Our hopes for early glory fail,
The causes that we fought for die;
Still avidly His Cross we hail,
In silhouette against the sky.— Charles A. Coulombe, “To Gary Potter.”
GARY POTTER has died; these lines are among the hardest I have ever written. Amongst Traditional Catholics — certainly of that small number who are also interested in the Church’s social teachings — he was a Patriarch. He was a mentor to me in many ways, and I hardly know where to begin in describing him. The bare facts of his obituary are impressive in themselves. Coming to consciousness during World War II as the son of Missourian parents relocated to California’s Bay Area, his whole life might be characterised as a search for Truth.
As a teenager in San Francisco, he fell in with the Beats — Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginzberg, and the rest. In fact, Kerouac immortalised him as a nameless teenager in The Dharma Bums. Now, Wikipedia, the endless source of truth, tells us that the Beat Generation was motivated thusly: “The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.” While the last two had little attraction for young Potter, the others did — and in a sense were with him the rest of his life. Certainly, he would always retain a sympathy for the unconventional, the non-conformist, and the underdog. As the son of two 1940s Greenwich Village actor-Bohemians, this was a side of him I found most congenial.
Gary travelled South to Pasadena, California, to attend the Pasadena Playhouse. There he gained an undying love of theatre and cinema and the lead in a performance of the Alcestis of Euripides. But he also met a fellow student named Virginia Ruger, from Mason City, Iowa. Their extended lunches at Ernie Junior’s Taco House became a passionate romance, and Gary would not forget her. But the quest for reality led him to desire something more “authentic” than the life of an actor.
Gary joined the Merchant Marine, which brought him a great many adventures. But one day, on a tropical beach, he read a passage of Hemingway’s — “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” As he was fast feeling his youth pass by him, he left the Merchant Marine and moved to the City of Lights.
There he reunited with some of his old Beat friends, and soon frequented various literary circles. But France was still in the throes of reaction to the Algerian defeat, and it was the circles of the French Catholic and Royalist Right whose membership attracted him. Henri Massis, Louis Salleron, Jacques Hérissay, Gilbert Tournier, Pierre Masquelier, Marshal Weygand, Marshal Alphonse Juin, Colonel Rémy, Gustave Thibon, Michel de Saint-Pierre, Gilbert Tournier, and many more such figures. He came to know men who had known Charles Maurras and became himself a man of the Right. But his conversion to the French throne began his conversion to the Catholic altar — and it was here, in Paris, that he would first dip his finger into the holy water font.
He returned to the United States, and in 1966 became a founding editor of the fledgling journal Triumph. Wedding the enchanting Iowan he had met in Pasadena, he and Virginia settled briefly in New York, and then moved to Washington, DC. The magazine was and is unique in American Catholic history, although possibly closest to the 1950s journal, Integrity. It was an all-star cast of American Catholic thought, and in the following decade challenged — albeit unsuccessfully — the directions in which American Church, State, and Culture were headed in an integrally Catholic manner, drawing upon Catholic Conservative writers from many nationalities and traditions. In a way, this experience internalized a sort of Catholic Cosmopolitanism in Gary himself.
After the magazine folded, Gary pursued a number of Catholic and Conservative political and literary efforts; by 1987, he had a regular column in the Wanderer. In that year, my first book, Everyman Today Call Rome was published. Gary gave it a glowing review, which in turn secured its success — at least in Catholic terms. Obviously I had to meet the man when next I would be in DC. I wrote him, and he extended an invitation to meet him at his office.
Fittingly, this turned out to be located at Confederate Memorial Hall, 1322 Vermont Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Gary introduced me to John Edward Hurley, then president of the association that ran the Hall, and a redoubtable figure in his own right. From that time on, Gary would introduce me to an unforgettable cast of characters, some of whom became good friends in their own right: John Wisner, Fritz Wilhelmsen, Farley Clinton, William Marshner, Thomas Molnar, Terry Boyle, Solange Hertz, Pat Buchanan, Ann Sheridan, Robert Hickson, Stephen Kerr, Herb Porras, and a host of others.
But his many interesting connexions were far from the most interesting thing about Gary Potter. In himself, he seemingly contained the Catholic world. He championed in Washington any number of relatively obscure and persecuted Catholic figures, from Equatorial Guinea’s Archbishop Rafael Nze Abuy to Rwanda’s King Kigeli V. French Legitimists, Spanish Carlists, Portuguese Miguelists and Integralists, British Neo-Jacobites and Distributists, Austrian Monarchists and Dollfussites, White Russians and on and on — all found a home in his heart and mind. He loved both Orestes Brownson and the Catholic Worker. In a word, in both thought and action he was quite simply the most pan-Catholic man I have ever known. His wealth of knowledge was incomparable.
But in addition to all of that, he was quite simply fun. In the earlier years of our friendship, he and his darling wife, Virginia, were amazing party givers. Any time I was in Washington until he left the City, there was no question of where I had to stay whenever I visited. For a while he was part of a group of Catholics that lunched weekly at the Supreme Court cafeteria; for many years, he was a leading light at Old St. Mary’s Church when the Traditional Latin Mass was revived there.
In almost forty years of friendship, we had a great many adventures, and a book would be needed to chronicle them. One thinks of the time the son of a liquor store owner offered us then-illegal cigars simply on the basis of our conversation as we shopped; there was prowling Paris with him before and after the 1993 Chartres Pilgrimage, or the toast-filled conferences in Los Angeles, El Paso, and Chicago. Watching “The Last Emperor” with him, I remarked that the film’s depiction of a 1930s formal party in Manchukuo might have been — save for the preponderance of Asians — reproduced in any major city on the planet in that decade. “Indeed,” he said, “it was called Western Civilisation — and was really worthwhile!”
Despite the fact that so many efforts he had been involved with did not realise the hopes of those who started them, Gary never lost hope for the future. Deeply rooted in history and literature as he was, he knew that neither seeming victory nor defeat are the final word in this life, and that both are transitory. What mattered was to keep every striving to be loyal and true to Him Who is Truth itself. Without a doubt, his many talents and gifts could have been employed in earthly gain, and I for one cannot doubt that he would have been marvellously successful in anything he put his mind to. But instead, he dedicated himself to proclaiming truths the world did not want to hear, but God had long since declared to be so. This included. In his last decades, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
As the years went by, after having been a fixture at the St. Benedict Center Conferences as emcee, he yielded that position to this writer, as he in turn has since yielded it to Mike Church. His last appearance would be in 2018, the same year this writer moved to Austria. Gary still lived in the old apartment on Mintwood Place in DC; there he would take care of Virginia until in March of 2020 COVID forced them out of their home to a new house in Frederick, Maryland next to their daughter Veronica, Son-in-Law, and Grandsons. There Virginia died, surrounded by her family, and mourned deeply by all of us who knew her. In August of 2021, I was fortunate enough to spend a last overnight at his place in Maryland. It was an extremely valedictory visit, as we both knew there was a good chance it woud be our last time. So it has proved to be.
