The Clang Birds

I was once the model for a rather unsympathetic character in a satirical novel. Most of the details have faded into distant memories before the Summer of Love, before Stonewall, and they will for the most part lie untrampled in the graveyard of failed friendships. However there are a few details that come to haunt me from time to time when I am feeling vulnerable or when I want to examine the way gay people were treated in religious life before Vatican 2, before the sexual revolution..

The novel was by John L’Heureux. I went looking for the opening passage. Here is the description of a Clang Bird. 

"The Clang Bird is a rare creature that flies in ever decreasing circles at ever increasing speeds until with a terrible clang it disappears up its own ass. It is only because of the will of God that the Clang Bird is not yet extinct.

— St. Gomer, O.S.T., Founder,

Order of St. Thomas, Novissima Verba, 1717”

This was John L’Heureux’s world. The absurd image of a bird flying up its own ass as recorded in the “newest words” of a totally fake 18th century Saint in a fictional religious order named after the disciple of Jesus who had some serious doubts. It was very clever, or pretended to be, toying with the imponderables of extinction and the will of the Force That Cannot Be Named. If it were clever enough to get a laugh, that somehow justified any cruelty. 

It was published in 1972, the year that John left the Jesuits. He’d left the Ph.D. program at Harvard and was working as an editor at the Atlantic. He had to have been writing “The Clang Birds” when we were both in graduate school at Harvard, he at John LaFarge House close to The Yard while I was living with six other Jesuits in a small house near Inman Square. Our address was 57 Oak Street. His fictional collection of “over-educated priest candidates” lived at 75 Oak Lane. 

This much was not made up. We were all to some degree involved in the Catholic resistance to the War in Vietnam as were his fictional seminarians. The most senior member of the collective was a young priest, John Galvani, who had been part of the recently closed Jesuit mission in Baghdad. He was involved in planning an anti-war action in Boston following the model of Philip and Dan Berrigan’s action in Catonsville. When the solemnly dressed men from the FBI really did knock on our door, I answered, and had been prepped what to say--nothing.  

Another scholastic, perhaps the one who’d already been selected for advancement in the Jesuit hierarchy, a bright handsome Irish kid from Queens was in the Harvard Med School. He had fallen in love with a very attractive African American nurse. There were endless conversations between his family, his New York superiors and our small living room which made for lots of real life drama. 

Another member of the group was a man from Maryland who was at the Divinity School and sang in the choir at Saint Paul’s. For some reason that was never made clear, his ordination had been postponed. Although I saw nothing overtly sexual at the time, he had a fascination about some of the adolescent boys in the choir school, and I am quite sure that his name later appeared on the list of Jesuits who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. 

A wonderful, first generation Hungarian whose family had fled Budapest in the Uprising of 1956 was the author of the “As Per Duck Cookbook.” When he told his dad that he was going to be cooking for several other Jesuits, the dad dictated some Hungarian homemade recipes, “The first thing you do is chop some onions, garlic, celery, carrot and gently saute them, then you brown the duck skin all over. For the goulash you start the same way as you did for the duck. For meatballs, you begin the same way as you did for the duck.” And in the young academic Jesuit’s notebook at the top of each recipe read “As per duck.”

I forget my character’s name--he didn’t play an important role in L’Heureux’s plot, but people who read it recognized me. I didn’t have to be told though I did have to be reminded it was satire. It was published by Macmillan, at that point still a publishing powerhouse, so it was not a fly by night hit job. Purporting to be about some of the most controversial aspects of the post Vatican 2 religious renewal, it was also in my view so unflattering I was happy when it was widely panned. Few people got the joke, and, given the situation, I certainly thought it unfair. I found nothing to like in the way I was portrayed so needless to say, I thought it was also cruel. Needless to say,, I also got on a high horse silently telling L’Heureux in the comfy Jesuit residence on Sumner Street to go fuck himself. He found it so easy to create satire using Jesuits who were actually putting themselves in danger of following Dan Berrigan to jail while he wrote his three page daily quota. It was abusive.

The young religious me was a rather inept caricature of a homosexual who was trying to live a celibate life. L’Heureux’s disdain for the man was palpable. Up until “The Clang Birds” I had considered myself his friend, not very close, but certainly a man whom I respected and admired and as Jesuits, assumed that we shared some common goals. 

In my Junior year at Fairfield Prep, L’Heureux had been my Latin, English, French and Religion teacher. I loved studying and working with him and, for the most part, excelled. He was creative and seemed very open-minded. He was certainly brilliant. I was star struck, even falling in love in the strained way that adolescent gays do as they discover and explore their attraction to men, but it was never returned. Thank god for that, but it was a factor in my deciding to become a Jesuit.

He attracted a following. He even gave a name to the clique, the BYP, the Bright Young People which was an actual group of blue blooded high flying hipsters who emerged in London’s Mayfair after the First War. Evelyn Waugh, one of John’s literary inspirations, wrote about them in Vile Bodies, which of course was assigned reading. 

There were some perks to identifying with the BYP and supporting them in the election for our class officers. L’Heureux organized Saturday excursions to New York City. I remember Tom Baker, Jan Wojcik and perhaps Jeff Connell were part of the group. And I was included until I wasn’t. I remember how much I loved those Saturdays. I grabbed the train in Bridgeport which was further east on the New York, New Haven and Hartford than the rest of the group joined. I remember seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin the Sun, Camelot and Bye Bye Birdie as well as the beefcake magazines in Times Square. 

Now the painful memory. I am standing alone in the entrance to McAuliffe Hall on North Benson Road waiting for my mother to pick me up. My mind is a blur and I can barely keep from crying. I have just seen L’Heureux in his room. He told me that I would no longer be invited to join the New York group. Perhaps there was some attempt at using the occasion for helping me “grow” in some way, but if there were, it didn’t ease the pain. I could not understand why I had been singled out. Looking back it might have been that I was just too gay, but that is hard to pinpoint amid the raging hormones of puberty and being rejected by my first crush. He probably just said that I just didn’t fit in with the group. Of course what he would not admit is that he, L’Heureux, was a conflicted bisexual. 

I had three meetings with John after The Clang Birds. I remember two extremely well or at least certain parts of our conversation, or my version of it, has stuck in my mind. Once Tom B and I visited him in his apartment in Boston’s Back Bay when he was working as an editor at the Atlantic. It was on one the blocks closest to the Boston Commons on either Marlboro or Newberry Streets. It was also the cruising block of a growing gay neighborhood. A stream of cars would slowly circle the block pretending to be searching out a parking space while lots of sexily dressed young men would be walking their dogs or just hanging out by fire hydrants or inspecting the parking meters. Eventually a driver and street walker got lucky, and an empty parking spot opened up for a connection. When John looked out the window and saw right below a connection happening, he kind of chanted, “dance away you little queer, somebody’s going to love you.” I may not have the words exactly, but I know that I have caught their exact feeling and can still feel the chill.

Much later, probably in the late 1980’s, when I had a business making custom furniture, we got a contract to supply some furniture for a new Alumni Relations building on the Stanford campus. During the installation I called L’Heureux to see if he had time to meet. He held the prestigious position as director of the Stegner Creative Writing program. He was very cordial, even friendly. He showed me a spacious office in a very beautiful Stanford building. We talked a bit about the AIDS epidemic and he admitted to a friendship with a person with AIDS. Obliquely, he was also admitting to having sex with men. I say oblique because although there was never an outright admission, his words and gestures pointed to the pain of losing a lover, and for a brief second we entered the level field of being completely honest.

As I followed his work throughout his long and productive career, I began to suspect that it was his own bi-sexuality, or totally closeted gayness that short circuited all our attempts at friendship. Of course when he was a Jesuit, all discussion of sexuality was out of bounds, and I just might not have been his type. I do know that he had sex with one man who happened to be my friend.

“The glorious thing about literature,” L’Heureux told The Stanford Daily, “is that it allows you, as a reader, to experience vicariously what you never fortunately have to undergo in real life. The same is true with a writer. It allows you to purge yourself of all the worst kind of bedeviling thoughts or ideas or even temptations without ever having to go through with them.” John, darling, this is at least to some degree wishful thinking. I know that you wrote about a man arrested for sex abuse in front of his class, but I never read the book. One of your last stories in the New Yorker, “The Long Black Line,” was about a Jesuit novice who left Shadowbrook under a cloud and committed suicide shortly after. You were there in the novitiate in 1954 and you died in 2019. That is perhaps 65 years of experiencing vicariously. It was only 63 years ago that you excluded me from a nice group of creative young men and it still stings. Perhaps I am just not as good a writer as you were. I pray that you did find some relief from living a lie. If it helps at all, I forgive you and I pledge that I will never allow my sexuality to block another person’s creativity or happiness.