SARA
FRANKEL
445
pieces I would think like Beerbohm, because you have
to
think
according to a prose style. A prose style is not just a decorator's piece
of icing on the cake-it's a form of expressing a theme that can't be
expressed any other way. Well , I have my own voice now.
SF:
You've attributed finding your own voice as a writer to your
converSIOn.
MS:
I don't attribute it to that, but it coincided with it.
SF: Do you think that they're linked in any way?
MS:
I think so, because finding my writing voice coincided with my
becoming a Catholic. I think becoming a Catholic made me feel
more confident , because it took care of a lot of problems . You know,
it's a matter of when you're at sea you like to have a compass so you
can know where the needle ' s pointing north, and then you can go on
from there. That' s what my conversion meant to me :
That's
settled,
that 's where I depart from, that's the north, the norm , and I can go
around from that point.
SF:
Then is it mainly in terms of a point of departure that you define
your Catholicism?
MS:
Largely , yes. It's very important to me to have a point of depar–
ture, because in the modern world nobody has any fixed belief or
fixed idea of anything, and in a world like that a fixed point is very
important. And it's not that I took it on for convenience-it's that I
can't
not
believe that there is this norm. What other norm could
there be , for someone brought up in the Western world, really want–
ing something? Whether we like it or not, the Christian-Judaic tradi–
tion that grew up around the Mediterranean dictates what we think
is good and evil, and defines all of the absolutes that we hold to be
important. The idea of Christ as an example, for instance, was ter–
ribly important to the whole development of the West-sociolo–
gically, morally, even politically. What would the slave liberation
movement have been without it? But if you go over to the Islamic
side, for instance, what have they got to teach us about love, about
pity , about all the things that we hold precious? They've nothing at
all. Therefore I hold, perhaps because I talk from within it, to this
Judeo-Christian tradition. And looking around at all the splinter
groups, like the Church of England, they don't have anything to of–
fer that can at all compare with the Catholic Church .
SF:
You once said, referring to your conversion, that "I had been
reading toward it for years, and one wet afternoon I went and did
it." Was it really as casual as you made it sound?
MS:
No, it's just that sooner or later I knew that I would have to do
