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Gleaming Brightly: T.M. Doran’s Catholic Imagination (INTERVIEW)

Mark Nowakowski on November 7, 2020

Editor’s Note:

T.M. Doran is a professor of engineering at Lawrence Technological University, but in recent years he has also managed to become one of the most exciting voices in Catholic literature. His novels Circling the Turtle, Terrapin, and Iota represent a bold breadth of thematic storytelling, while his novel Toward the Gleam has launched an entirely new series of Tolkien-related literature which teams with life and originality. Mark Nowakowski is a rising young Catholic composer of sacred music and a professor of music technology at Kent State.  Listening to these two Catholic creators converse is fascinating and revealing.

Mark Nowakowski: Thanks, Mr. Doran, for your valuable time today! What are significant things about Mr. Doran which animate him as a person and an author?

T.M. Doran: I’ve been married to my beautiful wife for over 40 years. She’s too good for me, and I’m not the only one who says that. My areas of specialty are the environment and infrastructure, having worked on hundreds of such projects over the years, and these subjects sometimes seep into my stories. I’m keenly interested in history/archaeology, astrophysics, and the natural sciences, and always have a book on one of these subjects at hand.

Mark Nowakowski: When and why did you start writing fiction?

T.M Doran: I began composing short stories before I was ten. As a boy, I loved to read, and I suppose that inspired me to try my hand. Many of these early stories had surprise endings.

Mark Nowakowski: How do you think about the relationship of your faith (Catholicism) to your art?

T.M. Doran: I strive to compose rousing, provocative, mysterious stories that people want to read. A common subtext in my stories is that moral choices have transcendent meaning, and consequences that migrate like cracks on an ice-covered pond.

Modernist literature may go so far as to admit that choices produce physical or psychological consequences, but can’t admit that such choices are inherently good or bad, right or wrong. So modern literature often depicts human beings as intelligent animals programmed by natural processes to respond in predictable, albeit dramatic, ways.

Authors with religious faith have to be careful not to fall into a similar trap where good choices are always rewarded in this life and bad choices are always punished in the here and now. Another thing I love to explore in my stories is the arc of human growth, often in fits and starts, and never complete in this life: “The road goes ever on and on.”

Mark Nowakowski: I myself am not an author of fiction, but fiction for me was an introduction to creative thought. As a creative kid, I for instance drew incredible solace and inspiration from the idea that an old English professor like JRR Tolkien felt free to spend incredible amounts of time contemplating an imaginary world. Even today, when I compose music, having good fiction at my side is often a wellspring from which inspiration rises (your books too!). Did you experience anything like this as well, given that you were writing at such a young age? And given the importance of Tolkien to some of your published work, when did you discover this pivotal Catholic author?

T.M. Doran: I first read The Lord of the Rings in my early twenties as a fantasy/adventure story. Subsequently, I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s connected stories as dense, interwoven sagas and songs of a mythological world, as a caution about the lure of pride and power, and more recently, as a stark depiction of human frailty and our utter dependence on grace.

The hero of Middle Earth, Frodo Baggins is the person best suited to take on that terrifying and daunting mission. But he could not have fulfilled his mission without the “assistance” of Gollum, and only mercy made it possible for Gollum to be present at that moment. As for Frodo, there is no peace for him in victory over the Enemy. Will a boat come for me at the end? is a deeply spiritual question many of us ask in times of trial.

Mark Nowakowski: One can often sense the (often hidden) Catholicity of a writer or filmmaker based on how they approach the idea of the consequence of our actions. It’s really a different way of seeing the world. Could you perhaps speak more to the question of moral choice in fiction?

TD: I perceive this Catholic perspective in many creative people: Vivaldi, Michelangelo, Eliot, O’Connor, Capra, Hitchcock, Brubeck, and Graham Greene among them.

I’ve read many reviews of Greene’s “The Quiet American” but none of these mark this essential last-page reflection of the atheistic journalist who contributed to the death of the American in the story: “I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside me at the Continental…Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”

Greene’s journalist has a sense of honor and contrition, but without God honor falls prey to desires and fears: Where does one go to confess and receive forgiveness when there is no God?

Mark Nowakowski: Speaking of Tolkien: Toward the Gleam is so successful because you a create a plausible prehistory of Tolkien’s created world which seems like it must have actually happened. Then you spin another tale around it which, while imagined, adds another layer of “this could easily be real” to the formula. Was this your intent?

T.M. Doran: Yes, this is what I intended with Toward the Gleam, though I’m not sure I’d have the courage to compose and submit such a story today. Someone once said that I took the easy path by choosing a Tolkien-like character for Toward the Gleam, not realizing how difficult John Hill was to write.

Even though John Hill was a fictional character, I felt severely constrained by what I could do with him. Jan Skala in Iota and Lyle Stuart in The Lucifer Ego were much easier to write because of the creative freedom I enjoyed with these characters; I could let them go in directions I hadn’t expected when I embarked on these stories.

For Toward the Gleam, I spent countless days researching and matching the era of the world of the manuscript with known biology (flora and fauna), geography, climate, even anthropology, thus John Hill’s meetings with Pepin Hermann (who features again in The Lucifer Ego) and Greta Erickson (who features again in book three). As the prehistoric civilization continues to affect characters in Toward the Gleam, so characters in Toward the Gleam continue to affect characters and events in The Lucifer Ego and Kataklusmós.

“This could easily be real” plays out in book three, something I had intended even as I began composing Toward the Gleam fifteen years ago.

Mark Nowakowski: Music has taught me that great art has some manner of pre-existence, and that the great works feel “necessary” in their own existence. When I think of the poetic, I think of a stream of something objectively real and yet entirely beyond our capacity to describe, one into which artists are allowed to dip despite not understanding. Considering the way in which the palpable realism of Toward the Gleam built upon the palpable history of the Lord of the Rings, can you perhaps speak to something like this? Have you had such a sense or experience?

T.M. Doran: I love how you describe the creative experience. In my writing, I’ve experienced this powerful sense of Truth and Beauty beyond understanding, and I’ve also sensed it in music and visual art: An invitation to a larger life, you might say, a life one is permitted to glimpse/hear for brief periods of time, and something that remains with us as a deep yearning.

When I’m writing, I often listen to classical music or instrumental jazz, as music inspires and invigorates me. Without faith, these glimpses of an “unattainable” larger life can lead to despair, as has often occurred in the lives of artists.

Mark Nowakowski: You speak so lovingly of your wife. Was your own marriage perhaps a model for how you depicted the main character’s marriage in Toward the Gleam, especially the closing chapters when they are old?

T.M. Doran: For John Hill and E.M., I did indeed draw on what I had learned about the Tolkien marriage and on my own marriage, as both marriages involve strong-minded people who are deeply in love. When someone spends “incredible amounts of time contemplating an imaginary world (art that transcends the physical world)” it is bound to affect those close to them, even if not a matter of mortal danger as it was for John and E.M.

Mark Nowakowski: Earlier on you mention Iota. As somebody who visited Communist Poland and heard many stories of this world and subsequently later studied it as an adult, I was beyond struck by the accuracy of the “feeling” you achieved in this novel, set in a Soviet prison shortly after World War II. What lead you down the path to pick this setting for a story? And how did you pursue the particular tone and tenor of the Soviet ideological atmosphere?

T.M. Doran: I embarked with the thought of contrasting heroic mercy, which doesn’t come naturally to man, with man’s unspeakable brutality when he rejects the true God. Doing so in the cauldron of a detention camp with men representing many ways of looking at life, and a world with so much chaos, seemed an appropriate setting for these ideas to play out.

There were so many influences on this story. I read a great deal on the Soviet and Nazi ideologies and regimes: Shirer, Churchill, Gilbert, Weigel’s biography of St. John Paul II among them. I have a friend who escaped from Communist Czechoslovakia via North Africa. Solzhenitsyn’s and Pasternak’s writings. The character of Father Petrenko was influenced by the priest depicted in the German film, “The Ninth Day” who was released from Dachau for nine days with the expectation that if he cooperated with the Nazis he wouldn’t be returned to the camp.

Heroic mercy is the central thread in the story: Fr. Petrenko, the guard Piotr, and finally Drewniak. Then, there is the Major, who is full of schemes, illusions, petty aspirations, and yet so empty of life. And yes, I write about the diabolical influence that accompanies extreme depravity. These were my themes.

Mark Nowakowski: How far do you think we are from an Iota setting in America and the West?

T.M. Doran: The totalitarian inclination has persisted throughout history, and particularly in eras where religious faith has waned or is under attack. Soon after the American Revolution, many actually wanted to emulate the brutal radicalism that triumphed in France. They were unsuccessful but came closer to prevailing than many now realize.

For myself, I’m dumbfounded that, so soon after witnessing the viciousness of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies in action, there is so much ignorance (including the so-called highly educated) of where this path inevitably leads.

Sometimes, I feel like George Orwell must have felt in the 1940s. There’s an irreverent story told about Robert Conquest who unmasked Stalin’s brutality in his book, “The Great Terror” (1968) and was roundly criticized/ridiculed for it at the time. Years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the book was reissued, Conquest was reported to have suggested the title: “I Told You So, You ###### Fools”. Irreverent but to the point.

Mark Nowakowski: What (if any) has been your experience with secular publishers?

T.M. Doran:  I’ve reached out to secular publishers/agents without success. I think it’s harder today to sell a story that goes against the strong secular/materialist spirit of today’s world. On the other hand, I don’t consider myself a strong enough writer (certainly not a Greene or O’Connor or Waugh) to be a good test. Furthermore, I don’t have the traditional education/experience of most authors, a significant shortcoming to many in the publishing world. I’m at peace with this today.

Mark Nowakowski: What can the world expect from T.M. Doran next?

T.M. Doran: I’m in the production phase for Kataklusmós, a story that completes the Toward the Gleam saga. A demanding story to write, 3-4 years composing, a dozen versions, lots of research, and challenging themes. I’m always working on several longer or shorter stories, but after Kataklusmós I may step back from publishing.

Mark Nowakowski: We wish you luck on that, sir, and hope that your step back from publishing may not be too long a hiatus. Thank you for your time today!

The Beha Option

Trevor Cribben Merrill on October 5, 2020

Flannery O’Connor; Walker Percy; J.F. Powers: young Catholic novelists may dream of joining the pantheon of 20th century greats, openly Catholic, yet acknowledged by the literary world. But is that even possible any more?

In 2015 Piers Paul Read, a bestselling novelist published by international giant Bloomsbury, suggested that in the UK the answer was “no”:

A novel with an overtly Catholic theme now finds it difficult to find a British publisher: the fine English Catholic novelist Lucy Beckett, having failed to find a publisher in the UK, has her work published by Ignatius Press in San Francisco. My own novel, The Death of a Pope, was published in the U.S. by Ignatius after I was advised by my agent that it was too Catholic in content to be submitted for publication in the UK.

And so a parallel literary world, a “Catholic ghetto,” has emerged in recent years to cope with this new reality. In the US, journals like Dappled Things and Image and publishing houses like Ignatius, Wiseblood, Angelico, and Slant offer Catholic authors a forum, and, perhaps even more crucially, a sense of community. Inspired by Dana Gioia, Catholic scholars, novelists, and poets now gather biannually in cities across the US to celebrate and discuss the “Catholic Literary Imagination.”

This mini-Catholic literary revival is a wonderful thing, and I am one of its many grateful beneficiaries. But for many of us, some nagging doubts remain: shouldn’t we be trying to escape the Catholic ghetto? Shouldn’t we write novels of the human condition that appeal to all kinds of readers, and not just to fellow churchgoers?

I don’t know whether Christopher Beha’s new novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, deliberately sets out to be such a Catholic novel for all seasons, but the results speak for themselves.

Set among the New York media and financial elite after the 2008 financial crisis, The Index is one of those ambitious, era-capturing sagas that recalls Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen. But Beha’s new novel is also concerned with faith in a thoroughgoing way that’s increasingly rare.

Beha, a cradle Catholic who, after falling away, recently reverted, is the author of two previous novels and a 2010 memoir, The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else, about the year he took off to read the Harvard Classics. In 2019 Beha was appointed the editor at Harper’s, which The New York Times, in reporting on his elevation, called “a hot seat in the world of highbrow journalism.”

Thus, he is a rare believer in the midst of the literary scene, bringing a Catholic perspective to a disenchanted world.

What that entails, exactly, is worth teasing out. The Index is not about what Beha has elsewhere termed “the Catholic experience.” True, the Doyle family at the heart of the book is Catholic. But they are hardly devout.

Kit, the mother, conceives of prayer as a form of relaxing meditation and doubts its power to act in the world. She goes to Mass every few months at best, and avoids the confessional.

By and large, Catholic practice doesn’t play a major role in the book, except when its patterns resurface under other guises in the behavior of former believers whose longing for meaning has outlived the lapse of their faith.

Instead of hagiography, Beha holds up a mirror in which readers full of ambitious dreams and little faith can see themselves flailing in self-deception, addiction, and sickness.

Walker Percy observed that the pleasure that a novel gives is equal to the recognition it inspires: the more the truth of our condition is revealed in the characters, the more we are elated to find our sins exposed and transcended. Beha puts his finger on the human tendency to tragicomic dysfunction, our compulsion to behave in ways no data-driven model would predict, often at great cost to ourselves and others.

This idea, a close cousin to the doctrine of original sin, is expressed in the titular “index,” a baseball stat that refers to hit batsmen, balks, and other pitching miscues. When Frank and “the kid” attend a ballgame, they argue about whether numbers capture the sport’s essence:

“Unbelievable,” Frank said. “We’re going to lose this game on a balk. How many of your computer simulations would you have to run before that happened?”

“Quite a few,” the kid admitted.

Like that hapless losing team, almost everyone in Beha’s novel meets with self-inflicted disgrace: Frank Doyle, a pundit and baseball writer, torpedoes his career by making offensive jokes on live television (the jokes are objectively offensive, rather than just perceived as such by an indignant mob, which anchors this episode firmly in 2009 rather than 2020). Journalist Sam Waxworth, despite his self-declared coolly rational worldview, embarks on an affair that puts his marriage and new job in jeopardy. Other characters get involved in shady schemes, hit “reply all” when they know they shouldn’t, or suffer illness or addiction without recognizing how weakened and enslaved they have become.

“Something in us wanted to be irrational,” Waxworth thinks at one point. “Something wanted, perhaps, to be wrong.”

Beha suggests these unforced errors are symptoms, the sort of glitch that happens when we don’t face up to our longing for eternity. “Nothing would be returned to us in the fullness of time, because time had no fullness,” Frank thinks despairingly on his deathbed. “It was a constant emptying.” He yearns for “a recording angel” to preserve the instants slipping away, the memories and unrealized projects that will die with him.

When a self-styled prophet named Herman Nash predicts the end of the world, Frank’s daughter Margo reflects that his “great mistake was not to believe that the world would come to an end, but to think that it wasn’t ending every day.” Camus once wrote something similar: “Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”

Christianity, in Beha’s novel, is less an objective truth that breaks into our lives, compelling assent, than the answer to a subjective, existential predicament. Repeated self-sabotage breaks down trust in the sovereign individual self, leading to a quest—“the search,” as Walker Percy put it—for a transcendent lifeline. Similarly, Frank’s desire to have his life omnisciently transcribed is a sign that we are, inescapably, religious beings, straining toward the infinite.

Nash, the streetcorner preacher with an internet following, is a touchstone for these longings. When a benefactor launches a full-fledged PR campaign to push Nash’s forecast of doom, billboards and even a television spot during the World Series ask a portentous question: “What would you change if you knew it was all going to end? November 1, 2009, 10 o’clock?”

Is Nash a lunatic or a con artist? He could be either. Yet his call to repentance resonates, both in our world and in Beha’s fictional one. We live in a culture which distracts us from—and lures us to—death, but the great questions nag at our hearts.

Frank Doyle’s son, Eddie, an Iraq War vet, is one of those touched by Nash’s message. Eddie first sees the preacher performing ad hoc baptisms in the fountain in Washington Square and ends up following him home. There Eddie makes an impromptu confession (“God’s power is greater than any sin,” Nash assures him) and is dunked in a bathtub:

Eddie had anticipated a sense of peace coming over him, but he felt instead exhilaration, as though he’d been walking around with weights on, and now that they had been removed he had a great store of energy and strength. Nash handed Eddie a towel from the rack by the sink, and he retreated discreetly from the room while Eddie dried off his face and hair. When he’d finished, Eddie didn’t go straight outside. He stayed by himself, seated on the edge of the bath, trying to catch his breath.

Eddie grew up Catholic. He has not so much repudiated the faith as found his parents’ lukewarm way of living it out unpersuasive. When eventually he moves in with Nash, the man’s preaching has “a kind of familiarity. So much of it was already somewhere inside of Eddie. He’d thought he’d left the church behind when he went off to college, but thirteen years of Catholic school had left more traces than he’d imagined. He felt as though he were coming home, rather than embarking on an entirely new practice.”

A true seeker, Eddie is humble enough to admit his desire for God, and willing to give of himself. He simply never encountered models of holiness who could make the Christian message vibrant and plausible. His scripture-quoting roommate turns out to be less reliable than anticipated, but through him Eddie rediscovers the power of the sacraments, if only in ersatz form.

Suffering from both crippling jealousy and a strange physical ailment, Waxworth’s wife Lucy also turns to a healer. Someone presses a flyer into her hand on the street: “Ms. Clara Luna says: DON’T GIVE UP!! […] SHE […] can bring the SPIRIT OF RELEASE and CONTROL […] There is a Doctor of all doctors. WHEN YOUR CASE SEEMS HOPELESS THERE IS A REMEDY FOR YOU.”

Lit by candles and fragrant with incense, Lucy’s awkward, comical visit with Clara Luna isn’t as satirical as it sounds. Rather than mocking alternative liturgies, Beha seems to be asking what their existence says about our craving for sacramental absolution.

Nash ends up being wrong, of course—the world does not end. But his prophecy comes true individually for Frank, Kit, Eddie, and the rest.

At first, these minor apocalypses produce a rosy foretaste of resolution. Disaster thickens family bonds. Margo and Sam experience moments of clarity—they seem to have come through a decisive ordeal. Yet just when the story seems poised to leave at least some characters sitting pretty, Beha resists the temptation to tidiness. Fortunes are lost; redemptive arcs unravel; couples split up, in spite of rectified intentions and sincere apologies.

While this life offers many good things, ultimate happiness is not among them.

Beha’s ability to reveal upward yearnings and sacramental patterns, as well as his refusal of what Joshua Hren has called “easy exits,” bespeaks a Catholic sensibility no less palpable for being largely implicit. What is missing here, perhaps, is confidence in what lies beyond the secular, a sense that not only do we long for the infinite, but that the infinite also longs for us.

In our days of diversity quotas and cancel culture, we need a “Benedict Option,” wherein Catholic talent can stretch its limbs freely. But to ensure the work is not only well-intentioned but also really good, we shouldn’t shy from the standard of the “Beha Option,” which wins readers who don’t necessarily share the author’s faith. No work can succeed, commercially but also aesthetically, unless it touches what all of us share: the inescapable human condition.

For today’s believing writer, Beha’s achievement in The Index of Self-Destructive Acts strikes me as an unavoidable reference point.

Trevor Cribben Merrill is the author of a novel, Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books, 2020). His writing has appeared in The University Bookman, Dappled Things, and The American Conservative, among others.

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