The Giant Joshua – Chapter 17: The Great Smile and the Sequel

Thank you for sticking with us this last two months! We end with a discussion of the final, 17^th chapter, followed by the story of Maurine’s efforts at producing a sequel, and a synopsis of the sequel. We are excited to say that five excellent completed chapters, along with other lost works of Maurine’s, will soon be published.

A public Zoom event will be held on Sunday, October 11, 8:00 pm Mountain Time (7:00 pm Pacific), where all can come and share their questions and comments on The Giant Joshua and Maurine Whipple. The event will feature several people who knew Maurine personally sharing their memories of her, including the poet Carol Lynn Pearson, Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale, the author Marilyn Brown, and the publisher Curtis Taylor. It will last 90 minutes. Anyone interested in Mormon literature or Mormon history is invited to attend and participate.

Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85698612887
Meeting ID: 856 9861 2887

Chapter 17, by Lynne Larson

“She saw them, the whole heroic cavalcade, marching toward more deathless stars. And she knew with an ancient exultation . . . that she would not have changed a moment of it. Tomahawk and war whoop, bran mush and lucerne greens, Virgin bloat, the Year of the Plagues, the Reign of Terror. She felt a detached pity for the generations yet to come who couldn’t plan and build a world.” (632)

The lines above might best embody the emotional, triumphant crescendo in Whipple’s final chapter and in Clorinda’s MacIntyre’s story. Our Dixie pioneer is dying, and in her last fading moments, she is recognizing with joy the amazing gift that is hers. In doing so, she is enraptured by the beauty and exultation of being part of a miracle. Brotherhood – The Grand Idea – the power that builds a noble community—Clory realizes it was worth the hardship and sacrifice required, and she finds her long elusive “testimony” in the Great Smile, which surely is the love of God beckoning from a radiant horizon and welcoming her home.

Chapter 17 actually begins seventy years in the future as “another Clory” (her granddaughter, who was to be a protagonist of the sequel) rummages through old keepsakes – David Wight’s newspapers, Abijah’s hymn book, ‘Sheba’s cathedral clock, time-eaten school books, the rosewood desk. And the younger Clory thinks of the people, as well as their possessions, “the dewy-eyed young ghosts” Whipple calls them, “hurrying out of the old daguerreotypes that have to be turned into the light just so to catch a glimpse of laughing eyes and tinted cheeks and clove pinks in shining hair . . . For a moment a shadow falls across their smiling faces, their eager eyes grow beseeching, their soft pink palms calloused and blistered. ‘We hand it across the years,’ they say to her. ‘Your heritage. What have you made of it? Where is the brave new world?’”

And our Clory thinks of “heritage,” too, as she lies dying. “Some day the pioneers who had lived and loved and fought would all be nothing more than names carved on stones for curious children to read,” she mused. “Someday her house would be dust . . . but she knew with a sureness like a loved handclasp that above the dust there would still be a pulsing in the air on bright moonlit nights—the remembered throb of a heart.”

For the past eighty years, readers have judged this last chapter of The Giant Joshua, and the novel itself, in a dozen different ways. Sentimentalists have certainly felt a “throb in the heart” and a pulsing in the air on “bright moonlit nights” in southern Utah. Some have lamented the fact that Clory’s ultimate “testimony” seems to be lacking, that it does not ring true as the typically faith-confirming Mormon spiritual experience. Other critics have disparaged the novel for various reasons of their own, some noting minor weaknesses which for them prevent the book from being the Great Mormon Novel it is sometimes called. But the scholar Michael Austin has lovingly written:

 “The experiences I had when I read The Giant Joshua were only slightly less profound than the experiences I had during my first sustained encounter with the Book of Mormon. I avoided both as long as I could, started them both reluctantly, entertained them both skeptically, and completed them both enthusiastically; by the end of both books, I knew I had read something that would change my life forever . . . There are, I am sure, literary flaws in Maurine Whipple’s Mormon classic, The Giant Joshua; however, I don’t have the foggiest idea what they may be. I have read literary critics describe it as an ‘imperfect masterpiece’ or ‘a flawed classic’, and I am willing to accept that this is the prevailing opinion among the learned. I, on the other hand, think the book is nothing less than a miracle that did what good miracles always do: change my life for the better.”

To Michael Austin’s words I would add a comment of my own, both as a teacher of literature and as a long-time admirer of The Giant Joshua. Maurine Whipple was careful in her final chapter to bring us back to the beginning, to remind us of her themes and her title:

“Each generation with its desert to cross,” she wrote, “but one must make an effort to tell them that there are always the Joshua trees, if poor stumbling humans will but lift up their eyes . . . always the Joshua trees pointing toward the Promised Land.”

Whipple is extending her metaphor and giving us hope.

Whether or not you share Austin’s enthusiasm for the novel, or my admiration for Whipple as a writer, or both, the very fact that you have read The Giant Joshua has opened up a world you may not have known before, and it’s a world that’s yours to keep and re-consider at your leisure. The quotation from Chapter 17 which began this essay, gives us a wonderful line to remember. Thanks to Maurine Whipple and her Joshua, we will always have those southern Utah pioneers, and all the pioneers forever in our hearts, “the whole heroic cavalcade, marching toward the deathless stars.”

Thank you for joining us in this journey through the novel!

Notes:

Cleave the Wood: The unfinished sequel to The Giant Joshua

The story is not over! Maurine wrote five substantial chapters of sequel, Cleave the Wood, which will soon be published for the first time in the volume, ‘A Craving for Beauty’: The Lost Works of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press), edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson. Maurine’s efforts at writing the sequel was an adventure in itself, involving a change of publishers, painful illness, unrequited romance, community rejection, and eventually Maurine’s descent into penury and paranoia.

Maurine claimed that she nurtured the idea of a multi-generational epic of the settlement of St. George as far back as her grade-school days. When Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked her to submit a piece for publication in 1937, she responded with a synopsis of an epic covering three generations. Greenslet encouraged her to break up the story into at least two volumes, and first focus on the pioneer era. Whipple decided to end the first volume, The Giant Joshua, with the protagonist Clory’s death in 1887, and expected to write a sequel which would follow Clory’s son Jim and eventually his daughter, Lenzi (aka “Young Clory”).

Maurine’s interest in writing the sequel appears to have dampened in the immediate months and years after the publication of The Giant Joshua in January 1941. She was disappointed by the book’s financial return, and eventually decided she did not trust Houghton Mifflin to publish the sequel. During World War II, besides suffering with health struggles, her attention was diverted towards giving war-bond lectures and other writing projects. Nevertheless, she did a significant amount of work preparing, including visits to the Arizona Strip region, where she planned to set part of the sequel.

The title Cleave the Wood idea came a collection of purported sayings of Jesus, found in Egypt in 1897, which included the phrase, “Raise the stone and thou shalt find me, cleave the wood and I am there.” The phrase appealed to Maurine, both because it implied the spirit of God being in everything, and expressed action needed to arrive at that knowledge.

In the fall of 1945, at the age of forty-two, she signed an agreement with Simon and Schuster to publish the sequel. It included an allowance of $150 a month for a year, with the manuscript due at the end of that time. Considering The Giant Joshua took her over three years to write, she was doubtful she could finish in a year, but her agent assured her that it was not a hard deadline. In February 1946 she wrote Dean Brimhall that she “didn’t give a damn that some relief society gals have made living in St. George hell.” She moved to Salt Lake City, and rented a series of rooms and offices. She managed to start writing, and sent off her first chapters, which included a magnificent portrayal of cowboy life on the Arizona Strip at the turn of the century.

As for what went wrong, you’ll have to wait for the book to see. For one thing, in her poverty she was frequently drawn towards writing magazines articles, which offered a quicker financial reward. Her best magazine articles, which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Life, feature vibrant description of Great Basin locations and peoples. They will also be included in the forthcoming volume.

Sequel synopsis

The five extant chapters feature the same high-quality writing level as that found in The Giant Joshua. Whipple also produced two synopses of the full saga, which helps to fill in for the unfinished areas. The first part of the sequel centers around Jim, Clory’s son, who was scarred from witnessing his mother’s pathetic struggles and his father’s inattention and cruelty. The first chapters are set in 1893, six years after the end of The Giant Joshua. Jim responded to Clory’s death by retreating from the village life of the Mormon community to the secular life of an Arizona Strip cowboy.

Jim is joined by two friends. Frank Wight, the son of Clory’s friends Palmyra and David, is an outgoing, perceptive boy who puts his faith in scientific knowledge. Although he mocks religion, he values the community that the Saints have forged in Dixie. Tony is a dreamy mystic, drawn both to LDS religion and philosophy as tools for discovering the Grand Idea of existence.

After a time on the Arizona Strip, the action swings back to St. George. Selwyn Sanderson, a non-Mormon, arrives in town to set up a photography and bicycle business. Sanderson is obsessed with the thrill of sexual seduction—the more difficult the mark, the better. Jim and Sanderson eventually clash over Thanksie Hichinoper, a flirtatious girl whose father is the Stake President. 

Thanksie and Jim end up spending time together while participating in the production of a musical. Jim goes through the motions of rejoining the fellowship of the Church, and takes up farming. Jim and Thanksie marry, but Thanksie, who comes from a family of some means, complains about the lack of comforts in her new home. She also secretly keeps up communication with Sanderson.

Jim, discouraged, enlists to serve in the Spanish-American War. He serves in the Philippines, where he is badly injured. He hurries home to St. George to absorb all he can of happiness before he succumbs to the blindness and rheumatism that he knows is coming. Thanksie is impressed by Jim’s heroics and the acclaim he wins in the town, and they reconcile. She becomes pregnant, but his worsening afflictions disgust her, and she runs away with Sanderson to the Muddy River region of Nevada, where she gives birth to a girl. A bishop there, a hard-bitten fanatic, denounces her, warning her that the only way she can be saved is through blood atonement. Sanderson cruelly abandons her, and she drinks laudanum and dies.

Jim, who has nearly given up on life, meets his baby daughter for the first time, and finds a new purpose. He names her Clorinda Agatha Lenzi MacIntyre, after his mother, and the girl comes to be known as Lenzi. Although Jim is tortured by his memories, he resolves to stay alive, collecting his army pension and providing a stable home until Lenzi is raised. Disgusted by the Nevada bishop, he leaves the Church, and he hopes to help Lenzi escape the Mormon indoctrination her extended family would otherwise insist upon.

Lenzi “grows serenely enough among the red hills and sunshine of Dixie. She has inherited her grandmother’s voice, and the whole community takes an interest in seeing that she gets the best training available. Jim glories in Lenzi’s successes, and devotes himself to the idea that she will someday leave St. George and all traces of Mormonism behind. He grows ever more feeble, having to undergo a number of amputations.

Jim insists that Lenzi go East to study music, and the town rallies to raise money to send her. The opportunity excites her, despite her reluctance to leave her father and Briggie Wight, the son of Frank Wight and her childhood sweetheart. Eventually the two young people’s ambitions (music and medicine) split them apart.

Lenzi finds success in the East and in Europe, but she continues to feel drawn back to her own people, and wants to marry and have children. She seeks counsel and confesses her religious doubts to a Church leader, but his critical and self-righteous replies stun her. Lenzi earns the opportunity to perform with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, a performance which is broadcast coast-to-coast, giving Jim a chance to listen. Lenzi’s performance is a success, but while on the stage, she realizes that the cost she has paid to reach the top has been too great, and that none of the men in her life would ever offer her a meaningful, lifetime relationship. She decides to return to St. George.

I’ll leave the lovely final scenes of the novel for you to look forward to in the forthcoming volume.

In a newspaper interview in February 1964, Maurine spoke about the trilogy. “The Mormon Story,” she said, “offers perfect ground for a series of three books since, in the time stretch from ox to space ship, the Mormons have come full circle. They have given up known comforts for unknown terrors in order to see if human brotherhood could actually work as a way of life. That it did work is a matter of record.” She said that the two sequels would be about the second generation after the pioneer generation, “who resented the poverty, ostracism and brutishness” that characterized their childhoods, and the third generation, who “achieve material success, but still are left with . . . the paradox of the dream unresolved,” feeling “forced to choose between conforming blindly or forsaking the dream altogether.” Maurine firmly staked out her own idealistic ground: “I believe that the dream of brotherhood is possible.”

In another manuscript, she explained her premise for the series. “The dream of brotherhood is possible, though only time can tell. Meanwhile, all any member of the human race can do is to seek the Holy Grail amid the dream’s debris—that despite what Thomas Wolfe said, I think you can ‘go home again;’ in fact, you must. For ‘going home again’ is a prerequisite to going anywhere else! Spiritually at least.”

Opening Poem: The Dixie Pilgrim

Chapter 17 opens with a charming poem, which “young Clory” finds in her grandmother’s things. It is supposedly by David Wight, and appeared in the Vepricula, the handwritten comic newspaper that really was published in St. George in 1864-65. I assume it is taken from a real poem published in the newspaper, probably written by Charles L. Walker. Enjoy.

I dreamed as I lay on my bed of sweet slumber
That Saint Peter, who bosses the gate and the keys,
Refused to admit quite an army in number
Because of their lives of most indolent ease.
An old Dixie Pilgrim next made his appearance.
With rag-tattered jeans and a broken straw hat;
Meekly bowing, he asked for a ticket of clearance,
Said Peter, ‘You need no such ticket at stat.’
Said Peter, ‘Good friend, we are all well acquainted
With all Dixie Pilgrims and loved ‘Rastus Snow—
They are worthy to enter and will surely be sainted’—
As he passed through the gate, Peter bowed very low

(Requiem)

He rests from his labors, from dread chills and fever,
His long-handled shovel he left down at Price;
He heeds not the roaring of old Virgin River . . .
He’s fumbling his grub-sack ‘neath tree Paradise.

“The Great Smile” in the final scene

Here are dueling opinions about the final scene of The Giant Joshua, by Mormon literature critics Eugene England and Harlow Soderburg Clark. 

Eugene England (1997):

Let me say straight out that I find The Giant Joshua among the finest two or three novels yet produced by or about Mormons. And more, it compares favorably with other, much better known, regional American novels such as Giants in the Earth, Main Street, and even My Antonia.  It is not only, as the critic ofWestern literature, Ray B. West has noted, “the most completerecord of a small pioneer community,” but it is also therichest, fullest, most moving, the truest fiction about theGreat Basin pioneer experience that I have found . . . [However] the first hints of the problem come with the passages describing Clory’s religious experiences. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is right in noting that Whipple is to be commended for making Clory one of the very few romantic heroines in Mormon novels who has religious experiences, but that even so these are awkwardly rendered:  “Whenever things get too bad for her, she turns to a kind of kindergarten mysticism, dwelling on thoughts of ‘The Unopened Door’ and ‘The Great Smile’ (which has a way of turning into Charlie Brown’s ‘Great Pumpkin’ once the spell of the book is broken).” [Laurel Ulrich, “Fictional Sisters,” in Claudia L. Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters, 1976, p. 75] For me these resounding abstractions (Whipple always helps the reader know what’s happening by capitalizing them), these vague and unsatisfactory mental Solutions to Clory’s problems turn into Emerson’s Oversoul or Transparent Eyeball.[1]

Harlow Soderborg Clark (2001):

The ending is generally disliked, even among those who think The Giant Joshua Mormondom’s best novel. I find it a good ending, and I am here to speak in contro to the versers who dislike it. The most common objection is to the penultimate paragraph . . . General objections [are]: 1. It seems too easy a resolution to a lifelong quest. It seems like deathbed repentance or a deus ex machina. 2. The vocabulary is not Mormon. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said in her “Fictional Sisters,” the phrase reminds one of the Great Pumpkin . . .

Testimony—especially in LDS culture—is a communal matter. We stand before our religious community and bear testimony. The metaphor is worth noting, not only because bear is the word we use for delivering a child, not only because bear is what prophets do with their burdens (songs), or what the Lord asks his disciples to do with his and each others’ burdens, but also because the word sounds like that wonderfully (or frighteningly) intimate verb, bare.

I salute Maurine Whipple’s understanding of how being rejected by a religious leader would add to Clory’s sense that she doesn’t have a testimony, and her guilt over that lack. I also salute Whipple’s ending the novel by affirming Clory’s testimony. But the affirmation is stated in terminology most Mormons wouldn’t recognize, and Whipple has been consistently faulted for not understanding Mormon spirituality. There is a deep, deep irony in this. At the end of the second to last chapter is a homecoming party for David Wright and Erastus Snow, just home from prison. Clory walks up Mount Hope—an expression of her sense, pregnant and abandoned, that she no longer belongs in the community—seeking for peace and watching the homecoming parade from that place. Apostle Snow seeks her out up there and she pours out her grief to him,

“Why, I haven’t even got a testimony” (619)

Erastus replies: 

“Prison has taught me many things, Clorinda Agatha. . . . But I’ll tell you—I’m not sure what a testimony is myself.”

He laughed a little. Heresy! 

“The way I look at it, the thing we’ve got that’s immortal is an Idea. And maybe that’s why we’ve been persecuted. . . . Maybe, human nature being what it is, the world will always stamp upon that Idea. . . . But you can’t kill it, Clorinda Agatha—it’s older than the world.”

His words seemed to come from out of the past, as if they had lived forever, as old as time, as old as the rocks. 

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor . . . Everybody’s reaching for it, only some religions are going ‘cross-lots, some kitty-cornered. . . . None of us have yet come within a million miles of it, but the big thing is that we try. And as long as we try and admit we’re trying, there’s hope. A mosque or a pagoda or a Tabernacle . . . and maybe we’re a little closer to it in the Tabernacle because we’ve gone out for it deliberately, colonized for it. I believe that to be Zion’s mission to mankind, Clorinda Agatha—to create among these barren hills a little inviolate world, a little sanctuary where the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God are not just words but living, breathing realities. . . .” (620)

That doesn’t sound very Mormon, certainly not like Erastus Snow or any other 19th-century Mormon leader, and some have cited it as further evidence that Whipple just didn’t understand Mormon spirituality. But there are two passages of scripture that could help us interpret the scene differently. Doctrine and Covenants 1:24 tells us that God speaks to his servants “in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.” Sure, it doesn’t sound like Erastus. It sounds like Clory. He’s speaking to her “after the manner of [her] language.”

He’s also speaking to her “in her weakness,” a phrase that restates Alma’s baptismal covenant at the Waters of Mormon to “bear one another’s burdens that they may be light” (Mosiah 18:8). In saying, “I’m not sure what a testimony is myself,” Erastus is taking upon himself Clory’s burden, her sense that she doesn’t have a testimony.

The deep irony is that, while Maurine Whipple portrays her faith community as bearing each other’s burdens, that community burdened her with the label of one who didn’t quite fit, indeed uses the very scene that celebrated their empathy as evidence she didn’t understand their spirituality.

If, instead, we choose to interpret the ending as evidence that she did understand Mormon spirituality, it becomes possible to ask why she chose to state that spirituality in terms most Mormons wouldn’t use. Veda Hale told me that she thinks Whipple wanted to relate Mormon spirituality to the great spiritual/mystical tradition, that she wanted to tell her non-Mormon readers that Mormon spirituality stands right alongside any of the great spiritual traditions. 

She ought to be celebrated for that.  . . .

Mormonism reasserted a high degree of physical detail, with Joseph Smith proclaiming God’s embodiment in the King Follett Discourse and “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also” (D&C 130:22). But Mormon descriptions of spirituality tend to be highly abstract. To use a platitude I’ve heard over and over in the last 25 or 30 years, “Trying to explain the Holy Spirit to someone who’s never felt it is like trying to explain the taste of salt to someone who’s never tasted it.”

That may sound like a solid, salt of the earth metaphor, but it’s really saying, “If you don’t know what a spiritual experience is I can’t tell you.” It’s a totally abstract statement—much more abstract than comparing one’s spirituality to the warmth and tenderness and affection and openness and joy and enigma and sensuality and generosity of —a Smile. . . .

I’m suggesting that Maurine Whipple’s images of the Great Smile and the Grand Idea are attempts to translate Mormon spirituality into terms non-Mormons might recognize . . .

Many LDS feel that Whipple did not re-present their spirituality faithfully. But I wonder how that might change if we changed our assumptions, decided that the image of the Great Smile is an attempt to relate our spirituality to a larger audience—a way of saying, “We are people just like you.”[2]

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[1] Eugene England. “Whipple’s The Giant Joshua: A Literary History of Mormonism’s Best Historical Fiction.” AML-List, March 1997.

[2] Harlow Soderborg Clark. “She, Clory, Had a Testimony, and a Great Smile.” Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 2001, p. 69-79.