Books

Tony Hendra takes a break from satire with 'Father Joe'

By PAULINE M. MILLARD
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP)_ Tony Hendra lounges in his Upper West Side apartment, a happy father.

The man who has spent most of his life as an often biting satirist pushes his long, strawberry blond hair off his face. He smiles coyly, as if reminiscing about co-starring in "This Is Spinal Tap," or starting National Lampoon magazine.

Hendra, now 62, takes a serious, more reflective side trip in his new memoir, "Father Joe." It is the story of his friendship with a Catholic monk that spanned more than three decades.

"I think writing something like this is almost an act of resurrection. It's sort of trying to make people live again _ you miss them so," Hendra says.

The walls of his living room are lined with hundreds of books and framed photographs of his family. A Steinway grand piano fills a corner; a guitar case is tossed underneath. While Hendra talks about his memoir, his children, Lucy, 11, and Sebastian, 12, alternately do their homework and eat dinner in the kitchen. A third son, Nicholas, 15, is off at school.

When Hendra was 14 and living in Hertfordshire, England, he befriended a reclusive married couple named Ben and Lilly. After a few weeks of hanging around their house for his catechism lessons, Hendra and Lilly, who said she was 22, fell into an affair that ended when Ben walked in on them.

In an effort to right the wrong, the Ben took Tony to see a monk at a monastery that sat on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. Hendra, sure that he was about to be flogged for his indiscretions, entered with much trepidation. But instead of a beating, he had a short meeting with a monk named Father Joe who listened and told Hendra that he was guilty of nothing more than selfishness.

So began a friendship that has lasted for over 30 years, through Hendra's various career moves, a failed marriage and assorted other crises. But no matter how bad things got for Hendra, he always found solace and wisdom in Father Joe.

"The quality of stillness that he had was a great thing," Hendra says. "Peace came off him as powerful as after shave. That is what I kept going back for."

Father Joe died in 1998 and Hendra was left with a terrible void. It wasn't until a few years ago that Hendra spoke publicly about his relationship with Father Joe, at a storytelling group in New York called The Moth.

After he spoke, he noticed that people in the audience were weeping. Luckily, someone had recorded his tale and within weeks his agent was shopping it around to publishers.

Hendra says that while he is pleased with the book's initial print and buzz _ it went from 15,000 copies in print to 150,000 in one week, according to Random House Publishing, and is rapidly climbing lists of best sellers _ he's not surprised that his experience with Father Joe has such appeal.

After all, he says, with the rash of sexual abuse charges against Catholic priests, his book is a story where nothing went on between a teenager and a monk other than a friendship.

"Father Joe didn't appear to need the clerical mental ruler of do-it-or-I'll-tell-your-father," Hendra writes in the book. "The 'he' of his God was gentle, generous, endlessly creative, musical, artistic, an engineer and an architect of genius, a 'he' who felt his joy and your joy deeply, who could be hurt just as deeply but would never give up on you, who showered you with gifts and opportunities whether you acknowledged them or not, who set you tasks but didn't abandon you if you failed them."

But it's not just Catholics who are responding to the book. A lot of Hendra's feedback from readings and through his Web site comes from people of all faiths and backgrounds.

"I think people are very nervous about the fundamentalism in the world _ across all the great faiths," he says. "But I think there is also a great yearning for some kind of meaning in this kind of vacuous, consumerous society we live in."

Dan Menaker, executive editor-in-chief at Random House, thinks that part of the appeal of "Father Joe" is that it offers people a kind of spiritual and emotional guidance that they may not have gotten otherwise. And for a Catholic monk, Father Joe doesn't speak much about Jesus.

"With 'Father Joe,' God becomes greater than doctrine or orthodoxy," Menaker said. "'Father Joe' speaks more about love, all kinds of love."

Menaker said that it's also somewhat surprising that a man such as Hendra, who spent most of his career in satire, would produce a book as a broad and literary as "Father Joe."

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at The New Republic, recently had a theory about the origins of Hendra's latest work. He wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "How did a man known for left-wing screeds and biting satire come to write a book that ... belongs in the first-tier of spiritual memoirs ever written? The answer is that Hendra resisted such extraordinary achievement just as he resisted God's love."

Hendra insists that in writing the book he wasn't trying to idolize Father Joe, he just wanted to tell his story. He doesn't think Father Joe could be idolized because he was so down to earth and so ordinary.

After all, Hendra says, Father Joe had large ears, catcher mitt hands and various other quirks and tics, Still, Father Joe managed to show Hendra different approaches and views to the most worldly problems, even though he spent much of life cloistered.

"If he was a saint, he was a very modern saint," Hendra says. "You could say he was the patron saint of imperfection. He was a saint of the ordinary, a saint of the possible. And I think that appeals to people."