In His book Man in Modern Fiction, Edmund Fuller speaks of those few writers, always a minority voice, whose function it is “to ask the anguished questions which life ever demands of the thinking man, believer or skeptic.… Not offering a view of man counter to, or in challenge of, the Judeo-Christian Western tradition, nevertheless they are compelled to probe and test unsparingly the validity of that tradition” (Random House, 1958, p. 16). Such a writer is D. Keith Mano. His perceptive probing is disquieting to skeptic and believer alike. At a time when complacency is widespread and seems to be leading to stagnation and even decadence, such disquieting is essential.
Mano is an accomplished writer and an orthodox Christian who was born thirty-five years ago in New York City. He graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University. He was a Kellett Fellow in English at Clare College, Cambridge (1964), and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Columbia (1964–65). A talented actor as well as a writer, he toured with the Marlowe Society of England while at Cambridge, appeared in several off-Broadway productions, and toured with the National Shakespearean Company. On the more mundane side, he has served as vice-president of his family’s X-Pando Corporation (model of Cleano Corp. in his fourth novel?), which manufactures home-repair cement and pipe-joint compound (see Mano’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Cement Manufacturer,” Esquire, March, 1972). Besides writing six published novels to date, Mano is a contributing editor of the National Review, writing perceptively and wittily on topics ranging from gay liberation to “the liberated man,” from T.M. to Hare Krishna, from pet cemeteries to service stations, from overeating to “the sacrament of Bingo,” from Rod McKuen to Marabel Morgan, from comic strips to The Exorcist.
Mano’s Christian belief dates from his undergraduate years at Columbia, where his investigation of Augustine led to a personal faith. “The initial thing, the opening, was my sophomore course in Contemporary Civilization,” he has said. “I wasn’t religious at all. But the teacher would come to someone like St. Augustine and say something like, ‘Of course we can’t bother about his religious views, but let us consider him as a thinker.’ This struck me as absurd. Augustine was simultaneously a thinker and religious” (interview in Jeffrey Hart’s syndicated column, November 27, 1970).
The world view of Mano’s novels is essentially Augustinian, orthodox Christian. Each novel asks anguished questions, the most pertinent of which is: “How does the Christian act and react in the modern world?” Mano has expressed his purpose as follows: “I feel that to write and speak out you have to say something valid, something finally valid. I don’t mean you have to be moralistic and preach sermons. It has to be there in the story. But it cannot be just a story. My problem is to show how the Christian deals with the modern world” (Hart interview).
His first novel, Bishop’s Progress (Houghton Mifflin, 1968), winner of the PMLA award for the best novel on a religious subject, deals with the Christian and “progress,” particularly medical progress—that “graven image,” “St. Augustine’s superb Christian logic, perverted by Descartes, evolving finally into its own antithesis” (p. 344). The bishop’s real progress, of course, is his awareness that “to live—with the whole of understanding, to live, no matter how, in the light that is the only true light—that alone is living” (p. 356). A short happy life of faith and meaning, Mano suggests, is preferable by far to a longer mechanical existence robbed of meaning by a diabolical scientism.
Mano’s second novel, Horn (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), deals with the Christian and black power. In some respects it resembles Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, but from a white man’s perspective. The white protagonist, again an Episcopal bishop, learns from a Black Power leader that what is ordinarily called hatred, prejudice, and bigotry is really fear. The denouement of the novel, at least psychologically so, comes when the atheistic Black Power leader tells the bishop what is wrong with the church: “You preach only the words. And they are hollow words because you have forgotten his promises. Maybe these promises are all lies. I think they are. But they are powerful lies. If I knew there was a heaven, if you had taught me that, then I would not hate Mr. George Wallace or the man who killed Martin Luther King. But all I have is this life. This body. This task to do. These things. I am afraid to lose them. And my fear fills me full of hate.… Your Jesus was great because he taught his people … how to love.… They could love. Because they had no fear.… That is the difference. You have forgotten that” (p. 326). To be reminded of what we have forgotten is disquieting but necessary.
War Is Heaven! (Doubleday, 1970), Mano’s third novel, deals with the Christian and war, a Viet Nam (Camaguayan) type of war. Among the anguished questions this widely misunderstood novel raises is that recurrent one, How can a benevolent God permit war? The novel suggests that “there is a heightening in war, if nothing else” (p. 41); it is “a microcosm of life, speeded up like an old movie” (p. 39). War merely concentrates, intensifies, the human condition of “ordinary” life and as such is a test situation. Death, a recurring theme in Mano’s fiction, is everywhere present in “ordinary” life, but in warfare no one “passes away”! Sergeant Hook, an anomalous Christian at best, realizes, as Mano has noted, that “the ultimate selfishness is to refuse to defend a man who is being killed because, ‘I am too pure to do so.’ ” The novel focuses less on war between countries than on its real cause—the individual warfare raging within the men; it thus provides a powerful dramatization of the truth of James 4:1–3.
In his fourth novel, The Death and Life of Harry Goth (Knopf, 1971), Mano turns to black humor, a mode that according to Burton Feldman is the most significant development in American fiction since 1945. The novel deals with the Christian and death. Harry, thinking he is dying of leukemia, only then begins to live; he learns from each of the Brothers Goth but mostly from Philip, alias Brother Chrysostom, cloistered in an upstate monastery. What Harry learns is that “without life of some sort, death cannot be said to exist” (p. 87) and, conversely, without death, both Christ’s and our own, life cannot be said to have meaning. Death, Philip tells Harry, “is shock therapy. It leaves us free to live. Unimpeded by things. By desires. Free to seek ourselves in God. I mean, you can’t be greedy or proud or cruel or ambitious—not when you’ve only got a few days to live.… We cannot be with God until we cease being with ourselves. Death. I seek death. Death of the self” (pp. 181, 183). The imminence of physical death—and, by metaphoric extension, the death of self—enables one to be disinterested, free of telluric conditions as Saul Bellow’s Artur Sammler is. But to be disinterested is not to be uninterested, as Sammler, Philip, and ultimately Harry, with his concern for his niece Sin-Sin, illustrate.
Perhaps Mano’s most bizarre novel is his fifth. The Proselytizer (Knopf, 1972), dealing with the Christian and the family—both the individual family and the larger family of God. Its protagonist, the “proselytizer” of the title, is Kris Lane, choir director at the Church of the Resurrection (Episcopal) in the town of New Faith. Lane “wins” women “converts” by first seducing them and then praying with them. Easily misunderstood, the novel reduces to absurdity the idea of justifying anything done in the name of Christ. Lane carries the specious logic of felix culpa to its absurd extremity, arguing, against Paul (Romans 6:1, 2), that it is right to do wrong in order to do right. “It’s only through wrong that we can approach the right. Christ’s crucifixion was a wrong, yet we celebrate it on Good Friday. Good. It’s through a knowledge of sin that we know our own frailty, our need for grace” (p. 176). As Lionel Trilling, one of Mano’s teachers at Columbia, used to say, the presence in literature of violence, sordidness, and insult to the prevailing morality most often indicates the intention to destroy specious good. That seems to apply in Mano’s fiction.
Mano’s latest novel, The Bridge (Doubleday, 1973), represents yet another mode, the futuristic, apocalyptic Orwellian tale. The novel deals with the Christian and ecology, the Christian and apocalypse, the Christian and totalitarian decadence. Set in a nightmarish post-Christian era of the twenty-first century, the novel describes a ritualistic slaughter of human beings (reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”). The novel graphically and grotesquely illustrates what most of Mano’s fiction does: the hypothetical but potentially real reductio ad absurdum of godless reasoning, of godless existence. Ecological Decree has dehumanized man, making him a little lower than the ants, the insects, the very bacteria he is forbidden to kill. Dominick Priest rebelliously affirms human life and survives, but centuries later his struggle has been distorted into sacrosanctity and his person into an apotheosis of a barbaric system whose motto is “All things eat or are eaten.” Oscar, an incipient rebel, recognizes some of the sorry truth: “Cannibals or suicides.… There are only two ages of man. Childhood and senility. Savage youth or a self-hating, self-destructive civilization. In between, a few moments—no more, a few—when the balance is held” (p. 236).
The novel suggests that the real bridge between primitive savagery and civilization is the Christian and his witness. On his journey for survival, Dominick Priest meets Xavier Paul, an octogenarian Christian in hiding. Although this Christian from a pristine era speaks abstractly of the Son of God who was crucified “to take men’s sins away” (p. 165), he has lost his own belief in the reality of the Christian faith; he thus fails to “bridge” the gap between savagery and Christian civilization, just as Bishop Pratt in Horn fails to communicate a life-changing witness.
Conversely, the witness of Bishop Belknap in Bishop’s Progress leads to the conversion of a fellow patient: “There’s a heaven and there’s a hell. Just like they say. One is with God and it’s good. One is without God and it’s terrible. Heaven is for those who believe in Christ, and in His saving Grace—only those.… It’s not what you do. It’s what you believe.… Anyone who has faith in Christ and in his redemptive Grace can be saved” (pp. 215, 214, 229).
With his Christian world view, Mano resembles Flannery O’Connor, particularly in his underlying premise that “without sin, what is the need for salvation?” “I’m a Flannery O’Connor man,” he has said. “The devil is both a dramatic necessity for the writer and, for any Christian worth his salt, a spiritual necessity” (in a letter to the author). Though he shares some common ground with other writers, such as John Updike, Evelyn Waugh, Peter DeVries, and Graham Greene, Mano is distinctive. If, as Henry James warned, the critic must grant the writer his donnée, his given, or incur the guilt of tampering with his flute and then criticizing his music, one must not make the obverse error of praising the music simply because it is played on one’s own familiar and favorite flute. Mano’s fiction is significant not merely because of its Christian donnée but also because of its probing power and its high artistic quality.
D. G. Kehl is professor of English at Arizona State University, Tempe.
