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Charles Andrew Brady
IF A WRITER WERE TO FOLLOW D.
H. LAWRENCE'S austere precept, "Never trust the artist,
trust the tale," he would never set hand to any such task
as autobiography, however skeletal, however informal. And it
is true enough that a writer's true autobiography (or biography,
for that matter) must be sought for in his books, not in anything
he says about himself, or in anything any one else says about
him. Nonetheless, when all is said and done, Lawrence was a Puritan.
More clubbable men, like Dr. Johnson, were never above gossipy
chit-chat. Besides, in the last analysis, there are a few things
about oneself and about the genesis of one's own books which
only oneself can know. Whether one chooses to tell, of course,
is another matter.
I was born in Buffalo, New York,
on April 15, 1912, at approximately the same hour the Titanic
went down. (It would be Horatian, if not precisely flattering,
to say that a whale groaned in mid-Atlantic and, on the American
side of Lake Erie, a minnow was born.) I account myself especially
lucky that for, say, the first five years of my life the horse,
not the auto, still reigned as king of Buffalo streets, in the
winter more particularly, and Buffalo can be a very wintry city.
And not only the horse, the gaslight, too, at least in the streets
outside where the man came to light the lamps each evening with
his flame-tipped wand. His name, my mother said, was Leerie.
It wasn't, of course. She got the name out of the Child's Garden
of Verses by that R.L.S. who was one of the presiding genii of
my childhood.
Less than a decade after the
Civil War, my father came to this country from County Cavan which
was then part of Ulster and not, what it is today, one of the
three northern counties gerrymandered to Eire at the time of
the Irish partition. As a result of his northern birth, his language-pattern
was as much Scots as Irish, and more Elizabethan than either.
I grew up thinking that ants were called "pismires,"
and that "michers" was the normal term for troublemaking
boys. Both of these words are, as it happens, in King Lear, but
hardly belong to the average vocabulary of western New York first-graders,
a fact which made for a few misunderstandings in my earliest
school days.
Nor, I soon found out, was "marguerite"
the usual word for daisy. It was my mother's usual word, however,
because it had been her mother's; and her mother had come to
these United States from a part of Yorkshire not more than fifteen
miles from the Bronte parsonage at Haworth where, in 1849, just
about the time my mother's parents first emigrated to America,
Charlotte Bronte had written, in Shirley, of the "last fairish
that ever was seen on this countryside." Possibly the reason
for this unhappy state of affairs was that the few remaining
"fairishes' '-Yorkshire for fairies-had crossed the ocean
with my mother's grandfather, a white-haired, Gaelic-speaking
old man, born in Mayo, and, apparently, on very easy terms with
the Good Folk. Thomas Bartholomew Conroy carried his sovereigns
in a silk handkerchief-he carried them to his death in that same
handkerchief, refusing to change them because the banks demanded
a discount for the transaction in questionkept a Lion and a Unicorn
over his mantle, and is, I think, though I never had the good
fortune to meet him in the flesh, the chief reason, through my
mother, why my childhood was as much environed by the world's
great fairy tales as ever Newman's was, or Gilbert Chesterton's.
I have many of those volumes with me still, the nucleus of an
ever-growing library: the Andrew Lang colored Fairy Books; the
Grimm and Andersen collections; the invented fairy stories of
Howard Pyle and George Macdonald; the Edwardian "magics"
of E. Nesbit that have been so happily revived today.
The great hero-tales came next,
always in splendid editions, for my mother respected books and
never returned from any one of the many trips she used to take
with my father without still another sumptuous volume for my
private shelves. It was in this way I came to know Odysseus,
Cuchulain, Thor and his somber comrades of Valhalla, Robin Hood,
Arthur--these latter two heroes in the wonderful Pyle versions
-Robinson Crusoe, Leather-Stocking, Sherlock Holmes, Alain Quatermain.
I suppose I would be described today as having been a precocious
reader; and my subliterary experience-which, incidentally, began,
I should judge, around sixth or seventh grade with Tarzan and
Fu Manchu, aided and abetted, naturally, by the elder Fairbanks'
cinematic cloak-and-sword ballets. St. Nicholas, it should be
duly entered in letters of gold, came each month. I have the
bound volumes for those years even now. But, alas, my own children
will not read them of their own accord and I am too wise to try
to force them.
The poetic experience--not counting
that wise old metrist, Mother Goose, who was an early heritage,
as she should be for every child-began inexplicably, breathtakingly,
utterly without outer prompting, and unmistakably, one summer
when I had just turned fourteen. I still remember the time and
the place of that epiphany: lunch hour at the Liberty Bank where
I had a vacation job as trotter. And the poem: Rupert Brooke's
"Grantchester" in a collection of twentieth century
poetry picked up at random-why, I don't know, no one had recommended
it, and, if anyone had, I should have spurned the pressurein
the Buffalo Public Library. I haven't read Brooke in some twenty
years, but that chance meeting with him proved to be the most
serendipitous of all my literary discoveries. I might add that
two years' invalidism in bed and wheelchair, a cardiac aftermath
of rheumatic fever in an age that did not know antibiotics, left
me plenty of time for solid reading; and I am not the firstnor,
I will wager, the last-writer to have found a serious childhood
illness thus turn out to be the most felicitous possible felix
culpa.
For those afflicted with the
strange disease that breaks out in a rash of writing, the personal
history of their reading is far and away the most significant
part of any personal history. But childhood is not all books.
There were my three older and two younger brothers. (I was the
eldest boy of a second brood. After the death of his first wife,
my father had married again; as a result of this patriarchal
energy of his, my youngest brother was actually younger than
some of his own nephews and nieces.) There was a woods near our
house where deer and raccoon lived. There were the long summer
vacations at Crescent Beach, Ontario, in a family cottage of
which I am now part owner. There were the many animals-luckily,
my wife is, if anything, even madder about animals than I am;
we are currently tyrannized by two Siamese cats, Djinn and Puck,
with martini-colored fur and chocolate-fudge muzzles. There were
sports, tennis especially. I had an absolute passion for tennis
which still persists, though, for many years now, it has had
to be satisfied on a purely spectator basis. There were the early
friends who can never be replaced. There was the aunt of aunts,
an epic personality, mansarded on a late Victorian scale with
moral values to match, who took me to Europe in 1928, and was
careful to include the Folies-Bergères as well as Lourdes
in our itinerary.
If the Children's Room of the
Public Library was the forcing ground of my imagination--I here
pay due tribute to the least acknowledged of American Almae Matres
mind and will may be said to have received what discipline they
could from the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Jesuit Fathers of Canisius
High School and Canisius College, and, on the graduate level,
the English Department of Harvard University, together with the
Departments of French, Celtic, and the Germanic Languages, in
the early '30's when some of the elder giants still walked the
streets of Cambridge: George Lyman Kittredge, John Livingston
Lowes, Fred Norris Robinson, Paul Elmer More-as a visitor only,
but he lectured in the Lowell Institute--and, opening up a new
and tonic, because iconoclastic, critical vista, that wind-weathered,
sun-cracked, Aztec idol of a little man, Bernard DeVoto. (I was
to come back to Harvard for the winter term of 1939-40; but,
though the University was still demonstrably our greatest, it
seemed to me that there had "passed away a glory from the
earth." Could it have been my youth?)
Wordsworth was surely right when
he set down the truth that the "Child is father of the Man."
Whatever one wants from life, it works out, willy-nilly, that
one's days are perforce, bound "each to each by natural
piety." And we are lucky-or unlucky, as the case may be-depending
on whether or not the object of our pietas is a noble one. I
was to acquire broader horizons and new intellectual passions
alter high school: a burning love of History; a lifelong absorption
in Chesterton; a taste for Balzac, the great Russians and Scandinavians,
for Waugh and Greene and Mauriac; an increasing dependence on
the comic and melodramatic genius of Charles Dickens whom I had
first read through in his entirety between the ages of twelve
and fourteen. Harvard taught me the values of intellectual detachment,
disinterestedness, and not always being a parti pris. I acquired
a kind of cultural method which to this day still owes more-and,
I think, not for the worse-to George Saintsbury than to Cleanth
Brooks or F. H. Leavis. But, imaginatively speaking, college
and university did no more than deepen the original bents acquired
in a household where political ambiance had been Irish and Wilsonian
Democratic and the cultural bias English to the point where I
mistakingly used to think that the British Christmas annual,
Chatterbox, fairly represented American life, so closely did
it seem to approximate the way my mother ran her life and ours.
I did Old Irish and Old Norse in the saga vernaculars at Harvard;
Sigurd and the Children of Lir were old friends of mine long
before that. I read the Chanson tie Roland in the original with
Professor J. D. Ford; years before James Baldwin's version had
made me free of Charlemagne's high court. In a sense, the books
I was later to write would be no more than further elongations,
however unheroic ones, of those same heroic shadows.
The really important things are
things that necessarily get left out of all autobiographies and
that get put down all wrong in all biographies. To skirt the
fringe only of such piercingly personal things, I might point
out that some of the same old romantic motifs of childhood and
boyhood may conceivably be detected in the maiden name of my
wife, Mary Eileen Larson, whom I married in Boston in 1937, and
whose paternal grandfather had been a Norse whaler before he
settled down as a shoemaker in St. Ansgar, Iowa. It is even possible
that it would not be altogether off the mark to spy out something
of the same sort in the names of my six children: Karen Janet,
Moira Ellen, Sheila Belinda, Kristin More, Eric Larson, and Kevin
Charles.
Kristin More was eleven in February
of 1960. Her second name happens to be my third-but by no means
my latest, to say nothing of my last-salute to the towering personality
of St. Thomas More. Not long before her birth I had written my
"Ballade of St. Thomas," which has had the good fortune
to be reprinted in many anthologies; and a prize-winning More
short story, "Weep for a Fool." My full clarion flourish
in honor of "God's Englishman" grew out of that same
short story by way of a-fortunately -unpublished, unplayed, and,
very likely, unplayable play, "My Lord Fool." I called
this first of my novels Stage of Fools (Dutton, 1953). One might
say that three published sallies into Utopia is a sizable number;
and so, admittedly, it is. But, after all, I did not choose my
Lord Chancellor More. He chose me. It is a critical commonplace
that the mythos can be as compelling as the logos. The compulsion
is doubly powerful when mythos and logos come together to form,
like a crystal, round the incarnate Logos.
Logos and mythos combined also
preside over my poems, Wings Over Patmos (Monastine Press, 1951).
Mythos pure and simple, however, must be admitted to dominate
my next two novels. Viking Summer (Dutton, 1956) seemed to me,
at the time of writing, and still seems to me a fairly subtle
experiment. Deliberately fugue-like in movement, overtly autobiographical
and set against the changing background of a single year in the
1950's, it represents an attempt to fix the idyllic quintessence
of life in the present, not, as is usual with idylls, in the
past moment. In addition, it happens to be the most poetic in
conception of my novels; and, perhaps, considering the novel's
historic matrix in epic and realistic comedy, this is a mistake.
At any rate, it is a mistake I shall not make again. This Land
Fulfilled (Bruce, 1958)-the title, though no one, to my knowledge,
ever caught the reference, comes from the very beginning of Chaucer's
Wife of Bath's Tale-is a long historical novel having, for its
main action, Leif Ericsson's voyages to the New World in the
first decade of the eleventh century and touching, in a final
chapter, on the death of the old North at Clontarf in 1014. This
climactic victory of the Irish High King, Brian Boru, over the
pagan Norsemen forms the miseen-scene of Sword of Clontarf (1950),
a Stevensonian romance designed expressly for the olderyounger
reader. This latter book will shortly be capped by a yet untitled
volume dealing with the Augustinian mission to sixth century
England.
I say nothing here of my two
early juveniles, Cat Royal (1949) and The Elephant Who Wanted
to Pray (1952); nor of the two volumes I have edited; nor of
my literary critiques which go on getting written as a matter
of professional course. I do most of my creative writing in the
summers, with the winters given over to teaching-I have been
a Professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo for more
years than I care to countto lecturing, and to reviewing. As
a reviewer week by week I have to read everything, which can
be very much of a mixed blessing, though I am also quick to admit
that treature-trove does keep turning up. It seems to me that
C. P. Snow's Trollopean roman fleuve of our immediate present
and J.R.R.. Tolkien's trilogy-essay
into the realm of pure story, The Lord of the Rings, is as rich
a literary ring-hoard as any reader has a right to expect from
a given decade, to single out but one ten-year span, and I have
been reviewing much, much longer than that as Saturday Book Columnist
for the Buffalo Evening News, and contributor to the reviewing
columns of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, America,
Renascence, and others.
Originally
published in The Book of Catholic Authors, Walter Romig,
Sixth Series, 1960.
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