Catholic Writing

Extract

Mr Evelyn Waugh once wrote, in a letter, I think, to a Catholic newspaper, that it is the business of the novelist to portray man ‘against a background of eternal values’. Few novelists and few critics have been sufficiently clear-headed to attempt such a succint definition. In making his point so neatly, Mr Waugh has disclosed the dilemma in which the modem poet and novelist find themselves, a dilemma which is fairly represented in this passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s own notes on novel-writing:

‘Great novelists write without pre-assumptions. They write from outside their own nationality, class or sex.

‘To write thus would be the ambition of any novelist who wishes to state poetic truth.

‘Does this mean he must have no angle, no moral viewpoint? No, surely, without these he would be (a) incapable of maintaining the conviction necessary for the novel; (b) incapable of lighting the characters, who to be seen at all must necessarily be seen in a moral light.

‘From what source then must the conviction come? and from what morality is to come the light to be cast on the characters? The conviction must come from certainty of the validity of the truth the novel is to present. The “moral light” has not, actually, a moral source; it is moral (morally powerful) according to the strength of its power of revelation. Revelation of what? The virtuousness or non-virtuousness of the action of the characters. What is virtue in action? Truth in action. Truth by what ruling? in relation to what? Truth by the ruling of and in relation to the inherent poetic truth that the novel states.’