The following is adapted from the keynote address Michelle Huneven gave at Writing Workshops LA: The Conference, which took place on June 28, 2014 at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles.
I would qualify to speak to the trouble with writing based on the sole fact that it took me 22 years to finish my first novel. In those years of trying and failing and trying again, and failing again, I even gave up writing fiction altogether and went back to grad school to train for a new career. But I failed to embark on a new career because writing, and all its attendant troubles, wouldn’t leave me alone. In those twenty-odd years, in which I tried and failed to write a book, and left writing and then came back to it and became a working writer who wrote books and also supported herself by writing, I grew intimately acquainted with many forms of trouble inherent in the vocation. And many of those troubles dog me to this day.
1. Trouble the Word
Trouble. Trouble is a great dustpan of a word. Its roots are found in Latin in the verb
turbidare, to make turbid; and in the adjective
turbidus, meaning disordered, turbid.
Turbid, of course, means unclear, muddied, obscure, and roiled up. We see its root in perturb, disturb, turbulent. Trouble branched off to mean that quality or state of being in distress or annoyance, of having malfunctioned; it’s a condition of debility, or ill health, a civil disorder, an inconvenience, a pregnancy out of wedlock.
The trouble with writing is that it’s awfully like having baby after baby all by yourself.
To get out of trouble, means to clear up, calm down, come out of confusion and distress, and function once again.
When I first sat down to write this piece, I made a list, like a
Joe Brainard poem, where every sentence began, “The trouble with writing is-------.” After about 5 pages, single spaced, I thought, well, there is my speech.
Writing trails trouble in its wake like a long train of quarrelsome camp followers.
I decided to talk about some of the troubles that I personally have encountered over the years, namely some the mental and spiritual troubles associated with writing as an activity and writing as a way of life--the ways we writers can malfunction and find ourselves confused and roiled up.
Writing is difficult. Writing is difficult in the beginning, difficult in the middle and difficult at the end. And then, when you’ve finished, there is a whole new raft of difficulties having to do with publication—but I will save those issues for a much longer speech entitled The Trouble with Publication.
Writing itself is a series of problems to be solved, problems that constitute the hard work of writing and being a writer. Sometimes you can be surgical and rational in solving various difficulties, but it is the peculiar distinction of writing and much of the creative life that the inherent difficulties of writing have a propensity to become internally, personally disturbing and confusing, agitating, and otherwise psychologically problematic.
When I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I discovered that, by spending a long time on a short story, I could make it pretty good. But all around me, people were turning in truly terrific short stories and saying, “Oh, I wrote it the night before I turned it in.”
There was so little talk of process back then, I really thought that I was the only writer there whose work went through an ugly stage. For years, I thought with deep shame that I was a fraud, up against the truly talented.
It took me about twenty years to realize they were lying, and just armoring themselves for the criticism to come, and pretending not to be as invested in the work as they were.
Thus does the difficulty of writing morph into confusion and perturbation.
The trouble with writing is that we writers are often scared to death.
2. The Trouble with Writing is Writing
A few months ago, I was interviewed by a 3rd grader whose assignment was to interview someone with an interesting job. Her father’s work, running two physics labs at Cal Tech, apparently was insufficiently intriguing. She had only three questions, one of which was, “What do you write about?”
I knew I had to keep it simple. I said, “I write about people who get into trouble and then get themselves out of trouble.” Of course, that describes a great many books, but it strikes me that this also describes my writing process. I’ll take an assignment, or start a short story or a novel or an essay, and soon enough it feels exactly as if I’ve gotten myself into trouble. I actually feel like a bad person, guilty and a little ashamed, like, I’ve gotten myself into this thing, and now I have to do it, and I’m not sure if I can pull it off.
I know too that, even if I manage to write my way out of this hole, it will take time, and cause me aggravation and pain along the way—pain in the form of self doubt, frustration, and one more time, hitting the limits of my capabilities.
I was a restaurant critic for a dozen years, turning in one column a week, 52 weeks a year. Not once did I sit down and just knock one out. Every single review was a tumble into trouble, and a climb back out.
You could say, I took the trouble to do the best I could.
3. It Never Gets Easier
The trouble with writing says the historian who lives next door to me, is that no matter how many times you do it, you start out every time with the sick sense that you don’t know what you’re doing.
The trouble with writing says a novelist friend, is that it never gets any easier. If anything, it gets harder. And if it starts to get easier, you’re probably slacking off or repeating yourself.
4. Getting Down to the River
Dylan Thomas said that he knew he contained a river of poetry within him. The trouble was getting down to that river, and bringing a bucket-full back.
The difficulty is getting down to it. Down to the desk, to the work zone, down to enough quiet and calm that we can even leave for the river. And once we’re there, the difficulty is locating access to that gush or trickle of material we contain. We range back and forth along the banks of the river, wondering where to plunge in.
The great late radical feminist theologian
Mary Daley wrote in an introduction to her first book about the trouble she had just getting around to writing it. Everything else—cleaning the house, buying groceries, taking the dog to the vet—took precedence over this thing that she wanted to do more than anything else. Write a book. Daily life was constantly eclipsing her creative life, and eventually she determined that she would have to reverse that, and put her creative life in the foreground and everything else in the background. She came up with a mantra: “I have to turn my soul around.”
I have to turn my soul around.
And after a number of weeks, slowly, it turned.
To write, you have to turn your soul around. And then you have to turn it around again, and again, because there’s always slippage. Even after dozens of years of writing, there is slippage.
5. The Writing Life is One of Interruptions
Writing is a solitary occupation requiring intense concentration, large blocks of time, and all of one’s mental capacities. The trouble is, there are frequent interruptions and constant distractions.
The writing life is a life of interruptions. I used to listen to my friend the novelist
Lily Tuck complain about her husband who often traveled for work.
Edward wants me to go with him to Madrid…to Athens…to Hong Kong. I was a poor struggling wannabe writer and I would have gone to any of those places at the drop of a hat. Now, it’s me telling my husband,
I don’t want to spend three weeks in Italy and the south of France!
Interruptions are inevitable, part of the fabric of the writing life. We must learn how to navigate them. There are meals, and sleep, and family; there are holidays and special occasions—weddings, graduations, funerals.
We have to accept the fact that there will be interruptions, and develop our abilities to get back into writing a little more swiftly each time.
It’s like meditating. In meditation, you return your attention to the breath. Your mind wanders and when you catch it wandering, you return your attention to the breath. You return your attention to your writing. You go off to your nephew’s graduation, you go back to your desk, you get back to work. At the same time, you have to know your rhythms, and allow them. I teach every Monday. The day after, I am never fully back to my writing. Tuesdays are the day for sinking back in. I know this and don’t beat myself up that I’m squirmy and unfocused. Everyone is different but it takes me a day or two to sink back into full writing mode.
There are even more pernicious attacks on the solitary and quiet thing we do.
6. The Trouble with Writing is that it is Fraught with Self-Loathing, Shame, Grandiosity, and Pride
I told you I quit writing at a certain point and embarked on another career. That career was to become a UU minister. In that process, I had to undergo a psychological evaluation—essentially, two psychologists determined my weak points and poked at me for a couple of days.
One psychologist asked why I had quit writing.
I told him that I’d grown up with parents who were highly disapproving and critical, and I must have internalized all that, because I lacked the confidence and self-esteem to write.
The shrink said, “You can blame a lot on your parents, but not that--that kind of self doubt and low self-esteem you’re describing is just part of the creative process.”
This was a revelation to me—that those terrible feelings actually signaled that I was IN the creative process and not that I was failing at it. Of course, low self-esteem and self-doubt are not
requirements—
Picasso never had many doubts, and nor does
Alexander MacCall Smith who can knock out a
No. 1 Ladies Detective novel in three weeks. But a great many of us do battle with self-confidence and doubts.
Because writing is so personal, or, more exactly, because its
prima materia, or primal material, is the self, many, many writers do experience various troubling, vexatious states around their writing. Recently, I have heard
Donald Antrim and
Karl Ove Knausgaard and
Edward St. Aubyn all talk about the shame they feel around their writing, and I have read that
John Banville, whose arrogance is singular—he freely admits this—also admits to feeling a terrible sticky shame about all his work and cannot bear to reread it. I am constantly bolstering my female writer friends, and they me, about the quality of our work, and even its right to exist.
Of course, even as the writing process tends to kick up doubt, fear, and self-loathing for some temperaments, it also kicks up the opposing states of grandiosity, entitlement, arrogance. Some writers think their work can’t be improved, or shouldn’t be edited at all. More of us pingpong between grandiosity and despair. This is a terrible failure of a book, we tell ourselves, and I should really get an enormous advance for it! One writer I knew periodically had to stop working on his novel to compose acceptance speeches for the major awards the book was going to win. (He did actually win several awards.)
The trouble with writing is that it is often a roller coaster pitching us between grandiosity and despair.
As troublesome as they are, these uncomfortable emotional states, can serve to our advantage. Self-doubt humbles me sufficiently, so that I can improve and revise, and accept editorial assistance. And a certain stubborn pride serves me well in the face of awful editing or bad reviews.
7. The Trouble with Writing is that Little Happens the Way You Think it Should
Writing requires an investment of time and thought and the self. In making this investment, we can’t help but kick up a few hopes concerning the returns this investment might give us. When I was writing my first novel for all those years before I quit writing altogether, I had these vague, unarticulated ideas—assumptions, really, that once I published my novel, I would move into a new financial zone, I would be able to find a good job, but mostly, that I would be inducted—indeed welcomed-into the larger literary community and conversation of my generation.
The trouble with writing is that, although rewards do come, and your life does change, these things often don’t happen when and how you imagined them happening.
The year that my first novel was published—and sold overseas and to the movies and got fantastic reviews in slick magazines and newspapers all over the country and was nominated for a few awards--I was completely unprepared for the psychic transition from solitary, intense writing life to the more outward routine of selling myself to readers, and having my work misunderstood--oh, I mean reviewed--in public. I had no idea what to do with the good news I got—you don’t want to call up your struggling writer friends and say, I just sold my book to the movies for a big pile of money! As it happened, my best friend, who could not sell her novel, dropped me anyway, and I ended up the year filling a prescription for antidepressants.
It’s a tricky business we’re in. We work with various parts of the self: our memory, our experience, and emotions, the conscious self, and the unconscious which includes the patterning parts of the brain, and the imagination. These are all skittish entities, not always cooperative. Over time, we get better at accessing our imagination, our knowledge, our storehouse of anecdotes and perceptions, vocabulary and beliefs. We learn to trust that, if we set to work, the structure, direction and shape of a work will reveal itself, and that a character eventually will accumulate enough traits and coherency to come to life. We learn how to get down to that river, and to bring back buckets. But even experience can’t guarantee that we can do all these things every time.
8. Writing is Not Always Trouble and Disturbance
When it’s going well, there is little to match it. Creation is a mighty power--you might even call it divine.
The psychologists tell us that creativity is an adult state of play. When you’re deep deep in it, in the state of flow, when there is clarity and absorption, and the clock hands twirl, that is writing at its best. Flow: to get there takes time and effort—you could say, you have to take some trouble to reach flow. It’s like getting an endorphin high when you’re running—according to a friend who lately has become a runner, it took her running almost daily for three weeks before she experienced her first endorphin high, and even then she only began to feel it when she was three miles into a run. Three months and three miles…The same timetable, roughly, could apply to writing in a flow state. You don’t just sit down to it. You can’t induce it by swallowing a pill. No drug, prescribed or illicit, can get you there. Only steady, regular work can get you there.
To create the ideal circumstances for writing, and to protect those circumstances, to keep our soul and body properly positioned to write, you would think, would be the great aim of our life.
9. Writing is an Act of Faith, and Delaying Gratification
The trouble with writing is that it’s a weird, lonely occupation with only intermittent and unpredictable satisfactions and rewards—except for the satisfactions and rewards that come from the struggle itself, and they, too, can be elusive.
Writers have to be able to delay gratification. To work without immediate pleasures. To delay gratification in general is the great sign of maturity. In writers it is absolutely essential.
If the ability to delay gratification is the great sign of being a mature human being, with the internet we have all regressed, because the internet gives us everything that writing does not: it gives us what we dream about when sitting alone at our desks: contact with our tribe and the sense that we’re in a community; for posting mere snippets, we get liked, retweeted, favorited, shared, tagged, and notified; we get emails and instant messages and invitations to chat online. We read daily what our friends and also some of our most esteemed writers have to say about writing and life. That great conversation I thought my first book would induct me into? Here on Facebook are some of the great writers of my generation tweeting away, offering links to articles, vaunting their politics, singing the praises of their colleagues’ work.
The internet reminds me of smoking—which I gave up almost 27 years ago—but whenever someone talked about cancer or heart disease it made me want to light up. Just talking about the internet this way, makes me want to check my email or log onto Facebook. Excuse me for a minute…
I am not an isolationist when it comes to writing. I believe in writing groups and in exchanging work with friends and there is nothing more compelling than in-depth literary conversation. I also believe in leaving my desk and going out in the world to observe and research in service of book and soul. I have to replenish, refuel. Yesterday, I finally went to see the new permanent display at the Huntington: a illuminated, hand-copied edition of
The Canterbury Tales; a Guttenberg bible, an original quarto of
Hamlet that’s four hundred years old. And then we walked through the cactus gardens there which, as I like to say, is one of the few psychedelic experiences you can have without ingesting a drug. Somehow, this felt more generative, more like a part of writing to me than the same amount of time spent on Twitter and Facebook.
The trouble with writing is that it’s a dynamic balancing act, we are always seesawing between concentration and interruption, grandiosity and despair. The trouble with writing is that there are long dry stretches in the ugly stage, and the rewards, when they come, may not come when we need them the most. The trouble with writing is that even when some of our dreams and hopes and expectations do come true, they don’t relieve the difficulty of writing, or the solitude of writing, or the weird rollercoaster emotions of writing.
The trouble with writing is writing.
So keep going. Keep the faith. Go home to your desks and get yourself into some deep deep, trouble. And then write your way out of it.
Image via aukirk/Flickr
Check out Alexander Theroux or Gene Wolfe, two (amazing) living Catholic writers. Theroux has written at least one masterpiece (Darconville’s Cat) and one Rabelasian monster of a book that comes close (Laura Warholic). Gene Wolfe is the best living science fiction writer, his best work being the New Sun books.
But seriously, a widespread reinstating of the Tridentine Mass is just going to bleed Catholic membership in most Western countries. It does seem alienating, even more so than the terrible reversions that just happened with the English translation. Anyways, since 2007, do a lot of churches actually perform the Tridentine Mass? I don’t think so.
A really nice article, Robert. I’d only submit that the Catholic “literary vacuum” is much more pronounced in certain countries than in others, and for varying reasons. When I read a lot of Irish fiction — that is, fiction from a land whose relations with Catholicism could be categorized on Facebook as “it’s complicated” — I’m reminded of that classic Onion joke: The religious breakdown of Ireland is 75% Catholic, and 25% Super-Catholic.
There’s a rich Catholic novel coming out in January by John Donatich titled THE VARIATIONS. It’s about the way the population of the Catholic Church is dying off, and the challenges one priest would face if he decided to leave his parish. Might be up your alley. It’s amazing how few explicitly Catholic novels have come around since John Gregory Dunne’s TRUE CONFESSIONS.
Isn’t Anne Rice one of the few mainstream openly Catholic writers out there? I mean, yeah, most of what she turns out now isn’t worth looking at (with the exception of Knopf’s typically wonderful cover designs) but back in the 70s and 80s, she was hitting on some legitimate questions in her stuff. The first three Vampire books, the first Witching Hour book….
thanks for the great essay and for the equally great comments (I’m noting all the suggestions of the books I have not yet read).
And for what it is worth, I find the Nov. 27 changes to the translations for Mass quite alienating indeed. I can’t see how it will draw newcomers in or wayfarers back. Christmas returnees will not feel welcome this year.
The title story of Don DeLillo’s new collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda, is a very Catholic story, in my opinion– not just its characters, a group of nuns in the Bronx, but in its theme that the miraculous is everywhere. (I review the collection elsewhere.) It’s an excellent story.
There are too few works of literature anymore which address the “big” questions– our place in the universe, say. Instead, many writers have an extremely narrow focus, and don’t seem to believe in anything except their own trivial fleeting sense-impressions of the moment. Attempting to understand society or the cosmos is clearly beyond them. They might as well be housecats, for all the intelligence they offer.
Just my two cents worth!
They’re not as gone as you think. Carlos Eire won a National Book Award for his memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana” in 2003, and it’s a very Catholic book. He followed that up more recently with Learning to Die in Miami, in which Catholicism also plays a huge role.
Also, shorter works by Catholic writers are available on a quarterly basis from quality publications like Dappled Things (www.dappledthings.org) and IMAGE journal (www.imagejournal.org).
Regarding the translations, I found them lovely and fitting, and much closer to what I’m used to in Spanish. I also found them quite minimal. What are you all getting your panties up in a bunch about? Really, people.
They never left. We just stopped looking for them.
I wrote a blog post series about this. The fourth post (of 4) contains a partial list — many more could be added:
http://imagejournal.org/page/blog/the-state-of-catholic-letters-part-iv-generations-lostand-found
I’m Jewish and adored the early novels by Mary Gordon, who grappled with c(C)atholic themes, issues, stuff. Wonder how those books would hold up now for me, so many decades later.
I know a good Catholic writer. He wrote The Franciscan Conspiracy and Angel’s Passing. The first was on the bestseller lists in Europe and the second did great in Brazil.
A notable contemporary Catholic author is Tim Powers. Powers writes fantasy–or magical realism, if you like–often with a historical context. Declare is his most explicitly Catholic novel.
Two words: Brian Doyle. His novel Mink River came out last year and is very Catholic in its way. He also has a new short story collection, Bin Laden’s Bald Spot, that is hilarious. And Catholic. One of the stories is about some dudes in Boston who kidnap Cardinal Law from his haven in the Vatican.
Those are his only two fiction books, but he’s got a whole mess of non-fiction.
I would argue that Catholic (in the broadest sense) writers are present in nearly equal numbers to what they were in the 60’s, and that the vacuum you describe has more to do with the increasing cultural marginalization of Catholicism in recent decades. More often than not books are simply no longer read as “Catholic”, even when they have explicitly Catholic themes.
Some good examples of working writers would include the essayist Patricia Hampl, Ron Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy), the underrated Valerie Martin (Property, Mary Reilly) and while we’re at it, why not Ann Patchett? (If Bel Canto is not a Catholic book I’d love to know what is.) I’m probably leaving out many more worthy names, but these are the first that come to mind.
The excellent “Deep Creek” by Dana Hand (a Washington Post Best Novel pick) features a heroine who is both a Catholic and a Native American; her alien faith is even more of a social barrier, she finds, than her mixed parentage.
During a good portion of the later years of this period another remarkable quondam catholic writer is Roland Merullo. His book BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA is a masterpiece on the spirit and all of his many books have this inherent spiritual theme since a deep appreciation of Thomas Merton has been one of his guides. You’d do well to look into this fine writer’s works.
You might also enjoy my site which is devoted to Merton and my tales of him in his last 10 years.
I’m pretty sure Tobias Wolff is and Andre Dubus was Catholic.
Newcomer Elizabeth D’Onofrio is a Catholic and her book “The Crystals of Yukitake” beautifully uses magical realism to transport the reader along a spiritual journey with a 17th century French nun and Japanese ronin. Her work was also influenced by Thomas Merton.
Many of these ‘missing’ Catholic writers are members of The Catholic Writers Guild (www.catholicwritersguild.com), producing quality fiction in all genres, ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’. — Interesting to hear of David Foster Wallace’s flirtation with the Catholic Church. I studied fiction with him at Illinois State in the 1990s. Makes me wonder if my Catholic-colored short stories had any influence on him (they were published in both Catholic and secular journals later).
John Desjarlais, author of ‘BLEEDER: a mystery’ and ‘VIPER: a mystery’ (Sophia Institute Press 2009 and 2011 respectively)
As a founder of the Catholic Writers’ Guild, I have to dispute your premise that we have a derth of great Catholic writers. Part of the problem is that with 250,000 new books coming out each year, it’s harder to get noticed, especially since so many people are going small press or self publishing (in part because many bigger publishers are no longer accepting works that are “too Catholic.”) I see from the comments that several names have been mentioned. Might I also suggest you check the Catholic Writers’ Guild website for a list of Seal of Approval titles? http://catholicwritersguild.com/index.php?name=Content_2&pid=3. These are fiction and nonfiction works that we have found adhere to the Magesterium.
And as long as we’re naming names, I’d like to add a few:
Michelle Buckman–Rachel’s Contrition, especially is Catholic
Ellen Gable Hrkach has several literary titles
John Desjarlais–great mysteries
Ann Lewis–Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes
Jane Leback–Catholic YA, science fiction and literary
Regina Doman–Catholic YA
Christian Frank–the John Paul II High School series
Michael O’Brien–literary, though I heard he’s getting into science fiction, too
I also write Catholic science fiction and fantasy, along with mainstream.
We’re out there! It’s just a crowded market and a little harder to see us!
Thank you, Robert, for starting this interesting discussion. As a Catholic writer (though only a poet–not a fiction writer), and as a teacher of courses in Catholic Studies (the literary ones), I feel compelled to weigh in.
Not only is there no current dearth of Catholic fiction writers. There are more than ever before. The list of fiction writers who are living or recently dead, who have experienced a Catholic formation, and whose imaginations (and books) bear the imprint of that experience is significant, and it is getting longer all the time.
One thinks of Ron Hansen (mentioned in the article), William Kennedy, Alice McDermott, Mary Gordon, Andre Dubus, Larry Woiwode, Tobias Wolfe, Elizabeth Cullinan, Louise Erdrich, Peter Quinn, Charles D’Ambrosio, David Adams Richards (a Canadian Catholic, to boot), Valerie Sayers, Erin McGraw, Cormac McCarthy (admittedly,reluctantly Catholic), David Lodge (one among several good English Catholics writers), and Brian Moore & John McGahern (numbering among numerous Irish).
This is but a quick list–as there are more–but it serves the purpose. A glance over these names and even a slight knowledge of their work reveals the great range among these writers. They are Catholics who engage with the culture they live in and whose work has been shaped by it, along with their faith formation, their ethnicity, their geography, their gender, and the particularities of their tribal and familial lives.
There is also a great range of attitudes towards the Church and its teachings evident in these writers–and even from book to book written by the same writer. A gloomy view might assert that this is a sign of the fragmentation of the formerly unified Church–but a hopeful (and more realistic) view would see in this a vital reminder of the adaptabililty of the Church and the remarkable capacity for the Faith to take root and flourish in any culture and time. Catholic Fiction is very much alive–and as long as it lives, the imaginative capacity of the Church will continue to flourish as well! Cheers!
Not to pile on, but I wanted to echo Angela’s earlier comment. There are definitely many Catholic writers working today. I would suggest keeping and eye on the literary journal IMAGE–it’s been around for a long time now. It also has a daily blog that features its stable of writers. I’ve published work with IMAGE and contribute to the blog, so I’m biased, but he community of writers and artists that have gravitated around the journal’s founder Greg Wolfe (who was featured in Poets and Writers last year, I believe) is a diverse and vibrant one.
But I also want to add that the world of the 1950s and 60s was open to the voices and visions of Catholic writers much more so than today. Some of this has to do with the priest abuse scandal, but it has more to do with the fact that O’Connor and Merton were writing in a prophetic mode that took aim at the often distorted theology of Christians who saw faith as a way of maintaining the status quo, the old balance of power in a world that was rapidly changing.
They had many fellow travelers during that time because so many (Catholic, many non-Catholic, and non-believers, too) agreed with their basic premise that America was worshipping a God made in its own image, an image that saw us as the moral arbiters in a dark world.
As to why there are more Catholic writers in the public eye is that they are not being sought out. Publishers and literary journals are not as interested in this world view anymore because many of the people working for publishing houses and lit journals about what to publish and what not to publish strongly identify with Jonathan Lethem’s quote in your post, which echos a famous line from O’Connor’s infamous “Good Country People” when the bible salesman smugly says to Hulga the one-legged Doctor of Philosophy, “…you ain’t so smart. “I’ve been believing in nothing ever since I was born.”
Interesting piece and interesting comments! I’d like to add a name, too, that I think no discussion of literature of the past 50 years and Catholicism could be complete without: Milosz.
In 2006, the Catholic Writers Guild was formed to address this question. Catholic writers are out there, but needed a forum to hone their craft. The same year (separately) the literary magazine Dappled Things was founded. It is an excellent magazine – expressly Catholic and well worth reading.
Wantonly I must ask: Because this article began by talking about James Joyce etc. and ended up with discussion of a writers’ group “loyal to the teaching authority of the Church” (v. interested to discover this), what is the organizational, aesthetic (?) response, if any, to classic works by Catholic writers which are perhaps not “loyal to the Church” in their content?
Like many authors mentioned here – Joyce, O’Connor, Greene, William Golding’s The Spire, Scott Fitzgerald (Irish Catholic, wrote a literal Devil into his first novel), deathbed convert Oscar Wilde, Waugh, etc.? How relevant are these writers, their works, to you as artists, as Catholics?
Catholic writers are incredibly important to me, in particular, Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. I loved the piece and am excited to discover more Catholic Writers. Also, you can read my discussion/interview with the Catholic poet, Edward Mullany over at Bigother.com –
http://bigother.com/2011/11/14/edward-mullanys-if-i-falter-at-the-gallows-2/
Hmm, I’m a big reader of Catholic literature, and while I agree with some of the comments about there being a larger-than-perceived group of contemporary RC writers, I must demur somewhat.
I heartily admit DeLillo, A. Theroux, Lodge, Karr, Patchett, Wolff, Les Murray (poet), Colm Toibin, and the philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and René Girard. But it’s disingenuous to include authors like Anne Rice, Gene Wolfe, and Cormac McCarthy – none of whom are honestly RC writers in the sense being discussed.
Now, as regards this “large” community of contemporary Catholic authors: let’s be honest. Between the years 1990 and 2005 you see the death of Graham Greene, Denise Levertov, C. Milosz, Walker Percy, Andre Dubus, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Shusaku Endo, Julien Green, and J.F. Powers. Literally a mass loss of some the most gifted writers of their entire respective generations, Catholic or not. To compare Dubus III with his father Andre, Ron Hansen to, say, Walker Percy, Tobias Wolff to J.F. Powers, Patchett to Spark! No comparison possible, I’m sorry to say. This last generation wrote in a time during which EVERYONE was reading the Catholics, they were massively popular! The fact that we need to see fifteen or more names no one outside the readership of Catholic magazines has heard of says plenty.
I think, actually, that it’s very healthy for this ‘dearth’ to exist. After most the Catholics of the post- and pre-war period died out (e.g. Bernanos, Waugh, Chesterton, David Jones, Roy Campbell) there was a period of silence! It’s natural we should wait a decade or two before we see a newer generation begin to produce their masterworks. I mean, we’re only just now seeing the serious upheaval of Roth, DeLillo, McCarthy, Pynchon, Morrison. I say give it to the end of the current decade and some of the younger RC writers will be carving out their own territory – David Foster Wallace’s influence as a writer DISTINCTLY pronounced.
Anne Rice’s books are one thing- but her rediscovery of her faith is another. Any interviews or essays she’s written– it was a while ago- about it are very moving. She had a true conversion in my mind and it gives me hope.
The poet Franz Wright cones to mind.
I especially like the quote at the end about the aesthetics of belief. Everyone wants to believe because it’s a lovely idea.
I’m surprised no one mentioned Walter Miller’s CANTICLE FOR LIEBOWITZ — a book I have re-read several times since middle school. Although a recent convert to the Church, I attended Catholic high schools and my first job in New York publishing was with Image Books/Doubleday. About this time I discovered J.F. Powers at the Strand Books on lower Broadway.
My own liturgical tradition (and literary as well) is the Book of Common Prayer and the 1611 Holy Bible. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Catholic literary tradition has Anglican roots (Blessed John Henry Newman, Msgr Knox, Msgr. Benson, Chesterton).
To make a generalization, when I think of Waugh or Greene or O’Connor or Burgess, Catholic literature has an overall toughness that may be missing from other traditions. My favorite quote remains O’Connor’s comment about the Eucharist that it “is true or to hell with it.” Of course I also claim a Southern heritage.
Fine piece which I linked through Complete Catholic.
Coming out against Vatican II? Seriously? What’s next? Opposing the right of women to vote? Reinstating the nobility with the high justice and the low?
I’m a 52 year old Catholic, old enough to recall the early (much more faithful to the original Latin) English Masses of the early 70’s, but too young to really remember the Tridentine Mass. Man in the middle, I suppose. What I have witnessed over the last 40 years has been a progressive eating away at the sanctity of the liturgy on the parish level, everywhere. I stopped going to Mass regularly years ago, but still visit the old churches (built pre-VII) when no Mass is being said, to enjoy the silence, light candles and make my devotions before the statues of the saints, and to kneel at the altar rail and recite the Anima Christi before the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes–rarely–I return for Mass on some feast day of importance to my private devotional practice, and I’m surprised to find myself overcome with emotion, despite the utter banality of the liturgy and homilies. The old emotional pull is evidently still there, ready to be resurrected in my heart, but the Novo Ordo Mass is an insurmountable obstacle. It is a pale, pedestrian, bloodless thing. The recent reversions in translation that have Vatican II types incensed are laughable–too little and much, much too late. Recently, I attended a concelebrated Tridentine Mass in honor of the victims of 9/11. But, without priests who really understand the old rubrics, and parishioners who have been taught what is happening at the altar and how to follow along in a Latin missal (myself included), this once beautiful liturgy was a mess of missteps, mistakes and stumbling hesitations. I’m resigned to the sad fact that the faith that existed before the council has been extinguished and there is no resurrecting it. The Church I was born into is dead, and the many churches I still visit are sepulchers, tombs, ruins.
Maybe there are so few Catholic writers because that is just too sad a reality to contemplate for very long.
(And to the commenter who wonders if those who lament the VII liturgical changes are all raving reactionaries and the worst kind of social conservatives–I’m a gay man and as liberal as they come. )
David Athey’s new novel _Christopher_ has been published. It is eminently Catholic.
The problem is Catholic writers have not disappeared: they are hidden and stifled by a world that is growing more hostile to Catholicism every day.
Practically all the books we see pushed today in the poular media are usually not what a Catholic would like, or should, read; usually amoral tripe that would be an occasion for a confession-session! The world in general is demanding trash, and it is difficult to promote literature written by contemporary Catholics to a wide audience under these circumstances, especially conversion stories, anything that might promote any semblance of morality, or make an attempt to introduce people towards Catholic culture.
I find it fascinating that the French mystic Marie-Julie Jahenny predicted that during the 20th century, Hell would be unleashed against the arts: it certainly feels like this has happened, and it appears to be getting worse.
Hey this is in response to JP, after SP was published in 2007 there has been a growth in the extraordinary form not only in the US but especially true in France where many practicing Catholics do attend the EF of the Roman Rite. And it has grown in Brazil, Spain, Argentina and Chile as well as in Germany. Hey you don’t have to go if you want to. I am a milenial gen who happens to love the EF of the Roman Rite.
But I am not familiar with Catholic Literary genres something I might explore because I admit I spend my time on facebook or listening to music. Guess I better read up.
\\the reverential tradition of kneeling at the altar rail to receive communion on one’s tongue was replaced with the breezy practice of taking the host standing and in the hand.\\
Breezy? Really?
The Byzantine Liturgies ALL call for receiving Communion standing, and a strict interpretation of the rubrics of Byzantine Liturgy of St. James calls for the Body of Christ to be delivered into the communicant’s hand.
Would one accuse the Byzantine Churches–Catholic or Orthodox–of liturgical breeziness?
Fr. Basil,
I think (and hope) it is different in the Byzantine Rite than in the Roman Rite. In the Roman Rite, Ordinary Form, people walk up, pick up the Host between two fingers and casually pop Our Lord into the mouth as if the Host were a potato chip. I hope there is more reverence in the Byzantine Rite–perhaps the throne/manger raising the Host to the mouth sort of thing.
Surely you know of the decline in reverence in the Roman Rite and don’t take offense to comments that don’t pertain to your rite.
I stumbled in here by accident, and I’m very glad I did.
I’m a war baby (1944), used to serve Mass in Latin (occasionally go to a Ukrainian Catholic church too, as well as my usual Roman rite).
I’ve been writing since about 1976 of the adventures and misadventures of four Catholic kids born 1944 who attended the same grade school, etc. After about 1980, I noticed that secular culture is indifferent or hostile to Catholicism; and stories about people Catholic to the core were simply unpublishable: too religious for the secular market, too earthy for the religious market.
But I’m still trying. Thanks for listening. Take care, God bless, Merry Christmas!
The Spirit of VCII is mainly at fault for the lack of great Catholic writers. The pervasive spirit of Pelagianism among contemporary Catholics, Rahner’s “anonymous Christians”, “everyone” is saved, etc., makes the thematic dramatic moral-doctrinal crisis leading to salvation incompatible with modern Catholic sensibilities. Add the demythologizing of devils, hell, the church militant, and mix in large doses of ecumenism and relativism and you are left with Catholics writing on superficial Catholic themes or even themes reinforcing the same Spirit of VCII relativism.
Sad… and it is going to be a very long time before it gets better.
Taylor,
“I think (and hope) it is different in the Byzantine Rite than in the Roman Rite. In the Roman Rite, Ordinary Form, people walk up, pick up the Host between two fingers and casually pop Our Lord into the mouth as if the Host were a potato chip.”
It’s more than breezy. It’s apostasy. Touching the Host is forbidden by all except those whose hands were consecrated for the purpose. In the new, man-made Vatican II church, no hands are so consecrated … but fortunately, even the words of Consecration have been changed, so in the opinion of many great theologians no Hosts are even consecrated in that man-made “Ordinary” rite. Which is fortunate, because if otherwise there would be a whole lot of desecration going on.
Agree completely with above poster. V2 brought about miseducated “Catholics” who can’t think. Pick up any V2 church bulletin or listen to their Saturday night “homily” and honestly wonder who in their right mind could put up with that.
I find the content of this article both superficial and gratuitous. The hand-wringing over a dearth of Catholic writers and/or Catholic-inspired literature in the post-Vatican II era is really nonsense: there is, indeed, a bounty of excellent contempory authors and works, many of whom have been mentioned in the Comments. Literature, like all art, responds to its time: the history of the novel shows experimentation with content and form in the same way the visual arts do. Catholic fiction is bound to do the same, responding to an artist’s particular vision of the intersection of faith and life in his or her slice of the contemporary world. And navigating this intersection today, especially in a pluralistic and secular society, is clearly far more difficult than it was in an earlier era. In many ways it was Flannery O’Connor who paved the way for the wide and exciting diversity among today’s Catholic (or Catholic-oriented) writers. She understood the complications and alienation of the post-modern world–especially American society– as it bears on belief, and in her open-endings she refused to be either triumphalist or apologetic in her approach to the mystery of human nature and free will. Were there excellent Catholic literary works of the earlier period that reflected this supposedly “golden age” triumphalism? Yes of course. But that period is gone yet God is not done with us yet. Are there more recent, excellent writers responding to the unfolding of the Spirit in our day? As my adopted Minnesota-speak would put it, “you betcha.”
I don’t think the “Latin Mass” is “officially” named the “Tridentine Mass”.
Actually, it’s simply the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.
Or, for most, the Missal of 1962, the last before the Reform.
Just to clear this up — and my apologies to non-Catholics, who will find all this even more boring than Catholics will: the Latin mass isn’t necessarily Tridentine, though the Tridentine mass is always in Latin. It’s a rectangle-square problem, as it were (with added complexities of course)…. It so happens that I regularly attend a ‘modern’ (post-Vatican II) mass in Latin, which is easy enough to find in England (at least in Oxford, Cambridge and London and a few other places full of the overeducated faithful). In France modern masses retaining a fair bit of Latin are often referred to as ‘Gregorian masses’ and that’s what you’ll find if you go (for example) to Nôtre Dame in Paris at 10.30 on Sunday morning. I can’t speak for other countries (let’s leave Italy out of the discussion for now) but in these two at least there’s a very important distinction between Tridentine masses (always in Latin of course) and ones in this post-‘Reform’ form that happen to be largely or mainly in Latin. The so-called Tridentine Mass (called that simply because of the Council of Trent) is one that follows any missal from between 1570 and 1962; in 1969 Pope Paul VI promulgated the ‘Novus Ordo Missae’ and the ‘Pauline’ mass we’ve had since then is the one that’s been translated into the various vernacular languages. Latin isn’t forbidden or suppressed by the church in any way, only less frequent than one hopes it were…. I suppose most parishes these days don’t have enough worshippers who’ve had even a rudimentary classical education so you can see the problems inherent in celebrating the Pauline Mass in Latin if you support the reforms of Vatican II. Very few of the faithful are in the position that I am of being able to chose fairly easily between multiple Latin masses (not that these things ought to be subject to whim — but let’s not open up a discussion that non-Catholics might find even duller than this one…). This has to do with one’s existing in a particular social bubble where a fair number of people Catholics and otherwise can be expected to have some minimal level of Latin. This isn’t the case in most of the States as I’m well aware…. Now that I’ve said all this I can look forward to being corrected at great length by liturgy bores, who have a habit of cornering me at the coffee morning after Mass most Sundays…. Don’t worry, I’m used to it….
Thanks to Mr. “Pedant.” Pedantry in the pursuit of devotion is no vice as someone once might have said (that’s an American cultural reference). As a former Anglican I am fascinated by the fact that Catholics — at least in this country — have no prayer book. I have my father’s old Book of Common Prayer from 1945 which I always carried to church during the 1960s as a boy. At a parish book sale this summer I came across a St. Andrews Daily Missal published in 1949. So I’ve bookended my faith. Both are small, thick and fit comfortably in the hand. I suspect that was common practice at the time. But the Daily Missal — despite its worn cover — is beautifully illustrated inside with small though detailed art nouveau drawings. As it happens I am an adult convert and attend the National Shrine of the Little Flower here in Royal Oak. ThIe only art nouveau church in the world, or at least North America, or so I’m told. I’m struck by the similarities in English (high English one might call it). Both attempt a completeness in liturgy and faith. The BCP includes a psaltry as well as the sacraments and a large collection of occasional prayers in the 17th and 18th century tradition. The DM includes details on the vestments, the collects for each saint’s feast days (as well as a short history) and much more I haven’t yet discovered. Also the Latin Mass with English translation (a real treasure for me). Perhaps liturgically irrelevant but catechetically significant as far as I’m concerned. I’m told by an elderly Catholic from Nova Scotia that Catholics always brought their missals to mass during the 40s and 50s. With the new ordinariate for Anglo-Catholics I joked with someone that there was no need to have composed a new English-language Mass since if the Church had waited a few years that would have been spared the expense with an English Mass whose costs have been amortized over 350 years (this is the 350th anniversary of the BCP published in 1662).
Holy socks, biased much? Taking Communion in the Hand (you know, like the Apostles did?) is not a “breezy process.” (Well, maybe for you…)
Is is really so surprising that attending the Mass in casual slouchwear has produced casual devotion as we slouch toward the unused Communion Rail for Holy Communion to-go? If a writer is a Catholic such intentional devotion may be reflected in intentional and thoughtful writing from a Catholic perspective. Are we Protestants who adhere to solo scriptorum (sp?) and have not benefitted from 2000 years of the works of the creative minority? That is St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the many other Doctors of the Church… Our rich intellectual and artistic heritage should give us the edge in the cultural free-fire zones of post-Christian and post-Constitutional America. Instead we respond to decontented volleys in kind. Not exactly in the tradition of Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor.
What Walker Percy got (and nobody these days seems to) is that the only really important question is whether God entered history as a man, or whether that story is fiction. If yes, the rest falls into place. If not, let’s all move on as most of society has already done. The search for the truth about this one question gets harder and harder because it seems our gurus and our peers aren’t even asking it anymore. It’s an increasingly lonely search. The Church should be leading us in the search, but I haven’t seen much evidence of that. We need a very bright and credible writer like Percy to use fiction as a vehicle to help smart waverers (like me) to keep searching. The only popular artistic clue that the search is still going on is, amazingly, The Life of Pi. (Which story do YOU prefer?)
In spite of what the right-wing (the Catholic equivalent of Tea-Party loons) thinks the discarding of the Latin mass is one of the great things to come out of Vatican II.
Catholicism is not ‘the West’ it’s a worldwide religion. While in the west Catholicism is struggling, mass in the vernacular isn’t hurting the expanding reach of the church in the third world. That is a condition one would expect if the jettisoning of the Latin mass were in any way the rationale for today’s lack of faith among those in the first world. It isn’t. The Mass thrives in Tagalog, Tetum, Fang, Kinyarwanda, Korean and dozens of other languages.
Catholicism is not Islam. Arguing the necessity of Latin in the Mass is akin to the Islamic argument that reading the Koran in Arabic reveals some ‘substance’ in it that native language editions don’t.
Waugh’s arguments against Vatican II were made when after he’d become an angry, bitter old man broken by bad health. Of course the writer here misses the obvious; Waugh, Greene and company came from the last generation of intellectuals who–Catholic, Protestant, agnostic or atheist–were schooled in Latin at a young age on ‘Gallia Est Omnis Divisa in Partes Tres’.
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Dave Griffith has a good point about low demand. I think the low demand is at the literary end of the market. The YA fiction market for Catholic books seems healthy & robust, but the serious realist literary fiction market with classic Catholic themes seems lethargic.