Men as pure abstractions

One of the things that I think ultimately stopped me from pursuing a writing career (not that I believe I would have made a very good writer. But it was worth a try) was this confusion I had about how to write a man. To explain more fully: my favorite book, Brideshead Revisited, written by Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, is truly one of the best books of the previous century, both in style and content. But I can see how critics like Edmund Wilson would criticize the religious dimension in the novel—because up until my own conversion to the Catholic church, it had never occurred to me to write “religion” into a story. Always it had been about the plot, the character development, how to get from point A to B or—in the case of my more juvenile imaginings—how to make surly reclusive SS fall in love with the ingénue HG.



But when I became Catholic, I realized, do I really want to write a story about characters who don’t go to Church on Sundays? Must I mention that they go to Church? Will that put anybody off? Would I really like a character who doesn’t pray the rosary everyday? And so the questions snowballed on until I could hardly even wrest a first chapter from myself, on any kind of plot.

I wanted to write a story about marriage, and I did, and I made the wedding a Catholic one (and the two protagonists Catholic also) because for me only a Catholic wedding is a real and true sacrament, and I got all kinds of flak from it. The criticism I got was always something along the lines of, why did I introduce such an unnecessary aspect into my story? It got to the point that I never had the heart to continue the story. I was paralyzed. I had grown incapable of seeing a man or a woman divorced from his relationship with God. We talk about character development in stories; but in real life, what is character development but the slow and winding journey of a soul to rejoin and ultimately love his Maker? To me being a Catholic is an inescapable part of life, something that permeates all of its aspects and which gives a person his humanity and dignity; how am I supposed to write about a character and divorce him from that which makes him truly human?

I was delighted to find, later on, that Evelyn Waugh had written his novel not necessarily to wave the flag of proselytism, but because he had come to the same conclusions as mine. (I was conceited enough to feel the connection between this great mind and my own tiny intellect because, though I may not be right or clever about a lot of things, I knew with a certainty that I had a leg to stand on here.) “He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story,” Waugh said on Edmund’s scathing review. “I believe that you can only leave God out by making you characters pure abstractions.”

Modern novelists, he added, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character – that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose. So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which to me means only one thing, man in his relation to God.”

I think of Rex Mottram, one of the characters in Brideshead—an incomplete man, a caricature of a man that can only be produced by this and the last century, who seemed on the surface to be normal and intelligent, but who was lacking in many things that make us human—a true curiosity, any genuine piety, the capacity to love, an understanding of the supernatural plane that is above but not contradictory to reason. To me that’s what novelists’ characters have become—pure abstractions, in Waugh’s words—if they are written divorced from their relationship to the God who made them. Everything, every object has a purpose: a glass for drinking, a spoon for eating, a telephone for calling; man has a purpose also, which is to come to know God and to correspond to His Will; of what interest can it be to me to write about a man if it doesn’t help him fulfill that purpose? I might as well start writing about a spoon that dreamt it could do the job of a colander, or a frying pan.

Other Catholic writers have found a way round this stumbling block. GK Chesterton resolved the idea by making his most famous character a priest, so that the religious (I say this only to avoid the word “spiritual,” which has become riddled with so many new-agey connotations, but I do actually mean spiritual rather than religious) aspect will be there and taken for granted as necessary. JRR Tolkien wrote an allegory—a marvelously complete one, and that’s the least that can be said of it. CS Lewis (though not a Catholic, bless him) did much of the same. Evelyn Waugh wrote one of the best, probably the best, novels on conversion so that it would become the matter of the book, its defining character and ultimate purpose. Dorothy L Sayers wrote about this dimension more obliquely, making Lord Peter Wimsey a more-or-less lukewarm High Church Anglican (I think; sometimes it’s hard to tell); the matter was never implicitly drawn out, but it was there, taken for granted and part of the tapestry that was LPW’s character, in the same way that you would expect the local squire to be there on the pew every Sunday with his family. A member of Opus Dei wrote Junia and its sequel, both about the first Christians, and both are about persecution and conversion. There are more—Diary of a Country Priest, Quo Vadis?, The Keys to the Kingdom…

I haven’t thought about writing about any of these things. (Though there was that one time, on a long bus journey, that I conceived the idea of a first novel called Augustine about a young Filipino girl who would be converted; it would have very obvious esoteric parallels with the story of St Augustine, I decided; it wasn’t until the journey from the other direction that I realized I’d never find a publisher, so I never wrote it.) I still haven’t solved the problem completely. How am I supposed to write about, say, Dr. Hopper (the name of the amateur detective I’d made up years ago) and his entire personhood, without making the work sound like a sermon or a sentimentally preachy thing?

But it’s reassuring to think that others came before me, and triumphed—reflecting in their own subcreation a tiny glimpse of that creation, the full glory of Christ.


(ETA. I read only recently that Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, had the same sentiments. She said she only learned to be a true novelist when she became Catholic, because it allowed her to see a human being as a whole.)