Correspondence
FERRY, W. H. & LAIRD, ROLAND & BENN, RUTH & KNOLL, ERWIN & McCUDDEN, JOHN & McConnell, Frank
Correspondence Faith & their works Evanston, 111. To the Editors: Frank McConnell's review of Waugh's Letters and Greene's Ways of Escape [Jan. 16] is an engaging one, but I wonder if the...
...30], makes an analogy between the Supreme Court's abortion ruling and Presidential Directive 59 as decisions that stir up militant movements in reaction...
...I think it would be closer to the truth of the matter to say that whatever the religious experience of each man was it had no influence on his work and cannot be found there in any but a superficial way...
...13] becoming an accomplice in the so-called ' 'counterforce'' debate...
...McCudden does raise a very interesting point: that is, the degree to which we can or should invoke what we know of an author's religious beliefs in interpreting his work...
...16] is an engaging one, but I wonder if the correspondence he seems to see between the faith of each man and his works is not mistaken...
...If religion was more than intellectual conviction for either man, as Mr...
...I'm afraid I happen to believe that we should invoke them to a much greater degree than McCudden does...
...Yet you still visualize the possibility of some "new weapons system" being "required for international stability...
...p. 173, Gurbutt, England...
...JOHN McCUDDEN The author replies: John McCudden's objections to my review of Waugh and Greene are articulate, intelligent, and expressed with great courtesy and point: obviously the man is not a professional literary critic...
...Faith," to give it its inflated term, is an itch we all feel, and an itch we all can't quite scratch...
...I, 1924, to current issues available through University Microfilm, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mi...
...Most citizens including me are not equipped to argue the technical merits of such an eventuality but it does not take too much insight to see that new weapons systems are more likely to heighten international tension...
...You would have f been among the first, I thought, to recognize this as merely another stage of the continuing discussion in the madhouse of nuclear politics...
...Serials Data program No.: ISSN 0010-3330...
...For Waugh, as well as for Greene, conversion was chiefly a matter of the intellect (Waugh told Father D'Arcy, who received him into the church, that he took the step "on firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion...
...To the Editors: Your editorial, "The Whirlpool of Weapons" [Jan...
...FRANK McCONNELL Peace & weapons Hollis, N.Y...
...are more celebrations of the society they portray than condemnations of it (what "moral concerns" are embodied in a Captain Grimes or a Basil Seal...
...The novels of Waugh commonly regarded as satires {Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, etc...
...To the Editors: I am sorry to see Commonweal [Counterforce, Feb...
...It all sounds rational if perplexing, important if not quite reassuring, a tantalizing chess-like problem suitable for the consideration of civilized human beings...
...Not because I think religious belief is all that special a thing, but precisely because I think it's all that common a thing...
...I would insist, though, that even in their strenuous protestations against their roles as "religious novelists," Waugh and Greene - and, for that matter, Camus, Sartre, and William S. Burroughs - establish for us the degree to which they do fulfill that role...
...168, 169, Cork...
...Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...Copyright © 1981 Commonweal Publishing Co...
...That could bring the hawks back to earth and strengthen the position of the lonely witnesses such as the Berri- gans...
...It's simply a matter of the way you read a book, and any way you read a book and make human sense of it is, as far as I am concerned, a right way...
...Sooner or later more people in this country will have to realize that the gentle can inherit the earth and will have to make greater efforts towards that end if Christianity and the other institutions which are characteristic of the human race's worthier efforts are to have a fighting chance (if you will pardon the expression) to survive...
...As for Greene, his typical hero, whether a Major Scobie or a Maurice Castle, is a man who is betrayed by his pity for his fellow man-an affecting fate but not necessarily a tragic one or one related to an "uncertain faith" or to any faith...
...McCudden doesn't, and I am not the man to tell him he should...
...McConnell seems to be saying, there is no evidence for that in their literary work or in as much of their private lives as has been revealed...
...170,174,175,177,Rita Corbin;p...
...Continued on page 191) Commonweal is indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index, -Index of American Periodical Verse, Book Review Digest and Review Index...
...So far the only new weapons system I have read about is the neutron bomb...
...ROLAND LAIRD Scarsdale, N.Y...
...However for a right-to-life movement vis-a-vis preparation for nuclear war to be effective, public opinion would have to be mobilized against raising money for better bombs...
...My only response is, I fear, simply to observe that we all are entitled to our opinions with the purchase price of the book...
...With Waugh and Greene, I find their varieties of religious experience present on almost every page of their fiction: and present, furthermore, in the only way a faith can really be present in a novel or in a human life, as something to be held, questioned, doubted, venerated and ridiculed at the same time...
...Illustrations: Cover & pp...
...170& cover, LNS...
...Microfilm from Vol...
...What his works as a whole reveal is not a sustained satiric vision made possible by a "firm faith" but a gradually dying sensibility that finally in his war trilogy leads him to create a protagonist who feels nothing and wishes only to die...
...48106...
...But if I'm hesitant about defending the "religiosity" of Greene's fiction, I'm also wise enough to stop talking at all once I've introduced William Burroughs into the debate...
...p. 176, Emil Antonucci.176, Emil Antonucci...
...The emotional and imaginative life that sustains the novels of each man is largely untouched, I believe, by religious faith...
Vol. 108 • March 1981 • No. 6
