A few minutes with A. J. Cronin

With my background in English literature, dare I admit my love for the novels of A. J. Cronin? (Well, why not? I have an MA in musicology, yet admit to a passion for 1960s rock music.) Cronin indeed had a gift for using the language well, though his novels tend to the melodramatic - Laurence Carroll, the main character in "A Song of Sixpence," sees more of the morbid side of humanity in the first ten years of life than I have in nearly half a century. His themes are solid, but the plots cry out for negative criticism. With that established, I can confess that I always did find them addictive. :)

I suppose that Cronin's best-known work was "The Keys of the Kingdom." Though Francis Chisholm, the main character, and I have little in common, I strongly identified with many of the questions he had from childhood. He could see the hand of God no less in the Buddhist or atheist than in the Christian - and, indeed, some of the Christians depicted (who, on the average, were no worse than many I observed in a lengthy church career) could learn quite a bit from those 'heathens.' Yet one particular incident in the book reminded me of a constant problem - the balance between devotion and a desire to see supernatural manifestations. I suppose that, for any devout Christian, the remoteness which we can sense at times in our relationship with God makes us wish that, perhaps, a resurrected Christ would invite us to place his hands in his side. I could write an essay (which I'll spare my readers for now) on how maturity demands our giving up anthropomorphic images, and acknowledging the inadequacy of our vision. Yet there often is another, darker side, where we so ache to see the hand of God (whom, deep down, we perhaps fear was a Deist version, who set the world in motion but basically could not care a fig for us) that we look for the magical.

In "The Keys of the Kingdom," young curate Francis Chisholm is assigned to his home parish. A young woman with an inordinate taste for smells and bells (and don't think I do not love both), Charlotte Neily, becomes quite a phenomenon. Charlotte notices that a local spring, long dry, has flowing water - and, with visions of Bernadette in her head, fancies she has seen the Blessed Mother. As a consequence of the emotional impact, Charlotte is temporarily unable to eat, and marks of stigmata appear. All who know of this, save the sceptical Francis, are quite delighted - and Charlotte's mother and their servant keep up the appearance of her living in ecstasy, needing no nourishment and so forth, until Francis discovers the deception.

Though the specific circumstances are not one too many curates would have encountered, the underlying problem is not unusual. I well remember, when my sensitive, young artiste's soul was under the influence of an excessively charismatic group (the Holy Spirit did lots of inspiring and transforming, though the theology of discernment was ignored), and I thought, for a short while, that I could probably do anything but raise the dead, and perhaps even that given time.

Oddly enough, I love folk religion in some manifestations. I wish I had the faith my mother used to bring to her devotions to the Infant of Prague, or the simplicity with which she'd scold Saint Anthony if he was tardy in answering a prayer. The more do I wish I could turn to God with her trust, believing he helped us in temporal needs. Yet I cannot say that such manifestations were 'magical' - they seemed more an acknowledgement of providence existing in all of God's work in creation.

Most of A. J. Cronin's main characters contain an autobiographical element, since he himself was the son of a mother who was Church of Scotland and an Irish Catholic father (hardly enviable in Scotland in the early 20th century.) What blends we all can be - with one part of ourselves seemingly in conflict with the other. I'm thinking of C. S. Lewis - who would know, from his theological works alone, that there was another facet who fell through wardrobes and ended up in Narnia? (I would have loved to sit in the pub with him and Tolkien...) Or John Henry Newman, the liberal Catholic (in the 19th century sense!) who dreamt of the Arabian Nights figures (presumably expurgated version), always had a hint of the evangelical pessimism, yet was bound by Victorian optimism to believe that "to become perfect is to have changed often," as if all change meant progress and improvement.

I must return to Charlotte Neily's 'vision' for the moment. A.J. leaves us with an image, not only of Charlotte caught in a fib and the other curate's dejection, but of one unexplained. A local boy, who is terminally ill and in agony, is cured when his mother immerses him in the water flowing from the well which Charlotte saw. We are left to consider how faith, prayer, love of one human for another, all can be used by the divine hand - even when we are left far more with questions than answers.