Pynchon and Catholicism

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise---he 
as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had 
been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author."

Thomas Pynchon: Introduction (Richard Farina: Been Down So Long It Looks 
Like Up To Me)

+ ... F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Catholic. He was in many ways a “bad 
Catholic,” to use Walker Percy’s tongue-in-cheek phrase, but he was a 
Catholic nonetheless. He was born and baptized a Catholic and lies 
buried as a Catholic. Where his soul is now is anyone’s guess; James 
Dickey even wrote a poem called “Entering Scott’s Night” that imagines 
Fitzgerald in purgatory.
Most people, even Catholics, don’t know that Fitzgerald was a Roman 
Catholic. They know that he was an alcoholic. They know he was married 
to the beautiful and doomed Zelda. They know that he worked furiously to 
make a living as a writer, whether it was for Hollywood or popular 
magazines. Yet few people know that Fitzgerald’s Catholicism shaped his 
personal identity and in many ways his vision of the United States.
Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minn., and named after his 
distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, the composer of “The Star Spangled 
Banner.” Most of his childhood was spent in Buffalo, N.Y., where he 
attended two Catholic schools. Fitzgerald was so precocious that one 
school allowed him to attend only a half day of school and permitted him 
to study independently. Further schooling took place in St. Paul and 
Hackensack, N.J. Fitzgerald attended college at Princeton, but left in 
1917 to join the Army. While training near Montgomery, Ala., he met 
Zelda at a party. They were married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New 
York in 1920. Their only child, Frances, was born the following year. 
After his celebrated stay in Paris, Fitzgerald published “The Great 
Gatsby” in 1925. Fifteen years later, after an agonizing marriage, a 
series of publishing disappointments, and deteriorating health due to 
his alcoholism, Fitzgerald died in Hollywood in 1940 at the young age of 44.
Before his death, Fitzgerald had made it known that he wished to be 
buried in Baltimore, which he considered his ancestral and spiritual 
home. Yet because of his drinking, his sordid novels, and his marriage 
to a Protestant, the Church would not permit him to be buried in a 
Catholic cemetery. Fitzgerald was buried instead in a Protestant 
cemetery in Maryland.
For over three decades Frances had struggled for permission to move 
Fitzgerald’s body to St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Baltimore, and in 
1975 the request was finally granted. Fitzgerald was at last where he 
had wanted to be, in sacred Catholic ground. Yet the students who 
continued to read Fitzgerald’s novels throughout the decades after his 
death knew little, if anything, about his religion. One of Fitzgerald’s 
early biographers essentially declared that Fitzgerald’s Catholicism was 
irrelevant.
Hindsight and some recent discoveries have shown the fallacy of that 
assertion.
Though Fitzgerald admitted to the critic Edmund Wilson that “I am 
ashamed to say that my Catholicism is scarcely more than a memory,” his 
choice of words implies that he still identified with the faith, that he 
missed it, and that it obviously had shaped his imagination. Perhaps 
Fitzgerald himself forgot for a moment one of the great lessons to be 
learned from his work: the things that mean most to us persist in the 
memory.
Like much great modern Catholic art and literature, the references to 
Catholicism in Fitzgerald’s work are usually subtle. The best example, 
as many people have suggested, is the wonderful image of the eyes of Dr. 
T.J. Eckleburg, staring across the wasteland of ash heaps from a 
billboard in “The Great Gatsby.” As a symbol, the eyes become like the 
gaze of God surveying the modern world.
Yet there are three overt references to Catholicism in Fitzgerald’s 
short stories, the fiction he wrote primarily to make a living. One 
story, “Absolution,” is a vivid portrayal of the Church before Vatican 
II, which demonstrates the discrepancy between the letter and spirit of 
the law. Another story, just discovered and recently published in The 
New Yorker magazine (6 August 2012), is “Thank You for the Light,” a 
one-page story about the Virgin Mary interceding for a woman who 
desperately needs a cigarette. It’s a funny story. It also affirms the 
possibility for the miraculous.
A final story, in the collection “Flappers and Philosophers,” is 
“Benediction,” which is about a young woman who stops to visit her 
brother in a Catholic seminary while she is on her way to meet a lover. 
One exchange in the story is particularly telling. The woman, Lois, has 
admitted to her brother that her Catholicism no longer matters to her. 
And yet her brother replies, “I’m not shocked, Lois. I understand better 
than you think. We all go through those times. But I know it’ll come out 
all right, child. There’s that gift of faith that we have, you and I, 
that’ll carry us past the bad spots.” Indeed, the brother requests, “I 
want you to pray for me sometimes, Lois. I think your prayers would be 
about what I need.”
In the wake of “The Great Gatsby” movie release, St. Mary’s Cemetery in 
Baltimore reports a huge increase in visitors to Fitzgerald’s grave. 
More people are reading Fitzgerald again, and not just students who are 
working their way through summer reading lists. Perhaps in all the 
recent buzz about Fitzgerald, someone should pray for him ... +

https://georgiabulletin.org/commentary/2013/06/f-scott-fitzgeralds-identity-shaped-by-catholicism/