Book Reviews
Letters From the Pen
Reviewed by Dan Krotz
"Men are not moved by events but by their interpretation."
Epictetus
Most of us know Dale McCurry as a former editor of and reporter for the Lovely County Citizen . We now add to our knowing of Dale as the author of Letters from the Pen , a just published (Boian Books, $14.95) collection of his essays.
In the late middle of a life as a family man and businessman, the good people of Missouri added criminal to McCurry's vita and sentenced him to prison for stealing while wearing a white collar. While thugs in blue collars usually use guns and knives, McCurry perpetrated a good idea that went south in apparently fraudulent ways. You should know that.
Letters from the Pen has nothing to do with correctional facilities or the experience of being held in a correctional facility. It is about being held as a prisoner, but the prison can be constructed of anything that ails us. Letters from the Pen is certainly about McCurry particularly, but it is also about people generally, and how they can - or not - make their lives mean something.
One of my heroes is Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning and the architect of logotherapy, which rose in his consciousness during the time he was an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. Logotherapy literally means "therapy through meaning" and in simplest terms calls on the "patient" to adjust his attitude to anticipate the future as meaningful and worth anticipating. With footings in both existential and stoic philosophy, logotherapy is a bit more complicated than "if life gives you lemons make lemonade," but your old mother's wise counsel approaches the basic idea.
The quote above from the stoic Epictetus is another summary of the idea that, no matter what the state of the world, our attitude toward it can help us. Even while facing death or suffering or city council meetings, by showing courage we can turn any situation into a supremely meaningful one. Perhaps that's what Hemingway meant when he described courage as grace under pressure.
On February 27, 2003, McCurry wrote, "The only way the 'axis of evil' can win is if we allow our fear of it to drive us to tantrum negativity. I am beginning to understand the power and grace in the choice of a cloistered life. Perhaps the best I can do for the world is offer it the only thing I really have to give - my love and prayers of thanks and forgiveness."
The federal prison where McCurry wrote, like all prisons and, frankly, all institutions, is a very small world. The stories McCurry tells us are small stories, but each contains a big lesson. I think the lesson is that we all live in small worlds, and our cloistered life here in Eureka Springs and Berryville and Holiday Island must be engaged with love and prayers of thanks and forgiveness.
I write this on the day that Arkansas celebrates the birthday of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert E. Lee. My friends back home in Minnesota are appalled that Bobby Lee shares this date with Dr. King. Yet no one can deny that Lee was a great Christian warrior and a great gentleman any more than we can fail to acknowledge that MLK was the Great Man of the twentieth century. Letters from the Pen celebrates this grand paradox - and all paradoxes - by helping us to see what is good, and to forgive what we think is less good.
"The walls I live behind have suddenly become the Alamo ...," McCurry wrote on June 7, 2001, " ...and Jose is grinning like Santa Anna, when I hear the martins. I stop just as my arm swings forward with the ball. "What!" screams my partner, his arms question marks ascending to a perfect May sky.
"Martins," I say, as if an adequate answer. "I hear martins."
To read Letters from the Pen is to hear martins, or to learn how to hear martins.
