Notes from the Radical Middle
Edited by Haley Stewart
Word on Fire, 2024; 200 pp., $24.95 (paperback)
A Review of A review of Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know
Catholics with high-minded or artistic inclinations have long been frustrated by the difficulties of cultivating what the novelist Lee Oser refers to as “the radical middle.” Drawing inspiration from St. John Henry Newman, Oser sees a space between the sacred and the secular, in dialogue with both but not aligned absolutely with either. Christians standing in this space can prioritize the truth in their intellectual and creative labors, offering benefits to the other two realms.
In this spirit, many people have recognized that art and literature, rooted in Christian truths, have the potential to yield tremendous fruit. They enable us to grapple with truth in ways that are deeply faithful while avoiding some of the constraints that impede representatives of the institutional Church. Artists are not chained to the literal; they can use metaphor and image to explore ideas from new angles. Also, because the Christian artist is on some level an individual agent, not a fully licensed and sanctioned representative of Christendom, he can pursue the truth with a certain boldness, like a scout venturing into hostile territory. He has the freedom that comes from knowing that he (or at least his work) can potentially be disowned if he crosses the wrong border. He moves without the weight of the bishop’s crozier or the papal tiara.
A Christian humanism, which explores deep questions about the human condition within a Christian philosophical framework, can not only explore new lands but also forge badly needed pathways between older and newer “countries,” occupying a space that looks towards the heavens without losing sight of the ground. When the gulf between common culture and the Christian worldview grows frighteningly wide, that’s the moment when artists, novelists, and humanists of all sorts need to work overtime to bridge that gap. And success stories there surely have been, though many Catholics presently have the sense that they are struggling mightily to get traction on this front. That’s an excellent reason to pick up Word on Fire’s new collection of essays, Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know.
This book delivers exactly what it promises: twelve essays from different authors, acquainting readers with the lives, works, and literary significance of twelve female Catholic novelists. Some, such as Flannery O’Connor and Sigrid Undset, are already familiar staples of a Christian-humanist reading list. A few, most notably Toni Morrison, are famous but not as Catholics. Several, such as Rumer Godden, had one rather famous book that I knew (in her case, In This House of Brede), but also a much larger corpus of work that I probably should have known. Then there are writers like Caroline Gordon, who tend to be better known for reasons other than their novels (in her case, her work as an editor and her marriage to the poet Allen Tate). A few of the featured writers were born in the nineteenth century or still alive in the twenty-first, but it would be fair to think of this as a “long twentieth century” survey of female-authored Catholic literature.
The essays are accessible and suitable for introductory purposes. There is an introduction from the editor, Haley Stewart, and a general conclusion from the Spanish writer Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera. And, though I almost hesitate to mention this for fear of drawing attention away from the book’s more substantive merits, but the book itself is quite beautiful, with a lovely cover, high-quality paper, and firm binding. It’s a bibliophile’s delight.
Survey books of this kind clearly prioritize breadth over depth, but they can have real value, especially by serving as an excellent entry point for deeper engagement with Catholic literature. Most people, I expect, will walk away with a list of novels they now want to read. (I now have Alice Thomas Ellis’s The 27th Kingdom and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on my reading list.) It also provides useful fodder for general reflection on the challenges of reinvigorating Catholic humanism. What enables a Catholic novelist to produce valuable work and get traction? What obstacles may stymie that effort? Are there sparks right now that we should be blowing, and how would we do that?
I have no single grand theory to unveil but can offer three loosely related thoughts that played through my mind as I considered this arresting collection of writers. The first is that the book largely supports my general impression that the middle decades of the twentieth century were rather a good period for Catholic literature, but the past few, less so. Alice McDermott is still a working writer, and Donna Tartt is at least still alive, but Christian humanism seems to have faltered a bit in the twenty-first century. One obvious explanation is that cultural forces hostile to Catholicism have captured major centers of culture, diverting resources and talent in other directions. But that explanation is somewhat dissatisfying; we shouldn’t need multimillion dollar grants to write stories, and it’s not as though Undset, O’Connor, Ellis, Gertrud von le Fort, or really most of the writers in the volume were resoundingly feted or overwhelmingly approved throughout their careers. They too were swimming against cultural tides and often working under difficult conditions. Excessive praise can be bad for writers. They need to struggle a bit.
This leads to a second thought: is it possible that many of our talented writers today are finding opportunities, but not of the sort that lead to a careful development of ideas or deepening of talent? We live in an impatient age, one in which there is great demand for “content,” though not necessarily of a healthy or uplifting kind. Perhaps many of our talented writers are charging off in search of “influence” and, too often, producing shallow clickbait that temporarily scratches the artist’s creative itch and the consumer’s yearning for distraction and entertainment without quenching the deeper thirst for beauty and truth. I offer this theory tentatively, because there is nothing new about writers being pressured to keep their bills paid by meeting deadlines. Many of the writers in this volume wrote for magazines (Caryll Houselander), worked as editors (Gordon, Ellis, Spark), or even started publishing houses of their own (Josephine Ward). Still, in those days, the content-producing machine didn’t move at such a frenzied pace, and readers, instead of restlessly “surfing,” might relax in the evening with a book or magazine. If we want more quality novels, both writers and readers may need to find a way to slow down.
That leads to a final observation. Good novelists can come from a wide range of backgrounds, but talented people are much likelier to produce good novels if they can find their way into circles of like-minded people where their talents can be fostered and encouraged. (These tend to be small and smoke-filled.) They need meaningful points of contact with the surrounding culture but needn’t enjoy its approval. But, importantly, to foster writing talent, literary circles must exist. People with talents, not only in writing but also in networking and building up camaraderie, must expend energy developing those human connections. Very occasionally a good writer does emerge out of a cloister of some kind, unheralded and apparently unassisted, but that’s very rare. All the writers in this book had mentors and literary friends.
Some might ask with suspicion: why produce a book specifically about female Catholic novelists? I might counter: Why Not? Other books could be written with other principles of selection, but there can be interest in comparing female perspectives. Not all the essays in this book comment explicitly on the writers’ femininity, and those that do are quite free of bitter oppression narratives. As a mother of five, I appreciated the fact that several of these writers (Ward, Undset, Ellis) were mothers of large families, but I also enjoyed the way that many fell very far outside the stereotypes people often apply to female writers, especially ones associated with religion. Are you one of those “women can’t be funny” people? Go pick up a book by Muriel Spark. Were you under the impression that women are sweet and sentimental? Meet Flannery O’Connor.
At the risk of indulging in some stereotypes myself, I would note that women are often rather skilled at networking, forging human bonds, and bringing people together. Several of these authors employed those talents even as they produced excellent novels of their own. If we do succeed in cultivating the radical middle, bringing about a new flowering of Christian humanism, you can be sure that it will involve many vibrant networks of creative Catholics and many fascinating and colorful women. Lord, let it be so.
