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ABSTRACT
This article contends that although the ‘golden age’ of the English Catholic novel has received (and continues to attract) ample critical attention, there is much still to be gleaned about contemporaneous Scottish Catholic literary works. In presenting George Scott-Moncrieff’s Death’s Bright Shadow (1948) as a case study, the article identifies a distinctively Scottish Catholic and nationalist imagination, which nonetheless owes much to the conventions of the French Catholic Literary Revival, as well as celebrated works by Greene and Waugh. Ultimately, the article suggests that political nationalism is a key feature of work produced by Scottish converts of the early to mid-twentieth century. It proposes that the geographical, cultural and political realities of place which inform the twentieth-century Catholic novel are a notable, if relatively under-explored, part of Scottish Catholic fiction.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Theodore P. Fraser notes that the work of the early critic of Catholic fiction, Albert Sonnenfeld, ‘reflect[s] on the full range and production of the Catholic novel from the “Golden Age” – the 1920s to the 1950s – and then from the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) to the end of the 1970s.’ The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe (New York, Twayne, Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994), xi–xii. Although Fraser’s study contains a valuable chapter on Sigrid Undset, Gertrude von le Fort, and Elisabeth Langgässer, and despite a good deal of scholarly work on Flannery O’Connor and Muriel Spark, criticism on Catholic fiction has tended to concentrate most on canonical male authors, including (in the French tradition) Mauriac, Bloy, and Bernanos, and (in the English tradition) Chesterton, Belloc, Greene, Waugh, and Lodge. In the last decade there have been several new studies of Greene and Waugh in their religious contexts. These include Martyn Sampson’s, Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), Paula Martín Salván’s, The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene’s Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Michael G. Brennan’s, Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
2 This article expands upon the preliminary remarks on Death’s Bright Shadow which appear in Linden Bicket’s, George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 23–6.
3 Patrick Reilly, ‘Catholics and Scottish Literature 1878–1978’, Innes Review 29, no. 2 (1978): 201. Reilly perhaps suggests here that Scott-Moncrieff does not fully succeed in his task, but his overall assessment of the novel is admiring.
4 Ibid., 201.
5 The most famous exemplar of the Catholic novel in English is still Graham Greene’s so-called ‘Catholic cycle’: Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), and The End of the Affair (1951).
6 George Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow (London: Allan Wingate, 1948), 10.
7 Ibid., 7.
8 Ibid., 35.
9 Morley Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a few friends: a brief memoir (Scotland: The Author, 1987), 1.
10 Ibid. See also: ‘Moncreiff, Robert Scott, 1793–1869 (advocate, illustrator and caricaturist),’ accessed 2 November 2023, https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/agents/people/14612; and Benjamin William Crombie, Modern Athenians: A Series of Original Portraits of Memorable Citizens of Edinburgh, ed. William Scott Douglas (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1882), 49–50.
11 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a few friends, 1.
12 Ibid., 3.
13 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 48, 59.
14 Ibid., 131. George Scott-Moncrieff, ‘The Scottish “Renaissance” of the 1930s,’ in Memoirs of a Modern Scotland, ed. Karl Miller (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 71–2.
15 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a few friends, 4, 5.
16 Edwin Muir, ‘Ann Scott-Moncrieff: An Appreciation’, The Scotsman, 11 March 1943, 4. ‘Scott-Moncrieff, Agnes Millar (Ann), n. Shearer’, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, 2nd ed., ed. Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, Jean Rendall and, Siân Reynolds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 382.
17 Ibid.
18 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a few friends, 10.
19 Ibid.
20 ‘Scott-Moncrieff, Agnes Millar (Ann), n. Shearer’, 382.
21 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 106.
22 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a Few Friends, 20.
23 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 42.
24 Edwin Muir, ‘Ann Scott-Moncrieff, 4.
25 Edwin Muir, ‘For Ann Scott-Moncrieff’, in Collected Poems (London; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1984), 157.
26 Robert Kemp, in ‘Some Memories of Ann Scott-Moncrieff’, The New Alliance, April–May (1943): 8.
27 Poignantly, the entry for Robert Scott Moncrieff in Crombie’s Modern Athenians notes that: ‘Robert Scott Moncrieff, whose age at this time we would suppose to have been over seventy […] was then a widower, and the beautiful portrait of his deceased wife – a well-known masterpiece by Raeburn, now in our Scottish National Gallery – then hung on the wall of his dining room.’ Crombie, Modern Athenians, 49.
28 Kemp, ‘Some Memories of Ann Scott-Moncrieff’, 9.
29 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a Few Friends, 13.
30 Ibid., 15.
31 ‘Scott-Moncrieff, Agnes Millar (Ann), n. Shearer’, 382.
32 Ann Scott-Moncrieff to Morley Jamieson, May 2, 1941. MS 26973, National Library of Scotland. This and other letters written by Ann Scott-Moncrieff are quoted by kind permission of her literary executor, Mrs Lesley Findlay (neé Scott-Moncrieff).
33 Compton Mackenzie, Catholicism in Scotland (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1936), 8.
34 Fionn MacColla, Too Long In This Condition: Ro Fhada Mar So A Tha Mi (Thurso: John Humphries, 1975), 77.
35 An excerpt of ‘Balmorality’ is reproduced in Margery Palmer McCulloch’s edited volume, Modernism and Nationalism, Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance (Glasgow: Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 2004), 250–2. Scott-Moncrieff, ‘The Scottish “Renaissance” of the 1930s’, 74.
36 MacColla, Too Long In This Condition: Ro Fhada Mar So A Tha Mi, 41. George Scott-Moncrieff to Morley Jamieson, September 17, 1940. MS 26973, National Library of Scotland. This and other letters written by George Scott-Moncrieff are quoted by kind permission of his literary executor, Mrs Eileen Scott-Moncrieff.
37 George Scott-Moncrieff to Morley Jamieson, date unclear but likely 1940. MS 26973, National Library of Scotland.
38 Scott-Moncrieff, ‘The Scottish “Renaissance” of the 1930s’, 70.
39 George Scott-Moncrieff to Morley Jamieson, November 24, 1939. MS 26973, National Library of Scotland.
40 Ann Scott-Moncrieff to Morley Jamieson, dated ‘2d Sept’ but collated with other letters from 1941. MS 26973, National Library of Scotland.
41 David Lodge, ‘The Catholic Church and Cultural Life’ (1980), in Write On: Occasional Essays ’65-’85 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 33.
42 Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn, or Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927), 35.
43 Lodge, ‘The Catholic Church and Cultural Life’, 33.
44 Ibid., 34.
45 David Ferguson, ‘Calvin in Scotland’, Theology in Scotland 17, no. 2 (2010): 67.
46 In a letter to Jamieson on August 20, 1941, Ann Scott-Moncrieff writes: ‘The Power and the Glory you know of; I enclose ancient Horizon review of it – for amusement.’ She implores Jamieson to read the book before the review, and is likely to be referring to Arthur Calder-Marshall, ‘The Works of Graham Greene’, Horizon, no. 1 (May 1940): 367–75. MS 26973, National Library of Scotland.
47 George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (London: Boriswood, 1937), 317.
48 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 78.
49 Ibid., 79.
50 Ibid., 90.
51 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a Few Friends, 12.
52 Ibid., 11.
53 Ibid., 24.
54 Jamieson also claims that the reaction to the Scott-Moncrieffs’ conversion by a friend of the family, Dr Charles Robertson, ‘was typical of many who knew them at the time. He was mystified […] for him their conversion meant that they had ceased to think for themselves and that they were incapable of criticism.’ Ibid., 13.
55 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 251.
56 Ibid., 235.
57 Ibid., 252–2.
58 Richard Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1850–2000 (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 116.
59 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 98, 143.
60 Ibid., 111, 112.
61 The novel also generally echoes Benjamin Disraeli’s, Lothair (1870).
62 See Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross, 102–24.
63 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 89.
64 Ibid., 234–5.
65 Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross, 116.
66 Thomas Woodman, Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 148.
67 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 77.
68 Ibid., 78.
69 Ibid.
70 Reilly, ‘Catholics and Scottish Literature 1878–1978’, 201.
71 Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross, 162.
72 Here, I paraphrase David Lodge’s oft-quoted summation of the preoccupations of the Catholic novel, as seen in Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle. Lodge’s summary from his introduction of Mauriac’s novel is quoted in Theodore Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe, xiv.
73 Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe, xviii. Here Fraser discusses the work of Conor Cruise O’Brien on Catholic fiction.
74 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 69. Warner notes that ‘Mary Magdalene sins because she is not chaste, and not for any other reason that might be considered more grave. The Christian harlot has absorbed to some extent the role of the classical goddesses of love. […] This facet of human personality could not be represented by the Virgin Mary, however beautifully and youthfully and enticingly she is portrayed. Her unspotted goodness prevents the sinner from identifying with her, and keeps her in the position of the Platonic ideal; but Mary Magdalene holds up a comforting mirror to those who sin again and again, and promises joy to human frailty.’ Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 239.
75 Michael Gorra, ‘On The End of the Affair’, Southwest Review 89, no. 1 (2004): 110.
76 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 77.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 77, 161
79 Ibid., 78.
80 Ibid., 140.
81 Ibid., 73, 109.
82 Ibid., 109.
83 Scott-Moncrieff, ‘The Scottish “Renaissance” of the 1930s’, 81.
84 Colin Kidd, ‘Scottish Independence: Literature and Nationalism’, The Guardian, 19 July 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/19/scottish-independence-literature-nationalism.
85 Jamieson, George Scott Moncrieff and a few friends, 23.
86 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 16, 17, 18.
87 Ibid., 21.
88 Ibid., 19.
89 Ibid., 20.
90 Ibid., 35.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., 165.
93 Ibid., 95.
94 Ibid., 7.
95 Ibid., 51.
96 Michael Shaw, The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 208.
97 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 52.
98 Ibid., 164.
99 Ibid., 168.
100 Ibid., 22.
101 Ibid., 165.
102 Ibid., 88.
103 Ibid., 110.
104 Kirsten Stirling, Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 36.
105 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 112–3.
106 Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross, 113.
107 Scott-Moncrieff, Death’s Bright Shadow, 239.
108 Ibid., 164–5.
109 Reilly, ‘Catholics and Scottish Literature 1878–1978’, 201.
110 Ibid., 247.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Linden Bicket
Dr Linden Bicket is Lecturer in Literature and Religion in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. The author of George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), her research focuses on Catholic literature, and on patterns of faith and scepticism in modern writing.