Ralph McInerny - On Being a Catholic Writer

8/13/2019 Ralph McInerny - On Being a Catholic Writer

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On Being a Catholic Writerby Ralph McInerny

Many Catholic writers have balked at being called that. They were Catholicand they wrote, all right, but they didn’t want to be read as if the point of theirfiction was a religious message. As if you could earn an indulgence by readingthem. And maybe they didn’t like the prospective company. There used to beCatholic book publishers who published Catholic fiction. Some of it was prettygood! 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 sogood. '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 asthe lay people.

A few years ago, ! went through a list of the recipients of )otre *ame’s+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. newoman who wrote under the pseudonym of Christian -ead had a predilectionfor plots in which $rotestants were bested in argument and eventually came intothe Church. She herself was a convert./ ther women wrote movingly of theplight of single !rish girls in the )ew %orld. Maurice #rancis 0gan, who endedup as American ambassador to *enmark, wrote some pretty good novels. 1ateChopin never won the +aetare Medal but she was a powerful Catholic writer atthe turn of the century. )ot everyone knows that 1nute -ockne wrote a novelcalled 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 laughuntil ! noticed that it was dedicated to one Arnold Mc!nerny who had fallen inthe #irst %orld %ar.

Such items suggest that there was a tradition of Catholic writing that isignored in standard accounts of American literature. !s this because it wasinferior2 Much of it wasn’t. !t was simply not aimed at the %AS$ audience. !t

was sort of like the )egro 3aseball +eague.

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! don’t mean that Catholic fiction is a genre, sort of like westerns andmysteries, and that the Catholic writer simply works within certain conventions.The more you think about it, the less plausible that is. 4istorians would probablye5plain the marginal place of Catholic fiction by noting the immigrant status ofCatholics 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 wouldrun, you will produce your own culture.

! don’t know what American Catholic first wrote simply for whom it mightconcern, 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 providesa cautionary tale. Most biographers of #it6geraldand their number increasesannuallyshow little interest in his Catholicism. ! have a theory that he wasshamed out of it by people like 0dmund %ilson, who patroni6ed #it6gerald whilesecretly envying him. !n a letter from St. $aul where he had gone to write ThisSide of Paradise, #it6gerald wrote %ilson that he 7tells his chrystalline beads nomore,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 tosee his faith as an impediment to his literary ambitions. 4is short story,7Absolution,8 intended as the beginning of The Great Gatsby , reads like anoutsider’s view of the terrors of the confessional and the perils of the celibatelife. 3ut Catholicism never lost its hold on #it6gerald’s imagination. 3eneath theromantic longing and the effort to find gold behind the glitter, #it6gerald’s fictiontakes place under the watchful godlike eye of *r. T. ". 0ckleburg. !t is good toknow that #it6gerald now lies in consecrated ground.

3ut it is the apostate Catholic writer "ames "oyce who looms large. Theend of the Portrait makes clear that "oyce saw his art as a substitute for religionit was either9or. "oyce took no cheap shots at the faith he abandoned,however, something one notices after the spate of novels written by disgruntledCatholics telling the world how awful it was, all that se5ual repression and senseof sin, the hypocritical clergy and religious. The note of special pleading isdominant.

!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 apartfrom the faith of those who produced it. This overwhelmingly obvious fact is anantidote against the not always implicit assumption that religious belief is animpediment in the arts. !t would be easier to argue, historically, that in large partChristian 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 ofmy last book28 ! have been uncharacteristically keeping myself out of thediscussion 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 inSouth Minneapolis. At thirteen, ! went off to )a6areth 4all, the minor seminaryof the Archdiocese of St. $aul, and this opened up a whole new world to me. !nmy first year, an upperclassman named %aldo 4ermes handed me Maisie%ard’s life of Chesterton, saying he thought ! might like it. The book was almostas big as ! was, and ! was flattered by the thought that ! moved in the samemental universe as young men who needed to shave.

Chesterton did it for me. ! wanted to do the sort of thing he did. At the backof 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 ofthem, 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 ofseventeen, ! 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 mainthing ! did in the Marines was to read through the section on American fiction inthe 0l Toro library. And ! kept a notebook in which ! issued promises andpredictions to myself.

%hen ! got out, ! went back to the seminary, and writing was done on theedge of other things, as it usually is. ! wrote poems and a verse play and begana 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 thanpeople who painted and drew. *ilettantes. ! was one.

#or years ! entertained the velleity of being a writer. Months would go byduring which ! wrote nothing at all. ! published a couple poemsscholarly

writing is not writing in the sense we are talking of here! completed twoalleged novels as well as some stories, but ! really wasn’t 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 growingfamily, 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 fiveyears of two payments a month on the house. %hat to do2 ! remembered awriters’ maga6ine ! had bought in the train station in +os Angeles in >?@. !tsadvertisements and articles were devoted to the proposition that there wasmoney 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 atthe end of that time ! had not sold anything ! would take up bank robbing ormaybe sell one of the kids. 0very night at ten o’clock, after the kids had beenput to bed, and Connie and ! had some time together, ! went down to thebasement where ! had put my typewriter on a work bench, and, standing, wouldwrite until two o’clock. Since ! wanted to make money, ! aimed my stories at theslick maga6ines. ! was about to serve my apprenticeship as a writer.

)ot many weeks passed before it dawned on me that ! hadn’t the leastidea what ! was doing. %ell, maybe the least idea. 3ut the transition fromconsumer of fiction to producer is a wrenching one. !t is necessary to becomeBuite analytical about what it is in the stories one en(oys that engages one’s

interest and holds it. %hat is it that makes a story linger in the imagination afterwe have finished it2 There are techniBues to be learned. The differencebetween a serious writer and a dilettante lies in their contrasting attitudestoward techniBue. The dilettante writes to amuse himself, an easy task, but theserious writer seeks to interest a reader. ver my typewriter ! pinned thelegend& No one owes you a reading . !t has to be earned. The old=fashioned waywith plot.

nder the tutelage of my first editor, Sandra 0arl at edboo! , ! learned toturn hitherto shapeless narratives into stories. +ater ! saw that ! was learning thehard way what ! had read about in Aristotle’s $oetics. And ! was constrained bythe 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 sowonderfully 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 reader’slikely response would be so that ! could guide it by what ! wrote. !f you devote aparagraph to the view from the back bedroom window in a short story, thatbetter 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 piccololessons, you can take a writing course. The emphasis will be on techniBue, howto do it. %hat the course cannot give you is vision or a voice. 'ou can mimic themasters for a while, you might do plausible imitations of themart imitating artrather than natureand come to reali6e that is all you can do.

This is why techniBue is looked down upon. This is why, fatally, it isthought to be unimportant. The fact that it is not sufficient does not make itunnecessary. 0ven 0. M. #orster, in As"e#ts of the No$el , laments that he musttell a story in order to amuse the masses when he would rather (ust write. ThankDod for the masses if they made #orster write the novels he did. A contempt forthe 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, meetingdifficulties, overcoming or being overcome, succeeding or failing. The men andwomen in stories face problems we all face, and this can interest us in theaccount 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 towrite, ! would not have wanted to (ust go on writing for those markets2 !t had todo with the range of issues, the treatment of them, the constraints ! mentionedabove. 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 thenovella ! wrote for the same maga6ine, A Season of %ndings, inspired a bit by#it6gerald’s Winter &rea's, is better than ! remembered. 3ut basically what !wrote were domestic storiesthe first recital, going off to camp, the visitinggrandma& dramas but not pressed to any great depths. And love stories, themost persistent theme of fiction.

My first novel, (olly ogerson, was published by *oubleday in >?F, mysecond, A Narrow Ti'e, in >??. %hat ! had learned on the maga6ines enabledme to write these, and in doing so ! reali6ed ! was liberated from a kind ofgeneric set of standards of success and failure. Slick maga6ine fiction does notgo 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 deepestbeliefs about what it all means. !n those novels, ! reali6ed ! had a voice and amass 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 thelens 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 thenature of the eye through which the action is seen. ". #. $owers is an e5Buisitewriter about Catholic things, and #lannery ’Connor, eBually good, mentionsthings Catholic in only one of her short storiesbut the sensibility of all herfiction 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 beingsby 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 andnuns on the set, not a matter of e5plicit reference to Catholic things, but ratherthe *antesBue vision. There are priests and nuns in stories that lack this visionEthis 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. Thefirst asked, in effect, what it was like for a young priest in the postconciliarChurch, and the second asked what it was like for old priests who saw thestructures of a lifetime crumble around them. The Priest was a best sellerE Gateof Hea$en has its discriminating fans.

!t was this writing about priests that led to the suggestion that ! try myhand at a mystery series involving a clerical sleuth. Somewhat reluctantly, !responded, little suspecting that #ather *owling would turn out to be my mostpopular character. Mysteries are matters of life and death, of crime andpunishment, but sin and forgiveness are also in play, and it is the latter thate5plain -oger *owling’s interest in murder and mayhem. The television series,

based loosely on these stories, ran for three years in prime time and continuesto be shown both here and abroad. A few weeks ago, a priest from "apan toldme he had watched the series in Tokyo. ! forbore asking him if he liked mycharacters in "apanese. +ast summer ! published two #ather *owling novels foryounger readers, dedicated to two of my granddaughters. #uture titles will bededicated 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 pullulatingwriting career ! thought of when reading Chesterton. !t was, of course, the#ather 3rown stories that gave me pause when ! was asked to invent a clericalsleuth. 3ut ! am reconciled to being less than Chesterton. And there are manythings in the wings.

"ust as natural law is included in Christian revelation, so there is a naturalmoral vision of human action operating in fiction that is not Catholic in the sensementioned above. Alas, we live in a time when natural morality is thought to bereligious, doubtless because the Church seems the ma(or champion anddefender of the natural law. The recognition that adultery and deviance andkilling people is wrong is often thought to be the Buirky outlook of Christians. 3utof course great pagan literature also proceeds from this recognition.

0mbarrassment about the notion of the Catholic writer is likeembarrassment at the notion of Catholic universities. The faith is seen as an

embarrassment and an impediment. 3oth attitudes founder on the same fact.niversities were born e) #orde e##lesiae, out of the heart of the Church, andso was our literature. 3eing a Catholic writer is not a falling away from an idealEit is the way to fulfill the ideal completelyto see human acts in terms of theultimate 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

Ralph McInerny - On Being a Catholic Writer

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