One of the marvelous aspects of still living in a reality where road trips mean driving myself places and not slumbering under the supervision of a self-driving car (can a car be said to have a self?) is getting to see the strange things we humans decide to build along the highway. For instance, on a drive this summer from Dallas to Austin—or more accurately, I should say from Irving to Cedar Park—I saw a billboard whose text threw me for a loop: “BIRTH CONTROL SAVES LIVES!” it shrieked in all-capital letters. It wasn’t until I realized there was a large feline next to the words that it dawned on me that, rather than this being an advertisement for Emperor Seth of Azania’s infamous parade (cf. Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief), it was a promotion for spaying and neutering one’s pets.
The purported humor of the oversized placard, however, did depend on one’s acceptance of human birth control and agreement with the sentiment that, outside of the purely feline or canine application, the expansion of technological restrictions on fertility would be a net-gain for the human species. For those concerned that perhaps we’re not yet fertile enough—whether when it comes to actual child-bearing or the spiritual fertility involved in bringing our neighbors into the familial environment of the Church—a good summer activity which might spur further contemplation would be reading a mid-century Catholic classic whose novelty has unfortunately been more often overlooked than appreciated: Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors (1956).
While many liberally educated American Catholics have heard the name of the acclaimed novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor, her friend and mentor Caroline Gordon is less well-known. Gordon, an established novelist when O’Connor was first coming into her own, was asked by the man who would become O’Connor’s long-time editor, Robert Giroux, to take a look at an early version of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. The correspondence the two women would establish reveals a great deal about how Gordon served as a literary mentor to O’Connor after her time in graduate school, encouraging her in her unconventional style and turning her attention to literary models like Henry James and to philosophic teachers like Jacques Maritain, the latter of whom Gordon had met and become friends with when she and her husband, the Southern poet and critic Allen Tate, were at Princeton. Before her entrance into the Church in 1947, Gordon had written six novels and a collection of short stories. The Malefactors was her second novel published after her conversion and provides a fascinating experience of the relationship between spiritual infertility and frustrated physical fertility, as well as the possibility of a vital renewal which can be brought about by conversion.
“A bull was made for breeding. A man ain’t got a right to keep him from it.”
We begin the novel with Tom Claiborne and his wife Vera at their Dutch Pennsylvania farmhouse, Blenker’s Brook, the morning of an agricultural fête, largely for Vera to exhibit her prize bull Bud. Tom is a poet ostensibly spending his days writing, but as we come to find out, while Vera tends her animals and fields, Tom is struggling to eke out any words at all, concealing from Vera his profound frustration and inability to write, which the blurb on the back of the new Cluny edition describes as “poetic impotency.” Gordon’s post-war scene is one where artists, writers, and intellectuals curiously mix with farmers, nuns, and Catholic Worker types, described in lush language, ripe with allusion to the classics and the contemporary. As her readers would recognize, the poet Horne Watts—a friend and mentor whom Tom recalls often—bears a likeness to the real American Hart Crane. And Catherine Pollard, who starts a “Catholic Laborer” group both with an urban center in New York City and a work-farm out in the country, is quite like Dorothy Day. But these characters retain a fullness and integrity even within the story, such that ignorance of their real-life counterparts does not diminish one’s enjoyment of the novel.
While the novel may centrally concern one middle-aged man’s reaction to poetic impotence, including his recovery and conversion after falling into grave sin, the novel is nothing if not rich in description. Yet one of the scenes that struck me as most emblematic of its concerns was the most dialogic, rich in speech but more spare of scene—more akin, in many ways, to O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which Gordon had read and to which she had suggested edits. Several chapters into Part I, during the fête, Tom and friends step up to a truck to hear a speech by a curly-haired young man who is never named but by the shocking phrase “the inseminator.” The young man has come to encourage the cattle farmers to consider artificial insemination for their cows, as a way of continually breeding the best among their bulls and enhancing their cattle population.
While Flannery O’Connor correctly noted in a letter about the novel to her friend Betty Hester that technically, there’s “nothing wrong with artificial insemination as long as it’s animals,” perhaps Gordon was conscious of an aspect of her time and ours, one perhaps less accessible to the farm-dwelling Flannery. When one lives on a farm in close association with animals, it is easy to maintain a steady awareness of the difference between human beings and the lower animals. We have been given them to tend, manage, and yes, even eat. But in the city whose environs dominate the latter half of Gordon’s novel, the social acceptance of Claiborne’s ongoing affair with his wife’s cousin Cynthia Vail betrays society’s animalistic understanding of sexual desire. One might simply transplant what one old farmer says in rebutting the practice of the inseminator—“A bull was made for breeding. A man ain’t got a right to keep him from it.”—into the realm of human libidinal pursuit.
The problem Gordon intuited as a cultural metamorphosis was the loss of the human in the elevation of the animal. It’s the reason why seeing or hearing anyone describe themselves as a “dog-mom” or “dog-dad,” or calling their animals their “fur-babies” makes me cringe. While it’s natural to care for one’s pets, especially if through no fault of one’s own, one has been unable to have children, the imagined use of them as replacement for human companionship is a particular species of delusion that is not disconnected from treating ourselves—through a variety of sinful means, whether the use or production of pornography, in vitro fertilization, or social media addiction—as less than human: less than unique, rational creatures made and loved by God such that he would take on our nature so that we might become one with him through theosis, divinization according to grace.
The novel is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the various levels of the hierarchy of being in the cosmos and, indeed, within humankind. Tom must be brought to see that those poor and addicted men and women who come to Catherine Pollard’s Catholic relief houses (modeled after Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker farms) are not “human offal,” but are rather, as she tells him, “Christ. And we must be Christ to them.” He must come to see that his friend, the deceased homosexual poet Horne Watts was, above all, seeking God—that an elderly nun would be the one to show him this reality despite his mistaken notions about her frigidity is just icing on the cake. What Tom—and we—must come to see by the novel’s end is how despite our abuse of our passions—for drink, sex, or food—there is still within us “liv[ing] the dearest freshness deep down things,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, and with the recognition that even a poet is a bum amid other bums, one might come to purgation of his or her sins and be reunited with the love that surpasses all understanding. Gordon’s novel is worth rereading today because of the dynamic vision it presents us of mankind, sinner, sufferer, more-than-animal, and, in coming to grace, more than man’s sinful self.