from THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
1
The old priest is a Jesuit, brainy and fey. He smokes Pall Malls fixed bayonet-style in an onyx and silver cigarette holder, and he crosses his legs at the knee. He tells stories as if he is being interviewed for a Public Television special on old priests. A small, guttural chuckle serves to launch one of his veiy interesting anecdotes: it’s a kind of punctuation that seives as transition, like a colon or dash. You bring your latest girl to see the old priest, you always bring your latest girl to see the old priest.
“Mildred, what are you doing with this rascal?” asks the old priest, ordering a Tanqueray martini “standing up.”
Mildred squeals at the idea of you as a rascal. Everything is very jolly. The old priest’s hair is the same shade of silver as the end of the cigarette holder, a prop which fascinates Mildred.
“This cigarette holder was given to me by the mother of one of our students,” explains the old priest. “She didn’t think priests should smoke non-filtered cigarettes, and she objected to the bit of tobacco that became occasionally lodged in the comer of my mouth. Later that same mother, emboldened by one too many grappas, tried to seduce me in the sitting room of the country house where I was to spend the weekend.”
Your latest girl is rapt at the stories of the old priest, they are always rapt, the old priest does half the seducing for you.
Back in the room Mildred says, “That’s some old priest. Is he gay?”
“What do you think?”
“I think all you Catholic school boys seem gay.”
Another girl and the old priest, always ready to be bought lunch or dinner. He smokes, drinks, laughs, tells stories—makes people feel as though they are participating in the history of their own time. The old priest is a monologist of the old school, tossing brightly colored balls
into the air and keeping them aloft.
“Another time, we were in Madrid and wanted to get out and see the night life,” recalls the old priest. “We conqocted a story that the American Ambassador had invited us to dinner, but the Prefect said that in order to receive permission to leave the house after nine we d need the permission of the Provincial. The Provincial said, If the American Ambassador really wants to see you, he’ll invite you to lunch. My friend Arthur Ramsay thought we were sunk right then and there, but I convinced him that we should go through with it anyway, even though it was against the rules. We danced the Flamenco till three.
Everything is very jolly. Your girl is from the South this time and refers to the old priest as a “sexy old queen.”
Time and again you meet the old priest. Years fly by the way they used to mark time in the movies: wind and leaves, the corny tearing of the calendar page, the plangent tolling of Time’s own iron bell. You either bring a girl along or, if you’re depressed, you go by yourself and expect to be consoled.
“I want to write but I can’t write,” you say.
“It will come,” says the old priest. “Give it time. But the pattern is that you should have written your first stories by now. You’re a bit behind schedule, you know.”
You can almost convince yourself that he knows what he’s talking about. He speaks with the authority of a grammar book and is relentlessly optimistic.
Life takes you through a couple of twists and turns, you do things you never thought you would be doing. You live in a rooming house, you drink a lot in the evening, you work a day job as a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City. You wear a white tuxedo, red bow tie and matching red buttons, which your fellow croupiers refer to as “the clown suit.” Nobody, not even you, can believe it.
In summer the old priest comes for a visit. You shake martinis in your third floor efficiency. The heat is stifling, oppressive. Through the walls comes the scent of frying meat, and a loud conversation that goes on and on.
This is a house of failure,” the old priest says, jaunty in his white polo shirt and Madras shorts.
“It’s experience.”
“So is being bitten by a shark.”
“I need a membership card that provides entree into the historical moment.”
“Dear child, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the old priest says, pausing for the transitional laugh. “When I was your age I was going to the bullfights in Spain. We actually saw Ava Gardner one time. I went beforehand to ask for permission but the Prefect said, ‘Jesuits don’t go to bullfights.’ When we got there the place was crawling with Jesuits in mufti.”
2
In your spare time you read Rimbaud and crave poetry, mystery, illumination. You find an old fish tank somebody has left at the curb and in it, according to the directions of a mail order kit, you raise a crop of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Two weeks before Christmas you visit the old priest at his sister’s house on Cape Cod, in Wellfleet, where you plan to spend the weekend breaking into the ancient mysteries. Poetry, mystery, illumination: you’d like to get to the bottom of it.
The old priest says to you as you’re unpacking: “Be careful not to leave anything behind. A friend of mine left a pair of black briefs in the guest bed and now my sister says she is beginning to believe everything she reads in the papers.”
“Just from a pair of black briefs?”
“Well, apparently he had Booty on Board embroidered into the rather narrow seat. Oh dear heavens!”
You drink a pitcher of martinis accompanied by three slices of American cheese and a box of stale Ritz crackers. For dessert you chew the mushrooms, one or two at a time, unsure of the proper dosage.
“This is a fine delicacy,” the old priest says. “It’s a first-rate cocktail snack.”
You nibble the mushrooms, dried and crumbling in your fingertips. The pattern and texture of the desiccated stems and tiny caps become
increasingly interesting until, without much warning, the old priest has sprouted tufts of white hair on his face, and his pinkish hands also have sprouted coarse white hair and the hard dull grayish-black points of two cleft hooves.
“Don’t look now, but you’ve turned into a goat-man,” you say to the old priest.
“Is that true?” wonders the old priest, lighting a cigarette. Even as a goat-man the old priest has not lost his taste for tobacco.
“Just look for yourself in the mirror.” >
The old priest stands to look into the gilt-framed mirror that hangs full length above the red velveteen sofa.
“I suppose I have,” remarks the old priest, vaguely amused. “Is it permanent, do you think?”
“For the next eight hours or so, anyway.” You laugh. The idea of the old priest transformed into a goat-man is hilarious.
He examines himself in the glass, puffing his cheeks and shaking his oversized head. When the cigarette is finished he shakes the cigarette holder and the final few filaments of burning tobacco fall to the floor. He stands before the glass with the empty cigarette holder and begins to wave it in front of him in frantic, cross-like motions.
“You take life, but you can’t give it,” says the old priest, his hand trembling but his eyes fixed steadily forward.
“Who are you talking to?” you ask.
“I have to chase these demons away,” is his response, but after a few more swipes he sits down on the sofa, places the cigarette holder in his shirt pocket, and laces his fingers together. “We’re not supposed to see this,” says the old priest, plainly worried. “This is a sin we’re committing.”
“It’s just in our heads,” you laugh. “It’s the power of the human imagination.”
That’s what you intend to say but it comes out, It’s the power of the fungus humungination.
“Oh no it’s not,” is his answer. “It’s even worse for you if you think it is.”
He gets down on all fours and in the process the cigarette holder drops suddenly to the ground. He clatters goat-like back and forth in front of you on his knuckles and knees, shaking the walls and knocking his sister’s knick-knacks from the mildewed shelves.
“Look what you’ve done to me now,” says the old priest, goat-like and forlorn. “Look what you’ve done to me now.”
Where s your God now?” you say, laughing, in your best Edward G. Robinson, then are immediately sorry to have said it. You are sorry to have turned the old priest into a goat-man. You are sorry to have spoiled his religion, to have brought him pagan-low. You are sony for everything. This is something you’ve been taught, something that will not go away. You are sorry for everything.
The Baltimore Catechism: “O my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because of Thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art allgood and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.”
“This is a bad trip,” you say, then add that it is his religion, not a handful of dried mushrooms, that makes one sony about everything. Then you are sony for that, too.
3
You find a new girl, it’s been a while, things have cooled a bit between you and the old priest since the magic mushroom incident. The three of you get dressed up and go to the best French restaurant in Boston, where the old priest is taking a year’s sabbatical at a Jesuit house in Cambridge. He is wearing his Roman collar and all signs of the goatman have vanished. He looks a bit less puffed around the edges, and his sea-glass eyes are sparkling. It occurs to you that the old priest has been consigned to a drying-out facility.
“Wine,” the old priest says, lifting a full glass of Nuits St. George. “Rringer of ekstasis to pagans and Christians alike.”
“What’s ekstasis ?” your new girl Ruthie wants to know.
“Well, it’s a bit different than ecstasy as you probably know the definition of that word,” explains the old priest, and it occurs to you that he is making a pronounced effort not to leer. “It’s the state, literally, of standing outside oneself. Of being able to step outside the prison of one’s own body, if only for a moment or two. Isn’t that what everybody wants, after all?”
“I guess I’ve never thought about it that way,” your new girl admits, leaning in.
“I dined with a Swiss Jesuit one time,” the old priest chuckles, passing Ruthie a bite of his Veal Oscar. “He ordered beef and I ordered duck. I wanted a taste of his beef and do you know what he said? He said, Tf you wanted beef, you should have ordered it, and if I wanted
duck, I would have ordered it.’ Oh dear heavens! The Swiss, well, you know what Harry Lime says: the great product of their civilization, the cuckoo clock!”
“Were you in Europe a long time?’ Ruthie asks.
“Seven years. I wanted to stay and earn a doctorate at the Sorbonne, but the Society of Jesus had other plans for me. I came back to Washington just in time for the Kennedy years, which was quite a spectacle.
“What do you know about anti-Semitism in Europe?” Ruthie asks, a
bit pointedly. >
“The place is crawling with it, I know that much.” He puts down his knife and fork. “Once, during my novitiate, I stayed for a time in a Jesuit house in Vienna. This was in the early fifties, not even ten years after the War, and the city looked it, too. The Jesuit house where I was to spend the summer was an old castle with parapets and ramparts, battlements and whathaveyou. In the first few weeks of my stay I made friends with a Jesuit from Argentina. He liked to joke that so many people from this part of the world had relocated to Argentina that he had to come to Vienna for a while, just to balance things out a bit. Father Madero hated the Viennese Jesuits, though. He told me one time about how he’d been in this house during the War, had in fact been there for almost ten years. In the evening after supper we used to go up on the roof to smoke and watch the sky change colors, flocks of swallows darting and diving among the chimneys, and one night he pointed down to a side street—I suppose we were up about eight stories—and said, There used to be a synagogue down there, where that kiosk is now standing. One night we were all gathered out here after dinner, smoking cigarettes and chatting, and from this roof we watched a group of men come down the street with sticks and bats. They broke every window in that synagogue then beat the Jews as they tried to run away. And do you know what your fellow Jesuits did?’ asked Father Madero. Well, I don’t suppose there was much they could do,’ I offered, for I knew by now that Father Madero hated the Society of Jesus. They cheered,’ was his reply, and he began clapping and whistling. Dear sweet Jesus.”
“An honest man,” Ruthie says, and for a few moments nobody says anything.
“An honest man,” Ruthie says once more, reaching with her fork for another bite of his Veal Oscar.
The old priest, it seems, will stop at nothing to impress one of your girlfriends.
<*
You go back up to Boston, this time alone. The new girl once more has not worked out and you are feeling depressed, ahistorical.
I m feeling depressed, ahistorical,” you tell the old priest.
“Well, so you’re making a pile of money, anyway,” the old priest says, exhaling cigarette smoke.
“Not a pile, exactly.”
“If you’re not making a really large sum of money, then I don’t get it.”
“It’s a job to do like any job. I’m not writing anything, so what’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference with anything?” the old priest wants to know. “Are you living your life or are you not?”
“I have no sense of my life as a part of the historical moment.”
‘Idiot,” he says, as if the French pronunciation will soften the blow.
“Maybe I should go to graduate school.”
“I was a contrary student myself,” the old priest says, though you were in fact a very good student, bursting with promise and the will to please. “If they told me to read Hamlet I’d read Macbeth, and if they told me to read Macbeth then I’d read Hamlet. My junior year in high school I despised my English teacher. One time I handed in an E.B. White essay on skating in Central Park, except diat I changed it to Boston Common. I got a C. I wanted to write E.B. White and tell him he’d gotten a C in high school composition. They kept me back a year, and I started to wise up.”
“They kept you back with C’s?”
“There were other factors.”
“Such as?”
“Unbridled contempt. They told me I’d never be accepted at an accredited school, so one day at the end of my senior year, only a couple of weeks before graduation, I walked over to Boston College. They asked me where I was going to high school, and when I told them they simply had me sign the forms and I was admitted at once.”
4
The old priest, who was built like an oarsman when you first met him, is nicotine thin. He is in Philadelphia for the time being, visiting with friends and trying to convince his superiors to reassign him to Boston, where he still has some family in Southie. He eats hardly anything and
insists that the second martini be on the table before dinner can be ordered. He likes to drink in tablecloth restaurants because it is more seemly than standing at a bar. However, the new smoking regulations land you at a table near the bar most of the time anyway. The bars are noisy and the old priest hears not so well. The evening ends when you get tired of shouting and pantomiming.
The new girl is a red-haired gold-digger named Tanya who has the cheek to order beluga caviar whenever the opportunity presents itself. You eat the caviar on toast points and waslji it back with iced Russian vodka. The old priest says, “I was once the guest of a woman who took us to a restaurant in Paris where the waiters came out with great crystal trays of caviar in crystal bowls that were somehow illuminated from the bottom. The lights were extinguished, they brought the caviar out in a procession, a long line of waiters holding the trays aloft on their right arms, the bowls rising up, lit by candleflame, unreal.”
The red-haired girl sits rapt, convinced she’s stumbled onto a pile of money and that the aristocratic bearing of the old priest proves it. However, this is the third or fourth time you’ve heard this story, and your attention, like the candleflames beneath the caviar, is quavering.
“The old priest the old priest!” the red-haired girl says, back in the room. “I’ve never met anybody like that, a character out of a Waugh novel!” The gold-digger is a gold-digger, but at least she’s not an illiterate like some you’ve brought round. “It’s interesting,” she says, “the urge toward self-creation. I guess it’s what most intelligent people do,” she says, then stares at herself in the hotel mirror.
“Whatever happened to the gold-digger?” asks the old priest, raising his martini glass. “I liked her. She spent all your money and told you you were a pompous ass when she was through with you.”
“The gold-digger hit paydirt, packed her shovel. Is off to another dig, I suppose.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on women,” says the old priest. “It’s their nature to be acquisitive.”
“You should have it happen to you sometime.”
“Oh dear child, if I were not in the Society of Jesus I’d be prey to every manner of boy hustler.” He fixes a cigarette in the holder. “As it stands, I have God on my side and they line up to buy me dinner.”
“God and history,” you say.
“They’re not exactly the same thing. Tolstoy calls on us to end the
false and unnecessary comedy of history and to dedicate ourselves to the simple act of living.”
“Joyce calls history a nightmare,” is your response.
I m inclined to agree with Tolstoy,’ laughs the old priest, waving his cigarette in the smoky air.
5
The next time you see the old priest he is in Washington, living in a Jesuit house in a sketchy part of Capitol Hill. The Boston plan, it seems, has not worked out, but neither of you mentions it.
“I’m teaching slum children how to speak French,” says the old priest. “I must say it’s better than working for the man. But what about you? How’s the writing going?”
“I haven’t written anything in years. A false alarm, I guess.”
“A velleity.”
“Huh? How’s that?”
“A wish for a wish. But what are you doing these days?”
“I left the casino business, finally. I’m waiting for my teaching certificate to come through.”
“Congratulations, you’ve finally done something sensible. But don’t be like that English teacher I had. He was giving me C’s, so one time I handed in an essay by E.B. White. It was on ice skating, and I changed the location from Central Park to Boston Common. Have I ever told you this one?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He gave me a C. I wanted to write E.B. White and tell him he’d gotten a C in junior composition at Saint Francis Xavier High School.”
“I won’t be that kind of English teacher.”
“Good.”
6
A year later there is a female English teacher, and the two of you take the train from Philadelphia to Washington. Her name is Dawn; she is twenty-three years old and very pretty and also economy-minded, the way natural-bom high school teachers always are. When the old priest starts talking about caviar she blenches, orders a tossed salad with lowfat dressing.
“The bowls were themselves of carved ice and illuminated from the
bottom, luminous in the dark against the black sleeves of the waiters’ jackets and the gleaming white of the doubled cuffs.”
“Such extravagance,” Dawn says. “Another time in history.”
“The woman who threw that party became attached to a gigolo from Argentina who used her, took her money, and left her addicted to piescription drugs.”
“Now that’s a good story,” Dawn says.
The old priest comes to Atlantic City for the wedding, even though you’ve insisted on a civil ceremony, and the two of you have a bachelor party at one of the casino buffets.
“I remember the last day of my first year at Boston College,” the old priest tells you, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Have I told you this story?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My friend Pat Dempsey was waiting for me in a car with the top down. I went into the office and there was this Jesuit behind a desk and I said, T want to sign up here. I want to sign up now.’ He told me to finish college first, and I told him that if he did not get me right then and there, on that particular day and time of day, he would not get me at all.”
“What did he do?”
“He signed me up at once.”
“So why didn’t you just turn away?”
“It’s a vocation. That’s what I’m trying to tell you about: something you absolutely have to do, regardless of what anybody thinks. You have no choice in the matter. Like you with your writing.”
“But I don’t write—haven’t written anything. I told you before. I stopped all that.”
“You’re young yet. It will come to you. You can make a pile of money in the casino business and then retire.”
“That’s what I’m planning on, yes. I’m considering teaching high school English after I retire. What do you think?”
“That’s good, as long as you leave yourself time to write.”
“I think I can work it in.”
“Sink roots down like the roots of old trees.”
At the reception the old priest tells stories to Dawn’s parents.
“My friend Itchy and I wanted to go to the movies but you had to go
to Confession on Saturday nights, so Itchy said to my mother, ‘He can go to Confession in my neighborhood, it’s on the way to the movie house.’ On the way we met this girl Itchy knew and she said, ‘Suckenfuckenickel.’ I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Suckenfuckenickel.’ As we walked away I said to Itchy, ‘What did that girl just say to us?’ What she’d said was that she would suck and fuck us for a nickel. Oh, dear heavens! Then Itchy took me to his church and pointed to a confessional box and I went in. There was an old German priest in there and he said, ‘Who ist das? Is you boy or girl? Speak up! Speak up!’ Oh, it was dreadful. I told him my small few sins and he cried, ‘Oh you bad boy, oh you weiy bad boy!’ and began to beat his hands violently against the wooden walls of the confessional box. When I came out Itchy was in the vestibule of the church, leaning one elbow against a holy water font and roaring with laughter. We went to the movie but could not contain ourselves. Every time there was a break in the dialogue one of us would shout, ‘Oh you bad boy! Oh you weiy bad boy!’ The third time we started up, the usher came and threw us out the fire door.”
“Where’d you get that old priest?” Dawn’s mother asks when you come back from the honeymoon.
“He was my French teacher in high school. French and senior guidance. We’ve stayed in touch.”
“He’s a scream,” Dawn’s mother says.
“He is that.”
“You should take a page or two out of his book,” Dawn’s mother suggests.
7
A year later you go down to Washington by yourself. Your English teacher, you’ve just found out, is having an affair with the school nurse—a pair of lipstick lesbians is the word in the halls —and you want to be consoled. The old priest seldom leaves his room, which reeks of tobacco and is heaped with dirty clothes and cardboard boxes. Wads of crumpled Kleenex are strewn about the floor and heaped atop the dresser. His hair is greenish in a certain light, and his eyeballs and fingertips are different shades of yellow. He wears a mauve crewneck sweater, loose black corduroys, and bedroom slippers with the toes snipped off. His knees, as he stands for a moment to greet you, open and close stiffly as a churchyard gate.
“This is my last weekend in this room,” explains the old priest.
“They’re moving me to Assisted Living. Father Lemmon was behind it.
I helped him through his novitiate and this is the thanks I get. But I shall die as I have lived, safe within the arms of the Society of Jesus!”
You bring Chinese takeout from around the comer and almost get mugged on your way back to the rectory. You set up all the little cartons on his desk, festive as can be, but he barely takes a bite. His hearing has dimmed considerably, and to communicate with him you have to shout. Tufts of coarse white hair sprout from his nose and ears.
“My wife is a lipstick lesbian,” you shout.
“How’s the cat?” is the old priest’s reply.
“I have dogs.”
“How are the dogs, then?”
“Fine.”
He stares at you, blinks, stares some more.
“I said they’re fine. The dogs are just fine.”
“Dear child, why are you shouting?”
“I’m passionate about my dogs.”
“How’s the wiiting?” the old priest asks.
“I haven’t done any wilting since I was a young man.”
“But you’re a young man still.”
“That’s a matter of opinion, but whatever the case I haven’t done any wilting for quite some time.”
“Well then, how’s the casino business?”
“I got out of it years ago. I teach English at Atlantic High. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ that sort of thing.”
“There you are, I knew you’d come to your senses. And you’ve had children?”
“No, not yet. Maybe soon.”
“Don’t wait too long: you’ll shorten the time you have with your grandchildren.”
“That’s a point.”
“My brother got married at fifty, a very Irish thing to do. He died when his only daughter was still in her teens.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Oh, I had two of them, one still alive.”
“Why did you never say anything about them?”
“How’s that?”
“Why did you never tell me that you had two brothers?”
“I don’t suppose it ever came up. But Itchy was more like a real brother to me anyway.”
“Whatever became of Itchy?”
Have I not told you that story? Itchy’s mother ran off with a man who arranged a menage a trois between himself, the mother, and the daughter. Itchy stayed with his father, who became very bitter and drank all the time. I think he beat poor Itchy. I came to the door one time and Itchy said, ‘Oh, it’s you again. Go ‘way,’ he said, and I went away. I never saw him again.”
“Why do you think he did that?”
“He was embarrassed by the situation, I suppose.”
“That his father beat him?”
The old priest gazes at you, and again you realize you have to speak up. “He didn’t want people to know his father was beating him?”
“That I loved him.” The old priest leans forward to take your free hand, the hand not holding the drink, in his own two hands. He sits peering at you as if by lantern light. “Dear sweet beautiful child of light and grace. He was embarrassed that I loved him.”
8
You picture the old priest in his ritual garments, his “vestments,” lifting the host up high at the consecration, the process of transubstantiation, the moment when a diy disc of unleavened bread becomes the body of Jesus Christ.
Per omnia saecula saeculorum.
Amen.
Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum.
Et cum spiritu tuo.
You picture the old priest in Europe in the fifties, spotting Ava Gardner at a bullfight in Madrid. She is wearing a beret, he is wearing a soutane. This is history. No, wait, he is not wearing a soutane, he is wearing mufti. He is in histoiy and he will lead you into the promised land of the historical moment, the instant in time in which history is happening and you are in history, you yourself present in that unique and meaningful moment: the moment in time when everything makes sense.
This is only theoretical, of course, but even so it seems clear enough to you that there are those who stand inside histoiy and those who stand outside, like beggars at the gate. This is not a matter of money; it is a matter of something else, though it is hard to say exactly what. Whatever it is, though, the old priest seems to have plenty for everyone.
To penetrate time you must go outside of time. Outside of time is the world of myth, of eternal and meaningful recurrence. Even as the old priest tells his anecdotes again and again they acquire substance, a kind of permanence or narrative integrity that goes beyond their literal level. No longer does the old priest as a young boy simply knock at Itchy’s door; he eternally knocks at Itchy’s door. Itchy, perhaps having just come from a fresh beating, eternally answers the door. This is a cool trick. You’d like to try it yourself, but you keep steady contact with so few people that there aren’t many whom you could repeat your stories to, if you had any stories you considered worth repeating. Well, you do, as it turns out. The stories of the old priest.
9
You call the book The Old Priest and you get an agent interested, and he gets a publisher interested. Priests old and otherwise are hot news that year because of the sex abuse scandal that is in all the headlines. In the popular imagination priests are rapidly becoming synonymous with pedophiles.
“I like the way you leave the whole sex thing ambiguous,” your editor says. “That’s really the heart of the matter. The idea of the priest as traditionally representing good is juxtaposed against the current idea of perception of the priest as representing evil. And you walk the fine line down the middle. Very ‘Young Goodman Brown’ of you. And of course your character is destroyed the same way as Young Goodman Brown. We don’t know what or how much really happened. It could all be in his head. Was there sex between the main character and the old priest?” the editor wants to know. “I mean, just between us.”
“I don’t know. I left it up in the air, so I never really had to make that decision.”
“Smart. Play both ends against the middle.”
The Old Priest is a short novel that was formatted and marketed as a novel, on the supposition that some people would like to say they’ve read a novel but not spend a lot of time actually reading one. It is written in the second person; it is “mannered, overstylized, derivative,” to quote one reviewer. As a writer you have some talent, most people seem to agree, but you also have an odd quirk that has proven a fairly severe limitation: you are only truly comfortable writing in the second person.
In fact, you wanted to change the title of your book to The Second
Person, but the publisher didn’t want to do it and the book went out into the world as The Old Priest.
“Old priests are what sells,” the editor told you, “not witty references to grammar books and Graham Greene. Let your character be the sap and you be the smart one.”
He was smart, that editor, but he missed the reference to Jesus, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Also perhaps the second person as the conscience or moral self, now that you think of it. All the same, you liked that: “Grammar Books and Graham Greene” should really be the title of something, though nothing you will ever write.