Souls and Bodies by David Lodge

Abstract

Reviewed by: Souls and Bodies by David Lodge Leslie Woodcock Tentler Souls and Bodies, by David Lodge (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1990), 256 pp. I concede at the outset that mine is an eccentric choice. Souls and Bodies—first published in Great Britain in 1980 as How Far Can You Go?—did not sell widely in the United States, where Lodge is best known for Small World and Changing Places, novels best described as acute comedic takes on academic life. Can an alleged "classic" be "forgotten" if it was not really known in the first place? Then too, Souls and Bodies is set in England, with British protagonists. What possible relevance, it is reasonable to ask, can it have for historians of American Catholicism? I do regard Souls and Bodies as meriting "classic" status, for reasons I discuss below, and will happily label it "neglected" rather than "forgotten"—a distinction that for all practical purposes is largely semantic. The novel's English setting, however, does raise certain difficulties in terms of its immediate utility for the teaching or writing of American Catholic history. The English Catholic experience, after all, has differed in significant ways from that of Catholics in the United States. The relative size of the two populations provides a point of departure. During the years covered by Lodge's novel (1952–1975), the Catholic population of England and Wales grew from roughly 7 percent of the total to just over 8 percent. In the United States in these same years, Catholic numbers swelled to 25 percent of the total population, still an all-time high. Anti-Catholicism was integral to the history and culture of both nations—American anti-Catholicism, indeed, is largely an English import—but it took a far more virulent form in the British Isles and limited Catholic civic freedom for significantly longer. Presumably as a result, English Catholicism was far less assertive both culturally and politically than Catholicism in the United States, even in the decades after 1945. No cardinal-archbishop of Westminster would ever have publicly condemned the political views of a former [End Page 56] Prime Minister's wife as New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman famously did in 1949 with reference to Eleanor Roosevelt and her opposition to public funding for Catholic schools. Not surprisingly, then, the turbulent years that came in the wake of the Second Vatican Council were a good deal quieter in England than in the United States. Perhaps for this reason, the number of priests in the English church did not begin to decline until 1971, five years later than in the United States. Like its American counterpart, the English church grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries primarily because of immigration. But while the United States received Catholic immigrants from a wide variety of locales, English Catholic immigration came almost exclusively from Ireland. (During the period of Great Britain's membership in the European Union, a significant stream of Catholics from Eastern Europe provided new and not always welcome diversity.) The English church, in consequence, has had a less fractious internal history in the past two centuries than its American counterpart. At the same time, it was arguably deprived to a significant degree of the institution-building and political energies that ethnic assertiveness often afforded. But the heavy Irish presence in English Catholicism also meant—and here we have a critical point of similarity with Catholicism in the United States—that the English church was heavily influenced by what one of Lodge's characters calls "the Irish Jansenist tradition"—the world- and flesh-denying obsessions so central to Irish Catholicism since the Famine of the 1840s. So too in the United States, where the Catholic clergy and the episcopate have historically been dominated by men of Irish descent. It is precisely this point of similarity—the "Irish Jansenist tradition"—that makes Souls and Bodies so fruitful a source for historians of American Catholicism, especially when it comes to teaching. (This is a book, I can assure you, that students will actually read.) Lodge is a wonderfully economical writer, with a keen eye for the telling detail. He evokes the collective consciousness of preconciliar Catholicism—"that...