In the fall of 2001, novelist Barry Hannah spoke to creative-writing students and their professors in an auditorium of Old Main on the campus of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The presentation was something of a homecoming for Hannah, a writerin-residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and the author of eight critically acclaimed novels and four shortstory collections, one of which, 1996 ’s High Lonesome, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
He was the first graduate, in the late 1960 s, from the UA’s Masters of Fine Arts program in creative writing, and the crowd might have expected insights on the fiction-writing life.
But Hannah had recently emerged from a harrowing battle with cancer, treated with chemotherapy that had strip-mined his immune system, resulting in pneumonia. Six months before his lecture in Fayetteville, he had been lying in a hospital bed, near death. At his lowest point, he believed Christ had appeared to him in the infirmary. In the vision, he told Christ, “I have not paid enough attention to you.” He awoke weeping.
The experience was transformative, and, that night in Fayetteville, it was all Hannah was interested in talking about.
But confront a crowd with details of a personal religious experience they are not expecting, and the reactions are likely to range from discomfort to bemusement.
So it went with one prominent Arkansas writer, seated near the front of the auditorium and solidly in Hannah’s sight line. As Hannah’s talk became increasingly sacred and emotional, the other writer began laughing, as if she had guessed the punch line, or at least sensed one was coming and wanted to get in front of it. Hannah interrupted his account to appeal to her sympathies.
“Don’t laugh,” he pleaded. “I’m being serious.” Hannah’s experience that night underscores the complicated relationship between faithfulness and mainstream artistic reception. Allowing a conversion experience to emerge through artistic endeavor can become a zero-sum creative exercise, in which an artist ends up sacrificing some measure of his embrace by the intellectual community.
And this is complicated by a rarely acknowledged but pervasive critical litmus test applied to artistic work — from writing to music to visual art — created by the faithful : Is the creator an artist who happens to be a believer, or a believer who happens to be an artist ?
Last week, the salvation story of Johnny Cash was explored in a segment on a nationally televised Billy Graham Special. Cash, of course, is a prime example of an artist to whom evangelical Protestants and secular cultural tastemakers alike can lay claim. Although there surely were some who feared what effect Cash’s rededication to Christianity in the early 1970 s would have on the pace and the artistic integrity of his output, he remained a revered creative force until his death in 2003.
But at the same time, there is the nagging sense that for Cash and, in the visual arts, the outsider painter Howard Finster, their devout Christianity was something their fans in the secular world “allowed” them — an anthropological beauty mark that put the “folk” in their folk art. (For Finster, the Alabama preacher turned painter of selftaught religious surrealism, the characteristics that defined his “outsider” status — profound rural isolation, the elevation of symbolism over form, a childlike and deceptively simple point of view — were intrinsic to his faith. )
Yet for all Finster’s critical acclaim, the painter that more Americans would like to (and do ) see represented in their home is Thomas Kinkade, whose aesthetic pleasantries — his candlelight-kissed church and home scenes make Rockwell look edgy — have won him few fans in the serious art world. DESERVEDLY LEFT BEHIND ?
With writers, the sliding scale becomes especially steep. Though novelist Graham Greene’s conversion to Catholicism occurred before he wrote most of his fiction (and, like Cash’s conversion, was inspired as much by the love of a faithful woman as any divine impulse ), biographers never fail to note the influence of his deeply Catholic sensibilities on his work, placing him in the stable of writers whose works are considered through the lens of their faith.
In the minds of literary critics, Greene is more of an intellectual than C. S. Lewis, and Lewis is more of an intellectual than Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the best-selling Left Behind series.
For a Christian writer like Jenkins, the body of work cannot be neatly divided into categories of pre-conversion and post-conversion. At the same time he has produced Christian works, he has also published in the secular world, including biographies of Hank Aaron and Walter Peyton. For years, he wrote the comic strip Gil Thorpe.
Jenkins operates the Christian Writers Guild, an institute designed to nurture fiction and nonfiction writers who want to publish in the growing Christian genre. To that end, the guild offers an annual Operation First Novel contest with a publication deal and a $ 10, 000 cash prize.
And Jenkins is a realist about the need to raise the bar on the quality of writing that invariably gets labeled Christian first and craft second. In an interview a few years ago about Christian versus secular writing, Jenkins minced no words about why he believes most Christian writers fail to make the crossover to mainstream critical acceptance :
Interviewer : Do you feel the Christian writing market differs much from the secular market ?
Jenkins : Yes. There is not as much good writing. We forgive too much if the motives are right.
Interviewer : Do you believe it is easier to break into the Christian market than the secular market ?
Jenkins : Oh, certainly. The Christian market has less competition and lower standards.
The question becomes not so much whether it’s bad to be a Christian artist, or even if Christian art is bad, but rather what we think of as Christian art. The categorization process reveals a schism in the creative community that runs along the same lines as the ones between Catholic and Protestant and between Protestant denominations.
The clash of faith versus reason — to say nothing of intellect and imagination — comes into play. To be embraced critically as well as across the spectrum of Christian belief, must a work be heavily allegorical, as with C. S. Lewis’ fiction, or can spiritual themes be woven into the characterizations, as in Greene’s work ?
And just as different faiths have different ideas about what constitutes a conversion experience, a writer’s ability to appeal to evangelicals especially depends largely on whether the spiritual turning point in his personal and creative life is convincingly transformative enough to be trusted. WELCOME TO GREENELAND Greene’s novels — especially the three that are thought of as his “Catholic trilogy,” The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair — perpetuated a world his public came to think of as “Greeneland.” In other words, one that could only exist in the collective mind of the writer and the readers who followed him there.
But Greene despaired that those visitors thought of Greeneland as a godless place. He once told a journalist, “I have often tried in my work to show the mercy of God. You cannot show it by portraying only virtuous people. What good is mercy to the virtuous ?
“ It is in the drunken priests that you can see mercy working. And I call that optimism. But they call it ‘Greeneland,’ as though it bore no relation to the real world. And yet, one is simply trying to describe the real world as accurately as one sees it.” In a New Yorker essay tied to the release of the third volume in Norman Sherry’s Greene biography, Ruth Franklin pointed out how a writer who explores issues of faith can be punished by the faith community for failing to strike the proper worshipful chord.
“Greene’s fundamental difficulty as a Christian was that he doubted his own ability to love God — to make the leap of faith, the unconditional surrender, that transforms a sinner into a saint,” Franklin wrote. “But his failings as a Christian were his virtues as a novelist, because the novelist’s dedication is to humanity, not divinity. If man truly is made in God’s image, then the distance between the two poles may not be as great as Greene thought.” And it’s hard to miss the attitude of unconditional spiritual devotion Greene ascribes to the character of Sarah in The End of the Affair — a posture that, even if Greene did not necessarily feel himself, he had no trouble imagining : “I believe there’s a God,” cries Sarah, the sinner torn between the depth of feeling she experiences for her maker and for her earth-bound lover. “I believe the whole bag of tricks ; there’s nothing I don’t believe ; they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted, and I’d believe just the same. I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.” THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST For a litany of reasons, Oscar Wilde is seldom considered a Christian writer, but the influence of his spiritual quest on his art is unmistakable. Scholars disagree on Wilde’s conversion timeline. Some locate it to prison, where he languished for “acts of gross indecency” ; some to his deathbed. And his homosexuality, the practice of which resulted in the prison sentence, certainly complicates his acceptance into the community of faith-based writers. If you accept the soul-searching that Wilde did in prison as his true conversion experience, a case Andrew McCracken makes in his essay “The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde,” everything Wilde wrote postrelease must be considered as the text of a new convert. McCracken notes that, upon Wilde’s release from prison in May 1897, he beseeched a Jesuit monastery to accept him for a six-month retreat. When he was denied, “Wilde wept at the news,” McCracken writes. “No doubt the Jesuit Fathers had reservations about accepting a man of Wilde’s notoriety, but we can’t help but wonder what effect six months of traditional Ignatian spirituality would have had on this sensitive man.” We don’t have to wonder what effect imprisonment had on him. Wilde’s Christ-centered reflections were less starry-eyed than those of Greene’s Sarah, but no less sincere. He had spent two years behind bars : roughly the same amount of time as the Apostle Paul, and for Wilde the experience was nearly as spiritually and creatively fruitful as a similar confinement had been for Paul, who used the time to compose much of the New Testament : the books of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon.
Most profoundly, Wilde experienced prison as a series of indignities he nevertheless found spiritually useful. Confinement enforced a deprivation of sensory and emotional attachments — primarily a separation from his children — that drove him prostrate.
Later, in his spiritual tract De Profundis, Wilde reflected on the episode with an attitude of submission that would satisfy any seeker after Christ. “It was a blow so appalling that I did not know what to do,” he wrote. “So I flung myself on my knees, and bowed my head, and wept, and said, ‘The body of a child is as the body of the Lord : I am not worthy of either.’ That moment seemed to save me.” Wilde was also newly contemplative about how his sense of devotion would manifest itself in his writing. He could not foresee divorcing his impulse to follow Christ from his impulse to re-create the world in art. “He who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song,” he wrote.
THE ARTISTIC LIFE For Wilde, that impulse was urgent, however daunting its execution. “It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can,” he said of his spiritual renewal. “If ever I write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are just two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself : One is ‘Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life.’ The other is ‘The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct.’... I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, ‘ Yes ! This is just where the artistic life leads a man !’” Which returns us to Hannah, who, despite the power he attributes to his hospital-bed Christ apparition, still feels some doubt about where the spiritual life leads an artistic man. In “Christ in the Room,” an essay he published last year in The Oxford American magazine, Hannah wrote that, even four years after his vision, “Christ stays in every minute I move, do, or think.” But he also expressed an artistic ambivalence about the experience that might comfort that fellow writer who laughed off Hannah’s nakedly earnest spirituality at the talk in Fayetteville. “I doubt belief in the Savior helps anybody write,” he notes point-blank.
At another point, he hints at the kind of humanist point of view that makes many Christian readers close their ears to the words of writers whose faith they find shaky or vaporous — in the process depriving themselves of spiritual enrichment from an unlikely source.
“Albert Camus, one of my heroes, said he learned all the ethics he ever knew playing soccer in Algeria,” Hannah reflected. “I believe he remained an atheist until his car hit a tree and he was dead. Whereupon he became a secular angel, as most writers might aspire to be.” Possibly what Christian writers and secular writers should concede is that they share at least a few articles of faith : The best writing appeals to the better angels of our nature. And that a secular angel still has more spiritual authority than no angel at all.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online