Writers Revealed
Breslin, John B.
BOOKS Deeper than sex or politics The trade of interviewing has many Jacks (and Jills) but few masters, and that's all right in general since most subjects get the interviewers they deserve. But...
...I am grateful to Rosemary Hartill not only for her generally probing questions and her gracefully relentless pursuit of elusive game, but especially for introducing me to a contemporary writer I might otherwise have missed.herwise have missed...
...Wilson...
...Which it certainly hasn't got from John Mortimer...
...and a final two, one older, one younger, write for a mainly British public (Bernice Rubens and Sara Maitland...
...And what follows doesn't disappoint, either...
...Moore remains elusive about his own psyche, but his final sentence on why he writes may hint at the gap novels like Catholics or Cold Heaven or Black Robe are trying to close: "[Novel-writing] is a way of not thinking about what I haven't done with my life...
...Indeed he even believes that his negative deposition had something to do with blocking the canonization process of John XXIII...
...That is a theme common to many of these authors for whom the crisis of belief touches the deepest part of the psyche and therefore probes more tellingly than politics or even sex the meaning of human life...
...two others, of a later generation, have established reputations but less transatlantic visibility (Piers Paul Read and A.N...
...Brian Moore was born a Catholic but professes to have no religious inclinations whatsoever...
...His response to that reveals how little influence the central message of Christianity has had on the minds of otherwise sophisticated and intelligent contemporaries: "Well, I think that's an awfully difficult question which needs an awful lot of thought...
...But occasionally the skillful prober comes along who unobtrusively elicits answers that surprise even the interviewee or who raises questions that move the conversation onto a new level of discourse . Reading Rosemary Hartill's collection of talks about God and faith with eight (mainly British) contemporary novWRITERS REVEALED Edited by Rosemary Hartill Peter Bedrick Books, $17.95, 144 pp...
...In contrast, A.N...
...He has since returned to the Anglican church which he proclaims to love "in all its dot-tiness and absurdity...
...This is how Hartill introduces her: "I believe," said Sara Maitland, taking a drag at her cigarette, "in a God who will take risks...
...For Anthony Burgess, Catholicism has a decidedly gritty quality associated with his working-class upbringing in a Manchester public house...
...Lewis...
...Wilson, Piers Paul Reid, and, especially, Sara Maitland demonstrate a sensitivity to a much wider range of religious experience aesthetic, psychological, prophetic, and ecstatic as well as ethical...
...Reading her interview made this whole book worthwhile for me...
...Four of the eight are quite well known to American readers (and public television viewers): Anthony Burgess, Brian Moore, John Mortimer, Iris Murdoch...
...Hartill pushes him beyond the tired arguments of theodicy and morality to the Christian concept of grace: "The idea that you are loved (not because of what you do, but that you are loved anyway) and that your life then becomes a response to this...
...John Mortimer exhibits a kind of unflappable agnosticism, taking refuge in Graham Greene's favorite image of the mix of faith and doubt (borrowed from Browning): some call the chessboard white, some call it black...
...Moore's agnosticism stands in sharp contrast to the religious experience of a younger and less well known writer whose books I now want very much to read, partly because of a curious coincidence: we may well have shared our tutor two decades ago at Oxford, although we never met...
...She wants to get beyond the tamed Christianity of Liberal Protestantism ("ethics tinged with sentiment") to something prophetic and disturbing...
...And yet he is clearly obsessed with religious questions in many of his novels, especially with questions of faith and its loss...
...Wilson was for a brief period in his late teens a Roman Catholic, largely due to the influence of Cardinal Newman and his Apologia...
...The group itself is definitely a mixed bag whose principal common denominator is that they all write novels which explore religious issues and, more immediately, that they seemed apt subjects for a BBC radio series on writers and their shaping ideas...
...What he salvaged from the wreckage of his own belief is an absolute conviction in the freedom of the will to make moral choices...
...Though she doesn't mention Flannery O'Connor, I suspect she would be a fan, as she clearly is of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ("a wonderful, wonderful book...
...Their range of religious convictions or even perception covers as broad a spectrum...
...Even more curiously, she seems to think St...
...The main reason for my interest, however, is that what Sara Maitland says about Christianity reveals a passionately intelligent believer...
...The idea had become a reality demanding a response...
...She became a Christian after leaving Oxford when she realized she couldn't go on talking and thinking about it without making a decision...
...John B. Breslin elists shows us such an interlocutor at work...
...I believe in a God who is wild, not tamed...
...Wilson admits to his own penchant for thinking of religion as primarily an individual experience of God, but he pushes beyond morality to see in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, a demand that we give up our quest for achieving perfection on our own terms, something Tolstoy, for all his passion and brilliance, couldn't comprehend, according to Wilson who has written a biography of him as well as of Walter Scott, John Milton, Hilaire Belloc, and C.S...
...This is balm in Gilead, indeed, after the careful rationalizing of the preceding interviews...
...In this he joins company with Mortimer and, to a lesser degree, Murdoch for whom religious questions reduce quickly to questions of good and evil...
...Dame Iris Murdoch has given the doctrines of Christianity plenty of thought but has ended up with a severely truncated notion of what's involved in being a Christian: no personal God, no divinity of Christ, no afterlife what she calls "demythologization...
...BOOKS Deeper than sex or politics The trade of interviewing has many Jacks (and Jills) but few masters, and that's all right in general since most subjects get the interviewers they deserve...
...In her novels she weds this religious faith with her social convictions in ways that link the struggles of contemporary women to the stories of Deborah and Jael in the Book of Judges or Mary and Elizabeth in Luke's Gospel or Teresa of Avila...
...Paul had the same thing in mind when he spoke of Christ...
...while he shares little else with the upper-class religion of Evelyn Waugh, he, too, seems unable to forgive Rome for what he calls the secularizing reforms of Vatican II...
...Maitland is a convinced feminist married, paradoxically, to an Anglo-Catholic priest who is opposed in principle to the ordination of women...
Vol. 117 • July 1990 • No. 13
