Dostoevsky's Faith
I have several contradictory layers in my psychology. One of them is a Catholic layer--the default, semi-conscious training from childhood--while yet another layer rebels against religion. This contradiction is probably related to having a great model of faith in my mother, on the one hand, and seeing my family get cut off the vine for no good reason, on the other. My dad had confessed at Bible study that he quit drinking, so these Christians cut us off. They said he'd been a secret drinker and a liar, so we had to go, though he'd gone to a recovery center and was sober. Even their children were forbidden to speak to me and my brother at school.
Christianity can feel quite shitty to those who have felt the lash and blister of a church picnic gone wrong. Many people feel this way, for good reasons.
But it's unfair to categorize all Christians according to the negative behaviors of some. I've had good experiences too. Once, in Portland in 2000, I was drinking buddies with a priest, a gay man who was hazed and tormented by some in his church. Someone had taken pictures of him entering gay bars with cross-dressers and put together an album. But the diocese stood up for him, and so did many parishioners.
Regarding the behaviors of the faithful, there were more good than bad in that situation.
I tend to disfavor hearing someone's absolute disdain for faith. I've met quite a few intelligent Christians, even some who share my skepticism of garish Jesus culture in America.
I've also known and liked some Christians who hated atheism. And I've known and liked a few atheists who hated Christianity.
In addition, I continue to have some views that are Catholic. I go to mass on a rare occasion, and I keep my mom's Celtic cross in my desk drawer. I like to see it there when I open the drawer to find a pen. I'm not one to hang a cross on the wall. But it feels meaningful and good to keep her cross in the drawer, where I see it often.
My experience with baleful Christians and salutary ones amounts to a draw, but I rest easy in my contradiction. There's no need to make furious boundaries between myself and entire groups of people. Evil exists in every demographic. I love the orthodox Catholic Flannery O'Connor and the atheist Christopher Hitchens. So be it.
Both Hitchens and Flannery have been castigated lately. Americans have a hard time forgiving authors their sins these days. The reason might be that our roots go back to Cotton Mather and the Puritan communities that shamed, banished, or destroyed sinners. All exceptions granted. There were thoughtful and educated Puritans. But even now, many Americans, right and left, love to gather around a sinner and jeer and scream like devils. It's in our blood.
As I say, I usually dislike blanket prejudices about Christianity or atheism. But I make exceptions when I like the person who's talking. Christopher Hitchens absolutely hated Christianity. But he was a charming genius, a force, one of the most articulate and educated people of our time, and he wrote about many other subjects.
Much of his criticism about Christianity exposes a cultural ignorance of those who wave their Bibles and flags in the air--behaviors that are likely offensive to intelligent Christians.
“The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.”
When some Christians find out you like Hitchens, it's a deal-breaker. They turn against you. Likewise, some atheists will disown you if you confess a fondness for C.S. Lewis. In our ridiculous culture wars, these flareups of solipsism and rebuke occur constantly. I'm glad I don't need to keep up the illusion of consistency with any club. I prefer individuals who see by their own lights, who aren't absolutely owned by ideology or religion, who pick and choose according to their personality and taste. Therefore I'm sometimes lonely.
I have known atheists who are disgusted by Dostoevsky, simply because he was a Christian. Since none of them were charming geniuses, I didn't think highly of them. But Hitchens loved Dostoevsky, and he didn't care that he was a Christian. Hitch put aside his own prejudice when he encountered great art.
Dostoevsky explores myriad human territories, embracing and respecting characters who are religious, atheistic, morally adrift, or deeply troubled. And all of them so intelligent! He animates their lives with the verbal skills to say who they are, to make their case, whether he agrees with them or not. He spends no time measuring people for their proper religious or political weights. He is wide open to human truths. He loves people, all people. I trust his vision, and therefore I love his faith.
In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov commits a terrible crime--he murders a moneylender and her sister--but the narrator refuses to talk above him. Instead, he stays close to this protagonist and his psychology, seeking to understand him. There are no sermons or abstractions--it's all Raskolnikov and his adventure.
And yet the book remains an expression of Dostoevsky's faith. Raskolnikov runs from the law, conjuring many reasons why they were justified murders. After all, great men like Napoleon killed people in service of their goals, he reasons. Sometimes he's Jonah, other times Job. But through his friendship with Sonya, the Christian prostitute who'd been sold out by her family, he comes to recognize his crime and find redemption.
It's first and foremost a human story. Faith is evident in these pages, but it finds human form, the scenes inbreathed with wisdom and sympathy, not judgment, not scorn, and thus it is one of the great Christian books.
Jim Thompson's 1950s crime novel The Killer Inside Me explores Lou Ford's life as a deputy sheriff in Central City, Texas. He seems like one of the solid "fellas" in town who holds up the law and keeps out the "bad elements," in his lazy manner, and when sometimes he has to bring down hard fists on a transient, townspeople don't mind. After all, he's an ordinary man and a good guy, cares about justice and doing right, and he makes people chuckle at the diner. A man of casual honor and chivalry--he knows the social codes, and it's useful to advertise them--he mostly exhibits a penchant for hanging around and making women smile.
Lou is funny and a little strange. In the diner, he offers lazy, inscrutable words that seem meaningful, though it's hard to say what he's getting at. In this quote, he seems to compare himself to the weather, as if even bad weather might create something good in the world.
"Another thing about the weather," I said. "Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything. But maybe it's better that way. Every cloud has its silver lining, at least that's the way I figure it. I mean, if we didn't have the rain we wouldn't have the rainbows, now would we?"
He's a good-looking man, and his looks and the attractive power of his badge have steered more than a few women into homes and motel rooms, beyond the eyes of the town. Sure, he has roughed up a few women, but for the most part, there were no bones broken or heads smashed too hard--or so the other men in law enforcement reason. A guy who takes on the bad men of the world has to let off some steam. Lou is as good as they come--a decent, Christian man who is well-liked. His bad behaviors have happened out of view, and therefore they don't exist.
This was 1950s Texas, a good time and place for those who wanted to abuse their power.
But soon we learn of Lou's extensive obsession with inflicting pain on others, especially women. It's his greatest pleasure. When "the sickness" takes over, he hunts this need and he will have it, whether it leaves a woman broken or dead.
The genius of the book is that Lou is likeable in the beginning, and remains so here and there, despite our growing recognition that he's a monster. Since Lou is casually smart and a little odd past his country-boy disguise, he works on us the same way many evil people do--charms, delights, makes us laugh, until we get to know them better.
It's a far more interesting and literary experience to like an ambiguous and evil character than to dislike an unambiguous and evil character. In the latter case, there's not much reason to finish the book.
Sooner or later, we understand that Lou is a pure sociopath and malignant narcissist, a man who conducts every public utterance to seem a certain way, and he's no longer charming, though he remains interesting. He removes himself in increments from our sympathy.
This quote is from the voiceover of the fantastic film adaptation, with Casey Affleck playing Lou.
"Out here you say yes ma'am an no ma'am to anything with a skirt on. Out here if you catch a man with his pants down you apologize, even if you have to arrest him afterwards. Out here you're a man and a gentleman or you aren't anything at all. And god help you if you're not."
I lose my sympathy for Lou, but not for the book. The Killer Inside Me shares a kinship with Macbeth, Crime and Punishment, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Lolita, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. If we don't get tangled up emotionally with these cracked protagonists, maybe we're not losing ourselves enough in the book, when a book is exactly the right place to get lost in.
Giovanni's Room
A blond, respectable, bisexual young man, David has leaned on his belief that he likes women, and he has a girlfriend when he meets Giovanni in Paris, though she's in Spain seeking to discover whether she wants to remain with him. Giovanni, a young bartender who lives in a maid's room, projects a vitality that is mesmerizing.
David has lived on the edges of a homosexual milieu in Paris, while conducting an upright heterosexual life. From a car he glimpses many butcher shops, and regards the daily lifestyle of unrestrained sexuality as a brutal reality that he ought to avoid.
But of course he follows Giovanni to his room, and he is never the same. He's repelled--repelled by himself--and he falls in love, and he despises his new lover.
“But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.”
When Giovanni is convicted of a terrible crime--the reader learns of this in the beginning of the book--David enters a darkness in which he feels that he is forever trapped. There is no longer any escape from his own nature or the young man he loves.
"People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget."
I feel intimidated when I read such a line of psychological learnedness. Then I remember to slow down to a speed of deep learning, allowing the words to become part of my own education.
Enormous narrative care attends the protagonist's cravings and recriminations. None of it exists without characterization.
Giovanni's Room is indeed an education. It's one of the top books from this celebrated author.
A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is one of Hemingway's top four books. There are so many drop-dead gorgeous lines, delivered in his characteristic sensory and metaphorical manner, and though I have read it thirty times, I'm a little shaky and breathless when I read certain passages of it on a good day.
“I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”
Frederick Henry refuses all the abstractions of war. He is cold and clear-thinking in his position as lieutenant ambulance driver for the Italian army. But he is in love with Catherine Barkley, and in this area he is emotional.
Though in the beginning Catherine says things like, "There isn't any me anymore. Don't make up a separate me," Frederick speaks in this love language later. Their language might sound treacly or absurd at times, but Hemingway always wanted to locate "the way it was," and this is what being in love sounds like, even if it's sometimes off-putting to those within earshot of the lovers.
I have heard that some readers believe Catherine is a flimsy female character and a projection of Hemingway's machismo, partly due to her love language, but also because she expresses femininity and is a traditional woman of her time. Since I also dislike false female characters whose speech and manner are silly and unconvincing, I understand the frustration of encountering such characters.
But Catherine has real depth. She has experienced loss in the war before meeting Fredrick. She's strong, but also a bit broken and spooked. She imagines herself dead in the rain now and then. She's not crazy, but she feels the pull and dread of her psychology during war, especially.
If Catherine is traditional, she also displays uncommon independence. When she gets pregnant and her nurse friends are melting in paroxysms regarding this "shame," Catherine is light-hearted about the child growing in her, knowing that such things happen in wartime. She believes she and Frederick are already spiritually married--a daring attitude in a time when pregnant unmarried women were often considered throw-away whores.
Catherine emerges as an exemplar to Frederick. As a hard-working nurse in wartime, she embodies the highest form of love, expressed by Fredrick's friend the priest: the value of doing for others.
When Frederick meets Catherine, he's just a kid. He later understands that he loves one of the strongest people he has met, and he is deeply influenced by her.
“I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
And since Catherine is brave--and psychologically wounded by the world--she becomes an authentic Hemingway hero, a designation of high respect.
Mrs. Dalloway
Most of what I have read about Clarissa Dalloway, or seen in films, presents her as an upper-class woman who gives a lot of parties to avoid her somewhat troubled interior and the silences of her life. This characterization suggests she avoids deep thought and hard realities.
But she's in fact plunged deeply into clear-eyed explorations of her life and her feeling.
Though she's conventional and attentive to social forms, she has an uncommon capacity to enjoy things. She throws herself into the vitality of London walks alone, noticing all the sensory richness and the metaphorical qualities of the world.
At the same time, she allows the stray disquiet to emerge in her thoughts, and she doesn't swat the thought away. She stays with it.
“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
Maybe her flaw is that she lives in deep analytical thought too much. But she's not escaping in her remembrance. She confronts the suffering of her past and present and interrogates it. She feels the social limitations of middle age, when it was time for women to put away colorful clothes. She explores the memory of a woman she loved and precisely how the experience made her feel so alive.
This protagonist brings to the page an enormous desire to understand herself, even while she ignores certain unpleasantness about her marriage. Yes, she's conventional and proper, but she appreciates authentic people and true utterances.
Now and then, Virginia Woolf's truth-telling nature seems to rise in Mrs. Dalloway.
“For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”
Clarissa isn't Virginia Woolf, though. She has a side of her that is respectable, fearful, wishing to do what's proper and ensure a comfortable life--always putting on a good face. Through Peter Walsh's point of view, we learn that she was all enthusiasm for Richard, her dull fiancé, who was sturdy and rich, a good catch, well-connected, and she quoted his banalities to her friends.
"With twice his wits," reports Walsh, "she had to see things through his eyes--one of the tragedies of married life."
Later, in middle age, Clarissa seems to feel that anything passionate in her world is happening inside of her solitary capacity to feel it.
If she gives parties to avoid the silence, it's also true that she sits with the silence of a perceptive interior for hours each day. She might buy flowers and have parties to take a break from these thoughts, but it's not as though she avoids interior exploration. That's what the popular view seems to get wrong.
Some people hide from their pain and do whatever they can to escape it, chattering about all the things that don't matter, throwing parties and doing anything to hide. But that's not Clarissa Dalloway.
Rethinking Politics
I used to embrace a libertarian ideal of free-speech, until I discovered the right and left censor in equal fashion. Right or left isn’t the problem. Politics is the problem.
Ideology divides people and it divides the mind. It’s rare to encounter anyone who declares a love of Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, for instance. Most people would pick one or the other, as an expression of their politics.
I wanted to locate Melville’s “howling infinite,” a territory of ambiguity and possibility, in which we are open to all things human and good. In Moby Dick, Melville invites us to love the cannibal Queequeg, who shares a bed very lovingly with Ishmael. In mid-nineteenth century America, such openness was indeed risky, and may have partly explained why the book was a flop upon publication.
Such openness to ambiguity isn’t allowed in the culture right now either. I appreciated Elon Musk when he was an apolitical geek who might have been on the spectrum. Then, as if he understood he needed a political party to back his brand, he met Jered Kushner at the World Cup and transformed into a MAGA dude, and was no longer intriguing.
We seek political fortifications on a smaller level too, in organizations and among our circle of friends. God forbid we should be seen standing alone.
I read recently in The New York Times that bisexuals are no longer considered “allies.” Apparently they’re too ambiguous, when what is needed is a clear choice for the sake of politics. Never mind the deeper impulses and the desires of our hearts that make us unique and human. What’s needed is a brain-centered steering of the vast and multifarious soul, so that others can recognize our persona instantly and we can fit into a group. Thus we shrink ourselves into slogans, like walking memes.
Publishing works along these lines. It’s all either right or left—you’ve seen the titles.
The culture wars have rotted the conversation on both sides. One editor of a conservative Christian magazine announced recently on Facebook that he wanted to see stories that argue from a pro-life perspective. I agree that such a story ought to be considered, instead of canceled on sight, but let's skip pro-life as a social genre--or any other such genres.
Every so often, I check out what's going on in the pages of a certain famous conservative journal, as if to escape the politics of left-leaning journals for a moment, and all I find there are photos of conductors leading an orchestra in a triumphant moment of western high culture, or lectures of old men who wish to resuscitate Allan Bloom.
It seems conservative editors are more interested in buttressing grand tombs than in presenting fresh writing. But expressing an independent idea is next to impossible in America, anywhere you look.
It's clear now that Christopher Hitchens carried the entire responsibility of creating fine independent cultural writing on his back for twenty years until his death. When he was gone, there were few writers out there who had the smarts to stand alone in their beliefs and shine a light on hypocrisy, no matter its ideology, and none so effective. He challenged major faiths for their treatment of women, but he was no academic pet who often changed his opinions to fit the news. He saw by his own lights, and he liked controversy.
But perhaps he was a bit strident in his condemnation of religion. Maybe he never met Marilynne Robinson, a Christian and a true genius, his equal in smarts, and also someone who embraces many pleasing contradictions--at least I always thought so, to her credit, when she was my thesis advisor and fellow Idaho writer at Iowa. She is a fierce liberal who protested nuclear pollution in Mother Country and loves Abraham Lincoln and John Calvin.
But Hitchens doesn't need schooling about his views. He left a wide circle that was his own terrain of individualistic discernment, and it has quickly been closed by ideologues right and left, who recognize no fine distinctions. His bright light of openness and reason inspired many who wished to think for themselves, in a world that tends to usher people into camps.
Two camps--that's all we're allowed. Pick one side or the other and sit quietly in the cold until it's your turn to say what you've heard so many times before.
“My own opinion is enough for me," Hitchens wrote, "and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.”
If Hitchens were alive now, he'd surely have cynical words for both sides--for the demands of absolute social conformity on the left, and the mania of the right to embrace a new Gilded Age, in which the very rich will hasten the spread of poverty and violence, and all safety nets vanished.
One day a new generation will appear, perhaps carrying musical instruments and books like Leaves of Grass, Mother Country, Letters to a Young Contrarian, The Diaries of Anais Nin, and Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, and because of their efforts, people will be allowed to be themselves without being excluded, corralled, beaten, or abolished from cultural memory. It's going to happen at some point. Each period of conformity falls away, and we have some time to breathe, until the next one comes along.
“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Macbeth is the most intriguing of Shakespeare’s tragedies to me. That’s because Macbeth is so changeable, ambitiously seizing on the evil of killing the king, then fretting that he will lose his eternal jewel, his soul. It's as if cross-currents travel in him throughout, as if many voices in him compete to be heard.
There are several psychologically interesting quotes that explore the nature of evil, that it must be hidden behind a smile, as Lady Macbeth says.
And this from Macbeth: “Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
But Macbeth pursues his plan in tortured fashion, too good to dispatch his conscience, too bad to do the right.
He’s a rare character whose enormous and ugly evil is mitigated by the powerful rage he feels against his own nature.
I have written of great evil and I have written of good people who committed it without understanding, but few wrote about it with such fearsome clarity as Shakespeare.
