A Hole in the World/Someday
Garvey, Michael O.
if a life lived in such self-imposed con- straints, where "thoughts against thoughts in groans grind," can produce the great poems of the age. The corpus is small and must make up in intensity what...
...Still, the selected bibliography points the direction to literary studies which make the case for Hopkins's greatness, and a rereading of the poems cannot but renew a sense of their power and originality...
...In time, under her vicious regimen, we might have come to occupy no space at all...
...I don't believe she began with a calculated program of coer- cion," Rhodes writes, "any more than the Nazis began with a calculated program beyond expulsion for the European Jews," but "since we were children, and had few rights in the first place, since our father was too cowardly to defend us from bru- talization, everything became possible for her as well...
...The lower case letter of his first person pronoun seems tragically appropri- ate...
...L7 the stick that weighted the linen bathroom window shade from its slot, sat on the toilet, put her mouth around the muzzle of a 12- gauge shotgun and used the stick to push the trigger...
...Nearly fifty, he met a woman "who needed me as much as I needed her," realized that he must choose between her and his rage, and chose...
...Anyone famil- iar with Irish wakes will have difficulty recognizing themselves or their relatives in this tableau, but Malcolm does his read- ers an admirable service with his unflinch- ing descriptions of the approach of death, his mother's ordeal, his own dismay, and the lingering sadness and bewilderment which still afflict him...
...She "funneled us into smaller and smaller spaces of physical and mental con- finement--less food, less room, less nur- ture, less hope...
...Their lives were saved one day when Stanley, "a thirteen-year-old boy taking responsibility for a frightened younger brother and two criminally irresponsible adults" sought sanctuary in a Kansas City police station...
...Rhodes believes that each of his books repeats a story about "one or several men of character who confront violence, resist it or endure it and discover beyond its inhu- manity a narrow margin of hope...
...It might be best to close by letting Hopkins speak for himself by quoting a poem Martin curiously doesn't mention but which also comes from the Dublin years...
...Someday when I'm gone--,' she says...
...My primary obligation is compassion--not to snoop around nor to opine, but simply to share your pain...
...An only child of kindly parents, he was loved, supported, and encouraged from his mother's womb to his wordpro- cessor at the New York Times, where he has written, among other things, startling stories about the manner in which Americans negotiate death...
...It's difficult to imagine either of these writers agreeing with Anna Quindlen's baleful defense of suicide in a recent column: "And if that day comes, whose business is it, really, but my own and that of those I love...
...He refused to go home and insisted on Richard's rescue...
...As autobiographers, Andrew Malcolm and Richard Rhodes have in common a principled refusal to invoke such authority, offering their private pain to public scrutiny on a hunch that it might be of more than personal significance...
...Rhodes's childhood was the sort of enormity which Ivan Karamazov might well have included in his argument for clinging to unappeased anger rather than embracing the kingdom that Jesus pro- claims...
...We cherish those children...
...J. Frank Devine, S J, Director of Admissions Weston School of Theology 3 Phillips Place, Department C2, Cambridge, MA 02138-3495 Telephone: (617) 492-1960, Fax: (617) 492-5833 Weston School of Theology A National Jesuit Theological Center in Cambridge, MA 586: Commonweal...
...Following his mother's death Richard's oldest brother, Mack, was sent to live with relatives in Washington State...
...11 October 1991:585 A HOLE IN THE WORLD Richard Rhodes Simon and Schuster, $19.95, 271 pp...
...The love of the two brothers, Stanley's devotion and bravery, and Richard's recov- ery and merciful retrospective are all lumi- nous in a narrative which might almost serve to illustrate St...
...Rhodes was barely a year old at the time...
...Rhodes sits today on the Institute's board of trustees...
...People, love, and people's business, she implies, are isolable entities, like Legos, which it is appropriate to select, stick together, and pull apart whimsically...
...But her voice is drowned out by her offspring and their spouses...
...I was in my crib...
...them driven by rage...
...Richard, Stanley, and their father boarded for five tolerable years with a pleasant family but "thereafter...lodged to other people's prof- it, precariously, wherever Dad could find to go to ground...
...The Arthur Rhodes his son presents is physically powerful, emotionally remote, and morally weak...
...His eloquent memoir seems less splendid autobiography than an occasion of grace...
...But it is odd to come away from a biography feeling the need to substantiate the writer's basic premise...
...nurturing and healing them is the mutual work of love we've set ourselves...
...She barred them from use of the toilet at night...
...After all, every one worships, and when "someday" arrives, what can be a more important ques- tion than the name of God...
...In addition to routine physical battery, their stepmother, "as diseases do, REVIEWERS EDWARD WHEELER /'~ chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...At Weston, students share in a col- laborative learning and faith expe- rience with distinguished faculty and a student body of talented men and women--lay and religious...
...I would have heard the explosion...
...His amiable, conversational style can as easily evoke the funkiness and particularity of his secure boyhood as the desolation of his decision to remove a respirator from his seventy- five-year-old mother as she lay dying "in a windowless private hospital with the tele- vision on...
...It's feasible that a terribly oppressed and frightened little boy could learn to write fine prose...
...It requires the careful integration of theological competence with personal spiritual growth...
...Perhaps another Charles Williams (the "mystical" novelist and Hopkins's second editor) might someday DOMESTIC DESTINIES give us the spiritual vision of Hopkins's inner life, but we face in A Very Private Life not only the paradox of Hopkins the poet and the man, but the larger relation- ships between art and life and between world and spirit...
...One day Grandma, now comfortable with her own approaching mortality, speaks over Sunday dinner...
...After a few years as a nomadic single parent, he married a veteran of "four or five" previous marriages, "a mantrap, someone who bushwhacked husbands and cleaned them out...
...A Hole in the Worm certainly fits in that canon...
...Dad became her plow horse...
...That he could also learn to love, to pity, and to forgive is mystery pure and simple...
...The recurrent "someday" of Malcolm's narrative is, of course, that moment one would rather not think about, when death comes, demanding oneself or one's beloved...
...she worked him for more than fifteen years, until he died of cancer of the stomach in 1964...
...Hopkins believed that: I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond...
...Weston offers: .9 Master of Divinity Program .9 Master of Theology Program .9 Master of Theological Studies .9Licentiate in Sacred Theology .9Sabbatical Renewals .9Access to the nine schools of the Boston Theological Institute Financial Aid Information Available For more information contact: Rev...
...Rhodes was born in 1937 in Kansas City, where his father worked as a boilermaker's helper for the Missouri Pacific railroad...
...Ivan will have no part of a harmony which includes the suffering of innocents, but the suffering innocent who is the pro- tagonist of A Hole in the Worm becomes remarkably capable of forgiveness and emerges into late middle age "amazed and grateful that he never forgot how to play...
...She slipped sought to harness our physiology to her own ends...
...MICHAEL O. GARVEY, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, works in the Public Relations and Information office at the University of Notre Dame...
...The corpus is small and must make up in intensity what it lacks in size...
...Their father's new wife told Richard and Stanley that "we have a few rules around here," introducing them to a twenty-eight- month-long nightmare...
...His older brother, Stanley, then two years old, "found the oceanic body, draining its sea of blood...
...Oh Grams,' they say amid nervous laughter, 'you're going to outlive us all.' And the children, peering out from behind their mashed potatoes, get the message that death is right up there with sex on the list of family unmentionables...
...We understood early in our relationship that we each protected within ourselves a wounded child...
...Paul's bizarre insis- tence in a letter to persecuted Roman friends that hope in the teeth of suffering "is no mockery...
...A juvenile court intervened, ordered that the two boys be removed from their home and sent them to the Andrew Drumm Institute, an orphan- age near Independence, Missouri...
...Your anguish, shame, grief, horror, and helplessness usually erupt from a precinct of your soul which I may enter only as an invited guest...
...Start thinks she married once more after that...
...The Drumm Institute was no Dickens novel ending, and Rhodes speaks of three subsequent decades of depression, anxiety, broken marriages, and alcoholism, all of Master the Art of Ministry Ministry is an art...
...Michael O. Garvey ersonal suffering endows the sufferer with an authority which it seems almost blasphemous to question...
...Malcolm and Rhodes are more imaginative than that...
...She alternately starved the boys and made them eat moldy bread or rotten eggs...
...Malcolm amply demonstrates and rightfully laments the fact that we have become as diffident about death as our parents were about sex, but this reticence is nothing compared with our bashfulness about worship...
...As presented in Someday, Malcolm's childhood was as tranquil as Rhodes's was horrific...
...In most families," he writes, "death is the d-word, not to be spoken...
...In a defensive letter written late in his life, he tells Richard, "You were left with me and i did the best i could...
...At the beginning of his life, "the world aquired a hole" when his twenty-nine-year- old mother committed suicide...
...SOMEDAY Andrew H. Malcolm Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 296 pp...
...I don't mean this as a pious criticism of an autobiography whose gen- erous author found it a real comfort, in the wake of his mother's death "to chisel, sand, and buff the words to the proper polish and put them in order, in case they might help others" through similar suffering, but the indifference seems worth noting...
...These days, even such perfunctory recognitions of human community are precious...
...Aside from a few early lines about a fatuous sort of Sunday school religion, Malcolm has surprisingly little to say about God in his book...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 17
