Episode 331 - Robert Nathan (So There!)

About this Episode

It's funny that in one's recovery from illness, the "band width" is still nowhere near what it used to be. I used to be able to read a novel by Dostoyevsky one week, then a book by Forde the next, then a novel by Cozzens the next.

**Sayonara to that! **Now one is fortunate to be able to read The Runaway Bunny.

So hey, I've gone back to reading in three-page spurts. And the perfect author for this "new way of walking, new way of talking" is... Robert Nathan.

You remember Robert Nathan. He wrote The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie, to name just two of his roughly 40 or so fantasy novels. But the thing is, Robert Nathan's novels are all short -- more like novellas -- and they read like pudding, because he was an excellent and simple narrator.

Anyway, I'm back to Nathan, like it or not; and today's cast updates you on this charming "Mid-Century" author.

It is good to note, too, that Robert Nathan was Jewish but had zero chip on his shoulder. That may be because he was born into a wealthy Manhattan family and didn't feel he had to prove himself in the wider American scene. (We would say today that Nathan was a child of "privilege".)

One corollary of Nathan's un-reactive growing up is that he was explicitly favorable to Christianity. You see this in several of his novels, and also in his poetry, which was much acclaimed on the home front during World War II.

Well, that's lesson two for 2022, and I hope it's the second of many, for Mockingbird, in our New Year. LUV U.