The mystical reveries of saints

"There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes… Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him."        from Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise”

I must begin by arguing with the question. The writing prompt asks us to respond by citing an author who agrees and an author who disagrees with Amory. The Fitzgerald quote describes a singular point in the development of any thinking person - the point, usually in adolescence, at which certainty is lost. No writer worth reading has not had this experience. Doubt is an integral component of reasoned thought. Whether an author rejects traditional values and faith or not can only be determined by what follows after the point of doubt.

"The Waste Land” is often cited as Eliot’s crisis of Faith, “Ash Wednesday” as his statement of Faith.  Eliott admitted that he wrote “The Waste Land” while in “a very bad mood,” not so much as result of the War or the condition of civilization, but because in 1914 he had married a woman that he discovered he disliked.  A woman who eighteen years later he would abandon to a mental hospital until she died in 1948. He never visited her there.

He did like cats, apparently more than Jews, several of his poems contain anti-semitic remarks or references without apology. Not a call for genocide, just the sort of thing that an upper class Londoner would say with a “those people” attitude.  I can forgive Shakespeare for Shylock, a fully drawn human being, and the play was written several centuries ago. Eliot, however, lived at a time when genocide was happening just across the channel. Casual bigotry says a lot about the essence of a man.

The direction of his latter work is a return to traditional English Faith and values. He became a deacon of the High Church. I read Ash Wednesday as a nightmare of Faith. The staircase section invites reference to Freud, and Hitchcock - big staircases make Eliot scared and dizzy; but are they signifiers of Faith? The last section refers to The Cult of Mary, which has brought much to Western Civilization. Yet, Eliot can’t quite find a solid Hope or Certainty within the symbol of Mary. Something dark and Freudian is going on in Ash Wednesday. I honestly try not to, but when I finish the poem I parse the last lines as, “Mommy, please protect me!” 

Some of my brother English majors connect the poem to Milton, or Dante, but I think both would find Eliot’s version of Faith of little worth as a support for living a meaningful life.  If Ash Wednesday is Eliot’s response to Amory’s point of doubt, his expression of Faith, then we seem to be stuck in the Waste Land with a Faith that doesn’t help much. Faith that leaves you just a little too cruel and just a little too bigoted.

James Joyce was a contemporary of Fitzgerald and Eliot. While they struggled with Faith, Joyce moved on, rejecting Faith in the Church and its values for a more complete affirmation of life.  His work is a joyous, wild affirmation of civilization, of the city, of being human. Joyce came from a traditional Irish Catholic family and received a strict Jesuit education, his moment of rejection of Faith has a powerful finality.  In his autobiographical “Portrait of an Artist…” Stephen Dedalus (Joyce) has lost his faith and cannot comfort his mother on her deathbed when she requests that he pray for her. The refusal haunts him throughout “Ulysses.” It is the point at which like Amory, he recognizes the reality of doubt and must move on.

Amory’s character rejects a thousand books. Eliot’s work reflects a writer who was well read, but rejected much, and valued only what affirmed his beliefs. Joyce seems to have read absolutely everything and affirms it all - for Joyce what is human, what humans do, is what is good. The answer to all the questions is “Yes.”

Amory rejects the mystical reveries of saints. Joyce sings to us the song of sons throughout all time who carry the guilt of betraying their mother’s pure love. Sons who bare with shame of the terrible sin of lust all around a Dublin that will be full of lust every June 16th for the rest of eternity, as we all lie inverted in our beds.

Eliot’s Church and faith didn’t protect him from bigotry. Joyce became a Jew wandering Dublin and a wandering Greek warrior whose son searched the city for his father.

Joyce’s world had been devastated by war and another war was rising, but he moved on from Amory’s point of doubt to a Dublin where every man and woman carried with them all the joys and all the sorrows that ever were and are, and all the words that had ever been spoken and all the books that had ever been written.