Grant Wood, New Road, 1939
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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MEETINGS AT
THE CROSSROADS
Face to face with...
THE CROSSROADS
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A place where roads meet. A time of change.
"If thou among the
eternal
Ideas art numbered,
which the eternal
mind
Deigns not should
e'er be clothed in
fleshly form,
And in frail human
frames
Learn with what ills
our mortal life doth
swarm;
Or if some other
earth be mine of
those
Innumerable worlds
wherewith heav'n
flames,
And, brighter than
the Sun, the nearest
star
Through kinder
atmosphere above
thee glows:
From here, where
days are brief and
skies soon darken,
To this, an unknown
lover's hymn, oh
hearken"
Giacomo Leopardi
"To my lady"
eternal
Ideas art numbered,
which the eternal
mind
Deigns not should
e'er be clothed in
fleshly form,
And in frail human
frames
Learn with what ills
our mortal life doth
swarm;
Or if some other
earth be mine of
those
Innumerable worlds
wherewith heav'n
flames,
And, brighter than
the Sun, the nearest
star
Through kinder
atmosphere above
thee glows:
From here, where
days are brief and
skies soon darken,
To this, an unknown
lover's hymn, oh
hearken"
Giacomo Leopardi
"To my lady"
| BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD Discovering the world of arts: performances and presentations |
Inspired by the 20th century’s Catholic literary triumphs—by Mauriac and
Bloy in France; Greene and Waugh in England; Merton and O’Connor in
the USA—editor and critic PAUL ELIE has attempted to map out the
intricate relationship between Christian vocation and artistic endeavor. His
essays have appeared in Commonweal, the Village Voice, and the New
York Times Book Review; his second book, the dynamic literary study,
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, analyzes
the lives of four Catholic American writers: the novelists Walker Percy and
Flannery O’Connor, the journalist Dorothy Day, and the mystic Thomas
Merton. From his post as Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he
helps to midwife some of the latest contributions to English-language
literature.
By Santiago Ramos
Why did you write this book? For whom?
It’s interesting that you ask this question a few days after Pope Benedict
arranged for the Tridentine Mass to be practiced more widely again. I
grew up in a Catholic family in upstate New York in the 1970s and 1980s,
and I remember feeling that, while my family was very definitely and
admirably Catholic, the Catholicism of my experience had very little to do
with the Catholicism of the past—the Catholicism that, as I grew older, I
read about in books by writers like Newman and Chesterton. They
described the Church as firmly fixed and drenched in mystery, whereas
the Church of my experience was shaped by changes that were very plain
to see. By the time I got to college, at Fordham, I needed to figure out for
myself what the relationship was between the post- and pre-Conciliar
Church; as a literary person, I naturally sought to do so through books. I
turned to the four writers in my book looking for explanations, and found
theirs especially credible. They are the writers who in my mind gave the
most affecting account of the Church in America as it was, and at the
same time spoke powerfully to the present. Their work suggested to me
that the pre-Conciliar Church and post-Conciliar Church were one Church
after all. And that was enough to send me on my way.
Many notable Catholic writers flourished in the first half of the
twentieth century, in the United States, England, France, and
Spain. What was the source of this literary fecundity, especially in
England and the United States, two countries without a dominant
Catholic culture?
My own instinct is to run away from sociological explanations—the ones
that take Catholic writers as voices of a “thick” Catholic culture that has
since vanished, and that take it as our business to re-establish something
like a “thick” Catholic culture so that Catholic literature might flower. There’
s no question that Catholic culture was quite vigorous in France and in
England in the twenties and thirties and then in America in the postwar
years, but when you look at the careers of people like Mauriac or the
Maritains in France, Waugh and Greene in England, or the four writers I
wrote about in the United States, the idea that they were expressive of a
larger culture breaks down pretty quickly. For one thing, those writers
were energized by the fact that Catholicism was not the dominant
culture—not a culture at all, as Flannery O’Connor insisted. For another,
they were (with O’Connor as the exception) converts, who drew on their
experiences prior to their encounter with so-called Catholic culture. And,
on top of that, they instinctively shied away from what was typical of
Catholic life at the time, instead emphasizing the unique and exotic:
English country-house culture and chattering-class adultery, Trappist
monasticism, the South, semiotics, voluntary poverty in the Bowery… For
all these reasons, I prefer to see them as confident individual writers who
had a sense of themselves strong enough to trust what attracted them to
the Church and to make something of it as artists.
In writing the book, I was often amazed in the opposite direction—by how
fleeting the connections among the four writers were. Today, we think of
them as the four great Catholic American writers of the 20th century. O’
Connor and Percy met once for 15 minutes and swapped a few letters. O’
Connor and Merton never met. Day and Merton never met. Percy met
Merton once; Percy met O’Connor once. That was it. They were
sustained by the knowledge that others were out there. They didn’t need
an institution or a program to make it real.
There is a lesson for us in this. It’s a Catholic temptation to try to devise a
program for everything. Those of us who are involved with the
movements—I myself am a “friend” of Sant’Egidio—are often preoccupied
with how we can transform the culture, how we can make the culture
hospitable to artists and writers who are believing Catholics. It seems to
me that the lives and work of these writers tell us to go in the opposite
direction. Percy didn’t wait for the culture to be ready for his art, nor did
Merton, O’Connor, or Day. They did what they were capable of, taking
account of their surroundings but not surrendering to them. They framed
their art in recognition of a culture that wasn’t Catholic or necessarily
ready for their work, but they figured out how to get it to the public
anyway.
One of the principal concerns in your book is the way in which O’
Connor, Day, Percy, and Merton interpreted the relationship
between their vocation as writers and their vocation to become
saints of the Church. In researching the ways that they
approached this issue, what surprised you?
All four writers initially perceived a tension between their calling to be
writers and their calling to be believers or saints in the Church. In each
case, the tension was resolved in favor of the calling to be a writer, and
that led them, paradoxically, toward the sanctity that was theirs to seek
through their writing—toward the kind of holiness that they thought was
not possible. Dorothy Day, for example, did not become a Catholic with
any intention of starting a Catholic newspaper. She converted to
Catholicism, had some tough times, and asked herself, “Well, what can I
do to serve Christ and the Church? My gifts are those of a journalist, so I
guess I’ll use them.” Merton attempted to sacrifice his calling as a writer,
to renounce his literary gifts in favor of the “elected silence” of the
Trappist monastery. Things turned out differently. The abbot asked him
to use his gifts as a writer to serve the Church, and the more he wrote,
the more he recovered his literary calling—and the more completely, if
paradoxically, he fulfilled his monastic calling. When Flannery O’Connor
went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was struggling to figure out how
to be a Catholic writer. Upon reading Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, she
concluded that the best way to write as a Catholic was to write about
rural, Protestant Georgia, even though the subject matter wasn’t
Catholic—that is, to write from a Catholic point of view rather than simply
treating Catholic subject matter. Paradoxically, she wound up the most
intensely Catholic of modern writers and the Catholic writer most
accessible to people of little faith or no faith at all. As for Walker Percy,
his early work wasn’t conspicuously Catholic, and that worried him—but
instead of worrying, he followed his instincts as a writer, trusting that the
Catholic dimension of his work would be present if you knew how to look
for it.
On the face of it, those are four very different approaches. Is
there a common way that all four approached this issue?
I think there is. One of the distinct aspects of the Catholic faith is that we
persist in taking the notion of vocation or “calling” fairly literally. We
believe that we are “called” to do something particular with our lives on
this earth. Well, these four took very seriously their calling to be writers.
Flannery O’Connor would astonish college students by telling them that
the reason she wrote was “because I’m good at it.” Her point was clear,
and theologically rich, too: I’ve been given this gift. I must have been
given it for a reason. I have a responsibility to develop it. I have to use it
in service.” This was true of the others, too. They all figured out that the
best way to fulfill their vocations was to do what in many respects they
were “good at”—writing, that is.
In your book, you write that some of the questions that agitated
Day before her conversion where, “How might the writer take part
in the affairs of the day? How could they reconcile the solitude
and apartness of the writer’s life with concern for the general
welfare of society?” There was a distinctive political concern in
the writing of Merton and Day, and to a lesser extent in Percy and
O’Connor. Yet all four seemed to ask the same questions that Day
was asking.
In her youth, Day was animated by her desire to be in solidarity with the
poor of the world. She found that the problem with the Marxist-Communist
approach, which she explored in her teens and early twenties, was that
the poor in big cities like New York and Chicago were Catholics, not
Marxists. In becoming a Catholic, then, she felt that she was joined to the
poor, physically by being with them in worship and spiritually through the
doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which for her affirmed, more
concretely, or, as it were, existentially, that the human race is one family—
that she and the poor were all one people. All of the Catholic Workers’
activities grew out of that radical insight.
As for Thomas Merton: in the book, I try to dramatize my sense that, as a
young man, one who was, after all, an expatriate and an orphan, he
yearned for a place where he could feel at home, and felt that not until he
was at home could he go on living his life. This is the Augustinian Merton:
“My heart is restless until it rests in You,” and so on. When he entered
the Abbey of Gethsemane, he felt so profoundly that he belonged there
that, paradoxically, the place, despite its rule of silence, actually freed him
to be a poet, and later freed him to be politically engaged—freed him
because he knew who he was, a monk, and where he belonged, at a
certain monastery in Kentucky.
One gets the sense that with Percy and O’Connor there was less
of an interest in writing a social novel or following a social tract,
that they were more focused on perennial, existential concerns—
as opposed to Dorothy Day, who was mostly a political writer.
I’m not sure that’s the case. Dorothy Day wrote a dozen books and
something like fifteen hundred newspaper articles and columns. She was
a journalist in the root sense, the writer giving an account of the events of
the day. Her column came to be called, “On Pilgrimage,” but its original
title, a bad pun, “Day by Day,” was literally accurate. The root of most of
her writing is what happened that day. In contrasting her with O’Connor,
too, it’s important to keep in mind how one picked up where the other left
off. O’Connor did strong work in her mid-twenties and died at 39. Day
didn’t start the Catholic Worker until her middle thirties, then stayed the
course into her eighties. Imagine if O’Connor had lived to 83, as Day did—
she would still be with us… I don’t have words for my sense of how much
might be different in the Church in America had she lived to a ripe old
age.
As a Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, you handle a lot of
contemporary American writing. Is there a Catholic presence in
American literature today?
I find today that there are many books with a distinctively Catholic aspect,
but that there are few (or no) exemplary lives akin to those of the four
figures I wrote about. William J. Kennedy’s Ironweed, for example, is a
powerful novel, one that is Catholic to the bone, but Kennedy’s work as a
whole is not religiously preoccupied. Rob Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy
sits alongside books he wrote about Jesse James and Nebraska… Why is
this? I’m not sure.
What about the future? Is another renaissance on the horizon?
My sense is that that is too general a way to approach the question,
whether you are a Catholic literary critic (and we need one of those) or a
Catholic artist. It’s not right for us to fret about whether we are having a
“significant impact.” It’s for us to ask ourselves whether our writing is
worthy of our callings and the religious faith in which the call is heard.
The rest, as T.S. Eliot wrote, is not our business.
Bloy in France; Greene and Waugh in England; Merton and O’Connor in
the USA—editor and critic PAUL ELIE has attempted to map out the
intricate relationship between Christian vocation and artistic endeavor. His
essays have appeared in Commonweal, the Village Voice, and the New
York Times Book Review; his second book, the dynamic literary study,
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, analyzes
the lives of four Catholic American writers: the novelists Walker Percy and
Flannery O’Connor, the journalist Dorothy Day, and the mystic Thomas
Merton. From his post as Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he
helps to midwife some of the latest contributions to English-language
literature.
By Santiago Ramos
Why did you write this book? For whom?
It’s interesting that you ask this question a few days after Pope Benedict
arranged for the Tridentine Mass to be practiced more widely again. I
grew up in a Catholic family in upstate New York in the 1970s and 1980s,
and I remember feeling that, while my family was very definitely and
admirably Catholic, the Catholicism of my experience had very little to do
with the Catholicism of the past—the Catholicism that, as I grew older, I
read about in books by writers like Newman and Chesterton. They
described the Church as firmly fixed and drenched in mystery, whereas
the Church of my experience was shaped by changes that were very plain
to see. By the time I got to college, at Fordham, I needed to figure out for
myself what the relationship was between the post- and pre-Conciliar
Church; as a literary person, I naturally sought to do so through books. I
turned to the four writers in my book looking for explanations, and found
theirs especially credible. They are the writers who in my mind gave the
most affecting account of the Church in America as it was, and at the
same time spoke powerfully to the present. Their work suggested to me
that the pre-Conciliar Church and post-Conciliar Church were one Church
after all. And that was enough to send me on my way.
Many notable Catholic writers flourished in the first half of the
twentieth century, in the United States, England, France, and
Spain. What was the source of this literary fecundity, especially in
England and the United States, two countries without a dominant
Catholic culture?
My own instinct is to run away from sociological explanations—the ones
that take Catholic writers as voices of a “thick” Catholic culture that has
since vanished, and that take it as our business to re-establish something
like a “thick” Catholic culture so that Catholic literature might flower. There’
s no question that Catholic culture was quite vigorous in France and in
England in the twenties and thirties and then in America in the postwar
years, but when you look at the careers of people like Mauriac or the
Maritains in France, Waugh and Greene in England, or the four writers I
wrote about in the United States, the idea that they were expressive of a
larger culture breaks down pretty quickly. For one thing, those writers
were energized by the fact that Catholicism was not the dominant
culture—not a culture at all, as Flannery O’Connor insisted. For another,
they were (with O’Connor as the exception) converts, who drew on their
experiences prior to their encounter with so-called Catholic culture. And,
on top of that, they instinctively shied away from what was typical of
Catholic life at the time, instead emphasizing the unique and exotic:
English country-house culture and chattering-class adultery, Trappist
monasticism, the South, semiotics, voluntary poverty in the Bowery… For
all these reasons, I prefer to see them as confident individual writers who
had a sense of themselves strong enough to trust what attracted them to
the Church and to make something of it as artists.
In writing the book, I was often amazed in the opposite direction—by how
fleeting the connections among the four writers were. Today, we think of
them as the four great Catholic American writers of the 20th century. O’
Connor and Percy met once for 15 minutes and swapped a few letters. O’
Connor and Merton never met. Day and Merton never met. Percy met
Merton once; Percy met O’Connor once. That was it. They were
sustained by the knowledge that others were out there. They didn’t need
an institution or a program to make it real.
There is a lesson for us in this. It’s a Catholic temptation to try to devise a
program for everything. Those of us who are involved with the
movements—I myself am a “friend” of Sant’Egidio—are often preoccupied
with how we can transform the culture, how we can make the culture
hospitable to artists and writers who are believing Catholics. It seems to
me that the lives and work of these writers tell us to go in the opposite
direction. Percy didn’t wait for the culture to be ready for his art, nor did
Merton, O’Connor, or Day. They did what they were capable of, taking
account of their surroundings but not surrendering to them. They framed
their art in recognition of a culture that wasn’t Catholic or necessarily
ready for their work, but they figured out how to get it to the public
anyway.
One of the principal concerns in your book is the way in which O’
Connor, Day, Percy, and Merton interpreted the relationship
between their vocation as writers and their vocation to become
saints of the Church. In researching the ways that they
approached this issue, what surprised you?
All four writers initially perceived a tension between their calling to be
writers and their calling to be believers or saints in the Church. In each
case, the tension was resolved in favor of the calling to be a writer, and
that led them, paradoxically, toward the sanctity that was theirs to seek
through their writing—toward the kind of holiness that they thought was
not possible. Dorothy Day, for example, did not become a Catholic with
any intention of starting a Catholic newspaper. She converted to
Catholicism, had some tough times, and asked herself, “Well, what can I
do to serve Christ and the Church? My gifts are those of a journalist, so I
guess I’ll use them.” Merton attempted to sacrifice his calling as a writer,
to renounce his literary gifts in favor of the “elected silence” of the
Trappist monastery. Things turned out differently. The abbot asked him
to use his gifts as a writer to serve the Church, and the more he wrote,
the more he recovered his literary calling—and the more completely, if
paradoxically, he fulfilled his monastic calling. When Flannery O’Connor
went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was struggling to figure out how
to be a Catholic writer. Upon reading Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, she
concluded that the best way to write as a Catholic was to write about
rural, Protestant Georgia, even though the subject matter wasn’t
Catholic—that is, to write from a Catholic point of view rather than simply
treating Catholic subject matter. Paradoxically, she wound up the most
intensely Catholic of modern writers and the Catholic writer most
accessible to people of little faith or no faith at all. As for Walker Percy,
his early work wasn’t conspicuously Catholic, and that worried him—but
instead of worrying, he followed his instincts as a writer, trusting that the
Catholic dimension of his work would be present if you knew how to look
for it.
On the face of it, those are four very different approaches. Is
there a common way that all four approached this issue?
I think there is. One of the distinct aspects of the Catholic faith is that we
persist in taking the notion of vocation or “calling” fairly literally. We
believe that we are “called” to do something particular with our lives on
this earth. Well, these four took very seriously their calling to be writers.
Flannery O’Connor would astonish college students by telling them that
the reason she wrote was “because I’m good at it.” Her point was clear,
and theologically rich, too: I’ve been given this gift. I must have been
given it for a reason. I have a responsibility to develop it. I have to use it
in service.” This was true of the others, too. They all figured out that the
best way to fulfill their vocations was to do what in many respects they
were “good at”—writing, that is.
In your book, you write that some of the questions that agitated
Day before her conversion where, “How might the writer take part
in the affairs of the day? How could they reconcile the solitude
and apartness of the writer’s life with concern for the general
welfare of society?” There was a distinctive political concern in
the writing of Merton and Day, and to a lesser extent in Percy and
O’Connor. Yet all four seemed to ask the same questions that Day
was asking.
In her youth, Day was animated by her desire to be in solidarity with the
poor of the world. She found that the problem with the Marxist-Communist
approach, which she explored in her teens and early twenties, was that
the poor in big cities like New York and Chicago were Catholics, not
Marxists. In becoming a Catholic, then, she felt that she was joined to the
poor, physically by being with them in worship and spiritually through the
doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which for her affirmed, more
concretely, or, as it were, existentially, that the human race is one family—
that she and the poor were all one people. All of the Catholic Workers’
activities grew out of that radical insight.
As for Thomas Merton: in the book, I try to dramatize my sense that, as a
young man, one who was, after all, an expatriate and an orphan, he
yearned for a place where he could feel at home, and felt that not until he
was at home could he go on living his life. This is the Augustinian Merton:
“My heart is restless until it rests in You,” and so on. When he entered
the Abbey of Gethsemane, he felt so profoundly that he belonged there
that, paradoxically, the place, despite its rule of silence, actually freed him
to be a poet, and later freed him to be politically engaged—freed him
because he knew who he was, a monk, and where he belonged, at a
certain monastery in Kentucky.
One gets the sense that with Percy and O’Connor there was less
of an interest in writing a social novel or following a social tract,
that they were more focused on perennial, existential concerns—
as opposed to Dorothy Day, who was mostly a political writer.
I’m not sure that’s the case. Dorothy Day wrote a dozen books and
something like fifteen hundred newspaper articles and columns. She was
a journalist in the root sense, the writer giving an account of the events of
the day. Her column came to be called, “On Pilgrimage,” but its original
title, a bad pun, “Day by Day,” was literally accurate. The root of most of
her writing is what happened that day. In contrasting her with O’Connor,
too, it’s important to keep in mind how one picked up where the other left
off. O’Connor did strong work in her mid-twenties and died at 39. Day
didn’t start the Catholic Worker until her middle thirties, then stayed the
course into her eighties. Imagine if O’Connor had lived to 83, as Day did—
she would still be with us… I don’t have words for my sense of how much
might be different in the Church in America had she lived to a ripe old
age.
As a Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, you handle a lot of
contemporary American writing. Is there a Catholic presence in
American literature today?
I find today that there are many books with a distinctively Catholic aspect,
but that there are few (or no) exemplary lives akin to those of the four
figures I wrote about. William J. Kennedy’s Ironweed, for example, is a
powerful novel, one that is Catholic to the bone, but Kennedy’s work as a
whole is not religiously preoccupied. Rob Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy
sits alongside books he wrote about Jesse James and Nebraska… Why is
this? I’m not sure.
What about the future? Is another renaissance on the horizon?
My sense is that that is too general a way to approach the question,
whether you are a Catholic literary critic (and we need one of those) or a
Catholic artist. It’s not right for us to fret about whether we are having a
“significant impact.” It’s for us to ask ourselves whether our writing is
worthy of our callings and the religious faith in which the call is heard.
The rest, as T.S. Eliot wrote, is not our business.
| Paul Elie will be the featured speaker in the Crossroads conference Flannery O'Connor: The life you save may be your own (February 2008) Here is an exclusive interview to Elie on his book, Catholic literature, and the past and the future of the Church in America. (from TRACES) |
