We have a new pope! But you knew that already. After a month of joining in the media frenzy over the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV, this column is glad to return to its bread and butter: obscure literary figures with at least a tenuous connection to Catholicism. It’s clickbait, we know, but ya dance with the one that brung ya.
When reading through our archives on America’s coverage of F. Scott Fitzgerald last month, I kept encountering a name that was unfamiliar to me: Riley Hughes. He wrote about Fitzgerald at length for America, but I soon discovered that he wrote about everything at length—not just for America either, but for The Catholic World, Catholic Standard, Commonweal, Four Quarters, The Saturday Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (look it up!), Books on Trial and Columbia, the magazine of the Knights of Columbus, for whom he wrote a book review column that lasted for 20 years. It is not an exaggeration to say that between 1940 and 1980, Riley Hughes reviewed well over 1,000 books for different journals.
Along the way, he also wrote a number of books himself, including a history of the Coast Guard Academy, a fictionalized biography of Bishop Simon Gabriel Bruté of Indianapolis, Frontier Bishop, a textbook on writing, Today & Tradition and a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, The Hills Were Liars. He also edited a number of books, including a collection of short stories by American Catholic writers, All Manner of Men.
I am reading The Hills Were Liars at the moment, and it is a wild ride—the story of eight survivors a century after a nuclear war, seeking to reestablish human communities and restore a fledgling church. Think “By The Waters of Babylon” meets A Canticle for Leibowitz. At first I suspected Hughes owed much to the latter for his inspiration, then discovered The Hills Were Liars was published in 1955, four years before Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Canticle.
Born Edward Riley Hughes in New Haven, Conn., in 1914, Hughes attended Providence College in Providence, R.I., where he was editor of the literary quarterly and of Veritas, the school yearbook, in 1937, writing book reviews for The Providence Journal all the while. After receiving his master’s degree in English from Brown University in 1939, he spent two years working as an educational supervisor for the Connecticut Works Progress Administration. He returned to Providence College as director of public relations and a professor of English in 1942, also teaching at the Rhode Island College of Pharmacology.
In 1946, Hughes became an associate professor of English in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. In 1960, he founded the Georgetown University Writers Conference, an organization he would direct until his death in 1981 that sponsored yearly conferences and workshops at Georgetown and elsewhere, featuring distinguished authors from around the country.
Hughes’s first article for America appeared in 1942, a review of Elliott Arnold’s The Commandos, a novel presented as both “a love story of the war” and a factual account of the training of soldiers in World War II. Hughes didn’t mince words: “In essaying both fact and fiction between the same covers, Mr. Arnold has failed spectacularly in both.” Nor did Hughes spare more famous authors. In a 1944 essay comparing Henry David Thoreau and the British sculptor and typeface creator (of Perpetua and of Gill Sans) Eric Gill, Hughes wasn’t afraid to take aim at an American idol:
The clear line that rings Walden Pond and bounds much of Thoreau’s experience is deceptive. There is clarity in his prose, and a sort of clarity and integrity in his life and action, but at the base of things lies muddiness of thought.
Hughes’s literary chops earned him some great review assignments in the years to come, including a 1947 take on the debut short story collection of a new author on the scene. “With this first book J. F. Powers steps into the front rank of contemporary American writers,” Hughes wrote in America of The Prince of Darkness And Other Stories. Essays on Cardinal Newman followed, as did reviews of books by William Saroyan and Evelyn Waugh and a dozen Irish short story writers.
In 1946, when the great missionary saint Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini was canonized, Hughes switched hats and penned a poem for America in her honor, “Sancta Francesca”:
Now Peter in his throbbing chair
Is carried on a surge of shoulders.
Now Benedicite! and the translatable smile.
The great painted testament whips forward.
Joyous and jaunty is a saint under sail
Coming to home port in sunset waters.
Damn! say gargoyles. Now hell is fresh raked
And void trembles and darkness shudders.
Sancta! In new minted silver shrills the word.
Now Bread leaps and Flesh quickens.
Clamor is flattened. Steel grinds steel
In antiphon. Armies and battlements
Flap in the wind like paper. Sancta!
Sancta Francesca, ora pro nobis!
Over the course of his life, Hughes seems to have made the acquaintance of everyone in the literary universe, Catholic or not. His papers at Georgetown include correspondence with Saul Bellow, William Blatty, John Dos Passos, Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., Paul Horgan, John Mayfield, Eugene McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Sean O’Faolain, Katherine Anne Porter, J. F. Powers, J.B. Priestley, Maisie Ward Sheed, Wilfrid Sheed, Dinah Shore (!!!), C.P. Snow, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty, among many others.
In 1940, Hughes married the author and literary critic Josephine Nicholls, his classmate at Brown University, from which she got her doctorate in English. (Her conversion story can be found in Gilbert Otto’s 1954 book These Came Home: The Odyssey of Fifteen Converts.) They had four children, all of whom became writers or professors, including the poets Hildred Crill and Winifred Hughes.
“Catholic themes were central to his work, as the Catholic press was to his career,” Winifred Hughes said of her father in an email to America. She added:
He was my first mentor; my first published words when I was a teenager appeared under his byline in the monthly book review column he wrote for Columbia. As a child, I thought it was perfectly normal to have boxes of books for review come in the mail nearly every day. Our house was filled with books of all sorts; I guess I began to read them in self-defense. By the time I was in graduate school, I found that he had moved his working desk into the living room, because his small study was overflowing with books on every possible surface, literally from floor to ceiling.
Riley Hughes retired from Georgetown in 1980, having taught English and journalism for 34 years. He died on March 8, 1981, at the age of 66. Some of his final publications, in the aforementioned Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, were short stories about detectives, including one titled “Crime of Omission.” To the end, Riley Hughes never met a genre he didn’t like.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Pomegranate,” by Gerald McCarthy. 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:
The history (and future) of covering conclaves
Remembering Peru’s literary master, Mario Vargas Llosa
A century later, how do we see F. Scott Fitzgerald?
The teaching legacy of Ladislas Orsy, S.J.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
