Professor Wyckhuis

Professor Wyckhuis would stand at the front of the classroom and lecture, his gaunt face tilted to the podium, his bare scalp growing red with fervor. He’d occasionally whirl toward the board behind him and scribble out etymologies, the chalk popping and splintering in his hand.

 

After class I’d join him for coffee in the Union. He would smoke cigarettes and touch his stout mustache and gently answer my questions about the Platonists and the Church Fathers, or describe his own scholarly projects: translations of commentaries by obscure saints and monks and mystics.

 

I once confessed to him that I was given to daydreaming, to making stories, and he, in a typically tender gesture, proposed that I might think of it as prayer and submit gratefully to it. We were walking beneath the trees of the quad, and he explained that the imagination might be exercised to understand our fears, and delight in the works of God, and grieve for our sins.

 

“Then,” he said, “if our devotion is deepened, and our minds not scattered, we may be called to the contemplative life.” He bowed his head and briefly closed his eyes to recite the words of—he later told me—a French parish priest, speaking so softly that I had to lean toward him. “The interior life is like a sea of love, in which the soul is plunged, and is drowned in love.” And then he opened his eyes and looked at me. “Just as a mother holds her child’s face in her hands to cover it with kisses, so does God hold the devout man.”

 

The story was that he’d left the priesthood in order to marry, his eyes still wetting with emotion whenever he’d speak of his wife, an elementary school teacher from Missouri, who’d passed from this earth twenty years before.

 

And there was also a competing and more dramatic story, that his wife had been a French girl, whom he’d impregnated when she was still at the lycée. It was then that he’d left the Church and married, and it was shortly afterwards that she and the baby died, the new bride hemorrhaging during childbirth, the infant’s neck bound with the umbilical cord.

 

If true, did he blame himself for the deaths of the schoolteacher or the French girl and the innocent child for whom he’d given up God, and whom God, in a show of spite and bile, cast to dust?

 

A reckless undergraduate was said to have mentioned the rumors to him, and he was reported to have smiled and said, “Charming,” and then, touching the student’s sleeve, “It is of course always easier to love the dead than the living.”

 

He once admitted to me that he’d stopped on the way home from campus the night before to buy a copy of Playboy. “I was angry,” he said, nodding his head. “I was very angry with God.” He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray upon the cafeteria table. “So then,” he said, his jaw thrust forward, and he shook his fist in the air.

 

Once, late at night, Greta and I were leaving a party at a house just off campus, and we saw him walking slowly along the dim sidewalk across the street, in the direction of his own house, two or three blocks away. Twice he stumbled, the second time falling to his knees.

 

“Oh, Joe,” Greta said, and we started toward him, but one of the hosts of the party, a graduate student, who was standing on the lawn and talking to some girls, said, “I’ll get him,” and trotted across the street, helped him up, and then, his arm around the old professor’s shoulder, escorted him home.

 

There was a small memorial service for Professor Wyckhuis in January of my senior year. His body had already been flown to Antwerp, where a lone surviving brother was to bury him. As Greta and I stood in the dim chapel near campus, I felt thin and frightened, as if I’d been scooped out.

 

“Joe?” I could hear Greta’s whisper at my shoulder, feel her hand on my arm.

 

Later, outside in the glare of the winter sun, she told me that I’d begun to whine, a sound so slight and high pitched that she at first become aware of it only at the breaking of her own breath.

 

When he heard I was engaged, Professor Wyckhuis told me not to enter into marriage easily. He said that only those who’ve never been married or are destined for divorce think that they’ll not tolerate woundings or pain. I could smell tobacco on his sweater as he sat near me, clenching his hands. “It is like faith,” he said. “Some do not understand the necessary agony of the relationship with God, and so their faith . . . ,” and he suddenly splayed his fingers, like an object scattering.

 

His brother had directed that his personal property be given away or destroyed. And so in rounds—faculty colleagues, graduate students, and then undergraduates—we strolled through his house—polite shoppers at an abandoned flea market—bending to examine books, peering into dark closets, smoky with old sweaters, glancing at the chipped china in the kitchen, looking for something to take with us.

 

Everyone stepped softly past the bathroom. Devil’s madness.

 

The walls in the living room and bedroom were yellowed and bare, the dresser and table tops white with dust. I stood before his narrow bed and picked up from the pillow his glasses, the gold spindly frames, the lenses smudged, the nose pads mossy with oil and skin.

 

And then my face began to ache, as if I’d been struck, and I left his house without taking anything.

 

During the time that I knew him, Professor Wyckhuis battled insomnia. We rarely spoke about it, but I’d sometimes notice a weary edginess as we had coffee, as he answered my questions, sometimes struggling to recall a name or find a word.

 

“Have you seen a doctor?” I would ask.

 

“Yes, yes,“ he would say, nodding, and he’d shrug. “But it is the cigarettes, I think.” Or he’d simply smile and recall the words of some medieval monk. “Suffering is short pain and long joy,” he’d say.

 

Once, during the fall of my senior year, he stopped me on the quad and gave me a copy of his latest book, a translation of The Cloud of Unknowing. He offered it to me and then bowed. “A gift,” he said.

 

On the title page he had written, in his small, cramped hand, “To Joseph, Thank you for your spiritual help in the past. I wish you the best always: Deus providebit.”

 

When Greta became pregnant, she and I would walk the small Kansas town to which we’d moved, out to a graveyard on its north edge, five flat acres in a pocket of mulberry trees. It was there that we decided upon the name Hannah. We’d been taken with the tall and graceful headstone of a woman named Hannah Jane Flax, who was born in 1859 and died in 1947, and who was surrounded by family members, some—a husband, two children, and a grandchild—preceding her there, all now lying peacefully beneath blizzards and droughts, removed from the welter of the world. Greta saw her in those terms—a life lived deeply and then the serene and slow re-absorption into the earth. I tried to reckon the anger and the grief of those left living, that which had been loosed over the years on these few acres, the weight of accumulated mourning, still, surely, in the air, the damp of it on our skin.

 

I labor at forgiveness, thinking of Professor Wyckhuis’s instruction, his quoting of Francis of Paola, that the recollection of injury adds to our anger and nurtures our sin. “It is,” he said, touching his breast, “a rusty arrow and poison for the soul.”

 

He once told me that Qoheleth, delivering one of most brutally honest books in the Bible, revealed that traditional wisdom has failed, that we can’t know God, that we lack control, and that life is short and death certain. “However,” he said, crouching, bending close to the surface of the cafeteria table, his fingers poised as if to pluck from it a crumb of bread, “joy can still come to us in small portions.” And he looked up at me and smiled. “We need to be attentive.”

 

The story was that Professor Wyckhuis’s landlady found him dead in his bathtub, three days after Christmas. In the wastebasket were, supposedly, empty bottles of lorazepam and Tylenol and a spent blister pack of Sudafed. On the bath mat was a half-full three liter bottle of Rosso di Montalcino. His wine glass wavered on the bottom of the tub, between his legs, beneath the skin of cold water.

 

The story was that at the beginning of his last final exam in December, he wrote upon the board, Faith is the agent of things un-hoped for, as the thief proved. And the students laughed, and he winked and wished them luck, and left the room, and the building, a graduate student arriving to proctor and pick up papers. And no one on campus ever saw him again.

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Interview: Marie Howe

Cover of Marie Howe's Magdalene.     Cover of Marie Howe's What the Living Do.     Cover of Marie Howe's The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

 

Marie Howe is originally from Rochester, New York, and is the author of four poetry collections, of which the most recent is Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), a musing of the channeled voice of the Biblical Mary Magdalene. The oldest girl of nine siblings, she did not seriously write poetry until the age of thirty. Howe, whose brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, has said: “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely.” Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Honors include the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I’m so excited to get to speak with you: Irish Catholic grade school commonality! Oh my, the stories! Reading your poems cues me in as to your own immense, lingering remembrances of an American Irish Catholic upbringing, grade school, and family. Your collection of the death of your brother—

 

Howe:

What the Living Do—

 

TFR:

Yes—I’ve taught that book—it resonates so much for me personally, and now I have the chance to ask you how your most recent book, Magdalene, came about.

 

Howe:

I feel fortunate to have been brought up in a tradition that had a very strong symbolic world. I was the oldest daughter of nine children. I’m the only one who went to a convent school, Sacred Heart in Rochester. I first went to parochial school, then this convent school. From a very early age, the gospels, and what we call “the old testaments,” and of course what the

Jewish tradition calls the Torah—the stories meant a great deal to me.

 

TFR:

In what way, specifically?

 

Howe:

Well, they felt archetypal and deeply poetic as there were so many silences in them.

 

TFR:

Silences?

 

Howe:

Yes, silent space where they could be inhabited, and of course in the Jewish tradition there’s midrash, a critical explanation where the Torah is considered a living document, and the rabbis imagine into those silences, and continue to create the Torah. I always loved those stories and the spaces one could inhabit within them—all those stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and the Jewish great dilemmas, or debates as they’re also called.

 

TFR:

I studied the Kabbalah in an undergrad course on world religion and love that aspect about Judaism—the intellectual debates with the sense that the faith is in a state of evolving. I like this idea of “silences.”

 

Howe:

Yes, exactly. And the silences, well, Moses was a stutterer—I was a stutterer as a young person, and I identified. Really, so many of the stories, right up to the New Testament, I was able to identify with, and those stores still mean a great deal to me. Some people grow up with the Greek myths, or other some other kinds of symbolic worlds, but that was the world I grew up in, the Biblical one.

 

TFR:

At the side of my nightstand when I was a child, I had a huge children’s Bible storybook with the most amazing illustrations. I still have it. I feel the stories helped create who I am. It’s not that my beliefs are the same as when I was a child, but as a writer, they’re so foundational when you hear them at a young age. Do they always find a way into your work?

 

Howe:

Not always, I mean there are many poems where they don’t, not really, but like any interior world they are there, somewhere, always in the background. They were for many people, for many writers, like Tolstoy and Kierkegaard. You know, he spent years writing about the Abraham and Isaac story.

 

TFR:

In Fear and Trembling—

 

Howe:

Yes, and for me, always of course like many girls, it was Magdalene’s story that appealed to me. I knew from a very young age that how she was depicted was wrong.

 

TFR:

I always questioned the Cain and Abel story, why an all powerful being would prefer a lamb over wheat. It always bothered me. Mary Magdalene too, I always thought of the scene where the crowd was going to stone her.

 

Howe:

I knew it, always, I just knew it. And then later, when studying the New Testament and the early Church, I studied with Elaine Pagels, actually, who wrote a book about the gnostic gospels, and how the church fathers created that persona of Magdalene we came to know. [The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, 1979].

 

TFR:

This is why I love your book—you’ve given her the voice stolen, and let her take advantage of the empty space left.

 

Howe:

We’ll never know, as much as we want to know about the historical woman, and as a woman I can identify with a her searching for meaning and for her own subjectivity outside the norms that existed for her then.

 

TFR:

That is sad, really, right? I mean all the women of the Bible, and there are so many! Their voices have been filtered, right? We only get to hear the redacted male versions. When did this idea come to you, to focus poems on her? Is this the first you wrote of her?

 

Howe:

I’d been trying to write in the voice of Magdalene for thirty years. I think trying is the key word there—for me it was a kind of receptivity that had to occur, I think I had to grow up!

 

TFR:

I get that. I’ve had to move away from the religion of my childhood, and then sort of dance with it through the years. Or maybe I should say break up with it, and reconcile, and then do it all over again. It feels like it will be a life-long process. As a poet I’ve written in the voice of Eve, Noah’s wife, stuck on that boat, questioning her husband’s sanity, and recently a piece where I envisioned Adam going through a divorce in twenty-first century Florida before heading off to Vegas. I never thought about Magdalene, really, and now I feel a bit bad about that. I did do an ekphrastic poem based on a de La Tour painting before I knew of your collection. I’m interested: When you found yourself exploring, felt her voice coming out, would you say you were channeling her? That’s how I feel they come to me, as if I’m the receptacle and I let them speak.

 

Howe:

Well, it is and it isn’t, I mean in the book she’s me, she’s you, she’s a contemporary woman, she’s a woman who’s still in history.

 

TFR:

“Still in history.” Could you speak to that phrase a little more?

 

Howe:

I mean every poem, of course, for me is different. Some are more like just me wearing a mask of Magdalene, but sometimes it’s like everything is there, and I feel she is me, she is you, she’s the woman over there. That what was taken from us, from us women, was our commonality of her—she was turned, by men, into a repentant prostitute, who was closed off to us. I feel she’s the female principle trying to integrate herself.

 

TFR:

I wanted to ask, how you feel about it—that she’s the one who always had to be forgiven for something, or Eve, right? These voiceless women who’ve been reduced, in so many ways, to objects in need of forgiveness.

 

Howe:

According to the story, it might have been her, or it might not have been her. A lot of those female figures were combined in the gospels to one kind of object, a female representational object for men.

 

TFR:

To fit into their narratives.

 

Howe:

Right. Have you read the gnostic gospels and the gospel according to Mary Magdalene?

 

TFR:
No, only the old and new, the little blurb-version in my Catholic Bible.

 

Howe:

The gnostic gospels were outlawed by the Catholic Church, and we had no access to them until they were found in the late 1940s in a cave in Egypt—

 

TFR:
The dead sea scrolls?

 

Howe:

They were found along with the dead sea scrolls, but they really were the Gnostics, the early Christian communities who called themselves the Gnostics, and there is a gospel according to Mary Magdalene. There’s a story that you can get, though the original scroll was tattered and there’s a lot of empty spaces, as it’s ripped up, perhaps missing some pages.

 

TFR:

A physical object that was found then. Is there an idea when she wrote it?

 

Howe:

There’s also many different ones, gospels, thirty or forty of them. As Elaine Pagels notes, there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and in it she is “a character.” Whoever she was, the early communities split off into different kinds of communities, you know, then someone dies, a leader or writer, and arguments arise: He said this, she said that, they were all priests at that time, it was circular, both men and women, in a circular community that was eventually outlawed by the hierarchy of the patriarchal central church that determined priests and bishops should be all male, with no women in even perfunctory roles.

 

TFR:

Which of course left us with two thousand years of patriarch-diluted history.

 

Howe:

Yes, oppressions of female history!

 

TFR:

This book, this collection, I feel, on oppression, is quite timely. On the other hand, when wouldn’t it have been? It’s two thousand years in the making. What do you want to say to young female poets, with your own revelations, about what we’ve always known of as sexual harassment?

 

Howe:

The key thing we’ve always known is that women know women who have been beaten down, drowned, burned, killed, beaten to death by men. I mean, I love men, but the patriarchy has to end. That’s the political feeling I have, as a poet. I feel Muriel Rukeyser’s great poets’ voice of [German artist] Käthe Kollwitz in the poem of the same name, comments in her poem, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” I feel we need to tell the truth about our lives. and we’ve been telling the truth all along, but no one would write it for us. There were a few women writers, but they’re almost invisible. We have to tell the truth about our lives. So I would tell young female poets, “Tell the truth about your life. Whatever that means.” All of our young women poets need to tell the truth in such a way they become transformed in the telling, which is what poetry does. Mere complaint doesn’t do it, mere witness doesn’t even do it. Something has to occur in the telling that’s transformative to the writer.

 

TFR:

Thank you for that. I find in some contemporary poetry it’s men and women ranting, and the ranting doesn’t do it.

 

Howe:

This is a very mysterious aspect of art, right? That somehow through language and style, silence and metaphor, and musicality, and writing into a subject, not merely about a subject, but into what you don’t understand about it, about the subject, then one becomes transformed in the act of writing, and one discovers something one doesn’t know, and that is what art is for. There’s nothing wrong with witness, we need it, but art transforms the maker. Art transforms both the poet and the reader.

 

TFR:

Do you feel once the poem leaves you it becomes the reader’s?

 

Howe:

That’s the great thing about poetry. It’s worthless in the commodified world and doesn’t belong to anybody. That what is so precious, one of that last things that can’t be sold. Learn poems by heart, and then take them across borders. Put them in your wallet, on your refrigerator, carry them around—that’s what I’ve done all my life! Cut out poems and carry them around. I didn’t have to ask permission, the poem belongs to the world—this gift is one of the last examples that shows how art belongs to all of us.

 

TFR:

I tell my students I probably only appreciate about 30 percent of the poems I read, and of that 30 percent there are only a few I love, but those poems help me live. I take them with me when I try to go to sleep at night after a horrible day. In your book, What the Living Do, you endured the death of your brother. I had a younger brother who died at forty-three of alcoholism.

 

Howe:

I’m so sorry! In my family too, we dealt with that. I feel the same way. Poetry saved my life.

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