Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Smick, John

English

Bhenatu

Nerenhausen, Amy

Interview with Bill Devall

Lompoc Snapshot, 1964

Smith, Lauren

The Self as Object in Critical Readings of Jane Eyre

Kennon, Robert

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Madole, David

BOOK REVIEW
David Madole
A Long Desire by Evan S. Connell. The North Point Press, 1988.
EVAN S. CONNELL, whose collection of historical essays, A Long Desire, 
has been re-released by The North Point Press, belongs to that curious 
group of authors whose work is both respected and ignored. In a 
recent profile of Evan S. Connell in the journal Ploughshares, Gerald 
Shapiro describes a career of hard work, praise, and obscurity. During 
the past thirty years Connell has written good books, over ten of 
them —six novels, three collections of short fiction, and two volumes 
of poetry—and they were well reviewed. But his career never reached 
commercial critical mass, and by the nineteen sixties, Connell, then in 
his forties, was no longer able to support himself with his writing, and 
he took a job with the California State Unemployment office.
Connell achieved commercial and critical success in 1959 with his 
first novel, Mrs. Bridge, a semi-autobiographical portrait of an afflu­
ent, mid-western matron. Mrs. Bridge is a masterful work of realism, a 
midwestern Madame Bovary, with the detached irony and dreamlike 
clarity of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Frank Conroy’s 
Stop-Time. In Mrs. Bridge, Connell begins to explore what will prove to 
be a lifelong preoccupation with authenticity—of how our desire to 
become something more than we are, something real, takes us a 
half-step out of life into the willy-nilly dream worlds his characters 
inhabit.
His 1966 novel, The Diary of a Rapist, is one of the best of these 
portraits, and its protagonist, Earl Summerfield, has been compared 
with Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. But The Diary of a Rapist doesn’t have 
the seduction of Crime and Punishment. Earl Summerfield’s misogyny is
153
apparent and repelling early in the book, and his character dominates 
the novel, without hope.
Which might have something to do with why Connell’s fiction gets 
great reviews and doesn’t sell—sometimes his portraits are excruciat­
ingly real and a little harsh—and the upturn of Connell’s fortunes 
with his recent non-fiction offerings. In his histories and essays, 
released from the constraints of realism he places on himself in his 
novels, a little bit more of Connell comes through in the telling.
In The Son of the Morning Star, Connell’s long rumination on the 
conflicting ambitions and dizzy schemes of the American West, and 
their fruit of slaughter, Connell embraces hs characters’ delusions, 
almost celebrates them. The myth which surrounds Custer (a tall tale 
which Custer did his utmost to perpetuate) becomes a part of the 
story, the fantasy which propelled the Seventh Calvalry into a muddle 
of death at the Little Bighorn.
Since the success of Son of the Morning Star, The North Point Press 
has begun re-releasing Connell’s early books. The Bridge novels are 
fine reads, and stand with The Diary of a Rapist, The Connoiseur, and his 
book-length poems, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel and 
Points for a Compass Rose, as his best creative work.
But Connell gained his wider audience with non-fiction, and A Long 
Desire, a collection of historical essays re-released this years, exhibits 
the same wit and vision of Son of Morning Star. The eleven essays in A 
Long Desire are loosely organized by their common subject—the 
tendency of adventurers through the ages to leave comfortable lives in 
the face of unknown dangers to see what they can see, and Connell’s 
curious relation to their exploits. In “Various Tourists,” Connell 
describes his fascination,
In 1939, when Richard Halliburton tried to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk, I 
was a fourteen year old stamp collector. Never doubting he would make it, I paid 
something like $1.50 to have him deliver a commemorative envelope. It seems to 
me that he was supposed to hand cancel the stamp to authenticate each letter he 
was carrying. It’s been a while, but I remember how I felt when that junk was 
overdue, annoyed and resentful. I wanted my commemorative envelope. I remem­
ber being uncomfortable with my attitude, nevertheless it was so; Halliburton’s life,
I could not deny, meant less to me than a letter he was carrying.
These were the adventures which fascinated Connell as a boy, 
growing up in the stultifying atmosphere he parodies in Mrs. Bridge. 
The essays in A Long Desire are concerned not so much with the 
adventures themselves, but with the passions which inspired the likes 
of Marco Polo, Cortes, Coronado, and lesser-known explorers like Ibn 
Batuta, the fourteenth-century Arab whose travels made “the journey 
of Marco Polo look like a walk around the block,” or the Greek 
Pytheas, who purportedly discovered Iceland, “Thule,” four hundred
154
years before the birth of Christ, and the armchair investors who 
cheered them on and funded them.
All of the essays are characterized by Connell’s firm voice, brisk 
pacing, and his eye for irony and detail. In “The Sea Must Have an 
Endynge,” Connell recounts the fated journeys of Cabot, Frobisher, 
and Hudson in their search for the Northwest Passage. Funded by 
greedy investors, fueled by their desire to find what Frobisher called 
“the only thing of the world that was left undone and whereby a 
notable mind might be made famous and fortunate,” the explorers 
and their crews end up, one after another, stuck in the ice which 
blocks the passage. It wasn’t until 1903 that the Norwegian Amundsen 
finally skirted through the passage with six men in a small herring 
boat, the first to make the passage, with the possible exception of the 
HSS Octavius, which Connell suggests navigated the passage in 1762, 
but not in the style or direction we might expect. In 1775, fourteen 
years later, the captain of another ship spotted the Octavius mired in 
an iceberg west of Greenland, whereupon boarding the Octavious, he 
found preserved the frozen crew, and a log detailing their departure 
from San Francisco, and their mounting problems with ice.
The haunting vision of the Octavius—the failed efforts of 
expeditions—are a common theme in the essays; fired by some lie or 
misapprehension, the overloaded and misinformed adventurers are 
most often thwarted after unknowingly stumbling onto some unrec­
ognized treasure.
The essays in A Long Desire explore the desires which fuel the truths 
we create, Coronado’s seven cities of gold, always “just a little farther 
north” in the prairies of Kansas, or the quite fabulous “Prester John.” 
A mysterious letter to the Pope in 1165 describes him:
. . . the Great Khan’s daughter [was] his wife. Twelve archbishops attended him, 
who were themselves mighty lords. His chamberlain was a king. His cupbearer was 
a king. His steward was a primate and a king. His marshal was a king and 
archimandrite. Beneath his banner lay seventy-two kingdoms whose monarches, 
each utterly subservient, ruled several lesser Kings. (75)
Despite the dubious authenticity of this resume, emissary after 
unlucky emissary was sent to search for Prester John, “because bad 
news kept trickling out of Asia and [a couple of Popes thought] it 
would be helpful to get in touch with Prester John” (82).
But the essays aren’t simple histories. Although A Long Desire is 
supplemented with a bibliography of over a hundred book-length 
references, the essays aren’t footnoted, and are packed with so many 
details, turns, and wry asides, that they read like surrealistic dramas 
rather than documented stabs at the truth. Connell presents so many 
contradictory explanations that he seems to be challenging the readers 
to pick their own truths. You get the feeling that Connell might swap
155
beers and talk with you about it if you cared to read all the references 
and make a better stab than he did; that he would be delighted, rather 
than disturbed, to swap theories.
Because it is the tales themselves which dominate A Long Desire, the 
element of storytelling is an important part of Connell’s narration. 
Like a Red Smith column, his accounts begin to take on a life of their 
own, removed from the related event. Connell celebrates the self- 
aggrandizement of his adventurers’ tales with an incredulous tone 
which evolves into something like adoration, which all adds to the 
curious, self-reflexive quality of these essays.
In “The Aztec Treasure House,” Connell explores the hidden 
desires which drove him to purchase a piece of Olmec pottery, the 
cracked figure of a woman’s form, etched during thousands of years 
in the soil by innumerable root coils. After involved descriptions of the 
Olmec culture, artistic tradition, and his own piece, which seems to 
justify his admiration and purchase of the figure, Connell finds 
himself faced with a less enthusiastic neighbor’s troubling question, 
“Why did you buy it?,” which sends Connell on a self-investigative 
search of why we value what we value.
Connell finds the answer in a San Francisco flea market.
I recognized the book from a distance, long before I read the title. It was “The 
Aztec Treasure House,” and adventure book for boys. I had checked it out from my 
high school library at least four times. . . .  I have tried several times to re-read it, 
but I cannot get very far. . . . Skipping across half remembered pages, I come to 
these lines: “Hello, Professor!,” Young called out, “have you found any antiques?”
It is the same theme Connell explores in his novel, The Connoisseur— 
the obscure desires which possess us to do what we do and believe 
what we believe, and their unlikely conclusions. None of the adven­
turers in A Long Desire seem to find what they went looking for, 
although they find quite a bit else. As Connell explains in “Various 
Tourists,” “I have come to realize that certain people do not travel the 
way most of us travel; not only do they sometimes choose odd vehicles, 
they take unusual trips for incomprehensible reasons.”
And even after the most fantastic journeys, the receptions back 
home seem mixed. Those with the most remarkable tales seem to be 
the ones who are beheaded, exiled, or sent right back out again into 
the wilderness from which they came. The Victorian explorer Mary 
Kingsley’s insistence,
that African Society was as meticulously structured as European society; that 
missionaries were doing more harm than good; that traders were not villainous 
swindlers taking advantage of childlike natives; and that taxing a man’s property, 
such as his hut, outraged the African’s sense of justice,
fell upon deaf ears, perhaps because it was not what the British
156
government wanted to hear, and Mary Kingsley, being a woman, was 
not at all who they wanted to hear it from.
“As to Pytheas. After his tremendous trip he was ridiculed—which 
does sometimes happen to story tellers,” Connell laments in “Various 
Tourists.” But not always. As a young man, Connell set out to reach 
his readers through brilliant fictional realism. But in his histories and 
essays, he appears to have found a much more fruitful route.
157


A Long Desire by Evan S. Connell

Anderson, D.

DELUGE
D. Anderson
It rained facsimiles that day.
Old timers sat
Daringly out on the porch,
Rubbing their chins,
Watching
It all come down.
They knew the network of family 
And food they grew up with was gone.
We stayed indoors,
Stretched under the bed.
To catch one 
On the head
Would have been bad medicine.
The next day, streets were cluttered 
With images of streets,
Trees with trees 
& Everyone denied 
Her own true picture.
125


Deluge

Front matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Adelman, Karen

Interview with Elizabeth Tallent

Flanagan, Tim

I ROCK
Tim Flanagan
I sit on my bed,
pillows at my lower back,
legs straight-forward, feet together,
hands clasped behind my knees,
and I rock to the radio,
back and forth: a metronome.
I am twenty-six years, three months,
and twenty-four days old,
and been a rocker as long as I remember.
My mother says I started
when she took away my jum ping chair.
I rock every day, if possible, 
for half an hour or more.
It’s a kind of therapy.
I haven’t needed any other.
No one knows I rock.
I rock in secret
and have never been observed, 
except as a little boy.
As far as I know,
I’m the only person in the world 
ever to rock the way I rock.
I hope that’s so. I want to be that proud.
131


I Rock

Not a member yet