Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists.

Sinclair, Peter M.

Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists. By Timothy J. Sutton. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1611491333. Pp. 237. $56.00.

The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in the Catholic influence on literature in England in the twentieth century and the numerous literary figures who converted to Catholicism. Ian Ker's Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961 (2003) examines the relationship between religion and aesthetics in the works of Catholic converts whereas Joseph Pearce's Literary Converts (2000) emphasizes conversion narratives. Most of the scholarship on the Catholic converts assumes that the Catholic revival extended from John Henry Newman's evangelical work in the nineteenth century. Adam Schwartz argues in Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones (2005) that, facing an era of religious unbelief, the twentieth century converts built upon Newman's declaration of a "Second spring" of British Catholicism with a flesh assertion of Roman Catholicism. In Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists (2010), Timothy Sutton departs from previous studies by arguing that Catholic modernism drew its inspiration from the recusant Catholic tradition, not Cardinal Newman.

According to Sutton, the converts felt a connection to and empathy for the small group of Catholics who secretly preserved their faith while maintaining an intense nationalism. Conversion for twentieth-century British authors meant that they had to abandon national religion, but "the nature of the English Catholic Church, with its recusant history, was such that it allowed them to continue to belong to an organization that at least attempted to function and express itself in distinctly English terms" (30). With the decline of the British Empire, "the modernist converts' allegiance to the Catholic Church provided a substitute myth system" (25). The converts' desire for a Catholic England was linked to their dreams for a reinvigorated empire, but Sutton argues that they did not function as an organized movement. Although they remained uninterested in English church hierarchy and the Vatican, "these converts proudly considered themselves Catholic, and their work helped to reintroduce Catholic literature into English culture" (25).

The book consists of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. After an introduction in which Sutton sets forth his purpose and connects the Catholic modernists to a recusant history, chapter one explores how Gerard Manley Hopkins' work expressed his difficulty at balancing his nationalism and loyalty to the Jesuit order. Although Hopkins believed that the survival of empire depended upon a revival in Catholic literature, Hopkins emphasized "the sacrifices he made for his country, rather than those he made for his faith" (60) in the years of his exile in Ireland before his death. Chapter two discusses Ford Maddox Ford, who "viewed his own conversion as a corrective act to his parents' decision to leave the Catholic faith" (86). Since Ford's work emphasized the means by which Catholicism preserves spiritual and cultural traditions in Europe that deteriorated after the Reformation, Sutton connects Ford to a recusant history. In chapter 3, Sutton examines T. S. Eliot, who converted to Anglo-Catholicism because he believed the Anglican Church's division from Rome allowed it to maintain a universal character while functioning in a national framework. Although Eliot claimed in 1936 that "the Christian world order, is ultimately the only one which, from any point of view, will work" after the horrors of World War II he accepted the failure to reinvigorate metanarrative in literature by constructing a "personal mystical vision" (200) of religion in Four Quartets. Chapter 4 covers Evelyn Waugh, who could never accept a compromise between modernism and Catholicism. As the decline of empire and religion in England became certain after World War II, Waugh abandoned the stark satire of his earlier work for a more sentimental and nostalgic tone concerning the loss of landed Catholic aristocracy. Waugh claimed that Brideshead Revisited was "an obituary of the doomed English upper class" while Sword of Honour was "an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries" (157).

The book culminates in an examination of Graham Greene in chapter 5. The span of Greene's work over the twentieth century allows Sutton to clarify and expand upon his argument that the converts' later work developed toward postmodernism. In his interpretation of what he calls Greene's "postmodern turn" Sutton uses Francois Lyotard's theory concerning metanarrative to ground his argument that Greene's work moves beyond the other converts' modernist sense of loss and nostalgia. According to Lyotard, modernism "reinforces metanarrative, or a transcendental ideological system that must be evangelized aggressively" whereas postmodernism "questions and/or discards the truth and efficacy of metanarrative" (169). As the converts come to accept their inability to create a "substitute myth system" for empire out of Catholicism, Greene's work turns into a petit recit that no longer asks of religion, "Is it true?" but wonders instead "what use is it" (195)?

Whereas Greene's early novels from the 1930s until the 1950s present Catholicism as a metanarrative, his later novels treat the same subject matter with comedy and irony as opposed to the converts' tragic sense of cultural loss in England. Part of Greene's ability to make a postmodern turn resulted from the fact that he never remained in England long enough to gain any nationalistic sensibilities. "While Waugh wanted England to return to Catholicism," Sutton claims, "and Ford argued that the British Empire should guide the world to peace as nationalism preserved religious and aesthetic culture, Greene was never tempted by such fantasies" (161). Unlike his fellow converts, Greene "believed the end of metanarrative is essential and useful" (194), his novels revealing how faith entertains a multitude of positions that question assumptions. The postmodern Catholic in Greene's vision is, like himself, a rootless man who practices his faith by engaging in political and multicultural dialogue. Although Greene reveals the irrelevance of a Catholic metanarrative, he demonstrates that the Catholic faith remains a useful force in its "important political and moral role in the world, even when functioning as a petit recit" (195).

Sutton admits that he distinguishes Greene from the other converts because "he faced a post-metanarrative social reality in a more developed form than the others" (194). According to Sutton, however, all of the converts struggled on some level with their failure to recover religion and tradition in England, and their final works show how they "accept the demoted place of faith (and empire) while seeking a reformulation of religious and national identity in the postmodern world" (195-96). The Catholic modernists' works reveal more about their dream to make a last stand for Catholicism and empire than the reality that they could do so. The English army Waugh depicts in the beginning and end of Brideshead Revisited does not spell hope for the future of empire, and the altar flame remaining lit in the derelict chapel that inspires Charles Ryder finally to convert appears as an ornamental symbol of the immutability of Catholicism.

Sutton's book offers a valuable alternative to the other studies on the British converts in his exploration of the relationship between conversion and empire, but his clarification concerning metanarrative and the advent of postmodernism examined in chapter 5 comes too late. He could have made the first few chapters less cumbersome in their close readings of nearly every major work by Hopkins, Ford and Eliot by introducing more of the postmodern issues he explores later and toward which he draws his conclusion with Greene. Although he points out how experimentation in both Hopkins' and Eliot's poetry greatly influenced literary modernism, there remains more he could say concerning Waugh's and Greene's experimentation with form that intimates postmodernism. Despite Sutton's sweeping assessment that Greene's "early novels never question the metanarrative of Catholicism" (170), Greene maintained an ironic stance toward dogma in a way that questions religious truths in his so-called "Catholic" novels of the 1930s and 40s. One suspects, for example, that Greene was often as playful as he was serious concerning the sacramental nature of suicide in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter. And as Sutton too briefly notes, "It remains intriguing, however, that while Waugh was so rigidly conservative politically and theologically, he both practices and remained interested in relatively experimental artistic forms" (158). Indeed, Waugh also maintained an ironic stance toward ideology in his novels, directing his satire at representatives of empire as caustically as he does toward agents of modernist chaos. Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, the spokesperson for empire and tradition in the novel, remains as much of a buffoon as the agents of modernity he fights. Even his final novels portray how characters who attempt to revive a bygone past operate under a dangerous delusion.

Scholars of twentieth-century British converts will find this book useful as a means by which to think further about how the Catholic modernists artistically and experimentally contend with a return to empire that never happened. Waugh and Greene reveal interesting means by which the converts confront a culture that has already been lost rather than reviving one that has past. The creative ways in which the converts contend with a modernist world through irony, satire and tragicomedy prefigures postmodernism in their effort at creating a Catholic literature that "can function when Catholicism is preserved as a petit recit" (201).

Peter M. Sinclair

Southern Connecticut State University