Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer Page B

about you. He’s going to get in touch with your agent.
    I’m sending you a copy of my book. With all my love. I wonder what you will think of it. Whatever judgment you deliver will be God’s grace.
    Yours,
    Bernard
     
    December 20, 1958
    Bernard—
    I want to thank you for getting me out of the nunnery and possibly getting me out of this other house of horrors.
    And: thank you for your book. It’s handsome. But please do not mistake me for someone who has direct communication with God. Also, I’m a fiction writer. My judgments are the judgments of a mortal, and they are hobbled by my earthbound obstinate insistence on the concrete. You know what I’ve told you before. You and I are so very different: I am one word at a time, one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how sure my footing is before proceeding to the next sentence, with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee. Your poems make the old feeling of cowdom come over me: stalled in a vast unconquerable field, alone, ruminating. While you’re Christopher Wren. You’ve made me commit the grave sin of hyperbole in trying to convince you of my esteem—Christopher Wren! Dear God. So be flattered.
    Yours,
    Frances
     
    January 15, 1959
    Dearest Claire—
    Happy new year!
    Well, it seems that I will now be edited by John Percy at Harrow, through the intervention of Bernard. Bernard would want to say it was God who arranged it all, but I am content to leave it at his creatures’ human kindness. That said, it does feel a certain blessing, to be rescued from the blind. John reminds me of Bill. Right down to the plaid work shirts. Only John does not safety-pin the cuffs back on when they wear themselves off the sleeves. I kept wanting to tell John about the time Bill pinned his wrist to the shirt accidentally, but John has a bit of primness about him, and I was trying to pretend that I was a Serious Artist.
    This has made me indescribably relieved, but I am worried about something. I read Bernard’s book of poems, and Claire, I am afraid that while Christ is all over these poems, hidden in historical figures, alluded to, quoted, and then expanded on as a way to reach Bernard’s own impressive imagery, Christ is not really in these poems. He is too on the surface of them to be actually moving within them. I do not doubt that Christ is in Bernard—and very deeply. When Bernard speaks of the Church he speaks of it with humility and passion. But Christ is buried—in Bernard’s poems and in his heart—under striving for world-historical Meaning and Complexity. I hear, in the poems, shields and lances clanking against the limitations of this imperfect world. Christ being the shield and lance—Bernard’s weapon against nihilism. I fight that war myself. This is why Bernard is necessary to me. But I also think the symbolism is a cover for what Bernard might really want to talk about, which is his own history. He is encoding his own struggles with purity, desire, and despair in the symbols of religion, and then sometimes the Greeks, for good measure. (What do I know about the Greeks? I know what I know mainly from Aquinas. Bill could read these and tell us for sure.) I wonder if a better weapon against nihilism might be one man’s life. One man in a struggle, and in that one particular struggle we more clearly apprehend the real. I suppose that is why I write fiction: character as argument. I suppose that is why I love Augustine. And Kierkegaard: one man in a war against despair directing us in our own hobbling away from it.
    Also from Aquinas: the intellect is God present in his creation. The intellect should be a servant to revelation, but Bernard is thinking that the intellect itself, amassed on the page, is revelation.
    I suppose I should write these things to Bernard. I don’t know why on this occasion I find myself unable to say what I think. You and I could not be friends if you had not told me that I needed to stop being so silent in