Moon's Progress

MOON GAFFNEY (289 pp.) -- Harry Sylvester--Holt ($2.75).

This novel of New York City life is dedicated to a group of "good Catholic radicals" and to the proposition that the city has too many blinkered Catholic reactionaries. "I like everything about the Church except the people who run it, or try to run it," says a character in Moon Gaffney; "until we become at least as ashamed of our hate as we are of our lust, we Catholics are going to be in a bad way."

Eight years ago, in Tommy Gallagher's Crusade, James T. Farrell beat his readers over the head with a poleax to make much the same point. Novelist Harry Sylvester, born in Brooklyn and schooled at Notre Dame, is considerably subtler as a storyteller, though hardly more graceful as a writer. Aloysius ("Moon") Gaffney is no anti-Semitic bullyboy like Tommy Gallagher, but a young Manhattan Irishman with a Fordham law degree and large horizons. With luck he will soon become an Assemblyman in Albany, and perhaps in time even sit in the big chair in New York's City Hall. He has brains, good looks, Irish wit and good Tammany connections.

But he also happens to have a few "Catholic radical" acquaintances, and though far from a radical himself, he objects when a pugnacious Brooklynite damns Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "filthy Jew advisers." One day Billy Ryan, the neighborhood Tammany boss, looks Moon straight in the eye and thunders, "You and your goddam Communist friends." A few hours later Father Malone angrily orders Moon out of the neighborhood rectory. Moon, who has never knowingly talked to a Communist in his life, recalls that a priest had once warned him that there were elements in the Church guilty of ignorant hate and "the most terrible obscurantism."

To Novelist Sylvester, himself a Catholic, the "terrible obscurantism" is what made some conservative U.S. Catholics pro-Fascist before the war, because they were ready to believe that Mussolini et al. would stamp out Communism. They were also antiliberal, anti-Negro, and anti-Semitic for a number of reasons, including Irish racial snobbism. As fiction, Moon Gaffney is hardly rnore than earnest and competent, but it is most impressive as a blast against bias, false Irish pride and the local little Father Coughlins.

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