Literary Giants Literary Catholics (24 page)

So much for the Revolution of Revenge and the wasteland that followed in its wake. England would not follow such a path, though she would emerge into her own more insipid wasteland.

Let’s return to England . . .

Having heard Sassoon’s poetry of protest, let’s now turn to the poetry of his friend and comrade in arms, Wilfred Owen. Perhaps Owen’s best-known—and perhaps indeed his best—poem is “Dulce et Decorum Est”. Describing how from behind the safety of his gas mask he had watched another soldier “drowning” in the “green sea” of gas, the poet concludes in plaintive rage:

     If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

     Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

     And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

     His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

     If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

     Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

     Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

     Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

     My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

     To children ardent for some desperate glory,

     The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

     Pro patria mori.

Does one not sense that the bitter conclusion of Owen’s poem is a deliberate riposte to the naïve jingoism of Rupert Brooke’s rosy portrait of the dignity of heroism, written at the beginning of the war before its full “animal horror” was known? Rupert Brooke was killed in 1915 and was laid to rest in some corner of a foreign field that is, presumably, “forever England”. Owen would be killed in the last few days of the war and, in consequence, was not part of the “music of returning feet” of those “who’d refrained from dying” of whom Sassoon had written.

Belloc lost a son in the war, and Chesterton lost his beloved brother. Such was the collective desolation, if not despair, that gripped England in the wake of the war that even the usually upbeat and optimistic Chesterton, mourning his brother, descended to the level of the protest poem. A year or so after the war’s end, Chesterton poured forth his anger in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, the very title of which conveyed a bitterly ironic allusion to the peaceful tranquility of Thomas Gray’s eighteenth-century poem of the same name.

     The men that worked for England

     They have their graves at home:

     And bees and birds of England

About the cross can roam.

     But they that fought for England,

     Following a falling star,

     Alas, alas for England

     They have their graves afar.

     And they that rule in England,

     In stately conclave met,

     Alas, alas for England

     They have no graves as yet.

Chesterton, like Belloc, had been a jingoistic supporter of the war at its outset; by its end, he was singing the same tune as Owen and Sassoon.

It was in this death-laden and doom-laden atmosphere that T. S. Eliot emerged as the voice of what became known as the Wasteland generation.

Eliot’s poem
The Waste Land
, published in 1922, four years after the war had ended, is probably the most influential and controversial poem of the twentieth century. Its appearance was at once a revelation and a revolution, polarizing opinion. It bemused and beguiled its admirers and irritated and infuriated its detractors. The avant-garde gazed in awe at its many layers; the old guard claimed that the layers were an illusion and that the emperor had no clothes. The pessimism of its language and the libertine nature of its form both added to the controversy. The war of the Waste Land was joined.

Almost half a century later, the obituary to Eliot in
The Times
perceived the heated reaction to the poem with a detached perspective that few at the time, caught in the heat of the fray, could achieve:

Its presentation of disillusionment and the disintegration of values, catching the mood of the time, made it the poetic gospel of the post-war intelligentsia: at the time, however, few either of its detractors or its admirers saw through the surface innovations and the language of despair to the deep respect for tradition and the keen moral sense which underlay them.

It is certainly true that few, at the time, understood Eliot’s purpose in writing
The Waste Land
. Lack of understanding led to misunderstanding so that battle lines were drawn according to erroneous preconceptions. On the one side, the “moderns” hailed it as a masterpiece of modern thought that had laid waste traditional values and traditional form. On the other side, the “ancients” attacked it as an iconoclastic affront to civilized standards. Both sides had made the grave and fundamental error of mistaking Eliot’s pessimism toward the wasteland of modern life for a cynicism toward tradition. In fact, the philosophical foundations of Eliot’s thought were rooted in classical tradition and found expression in a deep disdain for modern secular liberalism and the heedless hedonism that was its inevitable consequence.

The real key to understanding Eliot’s message in
The Waste Land
, and his motive for writing it, is to be found in his devotion to Dante. Eliot upheld the “philosophy of Aristotle strained through the schools”, that is, strained, particularly, through the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Dante was, of course, the poetic master of the Thomist school. Scarcely two years before
The Waste Land
was published, Eliot had written:

You cannot . . . understand the
Inferno
without the
Purgatorio
and the
Paradiso
. “Dante”, says Landor’s Petrarch, “is the great master of the disgusting.” . . . But a disgust like Dante’s is not hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and explained only by the last canto of the
Paradiso
. . . . The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.

The fact is that modernity is more at home in hell than in Purgatory and paradise. It is where it wants to be. It is where it has condemned itself to be by its perverse desire. As post-Reformation puritanism had stressed the punishment of hell in Dante and had ignored the “papist” parts about Purgatory and paradise, so postwar cynicism had stressed the negative aspects of Eliot’s wasteland and had ignored the “impulse toward the pursuit of beauty” that had led Eliot to the positive conclusion pointing to a “resurrection”. A world without faith, basking self-indulgently in its self-proclaimed futility, could understand the ugliness of the wasteland, sympathize with the souls in the inferno, see the Crucifixion and perhaps even weep for itself as the victim on the Cross; but it could not perceive the cleansing fires of Purgatory, the sanctified bliss of paradise or the glory and significance of the Resurrection. Ignited by the indignation of its own ignoble desires, it could not perceive perfection, nor the nobility that is its cultured servant.

Eliot responded to the sheer vacuity of those who could not perceive the beauty beyond the ugliness in
The Waste Land
in his next major poem, “The Hollow Men”. Here, the doyens of modernity are depicted as the hollow, empty-headed inhabitants of the postwar no-man’s-land: the anticultural no-man’s-land in which reside the no-men who refuse the call to manhood. Thus the poem begins:

     We are the hollow men

     We are the stuffed men

     Leaning together

     Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

It ends with a prophecy of the self-destructive doom that awaits those who dwell in the anticultural abyss of nihilistic self-indulgence:

     
This is the way the world ends

     
This is the way the world ends

     
This is the way the world ends

     
Not with a bang but a whimper
.

Put simply, Eliot’s poetry might have been a reaction to the “animal horror” of the war, but it was much more than that. Ultimately, it was not so much a reaction to the war as a reaction to the reaction. The destruction and desolation of the war had led to the cynicism and nihilism of the postwar generation; Eliot’s depiction of the hollow men who live in the wasteland of modernity was a reaction against this abysmal slide into the nihilistic inferno.

Seen in this light, Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism is scarcely surprising. Paradoxically, he had perceived the light of heaven through a deep penetration into the light of the fires burning in the infernal soul of postwar modernity. He, at least, had no intention of ending with a whimper.

Eliot’s conversion sent shock waves through the self-proclaimed avant-garde of the British literary establishment. How could the ultramodern poet have embraced the ultratraditional creed of Catholic Christianity? It was all too much for Virginia Woolf, who greeted the news with horror. “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot,” she wrote to a friend, “who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. . . . There’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.” (It is difficult to resist the temptation to retort that it is better than sitting
in
the fire by not believing in God!)

One is tempted, in fact, to treat the comparison between T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf as a parable of our singularly corrupt age. Eliot is still considered suspect in modernist circles for his “reactionary” embrace of Catholicism, whereas Virginia Woolf is lionized as a “progressive” soul who has much to say to the modern world. The Hollywood film
The Hours
has restored her status as one of the leading literary lights of the twentieth century. Indeed, in the wake of the film’s success, Woolf’s novel,
Mrs. Dalloway
, made the U.S. bestseller lists. What are her credentials for such laudatory treatment? She was an active homosexual who, as we have seen, detested traditional Christianity. In the end, her “enlightened” views brought her to despair, and she committed suicide. Thus, in our perverted age, Eliot, who preached the Gospel of Life, “may be called dead to us all” (to reemploy Woolf’s own words), whereas Woolf, as a prophet of the culture of death, is declared immortal for the “martyrdom” of taking her own life. It is easy to detect the satanic inversion at work in such a state of affairs. Hell on earth, or at least a foretaste of it.

Appropriately, Eliot’s first major poem following his conversion was the penitential “Ash Wednesday”, and he went on to produce several major works of Christian literature, notably the religious plays
The Rock
and
Murder in the Cathedral
, and the long, mystically sublime poem
Four Quartets
. Taken as a whole, one can see Eliot’s major work paralleling that of his master, Dante.
The Waste Land
and “The Hollow Men” were his
Inferno
, “Ash Wednesday” and
The Rock
were his
Purgatorio
, and
Four Quartets
was his vision of
Paradise
. What a legacy he has bequeathed to posterity!

One cannot conclude a reflection on the cultural reaction to the wasteland of modernity without paying respect, at least in passing, to several other major figures who followed in Eliot’s footsteps. Most notably, Evelyn Waugh should be considered “the T. S. Eliot of prose fiction”. His early satirical novels parodied the “bright young things” of the Wasteland generation in much the same terms as had Eliot in his early verse. Waugh’s novel
A Handful of Dust
even took its title from Eliot’s
The Waste Land
. Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 caused as much of a sensation as had Eliot’s conversion two years earlier. In avant-garde circles, Waugh was hailed as the “ultramodern novelist” just as Eliot had been the “ultramodern poet”. The fact that both had embraced Catholicism served as a salutary shock to the supercilious presumptions of modernity and as a source of salvific inspiration to the Christian literati.

Interestingly, a similar “reaction to the reaction” occurred at the end of the Second World War. On that occasion, as the world lurched from world war to the wasteland of the cold war, many great works of Christian literature emerged phoenix-like from the ashes—or perhaps, in keeping with the metaphor, emerged not from the ashes but from the ice. Edith Sitwell, having written her wonderful protest poem, “Still Falls the Rain”, during the Blitz in 1940, wrote
The Shadow of Cain
, the first of her “three poems of the Atomic Age”, which, inspired by the horror of Hiroshima, lamented “the fission of the world into warring particles, destroying and self-destructive” and prophesied “the gradual migration of mankind . . . into the desert of the Cold”. Edith Sitwell was received into the Catholic Church a few years later.

In the same year, 1945, Waugh published
Brideshead Revisited
, possibly the finest novel of the century; Lewis published his timeless indictment of modernity,
That Hideous Strength
; and Tolkien was putting the finishing touches to
The Lord of the Rings
, which is the greatest literary achievement of the century. And so we see that, emerging from the wasteland, the cultural reaction to the desert of modernity had produced the greatest poet of the century, T. S. Eliot; the greatest novelist, Evelyn Waugh; and one of the greatest epics not merely of the twentieth century, but of all time, Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
.

It was also in 1945 that our old friend, Siegfried Sassoon, who had come to prominence during the First World War for his poetry of protest, emerged once again with a poem of protest about the wasteland that followed the Second World War. It was titled “Litany of the Lost”:

     In breaking of belief in human good;

     In slavedom of mankind to the machine;