Where Myth and Magic Leaven Daily Life

Of all the troubles to afflict the satellites of the former Soviet Union--unemployment, crime, inflation--one of the worst is Western tourism.

Whether it happens to be American college kids drinking beer and passing out on the streets of Prague (thanks to a depreciated koruna) or Intourist buses stopping in Russian villages known for the rusticity of their starving peasants, Western tourism can be a demoralizing force when it makes light of the misfortunes of locals.

In Wendell Mayo’s “In Lithuanian Wood,” Paul Rood hopes to have a more positive encounter. An American English professor, Rood has gone like a Christian missionary (rood as in “cross”) to teach the poetry of Walt Whitman to a people who have never heard of him. After so many years of gloomy Soviet rule, Rood believes, nothing could be more inspiring than a good dose of poetry by the American paragon of optimism and brotherhood.

This premise sets the stage for an inevitable clash between cultures in “In Lithuanian Wood.” Mayo, a professor at Bowling Green State University, prepares us to watch as a culture works its magic on the preconceptions of an American traveler. Late in the book, Rood’s Whitmanesque buoyancy gives way to a view of himself as “so unreasonably faithless living in a land of faith.” The arc between these two outlooks is the book’s presumed course.

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Yet the transformation never really seems believable. Rood is a flat character: Little is known about him, there is little emotional background for the reader to connect with. The Whitman motif is quickly marginalized. There are no substantial encounters with Lithuanian students, nor are there any real discussions of Whitman’s poetry. As a young girl named Alma tells Rood, “[Whitman] seems a wonderful poet of the world of men . . . but here, now, so many men like Vygis have been taken away.” Her fiance, Vygis, is a quiet, moody shade of his former self--a Soviet rocket engineer who has suffered a nervous breakdown.

What really seems to be the book’s focus are the stories Rood hears about the challenges of post-Soviet life in the Baltic state. The stories share a common atmosphere and geography reminiscent of Steinbeck’s “The Pastures of Heaven” and “The Long Valley.” Rood also ties them together, sometimes appearing as a main character or simply passing through. The plot is a string of essentially “event-less” happenings: long bus rides, sightseeing stops, drives around Vilnius and Rood’s walks along the Nemunas River with his translator, Vilma. What emerges are compelling glimpses of the pathos of modern Lithuanian life. In its feudal past, Lithuania was a great power extending over large parts of Europe. Today it occupies a tiny piece of its former expanse, but the people have stayed connected with their great past through folklore and myth.

Sometimes these connections are comical, as in “The Witch and the Rain,” a story Vilma tells about a ragana (witch), writhing in childbirth, who commands her bumbling husband to sacrifice a chicken, dress in her clothes and perform other rituals that alleviate her pain. Elsewhere they are haunting, as in “The Gravedigger of Marijampole,” in which a man, digging fresh graves, can’t find a spot in the old cemetery that isn’t free of the bones of murdered Jews.

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Other stories speak of the frustrations of the young. In “The Dog Who Would Be Dead,” an alcoholic distillery worker finds companionship with a friend’s old dog that accompanies him everywhere like a four-legged Mephistopheles. An out-of-work sculptor in “The Ceiling of Saint John’s,” wiping away Soviet whitewash from the holy murals, experiences a burst of anger at his unemployment and his failed marriage while hanging from a hemp rope in the church’s dome. The rope turns out to be too weak to hold him and the weight of his disappointments.

Mayo has an eye for the small details, the ironies of custom and tradition. “Rue” is a lovely, albeit sinister, story about the possibility of retrieving lost innocence. An orphan girl finds she is pregnant after her worthless husband abandons her. Custom literally saves her when the garland of rue that she wore for her wedding, after being brewed like a tea, causes her to lose the pregnancy. At the story’s end, she lies in a field “under the changing autumn sky” feeling her flat stomach and singing about “rue, herb of grace.”

Such richly diverse stories suggest a powerful merging of history and folklore with everyday life. Others present touristic hubris, such as when, late at night, Rood coerces a dormitory worker to help him get a copy of a report about a papal visit. At that moment, Rood lives up to his name’s more common meaning.

“In Lithuanian Wood” contains many striking poetic moments that compensate for its lack of a coherent development of Rood’s changing attitude. Near the end, Rood writes to Vilma, who has left the country, to say he has decided to stay awhile. His letter expresses his bewilderment about his trip: He feels lost “in Lithuanian wood.” One hopes that he’ll crack open his “Leaves of Grass” and, after listening to Whitman celebrate the glories of discovery and the open road, regain some of his old enthusiasm.