★★★★★ A good guy

The Sojourner

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.
1 CHRONICLES 29:15

When I was an undergraduate, I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling. It was so good that I immediately grabbed everything by Rawlings in the Cornell Undergraduate Library. Unfortunately, that was easy, because Rawlings didn't publish a lot. Besides The Yearling (easily her most famous work), South Moon Under, a story collection When the Whippoorwill, a memoir Cross Creek, and this novel, The Sojourner, which became my favorite.

It's the life story of a man Asahel Linden. Ase is a farmer somewhere in the USA. (I don't remember where, but I have a vague impression of one of the southeastern states.) And the simple thing to know about Ase is that he's a good person. He is overshadowed by his brother Ben, whom his mother loves and considers his clear superior. But Ase is a modest man and doesn't mind the elevation of Ben, whom he also loves.

Chapter III begins with these words "Ase Linden had three friends and a flute," which is as good a summary of the world of the boy Ase as any. As he grows, he marries a woman whom he loves deeply, has children, some of whom he also loves, and makes a few other friends.

The novel ends with Ase's death.

It had been so brief a sojourn, not even a full century. He had been a guest in a mansion and he was not ungrateful. He was at once exhausted and refreshed. His stay was ended. Now he must gather up the shabby impedimenta of his mind and body and be on his way again.

In fact, when I recently read A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which has that same sense of life as a transient state, it reminded me of The Sojourner.

This is a beautiful thoughtful novel -- not big on excitement or drama, but my favorite work by one of my favorite authors.

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