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James C.G. Conniff
I WAS BORN, WITHIN RIFLE SHOT
OF FORDHAM University, in New York City's northernmost borough,
the Bronx, a "sweet Auburn" now gone almost entirely
to residential ziggurats. There at St. Barnabas', and later for
many rewarding years at St. Aloysius' and among the Jesuits at
St. Peter's in Jersey City, New Jersey, I learned most of whatever
it is school has to teach. In Jersey City, home of wonderful
friends and neighbors and a hotbed equally of Catholicism and
the Democratic Party, I learned also something which has since
stood me in good stead and will not, I trust, work to my eternal
detriment: the art and science of politics. For the past decade
I have lived happily with my wife and seven children among the
warm, generous-hearted people-Catholics and Protestants and Jews-of
Upper Montclair, New Jersey. One of the children is in heaven
where, forever part of this family, he intercedes for us all.
Like any professional, I write
for a living-that is to say, on assignment, and for specified
fees, or in the case of books, under contract. I have been doing
so for more than three-quarters of the twenty odd years since
I made writing my career. The output has included seven books
(with four more under contract, and another three about to be),
somewhere between 700 and 1,000 magazine articles and short stories
(Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, Better Homes and
Gardens, Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Good Housekeeping,
True, Coronet, Sports Afield, etc.), and a wealth of work
as a consultant enabling industrialists and businessmen to put
their brochures and stockholder reports into (1) correct and
(2) readable English prose. My clientele is by now, thank God,
world-wide. Many have become cherished friends as well as valued
clients. From time to time, some who were hard pressed have made
partial payment in the coin of prayer which is, I firmly believe,
legal tender in heaven. Almost invariably, they have also sent
new clients my way.
I mention the business-administration
approach to all areas of writing solely for the benefit of those
who wish to write. Contrary to widespread information, truly
professional writing is not a sometime thing, but a regular career
every bit as demanding, in its sphere of operation, as are law
and medicine in theirs. Recognition of this basic fact is indispensable
to survival-spiritual as well as economic--for the day-in-day-out
practitioner of letters who must produce rather than just
dream or talk about writing. A hard, practical philosophy-independent
of how well you may feel or the imagined spontaneity of your
"inspiration"--will, when linked to devotion to the
Holy Spirit, almost without exception prove to be the dividing
line which in this field separates the professional from, not
the amateur whose dedication is honest, but the addict of self-deception.
In the learning stage (which
is lifelong), anyone who really wants to write should be prepared
for contradictions. I owe much to my father, for example, because
in readying me for this work he reinforced a rich reading program
already well along by starting me on my Latin when I was seven.
By the time I reached St. Peter's College High School, in Jersey
City, Latin was my second language. (It still is.) Along with
Greek and the rest, what a boon to a writer! Yet today my father
frets because they're so slow about getting the Mass into English.
From shrewdly perceptive Jesuits
Father George Johnson (God rest him), and earlier from Mr. Bernie
Boyle and Mr. Tom Doyle (both now priests), I learned about writing
much that does not appear in books. I remember with awe and affection
a springtime walk along the muddy Patapsco River in Maryland,
near Woodstock College, during which Father Ralph Sturtzer, S.J.,
kindly urged me to think about writing something neither of us
then knew a real talent was already at work on--The Song of
Bernadette, by Franz Werfel. And I remember also with amusement
and gratitude, not too many years later, some advice from Ed
Stanley-now a top figure in programming for the National Broadcasting
Company--when he was editor of a national magazine and I was
doing a piece about then Archbishop Speliman for him. "For
the love of God," said Ed on seeing the first draft, "stop
writing as if you were still at Fordham !"
I hope all the work since then
has been for the love of God. I have certainly tried to make
it so. At any rate, I think, I have long since learned to wash
my prose of the academic jargon Ed had in mind.
Although a writing career has
afforded me the privilege of working with many well-known people-Danny
Thomas, Roy Rogers, General Don Flickinger, Sid Caesar, Governor
Foster Furcolo, Arlene Francis, Gwen Verdon, David Wayne, Kate
Smith, Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, to name-drop but a few-probably
the outstanding experience for me along these lines was the recent
collaboration with the former Postmaster-General James A. Farley
on a life of his old friend Governor Al Smith (1959) for
Farrar, Straus & Cudahy's Vision Book series. Jim Farley
is unquestionably one of the really great men of our time. I
regard his friendship and the opportunity of having gotten to
know him so well as one of the richest rewards of my calling.
That tells you nothing about the priceless insights into the
integrity and humor of Alfred Emmanuel Smith, but the book may.
Another deeply satisfying association
was with one of the keenest-minded Catholic editors of this age
when I was writing The Story of the Mass (Wyn, 1954) and
The Story of Easter (Dauntless Books, 1957). Both books
continue to flourish, year in and out, and may he flourish too:
Father Paul Bussard of The Catholic Digest. The same goes
for another burning figure of editorial acumen whom it has been
my pleasure to write for: Father Ralph Gorman, C.P., of The
Sign. Not least in this litany of praise is my old friend
John Donahue, editor of the Knights of Columbus national magazine
Columbia, with whom I have enjoyed the enormous stimulation
of working closely this many a year.
The Church, its great sinners
and heroic saints (sometimes in sequence one and the same) provide
inexhaustible story material for the writer not hampered by what
my friend James Brendan Connolly described to me shortly before
his death as "false awe." That is not the same as lack
of reverence, however, and I hope I may have partially demonstrated
what both Jim Connolly (God rest him) and I mean in books of
mine like The Good Shepherd Story (Graymoor Press, 1957),
The Bishop Sheen Story (Fawcett, 1953), and The Holy
Life of Eugenio Pacelli: Pope Pius XII (Fawcett, 1954).
I hope further to demonstrate
it in a remarkable series for which I am under contract: the
four volumes used in Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes
written in today's language to get Christ's message across
to today's teenagers. One volume is finished and ready
for publication.
For almost ten years I have
been at work on a book with an unusual approach to the influence
of the Jesuits in North America, from Jogues and Marquette to
Robert Ignatius Gannon and John Courtney Murray. It may take
another ten years or longer to complete.
Another long-term project,
in no way directly connected with the above, is a deep-probing
book on the role of the priest in our unique American society-with
a provocative working title from Cardinal Montini' s challenging
phrase, "Stranger in Life." It too will take its time
a-borning.
In immediate prospect, with
contracts on the brink of signing, are books on micrometeorology
and the dramatic origins of neurophysiology. As I meant to say
earlier, this profession is anything but confining. Then there
is a third book which I am at the present not free to talk about.
But if it works out as we hope, it should open wide a vast number
of Catholic eyes and rock a lot of complacency elsewhere.
To close on a definition: writing
is the exacting art of making rebellious words do a trained will's
precise determination-no less, and oftentimes much, much more.
And on a note of Faith: unlike
the saints, I find God in my distractions (who are also my soundest
inspiration, may He bless them always): Dorothy (Donnelly) Conniff,
Greg, Sue, Debbie, Cindy, Dick, Mark, and Bobby.
Originally
published in The Book of Catholic Authors, Walter Romig,
Sixth Series, 1960.
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