High Church Dionysians and the Problem of Pride: A Review-Essay

…and the house beheld a twofold woe,
and all Cyrene bowed her head,
to see the home of happy children made desolate.

Callimachus, 22nd Epigram

Anniversaries matter. One doesn’t have to be a historian to realize this. You might be a husband or wife who forgot your wedding anniversary, or a world leader who forgot one of his country’s signal military triumphs that turned the tide of a major conflict (D-Day, for instance). Anniversaries are privileged moments for us to experience the plenitude of memory, that testify to our more than material natures—“For who is sure he hath a soul,” John Donne asks in The First Anniversary, “unless / It see, and judge, and follow worthiness, / And by deeds praise it?” Last year, 2022, presented the Catholic literary sphere with two literary birthday parties. Those accustomed to large extended families perhaps won’t be strangers to celebrating a thirtieth and tenth birthday in the same year, perhaps even of two firstborn cousins.

September 1992 marked the release of Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, and May 2012 the arrival of Christopher Beha’s first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder. By the strange temporal coincidence of their birth, we may be brought to hear the resonance between the two fictions. As with all cousins, the resemblances are recognizable, but fainter than those between siblings.

This metaphor applies not only to these first novels, but also to certain aspects of their authors’ careers. Tartt is of the generation before Beha, but both writers were close to age thirty when their first novels were published. Both presently have three novels alive in the world, Beha with his compact and fast-moving narratives writing a bit faster than Tartt, who tends to muse slowly over pages and pages, spacing her fictional children with about ten years between them.

Both writers had widely acclaimed first novels, wildly acclaimed third novels (Tartt won the Pulitzer for The Goldfinch in 2014, and Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction among other awards), and second novels that some viewed as red-haired stepchildren. Talking briefly with me after a 2021 conference panel at Notre Dame, Beha noted that his Arts & Entertainments (2014) somehow failed to attract the widespread attention garnered by his other two novels, but that it might well be his favorite. Likewise, we might imagine that The Little Friend (2002) would hold a special place in Tartt’s affections, as her only novel so far to be set in her native Mississippi. But despite having a rightful claim to be one of the best Southern gothic novels so far this century, it tends to be forgotten between the Pulitzer-winning Goldfinch (which spawned an adaptation on the silver screen in 2019) and the stunning debutante The Secret History.

Both writers, notably, are Catholics. The convert Tartt and revert Beha (something in the writing of What Happened to Sophie Wilder helped bring him back to his childhood faith) both see that the depiction of faith and Christianity has to be done well on the level of art to be convincing. In “The spirit and writing in a secular world” (2000), Tartt claimed that a rare minority of novelists, “those of the very first rank—Dostoevsky is one who comes particularly to mind—are able to talk engagingly and at length about spiritual convictions without sabotaging narrative credibility, but this is a trick requiring exceptional passion and dramatic skill,” and a trick that even in the hand of masters like Tolstoy or Dickens sometimes fails to win the suspension of our disbelief. Nonetheless, she begins the essay by acknowledging that “faith is vital in the process of making my work and in the reasons I am driven to make it,” and concludes the essay by recalling the twelfth-century legend of Our Lady’s Tumbler, suggesting that “story-telling is not a religious gift per se, but it is good to remember that even lesser gifts—no matter how humble or frivolous or inadequate they may seem—can be a way of praying if they are practiced in the right spirit.”

Significant differences mark the two authors’ fictions, the more prosaic of which lies in their syntax. Tartt tends towards an expansive sentence with long clauses and subtle elaborations, which mirrors a certain way in which a knowledgeable person might speak were they to give you a tour down the hallway of their aunt’s house in the country, explaining a piece of art here or a family heirloom rather out of line with the best taste there. Beha crafts a succinct, precise line, dramatically well paced and aurally well balanced. Imagine Hemingway took a shot of Flaubert’s inkwell in the arm—although it’s hard to imagine Hemingway taking too many of that kind of shot.

But their literary worlds are quite different on an ontological level as well. Tartt’s novels consistently begin with a sense of some original crime: a founding murder, to use a term of René Girard. The to-be-explained murder of Bunny, the unexplained murder of nine-year-old Robin, the (accidental?) murder of Theo Decker’s mother—that these deaths color the worlds of Tartt’s narrative becomes clearer when one considers her general preference for first-person narrators (The Little Friend proving the exception) whose imaginations for various reasons have been enthralled by such tragedies. By beginning with the crime in the open, Tartt immediately frames each of her novels as a quest like that of the Holy Grail knights, where the reader first needs to find questions adequate to the experience. A tasteful epigram or two, from Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Albert Camus, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (of whose work she has published several translations), or even perhaps St. Thomas Aquinas, might help the reader to untangle the unruly skein of the crime at hand. The murders feel so central that they seem to stain the novels themselves, giving them recurrently, in the words of The Secret History’s narrator Richard Papen, “a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes.”

By contrast, Beha’s fictions tend to deal, rather, with the slow burn of decadence and the compromises with mediocrity made by characters in their late twenties and early thirties. When his characters eventually compromise with evil instead, it tends to shock us and send us scrambling for deeper understanding.

Both The Secret History and What Happened to Sophie Wilder fit within the category of Catholic literature, as recently sketched out for poetry by Dana Gioia in his First Things article, “Poetry and Christianity.” Each novel was written by a mind steeped in a sacramental imagination. Each presents a poetically crafted cosmos in imitation of the real viewed from a Christian perspective. But an even closer unity binds Tartt’s campus novel and Beha’s post-campus novel. Both present us with a preeminent spiritual problem revealed by Christianity, one which the narrators of the novels can only grasp “through a glass darkly”— namely, the vice of pride and its consequences.

An astute reader of the Greeks, like many who have made Tartt’s first novel a cult classic, might instinctively object to the phrase “revealed by Christianity.” Did not the ancient world know pride? The hubris of the tragic hero, the “pride goeth before a fall” of Proverbs, the megalopsuchia of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics? In a way, yes; in a way, no. For just as much as the ancient world knew pride as a vice, it also knew it as a virtue. While a kernel of truth remains in this latter conception, when combined with a particularly strict rendering of the problem of the few and the many, it presents a twofold problem to the Christian facing the ancients: first, the suggestion that pride may only be a problem facing the highborn, the noblest of Athens and the strongest of Sparta; second, perhaps more perniciously for some, that pride is the appropriate disposition for the few, that they should lord it over the many as the kings of Gentiles do (cf. Luke 22:25, Matt 20:25). It is the second half of this problem that plagues The Secret History’s little city of Hampden College, a more attractive precursor to the post-Christian universities of today, and yet one in which, to borrow from Yeats, “a terrible beauty is born.” For that plague to be cast out of the city, the characters who most deeply bear the plague’s marks must be themselves exiled, as Sophocles’ Oedipus is from Thebes. This is the tack Tartt takes, killing one fascinating character and allowing the other to be revealed as something of a fraud.

In an early review for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani admittedly struggled to describe The Secret History, but aptly characterized it by telling her reader to “imagine the plot of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment crossed with the story of Euripides’ Bacchae…told in the elegant, ruminative voice of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Having decided to throw a birthday roast in a review Gawker published January 2022, Tara Isabella Burton rather faulted The Secret History for being a “curious dark mirror” to Brideshead, a revision of Waugh’s most popular novel “without God at the center. . . where the aesthetic pull of beauty collapses into, at best, the snobbery of upper-class social signifiers and, at worst, a Nietzschean disdain for human life itself.”

It seems curious that Burton laments something that seems praiseworthy. Tartt doesn’t simply copy her inspirations. Tartt’s poetic purpose seems rather to follow that of Flannery O’Connor, whose sense of humor she admires and admits to sharing, or perhaps better yet, Walker Percy, whose novel The Moviegoer one imagines she must have read. Could it be by coincidence or due to some strange providence that both novels effectively conclude on Ash Wednesday with their protagonists outside (in one way or another) the Church?

Contra Burton, there are real goods being sought in the Greek class at Hampden College, but goods, like the classical tradition itself, that are radically incomplete without Christ. As Romano Guardini said in The Last Things, “the fact remains that as long as we live within the historical order, the intended order and the actual order do not coincide.” This entails that in this vale of tears “beauty may be perilously independent of goodness.” Such a perilous independence as we see in the novel reminds us of the fragmentary apprehension of both beauty and goodness before Christ’s revelation. About halfway through the novel, for instance, the group is dining at the Hoosatonic Inn, and Henry invites the waiter to eat with them. He converses with him, Richard notes, not as an equal exactly, but in a way that was fitting and put all at ease. Richard recalls their teacher Julian speaking about one of the definitions Plato gives for justice in the Republic, that members in a hierarchical society act as is appropriate to their station. Despite being unsure how this applies to those who combine poverty with exceptional talent, such as himself, Richard sees this idea of justice reflected in Henry’s conduct and in the way that the poor staff of Hampden admire both Henry and Julian.

Yet the apparent justice of the Classics crowd is challenged by their reaction to the aftermath of the group’s experimentation with Dionysian rituals. Their pursuit of Bacchic ecstasy results in the savage albeit unconscious murder of a local chicken farmer, Mr. McRee. While members of the group confess to feeling bad about McRee’s death, they don’t feel bad enough to risk serious prison time and the social consequences which would come from calling the police. Insofar as they are like the few of the classical world, they resemble the oligarchic Thrasymachus more than the aristocratic Socrates or Aristotle. The justice that determines their action depends fundamentally on their sense of superiority, “the advantage of the stronger,” not simply due to their social class, but due to their cultivation of the Classics.

Their sense of superiority shows up in a high estimation of their tactical ability. This is intimated early in the novel by Julian’s wry suggestion that they could perhaps conquer nearby Hampden town due to their reception of Xenophon and Thucydides. The queen of the moral and intellectual virtues, prudence, has been relegated by Henry, the group’s de facto leader, to a mere martial strategic genius. This reduction of prudence to a more Machiavellian virtù suggests, especially after the murders, a connection between their sense of the few and the many and the friend/enemy distinction (a translation of Nietzsche’s slave/master morality into politics by Carl Schmitt). Given the group’s rejection of the idea that they share a common good with the townies, it’s no wonder Aristotle only shows up in the novel as the author of the Poetics and the tutor of Alexander. In the May 2021 issue of New Polity, Marc Barnes and Andrew Willard Jones persuasively argued that a Schmittian insistence on the friend/enemy distinction as the basis of politics cannot be made congruent with the politics of the common good shared by Aristotle and the Catholic tradition. We should not be surprised then that the politics of The Secret History are so infernal.

Additionally, the protagonists’ claims to superiority rest on the intellectual virtues alone, as their “master morality” differs not in content but only in outward appearance from the lack of moral virtue generally present in the novel. Julian’s students share the same moral failings as do the students they think of as the hoi polloi: drinking to drunkenness, lying, and meaningless sexual encounters of the unconjugal kind. At the same time as Henry, Francis, Charles and Camilla romp through the forests of Vermont seeking some measure of self-transcendence through Dionysian drinking bouts and sex rites, the characters of the “many,” such as Judy Poovey and Cloke Rayburn, frequent Friday night parties with relatively similar extracurricular activities—just minus the chitons. Despite the great deal of pride involved in being a High Church Dionysian, being possessed of a sacred language, mystery, and exclusivity, the Classics crowd and the hoi polloi both seek an escape from the self, both involving the same ingredients, differing mainly in their relationship to the body. The hoi polloi seek escape through bodily pleasures simply, whereas the Dionysian novices use them as means for an out-of-body experience.

This search for transcendence, in each case pursued through a disregard of the hylomorphic order of human body-soul harmony, reveals a hunger for something higher than the ego and all its anxious works. Something that the cradle Catholics of the group had not found in the Church of their youth, likely decked out in 1970s fashion with felt banners, guitars providing the dissonance spiritually present between the faith of the ages and such practically Pelagian hymns as “We Will Build the City of God.” That the novel ends with the group’s remnants in a traditional liturgy with the priest vested in black, receiving ashes—yet not communion—suggests the possible emergence of humility, despite the non-Catholic Richard’s lack of understanding of the event’s significance.

Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder is likewise voiced by an intelligent yet unbelieving narrator, bereft of faith and its consequent sacramental awareness. Charlie Blakeman has just published his first novel, a general flop, and finds himself locked in malaise, unable to write. Despite his writer’s block, a new story begins when Charlie’s long-lost college girlfriend Sophie Wilder appears. The novel is intricately structured, in two halves of seven chapters each, named for the two things that drove the philosopher Kant to wonder: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Alternation is the name of Beha’s narrative mode here. In a move reminiscent of and yet more subtle than Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), the chapters shift between Charlie’s first-person narration and an apparently omniscient third-person narration focusing on Sophie’s life prior to the novel’s opening.

What we discover by the novel’s end is that Sophie has entrusted Charlie with telling her story, such that the third-person chapters are not as omniscient as they seemed. Despite Charlie being a cradle Catholic, he is singularly unequipped to understand Sophie’s death in the wake of her apparent suicide. When the police officer in charge of the scene tells him that it doesn’t seem that her taking as many pills as she did could be anything but self-destruction, Charlie responds, “She’s a Catholic… it’s against her religion.” We get the sense that Charlie remains uncomprehending of Sophie’s spiritual collapse even to the end, as the last chapter, narrated in third person by Charlie, apparently still hoping for her salvation, concludes the novel with the word “redeemed.”

Having been the beneficiaries of Charlie’s rose-colored remembrances of the college days he shared with Sophie, readers want her to prove strong in her newfound Catholic faith and the moral law within, yet she succumbs to major temptation. It seems sensible to ask, with Charlie: How could Catholic Sophie do this? About halfway through the dark forest of the novel, Charlie, reflecting on his recent encounter with Sophie, notices something that helps us make sense of her action. Remembering his Catholic childhood and school days, he notes the incongruity between the faith of people he knew growing up and Sophie’s: “I don’t think I knew a single person who would have spoken in that way about saving someone’s soul.” While Charlie connects this disparity to the apologetic way in which he heard the faith presented, we ought to remember that Sophie herself said that she “went downtown to save Crane’s soul.”

We see then a similar problem to that presented in The Secret History—the status of pride and the unity of the virtues—but apparent here as the dynamic of the unity of the vices, moral and theological. Sophie takes Crane’s salvation upon herself, rather than recognizing that such a work is Christ’s alone, and that she can only serve as Christ’s agent—which is possible only insofar as she remains in Him. During her vigil at Crane’s deathbed, she stops attending Mass and even remarkably stops praying altogether. The action of the novel reveals the dynamic between pride and despair: Once you have assumed the power of salvation over your own suffering, no matter how subtly or unintentionally, you are destined to fail. Such failure can ruin you, should you take the route of Judas rather than that of Peter: self-flagellation rather than repentance. Such a possibility is always present in human nature, as our actions are not determined by a transparent command of God, as if faith served the function that cultural Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci assign to ideology, wholly determining human action. Rather, as Guardini writes, “Our life in history proves that the human will is free. The will is free not only in matters of preference but in issues of the gravest import. Above all, it is free to make the ultimate decision, the choice that effects the final purpose of man’s life.” What Happened to Sophie Wilder testifies to that freedom, and the way in which moral and demonic vices such as pride and despair restrain us from participating in “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

“I don’t like Flannery O’Connor,” a friend of mine told me last year. We had traded books several months before. I had loaned her The Secret History. It hit just the right chords. “Her stories are too tidy—in all that mess of humanity, always at the end, the answer is just there, just the Church.” She struggled with her Catholic upbringing, seeing in its ritualism and memorized catechisms a too-ready answer to all the strangeness and ambiguity of the world’s suffering. The Catholic novel, while presenting an intelligible response to that suffering (we can know God in a limited way by reason, as Vatican I’s Dei Filius affirms), does not seek to empty suffering of its mystery, the abyss beneath our feet which resists reasonable inquiry. Why did Satan fall like lightning, when he had the best possible view of God, that beatific vision which satisfies all longings in the human heart? Rather, the Catholic novel seeks to present a vision shaded in some peculiar way with the apprehension of another, and higher mystery—that Christ descended from heaven to suffer, die, and rise on our behalf: a mystery wholly intelligible, but to divine, not human reason. Both Tartt’s The Secret History and Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder, by presenting us with “home[s] of happy children made desolate,” allow us well-crafted doorways into the house of fiction, where we can still today fittingly contemplate the pride of man brought low, the loftiness of men humbled.