Eminentoes/Andy's Ego
Dunlap, John R.
ANDY'S EGO by John R. Dunlap Andrew M. Greeley, if not quite a man for all seasons, is for certain a man of many parts. He is a Roman Catholic priest with a Ph.D. in sociology and a specialty in...
...the Right doesn't like him because he's flippant about authority, critical of capitalism, preoccupied with sex, and openly defensive regarding controversial theologians like Hans Kiing...
...the expression "more than 80 books" is evidently de rigueur when the topic is Andrew Greeley— watch for it the next time you read something about him...
...A would-be Studs Lonigan who looks more like Stan Laurel, Father Greeley bills himself with uncharacteristic modesty as "an Irish Catholic Democrat from Chicago...
...He is a journalist with an academic's contempt for journalism...
...The echo thickens...
...Andrew Greeley has been telling off the world since 1959, when he started writing (or dictating) "more than 80 books...
...As a diocesan or "secular" priest, Father Greeley is bound not by a vow of poverty...
...Warner/Bernard Geis, $13.95...
...Whence the echoes...
...the relationship between the bus driver and the passenger...
...Consider Father Greeley's feat of writing "more than 80 books...
...the real issue should be how to account for (and from there how to encourage) the fact that "in the ordinary course of human activity, self and society are more or less painlessly integrated"— not as "a collection of atomized individuals but, to quote William James, 'a buzzing, teeming pluralism' of messy, confused, uncertain and unpredictable networks of relationships...
...Chesterton: between the lone self and the state or corporate behemoth is a vast network of myriad "primary-group relationships"—families, friendship circles, neighborhoods, parishes, clubs, self-help organizations, cliques —and these "mediating structures" are both the condition and the assurance of an ongoing community...
...Forget it...
...In other words, Andy Greeley is too busy to pipe down, sit down, and spend a decade or so working up just one interesting scheme beyond the level of a bright idea...
...Listen now as the echo fades at a sympathetic pitch: the premise of most social theorists today is "a notable decline in the importance of intimate, personal, informal, nonrational, local, permanent, loyalty-based relationships...
...You will learn a great deal about Andy from his books...
...Full of topics, he is a topic unto himself...
...The Cardinal Sins—despite a silly disclaimer in its preface—is a thickly veiled reminiscence...
...Warner/Bernard Geis, $12.95 asides: "Most are chaste these days, some of them because they're neuters, others because they're committed celibates, like me...
...Today, 24 years and "more than 80 books" later, Father Greeley is, at age 55, anything but mellowed...
...Doubtless 80 of anything is quite an accomplishment, but I have trouble being awed...
...The Left doesn't like him because he's hard on Communism, contemptuous of socialism, disdainful of social engineering, and sharply antagonistic regarding trendy fellow clerics like Daniel Berrigan...
...In the industrial West, both capitalism and socialism accept this premise not only as descriptive (it isn't...
...Where most sociologists assume Gesellschaft as the dominant social characteristic of modern industrial society, Father Greeley hauls out a ton of data suggesting that we should "weep not for Gemeinschaft...
...Greeley achieves his prolific output by a combination of two devices, one of which is a small army of typists plugged into his dictaphones...
...John R. Dunlap teaches English at the University of Santa Clara...
...you're expected to be awed, I think...
...The other device is self-plagiarism...
...At one point in the novel, Father Sean Cronin taunts himself thus: "Tell off the whole world so you won't hear your own demons...
...He was referring to his prolific output as a whole, but he might just as well have been referring strictly to his novel The Cardinal Sins,* which was high on the best-seller charts when he made the remark...
...The quotation marks are deliberate: like the expression "more than 200 books" when the topic is Isaac Asimov...
...Schumacher and G.K...
...In The Cardinal Sins there are, truly, words gone wild —a wild mix of polemic genius and artistic idiocy...
...That's Andy Greeley, speaking through his first-person narrator, and exhibiting his leitmotif, the cosmic Irish ego...
...In Thy Brother's Wife, the second in what promises to be a long line of Greeley best-sellers (especially since Greeley announced he was dropping his column to write novels full-time), Greeley creates a character named Sean Cronin: a feisty Irish-American priest bearing a striking temperamental resemblance to Brennan/ Greeley of The Cardinal Sins...
...General Motors and the Federal Government are both naughty to the extent they violate the time-honored Catholic social principle of subsidiarity...
...but as normative (God forbid...
...What we have right under our noses, according to Father Greeley, is much less the "modernization model" of the contemporary sociologist than a "marvellous combination of modernity and tradition intertwined with each other...
...so, being the author of "more than 80 books" and—lately—a best-selling novelist, Greeley is a priest-with-millions and thus a sitting duck for a lawsuit every time he wags his tongue indiscreetly in public...
...But forget the stupid themes...
...society sticks together, regardless of how flaky it may get from time to time...
...It is alive and well and living in Midtown, Chevy Chase, Cambridge, and even Berkeley...
...and consequently tend to aggrandize themselves, fostering the bureaucratic behemoth...
...In other words, the central theme of The Cardinal Sins is Andrew M. Greeley...
...an academic with a journalist's contempt for academe...
...Ah, the trials of wealth...
...It is a part of our heritage, and none of us gives a damn about it anymore...
...And here Father Greeley echoes a key theme of Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quad-ragesinto Anno: "Nothing should be done by a larger and higher level organization which can be done equally as well by a smaller and lower level organization...
...Interesting echo, wouldn't you say...
...no one is even remotely aware that there is a theory of society that is radically different from and closer to the empirical sociological fact than either the theories of Marxism or capitalism...
...In fact, he is the quintessential imp—an intellectual sybarite: author of "more than 80 books," including data-packed treatises on the sociology of American Catholicism, notion-larded vignettes on politics and the religious impulse, and—lately again—potboil-ing novels on the behavior of a certain stripe of midwest IrishAmerican Catholic...
...in sociology and a specialty in public-opinion research...
...Greeley serves up many a point about life in the Church, such as that priests-have-feelings-like-everyone-else, and he makes other points roughly equal in banality: Church-honchos-can-be-jerks, yet love-wins-out-in-the-end, and so forth...
...The trouble is that I've read 16 of these books, and after about the fourth or fifth I started hearing echoes...
...But it's the fame that creates the majority of his enemies...
...It comes off as a post-adolescent show-and-tell...
...Andy Greeley is too busy skipping from one topic to another, too busy writing novels about himself, too busy ranting at his fellow Catholics who pay no attention to his thin schemes: No one is listening...
...Borrowing his jargon from the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, Father Greeley distinguishes Ge-meinschaft (human community) from Gesellschaft (mere association, e.g...
...Moderates are wary of him -because, no matter what he says or does, he is nearly always abrasive or hyperbolic about it...
...One echo of particular interest sounds like this: modern sociologists (i.e., most of Greeley's colleagues, many of whom are also among his enemies) are mistaken when they posit an opposition between self and society: lonely crowds, alienation— that sort of thing...
...And unless Andy Greeley can rid himself of those demons, it may reach a hundred.s, it may reach a hundred...
...I suppose," Father Greeley remarked not long ago, "that I have the Irish weakness for words gone wild...
...The echo resounds, with a hint of E.F...
...and—lately—a very popular novelist with a commercial hack's contempt for style...
...Our hero, the garrulous and prideful Kevin Brennan, is a man of many parts: a well-known priest-psychologist . . .sound like anyone you know...
...Soon the proper expression will be "more than 90 books...
...for instance, that he has a lot of enemies—but, well, that's what comes with being rich and famous...
...For social theorists, then, the real issue should not be how to resolve an (unreal) opposition between self and society...
...And wouldn't you like to pin down the source and get more detail...
...And he's working on two more novels, not to mention the publication of five new semi-technical works that he has incidentally added to his sprawling repertoire during these past few years of his new avocation as best-selling, self-confessing hack...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
