Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer Page A

they are happening. She is asking me to explain what I want the reader to realize by accumulation. “Why is Sister John so mean?” she says. “I don’t understand it. You need to tell us why.”
She won’t bring herself to tell me to give the book a happy ending but she is talking around it. I think she thinks I can turn the book into
The Nun’s Story
. She says that if I want to persist in my obscurity—she calls it obscurity—then I can go to one of those smaller houses that print difficult books.
    She should not have put that thought into my head.
    I do not like to ask favors of people, but threats to my work make me lose all scruples, and I have to protect my book. I humbly ask: Is there any way that you might speak to John on my behalf?
    My gratitude to you.
    Yours,
    Frances
     
    December 15, 1958
    Dear John—
    I got the copies of the book. It looks wonderful. I don’t, however. In that author photo I look like someone told me to think of Aristotle’s
Poetics
and then, on the count of three, snapped the picture. Why did I not see this before? Why did you not mention this to me? My mother might have told me as much but I still can’t hear her when she tells me I’m being stubborn, selfish, or smug. Oh well. That’s the least of my worries, this picture. All that matters is what’s on the pages, and I can find no fault there.
    Thank you for getting production to make those last changes. Book publishing is depressingly bureaucratic. And philistinic. I don’t see how you can stand it. I can barely stay awake in faculty meetings. People have discussions about pedagogy. They delect in the hashing out of various ways to programmatically open the mind and consolidate insight. “Well,” I said one day when one discussion had stopped at a crossroads that had been reached by a painfully democratic and glacially moving airing of multiple but finally identical methodologies, “the Greeks thought you could get pretty far with pederasty.” The chair sighed deeply. I had forgotten where I was and said what occurred to me. Have you ever had the experience of being so bored that you feel only your eyes in your head? That you’re only eyes, and the rest of you has diffused away into a roving gas? I don’t imagine you have. That was the state I was in when I spoke. This is why you have the job you do, and I evaporate into a roving gas with eyes at whatever job I have. But I do love the students, and to get to the students I have to wade through a slough of middle-mindedness. It feels like wading through concrete fresh from the mixer. With the students, I experience one of the purest states of being I know. I can float into the classroom as that gas after some dreadful meeting, and then as we talk I solidify into wholeheartedness. Single-mindedness. As you know: Purity of heart is to will one thing. Everything—worry, anger, sloth, frustration—falls away in the talking. I feel God in the room in the pure exchange of ideas, and their awakening to ideas.
    Speaking of middle-mindedness. Frances Reardon—the young woman I told you about from the colony—needs a new editor. I think her house is more grown over with bureaucracy and philistinism than yours, and her book needs you. Her editor, who took over the book after Frances’s original editor left to marry a banker, sent the manuscript back to her with only ten marks on it, seven of them arbitrary deletions, and a letter in which this editor asked if Frances could lessen the religious themes, because they might be off-putting, and said that she didn’t know whether she should like the protagonist or not, which was bothering her. I think her editor is a girl who has her job because she is tenacious and vapid—the tenacity masking the vapidity, and the vapidity fueling her ascendancy because vapidity frees the mind from bothersome, cumbersome self- examination. Let me know what we can do.
    Yours,
    Bernard
     
    December 16, 1958
    Frances—
    I’ve written to John