Decapitating the Mormons: Richard Scowcroft’s New Novel | Richard Scowcroft, The Ordeal of Dudley Dean

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Dudley Dean is a forty-year-old befuddled jack-Mormon professor of English. Wife Hannah has left him and married one of his teaching colleagues—a maudlin, oversexed boor named Ashton—and his devout Mormon mother has just died. Dudley returns to Salt Lake City after an absence of twenty years. He buries his mother, quits his teaching job, and decides to winter in the Wasatch while working on a book and angling for new employment. He sets up in the tower of an old East South Temple mansion, and divides his time between Elinore, a Mormon spinster left over from his eighth-grade leatherwork class, and April, a South State coffee-joint waitress with a nice pink bedroom out by the airport. 

The only lingering hang-up is seventeen-year-old son Tad, left behind with ex-wife and new hubby. Dudley’s instincts tell him that he should have a hand in “shaping Tad into the fine man he had it in him to be.” But the last thing he should become, of course, is a messed-up Mormon like his father. The book opens with Tad’s arrival at the Salt Lake Airport to spend Christmas vacation with Dad. Before the holiday is over Dudley is to learn a great deal about his fatherhood, his son, and the part that his atrophied Mormon background wants to play in their relationship. 

The theme of the book, in general, is individuality. Most of the comedy is generated by mistaken ideas of what individuality is, or by lack of respect for the individuality of others. Dudley’s quest for mere rationality (Elinore is a “sex-starved virgin of forty”); Tad’s precocious and subjective imagination (Elinore is “fascinating”); and April’s simple-minded animality (going to bed with Dudley is “just like going to the bathroom”)—these are the comically incomplete approaches to the problem. Tad’s version seems to come closest to the ideal, since Dudley can’t help trying to interest his son in a Mormon girl, and April, at the end, seems ready to fall for the phony tokens of a Mormon courtship. 

The Mormons in the novel have no concept of individuality at all. Individuality to them means simply conformity to the “Truth” of Mormon ism; all deviations are either attacked, ignored, or ridiculed; the only goal is the waters of baptism. Thus the Mormons perform the greatest comic sin in the book: they constantly seek to impose their one-track individuality on others. 

Whenever Mormonism comes up, Scowcroft’s narrative seems to shift gears: from realistic social comedy to direct, generalized satire. The average Mormon is simply not a “rational human being.” Mormons think of people only as “meanings”; they “hang the moral price tag on every experience”; their naivete is “scarcely to be believed”; and they go to their graves, like Dudley’s mother, without ever questioning their lives. These and other negative traits are embodied in Hannah’s sister Bessie and her family, and to a lesser degree in Elinore Alcorn and her maiden aunts. Elinore and her circle try to interest Dudley in a life of drinking sage tea, and Bessie and her tribe descend on Tad and Dudley in a misguided effort to brighten their Christmas by converting Tad and bringing his father back into the fold. 

As the novel progresses it turns increasingly into farce and finally almost collapses under its weight of accumulated scorn. Bessie’s people are, with minor exceptions, a collection of idiots. The standout is son Filmore, a returned missionary so insensitive that he can get himself invited to dinner (his second of the evening), and then accept half of Tad’s steak and half of Dudley’s, because he believes in “sharing the poverty of the Saints.” Wife Hannah, it turns out, has returned to the Church and is now president of her Relief Society; and on New Year’s Eve she and Ashton call to announce that they are “making a little sister for Tad .. . by God,” and that Ashton is going to be baptized. Bessie’s household is piously aflutter over this news, but Dudley (lured over to take the call, apparently) has had it. He respect fully asks them to exclude him from their prayers, and so would anyone. 

Most of these pokes at Mormon life strike me as accurate—considered as criticism. The question is whether Scowcroft’s basically realistic structure holds up under the burden of so many judgments that would seem to be true only in general. At times he seems so obviously out to “get” his Mormon characters that a double standard seems to be operating in his comedy, a somewhat contradictory point of view. The Mormons come in for a drubbing, but Dudley’s bathetic self-pity, Tad’s almost unbearable conceit, and April’s wasted life are portrayed with indulgent good humor. If the epitome of satire, in Dryden’s terms, is “the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place,” then Scowcroft might be accused of decapitating his Mormons with a sledgehammer. 

The problem is that Scowcroft’s Mormons are not “characters” in the sense that, say, April and Tad are characters. His Mormons are too obviously embodiments of the many generalizations “about” Mormonism that lace the book from first to last—some of which I have already quoted. Others include: “The Mormon God is very long-suffering when it comes to listening to prayers”; “Why, when you say no to a Mormon, does he always hear yes}”; “In the Mormon bed, God is always there”; “the schizophrenic combination of cosmopolitanism and provincialism in Mormon society,” etc. As if to compensate for all this footnoting, Dudley is given to say, late in the novel, that “The Mormons aren’t the only ones like this”; and Tad replies, “Yes. Isn’t it sad?” But if this is true, why all the emphasis on these as peculiar Mormon defects in the first place? 

On the whole, Scowcroft has written a skillful and often quite witty novel. The troubling thing is that our novelists, both pro and con, still have this tendency to first “explain” what Mormonism is, and then to construct somewhat wooden characters to fit the generalizations. In The Ordeal of Dudley Dean, the Mormons must dance to the tune of the footnotes, and the result is a slightly incongruous comic structure in which Mormonism is only the dear, demented backdrop against which the meaningful action takes place.

The Ordeal of Dudley Dean. By Richard Scowcroft. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1969, 272 pp. $5.95.