Another Sighting

More than a year ago, you may recall, I began to collect on this blog an unfinished compendium of literary references to Unitarianism - for, given that this is one of the few institutions in the world with which I have cast my lot sufficiently to feel that it is in some ways very nearly an extension of myself, it is also one of the few whose mere invocation is enough to fill me with a frisson of ego-validation.

I write today to report another finding to add to the catalogue. And this one was all the more gratifying for having been unearthed slowly, by inches, blowing off the dust as I went, reconstructed from its fragments like the skeleton of an ancient saurian.

I give you Wallace Stegner's beautiful, aching, justly-revered novel Crossing to Safety. I am finding as I read it, as many others have in the past, that there are so many enchanting and insightful things about this book. The vast majority of them have nothing to do with Unitarianism. But one that very likely does is the father of the character Charity, a professor of religious history named George Barnwell Ellis.

I am telling you that this fictional G.B. Ellis is a fictional Unitarian - another one to add to the pantheon, then, where we have already apotheosized Pyle from The Quiet American and several unnamed students mentioned in one sentence in a John Updike novel.

And since he is the father of one of the novel's major characters - the wife in the second wealthy couple who pose a counterpoint to our more hard-up protagonists - then we can by extension (for Unitarians are constantly claiming people by methods of this sort) say that she and her whole family are Unitarians too.

My evidence? He is the patriarch of a Boston Brahmin family. They are reported to live within blocks of the eternal resting place of Cambridge mainstay and oft-claimed Unitarian bard Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. ("Superior people never [...] have to be shown Longfellow's grave," observed Marianne Moore's very-Brahmin patriarch in her poem "Silence" - presumably because they are already so familiar with it.)

But so what? Not all Boston Brahmins are Unitarians. Marianne Moore's starchy patriarch in the family, for instance, was a Presbyterian.

But Dr. George Barnwell Ellis is more than just a Boston Brahmin. He is a Boston Brahmin with three names. He is described as a professor of religious history at Harvard Divinity School. And - the clincher - he has devoted his life exclusively to the study of obscure, statistically-negligible heretical Christian sects that flourished in the European dark ages.

Could this character be a nod toward anyone other than George Huntston Williams? And even if he is, is it possible that such a person, possessing the above-named character traits and having come of age in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, could be anything other than a Unitarian?

Friends, I am chalking this one up as another tally on the list.

Does this matter? Is it interesting? Enough to me, at least, to justify the short time I have spent in writing this post.