Mixed Blessings
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
Download the complete article PDF
Go to the FORUM and start a discussion thread about this article
Creed O'Hanlon's biography and other articles by this writer
The pope is dead. His body could be seen through a door left ajar at the side of the church. Dressed in pontifical vestments, it had been laid upon a simple wooden litter in the centre of the nave. The familiar bald head, nested in a small white lace pillow, was covered by a white silk zuchetto or skullcap, and over a white lace alb, a crimson mozzetta trimmed with white ermine at the collar covered the torso. A pallium, a band of white lamb's wool decorated with six small crosses that signified the Pope's authority, was draped over the shoulders. It framed an elaborate crucifix attached to a gold chain around the neck.
From where I was standing, I could only see the upper half of the body, illuminated by a warm, almost ethereal beam of light. The rest of the church was crisscrossed with shadows of varying density. It was hard to make out anything else inside.
I was twelve years old. This was not the first corpse I had seen but the sombre tableau was the last thing I had expected. Over breakfast that morning, my father had asked me if I'd like to come with him to view the church's sixteenth-century frescoes, and as we didn't often have time together, I was quick to say yes.
My father stepped into the dim chapel. The smooth leather soles of his loafers scuffed the floor like the stroke of wire brushes across a snare drum, echoing faintly.
"Morris! How are you?"
The deep American voice made me jump. The Pope had opened his eyes. He had raised his head from the lace pillow to gaze at us, his wax-like face creased by a smile.
"Very well," my father replied. "And you?"
I followed my father through the door. The Pope was not alone. At the end of the litter, sitting on a canvas chair with her long legs crossed, a young woman was massaging the Pope's crimson-stockinged feet with delicate, manicured fingers. Dark-haired, olive-skinned, dressed in a pair of tight, black capri pants and a white, short-sleeved, tapered blouse that stopped just short of her waist, she looked like a young Sophia Loren. There were others: spectral figures shuffling along narrow planks supported by scaffolding above the altar. As my eyes got used to the lack of light, I could see one of them tracing a fine charcoal outline of a male nude on an unfinished mural.
"I feel like that guy waiting for Michelangelo to finish," the Pope said.
"Pope Julius the Second?" my father asked.
"No. I think it was Rex Harrison. You know, in that film with Charlton Heston..."
"The Agony and the Ecstasy," the young woman prompted him. Her Italian accent inflated all the vowels.
"Yeah," the Pope said. He pointed to the figures on the scaffolding. "He should have had these guys. It's taken them about a week so far. How long did it take Michelangelo?"
There was a loud, metallic clunk followed by the agitated buzz of a high-voltage electric current. Suddenly, the shadows dissolved in a flood of bright tungsten light to reveal that we were standing not in a real church but a cavernous sound stage in the process of being transformed into the Sistine Chapel. Renditions of frescoes by Perugino, Botticelli, Rosselli, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio and Signorelli had been painted with ordinary emulsion on plywood forming the walls and behind the faux-marble altar, the upper half of Michelangelo's The Last Judgement was nearing completion. The dimensions of the set were similar to the chapel's – I had visited the real thing a few times before – but the roof was missing. Instead, several metres above the high plywood walls, the ceiling was flat and black.
There was the clatter of approaching footsteps and the dissonant clamour of several voices talking at once in both English and Italian. A disparate group – gaffers, riggers, wardrobe mistresses, make-up artists, costumed extras, stand-ins and production assistants – streamed into the room and, like actors in a play, began rehearsing their individual responsibilities in the scene that would be performed there later today.
The Pope sighed, and with a little effort, pushed himself up from the litter. "Gotta get back to work," he muttered.
"We'll leave you to it," my father said. It was only then that he remembered I was there. "Oh, let me introduce you. Son, this is Anthony Quinn."
The famous actor extended his left hand towards me, palm downwards. "I am Pope Kiril," he said. For an awkward moment, I thought he expected me to bow and kiss the gold-plated replica of the papal Ring of the Fisherman that he wore, as tradition demanded, on his fourth finger. Instead, I gripped his hand and shook it.
"Sometimes it's hard to let go of a character," my father explained to me later, "especially when it's the Pope." He meant it as a joke about actors, of course, but there was also a grain of truth in it about himself.
The pope is dead.
OF THE MILLIONS OF WORDS MY FATHER, MORRIS WEST WROTE, – in 32 fiction and non-fiction books, five screenplays and five plays (all of them produced), as well as hundreds of radio dramas, television scripts, essays, speeches and letters – those four probably had the most profound impact on his life and the life of his family. They made up the first sentence of his most famous novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman, published just weeks before the death of Pope John XXIII on June 3, 1963.
The novel was not my father's first critical or commercial success: that was a non-fiction book, Children of the Sun, a portrait of the scugnizzi, Naples' impoverished street kids, and Padre Borelli, the priest who worked among them, published in 1957. Two years later, sales of his novel, The Devil's Advocate, exceeded even the most optimistic expectations for a bestseller: it won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award. Still, the response to The Shoes of the Fisherman was even bigger: with its Cold War background and its premise of a young Eastern European cardinal being elected Pope, it resonated with the apocalyptic edginess of the times. The Cuban missile crisis had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war nine months before and, in England, 70,000 people had just marched from Aldermaston to London to protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Vietnam War was escalating: in protest, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, sat cross-legged in a Saigon street and set fire to himself in front of a group of United States photographers and television cameramen. The US Supreme Court would soon ban prayer and recitation of the Bible in public schools, and Martin Luther King would declare, "I have a dream" to a massive gathering of African-Americans from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Within six months of the burial of Pope John, the US's first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, would be assassinated by one or more gunmen as he rode in an open-topped limousine past the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, Dallas.
The success of The Shoes of the Fisherman in that tumultuous year took my father away from me.
It was not so much the physical separation. I had grown used to the long absences of both my parents during the past half a decade. They often travelled together to the US and Europe to support the promotion of a book or attend the opening night of one of my father's plays or to negotiate a lucrative scriptwriting offer – the last had taken them to Los Angeles for three months, leaving my younger brother and me in the care of my maternal grandparents – and it was not hard even for an adolescent to work out that their relationship revolved around each other, that there was this tacit pact between them to put my father's ambitions first. The conventional topography of parental attachment did not apply.
What made my father's absences hard was the unsettling awareness of his existence in a public realm that was unconnected to the existence I shared with him. A few months after the publication of The Shoes of the Fisherman, I was sent to board at a convent school in rural New South Wales, and although every student was compelled to write a letter to his parents once a week, visits were limited to just one weekend a month. What I knew of my father's doings came less from my mother and him than from newspaper clippings that one of the nuns would pass on to me or from a minute or two of footage in the black and white Movietone newsreels that preceded the main feature at Saturday night film screenings in the school's auditorium. When, often, my grandmother would turn up instead of my parents for the monthly visit, she'd bring copies of American magazines such as Look or Life in which my parents' other world – the one in which they lived most of the time, without me – was laid out in several glossy pages of photographs: here was my mother in a shimmering frock outside a Broadway theatre at night, her smile as incandescent as the billboard above her that spelt my father's name in lights; here was my father, a former Christian Brother, sitting cross-legged among meditating Buddhists on the floor of a gilded temple in Bangkok; here were my parents strolling an ancient, cobbled lane in Kyoto as cherry trees shed blossoms on them like confetti.
Over time, I stopped thinking of the man in the newsreels, newspapers and magazines as my father. He looked like him, but more and more he was like an actor playing a role, a character that wasn't real – at least not to me. Sometimes I recognised a familiar turn of phrase or a gesture but it was not specific enough to recall a real life memory of him, a memory that existed outside of all the media coverage. My relationship with him was the same as everyone else's: I was part of his audience.
Occasionally, I was given a brief walk-on part in one of his performances. When he returned to Sydney after yet another promotional tour of North America, where The Shoes of the Fisherman was at the top of The New York Times fiction bestseller list, my mother took my younger brother and me to meet him at the airport. As we waited outside the opaque glass doors that separated the baggage claim and customs area from the arrivals lounge, a television-news camera crew – this was in the days when they still shot on 16mm film – and a couple of newspaper photographers joined us.
"When he comes through that door, mate, why don't you run up to him?" the cameraman asked me. "Give him a big hug, then come back towards us holding his hand."
A few minutes later, my father appeared and I did as I was instructed. Without prompting, my father smiled towards the cameras as we walked.
"Bugger! I had a hair in the gate," the news cameraman said. "Umm, would you two mind if we shoot that sequence again?"