REVIEWS
A Slant of Light: Reflections on Jack Wheatcroft, edited by Peter Balakian and Bruce Smith (Bucknell University Press, 2018).
Whether it was in the classroom or the Bison, John “Jack” Wheatcroft ’49 nurtured generations of budding writers, putting Bucknell on the national literary map in his 45 years of teaching. With the encouragement of President and Professor of Biology Emeritus Gary Sojka, two of Wheatcroft’s stellar students — Bruce Smith ’68 and Peter Balakian ’73 — have gathered contributions from 18 former students who have gone on to be writers, academics and teachers as well as colleagues and friends such as former presidents Sojka and Dennis O’Brien. The collection celebrates the professor emeritus of English, who published 25 books of fiction, poetry and plays before his death in 2017. Wheatcroft’s most notable work was Catherine: Her Book, a 1983 prequel to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Review - The Portrait of A Lover by John Wheatcroft
By Jerilee Wei
November 11, 2012
In still another Inverted-A Press publication with a wow factor, John Wheatcroft's - Portrait of a Lover - delivers everything in excellence that any work of fiction should have to offer. More than a romance novel, Portrait of a Lover, leaps out at the reader with questions we all should ask or have asked at various times when it comes to the subject of love.
Just exactly what defines a love affair of the heart, mind, and body? Perhaps, in trying to affix a label on the true definition of love and romance, no two human beings will ever agree what love or romance is and even more importantly what love and romance aren't. However, John Wheatcroft's superb book will certainly have anyone reading it thinking upon the subject of love deeply and hopefully in ways never contemplated before.
As someone who has been married forty-three years, I’ve had a lot of time to think about love and romance. That’s especially true since my forty-three years of love and romance has been tempered with the reality that those impressive numbers of years were spread out among three different husbands.
However, before I go any further into my thoughts about this book, I am reminded of a rather long passage by Carson McCullers, from The Ballad of the Safe Cafe and Other Stories (another excellent author and book by-the-way):
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth."
"Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past.. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit.. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."
In Portrait of a Lover, the main character, Sarah Hevers, knows what I've come to know -- that all of life is about "love." This fact has always been true. It always was. It always will be. And like life, love has many definitions, but not always the commonly held belief about love having to be between two lovers, but sometimes of a love simply more mysterious, deeper -- and in the case of this book it is unreciprocated love, and that sometimes (not always), is quite enough because it is perfect in so many ways that reciprocated love can never achieve.
In contrast to the book, but central to Portrait of a Lover, one definition of "the portrait of a romance novel reader," might be defined as those who love reading such books about love -- all kinds of love, and especially about unconventional love and the kind of love affair that leaves you thinking long after you've closed the book enough to question your own definitions of love -- and that is what John Wheatcroft delivers in Portrait of a Lover, a story so expertly crafted that readers will not soon forget the depth of Sarah Hevers' love.
Random Necessities, by John Wheatcroft.
Cranbury, N.J.: Cornwall Books, 1999, 132 pp.
The Midwest Quarterly. 41.4 (Summer 2000): p 458.
Copyright 2000- Pittsburgh State University - Midwest Quarterly Ronald Charles Epstein
Retired Pennsylvania professor John Wheatcroft has amassed a formidable list of credits as poet, novelist and dramatist. One of his plays, Ofoti, has won the Alcoa Playwriting Award and was produced for television in 1984 as The Boy Who Loved Trolls. His most recent volume of poetry, Random Necessities, includes verses that were published in distinguished literary journals, such as Britain's Agenda, Canada's The Dalhousie Review and the Piedmont Literary Review. He is fortunate that Cornwall Books has offices in all three countries.
The poet offers different perspectives on love and sex. "Blue Mushrooms" is textbook mainstream verse. He even suggests that he and his Katherine should "... bill and coo," (16) "Like a pair of doves ..." (16). Such corny, or mannered, imagery might drive contemporary readers to the edgier fare of "Appetites". That piece cleverly defines a symbiotic relationship; one lover is porcine at the dinner table, the other is a sexual swine. In "Love and War" today's raw erotica is subtly outdone by the gritty sexuality of World War II sailors on leave. The Pearl Harbor pickup with "... a rose tattoo on her thigh;" (29) is a tired proletarian, not a trendy yuppie.
This World War II Navy veteran shares the horrible experiences that shaped his cynical antiwar attitudes. One walks in the combat boots of a sailor who destroyed a fishing boat to preserve his ship and traded cigarettes with a dying Japanese man for a stone figurine, learning why he does not celebrate Grenada or the Gulf War. The vet interprets traumatic events yet again.
Wheatcroft cleverly observes contemporary society, effectively touching the reader. "Christmas Eve 1996" deals with the poet's attempts to relieve the stresses of dealing with his ailing elderly mother by stopping at a roadhouse. There he watches:
On the television screen
above the bar, a pop tart
in hot pants and halter,
trimmed like Santa's suit, (64)while he hears "... a carol, lauding virginity," (64). Although the poet recalls a personal experience, this unsettling symbiosis between idealized spirituality and crass materialism can be found elsewhere--ask anyone who has played the slot machines in a Vegas casino in December.
This book's travel poetry explores Great Britain and may reveal the poet's background. In "The Tumbrel Coaches" a Yorkshire village's history is encapsulated:
The common, where anyone's sheep once grazed,
now paved for pay parking,
is the history of England in a square.
An earl in granite hogs the center. (91)Is this an academic exercise for John Wheat croft? The word "croft" refers to smallholding worked by "crofters," who were sometimes dispossessed by their "betters". Is the author another traveler who has found himself? The creative man establishes a conservative, neo-formalist literary identity. "The Mutilation of St. Agatha" is a religious poem that one associates with historical figures, not living artists. His revival of rhyme is only partially successful. The couplet, "Rising from ocean, a cuff of sand/with a nosegay of flowers in a hand." (79) is banal and stilted. Oil the other hand, using the line "Even my liver shivers" to describe a "Tropical Fever" (125) is wryly idiosyncratic.
Fortunately, Wheatcroft is not dependent on stray bits of wayward wit. He succeeds by affirming tradition and remembering history without compromising his ability to reach out to a wider audience.
RONALD CHARLES EPSTEIN is a widely traveled Canadian freelance writer. His reviews and verse can be found in numerous American and Canadian publications, including a Fall 1999 review of Donald Justice's Oblivion: Of Writers & Writing in The Harvard Review. He resides in Toronto.
Recollection by Elizabeth Smith-Mao, Bucknell University Class of 1971
In an interview, Professor of English Emeritus Jack Wheatcroft explains that Alice Rousseau, an employee of the University, was the prototype for Edie Dougan in his 1975 novel Edie Tells: A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Cleaning Woman.
She was a custodian in Vaughan Literature Building, and we got to be friendly. She would use my office to sit and read when she was to be doing other things that didn't seem to her to be so important. And, it never bothered me that I'd come back from class and find her sitting there reading, having pulled a book down from the shelf. And, the next thing I knew, (I was writing a little bit of poetry in those days) she'd write a little note: "This is dreadful! You can do better than that!"
The next thing I knew, she began to make suggestions. And, the next thing I knew, she was writing some poems of her own. She was not an educated woman, but she had qualities that a poet needs. She had imagination. She had passion. She was perceptive, observant, and she actually had a good ear. And so she wrote some lovely little poems. I can remember one in particular for the son she never had. She had two daughters, but no sons. It was a very moving poem indeed. In the novel I don't give her any children at all--just a way of changing things of course; I didn't want to get children involved in what I was doing in the novel.
Well, it got out that we had a custodian who was also a poet and the students asked Alice to give poetry readings. And before you know it, she was giving poetry readings in coffee shops. She also began to act. She had a part in one of my plays that was done by Cap and Dagger, the Theater Department at Bucknell. And she had quite a coterie of students who formed around her. She invited them to her house. I didn't know anything about her private life; that's all made up in the novel. But the custodian who is a poet, a portrait of the artist as a cleaning woman, a middle-aged cleaning woman, which is the subtitle of the novel--that's factual.
Vengeance is Everyone’s by Jay Neugeboren
The New York Times February 2, 1986
SLOW EXPOSURES By John Wheatcroft. 178 pp. New York: Cornwall Books.
THERE are two wonderful war stories in this collection by John Wheatcroft, and both of them, like all the pieces in ''Slow Exposures,'' are horror stories that turn on an act of nearly maniacal vengeance.
In ''Kamikaze,'' a seaman named Fels subtly manipulates Bond, through whose eyes we see the events, into acting against Mappes, a tyrannical petty officer. ''Then the kamikazes came and every man aboard felt it,'' the story begins. The threat of the kamikaze planes, which can rip through 16-plate steel and crack the armored hull ''as though it were an eggshell,'' seems mild next to the war against the petty officer, so that at the end, when a Japanese plane does divebomb the carrier, killing 12 of the crew, the act seems almost peaceful compared to the manner in which Fels and Bond, a bit earlier, have disposed of Mappes.
In ''The Forfeit,'' an even more terrifying story, a soldier recuperates from a war injury in Honolulu, learning to use a steel claw in place of a missing hand. Having lost at chess against an arrogant commanding officer, he longs to see the major defeated by another, more fit player. ''Because the revenge was to be vicarious,'' the narrator says, ''I waited for it none the less hungrily.'' The chess match becomes for the protagonist not merely a struggle with the major, but a duel with his own private demons. ''I jerked my eyes onto the steel fingers that refused to obey my will,'' he says at the story's climax. ''A movement by the major, a twitch of his white-gloved right hand, yanked my eyes from the fingers that were mine but not me.'' A moment later, when the major is on the verge of defeat, it is the narrator who suddenly despairs and, to our surprise and his astonishment, begins to perceive the movements of the major's gloved hand as if they were those of a mechanical claw.
Few of the other stories in this collection of 10 are as compelling as these, for while the others are awful enough - in one a young boy, to get even for acts of cruelty against his dog, drops from a tree and slashes a crippled man to death; in another, a dignified professor retaliates against a crass young colleague by ramming his Buick into the colleague's flashy sports car - they are rarely informed with the sense of psychological and fictional complexity that makes the war stories so powerful. The horror visited upon men and women by the world in these tales does not, for the most part, seem equaled by the horrors that possess them from within.
Mr. Wheatcroft, a poet, playwright and novelist and a professor of English at Bucknell University, seems well aware of what he is about in crafting these tales. In a world where the news media daily make the ghastly into the ordinary, what, his stories seem to ask, can still shock and terrify? The stories are set forth with intelligence, but in a rather flat and sometimes awkward manner. A few seem to be little more than grisly anecdotes. This is too bad, for when Mr. Wheatcroft allows himself to enter the inner caverns of his characters' most private passions and desires, he gives us tales that are stark and memorable. THE REVEREND BURNS RUBBER ''I wasn't speeding. Besides, I'm involved in making a sick call. One of my parishioners is dying.'' . . . ''I'm sorry, Reverend, but I clocked you at sixty-five. For over two miles.'' ''That's not true. Unless there's something wrong with my speedometer. Or yours.'' He definitely had not been traveling at sixty-five. Sixty-two, at most sixty-three. The fifty-five that was posted, the five they were supposed to give you, the two or three the manufacturer allowed for. It was a notorious fact that the highway patrol invariably added a couple of miles when they charged you, in order to seem not to be quibbling, rounding it off upward on the nearest 5 or 0. It wasn't fair. Suddenly the triteness of the speedometer excuse hit him and he laughed out loud despite his pique. The trooper laughed too. Well, the man had a job to do. Probably loved his wife, kids and cocker spaniel. And was good to a widowed mother. ''Like I say, Reverend,'' the trooper mumbled, the ball point pen in his mouth making him look like a pirate with a knife between his teeth, ''I wouldn't have started to write you up if I'd known. I'm a Catholic myself, but I respect all faiths. Guess I just didn't expect to find a reverend driving a foreign sports car.'' He ripped off the top sheet of the summons and handed it and Davis' operator's license to Davis. An angry flash shot through Davis' blood. Only the wrong kind ever found their way into law enforcement. Like the military. Chances were the fellow kept a German shepherd that was trained to attack. Or a Doberman pinscher. - From ''Slow Exposures.''
The Fugitive Self: New and Selected Poems by John Wheatcroft is a tribute to a distinguished career spanning fifty years in American letters. At once meditative, whimsical, and hard-hitting, it illuminates the spiritual cost of American expansion.
“. . . With ‘more shapes than water’ and ‘more selves than the Trinity,’ these poems explore the music of love and the weight of grief, while always being mindful of ‘history in the making—brutal, bloody, bootless.’ Here is a lifetime of poetry, a treasure house of what art can aspire to. With consummate skill, Wheatcroft probes the world for what won’t be sentimentalized, falsified, and is willing to embrace nothing, if that’s the final truth—but ‘nothing’ has never been so alive, moving, passionate, and compelling.”—Betsy Sholl