Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  If a biographer succumbs to the temptation to make his subject dance to his own tune, or to the tune of the times in which he is living, he is in danger of presenting only a marionette to the reader. His desire to control his subject becomes a barrier to the truth. At one extreme, the desire to present one’s subject in the best possible light leads to hagiography, in which the biographer plays the role of a disciple paying homage to his master; at the other extreme, the desire to present one’s subject in the worst possible light leads to hackiography, or the hatchet-job, in which the biographer plays the role of the supercilious high priest demanding crucifixion. There is, however, another approach, which is motivated by the desire to paint one’s subject in one’s own image, or in the image of the latest prevailing fad to which one currently subscribes. In this case, the biographer plays the role of Judas, betraying his subject with a kiss. None of these approaches is satisfactory. In each case, the desire of the biographer has distorted the subject. Desire has become destroyer.

  Unfortunately, in The Living of Maisie Ward, Professor Dana Greene has opted for the last of the approaches cited above. She has succumbed to the temptation to paint her subject in the colors of her own choosing with little regard for Ward’s true colors as a staunch and resolute defender of Catholic orthodoxy against modernism. She writes sympathetically of her subject, always couching her arguments in the language of praise so that the truth is concealed with a kiss. Suspicions are aroused at first perusal of the jacket notes, which bemoan the fact that in the mid-decades of the twentieth century, “very few Catholic women were able to define themselves beyond the traditional roles of wife and mother”. Maisie Ward was one of these noble exceptions because she “managed to elude the powerful constraints of her upbringing to make a unique contribution to Catholicism”. Since her upbringing was thoroughly Catholic and economically comfortable, one can only assume that the “powerful constraints” arose from the expectation that she should become a wife and mother, which, had she not “managed to elude” this dreadful fate, would presumably have prevented her making “a unique contribution to Catholicism”. The assertion is even more puzzling since Ward seems to have accepted the traditional roles of wife and mother with dutiful complaisance and with the utmost joy.

  Having demeaned the role of motherhood, the jacket notes conclude with a few biographical details about Dana Greene herself. As associate provost for faculty and professor of history at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, she is the author of five books on women and religious history. Presumably, Professor Greene is a Catholic, though her general tone throughout suggests that she is very much a disaffected one. The tone is set in her introduction, in which Ward is held up as a feminist icon in spite of the fact that the author admits that Ward was never a feminist:

  When she gave voice in her writing and lecturing to the latent desire for transformation in Catholicism, she did so as a traditional woman, wife, and mother. While offering no feminist critique, her life would nonetheless belie the traditional rhetoric about woman’s place. To women, the most dedicated and numerous participants in the Catholic revival, Maisie Ward offered an example; articulate and committed, she gave them liberty to think and act independent of clergy and with or without husbands.

  Throughout her biography, Greene’s feminism is combined with half-digested Freudian and Marxian assumptions so that Maisie Ward is explained, or explained away, in terms that Ward would have angrily rejected. Thus, for instance, Ward’s birth into a prominent and devout Catholic family is not depicted as a blessing, but as a burden. As the firstborn daughter of Wilfrid Ward, the well-known intellectual and biographer, and of Josephine Hope Ward, novelist and relative of the Duke of Norfolk, she was inhibited by “a narrow Catholic upbringing”: “Unbelief was not an option for Maisie. Her experience was too narrow, and Catholic doctrine and family culture too emotionally tenacious for her to reject them. Her only options were commitment or tepidity, and Maisie was incapable of the latter.”

  Leaving aside the theologically dubious assumption that faith is fixed by heredity and not by grace, freely given and freely accepted, one wonders what Professor Greene means by “a narrow Catholic upbringing”. Is she saying that Catholicism is not really catholic? Is she saying that the world outside the Church is broader than the Mystical Body of Christ? If so, she must realize, though she certainly doesn’t admit as much in her book, that Maisie Ward would have disagreed with her wholeheartedly. As Ward’s tireless work for the Catholic Evidence Guild clearly demonstrates, she believed that the Church’s teaching in its full and orthodox beauty was infinitely greater and eternally more relevant than the “broad church” of modernism with its enslavement to philosophical materialism and intellectual fashion. She would have dismissed as self-evidently absurd any suggestion that her upbringing could have been broadened in any meaningful or beneficial sense by the influx of non-Catholic or anti-Catholic influences. Such a suggestion would be akin to saying that something is gained by diluting the pure wine of truth with the stagnant water of secularism.

  The antagonism toward Catholic tradition in Professor Greene’s approach is betrayed by the title that she gives to the first chapter of her study. Maisie’s Catholic inheritance is discussed under the title “The Ties That Bind” as though, rather than providing the roots that impart life, the Catholic faith was something from which she had a duty to escape. Indeed, there is a sense in which Greene appears to be reprimanding Ward when she writes that “Maisie admitted that she was a conformist child who obeyed the dictates of parents and culture.” It is almost as though Maisie needs to confess publicly her failure to rebel.

  Maisie’s grandfather, William George Ward, a Tractarian and colleague of Newman, represented, according to Professor Greene, “the most conservative wing” of Roman Catholicism because he believed “that the church embodied the principles of right and truth and as such was a bulwark against the corrosive currents of modern thought.” According to such criteria, every Pope since Saint Peter and all the doctors of the Church down the ages can be marginalized as members of “the most conservative wing”! Incidentally, it is interesting that “the church” is relegated to the lowercase throughout Greene’s book, as indeed is “the pope”, whereas “Liberal” and “Modernist” warrant aggrandizement into the uppercase. So, for instance, the paragraph that precedes the assertion that William Ward is an extremist for believing that the Church is the embodiment of truth concludes by stating that he used his position as editor of the Dublin Review “to forward his views on strong papal authority against Liberals such as Acton.” Whether this is a deliberate literary ploy, or merely a subconscious slip of the pen, it illustrates clearly where Professor Greene’s sympathies lie.

  The most striking example of the author’s liberal bias is displayed in her evident support for the modernists, who were condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in 1906. The intellectual contortions and distortions to which she descends in order to insinuate that Maisie’s father, Wilfrid Ward, was a would-be fellow traveler with the modernists is frankly laughable—and thoroughly reprehensible in its dishonesty. Maisie’s parents were both resolute in their loyalty to the teaching of the Church and were united in their condemnation of modernism, as Maisie herself demonstrated in her biographical study, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition. Similarly, Professor Greene’s co-opting of Cardinal Newman into the modernist camp is tenuous beyond belief. We are told at one point that Ward’s attempts to show deference to the authority of the Church while at the same time defending Newman was intellectually “untenable”, as though support for Newman and support for papal authority are incompatible. Tellingly again, this discussion has “the church” and “the pope” rendered impotent in the lowercase while “Modernism” is accentuated into the full potent glory of the uppercase.

  The author alludes to the importance of R. H. Benson on Maisie’s intellectual and spiritual development without, apparently, knowing anything about the deeply traditional nature of Benson’s spir
ituality or his art. The merest cursory glance at Monsignor Benson’s Spiritual Letters, his Poems or his autobiographical Confessions of a Convert will illustrate the profoundly orthodox nature of his influence on Maisie. Similarly, Benson’s novels, which Maisie most certainly would have read and which her biographer evidently has not, depict the Church as very much the embodiment of the principles of right and truth, which Professor Greene finds “most conservative”.

  Professor Greene is evidently embarrassed by Maisie’s loyalty to the “aggressive style” of Chesterton and Belloc and is quick to point out that their “triumphalism” was “challenged” in the late 1920s by apparently more acceptable Catholic literary figures such as Christopher Dawson, E. I. Watkin and David Jones. Evidently she is unaware of the deep concerns that each of these authors expressed with regard to the impact of the new modernism on the Church in the 1960s. Dawson lamented “the pro-Lutheran utterances in the Catholic press”, failing to comprehend “how they reconcile this with their liturgical principles”. In 1969, in a tribute to Dawson on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Watkin defended his friend’s position:

  In too many Catholic quarters . . . Dawson and his teaching have been discarded as outdated, without value or even significance for the contemporary Catholic. Some who were foremost in his welcome and in the display of their regard for his work have turned away to a religious and cultural (more truly anticultural and radically irreligious) avant-gardism.

  As for David Jones, he spoke of the importance of the Greek and Latin languages and called on the leaders of the Church to guard her heritage, which was “saturated with the sacral”: “It’s not a matter of knowledge but of love. It’s a terrible thought that the language of the West, of the Western liturgy, and inevitably the Roman chant, might become virtually extinct.”

  Professor Greene appears to be blissfully unaware that the modernism that she espouses was rejected by the very intellectuals whom she praises, each of whom echoed Evelyn Waugh’s disdain for those “modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our own deplorable epoch”. Yet she is forced to admit that Maisie Ward, along with her husband Frank Sheed, expressed grave doubts of their own about the direction in which the Church seemed to be moving in the years after the Second Vatican Council. A year after the Council, Sheed declared that “chaos is staring us in the face”, citing the example of a priest in Australia who had taken a Rosary apart in the pulpit and thrown the beads into the congregation with the remark, “That’s the end of that nonsense.” Professor Greene’s study similarly misunderstands and misinterprets Maisie’s lifelong commitment to the social teaching of the Church. The rich social heritage passed down through the papal encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI and John Paul II and preached through the works of Belloc, Chesterton, Father McNabb, Eric Gill and others is lost on Professor Greene, who seems to be able to see political ideologies solely in the myopically stale formulae of “Left” and “Right”.

  There are a few redeeming features in The Living of Maisie Ward, but they are overshadowed and eclipsed by its shortcomings. There is no getting away from the fact that Professor Greene has written a muddled account of a life enlightened by the clarity of orthodox doctrine. Maisie Ward once referred to the Catholic intellectual revival, of which she was a small but significant part, as the “antidote” to modernism. As such, the “antidote” to Professor Greene’s study is to be found in Maisie Ward’s own works. If The Living of Maisie Ward prompts any of its readers to return to Maisie Ward’s books, it will have provided the antidote to its own poison.

  Apart from her best-selling life of Chesterton, Maisie Ward’s finest book was her two-volume family history, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition. The second volume, published in 1987, was entitled Insurrection versus Resurrection. This work dealt with the “insurrection” of the modernist and the “resurrection” of the Church. It is, therefore, more than a little perverse that Maisie’s life should be retold and “defended” in the language of the insurrection that she condemned and not the resurrection that she preached. She has been betrayed with a kiss.

  16

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  JOHN SEYMOUR

  Some Novel Common Sense

  IF THE CHESTERBELLOCIAN CREED of distributism is still alive as our misguided world begins the third millennium, it has as much to do with John Seymour as with any other person. In the last third of the twentieth century, only E. F. Schumacher, author of the neodistributist classic Small Is Beautiful, has done as much as John Seymour to propagate Chesterton’s “outline of sanity”.

  Perhaps Seymour is best known for The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency, a practical approach to one aspect of distributist life that has sold more than 650,000 copies in Britain alone. Since its first publication more than a quarter of a century ago, this book has inspired countless people to “drop in” to an improved quality of life.

  In a recent interview in Country Living magazine, Seymour made it clear that he disliked being referred to as a “guru”, but I hope he will forgive me if I say that he was, in my case, not so much a guru as a mentor. Along with Chesterton and Belloc, he was a beacon of common sense that enabled me to grope my way toward a clearer understanding of society’s ills. Indeed, the key books in my own progress, sociopolitically speaking, were Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity, Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property and The Servile State and Seymour’s Bring Me My Bow. All these books left an indelible mark.

  There is, however, one notable difference that sets Seymour apart from my other two mentors. Unlike the two halves of the Chesterbelloc, he is still alive. Whereas I cannot hope to meet Chesterton or Belloc in the flesh, at least not while I am marooned this side of the grave, I still live in hope of meeting Seymour, hopefully on his farm in Ireland over several pints of his home brew! (Now there’s a vision almost as celestial in its beauty as a meeting with GKC beyond the grave—well, almost!) In any case, although I have not met Seymour yet, I have corresponded with him on several occasions and can confirm that he is a great admirer of both Chesterton and Belloc and the distributism that they espoused. As a young man, however, he had admired H. G. Wells and was even a member of the H. G. Wells Society. Yet, as he put it, “Long before Wells had reached the end of his tether I had reached the end of mine.” It was then that he began to perceive the distributist alternative to Wells’ technolatry.

  I mention all this as a preamble to Seymour’s Retrieved from the Future, which is, I believe, his first foray into fiction. In its pages one sees the distant shadow of Wells in the fact that the novel is set in the future, but although the form is Wellsian, the substance is decidedly Chestertonian. It is a cautionary tale of the collapse of consumerism and the emergence of distributism in its wake. Yet it is not a tale of Orwellian gloom but of Chestertonian rambunctiousness filled to the brim with characters spilling over with Bellocian bombast. Certainly one could make many technical criticisms, but it is enough that this novel exudes common sense to a world in dire need of more of the same.

  In this age of pulp fiction, to speak of a modern novel exuding common sense sounds so incongruous that it almost has a ring of Chestertonian paradox about it. So be it. I love Chestertonian paradox, and I enjoyed this novel.

  PART THREE

  THE WASTELAND

  17

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  ENTRENCHED PASSION

  The Poetry of War

  IN THE SPHERE OF LITERATURE, the modern world has precious little to teach the Middle Ages. It is, therefore, refreshing to find that, in the sphere of war poetry at least, the twentieth century has something of real value to offer. It has something to say of enduring value. In fact, it has something to say that has seldom been said as evocatively in any of the preceding centuries. In the poetry of war, if in very little else, the twentieth century has a place of honor.

  In days of yore, the poetry of war was punctuated with pomp and pomposity and executed with the excitement and exhilaration of battle. We hear in the Nor
se sagas how King Harald Sigurdsson’s “war-seasoned heart never wavered in battle”.

  Norway’s warriors were watching

  The blood-dripping sword

  Of their courageous leader

  Cutting down their enemies.

  Similarly, the Orkneyinga Saga recounts with relish the blood spilled at the battle of the Menai Strait.

  On shields the arrow-storm

  Spattered; as men fell,

  deftly the lord of Hordar

  dealt the Earl’s death-blow.

  The bloodlust of the Viking versifiers was shared by the poets of England. Michael Drayton’s triumphal depiction of the English victory over the French at the battle of Agincourt glories unashamedly in the gore of battle. Shakespeare, in King Henry V, also waxes lyrical over the English victory at Agincourt, though with greater subtlety than Drayton. Before the battle, the king tells his outnumbered troops that they are destined for immortality.

  This story shall the good man teach his son;

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered—

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother.

  Great military blunders could be made as glorious as great military victories. Tennyson immortalized the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade during the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War with a eulogistic elegance that turns the blunder to wonder. With a graceful flourish of his pen, mightier by far than the sword, Tennyson makes the blood of the butchered glow as gloriously as that of the martyrs.