Counter-culture values, yet a real can-do guy
For the last few years I have been working on a volume of my father’s correspondence. He was the short-story writer and novelist, J. F. Powers, and he died 10 years ago, leaving a small body of published work and a larger, far-flung quantity of letters. Right now I am mired in footnotes involving a much-unpublicized movement in American religious history. It may be summarized as “counter-cultural Catholicism’’ of the 1930s and 1940s. It was a movement of many interwoven strands, all of which rejected, on Christian principles, capitalism, materialism, war, and, at times, the ideology (though not the doctrines) of the institutional church, especially as it manifested itself in the United States.
The Catholic Worker movement is the best known, most organized constituent part, but there were plenty of other, now-forgotten groups fermenting away, their members living lives obedient to the teachings of Christ with the understanding that the more disruptive of business as usual their scruples were, the better.
Aside from anything else - poverty, imprisonment, FBI dossiers, the contempt of peers, and the condemnation of civic and religious authorities - a good deal of comedy comes out of people attempting to observe the teachings of Christ without compromise. You just have to get over your irritation at so much high-minded fastidiousness to see it. In this respect, the Library of America’s just-published second volume of Thornton Wilder’s works, “Thornton Wilder: The Bridge Over San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926-1948,’’ ($35) could not have entered the house at a more opportune moment, for it includes “Heaven’s My Destination.’’ First published in 1935 and set during the Depression, this funny, ultimately moving novel begins with its hero, George Brush, a school-book salesman, making a nuisance of himself: inscribing biblical passages on the blotters of hotel writing desks, pulling down posters offensive to Christian morals, and relentlessly proselytizing everyone that he meets. His 23d birthday brings a new resolution: to embrace poverty, whereupon he withdraws his savings from the bank. (“ ‘You feel you must draw out your savings, Mr. Brush?’ said the [bank] president, softly, as though he were inquiring into an intimate hygienic matter.”) The result is a run on the bank, and Brush being thrown into jail for disturbing the peace.
Brush’s Christian zeal includes a subordinate, but pressing idée fixe: that he is married (in God’s eyes) to a woman - the only woman - with whom he slept and that he must find her and regularize the relationship. Explaining the situation to a certain Mr. Blodgett and his “cousin,’’ Mrs. McCoy, a worldly, incredulous pair, “Brush took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘From now on it’s kind of delicate,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I guess you’ve both been married.’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Blodgett, ‘we know the worst.’ ”
And so it goes, Wilder injecting similar sly digs and little ironies throughout (“ ‘Have an apple?’ asked Mrs. McCoy.”) He sends Brush around the country, from Texas to Kansas City and places between, where he encounters a wonderfully entertaining collection of American characters: Helen Solario, “a plump black-eyed little woman in an advanced state of negligé and intoxication;’’ Mrs Crofut, an enormous brothel owner, presented to Brush as the mother of a bevy of enchanting daughters. (“She wore a black silk shirtwaist covered with jet beads, and a gold watch was pinned over her lungs.’’) The book’s joke consists, in part, of that species of humor, once so loved by Americans, of the rube abroad in the world. But the joke is also turned on the worldly wise who are constantly confounded by Brush’s integrity. Because, in fact, Brush is no rube; he is not only a man of adamantine conscience - with a few lapses - but is far better read than anyone he encounters and is inspired not only by the teachings of Christ, but those of Gandhi. His way in the world amounts to a picaresque, sepia-tinged tale of Depression America that is both comic and poignant.
Even though J.D. McClatchy’s excellent notes to this volume do not mention it, it seems to me that it is possible that “Heaven’s My Destination’’ was partly inspired by Madison Avenue public-relations pioneer Bruce Barton’s “The Man Nobody Knows’’ (Ivan Dee, paperback, $14.95). First published in 1925, the book was an enormous best seller. It takes a case-method approach to the life of Christ, though the unfortunate matter (and meaning) of his death on the cross is downplayed except to the extent that the three years that preceded it provided a time frame during which he built an organization and “trained and equipped a force’’ to carry it on.
Far from being the namby-pamby, Lamb of God, spoil-sport outsider that some people think he was, Barton’s Jesus was a robust, can-do guy with a great sense of humor who sported “a broad smile across His wonderful face.’’ The emphasis is on his salesmanship, so effective that he even created demand - after all, “there was no demand for a new religion; the world was oversupplied.’’ His powers of persuasion were formidable, based, Barton tells us, in his use of simple ideas, pithy anecdotes, and arresting imagery. (“Every one of his conversations . . . is worthy of the attentive study of any sales manager.’’) Jesus was a consummate networker, a people person with “an all-embracing fondness for folks.’’ Indeed, he was “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem,’’ and, Barton notes with unintended bathos, “when he needed a room for the Last Supper with His friends, He had only to send a messenger ahead and ask for it.’’
I have to say, Barton, ad man extraordinaire, the genius who brought us Betty Crocker, among other questionable boons to humanity, did not let me down. I enjoyed every word of this book - though perhaps not with as much charity as true Christianity demands. And how timely it is! Though I find the TV series “Mad Men’’ obnoxious as a slick snigger at the early 1960s, I must say that “The Man Nobody Knows’’ makes an instructive companion to the show. The 1920s saw marketing poised to step into the role being vacated by traditional religion, and in these pages is the advertising mind in the first full vigor of youth, booming with an indomitable sense of mission.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, this column gave the incorrect title for a Library of America volume of Thornton Wilder’s works. The correct title is “The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926-1948.’’
