“I am fifty-one years old, yet I cannot feel I am growing older because I keep repeating the awakening experience of a child: I watch and I listen, I write in my journal, and each year I discover, with the awe of my boyhood, a part of the human spirit I had perhaps imagined, but had never seen or heard.”
Thus the narrator of “Rose,” the concluding story in Andre Dubus’s collection (1986), The Last Worthless Evening. At some risk to my critical credentials, I find that narrative voice remarkably close to its author’s and revelatory of the imagination that stands behind a considerable body of work published over the past two decades. Dubus began by publishing a full-length novel in 1967 that grew out of his studies at the Iowa writers’ school and, more to the point, out of his experience in the Marines. The Lieutenant has only recently come back into print, thanks to a small publisher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1967 Dubus has concentrated on shorter forms, stories and novellas of varying lengths, five collections worth, and a separately published short novel, Voices from the Moon. Whatever the form or the setting, however, the watching eye and the attentive ear are always in evidence, and with them the shock of discovery. Dubus picks his venues carefully, each reflecting his own lived experience: Catholic schools in Louisiana; the male-dominated world of the military; and, more recently, the Merrimack Valley northwest of Boston, an uneasy meeting point of town and gown amid the rubble of obsolete mills and factories. What they have in common for the reader is an assurance of authenticity, not just for the places, with their bayous or ward rooms or desolate winter roads, but more importantly for the troubled human beings—Dubus’s stock in trade—who with their distinctive accents, prejudices, and graces, attempt to puzzle out the meanings of the lives they’ve been dealt and have frequently messed up.
A consciousness of sin permeates the atmosphere of these stories, which is not surprising in a writer who answers, “Catholic,” when asked for a proper adjective to describe his work. Dubus accepts our flawed condition as a given, but he manages to view his characters’ failings with a compassion that bespeaks an equal conviction that grace is powerfully at work in the world. In a number of stories this pattern of sin and grace is played out within a specifically Catholic setting, but just as often, the characters have no religious convictions or, at most, exhibit a vestigial sensibility of the divine in lives otherwise determined by an overtly secularized culture. But moral questions remain, questions shaped and colored by family values, ethnic heritage, military ethos, and intellectual training. And it is to these moral issues that Dubus relentlessly returns, exploring their demands and their paradoxes in the lives of middle Americans of the mid-twentieth century.
Take Dan Tierney, the hero of Dubus’s first novel, The Lieutenant. Thrust into the command of the Marine detachment on an aircraft carrier, Lieutenant Tierney gets caught up in an attempt to save a weak young recruit from his perverted tormentors, only to find his efforts are futile against the engine of military justice and a naval captain’s determination to clear his ship, and his command record, of any sexual taint. Tierney’s insistence on following his conscience sabotages his own career.
Like many first novels, it is a story of innocence lost, and it suffers from the genre’s neat moral divisions of heroes and villains. But it sounds themes that Dubus will pick up and develop in his later and more sophisticated treatments of military life. One of these is the deep resentment felt by regular officers against the faceless and powerful intelligence arm of the military, the “dark men” of a later story. In both cases they violate the unspoken covenant that binds servicemen together, embodying in its place the impersonal force of authority that values order above all else. Dubus’s sympathies clearly lie with someone like Captain Devereaux who warns his pilot friend of the investigation into his personal life. The competing values are neatly summarized as the investigators stand with the captain on the flight deck of his carrier and he informs them that their prey is not on board:
“He’s out there. . .”
“Out there?″ Foster said.
“You let him fly? In a million dollar. . .”
Captain Devereaux looked at him, and he stopped.
This subversive, anarchic strain runs through many of these stories, and not just the military ones. Dubus’s characters are apt to take the law into their own hands to avenge or protect family or friend. He makes no abstract moral judgment on these tribal loyalties, and it is clear that the psychic price of such action comes high. As the man who has just murdered his son’s murderer in “Killings” tells the story to his wife, “the words had no images for him, he did not see himself doing what the words said he had done; he only saw himself on the road.” And later, as his wife sleeps besides him, “he shuddered with a sob that he kept silent in his heart.” Whether or not the murder is even discovered, Matt has been marked, like Cain.
Perhaps the most powerful of these stories of private judgment—and Dubus’s best in my estimation—is also one of his most explicitly Catholic. “A Father’s Story,” in The Times Are Never So Bad, gives us the first-person account of Luke Ripley, the divorced owner of a stable, who spends an hour early each morning in prayer and random reflection on his life before he rides off on one of his horses to the local church where, with his good friend Father Paul and a handful of others, he celebrates Mass. This daily pattern, Luke feels, brings him as close to his center as he has even been, but he has no illusions about mysticism or holiness. In his awareness of the gap between intention and accomplishment he captures the genius of sacrament and ritual, the essence of the Catholic imagination:
But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and the wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
Into this calm comes the shock of family disaster. During her annual summer visit Luke’s twenty-year-old daughter, Jennifer, accidentally hits someone with her car on a dark road and returns to wake Luke in the middle of the night. What he does, he does instinctively to protect his daughter. But the story is told retrospectively, and so at each stage—as he drives to the scene, finds the body, returns to tell her the boy is dead, and finally smashes the damaged fender into a tree at church—we hear as well his reflections, his awareness that efforts to spare Jennifer count also as sins against the boy and his family: “my first sin against him, not stopping for Father Paul, who could have given him the last rites, and immediately then my second one, or, I saw then, my first, not calling an ambulance to meet me there.” Later still, he rehearses the confession he will never make to his priest-friend, because he knows he would not act on his advice to go to the police: “He will not hear anything of failure to do all that one can to save an anonymous life, of injustice to a family in their grief, of deepening their pain at the chance and mystery of death by giving them nothing-no one-to hate.”
But what is most extraordinary about this story is its ending, and the risk Dubus takes in having Luke recount a dialogue with God from his morning reflections. Distinguishing between his sons and his daughter, he tells God he would have called the police if one of his boys had come to him, but would do again what he did for his daughter. “But you never had a daughter and, if you had, you could not have borne her passion.” To God’s further accusation that he therefore loves weakness, Luke responds. “As you love me,” and heads out to saddle his horse for Mass.
At a reading Dubus gave of the story several years ago, a friend of mine heard him say that a young woman had told him, “Daughters have stories, too.” That reaction echoed several I heard from women of various ages when I taught the story in class. They felt that Luke had done his daughter more harm than good in trying to protect her, but fathers of daughters also told me that even if they did not approve of Luke’s decision, they understood it. Dubus has clearly touched a live nerve in our sexually egalitarian society; it is a tribute to the power of his writing, however, that the story is never mistaken for a tract. It remains Luke Ripley’s narrative—credible, even sympathetic, because Dubus has made Luke that way.
In the later novel, Voices from the Moon, Luke Ripley turns up again, this time in a bit part as the stable owner on whose horses young Richie Stowe experiences a merging of body and spirit remarkably similar to Ripley’s own: “He had learned to make his spiritual solitude physical and, through his flesh, to do this in communion with the snow and evergreens, and the naked trees that showed him the bright sky of winter.” Indeed, Richie is in many ways a twelve-year-old version of Luke; he, too, finds in daily Mass the same centering; and he, too, is caught up in a family drama, but one largely out of his control. What is tearing the Stowe family apart is the divorced father’s decision to marry the ex-wife of Richie’s older brother Larry—a plot line that skirts dangerously close to soap opera, and is only saved by Dubus’s ability to give each of the characters involved an individual voice and a history that in conjunction make for a dialogue of generations. Family bonds, however, shredded by divorce, remain strong enough to lend credence to the mother’s prediction that Larry and his father will eventually be reconciled.
Meanwhile, Richie is undergoing his own personal testing which provides the narrative frame for the novel. Coming home from Mass, in the first chapter, he meets Melissa Donnelly who smokes and seems otherwise worldly and alluring to the young priest-to-be. In the final chapter, after we have seen each member of the Stowe family at his or her most vulnerable, Richie goes out to meet Melissa for an innocent tryst that he imagines as a major temptation against his religious calling. But Dubus leaves the matter much more ambiguous in the novel’s final words: ”(Richie) saw in the stars the eyes of God too, and was grateful for them, as he was for the night and the girl he loved. He lay on the grass and the soft summer earth, holding Melissa’s hand, and talking to the stars.”
Certainly Richie’s confessor, who early in the novel counsels the boy to have compassion and forgiveness for his father (′ ’even if it is wrong, it’s still love, and that is always near the grace of God”), would not see Melissa as a competitor to Christ. Dubus treats the demands of Catholicism seriously and refuses to reduce religious experience to good feelings, but just as firmly he rejects Jansenism and its world-denying instincts. Human love may be fractured, sometimes even a distorted mirror for God’s grace, but it remains for us here and now the only glass to see through darkly.
Which brings me to a final group of three interlocked stories that appear in different collections. Dubus explores the permutations of human love in the lives of two couples joined and divided by friendship and sexual appetite. Here, too, Dubus risks the low comedy possibilities of “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice” by focusing his stories on the sexual tribulations of four middle-class inhabitants of a Massachusetts college town. Hank Allison and Jack Linhart teach together, run together, and genuinely think of themselves as each other’s best friend. (“There are several men I love and who love me, all of us married, passive misogamists, and if we did not have each other to talk to we would probably in our various ways go mad.”) But as the first story, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” opens, Jack is having an affair with Hank’s wife, Edith, for which he feels the guilt of betrayal though he knows that Hank rejects monogamy in principle and has had numerous affairs with his female students. And by the story’s end Jack’s wife, Terry, has reciprocated by sleeping with Hank. These transpositions are important elements of plot, but the story is Jack’s as he struggles to comprehend his own deepest drives and frustrations. What does it mean to be married to a woman who continues to love him when his own passion has died? Is being a father enough to hold such a marriage together? Jack shares Hank’s doubts about the value of monogamy and is willing to experiment with an alternative, but he lacks his friend’s deep cynicism: “There are two kinds of people, Hank said. The unhappy ones who look it and the unhappy ones who don’t.” In the end Jack decides to stay with Terry for reasons he intuits but can’t express.
For the other two stories (“Adultery” and “Finding a Girl in America”) the focus shifts to Edith and Hank, but without the first-person narration that made Jack Linhart both more puzzling and more immediate. Dubus uses “Adultery” as the title of the collection in which it originally appeared but wryly appends ”& Other Choices.” These three words suggest a subtle commentary on the moral issue behind the erotic entanglement, yet also turn aside heavy-handed moralizing. We become what we choose, Dubus insists, and nowhere more so than in our loving. For a while Edith believes she can accept Hank’s philandering and match it; and he wants to believe that by condoning her affairs he will achieve a guiltless freedom. But Edith, like Jack Linhart, cannot finally separate sexual love from commitment, and when she falls in love with a forty-year-old ex-priest named Joe Richie, who is dying of cancer, she begins to realize the hollowness of her marriage.
Dubus divides “Adultery” into four parts, using the love story to frame Edith’s reflections on her life with Hank in the long second section. The effect is to make of her deepening love for Joe a prism through which both Edith and the reader can perceive her need to act even though her choice to divorce Hank offers no consolation since Joe will soon be dead.
Joe himself is another of Dubus’s overtly religious creations, a near relation of both Luke Ripley and Richie Stowe, who finds in the Eucharist a symbol and center for all his loves. Because he experiences something sinful in his relationship with Edith (though not the simple fact of adultery), he stops receiving Communion. Were she to divorce Hank and marry him, Joe would return to the sacrament. There is a casuistry here, but one of symbol rather than of law, that parallels Luke Ripley’s bold concluding dialogue in “A Father’s Story” with his daughter-less God. Joe, too, “loves in weakness,” but the love proves strong enough to free Edith from Hank’s loveless marriage arrangement with her. She recognizes that her ability to leave Hank is Joe’s final gift to her, just as her announcement of it as he lies dying is her gift to him.
The conclusion of the trilogy is, fittingly, Hank’s. “Finding a Girl in America″ opens with him apparently in the midst of still another affair with one of his students: “On an October night, lying in bed with a nineteen-year-old and tequila and grapefruit juice, thirty-five-year-old Hank Allison gets the story.” And it is not a pretty one. He has been, without his knowledge, the father of an aborted child from a previous affair. The image of that fetus haunts his waking and sleeping hours, forcing him to face the consequences of his own choices. “I don’t want to have to say no to anything, not ever”: the life philosophy he had enunciated for Edith when she first discovered his infidelities has borne this terrible fruit.
Coming to terms with that reality is the burden of the story, and Dubus nicely rounds off the trilogy by having us see Hank deal with it by turning to the central people in his life—Edith, Jack, his thirteen-year-old daughter Sharon, and Lori, the girl at the beginning of the story. Joined together by their daughter, Edith and Hank have achieved reconciliation in their divided lives, and she is able to offer him comfort in his grief as well as forgiveness. Jack tells him to marry Lori, and his encouragement has the added weight of someone who has refused to give up on his own marriage. Watching Sharon with Lori, Hank realizes that “he does not want her girlhood and young womanhood to become a series of lovers, he does not want her to become cynical and casual about making love. He does not, in short, want her to be like his girlfriends.”
But he also knows that Lori is not like his other girlfriends, either. She may be the latest of his student mistresses, but by story’s end he has determined that she will also be the last, and he asks her to marry him with all the trepidation of a young man courting his love. The circle has been completed, not so innocently, perhaps, as at the end of a Shakespearean comedy with all the young couples neatly paired off, but with enough resolution and reconciliation to give us hope, and some comfort for the pain suffered on the journey to self-knowledge.
The comic vision implied in this trilogy, and in Andre Dubus’s work in general, is profoundly Christian, and, more specifically, profoundly Catholic in inspiration. Dubus looks at the world around him and sees sin and brokenness, but he refuses to despair. For behind the physical detail his eye so sharply sees and behind the psychological nuance his ear so deftly notes, he perceives a presence that understands and forgives us more generously than we do others and better than we can ourselves. For those characters with a sensitivity to sign and sacrament (Luke, Richie, Joe) that presence finds a local habitation and a name in the Eucharist where the mystery of God-in-flesh continues daily to play itself out. For the rest there are hints and guesses, mostly in moments of vulnerability when their deepest loves and loyalties are threatened: Edith at Joe’s deathbed, Hank worrying about his teenage daughter, Captain Devereaux protecting his old friend. The grace that Bernanos’s cure” found to be everywhere and in everything often works strangely, even paradoxically, in a world hell-bent on denying its presence, but work it does, quietly and inexorably, not to save us from pain and suffering but to give them meaning by rescuing faith, hope, and love from our icy despair or lukewarm diffidence.
By watching and listening and, most of all, by writing, Andre Dubus continues to celebrate the human spirit in which it is possible, he insists, to see the power of God and God’s grace at work. He is a writer who needs and deserves a wider audience. The recent bestowal on him of a MacArthur Fellowship acknowledges his achievement so far and will, I hope, gain him more attention as an important contemporary writer working within a rich Catholic tradition.
