A Canticle for Leibowitz
Garvey, John
JOHN CARYEY A CANTICLE FOR LEI BOWITZ A eulogy for Walt Miller Walt Miller shot himself in January. His suicide fol- lowed by several months the death of his wife Anne. Many readers of Commonweal...
...I did a lot of swearing last week, come to think of it...
...Among other things, including a recognition of the divinity of the Virgin, it involved married religious orders with four vows...
...The novel is centered on the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, a monastic community which has preserved as much of the old world's learning as possible...
...I went to war with very romantic ideas about war," he told me, "and I came back sick...
...and in some ways the novel was also an argument with his anti-Semitic father, an admirer of Hitler...
...We corresponded from then on...
...I swore at a Sears service manager, a local radio station, a broker, and, in absentia, the archbishop of Canterbury...
...I have no idea what parts of his draft will survive if it is, but in one letter he wrote, "While working on the Canticle follow-up novel, I dreamed up something called the Northwest Heresy, which reflected a lot of my own ideas about what Christianity might, or might have, become...
...The fourth vow was this: I will follow Jesus Christ as my Lord on earth while I live, and I will refuse to enter heaven afterwards so long as any sinner at all is being tormented in hell...
...Recurring themes were writing and its difficulties, the pros and cons of computers, the evils of the modern nation-state, meditation and the differences between Buddhism and Western spirituality, and guns...
...As she did him...
...All fictional characters are the author himself, in various roles, accepted or rejected, conscious or otherwise...
...Walt was working on a sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz, which may yet be completed...
...If I felt too ashamed of my own life to tell my own story, how could I tell any man's story...
...I'm as mystified as ever and hold Canticle in even higher esteem...
...A Canticle for Leibowitz was written during a painful time: he was trying to piece a shattered marriage back together (and succeeded: he and Anne were married for fifty years...
...He was not sure why he became a Catholic, Walt said, and his relationship with Catholicism was a rocky one...
...begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.' (Huang Po...
...If the movement against nuclear warfare could be said to have an an-themic novel, this might be it, but the novel was much more than a political blast...
...I felt like I was getting away with something...
...The peculiar nature of the secret is that the book cannot be reviewed...
...He was antinuclear war, but progun and in fact pro warrior...
...In his last letter to me he wrote, "Man is biologically a professional poet and weapon-smith, not necessarily in that order....I also opine that the natural law legitimates Seppuku...
...He told me at one point during our couple of days together that he missed the Eucharist, but after his encounters with post-Vatican II Catholicism he was reminded more of the Protestantism of his childhood than of anything that had attracted him to Catholicism, and there was nothing much to hold him...
...On August 8 of last year he sent a note to people who had known Anne telling of her unexpected death...
...God rest him...
...They agreed, paid for a trip to Florida, where he lived, and paid for the consequent article as well...
...Many readers of Commonweal will know him as Walter M. Miller, Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fine, compassionate, and angry novel praised by C. S. Lewis, Walker Percy, and many others...
...During the first evening I spent with Walt and Anne he left the room to get a book, and Anne looked up and said to me, "Isn't he something...
...When I wrote to him, asking if he would agree to the interview, he said he would meet me, but mentioned the fact that he had drifted away from Roman Catholicism and was now "somewhere west of Zen and east of the Son...
...The novel developed a strong following and has been in print for most of the time since its first publication...
...If you want to do a good deed, kiss an enemy...
...I liked him very much...
...If Walt could be said to have a religion it was a kind of go-it-on-your-own Buddhism...
...In 1983, when the concern about nuclear warfare was a powerful and constant presence, I asked Notre Dame Magazine if I could interview Miller...
...It was my honor to have been married to her for fifty years, two months, and five days, and I can say that everyone who really knew her loved her...
...All fiction is autobiographical...
...Despite the order's best efforts, the human race moves once again toward self-destruction, and a remnant leaves earth to try again, somewhere else...
...For either the reviewer doesn't get it or, if he does, he can't tell...
...Walt was the only person I've known whose politics were vaguely lef tish who was also an ardent supporter of the National Rifle Association...
...It keeps getting bogged down in religion, because I do...
...I left the icy midwest for Florida in January to meet a writer whose book I admired, saw pelicans outside of a zoo for the first time in my life, saw real palm trees too, and spent a couple of days with someone who would continue as a correspondent and a friend from then on...
...Later in the same letter: "I swore off booze again last week (I do it thrice annually...
...Walker Percy found Miller's vision of the future more compelling than those of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, and wrote that "the book has a secret...
...Walt was never able to complete another novel: any attempt at writing one brought back the memory of a painful time too keenly...
...he was having a difficult time with the church...
...She hasn't gone anywhere...
...I'm sixty now, and surely shouldn't give a damn...
...She 'is that which you see before you...
...By her own request," he wrote, "there will be no funeral, no service, no one is invited, and she will be cremated, probably tomorrow...
...Neither condolences nor floral offerings (or any other kind) will be accepted...
...It wasn't the first mention of suicide in his letters...
...Walt was a veteran of World War II, and participated in the shelling of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Casino...
...Waifs letters were wonderful and often very funny...
...Knowing that he admired Miller's book I sent Walker Percy a copy of the interview, and he wrote back: "I am both fascinated and dismayed by the Miller interview...
...First published in 1959, it told of a post-nuclear-holocaust world in which humanity goes through three stages, roughly equivalent to the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and our own time...
...Shortly after the interview I received a letter: "John, I think my case of stifled creativity came from a sudden loss of the power to tell my own story, a disability which began afflicting me during and just after the Leibowitz years...
...I vow to work unceasingly for the salvation of every child of Adam throughout eternity, though God himself confine me to hell for doing so.'...That's been one trouble with the novel...
...He was a complicated, difficult, and compassionate man...
...For years I've speculated about this man, wondering where Canticle came from....Still a mystery: it's as if everything came together by some felicitous chance, then fell apart into normal negative entropy...
Vol. 123 • April 1996 • No. 7
