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PARTISAN REVIEW
that Bernanos adores the priestly function. Adores? At least he is
obsessed with it, and the erotic analogy persists. The feeling changes
with the object. The fetishist cannot be truly said to love the shoe or
the fur-coat in the sense in which he ought to have loved its possessor.
Is it perhaps that for the intelligent, contemporary Catholic the
priest is a figure he cannot accept? It must be obvious to an intelli–
gent Catholic that priests are commonly stupid and that many of
them mislead their flocks. Does he therefore wish to attach to them
a primitive, magical and quasi-phallic significance in order to fit
them into his world-picture at all? To working-class Protestants in
provincial towns, the Catholic priest is at once a figure of ridicule
and fear. I was brought up to believe that when a Catholic priest
visits the house of one of his parishioners, he leaves his umbrella on
the door-step as a sign that nobody, least all the husband, must enter.
Also, Catholic girls were supposed to be particularly easy for a young
man to persuade, doubtless because of some morally debilitating ele–
ment in their religion.
Certainly, the rank-and-file, secular priest is the central figure in
Catholicism, and certainly Catholic intellectuals are embarrassed by
him. He must be either sentimentalized, deplored or haloed with
primitive mystery. He is more popular with anti-clerical writers than
with his co-religionists. The lecherous, tormented priests of Liam
O'Flaherty, the bumbling idiots of Joyce, are more alive than any–
thing in
croyant
literature. Leon Bloy ignored the parish priest,
though he liked Trappists and Carthusians. Graham Greene has ·one
book,
The Power and the Glory,
which I imagine to have been directly
inspired by Bernanos. The priest here is placed in a country which
Greene visited, hated and failed to understand, and he is a bibulous
fellow of weak character but an efficient scapegoat. Otherwise, Greene
ignores all priests, secular and cloistered. His liveliest cleric is an
unfrocked Anglican.
In Greene's novels, the plumbing system of grace is in full flow,
but the scapegoats are laymen, preferably criminals and almost cer–
tainly lapsed Catholics. But the machinery of fear is altogether more
·elaborate and sophisticated in Greene. Fear itself is his obsession, fear
his theme. In
Brighton Rock,
which has been commonly regarded as
Greene's masterpiece, it is explicitly stated that the forces of good
and evil must be felt with maximum impact and that a bad Catholic
is
superior to a good pagan for this reason. In other words, faith
increases the
frisson.
The chief argument for belief is that, if you do
not believe, you cannot be damned.
