The Beat Friar

"I am a man of God," said the tall, black-clad man as he smiled shyly at his audience. "I'm beat to the square, and square to the beat, and that's my vocation." The Prior of his Dominican monastery would probably express the vocation differently, but he gladly permits Brother Antoninus to give readings of his own poems, as he is doing this week in Los Angeles for the Commonweal Club. His poetry and his whole career may be I way out, but his purpose is to move men way in to Christ.

Moment of Faith. Brother Antoninus, 46, came to his vocation through labyrinthine ways. Born William Everson in Sacramento, Calif., to a Norwegian-born bandmaster turned printer, he put in some time at Fresno State College, married his 1 high school sweetheart ("A square thing, but it happens to be the truth"), and was overwhelmed by the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. His other literary landmarks: D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. "They were the crystallizing books of my pre-Catholic formation," says Brother Antoninus. "They have a kind of terrible vitality that enabled me to strip the merely conventional away and expose my soul so that when the moment of faith actually came, I was free within myself to make the act of faith."

Bill Everson learned about religious anarchy at a camp for conscientious objectors during the war. When that was over, his marriage on the rocks, he joined the group of creative and not-so-creative bums around Poet Kenneth Rexroth that began the "San Francisco renaissance." before Beatniks Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg came out from Manhattan and put the movement in the news. "I'm pre-beat," says Brother Antoninus.

He moved in with a divorcee who was a painter, writer and Trotskyite trying to find her way back to the Roman Catholic Church. "She was going to Mass when I met her, so I went along because I couldn't stand being deserted. I hated the religion. Catholicism intruded a ritual between God and man. As an anarchist, I couldn't stand the idea of an institution between God and man."

But on Christmas Eve in 1948, he became a Catholic. Since he and his girl could not be married (the church ruled both of their previous marriages valid), they split up. After a year writing poetry on a Guggenheim fellowship, Everson joined the Catholic Worker movement in Oakland. Fourteen months later he became Dominican Brother Antoninus at Oakland's St. Albert's College. Except for an unsuccessful attempt to study for the priesthood ("I couldn't see it through for psychological reasons") and a three-week protest walkout (he objected to the installation of a TV set in the priory), Everson has served faithfully, washing dishes, scrubbing floors, making beds and working in the print shop. He explains: "I live, under obedience, the life of a vowed brother. But I am not vowed. I could leave any time, or they could send me away."

No Route Back. For his poetry readings Brother Antoninus takes off his white tunic, black scapular and hood, to dress his 6-ft. 4-in. frame in clerical street garb--a plain black suit, black tie. Says he: "Society has two structures, the institutional and the visionary. There has to be a synthesis. I feel that I have found that religion in which the institutional and the visionary are reconcilable . . . The beat have repudiated the institutional. They have no route back theologically.

"The beat is different from the other generations of revolt. Other generations have wanted to set up a counter-institutional world; even we anarchists wanted to do that. But the beat sees all these movements as being entrapped in the world of the square. The word square means four-cornered, or lacking flexibility. Of course, we all have some element of squareness in us. But the point is that the beat refuses to have any real dialogue with the world of the square, and this to me is fatal."

Brother Antoninus' dialogue is in his poetry, which he prefers to have spoken rather than set in type. Sample:

Now the lance-riddled man on that pronged tree

stretched in the death dance there opens his executing eye and gibbets me.

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