Author2Author: Pankaj Mishra & Paul Elie, pt. 1

I'd seen Pankaj Mishra talk about An End to Suffering back in January, and I was anxious to hear more about his exploration of the Buddha's life and continued relevance in an Author2Author conversation. So I ran the idea by his publicist, who suggested pairing Mishra up with Paul Elie, the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I was thrilled, because I loved Elie's study of the life and works of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy, and I was curious to see what would happen when their perspectives on contemporary spirituality came together. I wasn't disappointed, and I'm certain you won't be, either.

Pankaj Mishra: Paul, I have always been curious about how writers alight upon their subjects and in your case, I wonder: How did a writer and intellectual, living in a largely secular and metropolitan world where any hint of religious or spiritual affinities usually provokes disbelief if not scorn and pity, get interested enough in these four Catholic figures to attempt an interconnected narrative about their lives? Where did you first learn of them or begin to see their lives as tracing a particular journey through the modern world? I ask this probably because I had to overcome a great deal of inhibitions, a lot of reflexive secular prejudice against religion, before deciding to write about the Buddha.

Paul Elie: As you know, my book’s subtitle is "An American Pilgrimage," and the short answer to your question is that the book is in important ways the fruit of my own pilgrimage, which is bound up with the pilgrimage of the four writers the book describes. Like you, I have always sought from books, for whatever reasons, not just superior amusement, or information, or edification in the strict sense, but what Nietzsche, speaking of history in the passage you made your epigraph, described as knowledge “for the sake of life and action.” I think the initial appeal of those four Catholic writers lay in this--in the frankness of their assumption that literature might serve as a guide to life, or at least might speak to the great questions of our individual lives, and in the power of their work to suggest the possibility of some answers. Though I had been raised a Catholic, I had grown up in the postwar suburbs, where Catholicism’s history, like that of India in your account, is scanty and “largely unrecorded.” My encounters at Fordham, a Jesuit university in the Bronx, with Flannery O’Connor’s pointed dramas of outsized religious crisis, and then with Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, were an opening at once to the larger history of Catholicism and to the pressure that it at its best brings to the questions of our lives.

Whereas you went to a Himalayan village after university and began to write travel articles--and to ponder a novel about the Buddha--I went to work in an office building over Grand Central Station and began to write features about the television business. It was unfulfilling work to say the least. After hours, I was more or less alone in the city--no less so, to be honest, than you were in Mashobra. In those circumstances, I read certain writers with a great hunger: O’Connor and Merton, yes, but also Dorothy Day, the foundress of the Catholic Worker movement, which has fed, sheltered, and kept company with the poor for seventy years, taking a stand for peace and against war all the while. I was struck by the fact that these writers’ lives had unfolded in the very city where I was now living--that Merton and Day had been a “dangling man” and “wayward woman” on these very blocks half a century earlier. Even Flannery O’Connor, so distinctly southern a writer, had spent a few months living on upper Broadway, visiting the Cloisters, and so forth, measuring the distance between Manhattan and rural Georgia in every sentence of Wise Blood.

This factual coincidence of their lives and mine, so obvious in retrospect, came as a great surprise, akin to your surprise that the founder of Buddhism, arguably the greatest Indian who ever lived, had lived in the same places you had lived in. It was as if the reality of their presence in New York once upon a time served as evidence of the reality of the religious experience they described. I’d say that it was this coincidence that led me to identify with those writers. At first I followed in their footsteps in the ways their books rightly invite the reader to do. I spent Saturdays one Lent serving soup “on the line” at St. Joseph’s House, the Catholic Worker house of hospitality on East First Street. But identification turned into over-identification, as I read my own life, such as it was, through the screen of their writing: I wandered through an exhibit of Merton’s correspondence at Columbia like a secret sharer, an initiate into the mysteries of his life.

There came a point when I realized that I knew those writers’ thoughts better than I knew my own, and that I was burying my unbelief in their belief, or more precisely effacing my ill-formed belief in their searching and articulate accounts of conversion and suchlike. It was at that point, I suppose, as I drew near to my thirtieth birthday--the day of reckoning for Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer--that I determined to write a book about them: either to write my way out from under them or in some sense to make them my own.