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

7. Reclaiming the Modernists, Reclaiming the Modern

153 In 1948 the novelist Harry Sylvester published an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Problems of the Catholic Writer.” Among these problems was the obligation that Catholics had to marry and raise a large family, depriving the writer of the solitude and silence necessary for writing, and requiring him to earn enough money to support them all, usually through means other than writing. Sylvester also lamented the Church’s prohibition of divorce, as successful writers typically divorced a first wife and married a second, younger woman who could be instrumental in managing the writer’s life and career while he concentrated on continuing to write. Sylvester’s diagnosis of these problems reflected a deep alienation from what he described as “our American Catholic Bingo Culture” and its emasculating effect on U.S. Catholic men, a diagnosis developed in his novel Golden Girl. That novel’s Hemingway-esque plot centers on a young Irish American Catholic in Peru coming to the realization that his virginity had kept him trapped in immaturity. His desperate attempts to seduce the “Golden Girl” of the novel’s title end in tragedy, reflecting Sylvester ’s increasing despair over the possibility of American Catholicism’s attaining the kind of sexual maturity he thought it lacked. Eventually Sylvester did divorce his first wife (who had struggled for years with mental illness) and subsequently left the Church and remarried. He seemed in that Chapter 7 Reclaiming the Modernists, Reclaiming the Modern 154 CHAPTER 7 process to achieve a peace of mind that had eluded him for decades when he was striving to become a significant American Catholic writer.1 Sylvester’s good friend, novelist Richard Sullivan, was milder in temper and more generous in his assessment of the contemporary situation. Nonetheless he also wrestled with finding a place and a voice in the postwar landscape of U.S. Catholic literary culture and American literary life in general. From his position in the English Department at Notre Dame, he wrote and published six novels that never broke through to real sales, and into his old age he puzzled about why. For a while in the early postwar years he attributed his lack of success to a certain “softness” in his subject matter and style, but he could not pull off the harder, “Sam-Spade” approach he experimented with for a while after the war, and eventually he reverted to his customary style. As far as his extant correspondence reveals, he never attributed his personal or professional trials to the church or to Catholic culture, though he sympathized with Sylvester’s struggles and frequently asserted substantial agreement with his criticisms.2 Different as they were temperamentally, Sylvester and Sullivan struggled with dilemmas characteristic of Catholic writers of their generation. Well before the calling of the Second Vatican Council in 1959, Catholic scholars and intellectuals knew the Church was facing an era of profound change, change manifest in intellectual life and many other areas by the end of the 1960s. This story has often been told as a Catholic American bildungsroman, a coming-of-age narrative within which the things of childhood are put away and the things of adulthood embraced. What is embraced are the prosperity and affluence of postwar American consumer society, and, within a few years, the Enlightenment intellectual stance that had come to ground intellectual modernity. The distinctiveness of midcentury Catholic intellectual life, when not overtly rejected, became vaguely embarrassing, something people were happy to see behind them in the rearview mirror as they headed down the Vatican II highway. The intellectual history of U.S. Catholicism has also largely been told as an ancillary narrative—the real story of U.S. Catholic history focuses on politics and sociology (both within the Church and outside it). Accounts that examine intellectual and cultural history at all presume that theology and philosophy compose the central narrative thread. Literature as Intellectual History In the history of twentieth-century U.S. Catholic intellectual life, literature has often been treated as though its story is entirely distinct. There are very RECLAIMING THE MODERNISTS, RECLAIMING THE MODERN 155 good works on Catholic writers, but their work often seems to be analyzed as though it happens in parallel with the development of American Catholic intellectual life. In this, Catholic literary history is not far different from its secular counterparts, because this separation is itself an artifact of modernism...