Earlier this week, I sent off a "book report" to my colleagues at Loyola about the reading I’ve been doing for the Classics series. I’m not going to leak that HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL white paper here, but there’s some fruit of the experience worth reflecting on.

I’ve read a lot of books over the past six months. Not as many as I should, but I’m doing okay. I’ve learned a lot about the clear distinction between good and mediocre fiction. What’s been most disappointing to me is the number of books recommended to me by kind readers that just don’t hold up – books that are recalled as being great reads, important to their readers’ lives, and so on. I daresay if some of you re-read some of the books you’ve recommended you might have the same reaction.

Part of it is simply certain writing styles and habits that don’t hold up well. Quyite a bit of mid-20th century popular fiction is marked by long (read: endless) conversations between characters, for example, conversations which go on for pages and pages, which would never happen in real life, and which are intended, obviously, to reveal the characters’ inner lives and, at other times, political, social or religious issues of import. That kind of writing just doesn’t hold up today, and doesn’t work, period.

Much of the fiction I’ve been reading is marked by predictable pious plotting. Characters are introduced and established, and within a page you can safely predict who will die, who will enter religious life as a result, and so on. Some things never change!

What I’ve concluded , genius that I am , is that when it comes to the mass of literature, what lasts is, in the end, mostly not accidental. Cream rises to the top in milk and in literature as well. There is an enormous chasm between, say The Power and the Glory and The Cardinal, and even though the former deals with a sinful priest, and the latter with a presumably "good" one, it’s the former, because its honesty, spare, reserved style, artistry and subtlety that in the end, reveals more truth about faith than the idealized portrait in the latter ever could. As a result – it’s the former one that lasts and still has an impact, and the latter which is really nothing more than a quaint relic of a former age that was, if we’re honest, not even truthful or knowing about that – except at the level of revealing the ways that people would like to think about their clergy.

Another example. I had high hopes for one novel, published in the 50’s, with a very intriguing backstory. Written by an author rather well-known for non-fiction works, a Catholic convert, etc. The book was long, but..okay. We could deal with that. The first couple of hundred pages absorbed me. Wow, I thought. This is great, deep, conflicted and knotty stuff, but still accessible. But then….the novel shifted landscape, the protagonist moved and embarked on a bizarre, intense tug-of-war with an older woman which was interminable, and composed of scores, it seemed, of those lengthy conversations I was talking about up there, and that just completely derailed the whole thing. And we still have two hundred pages to go. The last fifty or so were on the level of that first third, and the ultimate payoff did involve this awful woman in the middle,but as it stood…the modern reader would have had a terrible time slogging through that second third, and would have found the experience less than enjoyable, which is not what we’re after. It was, as I said, disappointing.

In general…have you had experiences of re-reading a book that meant a lot to you in your younger days and wondering, "What was I thinking?"

Oh, and after the jump, some excerpts from an An Atlantic Monthly article on "Graham Greene’s Vatican Dossier"

Denunciation or inquiry was the usual means by which news reached Rome of a book that deserved investigation. In the case of The Power and the Glory, the news traveled circuitously. Its point of departure was Einsiedeln, in Switzerland. There, in 1949, the Catholic publisher Benziger was planning to bring out a German translation of the novel. Alarmed by the "polemic" that he claimed Greene’s book was raising in France, a Swiss priest asked the Holy Office for its opinion. Pressure slowly mounted over the years from other parts of Europe, and finally, in April of 1953, Rome looked into the matter closely. Greene’s case was examined (as were similar cases involving Evelyn Waugh and Bruce Marshall). The Holy Office appointed two consultants to consider The Power and the Glory. The first of these wrote in Italian, and he displayed his bewilderment at differences of culture and outlook. Greene’s mentality was "odd and paradoxical, a true product of the disturbed, confused, and audacious character of today’s civilization," he wrote. "For me, the book is sad." Sadness and sorrow, rather than anger and indignation, colored his tone. The work’s title implies an emphasis on God’s power and glory, but as the consultant read the book itself, he found only a barren landscape of despair. "Immoral" or married priests; the ambiguity with which the central figure refers to God and the doctrines of the faith; the conviction or the virtue attributed to Protestants and atheists–all this made it impossible for Greene’s first reader in the Holy Office to see why the book was regarded as excellent literature. "Troubling the spirit of calm that should prevail in a Christian" The Power and the Glory, in his judgment, ought never to have been written. Since the novel had been written, and published, and widely disseminated, the consultant hoped that its fame was already in decline. A condemnation would do no good, because the author, with his "paradoxical modes of thought," would probably not accept it, and the repercussions of an intellectual condemnation could be dangerous, given the author’s fame. Better, the consultant recommended, to have Graham Greene "admonished" by his bishop and "exhorted to write other books in a different tone, attempting to correct the defects of this one."

The opinion of the second consultant, delivered in Latin, supported that of the first. Both readers acknowledged that Greene was not only the leading Catholic novelist in England but also a convert from Protestantism. Despite his many failings, the comfort he offered to enemies of the Church, and his "abnormal propensity toward … situations in which one kind of sexual immorality or another plays a role," it would not do to put him on the Index, because his book was a best seller. The second censor therefore concurred that Greene should be told that "literature of this kind does harm to the cause of the true religion," and that "in the future he should behave more cautiously when he writes."

The mind-set of Rome’s censors was not malevolent. It is difficult, however, to resist the conclusion that it was dim. Defensive about their authority (which they desired to assert even as they doubted its efficacy), and incapable of grasping the conceptual problems posed by Greene’s writing, they could be checked in their course only by intervention from above. That intervention came on October 1, 1953, in the form of a confidential letter written by a highly placed colleague in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. It was a protest addressed to Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, the secretary of the Holy Office.

The letter was from Cardinal Montini, later Paul VI. Another churchman was asked for a second opinion, and despite his positive assessment of the book, the Holy Office nonetheless asked Cardinal Griffin of Westminster to have a sit-down with Greene. Which he did, and which Greene recounts in his intro to a later edition of the novel. Greene wrote an apologetic (and perhaps not totally sincere) letter and..

Three weeks after Greene had written his letter, Cardinal Ottaviano–he who had gleefully proclaimed his readiness to excommunicate any Catholic who voted for the Communists-scrawled on it that Cardinal Griffin had told him that the Holy Office should "understand and excuse" this right-thinking convert. And that is what was done.