Over the last few months I have been trudging slowly through the Autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila. I use the verb “trudge” advisedly: I found it heavy going. It was only with great effort and perseverance (well, OK, also under orders from my confessor) that I finished it yesterday.

One of the problems over which I kept butting heads with the good saint was her habit of referring to the world as “vanity”. Now while I know intellectually and as a matter of faith that the world is in fact, vain, temporary, meant to pass away, something to be “used and not enjoyed” (St. Augustine), I also, rather inconveniently, happen to live in it. Worse still, it appears that I have a vocation to live in it. This is very bad news indeed when one considers the detachment to which (St. Theresa says) genuine love of God should incite us, and the impossibility (which she strongly implies) of our achieving that detachment while living in the world.

But pass all that, for the moment. “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” If God wants me to be a saint in the world, he will give me the detachment necessary for being a saint in the world.

Even as I held shakily onto that line of thought, however, another difficulty presented itself. For a Christian life in the world—ordinary working, marrying, and having children life—is supposed to be a continual act of evangelization. We are meant to bring others to God through our ordinary activities. But if we achieve real detachment, can we really continue to perform those activities with any pleasure? How can we be an advertisement for good Christian living when the really good Christians aren’t supposed to enjoy life—when they are supposed to “despise” the world (dear old Philip Neri, of all people, said that) and to desire death for the love of God? as Alphonsis de Ligouri says in his Stations of the Cross (used inadvisedly, I think, in many traditional parishes during Lent). How are we even to understand these things, let alone to practice them?

The situation is exacerbated for a writer, or at any rate, for a fiction writer—and Christian artists of all sorts must face the same problem. How can we celebrate the good things of the world, and hold them up against the evil, when even the good things are ultimately straw?

The worst of it (this is always the worst of scruples) was that no one else seemed to be at all bothered by this apparent contradiction. I felt, like Kevin of Devin standing before the King, “quite, quite alone” in my puzzlement.

So it happened that this morning I found myself starting a book that had been sitting on my “mean-to-read” shelf for some time: Izak Dinesen’s Winter’s Tales. I can’t recommend the book as a whole (yet), but I can and do strongly recommend the first story of the lot, “The Young Man with the Carnation.” I would like very much to say “Go read the story now!” but for the sake of those short of time, purse, and patience, I will offer a synopsis here.

Charlie Despard (no symbolism in that name—no indeed!) is a young writer who’s published one successful book, and is afraid he’ll never be able to write another one. Worse yet, since he believes that everyone—his public, his wife, and even God—loves him for his artistry, he’s afraid of losing money, fame, wife, and ultimately salvation as a consequence of having lost his gift.

He is to join his wife after brief separate vacations at a hotel in a seaport. He arrives after her, late at night, and is directed by an attendant to “madam’s room”. He’s relieved to find it unlocked—he’d been afraid of waking his wife and having to have a conversation with her—and he simply goes to bed. A knock on the door disturbs him; it is the knock of a young man in evening dress and wearing a pink carnation in his buttonhole—a young man who is as greatly surprised to see Charlie there as Charlie is to see him.  The young man apologizes for “hav[ing] made a mistake” and leaves. Charlie goes back to bed, but is haunted by the memory of the expression he has seen on the young man’s face, an expression of “[t]hat infinite happiness . . . [which] was to be found somewhere in the world.” Finally he gets up and, leaving a brief note of farewell for his wife, leaves the hotel intending to “save himself, and . . . go in search of that happiness which existed somewhere. If he were to go to the end of the world for it, it did not signify; indeed, it might be the best plan to go straight to the end of the world. He would now go down to the harbor and find a ship to take him away.”

He goes down to the harbor and falls in with a group of sailors, with whom he spends the whole of the night, buying them drinks and listening to their stories and telling his own. He does not go back to the hotel until morning—but he does decide in the end to go back. Then and there in the rooms below he meets his wife—slightly worried by his lateness, but not greatly perturbed otherwise—certainly not as perturbed as she should be, after reading his farewell note. She takes him upstairs to their room . . . to their room, which is strangely different from the room he had entered last night. He asks his wife if she slept there the previous night. She says that she did. He asks whether anyone disturbed her.

“No,” she said. “My door was locked. And this is a quiet hotel, I believe.”

Then of course Charlie realizes what has happened: that he had been directed to the wrong room, to the room of a woman who really was expecting the young man with the pink carnation—a woman who had received the note that he, Charlie, had intended for his wife—a radiantly happy young man who was now in all probability miserable. He blurts out a few confused sentences that lead his wife to ask him whether he is “going write a love story;” he finds himself incapable of answering her. Then, according to Dinesen, “the situation develop[s] into a dialogue between Charlie and the Lord.”

The Lord said: “Your wife asked you twice if you are going to write a love story. Do you believe that this is indeed what you are going to do?”

“Yes, that is very likely,” said Charlie.

“Is it,” the Lord asked, “to be a great and sweet tale, which will live in the hearts of young lovers?”

“Yes, I should say so,” said Charlie.

“And are you content with that?” asked the Lord.

“O Lord, what are you asking me?” cried Charlie. “How can I answer yes? Am I not a human being, and can I write a love story without longing for that love which clings and embraces, and for the softness and warmth of a young woman’s body in my arms?”

“I gave you all that last night,” said the Lord. “It was you who jumped out of bed, to go to the end of the world from it.”

“Yes, I did that,” said Charlie. “Did you behold it and think it very good? Are you going to repeat it on me? Am I to be, forever, he who lay in bed with the mistress of the young man with the carnation, and, by the way, what has become of her, and how is she to explain things to him? And who went off, and wrote to her: ‘I have gone away. Forgive me, if you can.'”

“Yes,” said the Lord.

“Nay, tell me, now that we are at it,” cried Charlie, “am I, while I write of the beauty of young women, to get, from the live women of the earth, a shilling’s worth, and no more?”

“Yes,” said the Lord. “And you are to be content with that.”

Charlie was drawing a pattern with his finger on the table; he said nothing. It seemed that the discourse was ended here, when again the Lord spoke.

“Who made the ships, Charlie?” he asked.

“Nay, I know not,” said Charlie, “did you make them?”

“Yes,” said the Lord, “I made the ships on their keels, and all floating things. The moon that sails in the sky, the orbs that swing in the universe, the tides, the generations,
the fashions. You make me laugh, for I have given you all the world to sail and float in, and you have run aground here, in a room of the Queen’s Hotel to seek a quarrel.”

“Come,” said the Lord again, “I will make a covenant between me and you. I, I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Charlie.

“What did you say?” asked the Lord. “Do you want any less than that?”

“I said nothing,” said Charlie.

“But you are to write the books,” said the Lord. “For it is I who want them written. Not the public, not by any means the critics, but ME!”

“Can I be certain of that?” Charlie asked.

“Not always,” said the Lord. “You will not be certain of it at all times. But I tell you now that it is so. You will have to hold on to that.”

“O good God,” said Charlie.

“Are you going,” said the Lord, “to thank me for what I have done for you tonight?”

“I think,” said Charlie, “that we will leave it at what it is, and say no more about it.”

I went and looked up Izak Dinesen later. That’s actually the pen name of Karen Blixen, the Danish author who wrote Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast. She seems to have lived a life which was in some ways irregular, but . . . what a writer!

And of course, it could just be a coincidence that Winter’s Tales has been sitting on my shelf since some time this fall, and that I just happened to open it this morning—this morning, the morning after finally having finished the demanding St. Theresa. Could be. But I don’t believe in coincidences any more than Charlie Despard does.