Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  152: “Lao-tse”

  Now referred to as Lao-tzu or Laozi, the Chinese philosopher lived from 604–531 BC. He is generally regarded as the founder of Daoism.

  152: “Some noonday…he will be shot”

  Connolly is alluding to Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler, a novel in which the protagonist Rubashov is dubiously imprisoned by a regime evocative of Stalinist Russia. The dark but much-lauded book, now a classic, has many passages in which Rubashov ponders the weight of his worth, much as Dan is doing in this chapter.

  153: “Pathetically”

  “So as to excite pity, compassion, or sadness” (OED).

  Chapter 13

  154: “One noonday”

  Dan is now engaged in the battle with the noonday devil. Compare this with the use of “noonday” in chapter 3.

  155: “Canons of ordinary conduct”

  “Canon” here means “a standard of judgement or authority; a test, criterion, means of discrimination” (OED). The word has many Catholic meanings, as well: a canon lawyer studies the code of canon law; a canon or prelate of the Church; the section of the Mass called the Canon.

  156: “The sublime in life”

  Dan sees the sublime, “that which is grand or noble in human nature or life; moral or spiritual excellence” (OED).

  158: “A lunch counter”

  Lunch counters were popular places for quick meals in the 1940s and 1950s, especially if you were a teenager. Many places like drugstores would have lunch counters with soda fountains, as would department stores like Woolworth’s, where the crisp uniforms were part of the experience. “Because Woolworth had a reputation for value but also for modern efficiency, it provided a respectable spot for lunchers on a budget.”159

  158: “Prosaic”

  “Unpoetic, unromantic; dull, flat, unexciting; commonplace, mundane” (OED). In other words, the lunch counter seems to be exactly the wrong place for Dan’s highly romantic outlook.

  158: “For him, dainty food”

  Dainty here means “pleasing to the palate, choice, delicate” (OED). The narrator’s point is that Dan is accustomed to much coarser food more simply prepared.

  159: “Wistful”

  Though the word can mean “nostalgic,” Connolly is using it here also in its older sense: “Mournfully expectant or longing” (OED).

  161: “Only he who loses his life…”

  Dan is quoting Scripture: “For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.”160

  162: “He told of a poverty…”

  An excerpt of Dan England starting here and proceeding through the end of chapter 14 was reprinted by Catholic Insight magazine in their 2014 Christmas issue.161 Appropriately, they followed it with “The Modern Scrooge” by Chesterton.

  162: “The cynic whom Wilde described”

  The popular quotation is actually a compression of a dialogue in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. It defines any cynic, not a particular one. Interestingly, the play continues, “And a sentimentalist…is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”162

  163: “The day the Lord had made”

  This is an allusion to Ps. 117:24: “This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us be glad and rejoice therein.”

  164: “A better insight into Dan…”

  The narrator of Mr. Blue says the same thing when assessing Blue’s movie script about the end of the world.163 Again, Connolly’s craft is to give us a story a character wrote himself in order to reveal to us the most intimate things about that character.

  164: “A young man and homeless”

  See the end of chapter 14 for what “homeless” means for Dan in his story.

  Chapter 14

  167: “A little red sanctuary lamp”

  A sanctuary lamp or altar lamp must be present in a Catholic church wherever Jesus is fully present in the Eucharist, whether exposed in the Blessed Sacrament or reserved in the tabernacle. “The Church prescribes that at least one lamp should continually burn before the tabernacle…not only as an ornament of the altar, but for the purpose of worship. It is also a mark of honor. It is to remind the faithful of the presence of Christ, and is a profession of their love and affection. Mystically it signifies Christ.”164

  169: “The yardmaster who cursed”

  If the boy’s boss was a yardmaster, the boy worked on the docks, in the railyards, or at some similar heavy-duty manual labor. The foreman at the lumberyard in which Blue works in Mr. Blue is imagined by the narrator as a “yard slavedriver.”165

  169: “Big Mike”

  One of the destitute friends Blue makes at a lumberyard in Mr. Blue is named Mike; he brings Blue, bedridden, a secondhand book that the narrator implies was bought with the money usually spent on alcohol.166

  Here, the implication in Dan’s story is that the Boy’s witness at the yard convinces Big Mike to go to confession with him.

  170: “Pullman”

  “A railway carriage affording special comfort, especially one with sleeping facilities” (OED).

  171: “Cornices”

  In architecture, a cornice is “a horizontal molded projection which crowns or finishes a building” (OED).

  172: “Where is Home?”

  At the end of chapter 13, the narrator told us that this part of the story was about when Dan was “homeless.” The true meaning becomes clear now.

  172: “Filled his cell”

  The connotation of “cell” is clear: the Young Man’s harried work has imprisoned him in a mechanical, unsympathetic life spiritually far away from home and family. The wordplay on “cell” makes this point even more clear: a cloistered monk alone in his cell would be perfectly at home with God.

  Chapter 15

  176: “He deplored it”

  To deplore something is “to weep for, bewail, lament; to grieve over, regret deeply” (OED).

  176: “Archer’s iniquity”

  “Iniquity,” especially in Connolly’s time, meant “wrongful or injurious action towards another…generally connoting gross injustice or public wrong” (OED). Interestingly, “Old Iniquity” is sometimes used as “a name for the devil” (OED).

  The word has an important place in Catholic Tradition. For instance, in the Mass of Connolly’s time, the priest would pray aloud before the Kyrie, “Take away from us our iniquities, we beseech Thee, O Lord.”167

  176: “Washington Street…the Old South Church”

  The Old South Church was moved to its current location in Back Bay in 1875 and is nowhere near Washington Street. However, the old location—once called the Cedar Meeting House and now simply the Old South Meeting House—is directly off Washington Street and adjacent to Newspaper Row where the narrator works.

  The Old South Meeting House is well known as the original location of the Boston Tea Party, where would-be Americans overthrew the British by plundering their property. Connolly’s use of the Old South Meeting House as the site where the narrator learns of Archer’s “iniquity” takes on a deeper meaning: Archer has just overthrown Dan England in the same way the colonists overthrew England proper.

  177: “‘Seein’ snakes?’”

  The slang expression “seeing snakes” means to have the DTs or delirium tremens: alcohol withdrawal syndrome (OED).

  178: “A rule of silence”

  This is an ironic pun from the narrator and is repeated two paragraphs later. A “rule of silence” is a monastic observance of exterior and interior silence during prescribed parts of the day—most of the time for Carthusians, less of the time for other orders.

  180: “Perfidy”

  “Deceitfulness, untrustworthiness; breach of faith or of a promise; betrayal of trust; treachery” (OED).

  181: “Gossamer”

  “Light and flimsy” (OED).

  181: “Dan’s envy”

  Though writers have often used “en
vy” to mean hostility and jealousy of others’ advantages, the Catholic definition fits better here: “Envy…refers to the sadness at the sight of another’s goods and the immoderate desire to acquire them for oneself, even unjustly.”168 The sadness of envy has manifested in Dan as wistfulness, nostalgia, and immoderate self-deprecation.

  185: “Imperturbable was his conceit”

  “Imperturbable” means “not capable of being… agitated or excited; unexcitable; serene, calm” (OED).

  See the note on “conceit” at the end of chapter 10, when the narrator had used the word of himself. The narrator’s application of it here to Archer works two ways: it shows the much greater degree of conceit in Archer, and it allows the narrator, eventually, to see Archer as a fellow sinner.

  185: “That most personal of expressions—fear”

  Archer’s first real glimpse of interpersonal relationships, which breaks his total self-absorption, is fear. By the end of the novel, this experience will have begun to teach him the way from creatures to the Creator: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”169

  Chapter 16

  189: “Surlily”

  “With gloomy ill-humor;” in a bad temper (OED).

  190: “Almost religious belief in friendship”

  See the note “here were men…friends” in chapter 6, especially the usage of philia in the New Testament.

  191: “Ambrose had faith in man”

  That is what makes Ambrose’s tale a “secular gospel,” or, as Connolly might say, the tragedy of secular humanism. See the note “they were glad…” at the end of chapter 9.

  191: “Heroic charity”

  Heroic charity would be the highest form of heroic virtue, a necessary condition for the road to Sainthood.

  191: “‘Justus, you must forgive Barney’”

  The ironic wordplay on Justus’s name—justice must give way to mercy—points to the many reversals happening in this chapter, not the least of which is Dan’s heroic forgiveness of Justus.

  193: “Justus Archer had changed”

  Archer’s first conversion was imperfect, a contrition of fear. In Dan’s forgiveness, Archer was moved to “gratitude,” and his contrition has become that of charity, even if only to a small degree. Dan’s heroic charity, by definition, offers a share in its glory to others—if they will only cooperate with that grace.

  193: “Volatilized”

  “Readily changing from one interest…to another… characterized by levity” (OED).

  194: “An erectness extraordinary for him”

  This, and the final use of “erectly” three paragraphs later, is the culmination of the motif begun at the end of chapter 10 (see the note “erect with determination”). In cooperating with the grace of forgiveness, Dan has defeated the noonday devil; he can stand tall, both in spirit and in body. The great Chesterton passage Connolly may have had in mind describes the triumph of the Church in similar terms: “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”170

  194: “Pathetic”

  At the end of chapter 13, the narrator describes Dan’s voice as having “pathos” as he explains his poor upbringing. That pathos has now begun to take root in Archer, who had previously hardened his heart to such experiences. He has received the wound of love—the gift of pain, as Dan calls it in his poem at the beginning of chapter 15.

  194: “His new wisdom”

  This “new wisdom” is the fruit of having been forgiven by Dan and from mourning the loss of that love. “Fear of the Lord” in its fullness means awe and wonder, just as it means a healthy sense of not wanting to lose that which is most important.

  Dan has in different degrees brought out this wisdom in each of the people in his home, which is just the beginning of his triumph.

  * * *

  1.A. Philip McMahon, “Francis Bacon’s Essay Of Beauty,” PMLA 60, no. 3 (September 1945): pp. 716–759.

  2.Edgar Allan Poe, “Marginalia,” Southern Literary Messenger 15, no. 5 (May 1849): p. 293.

  3.Summa Theologiae (hereafter ST) I, q. 39, a. 8.

  4.CW, Vol. 1, p. 303.

  5.CW, Vol. 2, p. 27.

  6.CW, Vol. 2, p. 72.

  7.Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Or, Life in the Woods (1854; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), p. 143.

  8.Robert Hendrickson, God Bless America: The Origins of Over 1,500 Patriotic Words and Phrases (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), p. 140.

  9.G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (New York: John Lane Company, 1910), p. 6.

  10.Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1943; repr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p. 313.

  11.See the Cluny edition of Mr. Blue, p. 43, and the annotation, pp. 142–43.

  12.George Bernard Shaw, “On Going to Church,” The Savoy 1 (January 1896): pp. 13–28.

  13.George Bernard Shaw, On Going to Church: Being the Preachment which treats of Church-Going, Art, and Some Other Themes (New York: Roycroft, 1896).

  14.See p. 13 in The Savoy article or p. 2 in the Roycroft edition.

  15.CW, Vol. 1, p. 318.

  16.See, for instance, the quotation attributed to Chesterton in a contemporary novel about J. R. R. Tolkien. T. M. Doran, Toward the Gleam (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 199.

  17.CW, Vol. 1, p. 328.

  18.Thomas DeCantillon Church, “Christmas amongst the Irish Peasantry,” Donahoe’s Magazine 5 (1881): p. 61.

  19.CW, Vol. 1, pp. 216–17.

  20.CE, “Lay Brothers.”

  21.Euripides, Bacchae, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2008), II.774–75.

  22.J. Michael Walton, Euripides: Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 2009), p. 139.

  23.Euripides, Bacchae, II.282–83.

  24.GG, 137.

  25.For an excellent introduction, see CE, “State or Way (Purgative, Illuminative, Unitive).”

  26.MB, pp. 104, 182.

  27.Ibid., pp. 103, 180.

  28.J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), p. 89.

  29.Matt. 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36.

  30.Is. 62:2; Rev. 2:17.

  31.The Book of Modern Catholic Verse, comp. Theodore Maynard (New York: Henry Holt, 1926), p. 86.

  32.Aidan Nichols, O.P., The Shape of Catholic Theology: An Introduction to its Sources, Principles, and History (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), p. 186.

  33.“In the 1940s, consumers all over America and Canada could purchase cans of grass in their local pharmacies.” Steve Meyerowitz, Wheatgrass: Nature’s Finest Medicine, 7th ed. (Great Barrington, MA.: Sproutman, 2006), p. 1.

  34.CE, “Reductions of Paraguay.”

  35.René Fülöp-Miller, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1930).

  36.C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938; repr. New York: Scribner, 2003).

  37.Ibid., p. 130.

  38.CW, Vol. 1, p. 300.

  39.CW, Vol. 1, p. 164.

  40.See, for instance, Joseph Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  41.Joseph Pearce devotes an entire section of his book on literary Catholics to the Chesterbelloc. See Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants (2005; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), pp. 63–154.

  42.Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome (1902; repr. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), p. 27.

  43.Ibid.

  44.Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (1825; r
epr. New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 15.

  45.See CE, “Thanksgiving before and after Meals.”

  46.Interestingly, the passage is off by only one transposition of words from the English Revised Version of 1885, the British revision of the King James Version.

  47.“I suspect many people still feel that in some ways the most effective Beethoven biography remains the massive late nineteenth-century one by Alexander Wheelock Thayer…[this new study] was written in his spirit.” Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), pp. xii–xiii.

  48.Jonathan Yardley, introduction to Selected Stories, by Ring Lardner (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. viii.

  49.“Huysmans’s Retirement to a Cloister,” The Literary Digest 17, no. 13 (September 24, 1898): p. 369.

  50.Virgil W. Peterson, review of Modern Criminal Investigation, by Harry Soderman and John J. O’Connell, DePaul Law Review 13, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1963): pp. 189–190.

  51.The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, DC: ICS, 1991), p. 633.

  52.CE, “François Rabelais.”

  53.CE, “Utopia.”

  54.MB, pp. 42–43; 129–130.

  55.MB, pp. 98; 174–75.

  56.Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 175–76.

  57.Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, 2nd ed. (London: T. N. Foulis, 1913), p. xii.

  58.Rick Gonsalves, Placekicking in the NFL: A History and Analysis (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2014), p. 132.

  59.Glenn H. Roe, The Passion of Charles Péguy: Literature, Modernity, and the Crisis of Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 219.

  60.Philip Jenkins, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (1994; repr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), p. 82.

  61.Carol Fitzgerald, introduction to Series Americana: Post Depression-Era Regional Literature, 1938–1980 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2009), p. xxvi.

  62.Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (1996; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 203.