Frances and Bernard

June 10, 1958

Dear Frances—

Your letter did help. I know that this is probably just a boy’s recalcitrance to accept the fact that romance takes different shapes among us. What makes Ted feel like he’s alive is not what makes me feel alive, and it may be that Ted doesn’t need to be as alive as I do, and I have to accept that. When a friend stops reflecting you back to yourself in a way that keeps your vanity buffed and shined—that’s all this is, I suppose. There is something in my bones that senses eventual divorce, however.

All right, all right, enough, enough. I will keep in mind what Frances the Spiritual Director has suggested.

Love to you—

Bernard





June 26, 1958

Bernard—

I got a job in New York. Did you know I can type like a demon? Well, I can, and this talent has led me to be hired as Alfred Sullivan’s secretary at Sullivan and Shields. Jeanette, a friend of mine from Iowa who lives in New York mingling among the literary, has been keeping her ear to the ground for me and when she heard of this she thought I would be perfect for it. Alfred Sullivan, as you know, is seventy-nine and almost senile but still vain about his father’s name, and thus he needs to be placated so he’ll keep paying everyone. Alfred Sullivan needs a secretary. Or the illusion of a secretary, and here’s where I come in. The old one died. She was sixty-seven. She’d been with him for thirty years. She might even have been his mistress, but no one’s saying. And if he dies after a year, at least I will have gotten to New York. Her name was Frances too. I believe Mr. Sullivan is a superstitious, sentimental old Irish fool.

Which I am very grateful for, because his patronage is making it possible for me to stay at the Barbizon. Do you know this place? Actresses, writers, models, secretaries, convented away from menfolk so they can play at being career girls without being molested before they get married—when they’ll be molested legally. Another nunnery. But I get my own room, and meals are provided, and it’s clean and cheap. Mr. Sullivan wrote me a letter of reference, and he got another big shot at the house to write one for me too. I think, after nearly a year of waitressing and keeping house for my father and Ann, I will allow myself to enjoy a certain amount of paternalism.

This job has come at the right time. When I begin to be short with my father at the dinner table, I know things have gone sour.

I thought you might like to know this news. I hope you’re feeling better.

Yours,

Frances





July 2, 1958

Dear Frances—

I laughed out loud at your letter. I congratulate you. If a writer has to have a job, serving as handmaiden to the obsolete is the best kind to have. This nunnery, however, sounds ridiculous. Make me proud and get kicked out of there, won’t you?

And I’ve read your chapter. It’s fantastic. I have one thought: the ending is too abrupt. I think the problem is that you, the author, know what’s coming next in the book and can rest easy in that knowledge, but maybe there’s a way that you can adjust for those who don’t have that privilege. No, I have a second thought: I am hungry for Sister to say one thing that gives evidence of her theology—that she has a theology.

I really do think it’s wonderful. You make me ashamed of all my words.

Yours,

Bernard





July 9, 1958

Dear Bernard—

I can’t tell you how glad I am that you liked what I sent you. But I don’t want to change a thing. If there is lingering discomfort at the end, all the better.

I write you from my shoebox in the Barbizon. I have a tiny window. It looks out onto Sixty-Third Street, and since I am up high, the sunsets have been lovely evening companions. This place is very clean, which I require. But why are women so awful? Everyone’s perfectly nice—which is the problem. At dinner, the only thing they can think to ask me about, after my job, is whether I’m going with anyone. When I answer no, cheerfully, and keep eating, you can feel the pity and suspicion tiptoeing around in their silence. Since they can’t make their pity or suspicion public, they have to be encouraging: “Oh, you’ll find someone, I’m sure. It’s a big city!” It’s like eating dinner with my sister, only multiplied by eight to ten. Though my sister knows how to make a joke. These girls have some money—they’re daughters of doctors and lawyers and bankers—and I think money eliminates the need for the catharsis of humor. Kierkegaard says that comedy transpires in the gap between the eternal and the temporal, and I think that these girls, because they have not known the disappointment of being caught between what one hopes for and what one actually receives, can’t make jokes. But you know more rich people than I do, so correct me if I’m wrong.

The job is a joke.

I can’t invite you up to my chamber, but I could have you to dinner if you come to visit. Do you like instant mashed potatoes? I do. They are on offer every night.

Yours,

Frances





July 16, 1958

Dear Frances—

I’m so glad you’re happy. That place sounds as ridiculous as I imagined. I send you my pity, made public. But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope. And the rich can too make jokes. About their help, in whom they are constantly disappointed.

I see your point about the ending. I suppose I ask for more clarity in prose than I ask for in poetry. That is chauvinistic of me. You’re lucky I like you. Otherwise I would stare you down. As I have had to stare down even the expatriate literary lion, over a line of Latin he had incorrectly translated.

I would like to come and see you very much. There are a number of people I could stay with. I don’t have much to do this summer, seeing as how I’ve been given the fall semester off to start this new book.

I do sometimes wish we were in the same city. I do often wish we were in the same city.

Where are you going to church?

Yours,

Bernard





July 27, 1958

Bernard—

I’m going to church at Our Lady of Peace, which is on Sixty-Second Street. There’s very little to recommend it other than it’s convenient. The organist pounds away like she’s at a Yankees game, which amuses me. The last time I went I saw the priest, making his way back down the aisle at the end of the Mass, give a little start and then purse his lips when the force of the first bars of the benediction clapped him from behind. I enjoyed that little hiccup of fallibility. But I don’t think I need anything from the other people around me. I’m there for the liturgy and the host. I don’t even need the homily. Like you as a child in your Congregational church.

I went to an honest-to-goodness literary cocktail party the other night, courtesy of my employer. Despite the fact that it brought back the feeling I had at the colony of being a teetotaling toddler among the lotus-eaters, I enjoyed myself. I had a substantive conversation with another secretary at the company about what we’d been reading lately. But my favorite part of the evening? Overhearing conversations about (a) a writer whose fiancée left him for the actor hired to play him in the movie version of his autobiographical novel; (b) a writer whose publisher flew her out to Los Angeles and put her up in the Ambassador Hotel to get her away from a jazz musician who was making it impossible for her to finish her second novel; and (c) the husband half of a pair of married writers, less successful and less prolific than his wife, who apparently confessed to his editor that he’d thrown out her diaphragm and gotten her drunk one night in an attempt to get her pregnant and out of the limelight for a couple of years.

Do you know that I could not catch any of the names of these people? Drat. Was being polite and trying to look interested when spoken to. Somehow I’d gotten the impression—this must have come from Iowa, where everyone paired up out of boredom and was mostly too frozen to fire up scandal—that the modern way is for writers in love to cheer each other on from their matching Scandinavian desks. But this is not the case, at least in New York. Those coolly modern Scandinavian desks do not hide the fact that things are still very barbarous between men and women.

To my point: I know you remember Jim Schultz, the Esquire editor who told that story at dinner one night at the colony about having his publisher expense the whorehouses Jim visited while reporting in Vietnam. Well, he came up to me at the bar when I was getting another drink and said, “Is this Frances Reardon?” “Yes,” I said. “You look a shade less impregnable than last summer,” he said, tapping my collarbone (I had on a boat-necked dress—forgive me if you don’t know what that is; for a moment I forgot that I was writing to you and not Claire). “You look a shade more sober,” I said. He laughed. It was true: hair less greasy, suit less creased. “You know my nickname for you was Fanny Price,” he said. “If that’s an overture,” I said, “I feel compelled to inform you that the door is padlocked.” He raised his glass to me and then I pointedly ignored him while I waited for my drink. I have nothing to add to that anecdote, only that it is offered up in the spirit of having suffered through the same people during a summer.

I should also tell you that I sold my book! To Scribner’s. The girl who bought it seems a little young, but my agent assured me that she is, as they say, Going Places.

Why don’t you come to visit next month? I would be so very pleased to celebrate a little with you and thank you for your kindness toward my prose.

Yours,

Frances





August 2, 1958

Dear Frances—

Your book! I wish you could have seen the smile that broke across my face when I opened your letter and read the news. I’m smiling now to think of it. I hope you had your agent make them pay you what it’s worth, and then some. But I’ll pry the exact amount out of you when I see you.

Your description of this evening made me pant to be in New York with you, going to parties. I have to say that I’m a little surprised you took as much enjoyment as you did in that parade of envy, malice, and ambition. I suppose I imagined you would have only disparagement for those sins, that you’d leave the rejoicing in the horrors and wonders of that parade to me! You know, I think I heard that story about the diaphragm too. But I can’t remember who the perpetrator was. As you said: Drat. So let me come and visit you—I would love to come and visit you—so we could go to one of these parties together and pretend to listen to each other while we eavesdrop on everyone else’s conversations. You know I know where the bleeding will be heaviest.

I will admit that I heard Jim Schultz call you Fanny Price several times. Compared with what he called Lorraine, Fanny Price was downright chivalrous.

New York must have hard-boiled your heart in a cauldron of urbane indifference if Jim Schultz now touches your collarbone and you don’t turn him into scrapple. I am somewhat shocked. (A former student has recently alerted me to the existence of scrapple and told me that it is beloved in your native city, which is his city too. Frances, I have to say that scrapple now makes me understand why you referred to yourself as a northeastern hillbilly. Speaking of barbarous.)

What about the weekend of the twenty-second?

Yours,

Bernard





August 25, 1958

Frances—

Thank you for letting me visit. Here is a postcard I bought at the Cloisters for you. This is Clare of Assisi as a girl receiving a palm on Palm Sunday from her bishop. They say that after this moment she disappeared from the world and gave herself over to Saint Francis and his men.

Please do not ever disappear from me.

Love,

Bernard





August 26, 1958

Ted—

Here are the books that you asked for. Painting as a Pastime? Your love of Churchill knows no bounds. According to this curio, he and I agree on what the soul of an artist requires: “The first quality that is needed is Audacity.” You’re reading like a plutocrat these days, Ted—heavy on the military history and light on novels. Is Kay that distracted by decorating your place that you need this entertainment? Although I suppose we’ll now have sheets. But did we need sheets?

While I’m writing I’ll tell you: that visit with Frances Reardon was quite wonderful. I took her all over the city—she hadn’t dug into it yet, so we did it together. You have posited that she may have, as you like to say, a thing for me, but I don’t think she does, and I am fairly sure I don’t have one for her. I kept looking at her from different angles and examining my response. Various types of affection flared up in her presence, but not romance. I looked at her face while eating dinner at the Barbizon (that aqueduct built to conduct the flow of girls from Westchester straight into Connecticut while keeping them far above the catacombs full of dead dreams), her pretty milkmaid face flowering among all the pretty, iridescent silk-stockinged girls. And I did not find myself thinking her more beautiful than these, who were clearly nothing more than fish bred to stock the pond.

Then I watched her kneel and cross herself at Mass and she was so intent and yet unselfconscious in her movements it was as if I were watching a doe settle itself down in a green hush. Standing next to her in the pew, I felt that God truly lived within her. I didn’t want to seduce her. I just wanted to settle down by her side and drink at this stream with her.

And then I sang the Agnus Dei too loudly for her tastes, and she shushed me with a shush worthy of the gargoyles at the Bodleian. At lunch afterward I must have asked her one too many questions about Etienne Gilson and she put down her knife and fork in exasperation and said, “Bernard, God is not proctoring an exam!”

She is a girl, but she is also an old man, and I see that there is intractability in her heart that may never be shattered. Perhaps that is because she grew up among women who love harder than they think, and she has strengthened her innate intractability in order to keep tunneling toward a place where she could write undisturbed by the demands of conventional femininity. So she may always think harder than she loves.

I make her smile—in spite of herself, I can tell. This appeals to the part of me that needs a conquest. That is romance enough, I think, in this particular situation. And she is wise. She might have picked that up from the women who raised her, though she might not admit it. I have not met many women who seem wise. I have met women who are shrewd, but that is a different story.

Maybe you’ll meet her soon. I think you’d like her, very much. Maybe we could kidnap her and bring her to Maine and have her cook for us and tease us into submission.

Yours,

Bernard





August 26, 1958

Dear Claire—

Thank you for your letter. I wish you lived here. Or I lived there. Well, no. I don’t think Chicago is for me. Those people are too damn nice! How do you stand it?

Bernard Eliot came to visit this past weekend. I think I can call him a friend. We could not stop talking. Talking to him was like talking to you—only I don’t roll my eyes out of sheer exhaustion when I talk to you. So we talked. We spent five hours in a bar talking, two nights in a row. We talked. We talked, and walked. He thinks walking is “a purification,” and so we walked all the way around the city, setting out from Sixty-Third and Lexington, going down the East Side, curving around the tip of the island, then all the way back up to the West Side and through Central Park and home. He lived here a few years ago and so I did enjoy seeing the city from all different angles, and being shown these angles by someone who knew the ones that made the city look its best. Though I whined a little—you know me, I love to walk, but sometimes my slothful nature makes me want to sit down somewhere and then lie down on the floor with a box of crackers within reach. When I’m done, I’m done. Especially in August. So when I whined too loudly once he put us in a cab and took me for oysters at the Oyster Bar and insisted on buying a bottle of champagne—at the counter, where he told me what he thought I ought to look for in a husband. According to Bernard, and he’s thought a lot about this, I need to marry someone with money, which is not something he believes in usually, but he thinks I have the constitution for it, and the world, he said, needs my books. He says this, of course, having read one chapter of my first and only one. And after he’s heard me say several times that I do not want to marry. If this had come from someone else I would have been offended, but here it amused, because Bernard loves to pontificate and regrets not having had siblings he could pontificate to. His students aren’t enough. Right after he made this pronouncement he gave me a look like a taxidermist trying to decide where to start skinning and said, “I can see exactly how you would have looked in pigtails.” Which means there is no enchantment afoot.

So. We went to the Cloisters. We went to Mass. (He was too boisterous a singer during the Agnus Dei and I elbowed him and reflexively whispered a shush, though I was touched because he really does seem grateful, even desperate, for God’s mercy, and he just elbowed me back and kept singing.) He came to dinner two nights at the henhouse, and the girls ate him up, he was so solicitous of their aspirations, romantic and otherwise. Now, where had they gone to school? Did the young man they were dating seem serious? People are oxygen to him. It’s the part of him that can stand up in front of a classroom and teach. Whereas I think being around all those kids is going to give me some sort of disease of the mind—some degenerative disease contracted from contact with their undercooked brains. He told me later, half jokingly, that he’d chatted with the girls because he wanted to thaw me out in front of them. It was hilarious. Also a little maddening. I found myself jealous of those girls! Those sorority girls! Which makes no sense. Or maybe it was that I was jealous of his ability to charm and be gracious and make it seem effortless, make it seem an extension of his intelligence. While I tend to silently judge, or make an untimely crack.

Have you seen his picture somewhere in your reading? If not: big head, long straight nose rubbery at the tip, wide forehead, large mouth, finished off by open American eyes and a mild shock of brown hair. The bigness of his head, the calm of it, filled with what it is filled with, brings to mind a marble bust that might be trying to get itself on a pedestal.

But his mind and his heart seem free of cruelty—as he talked, I saw them as two gears connected by the same belt, a belt running at top speed, frequently hiccupping and flapping at the speed and the strain before correcting itself and grinding on.

That is Bernard.

My love to Bill.

Love,

Frances





September 1, 1958

Frances—

For the month of October I am going to live on Michael Lynch’s farm in West Virginia. I think you must know Michael from Iowa; he taught poetry there a few years ago. The idea is that I am going to pray and do manual labor. I’ve been feeling too cosmopolitan and scattered on the wind. A novelist, a girl from Kenyon, might show up too. Michael’s wife, Eliza, is also a poet, and they have a young daughter named Karen. Here’s my address:





Route 32, Box 2

Ravenswood, WV 26164





I hope New York is not killing you in this heat. I would ask you to come to the farm but I think I know what your answer would be.

Yours,

Bernard





September 8, 1958

Mr. Hair Shirt—

Since you know what my answer will be, I will not be reticent in letting you know what I think of Michael Lynch and his wife. He had a small crowd of acolytes that floated with him everywhere. Everyone thought that because I was Catholic and not an eighty-year-old Italian woman, I would love him too, but this was not the case. Michael and Eliza (she taught undergraduate poetry classes and taught piano too; I know you know all this, but did you know her real name is Eileen?) had faces that seemed cold with self-regard and I think what they imagined to be beatitude from their constant engagement with the upper regions of Catholic thought. Ugh. I read who they read, but I didn’t wear what they wore. Their trying so hard to look the part of conscientious objectors made me suspicious of their purity. Pardon me—I didn’t read exactly what they read. Dostoevsky was another Evangelist to them, the Grand Inquisitor chapter in Bros. Karamazov being the Sermon on the Mount. This gave me an antipathy for D. that I have just recently overcome. Eliza once came up to me after Mass and asked if I wanted to join them in praying the rosary on Sunday evenings. I demurred. When you grow up with women who pray the rosary as regularly as they do the laundry, with women to whom the laundry was a form of the rosary, it cannot be a project to reclaim it for your fancy piety. I hear that on his farm you live in sheds with the cows and piss out your window as if you were a medieval peasant.

That said, I hope you enjoy your time there. You have been busy this year, and you do deserve some rest. If you figure out a way to pray without ceasing—by which I mean without starting to wonder what you can fix for dinner—write me.

Yours,

Frances





September 16, 1958

Frances, you crank. I’ll pray for your soul while I’m there. On a rosary.

Affectionately,

Mr. Hair Shirt





October 6, 1958

Bernard—

I hope your writing is going well.

I hope you do not mind me interrupting your solitude with a letter, but I turned my novel in today and wanted to tell someone who would understand that particular achievement. I am thoroughly sick of it, but I’m not sure that the people who now have it will be able to do anything to make it better. Now that the initial surprise and excitement of having a book contract have worn off, fear of the ineptness of my new editor has set in. She has recently used the word irregardless in a letter to my agent.

The henhouse has turned gothic. Some of the sorority girls are now bitter. “You’ll do anything for a steak,” I heard one of them say last week at dinner, “but then that’s not all they want you to eat, the steak.” So there is the suggestion that they are now choking the men down along with the steak; that both delicacies, steak and sex, have become repulsive. Then there is Regina. She is studying to be an actress and is working as a secretary. She’s from Brooklyn. She has three sweaters and three skirts, she told me, which she bought to combine in six different ways. And a good black wool dress, she said, for when she has to go somewhere nice. She offered to loan me the dress once when I mentioned I had to go to a dinner for work, but I’m not keen on treating my closet like a lending library, so I said that I would prefer not to wear something that had a Dewey decimal number sewn into it. She did not laugh. It seems that several girls have gone in on that dress, but Regina paid the most, so it hangs in her closet. One night at dinner she leaned over to me and said: “Do you see that girl?” It was a girl across the room; she was talking and eating, nothing out of the ordinary. “She got in trouble,” Regina said, “for using too many condiments at dinner.” Then she says: “That girl and I moved here at the same time. We used to eat together, but she found those girls”—I looked at those girls, and they did seem a little more shampooed than Regina, who is bohemian manqué, like Marjorie Morningstar, only Italian, Catholic, and with an acoustic guitar—“and then that was the end of that.” Regina kept looking at the girls. I kept eating. “You see the girls here turn,” she said. “You see them fall prey to New York. Their hair is different, the clothes get showier, they’re talking all high class where they used to talk regular, and suddenly they’re not sitting with you at dinner. They’re going out with men.” Abruptly Regina went sour: “You just see them turn.” I decided not to sit with Regina anymore, and now I have the uneasy feeling that she is going to find some other girl to turn to, then locate me in the dining room, point me out, and tell this new girl that I hoard dinner rolls and silverware. Or she may come after me with one of the dull dinner knives, scratched out of its luster by endless runs in the dishwasher, and serrate me to death in my sleep.

Then there is a woman reading her way to Christian Scientism. Her name is Sarah. From Ohio. She is overweight. I’ve gone to visit her room and seen a few family photographs, so I know she was once slender. You can see how she might have been a pretty chorus-girl type—sweetheart face, big eyes, blond Veronica Lake waves, rosebud lips. Her eyes are the eyes of a girl who knows she believes lies but can’t do anything other than believe them. She moved in ten years ago—she wanted to sing in musicals—and she has never left. She never did really sing onstage—“Now I never will, I guess,” she says, referring to her weight—but she helps run the kitchen in return for room and board. If anyone is hoarding dinner rolls, it’s Sarah. She says she thanks the Lord for making this room available to her. She says she feels now that the Lord meant for her to sit quietly and figure out his mysteries through her reading, and she wouldn’t exchange that opportunity for anything. Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It’s the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson—American dynamism gilded into a platform for individual redemption. It’s religion as detergent. I thank God I was born Catholic. At least our fairy tales involve eyes being put out and women being stretched out on racks—suggesting there is no evasion of pain and suffering. That there is no redemption without suffering, and that suffering is sometimes the point.

Where was I? Forgive me. Sarah haunts me. I think I see Ann in her. Ann isn’t in the sorority girls; I was mistaken. Ann is in Sarah. They have the same eyes. Right before I left home, Ann and I had a fight. Did I tell you about this when you came? Earlier last year, my sister met a man at a dance. He was, she said, a men’s-clothing buyer for Wanamaker’s, and after that dance they spent a few evenings together. She fell for him. He was an Italian, handsome and traveled, and of course he dressed very, very well. He came for dinner. He was not overly ingratiating. He had manners. He asked my father about his job. He asked me what Iowa was like—he had family out there farming and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a place like that. But I watched him with Ann and there was an air of the waiting room about him—I got the sense that she was not a specific person to him, just someone pretty he had started chatting with while waiting to be called in for his annual. As someone who often cannot bear to be around even those people she loves, I will never understand this kind of personality—the just-dropping-by-out-of-boredom. I didn’t think it was manners that kept him from looking at her with desire or with the kind of adoration that is subdued because it is in public but still obvious nevertheless. I don’t know anything about romance, but I have my ideas about how people should show that they prefer each other over the vast horde. My father thought he seemed like enough of a gentleman, and to that I said yes, enough to come into a middle-class house and share a meal with strangers, but not so much that he’s going to carry Ann out of here on some steed the way she wants. My father said nothing, and for a moment I regretted saying what I’d said. My father reveres romance—he thinks he and my mother had a great one—and he wants that for Ann the way he wants success for me. The problem is that Ann suspects she’s beautiful but doesn’t truly know it. If she did, she could be dumb and scheming like Undine Spragg and we wouldn’t worry about her.

Some weeks later, this gentleman got a job in Baltimore. She wrote him. After a few letters, though, he stopped writing back. But she kept it up. She wrote a letter a month for six months. When I saw her on the sixth letter—yes, I kept count—I couldn’t take it anymore. “Stop it!” I said to Ann as she sat in the kitchen writing another one. “Ann, he is never going to write back! If he’s not dead, you are dead to him!”

She stood up. She looked at me in a way I had never seen her look at me—as if I were dead to her. Then she walked out to the living room, took her coat, and went for a walk. We didn’t talk for a week after that.

The faith that sent Ann to her pen is the same faith that had her lighting candles for me and my book.

And I haven’t even told you about the girl I saw putting paraffin on her teeth in the bathroom one Saturday night. I asked her what she was doing—this seemed like something out of a courtesan’s toilette circa Versailles—and she said it covered the discoloration and crookedness of her teeth. Or the old lady who’s been here for twenty years, who wears a tiny, violet-colored, violet-sprigged hat with a veil to dinner and an inordinate amount of face powder—you can see the face powder on her smart little jackets—and reportedly has papered every inch of her room with pages from movie magazines.

I think I need to move out of here. I’m five helpings of mashed potatoes away from turning into a matronly mountain that will move nowhere toward its goal.

Yours,

Frances





October 18, 1958

Frances—

I am getting you out of that nunnery! Mark, a friend of mine who has been living in New York, is moving to New Hampshire to live deliberately. This leaves his apartment vacant. I spoke to him about you and he said he’d tell his landlord that he should give the apartment to you. If all goes well you can have his room—it’s in the West Village, there’s a Murphy bed in the wall—as of November 15. Call the school at St. Frances Xavier on Sixteenth Street—or Fifteenth Street, I forget which—and ask for Mark Fitzgerald.

Love,

Bernard





PS. I got asked to leave the farm; I’ll tell you about it later.

Write me in Boston when you write next.





October 30, 1958

Bernard—

Thank you. Thank you. I called Mark and went over and met with his landlord and I will be moving in with my books and percolator on November 15. This was the only time in my life that I was glad of being the weaker sex—I think my new Italian landlord is relieved to have what he imagines to be a proper lady occupying that room, and he gave me the place on the spot. A proper Catholic lady—I shamelessly asked Mr. Bellegia where I should go to Mass because I thought this might make him look favorably upon me. And I was right. It was just after this that he said the place was mine. I hope the Lord doesn’t mind that I took his name in gain. I’d like to believe that the Lord thought I was being wise as serpents. Mmm. Probably not.

I like this neighborhood very much. I like the river, I like the gray and brick, I like the tumult of people on the crosshatching of narrow streets.

Your very grateful friend,

Frances Reardon





PS. What did you do?!





November 10, 1958

Frances—

Now you are a real New Yorker, cushioned no longer by mashed potatoes and the muy loco in loco parentis of the Barbizon. I salute you! Those winds off the Hudson are strong. Be warned. Will they blow you up my way? I wonder.

I am enclosing the proofs of your story. It should be in the spring issue. I am allowing you ten corrections in total. It’s my policy: everyone gets up to ten corrections; more than that and the piece is pulled. I am imagining everyone as correction-mad as myself. This is why my book has taken this long to come out. I was on my fourth set of proofs when I saw you this summer. John Percy, my editor, has said that between the third and the fourth, the production department made a Wanted poster out of my author photo. I look forward to seeing this.

I have to come to New York in the next few weeks—am dropping off my pages. I can’t wait for those winds to blow me your way—may I visit?

What happened at the farm is that they caught me and the novelist—the novelist was a girl—swimming without suits in the pond at night. The girl didn’t mean anything to me, but they could not quite believe that. The girl was a little crazy; she had these huge eyes and was terribly thin, and whenever I looked at her I always felt she was trembling, but that was only an optical illusion brought on by the fact that she was talking incessantly, so much it made my teeth chatter, about being a vegetarian and Tolstoy and Gandhi and celibacy and a Russian professor of hers who was married and who kept writing her at the farm. “He is married,” she kept saying while giving me a look that I was supposed to understand meant that he’d slept with her, or was trying to, and I could too, if I wanted to. I didn’t do much to convince them I most certainly did not want to. The girl wanted to stay because she was broke and had nowhere else to go, and I think they’re going to keep her on, to take care of their daughter. Michael is probably a much better Christian than me—if I were as godly, I would not have decided to celebrate my last week of summer by swimming naked at night, but have you ever seen the moon waxing crescent, hanging low and white in the sky, and heard the breeze blow through the bushes and trees? You feel as ripening and shining as the night you are in, and it’s excruciating to stand there enduring nature—God’s instantiation, God’s invitation—as a spectator when you can plunge yourself in the middle of it. That felt sinful, to not plunge myself in the middle of it. It made me think of Augustine:





God, then, the most wise Creator and most just Ordainer of all natures, who placed the human race upon earth as its greatest ornament, imparted to men some good things adapted to this life, to wit, temporal peace, such as we can enjoy in this life from health and safety and human fellowship, and all things needful for the preservation and recovery of this peace, such as the objects which are accommodated to our outward senses, light, night, the air, and waters suitable for us, and everything the body requires to sustain, shelter, heal, or beautify it: and all under this most equitable condition, that every man who made a good use of these advantages suited to the peace of this mortal condition, should receive ampler and better blessings, namely, the peace of immortality, accompanied by glory and honor in an endless life made fit for the enjoyment of God and of one another in God—





Light, night, the air, and waters suitable for us. That was what was in front of me, and I felt that I should make good use of them.

I quoted this passage to Michael as explanation, but he said I was perverting the text. That I was out of my mind to think that the passage legitimized my pagan gesture. I quoted Paul to him—you know, if you want to eat meat, eat meat; if you don’t, don’t, etc.—and then he said that my concept of sin was too precious and he quoted Paul back to me by reminding me that I was living according to the flesh, that I was too alive to sin and too dead to Christ. (Yes, the girl added luster to the evening, and I’ll confess to you that maybe I liked that there was something Edenic about the two of us in the water, and it occurred to me that I was indeed too alive to sin in that moment, but I was not interested in making anything more of our nakedness than a picture in my mind.) Michael and I went on for an hour, quoting scripture back and forth to each other, voices getting louder, which brought Eliza to the shed. She entered the room like Yul Brynner inspecting the slaves’ quarters or some such in The Ten Commandments (now I’m infected with your disdain, goddamn you) and put her hand on my arm, and while her touch was just a touch, just four fingers on my forearm, it put silence into me, because she was also looking at me with cold iron-gray-blue eyes, and then she said: “I think you are too great a disturbance to this house,” and asked me to leave. Ted thinks she got her moral authority purely from the fact that she’d thought I’d harassed a girl, not because I’d sinned. I laughed, but I think he’s wrong. Mostly.

Do you know we have now been writing to each other for just over a year?

Love,

Bernard





November 17, 1958

Bernard—

Thanks for the proofs. I have availed myself of all ten permissible corrections. I hope that rewriting a paragraph counts as a correction. Because four out of the ten are that. The rest was correcting what your proofreaders should have corrected. But I know you’re corralling glamour-seeking Harvard grads to do that stuff, so I can’t expect them to actually give a rat’s ass about doing their work. I think I smelled gin on these pages. Were these proofread at a cocktail party?

Bernard. You do realize that you have been kicked out of two Catholic communities for what looks like an inability to control yourself around women? I trust you left this out of your account because this goes without saying? I guess I should bring up Augustine again to scold you—you are still pre-conversion!—but this makes me laugh. Part of me thinks Ted just may be right. I like to think of your excesses as God visiting a judgment on these people’s fervor. That you have come to show them that the Church is the only house that could gather us sinners together in peace.

Please do come to visit my Catholic community of one. There are no chores except for making coffee and washing five dishes. Is this labor purging enough for you? I now have a small wooden table that I picked up off the street, with two wooden chairs, and I have taught myself how to make crepes. I have made them for my office mates—there was a small fire at the end of the evening when one Peter from publicity tried to turn a few into a flambé with his bottle of whiskey, and some of my bangs got singed off. But I stand undaunted with my spatula and would love to make some for you.

Yours,

Frances





November 27, 1958

Frances—

Yes, I do realize why I have gotten, as you say, kicked out of those two Catholic communities. I pray every day to have a calmer heart. I have been praying to the Holy Spirit. I’m not ashamed, but I am confused as to why this keeps happening. Why I go blank to reason, to self-control, to the purity God asks of me. Why I think I am doing the thing God wants me to do. Why I would not feel ashamed for him to find me in the middle of what I am doing. I take comfort in Paul: I do the things I do not want to do, and never do things I know I should. I take comfort also in Augustine, it’s true: the long, slow grudging, confused progress to God. The detour through the sin he thought was light.

I take comfort in the fact that you have borne with me.

I hear that the Paris Review wants to do an interview with me on the occasion of the publication of my book. It’s supposed to be a conversation on how the classics have informed my work (their phrasing). I would rather they talk about how Catholicism has informed my work, because that is the real story, but the Paris Review doesn’t know what to do about God taken up in earnest by someone who is not a demagogue or a rube. They are sending a young Barnard grad up to Boston to do it. They are doing a bright-young-things issue, and it appears that I am one of their favorites. I told them that you are one of my favorites. I sent them a copy of your story.

What are you doing for Thanksgiving? There is no avoiding going home for dinner. It will involve aunts and uncles and cousins, and soup tureens, and heirloom silver, and ivory linens scalloped at their edges with yellowing lace, and my mother will sit next to my father, who will be at the head of the table, and castrate him with a dozen nearly imperceptibly cutting remarks, some of which he will laugh at because, although he will sense that he is being demeaned, he will not have the strength of intelligence necessary to seize on the nature of the complaints. He needs my mother to anchor him and make him feel that he has done his duty as a man. Which is: to marry someone suitable and fill the house his forebears have had possession of since the eighteenth century with his own family. Having done this, he has felt free to float indefinitely in the uneventful heaven of middle mercantilism, falling further and further asleep into the past, where my mother was tempestuous but not yet sour. “Is it time for feeding?” he’ll say, walking into the kitchen, where my mother and my aunts will be furiously battening down the hatches. Few will have read, and no one will have understood, my book. “Bernard,” my mother will say, “these poems do give me a headache. But I trust that the people in New York know what they’re doing.” My father will not have read them at all. He will feel threatened by them, because even though he does not care for the life of the mind, he knows that somewhere in the life of the mind, his son is a success in a way he never was, and he paid for all the education, but he never meant for the education to mean anything; for him, Harvard was a convention to be observed the way church was a convention for my mother. But he enjoys feeling me out for poverty to see if he can’t compromise me with an offer of his money. I’ve caught him inspecting the bottoms of my shoes for holes. Back to dinner. If my grandmother were still alive she would say that it’s a good thing my mother didn’t have a girl because any girl my mother had would have had to spend her whole life in exile from the dessert table. And then she’d cut me an extra-large slice of pie. My uncle George will ask me why I’m not wearing a collar if I’m a priest, and I will have to remind him again that I didn’t end up going to seminary. And he will say, like he always says, that I’m much better off that way because I know the Catholic Church is filled with greasy, immigrant blood-drinking pagans, don’t I, and it would be like serving a mission in Africa if I had to pastor that herd. This is my father’s brother. His daughter, my cousin Caroline, however, will ask me about my teaching and tell me that she will try to read my book, and I will ask her about her teaching and then try to remember if I have met any young men who are tender enough for her. Caroline teaches kindergarten at a progressive school in Boston—she’s an Alcott daughter brought up by bankers. She has Walden Pond in her eyes but some schoolmarm in her heart, so she won’t stray too far from the Eliot ethos, which is mulish pursuit of respectability and material comfort. She and Ted once had an abortive, though charming, interlude that ended because Ted needs a little less Walden Pond and a little more Mediterranean tempest, and she needs a little less crank and a little more complacency.

Are you going home for Thanksgiving?

As you might say: Who is this Peter?!

Yours,

Bernard





December 5, 1958

Bernard—

Who is this Peter?! Bernard, I sigh. And then laugh at you and your persistence in imposing romance where there is none. Peter is a young man with whom I work. He likes whiskey and Edmund Burke. That is all I can tell you. When I find out that I really am in love with him, the bastard, in spite of myself, I will let you know. Dear God.

In return: How sharp and fetching was the Barnard grad?

Thanksgiving was pleasant. I went home on the train and helped my aunts make dinner, as I have always done. There are so many of us there need to be Sterno cans on the dining room table. This year I was in charge of the pies. All seven of them. I made a mincemeat pie for my father, which he ruined by eating a slice before it came out from behind the wings. Mincemeat is a pie for old people. My cousins and their children vastly preferred the whipped chocolate cream cheese pie, the recipe for which I got off the back of the Ann Page cream cheese package. This is slumming for me, the supermarket directive, but I do sometimes—sometimes—want to please a crowd. So as to better camouflage my dissent. My father raised a glass to my book being turned in, and everyone loudly cheered. I wanted to hide. There’s an aunt and an uncle who show up in the book as a battle-ax and the stone that ax loves to grind itself on, but I doubt they’ll read it. Or if they do, I bet they won’t be able to recognize themselves as two old nuns. A cousin said she was glad to see that I hadn’t gotten uppity since I moved to New York. I said I was glad I hadn’t gotten sold into white slavery. But it was a fine time in general.

Thank you for sending my work on to those people. Never expect more than a handful of people to understand what you are about when you are writing about God. Or care.

Your immigrant blood-drinking pagan friend,

Frances





December 8, 1958

Bernard—

So I have had a talk with my agent about my editor. I can’t take it anymore. This woman is dead set against mystery. She is asking me to articulate why things are happening when they are happening. She is asking me to explain what I want the reader to realize by accumulation. “Why is Sister John so mean?” she says. “I don’t understand it. You need to tell us why.” She won’t bring herself to tell me to give the book a happy ending but she is talking around it. I think she thinks I can turn the book into The Nun’s Story. She says that if I want to persist in my obscurity—she calls it obscurity—then I can go to one of those smaller houses that print difficult books.

She should not have put that thought into my head.

I do not like to ask favors of people, but threats to my work make me lose all scruples, and I have to protect my book. I humbly ask: Is there any way that you might speak to John on my behalf?

My gratitude to you.

Yours,

Frances





December 15, 1958

Dear John—

I got the copies of the book. It looks wonderful. I don’t, however. In that author photo I look like someone told me to think of Aristotle’s Poetics and then, on the count of three, snapped the picture. Why did I not see this before? Why did you not mention this to me? My mother might have told me as much but I still can’t hear her when she tells me I’m being stubborn, selfish, or smug. Oh well. That’s the least of my worries, this picture. All that matters is what’s on the pages, and I can find no fault there.

Thank you for getting production to make those last changes. Book publishing is depressingly bureaucratic. And philistinic. I don’t see how you can stand it. I can barely stay awake in faculty meetings. People have discussions about pedagogy. They delect in the hashing out of various ways to programmatically open the mind and consolidate insight. “Well,” I said one day when one discussion had stopped at a crossroads that had been reached by a painfully democratic and glacially moving airing of multiple but finally identical methodologies, “the Greeks thought you could get pretty far with pederasty.” The chair sighed deeply. I had forgotten where I was and said what occurred to me. Have you ever had the experience of being so bored that you feel only your eyes in your head? That you’re only eyes, and the rest of you has diffused away into a roving gas? I don’t imagine you have. That was the state I was in when I spoke. This is why you have the job you do, and I evaporate into a roving gas with eyes at whatever job I have. But I do love the students, and to get to the students I have to wade through a slough of middle-mindedness. It feels like wading through concrete fresh from the mixer. With the students, I experience one of the purest states of being I know. I can float into the classroom as that gas after some dreadful meeting, and then as we talk I solidify into wholeheartedness. Single-mindedness. As you know: Purity of heart is to will one thing. Everything—worry, anger, sloth, frustration—falls away in the talking. I feel God in the room in the pure exchange of ideas, and their awakening to ideas.

Speaking of middle-mindedness. Frances Reardon—the young woman I told you about from the colony—needs a new editor. I think her house is more grown over with bureaucracy and philistinism than yours, and her book needs you. Her editor, who took over the book after Frances’s original editor left to marry a banker, sent the manuscript back to her with only ten marks on it, seven of them arbitrary deletions, and a letter in which this editor asked if Frances could lessen the religious themes, because they might be off-putting, and said that she didn’t know whether she should like the protagonist or not, which was bothering her. I think her editor is a girl who has her job because she is tenacious and vapid—the tenacity masking the vapidity, and the vapidity fueling her ascendancy because vapidity frees the mind from bothersome, cumbersome self- examination. Let me know what we can do.

Yours,

Bernard





December 16, 1958

Frances—

I’ve written to John about you. He’s going to get in touch with your agent.

I’m sending you a copy of my book. With all my love. I wonder what you will think of it. Whatever judgment you deliver will be God’s grace.

Yours,

Bernard





December 20, 1958

Bernard—

I want to thank you for getting me out of the nunnery and possibly getting me out of this other house of horrors.

And: thank you for your book. It’s handsome. But please do not mistake me for someone who has direct communication with God. Also, I’m a fiction writer. My judgments are the judgments of a mortal, and they are hobbled by my earthbound obstinate insistence on the concrete. You know what I’ve told you before. You and I are so very different: I am one word at a time, one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how sure my footing is before proceeding to the next sentence, with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee. Your poems make the old feeling of cowdom come over me: stalled in a vast unconquerable field, alone, ruminating. While you’re Christopher Wren. You’ve made me commit the grave sin of hyperbole in trying to convince you of my esteem—Christopher Wren! Dear God. So be flattered.

Yours,

Frances





January 15, 1959

Dearest Claire—

Happy new year!

Well, it seems that I will now be edited by John Percy at Harrow, through the intervention of Bernard. Bernard would want to say it was God who arranged it all, but I am content to leave it at his creatures’ human kindness. That said, it does feel a certain blessing, to be rescued from the blind. John reminds me of Bill. Right down to the plaid work shirts. Only John does not safety-pin the cuffs back on when they wear themselves off the sleeves. I kept wanting to tell John about the time Bill pinned his wrist to the shirt accidentally, but John has a bit of primness about him, and I was trying to pretend that I was a Serious Artist.

This has made me indescribably relieved, but I am worried about something. I read Bernard’s book of poems, and Claire, I am afraid that while Christ is all over these poems, hidden in historical figures, alluded to, quoted, and then expanded on as a way to reach Bernard’s own impressive imagery, Christ is not really in these poems. He is too on the surface of them to be actually moving within them. I do not doubt that Christ is in Bernard—and very deeply. When Bernard speaks of the Church he speaks of it with humility and passion. But Christ is buried—in Bernard’s poems and in his heart—under striving for world-historical Meaning and Complexity. I hear, in the poems, shields and lances clanking against the limitations of this imperfect world. Christ being the shield and lance—Bernard’s weapon against nihilism. I fight that war myself. This is why Bernard is necessary to me. But I also think the symbolism is a cover for what Bernard might really want to talk about, which is his own history. He is encoding his own struggles with purity, desire, and despair in the symbols of religion, and then sometimes the Greeks, for good measure. (What do I know about the Greeks? I know what I know mainly from Aquinas. Bill could read these and tell us for sure.) I wonder if a better weapon against nihilism might be one man’s life. One man in a struggle, and in that one particular struggle we more clearly apprehend the real. I suppose that is why I write fiction: character as argument. I suppose that is why I love Augustine. And Kierkegaard: one man in a war against despair directing us in our own hobbling away from it.

Also from Aquinas: the intellect is God present in his creation. The intellect should be a servant to revelation, but Bernard is thinking that the intellect itself, amassed on the page, is revelation.

I suppose I should write these things to Bernard. I don’t know why on this occasion I find myself unable to say what I think. You and I could not be friends if you had not told me that I needed to stop being so silent in workshops, and I had not told you that if you did not marry Bill you would be a fool. I don’t think what I am saying could possibly put a dent in him. Bernard’s self-confidence is as impervious as a redwood. My words will be as the gnawing of a squirrel at its base. He can’t hear things—in the way that he can’t hear that it’s his own confusion, not Christ’s voice, speaking through the poems. I doubt he could hear what I am saying. But at least I will have said it. I feel obligated to do so.

Do I think, all this aside, that what he has done is beauty amassed on the page? I am not saying that he is a genius, but I do think that genius has something to do with mass and velocity, and the sheer torrent of words, the prolixity, the constant barrage of image and Shakespearean syntax, all coming so effortlessly—this feels to me something like genius. Without a doubt. There is so much intelligence and force that it razes my own will to create. In the way that talking with Bernard can raze my will to speak. I couldn’t write for a week after reading the book. But I know Bernard wants beauty and truth, and the truth is getting a little mangled by the whirring blades of his mind.

And now—I think, after writing this to you, I can write these things to Bernard.

Love,

Frances