Something I return to over and over is the presentation of Catholic life in the past from the past – in contemporary accounts in books and periodicals, in novels and memoirs. In trying to understand the continuities and discontinuities in Catholic life, secondary histories can only go so far, and how far they go is limited, not only by distance, but by bias.
I find that there’s nothing more helpful in overcoming assumptions about how Catholics surely understood their own faith lives and the institution than reading works from the past – and I don’t mean apologetics, as useful as that can be.
And even when I least expect it, I find nuggets and puzzles pieces – for example in That Summer in Paris, which I got at an estate sale simply because I’m interested in the period and two of the featured writers – Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Little did I know that author Morley Callaghan was Catholic and incorporated Catholic-type plotlines into some of his fiction.
And even here, there are points to note. This will be a lengthy post, so I’ll break it up. No commentary offered, except to say you can see how much has changed and how much hasn’t and how complicated relationships with faith have always been a part of human experience.
The first occurs on the ship over to Paris, when the Callaghans connect with a priest onboard:
LONELY men who are always in public places, men like Sinclair Lewis, have always interested me. Perhaps they are able to sense that I am drawn to them, for I can’t remember ever making the first approach. Just as it was part of my writing creed to distrust calculated charm in prose, so as a person, I suppose I felt it was beneath me to try to ingratiate myself with anyone who aroused my curiosity. Yet in one way or another I seem to get around to knowing the isolated men who interest me.
On the ship one night at dinnertime my wife said, “Look at the priest sitting all by himself at the table over there. Why have they stuck him there all by himself?” The reddish-haired, balding, freckle-faced, powerfully built priest didn’t look aloof and self-contained; he simply looked like a man left alone in a big dining room. At our table there were five of us; a solid Middle Western businessman and his wife, both pleasant and both dull, and the ship’s doctor, an incredibly noble stuffed owl of a man. At the captain’s table were at least eight passengers, all in a convivial mood, and among them in jolly splendour, the Anglican or Episcopalian clergyman. Of course, it was an English ship.
After dinner in the lounge my wife spoke to the big lonely priest, and we sat down with him for an hour, and he told us about himself. This priest, whom I’ll call Father Tom, for he may still be alive, was the Catholic chaplain for a California penitentiary housing incorrigible criminals who were there for life. In ten years he had walked to the execution chamber with sixteen men. All this year he had been breaking out into strange intermittent fevers. His superiors and the doctors had grown daily more worried about him. They had persuaded him to take a three months’ leave of absence, tour the Mediterranean, then visit his old mother in Ireland. Above all, the doctors said, he was to try and enjoy himself; forget the prison, throw all his cares away, and at least for three months try to find some joy in life. He was to join his touring party in Paris.
Yet he was a jolly, jesting, laughing man. He had a quick intelligence. What a relief to be talking to him after listening all through dinner to the endless flow of cliches from the ship’s doctor, whose punch line was “Quite, oh quite,” and the solid banalities of the bluff businessman and his good-hearted wife. That night leaving us, the priest told us that he was to say Mass on Sunday on the tourist deck, the Anglican clergyman having been given the care of the souls of the first-class passengers. Would we be sure to come to Mass on Sunday? It was a little thing, but after all, we weren’t Anglicans, were we? We assured him we would come.
On deck the next day I spoke to him cheerfully and asked him how he was passing the time. Surprised, he looked at me, laughed, then wanted to talk. He had assumed that our friendship would not go beyond last night’s polite encounter. A woman speaks to a priest; her husband listens sympathetically while the priest gropes around trying to tell them something about himself, the husband says little, and the priest asks them to go to Mass because he is a bit piqued at being regarded as an isolated figure among the first-class passengers. It was a pleasure, he said, to find I was a talkative man myself. We certainly talked, and about the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He was sharp-minded, and began to put me on.
After that, he attached himself to us. Nor did we tire of his company. At one moment he would be talking about the prison inmates; no penitentiary should be built that denied an inmate some wild hope of escape. Not that a convict might necessarily bring himself to try an escape. But he had a right to his harmless dreams, the exercise of all his ingenuity in his dream; it kept his mind alive; the remote possibility represented a last hope for men condemned to life imprisonment. Without this hope in the back of their minds the convicts would go crazy, he contended. Another time he would start talking about the views of St. Thomas on love, or hell as the deprivation of the love of God, or St. Thomas’ idea of beauty. Sometimes he would be chuckling to himself, just testing out my knowledge of St. Thomas. Or if we tired of convicts and philosophers he would have me exercise my gift for malice in little descriptions of the other passengers. He had a fine barbed comic spirit himself. Other passengers who might have noticed him at his lonely table would have been astonished by his alert awareness of their pretentions. Yet he would add charitably after some jest about an officer, “He’s probably a good soul, a kind man. God forgive us.” I had noticed that often he would ask to be excused. Within half an hour he would reappear on deck, his hair freshly combed, his face washed, and wearing a fresh clerical collar. Sometimes, it is true, when he reappeared, he smelled strongly of whisky. What was the idea? I asked, teasing him. Did he have to change his clothes to take a drink? No, he said apologetically. It was the sweat. Three times a day he would break out into sweats and be soaking wet, and he had to go and change all his clothes. It was also a good time to take a drink, wasn’t it? But suddenly I avoided his eyes. I had a hunch that the doctors who had told him to tour the Mediterranean and have a good time had been sure that he had not long to live…
When the ship landed at Le Havre, I remember how he came to us chuckling to himself. Nodding at a portly gentleman who had taken a grandly opulent air with some friends, he said, “See that fellow? He’s boasting that he had the biggest bar bill of all the passengers. I dare not disillusion him. But the fact is the steward just told me I did, and promised to keep it a secret.” On the trip to Paris I was so taken up with my own dreams and my sense of satisfaction at coming to the journey’s end where I would meet my friends, I didn’t pay much attention to the priest. I was reminding Loretto I had told her five years ago I would bring her to Paris. The priest may have been sitting behind us on the train. We didn’t realize he wouldn’t let us get out of sight. I was excited and eager. Even the neighbourhoods of Paris seemed to be known to me. At college I had studied French. The history of Paris; the heroes, even the pictures of the principal buildings, the churches, the square were in the front of my mind. I couldn’t believe I was a stranger. But coming out of the St. Lazare station, asking a porter for directions, I found my French was abominable. I had no sense of direction. Since we had McAlmon’s address, the Paris—New York Hotel on the rue Vaugirard, we would get into a taxi and go to this hotel. It was about noontime. Then Father Tom appeared beside us, taking my arm. Like a shy apologetic boy, he asked us if we would have lunch with him at the Cafe de la Paix. Before he joined his touring party, he said, he would like to sit with us at some famous French cafe, and he had heard of this one.
For April it was surprisingly chilly, about as chilly as it would have been back home, so we ate inside the cafe and drank too much wine. Outside on the rue de la Paix the girls were passing, taxis whirled by, the street life of Paris was just beyond our window. And I nursed a sweet satisfaction. For a long time, in my dream, I had seen us sitting here just this way.
The priest was to meet his party at a small Right Bank hotel, and we went with him to this hotel where we decided to register for the night so we could get our bearings. Then the priest had to leave us. “I don’t know what it’ll be like on this tour,” he said gloomily. “Well, look here. I’ll be back in June. I could look you up, couldn’t I? Would you mind very much?” Then he added in a resigned tone, “Ah, no, you’ll forget all about me.” We swore we wouldn’t, and as we watched him cross the lobby to meet an official of his tour, he had his head back like a man staunchly resigned to the company of a hundred middle-aged women, and convinced he would be allowed to drown in the depth of our memories without leaving a ripple.
And, as scheduled, Father Tom returns:
AT this time—it comes into my memory as being in the middle of the week—Loretto reminded me that the priest we had met on the boat, who had been so sure we would forget all about him, ought to be coming through Paris now on his return from his Mediterranean tour. That night we walked over to the Right Bank hotel, where we had parted from him on our first day in Paris. Since that first day, which now seemed so long ago, how rapidly the Quarter life had swirled around us.
The desk clerk said that indeed the priest’s party did have a reservation at the hotel, a large touring party was booked into the hotel for the end of the week. We left a note for the priest—just our name and the address, and a few joking words— I thought we were supposed to forget you. Two days later, coming home after boxing, I heard voices in the apartment. Someone was laughing loudly. When I entered there was the priest with Loretto, and they were both laughing hilariously. On the floor were two champagne bottles. Other bottles were on a little table by the window. Jumping up, the priest embraced me. I was embarrassed by the warmth of his embrace and his emotion. No one could have called me his old and dear friend. My awkward laugh, my embarrassment, only made Loretto giggle. “He’s just glad we were here,” she said. “Just happy he knew someone in Paris.” And Father Tom beamed at me.
Still giggling, he told me that his touring party had been made up of middle-aged Methodist women; in Italy they had watched him closely and disapprovingly; they had gossiped; furthermore they had been full of blue-nosed malice. And why? Because he had liked to consume the wine of the country. Every time he had sat down with them at dinner he could tell by their sly, knowing glances they had been gossiping about him. Whenever he went off on his own, they took their little digs at him. On his return they would practically smell his breath, convinced he would be reeking of liquor. He had wanted to express his contempt for them, yet couldn’t. He was stuck with them till the tour’s bitter end.
“For the last week,” he cut in, a smile of beautiful contentment on his face, “I kept saying to myself, ’If only those Callaghans look me up I won’t be alone. I’ll have at least one night when I can break away’.”
Now there were actually tears in his eyes. The poor man, this prison chaplain who had walked to the gallows with sixteen men, and whose only boast was that not one of these criminals entrusted to him had died in terror, and who, suffering from some fever that might be killing him, had been told to go to the Mediterranean and try and be happy, had in fact landed in a more depressing prison than the one he had left. You would have thought, looking at him now, that he had just jumped over the wall. My wife cut in to say he had asked immediately where they could buy something to drink and they had gone out together. Here they were now. Everything was fine. Then I noticed he was no wearing the priestly Roman collar. In France, he said, a clerical collar was taken as the mark of a Protestant minister. Therefore, an American priest had a choice between the soutane of the French priest, or the conventional white collar of the American businessman.
….
It was twilight when we went out to eat. The priest, walking between us, his arms around us, chuckled to himself. At this hour his ladies would be wondering what he was doing, he said. But he had left a note for them; he had told them he knew a writer in Montparnasse, living among all the wild free artists, and the writer had a lovely wife, and he, himself, would be dining with them, spending the evening in the Latin Quarter. The note would put them in a terrible tizzy. They would be sure he was off somewhere giving himself to the devil in the most dissolute company.
“What do you want to do?” we asked.
“Now, what would you be doing yourselves tonight?”
“Nothing. Just hanging around the Quarter.”
“Could I just hang around with you, just be a part of your life tonight?”
And….the priest drinks several too many Pernods, but makes it back to the hotel in the end:
When we had driven him to his hotel, I remember that as we guided him into the lobby he turned. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be up in the morning at eight.”
“You can’t get up at eight,” I said.
“I have to,” he muttered. “And I will. I told those women I had seen them for the last time. I told them they were malicious, uncharitable, backbiting and small-souled, and I was glad I would never see them again. And I won’t. Don’t worry. I’ll catch that plane. I have to.” Laughing a little, very moved, he put his arms around my wife and kissed her. He put his arms around me, too. “God bless you both,” he whispered, steadying himself, and he walked slowly into the hotel.
It had been such an innocent evening, just sitting around. All he had done was drink too many Pernods, a drink he was unaccustomed to. Yet he left us feeling like Samaritans who had rescued a good man who had fallen among thieves. We have given him a good memory to take back to his penitentiary.
Then, on Hemingway, who’d converted by that time:
Suddenly he told us he had become a Catholic. The girl he had married, Pauline, was a Catholic. So there we were, three of the faithful. Perhaps I should have clasped his hand warmly. I only looked reflective. Then Loretto asked him how he had been able to get a divorce and marry within the Church. Wasn’t it always difficult? It hadn’t been difficult, he said, since his first wife, Hadley, had never been baptized. Oh yes, a bit of luck, we agreed. He felt very good about being a convert. But converts had always bored me. At that time in France there were many conversions among the intellectuals. Christian artists were finding new dignity and spiritual adventure in the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain. Most converts I had known had changed their faith but not their personalities or their temperaments, and since they usually gained enormous self-assurance from the new faith, I would find myself disliking them more than ever. Too often a dualism remained in them. A beautiful writer like Mauriac would have one of his women characters, while holding a lover in her arms, be aware of the blackheads on his nose, a reminder that even in an ecstatic moment the flesh ought to be seen in its worst light. He made me feel exuberantly pagan. My own problem was to relate a Christian enlightenment to some timeless process of becoming. A disgust with the flesh born of an alleged awareness of an approaching doomsday bored me, as did the flash of light that gave a man the arrogant assurance that he was the elect of God.
I remember how I looked at Ernest, ready to question him, then I shrugged and smiled. There he sat, so full-blooded and healthy. And he had been so unassertive in telling about his conversion, no one could have imagined he would ever think of himself as the elect of God. Perhaps he saw I was neither impressed nor enthusiastic, for his manner changed. I mean he. suddenly was with me in my feeling about converts; he seemed to be saying that he called himself a Catholic now because he recognized that he really had been Catholic for some time—by temperament. In New York later, I heard someone at a party say mockingly, “Hemingway became a Catholic because all the Spanish bullfighters were Catholic.” No. There was much more to it than that. At the cafe that day, reflecting, watching his face as he talked, it struck me that by some twist of temperament, in spite of his puritan family, he was in fact intended to be a Mediterranean Catholic. And as it turned out, the older he got, the more often death kept hovering over his stories; he kept death in his work as a medieval scholar might have kept a skull on his desk, to remind him of his last end.
You only needed to look at his face, his eyes and his mouth, to know that he delighted in all that was sensuous. He had to savour all the sensations, know all the delights of the senses—with death apparently in his imagination like a presiding officer always asking him how he would take it when he came to the end of his knowing. What was more natural now that having established himself as an old hand in the faith, he should quickly begin to share my indulgent air toward all well-known converts. As old pros, whom did we pick on for our condescension? T. S. Eliot! We looked down our noses at his conversion. We shared our amusement over his choice of Anglo-Catholicism. Well, with the temperament he had it was probably the best Eliot could do. It was all very discreet and if it left him way out in left field, no harm was done.
And then, trying to get Fitzgerald to enter Saint-Sulpice:
The afternoon which was to reshape my relationship with both my two friends, Ernest and Scott, was a little different right from the beginning from the other afternoons. My wife and I were meeting Scott at his place and we were to sit at the Deux Magots. Zelda was busy with her ballet lessons. I have a clear picture now of the three of us, Scott, Loretto and myself, coming from the direction of his place. Then we stopped, looking at St. Sulpice with its tower rising against the blue sky, and I muttered something about St. Sulpice art. It was a name for bad Catholic art. Though Loretto and I had passed this church again and again, we hadn’t gone in. I made a joke about Scott living in the shadow of bad Catholic art. It amused him. Then he said that he liked living near the church; he liked the neighbourhood; he was always aware he was in the shadow of the church.
Close to the entrance now, he asked if we knew that this church had columns larger in circumference than any in Paris. And my wife said, “Why don’t we go in and look at them? Come on, Scott”
“No,” he said, half-irritably, he wouldn’t go into the church. If we wanted to go in and walk around a column, he would gladly wait outside for us. “Oh, come on,” my wife said, taking his arm. Firmly he detached his arm as he shook his head stubbornly. Since we were at the door of the church, going in with us wasn’t much to ask of him, was it? A little thing like looking at the pillars. So we kidded and coaxed him. “I never go into the church,” he said quietly. Suddenly his manner embarrassed us. We felt apologetic. “All right, Scott. But what’s the matter?”
“I simply won’t go into it,” he said. “Don’t ask me about it. It’s personal. The Irish-Catholic background and all that. You go ahead.”
So we left him standing in the sunlight while we went into the church. Rather quickly we paced around the circumference of one of the columns, then hurried out to Scott who was waiting, solemn and terribly unyielding. But his grim refusal to go in seemed to me to be a betrayal of some deep religious sentiment in him. We made some cheerful comment about the columns and went on our way.
Crafts & Vintage
