The Last Catholic in America

The Last Catholic in America
by John R. Powers
E.P. Dutton, 1973
ISBN 0829421300

The Last Catholic in America, like Catholics by Brian Moore, has been recently re-published by the Loyola Classics Series.   

The Last Catholic is typical of the many “I Survived Catholic Schools” memoirs about parochial school life before Vatican II.  It’s humor is affectionate and genial.  However, it does include the usual stereotypes of harsh nuns, obsessive priests, and parents unquestioning of the Church.  Also typical is the drama created by a growing boy’s tension with (and misinterpretation of) the Church’s view of human sexuality.  These are among the book’s funniest scenes including an attempt to buy soft-porn and a talk on the “facts of life” delivered to the eighth graders (segregated by gender) by an octogenerian priest — a talk which mysteriously turns all eight grade girls against the boys.

The Last Catholic in America  is a  refreshingly comic novel although it does have the occasional moment of poignant nostalgia.  John R. Powers followed The Last Catholic with Do Black Patent-Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up which continues his fictionalized memoirs with his adventures in a Catholic all-boys high school.

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Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger
Little, Brown and Company, 1955
ISBN 3-316-76954-1

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (which is actually two longish short stories published together as a novel) is not what’s usually thought of as “Catholic Fiction.”  However, I have a tradition of giving it to my nieces and nephews when they receive Confirmation, along with its companion work The Way of the Pilgrim. 

Franny is a senior in college when she runs across the slim volume The Way of the Pilgrim, a spiritual work by an anonymous 19^th-century Russian Orthodox peasant searching for the means to carry out St. Paul’s directive to “pray without ceasing.”  Franny begins to see, or to think she sees, that everyone around her is, in her words, “all ego.”  (Holden Caulfield would say they’re all “phonies.”).  In other words, she finds that this life, especially its intellectual pursuits, is “all straw.”   However, instead of leading her to higher spiritual insight, this idea leads her to depression.  It takes her brother Zooey, in his epymonious story, to help her find the peace through prayer that she seeks.

The Glass children, of whom Franny and Zooey are the youngest, are half-Irish Catholic and half Jewish, and they were all mentored by the eldest brother Seymour in Eastern spiritualities.  The religious references in the book are eclectic but ultimately Zooey closes the stories with one of the most christian, and catholic, insights I’ve ever read.  Certainly, it lead me to go on to read The Way of the Pilgrim when I myself was a senior in college and then onto the collection of Eastern Christian spiritual writings called The Philokalia studied by The Pilgrim.

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Jon Hassler

Even though I’ve already suggested one book by Jon Hassler (Dear James), since he has recently passed away, I would like to honor him with another entry.  All of Hassler’s works are eminently worth reading, but three of my personal favorites are The Dean’s List, Simon’s Night, and North of Hope.

The Dean’s List is the first Hassler novel I read.  It is an immensely funny depiction of academic life from the point of view of a weary administrator (who’d rather be a faculty member).  Edwards lives with his mother whose death he must soon face; he frequently runs into his ex-wife with whom he still has a friendly and loving relationship.  He occasionally runs into the friends of his teaching days (whose adventures are recounted in Hassler’s earlier novel Rookery Blues).  But something is missing from his life, something that’s been missing since his father was struck by lightening when Leland was fourteen.  He’s the dean of a mediocre university with a more than mediocre president.  His mother, a local radio personality, outshines him and controls him.  Then arrives on campus the noted poet Richard Falcon (a sort of Robert Frost-ish kind of poet)  whom Leland is supposed to keep track of.  Chaos, hilarity and pathos ensue.  And in the process his life changes.

Simon’s Night begins at what Simon Shea assumes is the end of his life.  He’s eighty now and having difficulty living by himself.   He has lived alone since his wife abandoned him years ago.  Simon’s commits himself into the Norman Home for the Elderly, a place filled with the most amusing old people ever described by a warm and loving author.  These are not caricatures or stereotypes of crazy old people – although they are to some extent crazy.  They are very much real people with faults, annoying habits, and deep, sympathetic souls.  Much of Simon’s story is his remembrances, and these flashbacks contain one of the most beautiful descriptions of making a choice between, not really good and evil, but between a good and The Good ever written.  Simon is ultimately faced with another choice in this novel – a choice between wasting his life or beginning it anew.

North of Hope is perhaps Hassler’s darkest novel, and it is also perhaps his masterpiece.  There are still amusing characters, however, such as the old parish priest who feels compelled to spend most of his day praying for all the people he once said he would pray for and all the souls of the dead he has ever buried through the years.  He questions at what point a person can stop praying for another, but since he has no answer, he continues in his duty though it leaves him little time for anything else.  Father Healy, the assistant pastor, originally chose the priesthood because it was his mother’s dying wish when he was eleven.  When this familial legend comes into question, his whole vocation comes into question.  He is the one in this novel faced with the choice – the choice between love and Love.  He must choose between a vocation that has recently left him empty and weary and a woman whom he has loved since a teenager and who now  desperately needs him. 

We have lost a great storyteller in the passing of Jon Hassler, one who so eloquently and sympathetically delineated our choices between good and the greater good.  Choosing between good and evil isn’t all that hard, but choosing between two loves can be.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. 
And may perpetual light shine upon him.

Requiescat in Pacem.

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“First Confession” by Frank O’Connor

“First Confession”
by Frank O’Connor

Sometimes you go through periods when you just can’t find anything to read.  You’re stressed; you’re busy; you’re a little overwhelmed.  When you find the time to sit down and relax with a good book, you can’t choose one.  You pick up one book, read a few pages, put it down; you pick up another, flip through, put it down.  You toss aside books you’ve been waiting months to read and old favorites you’ve read dozens of times.  Nothing fits your mood or grabs your scattered attention.  You can’t make a commitment.  You have become a Commitment Phobe in the realm of reading.  (Note that I have not done an entry in awhile so I know of what I speak.)  That’s when I turn to short stories.  Of course when one mentions “Catholic” and “short stories” in the same sentence, readers immediately think of Flannery O’Connor, and she is well worth reading (and will merit an entry here someday), but because it’s March, I will recommend at this time Frank (no relation to Flannery) O’Connor’s  “First Confession.”  Not only is O’Connor an Irish writer which makes St. Patrick’s Day an excellent time for reading him, but now is also the season of First Confessions and First Communions.  Catholic aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, etc. will be attending numerous First Communions in the coming weeks following Easter (I myself am already engaged for two) and memories of one’s own first sacraments – especially in cradle Catholics – will be very near the surface of the mind and heart.

“First Confession” is an extremely humorous, laugh-out-loud-in-public-even-if-you-embarrass-yourself, story.  The narrator Jackie doesn’t see the situation of having to make his first confession as humorous at all.  In fact he’s desperately worried about burning in hell in the afterlife and the misery his grandmother causes in his present, corporeal life.  As he sees it there is no way possible he can refrain from sinning, no way he can admit the heinous nature of his sins and therefore no way he can escape eternal damnation.  He can’t even operate a confessional correctly.  But it’s the adult mind looking back on the absurdities of the situation of a six year old and the seriousness and literalness with which he approaches everything that brings out the humor.  Frank McCourt’s recounting of his First Confession and First Communion in his memoir Angela’s Ashes is told in a similar fashion although O’Connor’s short story is much less grim.  (McCourt’s grandmother sends him back to the confessional three times in the same day because she disagrees with Father’s assessment of young Frank’s state of grace.)

“First Confession” is available in numerous collections and anthologies including Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor at Doherty.

FYI – The UST Catholic Fiction Reading Group will read O’Connor’s short story at their organizational meeting on Sunday March 16^th at 6pm in Doherty Library.  All members of the UST community are invited to attend.  See our Facebook page for more details. 

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
J.P. Lippincott, 1962

A visitor to Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, formerly Sandy Stranger and now a cloistered nun renowned for the publication of her work in psychology “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” asks her “What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena?  Were they literary or political or personal?  Was it Calvinism?”  Her response?  “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”

Miss Jean Brodie often tells her students “give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”  This may explain why Sister Helena, even years after Miss Brodie’s death, still attributes all of who she is to that one influential teacher.

Most people could probably name a Miss Jean Brodie from their past.  The teacher that expanded their minds and frightened them out of their wits.  The teacher who gave them the greatest gifts of imagination, creativity, independence, individualism, intellectual rigor, and who also tried to crush these very qualities out of them.  The teacher one never forgets and whom one never looks back on sentimentally or without a confusion of emotions. 

Miss Brodie is a bundle of paradoxes.  She is a free spirit, a progressive educator, an artistic, sensitive woman who is fascinated by the fascism of  Mussolini and Hitler, mainly because of its ability to organize and regulate.  Miss Brodie is able to cast off all societal conventions because she is in her prime, but she creates a set of incomprehensible rules for her girls such as one does not leave a window open more than six inches, for six inches is plenty and more is vulgar. 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie takes place in the 1930’s in Edinburgh, Scotland but was published in 1962. The setting of Calvinist Edinburgh mirrors the dark, dingy, depressing atmosphere of post-war England.  Although the moral conventions of the thirty’s are present in the plot, the open attitude toward sex of the sixty’s is prominent in the narration.  That is not to say that the book advocates the sexual freedoms of the last half of the last century, although the authorial voice does not condemn them.  But like most ideas addressed in the novel, sexual indiscretion is neither all good nor all bad.  Good comes out of immoral acts, even the most immoral intentions.  So does evil.  Perhaps only fascism is judged as completely evil, but those who are attracted to fascism are not. 

Sandy, now Sister Helena, says that “the influences of one’s teens are very important” even if “they provide something to react against.”  Sandy was not raised Catholic, nor was she raised Calvinist, nor with any particular religious convictions at all.  Miss Brodie exposed her young students to all kinds of spiritual views but disdained Catholicism for Catholics, she said, cannot and do not think for themselves.  Yet, Sandy’s acceptance of Catholicism is a conscious and deliberate act, more so than Miss Brodie’s rejection of it.  And it continues a conscious and deliberate decision, for although Sandy finds her true self in Catholicism, and the ability to discipline her insights about people into an influential book on morality and psychology,  she does not find peace and comfort, nor is she freed from the influences of Miss Brodie.[1]   

The narrator of Jean Brodie seems to be an omniscient one, yet at the same time the story is filtered through the eyes of Sandy, the student most like Miss Brodie, the student most misunderstood by Miss Brodie, the student who, as Miss Brodie predicted several times, did indeed go too far one day.  The narrative is not straightforward either but jumbled flashbacks and repetitive phrases piece the story and the characters together.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a short book and easy to read and follow, but it is not a comfortable book.  It’s as confusing and disturbing as memories of that teacher – you know the one – your Miss Jean Brodie.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is available at Doherty Library.

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[1]Benilde Montgomery, “Spark and Newman: Jean Brodie Reconsidered,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 43, Spring 1997, pp. 94-106. Reprinted in Novels for Students, Vol. 22.

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Kitty from the Start by Judy Delton

Kitty from the Start
Judy Delton
Houton Mifflin, 1987
ISBN: 978-0395428474

Should you be looking for a nice Christmas or First Communion gift for a young girl, Kitty from the Start by Judy Delton would be a good choice.  Kitty herself is in third-grade, but the book should appeal to readers from 3^rd-5^th.  Good second grade readers could enjoy the book as well.  Or maybe you yourself just want a break from reading Aquinas, Homer, or Freud.

 

Kitty is in third grade during the early 1940’s.  Although World War II is raging in Europe, Kitty is not very aware of it.  What she is aware of is moving from her well-known, well-loved school St. James’ to the new and unknown St. Anthony’s (where the church is actually in the school and where they make First Communion in Third Grade instead of Second!)  At St. Anthony’s Kitty does quickly make friends, just as her parents told her she would, but they are two such very different friends.  Mary Margaret is a perfect child, always neat, always has her homework done, always appropriately dressed, and always pointing out what others are doing wrong.  Mary Margaret goes to Mass everyday, and Kitty admires her and wants to be holy like her.  But she’s also attracted to the lifestyle of Eileen who likes to play “Confession” by turning her closet into a confessional and taking the role of a very old, very mean and very loud priest.  Kitty enjoys playing “Confession” but is sure Mary Margaret wouldn’t approve and is pretty sure it’s not holy to participate.

 

I related to Kitty a lot because, even though I grew up in the post-Vatican II 1970’s and not in Kitty’s pre-Vatican II 1940’s, we had a lot in common.  And I suspect a lot of kids who grew up Catholic do as well.  I too was attracted to the saintly life and adapted various bizarrely pious acts (I once tried to only wear blue to show my devotion to the Madonna but my school uniform was green and my mother refused to buy me all new clothes).  But I also enjoyed playing the titillating and somewhat gory game of “Martyrs.”

 

Kitty is told through the point of view of a nine year old girl which leads to the one difficulty with the book.  A geography lesson on Africa is presented in a patronizing manner and uses a racially insensitive name Bambo for a child in Africa that the American children are supposed to relate to.  While it is probably realistic that this lesson would have been presented to these children in the 1940’s in such a way, with only Kitty’s perceptions presented, there is no authorial voice indicating to today’s young readers that such an attitude is inappropriate.  An adult should discuss this issue with the child reader.

 

However, this instance is very brief and all in all, it’s a rather sweet book.  Kitty from the Start is actually the first in a series (although the last written) of novels about Kitty, Mary Margaret and Eileen.  The series eventually takes Kitty and her friends through high school.

 

Kitty from the Start is available at area public libraries.    

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