Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Transcript
Jenny Schroedel: This is a quote from Memnoch the Devil. “I sang and I sang but my song was full of longing and immense curiosity and frustration as well as celebration When it came home to me, sided to me that nowhere around me was there anyone who was unsafe or unsatisfied. Was there anything approximating stasis or boredom?
Yet the word frenzy was in no way applicable to the constant movement and shifting of faces and forms that I saw. My song was the only sad note in heaven yet the sadness was transfigured immediately into harmony, into a form of song or canticle, into a hymn of praise and wonder and gratitude.
I cried out, I think I cried out the single word GOD that was not a prayer or an admission or plea but simply a great exclamation.”
Now I shared this quote with our listeners because I think it speaks to what a lot of your fans were saying last night. That they felt that all of your novels had a certain spiritual yearning in them, that they were deeply spiritual, and that this book in particular had many Christian themes woven through it. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.
Anne Rice: Well I think that all of my books are haunted by Christ, haunted by the imagery of my church, and haunted by my desire to return to my church. Each time I wrote one of those books, I put in everything that I knew, everything that I felt, everything that I had to say at that point on the journey. As a consequence, I have no desire what so ever to repudiate those books or really turn away from them even. I feel that they are documents of importance. Of course they contain things that I would not write now because everything has changed for me. I found the transcendence and I found the path to redemption that Scott, Louie, and all of the characters were always searching for.
That leadsman, not the devil frightened and confused and unable to make a decision about what he has witnessed but that was the way I felt at that time. I was indecisive. I had not come to a conclusion yet about faith. That book is honest in that regard in that it reflects all of the doubts all of the complexities, all of the seemingly conflicting information we get as human beings about our salvation, from the world itself.
Not from Christ of course but from the world itself and sometimes even from the church and the acrogens and whatever we call the establishment. Now I’m completely unified in spirit and mind and have reached a point where I feel I can dedicate my life completely without any reservations, without any questions to writing the life of Christ.
Jenny: You know that reminds me of something that you say in your authors note at the end of the book, which is really an amazing line. You say I was ready to consecrate the stuff to God and I was ready to do violence to my career.
Anne: Right.
Jenny: Can you speak to that a little bit?
Anne: I had no idea what would happen if I took this turn. I lived for a long time with the idea that I couldn’t take the turn. That I couldn’t really write the things that I felt since my reconciliation with the church and my conversion. Then it occurred to me that not only could I do it but I had to do it. Whatever happened would be whatever happened. If I had to move out of my house, into a one room apartment in a hotel somewhere, that would be fine. There is room for a computer on a small table.
Jenny: [laughs]
Anne: I realize that when you are given an opportunity like this, when you are given a view of the world, and a zeal, and a task like this then you can not turn away from it. It would be completely irresponsible to do that. I did not want to do it. The desire to turn away left me. I embraced what I had to do in writing the life of Christ completely. I thought possibly there will be violence to my career. Possibly people will not buy the book. They will dismiss it. They will laugh. They will sneer. Of course, some people have done all of those things but not very many.
Jenny: What is the response generally from your fans?
Anne: It is pretty much acceptance from a great many of them. A curiosity of wanting to go on but these are the readers who value the books as a body of work. They value my writing as a style of writing and they value my view as a view of the world so they want to see where it is going. Now there are some people who have much more partial involvement with the books they’ve read. They may only be interested in vampires or witches. They have never been the majority of the readers. They are disappointed, I think, that I am not going to write any more about the characters that they were devoted to.
Some of them come up in line at book signings and they say will we ever find out what happens to Louie or will we ever know what happens to this person. I get emails like this too. What is going to happen? Will Louie ever find a partner? Will he ever find a lover? I say what I have to say. These characters are launched into the world. They are launched into infinite possibility but I can’t write about them any more because they do not work for me anymore.
Jenny: I wanted to ask you a little bit about themes in the other books. This, maybe, is helpful to the readers that are your loyal fans. Are there any themes that kind of connect the world? For example, with the vampires, the need to drink blood for immortality, it is almost impossible for me to separate that idea from the Christian idea of the Eucharist. I was wondering if you could speak to that.
Anne: Certainly there is a complex relationship between those two bodies of imagery. I did not see it when I started writing. I did not know that that was why I chose the vampire as the character. But I did sense, even as I began Interview with the Vampire, that there was something completely sacramental and Eucharistic about the vampire taking the blood of the victim and taking the life of the victim. It was not just the blood it was the life and the soul. Not the immortal soul, he can’t take that but he can take the living human soul of the person into himself for a few minutes. It was that idea, actually, that lead me to write the book. I was not aware of the full relationship to the sacrament. I wasn’t aware of how much the imagery over the years, that I would develop, would be related.
In some of my books, sexuality is related to the sacrament of the Eucharist in that way. I remember being surprise myself when I wrote a line in Cry to Heaven about Tonio the hero, when he sought out an erotic contact with another person. He felt he was doing it almost as if he was seeking the Eucharist. He so much wanted the strength of the other person in that union.
Jenny: That is interesting that you used the world union. That is what was coming to my mind, a searching for some union—not just for immortality, but for union in the ultimate sense.
Anne Rice: In “Memnoch the Devil” I have a fairly shocking scene where Lestat actually drinks the blood of Christ on the way to Calvary. I remember being asked on television about that, on the Today Show. The person who was interviewing me said, “Did you really write that scene?” I said, “Well, I drank the blood of Christ every morning at Mass for years.”
I knew there were connections, but it hadn’t let yet to transcendence for me. It hadn’t ledyet to faith. I was refusing to let it go, in a way. I was out there, an atheist, kind of lost and drifting, but I wouldn’t stop banging on the door. I wouldn’t stop questioning. I wouldn’t stop trying to make these connections. As I said before, I really didn’t know the full import of what I was doing. I just knew that I kept circling the light like a moth.
Jenny: “Circling the light like a moth.” That’s a beautiful way to express it. It reminds me of a question I had about your readers. I think your readers are extremely diverse in where they are coming from, but do you find that it is a lot of people that are seeking something as well?
Anne: Oh, definitely. I think Goth kids, when they show up at the signings dressed in black and antique lace, and beautiful jewelry, they are seeking the ineffable. They are seeking transcendence. They are not satisfied with secular materialism. They want something profoundly beautiful. They are sort of reflecting that in their whole persons. When they read about the vampires, they identify with them as outsiders, and lost ones. They identify also with the refusal of the vampires to give up trying to find meaning. My characters over and over again, testify to the beauty of the world, and how the beauty of the world gives them hope, that there is some meaning, that yes, they are lost. They can’t find out anything about God. They don’t know why they exist anymore than a lot of humans know why they exist, but they see beauty. They see the organization in the world, the ecstatic principles. Lestat calls it the “Savage Garden.” At one point in his despair he says, “The only rules that matter are the aesthetic rules.” Those are the only identifiable rules in the Savage Garden that things be beautiful, and I’ve always felt that way.
I feel a lot of the young readers, a lot of the guys, a lot of the older ones too, who have responded to these books are seeking that ineffable thing. They are seeking the transcendence. They are hoping that in what they see is beautiful, they are going to find redemption.
Jenny: It is really beautiful what you say, and actually I think you know that I am Eastern Orthodox. I told you that in an email that I sent to you.
Anne: Yeah.
Jenny: One of the quotes that the Orthodox always love to quote to each other is: “The world will be saved by beauty.”
Anne: Oh, isn’t that wonderful!
Jenny: Yeah.
Anne: Wow! That is really beautiful. Where does that quote come from?
Jenny: I’m not sure. Do you know who said that quote? I’ll look it up, and I’ll send it to you in an email. We can delete this part out that I didn’t know.
Anne: No, that’s fine. Let’s leave it in the discussion, because then it will prompt people to look it up. Don’t you think?
Jenny: Yes. Well, yes and I can also. I’ll send you an email with the full quote. I wanted to ask you about the process of you coming back into the church. I know that it was something that you were yearning for, but it was a struggle for you to reconcile yourself to certain things about the Catholic Church. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Anne: Well, I had many, many doubts and questions, but what I realized was that they didn’t matter, that the central truth of Christ being there, in the bread and wine. The body and blood of Christ was drawing me back, and I believed that. I was kind of surprised to discover that I believed that I could sit in my office and think, “Well, I don’t know the answer to all these cosmic questions, but I know He’s there. He’s on that alter.” Then I thought, “This is a gift. You’re being given a gift, go with it. Go back. Just ask if you can come back on this basis.” You’re not qualifying so much, as just saying, “I don’t know.” I can’t condemn homosexuality. I can’t necessarily figure out what original sin was from the story of Adam and Eve. That was keeping me away more than anything, the question of Adam and Eve and original sin, what was the nature of the fall? I finally thought, “You don’t have to figure this out. You’re not a teacher, just go back. You respond to the beauty of that story. You know what it means in your own life to have turned away from God, and to have fallen. That’s enough.”
So I went to confession and the priest said, “Come back,” and I went back completely. I went back to Mass. I went back to the Rosary. I went back to the full measure of Catholic devotion and Catholic attendance. I didn’t hold anything back.
Jenny: Was it at that point that you decided to start writing about Christ or was it before?
Anne: I had started before to want to write the life of Christ, and actually at that point I was inhibited, because I was newly joined to my church. I actually thought, “Oh, boy. I can’t do that book now. I don’t know enough to do that book. I’m not ready, and now I’m a member of something.” I had never been a member. In my adult life I had always been an outsider, but I was a member. So I had to lay low, and I had to study, and I had to read. When the pedophilia scandal broke, my response was to read about my church. It was to go in and read the biography of John Paul II, to read the life of Paul VI, to try to figure where my church was, and what the hierarchy was like, and what was going on, and I immersed myself in an education. Of course I was learning the English mass all that time, and getting acquainted with the church. That was the church at this time, which was very different from the church before Vatican II when I left.
Jenny: Yeah. What was the church of your childhood like?
Anne: Well, it was the Latin church. I mean we had the Latin mass, and attending mass was a very quiet, anonymous thing that you did. There was no participation from the Laity in the mass itself. We were at that time very, very anti-divorce in any form. Nobody was getting annulments the way they do today. It was a very strict, strict Catholic upbringing. Kids that went steady were considered to be committing mortal sin, because they were putting themselves in the occasion of sin by keeping company with each other. I mean it was very, very, very much of a rigid church. At the same time it was magnificent and beautiful, and had 2,000 years of tradition, the lives of the Saints, the testimony of the Mystics. It was a great, great tradition, and I never got over leaving it. I never stopped wanting. I never stopped grieving, the ache, the wound was enormous.
Jenny: That’s really beautiful how you express that. As you were talking about marriage, I had read in one of the interviews that your husband was willing to remarry you in the church. Can you talk about that?
Anne: Yes. Well, I went home and told him I had gone back to the Catholic Church. That it was required that we marry in the church, was he willing to do it? To my utter amazement he said, “Yes.” Now, I don’t know what I would have done if he had said “No.” [laughs] I mean it would have been quite a thing, but he was wonderfully supportive. Of course we had been together 38 years. Now, when we got married he was a passionate atheist, who wouldn’t participate in a religious ceremony of any kind. I understood that, and I supported him. But this time, he supported me. He said, “Sure,” he would do it.
When we went through the ceremony, we had a ceremony at about 5:00 in the evening–no, it was before 5:00. It was early in the afternoon, on a Saturday at church. My cousin, Father Jerry LaPorte married us. Stan, my husband, said the words with total feeling, as if we hadn’t been married longer than almost anybody we knew, and it was quite moving to me.
My cousins were gathered there, and some of them said, “We’ve been praying for this for a long time.” It was just a wonderful moment. We had a little reception, and then we went to mass. I went to mass. Stan went home, and I went to mass and received mommunion for the first time.
Jenny: Oh, wow! That sounds like a moment that you might return to again and again in your mind.
Anne: It was great!
Jenny: I wanted to ask you, this is not totally related, but you had mentioned that as you went back to the church, you emerged yourself in education and in reading about the church. I love in your author’s note at the end of “Christ the Lord, ” how you talk about your experiences with studying biblical scholarship, and how you came into it quite naive, imagining that there was far more unity in the field. I wanted you to talk a little bit about what you discovered, and what you learned there.
Anne: Well, over the years I had heard a lot of popular talk about the Gospels being late documents, about there being no real link to Christ Himself in the writings of the church, and I had imbibed all those popular notions that the church really had cooked the books when it came to the Gospels. So I went into the research wearily thinking, “This is going to be very disheartening for you, because you’re going to read scholars are going to prove all this to you, and you’re going to have to reconcile this with your faith.” What happened was they didn’t prove it to me.
I went through many, many books by skeptical scholars arguing about the late date of the Gospels, and arguing that Jesus really didn’t found Christianity, and that He really was a stumblebum who God accidentally crucified in Jerusalem, and never had a plan, and wasn’t really of the Son of God of course, and the miracles didn’t really happen. I read all this, but I didn’t find good scholarship. What I found was bias, and assumptions and assertions, and fabrication, basically.
I found scholars who devoted their whole career to developing their skeptical notions, based largely on their assumptions and their bias, based on the idea that “We the reader agreed with them.” I didn’t see good scholarship.
Since I’ve been doing research for all these years–I mean I don’t have a PhD, but I have a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing, and a BA in Political Science, and I’m no stranger to reading history and archaeology, and complex arguments about social history. I didn’t find good scholarship here, by and large. I found that it was very unconvincing, Jenny. As one scholar put it, “It has not been undertaken in good faith.”
Jenny: Can you talk about some books that you came across, some of the scholarship you came across, you really liked.
Anne: Oh, very much, yeah.
Jenny: Can you talk about some of your favorite?
Anne: Oh, yes.
Jenny: If somebody wants to start studying, what would be a good starting place for them?
Anne: Well, one of the greatest places to start is with N.T. Wright, Nicholas Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham. He has written book after book about Christ. They’re huge encyclopedic books, in which he really addresses all the skeptical arguments, and all the skeptical scholars. He does it with profound generosity and gentleness. He makes a beautiful case for the Christ that we believe in. He’s simply wonderful! He’s almost an aesthetic scholar in some ways to read, because this kind of joy comes out of his work. He goes to all the seminars. He knows all the skeptics, who are famous for going on TV and saying what I consider nonsense about Jesus, and he’s kind in his approach to all that. He says, “That the quest to the historical Jesus has given us great treasures. That the historical work done by these scholars has opened many doors, and revealed many things to us.” Then he goes on to prove in his own way that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead, and that He is the Son of God. He makes the case with the Jesus of faith.
N.T. Wright has written many, many books. It’s impossible for me to read all of his work. He writes many popular books under the name “Tom Wright.” He has books coming out all the time about the Eucharist, and about the Lord’s Prayer. He’s an Anglican. I find his writings simply transporting and beautiful. There’s nothing in there that’s going to cause the member of some denomination to hesitate. It’s about that. It’s beyond that. It has to do with what we all believe, Eastern and Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholic and Anglican. It has to deal with the core of our faith.
Jenny: Now, speaking about matters of faith. When you sat down to write this book about Christ, what was the greatest challenge for you?
Anne: The greatest challenge for me was actually the historical, archaeological, geographical background. As a novelist, I had been prepared to go into the first person voice of the character through imagination. I had been prepared for trying to strike a note, and maintain that note throughout the book. That I had studied plenty on. Dickens is my favorite novelist, and “David Copperfield” and “Great Expectations,” those are my two guiding stars as I write. In “David Copperfield” and in “Great Expectations,” you have a small boy talking about the world and the first person, and Dickens is a master of this.
I had studied and studied those books. I mean, I lugged them around with me. I was ready for all that, but what was really hard for me was to have to get so many details right to make a realistic picture of Jesus’ world, and I couldn’t get them wrong.
See, in the vampire novels, I could always pick and choose what I wanted to use historically. I didn’t have to use a given Palazzo in Venice. I could create a Palazzo and lay out the design for it for my characters to roam from room to room, but here I was working with Nazareth. I was working with Jerusalem. I was working with places that have been extensively excavated.
Yes, there are things that we haven’t dug up and we don’t know, but we do know a lot. We know what the Second Temple looked like, that it was the greatest Temple in the ancient world. We know that millions poured in there for the High Holy Days over and over. We know the Romans patrolled trying to prevent a riot over religious sensibilities.
I had to get all that right. I had to have Jesus in that Temple, and describe what it looked like or try to get what it looked like. I spent an enormous amount of time doing this, and there were times when I was almost crying. I would start to write a scene where the Holy Family was goingdown into the Jordan Valley, and I would think “I can’t get over there to see this. How am I going to get this right?” I’d have to stop the flow and the narrative to check details, “From what vantage point would they see Jericho burning?” Of course sometimes I had to be vague, because I just didn’t know.
This was the hardest single thing, other then the sheer nerve of doing it; of trying to draw this close to Christ, and be faithful to Christ as I believe in Him.
Jenny: Now, that reminds me of the other question I wanted to ask you. The emotional component of the book is really compelling to me, Mary and Joseph, and the way you kind of give a glimpse into their emotional lives as parents trying to protect Christ. They kind of have a sense ultimately, like any parent that they’re not going to be able to protect Him in the end.
Anne: Right.
Jenny: But getting into the emotional lives of Jesus’ parents and Jesus Himself; how did you do that?
Anne: Imagination; imagining, sitting and meditating. A lot of thoughts on this book came to me when I was saying the Rosary in church. I would go to Nativity of Our Lord Church in Kenner. After I moved out of the center of New Orleans, I went there. They say the Rosary every Saturday before mass, and they always say the Joyful Mysteries, the ones that concern Jesus; The Annunciation, The Visitation of Elizabeth and Mary, The Nativity, and so forth. That’s what turned out to be the subject matter of this book, right up through the finding of the child Jesus in the Temple, that’s the last of the Joyful Mysteries. I would sit there in church, and I would meditate and a lot of thoughts would come to me. Like I would think, “Of course they were upset when they were in Bethlehem, and that’s why the Lord sent the shepherds with the Angels, to reassure them. ‘You’re alright. Everything is fine.’” Because how could they not be upset that they were in a stable giving birth to this Child. They must have been thinking, “Did we do something wrong? Angels told us He was coming, but here we are in the hay,” which wasn’t by the way all that unusual. I mean a lot of people stayed with animals in stables in the lower part of hostels. I mean, but still given what they were told it wasn’t so great!
Thoughts like that would come to me, and I would see the connection, “Well, of course they would be reassured when those shepherds walked through the door with meaning faces, and announced that they had seen Angels singing.” They would be tremendously reassured by that. It would be a sign to them, “Yes, everything is fine. You are not doing the wrong thing.”
Jenny: One of the things that surprised me about the book was the amount of violence that was a backdrop in their lives, and I think that’s probably historically accurate.
Anne: It is.
Jenny: Yet it’s not what most people imagine, even though the story of the Nativity sounds like there is something kind of scary. They imagine Christ’s early life to be very peaceful. Can you talk a little bit about that violence, and the fear that the family must have experienced?
Anne: Well, the Gospels tells us that Herod tried to kill the Child. The Gospels tell us that the children of Bethlehem were massacred, and the truth is though we don’t have any historical reference to that massacre. It’s entirely probable in terms of history from a skeptical point of view, because we have masses of information in Josephus about Herod and the things he was capable of doing. He murdered his own children. At one point Augustus Caesar said, “I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son,” meaning since he doesn’t eat pork, I’d be relatively safe. But if I was one of his children, I might be dead. We know Herod was capable of that kind of thing. We know Bethlehem was right near Jerusalem, and it would have been a very simple thing to give that order. It probably wouldn’t have made the history books, because it was just one of the abominable things that he did. He did so many.
The chapters in Josephus are huge about Herod and his bad behavior. So that we have from the Gospels itself, that Jesus fled from that violence, was taken from that violence by the Holy Family. We do know that when He came back the Angel told Joseph to go to Nazareth, “Don’t stay in Bethlehem. Go on to Nazareth,” and that was to avoid, as I interpret it, what was going on.
Now the riots that were happening in that time, those are all based on history. They were happening, and the whole country was torn by bandits, and violence, and revolts. We know that Seforis, the city right by Nazareth, was according to Josephus burned, and the population sold into slavery at that time.
Now even if someone disagrees with my date for Jesus birth and says, “Well, He would have been younger than you say, and He wouldn’t have seen all that.” He would have seen a lot later that was just like that, because it went on. It went on. Herod Archelaus didn’t last very long. He was finally recalled by the Romans, and changes were made, and eventually things led to Pontius Pilot. We have a lot of documentation about the things that happened under him. So this instability in the Holy Land went on.
When scholars say with remarkable assurance that Jesus would not have seen Roman soldiers in Galilee and it was a peaceful time, they’re just wrong. I mean really wrong, because that simply is not what history tells us. Josephus paints a different picture, and there is nothing to support their picture of the peaceful life of the Holy Family.
Jenny: Now Anne, we’re two minutes overtime, and I really want to respect your time. I’m sure it’s very valuable.
Anne: Sure.
Jenny: So I wanted to ask you one last question. You sort of touched on this when you were talking about doing the Rosary, and images coming to you. I wanted to ask about the role of prayer in writing this book, and if you prayed when you wrote the other books. You were in a different place spiritually, but if prayer changes the process of writing and the relationship between writing and prayer.
Anne: Well, I do pray constantly, all day. It’s very natural for me to talk to the Lord about everything, and I say the Rosary every morning. When I actually sit down to write and I slip into the illusion, I go into writer’s mode. I put myself there, and I must make the leap of confidence to write, but my prayer life surrounds everything that I’m doing. When I was writing the other books, no, I did not pray.
Jenny: Well Anne, thank you so much for your time. It was really wonderful to hear your insights. was really wonderful to hear.
Anne: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed it a lot.
