The poet, James Morris, has just sent me an old issue of the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies (Winter 2006) in which reviews of two of my books, Literary Converts and Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, are published. Neither review can be described as glowing and, indeed, both might be said to damn with faint praise. I even detect an element of supercilious condescension all too common in book reviews written by those who are self-consciously “academic”. Nonetheless, I found the reviews of interest and am posting them in the hope that others might do so also.
Christianity and Chaos
Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, by Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. 425 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by John W. Osborne, Rutgers University.
Joseph Pearce is a Roman Catholic traditionalist who believes his church has been undermined by “a new generation of modernists hell-bent, seemingly, on tampering with Catholicism’s timeless beauties and mysteries” (55). But he is confident that the 2000-year-old Christian heritage will triumph over contemporary religious fads. Literary Giants, Literary Catholics is a broad survey of faith and culture which is intended to support that conviction.
This is a book of collected essays, not scholarly articles. Although there is a good index, it lacks footnotes and bibliography; the result is a large number of unattributed quotes. Eighty-eight of the 408 pages focus on G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and ninety-eight on J. R. R. Tolkien. Admirers of these authors should like what they read here. The broad range of other writers discussed includes Dante, Shakespeare and Paul McCartney. This book would be better if the choice of authors had been narrowed and articles such as the ones on Hollywood and Modern Art excluded, as well as comments about the Spanish Civil War and the atom bomb.
Pearce emphasizes the civilizing role the Catholic Church has played in European history, agreeing with Evelyn Waugh that the modern world faces a choice between Christianity and chaos. For both men, Catholicism represents the most complete and vital form of Christianity. But again, Pearce’s argument is weakened by a too wide range of subjects, and a less rhetorical, more measured presentation would better serve his purpose. Nevertheless he gives us some good discussions of major and minor Catholic writers. One of the latter is Maurice Baring, whose autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), provides a mental image of a cultivated and gentle way of English life that vanished during World War I. Baring signed the register at Waugh’s wedding to Laura Herbert and represented a privileged milieu that fascinated Waugh.
Although Waugh’s name appears frequently in this book, only two short pieces are devoted to him. One is an article, “Evelyn Waugh: Ultramodern to Ultramontane,” and the other is a favorable review of Douglas Lane Patey’s Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (1998). It is not surprising that Pearce would consider Brideshead Revisited (1945) “undeniably one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century” (212). As Pearce himself says, this assessment is not universally shared. Pearce is correct in noting Waugh’s firm belief that Catholicism is central to the Western cultural tradition, and that the statement of Catholic values in Brideshead Revisited aroused hostility among critics who had high praise for Waugh’s earlier novels. For Pearce, Waugh is only one of many British writers used to support a thesis, and one should not expect to find here an extended and nuanced discussion.
Waugh’s views on culture are relevant to the current controversy over a constitution for Europe. Readers who appreciate George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral (2005) should be interested in this aspect of Waugh’s thought. The conflict between Waugh’s exposition of Christian culture and the secular opinions of many framers of a constitution for a united Europe seems worthy of further exploration.
The whole of Literary Giants, Literary Catholics is better than the sum of its parts. Despite the mélange of chapter subjects and weak scholarly engagement, the book has interesting information and argument. It is a cultural critique which provides support for one of the many beliefs competing for our attention.
Last of a Dying Breed?
Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief, by Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999. Reprinted 2000. 452 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.
Joseph Pearce has published books on C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, separate lives of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, and a broader book on Catholic writers as literary giants. In Literary Converts he pulls together information on twentieth-century converts and some Anglicans to discuss “a potent Christian response to the age of unbelief” and to tell “the story of how these giants of literature exerted a profound influence on each other and on the age in which they lived.”
This is clearly an important topic, if only because, as Belloc said, “Converts can hardly be ten per cent of the Catholic body; that eighty per cent of the first-rate writers … come from this ten per cent seems to argue either a monstrous articulateness in the converts or a monstrous inarticulateness in the born Catholics.” Pearce does not explore this paradox, but someone should. Of course, some are more giant than others, and if many of the writers had not converted, few would think them worth mentioning.
Pearce organizes the material more or less chronologically from 1901 more or less to the death of Graham Greene. This principle leads to a good deal of interruption of individual stories, so that chapters 13 and 31 are devoted to Greene, who is given further scattered mentions. Moreover, discussions of clearly minor figures are inserted to interrupt continuity.
This being by a Brit, about Brits, much space is devoted to personal relationships and their influences, rather like a tightly wound game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or the dissertation on Waugh and many others by Neil Francis Brennan, in which everyone is connected to everyone else. There clearly was a good deal of interweaving, but the reader may grow weary of seeing Chesterton, Knox, and lesser-known writers appearing again and again. The desire to synthesize often leads to preposterous errors, as when Pearce includes Greene in a list of people who, as youths, had not yet encountered “the travails of later life” or Waugh in a list of people who thought Scobie a saint in The Heart of the Matter (1948). In discussing Orwell’s favorable view of Waugh, Pearce ignores Orwell’s belief that “One cannot really be Catholic & grown up” and that “Waugh is abt as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”
Only in the very broadest sense can this be called a work of literary criticism. Much of the commentary is eulogy provided immediately after a writer’s death or gleanings from friendly biographies. The rare quotations—of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems, for example—do little to justify the generalized praise. Elsewhere, and too often, Pearce simply asserts the importance of poems like Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) without saying why it is important or giving excerpts from which the reader can judge.
Of course, the book is obviously a thinly veiled work of apologetics, and Pearce is primarily interested in the stages by which the writers became converts. Motifs recur: rejection of modern chaos, fairly wide reading in Catholic philosophy and controversy, admiration of simple peasant or proletarian faith, recognition of the need for authority, belief that Catholicism is more rational than any other explanation of life. Still, one may question the applicability of “ruthlessly reasoned analysis” to a late T. S. Eliot jeremiad about the collapse of European culture.
Pearce sympathizes with the anti-Marxist distributist philosophy originally advocated by the Chesterton brothers and later by E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful (1973) and to some extent with the distress at the effects of Vatican II on the Mass and on other aspects of Catholic worship and possibly of later conservative support for Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (1968). Like Ian Kerr in The Catholic Revival in English Literature (2003), Pearce is troubled by Graham Greene’s denial of Hell and his post-World War II tendency to make “God in his own image,” by “his increasingly bizarre treatment of religious issues,” and in one case “by a leap of fatuity.”
Pearce ends the book by wondering whether new converts, whom he does not mention by name, are “the first of a new wave or the last of a dying breed,” concluding that “only time or eternity will tell.” On the evidence he presents, no English convert of the stature of Waugh, Greene, or even Muriel Spark has emerged. He might, though he does not, quite, argue that Vatican II has destroyed traditions besides the Latin Mass.
Having just returned from vacation, I’m doing some catch-up reading on the Ink Desk. I read this post just after reading the post on Tom Shippey. It seems a good deal of coincidence is involved in that reading sequence. The point I tried to make in my rather too long comment on the Shippey post is demonstrated by the detractions, both overt and covert in these reviews, along with other contemporary problems (mainly the ubiquitous fear of thesis) that cause intellectual arrest among secular academics. Read closely: They cannot deny the literary merit of Pearce’s book–it’s too obvious–but they must follow the policy of dismantling any conclusion that favors the faith in even the slightest degree, however oblique. I have no doubt that the reviews would have been entirely positive–with no detractions at all–if Pearce had taken a tone of superior secular condescension toward his subjects. He did not take the politically correct tone, and so, regardless of all other considerations, he must be somehow punished, the review cannot be an unqualified positive one.