteran. (OK, they called it battle fatigue after WWII, and the story is a touch sentimental, and Mary’s essay mentions Sorensen’s occasional sentimentality.) I also recommend Mary’s interview with Virginia Sorensen in Dialogue 13:3 (the same issue quoted above) which also has Sorensen’s story “The Train.”
I’ve found myself thinking occasionally about Sorensen’s comment that she had wanted to write a novel about a Mormon family reunion but Eudora Welty beat her to a family reunion novel with “Losing Battles.”
The Sorensen essay has an intriguing link to my own time in graduate school. My last few semesters at BYU I developed an interest in textual criticism (perhaps related to Gordon Thomasson telling me about FARMS’s Critical Text of the Book of Mormon project?). When I got to Seattle I took a class in textual criticism.
It was in the early days of word processing (look up PC-Write, a shareware pioneer) and we spent some time wondering about what kinds of textual variants electronic typesetting might create, what kinds of problems it might create, that would parallel the problems typesetting by hand created for textual critics, the multitude of variants created by continuing to print a page while it was being proofread and using the unproofed signatures, binding them in with the rest of the book.
We took a field trip to the University of Washington Press. Our prof asked the managing editor what kinds of difficulties electronic typesetting might present. He replied that most errors come from inattentive authors.
Reading “Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant” I think I found an example to answer our prof’s question. On page 28 the last and third-to-last paragraphs are in a markedly different style from the rest. I checked them against “Leaving Home” and they are quotes from Sorensen, as is the second paragraph in section III on page 26. As I considered the quotes it occurred to me that the problem of block quotes losing their formatting is unique to electronic typesetting.
If you’re setting type physically you have to indent each line of a block quote, but in blogging or word processing or typesetting software block quote is simply a code or paired code like
, easily deleted.
I spend a lot of time thinking about our conventions for identifying quotes, because they can affect how we understand a text. (For example, some scholars think I Corinthians 14:34-35 is a quote from the letter the Corinthians sent Paul, which he is replying to, and verses 36-40 are Paul’s denunciation of the idea that women should keep silent in the church. As, gently–pillow-like–is Mary Bradford’s book, especially the last essay.)
So I hope Mr. Mustard Plaster sells well enough to restore the block quote codes in a second printing.
A year or so back I was listening to “A Prairie Home Companion” and “The Hopeful Gospel Quartet” started singing a Mormon hymn, a Mormon hymn, one I had grown up singing, which had puzzled me mightily when I was first learning it. I knew what a tempest was and I knew what it meant to be tossed, but what was it about being tossed up and down on fluffy white pillows that could make you discouraged, feeling all was lost? Wouldn’t that be fun?
I could imagine a family reunion with some of the older cousins standing at the corners of a large pillow, tossing the younger cousins up and down in the air. (Coincidentally I just tonight finished listening to part 1 of Don Quixote, which ends with yet another of Sancho Panza’s comments about the episode of being tossed in the blanket–how it was a real experience, not part of some enchantment.)
I developed an image of life’s pillows, omnipresent for us affluent norteamericanos, but even life’s pillows can develop a tempest outside of a teapot. So I was delighted to open up Sunstone one day and see the title Mary Bradford had chosen for her contribution to their “Pillars of My Faith” series. Or maybe I thought, “Mary stole my image. I’ve got to write my own version of life’s pillows.”
Though she doesn’t say so in that essay, (saving it for the last piece, “They Also Serve” (Who Only Sit and Write) writing is one of the pillows of Mary’s faith, as is family, and I find her writings about her family intriguing and moving. “Gentle Dad” brought to mind many connections and contrasts with George Bennion’s haunting BYU Studies essay, “My Gentle Father.”
I came across a lovely erotic poem about Mary’s husband, Chick, in Dialogue or Sunstone several years ago, but didn’t have time to search it out in preparing this review. I believe the last line is “Ah! Connect.”
So I’ll close by bringing this essay around to the connection I started with. I looked up Mary’s review of my father’s book Moods: Of Late to get the exact wording of a quote I’ve been carrying around for decades, and found it was also a review of Emma Lou Thayne’s Once in Israel.
Mary has a long paragraph about a poem inspired by Emma Lou’s husband grabbing two left shoes, “So all day he’s been going in uncalculated circles—to everyone’s delight.” The paragraph ends, “All this from a pair of mismatched shoes!”
Right after reading the review, I read these words in “Marriage and Printmaking.” “Chick’s slow and sure temperament partly derives from an inherited physical disability that requires him to ‘take thought’ of every step. This has taught him patience and durability. He has also developed a brand of fearlessness somewhat daunting to people with phobias like me” (35).
Oh, that’s why she was so intrigued by the episode with the shoes, I thought, savoring a moment of grace.
And finally, I started out as a fiction writer, publishing a long story with an unindexable title, the longest from my thesis, in Dialogue 23:2, Summer 1990. The Association for Mormon Letters and AML-List diverted me into personal essay, and I developed a blend of personal essay and literary criticism and theory.
“Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays” reminds me of what draws me to the personal essay as a form, how rich it is with possibilities and connections. Besides bringing a lot of joyful reading, I hope this book will inspire you to write your own essay chains so the people who come after you will know and love and celebrate your humanity, even if you didn’t have to walk from Nauvoo to Salt Lake through five-foot snow drifts uphill both ways.