In some ways, John L’Heureux, who died in April of this year, may seem like a bit of a mid-century holdover. Having served as a Jesuit priest well into his thirties, he went on to publish a string of novels whose interrogations of guilt — and tendency, in the vein of writers like O’Connor and Malamud, to revolve around revelatory moments of grace — seem to reveal a hoary, belichened sensibility. His late-career resurgence as a writer of short fiction (his stories increasingly studded the pages of The New Yorker in the last years of his life) doesn’t so much tell a different story as it reveals a sea change in fictional tastes. There’s a certain sincerity and searchingness to his stories, after all, that no longer seem so passé in the constitutional brittleness of our digital age.
A native of Massachusetts, L’Heureux began his Jesuitical training at the age of 19, publishing poetry and a journal as he worked his way through the seminary. Significantly, the years of his study corresponded with the Second Vatican Council, which saw the Catholic church attempting, turbulently, to adjust to the modern world. In many ways, his religious sensibilities, as they crop up in his fiction, are defined by these two formative experiences — the dogmatically spare, crystalline faith of the Puritans is filtered through the rigor of the Jesuit academy and butts up, at last, against L’Heureux’s deep humanism, which inclines him to bend the trappings of faith to fit the masses and their needs; the brittle, piercing exhortations to simply love that stipple his fictions — a finer, feathery distillation of Forster’s command to only connect — are a way of severing the intractable knot of steely self-involvement that is his religious inheritance.
This divergence makes The Heart is a Full-Wild Beast a bumpy, fractious collection. L’Heureux’s stories range from sensitive, essentially realist studies of the fraught Catholic experience in the 1960s to ecstatically experimental tales, soaked in a punchy irony, that interrogate the extremities of religious experience via an equally extreme torquing of form. The book’s first section, “Mysteries,” compiles a series of hyper-stylized stories that, with their stripped-down, schematic plots and didactic heavy-handedness, inhabit an uneasy space between parable and satire. “The Comedian” follows Corinne, a standup comic who, at 38, finds herself accidentally pregnant; a caul of light fabulism settles over the story when the baby begins to sing to Corinne in a “soft reedy voice.” The climactic delivery scene itself is a finely limned illumination:
“The room is filled with singing and with light, and the singing is transformed into light, more light, more lucency, and still she says, ‘Yes,’ until she cannot bear it, and she reaches up and tears the light aside. And sees.”
It’s an ending fairly typical of L’Heureux’s short stories — a jumbled revelation that may sometimes feel perfunctory and too neatly gift-wrapped, as though L’Heureux had simply dropped the reins of his writing and exited his study in a hot air balloon. And yet, with its accretion of lights, each experienced in a different way — there is light as a purely visual experience, then a light experienced aurally, and at last a tactile light, one that can be grasped and torn — the description does give us a sense of Corinne’s absorption. The light, in the final analysis, is an isolation, a refulgent cocoon.
Traditionally, the visionary is a solitary experience. The danger arises when the solitude itself is experienced rapturously, when the discomfort of doubt and self-examination is luxuriated in. In “Witness,” a professor of statistics receives the stigmata and slowly goes insane; when the blinding pain periodically hits her, “she would hug her wrists to her chest, cradling the madness against her … like some poor crazy witch they hung in Salem.” There is something sanctifying in the act of cradling, a tincture of the pieta — for L’Heureux, it approximates a form of prayer without cease, a mechanical model of the perpetuum mobile of faith. Since the actions of faith tend to produce faith, L’Heureux insists, we must be careful where we bestow them; again and again, his characters end up worshipping things accidentally, unknowingly cradling their wounds and fears.
Sometimes one registers a certain roteness in L’Heureux’s prose, a fundamental earnestness and belief in the step-by-step construction of stories which, combined with his reluctantly dark sensibility, may leave his stories feeling like an odd cross between Cheever and Oates. But sometimes the blandness plays to impactful effect, as in “The Torturer’s Assistant,” an objective, Kafkaesque accounting of the titular functionary’s day-to-day activities, which involve ministering to torture victims:
“’This will be a short, sharp pain and it will leave a taste in your mouth. A bad taste like copper flings. And you’ll smell the burned flesh for quite a while. Are you ready? Are you okay?’ and I lean against him, lightly, so that he is not a body alone in space, in pain, but part of the general mess of things. ‘Okay,’ I say, very softly, lovingly, and before I signal the torturer to begin, I say to the patient, ‘You’re doing a good job, you’re doing very well,’ and I touch his chest with my fingertips, lightly, the tiniest reassurance.”
At their best, L’Heureux’s sentences express a devotional cadence, shuffling languorously onward; their willingness to extend themselves, to fold in additional adverbs and adjectives and absolute phrases, is a mark of desire, the wish to prolong the palliative properties of prayer. As long as I am speaking, his characters seem to suggest, the ministrations of the word will go on. “The Torturer’s Assistant,” like many stories in The Heart is a Full-Wild Beast, ends with an exhortation to love; as he ushers the over-tortured out of this world, the assistant explains, “I caress them with my voice, I murmur to them. They surrender, knowing they are loved, and there is nothing more to worry them, forever.”
L’Heureux is often criticized for the indefatigable wryness he tends to bring to his narration, and for his willingness to too artfully arrange his plots. Oddly enough, the most affecting stories in The Heart is a Full-Wild Beast are those in which he abandons himself to omniscience, dictating the story with the warm wisdom of an avuncular god. The ending of “The Priest’s Wife: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a compressed retelling of a lifelong marriage, is an erasure, a trailing-off into uncertainty, or pointlessness: “Time passed for them. There may have been children, a boy and a girl, adopted. There may have been a dog. There may have been … but the snow falls and everything recedes into uncertainty, except that we die and we do not wish to die.”
The final story in the collection, “Three Short Moments in a Long Life,” is an autobiographical coda; the story’s narrator, a writer, is working on a book that sounds a lot like L’Heureux’s An Honorable Profession. He is stricken with Parkinson’s as an old man and attempts to take his own life, and in the aftermath finds himself growing closer with his wife; they pray for some sickness to take him away before the Parkinson’s ravages his body:
“I say, I’ll miss you when I’m dead. And in a while there comes the final moment: the earth stops turning and a luminous silence descends. And then, as we draw one last breath together, I snatch your hand. And hold it. Holding it, and holding it, and still holding it. I breathe out.
Still, I’ll miss you when I’m dead.”
Here, we get a repetition of the rhythm at the end of “The Comedian.” The language of rapture, composed of the spawls of faith — a light-filled mosaic. What makes the story so tragic in the end isn’t that it so painfully charts L’Heureux’s own agonies — though it does, in spades — but rather the fact that it dwells so earnestly on the act of holding onto existence (of holding a hand, of holding one’s breath). Which is to say, what makes the story so tragic is the fact L’Heureux ever could have doubted that this — the cradling, the grasping — is how you make the world sacred.
[Published by A Public Space Books on December 3, 2019, 432 pages, $28.00 hardcover]
Bailey Trela is a writer living in Brooklyn whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Tablet Magazine, and The Harvard Review.