Utica’s Frederic a well-kept secret
Originally published July 1, 2000

By Dr. Eugene Paul Nassar
Guest columnist

Not many Uticans know just how good a writer our own Harold Frederic really was. F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to Sinclair Lewis in 1921 felt that Frederic’s “The Damnation of Theron Ware” (1896, available as a Penguin paperback) was one of the great American novels, an opinion seconded by Edmund Wilson in the ’60’s, and a verdict with which I would agree now more than a century after its publication.

Frederic was born in 1856 in Utica and brought up on South Street between Seymour and Miller, the street where he also attended grammar school and Methodist church services. He would go on to the Advanced School on Elizabeth and Charlotte, and then find employment at the “Utica Observer” newspaper, where by the age of 24 in 1880, he rose to the editorship.

As a young man Frederic might well have experienced what his character in his masterpiece, the Rev. Theron Ware, experiences: culture shock in admiring interaction with the leaders of the immigrant Irish community and its Catholicism. Frederic moved on in 1882 to a newspaper editorship in Albany, and then in 1884 to an assignment as foreign reporter for the “New York Times,” based in London, where he made his fame. Before his death in 1898 at the age of 42, he had written a dozen novels and volumes of short stories, half of which were set in the Mohawk Valley.

In “The Damnation of Theron Ware” (called, significantly, “Illumination,” in the English edition), the young married Methodist minister is enchanted, first, by the conversation of the rather free-thinking, liberal, Irish Catholic priest, Father Forbes (suggested perhaps by Frederic’s lifelong friend, Father Edward Terry of St. John’s Church in Utica), then by the aestheticism of the beautiful, redheaded Irish church organist, Celia Madden (based slightly perhaps on prominent Utican Thomas McQuade’s daughter, Nellie), and finally, by the scientific materialism of Dr. Ledsmar (who does not seem to have any local source).

Theron Ware is perhaps to be applauded for wanting to extend his range of knowledge and experience through these three new acquaintances, but, alas, he has not sufficient restraint or self-control to hold on to what good he has in his life and overreaches himself in chasing his fantasies.

Frederic has sympathy for Theron Ware, is quite aware of the limitations of Ware’s three tempters, and is finally perhaps most taken with the humane tendencies of Sister Soulsby, a tent evangelist, who is part huckster, part sympathetic soul. The novel is subtle and powerful, and in its ironies and ambiguities, reflective of life’s complexities. Utica has great reason to be proud of this native son, who is a major writer, thinker, and storyteller.

Dr. Eugene Paul Nassar is professor emeritus of English and director of the Ethnic Heritage Studies Center at Utica College. He lives in Utica.

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