FEATURE
His fertile pen… Charles A. Coulombe remembers Catholic novelist Bruce Marshall
B
ruce Marshall (1899-1987) was a household name in the 1950s – and not just among Catholics. The famed Scots author wrote forty books – most of them novels – in a career that spanned seven decades. His fiction was noted for its combination of complexity and realism, and its tendency to point out the mixed moral nature of humanity; it was filled with the irony of real life. Moreover, it was funny – a good-natured humour born of knowledge and acceptance of human nature. This acceptance was born of Marshall’s wide experience in war and peacetime, and of his Catholic Faith, to which he converted in 1917. Born in Edinburgh, when World War I broke out Marshall enlisted as a private in the Highland Light Infantry. Perhaps partly because of his conversion, when he was commissioned in 1918, he was assigned to the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Six days before the Armistice was signed, he was seriously wounded by shellfire; despite the danger, German medical orderlies risked their lives to save him. During his brief stint as a POW, his leg had to be amputated because of the injuries he sustained. In 1920 he was invalided out of the service. During his convalescence Marshall’s first published work appeared, a collection of short stories entitled A Thief in the Night. Regular career Resuming his education at the Universities of St Andrews’ and Edinburgh, in 1925 Marshall received his BA in Commerce and began his ‘regular” career as an accountant. Taking up a post with the Paris branch of a British firm, he would live in France until 1940’s German invasion. The previous year his first novel appeared. Entitled This Sorry Scheme, it was a realistic tale of a bad marriage. In 1928, he married Mary Pearson Clark. Although he continued to write
AUTUMN 2021
Bruce Marshall: life without the Catholic Faith was doomed to failure
novels, he only found real fame with Father Malachy’s Miracle in 1931. It is important to remember that in the immediate post-World War I era most well-known novelists either ignored religion entirely or held it up to ridicule – and this was especially true of Catholicism. Men like James Joyce shed oceans of ink in this pursuit. But Marshall’s work was different: while on the one hand joyfully affirming the objective reality of the Catholic Faith, it did not spare the foibles of the Faithful – clerical or lay. So it was that the eponymous Fr Malachy, while blessed with a genuine miracle, also had to face indifference and/or hostility on the part of the hierarchy, lay Catholics, and non-believers.
After the success of FMM , Marshall plugged away at both writing and accounting. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, he fled to England with his wife, rejoining the army. He was assigned to Intelligence and spent the war working with the French resistance. Afterwards, he worked with displaced persons in Austria, and was mustered out of the army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1946. He and his wife relocated to the Cote d’Azur and would live there until his death. Marshall continued his writing in his new home and became sufficiently successful to give up his accounting work. In 1944, he produced The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith . This story of a holy and believing priest in a rundown Scots industrial town has often – and rightly – been compared with Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest . Such clerics would continue to populate such of Marshall’s works as A Thread of Scarlet, Father Hilary’s Holiday, and The Month of the Falling Leaves. But his fertile pen was far from restricted to such directly clerical topics. A steady stream of espionage, historical novels, and nonfiction flowed from Marshall during these productive years. Adaptations of his work made their way to film, television, and radio.
'In the immediate post World War I era, most well-known novelists either ignored religion entirely or held it up to ridicule...' 39
