American requiem.

by James Carroll

In or about 1769, Samuel Johnson was heard to say, "A man who is converted from Protestantism to Popery may be sincere; he parts with nothing; he is only superadding to what he already had. But a convert from Popery to Protestantism gives up so much of what he has held as sacred, as any thing that he retains; there is so much laceration of mind in such a conversion, that it can hardly be sincere and lasting."

Catholics who remain faithful to the Church suffer when one of their own abandons it. Recently, Italian-Canadian novelist Nino Ricci went through a form of matrimony not in a church but in Toronto's Old Mill in Etobicoke, with readings not from the scriptures but Christopher Marlowe's "Come live with me and be my love," a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and lines from The Owl and the Pussycat. "Calling the service Unitarian would be overstating it," said the best man, Don Melady.

A Toronto Star article calls Ricci "a Catholic novelist in the tradition of Graham Greene and Brian Moore--writers who can't shake the obsession with guilt, sin and expiation through suffering." "If he is the new Graham Greene, it would be against his will," said Melady. "He is a reluctant Catholic, having said goodbye to all that." But can he, or the two writers Professor McBride discusses, be satisfied with a conversion to nothingness?

D.D.

Like Father, unlike Son: Irish Americans

"The Roman Catholic Church: A View from the Inside" could readily serve as a generic title for an abundance of contemporary books. James Carroll's An American Requiem and Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winner Angela's Ashes share common ground. Each is a memoir that coheres around the Irish Catholicism of its subject. Each has attracted high honours, lavish praise, and large numbers of readers. Each bears a funereal title that announces the anguish of the author, reflecting his perception of his ethnic and religious background as far more a burden than a glory. Finally, in a central convergence, each memoirist so conflates his relation to the Church with his relation to his father that the latter comes to personify the former.

Destitution versus privilege

Dissimilarities, of course, also obtrude. McCourt's father was a delusional romantic doomed to complete failure. Carroll's father was a man of conspicuous accomplishment. McCourt endured a boyhood of poverty and degradation in Ireland; Carroll's youth was one of privileged comfort and respect in such places as Washington and American-occupied Germany. The Great Depression exacerbated the material privation of the McCourts. The Vietnam War tested - and eventually shattered - the moral cohesion of the Carrolls. Frank McCourt's life became an uneven contest for physical survival. James Carroll's became a self-absorbed struggle, mainly generated from within, for psychological identity.

McCourt would do far more than survive. He would prevail along a path that took him from destitution in rain-drenched Limerick to the United States and a Pulitzer Prize for Angela's Ashes. Carroll would find an identity, not as the priest that he became in response to his father's call rather than God's, but as a laicized writer who would publish nine novels, and then win a National Book Award for An American Requiem.

The authors deliver their stories in engrossing narratives, albeit to vastly different effect. McCourt thrusts the reader down into a bleak Irish tale of constant hunger, recurrent disease, and squalor, a family fate made all the more intolerable by a father who was pious but "a shiftless, loquacious alcoholic." Carroll sweeps his readers up into an Irish-American saga of fascinating settings, famous personages, and momentous events. His father was, in swift succession, an FBI hero-agent, an Air Force general, a confidante of cardinals, and an advisor to presidents.

Notwithstanding their differences, McCourt and Carroll both obey the convention that one now expects in any chronicle of a Catholic upbringing. At the very beginning of Angela's Ashes, for instance, McCourt establishes his credentials for serious consideration by the current cultural elite:

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. (p.11)

In the account that then unfolds, there is much passion but also no little fashion.

Taken on its own terms, though, Angela's Ashes tells a strikingly sad story. A feisty lad sees himself as hectored by mean-spirited schoolmasters; patronized by narrow priests; and thwarted in his ambitions by sacristan and Christian Brother superior alike. But what pulls down the entire family is the drunkenness of Malachy McCourt, not, in the stock Irish phrase, "a good provider," because he fails to be, at bottom, any type of responsible man.

Spiritual poverty

If it is a wonder that Frank McCourt could rise above his father's failure, then it remains likewise a puzzlement that James Carroll should maintain such evident poverty of spirit in face of his father's success. An easy explanation might be that this success was on the father's own terms, not the son's. The younger Carroll intimates as much when he writes, "Our father would give us the motto Pro Deo et Patria" (p.33), but "What Hans Kung had showed me about my Church, Martin Luther King showed me about my country." (p. 153)

For Lieutenant-General Joseph Carroll, God and country, Church and State, Faith and Family, were constants that compelled service and absolute fidelity. During the watershed 1960's, James Carroll, first as a seminarian and then as a priest, supplanted his father's absolutes with loyalties serially personified. Let Hans Kung impeach the Catholic Church as an ossified institution, and he had James Carroll's fealty; let Martin Luther King accuse American society of racial bigotry, and he drew James Carroll to his banner; let Daniel Berrigan and Senator Eugene McCarthy arraign the American state for waging war in Vietnam, and they held James Carroll in thrall. Carroll's old hero, his father, who was a staunchly traditional Catholic, a protege and then ally of J. Edgar Hoover, and as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a co-prosecutor of the Vietnam War, appeared a perfect fit for the cumulative bill of indictment lodged by his son's new heroes. To James Carroll, in the mode of the time, the political was personal.

That these figures became heroes to Carroll when they did is not yet implausible, yet what strikes the reader, is the character of his commitments. They were essentially contingent, in the fundamental sense of being rooted in time, place, and circumstance. The ferment in the Church of the early post-conciliar period after 1965, the moral urgency of the civil rights movement, and the passionate intensity of the Vietnam War protest, all shaped, and were shaped by the sixties.

Three decades later, the once dominant issues have receded into history, while the individuals who symbolized them (and captivated Carroll) have become footnotes. And years after both his priesthood and the Vietnam War had ended, Carroll's own first loyalty would ultimately reassert itself when Alzheimer's disease struck down his father. With a concern deeply filial, he tenderly ministered to a congregation of one during Joseph Carroll's decline toward eventual death in 1991. In an instance, surely, of what Thomas Hardy called "heaven's persistent irony," this final pull of the ties that bind father and son dissolved the ephemerally political into the eternally personal. Since it occurs at the end of the book, it imparts a surprisingly circular quality to An American Requiem.

Conquest of the individual

Angela's Ashes, on the other hand, remains unswervingly linear. The protagonist, cast back in time as the young Frank McCourt, inches forward like a prizefighter, who receives repeated hard blows, but through the ability to take a punch and come back for more, gradually manages to tip the balance in his favor. As a moral of endurance, the book works wonderfully well.

As literature, it presents some difficulties, stemming from a certain discordance between the voice the author uses and the sensibility that he brings to bear. His voice is that of the boy from the slums - repetitive in its coarseness, casual in its irreverence, saucy yet provincial. In contradistinction, his sensibility is that of the mature artist - worldly, resourceful, and ever striving for effect. This discordance contributes to an overall impression of autobiography dressed as a novel. It is as though Holden Caulfield had read James Joyce.

Nevertheless, no contrivance in form can overshadow the substance of Angela's Ashes, viz., a dogged individual's conquest of the long odds that life had stacked against him. No matter how he has chosen to record it, Frank McCourt's personal history stands as a genuine and moving fulfilment of the old Royal Canadian Air Force motto: `Per Ardua Ad Astra' (Through adversity toward the stars).

Aesthetic criticism of Carroll would run in a direction opposite from that just levelled at McCourt's manner of presentation. The former writes as the polished wordsmith that he has become during his career, elegance of expression lends steady grace to his narrative. On the down side, his nine works of fiction may have saddled him with an occupational hazard: arrogation of the novelist's prerogative of omniscience regarding the motives and innermost feelings of those about whom he writes. This seems so evident in his crucial treatment of his mother and father that, at times, An American Requiem - conversely from Angela's Ashes - reads like a novel masked as a memoir

The assumption of suppressed guilt

To all appearances, both senior Carrolls were handsomely on terms with themselves, and with excellent reason. But their son declines to view these parental positives as outward signs of inward peace, let alone grace. Instead, he came to imagine that his mother and father shared a suppressed guilt. The guilt ostensibly derived from Joseph Carroll's termination of his own study for the priesthood, just prior to ordination, and his subsequent marriage to the lovely Mary Morrissey.

By a process he calls "only intuitive knowledge" but which lawyers might deem "assuming facts not in evidence," Carroll treats this supposed guilt as the defining presence in the lives of his parents. It purportedly coloured their conjugal union (with its issue of five sons). It supposedly prompted Mary Carroll to look upon the polio of her eldest son, Joseph, as a punishment from the God Whom Joseph, Sr. had rejected by refusing Holy Orders. It manifested itself at James Carroll's ordination when, upon receiving the priestly blessing from his son's hands, the father broke into sobs.

Carroll also gives an impression of taking liberty, in the manner of fiction writing, with another figure in An American Requiem. The person is Carroll himself. Even for a memoirist, the author is self-reverential in the extreme. One vignette, otherwise minor, might at least illustrate the point. When he gingerly joins an anti-war demonstration outside the White House, he imagines Lynda Bird Johnson - whom he dated when he was a Georgetown student - scanning the crowd from inside, noticing him in its ranks, and informing the President of his presence. Such musings, which combine both mockery of self and solemn pretence, inscribe the book like an author's signature.

At the opposite pole, an embroiled Frank McCourt could not afford, and never displayed, any such delicacy of feeling. An early life of slammed doors either breaks the spirit or anneals it. In McCourt's case, it did the latter. All the doors that opened so widely for Carroll, in contrast, only make him more perplexed about his authenticity in stepping through them. But the lad from the hovel on the lane in Limerick, and the young man from the mansion on Generals' Row at Bolling Air Force Base, once faced a common threshold.

"To go unto the altar of God"

This threshold would find expression in the antiphon that begins the Latin Mass: "Introibo ad altare Dei... Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem mean." The exact phrases, in curious parallel, appear in both Angela's Ashes (p. 148) and An American Requiem (p. 80). In McCourt's book the words serve to introduce one of its most poignant episodes. Malachy McCourt, who had been an altar boy in his day, displays a rare diligence by drilling his son in the language and gestures required to serve Mass. When the father leads his son, thus prepared, to the parish church for inclusion among the altar boys, the sacristan in charge of the servers curtly dismisses them. The McCourts attribute the rejection to a bias against the poor as unfit for such a duty. Hence, Frank McCourt's attempt "to go unto the altar of God" does not "give joy to his youth." It only results in yet another humiliation.

James Carroll employs the same liturgical passages to integrate a reflection upon his decision to become a priest. Although he ascribes as his motive the need to acquiesce in his father's projected but unspoken wish for his second son, he senses confirmation of his resolve from another figure. In a private papal audience for the full Carroll family, Pope John XXIII accords James Carroll such concentrated attention that the latter perceives this as a pontifical benediction of his vocation. The two juxtaposed images linger: Frank McCourt finding himself rebuffed in his desire to be an altar boy by a parish sacristan; James Carroll feeling himself embraced in his intention to be a priest by the Holy Father himself. There is no escaping the hard existential edge of the first nor the mystical presumption of the second.

Irish Catholic immigration to the United States had long sought a social niche - a temporal deliverance without detriment to transcendent destiny. It is a vision literally realised by Frank McCourt, if not fully expressed by him. Irish Catholic assimilation in the United States has lately shown a lessening of Christian commitment within the American project, and a loosened grip upon the transcendent character of all human striving. It is a decline into spiritual confusion that James Carroll expresses perhaps better than he realises.