Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  Besides Chesterton and Belloc, the writer most responsible for carrying the mantle of the Catholic literary revival in the early years of the twentieth century was Robert Hugh Benson. In some respects, Benson’s life paralleled that of Newman. His conversion to Catholicism in 1903 and his subsequent ordination caused a sensation on a scale similar to that which greeted Newman’s reception into the Church almost sixty years earlier. In Benson’s case the sensation was linked to the fact that he was the son of E. W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1882 until 1896. Like Newman, Benson followed a literary as well as a priestly vocation, and before his untimely death in 1914 at the age of forty-three, he had published fifteen highly successful novels. The other obvious parallel with Newman was Benson’s writing of a lucid and candid autobiographical apologia describing the circumstances leading up to his conversion. Benson’s Confessions of a Convert warrants a position alongside Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua as one of the great expositions of the spiritual and psychological background to religious conversion.

  An early admirer of Benson was Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in 1907 that he had met him once or twice “and liked him enormously”. Belloc was particularly impressed with Benson’s historical novels: “It is quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560. No book I ever read has given me the slightest conception, and I have never had time to go into the original stuff myself. This is the most interesting of historical problems”.

  Benson’s early death ensured that he was never able to fulfill Belloc’s wish. In consequence, Belloc, increasingly frustrated at the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, would reluctantly take up the cudgels himself. In later life Belloc would publish studies of key sixteenth-and seventeenth-century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James II, Charles I and Cranmer. His How the Reformation Happened, published in 1928, would endeavor to put the whole period into context. Yet to a large extent Benson achieved the same aim in his fiction. Come Rack! Come Rope! remains an outstanding work of literature in its prose, its plot, its characterization and its masterful control of the historical landscape in which it is set.

  Nor did Benson restrict himself to historical fiction. He wrote novels that dealt with the contemporary religious and moral dilemmas of Edwardian society and, as in the case of Lord of the World, novels that conjured up apocalyptic visions of the future. The latter were a reaction to the optimistic science fantasies of Wells and a foreshadowing of the nightmare visions of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. R. H. Benson, as a writer of fiction, was a master of the past, the present and the future. His Poems, published posthumously, mark him out as one of the most accomplished poets of his generation, and his Spiritual Letters, also published posthumously, display a deep religious faith rooted in a marriage of the mystical and intellectual. The neglect of Benson’s literary achievement says more about the decline and sickness of an increasingly secularized society than it does about any alleged shortcomings in his writing.

  Benson’s biographer, C. C. Martindale, saw a “disconcerting affinity” between Benson’s Papers of a Pariah and Wilde’s De Profundis: “Benson had, and Wilde was resolving, so he thought, to get, that direct eye for colour, line, and texture that the Greeks possessed . . . Benson,. . . in his direct extraction of natural emotion from simple and beautiful elements, like fire and wax, as in his description of the Easter ceremonies . . . reaches, sometimes, an almost word-for-word identity with Wilde.” Martindale also wrote of the “Chestertonian quality” in Benson’s work and quoted a letter Benson had written in 1905 in which he expresses admiration for Chesterton’s Heretics:

  Have you read a book by G. K. Chesterton called Heretics?. . . It seems to me that the spirit underneath is splendid. He is not a Catholic, but he has the spirit. He is so joyful and confident and sensible! One gets rather annoyed by his extreme love of paradox; but there is a sort of alertness in his religion and in his whole point of view that is simply exhilarating. I have not been so much moved for a long time. . . . He is a real mystic of an odd kind.

  The writing of both Benson and Chesterton was a principal constituent in the conversion of Ronald Knox to the Catholic Church in 1917. Knox was only sixteen, “a schoolboy just beginning to think”, when he had first read Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. It affected him profoundly, as he confessed to Frances Chesterton shortly after her husband’s death:

  He has been my idol since I read The Napoleon of Notting Hill as a schoolboy; I’ll only hope that you, who know as no one else does what we have lost, will find it easy to imagine as well as believe that he is alive and unchanged. Thank God for that faith; that I have it when so many of my friends lost it was due, I think, under God to him.

  Elsewhere Knox had written that “Chesterton’s philosophy, in the broadest sense of the word, has been part of the air I breathed, ever since the age when a man’s ideas begin to disentangle themselves from his education. His paradoxes have become, as it were, the platitudes of my thought.”

  The fact that Benson shared the distinction with Chesterton of being Knox’ idol during the formative years of his life is well documented in Knox’ A Spiritual Aeneid:

  It was at Manchester, on Christmas Day, 1903, that I read a book written (I was told) by an Anglican who had just become a Roman Catholic (actually, in that September). It was, of course, The Light Invisible, a collection of stories written by Mgr. Benson while he was still in the Church of England. . . . Most people find it an interesting book, but free from controversial tendency. . . Yet, to me, that Christmas Day was a turning point. It was the setting of the book—the little chapel in which the priest celebrated, the terms in which he alluded to the Mother of God, the description of confessions heard in an old parish church—that riveted me even more than the psychological interest. All that Catholic system which I had hitherto known only distantly . . . now for the first time entered my horizon.

  Thereafter Knox always looked upon Benson “as the guide who had led me to Catholic truth”, and in the last few days before his conversion, almost fourteen years after he had first read The Light Invisible, he read Benson’s Come Rack! Come Rope! “Hugh Benson, who had set my feet on the way towards the Church, watched over my footsteps to the last.”

  It was no great surprise that Knox considered Benson his mentor. They had so much in common. Both were sons of Anglican bishops and were educated at Eton. They both belonged to remarkable literary families and had brothers whose literary reputations were perhaps the equal of their own. Both passed through Anglo-Catholicism into full communion with the Catholic Church. There was, however, one major difference. Whereas Benson’s literary achievement was truly prodigious considering his early and untimely death, Knox failed to live up to his early promise. Evelyn Waugh, in his introduction to the 1958 edition of Knox’ A Spiritual Aeneid, described the precocious and meteoric rise of the young Knox:

  He went up to Balliol in 1906 preceded by a reputation of unique lustre. While still at Eton he had written a book of light verse in English, Latin and Greek and he is still remembered there as the cleverest boy who ever passed through that school. . . . At Oxford all the coveted distinctions—the Hertford and Ireland scholarships, the presidency of the Union, a first in Greats—came to him as by-products of an exuberant intellectual and social life. . . In 1910 there seemed no limit to the prizes, political, academic or literary, which a smiling world held out to him.

  Seen in this context it was scarcely surprising that Knox’ conversion proved almost as controversial as that of Newman or Benson, shaking the establishments of both Canterbury and Oxford. Expectations were high, and many believed that Knox was destined to be a latter-day Newman. It was not to be. The reasons for the literary anticlimax were explained by Waugh:

  After Caliban in Grub Street (1930) and Broadcast Minds (1932), in which he dealt with opponents who were mostly unworthy of his attention, he decided that
his vocation was not to discomfort the infidel but to work among the clergy and laity of his own Church to fortify and refine their devotion and remind them of their high calling. He drew apart from secular life with the result that the name of one of the very few prose stylists of his age was seldom mentioned in literary journals.

  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 al
armed 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.