The big questions: an interview with Doris Betts

Christian Century, Oct 8, 1997 by W Brown, Dale

Doris Betts is a Presbyterian elder, a Sunday school teacher and a part-time church organist. A former chairperson of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she has taught in the university's English Department for more than 25 years, and since 1980 has occupied the position of Alumni Distinguished Professor of English. Since 1954 she has produced three collections of short fiction and four novels. Her latest novels are Souls Raised from the Dead and The Sharp Teeth of Love. Betts has been accused of being a gloomy writer because she is preoccupied with the spiritual and with death. She likes William Saroyan's comment, "I began writing in order to get even on death," and one of her characters says, "Deny the metaphysical and the trivial will triumph." Although Betts mourns the visible emptinesses of our time, she continues to believe that "there is a moment in every day that the devil cannot find. "

When you were chair of the faculty, Billy Graham was invited to campus and you became embroiled in a controversy over whether or not you should introduce Graham. In the introduction that you did eventually deliver, you spoke of "the tribe of Thomas" into which you were born. Do you remember that speech?

That speech was a kind of turning point on this campus for me. I was very conscious that in a secular, tax-supported institution where you represent everyone from the atheist to the agnostic to the Jew to the Hindu to the Christian, some neutrality was required. But two students told me that there was going to be this big thing in the gym, an audience of 10,000, and before Graham spoke each night they wanted people--and this is the word they used--to "testify." At first I refused. At the same time it's very hard to say no to two excellent students--I began to feel guilty. Was this what Paul meant about being ashamed of Jesus Christ? Was I afraid to just come out and declare myself a Christian? Was I worried that I'd lose the respect of the faculty that had elected me? This is not a campus where one hears much about religious faith. Bill Friday, who was then president of all 16 University of North Carolina campuses, called and said, "Doris, I want you to know that I'm going to be on the platform, and I think you can do whatever you want to do." I said, "Well, if they won't introduce me as chairman of the faculty, if they will just allow me to be a person, a writer, I will do it." And so I did.

Two things happened that I found interesting. One was that I did talk about doubts and of being of the "tribe of Thomas," and I said that for me faith was always going to be a pilgrimage. And then Billy Graham spoke after me about how he'd never had a doubt in his life. It was a large crowd and people whom I had never met before would come up for days after and say, "I'm a Baptist." It was as if everybody was revealing some shameful secret. That little talk has been reprinted more than anything I ever wrote.

Recently I have come upon a raft of writers who are interested, at least, in religious questions. I'm thinking, for example, of Gail Godwin in Father Melancholy's Daughter or John Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany. There does seem to be an interest in religious issues.

It seems to me that even if it's not conscious, part of it may be a rebellion, not just against what I might call certain superficial fictions, but against the prevailing mode of deconstructionist criticism. How long can you go on telling stories if human beings don't matter, and how long will you be read, since there is also a great shift to preferring nonfiction? Biography has become almost more rewarding than fiction, because it appears to look at a whole life and perceive some kind of pattern.

Then there are the romance novels.

Yes. People are clearly reading those in the same way they look at television. They are looking to be entertained. Yet those books are almost piously moral, for all of the soft pornography in them. I mean the evil get their just deserts. It's pretty much like literature for children in which the villain is always punished and there's not much complexity.

More interesting, I think, are disagreements between serious writers like John Gardner and William Gatz. Gardner got so much flack over that book Moral Fiction, and William Gatz, who was his good friend and a good friend of mine too, is a writer who really does think of writing the way you might think of musical painting. He puts together objects in a way that they haven't been put together before so that the glittering surface is an end in itself. He says that what he remembers from reading a novel is not the content but the sentences. I think that's the real disagreement in writing. It's the same thing that has happened in art and in music; it just has been slower to get to literature because we still think words are what we use to make sense to one another. I'm inclined to think common sense is not willing to let go of that presumption. But I like content wedded to an excellent style.