The birth of a 'Catholic writer'

...You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was...

...It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man...

...perhaps he even showed me the road to Panama, which I was to postpone visiting for nearly forty years, and then was amply rewarded...

...The old Scotsman, Dr...

...My professional life and my religion were contained in quite separate compartments, and I had no ambition to bring them together...

...He was little loss, poor man.' " So it is that the material of a novel accumulates, without thewithout the...

...It was in Mexico too that I discovered some emotional belief, among the empty and ruined churches from which the priests had been excluded, at the secret Masses of Las Casas celebrated without the sanctus bell, among the swaggering pistoleros, but probably emotion had been astir before that, or how was it that a book which I had intended to be a simple detective story should have involved a discussion, too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good-and-evil and right-and-wrong and the mystery of "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God"-a mystery that was to be the subject of three more of my novels...

...I was in the habit of formally practicing my religion, going to Mass every Sunday and to Confession perhaps once a month, and in my spare time I read a good deal of theology-sometimes with fascination, sometimes with repulsion, nearly always with interest...

...So it was that the doctor put me on the track of Father Jose in my novel...

...Newman wrote the last word on "Catholic literature" in The Idea of a University: I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature...

...At that time I had not been emotionally moved, but only intellectually convinced...

...Catholicism was no longer primarily symbolic, a ceremony at an altar with the correct canonical number of candles, with the women in my Chelsea congregation wearing their best hats, nor was it a philosophical page in Father D'Arcy's Nature of Belief...

...Oh,' he said, 'He was just what we call a whisky priest.' He had taken one of his sons to be baptized, but the priest was drunk and would insist on naming the child Brigitta...

...I had no idea, even after I had returned home, that a novel, The Power and the Glory, would emerge from my experiences...

...Until I published this novel I had, like any other novelist, been sometimes praised for a success and sometimes condemned with good enough reasons as I fumbled at my craft, but now I was discovered to be-detestable term!-a Catholic writer...

...It was "clumsy life again at her stupid work" which did that...

...Nevertheless it is true to say that by 1937 the time was ripe for me to use Catholic characters...

...I was still not earning enough with my books to make a living for my family (after the success of my first novel and the spurious temporary sale of Orient Express each novel added a small quota to the debt I owed my publisher), but by reviewing films regularly for the Spectator and novels once a fortnight, I could make ends meet...

...A lost thing could I never find, nor a broken thing mend...

...Many times since Brighton Rock I have been forced to declare myself not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic...

...I tried to fly into Bilbao from Toulouse, for my sympathies were more engaged by the Catholic struggle against Franco than with the competing sectarians in Madrid...

...With Mexico I was more fortunate, an advance payment for a book on the religious persecution enabled me to leave for Tabasco and Chiapas, where the persecution was continuing well away from the tourist areas, and it was in Mexico that I corrected the proofs of Brighton Rock...

...they would irritate me if I dared to look at them now, for I know I ought to have had the strength of mind to remove them and to start the story again-with what is now called Part Two...

...It takes longer to familiarize oneself with a region of the mind than with a country, but the ideas of my Catholic characters, even their Catholic ideas, were not necessarily mine...

...The proofs of Brighton Rock, while I was away in Mexico, had occupied my thoughts, and perhaps the Franco volunteers on the German ship I took back to Europe began a train of ideas which ended in The Confidential Agent...

...I HAD NOT meant to write more than this one book, commissioned by a publisher, on the religious persecution...

...It was closer now to death in the afternoon...

...Robert Fitzpatrick, whom I met in Villahermosa, with his cherished scorpion in a little glass bottle, was the kind of treasure trove that falls to the lucky traveler...

...I had become a Catholic in 1926, and all my books, except for the one lamentable volume of verse at Oxford, had been written as a Catholic, but no one had noticed the faith to which I belonged before the publication of Brighton Rock...

...In recounting the story of his own life he told me of the kindly disreputable Padre Rey of Panama with his wife and daughter and the mice-not a scorpion-which he kept in a glass lamp...

...The first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story...

...Above all he presented me with my subject: the protagonist of The Power and the Glory...

...A restlessness set in then which has never quite been allayed: a desire to be a spectator of history, history in which I found I was concerned myself...

...Catholics began to treat some of my faults too kindly, as though I were a member of a clan and could not be disowned, while some non-Catholic critics seemed to consider that my faith gave me an unfair advantage in some way over my contemporaries...

...I think it was under those two influences-and the backward and forward sway of my sympathies-that I began to examine more closely the effect of faith on action...

...and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all...

...on the one side the socialist persecution of religion in Mexico, and on the other General Franco's attack on Republican Spain, inextricably involved religion in contemporary life...

...MORE THAN ten years had passed since I was received into the church...

...Now, of course, when I reread Another Mexico, I can easily detect many of the characters in The Power and the Glory...

...I found him shaving in a corner of his cafe at six in the morning and handed him the Delegation's dignified letter, sealed with scarlet wax, but no amount of official sealing wax would induce him to fly his plane again into Bilbao-Franco's guns on his last flight had proved themselves too accurate for his comfort...

...I had recently had two strokes of good fortune, and these enabled me to see a little way ahead-I had received a contract from Korda to write my second film script (and a terrible one it was, based on Galsworthy's short story The First and Last-Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who had much to forgive me, suffered together in the leading parts), and for six months I had acted as joint editor with John Marks of the weekly Night and Day...

...Even today some critics (and critics as a class are seldom more careful of their facts than journalists) refer to the novels written after my conversion, making a distinction between the earlier and the later books...

...I asked about the priest in Chiapas who had fled...

...I carried a letter of recommendation from the Basque Delegation in London to a small cafe owner in Toulouse who had been breaking the blockade of Bilbao with a two-seater plane...