The Edge of Sadness (Pulitzer Prize winner)

The Edge of Sadness (Pulitzer Prize winner)


The Edge of Sadness is a novel by the US author Edwin O'Connor (1918 - 1968); published in 1961 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962. The story of the book is about a middle-aged Catholic priest in New England.


The Edge of Sadness (Pulitzer Prize winner)


Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005
“A realistic Christian novel of hope in a non-Christian age.”—New England Quarterly
“A deeply felt and eloquently expressed work . . . A quiet, gentle novel of considerable insight and charm . . .”—Library Journal
“O’Connor succeeds in delineating poignantly the overwhelming spiritual storms of the soul which assail the conscientious clergyman.”—The Christian Century
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

In this moving novel, Father Hugh Kennedy, a recovering alcoholic, returns to Boston to repair his damaged priesthood. There he is drawn into the unruly world of the Carmodys, a sprawling, prosperous Irish family teeming with passion and riddled with secrets. The story of this entanglement is a beautifully rendered tale of grace and renewal, of friendship and longing, of loneliness and spiritual aridity giving way to hope.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover
A realistic Christian novel of hope in a non-Christian age.”—New England Quarterly

“A deeply felt and eloquently expressed work . . . A quiet, gentle novel of considerable insight and charm . . .”—Library Journal

“O’Connor succeeds in delineating poignantly the overwhelming spiritual storms of the soul which assail the conscientious clergyman.”—The Christian Century

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

In this moving novel, Father Hugh Kennedy, a recovering alcoholic, returns to Boston to repair his damaged priesthood. There he is drawn into the unruly world of the Carmodys, a sprawling, prosperous Irish family teeming with passion and riddled with secrets. The story of this entanglement is a beautifully rendered tale of grace and renewal, of friendship and longing, of loneliness and spiritual aridity giving way to hope.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Ron Hansen

We owned a shelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books when I was in high school, but the family hardbacks were limited to a handsomely illustrated and mostly unread Bible, Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton, Not as a Stranger by Morton Thompson, and The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor. Each of the novels was a critically acclaimed bestseller in its time—The Edge of Sadness won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for fiction—but only The Edge of Sadness has fallen out of print until its welcome resuscitation as a Loyola Classic.

Some books are so much of their age that they can quickly seem as quaint, old-fashioned, and nostalgic as foxtrot tunes. And that, I think, was the fate of The Edge of Sadness after Vatican Council II (1962–65), widely regarded as the most significant religious event in the Roman Catholic Church since the sixteenth-century Reformation. Pre-Council Catholicism is personified here in the St. Raymond’s pastor referred to only by his title, Monsignor: “an eccentric, despotic, devout old man who, like so many of the old-time pastors, seemed to have won from his people something that was not love, exactly, but a peculiar kind of exasperated idolatry.” (26)

His kind would fade away after Vatican II, as would the Latin Mass that O’Connor’s Father Hugh Kennedy “said,” facing the tabernacle and generally without the vigilant participation of his congregation. It could be a grand and regal spectacle but it had little to do with the Lord’s Supper or the practices of the early church, and so it was replaced by liturgies in English in which the aloof and anonymous parishioners of Old St. Paul’s would have been expected to offer the responses that altar boys, with memorized, misunderstood, and mispronounced Latin, had recited in the past. And there were other far-reaching changes. The church was no longer considered just the hierarchy or the clergy, but also the laity, the people of God, who were given a greater role in the management of their parishes. Ecumenism was encouraged. Hymnals were modernized for good and for ill, with some folk Masses becoming indistinguishable from a hootenanny. The harsher codes of canon law were rewritten in a more pastoral way. Religious orders were required to reexamine and in some cases alter their rules, their habits, and their ways of proceeding.

The consequence of that happy upheaval was that The Edge of Sadness seemed, to many, yesterday’s news.

Published five years after the enormous success of The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Connor’s third novel was born out of his close friendships with priests and his deep affection for and fidelity to Catholicism. And his alert, sympathetic, adjudicating intimacy made his book a catalog of the many things that were wrong in the church and needed aggiornamento—in the Italian of Pope John XXIII—the act of revision and updating. Because for all its wry asides and vaudevillian comedy, Edwin O’Connor’s novel is a profoundly melancholy book about loneliness, lost ideals, and the lack of integrity, whether among vain, crafty, tyrannical capitalists like Charlie Carmody, from whom we expect it, or among affectless, cynical, scandalous priests, from whom we don’t. Even its first paragraph begins with Father Hugh Kennedy’s self-denying delusion: “This story at no point becomes my own. I am in it—good heavens, I’m in it to the point of almost never being out of it!—but the story belongs, all of it, to the Carmodys, and my own part, while substantial enough, was never really of any great significance at all.”(7)

The book covers a half a year, more or less, in an unnamed city that combines various aspects of Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence and Woonsocket, Rhode Island; and its architecture is founded on a rather limited number of scenes that are far longer than those in most four-hundred-page novels: a populated birthday party at the Carmody home; conversations with Father John Carmody, Hugh’s seminary friend; scenes from the Old St. Paul’s rectory and parish, including hilarious dinner-table conversations with the zealous, stiff, naïve curate, Father Danowski, and, when Hugh can find him, encounters with Roy, the lazy, prevaricating janitor; Hugh’s memories of his father; a flashback to Hugh’s four years recovering from alcoholism at the Cenacle in Arizona; a nostalgic afternoon idyll with Mrs. Helen Carmody O’Donnell, John’s kid sister and the one woman from his youth whom Hugh could have imagined marrying; a confessional visit with a seemingly dying Charlie Carmody and, linked to it, a final St. Raymond’s rectory visit with the icy, chastising Father John; and then the inspiring, transporting final pages that signal the surprising, even miraculous, metamorphosis in Hugh.
Edwin O’Connor was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 29, 1918, and was raised in affluence in Woonsocket as the oldest son of a highly regarded doctor who specialized in internal medicine. His high school was the Christian Brothers’ La Salle Academy in Providence—he got there by train each day—and then, in 1935, he went west to South Bend and the rigid discipline of the all-male, seminary-like University of Notre Dame.

A powerful and persistent influence on Edwin O’Connor there was his principal English literature professor, Frank O’Malley, to whom The Edge of Sadness is dedicated. O’Connor called him “the greatest single help for me in college,” for O’Malley was the charismatic mentor who got the Rhode Island talent to change his major from journalism to English, and who introduced him to the greatest of the European Catholic philosophers and writers. But O’Connor had observed O’Malley’s otherwise wide-ranging and incisive intellect too often fuddled with alcohol, and so he gave Father Hugh Kennedy a similar affliction—O’Connor himself was a teetotaler—in order to provide his friend an example of hope and of a way out.

Also crucial to Edwin O’Connor’s development as a fiction writer was his job as a radio announcer, which he had after his graduation from Notre Dame in 1939 until he joined the Coast Guard during World War II, and his fondness for an uncle whose theatrical background extended from vaudeville to the movies. A gregarious joker, raconteur, and mimic, O’Connor was enormously attentive to accents and voice, and the speeches and spirited dialogues in his novel need to be read aloud to fully appreciate how good his ear and timing are. And his irony is a joy. Writing about Hugh Kennedy’s nighttime walks around a parish that includes skid row, O’Connor has the pastor recall a movie scene from the thirties or forties:It was a scene in which a priest was walking alone at night, through a district that I’m sure was intended to be very much like this one. It was sordid enough, suitably down at the heels, yet in the film it had an odd liveliness: one had the impression of neon and noise and motion. There was a peculiar wailing music in the background, and from the darkness came an occasional scream of violence. Through the shadows one could see the tottering and seedy drunks, the faded streetwalker, the few sharp-eyed hoodlums. And then the priest appeared: an erect man with a steady stride. He was quite handsome. He was also obviously a familiar and impressive neighborhood figure. Although his coat collar was turned up he was recognized at once; the recognition produced a chain reaction of edifying behavior. The drunks managed to straighten themselves and tug respectfully at their hats; the streetwalker, suddenly ashamed, turned away, pointedly fingering the medal at her throat; the hoodlums vanished in their evil Cadillac; the cop on the beat relaxed for the first time, twirled his nightstick happily, and hummed a few bars of “The Minstrel Boy.” The “padre” was passing by, and the district was the more wholesome for his presence. As for the “padre” himself, he continued to walk forward as strongly as ever, something about him managing to suggest, however, that he was in a dream—a muscular dream. His smile was compassionate but powerful: one had the feeling that here was a mystic from some ecclesiastical gymnasium, a combination of  Tarzan and St. John of the Cross. A saint, but all man. . . . (148–149)

After the war, there was more radio work and freelance journalism for O’Connor, and he lived hand-to-mouth in Boston even after the publication of his first novel, The Oracle. But The Last Hurrah, in 1956, made him famous and rich enough that at age thirty-eight he could buy his first car, a Porsche.

Still a suave and affable Irish bachelor, O’Connor became a favorite guest at fashionable dinner parties where he seems to have fallen into the good priest’s role of genial interlocutor and generous consort to the ignored. He became a man of regular habits and haunts, finishing his morning at the typewriter with a stroll to the café of the Ritz Hotel and the editorial offices of The Atlantic and his publishers Little, Brown—the sort of thing that fledgling writers imagine but few writers ever do.

Some of his jaunty life is reflected in Father Hugh Kennedy, who may seem to contemporary readers an incredibly carefree, negligent, and unharried pastor. There is little or no mention in The Edge of Sadness of parish councils, club and committee meetings, finance and administration, choir direction, confessions, baptisms, weddings, and funerals, counseling in his offices, contractors called...