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3. Faith and Fantasy
- Southern Illinois University Press
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66 3 FaithandFantasy Is it my fault if your little lives are so empty you must make mysteries out of a simple performance of illusionism? —Philip Barry, War in Heaven Philip Barry was, in many ways, a skeptic. As we’ve already seen, he could be skeptical about his own craft and the social class he had been permitted to enter. He could intermix enjoyment with a deconstruction of why we enjoy and what it is we do not notice as we enjoy—whether it be the pleasure of a ritualized cocktail,1 a clever line, or an assumption of superiority and entitlement. As we’ve noted in the previous chapter, he could test the boundaries of the vows of marriage to explore the permeability of truth. He was, above all, acutely aware of how individuals and groups of individuals could be locked into “little rooms” of belief where even religion itself could become spirit-denying, where the securing constructs of faith could become perilous. Barry grew up in an Irish-Catholic household at a time when wellentrenched prejudices resurfaced against both Irish and Catholics with the onset and aftermath of World War I. Anti-Irish feelings had washed over the United States a number of times throughout the nineteenth century and in the years leading up to World War I.2 Now, as the 1920s tried to balance transgression with normalization, a new outburst reminded of how wars often come about: through fear or resentment of the other. Historian $QGHUVRQ&KLQGG $0 Faith and Fantasy 67 John Higham, in his landmark study Strangers in the Land, referred to the decade not as the “Roaring Twenties” but as the “Tribal Twenties,” when nationalism and a variety of ethnic and religious prejudices would destabilize the push for stabilization in America and on the Continent. For Irish-Catholics in the United States, the war years had generated their own difficulties. Fund-raising by Irish Americans in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 had created suspicion about loyalties to the United States. Some Irish American publications were censored, and, as Desmond King points out, President Woodrow Wilson was joined by such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt in condemning ethnic Americans’ “tepid nationalism,” including Irish Americans among the ethnics (67).Irish American Brendan Gill recalled, “It would be hard to exaggerate the degree to which, in the period [Barry]—and, some twenty years later, I—were growing up (that is, during the first quarter of the twentieth century), our ancestry served to mark us as outsiders” (New York Life 162). Nevertheless, Barry was spared much of the immediate stigmatization experienced by others of his ethnic group by what was possibly a happy accident. As Gill noted, “The most important event of Philip’s life in Rochester may well have been his enrollment in a public high school” (“Dark Advantage” 10). There were, according to Gill, no Catholic high schools in Rochester, and his enrollment in East High School had two important effects upon Barry.3 First, it allowed him “to move at a single stride away from a narrow religiosity that was threatening to suffocate him. . . . Unlike the other Barrys, Philip had never been an exceptionally devout Catholic , though he had been a dutiful one” (10–11). Second, it acquainted him directly with the upscale, Protestant world of East Avenue, the grand residential boulevard of Rochester, where the big houses sat ranged in self-congratulating propinquity on their level green lawns, like so many stout matrons seated elbow to elbow, implacably chaperoning a ball; soon he was being invited to tea dances and birthday parties in those houses. He was carefully dressed, he had excellent manners, he was eager to please—oh, yes, in spite of the fact that he was Irish and Catholic and without money and without connections, he was worthy of a conditional acceptance; he would be given a chance to see whether, on further testing, he might not, after all, do! (11)4 Obviously, he did “do,” even as he retained a sense of how easy it was to become “the other.” For a person, then, naturally attuned to the dynamic of attraction and exclusion, the secular and religious articulations of faith that could $QGHUVRQ&KLQGG $0 [44.211.243.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:59 GMT) Faith and Fantasy 68 both unite and divide were something he would come back to repeatedly throughout his writings. During the postwar years of experimentation and redefinition, he increasingly sensed...