Tea at Trianon: The Catholic Side of Henry James and Hemingway

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

The Catholic Side of Henry James and Hemingway

From Russell Shaw at The Catholic Thing:

I recently read two hugely different novels in quick succession – The Wings of the Dove by Henry James and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Published only 24 years apart – the James in 1902, Hemingway in 1926 – they read now like voices from two different epochs (which they were – the epochs being the years before and after World War I, with the war tracing a blood-drenched dividing line between them).
The Wings of the Dove is a subtle analysis of innocence and corruption in posh settings in London and Venice. The Sun Also Rises, narrated in Hemingway’s clipped, tough-guy prose, chronicles lust and violence among self-destructive pleasure seekers in the bull ring and bars – especially the bars – of Pamplona.

Profoundly unalike as they are, however, the books share an intense interest in Catholicism. But since neither author is usually taken for a Catholic writer, that calls for an explanation.

In a 1993 study (The Catholic Side of Henry James), Edwin Sill Fussell traced a persistent fascination with Catholicism running all through the writing of this great “post-Protestant” writer. For example: In probably the best known of James’s stories, The Turn of the Screw, the malevolent ghosts of the dead butler and governess are Catholics; and in James’s last novel, The Golden Bowl, all four principal characters are as well.

And then there is The Wings of the Dove. Fussell cites textual evidence that Milly Theale, the doomed American heiress at the center of the story, is a Catholic. But even more to the point is a crucial incident near the novel’s end.

Trudging around central London on Christmas morning in a funk over his unwitting role in Milly’s death and the moral dilemma this has created for himself and his mistress, Milly’s close friend, the scheming Kate Croy, journalist Merton Densher decides that a bit of religious uplift might help. Seeing he is in the neighborhood of Brompton Oratory, Densher, though not a Catholic, heads there:

At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really – as it struck him – consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid service. . .which glittered and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of organ and choir. It didn’t match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory, in short, to make him right, would do.

(Read more.)