Voices of Power and Passion

"Voices of Power and Passion: the Best U.S. Catholic Writers" by Brian Doyle appeared in the recent issue of Liguorian Magazine.

Let's cut right to the chase. A handful of U.S. Catholic writers and books and essays and poems and songs are absolutely indispensable. These creative works should be required reading and/or listening for every man, woman, and child in the motley and miraculous clan of Catholic-works like most of Flannery O'Connor's stories and Willa Cather's lean, taut, perfect novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and Andre Dubus' last essays about Eucharist and forgiveness and painful love and all of J. F. Powers' extraordinary stories and Thomas Merton's riveting poem "Original Child Bomb" and Paul Wilkes' modern classic In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest and Annie Dillard's stunning For the Time Being and Alice McDermott's exquisite novel Charming Billy and...



But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's approach this in sensible journalistic fashion and try to be orderly about it all, for I have learned a few things after forty years of maniacally reading American Catholic literature. One: Catholicism in the U.S. has hatched some of the finest writers in the history of our nation, some of whom are working at a high pitch even as you read this. 



Two: American Catholic writing is vigorous, alive, and more curious and challenging than ever; the stresses and strains in the Church Eternal and the Church's increasingly crucial countercultural role in the modern world have widened and welcomed new voices of power and passion-voices often expressed on the Web.



Three: Hundreds of interesting, erudite, committed, and talented Catholic writers in the U.S. are both alive and already home in the Light. If there were ale enough and time, we could spend many hours talking about them, and what a hilarious conjunction of names and stories that would be: Myles Connolly's Mr. Blue and Breece Pancake's lone lovely book of haunted stories, Peggy Noonan's essays and Andrew Greeley's articles, Dorothy Day's letters and Garry Wills' adventurous books.



But let us pretend we are naturalists of literature, in a sense, and arrange our writers in three groups: the greatest ever; the indispensables; and others whose works you really ought to read when you get a chance, for they will open and edify and educate and enlighten and entertain your mind and your heart and your soul, and you will be delighted to realize you have many more spiritual teammates than you knew. Which is cool. 



So then: the greatest Catholic writer ever in these United States was Flannery O'Connor, a woman who raised peacocks and died at age thirty-nine. She lived with her mama all her life in rural Georgia, in what she called the "Christ-haunted" Bible belt of the South. Her first novel, Wise Blood, is the story of a young man who wishes to start a church without Christ. Her second book's title story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," is about epiphany, about grace wriggling through greed and duress, about the Christ in us all. Her third book, a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, is about a man who considers himself a prophet. See any pattern here? 



In her correspondence with two friends O'Connor wrote, "I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything" and "I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed." 



She died in the summer of 1964, ravaged by lupus, but much wonderful work was published after her death, notably, The Complete Stories; a lovely collection of essays and talks called Mystery and Manners; and her tart, hilarious, and fascinating letters, collected as The Habit of Being. 



O'Connor wrote of the challenges of the Catholic writer in various sources: "What we roughly call the Catholic [story] is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized world, but simply that it is one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by." "One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation." "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." 



Your first homework assignment after reading this article: go thou to the library or bookstore, get Flannery O'Connor's short stories and letters, and spend some weeks with them. I swear and vow you will find yourself entertained, moved, startled, and thrilled.

After Her Flanneryness are a handful of crucial American Catholic writers whose work says everything about grace under duress and belief in the miracle of Christ-in-us, writers I would call indispensable in that some or most of their work should be assigned reading for every Catholic in this rich and confusing land. If I were in charge-a horrifying idea-I'd link parish registration and school enrollment and Catholic-college graduation to required reading of the following texts: 



Broken Vessels and Meditations From a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus. In lyrical and sometimes heart-rending fashion, these essays (his last two books) catch the deep spirit of Catholic life. Dubus was famous as a fiction writer before the hot summer night when he saved two people from death on a highway and lost his own legs, and the haunted essays he wrote from his wheelchair are remarkable, especially those about the Eucharist. 



For the Time Being by Annie Dillard. This author is famous for her classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and her lovely memoir An American Childhood. For the Time Being is the single greatest spiritual book I have ever read, period. It is immensely odd and extraordinarily ambitious; using such seemingly pedestrian subjects as clouds and clay, pain and paleontology, Dillard builds a book about God, the meaning of life and death, and the song of the stars. Absolutely uncategorizable and probably genius. 

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Cather wasn't Catholic but wrote a lean, taut, perfect novel about the pioneer Catholic priests in New Mexico. What we are at our best, as people of the risen Christ, is in this book.



Lions , Harts, Leaping Does and Other Stories by J. F. Powers. This author also wrote two excellent novels about Catholic life, but let's choose his brilliant and layered collection of stories. 



The Pocket Thomas Merton, edited by Robert Inchausti, or Thomas Merton: Essential Writings, edited by Christine M. Bochen. Both are collections of the best of Merton's vast writings, and Merton-or Father Louis, as his fellow Cistercian monks knew him-apparently never had an unpublished thought. Many a young Catholic has waded into the sea of books by and about this most riveting American mystic and emerged goggle-eyed. Some readers will shriek that we do not choose Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain here, but for all its fame, it's not an especially good book and it also should have been cut by a third. Small doses of concentrated Merton are far more edifying. 



Charming Billy by Alice McDermott. In the way that William Faulkner and Eudora Welty caught Mississippi and Joseph Mitchell caught New York City and Walker Percy (a Catholic) caught Louisiana and Edwin O'Connor (a Catholic) caught Boston, McDermott masters Irish Catholic New York and in a real sense Irish Catholic America- which was a great deal of Catholic America-in the latter half of the twentieth century. No one in fi ction limns the dreams and drags, the grace and grit, of the urban American Irish Catholic experience with the same resonance and power. 



In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest by Paul Wilkes. The Catholic Church, in the final analysis, is simply and beautifully a billion people holding hands, and Wilkes' wonderful portrait of one Boston priest's final years is about the whole parish, the whole Church, the astounding idea at the heart of our daily lives as Catholics. A modern-day Diary of a Country Priest (by Georges Bernanos, a French Catholic). 



And then, well, there are the novels of Walker Percy, which are very much about confused hope amid the chaos of modern life; Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness; the essays of Barry Lopez (the book Crossing Open Ground in particular), a writer deeply absorbed in the spiritual power of community; the work of Mary Gordon and Ron Hansen, novelists riveted by grace under duress; the stories of Tobias Wolff and Tim Gautreaux and Paul Horgan and Jon Hassler and Richard Russo, many of which are gathered in The Best American Catholic Short Stories; the wonderful Climbing Brandon by physicist Chet Raymo, who postulates where Catholicism may be headed in headlong and wondrous fashion; and the poems of Marie Ponsot, Pattiann Rogers, and Mary Oliver, which spin around faith and hope and prayer and mercy and music in delightful fashion.



And then after that there are all sorts of riveting writers whose works swirl around t he dogged genius of Catholicism, its refusal to be reasonable and give up the idea that life defeats death, hope defeats despair, love defeats violence: Andrew Greeley, Ralph McInerney, James Carroll, Peggy Noonan, Charles Morris, Garry Wills, and many others.



And this is not even to mention the raft of Catholic writers from other countries whose work is deeply infused with the dense poetry and pain of Catholic life: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene in England, Australia's Terry Monagle and Tim Winton (whose hero as a child was Flannery O'Connor), Sean O'Faolain and Mary Lavin in Ireland, Georges Bernanos and Jacques Maritain in France, and many more. 



And after that there are many writers of other faiths and traditions whose work is eloquent and powerful on matters central to Catholic life: the extraordinary Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, utterly absorbed by courage against greed and lies; the remarkable David James Duncan, a former Adventist and now as articulate and honest a writer about the truly revolutionary genius of Christianity as anyone in America (read his angry and funny new collection of essays called God Laughs & Plays); the devout Buddhist Peter Matthiessen, whose nonfiction The Snow Leopard is a classic of spiritual journey and exploration; and the uncategorizable, unconventional Christian mystic Anne Lamott, who memorably called laughter "carbonated holiness" and who has written four superb books about living intent on Light: Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, Plan B, and Grace (Eventually). And, oh! Dona ld Miller, whose Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What a re fascinating voyages into how the fervid creative energy of Christians might still, can still, heal the bruised and bloody world. 



Well, enough and too much, as my grandmother used to say. I have either totally overwhelmed your bedside reading table or given you a map to new countries filled with wonder. In either case, I leave the page quietly, feeling that I could go on like this all day-plus I really want to read Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, which I have never read, and then it's about high time for me to reread Flannery O'Connor's letters, which are almost as good as those of Robert Louis Stevenson- there was another devout man; did you ever read that little collection of his evening prayers? oh, it was delicious, and that stunning, furious essay he wrote about Father Damien at Molokai, man, that's a glorious piece of prayerful prose, and...

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. Among his eight books is Two Voices, a collection of his essays and those of his smiling father, the columnist Jim Doyle.

ESSENTIAL READING CHECKLIST 
THE GREATEST
-1.    O’Connor, Flannery
-1.    A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
-1.    Mystery and Manners The Complete Stories
-1.    The Habit of Being
-1.    The Violent Bear It Away
-1.    Wise Blood

THE INDISPENSABLES
-1.    Cather, Willa
-1.    Death Comes for the Archbishop
-1.    Dillard, Annie
-1.    For the Time Being
-1.    Dubus, Andre
-1.    Broken Vessels Meditations From a Movable Chair
-1.    McDermott, Alice
-1.    Charming Billy
-1.    Merton, Thomas
-1.    The Pocket Thomas Merton Thomas Merton: Essential Writings
-1.    Powers, J. F.
-1.    Lions, Harts, Leaping Does and Other Stories
-1.    Wilkes, Paul
-1.    In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
-1.    Connolly, Myles
-1.    Mr. Blue
-1.    Day, Dorothy
-1.    The Long Loneliness
-1.    Lopez, Barry
-1.    Crossing Open Ground
-1.    Raymo, Chet
-1.    Climbing Brandon

© 2007 Liguori Publication