A Good Catholic Writer Is Hard to Find
Over at the Millions, Robert Fay has an essay with the provocative title, “Where Have All the Catholic Writers Gone?” Fay tells a story of decline, arguing that there has been a profound falling-off in both the quantity and quality of Catholic writers since the mid-century. (Paul Elie made a similar but more subtle argument in Commonweal a few years ago.)
In the years immediately following World War II, the “Catholic novelist” seemed to be an easily identifiable, well respected type. A list of the most prominent mid-century Catholic writers—Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy—reads like a veritable Who’s Who of post-1945 Anglophone fiction. And these writers were not Catholic in name only: Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, for instance, is almost as much about Eucharistic theology as it is about adultery, and Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie offers a startlingly original (and disturbing) exploration of the tension between free will and divine providence.
In Fay’s view, these halcyon days are long gone. Nowadays, Fay writes, there are few writers who offer “searing inquiries into the nature of man and his place vis-à-vis the Divine.” He argues that “there has not been a new generation of Catholic writers to take up” the mantle of O’Connor and others. It’s not just that writers don’t fully believe in Catholic doctrine; it’s that Catholic doctrine doesn’t even really occur to them as an option. The Catholic writer, it seems, has gone the way of the dodo.
Fay paints too bleak a portrait, ignoring several counterexamples: what about Ron Hansen? And why just novelists and not poets like Les Murray, or essayists like Gary Wills? But his broader claim is undeniable: Catholics have a less noticeable presence in contemporary fiction than they did in the mid-century. Fay trots out a few predictable causes for this decline—the Church’s position on birth control, the sex-abuse scandals—before settling upon a more surprising culprit: the vernacular mass. Essentially, Fay argues that celebration in the vernacular robbed the Mass of its mystery, which in turn robbed Catholicism of its aesthetic power: “what for centuries had seemed eternal, mysterious, and rich in symbolism — the very marrow that feeds artists — was suddenly being conducted in the same language as sitcoms, TV commercials, and business meetings.”
This is the most provocative part of Fay’s argument, but it is also the most weakly defended. Fay doesn’t offer much analysis beyond the above-quoted sentence; he merely relies upon the fact that the Catholic novelist seemed to fall off at just about the same time that the Latin mass did, as if this were argument enough. But correlation does not prove causation, and I need to see more evidence before I lay everything at the door of the vernacular mass. (Sure, plenty of writers, from Waugh to David Jones to Don DeLillo, lamented the movement away from the Latin mass. But this doesn’t in and of itself mean that later generations of writers won’t find the vernacular mass itself something “eternal, mysterious, and rich in symbolism.”)
Regardless of the validity of Fay’s claims, they have relevance in the wake of the new translation of the mass. Will saying “consubstantial with the Father” instead of “one in Being with the Father” bring about a dramatic shift in Catholic writing? Of course not. But it is a very different image expressed in a very different cadence, and, when heard week after week, this can’t help but have some effect on the storehouse of images and cadences that writers draw upon. In short, it’s worth remembering that changing the mass changes not just how we pray; it also can change how we write.
I think that the faith of the boomers is quite different from my old one, and it affects the sort of religious narrative that is possible for them.
To oversimplify, novels require narrative narrative requires conflict, conflict produces sin, and sin produces guilt. And those are themes we find in Catholic novels par excellence. Especially Greene.
But the boomers aren’t big on guilt. Any number of the comments about the “New Mass” I read today were against the mea culpas, especially the breast beating gesture. People like that don’t write novels like “Crime and Punishment”.
The other thing is that in their religion classes it was emphasized that Jesus is our brother, no, make that our buddy, and the old medieval image of God as infinitely omnipotent, omniscient, etc., seems to be unknown. So even though they are devoted to Jesus and have gotten His message about loving the poor people, their relationships to non-poor people, i.e., their friends and family and to God Almighty seems skimpy.
Ooops– sorry hit the button too fast. To continue”
So even though they are devoted to Jesus and have gotten His message about loving the poor people, their relationships to non-poor people, i.e., their friends, family, co-workers, etc., and God Almighty don’t have a built-in expectation of conflict that is necessary for interesting narratives.
One fine novelist with a Catholic upbringing whom I admire is Richard Russo. He is all sympathy for his characters’ faults and failings (none of which are truly awful), but his plots are weak — not being about any very deep conflict, sin, guilt. See?
Interesting points, Ann. I really like the narrative–>conflict–>sin–>guilt chain. You might be interested in Denys Turner’s Julian of Norwich book, where Turner thinks carefully about the relationship between sin and narrative, especially in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
There have been similar moments when art seemed to suffer because of the “Jesus is our buddy” motif. In fact, many of the writers I mentioned in the post–O’Connor, Greene, Waugh, you could add T. S. Eliot–were specifically reacting against nineteenth-century religious liberalism and its blithe narratives of progress and optimism.
It just occurred to me — the American Calvinists didn’t ignore sin, they overemphasized it. So what about their novels? Well, there’s the great “The Scarlet Letter”, but Hawthorne wasn’t your typical Calvinist, he had transcendentalist leanings. Maybe that’s why Hester can be saved in the end.
Speaking of transcendentalists, maybe their view of human nature was just too cheerful (or smug?) to write novels with a great deal of depth. Hmm. So now i’m wondering: Did they write novels? I can’t think of any notable ones, but I”m not well-read.
And then there’s Melville . . .
Thanks for bringing Robert Fay’s argument over to COMMONWEAL. It’s an interesting one, but it isn’t true.
Not only is there no current dearth of Catholic fiction writers. There are more than ever before. The list of fiction writers who are living or recently dead, who have experienced a Catholic formation, and whose imaginations (and books) bear the imprint of that experience is significant, and it is getting longer all the time.
One thinks of Ron Hansen (mentioned in the article), William Kennedy, Alice McDermott, Mary Gordon, Andre Dubus, Larry Woiwode, Tobias Wolfe, Elizabeth Cullinan, Louise Erdrich, Peter Quinn, Charles D’Ambrosio, David Adams Richards (a Canadian Catholic, to boot), Valerie Sayers, Erin McGraw, Cormac McCarthy (admittedly,reluctantly Catholic), David Lodge (one among several good English Catholics writers), and Brian Moore & John McGahern (numbering among numerous Irish).
This is but a quick list–as there are more–but it serves the purpose. A glance over these names and even a slight knowledge of their work reveals the great range among these writers. They are Catholics who engage with the culture they live in and whose work has been shaped by it, along with their faith formation, their ethnicity, their geography, their gender, and the particularities of their tribal and familial lives.
There is also a great range of attitudes towards the Church and its teachings evident in these writers–and even from book to book written by the same writer. A gloomy view might assert that this is a sign of the fragmentation of the formerly unified Church–but a hopeful (and more realistic) view would see in this a vital reminder of the adaptabililty of the Church and the remarkable capacity for the Faith to take root and flourish in any culture and time. Catholic Fiction is very much alive–and as long as it lives, the imaginative capacity of the Church will continue to flourish as well! Cheers!
Angela –
Fay’s list is notable for a second reason — non-Catholic critics agreed with the Catholic critics that those authors were first rate to great. Is the same true of the writers you list? If so, which are they? I mean who is comparable with, say, Ian McEwan in quality?
I read novels when I was young, but over the years I found fewer and fewer that were worth the time. Sad.
OK, I just looked at your llst again. I know that McDermott and Dubus are widely admired, but they don’t tempt me.
All of the writers on the list are first rate. (There’s a whole second string list I could name, as well, but these will keep any reader busy for while.)
Dubus is a master of the short story genre–a Catholic Hemingway only better (yes, better–and Hemingway, by the way, was Catholic, as well!) His crisp writing, unerring eye, and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and everyday speech make the experience of reading his stories a deep delight. In addition, they embody the most compassionate of visions. (Yes, we all sin. Yes, we are all infinitely loved and are infinitely forgiven.) Like a poet, he has a knack for saying the unsayable: “the sacraments aren’t seven in number, but seventy times seven” (On Charon’s Wharf). (In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a poet and tend to value writers whose work sings.)
Alice McDermott is a vastly underrated writer because she is so subtle and unassuming. She writes about the most ordinary of people who live the most ordinary of lives in the most ordinary world imaginable. And then she makes you love them. They are all walking around, shining like the sun (to steal some of Thomas Merton’s fire), and sometimes some of them arrive at this extraordinary, transcendent, redemptive realization. I’ve had the pleasure of reading CHARMING BILLY with my students about 10 times over the past few years, and the book gets richer with each re-reading. Each time I discover a gesture I missed, a fine quiet phrase that captures the tragic beauty of Billy, another hint at what makes us all, finally, mysterious and ultimately unknowable, even to those who love us most.
And both Dubus and McDermott create characters who love being Catholic–right here and now in this imperfect Church. How wonderful is that?!
Thank you, Angela. I’ll give them a real try.
Certainly the mystery is gone from the Church, along with a strong sense of sin and specific obligation. No doubt that’s partly due to the bland new language of the liturgy, but I’d guess the liturgy changed only because the translators and their bosses had already gone over to the culture of niceness. Culture is bigger than anything else, and in a society as mobile and porous as ours, parochial cultures have become all but impossible.
Part of the omnivorous, nondiscriminatory, equal-opportunity culture we’re mired in requires dumping all orthodoxies except political ones, so religious strictures are absolutely out. Far too “narrow”. And as Ann implies above (11/28 9:39), we no longer accept conflict as a normal part of life; all rough edges are seen as regrettable, like sores or broken bones, easily mended by therapies of one kind or another. The notion that there’s a war between good and evil going on (except in the political sense) is now known to be superstitious nonsense.
The supernatural does survive, but only as it suits the individual. Run your God down the checklist of stuff you approve of; if She passes (use your own scoring system), you can hang on to Her. But keep your guard up: gods tend to become fusty with age.
I agree with you, Angela, that there is an incredible wealth of Catholic writers writing today, from novelists to poets to philosophers to essayists. Thanks for giving us such a complete list!
But I also think it’s fair to point out that none of these writers has achieved the critical standing of a Waugh or an O’Connor (with the possible exception of McCarthy, but as you say, classifying him as a “Catholic writer” is not quite right). Of course this estimation might change in the future. But I suspect that few, if any, of your writers would make a list of “best writers alive” put together by the NYT, whereas Waugh, Spark, Greene, and O’Connor probably would have in their day. In other words, maybe Catholic writers are just as good now as they were then, but they’re certainly not regarded as such by the literary establishment.
Regardless, as you point out, things aren’t nearly as dire as Fay makes them out to be.
Ann, I love Richard Russo – for the reason you mention – compassion – and because he’s a marvelous storyteller. But I don’t think he can be called a “Catholic writer”, though he may be culturally Catholic. (An amusing description of a Jesuit neighbor (Straight Man) isn’t enough.) The same may, perhaps, be said of the people on Angela’s list, though I confess to not having heard of them till now. Many people would probably qualify as cultural Catholics who don’t give much thought to the Church except to say, in effect, that they’ve left all that behind.
By the way, I’m nowhere near as impressed by McEwan as you seem to be. Reading one of his novels, I felt I was being entertained by an exhibitionist. De gustibus.
David –
I wouldn’t call Russo a Catholic writer either. I re-read my post that mentioned him, and I realiz I didn’t make my point clear. It seems that he had a Catholic upbringing, but except in Empire Falls it doesn’t show explicitly, and i’d be very surprised if he called himself Catholic. But as with other Catholic writers of his generation, his upbringing probably didn’t give him an understanding of the problems and demands of choice, sin, and guilt, not to mention the possibilities of grace, self-sacrifice, heroic virtue, forgiveness and redemption that prior generations were taught were central to Christian experience. His talent is enormous, but he seems unaware of the great existential moral and theological challenges, so I don’t expect a great book from him. True, you don’t have to be a Christian/Catholic to know about such things, but I daresay it’s easier to be aware of them if you have some serious religious training of any sort. Those are all universal themes, but they are, to me, what is lacking in the more recent novels.
You might say that great writers write about sin and virtue while mediocre ones write about mistakes.
Nice.
“But I also think it’s fair to point out that none of these writers has achieved the critical standing of a Waugh or an O’Connor.”
Would that be the fault of the writers? Or the crtitics?
I also wonder to what extent genre fiction like “Christian romance” has marginalized the role of religion in fiction.
Novels by the transcendentally disposed? How about “Little Women”? I think it argues against the notion that there was anything very blithe or overly optimistic about Yankee Congregationalists and Unitarians. Certainly, a lot of talk about social injustice, sacrifice, and anti-materialism in that book.
Jean –
I don’t think of Congregationalists as particularly optimistic. I think of them as being rather Calvinistic, but as moving away from that. Of course, I don’t think I”ve ever known a Congregationalist, so I’m just talking from my English major background, not a theological one.
Certainly Little Women isn’t a book that downplays the dark side of life. I think it’s balance is one of the things that appeals so much to adolescent girls.
My Dad’s family were Congregationalists. They’re pretty liberal theologically–not a lot of official religious rules, emphasis on personal conduct and life of abstemiousness and service.
Congregationalists differ in a critical way from Calvinists in their leaning toward the notion of universal salvation (though historically they had many Calvinistic notions); you live a good life, you go to heaven regardless of your perceptions of the Almighty, who is unknowable by human beings in any case.
Calvinists believe that a relatively tiny number of people are predestined to be saved, e.g., the Wee Frees.
Jean, I wasn’t looking to assign blame to critics or to writers. Rather, I was just saying that, as a fact, Russo et al. are both a.) not as prominent within the literary scene as O’Connor, Greene, and others were, and b.) that Catholicism seems less important to the work and public persona of a Russo or a Lodge than it was to an O’Connor or a Greene.
If I were forced to, though, I would assign blame to the writers (though blame is probably the wrong word–I really like several of the writers listed above). I’d take O’Connor, Waugh, and Spark over any of the writers mentioned above, again with the exception of McCarthy.
Anthony, I wasn’t trying to blame, either, just to raise what I think is an interesting point about whether critics have relegated books with a religious dimension to “genre fiction.”
Jean, I know you weren’t trying to blame! I was just trying to make clear that my original comment was an empirical claim rather than an evaluative judgement.
Thanks for raising the question of genre. (It comes up a lot, doesn’t it?) I certainly don’t think that all novels with a religious dimension are dismissed as “genre fiction”–take Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, for instance, or much of Updike–but I take your broader point. It would be interesting to go back and compare reviews of Gilead to reviews of Housekeeping, where Robinson’s religious/theological concerns are slightly more under the surface (though they’re arguably just as important).