a tangent about Father Flye

From: Jim Forest (JHForest@CS.COM)
Date: Fri Aug 31 2001 - 07:28:01 EDT


August 31, 2001

Recently a book review by Alphonse Vinh, on the staff of National Public
Radio in Washington, DC, reminded me of an encounter I had many years
ago with Father Flye at St. Luke's Episcopal Church on Hudson Street in
Manhattan's Greenwich Village. I regret that I have my memory of that
chance encounter isn't more vivid. I only recall how kind and welcoming
he was and that he was appalled at modern liturgical texts. He had
sought and obtained permission from his bishop to use the Book of Common
Prayer at his celebration of Mass (the word he used) at St. Luke's every
Friday morning.

I mention Fr. Flye on the Walker Percy List as fly was a close friend of
Will Percy, who raised Walker, and had some contact with Walker Percy
as well. In October 1972, both Fr. Flye and Walker Percy took part in
a conference homoring James Agee at St. Andrew's School in Tennessee.

What a pleasure it has been these last few days to meet Fr. Flye (and his
artist wife Grace Houghton) through William Hampton's recently published
biography.

I had come to know of Fr. Flye through a book he had edited of letters he
had received from James Agee, the novelist and film critic, and also because
we had a mutual friend, Catherine Maldonado, who described him as a retired
teacher of history who was a walking anthology of poetry and who spoke
about events in the past so vividly that it made you think he must have been
present.

"Children can only be taught be those who love them," he observed. Even in
his old age -- he lived to be a hundred -- children were drawn to him like
bees
to flowers.

He was also someone with a wonderful sense of humor. "If you don't have
a sense of humor," he said, "then get down on your knees and pray for one."

Attached is Alphonse Vinh's NPR review of the Hampton biography plus a
short text by Fr. Flye.

Jim

* * *

"When he finally died in the spring of 1985 at the advanced age of one
hundred, one reporter wondered aloud, 'Is it possible that the memory of
Father James Harold Flye will be more enduring than the fame of James
Agee?'

"Agee co-authored with Walker Evans a notable book entitled 'Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men.' Although Father Flye became famous with the general
public only after the celebrated publication of James Agee's letters to him,
he
was famous to the Happy Few privileged to know him. Of Father Flye, James
Agee declared that he was 'my oldest and dearest friend.' Father Flye was a
living American Mr Chips. To the generations of prep students who studied
under him at St Andrew's School, a private Episcopalian school located in
fabled Sewanee, Tennessee, Father Flye was the most inspiring teacher and
charismatic teacher they had ever known. Long after prep school days, Father
Flye's former students who take their wives and children on annual
pilgrimages to Greenwich Village to visit the legendary priest who spent most
of his retirement years serving as a supply priest in his beloved New York and
social host to a vast circle of friends and associates.

"A man of immense learning, spiritual kindness, many eccentricities, and
great modesty, Father Flye was very quiet about his role in helping to restore
James Agee's literary reputation with the publication of their correspondence
which began when Agee was a 15-year old student at Exeter and ended only
with Agee's early death in 1955. One critic called the Flye-Agee
correspondence as 'comparable in importance to Fitzgerald's The Crackup and
Thomas Wolfe's letters as a self-portrait of the artist in the modern American
scene.'

"From the age of nine when James Agee first met Father Flye at St Andrew's
until his death at the age of 46, Father Flye served Agee as a surrogate
father
and confidant. Although Agee's personal lifestyle was radically divergent
from the old-fashioned, genteel Southern one that Father Flye lived all his
long life (even when he was surrounded by his bohemian friends and
homeless drunks in Greenwich Village in later years), the good priest never
judged his friends. His life was about God's forgiveness and the zest for
learning and good books.

"Father Flye collected many literary and artistic friends as well. They
included
Tennessee Williams, William Alexander Percy, Amy Clampitt, W.H. Auden,
Andrew Lytle, Robert Fitzgerald, Kevin Kennedy and, of course, James Agee.
But it was with students and parishioners that Father Flye was at his best.

"Many people were touched by this extraordinary man and now one of Father
Flye's former students has written the definitive biography of this remarkable
priest. The biographer and former Flye student is veteran radio journalist
William I. Hampton who received national recognition for his Dallas
on-the-spot coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

-- Alphonse Vinh

* * *

The Tree

In the soft, fading light of a September evening after a cloudy, somewhat
humid day, with light rain now beginning to fall, about six o'clock, I sit
looking out through the open door and across the little terrace at 19 Perry
Street, in Greenwich Village, above and across the enclosed court and garden
just in the rear of St. John's Church.

A bit of wind has begun to come up in gusts. Above the level of my eyes, as I
look through to the rear of the church, is the top of a maple tree, some 40
feet,
perhaps, above the ground, the branches now swayed, now still. The top is not
console thick but that one can see through to the rear of the Church; these
extended branches, with their gentle lines. Now they stand almost still; no
day
sway, dense by the gusts of the wind. The vital green of the leaves from the
summer's growth; no trace yet of the colors of fall; the wonderful, soft green
branches and twigs with leaves, thousands of them.

None of those leaves knows of its own existence, of its own individual and
beautiful form, or of the branch of the tree of which it forms a part. No
cell in
any one of the leaves knows of the leaf of which it is a part, or of the tree.
Each intent, so far as it can be said to be intent, on its own being. These
leaves
are living, vital, supplied by the watery sap which comes up to them in tiny
channels through the trunk, the limbs, the twigs, the little stems, the
delicate
leaf-structure, from the earth below. None of these could conceive of the
tree,
but the tree is an entity; yet shall we say inherently, or only to an
intelligence
capable of perceiving it as such?

This tree stands, its top far above the ground, the branches supported by the
trunk, and this anchored in the earth by roots, sinews of wood terminating in
filaments with tender, delicate tips burrowing down into solid earth and
forming the great root-system capable of solidly supporting the visible
structure of the tree above ground, tons in weight.

In a few weeks those leaves will have lost their green vitality. They will
have
become brown, dry; they will fall; and there will be the bare branches to be
seen against the sky. But the life of the tree goes on, and with the recurring
northward course of the sun, buds will form on the twigs and the tiny
beginnings of leaves will put forth and grow, and by summer, again the tree as
one looks at it will be clad in green leaves, branches growing, extending,
more
twigs and leaves forming, the tree enlarging. And the tree itself a part of a
greater entity, and this of a greater, and this of a greater.

And what shall we say of the cells which form the organs and parts of the
entity of our own body? And our body, is it a component of a larger entity?
What is that?

Father James Harold Flye
written on September 24, 1965, at age 80
from William Hampton's "Remembering Father Flye:
A Century of Friendships"
Sewanee, Tennessee: Ione Press, 2001

* * *



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