Nothing came between anyone in my family and The Lone Ranger. We moved on into the nighttime realm of the 2 7
more dangerous shows, shows I call dangerous because they scared me out of my wits.
The Inner Sanctum so traumatized me that I couldn’t listen to it after a certain age. But I was also caught unawares by episodes of Suspense, or The Lux Radio Theatre. And even The Big Story could pretty much drive me right out of my head. What all these shows shared, of course, was that they were narratives being conveyed to us by voices—stories being enacted and told without visual images and certainly without any experience of printed words.
I entered into complete little worlds with these radio shows and emerged from them to enter into more worlds as the day and the night went on.
Weekends brought the big entertainment programs like Burns and Allen, or The Bob Hope Show, or The Jack Benny Program, and though these were amusing and everybody gathered for them, they didn’t have the narrative pull of the
“story” shows, and the story shows shaped my idea of what a story was, and how important it was.
Either that happened or I simply responded to stories more than anything else.
There was certainly music pouring out of the radio, and it was invariably melodic and gentle. Songs like “Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)” or “You’re Like a Plaintive Melody, That Never Lets Me Be” were being sung by substantial voices. And I loved all this, but the stories were the key experience for me. When I could lock on to the events of a story, I was happy, or scared, depending on what those elements were. During these years, we also went to the movies at a small C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s neighborhood theater on Baronne Street two blocks away. Other than the church, no other place is as vivid to me in retrospect as the Grenada Theater. Yet the earliest films I recall, I saw downtown in spectacular movie palaces that were fantasies in themselves with great carpeted staircases, huge balconies, and even marble statues in the lobby and on the mezzanine floor.
The first film I recall seeing was Hamlet. We were in the balcony, my mother and my sister and I, and my mother was explaining to me what was happening as Hamlet’s father was poisoned by his brother. The Ghost was talking. The film was in black-and-white and the images of the murder were fuzzy because it was something the Ghost was describing. The only other scene I recall from this movie was the scene of Ophelia floating away in her madness on a raft of flowers in a stream. It puzzled me very much that she didn’t wake up when she fell into the water. I recall arguing about this. It seemed absurd that she simply slipped into the water, speaking soft words and gazing at the sky, and drowned.
Other early movies included Casablanca, of which I recall only the final scene between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart as they talked beside the plane. I thought it was a dull film. I’d seen, though I don’t remember it, a film about the Marx Brothers in Casablanca and I was disappointed that they weren’t in this Casablanca film as well. The other notable scene I recall is from Caesar and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra had herself smuggled on board Caesar’s ship, wrapped in a rug. That was a fascinating scene to behold: 2 9
Vivien Leigh, the gorgeous Cleopatra with her long black hair and curling arm bracelets, coming out of that rug to the amazement of Claude Rains.
It’s no accident that I remembered these scenes all my life. It’s no accident that I remember listening to the radio so vividly, that I can recall names and even bits of stories from the radio.
Again, all of this was knowledge coming to me audibly and not shaped by printed words. The motion pictures were immense and vital like the church and did not involve the printed word.
And in this preliterate world in which my interests and tendencies and faith were formed, there was a profound connection between narrative, art, music, and faith. It never occurred to me or anyone I knew that the radio shows were profane, for example, and the church was sacred. The radio shows and the worlds they revealed were as much a part of life as church. Same with films. My mother loved movies, and she told us stories that she had learned from movies. She described movies to us which we all thought would never come to the theaters of our time again. So anything one learned from the radio, from film, from museums, from church—all of it was a rich and wondrous stream in which one could thrive.
The radio brought us not only shows but broadcasts of the Rosary being recited, every evening for fifteen minutes. The Sunday Mass was broadcast over the radio too. My grandmother, long unable to go to church because of her broken hip and her built-up shoe, listened to the Mass in the C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s dining room as she said her Rosary and read Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic newspaper, all at the same time. When I went to school and began to read, I lost an immense world of image, color, and intricate connections, but undoubtedly I retained more than I lost. I gained in school a poor understanding of things through written text. School was when excruciating boredom and anger and frustration really began for me. The mystery and calm of the early years were destroyed by school. School was torture. School was like being in jail. It was captivity and torment and failure. But what remained forever, what continued, was the sense of God and His Presence, of His embracing awareness of us and all we said and did and wanted and failed to do, and of His love. School couldn’t destroy that faith. And alongside it, I retained the sense that the world was an interesting creative place, especially if one could get out of school. Let me emphasize this again: Christian faith was in no way opposed to the world in which I grew up. One didn’t leave the world to go to church. Church was simply the most interesting place in the world that I knew. The fact that the school was Catholic and the school taught about God didn’t come between me and God. Nothing could do that when I was a child. I simply thought the school was a boring and miserable place. And I think I was right.
3
Be re l i eve d . I don’t intend to describe eleven years of Catholic school in the same detail as I’ve described the world before school. I hated it too much to describe it here. It’s much easier to try to draw useful conclusions from what happened than to relive it and wind up in a padded cell. Before I go on to deal with school in any way, I’d like to talk a little more about my mother. And also I need to talk about my father and my older sister.
If I hadn’t known my mother was the primary source of my education when I was little, I certainly knew after a few years of staring out of the window in school. My mother’s whole presentation of the world is what I took away from the first fourteen years of my life. As I mentioned earlier, she’d read poems to us from before I could recall. My sister, Alice, and I would snuggle up with C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s her on her bed in the smallest and coziest bedroom in the house. The book was called Two Hundred Best Poems for Boys and Girls compiled by Marjorie Barrows. It was a small hardcover with a drawing of three timeless little children against a black flowered backdrop.
The poems were illustrated with small silhouettes by Janet Laura Scott and Paula Rees Good. The publisher was the Whitman Publishing Company, in Racine, Wisconsin. This was the only book from which my mother read to us in the first years. “Song at Dusk” by Nancy Byrd Turner set the tone of my entire life.
The flowers nod, the shadows creep, A star comes over the hill;
The youngest lamb has gone to sleep, The smallest bird is still.
The world is full of drowsy things, And sweet with candlelight;
The nests are full of folded wings— Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.
Other poems in the book were filled with pirates, dragons, fairies, and general mystery and magic. My older sister, Alice, liked the more action-packed poems, but I think we agreed on “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” by Ogden Nash. Belinda lived in a little white house, With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse, And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon, And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon. 3 3
The poem goes on for over twelve stanzas, and the gist is that Custard the dragon was a co
ward who nevertheless proved to be the only brave one in the house when a pirate broke in and threatened them all.
Belinda paled, and she cried, Help! Help! But Mustard fled with a terrified yelp, Ink trickled down to the bottom of the household, And little mouse Blink strategically mouseholed. But up jumped Custard, snorting like an engine, Clashed his tail like irons in a dungeon. With a clatter and a clank and a jangling squirm He went at the pirate like a robin at a worm. The reason I’ve copied out here so many stanzas of this poem is because I think it was significant that we, as little children, were acquainted with this kind of rhythm and vocabulary. Other poems in the book make a similar demand on the mind, and offer a similar musical delight. Probably nothing I ever wrote as a published author did not derive in some way from the sixteen or so poems my mother chose, over and over again, to read to us from this book. The sheer pleasure of the experience was key. I spent hours, not reading the poems, but looking at the silhouettes on each page and it did seem to me that these tiny pictures, usually no more than intricate borders for the poems, were filled with mystery.
But her poetry reading was the smallest part of my mother’s influence. She told us fabulous stories all the time. C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Lying on her bed, listening to her, I learned all about life. She loved to recount her own experiences, how she’d gone to California and lived among a family of movie people, ventured out to a town called Trona to work for a while, lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, though Heaven knows why, and how she’d dated this or that interesting young man, and gone to this or that Mardi Gras ball, or dinner at the yacht club, or how her father—dead in 1917—had been a powerful longshoreman who could carry huge sacks on his shoulders, dazzling other weaker men. She discoursed at length on other people, their psychology, what they were like, and she loved above all perhaps to tell us the plots of movies. Ben-Hur she had loved and also The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Robert Donat, and there were numerous other films which she sought to make real for us, which we might never see.
Nobody then dreamed of the archival world in which we now live in 2008, a world in which almost any film or book can be retrieved within a matter of hours. Films could be lost in time in those years. Indeed they could be lost forever. And when precious films returned to the art house theaters for a special run, our mother made sure that we saw them. The Red Shoes directed by Michael Powell with Moira Shearer was perhaps the greatest masterpiece to which she exposed us. But she also took me to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Another film which she took us to see was A Song to Remember starring Cornel Wilde as Frédéric Chopin, and Merle Oberon as George Sand, his lover. I was so taken by this film, so taken by the emotions of the young Chopin, when he clutched a 3 5
handful of Polish earth and swore to remember it, that I wanted nothing more than to have such meaning in my own life, something that precious to me, something to which I could give my whole soul.
In later years we went back to that same art house theater for other extraordinary films, like The Tales of Hoffmann or a film of the opera Aïda or delightful British comedies about Chesterton’s Father Brown and his jewel thief friend Flambeau. This was my mother’s doing, this film going, this believing in film as an art form, and seeing it as a door to inspiration and imaginary worlds.
Over and over again, my mother said, “I want to rear four geniuses and four perfectly healthy children.” Now, that might frighten a more timid person, but it never frightened me. She told us stories of geniuses of all kinds. She loved describing the vivid social world of Charles Dickens; she recounted to us how the Brontë sisters had written under pen names because they were women and then had taken London by storm as their real selves. She told us the story of the great author George Eliot. She told us about G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Oscar Wilde, whose stories for children we loved. She talked about Madame Curie the great scientist, and she passed on to us bits and pieces of information about her own studies, lectures she’d heard, wise people she’d known, and books she’d read.
I would say she was an irresistible talker, and she did something which now seems to me intensely and distinctively Catholic. She addressed a multitude of questions which had never come up. For example, I remember her C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s explaining to me almost casually why there was no conflict between theories of evolution and the words of the Bible. Genesis tells us God created the world in six days, she would say, but Genesis doesn’t tell us how long a day was for God, in God’s time. End of conflict.
We were as a family quite interested in evolution, and speculated about it all the time—what had life been like for cavemen? How had they communicated, how had they learned things? My older sister was always finding fossils in the gravel in the backyard. And these were true fossils, some of them, though the stories she told as to what they were had more imagination than scientific preciseness. There was almost nothing precise about anybody in my childhood.
As the years passed, my older sister brought home fascinating books from the public library, and my mother and my sister read these books together, while I listened to what they said. I remember the whole family becoming enthralled with the life of the ballerina Anna Pavlova. Around that time, we went to see the ballet Giselle.
This was an overwhelming sensuous experience—sitting in the fourth or fifth row of an elegant theater (The Civic on Baronne Street downtown, the very same theater that played all the foreign films or artistic films), and watching the exertion and the execution of the dancers at close range. We also attended a performance of the opera Carmen when we were still in grade school; and we started going to the Municipal Auditorium for concerts when I was still in grade school as well.
3 7
This was my education, this world of my sister and my mother talking about books, the world in which the radio continued to pour out suspenseful dramas in the evening, and in which classical music was played all the time on the phonograph because we could rent records from the uptown music library, records which we could never have afforded to own.
This was the place where I learned just about anything of importance that I now know.
I cannot imagine my life without my mother or my father or my sister Alice.
My father took us to the library when we were little, and he introduced us to books, yes, and he was a brilliant man. But the core experience for me was not reading these books, because I couldn’t. But of discovering that while he was in the Redemptorist Seminary, my father had been a writer, and that in his desk was a treasure trove of poems that he’d written and some short stories as well. Again, I couldn’t really read these things; I couldn’t make them my own emotionally by reading. Reading was too difficult. My mind wandered too much. But the idea of my father as a writer was something that blazed like the Burning Bush. My father also wrote a children’s novel at this time, called The Impulsive Imp, which he read to us chapter by chapter as he developed it. This novel was never published in my childhood, but my father did seek a publisher for it, and even had a friend do illustrations for it, dark paintings, as I recall, which we liked very much.
I, too, wanted to be a writer and struggled with stories C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s and poems even though I could hardly read. This was the first thing I wanted to do with my whole heart and soul, and the idea that I had to wait to grow up to do it was untenable, and gruesome. Though of course that is what happened. Let me briefly describe our house. It was a long lower flat in a duplex on the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Philip, and it had two porches on the front, one enclosed by screens, and the other open. French windows opened onto the porches from the living room. Sliding doors divided the living room from my mother’s bedroom, and from the main hall. The entrance to the flat was from a side porch, through an alcove that held shelves of books. These books included Chesterton, Dickens, and a row of volumes called the Harvard Classics which my father one day threw away. There were many other interesti
ng books in that alcove. Since I wasn’t a reader I never read a single one.
I think my older sister, Alice, whose IQ was on the genius level, probably read every volume. It was said that she read everything in the Children’s Library, and that is why she was sneaking upstairs into the Adult Library before she was old enough to do it. That I can believe, and I snuck up to the Adult Library with her.
The house was peculiar. Most of the floors were painted wood and bare. There was a linoleum carpet on the living room floor with a bright flowered pattern, and there were four antique rocking chairs on the four edges of the carpet, and an old studio couch with a pleasant pattern of ribbons and feathers stood against the closed door to my mother’s room. Flowered wallpaper covered the walls, and a lovely white marble fireplace and mantel surrounded the small iron 3 9
gas heater—like almost all the heaters of the house—on its curled legs.
And there was a constant flow in and out on the screened porch, which was considered as private as a room. My grandmother sat on the screened porch to shell peas in a colander in the evening. I remember stringing peas with her, and shelling them. I remember painting with an easel on this porch later on. Screened porches are all but lost to the world today, but screened porches were wonderful rooms. The soft breezes were always moving through them, yet one felt safe and private from the outside world. Other things I recall mark this as the end of an era. For example, I recall the iceman rushing up the back steps, with the block of ice on his leather-padded shoulder. I remember the first electric refrigerator that actually kept things cold. Garbage wagons were pulled by mules, and so was the wagon of the “banana man,” invariably black, who sang