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THE  RESTLESS  FLAME,  DANIEL  LORD,  S.J.

Thinking Big in a Parochial World


Chapter 4    Chapter 6


EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Five - 1913-1917
Sickness, Philosophy, Yet Full Steam Ahead!

Miscellaneous

In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille, a Broadway actor and director, took the train to California.  Lord would later note:

Anyone who is interested in the theatre is bound to be interested in the motion pictures.  He may share the fierce resentment with which the legitimate stage first regarded the films.  When Cecil B. DeMille, as he told me, first forsook Broadway for a barn on Vine Street in Hollywood, his family held a solemn conclave to determine whether they would hang crepe on the door and pronounce him dead.1

In spring 1913 Father Garesché completed his studies of theology in St. Louis.  He had written numerous pieces for Jesuit publications.

He had real poetic gifts, and the superiors, on the principle that an acceptable author should be an adequate editor, gave him the assignment of starting a sodality magazine and opening the central office of the sodality for the United States.
In the fashion to which religious become accustomed, Father Edward F. Garesché found himself with a new job, a nonexistent magazine, a room high over Grand Avenue on the third floor of the university faculty building, a desk and typewriter, no assistance, and no money.2

The Queens Work became the title of the magazine and the name of the office which produced the magazine, ran the Sodality movement, and in later years took on numerous other projects.

Father Garesché had discovered the revised edition of the Common Rules of the Sodality, published in 1910, and was building the policy of The Queen’s Work about the first rule; Personal Holiness, Defense of the Church, Service of the Neighbor.

I had only to glimpse that first rule to see its enormous potential.  What couldn’t be done with a magazine that set itself to present Holiness attractively, to defend and extend the Church of Christ, and to serve the neighbor without too much limitation or restriction?  And if the sodality could formulate a program that would actuate that first rule, it would be really great.3

Garesché received letters of support for creating the magazine from Archbishop Glennon of St. Louis and the influential Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore.4  Garesché spent much of his time traveling around the country trying to build interest in the Sodality.

Lord went with his mother to see the 1914 silent movie Cabiria.

Italy’s genius Gabriele D’Annunzio had foreseen what American producers had not guessed, the sweep and scope of pictures that moved and a story that could be told on land, sea, and air. . Enthralled I sat with my mother, I the young Jesuit in transit from studies to the summer villa, and saw Cabiria.  All the history of Rome and Carthage, which had slumbered through the pages of my textbooks, suddenly came to life.  The battles were not dusty wrestling matches between men in tin armor, but violent conflicts to settle the future of civilization and the world.  I marched with Hannibal and his elephants.  I watched Fabius as he fought his magnificent delays.  And out of the film emerged a great comedian, a vast giant of a man, Maciste, whose contribution to the story of the motion pictures is now only too vaguely recalled.5

Studying Philosophy

In fall 1914 Daniel Lord began his three years of philosophy studies in Saint Louis.6  Frank Quinn went with him.  Lord’s years at St. Ignatius had prepared him to study philosophy.  Other students struggled.  One student was so baffled by it all that he wandered the corridors of our house of philosophy as if one of the roof timbers had dropped on his head.7  Lord offered to help and found out that the best way to learn something was to teach someone else.

I took down faithfully the lectures of the professors, and rushing to my room after class, immediately copied them into permanent form.  To these I added a careful synopsis of the texts and required reading of auxiliary books.  And I made a carbon for my fellow students.

Indeed, in a short time a number of my friends had taken up the slogan, Carbon me, kid!  So my typewriter took a bulk of carbons and thin paper, and I was distributing them among the friends who found them helpful.  The more profound scholars regarded them with a bit of rightful disdain.  Those who knew something of struggle found them some slight aid.

Then, with special permission, each morning and late each afternoon I went to the private room of my associate and carefully went through the preceding day’s lectures and the textbook assignment.  He was quick, and my simpler presentation reached him.8

Lord, who wrote freely about the health issues that shaped his life, remembered his surgery:

The visual memory is keen to this day the ghostlike figures of the nurses hurrying about, the banks of lights in the ceilings, the skylights through which one got a sort of wistful glimpse of the sky, the smell of ether, the strangely shrouded figures of the surgeons, and horrific instruments that seemed to be waiting for the closing of some awful nightmare.

I wanted to close it all out by shutting my eyes. I could not because of the mesmeric fascination all the strange objects had upon me. I wasn’t afraid now; I was plain scared stiff.9

During my convalescence my youthful curiosity made me ferret out all that I could about hospitals.  . . . I found myself the invited guest at a series of operations.  I watched the great Dr. John Young Brown remove a fifth nerve, and almost fainted as through the hole in the temple for the first I saw the pulsings of a human brain.  I watched Dr. Glennon remove gallstones and an appendix.  I gritted my teeth while a leg was amputated.  It seemed to me that as a future priest I should have the edge taken off the possible horror of surgery and be ready to stand by if ever I were needed.10
Once I arrived at our island in Lake Beulah, Wisconsin, health came flowing back in sunshine and fresh air and gentle exercise and good food.  And I moved along to the three years of philosophy and the three strenuous years as a teaching scholastic on the crest of very considerable health and strength.11

Daniel Lord on George Bernard Shaw

Lord had always been interested in theatre.  He kept abreast of it while in his studies and read most of the better plays on Broadway.  In college, urged on by Pernin, Lord read all the plays of George Bernard Shaw.

During this period of my early struggles with the typewriter I ran across the trail of George Bernard Shaw.  He had just written Androcles and the Lion.  To me it seemed a bitter attack on the Christian martyrs whom I loved.  For me it was a new incentive to write.12

He wrote three articles on Shaw.  These would be republished as his first three pamphlets: Martyrs According to George Bernard Shaw (1915), George Bernard Shaw (1916), and Shaw’s Apologetics (1917).13

Lord thought that in lampooning the martyrs, Shaw was ignoring what made them heroic.

I would seem that the principle for which Christian martyrs died was quite too clear and obvious to need explanation nowadays.  But when I read the remarkable play, I found that Mr. Shaw had succeeded in so thoroughly obscuring it as to render it almost unrecognizable.  . . . So, after an evening at Androcles and the Lion, one might well ask in the amazement, Then why did Christian martyrs die?14
He has committed the unconceivable crime of never falling in love with any of his own characters; even they are the objects of his fine derisions, sinking, at the moment when they threaten to approach something like heroism, into abysmal depths of cowardice and selfishness and petty vanity.
If the priests of Christ’s Church were really typified by the ministers of Mr. Shaw’s play, Christianity would be today a smouldering heap of ruins.15

In Played by Ear Lord would later say:

I bow respectfully and gratefully to the late G.B.  My dislike for him, my anger at his sneers and sophistries, my fury at his smearing of martyrs and the Christian virtues, made me write many a hot, indignant page of script.  It left Shaw unharmed.  . . . He gave me a subject and motive for indignation.  And that’s a great help to writing.16

Unfortunately, Lord did not live to see the classical musical based on Shaw’s play Pygmalion: My Fair Lady.  Lord would have loved it.

Philosophy Teacher Hubert Gruender, S.J.

In the fall Lord returned for his second year of philosophy.  He had Father Hubert Gruender who opened up the world of the soul.17  He was a rational psychologist and had done work in experimental psychology, which was not common for the time for a Jesuit philosophy teacher.  I found his rapid-fire blend of German, English, and Latin fascinating.  He had a weird sense of humor which resulted often from his honest but completely wrong use of American slang.18  Greunder asked Lord to help him correct his mistakes.  Lord sat in the front row to catch them, but he got so pulled into the lecture that he could not keep track.

For almost two solid weeks he set himself to lay before us all the wild, wrong, misleading, half-correct arguments against the spirituality of a man’s soul.  He went after free will and human responsibility.  He built up a terrific case against the soul, leaving us at the end of every class feeling pretty limp and helpless.  I had many a questioning of myself during those days.  Here I had come to the Jesuits in the hope of saving my soul and working for the souls of others; and it looked dangerously as if souls were a figment of the poet’s fancy, wiped out by the science and philosophy of the modern age.

At the end of this period of blasting, he sat back in his chair to grin at us with mischief in his eyes.

There! he cried triumphantly.  I have destroyed your souls.  You are mere animals, slaves to the laws of chemistry and biology, the end resultant of chance, without dignity or destiny.  How do you like yourselves?  His grin grew into a sort of parody of the diabolic.  If, he continued, leaning forward closer to us and speaking out of his own personal experience in European universities, if you were in many a modern university, you would be left right at that point, soulless automata, spiritless links in a brute evolution.  Now, if you will sit back and relax, we shall begin something quite different  We shall prove to you that you have a spiritual soul, analyze and discuss its qualities, and put you back on your feet headed for a glorious immortality.19

A Santa Claus Pro Tem and Other Short Stories

The 1915 issues of The Queen’s Work included more charming Lord stories such as The Burglar and the Blessing by George A. Douglas about a down and out burglar who breaks into a rectory.  The Bowens of Highland Place, also by George Douglas, tells of two neighbors who resent each other: one a staunch prohibition advocate, and the other a Catholic who still likes his beer.  Things change when they both come down with typhoid.  Conspirators Four by Stephen I. Langdon is a cute story about the Young Ladies Sodality trying to keep Blanche in town by keeping her interested in Frank so they can win the bazaar against the Married Ladies.  Lord’s Christmas piece A Christian Vision in Four Panels shows that Santa Claus, wealth, and friends do not make Christmas.20

Lord also wrote A Santa Claus Pro Tem under the name James D. Sanford for the Father Dunne’s Newsboys’ Journal in St. Louis.  In this cute story an invalid man finds out that the Prescott family next store has lost all their money.  He sends his maid to get them presents.  But it gets late and he forgets to take them over.  Then he discovers a burglar in his house.  He calls the police, then confronts the burglar.  They talk and the man learns that the burglar was going to rob the Prescott’s.  The man convinces the burglar to not rob the neighbors, but rather sneak the Christmas gifts into their house; which he does.  The man pays him and sends him off.  When the cops arrive the man leaves them some money for Christmas.

Lord himself stated:

I make no pretense to being a profound philosopher; I should rather be a man who writes philosophy in such a way that the reader does not suspect he is reading philosophy but feels he is recognizing what he has always suspected was good common sense.  I am certainly no erudite theologian; but to me theology has always been an exciting and contemporaneous subject, and I have wanted to share with my readers the truth of God and the simple, beautiful structure of the Christian faith.21


NOTES



Chapter 4    Chapter 6

  

Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner