When the twenty-seven-year-old newly baptised Richard Joan (for Joan of Arc) Thomas (for Saint Thomas More) Gilman arrived in New Orleans in 1954, the city, although not exactly a boiling cauldron of lusts, was steamy enough to scald his thin spiritual hide. Like the patron saint of all autobiographers (in a line he quotes more than once), he chose chastity, but later. Illicit sexual “impulses,” idosyncratic attitudes, would drive this convert out the church doors and into the open arms of the literati a scant six years hence.
Not that he is happy about any of it.
Richard Gilman, child of Brooklyn’s Flatbush, distinguished drama and literary critic, (drama critic first at Commonweal, then Newsweek, more recently The Nation), professor of drama at Yale University, former president of PEN, winner of awards and grants worth coveting, has a confession to make. He once was a Catholic. (He never told his Jewish parents.) Worse, he misses it.
Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir is the story of Gilman’s conversion, apostasy, and “present existence in a realm of abstract, remembered spirituality.” That is a rarefied realm, to be sure, and if these revelations don’t make for inspirational reading, this work can still impress with its remarkable candor, sensitivity, and erudition. Indeed, if Mr. Gilman were a less generous and tolerant man—with himself as well as with others—he might have written a better, more original, book.
As it is, Gilman offers us an oddly importuning piece of writing. He attempts to woo the reader with therapeutic frankness, addressing us directly, and often imploringly. The voice that emerges is at once self-assured and more than a little self-regarding.
Gilman’s passionate infatuation with Catholicism began, appropriately enough, not in a church but a library—a branch of the New York Public Library to be exact. There he encounters the Amityville Horror edition of Etienne Gilson’s Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. And we mean Spirit! The book literally takes possession of our casual browser and he is drawn unwillingly to the tome by a mysterious force, an experience he later comes to accept as divine intervention—perhaps the only force powerful enough to get anyone to pick up a text on medieval philosophy.
Efforts to physically discard the book are eerily frustrated. Reading it he is struck quite blind by the magisterial assuredness of Gilson’s presentation. Intellectually he falls head over heels in love with Rome. (A romance any good Irish pastor would have warned him against.)
This “force” reappears on a number of occasions as Gilman, raised in an ethically homogeneous Jewish neighborhood, makes the culturally difficult move towards the Catholic church. “I didn’t go to the church, it came to me,” he insists. Perhaps. In any event, the Hound of heaven is evoked, and Gilman even professes to have learned the Hail Mary by a kind of osmosis.
These strange solicitations culminate in the appearance of Ruth, a somewhat prescient figure whose haunting spirituality is enhanced by her faded beauty. Ruth becomes Gilman’s spiritual midwife, coaching him through an intense but finally successful labor. The author’s feelings for her are still strong and demand respect. Still, Ruth’s “I wanted to kiss a leper” ecstasies are a bit theatrical. (She is an apostate actress.) A “secular nun” is how Gilman describes her. But she seems entirely too otherworldly for any serious religious work, and in this she is emblematic of much of the “religion” and even “mystery” in Gilman’s book.
Gilman, it hardly needs saying, is a gifted writer and a masterly exegete. Especially evocative is a lyrical passage on growing up in Brooklyn and his childhood impressions of Catholicism. He “had regarded as terrifying apparitions the nuns he would occasionally see going in and out of—scuttling in and out of—the Catholic church a few blocks away from his home … a church from which an endless procession of coffins seemed to emerge.”
His portraits of the Manhattan clergy he abashedly confronts in the 1950s while trying to sell subscriptions to the Catholic journal Jubilee are vivid and agreeably pointed. Equally adept, and crucial to the book’s ultimate purposes, is a sketch of a world-weary French priest who hears Gilman’s confession, offers an acute diagnosis of his spiritual condition (“aridity”), and stuns our memoirist with some nearly heretical counsel.
But finally there is too much talk—and a kind of fussily nuanced talk at that—and not enough action in Faith, Sex, Mystery. The mannered air of the seminar room seeps in. Gilman takes great pains to emphasize the complexity of life and the ambiguities of human motivation, and that is fair enough. But it also encourages an oblique, lofty, and yet tentative style that is too often the way the author hedges his bets. And he knows it. In the concluding pages Gilman confesses, “I know I’ve been a rationalizer, a subtle schemer after a ‘truth’ about my actions that would keep my conscience disarmed. And I know that beneath those rationalizations I fell back into self-commiseration because the battle against carnality and ambition—which had come more and more to look like aspects of the same primary force, alarming, guilt-ridden—had become too much for me. In this retreat I had left God behind. I wasn’t to be solicited anymore.”
This is a teasingly self-effacing assessment, and typical of Faith, Sex, Mystery in its somewhat manipulative quality. Gilman is just a little too fond of admitting to a shortcoming.
The fact is: he moved towards the church during a period of great personal frustration and insecurity. He was in his late twenties, unemployed, struggling in an unhappy marriage and unable for the most part to write. Socially, professionally, and to some extent sexually (or at least he thought so at the time), his status was marginal, his sense of identity shaky. To some extent Gilman is frank about this, although he argues that his anomalous social situation and his precarious psychological condition were secondary to what he calls his spiritual experience.
That may be true. But is it just coincidence that those so-called manifestations of the spirit evaporate as his professional and personal confidence grows? After four years as associate editor of Jubilee (1955-1959), his ambition is to move towards the nonsectarian press. (Amusingly, he goes to Commonweal.) His dissatisfaction with the lack of a “real” career and his determination to forge new professional relationships parallel the rapid dissipation of his faith. By the time he moves to Commonweal, a magazine he feels has prestige outside the limiting world of religious journalism, he is no longer a practicing Catholic. “It [Catholicism] all seemed irrelevant,” he says of religion’s role in his advancing career. “I became largely secular.” And by “secular” we understand that his devotion was transferred from a religious community to a succession of writing jobs.
This is hardly a unique evolution, and one can’t help but wonder at Gilman’s fretful reminiscence of it all. Understandably, he regrets that in leaving the church his life is now “set against nothing”; deprived of the promise of eternal salvation it lacks spiritual depth, even to a certain extent hope. But Gilman is unwilling to act on this regret; things are not that bad. Earthly perdition has its consolations. So if there’s nothing intellectually or morally dishonest—and Gilman maintains there isn’t—in the loss of his faith, why is it the source of such extravagant melancholy? He has been richly blessed with talent, success, children, and the affection of students and friends. Yet he claims to have forfeited some ineffable fulfillment. What—in this world—does he really expect from religion? Something, one suspects, he doesn’t want to pay for.
That Gilman is convinced he was once the object of “His special concern” is perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this memoir. And in this light it is interesting to note that his hard-won faith, the product of much study and personal anguish, is nonetheless curiously heterodox. He confesses, for example, that he had “trouble from the beginning” with the sacramental nature of the Eucharist. He just didn’t buy it, or to borrow his phrase, he unwillingly “swallowed” his doubts about transubstantiation along with the wafer. He wanted mystery, he says, “But in this case, as in some others, the mystery seemed too literal.” He couldn’t accept the idea that such mysteriousness was “confined to a physical fact.”
This insensibility to sacrament leaves Gilman with a rather attenuated Catholicism, as though he might have insisted on reviewing plays only by reading them and never attending a performance. He can’t help but see the bread and wine as “a concession,” a kind of visual and tactile aid to belief. He wants mystery to take him beyond, to the next realm—and immediately. “For all my avowed respect for mystery it seems that I couldn’t wait for its operations to take effect, didn’t trust that it would happen. And I don’t now,” he finally admits.
Gilman rejects sacrament, one fears, because it is not arcane enough. Its accessibility—you don’t have to ingest Gilson to worship at this table—taints it. But our ability to respond to such symbols, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is largely determined by our social experience and the systems of accountability that govern our dealings with others. In those terms, the individualistic meritocracy of the dominant culture Gilman embraces leaves little room for sacramentality.
Beyond that, the mystery of the Eucharist is something that, as I understand it, we need not trust to happen; it has already happened on the cross. Moreover, we must live in, not travel through the sacrament. The Eucharist does not offer access to some other dimension of existence, but delivers us over truly to the existence we live now. In this sense it is a discipline as much as a gift, or perhaps the essence of the gift is the discipline. As the symbol of the thing, as well as the thing itself, the Eucharist is not “confined” by the bread and wine. Rather, as Alexander Schmemann has written, those elements of the sacrament are the perfect expression of the ”reality of the symbol and the symbolism of reality.” Real life, notes Schmemann, is eucharistic life. There isn’t any other.
In the beginning of Faith, Sex, Mystery, Gilman outlines the problems of autobiography, and speaks of the necessity of finding a “shape” for his story. The risks he takes in pursuit of that goal are humbling. But the ultimate shape of this memoir is not a very surprising one—it preserves the glossy edges of an age whose spiritual sterility the author professes to disdain.
It could be said that Gilman had built the most modern of glass houses and then furnished it with the finest ecclesiastical antiques good taste and brains could find. The effect is at first striking, but soon the incongruity of the two ways of life becomes apparent. It is not a house you can live in. You can’t nurture the spirit in a world that increasingly demands the walls of every sanctuary be torn down and replaced with the transparent advertisements of the self.
Gilman’s final allegiance, like most of ours, is to the skeptical rationalism and individualism of this secular and so-called scientific age. In closing he asks us to indulge his uncertainty and admire the fact the spiritually he is “still pedaling in midair.” But such untethered longing is no great feat—it’s what most people do. That this fails to make any of us particularly happy is no surprise.
Faith, Sex, Mystery
A Memoir
Richard Gilman
Simon and Schuster
$16.95 | 253 pp.
