McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page i I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page ii McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page iii ralph mc inerny I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU my life and pastimes university of notre dame press notre dame, indiana McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page iv Copyright © 2006 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data McInerny, Ralph M. I alone have escaped to tell you : my life and pastimes / Ralph McInerny. p. cm. isbn-13: 978-0-268-03492-4 (alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-268-03492-3 (alk. paper) 1. McInerny, Ralph M. 2. McInerny, Ralph M.—Friends and associates. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Catholic authors— United States—Biography. 5. College teachers—United States—Biography. 6. University of Notre Dame—Biography. I. Title. ps3563.a31166z46 2006 813'.54—dc22 2006000840 McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page v In Memoriam uxoris meae Constantiae McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page vi Autobiographies are not really serious in the way novels are. —Kingsley Amis The best of a bad job is all the most of us make of it—except of course the saints. —T. S. Eliot Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. —Virgil McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page vii contents one Reflections in a Golden I 1 two Biosphere 5 three Spoiled Priest 13 four Paterfamilias 27 five Europe 37 six Author 55 seven Learning How to Die 81 eight Notre Dame 107 nine Vatican II 121 ten Editor and Publisher 135 eleven International Catholic University 151 twelve On the Banks of the Mainstream 161 McInerny-000.FM 1/17/06 1:35 PM Page viii McInerny-01 1/11/06 3:02 PM Page 1 one reflections in a golden i to say that this book is not the confessions of st. augustine may sound as gratuitous as saying that none of my novels is War and Peace, but the remark has point. In writing these memoirs I have been conscious of the fact that I am not writing the story of a soul; that would be an altogether more depressing exercise. The septuagenarian finds self- delusion difficult, and there is an account of my life that could be of in- terest only to God and myself. Remember Augustine’s addressee. Only a saint could be so unflinchingly honest about his life, and I—another needless disclaimer—am no saint. What I have written is the truth, but of course it is not the whole truth, not even the fuller grasp I myself might have of it. Even for that, I would want to invoke St. Paul’s neque meipsum iudico, his admission that he remained largely a mystery to himself and was even unable to say for certain that he was in the state of grace. When friends of mine suggested that I write an autobiography I was at first amused. But the thought grew on me, as unfriendly suggestions will, and I imagined writing little bursts on the order of the End Notes I did for each issue of Crisis: episodes, people, events, arranged more or 1 McInerny-01 1/11/06 3:02 PM Page 2 less chronologically, but not aiming at any narrative control beyond before and after. The thought enabled me to begin. What emerged is not quite 2 that, but it is close. I recall the past in terms of large categories that enable me to gather together events and activities and people. Of course there is Reflections some transgression of genera. The account has a beginning, a middle, and, in a Golden I if not an end, brings matters to where the shadows have lengthened, the sun sinks slowly in the west, and I find myself praying for mercy and the grace of a happy death. Autobiography is very likely the most various of literary genres. It in- cludes the confessional account—edifying like St. Augustine’s, the oppo- site in the case of Rousseau’s, corrupt as practiced by Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, incredible in the case of Frank Harris. Chesterton’s seems to be about everyone but himself, as in a way is that of Kingsley Amis. Most of Amis’s chapters bear the names of the persons and places he chooses to pillory and excoriate. The targets of these witty put-downs could scarcely enjoy them, but the reader is soon in the grips of morose delectation. Out- right laughter, actually. But then Amis is pretty hard on himself as well. Collections of letters are more unbuttoned, even more so diaries, par- ticularly when they were kept without any thought of eventual publi- cation. I would mention Evelyn Waugh’s letters to Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper, but he seems to have assumed these more or less pagan ladies were preserving his letters. Why this difference? The autobiogra- phy, excepting Augustine’s, perhaps, is a device that enables the writer to give a carefully edited version of his passage through time. But even Au- gustine fails to mention the name of Adeodatus’s mother. Graham Greene apparently forgot the names of his children. The autobiographer’s beset- ting temptation is summed up in Nietzsche’s question, “Why am I so won- derful?” If life is a book in which one sets out to write one story and ends by writing another, an autobiography tends to be an account which, if not hagiographical, seldom puts the writer in the dock. Even recounting unflattering episodes can seem a preemptive strike. I began this task reluctantly but soon was taking culpable pleasure in the exercise. Aristotle distinguished between memory and reminiscence, and I began to see what he meant. A hitherto forgotten past—people, places, events—suddenly comes vividly to mind, emerging from who knows what recesses of the self. The greatest problem is to find a prin- ciple of exclusion. So much of what comes flooding back can scarcely in- terest anyone but myself. It is the thought that much of the contents of McInerny-01 1/11/06 3:02 PM Page 3 memory will be interred with one’s bones that spurs one on. If nothing else, this record may be of interest to my children and grandchildren. Because the real story of one’s life is known only to God, few auto- 3 biographers put themselves in His presence as they write. The shaping of events makes one acutely aware of the mystery of even the most ordinary Reflections in a human life. “Know thyself” is not only the slogan for the most difficult task Golden I of all; it is one few of us care to undertake. The autobiographer becomes increasingly aware that he is plucking items from a vast underground river, the course of which he only dimly perceives. He comes to see that his can only be a partial account, not simply because the whole is quantitatively unmanageable, but because the sense of the whole is hidden from him. I find that the effort to write one’s own life induces a deep skepticism about biographies. As 2003 turned into 2004, sunning myself on Long- boat Key, I read a lot of biographies as distraction from, perhaps as a spur to, writing these memoirs. There are wonderful bookstores in Sara- sota, and I would periodically bring back a bushel basket of remaindered and discounted volumes to my sybaritic condo. Over the space of a few weeks, I read the lives of Oscar Wilde, of John Gray, of Emily Dickin- son, of Wilkie Collins, of Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. All of them were efforts to reconstruct a person from data available in archives and private collections, from the letters and the reminiscences of others. Research projects, in short. Someone emerges from such narratives, but the reader is usually more conscious of the writer than of the subject. Sterne was in his way the Andrew Greeley of his day (although to state the obverse would be libelous), but what one gets is a version of something essentially unknown. That we cannot get at the full truth of our own lives makes biography seem a branch of fiction. Attempts at a final judgment seem wildly presumptuous and finally impossible. For all that, I love biography, particularly literary biography. And I have become perhaps too fond of writing my memoirs. Jude Dougherty and I once entered into a pact to write one another’s obituaries—lest the truth come out. It turns out that there is little danger of that. It is not simply that friends have an honorable tendency to see the best in one an- other. In reflective moments, when one gets an intimation of what one looks like to God, it is a relief to have the moment pass. Such narratives as this are all, in a way, what Newman called the history of his religious opinions, an apologia pro vita sua. One is making a case in the hope that it is, if far from the whole truth, nonetheless true. McInerny-01 1/11/06 3:02 PM Page 4 McInerny-02 1/11/06 2:58 PM Page 5 two Biosphere where i grew up, the mississippi river divides minneapolis from St. Paul; lower down in Lake City, where my great-great-grandfather Patrick and his wife Nora are buried, the river separates Minnesota from Wisconsin; on a map, it cuts the whole country in two.