An interview with Mary Gordon
Cooper-Clark, Diana
think that Isabel is searching, trying to come to terms with her religious life. I would not say that her path of self- identification is a religious path, but in that she is so formed by religion...
...It' s also a profoundly anti- sexual tradition, and that's a big problem with it in a way that the French Catholics really aren't and the Italian Catholics really aren't...
...But on a profound level it's perfectly true: the only thing that matters is what you're doing in front of the page, and this has nothing to do with what anybody thinks about it...
...Therefore the Christian lives both in heaven and earth• Does the character of Isabel in any way embody this paradox...
...What you're left with is a marvelous ascetic type who stays in the church, or a person like Flannery O'Connor who's a virgin through and through, one of those wise and fierce Antigones...
...But there are people who are working to create a feminist criticism...
...Or is it a fait accompli when the story is submitted...
...Do you agree...
...she says that she has "borne the impress of his body all my life...
...she's angry at Eleanor's confession that she had sexual fantasies about her father...
...MG: Betraying her father...
...I don't know...
...I just don't want to hear about it...
...That love, that any passionate attachment is all to the good...
...MO: What's happened doesn't have to do with secularism, it has to do with communication...
...Irish Catholicism is very antisexual, and the sexy people get out of the church...
...I would not say that her path of self- identification is a religious path, but in that she is so formed by religion and really sees everything in metaphors of Catholicism so much, I think it is...
...Isabel says: "! loved him more than anyone else...
...Is there any kind of critical help on their part...
...Sacrifice as an abstraction is hateful unless you really want to...
...Human affection is much more universal than religion...
...She never expanded on it...
...something that has to build up over time for people really to be able to respond to it, and I think the whole tenor and tempo of the age is something . . . the symbol of our age would have to be something very evanes- cent because we're not interested in things that accrete over time, that build up meaning over time, and also if every- body's getting the same kind of stimuli all over the world, which people now are, I don't think there's going to be very much chance for the particular symbol...
...hav- ing a body even as Christ had a body with affections and needs and connections and yet knowing or sensing somehow that there's this angelic realm that you might almost have access to if you just give up this body...
...And Mauriac, who's very great, Flan- nery O'Connor, although she's a Catholic writer who never writes about Catholics...
...The lives and writings of saints and ascetics illustrate this impulse toward retirement and withdrawal...
...Is there a world where words like "sublime," "miracle," "mystery," "immutability," "'the im- possible," are realized and compatible with "certainty" and "authority" ? MG: Probably, but it would be such an awful world that I would never want to live there...
...So although it is very attractive because it is so all-consuming, it is in some sense damaging to her as what we would call a healthy person...
...If they make a movie I have nothing to do with it...
...Sure, it makes a lot of sense...
...What is the nature of her sin...
...But as a hunger it makes you much more interesting...
...She would never go to another woman because she was muck- ing around in the same 'unsublin~e' area...
...MI3: No...
...MG: You have to be very tough...
...DCC: Virginia Woolf said that there's such a thing as a female sentence...
...MO- Yes, it's something I think about all the time...
...Romantic and compelling as it is, there's no way for her to be an adult as long as her father is alive...
...I don't read many novels that don't have women in them, I don't read many novels about men shooting up other men and finding out what their penises are for...
...The kind of sacrifice that Isabel practiced in relation to Margaret is a kind of theft, sacrifice for its own sake without any movement of the heart...
...You could say that's what the Nazis were looking for...
...I don't care that she was being autobiog- raphical...
...Also I think that's very much a feature of Catholicism in America...
...And immigrants were worried about making money and surviving, and learning was a threat to the family...
...People do such terrible things in the search for certainty and sublimity...
...I have a lot of trouble with Muriel Spark...
...DCC: What is the role of an editor...
...But it seems to me that the impulse of charity comes from the Incar- nation, comes from going out...
...MO: What was very important to me was to make the distinction between genuine sacrifice motivated not only by love but by affection which seems to me to be of immense importance in life...
...DCC: That's outrageous...
...Do you agree...
...It is Kresge' s not Balmain's...
...Women believe that men have all the interesting data in some way...
...They are "connected by flesh...
...The Catholic church in America is an immigrant church...
...And a lot of female artists insist that female metaphors, for example, are very different...
...I think it's much more simple than that...
...DCC: And to pick up that point of using Roman Catholicism as a metaphor, do you think that the more secular world that we live in today has anaesthetized people to the symbolic world, to the un- derstanding or the sensibility of the sym- bolic, and has this changed writing styles, writing approaches...
...I'll read about what happens in the &aw- ing room in Somerset by the hands of Jane Austen for fifty years, but don't ever ask me to read Conrad again...
...Do you con-sider them Catholic writers...
...DCC: In your excellent article on Archbishop Lefebvre, l felt that the mod- ern world disappoints you...
...On the one hand, she is taught the need to lose one's life in order to save it...
...I do believe that in some sort of very primitive way...
...So that if a woman had aspirations to be anything but rooted in the flesh, she had to go to another man for it...
...Could you ex-pand on that...
...Isabel feels -that her father's stroke cleanses her sin and is "the mechanism of forgiveness...
...I hope it's changing now...
...But sacrifice in the book, espe- cially with Margaret, seems to be more than the "pride of sacrifice," the "ro- mance of devotion," the idea of martyr- dom...
...9 May 1980:273...
...IK:C: Carl Jung believed that religion binds humanity together...
...DCC: How about somebody like Waugh or Muriel Spark...
...DCC: Who do you consider to be the best Catholic writers...
...But unless 9 May 1980:271 always to be in love is no advantage in a world in which most people are neither...
...What part does this play in the motion of lsaber s life...
...DCC: Well you have met with tre-mendous success, and Graham Greene said something marvelous: "For the serious writer as for the priest, there is no such thing as success...
...The relationship between Isabel and her father is emotionally incestuous...
...I think one must hunger for that and yet not try to put it into practice...
...You have published in Redbook, Mademoiselle, etc...
...MO: Bernanos I think is the greatest...
...DCC: Wallace Fowlie has stated: "American literature is quite thoroughly non-Catholic...
...M6: I don't think about it...
...her sexual relationship with David is a kind of punishment because her father is not jealous...
...You spend all of your time getting rid of your flesh and the hell with everybody else's flesh...
...If they say we are going to cut out the whole middle paragraph because we have an ad for shampoo there, you just have to say 'Well, you can't do that.' They cut things up and you ,just have to be ferocious...
...DCC: What is the meaning of Isabel's sacrifice...
...DCC: You would prefer it done well, butMG: Sure, but if it means that I could buy a house in Cape Cod, I would like to have a house in Cape Cod...
...What is touching and moving is the loneliness of the immigrant experience, always feeling an outsider, always defining yourself as "not Protestant," and even later on as "not Jewish," knowing that you somehow never had access to the real power, and kind of looking in with your nose pressed against the window...
...Graham Greene, a won- derful writer...
...A symbol has to have a kind of thickness to it...
...That really is the root of totalitarianism...
...I do want to say that there is somethng overwhelming about their love for one another and not quite right...
...Certainly there would be points when the person is physically appalling to you at that particular time...
...I don't think it has much to do with religion, I think it has to do with the speed at which we live and our terribe disregard for history, because a symbol only takes on meaning as it attaches to the past...
...they have to...
...DCC: Well, that leads me to the next question...
...And this kind of habit of women saying 'tell me what I'm like' to a man and believing him against all sorts of evi- dence, and then being willing to radically change your life is a very big pattern in everything from professors and students, to husbands and wives, to the Manson family, and it just seems to have very strong ramifications...
...That's what I'm interested in, and because I think other things are trivial, I'm perfectly happy with that...
...The more you learned, the more likely you were to leave home...
...MG: Well they'd like to be considered Catholic writers...
...It's a terrible paradox...
...if they're starving and leprous, that's their tough luck...
...DCC" In reference to your next book, you said that you "want to be talking about women and their spiritual men- tors, and the female habit of abdicating responsibility for their inner lives to the men-priests, lovers-who in one way or another compel them...
...John Cheever says no...
...MG: Except in practical terms, if you have some money you have more time, and that's important...
...MG: I think we've always thought that anything not rooted in the flesh is the realm of men...
...That bores me to death...
...Another writer that I love is Tillie Olsen and one of the messages of Tillie Olsen that has been very instructive to me is that even 'warped' love is some- how life giving and in the end it will probably come out okay...
...There has never been in this country anything that would resem- ble a Catholic school of letters or move- ment in literature...
...Even if they did it well, it wouldn't be mine anymore, so good luck to them...
...And Waugh was a brilliant stylist, and I even like Brideshead Revisited, which about three people in the world do...
...To go to school and to study philosophy or litera- ture or art is very different because it's learning that won't get you anywhere, except out of the community...
...I think that women have a proclivity, women are trained to be more associative, and they're trained to be more interested in human relations, and so that's what they're going to tend to write about in their novels...
...If you got two people together talking about religion they'd usually disagree, but if you got people talking about the way they felt about their children they'd probably a- gree...
...Can mediums be trans- ferred...
...I've al- ways wondered how a contempla-tive can fulfill his obligation in charity because in some ways it's a profoundly egocentric life...
...They can stay and be quite interesting and quite admirable, but the sexual people have to get out...
...I love you more than Go, loves you...
...The Catholic church in America has been phenomenally anti-intellectual...
...DCC: The Christian in our society must confront certain essential paradoxes of her faith...
...I think it probably separates men, one from the other...
...But she manages to survive it because there is that love there...
...She has given up her life for her father but she makes that statement "not with self-pity but with extreme pride...
...her father says: "I love you more than I love God...
...she keeps Margaret from her father and is jealous that he has sent her money, written to her and sent her Christmas presents...
...On the other hand, the Incarnation, by which God became man, and dwelt among men in the world and in history with all of its evils, defies this with- drawal...
...I would feel terrific responsibility for anything I wrote...
...MG: It might be true, but it's nothing I think about...
...l~C: Diane Keaton took an option on Final Payments...
...On the other hand, we have Jane Eyre and Villette and I'm terribly glad we do...
...She's awfully thin to me...
...But because it's a different medium, I feel no responsibility for it...
...MG: Yes I do...
...I care about the novel...
...And they're right...
...And he would tell her what she was really like...
...MG: Well, it's overwhelmingly clear...
...I mean, I wonder about it, but I certainly don't wonder about it while I'm writing...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 9
