Literary Giants Literary Catholics (7 page)

   
Three books, certainly,
Enthusiasm, Let Dons Delight
and
God and the Atom
, claim a place in the library, however small, of anyone, however indifferent to religion, who recognizes distinction in literature, but it is by his Bible that he wished to be remembered. It took ten years of his life at the height of his powers.

Sadly, even Knox’ translation of the Bible, painstakingly crafted into what he hoped was a “timeless English”, was very soon eclipsed by later translations that were more accomplished academically. Knox, it seemed, was never destined to reach the literary heights of which Waugh and others believed he was capable. Instead, his importance to the Catholic literary revival has more to do with his place in what Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar, has called the “network of minds energising each other”. He represented a significant influence on the conversions of both Chesterton and Waugh and, in Waugh’s case particularly, provided spiritual succor and sustenance. Many years later, shortly before his death in 1957, Knox formed a late friendship with Siegfried Sassoon that proved instrumental in the poet’s reception into the Church.

If Chesterton and Belloc represented the voice of dynamic orthodoxy in the early years of the century, a new and radically different voice would be its principal exponent in the years between the two world wars. T. S. Eliot was hailed by the avant-garde as the authentic voice of postwar pessimism and scepticism, particularly after the publication of
The Waste Land
in 1922. By contrast, many of the poetic old guard viewed him suspiciously as a dangerous threat to tradition, an iconoclastic aberration who was thumbing his nose at convention. In the confusion of the fray that followed the poem’s publication, many on both sides of the critical divide had obviously missed the poet’s point. Lack of understanding led inevitably to misunderstanding, so that battle lines were drawn according to erroneous preconceptions. The “moderns” hailed it as a masterpiece of modern thought that had laid waste traditional values and traditional form. The “ancients” attacked it as an affront to civilized standards. Both sides had made the grave and fundamental error of mistaking Eliot’s pessimism toward the wasteland of modern life for a cynicism toward tradition. In fact, Eliot’s philosophical foundation and aesthetic sympathies were rooted in classical and medieval tradition, whereas he despised modern secular liberalism. It was, therefore, a perverse irony that he was being vilified by the upholders of tradition and championed by the doyens of secularism. Indeed, it would be fair to say that possibly no poem in the English language has been as admired, as abhorred and as misunderstood as Eliot’s
The Waste Land
.

It would be many years before a true perspective would begin to appear of the poem, the issues it raised and the reaction it caused. Although Chesterton had initially mistrusted Eliot’s work, mistaking the latter’s antimodern pessimism for postmodern cynicism, he eventually came to see Eliot as a major Christian literary figure, expressing admiration for Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
, which was published a year before Chesterton’s death in 1936. Nor would it be entirely correct to make such a simplistic comparison between Eliot’s dark vision and Chesterton’s high spirits. Chesterton and Belloc had always combined their
joie de vivre
with strident criticism of a centralist industrial system that they both despised. With the growth of the distributist movement, under Belloc’s ideological guidance and Chesterton’s charismatic presidency, in the years between the wars, this criticism became more robust than ever. Also, on a purely literary level, Chesterton’s response to the horror of the war was not that dissimilar to the bitterness being expressed by the war poets. His “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was as full of potent indignation against those responsible for the slaughter as had been Siegfried Sassoon’s “Fight to a Finish” or Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”. After all, Chesterton had lost his brother and several close friends in the war. Belloc, who had lost a son as well as friends, never recovered the prewar jollity that was the endearing feature of much of his early work. Stricken with grief, he wrote in 1920 of his own “desire to be rid of life”, words of desolation, not despair. For Belloc, life after the death of his son and the earlier death of his wife would still be enjoyed on the babbling surface, most especially in the company of friends, but was endured in the still depths.

Perhaps the hidden key to understanding
The Waste Land
, overlooked by almost everyone at the time and still ignored by many of the poem’s postmodernist admirers today, is to be found in Eliot’s devotion to Dante. Eliot perceived that Dante had been grossly misunderstood by the undue emphasis placed upon the “negative”
Inferno
at the expense of the other two “positive” books of the
Divine Comedy
, and there was something almost divinely comic in the fact that Eliot himself was to suffer the same fate after the publication of
The Waste Land
. As post-Reformation puritanism had stressed the punishment of hell in Dante and had ignored the “papist” parts about the cleansing grace of Purgatory and the Church Triumphant in paradise, so postwar cynicism had stressed the negative aspects of Eliot’s
Waste Land
and had ignored the cathartic conclusion that pointed to a “resurrection”. Typical of this myopic modernist miasma was the judgment of the literary critic I. A. Richards that Eliot in
The Waste Land
had effected “a complete severance between poetry and
all
beliefs”. This generally accepted assumption was blown asunder in June 1927 by Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, news of which was greeted with incredulity. How could the arch-iconoclast have become an iconographer?

Similar horror and incredulity greeted the news, three years later, that Evelyn Waugh had been received into the Catholic Church. By the end of the 1920s, he was seen as the ultramodern novelist in much the same way that Eliot had been perceived as the ultramodern poet. As such, Waugh’s conversion was treated with astonishment by the literary world. On the morning after his reception, there was bemused bewilderment in the
Daily Express
that an author known for his “almost passionate adherence to the ultra-modern” could have joined the Catholic Church. Two leaders in the
Express
had already discussed the significance of Waugh’s conversion before his own article, “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me”, was published on 20 October 1930. Waugh’s conversion, like that of Newman, Chesterton and Eliot, was rooted in tradition. The “essential issue” facing European civilization, he wrote, was “between Christianity and Chaos.” Waugh’s contemptuous dismissal of “talking cinemas and tinned food” as having any significance to civilization was indicative of a deep mistrust of scientism and technolatry, that is, the worship and idolization of technological “progress”.

A year after the publication of Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
, a novel that captured and encapsulated the author’s disgust with the vulgar elements of modernity at the time of his conversion, a work in similar vein was published by the poet Roy Campbell.
The Georgiad
was a merciless verse satire of the wealthy party-set, centered around Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, of which Campbell and his wife had at one time been an integral part.
The Georgiad
steers a
via media
between Eliot and Waugh in its rejection of a modern wasteland, populated by vile bodies and hollow men. Largely to escape the decadence of their life in England, the Campbells moved to Provence and then to Spain, where they were received into the Catholic Church in 1935. Perhaps Campbell’s most enduring contribution to Christian literature would be his masterful translation of the poems of Saint John of the Cross.

Besides Evelyn Waugh, the other leading Catholic novelist to emerge during the interwar years was Graham Greene. With
Brighton Rock
in 1938 and
The Power and the Glory
two years later, Greene made Catholic doctrine and religious dilemma the dominant force in his fiction. After the war, the increasingly heterodox nature of works such as
The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair
and
A Burnt Out Case
alarmed many Catholics, including Waugh, and some critics began to question whether Greene had lost his faith. Nonetheless, his biographer, Norman Sherry, believed that he “remained a strong Catholic until his death”. Whether this is so, the fact remains that the enigma of both Greene and his novels rests in the presence of an uncomfortable sense of doubt. Yet he and they seemed to perceive that to be anything other than a Catholic would mean becoming something less than a Catholic, a passing from inexplicable and doubtful depths to inane and dubious shallows. There was no escape from a truth that couldn’t be proved.

Ironically, considering the Allied victory over the Nazis, the same sense of pessimism accompanied the end of the Second World War as had greeted the end of the first. In part, this arose from the horror that many people felt about the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the realization that a new and horrific weapon had emerged. The dawn of the nuclear age coincided with the world’s lurch from a world war into a cold war, in which the future was as bleak as it was uncertain. This spirit of gloom and despondency was captured most memorably in Orwell’s
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, but there were a host of other literary creations born of a similar anxiety, many of which were imbued with Christian disdain for the nihilism of postwar materialism.

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.