Frances and Bernard (13 page)

I will never be the sort of person who despises religion.

And my faith also might have been fueled by a great fear—I wanted an ancestry that would not be the meaningless ancestry of my family: blood, land, money. I wanted a lineage, and what better church in which to seek a lineage?

So all of this is seeming very much like fear, obstinacy, vanity, and illness.

To go on in it would be like going on in a marriage after one discovers unfaithfulness. I know some people would dig in to the marriage, would fight for what they believed to be the truth about the marriage, which was that it was a good thing that has been wounded, and they would use their love to stanch the flow. But I see the uselessness of that kind of love now—that love may not be love, but fear. I could not stand under God now with a pure, expectant heart. After all that’s happened, I think my heart still has something pure and hopeful in it—if it didn’t I wouldn’t be writing you. But I don’t want to think that there’s a supernatural tone whose object is to extract purity from me. I went back and read Augustine last week and his own need for God is his own need for God—I am not moved. I am moved by the tenderness with which he comes to philosophic problems of memory, of time, and metaphors of creation, but I do not feel moved to capitulate as he capitulated. I once met a former priest—turned atheist by the war—who told me that every time he read the
Confessions
he found himself lured back to a desire for belief because of Augustine’s description of a God who would not give up on us. But I am utterly immune to the chords he’s playing.

I am sorry.

Love,

Bernard

August 5, 1959

Dear Bernard—

I wrote two other versions of this letter but then I decided to proceed as if your heart is indeed as sturdy as you say it is.

If you’re so focused on your own selfishness—your own sin—you will of course lose your faith. If you concentrate on your need for faith as display, you will never find him.

This is more attention paid to self, the notion that because you were selfish, your love was never really love. I have heard you speak, Bernard. And even though I will agree with you and say that yes, occasionally I thought exactly what you have said—that God was sometimes merely a conduit for feelings and thoughts that were too large even for your poems—I never, ever thought that you were deluding yourself in a love of him. Or that you were acting. I saw you as someone who was truly trying to love God.

A word on parishioners: Parishioners are not Christians. They are parishioners. Their allegiance is not to God but to their priest, whom they think is God. It’s like
Heart of Darkness
with Kurtz. And often priests are not Christians either, because they have too much of Kurtz in them. When a friend of mine was about fourteen, she found herself followed around the neighborhood by a young man who’d recently been discharged from the army after he’d had a nervous breakdown. He was the son of a man who owned a large grocery store and who gave a lot of money to the church school. The young man’s attentions were troubling my friend, and when it got to the point where he parked his car outside her house one night with the lights off, her father went to the priest and asked him to talk to the family about it. The priest said that it would be impossible to bring this up because it might offend the man whose generosity kept the church’s mission going. This man’s generosity was necessary, but the safety of my friend was not. My friend’s father eventually moved them a few towns over to get away from this boy. I am enraged by stories like this, and I’ve heard many of them. But if I decided to let this be the last word on God’s nature I would be no better than this priest who decided to let the supermarket king define what charity was. There is the church and there is the Church.

As far as loving your neighbor, you have always done a better job of that than I have, or ever will. Please do not berate yourself for not inventing the Catholic Worker.

I wonder if you should meditate some on the idea that God is eternal and bides his time. You once wrote to me of taking Augustine’s slow, blind journey to belief as an example. I am praying for you to see once again that we will never be made perfect in this lifetime, and that’s how God wants it. Perfection is what comes after this lifetime. You know your Paul. So you should know this.

If God is eternal he stands outside your illness. He cannot be corrupted by it.

Also, I think that psychoanalysis is reinforcing whatever selfishness you think you are crippled by. If you say you are suffering from a wish to be a hero, and that this wish has corrupted your faith, I don’t see how this system will disabuse you of that wish. It seems to me that it will keep putting you front and center of your own myth. Why is the unconscious any better than free will? What does it serve us to imagine ourselves enslaved to impulses? If you never imagined that we were enslaved to sin, why imagine that we are enslaved to drives and paralyzed by frustrations that we had no hand in making? This seems like nihilism.

I’m sending you this prayer to Saint Anthony that I hope might prick your conscience. I realize how much that makes me sound like my aunts and the nuts who buy Bishop Sheen’s books. But I am willing to take up the weapons of spiritual warfare used by the Irish banshees of Kensington if it means you might come back to the fold.

Love,

Frances

August 16, 1959

Dear Frances—

The card with Saint Anthony on it is now in my wallet. I intend it to stay there for all time.

Nevertheless, I can’t help what I am thinking and feeling now. These thoughts and feelings are truths piling up like rocks against the deluge of my previous whims; they feel like something to build from. Whatever I thought I knew scatters and drifts when I ask myself: Who and what did all this performance serve? I think this is perhaps the first time in my life that I can be said to know my own mind. I wish this acquaintance could have been made in a less disastrous way, but I am glad of it nevertheless. And there is still something in me that wants to say God has orchestrated this revelation. See, Frances, I am no complacent, smugly Buddha-minded, excessively rational indifferent atheist. Don’t worry, I won’t say Freud’s the orchestrator here.

I don’t want this parting of practice to sever our friendship. Am I naive to think it won’t? I still want you to make me laugh, and I want to make you laugh, and I want to read your work and see how it is coming into being, and help you strengthen it if you want me to, and I want you to take your pen to my work and see on what points I might be silent. I want the ruthlessness of your last letter riding my work to bits. When I look at you without my faith, I still see you, Frances, shining-eyed, penetrating, sound-hearted. I know that what you love me for is not God within me but me—or am I also naive in thinking that you did love me for me? It would fill me with sorrow to think that you and I could not ever again walk by the Hudson together and talk until the sun went down. We may not ever take communion together like we did that August, or that March, but could we not make New York City our sanctuary?

Write when you feel you can.

Love,

Bernard

August 25, 1959

Dear Bernard—

I have been thinking about faith, and your faith, and what might be helpful for you to hear at this moment. You might not want to hear about what I’ve been thinking, and it might sound hollow to you, but just write me and tell me if so. I’ve told you when I haven’t wanted to hear from you, so maybe it’s time I have a dose of my own medicine.

I think often of this sentence from Kierkegaard: “It is beautiful that a person prays, and many a promise is given to the one who prays without ceasing, but it is more blessed always to give thanks.” We should love him but without expecting his love in return. This way we know we are not loving him out of fear. Love then becomes a creative act, one in which each day we are responsible for moving forward into a more perfect practice of self-forgetting.

He loves us by letting us take a very long time to make that practice perfect. Otherwise known as: grace. He lets us, and lets us in the freest free will, make mistakes and keep trying. The fact that I am still standing and have not yet been reduced to a smoking pile of ash is some proof that grace is his nature. If you need to take a long time to figure out whether you love him, he will not be impatient.

And maybe I won’t be impatient. If you ever find yourself wandering forgetfully into a prayer, please pray for that. I can be too harsh. Harsher than God, which is pride. I was a little harsh in my last letter, and you were gracious enough not to remark upon it if you thought so.

What I think is that your fear is the problem here. Your fear, and the notion that you failed the Church because your sin eclipsed your love. (I’m relieved that you don’t think the Church failed you because then you would be leaving a disgruntled customer, which would be a much harder position to dig out from. Resentment, and I should know, is a toxin that causes paralysis, if not eternal enmity.) But I want you to think that perhaps you could be a knight of faith. You are the only person I have ever met who ever seemed capable of inhabiting and living up to Kierkegaard’s term. I don’t want to flatter you, but maybe you need a little bit of flattery right now.

Maybe you should leave off the Augustine and turn again to Kier-kegaard and Dostoevsky. I know we’ve talked about these two a lot, but I want to repeat myself. The gospels tell us Christ suffered, but all we have as proof is the stained-glass triptych of Christ’s suffering in Mark—the temptation in the desert, the praying in the garden of Gethsemane, crying out to God on the cross. It is helpful to know that Christ struggled with temptation—I am glad it is on the record—but sometimes it can feel like a bit of catechism we repeat without ever truly comprehending what he actually endured. But those two writers I think come closest to giving us the best modern articulation of what it means to struggle with what we have been charged with. They are poets of the agony that is doubt and of the burden that is conscience.

Bernard, I am about to flatter you again, but I think you could come up with an articulation that is as good as theirs. I think that if you wrote of this struggle, if you wrote of yourself, Bernard Eliot, born 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, with all your very particular temptations and fears, and your craving for God’s mercy, and the death that comes on from feeling so far from it, without glorifying yourself as a hero conquering this death but as someone in chains, it would be as powerful. I’ve said this to you before but I think you might need to hear it again. What I haven’t told you before, because I thought your head was big enough without your hearing this, was that the first time I heard your poems, at the colony, I thought of John Donne. Perhaps you could look at his poems.

I think I have written enough, and maybe too much.

Love,

Frances

August 30, 1959

Frances, my favorite. If God exists, he exists only in you.

All my love,

Bernard

September 5, 1959

Dear Claire—

Thank you for having me last week. I was very glad that Old Man Sullivan let me out of his clutches long enough for me to escape to you and Bill. Please give Bill my love. I am very appreciative of how he smiles with us, and at us, and then drifts off to his work as if out of respect. And I am very appreciative of how he and I can sit and have coffee while you sleep and feel like friends too. He is also a whiz at finding delicious uses for the many sausages that populate Chicago. You are a very lucky woman, as I have said before.

I still feel a little ashamed of the way I refused to go on that hike when I saw the Doberman hanging around the entrance to the trail. Your car makes a nice place in which to nap. Bill was very nice about that too. Don’t tell anyone. I try to make like I have steel intestines. I don’t know what’s gotten into me about dogs.

Could you send me the recipe for that pound cake you made for dessert on Saturday? Although I have a feeling mine will turn out to be a brick the first few times—you’ve always had a lighter touch than I when it comes to baking. I am convinced it is because you don’t hold grudges.

Speaking of which. Thank you for listening to me talk about Bernard. But I reject your suggestion that I may be in love with him. When I try to conceive of who he is to me—and you know I never like to spend too much time brooding about what anyone other than family means to me, because that way lies disappointment and self-righteousness—I conceive of him as an older brother. I see him too clearly to be in love with him.

I maintain that the force of my feeling is familial—that whatever I feel for him is as protective and exasperated as what I feel for Ann, and perhaps even more intense, as it explodes with frequent awe of his brain. And with pain, when I think of his tired gray face, a face that was his but not his, steamrollered by drugs and exhaustion.

I cannot comprehend what he is going through. So my mother died when I was four—what real pain is that? I think my words and my presence offer no more solace to him than the solace offered a dog in petting his head. I’m just standing there, petting Bernard, ineffectually. Why should he want to hear from someone in, as it were, Rude Health? What could I have to say that would make any sense to him? And yet I wrote him, twice, imagining I did have something to say. I think I am starting to feel some guilt for the way I responded to him last spring. I rejected him, and yet he still calls me his favorite. He really must be crazy to do that.

Now I will confess I do think Bernard’s handsome. You’re Claire; I can’t lie to you. He has physical vigor that appeals. He swims with an obliviously sloppy love of water, as if the ocean is a piece of paper he’s ripping in half. I’ve seen him climb trees in the middle of a walk just to climb them, and I’ve seen him tear legs off steaming turkeys with no care for the heat because he could no longer wait to eat them. His brute force makes me laugh, and it makes me feel affection—affection—for him.