EILEEN TABIOS Engages
Will You Happen, Past the Silence, Through the Dark? Remembering Leonard Casper by Linda Ty-Casper
(PALH / Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2022 / 2023)
(Editor’s Note: Due to The Halo Halo Review’s focus on Filipino literature,
this review focuses mostly on Leonard Casper’s involvement with Filipino literature.)
I find it challenging to trust the forms of biography and autobiography for the simple reason that something will always be left out of a life or that something inevitably will be misrepresented. When such occurs, this may not even be due to the teller’s deceit but subjectivity. Because of this, I’ve not turned away from the form but instead leaned into it: I’ve now written four experimental auto/biographies, with some deliberately disputing whether the auto/biography is possible.
Consequently, I was intrigued by Leonard “Len” Casper’s “memoir,” as the named author (and editor) Linda Ty-Casper put it. I was curious since I understood it to have been created posthumously—after Len passed, his wife and renowned novelist Linda put the manuscript together using letters she discovered among his possessions as well as third-party material like reviews of his books. Born in Fond du Lac Wisconsin in 1923, Leonard Casper had a full life as a writer, an academic, a literary critic, and literary activist until he passed away in 2018.
The title for Will You Happen, Past the Silence, Through the Dark? Remembering Leonard Casper came from one of Len’s courtship letters: “I feel like an island, feeling this is the moment before something: will you ever come, scrape this shore, pass through the silence? Will you happen? Even as I wait, I love you. Len.”
Linda considers the book to be the memoir that her husband Len did not have a chance to write. The letters reflect who Leonard Casper was to friends, high school classmates, teachers and professors, and colleagues in the Universities of Rhode Island, Ateneo University of Manila, University of the Philippines and Wisconsin. She also included letters from editors of Southwest Review who had encouraged Len to send stories from the European front during World War II as well as letters related to Robert Penn Warren. The latter includes Len’s first letter of inquiry when he began on his dissertation at the University of Wisconsin; Len’s dissertation became the first book on Warren, which critics said influenced subsequent books on Southern writers in the U.S. There are also letters from Filipino writers Len met from years of teaching in the Philippines.
What’s wondrous is how this approach is fully effective for three-dimensionally depicting the type of person that Leonard Casper was, as well as creating an interesting—often humorous—account of a writer and critic’s lifestyle. Certain letters might lose a reader’s interest here and there, depending on how much the reader is interested in Robert Penn Warren, the world of scrambling for grants and literary funds, and Filipino literature of which Len was a huge supporter. But his own letters to his wife show him in great light as a wonderful human and a writer whose humanity can strike a chord among many readers of varying interests.
Len’s memoir also makes me wonder what it would be like to be married to a fellow writer (as someone married to someone not in the literary field, I’ve occasionally wondered.) For the Caspers, one plus one equals three, which is to say, they supported each other’s writings. Several letters testify to how Len supported Linda’s career by giving feedback and helping her find publishers. This posthumous memoir, of course, is a great example of Linda’s reciprocation on behalf of Len’s words
I also recently learned that while Linda is deservedly renowned as an author of historical fiction, Len had supported her efforts as an adult writer to write poems. Linda’s poem “Running Secretly, Singing” (from the 1980s) is published for the first time by The Halo Halo Review. As a poet, Len clearly saw merit in her poem though it failed to find a publisher (he tried, according to Linda in an email to me). For his support as well as that he was a poet, Linda had expressed to me that she wished Len would have had a chance to see the poem’s publication and my essay about it.
It’s also logical that Len also came to support Linda’s writing peers. He wrote reviews, offered advice, wrote letters of recommendations, and did other supportive acts for such Filipino writers as Ninotchka Rosca, Isagani Cruz, Jaime An Lim, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Alfred Yuson, Bienvenido Santos, F. Sionil Jose, among many others.
But what, for me, was this book’s key revelation was how strongly Len had identified his support of Linda with supporting her birthland’s growing literature in English. While himself an excellent writer whose stories were widely published internationally, including appearances in Prize Stories: O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Storiesannuals, as well as editor of The World of Short Fiction (a 20th century anthology), he became the leading critic of the growing English-language literature by Filipino writers. His books include
Six Filipino Poets, editor, Benipayo Press, Manila, 1955.
The Wayward Horizon, Essays on Modern Philippine Literature, Community Press, Manila 1961.
The World of Short Fiction: An International Collection, co-editor, Harper and Row, 1962.
Modern Philippine Short Stories, editor, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1962.
The Wounded Diamond: Studies in Modern Philippine Literature, Bookmark, Manila, 1964.
New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology, Syracuse University Press, 1966.
A Lion Unannounced: Twelve Stories and a Fable, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1971.
Firewalkers: Literary Concelebrations 1964-84, New Day, Quezon City, 1987.
In Burning Ambush: Essays 1985-1990, New Day, Quezon City, 1991.
The Opposing Thumb: Decoding Literature of the Marcos Regime, Giraffe, Quezon City, 1995.
Sunsurfers Seen From Afar: Critical Essays 1991-1996, Anvil, Manila, 1996.
Green Circuits of the Sun: Studies in Philippine and American Literature, Giraffe, Quezon City, 2002.
Other critics came to call Len the “world authority on literature of the Philippines” (62) and “the foremost American critic and literary historian of Philippine literature” (77). He also helped create The Reconnaissance Award, then the first of its kind literary criticism among Filipino writers:
The Reconnaissance Award … has been made possible by Dr. Leonard Casper, writer, critic and world authority on recent Philippine literature. Bookmark, Inc. was asked to convert the royalties from his book the Wounded Diamond into an annual award for the best criticism, by a Filipino, of a work of Philippine Literature…The 1965 and first Reconnaissance Awards are a testimony to the fact that literary criticism in the Philippines can continually claim its due of challenge and esteem.
The role of critics can be important because it can be the critical work that can expand interest in a subject. With the many supportive actions of Filipino writers detailed in the book, Leonard Casper’s impact is something for which the entire country of the Philippines can only be grateful. But I didn’t know that his life—with that helpful support of Philippine literature—might not have unfolded the way it has if not for Linda Ty-Casper:
… for you, Linda I have begun to work out plans for a writers’ workshop, and annual of short stories, and other ways of helping the local writers help each other—because I believe that literature can be a mode of truth, and that the sensibility and sensitiveness of good writers is important to be preserved, for the society, the other people, among which they must live out their lives. But all these efforts need strength, Linda, and I am human and limited. My strength needs renewal; I can help only if I am helped, I can care only if I am wanted. Not just by these persons among whom I work—their affection is of a sort and quality which can hardly satisfy the full depths of my needs—but by you, Linda, for whom all this effort is intended. How can I help make a better world unless I am allowed to be with you, who are for me the heart of all that matters—the good, the beautiful, the true. I love you, Linda, more than I could ever have expected—more than pride, more than tears. There is nothing outside you, for me.
To my surprise, this is my primary take-away from the book: that Len’s activities that have been of such great service to Philippine English literature was made possible because Linda reciprocated his love. What if… she had not? My mind, to put it starkly, boggles at the idea! But to answer the question in the book’s title, Linda did “happen, past the silence, through the dark” for Len, and the Philippines' literature benefited.
Indeed, Len’s letters to Linda—the entire Chapter 10—should be re-released in some special edition designed to emphasize the scope of this love, what Len characterized as this “terrible love” that incorporates obligation and from which Linda did not shirk. Given the subject of his love for Linda, Len’s writings in this chapter are particularly moving. They also are impactful when it comes to his sharing his opinions on writing and writers (“the test lies really in what they have written, compared with [what] they might have written”), on “the heart of poetry” (“to touch that sometimes and to find yourself alive”) and philosophy, such as what he’s learned as a critic and advocate for Filipino literature:
You know how it is, Linda: a person raised in only one country sometimes thinks that was the original country from which all others came, and of which they are imitations. Our history books in America are as nationalistic as those elsewhere; and so, although the books never said so, as a child I had the idea that men like Thomas Jefferson invented human rights. Slowly, as I’ve traveled or exchanged letters, or have been talked to, I’ve learned that the desire for self-respect and therefore the willingness to respect others is part of the human race, not part of those who live in one place or time. I’m sure that you know these things; I’m not telling you anything new, but I suppose in a sense, I am telling myself. You see, Linda, I thought I knew what the “universality of man” meant; I believed it: but even something we believe, can be enlarged in our understanding of it, in time, just as a person who loves another can find each year another reason for that love. So at the UN I heard these voices in the five official languages saying words I had heard all my life, and they came alive again for me because they are so much alive for all these. The tone of their voices said that. And there was demonstrated what previously I had accepted on faith alone: that humanity will never be driven completely out of humans. And that’s quite a bit to learn in a world with daily headlines such as ours.
Will You Happen… makes the reader fall in love with Leonard Casper. When a biography or memoir attains that feat of receiving the reader’s love for its subject, the book also becomes a gift to the reader. As a reader, I am grateful that Linda Ty-Casper shared her husband, Leonard Casper, with the world.
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; a novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; an autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography; and a flash fiction collection Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French poetry books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Forthcoming in 2026 is a selected art stories collection, The Erotic Space Around Objects. Her literary inventions include the "Kapwa novel"; the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
No comments:
Post a Comment