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Bishop, I'm tempted to let you have the last word on the question of writing imaginatively about real people. But see what you make of this: My father was deeply upset by Amadeus, because he regarded it as ahistorical, a made-up story about real people that besmirched the names of both Mozart and Salieri. To which I imagine the author might reply, "I did not set out to write a play about either Mozart or Salieri. I set out to write about the peculiar blessing of genius, the way it alights on souls seemingly without regard for worthiness or even goodness. Mozart and Salieri were here merely characters. You will note that it was a play, not a history. I could say the same thing about A Man for All Seasons. Bolt did not set out to give a perfectly accurate account of Sir Thomas More et. al., nor even to perfectly account for the events that led up to his death. He set out to write a story about a man who would not surrender his self, and found in More a suitable starting point for that project. It is only piety that criticizes the liberties taken in Amadeus and celebrates them in A Man for All Seasons. If Hansen had wanted to explore the subject of the poet straining against his times and even his own convictions about the goodness of self-immolation, well, why not use Hopkins?"

 

Amy: You mentioned writers who employed a scorched earth policy in writing about other real human beings. Makes me wonder about Flannery O'Connor, who more than once referred to the author's obligation to describe the concrete realities she sees around her. She depicted some doozies in her time. But there, I suppose, she didn't actually name names, the way Hansen does here. She could say, "Oh, Mrs. Nastypants just provided a few ticks and quirks; I never intended for people to think that she was the Warthog in Revelation."

 

Or something like that.

 

Bishop, you and Amy both mentioned the deaths of the sisters. Amy, reading your line about the way the story ends for all of us gave me chills, thankyouverymuch. "You fool! This very night, your life will be required of you." The Lord comes like a thief in the night -- unexpected, unwanted, and intent on taking from us what we tend to regard as our own. In other words, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Good night, kids! Pleasant dreams!

 

You ask, "What narrative of our own lives does that leave us with, here, as we all are, in exile?" A scary question, because the mind loves stories, and wants very much to place a narrative on its own experience. When it finds that this is impossible, when it finds that God's ways really aren't our ways, then it is tempted to regard life, the story without a narrative, as absurd. And then it starts drinking absinthe and reading Sartre. Or else it casts out into the deep . . .

 

The bishop notes that there are differences between the deaths of the sisters and that of Hopkins. Here's a big one: The sisters' deaths inspired Hopkins to write perhaps his greatest poem. Not exactly laying down one's life for one's friends, but it does give some larger meaning to their story. I think it helps. Hopkins's death, on the other hand, would not have signified beyond itself, or at least, not as clearly. That's why it required more narrative closure. Imagine if his parents had never made it, if his last words hadn't been, "I'm so happy. I'm so happy." Imagine if he'd spoken, "For naught, this sojourn," into his empty room and slipped away. Even if that was in fact the way it happened, we would have been horrified, no? Especially if his poetry had followed him into obscurity. The only way we could make sense of it would be to think, "Well, at least it served to inspire Hansen . . ." And even then, if the story had ended with, "Hopkins died, and his poems disappeared into some Jesuit's filing cabinet in a school that would be destroyed by a German bomb in 1941," we would be in the realm of early Waugh, where horror was the intended effect.

 

 

But let's get back to those sisters. Bishop, you write, "I wanted these spiritual children of St. Francis to leave this world more artfully. I wanted a sign, subtle yet perceptible, given to me, the reader, that despite its harshness, theirs was a fitting fate . . ." I want to dig into the sisters' stories, see what I can find.

 

Sister Henrica gets washed overboard:

 

Her black veil smothered her face, her black cloak furled around her like the strips of burial cloths binding Lazarus in the tomb . . . she was burdened and yoked by her habit, and demanded by the sea. She remembered as she sank: Jesus wept.

 

Remember what she said when she discovered her vocation? "I feel I finally have let go of heavy weights and found out I can float." In reply, the foundress "quoted the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus spoke of his yoke being easy and his burden light, noting, 'When our vocation is from God, no matter how difficult it may otherwise seem, it is not a burden. We feel light.'" The outward sign of her vocation yokes her and drags her down into salt water. I will let the poets take it from there.

 

Sister Aurea, one of nine children, found at age 19 that God had named her Little One. One of the lines she finds in Scripture relating to this name is this: "Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." Though she is little (childish), though she is one of many, this verse tells her that she is loved precisely in her littleness, and that she is special. As she is freezing to death, she remembers getting scolded for getting into a hot apple pie, "wearing a stained apron that she tripped over. Children used to laugh because [she] wore hand-me-down clothes." Her apron is too big -- her littleness is a problem. She wears hand-me-downs; she is not special. But then: "Sister Brigitta was close as a memory now, and softly saying, 'Sister Aurea? Shall we pray an Act of Contrition together?'" Close as a memory -- replacing those bad old memories with a loving approach that singles her out and leads her in the prayer as a mother leads a child. "Sister Aurea couldn't understand, but it was like a sweet lullaby, a song urging a little one to sleep. And she was always such a good child. She slept."

 

Sister Brigitta helped the nurses in the children's infirmary, and died after wading through the chest-deep water to comfort a screaming child. That's a bit weak, I know. What about this? As a child, "Her Christian faith was authentic, but she knew only how to talk in the catechetical language of others. The most difficult question anyone could ask [her] was, 'How do you feel?'" And how does she die? Unable to remember the words to the "Hail, Holy Queen." Instead, she seizes on one phrase: "this, our exile." "The prayer was meant for a world sour with sinning. Exiles, then, not from Germany, not from Europe, but from Paradise, from Heaven. And the others were no longer exiles. She slipped helplessly underwater, and joined them." Her faith breaks free of the catechetical recitation of prayer; she meditates; and I don't think it's stretching the text too far to suggest that as she goes under, she feels that she is going home.

 

Sister Barbara is tougher, or maybe it's just that my brain is weak. Reading is hard! She decides at 19 that she wants to go to the convent. "Only there can I be fully alive." She is pleased to receive the name Barbara, "because she learned that the name was derived from the Latin word for 'wild, rough, and savage.'" Here is her death:

 

Sister Barbara could be self-sufficient and taciturn, masculine and pitiless, and some nuns presumed that she was without emotion. But in truth emotions could so rule and overwhelm her that she'd learned to dam them up.

 

She compares herself to Peter, with "contrary emotions spilling out of him whenever Jesus was around. . . . Wasn't she Peter now?" She recalls Peter in the water, crying, "Lord, save me." And immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand.

 

And she screamed into the night overhead, "O Christ, Christ come quickly!" But in their long ordeal on the Deutschland, she'd given up too much vitality, and she sank to her knees. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus," she said. Soon after that she died.

 

Barbara is like Peter; Peter has contrary emotions whenever Jesus is around; Barbara goes from screaming entreaty to gentle, accepting invitation. Therefore, the text suggests, Jesus is around. Further, when she screams, she breaks through the dam she has built around her emotions -- she becomes wild, rough, and savage, living up to the name given her when she entered the convent where she would be fully alive. Not with earthly life -- she has lost that vitality. But with the life to come.

 

But Sister Norberta? She's a tough one. I'll have to think about her some more. If anyone else wants to take a shot at it in the meantime, please do. And please consider these literary fumblings as my attempt to, as Joseph put it, get attuned to Hansen's art.

 

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Matthew Lickona is a staff writer for the San Diego Reader, a weekly newspaper. He is also the author of the 2005 memoir Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic. He lives in La Mesa, California, with his wife and children.