Last Wednesday, author, poet, playwright and columnist, James Carroll, visited the Advanced Fiction class with many guests bulging into the hallway and some even sitting on the floor. Professor Askold Melnyczuk showered Mr. Carroll with glowing praise, saying, “It is a writer’s duty to leave behind a shelf full of books,” and he pointed to the shelf behind him filled with Carroll’s publications. He said he was not a completist, or else he would have more.
Mr. Carroll began the discussion with some background into his life. He told the attentive audience that he was born on the South Side of Chicago, into a working class family that had very little literary sensibilities. He said that his father was educated by accident, for the mere reason that he studied to be a priest. He left on the eve of his ordination, which is incredibly similar to the character, Terry Doyle, in Carroll’s novel The City Below. In the novel, Terry Doyle leaves the day he is to be ordained.
Mr. Carroll was also a priest for five years; he served as a chaplain at Boston University. He described that the seminary was the place he learned to love books, because the students were allowed to read and not much of anything else. They were not allowed to watch television or listen to music, or embark in activities that were not related to religious study.
He told the audience that it was through reading the Scriptures that he understood that the meaning of literature and writing. He said that he started writing poetry on the margins of his books. He said that to create, to write, was to be like God, and that way we can reach God.Mr. Carroll said that since his teachers at the seminary thought he was such a talented poet, they allowed him a sabbatical to study with the poet James Tate at the University of Minnesota one summer. He was very excited and the first day he brought a giant stack of poems and plopped them on his desk. Tate looked at the poems and over the course of the summer, he read them, and he gave Carroll advice.At the end of the summer, Carroll asked Mr. Tate if he would autograph one of books of poetry for him. He wrote, “Good luck in both your vocations.” The young seminary student was thrilled with that, and carried with him the encouragement that he needed that he was at last, a writer.
Mr. Carroll explained to the group that he wrote his memoir, American Requiem, for which he won the National Book Award, after he wrote Memorial Bridge, but they were the same story. He told the audience that he wrote two books because he was dissatisfied with the happy ending of Memorial Bridge. The novel was about the conflict between his father and brother, and the end of the real life story did not have such a positive outcome.
Mr. Carroll said that most writers today don’t want to become too involved in politics, because they are too embroiled in their own writing process. He said that in some ways, writers are very solitary, but they don’t need to be. To write about issues that provoke thought can be cathartic, and inspirational to readers. James Carroll, in many different venues, achieves exactly that.