[Cheney is an American novelist, short story writer, dramatist, and critic. In the essay below, he identifies Gordon's fiction as the artistic and personal process of "self-realization" through which she achieved her conversion to Roman Catholicism. According to Cheney, Gordon's career is "the revelation of ontological motivation" which realizes its apotheosis in The Malefactors.]

Modernity's extended time of transition has been one which few if any seers have been able to bring into perspective. This has been peculiarly true here in the United States—for historian, philosopher, artist—all the prophets of this land, this land conceived in the delusion of escape and born to innovation. There has been no ground actually for a balanced stance between past and future here, for balancing the enduring and the changing.

Yet, even so, the modern view has not constricted all alike. There have been a few of greater perspective, a few exceptions among our poets and even among our novelists. For of all of the articulators of modern society none has kept closer to the prompter's wing than the fiction writer. The novelist in this country has remained at the elbow of the preacher and the politician and the social scientist. His myth-making, if any, has been under the Big Top and from its fabric. His prophecy has been curtain announcement.

Of that very small company who have never joined in with the circus chorus, none has been more deeply committed to her art, nor more uncompromisingly devoted to her incredible quest—nor more excluded, than Caroline Gordon.

We were still deep in the heartland of economic absolutism, when Caroline Gordon published her first story, "Summer Dust," in 1929. This sensitive piece evokes girlhood at the moment the child learns what lies in wait for virginity in the deceitful world of men. It is a proper proem to her work. This virgin becomes the antagonist of Caroline Gordon's panoramic dramas of disintegration and remains at the center of the ordeal of rediscovery as well.

The lack, not merely of popular recognition, but of critical appreciation for her work, has long been a matter of concern to the writer of this estimate. He has been inspired by her artistic commitment. The appearance of each of her stories has over the years brought him illumination. But they had not until now composed a whole, a totum. On re-reading the body of her fiction (eight novels and a score of short stories) he has been astonished to find, not merely dramatic sequence in her successive pieces, but the composition of an epic ordeal.

To be sure I have been aware of a relationship in her stories. And significance in it. Andrew Lytle has written [in the August 1949 issue of Sewanee Review] cogently about the historic image that informs her earlier novels to intensify the action and give it a high literary irony. And he observed that the image was dynamic, that "from novel to novel a sense of growth which distinguishes what is permanent and what there is of change" comes through. He even spoke of it as "the nearest substitute for the religious image." More recently Louise Cowan, writing on "Nature and Grace in Caroline Gordon's work," speaks of her sacramental attitude toward her material.

But none of all of this quite prepared me for what has finally revealed itself. What now appears to me, after re-reading her last novel, The Malefactors, is that it is not only the culmination of her work. It is the final flower of a quest that has ordered Caroline Gordon's whole artistic career. It is an answer to unremitting prayer. It is the revelation of ontological motivation.

If Caroline Gordon brought a longer and a deeper perspective than usual to her art, it came of no discipline of the modern day; neither sociology, nor ideology, nor politics. She has kept her distance from them. It came—in this many-voiced babbling din—of a holding onto, a sounding of the depths of her own being and nature that was not merely personal, but family and social history and tradition. It came, as Miss Cowan has remarked, of a sacramental attitude toward the world and toward the material from which she was to fashion her own imaginative microcosm. And I may add that it came, too, of her vigilant exclusion of the vulgar and the merely plausible.

When I read Caroline Gordon's first novel, Penhally, thirty years ago, I will confess that I thought it rather eccentric of her to take seriously (as I thought then) the principal of primogeniture. Old Nicholas Llewellyn, you will remember, is one of the few men in her fiction who will find favor with her. But I have come to a different view of her sympathy for Nicholas. Penhally is no apology for primogeniture. And, in the main action of the book, his successful effort to preserve the traditional order of blood relationship by preventing Alice Blair from marrying John, his chosen heir, only brought Lucy (on whom he smiled) bitterness in marriage with John and frustration to the both of them. Moreover, as an "irony within an irony" Nicholas was able to enforce this at a time when the defeat of the traditional pattern made his position meaningless for future generations. His efforts finally, in the person of Chance Llewellyn, turn out pathetically.

I see Caroline Gordon's sympathy for birthright now as merely for an institution that in its day was symbol for family and social stability. And more than stability. I see it as a manifestation of Caroline Gordon's sacramental attitude toward her material.

I have spoken of her having been engaged in a quest incredible to the modern reader, a pilgrimage—on a way unseen but felt out with her craftsman's thorn. This sword and serpent of seven wayside incantations has come to flower at last in The Malefactors. For I consider that work more than a triumph of art. And I think her instinct was true in selecting the only material available to her that might lead her to this goal. But perhaps I had better say this another way.

Let us recall that at this time humanism was in its phase of the Economic Man and that Marxism was the delusive social salvation of the day. The world was substantially secularized by then. They were lightless years for sanctity. In this dim hour Caroline Gordon turned to her Southern past for meaning.

Perhaps it would be relevant to recall here that this was about the time that a group of Caroline Gordon's fellow Southerners (several of whom were close to her in feeling and outlook) published that first protest against an uncritical ardor for industrialism in the United States—I'll Take My Stand. Though various, the essays in this symposium tended to re-examine our agrarian past sympathetically in search of something, something lost. It may have eluded definition at the time, but one of the group, Donald Davidson, has in retrospect suggested its metaphysical nature.

On rereading Caroline Gordon's early novels I am more convinced than ever that she turned to the society of the ante-bellum South for her material, not because of any delusion that there was life left in its wrecked and prostrate body, and not with any sentimental notion of sanctifying its memory. Indeed, it was her revulsion to sentimentality that sent her to this traditional order. Caroline Gordon carried on her long wake over the already laid out corpse of agrarian society in the South, because only there, in this whole land, remained any odor of sanctity.

If remote from the Christian Middle Ages, still agrarianism's heritage of responsibilities, of manners, morals and virtues retained more Christianity in them than all of Protestantism's pulpit splintering. A relic enhanced by the smell of distant saints.

Caroline Gordon understood that Southern society was already undone at the time of the Civil War. Recall the irresponsible commitment to the chase of Aleck Maury's Uncle James and his company in old Virginia, and the ironic figure of old Nicholas Llewellyn. Aleck Maury, himself, is a testament to a society out of balance. These were men whom the order of their day did not seriously occupy. The plantation was growing matriarchal, the men uncurious. And in Penhally and None Shall Look Back, as well as Aleck Maury, Sportsman, most of her men are weak, or frustrated, or spiritually exhausted. It is characteristic of the decay of any masculine society that the men (its leaders) rot first.

Woman is the conservator, the vessel for the preservation of order. Thus, as we should expect, Caroline Gordon's early heroines still retain integrity, are endowed with virtue and pride. Knowing the ante-bellum South to be more Stoic than Christian, she suspected (one senses) that it was but counterfeit feudalism, too. Yet there were inviolables and an attitude of reverence toward them, there was sanctity. And the Lucys and the Charlotte Allards and the Molly Fayerlees, in their pride, preserved it. Indeed, they are women still capable of love. The complication is that they cannot find a worthy lover.

Andrew Lytle has said (in reviewing The Forest of the South) "As Caroline Gordon's novels show, the true antagonist is woman. Manhood best defines itself in the stress between the sexes, which is the source of physical and spiritual human intercourse."

Sex relationships, to be sure, are the stock in trade of drama and fiction. That isn't the point. Throughout Caroline Gordon's stories this dramatic conflict constitutes the axis on which her fictional world turns. It is fundamental to her understanding of human experience. It is the creative core in nature by which she intuits life's meaning. And it is the key by which she eventually unlocks a material world to the Christian spirit.

In the progression of Caroline Gordon's heroines, Mr. Lytle sees emerging as theme "What Life, the sly deceiver, does to womankind but particularly to the woman of great passion and sensibility."

I do not disagree with that finding, except as to the abstractness with which it is stated. "Life," yes, but life within the history of Southern agrarian society. (Cathy in Green Centuries, may seem an historical exception. But after all, the Tennessee-Kentucky frontier was proto-Southern). Life, that still breathes the values of the Southern way and burns with its pride.

And these values and that pride find their tragic immolation in Caroline Gordon's great Civil War story, None Shall Look Back. As Mr. Lytle has pointed out, it is a tragedy and "death becomes the Adversary"—and, among other levels of action, the Adversary in a love triangle, as the "Dark Lady" who steals Rives Allard's affections from his wife. "The moment of greatest passion," he says, "is the moment when Lucy recognizes her loss of Rives in the pre-knowledge of his death." And he concludes, "The heroine has a rival at last equal to the demands of her pride."

Pride it may be, but pride at its death. For, in Rives' dying, die the love and the virtue, and the pride as well that makes Lucy what she is, that motivate her—the intensity of meaning within a societly that gives it sanctity.

Recall Lucy's tense terse abject moment of goodbye: "The pistols settled into their leather jackets, one on either side of his waist. His face was still bent down. She put her hands behind her to hide their trembling. She said: 'Yes.' You are going away. I may never see you again, but I will desire you all my life. 'Yes' she whispered, 'even a note.'"

When Caroline Gordon's heroine, in the person of Letty Allard, appears again in a novel (The Garden of Adonis) the Civil War is more than sixty years past and the disintegration of Southern society is far advanced. And now (the Great Depression of the 1930's) the corruption extends to Caroline Gordon's heroine, too.

Perhaps to highlight this corruption (and that of a lesser figure, Letty's counterpart, Idelle) Caroline Gordon has, so to speak, preserved two heroes in formaldehyde—Letty's father, the appealing Mister Ben and his tenant Ote Mortimer. They sparkle in colors brightened by the chemical of unreality, and move with the grace of sacrificial goats. And their hecatomb to the god of chaos is fired, each by his prostitute priestess. The faithless Idelle sends Ote to the murder of a Mister Ben, more subtly and indirectly, but no less surely drawn to the sacrifice by the adultery of his daughter. Under his nose, Letty befouls the Allard home with a casual guest—rotten scion of the old South.

It is noteworthy on the point of the appearance of Caroline Gordon's novels that Green Centuries should follow The Garden of Adonis. Having pursued the destruction of agrarian society to its end—to the consuming of even the embalmed relics of the virtues that once gave it an odor of sanctity, Caroline Gordon steps back in history, so to speak, to take a longer view of the American Experiment. But let me point out that she is still led by a metaphysical sense of smell—she is still bent on her quest. And her sensitive nose, in search of sanctity, turned up an astonishing discovery.

In Green Centuries Caroline Gordon's intuition succeeded in illuminating the flaw in the American myth of the frontier, which the more pedestrian historian and political philosopher have only come to perceive a quarter of a century later. And she did it, as I have intimated, by the unaccountable strategies of genius. She did it through an objective perspective on and aethetic distance from the Indians, did it at a time when the transmontane movement of English settlers to the west brought the two into fresh conflict and dramatic contrast. It was the odor of sanctity about an Indian society—far more primitive and generally reckoned recidivist, but still religious—by which she was able to render godless the smell of the sweat of the violent ever moving frontiersman.

To a little different purpose but nonetheless to my point, Mr. Lytle has analyzed the historical significance of Green Centuries acutely and at length. I quote here a paragraph that speaks my mind:

Each long hunter, each frontiersman became a primitive, homespun Dr. Faustus. Having dismissed the Devil along with God (the Protestant belief in private communion with God is equivalent to Man-become-God) man no longer had any defense against his violation of the laws of nature, nor any absolute set of principles to which he might refer the processes of reason. His plight is more terrifying than that of the protagonist of Greek drama, whose fated action achieved the dignity of suffering the inscrutable will of the gods. The unbalance of a purely masculine society, sharpened by the appearance of the Indian feminine society and therefore no true opponent to the European … becomes the complication determining the action of Green Centuries.

But it is in the love relation between her man and her woman, between Rion Outlaw and Cathy that we find the core of the action that delivers Caroline Gordon's meaning. Their love has broken down under the unbearable burdens of the westward movement. At the end Rion, apostrophizing his star, reflects:

"His father had come west across the ocean, leaving all that he cared about behind. And he himself as soon as he had grown to manhood had looked at the mountains and could not rest until he knew what lay beyond them." Like Orion, "fixed upon his burning wheel … he had lost himself in the turning. Before him lay the empty west, behind him the loved things of which he was made." Among these last were his brother whom he murdered and his wife who has just died.

It isn't her physical death that is the measure of his loss, however. For their love has been demeaned, betrayed, wasted in the grip of the wilderness. And there is the deadening of moral sensibility and moral responsibility. Yet, we sense it is not any one of these, in itself, nor all of them. They are but the symptoms and effects of the malady.

In her next novel, The Women on the Porch, Caroline Gordon brings this disease to definition.

The story in its main lines of action tells about Jim and Catherine Chapman who—having lost their direction in marriage and gone on the rocks through his adultery—find their way back together in a new love. The action opens with Catherine's flight from her husband to her mother's ancestral home, from New York to rural Tennessee, from a circus to a cemetery.

Catherine is Caroline Gordon's heroine a generation away from her Southern heritage and her deepest knowledge of it comes to her, you might say, through her genes. Being an instinctual woman, though lost, she is not deeply corrupted.

As Miss Cowan has remarked, "Marriage itself—in its idea and its actuality—is the subject of this novel." And Caroline Gordon uses it as a direction-finder in a confused secular world.

Chapman, the historian, provides the enlarged (from that of Green Centuries) perspective to view the westward flight in its true significance. He epitomizes it in an apostrophe to the city, the brilliance and beauty of which Mr. Lytle has remarked on. I surely agree with him and I do not disagree with his interpretation of Chapman's "O City" as symbol of "the apparent triumph of the masculine impulse toward godhead." But I see another significance in the symbol and the apostrophe.

The city is symbol, too, for traditional European culture. It is from the "dead" in this civilization that the queen bee takes her wild flight westward.

Chapman, the observer, now finds himself out of moral necessity, an actor, too. He recognizes his own rootlessness in turning to his fugitive wife and her ghostly country. But he seeks more. It is only after she is gone that he sees his extra-marital sexual relation as adultery. And, as moral realization comes, he asks himself "Did the woman who once truly received a man become the repository of his real being and thenceforward, witch-like, carry it with her where ever she went?"

That is the question that takes him back to her.

In the interlude, Catherine has had an affair with her grandmother's neighbor, Tom Manigault, rich, would-be farmer. Out of the tomb, a new Eden has risen, she believes briefly. But by the time Chapman arrives she has found out that Tom is flawed by an oedipus complex.

Yet her delusion still engages her and she is hostile when Chapman, seeking forgiveness, wants to take her back. Defiantly, she confesses her adultery with Manigault.

This triggers—to use Caroline Gordon's simile—like a jack-in-the-box sprung by a careless hand, the passion that wells up in him from the depths of his nature and from the agony of a soul seeking direction and identity. He chokes her—"not to be alone in the abyss into which her words had plunged him." Her automatic digging at his hands brings him to loose her short of strangulation.

But Nature has re-established the marriage bond.

From his wife's lost land, Chapman views the oncoming phantoms of the westward migration now, to define the enchantment upon them, the spell of the old Gaelic goddess, Cleena, who created the delusion of a land of perpetual youth, a utopia. The flight, then, is from self, the ego from the id, from reality.

Catherine's final disillusionment comes with the unexpected death of her Cousin Willy's young stallion, symbol of her new found Eden. This makes real for her the deeper significance of her own repudiation of her affair with Manigault, when—in Miss Cowan's words—"arising from the sylvan couch she thought to call her wedding bed to find herself lost in the woods: 'I have made a mistake'" she thinks; 'I have taken the wrong road'…."

So Jim's and Catherine's first step out of "the wood" comes with their discovery of the sacramental nature of marriage.

Vivienne Koch, in her essay, "The Conservatism of Caroline Gordon," speaks of The Women on the Porch as an "exploratory work." And Ashley Brown ("Caroline Gordon and the Impressionistic Novel") calls it "transitional." To be sure a case can be made for that view. In a sense, all of Caroline Gordon's novels before The Malefactors were exploratory and transitional. And a bit more than that, in this case. But in view of my thesis here, I would apply those adjectives rather to the novel that followed.

If Caroline Gordon's quest had taken her toward Christian mysticism and eventually met with personal conversion, as an artist she had still another problem. Perhaps I should say another aspect of her problem—if one looks at her fiction as self-realization. Yet the second problem, if not divorced from the first, is still very different. Within the limits of her observation and experience, she had to find the terms of moral conviction and Christian salvation in the context of contemporary life. And she had to invent a strategy and tactic to give them dramatic weight, to make the action real.

In the light of her accomplishment in The Malefactors, I would even call The Strange Children prefatory. It is, in my view, at once her cleverest (and at the time most accomplished) and slightest work. But it was necessary. It was necessary, not merely to her Christian ordeal, but to the composition of the epic whole, the form and unity of her oeuvre.

There is no central dramatic actor in The Strange Children, in the sense of reversal. No one is changed, or saved, through the action of this social comedy. The viewpoint is placed with nine-year-old Lucy, daughter of Stephan and Sarah Lewis who, if not the protagonists of, are at least the hosts to the play.

Lucy is an interesting and very much alive child and she does, perhaps, experience something like conviction (and unburdens her "sin") at the end. But Lucy, as an action in the play, is sacrificed to Lucy as a device for getting the story across. And the final comment on the action is in her father's voice. He seems awed by a Christian premonition, if not conviction. But here the story ends.

Regarding the novel as introductory to her next great work, it appears to me that Caroline Gordon here brings today's strange children from their cynical mirth into the light of Christian reality. And she dramatically presents the nature of conviction and the way to salvation.

I have said that all of Caroline Gordon's fiction is, in a sense, a progress toward The Malefactors, I have suggested that her work composes an epic quest. The pattern might be likened to that of a hunting dog, true to her scent—a cold-nosed hound on the trail of Old Red, Himself. There have been circuits, and stands, and a change of field. But in her final go, she has run Him to ground.

Categorically, The Malefactors is a story of Christian conversion—the conversion of Tom Claiborne, poet, approaching middle age, seemingly forsaken by his muse and suffering a deep malaise. But that tells little.

What is it that Caroline Gordon has done here?

One of the most lucid reviews of the novel at the time it was published in [the 13 April 1956 issue of Commonweal] was that of the Rev. John W. Simmons, a Catholic priest and English professor. "After a period of longueurs, futilities and indirections," says Father Simmons, "he becomes the frantic victim of a Divine ambuscade…. But from the point of view of art, what happens is less important than the strategy by which it is accomplished."

Father Simmons combines peculiar qualifications for a judgment here. He weights its difficulties:

A conversion is admittedly a special invasion of Grace into a particular life. If the artist, in his effort to summon the mystery, gives a maximum plausibility to the motives and conditions leading up to conversion he risks an attenuation of the essentially free character of Grace. If he gives a maximum permissiveness to Grace he risks making his character seem the puppet of Grace. In this case it is the art which seems implausible, for God becomes an almost literal deus ex machina. Highly endowed artists from Corneille to Graham Greene have either foundered on the rocks or been sucked into the whirlpool. Only Bernanos, for all his gaucherie, has come close to accomplishing this miracle.

I have quoted Father Simmons at length, not only because of his authority, but of the discrimination with which he speaks. After surveying in considerable detail the "resources" Caroline Gordon calls into play to bring Claiborne through the hazardous passage for her readers, he concludes, when I had finished the history of Tom Claiborne—obviously and not too implausibly in the toils of Grace—I was more than ever in admiration of a novelist who had not only avoided with her usual consistency the clichés of her craft but had come closer than any vernacular writer to encompassing the elusive miracle.

This acknowledges a remarkable success.

Yet, I am convinced that Father Simmons fails finally to perceive Caroline Gordon's greater accomplishment. By his own admission he does not appreciate that Divine ambuscade that reveals God to Tom Claiborne.

In this hour of secular man's four-dimensional uncertainty, holding his bowels in his own hands, trembling before the prospect of his blowing the earth to pieces and eyeing Venus and/or Mars in the delusion of escape, Caroline Gordon has not only made experimental for him the malaise of a fellow victim. Through analogy and paradox meaningful to him, she has revealed Grace in Action.

Or, if you prefer the Action of Grace through the effect of her dead poet, Horne Watts, on various actors in her drama, and on Claiborne in particular. Whether this unorthodox and unchurchly instrument of salvation is considered as purely fictional or as the proto-type of Hart Crane, he is appropriate to an age obsessed by licentiousness—urbane homosexuality equally with feline rut.

Father Simons says he cannot escape equating Pontifex (the name of the poem in the novel) with Crane's The Bridge. And I believe this is the author's intention. For thereby the action gains another dramatic dimension. But Father Simmons canfind no analogy between The Bridge and Saint Catherine of Sienna's Dialogo Divino, to identify Crane's poem with established sanctity.

He should have carried his transposition to "real life" on to identify the fictional work of Sister Immaculata with that of Sister Bernetta Quinn, who has in fact done just such an essay—the idea for which she attributes to Caroline Gordon:

Whether consciously or not, Crane presents his Bridge as a concretization of God considered in terms of the Incarnation—an idea at least as old as the thirteenth century when Saint Catherine of Sienna used it as the focal symbol in her Dialogues.

And after developing the parallel, Sister Bernetta concludes:

All this is not to say that in 'Proem' Crane deliberately selected Jesus Christ as the tenor of his metaphor, or (what is far less likely) that he had read Saint Catherine of Sienna, but rather that his mind, hungry for the Absolute, reached out to Roebling's triumph of engineering as one way of expressing the means to union with his Creator, so passionately and blindly desired under all his excesses.

There are many both intentional and unintentional aids to Tom Claiborne's conversion, as Father Simmons points out. There is Tom's wife, Vera, through her love and dependence on him that drove her to attempt suicide and by her being a Catholic, too. There is George Crenfew, Tom's Virgil, as Mr. Brown has pointed out. And Max Shull, with his paintings of Saint Eustace. And others.

But it is Horne Watts (in Claiborne's dream) who finally halts Tom's flight and turns him toward Grace. And it is Watts' representative in life, Catherine Pollard, in whom Claiborne first sees Christ and from whom he receives the kiss of Christ.

Watts, then, is the mysterious way in which God reveals Himself to this victim of a prolonged and abortive season of humanism. It seems to me that Horne Watts, through Hart Crane's The Bridge (with Sister Immaculata's recognition of the real motive of Watts' quest, supported by Sister Bernetta Quinn's essay) may have brought to the Action of Grace on Tom Claiborne something real to his secular fellow men.

Romano Guardini has said, "When a human being in the grip of divine power attempts to convey something of the holy otherness he tries one earthly simile after another. In the end he discards them all as inadequate and says apparently wild and senseless things meant to startle the heart into feeling what lies beyond the reaches of the brain." Guardini was speaking of The Beatitudes.

The truth of what Caroline Gordon has done—however she accomplishes it—lies in our realizing what Tom Claiborne finally found in Horne Watts' (or Hart Crane's) poem—that is, a recognition of man's ontological motivation—toward God, however impaled in flesh he may be.

Brainard Cheney, "Caroline Gordon's Ontological Quest," in Renascence, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Fall, 1963, pp. 3-12.