What We Must Read: Barry Lopez "Sliver of Sky", Terrence Holt "In the Valley of the Kings"

I have been reading Terrence Holt's story collection, In the Valley of the Kings. I bought the book after learning that Holt is Junot Diaz's favorite author ("There is no one in the wide sea of English who writes like him [as far as I know]; no one who is so profound and mysterious, so searingly human and so implacably apocalyptic..."). The stories grabbed me very quickly, and I mean this literally; I felt variously as though the air was being pressed out of me, and that I was being cast to the void. Holt wrote and taught writing before enrolling in medical school; he is currently a practicing physician. But to state that last seems redundant: Holt in both his guises is telling us what is going on here and in "realms outside the scope of ordinary existence." It is overly self-laudatory but I will write it anyway: I keep seeing similarities to what informs Holt's stories and some in Transportation, particularly the title story.

Tonight I read Barry Lopez's "Silver of Sky," which appears as memoir in the January issue of Harper's. It's behind a pay-wall but go ahead and subscribe, it's $16.95. What Lopez has written had to be written and must be read. It's about the sexual abuse he experienced as a child; what does and does not happen when you do and do not expose the savagery. You will, I am sure, want, as did I, to grab Harry Shier by the throat, to shame him deeply, yes for what he did, and also for the compounding he was willing to do. And for what others, due to their own fears and rationalizations (cue Penn State anthem) are not willing to do. Lopez, a National Book Award winner and a friend, has thought long about this and writes the following:

A more obvious question I asked myself as I grew older was: How could my mother not have known? Perhaps she did, although she died, a few years after she was told, unwilling to discuss her feelings about what had gone on in California. I’ve made some measure of peace with her stance. When certain individuals feel severely threatened — emotionally, financially, physically — the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good. To use the usual metaphor, they isolate the events from one another by storing them in different rooms in a large hotel. While these rooms share a corridor, they do not communicate directly with one another.

I’m not able, today, to put the image I have of my mother as her children’s attentive guardian together with the idea of her as an innocent, a person blinded by the blandishments of a persistent pedophile. But for whatever reason, she was not able, back then, to consider what might be happening in the hours after she saw Shier drive away, her son’s head, from her point of view on the porch, not quite clearing the sill of the car window as the two of them departed.

Reading one of these works in a week would be enough to knock one silent for a while. Reading both, today, made me need to tell you.

Comments

[Nina]

Just heard Terry Gross' interview with Barry Lopez on Fresh Air this morning. What a tragedy and he's remarkable for having survived it. Turns out Dr. Shier just died last year--perhaps one of the reasons Lopez the time was right to write about it.

[Paul]

Shier was murdered in South America in 1961 according to Barry Lopez. Good riddance.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

I believe that Shier died only a year or so ago.

[Paul]

Hello. Here's a direct quote from an article Barry wrote in 2002, published in the LA Weelky:

The relief I felt at the news that we would be leaving California was the kind of relief an animal might feel if that animal had been electrocuted to unconsciousness every few days by an indifferent owner, and then had awakened one morning to find the owner dead, the cage door standing open. Along with three other boys at the time (whom I've never met, and only learned about years later from two detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department), I had been sodomized repeatedly in the mid-'50s by an older man who ran a drying-out clinic for alcoholics on Riverside Drive in North Hollywood. He preyed, I would now speculate, largely on the sons of single mothers who brought a friend or relative in for treatment. He posed as a compassionate M.D. but was neither. In the way of a true sociopath, a pathological narcissist, he insinuated himself into a family with timely gifts on birthdays, extra cash for groceries and school clothes, and the offer of an evening off for a parent when he would volunteer to take a son "to the movies."

According to the detectives, Harry Shier fled L.A. in 1959, one step ahead of a grand-jury indictment, and not his first. He had fled earlier indictments in Canada and Colorado. He was murdered, the police told me, in South America in 1961.

Here's a link to the entire article:http://www.laweekly.com/2002-01-17/news/a-scary-abundance-of-water-2/full/