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Mary Ellen Evans
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BOTH MY GRANDFATHERS-WELSH
AND FRENCH Canadian-Irish-were, it seems, men of bookish, speculative,
mildly radical temper. My mother could recite the Paigrave Poets
backward, and did recite them in the usual direction. And my
father was to be found, any evening of my infancy, holding down
the tapestry wingchair, with a small boy and a smaller girl (me)
planted on either arm as he read aloud from Scribner's children's
editions. That is, when he was not on our playroom floor interpreting
the book of designs accompanying Richter's Anchor Building Blocks,
or penetrating for us the secret of perspective at the library
table, or playing on the red mahogany Victrola the latest batch
of Red Seal records he had brought home: Caruso or Evan Williams
or the symphonic transcriptions of Vessella' s Italian band.
We were exposed as well to the good things that came to our town
(Dubuque, Iowa, naturally) - and most good things did, from Otis
Skinner's Shakespeare to the Sistine Choir. And for spiritual-liturgical
exercise, we trotted with mother to Sunday High Mass at the Cathedral,
with its tradition of high fidelity to the Motu Proprio on sacred
music, whose chief American advocate, Archbishop John J. Keane,
founding rector of the Catholic University of America, still
hovered in retirement in the rectory next door.
Vistas thus unveiled, an abiding
interest in beauty, literary or otherwise, might have been predicted
of our parents' children. Much as I fondled the books on our
shelves, however, a career in letters was far from my early dreams.
From age three on, I said I was going to be a "dejiner"
when I grew up; and my image of me is still more that of a frustrated
architect or pianist (or at least music critic or disc jockey)
than that of a writer. Now that I think of it, my first published
effort, appearing in the archdiocesan organ, The Witness,
when I was about fifteen and we had just acquired our Orthophonic,
was a grief-stricken elegy called something like "Lines
Written in Sadness to a Discarded Victrola." But when at
the same point I assumed full management of our home and also
discovered the Public Library, any architectural or musical ambitions
went out the window. From then on, I concluded dimly, my job
was to make a home for father and brothers (a second one had
meantime arrived); but, on the side, I was going to know as
much as possible.
Apparently no one pointed out
that I was probably guilty of what Thomas Aquinas called curiositas,
though one high school teacher cautioned me to keep to the classics
and skip the commentators; and another, in college, alarmed at
my growing blue- stockings hip, that "people are living
books." In my invincible ignorance, but with an instinct
for what was liberalizing and what merely vocational in the curriculum,
I read my way through four years at Clarke College, Dubuque,
and the summers between, while doing much of the college publicity,
covering cultural events for the local papers, blowing a trombone
in the college orchestra and civic Symphony, teaching myself
some typing, Russian literature, and assorted languages, and
running our lively ménage. (Youth-It's Wonderful!)
The summer of my graduation
was the first summer of the first Catholic University graduate
branch, at Loras College, and for no practical reason I enrolled
in the medieval course of Rev. F. A. Mullin (already appointed
director of the C.U.A.'s library). This beloved priestscholar
was both the object of a fine friendship, and the efficient cause
of my first book. During that summer, in the course of a regular
Sunday drive to the tune of the New York Philharmonic and Deems
Taylor, my father and I made a discovery more momentous for me
than that of perspective or the Public Library. We discovered,
via an unrestored churchlet atop the leadmine village of New
Diggings, Wisconsin, one of the most exciting missionaries of
all time, Samuel C. Mazzuchelli, O.P., who had died seventy years
before (in 1864) and who had Christianized the Upper Mississippi
Valley. When I breathlessly reported to Father Mullin next day,
he said, "Well, write a book about him."
I obeyed-but it took some time
(more than Father Mullin could wait for) and some doing. I had
to get hold of local history, American ecclesiastical history,
Dominican history, and technique enough to achieve in my story
the form I could more readily sense in another's sonnet or sonata.
In this struggle I had the help of Msgr. M. M. Hoffmann's regional
researches, and of Dr. Wilbur Schramm's criticism at the State
University of Iowa, where, off and on until I had obtained an
A.M., I sat at the feet of another great preceptor, the Christian
humanist Norman Foerster, whose School of Letters was then at
its height. Although tangibly encouraged to go on for the doctorate,
I was still persuaded that my first duty was homemaking, and
that didn't mix with a scholarly vocation eighty miles away.
I felt the deprivation, but Providence made it up to me by giving
me another vocation--a Dominican one as a member of the Third
Order of St. Dominic. In the Dominican motto Veritas and
the Thomistic formula for the mixed hf e-Conteniplare ... et
contemplata aliis tradere-I found my rationale for whatever useful
I might do with my life. For some years more, I doubled as father's
hostess and a kind of ecclesiastical Junior Leaguer, writing
up anything that needed writing up, burnishing other people's
books, contributing to Catholic reviews, and, with Archbishop
Beckman's urging added to Father Mullin's, taking another whirl
at the Mazzuchelli story-with time out for some vicarious war-work
in Washington as NCCSUSO news editor during 1942-43.
Frank Bruce, on a visit to
Dubuque, gave me my next directive: "Go to John Tully."
Mr. Tully had recently salvaged a defunct book service in Chicago,
renamed it the Thomas More, and launched a little sheet with
the hair-raising name, Books on Trial (since renamed The
Critic). I went, and for the next five years (1945-49) handled
books, authors, publishers and their salesmen, reviewers, printers,
and customers-priests, sisters, laymen of every variety, from
potential converts to parish matrons in search of ways to stimulate
Catholic reading among their constituents. By the time I left,
the magazine was respected by publishers; the Thomas More Book
Club was flourishing; autographing parties and parish book fairs
were routine; I had many new friends (closest being Walter Farrell,
O.P.); and Mazzuchelli had a publisher--a new publisher (McMullen
Books), whose representative pried it out of me, and subsequently
annexed me when he became editor of the newer house, the Henry
Regnery Company of Chicago. This man, Philip N. Starbuck, taught
me everything I know about publishing, and did it over Bouyer's
first work in English, The Paschal Mystery. My debt to
him is unpayable, but I introduced him to his wife, which almost
evens the score.
After another hitch in Washington
setting up a library for the newly activated NCWC Bureau of Information,
I was taken on by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, in 1951,
under an "old pro," Joseph A. Duffy, and young Tom
Kenedy. I had some part in the break-through of the house from
traditional Barclay Street colportage to professional
publishing. One of my special "babies" was Father Bruckberger's
One Sky to Share, whose second half had made the rounds
of many major publishers. This book was put together by the author
and me, with the blessing of Joe Duffy and Tom Kenedy, and the
aid of our old porter who produced "Bruck's" daily
breakfast of biere; and the resulting book proved that a Catholic
imprint need not automatically disqualify a title from top secular
reviewing media, besides discovering the author's possibilities
as a latter-day Tocqueville to Life, Time, and the publisher
of his Image of America. Another was Dr. F. J. Braceland's
Life, Faith, Reason, and Modern Psychiatry, a solid-sending
affirmation of the identity of divine truth and scientific truth.
Developing properties like these is quite as creative as composing
one's own and much easier; but the life of an editor has more
months of tedious, unsung slaving over other people's manuscripts
than moments of dramatic triumph; and such travail can only be
supernaturalized unless one is stimulated by sheer fascination
with words or the satisfaction of producing a publishable manuscript
where there was none before. I was so stimulated, but could also
supernaturalize if necessary-up to a point. A few years later
(in 1954), I left Kenedy for Cork, Ireland, and editorship of
Mercier Press. Although I had left my father (retired now) in
better hands than mine, I grew uneasy about him after a half-year
overseas, and set my course America-ward. En route I wandered
into Spode House, whose warden, Conrad Pepler, O.P., I knew through
his book, Lent, his reviews, Blacbfriars and The Life
of the Spirit, and tales of ex-G.L's who had come under his
spell when stationed at Oxford. Not only was this one of the
memorable encounters with which my life has been blessed, but,
just as I turned up, they were sleuthing for someone to assemble
an anthology from The Life of the Spirit. I had only begun
on this- The Christian Vision (Newman, 1956), as I titled
it-when I was summoned home by father's illness. When I wasn't
relieving his nurse I kept at it, and got the manuscript into
the post one week before he died, good Welsh pagan to the last.
Thereupon I dimly articulated
another decision: to take the Our Father at its word, withdraw
from the ratrace (or, more patristically, from Augustine's "forum"),
travel light, be apostolically expendable-and see what would
happen. Plenty did: a number of editing assignments, including
the Maryknoll Missal, and then, within three days of each
other, two writing commissions: a centennial history for the
Cincinnati Sisters of Mercy, and a life of Mary Merrick-in that
order (some dear soul in either camp had remembered the Mazzuchelli
story).
For the first (published by
Newman in 1959 as The Spirit Is Mercy), I crammed
about five years' research into one, divided between the New
York Public Library and the Cincinnati archives, and burned up
another year trying to convert it into a contribution to ecclesiastical
Americana which might also be read by others besides the Cincinnati
Sisters. The writing of the second engages me now (1960), after
two years of documentdevouring under the hot copper roof of the
Library of Congress, in the care of the gentlest, kindliest,
most efficient people I can think of: the LC staff, colored and
white. And I am just at the point, the form refusing to emerge,
when I am wondering how anyone in his right mind could choose
to be a writer. I assume, of course, that when one counts
on Providence, and such commissions fall from the sky, where
Providence is presumably headquartered, the fact of being for
the moment a writer is more a fiat of Providence than a free
choice.
For myself, I could be content
"doing the Truth" in any other way, so long as it is
creative and my patrimony holds out. I don't expect Providence
to keep memerely to keep me in commissions. Actually, at any
given moment I am nursing along as I can, and without fiscal
contamination, a handful of books besides my own, and "causes"
other than myself. It would be a joy for me, even if it were
not my Dominican duty, to do so. Along with enough heartbreaks
and a few betrayals, I once had time for a bit of reading, thinking,
and "gaping," as Henry James termed it. While I am
homeless now, and do my traveling by foot, bike, or very common
carrier, I have had, on location, so many offbeat but beautiful
adventures that the book looks like a by-product or side-effect
by the time it is published. Even at my delayed-reaction pace,
it has taken me less than forever to confirm the comment of Sister
Josephina, B.V.M., "People are living books," and to
add my own: "Providence is another."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Her well-received
biography of Father Mazzuchelli, O.P., was entitled The Seed
and the Glory (McMullen, 1950; since taken over by Farrar,
Straus & Cudahy). Miss Evans writes from Rome.
Originally
published in The Book of Catholic Authors, Walter Romig,
Sixth Series, 1960.
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