The Bishop Was No Lady

THE FAIR SISTER by Wi//iam Goyen. 104 pages. Doub/eday. $3.50.

What goes on behind the sad facades of the store-front churches of evangelical sects in the Negro ghettos of great cities in the eastern U.S. is almost unknown to literature for the simple reason that both priests and parishioners are not literary people; often, indeed, they are barely literate. James Baldwin was a notable exception. But William Goyen, a white, 42-year-old Texan who never tried to save anybody, gives a far more readable and enjoyable account of Negro evangelists than Baldwin, who was one.

Insider or Out. Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, by now a celebrated item in the canon of that highly praised writer, stuns the reader's mind with the intensity of its autobiographical anguish, evokes all the prophetic frenzies of the author's Harlem childhood and violently scorns--at the same time that it demands respect for--his abandoned pulpit. Baldwin is the insider looking out. Many people, and this includes all who read for enjoyment, will prefer Goyen--the outsider looking in. When he looks in at the theological thimbleriggers of the clapboard cathedrals, he makes it clear that--as with purple cows--he would rather see than be one.

Goyen's considerable art has in it something of the exotic fantasy of Ronald Firbank and something of the rough native humor of Ring Lardner--that cruel popular satirist who asked nobody to love his self-convicted subjects.

It is not to be supposed that a Gothic chapter house full of Renaissance prelates was less full of worldly guile than Goyen's illiterate, self-certified Savonarolas in their rented temples. It is just that they are more obvious; no canon law inhibits their behavior and no lapidary creed slows down their freewheeling extempore theology.

The first paragraph sets the tone for the book, a tone maintained throughout like a good old-fashioned narrative poem: "All the rest of us in our family are dark, but Savata my sister is fair. Now Jesus, did you know, himself was a dark man. They say his hair was like lamb's wool and his feet like polished brass. Thank you Jesus."

Fleshly Glory. The narrator, Ruby Drew, is "sort of dean and master-at-arms in the House of Trainees" in the Church Zealous. This theological enterprise was founded and headed by the Prince o' Light, an impressive man who took "Exercises to Induce Continence," but who nevertheless caused ladies to "ponder the holy power hidden in this fleshly armature." Ruby Drew's story is of her efforts to bring her pale damned sister Savata to the grace of Prince o' Light rather than go on covered in feathers and fleshly glory at a nightclub in St. Louis singing her theme song: If You Like It Thataway, You Can Have It Thataway.

Savata, soundly scouted by her dark sister as "a good sinner," moves from being "infernal, lewd and magnificent" to become a certified bishop in the Church Zealous. She rises to a bishopric of her own in the LOWWHAC (The Light of the World Holiness Church), where she dispenses charm, holiness, sex and success.

This fine short novel is far more than an Elmer Gantry in blackface. Sinclair Lewis took seriously neither the form nor the content of Gantry's church. Fundamental to Goyen's tale is an implicit understanding that religion, however bizarre its forms, has something to do with God, and that though God may not be a black man, he is not a white man either.

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