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Fordham Center on Religion and Culture

THE INDELIBLE MARK: THE WRITER AND A CATHOLIC CHILDHOOD Fordham University, Pope Auditorium December 9, 2008

Moderator Patricia Hampl University of Minnesota

Panelists Stuart Dybek, Northwestern University

Lawrence Joseph, St. John’s University School

Valerie Sayers, University of Notre Dame

MARGARET STEINFELS: Good evening. Welcome to our conversation, “The Indelible Mark: The Writer and the Catholic Childhood.” I am Margaret Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture. We are delighted to see so many of you here tonight.

Before we begin, we will make our usual public-service announcements. Before we begin, let me ask you to turn off cell phones and anything else that beeps, chirps, sings, or plays Beethoven’s Fifth. Thank you.

We have all had childhoods. Some of us had Catholic childhoods. Some people love to tell stories about those childhoods — exuberant stories. These may include exaggerations, illusions, and out-and-out fabrications. This happens. Some of you were here at Fordham for our conversation with Mary Karr, in spring of 2007, when she talked about the conscience of a writer and the demands of truth telling in writing memoirs.

Tonight we’re going to look at another aspect of using our past to tell a story. Fiction writers and poets are not expected to tell the truth in a factual sense, though sometimes what they

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write happens to be true. Tonight we have for our edification, enjoyment, and, perhaps, amusement, writers willing to talk about what you can do with a Catholic childhood. There are other things you can probably do than they have done, but that is not the topic for tonight — psychoanalysis or whatever.

Each of them will read a selection from their work and then explain their selection and then talk to one another about how they transformed a childhood memory or event into a poem or work of fiction. Let me just note here for all of you that their books are for sale outside in the lobby.

Patricia Hampl will introduce them and lead the discussion, though she may need no introduction for some of you because you have seen her here before. But some of you may not know her as well as you should, so I want to read briefly something she has written on tonight’s subject:

“Mine was a Catholic girlhood, spent gorging on metaphor, mystical body, transubstantiation, dark night of the soul, the little martyrdoms of everyday life. And remember, girls, life is a journey. Your own life is a pilgrimage.

“Maybe,” she writes, “we had too much meaning too early. It was like having too much money. The quirkiness of life was betrayed, given inflated significance by our rich symbology. We powered around our ordinary lives in the Cadillac language of Catholic spirituality looking on with pity as the Protestants peddled their stripped-down bicycles. Nothing was just itself. Nothing was left alone. We were clasped, suffocating and yet happy, to the great bosom of Meaning.”

That’s from Virgin Time.

Here are some real facts about Patricia Hampl. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and published her first book in 1978, a collection of poems Woman before an Aquarium. A Romantic Education won a Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1981. In it she tells the story of her family’s Czech history against the backdrop of a visit to Cold War Prague. A second memoir, from which I have just read, Virgin Time, recounts her Catholic upbringing. In 2000, her collection of essays on memory and imagination, I Could Tell You Stories, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most

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recent books include Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, which she discussed in our forum, “The Eye of Matisse and the Mystery of God,” in the spring of 2007 here at Fordham. Her newest memoir is The Florist’s Daughter, which was published last fall. I can attest that it is a very good read.

She is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota. That’s in Minneapolis, where they are still trying to decide who their new senator will be, but where she teaches in the English department’s MFA program. Please welcome Patricia Hampl back to Fordham.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Hi, everybody. So pleased to be here with my distinguished colleagues and one old pal and two new friends.

I think there may be some significance — maybe even a shadowy heretical plot — that we are meeting just now to talk about the literary inheritance of a Catholic childhood, on this day, the exact 400th birthday of John Milton, the poet who set about trying to justify the ways of God to men. I doubt that anybody up here has come prepared to justify much of anything, but I may be wrong about that. Our postmodern enterprise may be less exalted than Milton’s, but at least none of us was ever in the employ of Cromwell.

We’re here with our Catholic girlhoods and boyhoods and the poems and stories, essays and memoirs that have some relation, vexed or affectionate, but inevitable, to that past — for some, a present, but for all of us, a past.

Here’s our plan, which Margaret explained in part. I will introduce all three of our writers. They will each give a short reading. I don’t justify this at all. The prose writers will have something like fifteen minutes to read. Most unfairly — speaking as a poet myself — the poet is apparently limited to a shorter time and may decide to be naughty and go right up to fifteen minutes, who knows? Not something that John Milton would have consented to, I’m sure.

After we have heard from each writer, we’ll start up again, this time giving each writer a chance to make some initial remarks about the Catholic background that was the grist for the

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reading we just heard and about writing in general. Then we will hope, together and in our conversation, to justify the ways of a Catholic childhood to adult readers and talk together, taking up questions that will surely arise from the readings. Then it will be your chance to ask questions. You have those pieces of paper, where you get to write your questions or protests or any kind of manifestos you want to say, and then they will be handed up to us and we can use them.

I will just tell you about each writer, and then each one will come up, in order, and read to us from the work.

Stuart Dybek is an old friend of mine. We spend part of every summer in a program in Prague, where we both teach. I have been very lucky to hear him read and to get to know him as a friend, as a writer, and to see his wonderful teaching as well. He is the author of three collections of short stories, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, which was Chicago’s “One Book” reading book recently, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, and two collections of poetry, Streets in their Own Ink and Brass Knuckles. His work has appeared in all of our top magazines — The New Yorker, regularly in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Best American Fiction, Best American Poetry. He is currently the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Northwestern University and just last year was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Valerie Sayers, whom I just met, received her BA right here at Fordham and her MFA at Columbia. She is the author of five novels. Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were both named New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and the film Due East, which is the fictional town of her books, was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. (I would like to know how you get him back.) She has received the Pushcart Prize for Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and has served on two NEA panels in literature. Her stories, essays, reviews appear widely, which is how I first came to know her. She has appeared in notable and distinguished lists in The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays.

Lawrence Joseph is the poet in the group. Stuart is a poet, too, but he is, I think, here representing himself as a fiction writer tonight. Anyway, Lawrence Joseph is a poet, critic, and

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essayist. His books of poetry include Into It, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos, Before Our Eyes, and Shouting at No One, which received the Starrett Prize. Among his other awards are the Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry twice. He teaches law at St. John’s University School of Law and writes a prose book called Lawyerland.

We’ll begin, I think, with Stuart and then just go right down the line, with Valerie and then with Lawrence. After that, we’ll begin our conversation.

Please join me in welcoming, first of all, Stuart Dybek.

STUART DYBEK: We have three readers, so I’m going to try to stick to my fifteen minutes. So I won’t be too chatty up here. It’s called “Thread.” I’m not going to read the entire piece.

“The year after I made my first Holy Communion, I joined the Knights of Christ, as did most of the boys in my fourth-grade class. We would assemble before mass on Sunday mornings in the sunless concrete courtyard between the convent and side entrance to the sacristy. The nuns’ courtyard was private, and being allowed to assemble there was a measure of the esteem in which the Knights were held.

“Our uniforms consisted of the navy blue suits we had been required to wear for our first Holy Communion, though several of the boys had already outgrown them over the summer. In our lapels we wore tiny bronze pins of a miniature chalice engraved with a cross, and across our suit coats we fit the broad satin sashes that Sister Mary Barbara, who coached the Knights, would distribute. She had sewn them herself. At our first meeting Sister Mary Barbara instructed us that, just as in the days of King Arthur, the responsibility of the Knights was to set an example of Christian gentlemanliness. If ever called upon to do so, each Knight should be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for his faith.

“Our sashes came in varying shades of gold, some worn to a darker luster and a bit threadbare at the edges and others crisp and shining like newly minted coins. We wore them diagonally in the swashbuckling style of the Three Musketeers. It felt as if they should have supported the weight of silver

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swords ready at our sides.

“Once outfitted, we marched out of the courtyard into the sunlight, around St. Roman Church, through its open massive doors, pausing to dip our fingers into the marble font of holy water and cross ourselves as if saluting our Lord — the bloodied, life-sized Christ crowned with thorns and crucified in the vestibule. Then we continued down the center aisle to the front pews that were reserved for the Knights.

“In the ranking order of the mass, we weren’t quite as elite as the altar boys, who got to dress in actual vestments like the priest, but being a Knight seemed an essential step up the staircase of sanctity. Next would be torchbearer, then altar boy, and beyond that, if one had a vocation, subdeacon, deacon, priest.

“Although I couldn’t have articulated it, I already understood that nothing was more fundamental to religion than hierarchies. I was sort of a child prodigy when it came to religion, in the way that some kids had a gift for math or were spelling whizzes. Not only did I always know the answer in catechism class, I could anticipate the question. I could quote Scripture and recite almost any Bible story upon command. Although I couldn’t find my way out of our parish, the map of the spiritual world was inscribed on my consciousness. I could enumerate the twelve choirs of angels. From among the multitude of saints, I could list the various patrons — not just the easy ones like Saint Nicholas, patron of children, or Saint Jude, patron of hopeless cases, but those that most people didn’t even know existed: Saint Brendan the Navigator, patron of sailors and whales; Saint Anthony of Padua, whose name I would take later when I was confirmed, patron of the poor; Saint Bonaventure of Potenza, patron of bowel disorders; Saint Fiacre, an Irish hermit, patron of cabdrivers; Saint Alban, patron of torture victims; Saint Dismas, the Good Thief, patron of death-row inmates; Saint Mary Magdalene, patron of perfume.

“I could describe their powers with the same accuracy that kids described the powers of superheroes — Batman and Robin, Green Lantern, the Flash — but I knew that, unlike the comic book heroes, the saints were real.”

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What happens in this piece is that sitting there waiting for the big moment when the Knights all file up first and lead the entire congregation to Communion, the narrator takes a piece of thread out of his sash and he puts it on the lines of his palm and begins playing with this gold thread and wonders what it tastes like, if it tastes metallic. He puts it in his mouth and he runs it along his tongue and he swallows it. And he realizes immediately that he has broken his fast and to receive Communion will now be a mortal sin. On the other hand, if all the Knights march up and he just sits there in the pew, everybody will wonder why he is just sitting there and they’ll figure that he has been committing mortal sins. So he is in an incredible dilemma.

“It would be a mortal sin for me to receive the host. Yet the primary duty of a Knight was to march to the Communion rail. I would feel, if I remained seated while the others filed up to the altar, more than I was willing to face. In a sudden panic, I worried I would be kicked out of the Knights, my ascent up the staircase of sanctity almost over before it had begun. I sat trying to figure a way out of the predicament I’d created, feeling increasingly anxious, a little sick, actually, as if the thread were winding around my stomach. I thought about how not one of my classmates would have realized that his fast had been broken by swallowing a thread, and since he wouldn’t have realized it was a sin, then it wouldn’t have been one. It didn’t seem quite fair that my keener understanding made me more culpable. Perhaps a thread didn’t count as food, I thought, but then I knew I was grasping for excuses. It seemed a dubious distinction to risk one’s soul upon.”

So what happens is that he remembers something that Sister Barbara told him, that there might come a time when you are going to receive Communion and you remember at the last second that you do have mortal sin on your soul, and in an instance like that, what you do is bow your head, clap a mea culpa over your breast — you always have a breast — and the priest will understand and pass you by.

“Communion time arrived, and on trembling legs I marched to the rail with the other Knights. How feverishly I wished I were simply going to receive Communion. I felt alone, separated from the others by my secret, and yet I became aware of an odd kind of excitement bordering on exhilaration

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at what I was about to do. Father Fernando, wearing his one- eyed pair of dark glasses” — he was a chaplain and he lost an eye — “approached, an altar boy at his elbow, holding a patent to catch the host in case it should slip from the priest’s hand. I could hear their soles on the carpet as they paused to deliver a host and moved to the next Knight. I could hear Father Fernando muttering the Latin prayer over and over.

“This is the aching flush of anticipation, I thought, that a penitent sinner would feel a murderer, perhaps, or a thief, someone who had committed terrible crimes and found himself at the Communion rail.

“Father Fernando paused before me, and I clapped a fist against my heart and bowed my head. He stopped and squinted down at me through the missing lens of his dark glasses, trying to catch my eyes and having a hard time doing it with his single good eye. Finally he shrugged and moved on, wondering, I was sure, what grievous sin I had committed.

“I never told anyone. I had swallowed a thread. No one but God would ever be the wiser. It was my finest hour as a theologian. Only years later did I realize it would be that moment I’d think back to when I came to wonder how I’d lost my faith.”

I think I have five minutes, so I’m just going to read another story until five minutes is up. When we have a chance to talk, I’ll explain why I’m doing this. It’s a story called “Hot Ice.” The first part of it is called “Saints.”

“The saint, a virgin, was uncorrupted. She had been frozen in a block of ice many years ago. Her father had found her half- naked body floating facedown among water lilies, her blond hair fanning at the marshy edge of the overgrown duck pond people still referred to as the Douglas Park Lagoon.

“That’s how Eddie Kapusta heard it.

“Douglas Park was a black park now, the lagoon curdled in milky green scum as if it had soured, and Kapusta didn’t doubt that were he to go there, they’d find his body floating in the lily pads too. But sometimes in winter, riding by on the California bus, the park flocked white, deserted, the lagoon

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frozen over, Eddie could almost picture what it had been like back then: swans gliding around the small, wooded island at the center, rowboats plying into sunlight from the gaping stone tunnels of the haunted-looking boathouse.

“The girl had gone rowing with a couple of guys. Some said they were sailors, neighborhood kids going off to war. Nobody ever said exactly who or why. They rowed her around the blind side of the little island. Nobody knew what happened there either. It was necessary for each person to imagine it for himself.

“They were only joking at first, was how Kapusta imagined it, laughing at her broken English, telling her to be friendly or swim home. One of them stroked her hair gently, undid her bun, and as her hair fell cascading over her shoulders, surprising them all, the other reached too suddenly for the buttons on her blouse. She tore away so hard the boat rocked violently, her slip and bra split, breasts spring loose, she dove.

“Kapusta didn’t want to wonder what she remembered as she held her last breath underwater. His mind raced over to that to her father wading out into the cattails, scooping her half- naked and still limp from the resisting water lilies, and running with her in his arms across the park, crying in Polish or Slovak or Bohemian, whatever they were, and then riding with her on the streetcar he wouldn’t let stop until it reached the icehouse he owned, where, crazy with grief, he sealed her in ice.

“‘I believe it up to the part about the streetcar,’ Manny Santora said that summer when they told each other such stories, talking often about such things Manny called weirdness while pitching quarters in front of Buddy’s Bar. ‘I don’t believe he hijacked no streetcar.’

“‘What do you think, man, he called a cab?’ Pancho, Manny’s older brother, asked, winking at Eddie as if he’s scored.

“Every time they talked like this, Manny and Pancho argued. Pancho believed in everything — ghosts, astrology, legends. His nickname was Padrecito, which went back to his days as an altar boy, when he would dress up as a priest and hold mass in the backyard with hosts punched with bottle caps from stale

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tortillas and real wine he’s collected from bottles the winos left on the stoop.”

Thanks.

VALERIE SAYERS: Thanks so much.

I’m going to read fragments of a story that appeared in Image Magazine last year. It’s about 1950s paranoia in Coastal South Carolina, which is where I grew up. I’m going to read first from the very beginning, just to set it up.

“The fifties. I don’t remember much. I was a small child. But I do know that fear was always buzzing in the background, like static from a transistor radio, a jangly, jazzy fear, not altogether unhappy.

“The day I discover I’m a freak of nature, the thrill runs from my bellybutton to my throat. We’ve come to see Dr. Freitag about the mysteries in my mouth, and he has found two whole sets of teeth up there in my top gums, waiting to claim the space when my baby teeth fall out, two rows of teeth. The current jolts me, sitting there in his big red leather chair, a princess on my throne. Not everybody gets a spare set of teeth.

“But my mother squints and blinks at the x-ray film, and when she finally makes out all my extra teeth, she moans, ‘Oh, my God,’ the way she did when she heard that Sister Alma’s boils were cancer of the face. That’s when I understand that I’m a monster. That’s when I see how I’ll have to curl my lips, how the prissy girls on the playground will lift up their pink chiffon skirts and shriek at me.

“Dr. Freitag says we must go to Charleston. For special shoes and my father’s assistant principal’s suit, we go to Savannah. For special doctors, like when my mother almost lost the baby again, we go to Charleston.

“‘It couldn’t be polio-related, could it, Herb?’

“Dr. Freitag rubs his big belly and cackles. Out in the colored waiting room, his parrot Lucinda lets out a cackle, too. ‘Doris, you take the cake. And I mean the twelve-layer cake.

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Sweetheart, you’re just nervous about this baby, all the trouble you’ve had. Fanny, don’t pay her any mind.’

“‘Don’t you tell Fanny not to pay me any mind.’

“‘Ya’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go turn the X-rays off.’

“When he’s halfway out the door, my mother rubs her own belly. ‘The way he forgets that machine, we’ll all be dead of radiation time we’re forty anyways.’

“She’s raised her voice, and I’m already dead from the shame of having a mother who says what she thinks. ‘Don’t say Jewish, don’t say Jewish, don’t let her say Jewish,’ I pray, though I’m not exactly sure what Jewish means. My mother wouldn’t know it if she broke Dr. Freitag’s heart.”

This is from a little later in the story, a scene near the end when the very large family is eating in a fancy Charleston restaurant after they have gone to that specialist.

“After a few sips of martini, my father says, ‘We should get anything we want on the menu — anything.’ Theresa, the sacrificial one, runs her finger down the prices. She’ll get a plate of hush puppies without so much as a glass of tea to wash it down. And Martin and Will cry, ‘Meat! Meat!’

“‘Shush, now.’ My mother laughs at them, balancing her hat as she leans her head back. ‘You’d think we starved you poor orphans.’

Only on the word ‘orphans,’ her voice drops down low, as if she has seen an apparition. Here she goes again. Lately she’s been crying over anything we do and sobbing out that she just hopes she doesn’t die in childbirth because we would feel such sorrow and ache then. Women don’t die in childbirth anymore. It doesn’t happen. My father says so.

“‘Stop now,’ my father says. ‘Stop.’ But she juts her head out like a turtle to stare. Then she turns as white as she did out in the blazing sun. All four of us girls, sitting across from her, turn around to look.

“It’s a giant taking his seat. Really, it’s a giant. And we all see

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him this time, not just my mother. He’s twelve times my father’s size, but he’s wearing a suit just as normal as an assistant principal’s suit, a blue seersucker suit same as all the Charleston men wear in the summer, only his is twelve times bigger. His hair’s combed over to the side like my father’s, too, but the giant’s hair is sparse and oily, like a carneys’. His nose is a flattened streaked tomato, as if somebody stepped on him. Who would step on a giant? He sits down all alone to eat his supper at Harvey’s, and we all hold our breath to see if he breaks the chair. If he orders a martini, they’ll have to bring it in a bucket. Caroline waves at him, only he doesn’t see. My mother gasps.

“‘Just calm down,’ my father says, or at least I think that’s what he’s saying. He’s whispering, and so is everybody else in Harvey’s.

“‘Here’s what we do,’ my mother hisses. ‘I’ll grab up Caroline and Willy and Martin can hang onto my skirt. One of the girls can distract him — you, Agnes Ann.’

“‘What?’

“‘Spill a glass of water or something. I’ll get them out on the sidewalk, Pat, while you slip the waiter enough for the martinis.’

“My father groans and Agnes Ann groans with him. The giant looks perfectly charming. See? The waiter greets him like an old friend and then turns toward our table. My mother whispers, ‘Tell him. Tell him.’

“The waiter leans in above my father. ‘Some tall gentleman, hmm?’

“‘Hmm-hmm,’ my father says, stiff and sad.

“‘Must be very nearly eight feet tall. You see him before?’

“‘Nuh-uh,’ my father says.

“‘You hear about him, though.’

“‘No, I can’t say I have.’

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“‘Most famous man in Charleston. Come in here about once a month,’ the waiter says, not even troubling to lower his voice. ‘Got a law practice, specialize in colored people’s problems.’

“‘Oh, yes?’

“‘Fair man, very fair man.’

“‘You see, Doris?’

“That is too much for my mother, who jumps from her chair, but forgets the part about grabbing up Caroline and Will and Martin. She pushes through the restaurant, which is not so easy with her belly that big, and the giant half rises in his chair as if to give her a hand. She escapes him, though, and wends her way through table after table, until she passes through the doorway to the illegal bar.

“‘Think she gone find the washroom all right?’

“‘She just needs a breath of fresh air. She’s expecting,’ my father says.

“The waiter chuckles. ‘We know how ladies get.’

“Then we all order our food as if my mother has not fled the restaurant, as if she isn’t part of this family anymore. The food comes in waves like the tide, and we don’t mention my missing mother, though every now and again I remember how she lost the last baby. We all thought she was just carrying on that time, too, until the blood pooled all over the front seat of the car and ran out the passenger door. I wonder if she’s sitting on the sidewalk in a pool of blood.

“When Theresa’s hush puppies land, I seize the moment to peek again at the giant. He’s stooped over his own plate — shrimp! a mountain of it, a giant-sized portion—and not just because his head is so high above the table. His bones are bent, his back stooped, his neck hanging down from shame, the ways ours were hanging down in the slave market: only ours was the shame of being white and his is the shame of being a freak of nature. I want to go sit in his lap. I want to show my mother there’s nothing to be afraid of. I wouldn’t

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actually tell him about my two rows of teeth, but if I opened my mouth wide enough, he would see, and I wouldn’t mention they were going to fix me.

“The giant reads my mind the way my father does and smiles, his own teeth huge and crooked and a soft yellow, like roses. He has four or five sets in there. Nobody sees but me.

“‘That suit custom-made,’ our waiter says when he brings dessert, vanilla ice cream with sparklers, six cut-glass bowls he removes from the tray with great caution, as if they’re alive. We all sit in awe as the sparklers sputter and pop, red and blue, the ice cream itself singing out a cheerful message.

“When we come outside, blinking in the bright, cloudy haze, my mother is sound asleep in the hot car, all the windows rolled down, but the door locks depressed and the plastic seat covers hot to the touch, as if they’re melting. Her hat’s tumbled down, and my father makes us all stand back while he plucks it off the seat and rests it on her head. When he sets the paper bag of food down next to her, she starts awake at the rustle, then stares as if she doesn’t have the least idea who he might be.

“‘Did the giant take the babies?’

“We all laugh. She’s joking.

“‘Everybody in.’ My father brings Martin and Willy around to the back and opens the tailgate, then he comes for me to go in through the driver’s side.

“‘Aren’t you hungry?’ I ask my mother. She won’t answer, but squeezes my hand, and when I look up, I see the tears streaming down. I squeeze back, furious, and let my nails dig in.

“My father lights a cigarette before he pulls out. He has to guide us through the narrow Charleston streets and then the gloomy Charleston highway, where the wrecks pile up in the summer, drunken marines and blown-out tires and people with bad luck who don’t see they’re running off the shoulder into the muck. “‘Gotta make tracks, chickpeas. Gotta beat out this storm.’

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“By then the sky is blistered with black cloud puffs and the streets of Charleston are still. The birds have all found their shelter, and if we don’t make it over the ferry bridge fast, we’ll be trapped. “‘I hate Charleston,’ I say.

My father says, ‘I think it’s the specialist you hate.’

“‘Don’t tell her who she hates,’ my mother whispers.

“My father drives on, over the brick streets and past the walled gardens. Everybody in Charleston lives in a mansion, unless they’re poor and live in an old shack.

“‘If I die in childbirth,’ my mother says, ‘I suppose you’ll marry her.’

“‘Doris, stop melodramatizing. Women do not die in childbirth anymore.’

“‘I would rather you did. I would rather the children have that mother than no mother at all.’

“‘Doris, I will not have you scaring them.’

“‘I want to go to the cathedral,’ she whispers. ‘I want to make my confession.’

“‘Marry who?’ Martin calls all the way from the back.

“‘Nobody.’ My father speaks in a calm, clear voice that roars through the station wagon. ‘We’re not going to the cathedral and we’re not going to scare the children.’ “He drives on, his cigarette close to his finger.

“‘I’ll put it out.’ Now I’m whispering. He doesn’t hear me.

“My mother sobs, ‘I want to go to the cathedral. Please, take me to the cathedral.’

“‘Let her go.’ Maybe I’m still whispering. He drives on. ‘Let her go to confession.’ My mother squeezes my hand. I never take her side.

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“‘Fanny’s the only one who sees what it’s like for me.’

“But I’m her match. I can run like the devil and I will never let her spank me with the hairbrush again. My heart is murderous, monstrous. She’s scared. I can’t stop myself pleading for her.

My father drives on. We’re almost up to the ferry bridge — almost. But here comes a yellow light. My father slows, but before the car rolls to a stop, my mother opens her door, and so he must slam on the brakes. She’s out before the light turns red, before the tires stop turning. She runs on those bird legs, her hand to her hat and the rain just starting to spit. Martin starts to cry, then Caroline, then Will. Agnes Ann says, ‘There is no woman, sillies. Daddy wouldn’t do that. There is no woman.’

“When the light turns green, my father slides the station wagon forward and we all sit stunned as we realize he means to take us home, over the ferry bridge, down the narrow highway in the darkening night, through the woods, and over the marshes, while our mother wanders the streets of Charleston with a giant abroad. And she hasn’t even had her supper.

“A great clamor arises, even from Theresa, even from Agnes Ann. We’re all shrieking her name, ‘Our momma! Our momma!’ A cacophony of miniature Doris voices. In our terror, we’ve become our mother. I hear myself hiccough. ‘She just wants to go to confession. She just wants to go.’

“When my father turns the car around to go back for her, she’s waiting dignified at the curb, though the rain lashes down and the water slides in streams from her boater. Or am I making that part up? Melodramatizing, hurling down lightning bolts to show how dazzling my mother was. Maybe she was only waiting in the wilting heat. Maybe she was trudging away from us, heading still for the cathedral.

“She climbs into her seat and smiles down sweetly at me. Don’t let her squeeze my hand. Don’t. Don’t. She takes from my lap the brown bag of food my father has brought her from Harvey’s, a doggy bag that any other time would make her cringe with shame. But this dark night she opens it eagerly

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and removes a single shrimp, from which she takes a dainty bite. The thunder crashes around us as we cross over the ferry bridge into the night. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I don’t need to find a storm to find sitting next to my mother thrilling. We never did go back to the cathedral for confession that night. But still, all our troubles were forgotten, washed clean.”

Thank you.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: I’d like to read a set of poems, poems drawn from different books of mine. I have chosen them and put them together in a way to form a sort of story. The first poem is a prologue poem from my first book, Shouting at No One. It’s the oldest poem among my collected poems. I wrote it in Ann Arbor when I was twenty-one years old. The title is the first line of the poem, “I Was Appointed the Poet of Heaven.

I was appointed the poet of heaven.

It was my duty to describe Theresa’s small roses as they bent in the wind.

I tired of this and asked you to let me write about something else. You ordered, “Sit in the trees where the angels sleep and copy their breaths in verse.”

So I did And soon I had a public following.

Saint Agnes with red cheeks, Saint Dorothy with the moon between her fingers and the hosts of heaven.

You said, “You’ve failed me. I told you, “I’ll write lovelier poems,” “but,” you answered, “You’ve already had your chance: you will be pulled from the womb

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into a city.”

“Curriculum Vitae” is the title poem of my second book. Among other things, it’s a biography, the course of the life, if you like, of a Catholic.

I might have been in Beirut, not Detroit, with my right name. Grandpa taught me to love to eat. I am not Orthodox, or Sunni, Shiite, or Druse. Baptized in the one true Church, I too was weaned on Saint Augustine. Eisenhower never dreamed I wore corrective shoes. Ford Motor Co. never cared I'd never forgive Highland Park, River Rouge, Hamtramck. I memorized the Baltimore Catechism. I collected holy cards, prayed to a litany of saints to intercede on behalf of my father who slept through the sermon at 7 o'clock Mass. He worked two jobs, believed himself a failure. My brother believed himself, my sister denied. In the fifth grade Sister Victorine, astonished, listened to me recite from the Book of Jeremiah. My voice changed, I wanted women. The Jesuit whose yellow fingers cracked with the stink of Camels promised me eternal punishment. How strange I was, with impure thoughts, brown skin, obsessions. You could tell by the way I walked I possessed a lot of soul, you could tell by the way I talked I didn't know when to stop. After I witnessed stabbings outside the gym, after the game, I witnessed fire in the streets. My head set on fire in Cambridge, England, in the Whim Café. After I applied Substance and Procedure

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and Statements of Facts my head was heavy, was earth. Now years have passed since I came to the city of great fame. The same sun glows gray on two new rivers. Tears I want do not come. I remain many different people whose families populate half Detroit; I have the racket of the machines the oven’s heat, curse bossmen behind their backs. I hear the inmates’ collective murmur in the jail on Beaubien Street. I hear myself say, “What explains the Bank of Lebanon’s liquidity?” think, “I too will declare a doctrine upon whom the loss of language must fall regardless whether Wallace Stevens understood senior indebtedness in Greenwich Village in 1906.” One woman hears me in my sleep plead the confusions of my dream. I frequent the Café Dante, earn my memories, repay my moods. I am as good as my heart. I am as good as the unemployed who wait in long lines for money.

“In this Time”

I. When you don’t understand yet, the city’s lungs are gray, the shacks on wooden pillars, salt heaps, scrap and cinders breathe blood. When you can’t even imagine Grand River on fire.

When Czechlewski pronounces “love is the mysterious labyrinth that emanates from the Divine.” Your father vomits every morning to ease

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his nerves. Latin syllables are counted, quantified. Low blanket of yellow sky inwardly summons prayer.

When you don’t understand yet, the look in your face is fear.

II. In the Jesuit school the middle voice of the optative mood, cassocks, wooden kneelers, pages of cosigns, syllogisms. In the imagination the blue cotton skirt at Immaculata High School lifted with both hands.

In the memorial building after the dance “when the music begins to play automatically you’re on your way.” At home the father returns late, green work clothes smeared with flesh of animals he butchers.

III It is blessed on Brush Street beside the machine shop’s junkyard, where hands are warmed over fire in oil cans, It is awesome, the poplars shivering gold. He is imitated, the soldiers’ saint who instructs that conversation, if disordered, is sin. She is praised whose tongue opens your mouth in the damp basement.

It is enough sun behind blue smoke to rent the elm buds, to burn the clouds’ bloom.

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IV In this time a boy works his mind beyond half dreams, beyond the older woman alone at midnight leaning toward him from a windowsill, a thousand chimneys hissing, the sudden sweat from the April heat broken down his backbone.

Already his heart accepts its ceaseless wait.

“Brooding”

How could I foresee, looking back seven centuries, one rose in the crystal vase in the room where she stood before me legs slightly apart, golden dusk all over us when she insisted not to go on talking as if I was dreaming, arguing the Summa Theologica’s proofs that God is the love she was brought up on, she and I. Always this point of departure always, ceaselessly, pushed toward particulars of light insistent emotions sometimes abstracted rarefied air. Not at all fazed that man on Grand Street is yelling, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani,” I’ve heard the words

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before. Blocks away substance dealers finance insurance companies, purchase pension funds. Russia, I see once again appearing in our minds. A conversation at a private reception for the recent celebrity intellectual of the almost freed state—“No one,” he laughs at my inquiry, “reads Mayakovsky anymore.” But decidedly, more astute than the anarcho-capitalist lawyers, he easily convinces what lies deep in his heart, —a bag of the softest leather, with many zippers, on his shoulder. Perhaps he knows how perfectly he mimics the southern Californian—“Paradise is a fuck-dance to the rhythms on video of electronically sexual dollars —while here I am feeling sorry for him, soul sickness which has, like our own strabismic know-how, caused the species dementia praecox in the corners of various chancelleries; with all due respect, the soul brother hasn’t yet entertained certain elegantly styled arrangements,

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transmogrified servitudes no one believes. God, but who could conceive it all? Excessive cerulean winds consecrated green, feeling in the back of the neck a kind of mingling, a nearness from faraway, and the finest flower of the nation’s executive branch, frazzled and fatigued before the press under April showers in Memphis, Tennessee, wondering out loud, “There’s no way I can explain how I came to be here” —quickly brushed Permanence around further fact: In Bose-Einstein physics, past and present generate wave functions on consciousness equal to a laser beam’s time. What you see, not what you do, what we say is absolutely modern. What do I see? A baby’s mysterious inability to open his eyes. What do I do? Mysteriously a month-old baby can’t open his eyes.

The final poem is, in effect, a short prayer. It’s entitled “Let Us Pray.”

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My name is Lawrence Joseph. in the name of my father, Joseph, who’s also my son, and in the name of the women who receive me. I confess too much. For my penance: corporal works of mercy. Who cleansed the prophet Isaias with a burning coal deign purify me that I may worthily proclaim. Let me pray. At the time the greatest commandment was to seize the light, I was light; in those days innocence rescued. Let us pray.

We cry from what makes sense. Our flesh resurrected, multiplies and divides into countless fiery tongues.

Let your cry come to me. I will not forsake you, I, Lawrence Joseph, loved so much by your pain and your beauty.

Thank you.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Now we get to talk to each other. Then you will be able to talk to us. One of the things that I’m wondering whether you would all like to discuss is — I don’t know if this is a function of being asked to think about ourselves as having a Catholic childhood, but the question of nostalgia —

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Aren’t we supposed to be giving a talk first about what we —

PATRICIA HAMPL: What a good idea.

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LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Am I right on that, Margaret? I prepared something, at any rate, and I know that Valerie has, too.

PATRICIA HAMPL: I would love that. That’s what I thought we were doing, too, but when I spoke to someone earlier, I was told I was supposed to start the conversation. So I’m happy to sit and listen to you actually articulate how you are connecting your Catholic childhood with what you have been writing.

Maybe you would like to start, Lawrence. I mean, I know you would like to start.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: It’s the lawyer in me. I apologize for that.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Not at all.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Also Peggy asked that we do it and I don’t want to break the order on this. It’s the Catholic side of me coming in here.

What we were asked to do was to give some kind of sense of why we chose the poems we chose and then basically our general thoughts about — at least what I’m going to be saying about a Catholic childhood and my writing, and being a Catholic.

Basically, in making these notes, I thought about not only a Catholic childhood, but growing up Catholic. I was not only baptized as a child, but I went to Catholic schools, both grade school and high school, and grew up, as I think all of us did, in a very close Catholic environment, which gives it a different way of feeling about Catholicism.

The poems I chose to read are among many of those I have written in which Catholicism is distinctly configured by the use of Catholic imagery or by the voice of a Catholic speaker. The influences of Catholicism can, however, be found in the vocabulary, in the rhetorical structures and syntax, and the very substance of every poem I have written.

When Martin Scorsese was asked what effect growing up

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Catholic had on his art, he answered that Catholicism was not only extraordinarily important to him as a person, but that none of his films would have been conceivable without the presence of Catholicism since childhood in his life. Catholicism — “I certainly call myself a Catholic,” Scorsese said, “and it will always be that way” — was part of his innermost self, part of his being. Family, Catholicism, and art were essentially what defined him as a person. Both the intimacy and the externalities of Catholicism brought to his childhood streets a strong sense of the oscillation between the sacred and the profane, providing him with a particular idea of suffering and redemption. The iconography, the dramaturgical aspect of the mass and other Catholic religious services were and remain for him profoundly powerful and evocative. In his The Last Temptation of Christ, he was, Scorsese said, interested in developing to the ultimate what was for him a crucial yet astonishing concept: The word that is made flesh.

Asked about his Catholicism, Don DeLillo answered, “I think there’s a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood. For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about because he is raised with the idea that he will die any minute, and with the sense that if he doesn’t live his life in a certain way, his death will be simply an introduction to an eternity of pain.” This, DeLillo said, removes the hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he is approaching important subjects, eternal subjects. “I think for a Catholic these subjects,” DeLillo says, “are part of ordinary life.”

Flannery O’Connor said of the Catholic writer that her desire is to penetrate the surface of reality, to find in each thing the spirit that makes it itself, to hold the world together.

William Carlos Williams, in the chapter of his prose masterpiece In the American Grain (titled after the Jesuit missionary Pere Sebastian Rasles) wrote in the context of Puritan Protestant America in the early 1920s: “Rasles, a Catholic, a Jesuit, to mystery rightly reasoned, logic is consigned. It is this to be moral, to be positive, to be peculiar, to be sure, generous, brave, to marry, to touch, to give because one has and to give to him who has, who will join, who will make, to create, not to sterilize, to dry up, to rot.”

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So America, Williams goes on, has become the greatest ground for the Catholic in the world today, in spite of everything, “a field where tenderness may move, love may awaken, and a way is offered.”

The French Marxist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously wrote in the 1950s, “The incarnation changes everything. After the incarnation, God is externalized. God is seen in a certain historical place at a certain historical time. The incarnated God leaves behind words and memories that are then passed on. After the incarnation, the human journey toward God is no longer achieved solely by contemplation, but also through the commentary on and interpretation of written texts, texts whose energy is never exhausted, written stories that open and reopen the question of the distinction between body and spirit, between interior and exterior. The word becoming flesh means that the reality of God must be found with and through human beings. The form of the gospel stories centers in their metamorphic content. The incarnation and the stories of Scripture are mediational realities in which the deepest human mysteries are disclosed and discerned in and through narrated aspects of tangible human life.”

Garry Wills, in “Memories of a Catholic Boyhood,” the first chapter of his 1972 book Bare Ruined Choirs, writes, “We grew up different. We spoke a different language than the rest of men and women. That terminology haunts the Catholic speech in ways he or she is often unaware of. The church judged things not out of a deeper antiquity, but from outside time altogether. That was borne in on us by an unanchored and anachronistic style or mix of styles in all things the church did — here one century, there another, and all jumbled together. One lived in contact with something outside time. Grace, sin, confession, communion — one’s own little moral wheel kept turning in the large wheel of seasons that moved endlessly, sameness and change, and change and sameness. So was it ever, so would it always be a repetition, like that frequent ‘always,’ per omnia saecula saeculorum, through all the ages punctuating our prayers.

“The course of American Catholicism,” Wills continued, “was largely settled in 1884, at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, where assembled bishops voted to require a

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Catholic education for every Catholic child. That one decision entitled many things. Faith bound one’s whole life up in times of communal teaching, habits, discipline, authority, childhood assumptions, personal relationships, memories thrown back, each of them stirring others. Certain feelings are incommunicable. One can’t explain them to others or even to oneself, moments when the strangest things made a new and deep sense beyond sense, moments belonging to a people, not only to oneself.”

“It was a ghetto,” Wills says, “undeniably.”

Yes, it was, undeniably. It was its own world, its own field of tangible and intangible truths, where tenderness moved, where love awakened, where a way was offered — not a bad world for a poet to have been born into or to have grown up in.

VALERIE SAYERS: Larry may have written his comments out because he’s a lawyer, but I wrote mine out because I’m a liar. I heard this conversation was going to be taped, so I thought I had better get my story straight.

Two years ago, I flew into Atlanta after a semester living abroad and immediately found myself in a state of profound culture shock. I had only been gone for four- and-a-half months, but on my return I found I couldn’t recognize my own country. People were so large. There were so many flags. I found myself replaying the constant loop of unbidden memories of my childhood in a small-town Jim Crow South, a time that seemed now strangely like the time I had returned to.

One of the images that recurred to me was that of a giant, or at least an exceedingly tall man, my family saw in Savannah, where we had gone, oddly enough, to see Captain Kangaroo. In London, I had just finished teaching Hilary Mantel’s great novel, The Giant, O’Brien, and giants were very much on my mind.

The way the terrified mother in this story flees from the giant is something like the way I saw a couple of people in a Savannah shopping center fleeing a giant, and perhaps something even like the way I imagine we Americans were expected to act in the middle of an unending war on terror.

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The story I read pieces of, “A Freak of Nature,” came to me more or less whole and is filled with bits and pieces of my own childhood, including the opening scene, inspired by the still completely vivid memory of my dentist, just delighted, just tickled, showing my mother and me x-rays of another little girl who had an extra set of teeth in her mouth, as if using the other child’s visible freakishness to reassure us of what I certainly felt to be my own questionable normality.

The family in the story I read is a family I thought I was finished with. They appear in a 1994 novel of mine called The Distance Between Us. Clearly, I wasn’t finished with them at all. They bear some resemblance to my own large Irish- American family, Catholics in the Protestant South. But they aren’t my family, and neither is the little girl in the story me — not exactly, maybe not even close.

I wrote the story so quickly that it pretty much fell on the paper as I conceived it, the writing evoking memories so viscerally. The family walks through the Charleston slave market I used to walk through, the little girl climbs on a cannon pointed at Fort Sumter, a cannon I used to climb, and I became a little frightened of the writing.

Nothing about it shocked me, however, until I came near to the end of the story. I knew before I wrote it that the mother was going to accuse the father of infidelity in front of the children, but I had no idea whatsoever that she was going to invoke confession. That part wrote itself. And there it was. The mother having invoked the notion of confession — not the father’s need of it, but her own — meant that now I, the writer, had to deal with it. My own associations with confession are complicated. It is theoretically my favorite sacrament — theoretically. It is also more than a little terrifying, which I thought made it an apt motif for the story.

Once the idea of confession was in, I struggled with it mightily, just as I struggled with my own ambivalence about a sacrament that is both consoling and frightening, an act that is at once public and private, an exchange between penitent and priest that uncovers secrets and sometimes keeps secrets safe. Making a bad confession, Catholics understand when they are very young, is worse than making no confession at all.

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In the first draft I wrote, Fanny is repulsed by the idea that her mother wants to go to confession. It’s just another example of her mother’s sanctitude, her holy-holy posturing. By the final draft, to my surprise, Fanny has taken her mother’s side, as confused by her own empathy as she and the rest of the children must be by the idea that it’s their mother who has something to confess. Does she want to confess a false accusation? Her anger? Her display of fear in front of the children? Or is she, after all, just using the idea of the sacrament to pat herself on the back, to present herself as morally superior to her husband?

Fanny will never know. In the section of the story that follows what I just read, she says she spent years wondering if her father loved another woman, wishing he did, even praying he did, and that she didn’t come close to offering her own absolution to her mother until she had children herself — a long and painful passage of time, the opposite of confession, the opposite of that sacrament. Yet her act of forgiveness is performed as something of a ritual, too, in the telling of the story, the remembering and recounting of the past.

Writing the story as I came home from a foreign country allowed me to meditate on what it meant to go through childhood sadness, even terror, and to be washed clean, if only momentarily, to see a glimpse of other people’s fear and stand for a moment outside of judgment. That’s the effect I hope it has on its readers as well.

It was published when there appeared to be no end to our terror. But like the story itself, we have now, perhaps, taken a more hopeful turn, and perhaps we can even begin to forgive those who urged us to display our terror so melodramatically. In order for that to happen, however, we need some very public acts of contrition, because I am not as generous as the little girl in the story.

STUART DYBEK: When Peggy asked each of us to say a little something about what we read, it was in five minutes. Religion is such an enormous topic. You can think of it as a moral system. You can talk about it as culture. So I decided that I would just talk about it as divided into two approaches that one might take. I’m certainly not claiming they are the

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only two approaches that could be taken, but I’m looking at them as poles between which a continuum is hung, and you can assume different positions along that continuum.

I read portions of the piece I read, “Thread,” in order to illustrate what I would call one pole, which is often written in the first person — it doesn’t necessarily have to be — frequently rooted in childhood, with its attendant nostalgia. I have to say, for me, since I was raised Catholic, that’s where I have the most authentic material to use. But a lot of times I just think I’m writing about religion and religious impulse. If I was going to divide things up, I wouldn’t divide them up between the Catholic mind, the Jewish mind, the Islamic mind. I would divide them up between fundamentalism in all religions and liberalism. I think they have a lot more in common with each other when you talk about them that way — which is not the way that I was writing that piece, however.

But in that kind of writing, one approaches a belief system, that whole mysterious notion of “belief,” with a rational mind. Here’s a kid immersed in all this complicated belief system, and he’s trying to hold it accountable to himself. It really reminds me of — my father, a Polish immigrant. It’s almost kind of a stereotype. You work and work and work, and then you get enough money and you buy a six-flat, which is exactly what he did.

I remember him getting up later and going out later than usual — because he got up so early for his factory, which was at Harvester — because they were having a meeting at the rectory. At the meeting at the rectory, what was going on was, all the landowners in this neighborhood I grew up in on the South Side of Chicago were getting together to talk about how they could keep the blacks from buying property. In my story, the moment the kid loses his faith is when he realizes the ridiculous stuff he has to go through because he swallowed a thread. But another story I could have written was this other one.

What was going on there was, to the rational mind, religion was not living up to itself. We do this all the time with democracy. We are raised on all these, many times, myths, if you explore what has actually gone on historically, and then we want to hold the myths accountable to themselves.

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My piece, by the way, was published as a memoir, but the reason it was published as a memoir was — I sent it to a magazine where I knew the editor. I just sent it to her. She said, “What is this? Is it a memoir? Is it fiction?” And she said, “We’re a little short on nonfiction.”

I said, “Fine by me.”

That’s another distinction that I don’t usually make too strongly with myself. A lot of pieces that were published as fiction pretty much happened as I wrote them. In this kind of piece, what’s going on for the kid is that a monotheistic religion has all these polytheist things going on, with the statues. If he was in Voodoo or Santeria, the same whole host of these patron saints would have become Venus and Mars and so on and so forth.

So I think that’s one pole, where the reasonable mind comments on belief. It can be a revelatory comment. The rational mind can be writing about revelation, about what this meant, about all the ideas that I think Larry so beautifully laid out. Or it can be talking about repression, as Joyce does. But one way or the other, the rational mind is having this relationship.

The other pole is that someone has grown up in this great mythos of ritual and gods and goddesses and saints and all these different patterns that we see from religion to religion, and what they do is a writer — they will use it as material, as in the first, but instead of having that conflict or that relationship between the rational and the irrationality of belief, what’s going on is that the writer adapts all those forms. So the writer begins writing from the inside of myth, which is why I read that section about the virgin in ice. Here in the middle of this neighborhood are these kids who have, in fact, been raised Catholic, and now they are on the inside of myth and they are making up their own myths about how to explain violence in the neighborhood.

Larry read a piece that he described as a prayer. That’s one of the hallmarks of that kind of writing. Your writing starts to assume the religious forms, even if the writing itself is anti- religious. It begins to become meditations. It becomes

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primitive, bardic, incantatory, metaphorical, prayer, litany. You don’t just make lists; you make litanies.

Those, for me, are the two poles that a writer can arrive at who has come out of almost any religious background. In one they mirror the myth maker and in the other they are the rational mind commenting on the mythical patterns that they, before even knowing it, have had a deep allegiance to.

PATRICIA HAMPL: I was thinking about this — and you brought up the word, Stuart — nostalgia. I sometimes wonder if the whole idea of a Catholic childhood is disappearing into our generation’s past, and the kind of richness of this mixture of myth and ritual and living within the whole culture. Whether you sign up on the dotted line all your life for everything, whether you ascribe to the hierarchies that Larry was talking about, the richness there is so profound that it lasts a whole imaginative life in each of your cases. But I’m wondering, when you look at the presence of the church now, whether you feel that a Catholic childhood has any meaning for the generations following us.

I’m thinking of this partly because of an essay I read in Commonweal, in the November 21 issue, by Paul Elie, who wrote a fabulous quadruple biography called The Life You Save May Be Your Own, about all the writers of mid-century — Catholic writers, not all of them — four writers of mid-century. In this essay he is talking about where we are today, and he makes the case that we’re coming to the end of a period of critical writing rather than creative writing.

One of the things he poses towards the end of this essay is the notion that the kind of Catholic childhood that is enfolded, often, in an ethnic neighborhood or an ethnic environment — or even, in your case, for instance, Valerie, in a regional environment, in an environment that’s largely Protestant, but where the Catholic identity is so strong — that these things are beginning to fall away. So the idea of having that kind of richness that you mentioned for Scorsese and each of you has clearly modeled — do you think it’s something that, therefore, makes you inevitably nostalgic as a writer? Or do you feel engaged in the issues of Catholicism still?

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: I don’t think it’s a question of

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nostalgia. I don’t feel nostalgic about it at all, in the sense that I have to go back there in order to find some part of myself. There are a lot of different places I find myself. There are different selves. The Catholic self is a very important self in me. But that’s because of me. That’s my personal self.

How it goes into the writing, I think, is an altogether different question, depending on what you want to be writing. I think the strength of it is not in its particulars, in which I think there is great strength, but in, for lack of a better way to describe it, what the passage from your work that Peggy read is the metaphorical quality of it. In other words, what’s going on out of these worlds is something very human, deeply human.

I think the side of Catholicism that carries through no matter what the particulars are — in the passing worlds, historically, of American Catholicism — there are a number of central things. One is the sacred nature of language. One is the notion of mystery. I think that’s as true for someone who is coming out of a Catholic imagination now as always. I don’t think that that’s something different.

Does that come from Catholicism to the writer or does the writer bring it to Catholicism? I don’t know the answer to that. That’s a mystery to me.

VALERIE SAYERS: I think there are in this moment, probably as there were in the 1950s — I just didn’t know any other moment than my own Catholic childhood — I think there are in this moment many Catholic childhoods. I raised my children in Brooklyn, where they had a very loose and loving Catholic upbringing — that is, from the nuns who gave them their religious education. Then, when we went out to South Bend, Indiana, we just didn’t know where we were, in the church or elsewhere. It was just a very, very different cultural experience.

What they had in common was a difference, I think, in the intensity of language. Certainly the language I experienced as a child was a constant presence. The fact that we memorized the catechism, for example, the fact that we heard the mass in Latin, all made the whole notion of language pretty mysterious and — I’ll use a contemporary word, in quite a different sense

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— “awesome.”

I think my children absolutely missed out on that. Then they had to sing those really sappy folk songs at mass. I’m sorry, I’m just agin' it.

Well, never talk about one’s children in a panel. That’s enough about my kids.

I do think that there are “Catholicism’s” in the country right now. The parish life we experienced in Brooklyn was very, very different from this Midwestern life, and very, very different from the parish life my family that is left in South Carolina experiences down there. I do see some parishes kind of splintering off, in the political sense, becoming much more politically engaged, either on the left or on the right, but very, very vociferously. That, I think, is an important part of what’s happening to the Catholic Church culturally. Where it will end I’m not willing to say.

Certainly if we live in a church that feels it’s more beneficial to lose the less enthusiastic among us, we will. That’s in process. We are losing people quite rapidly.

STUART DYBEK: I just basically think it’s really very difficult to generalize, because culture plays such an enormous part in that. What’s true of a Hispanic community, like the one I grew up in Pilsen, is not going to be true of some neighborhood in Boston. So I’m reluctant to generalize.

I agree with what Valerie said. There is one word that has many multiple meanings, depending upon who is defining it.

I have a good friend whose whole connection with it is liberation theology. I think but for that, there wouldn’t be much interest in the religion for him. But as I said in my other remarks, that whole notion of fundamentalism, which I think overarches religions, sometimes is more defining than the religion itself. I see that particularly going on in the world today. The nightmare of the previous eight years in the United States was deeply tied into that.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Part of, I think, the thinking about it in nostalgic terms — I think maybe another way of thinking

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about it is that certain imaginations are, to use Stuart’s word, “religious.” The religious sensibility, the religious imagination, has certain kinds of characteristics, if it’s not — and for writers, it’s not fundamentalist. There’s no writer of any worth that has a religious sensibility that is fundamentalist. It doesn’t operate that way. They operate in all of the mysteries and sacredness and complexities of language.

If the effect of your imagination and your childhood, if you have a religious imagination — the period of time in which I grew up, and in which I think we generally grew up, was a time that had its particular richness for a religious imagination, especially in the metaphorical side, which is what writers like, in some way or other. It certainly wasn’t true for everybody who grew up Catholic, and certainly those we went to grade school and high school with who didn’t have religious sensibilities or didn’t write — their attitude, if they were here today, would be very different than the way that we are thinking about this.

So I think, in terms of the changing nature of Catholicism, which is always changing — it has never been static, although it’s not a fundamentalist religion. That’s not the nature of Catholicism. There may be people —

PATRICIA HAMPL: That would be news to some people.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Well, then it’s news to them, as far as I’m concerned. If it’s news to them, then it’s news to them. Then I hope they can open themselves up to that news, because that side of closing the religious sensibility has led to murder; it has led to destruction of the highest order. You give whatever name you want to give it in any religion. We all know and we have been living through a period of unimaginable horror on the relationship of fundamentalist religion that none of us imagined we would be living in to the extent that we are living it.

Now younger people — of course they’re not going to think in religious terms if they think that’s what religion is. That will play out whatever way it plays out.

But I think that those with religious sensibilities who are

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writers or artists are going to attach to the sides of religions that go into the levels of the sacred and the mysterious and the human and the moral — what Williams talked about, what he saw as the Catholic, the moral, the touch, tenderness, openness, love awakens. All of the great religions have that and all religion has that. But the Catholic religion has it, too.

PATRICIA HAMPL: It has always been wonderful to think that the first poem in any anthology of Italian poetry is always “Canticle of the Creatures,” by Francis, which is, of course, a great prayer. That is simply considered part of the Italian cultural heritage and literary heritage.

I think you mentioned Bare Ruined Choirs by Garry Wills. He opens that book, if I remember, saying that D.H. Lawrence used to talk about England having a dirty little secret that was called “sex,” and the Catholic Church had a dirty little secret, called “change.” We didn’t like to believe that there was such a —

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: That’s in “Memories of a Catholic Boyhood.” He published it in Esquire, I found, in 1971.

PATRICIA HAMPL: I think that’s really part of the current discourse about religion. I really liked Stuart bringing in the whole idea that fundamentalism across the board has been a problem. Those books, the kind of triumvirate of atheist books — the manifestos of atheism — have really been usually presented in terms of a rationalist approach to life, to the world, to understanding the world, almost to epistemology. In fact, what’s missing in that case is everything you all have been talking about so far, which has to do with not whether religion connects with science, but this language has to do with poetry, has to do with ways of expressing human existence that can only be expressed through metaphor and through myth and through image.

What struck me about the things that you have said, the things that you have read is that you aren’t talking about what you believe, but what you perceive out of, what you perceive from, and what you therefore express. So signing on the dotted line of something makes no sense. It’s a deeper relationship to this cultural heritage than simply saying what I believe.

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LAWRENCE JOSEPH: If I’m writing a poem and I’m dealing with the belief of what I’m writing in a poem, it’s not going to be listing what I believe as a Catholic — as Scorsese says, he calls himself a Catholic — because that’s not what I do in poetry. I’m writing poems. If I’m writing poems and I use, from my own experience, the metaphorical richness of Catholicism, which has all sorts of different dimensions to it, that’s one thing.

Could I write a piece where is said what I believe in as a Catholic? Sure. But that’s not what I’m doing in a poem, and I’m not particularly interested in writing a piece like that. There are enough people that seem to be doing it these days, and they all seem to be quite violently opposed to one another on what exactly it means.

VALERIE SAYERS: Whenever you make art, you are trying to say something that can’t be said in any other way — that is, that can’t be said in a rational way, that can’t be reduced to a rational argument. So when you tell a story, every word of the story has to be told; when you write a poem, every sound in the poem is crucial to what it is you’re doing. I think those of us who have a religious sensibility may, as Larry says, perceive religion and art as both in the realm of the irrational, that which we cannot experience in any other way.

But this is, of course, in complete contrast to what Stuart just demonstrated in the wonderful notion of the thread. The thread, in a sense, is what connects our conversation to fundamentalism. It’s a literal belief, a fundamental kind of belief. I think there are those with religious sensibilities who don’t think in the “Thread” realm. I like the way the narrator of that story has both a rational and an irrational response to it. That is, he goes first to the storyteller’s realm to think about ways he can get around it. I think those of us who write fiction, for example, are always doing that. We are indeed trying to get around the rational, the fundamental, and instead, to explain the mystery, always.

I certainly thought that was very clever as a child. Whenever you had a question, it was a mystery. What a great church! But I embrace it now as a writer.

STUART DYBEK: One thing religions are, they are great

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repositories of story. So I think one thing that happens to a young person in any religion is that you grow up really liking those stories.

One experience I remember very clearly is that, as the kid in “Thread,” I loved those Bible stories. I thought they were just wonderful. A little later on, I discovered in a local library Greek mythology, and I just became absolutely addicted to reading these mythological stories.

For me, it’s kind of a basic human response to story. We are creatures who are wired to understand reality through stories, whether it’s history, the law, literature, religion. A story is how we understand things. It’s how we remember things. There is a strong relationship between storytelling and memory. The notion that somebody learns from their religion, whatever it is, to tell stories — well, yes, but they would know how anyway. That’s how we’re wired.

I think it’s kind of difficult to make these “A equals B, B equals C” kind of syllogistic notions for how we get from one thing to another. It’s just this big stew that you are mixed up in, and you sort things out when you need them.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Did you want to say something?

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Yes. I don’t think a writer necessarily has to have — in fact, a writer does not have to have a religious sensibility. A lot of writers that I love don’t use religious metaphors from any religion as a way, at any point in their work, to express things that are very similar, and they are great writers. I really think a lot of it has to do with whether you have a religious sensibility or not. I think you are born with it. Why you are born with it I don’t know — if you are a writer and you are born with it.

Then you’re going to be attracted to certain kinds of — if you’re a writer, you’re going to be attracted to stories and narrative, because you’re writing in language, and all the complexities of the way you make forms out of expression. But the content you put into it, I think, is very much affected by the imagination you’re born with. Does your religious sensibility become religious when you are baptized Catholic? I don’t think so. But I don’t know. At another level as a

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Catholic, if a Catholic said to me, yes, they think that’s what happens, I’m not going to say that isn’t right. I’m not sure Flannery O’Connor would have said, for example, that that’s where the religious sensibility came from; it was a gift, it was grace, it comes from God, and she posits that in Catholicism. I don’t find that wrong either.

PATRICIA HAMPL: That’s another one of those words like “mystery.”

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Well, “mystery” is a religious word.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Yes.

I think we should see what audience questions are. Peter Steinfels has them. I feel like this is that Academy Awards moment.

PETER STEINFELS: There has been a whole group of questions that really dealt with the issue of whether the post- Vatican II Catholic childhood would somehow result in a literature that was either not there or quite different. Patricia, you raised that question right off the bat. I don’t know whether you want to return to it at some point.

I’m interested in the fact that Paul Elie’s four authors who were mentioned in The Life You Save May Be Your Own — Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day — only one of them had a Catholic childhood. The other three did not. I don’t know where that leads you. But here are some questions.

PATRICIA HAMPL: This is interesting. Is irony a danger, an easy way to handle childhood — in other words, the distance, I think, that inevitably comes with knowing — we are reading about this thread idea. We think we know the distance that the author has to the narrator, and there’s the humor there. So the question is, is irony a danger?

I’m not sure what’s meant by danger. A danger to what? Anyway, is it a too easy way to handle childhood for a Catholic writer? Discuss.

VALERIE SAYERS: A writer cannot write without it— irony

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is crucial. Of course it’s a danger. And writing should be dangerous.

PATRICIA HAMPL: This is one that I’m surprised we didn’t touch on earlier. I have a note on it myself.

Mary Gordon, in Circling My Mother, her most recent memoir, said that her mother had worked for years as a typist and secretary, largely in parish houses and working for priests. She said that her mother would have found two things in the contemporary scene incomprehensible: one, that the typewriter had disappeared from every desk in America; and that the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they hear the words “Catholic priest” is child abuse.

Here, the question touches on that: What effect has the child- abuse crisis had on our remembrance, sensibility, and perception of a Catholic childhood? And its availability, I would say — this isn’t the questioner — its availability as material. I hate that word, “material” — its presence as a cultural touchstone.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: I’m not sure what it would do for our generation of Catholics, but I think for the present generation of Catholics, that’s a very good observation and I think it’s a significant and challenging kind of question. It changes the social side of the American church and the way it’s perceived on its institutional sides, and how that affects the imagination. Maybe that will be played out in literature and will be very mixed in with all the other kinds of conflicts that exist right now in the church.

PATRICIA HAMPL: I was thinking of a writer like J.F. Powers, the way he evokes the priesthood and the way he uses it. I once asked him, “Why do you always have priests?”

He said, “Because there’s automatically a spiritual life there already. So it’s already there; you don’t have to create it.”

I asked his biographer later, “What would he do with what’s going on now?”

She said, “His subject would have been taken away from him.”

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LAWRENCE JOSEPH: It’s hard to imagine a book like Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos being written now. I’m not sure how younger people read that — in other words, with what has happened with the church — or even some of Graham Greene, where the characters adhere very much to the kind of orthodox, fundamental side of the church’s teachings and then that becomes part of the plot. I’m not sure the way that is read. It probably needs footnotes, trying to explain that this is what people believed — that if you didn’t go to mass on Sunday, you would be eternally damned. But what would a footnote do?

PATRICIA HAMPL: But then you have the character — I don’t know if you can say a character is a real live person — Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. His Catholicism is central to that character, to his presence in the book. It’s part of what makes him who he is. You were going to say something, Valerie.

VALERIE SAYERS: I was going to say something about Powers, because I think Powers brings us back to irony. Powers wrote no story about a Catholic priest that was not fully informed by the knowledge that he had to write with irony. He had to write with the distance that allowed him to make sense of the material and to order it in a way that would be the most effective narrator. He wrote from the 1940s to — somebody can check me on the last years — certainly well into the 1970s. In the beginning, his priests were very concerned with integration and labor struggles and the streets of Chicago and so on. By the end, he had a priest who had a sexual past and he had a priest who was struggling with the Vietnam War. He moved his priests into real time.

I think, in fact, he’s a textbook example of what this crisis might release in writers, rather than what it might inhibit.

STUART DYBEK: Let me just say one thing about that. I want to talk about it as storytelling, which is this: These stories fall into patterns. Larry mentioned Graham Greene, for instance. One of Greene’s favorite patterns was rebirth. Sometimes it was secular; sometimes it was through some kind of act of faith.

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One of the favorite myths of the United States is rebirth. It was the George Bush myth. And it goes on all the time — any country preacher, any celebrity preacher on the radio who gets caught sleeping around or robbing the poor box or one thing or another. Then the notion is, the sinner becomes reborn and the healer heals himself and so on and so forth.

What’s interesting about this whole thing with priests as a story is that it’s hard to tell that story when the priest is a child abuser. You can tell that story about the priest who is a drunk. You can tell that story about the priest who steals money from the poor box because he’s a gambling fanatic. You can tell that story about the priest who is sleeping with the woman in the housing project. But it’s really hard to tell that story about the priest who is feasting on children. That’s where I think the border of difference is. That story tests the pattern of the rebirth story.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Is it necessary to perceive of growing up Catholic as an extremist experience in order to write about it?

In relationship to that, sort of a companion piece, is the post- Vatican II church a less fruitful field for a writer? I think Larry already answered that. Not necessarily does it need to be at all.

But the other question, this question of an extremist experience — maybe every experience has to be felt as urgently in need of telling, it seems to me, in order to be something that a writer wants to write about. Does that strike you as something —

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: I’m not sure that’s what the question is getting at. I think it may be something that — if a younger Catholic asked this, it is the fact that if you profess to the Catholic faith and you’re twenty-five years old, you are considered an extremist of some kind because of the way you are identified by the rest of the world.

We were very much, because of the patterns of the development of the American church and coming from ethnic backgrounds — and as Wills says in “Memories of a Catholic Boyhood,” what happened in 1884 in Baltimore in terms of the Catholic education — we were in these ghettoes. So everything

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that was going on here was where the world was. There was a world outside, but there was definitely a world and worlds within the world — families, just endless. I don’t think that exists to the same extent anymore — I think also because of the way the problems that exist in the institutional side of the church, separate from the faith ― I think it’s a problem with a lot of Catholics today, especially older Catholics. They don’t realize how — especially Catholics who have the fundamentalist side, for lack of a better word — they don’t realize how they appear to the rest of the world in the way that they profess their faith. The faith becomes identified that way, even by bishops, the way they represent the faith.

I think it’s a major, major kind of problem, especially if you are a younger writer and you are trying to deal with the church as it exists today, to try to deal with that in terms of the way you are, if, in fact, you are writing out of Catholic experience in some kind of way.

VALERIE SAYERS: I guess the question presumes, too, kind of autobiographical material, rather than perception — or perhaps not. I may be misinterpreting the question. Extremism in the experience is what I’m hearing there. I do think it’s important to distinguish what Larry has been talking about. Those with a religious sensibility may be writing about material that doesn’t even necessarily have any kind of Catholic content. Those are two different spheres. I’m not really getting at an answer. I’m just still picking at the question.

PATRICIA HAMPL: This is a question, actually, for Stuart, I guess, but I think it’s a good one for everybody. Did you have any Catholic writers, especially about childhood, among your models for writing? I would even extend the question a little bit to say, do you now? Of course, the models usually come a little earlier at their most intense.

STUART DYBEK: What I would like to do is give you a chance — you start with an answer.

PATRICIA HAMPL: I’m supposed to ask the questions.

STUART DYBEK: Come on, jump in. You’ve written so many beautiful books.

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LAWRENCE JOSEPH: I’m also going to make you do a five- minute presentation.

PATRICIA HAMPL: For me —

STUART DYBEK: It was Mary McCarthy.

PATRICIA HAMPL: Mary McCarthy was not important to me. I didn’t like her writing, but I did read her.

It was so intense for me. The nuns and Garrison Keillor were the ones who mattered to me when I was a kid, when I was learning how to write.

For me, to prove that I could write away from Catholicism was important. That was the big thing. It was fairly late in the game, I remember, that I was somewhere and somebody said, “Oh, you’re a Catholic schoolgirl.” I don’t know what I had done. I had done something polite, I guess. I don’t know.

I said, “Yes.”

“So you were brought up Catholic.”

I realized that I always answered that I was brought up Catholic. I never said, “I’m a Catholic,” in settings like that.

So on this occasion, just out of kind of perversity, I said, “No. I’m a Catholic.”

“You don’t mean you’re really a Catholic.”

I said, “Yes, I really am.”

I actually sort of wasn’t at the time, but — I remember thinking, a Jewish person wouldn’t make this distinction that I have been making much of my adult life in order to play ball with the big boys. What am I doing here?

So I started saying I was Catholic. And one thing led to another, and now I’m at church every Sunday. But I think it was only realizing my sense of how I had tried to fight against it that really brought me to begin to be interested in

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Catholicism as part of what I was. It had been there in everything I had written — everything. My whole conception of writing had to do with — as Kafka says, writing is prayer. There was no question of that at all for me.

Scott Fitzgerald was my great hero writer. I think he is very definitely a Catholic writer. That would be who I would put forward as my person.

Your turn.

STUART DYBEK: For me, in a word, it would be Joyce. I have been trying to emphasize the fact that — I know the topic is Catholicism, but I would be kidding you if I told you that you could put these things in these little categories. That whole generation of Jewish writers was absolutely essential for me — Bellow, Malamud, Salinger. Those guys showed me how you could take your background, honor it, write beautiful, beautiful work about it, and define yourself against it, and be subversive, in two ways: subversive in using it and subversive in defining yourself against it.

So the notion that to write in a particular — but my background was Catholic. So that’s where I had a lot of stuff from. Eliot was an important writer for me because of the interesting mythological way that he used, and Yeats.

I’ll stop with that.

VALERIE SAYERS: I didn’t know there were any Catholic writers when I was coming along. I just followed a series of crushes and would work my way through Faulkner, Balzac, or Tolstoy, Turgenev, Eliot. None of them had anything to do with Catholicism, but they all had something to do with a religious sensibility and a religious approach to life.

Eventually, I found all those writers who had rebelled against Catholicism, and that was absolutely thrilling. Certainly that’s where Joyce comes in.

It has always been hard to find “the Catholic writers.” Certainly there is a period in our literary history when we didn’t have a lot and they weren’t very encouraged. Then there was this kind of mid-century flowering, when we did

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have O’Connor and Percy and Spark and all those people in conversation with each other — all of them great ironists, I would like to add. I want to keep punching that point.

That was kind of thrilling, too. That was another kind of permission. I guess I discovered those writers when I was an undergraduate. That was a different kind of permission.

But writers read great writing. I’m never sure if I’m misquoting her entirely, if somebody else said it, but I think it was Dorothy Day who said something about liking atheists better. Does anybody know that?

PATRICIA HAMPL: Mary Gordon has said that.

VALERIE SAYERS: Because they are kinder to people. I felt that way about many writers who were not only not Catholic, but going at Catholicism very hard. I was glad to respond to them on their own terms. They certainly had something to teach me.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: “Catholic writers” includes a large — I’m of the belief that the Spanish language and the French language and the Italian language, and even the German language, to a great extent, are all hardwired Catholic at some level, so we can include all these literatures, for the most part.

But Catholic childhood, personally, and prose — James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — having gone to a Jesuit high school and been radically affected and changed by it and transformed by it, it was remarkable to read it. It’s one of the great books ever written.

In poetry, it’s actually Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, who writes about his Catholic childhood and infuses Catholicism virtually through his whole sensibility, which is very close to what, at least in the infusion of the Catholic sensibility — and even configured sometimes very explicitly into the work of something that had an enormous effect on me. I was reading him in the late 1960s. I was reading him very early on, fortunately, and so I saw that that could be done in poetry. He put what I call the configuration of Catholic imagery and Catholic voice into poetry, more than, I think, any other poet coming out of a Catholic country, if you like, in Europe and in

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European modernism. So he had a strong effect on me.

PATRICIA HAMPL: And he did that, I think, also in Native Realm, in his memoir.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: He does it in all his work. There’s a Catholic voice that’s there and he puts it right out front as fundamental and then he constantly is dealing with it all the time. That’s very similar to what I think I have done from the beginning in my poetry.

PATRICIA HAMPL: It becomes his way of just being human. He says “the instinct to bow the head and bend the knee.” He’s just got it, there it is, and —

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: Yes, because he’s definitely — but he also writes in his later life to the pope — not that the pope isn’t human. Nevertheless, that’s a configuration in poetry of a poet of that caliber that is really quite extraordinary when you think of it.

PATRICIA HAMPL: We are sort of at the end of our time. Someone has sent a note up here — I don’t know who these people are — saying, “The deep reflections tonight have brought to my mind Thomas Merton and that tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of his death,” and I believe it says, “and the 67th anniversary of his entrance into the monastery.” Then it says, “Thoughts?” But I’m not sure we have more thoughts than just kind of a salute to that figure of the mid-century who is so important to Catholic thinking and Catholic imagination.

Thank you very much. Thank you to our panelists.

PETER STEINFELS: As co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, I have the burden of bringing the discussion to a close. But before we offer again our thanks to the moderator and panelists, I have a couple of brief announcements.

On March 16, our Center will hold another evening forum here. This one will sail under the banner of “What in God’s Name Are Some New Yorkers Doing: The Untold Story of Faith- Based Activism in Our City.” We will have a group of very interesting community leaders across the religious spectrum at

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that forum. You can learn more about that event and many others in three ways, and I hope you take advantage of them all. One is to make sure that you are on our mailing list. Secondly, if you can add your email address when you are signing up, that would be great, too. Third, you can check our Web site, www.fordham.edu/religculture. It will tell you about future events. It will provide you transcripts, which we post as soon as possible, from past events, including, eventually — soon, I hope — this evening’s.

As you exit, you will find in the lobby a table where you can purchase books by this evening’s panelists and moderator. They have said they would be willing, at no extra charge, to sign books. The table with the books is out in the lobby. They will be seated down the stairs where you came in, at the table there.

Finally, again, let’s express our warm thanks for the wonderful panel.

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