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In the weekly Sunday Forum series at our church, we have been focusing on the arts and spirituality (“Creating in God’s Image”). Yesterday my wife Julia spoke about the murder mysteries of Canadian author Louise Penny. Here’s the talk.
Monday
By Julia Bates
I begin today’s talk on mystery writer Louise Penny with a basic definition of creativity since creativity is the focus of this year’s Sunday Forum. I follow it up with insights from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, in which he discusses the sometimes tortuous path that creative persons must follow to fulfill their creative impulses and share what they create as a gift. Sharing, Hyde maintains, is vital both for the creative process and to the health of the creative person and the receiving culture.
I then explore how Penny’s writing history is an example of someone heroically moving into the creative process and how a pair of mystery novels, A Trick of the Light and The Beautiful Mystery, foreground the tensions in creative gift giving and commercialization that Hyde describes.
The Encyclopedia Britannica says that creativity is “the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.” A creative person, then, is someone who can look at things as they are from a new angle. That creative observation opens up possibilities for change and healthy growth in the receiving culture.
The risk is that the creative gift may not be accepted by the receiving culture, with consequences for both the creative person and the surrounding culture.
Hyde notes,
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received, and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves this ‘begging bowl” to which the gift is drawn.
Polish Poet Czeslaw Milosz seconds this observation, speaking of the inner certainty he experienced that a shining point exists where all lines intersect. He writes about feeling very strongly that “nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” Hyde says many artists have this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control.
The artistic creation is also a spark for the audience’s own imagination. Novelist Joseph Conrad suggests that the artist appeals to that part of our being that is curious about change. That spark of curiosity, he says, “is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring.”
With such observations in mind, I look at the Canadian mystery writer as an example of an artist who struggles with both light and darkness to create the gift of her books. But since mysteries are often dismissed as “beach reading,” hardly worthy of the terms “art” or “literature,” what spark of creativity could she share?
I’m suggesting that, in the struggles Penny portrays between lead investigator Armand Gamache and the darkness that produces a murder, she provides many gifts to us as readers, sparking us to become potential creators and givers of gifts as well.
To explain both artistic gifts and the daunting barriers to sharing those gifts, Hyde provides an anecdote about a Native American giving a Puritan a ceremonial pipe. Delighted, the Puritan takes it home to add to his collection of new world art. He is taken aback, however, when a chief visits him two weeks later and wants a smoke and to receive the pipe in turn. These kinds of misunderstandings about the reason behind gifts gave rise to the derogatory term “Indian giver.”
Native Americans, according to Hyde, believed that gifts received should then move rather than be turned into private capital. If a gift is not treated as such–if one form of property is merely converted into a private hoard—something horrible will happen. In folk tales the hoarder usually dies. In tribal groups, the social fabric of the group is destroyed.
Hyde explores this principle further as regards the modern publishing world and the world of art galleries. While these organizations function as ways of “sharing” a creative gift, they also turn the gift into a commodity, which damages both the artists and the culture that tries to decipher what this “gift” of art means. How can a purchased item placed in a private space (say, a private art collection) create a call for change in the larger culture? When the gift is hidden away, the challenge of its call can’t be heard.
Remember: The artistic gift is not just the “thing” itself but the urge it ignites within us to also create and share.
In the two novels I’ve chosen, Penny explores the dynamics of (1) artistic preparation for the inspiration; (2) the possible corruption of the gifting process between the artist and the receiving community; and (3) the healing and atonement that can happen if the gifting process is honored.
In preparation for this talk, I looked at a series of interviews with Louise Penny to find examples of gifts she received during her creative journey. Penny notes,
I was a fearful child. Afraid of everything. I withdrew from the world and wanted to be in my room reading. As a punishment, my mother would send me outside to play. At the age of eight I came to a turning point when I read Charlotte’s Web. When I finished the book, I realized I was no longer afraid of spiders. The thing I was most afraid of disappeared because of the power of the story. It was magic. I wanted to be part of creating that magic; I wanted to be a writer.
The gift of a story about a spider gave Penny a goal.
Inevitably, however, barriers arose. Penny recalls, “I became afraid of becoming a writer. In Waiting for Godot, one of the characters notes, ‘Maybe it’s best if a dream isn’t attempted. What happens if you try and it doesn’t work?’” Penny reports,
I did delay. I delayed for 20 years. I took on elements of writing in journalism and editing, but not fiction. I covered Quebec politics and ended up feeling bruised. I took to drink. By the age of 35, I hit bottom. I realized I was only halfway through life. How do I get to age 80? If I had had a gun, I would have done myself in. In January of 1994, I went to an AA meeting and listened to two women talk about the holidays and their past ways of coping through drinking. They talked about things I was ashamed of.
The meeting proved to be a turning point. Penny found golden gifts through the sharing of stories and in the solid relationships she formed in sobriety:
I felt hope. In talking to others I realized I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know how to live. I’m now a big believer in asking for help. If you reach out, there will be a hand reaching out. Now I respond in kind. Within three years I was married to Michael and within five I began writing fiction. Michael said he would support me, and he become my biggest fan.
To be sure, there were still struggles. At first, Penny tried to write the “best historical fiction ever.” Nothing, however, happened creatively. Her muse wasn’t coming to spark the filling of her empty bowl, and a series of other things had to happen to get her writing.
Among these were moving out of Montreal to a small village. There Penny found a group of creative women who called themselves “Les Girls.” In their monthly meetings, which continue to this day, she saw some creative projects that succeeded and others that did not. She noticed that having a flop didn’t kill anyone, a realization that was itself a gift. “Not trying to write is what would kill me,” she realized.
Penny had started reading crime novels at the age of 11 when her mother gave her an Agatha Christie novel she had just finished reading. She felt honored then to be gifted a “grown-up” book to read, and returning to that experience, decided to try her hand at mystery novels. She began by drawing a map of Three Pines, the village featured in many of the novels.
In Canadian history, three pines were often planted to indicate Loyalist leanings prior to the American Revolutionary War. After twenty years, these pine plantings served as signals to fugitives leaving an America that would no longer harbor them. The village is a gift Penny gave herself as a safe refuge. It is a gift of refuge for readers as well.
Penny then wrote biographies of the characters who inhabited Three Pines. She based Gamache , her lead detective, on her husband Michael. “I knew I wouldn’t get published,” she says,” so I wanted people and places that I would love to be with.” Again, she felt the comfort of retreating to her own room. “The writing began as a gift to myself,” she says. Furthermore, “the village and people continued to comfort me while Michael went into decline with dementia and eventually died and while Covid isolated all of us.”
The next step, getting published, was an ordeal, much as Hyde describes the damage that can be done to both the creative person and the receiving community when a gift is abused. Penny sent Still Life, her first novel, out to 50 publishers and received no answers. She had submitted it to the “Dagger Award” competition for first time mystery writers. She got an email saying that, out of 800 submissions, she had made the top five and was invited to the awards ceremony.
She notes,
As a journalist, I got prepared, I researched all the publishers and agents who would be there. At the awards ceremony, I looked for the top agents. The top agent wasn’t there, the second level agent snubbed me, and the third level agent was drunk. Then I didn’t get the prize. I went home and curled into a ball. Michael said, ‘get up, we’re going to a party that is also a silent auction to benefit a charity.” With no good grace, I went. I saw a lovely blue shawl. I reached out to take it at the same time another woman took hold. I introduced myself. “Oh, she said, “I have your name on a post-it note on my laptop.” Then she introduced herself as the top agent who hadn’t attended the ceremony.
They have worked together ever since. What a gift that chance encounter was to Penny! The agent has made the gift transfer process between Penny and her reading audience as transparent as possible.
The books eventually were well received, although they took a while to catch on. Not until book six did Penny feel she could actually make a living by writing. Hyde would observe that Penny has negotiated the challenge of giving a gift, of successfully marketing what she has created.
Penny doesn’t stick slavishly to the typical mystery “who-done-it” structure. She is more interested in themes based on our yearning for community. She feels that, regardless of where the reader lives, there is that universal yearning to belong. In the face of murder, of terrible violations of community, she writes of atonement, of second chances. Her village of characters “opt for decency.”
Many of her themes involve poetry or music or art as expressions of the creative spark. She used to walk with her grandfather, who recited poems as they went along, and from those walks she developed an ear for the cadence of language. She takes the poetic gifts that others have created and moves them forward.
For instance, she notes in the acknowledgements of How the Light Gets In that she wrote to Leonard Cohen about using the lines from one of his songs:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There’s a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
When she asked how much she would need to pay for their use, he told her she could have them for free, even though he had just lost a lot of his wealth to a scam artist. “How the Light Gets In” is the title of her ninth novel.
Meanwhile, Penny has credited Ruth Zardo, the crazy poet of Three Pines, with portions of poems actually written by Margaret Atwood and Marylyn Plessner (with their generous permission). Another gift.
In at least three of the novels, works of art created in Three Pines are key clues in solving a murder. While the novels show the generative creative power of art and gift giving, they also show how the stultification of the creative/ giving process corrupts and destroys people and organizations. To control or to own art for mercenary reasons wreaks destruction all around. Fortunately, in solving the mystery of the crime, Gamache makes atonement possible. Art can once again contribute to the health of the community.
Penny says that she lays out her novels in groups of three or four with layers of plot development that move at three different paces. The fastest pace is the solution of the current murder, yet sometimes the crime is not presented until three chapters into the book.
The next level of movement lies within the Three Pines characters or the lead members of Gamache’s investigative team, who grow or change based on their own limitations or gifts. These changes happen over multiple novels and some characters never stop changing.
The final and slowest strata occurs at the national level of Canadian cultural institutions, primarily the Catholic church and the Canadian government. This theme plays out in all the novels, with occasional volcanic eruptions.
The leader on all three levels is Armand Gamache. He and his actions and thoughts are the measuring rod of integrity in all of the novels. Because she had used her husband as a model. she wondered if she could continue to write after he died. But she has continued to find comfort in meeting up with the spirit of Michael as she creates and moves forward with Gamache. We see Gamache in his first appearance in Still Life:
He knelt down; his knees cracking like the report of a hunter’s rifle, his large expressive hands hovering over the tiny circle of blood marring her fluffy cardigan, as though like a magician he could remove the wound and restore the woman. But he could not. That wasn’t his gift. Fortunately for Gamache he had others. He was surprised to see her. That was his little secret. Not that he’d ever seen her before. No. His little secret was that in his mid-fifties, at the height of a long and now apparently stalled career, violent death still surprised him. Which was odd, for the head of homicide, and perhaps one of the reasons he hadn’t progressed further in the cynical world of the Surete. Gamache always hoped maybe someone had gotten it wrong, and there was no dead body.”
The element of surprise means Gamache sets aside assumptions about the cause of death. Gamache speaks to a particularly inept cadet about those assumptions: “You look but you don’t see. You hear, but you don’t listen.” He then conveys four sentences that function as a guide to wisdom, which he learned from his mentor and regards as “a huge mountain of a gift”:
–I’m sorry.
–I don’t know.
–I need help.
–I was wrong.
Over the course of 18 mysteries, we see Gamache share these truths with all of his team members. Often the adages are received with skepticism until the new detective acknowledges their wisdom three novels later.
In contrast with Gamache, we read of Beauvoir, his second in command, who first sees the darkness in every situation. The tension between the two leads us through the problem-solving process that is reading a mystery. One sees the two go back and forth in Trick of Light and Beautiful Mystery.
In these novels Penny wrestles with the demands of creativity and how being open to its gifts affects individuals and communities, especially as the gifts encounter the warping demands posed by art critics, gallery owners and publishing houses.
A Trick of the Light centers around the creative life of Clara, an artist in Three Pines, as other artists (including her jealous husband) recognize that she has an authentic vision and artistic style. She has spent 25 years in obscurity living in Three Pines and experimenting with sculpture and painting. She has patiently opened herself, creating the ‘begging bowl” for the muse of inspiration. In the midst of her first major exhibition and celebration, another artist is murdered.
Clara’s mind seems to be a venue for Penny to explore her own fears concerning creativity and recognition—issues that were still fresh since the novel came out only four years after her first one. We see a Clara who is terrified to enter her first solo art gallery presentation, a dream she has had since childhood.
In her panic attack, Clara thinks, “Someone had lied. Or hadn’t told the whole truth. In her dream, her only dream, played over and over since childhood, she had a solo show at the Musee d’Art Contemporain. She walked down this corridor. Composed and collected. Beautiful and slim. Witty and popular.
Into the arms of an adoring world.
Now within feet of the end of her journey all she wanted to do was run away home to Three Pines. The person who had lied was herself.
Clara’s frightened ego has gotten in the way of being that composed person. She may be her own worst enemy.
But there are other enemies. As the novel progresses, we learn about the source of her terrible fear. Artists have to deal with gallery owners so that the public—those that the artists want to reach—can receive it. Then artists face reviews written by critics of those displays that mediate how the public will see their creative gifts. A bad review can metaphorically kill a career. In this novel, a bad review is also connected with a literal death.
We see the spark of Clara’s inner motivation through the eyes of her jealous husband Peter:
Without a single crucifix, or host, or bible. Without benefit of clergy, or church. Clara’s paintings radiated a subtle, private faith. In a single bright dot in an eye. In old hands holding old hands. For dear life. Clara painted for dear life. While the rest of the cynical art world was painting the worst, Clara painted the best. …Peter had never met God so how could he paint him.
Clara had not only met Him, she knew Him. And she painted what she knew.
As readers we can suspect that this description could also describe Louis Penny and the motivation behind her mysteries.
Later, at a gallery showing, we get another glimpse into Clara’s depth as Gamache and an art dealer discuss a portrait of a friend:
Clara had painted her (Mary) as the forgotten and belligerent Virgin Mary. Worn down by age and rage, by resentments real and manufactured. By friendships soured. By entitlements denied and love withheld. But there was something else. A vague suggestion in those weary eyes. Not even seen really. More a promise. A rumor in the distance.
Amid all the brush strokes, all the elements, all the color and nuance in the portrait, it came down to one tiny detail. A single white dot.
In her eyes.
Clara Morrow had painted the moment despair became hope.
The official art world is so cynical, however, that it’s suspicious of authenticity:
Francois Marois stepped back half a pace and nodded gravely.
It’s remarkable. Beautiful.” He turned to Gamache then. “Unless, of course, it’s a ruse.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gamache.
“Maybe it isn’t hope at all,” said Marois, “but merely a trick of the light.”
Gamache, in his integrity, can honor the spark of inspiration ignited by the painting. The gallery owner, facing the challenge of hope, is open to denial and rejection of the gift of the painting.
In both Trick of the Light and Beautiful Mystery, Penny wrestles with this question about the inspiration we might gain from a creative gift. Is the artist sincere, are the insights we gain legitimate and illuminating for our lives? Or are these moments of uplift merely our visceral response to good marketing?
In exploring these moments of inspiration and testing them for authenticity, we are like detectives solving a crime. We look for clues in the scene of the inspiring moment and in our own responses.
Penny poses two modalities of exploration: intuition and logic. Gamache is intuitive and creative in his problem solving. Beauvoir, his right-hand man, is a logical, linear thinker.
Of Gamache’s approach, Penny writes,
Facts were necessary. They pointed the way and helped form the net. But the killer himself was tracked by following not only facts but feelings. The fetid emotions that had made a man into a murderer.
In contrast, Beauvoir’s approach is darker. He contrasts himself with his chief:
The chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”
And every day it frightened him (Beauvoir) that Gamache couldn’t see that. That he was blind to it. Because out of blind spots terrible things appeared.
This back and forth debate about the nature of good and evil continues between the two mindsets through all of the novels. Penny also uses both men and their early childhood immersion in the Catholic church to explore why they have moved away from formal religion to frame this good vs evil conflict more broadly.
These reflections could have been expressed as author asides, but instead Penny acts as a mind reader author so that the debate is between characters, not imposed from the outside.
The second novel, Beautiful Mystery, is set in the heart of established religion—which is to say, in a monastery. The structure, while it allows Penny to explore the limits and perhaps hypocrisy of structured religion, also has the creative potential to show the transformation possible during an authentic ritual. As Penny notes in the acknowledgements,
The book started as a fascination with music, and a very personal and baffling relationship with it. I love music. Various pieces have inspired each of the books, and I’m convinced music has had a near magical effect on my creative process. When I sit on planes, or go for walks, or drive and listen to music, I can see scenes from the book I’m about write, or am writing. I feel the characters. Hear them. Sense them. It’s thrilling. Gamache and Clara and Beauvoir come even more alive when I’m listening to certain music. It’s transformative. Spiritual, even. I can feel the divine in the music. Just a few notes can take us to a different time and place, can conjure a person, an event, a feeling. Can inspire great courage, and reduce us to tears.
In this novel, as in Trick of the Light, Penny shows how a genuine gift can be corrupted. A secluded monastery in the Canadian woods excels at performing inspirational Gregorian chants, but these are originally intended only for the members of the abbey, and we get a deep history of their purpose and how they were created.
The monastery’s isolation is shattered, however, when someone sends out a CD of the chants, which proceed to become a musical bestseller. The monastery’s choir director is then murdered just as he is urging the monastery to create a second CD, which will save the monastery’s walls from collapse.
The project divides the monks into two groups and challenges the consensual leadership of the abbot. The scene is the familiar mystery structure of a crime committed within a locked room— or in this case, a private garden.
We see the scene through Gamache’s eyes:
For the first time, Gamache began to wonder if the garden existed on different planes. It was both a place of grass and earth and flowers. But also an allegory. For that most private place inside each one of them. For some it was a dark, locked room. For others, a garden.
Each of the characters in the book is led to explore his (all men in this text) own inner room. We are at that second level of change that I mentioned earlier: personal growth of Penny’s detective team. We as readers experience both the fantastical play of light through the monastery windows and the haunting sounds of the chants through the effects they have on Beauvoir, who is avoiding being honest with Gamache and himself about a growing drug addiction.
The book ends with an indigenous people’s parable that speaks to the tensions between Beauvoir and Gamache:
An elder told him that when he was a boy his grandfather came to him one day and said he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was gray, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy. He asked, “grandfather, which of the wolves will win?”
“The one I feed”, the grandfather said.
Gamache feeds the gray wolf, Beauvoir the black.
And what gifts has Penny given us? First, she presents us with a set of characters whom we would like to have as friends. They grow and evolve in ways that Lord Peter Whimsey or Hercule Poirot don’t. Gamache is a template for our own best selves.
At the same time, Penny gives us a village where friendship is enacted over and over again in the face of tragedy and dire mistakes. We would like to live in such a place, and Penny challenges us to create similar villages rather than just allowing us to find a comfortable fictional retreat.
The particular way that crimes are handled, meanwhile, point to the higher ethical imperatives that are invoked. This depth is unusual in detective fiction.
Second, Penny calls us to explore our own dark gardens. What have we locked inside that needs to see the light of day? Penny’s own life is anchored on the twelve-step program that supported her after reaching rock bottom. How can we make amends to those we have offended? How can we step beyond fear to share our gifts?
Often we have a penchant to retreat into ego-driven responses. We reflexively reject new works of art or music, ignoring the sparks they can ignite within us to take risks. Can we say what Gamache recommends: I’m sorry. I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong.
Finally, Penny confronts us with our mortality. As we face death within her murder mysteries, we are like Penny learning not to fear spiders through reading Charlotte’s Web. In these novels we see how the dead are honored by their friends and family. At the same time, we see a detective team giving the victim’s lives worth by investing their time and ingenuity in deciphering what has happened. Our own lives are works of art that we can share with others.
A crime, Penny notes, begins when an event creates a miserable hook in someone’s past that festers and eventually explodes. In essence, that wound causes someone to break the ten commandments, which constitute the ethical background of the novels. We feel secure when those rules are reestablished as the norm at the end of each book. But death is something we all will face, whether we are murdered or die at a healthy old age. We all have buried wounds that may cause us to speak darkly behind someone’s back or to turn a deaf ear to a request for help.
The question facing us at the end of each of Penny’s mysteries is how we share the gifts we’ve been given. Are those around us familiar with our stories because it is the sharing of stories that is the ultimate gift. Weaving the stories together creates a village where we can belong as living beings or as honored ancestors. Sharing gifts strengthens relationships and encourages creativity in ourselves and others.
Here in Sewanee we live in a village much the same size as Three Pines. Are we a place of refuge and creativity? In his October 1 sermon, Rev. Lamborn challenged us to become such a place by discovering the fullness of our begging bowls and pouring them out in love.