Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  Dan’s point is that he is looking for the extraordinary, the miraculous—not things against nature, but those that are supernatural.

  74: “Abetted”

  “Abet” means both “to encourage or assist (a person) to do something” with no other connotation, or to encourage someone “to do something wrong, especially to commit a crime” (OED). Given the tone of the narrator’s comment, the latter definition seems to hit the mark.

  74: “What Cardinal Newman said”

  This excerpt is from A Grammar of Assent and should have an ellipsis before “impressions,” as the final two sentences occur two paragraphs later in Newman’s text.91

  76: “Punch-drunk”

  By the mid-1930s, this term had taken on another significance in addition to its use in the ring. Outside a fight, someone who was “punch-drunk” had “a neurological syndrome characterized by weakness of the legs and unsteadiness of gait, tremor, impaired speech, and slowness of thinking, seen chiefly in boxers (often after retirement)” (OED).

  77: “Who carried a banner and carried it high”

  Connolly uses similar imagery to describe Blue.92

  Chapter 8

  80: “Carthusian”

  The most ascetical Catholic religious order, Carthusians are cloistered monks who, in addition to the usual vows, take a vow of perpetual silence, abstain from meat much of the year, and spend long hours in contemplative prayer.93 The documentary Into Great Silence (2007) was a landmark look into their way of life.

  81: “Diffuse and slovenly”

  “Diffuse” here means “long-winded, verbose,” while “slovenly” means careless or messy, with a “lack of precision” (OED).

  81: “The mad Nietzsche”

  The source of this quotation is obscure.

  81: “Paul Bourget’s description”

  Paul Bourget (1852–1935), an influential critic and novelist, “was perhaps the first to take a theoretical interest in literary decadence.”94 His definition, which Dan reproduces with only a few embellishments, continues to be a standard in literary analysis.

  Interestingly, Nietzsche—whom Connolly has just mentioned above—paraphrased Bourget’s definition when writing of literary decadence himself.95

  82: “Francis Thompson…Psalmist”

  Thompson was mentioned in chapter 6; he was a devotional poet and, ironically in this context, an ascetic. The Psalmist usually means King David—the chief composer of the psalms—but can mean the author of any of the psalms.

  83: “Villon”

  François Villon (1431–1463?) remains one of the most popular French poets, though many associate the author with his early life of crime and prodigality. The preeminent Villon scholar of the twentieth century writes that “Villon’s particular gift was his capacity to revitalize and authenticate commonplace sentiment by humor, vulgarity, and insights based on lived experience.”96

  84: “Like the savage who believes”

  Dan may be referring here to the widely known poem “The Indian Burying Ground” (1788) by Philip Freneau, which depicts particular Native Americans as buried sitting up and outfitted for their afterlife.

  85: “Rapier mind”

  Equivalent to “rapier wit,” it means “a quick or incisive wit or intellect,” like the rapid thrusts of the rapier used in fencing (OED).

  86: “Trappings”

  The literal sense of the word is apparent—external ornamentation or outward trimmings—and carries no negative nuance, as the meaning is based on a horse’s trapping or “covering spread over the harness,” usually brightly decorated (OED).

  The spiritual meaning is deeper: Howard’s faith in insurance has trapped him in a vacuous life—and a deserted death. The lack of people at the funeral is reminiscent of the same scene in Gatsby.97

  87: “Felicitous”

  “Admirably suited to the occasion; strikingly apt or appropriate” (OED).

  87: “Bel Paesi”

  Bel Paese (Connolly’s spelling probably emphasizes a regional pronunciation) is a popular mild cheese whose title means “beautiful country.” For Italians, the “Bel Paese” means Italy. The spiritual meaning here is that Dan, having witnessed a stark ending for Howard, is moved to embrace the goodness of created things in order to be led through them to the heavenly Beautiful Country.

  87: “Human and Christian in a crime story”

  Connolly is alluding to the many popular crime stories written by Chesterton, collectively called The Father Brown Stories. The stories feature the crime-solving priest Fr. Brown not only untangling complicated plots but, more importantly, ministering to criminals in order to help them receive God’s mercy.

  88: “‘Canticle of the Sun’”

  This well-known poem in blank verse and Umbrian dialect by St. Francis of Assisi praises God in all His creations. St. Francis gives all of them family names, as in “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon.” Pope Francis used this canticle for the title of his encyclical Laudato Si’.

  88: “‘Prayer of the Enamored Soul’”

  This prayer could be found in Connolly’s time in the Spiritual Maxims section of collected works dedicated to St. John of the Cross. For instance, the prayer goes under the title Dan mentions in the nineteenth-century Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross.98 In the 1991 Collected Works, the editors have translated the title as “Prayer of a Soul Taken with Love” and placed it along with his other maxims in The Sayings of Light and Love.99

  89: “‘O sweetest love of God’”

  In the older source mentioned above, the lines that Dan recites in this and the following two paragraphs can be found directly after the “desires of thy heart” line. In fact, they begin a new paragraph.

  However, the editors of the 1991 Collected Works have split up this paragraph and removed parts of the sayings they could not verify were written by the Saint himself. The “O sweetest love” sentence and the one following it, which ends with “at rest,” are placed earlier in The Sayings.100 The soaring final sentence—which is now translated even more dramatically as “I am a squanderer of my soul”—occurs later.101

  The “let everything be changed” line is the only one that appears not to have made the cut, but the Saint has very similar counsels elsewhere, to wit: “When the soul rids itself completely of what is repugnant and unconformed to the divine will, it rests transformed in God through love.”102

  89: “Fervid”

  “Glowing, intensely impassioned” (OED).

  90: “The poet who saw”

  The narrator is referring to Francis Thompson and the poem “The Kingdom of God.”

  90: “Eckermann…Boswell”

  The narrator feels like a biographer of a famous writer, as he makes clear at the end of the paragraph. To that end, he cites two famous examples. Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) wrote the three-volume Conversations with Goethe based on extensive interview notes and his friendly working relationship with the author of Faust. James Boswell (1740–1795) had a similar relationship with Samuel Johnson—the great literary figure who is quoted as often as Shakespeare—and wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.

  90: “Dr. Johnson and Oscar Wilde”

  See the note directly above concerning Samuel Johnson.

  The wide-ranging Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was associated with the Decadent movement, the subject of Dan’s story in this chapter. That Wilde was a gifted conversationalist is well known. The playwright Laurence Housman described Wilde as “incomparably the most accomplished talker I had ever met.”103

  92: “Enslavement”

  The narrator means Briggs’s complete and total fascination, his utter devotion to the point of giving everything to Doris. He has become “a ‘slave’ to passion” (OED).

  Chapter 9

  94: “Stravinski…Sacré du Printemps”

  Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century, and The Rite of Spring (1913) or
Sacré du Printemps is one of his most famous scores, at least in part because of the riot that broke out at its Parisian premiere. “The music might well have merited a riot…But behind all the racket, behind the willfully discordant harmonies and convulsive metric irregularities lay a genuinely innovatory kind of musical thinking.”104

  96: “He believed profoundly in friendship”

  The story of Ambrose continues one of Connolly’s main themes in the book: worldly or secular friendship, versus the recovery and re-presentation of philia, God-rooted friendship. (See also the note on friendship in chapter 6.)

  97: “They took…returned him water”

  The narrator is invoking the Miracle at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine for the benefit of the bridegroom’s reputation and for the pleasure of all in attendance.105 Ambrose’s guests do the opposite—a reverse Cana, as it were.

  97: “Andante movement”

  In a classical concerto, the middle of the three movements is slower than the faster-paced outside movements. Andante is a moderate pace and would thus belong in the middle.

  98: “Essayed”

  “To attempt; to try to do…anything difficult” (OED).

  98: “A paragraph that Mozart wrote”

  The translation Connolly used for this quotation can be found in the different Grove’s Dictionary editions of the times.106

  Importantly, Connolly has left out one of Mozart’s sentences, which occurs in the middle of the original: “And I thank God for giving me the opportunity (you understand) of learning to look upon death as the key which unlocks the gate of true bliss.”107 A footnote in the 1907 Grove edition points to the words “you understand” as being “a reference to the doctrine of the Freemasons.”108 Indeed, an 1875 issue of a Freemason magazine cites the same letter—and that line in particular—as “proof of the high moral earnestness with which Mozart, in his connection with Freemasonry, sought for enlightenment on the highest questions of being.”109

  Later in this chapter, Dan says that the intention of Ambrose’s concerto was “to tell heroically and happily of Mozart’s faith and his defiance of death.” Connolly likely removed the Freemason-influenced line for that reason: Connolly saw Mozart’s dabbling in Freemasonry as inconsistent with, and ultimately unnecessary to, his Catholic faith.

  99: “Requiem”

  Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626) was commissioned for use in a Mass for the Dead but remained incomplete when Mozart died in 1791. Even so, many consider the composition Mozart’s masterpiece. “That he struck a chord with contemporaries is clear from the Requiem’s tremendous and constantly growing acclaim, with Haydn, for example, prophesying that Mozart would achieve immortality with this one work alone.”110

  102: “The poems of the leading religious poet”

  The narrator may have in mind T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), who converted to Anglican Catholicism in 1927 and was known for writing extremely dense poems with voluminous literary allusions.

  102: “A stream-of-consciousness farrago”

  A farrago is a confused mixture or jumble. The narrator’s description sounds like a criticism of the long fiction of James Joyce (1882–1941), specifically Ulysses (1920).

  102: “Prate and prattle”

  “Idle, profitless, or irrelevant talk” (OED).

  103: “Browning…Wagner”

  Robert Browning (1812–1889) was a chiefly self-educated prodigy who was so well-read that critics complained of the obscurity and density of his poems. His wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more popular, but by the end of his life Browning began to see the recognition he deserved. Now he is considered in the same literary league with Tennyson and is especially revered for his dramatic monologues.

  Richard Wagner (1813–1883) remains one of the most important and controversial nineteenth-century composers. He is most famous for his operas like The Flying Dutchman and The Ring Cycle, the latter of which contains “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Wagner is infamous, however, for his anti-Semitic writings. Ambrose mentions him probably because Wagner wrote his own librettos—an uncommon practice for a composer.

  103: “A feeling of bigness”

  Morgan sees Ambrose’s generosity as self-important puffery. Dan’s description of Ambrose, however, is more in line with the classical virtue of munificence, “which disposes one to incur great expenses for the suitable doing of a great work.”111 Ambrose’s great work is friendship, as Dan has made clear, and to accomplish that work Ambrose “gives with royal generosity.”112 Is Ambrose’s giving “always, however, in accordance with right reason”?113 Connolly will provide a contrast in Dan later in the novel.

  104: “Mozart’s faith and his defiance of death”

  See the note on Mozart earlier in this chapter for an important gloss on this line.

  104: “Tawdry”

  Cheap; “showy or gaudy without real value” (OED).

  105: “He stood limply listening”

  To limp means to walk with an impediment, usually because of some injury or damage. Yet Ambrose is standing still. Connolly’s play on “limply” reinforces that the damage has occurred within: Ambrose listens in an injured way, with all the strength gone out of him.

  106: “Sat and waited…and some prayed”

  The situation described here and in the following pages is reminiscent of the apostles’ behavior after the death of Christ yet before He appears to them resurrected.

  106: “Sin against the Holy Spirit”

  These are mentioned in several places in Scripture as unforgivable sins, and Catholic Tradition has named them as “despair, presumption, impenitence or a fixed determination not to repent, obstinacy, resisting the known truth, and envy of another’s spiritual welfare.”114 In each of these cases, a person is knowingly and maliciously refusing God’s mercy; “the irremissibleness of the sins against the Holy Ghost is exclusively on the part of the sinner.”115

  Though Morgan’s theft can be seen as both presumptuous and impenitent, Morgan’s derision of Ambrose’s generosity (see note above) points to envy of Ambrose’s spiritual welfare—and a malicious attempt to break it.

  108: “They were glad he had not returned”

  Connolly is showing here the tragedy of a “secular gospel.” What happens when a heroically generous person is injured in his very soul? What happens to his followers? The story of Ambrose is one where that hero leaves only an ideal behind, one that becomes further romanticized as time passes. The person is no longer present to his friends, and heroism becomes an abstraction. Connolly has invoked the apostles several times in the novel so far; did they think something like this in the locked room, not yet understanding all that Christ had told them?

  109: “Entirely free of guile”

  Jesus says this of the apostle Nathaniel or Bartholomew when the latter comes to meet him for the first time: “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.”116 Connolly thus closes the chapter by giving us an apostolic, evangelical image of Dan, one who gathers people to him from far and wide in order to bring Christ to them through his generosity and tales.

  109: “Pathos”

  “A quality which evokes pity, sadness, or tenderness” (OED).

  Chapter 10

  111: “Rhapsodies”

  “Exaggeratedly enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling” (OED).

  113: “I’m free to go to hell”

  A strikingly modern take on this same teaching can be found in one of St. John Paul II’s addresses: “In his merciful love [God] can only desire the salvation of the beings he created. In reality, it is the creature who closes himself to his love. Damnation consists precisely in definitive separation from God, freely chosen by the human person and confirmed with death that seals his choice forever. God’s judgement ratifies this state.”117

  114: “Suspect”

  Dan means that church officials have always been subject to suspicion, not that they are by their nature always worthy of suspicion
(which is how the world typically sees them).

  114: “Cardinal Suhard”

  Emmanuel Célestin Cardinal Suhard (1874–1949) was Archbishop of Paris from 1940 until his death in 1949 and wrote the pastoral letter Priests Among Men (1949). He introduced a priest-worker movement that “provided the occasion for priests to taste the direct reality of grueling manual labor.”118 Dorothy Day had started something comparable in America—the Catholic Worker movement—and Connolly had given his character Blue a similar mission in Mr. Blue.

  114: “Communist Manifesto…Rerum Novarum”

  Marx co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels in 1848. Pope Leo XIII wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, and it has been hailed since as one of the most important documents of the Church’s social teaching. Saint John Paul II encouraged people “to discover anew the richness of the fundamental principles which it formulated for dealing with the question of the condition of workers.”119

  Dan’s point is that Marx and Engel’s text had, for all its flaws, drawn attention to the plight of the working class long before the Church released a papal document on it. So, argues Dan, it would be silly to call the church’s hierarchs “political schemers,” as they appear to be quite inept in that regard.

  115: “Invectives…dither”

  An invective is “a violent attack in words,” one of which has put Dan in a dither, “a state of tremulous excitement or apprehension” (OED).

  115: “Timbre”

  Timbre means not the pitch nor the intensity of a sound but “the proportion in which the fundamental tone is combined with the harmonics or overtones” (OED).

  116: “Until I knew your hate!”

  Dan’s poem is reminiscent of Chesterton’s argument in Orthodoxy that criticisms of Christianity revealed to him what was deficient in the critic, not what was wrong with the faith. “Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing [Christianity] is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.”120