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An Interview with Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch, essayist, poet, and funeral director, comes from a large Catholic family. He's one of those people who is quick to talk about his mother; her influence on him is both charming and immediately apparent as evidenced in the following story Lynch loves sharing: Upon seeing the whole lot of us, all of us kids trailing behind my mother, many people would say to my mother, "You must really love children." "No," she would respond, "I just really love Eddie Lynch."
It's a perfect introduction to Thomas Lynch and his sensibilities as a writer. In The Undertaking, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, and most recently in Booking Passage, Lynch is one part humanity, two parts humor. Reading him makes one more aware of the close proximity of tears and laughter. In an interview done at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 1st, 2007 (All Saints Day), Lynch talks about the job of the writer, the beauty of the sonnet, and his desire to change the conversation about death and the funeral business, all with the same humorous approach that makes death—and sonnets—a little less bleak and unmanageable.
Molly Jo Rose is a fan of Thomas Lynch, and a fellow Catholic with a whole mess of questions and a lot of writing to do to figure it all out.
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UpInMichigan.org: Let's start with an impossibly broad question. Do you think there is a relationship between the life of a poet and the life of a mortician?
Thomas Lynch: Well, sure, language has a lot to do with both. It's sort of our stock and trade. Funerals, certainly to the extent that they involve some sort of liturgy, or some holy person standing between the living and the dead and trying to make sense of all this is sort of the predicate for all funerals. The essential business of the funeral is—the ingredients have always been the same: someone that dies, someone who cares; and then someone—priest, pastor, shaman or imam, someone who stands between and brokers the distance between the living and the dead. And it usually is some sort of sacred text or sacred speech they're giving out with in order to do this. So language is a big part of this: metaphor, symbol, ritual. All parts of both the funeral director's life and the writerly life. Yes, I do think there's a lot of overlap. What was Yeats's notion? The only thing the studious mind gives any pause for is sex or death. What brings us into the world and what gets us out—these sort of bookends. You shouldn't trouble yourself with the rest of it. Sex and death are the only subjects worth talking about or writing about or thinking about. So in that sense being a funeral director is handy—you're around a lot of people who are thinking about those things all the time—sex and death.
UIM: It does seem like the perfect marriage. There have been a number of great reviews for the PBS Frontline film you did which aired on October 30. The film is about your business and I was wondering if there were any stereotypes about the funeral service procession, if you could refute them what would they be?
TL: You can stream that show online. You can watch it all online now. [link]
One of the reasons I agreed to make that film was that I really wanted to change the conversation that has operated around funerals forever. I was fifteen when my dad brought me The American Way of Death, which he had gotten at a convention. And he said, "read this and tell me what you think."
UIM: When you were 15?
TL: Yes, well, I was working with him at the funeral home.
UIM: That's still remarkable.
TL: He knew I read, so why would he read it? "Read this," he said, "and tell me what's in there." You know, funeral directors knew that book was coming, but they completely underestimated the impact a book could have. After that book was published in 1963, it set the conversation for the next forty years and the conventional wisdom had always been with a conversation of how much. The conversation was almost entirely about the math of the mortuary transactions; or the math of caskets; or how much you can spend; or who can do it cheaper. Every year, it was a sort of sweep's week sucker punch and every cub reporter would write an article that was a constant missing of the point. After a while the high cost of anything is a yawner. It was a yawner for me pretty quick when there is so much more there. My experience has always been that this is the other side of the coin of loving. There's a lot of shit that goes on here and there's a lot of entanglements that only make themselves clear when a death occurs. This to me is the existential crossroads. The reason I wrote a book called The Undertaking was to give them another version of the conversation: Think about this, maybe. Alan Ball was helpful in popular culture when on HBO, the first season, the first show...do you know this show?
UIM: Yes, of course. (For the reader, Lynch is referring to the hit show Six Feet Under, which was about a family who ran a funeral home called Fishers & Sons. Every episode began with a death.)
TL: At the end of the first Fisher funeral, right? They're burying the guy that got hit by the bus and the sons come to grieve over the body with a salt shaker. Do you remember this scene?
UIM: Yes, the brothers are in a disagreement over this.
TL: Yes, and I'm watching this scene and I'm thinking, he's changing the conversation. They're not going to talk about what they're spending. They're going to talk about what we're going to do. Now there's a conversation I'm interested in. What are we going to do when someone dies? To me, that's sort of the signature question of our species. I was very pleased with Alan Ball's show. I mean, it got to be a bit of a soap opera, but the actual show—we had a little correspondence—and he got it. He got that it's not just about the math. It really has more to do with the meaning. So he did that and that went fine. Then there was that sad cartoon called "Family Plots" in which—I mean, Al Ball's great, but that was essentially actors trying to be funeral directors. It was Hollywood, very quirky, very eccentric. Then there was a couple other ones. So when Frontline came around to me—they had come to me first around twelve years ago—so I had met the filmmaker twelve years ago with David Fanning, who is the head of Frontline. When they had first pitched this, I had said, "No, I don't think so. I'm not ready for that yet."
But twelve years later with the marketplace and the media, the conversation was still as dull as soap as far as I was concerned. So I thought, well, if Frontline, who are our best documentary journalists, can't get this right, then okay, but at least I'll give it a go. I really do want to shift the conversation about these things. That's been my interest.
UIM: That's interesting. I wonder what was happening when Alan Ball started with this. Were we just ready for it? Or maybe we weren't and he was that innovative.
TL: The show was pitched to Alan Ball by a producer at HBO and it fit nicely with him. His personal biography is such that you can see why he would have been the guy to do it, apart from his artistic skills. You know, he buried a sister when she was thirteen. He knew how the culture told people to shut up and sit down and take a pill. I think he was the right guy for the job. I think the mortuary soap is something people were ready for. We had sort of blood and guts-ed ourselves to dullness about Disney death, so we wanted to see the real thing. Interestingly, for many people, the first "real virtual" corpses they've seen were in that film, because all the other corpses were sliced and diced, you know? It's strange to me that we occupy a culture in which ordinary people have no family or cultural or ethnic event that puts them in touch with a dead body anymore. Yet you can drive down the freeway and see a billboard advertising BodyWorks. You can go to a museum to watch Chinese corpses being splayed.
UIM: I think that's important. I went with a bunch of poets and that experience of facing it—like, you know, this is lung cancer. This is what lung cancer is. That was an incredible thing. It is unfortunate that we've lost that. So I know Ball was familiar with you and with Mitford beforehand, but was that your only involvement with that show?
TL: Yes, and some correspondence. I never had anything to do with the production of that show. He made his people read my books. He's been generous in crediting my books with getting the tone right that he wanted.
UIM: Because we are doing this interview at a Catholic college and because it is All Saints Day, I must ask you a few specific questions about Catholicism. I have a theory about language and being raised in a Catholic household. I think growing up in an environment where children toss around words like transubstantiation and where they have a working knowledge of Latin greater prepares them for the magical nature of language. Would you agree with this? Can you talk about the inclusion of Latin in your writing and what it means to you?
TL: I would, I suppose, agree, that any experience of language that expands our understanding of its gift, and expands our vocabulary leads us into better conversations all around. Being raised in a Catholic household, I learned the power of language—and all its edges.
UIM: In Bodies In Motion and at Rest, you approach some of the more controversial issues currently affecting the Catholic Church and society in general. I am referring in particular to the essay "Wombs," which deftly manages the discussion of that part of the female body and the surrounding politics grown from that place. And in a following essay, "The Bang & Whimper and the Boom," you address sexual responsibility and how you managed this dialogue with your sons. In both of these, you move forward with the confidence of an intellectual who has deeply considered these issues. But still, you are careful and respectful of the Catholic reader. It makes me wonder what, if any, responsibility you feel you have as a Catholic and a writer?
TL: As a writer I think my jobs are to keep the record, bear witness, say what is and isn't. Like our families and friends, like all of us, the church both endears and disappoints. I've always thought it gets Life sublimely right, but too often gets living—the small case, gerundive, daylong imbroglio—very wrong. This past summer I was in West Clare, where I have a little house by the sea and where, in the forty years I've been going there, the church has been downsized considerably in the culture. It was the week of the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time when the pope made his needlessly stupid comment about the other Christian denominations being "flawed" and "in error." The same week Cardinal Mahoney out in LA was writing a check for nearly 700 million dollars to keep the hush on the pederasts and pedophiles he'd shifted from parish to parish around that city of angels. No mention of his flaws or errors by the pope. That Sunday in the parish church in Carrigaholt, Fr. Pat Culligan, who could have retired years ago, but carries on because there's no one else to fill his place in that little fishing village, whilst preaching on the story of The Good Samaritan said, "I think the idea is to be a good passenger on the boat of Life." God blesses us, I think, with priests like him. As a writer, and a Catholic, I'm trying to be more like Fr. Culligan than the bishop or the pope.
UIM: Ah. That is a good distinction. I wanted to ask you a couple of things about your poetry. I've been looking through them and noticing a lot of form. It seemed to me fitting to me that someone who is comforted by tradition and ceremony and the formal nature of things would also be working within form and I wondered about the sonnet form in particular and your decision to work within it. Is it just a throwback to the work of Yeats and those who came before you?
TL: Yeah, I mean, it's a nine iron, you know? The nice thing about a sonnet is, what's Billy Collins' line, "All you need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now." The doing of it is the undoing of it. You know how to wrap up because you make a turn at line eight and you wrap up at line fourteen. It's got its own pace established, the infrastructure of the thing. It's nice. I've always liked the reliable ten-syllable line or twelve.
UIM: And the prevailing order. It just seems to fit with everything of your profession—the equilibrium and balance of it all.
TL: I think it might apply to those Catholic questions. Catholics are given to a sort of discipline - "Good, orderly direction," as we call God. We like the idea of form and tradition and that type of thing. I mean, why reinvent the wheel? Use the wheel to get you where you are going. That said, once you begin to know form well enough, you can let the net drop. Play tennis without it.
UIM: Right. Often I think the form can be a more creative force.
TL: Of course. You get that. Good for you.
UIM: Yes, but that's antagonistic to the whole free verse generation.
TL: Free verse is, well, it's like free love. There isn't any. Love hurts. Period. It's costly. And there's no such thing as free verse. You have to earn the language, however you do it. If free verse means waiting to be inspired, like the spirit's going to walk out and say, "Now today, you are the proper vessel for this"—that doesn't happen. I mean, at least, it doesn't happen to me or the poets I know. But if you work in form—Aquinas did have a beatific vision, you know, but it didn't come early, it came late. It came late enough so he could say, "Everything I've ever done is nonsense compared to this." And there are times when you've been working away and after you've written a lot of poems, there are things that seem like gifts that are just handed to you.
UIM: Well, "The Undertaking," you wrote to me and said you sat down and wrote that in one afternoon.
TL: Oh, the first essay of the book, yes. And the last one. Both done at the drop of a hat.
UIM: That's amazing. That's a gift.
TL: I was under deadline for a guy who said, "I'll print this if you write it."
UIM: And that guy was Gordon Lish.
TL: Gordon Lish. He had published my poems. But it was such a luxury for a poet to have someone to say, "If you write it, I will print it. Period. No questions asked." Because most poets, all poets, spend most of their early time just trying to find the right housing for their poems. I was in Arkansas. I was visiting my friend Mike Heffernan—
UIM: Michael?
TL: Michael Heffernan.
UIM: Oh, Heffernan. I know who that is.
TL: Do you? That's very good. Do you know any of his poems?
UIM: I'm terrible at titles.
TL: That's okay. Now there's a Catholic writer. I mean, lapsed, but very, very much the product of a Jesuit education.
UIM: I have been trying to talk to people where I work, which is at a business college, about poetry and I think it's unfortunate—we were talking about the housing for it—people don't read poetry, largely. And I feel like I'm almost a bridge to it in a way. I feel like I can understand. I used to be afraid to read poetry. I used to think it would take me - I mean, the lines are so weighted, everything's so heavy - that I felt like, I really have to invest. And someone said to me, "No, you know what? You sit down in an afternoon and you read a book of poetry." And that was so freeing for me. And I got it.
TL: Well you're right to use the word bridge, because the Greek path is the root for metaphor. This parallel life; this travelling with; this bridge between two different realities. That's what metaphor does. It makes a bridge. And form is the thing that says jump through this hoop, not that one.So you don't have to spend your whole day rummaging through all of the words. You have only the words that rhyme with orange to do. Once you know that that's the task, you'll get more of that done than you would if you're left with the whole language.
UIM: Which makes the writing of essays a completely different beast.
TL: I wonder because I think of essay as setting forth to see what you'll find is exactly the sense I have when I start an essay. Truly, all you are trying to do is stay afloat. The language is the sea, you're trying to stay afloat, keep it going, keep your sentences going. If you run up against—I mean, Montaigne was wonderful about this—if you read his essays you'll notice that every time he sort of hit the end of a paragraph and didn't know where to go, he went to his library, pulled down a book of poems, read a little Ovid or Catullus, thought about that for a minute, threw in a couple of lines and moved on. So poems for him, or portions of poems, became for him the sort of stepping stones, that sort of connecting to the bridge to get across that particular dodgy water. Essaying is that searching, searching, searching for that particular reality, that particular truth, that particular settling of accounts, whatever it happens to be. But it is a searching for, it's not a having. It's a looking.
UIM: It's a question.
TL: It is.
UIM: I like to think of essay as a verb.
TL: It is essaying. I always think of those old films we used to watch when we were kids. A guy would find gold and go into town to have it essayed. It is looking for gold, looking for gold in language. It's fun to do and particularly fun when they say do it in this many words or that many words, on this subject or that subject, you know? I think tasking, and form is a way of self-tasking, commissioning is another way of tasking. Write me 800 words on this by then. You'll do it. If you're a writer, you know.
UIM: It's a way to deal with the blank page and the stark white and the scariness of the void.
TL: Yes.
UIM: Regarding the essay "The Undertaking," you often use the meditative recursiveness of a poet. I am thinking here of your returning attention to the placement of Milo Hornsby's hands, to that lovely, lovely phrase: "one hand washes the other," which refers to both the immediate work of preparing his body and to the care he gave you when you first became a single father. Do you find that your writing begins with this sort of poetic phrasing and the essay grows around it? Or does the essay start elsewhere? In an idea? In a question you want to puzzle out?
TL: Well, most poems start with an image or a line or something curious in the language—some small acoustic that triggers the imagination. Essays are almost always a kind of journey, trying to keep a boat afloat on words, connecting dots that would not otherwise ordinarily connect. In both cases, having "touchstones" or stepping stones that help us make the leap between things are useful. But it is the poem or the essay itself that usually turns these up (that's the magic part): the language repays our trust in it by giving the writer (who is a listener of sorts) these 'gifts.' That was the Gordon Lish-commissioned essay, written for his literary magazine The Quarterly. When I asked him what it was he wanted, he simply told me: "Tell us what it is you do." Thus the opening sentence.
UIM: More on the idea of bridge. I work inside academia. I am academia. I love it there and it's a home for me, but I do feel often that I have to be a bridge to my Catholic life and my academic life. There is often a gap. So much so that when I was e-mailing you some pre-interview questions, I felt like I had to temper the Catholicism. I'm wondering if you ever have that experience or if you feel like they're at odds?
TL: I've always thought of Catholicism as a kind of language, do you know? It just gave you a different cipher for the way things are. I've always thought of denomination, this naming of differences, as just different dialects of the one language. And whomever is in charge here, God, speaks all of them, so have at it any way you want. The trouble I always have with it is the first article of most denominations is to say us, not them.
UIM: We're the one true faith. That idea.
TL: Yeah. And that to me is sort of like heresy. It's just against my experience. Now I have had the orthodox Catholic upbringing, but I also had a mother whose best friend was a Jewish woman who was so devout. These women were married in the same dress, but they couldn't be at each other's wedding. Shame on both their faiths. I said to you before, I think the Church gets life right, living wrong.
UIM: Right. I like that.
TL: That's been my experience of it. And it has to do with the fact that the Church as we have come to know it is a gift of God's, whomever it is, but the Church as it works its way through history is full of humanity, you know, brutish, dull humanity. So I have this love/hate relationship with it. It's very disappointing, like all people we love. But I'm drawn to it and I can't stop being it. You can't not be Catholic.
UIM: Right. Exactly! It's so inherent.
TL: My mother was right about this. It doesn't really matter, because you are. You can think what you want, but you are. And it's true. It's impressed on you like language, like gender, like everything else. It is. I can't stop being white or male, you know? I can't stop being Catholic. I can stop being a Rotarian. I can stop being a meat-eater. But I can't stop being Catholic.
UIM: Yes. And it's reinforced with the experience of death, I think. It's inescapable. I'll try to intellectualize a lot of things away and then I'll really need it and I'll realize, okay, this is real. It's necessary. It's not a discussion or an argument with my mother.
TL: Do you know the Irish writer, John McGaharn, the short story writer? Well, he's everything now, but he died last year and McGaharn had the standard sort of Irish trouble with Church. I mean, they banned his books, you know, Catholic Ireland banned his books. They threw him out of his civil servant teaching job because the Church controlled that in his time. So he had to make his living as a small farmer/writer rather than a teacher which is what he loved. I think he had a cousin, a priest, do you know? He had all the quibbles, but when he died, he insisted that he have a Mass, but he also insisted that nobody say anything. Just do the Mass because he had a profound sense of the power of that language, that liturgy. This has been my experience. The Mass has, for me, power beyond its parts, beyond its discernible parts. But as soon as someone starts speaking, as soon as the Homiletics start, I just want to say, Adios.
UIM: Really?
TL: Oh, yeah.
UIM: So the Liturgy of the Eucharist. That's the part for you.
TL: Well, the whole sort of—just do that—it's like sometimes we'll wheel some poor sinner into church. And the priest, some of the more traditional ones, will meet you with incense and holy water and they'll start explaining the holy water and explain the incense and I'll say to myself, shut up. Shake it. Just do it. People will get this. This is Hemingway. Show us, don't tell us. Just do it. And shut up. That's the way I feel sometimes.
UIM: I don't disagree with you. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is this—you have a more constant relationship or experience with death than most of us do, I would argue. Is that safe to say?
TL: I'm around people who are dealing with it more.
UIM: I'm wondering if that's one of the propulsions for why you write or if writing is a sort of stay against confusion?
TL: I don't know. I've just always done it. I dislike the approach to it. It's like flying. I hate the airport but I love flying. I hate having to get up and going, what am I going to do today about the book I need to finish? But as soon as I start, I think, this is why I do it. This is why I do it, clicking on all burners, everything's working. I'm alive and well.
UIM: Do you write every day?
TL: Yeah, pretty much. I write something or I read something. And they're the same to me.
UIM: This is for a Michigan site so I wanted to ask you about Michigan. You own a home in West Clare, Ireland and of course you have the funeral home in Milford, Michigan...
TL: And I have a house at Mullet Lake also.
UIM: Now everyone knows how to find you. I'm wondering about the commitment to Michigan and what it is about Michigan that keeps you here.
TL: Well, funeral directors are not portable. They rely entirely on established reputations and locale. They are the least likely to shift occupationally in any town. So that keeps me here.
UIM: Did you know at fifteen when your dad asked you to read that book that this is what you wanted to do?
TL: Oh no, I think it was in 1971 or 1972 when I decided, I think I'll be a funeral director. I was an adult. He sort of pushed us in other directions.
UIM: You talk about that in The Undertaking.
TL: I'm sure I do. It was an adult decision and I can remember quite clearly looking at it—I was at a National Funeral Director's Convention. I saw sociologists, and theologians, and ethnographers on a panel talking about The Funeral. Not this funeral or that funeral, but The Funeral. And I thought, they're on to something here. This was after Mitford and the executive director of the National Funeral Directors Association, Howard Raether, he's long dead now. He was an attorney. But he was the funeral directors' main man all across the country. He knew that the Mitfordian conversation would only be shifted in the marketplace of ideas, not in the marketplace of doodads. You know, you couldn't get a better casket or a shinier hearse or more of the spangles. You would have to actually get people to understand what's going on here. So he enlisted what he regarded as reliable witnesses: theologians, sociologists, psychologists, ethnographers, anthropologists to talk about The Funeral. I happened to be there listening to this panel and I thought, oh, thinking people do this. Because that's what always interested me about the funeral. How do people do this? Why do they do it? How do they do it? What ought they do? What shouldn't they do? What's a good funeral look like? This was interesting to me. It was at that point I thought, I think I'll do this.
UIM: And what would you change if you could change the traditions of The Funeral?
TL: I would try to shift the marketplace, because I do see that the marketplace has really not had any useful conversation about this. The marketplace keeps shoving forward more stupid stuff. It's like constantly being caught in the souvenir shop or rest stop on the way from Bay City.
UIM: It's that clinical salt shaker in the opening scene of Six Feet Under.
TL: Yeah, only worse. That scene, as clouded as it is with all the accessories, actually there's a dead man in a box over a grave with the family and the clergy and the flowers. But the essentials are all there. The accessories are nuts, of course, like the salt shaker. But all the essentials are there: the dead, the living, the guy between them. And the body's actually hovering over an open grave. Now you don't even get to see the grave. We have these virtual experiences of funerals where if I take the body to the cemetery, the cemetery takes me to their chapel or to a roadside set-up that they call, without any irony, a dummy set-up. For dummies, mostly. So I would like to see things return to the real. When you see the Frontline film, you'll see the story of these young parents burying a child who was born with an illness. This is a very Catholic film even though the mother, a woman of about your age, says, "We all have doubts about religion." But she brings her boy to church to be blessed by the priest, to have a Mass. She lowers him into the ground with her husband and the boy's grandparents. I was thinking that's a wonderful thing, but you couldn't do that at nine out of ten cemeteries.
UIM: Is that right? It's the cemeteries that are making the rules?
TL: Well, it's the marketplace. The cemeteries are owned by corporate moguls who keep saying things like liability prevents us from doing that, which is a lie, of course. But it's because their union doesn't want to have to do this. It's just nonsense. So I would like to change the habit within funeral service as well as change the conversation outside the funeral service. I think a memorial service - I think a funeral without the body there is a waste of time. It just makes no sense to me. It's like the wedding without the bride, baptism without the baby, all those things, cavern without the corpse and the cross and the rest of it, do you know what I mean? I would like to see it more real.
UIM: One last question if you don't mind. I know you've been asked this before. There's a strong sense of humor in the writing and I wonder if that is a tone you set for your reader or if it just happens?
TL: It just happens. It just happens because creation shoves the ridiculous and the sublime into the same place. It always has so that the good laugh and the good cry are very much part of the same thing.
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FEATURED:
An Interview with Peter Ho Davies