Dan England and the Noonday Devil Read online

  DAN ENGLAND

  AND THE NOONDAY DEVIL

  Also by

  Myles Connolly

  The Bump on Brannigan’s Head

  Mr. Blue

  The Reason for Ann

  Three Who Ventured

  DAN ENGLAND

  AND THE NOONDAY DEVIL

  Myles Connolly

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  Stephen Mirarchi, Ph.D.

  &

  A Preface by

  Mary Connolly Breiner

  Cluny Classics

  Stephen Mirarchi, Ph.D., Series Editor

  Cluny Media edition, 2017

  Cluny Media edition copyright © 1951 by Myles Connolly; reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved

  www.clunymedia.com

  ISBN: 9781944418328

  Cover design by Clarke & Clarke

  Cover image: Charles Demuth, After Sir Christopher Wren, 1920, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on cardboard

  Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

  For Myles, Kevin, Terence

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  BY MARY CONNOLLY BREINER

  Introduction

  BY STEPHEN MIRARCHI, PH.D.

  Dan England and the Noonday Devil

  Notes

  There Is No Excellent Beauty That Has Not Some Strangeness in the Proportion.

  ~Francis Bacon

  Preface

  Of the five books my father wrote, Dan England and the Noonday Devil was his favorite.

  I think that this was because, more than any of his other books, it is his own story as he developed it through the years. He was no longer the young idealist who had written Mr. Blue, but a husband and the father of five children. At this time in his life, he liked to tell us that he was a realist.

  Soon you will come to know Dan England on these pages, a man who is happiest when his friends are joining him around his dining room table. They are a colorful band, though not always of good character. Having no doubt about their friendship, however, Dan believes absolutely in the goodness of every one, and sees each as the hero of his own life. He loves to share his beliefs with them, holding forth on everything from Lady Poverty and insurance policies, to good red wine and asceticism. He expounds on Ignatius, Augustine, and Aquinas. He whispers in awe of fatherhood.

  Dan is a single man, too afraid and too cowardly, he believes, to ever attain the “high heroism of dedicated fatherhood.” The father, as Dan sees him, is “that undistinguished yawning man you see in the early morning,” leaving home for his job. Returning each night, tired and troubled, he is smiling and cheerful with his family. No flags or bands for him, he is the “slaving poor father” who seeks above all else to bring home what his children need for their total well-being. Shot through the seeming tedium of his days, however, is his earnestness about teaching them Faith, deeply certain that this is the most critical nourishment he can, and must, provide them.

  In many ways, the story of Dan England continues to be relevant to this day. Being a father is always a difficult and important calling. In a culture where the Self can be regarded as supreme and God as irrelevant, the father is called upon to model heroic love for his family. His children watch, listen, and learn as he shows them his love for the Lord and for those who are lost. They grow in spirit and in grace as they see him live his faith, serving those in need with reverence and warm welcome.

  Such lessons were very much part of our own family life as my Dad modeled heroic love for us.

  Those nights were memorable when we sat around the dining room table with my father’s many friends and listened in fascination to his passionate toasts, his philosophies and theologies. What inspired our deepest admiration, however, was seeing how he handled personal challenges, such as the occasion when someone he believed in, someone he loved as his good and loyal friend of many years, disappointed him gravely. The forgiveness he showed this person then, the tender mercy that came from his depths, amazed us all.

  It is one of the many lessons in Faith that runs through Dan England, and resonates and inspires anew in these difficult and challenging times.

  ~Mary Connolly Breiner

  March 15, 2017

  Introduction

  Nota bene: This introduction and the notes at the back of the book refer freely to the events of the novel, including the ending. Readers unfamiliar with Dan England may wish to read the novel first and then return here.

  I. History and Reception

  When Myles Connolly’s third novel Dan England and the Noonday Devil appeared in 1951, the author was already a successful Hollywood producer and screenwriter. Moreover, his first novel Mr. Blue, which upon its release in 1928 had been promptly forgotten, had caught its second wind and was selling better than ever. As one historian explains, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement had lit a fire in the hearts of many Catholic youth, and they saw in Mr. Blue’s title character a model of the suffering servant.1 Connolly had depicted Blue’s supernatural joy with attractive conviction. So successful was Mr. Blue at this time that Connolly would be asked for the novel’s silver anniversary to write a new introduction, which would appear in 1954.2

  It was not surprising, then, that people compared Dan England to Mr. Blue. Even Connolly’s publisher for Dan England, the Milwaukee-based Bruce Publishing Company, used Blue’s rising popularity to drum up sales: “Here is another novel for all those who kept [Connolly’s] Mr. Blue a favorite through the years.”3 The journal of the Thomas More Association agreed: “Blue’s spirit of improvident unworldliness, Franciscan and casual, continues to startle readers of Myles Connolly’s later books.”4

  The reviews of Dan England were generally good. The Catholic World, the robust magazine of the Paulist Fathers, only politely alluded to Mr. Blue while praising Dan England as “a delightful and a merry book, one that recalls Chesterton’s early novels, and Belloc’s, and of course Mr. Connolly’s own.”5 The Franciscan Message magazine was more direct: “This fantasy/novel isn’t as great as the author’s Mr. Blue, but we think it will appeal to most adult readers.”6 The Catholic Library World enjoyed Dan England’s “soundly and beautifully philosophic” method but worried about its “slight plot,” its “elusive” story, and its tendency to be “‘talky,’” which was “apt to bog down…youthful readers.”7 The same review mentioned that Connolly’s “two previous titles” had been “starred in the Catholic Supplement.”8

  As the dedication of Dan England to his three sons demonstrates, Connolly especially valued fatherhood—specifically, lay fatherhood—and the need to recover its vocation as a potentially heroic pathway to sanctity. Indeed, his exemplary handling of fatherhood in the novel was quickly recognized. A review of a 1953 nonfiction book on fatherhood by Joseph A. Breig—one of the most popular and orthodox Catholic writers of the time9—began with a quotation from Dan England. Breig had used it himself as a touchstone for his book.10

  Dan England was valued enough to merit its own paperback reprint in 1967, three years after Connolly’s passing.11 The book was marketed differently now. The original release had been promoted as a novel about “a joyous gent who wasted his life beautifully until the day he decided to really love.”12 The reprint, however, was advertised as a story “about a man who spends his life helping others, for the sheer joy of it…until he suddenly falls prey to the ‘noonday devil’ of doubt.”13

  While both of those blurbs are more or less accurate synopses of the book, the fifteen years or so between Dan England’s release and its reprint had been both glorious and tumultuous for Catholics. Pope Saint John XXIII had opened the second Vatican council in 1962,
and within a few years no one seriously questioned whether or not they were suffering from the noonday devil. Also known as acedia, the noonday devil is a condition of spiritual weariness often accompanied by worldly absorption or restlessness. If anything, Catholics were suffering from overzealous activism; as one historian puts it, “interpretive chaos…followed in the wake of Vatican II.”14 Connolly’s book depicting one man’s agonizing battle over his inability to embrace a heroic calling suddenly seemed anachronistic. Even Mr. Blue seemed to be “lost in the post-Vatican II shuffle.”15

  A few years ago, however, Benedictine Abbot Jean-Charles Nault wrote The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times.16 Dom Nault points out that acedia has been mostly forgotten in our times, and at a great cost: “it is perhaps the root cause of the greatest crisis in the Church today.”17 He concludes, though, that the noonday demon can be defeated: “The chief remedy for acedia is found in the joy of the gift. A gift that precedes us, which is the gift of God himself…We can make this gift of God our own; we are called to enter into the same dynamism; we are called to give ourselves in turn.”18

  This joyful gift of total self-offering that is a response to Christ’s own gift of His very self is the drama Connolly enacts in Dan England. He had told a version of this story in Mr. Blue, but in Dan England Connolly has honed his craft. He sets up Dan as a spiritual father for the misfits he gathers to himself, and Dan does much transforming good for his friends by storytelling and example. Yet Dan’s interior life calls him to a greater sacrifice, to a greater share in Christ’s own passion and resurrection.

  If Dom Nault’s diagnosis is correct—that acedia is the chief cause of Catholic dullness today—his solution finds no better literary treatment than in Dan England.

  II. Fatherhood, Philia, and Transfiguration

  Though Connolly touches on many themes in Dan England—from the need for a broader view of the global Church, to the supposed battle between faith and reason—I will highlight three of the more important ones, each of which leads to the next: fatherhood, friendship, and transfiguration.

  As mentioned above, Connolly wanted to tell stories of courageous father figures in order to retrieve the heroic vocation of fatherhood. One need not cite the numerous examples in our own times19 of the urgent calls for the same: to recover and re-present the challenging yet joyful role of lay fatherhood and even lay spiritual fatherhood, the domain of the godparent, the wise friend, and others.

  The overall structure of the novel follows this theme, as the title character draws various personalities to himself—some of them quite eccentric—and fills them not only with his food and wine but his love of the Catholic faith. In this way, Dan runs a spiritual boarding house of sorts, with many of the retreatants growing in their love of God and neighbor while contemplating his tales. Connolly often cites the Acts of the Apostles to strengthen Dan’s role as an evangelizer or, somewhat like St. Thérèse, a homebound missionary.

  These fruits of Dan’s spiritual fatherhood lead to philia or the love of friendship. One of the novel’s centerpieces is a story about Ambrose, a composer who values friendship above almost all else. Because Ambrose’s love of friendship is not rooted in the Godhead, it cannot stand a serious attack. When confronted with a particularly nefarious case of treachery, Ambrose disappears, leaving behind only a Platonic ideal. Connolly wisely gives us this story to show the tragedy of secular humanism: if we place our trust in human beings, we will inevitably be disappointed.

  Connolly contrasts this worldly friendship with philia, the love of friendship rooted in God. Several times throughout the novel the narrator mentions this kind of friendship and the bonds it forms—a kind of camaraderie in which people are free to challenge each other in virtue with mutual good will. A true friend in this regard can even forgive a betrayer, as we see in the novel’s climax.

  Such God-rooted friendship, taking its strength from God-given fatherhood, can lead to transfiguration. Connolly uses numerous images of and allusions to the Transfiguration in Dan England to highlight the miraculous, awesome power of spiritual progress. In Briggs, the transformation is his beginning of that life: he goes from a pallid ascetic to a joyful devotee, someone now ready to walk with Christ. We witness a similar transfiguration in Archer at the end of the novel, though the circumstances are more dire. The narrator himself, a proficient in the spiritual life, slowly begins to understand the greater love to which he is called: the specific evangelizing function of a journalist or storyteller, which he has begun to embrace in writing this book.

  The greatest transformation, however, is in Dan himself. A daily Mass-goer, avid spiritual reader, and inquisitive seeker in many areas of knowledge, Dan is highly proficient in the spiritual life but is lacking in one thing. When that obstacle is removed, Dan embraces his cross with great joy—a cross that will bring him into closest union with Christ, the height of the spiritual life. Connolly tells of this dramatic religious experience in the language of the Transfiguration: where Christ draws his closest friends in union with His visible glory, and they hear the comfort of the very voice of the Father.

  Connolly has thus given us a tripartite message: true transformation happens in the fraternity of God-rooted friendship in response to the Father’s love revealed in Christ and which continues through His apostles.

  III. Franciscan, Jesuit, and Carmelite Spirituality

  Like Mr. Blue, Connolly’s Dan England features several Catholic spiritual approaches, namely, Franciscan, Jesuit, and Carmelite.

  The Franciscan way is mentioned in several key passages to highlight the joyful asceticism of St. Francis of Assisi and to note the Saint’s great, final union with Christ in the Stigmata. The title character of Mr. Blue had often been called a modern-day St. Francis, however, and Connolly wanted to tell a distinct story in Dan England, so the Franciscan references are fewer in number here.

  Educated in the venerable Jesuit style himself, Connolly portrays Dan as someone who understands and lives what St. Ignatius calls the “Principle and Foundation:”

  Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

  And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.

  From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.20

  Dan does nothing without praising God effusively for it—from drinking wine to seeing the hidden good in the people the narrator often refers to as “parasites.” We also learn that Dan knows the meaning of true poverty, having lived it as a child; he knows that having almost nothing is not an impediment to generosity, as his relationship with his mother exhibits. As the novel draws closer to its climax, the narrator invokes Dan’s Jesuit training to explain his preoccupation with the salvation of his soul.

  Much of the time, however, Connolly’s use of Jesuit spirituality stays implicit. When he wants to tackle the spiritual concept of attachment, he turns explicitly to the Carmelites. The narrator remarks that Dan’s recitation of one prayer in particular has vast significance: a saying of St. John of the Cross, the great mystic and Carmelite reformer. Dan prays, “O Lord, I beseech Thee, leave me not for a moment, because I know not the value of my soul.”21 A more recent scholarly translation magnifies the intensity: “Now I ask you, Lord, not to abandon me at any time in my recollection, for I am a squanderer of my soul.”22

  In the Carmelite tradition, one must be ready to give up any creature—anything not the Creator—in order to be fully detached and thus unencumbered for full union with God. Giving up sensual pleasures is generally a first step, after which comes the detachment from spiritual things: honors, reputation, accomplishments, and the like. To be fully detached, the person must ultimately be ready to give his or her life, whether that means long imprisonment such as St. John of the Cross himself suffered, or martyrdom,
no matter how painful or obscure.

  The heroic forgiveness Dan shows Archer at the end of the novel is best understood in this light: Archer has removed a stubborn attachment for Dan. The writing of Evening Star had plagued Dan for years; he had made resolution after resolution, only to fall prey to spiritual sloth—the noonday devil—again. He was seemingly unable to rid himself of that attachment. Archer’s treachery is an unwitting gift to Dan, for it removes the final obstacle to his spiritual progress. This is why Dan can forgive and even thank Archer, for with that obstacle removed Dan can proceed to his heart’s true delight in God. He can now receive the greater gift to which he is called, that of martyrdom.

  Connolly himself understood that lesson early in life. When only twenty-four years old, Connolly had written an article on Chesterton for the Jesuit magazine America that concluded with this wisdom from G. K.: “‘Purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else.’”23 Six years later, Connolly would publish Mr. Blue, alluding in its pages to St. John Vianney’s “Catechism on Suffering.” In a crucial moment, the main character Blue resolves to work among the poorest of the poor, and to seal his decision he hands the narrator a holy card with the Saint’s saying, “The cross is the gift God gives his friends.”24 Though that particular sentence never occurs in Dan England, Connolly or one of his editors put a version of it on the book jacket of the first edition: “[Dan] had never carried the cross Christ gives…his friends.”25

  Connolly saw that spiritual progress, especially in its upper reaches, involves embracing one’s crosses with joy. To do so means understanding suffering as redemptive—as removing obstacles that would impede our responding fully to God’s gift of union with Him. Connolly has thus given us in the character of Dan England a model of the Christian hero who risks everything “for the splendid mysteriousness and happy madness of ordinary life…especially when they [have] to be paid for by suffering and sacrifice.”26