Boiling the Irish Catholic pot
McConnell, Frank
SELF-HUGGING PARABLES Boiling the Irish Catholic pot FRANK McCONNELL A SOCIOLOGIST-Andrew Greeley, say-might well be interested in the reasons the Irish Catholic potboiler has suddenly become...
...and they seem to advocate smugness as a rational response to life...
...Why should a priest, Greeley asks in the pompous afterwords to both novels, write novels at all...
...And why is Thy Brother's Wife-a shallower performance in every way than The Cardinal Sins-likely to get the same treatment...
...In Dunne's True Confessions it is the cop and his brother, the priest on the make for the bishop's job...
...FRANK McCONNELL teaches English at Northwestern University...
...Take two strong male figures, both Irish Catholic, one dedicated to worldly success, the other dedicated to the spiritual life...
...make them related (e.g...
...John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions, Eugene Kennedy's Father's Day, Robert Tine's State of Grace, and a number of other novels have all done grandly lately, and have all relied, with varying degrees of skill, on much the same Mulligan stew of power politics, troubled priests, florid sex, and pure malarkey...
...In his headlong quest for scandalous storytelling, and his clumsiness on that quest, he resembles most, among recent American novelists, the unfortunate Erica Jong, whose Fear of Flying announced to us all what we all already should have known...
...But of course, one sighs...
...The Cardinal Sins...
...and serve...
...His books include Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature (Oxford University), The Science Fiction of H.G...
...Particularly," as he says after Thy Brother's Wife, "a secular novel, about adultery, incest, and sacrilege...
...Indeed, at the beginning of The Cardinal Sins and again at the beginning of Thy Brother's Wife, he thoughtfully provides us with introductory paragraphs explaining just how the story and characters to follow fit into a conventional scheme of Catholic morality...
...In Thy Brother's Wife-has no one, by the way, noticed how dumb that title is?- the antagonists are Paul Cronin the Kennedy /Daley style politician and Sean Cronin the priest...
...This, at any rate, is the impression one gets of the culture of Irish American Catholicism from Greeley's two books...
...stir in one, or no more than two, sexually active but guilt-ridden Irish women...
...And these-Morte D'Urban, The Third Deadly Sin, Gravity's Rainbow-are real parables...
...In your grammar school and mine, it was the kid who always knew how to cadge lunch money from the smaller kids, and the kid who announced in grade five that he was going into the seminary...
...And his espousal of a new, liberated Catholic theology turns out to be as inoffensive to conservatives, as basically old-fashioned and unadven-turous, as Jacques Maritain himself could have desired...
...Thy Brother's Wife...
...But let him not have the bad taste to make the identification explicit...
...put them in Chicago...
...Paul Cronin, the politician/anti-hero of Thy Brother's Wife, is described early on in the book as having "a devil-may-care grin and mischief-filled eyes: a black Irish warrior with the looks of a movie star...
...THIS nonsense appeals as much as it does, I think, because - in post-Watergate, pre-nuclear, mid-Reagan America-the Irish obsession with family and with guilt and with tradition is a kind of mythic antidote for what, otherwise, seems a national crisis of jadedness (remember how we all laughed when Jimmy Carter attacked the "moral malaise'' of America...
...Greeley perfectly incarnates in his characters all the arrogance, insularity, and irresponsible sentimentality of the Second City...
...He just doesn't, one feels, know that he does...
...they are stories that humanize us, that is, and stories that help us get through the day with something like grace...
...I think it has to do with two basic things: the innate fascination of the Irish Catholic experience in America, and Greeley's own brilliant talent for self-advertising...
...I wonder, by the way, what the alternative is to a "secular novel"-a transcendental novel, maybe...
...They are smug...
...especially if you're also disturbed about being Irish Catholic (and, saints preserve us, what Irish Catholic isn't...
...Then why all the noise...
...Any number of writers-J.F...
...put them in conflict...
...Why was Greeley's first novel so viciously attacked by many Catholic reviewers, and so effusively praised by many dunderheads...
...And that is the difference between art and schlock, between a storyteller and a mere relayer of anecdotes...
...In Eugene Kennedy's Father's Day it is the politically-savvy old man and his idealistic son, the President of Notre Dame...
...Wells (Oxford University), and a forthcoming study of the fiction of Graham Greene...
...What must the world be coming to...
...In his two novels, The Cardinal Sins and now Thy Brother's Wife, the politics is as corrupt, the priests as troubled, the sex as overwritten, and the malarkey as uncut as you could wish...
...father and son, best buddies from childhood, brothers...
...Negligible as fiction, laughable as cultural history, they are nevertheless important - and disturbing - ds phenomena...
...So the attractiveness of the IRA mythology for America at the present time may be more than merely a nostalgia for a lost culture of shared values, it may be, more seriously and more distressingly, a nostalgia for a simplified world of easy solutions and unexamined bromides that was false to begin with...
...Suddenly, if we can trust sales figures, it's very in to be Irish Catholic...
...By Andrew Greeley...
...The sentimentality of that, particularly of the mawkish "we Irish," is deeply embarrassing...
...And if the Irish Americans generally are a self-hugging lot, nowhere do they embrace themselves more ferociously than in Dublin-by-the-lake, Chicago: the inevitable scene of Greeley's stories...
...And it is-well, offensive of him to suggest that they are...
...Well, rather less, actually, than Greeley himself seems to think...
...They did, I think, because of a fundamental and still unresolved schism in the Irish Catholic consciousness: the inability successfully to integrate a sense of being in the world with a sense of being justified...
...It is not the astonishing arrogance of this that I find so distressing, as much as the unsophistication of it all...
...As he exited, for the last time, the City Council, he turned in wrath and delivered the eloquent judgment: "It ain't seemly...
...If Greeley wants to explain his work as a fiction writer by analogy with the parables of Jesus, then by all means let him...
...In The Cardinal Sins (which contains an obvious caricature of Chicago's late Cardinal Cody) the antagonists are the worldly priest Patrick Donahue and the priestly priest Kevin Brennan (an obvious projection of Greeley himself...
...Well, because, he tells us, all the greatest religious teachers -Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc.-have always used fiction as a means of getting their lessons across...
...Greeley's characters, in times of severe stress or despair, tend to fall back for solace not so much on a faith or a love or even an idea, but rather on the mere fact of their Irishness...
...And such are the ironies of history that, when we try to think ourselves back to a time of real hope and real creativity in government, most of us inevitably remember the image of the Kennedy years, of "Camelot"-a tarnished coin, to be sure, but still a brighter one than any since minted...
...By Andrew Greeley...
...A priest, after all, writing so frankly about ecclesiastical hypocrisy and about illicit sex...
...Warner Books, $12.95, 350 pp...
...His descriptions of political and churchly corruption are about as daring in their revelations as an average prime-time television series...
...No ethnic group in this country can be quite as fatuous in its self-hugging as the Irish...
...Powers, Norman Mailer, Lawrence Sanders, and most especially Thomas Pynchon-have managed to transmute the Catholic experience in America into the stuff of real mythmak-ing, the stuff of real legend, the stuff of a real cultural access of consciousness...
...But to claim that this clumsiness is a '' religious story?'' Well, let me quote the famous utterance of a deposed alderman-convicted of fraud, peculation, blackmail, and embezzlement- from Greeley's beloved Chicago...
...Those twins, fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, who inhabit the landscape of the IRA are really a dramatization-or maybe, even, a projection-of the deep split that cuts across that narcissistic culture...
...Greeley, like Eugene Kennedy and a number of other writers of the IRA school, puts heavy stress on Camelot-nostalgia in both his novels, even introducing Robert F. Kennedy as a minor character in Thy Brother's Wife...
...The big news that priests can be as horny as the rest of us should shock nobody who has actually inhabited the planet for a few years (it's always surprising, to be sure, how many people really haven't...
...Remember how those two always hung out together...
...Silly, yes: but that's what the IRA is all about: and Greeley has grasped the formula with an accuracy that is either cynical or so innocent that it is just next door to pure cynicism...
...Of course, Andrew Greeley is unlikely to carry out that particular study, since he has become one of the chief potboiler-makers himself...
...Faith 'n begorrah, Sodom and Gomorrah: I said a few years ago that this is the elementary formula for the Irish Romantic American novel-let's abbreviate that to the IRA-and I think it still holds true...
...And, of course, since Greeley is a priest-indeed, one of the most controversial priests in America - the novels carry an added, albeit ex-traliterary thrill...
...Writing, God help us, about sex as ifit were fun...
...SELF-HUGGING PARABLES Boiling the Irish Catholic pot FRANK McCONNELL A SOCIOLOGIST-Andrew Greeley, say-might well be interested in the reasons the Irish Catholic potboiler has suddenly become such big business in American fiction...
...Andrew Greeley's crude cartoons are nothing of the sort...
...There is also hope," says the narrator of The Cardinal Sins in a funeral sermon for his father, "unquenchable hope, indeed the laughing hope with which we Irish always defy death...
...Don't mind that whirr in the background, it's only Kierkegaard spinning in his grave...
...Not that Greeley isn't fun to read.' There is a set form to the IRA novel, almost as predictable as the conventions of soap opera, and both Greeley's novels fill it out to perfection...
...Warner Books, $14.95, 351 pp...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 11
