1950: The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson

The Author: 

Henry Morton Robinson (1898-1961) was born in Boston, the oldest of eleven children.  Upon graduating high school, Robinson served in the U.S. military for two years.  He then attended Columbia University and began publishing poetry, his first book, Children of Morningside, being published in 1924.  That same year, he received his M.A. and went on to teach at Columbia.  

He produced volumes of poetry, novels, and non-fiction works in the following decades.  In 1944, Robinson and Joseph Campbell released "The Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake."  The Cardinal, published in 1950, was Robinson's most successful work.

The Book:

Length: 579 pages
Subject/Genre: Catholic priests/religious fiction

The Cardinal follows the story of Father Stephen Fermoyle, a priest from a working class Boston family, from his first assignment through his rise to the position of Cardinal.  

I've read several books about priests or religious professionals so far on this list, and while Robinson's prose may be the nicest, I'm not that fond of the story for a few reasons.  I'm going to compare this to a couple other novels I reviewed, 1913's The Inside of the Cup and 1941's The Keys of the Kingdom.  The Inside of the Cup deals with its protagonist coming to reexamine and reinterpret his faith.  While Father Fermoyle has challenges thrown at him, there's (at most) a little uneasiness on his part, but he learns a valuable lesson and moves on.  Generally speaking, Stephen Fermoyle is a good guy who cares about everybody and wants to make the world a better place.  The same is true of the protagonist in The Keys of the Kingdom, but the protagonist of that novel is not always able to overcome the obstacles set before him and, because of this extreme honesty and kindness, does not climb higher in the church.  The big problem I have with The Cardinal is that Father Fermoyle doesn't really face much resistance. Things just work out because he's a nice guy.    

Of course, that may be the point.  When doing research on the novel, I usually saw it referred to as "inspiring."  Assuming this isn't just a case of the phrase 'inspirational literature' being synonymous with 'religious literature,' it's easy to see why people liked it. It's a story about a good man who, through being good and honest, succeeds.  It's an affirmation of the values we are told to cherish.  More than a few of the reviews I read included people saying that it made them want to be a priest when they were kids.  

There is a sense of nostalgia running through The Cardinal, and not just because it's set in the first half of the 20th century.  It's clear that Robinson had a love for the church and this shows in his writing.     

While I've not been able to confirm it, the claims that Stephen Fermoyle is at least partly based on the cardinal Francis Spellman seem reasonable.  At the risk of going on a weird little tangent, there's a pretty vicious letter that Hemingway wrote to Spellman after Spellman had a bunch of seminarians break a gravediggers strike in 1949.

My Dear Cardinal:   

In every picture that I see of you there is more mealy mouthed arrogance, fatness and over-confidence.   

As a strike breaker against catholic workers, as an attacker of Mrs. Roosevelt, I feel strongly that you are over-extending yourself.  It is very bad for a Prince of the Church to become over-confident.

I know that you lied about the Spanish Republic and I know why you lied.  I know who you take your orders from and why such orders are given.  You are heading a minority group in the United States, to which I was a dues-paying member, but you are heading it with arrogance, insolence, and the fatness of a Prince of the Church.

The word in Europe is that you will be the next, and first, American Pope.  But please disabuse yourself on this and do not keep pressing so hard.  You will never be Pope as long as I am alive.


Being a religious novel, The Cardinal does take up some controversial topics, most notably abortion.  Specifically, abortion when giving birth would definitely kill the mother.  Putting aside the rest of the debate on abortion, and just focusing on this specific circumstance, it's clear how it would be a morally contentious point with no easy answer.  Unless, of course, you're Stephen Fermoyle, in which case the answer is unquestionably to let the mother die.  This view plays a major part in an important plot point.  I don't mean to get hung up about it, but the issue is not handled well in the novel at all.  

That bit of unpleasantness aside, the book kept selling, and was the #4 best seller in 1951.  A film version was released in 1963, starring Tom Tryon (I've never heard of him, either).

The Cardinal is well-written, and if you're looking for a religious, inspirational story, then this should work for you.   

Also Published in 1950:

Isaac Asimov - I, Robot

Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

Ford Madox Ford - Parade's End

C. S. Lewis - The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Sources: 

Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner. Supplement 7: 1961-1965. Print.  

Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Scribner. 

      1981. Web.   

Robinson, Henry Morton. The Cardinal. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1950. Print.

1942: The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel

The Author:

Franz Werfel (1890-1945) was born in Prague, Austria-Hungary, to a family of wealthy Jewish merchants. From a young age, he was immersed in several different religious cultures (most notably Jewish and Catholic), which informed much of his work. He attended a Catholic school and later served in the Austrio-Hungarian Empire’s army in World War One, eventually becoming a member of the Military Press Bureau.

Werfel was a well established member of the Austrian literary world, successful as a poet, novelist, and playwright. After the first world war ended, Werfel began an affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the Austrian composer Gustave Mahler, and was at the time married to the influential German architect, Walter Gropius. She divorced Gropius in 1920, eventually marrying Werfel in 1929.

In 1930, after touring the Near East, Werfel fought to bring the world’s attention to the Armenian genocide.

Werfel’s career continued to grow in Europe, but the rise of anti-Semitism led Werfel and Mahler to flee to France in 1938. In 1940, they snuck into Spain and made their way to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. In 1942, Werfel published The Song of Bernadette. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1945.

The Book:

The Song of Bernadette is about Saint Bernadette Soubirous, a French peasant girl from the town of Lourdes who, in 1858, claimed to witness numerous apparitions of the Virgin Mary. It's the story of her conviction in her faith in the face of doubt, and the events that led to Lourdes becoming a major pilgrimage site.

The story of what led Werfel to write this novel is fascinating and may also have bearing on decisions he made about the story and characters.

"In the last days of June 1940, in flight after the collapse of France...my wife and I, had hoped to elude our mortal enemies in time to cross the Spanish frontier to Portugal...but had to flee back to the interior of France on the very night German troops occupied the frontier town of Hendaye. It was in this manner that Providence brought me to Lourdes... We hid for several weeks in the Pyrenean city. It was a time of great dread...

"It was, I repeat, a time of great dread. But it was also a time of great significance for me, for I became acquainted with the wondrous history of the girl Bernadette Soubirous and also with the wondrous facts concerning the healings of Lourdes. One day in my distress I made a vow. I vowed that if I escaped from this desperate situation and reached the saving shores of America, I would put off all other tasks and sing, as best I could, the song of Bernadette."

I can't help but be underwhelmed with The Song of Bernadette.  Because Werfel wanted to paint an undoubtedly positive image of Bernadette, what we get is a character that is guileless and ingenuous and beyond any negative qualities.  She is, literally, a saint.  Since Bernadette starts out practically perfect (spiritually, at least), and there is no fall from grace, she ends up being a pretty static character.  Unless you already have an emotional involvement in the story of Saint Bernadette, or see this book as an affirmation or your religious philosophies, it comes across as largely uninteresting.

Yet The Song of Bernadette falls between two more very religious novels on my list, 1941's The Keys of the Kingdom and 1943's The Robe. At a time when the U.S. was gearing up for another war and still recovering from a major economic disaster, an attempt to seek out solace and inspiration from religion makes a lot of sense.  It's interesting to note that of the these three novels, one is by a Scot, one by a German, and one by an American.      

Like The Keys of the Kingdom and The Robe, The Song of Bernadette had a major movie adaptation.

Also like the above-mentioned, Bernadette remains notable primarily in the genre of religious fiction, it's mainstream appeal having diminished in the intervening decades.   

If you're interested in the story of Saint Bernadette or in modern religious history, you'd like The Song of Bernadette.

Also published in 1942:

Albert Camus - L'Étranger
C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters   
Edith Hamilton - Mythology

Sources:

Verlag, S. Fischer. Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood. New York: Grove

             Weidenfeld. 1987. Translated from German by Anselm Hollo.

Werfel, Franz. The Song of Bernadette. New York: Viking Press. 1941. Print. Translated by
              Ludwig Lewisohn

    

1941: The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin

The Author:

           Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Dunbartonshire, Scotland.  His father died when he was seven, and he and his mother lived with his maternal grandparents before eventually moving to Glasgow.  At the University of Glasgow, Cronin became a medical doctor, serving as a medical officer in the first world war and later as a general practitioner in small towns in Scotland and a mining town in Wales, before being appointed Medical Inspector of Mines.  At the university, he also met Agnes Mary Gibson, whom he married in 1921.  They had three children together and they were married for nearly sixty years.

            He was laid up with an ulcer in 1930, requiring six months recuperation, during which time he wrote his first novel, Hatter’s Castle, which was an immediate success.  He wrote several books before, in 1937, publishing The Citadel.  The Citadel is to the British National Health System (NHS) what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is to the US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Not only a huge critical and commercial success, The Citadel established Cronin’s as an important literary figure of his time.

            In 1939, Cronin and his family moved to the US, settling in places as disparate as Bel Air, California and Blue Hill, Maine.  He remained a prolific writer for the rest of his life, and spent the last years of his life living in Switzerland.  He passed away in Montreux in 1981.

The Book: 

          The Keys of the Kingdom tells the life story of Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic priest, from his childhood to his old age, focusing largely on his thirty five years spent in establishing a mission in Pai-Tan, China. Chisholm is an extremely sympathetic character, and, like most of the supporting characters, is written with a good amount of depth.  The characters are the greatest part of this novel.

         From the beginning, we know that Chisholm is not your dogmatic, stiff, hellfire-and-damnation cleric.  The first chapter takes place when Chisholm has a vocation in Scotland in his old age, and is being investigated by the local bishop (the rest of the novel is chronological, starting from his childhood).  He had complaints against him for saying things like, "Atheists may not all go to hell. I knew one who didn't," and "Christ was a perfect man, but Confucius had a better sense of humor."¹  This is a trend I've been finding in a lot of the books on this list: pro-religion via being anti-dogma.  That is to say, many of these books argue that reliance on dogma is not only bad, but directly detrimental to religion, arguing instead a form of what is essentially Humanism based on Christianity.  The first book I reviewed, The Inside of the Cup, dealt with a priest discovering this.  This trend continued.  There were the good preachers in Elmer Gantry, Dean Harcourt in Green Light, and Casey in The Grapes of Wrath.  Whereas a novel like Elmer Gantry tried to combat what Lewis saw as hypocrisy by exposing a negative figure, the others I've listed focus mainly on presenting a good preacher, an example of what religious officials should be. (I don't think it's a coincidence that the good preachers in the novels listed above rarely achieve any high status, as opposed to the Gantry-like characters.)

     Chisholm's life is one long attempt to make the world a better place, which he does, to the extent that he is able.  Other characters, often within the clergy, stand in his way, but this opposition is not generally due to malice or greed, but rather people who are more concerned with the number of baptisms at the missions than with the number of people who benefit from the mission.  The amount of philosophical and theological monologues alone suggests that Cronin is using Chisholm to state his own religious views, which seem to be humanistic.  Chisholm argues that the church should argue pacifism in times of war.  He argues that good works, regardless of religion, are paths to salvation.  Basically, he argues for human decency and kindness.

      Like pretty much every book I've read here so far, this one was adapted to film:

      The 1944 film starred Gregory Peck (who also played Pa Baxter in the film adaptation of The Yearling).  It seems, though, that Cronin is better known outside the U.S. Most of the search traffic for his name comes from India and the U.K.,² which is probably in no small part due to the importance of The Citadel in the U.K.

     I wouldn't try to stop anyone from reading The Keys to the Kingdom, and it is certainly an enjoyable book.  I don't feel that it's one that you need to go out of your way to read, though.

Also published 1941:
James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce   
C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters 
H. A. Rey and Margret Rey - Curious George 
Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children

1. Cronin, A. J. The Keys of the Kingdom. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1941. Print.
2. Google Trends page