Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  On his return to London a year later, Burns revived his public-speaking assignments proclaiming the revival of pan-European Catholicism; he would later compare proselytising to the work of a ‘secret agent in a foreign land, carried out with a mixture of excitement and dread of self-betrayal’. Enlisted by the Catholic Evidence Guild, an organisation of lay volunteers, Burns campaigned with the missionary zeal he had learnt from the Jesuits, convinced of the truth of his faith, and happy to take on hecklers.

  They included equivalent fanatics from the Protestant Alliance and the Rationalist Association. ‘With their bowler hats and mackintoshes and loud rasping voices, I imagined them as KGB men,’ Burns later recalled. The Guild had been founded in 1918, the year after the Russian Revolution.

  It was through the Guild that Burns met his first employers, an Australian called Frank Sheed and his English wife, Maisie Ward. The couple were not only street-corner evangelists, but also ran a successful family publishing firm. Burns carried publishing in his blood. His great uncle James was a Catholic convert who had published the works of Newman under the imprint Burns & Oates.

  While there was no family succession to the firm because James Burns’s son became a priest, Tom Burns had always revered the memory of his great uncle and dreamed of one day bringing the Burns family back into the business. Burns cut his own literary teeth as a commissioning editor before a prompt promotion to manager with Sheed & Ward, whose owners had identified the commercial potential of the growing Catholic revival and its engagement with the mainstream of literary and political debate.

  Soon after joining the publishing house, Burns pulled off a coup, securing the rights in 1926 to Belloc’s A Companion to H.G. Wells’ Outline of History. The book formed part of a heated debate between Belloc – one of the literary icons and father figures of the Catholic revival – and Wells, the atheist who gave utopian visions precedence over spiritual realities.

  Burns had first met Belloc when he was still a schoolboy. He had read Belloc’s The Path to Rome and then written to the author for advice on how to cross the Pyrenees on foot, the subject of another book in which he combined a Catholic instinct for pilgrimage with an explorer’s love for adventure through travel. Belloc had responded to the young man’s enquiry by inviting him to a meeting at the Reform Club. There he drew sketch maps of mountain paths and recommended an inn on the Spanish–French border for accommodation.

  Within minutes of entering Spain, Burns found himself hopelessly lost in the mountains. He lacked a compass, and Belloc’s instructions proved an inadequate reference point for the plethora of paths which seemed to straggle in all directions. Burns followed a path that ran parallel to a stream and eventually came across what he took to be a guardian angel – a woman leading a donkey laden with firewood, on her way to the nearby village. There, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, Burns found a religious procession forming, led by a priest wrapped in a golden chasuble and protected by a canopy under which he held a large communion host in a monstrance.

  Burns picked up a candle and accompanied the other men of the village as they walked slowly behind the priest through the cobbled streets, in a murmured litany of hymns and prayer. It was the feast of Corpus Christi, one of the great events of the Catholic calendar. And on this, his first visit to Spain, Burns was enthralled by the folklore and the strong undercurrent of mysticism which he had felt was blended as nowhere else.

  He spent the rest of his time in the Pyrenees travelling through nearby villages with a troupe of performing dogs and their owners. Their most popular act had a terrier dressed up as a priest witnessing a wedding between two other dogs dressed as bride and groom. The central joke had the ‘bride’ repeatedly straying from the marriage service and collapsing on a nuptial bed with her hind legs in the air, before being pulled back to the ceremony by the ‘priest’. Thus did Spain unravel itself with its unique blend of piety, sensuality and anarchic irreverence. Reflecting on that period in his memoirs, Burns identified a foreshadowing of critical moments in his life by intimations that were not recognised as such at the time, but which came to find a place in a pattern as the years went by. He called his schoolboy Pyrenean adventure the first Spanish prologue.

  After Belloc came other ‘names’ which Burns attracted to his growing publisher’s list. The Catholic literary icon G.K. Chesterton offered Burns a book of verses, Our Lady of the Sorrows, and later a book of essays. On the rare occasion that G.K. was neither on a ritual drinking binge with Belloc nor cloistered with his wife at their house in Beaconsfield, Chesterton invited Burns to take a taxi ride with him through central London. As the cab passed the Cenotaph, G.K. cut short their conversation and in silence raised his hat to salute the memorial to Britain’s war dead. Like the portraits of the old Stonyhurst boys who had won the VC, the image of Chesterton’s tribute would for ever remain in Burns’s memory as an example of how English Catholics could both defend their faith and be loyal patriots at the same time. G.K. had been one of Burns’s idols during his schooldays and was to remain so for decades, his writing – so it seemed to his young publisher – as light and dexterous and timeless as a coracle.

  And yet perhaps the most innovative if controversial of Burns’s early stable of authors was Eric Gill, the woodcutter and sculptor whose writings and works of art came to have a defining influence on numerous Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s. Burns was seventeen when he visited Gill for the first time, the sculptor’s junior by twenty-four years, but the gap seemed to narrow as they found common ground on matters of faith and art. Gill and his family were living in a community of other artists and craftsmen first at Ditchling, in Sussex. They later moved to Pigotts, near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, where Burns became a frequent visitor as publisher and friend. ‘Pigotts came to be a weekend home-from-home for me,’ Burns later recalled. ‘In those years one was alert to everything that life had to offer, negotiating a minefield of ideas and emotions in a no-man’s-land between opposed trenches: those of my faith and those of the world outside. Pigotts seemed to me a safe billet if ever there was one.’

  By the early 1930s Burns was living in Glebe Place, off the King’s Road, Chelsea, near his friend Harman Grisewood, a BBC announcer who was destined to rise high in the Corporation. A contemporary of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, Grisewood’s cocktail parties were immortalised in Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies as those given in ‘basement flats by spotty announcers’, although the author may have also been thinking, less generously, of John Heygate, a BBC news editor he held responsible for the break-up of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner. A letter survives from this period giving a sense of how Burns enjoyed life outside his working hours. It is written by Grisewood to David Jones, the Welsh artist and writer whom Burns had befriended at Eric Gill’s and added to his growing Catholic network. While the subject of the letter is the advice Grisewood wants to give Jones about book writing, the BBC man struggles to concentrate in the presence of Burns, who appears to be in a state of woman-induced euphoria: ‘… Tom is dancing a tremendous dance and his room strewn with rejected white ties, and enigmatically, fragments of a charming crystal necklace’.

  By the early- to mid-1930s several of the generation that had celebrated a cult of youth in the 1920s as a band of pleasure-seeking bohemians had become increasingly dispersed. But if, as D.J. Taylor has put it, something of the ‘original spark’ had gone out of the Bright Young Things, turning the one-time fanatics of the party-going scene into jaded veterans, the Catholics among them still seemed to flourish in a network that managed to accommodate both success and spiritual anxiety.

  While Burns pursued his publishing career, building up an impressive list of authors, his best school friend Henry John was thrown into emotional turmoil by the intense, if platonic, friendship he had formed with his mentor Fr D’Arcy and his struggle to cope with the obligations of celibacy imposed on his training to be a Jesuit priest. In 1934 John abandoned the Jesuit order and embarked on a series of doomed affai
rs with women. By the summer of 1935 John had fallen in love with Olivia Plunket Greene, one of the more enduring survivors of the Bright Young Person society.

  A complex personality, Plunket Greene had left a trail of shattered loves behind her, including Evelyn Waugh, and continued to attract men like moths to a light. She mirrored the young John with her tortured mixture of repressed sexuality and religious faith. The girl who was happy to party, get drunk, and tease her suitors to the brink of intercourse was also the girl that claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary urging her to a life of chastity.

  That summer, Plunket Greene rejected John’s plea that they should sleep together with a letter insisting that she could not enter an ‘immoral’ relationship with him. Soon after receiving it, John swam out to sea off the coast of Cornwall and drowned. His body was washed up two weeks later, having, as his father Augustus put it, ‘suffered the attention of sea gulls’. Burns, one of Olivia’s enduring male friends with whom he shared an unconsummated mutual attraction, refused to accept that he might have committed suicide as others believed.

  While assuming a sense of guilt in the sorry affair – it was he who had introduced Henry John to Plunket Greene – Burns would later claim that by the mid-1930s his friendship with his best old school friend had cooled somewhat. ‘Henry had given much more than joy to my youth, but his last years had disclosed a chasm between us and had filled me with foreboding,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs.

  These were halcyon years before there were even rumours of war, with a packed diary of cocktail parties, debutante balls and nightclubs. Burns discovered that he was on an informal hostess register, much in demand for his dashing looks, intelligence, manners and skills as a dancer. When not dressing up in white tie and tails and taking a debutante to her ball, Burns would drink several whiskies from his personal bottle at one or other of his habitual night dives the Gargoyle, Hell and the 43, where the lights were low, the music less controlled, the women looser.

  It was on one such night that Tom Burns and Evelyn Waugh got to know each other in a nightclub of dubious repute. The fact that Burns had some foreign blood in him, and had not gone to Oxford, marked him out as different from the undergraduate friends Waugh had stuck with since public school. But they shared friends in common they had come to know independently from each other. Both men cultivated extensive contacts in the literary world and had learnt to comport themselves in patrician circles. Waugh and Burns shared a snobbism that attracted them to and filled them with admiration for the English upper-class. They were also both fascinated by matters of faith. According to Burns, when he met Waugh the author – then close to conversion to Catholicism – saw himself as a man who had joined a regiment ‘with traditions and rules which he never questioned’. As someone who had taken to the soapbox in defence of the Catholic faith, Burns respected such loyalty.

  Burns and his circle of Catholic friends contemplated the emergence of communism, and the spread of industrialism, and feared the erosion of the sacral in daily living, an alienating period in history which threatened to undermine civilisation itself. The challenge was to shake up the Catholic Church and its members in a way that might increase their relevance and their influence in modern society.

  A key battleground for the reform movement was the media, so it was perhaps unsurprising that Burns should single out the Tablet as a target for a takeover. The Tablet was an intellectual Catholic weekly which, under the ownership of the Catholic Primate of Great Britain, the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Bourne, had adopted an editorial line that Burns regarded as ‘sectarian and puritanical, pompous and parochial’. As Catholicism entered the 1930s, Burns coordinated a thinly veiled campaign of criticism of the magazine, attacking in particular the theologically conservative editor, Ernest Oldmeadow.

  The conflict between Burns and Oldmeadow was a sparring match that needed a specific issue of major principle to develop into open warfare. The spark that lit the fuse was the publication in 1932 of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief. The book was widely acclaimed, but Oldmeadow found its comic treatment of African politics and social mores, particularly a thinly disguised parody of Roman Catholic teaching on birth control, morally reprehensible and unworthy of someone who had recently converted to the Catholic faith. On 7 January 1933 Oldmeadow wrote a review of Black Mischief in which he proclaimed the novel ‘a disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name’.

  Two weeks later, on 21 January, Waugh was able to rely on a powerful counter-attack. Planned and executed by Burns, it drew on an alliance of prominent Catholic laymen and clergy who put their names to a letter to the Tablet accusing Oldmeadow of exceeding ‘the bounds of legitimate criticism’ with remarks that amounted to an ‘imputation of bad faith’. Within three years, in January 1936, Burns had organised a buyout of the Tablet, putting it under secular Catholic ownership and replacing Oldmeadow as editor with Douglas Woodruff, an old Oxford friend of Waugh’s and a leader writer at The Times.

  It was partly under Burns’s influence that Waugh followed up Black Mischief with a biography of the Catholic Elizabethan Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, with the royalties going to the Oxford Jesuit college Campion Hall, whose then master was Burns’s old schoolteacher Fr D’Arcy.

  When the book was republished in 1961, Waugh reflected that ‘we are nearer to Campion that when I wrote of him’. He drew an analogy between cruelty shown to Catholics in Tudor England, and the even greater ‘savagery’ committed by communist regimes of Eastern Europe against their Catholic subjects. To that extent Waugh’s description of a Church forced underground and priests becoming martyrs foreshadowed the pro-Franco stance he, Burns and many other Catholics were to take during the Spanish Civil War.

  Before its outbreak in July 1936, Burns had befriended another author, Graham Greene. The two had met for the first time in 1929. Burns had just finished reading The Man Within, Greene’s third novel and the first to be published. Of that first encounter Burns would later write: ‘Graham leapt into my landscape like a leprechaun, as it seemed to me: witty, evasive, nervous, and sardonic, by turns. He stood out in the company we both kept in those days, which was mainly of publishers and authors, joyfully joined in plans and projects. Nothing was stereotyped, nothing predictable, for the world as we knew it was free – little knowing of the bondage to come.’

  It was at about this time that Greene remarked that his political progress thus far in his life had been ‘rather curved’. That was perhaps an understatement for the shifting political loyalties he had shown during and since his university days. He had supported the Conservative Party at Oxford before toying with joining the Liberals, joined the Communist Party ‘as a joke’ in 1925, volunteered as a special constable to help break the General Strike of 1926, before in 1933 becoming a member of the Independent Labour Party, whose chairman had accused the Labour Party of being counter-revolutionary. At the time of Greene’s joining, the ILP’s newspaper the New Leader had begun printing letters by Leon Trotsky, a first step along a path that was to see it backing, along with George Orwell, the Trotskyite POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) in the Spanish Civil War. By 1938 Greene, who had converted to the Catholic faith in 1926, a year before his marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, had been persuaded by his friend Burns to write his first article for the Tablet.

  Three years earlier, in the summer of 1935, Burns had paid his second, and similarly providential, visit to Spain. He was answering an invitation from two of his best friends, the writer Barbara Lucas and her academic husband Bernard Wall, Stonyhurst old boy, to join them on their honeymoon in Pamplona for a small holiday of wine, tapas and a bullfight starring Juan Belmonte.

  The bullfighter had already achieved some international notoriety thanks to Ernest Hemingway’s popular novel Fiesta. In the 1930s Belmonte was already a veteran, close to the end of his career. He had come out of retirement to shore up his dwindling finances. The legend had returned. Hemingway had written that no real man had ever worked as clo
se to a fighting bull as Belmonte, which is why the uninitiated were advised to see him as soon possible before he was killed. Burns had dreamt of meeting Belmonte, alive.

  The opportunity came when he least expected it. Shortly after the Walls had left London for Spain, Burns received a telegram from Pamplona. It was from Barbara and it was a cry for help. Three days into their honeymoon, the young newly-weds were still struggling to consummate their union fully. Barbara beseeched Burns to come and join her and her husband as quickly as possible and act both as mediator and counsellor. Burns initially felt awkward, although his long-standing friendship and loyalty to both Barbara and Bernard prevailed. As he later recalled, ‘To be a gooseberry to a loving couple was not my idea of fun or duty. But the summons was clearly heartfelt.’

  Burns enlisted the support of his mutual friend, René Hague, Eric Gill’s son-in-law. Taking first the ferry from Folkestone to Boulogne, and then a third-class train ride south, Burns and his companion crossed the Pyrenees. They had barely left the platform and begun to make their way from the station to the Walls’ hotel, than they spotted a poster. It announced that Belmonte was bullfighting the following afternoon in the nearby town of Logroño.

  Belmonte had killed more than a thousand bulls in his career, but as he grew older he insisted that his bulls should not be too large, and not too dangerously armed with horns. But that afternoon he ventured deep into the bull’s space, his glittering suit touching the black hide, his prominent jaw jutting in defiance. There were moments when he drew away, and seemed, as Hemingway had seen him, ‘utterly contemptuous and indifferent’ to what the crowd expected of him. By this stage in Belmonte’s career many of his fans thought him ‘past his sell-by date’ – getting old, and losing his nerve. But Burns saw only an artist in the sand, confronting death head-on. Thus began a curiously un-English passion for bullfighting that would remain with him for the rest of his life.