A thought-provoking examination of the literary stars who became Catholic – from Evelyn Waugh to Muriel Spark
I
n the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene. But there was a whole host of poets, artists and public intellectuals less known to us today, whose “going over to Rome” provoked envy and dismay.
In this thoughtful though brisk book, Melanie McDonagh, a columnist for The Tablet, gives us 16 case histories of Britons who went “Poping” during the scariest decades of the 20th century. At a time when reason and decency appeared to have been chased out by political extremism and global warfare, it was only natural to long for something solid. Writing in 1925, Greene confided to his fiancee “one does want fearfully hard for something firm and hard and certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux”.
Contrary to lurid Protestant fantasies, Catholic priests were not on the hunt for celebrity scalps to “lure” into their incense-fugged, whiskey-sodden clutches. Again and again, McDonagh’s converts report being taken aback by the way in which their approaches to Brompton Oratory or Chelsea’s Farm Street Church were met with a cool equanimity and slightly humiliating lack of interest. The job of the instructing priest was to tell you what was what, furnish you with the Penny Catechism and send you on your way. According to Maurice Baring, a man of letters who converted in 1909, the clergy were what ticket offices were to train stations: they gave the traveller information and told them where to go. Whether the traveller boarded the train was none of their business.
