My latest article - on ‘Liturgical Conservatism and the Modern Novel’ - has just been published by The European Conservative. Here’s the opening:
The conservatism of some of the greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century has often baffled, and sometimes enraged, their literary critics, with Evelyn Waugh and J. R. R. Tolkien in particular coming under sustained attack. Writing in the Guardian, for example, Damien Walter complained that “Tolkien’s myths are profoundly conservative” and so aren’t to be trusted. Maybe Sauron wasn’t evil at all: “Isn’t it more likely that the orcs, who live in dire poverty, actually support Sauron because he represents the liberal forces of science and industrialisation, in the face of a brutally oppressive conservative social order?” As for the dragons, “a balanced telling might well have shown Smaug to be much more of a reforming force in the valley of Dale.” Evelyn Waugh has been similarly chastised. One critic protested his “excessive conservatism” and another, clearly irritated by The Sword of Honour’s critical success, argued that it was a triumph only “for pessimism and conservatism.” Writing in the New Statesman recently, Will Lloyd could not hide his exasperation: “Why the passing decades cannot diminish him ought to trouble our creaking, secular, liberal age.” Well, quite.
If Waugh’s social and political conservatism has been difficult to swallow, his liturgical conservatism has proved to be utterly inexplicable. Many critics seem to believe that the liturgical changes enacted after (not, despite popular belief, by) the Second Vatican Council were proof of the Catholic Church’s belated but inevitable acceptance of the modern world. Waugh’s heartfelt criticism of these changes was, therefore, clear evidence of his reactionary nostalgia: “An ardent traditionalist,” Mary R. Reichardt wrote, “Waugh especially deplored the liturgical changes of Vatican II, sadly convinced that his beloved Church was merely giving in to modernity.”
Waugh wasn’t the only conservative author to be damned with faint adverbs. David Jones, the great modernist writer and artist, has suffered the same fate. According to one otherwise sympathetic critic, “One of the key changes of The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962-1965) was permission to celebrate most of the Mass in vernacular languages. Jones was deeply opposed to the changes: he wrote several letters to The Tablet and discussed them, at times obsessively and at length, in correspondence to friends.” That this liturgical obsession enabled Jones to write some of the greatest literature of the century is, it seems, an irony lost on this critic.
Like Jones, Waugh took his critics’ liturgical incomprehension seriously and used it to shape his own writing, his imagined readers being not unlike the Yugoslav partisans in Unconditional Surrender who pressed forward for the sermon to check that the Serbo-Croat priest was not voicing politically subversive views before retiring to the back of the church when the liturgy resumed. Time and time again, Waugh’s narrators foreground secular incomprehension in the presence of the liturgy. In Officers and Gentlemen, we are told that, “all over the world, unheard by Sprat, the Exultet had been sung that morning. It found no echo in Sprat’s hollow heart.” In Unconditional Surrender, Arthur Box-Bender “kept his eyes on Angela and Guy, anxious to avoid any liturgical solecism.” In Brideshead Revisited, it is the boorish, fascistic platoon-commander, Hooper, who is the first to stumble on “a sort of R.C. Church” at Brideshead: “I looked in and there was a kind of service going on—just a padre and one old man. I felt very awkward.” And then, of course, there’s Charles Ryder.
When, late in Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia tells Charles about the closing of the chapel at Brideshead, she asks him if he has ever been to Tenebrae. He has not. “Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas … it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear.” Charles waves the suggestion away but, as the great angler reels him in from the ends of the earth, we hear in passing that he has now “heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choir in Guatemala, nearly a year ago.” The liturgy remains hidden in the narrative but its effects—as expressed again on the last page of the novel with the repetition of Quomodo sedet sola civitas (How lonely the city sits)—are undeniable. For Waugh, it is what happens outside the confines of the narrative that truly matters. Novels give way before the liturgy, which draws his characters upwards towards the inexpressible worship of heaven.
You can read the rest of the article (about Tolkien, Alice Thomas Ellis, George Mackay Brown, and Martin Mosebach) here.