Dear James
Hynes, Joseph
both loony and profound. Note that the narrator' s voice, from Treasure Hunt (1977), is different from Bebb's and from the voice in A Long Day's Dying. The passage, I think, startles us and...
...As always, Hassler is conscious of the pettiness, sometimes vicious and sometimes hilarious, of which we are all capable and which we are ever ready to spot in others...
...He did not wait for my answer...
...266 Fax (519) 767-0994 Commonweal 16 July 1993:29...
...Who knows...
...GUELPH CENTRE OF SPIRITUALITY Symposium on lgnatian Spirituality The Eighteenth Annotation in The Spiritual Exercises of St...
...It is not purged but is transformed and disciplined by ironic wit and by love, charity...
...He wants their religious faith and their love to act on and for others...
...Maybe they have seen every step I have taken ever since...
...San Francisco Theological Seminao' 9 1Jtwrence Murphy, S.J., Provincial, Irish Province, Dublin September 24-26, 1993 LOYOLA HOUSE Guelph, Ontario For further information contact: The Secretary, Loyola House, P.O...
...The point is that it was a gorgeous, clownish, inspired, and inspiring thing to do...
...Hassler manifests the rare ability to write fiction both popular and important...
...Jacob comes to realize the inadequacy of language...
...Moving both omnisciently and epistolarily from November to July, from Staggerford to Ireland to Italy, and developing a substantial subplot conceming French Lopat and Imogene Kite, he retains his sharp-eyed ability to laugh at silliness in or outside of the church, even as he transcends the topical to give us the sacredsecular picture from long range...
...Their need, their author, and God's grace cooperate to let them meet again, this time during Agatha's pilgrimage to Italy with American students...
...James, Agatha, and Hassler alike finally realize that attention to such tradition for its own sake can detract fatally from true growth in faith and love, and indeed from the reality of Original Sin, which is not to be forgotten and which is not to be resisted by reviving Latin or forcing nuns to wear habits...
...They are now seventy...
...He blessed me as I had asked him...
...Each is now in dire need of the other...
...Why did he do it...
...This is how Buechner imagines Jacob's confronting the angel and wrestling with this being: "We were both of us whispering...
...The Son of Laughter reinforces this understanding of the limitations, the fallen ghostly nature of words...
...We have come a long way from the circumlocutions of Henry James and the monkey, but we still recognize that words are "queer" and "terrible" because they can't hold the mysteries of even everyday events...
...He uses simple sentences which, in effect, mirror the Hebraic style...
...I do not want to suggest that Dear James is a tract, or that the two principals are made to seem perfect...
...Jon Hassler Dear James turns out that each has written long unmailed letters to the other, regularly, since that traumatic occasion...
...In the earlier novel Agatha and James had become soulmates through their correspondence over several years...
...It was a radically new way of looking at the mysteries of earth and heaven...
...Like James, Agatha must discard self-pity and work again for others...
...Who even cares...
...An odd passage from The Clown in the Belfry, a collection of Buechner's essays about "faith" and "fiction," is instructive...
...It is Saint Paul writing, 'We are fools for Christ's sake'" (my italics...
...Maybe they are still waiting for me to call once again their queer and terrible names...
...Was he drunk...
...In Hassler' s novels, loneliness is prominent...
...S.N.J.M., Projessor...
...He recognizes, despite his brilliant words, that language cannot capture those extraordinary, wordless, "radical" moments (or eternities) which transfigure us...
...Importantly, she tells French Lopat, a troubled Vietnam veteran and local drifter, who he is...
...The Son of Laughter is a re-creation of Jacob (or "Israel" as he is called after his love-battle with the angel) but it refuses to settle for closure...
...Fiction can hold opposites together simultaneously like love and hate, laughter and tears, despair and hope, and so of course does faith which by its very nature both sees and does not see and whose most characteristic utterance perhaps, is 'Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.'" t~ A DECEMBER-DECEMBER ROMANCE DEAR JAMES Jon Hassler Ballantine Books, $21,438 pp...
...However, his conversational style unsettles us because we don't expect Jacob to be so "down to earth...
...Jacob throws away the idols of the heathens and he says "simply": "Who knows about gods...
...Suffice it to say here only that one day he climbed up and stood on his head in the belfry...
...Judith thinks of creation as God our mother' s "laying an egg," and has no use for the doctrine of Original Sin...
...The event is described in its proper place...
...His talk is startling-more and more about dreams, visions, and signs, and his emphasis upon these reinforces the point that the "uncanny" is beyond language...
...Their agreement was that she would write first, if she thought she could do so--although it 28:16 July 1993 Commonweal"'Should we go see the pope tomorrow, Darrin?'" "'I seen enough popes," "'l seen their statues...
...Indirectly the book questions the requirement of priestly celibacy...
...The passage, I think, startles us and makes us think about the value of words and of the Word...
...He surprises us with the suggestion that Bebb may hold "secrets" from "another world...
...Joseph l-Iynes L ove is best for everybody," remarks Bishop Richard ("Call me 'Dick'") Baker...
...Indeed, he dares to enter the complex, bewildered consciousness of a revered ancestor...
...Ignatius Presenters 9 Gilles Cusson...
...Was he crazy...
...It is such human behavior, anywhere, that the book's gentle indirectness urges us to see and to ignore or take in stride, trusting in God and the long view as well as in our own works...
...I guess this one talks ten languages, " "1 thought you couldn't be a pope until you were dead and a miracle happened" "'That's a saint, you dumb shit...
...When Agatha eventually visited Ireland, however, she learned that James had concealed his priesthood from her--because he feared diminishing the openness of their letters were he to declare his identity-and no letters have been exchanged in the intervening three years...
...He is her only living relative, a grand-nephew, and her ability to overcome two generations' small-minded refusal to tell the truth about his origins marks her own growth in concern tbr others...
...What raised their spirits was just the sight of him...
...Jacob speaks as the novel progresses...
...How foreign America must be...
...I'm afraid t have used many words to convey that Buechner is a master stylist-a stylist who moves easily from late James to Hebraic simplicity...
...519) 824-1250, ext...
...Note that the commonsensical style suggests that such words as "crazy" or "drunk" are insufficient--that they are meaningless in defining all the "mysteries of earth and heaven...
...He [Isaac which means "he will laugh" in Hebrew] would pass among his people with his sad smile and liquid eyes trying to say things to them that would raise their spirits, but it didn't matter what he said to them...
...And Jon Hassler has set out, in his seventh novel, to put some moral zip, humor, and poignance into the bishop's soggily incontrovertible platitude...
...Agatha's beloved Saint Isidore's School has been closed by Bishop Baker and she has grown sour and reclusive between her June retirement from teaching and Thanksgiving, when this book opens...
...James has undergone surgery for cancer and has also been retired as pastor...
...I remember the blessing of his arms holding me and the blessing of his arms letting me go...
...James speaks of "the tyranny of tradition," by which in large part he means his and Agatha's tendency to cling to preVatican II liturgy, language, thinking...
...Assisi, however, has an even greater effect, both because it more closely resembles the small towns they know and because it prompts the analogue of Saints Francis and Clare in their intensely chaste love for each other...
...How pagan...
...For example, the natives gathered at Thanksgiving and Easter dinners at Agatha's house range from the shiftless and virtually mute French Lopat, to the drunken and lewd old Sylvester Juba, to Juba's daughter, Sister Judith, a liberated nun given to touching and hugging...
...Thus James discards his bitterness over diocesan politics and over his inability to find intellectual friendship among his parishioners, and determines to spend his remaining years in the cause of Irish peace--a difficult and dangerous mission...
...Hassler's development in scope and depth in this regard is clear in his last three novels--Grand Opening (1987), North of Hope (1990), and this new book...
...To that end, Dear James restores to us as principals Miss Agatha McGee of Staggerford, Minnesota, and Father James O'Hannon of Ballybegs, north of Dublin, two who figured centrally in Hassler's A Green Journey (1985), when they were sixty-seven...
...It ends, in fact, with uncertainty: "Who knows the full meaning of words...
...In The Son of Laughter, Buechner dares to retell the biblical story of Jacob...
...Was there a teen-ager anywhere in Ireland, James wondered, who didn't know the difference between popes and saints...
...Once again, it seems to me, Buechner is questioning the nature of interpretation...
...This kind of love grows between Agatha and James, most movingly, and Hassler is expert in persuading us that such love is possible and healing, spiritually and physically, even as he refuses to wax sentimental or soft-pedal the difficulties of any kind of attachment...
...I do not remember the words of his blessing or even if there were words...
...S.J., Founder, Centre de spiritualit{ lgnatienne, QuEbec 9 Elizabeth Liebert...
...Her reversion to type sees her driving James on his speaking engagements, helping to rehabilitate a young Irish boy by moving him to a family in Staggerford, and forgiving Imogene and other Staggerfordians, who have contrived to damage her reputation...
...Rome works its spell on three coreligionists, convincingly, despite Hassler's rather heavy-handedly arranging for the pope to single out James for special encouragement...
...Hassler wants to cure these two, however, for reasons beyond that healing itself...
...The task is to see such facts charitably if we can...
...Box 245, Guelph, Ontario N IH 6J9, Canada Tel...
...How mysterious...
...As for the tape itself, to me it was all fascinating--even the lists, the pauses, the unfinished scraps of things--because it was all Bebb, and Bebb speaking from another worM, and Bebb speaking to himself, which meant that for all I knew he might at any moment lay some secret bare, some shadowy corner of those last days of his life when he recorded it" (my italics...
...Perhaps he should have the last word: "Faith and fiction both journey forward in time and space and draw their life from the journey, are in fact the journey...
...In the introduction he writes: "It is bats that are supposed to be found in belfries, but for a few incandescent moments in t 831 a man named Lyman Woodward was to be found in one that is still higher than any building in Rupert, Vermont...
Vol. 120 • July 1993 • No. 13
