Faith, Sex, Mystery by Richard Gilman

First published: 1986

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Primarily New York City, Colorado Springs, and New Orleans

Principal Personage:

• Richard Gilman, a drama critic and professor at Yale University

Form and Content

Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir is divided into five chapters plus a brief but significant introduction. In it, Richard Gilman traces the growth and decline of his religious life from a childhood in a home which was Jewish only in its ethnicity to baptism and active membership in the Roman Catholic church to his present position as a nonparticipatory theist. The first chapter is the longest, 82 out of the 253 pages.

Gilman is originally attracted to Roman Catholicism by its intellectual structure, especially its appearance in the great literature of the world. Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy: The Gifford Lectures, 1931-1932 (1936) seems to give him an intellectual framework with which to comprehend the world, especially those problems that are to shape his life and this narrative: sexuality and death. Ruth, a beautiful and mysterious older woman, a convert like himself, serves as his spiritual mother, and the first chapter ends with the breakup of his marriage and a trip to Colorado Springs, culminating in his baptism. In the second chapter, Gilman’s religious honeymoon, he learns the fascinating ceremonies and ritual of his new faith and deals with his intrusive sexuality in a trip to New Orleans. In the third chapter, he returns to New York City and tries to renew his marriage. The new Catholic magazine Jubilee gives him both a community of coreligionists and the job he desperately needs that will use his liberal arts education and wide, if eccentric, reading. Once again, however, sex and death become spiritual problems, this time to a new and difficult degree. The love-motivated suicide of a coworker and the question of a religious identity cause a crisis of faith; Gilman considers his and his Catholic coworkers’ religious identities as they relate to personal identities. Is a Catholic’s goodness the result of his faith or his personality? Is Gilman himself still more Jew than Catholic, even though he is technically still within the Catholic community?

The fourth chapter marks a definite downturn of the author’s faith: He has a crisis of sexuality in the death of his marriage and the rejection of his spiritual mother, Ruth, whom he encounters again by chance. Gilman’s withdrawal from the faith community is seen in his exchange of what he calls the “little box” of the religious confessional for conventional psychoanalysis, first by Catholics and then by seculars. The final chapter begins with the last time the author tries and fails to attend Mass, going down the church steps without going in. He briefly summarizes his second marriage and the birth of his three children as well as his increasingly successful career as a drama critic and university professor.

He ends the memoir with a brief summary of the roles of sexuality, death, and faith in shaping his life:

I think now: sex and death have been the dominant words in this book, the rubrics under which I’ve tried to organize what’s happened to me. Sex and death and mystery. I came into the Church because of death and left because of sex. I didn’t trust mystery, which is the same thing as saying I didn’t give myself.

Critical Context

Gilman states clearly in the final chapter of this book that it is a radical departure from the previous works that have made his name as a drama critic and teacher of modern theater. His other works—Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (1979), The Making of Modern Drama: A Study of Buchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Handke (1974), Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre, 1961-1970 (1971), and The Confusion of Realms (1969)—are either columns of dramatic criticism published in magazines such as Newsweek and Commonweal or the result of his teaching at Yale and Columbia universities and his work as a literary adviser to the Open Theater.

This book is a revelation of the secret places of Gilman’s soul. He has written it to give the model of an honest and intelligent man’s journey from unfaith to faith and back again. Beyond the personal message of this memoir, Gilman wishes to bear witness against the growth of what he considers the “aggressive, derivative religiosity,” and “idiot vulgarity” of the new popularity of religion and the born-again movement. He says openly that he wants to protect God from those who believe in Him for the wrong reason, using Him as either a weapon of war against nonbelievers or as a self-righteous justification of their own limited ideas of Him.

Bibliography

Baumann, Paul. Review in Commonweal. CXIV (February 13, 1987), pp. 85-88.

Davis, R. G. Review in The New Leader. LXIX (December 1, 1986), pp. 11-12.

Eykerp, Muriel Crowley. Review in Library Journal. CXII (March 1, 1987), p. 71.

Prose, F. Review in Vogue. CLXXVII (January, 1987), pp. 100-101.

Sullivan, A. Review in The New Republic. CXCVI (February 16, 1987), pp. 37-38.