Dragonwriter (22 page)

F
ather, have ya got a blessing for a horse?” said Anne McCaffrey to Richard Woods, OP, sometime during their first meeting. Anne had shortly tried her hand at raising racehorses, and this was the occasion when Nickel Run was first due to run. Richard rose to the occasion and produced some good words, but sadly Divine Providence demanded otherwise for poor Nickel.

Though the whole Dragonhold lot—a group of horse-mad girls who had attached themselves to Anne in the early '70s and grown into women who remained her close friends—were wary of a Dominican priest, Richard wooed them all. He continued to woo them and me when I met him. Richard is the sort of person who gives religion and the Catholic Church a good name.

Anne had given up on the Catholic Church in the midst of the Second World War when her father was missing somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, her little brother was getting ready to die of osteomyelitis, her older brother was in Hawaii awaiting possible invasion, and she herself was sent down South to a boarding school. Conversations with Richard seemed to have changed that, so much so that Anne came to write “Beyond Between,” decided to be buried rather than cremated, and had a cross on her casket.

Richard wryly commented that Anne had either a “Presbytolic” or a “Catholitarian” funeral service. My brother, sister, and I asked if Richard could say something at her service, and he found the most excellent words of both praise and comfort.

“
IF YOU COME
to the church, you've gone too far.” That pretty much sums up Anne McCaffrey's approach to organized religion.

Anne once told me that she came from Catholic stock, but separated from Rome over a number of issues long before I met her. Nominally, she was Presbyterian, a wise choice for the Republic of Ireland, where she had moved with two of her three children in 1970. In the end, her funeral was conducted warmly and well by a retired Presbyterian minister, Rev. Jim Carson. He had been her choice, and it was the right one. (Jim asked me to give a reflection at the service, which I was honored to do. But that's another story.)

Because Anne had excluded religion from her Pern stories in particular, many fans and even some professional critics assumed that she was an atheist. Some celebrated the assumption; others denounced it, for instance, as, “Anne's hatred of religion and morinic [sic] view on religion as an evil destructive force. The people of Pern are not human, since every one of them are atheists.”
¹
She did have many atheist fans, who peppered the dozens of McCaffrey (and other) forums with their views, not least in the “Atheist OUT Campaign” string on the New Kitchen Table page.
²

But Anne was not an atheist. Her attitude toward religion, including religion on Pern, was more nuanced than might appear from blogs and brief reviews, however, and it was especially so toward the end of her life. Thereby hangs my tale.

I first met Anne in 1981. I was working on a book about trends in contemporary culture and spirituality, especially the implications of some ground swells in regard to an apparent revival of neo-Celtic themes in music, literature, and art. Although I had read the Dragonriders trilogy and the Harper Hall trilogy, I was still unaware that Anne was laying the groundwork for a vast science fiction saga. I was inclined to see her stories more as the exploration of an alternative medieval world with Celtic undertones. And I was very fond of dragons. Always had been, and it wasn't all that trendy then.

Thus armed with happy ignorance and eagerness, I took advantage of a trip to England, where I was conducting research at the time, to visit Ireland and, if possible, to interview Anne McCaffrey. I wrote, she wrote back, and I was invited to come around. I still have the postcard she sent. At the time, Anne lived in Kilquade, a tiny village between Bray and Wicklow Town. It was not easy to find. Hence the phone call. Scribbled at the bottom of the card are some instructions I jotted down: “Road to Bray, right at Loch Garman sign, 7 mi to sign Kilpedder (L), sign to Kilquade, ½ mi down rd, 3 gateways, R L R, last house, church = too far . . .” That would have been tiny St. Peter's Church, which (she told me later) had a wall dating back to the ninth century. Hence the name, so characteristically Irish—Kilpedder, Peter's Church. (I never figured out who Quade was.)

When I finally arrived at Dragonhold, I was ushered into a living room full of dogs, cats, and people—Anne herself, and a few close friends, Derval Diamond and Maureen Beirne among them. Later I figured out they were there in case “the priest” tried to strong-arm her into some kind of confessional debate. Fortunately, that was the farthest thing from my mind, and we got along well enough that she invited me back. Later, she told me, it was not all that common an occurrence. When my book came out, I dedicated it to Anne. And I did go back.

Gradually, I met more friends and family—“the daughter,” as the Irish say, Georgeanne (Gigi) and her brothers, Todd and, eventually, Alec. Anne's widowed sister-in-law (once removed), Sara Virginia Brooks Johnson, came to live with her shortly afterward, and Geoff Kennedy, a friend of Gigi's from earlier days, was a frequent visitor. Fast forward to Geoff and Gigi's gorgeous wedding in the little parish church of St. Patrick in Glencullen, and then Todd's wedding, his daughter's baptism, and two funerals. By then you might say I had become the unofficial weyr chaplain of Dragonhold.

Somewhere along the way, “Anne” became “Annie.” Over the next thirty years, we engaged in a mainly epistolary exchange but at times worked together on projects of mutual interest. When I was able to visit, we plotted and schemed story ideas, went to movies, and enjoyed bodacious family feasts at Christmas and whenever the occasion might be made to arise. Part of the fun of working with Annie was that the “brilliant ideas” we concocted over these sessions served mainly to stimulate her imagination and rarely glimmered even faintly between the lines of print. But that's why we did it.

Once in a while religion came up, but it was hardly a topic of everyday interest despite the wonderfully flinty observations of the redoubtably Protestant Sara Virginia. She, however, was Methodist, like my grandpa. We had that and gardening in common (she was an expert gardener), and she had been a nurse. We got on.

Teaching at Oxford half the academic year during the 1990s gave me a good opportunity to ferret out odd bits of information for Anne, perhaps most usefully in regard to the development of horseshoes in sixth-century Britain, which she used to good effect in her young-adult Arthurian novel,
Black Horses for the King.
She put more “religion” in that than any other of her books, which was historically appropriate. She ran a few of the scenes past me to make sure she got details right. She did.

As we were otherwise separated by the Irish Sea, the wide Atlantic, and half the United States, we initially exchanged real letters every few weeks, but with the advent of email, the dialogue quickened prodigiously. I archived most of the messages, and fortunately so because they have a way of clarifying events that might otherwise pass unremarked or misunderstood in other biographies and interviews, including the matter of religion on Pern.

Though religious matters never occupied much line space in the hundreds of letters and emails we exchanged, scattered clues and asides illuminate some of the more obscure zones in accounts of the development of the saga. In February 1998, she wrote, not without a touch of gentle irony, “As I said the other day, I do not like organized religions but that doesn't mean I am not religious in my own way and form.”

On a number of occasions—accidents, the injuries and illness of friends, sudden deaths, and similar challenges—she would briefly request that I put in a word with the Lord. And I believe she did as well, in her own fashion. No doubt more a polite suggestion than a plea, but the Lord did not seem to mind. However, churchgoing was reserved for Very Special Occasions, especially weddings, baptisms, and funerals.

If organized religion was an unobtrusive and very infrequent guest at Dragonhold, it was totally lacking on Pern, an absence that hardly went unnoticed. Many science fiction writers and fans are vehemently skeptical, but others range from the spiritually curious to outright Bible-thumping evangelical. So for one reason or another, Annie found herself constrained on occasion to render an account of the apparent vacancy in her best-selling series.

When asked by one interviewer why the people of Pern were not overtly religious, Anne explained,

    
As you probably realize, during a terrible war situation people either cling as their last hope to the religion of their choice, or they become agnostic, losing their belief in a Good, Kindly [and] Wise Deity who has allowed such atrocities to happen to innocent people.

       
The colonists who went with Admiral Benden and Governor Boll were of the second type, especially from groups who had suffered from atrocities committed BECAUSE of religion: notice what's happening in Kosovo and Iran. What happened to the Mormons in the USA? So no ORGANIZED religion was brought to Pern and none was set up. There is, however, a strong ethical code among the colonists and by this they govern their lives and interactions. Not even Thread was allowed to alter these precepts.
³

Anne was well aware of the role “organized” religion played in bloody strife, not least in Northern Ireland, as well as in other global hotspots. She—along with her Pern colonists—deliberately precluded that from marring what was planned to be a permanently peaceful new world, at least in that respect. There would be plenty of malice, greed, hate, and violence, of course—what would fiction be without them?—but not as the result of religious conflict. Not on her planet! I suppose it could be argued from this that Anne's evaluation of what religion ought to be was, in fact, too lofty. She was hardly a Utopian, but she had high ideals.

As we learn from Emily Boll's speech in
Dragonsdawn,
eliminating organized religion from Pern had been deliberate from the earliest phases of the colonists' planning:

    
“We may not be religious in the archaic meaning of the word, but it makes good sense to give worker and beast one day's rest,” Emily stated in the second of the mass meetings. “The old Judean Bible used by some of the old religious sects on Earth contained a great many commonsensible suggestions for an agricultural society, and some moral and ethical traditions which are worthy of retention”—she held up a hand, smiling benignly—”but without any hint of fanatic adherence! We left
that
back on Earth along with war!”

Though admittedly smug, Emily's statement effectively summarized the colonists' rationale. Anne's own explanation (supplied after the fat hit the fire following the publication of “Beyond Between” in 2003) provided some personally meaningful detail:

    
I figured—since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing—that religion was one problem Pern didn't need. However, if one listens to childhood teachings, God is everywhere so there should be no question in any mind that he is also on Pern. Thus, there is a heaven to which worthy souls go. So, without mentioning any denomination of organized religion, I figured that both Moreta and Leri deserved respite after their trials . . . and that's where “Beyond Between” is.
⁴

Personal comments from earlier emails cast a bit more light on her attitude, such as this revealing aside from September 1996:

    
Actually, I usually do counter the lack of religion by the presence of a high tone of spirituality on Pern—when pushed by Baptists to do so. I'm currently reading a Dave Duncan which has a veritable pantheon of gods/esses for all sorts of purposes, each with a color and a creed and an ability to interfere with mortals similar to the games that went on at Mt. Olympus. Well, it makes a nice change from galleying McCaffrey.