READERS GUIDE: All the Living by C.E. Morgan 
Review: Strong sense
of place defines exquisite
'All the Living'
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Berea author's debut novel rewards the careful reader
By Amy Wilson awilson1@herald-leader.com
About the title
C.E. Morgan took the title of her novel, All the Living, from the Bible's Ecclesiastes 9:3-6:
"This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.
"For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
"Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun."
A novel's soundtrack
On a blog called LargeHearted Boy, C.E.Morgan provided a lengthy playlist for All the Living, with liner notes. For the complete unabridged version of the list, click here.
In Morgan's own, abbreviated, words:
A playlist for the novel might have provided a list of the best acts working in contemporary bluegrass, because the work is set in East-Central Kentucky, where bluegrass is ubiquitous (as well as old-time, gospel and country). Instead, I decided to do something more basic: classical.
What follows is not comprehensive and not programmatic (though it is roughly chronological); these pieces don't impress through virtuosity alone, and I make no claims for their supremacy within the genre. I just believe that the best place to start is with whatever moves you. I trust that the intellect rallies when the heart is stirred, and so what follow are some of the most stirring pieces I've encountered in a lifetime of listening. No previous experience or knowledge required.
Josquin's Ave Maria, Tallis Scholars: Josquin des Prez's Ave Maria is a fully realized example of a polyphony, a motet in which all voice parts enjoy a musical equality in ironic contradistinction to the larger religious and social world of the time. The Tallis Scholars excel at Josquin; his music requires an unobtrusive bass, moderate middle voices, and a soprano like a white ray of light — all blended together into a tone of bleached purity.
Bach's Prelude to the Cello Suite in G, No. 1, Yo-Yo Ma: Bach wrote six suites for cello (violoncello in the 17th century), which together constitute a kind of artistic apex for the instrument. This prelude — joyful, swiftly meandering, ordered yet improvisational-feeling — is a perfect two-minute illustration of why Bach endures.
Bach's Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould: One of the most important variations of the Baroque era, the Goldberg Variations aren't as popular as the Well-Tempered Clavier, largely because of the virtuosic technique required. Gould recorded the first version in 1955 as his debut, and the second in 1981. The first version is vivid, declarative and fast (Gould would later dismiss it as "too fast"); the second is careful, sage, and more introspective (with slower tempi).
Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus: I pick a single Mozart piece with great fear and trembling. It's an almost impossible task. This motet may be the single most peaceful thing he ever wrote, a three-minute distillation of the all the longing and reverence at work in the human religious impulse. Designed for use during communion, this is as simple and beautiful as sacred music gets.
Billings' David's Lamentation: Born a poor man and largely self-taught in music, Billings was an idiosyncratic American composer (contemporaneous with Mozart), whose choral work was (and is) vital to shape-note singing, also known as Sacred Harp. Shape-note practice emphasizes participation and not performance, which results in a marvelously abrasive sound midway between hollering and singing.
Beethoven's Third Symphony (Eroica), von Karajan conducting: A signpost for the start of Romanticism, Beethoven's Third bursts with ferocious joy, plangent despair and ultimate triumph — basically, everything that made Beethoven Beethoven. There is more life force in a single hour of Beethoven than in some other composers' entire oeuvre. He seemed determined not to let a human emotion pass him by.
Schubert's Erlkonig, Jessye Norman: Told alternately from the perspective of the devil-like Elflking, and the father and son fleeing his grasp, the song is urged forward by a restless, churning piano accompaniment. Although the piece often is performed by men, Jessye Norman excels at the three different voices, grasping equally the high fright of the child, the soothing father, and the growling hell of death. Her enormous and demanding soprano makes this song not just moving in its depiction of mortality's approach, but terrifying.
Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma, Joan Sutherland: If you think you don't like opera, give this aria a try. If it doesn't do anything for you, there may be no hope. This piece has everything: high drama, a choral backdrop, heart-stopping melismas and top notes without handholds.
Donizetti's Una Furtiva Lagrima from L'Elisir d'Amore, Placido Domingo: There were never three tenors, only one: Placido Domingo. This is Domingo at his best, the kind of singing that scares away all pretenders.
Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, second and third movements: For my money, Ives is the most exciting figure in the American canon — perched precariously between the safe ground of traditional American song and hymnody, and the frontiers of 20th-century atonality. His approach feels empathetic; he's gentle on a listener afraid of losing the tonal center.
Henry Cowell's The Banshee: Scary, radical, important. If you ever meet a rabid, slavering bitch from hell, she'll probably sound like this. Redefining what it meant to "play" the piano, Cowell introduced indeterminacy (the ultimate freedom of artistic choice) into performance practice and paved the way for the "prepared piano" of artists like John Cage.
Strauss' Four Last Songs, Gundula Janowitz, von Karajan conducting: A work that demands the most extraordinary lyricism from the biggest soprano voices, The Four Last Songs is a meditation on death, but conceived without angst or morbidity. There's a pervading sense of calm and acceptance, of well-earned fatigue at the end of life's day.
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"The book came. It seized me. I wrote the draft in 14 days. It was like the universe opened my head and poured it in. I stepped out once to put a bill in the mail."
The first 20 pages simply poured out, she says, much as they appear today in the book. After those pages, she abandoned herself to whatever came. She worked all day, sleeping little, eating boiled eggs, drinking coffee, letting the scenes come in whatever sequence they came.
"I don't know what to call it. I was just a conduit. The characters came fully fleshed. It just came. As soon as I'd get an idea for something, I'd start a new page. Later, it all slotted together."
She was busy with school, so the editing process took the next two semesters.
This is where most writers become aware not just of story, but of the exactitude as well as the limits of words.
Editing is a "going-over and meditating on every sentence, every single word choice for maximum resonance. I want every single word to sound not just like a pitch but like a series of overtones, so there's an intertextuality at work: multiple texts, multiple meanings, allusions to other things, as much as you can. And to make sure each sentence reads out loud properly, to think about derivations of words and percussiveness."
Critics writing about All the Living have referred to Morgan's language as "effortless," "stunning," "lyrical" "earthbound and hymnlike."
"You use words with extreme intention," she says. "They are always arrows shooting for a target."
Finally, her own place
The thunder booms outside Morgan's second-floor window, which looks out on a wide-open pasture with a view of the hills beyond. It's late on the afternoon that tornadoes will come through Madison County. Morgan's cat, The Hankster, has already crawled into the kitchen cupboards to hide.
This is the first apartment she has ever had. Before the two-book deal from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she had neither fork nor spoon to her name, she says. She had her books and a computer that was given to her when she went to Berea College, where she studied English and voice. She slept on friends' sofas. She drove, and still drives, a 20-year-old Ford Ranger with 250,000 miles on it.
Her apartment has five rooms, pots of oxalis, a new soft, oversize chair, and two oft-used hitchhiking signs.
"Five rooms is difficult to adjust to," she says, laughing. "This is a radical change. It's not a shift in personal understanding, only a shift in my physical safety in the world. The real change is that I have health insurance now. I can put gas in my truck. I still mentally calculate the cost of every meal I eat."
Hers is not a life that has been preoccupied with making a living. Trained operatically, she has sung to pay the bills. Her life is full of literature, music and thought. Her choice to go to Harvard, she says, was borne of "a preoccupation with what moral beauty looks like, what a secular ethic looks like, what a religious ethic looks like, post-20th century.
"I can't imagine that we all aren't waking up every day wondering what moral beauty looks like. We live in a world consumed by issues of physical beauty, yet we stand at the tail end of the most horrific century that humankind has ever known. How do we wake up every morning and not ask how to live in the world without harming others? What does harm look like? What does it mean to live with others rightly?"
She worries about that.
The rain comes. She gets up and closes the front windows to keep her new things dry. Outside the windows, it is darker, but the colors are more vivid.
She needs to talk about the readers. She is not going to tell them how to think about her novel.
"I don't want to say too much. I want very much not to interpret the work in public. I do that first, as a show of respect for the integrity and the completeness of the text itself. But also as a show of respect for the hermeneutical liberty of the reader.
"I see the relationship between reader and writer as equals. We're linguistic and intellectual peers."
That is, she insists, what she envisions when she sits down to write. She will tell her story, and readers can bring to it what they do. She will not goad them into what they should think.
"Life has a way of stripping us of our freedoms, and we ought to not just throw them away. It can seem like small potatoes to have the freedom to interpret a piece of art, but that's related to our intellectual freedom, and that's an enormously important component of our lives. The readers' freedoms are sacrosanct."
Not a bad job
Morgan has no set routine for writing the book she now owes her New York publisher. As long as she has "forward motion" on it, she says, she's happy. It, too, will take place in Kentucky, and she has a lot of research to do before she can start to write.
This is the first time that her job is what the 7-year-old Morgan might have imagined it was like to be a writer. She has had bad jobs, she says, and this isn't one of them. It is not as if she has to wait, she says, for her "nine-minute break" to create. She gets to do it anytime she wants.
So she lives among her dearest friends, thinks about planting tomatoes when the ground is no longer soaked, and works when she decides to.
Almost all surfaces in her apartment are stacked with books: favorites, graphic novels, new things yet unread. On the dining table are large promotional materials of her own book cover. Pictured: a stark scene, a white tobacco barn and an almost subliminal tornado in the dark clouds behind it.
Morgan worked with a Berea College librarian to pick the two photographs that were PhotoShopped to create the cover of All the Living.
It is raining really hard now. The wind rushes through the few windows left open in the back of her home.
You do not need to know her story to know that C.E. Morgan knows from whence she writes. And how it feels to sense the storm coming.
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