{"id":90486,"date":"2015-10-02T12:28:48","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T16:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90486"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:44:26","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T19:44:26","slug":"sick-souls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/02\/sick-souls\/","title":{"rendered":"Sick Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the long line of conversion literature from\u00a0imprisoned writers.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Eldridge Cleaver in the pants he developed.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the first entry, on Dostoyevsky\u2019s<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Notes from a Dead House,<\/a> here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In one of his later theological tracts, the sixteenth-century Nonconformist preacher John Bunyan interpreted a few lines from 2 Timothy\u2014\u201cI am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand\u201d\u2014as a kind of challenge. \u201cHere we see,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthat a Christian\u2019s heart should be unclenched from this world; for he that is ready to be made a sacrifice for Christ and his blessed Word, he must be one that is not entangled with the affairs of this life: how else can he please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier?\u201d<\/p>\n

Modern Biblical scholars suspect that Paul didn\u2019t write most of 2 Timothy at all (it was likely composed by the apostle\u2019s acolytes some time after his execution), but Bunyan could just as easily have extracted the same lesson from any number of lines in the letter Paul wrote to the young church in Philippi during one of his several imprisonments by the Roman government. \u201cMy desire,\u201d Paul confesses frankly early in the epistle, \u201cis to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.\u201d Some verses later, he heaps scorn on the respected Pharisee he\u2019d been earlier in life. On the road to Damascus decades earlier, he\u2019d survived a violent conversion experience:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ruthless self-excoriation, dramatic acts of abandonment, intractable confidence mixed with frightening displays of vulnerability: there\u2019s something unhinged about the line of conversion literature that began with Paul and came to include figures as diverse as Bunyan, the nineteenth-century transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, and the twentieth-century militant activist Eldridge Cleaver. That three of those four figures did much of their most influential writing from prison goes some way toward proving a fact Bunyan identified in his treatise The Acceptable Sacrifice<\/em>. Converts, Bunyan argued, are threats to the state precisely because of their melancholy, their extreme dissatisfaction, and their reckless lack of care for their earthly lot:<\/p>\n

\n

A man, a woman, that is blessed with a broken heart, is so far from getting by that esteem with the world, that they are but burdens \u2026 such people carry with them molestation and disquietment; they are in carnal families, as David was to the king of Garth, \u201ctroublers of the house.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rembrandt, The Apostle Paul<\/i>, c. 1657<\/p><\/div>\n

As the snippets above suggest, Bunyan\u2019s prose is too ruminative and too dense with scripture to relate events reliably. Reading Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners<\/a><\/em>, the feverish spiritual autobiography he wrote during his twelve years in jail for preaching to \u201cunlawful assemblies,\u201d you get only the dimmest sense of the man\u2019s unfortunate, eventful life. A prolific, well-known contemporary of Milton, Hobbes, and Thomas Browne, he was born to a struggling brass worker near the end of 1628. In the sixteen years between 1644 and 1660, he buried his mother and his younger sister (a month apart), his first wife, and his infant son by the woman he soon remarried\u2014losses to which Grace Abounding <\/em>hardly ever refers. When you read, five pages before the end of the book, a passing reference to Bunyan\u2019s \u201cpoor blind child,\u201d you want to look back for any earlier mention that his first daughter was born blind. You won\u2019t find one.<\/p>\n

What you will find, page after page, is a man fretting at length over the state of his soul. Some of the doubts Bunyan confesses might be expected of a recent convert: Have I counted my early, worldly life as enough of a loss? Have I sufficiently abandoned my \u201cconfidence in the flesh?\u201d Others are out of his hands. Bunyan agonized over his place in the elect; it tore at him that \u201cunless the great God \u2026 had voluntarily chosen me to be a vessel of mercy, though I should desire, and long, and labour until my heart did break, no good could come of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In most cases, his worries cluster around snippets of scripture. Bunyan had a more intimate, obsessive relationship with the written word than can now be easily imagined. The language with which he describes calling Bible verses to mind is the kind you\u2019d attribute to someone imprisoned or possessed: \u201cThis scripture also did seem to me to trample upon all my desires\u201d; \u201cThat piece of a sentence darted in upon me.\u201d A single string of words, Bunyan insists, once \u201ccame with great power upon my spirit.\u201d Elsewhere, he describes how he\u2019d sometimes \u201chave a touch from\u201d another. Words claim Bunyan\u2019s attention throughout this book more than other people ever do, and for William James, that was enough to mark him\u2014at least as he emerges in Grace Abounding<\/em>\u2014as an example of a \u201csick soul\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s maybe unwise to take Bunyan\u2019s autobiography as grounds for a psychoanalytic diagnosis. Like a patient\u2019s testimony, Grace Abounding <\/em>is a carefully and selectively composed self-portrait. But it\u2019s revealing that it was for these <\/em>particular kinds of regrets and abdications that Bunyan wanted to be known. Like Paul, he was rarely more violent than in his disdain for \u201cthe flesh.\u201d (When his enemies accuse him of consorting with loose women, he fires back with the astonishing declaration that \u201cI know not whether there be such a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of the whole heaven but by their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife.\u201d) He seems, indeed, to mistrust the whole web of human social life. To the extent that he was a perfect convert, he was also an unruly citizen, an element that couldn\u2019t be fixed down by the usual laws or proprieties. The question, as far as his imprisoners were concerned, was not whether he was a progressive or a revolutionary; it was what law he answered to, what words he gave weight, and into how many martyrdoms his \u201cbroken heart\u201d could lead him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An illustration by Harold Copping from a 1905\u00a0edition Grace Abounding.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Paul\u2019s conversion occurred in three days. (That was how long it took for him to receive a visit from the prophet Ananias, at which point \u201csomething like scales fell\u201d from his eyes.) Bunyan\u2019s took place over years of painful self-assessment. Eldridge Cleaver, the volatile polemicist who traveled from the halls of Soledad and Folsom to the uppermost level of the Black Panthers and then, improbably, to the Church of Latter-day Saints and the GOP lecture circuit, underwent more conversions than it\u2019s easy to count. Soul on Ice<\/a><\/em>, the essay collection he wrote and published in 1968 while serving a lengthy prison sentence for rape, is his major literary testament. It\u2019s a strange, uneven, and sometimes repellant book, the product of a mind that never found a set of beliefs on which it could settle for long.<\/p>\n

The young Cleaver produced some of his era\u2019s most trenchant critiques of the American prison system. (\u201cMany convicts who do not have lawyers are forced to act in propria persona<\/em>,\u201d he wrote, denouncing prison libraries for refusing to carry explanatory books about law. \u201cThey do all right. But it would be much easier if they could get books that showed them how to properly plead their cause.\u201d) The account he gives midway through Soul on Ice <\/em>of white America\u2019s disillusionment with its own heroes might be more dated than the prison journals earlier in the book, but it\u2019s no less revealing about the era\u2019s agonized mood. (\u201cNot even the master\u2019s own children can find it possible to applaud him\u2014he cannot even applaud himself! The negative rings too loudly.\u201d) It was these sections of the book, one suspects, that white critics like Maxwell Geismar or Norman Mailer had in mind when they praised Cleaver for\u2014in Geismar\u2019s words\u2014\u201cdissecting the deepest and most cherished notions of our personal and social behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cleaver evidently\u2014and understandably\u2014didn\u2019t want to stop at doing his white readers the service of dissecting their behavior. Instead, in Soul on Ice<\/em>, he insisted on making an elaborate, overblown monument to a subject that had come to possess him at least as strongly as the thought of salvation possessed Bunyan: masculinity. \u201cI could not approve the act of rape,\u201d he writes in an troublingly abstract, noncommittal key about the spree of racially targeted sexual assaults he committed at age twenty-two. \u201cEven though I had some insight into my own motivations, I did not feel justified \u2026 My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Cleaver to identify the most notable casualty of his rape spree as his own \u201cpride as a man\u201d is staggering, but not altogether surprising. Throughout Soul on Ice<\/em>, he rarely attends so much to any individual people as he does to the legends he spun around what it meant to be a man. \u201cEach half of the human equation,\u201d he wrote in a berserk cosmological treatise late in the book, \u201cthe male and female hemispheres of the Primeval Sphere, must prepare themselves for \u2026 fusion by achieving a Unitary Sexual Image, i.e., a heterosexual identity free from the mutually exclusive, antagonistic, antipodal impediments of homosexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Cleaver held beliefs like this goes some way toward explaining how he could write the hate-filled diatribe against James Baldwin that stands midway through Soul on Ice<\/em>, in which he accuses the older author of \u201cethnic self-hate\u201d on the basis, apparently, of his sexual interest in white men. It also suggests why he included a cringe-inducing set of love letters to his female lawyer later in the book (\u201cafter you left, I loafed in the cage of my skull, feeling prematurely embalmed in some magical ethered mist dispensed by the dialectic of our contact\u201d), and how he could see fit to conflate \u201cmanhood\u201d with human dignity as he does during one of the collection\u2019s show-stopping climaxes. \u201cWe shall have our manhood,\u201d he announces then, \u201cor the earth will be leveled by our attempts to get it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also helps explain the series of hairpin turns his career took after his release from Folsom. After a shoot-out with the Oakland police, Cleaver\u2014by then the Panthers\u2019 minister of information and one of their most prominent spokespersons\u2014fled the country. He settled in Cuba, then Algeria, where he effectively broke with the party. Upon seeing the face of Christ in the moon from his balcony during an abortive suicide attempt in Paris, he became a prompt convert to Christianity. This did not impede him from using his revenue from Soul on Ice <\/em>to develop and market a special line of male trousers equipped with dangling, fitted codpieces that, he claimed, would \u201cput sex back where it should be.\u201d (\u201cYou\u2019re wearing sissy pants,\u201d he once snapped at a Harvard undergraduate during an interview with the Crimson<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

By 1975, Cleaver had returned to the States. \u201cWith all its faults,\u201d he now insisted, \u201cthe American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.\u201d For the last twenty years of his life, he drifted erratically from dogma to dogma: at various points, he was a Moonie, a Mormon, a committed Republican, and the founder of something he baptized \u201cChristlam\u201d\u2014a fusion of Christianity and Islam that also came to include a smaller sect he called the \u201cGuardians of the Sperm.\u201d He died in 1998.<\/p>\n

Like Bunyan\u2019s, Cleaver\u2019s is a tempting life to comb for pathologies. Coming across such a \u201cpsychopathic temperament\u201d as his, so prone to misogynistic or homophobic outbursts, so fixated on the redemptive possibilities of masculine sexual energy, so susceptible to unwise conversions and disastrous decisions, it\u2019s hard not to go looking for a single, explanatory cause. But there\u2019s no isolated conversion gene in Cleaver or Bunyan. The writing they produced in prison is too tense, conflicted, and formally baffling to justify any diagnosis other than the obvious one: that they were both, to a profound degree, not at home in the world. Their shared desire wasn\u2019t far from the one Paul confessed to the Philippians: to \u201cdepart\u201d this world rather than \u201cremain in the flesh.\u201d In Bunyan, that desire took the form of a kind of exaggerated contrition; in Cleaver, that of an equally exaggerated obsession with male sexuality. But both of their spiritual autobiographies suggest what a lonely, precarious thing it is to be a convert of such a reckless stripe\u2014to accept some temptations too readily and reject others too vehemently, to be always renouncing more and yet never renouncing enough.<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, <\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the first entry, on Dostoyevsky\u2019s<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Notes from a Dead House,<\/a> here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the long line of conversion literature from\u00a0imprisoned writers. Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the first entry, on Dostoyevsky\u2019s\u00a0Notes from a Dead House, here. In one of his later theological tracts, the sixteenth-century Nonconformist preacher John Bunyan interpreted a few lines from 2 Timothy\u2014\u201cI am now ready to be offered, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19434],"tags":[19627,8618,19625,19624,19633,19628,19632,19436,14307,19629,19631,19626,8902,19435,1786,19634,19630,5505],"class_list":["post-90486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prison-lit","tag-apostles","tag-christianity","tag-conversion","tag-conversion-literature","tag-eldridge-cleaver","tag-epistles","tag-grace-abounding-to-the-chief-of-sinners","tag-incarceration","tag-jail","tag-john-bunyan","tag-orestes-brownson","tag-paul","tag-prison","tag-prison-literature","tag-religion","tag-soul-on-ice","tag-the-acceptable-sacrifice","tag-the-bible"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSick Souls: On Writers Who Found Religion in Prison<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Max Nelson on the long history of conversion literature from imprisoned writers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/02\/sick-souls\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sick Souls by Max Nelson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 2, 2015 \u2013 On the long line of conversion literature from\u00a0imprisoned writers. 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