Interview with Paul Lisicky

So pleased to have Paul Lisicky as the first interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted via e-mail. Photo credit goes to Star Black. A bio note, as well as links to Paul's books, follow the interview. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us, Paul!

1. "The Didache" is a beautifully layered prose piece that engages the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the title refers to the non-canonical, yet essential document of the early Church. How do you envision the connection between the title and the narrative of the piece?

A little patch of the actual Didache has always stayed with me: "As this broken bread was scattered on the mountains and was gathered and made one, so may your church be gathered together to the ends of the earth." That translation probably comes from one of the liturgical songs I sang (or wrote?) during my teenage years. I know I was thinking a lot about brokenness at the time I wrote the piece. My late mother seemed pretty broken health-wise; she also seemed broken in terms of her identity. As her memory went, she had a range of selves that stood in for who she'd been. My father? Well, he was sometimes known to her as Bernice, the lady who ran the (non-existent) restaurant on the ground floor of their condo.

There was a day, on a family visit, when my mother insisted on making a sandwich for me, when I knew it was very hard for her to do that. I could see the concentration in her face, her attempt to steady her hands. That gesture seemed profound to me--can I say Eucharistic? I needed to let her make the sandwich, though I could have done it myself. I must have been wondering whether there was a beauty to brokenness, to all the selves we'd been (or almost been) over time. So the piece wants to gather all those selves together in a single gesture. In that way, the piece wants to echo the intent of the document it takes its name from.

2. Could you discuss how music (and your experiences as a composer) connect to, and enhance, Catholic mass and faith?

I can't imagine the Mass without music; most of those texts insist on being sung. Compare a sung Holy (Sanctus) to a spoken Holy. The latter thuds along and it's over before you know it. It's all murmured at the same pitch, no highs and lows, no contours. All monotone. So much of the mass is fragmentary. Responses and acclamations need the emphasis of melody and harmony or else they're swallowed up.

It's a beautiful thing when an assembly is singing together, without fear, their breaths practically in sync. The experience is physical, it takes us out of ourselves; we're part of the larger body. Something extraordinary about interconnectedness is enacted rather than just instructed. At the same time, it's very intimate. We get to meet our own bodies again, as well as the bodies of the people to our right and our left.

3. Famous Builder, your memoir-in-essays, contains some wonderful representations of post Vatican II Catholicism, especially the organic, "joyful" sense of celebration with mass. Has the Church gone in another direction since that post-conciliar optimism?

That's hard for me to talk to, as I go to Mass at an urban parish, where progressive politics and progressive theology are very much alive. Lay people of all colors, income levels, and sexual orientations, etc. are involved in the liturgy. They're lectors, Eucharistic ministers, cantors--all that. Interestingly, the assembly applauds at the end of the final hymn, and it never feels like self-congratulation, or simply about the good job the choir did. It's pure gratitude--or maybe awe that something meaningful, on a communal level, could take place in a hard and cynical world.

It's funny--I didn't go to church for decades after having been so involved in liturgical music as a young person. As writing took over my imagination, art became my church, and that other world fell away, gently. The church doesn't often look so good from outside, when you're not in it. That's not exactly news to us. I couldn't help but think, well, the church of my childhood, the church interested in social justice and transformation of self and culture--well, that's just dead. I felt sad about it for a long time. It's been reassuring to learn that the story's more complicated than that, at least on the parish level. I think the parish is where grace is actually transacted, especially in the liturgy. There are good people out there, very quietly, very humbly, doing their part to change things.

4. Could you discuss your appreciation for the writing (and ideas about writing) of Flannery O'Connor?

I've always been stirred by the relationship between disruption and growth in her work. Grace doesn't often happen without confrontation, especially confrontation between strangers. I'm also interested in the relationship between irreverence and reverence in her stories. You can't have reverence without the other, you know? The Grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" doesn't reach out to touch the Misfit's face until after she mumbles, "Maybe he didn't raise the dead." That's the first point in the piece where she actively doubts, the first time she asks a question. The religion of complacency and denial and reward for social achievement--gone up in a flare. I don't think that she would have come to that radical connection with the Misfit unless she'd opened herself up to doubt.

I also love what O'Connor does with tone--the almost slapstick, vaguely sitcom-y opening of "A Good Man" morphing into something so grave and pressurized that it's almost unbearable. Try reading that whole story aloud in a group setting: It's on fire. I'm always relieved by any piece of art that escapes its original terms, that's given permission to leap and stretch and go to strange, anarchic places. Of course there's still humor, dark humor, in the gravest parts of the story, but the story's become another animal in its final pages. There's such a lesson in that, not only in terms of content but form, too.

5. Any Catholic literary influences (besides O'Connor)?

Ah, definitely Denis Johnson. JESUS' SON is about as important to me as anything, not just its thinking, its accommodation of heightened perception, but its economy, its disjunctions, its room for inference. A beautiful, wounded mind that's always struggling toward clarity, grace--and what it means to recognize other human beings. It's music in language.

6. What are the elements or traits of Catholicism that make it so appealing to writers?

The grandeur and mystery alongside its down-to-earthness. I think the meeting up of those two points of view is a fertile place for art. And I've always been drawn to its space for questions, its room for contradiction. I mean, number the contradictions in any O'Connor story--it's instructive.

If we're talking about potent traits...How about the respect for fallibility, screwing up, the deep, shadowy side of any human character? I think that might be partly why I've never been able to bear the notion of "likable" characters in fiction. Who's interested in likable characters if redemption is a dynamic, ongoing thing? Likability always strikes me as being so externally determined, never organic to the character in question.

7. Michael Leach has written that "If Catholicism can enchant and enthrall your imagination in the early years of your life, you will always be haunted by it. As novelist Alice McDermott said, with considerable pride, we are forever doomed to be Catholic." What is about Catholicism that has once (or continues to) fascinate/enlighten/help you?

I might have already spoken to that, in different ways, in the questions above. All I know is that for the years I didn't go to mass, I felt a terrible pang whenever I walked by a church and heard singing coming from inside. It's home to me, even if I'm troubled by the conservative turn the (larger) church has taken in the last twenty-some years. The rhythm of the liturgy is really intrinsic to how I think, to how I make art. I miss it when I'm away from it for too long. It's exile.

8. One of my theology professors, Rev. Patrick Madden, has discussed how the Church can benefit (and has benefited) from the scholarship of independent Catholic theologians. What could the Catholic Church learn from writing and writers? Do you have advice for the Church?

To be open to theologians, writers, artists who might not be friends of Catholicism. To respect other points of view, not necessarily Christian points of view, but Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic, atheist points of view. I'm a great fan of the liberal Dutch church, the music and texts of Bernard Huijbers, Huub Oosterhuis, Antoine Oomen, and Tom Lowenthal. I've loved that work since I was a teenager, its dignity and common-sense, its lack of sentimentality, its respect for social justice. When I listen to that music, I can't help but think it could change the world if only we had it in ourselves to take it in.

As for what's hard to take? Dead language, mawkish language. I think all of that does more soul-damage than we know. That's what makes us cringe: when we hear people talking too easily, too certainly, about the divine. It's embarrassing. Empty, overworked phrases that are expected to stand in for the hard work of seeing, naming. Those Oosterhuis texts, even though they're decades old now, make an active effort to resist that.

9. What project(s) are you working on now?

I'm close to finishing the second draft of a nonfiction book called I'D SURE LIKE TO SEE YOU. It's a book about friendship, particularly about my friendship with the late writer Denise Gess, who was in many ways a mentor, a sister, my best friend. It wants to be part JUST KIDS, part THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, part something else. Passages about friendship are interspersed with scenes of the planet in trouble: the Deepwater Horizon spill, the wars, the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the costs of global warming. It might just be a big old mess, but people seem to be liking what they've heard.

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Paul Lisicky is the author of LAWNBOY, FAMOUS BUILDER, and two forthcoming books: THE BURNING HOUSE (novel, 2011) and UNBUILT PROJECTS (short prose pieces, 2012). His work has appeared in PLOUGHSHARES, THE IOWA REVIEW, FIVE POINTS, BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW, GULF COAST, THE SEATTLE REVIEW, and numerous anthologies. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU. In Spring 2011, he will be visiting writer in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City. His blog, MYSTERY BEAST, can be found here.

"The Didache" by Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky's memoir-in-essays, Famous Builder, is a must-read for representations of post-Vatican II Catholicism, as well as the complicated intersection between Catholic tradition and sexuality. "Wisdom Has Built Herself a House" is an essential essay in the collection.

His short prose piece, "The Didache," originally appeared in Subtropics (Winter/Spring 2008). It will also appear in his forthcoming collection of short prose, Unbuilt Projects.

I was first struck by the contrast between the title of the piece--a reference to the apocryphal, anonymous document of early Jewish-Christians--and the domestic content. The Didache is instructive, so there's certainly an implicit connection between the instruction we received from faith and that which we receive through a parent, but Lisicky's willingness to allow those elements to only coalesce in a symbolic manner makes this piece work so well. It becomes dramatic rather than didactic.

The narrative begins with a question: "What were you like the last time I saw you whole?" The piece follows with more questions and considerations, the wonderings of a son in relation to his mother (who exists in this piece with a touching, Marian care and concern), noting "It's funny how we end up where we do," and yet the narrator appears quite aware of how life moves.

The language of the final sentences moves comfortably into the Biblical-lyrical. I've seen Lisicky do this elsewhere in his prose, and it always occurs at the right moment:

"As the broken bread was scattered on the hillsides, and so was gathered and made one, so may the many of you be gathered and find favor with one another."

The lines are a lyrical refiguring of a Didache hymn, and the result is powerful. We follow toward the conclusion of Lisicky's piece:

"Take. Eat, says the mother, given up and broken, and pushes the sandwich into the lunch bag, and sends me on my way."

The Didache/Biblical suffuses into the domestic, the love of mother/son becomes eternal. The suffusion of the archetypal/Biblical into the domestic accomplishes several results: it re-establishes the "truths" inherent in these ancient actions and connections, and yet it also reminds us that our present, prosaic world is capable of being legendary and graceful. Lisicky's compressed piece feels like the best of sermons: life observed so carefully it becomes real in the re-telling. It's beautiful writing, a piece worthy of re-reading.

Coming tomorrow: An insightful interview with Paul Lisicky!

Dean Brackley, SJ: Upcoming Lecture

Mark Radecke, Chaplain of Susquehanna University, has generously shared the info that Jesuit priest Dean Brackley will be delivering the 2011 Alice Pope Shade lecture on January 19th, at 7:30 pm in the Stretansky Concert Hall.

From SU's website:

Brackley is a Jesuit priest who writes and speaks passionately about the role of faith in addressing the social challenges facing the Central American nation of El Salvador and the global community. Brackley succeeded one of the six Salvadoran Jesuits who were assassinated by the Salvadoran military in 1989. He continues to uphold the memory of their lives through his pastoral work and teaching.

Chaplain Radecke also passed along a link to one of Father Brackley's essays on his pastoral experiences (goes to PDF).

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My favorite excerpt from Father Brackley's essay:

"By distancing the non-poor from the daily threat of death, the benefits of modernity have induced in us a kind of chronic lowgrade confusion about what is really important in life, namely life itself and love. Besides, superior technology and the communications media induce us to think of our culture and perspective on life as the norm, and basically on track. The encounter with the poor stops us short; it recollects us. When we come out on the other side, we realize that the marginalized are actually at the center of things. It is we, in Washington and Paris, who are on the fringe."

More Greene

Rediscovered this today:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2008/fall/greene.html

My favorite excerpt from this piece about Greene's revisions to The Power and the Glory:


"Near the end of the manuscript, Greene crossed out three lines in the elaborated scene of the execution of the "whisky priest." The episode is told by the only witness—a secondary character—who sees the execution from the window. He had first met the priest by pure chance at the beginning of the novel, thus bringing the novel full circle. This pattern is further enhanced by the inclusion of the buzzards already present on the first page (changed into vultures in the later editions).

The published text runs as follows:

"Then there was a single shot, and opening [his eyes] again he [Mr. Tench] saw the officer stuffing his gun back into his holster and the little man was a routine heap beside the wall—something unimportant that had to be cleared away. [added on the manuscript and published: Two knock-kneed men approached quickly]."

After "cleared away," Greene crossed out the following lines that were not included in the published version:

"But looking down Mr. Tench caught a look on the officer's face—an uneasy look, the look of a disappointed man and it suddenly sunk to him, as the buzzards flipped down again after the explosion's shot, as though the blood had been cleared away from a whole region of the world."

The erasure of this passage seems to underline Greene's intention to allow his readers a greater freedom of interpretation. Those suppressed lines, with the look of disappointment read on the lieutenant's face after the execution of the priest made the priest appear to be too much of a Christic figure, a martyr, possibly on the way to Sainthood at the moment when, following the explosion, "the blood had been cleared away from a whole region of the world.""

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This is a fantastic find by François Gallix.

Definitions, 2

What is "Catholic"?

Roman Catholic. Anglo-Catholic. Episcopalian ("the bridge church").

I started this line of questions in a previous post; one (hopeful) result of this site is that we all can begin talking, refining, revising, and perhaps expanding the conception of what is defined as Catholic literature.

In moving forward with this site--and my future plans of a print anthology of contemporary Catholic writing--I am amazed at the amount of writers who have experienced the Catholic tradition, who have wrangled with the faith, left the faith, returned to the faith. It's a tradition that's endlessly complicated, that resists attempts at definition (like my own).

Perhaps we should defer to Flannery here:

"The Catholic novelist doesn't have to be a saint; he doesn't even have to be Catholic. He does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist. . . if I had to say what a Catholic novel is, I could only say that it is one that represents reality adequately as we see it manifested in this world of things and human relationships. Only in and by these relationships does the fiction writer approach a contemplative knowledge of the mystery they embody."

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Also, at Vox Nova a great start to the discussion from 2008.

Misc.

Look for interviews with Paul Lisicky and Joe Bonomo here at The Fine Delight in the upcoming weeks!

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From Bernardo Aparicio García:

Dappled Things is undergoing a redesign, upgrade, and more.

PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience just released their inaugural issue.

Joseph Pearce relates that a new journal, The Roman Catholic Arts Review, is about to launch.

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NPR!

"For These Young Nuns, Habits Are The New Radical"

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As I said in the earlier post on Greene, art can be Catholic in spirit without being Catholic in name or content.

Another example is this amazing documentary:

The Philosopher Kings (2009)

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 3 of 3

Part 3: The Reaction

Greene once asked (through correspondence) Evelyn Waugh: "Must a Catholic be forbidden to paint the portrait of a lapsed Catholic?"

I hope the answer is NO, or Catholic literature is in trouble.

Later in that same letter, from January 1961:

"What I have disliked in some Catholic criticism of my work . . . is the confusion between the functions of a novelist and the functions of a moral teacher or theologian.

The Power and the Glory was condemned by Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, from the Vatican's Holy Office, because it was "paradoxical"--in short, sympathetic to the whisky priest rather than condemning his sins (Literature Suppressed On Religious Grounds by Bald and Wachsberger). Pizzardo actually requested that Greene make alterations to the novel!

Bald and Wachsberger relate other gems: "In a 1948 essay "Why Do I Write?," Greene defended his right to be "disloyal" to the church . . . [Greene] thought he must be able to write "from the point of view of the black square as well as the white." Greene was well-aware that pedantic Catholic fiction would be disastrous: the work must be organic, dramatic, and honest to the realities of the Catholic world, a world in which evil exists in equal (or greater?) parts than good.

Bald and Wachsberger continue that Greene offered the character of the whisky priest in part as a reaction to the more superficial brand of Protestant criticism that the Catholics idolized the role/position of the priest. Greene states that "the man's office doesn't depend on the man. A priest in giving sacrament believes his giving the body and blood of Christ, and it doesn't matter whether he himself is a murderer, an adulterer, a drunkard." Fascinating stuff, and one can't help but read Greene himself into the statement: the imperfections of the Catholic writer enhance, and do not detract, from the "good work" of his/her writing.

Much has been made of Greene's "Marxist Catholicism," his material support of revolutionaries AND ministries. I am continually intrigued by his complexities, and will certainly revisit his other work on this site.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 2 of 3

Part 2: The Text

I think one element of truly successful Catholic literature is that the work can be read, appreciated, and discussed without being treated as a devotional text; in other words, its Catholicism is essential and yet one does not need to be Catholic (or Christian) to appreciate the work. Greene's novel fits.

The theology of the novel focuses on the character/concept of priest as father and representation of Christ. The whisky priest, Father Jose, and all other members of the clergy alluded to within the text are "officially" unacceptable, and yet the whisky priest's true theology is his personal suffering and self-doubt.

Greene is clever in avoiding polarization between the priest and the lieutenant, whose atheism is both pragmatic and reasonable in the context of this world: "There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk-a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again." Later the lieutenant claims "One day they'll forget there ever was a Church here," which of course is the fatal flaw of his philosophy. The text makes clear that the Mexican church was bloated, indulged, and overwrought, but the problem was the administration of that church, not the faith belief; the lieutenant has mistakenly yoked a disdain for certain clergy with a desire to whitewash belief systems.

The priest feels unworthy: he mangles sermons, mumbles confessions. He is truly aware of the inadequacy of his corporeal: this is a Mexico where insects "burst," where bodies are flaked by hunger. The layers of Greene's novel allow him to unfold this theological backdrop against a relatively standard chase-thriller, with a last act betrayal that has been sufficiently rehearsed.

My favorite quote from the novel is some third-person subjective thought of the whisky priest:

"How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt."

I say Amen, but this is what got Greene in trouble with the church.

Part 3: The Reaction

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 1 of 3

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene was first published in 1939. The book was a fictionalization of Greene's experiences in Mexico, and a non-fiction account of those events, The Lawless Roads, was later published.

1. Is the writer Catholic?

Greene remained slippery on this point. A convert to Catholicism for marriage, he later self-identified as "Catholic agnostic," though claimed to receive the Host in his own home. Greene's infidelities are legendary, though if sin demoted one's Catholicism none of us need apply. How did Greene contextualize adultery (his and others). Could The End of the Affair help us understand his opinions?

Regardless, Greene certainly counts as a Catholic writer.

2. Is the practical content Catholic?

Absolutely. An unnamed whisky priest is wanted by an atheist lieutenant during Canabal-like "fascist" control of Mexico. Greene slyly appropriates genre conventions here (beginning the novel with his useful "independent" British expatriate--this time a "Mr. Tench"; the mid-book political wrangle; the cross-country chase with final-act ambush), yet the novel reaches much, much higher. The whisky priest is no hero: he has fathered a daughter, who now hates him (along with the mother). He was an over-fed, proud clergyman whose penchant for liquor bleeds into his inability to resist other corporeal temptations. Self-doubt is his constant, and it is sometimes unclear whether he baptizes for the sacrament, the (previous) duty, or to make meager money. He is willing to have others be captured, and die, so that he is not caught by the "Red Shirts," and Greene is smart to present his actions as either cowardice or the fact that the priest's life and actions exist for the greater good of believers.


3. Is the thematic content Catholic?

Again, yes. The lieutenant, though, is perhaps the essential Catholic element in the text. Hard-nosed, (and in the sense of metonymy) presented as a gun-in-holster lawman in the archetypal sense, he's a sufficiently complex character: some incident in his childhood fed his distrust of the church, a church showed in the text as one that fattened its clergy while simultaneously thinning its parishioners. The lieutenant's perspective is jaded, of course, and the key philosophical consideration of the text is whether the lieutenant (or any government entity) has the right to dictate the faith beliefs of citizens. The whisky priest is dirty, shamed, a horrible role model. He has, in the dogmatic sense, erred in the essential tenets of the church. And yet he is loved by the faithful not for his sins, but for the representation of Christ he presents--this appears to be the fatal miscalculation of the lieutenant. The lieutenant's violence and rhetoric leave a much worse taste than the delinquencies of the priest. Children go from pining for the lieutenant's gun to spitting on his holster; the whisky priest is gone but Catholicism in Mexico is continuous.

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It is difficult to read Greene's novel and not appreciate the work as Catholic in the thematic sense: the "spirit" of the priest has endured suffering and rhetoric, and yet his enemy, the lieutenant, operates not without intellectual and emotional warrant. Greene portrays a damaged church in Mexico, one particularly susceptible to criticism and revision. Yet such an acknowledgment is only the first step.

Part 2: The Text

Part 3: The Reaction

Definitions?

What makes a work of literature Catholic? Or is that an inappropriate question to ask? Can texts be Catholic (or Jewish or Norwegian), or are such adjectives only appropriate for writers?

Is a writer only a Catholic writer if he/she is practicing? How does one define a practicing Catholic? Practicing in thought or action? Intention or result?

Is a lapsed Catholic writer less Catholic in the literary designation than a practicing Catholic? Is the content of the work more essential than the producer of the work?

At least two commentators (Cornel West and Patrick Samway, SJ) have noted the Roman Catholic upbringing (practice?) of Toni Morrison. Is Beloved a Catholic novel?

Such questions are open to genre, form, origin, and more, and therefore certainly not limited to considerations of Catholicism. But I think the best consideration of Catholicism in literature operates from William Gass's favorite usage of the word: catholic as a general, encompassing term. Better to form definitions through examples than prescribe a forced set.

That said...I think 3 main elements can be considered when pursuing a identification of a text as "Catholic":

1. Is the writer, or has the writer ever identified as, "Catholic."

2. Is the practical content of the text (characters, setting, plot action, etc.) Catholic, either in the faith or cultural sense.

3. Is the thematic content of the text Catholic? This final element is, of course, the most subjective. Does the work operate within a Catholic worldview?

First up: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Welcome

The Fine Delight exists to document, not proselytize; to observe and not judge. Representations of any and all aspects of Catholicism (Roman, Anglo, and more) in imaginative literature (novels, short fiction, poetry, non-fiction) will be complimented by interviews and reviews, all intended to enhance the existing information on the topic.

Our name comes from the first line of Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins's final sonnet, "To R. B.":

"The fine delight that fathers thought."

Thanks for stopping by!