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Good Letters

20080829-the-state-of-catholic-letters-part-i-by-greg-wolfeIn the conservative Catholic press—and blogosphere—there has been much harrumphing about the decline and fall of Catholic letters.

Of course, the question of whether Catholic writing is alive, much less well, is really just another skirmish in the larger culture wars—perpetuated largely by those with ideological axes to grind.

I am not so naïve as to believe that I or anyone else can put an end to such posturing. To be sure, on one level, the logical inconsistencies and blinkered vision behind this attitude call out for some response. But in the end, what gets me so worked up is that this attitude ultimately trivializes and emasculates the Catholicism it seeks to vindicate.

In a recent post at the First Things blog, Amanda Shaw quotes an admiring New Yorker review of a Graham Greene novel by George Orwell. In the review, Orwell writes: “A fairly large proportion of the distinguished novels of the last few decades have been written by Catholics and have even been describable as Catholic novels.”

Orwell is presumably referring to such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac who, with Greene, were the major figures in the mid-century “Catholic literary revival.”

Ms. Shaw goes on to say:

“In the sixty years since George Orwell was reviewing Graham Greene’s novels, the phenomenon of the Catholic novel has shriveled into virtual nonexistence. I just returned to noisy New York after attending the third annual Southwell Institute creative writing workshop, and on the first evening Orwell’s observation was presented to a group of us young writers. “Who are the great Catholic novelists, poets, and playwrights of today?” we were challenged, and there was no quick response. As silence grew, the question was amended: If the human conflicts described by Orwell remain, and if art really can “hold a mirror up to nature”—showing us both good and evil, in all their power and glory—then why is “Catholic fiction” such a musty old phrase?”

The ignorance of that particular crowd really doesn’t prove much of anything—after all, it consisted of young writers. But the leaders of that workshop should know better.

As they say in the business world, it’s all a matter of “optics.” What are people seeing and what are they missing? Who is admitted into this particular canon? And what are their qualifications?

The conservatives’ myth goes like this: writers like Greene, Waugh, Bernanos, Mauriac, along with the Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, were both famous authors in their time and “muscular Catholics.”

What’s crucial to this myth is that these writers were real Catholics and held a position of eminence (read: power) in the public square. The subsequent story is one of disenfranchisement and apostasy.

The problem is that this is nearly all wrong. Some of these writers were politically and theological conservative, but others were anything but.

Take Greene himself. He was always a man of the Left and never an apologist for the Magisterium. The novels the conservatives most admire—The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter—were roundly condemned by the conservative Catholics of the mid-twentieth century. The prevalence of adultery, substance abuse, and highly dubious moral dilemmas that characterized these novels was the subject of much mid-century harrumphing.

Even as conservative a writer as Evelyn Waugh had to write a long, impassioned letter defending his satirical novels to the Archbishop of Westminster, after he had been attacked in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet. Poor Waugh had to do the worst thing possible for a satirist and comedian—he had to explain his jokes. (In his novel Black Mischief he had described a campaign by white colonialists to bring contraception to the native African population, with hilarious and unpredictable side effects—as a form of undermining anti-Catholic thinking.)

Waugh’s irony, Greene’s venal protagonists, Mauriac’s thoroughly nasty cast of characters, O’Connor’s violence and grotesquerie—all these were subjected to ridicule by the predecessors of today’s conservative tut-tutters.

And while we’re on the subject of irony, it’s worth noting that every one of these writers hated being classified as a Catholic novelist. They wanted no adjective before that noun. Nor did they see themselves as a bloc, flexing their Catholic muscles in the public square. To do so would have reduced their work to propaganda.

If these writers were muscular it was because the Catholic faith enabled them to write incarnationally, which is to say sacramentally. This entails a highly defined sense of paradox, since it is grounded in the mysterious yoking of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh. That’s why these writers employed irony and ambiguity: in order to convey a sense of how sin and sanctity can co-exist within the same person, how violence can model grace, how suffering and loss can lead to a sense of the lightness of being. There were edgy writers, unpredictable and dangerous, causing frequent flutters among the church’s hierarchy.

But to contemporary pronouncers of gloom, all that is forgotten.

Next time I’ll explain the cause of that amnesia.

Read part two here.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Gregory Wolfe

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