BOOK
Ratté, John & Wimsatt, Margaret & McCauley, Michael F.
Never Look Bach: The Career and Concerns of John J. Burke JOHN B. SHEERIN Paulist Press, $7.95 MICHAEL F. McCAULEY To have had an inestimable influence on twentieth century American Catholicism...
...Some big men are left out, some smaller men are brought in...
...At the war's end Burke determined that the influence of the War Council in coordinating all of the nation's 20 million Catholics should not fade away...
...His opus we hope is not complete, but his many opera take up a good section of library shelf...
...It is hard to write about music, and Mr...
...This unfortunate injustice has been laudably remedied by fellow Paulist John B. Sheerin's Never Look Back...
...Yet whatever editorial restraint Burke may have exercised in dealing with theological issues was overshadowed by his forward stance regarding social justice...
...Initial hopes of uniting American culture with Catholic faith into a "new civilization more just and compassionate than any in the tortured history of the past" were dispelled even before Burke's death by the realization that "America would not be converted to Catholicism...
...If it can be said that we are no longer an immigrant church some of the credit must go to John J. Burke and the efforts of NCWC...
...Father Sheerin likens Burke, somewhat, to the business tycoons of the roaring 20s and New Deal 30s...
...Because documents pertinent to Monsignor Burke's life had been sealed away for forty years following his death, Father Sheerin's biography is a long overdue tribute to the man who conceived and supervised the National Catholic War Council during World War I and later served as general secretary to the National Catholic Welfare Conference (forerunner of the USCC...
...Five years after his ordination John Burke became editor of the prestigious Catholic World and was plunged into the intellectual repression that grew out of Roman condemnations of Americanism and Modernism...
...have done their usual skillful job of design...
...John J. Burke steadfastly lived by that motto and did indeed "never look back...
...Never Look Back, though "not the last word on his career," ably captures the scope of John J. Burke's life and times and puts into focus the man and his accomplishments...
...The book is elegantly produced...
...More controversial is the substance of this unique work...
...Among film stars he favors for obvious and I think correct reasons those who have had stage experience...
...Never Look Bach: The Career and Concerns of John J. Burke JOHN B. SHEERIN Paulist Press, $7.95 MICHAEL F. McCAULEY To have had an inestimable influence on twentieth century American Catholicism and yet remain largely unknown to most has been the fate of Paulist John J. Burke...
...He divides actors into those who are always themselves, whatever the part (Humphrey Bogart, John Gielgud) and those who are always the character, changing with each part, low-profile personalities...
...Both aside and front, center, he tells us that this is an old man's book, "almost an old man's hobby horse...
...Almost inexplicably he weathered the religious inhibitions of the day and succeeded in elevating the Catholic World to a level of excellence paralleling Atlantic Monthly and Harper's...
...Most actors nowadays commute, so are known in both countries...
...Nevertheless, one recognized him, one Midnight Mass, at London's Farm Street Church...
...Burke later became disillusioned about U.S...
...Thus Mr...
...democracy was not working at all in America-or very well in France or England...
...I am indulging my whims...
...He was a powerful, yet humble man who had an influence on the church only fully realized now, in the post-conciliar era of national episcopal conferences that focus on "broad social, political and economic problems possessing moral dimensions...
...But there are many Englishmen in there we have never heard of, masters of their art no doubt, top liners at London's Palladium, but they do not come across firmly in words and oldtime photographs...
...fascism of a moderate sort, even Nazism, could be lived with as the disciplinary force of a "new Europe"- until Nazi-sponsored reconstruction was revealed as limitless exploitation...
...This long and irritating book will be a major presence in the minds of historians and teachers of history who, while suspicious that we can ever "tell it like it really was" (my apologies to von Ranke for this contemporary rendering of his inescapable aphorism) know that their first duty is to approximate in their speech what people in the past thought was happening, in all its messiness and inconsistency, before they attempt to fit those events and thoughts into their own world-view...
...Not about literature, the book is divided into four sections, discussing pictures, music, acting, and clowning...
...He tells us that he considered "using simple musical notation for important musical themes" but decided against it as too pedantic, appealing to the wrong people...
...He wholeheartedly endorsed the war effort urging in Catholic World editorials all Catholics to patriotically respond to the nation's summons...
...His essays on Katharine Hepburn and particularly Spencer Tracy, both from his Class I, are paeans of praise and intelligent delight...
...J. B. Priestley, born in 1894, might indeed be thinking of resting on his laurels, but in Particular Pleasures he shows, apart from a few querulous remarks like this, no signs of diminished vigor...
...Priestley, aside...
...He pleads for, brags about, their particularity...
...The section on acting is more available...
...In this section of the book he grows wistful and ponders mortality...
...The section on clowns is the most remote for American readers...
...Far from isolationist or divisive, Burke's NCWC provided the information and transitional support to encourage European Catholics arriving at Ellis Island to fully adopt and adapt to their new homeland...
...This approach yields some repetition of themes, and even the duplication or near-duplication of paragraphs...
...We cannot help but wonder at the appalling lengths to which prejudice can distort reason and compassion that any minority should point with pride to carnage as proof of patriotism...
...He likes youth, innocence, freshness...
...The hast European War September 1939-December 1941 JOHN LUKACS Anchor Press/Doubleday, $15 JOHN RATTE John Lukacs' book is novel in both form and substance, and diverges from the liberal left American historical view on many issues...
...Let no man who puts his hand to the plough look back...
...involvement in the war and regretted his strong advocacy of Catholic participation...
...The art and music sections are capricious, will please some people and offend others who feel their favorites have been slighted or the wrong beauties stressed...
...Yes, we know abou Benny and Fields and Keaton, enjoy Priestley's opinions, warm to his admiration of Chaplin (mid-Atlantic, unique) and the Marx Brothers...
...The painting section is more cheerful...
...Deriving from Burke's progressive social attitudes was his work in launching the National Catholic War Council...
...A national organization, in his opinion, could develop a tighter Catholic consciousness and "protect the interests of the Catholic minority...
...and I can only suggest that Yours Indignantly should abandon the book at this point...
...We take the Battle of Britain seriously because hindsight enables us to identify with our not-yet-ally in her moment of crisis...
...As general secretary of NCWC Burke was deeply involved with religious as well as government officials...
...the lines separating Left from Right, and especially communist socialism from national socialism, were not as clear as we would want them to be in retrospect...
...A failure, perhaps, but hardly capable of negating the importance of NCWC...
...An astute representative of the Catholic mind of the 20s and 30s, he consulted with live presidents and was responsible in part for FDR's popularity among Catholics...
...During the First World War [Burke] felt confident that the bravery and loyalty of Catholics on the battlefield, as witnessed by the large number of Catholic casualties of immigrant stock, would dispel once and forever deep-rooted anti-Catholicism...
...The Good Companions is perhaps his best known novel...
...The work is unconventional in structure in that it presents the European military conflicts of 1939-1941 as a historical unity for description and analysis, and further, separates those two activities into two large sections, so that the reader is treated to a fairly conventional review of the military and diplomatic history of the war and then led into a discussive presentation of its social, psychological, and political impact on the European nations, much in the manner of French historical writing...
...In between times, he has criticized, edited, published his wartime broadcasts over the BBC-has been and performed, that is, as an all round old-fashioned man of letters...
...What we missed in our youth (or have forgotten) can be picked up on late-night television...
...Burke himself once wrote: "Christ is of the living...
...George Rainbird, Ltd...
...Since many historians today write as if they were not members of the middle class, it is refreshing to find one who will, and whose own viewpoint, by virtue of its co-incidental "fit" with the traditional ideas of European elites in these years, can make those ideas real...
...his plays run to many volumes and have been successful on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Particular Pleasures J. B. PRIESTLEY Stein and Day, $16.95 MARGARET WIMSATT "I don't know, and because I am writing this book against time, I can't undertake any research...
...The American hierarchy quickly supported Wilson's war declaration, assuring him of unconditional Catholic support...
...That Burke was able to launch NCWC at all is a minor miracle involving no small amount of organizational acumen and what has been called Burke's innate "Gaelic charm...
...Writes Father Sheerin: "[Burke] suggested not only that a specialist in social sciences be added to seminary faculties but also that students with special aptitudes be allowed to arrange their work in such a way as to incorporate social and economic training into their theological courses...
...So for example you will not find Degas, Manet and Monet here, though in fact I have an enormous admiration for these painters...
...Because Lukacs is a philosophical historian and a Christian humanist, and was (and in a sense still is) a European of the middle class, he is able to make plausible to us-with condemnation or praise as he sees appropriate-the realities of the late 1930s and early 1940s: realities a left-oriented historiography have derided, and a democratic tradition has chosen to ignore...
...Only through a national coalition could vast numbers of immigrants be effectively absorbed into American society...
...Above all, Hitler was more complex-and, were it not for the Holocaust, even more "reconstructable" -as a world-historical figure than most of our books and memories yet accept...
...Prior to U.S...
...entry into the First World War Burke "deplored the war . . . saying that the human heart must protest...
...Americans possess an image of World War II, not of a European war: our global-and nationalists-perspective is incarnate in terms like "the European Theatre" and "The Pacific Theatre...
...Overcoming opposition from some paranoid bishops and a handful of misinformed members of the Curia, Burke eventually succeeded in establishing the National Catholic Welfare Council-changed to "Conference" in 1923 -to unify and coordinate Catholic activities...
...The illustration credits at the back of the book make it easy to identify the many pictures: a various lot of reproductions from national galleries, composers' biographies, and theater archives...
...But the attempt to present a "total history" of the war as a distinctly European event is generally successful, and that in large measure because of the sense of depth and dimension gained by the reader as he is shown the same events from differing perspectives...
...for example, he chooses a Gauguin from the artist's first, not his second and more productive, visit to Tahiti...
...Alec Guinness, he informs us, can go anywhere with no fuss...
...So it is obvious why these pleasures are particularly sweet...
...The "plucky Finland" of the winter war and Polish sufferings...
...More than 50 other national hierarchies, Father Sheerin informs, have taken NCWC as their model...
...He has been listening to music, performing it too, for a long time, long enough, for instance, to have seen the rise of Sibelius' reputation, and its decline...
...they reflect a hobby, not a trade...
...Yet for all the acclaim the dream from which NCWC grew never materialized-and doubtless never will...
...It was plausible to men of good will that a war of Hitler against Stalin, if not even with him, was preferable to a war against Hitler...
...a traditional conservatism might have seemed preferable to either socialism or fascism...
...Painting and Music are arranged chronologically, but Acting and Clowning are in alphabetical order, so many of the subjects being from the same period, so many still alive...
...But, according to Father Sheerin, this is exactly the way Burke viewed the situation...
...But reports of German atrocities and the sinking of the Lusitania outraged him...
...His selections seem chosen to reflect old age (Verdi's Falstaff) or early death (Bizet...
...From our present perspective-post-Vietnam, etc.-it seems bizarre that Catholics should have considered WWI a fortuitous opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty and deep Americanism...
...French political confusions-they have meaning for us not as events in their own right, but as antecedents of matters of moment to our own destiny such as Soviet brutality in Eastern Europe, or the problems of our relations with the Vichy government and DeGaulle after the European war became a global-and hence American-enterprise...
...All this arose from his own conviction that Catholics as a minority needed to organize to protect and defend their interests...
...An ordinary index would have been helpful, but perhaps not suited to the informal spirit of this book...
...Despite the perhaps questionable motives for the War Council-mobilizing Catholics to die for the flag-Burke was successful in organizing for the first time not only the country's nearly 15,000 Catholic societies but also the often quarrelsome hierarchy which, since 1884, had not met in formal assembly...
...Priestley does it well...
...Priestley knows the stage from exactly the most sympathetic angle-old feuds being over and done with-that of the author...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 16
