“You Will Never See Any God”
Ervin D. Krause
University of Nebraska Press, $17.95
The nine short stories in this collection are filled with harsh, changeable weather in the natural world and the human heart. Set in the Midwest, where author Ervin D. Krause grew up, they describe a perilous yet beautiful landscape and the tools, tasks and rhythms of agricultural life.
Krause moved to Hawaii in 1961; he taught literature and creative writing in the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa until his death from Hodgkin’s disease in 1970 at age 39. His widow, Loretta Krause, lives in Honolulu and helped collect materials for the book.
Themes of isolation and human cruelty prevail. In “Metal Sky” a farmer lies pinned and bleeding beneath his tractor, thirsty, his face burning in the sun. When a butterfly lands on his cheek, he captures it in his hand. Its beauty brings back memories of his son bringing him water and riding beside him on the tractor. Then “he crushed the brittle butterfly … and there was still the light-yellow smudge of the wing coloring covering the blood on the man’s fingers.”
In “The Snake,” a tractor driver stops to move a snake out of danger and is transfixed by its beauty. He feels happy and self-congratulatory, only to lash out when his nephew kills the creature. This and other stories in the book were included in O. Henry Awards and “Best American Short Stories” anthologies.
“Anniversary” features an assistant professor who grows disgusted with a love affair: “With sham they seduced each other, used each other, in this parody of love.” It is told from the male professor’s point of view, but we see more in the woman, a working mother, than he is able to. Published here for the first time, “Anniversary” was accepted in 1961 by Prairie Schooner, the literary magazine of the University of Nebraska, but censored by a college dean. The editor resigned.
These are suspenseful, well-crafted stories. Although the author keeps a distance from his alienated characters, his skill is such that the reader cares what happens. In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, Krause builds settings that readers fully experience.
