April 25, 2003, was an ordinary Friday morning. I was making final sermon preparations for the coming Sunday when my next-door neighbor informed me that a friend of mine was going to recite poetry in Concord that afternoon. Jim Bradley and I had discussed literature in depth for years. He was a University of Chicago graduate with an English major and a degree in theater from nearby Saint Anselm College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts school.
In the course of our conversations, I had mentioned my acquaintance with novelist Larry Woiwode. Jim said he had enjoyed reading Larry’s fiction back in the 1960s and ’70s in The New Yorker, which published fourteen of the forty-four chapters of his acclaimed novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975). I first met Larry—who was an elder in one of our North Dakota churches at the time—at an OPC general assembly in 1991, when he was pleased to autograph Beyond the Bedroom Wall for me.
So I drove twenty-five minutes north to Concord and found Larry seated with three other poets laureate from around the country. New Hampshire poet laureate Marie Harris organized this first ever gathering of state poets laureate, giving it the odd title “Poetry and Politics.” So it was appropriate that this opening event should take place at the New Hampshire Political Library.
I had never heard Larry read, although I remembered that he had a deep, powerful voice. He entered the book-filled room in his cowboy boots with a bottle of Moxie. He read Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode” and William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” O’Shaughnessy’s line “We are the movers and shakers of the world forever it seems” reminded me of former New Hampshire poet laureate Maxim Kumin’s greeting to the audience at the main event on Saturday, borrowing from Shelley, “Welcome unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I remembered that Ezra Pound had asserted that artists are “the antennae of the race.”
I should say, rather, that Larry recited these poems, not read, because he did it all from memory—and head and shoulders above the others with a voice like Richard Burton or John Gielgud. The others of course were good, but Larry’s recitation was clearly on another level. Later, I learned why from an email exchange with him:
I played the King himself, that is Richard II, on the main stage at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1963. In the mid-sixties I was in an off-Broadway play with Robert DeNiro, as seen in the memoir, What I Think I Did (2000).
Larry also recited “Letter of an Imaginary Friend” by North Dakota poet and columnist Thomas McGrath (1916–1990). It was a truly remarkable encounter.
After the event, I reintroduced myself to Larry and was pleased that he remembered me from 1991. He often found that ministers in Reformed circles were not great fans of novels or poetry, so perhaps my interest had stuck in his mind. He kindly autographed two more books for me, Acts (1993) and Poppa John (1983). But his autograph in Beyond the Bedroom Wall was the most memorable and says so much about Larry as a writer and a Christian:
For Greg, with gratitude for your interest; and gratitude that the family, too, is part of the Body of Christ.
I was not able to attend the other events of the conference, but on Sunday Larry called and asked if he could stay with us that evening. My answer was an easy affirmative. So I picked him up at the Highlander Inn near the airport, where the poets were all staying. He worshiped with us that Lord’s Day evening.
The afternoon and evening were filled with intense conversation, as I later recorded in my journal: “He is brilliant and creative. He is working on a new novel but would not talk about it.” This must have been A Step from Death (2008), a powerful memoir. We talked late into the night over tawny port. This was a rare kind of fellowship; and now reliving it, partly through my memory-jogging journal, is pure joy.
Since Larry had a late flight out of the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, we had the day to ourselves. It was a gorgeous, warm, sunny day. We discovered that Larry was mentioned in an article in the arts section of The New York Times. He also made the front page of the state newspaper The Union Leader, in the coverage of the poets laureate conference.
In our conversation, we discussed the Bard and covered Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) and The Western Canon (1994). The capstone of our fascinating conversation was a 1928 book that Larry recommended to me: George H. Morrison’s Christ in Shakespeare: Ten Addresses on Moral and Spiritual Elements in Some of the Greater Plays.
After lunch, I remembered that Shakespeare’s birthday of April 23 was being celebrated a few days late at Saint Anselm College, where each year the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets are read, thirty at a time, with a twenty-minute open mic between each session for ad hoc recitations from the plays. So I put the top down on my Miata and drove off to listen, or so I thought, to the readings.
Larry wanted to recite during one of the open mics, so I asked the person in charge, who welcomed the offer. So, Larry took my copy of the Oxford Shakespeare he had asked me to bring along and looked briefly at a certain text. It was King Richard’s soliloquy from Richard II, Act V, Scene 5, that he had not recited since a half century earlier in 1963. People were milling about, sipping coffee and conversing, as was usual during these breaks—until Larry’s soul-penetrating voice stopped everyone in astonishment. Larry shone, and everyone applauded wildly when he was done. It was a moving moment. Some of the greatest experiences in life are completely unplanned, at least by us humans.
I shall forever treasure Larry’s signed copy of the beautifully published letterpress, handbound edition of his poetry chapbook Land of Sunlit Ice (2016). He thanked me for my positive review in Ordained Servant (June 2016). Promoting good literature in the lives of Christians—especially church officers—has been part of my mission in life and particularly in editing Ordained Servant. Larry Woiwode was a tremendous encouragement in that endeavor.
Larry, like John Updike, purposely never connected with literary circles. After his stint in New York City, Larry’s home turf in North Dakota became the context for his inspiration. Like Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, he revered his humble home. As I noted in my journal, Larry’s “writing is brilliantly descriptive of person and place in natural human rhythms. He only adds insight as it comes naturally, not forced.”
Soon after Larry left, I acquired the lovely British first edition of the Morrison book he had recommended. Here, Morrison writes about Romeo and Juliet:
Shakespeare, with consummate art, carries over into the realm of poetry what in history was exemplified at Calvary. . . . Shakespeare would have us learn that love is the great reconciler. . . . Love was the mediator, love that did not count the cost; love that for the joy that was set before it went down into the darkness of the grave. And though Shakespeare does not point us to the road that leads to the place called Calvary, do we not catch a glimpse of that way of sorrow; and hear on it, far off, the footfall of One who loved unto the uttermost, and loving died, and dying achieved a mightier reconciliation than any that Verona ever knew. (137, 141–42)
As the lines from the Richard II soliloquy remind us:
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock.”
But for Larry, being wasted by time is not the end, as his fiction and poetry always reminded us of a realm beyond this life with the Savior he trusted for everlasting life.
Larry, thank you.
Gregory Edward Reynolds is editor of Ordained Servant: A Journal for Church Officers and pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire. He is the author of The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age.
