Frances and Bernard (3 page)

Bernard

February 11, 1958

Dear Bernard—

No apologies needed. I thought what I had written was a wink, but I can see what I might have sounded like. Even though you’re making a guess based on one long lunch, I think you may be right about me. I have taken what I needed from Miss Austen and some Russians and I have packed my bags.

Was your party a success? Did Ted realize that he needed to add mustard powder to his bloody marys?

Bernard, that poor German professor! My aunts liked to say I had the devil in me, but they would have gone right ahead and called in a priest to exorcise you. Now, remind me again—do you
like
women or do you
loathe
them? Just so I know how to proceed.

Well, I will keep this letter very short. I have to review two books for Iowa’s journal and I need to take a pile of notes on them. Here is a sneak preview of my review: If one is going to write of a crisis of faith, do not ask the reader to believe that the crisis can be solved only by (a) marriage, or (b) suicide.

Before I go—I know what you mean about letters vs. rooms. Christ would not have taught the disciples by correspondence course, I’m fairly sure.

Yours,

Frances

February 23, 1958

Dear Frances—

My, you do chide. But I like it.

You asked me to tell you how I converted.

As a child, I was taken to a Congregationalist church. We went roughly every week—and by
we,
I mean my mother and myself. It meant nothing, really, it was just what was done. My father, I think, thought it my mother’s job to take me. I still don’t know what he really believes about God. I don’t think he thinks religion is silly—he’s much too intellectually complacent for that—but if I had to guess, I’d say he thinks it exists so people can make a necessary, respectable fuss on holidays in order to feel part of the clan. That religion is part of the dues paid for respectability. My mother may feel the same. I’ve never asked either of them about it.

When I was eight, my mother refused to take me to church any longer because I gave a ferocious pinch to the back of the neck of an old man who’d fallen asleep in the pew in front of us. I’d seen plenty of people fall asleep but this one was close enough for me to smite. I saw it that way: smiting. (I was a real brute of a child. I bloodied a dozen noses before I entered high school.) I was glad to not have to go anymore. Instead of listening to the sermons, I’d been reading the Bible—straight through to Revelation and then again—and I knew we were sitting in the kind of church that Jesus would have spit out of his mouth. Lukewarm, neither hot, nor cold. Massachusetts clapboard moribund.

I did not like church but I wanted an absolute and I wanted its demands.

I studied classics at Harvard partially because I wanted to know about the civilizations that cradled Christianity. The other part was because I was a pompous ass. Ted likes to say that I studied classics because I wanted to know where Western civilization came from, the better to conquer it through literature.

So I was studying and speaking out against every triumph of the powerful over the powerless. I led demonstrations. Against conscription, against segregation, against McCarthy. I broke my arm while trying to climb up the side of Memorial Church at a protest against the bomb. I filled the
Crimson
with screeds on what I thought a so-called Christian democracy should look like. I led a hunger strike for a few days to protest the college’s hiring of a right-wing ideologue whose work was a tract against welfare. I passed out on the third day. My father threatened to stop paying the bills if, as he said, I pulled “a stunt like that again.” And I did all this thinking of Christ. I did not go to church, but I kept Christ in mind as I acted. Whatever you have done unto the least of my brethren, you have done unto me. Whoever helps one of these little ones in my name, helps me.

Maria. Maria was in a class of mine when I was a junior. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale—some great fire from within had consumed her and then expired, leaving her white and stark. Maria was Russian, from Brooklyn. She and I slept together quite a bit. I didn’t think that I loved her but I knew I liked sleeping with her. I thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to have something beautiful. But then I got the feeling I was an amusement for her. Like Babe the Blue Ox—some big strong dumb American animal who put its blind trust in what it believed, charging and snorting all over the place, rushing toward goals it would never achieve. Her grandfather had been put to death by Stalin and she thought that to be politically engaged was the height of naiveté. She once told me that she thought I might one day be great but that I had to stop thinking God was going to have anything to do with it. She thought that my belief in God made me a child, that only a spoiled child could think God existed. This was invigorating but it also drove me mad. I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more than I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did—I mean, I didn’t want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger. She tried to kick me out. I called her a whore. I woke up the next morning outside her door with blood crusted around my nostrils and over my upper lip—the remains of a bloody nose. She told me later that she’d pushed me away, and when she did my legs twisted up beneath me, which sent me crashing to the floor, which gave me the bloody nose. She told me she’d thought about calling the police but then decided that that was an overreaction. She wanted nothing more to do with me. I used to get in fights all the time in school—anyone without an older brother, I came to his defense, and this was partly a function of my being an only child and missing the chance to be heroic for a younger sibling—but this was different. I had been violent toward a woman. This made me sick. I started to feel nauseated when I thought about how bellicose, how thunderous, I’d been all my childhood—and I saw my time at Harvard as childhood. I thought I had been growing up by unleashing my strength and mind onto the world, by imposing myself and not being afraid of it, but this suddenly began to seem like a lifetime of tantrums. I’d gotten used to having too much, at having whatever I willed become real, which had made my will promiscuous. Not strong at all.

My mother had a story she would occasionally tell me whenever I refused to go to some family engagement or to dress up for these engagements, or when I rejected their offers of money or their ideas about law school. “When you were about four years old,” she would say, “someone gave you a scooter for a present. And one afternoon, when you were out with your father, you kept trying to see how far you could go.” At one point my father told me to come back, but I just kept rolling on. “No one can stop me,” I am supposed to have said, “only God.” I thought about that story many times after what happened with Maria. I started to feel that I needed to stop thinking only God could stop me. Perhaps I should try to submit myself to God, rather than try to be him.

Then, at the start of my senior year, a theologian came to dinner at a professor’s house and we talked. He spoke of Maritain, who said that art was the practical virtue of the intellect (you know this), and after reading Maritain I decided that art should be my action, and that I should become a Catholic. It was as simple as that. It happened in one night.

And I wondered, I still wonder—I want to think deeply and not have it carry me off to some place where I’m useless. I mean, I carry myself off enough when I write, and I fear that, although it may make me great, it may make me useless as well. My politics might become an unintelligible mess. I saw in that theologian, in his Catholicism, a way to make a sustained and coherent statement about what I believed. And that seemed a sign—when you see what is possible, and you become less afraid. I became a Catholic that Easter.

So I was a senior, and I could have gone on to get a PhD after graduating, but I decided to become a Trappist monk instead. My parents were livid. They still imagined that I would suddenly straighten up at the end of college and decide to go to law school, which demonstrates how little they know me, or want to know me. I went to a monastery in Virginia for about two months that summer. At the monastery, the monks thought—they knew—I meant well. But there was the sense that I would not last. Near the end of the summer, the abbot said he thought he saw me, as he put it, sweating at the communion rails. He told me to go back out into the world. He did not want me using the religious life as atonement or refuge. He thought that if I persisted I would eventually be miserable. He thought I would be better off living a faith in the world, writing of God to the world from the world. In the monastery, he thought, I would try too hard; I would make a commotion. He told me that my penance would be noisy, but it would not make a joyful noise, and because my penance would not be joyful, it might distract my other brothers. He was not saying, he told me, that a religious life should be free of anguish, but that there was joy in the Psalms too, and he thought that it might be easier for me to find joy, if I could find it, in the world, in marriage, maybe, he said, and family. He thought I needed to be among people, not to renounce them. He reminded me that Maritain was not a priest.

Then, seeking a way to be prostrate before God while also in the world, I went to a Catholic Worker, the one in the East Village. And soon I got asked to leave. This involved a girl. A girl who lived there thought I liked her too much. She was bothered by the fact that I had written her a few poems. (Yes, I suppose that can look rather menacing if the one writing is well past his teenage years.) She once told me that the amount of time I spent in confession had convinced her that I saw it not as an opportunity for contrition but as a chance to perform an aria. This girl was a blonde. She wore her hair in braids. Her name was Ellen. Her soul seemed clean and well ordered, and now that I think about it, I might have gotten that impression solely from her braids, her tightly, very tightly, woven brass-gold braids. They had me thinking of the purity and severity of childhood. With those braids, and her padded pink-and-ivory face, forehead an imperiously vaulted arch, I’d turned her into a long-lost virgin companion of Saint Ursula—have you seen those Flemish busts at the Cloisters? Now I see that I mistook her severity for true spiritual radiance, but at the time, when I was convinced I was in love with her, I told myself that perhaps the abbot had been right, and God had led me out of the monastery because he knew celibacy would be disastrous for me. Because I thought I was in love with this girl, and I was writing poems in this place, where I was also doing good, I hoped. So even after I was asked to leave, I was undaunted, because I had learned a lesson, I thought, and I had had a sign, which was that I did not need to be constrained within the bounds of a religious community, whether lay or ordered, to live a Christian life.

Then I spent the last year before the colony in New York, reading manuscripts and writing. And then I went to the colony, where I met you.

Yours,

Bernard

March 1, 1958

Bernard—

Dear God, Bernard! Such strenuous effort. I got worn out from reading about it. A Trappist monastery! I see how lazy a Christian I have been. Your letter gave me a complex. But I think you and I have a little something in common.

When I was about eight, there was a nun who was out to get me. She answered me with sarcasm when I asked questions and in general behaved as if I were an unwanted foundling strapped to her already overburdened back. Even as a kid, I knew this sister had it in for me because I asked questions. I was always polite when I asked them, but I asked them, and this drove her crazy because it meant that I was onto her small mind.

One day she started to ask a question of the class—I forget what it was—and in my eagerness to answer I spoke before she finished her sentence. “Frances,” she snapped, looking straight at me, “that’s enough out of you.” That was the last straw. I shot up from my desk. “Sister, why are you talking this way to me?” I said.

“And what way is that?” she said, the tips of her fingers resting on the desk, standing tall, waiting in insolence for more insolence.

Apprehensive, anticipatory silence from the girls behind me. “You’re being mean to me for no reason.”

“But you interrupted me.”

“Sister,” I said, “if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” It was a passage from John that had been read to us at Mass the week before. It seemed like a shotgun you could pull out to use on people when they got out of line.

I was sent to the Reverend Mother. My father had to go in and smooth it all over. He told me I could not talk back to any of my teachers until I went to college because his part-time job as the church groundskeeper—he worked at a printing press during the week—allowed me and my sister, Ann, to go to the school for free. “Those nuns aren’t holier than the rest of us,” my father said to me. “They’ve never known the love of anyone but God, if that. But they have been charitable to us, and you need to be kind to them. You’ll never lose anything in being kind, Frances.” I felt no kindness toward them, but I bit my tongue after that. I did it for my father, not for the nuns. I like to think Jesus has forgiven me that sin because I had only just lately arrived at the age of reason. I think if my sister, Ann, had been kicked out and gone to public school, my father wouldn’t have minded so much. But he was intent on my earning a scholarship and getting for myself what he couldn’t give me. He loved us both—loves us both—but he was not very good at hiding his delight in my brain. And Ann is not very good at hiding her mistrust of it. “The only way those books will keep you warm is if you burn them,” she likes to say. She thinks I’m no better than those nuns after all. I often fear she may be right.

But I don’t want to forget to say that it’s a common mistake to confuse severity for spiritual radiance. I think many religious folk mistakenly champion the importance of being ramrod. Especially religious folk who have coagulated into a group.