James Carroll: Practicing Human
"If things are so bad, why don't you just leave?" No matter how often you hear such things, they always sting--in part, of course, because there are enemies and scoffers you don't mean to comfort--but more deeply because unusually detailed criticisms imply an unusually vivid idea of how things might have been; they occur, typically, to people who have had their lives changed by moments of revelation and romance, when things that seemed painfully contradictory seemed reconciled--when something like "identity" took shape. To be asked why you don't leave feels like being disinherited.
This is a round about way of saying why Jim Carroll has been as much an inspiration as a friend for nearly 30 years, and why I so resent the odd review of his new book, Practicing Catholic, in today's Times. More than anyone I know, Jim has criticized the church out of a relentless desire to live out what he knew it could be; to hold dear its history, grandeur and gifts, and yet finally move it beyond the grotesque infallibility of its clerical hierarchy. The reviewer of his book, Jack Miles, a good man and a fine writer in his own right, is asking Jim why, in view of all his criticisms, he remains a Catholic. As if Jim has not asked his friends to answer this very question, letting loose a self-deprecating laugh, every time he asks them to read a manuscript. As if asking this is not like asking someone on page 879 of a Russian novel why he intends to finish it.
Obviously, there is particular fellow-feeling here, since a great many people are now asking why people with democratic impulses don't just give up on the Jewish state. For me, the moment of truth came on a farm in the Valley of Jezreel where I volunteered for work during the summer of 1967. Chanan, the farmer who hosted me--his sunny daughters hanging from him--was trying to explain that his friend who had been killed in the war was an excellent farmer; he said, "mi shichmo va maala," "from his shoulders and higher," which I instantly recognized as a fragment of the phrase "from his shoulders and higher taller than the people," the description of Saul--so I had I had learned--from The Prophets which caused Samuel to choose him as king of Israel.
Just why hearing Chanan say this meant the world to me is hard to explain quickly. I loved my father, still back in Montreal, but hated (as he tried to, but could not quite) the orthodoxy of the extended family. And so I loved his Zionist criticism of orthodoxy but loved all the more Philip Roth's skepticism about fathers. Then again, I loved the Torah, but hated what the rabbis did to it, but hated all the more what Nazis did to rabbis. Anyway, here on my new mentor's farm I suddenly saw a way of loving more freely. One did not have to sacralize the Torah, one could milk cows quoting it. One did not have to give up on fathers.
JIM'S MOMENT WAS the feel on his cheek of Pope John XXIII's cheek, at an audience in the presence of his father, whose own cheek (so we learn from Jim's award-winning memoir, American Requiem) was not easily brushed against. This meeting was just before, and became inseparable in Jim's mind from, Vatican Two and President Kennedy's election--events that were going to insinuate what American Catholic life might yet be, and has since become something else again.
What Jim teaches is quite simple, really. How you make your stand for conscience defines who you are. Where you make that stand is mostly a matter of fate. You may, for all kinds of good reasons, choose to let the cup pass from your hand, but it will be placed there. To ask Jim why he doesn't leave the church is to wish, not for a better world, but for another one--not a bad thing to be thinking about on, of all days, Easter Sunday.
So here is an Easter gift, and a Passover gift, for that matter. Listen to Jim's interview about his book on Chris Lydon's indespensible program "Open Source."
"If things are so bad, why don't you just leave?"
Meanwhile, Gaza is still being put on a diet, and people are still dying in ambulances at checkpoints in the West Bank.
Palestinians have been asked that question constantly since Irgun/Likud showed up in the 30's.
April 12, 2009 11:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
You make an interetsing point, Bernard, but maybe you're not being forgiving enough to your friend's critics -- leaving is a statement too. Maybe the best thing that could happen for the world would be for all thinking Catholics to leave the Catholic church. Then we could ask a more important and prescient question: why doesn't the church change to try to re-engage its members?
Walking out isn't always possible and it isn't always the answer. "America love it or leave it," is bunk. But being a member of any religion is, essentially a choice. You can try to change it from the inside or you can make the ultimate and most useful decision to leave that religion behind. so the question isn't "If you don't like it, why don't you just change the channel," it's: "If you don't like it, why do you validate it with your support?"
April 12, 2009 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obviously, there is particular fellow-feeling here, since a great many people are now asking why people with democratic impulses don't just give up on the Jewish state.
So, the decision whether to remain Catholic is of the same order as the decision to keep supporting politically a state structure that privileges you because you are Jewish, in which you are safely enjoying the benefits of theft and larceny?
How would you think of comparing Caroll to Tom Delay refusing to give up on Jim Crow?
When will you stop making excuses? Cows, farmers, land, all stolen.
April 12, 2009 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Evildoer, I do not need lectures from you about the deficiencies in the legal structure of the state. I wrote the first article published in America critical of the settlement movement (in The New York Review) back in 1975; and my 1985 book, "The Tragedy of Zionism," explained how the settlements were of a piece with an Israel whose discriminatory laws can be traced back to old Zionist institutions--something that sounds obvious today, but you simply did not say in 1985 (and pretty much cost me a comfortable academic career). The question is about baby and bathwater. The beauty, and logic, of a Hebrew speaking nation is in my bones. It was created, on balance, in a kind of moral draw. And I can think of obvious ways to secure it without perpetuating grievances.
April 13, 2009 3:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for what you wrote. But I must say that when I later read Jack Miles’ review, I didn’t find what your essay had led me to expect. You say that Miles, in his review, “is asking Jim why, in view of all his criticisms, he remains a Catholic.” In fact, Miles never asks that question; and in what he does say, his tone is far from the tone of the first words of your piece: "If things are so bad, why don't you just leave?"
While he’s unpersuaded by Carroll’s position, Miles shows respect for it. He includes a long quote to let Carroll explain that position himself, and then simply adds that his view and Carroll’s are different. Similarly, after quoting another section of the book, Miles simply comments, “So Carroll believes. I believe otherwise.” I don’t find in this anything of the "If things are so bad, why don't you just leave?" attitude which you cite at the beginning of your piece.
If anything, I find the opposite. Miles concludes,
That is: while he doesn’t share Carroll’s hope, Miles doesn’t criticize him for holding it – or for not leaving the church.
One last comment: I wish that, in addition to mentioning Carroll’s “An American Requiem,” you had said more about it, enough to encourage your readers to buy it and read it themselves. It’s a very good book
April 12, 2009 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gene Palumbo, perhaps our different readings have to do with how alert authors and reviewers are to the "code" of the Sunday Times "Book Review"--still the only review that really matters. The velvet tone is a given in case like this. And the little explanation Jack Miles quotes for Jim's decision to stay in the Church is very, even irresponsibly, partial. Jim's entire book is a theological, aesthetic, and autobiographical disquisition on his choice. Miles does not really try to represent, much less understand, the book's uniqueness. He is really saying, hey, I left, you didn't, and your explanation for why you stayed does not convince me. That is perfectly fine over dinner, but it is not a fair, or even serious, review of the author's life-long struggle.
April 13, 2009 3:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Allowing all its misdeeds and his own dissatifaction, maybe Carroll senses the church is embattled, assailed by interests not Catholic and not at all sympathetic to the very real values and grace of Roman orthodoxy. Maybe that part of him wants to stick around, to rise to its defense. It's one thing to criticize your own home for leaky faucets and dangerous stairs; it's quite another to here attacks and dodge rocks thrown by neighbors, by outsiders. And maybe he knows that for those critics, anything the church does is wrong.
Maybe Israelis sense the same thing about their state.
April 13, 2009 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
...Should be "bear attacks"...
April 13, 2009 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is profound overstatement: "More than anyone I know, Jim has criticized the church out of a relentless desire to live out what he knew it could be; to hold dear its history, grandeur and gifts, and yet finally move it beyond the grotesque infallibility of its clerical hierarchy."
As someone who suffered through Carroll's hideous book, "Constantine's Sword," it's probably more accurate to say that he's about as Roman Catholic as Martin Luther. He also wanted to cleanse the church.
Let's not kid ourselves. Carroll loves a church that does not exist. That is to say, another self-righteous twit who loved the church so much he broke it.
On behalf of millions of catholics who actually love our church, I would quite happy if Carroll became an Episcopalian. They need members, we don't.
April 13, 2009 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard Avishai:
After reading your response, I thought to myself, “I wonder what Jack Miles would say about all this?” So I got his email address from a friend, sent him our exchange, and asked for his thoughts. Happily, he has replied. I wrote back and asked if I could send in the reply as a comment on the post. He said yes. Here it is:
Dear Gene:
Thanks for sharing this interesting exchange. You won't be surprised that I find you the closer reader of the review. But here's what I would say to Bernie if we were seated at the same table:
I love loyalty to friends, and I love the loyalty I see here and the vicarious pain on behalf of a friend you see as wounded. But the wound cannot be the one you feel because the difference between the Roman Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church is not the difference between eretz yisrael and the golah. Jim Carroll and I share the assumption that beneath many historical differences there abides a single great church. I haven't left that greater church, and he wouldn't claim otherwise, any more than he would claim that his Episcopal wife is less authentic a Christian than he is.
Once we recognize that nobody is finally leaving anything, the decision to practice Christianity, including the pursuit of Christian unity, from one of its many administrative centers rather than from another is a practical choice that each may legitimately make on practical or, for that matter, even on emotional and sentimental grounds. For me, the practical grounds were decisive and rested upon the judgment that the laity had not taken power in the Roman Church and were unlikely to do so. The emotional grounds came down to: Where do you feel at home?
In any case, the larger point is that the Roman Catholic church, for an informed and liberal Catholic, is not "the" church in the way that eretz yisrael is "ha" aretz. Would Bernie regard choosing Reform over Orthodox Judaism as analogous to choosing the golah over eretz yisrael? I doubt it. But isn't that analogy, finally and rather obviously, the closer fit to Episcopalianism vs. Roman Catholicism?
The only way one could defend the analogy he wants to draw is by regarding the Roman Catholic Church as a kind of greater Vatican State into which all Christians must eventually be ingathered as Jews ingathered into eretz yisrael. But Christian unity won't come about that way, and shouldn't. Here, I am reminded of the remark of a Serb nationalist around the time that Yugoslavia was coming into existence between the world wars. He said, "I do not wish Serbia to be dissolved into a South Slav Sea. I wish Serbia to be the sea into which all South Slavs are dissolved." But Rome is not the promised land to which all will one day repair or the sea into which all will be dissolved. It has been only half a church since the schism of 1054; and many would argue, perhaps Jim among them, that its spiritual unity was destroyed rather than preserved by the political unity created by Constantine and Theodosius. That lost spiritual unity will only be achieved by the assembly and preservation of some kind of world Christian mosaic. And in the long interim before that happens, what Roman Catholics can best do is begin thinking of the distinction between their church and the other world churches as analogous to the distinctions among their own religious orders, each with its own habit, its own history, its own spirituality, and all here to stay. Paulist/Jesuit rather than anything remotely approaching oleh/yored.
Oh, and about the New York Times: They gave me not a word of advice beforehand, and their one revision afterward was to include the full titles of the Carroll books to which I had alluded.
April 13, 2009 6:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jack,
We haven't seen one another for many years and should not be meeting like this. If I have been intemperate, I apologize; I know your integrity, and certainly did not mean to imply that the New York Times edited or restrained you, only that there is a code to reviewing here and writers and readers all know what to make, alas, of even velvet criticisms like yours. But more important, I feel you have not done justice to this opportunity to engage with Jim's book. I should not be answering for him, so let me address what you suggest is my portion of the problem, my presumably false analogy between Catholicism and Zionism.
You say, as you do in your review: "For me, the practical grounds were decisive and rested upon the judgment that the laity had not taken power in the Roman Church and were unlikely to do so. The emotional grounds came down to: Where do you feel at home?"
Then you say: "The only way one could defend the analogy [Bernie] wants to draw [to Zionism] is by regarding the Roman Catholic Church as a kind of greater Vatican State into which all Christians must eventually be ingathered as Jews ingathered into eretz yisrael. But Christian unity won't come about that way, and shouldn't."
Jack, my point, surely, was not about reforming any religion; nor did I expect to invite visions of a Catholicism reconstituted as Vatican state. My point, precisely, was that where you feel "at home" is not, or not always, merely "sentimental," a kind of touching childhood prejudice, as opposed to some "practical" (presumably, more adult) judgment about the likelihood of succeeding in remaking the world as you would want to.
The analogy to my Zionism suggests that it is possible to feel at home in a vivid experience of how things might me, a microcosm of possibility--a hope, if you'll forgive the expression--that resolves (for a while, but unforgettably) the moral, aesthetic and affectionate contradictions that you live in and know you will always live in. Think of Pete Seeger's socialism and folk tradition. Shall we dismiss him (as The New Republic has) as an implicit Stalinist, or tsk-tsk about how 1960s folk music eventually yielded cheezy pop or heroine addicts?
No, hope that is played out in this way, and with this integrity, becomes the foundation of identity, the name of your desire--not in the silly sociologist's sense of socialized appetites, or as a child's first impressions, but as a maturing choice that continues on the level of the lived life. It is like your falling in love, which remains an indelible experience, no matter your later experience of your wife's faults or burps.
And here is the analogy to Zionism. I know that Israel has become in many ways a grotesque version of the cultural Zionist or Haskalic theories I once studied. But every time I hear a poem of Yehuda Amichai's or Leah Goldberg's, or visit Chanan's farm, I know that I can never disengage from the hope of Zionism. It is real, you see, not sentimental. My wife Sidra and I touch it again and again--this synthesis between Jew and "modern."
It doesn't have to win to be real, you see. Once you have fallen in love with it, fighting for it becomes second nature. And this, I think, is Jim's experience of Vatican Two, of its democratic possibility, of creating a innovative mass as a young priest, of feeling Cardinal Cushing's synthesis of American tolerance and the world-wide institution, of smelling Pope John XXIII's cheek in the presence of his father.
To engage with Jim, one has to think about the peculiar theological moves possible in the Catholic church of his hope, as opposed to, say, an Episcopal or black Baptist church. What does Jim desire that no other possibility provides? To do justice to the question, a reviewer would work sympathetically to tease this out. He or she would not say, well, we are all Christians, all part of this big church, and he could just as well have found this corner of it, as I have.
That is like someone saying to me, well, if you want to be a Jew and modern, why not just be a Reform Jew--something the American Council for Judaism has been telling Zionists for generations. It is like saying, hell, Pete Seeger might simply have joined the Stevenson campaign.
As if Reform Jews are not disappointing in their own way. As if Episcopalians and liberal Democrats are not. The real point is--dare I say Jesus's point, brooding in Gethsemane during the night before his death--is that we will never remake this world as we would want it. Our hopes will always be disappointing, as we will be, but our choices can have an integrity that is irreducibly precious--anyway, that is not simply "emotional." You stand (God willing, not die) for your hope. And our different hopes (sometimes books) are, if nothing else, interesting; they deserve to be explored as far as possible on their own terms.
April 14, 2009 5:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
It was created, on balance, in a kind of moral draw. And I can think of obvious ways to secure it without perpetuating grievances.
Maybe you don't need a lesson about the deficiency of Israel's legal system. And romantic nationalism can be sometimes almost harmless, but yours isn't. What moral draw are you talking about? About 10 million Palestinians suffer today various levels of abuse, from life barely batter than a concentration camp's, through exile and dispossession, and all the way to "merely" being discriminated against in all wakes of life. And what great injustice has been righted by this suffering apart from your youthful alienation from biblical Hebrew? I am not fond of "an eye for an eye" but at least I understand it. Your ethical calculus is beyond me.
What I respect particularly about the Hebrew Bible is the consistent excoriation of narcissism. And what I loath in this piece, your comparison of your alienation from Israeli politics to the catholic alienation from the Church, is how nostalgic and self-involved it is. Get over it. You're not the victim in this story, even if you lost your "pot of meat in Egypt."
April 15, 2009 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink