Problems of the Catholic Writer

by HARRY SYLVESTER

1

THERE are no living American Catholics who are major writers. By two rules of thumb I suggest that American Catholic writers have been found wanting: individually they have failed to produce (1) a sufficient quantity of work, or (2) a high quality of it. We have a few poets and one or two short-story writers whose work is distinguished enough, but none of these has produced what might be called a body of work; while those Catholics — mostly novelists — who have published what might be described as a body of work have failed so utterly to create anything even suggesting art that they try the faith of those who have thought very much about cause and effect.

Nor can it be said that we Catholics, until quite recently, have made any serious attempt to improve matters. If anything, we have gloried in and extolled our mediocrity, as propaganda-minded as Communists, appraising writing — and indeed all the arts — by the same pragmatic standards: not by whether it is good writing or true writing but by whether or not the writer is on our side. We have not only extolled our apostles of mediocrity but have honored them. There is no national literary or artistic group whose mediocrity is quite so monolithic as that of the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors. By a precision which mere chance alone could not account for, the people who “choose” the members of the Gallery have almost infallibly neglected those few American Catholics who have written honestly or with distinction. Of course, we should not be too amazed by this. A generation ago Charles Péguy reminded us of “the deep sureness with which the mediocre know and support the mediocre.”

Being by nature more polemicist than novelist, I hold that these things are self-evident to anyone seriously concerned with the state of Catholic writing, and my purpose is to try to suggest why such a condition prevails. A Catholic culture in other countries has produced writers of distinction; one has only to say England and France to suggest a dozen living Catholics who are creative writers of distinction or even greatness. There is nothing innate in Catholicism which inhibits the artistic process or blunts its edge. Quite the opposite. Why, then, in our own country, have we produced a group of meechers and propagandists, who are Catholics, however nominal, before they are people, and whose principal concern seems to be not to write truly but to win ecclesiastical approbation ? That our Catholicism is newer and less rich culturally is a reason long advanced for this condition; at best it was never much of a reason and now it is no longer even an excuse. What then are the reasons ?

In attempting to suggest what they may be, I must discuss matters which will cause some of my readers pain, and which may be deemed propaganda. I wish to make a disclaimer now. If during the course of my argument or exposition I indicate that the Church’s teaching on certain matters of personal relationship adds to the burden of Catholic writers in our neurotic time, it is not because I believe the teaching erroneous or unreasonable, but simply that it is one more problem for the Catholic writer. Catholicism has never been an easy way of life for those who have understood it, and its disciplines both aid and handicap the creative artist.

Catholicism in our country has in effect sneered at and discouraged creative writing. Whatever a small, not particularly literate group thought good propaganda it called good writing; whatever it thought bad propaganda it termed bad writing. It is no longer quite that black and white in the minds of an increasing number of Catholics, but the damage to our perception remains in greater or lesser degree. There was a time when a hack such as Frank Spearman was considered to be a fine writer because he favored a quite superficial Catholicism, while a great artist like James Joyce was hooted at or condemned because he was critical of things Catholic. This is a most fearful sort of obscurantism — and yet it was the major principle of Catholic criticism, so-called, in this country until some ten years ago.

The high schools and colleges which most of us attended inculcated this principle of criticism in one fashion or another. It was obviously the creation of peculiarly undiscerning people. For when a sensitive and perceptive student or young adult began to realize that the writer condemned as bad was actually one who wrote more accurately and deeply and truly than the writer called good (I use such black-and-white terms only because, in the time I refer to, values were taught to be so colored) that student or adult was likely to have his faith shaken. If our teachers had taken the trouble to explain, as Maritain does in Art and Scholasticism, that diabolism sometimes infests the greatest of writers, that it is possible for a man to be at once evil and a great artist, we would not only have understood more about the nature of literature but been better equipped for life.

But no — our teachers indulged their wishful thinking, so that the taste of writers and serious readers who remained in the Church was often confused and emasculated, while a good many others felt that Catholicism was not for them if they were to write honestly or even to read honestly. I need only mention the names of Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, and John O’Hara to suggest how many former Catholics are numbered among the top-flight American writers.

2

CATHOLIC teaching has also inhibited the creative process at its sources by the unnecessary degree of rigidity which it imposes on the thought of many of those who reach college. This idea is not my own, but was suggested to me several years ago by a well-known priest who is one of the few pioneers in attempting to create the conditions which might foster a commensurate Catholic art. If the Church can embrace theologies as different as those of Augustine and Aquinas, if it is able to call both Savonarola and Meister Eckhart Catholic, our colleges should be sufficiently liberal to permit, if not to encourage, a certain amount of speculative thinking. Until recently such was not their practice. Indeed, many of us went through college knowing nothing about the grounds on which the greatest theologians differed, nor even that Thomism was but one of the Catholic systems of thought. This rigidity exists on many levels of Catholic life, and is often justifiable on moral grounds. But not invariably, nor always in the intensity encountered.

The mind, interests, and many of the activities of the creative artist require minimum amounts of freedom and space and an ambience not too inhibiting. If during his formative years it has been impressed upon him that certain areas of thought are forbidden or sneered at, his intellectual or artistic growth may be affected.

It is often said that the Church in the United States has been a mission church until the past decade or two, and as such could not foster the arts. If this excuse for our illiteracy, as it were, was once valid — and at best I think it was worked to death

— it no longer is. When we find pastors and their lay confreres paying more money for bad and even dangerous machine-made church art than they would have to pay for honest and original carving by one of an increasing number of distinguished Catholic craftsmen, we have reason to believe that any talk about the inadequacies of mission Catholicism has become merely the excuse for bad habits.

More significant are such influences as those which may stem from Jansenism. It has been said that American Catholics, instead of being taught to fear sin, are taught to be horrified by it. The distinction is a grave one and has many implications. It has also a parallel in what might be called the official attitude of the Church or Catholics toward realistic elements in creative writing. About this a good deal could be said; all I wish to say here is that whether or not a passage of writing may be an occasion of sin depends on a great many variable factors. If we are to impose strictures designed to protect the more susceptible among us, I suggest that in so doing we are liable to create occasions of sin for those who function on another level of intelligence or susceptibility. Whether or not a passage is pornographic depends, first, on the author’s intention and, secondly, upon the attitude and susceptibility of the reader. When we impose — with great rolling of eyes and raising of hands — a blanket prohibition on certain kinds of writing, we not only offend the more intelligent but, through our stressing of horror rather than sin, make for an unhealthy interest on the part of those we might clumsily be trying to protect. (The Hearst papers are old adepts at this; on the very page on which the Hearst crusade for clean literature is being pushed, there may be an ad based on the cheapest sort of sex interest.)

The nice-nellyism of this Catholic attitude toward fine writing both fosters and is a part of the literalism which infests Catholicism in this country. We are so propaganda-minded that we are unable to understand or appreciate the method of implication on which the best contemporary writing is based. The fact is that writers like Alvah Bessie, Hemingway, or Ralph Bates, who use the method of implication, arouse our suspicion if we bother to read them at all — for all three are actively opposed to Franco. . . .

Such provincialism and worse cannot foster an honest or distinguished art. Yet it is the seedbed in which we have attempted to grow a Catholic literature, and after a fashion to encourage Catholic writers. I have dealt with it at length because it is part of the problem for any Catholic attempting to write or paint honestly. It is, as it were, the background problem and there are indications that it is being surmounted. The more special problems may now be enumerated with suitable allowance made for personal bias or lack of objectivity.

3

CATHOLIC writer” is itself an awkward term which is indicative of the manner in which we have made our approach. It is better to say “a writer who happens to be a Catholic” or “a Catholic who happens to be a writer.” But the term may be justified as pertaining to a writer who sees things from a Catholic viewpoint, although not to the extent that he subjects truth to expediency or forces it into a pattern. As such he is two things: a Catholic and a writer.

As a writer he shares the many problems of other contemporary writers, whose occupational diseases include peptic ulcers, migraine, adultery, and enlargement of the ego. As a Catholic he is burdened with additional and special problems. I think it best to adumbrate first those which the Catholic writer shares with other writers.

In general his first problem, granting the possession of talent, is an economic one. If he is not a serious writer he may solve this expediently by writing for the radio, or for the pulps, for the slicks, if he is able, or for Hollywood. In these fields he encounters only the ordinary hazards of his own or any profession — changes of policy or editors, old age, and so forth. It is when the writer wishes to write honestly that he encounters to an acute degree the problem of supporting himself. There are various ways of meeting this problem, and one of the most common is for the writer to write honestly at one time and commercially at another. Sinclair Lewis, J. P. Marquand, and Scott Fitzgerald are among the better-known writers who have had to do this at some time during their lives. Fitzgerald’s is the classic tragedy of this way of life. It is in the Fitzgerald symposium, The Crackup, that his friend, John Dos Passos, wrote of the personality problems which this sort of literary double-life makes for. Among them, Dos Passos lists schizophrenia and paralysis of the will. Those who know Fitzgerald’s story need be told no more. For the purpose of argument it is needful to say here only that these aberrations were disastrous to Fitzgerald both as a person and as a writer. If anyone wishes to say that had Fitzgerald remained in the Church he might have found the grace to heal himself, I will not argue with him. But I will say that of those few serious American writers who have remained in the Church, I can think of not more than one whose life is not marked by tragedy directly related to his special position or calling as a Catholic writer.

No matter with what rhythm a writer alternates his serious writing and his commercial writing, the process of a deliberate withholding and mutation of thought which the latter almost always involves has a pernicious and crippling effect upon both work and personality. His alternatives to this are not writing at all; being fortunate enough — there are not ten such in the United States — to have his serious writing support him; marrying money — I am not being facetious; or doing some other sort of work, such as journalism or teaching, to support himself. This latter course is one which places a severe drain upon a writer’s nervous energy, which is after all what he writes with, as someone else might use it to work with a pick and shovel.

That brings us to the second problem which our Catholic writers share with those American writers who are not Catholics: the simple quality of endurance. Writing uses a great deal of nervous energy; indeed, the emaciated physical quality some writers acquire in their later years is noticeable; and contemporary life, particularly as lived in the cities, places a drain upon anyone’s nervous energy such as the human body was not intended to endure. It is one of the reasons we have so many one-book novelists and occasional poets. The plain fact is that for the majority of writers today, to write a novel is nothing short of a feat — not of talent or ability but of endurance. Indeed, it is a combination of lack of endurance coupled with economic pressure which often causes a writer to hurry his work, with a consequent failure to make his style as clean, elegant, and rich in implication as it should be.

These are some of the problems which the Catholic shares with those writers who are not Catholics. They bring me to the very heart of my polemic: namely, those problems which are special to a man or woman who is at once a writer and a Catholic. It is here that I wish to repeat my disclaimer; I am not mentioning certain matters as propaganda, but as obstacles insuperable, perhaps irremovable, while the writer remains a Catholic.

4

THE first problem for a Catholic writer is that usually he is committed to more children than are non-Catholic writers. The incidence of children among writers is low, and the reason is not in every case mere selfishness. Children add considerably to the pressures on a writer’s economies, both nervous and pecuniary. They also enrich his life and contribute to his knowledge, but the plain fact is that few of our major successful writers in the country have what used to be called a family of children.

Secondly, the Catholic writer has a good many psychological problems. He is troubled, depending upon his personality, as to what he may write about and how he may write about it. The sad but inescapable fact is that of those who might be called spiritual directors, almost none has knowledge of the art and craft of narrative writing, or any desire to acquire such knowledge. In short, a young Catholic writer with such a problem would scarcely know which way to turn in his indecision and paralysis of will. It would be good if men like Father John S. Kennedy or Father Leo L. Ward were near to advise and discuss, but it is rarely so. The Catholic writer may be troubled as to whether his work is an occasion of sin, and on this ground he continually encounters conflicts between his art and his religion. Eventually, he resolves this by deciding that if his work is to have a double effect, he wills only the good one; by hoping that more good than harm will result from it; or by deciding that what might be an occasion of sin for some celibates would not be one for married people. If he is married, this may affect his decision, for he may be convinced that married people have gotten pretty cavalier treatment from certain elements in the Church.

Thirdly, the Catholic writer who decides to teach at a Catholic college, instead of interspersing his serious work with potboilers, not uncommonly encounters censorship from the institution with which he is affiliated. Sometimes it is open and clumsy, more often tacit. It is not necessary to mention just how he may be hurt. (However, I do believe that the generally liberalizing influence whose cool breath we have begun to feel in the Church during the past decade is having its effect.)

This in turn brings us to the fourth problem: the rather painful disciplining which a few Catholic writers have encountered. The technique has apparently been borrowed from the Communists, who used it during the twenties and thirties, when certain writers needed regulation. I refer to economic sanctions. To put it bluntly, certain Catholic groups, institutions, and organizations have not been above boycotting Catholic writers whose work they did not like, or having them discharged from their positions, or having editorial work taken away from them. I could cite chapter and verse on this but prefer not to do so publicly. Such treatment is particularly cruel where a Catholic writer is concerned, because of those burdens which other writers do not carry.

Fifthly, the necessary tranquillity for creative work is hard to come by in the home of a large family; and an outside workroom or its equivalent cannot always be found or afforded. To readers who may immediately think of Bernanos’s six children, I would say that friends of his have told me he often seeks the comparative peace and quiet of a café to do his work.

The sixth problem, also, concerns a subject which many Catholics may find painful. In virtually all the arts and in almost every century young writers, and some not so young, have had patrons. It is an accepted practice in many of the arts — particularly music — for artist and patron often to enter into a close and at times unhealthy relationship. I need hardly add that this is one manner of getting one’s work done that is closed to Catholics.

Seventh, divorce is not possible for a Catholic. One of the most common American literary patterns, indeed the most common among the more successful writers, is the practice of taking a second or third wife. This is not wantonly indulged in as often as some of us may think. In any marriage one person is probably going to grow more than the other. If the disparity in growth is great the makings of tragedy are present. We all can think of writers who did their best work while living with the second or third spouse.

Classically and truly, the relation between husband and wife is closely connected with the writer’s writing or the painter’s painting. Where there is any deep cleavage or serious lack of compatibility the writer’s or painter’s work is likely to suffer. The Catholic writer will naturally stay with his or her spouse and try to make the best of it; but in a time when sublimation is not the order of the day and is about as misunderstood as anything well could be, the process of making the best of a bad bargain is more apt to be botched than not. Yet Catholics do not generally make good spouses to artists; we are too enamored of economic security and, more so than most Americans, rarely achieve emotional maturity.

These then are some of the problems the Catholic writer encounters in our time and in our country. A few of them are obviously insuperable on a natural level. Together they interact, forming a complex, affecting not only the writer’s work but the personalities of both himself and his immediate family. I do not think there is a remedy. That widening and deepening of Catholic culture which might place Catholic artists under less pressure is nothing that can be achieved either quickly or through the employment of mechanical and entirely conscious means. A few things might be remedied, and in this connection I should like to mention that the most vicious critics a serious Catholic writer encounters are not non-Catholics, nor those sorry bumblers who do reviews for diocesan weeklies, but rather the literary lights dotting every Catholic campus, who know what a rich and complex subject Catholicism is for the writer but who lack the endurance, talent, or courage to undertake the arduous task of writing about it; yet they are always ready with convenient misinterpretations, half-truths, and outright lies to attack those who have ventured where they have not dared to tread.

5

WHETHER a system of subsidies to help Catholic writers would help, I seriously doubt. That special brand of nepotism which is the bane of the Catholic press would doubtless be all-present in the administration of any fund for Catholic artists. Nor do I feel that properly qualified people would be chosen to do the administering. I strongly feel that the people delegated to handle such a fund would have little real knowledge of what creative writing is, and, like their predecessors in the diocesan press, would think of literature strictly in terms of propaganda. In this connection, let me tell a story about a lady who, although somewhat confused, has accomplished a deal of good work toward disencumbering Catholic writing in America. I was in Latin America with my family, and received an air-mail letter from her. She was rather excited over a plan for the subsidization of Catholic writers. She was one of those called upon to help formulate the method and she had written to me for advice. “What we want to do,” she wrote, in almost her last sentence, “is to help Catholic writers to have more babies.”

I wrote back that the Catholic writers I knew didn’t seem to have much difficulty having babies; what they needed was some honorable arrangement through which they could write more books. Our relationship has never been quite the same since. The incident — and this woman is neither unintelligent nor unperceptive — is typical of what I feel would be the way subsidies to Catholic writers would be handled. In addition, I feel that any system of subsidization would tend to favor the most extreme conformists, and yet the better creative writers are not noted for their conformism.

A group of Catholics in the East, who also indulge in a somewhat small-boyish sort of mysteriousness, have offered very substantial prizes for Catholic books. Yet their public and private utterances reveal them as no more than semiliterate, propaganda-minded to a degree, and contentious. It is easy to imagine the book their fivefigure prize will go to.

And a gentleman with an equal lack of preparation for his task — surely one of our especial Catholic vices — began a non-profit literary venture in the Middle West. By and for amateurs, the enterprise would be a joke if it were not persisted in at a time when the Church in the United States, and especially its culture, show some indications of emerging from the denigration and obscurantism which infested them for decades. The gentleman was, I believe, a successful banker. If we should ask him why he did not start a non-profit bank instead, he would think us unreasonable. And yet he obviously must know a good deal about banking and just as obviously knows nothing about writing. There is also, I believe, some need for a non-profit bank.

This lack of preparation which I say is a peculiarly Catholic vice in this country is related to that Angelism which we see around us in various aspects of Catholic life. Say a Hail Mary, write a story, and sell it to Cosmopolitan (everyone knows the Hearst papers go for things Catholic). Say a Pater, paint a picture, and sell it to Father O’Duffy for the altar. That’s the sort of preparation many Catholics make for the venture into a woefully complicated and arduous profession. I feel also that the lack of preparation is somehow related to a lack of purity of intention. If one prepares at length, sooner or later one must encounter one’s intention and know it for what it is. And where Catholics lack that purity of intention they become a laughingstock or something more tragic. I am thinking here not only of what we call our literature but of such facts as that where there has been slum ownership — in absentia, of course—by Church groups in Madrid and in New York, again and again brothels have been established in those properties. And I am thinking of how the lady selected by her pastor or the director of her sodality to speak publicly against birth control almost invariably is childless or nearly so. If the reader thinks I have overstated the case, I feel that for the most part I have understated it. We Catholics are great people for the letter of the law, but the spirit seems to have withered within us — and it is with and from the spirit that any honest or serious art must flow.