Among the Intellectualoids/Virgin Martyrs

...Ah, you may say, here it comes...

...Even here, rendered weak and ordinary and even ridiculous, I dare to assert that this is special, that this thing is better and more crucial than other things for some hidden and all-explanatory reason...

...Miss Gordon would seem to admit this, by her half-hearted comment in an interview that only feminism could come close to the lost "resonance" of Rome...

...Great stuff so far, an authentic voice saying things that nobody else is saying-gritty and unfashionable things...

...That is why those who have "outgrown" the Church and would recall it with sage nostalgia rile me more than the slanderers...

...The figure of a personal Christ, the stumbling stone to this primal lament, is oddly absent amid all the sighing for "cool light refreshed by water," "a fine, dull whiteness of absolute quality," "the thin, transparent God that barely left a shadow...

...This strikes everyone in our decade as unusual, barbarous, cruel...

...Here again is a wilted flower of Catholic girlhood just aching for defloration at the hands of modernity (with, I might add, so little guilt- even the reflexive, vestigial kind- that Miss Gordon surely lost credibility points with fellow insiders...

...The Fifth Commandment, he tells her, covers slow deaths too...

...The professor of desire suggests that she sleep with the guy downstairs for variety, then dumps her...

...The nittygritty, stripped of Mass cards and sex and the rest of it, is not a choice between marching in two different directions, but between marching and running in circles...

...Hers gave her Marx to read...

...We know that we and our dilemmas are like the last numbers of a lithograph, like dinosaurs, like Ashley Wilkes...

...Felicitas loses her faith in her enlightened teens and secretly works for the peace movement (as did Isabel), forsakes a small Catholic college to go to Columbia, and promptly falls with a thud for her professor of Modern Political Theory...

...He lives in a semi-commune with two other women, a child named Mao, and three dogs named Ho, Che, and Jesus, and says things like, "God, how I wish I'd been born Third World...

...I was sinking lower and lower...

...her humiliating affair with a repulsive married Catholic and her redeeming joyous one with a kindly married Protestant...

...Over the years, we would watch alumna turn into lawyers, mothers, lesbians, addicts, architects, Mormons, occasionally nuns, and would go on loving them...

...But then things take a turn for the bizarre...

...A lifelong metaphysical shell game, after all, is a somewhat bigger swindle than Santa Claus...

...Pregnant, she drops out of school, flees an illegal abortion clinic in last-minute panic (at physical, not spiritual, peril-a feminist sign of the cross at the expense of honesty...

...Felicitas itches to tell him that a majority of the world's population would have loved to have been born him...

...She submerges herself, as the novel grows shriller and more harrowing, in the woman's squalid, pious milieu- gaining weight, getting an ugly haircut, and generally punishing her exquisite, treacherous sensibilities with a hair shirt of polyester...

...for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it.'' For, of course, there is no other army...

...People like you aren't fit for normal life...

...And just let anyone grappling with the impossibility of young Catholic womanhood dare to suggest that "that's easy for you to say...

...They are, again, like Chesterton's "candid friend" who says "I am sorry to say we are ruined"-and is not sorry at all...

...Isabel's first voyage in years into dangerous, metaphoric Manhattan for a spree at Blooming-dale's...

...She was perfectly right about me...

...Of course you have to go away mad-angry-mad or crazy-mad, either is a dignified response-or else go away comatose, which is the cheerful option we're given here...

...I cannot take seriously the spiritual life For anyone for whom 'the tacky' is not a lively concept," she once wrote in a smirky-but-serious piece on Marcel Lefebvre in Harper's...

...We were rare in our situation but not unique...

...It is novelists like Miss Gordon, not the Church, who exist to keep certain scenes intact: the discovery of poor sex-starved Isabel in bed with her first boyfriend that literally gives her father a stroke...

...Isabel tells off Margaret (and leaves her her life savings as the price of freedom), goes on a diet, and drives away with her friends, back to the world of love and loss and Bloomingdale's...

...It's like seeing a cycle of O'Neill plays done by the same rep company...

...The effect is not unlike watching an Ingmar Bergman movie shot in Archie Bunker land...

...But she kept silent...

...There's something disgusting and unhealthy...

...Now, that is bosh...

...We are asked to contemplate their spiritual ashes with something like admiration, and that is where she loses me...

...That is why, when I praised the keenness of both books, I almost said "alas...

...We have both ferociously loved-and been loved by-orthodox parents too good and intelligent to deserve rebellion...

...Even Isabel Moore would have sneered, I think, at this groveling lamb being led to the slaughter...

...The purgative she chooses is life with Margaret Casey, the loathesome housekeeper whom Isabel ousted years ago from her widowed father's turf...

...Heavens, you mean like the Holocaust...

...you will wind up in detente with the world and at odds with the void...

...which doesn't even seem to need your belief once it has made its point.'' The Church a "multilayered poem'' in the New York Review of Books...

...My life is isolated, difficult and formal...

...She did not want to ruin what was going to be the most important experience of her life with her sharp, terrible tongue...

...And that is precisely where Mary Gordon cheats, skating glibly over the heart of the matter ("God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there he is a poor contender...

...Miss Gordon-hell, Mary-and I grew up within miles of each other...

...Kindly Protestant's gorgon of a wife descends on Isabel: "I know all about girls like you . . . Catholic girls with holy pictures of virgin martyrs...

...Another Lapsed Literata has escaped the convent for the marketplace, there to hawk elegant self-portraits complete with stigmata induced by that Freudian demon, the Catholic Childhood...

...Early on in his seduction by Christianity, G. K. Chesterton confessed that "it did for one wild moment cross my mind that perhaps those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion - to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other...

...Miss Gordon, if her heroines are as close to her heart as they seem to be, would seem to have problems on both counts...

...she's all but bribed fate to ,get them immolated...

...This double-barreled technique is sustained throughout the novel- martyr without a cause...

...My decision at nineteen to care for my father in his illness...

...Forgive me for a bit of Gordonesque melodrama...

...There's something very wrong with you...

...It could happen again...

...Finally, after pondering inevitable death on Good Friday (such ponderings on Easter Sunday would be trickier to render in this ghastly light) she responds to an offer of, rescue- not from wholesome lover or her two steadfast female friends but, in a typical confounding fillip of Gordon complexity, from the lovingly drawn, boozy parish priest Father Mulcahy...

...I could kiss her for writing things like this: She [one of Felicitas' mother's friends] had no real friends among the people that she worked with, for she feared their incomprehension...

...In Final Payments, Gordon's acclaimed debut, we met Isabel Moore...

...It's most difficult to say, and even harder to do, and here I fear I must get personal...

...Well, I certainly went away mad -both from Miss Gordon's clever and well-meaning books and, more pointedly, from the critical reception accorded them...

...We would both laugh at our pomposity, we smug daughters of Queens...

...mine lent me The Culture of Narcissism after underlining the parts that referred to himself...

...And I go on," the book ends, "the daughter of my mother, the mother of my daughter, caretaker of the property, soon to be a man's wife...

...This is not Maria Monk scribbling on the walls of the Women's Room, and I'm tempted to say "alas," because such unalloyed rubbish would be far less depressing to those of us still hanging on by the fingernails...

...Mary Gordon's, however, are set up meticulously for the kill, virgin martyrs on their way to some altar of the Zeitgeist...

...The Church is not portrayed in grisly stock footage, but in all its exasperating complexity-at once unbending and forgiving, logical and crazy, regal (at least in memory) and tacky...

...To me, it was not only inevitable but natural...

...But, thanks to Miss Gordon's considerable, if uneven, talent, they are more than that...

...I could see that...

...Has Catholicism found its Woody Allen...

...But I feel (and I'm not quite alone, not yet) towards the living core of Catholic doctrine the way the Italian surgeons must have felt who, a few hours ago as I write this, struggled over the bleeding Pope: This is special...

...You couldn't wait for your father to die so you could get a man between your legs...

...The sharpness of observation-on women with each other, on the homely domestic details of the Church before and after Vatican II-is relentless...

...We feel cheated at the fadeout when the lights go up, and the author knows it, and we know they know...

...they have literally made us and thrown away the mold, sometime between 1962 and now...

...But wait-then drops the other shoe, in the Mary Gordon Martyrdom Two-Step: The Church exists and has endured for this, not only to preserve itself but to keep certain scenes intact: My father and me living by ourselves in a one-family house in Queens...

...She doesn't play fair...

...I think I like Woody better...

...At the opening salvos, I pricked up my ears: I gave up my life for him...

...He may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor...

...For who wants a nov elist who really believes in happy endings...

...It's all there-all except belief, and the cold at the center chills every cozy scene to a Gothic vignette...

...Well, you would be right-and wrong...

...Not quite...

...But another, wrote Wilfred Sheed (himself reigning wizard in this niche) in his review of Final Payments, is that "if you are an ex-believer, you don't have to go away mad...

...Both books present us with bright defector heroines from blue-collar Brenda L. Becker is contributing editor to Travel/ Holiday...

...And another virgin martyr bites the dust...

...The intellectual world, having witnessed close to two anaemic decades since our Council frolics, may have relaxed at last, and let us exchange our Father Fang persona for that of just another, if slightly weirder, ethnic backdrop...

...Felicitas, raised by her widowed mother, is described as a sort of "spiritual prodigy," the repository of hope for her mother's widowed or virginal friends (the company of the title) and for Father Cyprian, their spiritual advisor and reactionary male authority figure...

...We attended the same high school within five years of each other, although we never overlapped...

...What are the messages here ? One is the feminist dirge that men, self, God, and Happiness don't work in any combination...

...We both crossed the East River to secular Behemoth U.'s, where she-uh, Felicitas-and I both sighed over cool worldling professors, children of their decades...

...It is quite possible that we who remain are witnessing the unthinkable: We are being rendered innocuous...

...she creeps with her camera eye in a moody slow pan over Gregorian chant and guitar-wielding nuns, hideous little Mass cards and Raphael Madonnas...

...Final Payments was upbeat by comparison...

...Felicitas Maria Taylor was called after the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness," begins her second one, The Company of Women...

...They make perverts out of you, don't they...

...Miss Gordon's two books- both bestsellers-can indeed be read as familiar reverse-gear apologetics, Rent-a-Joyce sagas of guilt and liberation with a predictable dash of feminist rancor thrown in...

...Eventually, with much nudging about immaculate conception, Felicitas returns to the welcoming arms of her childhood's vestal virgins, and the unexpected forgiveness of embittered, Lefebvre-like Father Cyprian, to bear her daughter...

...Queens or Brooklyn who, after crippling bouts with the Outside World, return in uneasy reconciliation to the shell of the cathedral, where they apparently will dwell in anomie and the company of friends all the days of their lives...

...Possibly, this is because it is even sillier...

...But that is bluff...

...At thirty, Isabel has lost the only vocation she knows-the daily care of her invalid father, a stern right-wing ascetic...

...they preferred to think of her as having cleverly hidden something unspeakable, some practice that would shock even the most casual of them...

...She takes it dead seriously, through two books nearly identical in theme and outcome...

...Even the standard cadre of critics, who are as solicitous of Miss Gordon as they would be of a just-cured paralytic, have grimaced and pointed out in unison that non-celibate males are Gordon's weak spot, and that this turkey is no character at all, but a caricatured grotesque of the sixties...

...It is, perhaps, not the life I would have chosen, but it is a serious life...

...Of course we all know Isabel will now go, like the Swan Queen under Von Rothbart's evil spell, to atone for trying to enter the happy world of mortals...

...Woody's doppelgangers run afoul of their guilt and angst more or less at random, taking the silly and the somber with a wry agnostic bravado...

...We would have rolled with glee at tacky old nuns, tackier new nuns, twit ingenues, and beefy boys from Bishop Molloy High...

...and she would go on to be the novelist, I the journalist...

...I quote this unlikely tirade at length to illustrate what I mean about Gordon's heavy-handed talent for manipulation...

...Indeed, this concept of the tacky, and the impossibility of truth clothed therein, is central to Gordon's work, and possibly to that of anyone raised in Queens...

...I nursed him until he died eleven years later...

...Is a Final Payments TV movie with Jill Clay-burgh next...

...They are deft, thoughtful, often funny, and occasionally brilliant...

...the Christian framework, emptied of conviction, is not a kind ethical retreat for battered women, but a monstrous, lying fraud...

...The answer, in The Company of Women, would appear to be: home again, Kathleen...

...I do less harm than good...

...we would start having long, lucid arguments, and at the end of each would find ourselves a little further apart...

...No wonder Mary Gordon's second novel was so eagerly awaited-where could she go from there...

...Now, had Mary and I gone to the Mary Louis Academy (yes, it's called that) at the same time, I have no doubt whatever that we would have been friends, friends of the gut profundity she knows so well...

...This novel is lighter in tone and less bitter, but without the driving force of Final Payments...

...But G.K.'s doubt has not much troubled the mind of, say, Miss Francine du Plessix Gray, who proclaimed Gordon "her generation's preeminent novelist of Roman Catholic mores and manners.'' Sheed again: "In the European manner, the Church is seen not as a good place or a bad place . . . but as a multilayered poem or vision which dominates your life equally whether you believe it or not...

...Our trust in the narrator falls with her...

...She feared passing that point of intimacy after which someone would feel free to say, "I hope you don't mind my asking, but what is it with you ?'' Her virginity no one would believe...

...She names her Linda ("I asked the nurse what name had been given to girl children most often that year"), and decides to marry the owner of the local village hardware, store ("Leo's movements are slow, and I'm not sure he isn't stupid...

...We wince in painful recognition, and feel superior to our neighbors and former selves for having done so, but-we cannot live like this...

...I will wind up, I would tell her, at Quixote odds with the world but at home in the cosmos...

...only if you understand my father will you understand that I make that statement not with self-pity but with extreme pride...

...He had a stroke when I was nineteen...

...Belief is not regained, but "life" is chosen over its alternative...