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Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

LETTERS
September 2005

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WHY DID YOU PRINT THIS?

I was appalled to see the twisted and mean-spirited article by Stephen Schwartz in the Faith about my friend, companion, and husband of over forty years, Philip Lamantia. ["A Mystic and Tormented Believer," June Faith.]

Schwartz has maliciously used you, and my late husband, to pursue ongoing squabbles with his many critics and enemies. How could the rambling and petty concerns of this piece not alert someone on your editorial staff? A piece written by a non-Catholic, who was in Washington, D.C. when the funeral Mass took place and who devotes much of it to people and ideas irrelevant to my husband's life -- why is this printed on the front of page of San Francisco Faith?

In his report of an event he did not witness, Schwartz has degraded a beautiful, dignified, and sacred rite, one that was deeply meaningful to Philip's many friends and relatives. He reports that non-Catholics rushed to take Holy Communion. That is not true. When invited by Father Ulysses to come forward for a blessing, after Holy Communion, two or three mourners did so.

From childhood, Lamantia suffered intermittent periods of paralyzing depression, his dark night of the soul. It is painful for me to see the unbearable anguish he experienced blamed on writers and friends in North Beach and at City Lights with whom Schwartz, not Lamantia, has quarrelsome relationships. Furthermore, Schwartz quoted out of context a careless and uncharacteristic remark of Lamantia's about purifying the Church, which is quoted in your newspaper for the second time. I've known Steven Schwartz for many years; he's a passionate polemicist who was not always on good terms with my husband. I'm not surprised to see what he wrote, but I don't understand why you published it. Nor why this particular issue (no others) of Faith was distributed to the North Beach businesses frequented by Schwartz's targets. What's your agenda here? Such uncharitable obituaries surely do not represent the values of most lay Catholics of the Bay Area.

There are other sly innuendoes that are objectionable in the article. What did you think his motives might be when he writes that Philip and his friends, the VandenBroecks, read books on Egyptian mathematics and myth written by an author who belonged briefly to an anti-Semitic organization in the 1920s? How could you print such a thing! This is worse than people who judge the pope's whole life on the basis of his supposedly belonging to a Nazi youth group. In this case, Lamantia and the VandenBroecks were simply reading books and on a completely unrelated subject. In fact, VandenBroeck's Jewish family was personally beset by Nazism, and he himself joined the American military and was wounded in action in World War II. What must he think finding this vicious insinuation in San Francisco Faith?

As for Lamantia's own faith, he was neither wholly conservative nor liberal. While he admired John Paul II's stance against war and his ecumenical achievements, he was, at the same time, a fervent supporter of liberation theology, admired of Hans Küng and other dissident theologians, and hoped for a more liberal pope as successor.

Philip was indeed a mystic. Whether through poetry, the Church, or whatever other vehicle (and there were many), the primary motif of his life was the quest for union with the divine. In 1999 he became active at the St. Francis Shrine in San Francisco, where he found many spiritual friends whose support and empathy meant much to him. The life of St. Francis was a genuine inspiration. In Lamantia's last years, he strove to realize caritas in his deepest being and made it the focus and center of his life.

Nancy Peters (Lamantia)
San Francisco

Editor replies: It is not apparent to me that Mr. Schwartz dealt with petty concerns in his article on Philip Lamantia. Nor did Mr. Schwartz devote much of the article to ideas and individuals that were irrelevant to Lamantia. Rather, the article focuses primarily on Lamantia with a few side references to those whom Mr. Schwartz calls the "po-biz" crowd of San Francisco. When I received it, Mr. Schwartz's article seemed to me basically a well-written piece on a man I had known nothing of before. Thus, I cannot vouch for Mr. Schwartz's interpretation of the character of Lamantia the man, but it did not appear a priori false or ridiculous.

Mr. Schwartz does not say that Lamantia merely read books on Egyptian mathematics and myth, as Mrs. Lamantia says, but that he belonged to an authoritarian cult that "had historical associations with Nazism." The article also says that Lamantia struggled with the anti-Semitic nature of the cult, on account of which he abandoned it. This hardly reflects badly on, nor is it a judgment of, Lamantia's whole life. Mrs. Lamantia actually makes a far more serious and damaging allegation -- that her husband was enamored of dissident Catholics. Schwartz merely said Lamantia once belonged to a silly cult, the anti-Semitism of which he never embraced. Mrs. Lamantia tells us her husband played fast and loose with his religion. Which is worse?

The distribution of papers in North Beach was not our doing. Readers of the Faith sometimes request bulk shipments of the paper to distribute at various venues. Such a person could be the source of the North Beach distribution.