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His fertile pen
Charles A. Coulombe remembers Catholic novelist Bruce Marshall
Bruce 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 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.
Blazed a trail
It may well be said that he blazed a trail for such modern Catholic novelists as J.F. Powers and Flannery O’Connor, who like himself adopted a realistic vision of a Faith which was as firmly planted in this world as in the next. Marshall serves as a bridge between the interwar Catholic Literary Revival and these postwar greats. Yet, his work has seemingly vanished from both the secular and the Catholic markets and is not to be seen in major anthologies of Catholic authors. Why would this be?
Part of it may be assigned to the decidedly ambiguous motives and morals of many of his characters –Catholic and non- and anti-Catholic alike. Although he certainly has heroes and villains, Marshall also gives a great many characters who are like us: mixed, uncertain, and often far more like our opponents than we would like to admit. This unsparing view of even his fellow Catholic was not calculated to win approval from those of his co-religionists who preferred to see fiction involving the Faith in pure black and white.
But an increasingly hostile secular literary establishment could not be expected to embrace him either. Unlike such figures as Graham Greene whose own doubts were reflected in their work, Marshall offered no such indecision. His characters might be mixed, and their own faith might be tainted or even ridiculous, but not the objects of their belief. A bishop or priest might be greedy, blind, or traitorous, but the Great God Who made Heaven and Earth still came down to the altar at their bidding. So too with the faithful. Whatever their failings, their prayers went up to a Heaven that hears them.
Hostile reaction
There is a third factor, however. Even as Marshall had been a keen-eyed observer of the travails of the Church and the world through the two great wars and the period between them, so too he proved to be with both the postwar scene and the chaos that affected the Church in the wake of Vatican II. In his 1970 novel The Bishop, he lampooned the hostile reaction of trendy clergy to Humanae Vitae. Three years later came its sequel of sorts, Urban the Ninth, a “Catholic comic thriller,” which featured the Pope elected in the disastrous wake of Pope 40
Marx the First, who had vanished in an airplane crash. That renegade Pontiff is found alive and forms the subject of the next in the series, likewise named Marx the First. The returned Pope’s radicalism and the resistance to it may eerily remind the reader of certain recent developments. The last of these Catholic dystopian novels is Peter the Second, which features a Soviet apparatchik who undergoes a genuine conversion, enters the priesthood, and reverses the doctrinal and liturgical havoc wreaked by his predecessor – while allying politically with the Soviet Union.
Despite the dark comedy of this series, it does reflect the deep concern that Marshall developed for the direction in which the Church appeared to be headed. Starting in 1970, he became involved with both the nascent Latin Mass Society and Una Voce, serving as the head of the Scottish branch of the latter organisation in 1973. From then until his death in 1987, Marshall was as deeply concerned with defending the Church’s tradition as he was with lampooning its opponents in his fiction. In today’s climate, that by itself would be more than enough to guarantee him anonymity.
For the rest of us, however, it makes him a figure to emulate. Just as he viewed the everyday world through the eyes of an unsparing Faith, so should we. While making every allowance for fallen human nature, he nevertheless held out for both wonder and redemption. For Marshall, any attempt to accurately depict or understand life without the Catholic Faith was doomed to failure – just as eliminating any other key factor would be. In essence, defending Catholicism was defending objective reality. In a world dedicated to sordid fantasy, His is a message we would do well to hear. Certainly, his books could do with a rereading.
Bruce Marshall: life without the Catholic Faith was doomed to failure
