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The professor whose opinion mattered most to me in college is retiring. I'm finding my note of appreciation hard to write—and not just because he was my instructor in advanced grammar. For all he taught me about language, I never had an easy conversation with him about the simplest, everyday thing. He was a constant perplexity to me, his eye kindly but quizzical, missing and revealing nothing. A new memoir by another advanced composition teacher, Patty Kirk's Confessions of an Amateur Believer, has made me think I should ask my teacher to write his memoirs.
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The discipline of grammar is historically aligned with the study of rhetoric, a subject that fascinates Kirk, at least in the sense that her book develops a phenomenology of persuasion: the everyday, non–expert, experience of people who believe and disbelieve by turns. It's a theme not unfamiliar to readers of other memoirists, Buechner, Norris, and Dillard among them. Kirk's memoir shares their emphasis on everydayness and their alertness to the obstacles to belief. Like them, she knows what it is to doubt the love of God: her bout with unbelief lasted more than half of her adulthood so far. Like them, she knows what it is to doubt the love of neighbor: her experience of sexual assault left her lastingly leery of uncompassionate Christians. But unlike her best–known counterparts, she emerges from her experiences a curiously conservative evangelical, who reads her Bible every morning and goes to a non–denominational church where "the French roll and grape juice we share only symbolize Jesus' body and blood."
Even for unbelievers, close attention to the quotidian requires a kind of sacramental sense of the world. Kirk's memoir emerges from a lapsed Catholicism that doesn't believe the too–large chunks of bread her daughters tear off at the Lord's Supper are actually means of grace. Communion, she says in her essay, "In Memory of Him," "is simply a medium for reminding myself about redemption." Even so, she has a good ear for the earthy guesses that children make about sex, a clear eye for the complex relations of farmers and barns, a sacramental feel for what red ink signifies to her grammar students. For all this redemptive remembering, one narrative habit of Kirk's, I think, keeps her from opening the present as well as she might have.
Confessions of an Amateur Believer divides into four sections—Meeting God, Struggles, Progress, and Rest—whose essays, early and late, open with conflict and work towards resolution. But Kirk's insistence that every chapter end in believing insight gives her memoir a sometimes over–the–shoulder quality. We often hear what her future self will say (would say? is saying?) to her past disbelieving self from the vantage of an arrived–at insight. I wish that Kirk would relinquish, now and then, the classical narrative style of conflict, struggle, resolution, and denouement. If some chapters ended, for example, with lament, the book might allow more clearing for that grace that comes apart from struggle, in spite of struggle, the grace that comes when we simply take and eat.
Comedian Steven Wright used to say he liked to reminisce with people he didn't know. But it's no joke to say that Kirk's memoir covers history that hasn't happened yet. She's enough of a humorist (see especially her piece "Blind Drivers") to appreciate the paradox. Her humor sometimes achieves a religious vision, a vision that guides her own vocation as an English professor and gathers up the tribulations of other composition teachers—my professor's included. I think of him now with his long fingers perpetually shuffling and re–shuffling our unripe essays as they overtook his desk. He must have known precisely the fear that one of Kirk's final essays describes, the "fear that we will lose what we are working for or never get done." Her answer to this fear is a hope straight out of the book of Amos, an intimation of the Day of the Lord "when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes." Kirk glosses Amos' prophetic dream envisioning workers "getting in one another's way, always having to stop and laugh, eating bread and fruit and drinking wine and exchanging jokes and stories as they worked." Her memoir shows us that when we exchange jokes and stories, allowing our past and present to get in each other's way, we can find our way into a rich imaginary for work and rest.
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