James Valvis

 

I’ve been enjoying the poetry and prose of James Valvis for years now, so I’m happy to share his thoughts as the nineteenth interview in The Fine Delight series. James talks about his own Catholic faith, the writing of GK Chesterton, the difficulty of authentic morality in fiction, shifting between forms, and writing outside the self. A bio note and link to purchase his book, How to Say Goodbye, follows this interview.

1. Are there any Catholic images and moments from your childhood that still resonate today?

Countless. I find it impossible to think about my childhood without Catholicism playing in the background like a soundtrack. Periodically these moments and images gurgle up as stories or poems, but even when they do not they exist somewhere under the surface.

We were not the most dedicated Catholics, but I attended Catholic schools some years and went through all the sacraments and spent a lot of time praying. Periodically, usually when he had recently given up drinking, my stepfather would decide he needed to become a better Catholic and Mass attendance went up.

I think the thing that resonated most strongly to me—and part of what helped pull me back to the Church after two decades of self-satisfied atheism—is the rich history of the Church. As a boy I changed the lyrics to “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” to “My Heroes Have Always Been Catholics.” And this was true. The lives of the saints fascinated me, their martyrdoms. I wanted to be a saint. Still do. As Charles Peguy said, "Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint." Of course, the bulk of people who make up of the Church are not saints or anywhere close to that, myself especially, and so that disparity between ideal and reality made up a lot of my eventual disillusionment. I had not yet been blessed with the understanding and grace of forgiveness. In fact, I still struggle with that.

I think I understood early that our religion is a religion of stories. At heart Judaism is a religion of laws. Buddhism is a religion of truths. But Catholicism, as I understand it, is at core a religion of stories, most especially the story of salvation. And the first storyteller of the religion is Jesus himself, who delights in telling stories, being the inventor and foremost practitioner of the parable. God himself seems to love stories, which is why all of us have them, why the universe moves from beginning to middle to end, birth to growth to death. People who think Catholicism is all about “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” miss the full nature of our religion or at least essential parts of it. Yes, laws are important, but the Bible is far more a book of stories than a book of commandments or even a book of wisdom, and this is especially true of the Gospels. There’s a reason it’s called the greatest story ever told and not the greatest killjoy ever written.

That love of story stayed with me even when my faith reached a crisis. It was still there when reason compelled me to return. And it has never left me. I hope it never does. After all, I’ve had far better success being a storyteller than I’ve had trying to be a saint.

2. I like that you discuss Catholicism in terms of story and narrative--are there any writers or poets in the Catholic tradition who have dramatized the faith in ways that have appealed to you?

I’m not sure there are any western writers who are not in the Catholic tradition. It’s not like the Catholic tradition disappeared from Protestant writers once Martin Luther tacked up his complaints. It’s not like there are no Catholic concepts sitting in the head of every Californian Buddhist or Wisconsin Wiccan. I see such influence everywhere, often unknown to the people involved, some of whom are violently hostile to Catholicism. The very hostility some feel for Catholicism is proof of just how much it matters to their lives. They hate the obvious debt. Consider the influence of Shakespeare, whose Catholicism is widely accepted. Who can say they have not been profoundly influenced by him? And then there’s Chaucer, Balzac, Waugh, Tolkien, Mauriac, Percy. I love the humor of John R. Powers and the short stories of JF Powers. I’m a big fan of the recently deceased Ralph McInerny. Flannery O’Connor gets my vote for greatest American short story writer. Yes, greatest. Sorry, Hemingway. Sorry, Faulkner.

But the Catholic thinker and writer who most influenced me is GK Chesterton. I often say that CS Lewis brought me back to the faith, but almost everything Lewis said was a reworking of Chesterton. The Father Brown stories alone are invaluable. In fact, if I wanted to convert someone, I wouldn’t start them with the Bible or the Catechism or a book of apologetics, but would tell them to read the dumpy humble priest of these stories. Jesus understood this truism and so did Chesterton: people love a story, hate a lecture, but they’ll put up with a lecture better if it’s wrapped around a good story. And the Father Brown stories are not just good, they’re great. Along with Doyle’s Holmes and Christie’s Poirot and Stout’s Wolfe, they represent the summit of detective fiction. Not only that, but Chesterton’s “amateur detective” was the first real invention in the genre since Poe invented it. And I can think of none since.

There is no bottom to this subject, so I’ll stop here.

3. I definitely agree with your assessment of the Catholic literary and cultural influence: as you note, the faith has been both an enabling force and something to react against. I love the writers you mention; in particular, O'Connor (a cradle Catholic) and Hemingway (a convert).

O'Connor once said that "the novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater."

What do you think of that sentiment? Does it apply to your own writing?

Chesterton said something similar. He said, paraphrasing, that Christianity has no problem incorporating the whole of science, but materialism cannot handle even one tiny miracle without crumbling into dust.

I would take issue with the O’Connor quote on this account. I would argue that the Christian doesn’t live in the larger universe, but in the universe as it really is, for the spiritual world exists, and the world where the spirit does not exist is entirely alien to us. Meanwhile, I do not believe the “naturalist,” by which she means radical materialist, believes his nonsense when he is penning fiction and most of the rest of the time. Away from his fiction he defends his materialism, he probably believes he believes his materialism, and then he’ll go and do a thing like claim Christians are murderers and evil and poison everything. But if Christians are murderers, so what? And what’s this evil business? Who set that bar? An atheist who is an honest atheist must see that Nietzsche was right. Without God, there can be no fixed morality. The real materialist will be beyond good and evil, not in that he embraces evil so much as it truly does not matter at all. Good, evil, whatever. A man who has invented his own morality can pat himself on the back for his cleverness, all the while claiming he’s more moral than some Christians he knows, but he’s living in a fatal contradiction with his own materialist philosophy and can in no way compel his morality on anyone else. CS Lewis says there must be a God for there to be any progress whatever. God alone can set the marker that we can use to decide whether we are moving toward or away from the fixed ideal. You cannot move toward or away from a relative ideal, an ideal with no designer to set it in stone. The ideal keeps changing, confounding, remaining ever elusive. This is bad news for progressives, who love both relativism and progress, since they are mutually exclusive.

What does this mean for fiction? It means the radical materialist cannot possibly write fiction and remain true to his materialism because fiction in its essence is moral. There is no such thing as fiction that is not moral, though generally we do not call them morals but instead themes. Even those stories that portend to have no morals have morals, or they are not stories. (Just like Seinfeld was a show about something.) No one would think of Raymond Carver as a moral writer, and yet you cannot read any of his stories without being struck by how moral they are. Take “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Is this story not an asking again of the question: Am I my brother’s keeper? And Carver answers this question too. There is little doubt to his answer, and the answer is yes. In any case, find a writer who claims to be an atheist, someone like Somerset Maugham, and you will see the same kind of thing applies. A man should treat his wife in a certain way. A man should not be a hypocrite. A man should this, shouldn’t that. Thou shalt, thou shalt not.

The problem is deeper for materialists. They claim that nothing exists but matter and that our selves are merely so much matter worked upon by chemistry. Okay. But if that’s true, why should I care about mere matter and chemistry? Why should I care if anything poisons anything? Why should anyone? Worse, why should I care about people who do not even exist, who are merely dots on a page arranged in an order? Surely we must say that if anyone belongs in the spiritual realm it’s the fictional character. He exists nowhere else! The dream state the reader enters into is akin to a spirit realm where anything can happen. In the old way of putting it, the reader must “suspend disbelief.” What is suspending disbelief except—a kind of faith?

So here’s what we have. A person (random particles) who doesn’t believe in morality asking you to sit through his moral tale and a person (random particles) who doesn’t believe in faith asking you to suspend your disbelief to enter a spirit world that does not exist for the purpose of making meaningless chemistry act on purposeless matter.

Oh boy.

How does the radical materialist get around all of this trouble? Well, he ignores it of course. He goes ahead and writes his stories and they are in every way moral stories that pull people into the spiritual realm. O’Connor is right that if such a materialist were to live by his own creeds, he would be severely handicapped in, if not forbidden from, creating fiction. But he does not live by his creeds. His creed says it’s just as good to eat his baby as love her, but he does not eat his baby. His creed says it’s just as good to steal his friend’s wallet as leave it alone, but he does not steal the wallet. He takes up spirituality when he needs it and drops it when he doesn’t. He irrationally swears by moral codes that cannot possibly have any rational underpinning sans God while claiming God is for childish minds who lack reason. He disavows relativism until which time he can use it to beat up a Christian again for his “intolerance.” And he happily collects his publications and prizes and swears he’ll “live on” through his writing, an immortality coveted by those who claim not to believe in immortality.

Frankly, O’Connor was being kind to them.

4. That's an examination that would make Chesterton proud. And it leads me to consider your own creative work, which I think fits within the schema you've presented here.

First off, I like that you use the word “moral.” Mary Gordon's one of the few writers to use that term since John Gardner's book On Moral Fiction, which Gardner himself admitted reached the level of a jeremiad at points. I think Gardner's shorter essays had a more reasonable presentation of the concept: a fiction that is honest with its readers, that moves beyond artifice (in recognizing that even in fictional worlds something is very much at stake).

Which brings me to your writing. I'd like to consider two pieces: "The Weight of a Father" and "The Pause." Prose and poetry, they both contain knockout lines: "My father’s weight descended toward us."; "According to the attendance, my father had touched few lives."; and "all you hear is the buzz, / the bee stings of leather / as you raise your arm like a thin white flag." Both works build toward powerful final lines.

Those pieces have the feeling of authenticity. I don't mean the accuracy of non-fiction fact, but the emotional authenticity of the fictional or narrative moment that comes from you, as writer, seeing characters as more than "merely dots on a page arranged in an order."

Could you discuss your writing process that enables you to arrive at such tight moments that still breathe with the emotion of real experience? How do the forms you choose (prose or poetry) affect the presentation of these narratives?

It’s interesting you chose those two pieces, since both are about my father, both about forgiveness, both originally written as poems, and both works I could never have written before my reconversion to Christianity.

The truth is I do not always know when writing if a piece is going to be a poem or short fiction. Often I write a piece as poetry and only later decide to convert it to fiction. The deciding factor is usually length and length is often determined by exactness of moment. A poem that runs too long in time or has too many characters or settings or objects is probably not right for the compression that poetry demands. This was the case with “The Weight of a Father,” which simply ran long and I knew would have a better chance of being published as fiction than poetry. It’s a trick of the mind, but people will read a three page poem and think it’s long and read a three page story and think it’s short. Meanwhile, it’s the same number of words. But it’s also true that poetry without compression is merely prose broken into lines.

I have different methods for writing different kinds of works. In cases such as these, where the autobiographical genesis is strong and the type of poem/story is narrative, I usually start with a moment, the more exact the better. There’s this cool little writing book by Ron Carlson called Ron Carlson Writes a Story in which he takes the reader with him through the process of writing a story. In this book he talks about an incident (his initial story idea) being like a coin he keeps in his pocket and doesn’t give up until he absolutely must. I hunt for such moments in my past or in my imagination and try to match them to a feeling. In “The Pause” the incident is my father stopping once mid-beating to consider what he was doing. That’s it. I matched that moment with the love I feel for him despite his flaws. But unlike Carlson, who is trying to write a short story, usually of several thousand words, I’m willing to spend that coin right away, to throw it down on the table and consequences be damned. When this is done well, you can produce a tight work that in a very short space will have a powerful impact on a reader.

I’m glad the pieces have authenticity. I work hard at that. It doesn’t come from them being autobiographical, though those two pieces are, because past fact is irrelevant and hard to remember precisely even if you have a terrific memory. What matters is the emotion the writer is able to pull forward in the moment of the writing. I don’t want to get too detailed about it, but the poem happens in the moment of the poem, not at the moment you lived the original incident. You experienced your father’s funeral, but then you experienced the poem about your father’s funeral as you wrote it. You are both in the past moment with memory and in the poem writing moment, the two becoming one, though the present moment is the one that matters. In other words, you cannot write a sad poem unless you are feeling sad in that moment. It isn’t enough to have been angry when your wife left you. For the duration of the poem, you must be angry now also—while also in control of your craft—if you are going to write a successful angry poem. If you’re merely sad now, or even happy about it, you need to use that present emotion to drive the poem. This is why authenticity is difficult for so many to pull off. They think they are still upset at their mother’s alcoholism like they were at age 8, but in fact they are no longer upset but indifferent. They aren’t being honest with themselves about who they are now. We cannot write about yesterday’s emotions with any kind of authenticity or immediacy. We must write about today’s emotions. This is why a poem about your deceased grandmother ten years ago is very different than the one you write today. Or should be. You feel different things about her, even if the change is slight.

I cry when I write. I laugh when I write. I want to punch the screen when I write. I feel joy and envy and pride. These are all good things. But I know if I’m laughing, or worse yawning, while writing a “sad” poem there’s something very wrong with me and, more importantly, my poem.

5. I really like this experiential, in-the-moment approach to writing with emotion: it does shine through in your poetry and prose. It also sounds like a trying activity: pouring one's self into a narrative and having real, physical results. Are there any stories or poems of yours that come to mind that required you to very much step outside of the self, out of adaptations of your personal experience and into people and moments quite different from your own? If so, what was the mental and spiritual process that enabled such empathy?

Although many or even most of my literary poems and stories come from what I would call the Valvis persona, even when they are not autobiographical, there are many times I step out of that persona to write from different points of view. For instance, my YA novel, which I am presently shopping, is written from the point of view of a 15-year-old girl.

I am many things, but an adolescent girl isn’t one of them. Yet I don’t find it all that difficult to step into such shoes. (Walking in them is a bit more difficult.) Despite what many people will tell you, such as a young white man could never understand what it’s like to be an old black woman and other misconceptions of today’s PC culture and identity politics, the fictive imagination is not limited by gender or color or age. At least it’s not for me. And this is absolutely vital because even when you are writing from your own point of view it is still necessary to step into the other character’s person for their action and dialogue and motivations. Think back to “The Pause.” It is as much a poem about the father’s perspective as the son’s. Dehumanize that father even a touch and that poem becomes nonsense and loses all of its power.

I think this is a learned skill. We are not born with it and some people never develop it very well. I think the popular conception has it exactly wrong. We’re born bigots and must learn how to feel empathy for others. We must train ourselves to overcome original sin and then forever be on guard against it. This hasn’t changed in our times, and in some way it’s become worse. We’re still burning crosses on other people’s lawns, they’re just different lawns. We’re not so much racists, but we’re leftists or rightists. We’re not so much anti-Semites, but people run around making millions telling adoring fans that “religion poisons everything.” I know people who say things like, “I don’t know how that right-wing Repuke tea-bagger can think like that.” Or, “I don’t know what those smelly commies were thinking when they voted for Obama.” Well, if you can’t get into the psychology of people who are different than you, if you don’t just think they’re wrong but also think they’re mad or inhuman, then you will never be much of a literary writer. You might be able to write polemics, perhaps even fancy-worded polemics, very artistic polemics, but they will be mere polemics all the same.

           

The best literature breaks down barriers rather than reinforces our differences. It asks us to step outside ourselves and become the point of view character, an act more emotionally intimate than most sex, and it understands that even evil people see themselves as the heroes of their own stories. Scrooge never saw himself as a bad guy. He thought he was being generous to his employee giving him a full day off. With pay! I imagine Dickens knew enough of these kinds of people and was repulsed by the Scrooges he knew, but when he wrote Scrooge down he portrayed him with great empathy. Scrooge has a motivation (often sympathetic) for everything he does and thinks. He’s no dope and there’s no evidence he ever committed a crime—unlike so many of today’s image conscious businessmen who smile to your face and rob your pension while you’re sleeping. The reader, of course, feels great sympathy for Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, but I’m telling you it’s the empathy that Dickens feels for Scrooge, this bellicose miser in his dusty quarters sucking at his gruel, that makes the tale so memorable.

           

Some of what I see in today’s poetry and fiction is what I call cheap compassion. They expect to be patted on the back for not being racist, as if that’s some kind of accomplishment in today’s society, as if that stance is not a baseline, and yet they will stab you in the neck if you disagree with them on school vouchers. Compassion for some people is merely a way of showing off. “Look, Ma, no misogyny!” Well, okay. Here’s your medal. Now give me a story that bleeds human frailty and finds some good in your fat, grouchy neighbor with the Ron Paul bumper sticker on his Beemer.

           

This is where Christ comes to the rescue of the literary writer. From the Book of Matthew: ““You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?”

           

This may not look like writing instruction, but along with being the greatest advice ever given it is also a tool writers need to use. Think of Christ’s own famous parable of the despised (in his day) Samaritan. If you “greet only your own people,” then you will never write a story that even approaches the power of A Christmas Carol. Every protagonist will be an angel, every antagonist a demon from hell. Progressives will be idiots. Conservatives will have a mental disease. Southerners will all be racists. Northerners will all be traitors. Atheists are all demonic. Catholics are all pederasts. This is no way to be, let alone write, even if you’re George Lucas. A writer must love every character as that character loves himself for the duration of the writing. And he has to love the heel as much as the hero. Maybe more. Why more? Because he needs more. Conviction is important, and fiction cannot be written without morals, but those morals must be achieved organically, not by making characters pathetically simplistic. This is difficult to do—which explains why so many are bad writers.

And bad Christians.

I’m still working on both myself.

***

James Valvis is the author of How to Say Goodbye, 190-page poetry collection, published by Aortic Books. His poetry, short fiction, and narrative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in hundreds of journals, including Anderbo.com, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Confrontation, Daily Science Fiction, Hanging Loose, Juked, LA Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Rattle, River Styx, Rosebud, Strange Horizons, and Vestal Review. His poetry has been featured in Verse Daily and the Best American Poetry website. His short fiction has twice been a Notable Story for storySouth’s Million Writers Award and was chosen for the 2013 Sundress Best of the Net. He is a former soldier and lives near Seattle with his wife and daughter. His website is http://valvis.net/. 

A signed copy of Jim’s book, How to Say Goodbye, can be purchased for $15 (postage paid) by contacting him at valvis@ketzle.net.

His book is also available at Amazon (unsigned):

http://www.amazon.com/How-Say-Goodbye-James-Valvis/dp/0978798333