'Of Man’s Disobedience and of the Fruit'

A recent visit to Kaboom Books yielded a first edition of Fred Chappell’s second novel, The Inkling (1965), signed by the author: 

“Of man’s disobedience and of the fruit . . .”

-- Greetings!—

Fred Chappell

 

The line from Milton is a slight misquotation from the opening of Paradise Lost:

 

“Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe . . .”

 

The epigraph to Chappell’s novel is a line from the Aeneid describing Polyphemus:  epimonstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum. That is, “a horrible monster, deformed, huge, whose eye had been taken.” This hints at the Faulknerian strain that runs through Chappell’s early fiction. Like Flannery O’Connor and other Southern writers, he was attracted to grotesques who are sometimes caricatures of human beings. There’s an obligatory-seeming touch of the Gothic in The Inkling and a certain academic stiffness which Chappell (now eighty-seven years old) later outgrew. His “Kirkman Tetralogy” of novels is wonderful but it’s his reputation as a poet that will endure.

 

On the same visit to Kaboom I found a first edition of William Maxwell’s third novel, The Folded Leaf (1945). The front endpaper is stamped “Ret. to / Adrian C. Tenny / 151 Webster Road / Scarsdale, N.Y.” I see that Mr. Tenny died in Scarsdale on January 23, 1957, at age seventy-four. Books are haunted.

 

I also found a seemingly unread copy of The Books of Jacob (Riverhead Books, 2022) by the 2019 Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. Tucked into the pages of the novel is a card signed by the author. Tokarczuk said in her Nobel lecture:

 

“Fiction has lost the readers’ trust since lying has become a dangerous weapon of mass destruction, even if it is still a primitive tool. I am often asked this incredulous question: ‘Is this thing you wrote really true?’ And every time I feel this question bodes the end of literature.”