I’m pleased to announce the publication of my interview with Jared Zimmerer for Fr. Robert Barron’s website, Word on Fire:
Word on Fire and Beauteous Truth
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About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
I reflect on some of the things you discuss in the interview in something I wrote (which will never be published).
If you will permit me;
Speculative
Waugh found a handful of dust in South America,
Greene found the power and the glory.
Greene found the heart of the matter in black Africa,
Waugh found black mischief.
I’m not saying the stories were hidden there, or maybe I am?
Am I saying that?
Should God be credited co-author?
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh,
In collaboration with God.
Did God plant the story there in the Amazonian rain forest?
Did He cultivate it there?
Did the seed grow there?
The stories of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh are really sub-plots in in their life-story, in the the sory of their lives.
Did God make Greeneland?
We know he made the geographical place called Greenland,
But did He make the sleazy, seedy place we know as Greeneland?
Was it Evelyn Waugh who’ traced the operation of Divine Grace
On a group of closely connected but disparate characters’,
Or was it ACTUALLY The Holy Spirit?
They were both unique in creating stories so close to their experience.
They made stories out of their lives,
From the story of their life.
The Sword of Honour series is almost a direct transcription of what he did in the war,
It could almost be called Evelyn’s War,
Like a very lengthy military dispatch.
They didn’t have the imagination of a Dickens or a Balzac,
So they had to go out and find a story,
Like a reporter.
Waugh scooped the scoop of Scoop out of-‘the rubbish heap of experience’?
Greene moulded Brighton Rock,
From the sugar and spice of life.
The Ultimate Story, the Greatest Story Ever Told,
The Life of Christ,
‘The fairy-tale which is true’.
What is true is stupendous,
What is fiction mundane.
The fiction of our lives is the mundaneness.
The truth; ‘we cannot stand very much reality’
Truth is stranger than fiction really,
Our lives are fiction compared to the Crucifixion.
Waugh was a cuckold (in despair),
God guided him to South America,
Had him meet the model for Mr. Todd there.
That’s how God created A Handful of Dust
God is: ‘il miglio fabbro’
The Greater Creator.
Maybe it should be ‘That’s how God generated A Handful of Dust’
No, that would be theologically wrong as well. I diminish human freedom.
There’s a line in John Berryman-‘We are Transacting with You’.
Not that’s wrong too.
You said: “one only writes as well as one reads. Read well and you will write well. ” To which I’d add:
And since writing is thinking, the obvious conclusion is that if one reads well, one thinks well.