 |
 |
 |
| United States Catholic History: U.S. Catholic Literature Una M. Cadegan This article, "U.S. Catholic Literature," was the seventh article of the University of Dayton's Catechist Formation Program in association with Catechist magazine, a Peter Li Education Group Publication (April/May 2001). It is reprinted with permission. For additional information, go to the following websites: University of Dayton, www.udayton.edu/~catechis, and Catechist magazine, www.catechist.com. |
||
|
|
What does it mean to talk about "Catholic" literature? This question cannot be answered simply, but its complexities are illuminating. It isn't enough simply to say that Catholic literature is anything written by a Catholic, though what U.S. Catholics have written is of great interest to us. It also isn't enough simply to include anything that has an identifiably Catholic setting or theme, because that would exclude works that might not mention priests or sacraments, but are deeply Catholic in the way they depict human nature and created reality. So where does that leave us? If we define the topic too broadly, we run the risk of banality, watering things down to some vague sense of "Catholic values," without ever saying what that means. On the other hand, if we have to err, my study of U.S. Catholic literary culture has taught me, we should err on the side of capaciousness; i.e., we should include rather than exclude. In order to explain why that should be, I want to approach the answer to this question from two different angles: first, what have U.S. Catholics written? Second, how have they thought about literature? Then, what does the view from these two angles tell us about the U.S. Catholic past? When we talk about "literature," we most often mean writing of special aesthetic worth (e.g., Jane Austen is literature; John Grisham is not). This is a relatively recent use of the term. A century ago, "literature" referred to many different kinds of writingónovels, poetry, drama, essays, travel accounts, memoirs, letters, journals. If we approach the study of U.S. Catholic literature like literary critics, the landscape looks pretty bareóthe ranks of "great American writers" who were Catholic or who wrote about Catholic subjects are pretty thin. But if we approach our study as historians or anthropologistsóthat is, if we're interested in whatever people were writing and reading, and leave aside questions of literary "worth," at least temporarilyóthe picture is very different. All of a sudden the landscape is densely populated with people engaged in every kind of literary endeavor. Let's look at some of them chronologically; then stop and see what they tell us about whatever "Catholic literature" is. The 19th Century At first glance, 19th-century U.S. Catholicism can seem like a foreign country, and in some ways it is. Its theological disputes, while crucial to the way the Church looks and operates today, require considerable background in order to understand. For an appreciation of what the time looked and felt like a little closer to the experience of the ordinary Catholic, perhaps no better source exists than periodicals. At the end of the 19th century, magazines flourished generally in the United States. Advances in printing and distribution made them affordable to the rapidly growing middle class, and they played a role in these homes much as television does todayóthey were sources of entertainment and information for the whole family. American Catholics thought it very important that this influential medium should have a Catholic dimension. They published a wide variety of magazines that looked very much like their American counterparts, but which addressed Catholic households as their intended audience. If you'd like to get a sense of what concerned Catholic families in the second half of the 19th century, of what the concerns and issues of the day were, one very good way to do so is to browse through issues of Catholic World, Ave Maria, or Messenger of the Sacred Heart. Two writers, different from each other in many ways, typify central themes in 19th-Catholic writing. Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) was a prominent convert, already well-known for his prolific journalism and for his involvement with the New England Transcendentalists when he became a Roman Catholic in 1844. Because of the era's considerable anti-Catholicism, Brownson's conversion meant renouncing much of his success and influence. He continued to write for the rest of his life, however, turning his talents to defending Catholicism against its American detractors. From writings such as The Convert, or Leaves from My Experience, readers today can get an idea of how different the situation of U.S. Catholics was a century-and-a-half ago. Some of yesterday's debatesósuch as those in Brownson's The American Republic over the disadvantages and limitations of democracyóseem outdated today, but remind us forcefully that even the most basic assumptions we make about the world were not always so. Different from Brownson in temperament and medium, but like him in her concern for the situation of immigrant Catholics was Mary Anne Sadlier (1820-1903). Herself an Irish immigrant, Mary Anne Madden married into the Sadlier family, one of the best-known Catholic publishers. In books such as Bessy Conway; or The Irish Girl in America, Sadlier saw her purpose very clearly: "It is simply an attempt to point out to Irish girls in Americaóespecially that numerous class whose lot it is to hire themselves out for work, the true and never-failing path to success in this world, and happiness in the next. Perhaps in the vast extent of the civilized world, there is no class more exposed to evil influences than the Irish Catholic girls who earn a precarious living at service in America." Sadlier's works, popular in their day, are largely forgotten now, which makes them a valuable window onto another time and place. While we think most often of literature as something timeless, sometimes what is more valuable instead is timeliness; i.e., the ability of a piece of writing to reflect a time genuinely different from our own. In its depictions of servants and mistresses, urban American dangers and rural Irish poverty, Bessy Conway is not thematically or stylistically complex, but it does offer a sense of the texture of life hard to acquire from any other source. Modernism and Its Contemporaries The same concern with everyday reality is evident in the wildly popular novels of Kathleen Thompson Norris (1880-1966; not to be confused with the contemporary spiritual writer). Norris published her first book, the semi-autobiographical Mother, in 1911; over the next 50 years, she published almost 90 more. One of the best-selling writers of the century, she was discouraged in the early years of her career from including Catholic settings in her novels, for fear of limiting sales. In 1925, however, she published Little Ships, in which the very clearly Catholic Cunningham family navigate the bringing of five children to adulthood. Like almost all of Norris's novels, Little Ships focuses on the small daily realities of household and family life, insisting on their meaningfulness amid the changing and dangerous world outside. Better known at least in part because they decided to depict the changes and the ambiguities of modern life are the American authors we often associate with modernism, the most pervasive literary trend of the early 20th century. What is not widely known about some of these writers is that they were at some point in their lives, by some definition, Catholic. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), and James T. Farrell (1904-1979) all were either raised Catholic or converted, and all dealt with discernibly Catholic themes in their work, though in ways very different from Mary Anne Sadlier and Kathleen Norris. James T. Farrell (in his Studs Lonigan trilogy) and Eugene O'Neill (in many plays but especially in Long Day's Journey into Night) depict the pathologies of early-20th-century Irish-American Catholicismóurban poverty, sexual repression, alcoholism. The work of Dreiser, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald was Catholic in a different sense. Each was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by Catholicism (Dreiser and Fitzgerald as cradle Catholics who left the Church, Hemingway as a somewhat ambivalent convert). While the settings of their work are not, for the most part, explicitly Catholic, critics and biographers see Catholic influence (both positive and negative) in the way they approach their subjects. What all these writers have in common is that the picture they paint of the modern world is very bleak; indeed, for much of this century, Catholic critics refused to call them "Catholic writers," partly because they had left the Church, partly because their work was so negative in its depiction of human nature and society. More recently, though, each writer has been in some ways re-appropriated; that is, we have come to recognize what we can learn about the situation of early-20th-century Catholicism from their writing. Few writers, for example, depict as powerfully as Dreiser the inexorable weight of injustice bearing down on helpless workers in U.S. cities at the turn of the century. His naturalistic universe is so bleak at least in part because it is godless; its very barrenness can serve as an affirmation of how belief changes the way the believer sees the world. Similarly, even in the depths of their human wreckage, the families in the work of Farrell and O'Neill reinforce rather than negate what Kathleen Norris insists onóthat families produce and sustain their members, that their influence is life-long, and that religion can be a life-giving or a soul-destroying force, depending on how believers wield it and are wielded by it. Norris errs on the side of the formulaic and sentimental, Farrell and O'Neill on the side of anger and retaliation; all, however, offer compelling, emotionally gripping evidence of the difficult transition from immigration to assimilation that was the central shaping experience for generations of U.S. Catholics. Not American, Not Catholic Perhaps surprisingly, we can learn a great deal about American Catholic literature by looking at three writers who were either not Catholic or not American. Their writing is a valuable resource for understanding certain aspects of Catholic experience; even more interesting, though, is how they were received and understood by U.S. Catholics writing about literature in the 20th century. Willa Cather (1873-1947) is best known for novels of the American West such as My Antonia and O, Pioneers! in the late 1920s and early 1930s, though she published two novels that took as their subject the "deep past" of American Catholicism. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is the fictionalized story of the first archbishop of Santa Fe (in the novel, Fr. Latour; in reality, Jean Baptiste Lamy). In beautiful, elegiac prose, Cather conveys the hardship of the bishop's life, the contrast between his French elegance and the roughness of his surroundings, and the gorgeous unlikelihood of Catholicism's taking root in the vast American Southwest. Shadows on the Rock (1931) has in some ways a very different subject and main character, but explores many of the same themes. It focuses on the life of a young girl in 16th-century Quebec, whose mother has just died so that she is responsible for maintaining the household and caring for her father through the long and dangerous winter. The Catholicism of French Canada is part of the fabric of the novel. Cather hesitated before writing Death Comes for the Archbishop, attracted to the story but convinced it would fare better in the hands of a Catholic writer. The novel's publication caused some soul-searching on the part of American Catholic writers and criticsówhy, they wondered, had such a powerfully American and Catholic novel been written by a non-Catholic? What prevented Catholics from depicting their own experience as powerfully and attractively? This question would haunt Catholic writers for at least another generation. A different light is shed on U.S. Catholic literature in the 20th century when we look at two of the most famous Catholic writers outside the U.S.óJames Joyce (1882-1941) and Graham Greene (1904-1991). Joyce was in some ways a prototype for the Catholic writer's ambivalent relationship both with modernity and with the Church. He rejected Catholicismóand Irelandóbut was undeniably influenced by them; he saw how modern notions of the autonomous self both freed people and alienated them. His stylistic innovations excited literary critics but helped reinforce the idea of literature as a specialized realm to which only the initiated had access. U.S. Catholic writers and critics hesitated to claim Joyce as a Catholic writer, as they had with the American modernists, because he had left the Church, and because the themes of his fiction were considered by some to verge on blasphemy and obscenity. As the century progressed, however, Joyce came to be seen as part of the history of 20th-century Catholicism, as a writer who had struggled with genuine questions raised by the modern era and its changing notions of human nature and created reality. The dilemma seemed to be that major writers, both American and non-American, seemed to become great in part by leaving the Church. Was it possible for a writer to be both major and Catholic? Graham Greene's career provided an answer to that question that some critics might have preferred not to hear. Greene was a British writer who converted to Catholicism when he married, and who identified himself as a Catholic for the rest of his long life, despite deep disagreement with some Church teachings and a personal life (including a sustained and public extramarital affair) that he himself admitted did not conform to conventional Christian morality. He may, however, in his provocative way be the most indisputably Catholic writer in English of the century. In his novels Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair, Greene raised apparently unanswerable moral questions (Can someone commit suicide for the love of God? Can an adulterer be a saint?); to answer them, his readers had to confront the limits of their own belief in the infinity of God's mercy. As U.S. Catholic writers and critics admired Greene's work and wrestled with the dilemmas he posed, they developed a growing maturity (their word, not mine) in their view of the relationship among Catholicism, the modern world, and the artists who interpreted it. This emerging view accepted the ambiguous place of humanity in a world no longer unquestionably Christian, and attempted to find a new language in which to describe the relationship. It is a view we find in the work of the three U.S. Catholic writers whose achievements are most clearly both excellent literarily and deeply Catholic. U.S. Catholic Writers Come Into Their Own It sounds a little simplistic, but J. F. Powers (1917-1999) would probably be a lot more famous if he had written more. Five books (two novels, three collections of short stories) in 40 years simply wasn't enough to get him onto the critical radar screen and keep him there. No other U.S. Catholic writer has so deftly and effectively caught the nuances and textures of parish life. There may be no better way to gain perspective on the changes wrought in U.S. Catholicism over the last several decades than to read Powers's 1962 Morte d'Urban and then his 1988 Wheat that Springeth Green. Walker Percy (1916-1990) mined a somewhat different vein of American Catholic life, the Southóthe modern South, in which old certainties are crumbling and new ones are not ready to hand. Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award in 1962, and, though it has little of the Catholic detail and atmosphere of Powers' writing, is one of the great U.S. Catholic reckonings with contemporary American life. Its protagonist, Binx Bolling, is rootless and restless in ways recognizable to many citizens of the century; the movies seem more real to him than his own life. He senses, though he cannot articulate or place it, something bigger and truer beyond what he can see and hear around him, and by the end of the novel he seems to be pointed in its directionómaybe. In its ambiguity and hesitancy, The Moviegoer is perhaps less immediately satisfying than other works with clearer resolutions and a surer vision of the world and the Church's place in it. In hindsight, though, it seems to capture a moment in U.S. Catholic history with a wit and empathy and wisdom unmatched by almost any other work, including Percy's other novels (all of which are well worth reading, though). Among U.S. Catholic writers, Percy's only current peer in literary achievement and reputation is Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). O'Connor lived for most of her short life on her mother's farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia, but her vision and ambition ranged wide and deep. She identified herself as a Catholic author, and steeped herself in theology and spiritual reading, but her fiction depicts the world she could observe from her homeóthe world of the pre-Civil-Rights South, with very little in the way of Catholic presence or atmosphere about it. Before she died, at the age of 39, O'Connor published two collections of short stories and two novels. Understanding what makes her fiction Catholic requires some effort, but few authors reward the attempt more. Flannery O'Connor wrote not for an audience of convinced and devout Catholics but for people who, as she put it, "think God is dead." She took drastic measures (such as having her characters shot by serial killers or gored to death by bulls) to direct her readers' attention to God's action, God's presence in the world, to the consequences of the Incarnation. Her vision is unsentimental and idiosyncraticóher works are not particularly useful as documents of American Catholic cultural history. But as experiencesóthat is, as encounters with the power of art to illuminate realityóthey have a power unique in U.S. Catholic literature. Read them along with her letters, published under the title The Habit of Being, so that the stories' starkness and gothic exaggeration are complemented by her humor and humanness. Conclusion When I teach literature in my history courses, I constantly remind my students that the great disadvantage of using fiction as a source of historical evidence is that novelists are allowed to make things up. At the same time, as any reader knows, there are truths available in fiction that are difficult if not impossible to access any other way. So, what truths about the U.S. Catholic past does its literature reveal? Much more could be said here than we have room for; three points, though, are crucial. First, the relationship between Catholicism and American culture has often been an uneasy one. The uneasiness emerges in fears that, on the one hand, American culture can have a corrosive effect on faith and, conversely, that the more insular and parochial elements of U.S. Catholicism can stymie the democratic promise of America. When Mary Anne Sadlier depicts a Catholic mistress deeply concerned that her servants attend Mass on Sunday, she wants to protect her readers (whether mistresses or servants) from the temptations to distraction and laxity she perceives in the growing material comfort of U.S. Catholic life. In stark contrast, James T. Farrell sees very different dangersóthe stifling of creativity and originality through relentless, doctrinaire orthodoxy. The contradiction here is irreducibleówe cannot find a compromise between these two visions of American Catholic life. At the same time, though, the main reason this unease is so evident is that the effort to engage the question has been so pervasive and persistent. In other words, U.S. Catholics of widely varied beliefs, whose relationship to the Church varied from deep devotion to outright rejection, consistently wrestled as artists with the meaning of the Catholic experience in America. Their answers are as diverse as their beliefs and temperaments; Kathleen Norris' happy families and Flannery O'Connor's backwoods prophets seem to inhabit different universes. What they share is the conviction that God is present in the world, and that the writer's job is to make that presence apparent to their audience. Writers were only one contingent of the vast Catholic literary enterprise engaged in this same work. U.S. Catholic literary culture also produced critics, editors, publishers, printers, librarians, teachers, reviewersóall testifying by their existence to the central place Catholics in the U.S. believed literary art should have, even in a population concerned more with survival and with material success than with the less tangible satisfactions art can offer. Third and finally, reading what Catholics have written in the past offers an encounter with an American myth (that is, a narrative by which we understand and structure our experience) different in important ways from those that shape what is often considered to be "great American literature." The important texts of American literature most often celebrate archetypal experiences of freedom from history and from communityóHuck Finn lighting out for the territory, Captain Ahab pursuing the white whale. Catholic tradition, in contrast, emphasizes the inescapable embeddedness of the person in history and in community, and the continuity between past and present. U.S. Catholic literature makes clearer than any other source that this very different story is nonetheless undeniably American. Una M. Cadegan is the associate professor of history and the director of the American Studies Program at the University of Dayton. She holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of several articles on U.S. Catholic literary culture. Additional reading: In addition to the works described in this article, there are a number of Catholic writers flourishing today. All of the writers below have written more than the one work listed; what these represent in each case is a very good place to start. Andre Dubus, Dancing After Hours Mary Gordon, Final Payments Andrew Greeley, The Cardinal Sins Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy Jon Hassler, North of Hope Alice McDermott, Charming Billy Anna Quindlen, Object Lessons |
|
| Home | Blog | Used Books | eBooks | Recommendations | Publishers | Books by Title | About Us | Email Us Copyright © 1998-2007, Daniel
J. Pierson. |
||