LewRockwell
For thirty years I have taken my father’s name in the vain hope that some of his exquisite writing and character would be recognized through his son’s hand. When he died in 1993, I was devastated. I was the middle child squeezed between seven sisters.
As the only son, my father and I had a very special bond, heralded by my being named after him and sealed by an intimacy exclusive to the two males in the family. When he died, I became the oldest man in a vast extended family bearing the name Curtin. I felt older and more responsible.
Shortly after he died, I very consciously dropped the Jr. from my name to carry on his. This seemed like a way to keep him with me, as if we were one, and just as he once seeded me into life with my mother, I could give him continued life in me, for naming is numinous and in the beginning and end are the words.
From the start, he was my great supporter in all I wrote (and did). With him behind me, I have always felt filled with supreme confidence, as the word attests to its meaning as a shared faith. His in me and mine in him and both of us in something far larger than us: God, the Spirit that inspires us. I would send him my published writings and he would respond with wit and praise, sometimes disagreeing with some of the content of my work but always instilling in me the inner confidence that I was born to write. And as his letters were works of art themselves, I always felt he was blessing me, as if we were poetic souls together exchanging communion, as we often did when I was young and we would attend early morning Mass together, often stopping afterwards for his favorite corn muffins, a simple second act of breaking bread together.
As Irish-American Catholics educated by Jesuit priests, we both had the sensibilities of James Joyce when he said in a letter, “ [A writer] is a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Since we lived more than a hundred miles from each other, a life of letters between us ensued…
