PARTISAN REVIEW
of irrationalism; or a return to 'values,' though the conditions which
produced them, the conditions of stability above all, are lacking.
And it must be said that the brilliant school of Catholic pessimists
and converts has brought new material to the novel. The soul-one
of the repressed subjects of a rational period-has the attraction
of the repressed. Original sin has replaced sex as the exquisitely for–
bidden fruit; and the pleasure of showing how good are the souls of
bad men has been exploited with brilliance. In their badness lies the
soil of faith: a bad Catholic is better than a good non-Catholic. The
Catholic novelist has the great advantage of writing against the cur–
rent of his time.
But against them must be put the fact that the Catholics are
all converts; they write with Protestant zeal and the Calvinist zest
for damnation. Like the Marxists, they are totalitarians and total–
itarians do not value individual human life. Not for long. Never when
we come to the precise test. Like the Marxists, like the sceptics of our
generation, they are specialists. There is no conflict. There is the
medicinal application of doctrine to life. The result is that although
the religious approach has added new material to the novel, new
material that is handled with all the advantage of the long, flexible
western tradition of Catholic culture, it is still specialized. The range
is still narrow. Life has gone into hospital: the smell of ether, the smell
of the surgery, the unpitying point of the surgeon's knife, are sug–
gested by these brilliant misanthropists, who would persuade us that
we
all
urgently need an operation.
In their general terms, these two movements, the religious and
the political, have done a service to the novelist. They have reawak–
ened his interest in ordinary people, they have interested him in the
present melting of classes--in which a new class, the upper-working
or lower middle-class are coming to power, as interestingly as Balzac's
manufacturers--they are restoring the sense of environment. But
they touch only the fringe of their two subjects, the side to
which their doctrine exclusively directs them. Money and religion:
yes, those are the two repressed subjects in the modern novel upon
which furtively we open the door, two matters so closely entwined in
human life that in observing the lives of ordinary people we can never
escape them. Not only that: their aspect changes in every genera–
tion, as certainly as the fashion of love. How far we have moved,
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