“It made me want to be a Catholic, only to be able to pray in them.”
a character in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth [1]
“‘We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.’” “What’s that supposed to mean?”
a character in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake [2]
If only it would happen to me what happened to Ignatius of Loyola on that day in 1521, when, convalescing from his battle injuries, he asked for the sort of literary reading materials that he most liked and was handed instead Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ. And thereafter, his life, up to that moment a vainglorious mess, was on its right course. [3]
Yes, for sure, something like that would also do me, a lit prof, a world of good, for having spent the near whole of my adult life prowling around in literary spaces, don’t I know how books, no less than anything else, can occlude the voice of God. And then, as if I didn’t know it, there was that big, big mistake I made just yesterday which reminded me of it. As usual, I was in my office, in the moments before the mistake, seated at my computer, working in the familiar, lee-side shadow of the mountain of books that over the years have come to accumulate on my desk, contemplating an email just received. An editor assembling an anthology of Jhumpa Lahiri scholarship, said the email, wanted me to hand over to him for re-printing a long-ago, obscurely published Jhumpa Lahiri essay of mine that had never received any scholarly notice. [4] His offer, as I considered it, had its attractions. In the anthology, my essay would be rubbing shoulders with those of the heavy hitters in the subject area that is theirs and mine, the fictions of Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. [5] Also, the anthology would be widely distributed. Who knows how many people would read it? Or how many hearts changed by its presence in it, so singular were my tone and outlook relative to the collection’s other contents?
Yes, for sure, an attractive offer. But, no, for years—for a dozen years, in fact—I had been planning to include that particular essay in a swan-song, career-capstoning book of my own. Indeed, that essay in which I had demonstrated Lahiri’s counter-progressive, lofty regard for literature’s canonical authors would be the book’s largest, weightiest entry. Without it, my book would neither offer much nor have punch. What’s more, thought I, God Himself wanted me to get out this career-closing book of mine, which, marked by its conservative, Catholic tilt, would reprove the manifold unbelieving, proud-of-heart in my scholarly crowd. And, lastly, in my long career in letters, I had never published a book of my own, and that was something I very much wanted to do before retiring.
And then, as these thoughts were passing through my head, this other, strange thing of an opposite, scary character happened:  In the editor’s offer, as I re-read it, I thought I heard the voice of the devil! Give up before the fight is over, was saying to me that sneaky fellow. You’ll never write a book. You’re too old. You’re done. What have you yet got to show for yourself? Why, just look at that preposterous mountain of books on your left. Yes, Old Scratch was talking to me in belittling terms such as those, and, importantly, he wanted me to look at the pile of books on my desk. They were the leavings, he was reminding me, of the many writing projects I had started in my career and never finished. In its absurd height, he was suggesting, the pile constituted a monument to my vain, misguided ambitions. In short, relinquish the essay, the Evil One, I thought, was saying to me.
And how did I respond to Old Nick? First, for sure, by not looking at the shoulder-high mountain of books to my left. For, as everyone knows, a heck of a lot of trouble comes to those who look at the things the devil encourages them to turn toward. Instead, with my eyes still fixed on my computer’s monitor, I took a deep breath and tapped the following on the machine’s keyboard: Thanks, but no thanks, kind sir. I would prefer to retain that essay for a later book publication of my own.
I hit send, and, Oh! For the next two minutes or so, how sweet was the sense of spiritual satisfaction that swept over me! God Himself, I thought, was confirming me in my decision. I had fended off Satan. I had stuck to His Almighty plan. I would not give up my paper, but, instead, I would keep on working on my book, and eventually I would put out a scholarly text imbued with Catholic values, one that would administer a spanking to the proud, academic crowd who would read it. Then, too, by this book my professional life’s work would be vindicated. After so many years of obscure toil in fields unnoticed, poetic justice would be served up to me on a plate of renown. I would be the guy who set the scholarly community straight in Jhumpa Lahiri’s regard. Yes, sweet and satisfying was the spiritual feeling that came over me when I hit that send button! If my knees weren’t so rickety, I’d have danced.
And then this: the ping of a fresh new email arriving in my inbox. Was it the editor acknowledging my response? Making a second effort to get my essay? I looked to see. No, of course, it wasn’t he. For editors are a touchy bunch. Once scorned, they write off the scorner forever. Rather, it was an electronic alert from my local public library: Please be advised, it said, that Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri is long overdue. Its fine is mounting. Please return it. I took off my baseball cap and slapped my head with it. Yes, yes, of course, I had that book. A novel emanating from the writer’s career’s second half, its Italian half, when it was published some three years ago, it hadn’t interested me as much as had her earlier works. For that reason, I had never purchased it, but instead borrowed it from the library. Also, I knew where it was. It was somewhere in that mountain of books on my desk. I turned to get it.
And, oh, Wow! What a difference that turn made! For, yes, by what I now saw, weren’t my eyes opened, my head spun round, my jaw dropped, and my heart stopped! That pile-up of books, absurd in its height and incoherent in its collocations — Paul Theroux’s Fresh Air Fiend and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye aside one another? Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Shakespeare’s The Tempest looking like bread slices at either side of a sandwich that had yet to be filled? — was, yes, just what the voice had been telling me it was: a testament to my vain ambitions. So much reading had I done in the making of that mountain, and so little, in terms of influential scholarship, had I to show for it! For, no, my subtext in the several papers I had succeeded in publishing, if not my thesis per se—that, against what is said about them by the idealogues who control the narrative in the scholarly places where books are talked about, good writers, serious writers were almost all of them devotees of the Western canon—no, that thought, in the woke places where I hoped it would be heard anyway, had not seemed to disturb anyone. And now I was nearing seventy. And now, too, the voice that I took to be the devil’s as it urged me to relinquish my Jhumpa Lahiri essay of long ago, said the inert mound of books on my desk, had not been Satan’s, but, instead, God’s. And, beyond that, He, God, had been telling me this other, more general thing that I also needed to hear: Clean off your desk. It’s time to move on.
You would think, then, that on the feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola—which is today, July 31st—I’d have come into my office to unbury my desk, and, in-between book tosses, to read a few pages from Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. For his tricky subject in that treatise, the discernment of God’s will in the moment He expresses it, had been my shortfall in my engagement with the editor yesterday, hadn’t it? Yes, it had. And, indeed, to some extent, that’s what I have come into my office intent on doing. The fast-filling cardboard boxes now stacked in front of my desk and the hand trolley parked outside my office door testify to that fact. But, no, inveterate that I am, that’s not the entirety of my plans for the day. For even as I bid farewell to the gross whole of the books on my desk and box them, I’ve been setting aside those written, edited, or translated by Jhumpa Lahiri for further study. And what, you ask, is that all about? It’s about this:  my having read yesterday, before leaving my office, a few pages of the novel by her called for by the library, and, then, having bypassed the library as I went home, my having spent a good portion of the night reading the rest of Whereabouts.
But, for God’s sake, I will interrupt my story to tell you, what else was I going to do? Wallow in the disconsolate contemplation of all the good I had likely missed out on because I had mistaken God’s voice for Satan’s? For if I had imagined some good coming to me by way of my hanging on to my Jhumpa Lahiri paper because I thought it God’s will that I do so, ten times that good would undoubtedly have resulted from my doing what He actually wanted me to do, namely, get it off my desk.
In short, yes, in sore need of something to read last night, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, with this stunning result:  I saw in it manifold evidences of its author’s need, like mine, for an Ignatius of Loyola moment, that is, a moment in which, in answer to her request for a next, good, literary book to read, someone hands her a Life of Christ, or another Catholic text of that order. Also, and this is just as important, I saw evidences in it too of her hesitant awareness of that reality.
For the time being, if you would, I ask your indulgence in not asking me what those evidences were, nor asking me either for the long list of comparable evidences that I find in the writer’s other works when I start reviewing the group of her fictions in my head. For my explaining them to you here would take far too many pages. Rather, I ask that you content yourself for now with the pair of snippets from her work that I supply in my epigraphs, bespeaking, as they do, these twin realities about the non-believing, best writer of her generation’s current, spiritual state of mine: having lost her faith in literature’s power to save, Jhumpa Lahiri finds herself now and before running into, in places surprising and unsurprising, Catholicism as that loss’s happy remedy. Also, without having to write too much about it, I can tell you this about Whereabouts: It’s a novel written by a woman who notices everything, which is a great talent to be possessed of if you’re a writer, but a mind-warping burden if you don’t believe in anything.
And now, lastly, as to the for the time being just snuck into my last request: Yes, by way of it, I would wish to tell you that I’m back to writing a book about Jhumpa Lahiri, or, better said, I will be back to it once I get my desk cleaned off. When published, I hope you’ll read it and like it. So, too, St. Ignatius of Loyola. I hope he’ll read it and like it. Howsoever little his interest in literary books, I think he will.
[1] Jhumpa Lahiri, “Once in a Lifetime,” Unaccustomed Earth (Random House India, 2009 [2008]), 233. [2] Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 78. [3] The Autobiography of Saint Ignatius, edited by J.F.X. O’Connor, S.J. (New York, Cincinnait, Chicago: Benzinger Bros, 1900), pp. 7-8; http://stpatsott.phpwebhosting.com/pages/ebooks/St.%20Ignatius-The%20Autobiography%20of%20Ignatius.pdf. [4] John Cussen, “the william morris in jhumpa lahiri’s wallpaper / and other of the writer’s reproofs to literary scholarship,” JEAL: Journal of Ethnic American Literature 2 (2012): 5-72. [5] “Jhumpa Lahiri: American author. Britannica, 7 Jul 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jhumpa-Lahiri.
