DEAN’S LIST -- Taking secular learning seriously and wrestling with language: The literary life.
The training of a Jesuit in the early '50s, Chicago Province . . .
John A. (Gus) McGrail, the dean, never raged. Short and stocky, an athlete in his time, he was the soul of precision, encouragement, and good humor. If we were to yawn, he once advised, we should do it so that “many men together” would not know it. Faced with a difficult task, we should keep in mind that “what man has done, man can do.” Most of all, he taught Cicero as if it was worthwhile in itself.
This is noteworthy. We were coming from a spiritual hothouse, where we had investigated ourselves unrelentingly, applying rules and spiritual advice in daily meditation. Now we were to look outward, at Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Milton. One summer I read “Paradise Lost” out loud, alone, reveling in the cadences. We memorized Greek drama and acted it out on a small stage. We did the same for Shakespeare. We declaimed Cicero. We took secular, pre-Christian learning seriously.
It was new for us. Not even in our Catholic classrooms had we so obviously embraced such material. It’s as if we were big boys now, able to to see beauty bare, to adapt Euclid per Edna Millay. Such experience had as much to do with making us Jesuits as the Long Retreat. We were to think and react with a view to the best thinkers in Western tradition. Years later I was chided by a Chicago monsignor for sending our kids to non-Catholic colleges. “What about your tradition?” he scolded, signalling the tongue-wagging and head-shaking or -scratching that had been a mostly silent chorus to my wife’s and my decision, or rather, our children’s decisions.
But he and I did not look to quite the same tradition, I decided. His was Catholic-no-matter-what, mine was Catholic as part of and crucial to Western civilization. So off our children went, to Vassar, Swarthmore, Carleton and the like — as part of those schools’ affirmative action programs, I have thought, sprinkling Irish Catholics in their midst.
Not all Jesuits bought into this heavy-learning business. “Are you an intellectual?” a Chicago-based Jesuit asked me playfully in my father’s presence during a visit to Milford during this time of our “juniorate” training. “I’m working on it,” I said, adding, “If so, what can I do for you?” His was the skeptical, I might say utilitarian mentality, he a friendly, gregarious man whom my parents knew from their Loyola University parents’ experience.
Much later, a colleague on the Xavier University faculty took strong exception to my joining a protest of treatment by police of anti-war protesters and my reporting of it in the Province Chronicle. Our discussion ranged beyond that far enough somehow for me to invoke John McGrail’s juniorate teaching about the validity of the purely secular. Fair enough, but I didn’t have to tell the fellow he was full of shit, now did I? I sure didn’t learn that at Father McGrail’s knee, and even less from Ignatian rules for conversation.
On another occasion, the minister of the Milford house—in charge of running it in all things material—equally affable and friendly, wryly spoke of those who got impractical about daily life, aiming especially at spenders-without-common-sense. He considered it important to make this well-aimed, wholly legitimate point with us as a group, but conversationally with a few of us he demonstrated amused scepticism at my grand scheme, as I recall it, of comparing the Roman historian Tacitus to Hemingway—which I never got around to doing, by the way. Nor had anyone else, I was reasonably convinced, until, by heaven, I found just such a comparison in a review on Amazon of a Tacitus translation whose lack of “redundant verbiage” provided “a curious parallel” to Hemingway. I’ll be darned.
WRESTLING WITH LANGUAGE Indeed, not all of us bought into the literature and, later, philosophy study in which we were immersed for five years in all. How could this not be so? None of us came from scholarly families that I can recall. Indeed, one mother, an articulate, competent woman, fearing a supposed distancing from real people, told her son not to get a doctorate. He did, much later, in theology. But she had made an exception for theology.
We were absorbing the concept of “the hyphenated priest”—priest-scientist, priest-editor, and the like, especially, of course, priest-teacher, with whatever studies any of it would require. But not all our parents were ready for it. The fathers came to visit Milford—printers, salesmen, ground traffic controllers, fire engine drivers, office managers. They were hard-working, not always gentle folk.
A contemporary of mine who later got a (non-theology) doctorate told of being smacked with a folded newspaper at table one night when he complained about the food. Another told of his physician father, returned from World War II service, pushing people off the sidewalk as expression of his hard-gained hostility to the world. My father had left Austin High School on the West Side of Chicago after two years to enter the printing trade. He had been a printing broker cum creative direct-mail ad man and producer of industrial catalogues for many years before I entered the society. He and my mother had been quite demanding in terms of doing well at school, leading me on one occasion to complain that some kids got praised for passing, but I got bawled out for getting B’s.
None of it mattered in the juniorate. Like it or not, you got Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare. And speech training and speech experience. You read aloud, without a microphone, to 200 people busy eating and waiting table. You wrote and memorized and delivered sermons to the same eaters and waiters. You gave talks of every kind to your classmates. Willie Ryan threw his repetats into the refectory air, you caught them. And if you fumbled, you got a second repetat immediately, and a third, until Willie corrected you loudly and directly, telling you in front of all what the problem was. Words meant something. You had to get it right, you had to say it right.
For Jesuit high school graduates, Latin and Greek study was more of the same. From my non-Jesuit school and my year at Loyola I had excellent Latin but no Greek. The Latin we got now was Livy the historian, Cicero as essayist and orator, Virgil (including my third run through the 6th book of the Aeneid, the first in high school,the second at Loyola), Tacitus (another historian), Horace the poet, and maybe others whom I cannot recall. The Greek was Homer, Thucydides the historian, the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides, and others. I memorized and delivered with feeling a speech from Sophocles on stage. And got ribbed for it. In Latin I could sight-read Virgil. Greek I could read aloud without a pause and get much of it on the run. We were taught to hold Latin- and Greek-English desk dictionaries in mild contempt and instead used the big Liddell and Scott on a stand in the library, tracing words and phrases down to their beginnings. Willie Ryan’s emotion-laden “If words mean anything!” was reinforced by our immersion in language.
Later, in philosophy, we would hear about English “adversaries” to our scholastic positions who emphasized language analysis, as opposed to our leaning on essence and existence. In the juniorate we worked towards fluency in such analysis. Along the way, I found myself challenged by Greek. Having none, I entered the beginner’s class, but in due time got promoted. By the second year, I was in the A-class, reading the orator Demosthenes, and here I chickened out. I went to the teacher, Ed Hartman, and begged to be excused. Things were causing me pressure, I told him. “Well, ‘things’ are ‘things,’ aren’t they?” he responded pointedly, not pleased at losing a student. Abashed, I agreed and let it go at that.
It was taking an easy way out. For all his rather grand manner, Physical Ed was worth sweating for. He was sharp but no bully. Neither was Willie Ryan. None of the juniorate teachers were. In fact, it was for me all in all a happy time. We were in the meatiest of study arenas, in my view. Books, poetry, language work, an emphasis on writing, including for publication, dramatics, including for me performing and directing plays, and lots of baseball, softball, touch football, even a little basketball, swimming in our own pool, hiking, picnicking, and talking, talking, talking.
Milford was an exurb, a nice middle American small town. Our walks could take us through Indian Hills, a posh ‘burb, or past a golf course. The hills and woods were rural. In fact, we had a working farm in walking distance, complete with cows and chickens. The farm had a “villa” in its middle where we gathered weekly for a day-trip walk destination and spent two weeks in the summer. After we left, Paul Allen as rector had a swimming hole put in. Pretty relaxing for the most part. We had neither beer nor babes to distract us from God, nature, and each other.
The novitiate-juniorate grounds proper were a garden spot, full of athletic fields on either side of the three-story building, which had a pleasant design to it. There were big leafy trees, statues and shrines, heavy wooden chairs to flop into with a book. The Little Miami River flowed by on one side of the property, beneath a bluff. We skated and played hockey on the river now and then.
On the other side of the property was a cemetery where Father Zurlinden, known as “Zoo,” walked chanting his divine office, his long hair pulled from behind over the top of his bald pate. He was a survivor of the Belize hurricane of 1931, in which nine Jesuits died. Their names appeared in the “necrology,” or calendar list of the dead, on the anniversary of their perishing, to be prayed for on that day. Not just remembered, but prayed for: we wanted to spring their souls from the purgatory that awaited us all.
These were in large part two years among the lotus-eaters, like Ulysses on his way home, though come to think of it, we never did the Odyssey at Milford, just the Iliad.
more more to come of Jesuit training 70 years ago . . .