Places and Persons
Williams, Michael
Places and Persons FROM MIDDLETOWN TO ROME By MICHAEL WILLIAMS WHEN the cardinal archbishop of Boston recently answered an extraordinary letter published in the Boston Herald by Professor Irving...
...Wickham was deliberately using his newspaper experiences and opportunities to come to close grips with the realities of life...
...If so, there are other books, some of them very curious ones, to be some day revealed in print...
...Wickham by deliberate choice retained an aloofness from personal publicity and a detachment from the instinct, or perhaps it is merely a bad habit, of submerging one's whole personality in the glamorous work of journalism, that was highly remarkable...
...Yet, a potent force to pull down the air castles which James and Santayana and Einstein have erected out of pure fancy in defiance of both good sense and good scholarship...
...3.50...
...but it is those who have neither the solace of the Faith nor the steadying influence of the common-sense philosophy stemming from the Faith, who need him most...
...But there is no lack of appreciation...
...Harvey Wickham...
...Here is a Chesterton and Belloc embodied in one...
...H. L. Mencken, but the greater part of it he wrote for his own amusement or for the sheer pleasure of practising the technique of writing, which now has borne such glorious fruit in his trilogy, more particularly in the crowning work of that trilogy, The Unrealists...
...The penetration and the amazing erudition of Mr...
...It puzzled me very much...
...I have recommended the reading of Mr...
...It is these sophists who have for so long laughed to scorn the calm and reasonable deductions of the greatest minds in Christendom...
...It was the same way with his music...
...Wickham himself has paid juster tribute to the genius of some of the men he writes on, among whom are true artists, poets, intellectual geniuses...
...Nobody more than Mr...
...So far as I am concerned, I could not review the book without writing a whole book myself, and that I am unable to do for many reasons: the principal one being a lack of competence...
...I wonder if in the depths of those trunks, stuffed full of manuscripts, which Mr...
...I very well remember saying to Harvey Wickham, at the conclusion of a long conversation in which we had discussed a great many things-as we always did -that the Catholic Church was, of course, the fundamental and inevitable stumbling block in the pathway of human progress, and Mr...
...Wickham was, however, long before the advent of The Commonweal...
...It would not be correct to say that The Commonweal discovered Mr...
...Francis Grierson somewhere remarks that all modern philosophy, if brought together in one volume or set of volumes, might bear the appropriate title of The Sum of Human Folly...
...I began reading The Unrealists pencil in hand, to mark such passages as I might wish to refer to in reviewing the book for this journal...
...The most subtle artistic intelligence I have ever met, that of Harvey Wickham, my closest comrade in my San Francisco adventures, did more to show me this consoling truth than any other influence...
...It is to be hoped that American readers will widely recognize the value of this new writer-new in the sense that after a lifetime of writing, but more particularly of thinking, and of extraordinary fulness of experience, he now literally bursts upon the respectful attention of all thinking people...
...I daresay that he has written more millions of words than even Mr...
...So instead of a review, I will write about Mr...
...but now I think I understand...
...Stories, essays, poems, were published in the Pompeian, if you may speak of publication in connection with a typewritten journal, which, so far as I know, was only read by two persons, Mr...
...But I find I cannot review it...
...My personal acquaintance with Mr...
...Wickham, may fully understand the most essential thing about them all, which is their fundamental falsity...
...Wickham's books to my own clergy, and, as you will see from the clipping which I enclose, my last recommendation was to a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...You and I have been lamenting for a *The Unrealists, by Harvey Wickham...
...Wickham agreed...
...The incisive and decisive analysis of that folly is contained in Harvey Wickham's latest book...
...Catholic readers of course should welcome him...
...for Mr...
...Composer and pianist, he passed by the many opportunities which the concert platform offered him, preferring lonely hours by himself, or in company with one or two appreciative listeners, at the keyboard of his piano: improvising, experimenting, or playing his own finished compositions, or interpreting the masterpieces of both the classical and the experimental schools with astounding brilliancy and power...
...Even those many readers who are, like the present writer, unable to grapple directly with the authors dealt with by Mr...
...Harvey Wickham himself anticipated The Commonweal, or any other medium of publication, sometime ago...
...While perfectly competent for any part of the manifold task of journalism, Mr...
...Not for many a year have I read such a closely reasoned document, perfectly fair, admitting whatever good there is to be found, but going with the author's keen mind to the very point of falsity and folly, tearing the mask away from those who, under the guise of science, are endeavoring to wreck the last vestige of faith in the youth of the land...
...Now, he lives in Rome (where I also would be if I could) not a member of the Catholic Church-in fact, so far as I know, he is still, as ever, personally detached from all organizations-but hailed by a cardinal of that Church in the terms quoted above: one of the strongest, ablest and, fortunately, most entertaining and wittiest living champions of that common sense in philosophy and of that firm, unshakable faith in God and the reality of the supernatural, which the Catholic Church exists in order to maintain, and to prove...
...But at least The Commonweal may be proud of the fact that it did publish the tentative sketches and essays which contained the germs and seeds of his trilogy...
...Yet, thank God, he has not lost in the profundity and clarity of his thought a glorious sense of fun, which is precisely what the pseudo-scientists and the pseudo-psychologists never have and never seem capable of acquiring...
...We roamed together through the underworld, and together we watched the stars of many a dawn fade like silver music from the disappearing darkness...
...Wickham deserves the greatest praise for unmasking the specious and wholly false arguments of modern philosophers and psychologists...
...Wickham and myself-who was a more occasional and decidedly less important contributor...
...I am sure that his books will have a very wide circulation with untold profit to the readers, at least such of them as have the desire for truth and the goodwill to see it when it is so clearly pointed out...
...I hope you will convey to Mr...
...In the same spirit, he was the editor and chief contributor to a magazine which bore the appropriate but cryptic title of the Pompeian- an organ, so to speak, of that Pompeii which was buried in ashes, hidden from all eyes, but which under the surface contained rich treasures...
...but nobody more clearly has perceived and more lucidly expressed the mental chaos in which like meteors these coruscating false lights gleam and dart, to the bewilderment and the misleading of those who have been led to think of them as fixed stars in the heavens of truth...
...Wickham my sincere thanks for the most interesting three books which I have read in many a year...
...Places and Persons FROM MIDDLETOWN TO ROME By MICHAEL WILLIAMS WHEN the cardinal archbishop of Boston recently answered an extraordinary letter published in the Boston Herald by Professor Irving C. Whittemore of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which Professor Whittemore expressed some singular views concerning what the cardinal archbishop had previously said to a group of Catholic students, putting them on their guard against the teachings of certain modernist philosophers and psychologists, he concluded his decisive refutation of Professor Whittemore's opinions by advising the latter "to read Harvey Wickham's illuminating expose of modern pseudo-philosophy and pseudo-psychology...
...Having for many reasons, with which I shall deal below, a special interest in Mr...
...Wickham are a real revelation to the world...
...An astute publisher, reading these first articles, became the means of introducing the work of Harvey Wickham to the English-speaking world, where his advent was hailed immediately in a full-page article by no less a one than G. K. Chesterton in the Illustrated London News...
...The three books referred to by his eminence are The Misbehaviorists, The Impuritans, and the last and greatest of the remarkable trilogy, The Unrealists, in which Mr...
...Wickham was a newspaperman of a unique sort...
...At last, thank God, in the mind and pen of Mr...
...Wickham are a real revelation to the world...
...But Mr...
...It is a long road from Middletown to Rome, but like all other roads traversed by men and women sincerely seeking the truth-it led to Rome...
...Wickham and his work, I asked Cardinal O'Connell to express himself more fully concerning the Harvey Wickham book,* and in reply I received a letter, the pertinent parts of which I am taking the liberty to make public: "I can say unreservedly that Mr...
...We were both newspapermen, in those days "before the earthquake" in San Francisco...
...At least, never has it been my lot to meet any other newspaperman like unto him...
...Wickham deals, subtly yet with crystalline clarity-as he alone seems able to deal-with the dreams and fantasies of William James, Bergson, Santayana, Einstein, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey and Professors Alexander and Whitehead...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Wickham took with him in his wanderings from New York to San Francisco, and later throughout Europe, those copies of the Pompeian are still buried...
...long time the lack of men here like Chesterton and Belloc...
...No more effective antidote to the literary poisons of modernism has appeared since Chesterton's Orthodoxy than Harvey Wickham's The Unrealists...
...Always an omnivorous reader, he at the same time was equally a first-hand participant in life itself...
...but he retained always a mastery of the material that he was dealing with, instead of being mastered or overcome by it, as is the unhappy fate of so many practitioners of that craft...
...Almost every page is pencil-marked, and those which are not would have to be quoted in their entirety if they are to be fully appreciated...
...In one of my books, The High Romance, in which I tried to tell the story of my own revolt from chaos and my adventures and my struggles to return to truth, published a good number" of years ago, I wrote: Perhaps the worst blunder an observer of life can make would be to think that evil is the predominating quality in any particular city, or any particular person...
...Wickham himself: frankly as a propagandist, sincerely desirous of having one of the most remarkable intellects of our day made more widely acquainted to readers who are fed up with the fads and follies of the false prophets of modernism, and who are beginning to turn back to the fixed and unwavering guidance of true reason, common sense, and, above all, faith in a tran-scendant deity, the denial of which is the common ground on which the false prophets of modernism and their followers stand...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 26
