... is now available from Ignatius Press. A bit about the book, first published in 1945:
More from Jenkins (who wrote the foreword to this new edition of Dayspring) about Sylvester (1908-1993) in this March 2007 article for First Things:Dayspring: A Novel
by Harry Sylvester
Spencer Bain is a modern man of science, a university anthropologist doing fieldwork in a small New Mexican town. Used to long separations from his wife, a UCLA professor equally dedicated to her career, he is mostly untroubled by his infidelities, and hers; that is, until now.
In order to study the religious practices of the Penitentes, a brotherhood of local men who engage in severe, medieval penances, Bain feigns a conversion to Catholicism and participates in their Lenten observances, including their dramatic public procession on Good Friday.
Nothing in Bain’s skeptical academic training has prepared him for the profound remorse that he begins to experience. Though no sentimentalist with respect to the poor and ignorant who surround him, he cannot help but contrast the simple yet solid lives of the men and women he studies with his own fruitless relationships and those of the jaded, over-sexed sophisticates — the self-proclaimed artists and intellectuals — he considers his peers.
Artistically descriptive of the rugged Southwest and the people who dwell there, the novel also movingly portrays the inner landscape of a man coming to grips with his need for redemption. Author Harry Sylvester masterfully illustrates both the objective reality and the subjective experience of guilt and grace.
“Dayspring is timeless in that it deals with an ordinary man suddenly and shockingly exposed to eternal realities far beyond his experience or comprehension”. — Philip Jenkins, Professor of Humanities, Pennsylvania State University
Forgotten writers often deserve their oblivion: Either they were not all that good in the first place, or their work made sense only in the context of a particular era. Neither applies to Harry Sylvester or his three Catholic novels, Dearly Beloved (1942), Dayspring (1945), and Moon Gaffney. To read them today is to recognize their relevance for modern audiences. In the mid-1940s, a generation ahead of their time, Sylvester's novels were already exploring such themes as Catholic social activism, church involvement in civil rights, Christian mysticism, and Hispanic religious practice.Read the entire piece.
<snip>
Both these novels reflect Sylvester's immersion in the political causes of the 1940s, issues from which he largely escaped in Dayspring, his best novel and a classic of American religious fiction. Like many artists of the time, he spent lengthy periods in New Mexico, which had become wildly fashionable because of the primitivist vogue for Native American cultures. For Sylvester, though, the area was a revelation because it introduced him to the Hispanic religious tradition symbolized by the Penitentes, made nationally famous by Alice Corbin Henderson's book Brothers of Light (1937). While many Americans saw in Hispanic religion merely another tourist attraction, Sylvester found a radically different version of Catholic Christianity, apparently free of the clericalism, bureaucracy, and compromise he so despised. This was palpably not the “Irish-French kind of Catholicism that's managed to bitch the Church up over here. It's why a few people have come here or stay here [in the Southwest], where Catholicism is still pretty close to what it should be.”
<snip>
Harry Sylvester's novels are worth reading for many reasons, not least because they so challenge the widespread sense among younger American Catholics that they are the first to confront the paradoxes created by an institutional church living at once in the world and beyond time. But Dayspring is modern also in the questions it asks about the nature of Catholic Christianity and the tremendous spiritual appeal of the forms of faith found outside the European mainstream. During the 1940s, at a time when other Westerners were seeking enlightenment in the religious mysticism of India, Japan, or Tibet, or in the imagined primitivism of Native America, Sylvester was among the few who grasped the power of the faith in Hispanic spirituality. His openness to hearing those voices is all the more attractive at a time when Catholic numbers are growing so rapidly in the global South and when churches across the United States are being transformed by the Latino presence.
In Harry Sylvester, we find novels of devotion, of social activism, of mystical experience. What else do we need to see all his books back in print?
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