Whispering Hope

Doris Betts

WHEN Flannery O'Connor was asked before one of her Southern audiences, "Why do you write?" she promptly answered, "Because I'm good at it." People recoiled; in our region, modesty is thought to be automatically transmitted with the X chromosome. But Miss O'Connor, a committed Catholic, was not being arrogant. She hastened to add that she took seriously the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, so if she wrote fiction because she was "good at it," that answer grew out of her conviction that every person's talent was a gift, that each of us has a responsibility for using that gift as well as we can and by that use returning it to the Giver at least as large as ever—possibly larger if service has helped it to increase.

Though this Presbyterian agrees with Miss O'Connor on the why of writing, we differ on the how. She wrote in "The Fiction Writer and His Country" that if a writer can assume that her audience does not share her beliefs, she may have to make her vision apparent through shock: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." That is certainly one method, but I—like many mothers and kindergarten teachers—have found that the whisper can also be effective. There's quite a range between characters like O'Connor's startling Hazel Motes in Wise Blood and Ann Tyler's quiet Ian Bedloe in Saint Maybe; as there's a range between times when Jesus inveighed strongly against a "generation of vipers" and other times when he might stoop and silently scratch words in the ground.

In O'Connor's world, the road to Damascus runs straight through south Georgia, where God's grace gets thrust almost violently into people's lives; in Walker Percy's world, some awkward pilgrim will set out, of his own free but uncertain will, on a quest to determine God's very existence. Graham Greene works with apparent moral failures like the whiskey priest of The Power and the Glory. C.S. Lewis extracts a whole pre-Christian novel (Till We Have Faces) out of I Corinthians 13. In Susan Ketchin's collection of writer-interviews, The Christ-Haunted Landscape, novelists as different as Lee Smith, Reynolds Price, Harry Crews, and Will Campbell express their talents in very different styles.

If, in O'Connor's stories, the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit and then perishes, or Mrs. Turpin gets called a wart hog in two different ways, or the Holy Ghost continues, implacable, to descend from a ceiling stain, my own characters don't seem to earn such direct intervention. Like the descendants of Job's second cousins once removed, they struggle through a long weekday process that includes losses and boils until in the end God does not so much answer their questions as silence them, simply by being there, so that my characters end by saying—or maybe whispering—"Mine eye seeth Thee." Some of them might add, "That is You, isn't it?"

Neither a shout nor a whisper spoken by a believer who thinks she distinguishes a dim gestalt of the Holy Spirit operating in this world will convince a non-believer. Answered prayer is the easiest of all experiences for an atheist to explain away—until he has one answered himself. I work mostly with characters who gradually, sometimes reluctantly, become alert to the possibility that human life is more than meets the eye. Being alert to possibility is, after all, the way most writers generate stories. Metaphor, simile, symbol suggest meanings beyond the concrete objects from which they arise. The "seeds" for stories that Henry James described seem to arrive as mere coincidence.

My most recent novel, Souls Raised from the Dead, got underway because on my daily commute to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, I came upon a chicken-truck wreck beside the highway. Seventy-five hundred capons, raised in houses heated and lit by electric current—chickens that had never set foot to ground before—were loose from the overturned poultry truck. They flew; they hobbled with bloody wings, banged into passing windshields. Neighbors were catching some in tow sacks for lunch and dinner. Imbedded in this scene, with wounded chickens flapping past his head, a state trooper was trying to bring order out of chaos in a tableau both horrible and funny. And the look on his face? Pure existentialist despair. If Jean-Paul Sartre had lived in Chatham County, North Carolina, he would have recognized this as Page One, though perhaps we would have written different paragraphs at the end. In my case, that chicken-truck wreck opens a novel in which a highway patrolman longs to protect his daughter from all harm at all times, to rear her as perfectly as if she could be kept in unnatural isolation like those chickens. But of course, there is no way to give children a perfect or a perfectly safe life. There will be wrecks in their lives, too. There will be escapes, freedom. And in time there will be injury.

As I was starting the novel, Harold Kushner, a Massachusetts rabbi, published his 148-page book in memory of his son who had died at age 14, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Here he brought traditional Judaism to wrestle with the old question of undeserved suffering in a world he believes to be ruled by both a good and a powerful God. Kushner never pretended that people get what they deserve in life; he did not accept the premise that God sends pain for testing or improvement, nor that either God or ourselves are to be blamed for the cancer, the avalanche, the drive-by shooting. What he did choose to do was what my own characters must: cope with grief and loss, struggle for hope, help one another. In my novel, the survivors, not the sick child, are the "souls" that are to be raised, raised from despair.

Not until the novel was done did I notice that its structure had taken the shape of an anecdote Kushner tells, an old Chinese tale about a woman whose only son had died. In her grief, she went to the holy man and said, "What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?" Instead of sending her away or reasoning with her, the holy man said, "Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life." At once the woman set off in search of that magical mustard seed. She came first to a splendid mansion, knocked at the door, and said, "I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place? It is very important to me!" They told her she had certainly come to the wrong house, and began to list all the tragic things that had befallen that family. Since she had been through misfortune of her own, the woman decided she might be the best person to help these wealthy people, so she stayed to comfort them. Later she continued her search for a home that had never known sorrow, this time going to a shack, next time to a city slum. But wherever she turned, from palace to public housing to country club, she listened to one story after another of sadness and misfortune. Ultimately she grew so involved in ministering to other peoples' grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had—in fact—driven the sorrow out of her life.

At the end of my first chapter, I could see that a young girl was going to have a life-threatening illness. In her name, Mary Grace Thompson, I managed to whisper both "Grace" and the surname of a poet named Francis, and lift an invisible hat to a Flannery O'Connor character as well.

But what should the illness be?

A friend and rather literary doctor at the U.N.C. Medical School, Bill Blythe, was the obvious adviser. His father, LeGette Blythe, had published many Biblical novels, Bold Galilean being the best known. His son, a former student of mine, is now an editor at Esquire. Could Dr. Blythe suggest some fatal illness ? (Not leukemia: that's been done; and not that obscure literary ailment that kills off the girl in Love Story, what we usually call "Ali McGraw Disease.") Dr. Blythe suggested kidney failure because, he said, "We can cure almost everything else."

Immediately the moment of the chicken-truck wreck turned transparent and permeable; I went falling through it like Alice into the whole territory of medical ethics—those questions our grandparents seldom raised in Sunday School. What about organ transplants, heroic deathbed measures, surrogate parents, euthanasia, abortion, genetic manipulation? I began to be homesick for O'Connor's "Greenleaf" with its unambiguous bull that would drive a horn straight into Mrs. May on the last page.

And how to tell this medical story? O'Connor's "large and startling figures" could easily be transformed into melodramatic actors on some TV "Disease of the Week" program with soaring background music and Tylenol commercials. Should it be written in cool and clinical prose? Or should I assign to the state trooper a bookish narrator-friend who reads theodicy on the side? And if the daughter died, how could the story be anything but morbid and depressing, as even the Gospel story would be if it stopped short on Good Friday or Holy Saturday?

Anton Chekov's story, "Grief," which is also about a father's loss of a child, confronts all these risks of being melodramatic, sentimental, overdone. On a cold, winter night in St. Petersburg, the driver of a horsedrawn cab is transporting passengers back and forth through the swirling snow, to parties and back, to the opera, the cafe; and tonight the job is very hard for him because his son has just died. All evening, he tries to tell his passengers about that death and about his grief; but they're too busy to hear. They talk with one another about the magnificent overture, about the velvet gown their hostess wore, about the quality of the evening's wine. At the end of the long, cold night the cab driver goes through the falling snow and down to the stable where he tells his grief to his horse. "Listen," he says, "suppose your colt died and you lived on? That would be sad, wouldn't it? Yes, that would be sad."

For Chekov, what keeps that moment full of sentiment but just short of sentimentality, is its brevity and understatement played out against the snow, that whirling frigid snow that cools the moment, that holds it in tongs like a specimen.

In North Carolina we lack blizzards, so I set out to balance a story about illness and death against—not cold snow—but the warm counterpoint of life and laughter. One axiom of storytelling is that if a character is to die in a way that moves the reader, that character must first be made fully alive; otherwise no more emotion will be generated than when strangers' names appear in the obituaries.

But writers turn into foster parents themselves, and once I concentrated on bringing Mary Grace to life as a normal, funny adolescent, I was in the same position as her trooper-father. I did not want to lose her. When Charles Dickens was publishing The Old Curiosity Shop in installments, it's said that when the sailing ship bearing the latest chapter came into Boston Harbor, people were waiting on the docks, shouting, "Did she die? Did Little Nell die?"

Nobody was waiting to hear hard news from me. I ran head-on into a wall that was half theodicy, half writing-block.

When in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan debates how God can be both all-good and all-powerful, considering how much the innocent suffer—especially the innocent children—he becomes enraged at injustice. He offers to give back his ticket to life because, if God is good but not all-powerful, then he can't intervene against cruelty; but if he's all-powerful and simply unwilling to intervene, then how can he be good?

When Caroline Gordon, in How to Read a Novel, cautioned against the "novel of ideas," my translation is that it's better for novelists to get to metaphysics via a chicken-truck wreck than the other way around. Stories, like lives, give rise to questions naturally. To start from philosophical premise risks constructing a tinker-toy novel, a paint-by-number portrait, a Barbie doll sculpture, in which all content is a means to an end and a means with the life wrung out. Students in writing classes can easily be paralyzed by the question I once heard a teacher ask: "Do you really have anything to say?" Only allegorists start from that end and work backwards. Most writers set out to tell a story, knowing that who they are and what they believe will whisper its way in just as they do in one's daily life; their personality and beliefs will sink below the word-surface like a stain; they will be inside events the way the peach seed grows inside the peach.

Despite my first assumption that I was writing a medical novel, I saw that its pages had been whispering religious implications all along—that from the first glimpse of that poultry-truck wreck the subject matter partook of Jesus' lament over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34.

That's how "The Hound of Heaven" by Francis Thompson got into the plot, because I did not hold the same theological position as Rabbi Kushner. I was not even in the exact position of that Chinese lady who sought the magical mustard seed, since I knew a different mustard-seed story. Kushner's book lifted the ceiling off the Old Testament and flooded that view of Yahweh with the light of mercy and compassion, but it still wasn't the same as the New Testament.

Beyond this block of metaphysical seriousness came the psychological one of refusing to let Mary Grace die. I invented several miraculous cures, brought in European specialists. I wrote splendid sky-descriptions. Many minor characters entered the book and most of them made exits.

Then Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel prize poet, came for one semester to the Chapel Hill campus where I teach. Awestruck, I could not think of any conversation to make with a man who had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, had written so many memorable poems, and had called tragedy "awareness of the philosophical deep, over which—and thanks to which—science and technology have erected their flimsy palaces." But the great man proved accessible, humorous, a devout Catholic whose wife grew up in eastern North Carolina. By then I had already entitled the novel Souls Raised from the Dead, but now stumbled across its thematic epigraph in a poem Milosz wrote in memory of his mother who had perished in World War II.

In the poem, at Mass, after hearing the morning's scripture, the speaker of the poem says:

A reading this Sunday from the Book of Wisdom
About how God has not made death
And does not rejoice in the annihilation of the living.
A reading from the Gospel according to Mark
About a little girl to whom He said: Talitha, cumi!
This is for me. To make me rise from the dead
And repeat the hope of those who lived before me.

Discovering this poem, like the chicken-truck wreck, seemed fortuitous, seemed lucky. It seemed like Grace.

All my novel had to do was to repeat that hope or, as T.S. Eliot would have said, to "redeem the time." The soul to be raised was not that of Mary Grace from death, but the soul of her father from despair—the ultimate death. And the end of the novel does not shout about Heaven, does not draw large and startling pictures; it only whispers. In the end Mary Grace Thompson does die and her father's heart is broken, but he makes a start toward hope in divine mercy. Hope may even be whispered so softly that not every reader will notice that there are fathers and Fathers in the final paragraph.

Would I describe it as a "Christian" novel? That durable noun first used to name the saints at Antioch seems to spoil to a rancid adjective with a slight whiff of the Pharisee. Between Pittsboro, where I live, and a neighboring town there's a gas station with a sign: WE TITHE. BUY GAS FOR JESUS. I drive on by.

Yet at the end of the novel, my bereaved state-trooper father is entering the state George MacDonald ascribed to one of his own characters, an elderly Anglican priest named Thomas Wingfold, who has spent his entire life serving the church. Now Wingfold is old; his doubts have awakened again; he is afraid of dying. Also, he wonders if his life has made any real difference or had any meaning at all. Wingfold ends with a version of the Pascal wager, hoping eternal life is true, choosing it even if he can never be absolutely certain. In his diary, Wingfold writes these words:

Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not...Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their deaths make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord.

Issue #7 • Fall 1994