Frances and Bernard Read online

  What is your confirmation name, and why?

  The gospels or Paul?

  Or is that the wrong question entirely?

  Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? Or neither, and instead the whole of Shakespeare?

  Or is that the wrong question entirely?

  James Baldwin? (Say yes.)

  Gossip—in the hierarchy of sins, I’d put it a step or two below venial, wouldn’t you?

  Whose food did you most want to poison at the colony?

  Have you ever sent a letter you wish you hadn’t?

  Or forget all that and—tell me something I might not believe about you.

  Yours,

  Bernard

  January 10, 1958

  Dear Bernard—

  Although I have yet to turn a book in to a publisher myself, I have a feeling I would experience something very similar. I have been known, at the end of a school year, to spend a good two weeks feeling that if I did not have an exam to take or a paper to write, there was no reason for me to be alive. I get the existential shakes—I’m like one of those small metal wind-up toys that chatter in circles until they peter out, exhausted, and finally keel over. When my existential shakes peter out—gradually I comprehend that no one’s going to phone me at home asking for a twenty-page paper by next Thursday—I can go down the shore with a clear conscience.

  Whom did you want to poison at the colony?

  Something you might not believe about me? Hmmm. I’m not sure that we’ve known each other long enough to have ideas about what in our characters would prove contradictory! Hmmm. You might not believe that children like me, but they do. Or that I have not been able to stop playing Ella and Louis Again since I received it for Christmas. I feel ill-equipped to discuss just what it is I love in that record—I am the epitome of square, and I know nothing about music—but there is something about the lower register of her voice that makes me feel as if I am afloat in an ocean the color of midnight.

  I think writing to a poet may be rubbing off on me, and not for the good.

  Here’s something else. I had a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. I was not the kind of girl who had crushes on movie stars—that was my sister, who had a framed picture of Tyrone Power on her dresser. But Grant seemed like someone out of a novel rather than a creature cobbled together on a studio lot. What is it? He is refined but also given to the ridiculous, and the ridiculousness never erases his refinement. Well, I shouldn’t lie. I still have a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. He may be the cement in my relationship with my aunt Peggy. She will say aloud from behind the paper, as if she means to invite everyone in the room and not just me, “An Affair to Remember is playing up over at the Ritz,” and I will say, with feigned nonchalance from behind my book, “What time?” and then we will race out of the house like women who’ve been told he will be there in the flesh.

  Both the gospels and Paul; the gospels because they represent God’s faith in our imagination, and Paul because more often than not we are too stupid to use it.

  And now you have heard more than enough from me. Please do write soon.

  Sincerely,

  Frances

  January 17, 1958

  Dear Frances—

  Let us settle this once and for all: I am the epitome of square. In fact, the other day a group of students lovingly accused me of this when they found out I did not own jazz records. I don’t, and I’ll tell you why: it is an agent of agitation, and I’m already agitated enough. It’s not that I don’t like jazz. I wish I could. It’s just that one song is the equivalent of four dozen phone calls to a switchboard that’s already buzzing and sparking like a pinball machine. I’m ten years younger than Kerouac, and yet the response to his book makes me feel that my shirts are as starched as my father’s. Kerouac and I are Catholics, and yet I cringe at his ecstasies: there is nothing revealed by his mysticism but his own psychology. The self-taught always do make me a little impatient because they make idolatries of their heroes, or of their own psyches, that suspend them in artistic adolescence. Lorraine, the kimonoed odalisque whom you may remember from the colony, is an exemplar of this type, with her worship of Colette. I’m not jealous of Kerouac, or perplexed by him—just indifferent. To my students’ chagrin. I think they want me to launch into a philippic declaiming him as a false heir to Rome—want some kind of reactionary grandstanding intellectual contretemps played out in front of them. They also want me to give them permission to behave badly because they are writing poems. I have behaved badly, but it wasn’t because I thought my gift needed to be fed by it. The most talented students this year think that talent absolves them from discipline. Since none of this talent is large enough to make me feel I need to rescue them from this folly, I sit back and watch them bark and loaf as if they were seals on the rocks in Maine. What do I care? I just finished a book; I’m glad of the vacation. I am now writing every day, and I’d rather not have many other demands made on me.

  I’m no moviegoer, but even I can tell Cary Grant is gifted with an obscene amount of elegance—however, I would never have taken you for a fan of anything remotely related to jazz. Although now that I think about it, there is something in you, I believe, that swings. It manifests in your smile.

  Children like me too. I intuit that they take me for a bear.

  Whom I would have poisoned: that woman who was cannibalizing Ivanhoe! She reminded me a little of my mother.

  Here’s a gift for you. I remember you said that you liked Bach, that day we had lunch at the colony. I am sending you this recording of Glenn Gould, which I think you might like quite a bit. (It’s come to this, as I near the end of my third decade: I prefer my angry young men angry with Chopin.) I am particularly enamored of #25.

  Yours,

  Bernard

  January 24, 1958

  Dear Bernard—

  Thank you so very much for the record. What a lovely gift. I put it on the evening I received it and found myself laying my book aside and just listening. And I’ve been listening to it ever since. It’s like nothing else.

  Oh, I remember Lorraine.

  Regarding Kerouac, I’m allergic too. The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson. Ahem. To your point about feeling as starched as your father, I say: Why don’t I just take up knitting already? I feel compelled to stress that I always voted for Democrats.

  About being self-taught—I’d say that I was self-taught compared to you, being as I was educated by parochial-school nuns and graduated from a college that was not Harvard. But I never have made heroes of writers, so maybe that’s why you’re still writing me.

  Other than the Gould, which made me forget we were in the dead of January, I have no news! No anecdotes! I write, I work, I cook, I read in the living room while my father does a crossword puzzle and my sister washes the dishes, and then I retire to my chamber when they turn the television on. To me, the dead of January is to be as feared as the ides of March. But I would like to make a formal request. Would you tell me how you converted? It is something I have been wanting to hear.

  Again, thank you for the record.

  Yours,

  Frances

  January 31, 1958

  Dear Frances—

  I’m still writing you because I want your friendship, silly girl. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I can see where you might characterize yourself as self-taught—from what I can tell, whatever you learned, you learned in spite of your schooling, not because of it—but I’m speaking of the intellectually feral. What I have observed is that you have respect for tradition while not being weighed down by it. You know what you like and who you’ll follow, and when and why and where you’ll part ways. Most of the writers I admire possess this combination of reverence and courage. If you don’t know anything, I tell my students, you at least need to know the rules. But I forget how much trouble I was as a student. I was hellishly belligerent. I once made a young professor of German cry becaus
e she refused to accept poems I’d written (in German) as a final exam. I told her that her fanatical adherence to protocol made her a stereotype, which made her a poor ambassador for her country, which needed all the good publicity it could get.

  I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

  The dead of winter is a terrible thing. Ted and I are throwing a party this weekend to try to distract ourselves from how terrible it truly is. He has just come up to me with a tray full of shot glasses that contain various iterations of a bloody mary he is trying to perfect, and I have been telling him that they all taste like spiked canned soup. Ted says hello. He adds that you should not listen to me on matters of taste, because I have been known to subsist for days on nothing but peanuts and beer, like an alcoholic circus elephant.

  I’ll write to you of my conversion in my next letter. I am in no mood to fulminate on paper—I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.

  Yours,

  Bernard

  February 11, 1958

  Dear Bernard—

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

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

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

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

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

  Yours,

  Frances

  February 23, 1958

  Dear Frances—

  My, you do chide. But I like it.

  You asked me to tell you how I converted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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