The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic

"We really were happy, and I--I really was a good man.  Here's the kind of joke God plays!  You see me here six months after.  Look at me!  I haven't got an honest hair on my head.  I'm a bad man through and through--that's what I am.  I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere of the good man I used to be.  And, mind you, I never lifted a finger to prevent the change.  I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight.  I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open.  I told myself all the while that I was climbing up-hill instead, but I knew in my heart that it was a lie."

When this novel opens, the protagonist, Theron Ware, is a Methodist minister in upstate New York.  He's just given an inspiring sermon, and he's hoping that he'll snag the crown jewel of ministerial placements, but instead he's assigned to small-town Octavius, a place where congregants are suspicious of multisyllable words and he's warned not to let his wife walk around with flowers in her bonnet.  On top of that, the trustees of the church are intent on squeezing their profit out of the church and out of Theron himself.

Eventually, Theron, a dyed-in-the-wool primitive Methodist, finds himself mixed up with the town's other half, a population of Irish Catholics.  He makes the acquaintance of Father Forbes, the priest, and his friend Dr. Ledsmar, as well as the beautiful redheaded organist Celia Madden.  In despair over the petty ugliness of his own congregation, the Catholics of Octavius open Theron's eyes up to the possibility of another religion and another life.  That religion is not quite Catholicism, but a kind of modernist (for 1896, but recognizable in today's liberal traditions) humanism that regards Theron's Methodism as remarkably quaint and backward.  Celia and Dr. Ledsmar represent two opposing prongs of this intellectual awakening: Celia is a neo-Pagan who plays Chopin like an orgiastic ritual; Ledsmar is an atheist and rationalist suspicious of both Theron's religion and Celia's.  Only Forbes' Catholicism--an empty shell of ritual--seems right to Dr. Ledsmar.

For Theron, these acquaintances offer an intellectual awakening.  They introduce him to Renan, to George Sand, to all sorts of writers and thinkers he has never heard of.  Slowly and surely, he finds himself drifting away from the church and reconsidering the Methodist beliefs that have defined his life.

The Damnation of Theron Ware sets itself up as a novel of ideas: fundamentalism vs. liberalism, Methodism vs. Catholicism, Christianity vs. paganism, religion vs. science.  In the end, though, I think all of that is a kind of feint; Theron Ware is not a novel of ideas, but a novel about the way we use ideas to justify and conceal our human instincts at their basic and most tawdry.  Theron's embrace of Celia's paganism can hardly be extricated from the embarrassing crush he has on her.  He blames his own drifting away from his wife Alice on her redoubled fundamentalism, rather than his interest in another woman.  Is his ardor for Celia produced by the ideas she embodies, or is it the other way around?

The Damnation of Theron Ware is neatly and effectively constructed: for a long time I was right there with Theron as he grew out of the simple-mindedness of his youthful religion, and I found myself rooting for his relationship with Celia.  But little by little, Frederic punctures the myth that Theron's constructed around his life by abandoning his point of view long enough to let us see that each of his newfound friends--Forbe, Ledsmar, Celia--actually thinks Theron is a pathetic boor.  By the climax, in which Theron follows--or stalks--Celia on her way to New York City, we see the truth just barely before Theron does, that he has become pathetic, abandoning his wife to chase a woman that doesn't love him.  There's no romance in it, no big ideas or revelations, just the small and repulsive tragedy of a horndog who can't get his shit together.

In his review, Brent wonders if the story is a "morality tale," but if it is I think it's a moral of the most basic kind.  Don't be a pretentious dick, and don't treat your wife like garbage.  On that, at least, the Methodists, the Catholics, the neo-Pagans, and the rationalists, I hope, can agree.