Monsignor Quixote Graham Greene
Sisk, John P.
rience. He went from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands via Bermuda and the Azores to Marbella in southern Spain, in June 1980 on a 71-foot ketch. He had gathered a group of companions, young and...
...But as the Monsignor tells the Mayor, "No doubt...
...for the Mayor it means Marx and Lenin...
...D Karl O'Lessker Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...It was only by tilting at windmills that Don Quixote found the truth on his deathbed," the Italian bishop says after he has given Father Quixote his commission to go forth on the high roads of the world...
...Monsignor Quixote is morally very earnest indeed about the priority that must be given to a fideistic approach to truth...
...For the Monsignor this means Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Francis de Sales, and the German moral theologian Father Heribert Jone...
...By all rights, then, I should have experienced the decade as it is currently portrayed by people who now hold views I have long since abandoned...
...At the time this review appears in print I shall be teetering on the brink of my 54th birthday, which means Karl O'Zessker, our aging senior editor, is professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...
...He comes to the aid of a stranded Italian bishop who, impressed with the simple priest's combination of goodness and practical ability, not only directs him to "go forth like your ancestor Don Quixote on the high roads of the world" but sees to it that he is properly knighted for the excursion (and at the same time overqualified for further service in his beloved parish) by causing him to be commissioned a monsignor...
...How is it, he wonders, sounding as if he is the one who has gone to school to Unamuno, "that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow of disbelief haunting my belieff" Later he confesses, "I am fiddled by doubts...but doubt is not treachery, as you Communists seem to think...
...And like Jeffrey Hart, the author of this engaging new book on "American Life in the Fifties" (that is its subtitle), I saw and remember it as vastly different from what its present reputation would indicate...
...Pfitchett has called him "the most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists," Here the ingeniousness in combination with the wellordered language centers on the relation between faith and doubt, between reality and fiction, and inevitably on the problem of windmills...
...He does not belong in the congregation at that high point in the story when the dying Monsignor, in saying his apparently imaginary Mass, closes the gap between the fictive and the real...
...Hart was a committed conservative even then, I was a fully accredited leftliberal (or as the late great Northwestern University professor William Montgomery McGovern used to call me in those days, an "Eastern pinko internationalist...
...While Rocinante is being repaired, they attend a movie which the Monsignor expects to be religious but which turns out to be pornographic...
...To elude the police they overnight in a Salamanca bawdyhouse where the Monsignor reads The Communist Manifesto, finding therein an unexpectedly usable Marx...
...in writing, J.D...
...Hart's book is that he shows why it wasso and why intelligent people of diverse cultural and political interests should have found it to be so...
...Fortunately, both assumptions were premature...
...this second one has that intimate sense of place we tong ago came to associate with Greene's fiction...
...It would be an oversimplification to say that it is a witty replay of Don Quixote in contemporary terms, as if it belongs John P. Sisk is Arnold Professor of the Humanities at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...
...The most adventurous moments were caused by his irrepressible progressivism, his American trust in improved gadgets that went often out of whack and seldom delivered what the ads and instruction books promised...
...As for the author, he can expect to be irritated once more by those readers who, as he puts it in Ways of Escape, confuse "the functions of a novelist and the functions of a moral teacher or theologian...
...As its title suggests, it also has connections with Cervantes's masterpiece...
...The hero of the novel begins as Father Quixote, pastor of a poor parish in [] Toboso and descendant of a fictional character in a novel that, his unsympathetic bishop says scornfully, would not have passed the censor in the days of'Franco...
...Such people, of course, tend to place little value on fiction...
...But he has learned to love the Monsignor, and the legacy of that love is what we may take to be a state of doubt sufficiently healthy to merit the approval of his old teacher, Unamuno...
...Inevitably the Monsignor is apprehended by order of his disturbed bishop, taken back to El Toboso, confined in quarters as a madman, and forbidden to say Mass...
...Fischer of Geneva came without warning into his mind, and now at age 78 he has given us this delightful new novelnas if in proof of his own words: "a writer's imagination, like the body, fights against all reason against death.'" Monsignor Quixote has in common with Greene's third novel, Rumour at Nightfall, a setting in Spain...
...Bloomington, Indiana I I I I II II I II I that my legal adulthood arrived almost exactly with the advent of the fifties...
...WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD...
...What else would one expect when its author himself professes to be a dweller in the tragicomic region of La Mancha...
...But I didn't...
...I I The Italian bishop's position is central: if you want the truth you must be willing to run the risk of the windmills...
...But he is enough of an old-fashioned sailor to make do, in a pinch, very well if reluctantly, with ancient and well-tried instruments, those most non-Americans still use...
...redeemed if at all only by the rebels with or without a cause...
...That was preeminently the decade--as everyone knows--of blind conformity and savage McCarthyism: dull yet scary...
...They fall in with a robber who steals the Monsignor's shoes and forces them to drive him to his destination...
...And where in the end does this leave the Communist Mayor, who, as Father Leopoldo tells him, received the Host at that Mass, at least in the mind of the celebrant...
...In his Prologue to Don Quixote, Cervantes represents himself as uncertain how to tell his story until a At the end of his excellent Ways of Escape Graham Greene writes that having finished The Human Factor he assumed, as he had assumed twenty years before after finishing The Burnt-Out Case, that his novelwriting days were over...
...By any measure a very ugly scene...
...He asked each one to keep a diary and the excerpts from each, which he selected and incorporated in his personal narrative, make enticing reading...
...Nothing much happened during the voyage, thank God, and Buckley was not obliged to force on the reader a series of incomprehensible mishaps explained in sailor's jargon...
...One of its side effects is to make you want to reread that text, preferably in the Cohen translation, which is the one Greene favors...
...That first Spanish novel (no longer listed among his published works) was based on a teen-ager's one-day acquaintance with the country...
...AMERICAN LIFE IN THE FIFTIES Jeffrey Hart / Crown Publishers / $15.95 There may be no stronger testimony to the influence of liberal "communicators" than the present dismal reputation of the 1950s...
...one might even say that it is a Midrash-type commentary on a primary text, designed to make available to subsequent readers meanings of crucial importance...
...The book is filled with witticisms, bits of fascinating conversation, reflections, memories of other voyages, anecdotes, and souvenirs of life on land...
...The irritation is understandable, but so is the confusion if you believe that really good fiction cannot help being, in the late John Gardner's sense of the term, moral fiction...
...There opportun, ity America...
...So it is a decade I remember well and am in a fair position to evaluate...
...As the two friends proceed on their way arguing about their respective faiths, their quixotic conduct quickly attracts the attention of the police...
...On the contrary, I thought it was a wonderfully exciting era, not only for me personally but for culture and politics as well One of the many virtues of Mr...
...The Mayor with his certainties has the best of it to begin with, but the advantage gradually shifts to the Monsignor, the turning point being perhaps the night in the bawdyhouse, during which, while the Mayor is tilting against the windmill of sex, the Monsignor tilts against Marx and comes out a winner (but not before he has mistaken a condom for a toy balloonL Everywhere, of course, the fine comedy of the story depends on misinterpretation of information, nowhere more significantly than in the suspicions of the Monsignor's bishop and his replacement, Father Herrera: the Monsignor is a windmill they mistake for a giant against whom they tilt in vain...
...He had gathered a group of companions, young and middle-aged, all of them agreeable...
...On Christmas Day in Switzerland, at age 75, Dr...
...MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE Graham Greene/Simon and Schuster/$12.95 John P. Sisk Sancho is the former Communist mayor of El Toboso, recently voted out of office by the forces of the Right...
...It is, nevertheless, in analogy with Don Quixote...
...Salinger, James 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983...
...The bishop disdains not only Cervantes's novel but novels in general...
...A real Host means mystery and, as he tells the Trappist, "I prefer Marx to mystery...
...He also gives brief character sketches of each friend...
...An ensuing accident leaves the Monsignor mortally wounded and out of his mind...
...They embark on their adventures in the Monsignor's Rocinante, an ancient and not too reliable Seat 600, taking with them a supply of the local wine and their books of chivalry...
...No faith...
...stagnant yet teetering on the brink of fascism...
...In this condition he rejoins his great ancestor after celebrating an imaginary Latin Mass during which the Mayor receives an imaginary Host...
...The Monsignor's bishop, Father Herrera, and for a long time the Mayor, do not in their own minds run this risk (though in fact they are vigorous tilters) because they have no doubt...
...Because he is riddled by doubts Monsignor Quixote sometimes envies those who, like his bishop and the moral theologian Father Jone, "were able to lay down clear rules...
...Since Buckley has had a rich and many faceted life, his store of memories and experiences is vast, the number of interesting friends extensive, his expertise in many field enviable and unique (music, politics, painting, skiing, Catholic theology, wines, food, debating techniques), the result is a book that anyone can read from cover to cover with pleasure...
...Greene might be said to have followed this excellent advice as he demonstrates once more why V.S...
...Doubt is human...
...His THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 33 friend advises him: "You have only to see that your sentences shall come out plain, in expressive, sober and well-ordered language, harmonious and gay, expressing your purpose to the best of your ability, and setting out your ideas without intricacies and obscurities...
...The wittily managed argument between Christian and Marxist is itself a contention between antagonists, each of whom believes the other a tilter at windmills...
...In the Valley of the Fallen they visit the tomb of Franco and in Salamanca the tomb of Unamuno, the Mayor's old teacher who still haunts his memory...
...The technical moments of difficulty do not take up many pages...
...What makes this conjunction of views more noteworthy than it might at first appear is that while Mr...
...Recall some of the people who flourished in the fifties: in painting and art criticism, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Hilton Kramer...
...He prefers, even needs, to believe that there was no Host, for to have doubts about that, he thinks, "is to lose the freedom of action...
...That we may all be fictions in the mind of God, as the Italian bishop suggests, or that fact and fiction are difficult to distinguish, as the Trappist Father Leopoldo says at the end, would be heretical nonsense to him...
...Before long he escapes with the Mayor for a briefer second excursion in Rocinante...
...with the late twentieth-century literature of exhaustion that uses parody in a more or less successful effort to hide poverty of imagination...
...This time he is wounded as he attempts to disrupt a desecratory festival for the Virgin, after which, pursued by the police, the two of them speed off precariously to the haven of a Trappist monastery...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
