Will the Real Catholic Writers Please Stand Up?
My evangelical ancestors would be pleased to know that I’ve become obsessed with conversion; they would be less satisfied to learn that interest runs almost exclusively in a Catholic direction. As a fairly recent convert to Catholicism from the Southern Baptist tradition (through a long and painful process), I am constantly gathering more examples of other writers who made the leap as a way to shore up reinforcements against my own lingering insecurities. I’m always hopeful that the next one I find will convince me permanently that I am finally where I belong.
The new Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture, “The Situation of the Catholic Novelist,” by Trevor Cribben Merrill, has provided further material to mine. Merrill traces developments in literary and religious culture from the past sixty-ish years that have left many in the faithful remnant wondering where we can still find committed Catholics writing literary fiction of the caliber that the usual suspects (Greene, Waugh, Percy, O’Connor, etc.) exemplified at mid-century, balancing art and orthodoxy in a way that reaches a broader audience. He covers both familiar ground and explores some less well-known writers like Alice Thomas Ellis and Piers Paul Read. He also considers more recent authors taking a variety of approaches toward faith in fiction, such as Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott, Christopher Beha, and Randy Boyagoda. Such concerns are not new for the Christian literary community, but Merrill offers various through-lines for how Catholic writers might continue to pave the way forward in the tradition.
Rather than disagree with his observations, I hope to add to the conversation as a former “ex-vangelical” who found herself helplessly, irrevocably drawn to the fullness of the Church. As I look back on the books that first entered my life in those years of spiritual limbo between traditions—most of Percy’s, a lot of O’Connor, the occasional Greene, Brideshead Revisited—it is unsurprising that my general understanding of Catholic literature has so far tended toward the conventional. But the longer I am Catholic, feeling my way through Sacred Tradition largely with fictional guides, the more I feel I can understand the characters who have come to define and redeem my grasp of what it means to be a bearer of Christ—to choose faith as frequently as we are also swept up or troubled by it, tethered to a long line of saints and sinners who shared similar experiences. I find myself increasingly connected to the Binxes and Dr. Tom Mores, the Sebastians, the Bendrixes—all men who knew not only what it means to submit to belief but to be agonized by its inescapability. These characters embody not only the pull of faith but the grief, pain, and alienation that often comes with it as well. It’s the same sense of loss that we see later in Sophie Wilder—a woman I’ve been unable to stop thinking about since reading Beha’s novel months ago—and the same type of wandering we encounter in Boyagoda’s more recent Prin novels. Dante’s Indiana especially evokes a certain gravitas that ranks up there with novels like The Moviegoer or The Power and the Glory—all instances of characters who accept the constraints of orthodoxy while struggling to reconcile their own wayward lives to them.
Although Merrill focuses on increasing cultural trends toward secularism that he sees as cultivating a different type of audience than the mid-century giants experienced, it strikes me that in the case of most of the novels I’ve referenced, the major philosophical tension at work is in those characters readiest to dismiss religious belief as old-fashioned in a modern age. Before his conversion, Charles Ryder feels unable to take the Flyte family’s Catholicism seriously, falling back on tired arguments for choosing reason over superstition. Bendrix employs a similar strategy against Sarah as he continues to protest far too much to be convincing in the midst of losing who he thought was the love of his life. Sophie’s literary agent finds her conversion exotic, offering up this observation: “I mean, who converts anymore? Unless they’re converting away.” Cultural resistance to religious belief is nothing new; we are simply in the midst of its latest expression. Perhaps more than ever, though, we are sometimes wondering with Binx how to find enough reasons to get out of bed in the morning.
It is in such times that I can find it tempting to be tired of going back to the same old books by the same old authors, seeking comfort that these questions have lasted longer than “these dread latter days.” It can be tiresome to keep seeing the usual lists rattled off, almost like the price of admission to a Catholic literary club—a quasi-exclusiveness that inevitably leaves me fearing I’m about to be left out somehow again for not knowing the right answers. In my better moments, however, I see these gestures as eager attempts to find current kindred spirits in an age of isolation—a tentative hand reaching out across the void to find others who have been as changed by these books as we have been ourselves.
Ideally, the more aware we become of those names that keep coming up (and why), we should also be inspired to keep adding to the list as many as possible. So far, in a preliminary (and painfully limited) search for Catholic convert writers beyond those already listed (and more of the typical names), this is who I have found: Elizabeth Ann Seton; Sigrid Undset; Rumer Godden; Paul Claudel; Wallace Stevens (a controversial choice); Claude McKay; Muriel Spark; Edith Sitwell; Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate; Robert Lowell (though he renounced it later); John Martin Finlay; Walter M. Miller, Jr. (of Canticle for Leibowitz fame); Philip Trower; Denise Levertov; Malcolm Muggeridge; Dean Koontz; Louis Bouyer; Joseph Pearce; Toni Morrison (gratefully gaining more attention recently in this context); Mary Karr; Sally Read; Leah Libresco; Jennifer Fulwiler; Abigail Favale; Scott and Kimberly Hahn; Jon M. Sweeney; Gregory Wolfe; and Trevor Cribben Merrill himself. If we add writers who were raised Catholic—and have ended up along various points of the spectrum of devotion—the list staggers on endlessly. There is so much more reading to do. I hope you’ll join me.
