Of the T.S. Eliot shortlisted collections I have read so far, Shane McCrae’s “Sometimes I Never Suffered” gets the Oddball Prize for the moment. It contrasts the views of two very different characters, in different sections of the book. First, a “hastily assembled angel”:
"the angels Had seen the creatures coming in the waves Then covering the Earth the angels had Seen them and hadn't wanted to be forced To live with them and so had voted to Build their own angel but they hadn't asked Permission first instead they all together Threw him together and as Gabriel Asked God if this new angel could be sent Instead to Earth fresh eyes for a fresh World The other angels shoved the thrown- together angel From the clouds and Heaven..."
This solitary figure, cast out from Heaven with a mission, watches the development of the human race:
"His job he knew it had to do with seeing And what he saw was everything would come Together at the same time everything Would fall apart..."
Each poem in this section takes a different episode in the perception of the hastily assembled angel, who appears to have no function other than to watch. There is no communication with God, and the angel feels increasingly isolated. Then, quite late in the section, a second being appears – the “disappointment angel” – who seems so dangerous that the hastily assembled angel is afraid to lift his arm to wave in case he loses it to the disappointment angel as it sweeps past.
"it coincid- ed the beginning of its flight with the Beginning of the hastily assem- bled angel's loneliness and fascination With human beings which itself began Centuries after they began to thrive..."
You will by now have noticed, from the passages I have quoted, some oddities of style: double spacing between lines and spaces in place of commas or other punctuation (although sometimes the spaces seem random), together with aggressive line-breaks that follow no apparent logic, combine with what now appears a slightly archaic practice of lines beginning with an upper case letter. This seemingly haphazard combination of conventions, with its abundance of white space, creates a disorienting no-man’s-land, a dreamworld that evokes the curiously floating feel of an angel hovering over vast expanses of territory, puzzled about what he sees.
At the end of the book, in a rather beautiful long poem consisting of five-line stanzas, the hastily assembled angel builds a ladder to return to Heaven:
"each rung was like A thousand rungs the first rung who could say How many feet from the ground it was how many Miles from the ground more than the higher rungs it looked Like most rungs on most ladders made by humans..."
The first rung is like a rusty rung on a fire escape, the second is made of glass, filled with water and tiny plastic animal figures. The third is a sky-blue thread, the fourth “a row of puffed white rice/Kernels implanted in a strip of moist/Chewed gum”, the fifth “locusts strung together/On a golden chain”, the sixth a wide-open black book. The seventh rung, however, expands into a landscape in which the angel rests, sleeps and dreams, echoing the seventh day of the Creation myth. After a surreal conflict with the sky, when the angel growls
"and his Growl echoed through the new valleys his body Had made and animals big cats and lizards Bipeds and quadrupeds invertebrates birds fish Appeared in the dream and in the waking world"
the angel wakes and steps from the rung to Heaven.
With me so far? The second character in the book, who is also in Heaven, is Jim Limber. Unlike the hastily-assembled angel, Jim Limber is a historical figure, who achieved fame as a child when he was removed from his black family in the Southern States of America and taken into the care of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina. This only lasted for a year or so, since the Davis family were captured by Union forces and Limber removed into the custody of the Union general Rufus Saxton before being sent north to be educated. From this point on he disappears from history.
In the McCrae world, Jim Limber dies of old age and finds himself in Heaven, to his considerable surprise:
"I got to Heaven and I won't believe it 'Cause nobody in Heaven's gonna make A fool of me I told them Send me back If you're good angels like they got in Heaven I told them Send me back and I'll Believe you when I wake up in good boots Since I never had good boots I'm wait- ing on those good boots still..."
Jim is bewildered by Heaven, where he enjoys every comfort but appears to have no contact with other heavenly beings. Indeed, the angels themselves are scary, “Standing like white boys standing at the edge of/Town staring at you and they look like/Giants…” In part of this section McCrae inserts a brief playscript, a dialogue between Jim Limber in Heaven and Jefferson Davis, who, it transpires, is in Hell, accompanied by a demon disguised as Varina. Those in Heaven are able to watch those in Hell from an “observatory”, from which Jim watched Jefferson Davis:
"I found the observatory, saw your dreams. You pleading with that demon in that mask - I saw you and I felt ashamed. But I Saw you. That demon has you like you had Me - pleading with a mask I put on you - The year I lived with you. "
An added twist to the Jim Limber section is the idea of a “multiverse” – i.e. the idea that there is more than one universe, meaning that there is more than one Jim Limber. This gives rise to a section called “Variations on Jim Limber goes to Heaven”, where there is a sequence of fourteen-line poems giving alternative perceptions of Heaven from Jim’s point of view. The combination of bewilderment, memories of how hard life was and the surreal surroundings in which he finds himself is highly unusual:
"What if I had been born in Heaven do They do that here I've never seen a baby But I see full-grown people who I hear the angels whispering they say they Were babies when they died I always look Those people in the eye but I don't think They see me and I've never heard them speak They just walk around in sailor hats with blank Looks on their faces..."
In one of the recorded pieces I hunted out about Shane McCrae, he explains that “Sometimes I Never Suffered” is the third part of a trilogy covering Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, in the same way as Dante. At that point, I think, the resemblance ends. McCrae has created a confused and disorienting world with a remote godhead, insubordinate angels and rough justice, even if the language is often very beautiful. When I first read it I was totally baffled. After several readings I am a little less so, and have enjoyed much of the writing. But I remain a little unclear about what McCrae is trying, artistically, to achieve.
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Shane McCrae’s “Sometimes I Never Suffered” is published by Corsair.
I can’t exactly say I ‘got it’ but the idea(s) intrigued me. On second reading the layout became irritating and discouraged me from further reflection. But the words had brought images that I cannot forget. What a gift. Thank you, Mr McCrae.