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SUDDENLY A MORTAL SPLENDOR Excerpt from Suddenly a Mortal Splendor Once in September of ’28 a boy named Woolpack and called Boy visited the Grand Canyon. Most of the way he slept in the saddle behind his grandfather, hour after hour in the hot dry air amidst the steady clatter of hooves on a rocky trail, scents of sagebrush and piñon mingling with J. Byron Woolpack’s strong odor, Boy lulled in and out of sleep…. Then he was wakened by the snorting of the horse to his presence on a rim of light-gray limestone but a few feet away from a chasm of appalling depth in which clouds drifted in the belly of the wind and flat-topped mesas floated like an archipelago. He slid to the ground. Grandpa vaulted from the saddle, tethered the horse, came and took Boy to that rim of what seemed the outermost and innermost sublimity. Grandpa pointed vaguely southwards to masses of color - - purples, reds, yellows, blues - - above the abysmal black through which a thin river ran. “See there, Boy!” Grandpa’s voice, for once, could not contain exuberance. “That’s where we’re putting her, by dom and thunderation! Four times higher than the Empire State with more stone in her than all the pyramids, more steel than all the naval vessels of the world! She’ll make the wonder of the ages! Far as the eye can see - - water, blue water, Lake Woolpack, greatest man-made lake in creation - - an ocean, Boy, an ocean right here lapping at your feet! And down a ways further, by dom, we’ll excavate so much the Panama Canal will dry up with envy. We’re taking water to the cities, Boy. One day, tens of millions of folks will wake up in a tropical paradise instead of a dom furnace and say to themselves one word of regeneration like a god’s!” He paused and gripped Boy by the back of the neck. “What d’ye think the word is, Boy?” Half a century in the future we stood on the awesome height, Woolpack and I. He spat blood and answered his grandfather’s question as his soul might have done in childhood could it have spoken: “No! The word was no. Not only no, but Hell, no!” Back then, Boy speechless and Grandpa standing and staring like Moses on the Mount, a clap of thunder burst below them and reverberated through the Canyon, a giant’s mad dance on a drum. Bolts of lightning slashed pinnacles and spires. “What’s the word, Boy?” He had to answer, but Grandpa answered for him. “Opportunity,” he muttered and sucked upper lip until its smacking sound exploded. Then Grandpa seized Boy’s wrist in a vise-like grip and dragged him to the rim. “Opportunity, Boy. Look around you.” He swept his free hand across the sky, like an eagle’s wing. “All is open to the shrewdest and the boldest…. We’re building here the greatest dam the world has ever seen, me and John Junior,” he went on in a kind of rapture, then frowned and lowered his voice. “Soon’s we get the capital, of course. But we’ll get it by hook or crook, by thunder and lightning we will! And that’s where you come in, Boy. If you grow up man enough… I may not live to see Woolpack Dam and Lake Woolpack. Jon Junior may not live to see them. You will. You’ll be rich. You’ll build her. Huh? What d’ye see out there? Tell me, Boy. What d’ye see?” Grandpa tightened his grip with one hand and pointed with the other. “Water! Water, water everywhere! Look there, look! Water!” All of a sudden Grandpa swooped and, after seizing Boy’s other wrist, began to swing Boy in a clockwise circle of centrifugal force, each 360-dgree turn becoming faster and more unsteady than the previous one, Grandpa shouting, “Say water! Say you see water!” and Boy saw, like a strobe light going berserk, the abyss illuminated by the spider-webbed lightning, high and multicolored buttes blurred into a phantasmagoria of titanic upheavals and subsidences. “Say water, ye dom fool!” Boy neither spoke nor screamed. The last thing he remembered before he fainted, he fell in a world of white light. The first thing he saw when he woke in the cactus where Grandpa had flung him was a face peering down, black with the poison of its lunacy. “Disgrace!” the face said. Disgrace, Grandpa would later be saying to John Junior in the Great Hall. I saw water right away, didn’t I, Pa? John Junior said. Never thought a son of mine would be weakling. Send Boy with the Woman back to England. But get him out of my sight… Not long ago on that bald rim of a Golgotha that drops off into unimaginable layers of the Earth’s evolution - - seas become mountains, mountains become seas, over and over - - Virgil and I pondered Woolpack’s circular journey in life. Longhaired Virgil answered in silence the question I had not even uttered: Why. Because the answer was already woven in a Joseph’s coat of rocks, already orchestrated for the point-counterpoint of man and the earth when destiny had been fulfilled, Woolpack born to the imperative of beauty, faithful in his radiant ashes to the soul of a boy’s unspoken imperative of love, repudiating everything that his father and grandfather had dreamt of and worked for in their ecstasy of profanations. "I finished reading it last night and thank you for a raucous, yet serious ride. You have miraculously jammed into 300 mere pages some half- dozen cultures, three continents, and three wars, sex, danger, perversion, honor, and more." – Donald Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, War, Literature & the Arts "Alexander Blackburn has earned our serious attention." –Reynolds Price, novelist, poet, playright, winner of the New York Critics Circle Award and others "This novel is -- exhilarating!" Fred Chappell, novelist, story writer, poet, winner of the Bollingen Prize in poetry "Suddenly a Mortal Splendor is a beautiful, intelligent, and wonderfully crafted novel, a novel epic in its scope and landscape and imagination. What Alexander Blackburn has done here is nothing less than a miracle; in a time when contemporary novels are indistinguishable from daytime talkshows, he has given us a world resplendent with ideas and actions and blood and love and the land. This is an important book that will last." -- Bret Lott, novelist, story writer, author of the best-selling novel, Jewel, and formerly Director of The Southern Review "Every once in a while a good unknown writer gets anointed, the Pulitzer committee issues a prize, and sales jump. Still, for every winner there are scores of writers who are as good but are virtually unread. To that list of unknown writers, good writers toiling in relative obscurity, add the name of Alexander Blackburn… Suddenly a Mortal Splendor…is a beautifully crafted, frequently moving tale about innocence and greed as they play out in the lives of citizens and in the lives of empires." – Ronald Reed, The Dallas Morning News "Blackburn tears off a great hunk of late 20th century history to use as a source of inspiration and moral instruction. He writes with savage humor about man’s limitless capacity for inhumanity and equally limitless capacity for survival… The bravado of its romantic hero is matched by the bravado of an author who dares to offer a full-scale picaresque adventure in an age of miniaturization." – Amanda Heller, Boston Globe "This is a wonderful story. I read it with fascination." – Bill Henderson, Publisher, Pushcart Press "I like the way the piece begins with a sense of harmony with the natural world and the forces of life, the sense of wonder and freedom, then moves into the division and disorder that comes from the denial of freedom and love. I think the characters are finely realized and the action not only unfolds out of a sense of character, but does so with a real and compelling suspense.” – Gladys Swan, novelist, short story writer, and creative writing professor at University of Missouri. Suddenly a Mortal Splendor grew out of ‘Sentimental Revolution’, a story published in Crosscurrents. "Further feedback has confirmed ‘Sentimental Revolution’ as the most widely appreciated story in our Editor’s Issue. It is gratifying for me to see such a good work receive due praise." Linda Michelson, Editor of Crosscurrents "I wanted to let you know that I especially enjoyed ‘Sentimental Revolution. ’You have a beautiful talent for communicating urgency, anguish and chaos, all at the same time… Yours was a brilliant, compassionate piece." – Pamela Camille, contributing editor of Crosscurrents |
Runnerup for the 1996 Colorado Book Award in Fiction.
