Fact & Fiction in Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer

“What use is my sense of humor?” Robert Lowell famously wrote in “Waking in the Blue,” an early confessional poem that took his struggles with bipolar disorder and institutionalization as its subject. In her letters, Flannery O’Connor mentions that she’s made use of humor in her own fiction in unusual ways, calling everything funny she’d written “more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.” This tension—between gravity and lightheartedness, soul-searching and abandon—was a thematic concern for both Lowell and O’Connor in their personal and writing lives. It’s not surprising, then, that this conflict also plagues the two protagonists of Carlene Bauer’s first novel, Frances and Bernard, who are inspired by the real lives and letters of these iconic writers.

Bauer’s epistolary novel is a strange hybrid of fact and fantasy; famous fables of the East Coast literari of the 1950s meet wild imaginings that seem virtually impossible to some Lowell and O’Connor scholars. Frances and Bernard meet as young up-and-comers at a writer’s colony in 1957. O’Connor and Lowell did indeed meet at Yaddo, a writer’s retreat, in 1948, though by then Lowell had already won a Pulitzer Prize and O’Connor had only just finished her MFA at Iowa and hadn’t published a book yet. Many historians suggest that O’Connor did in fact have a crush on Lowell, and perhaps that’s where Bauer’s idea found its feet, because—though the two were friends and intermittently corresponded over the years—nothing even approaching romance occurred between the two in real life.

That being said, I found two particular (and, frankly, opposing) joys in this book. One was to note the ways in which the main characters’ stories matched or strayed from the their two real-life counterparts. Bernard’s life story seems closer to Lowell’s than Frances’ is to O’Connor’s.  Bernard and Lowell were both well-educated Boston Brahmin, charismatic and tumultuous, sufferers of bipolar disorder and subsequent institutionalization, philanderers and converted Catholics who fairly quickly denounced their own conversions. O’Connor, on the other hand, while staunchly and unwaveringly Catholic like Frances, was unfailingly Southern, in contrast to Frances’ Philadelphia upbringing, and was not known for any serious romances, which led to questions, in posterity, of her sexuality. Most importantly, while both women, fictional and real, lost a father in a profound way, Frances was herself healthy, while O’Connor suffered from Lupus, the complications of which killed her at age 39.

Whether intentional or not, Bauer presents fans of these two great authors with a puzzle to solve; one that allows us to dive into her novel and the historical context simultaneously, learning more about these iconoclasts than we’d known before.  These inquiries into history were fun: I was tickled to find out that Lowell did indeed call O’Connor “a saint,” just as Bernard calls Frances during a manic episode, and that O’Connor did meet Lowell’s editor after having problems with hers, just as Frances does.

The second joy in reading Frances and Bernard, though, requires quite a different tack than the first. Writing about real people and real historical situations offers readers color and context, but in order to see Bauer’s true original story,  I eventually had to abandon the narrative’s real-life muses and take the tale on its own merits.   While Frances and Bernard illuminated much of Lowell’s and O’Connor’s real yearnings and crises in their letters (most especially the religious questions Lowell sought to answer so frantically in his youth and dismissed as summarily in later years), Bauer couldn’t possibly encompass it all.  

When the two made an appearance at a party with the infamous Partisan Review crowd—luminaries of the U.S. writing world at the time—I yearned for that history, the juice of those writers' real lives, not the more limited fictional ones.  Bauer captured the thin line between O’Connor’s sardonic wit and Christian innocence well in Frances, but didn’t touch on her many musings on grace, and its wild importance in her writing and her life. She got Lowell’s religious vacillation and intellectual charm, but not the media sensation he caused, virtually turning the entire poetic tide of the decade in his favor, and the effects of this phenomenon on his psyche.  The epistolary form worked well to highlight the passion, fear, confusion and joy of the two writers, but within it Bauer was only able to give us bits and pieces of their fascinating histories.

Luckily, she didn’t have to. That’s the point.

Though I felt temporarily let down, I quickly returned to the notion that this is a book about two writers who fall in love." They had literature and philosophy to muse over,  religion to discuss, discover and (in Bernard’s case) disregard, and a romance to conduct. Wanting them to tackle the complex entirety of Lowell and O’Connor was, I ultimately realized, unfair. She gave us  two complicated, full characters who are both likable and problematic, who have failings and failures and moments of confusion and moments of ecstatic joy, and isn’t this what we ask of fictional characters?  If so, Bauer did us good service.

And while readers can pipe in on whether Frances and Bernard’s romance worked out as it should have in the end, for me, one of the biggest and most lasting pleasures of the book occurred not because of, but alongside, their developing romantic relationship.  I’ll confess it: I especially loved acting as voyeur while the two gossiped with each other. They profess their love for many writers, it’s true, but at the same time Frances dismisses the Beats in one fell swoop, and both of them take down writers, colleagues and literary luminaries in a series of truly entertaining snark sessions. It would be the rare reader who couldn’t relate to this indulgence, and Bauer does it very, very well.

The book is about thinking and intellectual attraction, and consequently it isn’t action packed.  Certain narrative moves reveal that.; Bauer needs outside characters to come in with their own letters to move the action forward, which sometimes feels like a breath of fresh air in the story, and sometimes feels contrived.   Regardless, the novel is a fascinating musing on how the romantic life and the life of the creative mind can both bolster and hinder each other. It doesn’t avoid some of the larger problems of the era, either, including class and gender concerns. The battle Frances wages between indulging in love, marriage and family and being a true, dedicated writer is one of the most interesting the book offers, giving readers a well-wrought glimpse at how much doggedness a female writer of that period needed in order to be taken seriously. When Bernard says, of Frances: “She does not know anyone who has written and mothered, so she thinks it’s impossible,” he speaks in a heartbreaking way to the dilemma of both the female artist and the working woman of that era in general. Maybe of this era, too.

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro

At the International Festival of Authors in 2009, Alice Munro told audiences about her early love affair with the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and in particular "The Little Mermaid." Reading that story’s sad ending, she posited, might have been what actually began her writing career. “I was appalled,” she told the audience. “I got up and I went out and walked round and round outside the house, making up a happy ending to 'The Little Mermaid.' She got the prince! And she didn’t have to be turned into foam on the sea.”

For those who’ve read Alice Munro’s stunning and subtle stories over the years, her yearning for a neat, happy finale might be surprising. The 81-year-old, highly acclaimed author primarily sets her deceptively quiet stories in her native Canada—landscapes dark, cold and evocative as any Andersen offered his readers—and certainly isn’t known for tying the narratives up in neat, pretty bows. Instead, Munro’s fiction edges along the same lines our own real lives walk: that thin edge between desperately wanting to make legible stories out of the randomness of our world, and the impossibility of knowing our future enough to do so.

In much of Munro’s work, that tension of the events in the characters’ lives—between what she tells us about them outright and what she implies—is crucial, and none more so than in Dear Life: Stories. Each of the tales in this book hinges around characters who aren’t exactly sure that they’re happy with their choices, aren’t 100% committed to what they say they want, and are trying to make sense (or avoiding making sense) of where their decisions are taking them.  It’s also telling that at the same IFOA conference mentioned above, Munro said outright that her next work—this book—would be about sexual ambivalence. So many of the characters in these stories are especially invested in how their romantic and sexual desires affect them and others, and how they can make the stories they’ve told themselves about life match up with their actions.