“I rebel - - therefore we exist.” - - Albert Camus in L’Homme révolté (1951), translated as The
Rebel by Anthony Bower. Throughout this Nobel Prize-qualifying philosophical work, Camus is
at pains to distinguish rebellion from revolution, seeing as noble the impulse and action of
rebellion because it affirms human solidarity, whereas revolution tends toward ideological
murder. Thus, as he writes, “rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.” He
concludes, as follows:
I alone, in one sense, support the common dignity that I cannot allow myself or others to
debase. This individualism is in no sense pleasure, it is a perpetual struggle and,
sometimes, unparalled joy when it reaches the heights of intrepid compassion. We shall
choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, the generosity
of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our
brothers are breathing under the same sky; justice is a living thing. Now is born that
strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again renounce to a
later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter food, the harsh wind
off the sea, the ancient dawn forever renewed. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall
remake the soul of our time…. ( emphasis added ) |
Each of the co-protagonists of A Strange Joy is a rebel, the woman against the conventions
and restrictions of the aristocracy of wealth, that she may serve others as a nurse, the man against
the use of the atomic bomb, that children as yet unborn will not have to live under its reign of
terror, but in what he envisions in a multiform metaphor as a New World.
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Trinc DeRoman knows herself as the unwanted child of self-centered parents and as the
privileged captive of a feudal aristocracy of New England industrialists, the Heartwells. Only
Uncle Doc, personal physician to Teddy Roosevelt, understands her yearning for affection and
for an independent life. When she is seventeen, at boarding school away from the iron rule of the
Heartwells, she meets Dr. Aeneas Caldwell, a junior physics professor at Vassar who mirrors the
moving spirit of her life as she, his. But he suddenly disappears. Only gradually does she learn
that the patriarch of the Heartwells, Grandpa Deck, had discovered the affair and attempted to
have Aeneas castrated; further, that Aeneas had enlisted in the army, survived the war in France,
had gone to study the new physics in Cambridge and had not, after all, been permanently
maimed.
Can their love be salvaged? Should she try, without his knowledge, to seek to effect his cure?
While nursing victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, she discovers her vocation, then with
Uncle Doc’s help defies the family and undergoes nurses’ training in a despotic New York
hospital. She proves competent in spite of slim odds. Briefly she dates Dr. Troy Turner, an easygoing
surgeon, but there is something sinister about him that reminds her of Grandpa Deck. She
turns her attention to having Aeneas cured by a spiritual healer in Switzerland; the cure is
successful, he returns to America, they marry, and the marriage prospers for fifteen years as they
raise a family in a North Carolina city where he is employed at a university.
Aeneas Caldwell is determined to rise above an unpromising background: his father has been
an improvident potter and religious fanatic who uprooted the family in the Carolinas, removed it
to rural New Mexico, abandoned it there and commited suicide in Chaco Canyon. Aeneas’s love
of science accordingly has a missionary aspect, for he believes that science must have the noble
aim of setting humankind free. At first, the discovery of nuclear fission seems to promote such an
ideal, and so he buries himself in secret work for the development of an atomic bomb. But he
neglects Trinc. Taking their two children with her to New York, she resumes her career, little
suspecting that she is precipitating in Aeneas the infamous mid-life crisis. He becomes infatuated
with a beautiful young Japanese-American artist, Blevyn Hayakawa, only to be "saved " by a
tragedy when she is herded into a concentration camp in California. Shortly thereafter he is
recruited to work in Los Alamos.
In the period, 1943-45, a contrite Trinc moves to New Mexico, works as a public-health nurse,
and is reconciled with Aeneas. Realizing at last the scientists have lost control of the bomb
project, he wishes to register his protest by quitting it. But a vindictive Troy Turner, now an
intelligence officer at Los Alamos, threatens, if he quits, to have him blacklisted at all American
universities because of his alleged affair with Blevyn, an "enemy alien." Trinc agrees that Aeneas
must follow his conscience. After the bomb is tested at Trinity, he resigns from the project,
comes home in time to prevent Turner’s rape of his daughter, and in the struggle may lose his life —but Trinc arrives on the scene, kills Turner with Uncle Doc’s revolver, and, in effect, redeems
her family’s honor.
They go into voluntary exile in Cambridge, England. Although he is dying of leukemia
caused by over- exposure to radiation at Trinity, when Aeneas fixes his gaze upon the inspiring
statue of Sir Isaac Newton, he feels certain that he has upheld the integrity of science and, in
doing so, expands the power of love in ever- widening circles. Trinc will devote her services to
work with the International Red Cross, having come a long way in declaring independence from
a puritan and excessively masculine society. Blevyn, too, has flourished through the power of
love. Following her release from concentration camp, she finds success as an artist in New York
and will marry Uncle Doc’s former chauffeur, Jun, a decorated hero of the Japanese-American
442nd Regimental Combat Team.
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James R. Bennett, in his citation of this novel for the PeaceWriting Award, expressed his
appreciation in the following words:
“This major novel offers a vision of hope for the future. Filled with numerous vividly
portrayed characters in a powerful story of personal emancipation from family and national
limitations, the novel marks a significant contrast from the soap operas and romances which
prevail in popular literature… Away from the coldness and cruelty of her wealthy parents and a
family-first enclosure, Trinc moves to expanding circles of love and service. Rising out of
poverty, war, and suicide, Aeneas likewise discovers an enlarging life. Each moves from varieties
of exclusive Puritanism to an inclusiveness of a William Blake. And they find each other in their
struggles for liberation. Trinc becomes wife and mother, and then nurse to the interned Japanese-
Americans during WWII and later a nurse for the International Red Cross. Aeneas chooses
physics and atomic research, for a while descending into the building of the atomic bomb with
Oppenheimer in New Mexico, until rejecting its destructiveness prior to the July 15, 1945,
testing. He writes and lectures on ‘The New Physics and the Coming World of Conscience.’
Their children and their growing extended family enjoy the head start provided by parents who
are in the vanguard of the New World.”
“Blackburn has a way of making epochal issues poignant and personal, and
creating characters of psychological depth that will invite worthwhile speculation on
the part of those who read for pleasure, and study on the part of those of us who would
trace the lineage of modern tendencies of thought to the inner life of our forebears. In
Blackburn these strong characters may be seen to struggle as intelligently and
knowledgeably as we must have done to escape or uphold the conventions of their day,
define their purposes, imbue their acts with feelings beside those of self-interest, and
besides money and property create a legacy of character and outlook which will be
strong enough to shape the lives of their children.” – Jeff Putnam, novelist and formerly
Editor- in-Chief of Baskerville Publishers.
“It does one of my favorite things – one of the hardest things- a heavy message given
with a light hand. And it is also a neat romance… I was at the wedding of Lady
Chatterley and Mellors and I gave that marriage six months… The love between Trinc
and Aeneas is not silly” - - Joanne Greenberg, author of eighteen books of fiction, including I
Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
“You have a powerful story to tell. Most of my reading was focused on the areas involving
Japanese Americans.” – Bill Hosokawa, a retired editor of the Denver Post and foremost
authority on Japanese American experience.
“An epic piece of work. Epic in its use of space, epic in its use of time. You deal with big
ideas and big issues, and do it, of course, with interesting people and interesting writing…. One
of the things I liked best was the narrator‘s voice – generous and
thoughtful of the reader, capable of soaring the heights when necessary, capable of down- toearth
writing when that was called for .” – Henry Hager, novelist and Professor of Journalism,
University of Missouri
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