Dan England and the Noonday Devil Read online

  ~Stephen Mirarchi

  Atchison, Kansas

  March 27, 2017

  * * *

  1.See James Terence Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 95–97.

  2.Myles Connolly, introduction to Mr. Blue (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1954), pp. 7–12.

  3.Advertisement for Dan England and the Noonday Devil, Wilson Library Bulletin 26 (September 1951): p. 24.

  4.Sister Consolata, S.C.N., review of The Reason for Ann and Other Stories by Myles Connolly, Books on Trial 11–12 (1952): p. 338.

  5.Riley Hughes, review of Dan England and the Noonday Devil, The Catholic World 174 (October 1951–March 1952): p. 314.

  6.Fr. Fulgence, O.F.M., review of Dan England and the Noonday Devil, Franciscan Message 5, no. 5 (Nov. 1951): 159.

  7.Review of Dan England and the Noonday Devil, Catholic Library World 23–24 (1951): p. 159.

  8.Ibid.

  9.For a helpful introduction, see the “Joseph A. Breig Papers” at the Notre Dame website: http://archives.nd.edu/findaids/ead/xml/bri.xml.

  10.Review of A Halo for Father by Joseph A. Breig, The Liguorian 41 (November 1953): pp. 700–701. The same review ranks Breig “one of the best personal essayists in Catholic America” (701).

  11.Myles Connolly, Dan England and the Noonday Devil (1951; repr. New York: Echo, 1967).

  12.Advertisement, Wilson Library Bulletin, p. 24.

  13.Advertisement for Dan England and the Noonday Devil, Ave Maria 105 (1967): p. 26.

  14.Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 324.

  15.Mitch Finley, “‘Mr. Blue:’ a kite-flying prophet of a living faith,” Our Sunday Visitor 79 (July 22, 1990), p. 6.

  16.Dom Jean-Charles Nault, O.S.B., The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times (2013; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2015).

  17.Ibid., p. 18.

  18.Ibid., p. 201.

  19.For a lay focus, see chapter 5, “Restoring Manhood,” in Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2017). For a priesthood focus, see Fr. James Mason, “The Forgotten Vice in Seminary Formation,” Homiletic & Pastoral Review (July 27, 2015). A diocesan document on Catholic manhood that has garnered national attention is Into the Breach, an Apostolic Exhortation by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted (Sept. 29, 2015).

  20.St. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Fr. Elder Mullan, S.J. (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1914), p. 19.

  21.Myles Connolly, Dan England and the Noonday Devil, introduction and notes by Stephen Mirarchi (1951; repr. Tacoma, WA: Cluny Media, 2017), p. 89.

  22.St. John of the Cross, The Sayings of Light and Love, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, DC: ICS, 1991), p. 95, §124.

  23.Myles Connolly, “Chesterton’s Cap and Bells,” America (August 26, 1922), p. 440. The original quotation can be found in Chesterton’s essay on “Savonarola” in Twelve Types: A Book of Essays (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1906), p. 171.

  24.Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue (1928; repr. Tacoma, WA: Cluny Media, 2015), p. 105. The original quotation from St. John Vianney can be found in a slightly different translation in The Spirit of the Curé of Ars, trans. Alfred Monnin (London: Burns, Lambert, and Oates, 1865), p. 121.

  25.Myles Connolly, Dan England and the Noonday Devil (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1951), back flap.

  26.Connolly, introduction to Mr. Blue, p. 8.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Benedictine College Library for their timely help and joyful service. Hannah Voss tracked down some newspaper articles and confirmed my assessment that there was not much out there about Dan England. My colleagues Richard Crane and Jean Rioux provided helpful information that improved the annotations. Mary Connolly Breiner provided us with another wonderful preface and graciously answered further questions I had. My lovely wife and daughter have supported me in more ways than I can count.

  Chapter 1

  There were some who looked upon Dan England as merely lazy and self-indulgent, a man who had let himself go. Dan did tarry long at the wine, and he was a hard man to get away from the table, morning, noon, or night. He abhorred exercise, read little, could not endure the theater in any form, hated to leave his home even to mail a letter, and dedicated his life to conversation.

  “Talk is my vocation,” he used to say, his eyes twinkling, his two hundred and thirty pounds bulking hugely over his dinner table, a large globular glass heavy with red burgundy in his hand. “Not in deeds but in talk do I toil for the edification of my friends and the illumination of mankind!”

  It was, thus, easy to understand that some should think of Dan merely as a self-indulgent man who had let himself go. But others of us—the less sensible of us, I suppose I should say—had a somewhat different idea of him.

  Dan was a natural-born storyteller, and he made such living as he made, writing detective stories. His stories were good enough in their way, noted, curiously enough, for their realism and their sharp economy in use of words. But his heart was not in them, and he wrote them apologetically and reluctantly and only for the money they brought. It was in his talk and in the stories he told that he was most himself.

  “I am a hack,” he used to declare, “and the crimes I commit in writing the stories I write are worse than the crimes I write about. Never do I describe a justifiable killing, however horrible, but I feel it is I who should be the victim.”

  Dan was a bachelor and his needs, outside of his beef and red burgundy, were few. But his home was a veritable hotel for his friends, and, as most of his friends were parasites of the most genuine and enduring sort, Dan found himself driven to a toil he did not relish.

  After dark, in regular ritual, this family of friends, most of them usually his house guests, gathered around him—punch-drunk fighters, poets without dreams, refugees from Communism and White Supremacy, painters without talent, derelicts, agnostics, believers, alcoholics, lords, lackeys, of all races, religions, and philosophies, all having in common a love of Dan’s hospitality and generosity, and a few having a love of Dan himself—all gathered around to hear Dan’s tales. This was when Dan was at his happiest and best.

  These were his real tales, he would declare, tales of the adventures of the spirit, as he described them, tales of the men and ideas and enthusiasms that he thought mattered. These were, he would announce solemnly and often, the tales he was presently going to write.

  “When I grow sufficiently wise and humble, which I pray will be soon, I am going to write them,” he would declare. “For they are to be written in radiant language by my immortal soul. These—” he would wave to the pages of the murder mystery that represented the day’s toil “—these are written by Brother Ass, my gross and blundering, poor body.”

  But time went on, and it seemed as if he would never get around to writing his stories. He was waiting, perhaps, until he had grown to be what he considered sufficiently wise and humble. More possibly, he was reluctant to write his stories, preferring to tell them, enjoying the enchantment of his listeners and the immortality of the moment, as did the minstrels and bards of ancient times.

  Dan, using the words from Scripture, as he liked to do, would often raise his wine glass in a toast: “The wisdom of God is the folly of man. To the fools of God!”

  When first I knew Dan, and first heard this toast, it seemed to me that in his extravagance, especially in his prodigality with his stories and ideas and hospitality, he was a fool, and not in a religious sense. It was not until after knowing him for a time and observing how curiously he influenced and, on occasions, inspired those around him that I felt Dan in his folly might well be somehow in the wisdom of God.

  “To affect the quality of the day,” Thoreau said, “that is the highest of arts.” In this sense, Dan was one of the hig
hest of artists. He changed for many the quality of the day and, for more than a few, the quality of their lives. I doubt if anyone who met him and learned really to know him was ever quite the same afterward.

  Of Dan’s particular genius for affecting the quality of the day I shall try to tell—and in telling of it try to sketch a few of the people around him, and presume to give some of his talk and tales, in the desire that others may meet him, even if vaguely and distantly. The best hope of giving an adequate portrayal of Dan—particularly of him in his huge exuberant innocence—lies in the use of his own good words, and I shall sew them together and stitch them in at every opportunity. I therefore beg help not from the gifted patron saints of writers and journalists but from good St. Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers.

  Chapter 2

  It was through Briggs I first got to know Dan England.

  We worked together, Briggs and I, on a newspaper in Boston where he was what was quaintly described in the office as the Religious editor.

  His chief assignment was what was described, also quaintly, as the Religious page, there being nothing particularly religious about it. It was his responsibility to see to it that all denominations were represented as impartially as possible on the page, and that the extracts he made from announcements and sermons were in no way too eccentric or sensational, for such might mar the bland inconsequentiality of the page. Briggs was given a free hand, his work being as little supervised as his page was read.

  Briggs was in his late twenties, some five feet seven or eight in height, but weighing no more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and probably less. This thinness, topped by his skull of a head, his somber eyes and his black, flat hair seemed to associate him properly with the duties of the Religious editor. He lunched alone at a small vegetarian restaurant, and came and went without any apparent awareness of anyone else in the office. It was pretty much by accident that I got to know him.

  He had not appeared at the office for several days and had telephoned from Dedham, where he lived, saying he was indisposed but would be back in a few days. Taggart, one of the assistant editors, sent me out to see him.

  “Just check and see if there is anything the kid needs,” Taggart suggested. This show of benevolence from the hardbitten, often sadistic Taggart surprised me. But, when he added, “And see if you can’t get the low-down on him from his doctor. I figure the dope’s been dead for about two years now and nobody’s told him,” I got the feeling that old Taggart would not be too much upset if Briggs were really on his last legs, and he was sending me out to check the chances.

  Taggart was the old-style loud, profane, fist-brandishing editor who was always annoyed if an underling did not jump or quail before his thunder. But Briggs neither jumped nor quailed, and this, particularly in a Religious editor, and more particularly in a walking skeleton like Briggs, exasperated Taggart greatly. Most of us would, out of diplomacy, at least pretend to be beaten down or bruised by Taggart’s fulminations. But not Briggs. He took them coolly, blandly, as if he were clipping a paragraph from a sermon on the disadvantages of sin. There was no courage or character in this. Only what might be called Briggs’s chronic detachment.

  But Taggart’s hope was not to be fulfilled. I found Briggs sitting in the living room of the ramshackle old farmhouse that was his home, without any slight indication of illness about him. It was a cold, drab, late autumn day, and there was a fire in the fireplace, a small, smoking, complaining fire. The window shutters were drawn against the chill outside or, more probably, against the world outside, and the room was quite dark and completely dismal. There was no doubt Briggs belonged in the room.

  His mother and her sister, two thin, angular, prematurely old women—who looked, to me, at any rate, exactly alike—were sitting with Briggs when I arrived. But immediately on my entrance, they rose noiselessly and slipped away, a pair of gray shadows fading silently into the darker shadows of the depths of the house.

  Briggs greeted me without surprise, as if my dropping in were a routine event of every day, like the coming of the postman. But he did treat me with courtesy; formal good manners being natural to him.

  He thanked me for coming. I was quick to explain, lest he ascribe to me some virtue for the visit, that Taggart had sent me.

  “Mr. Taggart. I see.” He looked into the abject little fire a long moment. “I did not expect him to be so concerned. Tell him I’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “You feel better, then?”

  “I feel all right,” he answered indifferently.

  I studied his gray face, noted it looked no worse than it had looked before. “What was the matter with you?”

  “I had an attack of…let’s call it futility,” he replied levelly.

  I laughed, of course. I thought he was trying to be amusing. “Just felt like a little vacation?”

  “Please. I was ill,” he solemnly reproved me. “Very ill. I had an acute attack. I’ve been extraordinarily disinterested for the past several days.”

  I searched his face. Briggs was the last man in the world I would suspect of a sense of humor. But he had to be joking.

  “Disinterested? That’s pretty good,” I said. “The gang will get quite a laugh out of that.”

  “It’s no joking matter,” he replied grimly.

  I saw, then, he was deadly serious. Crazy, I said to myself, crazy as a bedbug. To humor him, I asked as gravely as I could, “This futility business, how does it attack you?”

  He pondered, his eyes still on the dreary fire. “You get up one morning, and you say to yourself, ‘What’s it all about?’ Then you answer yourself what you’ve known all along, that it’s all about nothing. You remember it’s all inconsequential and not worth the trouble, and you end up with an acute brain ache.”

  “What is it exactly that’s not worth the trouble?”

  He shrugged ever so slightly. “Life. People. Work. Living. Death is always nipping at your carcass. Cancer. Brain hemorrhage. Heart attack. If you run, death runs after you. It always gets you. So, why run?”

  “And how do you treat yourself for this brain ache?”

  “I don’t know. It is a chronic ailment of a wise and civilized mind. Sometimes the ache is more acute, that’s all.”

  “Maybe if you got another job on the paper—at City Hall or the water-front beat, say—maybe you might find an interesting reason for living,” I suggested, more to see what his answer would be than anything else.

  He frowned. “Only a fool goes around looking for reasons and significances. Only a fool drugs himself with faiths and philosophies—fantasies to keep him from looking reality in the face. Hope—optimism—they’re failings of the weak, phantasmagoria of diseased minds. Like romance, like religion. Forms of self-intoxication, as Shaw called them.”

  “Mr. Shaw? The Sunday editor?”

  “George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, the great apostle of realism and honesty,” he answered with a slight trace of pomposity.

  I searched his face again. Behind all this pedantic talk there had to be some comic notion. But no, he was as somber as a man could be.

  “You don’t think, do you, that only realists are honest?” I asked, to draw him out. “A poet, for example, couldn’t he be honest?”

  “A sentimentalist is an idiot,” he replied evenly. “I suppose idiots can lay claim to honesty of a sort. The people the Catholics call saints, for example, they are the most dreadful of all sentimentalists, yet I suppose no one could correctly call them dishonest. Self-deluded, perhaps, but not dishonest. I am broad-minded, as you can see.”

  Revelation was piled on revelation. “Doesn’t it ever bother you, being Religious editor?” I asked.

  “I consider myself an excellent choice for the job,” he answered. “I am without prejudices. To me, all religion, from Christian Science to Swedenborgianism, is childish escapism. I look on it as a doctor looks on a disease. Thus, I am impersonal in my editing, dispassionate in my judgments.”

  I g
ot to my feet. I had had all I could take with a straight face. “I’d better be going back. I’ll tell Taggart you’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “Yes.” He went with me to the door. “Tomorrow, I shall again be able to face the great inanities.”

  “He had a sore throat,” I told Taggart. “He’ll be in bright and early.” I could not bring myself to tell the truth. I knew it would not be believed.

  “Maybe he’ll be hit by an automobile on the way in,” Taggart growled.

  Chapter 3

  When Briggs returned to work, he resumed his detached and impersonal routine, apparently as unaware of me as he had been before. If he had any uneasiness at having allowed me a glimpse into the privacy of his peculiar mind, he gave no sign of it. I was a little disappointed. The complete agnostic who considered himself the perfect man for editing church news had caught my curiosity, to say nothing of the man who suffered such strange experiences as acute attacks of futility and disinterestedness. I approached him on several occasions and tried casually to begin a conversation, but he coolly discouraged me. So, soon, we returned to our former relationship, or, rather, lack of it, and the memory of my visit to Dedham grew so blurred and distant that I sometimes found myself uncertain as to whether I had ever been to Briggs’s home to see him. The incredibilities of the man’s talk and temperament that day greatly aided the illusion that I had never been near him at all.

  Then, one day after Christmas, several months later, he approached me as I was going out to lunch and asked me if I minded his going along. He was completely at ease, as much so as if we had been going out together for lunch off and on for years. I covered my surprise as best I could and led him through a snowstorm to Luigi’s, a small primitive Italian restaurant below the street about ten minutes’ walk away.