By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: This is part two of a three part series about how the Holy Cross Sisters were the face of the Notre Dame community in the Wild, Wild, West.)
The Holy Cross Sisters brought wonderful things to my home state (Utah) and my home town (Ogden) when they arrived 150 years ago in 1875. One of them was Notre Dame.
Their guidance, friendship, and love proved invaluable to at least three members of the fledgling Notre Dame family living far from the shimmer of the Golden Dome. My last post discussed one of the first Catholic teachers in Utah, Florian DeVoto. In 1897, Florian had a son he named Bernard Augustine DeVoto—Utah’s first Pulitzer prize winner.
Like his father, Bernard eventually had his own profound interactions with Holy Cross and Notre Dame, in the form of a kindred Utah spirit and fellow writer named Sister Madeleva Wolff.
Sister Madeleva and Bernard
Stegner summarizes Bernard DeVoto with a captivating list of words: “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running scared all his life, often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.”
Bernard grew up estranged from the dominant Mormon faith. For a time, he was the only boy enrolled in the all-girls Sacred Heart Academy run by the Holy Cross Sisters. And at Ogden High School he was mocked for aspiring to the unusual (at least in Ogden) vocation of writing.
In 1920 he told a friend, “Do not forget that at best, I am a spore in Utah, not adapted to the environment, a maverick, who may not run with the herd, unbranded, given an ill name. These people are not my people, their God is not mine.”
As his writing career started, he penned two venomous articles for H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury that offended pretty much everyone at home. Among other well-crafted but derogatory jabs, Bernard proclaimed, “Civilized life does not exist in Utah. It has never existed there. It never will exist there.”
During this difficult time, while Bernard grappled with being an outsider in his own home, he found refuge in only two places.
He hiked and camped in the Wasatch foothills and mountains just east of Ogden, calling them “an oasis, a garden in the desert, with the peaks splendid above it—lines that sweep the eye irresistibly onward, distances and colors that carry the breath with them, the mountains in which the Gods of the Utes walked in the cool of the day.”
Bernard’s other primary form of escape involved books. He read everything he got his hands on and even took a part time job at Spargo’s Book Store in downtown Ogden. Fittingly, he met Sister Madeleva there, and they discovered their mutual love for Western landscapes and literature.
Madeleva—born in Wisconsin as Mary Evaline Wolff in 1887—joined the Holy Cross Sisters after attending Saint Mary’s College and acquiring her lifelong love for poetry. Her chosen religious name was itself a poetic combination of Mary, Magdalene, and Eve.
After earning a master’s degree in English from Notre Dame in 1918, the Holy Cross Sisters sent her to teach at the Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden. A few years later, they appointed her president of the College of Saint Mary of the Wasatch nestled in the foothills of Salt Lake City.
She called her seven years in Utah her “happiest mission.” The Beehive State was a muse for Madeleva’s poetry. In her 1959 autobiography My First Seventy Years, she described her arrival in Ogden four decades earlier. “I was elated,” she wrote. “Mountains at last! Deserts, Sagebrush, and the West! Oh, Pioneers!”
In a letter to a friend she explained, “I am personally in love with the world of growing, beautiful things. My best recreations are hikes but not on beaten trails. I love ‘The road that leads to God knows where.’ My hiking stick…bears upon his stout thorny body records of many miles by mountain and river.”
In 1934, the Holy Cross Sisters called Madeleva back to Notre Dame and made her the president of their flagship Saint Mary’s College. Between administrative duties, she authored several acclaimed books of poetry, and did postdoctoral work at Oxford under literary luminaries like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Lewis described one of her books as “wholly delightful.”
My personal favorite of her many poems, included in a 1947 collection, addresses a subject she also likely discussed with her Ogden friend Bernard DeVoto—Utah’s mountains and deserts:
In Desert Places
God has a way of making flowers grow.
He is both daring and direct about it.
If you know half the flowers that I know,
You do not doubt it.
He chooses some gray rock, austere and high,
For garden-plot, traffics with sun and weather;
Then lifts an Indian paintbrush to the sky,
Half flame, half feather.
In desert places it is quite the same;
He delves at petal-pans, divinely, surely
Until a bud too shy to have a name
Blossoms demurely.
He dares to sow the waste, to plow the rock.
Though Eden knew His beauty and His power.
He could not plant in it a yucca stalk,
A cactus flower.
Madeleva recounts her 1919 initial meeting with Bernard in My First Seventy Years: “On my first errand downtown, I stopped at Spargo’s drug and book store. Bernard DeVoto, a junior at Harvard, was working there for the summer…The first eight years of his school life he spent at Sacred Heart Academy. He had the questionable distinction of being the only little boy admitted to this select academy of young ladies. I cannot say that Bernard relished the privilege. When I met him, he was in the process of achieving Harvard’s intellectual, maturity, and writing the first of his novels…The plans of more than one of his projected books we took apart and put together again across the bookstore counter at different times in Ogden…”
They were an odd couple but an interesting match. Both were young, but she was a decade older than him, and more settled in her vocation and life path. She was probably like the kind and supportive big sister he’d never had.
After their initial encounters, DeVoto wrote to Madeleva in 1925 when she published her first book. He told her it gave him great pleasure and although he was a “renegade Catholic,” he thought her writing was good for both literature and piety. He said he had instructed his publisher to send her a copy of his first novel and asked for her input.
Despite their distance in physical geography and life circumstances, the two writers remained friends and stayed in touch. Although Bernard never had much good to say about religion or religious people, in a 1935 letter to Katherine Grant Sterne, he called Sister Madeleva “a talented scholar, a poet of some quality, an accomplished critic, and a woman of wit and urbanity.”
Four years after Bernard’s sudden death in 1955, Madeleva wrote affectionately about her adopted Ogden little brother, “Through all his turbulence of mind and soul we remained friends. He wrote me once, ‘I am one of that unhappy band whose minds refuse the allegiance without which their hearts will never be at rest.’ His last letter came a matter of weeks before his death.”
Next week, some more contemporaneous encounters between Ogden (and other Utah) boys and the Holy Cross Sisters.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
