My Jesuits… the CIA and the Vatican…

One was tall, handsome, dark eyes that bore right into your brain.

The other, shorter, plain, mild but with eyes that bore right through your soul.

Reed Walsh, guestmaster at the Jesuit Residence in Manhattan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency — the greatest spy force in the world.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit Cardinal from Argentina, now the spiritual father of 1.2 billion souls on Planet Earth.

Reed Walsh, you won't see on the nightly news… he lives in that magic world of the crime novel… he helps good guys find the bad guys…

Francis might well be on your nightly news… and in your daily paper… he lives in a little apartment in a big church in Rome. Helps the good guys recognize - and forgive - the bad guys…

The book man lives in my heart and mind.

The other guy came to visit my city, recently, and I swear he looked directly at my soul - right through my TV screen…

I felt I knew him - yet he was a man of mystery, as is the other guy…

Both are deep thinkers, deep feelers. Both are very, very complex men… don't be fooled by the smile and simple language.

You know a lot from the media about what makes the guy who was CIA tick… but you need to look quite carefully at this other unassuming guy… His inner machinery runs very deep… underneath all the quiet and unassumingness…

He is like a quiet giant volcano… what you see is only the tip…

He'll smile at you sweetly, say, "Please pray for me." And… "You try to put the Holy Spirit in a box… at your peril."

This quiet guy was a bouncer at a nightclub in Buenos Aires as a young man - he loved to tango!

This quiet guy has held some pretty heavy jobs: now the first Jesuit elected as the Pope!

Archbishop of Buenos Aires, President of the Bishops' Conference of Argentina, served as Jesuit Provincial in Argentina, got the second-most votes when the old Pope died in 2005.

Was active in political diplomacy and environmental advocacy
Trained as a chemical technician
Taught Lit and Psych in colleges
Got his Doctorate in Theology in Germany

No slouch, this little guy…
Don't be fooled by his meek smile…

As you know, the Jesuits are known as God's Soldiers, God's Marines, and The Company. No little club for the faint-hearted or meek or frail of heart!

The Society's commitment on earth is to accept orders anywhere and to endure any conditions. The Society of Jesus is also known as the papal "Elite Troops."

Jesuits have long been known as the trainers par excellence of lawyers and public officials. Jesuits priests often acted as confessors to Kings - and were noted for their intellectual ability and ability at debate among the European aristocracy.

The Nazi regime considered the Jesuits one of their most dangerous enemies! Many Jesuits were deported to concentration camps!

Maybe you wonder why I'm so devoted to the Jesuits?

Many years ago I was privileged to study the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius at a Jesuit Monastery in Wernersville, PA, with a crack cadre of brains and souls…

I was deeply touched by the intelligence, character and dedication of the Jesuits there and the high level and quality of humanity has remained a deep part of my own life.

As I watched this new Pope, the leader of so many men and women on this fragile earth, I pray he is strong enough to carry the mission he has been given in this trembling planet.

A man with his history and experience in governing, studies and commitments worldwide, is no simple soul.

This quiet man is not so quiet… he is not a "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." If you look at him hard you see he is a rock of ages…

But all of us, whatever our faiths or non-faiths, should be encouraged by the strength this quiet man shows — right through the screens of world-wide televisions…

Thelma Straw

P.S. What is my message to crime writers today?

Infuse your chapters with multi-layered people with many depths of emotion and feelings…

Memoir, Part I

I teach a class called Introduction to Memoir at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy NY. The class being about memoir, about the personal, the private, and the interior, I learn a lot about my students. I’m sure they learn about me too, even if I don’t use my own attempts at memoir writing as an example for them. In spite of this process of coming to know one another, I have been keeping one big secret from them: I AM NOT ENTIRELY SURE I KNOW WHAT MEMOIR IS.

Oh, I have some idea, but not a crystal clear one, like I think a teacher should. I can expound on the what, how and why of the memoir as literary genre, but if you asked me to give a definition that included all that is memoir, and excluded all that is not, I would not be able to do it. And I have a bone to pick with the ways that some people have defined it in the past. So my class is not so much a top-down lecture about the form, but an exploration undertaken as a kind of corporate venture to a New World of Truth, however provisional and contingent that truth turns out to be.

So let’s go with the ‘what’ of memoir first. It is not fiction, not history, but it appropriates approaches from both of those genres. It finds truth in what actually happened to a person, however fictional it may be in terms to being a selective and interpretive enterprise. It tries to find universal, general, abstract human truth in the particular and concrete experiences of a single person. In that sense, it is didactic. Hopefully, it is also entertaining. In fact, I think you can justify memoir on the basis of its mere entertainment value. I don’t read truly engaging stuff often enough. Funny and articulate and surprising will do for me.

My mentor, Marion Roach Smith, who teaches the more advanced course at the ACCR (and who authored the wonderful book about the craft of memoir called THE MEMOIR PROJECT: A THOROUGHLY NON-STANDARDIZED TEXT FOR WRITING AND LIFE) feels that memoir should tell a story with some of the standard elements of fiction: conflict, resolution, change, epiphany, transcendence. I don’t think all memoirs do this, and I know the one I am working on does not (at least not yet, but I am hoping perhaps the writing itself may somehow bring me the insight and change that I seek).

I think of a great memoir by Joe Queenan called CLOSING TIME, wherein he describes growing up poor with an alcoholic abusive father and a manic depressive mother. There is little to be learned, except perhaps the desperate nature of poverty, and that if you are a very bright and lucky poor kid, it might help you to read a lot of books (which he calls the siege weapons the poor use to breach the walls of the middle class). Queenan is the same wiseacre as a kid as he is as an adult. No transcendence. He does learn that the priesthood is not for him, and that suffering is more often dehumanizing than ennobling, but there is no great conflict or confusion, no journey of discovery, no triumphs, just a life so skillfully drawn, a life so desperate and yet so funny, that it is my favorite in the genre.

And besides, there is change of a sort. Sometimes the change comes in the reader and not the writer, when expectations are frustrated. I expected Queenan to make some pronouncements about poverty, about how he learned to overcome it, and about perhaps how society can eliminate it, but he doesn’t set his sights that high. He is content to tell us that he has no answers, that he was lucky to get out, and that the poor will always be with us. That is still a lesson, though implied.

I think of Chekhov as Queenan’s analogue in fiction. Think of his short story THE KISS. Officer Ryabovitch obsesses over a woman who accidentally kissed him at a ball and then disappeared, and we think that the story will end one of two ways—he will find her and be turned down, or find her and be united with her (or maybe find her and lose her, and win her and wish he hadn’t). We never suspect that all the obsessing will come to nothing, that he will never try to find her, that he will allow his life to be lived without any of it being resolved. And so we are changed, because our expectation was thwarted, and we are forced to face the idea that in real life a lot of things don’t get resolved.

I tell my students honestly that in the memoir that I am writing, there is no resolution. At least not yet. Maybe there will be in time, if I find some way to make peace with my childhood, my life, of depression, OCD and anxiety. But I haven’t done it yet. This makes me wonder if the resolution in a lot of memoirs is forced. Maybe some of these people write in their journals and diaries with an eye towards a coherent story about their lives, but my old diaries and journals, which weren’t, don’t read that way. And the whole thing begs the question—How can I say that any version of my life is true if my own understanding of it is so fragile and malleable? If I write it pre-transcendence it is a much different memoir than if I don’t.

This makes me think of what Augustine’s CONFESSIONS would have been like if he was still enjoying the good life, placing body above soul, and generally having some fun when he wrote it. Less of a drag, I am sure.

Of course, he needs to strive towards the divine because he is writing less with an eye towards truth and more because he is propagandizing (another thing that calls into question how true any memoir can be). Augustine is using his life as an exemplum with which to win recruits to his version and vision of Christianity, his story of coming to God being the vehicle, just as Ben Franklin was consciously using himself as an example of America in The Autobiography of Ben Franklin (breaking from his brother and finding success in the same way the country breaks from England and through brains and hard work and a certain kind of godliness and purity finds success too). Shit, even George Bush, in DECISION POINTS, has an epiphany (God tells him to stop taking coke and stop screwing up one business after another and go screw up the entire county instead), as does Hitler in MEIN KAMPF, wherein he suddenly sees the truth about the Aryans and the Jews and his role as the one chosen to redeem the former and eliminate the latter.

So I find it hard to come by epiphany, and am suspicious of it as being a pernicious thing, and I don’t know if my life is an example of anything. If it is not, I don’t want to phony it up by writing it like it is.

Next week, more on the ‘what’ of memoir.

© 2015 Mike Welch

The Horror! The Horror! Getting Rid of Books

“But however many bookshelves Crispin built there were never enough. The books in alphabetical rows were overgrown by piles of new books, doubled in front. Books multiplied, books swarmed, books, I sometimes dreamt, seemed to reproduce themselves—they were a papery population explosion. When they had exhausted the shelves, they started to take over the stairs… You cannot have a taste for minimalist decor if you seriously read books.”

Say Amen, somebody! The paragraph above is from Linda Grant’s Kindle Single, “I Murdered My Library.” The rest of the essay goes on to consider things I’m not much interested in, but this bit struck a chord. I don’t have Crispin (the gentleman who built Grant’s bookshelves), I have Bob (the husband who bolted numerous canning shelves to our walls). Bob has a boyhood friend, an architect, who asks ever so gently, if we might want to put in something more attractive.

The answer is no. We will eventually be moving to a smaller place and we aim for sturdiness, not beauty. The shelves are bolted down because I am not always fleet of foot and I fall. What would happen if I grabbed a bookshelf and it fell on me. Bob has insured that I will not be maimed or killed by the objects I love so much.

When we moved to our current house 10 years ago, we were moving to a bigger place. Even then the books were an issue. The movers came to do an estimate.

They figured I had 90 boxes of books and that this would add an additional $1,500 to the move. Bob moved the books and I would get phone messages at work. “Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are in Collingswood.”

Since then, I discovered one click at Amazon and I still frequent book stores.

The Kindle has eased things, but I read old books that often mention other old books.

Kindle tells me I have “The Complete George Bernard Shaw” but it doesn’t include “Pen Portraits and Reviews” which other bookish people assure me is not to be missed. Many wonderful things are not available electronically. And there are so many pleasures in old books. The aforementioned Shaw volume comes from The Lancaster (England) Public Library. A little sticker in the front of the book tells me I can borrow it for two weeks, I must alert the library when I move out of the district and I cannot borrow books if someone in my home has an infectious disease. In a volume of Anne Fleming’s letters, someone has obliging included newspaper clippings: Anthony Powell’s review of the letters and the obituary of a Fleming relative. The letters are fun, by the way, but Fleming, I suspect, will always be known primarily as the wife of two famous men, Lord Beaverbrook and Ian Fleming.

A cozy mystery I bought (The Case of the Missing Book by Ian Sansom) included a gift note. The giftee was ill and the giver offered the book and any other assistance that might be needed. I rely on my Kindle but electronic books don’t allow for personal touches, though I am always interested to see what passages other people highlight.

I had intended this to be a little meditation on what books I’d gotten rid of and find that I’ve talked more about why I still need to acquire paperbacks, hardcovers and what Amazon calls “unknown bindings.” In the field of addiction there’s the concept of “harm reduction.” You may not be totally abstinent but your needles are clean and you don’t use as much. I used to get rid of 2 books and buy 5. Now it’s the other way around.

© 2015 Stephanie Patterson

Black Mass

Growing up watching the Godfather movies, I always thought gangsters were Italian. The Irish in mobster movies all seemed to be flat-footed cops, like the ones that are always chasing Bugs Bunny in the cartoons and failing to catch him, talking in an exaggerated brogue and displaying the brains of turtles. The Italian bad guys were more interesting to me than the Irish good ones. Being Don Corleone was way more cool than being Eliot Ness or, God forbid, Sergeant Joe Friday. It wasn’t until THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987), with Sean Connery playing Jimmy Malone, that I found an Irish Cop who was cool enough, charismatic enough, and tough enough to make me wish I could be him (if I could do it without risking being gunned down by Al Capone’s gunsels).

Maybe we all want to be that powerful. And that tough. Say what you want about the immorality of these guys, you can’t say they are wimps, or cowards. If they have any fear (the truly crazy ones don’t, perhaps, but if you are that crazy I don’t think you last long), they never give in to it. They don’t let anyone steal a cab from them, whistle at their girlfriends, or cut in line on them at the movie queue. What freedom that kind of toughness and courage could give you! When you are a mobster, you very rarely encounter a problem you can’t buy off or kill off (indeed, the longevity of your career often depends on how long you can keep buying off and killing off your problems).

James “Whitey” Bulger is a real life Irish tough guy mobster portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 2015 movie BLACK MASS. And he’s Irish, a guy who grew up in “Southie” (South Boston) an Irish American neighborhood that has been around since before George Washington drove the British off Dorchester Heights during the Revolutionary War, those heights being where South Boston High School (ground zero for the melee over forced busing in 1974) now stands. Southie doesn’t get the same attention as Compton or Bed Stuy, but it is a ghetto nevertheless. An Irish one.

There have been portrayals of South Boston in the movies before. Matt Damon plays a tough kid from Southie in GOOD WILL HUNTING, and Casey Affleck a detective solving the disappearance of a young girl from the neighborhood in GONE BABY GONE. But Affleck, his brother Ben (who appears in the movie with Damon) and Damon were pampered rich kids not from the area. Denis Lehane, on the other hand, is from Southie (which is still among the poorest places to live in America, even with the recent rise in real estate values from the increase in demand resulting from the rehabilitation of the Boston Harbor area), and he portrays it with a chilling realism in his novel MYSTIC RIVER (later a movie directed by Clint Eastwood). Mark Wahlberg is from nearby Dorchester, and has a felony record from his gang activity as a youth.

Bulger has been portrayed before. In DEPARTED, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) is loosely based on him. Costello famously tells someone early in the movie that he, like Lucifer in Paradise Lost (and Stephen Daedalus in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN), will not serve, that he will not be a “product of my environment. My environment is a product of me.” James Woods, in the Showtime series RAY DONOVAN, plays Bulger as a ruthless old psychopath also (he murders his girlfriend when she lets slip with something that could remotely be thought of as perhaps leading to his being caught), but without the charm and intellect of Nicholson’s Costello.

Depp’s Bulger has ice blue eyes, slicked back hair, and the emotions of a lizard—i.e. none, except for a kind of all encompassing hunger for more money and power. Indeed, except for playing cards with his dear old Ma (after he does nine years in prison as a young man), whom he lets win, while she tells him “didn’t they teach you how to play cards in prison?”, he shows almost nothing, with his sunglasses on or not. But his hunger, and the anger he feels when he can’t satisfy it, does show occasionally through, like when he kills members of his own crew and strangles the stepdaughter of one of his partner’s girlfriends.

I was thinking of a parallel with Tony Soprano here, especially when I saw that Depp’s Bulger did seem to really love his wife and kid, brother and mother. And he had a sentimental feeling for the IRA too (and not just because they pay him for guns). Tony was loyal to his family like Whitey (or tries to be, until he kills his nephew Michael and forfeits his soul). Tony would never be a rat. Bulger, on the other hand, would never try therapy. Tony does, to try and quiet the voice in his head that tells him there is no way he can ever square what he is doing. There is never even a consideration for what is moral for Whitey. He can’t lose his soul because he doesn’t have one.

Bulger early on is a rising member of the Irish mob in South Boston. He kills people on both sides in the Killeen-Mullen wars, and ends up head of the Winter Hill Gang. But the Patriarca family in the North End (a subsidiary of the Gambinos in New York), in particular the Angiulo brothers, are a danger, a threat, a cause of that hunger. So Bulger teams up with a grade school friend, John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), who has now become an FBI agent. In return for intel that will help bring down the Cosa Nostra, Whitey becomes immune from prosecution (as long as he commits no crimes—ha!) Whitey ends up getting more useful information from Connolly than Connolly gives to him (even some that leads him to “rats” he blithely executes).

In the end, people notice that Whitey now rules Boston, and new blood on the force brings him and Connolly down. Whitey, though, clever as a fox (and vicious as a rabid dog) flees and is on the Most Wanted list for 12 years, until 2011. Connolly gets forty years for giving Whitey information on who is ratting Whitey out, information on how to avoid prosecution, and for withholding information about Whitey’s criminal activities from his superiors.

Towards the end of the movie, there is a scene where Whitey, just before he runs, calls his brother William, a Massachusetts state senator, to say goodbye. It made me wonder why one brother turned out good, and the other not. That is, if you think being a state senator is better than being a killer. It’s close, I know, but the point is, I don’t think you can lay what Bulger becomes at the doorstep of poverty. Whitey talks about the oppression of the British, and even the Italians, during the movie, but he is the real oppressor of South Boston. He can’t be corrupted by South Boston because he was rotten from the start, and he corrupts it. The one thing you never do in Whitey’s world is rat, and that is what he did, even as he killed people for doing the same. Someone in the movie says “You can lie to your wife or your girl, but never to a friend.” Lying is betrayal, informing the worst kind of betrayal. But maybe that is what it takes to be a mob boss. Maybe I don’t want to be a gangster after all.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Striking Gold

Yesterday was the 105th birthday of James Wilson Marshall.

Who was he? you say. And why should I care?

James Wilson Marshall

As you may or may not know, I am the senior docent at the James Wilson Marshall house, the headquarters of the Lambertville Historical Society. Nearly every Saturday between Shad Fest (the last weekend in April, or Malice Domestic weekend, for those of you who follow the mystery fiction circuit) and House Tour Sunday (October 18 this year, sometimes later) I can be found at the Marshall House between one and four in the afternoon, shooting the breeze about James Wilson Marshall, the California Gold Rush, Lambertville history, and whatever other topic the visiting tourists feel like discussing. So I'm sort of an expert on Mr. Marshall. Who was he, then? Mainly he was the man who discovered the first gold in California, back in 1848. You've heard of Sutter's mill. Marshall was building the mill for Sutter when he found the gold.

John Sutter

You probably didn't know that it was a Jersey boy who started the California gold rush. Little James came to Lambertville (then known as Coryell's Ferry) at the age of six, in 1816, when his father built the house on Bridge Street and set up to be a wheelwright and wagon maker. When he was fifteen he had a bit of unpleasantness with the old man that caused him to leave the house, vowing never to return while his father lived. When he was 24 his father died, and he came home to help his mother sell the business, since he hadn't learned it himself and there were no other sons. Then he went west, moving by stages to California, which was part of Mexico. Long story short, he fell in with Captain John Sutter, the Swiss national who became a Mexican citizen in order to buy obscene quantities of land from the Mexicans. After the war with Mexico Captain Sutter sent James Marshall and a crew into the hills to build the mill, and there he found the gold in the river. He changed the course of American history.

I've been writing historical fiction for a number of years now. People ask me sometimes why I don't write about the gold rush. Here's the thing. I've read a lot about it, I continue to read a lot about it, and I have yet to find anybody involved in those times and events that I like well enough to sit down with for the six or eight months it takes to write a book. Some of these people I actively detest. Captain John Sutter comes to mind. To begin with, he abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland, leaving them in debt, taking enough money with him to buy a big piece of of California, and proceeded to enslave all the Indians he found on his newly-purchased land. He bought and sold little Indian children. After the gold was discovered, the rough, tough forty-niner claim jumpers ran him off his holdings. He lost everything, and it couldn't happen to a nicer fella, in my opinion.

John Charles Frémont

Marshall was a better person than John Sutter, though he drank all the time and had trouble getting along with other people. It's said that children liked him. It's said that he risked his own life defending the Indians from attacks by rampaging forty-niners. So he may have been a good guy, but I'm sorry, I can't warm up to a habitual drunkard.

Jessie Frémont

John Charles Frémont to me is the most interesting figure in the California gold rush days, intrepid explorer, impetuous military man, failed politician. Some of the deeds he did as a military man were so base that the rumor of them later disqualified him for public office. He made a huge fortune in the gold rush by virtue of owning seventy acres of gold-rich land and sharing the proceeds with the men he set to digging on it, but eventually his workers figured out that they didn't have to give him a share at all. I think I like him because his wife loved him so. He married Senator Thomas Hart Benton's daughter Jessie. She followed him to California, sailing to Panama, crossing the isthmus through fever-ridden jungles, sailing up the west coast to San Francisco to be with her man.

The stories are worth telling. I just don't want to tell them, not right now, when I'm deeply in love with other historical figures, people in other times that I'm working into a novel. Maybe I'll write about the gold rush later, when I finish the spy thriller.

© 2015 Kate Gallison