Interview with Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani is the ninth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Paul's books, follow the interview. Thanks for your heartfelt and insightful responses, Paul!


1.I first learned of Gerard Manley Hopkins as an undergraduate--from a poet more interested in Hopkins's language than his Catholicism. I think the two are inseparable. Do you view Hopkins's language as idiosyncratically Catholic?

You touch on a profound subject here, which is at the core of my own understanding and love of Hopkins’s work. Many poets and critics and teachers have been touched by the beauty and force of Hopkins’s poems, especially those he wrote as a Jesuit. And many of these have come away from the experience by loading what they could of Hopkins’s charged language into their cars or trucks and taking it back to their own houses, in a way analogous, say, to someone who comes across the ruins of an ancient church and chisels away this fresco or that painted tile or mosaic fragment for their mantel piece or local museum.

But what Hopkins discovered came through long reflection on the nature and evolution of language structures, especially Greek and Latin and the Anglo-Saxon roots of English. What was at the heart of an English sentence, at the heart of poetry written in English—the calculus of it, the essential music of it. If words rhymed or chimed, why did they? Was this a random occurrence, or were there deeper connections among like-sounding words: skip, scope, scape, landscape, seascape, inscape, stress, instress. Were these fragments of the Word, tints of a rainbow, a Covenant? And if the Word spoke, how did we hear it? Were we prepared to hear it given our imperfect, fallen natures? And if the Word became incarnate, enfleshed itself in the matter of the world, in the matter of humankind, how could we find it? How witness to it? The world is charged with the grandeur of God, Hopkins wrote in February 1877, but so might words themselves be charged with that grandeur. But it would have to be instressed on the poet as witness, who in turn would witness for us. His language is deeply sacramental and—like Shakespeare’s, like any very good poet—speaks to us on many levels simultaneously—to our intellects, our hearts, our very selves—and we catch of it what we can. But some see oil or fresh water and think: how much can I get for this? What’s its market value? Not what is its value, but what is its value in dollars or pounds or francs or Euros. And meanwhile the God of nature gives it away abundantly, freely, with open arms—as on the cross.


2. In Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, you write that Hopkins's conversion to Catholicism "meant going counter to the secular and agnostic cutting-edge thinking of his own day." Do you find contemporary Catholic writing operating also within a subculture? What living Catholic writers especially interest you?

Who was it who said, “Be as cunning as serpents, yet as innocent as doves”? You try—try—to remain faithful to the felt experience of your faith—not merely the doctrinal, but the sense of the living Christ within and around you—and you learn to negotiate with whatever forces are out there. Flannery O’Connor called it a kind of Catholic skepticism. To be wary of the voices out there promising this or that lie, sugar-coated, ah so sweet, but so poisonous in the long run, which—after all—isn’t so very long in the great scheme of things. I no longer care very much if it’s a sub-culture or not. If you have something of value to give, people will listen up and even try it on. I’m seventy now, and I’ve been on the road a long time, so I’m closer to home (whatever that turns out to be) than I ever was. Writers who interested me once have been replaced by others, who have something to say about the road I’m on. I’m Catholic in my tastes, have always tried to be. So I read Hemingway again and say he spoke to me back when I was twenty, even thirty, John Wayne, Bogart model, say. But the model of Christ on the road—to Cana or Capernaum or Jericho or Jerusalem or Emmaus—that is what I am looking for. Who helps me there in terms of Catholic writers? Ron Hansen, Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott, Mary Karr, Franz Wright, Jody Bottum, Fr. Jim Martin. But we’re talking about the Communion of Saints here, finally, and there the company moves from the antechamber into the great hall to include so many more—Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Pope, Hopkins, and—if the truth be told—figures as diverse as Homer and Aeschylus, Virgil, the Hebrew prophets, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Auden, Joyce, Sigrid Undset, Peguy, Philip Levine, Mark Jarman, Merton, Denise Levertov, and Anonymous. And I will keep looking. Right now a young brilliant Catholic playwright named Rajiv Joseph, whose work is appearing off and on Broadway this season.


3. Your son, Paul, is a Jesuit. How has his faith experience affected yours?

So profoundly, I can only guess, really. How could I, his father, not follow where he went, as he followed me where I went when he was a boy? His commitment has certainly deepened my own, or so I believe. I also believe it’s one of the main reasons I left the University of Massachusetts at Amherst after 32 years and went to Boston College, following a Jesuit retreat experience back in the spring of ’99. It’s why I did the Thirty-Day Long Retreat with the Jesuits at Eastern Point in January 2000. It’s why we keep in touch about the mission. But the electric moment came for me when he lay supine on the church floor in Los Angeles, arms outspread in the shape of a cross, along with four other men, and offered himself freely to the Lord. That was a three-handkerchief affair for me and my father-in-law, standing next to me, and something happened—something of a very serious nature—which meant a renewed sense of surrender for me as well. The rest is history.


4. One of my favorite excerpts from Thirty Days occurs during your meditation on Matthew 28:16-20 as part of your retreat:

And once He is lifted from our sight altogether, how will He touch us down the long corridors of history. With the physicality of the sacraments: with the water of Baptism, with the bread and wine of the Eucharist, with the tears that come from forgiveness, with the coming of the Holy Spirit in fire and wind and oil, in our lives together as husband and wife, with the priests and religious--the anointed ones--who serve as witnesses with lives of service, with the Lord for company on the last lonely leg of the journey through death, whether in a bed, on a road, at sea, in the air.

Have you adopted elements of the Spiritual Exercises in your daily life (beyond attending retreats)?

I think of the Jesuit way of life every day—how could I not, with my own son on the front line now? I think they got two or three (my wife) for the price of the one. And this means a new sense of freedom, a new sense of purpose, a new sense of seriousness, of joy, of laughter, of expectation. I’ll be 71 at the end of this month, and I’m still teaching, because Jesuits don’t retire until they have to. I find myself in my petitions going first to the Blessed Mother, and then to her Son, and then to His father, up the Jacob’s ladder as it were. I keep the examination of conscience each night and read a section of the Sacred Scriptures each morning with my wife, within the context of the Lectio Divina. I go around the country giving talks on aspects of God & the Imagination, and in that sense preach, and even use words when I have to, as St. Francis—so dear to Fr. Hopkins—recommended. And I’ve found it a lot less lonely than I had supposed it would be with the Master at my side.


5.
How does one bargain
with a God like this, who, quid pro quo, ups
the ante each time He answers one sign with another?

I love the above ending to "Quid Pro Quo" from The Great Wheel; it's such a complicated poem about the relationship between God and man. How do you conceive of God within your poetry? Do you have a consistent image of the divine throughout all your work?

Another big question. But here’s what I imagine. We’re talking here about a great immensity—the Creator of the Universe and of everything good in it. We’re a speck, a dust mote, in all of this from one perspective. And yet from another perspective, there’s this great Lover out there, in here, everywhere, this Father who we have been told on good authority is also our Father. A real Father, with all the attributes of a Father, including the maternal. It’s something I’ve had to learn by stages, and something I’m still learning, and He constantly surprises and shelters me, as the Psalmist sang. Of course there’s evil in the world, enough to erase me like a bug. But then there’s this sense of safety, of the one Voice I have learned the hard way to trust and to follow. Nothing else works for me, nor has it for untold millions of others, all those faces where Christ shines out in ten thousand places.


6. So much of your work (I'm thinking "Shadow of the Father," for example) mediates between Catholic/Christian past and present; in a way, continuing the conversation of tradition. What does poetry have to offer the canon of literature influenced by Christ's message?

One thinks of those poets who have written in the Christian tradition—some of whom I mentioned earlier, a list to which I could include many more. Add to them those poets who have borrowed from the Christian tradition—from Chaucer and Marlowe and Shakespeare and Spencer and Milton to Thomas Hardy and Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke and Marianne Moore and on and on and on. Then subtract all of these and tell me, really, what’s left of lasting value? Nihilism gives me the creeps. I’ll look at it, consider it, but the fires there are too forbidding, especially when the serpent’s voice hisses, here, try this one. How can it hurt, really? And then you find out it does, and the poison sinks in, unless that other figure spread-eagled on the cross draws the poison out.


7. You teach at a wonderful Jesuit university--Boston College. Any favorite courses/ works that you have taught?

I love teaching at Boston College, and being part of the diverse community there. And I’ve been fortunate to have had three chairpersons, so different in themselves, who have allowed me to experiment with various courses in which I can try out new ideas. Among my favorites over the past dozen years have been seminars in Hopkins and his Legacy, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, Yeats and Heaney, Bishop, Berryman & Lowell, American Poetry & High Modernism, 1914—1930, as well as workshops in Poetry and Writing the Other/Writing the Self. More recently, there’s a course for undergraduates and graduates I’m still inventing called God & the Imagination, and it includes Dante’s Commedia, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton’s Journals, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, William Kennedy’s Ironweed, Anthony Hecht, Denise Levertov, my friend Ron Hansen’s novels, Lowell’s "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Eleven Addresses to the Lord, Mary Karr, Franz Wright, and others.

*

Paul Mariani is the author of over 200 essays and reviews, as well as sixteen books, six of them volumes of poetry. He is also the author of five biographies of poets, including William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane and—most recently--Gerard Manley Hopkins. All have been listed as Notable Books by the New York Times; his biography of Williams was short-listed for the American Book Award. He has also written four critical studies, including God & the Imagination, as well as a spiritual memoir, Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, two from The National Endowment for the Humanities and another from The National Endowment for the Arts. From 1968 until 2000, he taught at the University of Massachusetts, where he served as Distinguished University Professor of English. Since 2000, he has held a Chair in English at Boston College. In 2009 he was presented with the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. His current projects include a book of essays, another of poetry, a memoir, and a life of Wallace Stevens. The Broken Tower, his life of Hart Crane, has been made into a film, directed by and starring James Franco, and is scheduled to be released later this year.