Spirits in the Leaves By Jerry Johnston Signature Books (Salt Lake), 1996. ISBN: 1-56085-053-1 Suggested retail price: $9.95 (US) Audience: General readers, or anyone who appreciates lyrical prose
Reviewed by: Harlow S. Clark

For Starters

I like this book, refreshing as a body float down the Weber river after shovelling weevilly oats out of bin 3 in Clark Bros. warehouse twenty years ago. Well, maybe it's not quite that refreshing, and my metaphor didn't include what is so common in this book, trees, but the five summers I worked on my Grandfather's farm in Morgan, Utah, I always looked forward to wheat harvest, not because I liked climbing up inside the silos when they got near full and shovelling wheat away from the spout, first standing up, then bending over, kneeling and on my belly, so we could get more into the silo (wishing we had cone tops rather than the a-frame and flat roofs (including an old watertank), but because, in between trucks, or waiting for our small elevator to empty out, so I could dump more wheat, I could read. I associate reading with refreshment, conversation, storytelling, with the kinds of things that suggest why community and communion are cousins, and why eating and refreshment are part of communion.

Stories. Watching a childhood friend ride a gravestone at midnight and promising not to tell, and telling why you did tell; finding Lehi's tree out in the desert, and the great and spacious building nearby in Wendover; gathering walnuts at Thanksgiving from Grandmother's lawn; savoring how a Christmas tree makes your "house into a kind of church," and by the tree's light you think "long, long thoughts about Christmas and God's charity" (32).

I did not read Spirits in the Leaves through in one sitting, the essays have a compression that needs some time to fill out inside you, but I didn't read it one piece at a sitting either. So it was that once when I took a break from reading, and came back and looked at the cover, I thought, 'I'm glad I've got a review copy -- I wouldn't spend $10 for it.' A depressing thought, I thought. 'Does that mean Johnston's words just aren't worth $10 to you? Isn't that why poetry and small volumes of personal essays don't sell well, because people don't want to pay well for them?'

A depressing thought indeed, until I related it to Johnston's story about taking William Stafford to Bryce Canyon:

At the overlook he slid the hat from his head and peered into the acres of sand and stone. Two minutes went by. Five. Eight. All in silence. After ten minutes he turned to leave.

I had to ask.

"So, what did it feel like?"

He thought a moment. "Like standing on the moon," he said. And that was all.

A few weeks later I phoned him in Oregon on another matter and discovered that Bryce Canyon had slowly worked its way into the cracks and crevices of his mind.

"Remember Bryce?" he said. "I've decided that God went berserk out there. It's so lonesome. You could get lost forever in those breaks. That long swoop, the cold wind, the altitude. I'd imagined it all but never felt it until I stood on that overlook. It made me terribly uneasy." He paused a moment. "I guess I'll always be more comfortable with life on a human scale." (37)

This book is on a small, human scale. It is not an epic, and the thought of paying an epic price for it (especially on a non-epic paycheck) is uneasy-making for me. Terribly.

But I don't want to relate everything to the price of the physical object (the library can worry about that), so I offer,

A New Beginning

Renewal, revival, refreshment: words to do with the needs of our spirits, needs Jerry Johnston finds supplied by trees, like the trees Johnny Appleseed planted for people:

Chapman was a misfit. Unlike Daniel Boone and John Henry, he was not an over-achiever, a rugged individualist. He didn't yearn to excel. He was not the embodiment of the American dream.

John Chapman was better than that. He had nothing and gave it away. . . .

What impresses me most is the haphazard quality of his good deeds. One notion today claims we should commit "random acts of kindness." But such deeds are like flashbulbs, they flare and fade. Chapman went a step beyond that. He performed random acts of substance, goodwill that lived on from season to season like a beacon light.

The meditation on Chapman leads Johnston to meditate on others who feel to spread love, like Mother Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi. "I am not a pious man." This is all the back cover quotes from the book, but these essays generally arrive at some kind of spiritual reflection, not because Jerry Johnston is pious despite himself, but because part of being human is the capacity to see many things in one thing. In Keats he sees a title for his essay "On First Looking into Chapman's Apple Trees," a playful title, and he expects us to recognize the play on words, not after much reflection, but instantly, with other meanings to follow after reflection, after looking into Chapman's apple trees as you would look into a vision, Johnston's vision of Chapman's vision of how one should live. Thus,

A New Beginning

Gene England, Mary Bradford and others have commented on the personal essay as one of the strengths of Mormon literature. A good book can suggest the possibilities of the genre. Gene and Mary and others have shown us the possibilities of the long personal essay, Jerry Johnston shows us what can be done in a brief essay, and like Wallace Stevens listening to the woman sing on the beach at Key West, I want to go and create my own short song. On the way, I'll recommend this lyrical book to a few librarians, and a few non-librarians who aren't (I hope) living off an adjunct instructor's paycheck.

Harlow Soderborg Clark
4Clarkha@UVSC.EDU

Renounce war and proclaim peace.
--Joseph Smith  August 6