In July of 1986, Andre Dubus stopped to help a motorist on the side of a Massachusetts highway and was himself struck by a passing car, costing him one leg and the use of the other. To anyone familiar with his fiction, the accident was uncanny. Dubus (pronounced dub-yoose), a Catholic writer from the South, had made a career from telling stories in which characters experience various accidents that force a self-reckoning. He could have scripted this one himself. But Dubus was not like his characters—men and women who have grown spiritually numb and are in desperate need of a wake-up call. Dubus was already wide awake and attuned to the spiritual significance of the physical world. He had, in a sense, already thought through the implications of such a life-changing accident—he did not need it to actually happen to him.

But it did happen. And it changed him—in ways he could not have predicted. While Dubus had always made his characters face challenges, provoking them from passivity to activity in order to achieve redemption, the challenge posed by his crippling accident led him in nearly the opposite direction. The strong and vital man who had always defined himself by action learned in a much deeper way the action of receiving.

Dubus has been described both as a man's man and a writer's writer. A kind of Catholic Hemingway, he wrote muscular prose that is "lathed to perfection," as one critic observed; in his stories, meaning is fused almost imperceptibly to action. Dubus was born in 1936 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he went to Catholic school in Lafayette, the heart of Cajun country. In a culture known for aggressive and "manly" men, he experienced a conventional boyhood of hunting, baseball, coming-of-age challenges, and the felt need to prove himself to his father. It was partly to please his father that he entered the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class at Quantico, Virginia, at age 19, and that he later served as a Marine captain. Though he confessed to being too much led by his father in joining the corps, he never saw the decision as a bad one. His experiences shaped him as a writer, as is clear especially in his Paul Clement stories.

Typical of Dubus' work in the 1960s and 1970s, the Paul Clement stories explore the silent terrain of the relationship between father and son, and the unspoken tests of manhood—almost always defined by activity—that become a rite of passage. For example, in "Cadence," Paul faces a difficult sergeant who nearly crushes his spirit during basic training. Just at the point when Paul feels that his body will betray him, he "regains possession" of his legs and finishes the course, triumphant. Paul's rite of passage has a high moral cost in this story, as he betrays his friend Munson (who cannot finish the course) in order to join the corps of men. Yet the betrayal that reveals Paul's moral weakness does not render the test of manhood invalid. As he takes his place among the other men of the corps, he reflects on his past—the job digging trenches that his father had got him when he was sixteen. It was the first real physical challenge he had ever faced: the sun's heat and the backbreaking labor brought him to the point of exhaustion and nausea, and he wanted only to go home. But when his father arrived and took him to buy a pith helmet, he found the strength to stay on the job and earned the silent respect and pride of his father.

Dubus' Paul Clement stories are as autobiographical as Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Readers would later discover in Dubus' essay "Digging" that Paul's memory of the trenches is Dubus' own. Because he and his father could not really talk to each other, this test of manual labor passes between them as a kind of spiritual gift from father to son. The gift is the opportunity to attain manhood, and the older Dubus reflects that "it is time to thank my father for wanting me to work and telling me I had to work and getting the job for me and buying me lunch and a pith helmet instead of taking me home to my mother and sister." If he had quit, Dubus writes, "he would have spent the summer at home, nestled in the love of two women, peering at my father's face, and yearning to be someone I respected, a varsity second baseman, a halfback … yearning to be a man among men, and that is where my father sent me with a helmet on my head." "Going home" to the women would have been to settle for passivity, to consign oneself to a world of yearning instead of a world of action.

For Dubus, to mature is to move from yearning for respect to earning it through right action. This theme runs throughout his essays and fiction, whether the characters be male or female, and whether the challenges be physical or spiritual. It was a sensibility he learned from the Marines—the conviction that action and assertiveness are always preferable to passivity. Dubus believed, along with Hemingway, that the world is inevitably filled with brokenness, pain, and accidents. Although the only thing we can control is our response to such events, the assertion of will inherent to an active response is a considerable power indeed. The Marines respect this truth by working to discipline and train soldiers so that action, not talk or thought, becomes the instinctive response. For Dubus, right action arrives at its ultimate perfection when it becomes unselfconscious, an unspoken outgrowth of one's previously willed and determined commitments.

It is easy to see the role of instinctive action in the realm of evident physical need: Dubus' Marine training clearly went to work in him when he saw the stranded motorist and got out of the car to help. But the need for right action is equally imperative for Dubus in the spiritual life and in human relationships. In an interview in 1987, Dubus said that "I certainly believe in a series of gestures with escalating and enduring commitments. I agree with gesture, with actions, with ritual, more than with talk when it comes to love. I think that so many of my characters and us, since you ask, fail to live up to this for one reason: because we are defeated by our own pain."

Those who permit the inevitable pain of life to render them inactive are the most pitiable of people. And although Dubus speaks quite truthfully about the love he feels for all his characters, he has open pity for the many of them that are lukewarm, like Polly of his story "The Pretty Girl." Spiritually lazy, Polly drifts through life on her good looks, makes no real choices for herself, and ends up with a miserable husband who stalks and rapes her. Polly does not deserve the rape, but Dubus suggests that she doomed herself far earlier by living a passive life. When she finally does act decisively, getting a gun and shooting her husband when he comes for her again, she is paralyzed by the consequence of her actions, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor. Dubus told an interviewer the biggest problem was that Polly was not even aware that she lived her life so poorly. "What's wrong with her life is that there's nothing she loves and wants. She's passive … she's got to stop being just a pretty girl."

Since passivity is the problem, activity is the solution. In Dubus' fictional world, men and women have nearly equal opportunities to achieve redemption through action, a kind of redemption that they may better achieve when they are unaware that they are achieving it. "Rose," another story of domestic abuse, is vintage Dubus. The narrator is a man who listens to a woman tell her story to him in a bar and then interprets that story for the reader via his redemption-through-action philosophy.

Although the narrator does not hold all of Dubus' religious convictions, that philosophy of action is Dubus' own. Indeed, Dubus deliberately makes the narrator an atheist to show that an active nonbeliever comes closer to redemption than do wishy-washy Catholics. It is the atheist narrator who speaks the truth that Rose and her husband Jim were Catholics who were "never truly members" of that faith because

they could not see a single act as a renunciation or affirmation of a belief, a way of life. No. They had neither a religion nor a philosophy; like most people I know, their philosophies were simply their accumulated reactions to their daily circumstance, their lives as they lived them from one hour to the next. They were not driven, guided, by either passionate belief or strong resolve. And for that I pity them both, as I pity others who move through life like scraps of paper in the wind.

But to the delight of the narrator, Rose proves herself to be more than a scrap of paper in the wind. She rescues her children from the house her husband had set on fire, clearly ready in that moment of unselfconscious love to give her life for theirs. And although she survives to tell her story in despair rather than triumph, believing she does not deserve her own children, the narrator celebrates her heroism. The life she had previously chosen for herself in passivity had "slowly turned on her, pressed against her from all sides, invisible, motionless," but through her recent action she "re-entered motherhood, and the unity we all must gain against human suffering … she redeemed herself, with action, and with less than thirty minutes of it."

Dubus shows his love for characters like Rose by putting them into these situations. He liked to tell stories of moral and ethical dilemmas because, like a fork in the road, they force action. They prove—or disprove—one's spiritual mettle. Dilemmas foreground the fact that life is a series of decisions, and they illustrate how one makes decisions, whether from the will or from the heart, from right action or from what feels good at the time.

One of Dubus' best treatments of such a dilemma is the oft-anthologized "A Father's Story." A Catholic parent, Luke Ripley, has the kind of real, down-to-earth faith that Dubus admires. He is aware of the need to give God praise for his very breath, to honor him with gratitude in the daily action of life—"while making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and mood, as a prayer of thanksgiving." But Luke's peace is challenged, as it always will be in a broken world. His daughter, driving alone at night, hits and kills a man on the side of the road and returns to her father, sobbing. Instead of reporting the accident to the police or to his friend, Father Paul, Luke covers up for his daughter and thus loses his peace.

Guilty and defiant, Luke accuses God of never having had a daughter. For Dubus, a father himself to four daughters, the father/daughter relationship is one especially charged with passion, the desire to shield and protect whatever the moral cost. But for all its purity, that passion is dangerous because it can cloud the judgment necessary for right action. Right action always comes from commitment to love. To love, says Dubus, means "to be loving. But it also means to do what's right—what's truly right for your daughter, say, instead of what feels right at the time … to have that sort of integrity requires a combination of judgment and experience and feeling." Luke Ripley, though he has the resources to attain it, does not act out of that integrity, and it costs him.

"A Father's Story" is interesting because Luke has a real connection to a tradition that would enable right action if he would choose it. Dubus believed that most Americans lack integrity because it "requires a sense of historical direction," and most people "seem to live as if the world began when they were born." For Dubus, the sense of historical direction is fading because the Catholic Church is losing influence. Being a Catholic entails the re-enactment in the Eucharist of Christ's salvific action, both in becoming flesh and then sacrificing that flesh for others—an action undertaken in history at a specific time and place. Though the world is fallen, Christ's incarnation proves that the creation is itself a good gift, worthy of the action he will take to redeem it.

But how exactly does one live out that sacramental understanding? In Dubus' 1977 story "Adultery," faith commitments clash head on with the power of human need and loneliness. The story describes a woman named Edith who is married to a selfish and adulterous writer, Hank. Edith becomes the lover of a lapsed Catholic priest, Joe, who is dying of cancer. Dubus pushes against all kinds of boundaries here—the Catholic fixation on sexual sin, the issue of celibacy in the priesthood, and the difference between an adulterous attitude like Hank's and a committed love like that that between Edith and Joe.

Joe's struggle with guilt leads him to abandon the practice of his faith in order for him to keep his belief in its sacramental truth, which is wound together for him now with human sexuality:

He maintained and was committed to the belief that making love could parallel and even merge with the impetus and completion of the Eucharist. Else why make love at all, he said, except for meat in meat, making ourselves meat, drawing our circle of mortality not around each other but around our vain and separate hearts. But if she were free to love him, each act between them would become a sacrament, each act a sign of their growing union in the face of God and death.

Although adultery is not clearly condoned, Dubus confirmed in an interview that the story ends with a celebration of Edith's decision to divorce Hank. Since it approaches blasphemy for Dubus to invoke the Eucharist in this situation, the move invites some thorny questions. Who gets to decide which commitments are absolutely binding and which can be bent? Can an action really become a sacrament through a decision of the will, even if you break other commitments in the process? That Dubus cannot or will not answer these questions probably has more to do with his personal struggles than anything else.

"Adultery" is just one of many stories in which—though they are not strictly autobiographical—one feels Dubus struggling with the failed commitments in his own life, the choices and rationalizations he must have made, the times when he acted in ways that were not ultimately redemptive. He had left the Marines in 1964 when his father died, and went with his first wife to the University of Iowa to get an MFA and commit himself to the writing life. He had three children by his first wife (one of the children, Andre Dubus III, is himself a successful writer). After Iowa, Dubus and his family moved to Massachusetts, where he would live the rest of his life. He divorced his first wife in 1970, remarried in 1979, and had three more children before that marraige ended. Dubus didn't write or say much about either divorce, though occasionally he hinted that not maintaining his marriages was his deepest regret. In spite of these personal difficulties he became as successful as a short story writer can be in America, winning a Guggenheim in 1986 and the coveted MacArthur "genius" fellowship a few years later. It was just before the birth of his youngest child, Madeleine, that he stopped by the road to help someone in need and nearly died.

By Dubus' own admission, the accident knocked him out of writing seriously for two years. He was operated on 12 times, had to endure intense physical therapy, and had days in which he could not control his bowels. He struggled with thoughts of suicide. He was frustrated at having to be cared for. Eventually Dubus' second wife left him; whether that was because he could not receive the care, or she tired of giving it, is unclear.

Nevertheless, true to his character and to his convictions about the redemptive power of action, Dubus returned to his work, using the accident to write about the same issues that had always interested him. These essays, appearing in Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Movable Chair, are not maudlin in any way. At first he deals with the accident by remembering it amid the sort of heroic action he admired. Though he had blacked out and did not remember much, he eventually discovers from talking to others that he must have grabbed the woman and pushed her to the side of the highway, away from the approaching car: "I knew, from the first moments in the stationary ambulance, that a car struck me because I was standing where I should have been; and, some time later, in the hospital I knew I had chosen to stand there, rather than leap toward the guard rail." He had to see his own action in the event as potentially saving the woman's life in order to be able to accept it.

As the years passed and Dubus continued to write about the accident, something changed. In a subtle but fundamental shift, he began to write about human brokenness—especially his own—in a way that had never been truly available to him before. It started with the full recognition of the reality of his physical transformation: a man who had so enjoyed feeling the strength in his legs while running had to learn new ways to exercise. He had to learn to slow down; a cripple, he says, takes three times as long to do anything.

There were blessings in return. The slowing down offered an opportunity to even more fully possess the idea of life as sacrament. In one essay, he acknowledges that he had always been grateful for the legs that enabled him to run, but that he never really thanked God or anyone for them. He delights in the Eucharist more openly than ever because he needs for Christ's love to be tangible, a real connection between this world and the spiritual one:

Being at mass and receiving Communion give me joy and strength. Receiving Communion of desire on my bed does not, for I cannot feel joy with my brain alone. I need sacraments I can receive through my senses. I need God manifested as Christ, who ate and drank and shat and suffered, and laughed.

With the definition of sacrament made simple—"an outward sign of God's love"—the sacraments can be found everywhere for Dubus; they are not limited to the seven of Catholic doctrine. "The church is catholic, the world is catholic, and there are seven times seventy sacraments, to infinity." He sees God's presence in the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters, now that he is forced to focus on every action he makes:

on Tuesdays when I make lunches for my girls, I focus on this: the sandwiches are sacraments. Not the miracle of transubstantiation, but certainly parallel with it, moving in the same direction. If I could give my children my body to eat, again and again without losing it, my body like the loaves and fishes going endlessly into mouths and stomachs, I would do it. And each motion is a sacrament, this holding of plastic bags, of knives, of bread, of cutting board, this pushing of the chair, this spreading of mustard on bread, this trimming of liverwurst, of ham. All sacraments, as putting the lunches into a zippered book bag is, and going down my six ramps to my car is.

In the new slowness of his life, Dubus seemed to learn something vital about receiving the sacraments instead of achieving them. The accident took away much of the power of his own body, a body he had always thought of as a tool or as a weapon to defend others. A man who had written about the importance of physical challenges to male initiation had to struggle, during intense physical therapy, with the need to redefine manhood:

Moving across the long therapy room with beds, machines, parallel bars, and exercise bicycles, I said through my weeping: I'm not a man among men anymore and I'm not a man among women either. Kathy and Betty gently told me I was fine. Mrs. T said nothing, backing ahead of me, watching me leg, my face, my body. We kept working. … It's in Jeremiah, she said. The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can't make a new vessel out of a broken one. It's time to find the real you.

The "real" Dubus is still the man who would act first, who would give his body for others. But the real Dubus is now also one who understands human limitations, especially his own. He knows that he cannot ultimately protect anyone in his life, not even the women, whose protection calls upon what he feels as the highest impulse.

In the late essay "Giving up the Gun," Dubus realizes that by always carrying a gun—for the best of reasons, to be prepared to defend the weak—he has become more likely to use a gun even when it should stay holstered. He recalls a conflict outside a bar, when he used his gun from instinct, an instinct he now wants to retrain: "That night on the sidewalk, my only instinct had been to aim a gun. I had no conflict, because I had only one choice. Now I wanted more choices, and I wanted to know what they were." He understands that the responsibility of accidentally killing someone is the price one might pay for self-reliant and unselfconscious activity. And so Dubus gives up the gun—to God:

Then, as I looked out the train window at snow on the ground, one sentence came to me: With my luck, I'll kill someone.

That was all. Luck was not the accurate word, and I do not know what the accurate word is. But with that sentence, I felt the fence and gate, not even the lawn and porch and door to the house of sorrow I would live in if I killed someone. Then I felt something detach itself from my soul, departing, rising, vanishing; and I said to God: It's up to you now. This is not the humble and pure and absolutely spiritual love of turning the other cheek. It is not an answer to turn someone else's cheek. On the train, I gave up answers that are made of steel that fire lead, and decided to sit in a wheelchair on the frighteningly invisible palm of God.

A number of stories in Dubus' final collection, Dancing After Hours, illustrate just how easy it is to enter into the sorrow of causing someone else's death. Although Dubus never judges his characters for their responses, the stories suggest that the characters have yet to learn the paradox that his essays outline: to surrender one's will to God opens up more choices, including the choice of right action in the place of mere action.

It is not surprising that in the late essays, such as "Bastille Day," Dubus revisits his relationship with his father, seeing the two of them more equally now as "mere men." In 1988, Dubus catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and sees his weakness as a reflection of his father's weakness before he died. It is an essay about reduction, diminishment; Dubus' accident is teaching him how little is really required to live. But the essay is far from defeatist. His father had sung the "Marseillaise" to them; now, writes Dubus, the battle looks different. It is still a fight against weakness, but the challenge is to move toward grace: "I see him assaulting with me the gate, the walls, the prison and armory of our flesh: my father in his final and radiant harmony, and I crippled in my chair: mere men, rushing to grace."

And as Dubus writes tenderly of his father's death, and of how he learned to communicate love to him through his actions, we get a picture of how Dubus must have faced his own death in 1998. Dubus' faith, his learned ability to live in gratitude for the gifts of the present moment, ultimately enabled him to receive his death in its own time instead of taking his life as Hemingway had done. Hemingway sought to control his life as he had controlled his fiction; he attempted in both to triumph over inescapable pain—to act, in some way, against it. In contrast, I suspect that Andre Dubus died as he lived, with the joy of learning a spiritual balance few of us attain.

To read him now is to learn that while we must indeed receive grace—we cannot merit or control the gifts we have been given any more than we can effect our own existence—we must achieve gratitude by living fully in the present moment, giving away in love what we have been given. It is a kind of active passivity—we choose to receive. Living life well and writing well are in the end the same challenge: to concentrate, to receive, to affirm, to give. Dubus' final gift to his readers is the gift that his condition was to him. "My crippling is a daily and living sculpture of certain truths: we receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life remains after the losses."

Christina Bieber is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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