An hour after arrival in Minneapolis Philip Knight called on his client, but the man who answered the door was clearly a policeman. “Is Genevieve Magee at home?” “Who are you?” Though he was on a step below the man, Philip could see the top of his head. “I was going to ask you the … Read more
On a recent flying trip to France, having accomplished the academic tasks for which I came, I had several days for reading, writing, and revisiting favorite places. I holed up in Auxerre for a long weekend, settled down at my laptop, and the first day wrote from the crack of dawn until midnight, with a … Read more
It was a densely wooded plot of land that lay at the intersection of two country roads, not what one would have thought of as remote, but it was not until late October when the leaves had fallen that the old bus became visible from the road. How many motorists caught a glimpse of it … Read more
Many writers have been afloat, on one liquid or another; some have gone to sea, but now we have entered the age of the cruise. Writers who once wandered robed and slippered about their studies, shuttling from coffeepot to desk, now stride the decks of luxury liners in snow-white sneakers and a pensive look, lecturing … Read more
Mae Brown’s house was set Lack on her lot, on a slight knoll. On the opposite side of the road an imposing hill rose almost mountainlike. At various levels of its elevation there were houses, and it was one of Mrs. Brown’s innocent pleasures to sit in her front window and look across the road … Read more
The other day I went to the airport, got my seat assignment, checked my bag, and then went to the waiting room where I settled down with my book. Some time later I looked up and found that I was alone. My plane had gone. I went back to the counter and sheepishly explained what … Read more
Aunt Lucerne was the only relative Philip and Roger Knight had, so it was perhaps fitting that she should be absolute. Once in the dimly remembered past she may have entertained doubts, but this was long before her nephews came to know her. In their experience, she had always been omniscient, riddled with certainty and … Read more
Once in Athens I was nearly hit by a truck as I started to cross a street. I got back in time to read the legend lettered on its side. Metaphora. One is supposed to be struck by metaphors, of course, but this seemed too literal a way to go about it. The legend meant … Read more
Introducing—The Knights Tales: Ralph Mclnerny, creator of Father Dowling, offers the first in a series of moral mysteries written for Crisis. Given his enormous size, Roger Knight was capable of discomfort in any season, with the result that he had come to appreciate them all, but the winter scene at their window suggested to his … Read more
They show up often in books, unintended reminders of something that is very likely no business of the discoverer’s. In his novella Kathleen, Christopher Morley gets the action going when a young man finds a letter in a book—in a library, in a bookstore, I forget which. Letting Go, Philip Roth’s best novel, I think, … Read more
1997 is the Year of Jesus Christ in the countdown toward 2000, the beginning of the third millennium. Pope John Paul II referred to this looming event often before devoting an Apostolic Letter to it in 1994. The letter might be translated into English: As the Third Millennium Draws Near; the original is Tertio millennio … Read more
Keirkegaard once described himself as a letter facing the wrong way in a line. Maybe only a writer would seek a simile of himself in misprints and typographical errors. God knows that most biographies of writers stress the bizarre and flaky in the lives of their subjects. Often, after reading about an author, one has … Read more
A teacher can give us explanations but she cannot give us understanding. The function of the teacher is not to trade ideas. It is a bane of what we laughingly call our educational system that the seminar, once the preserve of graduate studies, has trickled down into high schools, into grade schools, into kindergarten. I … Read more
September marks the centenary of the birth of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The thought of the writer who became all but identified with flaming youth and the roaring ’20s as a hundred years old rattles the imagination. When he died in 1940, at the age of 44, Fitzgerald seemed to have outlived his material and to … Read more
Many years ago, in 1948, a book was published that had an immediate dramatic effect on its readers. It was written by a young man, Thomas Merton, and told the story of his riotous youth, conversion to Catholicism, and entry into the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani, Kentucky, in 1941, when he was twenty-six years old. … Read more
A dissident theologian who writes a syndicated column has, not for the first time, written longingly of the death of the pope. The poor devil sees the papacy of John Paul II as an unaccountable aberration, a deflection from the supposed progress that marked the period from the end of the Council until 1978 when … Read more
One late afternoon I left a meeting in Manhattan and managed to get to LaGuardia to find that my flight would be delayed three hours. It was more like five hours before we took off, feeling like Lindbergh just clearing those power lines as he lumbered into the gloom. I was to change flights at … Read more
There seem to be two kinds of Catholic, those who will believe nothing and those who will believe anything. Of course there is another kind as well, those who believe what the Holy Catholic Church teaches. If the Holy Father ever gets around to reading the South Bend Tribune he will find in the December … Read more
You would have thought that the day was long since past when the ability to get easily out of lifetime promises would be regarded as progress, but the reaction to the Irish vote on divorce says otherwise. Poor Ireland was pictured as catching up with the modern world, and one fears that this is all … Read more
Many Catholic writers have balked at being called that. They were Catholic and they wrote, all right, but they didn’t want to be read as if the point of their fiction was a religious message. As if you could earn an indulgence by reading them. And maybe they didn’t like the prospective company. There used … Read more