Literary Giants Literary Catholics (31 page)

The fight for personal survival was lost, and Greene, in losing himself, had gained the Faith. Yet the dogmatic atheist was only overpowered; he was not utterly vanquished. He would reemerge continually as the devil, or at least as the devil’s advocate, in the murkier moments in his novels.

The literary critic J. C. Whitehouse has compared Greene to Thomas Hardy, rightly asserting that Greene’s gloomy vision at least allows for a light beyond the darkness, whereas Hardy allows for darkness only. Chesterton said of Hardy that he was like the village atheist brooding over the village idiot. Greene is often like a self-loathing sceptic brooding over himself. As such, the vision of the divine in his fiction is often thwarted by the self-erected barriers of his own ego. Only rarely does the glimmer of God’s light penetrate the chinks in the armor, entering like a vertical shaft of hope to exorcise the simmering despair.

Few have understood Greene better than his friend Malcolm Muggeridge, who described him as “a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony”. There is more true depth and perception in this one succinct observation by Muggeridge than in all the pages of psychobabble that have been written about Greene’s work by lesser critics. The paradoxical union of Catholicism and scepticism, incarnated in Greene and his work, had created a hybrid, a metaphysical mutant, as fascinating as Jekyll and Hyde and perhaps as futile. The resulting contortions and contradictions of both his own character and those of the characters he created give the impression of depth; but the depth was often only that of ditch water, perceived as bottomless because the bottom could not be seen. Greene’s genius was rooted in the ingenuity with which he muddied the waters.

It was both apt and prophetic that Greene should have taken the name of Saint Thomas the Doubter at his reception into the Church in February 1926. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, he was always a doubter par excellence. He doubted others; he doubted himself; he doubted God. Whatever else might be puzzling about this most puzzling of men, his debt to doubt is indubitable. Ironically, it was this very doubt that had so often provided the creative force for his fiction. Perhaps the secret of his enduring popularity lies in his being a doubting Thomas in an age of doubt. As such, Greene’s Catholicism becomes an enigma, a conversation piece—even a gimmick. Yet, if his novels owe a debt to doubt, their profundity lies in the ultimate doubt about the doubt. In the end, it was this ultimate doubt about doubt that kept Graham Greene clinging doggedly, desperately—and doubtfully—to his faith.

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Greene, Undset and Bernanos

A review of J. C. Whitehouse’s

Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset and Georges Bernanos
⁺

T
OWARD THE BEGINNING
of this thought-provoking study of three of the last century’s most prominent Catholic novelists, Dr. Whitehouse claims that their work was informed by “that older Catholic view of man as a creature of enormous individual worth, living in a special and dynamic relationship with his Creator, taught by the Church Christ founded and moving gradually towards salvation or damnation”. Rather incongruously, he then adds that such a view “no longer seems quite relevant to the newer, post-Council and conciliatory Catholic world of community and communications”. This alleged schism between the pre- and post-conciliar Church runs through Dr. Whitehouse’s book and mars what is otherwise an intriguing study.

The vision of “vertical man”, who is principally concerned with his relationship with God, and the vision of “horizontal man”, who sees himself as part of society or the community, are perceived as distinct. The Second Vatican Council is seen as guilty of promoting the latter vision of man as opposed to the former. Perhaps, however, Dr. Whitehouse is guilty of praising vertical man to the detriment or even exclusion of horizontal man. Surely the two great commandments of Christ, that we love the Lord our God
and
that we love our neighbor, place the two visions in equilibrium. We cannot truly do the one without the other. They are inseparable. The vertical and the horizontal meet in the love of Christ and, in so doing, form the cross of our salvation.

Apart from this reservation, Dr. Whitehouse’s study of the vertical aspects of the fiction of Greene, Undset and Bernanos is fascinating. Of the three, Undset emerges as possibly the most profound, particularly in the poignant depiction of the soul as a fathomless sea at the bottom of which is its Creator. “Fear and uneasiness and indignation might chase each other on the surface. But love was felt as something heavy which sank down and down.” Such a view is rooted in perennial Christian mysticism. The problem arises when this is confused with, or confounded by, post-Freudian self-analysis. There are dangers in Bernanos’ view that life is an elaborate masquerade. If everyone adopts a persona that deceives as much as it reveals, there is nothing left but relativism. The lie is enshrined as the individual’s personal truth. At this stage, the perceived depths are an illusion. It is a case not of fathoming the depths of the soul but of muddying the shallows of the self.

Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in the novels of Graham Greene, a fact that Dr. Whitehouse prefers to overlook so that he can concentrate instead on the theological aspects of Greene’s work. The genuine groping for religious truth in Greene’s fiction is always thwarted by his obsession with the darker side of his own character. As such, his vertical vision only rarely escapes beyond his own ego. It is only at such moments that the glimmer of God’s light penetrates the chinks in the armor, a vertical shaft of hope.

The last words belong not to Greene but to his long-suffering wife. “Many of the later Catholic writers had a dark view, whereas Chesterton had high spirits. The later writers seemed depressed in comparison. Perhaps it had something to do with what was happening in the world.” Perhaps indeed . . .

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A review of

Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography

by Gregory Wolfe
⁺

S
TRICTLY SPEAKING, GREGORY WOLFE
’s biography of Muggeridge is not a new volume. It was first published in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton in the United Kingdom and, two years later, by Eerdmans in the United States. At the time of its first publication, I was living in England and was putting the finishing touches to my own first biography, a life of G. K. Chesterton, which was to be published by Hodder and Stoughton a year later. I recall that Wolfe’s biography appeared at the same time that HarperCollins published another life of Muggeridge, by Richard Ingrams. The two volumes even had very similar titles. Wolfe’s was entitled
Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography
, whereas Ingrams’ volume was called, more boldly,
Muggeridge: The Biography
. The boldness of the latter sprang from the fact that Ingrams was a well-known journalist and television celebrity and a long-standing friend of Muggeridge, whereas Wolfe was a young and unknown debutant. Ingrams had a sufficient degree of
gravitas
to claim the right to have written
the
biography of his friend. A similar claim by the young arriviste would have sounded not only absurdly precocious but absolutely preposterous. It would seem, therefore, that this battle of competing biographies was a somewhat one-sided affair. Ingrams was cast in the role of Goliath, whereas Wolfe was David. Surely there could be only one winner, as indeed there was. In conformity with the tradition established by their archetypal forebears, David triumphed unexpectedly over Goliath.

Although both biographies were enjoyable and sympathetic, Ingrams’ bore the mark of the tried and tested journalist, while Wolfe’s bore the stamp of the true and trusty scholar. Ingrams waxed eloquently and entertainingly while barely paying lip service to scholarly standards of annotation and source citation; Wolfe wrote well, and with equal eloquence, without ever compromising the highest standards of scholarship. Ingrams was somewhat sketchy in his coverage of the full panorama of Muggeridge’s multifaceted life, providing good coverage of some periods but inadequately patchy coverage of others; Wolfe covered every period with detailed dexterity and wove them all together into a perfectly proportioned tapestry. It is, therefore, a real boon for twentieth-century literary scholarship that ISI Books has resurrected Wolfe’s wonderful work.

Wolfe sets the tone (if the obscure Irish pun can be forgiven!) in the very opening paragraph of the first chapter.

In 1903, the year Malcolm Muggeridge was born, George Bernard Shaw published his play,
Man and Superman
. Malcolm’s father, H. T. Muggeridge, would boast to his friends that he had published his own Superman in 1903. . . . H. T.’s
bon mot
. . . concealed a world of hopes and ambitions for his son. It foreshadowed nearly all of the conflicts and tensions that would be played out in Malcolm’s life.

In these few lines, Wolfe succeeds in setting the scene for the whole of the life he is about to present to the reader. He sets the scene not merely physically but metaphysically. As Wolfe informs us, Shaw was not only “the leading socialist intellectual of the time”, he also “symbolized everything that H. T. fervently admired”. Shaw was the hero of Muggeridge’s father’s generation. He was the prophet of the Nietzschean notion of the superman. The young Muggeridge was born into a world that idolized the myth of “progress” and the perfectibility of mankind. Man, so the theory insisted, would outgrow the primitive superstitions of the past and would evolve into an advanced superintelligent being. Man would become superman. Muggeridge would spend the rest of his life unlearning these dogmas that dogged his childhood. Eventually, and progressively, he would see beyond the chimera of the Shavian “superman” and discover the reality of the essentially unchanging and everlasting “man” that predates and postdates the Nietzschean nonsense of his father’s generation. Eventually. And progressively. But it would take him a lifetime of soul-searching and intellectual probing to do so. This book takes us on that exhilarating journey as we watch Muggeridge’s Dantean progress from the hell of man’s insurrection to the heaven of God’s resurrection. From Fabian socialist to Roman Catholic convert, and all stops in between, we see the travels and travails of a soul in search of its source.

Muggeridge’s journey, or perhaps we should say his pilgrimage, is also interesting for the people who accompanied him along the way. He was born in the same year as Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, and a year before Graham Greene, and his relationship with these literary giants, his exact contemporaries, is one of the most illuminating and engrossing aspects of his life. There is also a wonderful, if somewhat voyeuristic, account of Muggeridge’s encounter with the aging Winston Churchill and his sudden vision of Churchill as Shakespeare’s King Lear, a pathetic figure, “imprisoned in the flesh, in old age, longing for a renewal of the disease of life, all passion unspent” (263).

I note, as a postscript, upon perusing my 1984 edition of
Chambers Biographical Dictionary
, that there is no entry for Muggeridge. It skips from Robert Mugabe to Ladowick Muggleton. The former, as the butcher and tyrant of Zimbabwe, needs no introduction, but who on earth is the latter? I know now, of course, because I have the dictionary open in front of me, but why, I wonder, does the obscure founder of an obscure seventeenth-century puritan sect called the Muggletonians take precedence over a writer as important as Malcolm Muggeridge? Why indeed? I note upon further perusal that Muggeridge’s aforementioned contemporaries—Greene, Orwell and Waugh—all merit reasonably sized entries in the selfsame dictionary. Perhaps this is fair enough. Perhaps it is true that Muggeridge has not bequeathed to posterity literary classics of the caliber of
Brighton Rock, Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
Brideshead Revisited
. His legacy is, however, of a different sort. Aside from his works of real literary merit, of which there are several, he was a pioneer of quality television in the days of the medium’s infancy, and, more important, he was, and remains, a towering figure as a fearless dissident against the decadence of his age and ours.

As a prophet, his reputation stands secure. He is a modern-day Jeremiah, or, perhaps, England’s answer to Solzhenitsyn. Either way, his reputation merits resurrection.

As a writer who has specialized in writing biographies of literary converts to Catholicism, I would have relished the challenge of writing a life of Malcolm Muggeridge. It is, however, too late. The challenge has already been met. The definitive biography has already been written. Indeed, my only complaint is that Gregory Wolfe’s book has the wrong title. It is not “a biography”—it is
the
biography of Malcolm Muggeridge.

PART FOUR

J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND THE INKLINGS

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T
HE FIRST HALF
of the twentieth century was marked by a battle for the very soul of English literature. The early years of that century were remarkable, principally, for the battle of wits and the war of words between the prophets of secularist “progress” and those of dynamic orthodoxy. In the former camp were the literary giants H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, urged on by the “progressive” socialists of the Fabian Society; in the latter camp were giants of at least equal stature in the pyrotechnic personalities of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Two distinct literary “movements” were, in some respects, the inheritors of this struggle. On the side of those who shared Shaw’s belief in the perfectibility of man into a mythical superman, and who shared Wells’ faith in the benevolence of “progress” or at least his contempt for the past, were the small group of writers and artists that became known, collectively, as the Bloomsbury group. These included Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Duncan Grant and, perhaps most notoriously, the archcynic and cultural iconoclast Lytton Strachey. The group’s moral relativism, which found expression in a bland blend of subtle subversion and pathetic perversion, was a natural prerequisite for the nihilism of deconstructionism. The other group, far healthier in outlook and far closer to reality, was the Inklings, who included in their number J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams.