All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America

3. Declining Oppositions

64 It is probably not an accident that in George Shuster’s The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature the word “modernism ” does not occur, despite the work’s appearing in modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922, the year of publication for both Ulysses and TheWaste Land. The only time the word “modernist” appears is in an approving description of Hilaire Belloc’s attempt to “uncover the medieval walls upon which modern Europe rests” in The Path to Rome: “He laughs with the Catholic peasant at the expense of the modernist; he joins eagerly in the dozen democratic things which people who are free in practice think it natural to perform” (257). Shuster, who would soon move on to Commonweal magazine and eventually to the presidency of Hunter College and to a variety of positions within the U.S. government, including seventeen years with UNESCO, almost certainly was aware both of the work of those who embraced the term and of the condemnation by the Vatican of a set of theological positions collected under the same name. The absence of the term while Shuster explores “modern” English literature is most usefully seen not as evasion but as engagement, but engagement on territory on which many combatants had been warned not to tread and had therefore to proceed delicately, alert and wary. The boundaries they were attempting to circumvent were not solely literary , and they were policed not solely by Catholics. In a 1929 review in the Chapter 3 Declining Oppositions DECLINING OPPOSITIONS 65 American Journal of Sociology, Chicago Theological Seminary’s Arthur E. Holt reviewed Shuster’s 1927 The Catholic Spirit in America along with Winfred Garrison’s Catholicism and the American Mind. In the review, Holt approvingly quotes Garrison’s zero-sum formulation of the predicament facing Catholics such as Shuster: “The men who defend the principle of toleration for all varieties of religious opinion, assume either that all religions are equally true or that the true cannot be distinguished from the false. On no other ground is it logically possible to accept the theory of indiscriminate and universal toleration.” Holt assesses this as “a rather hard nut for a man of Mr. Shuster’s liberal tendency to crack.”1 This sense, perceived and articulated on both sides of the divide, of the incompatibility of Catholic stances with the foundations of modernity generally and with modernism in literature in particular, could take on epochal dimensions, as in Ezra Pound’s announcement of the end of the Christian era when James Joyce wrote the last words of Ulysses, an end he saw as so definitive that he proposed that 1922 become “year 1 of a new era.”2 But as we know, Catholic writers both of and about literature refused to stay put on their side of this divide. How did they navigate in order to eventually remap the divide, claiming the entire territory as their homeland? Four dimensions of the problem distinctive to the literary will be central, two of which—individual and community, iconoclasm and orthodoxy—have to do with literature’s content, and the two others—openness and closure, innovation and repetition—with literature’s form. Individual and Community The modernist project exalted the creative individual, the person who was able to shed the strictures of history and society and see and render the world afresh. In its European forms, the history and society against which modernism defined itself were inescapably Catholic. As American critics began articulating an indigenous modernism, they made the development of American literature into a variant of this story writ large. That is, American history itself was the story of the independent and autonomous, democratic spirit of Protestantism finding fertile soil in the New World to cultivate a society free from the conventions and hierarchies of the old. The most “American” literature, increasingly by the 1920s, was that which told this story. By the 1940s, “American literature” (the canon of valued texts) was deeply inflected by Protestant-romantic notions of the authentic self, free of the constraints of society, history, and community. Huck Finn 66 CHAPTER 3 “lighting out for the territory,” Ahab desiring to “strike the sun if it insulted me,” Jay Gatsby’s believing in the green light, “the orgiastic future that year by year receded before us”—these protagonists stood contentiously against their soft, compromised compatriots and boldly faced the world without the support of convention...