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.
Yet later Catholic fiction almost changed Orwell’s mind. On his deathbed, he was composing a piece on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (an article that he did not live to finish). Waugh had been received into the Catholic Church in 1930, the year in which Vile Bodies was published, but this was his first explicitly Catholic novel. Orwell, his friend and admirer, regretted the new influence of religion on his work. “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (ie as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”
The jury is still out on Brideshead (1945), but no one can doubt that it is established in the canon of English fiction, and that its religious underpinning gives it its coherence. Waugh is clever enough to invent a narrator, Charles Ryder, who is baffled by and hostile to Catholicism for most of the novel. All the Catholic characters are unappealing and several, in their faith, absurd. Yet there is no resisting that faith. It would continue to be important in Waugh’s subsequent Sword of Honour trilogy, whose protagonist, Guy Crouchback, leans on his Catholicism in a world apparently breaking apart.
Waugh had become friends with the other leading Catholic novelist of his generation, Graham Greene, the two men reading and relishing each other’s work. In 1950, Greene wrote to Waugh expressing his interest in penning the screenplay for a proposed Hollywood film of Brideshead. He also sent him the proofs of what is now probably the most widely read of his Catholic novels, The End of the Affair (1951). Waugh loved it, even comparing himself to Greene’s self-hating novelist protagonist, Bendrix.
The End of the Affair has something essential in common with Brideshead. In both these first-person narratives, the non-Catholic protagonist has to relinquish the woman he loves because of her religious belief. In Waugh’s novel, Julia ends her affair with Charles Ryder because she is married to another man and her Catholicism forbids her divorcing him. In Greene’s novel, Bendrix’s lover Sarah, his friend’s wife, fears that Bendrix has been killed in an air raid and tells God that, if He allows her lover to live, she will give him up. Each narrator knows that God is his enemy.
Sarah believes herself to be a convert to Catholicism, though, after her death, Bendrix learns from her mother that she was in fact baptised a Catholic as an infant. At the end of Brideshead, Charles Ryder seems on the brink of conversion to Catholicism. Greene, of course, was, like Waugh, a convert to Catholicism. Lodge, brought up as a Catholic, notes “the high proportion of converts among English Catholic novelists”. This was as true in the 19th century as in the 20th. It is as if conversion to Catholicism were once a necessary career move for a novelist.
After a series of what he called “entertainments”, Greene had published his first really serious novel, Brighton Rock, in 1938. Its main character, the murderous 17-year-old gangster Pinkie, is an unsceptical Catholic, the Latin mass echoing in his thoughts as he pursues his evil ends. Rose, the teenage waitress he plans to marry to prevent her testifying against him, is equally devout. One evil, the other good, their shared faith seals them off from the world. British Catholic novelists have always written out of a powerful sense of being a minority (unlike Irish novelists, who have usually written about the powers of the Catholic Church in their country, rather than about the trials of individual belief).
Soon after Brighton Rock, Greene published The Power and the Glory (1940). Set in Mexico in the 1920s – where religion is banned and priests who do not renounce their faith are executed – it focuses on an unnamed priest, in hiding from the authorities. He is as flawed as can be, an alcoholic who has fathered a daughter from a one-night affair with one of his parishioners. We spend a good deal of the novel in his thoughts: tormented, self-condemning, always on the brink of “the unforgivable sin, despair”, yet also a channel for God’s grace. His agonising always makes psychological sense, even to the non-believing reader.
“I wrote a book about a man who goes to hell – Brighton Rock – another about a man who goes to heaven – The Power and the Glory,” Greene told a Time journalist. In the conclusion to his thesis, Lodge explains the advantage of Catholicism to a novelist:
“The Catholic novelist has not been concerned to imitate the impression of each individual atom of experience on the human consciousness, but to elucidate a moral pattern in the superficially aimless flux of life.”
Greene later liked to pooh-pooh the notion that he wrote “Catholic novels”, but his fiction continued to depend on Catholicism for its sense of moral patterning.
The other leading British Catholic novelist of the 20th century (and another convert) was Muriel Spark. In the year that Lodge finished his thesis, 1959, she published her third novel, Memento Mori, a formally audacious (and hilarious) book in which the author does divine justice to the human capacity for self-delusion and evil. Each one of the novel’s elderly main characters receives telephone calls from someone who says, “Remember you must die,” and each responds differently. The police fail to identify the caller (who is, of course, Death). Spark’s Catholic convictions, transfused into her fiction, allows her narrative tricks that a non-Catholic would surely never have contemplated.
Spark’s Catholic characters are not necessarily sympathetic (her novels feature some notably unchristian nuns); the influence of her Catholicism is instead in her narrative method. Lodge, who would eventually become a huge admirer of Spark’s fiction, observed: “The Catholic God is intensely concerned with the fate of each individual soul, and Catholic novelists have adopted the ‘God’s eye’ viewpoint in order to control or comment on the destinies of their characters.”
Spark watches over her characters’ fates with an unsentimental, perhaps cruel, intelligence. In novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), she uses her signature device of “flash forwards”, as she liked to call them, to chart the destinies that her characters forge for themselves. In the extraordinary opening of The Girls of Slender Means, Spark intercuts her story of the young women living in a genteel London hostel in 1945 with phone conversations, from years later, in which some of them gaily chat about the fate of Nicholas Farringdon, “The one that got on the roof to sleep out with Selina”. His experience of the lovely Selina’s deep wickedness will make him a Christian. He will be murdered, as a Catholic missionary in Haiti.
The recent British novelist most influenced by Catholicism is probably Hilary Mantel, as alert as Spark to that possibility of human evil that Catholics recognise. However, Mantel, who had a strict Catholic upbringing, explicitly renounced her Catholicism: “I’m one of nature’s Protestants. I should never have been brought up as a Catholic.” In Wolf Hall and its sequels, Thomas Cromwell embodies an enlightened Protestantism, while the staunchly Roman Catholic Thomas More is repellent. Yet her earlier novels, in which the mystical and the numinous co-exist with the ordinary (as they do in Spark), are unimaginable without her early Catholicism. One of the most extraordinary, Fludd (1989), set in a small northern town in the 1950s, concerns a visitation to a Roman Catholic community of a curate (Fludd) who seems to have miraculous powers. He might be a devil or a saint. The novel is scathing about repressive powers of the Catholic Church, yet it is also the product of a Catholic imagination.
The British Catholic novel now looks like a historical phenomenon, a thing of the past. David Lodge chronicled it and was there at its end. Yet what Catholicism gave the British novel – a means of “elucidating a moral pattern” – was something valuable. It is still what novels need to find.
[See also: The Prince Charles Cinema and the death of the West End]
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