O'Malley of Notre Dame

...He hated the idea of"specialization"--the idea that there was a technique for reading, like the technique for changing a distributor cap or napalming civilian popula- tions-because for him literature was a holy thing...

...For Frank was unstinting in his praise of his students' work--O'Malley grading on a curve would have been like a seagull trying to crawl--and was (this is the only word that works) on fire with the books he read...

...His Catholicism was so central to the core of his being that to take it away would have been to break him altogether...

...Even more, as an English Ph.D., a scholar of George Orwell's work, and a teacher of courses in the history of utopi- anism, I felt also thefrisson of uneasy recognition: Here was a man of precisely my own age (thirty-four), a student of his nation's literature, a onetime idealist who had spent his entire life desperately clinging to utopian illusions...

...n fact, I think he would have made much...

...3263-X $4.95 DISCIPLES AND LEADERS, The Origins of Christian Ministry in the New Testament, John F. O'Grady...

...Mark Allan Powell...

...We haven't...

...3277-X $9.95(t) WHAT ARE THEY SAYING ABOUT ACTS...

...By the middle of freshman year, I was sure of two things: O'Malley was probably god and I was-----couldn't miss--the next great American writer...

...And, on the surface, it can look today like a Catholicism we--or I--would blush at, a little too sectarian, male-dominant, and Eurocentric...

...and his wiry frame hunched over our little table...

...But there's more...

...Among the "Modern Catholic / Writers" he taught were Virginia Woolf, Dostoyevsky, and Blake and Kafka...

...Well, most of us aren't born seagulls...

...My career track was clear--dozent, then professor, then ordinarius...

...s and "Great...

...3286-9 $11.95(t) ff, <t9 t~,~.~._~ ~"o~*l'c'~" IN THE DAYS OF PAUL, The Background and Teaching of the Apostle, Anthony J. Tambasco...

...3266-4 $12.95 SPIRITUALLY AWARE PASTORAL CARE, An Introduction and Training Program, Earle and Elspeth Williams...

...Mind you, I couldn't begin to imagine how those guys would get along together, although I often try...

...7, Natural Law and Theology, edited by Charles E. Curran and Richard S. McCormick, S.J...

...3179-X $14.95 SPIRITUALITY AND EMPTINESS, The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity, Donald IV...

...VOICES FROM JERUSALEM, Jews and Christians Reflect on the Holy Land, edited by David Burrell and Yehezkel Landau...

...I'd decided, with more than faint embarrassment, that Frank had been just a well-meaning but muddled Mr...

...Classics of Western Spirituality Series.] Cloth 0451-2 $24.95(t...

...We glowed...

...3267-2 $14.95 DECEMBER 1991 A BRIDGE TO DIALOGUE, The Story of Jewish-Christian Relations, John Rous- maniere...

...I must quote for you what he says at the end of his essay on William Blake: "All thinkers and artists whose wisdom really burns through the skin of time will give heart to us, will forever help us to know and to be...

...He expected to be let go in six months...

...Cloth 0397-4 $24.95(0 BELIEVING: UNDERSTANDING THE CREED, Gerald O'Collins, S.J...

...3284-2 $8.95(0 CATHOLIC SPIRITUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody...

...He had spent the past ten years at the school, East Germany's second- ranked after the Humboldt University of East Berlin...

...Once drafted, the motion passed unanimously...

...3271-0 $9.95(0 NIZAM AD-DIN AWLIYA: MORALS FOR THE HEART, translated and edited by Bruce B. Lawrence...

...It is part of the reason America is becoming the kind of soulless and mercenary shopping-mall that George Bush thinks is just swell...

...Probably I'll have to emigrate...

...3224-9 $7.95 OCTOBER 1991 AN AMERICAN SPIRIT, The Life and Times of Isaac Hecker, David J. O'Brien...

...And of them all, maybe O'Malley looms the largest: the least-famous, the least-published, the most self-effacing...

...I had a place secured, a paved road before me," came the answer, as if from a great distance...

...Obviously I've been thinking about Frank a lot lately, and one of my first thoughts is always that first day of class in 1960...

...All those "Wonderful...

...After all, he had been living for more than a year in the aftermath of the 27 September 1991:547...

...They were the passionate effort of a believer in the Good to find and nurture whatever of the Good he could see in others...

...As he glided out of class, I couldn't decide which was the case...

...Young professionals who call themselves "deconstructionists" or "new historicists" or "semioticians" are involved--because it makes money and because it garners tenure--in promulgating an approach to literature that is a pure technology of commentary, having nothing at all to do with whatever of passion or life may 546: Commonweal have been involved in the writing of the text, and with no passion or life of its own...

...More than anything, it was his understated, almost deliberately self-deflationary delivery that made Jurgen's words so powerful...

...3279-6 $7.95(0 3261-3 $13.95 3264-8 $7.95 PAULIST PRESS 997 Macarthur Blvd., Mahwah, N.J...

...But what they all had in common was their fierce conviction that we read books to save our lives, to serve the Lord (never mind who he/she is), and to make the lives of our friends and lovers better...

...Thinking about him I think about what Olaf Stapledon said about H.G...

...He had no idea of his future...

...3288-5 $9.95 READINGS IN MORAL THEOLOGY NO...

...3270-2 $9.95 WEB OF THE UNIVERSE, Jung, the "New Physics" and Human Spirituality, John Hitchcock...

...Jesus...

...The point of it all, he wrote and acted out, was not being perfect but con- tinually becoming that...

...Chips, certainly not a serious, professional literary critic like, say, well, me: a sentimental anachronism, sort of like my old Hopalong Cassidy knife...

...Blake would have approved...

...Does the future of literature really belong to today's careerist technocrats...

...On a cold, drizzling afternoon last winter, Jurgen Roth, a wis-senschafilicher assistent [lecturer], sat in a dingy cafe in Leipzig, a few streets from the Karl Marx Universit~it, telling me in his soft German about his life as a party activist and organizer at the university...

...And if you want to call that just first- crush nostalgia, okay, Jack, think about your first crush: did it ever end...

...3272-9 $9.95(0 INTRODUCING THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, John Pilch...

...And what I can tell you is that not at Yale, not at the Smithsonian, in Paris, or Berlin, or at the Library of Congress have I had a clearer glimpse of what it might feel like to live in and for a community of ideas and mutual enthusiasm...

...Because--you heard it here first--the teaching of literature in American universities today is a bloody scandal...

...rH[ DYNAMIC50g SPI/elYUAL UFE 1'~ BUDDHISM AND CrlRjSTIA~VITy SPI TUAUTY FII) DOI~LD W./~T(t~LL THE WORD IN AND OUT OF SEASON, Homilies for the Sundays of Ordinary Time, Cycle C, Richard Viladesau...

...3268-0 $7.95 INTRODUCTION TO JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS, edited by Michael Shermis and Arthur E. Zannoni...

...In time, if I were reasonably productive, it would have all been there...

...devotes a chapter to O'Malley's influence during the postwar years ("Thinker, Critic, Revivalist...

...3167-6 $14.95 THE TWELVE STEPS IN THE BIBLE, A Path to Wholeness for Adult Children, Michele S. Matto...

...So by the time I got my Ph.D...

...CLINGING TO AN ILLUSION JOHN RODDEN AN APPARATCHIK REMEMBERS hat was it like, under the Honecker regime in East Germany, to be a junior faculty member at a state university, and a longtime SED (Communist party) supporter...

...Yet I now realize that it was I, more than he, who invested our three hours together with such dramatic significance...

...It's apt, because his teaching was always in terms of literature as a way of gaining life, and that more abundantly...

...As Chesterton says, there are two ways of getting home, and one of them is to stay there...

...And if lit- erature is that, then so are you and I, because we're the stuff literature is made of...

...Filet Mignon (which I didn't know what it was), Caesar salad (which ditto), Baked Alaska (yeah, yeah), coffee and liqueurs...

...3265-6 $11.95 A POOR MAN'S PROOF FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, John H. Constantino 3262-1 $5.95 PROMISES TO KEEP, Developing the Skills of Marriage, Kathleen R. Fischer and Thomas N. Hart...

...Arnold Sparr, in his book To Promote, Defend, andRedeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960 (one helluva title...

...Of course, he had also paid for the whole evening...

...For they break the chains that freeze our bones, that require us to live as though dying or already dead...

...And there are worse ways to be a teacher: lots...

...I wonder if anybody who knew him--or thought they did--ever has...

...What the hell was that...

...Frank had been there to greet us, had mumbled a few words of welcome and encouragement, had dinner and then--we severally noticed as we explored God, history, and the Dave Brubeck Quartet--had disappeared...

...Nervously he flicked the ashes of cigarette after cigarette, his palms wet JOHN RODDEN is a member of the department of rhetoric and com- munication studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville...

...and Mary Venturini...

...We scintillated...

...3282-6 $8.95 CONSCIENCE AND CATHOLIC FAITH, Love and Fidelity, Anthony Marinelli...

...I used to think that was odd: I can't anymore...

...s he scrawled on our--pretty lame---efforts were not the burblings of a sentimentalist...

...07430 1-21)1-825-73Q0 jackets and ties...

...3281-8 $14.950) IMAGE AND LIKE- NESS: Religious Visions in American Film Classics, edited by John R. May...

...With people like that," she said, "you even have to stoop to enthusiasm...

...In a few of his essays, O'Malley referred to teaching as anal- ogous to the art of the physician: coaxing one's subjects toward a fuller, healthier enjoyment of life...

...Who was he now ? Even as we talked, the senior faculty in Jurgen's department were drafting a motion dealing with their collective identity, as if overwhelmed by the same deafening question...

...This is to say, of course, that for Frank teaching was a religious vocation...

...Wells: One does not record one's debt to the air one breathes...

...The thinkers he venerated--and largely introduced into the American mainstream--were the European Catholics of midcentury who, in their various ways, understood the "Body of Christ" to be the family of man in its sad, funny, and profoundly noble quest for a love that will stay: Christopher Dawson, Etienne Gilson, Ignazio Silone, Georges Bernanos, and, preeminently, Jacques Maritain...

...What would he have made of liberation theology, or of the movement to ordain women, or of the idea that all religions are One Big Religion...

...But for me, O'Malley came first...

...Because his movement was always toward the more humane, the freer, the more generous...

...3269-9 $9.95 THE FAITH OF PARENTS, As Your Child Begins Formal Religious Schooling, Maria Harris...

...I recently overheard one of my colleagues complaining about having to teach Renaissance poetry to under- graduates...

...Funnier and more profound things had, we were sure, never been said...

...it asked that the university return to the hallowed name by which it had been known for more than half a millennium, before the Communists changed it in 1952: the University of Leipzig...

...Which is why, I guess, the rediscovery and celebration of O'Malley seems to me so much more than a mere, posthumous "career award...

...It is a betrayal: of the literature and of the human and of the idea that all this stuff matters...

...In embracing "new understand- ings of the church as an organic community, and the new empha- sis upon the priesthood of the laity," Sparr concludes, "O'Malley, in significant ways, anticipated the reforms of Vatican II...

...No small legacy, that...

...MOTHER CHURCH, What the Experience of Women Is Teaching Her, Sally Cunneen...

...They become in truth the champions of the should...

...Now, no university in Germany will have me...

...Martinis and Manhattans lined up on the buffet...

...3283-4 $5.95(0 INTRODUCING THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, John Pilch...

...We cannot help attaching ourselves to them and depending upon them...

...Years later, when I read Robert Lowell's wonderful elegy for John Berryman --"We prayed to be possessed by poetry/And we were"--my first thought was, "Oh, yeah: that was Frank...

...3280-X $17.95(t) A PAGE A DAY FOR LENT 1992, Margaret Ellen McGraw, C.S.J...

...I've been blessed enough to work with three great teachers: Frank O'Malley, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom...

...Those people possessed him, and he was eager to share their joyous possession with anybody who would listen...

...The man who could write that knows a lot about light, but at least as much about darkness...

...And then I started teaching literature, and started asking myself why I was teaching literature, and how the hell you taught lit- erature anyway...

...A private room in the restaurant...

...At Notre Dame, on October 4-6, 1991, as part of the school's sesquicentennial observance, there will be "A Tribute to Frank O'Malley" featuring discussions of the man's influence by a couple dozen of his former colleagues and students, including me...

...Michell...

...Every graduate student in English knows that, to pass the Ph.D...

...So by "Catholic" he meant catholic...

...Either this guy was such a humble pastry that he didn't think his name mattered, or he was such an arrogant turkey that he figured we were all stupid for not knowing who he was (think about Milton's Satan to the celestial coastguard in Paradise Lost: "Not to know me argues thyself unknown...

...and began a twenty-five-year process of finding out that I'd been right the first time: Frank O'Malley was some kind of great man...

...3285-0 $11.95(t) FOUNDATIONS OF THEOLOGICAL STUDY, A Source-book, edited by Richard Viladesau and Mark Massa...

...I felt as ifI were present at a private reading of our generation's The God that Failed, that powerful collection of memoirs of several leading ex-Communist intellectuals of the 1930s and '40s...

...And knows to choose light...

...And then Frank, Frye, and Bloom also had their passion for Blake in common: Blake who, at the beginning of the truly modern era, saw that the chances for the future would be either absolute spiritual freedom or absolute imaginative slavery, and who tried so hard to break the chains that freeze our bones and tell us how to do it...

...3287-7 $2.95(0 THE STORY OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR, Richard M. Nardone...

...That's the only way to escape everyone forever asking me what I did in the party and why I did it...

...My name's O'Malley...

...You--you've spent your whole life competing...

...exam, you don't have to read many of the texts themselves, or really care very much about them: all you have to do is know the jargon of the current gnosticism, and repeat it...

...Not as long as the memory of O'Malley and Frye, and the presence of Bloom, persist: one hopes...