The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (2)

Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that:
"[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."
Chesterton provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out. It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the influence of Chesterton and Belloc came primarily through their non-fiction - "especially their vigorous defense of Catholicism" - but that they did write some fiction which had bearing on the development of the English Catholic novel:

"Chesterton used allegory and fantasy to express religious themes, a technique that would be utilized by later novelists. Although weak in terms of character development, his novels like Napoleon of Nottinghill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and The Return of Don Quixote (1927) effectively convey Chesterton's sense of Christianity as a robust, life-affirming religion, and a vision of humanity as flawed and unable to improve without supernatural help ...

There is a possibility that Belloc, who spent a good part of his youth in France (his father was French), may have read Huysmans and some of the other French novelists, for in his novel Emmanuel Burden (1904), a satire on the moral debasement of a mercantile English family, he writes with the kind of interiority and emphasis on the salvation of one's soul typical of the French Catholic writers."

Crowe continues that "Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both of whom started publishing fiction in the late 1920s, were the most important English Catholic novelists of what is referred to as the golden age of the Catholic novel":

"Perhaps because of his robust enthusiasm for his new faith and his pugnacious disposition, Waugh made no apology for the less salient aspects of Catholicism ... By making that choice, Waugh produced novels that arouse repugnance in secular readers (as well as in some Catholics), but also provide for many Catholic readers a fiction that explores with great depth and subtlety the religious world in which they live. Although Waugh's approach alienates some, it is possible that his boldness in unabashedly insisting on Catholicism as a supernatural entity gives his fiction a depth and intensity that resonates with many readers, even many secular ones ...

Whereas Waugh looked to the Church as a principle of order in the chaotic decadence of modern life, Greene was more focused on the personal drama of good and evil, sin and grace. Also, although Greene had no illusions about the depravity to be found in the secular world and depicted it in stark detail, he was also attentive to a critique of the Catholic community. Perhaps for this reason, he did not arouse as much ire among critics as did Waugh. Like Mauriac, whom he very much admired, Greene is particularly hard on self-righteously pious Catholics who keep the letter of the law but have little charity."

Joseph Pearce writes on CatholicAuthors.com that:

"Graham Greene is perhaps the most perplexing of all the literary converts whose works animated the Catholic literary revival in the 20th century. His visions of angst and guilt, informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility, make his novels, and the characters that adorn them, both fascinating and unforgettable.

His fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created."

Crowe writes that:

"Muriel Spark ... is one of the most important English Catholic novelists after Waugh and Greene ... Spark believed that her conversion enabled her to write: "Nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now, whereas before my conversion I couldn't do it because I was never sure what I was. ... I didn't get my style until I became a Catholic because you just haven't got to care, and you need security for that." One critic refers to Spark's Catholicism as her "rock," a position from which the believer can survey the human condition. She herself said that Catholicism helped her become a satirist. "The Catholic belief is a norm from which one can depart. It's not a fluctuating thing." Spark's narrative voice is sure and confident, able to survey the foolishness in a fallen world without ever quite falling into cynicism. The irony, though sharp, is open to the possibility that God may bring good out of sin and evil."

Crowe wrote in 2007 that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon":

"... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism. Yet ... they have produced highly accomplished fiction in which religious meaning emerges from and is inextricably entwined with human experience. Some of their novels make extensive use of explicitly Catholic material. Others are deeply informed by a Catholic vision without much use of explicitly Catholic material ... Clearly they have not been doing the same kinds of things that Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, and Greene did, yet their fiction exemplifies exciting possibilities for the Catholic novel ... they have more than most contemporary English novelists, allowed their faith to inform their writing and have exemplified very different and interesting ways of integrating Catholicism into their work in ways that are substantial, imaginative, and serious."

Crowe concludes regarding Ellis, Lodge, Maitland and Read:

"These novelists do not hesitate to delineate with trenchant irony, biting satire, or simply devastatingly realistic description the ways in which the Church fails. Their angles of vision diverge and their critiques are distinctly different, focused on sexual teachings (Lodge), patriarchy (Maitland), or post-Vatican II developments (Read and Ellis). Yet they still see their world through the categories, the symbols, the stories, and the rituals of Catholicism - not just because they are literarily useful, but also because they undergird the story with a meaning that transcends the secular."

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James Macmillan - On Love.