“This story at no point becomes my own.”
Fifty-five-year-old Father Hugh Kennedy is the solemn pastor of a declining New England Catholic parish, Old Saint Paul’s, which is located in the middle of a slum. It is a church “whose best days are obviously over, and whose slow quiet fade has long ago begun” (28). This is the sorrowful setting of Edwin O’Connor Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Edge of Sadness. Amidst the dusty smell of decay and the awareness of irreversible decline, Father Kennedy’s somber existence mirrors the very edifice of Old Saint Paul’s church, “and in such an atmosphere there is always a certain sadness, but there is always too a feeling of calm and timelessness which is not at all unpleasant…”
With a certain air of mystery that only becomes more apparent as the novel progresses, Father Kennedy has secluded himself from friends and family, especially from the Carmodys who reside across town, as he leads his small congregation. Father Kennedy’s counterpart is John Carmody, an energetic pastor who presides over Saint Raymond’s church –an endlessly busy parish located in a prosperous, upper-class part of the city, in on contrast to Old Saint Paul’s which is situated in an impoverished district and is quietly attended by a dwindling cohort of immigrants (mainly Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Syrian, and Chinese). Suddenly, one warm day in June, Father Kennedy is invited to the birthday party of Charlie Carmody, the wealthy, aging patriarch of the Carmody family who is turning eighty-one despite telling everyone he is turning eighty-two. He is a fast-talking Irish businessman who has been made infamous in this New England city (presumably Boston) due to past transgressions. During his long career, Charlie lost a great many friends and admirers, or as Father Kennedy’s dad used to say, Charlie Carmody was “as fine a man as ever robbed the helpless.” Even though Charlie’s birthday invitation comes as a surprise to Father Kennedy, he still decides to attend since he grew up with the Carmodys and his late father had spent his childhood with Charlie.
In time, we learn of the troubled familial ties among the Carmodys –John is stressed out while trying to manage his overwhelmingly busy parish, and Charlie has strained relationships with many in the community extends to his own children (such as his daughter, Helen, who once had vague romantic inclinations for Father Kennedy when they were younger). Charlie’s wife died some years earlier, and aside from his children –John and Helen– his son, Dan, is running a mutual fund scheme, and his eldest daughter Mary is unmarried and living at home while serving as caretaker for her father. And we also learn why Father Kennedy has remained distant from the Carmodys for so many years. After his father’s death, Father Kennedy fell into a pit of despair: “…shortly after my father’s death my life began to change, and it was not that I began to do heavily and steadily what before I had done lightly, occasionally, and in a very different spirit, that I began to drink seriously, and to my own danger, and to the danger of my parish” (129). While copiously drinking, he stopped communicating with the Carmodys. He retreated from his parish and began spending most of his time locked inside his tiny dark room while drinking away a small insurance policy he had inherited from his father.
Sadly, Father Kennedy’s excessive drinking had eventually become unmanageable. One evening, he was discovered in a collapsed drunken stupor outside his room, and this led to an inquiry by the Bishop who gave him one more chance, but when this failed, Father Kennedy was sent to a recovery program called “The Cenacle” in Arizona, where he remained for four years hoping to overcome his alcoholism and severe depression. When he finally returned to his home city, the local Bishop decided to relocate him to the seemingly futile parish of Old Saint Paul’s. Of course, these events all occurred in the past, and Father Kennedy recounts these memories with a sorrowful detachment in his first-person narrative, reflecting on his own profound loneliness, having neither a wife nor a child to comfort him, while surrounded by a struggling church devoid of hope.
This is a novel with lots of digressions, and it is burdened with a sad sense of longing –yet it still takes a very leisurely pace in unfurling its plot. At his birthday party, Charlie delivers a long-winded speech about his age and the passage of time before cryptically remarking to Father Kennedy that he has a lot to say to him. This leads to a stream of random unsolicited phone calls over a period of several months in which Charlie prattles on to Father Kennedy in a seemingly aimless manner, until one day, Charlie suffers a serious fall due to a severed coronary on Christmas Day. Following this, he calls upon Father Kennedy to appear by his side so he can vent his private fears and frustrations about his impending death. He laments that when he finally departs, he won’t be missed by anyone: “How can a man die happy if he knows that when he dies he won’t be missed by a single livin’ soul?” (347).
While we are led to believe that Charlie’s death is now imminent, in a twist ending, Charlie makes a miraculous recovery and it is actually his son John who suddenly dies of a hemorrhaged duodenal ulcer. Perhaps attempting to manage a hectic church schedule was never the idyllic place Father Kennedy had once imagined it to be. Despite having more money, it is still not the right fit for everyone. In the end, the local Bishop stops in to check on Father Kennedy, and to offer him the chance to take the newly vacant pastorship at Saint Raymond’s, but despite once longing to lead a parish like Saint Raymond’s, now Father Kennedy sees things in a new light and politely declines. As the novel ends, he decides to remain at Old Saint Paul’s –a “spiritual watering hole: a halting place for transients in despair”– and he learns to accept it as his home:
“So I was alone again. It was hardly the first time id been alone in this rectory –but now there was a difference. This was the first time id ever stood, all alone, in the silence of this old building filled with little but the echoes of a past which was over before my own began, and looked around me, and slowly realized, at last, that this was mine and would be mine: that it was my home for the rest of my life. And with this at first I felt a touch of regret, an edge of sadness…” (457).
In many ways, this is a tale of homecoming. Father Kennedy rediscovers satisfaction in his gloomy despondency at Old Saint Paul’s, no longer dwelling on the ghosts of his flawed past, finally unearthing his ability to pray again, and granting himself permission to let go of his ocean of sorrow. In The Edge of Sadness, we are presented with his trials as a priest –a constant struggle for relevance and funding, a frustrating battle with complaining parishioners, and a personal desire for escapism. The specter of death and the weight of grief looms large over this novel, though there are certain moments of levity, particularly in scenes featuring the baroque overly optimistic Father Danowski, a young and zealous priest who serves as Father Kennedy’s curate. We also meet Roy, the formerly incarcerated church janitor. Together, these characters face numerous amusing little crises within their hapless church, though at one point Father mentions the hopeful winds of political change which could bring a new urban renewal to their small community. With the benefit of hindsight, I noted that this offhand observation carried increased weight since The Edge of Sadness was published in 1961 (later winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1962) at just the very moment the United States was set to embark on a transformative and tumultuous epoch –the 1960s—and the novel was also notably published only a year prior to the Catholic reforms instituted at Vatican II. With this in mind, I cannot help but wonder how Father Hugh Kennedy and his struggling parish would have fared in the decade ahead.
Edwin O’Connor dedicated The Edge of Sadness to Frank O’Malley, a shy but charismatic humanities teacher at Notre Dame University (though O’Connor was careful to include a disclaimer that all characters in the book were intended to be purely fictional). The title “The Edge of Sadness” actually appears a couple times in the book, highlighting the woeful sense of melancholy described throughout the novel. Astute readers of the Pulitzer Prize-winners will note similarities between Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead –both portraying sad, sober reflections of an aging clergyman– however, whereas The Edge of Sadness has an aching charm to it, Gilead is unquestionably the greater of the two novels.
Notable Quotations:
“I found that I had listened dutifully but had not believed. Seminaries are peppered with occasional doubts, but mine were secular rather than theological: I could not believe in the joyous morning bound. It was disbelief well-founded: thirty-five years between then and now, and while I rise punctually I do so grudgingly; each morning brings its own renewal of the battle” (5).
“Saint Paul’s: what a strange parish it is, really. Days, even weeks go by, and I don’t even think of this; then, without preparation of any kind, there comes a moment –when suddenly all the lights seem to be turned on at once, piercing the comfortable protection of routine, and I am confronted with the cold fact off Saint Paul’s. It is called Old Saint Paul’s, but there is no New Saint Paul’s –the adjective refers only to the age of the parish. The church itself is the perfect metaphor of the district: once, three generations ago, active, prosperous, in a way even noble, today, a derelict, full of dust and flaking paint and muttering, homeless, vague-eyed men. This section of the city is dying and so is Old Saint Paul’s” (13).
“Every parish has its core of hardy conversationalists who are always on the prowl, day and night, carrying with them a little invisible knapsack of treasured complaints; at the sight of the Roman collar, the eyes brighten and the knapsack opens” (26).
“For this was a moment I had postponed for a long time, and one I had never dreamed would finally take place on a summer afternoon at an old man’s birthday party. Unlike John, I had come back, not to stay, but only for an hour or so – long enough to see and to savor again, for the first time in nearly five years, that small and surprisingly unchanged part of the city where I was born and had spent so much of my life, where I knew every building and back alley as well as I knew my own front yard, where I had been a young priest, where I had my own parish, and where, as in no place else, I had belonged, I had been at home. I suppose it’s the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find that I have a special and lasting love for this place which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years” (39).
“For what is really dreadful, what I find genuinely frightening, is this spreading, endless despair, hanging low like a blanket, never lifting, the fatal slow smog of the spirit” (106).
“’…I seem to spend most of my time looking for old footprints to step in’” (244).
“I went back into the rectory, and through all the halls on all the floors, opening doors, entering all the abandoned rooms, meeting in each one the same combination of total emptiness, stale air, dust, and motionless dead cold. It was a melancholy journey, and before I was halfway through I. found myself wondering why I had even begun. But I kept on stubbornly, and each new step seemed to reveal the place under the light of an essential hopelessness. That is, all the unpleasantness and aspects of Old Saint Paul’s that I’d come to terms with long ago, all the drawbacks id dismissed as being small and of no matter, now seemed to pounce out of these cold shadows to remind me with force and with contempt, that whatever I was doing here, whatever I could do here, was really all for nothing: the place was dying, dying, dying and could not be saved… For example, even now: an aging priest walking by himself at night through long deserted rooms – was this the action of a pastor of a living church? Or the routine stumbling of a caretaker, the custodian of ruin…?” (309-310).
“All my life, it seems to me, people have had a way of coming at me with questions which I never expect at all” (444).
On the 1962 Pulitzer Prize Decision
For the Pulitzer Prize decision in 1962, the Fiction Jury contained the same two members as the prior year:
- John Barkham (1908-1998) was originally born in South Africa on an ostrich farm, before he became American historical book reviewer, focusing primarily on books about Africa. According to his obituary in The New York Times, in his heyday, Mr. Barkham could deliver a stream of 4-6 book reviews per week. He would typically sit back in his Eames leather reading chair at 3pm, and once finished reading, he would handwrite his review of the book before typing it up again on his typewriter. His writing appeared in numerous publications including TIME, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Post and others. Mr. Barkham served on many Pulitzer juries in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Biography over a period of approximately 20 years.
- Irita Van Doren (1891-1966) was one of the leading literary lights in New York City for more than 40 years. She began her career on the editorial staff at The Nation in 1919 before moving to The New York Herald Tribune Books for some 35 years, where she worked under editor Stuart P. Sherman (who served as a Pulitzer Prize Juror in 1920s). When he passed away in 1926, Mrs. Van Doren succeeded him as editor of The Herald Tribune, and she quickly “won respect for her editorial judgement, for her punctuality in printing book news and reviews and for her policy of representing all shades of taste and opinion in books and reviewers.” For example, it was she who selected Lewis Gannett as the paper’s long-serving daily book critic (he also served as a Pulitzer Prize Juror in the 1940s). She was previously married to Carl Van Doren from 1912-1935 (he won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ben Franklin in 1939). In her later years, Mrs. Van Doren ran in many high-brow literary circles while developing a deep love of Southern literature (perhaps owing to her family lineage, being the granddaughter of a Confederate General). She led a storied life that apparently included a secret romantic affair with Wendell Wilkie, Republican presidential nominee in 1940.
There has apparently been some speculation about whether or not the award for The Edge of Sadness was actually intended to honor Edwin O’Connor’s more widely reputable novel, The Last Hurrah (1956), a novel about Irish Catholic politicians in Boston (a similar caricature of the Boston brahmins as satirized in fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner John P. Marquand’s novel The Late George Apley). The Last Hurrah had previously been considered for the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 (a year when no award was issued, click here to read my review). Per former Pulitzer Prize administrator, John Hohenberg, the 1962 Fiction Jury also considered Carson McCullers’s Clock Without Hands and William Maxwell’s The Chateau, however they passed up the most discussed work of the year, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey which was regarded by the jury as less of a novel, and more like two segments of an ongoing work. The jury was disappointed in John Steinbeck’s The Winter of our Discontent, John Dos Passos’s Midcentury, and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life.
Notably, in 1962 the Pulitzer Prize faced a public controversy for its biography category selection. The Board of Trustees at Columbia University rejected the Pulitzer Advisory Board for its decision to grant a Pulitzer Prize to Citizen Hearst by W.A. Swanberg apparently because William Randolph Hearst was deemed an unfit figure to be the subject of the award. However, Swanberg later won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for other biographies he wrote.
In its announcement of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize winners, The New York Times included the following amusingly high-falutin note: “Neither the Pulitzer Prize system, nor any system, is infallible, but it usually reflects good standards as well as popular tastes. We can be sure that the jurors do their best to bring to light artistic and human qualities that might otherwise remain obscure.” And in The New York Times Book Review segment on The Edge of Sadness on June 4, 1961, Harvard professor John Kelleher claimed: “To hail this book as the definitive Irish-American middle-class Catholic would do it an injustice” –he judged the theme of the novel to be about a lost man searching for his place and purpose.
Who is Edwin O’Connor?
Edwin O’Connor (1918-1968) was born in Providence, Rhode Island and he spent his early life in Woonsocket, attending public schools and La Salle Academy in Providence before completing his undergraduate work at the University of Notre Dame. After graduation he worked as a radio announcer in a variety of places, including Providence, Palm Beach, Buffalo, and Hartford. During WWII he was a coast guard for three years and worked for the Yankee Network as a writer-producer. He fell in love with the city of Boston while stationed there in World War II.
O’Connor then left his career in radio and became a freelance writer for a variety of magazines and newspapers, as well as scripts for radio and television, but he found his true calling in writing novels. His first novel was The Oracle (1951), about a radio announcer; he then published The Last Hurrah (1956), his most celebrated novel about the Boston mayoral campaign of political boss Frank Skeffington (which won the Atlantic Prize); Benjy (1957), a children’s book; The Edge of Sadness (1961), which won the Pulitzer Prize; a broadway play entitled I Was Dancing (1964); All In The Family (1966), a portrait of an Irish-American New England clan; and a posthumously published collection entitled The Best and the Last of Edwin O’Connor (1970).
Per his obituary in The New York Times, Edwin O’Connor was described as a “delineator of Irish-Americans.” He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 49 in 1968.
Film Adaptation:
- None.
Literary Context in 1961-1962:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1961): awarded to Yugoslavian author Ivo Andrić “for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country.”
- National Book Award (1962): The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestselling novel in 1961 was The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone, followed by Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Also appearing on the list was Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor, and The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck.
- American dramatist Arthur Miller and film star Marilyn Monroe were granted a divorce in Mexico on grounds of incompatibility.
- Grove Press published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the United States 27 years after its original publication in France. It led to numerous obscenity trials.
- Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was published.
- Agatha Christie published Double Sin and Other Stories and The Pale Horse.
- Ian Fleming published Thunderball.
- Robert A. Heinlein published Stranger in a Strange Land.
- Stanisław Lem published Solaris.
- V. S. Naipaul published A House for Mr. Biswas.
- Walker Percy published The Moviegoer.
- J. D. Salinger published Franny and Zooey.
- Irving Stone published The Agony and the Ecstasy.
- Richard Yates published Revolutionary Road.
Did The Right Book Win?
The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor is a decent little novel, but there are at least several novels that would have made for a much more fitting selection for the Pulitzer Prize in 1962, such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.
O’Connor, Edwin. The Edge of Sadness. Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1961.