Rumer Godden's FIVE FOR SORROW, TEN FOR JOY

Rumer Godden (1907 - 1998) was a prolific author who wrote over sixty books during the course of her long life.  Godden was the author of the three best novels of all time about nuns: Black Narcissus (1939), In This House of Brede (1969), and Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (1979).


In 1979, when Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy was published, Rumer Godden was seventy two years old and had led a long and distinguished career as a best selling author. As her biographerAnne Chisolm notes,

“It was a time when novels like Rumer’s were in a critical and commercial shadow; long disregarded by the fashionable and avant garde, her books were too gentle and well-mannered for a mass readership fed by blockbusters of the Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins variety.” 

Chisolm notes that in her seventies Godden wrote eight books. Godden was still writing novels well into her eighties.  Her last book, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, was published in 1997.

Rumer Godden

“Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (1979) was a novel about an order of French Catholic nuns, the Dominican Sisters of Bethany, who worked with prisoners and prostitutes.  To write the story of Vivi, a child who grows up in a brothel, and the madam turned nun who tries to help her, Rumer spent six months improving her French; she then enlisted Dorothy Watson to go with her to France to visit courts, prisons and the back-streets of Paris.  Rumer was not above a little string-pulling to get what she wanted: the British Ambassador in Paris was asked to pass on a letter to the French justice minister from Harold Macmillan, who vouched for Rumer as ‘a person of the highest probity and discretion,’ who would be willing to submit her book for approval before publication.  Dorothy Watson, observing Rumer at work, was impressed with her stamina and determination.  They attended a murder trial, visited the women’s prison at Rennes and were driven round the roughest quarters of Paris in the small hours; Rumer then went to stay at the convent at Fontenailles where many of the postulants were ex-prisoners.  Two of the Sisters of Bethany were her special advisors. . . . Rumer made sure that in return for their help the Sisters of Bethany benefited financially from the book.  She also took an interest in the small, impoverished community that the order had set up in north London.  When she found out they could not afford to furnish their chapel, she undertook to do it by persuading ‘everyone who had benefited from my writing’ to help. . . . The book attracted some excellent reviews; the Financial Times called it ‘a very readable and dramatic story of manipulation, violence, double-dealing and redemption,’ while Auberon Waugh in the Evening Standard said it was ‘a first-class story, with a nice and unusual plot.’ *

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is the story of Elizabeth Fanshaw.  Elizabeth, known as Lise, is an orphan who has been reared by her spinster aunt.  Joining the British Army as a teenager during World War II, Lise is sent to France as a driver.  In Paris, Lise is seduced by Patrice, the owner of a high class brothel.  After becoming Patrice's lover, Lise is forced into a life of prostitution.  Lise becomes known as La Balafree, "the branded one'" after she is accidentally cut across the face in a fight between Patrice and a client who has fallen in love with her.  Ultimately,  Lise becomes the brothel's madame and manages the house for Patrice and his brother Emile.

Lise rescues a young girl named Vivi.  Vivi had been the victim of incest at the hands of her father and had been given refuge in an insane asylum during the German occupation of France.  Lise finds Vivi living on the streets of Paris and about to be arrested as a vagrant.  As Vivi gets older she becomes more beautiful.  Tension ensues when Patrice removes Lise as his mistress and replaces her with young Vivi.  Vivi, however, becomes bored with Patrice and seduces Luigi, a young Italian delivery boy.  Lise helps Vivi to escape the brothel and run away with Luigi.  When Patrice discovers that Vivi is gone, Lise is savagely beaten.   About a year later, Lise gets information that Patrice is about to kidnap Vivi and force her back into a life of prostitution.  Lise follows Patrice to Vivi’s doorstep where she shoots and kills him.  Lise has been mistaken, however.  It turns out that Vivi, now bored with her husband and neglectful of her baby, had herself contacted Patrice and asked him to take her back. 

Lise is sentenced to 15 years in prison for manslaughter.  During her years in prison, Lise becomes acquainted with the Sisters of Bethany who come to minister to the prisoners.  While still in prison, Lise begins preparing for religious life, and makes plans to enter the Sisters of Bethany following her release.  

Another prisoner, a young girl named Lucette, is released from prison at the same time as Lise. Although Lise tries to get rid of her, Lucette looks up to Lise as a role model  and is determined to follow Lise wherever she goes.  Lise then enters the convent and begins the long road to become a fully professed nun.  

Two real life Sisters of Bethany hold up a picture of the founders of the order, 

Mother Henri Dominque and Father Lataste, which was made by a prisoner.

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is about the intersection of Evil and Divine Grace in the lives of these three women: Lise, Vivi and Lucette.  The title, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, is a reference to the prayers of the rosary (sorrowful mysteries, joyful mysteries, and glorious mysteries).  When Lise finds Vivi on the streets of Paris, Vivi is carrying a rosary.  Later, after Vivi has betrayed Lise at her trial for murdering Patrice, Vivi sends the rosary to Lise in prison. Heartbroken and angry,  Lise breaks the strand of beads in two and sends it back to Vivi.  When Lise becomes a nun, although she intends to take the name "Sister Mary Lise of the Cross," she finds herself saying "Soeur Marie Lise du Rosaire" or "Sister Mary Lise of the Rosary."  Guilty over her treatment of Vivi, Lise is unable to say the rosary.  Lise's relationship to the prayers of the rosary and what happens to Vivi's broken rosary is an important theme of the novel.

  Our Lady of the Rosary

As in a number of her other novels, Godden has a unique story telling technique with relation to time.  Rather than just telling the story in a linear fashion, the novel, which is set in  the present  of the 1970's, is put together as a series of flashbacks to different periods in Lise's life.  The narrative is advanced through the past and present, with more and more of Lise's life being revealed throughout the novel.

Although Godden has been accused of merely writing a rehash of In This House of Brede, I think that Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is a very different kind of book.  Whereas In This House of Brede was concerned mostly with the inner action of the spiritual life, the subject matter of this novel can be described as a lurid melodrama.

Although some will find the melodramatic elements of the story to be over the top, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, has to rank as one of the best Catholic novels of the twentieth century.  It is also a very entertaining read with sufficient twists and suspense to keep the reader enthralled.  Rumor Godden was a very talented writer, and even when dealing with this potboiler material does not disappoint.  On a scale of one to five, the Bad Catholic gives Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy five Rosaries.

______________________


*Chisolm, Anne, Rumer Godden: A Storyteller’s Life, Greenwillow Books (1998) p. 281 - 282

Connolly's Life

The late Ralph McInerny (1929 - 2010) was a first rate scholar and a popular author. From 1955 until his retirement, McInerny was Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University and was the author of over twenty non-fiction books. As a popular author, McInerny was the author of over seventy novels. Today, he is best known as a mystery writer, being the author of the popular “Father Dowling” mystery series.

The author biography in the back of the book under consideration says “Ralph McInerny has written several novels, including The Priest, which find their themes in the groves of academe and the often comic, sometimes tragic, commotion that plagues the post-conciliar Church. He is also the author of the very popular Father Dowling mystery series.”

Connolly’s Life (1983) was definitely written as an excuse for Professor McInerny to discuss the “commotion that plagues the post-conciliar Church.” Michael Connolly is a priest and dissident Catholic theologian who has presumably just died in the crash of a commercial airliner. The novel is narrated by Jim Clark, a former classmate of Connolly’s at a minor seminary in Wisconsin and one of Connolly’s best friends.

Clark dropped out of seminary and joined the Marine Corps while Connolly continued his seminary studies and became a priest. As a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Connolly has become a theologically liberal theologian who writes and teaches against the official teachings of the Catholic Church on issues of faith and morals.

The novel is written in the first person and is narrated by Clark, who is currently living in Rome while he writes adventure stories for boys and cavorts with Maria, his young college age girlfriend. Clark has just gotten word that Connolly has died in an airplane crash and is making plans to fly to the U.S. to attend the funeral. We find out that Clark had been married to Nancy, a former Franciscan nun, who left the convent during the tumultuous 1960s. After the death of their young son, Clark’s marriage to Nancy began to fall apart. Clark is sent to Rome to cover the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council as a correspondent for Alleluia, a progressive Catholic periodical. While Clark attends the council sessions, Nancy stays in their apartment in Rome and paints. Connolly is also in Rome reporting on the Council for the liberal Catholic press.

Ralph McInerny

One day when Clark comes home early, he catches Connolly leaving his and Nancy’s apartment. Convinced that they are having an affair, Clark abandons Nancy in Rome and leaves for the States. Rumor has now reached Clark that, despite his vow of celibacy as a Catholic priest, Connolly is a regular over-night visitor at Nancy’s apartment in Washington, D.C.

Leaving Maria in Rome at his apartment, Clark travels to Washington. Unable to find a hotel room, Clark is forced to stay with ex-wife. Clark then flies to Wisconsin where he attends Connolly’s funeral on the grounds of the former Catholic seminary which has now been sold to Fundamentalist Protestants. After visiting Connolly’s sister who is a cloistered Carmelite nun, Clark flies to New York to meet with his agent who tells him that there is no more market for the kind of adventure stories for boys that he writes.

Thinking that he has merely misplaced them, Clark is unable to find his passport and credit cards. Traveling back to Washington, Clark checks into a seedy hotel room and goes back to see Nancy who tells him that Connolly is not dead and that he has been to her apartment.

Unable to get in touch with Maria, Clark telephones her mother who tells Clark that Maria is very sick and in the hospital. Rushing back to Rome, Clark finds out that Maria has lied to her parents by telling them that she was sick in order to get her father to send her more money. Instead Maria’s father has come to Rome to check on her. Clark meets Maria’s father who is Clark’s age or a little younger.

Clark is confronted by Austin, Maria’s former boyfriend. Austin is mentally unstable and threatens to kill Clark if he doesn’t leave Maria. Austin repeatedly makes threatening phone calls to Clark’s apartment and confronts Clark on the street where they engage in a fist fight with Clark getting the best of Austin.

Meanwhile, Clark is trying to re-invent himself as an author and write a mystery novel. Furey, a right-wing traditionalist Catholic, offers Clark a $20,000 advance to write a tell all biography of Connolly. Not really wanting to accept, but desperate for money, Clark accepts the advance. Clark then runs into some old friends, an English couple named Ian and Milly. Ian and Milly own a house in the Italian countryside. A ruined medieval monastery is located on the property. Ian and Milly invite Clark to move there and write while they are out of the country.

Clark moves to Ian and Milly’s country estate and gets to work on his biography of Connolly. Coming home one afternoon during a pouring rain storm, Clark finds the guest house where is living ransacked and then the tires on his car are slashed. Shortly after this, Connolly shows up.

Connolly explains to Clark how he "died." Connolly tells Clark that, wanting a drink before getting on his flight, he left the gate and went to the airport lounge. He left his carry on bag in a chair at the gate his flight was leaving from. At the bar, a woman suffered a seizure and collapsed asking for a priest. Connolly has not worn a clerical collar in years and was dressed in a suit and tie. He tried to administer the last rites to the woman but could not remember any of the prayers. Finally, he was pushed away from the woman by others to make way for the airport chaplain.

Overwhelmed by the feeling that his priesthood has been a sham and a lie, Connolly forgets about his flight and checks into the airport Hilton. Going back to the Gate, Connolly discovered that his bag was gone but someone else’s bag that looks the same was still there. The next morning, Connolly turned on the television news and found out that the flight he was supposed to be on crashed and there were no survivors. Apparently, the remains of the passenger who accidentally took Connolly’s bag was identified as Connolly.

Connolly now becomes a penitent. He begins to say Mass everyday in his hotel room and anonymously attends Mass at the airport chapel. He comes to the realization that all of his erudite theological writings are empty and that he has abandoned the simple, true faith in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which he once believed in.

“I no longer ask myself what the Church should do in the modern world or how me must learn the lessons of modernity. . . . I do not think of liberal or conservative positions on this or that. The underground chapel makes such contrasts puerile. Why do people go down there? To receive the body and blood of Christ. Why? Because he died for our sins. And rose again from the dead on the third day. My writings are a mockery of their faith.”

Connolly visited Nancy in her apartment where he found Clark's passport and credit cards. He has been traveling using Clark's passport and paying his way on Clark's credit cards. Connolly tells Clark that he wants to stay dead and buried so that he can pray in privacy. Clark suggests that Connolly stay at the ruined abbey and act as Ian and Milly’s caretaker.

The ending of Connolly’s Life is predictable melodrama. Clark finds his young girlfriend, Maria, swimming in the pool in her bra and panties. Even though Clark repeatedly claims that he wants to get rid of Maria, he almost immediately jumps in bed with her. Clark sees Maria’s crazy former boyfriend Austin. After telling Connolly to be careful, Clark and Maria take off on foot for the nearest village. After reaching the town, Clark puts Maria on the bus back to Rome and gets a taxi ride back to the estate. Mistaking Connolly for Clark, Connolly has been murdered by Austin. Rather than calling the police and inviting a lot of unpleasant questions, Clark buries Connolly out at the ruined monastery. Nancy flies to Rome and is met by Clark who drives her out to the Abbey. Clark convinces Nancy that Connolly truly is dead. Nancy now believes that Connolly appeared to her after his death. The novel ends with Clark and Nancy by the pool overlooking the ruined Abbey and Connolly’s grave.

Long out of print, Connolly’s Life is really only of interest to those who are interested in the history and politics of the Catholic Church. Professor McInerny loved the Catholic Church and was deeply disturbed by the turmoil in the Church in the years following Vatican II. McInerny was a good writer and this novel is fast paced and well plotted. Connolly’s Life is a good “Catholic Novel.” The Bad Catholic gives Connolly’s Life three and a half crucifixes.

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair

In my effort to read all of Greene's so-called "Catholic novels," I finally got around to The End of the Affair (1951).

This book is about adultery, sin, redemption and the nature of faith. Elements of the book may be loosely based on Greene's notorious real life carryings on with various of his mistresses, especially Lady Catherine Walston.

The End of the Affair doesn't involve a love triangle, it involves a love rectangle. The four lovers being Sarah Miles, her husband Henry, Maurice Bendrix, and God.

The book is primarily the story of the lovers Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix. Sarah is in a loveless marriage to a civil servant named Henry Miles. Then just before the outbreak of World War II, Sarah becomes involved in a passionate love affair with the novelist Maurice Bendrix.

The love affair reaches its climax during the London blitz. In 1944, while making love in Bendrix' apartment, a German V-1 rocket lands near by and Bendrix is hit by a falling door. Thinking that he has been killed, Sarah, who is an agnostic, sinks to her knees and promises God that if Bendrix lives she will give him up.


Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore as Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles

Sara ends the affair with Bendrix. After two years, in 1946, Bendrix happens to run into Sarah's husband Henry. Henry confides in Bendrix that he thinks that Sarah is having an affair. Jealous at the thought that Sarah had left him for another lover, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow her.

Sarah is indeed involved with another lover for whom she has left Bendrix: God. A big theme of The End of the Affair is the nature of faith. Sarah is desperately unhappy in her marriage and wishes to leave Henry to be with Bendrix. She rationalizes that if God doesn't really exist then she is free to do as she pleases. In order to try to convince herself of God's non-existence, she begins studying with a notorious atheist intellectual. Unfortunately, atheist arguments against the existence of God only convince Sarah that God is real and that she must keep her promise.

Sarah begins taking instruction from a Catholic priest, and performs random acts of kindness. At one point, she prays that she could take Christ's place on the cross and suffer for the redemption of humanity. Her wish is granted, as shortly thereafter, Sarah dies from pneumonia.

After Sarah's death there are several miraculous healings associated with her intercession in Heaven. (Apparently, the long-term enthusiastic commission of the sin of adultery doesn't cause Sarah to have to spend much time in Purgatory, since she seems to zip straight to the presence of the Beatific Vision!). In other words, it turns out that Sarah Miles was a Saint.

After finding out that his girlfriend left him for God, who then proceeded to take her away permanently, Bendrix, who has been an atheist, hates God. Bendrix realizes that he cannot hate God and remain an atheist since hate is just the other side of love. In order to hate God, Bendrix must first believe in Him.

The End of the Affair is rightly recognized as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

GRAHAM GREENE'S BRIGHTON ROCK

In trying to catch up on my reading, I just finished Graham Greene’s classic Brighton Rock first published in 1938. The Heart of the Matter left me unsettled, but I really don’t know what I think about this book.

The title refers to hard candy sold at the beach in the town of Brighton in England. Brighton Rock is the story of a teenage gangster named Pinkie Brown, his hapless girlfriend Rose, and a busybody named Ida Arnold. Sound like a bizarre plot? Well, Brighton Rock is a bizarre book.

The plot of Brighton Rock is readily available elsewhere on the internet so I won’t bother everyone with it here. What I want to focus on are the much heralded theological aspects of the novel. Brighton Rock is considered to be one of Greene’s “Catholic Novels,” the others of which are The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Power and the Glory. Although Greene habitually throws in some reference to the Church or Catholicism in his thrillers and “entertainments,” like the daughter who goes to Catholic school and says her rosary in Our Man in Havana.

Greene has said that when he started writing Brighton Rock he intended it to be a conventional thriller or detective story, hence the exciting opening chapter which describes a chase and a murder. The novel’s famous opening line sets the stage for what follows:

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”

Hale is indeed murdered. At Hale’s sparsely attended funeral, the Anglican priest mouths the platitudes of modern religion of the “I’m OK, You’re OK, God’s OK” type:

‘Our belief in heaven,’ the clergyman went on, ‘is not qualified by our disbelief in the old medieval hell. We believe,’ he said, glancing swiftly along the smooth polished slipway towards the New Art doors through which the coffin would be launched into the flames, ‘we believe that this our brother is already at one with the One.’ He stamped his words like little pats of butter with his personal mark. ‘He has attained unity. We do not know what that One is with whom (or with which) he is now at one. We do not retain the old medieval beliefs in glassy seas and golden crowns. Truth is beauty and there is more beauty for us, a truth-loving generation, in the certainty that our brother is at this moment re-absorbed in the universal spirit.’

It astounds me that Greene was already able to poke fun at New Age babble like this in the late 1930's. This kind of stuff sounds good but has no real content. This is not a religion that a person will give his life for.

Ida Arnold, who was a woman that Hale picked up in an attempt to avoid being killed, becomes obsessed with finding Hale’s killer and bringing him to justice. Ida represents the modern person. She has no religious beliefs to speak of, she just believes in “right and wrong.” However, Ida finds no fault in anything which brings her pleasure. Ida sees nothing wrong with casual sex, for instance. “It’s natural” she says, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

“She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers.”

So while “the good guys” in this novel are not religious, “the bad guys” are very religious. Hale’s killer Pinkie was reared as a Roman Catholic, sings parts of the Mass to himself, and believes in all of the doctrines of the Church. Outside of the fact that Pinkie is also an evil psychopathic killer, he’s not a bad bloke.

Pinkie believes in Hell and knows that when he dies in a state of mortal sin that he will certainly go to it. In the back of his mind, Pinkie hopes that he’ll be able to make a confession and be granted absolution before his death. If Pinkie dies and goes to Hell in the meantime, well, as they said in The Godfather, it ain’t personal, it’s just business.

Pinkie kills Hale for being involved with the murder of the gang leader Kite. Then he kills a member of the gang named Spicer so that Spicer can’t talk. Pinkie seduces the hapless Rose, a 16 year old waitress in a greasy spoon who can give incriminating testimony against him, and convinces her to marry him.

Rose is also a Roman Catholic. Before their civil marriage ceremony, Rose goes off to confession but then realizes that marrying Pinkie in a civil ceremony outside the Church is a mortal sin so it doesn’t make any difference anyway. Rose and Pinkie are very moral in a bizarre kind of way. Rose knows that Pinkie is a murderer, but makes a conscious decision to go to Hell with him.

Although neither Pinkie or Rose believe that their civil marriage is valid in the eyes of God, they refrain from sex until they are married. In fact, Pinkie has a revulsion of the entire idea of sexual intimacy from listening to his parents make love through the thin walls of a poor tenement apartment. Pinkie says that listening to his parents in their bedroom disgusted him so much that he swore he would become a priest. However, when the time comes on the wedding night, Pinkie overcomes his disgust and does his duty.

Since Rose is convinced that she is going to Hell by living in sin with Pinkie anyway, she is ready to commit the ultimate mortal sin by taking her own life when Pinkie asks her to. Rose winds up throwing the gun she is supposed to kill herself with away and Pinkie accidentally splatters acid all over his face (in grim preview of where his soul is headed) before he plunges over a cliff and dies to avoid capture by the police.

If any of the above makes sense to you, then you may be either (1) a deranged lunatic, (2) a Graham Greene fan, (3) a Catholic, or (4) all of the above.

Greene seemed to be obsessed with mortal sin and damnation. This led George Orwell to famously opine that Greene apparently viewed Hell as an exclusive high class nightclub open only to Catholics.

I can’t really say that I enjoyed reading Brighton Rock, but it certainly provided much food for thought. Graham Greene was a one of a kind author. It may just be that Brighton Rock is a great work of literature.


Pinkie & Rose in a film version of Brighton Rock



Graham Greene

Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away

As I mentioned, the Bad Catholic has been catching up on reading Catholic authors. I have previously read Wise Blood, the short story collection A Good Man is Hard To Find and dipped into the letter collection The Habit of Being. I have also read most of the lectures and non-fiction contained in the Library of America's Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works.

After visiting Graham Greene's West Africa, I decided to pay a visit to Miss Mary Flannery's South. I am aiming to stay for a while.

O'Connor's best writing is in her short stories and in her letters. She wrote two novels Wise Blood and the one under consideration, The Violent Bear It Away. Of the two, I think that the latter is by far the better book. Toward the end, Wise Blood became confusing and hard to follow, whereas, The Violent Bear It Away moves inexorably towards its inevitable, horrifying ending.

Following Jesus is never easy and you are liable to get maimed in the process. Jesus went to suffering and death, and if we are going to follow him then we must be prepared to go to Crucifixion and death along with Him.

The Violent Bear It Away refers to a quote from the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away." Matthew 11:12.

The novel is the story of a young teenager, Francis Marion Tarwater. Tarwater has been raised by his great uncle, Mason Tarwater, who kidnapped the orphan child away from Rayber, Mason's nephew and Tarwater's uncle, in order to raise Tarwater to do the Lord's work.

Mason considers himself to be an Old Testament prophet. Rayber, referred to throughout the novel as "the schoolteacher," marries a social worker known as "the welfare woman." Mason tells young Tarwater that the welfare woman was older than Rayber and only able to give him one child, and the Lord spared the child from their evil ways the only way He could by making him dim-witted. Mason believes that he has been chosen by the Lord to baptize Rayber's retarded child, Bishop.

Anyone wanting the rest of the plot summary can read the entire thing here. Otherwise, I'm going to assume that everybody knows the basic story outline.

The Bad Catholic is also probably a bad literature critic, because, if I'm honest, just like I didn't know what I thought of Greene's The Heart of the Matter, I don't really know what I think of The Violent Bear It Away either. However, I'm a real fan of the Southern Gothic style. Greene is good but he ain't no William Faulkner, or Flannery O'Connor for that matter.

It's pretty obvious that Mason Tarwarter represents the religious outlook on life and that Raber, "the schoolteacher", represents the modern secular world view. Tarwater must either choose the Lord or choose modern agnosticism. In O'Connor's hands there is a certain fanaticism on both sides. Old Mason had been committed to the mental hospital, but in their way, both Rayber and his absent wife are just as crazy. There is a lot to think about here. Why would a good God let there be retarded children like Bishop? If there is no God, is everyone better off if Bishop was dead?

This being an O'Connor novel, even without knowing the ending, when I read that Rayber had once tried to drown his son in the ocean but couldn't go through with it, I knew that Tarwater would drown Bishop while baptizing him. Thus the paradox. If Rayber had drowned Bishop, in Rayber's secular world view, Bishop would just be dead. When Tarwater drowns Bishop and baptizes him at the same time, Bishop becomes the Lord's and is born to new life.

O'Connor's sacramental theology runs throughout the book. As in the teachings of the Catholic Church, baptism operates as a channel of grace which affects the individual whether the person wants it to or not. You can reject the grace, like Rayber has, but you can't ignore it. It exists whether you like it or not.

I also don't know what I think about Tarwater's voice that he hears througout the novel challenging him to go against his destiny. Is it the devil? The evil side of himself? The rational side? Because we know that following the Lord isn't rational. You got to be a fool for God like all them prophets in the Old Testament was, and like Saint Francis was. After all, Jesus himself went and got his self kilt when all he would have had to done to avoid it was to keep his mouth shut and not be a raisin' the dead and healing the lame and a makin' the blind see.

I have to say that the homosexual child molester that gets Tarwater near the end of the book surprised me as much as the murder of the family by the Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find surprised me when I first read it.

Tarwater is destined to be a prophet of the Lord. No matter what he does he can't shake off the destiny that the Lord has for him. He can try to reject it, but he can't get away from it.

Well, the Bad Catholic has a got to get up from this here computer and quit bloggin' and git on with his bidnis of lawyerin' and makin' a livin' and fallin down and worshipin' the Great God Mammon and all like that.

The Violent Bear It Away is grotesque, silly, and profound all at the same time. I think that's a good definition of a masterpiece. Don't you?



Miss Flannery rocking on the porch.

The Heart of the Matter

I've been catching up on my reading of "Catholic novels" lately. This afternoon I finished Graham Greene's famous 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. Honestly, I don't know what I think of it. Like everything I have ever read by Greene so far, the book is well written and engaging. The characters are well drawn and the reader comes to care about what happens to them.

However, The Heart of the Matter is a strange novel. I can't do any better than George Orwell's review for the July 17, 1948 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Orwell's review is literature in in its own right:

Here is the outline of the story: A certain Major Scobie, Deputy Commissioner of Police and a Catholic convert, finds a letter bearing a German address hidden in the cabin of the captain of a Portuguese ship. The letter turns out to be a private one and completely harmless, but it is, of course, Scobie's duty to hand it over to higher authority. However, the pity he feels for the Portuguese captain is too much for him, and he destroys the letter and says nothing about it. Scobie, it is explained to us, is a man of almost excessive conscientiousness. He does not drink, take bribes, keep Negro mistresses, or indulge in bureaucratic intrigue, and he is, in fact, disliked on all sides because of his uprightness, like Aristides the Just. His leniency toward the Portuguese captain is his first lapse. After it, his life becomes a sort of fable on the theme of 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave', and in every single instance it is the goodness of his heart that leads him astray. Actuated at the start by pity, he has a love affair with a girl who has been rescued from a torpedoed ship. He continues with the affair largely out of a sense of duty, since the girl will go to pieces morally if abandoned; he also lies about her to his wife, so as to spare her the pangs of jealousy. Since he intends to persist in adultery, he does not go to confession, and in order to lull his wife's suspicions he tells her that he has gone. This involves him in the truly fearful act of taking the Sacrament while in a state of mortal sin. By this time, there are other complications, all caused in the same manner, and Scobie finally decides that the only way out is through the unforgivable sin of suicide. Nobody else must be allowed to suffer through his death; it will be arranged as to look like an accident. As it happens, he bungles one detail, and the fact he has committed suicide becomes known. The book ends with a Catholic priest hinting, with doubtful orthodoxy, that Scobie is perhaps not damned. Scobie, however, had not entertained any such hope. White all through, with a stiff upper lip, he had gone to what he believed to be certain damnation out of pure gentlemanliness.

I have not parodied the plot of the book. Even when dressed up in realistic details, it is just as ridiculous as I have indicated. . . .

The Bad Catholic has to agree with Orwell. The book is well written, engaging, interesting, but . . . Orwell is right, the plot is ridiculous. Orwell is absolutely spot on, in my opinion, when he says that "If he (Scobie) were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women."

At one point in the novel, when Scobie is taking communion in a state of mortal sin, and has decided to kill himself to spare the feelings of his wife and his mistress, he prays that God accept his damnation on their behalf. Greene is here almost parodying the Catholic theology of offering up one's suffering on behalf of others as a form of prayer. We can offer up suffering because Christ suffered. How can one offer up a sin as prayer? It is certainly interesting fiction but it's very, very bad theology.

Orwell's classic review of The Heart of the Matter has some other great quotes:

"In addition, it is impossible not to feel a sort of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, both here and in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish."

Or this quote, which I absolutely love:

"Every novelist has his own conventions, and, just as in an E.M. Forster novel there is a strong tendency for the characters to die suddenly without sufficient cause, so in a Graham Greene novel there is a tendency for people to go to bed together almost at sight and with no apparent pleasure to either party."

The Heart of the Matter is acknowledged to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It's fun to think about the issues raised in the book and its fun to sit around and feel sorry for poor Scobie, but its terrible theology. And in fact, the ending of the novel shows that Scobie accomplished nothing by his suicide. His wife Louise knew he was having an affair all along and figures out that he committed suicide. Scobie's girlfriend, Helen, can't live with Scobie's death and sinks into moral depravity by being willing to sleep with any man who wants her. When asked what he thought happened to Scobie, Evelyn Waugh famously said "Scobie is in Hell." The Bad Catholic has to agree.


Graham Greene

Henry Morton Robinson's THE CARDINAL

I just finished reading the sixty year old pot boiler The Cardinal.

In its day this book was extremely popular. According to the blog Abandoned Books, The Cardinal was the number one bestseller of 1950 and the number four bestseller of 1951. Director Otto Preminger made a movie of the same name based upon the novel starring actor Tom Tryon. Having now read the book and seen the movie, the novel is far superior to the film which changes and condenses plots and in some cases drops plots and characters altogether.

About the only facts which I could dig up about the author, Henry Morton Robinson, came from the "About the Author" blurb in back of the book and the short article on Wikepedia. Robinson was born in Boston, Mass. in 1898 and served in the navy during World War I. He taught English at Columbia University and was the author of a number of popular books. Robinson died in 1961 after taking a sedative and going to sleep in a bathtub.

The Cardinal is the story of the life and career of the title character, Stephen Fermoyle, who rises from being the son of poor Irish immigrants in Boston to be a Prince of the Church. It is reportedly very loosely based on Cardinal Spellman. Being the story of one man's life, the novel has no one single plot and can instead be considered a series of linked stories and plots which involve Fermoyle at various stages of his career.

The characters in The Cardinal are mostly caricatures and stereotypes. The book describes a Catholic Triumphalism which would not be possible in a contemporary novel. The novel also takes a very romanticised view of the Church and clerical life in general. It is full of cliches and characters whose only purpose is to evoke a romanticized piety in the reader.

For instance, Father Fermoyle's sister Ellen is a pious Carmelite nun who contracts tuberculosis. Obviously she is intended to evoke the memory of Saint Therese. When Fermoyle is feeling that his vocation is challenged by his love for a woman, he goes off to a Benedictine monastery and is assigned to work in the kitchen beside a simple lay brother who stays mystically close to God through his work. Obviously, this is supposed to evoke shades of Brother Lawrence of The Practice of the Presence of God fame.

The reader has to be taught a moral lesson, so when Father Fermoyle's little sister refuses to marry a nice Catholic boy like she ought to and runs off with a Hispanic dancer (who also turns out to be a notorious back alley abortionist), we know that things are not going to turn out well. After all, the wages of sin is death. Mona, who is pregnant in a flop house, goes to a church and prays before a statute of Saint Anthony to be found by her family. Mona's prayers are answered and she is rescued by her brothers. However, there is a complication in her pregnancy which requires Monsignor Fermoyle to decide to let the doctors abort the child or let Mona face certain death. Of course, Mona dies in child birth and Monsignor Fermoyle names his newborn niece Regina in honor of the Blessed Mother. (I was told by an older lady of my acquantance that Protestant girls of her generation hesitated before dating Catholic boys because of this very scene in this novel.)

I have to say that the book is very well written for the type of thing that it is which is what we today would probably call beach reading. (In fact, I read a whole bunch of The Cardinal at the beach week before last.)

The Cardinal is a cliched Catholic soap opera. In short, The Cardinal is wonderful and I had great fun reading it. It would be well worth the time and money for anyone who loves the Church to dig up a copy of this old pot boiler.