Slothrop's nativity & Religion.2

[Terrance]

One part of Fitzgerald's Catholicism-the weakest, least
important part, in fact-is obvious in his life and in his
fiction. He was born and reared a Catholic, and he had a
cousin, Thomas Delihunt, who
was a Jesuit priest and whom, in 1924, the fully apostate
Fitzgerald would still list beside Theodore
Roosevelt and Garibaldi as one of his heroes. His first
novel-that scandalous, marvelous, twenty-three-year-old's
astonishing bound into fame and fortune-opens with scenes
among wealthy Catholic families. This Side of Paradise is
dedicated, in fact, to Sigourney Fay, the worldly priest who
stood for a
time as spiritual (and surrogate) father to the author, and
Fay appears, very
lightly disguised as Monsignor Thayer Darcy, throughout the
book's semi-autobiographical tale of a handsome, pampered,
and yet still idealistic young Princeton student named Amory
Blaine.  So, too, Fitzgerald published two explicitly
Catholic short
stories in the days of his great success. There was the
bizarre tale "Atonement," which
he originally intended to be part of The Great Gatsby, about
a boy who lies in the
confessional and a priest who goes mad. And there was
"Benediction," which
appeared in his first collection of jazz Age stories,
Flappers and Philosophers,
and tells the story of an upper-class Catholic girl who (on
her way to give up her
virginity to her lover) stops off to visit her brother at a
Jesuit seminary in Maryland.
In an early piece of juvenilia called "The Ordeal,"
Fitzgerald wrote of his own youthful visit to his Jesuit
cousin, and in "Benediction" he
transfers from himself to a nineteen-year-old girl the
visitor's experience of being
simultaneously an outsider and in the presence of genuine
righteousness. The story ends
with the girl's almost deciding not to meet her lover.  Of
course, in the world of
modern literary criticism and biography, there's almost no
mention of any of this-for Fitzgerald, like every other
important author, has been redefined as a good, red-blooded,
all-American, atheistical secularist. But in this one case,
the redefinition has
considerable truth. Fitzgerald didn't want to be merely a
kind of Catholic writer,
composing his books for the Catholic ghetto in America.  He
didn't want, in fact, to be
any kind of Catholic writer. The declassse world of American
Catholicism mostly
embarrassed him, and if F. Scott Fitzgerald was the first
writer from a Catholic background to achieve canonical
success in American writing (leaving aside the question of
Theodore Drieser), you'd hardly know it from him. 


Marshall McLuhan was a skeptic, a joker, and an erudite
maniac. He read too deeply from Finnegans Wake, had too
great a fondness for puns, and never allowed his fun to be
ruined by the adoption of a coherent point of view. He was
dismayed by any attempt to pin him down to a consistent
analysis and dismissive of criticism that his plans were
impractical or absurd. His characteristic comment during one
academic debate has taken on a mythic life of its own. In
response to a renowned American sociologist,
McLuhan countered: "You don't like those ideas? I got
others."  In a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau, with whom he had a long friendship, McLuhan argued
that in the
modern electronic environment, it is inadvisable to be
coherent. "Any moment of arrest or stasis permits the public
to shoot you down." McLuhan preferred to make his rebuttals
in the form of a quip. As he explained to Trudeau: "I have
yet to find a situation in which there is not great help in
the phrase: 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' It is
literally
disarming, pulling the ground out from under every
situation! It can be said with a certain amount of poignancy
and mock deliberation."  McLuhan's idea that media are
extensions of man was
influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of
electricity extends the central nervous system. McLuhan's
mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that
electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward
and put humankind in closer contact with God.  But McLuhan
did not hold on to this brief hope, and he later decided
that the electronic unification of humanity was only
a facsimile of the mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the
electronic universe was "a blatant manifestation of the
Anti-Christ." Satan, McLuhan remarked, "is a very great
electric engineer."  Though he enjoyed observing the battles
of the day as they were played out in the media, McLuhan was
deeply attached to
the church and suspicious enough of worldly goings-on to be
immune to large-scale politics or reformation movements. He
put his faith in Christ. When challenged by a British
journalist about the deleterious effects of electronic
culture, McLuhan responded that he had "no doubt at all that
Christus vincit. That is why a Christian cannot but be
amused at the antics of worldlings to 'put us on.'" The true
Christian
strategy, McLuhan believed, was "pragmatic and tentative." 
Pragmatic and tentative hardly seem the right adjectives for
one of our era's greatest provocateurs. But in light of his
Catholicism, McLuhan's pragmatism makes sense. Mystics are
attuned to the voice of the Holy Spirit coming in directly,
and they are the great demolishers of doctrine. Pragmatic
does not mean practical, but nonsystematic. Tentative does
not mean weak, but provisional and willing to change course
under the influence of new revelations. 

For the pragmatic Penn vs the principled new englander see
the chicago chapter of The Education of Henry Adams.