Michael W. Higgins

Tradition and Rebellion in the Writings of R.j. MacSween

Writer, critic, teacher, and priest Rj. MacSween was an utterly Catholic thinker. His sensibility, intellectual predilections, and sacramental vision were shaped and nurtured by his Roman Catholic conunitment. This is not to delimit him. Quite the contrary. NacSween's Catholicism was as expansive as his creative gifts and his physical girth.

Being identified as a Catholic author can prove restrictive, however, particularly in publishing and academic circles on this continent. MacSween eschewed such mindless post-Enlightenment parochialism and publicly wrote of Catholic matters without embarrassment or justification.

He was not a confessional writer, a writer who saw himself as an apologist or polemicist, but a "wisdom" writer, a sapiential thinker. Such a thinker and artist, in the words of the poet-monk Thomas Merton, is possessed of "an awareness of man's life as a task to be undertaken at great risk, in which tragic failure and creative transcendence are both possible. Another aspect of this moral and religious wisdom is a peculiar understanding of conflict, of the drama of human existence, and especially of the typical causes and signs of moral disaster." ("'Baptism in the Forest': Wisdom and Initiation in William Faulkner," The Literaty Essays of Thomas Merton, New York: New Directions, 1981, p. 100)

The stories and poems of R.j. MacSween bear out the appropriateness of designating him a wisdom or sapiential writer. Although MacSween never applies this term either to himself or to any other writer, the deeply spiritual component constitutive of his own vocation as a writer is indirectly highlighted in a review he wrote of Robert Speaight's François Mauriac. A Study of the Writer and the Man. For Maurice the art of novel writing was 'not merely a matter of creating a set of characters and of moving them skilfully through an ordered sequence of events. For Mauriac it was an adventure, a voyage of discovery into regions untouched by man, into spiritual landscapes that startle and amaze, and, at the same time, without removing our feet from this too solid earth." (The Antigonish Review (TAR), Number 29/1977, p. 96) What holds true here for the French novelist holds true for the parson-poet of Antigonish.

But it is principally in the critical essays - generously deployed throughout The Antignish Review from the time of its founding to virtually the time of MacSween's death - where we discover his skill and depth as a sapiential thinker.

MacSween's criticism is sharp, clear, and large-hearted. He writes to understand. He celebrates. He elucidates a life. He champions an insight. He does not write to score points, to factionalize, to indulge his ego. In his essay "Ile Strange Case of A.E. Housman" (TAR, 29/ 1977, P. 85) MacSween observes that the English classicist's articles "wore his unmistakeable stamp ofsharp economical phrasing, absolute accuracy, and ruthless expression of truth." MacSween deplores the fact that many of Housman's contemporaries, and indeed many of his own, see only the academician with the 'endless obscure researching, the treasuring of the minutiae of scholarship, the clanging and somewhat ridiculous battling against other moles of learning." (p. 86)<.P>

In this assessment of the work of A.E. Housman, MacSween deftly betrays his own scholarly prejudices: the necessity for an uncluttered prose style coupled with a healthy intellectual curiosity that spurns the myopic preoccupations of the"moles oflearning."Vintage MacSween. Because he understood the central importance of religion in his own makeup, MacSween was persistently fearless in acknowledging the role of religion in the lives of other writers. Fearless, in part, because he knew that the sexual tastes of artists were standard fare for critics (in later years to be replaced by authorial insignificance) but not religion, and because he knew that for many scholars religion remains a matter of the private sphere only.

MacSween was not a reductivist. He was not dismissive of any approach which could shed light on the work and life of a particular artist. With rare exceptions, Ezra Pound most notably, he found in Catholic writers a cosympathy, a mutuality, which elicited his finest critical writing. Hilaire Belloc, Alexander Pope, Marshall McLuhan, John Dryden (as translator of0vid), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shusako Endo, these and others he wrote about with that largeness ofperspective that Catholicism gave him.

Catholicism also gave MacSween a profound tolerance for all that is human. It nourished his heart as well a his mind, as we can see with his stunningly prescient 1970 piece on Graham Greene, 'Exiled from the Garden." Greene's various autobiographical disclosures - A Sort of of life, Ways of escape, Getting To Know the General, and even j'accuse, the first volume of the Norman Sherry biography of him which he approved of and assisted with, his sublimely funny and theologically multi-textured novel,

Mosignor Quixote, and the frank revelations regarding faith and morality to be found in his interview (a year before his death) with author John Cornwell in The Tablet of England, all ably confirm MacSween's astute assessment of Greene's religion and its critical role in his art: "Catholicism entered his spirit permanently, a strange disturbing kind of Catholicism. It seems always on the edge of heresy, prone to see monsters where angels should be, a lush land of wild flowers and crippled men. And yet without this grasp upon the supernatural, however twisted it might be, Greene would only be an entertainer of the masses, a polished writer of thrillers and romances. His religion, however, gave him a world view that left nothing out. Greene felt compelled to focus his eyes upon one aspect of that panorama. Where the saint would see a garden devastated by storm but still bursting with life, Greene saw only that the garden had been blasted by 'some terrible aboriginal calamity.' These quoted words, written by Newman, express his attitude toward life. Greene lives in a devastated world and its interest lies precisely in its devastation." (TAR, 6/1970, pp. 41-2)

There is no shrewd Catholic propaganda in this, no orthodox denunciation ofgreene's theological improprieties, only a disinterested and sensitive portrait of that spiritual condition that critics call Greeneland.

The quirkiness of Greens's theology did not in itself appeal to MacSween. It was the artist who did. But the theology had to be addressed, the faith of the man explored and appreciated.

A tolerant man and a tolerant critic, MacSween avoided the easy prejudices and snap judgements of lesser critics because he avoided ideology and system, preferring creative sympathy to pedantry.

In his five pieces on Evelyn Waugh in The Antigonish Review "Evaluating Evelyn Waugh" (25/1976); "The Private Papers of Pinfold" (31/1977); "The Labels of Evelyn Waugh" (32/1978); "Evelyn Waugh's Ladies'(46/1981); "Helena Waugh's Failure" (73/1988)-MacSween identifies the genius of the man with disarming clarity and musters more sympathy for the acerbic English satirist than Waugh has enjoyed for years. He understands the complex and paradoxical composition of the bone fide humorist: "As is the case with all humorists, there was a very serious side to Waugh. He was always of a religious cast of mind, from very early in life the Diaries reveal, and he changed very little in this matter for the rest of his life. When he became Catholic he did not cease to be Waugh." ("Pinfold," p. 94)

In fact, MacSween observes, "he was saved by his Catholicism." ("Ladies," p. 45) His tendency to ennui and despair could, quite simply, have overwhelmed him had he not had the anchor of the Roman Church and his second marriage. He also had the anchor of his not inconsiderable creative gifts, the principal of which in MacSween's mind was Waugh's capacity 'to reproduce the human voice as it sounds around him. To take the colloquial and to perfect it without destroying its native quality." ("Ladies," p. 44) This is the kind of artistry MacSween most admired and sought to achieve in his own critical prose, fiction and poetry, an artistry as far distant as possible from the strained reasoning and tortured prose of the professional academician and from the affected discourse and rarefied sentiments of the decadent.

This is not to suggest that MacSween felt comfortable only with tradition and the forces of reaction. Quite the contrary, for his sympathies were with the true rebels - T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins and, yes, Evelyn Waugh - artists and thinkers who knew, as MacSween notes in his poem 'if clarity returns" (TAR, 64/ 1986, p. 39):

the certainties of scholarship
 fade with the ink
 that created them
it is best to recoil into our cells
 to reconsider
            the truths we cherish 
if clarity returns it will be by retrenchment
 by prayer in the quiet evenings
 by meditation in the night
 by the slow examination of our state
 by the warm love for what is true

This is the rebel's true charter. It is MacSween's own. Like the South African poet and Catholic convert Roy Campbell, whose 1982 biography by Peter Alexander MacSween reviewed in "Roy Campbell Talking Bronco' (TAR 50/1982), the true artist and rebel is "uneasy among his fellows, who ... for the most part ... have accepted domestication in their lives and in their art." (p. 35)

Certainly, MacSween did not accept domestication, but he did accept the ordinary, the commonplace, the mundane as the very turf on which one happens upon the numinous, the transcendent, the extraordinary. In this he was strikingly like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the berelettrist, savant and generalist whose rootedness in the Catholic tradition and fully free spirit appealed to MacSween profoundly.

In his 1986 article, "G.K.C.: The People'sjournalist' (TAR, 66-67), MacSween provides the reader with his own artistic credo, a credo that celebrates the ordinary and the truly human: "...we do not have to go seeking for the exotic in order to live with intensity. Every man, and of course here he [Chesterton] is embracing the mass of the people, lives a life of great risk. In fact, there is no escape from it." (p. 18)

What he also admired about G.K.C. was his unlaboured erudition, his refusal to write only for the specialist, and his insatiable curiosity regarding all matters of the mind and spirit. From the bowels of Antigonish MacSween traversed the globe and spanned the centuries. G.K.C. was the perfect model.

And so was John Henry Cardinal Newman. The Cardinal was the subject of one of MacSween's last articles for TAR. And there is a wonderful rightness about it being so. Newman the thinker embodied 'the best of the tradition MacSween loved and served. Newman the writer, the stylist, embodied the perfect craftsman.

Newman's genius was made rich and accessible by his translucent prose. MacSween writes in "Cardinal Newman Writer " (TAR, 81-82/ 1990): "There is a silvery sheen on Newman's writing. It is never muddied, never knotted, never dark and obscure. There is nothing finer than the sight ofhis mind unravering the intricacies of some dark thinker whose thought seemed beyond retrieval before." (p. 93)

Newman understood the Catholic tradition. He treasured it. He explained it. He enriched it. It was the tradition that nurtured MacSween and he, in turn, treasured, explained, and enriched it in his own way. His poem, "treason" (Called From Darkness, Tarlane, 1984) poignandy illustrates the consequences ofbeing shallowly rooted and, more obliquely, the reprehensible consequences of the modern trahison des clercs:

 when the young became dirty and savage
 the aged surrendered their manners
  and the principles 
       of arch and dome

 when the young sang simple ditties
  according to blood
       and breathing
 the aged threw away Palestrina
  the style of sense and balance
  the discipline of the parts

 when the young grew tired of destruction
  the aged died
  without pageantry of ritual
 they had beggered themselves
 in a cause
 of one day

Like Newman, MacSween had little stomach for the ephemeral, the fashionable, the banal. That's why he loved his Pound and McLuhan, for they were true rebels grounded in the perduring. No more appropriate an epitaph can be found for the life and talents of R.j. MacSween, sapiential writer and Catholic thinker, than his own fine words on the essential Newman: "In his religious ceremonies, in his sermons, in his lectures, in his letters, in the formulation of his ideas, the fire breaks out to excite and charm his friends and his readers. Only a recognition of this fire explains the charisma of his presence and the speed and beauty of his prose." ("Cardinal Newman Writer," p. 95)

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The Antigonish Review is a quarterly literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. The Review features poetry, fiction, reviews and critical articles from all parts of Canada, the US and overseas, using original graphics to enliven the format.

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