Elegy in Blue: Mark Helprin Still Believes in Heroes

Reading Mark Helprin’s Elegy in Blue feels like visiting an old friend, a friend who is clearly aging, (as am I) but still his brilliant self. Readers like me who have followed Helprin across four decades of novels know the territory well: a noble hero, a luminous woman, evil that must be confronted, and prose so beautiful and so funny that even ordinary scenes seem touched by poetry or stand up comedy. At age 78, Helprin remains unmistakably himself.

Any discussion of Elegy in Blue must begin with A Winter’s Tale (1983), the novel that established Helprin as one of America’s most distinctive writers. That extraordinary work of magical realism transformed New York City and the Hudson Valley into a mythic landscape inhabited by the unforgettable Peter Lake and the ethereal Beverly Penn. The novel, Helprin's second, stretched reality almost to the breaking point, yet somehow remained emotionally true and solid. It remains for me Helprin’s masterpiece and one of the most beautiful American novels of the last half century.

Much of Helprin’s later work has been more grounded (at least partially) in recognizable reality. Whether set in New York, Paris, the American West, or aboard a US Navy gunboat, his novels increasingly inhabit the world we know. Yet the essential Helprin vision remains unchanged. His heroes are honorable, capable men devoted to family, duty, beauty, and civilization itself. They are gentle when gentleness is called for and utterly ruthless when confronted by evil. His heroines are equally remarkable—intelligent, beautiful, courageous, and possessed of an almost impossible competence. Realistic they may not always be, but they are part of the moral universe Helprin has spent a lifetime creating.

In Paris in the Present Tense (2017), the seventy-five-year-old cellist Jules Lacour displayed a vigor and competence that seemed remarkable for a man of his age. Early in that novel, Lacour intervenes to stop Islamic terrorists from murdering an Orthodox Jew, killing two of the terrorists. Lacour escapes by swimming the Seine at night through barge and tour boat traffic. Beyond improbable, but devoted Helprin readers ride the wave of fantasy.

In Elegy in Blue, Helprin pushes the geriatric hero theme even further. His unnamed protagonist is eighty-two years old. Three years earlier, at seventy-nine, he intervened when a young Nazi who had volunteered with ISIS attacked students and parents at an Orthodox Shul in Brooklyn, killing seven before the protagonist ended the massacre by tackling the terrorist and breaking his neck, yet within Helprin’s fictional universe, it feels plausible.

What matters is not realism but aspiration. Helprin has spent his career writing about what human beings might be at their best. His heroes are embodiments of courage, loyalty, and moral clarity. In an age of antiheroes and moral ambiguity, Helprin continues to believe in heroism. 

The pleasures of Elegy in Blue are the pleasures that longtime readers have come to expect. The prose sparkles with wit and observation. The dialogue is intelligent and often very funny. The action unfolds with confidence. The final major action of the novel will surprise no one familiar with Helprin’s work, yet it remains deeply satisfying because it fulfills the promises the novel has been making from its opening pages.

As I read the book over a weekend, I found myself reflecting on the unusual trajectory of Helprin’s career. Many writers become more cynical with age, especially a writer with profoundly conservative politics who is a scholar at the Claremont institute. Helprin has remained remarkably consistent. He still believes in beauty, love, courage, and civilization. He still believes that evil exists and must be opposed. And he still writes as though great men and women walk among us.

Whether one accepts Helprin’s vision or not, there is no one else writing quite like him. The title says this is the final novel, but maybe there will be an 86-year-old who pushes a terrorist into the path of a Q train with his cane then disappears into the labyrinth of Atlantic Ave--Barclays Center Station.  

Elegy in Blue is not Heprin's greatest novel, it is the latest variation on themes he has been exploring since Refiner's Fire, his first novel.  For readers who have traveled with him through those decades, it is a welcome return to familiar ground and a reminder that Mark Helprin remains one of America’s great writers. 

Memoir from an Antproof Case

Tonight I finished a book I thought I had read more than 20 years ago, but I had not. I had read a couple of chapters and lost interest. But I have read all of Helprin's other novels and short stories, so I decided to give it another try.

I like it better now, but having finished it, I will not keep it. I won't read it again.  It is the memoir of a grumpy 80 year old. Worse, it is a grumpy 80 year old who loathes coffee. He attacks espresso machines on occasion and has ended friendships and marriages because of his anti-coffee obsession.

For a coffee lover like me, his rants are painful.  Worse I am in the midst of reading the 15th book in the Master and Commander series in which the central characters are two great friends who share a love of music and coffee.  And I just spent a week with a good friend from the Army in the 1970s who has been a Franciscan monk in Germany since shortly after leaving the military during the Cold War.  Bruder Timotheus and I have very different lives, but we share a love of good coffee.

I realized as I read the book, it is also something of a blueprint for my favorite novel by Helprin: Paris in the Present Tense. In both novels the central character is at the end of his life telling a story that begins with losing both of his parents in a brutal, senseless murder.  Both lead lives of love, loss, promise, courage and failed expectations.

But Paris left me wanting to re-read the book and mark passages, which I did. Antproof  left me smiling thinking that this was the trial run before the book I love most.

Since it is Helprin, there are brilliant passages:
The human soul is ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful, shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are best. They last into time as inviolably as light.

And Helprin's books always have humor.  This book begins: Call me Oscar Progresso, or for that matter call me anything you want.... following that first line I was ready for a grumpy old narrator.

And the book is dedicated--To Juan Valdez.

Loving the Book is not the Same as Liking the Author

Mark Helprin, I love his books, hate his politics

 My two favorite living authors are very different men. I have read all of the novels of each man and re-read my favorite novel by each. I plan to re-read more and, of course, read anything else they write. C.S. Lewis said “Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.” He also cautioned that a reader who loves an author’s work should not believe he would like the company of the author.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Noble Prize in Literature, 2017

I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro in 2014 on the recommendation of a good friend. The first novel I read by him was “Remains of the Day.” In January of this year I finished “The Unconsoled,” making my reading of Ishiguro complete. Two years ago I re-read Remains of the Day, still my favorite, although “TheBuried Giant” is a close second. The Buried Giant was published in March 2015. Two months later Ishiguro spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia.  After hearing Ishiguro speak, I was quite convinced I would love to have a drink with him. His Nobel Prize address last year made me even more sure I would love to hang out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself. That address is moving, brilliant and sad, the common threads in everything Ishiguro writes.

In February 1983, when I was still in graduate school, I first read Mark Helprin in the New Yorker magazine.  I read the story “Jesse Honey Mountain Guide” in the last issue of the month.  The story was a chapter in his second novel “A Winter’s Tale” published the following September. I was hooked.  I read his first novel and two short story collections published to that point. In the years since I read every other novel as each published. I have re-read Winters Tale and plan to re-read Helprin’s most recent novel “Paris in the Present Tense” this year or next year. “Paris in the Present Tense” is now my favorite.

I was so taken with Jesse Honey, I wrote paper in grad school about Helprin’s precise use of exaggeration in the story, comparing to the Walter Mitty stories by James Thurber.  

Over the years I read Helprin’s editorials in the Wall Street Journal and other essays. He is a conservative, so I never imagined we could have a totally friendly conversation, but in 2015 and 2016 Helprin spoke out against Trump and seemed to be a Never-Trump conservative.  Maybe we could have a drink?

Alas, that was in 2016. After Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, Helprin wrote in Trump’s defense in The Claremont Review of Books. Next month Helprin is speaking in New York. I have never heard Helprin speak, and I would like to, but I won’t be attending the event.  He is the featured guest at “Socrates in the City” an occasional gathering organized by author and total Trumpian Eric Metaxas. In 2011, Metaxas wrote a biography of a martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Despite writing about a victim of the Nazis, Metaxas is a full-throated supporter of a man whose campaign was built on the Birther form of racism and spread to every other non-white group as soon as the campaign began.

So I won’t be paying Metaxas to hear Helprin speak. In addition to Helprin, the event is a launch party for a new Children’s book by Metaxas “Donald Drains the Swamp.” Metaxas is a very funny guy. He is one of the creators of the “Veggie Tales” series. But, sadly, in his new book he is not ironical. Metaxas really sees Trump as the savior of the western world. The irony runs the other way though: no one in Washington has ever been more corrupt than the Swamp-Creature-in-Chief. 

When I think of Veggie Tales now, I imagine Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber being thrown into a Black Car driven by the Veggie Gestapo. Bob and Larry plead that wanted to salute The Orange Fuhrer, weakly protesting, “But we don’t have arms!”

Larry and Bob

I will keep reading Helprin, because the things he writes, like all creations, are from, not of, the person who created them.  And 70-year-old conservatives can become cranky—at least that’s what I’ve heard. 

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In Sunlight and Shadow by Mark Helprin

On the train to Philadelphia yesterday, I finished Mark Helpin's latest novel, In Sunlight and Shadow.  I came pretty close to crying.  Helprin is a soldier who writes love stories.  In this most recent book, the central love story was vivid, between two people iridescent with love.  The love story is set in New York, from the eastern end of Long Island to the reservoirs north of the city.  And it is a love story about New York City, set in the years just after World War 2.

For those who have read other of Helprin's books, this one is more down to earth.  The exaggerations in A Winter's Tale, in A Soldier of the Great War and A Dove of the East rival Mark Twain in being colossal and very American.  In Sunlight and Shadow, the hero lives for love and honor and finally is caught between the demands of both.  The same choice comes to the hero of many of Helprin's tales, but in the latest novel, the choice is more vivid and final.

If you think modern literary novels have squishy irresolute heroes (if they can be called heroes) and you would like to read a love story with strong admirable characters, this novel is for you.  As is almost everything Mark Helprin writes.