BEING A WRITER, BEING CATHOLIC: To what extent and in which ways should Catholic writers be propelled by the gospels?

...I'm all for novels in which Catholicism is a problem, if that is where the writer must dig...

...I hope we get writing with forms that comment on this computer-video-comic book-virtual reality age of ours...

...At my university, as in other religious and political spheres, there is currently tremendous emphasis on answering that question by announcing religious identity repeatedly, by insisting on it...

...Let me give an example...

...When O'Connor was asked, she said: "Because I'm good at it," and then, she says, she "felt a considerable disapproval in the atmosphere...

...Larry Woiwode's great American novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, is so suffused with Catholicism that I never would have guessed from its pages that its author would leave the church for Protestantism...

...They often include a fake sense of community, a gooey and repetitive blandness of voice that I find utterly depressing...

...Writing is not a higher calling...

...The formerly Catholic—and here I think first of Robert Stone, Louise Erdrich, and (I guess) Maureen Howard—show us the church anew, sometimes in terrifying ways, and while it is fascinating to speculate about their current religious beliefs, the speculation isn't nearly as fruitful as the reading itself...

...ligious question of our time is whether religion itself is legitimate...

...So, it seems, does my mother...

...Question 2: What is the duty of the Catholic novelist who chooses to write about the church...

...Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself...

...Writers choose their subjects in pretty much the same way all of us choose our dreams: subjects pursue writers, not the other way around, and often it is the least tasteful and/or the most threatening subject that insists on being explored...

...I am not making this up...

...BEING A WRITER, BEING CATHOLIC Sometimes the twain can meet Valeric Sayers In a recent talk to a group of Catholic writers, artists, and academics, book editor and journalist Paul Elie argued that the most distinctive thing about the contemporary Catholic writer is his or her "aloneness," and that any distinctively Catholic writing must come to terms with that fact...

...Let me invoke a non-Catholic, Eudora Welty, who says that the act of writerly imagination she holds highest is the act of identification with others: "What I try to do in writing of any character," Welty says, "is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself...

...Certainly we Catholics may have particular cause to concentrate on the physical, on the body—on the roller skates, perhaps— in our writing...

...If we look for idiosyncrasy from Catholic writers—and I think we should—we might get characters like Charmian Piper in Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, whose Catholicism is confused and imperfect but nonetheless unwavering and joyful, and not in the least perturbed by divine voices ringing up on the telephone...

...Even/thing that Rises Must Converge," she said...

...Some writers—Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr—hardly give themselves away...

...Besides, O'Connor was uncharacteristically soft about that grandmother the Misfit shoots: "She lacked comprehension," O'Connor said, "but...

...many argue that it's not much of a calling at all...

...My mother's identification with these old mothers was so complete that her heart went a little wild...

...while that sort of name-tagging provides succor and support, as we Catholics in the Protestant South knew, it can also lead to the worst kind of front-pew breast-beating...

...Writing is first of all a solitary pursuit...

...far more difficult to define writing that is Catholic...

...Powers and Walker Percy did—the superficiality of much activity described in our culture as religious...

...The answer he gave was multifaceted and nuanced, but finally settled on the "nature of writing as much as the nature of American Catholicism today...

...I sometimes worry that the concern over selfidentity obscures a far bigger problem...

...Several years ago I spoke to the Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs on the subject of the Catholic writer who chooses to portray the church...

...There is certainly no guarantee that we as writers will give any clearer demonstration of what it means to be Christ-like than that carpenter or nurse or funeral director will...

...Harold Bloom's whimsical notion that the great writers are also the odd writers seems tailored for contemporary Catholics, whose religion so often looks odd to the culture...

...I hope we get writing created in isolation and loneliness that, as it reaches its readers, achieves communion...

...This act of identification, it seems to me, is a writerly affirmation of the Gospels and their call to see ourselves in others...

...Elie also asked his audience to imagine what a great contemporary memoir of adult Catholicism might be like...

...The Catholic writer, like all writers, "hopes to make himself or herself understood to one other only...

...But what, exactly, qualifies as "Catholic" writing...

...that will tell you far more about my own cynicism than it will tell you about Hansen, who is indeed Catholic...

...We may also see unexpected images of the church: my Notre Dame colleague Sonia Gernes, for example, recently published a story in the Georgia Review about nuns on roller skates...

...For many modern Catholics, the stumbling block to faith is religion, and even 'the faithful' have to ask themselves constantly whether religion is a way to God or stands in the way of God—if God exists...

...I felt that this was not thought by the majority to be a high-minded answer...

...Their own crosses were tastefully empty, the better to concentrate on Christ's triumph and not on his agony...

...When they take the grandmother off to shoot her...

...Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, on the other hand, is so reverent a novel that I was certain only a nonCatholic was capable of achieving the distance necessary to describe ecstatic religious experience...

...and I am currently employed by the University of Notre Dame, where I only have to holler down the hall to find another Catholic writer or two...

...Why do we feel, each of us, that we are working alone in the dark...

...One of the problems with discovering new Catholic writers is the problem with discovering writers at all: the consolidation of the publishing industry, the mega-corporate bodies unwilling to commit to a novel they can't pigeonhole or guarantee to be an eye-popper...

...Naturally I asked which O'Connor she had been reading...

...Yet identification is useless if it is sentimental or deluded...

...In that sense, we ask of the Catholic writer precisely what we ask of the Catholic carpenter and nurse and funeral director...

...I was raised in the Deep South where Catholics banded together in large raucous groups, the better to flaunt our drinking and dancing in the Bible Belt...

...Elie asked...

...We can all recognize a piece of writCommonweal 12 May 4,2002 ing that uses Catholicism as subject, or even as background...

...Here we are in an age defined, simultaneously, as postreligious and hyper-religious...

...I don't believe that a Catholic writer needs to be writing about explicitly Catholic subjects, but I don't object to the most prickly of them either...

...Among my undergraduate students, who've grown up on some pretty bad so-called folk music, I think I see the effects and I think they're pretty scary...

...writers have to be clear-eyed and they need to achieve that distance we know in literary terms as ironic...

...And this is where we come full round to Paul Elie's insistence on the singular act of the writer, because much as we need community—Catholicism is community—the word comes out of one mouth at a time...

...Catholicism calls us to reimagine our lives by looking outward as well as inward, by identifying with the poor and the suffering and the least among us, and that is sometimes hard to remember in the comfy little enclaves of Catholicism, whether they be universities or jolly parishes...

...It's also fine with me if a novelist chooses a religious crisis or an institutional crisis or abortion or the death penalty or parish scandals or all or none of the above...

...Contrary to much of the communal rhetoric that attaches itself to the church, such an individual emphasis is not foreign to Catholicism...

...Those writers achieved a balance between the time spent looking inward and time spent looking outward...

...A single convert will do...

...In the latest Best American Short Stories, Tim Gautreaux, who lately seems to be in the volume every year, has a story about an alcoholic priest and in his commentary mentions his own Catholicism: a delight to discover another from the fold, even though I didn't much like the story...

...If we aspire to Catholic writing, then we had better let the Gospels propel us...

...I hope we get writing that does not have to trumpet its Catholicism because it will be so Catholic...

...I think I understand what he was trying to do, and perhaps it's not necessary to be Catholic to be a Catholic writer, but I wonder then how useful the label itself is...

...They offer us another vision of the way Catholicism makes its presence known in culture, and so too will emerging African and Asian writers...

...For many years a popular teacher at Notre Dame taught a course Commonweal 14 May 4,2002 on Catholic writers whose reading list included Kafka...

...we wallowed in suffering, they thought...

...But when a writer is able to simultaneously enter a subject's skin and see the subject clearly, from a distance—even when the subject is the self—then we have some hope of a connection between writer and subject and reader, a link, a shared vision which challenges the writerly solitude about which Elie spoke...

...The Catholic writer's duty is not only to subject but to form: to affect a reconciliation between subject and form, to practice the art with responsibility and delight, to give fully of the writerly self in the service of the work...

...Commonweal 16 May 4,2001...

...in fact, there is considerable evidence that writers, like the rich, may have farther to bend...

...For the writer the obligation is to make that word precise and pleasurable and challenging and true...

...Those are connections to be relished...

...But Catholics insist on the body, on the word incarnate, and that is just as likely to involve a depiction of suffering bodies as it is to involve suffering souls...

...When I think of the great spiritual memoirs, of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, I think of the communities in which they lived, the lice in the Worker houses which Day could use as the contrast to her own life story, the background of monastic life against which Merton could consider his own nonreligious upbringing...

...I was reading Flannery O'Connor and boy she really set me off...

...That subject may or may not be identifiably Catholic, but certainly a Catholic vision of the world will inform every word a writer chooses...

...is: "It's all I know how to do," but for many of us that's the sorry truth...

...Easy enough to practice identity Catholicism, to say I am Catholic, or a Catholic writer...

...We will get, I hope, a surprise, something that is as angular and gawky as Wise Blood or as starkly poetic as Mariette in Ecstasy, something as hard to believe and as inescapable as the Gospels themselves, something which makes its way to the self through an examination of other lives...

...Certainly it is hard for the writer sitting alone at a blinking computer screen, engrossed in describing this glitzy world of ours in all its hyper- and postreligious manifestations...

...One thing that a range of Catholic and once-Catholic writers from different cultures reminds us of is that it is a writer's formal impulses, and not just a writer's subject, that lead us to wonder whether Catholicism has a hand at the writer's elbow...

...And yet I think Elie's emphasis on the loneliness of the contemporary Catholic and the solitude of the Catholic writer is absolutely correct...

...I am working my way through the novels of Hilary Mantel, two of which, An Experiment in Love and Fludd, concern themselves directly with the Catholic experience...

...This article is adapted from a talk given at a colloquium on Catholicism and literature sponsored by Commonweal's "American Catholics in the Public Square" project and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts...

...Let me begin with a little autobiography...

...Perhaps the greatest danger for a Catholic writer is a projection of a personal spiritual struggle onto the subject at hand...

...We, on the other hand, are living in the Age of the Self, and it appears to be harder for a memoirist to achieve that...

...I am convinced (again, I'm guessing, and I'm a poor guesser) that Mantel is an exCatholic, but in Fludd the voice is so driven, the comedy so ecstatic, the form so enticingly close to surreal, that I see her literary connections to Spark and Waugh and I cannot but speculate...

...I find that I am a poor guesser about who belongs in what group: when, as a young woman, I first read Muriel Spark, I was astounded to discover that the possessor of that cold eye was a practicing Catholic...

...I back off a little at the word memoir: the sheer volume of these self-reflections in the last decade or so has been overwhelming...

...But most crucially, Catholic writers write knowing that, as Isaac Babel said, "No steel can pierce a heart so icily as a period in the right place...

...she had a good heart...

...but it was the only answer I could give...

...Answer: The duty of the Catholic novelist who chooses to write about the church is to write a good story...

...I spent a good chunk of my adult life in an equally social parish in Brooklyn, where even our little homeless shelter served as the site of all-night doughnuts and yacking...

...I ended that address with a little catechism for Catholic writers: Question 1: What is the duty of the Catholic novelist...

...We should certainly also keep our collective Catholic eye on Latino and Latina writers—here I think of Cristina Garcia, Junot Diaz, Ana Castillo...

...when I called the hospital, she said (with some spirit): "I'll tell you what landed me here...

...For those of us who remember the Latin Mass, the effect of that liturgy on our formal concerns is a given...

...My Protestant friends in South Carolina found it shocking that we kept Christ's body up there on the cross...

...We might get the moral tales that Eric Rohmer gave us in two forms, story and movie, each unashamed to be Catholic and unashamed to be sophisticated and worldly and witty...

...Answer: The duty of the Catholic novelist is to write a good story...

...In this age of the first person—look how shamelessly I have used it here—we can hope for a memoir of a spiritual life, but we might, if we are lucky, get other kinds of writing too, writing far stranger...

...I stand by those words, however much I recognize the wise-guy tone of my younger self...

...There are Catholics who are writers, and there are writers who concern themselves with the church, and the intersection of those two groups sometimes looks tiny, especially since there are so many former Catholics (bad Catholics, we used to say) writing about their institutional experiences...

...The very question, perhaps, is enough to make us feel alone...

...Far harder to be a Catholic writer...

...When the subject is the church itself, Catholic writers open their eyes wide and often find themselves describing—as O'Connor and J.F...

...My assessment of the problems facing the Catholic writer and my hopes for the future of fiction written by Catholics are slightly different from Elie's, although I do not fundamentally dispute his thesis...

...When trying to define Catholic writing it's also impossible not to notice how many self-identified Catholic novelists—Spark, Waugh, O'Connor, Percy, Powers—have been drawn to comedy and how often that comedy challenges the limits of realism, as if our faith itself so challenges the limits of rationalism that realism becomes inadequate as form...

...My eighty-two-year-old mother was hospitalized recently with heart fibrillations...

...She had confused Everything that Rises with A Good Man Is Hard to Find, but she said exactly what she needed to say to me, because it was I who recommended Everything that Rises, and that is yet another story in which an older woman dies at story's end...

...I think that would have pleased O'Connor, especially since my mother is one of those readers who not only won't miss the religious significance of the fictional physical crisis, she will take it upon herself...

...What makes the Catholic writer feel so fixed in isolation...

...Christ's story, after all, is the ultimate act of identification, the narrative of God's willingness to take on human skin...

...In such a time every writer is acutely aware, as Elie says, that "the reValerie Sayers, a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels...

...The standard coy interview response to the question, "Why do you write...

...The Catholic writer's independence means, too, that this writer can focus on the individual person's struggle with the act of faith," Elie said...