Carlene Bauer’s novel follows the correspondence and ensuing friendship of a young man and a young woman who meet at an artist’s colony. Bauer’s account of the ups and downs of Frances and Bernard’s relationship is by turns beautiful and heartbreaking. Her story in enhanced by the superb narration of Angela Brazil and Stephen Thorne, who narrate Frances and Bernard’s letters, respectively. Both narrators excel at bringing forth the joy and pain in the letters, ensuring that the listener receives the full emotional impact of Frances and Bernard’s story. Brazil and Thorne’s delivery is natural and expressive, taking Bauer’s lovely work and making it a memorable listening experience. J.L.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
The novel is anchored by two deeply imagined, fully inhabited characters who give voice to a love story that is as emotionally powerful as it is intellectually spirited.
The novel is anchored by two deeply imagined, fully inhabited characters who give voice to a love story that is as emotionally powerful as it is intellectually spirited.
Frances and Bernard
Narrated by Angela Brazil, Stephen R. Thorne
Carlene BauerUnabridged — 6 hours, 40 minutes
Frances and Bernard
Narrated by Angela Brazil, Stephen R. Thorne
Carlene BauerUnabridged — 6 hours, 40 minutes
Overview
The novel is anchored by two deeply imagined, fully inhabited characters who give voice to a love story that is as emotionally powerful as it is intellectually spirited.
Editorial Reviews
Bauer…writes with authority and gusto about issues of faith. The prose here is exquisite, winding between narrative momentum and lofty introspection. And she employs the epistolary form nimbly, providing an intimate, uncluttered space for her characters to develop. The most unexpected pleasure of this period love story is spending time in the company of people who are engaged in the edifying pursuit of living as Christians—a good reminder that, regardless of the current upheaval in the church, the big questions are still worth asking.
What Frances and Bernard has to offer is a fresh voice thinking seriously about what a religiously committed life might have felt like and perhaps, in our own far-from-tranquil period, might feel like again.
Frances and Bernard are writers. She’s a novelist who studied at Iowa, Catholic, a bit prim, but tart-tongued. He’s a poet, descended from Puritans but a convert to Catholicism, prone to fits of mania. They meet in the late 1950s in a writer’s colony and become friends. If this sounds like Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, it should: Frances and Bernard are their fictionalized avatars, with Frances the more fictional, since she’s neither Southern nor suffering from an incurable disease. Short but satisfying, this epistolary novel covers roughly nine years, as Frances and Bernard grow closer, at first through letters, then visits, always fending off questions from themselves and others about whether they could be more than friends. If Bauer makes things better for O’Connor than they were in actuality, she does it without cheating on her characters, who, whatever their real life inspirations, are fictional and obligated only to work in that form. Bauer’s debut novel (after her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl) is well written, engrossing, and succeeds in making Frances and Bernard’s shared interest in religion believable and their relationship funny, sweet, and sad. A lovely surprise. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.)
"A story of conversion, shattered love and the loss of faith, recalling 20th century masters like Graham Greene and Walker Percy…Frances is refreshingly down-to-earth in her spiritual convictions…Bauer gets right… the shifting balance of literary ambition and emotional need, Yeats’s old choice between perfection of the life or of the work. Bauer is herself a distinctive stylist who can write about Simone Weil or Kierkegaard with wit and charm. A fresh voice thinking seriously about what a religiously committed life might have felt like and perhaps, in our own far-from tranquil period, might feel like again." - New York Times Book Review
"Graceful and gem-like…. Through Bauer’s sharp, witty, and elegant prose, [Frances and Bernard] become vibrant and original characters…. These are not your typical lovebirds, but writers with fierce and fine intellects.… We are reminded of the power of correspondence — the flirtation of it, the nervousness, the delicious uncertainty of writing bold things and then waiting days, weeks, or even months for a reply. After finishing this sweet and somber novel, we might sigh and think, 'It's a shame we don’t write love letters anymore' — before stopping for a moment to marvel at the subtlety of what Bauer has wrought out of history and a generous imagination, and being thankful that someone still is."--Boston Globe "Frances and Bernard portrays two writers drawn into a friendship sparked by mutual admiration. They elegantly convey their reflections, encouragements and chastisements in letters written over a span of 11 years…Bauer captures the style and language of the period with gleeful dexterity.…Bauer is masterful in whipping up the frenzy of Bernard’s unstable certainty that she is the answer to his Olympian quest…Bauer, who has published a memoir about her evangelical childhood and subsequent conversion to Catholicism, writes with authority and gusto about issues of faith. The prose here is exquisite, winding between narrative momentum and lofty introspection. And she employs the epistolary form nimbly, providing an intimate, uncluttered space for her characters to develop. The most unexpected pleasure of this period love story is spending time in the company of people who are engaged in the edifying pursuit of living as Christians — a good reminder that, regardless of the current upheaval in the church, the big questions are still worth asking. -- The Washington Post "With wonderful writing, elegant, pithy and witty, the author reeled me in from the very beginning. Two young writers in another, more genteel place and time, a burgeoning friendship, the possibility of romance? It struck me as the perfect confection...[It] wrestle[s] with big questions in gorgeous and sharply hewn language. There is much to admire in this smart, ambitious, debut novel." - Pittsburgh post-Gazette "A surprising and insightful novel… blooming with richness and intelligence…. The two [main characters] share and joust and tease and advise and explore and analyze and admire …. The careful trajectory of their intertwining and deepening relation becomes "a beautiful thing" — these two voices in Bauer’s fine rendering sing counterpoint that is exhilarating, and heartbreaking…. Their relation stirs into the love, for each, of a lifetime. A marvelous tracing of these lives." - Buffalo News "A debut novel of stunning subtlety, grace, and depth. Bauer’s use of the epistolary form is masterful as she forges a passionately spiritual, creative, and romantic dialogue between characters based on two literary giants famous for their brilliant letters, Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. Though she changes the particulars of O’Connor’s life, Bauer retains the great writer’s rigor, humor, faith, penetrating insights, and wisdom. Bauer is phenomenally fluent in the voices and sensibilities she so intently emulates, composing dueling letters of breathtaking wit, seduction, and heartbreak. Spanning a stormy decade, Bauer’s piercing novel is dynamic in structure, dramatic in emotion and event, and fierce in its inquiry into religion, love, and art."—Booklist "There are so many reasons to love this perfect novel, not least because before our eyes, Bauer quietly reveals the lovers to each other, and to themselves, while she explores all of the important problems of faith, work, art, marriage, passion, and how best to lead the life that you think you're meant to live. Frances and Bernard is smart and clear and deep and beautiful. I worship it." – Jane Hamilton "I'll never stop raving about FRANCES AND BERNARD. I loved, admired and devoured it; didn't want it to end. What is better than a good novel in letters? A great one. Carlene Bauer has written a book that is dear, brilliant, and unforgettable."--Elinor Lipman "Short but satisfying...well written, engrossing, and succeeds in making Frances and Bernard’s shared interest in religion believable and their relationship funny, sweet, and sad. A lovely surprise."--Publishers Weekly (starred) "A series of erudite letters, some of which are exchanged between the two rich and somewhat eccentric protagonists, and some are written by these characters to others. This remarkable method of storytelling provides snapshots of the events that shape the story."--Library Journal "I have rarely encountered historical fiction that seems to spring so authentically from the period in which it's set. The two correspondents in Carlene Bauer's book, along with their families and friends, come wittily alive in the letters they exchange, and those letters end up accumulating a terrific narrative and emotional force. Bauer recaptures a time in which people took one another more seriously, an era when they still inclined toward epistolary explorations instead of self-promoting tweets. Frances and Bernard is one of the best first novels I've read in years." --Thomas Mallon "Dazzling and gorgeously written, FRANCES AND BERNARD features a pair of brilliant, complicated writers who present themselves to each other in letters that form the most exciting epistolary novel in recent memory. A slim book, it still seems to say all of the important things about friendship, faith, love, the literary life, and especially the costs of living as an artist while still inhabiting the real world. It’s a marvel." – Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words "I had ten pages left as the bus pulled into my home station, and I wanted to murder the driver for rousting me from my seat. Instead of heading home, I stood in the parking lot and finished the book right then and there. I did not merely love Frances and Bernard; I worried myself sick over them. And the prose! So delectable you could eat it for dessert." – Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys and Any Bitter Thing "A truly original, very moving novel about how sometimes the deepest relationships in our lives are also the most impossible. The letters between Frances and Bernard-- which begin as witty, sometimes wary, and full of unusual confidences about love and spiritual matters-- explode with passion on the page. My eyes filled with tears. It is wonderful to read something so rare and true. What a rich writer and two unforgettable lovers!" -- Stephanie Cowell, author of Claude and Camille: a novel of Monet and The Physician of London (American Book Award)Bauer's (Not That Kind of Girl) latest imagines the relationship writers Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor might have had. Frances and Bernard meet one summer at a writers' colony and start an alliance of the mind, growing closer as they write letters over several years in which they discuss their writing, their faith, and the jobs each takes to provide food and shelter. Epistolary works can be difficult to imbue with emotion owing, in part, to the lack of dialog. The narrators, Angela Brazil and Stephen R. Throne, do a wonderful job; Brazil is especially skilled at conveying the emotional depth in Frances' letters. VERDICT Recommend to listeners who enjoy works of a meditative nature, or who like works such as Jonathan and Tad Richards's Nick and Jake. ["This remarkable method of storytelling provides snapshots of the events that shape the story. This book will appeal to readers who enjoy plumbing the depths of the human condition," read the review of the Houghton Harcourt hc, LJ 9/1/12.—Ed.]—Suanne B. Roush, Seminole, FL
Frances, a novelist, and Bernard, a poet, meet at a writers’ colony where he observes her being silently, and wonderfully, snide. They strike up a correspondence, first about the Catholic faith, soon about writing, and then later, chronicling their angst-filled romance. Letters to others augment their own as they each write to their closest friends and to their mutual editor. The dust-jacket copy makes clear that the novelist Flannery O’Connor and the poet Robert Lowell were the inspiration for Frances and Bernard. Readers need not be familiar with either of those author’s lives, however, as Bauer crafts two wholly complete characters in their own right (and takes great liberties with the real biographical record of O’Connor and Lowell as well). While the canvas is small—intimately restricted to Frances’s and Bernard’s personal lives—Bauer creates a richly characterized and multi-layered portrait of both artists that deftly unfolds in leisurely, episodic exchanges. Gracefully written, Bauer’s fluid prose is at once solemn, tender, and witty as she ponders the cost and duty of art and love.
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Debut novelist Bauer pens an epistolary novel whose protagonists lead insular, self-absorbed and very dull lives. When Frances and Bernard meet at a writers' colony in 1957, they develop a tentative friendship. Frances, a middle-class young woman from a loving, boisterous family, is stoic and undemonstrative. Bernard, the product of a privileged background and a Harvard alumnus, is unpredictable and outgoing. While seemingly polar opposites, they remain connected through their letters and spend years discussing everything from their tastes in music to their religious beliefs, their lives and the books they write. Bernard's a poet while Frances writes fiction; they describe themselves as the epitome of square, but their letters, while boring and full of obscure references and stilted wording, come off more as condescending and pretentious than square. Both write as if they're throwbacks to the Victorian era--at one point Frances informs Bernard that she retires to her chamber at night while her family watches television--which might explain their attraction to each other. Frances eventually moves to New York City, and Bernard visits her. Together, they explore the city. Then Bernard makes a huge mistake: He catches Frances off guard and kisses her, and she's not exactly pleased. It takes several more letters and a breakdown on Bernard's part before Frances finally admits she loves him. But both face difficulties and waste a lot more ink as Bernard struggles with mental illness and Frances copes with family crises before the final letter is completed. There's no doubt Bauer is well-educated and passionate about her religious views, her love of literature and her characters, but her attempts to create stimulating spiritual and intellectual dialogue feel forced. The characters are too wrapped up in themselves and totally ignore anything outside their narrow personal spheres. How can they not once mention one word about the space race, Elvis, the Beatles, JFK's assassination or Vietnam (just to name a few of the social and political events that occurred) during their 11 years of correspondence? Disappointing.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169863109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2013 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
August 15, 1957
Dearest Claire —
How are you?
Here I am in Philadelphia, back from the colony. It was mildly horrific, except for the writing. I finished what I think might be a draft of the novel. If I can just figure out a way to continuously sponge off the rich, the rest of my life should go very well!
I fear, however, that I will have to become a teacher to support this habit. I don't think the rich found me very grateful, and they probably won't ask me back to their glen. Oh well.
And now I will tell you the mildly horrific part. You deserved a honeymoon, but the whole time I was there I kept wishing that you could have come with me so that we could have taken long walks together fellowshipping in daily indictment of our fellow guests. Here were my spiritual exercises: I prayed, and then I had conversations with you in my head about the idiotic but apparently talented. I kept silent at meals, mostly, and this silence, as I hoped, kept people from trying to engage with me. I had nothing to say to them, because they were always telling stories about the other writers they knew or the hilarious things they'd gotten up to while drinking. And me, dry as the town of Ocean Grove. Sample colonists: Two poets, boys, our age. Editors at two different literary magazines. Indistinguishable. Their names do not bear repeating. Sample dinner story: These two had been members of a secret society at Yale, with one the head and the other his deputy. The head would sit on a gold-painted throne they'd stolen from the drama department to interview potential candidates. "Sodomy or disembowelment," he'd ask, "and every man who answered disembowelment got in." And then this, from the cocktail party they threw for us the first night: A novelist (a lady novelist, a writer of historical romances). Your mother has probably read them. I've seen them eaten with peanuts on trains. Was introduced to her as a fellow novelist and that was the last she cared to know of me, as she was off on a monologue detailing her busy reading and lecture schedule; the difficulties of balancing this schedule and her writing; the infinite patience of her advertising-executive husband, who never minds using his vacation time to travel to Scotland and Ireland and France for her research; the infinite patience of her dear, dear editor, who always picks up the phone when she needs to be cajoled out of an impasse, which isn't often. "Thank heavens I'm a visceral writer. It just comes out of me in a flood. I can't stop it. I usually need about three weeks here for six hundred pages, which I then whittle down to a —" I wanted so badly to tell her what this self-centered harangue was making my viscera do. Sometimes there's no more satisfactory oath to utter at these times but an exasperated Jesus Christ. I'd feel bad about taking the Lord's name in vain but I like to think he's much more offended by the arrogance that drives me to offer up such a bitterly desperate beseechment. Well, I guess he's offended by my bitterness too, but — a visceral writer. Dear God. Claire, please let me never describe myself or my work with such conviction. The self-regard that fuels so many — I will never get over it. It's like driving drunk, it seems to me. Although these people never kill anybody — they just blindside everyone until they've cleared a path to remunerative mediocrity.
On the few occasions I did speak at these gatherings, I was looked at as if I were a child of three who'd toddled up to their elbows, opened her mouth, and started speaking in perfect French. I enjoyed that. Silence, exile, cunning.
There was one young man who did bear scrutiny. Bernard Eliot. Harvard. Descended from Puritans, he claims. Another poet. But very good. Well, I guess I should say more than very good. Great? I know nothing about poetry, except that I either like it or don't. And his I liked very much. I hear John Donne in the poems — John Donne prowling around in the boiler room of them, shouting, clanging on pipes with wrenches, trying to get this young man to uncram the lines and cut the poems in half. We had a nice lunch one day — he asked me to lunch, he said, because he'd noticed me reading a book by Etienne Gilson. He converted a few years ago. Here I frown: could be a sign of delusions of grandeur, when a Puritan turns to Rome. He said an astounding thing at lunch. He asked me if I had a suitor — his word — and I said no. I was pretty sure this was just to start conversation. Then, after a pause, while I was shaking some ketchup out over my french fries, he said, chin in hand, as if he were speaking to me from within some dream he was having, "I think men have a tendency to wreck beautiful things." I wanted to laugh. I couldn't figure out what kind of response he wanted — was he trying to determine if I was the kind of girl who had experience with that kind of wreckage and who would then be a willing audience for a confession of some of his own, or was he laying a flirtatious trap to see how much of his own wreckage I'd abide? Instead I asked him if he wanted the ketchup. "Actually, yes, thanks," he said, and then, while shaking it out over his own fries, "Have you ever been to Italy?" He asked if he could write me while he was there. I did like him. Though I think he comes from money, and has read more at twenty-five than I will have read by the time of my death, he seemed blessedly free of pretension. Grandiose statements about romance notwithstanding.
Tell me of Paris. Send my love to Bill. When can I visit you in Chicago?
Love, Frances
August 20, 1957
Dear Ted —
I'm packing for Italy, and sorry that I won't get a chance to see you before I leave and you come back from Maine. Say hello to your mother and father for me. Will you finally make a conquest of that lobsterman's daughter? I think you're making this effort only to weave a line about it into the final ballad of Ted McCoy, just so your sons and grandsons have something to which they might aspire. Which I applaud. It's as good as catching a mermaid.
It's a damn shame that you didn't get accepted to the colony. I've said it before and there, I said it again. They decided to give all the fiction spots to women this round. Everyone there was a thoroughgoing hack. There was a pert, kimono-wearing Katherine Mansfield type to flirt with, but she wasn't smart enough to consider doing anything serious about. Which was all for the best. She couldn't remember my name until the second week of our stay. She insisted on calling me Anton. "I'm sorry, you remind me of —" but she would never say who this Anton was. I wanted to know! She meant to give off an air of mystery — instead she gave off an air of distracted imbecility.
I met a girl I quite liked — but not in that way. I think you'd like her too. She looks untouched, as if she grew up on a dairy farm, but she's dry, quick, and quick to skewer, so there's no mistaking that she was raised in a city. Philadelphia. Her name is Frances Reardon. Was a little Mother Superiorish. She's just escaped from the workshop at Iowa. She was the only other real writer there. Her novel is about a hard-hearted nun who finds herself receiving stigmata. It sounds juvenile, but it's very funny. (I stole a look at some pages in her bag at lunch when she'd gone to get us some coffee.) Clearly someone educated by bovine-minded Catholics taking her revenge — but for God. A curious mix of feminine and unfeminine — wore a very conventional white dress covered in the smallest of brown flowers and laid her napkin down on her lap with something approaching fussiness, but then thumped the bottom of a ketchup bottle as if she were pile driving. At one point said that "reading the verse of Miss Emily Dickinson makes me feel like I'm being suffocated by a powder puff full of talc" but avowed that she did like Whitman. "Does that give me the soul of a tramp?" she said, smiling. Very charming, and without meaning to be. A rare thing. Also a very, very good writer. She made me laugh quite a bit. And yet she is religious. Also very rare. I think I might try to make her a friend.
I know you're not a letter writer, but drop me a postcard or two.
Yours, Bernard
September 20, 1957
Dear Frances —
I hope this letter finds you well and still pleasurably hard at work.
I write to you from outside Florence, Italy, where an old professor of mine has a family house that he has very kindly allowed me to come and stay in. I'm finishing my book here.
I very much enjoyed talking with you this summer, and I would like to talk to you some more. But I'm in Italy. And you're in Philadelphia. So will you talk to me in letters?
Have you ever been to Italy? In Italy, I feel musical and indolent. All speech is arpeggio.
I wanted to ask you this question when we had lunch: Who is the Holy Spirit to you?
Sincerely, Bernard
September 30, 1957
Dear Bernard —
I was so very pleased to receive your note. Thank you for writing me. It would be a pleasure to talk to you in letters.
I have not been to Italy, but I have been to London, where I remember seeing young Italian tourists thronging about major landmarks and chattering in a way that made me think of pigeons. I know that must be unfair, but that is my only impression of Italy, refracted as it is through the prism of stodgy old England.
Have you ever been to Philadelphia? Right now, as summer winds down, it is fuzzy with heat and humidity, and the scent of the sun baking the bricks of the houses in this neighborhood. I feel indolent, but not musical. I am waitressing while I try to find a job in New York. One that allows me to pay the rent without taxing my brain. I can be a night owl and wouldn't mind writing until the wee hours after work.
The Holy Spirit! Bernard, you waste no time. I believe he is grace and wisdom.
I hope your work is going well.
Sincerely, Frances
October 30, 1957
Dear Frances —
There are pigeons here too. These Italian boys hoot and coo at the young foreign women wandering through the piazzas. Both sides are intractable — the boys with their intense conviction that they can catch something this way, the girls in their perturbation, their furrowed brows. It gives me great pleasure to sit and watch this. I keep hoping that one of these days a girl will whirl around and take one up on his invitation.
I've never been to Philadelphia.
I don't believe in wasting time when I've met someone I want to know more of.
I don't know what the Holy Spirit is or does. I think this is because I came to Catholicism late and have felt hesitant to penetrate this mystery. Protestants shove the Holy Spirit to the side — too mystical, too much a distraction from the Father and Son. They regard the Holy Spirit with the same suspicion, I think, as they do the saints — it's a form of idolatry to shift the focus to a third party, whether it be the Holy Spirit or Saint Francis. To appeal to the third party is pagan. Is he grace and wisdom? How do you know?
Let's not ever talk of work in these letters. When I see you again I want to talk to you about work, but I am envisioning our correspondence as a spiritual dialogue.
Sincerely, Bernard
November 20, 1957
Dear Bernard —
Deal. No discussion of work. I don't like to write about the writing either. I can talk about it, if pressed, but I prefer silence. I don't want to be responsible for any pronouncements on which I might fail to follow through.
I have to tell you — I am wary of projects that are described as spiritual. I fear — this is related to my aversion to artistic empty threats — that the more consciously spiritual a person appears to be, the less truly spiritual that person is. I know what you're after isn't that at all. Perhaps what I am also wary of is the notion that enough dogged inquiry will induce enlightenment. It may be a mistake to think that it can.
This is also why I fear I can't talk about the Holy Spirit in a way that will make him visible or present to you. I believe that he is counsel, because that is how Christ described him. To me counsel means that he is grace and wisdom. But I've never experienced grace and wisdom hovering like a flame over my head, and if I do ever realize that I acted wisely or received foresight clearly because of the Holy Spirit, I will let you know. But I don't ever want to feel touched or gifted spiritually. Or sense God moving about on the face of my waters. What a burden! Everything would then have to live up to being knocked off a horse by lightning, wouldn't it? I think I prefer to live at the level of what the British call muddle. Muddle with occasional squinting at something that might be called clarity in the distance, so as not to despair.
Sincerely, Frances
December 6, 1957
Dear Frances —
Points taken. My enthusiasm over finding someone with whom to talk these things over got the better of me.
My sin is poetizing. Can you tell?
As much as you protest, I think I have a better understanding now of the H.S.
Why do you despair?
Italy has ceased to be musical. It now feels decrepit and entombing, and I'm glad to be leaving next week. I'm not even taking pleasure in the fact that my Italian is now as musical as my German is serviceable. I don't feel indolent anymore either; I feel crushed by effort. I feel that I'm toting slabs of marble around from second guess to second guess.
I have sinned against us — I have spoken of work. Give me a penance.
When I come back I'll be living in Boston with Ted, a friend of mine — a college roommate whom I call my brother. I'm going to be teaching some classes at Harvard. I'll also be the editor of the Charles Review. I am looking forward to being back in Boston. I'm not looking forward to being that close again to my parents, but I think I can keep their genteel philistinism at bay. Send me your next letter at the address on the back of this page.
In fact, send me some of that novel you're working on. I command you.
Yours, Bernard
December 15, 1957
Bernard —
Please enjoy this postcard depicting Philadelphia's storied art museum and the mighty Schuylkill. Now you do not ever have to visit.
I hope that you are settling down in Boston. I hope that your marble slabs have become fleshly and alive again.
Oh, I don't despair of anything. At least right now. I was being hyperbolic. If I did despair, I probably wouldn't tell you of it, for your sake and mine! And God's. If I described my despair I would be poetizing and legitimizing it. And I'm not Dostoevsky.
I won't send you some of the novel just yet — it is still percolating. But I am flattered that you want to see it at all.
Penances are God's purview, not mine. Instead, I will wish you a merry Christmas. Love and joy come to you, and to your wassail too.
Sincerely, Frances
January 1, 1958
Dear Frances —
Happy new year! It is 1958. Do you care?
I have turned my book in. Now I am in that terrible period between labors, waiting for editorial orders, pacing the apartment like Hamlet waiting for his father's ghost. Although I have begun to write what may be poems for the next one, I can't throw myself into them quite yet. The lines are an insubordinate gang of children who have sized their father up and found him feckless. The only thing to do with this restlessness is talk and drink. Or box. I went to a gym a few times when I was at Harvard, thinking I would take it up, but I quickly abandoned that scheme. "Did you forget your bloomers?" a gentleman once said to me while we were sparring. I knocked him flat and never went back, knowing that I would have wanted to punch me, too, had I been a regular and spied my Ivied, ivory self sauntering through the door. If I didn't have to teach in a few days, and I keep forgetting that I do, I would probably get on a bus or a plane and hope to be invigorated by foreign context. I thought I had tired of Italy, but now — in frigid, colorless Boston, clouds like lesions, having had a dispiriting dinner with my parents, museum pieces already, immobilized by their complacencies — I wish I were there again, where history hung in the air like incense after a Mass, still alive, where around every corner there lurked a spiritual or architectural delight.
Here is a delight: the prospect of getting to know you better. To that end:
Frances, where in this world have you been besides London?
Where in this world would you like to go?
Have you been reading anything you like? Anything you loathe?
What is your confirmation name, and why?
The gospels or Paul?
Or is that the wrong question entirely?
Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? Or neither, and instead the whole of Shakespeare?
Or is that the wrong question entirely?
James Baldwin? (Say yes.)
Gossip — in the hierarchy of sins, I'd put it a step or two below venial, wouldn't you?
Whose food did you most want to poison at the colony?
Have you ever sent a letter you wish you hadn't?
Or forget all that and — tell me something I might not believe about you.
Yours, Bernard
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Frances and Bernard"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Carlene Bauer.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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