Dena Hunt’s Jazz and the Teller of Good Tales

Dena Hunt’s Jazz and the Teller of Good Tales
Wiseblood Books, 2020; 218 pp., $13.00

A blurb by Dr. Stephen Mirarchi on the cover of Dena Hunt’s latest book, Jazz & Other Stories, is worth quoting:

Dena Hunt demonstrates an impressive aesthetic range in this collection, from the Walker Percy-inspired novella Jazz to the more haunting and immediately arresting short stories akin to Flannery O’Connor meeting John Updike. Indeed, the force of Hunt’s post-Jamesian psychological realism marks her as a worthy inheritor of Caroline Gordon’s mantle, that underrated novelist whose immaculately rendered sentences drew readers into the irrupting worlds of the divine and the fallen. And constantly flickering at the edges of Hunt’s vision is wisdom incarnate—and the fear that we might be seized by that very love.

What Dr. Mirarchi writes is insightful and true. I also thought of Walker Percy when I read Jazz. But what I would like to do here is to emphasize another, more important aspect of Dena’s writing and, by extension, of the writing of almost all the authors of fiction I have met. I don’t know Dr. Mirarchi, but—as a fellow lover of literature—I believe he would be sympathetic to what I share here.

Dena and I are friends, and I am one of her beta readers. I read an earlier draft of Jazz several years ago, and had a chance to go over the manuscript of the complete book before it was finalized in print. These are truly wonderful stories—highly readable, with depth, palpable characters, a strong sense of time and place, and unusual insight and wisdom.

Above all, they are stories. Dena is a Southern writer and writes in the Southern tradition; she is a Catholic writer and writes in the Catholic tradition. She is as aware of literary history and theory as most educated readers. But above all this, and more importantly, she is a storyteller. As she wrote to me not long ago:

Verily—stories are indeed just stories. If I were to choose what appellation I most prefer as a writer, it would be A Teller of Good Tales.

What is it to be a storyteller, a teller of good tales?

Stories grow in our minds and hearts. They may be started by something we see—a woman crossing the street, a family sitting together at a restaurant. Or by a word or an object, a color, a place, or an idea. However they start, if not nipped in the bud, they begin to grow—characters appear, meet, talk with one another, act. They move within a setting, an atmosphere. All this becomes more and more real—I (the author) am there, am with the characters—when I write about them, I am the characters.

All of this takes place, initially, in the heart and mind. Many of the stories are stillborn—they simply don’t have enough depth and weight to survive. But those that do survive continue to grow. It is not a process governed by the author (I think of a book my wife has on garden parables—the new gardener may think she plants, organizes, and controls the garden, but by the third year of gardening, she knows that the garden has a rhythm and being all its own.)

For those stories that survive, the author has a choice: to write them or not to write them. When we write them, a certain number work well, a certain number do not. When we don’t write them, they cry out within us, plague us. Some, if left unwritten long enough, they wither and die, but lie like corpses in our memory, haunting us. Others remain inside us—sometimes for years, even decades—adamant, calling to be born.

But those we do write down, those that work, that we craft (we do have responsibility for crafting them, though they have a life of their own)—those are the ones that speak, that satisfy, that our readers relate to—inevitably finding truths in them of which we were unaware.

Yes, we write out of traditions. In us is everything we have ever read, every person we have ever met, every experience we have ever had. These—and the rhythms of our language and culture—right our craft, help form the stories—but they are not the stories themselves.

It is this—or some permutation of it (every writer and every reader is distinct)—that I believe lies at the heart of Dena’s statement that “Stories are indeed just stories.” It is this creative birth that has inspired storytellers since the beginning of time, that—while we read or listen to them—makes stories more real than the world around us, that has led to stories being as essential to us (writers and readers alike) as food and drink.

Dena’s talent as a storyteller is fully alive in Jazz & Other Stories. Each story is unique and, most importantly, each keeps us turning the pages, wanting to know the characters better, wanting to know what they will do, what will happen to them.

It is difficult to describe the fascination of these stories without spoilers, but I will do my best. In “A Train in Germany,” tension mounts to an almost unbearable pitch. A woman in “The Funeral,” arriving early for an old college friend’s memorial service, sits in her car in the parking lot and—thinking, remembering—begins to see herself in a new way. A young priest in “Lavábo”—caught in sin—graphically and hauntingly sees the saving power of sacrament.

“Retreat”—which follows two women, strangers—turns upside down our concept of who is (for want of a better term) saved and who needs to be saved. In “Catherine’s Garden,” a seemingly passive, middle-class widow reveals—without realizing it—a deep understanding of faith.

One of my favorites is “Pear Trees.” A young woman is (partially due to her own fault) in a bad relationship. The need for decision, for action, builds so strongly that I—the reader—feel that, if someone doesn’t act, I’ll have to do so myself.

“Jazz”—the title story—is a novella. As always, Dena writes her short stories from what she calls “inside.” I believe she means roughly what I mean when I say that I become each of my characters as I write about them.

In “Jazz” we are inside William Cauley, history professor (one of six or so people in the world who know most about Charlemagne), chairman of his department, fifty-plus years old, life-long New Orleanian. His wife, Lauren, who delayed her education in order to accompany William, has earned her doctorate in special education and received a tenure-track teaching position in southeastern Georgia. William plans to resign his teaching position to move to Georgia with her. But this entails leaving not only his job, but his life—their home, his lifelong friendship ties, the city whose culture flows through his veins.

Not, perhaps, an uncommon theme, but it is uncommonly well handled. Dena weaves together inner and outer elements that go into making a rich wholeness. Not only is William changing—in a sense, dying—but so is his discipline. He had “lived for History, for love of it, and belief in it—belief in its value, its transcending value above all endeavors, its immortality. And History was dying.”

History of Western Civilization I and II had been a two-semester requirement for all majors for so many years, then it became required for only arts and humanities, and finally it had become a mere elective. Enrollment had declined rapidly in the past several years.

And a newer, star professor advocates a “controversial interpretive theory”—essentially that there is no objective meaning in history—that William thinks absurd.

But worse than these external factors is that William finds that he himself does not care anymore. Except for his love for Lauren (and even there, to a certain extent), he feels that nothing has much meaning.

Dena has done an outstanding job of getting inside an aging intellectual male’s mind. She understands the need for the mind to have something—almost anything—to chew on, to think about, to apply itself to: the restlessness that goes with that—the need to look at meaning beyond the intellect—and the scariness of doing so.

For William, this is particularly scary. Although introspective to a point, he has spent his life evading facing mortality. When he was seven years old, a classmate died of meningitis, and William suddenly became aware of death: “After that . . . we just play pretend, to ourselves and to each other, and we get very angry if anyone stops the pretend game,” pretending that death does not exist—and, in the process, retreating from much that is meaningful in life.

For instance, in marriage:

William loved his wife, sometimes with an intensity that almost frightened him when he thought about it, so he’d learned not to think about it too much. Years ago, on some late-night talk show, a guest . . . answered the question, “How do you account for your happy marriage?” by saying that he believed he had a happy marriage because he and his wife had never had a single in-depth conversation. Perhaps this was true of his [William’s] own marriage.

And indeed it seems to be—William and Lauren, though loving each other in a comradely sense, never seem to really want to know, to deeply understand, one another.

Like most New Orleanians, William is nominally and culturally Catholic, but neither he nor Lauren participate in the Church. He contrasts the “corruption that seeped pervasively through the upper-class New Orleans society to which his family belonged”—where (he feels) people pretend—to his younger sister, who married an uneducated Cajun carpenter, has seven children in a vibrantly Catholic family, and is deeply happy.

The story is played out against the background of jazz. Thinking about Joanna, a young graduate student from the North (whom he loves), William realizes

as literature students discovered sometimes to their disappointment, words are not the language of New Orleans, but music—specifically, jazz. For tourists, that’s a sound, but for New Orleanians, it’s more like a pulsebeat, and notably absent from the rhythms of jazz is any sort of work ethic, a trait that caused Joanna constant irritation. He tried to explain to her that it didn’t mean New Orleanians didn’t work, just that they think of getting up in the morning and going to work not as a matter of discipline . . . but as a personal existential choice. . . . The same was true of planning anything; there must always remain room for improvisation.

A wonderful book. The characters are alive. There are insights, wisdom, and points to ponder on almost every page: well worth reading and rereading.