A reminder that Books Inc (in the Marina on Chestnut) in San Francisco is hosting a book reading, book signing, author Q&A, on June 11th at 7:00 pm. Diane [whose art is the cover] and I will both be there and would love to see you.
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There is of course no real way to know what someone else's motivation is, but I would imagine most of the boys who entered seminary then had more of a calling than Holland. There would be various degrees of calling involved. Some would have been there because their mother badly wanted a priest in the family - adorning her resume for the next life. Many other would be there because there was a tradition of a priest in the family and he was the designee. Some others because they'd always had a bent towards being celibate or at least not married to a woman. And then there were those who were genuine seekers after a higher spiritual meaning in their lives.
Jack Holland and perhaps his friend Jerry had found seminary as a refuge from one thing or another on the outside and were determined to make as good a job of being priest as they would have of being a teacher or a doctor. Not terribly spiritual admittedly but fairly typical of the attitude of most priest of that time. They regarded it as a profession, took the job seriously, worked pretty hard, played a bit of golf with their friends and said their prayers fairly regularly. Much of this changed in the 1960's with the societal upheavals of Vietnam War protests, Free Speech protests, Civil Rights protests. Within the Catholic church the Vatican Council had stirred up hopes of reform that loosed young priests and nuns from more traditional confines. Thus freed-up they often took freedom the outer edge of acceptable conduct and beyond. (More of this in A Priest in Graduate School - next blog). This is probably the most asked question I get about the novel and I must say that - luckily for the Catholic church - he is a gross exaggeration.
In my experience of 11 years as a priest and many more beforehand as a seminarian, the vast majority were very good and sincere men. Most of them tried to observe celibacy - with differing degrees of success. The parish priests I portray in the novel are fictional characters and pretty much caricatures unlike any men I ever met. For the most part they were reasonably bright and kindly souls some of whom may have become a bit shop-worn in their style and approach to ministry. There would have been a few - mostly younger men - who found that the 1960's gave them leave to follow a different sexual ethic. These would be the priests with girl friends or boy friends. It would have been easy to keep such behavior from religious superiors when living in a graduate school dorm far from one's diocese and so the incidences would have been greater there. I don't doubt but that there was a Jack Holland somewhere in the USA but I never met him or one quite so promiscuous. One of the questions most asked about an all-male place where young men are cloistered behind high walls for months at a time. The answer is complicated. There were what were called "particular friendships" which scared the hell out of the authorities. These were in the nature of opportunistic homosexual attractions - similar to what happens in prisons and aboard ships at sea. The individual - through sexual repression most likely - begins to find some good-looking boy attractive. Often these are passing things and the student will revert to a heterosexual life when released. A certain number will be homosexual. This was not well-understood in the 1950's.
The title, "Bitter Oranges" refers to the often-stated desire of this boy - growing up in dark, cold, always-rainy Northern Ireland - to live where the sky was blue, there were palm trees and oranges grew alongside the road. Some will be familiar with similar longings from British novels and movies such as Shirley Valentine where Shirley is dreaming of "drinking the wine where the grapes are grown." Such a deep pining for the sun may be unintelligible to those raised in anywhere with warn, dry, sunny summers. This author remembers the first time he stood in a vineyard in the south of France. He was hitchhiking and was stuck looking for a lift for hours near Carcassonne. But, somehow I didn't really mind it that much. "I'm actually standing in the middle of vineyards." How bad could it be, loafing about for a while where it is warm enough to grow grapes?" A scene in the novel where he is freezing in a Dublin seminary and reading about the plight of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath - hot and dusty Oklahoma of the dust bowl - prompts the thought,"How bad could it be when it's hot and dry enough to produce dust?". It's hardly a spoiler to predict that the "oranges" he so looked forward to in California, turned out to be not as sweet as he'd dreamed. In the 1960's - the time-frame of the novel - many California dioceses were still in the post-war (WWII) expansion mode. New parishes were springing up to accommodate the thousands of new families and California could not supply anything like the number of priests and nuns needed to staff these churches and schools. Ireland, on the other hand, was at this time experiencing a bumper crop of young people entering convents and seminaries - training to become teachers and priests.
For a pittance California bishops recruited these young Irish men and women. ["Paddys for peanuts," a more cynical person might call the program. A new priest was paid the lordly sum of $64.00 per month all found]. It was under such a program this author - and Jack Holland - came to be in a California diocese. |
AuthorSeamus O'Connor has written this novel based (fictionally) on his experiences during 11 years as a Catholic Priest. How Sausages are made - what went into the book. (coming soon)
March 2015
Out takes - passages that were not included in final version of ms. (look for them)
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