–This week’s issue of the New Statesman has as its Weekend Essay an article by John Mullan. This is entitled “The Death of the British Catholic Novel: Catholicism gave English literature something it needs to rediscover” and opens with this:
When the novelist David Lodge died in January, the obituaries reflected on him as a Roman Catholic novelist â 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: âCatholic fiction since the Oxford movement: its literary form and religious contentâ, 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) â 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 â began his career with a study of the very sub-genre to which he would himself contribute.
Lodgeâs 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 novelistâs imagination. Lodge quotes (in order to disprove) George Orwellâs assertion in âInside the Whaleâ that âthe atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novelâ. The roll-call of notable Catholic novelists before the 20th century (all discussed in Lodgeâs thesis) would hardly challenge Orwellâs anti-Catholic dictum: EH Dering, Mrs Wilfrid Ward, Robert Hugh Benson⊠John Henry Newmanâs 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 Orwellâs mind. On his deathbed, he was composing a piece on Evelyn Waughâs 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. âWaugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (ie as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.â…
Mullan goes on in some detail to consider the careers of other Roman Catholic novelists of the period, focussing particularly on Graham Greene and Muriel Spark. In the case of Greene, Mullan discusses how the religious themes in his The End of the Affair are related to those in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He ends with a brief consideration of the works of Hilary Mantel, who was born a Roman Catholic but renounced her religion. The article concludes with this:
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 â a means of âelucidating a moral patternâ â was something valuable. It is still what novels need to find.
The full article can be read at this link.
—The Spectator has a brief article in its “Mind Your Language” series. This is written by Dot Wordsworth and is entitled “‘Loved Ones’ are everywhere at this time of year.” Here’s the text:
“My heart will melt in your mouth,â said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: âCreate a special Valentineâs Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, ÂŁ2, new in at Morrisons.â
Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about âa loved oneâs wellbeing weighing on your thoughtsâ. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved.
The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of loved one from the 18th century onwards. It notes that in recent times it frequently makes conscious reference to the phrase in Evelyn Waughâs novel The Loved One (1948), quoting this example: âI saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before.â Waugh had taken his family to California in 1947. While there he visited Forest Lawn, with horrid fascination
Curiously, Aldous Huxley had a similar experience two decades earlier, but in Chicago, as he recounted in Jesting Pilate in 1926. The telephone directory carried an advertisement for a firm of undertakers, or rather morticians: âTheir motor-hearses were funereally sumptuous; their manners towards the bereaved were grave, yet cheering, yet purposefully uplifting; and they were fortunate in being able to âlay the Loved Ones to rest in â graveyard, the Cemetery Unusualâ.â It takes politicians with tin ears to take the object of Huxley and Waughâs ridicule and adopt it as a solemn expression of sympathy.
–The Washington Post has an article in which it announces the retirement of its long-serving book editor Michael Dirda from his production of regular weekly reviews. He will continue writing for the paper on the subject of books but on a less regular basis. The article is followed by a Q & A which includes this exchange:
Q. Do you have a few reviews you remember most vividly or fondly? Not because they were raves necessarily, but because the act of writing them and thinking about them has stuck with you?
Thatâs a subtle question. I once wrote a piece of several thousand words for Book World in which I surveyed then-current biblical scholarship. I must have read 20 books, but the whole project was deeply gratifying. In another life, I did earn a PhD in comparative literature, and thereâs a scholarly side to me that I like to allow out now and then.
I also once wrote a column about spending three weeks reading the six volumes of Arthur Waleyâs translation of Murasaki Shikibuâs âThe Tale of Genji.â That book was a revelation and led me to explore classical Japanese literature and culture. I had a similar experience with Ferdowsiâs âThe Shahnameh,â in Dick Davisâs translation of the Persian epic, and with Gene Wolfeâs intricate and tricksy masterpiece âThe Book of the New Sun,â the high point of late-20th-century science fiction.
Over the years, I discovered a couple of dozen contemporary writers whose work spoke to me with particular charm or power. I reviewed as many of their books as I could. These included Russell Hoban, John Crowley, James Salter, Steven Millhauser, Gilbert Sorrentino, Guy Davenport, Anthony Hecht, M.F.K. Fisher, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, Jack Vance, John Sladek, Robertson Davies, Daniel Pinkwater and Penelope Fitzgerald. Whatâs more, I think I must have reviewed nearly every nonacademic book written about Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov.Truth is, Iâve loved a lot of books. In my hot youth, it was my ambition to read all the classics of world literature. I still have quite a few to get to.
Oh, but I should mention the review I most often recall when I give talks. It was a scorched-earth destruction of Judith Krantzâs novel âDazzle.â My lead was: âI read most of âDazzleâ in one sitting. I had to. I wasnât sure I could face picking it up again.â The kicker, which I wonât quote, is even better. But W.H. Auden convinced me that writing snarky negative reviews â which, by the way, is dead easy â was bad for oneâs character, so Iâve tried to avoid doing so as much as possible.
The full article and interview can be accessed at this link.
–St John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe has published a list of its courses on offer this summer at the Santa Fe campus. This one may be of interest:
Evelyn Waughâs Sword of Honor
Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters
10 a.m.âNoon MDT
July 7â11, 2025
IN-PERSONAs we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, it is timely that we read the best novel to emerge from that war, Evelyn Waughâs Sword of Honor. Waugh, a captain in the Royal Marines, imaginatively transforms his personal experience, coupling it with an acute sense of character and foible, farce and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, faith and despair. He created a full picture of British life at home, in the officerâs mess, in battle, from false starts in the Phony War to harrowing days in Greece and Yugoslavia. Comic wit, serious purpose, and heart join to summon a world long gone, yet living anew in this vivacious drama. Americans can discover here aspects of World War II uniquely beyond our literature.
Text: Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor. Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0316216692
Registration and other details are available here: https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics/seminar-schedule
–Somerville College, Oxford, has posted this notice on the internet:
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Catherine Peters (married name Catherine Storr) on Sunday 12th January, aged 94. Catherine taught English Literature at the college between 1980 and 1991, and wrote notable literary biographies of Thackeray (Thackerayâs Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality, 1987) and Wilkie Collins (The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, 1992), as well as books on Dickens and Byron.
She graduated with the top first class degree in English Literature aged 50, in 1980, from St Hughâs College. Daughter of literary agent A.D. Peters, who represented major writers such as Evelyn Waugh, she was married to psychiatrist Anthony Storr (Wadham and Green Templeton Colleges).
Catherineâs family will hold a memorial in Somerville later this year to commemorate her life. Details will be put here when they are available, and invitations will be sent to those students reading English when she taught in College.
She will also be remembered as part of this yearâs College Commemoration Service, on Saturday 14th June, to which all alumni are invited.
The family have asked that anyone who remembers Catherine might consider donating to Marie Curie in her memory: https://catherinestorr.muchloved.com. She benefited hugely in her last years from night-time care from Marie Curie nurses.
