The Great Good Thing (10 page)

These stories were dense with Christian imagery. Of course they were. The church had virtually invented the code of chivalry as a way to convince real medieval knights to stop being the violent louts they were. In fiction, knights were courageous warriors for Christ, and ladies were virtuous in the Holy Virgin's name. The climactic Arthurian adventure—the quest for the Holy Grail—in most versions of the story was a search for the chalice from which Jesus poured wine at the Last Supper.

As it turned out, too, the symbols from these legends were strewn throughout all my favorite books. In Chandler's original Marlowe story, the knightly detective was actually named Mallory.
The Maltese Falcon
's link to the Crusades gave the story overtones of the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail mythology virtually dictated the plot of
The Sun Also Rises—
and that, in turn, connected the novel to T. S. Eliot's magnificent poem
The Wasteland
. Here was another writer—Eliot—who had seen the great culture of the West collapse and
had tried to reconstruct its values within himself. I could see now why the poet had ultimately become a Christian.

In fact, by the time I was fifteen or so, I had begun to understand that Christianity was central to everything I had been reading. It was Christian ideas that had powered European culture, and it was belief in those ideas that had fallen when Europe's culture fell. The empty church in which Jake Barnes couldn't pray, the Holy Grail that Sam Spade found to be worthless, the stained-glass window that held Chandler's knight helpless, and the fragments of literature that Eliot shored against his ruins: these were the sad remnants of a founding faith that had all but gone out of the intellectual world.

I was only a boy still and I didn't understand much, but I began to understand that at the heart of all Western mythology, all Western civilization, all Western writing, all Western thought, and every Western ideal, there stood a single book, the Bible, and a single man, Jesus of Nazareth.

I decided I ought to find out more about them both.

I
had no religious motives in reading the New Testament. I wanted to be a writer. Christian symbolism was everywhere in the writing I admired. I wanted to know where the symbols came from. That really was all.

Of course, my family did not own a Bible with the New Testament in it. I had to go to the store and buy one. I don't remember where I got it, but the copy I bought is on the desk beside me as I write. A forty-five-year-old volume now, its binding is worn to the glue, its brown cover cracked and broken. Poignantly, I noticed only recently that it was published by Thomas Nelson, the same company that contracted me to write this book.

I decided to start with
The Gospel According to Saint Luke
. I think this was because I liked Christmas and Luke includes the Christmas story, which I had never read in the original. My older brother had recently left for college and I
had inherited his coveted bedroom, down on the ground floor away from my parents' and younger brothers' rooms upstairs, so that's where I was when I started. It was a weekday evening, around dinner time. I closed my door, lay down on my bed, cracked open the book, and began to read.

Now, my father was a saboteur. He could not switch off his ferociously competitive instincts even when it came to his own sons. I believe it unnerved him to see us succeed at anything. I believe he was relieved to see us fail. I believe this was especially true when we aspired to accomplish something he hadn't or felt he couldn't accomplish himself. Whenever that happened, it always seemed to me he made extra efforts to thwart our ambitions by subtle and devious means.

I don't know whether he intended to do this. I don't even know if he knew he was doing it. It's possible he only sabotaged our projects in the same ways he often sabotaged his own. But speaking for myself, I found whenever he gave me professional advice, it was misguided. Whenever he introduced me to professional contacts, they turned out to be hapless or dishonest. Whenever he offered me financial assistance, it always came with a catch—some favor or side project I had to do in return that would somehow result in the ruination of my main purpose. From a very early age, I understood that if I wanted to succeed at anything in life, I would have to avoid my father's “help” at all costs.

This was certainly true when it came to my ambition to write novels. I had decided I would become a fiction writer on my fourteenth birthday. This was a Saturday in July. I was
working a summer job as a busboy in a railroad station diner. It was a horrible job. Eight hours a day scraping half-eaten food off plates in a broiling basement kitchen. I was forbidden to talk to customers. I wasn't permitted to receive tips. I was constantly browbeaten by my bullying boss, an embittered Holocaust survivor who hated everyone, including me. Nonetheless, it was my first full-time job and I was proud of it. I had gotten it myself, starting at one end of the town's main drag and walking about three miles to the other end, stopping in every store along the way to ask for work. The diner was the last place I planned to try. They hired me on the spot.

I worked there two miserable weeks. Then, on my birthday, the owner suddenly “discovered” I was too young to be employed for such hours. I don't think I had lied to him about this. I suspect he had gotten into some sort of trouble over it or simply wanted an excuse to get rid of me. In any case, he called the house and spoke with my father. I was still asleep in bed when Dad burst into the room brimming over with glee and cried out with gusto, “Happy birthday! You're fired!”

I can't say I was heartbroken. It really was an awful place to work. But I didn't want to spend my summer idle either. I had started writing some adventure stories on an old portable typewriter. It was mostly kid's stuff I liked to share with my buddies at school. But now I decided I would try to go professional. I resolved to spend the summer writing stories and mailing them out to magazines. I followed the guidelines I had found in a helpful volume called
Writer's Market
. I would write my story, locate an appropriate magazine in the book,
then mail my work to the editor with the required SASE—a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. Without fail, the magazine would promptly use the SASE to send the story back to me with a rejection slip attached.
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, your story does not fit our needs at this time
. Undaunted, I continued writing through that summer, then into the fall and winter and stubbornly through the years. I sold my first story five years later, when I was nineteen.

It's hard to remember now, but in those days, novelists were important cultural figures, the kings of narrative art. Celebrity writers like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were striving to fill the shoes of the idols of only one generation back, men so famous they went by a single name—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald—as pop singers do today. Mine was a lofty ambition, in other words. And it was one my father shared. He wanted to write novels, too, and may have even tried it a couple of times, I don't know. I think the idea that I might succeed where he had not appalled him. In any case, almost from the moment I started writing seriously, my father began a nearly full-time campaign to derail my efforts.

It seems sadly hilarious to me now but at the time it was annoying and threatening. He would bombard me with absolutely terrible advice.
You can't work too many hours as a writer; you'll burn out. You can't have a job and write in your spare time—if you take a job, that's all you'll ever do. If you're not actually writing, you'll never be a writer—thinking and imagining are pretentious wastes of time. You have to write trash if you want to succeed.
The barrage of paternal words of
wisdom that were not just untrue but the opposite of true was relentless.

Also, when I first started, he would occasionally convince me to show my work to someone he knew, usually someone with some tenuous connection to publishing. Inevitably, they would add their own bad and discouraging advice to his.
Try to write down to the audience more. You might consider going to law school so you have a backup plan.
One of them even told me that the market for pornography was quite strong so that might be a good place to start! After a few of these experiences, I began to refuse my father's offers of help, which left him hurt and furious.

What I remember most, though, are his interruptions. They were constant. Whenever my father heard my typewriter clacking, he would rush to the scene like a fireman to a fire. He would burst through the door without knocking and busy himself in my room with some meaningless chore sure to disturb the flow of my work. If I politely asked him to leave and let me get back to writing, he would become angry and verbally abusive, hurling four-letter curses at me. Once—so help me this is true!—he came in immediately after I started typing and began to lean over my shoulder to fiddle with the desk lamp directly above my page. “I just wanted to make sure this bulb didn't need changing,” he said. Whatever pretense he used to enter, he would stay in my room until he felt he had broken my concentration. Only then would he withdraw.

This went on well into my adulthood. Taking the advice I had gotten from Raymond Chandler's letter, I would never do
anything but write during my writing time. Most especially, I learned never to answer the phone. This drove my father crazy. He would call and let the phone ring twenty or thirty times until I unplugged it—maybe even after I unplugged it, for all I know. If my girlfriend picked up and told him I couldn't be disturbed, he would argue with her bitterly. Then he would call me later and berate me with foul-mouthed insults. After the answering machine was invented, he would snarl the four-letter words into the recorder and then loudly slam down the phone.

By then, though, I was out of his reach and power. In those earlier days when I was still living at home, I had to learn to take more elaborate countermeasures. I tried to arrange my work time for when he was out of the house. I worked in the basement with the washing machine rumbling to hide the rattle of my typewriter. Finally, I learned to write with a pen in a notebook—silently—and type the manuscript only after I was done with its composition. I continued to do that, in fact, until the personal computer came along a decade or so later.

As a result, even my silences became threatening to the old man. He started staging surprise raids on my room even when it was quiet.

So it was on that evening I lay down on my bed and began to read the New Testament for the first time. Rather than call me to dinner from afar as he always did with my brothers, my father made his way to my room and threw open the closed door without knocking to announce that dinnertime had come.

And what, to his absolute shock and horror, should he
discover but his own son lying there on the bed reading . . .
The Gospel According to Saint Luke
!

Oh, he was furious.
Furious.
The rage burbled out of him slow and thick like tar from a pit. He saw at once it was the Bible I was reading, and not the tremendous Old Testament he kept on a shelf in the den either, but something suspiciously compact and functional, the sort of thing some devious Christian might leave in a hotel room as an evangelical snare for unsuspecting alcoholics, homosexuals, and Jews!

When I set the book open, facedown on the desk so I could find my place again after dinner, he immediately snatched it up to examine it. Worse and worse! There, practically leaping off the page at him, were the words of Jesus Christ himself
piously highlighted in red
.

My friends at Thomas Nelson are lucky the old man's not alive today or he might hunt them down one by one. As for me, he let me know just what he thought of my reading material in no uncertain and no printable terms. It began slowly, with what I think were meant to be a few dismissive obscenities. But he clearly couldn't stop what was boiling up out of him. Soon, in a voice all the more unnerving for being murmurous and choked rather than explosively loud, he was coughing out a relentless stream of curses against both me and the fantastical sourcebook of our people's enemies.

I was actually taken aback. Like any teenager, I was perfectly capable of goading and provoking my parents. I'm sure I did many things purposely designed to defy, shock, and annoy them. But in this case, I was completely innocent. I had
come to believe the Bible was central to Western literature. I wanted to work in the field of Western literature. So I was reading it. I wasn't brandishing the deadly volume at anyone. I was hidden away in my own bedroom behind a closed door. I didn't have the slightest thought of believing in the thing either. I just wanted to know what was in it.

I tried to explain some of this to my father as I followed him down the hall from my bedroom to the dining room. His anger was becoming frightening, all the more so for the low, strangled tone and the frozen smile with which he kept spitting out these obviously unstoppable obscenities. My explanation only galled him more. It stank of the intellectualism and cultural ambition that were part of what offended him about my writing in the first place.

Finally, as we reached the table where the rest of the family was waiting for us, he swiveled to me and pointed his finger in my face about half an inch from my nose. He said, “I hope you know that if you ever convert to Christianity, I'll disown you!” With that, he plonked himself down at the dinner table and ate without speaking another word.

Today, this memory makes me laugh. The idea of a father bursting in on his teenaged son and recoiling in horror to find him reading—the Bible! When you think what he easily
could
have found me reading—what he could have actually caught me
doing
in those wild days! The incident almost seems like a sketch from a television comedy show.

But I do want to be fair to the old man. He's no longer here to defend himself, for one thing. And for another thing,
he was often so kind to so many people who did not happen to be me, he does not deserve to be remembered solely for the wrath I inspired in him. There was just something about me that made him mad, that's all. We were a bad father-and-son combination. It happens.

The full truth is, he had other good reasons to be concerned about my religious loyalties. The previous December, we had had one of the opening battles of what would become our ongoing war of wills. The cause had been nothing less than my refusal to celebrate Hanukkah with the rest of the family.

My bar mitzvah had been a slow-motion trauma for me. I never wanted to go through anything like it again. I had sworn to myself I was done with religion forever. When Hanukkah came, I simply refused to participate in the nightly prayers or in the lighting of the menorah. My father responded angrily by declaring I would, in that case, receive no Hanukkah presents. It was a tactical error on his part. I thought the no-presents rule was completely fair. I figured if I wanted to take a stand on principle, I had to be willing to pay the price. It was hard to watch my brothers receive expensive gifts for eight nights while I got none. But I would not surrender. In the end, it was my father who relented, giving me my presents all at once when the holiday was over. Another tactical error you might say, but it speaks to his natural generosity. He really did want to give good things to his children.

When he found me with my words-of-Jesus-in-red Bible, it was natural for him to assume that, having abandoned Judaism, I was now considering Christianity. I wasn't. Not
then. I explicitly remember thinking, as I made my way through first the New Testament and then the Old, that the Bible could not, and must not, be believed.
Faith is the death of thought
, I told myself. As an aspiring intellectual, I intended to avoid it at all costs.