UniBrow

As I’ve mentioned here before, I greatly admire the work of novelist Paul West. Though I haven’t read any of his most recent books–I am a bloody fool–there was a period some years back when I couldn’t leave him alone. His prose is lush, complicated, musical, often earthy–just gorgeous, and utterly unlike anyone else’s. The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, Lord Byron’s Doctor, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, Rat Man of Paris, Love’s Mansion, and the essays collected in the Sheer Fiction volumes–most memorably ”In Defense of Purple Prose”–are all, both in tenor and by example, antidotes to everything that is wrong with everything.

And I didn’t know until just today, when I found this, that in 2003 West suffered a stroke that left him with a condition called “global aphasia,” the complete inability to process language either in speech or in writing. The link takes you to an excerpt from West’s forthcoming memoir about his experiences since the stroke–the writing of which, in exhausting dictation sessions, apparently served as the speech therapy he needed to re-enter the world of words. West has also recently completed a novel, according to the little preamble supplied by his wife, the writer Diane Ackerman. 

If you’d like to hear a piece of orchestral music inspired by Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–and why wouldn’t you?–go here and listen to David Heuser’s A Screaming Comes Across the Sky. You have the choice of listening to it entire or just hearing an excerpt–but the whole piece is only six minutes long, so try to deal.

A new book of her letters … show [Mother Teresa] struggling for decades against disbelief. … That may rattle some believers, but it is a welcome reminder that saints, too, are only human, and that stories of dauntless piety tend to be false.

–The New York Times, Sept. 5, 2007

Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are thought to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?

–Sam Harris, The Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2007

Well, I wouldn’t begrudge the Times editors their point about the humanizing of Mother Teresa. She is very definitely and very considerably humanized by the news of her–let’s call it what it is–panting inability to believe in the Christian god. It’s just that it’s a little bit difficult to see how these revelations could possibly fail to jeopardize her canonization, given the standards of once-upon-a-time (of which more below), and surely the church is–at a minimum–denying that anyone it confers sainthood upon is “only human.” Then, too, it’s dispiriting to see The New York Times joining the spin chorus. Struggles with doubt may indeed make Mother Teresa’s story more moving and render her a more relatable figure; grappling with doubt may even place her in company with St. Augustine and St. John of the Cross. But her apparent inability to shed those doubts separates her from those icons irretrievably. And I would think that this might matter to the Vatican and to ordinary Catholics as well. But standards are slipping everywhere, even in St. Peter’s, and PR sham is the sovereign imperative. It was well known before all this surfaced that Mother Teresa had been placed on a fast track to sainthood by the late Pope John Paul II–a transparently cynical gambit, in Christopher Hitchens’s view, to distract lay Catholics from the child-rape scandal that it nurtured for decades and to give them something positive to rally around. So the Vatican has been unequivocal in its willingness to overlook some of the niceties it once observed–um–religiously in stocking its pantheon, at least in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning international celebrity who carried the white-man’s burden to the Calcutta slums. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone if this latest development doesn’t slow things down.

Your dutiful host was raised in the Catholic tradition and found it to be (among other things) superb training for a lifetime of godlessness. I even attended a gender-segregated Catholic high school, where in my sophomore- or junior-year religion course I was told of a religious figure (I cannot remember his name) who had been under consideration for sainthood but was rejected after church officials–for whatever reason–exhumed his body and found him in a position that suggested he had been buried alive. Any chance of canonization ended right there, apparently, because the church couldn’t be sure of the man’s state of mind during those final, desperate, horrifying hours or days while he still lived in the ground. The strongest piety might not be proof against God-denying thoughts under such harrowing circumstances. This is the story we got, at any rate, from the meek and wizened little Christian Brother who taught the class. The case of Mother Teresa isn’t exactly the same as this, of course, but we should remember that God denial counts as blasphemy, and if Teresa didn’t deny God, lamentations like this come awfully close:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love–and now become as the most hated one–the one–You have thrown away as unwanted–unloved. I call, I cling, I want–and there is no One to answer–no One on Whom I can cling–no, No One.–Alone … Where is my Faith–even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness–My God–how painful is this unknown pain–I have no Faith–I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crows in my heart–& make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them–because of the blasphemy–If there be God–please forgive me–When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven–there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.–I am told God loves me–and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

I can’t read these words without sympathizing with the person who wrote them, and even admiring her honesty and courage in committing them to paper, whether or not she ever expected them to become known. But seriously–when it comes to her prospects for sainthood, it doesn’t matter that she ended her days in this state of mind?

There’s a worthwhile exchange under way this week at Slate between Meghan O’Rourke, Slate’s literary editor, and novelist Walter Kirn. The subject is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, and it’s worth hooking onto mainly for Kirn’s entries. (O’Rourke has never impressed me.) Kirn, the author of several novels (haven’t read ‘em), including one that he dribbled out serially in Slate for the better part of last year (didn’t even consider reading that one–I just don’t want to get a novel that way), has so far posted only one meditation on Kerouac’s novel, but it’s a real beauty. You owe it to yourself. Here he is describing what happens to him every time he re-encounters the book: 

First, I mourn.

I mourn for the whole doomed enterprise and for the ideas, so dated now, so dead, that convinced its author it was possible.

I mourn the idea that America could be healed not through the calibration and adjustment of competing interests and group identities—through lobbying, lawyering, and legislating—but through participation in a great ecstasy. (One modeled, perhaps, on the compassionate mania of On the Road’s Dean Moriarty, “who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was … “)

I mourn the idea that the geographical is personal and that rivers and plains and cityscapes—and even place names, in some mysterious way—aren’t interchangeable backdrops to our lives but fundamental sources of our fates. (“Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another, and at dusk we were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering. … “)

I mourn the idea that a novelist needn’t promise us any more than this: You need to hear this because I need to tell you, and the reason I need to tell you is that it happened, because if a thing can happen it must mean something—or else nothing means anything, which is highly possible. (“It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel.”)   

Exit Ghost, a new Philip Roth novel–and, it seems, Nathan Zuckerman’s valedictory appearance–is due out October 1. I was intrigued to see that Roth is returning to the ground of The Ghost Writer, the first and in many ways the best of the Zuckerman books. Here’s the Publishers Weekly description:

Philip Roth’s 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer’s young and beautiful wife. There’s also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can’t help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth’s voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animal than Everyman.

It’s Labor Day weekend, and you will be out there–out there where I am, except that you’ll be out there with your mayonnaises and your gluten breads and your brewskies and boxes of vinegary wine. And your clattering, belching motorcars. You are in savage need of the following highway-safety public-service announcement.