Pure Act (Catholic Practice in North America) by Michael N. McGregor

Author:Michael N. McGregor [McGregor, Michael N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823268023
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-09-21T22:00:00+00:00

If by some crazy miracle you had been “totally innocent”—I wouldn’t have known how you felt—but now I do.

Have always (as you certainly know) admired you—but now much more.

When I interviewed Charlie forty-four years later, he still remembered—and cherished—that note.

Rice and the others at Jubilee continued to admire Lax for his intelligence and spirituality, but the more dissatisfied he became with his work, the more frustrated they became with his laissez-faire approach. He came and went when he wanted to, edited idiosyncratically, and often pursued his own interests instead of magazine business while at the office. One of those interests was Pax. Another was his publishing with Antonucci.

It’s impossible to overstate Antonucci’s importance to Lax during the last two years he lived in New York and, in a slightly different capacity, the years after that. In addition to publishing Lax himself, he promoted him to editors and bookstores, negotiated publication arrangements, and, most important, lavished him with praise. For Antonucci, who was young and believed wholeheartedly in the value of art, Lax was a pure artist unencumbered by commercial concerns. He honored everything Lax did and considered it a privilege to work with him, even if that meant paying for things himself. While trying to build his own career as a designer and illustrator, he promoted Lax tirelessly without being paid a penny.

But even Antonucci’s partnership and promotion couldn’t make Lax want to linger in New York, where he felt mired in a workaday world awash in materialism. In fact Antonucci’s enthusiasm for his poetry strengthened his desire to escape. The stronger that desire grew, the uglier the world he lived in looked and the more despondent he became. Some nights he’d stay in one of Jubilee’s Manhattan apartments and go on nighttime walks that left him standing in front of luggage stores or brooding over coffee in Greek diners. One cold night an old Greek waiter offered him a cigar. Lax tried to refuse it but the man insisted, so he took it, and soon the waiter was talking about his homeland. It was beautiful and warm, he said. It never snowed. He went on to describe the landscape and the people, then said, “You ought to go there. You ought to go to Greece.”

Lax doesn’t record what he replied but months earlier, when his Time colleague Alex Eliot had been brooding over what to do with his own life, Lax had encouraged him to go somewhere where he could write freely and Eliot had chosen Greece, in part because it was cheap.

Beautiful, warm, and cheap—what better place could there be?

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