pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat -
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
- Francis Thompson,
"The Hound of Heaven"
Chapter Seven
Before I move on to the actual moment that my faith came back to me, let me say a few words about pilgrimages, because by the 1990s, I was making them all the time.
Emotional lives have landscapes. Interior journeys have an exterior geography. The geography of my life has always been intense and dramatic. I knew this when I was growing up.
St. Charles Avenue was a great historic artery of New Orleans. On the far side of that street, the Garden District began, enclosing the finest and most significant antebellum houses in the city, outside of the French Quarter downtown.
That I had to walk from St. Charles Avenue, through that eerie and enchanting neighborhood, in order to get to the Irish Channel and its two enormous churches was significant. I passed from a world of wealth and charm into a world of work and economy, yet the journey ended in a vast Romanesque church, St. Alphonsus, which is even now a jaw-dropping wonder to those who visit it.
My later writing always sought to recapture the harmony, the lushness, and the timeless loveliness of the Garden District, whether I was writing literally about the neighborhood itself, or about Venice, or Vienna, or Haiti, or Rome.
And my novels always sought to express the intensity and the high-pitched allegory and symbol of the church.
The noisy and narrow streets of the Irish Channel were the map of the world that I feared - the world without art, the world without timeless beauty, the world of necessity and raw experience, and random suffering, into which anyone at any time might suddenly drop, the world in which someone by circumstance might be completely trapped.
I didn't grow up in the Garden District. I didn't grow up in the Irish Channel. I grew up on the margins of the world that included both.
I don't belong anywhere. I don't come from any particular milieu. No group embraced my eccentric family. My mother's dreams of raising four perfectly healthy children and four geniuses probably died with her. Her death was a catastrophe. She was forty-eight and beautiful. She was brilliant, perhaps the most brilliant person I've ever known. She died of the drink. We didn't save her.
By the time I came home to buy a mansion in the Garden District, indeed to buy the very house in which she had been living when she died, well, she had been gone for over thirty years.
But I get ahead of my story.
Let me drop back.
Geography is important.
At the beginning of my career as a novelist, I began to seek God in geography rather consciously though with no expressed hope of ever finding Him in the journeys and pilgrimages I made.
As soon as the money flowed in from Interview with the Vampire, Stan and I went to Europe. What interested me above all were churches. The Cathedral of Chartres and Notre Dame de Paris were what I wanted to see in France.
The Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, those were extra experiences, wonderful though they were.
In Rome, it was St. Peter's that drew me, and then all the other magnificent churches of the Eternal City, as well as the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel.
Within a year of that first trip to Europe, I went back to Italy with my father and stepmother and younger sister. We journeyed to Rome, Florence, and Venice. And we also went to Assisi, where I stood in a long line of pilgrims, waiting for a few moments to press my hands to the tomb of St. Francis, whom I'd loved so much as a child.
Again, I found myself wandering through St. Peter's Basilica, gazing on the crypts of popes, and on the wondrously colored marble work, and staring at the varied monuments of my ancient Catholic faith.
In the town of Siena, it was the cathedral that drew me. In Venice, I sat in San Marco staring at the walls of tessellated gold.
Art, yes, art, that's what I was seeking, but what else was I looking for as I wandered silent - refusing to pray, refusing to believe in God - through all those houses of worship? I told myself I was grieving for St. Francis, grieving for the church, grieving for belief which was inaccessible and unrecoverable.
The journey went on.
As mentioned above, I had returned to New Orleans with Stan and