When the novelist David Lodge died in January, the obituaries reflected on him as a Roman Catholic novelist – perhaps the last in a line of postwar British Catholic novelists. Hardly anyone noted that his distinguished career as a literary academic was also rooted in his Catholicism. Lodge obtained his first academic post, a lectureship at Birmingham University, on the strength of his thesis: “Catholic fiction since the Oxford movement: its literary form and religious content”, composed as a graduate student at UCL in the late 1950s. This author of such an intensely Catholic novel as How Far Can You Go? (1980) – which took a group of nine Catholic students (and a young priest) in the 1950s and followed them through their subsequent trials of sexual discovery and religious doubt – began his career with a study of the very sub-genre to which he would himself contribute.
Lodge’s thesis survives in a warehouse in Essex that forms part of the UCL Library. You can still call it up. Typed blurrily on very thin paper, it earnestly tests whether religious faith can feed a novelist’s imagination. Lodge quotes (in order to disprove) George Orwell’s assertion in “Inside the Whale” that “the atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel”. The roll-call of notable Catholic novelists before the 20th century (all discussed in Lodge’s thesis) would hardly challenge Orwell’s anti-Catholic dictum: EH Dering, Mrs Wilfrid Ward, Robert Hugh Benson… John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain, a bildungsroman about a convert to Catholicism, may have been a Victorian bestseller, but is now unreadable.
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