African-Americans, Jews and the Catholic Novel
Harvard’s Elisa New reviews new book by Eric Sundquist on African-Americans and Jews in postwar American literature. The review is terrific, even brave, as a genre piece. New weaves her own life-history as a Jew and English professor into her assessment of post World War II literature. She and Sundquist also make some controverisal judgements: downgrading the stock of Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow, upgrading Ralph Ellison (although I’m not sure he needed it), Philip Roth (ditto), Harper Lee, Anna Deavere Smith, and Bernard Malamud.
A snip: “Sundquist’s new book reveals not only how much of the literature we will remember from the last half of the twentieth century is literature of America’s “strangers”–blacks and Jews. He also reveals how the tragic alliance and the estrangement of these groups from each other emerged as late twentieth-century American literature’s most haunting obsession.”
What struck me was how distant the great “Catholic” literature of the postwar period seems from all this: the intense back and forth, the focus at once on slavery and the Holocaust, the endless reworking of Exodus. You can read Paul Elie’s brilliant study of the immediate postwar period as if the authors in Sundquist’s study don’t exist.
Put another way: how do Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, J.F. Powers, Richard Rodriguez, Alice McDermott et al. fit into this story? Or do they? Should they?
Don’t forget Edwin O’Connor, the author of the Last Hurrah, a novel suggested by the remarkable career of James Michael Curley. There was a movie with Spencer Tracy, but it did not do justice to the original.
Percy and O’Connor are in this territory, if differently than others. O’Connor and Percy both convey a strong awareness of African American lives, but also a range of white responses to the changing role of African Americans in the US.
They both also are concerned with the Holocaust: O’Connor most clearly in the intro to Memoir of Mary Ann and The Displaced Person, but also in her awareness of disability; Percy especially in Lancelot and The Thanatos Syndrome, but also in his nonfiction.
Exodus is not their main text (the escape from an oppressive regime into a promised land), but the prophets: the need to announce God’s word to a hostile world.
I agree with Joseph G. about Edwin O’Connor, oddly underrated. His “The Edge of Sadness” is perhaps even better than “the Last Hurrah.”
Frederick is quite right about Percy and O’Connor, although the difference in how they talk about African-Americans would probably be worth exploring. In this sense it may be more important that they are southerners, not that they are Catholics. Martin Luther King, Jr., also evoked, repeatedly the Old Testament prophets.
Another novel that I plug occasionally in this vein is Robert Clark’s beautiful ‘Love Among the Ruins” which touches on Catholics during the late 1960s.
Isn’t Love Among the Ruins by Walker Percy? Is there another work of the same name or am I mixing up titles in some way?
Flannery Connor once wrote, I believe, that she didn’t write more about the Black experience because it wasn’t her experience. I think her best stories are sufficiently well-wrought that they do serve as commentary on Southern life of the times, but her main characters are always white (not always Catholic, not even usually Catholic).
For me, Walker Percy’s later works fell off markedly in quality and relevance. The Moviegoer is, in my view, his most outstanding work, but Lost in the Cosmos is not far behind. I also never liked his emphasis on relations between men and clearly vulnerable women, whether by reason of age or diagnosis. I found it to be distracting and sexist.
I too loved Edwin O”Connor (but also loved Spencer Tracy in “The Last Hurrah.”)
The paucity of Catholic novels about african Americans is probably due to the fact that there are only small numbers of Catholic African Americans and often remote enough from the broad Catholic experience here – which has tended to be heavily influenced by the Irish til of late – also, perhaps, that the Black Catholic experience here has often been tinged with sadness.
I think particularly, for example, of the sad story of Bishop Emerson Moore of New York.
I was taken last night by the author of “To Sir With Love” on CSPAN. He spoke of how he was told that his school was a “sanctuary” for the yongsters there and he was never to be authoritarian with them so that the school would really be a place of learning and safety and ability to develop self.
The magnificent writings of Johnathon Kozol, grounded in experience of children in the inner-city, also speak reality to me of the poor black comunity.
In the meantime, it strikes me that the Church is withdrawing therefrom more and more.
But particularly, the Baptists and the AMEs will speak loudly on the politics and relationships with the Jewish community from that voice
I too loved Edwin O”Connor (but also loved Spencer Tracy in “The Last Hurrah.”)
The paucity of Catholic novels about african Americans is probably due to the fact that there are only small numbers of Catholic African Americans and often remote enough from the broad Catholic experience here – which has tended to be heavily influenced by the Irish til of late – also, perhaps, that the Black Catholic experience here has often been tinged with sadness.
I think particularly, for example, of the sad story of Bishop Emerson Moore of New York.
I was taken last night by the author of “To Sir With Love” on CSPAN. He spoke of how he was told that his school was a “sanctuary” for the yongsters there and he was never to be authoritarian with them so that the school would really be a place of learning and safety and ability to develop self.
The magnificent writings of Johnathon Kozol, grounded in experience of children in the inner-city, also speak reality to me of the poor black comunity.
In the meantime, it strikes me that the Church is withdrawing therefrom more and more.
But particularly, the Baptists and the AMEs will speak loudly on the politics and relationships with the Jewish community from that voice
Thanks John for this: the “Catholic Studies/Catholic Imagination” move is highly problematic here. If we teach Flannery O’s “Displaced Person” strictly from perspective of ‘sacramental imagination’ and ignore race and region and work and peacock husbandry then Catholic lit will never enter the discussion to which it properly belongs.
Interesting but not surprising that many of the Catholic writers mentioned here are Irish.
In my experience with my mother’s very difficult family, Irish Americans are pretty clannish and introspective, and some of the Irish writers mentioned (I’m thinking especially of McDermott) write about characters as much trapped by as proud of their ethnic and religious roots.
In the claustrophobic world of Irish-American novels, the Irish have enough on their plate parsing the varieties of being Irish (and deciding which is the best) that there’s little room for anyone outside that experience to live.
All that said, I love Alice McDermott.
I loved “The Last Hurrah” too, but the movie despite some funny moments just didn’t capture the giddy fantasy of the book. It was much too staid, and Spencer Tracy was badly miscast. O’Connor hated it. (He said he would have preferred to have Skeffington played by Claude Rains!)
O’Connor’s favorite book , and in a way, mine, too is “The Edge of Sadness,” a venture into J. F. Powers territory that got him a well-deserved Pulitzer.