Listening to What the Thunder Said
by Edward Short - February 3, 2010
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
"I had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness," G. K. Chesterton wrote in his autobiography, "which has not been killed by sin or even by sorrow; for though I have not had great troubles, I have had many. A man does not grow old without being bothered; but I have grown old without being bored."
In her new memoir, Lit, Mary Karr shows how sin and sorrow actually increased her receptiveness to the drama of her days. In her earlier memoirs, The Liar's Club and Cherry, she recalled her coming of age in east Texas in a family steeped in love and madness. In Lit, she shows how the legacy of those years haunted her young adulthood, the crises of which she describes with rueful honesty.
Whether read independently or together as a trilogy, all of her memoirs exhibit an extraordinary talent, though Lit is probably the best of the lot. A book about home and exile, it is also a meditation on the springs of conversion.
The daughter of a Texan oil worker and amateur artist, Karr was set on becoming a writer before she entered her teens. After a series of missteps, she mined the real-life material of her family to renew a genre that needed renewing. Now, in addition to being a bestselling memoirist and poet, Karr is Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University. When not hawking Lit, she has also been regularly visiting her Syracuse parish priest, who is dying in hospice. During this sacramental watch, Karr tells me over the telephone, she has learned a good deal about "the terrible nexus between love and sacrifice."
The sorrows of mismarriage, the joys of motherhood, parting from parents, and the 20- odd years she spent trying to find her way out of the monkey house of alcoholism all figure in the new memoir. As does her love for her sister, Lecia; writing of her support during the difficult gestation of The Liar's Club, Karr writes: "Needing money is a supremely noble cause among our ilk, but Lecia would have backed any project I'd taken on. ('Going on a murder spree? Good, lotta bastards need killing.')"
There are many brilliant memoirists with Karr's mordant comedic gifts – one thinks of Ford Madox Ford, Osbert Sitwell, Gwen Raverat, and Lorna Sage – but there is only one who has Karr's profound sense of sin, charged with an even greater understanding of love, and that is the granddaddy of all memoirists, the man who invented the genre: St. Augustine.
"Rest in [God] and you will be at rest," St. Augustine says in the Confessions in a passage that describes the arduous mission of the Catholic autobiographer.
Where are you going to along rough paths? What is the goal of your journey? The good which you love is from him. But it is only as it is related to him that it is good and sweet. Otherwise it will justly become bitter; for that comes from him is unjustly loved if he has been abandoned. With that end in view do you again and again walk along difficult and laborious paths (Wisdom 5:7)? There is no rest where you seek for it…
These are the paths that Karr has mapped out with a cartographer's precision, and what makes the latest installment of her memoirs so powerful is that it incorporates her discovery of what St. Augustine discovered in Milan in the fourth century, with the help of St. Ambrose. "He who for us is life itself descended here and endured death and slew it by the abundance of his life. In a thunderstorm voice he called us to return to him, at that secret place where he came forth to us." Karr's latest memoir can be read as a kind of listening to this voice. Like T. S. Eliot, she attends very closely to what the thunder said.
When I met Karr for the first time, it was to introduce her to one of the churches I attend on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, St. Vincent Ferrer, which is run by the Dominicans, whose prayers she credits with saving her from a life-threatening surgery. Since we were early for Mass, we went next door for coffee, and there I noticed that she is even funnier in person than she is on the page, which is saying a good deal. After Mass, as we left the church down the center aisle, I turned to show her the magnificent crucifix that hangs above the nave showing Christ and the two thieves – every defective Catholic's reminder of the reality of conversion. "Yes," she said, "it was the first thing I noticed."
What Catholic readers will notice about Lit is that it is our fallenness – sin, in a word – that first puts Karr on the road to conversion. Desperately, for the sake of her young son, she yearns to be free of her addiction to alcohol, which she has inherited from both her parents. A Franciscan nun with whom she is friendly tells her to pray. One improbable prayer leads to another; soon, like Hazel Moates, the God-haunted hero of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, she embraces the God she is determined to spurn. Bare-assed human need, as she might put it, beyond the cold comfort of secular humanism, which the professional atheists recommend with such easy, heartless aplomb, forces her to cry out, like Christ's companion on the cross, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Lk 23:42).
Earlier, on the telephone, in reply to questions about how the religious import of her new book is being received by Catholic and secular readers, she replied that the response from both camps has been "eerily positive." How can this be? She was convinced that atheists and Catholics alike would join in finding fault with the book. Catholic readers particularly, she says, have welcomed Lit with open arms. In Washington, D.C., where she attended a Latin Mass, her Opus Dei hosts "were all talking about how I would love the Summa Theologica," which prompted her to ask, "Do they know who I am?"
The self-deprecatory charm of her comment is characteristic, and yet it reveals another aspect about Karr: her penchant for truth-telling, even, or perhaps most, when the truth baffles her expectations. Later, when I met her for dinner with a young Dominican priest attached to St. Vincent's, she recounted how astonished she was to find herself converting. When she took up the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, she discovered an understanding of sin that only deepened her solicitude for her family's communal distress. Readers of Lit will see the hard-earned fruits of these exercises in an unforgettable scene between the author and her dying mother. And yet when Karr tackles such painful matters, it is never with dreary religiosity. She certainly jolts my cradle-Catholic smugness when she asks, after describing the many benefits of conversion, "Isn't it great being Catholic?"
For the storyteller in Karr, who battens on the concrete, it is the reality of Catholicism that is most attractive. "One of the things I love about Jesus," she tells me,
was His carnality. For example, there is the time, after the resurrection, when He is on the beach and He encounters His disciples. What is He doing? He is making a barbecue! As a writer, there is something about this carnality that I love…
I think a big part of the grace I have been given as a Catholic within the Church is a love of the world, which I didn't have before I converted. One of the great gifts of the Church is that we have a body on the Cross – it's not an idea of a body or a shape of a body but an actual body, a body like our own. No one can look at the Crucifixion and not recognize that. I love that line from Simone Weil: "Spiritual living is accepting reality at any cost." I remember reading that when I was first getting sober, when I really had no desire to become a Christian… and I remember being horrified by the idea that anyone should even dream of accepting reality at any cost. I remember thinking: what an awful, awful thing. And now I take so much consolation in knowing that I don't have to manufacture reality any more. You know, I was never much good at it. So much of my drinking and depression stemmed from that. There was never any really good news attached to it. And I had this confirmed when I read the Spiritual Exercises, which stress that sin is not merely a breaking of this or that rule but a turning away from God, a turning away from reality, a turning away from the truth.
Karr confessed to worrying whether she gave enough attention in Lit to her religious conversion, admitting that she jettisoned over 500 finished pages from the manuscript she submitted to her publisher, which, at the time, seemed overly religious. But in the published book she has integrated her religious themes seamlessly into a narrative that does profound justice to the character of her faith. On page after page, readers will see love, hope, and charity brought to unforgettable life, though her recognition of how these mysterious things work is too clear-sighted for her to downplay their enterprising opposites: sin, despair, and selfishness.
Karr's individual love, which tests her faith even as it steels it, is evident on nearly every page of Lit. Here is an example from a scene in which she speaks of the day she moved her beloved father from his home hospital bed.
My hand grasps the aluminum bar Daddy's hand holds on to. He is clinging hard, and the bewilderment in his face tells me that all the explaining I've done about the move has rolled through his head like tumbleweed… Garfield, he says. He says this word a lot. Mother and Harold [the male nurse] take it as a reference to the orange rascal of a cartoon cat from the funnies. Daddy has an orange cat coffee mug that he can't drink out of… Garfield, Daddy says. Maybe this is the day I figure out that Daddy never gave a shit about an orange effing feline in the funnies… Garfield's the name of our own street. What dimwits we are. How often did he tell me I couldn't leave home by saying, You're staying right here at 4901 Garfield. Garfield, he says. Which means Home. Safe. Stay. How little we ever wanted, the creatures in my family, and how hard we struggled in one another's company not to get it… And when the ambulance driver shows up with his stretcher, he and the attendant have to pry Daddy's large-knuckled hands off the silver bars of that bed. Daddy's eyes lock on mine. He says one word to me, and it must meander through his skull a long time, searching through the ruined brain to find the perfect monosyllabic curse. Bad, he says… They've taken his teeth out, and tears river down the crow's feet of his tough Indian face. Bad bad bad.
After she gets him into the ambulance that will take him to the hospital, she ransacks his wallet for his social security card, which she can't find. "But what I do find is my first college report card – straight A's for the only time since grade school. Also, there's the copy of the first poem I published at age nineteen, with the stains of many beers where it had been spread across the damp surface of many bars, a page smoothed out for men no doubt too bleary to read it. We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar."
These passages will give readers unfamiliar with this artful writer a sense of her mastery of narrative, her psychological acuity, and, not least, her economy, which nicely conveys her sense of the ludicrous. As all of her many fans can attest, she can be laugh-aloud funny. Speaking of her father, she writes: "His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one."
But what sets Karr apart above all is her moral sense. In considering how parents pass on their follies, which their children duly make their own, she misses nothing. Recalling riding in her father's truck after her first term in college, she writes:
For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat. He put the upended lid in the ashtray, and before he handed the bottle over, he drew out a corner of his shirttail to wipe the top with, saying, Want a swig?… The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whisky, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine… As he went to screw the lid back on, my hand swung out of its own accord, and I said, Can I have another taste?
Here the memoirist's art is like a confession, an honest-to-God acknowledgement of flaws too deep for fathoming. Where the prodigal heart craves reconciliation with Him who made the heart, there can be no Pelagian denial of the heart's treachery.
Yet if there is a confessional quality to Karr's art, it is distinctly different from the narcissistic sensationalism that Robert Lowell's tell-all Life Studies (1959) fostered in such lesser lights as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In this regard, Karr is Lowell's most reputable heir, a confessional writer who examines the self to transcend the self.
This is why her affinity with Augustine matters. Before he converted, Augustine was in Rome, where he nearly died of fever. Recalling a death that would have left him, like Hamlet's father, "with all his imperfections on his head" inspired in him a kind of holy horror. And yet he showed how this brush with death transformed him by giving him the grace to discover God's conquest of death.
Insofar as the death of [God's] flesh was authentic, to that extent the life of my soul, which disbelieved that, was inauthentic. The fevers became worse, and I was on my way out and dying… My mother did not know I was ill, but she was praying for me, though not beside me. But you are present everywhere. Where she was, you heard her, and where I was, you had mercy on me so that I recovered the health of my body. I still remained sick in my sacrilegious heart… for I had no desire for your baptism… Yet you did not allow me to die in this sad condition of both body and soul. If my mother's heart had suffered that wound, she would never have recovered. I cannot speak enough of the love she had for me. She suffered greater pains in my spiritual pregnancy than when she bore me in the flesh.
Karr, in so much of the period covered by Lit, was like Augustine dying what might have been a fearful unshriven death but, happily for her and for us, she was also St. Monica, praying for her own and her family's redemption. And since this family also includes her many readers, it is no wonder that so many of them feel for her such affectionate admiration.
What more is there to say? In Mary Karr we have a brilliant Catholic writer who is working at the very top of her form, and that is very good news indeed.
