Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession Page 11

  After a few months of dismal grieving for my faith, I began to feel a new relaxation, and a new passion for life. But I felt a certain bitter darkness too. The world without God was a world in which anything might happen, and there would never be justice for the millions who died at the hands of tyrants, or the poor who suffered in the neglected parts of the world. The world without God was the world of the Cold War in which “the bomb” might drop at any minute—and civilization might be annihilated, leaving behind a polluted and silent earth.

  One had to face this. A third world war was likely; the end of civilization was likely. We believed this strongly in the 1960s. One couldn’t run to an outmoded idea of God for comfort. One had to be strong; one had to construct meaning in the silence in the wake of the departure of God. And so began my journeys through the secular world of America in the 1960s, and so began my flight from the realm of faith and beauty and harmony which had been my childhood. So began my struggles with a harsher discipline than that which I’d left behind.

  It is ironic perhaps that I did not subsequently become sexually liberated or wild. Solitary sex relieved the tension I felt, but I remained an extremely conservative well-controlled woman who refused to be intimate with anyone until she found the person with whom she wanted to spend her life. C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s This was Stan Rice, the boy from high school, who came up to Denton to go to North Texas State College in 1960, and who followed me to San Francisco in 1961. I went back to Denton to marry him in that same year. For all the agony over sex, this was the love of my life. We married as soon as we could because this marriage represented the highest commitment we could make to one another. And we remained married for forty-one years until his death in 2002. I’ve never been with any other man, but Stan Rice.

  So much for sex. So much for all that agony. So much for all that day-in and day-out misery of those crucial years. There’s more to the story in that I later became a nationally famous pornographer for a series of fairytale erotic books written under the pen name A. N. Roquelaure—but that was in the 1980s, and those books contain imaginary characters and imaginary realms.

  As for my great desire to read forbidden authors, I was still in my first few years of college severely disabled as a reader, and could only make it through the short stories of Jean-Paul Sartre, and some of the works of Albert Camus. Of the great German philosophers who loomed so large in discussion in those days, I could not read one page. But I understood Camus’ famous The Myth of Sisyphus and I understood his concept of “the absurd.” I read his novels The Stranger and The Plague. And I took from these works Camus’ urgent faith that we live a moral and responsible life even if nothing is known about how we got here or where we’re going, that we make the meaning, that we stand for values which we can’t deny. I got it. It was as rigorous a discipline to believe in the 1 2 9

  ideas of Camus as it had ever been to be Catholic. In fact, being an atheist required discipline very like that of being Catholic. One could never yield to the idea of a supernatural authority, no matter how often one might be tempted. To think that a personal God had made the world was to yield to a demonic and superstitious and destructive belief. Stan Rice, whom I married in 1961, was one of the most conscientious people I’d ever met. He was positively driven by conscience and thought in terms of harsh absolutes. His life was devoted to poetry and, later, to painting; art for him had replaced any religion that he ever had. He scoffed at the idea of a personal God, and scoffed at all religion in general. He did more than scoff. He felt it was stupid, vain, false, and possibly he thought it was evil. I’m not sure on that. The point for me was that he had intense personal values. And he understood that I wanted to be somebody, and he believed that I should. Though he deplored my sloppiness, lack of discipline, inability to read or study, and general disarray and confusion, he believed in my intellect and in my passions and he found me interesting, more interesting apparently than anyone else.

  Never did he question my capacity or my intentions to have a full rich committed life. And I believed of course in his full committed life.

  He was a model of personal discipline, a great reader of anything that he chose to read, and a model student, as well as being the most interesting and attractive person that I ever met. He was a great poet, and early on, he became a great reader of his poems before audiences large and small. We worked our way through college together, and noth-C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s ing could have shaken our dedication to getting an education or living in a world of ideas and books. Stan’s parents had not gone to college and he wanted to be in the college world. I was right with him on this. The fact that we might someday have jobs at a university, that we might make our living in the world of literature, this was our dream.

  Part of our marriage was fierce intellectual argument and we often frightened people as we tore at each other, and shouted at each other, and insisted on various abstract points. But in general we had a wonderful time.

  I think our marriage was as free of gender inequity as any marriage I knew. It wasn’t entirely free, and certainly other people pressured us incessantly to conform to gender-specific roles. If I went on a diet, mutual friends adamantly reminded me that I must still “cook for Stan” so that he got proper meals. People went so far as to say I shouldn’t make as good a grade in a class as Stan was making. One male friend furiously insisted that I “admit” Stan was more intelligent than I was. People in the main were far more interested in him than in me, and I existed in his shadow, especially when he began to write and to publicly read his works.

  But in general, the jarring remarks of others didn’t penetrate the gender equality we maintained. We were both working; we both had dreams. Indeed the preservation of my personal dreams was probably essential to maintaining Stan’s admiration, and vice versa.

  Stan was an English major, went on to get a graduate degree in English, and went right into teaching at San Francisco State, our alma mater, and was soon put on tenure 1 3 1

  track, on the strength of his abilities as a teacher, and his poetry which commanded terrific respect. It was highly exceptional for a graduate of San Francisco State to be accepted there as a full-time teacher, especially if one did not have a Ph.D., but Stan was accepted and he became one of the youngest professors on the faculty, and he continued to teach at San Francisco State until 1988.

  I had a much more difficult time. I couldn’t keep up in English classes. It was the reading problem. When an English teacher told us to read a play by Shakespeare in a week, I knew that this was virtually impossible for me and I dropped out of English and started wandering, simply seeking a liberal arts education, and ending up as a political science major because classes in political science were understandable to me on the basis of lectures, as well as on the basis of some reading, and I was able to do well in this field. I graduated with a B.A. in political science after five years, and together with Stan who graduated summa cum laude in English after four years.

  We both went on to graduate school. And in graduate school I did finally learn to read. The world of literature was gradually opened to me, and certainly the world of history was opened, and I was seldom without a book at my side after those times.

  It’s pointless to describe my whole life as an atheist, or to attempt a personal memoir here of how I became a published writer.

  What matters for the sake of this memoir is that I learned in college all I could possibly contain about the modern C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s world. My learning was disorderly, haphazard, at times daring, obsessive, and full of gaps and blind spots. But I sought freely the answers to my questions.

  And the principal moral lessons I learned had to do with the Great Wars.

  I’d been four years old when the United States dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. I learned in college that this had happened. It was a profound shock. It was in college that I learned about the Holocaust, from films like The Pawnbro- ker with Rod Steiger, and from
documentaries in the theater and on television. It was in college that I read (slowly) All Quiet on the Western Front.

  Our professors had fought in the Second World War or experienced the war firsthand in some way. They sought to make us understand what this war had meant for Europe and for the world. And I remember impassioned lectures on the terrible Great War of attrition that had preceded the Second World War, and what that first war had “done to rational Europe,” to all its hopes and dreams.

  This was something I wanted desperately to grasp. Again, the primary source of education here was lectures, not books. Remarque’s novel, Hemingway’s novels, other fiction, gave me something of the experience and impact of these wars, but the professors really established the context, the seriousness of what had happened, and directed the reading I chose. I gravitated to brilliant lecturers, men and women who could give me a coherent picture of the world. And all of my radiant memories have to do with lectures, or moments during lectures when certain immense ideas became clear. 1 3 3

  I don’t know what anybody else heard in those classrooms, but I was seeking to understand things like why the color and figure went out of art after the Impressionists, and why artists like Picasso, with his wild, brutal abstractions, rose to the fore. I sought to understand all of history, actually, dipping back into the centuries as I took art classes, and dreaming of traveling to places to which we couldn’t afford to go. I longed for a coherent theory of history that was beyond my grasp.

  As for what was going on around me—the feminist movement, the rise of the hippies, the transformation of the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco (where I happened to live), the Vietnam War protests—I ignored these things pretty much. They didn’t interest me, per se. I had no perspective on the emancipation of women or how key it was to the conditions of my own daily life. I couldn’t see how rapidly it was advancing. I think I ignored militant feminism because it was too painful for me to become involved in the fray. Also there was no way that a young person like me, with such limited mental tools, could grasp that we were in fact experiencing one of the most tumultuous and significant times in world history.

  I had no sense then that I’d been born into a world of rampant social experiment, and I did not see the worldtransforming significance of the emancipation of women, and the liberation of gays.

  I was too focused on the past.

  As for the civil rights movement, I missed it. I’d left the South before it started; and I was in California almost the C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s entire time that the key court decisions were made. Thousands of young people were being radicalized by their participation in this movement. I wasn’t aware of it. I was deep into my timeless studies, often experiencing profound insights into social situations for which I had little or no continuous context.

  But I’m not sure many other people struggling through the 1960s and 1970s realized how unique were the changes that we saw.

  Assumptions about race and gender were being thrown out the window.

  The Western family was being entirely reconfigured. Women had attained more legal rights and privileges in ten years than they had in seven thousand years before. Respectable men and women lived together out of wedlock. No-fault divorce came into existence. Contraceptive devices and drugs were readily available. The prosecution of rape as a crime underwent a transformation, in which the victim was no longer on trial, but the perpetrator.

  The Vietnam War polarized the country. Illegal drugs spread from the campus elites to the middle classes and to the working classes, and ultimately to the criminal classes. Millions of women not only had access to more jobs than ever before, but discovered they had to work for a living, whether they wanted to or not, and the “stay-at-home wife”

  became a rare being, along with the husband willing to support her. All this was simply too vast, too swift, too inexorable for people to comprehend. Social and economic forces were too 1 3 5

  intermingled with the voices of protest or the prophets of social justice. I saw life transformed for millions of Americans, out of the corner of my eye. Meantime, my early years in San Francisco were rich years. Foreign films were the rage, which meant continued exposure to the work of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Antonioni, Buñuel, and Truffaut. San Francisco has marvelous small theaters in which we saw the plays of Sartre and Camus. All this educated me in ways that books could not. And around me, as ever, were good people, conscientious people, secular people who on principle wanted to make our world a better world—for the black person, for the woman, for the poor. I can’t emphasize this enough: in San Francisco and later in Berkeley, I saw secular humanism as something beautiful and vigorous and brave. And looking back on it, I still see it in that way.

  The great hippie revolution occurred as I was finishing my undergraduate years, and I found myself in the thick of it, living as we did one-half block off Haight Street in an apartment house that came to include the famous Free Clinic of the neighborhood.

  Friends and relatives trooped through our apartment, marveling at the paintings on the walls, at Stan’s poems hanging over his typewriter, at our intense and high-pitched intellectual life amid piles of books and sometime domestic confusion, a world in which Stan and I pounded away on our separate typewriters or argued furiously about philosophy and literature, no matter who might be there to witness the screaming and get upset.

  C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s People all around us were discussing the ideas of Timothy Leary, the effects of LSD, the joy of being a dropout artist. Marijuana smoke was thick in the air. It was the incense of the church of psychedelic transformation. People took carefully structured LSD trips with others who had experienced the drug, acting as protective “guides.”

  I was no more part of this than I had been part of childhood or adolescence. I was working at a fairly high-paying job in a theater box office downtown as I went to school. I showed up for art class in high heels and stockings, no matter who said what, and ignored the pressure of my hippie friends to leave “the establishment” or drop out of school. I didn’t touch LSD. I was too afraid that it would drive me out of my mind. And the new revolutionaries provided me with a whole series of new gender shocks. In the midst of rampant liberation, the flower children were stridently if not viciously sexist. “Chicks” were supposed to bake bread, clean up, feed their hippie boyfriends, and if at all possible hold a job to support the artist-poets of the group, and perhaps even fork over a bit of financial support received from frantic parents back home. It was no accident that these “chicks” wore long dresses and long hair. They looked like pioneer women, and they worked just about that hard. There was so much pejorative talk of

  “chicks not knowing how to be chicks,” and how “chicks”

  were anti-marijuana, and how “chicks” were middle class, and how if your “old lady” was a real “old lady,” she should feed you, and how “chicks” brought you down nagging at you to do chores and things, or make a living, that I withdrew from the company around me in alienation and disgust. 1 3 7

  But all this was superficial compared to the real changes in the status of women and gay people that were taking place. This was nothing. But it was the nothing that surrounded me and threatened me, and the nothing from which I withdrew. As we rolled into the 1970s, I continued naturally and unconsciously to ignore anyone who ever sought to define me as a woman, because I didn’t feel like one, and I made the tragic mistake of saying casually, “I don’t like women,” which I would never do now. I wanted to separate myself from a class of beings who were being treated essentially like dirt, at the very moment in history that they were gaining unprecedented freedom and rights. I couldn’t see the larger picture. I didn’t understand feminism in a fair or reasonable way. I was fleeing from being a woman; and feminism invited too much pain.

  I was in graduate school when my daughter became sick. Two years later, after her death before her sixth birthday, I became a writer.

  It was practicall
y an accident, and yet it was the most deliberate thing I ever did. The book was Interview with the Vampire.

  I recognize now that it was distinctly postmodern in its use of nineteenth-century characters, opulent sets, and ornamented, adjective-laden prose. It was distinctly postmodern in its use of old-fashioned plot and straightforward narrative, and in its use of heroic characters. Modernism had supposedly killed the well-plotted novel. It had supposedly killed the hero. Well, not for me. I didn’t even really know what modernism was.

  The novel was also an obvious lament for my lost faith. C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s The vampires roam in a world without God; and Louis, the heartbroken hero, searches for a meaningful context in vain. But for the purposes of this narrative, what is also important is that the book was a flight from gender, a flight from the world of which I couldn’t make any sense. In my fiction, the characters were practically androgynes. The vampire heroes, Louis and Lestat, had feminine beauty, luxuriant hair, rich velvet clothes, and preternatural strength. They loved each other or others, with no regard for gender, and they loved the child vampire Claudia in a way that established a polymorphous sensuality for the entire work. The work wasn’t about literal sex. The work was about the “marriage of true minds” beyond impediments. The work had nothing to do with domestic struggle, or class struggle, or gender struggle. The work transcended all of this. The work was about my own fierce polymorphous view of the world in which an old woman might be as beautiful as a young male child. My book reflected a fusion of the aesthetic and the moral with some tentative connection to the lost harmony of my Catholic girlhood.

  Where did such a view come from? How had it been sustained?

  This book established me as a writer. And to a large extent, the sexism I took for granted in the behavior of others dropped away overnight. There were still people around who reminded me “to take care of ” my husband’s ego, or inquired tactlessly and in the presence of others as to how Stan was