by Daniel Quinn
Neither of them could see things from the other’s point of view—but I could. This was evident. I understood what Father wanted from life. If I’d been my mother, I would have had the housework done by five o’clock without fail. I would have had dinner ready by six. On the other hand, I also understood what Mother wanted from life, and if I’d been my father I wouldn’t have expected her to have dinner on the table at six or seven. I wouldn’t have gotten angry if she’d gone on working till nine or ten or even midnight. No way. If I’d been my father, I would have been a perfect husband, seeing everything from Thelma’s point of view, and if I’d been my mother, I would have been a perfect wife, seeing everything from Bert’s point of view.
But of course I couldn’t be them or force them to behave the way I wanted them to. I was in the same relation to them as the ancient rainmaker was to the elements. All I could do was produce in myself the effects I wanted my parents to manifest. All I could do was make myself perfect, the way I wanted them to be.
That then was my magic, to be perfect. It didn’t work, of course, but no one in the whole history of the world ever quit on magic just because it didn’t work. Nobody in the whole history of the world ever quit on anything just because it didn’t work—magic, science, politics, love, religion. But especially magic. To give up on magic because it doesn’t work would be silly. If it doesn’t work, that just means you didn’t do it right. That’s how you tell you didn’t do it right—when it doesn’t work.
My magic didn’t work, of course, but no one in the whole history of the world ever quit on magic just because it didn’t work.
Anyone knows that.
Of course, a perfect boy is an abomination, is an unnatural creature. The desired boy is the “real” boy, father to the desired “real” man, and by the time I was ten I was no longer anything like a “real” boy. In order to show the universe what was expected of it, I had made of myself an exquisitely delicate instrument, acutely sensitive to the feelings and wishes of others—and of course an exquisitely delicate and sensitive boy is nothing remotely like a real one. The people around me didn’t like it—my own parents, teachers, other children, especially other boys. The girls didn’t mind so much, because real boys of this age were generally not very agreeable companions.
I remember once visiting the house of a girl I was rather smitten with—or would have been smitten with if I’d dared to be. As I recall, she was quite the most beautiful child in the class. At any rate, while she was making some effort to entertain me, her older brother—older, perhaps, by a year or two at most—made an unwelcome appearance. Having looked me over, he disappeared briefly. On returning, he handed me something wrapped in toilet paper, which I solemnly accepted and unwrapped. It was a turd, which he had just then produced on purpose to present to me. The girl was mortified, which of course was the object of the exercise. I was stunned, speechless. This was the act of a real boy, and we both knew it.
As things got worse for me, I got better—purer, nobler, more sensitive—which of course had the effect of making things even worse. By the middle of high school, everyone knew I was queer, meaning homosexual. I say “everyone knew,” but I was the exception. I had no inkling of such a thing. These were still the dark ages, and I was exceptionally naive. It had never occurred to me that persons of the same gender could be sexually attracted to one another. The idea would have astonished and appalled me. I was in fact attracted to nothing but girls, then or ever.
The desired boy is the “real” boy, father to the desired “real” man, and by the time I was ten I was no longer anything like a “real” boy.
I remember my father once introducing me to one of his business acquaintances. “This is Daniel,” he said, adding dryly, “he’s a little queer.” I knew he was getting at something but didn’t have the slightest idea what it was.
I have to assume that there were boys inclined toward homosexuality at Creighton Prep at that time—why wouldn’t there be? If so, they had the very good sense to act like real boys and stayed well away from me, knowing that not only was I not a real boy, I wasn’t even a real queer.
It wasn’t till I reached the wider world of the university that I began to understand the assumptions that were being made about me by people like my father. Given my well-developed faculty for seeing things from other people’s point of view, I naturally tended to credit them with a perspicacity beyond my own. In short, never having felt the slightest tug of desire for a person of my own sex, I began to be seriously worried that I might be a homosexual.
Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. It sounds quite absurd now. At the time, the fashionable theory was that one could be a latent homosexual. This was deeply troubling, because the whole notion of being a latent anything means you can never be sure what you are. If a heterosexual can be a latent homosexual, then a John Bircher can be a latent commie, a nun can be a latent whore, a minister can be a latent murderer, and a jazz virtuoso can be a latent rock ’n’ roller. Experience becomes meaningless—becomes irrelevant as a measure of interior reality, because the feelings you actually feel might turn out to be less real than feelings you never felt in your life.
———
I mustn’t leave out an especially charming, if brief, episode in my life of this period. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college I worked as a lookout at a bookie joint in downtown Omaha. This wasn’t my father’s establishment. Bert worked behind a three-inch-thick steel door in a cavernous bunker under a cigar store known as Baseball Headquarters. My bookie joint was a small operation up a flight of stairs and separated from the public and the police by nothing but a locked door with a window in it, which was my station.
There was no baloney about passwords. If people walked up the stairs, as they mostly did, then they were players, and I unlocked the door and let them in. If they charged up the stairs, then they were obviously cops, and I made them wait while all evidence of wrongdoing was disappeared—a practiced routine that occupied perhaps twenty seconds. Then I let them in and we all sat around playing gin rummy or solitaire till they got bored and went away.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college I worked as a lookout at a bookie joint in downtown Omaha.
The high point of the summer for me occurred one afternoon when the toilet-paper salesman made his quarterly appearance. After writing up the order, he paused at my station and asked what I was reading. Feeling rather smug, I gave him a look at it: Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. The toilet-paper salesman shook his head disdainfully and said that a bright youngster like me shouldn’t be wasting his time on such lightweight reading as that. He tore a sheet out of his order book and gave me a list that included Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
A horseplayer by the name of Angie gave me the benefit of his life’s experience in this useful principle:
You can beat a race, but you can’t beat the races.
FOUR
In the Quinn household, notions of God and Heaven belonged to a generalized childhood fantasy that included Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Rabbit. Small children were taught to kneel down at bed-time and pray “Now I lay me down to sleep” because it was a cute and harmless “part of growing up.” I suppose the presumption was that, at the appropriate time, such whimsies would uproot themselves and be left behind, like baby teeth. Religion was not avoided as a topic of conversation; it simply had no existence.
When I was eleven, however, it came to my attention that my brother was “having instruction” in the Roman Catholic faith. I don’t recall that he encouraged me to look into it; encouragement wasn’t necessary. As far as I was concerned, if he was doing it, it was clearly a thing to be done. Dennis joined the army before completing his instruction (or at least before sealing the matter with baptism), but I saw no reason to follow his example in this procrastination. I took instructions and was baptized bef
ore the beginning of eighth grade.
I couldn’t possibly have known that Catholicism was the ideal and very worst choice of religion for a child predisposed to believe that making oneself perfect is tantamount to making oneself lovable. This isn’t to say that Catholicism insists on perfection; but if you insist on perfection—hunger for perfection—indeed, want to lose yourself utterly in the pursuit of perfection—Catholicism is the religion for you. The Church can definitely show you how it’s done.
By the third year of high school, I was not only a queer, I was something much worse: I was a pious queer.
I was of course responding to needs much deeper (and far more human) than I knew about. I was of no importance to my mother, despised by my father, and loathed by my peers—and knew of no way to change this. What I did know was how to make God love me; I was assured of this; this was guaranteed. Being God, you see, he really doesn’t have any choice in the matter; if you love him, then he jolly well has to love you back, no matter how personally repellent you might be. This is all right there in the contract.
You’re probably thinking this can’t possibly have anything to do with Ishmael, but it does. Consider this. Although I didn’t know the biblical story of Ishmael at this time—probably had never even heard the name—he had already become the model for my life. Abraham’s son by Hagar, a serving girl, Ishmael, along with his mother, was driven out into the desert when Abraham’s wife gave birth to Isaac in her old age. When my mother gave birth to another son in her old age, when I was thirteen, I too felt myself driven out into the desert. Hagar left her son to die under a bush, but he didn’t perish there. The cries of the forsaken infant fell on deaf human ears, but they were heard by God, who intervened to save him, and this is the meaning of the name he was given: God heard.
At the age of sixteen, I was already Ishmael, howling in the desert, yearning to be heard by the One Who Hears.
At the age of sixteen, I was already Ishmael, howling in the desert, yearning to be heard by the One Who Hears.
It was at this age that I came across The Man Who Hated God, not a typical piece of literature for a boy reading Latin and Greek in a Jesuit prep school. It’s the biography of an American roughneck who grew up (if my memory is right) in the late decades of the nineteenth century, became converted to Roman Catholicism in his thirties, and then (doubtless much to the horror of his family) entered a Trappist monastery. Self-willed, impulsive, and stubborn, he seemed (and proved to be) an unlikely candidate for the contemplative life. Nonetheless, after sufferings I frankly no longer recall, he subdued his unruly nature, made his profession as a lay brother, and in a long life attained great holiness, on at least one occasion performing what appeared to many witnesses to be an undoubted miracle. (By rule or custom, I’m not sure which, the Cistercians never seek canonization for their members.)
If you know anything about the Trappist life, you’ll understand why I was drawn to it. It represents no sort of compromise between the monastic ideal of a thousand years ago and the realities of contemporary life. It makes utterly no concessions to modern religious fashions. These are things I could understand and admire.
The notion of penance (which is certainly central to the Trappist life) has virtually disappeared from modern Christianity, except when trivialized as the little packets of Hail Marys and Our Fathers that priests dole out in the confessional. The notion of living a life of penance makes persons of a modern sensibility squirm, because they’re almost entirely ignorant of the worldview to which it belonged. They imagine that the penitential life was basically about people beating themselves up for their sins—and that wasn’t it at all.
Medieval Christianity embodied a fundamentally heroic vision of the universe, with the earth the prize contested by cosmic forces of good and evil. They knew the earth was only a speck—that didn’t matter. It was the speck that God and Satan had chosen at the beginning of time to be their battlefield. This was no metaphor. A very real war was engaged everywhere, at every level of being. Devils and angels struggled unseen to win the human race into the service of one army or the other. Heretics were not merely purveyors of mistaken ideas; they were traitors, saboteurs—Satan’s fifth columnists. And the monasteries—the monasteries were not conceived of as places of retreat or refuge in those days, not places in which to find tranquillity and joy. Quite the contrary, the monasteries were understood to be the first line of defense against the almost overwhelming power of Satan. The monasteries were strongholds, bastions, citadels manned by stalwarts who had embraced the warrior’s life for God, who lived the way soldiers live on the front lines—literally sleeping in their clothes so as to be ready for service at a moment’s notice, laboring without comforts, sleeping little, obeying the commands of their superiors without reservation, hardening their wills against the temptations of sloth and self-indulgence. It was perfectly all right for civilians to enjoy the comforts of home, family, and friends, but these were not for the monks. Monks were the shock troops, the Green Berets—disciplined and fit, though they took their exercises in study and prayer—and indeed penance—rather than in calisthenics and the martial arts. Their prayers and their atonements for the sins of mankind held the enemy at bay, kept Satan from overrunning the world.
If you know anything about the Trappist life, you’ll understand why I was drawn to it.
Well, you can see that this is an entirely different vision of the monastic life than is known to the average layman, who thinks of the monk (or the nun) as someone who is simply “running away from life”—from what they perceive to be “real” life.
Did I embrace this worldview? You mean at the age of sixteen? Yes, I think I did, though I would not have been able to articulate it as fully as this. This was what was meant by being a “serious” Catholic, and I was certainly one of those. A “serious” Catholic “really believes” that all this stuff matters—sin, grace, redemption, heaven and hell, God and Satan. I wasn’t just serious, I was super-serious.
This was an enterprise that no one could— What?
Oh, the enterprise I mean is saving the world. Even then I was obsessed with saving the world, though it meant something completely different to me then, of course.
Where was I? I was saying I wasn’t just serious, I was super-serious. I was like a superpatriot; naturally I wanted to be sent right into action. Being super-serious, I naturally wanted to join the absolute toughest, most demanding outfit I could find, and that was the Trappists. The Trappists were fighting right at the front. People like the Jesuits and Dominicans and Benedictines were so far behind the lines they were practically civilians.
Of course at the age of sixteen this was something for the future. For the indefinite future.…
I’d have to say that from the age of twelve or so it was a settled thing in my mind that I was going to be an artist of one kind or another. This was because being an artist was like being perfect and like loving God: something I could do all by myself, without outside help. Do you see what I’m saying? I knew I couldn’t succeed at something that required me to be liked, but I could succeed as an artist whether anyone liked me or not. I’m speaking now of the way a twelve-year-old understands such things. Artists can just sit in their garrets all by themselves and write or paint. No one can stop them, and if they’re good at what they do, then they’re good.
How is this like loving God? Well, you see, no one can stop you at that either. You can just sit there burning with love for God, and he’s got to love you back, and that’s that. You don’t need to depend on anyone’s support to succeed at being holy—or to succeed at being an artist. It’s all up to you, all in your hands.
I was drawn to the arts for the same reason I was drawn to piety, because I could be good at them even if I wasn’t good at anything else.
I don’t mean to suggest that I could have verbalized all this as a child. It’s simply my present estimate that I was drawn to the arts for the same reason I was drawn to piety, because I could be good
at them even if I wasn’t good at anything else.
I started taking private art lessons when I was ten or so. Luckily, I wasn’t tremendously encouraged in this. I did a lot of painting in the next twenty or thirty years, but I was never going to be anything more than good.
Yes, that’s right, the paintings on the walls are mine. I agree, they’re good. I wouldn’t hang them if they weren’t, but look, there are eighteen million starving painters out there who are good, and most of them are better than I ever would have been.… These are all quite old. I haven’t done any painting in fifteen years. This is because when I paint, I paint, and when I write, I write. I couldn’t do both. I had to choose one or the other, and I chose writing. I began to experiment with writing when I was in my mid-teens. It’s no surprise that I found language a more satisfying medium than paint. Paint is unruly stuff, you know, not the best material for achieving perfection, whereas language does exactly what you want it to, no more and no less. If you want an elephant in a story, you say, “There was an elephant standing in the garden,” and by God there it is—in three seconds flat—trunk, tail, ears, and everything, perfectly proportioned, exactly the right color and texture, every muscle and sinew in precisely the right place. Try to duplicate that feat with a brush and paint!
Like most people then and today, I lacked any clear idea about what writers are and what writers do. Obviously they fill pages with words, and they do this in such a way that people want to buy and read their books. Even this apparently naive and superficial statement reflects more understanding than I actually had. Writers, as I imagined them, sat in their rooms and were impelled or inspired to fill pages with words. Publishers, on learning that this activity had taken place, would then say to them, “You know, if these pages were done up into a book, people would want to read it.”