Frances and Bernard

Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer




So, I have written you a love letter, oh, my God, what have I done!

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov





August 15, 1957

Dearest Claire—

How are you?

Here I am in Philadelphia, back from the colony. It was mildly horrific, except for the writing. I finished what I think might be a draft of the novel. If I can just figure out a way to continuously sponge off the rich, the rest of my life should go very well!

I fear, however, that I will have to become a teacher to support this habit. I don’t think the rich found me very grateful, and they probably won’t ask me back to their glen. Oh well.

And now I will tell you the mildly horrific part. You deserved a honeymoon, but the whole time I was there I kept wishing that you could have come with me so that we could have taken long walks together fellowshipping in daily indictment of our fellow guests. Here were my spiritual exercises: I prayed, and then I had conversations with you in my head about the idiotic but apparently talented. I kept silent at meals, mostly, and this silence, as I hoped, kept people from trying to engage with me. I had nothing to say to them, because they were always telling stories about the other writers they knew or the hilarious things they’d gotten up to while drinking. And me, dry as the town of Ocean Grove. Sample colonists: Two poets, boys, our age. Editors at two different literary magazines. Indistinguishable. Their names do not bear repeating. Sample dinner story: These two had been members of a secret society at Yale, with one the head and the other his deputy. The head would sit on a gold-painted throne they’d stolen from the drama department to interview potential candidates. “Sodomy or disembowelment,” he’d ask, “and every man who answered disembowelment got in.” And then this, from the cocktail party they threw for us the first night: A novelist (a lady novelist, a writer of historical romances). Your mother has probably read them. I’ve seen them eaten with peanuts on trains. Was introduced to her as a fellow novelist and that was the last she cared to know of me, as she was off on a monologue detailing her busy reading and lecture schedule; the difficulties of balancing this schedule and her writing; the infinite patience of her advertising-executive husband, who never minds using his vacation time to travel to Scotland and Ireland and France for her research; the infinite patience of her dear, dear editor, who always picks up the phone when she needs to be cajoled out of an impasse, which isn’t often. “Thank heavens I’m a visceral writer. It just comes out of me in a flood. I can’t stop it. I usually need about three weeks here for six hundred pages, which I then whittle down to a—” I wanted so badly to tell her what this self-centered harangue was making my viscera do. Sometimes there’s no more satisfactory oath to utter at these times but an exasperated Jesus Christ. I’d feel bad about taking the Lord’s name in vain but I like to think he’s much more offended by the arrogance that drives me to offer up such a bitterly desperate beseechment. Well, I guess he’s offended by my bitterness too, but—a visceral writer. Dear God. Claire, please let me never describe myself or my work with such conviction. The self-regard that fuels so many—I will never get over it. It’s like driving drunk, it seems to me. Although these people never kill anybody—they just blindside everyone until they’ve cleared a path to remunerative mediocrity.

On the few occasions I did speak at these gatherings, I was looked at as if I were a child of three who’d toddled up to their elbows, opened her mouth, and started speaking in perfect French. I enjoyed that. Silence, exile, cunning.

There was one young man who did bear scrutiny. Bernard Eliot. Harvard. Descended from Puritans, he claims. Another poet. But very good. Well, I guess I should say more than very good. Great? I know nothing about poetry, except that I either like it or don’t. And his I liked very much. I hear John Donne in the poems—John Donne prowling around in the boiler room of them, shouting, clanging on pipes with wrenches, trying to get this young man to uncram the lines and cut the poems in half. We had a nice lunch one day—he asked me to lunch, he said, because he’d noticed me reading a book by Etienne Gilson. He converted a few years ago. Here I frown: could be a sign of delusions of grandeur, when a Puritan turns to Rome. He said an astounding thing at lunch. He asked me if I had a suitor—his word—and I said no. I was pretty sure this was just to start conversation. Then, after a pause, while I was shaking some ketchup out over my french fries, he said, chin in hand, as if he were speaking to me from within some dream he was having, “I think men have a tendency to wreck beautiful things.” I wanted to laugh. I couldn’t figure out what kind of response he wanted—was he trying to determine if I was the kind of girl who had experience with that kind of wreckage and who would then be a willing audience for a confession of some of his own, or was he laying a flirtatious trap to see how much of his own wreckage I’d abide? Instead I asked him if he wanted the ketchup. “Actually, yes, thanks,” he said, and then, while shaking it out over his own fries, “Have you ever been to Italy?” He asked if he could write me while he was there. I did like him. Though I think he comes from money, and has read more at twenty-five than I will have read by the time of my death, he seemed blessedly free of pretension. Grandiose statements about romance notwithstanding.

Tell me of Paris. Send my love to Bill. When can I visit you in Chicago?

Love,

Frances





August 20, 1957

Dear Ted—

I’m packing for Italy, and sorry that I won’t get a chance to see you before I leave and you come back from Maine. Say hello to your mother and father for me. Will you finally make a conquest of that lobsterman’s daughter? I think you’re making this effort only to weave a line about it into the final ballad of Ted McCoy, just so your sons and grandsons have something to which they might aspire. Which I applaud. It’s as good as catching a mermaid.

It’s a damn shame that you didn’t get accepted to the colony. I’ve said it before and there, I said it again. They decided to give all the fiction spots to women this round. Everyone there was a thoroughgoing hack. There was a pert, kimono-wearing Katherine Mansfield type to flirt with, but she wasn’t smart enough to consider doing anything serious about. Which was all for the best. She couldn’t remember my name until the second week of our stay. She insisted on calling me Anton. “I’m sorry, you remind me of—” but she would never say who this Anton was. I wanted to know! She meant to give off an air of mystery—instead she gave off an air of distracted imbecility.

I met a girl I quite liked—but not in that way. I think you’d like her too. She looks untouched, as if she grew up on a dairy farm, but she’s dry, quick, and quick to skewer, so there’s no mistaking that she was raised in a city. Philadelphia. Her name is Frances Reardon. Was a little Mother Superiorish. She’s just escaped from the workshop at Iowa. She was the only other real writer there. Her novel is about a hard-hearted nun who finds herself receiving stigmata. It sounds juvenile, but it’s very funny. (I stole a look at some pages in her bag at lunch when she’d gone to get us some coffee.) Clearly someone educated by bovine-minded Catholics taking her revenge—but for God. A curious mix of feminine and unfeminine—wore a very conventional white dress covered in the smallest of brown flowers and laid her napkin down on her lap with something approaching fussiness, but then thumped the bottom of a ketchup bottle as if she were pile driving. At one point said that “reading the verse of Miss Emily Dickinson makes me feel like I’m being suffocated by a powder puff full of talc” but avowed that she did like Whitman. “Does that give me the soul of a tramp?” she said, smiling. Very charming, and without meaning to be. A rare thing. Also a very, very good writer. She made me laugh quite a bit. And yet she is religious. Also very rare. I think I might try to make her a friend.

I know you’re not a letter writer, but drop me a postcard or two.

Yours,

Bernard





September 20, 1957

Dear Frances—

I hope this letter finds you well and still pleasurably hard at work.

I write to you from outside Florence, Italy, where an old professor of mine has a family house that he has very kindly allowed me to come and stay in. I’m finishing my book here.

I very much enjoyed talking with you this summer, and I would like to talk to you some more. But I’m in Italy. And you’re in Philadelphia. So will you talk to me in letters?

Have you ever been to Italy? In Italy, I feel musical and indolent. All speech is arpeggio.

I wanted to ask you this question when we had lunch: Who is the Holy Spirit to you?

Sincerely,

Bernard





September 30, 1957

Dear Bernard—

I was so very pleased to receive your note. Thank you for writing me. It would be a pleasure to talk to you in letters.

I have not been to Italy, but I have been to London, where I remember seeing young Italian tourists thronging about major landmarks and chattering in a way that made me think of pigeons. I know that must be unfair, but that is my only impression of Italy, refracted as it is through the prism of stodgy old England.

Have you ever been to Philadelphia? Right now, as summer winds down, it is fuzzy with heat and humidity, and the scent of the sun baking the bricks of the houses in this neighborhood. I feel indolent, but not musical. I am waitressing while I try to find a job in New York. One that allows me to pay the rent without taxing my brain. I can be a night owl and wouldn’t mind writing until the wee hours after work.

The Holy Spirit! Bernard, you waste no time. I believe he is grace and wisdom.

I hope your work is going well.

Sincerely,

Frances





October 30, 1957

Dear Frances—

There are pigeons here too. These Italian boys hoot and coo at the young foreign women wandering through the piazzas. Both sides are intractable—the boys with their intense conviction that they can catch something this way, the girls in their perturbation, their furrowed brows. It gives me great pleasure to sit and watch this. I keep hoping that one of these days a girl will whirl around and take one up on his invitation.

I’ve never been to Philadelphia.

I don’t believe in wasting time when I’ve met someone I want to know more of.

I don’t know what the Holy Spirit is or does. I think this is because I came to Catholicism late and have felt hesitant to penetrate this mystery. Protestants shove the Holy Spirit to the side—too mystical, too much a distraction from the Father and Son. They regard the Holy Spirit with the same suspicion, I think, as they do the saints—it’s a form of idolatry to shift the focus to a third party, whether it be the Holy Spirit or Saint Francis. To appeal to the third party is pagan. Is he grace and wisdom? How do you know?

Let’s not ever talk of work in these letters. When I see you again I want to talk to you about work, but I am envisioning our correspondence as a spiritual dialogue.

Sincerely,

Bernard





November 20, 1957

Dear Bernard—

Deal. No discussion of work. I don’t like to write about the writing either. I can talk about it, if pressed, but I prefer silence. I don’t want to be responsible for any pronouncements on which I might fail to follow through.

I have to tell you—I am wary of projects that are described as spiritual. I fear—this is related to my aversion to artistic empty threats—that the more consciously spiritual a person appears to be, the less truly spiritual that person is. I know what you’re after isn’t that at all. Perhaps what I am also wary of is the notion that enough dogged inquiry will induce enlightenment. It may be a mistake to think that it can.

This is also why I fear I can’t talk about the Holy Spirit in a way that will make him visible or present to you. I believe that he is counsel, because that is how Christ described him. To me counsel means that he is grace and wisdom. But I’ve never experienced grace and wisdom hovering like a flame over my head, and if I do ever realize that I acted wisely or received foresight clearly because of the Holy Spirit, I will let you know. But I don’t ever want to feel touched or gifted spiritually. Or sense God moving about on the face of my waters. What a burden! Everything would then have to live up to being knocked off a horse by lightning, wouldn’t it? I think I prefer to live at the level of what the British call muddle. Muddle with occasional squinting at something that might be called clarity in the distance, so as not to despair.

Sincerely,

Frances





December 6, 1957

Dear Frances—

Points taken. My enthusiasm over finding someone with whom to talk these things over got the better of me.

My sin is poetizing. Can you tell?

As much as you protest, I think I have a better understanding now of the H.S.

Why do you despair?

Italy has ceased to be musical. It now feels decrepit and entombing, and I’m glad to be leaving next week. I’m not even taking pleasure in the fact that my Italian is now as musical as my German is serviceable. I don’t feel indolent anymore either; I feel crushed by effort. I feel that I’m toting slabs of marble around from second guess to second guess.

I have sinned against us—I have spoken of work. Give me a penance.

When I come back I’ll be living in Boston with Ted, a friend of mine—a college roommate whom I call my brother. I’m going to be teaching some classes at Harvard. I’ll also be the editor of the Charles Review. I am looking forward to being back in Boston. I’m not looking forward to being that close again to my parents, but I think I can keep their genteel philistinism at bay. Send me your next letter at the address on the back of this page.

In fact, send me some of that novel you’re working on. I command you.

Yours,

Bernard





December 15, 1957

Bernard—

Please enjoy this postcard depicting Philadelphia’s storied art museum and the mighty Schuylkill. Now you do not ever have to visit.

I hope that you are settling down in Boston. I hope that your marble slabs have become fleshly and alive again.

Oh, I don’t despair of anything. At least right now. I was being hyperbolic. If I did despair, I probably wouldn’t tell you of it, for your sake and mine! And God’s. If I described my despair I would be poetizing and legitimizing it. And I’m not Dostoevsky.

I won’t send you some of the novel just yet—it is still percolating. But I am flattered that you want to see it at all.

Penances are God’s purview, not mine. Instead, I will wish you a merry Christmas. Love and joy come to you, and to your wassail too.

Sincerely,

Frances





January 1, 1958

Dear Frances—

Happy new year! It is 1958. Do you care?

I have turned my book in. Now I am in that terrible period between labors, waiting for editorial orders, pacing the apartment like Hamlet waiting for his father’s ghost. Although I have begun to write what may be poems for the next one, I can’t throw myself into them quite yet. The lines are an insubordinate gang of children who have sized their father up and found him feckless. The only thing to do with this restlessness is talk and drink. Or box. I went to a gym a few times when I was at Harvard, thinking I would take it up, but I quickly abandoned that scheme. “Did you forget your bloomers?” a gentleman once said to me while we were sparring. I knocked him flat and never went back, knowing that I would have wanted to punch me, too, had I been a regular and spied my Ivied, ivory self sauntering through the door. If I didn’t have to teach in a few days, and I keep forgetting that I do, I would probably get on a bus or a plane and hope to be invigorated by foreign context. I thought I had tired of Italy, but now—in frigid, colorless Boston, clouds like lesions, having had a dispiriting dinner with my parents, museum pieces already, immobilized by their complacencies—I wish I were there again, where history hung in the air like incense after a Mass, still alive, where around every corner there lurked a spiritual or architectural delight.

Here is a delight: the prospect of getting to know you better. To that end:

Frances, where in this world have you been besides London?

Where in this world would you like to go?

Have you been reading anything you like? Anything you loathe?

What is your confirmation name, and why?

The gospels or Paul?

Or is that the wrong question entirely?

Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? Or neither, and instead the whole of Shakespeare?

Or is that the wrong question entirely?

James Baldwin? (Say yes.)

Gossip—in the hierarchy of sins, I’d put it a step or two below venial, wouldn’t you?

Whose food did you most want to poison at the colony?

Have you ever sent a letter you wish you hadn’t?

Or forget all that and—tell me something I might not believe about you.

Yours,

Bernard





January 10, 1958

Dear Bernard—

Although I have yet to turn a book in to a publisher myself, I have a feeling I would experience something very similar. I have been known, at the end of a school year, to spend a good two weeks feeling that if I did not have an exam to take or a paper to write, there was no reason for me to be alive. I get the existential shakes—I’m like one of those small metal wind-up toys that chatter in circles until they peter out, exhausted, and finally keel over. When my existential shakes peter out—gradually I comprehend that no one’s going to phone me at home asking for a twenty-page paper by next Thursday—I can go down the shore with a clear conscience.

Whom did you want to poison at the colony?

Something you might not believe about me? Hmmm. I’m not sure that we’ve known each other long enough to have ideas about what in our characters would prove contradictory! Hmmm. You might not believe that children like me, but they do. Or that I have not been able to stop playing Ella and Louis Again since I received it for Christmas. I feel ill-equipped to discuss just what it is I love in that record—I am the epitome of square, and I know nothing about music—but there is something about the lower register of her voice that makes me feel as if I am afloat in an ocean the color of midnight.

I think writing to a poet may be rubbing off on me, and not for the good.

Here’s something else. I had a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. I was not the kind of girl who had crushes on movie stars—that was my sister, who had a framed picture of Tyrone Power on her dresser. But Grant seemed like someone out of a novel rather than a creature cobbled together on a studio lot. What is it? He is refined but also given to the ridiculous, and the ridiculousness never erases his refinement. Well, I shouldn’t lie. I still have a girlhood crush on Cary Grant. He may be the cement in my relationship with my aunt Peggy. She will say aloud from behind the paper, as if she means to invite everyone in the room and not just me, “An Affair to Remember is playing up over at the Ritz,” and I will say, with feigned nonchalance from behind my book, “What time?” and then we will race out of the house like women who’ve been told he will be there in the flesh.

Both the gospels and Paul; the gospels because they represent God’s faith in our imagination, and Paul because more often than not we are too stupid to use it.

And now you have heard more than enough from me. Please do write soon.

Sincerely,

Frances





January 17, 1958

Dear Frances—

Let us settle this once and for all: I am the epitome of square. In fact, the other day a group of students lovingly accused me of this when they found out I did not own jazz records. I don’t, and I’ll tell you why: it is an agent of agitation, and I’m already agitated enough. It’s not that I don’t like jazz. I wish I could. It’s just that one song is the equivalent of four dozen phone calls to a switchboard that’s already buzzing and sparking like a pinball machine. I’m ten years younger than Kerouac, and yet the response to his book makes me feel that my shirts are as starched as my father’s. Kerouac and I are Catholics, and yet I cringe at his ecstasies: there is nothing revealed by his mysticism but his own psychology. The self-taught always do make me a little impatient because they make idolatries of their heroes, or of their own psyches, that suspend them in artistic adolescence. Lorraine, the kimonoed odalisque whom you may remember from the colony, is an exemplar of this type, with her worship of Colette. I’m not jealous of Kerouac, or perplexed by him—just indifferent. To my students’ chagrin. I think they want me to launch into a philippic declaiming him as a false heir to Rome—want some kind of reactionary grandstanding intellectual contretemps played out in front of them. They also want me to give them permission to behave badly because they are writing poems. I have behaved badly, but it wasn’t because I thought my gift needed to be fed by it. The most talented students this year think that talent absolves them from discipline. Since none of this talent is large enough to make me feel I need to rescue them from this folly, I sit back and watch them bark and loaf as if they were seals on the rocks in Maine. What do I care? I just finished a book; I’m glad of the vacation. I am now writing every day, and I’d rather not have many other demands made on me.

I’m no moviegoer, but even I can tell Cary Grant is gifted with an obscene amount of elegance—however, I would never have taken you for a fan of anything remotely related to jazz. Although now that I think about it, there is something in you, I believe, that swings. It manifests in your smile.

Children like me too. I intuit that they take me for a bear.

Whom I would have poisoned: that woman who was cannibalizing Ivanhoe! She reminded me a little of my mother.

Here’s a gift for you. I remember you said that you liked Bach, that day we had lunch at the colony. I am sending you this recording of Glenn Gould, which I think you might like quite a bit. (It’s come to this, as I near the end of my third decade: I prefer my angry young men angry with Chopin.) I am particularly enamored of #25.

Yours,

Bernard





January 24, 1958

Dear Bernard—

Thank you so very much for the record. What a lovely gift. I put it on the evening I received it and found myself laying my book aside and just listening. And I’ve been listening to it ever since. It’s like nothing else.

Oh, I remember Lorraine.

Regarding Kerouac, I’m allergic too. The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson. Ahem. To your point about feeling as starched as your father, I say: Why don’t I just take up knitting already? I feel compelled to stress that I always voted for Democrats.

About being self-taught—I’d say that I was self-taught compared to you, being as I was educated by parochial-school nuns and graduated from a college that was not Harvard. But I never have made heroes of writers, so maybe that’s why you’re still writing me.

Other than the Gould, which made me forget we were in the dead of January, I have no news! No anecdotes! I write, I work, I cook, I read in the living room while my father does a crossword puzzle and my sister washes the dishes, and then I retire to my chamber when they turn the television on. To me, the dead of January is to be as feared as the ides of March. But I would like to make a formal request. Would you tell me how you converted? It is something I have been wanting to hear.

Again, thank you for the record.

Yours,

Frances





January 31, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m still writing you because I want your friendship, silly girl. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I can see where you might characterize yourself as self-taught—from what I can tell, whatever you learned, you learned in spite of your schooling, not because of it—but I’m speaking of the intellectually feral. What I have observed is that you have respect for tradition while not being weighed down by it. You know what you like and who you’ll follow, and when and why and where you’ll part ways. Most of the writers I admire possess this combination of reverence and courage. If you don’t know anything, I tell my students, you at least need to know the rules. But I forget how much trouble I was as a student. I was hellishly belligerent. I once made a young professor of German cry because she refused to accept poems I’d written (in German) as a final exam. I told her that her fanatical adherence to protocol made her a stereotype, which made her a poor ambassador for her country, which needed all the good publicity it could get.

I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

The dead of winter is a terrible thing. Ted and I are throwing a party this weekend to try to distract ourselves from how terrible it truly is. He has just come up to me with a tray full of shot glasses that contain various iterations of a bloody mary he is trying to perfect, and I have been telling him that they all taste like spiked canned soup. Ted says hello. He adds that you should not listen to me on matters of taste, because I have been known to subsist for days on nothing but peanuts and beer, like an alcoholic circus elephant.

I’ll write to you of my conversion in my next letter. I am in no mood to fulminate on paper—I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.

Yours,

Bernard





February 11, 1958

Dear Bernard—

No apologies needed. I thought what I had written was a wink, but I can see what I might have sounded like. Even though you’re making a guess based on one long lunch, I think you may be right about me. I have taken what I needed from Miss Austen and some Russians and I have packed my bags.

Was your party a success? Did Ted realize that he needed to add mustard powder to his bloody marys?

Bernard, that poor German professor! My aunts liked to say I had the devil in me, but they would have gone right ahead and called in a priest to exorcise you. Now, remind me again—do you like women or do you loathe them? Just so I know how to proceed.

Well, I will keep this letter very short. I have to review two books for Iowa’s journal and I need to take a pile of notes on them. Here is a sneak preview of my review: If one is going to write of a crisis of faith, do not ask the reader to believe that the crisis can be solved only by (a) marriage, or (b) suicide.

Before I go—I know what you mean about letters vs. rooms. Christ would not have taught the disciples by correspondence course, I’m fairly sure.

Yours,

Frances





February 23, 1958

Dear Frances—

My, you do chide. But I like it.

You asked me to tell you how I converted.

As a child, I was taken to a Congregationalist church. We went roughly every week—and by we, I mean my mother and myself. It meant nothing, really, it was just what was done. My father, I think, thought it my mother’s job to take me. I still don’t know what he really believes about God. I don’t think he thinks religion is silly—he’s much too intellectually complacent for that—but if I had to guess, I’d say he thinks it exists so people can make a necessary, respectable fuss on holidays in order to feel part of the clan. That religion is part of the dues paid for respectability. My mother may feel the same. I’ve never asked either of them about it.

When I was eight, my mother refused to take me to church any longer because I gave a ferocious pinch to the back of the neck of an old man who’d fallen asleep in the pew in front of us. I’d seen plenty of people fall asleep but this one was close enough for me to smite. I saw it that way: smiting. (I was a real brute of a child. I bloodied a dozen noses before I entered high school.) I was glad to not have to go anymore. Instead of listening to the sermons, I’d been reading the Bible—straight through to Revelation and then again—and I knew we were sitting in the kind of church that Jesus would have spit out of his mouth. Lukewarm, neither hot, nor cold. Massachusetts clapboard moribund.

I did not like church but I wanted an absolute and I wanted its demands.

I studied classics at Harvard partially because I wanted to know about the civilizations that cradled Christianity. The other part was because I was a pompous ass. Ted likes to say that I studied classics because I wanted to know where Western civilization came from, the better to conquer it through literature.

So I was studying and speaking out against every triumph of the powerful over the powerless. I led demonstrations. Against conscription, against segregation, against McCarthy. I broke my arm while trying to climb up the side of Memorial Church at a protest against the bomb. I filled the Crimson with screeds on what I thought a so-called Christian democracy should look like. I led a hunger strike for a few days to protest the college’s hiring of a right-wing ideologue whose work was a tract against welfare. I passed out on the third day. My father threatened to stop paying the bills if, as he said, I pulled “a stunt like that again.” And I did all this thinking of Christ. I did not go to church, but I kept Christ in mind as I acted. Whatever you have done unto the least of my brethren, you have done unto me. Whoever helps one of these little ones in my name, helps me.

Maria. Maria was in a class of mine when I was a junior. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale—some great fire from within had consumed her and then expired, leaving her white and stark. Maria was Russian, from Brooklyn. She and I slept together quite a bit. I didn’t think that I loved her but I knew I liked sleeping with her. I thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to have something beautiful. But then I got the feeling I was an amusement for her. Like Babe the Blue Ox—some big strong dumb American animal who put its blind trust in what it believed, charging and snorting all over the place, rushing toward goals it would never achieve. Her grandfather had been put to death by Stalin and she thought that to be politically engaged was the height of naiveté. She once told me that she thought I might one day be great but that I had to stop thinking God was going to have anything to do with it. She thought that my belief in God made me a child, that only a spoiled child could think God existed. This was invigorating but it also drove me mad. I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more than I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did—I mean, I didn’t want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger. She tried to kick me out. I called her a whore. I woke up the next morning outside her door with blood crusted around my nostrils and over my upper lip—the remains of a bloody nose. She told me later that she’d pushed me away, and when she did my legs twisted up beneath me, which sent me crashing to the floor, which gave me the bloody nose. She told me she’d thought about calling the police but then decided that that was an overreaction. She wanted nothing more to do with me. I used to get in fights all the time in school—anyone without an older brother, I came to his defense, and this was partly a function of my being an only child and missing the chance to be heroic for a younger sibling—but this was different. I had been violent toward a woman. This made me sick. I started to feel nauseated when I thought about how bellicose, how thunderous, I’d been all my childhood—and I saw my time at Harvard as childhood. I thought I had been growing up by unleashing my strength and mind onto the world, by imposing myself and not being afraid of it, but this suddenly began to seem like a lifetime of tantrums. I’d gotten used to having too much, at having whatever I willed become real, which had made my will promiscuous. Not strong at all.

My mother had a story she would occasionally tell me whenever I refused to go to some family engagement or to dress up for these engagements, or when I rejected their offers of money or their ideas about law school. “When you were about four years old,” she would say, “someone gave you a scooter for a present. And one afternoon, when you were out with your father, you kept trying to see how far you could go.” At one point my father told me to come back, but I just kept rolling on. “No one can stop me,” I am supposed to have said, “only God.” I thought about that story many times after what happened with Maria. I started to feel that I needed to stop thinking only God could stop me. Perhaps I should try to submit myself to God, rather than try to be him.

Then, at the start of my senior year, a theologian came to dinner at a professor’s house and we talked. He spoke of Maritain, who said that art was the practical virtue of the intellect (you know this), and after reading Maritain I decided that art should be my action, and that I should become a Catholic. It was as simple as that. It happened in one night.

And I wondered, I still wonder—I want to think deeply and not have it carry me off to some place where I’m useless. I mean, I carry myself off enough when I write, and I fear that, although it may make me great, it may make me useless as well. My politics might become an unintelligible mess. I saw in that theologian, in his Catholicism, a way to make a sustained and coherent statement about what I believed. And that seemed a sign—when you see what is possible, and you become less afraid. I became a Catholic that Easter.

So I was a senior, and I could have gone on to get a PhD after graduating, but I decided to become a Trappist monk instead. My parents were livid. They still imagined that I would suddenly straighten up at the end of college and decide to go to law school, which demonstrates how little they know me, or want to know me. I went to a monastery in Virginia for about two months that summer. At the monastery, the monks thought—they knew—I meant well. But there was the sense that I would not last. Near the end of the summer, the abbot said he thought he saw me, as he put it, sweating at the communion rails. He told me to go back out into the world. He did not want me using the religious life as atonement or refuge. He thought that if I persisted I would eventually be miserable. He thought I would be better off living a faith in the world, writing of God to the world from the world. In the monastery, he thought, I would try too hard; I would make a commotion. He told me that my penance would be noisy, but it would not make a joyful noise, and because my penance would not be joyful, it might distract my other brothers. He was not saying, he told me, that a religious life should be free of anguish, but that there was joy in the Psalms too, and he thought that it might be easier for me to find joy, if I could find it, in the world, in marriage, maybe, he said, and family. He thought I needed to be among people, not to renounce them. He reminded me that Maritain was not a priest.

Then, seeking a way to be prostrate before God while also in the world, I went to a Catholic Worker, the one in the East Village. And soon I got asked to leave. This involved a girl. A girl who lived there thought I liked her too much. She was bothered by the fact that I had written her a few poems. (Yes, I suppose that can look rather menacing if the one writing is well past his teenage years.) She once told me that the amount of time I spent in confession had convinced her that I saw it not as an opportunity for contrition but as a chance to perform an aria. This girl was a blonde. She wore her hair in braids. Her name was Ellen. Her soul seemed clean and well ordered, and now that I think about it, I might have gotten that impression solely from her braids, her tightly, very tightly, woven brass-gold braids. They had me thinking of the purity and severity of childhood. With those braids, and her padded pink-and-ivory face, forehead an imperiously vaulted arch, I’d turned her into a long-lost virgin companion of Saint Ursula—have you seen those Flemish busts at the Cloisters? Now I see that I mistook her severity for true spiritual radiance, but at the time, when I was convinced I was in love with her, I told myself that perhaps the abbot had been right, and God had led me out of the monastery because he knew celibacy would be disastrous for me. Because I thought I was in love with this girl, and I was writing poems in this place, where I was also doing good, I hoped. So even after I was asked to leave, I was undaunted, because I had learned a lesson, I thought, and I had had a sign, which was that I did not need to be constrained within the bounds of a religious community, whether lay or ordered, to live a Christian life.

Then I spent the last year before the colony in New York, reading manuscripts and writing. And then I went to the colony, where I met you.

Yours,

Bernard