Frances and Bernard (9 page)

Are you going home for Thanksgiving?

As you might say: Who is this Peter?!

Yours,

Bernard

December 5, 1958

Bernard—

Who is this Peter?! Bernard, I sigh. And then laugh at you and your persistence in imposing romance where there is none. Peter is a young man with whom I work. He likes whiskey and Edmund Burke. That is all I can tell you. When I find out that I really am in love with him, the bastard, in spite of myself, I will let you know. Dear God.

In return: How sharp and fetching was the Barnard grad?

Thanksgiving was pleasant. I went home on the train and helped my aunts make dinner, as I have always done. There are so many of us there need to be Sterno cans on the dining room table. This year I was in charge of the pies. All seven of them. I made a mincemeat pie for my father, which he ruined by eating a slice before it came out from behind the wings. Mincemeat is a pie for old people. My cousins and their children vastly preferred the whipped chocolate cream cheese pie, the recipe for which I got off the back of the Ann Page cream cheese package. This is slumming for me, the supermarket directive, but I do sometimes—sometimes—want to please a crowd. So as to better camouflage my dissent. My father raised a glass to my book being turned in, and everyone loudly cheered. I wanted to hide. There’s an aunt and an uncle who show up in the book as a battle-ax and the stone that ax loves to grind itself on, but I doubt they’ll read it. Or if they do, I bet they won’t be able to recognize themselves as two old nuns. A cousin said she was glad to see that I hadn’t gotten uppity since I moved to New York. I said I was glad I hadn’t gotten sold into white slavery. But it was a fine time in general.

Thank you for sending my work on to those people. Never expect more than a handful of people to understand what you are about when you are writing about God. Or care.

Your immigrant blood-drinking pagan friend,

Frances

December 8, 1958

Bernard—

So I have had a talk with my agent about my editor. I can’t take it anymore. This woman is dead set against mystery. She is asking me to articulate why things are happening when they are happening. She is asking me to explain what I want the reader to realize by accumulation. “Why is Sister John so mean?” she says. “I don’t understand it. You need to tell us why.”
She won’t bring herself to tell me to give the book a happy ending but she is talking around it. I think she thinks I can turn the book into
The Nun’s Story
. She says that if I want to persist in my obscurity—she calls it obscurity—then I can go to one of those smaller houses that print difficult books.

She should not have put that thought into my head.

I do not like to ask favors of people, but threats to my work make me lose all scruples, and I have to protect my book. I humbly ask: Is there any way that you might speak to John on my behalf?

My gratitude to you.

Yours,

Frances

December 15, 1958

Dear John—

I got the copies of the book. It looks wonderful. I don’t, however. In that author photo I look like someone told me to think of Aristotle’s
Poetics
and then, on the count of three, snapped the picture. Why did I not see this before? Why did you not mention this to me? My mother might have told me as much but I still can’t hear her when she tells me I’m being stubborn, selfish, or smug. Oh well. That’s the least of my worries, this picture. All that matters is what’s on the pages, and I can find no fault there.

Thank you for getting production to make those last changes. Book publishing is depressingly bureaucratic. And philistinic. I don’t see how you can stand it. I can barely stay awake in faculty meetings. People have discussions about pedagogy. They delect in the hashing out of various ways to programmatically open the mind and consolidate insight. “Well,” I said one day when one discussion had stopped at a crossroads that had been reached by a painfully democratic and glacially moving airing of multiple but finally identical methodologies, “the Greeks thought you could get pretty far with pederasty.” The chair sighed deeply. I had forgotten where I was and said what occurred to me. Have you ever had the experience of being so bored that you feel only your eyes in your head? That you’re only eyes, and the rest of you has diffused away into a roving gas? I don’t imagine you have. That was the state I was in when I spoke. This is why you have the job you do, and I evaporate into a roving gas with eyes at whatever job I have. But I do love the students, and to get to the students I have to wade through a slough of middle-mindedness. It feels like wading through concrete fresh from the mixer. With the students, I experience one of the purest states of being I know. I can float into the classroom as that gas after some dreadful meeting, and then as we talk I solidify into wholeheartedness. Single-mindedness. As you know: Purity of heart is to will one thing. Everything—worry, anger, sloth, frustration—falls away in the talking. I feel God in the room in the pure exchange of ideas, and their awakening to ideas.

Speaking of middle-mindedness. Frances Reardon—the young woman I told you about from the colony—needs a new editor. I think her house is more grown over with bureaucracy and philistinism than yours, and her book needs you. Her editor, who took over the book after Frances’s original editor left to marry a banker, sent the manuscript back to her with only ten marks on it, seven of them arbitrary deletions, and a letter in which this editor asked if Frances could lessen the religious themes, because they might be off-putting, and said that she didn’t know whether she should like the protagonist or not, which was bothering her. I think her editor is a girl who has her job because she is tenacious and vapid—the tenacity masking the vapidity, and the vapidity fueling her ascendancy because vapidity frees the mind from bothersome, cumbersome self- examination. Let me know what we can do.

Yours,

Bernard

December 16, 1958

Frances—

I’ve written to John about you. He’s going to get in touch with your agent.

I’m sending you a copy of my book. With all my love. I wonder what you will think of it. Whatever judgment you deliver will be God’s grace.

Yours,

Bernard

December 20, 1958

Bernard—

I want to thank you for getting me out of the nunnery and possibly getting me out of this other house of horrors.

And: thank you for your book. It’s handsome. But please do not mistake me for someone who has direct communication with God. Also, I’m a fiction writer. My judgments are the judgments of a mortal, and they are hobbled by my earthbound obstinate insistence on the concrete. You know what I’ve told you before. You and I are so very different: I am one word at a time, one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how sure my footing is before proceeding to the next sentence, with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee. Your poems make the old feeling of cowdom come over me: stalled in a vast unconquerable field, alone, ruminating. While you’re Christopher Wren. You’ve made me commit the grave sin of hyperbole in trying to convince you of my esteem—Christopher Wren! Dear God. So be flattered.

Yours,

Frances

January 15, 1959

Dearest Claire—

Happy new year!

Well, it seems that I will now be edited by John Percy at Harrow, through the intervention of Bernard. Bernard would want to say it was God who arranged it all, but I am content to leave it at his creatures’ human kindness. That said, it does feel a certain blessing, to be rescued from the blind. John reminds me of Bill. Right down to the plaid work shirts. Only John does not safety-pin the cuffs back on when they wear themselves off the sleeves. I kept wanting to tell John about the time Bill pinned his wrist to the shirt accidentally, but John has a bit of primness about him, and I was trying to pretend that I was a Serious Artist.

This has made me indescribably relieved, but I am worried about something. I read Bernard’s book of poems, and Claire, I am afraid that while Christ is all over these poems, hidden in historical figures, alluded to, quoted, and then expanded on as a way to reach Bernard’s own impressive imagery, Christ is not really in these poems. He is too on the surface of them to be actually moving within them. I do not doubt that Christ is in Bernard—and very deeply. When Bernard speaks of the Church he speaks of it with humility and passion. But Christ is buried—in Bernard’s poems and in his heart—under striving for world-historical Meaning and Complexity. I hear, in the poems, shields and lances clanking against the limitations of this imperfect world. Christ being the shield and lance—Bernard’s weapon against nihilism. I fight that war myself. This is why Bernard is necessary to me. But I also think the symbolism is a cover for what Bernard might really want to talk about, which is his own history. He is encoding his own struggles with purity, desire, and despair in the symbols of religion, and then sometimes the Greeks, for good measure. (What do I know about the Greeks? I know what I know mainly from Aquinas. Bill could read these and tell us for sure.) I wonder if a better weapon against nihilism might be one man’s life. One man in a struggle, and in that one particular struggle we more clearly apprehend the real. I suppose that is why I write fiction: character as argument. I suppose that is why I love Augustine. And Kierkegaard: one man in a war against despair directing us in our own hobbling away from it.

Also from Aquinas: the intellect is God present in his creation. The intellect should be a servant to revelation, but Bernard is thinking that the intellect itself, amassed on the page, is revelation.

I suppose I should write these things to Bernard. I don’t know why on this occasion I find myself unable to say what I think. You and I could not be friends if you had not told me that I needed to stop being so silent in workshops, and I had not told you that if you did not marry Bill you would be a fool. I don’t think what I am saying could possibly put a dent in him. Bernard’s self-confidence is as impervious as a redwood. My words will be as the gnawing of a squirrel at its base. He can’t hear things—in the way that he can’t hear that it’s his own confusion, not Christ’s voice, speaking through the poems. I doubt he could hear what I am saying. But at least I will have said it. I feel obligated to do so.

Do I think, all this aside, that what he has done is beauty amassed on the page? I am not saying that he is a genius, but I do think that genius has something to do with mass and velocity, and the sheer torrent of words, the prolixity, the constant barrage of image and Shakespearean syntax, all coming so effortlessly—this feels to me something like genius. Without a doubt. There is so much intelligence and force that it razes my own will to create. In the way that talking with Bernard can raze my will to speak. I couldn’t write for a week after reading the book. But I know Bernard wants beauty and truth, and the truth is getting a little mangled by the whirring blades of his mind.

And now—I think, after writing this to you, I can write these things to Bernard.

Love,

Frances

February 11, 1959

Frances—

Thank you for your letter.

How I wanted you to love what I had done. That was very childish of me, wasn’t it? I think I knew what you would think of it. I think I wanted you to tell me what you told me, which is why I referred to your judgment as God’s grace.

But you do think it’s beautiful, even while in error, and that means a great deal to me. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done. I’m still pleased with it. To turn on it would be to despair over it, which, as you know, is a sin. And I have you as a reader. So that’s joy. And this is just my second book. So there’s hope.

Thank you for not referring to me in your critique as the Sounding Brass.

Love,

Bernard

February 15, 1959

Dear Bernard—

Please always remember this: that whatever else I think about your poems, I will also be thinking that they are beautiful. If I didn’t make it as clear as I should have that I was honored to read them: I was honored to read them. Very, very honored. I’m a little ashamed, because your letter reminded me of the flak I used to get in workshops for not being as complimentary as I could be. At the time I couldn’t give a rat’s ass because I didn’t care about anyone in the workshop but Claire. Now things are very different. I should have perhaps been a little less forceful in pressing my point of view.

February in New York City is the very heart of darkness. Spring seems as far away as Fiji. I am wondering—would you come to visit in the next few weeks to liven it up around here? If you come, we can talk more about your poems. The offices are cold. People are wiping at their noses and look as if they haven’t slept or washed their hair in days. On Friday, I snapped at Sullivan when he asked me for the third time where he was supposed to go to lunch. I’ve been reading too much because it’s too cold to go out. I’ve gone through three Hardy novels in two weeks.

But I have some good news. There is a prospect of getting published in the
New Yorker.
They have one story and want another. Although: a pox on the
New Yorker.
John was told that they already have a Catholic woman writer—probably Elizabeth Pfeffer, because I think she’s published with them two or three times—with a story slated to run this year, and they don’t know if they can have two Catholic women in it within twelve months, so either my story will bump hers or hers will bump mine, and they’ll hold on to what I’ve given them if I let them. But the two of us are so very different, as you know—she does the domestic ecstatic—so there’s no chance that publishing us in what they consider to be rapid succession will make it look like the Vatican has annexed the
New Yorker
’s fiction department and is using it as a back office for nihil obstating. Perhaps you or John should write and tell the
New Yorker
editors that several prominent Catholics refuse to believe I’m Catholic! Thank goodness that working in publishing has made me privy, and therefore inured, to the unrelenting boneheaded arbitrariness that is supposed to pass for good taste. Thank goodness I at least have the stamina to write around a job. And, ahem,
at
the job. When Sullivan dies, I am in trouble. If they keep me, they might decide to give me to someone who actually needs my help.