Imagine a middle-aged white man in good clothes waiting for a morning train at a station of the Long Island Railroad. He appears at ease, even a little self-satisfied. He could afford a driver to take him into Midtown, but being democratic in spirit, he sticks to the train. He is a cradle Catholic, an underwriter of Church missions, a board member of the Jesuit high school he attended decades ago. When he looks at his wife, he still sees the girl he fell in love with across the dance floor in the eleventh grade. His teenage children, who are “good kids,” admire him and sometimes roll their eyes at him. Mostly they are indulgent. His work in finance, which they regard with bafflement, has given them their privileged lives. He plays eighteen holes at Pine Hollow with the same foursome every Sunday when he is not with clients in Europe or the Pacific Rim. He enjoys a friendly wager, tips his caddie and the barman well. He is a man prepared to live in the world, to enjoy what he has built, and to do good where possible. And he is about to have an experience that will change his life.
We know that the Catholic novel exists and that there are occasional distinguished examples. I have a good one, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, sitting on my nightstand. At the same time, the very idea of the Catholic novel might strike us almost as a contradiction in terms. The novelist Alice McDermott, a lapsed Catholic, has said that her work is an attempt to answer the question, “How can this be enough?” That is, given that in a hundred years almost everything we’ve based our lives on will be demolished or forgotten, how can the rare moments of grace be enough to sustain us? The Church tells us that we need not worry about this, because we have everlasting life through Christ. Of course, a Catholic life is more than the catechism. Faith must be constantly tested and renewed. And every novelist, religious or not, has his own priors, because he has an intellectual and a personal history. Still, the habits of mind required of a supplicant and of a writer are not necessarily the same. The writer grants herself liberties that the supplicant cannot.
The vocabulary of religious life is less and less a lingua franca in the West, and the thinning of our spiritual atmosphere creates a further problem for the Catholic novel. John Updike, a diffident Christian who nonetheless made belief a major theme of his work, wrote in 1994 that “there is almost no sense, in writers under forty-five, of there having been a religious upbringing or that there is anything of a religious question hanging over human existence.” The secular outlook has grown only more dominant since. The Catholic writer therefore risks anachronism if not irrelevance in a literary world that regards his concerns at best as quaint.
The novel’s aesthetic values should not be alien to Catholics, for whom religious experience has a strong aesthetic component. Mystification, too, is central to both the novel and the Catholic faith, in the sense that both ask us to believe in something we cannot verify in a scientific or mathematical sense. At the same time, we take for granted that the novel is about the world. It must take the risk of making sin attractive. This is why we sometimes see Catholic groups objecting to works of art on moral grounds. They are not wrong per se; if art can be good for us, it can also be bad. It is this tension between vitality and moral hazard that gives the novel something of its special interest.
By broad consensus, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh are the most gifted Catholic novelists in English. Each of them, however, is a problem for the Catholic novel tradition itself, because despite their gifts, neither gives us a wholly convincing picture of the world as sanctified by the presence of God. For Greene and Waugh, the world is Manichean darkness, and the Church is light. The world is where faith is corrupted and persecuted, and so the world is hateful to them, even as they are worldly men themselves.
Greene does many things well as a novelist, but his conception of the Catholic faith is often shallow and pedantic. In Brighton Rock, Pinkie Brown, purportedly a tough young gangster type, recites bits of the Latin Mass to himself as he speeds toward perdition. In The Heart of the Matter, Greene maneuvers his hero, Major Scobie, a middling figure in the British Administration in Sierra Leone, into sin and corruption and a spiritual crisis. Scobie ends a suicide, though he disguises his death to make it appear an accident, so as to spare his devout wife the pain of knowing that he has committed a mortal sin. Here the novel’s Catholicism is not a felt reality but a plot contrivance, literally a deus ex machina. In Greene’s alchemical mix of Catholic faith and existential despair, the despair often threatens to dissolve the Catholicism. One thinks of the “nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” refrain of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” the work of another problematic Catholic.
Greene’s fullest treatment of his themes of sin and redemption, The Power and the Glory, gains in gravity from its setting in revolutionary Mexico, where the persecution of Catholics is state policy. Here Greene, who claimed to have participated in games of Russian roulette as an Oxford undergraduate, found his ideal subject; he was never satisfied playing for less than mortal stakes. His “whiskey priest” is imprisoned and finally martyred, but he is not defeated. According to another priest in the novel, “he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation—the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God.” Unusually for Greene, the novel ends on a modest note of spiritual uplift. Even so, we might reasonably feel that Greene has asked too much of us in his creation of an almost oppressive atmosphere of debasement and fear. Most of us are not prepared to be martyrs, even in the service of a faith that, as T. S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding” (1942), demands “not less than everything.” But these are the only terms that Greene understood.
Evelyn Waugh had stared into the abyss early in life—betrayed sexually and humiliated socially by his first wife, and lacking, as he thought then, a real profession, he considered suicide. Even after he converted to Catholicism in 1930, he continued to write in an elegant, heartless, satiric mode, with great success and distinction in novels, travelogue, and memoir. As he entered middle age, Catholic themes began to enter his novels. Waugh’s Catholicism seems, however, to have been corrupting rather than galvanizing. Corrupting, certainly, in terms of his prose style, which in his major Catholic novel, Brideshead Revisited, becomes sentimental and therefore unconvincing. The author seems to be trying to talk himself into something.
Waugh needed his faith every bit as much as Greene and largely for the same reason. He liked to tell friends and interviewers that, since he was not instinctively charitable, his character would be a good deal worse if he were not a Catholic. He claimed to find the world “unintelligible and unendurable without God.” That we need God is not, of course, sufficient evidence of his existence.
By the late Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh’s Catholicism merged completely with his anti-modernism, leaving his hero, Guy Crouchback, feeling that the British Army may not be altogether different from the German Army or the Soviet. Of course, a Waugh who did not write against the grain of our received ideas about England’s triumph over fascism would be unrecognizable. Waugh served as an officer in that war, disliked by his men but conspicuous in his bravery. One cannot help but feel, however, that on an unconscious level he had been in retreat from the world for too long. A Catholicism that can only look backward—Waugh spoke of having “written an obituary of the Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries”—cannot long sustain us.
Our protagonist grew up in the Irish enclave of Woodside, Queens, and cannot understand why anyone would consent to be raised elsewhere. He thought of his family as middle-class but now knows that things were a little tighter than his parents let on. The whole family went to Sunday Mass; his mother also attended service on Wednesday mornings. His younger sister is now a nurse and is married to a man he pretends to respect. His parents died, as far as he can tell, of exhaustion. He told himself it was all right, even though they were only in their sixties, because they were going to be with God. What he remembers about his father is that he never complained. That was his only pride.
As he stands on that Long Island Railroad platform, our protagonist thinks of the old “two-up, two-down” they lived in, within the confines of what he then thought of as less a neighborhood than a parish. Reagan was in the White House, but the 1960s hadn’t happened to his own family yet. He lived with his brother and sister in one of the two upstairs bedrooms. His brother is dead almost a decade now, hit by a truck in the street. The short, sharp memory of the telephone call he got from his father reporting the news makes him feel suddenly empty and insufficient. Tommy did not have a good life, he tells himself decisively. But why not? No one ever liked a good time more. When what is left of the family is in a room together now, this is the question they turn over, still spilling earth on the grave.
He tries to shake off his sudden dour mood. His life in business has taught him not to dwell on what he cannot control. Returned to the present, he observes a young woman walk to the end of their platform. She is slim, neatly dressed, purposeful. She climbs down the short set of metal rungs that leads to the track level and steps gingerly onto the track bed. He thinks, “She has dropped her phone on the tracks.” With her arms out for balance, she picks her way slowly out to the middle, where her phone cannot be. There she smooths down her skirt, tugs firmly on the tails of her blouse, and kneels. Other passengers are shouting now—the train is coming on the express track. Very deliberately, the young woman extends her arms above her head, palms forward. The gesture says to the conductor, “Stop!” but she makes no effort to move. Our protagonist notices that her bare knees are sunk into the gravel of the track bed, which must be painful. The train’s emergency brakes are squealing horribly. Still the young woman does not move. As he feels himself about to call out, the train strikes her with a thud.
With the young woman’s body somewhere under the train, the station is evacuated as EMTs arrive with their gear. Of course, she cannot be alive; they are only doing their jobs. He thinks of his sister, the things she must have seen in thirty years working in hospitals. He stands in the weedy parking lot and waits his turn to give a statement to an apologetic young officer from the Suffolk County Police. “We’ll have you on your way in just a minute, sir,” the officer says. “We do get this kind of thing, people off their medications or what have you, they tend to come to the stations.”
After about an hour, our protagonist is able to call an Uber and resume his trip. He finds that he is eager to unburden himself to others at the office. Once there, however, he discovers that his experience is somehow incommunicable. It is not that his colleagues are callous, exactly—they say the appropriate things; someone suggests that he go home for the day—but neither are they very much moved. Instinctively they wish to keep the dead woman outside the zone of their concerns. He is left wondering how well he knows these people, whom he sees every day and whose children’s weddings he has attended.
The Catholic novel need not be written by a Catholic. For me, the model of the form is Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose author, Willa Cather, was an Episcopalian. Cather’s novel tells the story of two priests, Fathers Latour and Vaillant, who are attempting to establish a diocese in nineteenth-century New Mexico. I call it a model not simply because it has priests for protagonists or deals directly with a Catholic subject. As O’Connor wrote, “what we roughly call the Catholic novel is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized world. . . . It is one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by.”
Cather’s novel has its origin not in Catholic faith itself but in the objects she encountered in the Catholic Southwest—churches, statues, frescoes—which, as she told the editors of Commonweal, “had a moving reality about them.” This moving reality is the mystery Cather was trying to solve in Archbishop, by creating a story that would be an analogue to the material evidence the missionaries had left behind. At first she assumed that “any story of the Church in the Southwest was certainly the business of some Catholic writer.” Gradually, she came to see the story of the early missionaries in the Southwest as presenting an interesting aesthetic problem, of the kind she was equipped to solve, as well as a spiritual incitement that crossed sectarian boundaries.
The novel is a series of movements from a lower to a higher spiritual plane. The prologue is set in the hills outside Rome, as senior churchmen meet to have a vinous lunch and decide who will be sent out to establish the new diocese of New Mexico. St. Peter’s Basilica is visible in the distance. This is the institutional Church, stately but also worldly and therefore potentially corrupt. When Fr. Latour first encounters New Mexico at the culmination of a long journey on horseback, it seems almost featureless to him. Only after he has lived there for decades does he learn to see its beauty. The church he builds near Santa Fe is not grand, but it is the product of an authentic devotion. Finally, as Latour nears death, the scale of things is retrospectively reordered for him. Events that seemed important in living them are now revealed to have been trivial; others, perhaps forgotten, assume talismanic importance. His ego has begun to dissolve. He is able to see his own life clearly for the first time.
Cather’s priests are morally impressive, but they are not plaster saints. They are in the world, and even the good they do has a cost. It is rather Cather’s prose and the Southwest landscape it evokes that orient the reader to transcendence. Cather spoke of wanting to write “something in the style of legend . . . something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition.” The hardiness and rough idealism of Vaillant and Latour are moving precisely because their story seems to have been composed “without accent”; their character stands out against a flat rhetorical ground. Of course, this is itself an artifice, imposed by an austere and commanding writer in the autumn of life. One nonetheless feels that Cather has met the harsh discipline of nineteenth-century New Mexico with an answering discipline of composition. The syntax of the novel fuses with its subject, just as the humility of Cather’s protagonists seems to correspond to the arid sublimity of their surroundings. This is the beauty of “nothing wasted.”
Latour’s death in Santa Fe, which ends the story, is a “good death” in the old sense, implying acceptance and equanimity within the context of a secure moral order:
The change was that the old man did not want food, and that he slept, or seemed to sleep, nearly all the time. . . . There was little to do but watch and pray, so peaceful and painless was his repose. . . . When the Cathedral bell tolled just after dark, the Mexican population of Santa Fe fell upon their knees, and all American Catholics as well. . . . [A]nd the next morning the old Archbishop lay before the high altar in the church he had built.
This is a death that is not death but salvation and release. Latour has done his work; he has fulfilled his duty; he has earned his rest. The book’s ending enacts for the reader the fullness and completion the old priest achieved in life.
With increasing urgency, our protagonist sets out to investigate the dead woman’s background and what led her to the train station. He thereby begins a journey away from the settled life he has known. His investigation brings him back to Woodside, through which the suicide likewise passed in her last, desperate years. He finds it now much changed but still, for him, charged with memories. He recalls the inarticulate but urgent Catholicism of his parents and his immigrant grandparents. His sleep and his emotional equilibrium are disturbed. He loses weight. His family life becomes unsettled. He eventually takes leave from his firm. Still the meaning of the woman’s gesture, which he comes quixotically to think of as intended for him, eludes him.
The end of our story is ambiguous. He learns a good deal about the suicide’s life—about her own immigrant parents, her early promise, her schizophrenia diagnosis. She had been sleeping at a Church mission house, doing well for stretches, then retreating into illness. “She was a nice girl,” her brother tells him. “But what are you going to do? She told me, ‘I’ll never get better.’” He finds himself helping this brother financially, trying subtly to direct him to a more secure life. He donates a reckless sum to the mission house, then quarrels with its director and ends the relationship. We do not know what, if anything, our protagonist has achieved, either in the world or in his own heart. Yet he feels both an inner turbulence and a curious lightness, a sense of having at last been called. Perhaps he has begun a new life. Perhaps all he has done is to complicate the old, blessed one, to no particular end.
The Catholic novelist may not be indifferent to the questions of modernity. The relation between modernity and belief is too fraught, its complications too insistent, for the writer to pretend that the world he lives in is hospitable to his faith. Of course, the novel as a genre lives in the world and must concern itself with the world’s business; it must earn its authority. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “it is important to hold on to the idea that art is about the world, it exists for us standing out against a background of our ordinary knowledge.” A novel’s metaphysical claims can only be formed from the contingent claims it makes about the realities of daily life.
The role of the Catholic novel is small because the role of the novel in Western culture is small. Still, there may be some advantage to the ambitious Catholic writer in writing against the secular mood. A sense of grievance, however obscure, may be necessary to the production of literature. Of course, the absence of a secure audience, and the diminishing possibility of being understood on his own terms, may act as too great a discouragement. Readers must call forth the writer, not the other way around.
The novel is a secular form, with origins in the Enlightenment’s concern with reason and the claims of the individual. But its rise may also have depended on its power to speak to the vestigial longings of the Christian cultures into which it was born. Even most of the earliest readers of Anna Karenina had lost their faith, yet Tolstoy’s spiritual commitments would not have been alien to them. The presiding metaphor of Anna’s fallenness would not have made sense to them otherwise, and the story would not have made the impression on them that it did. Tolstoy belonged to Eastern Christianity, but he must be of more interest to the Catholic reader than is the “large body of pious trash,” as O’Connor wrote, “for which [Catholic writers] have so long been famous.” That modern readers incline to see Anna as the victim of a hypocritical society—a reading that neatly replaces Tolstoy’s moral vision with that of a more permissive secular culture—is instructive.
I myself am Catholic only in a weak sense—what is sometimes called a “cultural” Catholic, baptized, Catholic-educated, but hardly imbued with the holy fire. So what is there for me in the Catholic novel? Whatever there is in the novel itself—that is, whatever enhancement of my sense of beauty, meaning, and purpose may be found there, whatever recognition of life’s finitude, whatever hope of redemption. I am interested in the Catholic novel because I am interested in the novel as an engine of revelation. I both feel and believe that the materialist conception of life is inadequate. The Catholic Church and the Catholic novel are there to tell me that I am right.
What we want from a Catholic novel is not that the writer’s belief should become our own. Novels do not create converts, or more priests would busy themselves writing them. As readers, we properly resist the imposition of any agenda upon the novel as a form. We resist the idea that novels must embrace fashionable politics. We resist the idea that novels must improve us morally. We resent the writer whose first instinct is to do anything other than enthrall us.
The avowedly Catholic novelist, however, can only partly disclaim such intentions, insofar as her Catholicism is integral to her vision. She wishes to draw our attention to the evidence of God’s presence in the world. She may have other agendas—indeed, she had better have an aesthetic agenda. As O’Connor tells us, the Catholic writer must “seek the will of God first through the laws and limitations of what [she is] creating; [her] first concern will be the necessities that present themselves in the work.” The “writer” must never be eclipsed by the “Catholic.” But the desire to spread the word remains.
The Catholic writer may solve the tension between the verities of the Church and the exigencies of the novel only by merging the claims of his religion with his manner of seeing. His faith broadens his moral imagination, shapes his perceptions, informs his humility in the face of mystery. I don’t know that there is a Catholic way to order sushi or buy a train ticket or any of the other things that novel characters must do. The faith that must be present behind every sentence is not the character’s, but the writer’s. Even faith is insufficient, however, where aesthetic conviction is lacking. Why choose the form of the novel, if not because one believes in the epistemic value of its braiding of observation and feeling, thought and belief? For the novelist herself, the ultimate importance of the Catholic novel is that if what the Church teaches cannot be represented in fiction with aesthetic integrity, she must either concede her own failure or consider the possibility that the Church is wrong.
The banker in my hypothetical Catholic novel would appear at first to be an unusual man. He is unusually rich, unusually influential, unusually blessed. He is not, however, unusual in his moral aspirations—not unusual enough, that is, for one who recites the Nicene Creed. The gap between his social station and his inner life is where the novel takes place. The suicide at the train station catalyzes him spiritually, even as its meaning eludes him. The question then becomes whether he can reach the more distant shore of faith for which he is aiming and whether, in reaching it, he will have to break certain promises he has made to his family about the life they will live together.
I am not going to write this novel, because I am not a novelist. There is also something schematic in the plot I have recited. Even in deft hands, the book seems likely to be a failure. The questions it asks, however, seem to me the right questions for the contemporary Catholic novel. What are the terms of a Catholic’s bargain with modernity? If he actually believes what he professes, what is required of him? At the end of the novel, I picture the protagonist at a graduation dinner for one of his children. In some ways, he is now a diminished man. When he is out of earshot, people say he seems older. His golf game has gotten worse. Some of the relationships at the center of his life are now strained. Yet he is not diminished in spirit. His convictions are narrower but deeper. He has faith, and he thinks that one day he may be prepared to face the judgment that awaits us all.
