Bernard Bergonzi RIP

In the Guardian obituary of Bernard Bergonzi, we read: 'In 1982 an essay by Bergonzi was included in Why I Am Still a Catholic, a collection edited by Peter Stanford. Bergonzi remained a lifelong practising Catholic, though of a distinctly liberal temperament. Occasionally describing himself as a “papist critic,” he was a man of the second Vatican council, and the winds of change that were blowing through the church in the 60s.'

David Lodge wrote: 'I always looked forward to these meetings because we had plenty to talk about: new books, our current projects, literary and academic gossip, and the state of the Catholic church. Bernard took a particular interest in my novels that dealt with this last subject, and wrote perceptively but not uncritically about them.'

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Gerard Manley Hopkins - The Leaden Echo & the Golden Echo.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (5)

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of Bernanos and Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of Maritain, Claudel, and Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."
Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the critical literature on the Modern Catholic Novel suggests:

"... the highest achievements in the genre of the Catholic novel were possible only because a window of opportunity appeared as Catholicism was venturing out from its defensive posture and entering into conversation with the secular world yet still maintained a clear and robust sense of its own identity. If this thesis is correct, we are unlikely to see again Catholic novels of the quality of the best of Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene, and Waugh or other European Catholic novelists in the years preceding Vatican II.

The Catholic writers who produced the flowering of the Catholic novel faced the perennial challenges of all Christian novelists: how to show the workings of grace and allow for the miraculous and supernatural without violating psychological credibility or the canons of realism, how to make salvation or damnation seem important to a secular reader, and how to convey a worldview based on a deeply held personal faith without appearing to engage in underhanded apologetics and evangelization ... not all critics agree that they met all these challenges successfully, yet some novelists found ways to navigate these difficulties and produce fiction of exceptionally high quality and wide appeal for secular as well as Christian readers. To what extent these extraordinary achievements in Catholic fiction were the result of the uncommon situation of the Church - an unprecedented openness to secularity while still retaining a clear and strong sense of its own identity - and to what extent they were the result of the appearance of several extraordinarily gifted Catholic writers must remain a matter for speculation."

Many of those discussed as Catholic novelists in this series of posts have, in the words of Theodore P. Fraser from The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, "adamantly shunned for themselves the nomenclature of "Catholic novelist" and have insisted that as artists they possess their own angle of vision and unique literary universe":

"Ultimately they view themselves not as writers consciously writing novels with specific "Catholic" content but as Catholics who happen to be novelists. François Mauriac has perhaps best explained the intention and intellectual disposition of Catholic novelists who are creative creative artists in their own right: "Being a Christian," he says, "my Christian beliefs dominate my novels, not because I want to make propaganda for Christianity, but because it is the deepest part of my nature ... I am a christian first and last, which means a man responsible to God and to his conscience for the epoch he lives in ... he has been put here to play a certain role among his fellow men. He is engaged; it isn't a question of deliberately engaging himself.""

David Lodge, in The Novelist at the Crossroads, insists that:

"in their appraisal of Catholic novelists critics would do well to follow the wise dictum of Henry James: that artists must be granted the right to use their ideas, their artistic vision, their donnée as their inspiration directs them, and that the proper role of critics is to comment on the use that authors have made of their donnée through an evaluation of the craft of their work (Lodge 1971, 88) ...

Using James's sensible critical principal as his point of departure, Lodge grants that Greene indeed makes frequent use of Catholic symbolism to create his "metapoesis." Yet in doing so his intention, Lodge insists, is not to proselytize or to present "a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent" but to see his fiction as "a system of concepts, source of situation, and reservoir of symbols ... to dramatize intuition about the nature of human experience" (Lodge 1971, 89). Hence, Lodge contends, Catholicism as a system of dogma and laws is not in or by itself an adequate key to understanding and interpreting the meaning of Greene's works, and these are, Lodge argues, as accessible to most readers as any other works of art that possess a unique vision and aesthetic patterns. These Catholic novels can therefore be appreciated as authentic pieces of literature above and beyond the doctrinal or confessional elements of faith contained therein."

Fraser believes that what Lodge says of Greene can be applied to other novelists considered as "Catholic".

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Bruce Cockburn - Understanding Nothing.

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.

Modern Catholic novels

I'm currently reading Marian Crowe's Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth which is an excellent analysis of four contemporary Catholic novelists - Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Piers Paul Read - demonstrating that the demise of the Catholic novel has not yet occurred in the UK, at least.

Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:

"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."

Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.

All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.

In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:

“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The problem as O’Connor sees it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.

Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.

What O’Connor and Percy both seem to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.

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Woven Hand - Tin Finger.