Culture

David Rabe on Childhood and Faith


Photograph by Ben Gabbe / Getty

Your story in this week’s issue, “Things We Worried About When I Was Ten,” is set around the time when you yourself were ten. Does it draw on your own childhood?

Everything I’ve ever written, even depictions of the most extreme situations—ones that might seem far from my experience—began with something I knew, if only a dream recalled in the morning, or a memory that arose like a dream recalled. Sometimes impulses or ideas or memories become available only after they’ve been put through some unconscious process that, like a kitchen blender, mashes them into something not quite what they were. So, in that sense, and probably in a more direct way, too, this particular story connects to my childhood.

The narrator of the story, Danny, is a ten-year-old Catholic boy, who, like his friends, goes to a Catholic school taught by nuns. What does Catholicism mean to these kids, beyond the familiar rituals?

That’s a question I have asked myself, and I am certain only that I have no single answer. Catholicism asks for faith. But when you are young, as these boys are, almost everything requires faith: faith in the adults around you, in how they live, what they say, and what they embody; faith in the future; faith that people know what they are doing, and that their example makes sense, or will, possibly, when you’re grown up. It’s the fate of faiths to face the tests and contradictions that come with reality and the steady march into experience and time. The only moment in the story that approaches this question directly is when Danny is returning from the communion rail with the host in his mouth—which he has been taught to believe and wants to believe is the body of Jesus Christ—and, as he opens his eyes, giving up his pious pose in order to find his way back to his seat, what does he see but a young girl, whose body is budding with sexuality, and he responds with “weird feelings,” as he calls them, as she pushes Jesus out of his thoughts, leaving him with a mind full of Mary Catherine Michener. Does Jesus know? Does he care? What is Danny to do about that? What are any of the boys to do? How these boys work out their relationship to this question, or all matters of their connection to the church, would be private, if not secretive.

You had a similar upbringing in Dubuque, and even, I think, considered becoming a priest. What drove you in a different direction?

“Considered” would be the apt word—and not for long. But at certain junctures—with the faith of an imaginative childhood at play, as well as the “reality” one encounters, with its seemingly irreconcilable contradictions, if not oppositions to faith—becoming a priest can seem like the solution to a riddle. A way out of the riddle, a step to be taken, an act that provides the hope of getting extra help in solving the contradictions, so to speak, by way of the sacrament. I think I saw quickly, though in a fairly inarticulate way, that I was looking for a way to cope, a strategy to keep life at bay, and so I suspect it was not a true vocation. I think that following a true vocation would be an act of embracing life—a priesthood that engaged with life. For me, the impulse was anti-life, isolationist, protectionist. I can’t say that I understood this clearly then, but I knew enough to see that the impulse was fake and that to follow it would be a big mistake.

Jackie Rand is only ten but has already had to cope with his mother’s death, his father’s brutality, his stepmother’s mercurial interest, and the constant taunting of his peers. Do you think there’s a chance he’ll make it through this childhood intact and have a better future?

I think Jackie has little or no hope of getting through life intact. He is already, at the age of ten, a tattered soul, jerry-rigged and patched together with tape and wire with a lot of bad splices. For him to somehow turn the shambles he is into someone thriving would be possible, of course, but a lot of luck would have to come into play.

Toward the end of the story, it occurs to Danny that Jackie is, in a sense, a Jesus to the other boys—the person who takes all the punishment and suffering onto himself, enabling the others to feel better off by comparison. Is there something spiritual underlying his final “resurrection”?

I never thought of it as a resurrection when I was working on the story, though, looking back, I can see that the idea is there. However, there’s nothing spiritual in it for Jackie. He just gets knocked out and wakes up. On the other hand, what Danny sees in that moment may have a resonance or a dimension of awakening, a realization that we all suffer and survive separately, though we can bear witness to one another.

This pack of boys exists in a world with virtually no adult supervision, beyond the nuns at school, and very little access to information. That kind of childhood is hard to imagine now. Do you feel nostalgia for it?

I don’t know if I have nostalgia for that time, though certain aspects seem to have a richness. Is abundant information better than mystery and imagination? If a movie came to town that we saw and loved, we couldn’t summon it up with the press of a button once it left town. We had to remember it, find stills in magazines, and enact what we could of what we remembered. We waited and hoped that it would come back to one of the little theatres that specialized in second runs. When it happened—when a longed-for movie came back, which wasn’t all that often—it seemed a kind of miracle. I think a lot of what we do as children is create a disguise for ourselves, a way of being that has to be convincing to those around us. We invent certain codes and passwords that only we know and that we employ in order to appear as we should, rather than as we are. We smuggle our disguised selves out of the country of origin and across the border to whatever awaits, where we hopefully will remember the codes and passwords so that we can work our way back, following our trail of bread crumbs, decoding the mystery we made of ourselves. A lot of what goes on in this story, among these boys, who are thankfully free of adults, is that they are working together, whether they know it or not, to determine those codes. Not that a little more information and less ignorance back then wouldn’t have been helpful in some matters, but what we have today is information turned into a juggernaut of willed ignorance.

Do you have any favorite childhood memories?

The hill behind our house. It went on for miles. It was high, several stories high, hundreds of feet—not a mountain but steep, with plateaus and bluffs and cliffs. I could leave my house and be on it in minutes. The hill, the hill, the hill. We found refuge there in the games we played, the camps we built, the movies we enacted, the fantasies of heroism, brotherhood, betrayal, honor, vengeance.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.