'A Canticle for Leibowitz': a eulogy for Walt Miller

Commonweal, April 5, 1996 by John Garvey

Walt Miller shot himself in January. His suicide followed by several months the death of his wife Anne. Many readers of Commonweal will know him as Walter M. Miller, Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fine, compassionate, and angry novel praised by C. S. Lewis, Walker Percy, and many others. If the movement against nuclear warfare could be said to have an anthemic novel, this might be it, but the novel was much more than a political blast. First published in 1959, it told of a post-nuclear-holocaust world in which humanity goes through three stages, roughly equivalent to the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and our own time. The novel is centered on the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, a monastic community which has preserved as much of the old world's learning as possible. Despite the order's best efforts, the human race moves once again toward self-destruction, and a remnant leaves earth to try again, somewhere else. Walker Percy found Miller's vision of the future more compelling than those of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, and wrote that "the book has a secret .... The peculiar nature of the secret is that the book cannot be reviewed. For either the reviewer doesn't get it or, if he does, he can't tell."

In 1983, when the concern about nuclear warfare was a powerful and constant presence, I asked Notre Dame Magazine if I could interview Miller. They agreed, paid for a trip to Florida, where he lived, and paid for the consequent article as well. I felt like I was getting away with something. I left the icy midwest for Florida in January to meet a writer whose book I admired, saw pelicans outside of a zoo for the first time in my life, saw real palm trees too, and spent a couple of days with someone who would continue as a correspondent and a friend from then on.

When I wrote to him, asking if he would agree to the interview, he said he would meet me, but mentioned the fact that he had drifted away from Roman Catholicism and was now "somewhere west of Zen and east of the Son...." If Walt could be said to have a religion it was a kind of go-it-on-your-own Buddhism. He told me at one point during our couple of days together that he missed the Eucharist, but after his encounters with post-vatican II Catholicism he was reminded more of the Protestantism of his childhood than of anything that had attracted him to Catholicism, and there was nothing much to hold him.

Walt was a veteran of World War II, and participated in the shelling of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Casino. "I went to war with very romantic ideas about war," he told me, "and I came back sick." He was not sure why he became a Catholic, Walt said, and his relationship with Catholicism was a rocky one. A Canticle for Leibowitz was written during a painful time: he was trying to piece a shattered marriage back together (and succeeded: he and Anne were married for fifty years); he was having a difficult time with the church; and in some ways the novel was also an argument with his anti-Semitic father, an admirer of Hitler.

The novel developed a strong following and has been in print for most of the time since its first publication. Walt was never able to complete another novel: any attempt at writing one brought back the memory of a painful time too keenly. Shortly after the interview I received a letter: "John, I think my case of stifled creativity came from a sudden loss of the power to tell my OWN story, a disability which began afflicting me during and just after the Leibowitz years. All fiction is autobiographical. All fictional characters are the author himself, in various roles, accepted or rejected, conscious or otherwise. If I felt too ashamed of my own life to tell my Own story, how could I tell any man's story? I'm sixty now, and surely shouldn't give a damn." Later in the same letter: "I swore off booze again last week (I do it thrice annually). I did a lot of swearing last week, come to think of it. I "Swore at a Sears service manager, a local radio station, a broker, and, in absentia, the archbishop of Canterbury."

We corresponded from then on. Walt's letters were wonderful and often very funny. Recurring themes were writing and its difficulties, the pros and cons of computers, the evils of the modern nation-state, meditation and the differences between Buddhism and Western spirituality, and guns. Walt was the only person I've known whose politics were vaguely leftish who was also an ardent supporter of the National Rifle Association. He was antinuclear war, but progun and in fact prowarrior. In his last letter to me he wrote, "Man is biologically a professional poet and weaponsmith, not necessarily in that order .... I also opine that the natural law legitimates Seppuku." It wasn't the first mention of suicide in his letters.

On August 8 of last year he sent a note to people who had known Anne telling of her unexpected death. "By her own request," he wrote, "there will be no funeral, no service, no one is invited, and she will be cremated, probably tomorrow. Neither condolences nor floral offerings (or any other kind) will be accepted. If you want to do a good deed, kiss an enemy. She hasn't gone anywhere. She 'is that which you see before you; begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.' (Huang Po) ... It was my honor to have been married to her for fifty years, two months, and five days, and I can say that everyone who really knew her loved her...."