In Lithuanian Wood. - Review - book review

Wendell Mayo, In Lithuanian Wood. Fredonia, New York' White Pine Press, 1999

Some years ago--when revolutions in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had begun what would be the entire disintegration of the Soviet empire--I read an editorial in which the writer remembered the 1950s Independence Day parades in his Midwest home town. At the end of each parade there was always a tiny, curious contingent carrying a lonely banner which read "Free the Baltic States." What are the Baltic states, the writer, then in grammar school, wondered, for he had literally never heard of them. And what do they need to be freed from? The writer of that editorial regarded his lack of knowledge ironically, but in point of fact until the 1990s his young ignorance was the ignorance of an entire nation. Extremely few Americans even knew of a Lithuania or Latvia much less where they were located. And even now, after the impossible casting off by these tiny countries of the Soviet behemoth, even fewer Americans could say a word about the topography or history or sensibility of the Baltics.

Into that void comes Wendell Mayo's In Lithuanian Wood, the second collection of fiction from a writer who, just beneath the level of a national recognition he deserves, has for years been diligently refining his craft and expanding his range. In choosing Lithuania as his subject, Mayo throws long needed light, a perceptive and sympathetic light, on an ignored nation and its people. Since Mayo is a storyteller, not a political scientist, however, he presents his subject via the indirect and profoundly personal manner of short fiction. The stories in this collection are mostly centered around the experiences of Paul Rood, an American professor of literature, who visits the newly liberated Lithuania of the early 1990s to conduct workshops and oversee a Lithuanian edition of Whitman's work. Rood arrives, teaches, listens to stories, tells stories, travels the Baltics, feels increasingly alienated from his fellow American educators, and, after a night's drunk in Vilnius which causes him to miss his plane back home, decides to remain in Lithuania indefinitely.

However, Rood's story, while present, is not always foregrounded, intermittently disappears, and is certainly not what makes In Lithuanian Wood the achievement it is. Instead, what impresses the reader most is the painfully beautiful lyricism of Mayo's writing, an unindulgent, unbathetic lyricism which does not muddy but only evokes person, place, and emotion with further clarity. Consider the ruminations which conclude the story "Songbird," thoughts from a lonely Lithuanian student of Rood's, a young man emotionally exiled from his own life, homeland, and ex-love:

   How will you have me? Sad? Happy? Indifferent? What do you expect? What
   will you have me say? And what will I do tonight? Will I once more let my
   heart out to walk among pines in evening that is light and blue smoke? Or
   will I listen so long for an ancient song in reply that I must sleep where
   I am standing? What am I to do tonight? Will I let my heart out to walk
   among you, while I remain here and hope no one will step on it?

Or this passage from the story "After the Talkutschka," in which the companionless, spiritually adrift Rood, as he leaves for what he hopes will be a singularly isolated pilgrimage to the Thomas Mann house, solemnly observes a ferry boat disappearing into the evening water:

   He traced that night the slow progress of the other ferry ... to a point in
   the uncertain distance where its thirty-six cabin lights, the twelve, four,
   one--passed from deep night into deeper night ... far from the calamitous
   confines of the talkutschka, into liquid space, growing smaller and
   smaller, some unformed thing in water's womb.

Mayo's powers of observation and revelation have never been so subtle or acute. He uses these powers to present an expertly mixed picture of contemporary Lithuania: happy to be free of Soviet domination, but still burdened, even invisibly traumatized, by a wider history of oppression it cannot escape (in a wonderfully symbolic episode in "The Gravedigger of Marijampole," the narrator unearths countless skulls of those massacred by the SS); flirtatious with the cheery decadence of Americana (apparent are Bevis and Butthead, Coca-Cola, and "FUCK YOU" graffiti), but deeply uncertain to what extent it wants to embrace the character of the ubiquitous West. Mayo's Lithuanians are respectful and sometimes quite friendly to Rood, the American, but finally and inevitably, even in their moments of most open friendliness, aloof. Guarded. This Lithuania seems to know what it does not want to be, but, only just freed after generations of outside rule, has not quite determined what it is. And it will not be rushed to find out.

At the same time, in other stories, such as "The Woodcutter and the Devil," "The Witch and the Rain," and "Rue" (itself worth the price of the book), Mayo evokes the Eastern Europe of folk tradition. In another writer, the peasant farmers, daughters, and housewives of these stories might become stock figures, but Mayo, reminiscent of Toomer and Anderson, observes these country people with such fresh vision and brutally specific physical detail that their characters and stories are superbly alive. The enfolding of this peasant past with a complicated urban present--all tied together by one visitor's experience--makes In Lithuanian Wood necessary reading about a country and people long overlooked and little understood.