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James T. KeaneNovember 19, 2024
Doris Grumbach in 1974 (Wikimedia Commons)

When the accomplished novelist, literary critic, biographer and memoirist Doris Grumbach died in 2022, she was given a long and detailed obituary in The New York Times: “Doris Grumbach, Author Who Explored Women’s Plight, Dies at 104.” That and many other obituaries noted Grumbach’s prolific literary output—seven novels and six memoirs—and erudite literary criticism, including work for NPR, The New Republic, PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. They also cited her pioneering role as a prominent author of L.G.B.T. themes in her fiction and memoirs.

What they all missed was another long and productive period in Grumbach’s career as a reviewer, literary critic and essayist for Catholic periodicals, including America, over more than two remarkable decades. Her reviews for America between 1951 and 1972 displayed a startling breadth of knowledge and no small degree of fearlessness. No author, no matter how famous, was exempt from Doris Grumbach’s incisive editorial pen.

Grumbach was born Doris Isaac in New York City in 1918. A precocious student, she began high school at the age of 11. She graduated from New York University in 1939 with a degree in philosophy and went on to get a master’s in medieval literature at Cornell the following year. At Cornell, she met Leonard Grumbach, a doctoral student in neurophysiology, and the two married in 1941.

Both Leonard and Doris Grumbach served during World War II (she in the Naval Women’s Reserve). At the age of 27, Doris experienced a religious epiphany, what she years later described as a “feeling of peace so intense that it seemed to expand into ineffable joy,” and she converted to Catholicism soon after.

After the war, she and Leonard eventually settled in Albany, where they raised four daughters. She became a regular contributor to both America and Commonweal in the 1950s while teaching English at various schools. From 1960 to 1971, Grumbach was a professor of English at the College of St. Rose in Albany. She also published two novels, The Spoil of the Flowers (1962) and The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth (1964), and a 1967 literary biography of Mary McCarthy, The Company She Kept. (McCarthy didn’t like it, and sued Grumbach before the book even came out.)

How did she find her way to America, Commonweal and other Catholic journals? She offered an explanation in a 1960 essay:

In 1948 I was full of brand-new apostolic ardor. I was newly made a Catholic, and I put my strong feelings of gratitude into an article and sent it off to the only Catholic publication I had ever read, America. From this beginning I began to review books, first for America, and then for a variety of Catholic publications. For one of these I was a full-time reviewer, writing an average of 15 reviews a month for two and a half years. Others sent me books on occasion, and in three years I had become fixed into the period of the modern American and British novel. How this came about is still a mystery to me. To each of these publications I had replied, when queried about my area of competency, that my forte was medieval literature with emphasis upon the 14th century and Geoffrey Chaucer. Perhaps it was inevitable and natural that I should therefore be called upon to write authoritatively on modern fiction.

An early article for America in 1951 was an open letter to a former mentor, Margaret Schlauch, who had chosen to “live behind the Iron Curtain” and teach at the University of Warsaw. Grumbach contrasted her own conversion to Catholicism with Schlauch’s embrace of communism, writing in a frank and uncompromising style and with a convert’s zeal:

We worship at opposite altars—yours revised to man and his pitiful, corruptible will, mine to God and His single, unfailing power. Your faith seems to be deep and sincere, your willingness to defend your faith certainly more tested than mine. The tragedy is that you will find your gods to be dust and your faith a gossamer in the cold wind of disillusion that is blowing across the world and will reach you one gray day.

Ouch! She could be equally blunt in her reviews, including of some authors whose fame did not deter her. “Christian humility is a great virtue,” she wrote in America in 1960, “but not, it seems to me, when it becomes the habitual attitude of the book reviewer that the printed word is sacrosanct.” She called Muriel Spark’s 1965 The Mandelbaum Gate “a startling, wholesale failure.” John L’Heureux’s Tight White Collar in 1972 didn’t find much favor either. “What I cannot forgive, the Lord and the author forgive me, is L’Heureux’s thinking that he had here a novel, or the makings of a novel, or even a palatable subject for one,” she wrote. “For myself, and readers like me, Tight White Collar is three or four sizes too small.”

On the other hand, if Doris Grumbach liked you, she really liked you. In 1966, she reviewed Walker Percy’s sophomore effort, The Last Gentleman, and declared it even better than The Moviegoer. (The latter had won the National Book Award in 1962). Other authors who earned her praise over the years fit no clear generalization, including Susan Sontag, Philip Roth and George Orwell. She was eclectic in her tastes and unapologetic about it. “Good criticism,” she wrote in 1960, “has always been the result of an interesting, well-stocked, trained and often eccentric and original mind dealing in disciplined prose with the book assigned to it.”

Grumbach and her husband divorced in 1972, and she began a relationship with Sybil Pike, who would remain her partner until Pike’s death in 2021.

After leaving St. Rose, Grumbach served as the literary editor of The New Republic for several years, and was a columnist for The New York Times Book Review from 1976 to 1983. Her 1979 novel Chamber Music gave her new recognition as a novelist, and was followed by The Missing Person (1981), The Ladies (1984), The Magician’s Girl (1987) and The Book of Knowledge (1995). She also wrote six memoirs and a children’s book. Grumbach taught at numerous colleges and universities after leaving St. Rose, including American University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. For many years, she and Ms. Pike also ran a bookstore in Washington, D.C., and then in Sargentville, Maine.

Her religious journey was a long and complicated one. Born into a non-practicing Jewish family, she became Catholic in her late 20s but began attending various Protestant churches after her divorce. She eventually embraced a sort of non-denominational mysticism, as she described in her 1998 memoir, The Presence of Absence. In that book, she spoke not only of her longing for a second epiphany like that she had experienced at 27, but also for spiritual answers to her struggles with nerve pain. She described finding solace and guidance not only in the Psalms, but in the writings of authors like Dag Hammarskjöld, Thomas Merton and Simone Weil.

Upon Grumbach’s death in 2022, the novelist William Kennedy (Grumbach had delivered the keynote address in 1984 at a celebration in Albany for Kennedy after he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Ironweed) wrote of Grumbach’s unique place in American letters:

When her age silenced her, the literary world lost a grand talent, a vital spirit, and a crackerjack mind with its vast photogenic memory, the likes of which I never encountered in anyone else in this life.

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Behold the Handmaid,” by America’s poetry editor, Joe Hoover, S.J.. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

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