Broken Vessels
Toolan, David
BOOKS Harshness to poetry, poetry to revelation riters have their own set of moral commandments to add to the classic ten. "I can't write about any place I haven't smelled," admits Andre...
...Colle of the ge Holy Cross 22 November 1991:697...
...You will also know, freshly, the gift of the storyteller...
...The writer's challenge, as Goethe once put it, is to turn the harsh truth of one's life into poetry...
...On Charon's Warf' Dubus reflects on how the mystery of the Eucharist--"without touch, God is a monologue...he must touch and be touched"-connects with marriage, which often suffocates under words, and which perishes if it is not nourished by silent rituals of affection (such as scrambling eggs for your beloved...
...Finally, as you will have come to see in "The Judge and Other Snakes,'" a story of a young girl rescued from a beating by a town bully, it will be no surprise that Dubus stopped for those strangers on the highway...
...T," his principal therapist, says nothing for a while, proceeds to massage the foot, ankle, and calf of what he now calls his "good leg," and then looks straight at him and says: "It's in Jeremiah...
...In a deeper sense, which Andre Dubus demonstrates, there is a further task, to turn poetry into revelation...
...They write stories because they have to...
...The potter is making a pot and it cracks...
...David Toolan What happened to Dubus in an instant, at the very moment of reaching out to help strangers who scarcely spoke English, would be hard enough to bear for any man...
...Under the Lights" is pure lyricism, a tribute to Class C baseball and Billy Joe Barrett's amazing home run--that sends "a bright and vanishing sphere of human possibility soaring into the darkness beyond our vision...
...His touchstone is Pericles, Athenian aristocrat, builder of the Parthenon, and visionary of democracy whose political genius brought us such tools of statecraft as the economic embargo and treaty arbitration clauses...
...CITIZENSHIP: THE ORIGINAL VERSION PERICLES OF ATHENS AND THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY Donald Kagan Free Press, $22.50, 287 pp...
...To capitalize on the upsurge in democratic interest since Communist Eastern Europe began to crumble in 1989, Kagan says...
...The Office of the College Chaplain comprises a professional staff of three priest& two lay women and one woman religious...
...All gone...
...Francis Flaherty itizens are chatting and laughing in the Agora, the marketplace of ancient Athens...
...So he makes a new vessel...
...On his way home late that night, on a four-lane segment of 1-93 North, Dubus stopped to assist Luz Santiago and her brother Luis, whose car had collided with a motorcycle abandoned in the third lane...
...Review of applications will begin on December 1, t991...
...The Chaplain represents the office and its special place within the College on a number of college committees, at special functions, meetings and liturgies, at pastorally sensitive moments and, often, in working with other offices and departments of the College and with the Jesuit Community...
...Shortstory writers," insists Dubus, "simply do what human beings have always done...
...The College of the Holy Cross is a small (2,700 undergraduates), highly selective, Jesuit and Catholic liberal arts college located in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...Through such vignettes, Yale classicist Donald Kagan brings to life the world's first democracy...
...On the night of July 23, 1986, that imperative had drawn him from his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire border, to a seedy section of Boston to do research for a story he was writing about a prostitute...
...The cyclist, drunk, had fallen off his bike, and fearing arrest, had wandered off...
...By the time you have moved through these story-fragments of a writer's life, you 696: Commonweal will understand why Tobias Wolff, in his introduction, claims that for Dubus "the quotidian and the spiritual don't exist on different planes, but infuse each other...
...Literally not a leg to stand on...
...That's a vivid and revealing glimpse of life in the Athens of Pericles, fifth century B.C...
...What gives the event a special edge in this case has to do with the boisterous physicality of this man: ex-Marine captain, hunter, weight-lifter, runner, boozer, riotous Red Sox fan, hilarious storyteller, and sensual lover of women--someone made in the image of Hemingway...
...A modem The College Chaplain of The College of the Holy Cross The College of the Holy Cross is seeking a Director of the Chaplain's Office (the College Chaplain) beginning in August of 1992 or earlier, if available...
...Requisite qualifications: A Master's degree in Divinity or its equivalent, five years' pastoral experience, preferably in a college setting, administrative abilities and commitment to Ignatian Spirituality and Jesuit education...
...In a scene, the reader learns that common folks participated in the legislature and that their participation was required...
...BOOKS Harshness to poetry, poetry to revelation riters have their own set of moral commandments to add to the classic ten...
...In front of all the attendants at the Hale Hospital physical therapy clinic, Dubus tells us in the title essay, he broke down and wept uncontrollably, blurting out, "I'm not a man among men anymore and I'm not a man among women either...
...By June of 1988, Dubus confesses in this stunning collection of essays, "I wanted to die...
...In these tales from his life, we move with the author from his Catholic boyhood in Cajun-Creole Louisiana up through the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood and into the tangled business of making a living as a writer who refuses to produce the big novel publishers want...
...Why a biography of Pericles...
...How rare it is," John Updike has written of Dubus's work, "to encounter characters with wills, with a sense of choice...
...Everything takes "three times as long...
...You cannot move quickly enough, for instance, to prevent your infant daughter from slicing off her index finger in the sprocket of an exercise bicycle...
...Without self-pity, with unflinching honesty, we come in the last third of this wondrous book to the accident--and to what it's like to be a paraplegic...
...But they soon quicken their pace: For city officials are carrying the rope soaked in red dye forward toward the meeting place, and any tardy citizens with the telltale stain on their clothing will be fined...
...Reporting directly to the College President, the College Chaplain coordinates, encourages and supervises the ministry of the office...
...Members of the Society of Jesus are encouraged to apply...
...BROKEN VESSELS Andre Dubus David R. Godine, $19.95, 195 pp...
...in January 1987 his sixth child, Madeleine, was born, and in November of that year, his third marriage (to the writer Peggy Rambach) broke apart and the police arrived at his door to take Madeleine and her older sister, Cadence, to their mother...
...Of course, as in any crowd, there are some laggards...
...You can't make a new vessel out of a broken one...
...expands that instinct beyond families or mates or other beloveds to include all Marines...which means, sadly, that the Marine Corps, in a way limited to military action, has in general instilled more love in its members than Christian churches have in theirs...
...It's time to find the real you...
...A high percentage (90% or more) of the students identify themselves as Roman Catholic...
...Pacifists might well meditate the paradox, as Dubus puts it, that "the Marine Corps develops in a recruit at boot camp, an officer candidate at Quantico, the instinct to surrender oneself for another...
...I can't write about any place I haven't smelled," admits Andre Dubus...
...The College Chaplain works with and is available to students through liturgies, committees, group meetings, individual pastoral care and counseling and programs of study and service in Latin America, Appalachia and in the city of Worcester...
...Soon, they slowly begin to walk over to the Pnyx, a nearby hill, for a meeting of the city assembly...
...Interested persons should send a resume, three letters of reference and a one-page personal statement of one's vision of Campus Ministry to: Chair, Search Committee for the College Chapla ~n, Chaplain's Office, College of the Holy Cross, | College Stre,.~t, 8ox 16A, Worcester, MA 01610-2395...
...Broken Vessels collects twenty essays, written between 1977 and 1990, that display not only the "real" Dubus risen from the wish to die, but also his serviceable old vessel--the one that can so masterfully track the pain, complications, and precarious choices of his character...
...Mrs...
...Moments later, an oncoming car struck the three, killing the twenty-threeyear-old Luis, slightly injuring Luz, and leaving Dubus's life hanging by a thread...
...because they cannot rest...because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop the quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it...
...Like "good counselors who won't let you get by with the lack of honesty and commitment we bring to abstractions...short story writers simply do what human beings have always done...
...It is his habit, the habit of one perhaps more inclined to brawl than the next fellow, but one who learned from an unlikely quarter to turn his strength to other purposes...
...Twelve operations followed, including the amputation of his left leg...
...Along the way, we get an elegiac train trip across the country ("Railroad Sketches"), a bitterly funny encounter with anything but "sweet and lovable sheep" ("Out like a Lamb"), an account of visits by two ghosts Dubus was "unable to help" ("Two Ghosts"), and the careful dissection of the author's youthful habit of idealizing females, a tendency that slowly yields to an effort "to see women as they are...creatures like me, who...do not need me to keep them from being splashed by cars, from falling down the stairs" ("Of Robin Hood and Womanhood...
...One gets a feel, too, for the simplicity and small scale of Athenian democracy, so unlike our vast, modem, multilayered version...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
