An Errant Seeker of Truth

...Innovative, vigorous, complex, Gilman' s previously published writings on literature are in a different world from this memoir...

...Though the earlier force had to be God, and "up to something," Gilman will not admit that correspondingly the later one had to be demonic...

...The force, as great as that exerted in the library, prevails and he goes away defeated...

...The early Gilman is hard to see as others must have seen him, too, although he apparently won friends easily...

...After long separation Gilman decides to go to church again, walks toward it in a chill dusk, crying softly...

...Nevertheless his story is compelling, as any must be in which a soul is laid bare, in which a hypersensitive bookworm has to make his way in a world of strange people and strange rituals...

...No, it was "only my unconscious resistance...

...Gilman, for instance, one day finds himself with his dutiful wife in thedreary parlor of a rectory, being obtusely counseled in marriage by a celibate, pietist priest...

...Living in Colorado Springs where an old Army friend gave him a temporary job and meals at his house, Gilman went through the preliminary steps of baptism in the Church with much emotion, yet said nothing of it to his friend...

...This was quite untrue, as a pathetic note from Ruth discovered in his papers demonstrated . Years later Gilman saw Ruth at a meeting, rushed up to her and identified himself...

...Questionable on a profounder level of reliability is his story of "Ruth...

...Gilman's being so certain of his version of the Merton experience that he did not bother to check it makes us suspect his other instances of the occult...

...Gilman is the sole subject of Faith, Sex, Mystery...

...The period since Barth, Bonhoef-fer and Bultmann has been a very exciting one intellectually, and Catholic theologians have been the most advanced, debating the problem of God's absence with atheists on the atheists' own grounds...

...Both Gilman and the book might have been helped by a strong infusion of Jungianism: this would also have enabled him to better incorporate as archetypes Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary...

...Then when his spiritual path was plain to him and he no longer needed her, he broke off the relationship without a word...

...While it hurt his marriage, the sex hardly deserves its billing in the title...

...For example, he found himself compulsively repeating the Hail Mary accurately without ever having heard it, and he hallucinated that agirlkilledinafallfrom a building the night before was in his apartment intent on making love to him...

...It consisted chiefly of mastur-batory fantasies of a dominant woman in black stockings and garter belt, modeled on the Marlene Dietrich of Blue A ngel...

...Except for those involved with him as laymen or priests in the Catholic Church, other people hardly exist, especially his unfortunate first wife, mother of his son...

...Picking up Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, he reads that Merton in the same mood in the same branch library had exactly his own experience with Gilson'sbook, step by step, detail by detail...

...Reread now, in the light of what has happened to Mailer, it seems even more cogent than it did then...

...Gilman draws from the shelf Etienne Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, finds it dry, technical, alien, tries four times to put it back on the shelf, is compelled to check it out at the desk, wants to throw it from the bus window, but is afraid of library penalties...

...She is far less of a presence than Ibsen's Nora or Strindberg's Miss Julie in Gilman's other books...

...A collection of his essays of the'60s, Confusion of Realms, includes a 72-page piece on the Norman Mailer of A rmies of the Night that many at the time thought the best written about Mailer so far...

...Now there was an "unseen hand," an "eerie pressure," forcing him toward the Roman Catholic shelves...

...He served as organizer and play director for the Open Theater, and was successively drama critic of Commonweal and Newsweek and literary editor of the New Republic...

...He tells this in a book bearing the "nihil obstat," by then acceptable to him...

...She devoted herself utterly to him, with a love that was pure on her part, though he tried to impurify it...

...Merton, already friendly to Catholic culture, bought the Gilson book in Scrib-ner's while taking a course at Columbia in French Medieval Literature...

...Upon his return he read her Waiting for God, published in 1951...

...He was indeed tempted to throw it out the window of a Long Island train, but only because he was offended by the "nihil ob-stat" in the front...

...Her cold silence made him " back away after mumbling something like 'What's the matter, I don't understand.'" And he adds, as of the time of writing, "I still don't...

...They met secretly in odd places, mostly park benches...

...In The Making of Modern Drama, a collection of Yale lectures of the early '70s, Gilman relates modernists like Beckett and Brecht to predecessors like Buechner and Strind-berg in ways (hat require an illuminating new look at the nature of theater itself...

...He devotes only a couple of sentences to this book, yet it "discomfited" him at that time and was obviously much more relevant to his joining the Church than the Gilson, to which he devotes many pages...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University Set against the career and the authority of the author, this is one of the most perplexing books I have ever read...

...It cannot be ignored, because it is an account of how in a miraculous event God took over Richard Gilman's life and was then gradually eased out of it—relegated as it were to the back yard where He is glimpsed occasionally through the window, not speaking or spoken to...

...Passionate about French culture, well aware of the religious revival among French novelists, a great visitor of cathedrals, Gilman and his wife met Simone Weil's brother and his family on the boat to France...

...From 1981-83 he was president of the American PEN center, and over the years has traveled widely and won all sorts of prizes and grants, plus an honorary degree...

...Such nonacknowledgment is baffling, even from one practiced in deception...

...She guided his reading, his thinking...

...Gilman failed the Church, he tells us, because he let perverse sexuality and literary ambition distract him from total service to God...

...Yet he had an on-again, off-again relationship with her for years, and her money often supported him...

...It happened in the summer of 1952 at the Cathedral Branch of the Public Library in Manhattan, chosen by Gilman on impulse...

...Psychoanalyzed for several years by Theodor Reik, he says only that he got nothing from it because Reik was too old and sleepy...

...Particularly significant is the "one exception" to his aversion to religious books...

...Gilman "was infatuated " with the young daughters, and in Paris was shown Simone's papers...

...A year later, also at the Cathedral branch, Gilman has an equally eerie encounter...

...The experience ends in 1959 as dramatically as it began...

...But his relationship with God, he assures us,isnotover.Heisnowjust61,andhe trusts the reader to accept his story even if it offers no finality, no call to order, no moral resting place, only the spectacle of a truth-seeker "pedaling in midair...

...Many people helped Gilman as he started on his way toward baptism, but none more than a woman he was mysteriously led to in a lending library, again at the direction of unseen forces...

...At home he begins reading it, reads it almost without food or sleep for two days and nights, takes 40-50 closely typed pages of notes, and in the end is completely convinced of the doctrinal truth of the Catholic religion...

...Gilman began his memoir convinced that Ruth gave him up: "I even wrote about my frantic search for her, her not being athomeornot answering the door...

...Richard Gilman is a well-known critic and professor in the Yale School of Drama...

...The story begins when an atheist Jew, unemployed following a stretch in the Army, an insatiable reader with no prospects in life except an undefined desire to write, is completely converted intellectually to Roman Catholicism after reading a single book under supernatural compulsion...

...He became dizzy with nausea, "trembling and scraping my shoes on the floor in an effort to turn around and get away— a kind of clown act or demented danced movement it might have seemed...

...Back in New York after proving himself as a writer on a struggling Catholic magazine called Jubilee, he joined Commonweal, but did not tell the editors or other Catholic friends who had helped him so loyally that he had stopped going to Mass...

...As for literary ambition, certainly a source of difficulties for the prolific Trap-pist Thomas Merton, it did not affect the faith of the English and French Catholic novelists whom Gilman much admired...

...He cannot move his feet or lift his thighs with his hands, and is troubled lest any onlookers see his antics...

...If Gilman had treated in their terms his movement toward and away from the God in which he still "grudgingly" believes, treated it on the same level with his bold, informed inquiry into modern drama, he would have given the reader something to hold to intellectually amid embarrassing intimacies...

...We do not know her name, her history, her voice, her gestures, and of her body only that it did not turn her husband on...

...Though he had taken all the books he wanted, an even stronger impulse drove him to a remote section devoted to religion, a subject he had always been averse to "with one exception...

...I looked up Merton's autobiography, published in 1948, and found that except for one detail, none of this was true...

...His brain in a whirl, Gilman writes Merton about the incredible coincidence...

...But halfway up the church steps a force seizes him...

...Remembering that some Jews observe shivah, the seven-day mourning period for the dead, if a child has become a Christian, he concealed his Christianity from his parents...

...As if the unconscious could not be demonic...

...Sublimated, it fueled a life-long love for the stalwart Saint Joan of Arc, to whom he could, as a Catholic, pray...