5: “St. Crispin”
St. Crispin was a third-century martyr. His feast day is October 25th.
Chapter 2
9: “Crazy as a bedbug”
Etymologist Robert Hendrickson dates the origin of this common expression to early nineteenth-century America.8 It means “completely unstable” or “utterly mad.”
11: “George Bernard Shaw”
Chesterton began George Bernard Shaw, his book-length study of Shaw (1856–1950), with one of his typical witticisms: “Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.”9 Their much-celebrated friendship, founded in mutual respect as much as it was in disagreement, led Shaw to speak of Chesterton as a “colossal genius.”10
11–12: “Christian Science to Swedenborgianism”
The Church of Christ, Scientist, was founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) in 1879. Christian Science continues to be a popular religion worldwide. Connolly had alluded to Christian Science in Mr. Blue.11
Swedenborgianism arose in England in 1788 as “The New Church” centered on the religious writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Though “The New Church” was a smaller denomination, Connolly may have been familiar with it through its activities in Boston, where Connolly grew up and attended college.
Chapter 3
15: “Shaw’s piece, On Going to Church”
This essay was first published in the London magazine The Savoy in 1896 and was in fact the lead article.12 An American publisher quickly got it into print as a small book.13 Connolly has changed only one word: Shaw originally wrote “morphia,”14 which Connolly has rendered as “morphine,” an equivalent word which Connolly probably thought would be more readily understood (OED).
16: “Roisterer”
“A noisy and boisterous reveller” (OED).
16: “Voluptuary”
“One who is addicted to sensuous pleasures; one who is given up to indulgence in luxury or the gratification of the senses” (OED).
16: “Jilting”
To leave someone at the altar; or, more broadly, “to deceive after holding out hopes in love” (OED). Connolly means here that, according to Briggs’s friend, Shaw should have denied himself from falling into self-love, for only then could Shaw begin to create good art. This thinking is reminiscent of Chesterton’s view of happiness: “The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.”15
16: “Tippler”
“A habitual drinker of intoxicating liquor (implying more or less excess, but usually short of positive drunkenness)” (OED).
17: “Dewy-eyed and purple Late Victorians”
“Dewy-eyed” means “innocent and trusting; naïve” (OED), especially in a sentimental way. “Purple” has a special meaning among journalists like the narrator: “elaborate or excessively ornate writing” that needs to be edited (OED). Putting these together, the narrator’s meaning is that he found Shaw’s writing a useful corrective against the overly emotive and extravagant, self-absorbed works of the Late Victorians, such as Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
18: “Fanatical rigorist”
Though we cannot find any evidence that he said it, Chesterton is sometimes credited with the quip, “Too much rigor produces rigor mortis.”16
18: “The lamb chop…a new life”
Connolly draws a clear connection between Briggs’s new life and the sacrifice of a lamb. This symbolism may seem heavy-handed, but important here is Connolly’s description of that new life as an “audacious…venture” that involves risk, confidence, and boldness. This view is consistent with Chesterton’s conception of freedom and responsibility: “The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare…For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable.”17
18: “One noonday”
“Noonday” as a noun literally means “the middle of the day; midday” (OED). Though Connolly has not yet formally introduced us to the noonday devil, the use of “noonday” here draws our attention to the battle against that very spirit of despair and do-nothingness that Briggs has been fighting.
21: “Little Christmas”
This term for Epiphany has a long Irish heritage, and immigrants continued the tradition such that it became a widely known event in America. See, for instance, the Boston-published Irish-Catholic magazine Donahoe’s, which celebrates in an 1881 article “the Epiphany, termed by the Irish ‘Little Christmas day’.”18 Christmas will play a crucial role later in the novel (see chapter 14).
22: “Heralding”
In Connolly’s 1951 text, this word was misspelled as “hearlding.” We have corrected this mistake.
23: “Who came to work as a porter”
Connolly draws here on a tradition of lay brother Saints who seemed to have no special gifts, were thus assigned to the humble job of porter, and through this work exhibited heroic sanctity. Two well-known examples are the Jesuit Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez (1533–1617)—whom Gerard Manley Hopkins immortalized in his poem of the same name—and St. André Bessette (1845–1937). For more on lay brothers, see the “Jesuit lay brother” note below.
24: “He lost belief in himself ”
Chesterton has a whole chapter on this topic in Orthodoxy: “A man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief…the man who has it has ‘Hanwell [Asylum]’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.”19
26: “Jesuit lay Brother”
Lay brothers are “religious occupied solely with manual labor and with the secular affairs of a monastery or friary…[and] are entirely distinct from the choir monks or brothers, who are devoted mainly to the opus Dei [Divine Office] and to study.”20 The implication here is that Ratherskin as a lay brother has given up any further study—for instance, theology—as the inordinate pursuit of knowledge had been his downfall before his conversion.
29: “What Euripides said”
The line is from The Bacchae, and though translations differ, the essential meaning is the same. One translator renders it as, “Without wine, there’s no more Aphrodite— / or any other pleasure left for men.”21 Another scholar offers a more dynamic interpretation: “And without wine, there’s no love either, / and precious little else for a man to enjoy.”22 The play contains many similar lines, such as, “Apart from wine, / there is no cure for human hardship.”23
30: “The metaphysical Shaw”
The narrator is using the depreciative or unflattering sense of “metaphysical” here, meaning “excessively subtle or abstract [in] reasoning, ideas, etc.” (OED).
30: “The transformation was complete”
Connolly echoes a line from The Great Gatsby, a book he knew well and countered with Mr. Blue. In a climactic moment in Gatsby, Tom Buchanan confronts the title character with what he knows about him and says he will not stand for Gatsby’s advances on his wife. Given Tom’s history of adultery, Nick finds Tom’s hostility hypocritical: “The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.”24 Of course, the opposite has more or less happened to Briggs, which makes Connolly’s echoing of the line all the more pointed in its inversion.
31: “His dark hours”
What Dan summarizes in this paragraph is the standard model of spiritual progress as elucidated by many Saints: purgation, illumination, and union. Dan describes each stage in turn, including the dark night of the soul that often precedes union with God.25 That the narrator des
cribes Briggs’s current problem as “mental rather than emotional” signals that Briggs has entered a dark night of the soul, having passed through a dark night of the senses, “if even only in a lesser degree,” as Dan says.
32: “The tomb of cowardice and compromise”
Compromise as an obstacle to heroism is a consistent theme in Connolly’s work. See, for instance, Mr. Blue when the narrator complains of Blue’s “abstract World of No Compromises”26 in response to Blue’s joking praise of the narrator’s no-compromise gluttony.27
33: “Briggs went Ratherskin one better”
A key theme in this novel is how people transform others and are themselves transformed when they live out heroic stories. As the narrator says, the idea is not merely to imitate the tale but to live it at a higher level—to make the story even better, as it were. Tolkien had delivered his lecture “On Fairy-Stories” in 1939 and had revised it for publication in 1947. His conception that the Christian author of Fantasy “may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation” would be fruitful to study in relation to Connolly’s ideas here.28
33: “Lambent sermons”
Especially in conjunction with the “usual dull equanimity” that follows, “lambent” here means mild, even bland, like fire “gliding over a surface without burning it” (OED).
34: “He spoke little of himself”
The narrator’s description of Dan in this paragraph could very well portray Chesterton. Dan, however, is not an allegory or stand-in for Chesterton, as Connolly will make plain soon enough.
34: “Stevedore”
“A workman employed either as overseer or laborer in loading and unloading the cargoes of merchant vessels” (OED).
35: “In his own tale of Ratherskin”
Connolly continues the theme of the acquisition of virtue and progress in the spiritual life through living out heroic tales to a new degree. Dan credits Briggs’s “courage…vision…[and] originality” to Briggs himself, though the narrator reminds us that it began in the telling of “[Dan’s] own tale.”
35: “The rather pallid Briggs”
Pallid can mean physically pale or intellectually dull; here, the latter fits better. However, the thematic context of transformation suggests another layer, the more grotesque meaning of pallid as indicated in “death pallor:” on the verge of lifelessness.
35: “Briggs was transformed”
The details in these paragraphs are suggestive of the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s Transfiguration.29 Again, there is no straight allegory here but rather an invocation of the power of Christ working through a tale-telling intercessor in order to transfigure others.
36: “Alvin”
Briggs has been present for most of the novel already, yet here is the first time we hear his first name. Briggs is no longer trapped in his brig; we can call him by a new name, for he has been transformed through Dan. Connolly has used a literary method here to exemplify the prophetic Scripture, “Thou shalt be called by a new name.”30
36: “Good God, and this is Easter!”
Connolly himself wrote “Easter,” the poem from which this stanza appears, sometime before 1927. The earlier version has a stanza break between “parade” and “Oh.” The full poem can be found in The Book of Modern Catholic Verse, which features selections from Belloc, Chesterton, Hopkins, and many others.31
37: “‘Exsultemus!’”
Latin for “Let us rejoice,” and a keen allusion by Connolly: the lovely, ancient chant that begins the Easter Vigil Mass after the procession is the “Exsultet.” Theologian Aidan Nichols puts it succinctly: “What the Exsultet teaches…is the universal, cosmic significance of the resurrection of Christ…the point where the Creator God begins the re-creation of his world by transforming the corpse of Jesus into the nucleus of a new creation.”32 Indeed, “the rather pallid Briggs” has been just such transfigured.
37: “Largely fantastic”
“Fantastic” here means “existing only in imagination” or “extravagantly fanciful” (OED).
37: “One whit”
That is, “a very small, or the least, part or amount” (OED). This may be a pun, too, on Whitsunday, the traditional name for Pentecost, which ends the Easter season.
Chapter 4
39: “A grass eater to a diabolist”
A “grass eater” was just that: someone who consumed wheatgrass, which was a popular fad in the 1940s.33 A diabolist is “a person who (knowingly or unknowingly) follows the Devil or serves his interests” (OED).
39: “Wag”
“A habitual joker” (OED).
41: “Homer, Dumas, and Verne”
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are well known. Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) wrote the internationally popular The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Jules Verne (1828–1905), sometimes called the father of science fiction, wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. The narrator has thus selected some of the greatest authors of adventure fiction—each with his distinct contributions.
Chapter 5
42: “The story [Evening Star]”
An adapted version of this chapter was broadcast as episode 75872 of The Hour of St. Francis, a nationally popular radio show started by Fr. Hugh Noonan, O.F.M., of St. Joseph Church, Los Angeles. The episode, “Evening Star,” aired on April 27, 1952 and ran just under fifteen minutes.
43: “Musical Kingdom”
Jesuit missionaries arrived in Paraguay in 1587, and over the next two hundred years established nearly sixty settlements or “reductions” that became widely studied and debated. As the Catholic Encyclopedia relates, “The Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay, one of the most singular and beautiful creations of Catholic missionary activity… have been the object alike of the most sincere admiration and the bitterest criticism.”34
Indeed, the appellation “Musical Kingdom” comes from a chapter title in René Fülöp-Miller’s The Power and Secret of the Jesuits,35 a conspiracy-minded work that unfailingly puts the missionaries’ work in a poor light. In his usual fashion, Dan has idealized the phrase.
43: “To have a song written, and sung, about him”
The first few paragraphs here are reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, especially the situation the protagonist Ransom encounters when he lands among the hrossa.36 See especially the funeral song that so deeply affects Ransom that it “bow[s] down his spirit as if the gate of heaven had opened before him.”37 As Dan’s story continues, however, the similarities disappear.
Chapter 6
53: “Bumptious”
Self-assertive to an annoying degree. The description of Dan’s house reminds one of Chesterton’s idea of Christian freedom: “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”38
53: “Modishly”
“Attentive to or following the mode or latest fashion or style” (OED).
54: “Sponge”
“To live on others in a parasitic manner” (OED).
54: “Singing in chorus”
Chesterton addresses this very point when he bemoans how specialists are replacing popular participation: “Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better.”39
54: “The success of Luther”
Dan is referring to the popular notion that Martin Luther’s insistence on congregational singing contributed greatly to the success of the Reformation. Dan’s point, however, is that this kind of singing ought to be recovered or revived by Catholics, as it had been a prominent feature of the Medieval Church. Recently, the idea that Luther’s congregational singing was key to his success has come under scrutiny.40
54: “Belloc’s praise of habits”
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) was a writer of prodigious output, including the hilarious parody Caution
ary Tales for Children (1907). Belloc was such good friends with Chesterton that, despite their vastly different personalities, they were often referred to together as “the Chesterbelloc.”41
54-55: “‘Always drink some kind…’”
The quotation is from Belloc’s The Path to Rome.42 Earlier in the same paragraph, Belloc writes about “whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit,”43 which Dan summarizes before he gives the quotation.
56: “Brillat-Savarin…Escoffier”
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) was a lawyer and is still famous for his book The Physiology of Taste, from which comes the quotation, “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.”44 Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) was a French chef who revolutionized cooking and the restaurant business. He was known as “the chef of kings and the king of chefs.”
56: “Gormandizer…gourmet”
A gormandizer is one who eats greedily; “a glutton” (OED). A gourmet is the opposite, “a connoisseur in the delicacies of the table” (OED).
56: “Grace before meals and after them”
Praying both before and after meals has a long Christian provenance; the practice is well attested by the Church Fathers.45
56: “Compass and callipers”
The traditional instruments for navigation and measurements on a map, or for mathematics.
57: “Henry bowed us in”
That is, he showed in the guests with a bow.
57: “It is written”
The passage is 1 Cor. 1:19. The translation here matches the Douay–Rheims 1899 American edition.46
58: “These books”
The Life of St. Francis of Assisi in Pictures (1947) tells the Saint’s biography through detailed and vibrant watercolors by Pedro Subercaseaux Errázuriz.
The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven (1866–1908, German; 1921, English) by Alexander Wheelock Thayer is still considered a standard in the field.47
You Know Me, Al: A Busher’s Letters (1925) by Ring Lardner is a satire on baseball by a newspaperman turned short story writer. Lardner’s biographer “argued that his keen ear for American speech was ‘the chief instrument of a revolution in American fiction.’”48
Dan England and the Noonday Devil Page 15
