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Mariella Gable and the
Literature of Spiritual Values
by Nancy Hynes, O.S.B.
The mission of Nimble Spirit is to spread the word about “books of high literary merit that confront the challenges of living a spiritual and spirited life.” No one spread the word more consistently or effectively than Sister Mariella Gable O.S.B. (1898-1985), an English professor at the College of Saint Benedict, St. Joseph, Minnesota, from 1928-58 and 1962-1973.
“Should our Catholic writers expose the dirty laundry of the Church? Why not? The Church is made up of fallible human beings subject to the temptations of power, possessions, and prestige. To edify the masses with portraits of perfect, plaster saints does a disservice to the Church. Edification at the expense of truth is always a doubtful good,”says Sister Mariella Gable in my sophomore creative writing class in the 1950s.
My mind’s eye sees her.
Towering, even intimidating. Garbed in black habit and white coif, she stands on a platform in front of the classroom.
Passionate. She speaks in clear, confident tones, her blue eyes riveting us. “Catholic fiction must portray truth. It must be realistic as Chekhov’s stories are. Perhaps, if we have a number of half-baked Catholic writers, it is because we do not make the oven hot enough.”
Earthy. She says, “Writers are either putter-inners or taker-outers. Hemingway is a taker-outer with his simple sentences and Anglo-Saxon words. Thomas Wolfe is a putter-inner. You Can’t Go Home Again because you get lost in 900 pages. Words flow from his pen like -- ” (she searches for the right word) -- “diarrhea.” Leaning back in her swivel chair, she smiles at her accurate, graphic word.
Direct. She asks a shy student why the Trojan War started. The student stumbles over her words, “Paris loved Helen . . . uh . . . and . . . uh . . . deflowered her.”
“My dear,” Gable leans forward, “When you mean rape, say rape.”
I never forget her. I suppose I can’t, having taken seven major courses with her: creative writing, nineteenth-century English literature, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and a senior seminar on Pitirim Sorokin’s The Crisis of Our Age. Her impeccable scholarship, her incisive questions, and her excitement about literature inspired us, motivated us, scared us. We didn’t dare enter her class unprepared; we couldn’t face her penetrating gaze when she “caught us out.”
In the 1970s and 80s, when retired from teaching, this amazing woman gave retreats on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man to women’s groups, high school students, and prisoners in the St. Cloud Reformatory. And they never forgot her. In addition to Teilhard’s work, she also specialized in Nikos Kazantzakis and Buckminster Fuller.
I used to wonder what kind of education we were getting in this small midwestern liberal arts college (only 200 when I was there; now over 2,000). When I pursued graduate work at Marquette and the University of Southern California, I discovered that my grounding in Western literature, the classics, and literary criticism was superb.
Undoubtedly, she influenced me in what I ended up doing myself -- teaching English in college for thirty-one years; researching Gable’s life and publishing her most important essays on Catholic fiction; working on a biography of J.F. Powers, the first real American Catholic writer, according to her.
Gable was a mover and a shaker in Catholic literary circles from 1940 to 1975. A scholar and master teacher, she urged her students to write about reality, not sentimental romance. Her students often won the Atlantic Monthly writing contests in the early forties. For a small Central Minnesota college, this was heady stuff. Gable herself published a small book of poetry called Blind Man’s Stick (1938), but she was best known for critical work that set high standards for true art and reclaimed writers who otherwise might have been lost, such as Sean O’Faolain, J.F. Powers, Brendan Gill, Richard Sullivan, Antonia White, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Gable edited three collections of short stories: Great Modern Catholic Short Stories (1942; re-issued as They Are People, 1944); Our Father’s House (1945); and Many-Colored Fleece (1950). She also wrote over 70 essays and book reviews defining Catholic fiction. An astute critic, she identified Flannery O’Connor, J.F. Powers, John Updike, and J.D. Salinger as excellent “Catholic writers,” before they were well known and despite the fact that Updike and Salinger are not baptized Catholics Clearly, she defined Catholic fiction broadly.
Gable’s theory of Catholic fiction influenced the curriculum of Catholic high schools and colleges from the forties to the sixties. Even in 1989, John Harriott of the London Tablet paid homage to her work in an editorial, “The Nun’s Tales.” He re-read her anthologies and judged that “[t]hey were and are superb.” Her selection of stories demonstrates that the “work of grace enters into the most everyday situations and appears in the most improbable contexts. . . .” Her legacy, Harriott said, was her “shrewd observation that bad art makes for bad religion and the non-believing artist may often strike a note of truth beyond the incompetent religious artist.”
Over the years Gable’s definition of Catholic fiction became progressively broader, but two goals remained the same; she always looked for good art and God-consciousness. Aware of the giants of the Catholic Literary Revival sparked by Cardinal Henry Newman in the late nineteenth century, she praised Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, James Joyce, Sigrid Undset, Dante Alighieri, and Leon Bloy as models for Catholic fiction. In her introduction to Great Modern Catholic Short Stories, she argued for a realism of the sort demonstrated by Anton Chekhov. Chekhov defended his “ordinary” stories and pointed out that “real people rarely go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. Most go to offices, quarrel with their wives, and eat cabbage soup.” Gable endorsed this “new realism” by choosing stories that portrayed the lives of “the sister, the priest, the brother, and the monk as normal, intelligent persons doing normal, intelligent work.” They also “teach rapid addition to children in parochial schools, drink the proverbially bad coffee brewed in monastery kitchens, and are occasionally jealous of each other,” she observed.
In Gable’s introduction to Our Father’s House, she creates the theory of the literary “bull’s eye.” At the center of the bull’s eye are artistic stories about the “little people” [saints] who struggle daily to make appropriate choices among values. She cites Leo Tolstoy’s “God Sees the Truth, But Waits” and Bjornstjerne Bjornson’s “The Father” as examples. Next to the center are concentric circles of fiction dealing with Catholic teachings on race or birth control such as J.F. Powers’ “The Trouble” and Richard Sullivan’s “Night in August.” Finally, peripheral fiction probably isn’t Catholic fiction at all, says Gable, though it may have the “local color of Catholic life.” For example, August Derleth’s “That Heathen Alonzo” may depict Aunt May as a strong member of the Catholic Rosary Society, but that fact alone does not make for Catholic fiction.
Gable bases her bull’s eye theory on Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Liturgy and Personality,in which he defines the classic personality as one who regards human love and friendship as the highest gifts in the world. Therefore, the “re-education of love” is the main work of human lives. (It also happens to be a major theme in Dante’s Divine Comedy, one of Gable’s strongest courses.) Human beings struggle to give appropriate responses to values. Whoever portrays that struggle artistically is the Catholic artist. Gable rails against the Catholic magazines of the 1940s which publish saccharine, sentimental stories with miraculous endings. These so-called Catholic editors think that throwing a rosary in a drawer or nailing a crucifix to the wall makes a story Catholic. In Many-Colored Fleece Gable reaffirms truly Catholic art as a realistic portrayal of the “re-education of love,” and she describes the “literature of spiritual affirmation” as three-dimensional, seeing the individual in relationship with self, others, and God.
Her groundbreaking article, “The Novel” (1962), outlines an even broader definition of Catholic fiction. She observes that the “human condition” encompasses religious expression whether it is Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon, Jansenist, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, or others. By this time, her definition of Catholic fiction has expanded to include any fiction that “explores the spiritual and moral mystery of the human condition.” This definition includes authors such as C.S. Lewis, Lewis Wallace, Muriel Spark, H.F.M. Prescott, Boris Pasternak, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway. She quotes Cardinal Henry Newman to support her claim that Catholic literature need not treat of Catholic matters at all: “By Catholic literature is not to be understood a literature which treats exclusively or primarily of Catholic matters, of Catholic doctrine, controversy, history, persons, or politics, but it includes all subjects of literature what ever, treated as a Catholic would treat them, and as he only can treat them” (Idea of a University).
Sister Mariella paid a heavy price for her broad interpretations. Bishop Bartholome of the Saint Cloud Diocese, who had suspected her work ever since she went over his head to ask for an imprimatur from the Cardinal in New York, asked priests from the College of Saint Thomas to evaluate her work independently. When a Benedictine priest from Australia, Jerome Doherty, was assigned to Saint Benedict’s in 1958, the bishop told him: “Watch out for Sister Mariella Gable because she is famous for being anticlerical and for furthering pornographic literature.” The bishop got the ammunition he wanted when Doherty objected to the “filthy and obscene” language in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a book on the English department’s recommended reading list for contemporary American literature. Doherty called a meeting of the prioress, the college president, the dean, Gable as head on the English department and Kristin Malloy, O.S.B., whose reading list included Catcher. Admitting that he had not read the whole book, he read to the group only the “blasphemous” parts, thus breaking two of Gable’s strongest tenets: do not let parts condemn the whole, and go to fiction for art, not moral instruction. The bishop took this opportunity to banish three nuns from the College: Gable, Malloy, and Sister Thomas Carey, O.S.B., an artist whose “modern” crucifixes offended him. In four years with a new bishop and prioress, Gable returned to the College in 1962 to teach another ten years.
If Gable were alive now in this pluralist, popular culture of the United States, I am certain that she would broaden Catholic fiction to a more inclusive term, such as “the literature of spiritual values,” and she would have included under that heading such contemporary authors as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, David Guterson, and Andre Dubus. Erdrich’s Love Medicine may portray a negative view of a warped nun, Sister Leonarda, but the novel affirms the redeeming value of love; Morrison’s Beloved captures within one black family the inhuman burden of slavery; Guterson describes the agonizing struggle of Ishmael Chambers, who has information to free a condemned man, a man married to the woman Israel loves. Andre Dubus, in “The Father’s Story,” describes a well-meaning father who “protects” his daughter and covers up an accident caused by her driving while drinking.
What is a Catholic novel? The term connotes a provincial point of view because it presumes that Catholic morals must be taught. Albert Menendez’s bibliography of Catholic novels insists that the Catholic novel reflect “values, culture, and conflicts of the Roman Catholic faith and its community,” thus excluding novelists obviously Catholic in spirit, such as Rumer Godden and Flannery O’Connor. I prefer to think of Catholic fiction as the literature of spiritual values. Like Gable, I define it as any good art that explores the human struggleto live a moral and spiritual life. It must be good art, first, to lift us up and show us human possibilities with the grace of God. Portraying the struggle does not mean that all characters succeed; it simply means that they strive toward the light. They may be defeated and give up, as the priest seems to do in J.F. Powers’ “The Prince of Darkness,” or they gather their strength and continue the journey, as Father Joe Hackett accepts his assignment at Holy Cross in Powers’ Wheat That Springeth Green.
What is amazing is that forty years ago Gable’s vision of the Catholic novel foreshadowed the present discussions mentioned here. Before the radical changes in the Church following Vatican II and before the ecumenical movement developed, she pioneered a broad definition of Catholic fiction. She wrote in 1962: “In the wake of the promising ecumenical movement alive in the world, one wonders sometimes if one ought not be talking of Christian fiction rather than of Catholic fiction.” Today she would suggest an even broader category: the literature of spiritual values.
Nancy Hynes, O.S.B., is professor of English at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota. She is the editor of The Literature of Spiritual Values and Catholic Fiction (University Press of America), a collection of the writings of Mariella Gable, which is available from the Whitby Gift Shop, Sisters of Saint Benedict, 104 Chapel Lane, St. Joseph, MN 56374-0220. The cost is $43 plus $2 postage.
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