Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  116: “Compunction”

  Though this word has a long provenance in Catholic Tradition as related to serious remorse in the soul, the way the narrator uses it here means “a slight or passing regret for wrong-doing, or a feeling of regret for some slight offence” (OED).

  117: “Particle”

  In grammar, a particle is “any of a set of words…that are typically short and indeclinable,” such as the word “to” in English infinitives (OED).

  Given the poem’s content, however, “particle” is an ironic pun, as it also means “a piece of bread…consecrated as the host in the Roman Catholic Church” (OED). Standard Catholic liturgical practice, for instance, requires consuming any visible particles of consecrated bread.

  118: “Wassail”

  As Dan’s is a Christmas poem, the use of wassail is appropriate, as it means “the spiced ale used in Twelfth-night and Christmas-eve celebrations” (OED). In context, however, the meaning of wassail as “a carousal; riotous festivity, reveling” makes more sense (OED).

  119: “‘Semite’”

  Dan combines three Scripture passages in this poem: the healing of the blind man with spittle and mud; the Good Samaritan; and the crucifixion of Christ.121

  120: “The world, the flesh, and the devil”

  These are “the three traditional sources of temptation.”122 Chesterton notes in his biography of Aquinas that “good things, like the world and the flesh, have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil.”123 Blue mentions them in Mr. Blue.124

  120: “The Ninetieth Psalm”

  The narrator is correct: Dan adapts Ps. 90:4. Verse six contains the source of Dan’s next line: “the business that walketh about in the dark: of invasion, or of the noonday devil.”

  120: “The noonday devil”

  This is the first mention of the phrase from the title of the book. The noonday devil (cf. Ps. 90:6) is sloth or, more precisely, acedia, “sadness in the face of some spiritual good which one has to achieve.”125 It can be spiritual laziness, but more often it can be over-activity or restlessness. “Weariness, melancholy, feeling overworked, discouragement, instability, activism, boredom, or depression: these various manifestations of the ‘noonday devil’ are enough to convince us of the relevance of an evil that causes a man to lose his relish for life and paralyzes his interior dynamism.”126 As always, there is hope. “The ‘noonday devil’ can be vanquished only by accepting the love of God and the sublimity of our vocation, which, in turn, gives rise to the joy of true Christian freedom.”127

  120: “The worst”

  Dan is in good company claiming “the noonday devil” as the worst. The great ascetic Evagrius of Pontus is often quoted in this regard: “The demon of acedia…is the most oppressive of all but leaves the soul proven to the highest degree.”128

  122: “To fritter our labors away”

  Dan is loosely quoting Thoreau: “Our life is frittered away by detail.”129

  122: “Erect with determination”

  Connolly will use forms of the word “erect” again at crucial moments in chapter 16. In Connolly’s time, the word was not immediately synonymous with its sexual connotation. In fact, the narrator is combining two senses of the word here. The first meaning is the standard “upright posture,” which describes Dan’s body, and which Connolly had used to first describe Henry (38) as well as Fr. Pitka and the heroic young soldier (137). The second meaning is the now-obsolete “alert, attentive,” with “the mind…directed upwards” (OED). Dan, in other words, can stand tall in both body and spirit for overcoming the present temptation of acedia.

  123: “Conceit”

  Simply “a notion, conception, idea, or thought” (OED). However, the play on words is clear: the narrator lightly chides himself for getting conceited about his conceit.

  Chapter 11

  125: “The Church to me”

  Throughout his examples in these pages, Dan often locates people and art in their particular times and places, and he uses the present tense to portray the Church cinematically. When he tells us of El Greco’s Assumption, we are transported to late-sixteenth century Toledo to glimpse, with the Cistercian sisters, his work. Dan thus gives the impression of the Church as living and effective throughout the world and across space and time.

  He also gives intentionally contrasting examples to show the breadth and depth of the Church’s wide-ranging engagement. He lauds the sonic brilliance of the foremost chorale in the world, the Sistine Choir, then bids us listen to Chinese schoolchildren singing, in Latin, the Regina coeli.

  126: “Pius XII”

  Pius XII was Pope from 1939 to 1958, during which Dan England was published.

  126: “Ulithi”

  Ulithi is an atoll—a coral ring of islands around a lagoon—in the Pacific Ocean. It played an important role in World War II as the United States had an active yet secret naval base there. Ulithi “was taken over by U.S. forces on 22 September 1944, and by early 1945 was taking in over 300 tons of supplies daily.”130 Catholic missionaries had visited Ulithi as early as the eighteenth century.

  126: “At the communion rail”

  In the Extraordinary Form of the Mass or the Latin Mass, which was the norm in Connolly’s time, communicants would receive the Eucharist while kneeling at the altar rail, which separates the sanctuary from the nave or the large, open area of the church.

  126: “El Greco’s soaring Assumption in Toledo”

  Greek painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, produced The Assumption of the Virgin in 1577 as the centerpiece of several works that were commissioned for the Cistercian convent in Toledo, Spain. At 13 feet tall by 7 feet wide, the work indeed soars. The Assumption had been purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906 and is still there today.

  126: “Sistine Choir”

  One of the oldest chorales in the world, the Sistine Choir was established in 1471 to perform at all official papal celebrations, which were to be held in the Sistine Chapel. The members are popularly known as “the Pope’s choir.”131

  126: “At prime on Monte Allegro”

  Prime is one of the Hours of the Divine Office as it was said in Connolly’s time and is still recited by some traditional religious orders today. “Prime is the morning hour which consecrates all the work of the day.”132 Monte Allegro, or Montalegre Charterhouse, is a Carthusian monastery in Tiana, Spain, near Barcelona.

  127: “Scheutveld Father”

  The Scheutveld Fathers of the Congregation of Scheutveld, Brussels—also known as the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Mary—were active in the Congo from 1886 onwards. The sleeping sickness Dan refers to is spread by tsetse flies.133

  127: “Notre Dame de Namur…Kwango”

  The Notre Dame Sisters of Namur established a house in the Congo to educate Congolese women. They served in the southwestern province of Kwango.

  127: “Maryknoll Sister…Manchuria”

  The Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic were founded in 1912 by Mary Rogers with a charism for foreign missionary work. They were serving in Manchuria, northeastern China, during some of its most war-torn years.134

  A commissar is “a Communist Party official appointed to oversee political instruction and ensure political reliability” (OED).

  127: “White Sister teaching the Arabs”

  The Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, better known as the White Sisters, were founded in 1869 by Archbishop Charles Lavigerie, who would later become a Cardinal. With their help, Lavigerie “established and maintained at great cost orphan asylums, industrial schools, hospitals, and agricultural settlements, wherein the Arabs could be brought”135 the light of the Gospel.

  Dan’s mentioning of them is reminiscent of an article on Cardinal Lavigerie in an 1894 issue of The Atlantic: “I saw a White Sister cross the marketplace, and actually being saluted by many of the fanatical Sahara Arabs with their familiar courtesy.”136

  127: “Gives up he
r bridge”

  Bridge was (and still is in many places) a popular card game. The preferred form, contract bridge, involves two teams of two players who bid on tricks to be won. Bridge clubs were common in America in the early twentieth century: “By the end of the 1930s, contract bridge stood unchallenged [as] the nation’s most popular card game.”137

  128: “Climbing the September hill”

  This means, presumably, that classes at seminary usually began after Labor Day, which occurs in early September.

  128: “St. Phocas”

  St. Phocas the Gardener was martyred in the year 303. Even in his lifetime he was revered for his generosity, hospitality, and total submission to the will of God.

  128: “Gregory Thaumaturgus”

  St. Gregory the Wonder-worker, a Father of the Church, was renowned for his learning and his miracles. He died in 270.

  128: “St. Winefride”

  The Welsh Winefride, sometimes called Winifred, has many legends surrounding her, including a famous story about being brought back to life after having her head severed by an envious suitor. The place where her head lay before being rejoined to her body gave rise to a healing spring of waters: Holywell, Wales. Numerous miraculous cures have been reported there. St. Winefride died in 660.

  128: “St. Mary Euphrasia”

  St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier founded the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in 1835. Over the next thirty years she established more than one hundred convents around the world. She had been canonized in 1940, just a decade before Connolly published Dan England.

  129: “The priest working…in the Ruhr”

  Dan may be referring to the explosive growth of the Ruhr mines in the early twentieth century. In the space of forty-three years, the number of workers “rose from 52,000 to 409,000.”138 Many of these new workers were Poles, and to support them, “Polish priests moved to the Ruhr.”139 See also the note in chapter 10 on Cardinal Suhard and the priest-worker movement.

  129: “The Door…the Faith”

  Dan is referencing the “Door of Faith,” which is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.140 Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI opened the 2012–2013 Year of Faith with a document of the same name.141

  134: “As Chesterton said”

  The quotation comes from Chesterton’s George Bernard Shaw, which in collected editions is sometimes called Chesterton on Shaw.142

  134: “One is not poor who has a friend”

  This is a saying of Frank Capra’s, reproduced in his autobiography, which describes why the director thought his movie It’s a Wonderful Life was the best film ever made. It was “a film that said to the downtrodden, the pushed-around, the pauper, ‘Heads up, fella. No man is poor who has one friend. Three friends and you’re filthy rich.’”143

  Capra and Connolly were great friends, and Connolly helped with It’s a Wonderful Life even though he was uncredited.

  134: “Being transformed to resemble Dan’s opinion”

  Connolly continues the “transfiguration through tales” theme and even ups the ante. If Pagineau, whom the narrator has described as having the arrogance of “pure evil,” can change for the better through Dan’s influence, who could not? Of course, Connolly allows for free will: it is up to Pagineau to continue to cooperate with that grace—or not.

  135: “Noblesse oblige”

  “Noble ancestry constrains one (to honorable behavior); privilege entails responsibility” (OED).

  136: “Despoiled”

  To despoil means to viciously rob someone of possessions. In this context—Pagineau’s despoiling of a woman—it also means to have cruelly taken advantage of her attraction to him.

  136: “Honi soit…”

  Meaning “shame on him who thinks evil of it,” this motto adorns the garters of The Most Noble Order of the Garter, an exclusive English order of chivalry. Since garters have also long been associated with sexual flirtation, Pagineau’s reference is all the more maddening.

  136: “So much for Pagineau”

  Like the final scene with the owner of the car in Mr. Blue, Connolly here presents the reader with a test. Do we think that Pagineau got what he deserved? Are we happy to see him “seriously hurt”? Do we, like Dan, try to see the best in Pagineau? Connolly brings Dan’s lessons directly to his readers in how they respond to Pagineau in this moment.

  137: “Grave, erect, striking men”

  See the note in chapter 10 on Connolly’s use of “erect.” Here, it does mean that the men are standing tall, but, as we will see later, the word describes the “uprightness” of one’s vocation, as well.

  138: “Tatterdemalion”

  “A person in tattered clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow; a ragamuffin” (OED).

  140: “To quote Stevenson”

  Connolly has pulled a fast one on the reader, for he makes it seem that the narrator’s quoting Stevenson would have comforted Dan. However, the full quotation from Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae has a surprise ending: “Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is—nor yet so good a Christian.”144 That is exactly what Dan suspects of himself, and is indeed the thrust of the novel’s spiritual development.

  Chapter 12

  141: “Léon Bloy”

  Léon Bloy (1846–1917) was a novelist and short story writer who was controversial for showing the workings of grace in his wretched characters in their destitute circumstances. Like Flannery O’Connor, an admirer of Bloy,145 would do many decades later in the American South, Bloy created a kind of “Catholic Gothic,” at least one of the main points of which was to show the meretricious allure of sin and the repulsiveness of its consequences. Crucially, however, both Bloy and O’Connor after him would always include in their works the presence of God’s grace and a character’s decision about how to cooperate with it—or not.

  The Woman Who Was Poor (1897, French; 1939, English) is coming to be regarded as a landmark book in French Catholic fiction. After reading it, no less a mystic than Raïssa Maritain was paraphrased as saying that “one becomes aware of certain mannerisms that could seriously mar the work of art if it were not for the great religious genius that sustains it.”146

  141: “‘There is only one unhappiness…’”

  Less a decade after The Woman Who Was Poor had appeared in English, the novel’s final line, which Dan quotes here, had become “that most quoted sentence… [of ] Bloy’s masterpiece.”147 As historian Arnold Sparr remarks, “The 1940s and 1950s were exciting times to be young, Catholic, and intellectual…It was a time, moreover, when many zealous college-age Catholics quite literally believed with Léon Bloy that ‘there is but one sadness—not to be one of the saints.’”148

  142: “Wastrel”

  “A good-for-nothing, idle, worthless, disreputable person” (OED).

  142: “Succor”

  This is an allusion to two of the many titles Mary is venerated under: Our Lady of Prompt Succor—a devotion of the Ursulines—and Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, now often called Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

  142: “The Hill”

  Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, means “Place of the Skull” according to the Gospel of John.149 It has often been called “Hill of the Skull.”150

  144: “Fatherhood is an heroic calling”

  This is an enduring theme in Connolly’s work. See Blue’s thoughts on this topic, for instance, when he cites St. Thomas More and others as exemplary lay fathers.151

  145: “He, truly, has given hostages to fortune.”

  Dan is quoting Francis Bacon (also the source of Dan England’s epigraph): “He that hath wife and children, hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.”152 Dan’s point is that the father has given up worldly honors, even good ones, for the greater good of sacramental marriage.

  147: “Beatific Vision”

  “The immediate knowledge of God which the angelic spirits and the souls of the just enjoy in Heaven.”153


  148: “Fabulousness”

  “Fondness for fables; proneness to fiction or invention” (OED).

  148: “Levity”

  “Want of serious thought or reflection” (OED). Chesterton famously wrote that the positive function of levity—lightness of being—was to avoid taking oneself too seriously: “Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice…For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”154

  149: “The Greater Glory of God”

  The motto of the Jesuits, often seen as A.M.D.G., is Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: for the greater glory of God.

  149: “The heroic underground”

  The Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states in 1940, only to lose them to Germany in 1941. The Soviets gained them back in 1944 and would not leave completely until more than forty years later.

  Connolly is referencing the “Forest Brothers,” freedom fighters in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia who engaged in “a desperate struggle against the occupation authorities.”155 Sometimes called “partisans,” the Forest Brothers were a distinct fighting force. Even when they were “inevitably overpowered by the Soviet forces, they had become a great symbol of the Baltic States’ desire to oppose their occupation by the USSR.”156

  151: “Only what raiment you will wear”

  Connolly’s use of “raiment” here draws together two of the novel’s most important threads.

  First, the dangerous evil that Dan describes counsels exactly the opposite of Christ’s words: “Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on. Is not the life more than the meat [flesh]: and the body more than the raiment?”157

  Second, the only other time “raiment” is mentioned in the Douay-Rheims translation is the Transfiguration: “And his countenance was as lightning, and his raiment as snow.”158

  Connolly is thus drawing together in this moment the possibility of Dan’s transformation through the rejection of a difficult foe.