Divided Friends

10. William L. Sullivan’s Fictions

10 WILLIAM L. SULLIVAN’S FICTIONS America’sTyrrell? Among the talented young priests attracted by George Tyrrell ’s spiritual writing in the early twentieth century was the Paulist William L. Sullivan (1872–1935). “Father Tyrrell we knew best of all,” Sullivan wrote in a memoir of the modernist crisis. So began a two-and-a-half-page tribute to Tyrrell in Sullivan’s posthumously published autobiography, Under Orders (1944), which he had originally titled A Mirror for Modernists. Sullivan went on to describe Tyrrell as “a strange, wild, beautiful soul, Celtic in his personality, in his brilliance, in his profound mystical sense.” He likened the Irish Jesuit to a lark “sent into the world to sing of God’s glory.... Tyrrell used to tell us,” Sullivan wrote, “that whatever our doubts or denials we should never leave the Church.” At his death in 1935, Sullivan left his autobiography unfinished. This appreciation of Tyrrell was written some time near the end of Sullivan’s life.1 Writing some twenty-five years earlier in Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X (1910), Sullivan began the preface with a quotation from Father Tyrrell uttered “less than a year before his too early death.” I cannot understand America. With its freedom and intelligence, its representatives ought to be in the forefront of the Modernist movement. Yet 259 1. Under Orders: The Autobiography of William Lawrence Sullivan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944; revised 1966), 102–5. For the general chronology of Sullivan’s life I have relied primarily on his obituary in the New York Times, October 7, 1935, 15, and on “Outstanding Dates in Dr. Sullivan’s Career,” compiled by Max Daskam in the 1966 edition of Under Orders, 198–200. 260  McSorley and Sullivan Modernism has produced there hardly an echo. The Church in America is asleep; but I can conceive nothing that will awaken it, but the production of some book native to the soil, which will raise so loud a cry of reform that all who have ears must hear. Sullivan concluded the preface by referring back to the “keen remark of Father Tyrrell quoted at the head of this article” and suggesting that readers now had in their hands just what Tyrrell had hoped for.2 Both these texts indicate that Sullivan intended his readers to think that he knew George Tyrrell personally and that the quotations Sullivan attributed to Tyrrell were spoken or written by him. But Sullivan and Tyrrell never met. Despite invitations, Tyrrell never traveled to the United States. At the time of Tyrrell’s death, Sullivan had never been to England. Nor is there any evidence of a Tyrrell-Sullivan correspondence that might corroborate the statements that Sullivan attributes to Tyrrell. No letters from Tyrrell are preserved in Sullivan’s correspondence at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. As John Ratté observes, the quotation from Tyrrell that begins the preface to Letters “probably reflects Sullivan’s hopes more than Tyrrell’s opinion.”3 Sullivan’s representations of his relationship with Tyrrell appear more fictional than real. The preface to Letters positions Sullivan as Tyrrell’s American successor and inheritor of the prophetic modernist mantle. Despite the fact that they had met only through the medium of Tyrrell’s writing, Sullivan identified with Tyrrell. It is hard to read Sullivan’s long encomium to Tyrrell in Under Orders as a Celtic mystic and writer and not think that one is also reading Sullivan’s imaginings about himself. George Tyrrell is “the gallant soldier, fearless and high-minded, with that bruised heart within him, that exiled soul, that heap of ashes which once had been his beautiful hopes.” At the end of his life, Sullivan stated that he still felt “an affectionate homage” for Tyrrell.4 No doubt Sullivan fancied himself something of an American Tyrrell . In Ambrose Hanlon, the fictional protagonist of Sullivan’s 1911 novel, The Priest: A Tale of Modernism in New England, Sullivan and Tyrrell converge in an uneasy Unitarian amalgam. 2. William Sullivan, Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X by a Modernist, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1914), xiii and xviii. 3. John Ratté, Three Modernists: Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, William L. Sullivan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 265. Ratte’s treatment of Sullivan remains indispensable. 4. Under Orders, 105. Sullivan’s Fictions  261 To anyone who reads them both, however, it is clear that Sullivan is not Tyrrell. Tyrrell elevates...