The Great Good Thing (13 page)

So it happened one winter morning—late one winter morning after one of my long nights—I found myself lying awake in bed, bored and staring at the ceiling, too lazy to rise. I looked down over the blankets. One of the many books that were strewn around the room had come to be lying at the foot of the bed. My sleepy eyes focused on it. It was
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner.

Now, as I've said, Faulkner was the sort of novelist I did not read. I didn't have to. I knew he was no good. Not tough. Not terse. Not realistic. He was florid and fancy and hard to understand. He made pretentious allusions that only pretentious intellectual snobs pretended to comprehend. I didn't have to look at a word he'd written to know that I disdained him utterly.

But here I was. Bored and snug in bed.
The Sound and the Fury
was the only book I could reach without getting out from under the blankets. So I curled around and snagged its cover between my fingertips and drew it to me. I figured if I actually read a page or two, it might give me a bit more credibility the next time I denounced the author. I scanned the first line.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting . . .

I read on. And wait, this wasn't hard to understand at all. It was a description of a golf game. If the writing was a little unclear, it was because the character describing the game
was mentally retarded. And hey, that made sense. It was
The Sound and the Fury
, right? “A tale told by an idiot,” like in that sound-and-fury speech from Shakespeare's
Macbeth
. I kept reading. The book told the same story four times from four different perspectives. That reminded me of something too. Oh, yes: the Gospels! I was beginning to see how this worked.

I read the book through to the end. I loved every page of it. And I loved Faulkner's
Light in August
. And I thought his
Absalom, Absalom
was one of the most profound and touchingly tragic novels I had ever read. I still felt I was betraying my values by admiring these fancy and elaborately written books. But I just couldn't help myself. I would've had to be blind to miss how good they were.

It took time, a long time, but the shock of discovering Faulkner began to edge me away from my deeply held and completely uninformed literary opinions. I began to experiment a little, reading other books that were somewhat different from what I usually enjoyed. Two of those books had a powerful effect on the way I experienced the intellectual atmosphere of the rest of my university days.

I went to college just as the ideas often called postmodernism were rising up through the educational system. Up to that time—under modernism—academics and intellectuals had considered themselves to be participating in a Great Conversation, an interchange carried on across the centuries by the major thinkers and artists of the Western canon. The idea was that by studying this conversation you could move closer to the Truth and so find a fuller wisdom about
reality and what made for the Good Life. Now, though, those intellectuals who derided and even denounced the Western canon and Western values in general had come to the fore. Literature was no longer to be loved and learned from, but deconstructed to reveal its secret prejudices and power plays. Language itself was now considered not a rude tool for transmitting meaning but a political instrument of imperialism and oppression that needed radical criticism. The very idea of Truth was being rejected. All morals were relative, all cultures equally legitimate.

Those professors who had studied literature under the old system were on the defensive and had lost their confidence. I remember sitting in a class on Alfred Lord Tennyson, a poet of the highest genius who often comes under attack now for his Victorian values. The professor was lecturing to an auditorium full of students about
The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The poem is a brilliant description of a disastrous but courageous charge on a Russian cannon emplacement by six hundred British cavalrymen in 1854 during the Crimean War.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

The professor, a mild-mannered woman in her forties, was discussing the poem with gentle enthusiasm when a very
serious young lady in a very serious pair of spectacles rose from one of the front seats and demanded angrily, “How can we even read this poem when all it does is glorify war?”

The poor professor's face went blank. Clearly, she was a product of the old school. She studied literature because she loved literature not because she wanted to use it to preen herself on her own political virtue. She had never had to defend the beauty of beauty before, or the wisdom of wisdom. She smiled, embarrassed. She shrugged weakly. “I see what you mean,” she said.

At the back of the auditorium, I leapt to my feet, appalled. Here was a poem I had actually read—and I loved it. I still do. Because it's great. Inarticulate with passion, I began to slap my open volume of Tennyson with the back of my hand, reading the opening lines aloud and saying, “Listen! Listen to this! Listen! ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward—all in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.' You can hear the horses! You can—listen!—you can feel the courage and the madness, everything, it's all there . . .” I babbled on like that for a few more seconds and then dropped back into my seat, blushing, feeling like an idiot.

The professor made a bland gesture in my general direction as if to say, “Yes . . . yes . . . I suppose it's something of that sort,” and then continued with her lecture. Such survivors from the old days could raise no defense against the postmodern onslaught.

Myself, I could see the logic behind postmodernism and its moral relativism. Much of what we think is good—individual
freedom, equality before the law, tolerance for conflicting opinions—is learned from Western culture and taken on faith. Why should we not accept that other cultures with other values and other faiths might be just as legitimate as our own? I could see the logic—and yet, my senses rebelled. To abandon those basic principles seemed false to something equally basic within me. It seemed an act of violence against my idea of what a human being was. I was torn between the intellectual fashion of the day and my own deepest convictions.

That's part of the reason why
Hamlet
obsessed me so: it was the story of a man who could not decide what was right, what was true. I read it first in a Shakespeare course, then read it again and again and watched many of the movie versions too. One scene—the “mad scene”—haunted me endlessly. Hamlet is pretending to be insane—and may actually be a little insane at that point. When he's asked what he's reading, he answers weirdly, “Words, words, words.” He talks about how his internal moods seem to transform outer reality so that he can never be sure what the world is really like. Morality especially has come to seem to him completely dependent on his own opinions. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he says.

How wild was this? Shakespeare had predicted postmodernism and moral relativism hundreds of years before they came into being! Like Hamlet, the postmodernists were declaring that language did not describe the world around us. It was just “words, words, words.” Like Hamlet, the postmodernists announced that what we thought was reality was
just a construct of our minds that needed to be disassembled in order to be truly understood. And like Hamlet, the postmodernists had dismissed the notion of absolute morality. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

But there was one big difference. Hamlet said these things when he was pretending to be mad. My professors said them and pretended to be sane. Shakespeare was telling us, it seemed to me, that relativism was not just crazy, it was
make-believe
crazy, because even the people who proclaimed it did not believe it deep down. If, after all, there is no truth, how could it be true that there is no truth? If there is no absolute morality, how can you condemn the morality of considering my culture better than another? Relativism made no sense, as Shakespeare clearly saw.

But what was the answer then? On the one hand, it seemed prejudiced and dogmatic to cling to moral absolutes. On the other hand, relativism was self-contradictory, mad-scene gibberish. As a writer who wanted to describe reality, how could I steer between the craziness of postmodernism and the rigidity of self-righteous self-certainty?

The seed of the answer was planted in me by Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment.
I was about twenty when I read it. It changed my life. I had moved out of Berkeley by then and was commuting to my classes from across the San Francisco Bay. I had a dingy little apartment on one of the pretty city's pretty hills, a street of townhouses with bay windows, the cable-car bells ringing in the near distance. I still didn't do much schoolwork, but I read more of the books
I bought now, and read a broader range of books than ever. I had learned how to turn off my ever-so-insistent opinions and simply let the authors speak to me. I had learned to ride a story like a wave, wherever it went.

This was an important change in me, an essential change. Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it's like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors. We can only say: it's like this—this story, this picture, this song. I had finally sloughed off some of my teenage arrogance and started to listen to those descriptions with an open mind. Without knowing it, I had joined the Great Conversation.

So . . . I remember sitting in my San Francisco apartment one evening, sitting in a rickety, straight-backed wooden chair at my little writing desk. The paperback of
Crime and Punishment
was open like a prayer book in my two hands, held under the desk lamp. The lamplight was dim. I had to stare at the small print on the page through the deepening dusk. I stared, my eyes wide, my lips parted. I read.

Crime and Punishment
is the story of Raskolnikov, a former college student. Sunken-eyed, feverish, half-crazed, depressive, he reminded me of me when I first arrived at school. Raskolnikov comes to believe that morality is relative, that a great man can create his own right and wrong in the name of freedom and power. In the grips of that belief, he commits two horrific axe murders. Then, too late, he discovers
he has violated the absolute moral law within himself. It was real all along, much more real than he knew. His conscience will not let him rest. He is tortured by remorse. But slowly, he comes under the sway of a Christian girl who has fallen into prostitution. Through her love and kindness and faith, Raskolnikov begins to accept his sinfulness and shame and to return to the moral world. As the story ends, he begins the “new story” of his redemption in the Gospels.

When I finished the book, I laid it down on the desktop, my hand unsteady. I pressed the heels of my palms against my forehead as if to keep my thoughts inside me. After reading that novel, I was never quite the same. I did not accept the Christian aspect of it then. I couldn't. It was too alien to my upbringing, too at odds with the mental atmosphere in which I lived. I told myself that Dostoevsky was merely using Christ as a symbol for the reality of moral truth. But never mind. I knew beyond a doubt that the essential vision of the novel was valid. The story's
rightness
struck me broadside so that the journey of my heart changed direction. From the moment I read
Crime and Punishment—
though I did not know it, though it took me decades, though I was lost on a thousand detours along the way—I was traveling away from moral relativism and toward truth, toward faith, toward God.

Soon after this, I met Ellen, the woman who would become my wife. I'll tell all about that in the next chapter, but for now, I want to end with this.

Ellen's father, Thomas Flanagan, was the chairman of the Berkeley English department. This had nothing to do with
how I met her. I was so mentally dissociated from the school experience that I had no idea what the chairman of an English department was. But moving in with Ellen turned out to be sort of like marrying the boss's daughter. Even the professors who suspected me of faking it started to give me As. It's probably how I got my degree.

More importantly, Ellen's father and mother took to me. The first time I came into their house, I was approached by their yapping wire-haired terrier. I laughed and said, “Asta!” Asta was the dog in Dashiell Hammett's
The Thin Man—
a schnauzer in the novel but a wire-hair in the famous 1934 film
.
Tom's face lit up when I called the dog that name. I think both he and Ellen's mother were thrilled their daughter had finally brought home a boyfriend who might have actually once read a book! In any case, they kindly welcomed me into their family.

It was a fine, delightful irony. Here I was, an academic fraud, suddenly attending dinners and cocktail parties with the stars of the university's English department. These were brilliant men, almost all men, a faculty rated second in the country only to Yale's. They spoke effortlessly and allusively of literature from Homer to Seamus Heaney. Seamus himself was a good friend of Tom's and sometimes in the house. He and Tom and Ellen and I even traveled through Ireland together once, the Irish poet and the Irish-American professor-novelist discoursing on the history of every blade of grass. These men—all these learned men I met—seemed to know everything about everything. They made casual jokes about lines from poems I had never heard of. They discussed
current events in the context of a history I only dimly understood. They lived, in other words, in a world whose existence I had only just begun to suspect: the world of ideas. For the first time, I started to wonder whether it might be my world, the world I belonged in.