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Books Reviewed: Ghost Pain. By Sydney Lea. Sarabande Books, 99 pages paperback.

Deaths and Transfigurations. By Paul Mariani. Paraclete, 95 pp.

Poetry reviews appear in religious journals more rarely than poems, and poems are rare enough. This absence is not because poetry of interest to readers of these journals is in short supply. It is instead probably because, like the rest of the reading world, pastors, theologians and engaged laypersons rarely read poetry -- maybe because it requires a different set of skills from reading prose, maybe because these readers choose not to embrace the indirection of metaphor, and maybe also because they have read examples of bad religious poetry that make the whole endeavor seem like a waste of time.

Even some good poetry is gaining a bad reputation these days because of certain theoretical influences that have made inaccessibility a popular trait. One recent winner of a prestigious poetry award admits that the strongest influences on his work are Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Lacan, none of whom write poetry themselves, but all of whom have left lasting imprints on literary theory. This phenomenon, of the poet grounded more in a tradition of philosophy or psychoanalysis or feminism than in the tradition of poetry and poets (one T. S. Eliot described in his admirable essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent") is, unfortunately, creating a class of poets speaking not even to each other.

Of the dozen volumes of verse that have come across my desk in the past few months, these two are the strongest and most appealing. That one of these poets, Sydney Lea, has appeared in the pages of the CHRISTIAN CENTURY over the past two years has been a matter of delight. The primary criterion for selecting poems for these pages is that they must be interesting. For a poem to capture our attention it must upset the usual ways of seeing or hearing and transform the ordinary so that it delights and surprises the reader. Poetry is an attempt to name experience, to create feeling and to express the otherwise inexpressible. It does so through images, metaphor, sound effects, rhythm and form. A poem must put the reader inside of an experience so that it is impossible for her to be just an observer. A poem must make the reader a participant in the experience. A poem must say to a reader, "Pay attention!"

In publishing Lea, we have invariably broken our guideline on length: a Lea poem is rarely under 20 lines. His poems are often torrents of words, creating longer lines and therefore longer poems, although he also uses short-lined quatrains in some of his verse. Heavy in images and strong on narrative, his poems require space; in fact, they often tell stories that catch you by surprise with their striking oddness and their pattern of shifting the topic from degeneracy to hints of redemption.

The second part of Ghost Pain is titled "A Man Walked Out," with an epigraph from Psalm 40: "and He hath put a new song in my mouth." But the journey from the first poems to the "new song" of the psalm is, in e. e. cummings’s words, "banged with terror." A suite of ten poems, it begins in depression and fear:

Even amidst this alarm and dread, even in spite of the man’s "bodily deafness / and his longstanding other sorts of torpor," there is a small sign, maybe even a still voice, at any rate "a tiny bell . . . there to be heard it seemed heard in its minuscule clangor." Though the man cannot quite remember what that tiny bell is, he responds to it with lessening fear. In the next poem, called "666: Father of lies," he fights the devil, but once again at the end, a "delicate ringing in our man’s left ear. / His tinnitus? His angelus?" Each poem in the series traces this trajectory from the knowledge of total depravity to the recognition of grace. At one point he asks, "Where did hope ever come from? Knowing the facts / how might anyone ever opt for joy?"

The poem ends, if not with images of resurrection, then with at least the hint of a pleasant freshness in the air and the rustling of a spirit not yet recognized as holy.

A part of the process of conversion is the conviction of guilt, and so halfway through the cycle of the man remembers and relives in graphic images his years of predatory behavior. All of the faces "line up on this new horizon to glare at him." Another poem describes a moment of road rage conquered, when he for the first time through the sheer act of will simply forgives and pulls over to the side of the road. In the penultimate poem of the series the man for the first time experiences grace in its fullness:

. . . in that moment, the man felt forgiven

for each unpardonable word and deed

even the worst, which he couldn’t name.

Everything out in the Yankee woods

recalled the hour of its creation,

and even dying, declared it good.

In the final poem the man walks out into the October landscape one Sunday at noon (here the familiar bells faintly chime in the distance) with the memory of the previous evening’s psalm reading in his head: "Make me to hear joy and gladness that the bones/which thou has broken may rejoice." His prayer is on his lips: "Forgive my little postures." And then he catches a scent of something he cannot define on a wind blowing softly to him, as if fanned by the wings of a passing hawk.

So moves the holy spirit, his holy muse, nudging him toward miracle and poetry.

What Lea has accomplished in "A Man Walked Out" is terribly difficult to do. The Christian poet attempts one of the most challenging endeavors, revitalizing the language, the common language, which all of us have heard for years both in scripture and in the church. This is language which is often filled with cliches, with formula phrases, with theological lingo. It is language which has become so familiar that it is invisible. It is why at one point in the final poem in the series Lea writes:

Language, especially familiar language, seems almost insufficient to capture the transcendent, to reflect truth in all of its complexity. But language is what the poet has to work with, and so the poet is forced to take sometimes exaggerated, sometimes extreme steps to pierce the mundane, breaking up lines, using words in odd new contexts, relying on sound effects and packing the stanzas with sensuous images and fragments from scripture, and the common language of faith suddenly takes on new meaning through these odd juxtapositions.

For Lea and for any poet who is trying to capture religious truth in language, the poem is a miracle, a journey home for all of us who, because we are human, have at some time or other been terribly lost.

One of the epigraphs in Paul Mariani’s book is from Flannery O’Connor: ". . . if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery." Mariani penetrates stunning surfaces to get at the mystery beyond, as in "Solar Ice":

Mariani has said elsewhere that what he is after "is discovering the imaginative possibilities of the spirituality with which I grew up, I mean my Roman Catholicism." He goes about this through creating surfaces which intensely engage the senses and then moving beyond them to the core questions: What does it mean to be human? Who is God? How can we make sense of suffering? Why does God sometimes seem so silent? Mariani is not satisfied with pat answers. He is looking for incarnational and even sacramental connections with his subject matter. The incarnation is Spirit becoming flesh, and that’s what the best Christian poets must work at doing in their poetry -- bringing the spirit into flesh.

In another of his poems, "Making Capital," he attends Sunday mass with his wife after six weeks of "nada, zip & zero," a dry spell in his poetry, a time when he "could not make those protean shapes sit still, though / God knows I’ve tried." The sermon is uninspiring, the congregation is asleep, but suddenly the poet catches a glimpse of something beyond the ordinary, flat experience of worship in a "place [in which] the Good News . . . dropped down some black hole." The shadow he sees at the altar is of Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice, and this figure is transformed in an instant into Christ on the cross: one son saved, the other sacrificed in order to rise "from the stink/ of death, promising to lift us with him."

I looked around

the church, knowing what I know of death: the death of

mother,

father, friends, the death of promise, of vision run

aground,

death of self, of all we might have been, death of that

ideal other,

the bitter end of all. Nada, zip. . . Except for that loop in

time, when

something gave: a blip of light across the mind’s dark

eye, if you

can call it that.

That flash of insight, that glimmer of hope comes to us sometimes in fragments, the poet seems to suggest, a "loop in time," when in spite of our spiritual drought and the church’s ineffective attempts to bring Christ to us, he comes anyway.

Mariani has mastered the forms of poetry. While he writes primarily in free verse, he also uses rhyme to unify his poems, he often organizes his lines into quatrains (sometimes rhymed, sometimes not), and he has a firm sense of what a poetic line can do. In short, even his free verse is disciplined; he wastes no words, and the words he chooses are appropriate and beautiful, contributing sound to sense. With "New York, Christmas Eve, 1947" he has even written a successful villanelle, a beastly difficult form because of its use of repetition of both rhymes and lines. The last three stanzas provide a glimpse:

Poets are also able to provide a unique angle of vision for those whose imaginations have atrophied -- and what could be more important to believers than the imagination? How can we carry on a theological conversation if our senses have not been trained and our imagination is dead? In fact, it is in the imagination that faith begins. How could it possibly be otherwise? Believers believe in what cannot be seen. We accept the miraculous as fact. We must have imaginations to be people of faith.

In "How It All Worked Out" Mariani imagines himself in his shroud in a long, dark "procession toward the ivory gate." He describes an odd, dreamlike scene he wants to flee but cannot as he approaches the gate, unsure whether "friend or foe [is] shouting for us up there in the stands." How it all works out is with a blinding light and a flood of memory as he stands on the threshold in utter silence. Here is a poem that surely upsets the ordinary way of seeing and hearing and that drags the reader into its visceral experience of judgment and the possible absence of grace.

Paraclete Press took much care in the production and publication of Deaths and Transfigurations, including striking engravings by Barry Moser, winner of the American Book Award for design and illustration. That there are publishers like Paraclete and Sarabande, willing to commit precious resources to publish poetry -- not the most lucrative of genres -- and especially poetry that communicates truths "hidden with Christ in God" is remarkable. The poet Sherod Santos says, "It may be we’ve wandered so aimlessly, so unsure of why or where we’re going, because there’s no longer anywhere to wander to, not even the future." Contemporary writers often reflect this sad reality, and it is helpful to point to (and to publish) the writers who grapple courageously with this dilemma, writers whose imaginations collide with the grim implications of life in a culture which has forgotten the future. The imagination and its image-making, word-creating, storytelling functions now and then afford us life-giving glimpses of the transcendent.

Octavio Paz, Mexican author of more than 40 volumes of poetry and prose and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, has written an extensive biography that reintroduces a long-neglected literary figure of the 17th century: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. One of six illegitimate children of an unusually self-reliant mother who refused marriage, Sor Juana revealed her intellectual gifts early in life, attracting the attention of the court of the vicereine. Seventeenth-century New Spain was a markedly masculine culture, affording women few opportunities to cultivate intellectual talents. Women were barred from school and university, so Sor Juana took upon herself the responsibility for her education. Her accomplishments would be in any age remarkable; in light of her particular circumstances, they are nothing short of miraculous.

Beautiful, learned and eloquent, Sor Juana was not interested in marriage, which in 17th-century Mexico would have required her to relinquish her scholarly and artistic pursuits. Instead, at the age of 20 she left the court and entered a convent where she spent the rest of her life. It was the only place her intellect could flourish. Here she had the freedom to read, amass a library, study science and perfect her musical and poetic talents.

Her astuteness in debate and her literary successes, which included winning university competitions, did not endear her to the church hierarchy, however. Jealous that a woman could so outshine them, they attempted to silence her, but for a long time she was protected by her court sponsors who continually interceded on her behalf. Finally, however, she was forced to relinquish her books, her musical and scientific instruments and her writing. Two years later, at the age of 46, she died after nursing several of the convent sisters through a plague epidemic.

What she left has been collected and translated by Alan Trueblood. The collection contains courtly poetry from her early years, elegant verse addressed to patrons and even in some cases to portraits of patrons -- proof that Sor Juana could play the witty court games as skillfully as anyone. Here also is religious verse presented side-by-side with poetry satirizing the chauvinistic poses of the time. In a poem with the headnote, "She demonstrates the inconsistency of men’s wishes in blaming women for what they themselves have caused," Sor Juana writes:

Silly, you men -- so very adept

at wrongly faulting womankind,

not seeing you’re alone to blame

for faults you plant in woman’s mind.

After you’ve won by urgent plea

the right to tarnish her good name,

you still expect her to behave --

you, that coaxed her into shame.

You batter her resistance down

and then, all righteousness, proclaim

that feminine frivolity,

not your persistence, is to blame.

Also included in this anthology is a letter, "Reply to Sor Philothea," in which Sor Juana discourses at length on the constraints placed on a woman with an active intellect. She describes the time, early in her life in the convent, when a prelate ordered her to stop studying, since it seemed "something for the Inquisition." Until the bishop interceded on Sor Juana’s behalf, she obeyed the order and did not pick up a book, but she reported that she could not keep herself from studying. "I saw nothing without reflecting on it," she writes. "I heard nothing without wondering at it -- not even the tiniest, most material thing. For, as there is no created thing, no matter how lowly, in which one cannot recognize the me facit Deus. . . there is none that does not confound the mind once it stops to consider it."

Sor Juana describes pacing her sleeping room and observing that although floor and ceiling were perfectly parallel, her eyes made the lines of ceiling and floor appear closer at the far end of the room. "And I asked myself whether this could be the reason the ancients questioned whether the world was spherical or not. . . . This type of observation would occur to me about everything and still does, without my having any say in the matter.

Even the most menial tasks contained scientific and philosophic lessons for her. "What could I not tell you, my Lady, of the secrets of Nature which I have discovered in cooking! . . . If Aristotle had been a cook, he would have written much more.

These are companion volumes, handsomely presented. The anthology prints both Spanish and English translations of the poetry -- translations that are accurate, if occasionally prosaic. While Paz’s approach seems somewhat cumbersome, he is, after all, not only presenting a picture of a 17th-century Mexican nun; he is also in a sense rewriting the history of the Counter-Reformation church in New Spain.

Louise DeSalvo’s book is a different kind of literary biography. DeSalvo, whose previous work includes an edition of an early version of one of Virginia Woolf’s novels and a collection of letters from Vita Sackville-West to Woolf, argues that other biographers of Woolf (particularly Quentin Bell) have glossed over the formative traumas of her early life, dismissing them as unimportant and in effect blaming the victim for the abuse she suffered.

From age six until she was well into her 20s Virginia Woolf was molested repeatedly by her half-brother George Duckworth. Her writings reveal that she was not the only victim in her family; her sister Vanessa and her half-sister Stella Duckworth were also victims of sexual abuse at the hands of family members. Biographers have previously portrayed this family as a reasonably stable household with a few eccentricities. According to DeSalvo, this is a false picture of a family that was actually in crisis. These traumas were not closely guarded secrets. Virginia often read portions of her memoirs in public, and in letters and conversations with many people she repeatedly revealed the facts. Biographers have, nonetheless, continued to question the truth of her allegations, or at the very least minimized them.

In April 1939 Woolf recorded in "A Sketch of the Past" her earliest memories, revealing signs that she was in her childhood profoundly depressed, that she learned early not to fight back, that she felt escape was impossible. Here were the seeds of her later despair.

In later years she studied Freud, attempting to come to terms with the sexual abuse she had experienced, but she found no help there. Whereas she was desperately trying to understand her pervasive depression as the result of childhood abuse, Freud argued that reports of incest were usually fantasies. Had she taken Freud seriously, she would have had to conclude that she was mad.

DeSalvo points out the metaphors of drowning that appear so often in Woolf’s writing -- metaphors frequently used by victims of incest. That the metaphor finally became fatally real for Woolf in her own drowning-suicide is the tragically ironic denouement.

In its thoroughness and even tone this carefully researched study of Woolf and her works makes a convincing case that the theme of sexual abuse appears and reappears in Woolf’s work -- from her earliest writing at age ten throughout her life -- and that the traumas of her childhood caused lifelong depression and led to her suicide. Almost as troubling as Woolf’s own suffering is its invisibility in the work of so many critics and biographers who have denied its importance as a cause of her psychological problems in middle age. As outrageous as it may seem, they have even suggested that she enjoyed the abuse she suffered.

Jeanne Murray Walker, professor of English at the University of Delaware, offers in her most recent book of poetry, Coming Into History, some of the finest poems I have read in recent years. This is strongly feminine poetry, in the sense that it is about creation, nurture and connection. Her images are of pregnancy, labor and delivery; she writes about mothering both the infant and her daughter from a previous marriage, about taking a sick child to the doctor. Her titles are "Nursing," "I Won’t Read the Alphabet Book Once More," "Talking to the Baby after Teaching a Poetry Workshop," "Talking to the Baby about Taking the Bus," "Studying Physics with my Daughter."

This is not, however, a simple collection of parenting poems, for in the center, like Blake’s invisible worm that flies in the night, is another presence. These are poems that take as their beginning point headlines from the National Enquirer: "Beauty Queen Has Monster Child," "Woman Picked up by UFO, Flown into Black Hole," "Sweethearts Vanish in Tunnel of Love," "Human Boy Found in Indian Jungle Among Wolf Pack." My favorite is "Man’s Thumb Bleeds for Three Years," in which a man who installs auto glass finds unbearable the silence of the "millions of car windows/resting on their sides" in the shop.

I started to hate Manny, the guy

who brought them in.

I’d see him unloading used ones from the

truck

and I’d want to kill him for saving them

from

the wrecker, like keeping their music

locked

inside this thin shiny sheet. Sot got a

hammer,

cut the wire fence, and started smashing.

The night I let the music out

the sky was all bright riffs and chords

and now my head is clear, if only I

could do something about this bleeding

thumb of mine.

This thumb is the sign he must hide from everyone, the proof of his guilt. Hungry for music, he cannot afford to buy a real keyboard, so he must practice on the one he draws on cardboard, and, as he says, "it gets bloody."

This volume of poems is about coming into the story that we all must step out of someday. It is about fragility, danger and inevitable death. It is filled with the fears, the myths, the fairy tales of every day, the transcendence in the ordinary. In "Dancing in Early Evening" the baby’s father drives home:

Two feet’s mistake

in any direction,

death. He stays on

track, bound down,

so far, so good.

He approaches the house, enters and sweeps up the baby.

You lay your bald head on

his worsted shoulder,

woo him with contralto

toots and drooling.

Then the two of you step out

together, polishing

the floor, your diaper

bagging, pooching, your

fuzzy blue socks flashing, as

night descends, the two

of you untying

obsolete routines, unloosening

gravity’s old malice,

holding one another in

the lamplight, shooby,

romping, dancing, rising,

floating clear of death.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Walker has created a circle of poems. She is not concerned with the linear progression of thought; instead she shows how cycle more accurately defines womanhood. She is concerned with those things passed from woman to woman, those connections with life and death which often come perilously close. Walker dedicates the book to her grandmother who never met Walker’s son, but whose role in creating him was just as great as Walker’s own.

The poems by Malcolm Glass, author of two previous books of poetry, have a tactile quality unusual in contemporary poetry. Whether describing a man constructing and then climbing into a coffin to try out the feel of it or someone swimming into a whale’s mouth, Glass is concerned with making experience immediate and tangible. He also explores the connections between generations of men -- the Harris Tweed that keeps reappearing over the years, the rituals of fishing, the importance of the penknife willed to him by a friend.

I sliced cheese, cut rope,

spread meat on bread

with the knife you used

to clean fish and fidget

with antique clock-works,

the knife willed to me,

mine these three months

you have fallen in the grave.

When I realized it had slipped

from my pocket, gone in the sea

of mountain top grass, I searched

the campsite. I would not

have it seem to mean so little.

Yet I knew all along

how right my losses always are.

Glass reimagines the biblical stories of Jonah, Daniel, Abraham and Isaac, providing new endings occasionally, but always presenting the convincing voice, turning an old story to the light in a new way. In the title poem "In the Shadow of the Gourd," a character very much like Jonah is swallowed by a whale.

I scraped along

coral and rocks, as black currents

dragged me into a cave, narrow

and slimy with eels. When I could

no longer hold my breath, my heart

jumped staccato as my lungs filled

with . . . air! unbearably hot!

My hands and face were burning

as though my skin would shed

all trace of human features.

The whalers finally rescue him:

Someone had seen

movement deep in the stripped carcass.

We hoisted the sagging stomach

on deck and slit it open to find

a man, twisting fitfully in sleep.

We slid him onto the deck

and bathed him in sea water

to revive him.

This mythic re-enactment of Jonah’s adventure and rebirth finds its fulfillment in the man’s ravings for the next few weeks as he seems to relive all history, including Christ’s life and death. Finally, he says, he returns to life, feeling very good "and never quite so human."

Glass’s most pervasive theme is humanity’s eternal attempt to communicate. In "Books" he shows the books themselves -- the making, the binding, the paper and our handling of them, our attempts to read and understand what is written on the page and what is written between the lines, our desire to decipher the hieroglyphs that books are, our hopes to find the meaning in the silences. In "Witnessing" he presents three characters who have witnessed death and then spend their lives trying to understand what they have seen. One is Deborah Lopez, who on a spring walk discovers the skull of "Jennifer Stinson, abductee," leading to Deborah’s own "clueless wandering in search/of language to carry her beyond mere/narrative, beyond logic, beyond fear." The only way for these three witnesses to communicate, the poet says, would be to find each other, but it will never happen.

It never occurs to this small and scattered

band to gather for Witness Anonymous

meetings, to huddle Tuesday nights

in a Fellowship Room or a Lutheran

basement to spill the words again,

to straighten the account once and

always, to know their listeners feel

the same shiver and twist of the spine,

to know they are sure of nothing else.

Hugh Cook works with this theme throughout The Homecoming Man. A major concern of Cook’s is the lack of communication between an aging father and his adult son -- due in part to the father’s inability to come to terms with his past. Pushed into the cowardly betrayal of his friends to the Nazis, he has spent most of his life muffling his guilt. In this novel Cook, author of Cracked Wheat and Other Stories, is once again writing of Canadian Dutch Calvinists. Paul Bloehm returns home after his divorce to work on a translation of 17th-century Dutch verse. He and his father, Gerrit, who is haunted by the secret he has kept for many years, share the same house but live separately.

The novel is about men imprisoned, men who live together yet apart, who must learn the lessons women seem to know already because they are lessons about living in community, about nurturing and about accepting pain and humiliation as part of life. In the preface L. de Jong briefly explores the difference between the male and female experience of Nazi imprisonment. He regrets that for several reasons the bond between men in the camps was not as strong as that between women. The novel attempts to provide a corrective, to show a father and a son learning to share their mourning, learning to reveal their secret selves to each other and finally coming to manhood.

This is a masterful novel by a writer who does not yet seem to have a large American audience, perhaps because of the Dutch Calvinist world he writes about and out of. One hopes readers will see that lying in the particular world Cook describes is the universal. This is a novel about life and faith, about the intersection of Christ’s sacrifice with our own human longings. It is, in short, about all that is important.

Three weeks before her death at the age of 39, Flannery O’Connor copied out a prayer to St. Raphael and sent it to a woman she had never met, but who in the short year and a half of their correspondence had become a close friend. This prayer, which O’Connor said she prayed every day, ends with an image of heaven as a home "beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright with the resplendent glory of God." It was also to this woman, Janet McKane, that O’Connor wrote of receiving communion and the sacrament of the sick (formerly known as extreme unction). Flannery O’Connor knew she was dying. In fact, she had lived with this knowledge for 13 years, ever since she had been diagnosed as having lupus erythematosus, the disease that had killed her father.

It is tempting to speculate about what O’Connor could have accomplished had she lived longer. Fifteen months before her death she wrote: "I appreciate and need your prayers. I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing." Here O’Connor showed uncertainty about what lay ahead for her as a writer, but she also revealed a sense of artistic completion. That she would ask for prayers also indicates a certain measure of anxiety as she approached the unknown. She was, after all, besides an artist and a woman of profound faith, human in her reluctance to leave what she loved so well. In one of her final letters to Janet McKane, O’Connor quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lines: "Márgarét, áre you gríeving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?" She was not complaining, but she did feel a natural human grief. As she wrote in an earlier letter, "You have to cherish the world at the same time you struggle to endure it."

For O’Connor, writing and faith were tightly bound together. She identified "conversion" -- that is, a "character’s changing" -- as the only real subject of good literature. What created story for her, what created the necessary conflict, was a character’s resistance to God’s grace, which often led violently to sudden revelation. She once wrote that loss is frequently a precondition to conversion. Perhaps the loss of her father, and her own debilitating illness, helped keep her faith strong and her writing persistent. "In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies," she wrote in 1956.

O’Connor’s letters, collected by her friend Sally Fitzgerald in The Habit of Being (Vintage, 1979) , bring into clearer focus the human being behind the art. The collection was an invaluable contribution to scholarship, and has, since its publication, offered readers information that is indispensable in understanding the author. The O’Connors did not install a telephone at their farm until late in Flannery’s life, so to communicate with her friends she had to write to them. These letters form a diary beginning in 1948, after her graduation from the University of Iowa’s School for Writers, until her death in 1964.

They allow the occasional reader to dip in and out quickly but they reward the cover-to-cover reader with a strong sense of immediacy. The O’Connor farm, the Georgia characters O’Connor lived with every day, the animals she raised, the visitors who were often invited to stay for dinner live as vividly in her letters as they do in her fiction. One is able to see connections between inhabitants of her daily life and characters in her stories. One can also watch the genesis and development of her work as she related its progress to her friends, who included not only her literary agent and editors, but also people whom she never met face-to-face. Her humor reveals itself in her anecdotes and punch lines, and in the turns of phrase she used to berate a friend’s slip into Freudian terminology or answer a professor of English who asked what she considered unreasonable questions.

Above all, O’Connor’s letters reveal a strong, committed artist, Christian, daughter and friend. She answered the most difficult questions posed to her by friends who did not understand her Catholicism. She shared with fellow Catholics and non-Catholics alike her love for her church and her Lord. She corrected correspondents -- sometimes quite firmly -- when she felt they were wrong, and she often apologized later for her bluntness. But she also encouraged them, sustained them and nourished them with her wit and insight.

Women journal writing has become a genre of its own in the 20th century, but I cannot imagine that O’Connor speaking to herself in diary form could give a reader any more insight into her character than O’Connor in dialogue, which is, essentially, what these letters present.

Like so many writers early in their careers, O’Connor felt she had to leave home to gain a broader perspective than the one afforded her by rural Georgia life. What she was to discover was that for the artist, the entire universe exists in the gesture of the individual, and the individual she knew best was southern. When she finished her studies in Iowa, she moved to Yaddo, a retreat for writers in New York, spent a few months in New York City and then, after returning home for awhile, moved into the Connecticut home of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. When she became ill late in 1950 she returned to Milledgeville and gradually began to realize that Georgia was where she belonged. For the rest of her life she remained close to home with only occasional forays north for speaking engagements and visits. Due to a deteriorating hip joint, she was on crutches for many of these years, and travel was an excruciating ordeal for her.

She and her mother did, however, manage a pilgrimage to Rome and Lourdes, where, as Flannery reported, Sally Fitzgerald made her take the healing baths. She wrote in her only letter from Rome: "Lourdes was not as bad as I expected. I took the bath. For a selection of bad motives, such as to prevent any bad conscience for not having done it, and because it seemed at the time that it must be what was wanted of me. I went early in the morning. Only about 40 ahead of me so the water looked pretty clean. They pass around the water for ‘les malades’ to drink & everybody drinks out of the same cup. As somebody said, the miracle is that the place don’t bring on epidemics. Well, I did it all and with very bad grace" (p. 280) Much to her chagrin and the delight of her elderly cousin who had financed the trip, O’Connor’s hip improved a few months later. But she was determined not to undertake such a trip again. For most of the trip’s 17 days she suffered from a violent cold and later wrote, "We went to Europe and I lived through it but my capacity for staying at home has now been perfected & is going to last me the rest of my life" (p. 285)

The chief animal-keeper at the farm, however, was Regina, her mother. Her influence on her daughter is inestimable, but it is certain that both the colloquial and the Christian in Flannery’s character were gifts from Regina O’Connor. The letters are filled with anecdotes about Regina, whom Flannery affectionately calls "my parent." To Cecil Dawkins, a gifted young writer and regular correspondent, O’Connor wrote in 1959: "The current ordeal is that my mother is now in the process of reading [The Violent Bear It Away]. She reads about two pages, gets up and goes to the back door for a conference with Shot, comes back, reads two more pages, gets up and goes to the barn. Yesterday she read a whole chapter. There are twelve chapters. All the time she is reading, I know she would like to be in the yard digging. I think the reason I am a short-story writer is so my mother can read my work in one sitting" (p. 340).

In O’Connor’s characters, and running throughout her letters, is a streak of humor which is indigenous to the southern cracker. A combination of mild self-deprecation, irony, vivid phrasing and flawless timing, this is the humor that initially turns a reader’s head. She says to one of her correspondents, "I certainly am glad you like the stories because now I feel it’s not bad that I like them so much. The truth is I like them better than anybody and I read them over and laugh and laugh, then get embarrassed when I remember I was the one wrote them" (pp. 80-81).

Toward the end of her life, O’Connor asked a friend to try to find a picture of a statue she had seen of the Madonna and child laughing -- not merely smiling, but laughing heartily. Humor was, for O’Connor, a necessity, so her attraction to the laughing babe who was also to be the suffering Christ is appropriate. For her and for all Christians, sorrow and triumph can be contained in the same image.

It was not her propensity to laughter, however, that provoked so many young writers to ask O’Connor for advice -- both specific advice about individual stories and more general recommendations about the writing process itself. She wrote to these literary newcomers with great seriousness. To Dawkins, who was experiencing a dry spell, she wrote: "You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading" (p. 417). O’Connor’s regimen was to sit at her manual typewriter for two or three hours and follow her characters around. She did not write from an outline, insisting that her characters could carry the stories by themselves. "Remember," she wrote to her friend, "that you don’t write a story because you hive an idea but because you have a believable character (p. 219). She also advised writers to forget about plot when beginning a novel or story. "When you have a character he will create his own situation and his situation will suggest some kind of resolution as you get into it. Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you" (p. 188). (In one of the books in her personal library [Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism: With Other Essays], O’Connor underlined the following passage: "Do not make the absurd attempt to sever in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you really are a Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some aesthetic system. But apply only the artist in you to the work in hand; precisely because they are one, the work will be as wholly of the one as of the other". [Arthur Kinney, Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (University of Georgia Press, 1985) , p. 94].)

O’Connor spoke of "self-abandonment" in writing, a lack of self-consciousness, and compared this experience with "Christian self-abandonment" (p. 458) , suggesting that in both her faith life and her artistic life, the self could become a vehicle for the Other. When this occurred, she was so entirely caught up in the creative process that she forgot completely about her physical situation. Only then could she become a channel for God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s breath.

As a Catholic, O’Connor possessed a sacramental understanding that gave her art its solid base. She wrote to a professor, "You said something about my stories dipping into life -- as if this were commendable but a trifle unusual; from which I get the notion that you may dip largely into your head. This would be in line with the Protestant temper -- approaching the spiritual directly instead of through matter" (p. 304). Because O’Connor accepted sacrament as truth, she found it easy to view the natural things of this world as vehicles or instruments for God’s grace. The concrete, the hearable, sayable, seeable object or event always possessed the potential to be used sacramentally. In her stories the world of matter is always a handle for one of God’s mysteries, making it accessible, if not completely understandable.

By today’s standards O’Connor was a conservative Catholic. She accepted without question, for example, the pope’s dictum on birth control, writing, rather tersely, "Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding" (p. 338). She requested official permission to read books on the Catholic Index, but probably would not have read them if she had been denied that permission. She was not comfortable with the spoken English mass, and she was, as might be expected, a lover of the liturgy. "many prayer books are awful," she wrote in 1956, if you stick with the liturgy, you are safe" (p. 160). Liturgy was for O’Connor the careful arrangement of worship so that human weariness or inattentiveness or laziness did not intrude upon the worship of an entire congregation. A priest’s feelings on a particular day did not change the liturgy, which was consistent, operative and effective in spite of human weakness.

Living in the South, a region fraught with tritely emotional religious expression, O’Connor distrusted feelings as an indicator of faith. She wrote at length about this and other Christian issues to a woman identified in Fitzgerald’s collection only as "A." "There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion" (p. 100). As she wrote later, "We [Catholics] don’t believe grace is something you have to feel. The Catholic always distrusts his emotional reaction to the sacraments" (pp. 346-47).

O’Connor was often critical of what she considered Protestant shortcomings. "A Protestant habit is to condemn the Church for being authoritarian and then blame her for not being authoritarian enough" (p. 347). She had a healthy respect for fundamentalist Protestants, and she was alarmed at the liberal theology she heard coming from some Protestant camps. "One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so and that religion is our own sweet invention" (p. 479). She understood the difference between cheap grace and costly grace. "What people don’t realize," she wrote to Louise Abbot, "is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross" (p. 354).

O’Connor felt that fundamentalist Protestant churches were closer to Rome than they realized, even though many still considered the Roman Catholic Church the archenemy. The grand equalizer was the universal experience of unbelief, which O’Connor considered the necessary starting point of faith. Though she misidentified the biblical figures, she reminded one correspondent of the plea issued by the father of an epileptic boy whom Jesus heals (in Mark 9:24) : "1 believe. Help my unbelief" (p. 476). She pointed out that Peter, the founder of the church, was the same man "who denied Christ three times and couldn’t walk on the water by himself" (p. 307).

O’Connor was realistic about human nature and its ability to resist grace (p. 307), and she understood the ebbs and flows of faith. Perhaps because she felt that conversion was a continual process, she was troubled but not burdened when her friends experienced momentary setbacks in their faith lives. She wrote to "A," who had converted to Catholicism and was now filled with doubts:

O’Connor’s conviction that our age is deaf and blind to truth appears in all her writings. How to reach a handicapped generation is her constant concern. She does it by shouting or drawing very large pictures, and recommends pushing "as hard as the age that pushes against you" (p. 229).

The violence that shocks so many first-time readers of her fiction initially seems so unpalatable because it is so personal. We usually encounter violence at a distance, but O’Connor forces it upon us in a form we cannot escape. Whether it is the drowning of a child in a river or the murder of an old man in the stairwell of his apartment building or the massacre of an entire family on a deserted Georgia road, O’Connor pushes readers to the brink over and over again. "The kingdom of heaven," she writes, "has to be taken by violence or not at all" (p. 229). Her stories are particularly difficult for the secular "good man," who will not find in them many examples of the godly life, but who will be continually challenged to define and redefine his conception of goodness. "It’s not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical culture series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh" (p. 227). She goes on to identify this as both a Roman Catholic and an orthodox Protestant belief.

In O’Connor’s works one is always pushed back to the agonizing scandal of the cross. That scandal has at its heart the recognition that humanity is fallen and needs redemption. Perhaps because the South still smarts from its own fall in the War Between the States, redemption has a special meaning there. With defeat comes the realization that humanity cannot save itself or perfect itself alone, that humanity is vulnerable and weak. In 1958 O’Connor wrote that "the Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt. and is ultimately perfectable by his own efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all the mysteries will eventually be cleared up" (p. 302).

Of course, for the Christian the mysteries, finally remain mysterious. Perhaps this recognition that not all human motivation and behavior can be completely explained accounts for O’Connor’s strong feelings against the social sciences (ironic because she was a social-science major in college) Freudians particularly irritated her. She wrote William Sessions: "I do hope . . that you will get over the kind of thinking that sees in every door handle a phallic symbol. . . . The Freudian technique can be applied to anything at all with equally ridiculous results. My Lord, Billy, recover your simplicity. You ain’t in Manhattan. Don’t inflict that stuff on the poor students there: they deserve better" (p. 407).

In many letters O’Connor referred in a deprecating tone to academics in general and English teachers in particular. She answered one professor’s questions about her story, "Greenleaf": "Thank you for your note. I’m sorry I can’t answer it more fully but I am in the hospital and not up to literary questions. . . . As for Mrs. May, I must have named her that because I knew some English teacher would write and ask me why. I think you folks sometime strain the soup too thin" (p. 582). She threw up her hands at one well-known literary critic, wondering, "Can it be possible that a man with this much learning knows so little about Christianity?" (p. 411). That was the problem she faced every time she published. She was writing for an audience to whom the incarnation had little meaning, and yet her fiction repeatedly showed common people encountering the terror, mystery and beauty of the Word made flesh. She might have predicted that many of her readers would be mildly puzzled, if not completely confounded.

That fiction contained truth was the conviction she lived with every day. The fact that this truth was sometimes odd or uncomfortable or violent, that it led often to the grotesque, O’ Connor faced unflinchingly. Quoting Robert Fitzgerald, she wrote, "It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth" (p. 343). What could be stranger than a God who decides to suffer with us? What could be more uncomfortable or more violent than the cross? What could be more comically grotesque than an individual trying to escape his own identity as God’s child and in his rush out the temple door smacking straight into the incarnation?

One experiences a depressing sense of inevitability as one nears the end of the letters. The temptation is simply to stop reading -- as if that would somehow prevent the end from coming. Her final letter, written on July 29, 1964, was found on her nightstand after her death. In referring to an anonymous phone call her friend had received, she was playful but serious. "Be properly scared," O’Connor advised, "and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions . . . Cheers, Tarfunk" (p. 596).

Such proper scaring is what many of O’Connor’s characters and readers required and experience. We must go on doing what we have to do, but with better eyes and more sensitive ears, having run into truth along the way.

Many people have heard of Naipaul, but few know much about him. His writings have proven arresting, though for reasons few commentators have articulated. This failure of insight has become more acute as Naipaul’s stature has grown. With the publication of Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (Knopf) in 1981, Naipaul reached the pages of the Atlantic and the cover of Newsweek.

Naipaul presents a consistent image of social reality in the non-Western world, where dispossessed people search for order in their lives. His own search for rootedness bespeaks the search of many colonial peoples. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born on Trinidad in 1932. He world was bounded by Indian descent and the racial mix of a colonial island. Wanting to transcend his boundaries, Naipaul entered Oxford on an island scholarship at 17. Following graduation and a period of employment with the British Broadcasting Corporation, he began writing full-time. He became a resident of England, married an English woman, and in 1957 published his first book, The Mystic Masseur (A. Deutsch), a novel about a failed Trinidadian masseur turned Hindu guru. Sixteen books, from novels about the Caribbean to journalistic accounts of Third World travels, have followed.

Naipaul gives us a broad sense of human experience -- so broad, in fact, that critics from the social science realms may encounter questionable assumptions or generalizations. He sometimes appears to define historical or political facts carelessly. But that in itself does not gainsay the reality he represents. Writing as a dispossessed person, one who has been culturally uprooted and forced to create his own world, Naipaul presents not objective reality but subjective perceptions. He finds personal resonance with the world views of the dispossessed, the former colonial subjects now cast on their own resources and in search of distinctive identity. Both empathic and critical, Naipaul catalogues the failures of developing societies. The quest for autonomy and form, inherently admirable, reveals opportunities for self-deception, for seizing the image of a coherent self or the illusion of a just society rather than grasping their essence. Worse than formless existence is the chaos of an imagined order imposed on reality. In Naipaul’s novels, as in his own life, there are certain givens. The most elusive one is the West. Naipaul has expended little ink on the circumstances of the West’s expansion, on the motives for colonialism or the lineaments of Western culture itself. The West, as Naipaul depicts it, is vaguely English and American, an inchoate cluster of culture and technology. Jet planes and Coca-Cola cross the lives of his characters. Democratic ideals and bureaucratic realities circumscribe images of freedom. Marxism, the most convenient ideology of rebellion, represents yet another Western legacy, as though one were obliged to rebel against the West in a prescribed, Western way. The Loss of El Dorado (A. Deutsch, 1969), a historical essay, presents Western fascination with virgin, non-Western land. But otherwise Naipaul says little about the West’s assertion of its dominance.

This is not a crippling omission. Naipaul, of course, depicts a subjective sense of reality. Rootless non-Westerners perceive Western influence as an inheritance. Dispossession is a state into which one is born, a fact not of one’s own choosing. Naipaul’s perspective begins with the non-Western person’s realization of this state, of the sense of having boundaries drawn around his or her life by the West. Having sensed this dispossession, the former colonial begins to fantasize, to dream of greater reality, and seeks to create the conditions of liberation.

The restive person first pursues liberation through conformity. Reality drawn from Western example prompts mimicry. Having failed as a masseur and author, Ganesh Ramsumair, protagonist of The Mystic Masseur, discovers Hollywood’s image of the Hindu sage. Donning a turban and dhoti (loincloth) and burning incense, Pundit Ganesh attracts a following lured more by his airs than by his ersatz wisdom. Success enables him to build a career in politics and spurs him to change his name to G. Ramsay Muir.

Politics provides a clue to understanding mimicry. At its core, in Naipaul’s vision, status devolves from political power. But the celebrity finds that he retains power only so long as he embodies popular aspirations. Ralph Singh, an exiled colonial minister in the novel The Mimic Men (Macmillan, 1967), experiences the fate of being a retired symbol. Useful no more, Singh loses power. Similarly, Eva Peron became Peronism’s madonna. She emerged from Argentina’s poor and clawed her way to status. She sanctified the Peronist ideology of wealth for all. Her tragic death, writes Naipaul in The Return of Eva Peron (Knopf, 1980), was the “public passion play of the dictatorship.”

The Western legacy is democracy with material comfort. But in the developing world, events rush out of control. Behind the sense of order conveyed by Western political models stands chaos. Western culture remains as ~.a veneer, an illusion which obscures a confused, tumultuous search for recognition and security. In The Suffrage of Elvira (A. Deutsch, 1958), a fictional account of a district election on Trinidad, the process of campaigning becomes a carnival, a ritual of aspirations and fears in the guise of democracy. The British political model when transplanted retains its form but sheds its original meaning in favor of local alternatives. A multiracial, colonial society seizes upon such rites as elections as legitimation of its quest for an indigenous order.

Naipaul’s ability to depict the aspirations of individuals surpasses his social sensitivity. His corpus is a montage of individual portraits, glimpses of ordinary people who exemplify extraordinary reality. Miguel Street (A. Deutsch, 1959) is a series of brief portrayals of characters who inhabit a section of Port of Spain. Here all are poor and all fantasize about a better life. Fantasy turns to mimicry. The reader meets Bogart, who called himself Patience until the film Casablanca reached Trinidad. Bogart cultivates an American accent and gives chocolates to children. There is also Man-man, failed politician turned evangelist, and B. Wordsworth, the poet who dreams lines but never writes poetry.

Yet “the eternal Indian attempt to incorporate and nullify” has created a destructive psychology. Ancient cultural forms persist, shorn of their original rationale. The fulfillment of function, the blind allegiance to memory, renders India subservient to symbolic gestures rather than alert to social realities; thus Indians have been reduced to mimicry of themselves in the name of resisting pollution by alien cultures. Naipaul argues that Indians must realize that they can never go forward until they cease trying to go back to the past.

Other societies, less culturally malleable than India, cannot retreat into an inner world. Either they are artificial creations of Western expansion -- thus wildly heterogeneous -- or their indigenous cultural forms allow no easy acceptance of the West. One of the pillars of Naipaul’s vision is his sensitivity to the power of the past. Traditional cultural forms relentlessly reassert themselves; social habit takes over where mimicry fails. The past, in Naipaul’s scheme, asserts itself in a fascination with things medieval and an appreciation for traditional religions. In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul presents Srinagar as a medieval spectacle, offering festivals and wonders such as holy men. Religion passes on forms without regard for history. The past can be selectively appropriated, romanticized, shorn of evidence of pa1lution from the outside. Religion records memories of human aspirations and threatens to impose its forms whole on changed realities. A traditional pilgrimage to a cave where an ice formation symbolic of Shiva has appeared in years past reveals hundreds of devotees but no ice formation: the act of making pilgrimage itself proves sufficient.

The past’s appeal is an underlying theme of Among the Believers. Qom, the Iranian holy city, functions as a medieval center of learning. As did medieval Spain or medieval Arabia, Qom symbolizes the integration of faith and life. Pakistan, too, represents the search for a pure Islamic nation. People who feel dispossessed, Naipaul writes, find kinship with a resurgent Islam. Fundamentalist Islam glorifies a time that never existed, an imagined past when triumphant Arabs unified faith and life and forged an ideology of conquest. Thus the achievement of purity -- symbolized by throwing off the West’s pollution -- becomes an obsession, representing salvation. In the process, however, history serves theology. The present mimics the past, for the past cannot be reconstituted. But the past lingers, though in forms that thwart a purist’s vision: ancient Malaysian village society persists; traditional Indonesian pluralism dilutes Islam with Hindu and Buddhist residues; Pakistan finds that it has nothing that can effectively replace the British system of law. Escape proves difficult from the more recent, as from the more distant, past; pure recovery is an illusion.

Fear of losing one’s remembered culture breeds frustration. The West becomes an unwelcome interloper which one cannot escape but to which one cannot adapt. Historical and social realities blur in a sense of dispossession; of being cut off from an imagined glorious past. Frustration mounts and engenders anger. Western pollution must be stripped away. Indigenous forms of life must be reanimated. But still, Naipaul injects, holy men travel by jet, Iranians go to America for education, and phonograph records by the Carpenters are popular in Pakistan. The West is too massive and too convenient to be excised whole. It becomes an easy target for rage.

Rage also figures prominently in Among the Believers. The Iranian revolution seizes upon religion as a vehicle for social purgation. The West has proven empty. Social self-esteem can be appropriated from the past, from a pure reanimation of a cultural heritage. The enraged assume that something or someone can bequeath social wholeness. But history proves awkward; it must be treated selectively with a cultivated blindness to truth. Therein lies the dilemma of revolution. It falls prey to fantasy, much as the West did in its search for El Dorado, the mythical city of gold. Naipaul’s most searing question emerges in his study of Pakistan.

Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

Despite his pessimism, Naipaul affirms a human capacity for genuine change. The quest for freedom, despite aberrant turns, is innate. Therein lies the source of human wholeness and social integrity. Bobby and Linda, traveling across Africa in the novel In a Free State (A. Deutsch, 1971), find themselves separated from the influences of traditions and societies. Their sense of self derives from the land’s immediacy. A powerful sense of the self in relation to history emerges.

People seek to impose forms on the land. In itself this is good, for it demonstrates the human zeal for freedom from fate, from imprisonment by the past. In A House for Mr. Biswas (A. Deutsch, 1961), a novel suggestive of his father’s life, Naipaul presents Mohun Biswas, who, despite all that augurs against him, determines to be different, to have his own house and to make himself unique. Failures multiply; he receives scorn at every turn. But he persists: he reads, works, aspires.. Eventually, Biswas becomes a journalist and acquires a house. Like his life, the house is a hodgepodge, a poorly assimilated assortment of ill-coordinated elements. Nevertheless, his spirit has reached out and impressed itself on the land.

As Naipaul discovered for himself in India, the human spirit must know itself in relation to the land; the land desolates fantasy. Culture, including religion, serves to symbolize the history of human reliance on land. Among India’s mountains Naipaul absorbed a sense of genuine heritage. Thus, for all the dispossessed, a realization of the self’s aspirations can derive only from the inherent sense of order found in nature. Here a transcendent reality prevails. Here freedom becomes possible.