The Catholic Writer of the Future: A Review of Many-Colored Fleece
Many-Colored Fleece: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Fiction by Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B.
Cluny Media, 2022; $22.95, 344 pp.
I remember that at Marillac, you and I said we were easily defeated when it came to defending what we thought were necessary judgments about fiction in the face of people who didn’t see them. I still am, and I’m much more liable to try to get out of the way as fast as possible than to make my views plain. I think though that it’s the people and not the questions that defeat us.
—Flannery O’Connor to Sister Mariella Gable
Cluny Media keeps bringing Catholic books back from the dead. Soon they will lend a new spine to Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate’s The House of Fiction, an anthology of dexterous short stories ranging from Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” to Gogol’s “Old World Landowners,” Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” to J.F. Powers’ “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does.” Gordon appends selected stories with commentaries devoted to the craft of fiction, careful applications of central literary devices and modes that she advances in a section entitled “The Arts of Fiction” (an appendix entitled “The Faults of the Amateur” succeeds all this goodness). As if to overwhelm us with just how many rich aunts of the Catholic literary tradition we have neglected to (re)visit, Cluny has republished Many-Colored Fleece: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Fiction by Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B.
By an apparent coincidence you could—in good conscience—call providence, these fleece come grazing at the same time that First Things has printed one of the freshest contributions to the conversation on Catholic fiction that we have seen since Dana Gioia’s foundational essay “The Catholic Writer Today:” “A Theology of Fiction,” by Cassandra Nelson. Nelson begins her essay by asking us to assume a familiar Catholic posture: crane your neck backwards so that you can find what footing you might climb next. She does this by asking “the logically prior question,” the question that should precede the other inquires that have stirred the last decades’ spirited debate: “Where did Catholic literary fiction come from in the first place?” For what so many of us can take for granted (a holy impatience with Catholic stories that “sacrifice the truth of human nature to the purposes of pious teaching,” for one), we owe some serious pietas to Sister Mariella Gable. Sister Gable taught at the College of St. Benedict in J.F. Powers’ territory of Nowhere, Minnesota from 1928 to 1973.
As Nelson notes, Sister Mariella “threw herself into teaching the craft of writing after another nun asked why the college never won any writing awards. ‘The question,’ Sr. Mariella recalled, ‘filled me with rage.’” Unlike the wrath of Achilles, which sent him sulking by the seashore, playing his lyre for no one to hear, Gable’s galvanized a flowering of very fine fiction. Over the next few years, her students won six honorable mentions and twice took the top prize in the Atlantic Monthly’s creative writing prize. The literary reputations of Powers and O’Connor rose, in part, on her reviews, anthologies, and single-handed reconsiderations of what Catholic literature could be. When overwork left her wracked with diverticulitis and depression, anxiety and insomnia, the doctor warned her to “stay within my limitations.” Instead, she did the yeoman’s work of writing a book of essays meant to spread a literary sensus Catholicus to schoolteachers (thereby disseminating a higher literary standard among students of Catholic schools), and assembling three anthologies: They Are People, Our Father’s House, and Many-Colored Fleece.
The contents of Fleece give you the flavor of her approach. “Catholic fiction” need not be written by Catholics, but it must be written by serious fictionists: yes, here are stories by usual suspects such as Paul Horgan and Graham Greene, but beyond these find Langston Hughes’ “Home” and John Steinbeck’s “The Miracle of Tepayac,” which Gable describes as a “flawless retelling of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe”—not a story familiar to most of us who reside East of Eden. Operating on J.F. Powers’ principle that “God doesn’t like crap in art,” the Benedictine sought to fortify the tastes of Catholic readers until they could no longer bear the “deplorably low” grade fare most had been taught to consume. A pile of good stories would not do. She needed to include extensive introductions to each of her anthologies. And thank God the need was there.
The miniature course that begins Many-Colored Fleece contains fresh takes on all of the major questions Catholic artists and audiences have been asking in the seventy-five years since. Some of her misplaced faiths (in the coming harmonies between science and religion, in the existence of fixed literary cycles that spin from allegorical to idealistic to decadent) feel dated, but let the one among us is who is without flaws pull out the red pen and cross out these paragraphs. Even should you do so, what remains will give all comers—fictionists and aficionados alike—much to mull. Sister Mariella gauges that fiction has “gone as far away from God as it can go. There is no unexplored nastiness, perversion, or animality.” Sadly, subsequent decades of literary degenerations would prove this presumptuous, but her next contention is worth our attention: “Either fiction will bring God in, or perish in stagnation.” She does not mean that fiction will disappear from the face of the earth, but rather that it will become “intolerably boring,” flat, what she calls “one-dimensional.”
An actualized Catholic fiction, on the contrary, is “unlimited;” whenever this rare real thing appears, it “embraces all reality.” Whereas one-dimensional fiction is severely limited by its mere materiality, in Catholic fiction ““Every person present is either in a state of grace or of damnation. Hell and heaven are present in the room” of any novel worth its exorcised salt. Eschatological, such fiction “extends boundaries,” eliding the “dehumanizing” abstraction of allegorical moralism and resisting unqualified apprenticeship to the literary darlings of the moment. “The way, therefore, not to be a great Catholic writer is to sit at the feet of contemporary artists and study their form.” Why? Because “the craft of the Godless cannot be the craft of the God-filled. The substance expressed will always determine the form of expression.” True, one-dimensional stories can be “utterly charming in their human insights,” sometimes even breathtaking in their psychological courage and complexity, but we must not “overestimate this one-dimensional” type and “place it in the same category as fiction with spiritual depth.”
But shouldn’t we judge a work of fiction according to the marks of the craft—whether it is a well-made thing? Aren’t spiritual dimensions foreign to the art of fiction as art? Gable approvingly cites T.S. Eliot’s judgment that “The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.” Nonetheless, though we can learn much from the techniques of living luminaries, and can absorb interesting lessons from the formalist criticism of, say, Viktor Shklovsky, Sister Mariella wishes us to pick up where Eliot leaves off:
the greatness of literature can be determined by the degree to which a three-dimensional substance is integrated with perfect artistic expression. But the artistic expression of three-dimensional content can never be in the same mode of expression as one-dimensional content, for substance and form are one.
The consequences of this resonant rallying cry leave the writer wandering from gas station to gas station, in search of a pack of cigarettes under seventeen dollars by which he can calm his suddenly taxed nerves. You know what? Can you give me a single shot of that rum, too? Cheap menthols will do: “A three-dimensional fiction lays greater demands on the artist qua artist than does one-dimensional fiction. The Catholic writer must be a greater artist than his secular confrere. And by the standards of pure art three-dimensional fiction must be greater fiction.”
Sister Mariella points out a number of anemic veins wherein the Catholic writer ought to bring blood. In addition to struggles over racial prejudice or labor tensions that have their telos in justice, she suggests the agon of a Catholic family sustaining the contests of the human spirit “in spite of nearly insurmountable economic handicaps,” this in a milieu that is decidedly post-Christian, alien in a culture that is at times “pagan.”
Too often Catholic writers look for lightning rods of spiritual significance in less ordinary, more clerical (Morte d’Urban, The Edge of Sadness) or more freakish (Wise Blood) figures. But what of these nobodies’ “heroic fortitude”? Gable is here not calling for a three-dimensional marriage plot, but for novels that start after the wedding, when the vows meet the vale of tears, when we watch “how man ticks when he moves toward goodness, what his spiritual problems are as he makes three steps forward and two steps back.” Easy to do badly, hard to do well. But if—
Marital matters might receive compelling, cathartic treatment in what we might call “negative fiction,” as in Tess Slesinger’s “Missis Flinders” (included in this anthology). Negative fiction does not negate; the way down is the way up. “The story of failure is often like the hole in the wall, without which we could not see the thickness, strength, and solidity of the masonry.” When, in “Missis Flinders,” a married couple buys a lease on liberty by means of an abortion, any harmony gained is theatrical, as “they suffer frightfully in their subtle contempt of each other. They have broken a natural law, and nature punishes them.” Gable offers an apologia for the goods of the via negativa: “The strength and thickness of the protecting wall could scarcely have been seen unless a hole in it had been exposed.”
There is another dead vein that Sister Mariella here nurses with precision and passion: the need for “an art which moves the reader to accept the good as lovable”—fiction that achieves a psychology of goodness “with anything like artistic success that commonly distinguishes the analysis of evil.” If St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that every human being is—by nature—oriented toward goodness, most fiction would have us see mankind as headed for hell from the first. Most “good characters” are, artistically, failures. Evil, on the other hand, pulses with pathos. Gable applies Kenneth Burke’s insight to the many writers who espouse noble ends: “You find, in going over his work that the enemies of his cause are portrayed with greater vividness that the advocates.”
Should Catholic writers succeed, most contemporary fiction will seem “shallow and dull” by comparison. Most imitators of goodness err by delivering their characters from concupiscence entirely, bringing us boring cut-outs, doppelgängers of one-dimensional decadents. If truthfully realized—if the truth were told—good characters would be not dull but full of pull, “for the sharpest conflict in the world begins to take shape the moment a soul sets out to seek God in earnest.” Immediately the weakened will tries to disguise self-seeking as spiritual quest. The conflict begins before the character opens his door. But the character of good will does not regress into narcissistic nothingness. His sobered centimeter-steps toward goodness grow in us the sense that (and here she cites von Hildebrand) “all the things we can know are ranged in a hierarchy of being, some deserving less love, some more,” that each of us should “strive to give each thing the love it deserves.” Watching him work out his salvation, the reader is roused too to be “done once and for all with the feverish desire merely to be different,” is ready to do “away with the romantic emphasis upon the ego.” Do not misunderstand her: Sister is not asking for “edification at the expense of truth,” but for writers who can “impart on the level of pure art the vicarious experience” of an odyssey toward God, this not in the epic paragons but the ordinary nobodies who remain unsung, all told with a conjunction of solidity and dimensionality no other form can so fully communicate. This “still undiscovered” craft of goodness is the greatest challenge—and highest summons—that the “artist of the future” must face. As this book was first published in 1950, that artist is (I’ll send you a cigarette if you send me a postmarked envelope) you.
