Homage to Lance Mannion

I lost a good friend just over a year ago and I’ve been mourning him ever since. He was the author of a marvelous blog with the nom de plume “Lance Mannion” but in real life he was Edwin David Reilly. Like so many in these pandemic times he died too soon though it wasn’t COVID that got him but good old heart disease. This morning, walking my dog in the first heat of summer I thought of all the ways his friendship changed my life.

But first l want to say something about the name of his blog.

“Lance Mannion” comes from an episode of “Cheers” the iconic 80’s sitcom about a neighborhood bar in Boston. “Sam” the bartender (played brilliantly by Ted Danson) is a lothario who, in a comic moment, admits to using the name Lance Mannion while flirting with women.

Dave Reilly took the name for a blog which turned into a sensation in the early 2000’s in the first wave of literary blogs and you can still visit it. Of course the website had nothing to do with Danson’s Lance. Instead Reilly created “Mannionville”—a place of family joys, old style Kennedy liberalism, and bookish ideas. Lance Mannion the blogger was a descendent of Dickens, especially the Dickens of “Household Words.” Shortly after its launch the Lance Mannion site attracted literary attention and many many friends in the “blogosphere.” David turned “Lance” from Cheers into a public intellectual. It was elegant fun.

I met him thirty years ago while was working on a doctorate at the University of Iowa. You have to picture me, a blind graduate student trying to earn a literature degree before the Americans with Disabilities Act. There was no assistive technology. I had to rely on people to read to me. Dave was earning his MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. One day he saw a home made sign I’d made, calling for folks to read books aloud to a blind Ph.D. student. He turned up at my door.

What to say? He was earnest, thoughtful, generous, and richly amusing. We hit it off “above and beyond” the business of reading aloud. We became lifelong friends. Now and then a man meets another man and yes, sometimes a “Mannion” who’s decent, and whose presence feels like an old song remembered. He was a kind liberal as opposed to the rebarbative and bitter lefties I tended to know. Generally speaking my grad school classmates were wildly unhappy and rather skilled in rhetorics of rage. Many of them were addicted to their particular brands of unhappiness. Dave was different. He believed in the possibility of goodness even where it might not be apparent. He dignified people over polemic.

He’d grown up in a liberal Irish-Catholic family in Schenectady, New York. It turned out that his father knew my father. (My dad had been the president of the State University of New York in the late sixties, and Dave’s “pop” as he called him, was a professor of computer sciences who, during a student riot, stood arms akimbo in the door of the technology building and stared down a mob who wanted to break windows. You bet my dad liked him.)

Dave showed me how the left’s rage was in no way superior to the right’s and moreover, the aim of anger is to build something. He loved great literature and especially poems or novels that evince the better parts of human nature despite the bitter taste of our hearts. I first came to know this when he read aloud to me “The Heart of Midlothian” Sir Walter Scott’s classic novel about a woman who walks from Scotland to London to appeal her sister’s death sentence before the Queen. He read with discernment, agreeably, and better than the reading was the talking for we found the book to be nuanced and scrupulous in its portrayal of rage, joy, persistence, faith, and yes, optimism. Old fashioned, yes, necessary lessons, absolutely.

In the end I didn’t get my Ph.D.. Disability has meant for me a life of painful encounters. From childhood right up until yesterday (today will have to wait) people in authority have told me that my blindness is a problem—my efforts to get that advanced degree in literature were crushed by faculty at the University of Iowa who didn’t like my requests for additional time to read books. One told me I didn’t belong at the university. This was just before the ADA. The experience almost broke me in two. Because I already had a degree in poetry writing I decided to “just become a poet” and I left town.

Mannion stayed “up” with me, wrote me fabulous letters, sent me stories he was writing, visited me in upstate New York where I’d gone to nurse my wounds and scribble. And later, against the odds, he and his wife Adrienne moved to Syracuse which was a short bus ride from my perch in Geneva, New York. I saw him become a father, saw him take on the tasks of adulthood with ardor. And then, when the world of online writing became feasible he took to it with amusement and humane intentions.

By the early 2000’s I’d gone to Ohio State to teach creative writing. And there was “Lance Mannion” the blog. While my students wrote sorrowful and bitter prose about their parents or “society” there was Edwin “David” Reilly Lance writing prose about living successfully in the midst of social disasters.

Not with sentimentality. He wasn’t a self help guru. He simply wrote the prose of a grown man who knew a thing or two about persistence. I offer this small passage:

The American philosopher Sissela Bok wrote this in 1983; the Italian poet Petrarch walked the earth in the 14th Century. The issue is human nature. Politics has an implicit relation to the matter at hand, only because politics is the result of humans being human trying to live together. The words liberal and conservative are beside the point. But it speaks to certain political questions of the moment, doesn’t it?

“Before and after Petrarch, a great many thinkers have…warned of the corrosive and perversely self-destructive nature of such avoidance of truth, of the lies we tell ourselves, and of the secrets we keep from ourselves. But they have seen far different truths—equally obvious in their own minds—at the ones we so obstinately reject through self-deception. In our time, Marx and Freud have signaled, as false consciousness and defense mechanisms, the clinging to illusion that stands in the way of becoming free. Only through unmasking, demystification above all interpretation, can we break through the web of illusion and become aware of our role in perpetuating it.

Some have claimed that we would not become more free through the dispelling of self-deceit, but also more capable of acting morally and leading nobler lives. Echoing Plato, they have argued that if only we could discern what is right and what is true, we would surely choose it. Others have held, more pessimistically, that self-deception may be our only shield against knowledge that would otherwise cripple us—that without what Ibsen call our “life-lies” we could not survive.

Whatever role they assign to self-deception, most have taken its presence for granted. To see the self as deceiving itself has seemed the only way to explain what otherwise might be incomprehensible: a person’s failure to acknowledge what is too obvious to miss. How, if not through such intentional misleading of self, can someone fail to notice that his work leads nowhere, that he lives beyond his means, that his marriage is a farce? How else can so many patients listen to a doctor’s explanation of their life-threatening disease, respond as if they understand, yet know nothing about it a few hours later?

Postulating such self-inflicted ignorance helps point to the biases and weaknesses besetting perception and testifies to the perennial effort to understand human failures that would otherwise seem inexplicable: and it is secrecy that lies at the center of such self-deception: the secrecy that is part of all self-deception. According to such a view, we keep secret from ourselves the truth we cannot face.”

—Sissela Bok, “Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation”.

The world of Lance Mannion’s blog was one of careful human deliberation. He valued perception, self-understanding, truth, and affirmations of dignity. If you think these values are in broad circulation I’ll have what you’re having. In the meantime I’m treasuring my good fortune to have known the mannion.

I don’t know how much longer his sons will keep the website up, but I urge you to visit Lance Mannion the blog and see for yourself the discernments and affirmations. His site has a quote at the top, taken I believe from one of the Jeeves and Wooster stories: “You can’t make policeman take the romantic view…” But we can try.

See: https://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/