The Book of Bebb

It is a series of four novels that are breathtaking. I think I have mentioned them before on here, but I cannot imagine a more interesting couple of characters than Leo Bebb and Antonio Parr the narrator. Bebb is part charlatan and part preacher and part philosopher and completely a saint. I am halfway through the fourth book and I can't tell if the main character died in the third book or not. But one thing is for sure: I am going to have a day of sadness in a couple of days when I finish this last of the series.

"The trouble with people like Brownie," says Leo Bebb, "is that they hold their life in like a bakebean fart at a Baptist cookout and only let it slip out sideways a little at a time when they think there's nobody noticing. Now that's the last thing on earth the Almighty intended. He intended all the life a man's got inside him, he should live it out just as free and strong and natural as a bird."

There are moments like this of profound insight but told through simple and even vulgar ways. And then there are moments of sheer poetic majesty, like this scene from the end of the first novel:

"Terrible as an army with banners" were among the first words Bebb had quoted from the Song of Solomon in an effort to describe her to me once, and for the first time I realized what Solomon if not Bebb must have meant by such a curious image was that one way mortal man has always reacted to beauty like hers is with terror in his very bowels. I was scared stiff as I saw her picking her way toward me through all the Indians, and as nearly as I can tell, I was scared not so much because of the terrible power her beauty gave her over me as because of my own terrible inability to respond to it in anything remotely like the way the stars themselves cried out for me to. In face of such a sight and mystery as a girl can present when she walks toward you through a firelight in a moon-colored dress, it is possible for any one of us to be like whichever prophet it was who, when he beheld the Lord himself sitting high and lifted up among his angels, could only cry out "Woe is me, for I am undone.....I am a man of unclean lips....."

Any man who has ever been in love can relate to that, methinks....