BOOKS

...It may be of interest to note here that this distinguished editor lived almost his entire life on the fringes of that church he never completely abandoned...

...It would be difficult, e.g., to conceive of William Cardinal O'Connell writing the moving and effective letter that Hughes wrote to Abraham Lincoln in behalf of the fifteen-year-old lad from St...

...Dagger John is also an American success story—the rise of the immigrant lad of humble birth and meager education who became the leader of the American hierarchy, the friend and confidant of popes and presidents, the recipient of national and international acclaim...

...They also furnished, though unwittingly, one of the most effective ecumenical tools the church of those years possessed, so deeply respected and esteemed were they by their non-Catholic fellow citizens...

...Poetry did not hold Sexton's hand—nor Plath's—long enough, nor steadily enough, to keep her alive...

...Friends discussing their poetry over too many martinis in Boston's Ritz bar, New Englanders, compulsive letter-writers whose letters hide more than they reveal as their poems do not, Sexton and Plath have been apotheosized by an adoring feminist cult—for all the wrong reasons...

...Linda Sexton's edition of her mother's letters, with its carefullyguarded interleaved biographical material, is an embarrassment, a testament of a daughter's love-hate for her mother's success, her mother's affairs, her mother's abandonment...

...Only Howe's commonsense dissent, itself too brief as though he felt Plath's poetry was not worth any intense scrutiny, grasps Plath's talents—and her limitations...

...He was not always victorious nor was he always right...

...Dagger John RICHARD SHAW Paulist Press, $10.95 [403 pp] E. HAROLD SMITH The subtitle of this book, the Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York (many would say the greatest of its dead Archbishops), is an accurate description of its contents...

...Hughes ignored (i.e., publicly) Bennett's existence...

...By temperament and conviction he was an authoritarian of the first water, giving unswerving obedience to those placed over him, demanding the same from those under him...

...His life has never ceased to fascinate serious students of American Church history...

...John Hughes was endowed with intellectual ability of high order, an iron will and driving ambition...

...The letter won him his freedom but, alas unwittingly, paved the way for his death in the Confederate ranks when he was just sixteen...

...the full force of a profound truth had come home to him: "intellect has nothing more to do with faith really than jewels have to do with a beautiful woman...

...At times he could be unfair and even despotic...

...The essayists try, but they, like their subject, somehow fall short...

...That done, the letters themselves should have been burned or left in a moldy trunk...

...Hughes opened parishes for them when he could, won for them the right to maintain their own schools...

...Their origins were practically identical—the difference between a North of Ireland and Scotchborn Catholic was the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee...

...Magazine has the chutzpah to write, "Anne Sexton's life has been defined by her suicide...

...He fought for them (sometimes with them, but no matter) against the nativists, the Know Nothing Party, and the enemies of the church wherever they showed their face...

...A packrat, as though hoarding life's detritus rather than celebrating life's rare moments of tendresse, savoring its scarce seconds of synchrony with another's spirit, Sexton saved carbons of all her letters, postcards, snapshots, flowers...

...His knowledge of the Negro's background was inadequate, to say the least, and he apparently had no deep sympathy with the black man's plight in this country...

...The same "Glamour of Fatality" hangs over Anne Sexton's head, when Ms...

...In schools, hospitals and orphanages, these dedicated women did yeoman service...

...Anne SeXUms A Selt-PortruU in Letter* EDITED BY LINDA GRAY SEXTON AND LOIS AMES Houghion Mifflin,$15[433 pp] S»lvim Plath: Tfce Wommn and the Work EDITED BY EDWARD BUTSCHER Dodd, Mead, $8.95 [242 pp] NANCY YANES-HOFFMAN There is a Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times...

...He was not a tragic figure in life nor will history ever record him as one...

...They were life-long foes...

...Apparently with no influential patrons either in this country or in Rome, he rose by sheer force of his talents and character...

...Hughes was not an ecumenist born out of due time...

...He carried on this warfare in the pulpit, on the public platform, in the press...

...For picking at the bare bones of a dead poet's emotional carcass is an affront—to the poet, her work, her readers—and denies whatever meaning through poetry that she could extract from her life...

...The biographical material never touches on the Sexton divorce (an understandable omission for a daughter but not for the reader), the bitter acrimony of 45 MERCY STREET, Sexton's relationships with her lovers, although Love Poems is probably Sexton's best work...

...With foes like Bennett what need had the Archbishop of friends, at least after death...

...Plath and Sexton are both minor poets, because their voices remained fragile and fragmentary, self-deprecating and precious, because they never connected with the fearsome structure of existence...

...In discussing that book with this reviewer, he emphasized that he was deeply impressed by the fact that Hugbes's entire life almost from birth was filled with turmoil and conflict...

...Bishop Haas insisted on just one thing: "Don't tell me he didn't enjoy it all...

...Neither friend nor foe, it would seem, ever questioned his rugged integrity...

...The same life story now set forth in Dagger John also would seem to indicate that he probably did...

...The walls of St...

...However, it is a well researched study in depth, written in a lively and engaging style...

...Butscher's collection by such notables as Richard Wilbur, Dorothea Krook, Marjorie Perloff, Joyce Carol Oates contributes something to our understanding of Plath, the woman, adds little to our comprehension of the cultural death-wish which has elevated Plath (and by extension, Sexton) beyond the realm of minor poets...

...He sent for Archbishop McCloskey and received the last sacraments from his hands...

...However, he always believed he was...

...as Sexton wrote in her poem about Plath's suicide, "Sylvia's Death...

...In the two decades preceding the Civil War, Catholic immigrants by the millions, principally from Ireland and Germany, for the most part poor and uneducated, were pouring into New York...

...For suffering, for anguish, for the appetite voracious for reassurance, for the coward's (who lives in us all) fear of the future...

...He had been plagued by religious doubts even as a teen-aged junior seminarian wandering on the banks of his native Dee...

...Most of the correspondence culled from 50,000 scraps of a life disintegrated extends our knowledge of Sexton's poetry not one iota...

...In the late 1940's Francis J. Haas (bishop of Grand Rapids, 1943-1953) had just finished reading Hassard's account...

...Yet, beneath a stern exterior beat a heart of feeling and compassion...

...Prickly, romantic, irascible, dependent, kind, obsequious, imperious, subservient, Sexton must have been impossible to live with, just as her ghost seems unbearable for her daughter to live with...

...Mary's, Emmitsburg, who was being held in federal custody...

...Indeed, the most poignant letter from our 20/20 hindsight is one written to a student at McLean Hospital, a private mental institution: "Poetry led me by the hand out of madness...

...James Gordon Bennett would die in the faith of his and John Hughes's baptism...

...A Glamour of Fatality hangs over the name of Sylvia Plath," says Irving Howe, in his "Partial Dissent," one of the few clear-eyed, hardheaded essays in Edward Butscher's collection, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and The Work...

...He was ordained a priest in 1826...

...Sexton and Plath are steeped in the melancholy, but their poetry has no sense of the temple of Delight...

...It is not the definitive life of this churchman...

...When Hughes died, however, the Herald's editor wrote: (Hughes) "stood as the champion of that Church and the Champion of its people by whom he was so greatly admired...

...Some of his later counterparts, however, seem not to have possessed some of Hughes's strengths...

...Richard Shaw's work reflects this trend...

...The author explains why he did not attempt such a life...

...I am hoping I can show others that route...

...Sexton's and Plath's importance to the literary world must begin and end with their poetry, not with their suicidal obsessions, which finally lead them both to their self-made gas chambers...

...Fordham College and St...

...If he had decided to take up the study of law or medicine or enter the diplomatic service, he would have undoubtedly risen to a place of distinction...

...No longer do these consist merely of the biographies of popes and bishops or even the bare account of religious developments and changes...

...Some of Hughes's contemporaries who appear in this biography are almost as interesting as himself...

...In his death, the Church in America has lost its best friend...

...This is the first published life of Hughes of any critical worth since Hassard's biography (1866...

...Editing these letters seems Linda Sexton's effort at exorcising her mother's incubus...

...Again understandably—but infuriatingly, Linda can only comment about Brian Sweeney, the flamboyant Australian millionaire, to whom Anne wrote so seductively: "their flirtation was to remain platonic...

...He had differences with his fellow bishops as well as with his own flock...

...Joseph's Seminary in Troy were both begun by New York's first Archbishop...

...The times of both Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were "interesting," if neurosis, selfflagellation, pain, an emotional rollercoaster, may be described as "interesting...

...They found one in John Hughes...

...the latter never missed the frequent opportunities afforded him to attack the Archbishop in print...

...This citizen and churchman of the nineteenth century has eminently earned the right to be judged in the light of the time and circumstances in which he lived and not by the standards of a later day...

...Patrick's Cathedral, of which he laid the cornerstone in 1858, were only one story high, the project that engaged his best thought and energy in the last months of his life, the provincial seminary at Troy for the education of priests, would not open its doors until the fall of that year, the fate of his beloved though adopted country still hung in the balance...

...church history is now written as primarily the life story of the people of God...

...Nor can one imagine Dennis Cardinal Dougherty with sufficient influence to pacify the workers involved in the industrial uprisings in Pennsylvania in the 1930's, as Hughes had the draft rioters in 1863...

...Trusteeism, which he judged an internal enemy, he fought and vanquished...

...But it is for the few good early poems, the Love Poems, Live or Die, perhaps All My Pretty Ones, that the poetry of Anne Sexton will live, not because of any chaotic correspondence depicting the war to the death between "the good Anne" and "the bad Anne...

...To be sure, organized religion, the churches in general, and their official representatives had no more caustic critic in those years than the same Bennett...

...Both wrote of their recurrent suicide attempts, both affected Nazi imagery for husbands and fathers, more loved and more hated than their "lovers," those other men who came and went in their lives, as in Plath's masochistic fantasy: Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you...

...His achievements and victories were the fruit of hard-fought battles...

...He was not the last authoritarian to shepherd a large American see...

...As Keats put it so well, "Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine...

...In the last twenty-five years a new approach to church history and ecclesiastical biography has been adopted...

...Communities of religious women were invited and welcomed to his Archdiocese...

...In the early years of his priesthood he labored in Philadelphia...

...John Hughes did not depart from this world, however, a frustrated or disappointed man...

...the country one of its purest patriots...

...He exhibited the same zealous and aggressive qualities that were later to mark his years as bishop and Archbishop of New York...

...Both "confessional poets," influenced by Robert Lowell and John Berryman, they never thought to ask, "Why live...

...However, some weeks before his death, while still in full possession of his faculties, the doubts lifted...

...The Catholics of those years in the United States were a sorely pressed, persecuted group without a leader...

...New York's first Archbishop died in the first days of 1864...

...Consider James Gordon Bennett, founder and long-time editor of the prestigious New York Herald...