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

1. U.S. Catholic Literary Aesthetics

20 In 1921, Condé B. Pallen published an article in America entitled “Free Verse.” Pallen by this time had been prominent in Catholic literary culture for decades. As editor of Church Progress and Catholic World of St. Louis, poet, literary scholar and critic, popular lecturer on literary topics, and managing editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia, Pallen in his career linked literary and nonliterary work, institution building with scholarly and creative productivity. In “Free Verse,” he wrote, “‘Shredded prose’ is an apt description, if not an exact definition of what its advocates call free verse. That it is free, as free as madcap caprice, may be granted; that it is verse, which is built on metrical units, is to be denied. People may speak of a square circle, but there is no such thing; contradictions in terms are only a way of registering the impossible.” So far, a formal argument from a disgruntled conservator of ossified stylistic convention. But as Pallen continues, an alternative cosmology becomes apparent. “The free-verse movement, like many other radical movements of the day, is a reaction from law and order. . . . Like free verse, cubism and futurism have flared up, the dawn of new things, only to be consumed in the lurid flame of their own incandescent folly. Free verse is only another ignis fatuus blown from the miasmic jungles of disorder. You cannot escape the law. God made the world in measure, weight and number, and in measure, weight and number it will endure.”1 This is an argument not just about literary style, but about Chapter 1 U.S. Catholic Literary Aesthetics U.S. CATHOLIC LITERARY AESTHETICS 21 the nature of the world. Its alternative cosmology is theocentric, and the order and purpose of the universe are discernible to humanity.2 Pallen was not alone in his conviction that the literary was connected to every other aspect of reality. Indeed, he shares with his co-religionists this and other beliefs that put them at odds with many of their contemporaries— not just religiously, but also philosophically, politically, historically, and literarily . For this generation, the “root source of modern disorder,” as Philip Gleason puts it, lay in society’s rejection of Catholicism’s perennial truth and legitimate authority. Equally important, Catholics also believed they knew how—and were obligated—to address modernity’s deepest discontents.3 Catholics who took up this obligation via literary work needed not just institutions and publications, not just organizations and printing presses; they needed an aesthetic—a conscious, explicit philosophical framework for de- fining and evaluating literature. Such a framework had already been shaping U.S. Catholic literary work for some time, as Condé Pallen’s critique suggests. Its role in the cultural work of Catholic literature can be more clearly demonstrated by sketching its contours, describing some of its major elements, and examining its role in appraising one of the major literary movements of the generation before the era of the Great War, realism. Interwar Catholic Literary Culture Catholics involved in literary work were shaping and employing their literary aesthetic in an era when changes in the secular literary academy significantly affected the nature of their task. Two of these changes are especially important here. Beginning in the early 1920s, American literary culture was becoming simultaneously professionalized and nationalized. In the generation of the “genteel tradition,” late Victorians writing between the U.S. Civil War and World War I, literature had been more avocation than profession , the province of “men of letters” who wrote and read primarily in mainstream middle-class periodicals.4 As university study and research became more specialized in the first decades of the twentieth century, departments of “English” began appearing, and literature increasingly became the province of the universities, requiring professional study and credentialing, especially to undertake the work of the critic. A cause and consequence of this change was the growing legitimacy of American literature as an object of serious study. Earlier generations had considered reading post-Renaissance English-language literature to be leisure, not scholarship—and if this was true of authors such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, how much more 22 CHAPTER 1 true must it be of Washington Irving and James Fennimore Cooper?5 As literary scholars began to discern an “American Renaissance” in the writings of a number of mid-nineteenth-century Anglo male Protestant New Englanders, however, they expanded the body of work...