The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950

Prologue

xi P r o l o g u e George Orwell noted in several of his essays of the 1940s that what he referred to as “political Catholicism” had been a central feature of intellectual life in England between the two world wars. Comparing au courant intellectuals’ recent interest in the Communist Party to the earlier influence of Catholicism, Orwell, writing in 1940, observed of the late 1930s, “It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had ‘joined’ as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Ca­tholi­cism was fashionable, to hear that so-and-so had ‘been received.’” Explaining that “nationalism” was “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests,” Orwell noted in 1945 that “ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism.” For Orwell then, this brand of Catholicism was more than a religion, more that is than a particular theology and form of worship. It was a political phenomenon, comparable to Communism or Fascism, and just as mischievous in his estimation.1 Orwell’s political Catholicism was the product of an articulate counterculture of self‑consciously Catholic writers and artists—­ including novelists and poets, historians, an accomplished painter, a prominent sculptor, several publishers, and many journalists. That such a group developed in a nation of peoples who had defined themselves as Protestant for centuries is noteworthy. That many of these individuals were neither members of England’s old recusant Catholic community nor from among the recent generations of Irish immigrants who had accounted for the vast majority of the Church’s increase in England but were instead converts to Catholicism makes this religious dimension of interwar England extraordinary. xii To most scholars, however, the notion that Catholicism had been an intellectual force in interwar England will come as a surprise. While the names Belloc and Chesterton remain familiar, they are likely to evoke the atmosphere of late-Victorian and Edwardian England—of opposition to the Boer War, of debates with Shaw and Wells, and perhaps of the prewar Marconi scandal. Not enough attention has been paid to the impact of Belloc and Chesterton after the Great War, and of the many Catholic writers and artists whom they influenced during this later period too little is heard. To be sure, Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have not been ignored, but of the many other prominent Catholic intellectuals of the era, of Eric Gill and Vincent McNabb, of Douglas Jerrold, Christopher Hollis , Douglas Woodruff, and Arnold Lunn, of David Jones, Tom Burns, Bernard Wall, and Michael de la Bedoyère, or of Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and Christopher Dawson—to name just a few—not much has been written beyond the odd biography and essay. That this group constituted an intellectual community of considerable weight and influence in these years has been, in general, lost on historians of the interwar frame of mind. This book seeks to repair this neglect. It argues that the Catholic intellectuals in interwar England were not a disparate collection of individuals but a genuine community united not only by close personal ties but especially by ideology. The foundation for this community, I explain in chapter 1, lay in the ideas of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), as promulgated in the years immediately before and after the Great War. Belloc presented a unified and self-consciously Catholic theory of government, political economy, and history. Coupled with his dynamic , confrontational personality, this ideology made its first influential converts, as I detail in the second chapter, in the persons of the Dominican priest and social critic Vincent McNabb (1868–1943), the sculptor and writer Eric Gill (1882–1940), and the prolific man of letters G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). The members of this first generation of Bellocians, who had each, like Belloc himself, come of age in late-Victorian England, began to promote Belloc’s ideas almost as soon as he had proclaimed them. Prologue xiii The next generation of Bellocians, examined in chapter 3, included the author and publisher Douglas Jerrold (1893–1964), the journalist Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978), the historian Christopher Hollis (1902–77), the novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), and the apologist Arnold Lunn (1888–1974). These writers were fundamentally of the postwar...