Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  Ronald Knox’ God and the Atom set the cautionary tone with its warnings about the dire consequences of the triumph of scientific materialism. Edith Sitwell had been so shocked by an eyewitness account of the immediate effect of the atomic bomb upon Hiroshima that she composed her poem The Shadow of Cain, the first of her “three poems of the Atomic Age”.

  The horrors of Hiroshima also inspired Siegfried Sassoon, writer of some of the finest poetry of the previous war, to new heights of creativity. In 1945 he wrote “Litany of the Lost”, a verse that echoed the concerns expressed by Sitwell and that employed similar resonant religious imagery as a counterpoise to postwar pessimism and alienation. By the middle of the following decade, these concerns had led both Sassoon and Sitwell into the arms of the Catholic Church. In common with Graham Greene and the many converts who had preceded them, they were longing for depth in a world of shallows, permanence in a world of change and certainty in a world of doubt.

  In the same year that Sitwell and Sassoon were expressing their nuclear reactions, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was published. Written over a year before the bomb was dropped but not published until 1945, Waugh’s novel of hope among the ruins of a vanishing civilization was nonetheless animated by the same postwar pessimism and anxiety that permeated the poetry and prose of Sitwell, Sassoon and Knox. It sold exceedingly well on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the Tablet acclaimed it as “the finest of all his works, a book for which it is safe to prophesy a lasting place among the major works of fiction”. In America, Time described Waugh as a stylist unexcelled among contemporary novelists.

  The praise was tempered by a vociferous minority who disliked Brideshead Revisited on both political and religious grounds. It was deemed politically incorrect for its nostalgic swan-songing of a rapidly vanishing aristocratic way of life, and Waugh was vilified for being a reactionary and a snob. Meanwhile, other critics, such as Edmund Wilson, had criticized the religious dimension.

  With the publication of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh completed the metamorphosis from ultramodern to ultramontane and also invited comparisons between the works of Waugh and those of the disappearing old guard of the Catholic literary revival. Certainly, the influence of Chesterton on the writing of Brideshead Revisited is patently obvious. The combination of Catholicism and aristocratic high society in Brideshead also invites comparisons with the novels of Maurice Baring, who died in the year of the novel’s publication. Less obvious but probably as powerful was the subliminal influence of Hilaire Belloc, who had been one of Waugh’s heroes since Waugh’s days as a schoolboy at Lancing. Waugh was attracted to Belloc’s militantly aggressive and traditional approach to Catholicism but was equally impressed by the matter-of-fact, almost humdrum, way in which he practiced his faith. It was the simple unaffected faith of cradle Catholics like Belloc, as distinct from the arriviste zeal of converts, that shaped the characterization of the Flytes in Brideshead. Another Catholic writer who probably influenced aspects of the writing of Brideshead Revisited was Compton Mackenzie, whose evocative description of life in Oxford in Sinister Street, a book that Waugh had read and enjoyed at Lancing, found resonant echoes in Waugh’s own atmospheric treatment of Oxford undergraduate life. Thus, in one novel, one can witness the full plethora of influences that had animated the Christian literary landscape in the previous forty years.

  Another novel that displayed an orthodox Christian response to the dilemmas posed by postwar modernism was C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength published in July 1945. At the time of its publication, Lewis’ friend J. R. R. Tolkien was in the midst of writing The Lord of the Rings, and there are certain distinct similarities between the two books. Lewis’ ascribing of demoniac powers to the men of science in That Hideous Strength bore more than a marked resemblance to Tolkien’s treatment of the same issue. Indeed, Lewis’ description of That Hideous Strength to an American correspondent in 1954 could almost serve as a description of The Lord of the Rings: “I think That Hideous Strength is about a triple conflict: Grace against Nature and Nature against Anti-Nature (modern industrialism, scientism and totalitarian politics)”. This triple conflict between the supernatural, natural and unnatural was arguably the key to both books, and it is an indictment of the ignorance of the postwar world that many of Tolkien’s millions of readers remain entirely ignorant of the orthodox Catholic theology at the heart of his subcreation.

  Unfortunately, the Church’s ability to win converts through the power of tradition seems to have been undermined in recent decades by the efforts of a new generation of modernists hell-bent, seemingly, on tampering with Catholicism’s timeless beauties and mysteries. The danger was perceived by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote in 1964 that “throughout her entire life the Church has been at active war with enemies from without and traitors from within”. To his great distress Waugh began to feel that the “traitors” within the Church were working to deliver the faithful into the hands of the “enemies” without. The Church Militant was being betrayed to a modern world seemingly triumphant. Alarmed at developments, Waugh devoted a great deal of his time during the last few years of his life to opposing the modernist tendency in the Church.

  In a postscript to his biography of Waugh, Christopher Sykes endeavored to put his friend’s obstinate opposition into context. “His dislike of the reform-movement”, Sykes wrote,

  was not merely an expression of his conservatism, nor of aesthetic preferences. It was based on deeper things. He believed that in its long history the Church had developed a liturgy which enabled an ordinary, sensual man (as opposed to a saint who is outside generalisation) to approach God and be aware of sanctity and the divine. To abolish all this for the sake of up-to-dateness seemed to him not only silly but dangerous. . . . He could not bear the thought of modernized liturgy. “Untune that string” he felt, and loss of faith would follow. . . Whether his fears were justified or not only “the unerring sentence of time” can show.

  Perhaps the unerring sentence has not yet been passed, but it was certainly the case that Waugh was not by any means the only person who held these views. On 6 July 1971 The Times published the text of an appeal to the Vatican to preserve the Latin Mass. The appeal was signed by a host of well-known Catholics, as well as many non-Catholic dignitaries and celebrities, including Harold Acton, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lennox Berkeley, Maurice Bowra, Agatha Christie, Kenneth Clark, Nevill Coghill, Cyril Connolly, Colin Davis, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Joseph Grimond, Harman Grisewood, Rupert Hart-Davis, Barbara Hepworth, Auberon Herbert, David Jones, Osbert Lancaster, F. R. Leavis, Cecil Day Lewis, Compton Mackenzie, Yehudi Menuhin, Nancy Mitford, Raymond Mortimer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Iris Murdoch, John Murray, Sean O’Faolain, William Plomer, Kathleen Raine, William Rees-Mogg, Ralph Richardson, Joan Sutherland, Bernard Wall, Patrick Wall and E. I. Watkin.

  A moderate but nonetheless critical view was offered by Robert Speaight, actor, writer and Catholic convert, in his autobiography, published in 1970. Although he had sympathized with the reforms of the Council, he complained that much had happened “far beyond the intention of the Conciliar fathers”:

  The psychology of adherence to Catholicism has subtly changed; authority is flouted; basic doctrines are questioned. . . . The vernacular Liturgy, popular and pedestrian, intelligible and depressing, has robbed us of much that was numinous in public worship; there is less emphasis on prayer and penitence; and the personal relationship between God and man . . . is neglected in favour of a diffused social concern.

  Ultimately, Speaight’s frustration with the modernists was linked to their evident contempt for tradition: “What exasperates me in the attitude of many progressives is not their desire to go forward or even to change direction, but their indifference to tradition which is the terra firma from which they themselves proceed”.

  Alec Guinness was another thespian convert who found his initial enthusiasm for reform tempered by subsequent abuses of the Council’s teaching. “Much water has flown under Tiber’s bridges, c
arrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII”, he wrote in Blessings in Disguise, his autobiography. Yet he remained confident about the future, rooted in the belief that the essential traditions of Catholicism “remain firmly entrenched”:

  The Church has proved she is not moribund. “All shall be well,” I feel, “and all manner of things shall be well”, so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the Idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.

  Guinness quoted one of Chesterton’s “most penetrating statements” as a prelude to his discourse on the reform of the Church. “The Church”, wrote Chesterton, “is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time.” Perhaps he may also have added that tradition, as guarded and guided by dynamic orthodoxy, is the one thing that saves the Church herself from being a child of her own time. Certainly Chesterton had something similar in mind when he employed the imagery of the Church as a heavenly chariot “thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect”. It was this vision of a militant and dynamic tradition combating error down the ages that had inspired the host of converts from Newman to Chesterton, and from Waugh to Sitwell and Sassoon. If the flow of high-profile literary converts has been more noticeable by its absence than by its presence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, perhaps it has something to do with the loss of that vision of tradition amid the fogs of fashion. No matter. Fogs pass and the clarity of day reasserts itself.

  Tradition remains. It not only remains, it also retains its power to win converts; for, as Chesterton also said, what is needed is not a Church that can move with the world but a Church that can move the world.

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  TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLAND’S CHRISTIAN LITERARY LANDSCAPE

  THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH century was accompanied by the death of two figures, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, who were the products of the century that had just expired and who would epitomize the spirit of the century that had just been born.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, who died, after twelve years of insanity, in the opening months of the new century, was the most outspoken philosophical foe of Christianity to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Convinced that Christianity was bankrupt, he proclaimed Arthur Schopenhauer’s “will to power” and emphasized that only the strong ought to survive. He maintained that Christian charity served only to perpetuate the survival of the weak and contraposed the idea of the superman or overman (the Übermensch), who would overcome human weakness and vanquish the meek. (In Tolkien’s mythical world, Nietzsche’s shadow emerges in the “will to power” of the Enemy, most specifically in the designs of Sauron and Saruman but also in the pathetic ambition of Boromir and Gollum.)

  Oscar Wilde, who died on 30 November 1900, was the inheritor of the dark and decadent romanticism of Byron and Baudelaire. He flouted traditional morality and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment as a result of his homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the sordidness of which scandalized late Victorian society.

  Nietzsche’s pride found deadly “fruition” in the Nazi death camps and in the rise of the abortion clinics. Wilde’s prurience found its sterile “fruition” in the sexual “liberation” of the ‘sixties, the AIDS epidemic of the ‘nineties and, yes, in those same abortion clinics. Nietzsche died impenitent, insane and, one would imagine, condemned for his sins; Wilde was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, died as a penitent and, one would hope, was forgiven his sins.

  The pernicious influence of Nietzsche and Wilde on the secular culture prompted a healthy reaction among many of the Christian literati in England, so much so that their influence would help to shape the Christian literary landscape of the century that followed their deaths.

  G. K. Chesterton, the most important figure in the Christian literary revival in the early years of the century, had fallen under the spell of Wilde and the Decadents as a young man at London’s Slade School of Art during the early 1890s but had very quickly recoiled in horror from the moral implications of the Decadent position. Much of his early work, particularly his early novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, was an attempt to clear the Wildean fog of the 1890s with the crisp clean air of Christian clarity. Chesterton also crossed swords with Nietzsche, most particularly in his refutation of the neo-Nietzschean ramblings of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. “Nietzsche’s Superman is cold and friendless”, Chesterton wrote in Heretics. “And when Nietzsche says, ‘A new commandment I give to you, be hard’, he is really saying, ‘A new commandment I give to you, be dead.’ Sensibility is the definition of life.” In the light of the “hardness” of the Nazis and the communists during their mass extermination of millions of “dissidents” and “undesirables”, Chesterton’s words, written more than ten years before the Bolshevik Revolution and almost thirty years before Hitler’s rise to power, resonate with authenticated prophecy.

  Chesterton’s influence on the Christian literary revival was so central and catalytic that only the giant figure of John Henry Newman in the previous century matches him in terms of stature and importance. Those literary figures who have expressed a specific and profound debt to Chesterton as an influence on their conversions include C. S. Lewis, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers and Alfred Noyes. Thus, without Chesterton, it is possible that the world would have never seen the later Christian poetry of Noyes, the subtle satire of Knox, the masterful translation of, and commentary on, Dante by Sayers, and the multifarious blossoming of Lewis’ prodigious talents. Clearly we, as the inheritors of this cultural treasure trove, have much for which to thank Chesterton.

  If Chesterton, along with his friend Hilaire Belloc, was the giant figure of the Christian literary revival during the first twenty years of the century, the figure to emerge as a Christian literary giant and inspirational catalyst in the next twenty years was undoubtedly T. S. Eliot.

  Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922, is probably the most important poem of the twentieth century, and arguably the greatest. Although grotesquely misunderstood and misinterpreted by modernist and postmodernist critics, The Waste Land is profoundly Christian in its deepest layers of meaning and profusely traditionalist in its inspiration. Eliot’s reaction to Decadence is rooted in the same sense of disgust as that which had animated Chesterton, but his mode of expression is starkly different. Whereas Chesterton alluded to the “diabolism” of Decadence, Eliot exposed its putrid corpse to the cold light of day, dragging it whimpering from its furtively seedy den.

  The Waste Land’s depiction of modernity as utterly vacuous and sterile is reiterated as the central theme of Eliot’s next major poem, “The Hollow Men”, published in 1925. Following his open profession of Christianity in 1928, Eliot’s poems become more overtly religious, more didactic and “preachy” and perhaps less accomplished as poetry—though it should be stressed that a relatively unaccomplished Eliot poem is considerably more accomplished than the finest efforts of most of his contemporaries.

  Eliot exerted a considerable influence on the writers of his generation. One such writer was the young novelist Evelyn Waugh, who rose to prominence following the publication of his first novel, Decline and Fall, in 1928. Two years later Waugh was received into the Catholic Church, and thereafter, his darkly sardonic and satirical novels could be described as prose reworkings of the fragmented imagery of The Waste Land. Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust even took its title from a line in The Waste Land, and its plot could be seen as a tangential commentary on the disgust at Decadence that Eliot had expressed with such lurid eloquence in his great poem.

  If Chesterton and Belloc could be said to have dominated the first twenty years of the twentieth century, and Eliot and Waugh the next twenty years, the middle years of the century belong to C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. These two giants are perhaps the “dynamic duo” at the very h
eart of the Christian literary landscape of the twentieth century (though one could certainly argue that Chesterton and Eliot are of equal or perhaps even greater stature—such an argument is, however, beyond the scope of the present essay).

  Lewis’ manifold and multifarious talents covered the spectrum of the peripatetically purgatorial Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce, space travel and children’s stories, and works of straightforward Christian apologetics. Tolkien, for the most part, channeled his own considerable gifts in one direction only. The subcreation of Middle Earth, through the weaving ofThe Lord of the Rings within the larger tapestry of The Silmarillion, was, for Tolkien, the labor of a lifetime. In his mythical epic we see the Nietzschean “will to power” countered by the humility of the meek, and we see the poison of Wildean decadence healed by the purity of relationships in which eros is bridled by the charity of chastity.

  Tolkien’s mythical masterpiece is the pinnacle of achievement at the highest and most beautiful point on the Christian literary landscape of the twentieth century. In the same landscape is to be found the most important poem of the century (Eliot’s The Waste Land) and the century’s finest novel (Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). Quite clearly, the twentieth century, like the preceding nineteen centuries, owes a great deal to the munificence and magnificence of its Christian heritage.

  PART TWO

  THE CHESTERBELLOC

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  THE CHESTERBELLOC

  Examining the Beauty of the Beast

  Wells has written . . . about Chesterton and Belloc without stopping to consider what Chesterton and Belloc is. This sounds like bad grammar; but I know what I am about. Chesterton and Belloc is a conspiracy, and a most dangerous one at that. Not a viciously intended one: quite the contrary. It is a game of make-believe of the sort which all imaginative grown-up children love to play. . .