Interview With N. John Hall
Introduction
N. John Hall is considered the world’s leading authority on Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm. His books include Trollope: A Biography, and Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. He twice has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. Since 1967 he has lived in Greenwich Village.
Many memoirs are not factual, or they are embroidered in some way, but your memoir, Belief, rings absolutely true—even at its most unbelievable, which we will get to in a minute. All this really happened to you, right?
As I say in the preface, I made up nothing. I interviewed about 30 people and recorded their memories. Because I never throw out written documents (although I hope to do so soon), I had all sorts of college and seminary notebooks and letters received (and I had even those I wrote home, kept by my mother). Additionally I had all my books from the years back then. And of course fearful memories, like those of worry and guilt and a nervous breakdown, are likely to stay in one’s mind.
You have shown a remarkable amount of self-knowledge in Belief. Was it difficult to be so honest—not only about other people, but about yourself?
No, I didn’t find it difficult. But here is something I didn’t mention in the book—perhaps I should have: When I “came out” into the real world in 1967, everything about the world into which I landed thrilled me. My wife to be, Marianne, of course, but also living as a free man in Greenwich Village, and, especially, attending Ph.D. courses in literature at NYU [New York University]. These courses were so different from what I had encountered in so many years of Catholic education. That education has been largely catechetical, with the answers in place.
But I never bothered to tell people of my past. It was not that I was ashamed of my past, just that I wanted to make a completely fresh start. My past story would have been a distraction. Moreover, telling people about it would have required—for them to get it right—an awful lot of explanation. I almost never gave my past a thought, until relatively recently when I decided to write this book of explanation.
Your book raises issues of the attitude of the Church toward women (pp. 61-62 and elsewhere). Can you compare/contrast that attitude with the attitude toward women of the Muslim fundamentalists about whom we have read and seen so much in recent years? Would you comment about the attitude of any fundamentalist religion toward women?
Now you mention it, there is a parallel between 1950s Catholicism and Muslim fundamentalism in regard to women—though clearly an imperfect one. The Catholic suppression of women went hand in hand with a worship of Mary and of womanhood—if the women behaved as they were expected. The Church has made progress—it allows, for example, women in the pulpit at stated and limited times. But ordination of women seems far off, and until that happens true equality seems far off. When an idea like the subjection of women holds sway, an idea rooted in feelings, its refutation by reason is difficult, close to impossible, because as J. S Mill famously put it, the more a conviction rests on feeling and the more poorly it stands up to reason, the stronger that idea becomes because its adherents are persuaded that the feeling rests on “some deeper ground.”
You compare the seminary to a totalitarian state—right down to the facts of informers, censorship, and other kinds of control. You also (p. 116) compare it to a prison, and (p. 120) to a mental hospital. How difficult is it for someone to break away from such an institution? Did many other men break away as you did?
Many people left the seminary. I’d estimate 10 t0 15 percent. (On the other hand, it was also difficult to stay in such an institution.) Everyone was free to walk away. Those who stayed viewed this totalitarian institution as the route to what they wanted, namely, the priesthood. They knew they’d be free, eventually.
The United States is drenched in religion of one kind or another—to the point that it is generally accepted that a nonbeliever (a “bright”, an agnostic or atheist, a secular humanist) could not expect to be elected to any major office. Republican candidates race to make obeisance to religious leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, and Democratic candidates make sure their religious beliefs are known, even if those beliefs are not so fundamentalist. When one reads the statement that John F. Kennedy made to the Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960, it seems we have come a long way, and possibly we have been headed in the wrong direction. Comment?
Yes, the position of religion in America is a great part of “American differentism” from the rest of the Western or developed Western world.
Europeans are often mystified by Americans in this regard. It’s embarrassing. It’s truly sad how distrusted nonbelievers are in America. A broad education seems the best hope in “breaking the spell” whereby parents pass on religion to their children.
Your publisher chose as a jacket illustration for your memoir a painting by Hieronymous Bosch called The Ship of Fools. Were you consulted on this illustration? Do you think it fits the subject matter of your memoir?
Frederic Beil kindly let me pick the jacket illustration (though he of course had to agree with my choice). It fits in an oblique and ironic way. I wanted a cover that would be edgy, funny, irreverent—which, I trust, the book also is.
It was a book difficult to name—Disbelief? Beyond Belief? and difficult to illustrate on the cover. I use the title word Belief in that this is a study of religious belief, but as the book winds down, another kind of belief emerges, a belief in human love, intellectual freedom, fairness, generosity, forgiveness, etc
An abstract cover would have made the book appear as a religious book—and perhaps this one does too, if people miss the irony. But if the cover prompts one to pick up the book, the jacket texts should clear up any ambiguity.
Yours has been a fascinating journey from seminary to academia. You are a Professor of English at the City University of New York, with a specialty in Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm. What drew you to those two writers?
Academics are often asked that question and they all too cleverly say that their subjects choose them. Trollope and Beerbohm appealed to me, and I found that not much work had been done on either of them. I liked the fact that they were both comic artists.
What else would you like to say?
Readers have asked me why I am not more “angry” in the book. I tell them (a) that laughter is better than anger in regard to one’s past. And (b) that if one is in a good place today, then everything that went before has contributed to being in that place today, and for hence gratitude is called for, not anger.
The only thing that makes me angry is the nonsense about religious people being more “spiritual” than nonbelievers. That kind of ignorant stupidity annoys me.