Literary Giants Literary Catholics (29 page)

     And that the White had risen overhead.

Clearly the struggle is not merely between belief and unbelief but between the poet’s new and previous self. His youth, scarlet with sinfulness and red with the political atheism he had rejected, was at war with a new force in his life—the “white”, symbolic of the Mithraic unity of the spectral colors and also of the transfigured purity of Christ, the “unknown pilot”. The red craft, the former self, is finally shot down so that the white can emerge triumphant, a “white phoenix” rising from the ashes of “his scarlet sire”. The final verse is a joyous hymn of thanksgiving for the poet’s deliverance, paying homage to the victory of the “Solar Christ”, the Sun and Son Ascendant.

     The towers and trees were lifted hymns of praise,

     The city was a prayer, the land a nun:

     The noonday azure strumming all its rays

     Sang that a famous battle had been won,

     As signing his white Cross, the very Sun,

     The Solar Christ and captain of my days

     Zoomed to the zenith; and his will was done.

Campbell’s passion for Spain, which he later described as “a country to which I owe everything as having saved my soul”, was inflamed still further by the ancient city of Toledo, the city to which the family moved in June 1935. “Good Lord, kid,” Campbell exclaimed to Mary when they first arrived, “this town is fabulous! I never imagined it would be so marvelous! Let’s stay here for the rest of our lives.”
¹³

Toledo was bulging with religious buildings, including two cathedrals, and because the great fortress of the Alcazar served as one of Spain’s leading military academies, every other person seemed to be a monk, nun, priest, seminarian or soldier. Mrs. Campbell Lyle recalled that her father was “almost too enthusiastic over the town”, soaking up the atmosphere of military and religious discipline that permeated every aspect of its life. “Its strong, nostalgically evocative historical and literary associations overwhelmed him.”
¹⁴
Clearly Toledo had cast its spell on Campbell, who dubbed it “a sacred city of the mind”,
¹⁵
and one can imagine his echoing the words of the Austrian lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who had been similarly intoxicated by the city’s mystical beauty. “My God,” Rilke had enthused, “how many things have I loved because they tried to be like this, because they had a drop of this blood in their hearts. . . . Can I bear it?”
¹⁶

“But it was not only Toledo itself that had this effect on my father,” wrote Mrs. Campbell Lyle, “it was the whole of Spain—its architecture, its painting, its language.”

What affected him most profoundly was to find a country where tradition still exercised a civilizing force on the population. He was deeply affected by the mystery and spiritual strength of this surprising country. Obviously in Toledo he was suffering from culture-shock. Spanish culture had opened up a vast new vein of gold in the fabulous mine of the arts, and he found it intoxicating. . . . He was immersed in the works of Gongora, Quevado, Calderon, Lopa de Vega, Fray Luis de Leon, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross; immersed also in the paintings of Goya, Velazquez (his favourite) and El Greco—who lived and died in Toledo.
¹⁷

Campbell was also fascinated by the ordinary Spanish people with whom he imbibed wine in the local cafes, intoxicated by their conversation, “so prolific in proverbs, puns, irony and fatalism”.
¹⁸
His gratitude and love for those who populated the sacred city of his mind was expressed effusively in his poem “Driving Cattle to Casas Buenas”.

     The church, with storks upon the steeple,

     And scarcely could my cross be signed,

     When round me came those Christian people

     So hospitably clean, and kind.

     Beans and Alfalfa in the manger—

     Alfalfa, there was never such!

     And rice and rabbit for the stranger.

     Thank you very much!

Little could Campbell have known during those halcyon days in Toledo in 1935 that his bliss would soon be blistered by a fratricidal civil war in which the Spanish people would expose their dark and murderous underbelly.

In March 1936 the anticlerical contagion spreading across Spain reached the streets of Toledo. Churches were burned in a series of violent riots in which priests and monks were attacked. During these bloody disturbances, Roy and Mary Campbell sheltered in their house several of the Carmelite monks from the neighboring monastery. These anticlerical riots shattered Campbell’s perception of Toledo as a pastoral paradise beyond the ravages of time. It seemed that even the sacred city had succumbed to secularism and that he and Mary, refugees from modernity, were once more without refuge.

By bribing some militiamen, the family managed to escape from Toledo in the back of a truck used for conveying corpses. Eventually, by long and tedious stages, they made their way to Madrid and then to Valencia. In every village en route they saw burned or burning churches, a grim reminder of the madness gripping the country they had learned to love but were now being forced to flee. On 9 August 1936 Roy and Mary Campbell, together with their two daughters, boarded HMS
Maine
bound for Marseilles. The Campbells had spent less than three years of their torrid and turbulent lives in Spain, but those three years were the most important and most potently significant days of their lives. Life after Spain would never be the same.

25

_____

Ultramodern to Ultramontane

Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.

T
HESE WORDS OF EVELYN WAUGH
, written in “intense delight” to Edward Sackville-West after the latter had informed him of his intention to be received into the Catholic Church, represent perhaps the most succinct and sufficient description of the process of conversion ever written. Waugh’s own conversion from the “absurd caricature” of ultramodernity to the “real world” of Catholic orthodoxy was greeted with astonishment by the literary world and caused a sensation in the media.

Waugh’s reception into the Church on 29 September 1930 prompted bemused bewilderment in the following morning’s edition of the
Daily Express
. It seemed incomprehensible that an author notorious for his “almost passionate adherence to the ultra-modern” could have joined the Catholic Church. In the gossip columns, his latest novel,
Vile Bodies
, had been dubbed “the ultra-modern novel”. How could the purveyor of all things modern have turned to the pillar of all things ancient?

The paradox was both perplexing and provocative, prompting the
Express
to publish two lead articles on the significance of Waugh’s decision. Finally, three weeks after Waugh’s controversial conversion, Waugh’s own contribution to the debate, entitled “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me”, was published. It was given a full-page spread, boldly headlined.

Waugh’s article was so lucid in its exposition that it belied any suggestion that he had taken his momentous step lightly, or out of ignorance. He dismissed the very suggestion that he had been “captivated by the ritual” of the Church or that he wanted to have his mind made up for him. Instead, he insisted that the “essential issue” that had led to his conversion was a belief that the modern world was facing a choice between “Christianity and Chaos”:

Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization—and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe—has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. . . . It is no longer possible . . . to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests.

Waugh concluded by stating his belief that Catholicism was the “most complete and vital form” of Christianity.

The debate continued in the next day’s edition of the
Express
with the publication of an article by a Protestant member of Parliament, which was followed, a day later, with an article by Father Woodlock, a Jesuit, entitled “Is Britain Turning to Rome?” Three days later, an entire page was given over to the ensuing letters. Seldom has a religious conversion prompted such a blaze of national publicity.

Part of the reason for the extensive interest in Waugh’s conversion, apart from his own celebrity status as a fashionable young author of best-selling satirical novels, was the growing awareness that his reception into the Church was only the latest of a long and lengthening list of literary converts to the Catholic faith. On 8 October 1930 the
Bystander
observed of Waugh’s conversion that “the brilliant young author” was “the latest man of letters to be received into the Catholic Church. Other well-known literary people who have gone over to Rome include Sheila Kaye-Smith, Compton MacKenzie, Alfred Noyes, Father Ronald Knox and G. K. Chesterton”. The list was impressive but far from exhaustive. By the 1930s the tide of converts had become a torrent, and throughout that decade there were some twelve thousand converts a year in England alone.

A similar mood prevailed in the United States. A few weeks after the controversy in the
Daily Express
, a debate between G. K. Chesterton and the famous Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow on the question “Will the World Return to Religion?” attracted an audience of four thousand to the Mecca Temple in New York. At the close of the debate, a vote was taken. The result was 2,359 for Chesterton’s point of view and 1,022 for Darrow’s.

Waugh’s particular path to Rome had been influenced by a number of the literary converts who had preceded him, particularly by Chesterton and Knox, the latter of whom would be the subject of a biography by Waugh published in 1959. When Waugh was only eleven, his father had read Knox’ antimodernist satire
Reunion All Round
and was “dazzled” by its brilliance. “Since then,” Waugh wrote to Knox years later, “every word you have written and spoken has been pure light to me.” In 1924 Waugh had been impressed by Knox’ oratorical prowess at the Oxford Union. On that occasion, Knox had been among several well-known speakers to debate the proposition “that civilization has advanced”. In Waugh’s opinion, Knox had stolen the show by showing that “we were rapidly approaching the civilization of the savage”. In Waugh’s public confession of faith in the
Express
, there are clearly discernible echoes of Knox’ brilliant oratory from six years earlier.

The most striking example of Chesterton’s influence on Waugh is to be found in the way that Chesterton inspired
Brideshead Revisited
, arguably the finest of Waugh’s novels and undeniably one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The novel’s central theme of the redemption of lost souls by means of “the unseen hook and invisible line . . . the twitch upon the thread” was taken from one of Chesterton’s
Father Brown
stories. Waugh told a friend that he was anxious to obtain a copy of the omnibus edition of the
Father Brown
stories at the time he was putting the finishing touches to
Brideshead
, and a memorandum he wrote for MGM studios when a film version of the novel was being considered confirmed the profundity of Chesterton’s influence:

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G. K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman’s line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a “twitch upon the thread” draws the fish to land.

The Chestertonian metaphor was not lost on Ronald Knox when he first read
Brideshead Revisited
: “Once you reach the end, needless to say the whole cast—even Beryl—falls into place and the twitch upon the thread happening in the very bowels of Metroland is inconceivably effective”.

In many respects, Waugh’s finest novel is a reiteration of the theme in his article for the
Daily Express
. It is a tale of hope among the ruins of a vanishing civilization in which the light of Christianity shines out amid the Chaos.

Brideshead Revisited
sold exceedingly well on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the
Tablet
acclaimed it “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. In particular, the American critic Edmund Wilson criticized the religious dimension in the novel. “He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story”, Waugh replied. “I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.” Modern novelists, Waugh continued, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose. So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which to me means only one thing, man in his relation to God.”

With the publication of
Brideshead Revisited
, Waugh completed the metamorphosis from ultramodern to ultramontane and in so doing passed from fashion to antifashion. As with so many of the other converts at the vanguard of the Catholic literary revival, his work was an act of subcreation reflecting the glory of Creation itself. As Waugh himself put it: “There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.” What is true of art is as true of the artist. In the works of Waugh, as in the works of the other literary converts, a tiny gleam of Christ is always reflected.