[Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, by Joseph Pearce; Ignatius Press, 425 pages]
The American Conservative, January 30, 2006
Literary Giants, Literary Catholics differs from Pearce's earlier publications, in that it comprises essays that have already appeared in Chronicles, Gilbert Magazine, This Rock, Catholic World Report, and a dozen other periodicals, including TAC. Most of its essays are short, some being fewer than four pages long, although one takes up more than 30 pages. Many are perhaps best interpreted as trailers, or teasers, for the full-length biographies - concerning Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, and Roy Campbell, as well as the three apologists mentioned above - which Pearce has already produced. Sadly, Ignatius Press nowhere cites the original sources for this material, sources which Pearce has failed to provide ("My memory is no longer equal to the task of remembering which articles appeared in which journals", he admits in his acknowledgments section).
At least no-one can quarrel with the range of Pearce's interests. He has tended to concentrate on a specific time and place - early-to-mid 20th-century England - where, one gathers, his main devotion lies. As against that, he remains among the very few modern commentators who have written with understanding of Solzhenitysn. His pleasurable variety is matched by a pleasurable style: plain, clear, no-nonsense. If only the term "stolid" lacked insulting connotations, it would describe Pearce's idiom well. He shuns the faintest suggestion of that ghastly frivolity which is English Catholics' national vice, and which makes whole tracts of Ronald Knox almost unbearable. Perhaps the nadir of postwar English Catholicism came when Knox, having obtained the signal honor of a private audience with Pius XII, proceeded to lecture His Holiness about ... the Loch Ness Monster. In Pearce's thought-processes, even when they inspire occasional disagreement (see below), there are no Loch Ness Monsters.
Any volume with a title like Literary Giants, Literary Catholics will have the genial, elephantine shadow of Chesterton looming over it. Sure enough, Chapter 9 of this volume provides as neat an epitome of GKC's life, philosophy, and importance as can ever have been written. Notable above all is the epitome's stress on how Chesterton influenced later apologists, a fact insufficiently emphasized in many more ambitious accounts of the man. For Lewis, as Pearce insists, "Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together." Dorothy L. Sayers - who never formally joined the Roman Catholic Church - also acknowledged, with fervor, Chesterton's impact. It is good to be reminded by Pearce that Chesterton wrote The Everlasting Man partly "as a refutation of [H. G.] Wells's case" in The Outline of History, this case being for Christophobic, Europhobic, Third-World-glorifying, pagan agitprop. (Felipe Fernández-Armesto afterwards peddled similar agitprop, with a somewhat thicker simulacrum of scholarly etiquette, in works like Millennium.) Pearce has of course comprehensively exploded, in other contexts, the myth of Chesterton's and Belloc's anti-Semitism. It would be pleasant to think that this myth was now confined to Abe Foxman's and Lyndon LaRouche's respective shadow-lands. But no: it blooms anew in the recent Dictionary of National Biography, a weird throwback to Clinton-era political correctness. So Pearce's chapter called "Fascism and Chesterton" merits special study.
Pearce's other topics include Waugh; T. S. Eliot; Dame Edith Sitwell; England's World War I protest poets (particularly Siegfried Sassoon, who - like Dame Edith - converted to Catholicism in old age); Shakespeare; Dante (about whom more in a moment); Graham Greene (ah well); Muggeridge (hmmmmm...); Hollywood; and Christmas. If Muggeridge must be praised at all - and one does wish that Muggeridge's outright heresies, such as his printed denial of the Virgin Birth as late as 1987, could be honestly conceded rather than huffily ignored - Pearce's way is the best way to do it. Correctly, Pearce compliments Gregory Wolfe's 1995 life of Muggeridge for its diligence, thoroughness, and (Pearce's words) "eloquence, without ever compromising the highest standards of scholarship." He also observes that Richard Ingrams's contemporaneous, and arrogantly titled, Muggeridge: The Biography "barely pa[id] lip service to scholarly standards of annotation and source citation." These standards being - as Pearce's politeness prevents him from spelling out - anathema to the whole Ingrams mindset, with its glorification of ink-stained amateurism, and its loathing of scholastic competence.
Chapters 30 to 47 consist mostly of Tolkien analyses, with occasional excursi into Lewis's "Inkling" milieu, including a delightful portrait of Lewis's fellow Inkling Owen Barfield. Familiar to readers of Surprised By Joy, Barfield died in 1997, when a mere stripling of 99. Pearce met him not long before the end; "I realized", says Pearce, "as those eyes met mine that the decaying body was merely an inadequate shell for the immortal soul."
Regarding Tolkien: here, launching timidly and vertiginously into the first person, I must declare a fault which may well scandalize at least half of TAC's readership. I can no longer read any Tolkien; have never finished any of his books except (under duress) The Fellowship of the Ring; and have never been inspired by Tolkien to any emotion except sheepish ennui. Therefore I must take on trust Pearce's glowing assessment of JRRT's magnum opus. Evidently Lord of the Rings means more to him than even the Chesterbelloc does. If a Catholic Tolkienophobe may respectfully address a Tolkienophile, I would point out the oft-forgotten fact that although millions of Catholics now regard Tolkienophilia as an article of faith, this is an extremely recent phenomenon. During my 1970s adolescence (Pearce and I were both born in 1961), his cultists consisted largely and perhaps wholly of hirsute flower-children - beards imperative for both sexes - who regarded LOTR as a 1000-page acid trip. Hobbits, man, forests, man, far-out, man, groovy, man. Nobody ever told either the flower-children or me that the character of Galadriel alludes to the Virgin Mary. Nor, if we had been told it, would we have believed it. The championing of Tolkien by hippies, whom he would have rejected with the most blatant scorn, has implications for those who confuse other artists with such artists' more asinine groupies. (Wagner, anyone?) Clearly Tolkienophiles will need Pearce's latest exegeses to devour, to digest, and doubtless to argue about.
Parts of Literary Giants, Literary Catholics prompt reservations. T. S. Eliot's early reproofs of Milton are quoted with reverence, but Eliot's eventual recantation of these reproofs is not. Neither are the defenses of Milton by critics Charles Williams and William Empson, against the smart-aleck Blake epigrams which Pearce does mention - "the devil's party without knowing it", and so forth. In fact Milton seems to inspire all of Pearce's very few errors. "Milton", Pearce asserts, "descends from the positive to the negative". Where does that leave Paradise Regained?
Other drawbacks are sins of omission rather than of commission. Take Pearce's encomium to Dante. Yes, the more people intelligently read Dante, the better; but Pearce skirts the whole question of how we can read it if we either lack adeptness in Italian, or have lost what limited adeptness we ever had. And yes, Sayers's Dante translation is a wonder of Bach-like ingenuity; yet can it be a substitute for the original language, any more than piano arrangements of Beethoven symphonies can be for top-flight live orchestral performances?
The remaining complaints, small but not trivial, appear to derive from Pearce being simply too nice a man. His tribute to Salvador Dali - who after settling in America reverted to Catholicism - ends thus: "in the importance things in life, he stood up to be counted ... for the most part, he was on the side of the angels and the saints." Fine, except for the little matter of Dali's 1942 memoirs, the depravity of which Orwell exposed in one of his most celebrated articles, "Benefit of Clergy". No suggestion of this depravity's extent informs Pearce's account. Catholic teaching to the Catholic faithful concerning mortal sin, as Pearce well knows - although non-Catholic readers might not know - binds firmly and explicitly: public sins require public penances. Did Dali do public penance for his memoirs? Maybe he did, but Pearce mentions no such mea culpa. Again, and perhaps more grievously, Pearce's justifiable praise for Catholic Distributism refers in passing to sculptor and typographer Eric Gill. Sorry, but if you are a Catholic, you do not want Gill as a public presence on your team. Given TAC's family-oriented readership, I shall avoid spelling out Gill's more emetic carnal practices (chronicled in print since 1989), other than to hint that no sister, daughter, or dog in Gill's habitat was a safe sister, daughter, or dog. Catholicism's long and dreadful list of recent sex scandals should make all Catholic spokesmen hypervigilant about avoiding even the merest suspicion of cover-ups.
Otherwise, Pearce's erudition and lucidity deserve not only deference, but enthusiasm. Literary Giants, Literary Catholics arrives at a time which greatly needs something like it. In 2004 thousands of us writers, Catholic and Protestant alike, voiced hopes that The Passion of the Christ - treated to a particularly touching Pearce meditation - would fan a great religious revival. We can now comprehend that such hopes belonged, barring a miracle, to the realms of daydream. The slough of despond looks a damnably tempting place right now. Pearce wants to arm his readers with weapons that can help resist that slough. His pen serves Christ's Cross. America is lucky to have Pearce. But then Pearce is lucky to have America, the only English-speaking land where official Catholicism uses the words "intellectual" and "convert" as something nobler than terms of abuse.
R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.
© The American Conservative, 2006