Phyllis Tickle

A Life

Jon M. Sweeney

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780819232991, 9780819232991
• eBook ISBN: 9780819233004
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

The definitive biography of one of the most beloved and respected figures in American religious life. In this comprehensive biography, Jon Sweeney, official biographer of Tickle's literary estate, explores every aspect of her life, a more than 50-year legacy of poetry; plays; literary, spiritual, and historical/theological work; and advocacy. Sweeney examines Tickle's personal and professional roots, from her family, long marriage, and life on The Farm in Lucy, Tennessee, to early academic career and move into book publishing, where her role as founding editor of the Religion Department at Publishers Weekly influenced the growth of spiritual writing and interfaith understanding during the 1990s. Sweeney also looks at pivotal relationships with John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and Brian McLaren, as well as her great influence on the increasing number who adopted fixed-hour prayer, the Episcopal Church as a whole, and the Emerging Church, for which she served as historian, forecaster, and champion. A look at her early, passionate advocacy for the LGBT community, lecture circuit controversies, and projects left unfinished completes the picture.

CHAPTER 1

Her Father’s Daughter

Some women have the bearing of their mothers, some, more of their fathers. Phyllis was always the latter. This was partly owing to fate, as birthing Phyllis nearly killed her mother, Katherine. The baby was born by Cesarean section on Monday, March 12, 1934. All nine and a half pounds of her emerged at 4:50 p.m. She let out her first cry two minutes later. It was fifteen days later, March 27, also her parents’ sixth wedding anniversary, before mother sat up again. By then Phyllis was drinking formula. Katherine first held her, with assistance, a day later, and the attending physicians made it clear that there could never ever be another pregnancy. The two went home on March 31. To add insult to injury, Phyllis cried non-stop that night from six o’clock to ten o’clock.

Her father, Philip, was the youngest of fifteen children and could not fathom a house without many of his own. He was an Alexander, a family that traced its origins in the United States back to Cecil County, Maryland, in the late seventeenth century. They came “from Scotland by way of Northern Ireland, where they probably lived at Raphoe, Donegal, and Sligo. Church records of Ulster prove that members of the Alexander family were Presbyterians there quite early,” as an extensive genealogy prepared by two of Phyllis’s cousins in 1964, reads.

Philip’s father, Washington Lafayette Alexander, fought at twentynine on the side of the Confederacy in the Battle of Shiloh, in southwest Tennessee, April 1862, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the American Civil War. This was before he found his love, Jennie, and married her four years later. Their marriage was a happy one, resulting in five sons and three daughters, but then Jennie died in 1884. Soon, Lafayette married Jennie’s sister, Virginia, who had also lost a spouse and had six children of her own. They made an enormous blended family even before Philip became the child of their old age. Philip was born April 17, 1892 in Lake County, West Tennessee, when his father was fifty-nine.

2

Both relieved and a bit heartbroken by the time Katherine and baby Phyllis came home from the hospital, knowing that he would only have one child, Philip knew one thing for certain. He would pour everything he could into the daughter that he’d held all alone for her first fifteen days of life.

He doted on her, making notes of her earliest days in a small brown leather diary.

Thursday, April 5, 1934

Slept most of the day. Appeared tired—profile grows more beautiful each day—cried “tears” to-day.

Friday, April 6, 1934

Cried from 7–9 p.m.—hungry we thought. Mother went for a ride.

Saturday, April 7, 1934

Smiled several times during day. Lovely features.

Nurses were coming and going, helping out, in those first weeks. Phyllis was growing and developing fine. At one month, she’d gained more than a pound. Philip continued to dote, writing on April 23, “Cried all morning. Angelic in afternoon. Six weeks old.” By two months, Phyllis was weighing more than twelve pounds and sucking her thumb. Both mother and daughter were doing well. Philip continued to chronicle the events: as she turned over for the first time, rode in a buggy, had eczema problems, babbled, showed an interest in dolls, slept (and not) through the night, cut her first teeth, and visited family in West Tennessee where “Daddy played nurse most all day. Did not leave hotel,” on the first day. Phyllis’s first words were “Da-da,” at eight months.

Katherine was a devout Southern Baptist before she wed the Presbyterian Philip Alexander. Philip was also a Christian humanist, well-read in classic novels, the Romantic poets, and Latin classics. As was common for a broadly educated man at that time, he also showed an interest in the histories and literatures of the East, including India, Persia, and the Arabs. Books filled every room, and were piled neatly on the table beside Philip’s green leather recliner in the study. One area outside the boundaries of what he took in, however, was Catholicism; a quiet anti-popery ruled in their house.

Educated at Peabody College in Nashville (now part of Vanderbilt University), he then earned a PhD at Columbia University in New York, with a year at the University of Edinburgh along the way, writing his dissertation on the relationship between Appalachian speech and Elizabethan English. Philip and Katherine married before the PhD was finished and she helped support him through the final years of graduate school. Philip also earned money playing jazz piano in speakeasies and other clubs in New York in the 1920s. (His grandchildren remember him playing these tunes for them as children—and being shocked by the lyrics.) As an adult, Phyllis kept and treasured Philip’s dissertation in a fireproof metal box, and she was deeply unhappy when her mother buried him wearing his Phi Beta Kappa pin. She wanted it.

3

Philip and Katherine were transplants from West Tennessee. Their house on Southwest Avenue near East Tennessee State in Johnson City was noteworthy for its immaculate English gardens in place of a lawn, and the built-ins stuffed with books in the living room, bedrooms, and study. Dark wood flooring and Navajo rugs set the feel when visitors walked in the front door, as did a console piano in the living room and sheep’s head clock. Groceries were delivered. Philip’s shirts were dry cleaned and starched.

One of Johnson City’s highlights at Christmastime was Katherine Alexander’s open house, or high tea, each year on December 20 and 21 at three o’clock in the afternoon. Hundreds of people came through their home, from the university community, the local bridge club, and the Alexander’s church, to enjoy Katherine’s raffinement and pecan fudge cake. Phyllis would later remember these occasions as being more about satisfying her father’s career and her mother’s desire to be domestically efficient, than about celebrating the religious season.¹

Every Christmas, and more than once each season, Philip would read aloud his favorite Christmas tale, Henry Van Dyke’s short novel The Story of the Other Wise Man, originally published in 1895. A prominent Presbyterian minister and professor of English literature at Princeton for a quarter century, Van Dyke was a man after Philip’s own heart. The Story of the Other Wise Man expands on the biblical story of the magi coming to see the Christ child, as told in the Gospel of Matthew, and creates a “fourth magi,” a Mede from Persia, who does a variety of good deeds on the long journey to Palestine—helping a dying man, selling some of his possessions to assist the needy—so that he is late in arriving after the holy birth. He is thirty-three years late, so occupied has he been helping others. He arrives only in time for the crucifixion; but then he misses this, as well, selling his last pearl (“of great price,” as in the parable) to help yet another. As he’s about to die, as Christ dies on the cross, the fourth magi hears a voice say the words of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 25:40: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

With a sonorous voice, Dr. Alexander—who was tall, slender, and handsome—wouldn’t simply read the story; it was an aural performance. Using a copy he’d owned since childhood, and in which he’d penciled dozens of notes and instructions to himself for these occasions, Philip would entertain and instruct family and guests. The notes included reminders as to which lines to emphasize, paragraphs to omit altogether, and certain things he wanted to remember to say, such as, “translated into 37 languages,” and “something that will turn my thoughts back to the real purpose of Christmas,” and, near the story’s end, “true significance—service to others.”² Through these performances, Philip taught his daughter the love of a stage and ingrained in her a respect for the gift of public speaking: One is always responsible before God for how carefully and prayerfully it is used.

4

Phyllis first learned poetry through the voice and performance of her father. She loved to listen and he loved to read to her. Throughout her life, poetry lived in her head in his voice and cadences. She didn’t cut her teeth on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but on hearing verse read aloud. When Phyllis was four and five years old, Professor Alexander would draw her bath, then sit on the clothes hamper, reading and reciting verses while she soaked in the tub for an hour. He started with his favorites, such as Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) / Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace . . .” With crescendos in all the right places, he would briefly pause and then continue with one that begins . . .

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.

Of course, “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allen Poe. But none would remain with Phyllis more than her dad reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay.” A poem of the Victorian age, by its most famous author, “Mandalay” was essential to childhood for Philip’s generation, known line-by-line by as many then as those who know not a word of it today. Its theme is also as politically incorrect by today’s standards as can be: a British soldier yearns to experience the “exoticism” of the Far East, a world away from dreary old England. It begins:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,

There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;

For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the Temple-bells they say:

“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”

5

Despite the Great Depression, the Alexander household was a loving and secure one, occupied only by the three of them.

Phyllis’s parents were passionate and overtly affectionate. In her innocence, Phyllis imagined that all marriages were consistently engaged and sensual. It was a shock, later, when she discovered that not all couples worked on the same principles. Most didn’t. One of her warmest memories was of her five-foot-three-inch mother hopping onto the bottom step of the hall landing so she could be tall enough to reach her six-foot-three-inch father for a dead-on, daytime kiss, to their obvious and mutual delight. She also remembered him chasing her around the kitchen, flipping a tea towel at her back side, while they giggled. In Phyllis’s house, when the bedroom door was closed, you didn’t knock unless blood was coming from your ears. These memories gave her a sense of stability.³

They lived in a place immortalized with a few sentences at the opening of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In that story, the grandmother is unhappy that the family is about to set off on vacation to Florida, for she’d rather visit cousins in East Tennessee. Looking around at her grandkids and their various disobediences, the grandmother pridefully remarks, “The children have been to Florida before. . . . You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.” When O’Connor was at Vanderbilt in April 1959 and read that story aloud, the audience erupted with laughter as she finished that line. Phyllis herself once told the people of Memphis (in West Tennessee), “I’m from the mountains of East Tennessee. . . . and ultimately every decision, every choice, every judgement gets back to that central fact.”⁴

In Johnson City, they raised chickens and kept hens. Phyllis remembered “cleaning up the flagstones after my father had wrung the neck of Sunday dinner and let it flop around the backyard until it died.”⁵

In her fourth year, banks were failing and stocks lost half their value on the New York Stock Exchange. Unemployment hovered at 20 percent. Around her birthday, German troops invaded Austria, forfeiting the Treaty of Versailles. Pessimism prevailed. But the Alexander home communicated none of this to their daughter, except for what she may have picked up from the nightly radio broadcasts.

The summer she turned five, 1939, would be memorable for many reasons. The first took place when Philip spent a week of mornings in July damming up a nearby creek so that Phyllis could swim in it. Once the work was done, the five-year-old spent gleeful hou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chronology
• Author’s Note
• Phyllis Tickle’s Books
• Prologue
• 1. Her Father’s Daughter
• 2. Southern University Town
• 3. College and the Classics
• 4. Wife of a Country Doctor
• 5. A Woman among Men
• 6. Anesthetizing Grief
• 7. Making It in Verse
• 8. The Mid-South Phenom
• 9. Moving to Lucy
• 10. When Daisy Called
• 11. The Boom before Amazon
• 12. Prayer Manuals and Mysticism
• 13. The Shaping of a Life
• 14. Behind the Scenes for LGBTQ
• 15. A Rapidly Changing Church
• 16. Navigating Gratia and Jesus
• 17. Trouble at Home and on the Road
• 18. Death, Again
• 19. Her Final Year
• 20. Future Projects
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index