[In the essay below, Allums examines Gordon's later fiction as indicative of a "distinctly Christian imagination."]

The striking shift of artistic method at a certain point in the career of Caroline Gordon is familiar to anyone who knows her work. Also well known is the fact that the change occurs around the time of her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1947. Generally, the novels she published before that crucial event are epic in their sweep and tragic in their movement, whereas the later novels are more restricted in terms of time and action, with one notable exception, and they move toward comic resolutions. Although this change of focus is dramatically clear, what it implies, both for her own poetics and, by extension, for the reader's understanding of the imagination itself, is still a matter of conjecture. Perhaps the change in Gordon's poetic method delineates the radical distance between the classical and Christian myths. More importantly, the later works embody the operation of a distinctly Christian imagination. Furthermore, in her final novel, a controversial retelling of the story of Heracles that seems an overly ambitious attempt to synthesize and Christianize the Greek myths, this embodiment is most clear.

Although a radical change in Gordon's work can be documented, she herself remarked in 1965 [in "Cock-Crow"] that her entire career was the result of a single, "lifelong study" of

the life and times of the hero. That seems to me the proper study of every one of us all our lives through. A hero—any hero—spends his life in combat with the common, the only enemy, Death. When a man is faced with death, energies which he was not aware he possessed are rallied in the effort to preserve the life which, until that instant, may not have seemed to him as precious as it truly is. War which, now under one disguise, now another, pits man against his arch enemy, Death, has always provided a favorable climate for the growth of the hero, as well as for the study of his ways and deeds. The novelist, like the soldier, is committed by his profession to a lifelong study of wars and warriors.

Appearances to the contrary, these remarks are consistent with Gordon's movement toward a Christian poetics. In fact, when applied to the novels, her reflections on the hero reveal more clearly the nature of her poetic metamorphosis.

When using such terms as combat, death and warriors to describe the heroic enterprise, Gordon at one extreme means them quite literally: often in the earlier novels, her protagonists find themselves in physically perilous circumstances, fighting for their lives in actual combat with an enemy. Such actions evoke the classical Greek myth, at the heart of which stands the idea of the heroic. According to the Homeric epics, virtue—arete or "excellence"—is closely identified with strength, skill and deeds of valor in battle, whether with men, monsters or the gods themselves. The Greek hero is consciously devoted to fulfilling the heroic ideal as if it were a calling. Indeed, it does present itself as a calling to him, a divinely proffered task that is given to him to do or not to do, as he chooses. In the Iliad, Achilles speaks of the dreadful choices before him:

I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either, if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.

Achilles does not speak of basing his choice on hatred for his Trojan foes. He sees that his real enemy is the common destiny of all mortals—Death—and all that remains in his power is choosing the circumstances of his ultimate defeat. Although the Homeric hero's choices have communal effects of great consequence, he knows that for him there is nothing redemptive about his life but reputation—everlasting glory. This is hardly comforting; as Achilles says while still alive, "I detest the doorways of Death," and in the Odyssey his shade complains in Hades that he "would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead."

In many respects, Gordon's early novels are reenactments of the Homeric hero's combat with forces that would take his life. Her protagonists struggle incessantly with the fact of their mortality, spurning the love of a lady or the security of family in order to challenge that which they cannot possibly vanquish. In None Shall Look Back, for instance, Rives Allard compulsively seeks death on the battlefield until he finds it; in Green Centuries, Orion Outlaw, significantly named for the constellation of the great hunter, yields just as compulsively to the "westering" instinct and its delusive promise of boundlessness; in Penhally, Nicholas Llewellyn attempts to preserve his ancestral house so that its identity will survive his own dissolution in death; and in Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Aleck craftily tries to forestall Nature's pull toward the grave by becoming her devoted "student" and in that way learning her deadly secrets. These protagonists are essentially tragic figures, like the Greek hero himself, engaging the ultimate foe in different ways yet finally experiencing either death itself or the shock of recognizing that in the natural order, from which man cannot save himself, death reigns over life.

This tragic fact of human existence is the ontological pivot on which Gordon's poetic vision swings as she moves from her classical to her Christian phase. For the irreducible element through which the Christian myth altered Western consciousness is its revising—its re-visioning—of life and death. St. Paul wrote eloquently about the mysterious truth of the soul revealed in history as the Incarnation and called it a scandal that the Greeks could neither accept nor understand. It remains a scandal to the rational mind, yet it has transformed Western thought to such an extent that all previous myths must in some sense be measured in terms of it. Furthermore, just as Homer fully embodied the tragic vision of the classical hero in his Iliad and Odyssey, so it was another poet, Dante, who imagined the plentitude of the Christian myth in his Commedia.

In its magnitude and complexity, Dante's sacred poem allows us to conceive of a distinctly Christian imagination, only a potential faculty until the Incarnation, since only at that moment in history was fullness of being released into the world. As William Lynch says in Christ and Apollo, Christ "has subverted the whole order of the old imagination," and "the new imagination begins to assume the order of creation and to lift it into its own vitality." In a radical revision of human time and action, the Christian imagination perceives the redemptive potential not only of the present but of history as well, because it apprehends the anagogical in the light of the Incarnation and its promise.

Dante's Commedia simultaneously celebrates Christ's triumph over time and redefines the heroic paradigm, at the center of which still stand powerful vestiges of the classical paradigm: the ancient foe and the fact that man must struggle against it. Death remains the enemy of man, and tragedy is still a haunting possibility in spite of Christ's promise. Fearful of the journey that Virgil has outlined for him, Dante protests that he is neither Aeneas nor Paul but an ordinary mortal whose inclination is to stay in the savage wood within comforting sight of the sun rather than travel through an act of faith to the regions of the dead.

By accepting the challenge of the journey, Dante becomes the Christian Everyman and his poem that new paradigm of the soul's perilous pilgrimage through this life. It is within the trajectory of this movement that Caroline Gordon patterns her late novels and heroes. In 1944, three years before her conversion to Catholicism, she published The Women on the Porch, the story of a man's estrangement from and reconciliation with his wife. In it, the scope of the action is reduced and interiorized. The quest of the hero, Jim Chapman, takes him into the depths of his own soul, a journey that is, if anything, more tortuous than the classical hero's acceptance of the battlefield challenge. Chapman himself senses this at one point as he listens to a young naval officer speak almost brightly about the prospects of war with Japan. "I was too young for the last war and am too old for this war," Chapman thinks. "But I wish I was one of them, for it is something, in this life, for a man to know where he is going, even if the appointment is with the minotaur."

[In his 1966 The Hero with the Private Parts] Andrew Lytle has maintained that the reconciliation at the novel's end is unconvincing: it is too sudden and unprepared. It seems instead to mark the first signs of the emergence of Gordon's Christian imagination. [In her "Nature and Grace in Caroline Gordon," Critique 1, no. 1 (1956)] Louise Cowan has suggested that the apparent flaw at the conclusion of The Women on the Porch is actually "an aperture, through which something supernatural enters into the framework of the novel." That supernatural element we may recognize as a moment of grace given to the estranged husband and wife, and it prefigures the more explicitly Christian structure of the post-conversion novels, as does the fortuitous moment, reminiscent of St. Augustine's conversion in the Confessions, when Chapman's eye happens to fix upon Dante's Inferno, which lies before him and has fallen open to the first page of the poem: "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost."

Jim Chapman is an intellectual, a professor of history, tormented by the agonizing uncertainties of modern life. In her next two novels, The Strange Children (1951) and The Malefactors (1956), Gordon's heroes are again writers whose muses have fallen silent and whose enemy is the death of the spirit. Both works contain an abundance of Christian elements, themes and allusions, and each ends with a moment during which, against all reason and nature, grace is offered—the grace of sudden insight. The Strange Children concludes with Stephen Lewis's ominous vision of the apocalypse, the event toward which, according to the Christian myth, all of history moves:

A Perseid fell, trailing its golden dust, and then another: little meteors that had been falling through space for God knows how many years. But the other stars that shone so high and cold would fall, too, like rotten fruit—when the heavens were rolled up like a scroll and the earth reeled to and fro like a drunkard and men called upon the mountains to fall upon them and hide them from the wrath to come. This very hill upon which he stood would shake. The river which lapped it so gently might turn and, raging against it, tear it from its green base and hurl it toward the sea. But there would be no sea!

Throughout the novel Lewis has wandered through a labyrinth of hopelessness, masking his despair with a cynical cruelty that has isolated him from his family and friends, but his terrifying vision of the apocalypse awakens him to the tragic destiny that awaits him, a destiny that is at once both universal, embracing all human history, and particular, extending to him in his time and place. But he also sees the redemptive power of Christ, for the apocalypse—both as the end of history and as the death of individual men—is a time not only of destruction but of fulfillment, the gathering together of the faithful from the four corners of the earth. Thus, Lewis's vision of the end marks a new beginning; through his sudden insight—the offering of grace—he is taken, as it were, like Dante in his dream, to the gate of purgatory, and as he wonders at the necessary journey which lies before him, embracing his family for the first time in the novel, he groans "so loud that the woman and the child stared at him, wondering, too."

One need only compare this purgatorial and therefore redemptive, comic ending with the tragic conclusion of Green Centuries, first published in 1941, to see the radical effect of the Christian myth upon Gordon's imagination. There, Orion Outlaw sits with his dead wife and, staring out at the stars, reflects upon his past:

When he was a boy on the Yadkin he used to like to think that he took his name from the mighty hunter, and out in the woods at night or coming home from a frolic he would look up and pick out the stars: the hunter's foot, his club, his girdle, the red eye of the bull that he pursued ever westward…. 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. But it seemed that a man had to flee farther each time and leave more behind him and when he got to the new place he looked up and saw Orion fixed upon his burning wheel, always pursuing the bull but never making the kill. Did Orion will any longer the westward chase? No more than himself. Like the mighty hunter he had lost himself in the turning. Before him lay the empty west, behind him the loved things of which he was made. Those old tales of Frank's! Were not men raised into the westward turning stars only after they had destroyed themselves?

Although Orion looks into the same heavens that Stephen Lewis gazes at in The Strange Children, he sees only futile repetition and feels nothing but despair: nothing of his "westering" life can be redeemed, and he does not even have the luxury of a terrifying hope.

In her final novel, The Glory of Hera, Caroline Gordon distills her "lifelong study" of the hero, combining the divergent patterns of classical and Christian in a retelling of the life and times of Heracles. On one level a prodigious compendium of Greek myth with Heracles at its center, The Glory of Hera at the same time clearly issues from the Christian imagination functioning in Gordon's three previous works. A crucial distinction must be made, however, concerning this explicit treatment of Greek mythology: rather than allegorizing and thus circumscribing the classical myths neatly within the pale of the Christian myth, she appropriates them in an act of "re-reading" pagan history from her final artistic stance, that is, through the lens of Christian revelation.

In this, Gordon once again approximates the imaginative paradigm of Dante, who could not bring himself to save his beloved Virgil but could regard his mentor's great epic as being included in the transformation wrought by Christ's redemption upon all of history and even upon the act of reading itself. Thus Dante returns to the Aeneid—and in fact to virtually as much of pagan history as was known to him—in order to perform the "misreading" demanded by the Incarnation, a new reading which becomes possible only when the meaning of Christ fully pervades his imagination.

Caroline Gordon's strategy in The Glory of Hera is similar; that is, she regards the Christian God's plan for mankind—the Incarnation—as the lens through which to read the Greek myths anew. Appropriating the divine mind of Zeus as a narrative post of observation, Gordon portrays the "father of gods and men" as desiring two things: to vanquish forever the dark and threatening powers that he had to defeat in order to ascend the throne and to bridge the great chasm between Olympus and earth—between the divine and the human realms. This clearly echoes the Christian myth and is a radical departure from anything we may read in handbook of mythology, yet Gordon very carefully preserves the irreconcilable gulf between the two myths: for all his power and purity of motive, Zeus cannot achieve what he desires, for he is not the God in whom, to use Dante's words from the Inferno, "will and power are one." The very nature of the greatest Greek god suggests the tragedy that permeates the classical world.

Thus Caroline Gordon's method in The Glory of Hera is not allegorical but analogical: in Zeus's scheme, Heracles's exploits and the apotheosis that finally brings peace to Olympus, we see, to use Dantean terms again, "shadowy prefaces" of Jehovah's plan for mankind, the Incarnation, and the final triumph of the resurrection. Even at the novel's comic ending, however, we recall Zeus's unfulfilled desire and the tragic residue of the partial vision of the Greeks. Heracles, the greatest of heroes, remains an incomplete image of redemption.

The Glory of Hera was to be the first of a two-part work, the second part of which Gordon did not complete before her death. Perhaps that other volume would have altered the reading of Heracles and his exploits.

As it stands, The Glory of Hera is a remarkable culmination of her faithfulness to a lifelong study of the hero. Steadfastly continuing the focus of her post-conversion novels, The Glory of Hera is the product of a distinctly Christian imagination. It also represents Gordon's final reading of the classical Greek world that she loved so dearly.

Larry Allums, "From Classical to Christian: Versions of the Hero in the Novels of Caroline Gordon," in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, Spring, 1990, pp. 63-70.