2025 represents the 100 year anniversary of a book that, as much as any other, has a claim to be called the Great American Novel — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Revisiting the book this year, I came upon something I wrote on the blog Whosoever Desires back in 2011 about one of Fitzgerald’s few explicitly Catholic stories “Benediction.” I thought I’d share it here. This weekend, I’ll have something at Law & Liberty about Gatsby.
I have long thought F. Scott Fitzgerald to be a very Catholic writer, though explicitly Catholic themes show up only rarely in his work. There’s the urbane Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise, for example, and a few scattered references in Tender is the Night, but mostly Fitzgerald’s Catholic sensibilities come through in his moral vision, in the interplay of truth and illusion we see, for example, in The Great Gatsby.
In a Fitzgerald biography, however, I’d once come upon a reference to an early (1920) short story called “Benediction,” and I took advantage of a Chicago snow day last week to track the story down. I was not disappointed.
The story is a gem, written in the witty, dancing prose of the youthful Fitzgerald, and touching on many of his typical themes—the giddiness of coming of age, the wistful sadness of romance, even a hint at class sensitivities. The story centers around Lois, a romantic and beautiful nineteen-year-old travelling to Baltimore to meet her lover, Howard; on her way to their rendezvous she stops to visit her only brother Keith, a seminarian she has not seen in seventeen years.
Fitzgerald’s description of the seminarians spilling out onto the lawn after class like “a swarm of black human leaves” carrying thick volumes of Kant and Aquinas is typical of his lapidary prose—and hints at the identity of the crowd that Keith has gotten himself involved with:
There were many Americans and some Irish and some tough Irish and a few French, and several Italians and Poles, and they walked informally arm in arm with each other in twos and threes or in long rows, almost universally distinguished by the straight mouth and the considerable chin—for this was the Society of Jesus, founded in Spain five hundred years before by a tough-minded soldier who trained men to hold a breach or a salon, preach a sermon or write a treaty, and do it and not argue…
Keith, whom Lois remembers chiefly from the picture of a skinny teenager their mother keeps on her bureau, turns out to be a true brother—understanding, kind, insightful, sympathetic, confident. Lois describes him as “sweet.” He recounts his vocation story with slight dissatisfaction, feeling, as one often does when telling one’s vocation story, that something inexpressible—the most important thing—has been left out.
In Keith and his fellow Jesuits, Lois encounters something she recognizes as beautiful and weighty—and different. What is more, Lois, a Catholic herself, though by her own description a “lukewarm” one, seems to realize that this different something around which her brother’s life revolves makes a claim on her too.
Continue reading “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jesuit story”
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 