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On Being a Catholic Writer

by Ralph McInerny

Many Catholic writers have balked at being called that. They were Catholic and they wrote, all right, but they didnt want to be read as if the point of their fiction was a religious message. As if you could earn an indulgence by reading them. And maybe they didnt like the prospective company. There used to be Catholic book publishers who published Catholic fiction. Some of it was pretty good ! still remember books by a "esuit named #inn, Tom $layfair, $ercy %ynn& !ve looked for copies of those books but without any luck. Some of that Catholic fiction was pretty bad, of course, largely because it was trying to be so good. 'ou (ust knew there was a lesson to be learned, like the point of a homily. $riests in those stories were usually unbelievable, almost as unbelievable as the lay people. A few years ago, ! went through a list of the recipients of )otre *ames +aetare Medal and was struck by the number of novelists, most of them women, who had been honored. ! looked up some of their novels and read them. ,ne woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Christian -ead had a predilection for plots in which $rotestants were bested in argument and eventually came into the Church. .She herself was a convert./ ,ther women wrote movingly of the plight of single !rish girls in the )ew %orld. Maurice #rancis 0gan, who ended up as American ambassador to *enmark, wrote some pretty good novels. 1ate Chopin never won the +aetare Medal but she was a powerful Catholic writer at the turn of the century. )ot everyone knows that 1nute -ockne wrote a novel called The Four Winners: The Hands, The Feet, The Head and the Ball , a boys book set at *u+ac Academy. %hen ! first came upon it, ! was disposed to laugh until ! noticed that it was dedicated to one Arnold Mc!nerny who had fallen in the #irst %orld %ar. Such items suggest that there was a tradition of Catholic writing that is ignored in standard accounts of American literature. !s this because it was inferior2 Much of it wasnt. !t was simply not aimed at the %AS$ audience. !t was sort of like the )egro 3aseball +eague.

! dont mean that Catholic fiction is a genre, sort of like westerns and mysteries, and that the Catholic writer simply works within certain conventions. The more you think about it, the less plausible that is. 4istorians would probably e5plain the marginal place of Catholic fiction by noting the immigrant status of Catholics and the fact that they were generally far down on the social scale. !f you live in a more or less hostile cultural environment, the e5planation would run, you will produce your own culture. ! dont know what American Catholic first wrote simply for whom it might concern, to be read as one might read anyone else off the shelf. #. Scott #it6gerald was certainly not the first, but in this, as in other matters, he provides a cautionary tale. Most biographers of #it6gerald and their number increases annually show little interest in his Catholicism. ! have a theory that he was shamed out of it by people like 0dmund %ilson, who patroni6ed #it6gerald while secretly envying him. !n a letter from St. $aul where he had gone to write This Side of Paradise, #it6gerald wrote %ilson that he 7tells his chrystalline beads no more,8 a sad little remark that seems to invite congratulations from %ilson. #it6gerald is a complicated case, but it can be said, ! think, that he came to see his faith as an impediment to his literary ambitions. 4is short story, 7Absolution,8 intended as the beginning of The Great Gatsby, reads like an outsiders view of the terrors of the confessional and the perils of the celibate life. 3ut Catholicism never lost its hold on #it6geralds imagination. 3eneath the romantic longing and the effort to find gold behind the glitter, #it6geralds fiction takes place under the watchful godlike eye of *r. T. ". 0ckleburg. !t is good to know that #it6gerald now lies in consecrated ground. 3ut it is the apostate Catholic writer "ames "oyce who looms large. The end of the Portrait makes clear that "oyce saw his art as a substitute for religion it was either9or. "oyce took no cheap shots at the faith he abandoned, however, something one notices after the spate of novels written by disgruntled Catholics telling the world how awful it was, all that se5ual repression and sense of sin, the hypocritical clergy and religious. The note of special pleading is dominant. !t is a good thing for an aspiring writer, and everyone else, to reali6e that %estern literature, our entire culture as a matter of fact, is inconceivable apart from the faith of those who produced it. This overwhelmingly obvious fact is an antidote against the not always implicit assumption that religious belief is an impediment in the arts. !t would be easier to argue, historically, that in large part Christian faith has been a condition of e5istence for the arts. 73ut enough about me,8 the typical writer might say. 7%hat did you think of my last book28 ! have been uncharacteristically keeping myself out of the discussion thus far, but now ! want to make a personal appearance. The thought of becoming a writer came to me in stages. #irst, as a kid, when ! spent a lot of time in the -oosevelt 3ranch +ibrary on :;th Avenue in South Minneapolis. At thirteen, ! went off to )a6areth 4all, the minor seminary of the Archdiocese of St. $aul, and this opened up a whole new world to me. !n my first year, an upperclassman named %aldo 4ermes handed me Maisie %ards life of Chesterton, saying he thought ! might like it. The book was almost as big as ! was, and ! was flattered by the thought that ! moved in the same mental universe as young men who needed to shave. Chesterton did it for me. ! wanted to do the sort of thing he did. At the back of study hall there were a few reference works, among them a huge green

volume, Twentieth Century Authors by 1unit6 < 4aycraft. ! spent hours with it, reading about writers, looking at the little postage=stamp=si6e photographs of them, noting how old they were when their first book was published. 4ow ! longed to be among their number. %hen ! (oined the Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, ! thought ! was embarking on my career as a writer. College2 )ot on your life. ! would confront life in the raw and write memorably about it. The main thing ! did in the Marines was to read through the section on American fiction in the 0l Toro library. And ! kept a notebook in which ! issued promises and predictions to myself. %hen ! got out, ! went back to the seminary, and writing was done on the edge of other things, as it usually is. ! wrote poems and a verse play and began a novel. 3ut ! was more interested in being a writer than in writing, so to say. %hen Chesterton was in art school, he noticed that there were more artists than people who painted and drew. *ilettantes. ! was one. #or years ! entertained the velleity of being a writer. Months would go by during which ! wrote nothing at all. ! published a couple poems scholarly writing is not writing in the sense we are talking of here ! completed two alleged novels as well as some stories, but ! really wasnt serious about writing. !t was necessity, as they say, that became the mother of invention. ! was now a professor of philosophy, married, the father of a growing family, and we bought a house to keep them in, more house than ! could afford. ! borrowed money in order to take on the mortgage. ! faced the prospect of five years of two payments a month on the house. %hat to do2 ! remembered a writers maga6ine ! had bought in the train station in +os Angeles in >?@A. !ts advertisements and articles were devoted to the proposition that there was money to be made writing. ! was in need of money. Therefore ! could write. %rite seriously. ! made a resolution to write every day for a year and if at the end of that time ! had not sold anything ! would take up bank robbing or maybe sell one of the kids. 0very night at ten oclock, after the kids had been put to bed, and Connie and ! had some time together, ! went down to the basement where ! had put my typewriter on a work bench, and, standing, would write until two oclock. Since ! wanted to make money, ! aimed my stories at the slick maga6ines. ! was about to serve my apprenticeship as a writer. )ot many weeks passed before it dawned on me that ! hadnt the least idea what ! was doing. %ell, maybe the least idea. 3ut the transition from consumer of fiction to producer is a wrenching one. !t is necessary to become Buite analytical about what it is in the stories one en(oys that engages ones interest and holds it. %hat is it that makes a story linger in the imagination after we have finished it2 There are techniBues to be learned. The difference between a serious writer and a dilettante lies in their contrasting attitudes toward techniBue. The dilettante writes to amuse himself, an easy task, but the serious writer seeks to interest a reader. ,ver my typewriter ! pinned the legend& No one owes you a reading. !t has to be earned. The old=fashioned way with plot. Cnder the tutelage of my first editor, Sandra 0arl at edboo!, ! learned to turn hitherto shapeless narratives into stories. +ater ! saw that ! was learning the hard way what ! had read about in Aristotles $oetics. And ! was constrained by the demands of commercial fiction. There was no room for tangential flights of fancy. 7%hy the second paragraph on page ?28 an editor might Buery. 7!t is so wonderfully well written,8 would not serve as an answer. !t had to play a role in

the story. ! learned economy and ! learned to concentrate on what the readers likely response would be so that ! could guide it by what ! wrote. !f you devote a paragraph to the view from the back bedroom window in a short story, that better be significant for the way things come out. The thing about techniBue is that it can be taught and learned. This is true of any of the arts. 'ou can take a course in watercolors, you can take piccolo lessons, you can take a writing course. The emphasis will be on techniBue, how to do it. %hat the course cannot give you is vision or a voice. 'ou can mimic the masters for a while, you might do plausible imitations of them art imitating art rather than nature and come to reali6e that is all you can do. This is why techniBue is looked down upon. This is why, fatally, it is thought to be unimportant. The fact that it is not sufficient does not make it unnecessary. 0ven 0. M. #orster, in As"e#ts of the No$el, laments that he must tell a story in order to amuse the masses when he would rather (ust write. Thank Dod for the masses if they made #orster write the novels he did. A contempt for the masses goes hand in hand with the re(ection of techniBue as the means of engaging the reader. !t is with something more than techniBue that the Buestion of the Catholic writer arises. Stories are about people doing things, pursuing goals, meeting difficulties, overcoming or being overcome, succeeding or failing. The men and women in stories face problems we all face, and this can interest us in the account of how they fare. )ow this is true of commercial short stories as well. %hy is it that having made some money, gotten out of debt, and learned how to write, ! would not have wanted to (ust go on writing for those markets2 !t had to do with the range of issues, the treatment of them, the constraints ! mentioned above. Some of the stories ! wrote for the maga6ines were as good as any ! have done. 7The #irst #arewell8, my debut in edboo!, is all rightE and the novella ! wrote for the same maga6ine, A Season of %ndings, inspired a bit by #it6geralds Winter &rea's, is better than ! remembered. 3ut basically what ! wrote were domestic stories the first recital, going off to camp, the visiting grandma& dramas but not pressed to any great depths. And love stories, the most persistent theme of fiction. My first novel, (olly ogerson, was published by *oubleday in >?AF, my second, A Narrow Ti'e, in >?A?. %hat ! had learned on the maga6ines enabled me to write these, and in doing so ! reali6ed ! was liberated from a kind of generic set of standards of success and failure. Slick maga6ine fiction does not go to the most fundamental Buestions involved in human action. !t sails the sea of received opinion. !n my first novels ! was able to write out of my own deepest beliefs about what it all means. !n those novels, ! reali6ed ! had a voice and a mass of material and that ! wanted to go on doing this as long as ! lived. My characters were Catholic. They saw what they were doing through the lens of their faithE success and failure finally was a matter of grace or sin. Catholic fiction in this sense is not a matter of lore or the settings but of the nature of the eye through which the action is seen. ". #. $owers is an e5Buisite writer about Catholic things, and #lannery ,Connor, eBually good, mentions things Catholic in only one of her short stories but the sensibility of all her fiction is Catholic. %hen *ante dedicated the Paradiso to Can Drande della Scala, he said that the literal meaning of the &i$ine Co'edy is the way in which human beings by their own free acts earn eternal punishment or reward. That is the $ision of

hu'an a#tion that 'a!es fi#tion Catholi# . !t is not a matter of having priests and nuns on the set, not a matter of e5plicit reference to Catholic things, but rather the *antesBue vision. There are priests and nuns in stories that lack this visionE this vision is present where there is nothing peculiarly Catholic in view. My ne5t two novels, The Priest .>?FG/ and Gate of Hea$en .>?FH/, were about Catholic things as well as being Catholic in the fundamental sense. The first asked, in effect, what it was like for a young priest in the postconciliar Church, and the second asked what it was like for old priests who saw the structures of a lifetime crumble around them. The Priest was a best sellerE Gate of Hea$en has its discriminating fans. !t was this writing about priests that led to the suggestion that ! try my hand at a mystery series involving a clerical sleuth. Somewhat reluctantly, ! responded, little suspecting that #ather *owling would turn out to be my most popular character. Mysteries are matters of life and death, of crime and punishment, but sin and forgiveness are also in play, and it is the latter that e5plain -oger *owlings interest in murder and mayhem. The television series, based loosely on these stories, ran for three years in prime time and continues to be shown both here and abroad. A few weeks ago, a priest from "apan told me he had watched the series in Tokyo. ! forbore asking him if he liked my characters in "apanese. +ast summer ! published two #ather *owling novels for younger readers, dedicated to two of my granddaughters. #uture titles will be dedicated to other grandchildren, out of which ! am not likely to run. There are other mystery series and other novels, some in my own name, others under pseudonyms. ! am having, thank Dod, the e5uberantly pullulating writing career ! thought of when reading Chesterton. !t was, of course, the #ather 3rown stories that gave me pause when ! was asked to invent a clerical sleuth. 3ut ! am reconciled to being less than Chesterton. And there are many things in the wings. "ust as natural law is included in Christian revelation, so there is a natural moral vision of human action operating in fiction that is not Catholic in the sense mentioned above. Alas, we live in a time when natural morality is thought to be religious, doubtless because the Church seems the ma(or champion and defender of the natural law. The recognition that adultery and deviance and killing people is wrong is often thought to be the Buirky outlook of Christians. 3ut of course great pagan literature also proceeds from this recognition. 0mbarrassment about the notion of the Catholic writer is like embarrassment at the notion of Catholic universities. The faith is seen as an embarrassment and an impediment. 3oth attitudes founder on the same fact. Cniversities were born e) #orde e##lesiae, out of the heart of the Church, and so was our literature. 3eing a Catholic writer is not a falling away from an idealE it is the way to fulfill the ideal completely to see human acts in terms of the ultimate stakes of life. And to engage and amuse the reader in doing so. This essay by the late al"h *#+nerny first a""eared in the &e#e'ber ,--. issue of Crisis 'aga/ine0

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