Pynchon and Catholicism

[John Bailey]

Interesting. I definitely would have pegged Fitzgerald as a Catholic
and Hemingway not (although I see he did convert to Catholicism at
some point in order to marry a Catholic).
Some of the defining features of Catholicism that I've heard
distinguish it from other strains of Christianity include:
- a much greater emphasis on ritual, with masses delivered in much
more obtuse and convoluted language
- greater emphasis on symbols, statues, icons
- a massively more significant role accorded to Jesus's mother Mary...
in fact at one point Mary was worshipped more than Jesus and the
authorities had to step in a reel that back
- Predominantly Catholic countries tended to favour hot chocolate
while Protestant countries jumped on the coffee train
- Historically, Protestants tended to think of Catholics as
over-the-top weirdos while Catholics thought of Protestants as
straight-laced and boring

On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 8:33 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>
> "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/
>
> --
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