By Walter Miller Jr.
Apparently, A Canticle for Liebowitz, published in 1959, “stands for many readers as the best novel ever written in the genre”. This is not atypical of the accolades applied to Walter Miller Jr’s novel by the most prestigious critics and publications in the industry, e.g. The New York Times Book Review and the Chicago Tribune Review of Books. Not all critics were so energized. But it’s hard to argue with a Hugo Award for Best Fiction if you’re looking for evidence of literary stature. Personally, I couldn’t read it – I tried a number of times. I still haven’t figured out exactly why it didn’t engage me but that’s neither here nor there. We have to report it as a foundational pillar of the genre.
The Wikipedia plot summary is extremely helpful. It reveals a rich imagination and 2000 years of post-apocalyptic history. A lethal social movement of anti-intellectualism lashes out at the technology and civilization that brought on the nuclear war that snuffed out the lives of so many. Books are burned. Libraries, laboratories and universities are laid waste. Anyone who can read is killed. Civilization evaporates and 10,000 years of culture and knowledge flickers out. A Dark Age ensues.
Miller’s brilliant plot superstructure relies on the monastic tradition of the Catholic Church. The story opens 600 years after the martyrdom of St. Liebowitz. He was a Jewish electrical engineer working for the military during the apocalyptic war known as the “Flame Deluge.” After the war he hoarded and hid books and any form of knowledge from sure destruction at the hands of the rampaging mobs – the self-named “Simpletons.” Liebowitz found refuge in a Cistercian monastery in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert, not far from where he had worked. In time, he joined the monastery, took his vows and became a monk. He got permission to found an order to protect and preserve the shreds and vestiges of the old knowledge that he had collected since the Deluge.
Literary analysts have revealed at least two prominent themes explored by Miller. He has a theory of cyclic history or recurrence. In 2000 years after the Flame Deluge, society progresses from destruction, through dark age and renaissance a few times. Technologically – in one iteration – the reborn civilization surpasses the 20th century. And consistent with the monastic framework, the story is peopled with monks, pilgrims, wanderers, abbots, friars and popes – always focused on the Albertian Order (Liebowitz’ legacy) and its calling to preserve the old knowledge. Another theme is that of the dialogue between church and state or – alternatively – “the conflicts between the scientist’s search for truth and the state’s power”.
As a tail gunner and radio operator in a B-25 bomber in World War II, Miller participated in the spectacular violence and destruction of the bombing of the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino. The savagery of that event, and probably its symbolism and ethical ambiguity, marked Miller for the rest of his life. He had frequent bouts of depression. One observer said that he had PTSD for thirty years before they had a name for it. Nonetheless he was a successful author, writing short stories for magazines, and he was a scriptwriter for a TV show. ‘Canticle’ was actually Miller’s second Hugo Award. The first was for The Darstfeller in 1955.
Miller’s experiences during World War II are imprinted throughout A Canticle for Liebowitz. Miller was an engineer in the army before he flew bombing missions over Italy. He reflected on the Monte Cassino bombing as a stand-in for the destruction of civilization and civil society. He converted to Catholicism; faith and its dialect with scientific advancement are an undercurrent of Canticle.
Depression and ‘writer’s block’ overtook Miller after the publication of Canticle. He became a recluse. He had married Anna Louise Becker in 1945 and he divorced and remarried her in 1953. Anna’s health declined and she died in 1995. William Miller Jr. died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound five months later.
Event Horizon 