Grace, in her early days, aspired to be a journalist and later helped in Parish worked and act as Catechist with the children. Her books and diary show her love of writing. She left a note, shopping list, in this book of Van Zeller. The Chapter, "Spiritual Writer's Cramp", recalls the interests of Grace.
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was born in Egypt and entered Downside Abbey at the age of nineteen. He briefly left Downside to try his vocation with the Carthusians. A talented sculptor as well as a writer, his artworks adorn churches in Britain (many works can be seen at Downside abbey) and the United States. He was a friend of the great Catholic writers Msgr. Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh, and is the author of Holiness: A Guide for Beginners, Holiness for Housewives, and Spirit of Penance, Path to God, We Sing While There’s Voice Left.
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We Sing While There’s
Voice Left
by Dom Hubert Van
Zeller 1950
SPIRITUAL WRITER’S CRAMP pp.56-60
ONE OF the things which hinder a
writer on spiritual subjects is the
fact that he cannot get away from himself.
His case-book is his own soul, his stock-pot is his own past, he is his own yard-stick. [1] It is a
drawback to him for two reasons:
first he is forced in upon himself, examining, weighing up, racking his memory,
testing his good-faith the whole time
and this is bad, because the spiritual life is meant to be as objective as possible; second, his wares are thrown out into
the open market to be viewed by the curious and the critical as well as by those whom he is doing his best to benefit. He becomes like a poulterer
who decides that the best way of
satisfying his customers is to lay himself on the marble slab along with the pheasants and partridges. He is, in a true sense, "game". The
customers, quite rightly, take advantage
of this. Peering and prodding, the reviewers make comparisons. Deductions follow swiftly. It is, for the person on the slab, all very intimate
and shaming. But then the price of
having a public is the giving away, to a certain extent, of what is private; it is a price which any writer should be willing to pay. If he is
sincere, an author is the servant of
other people the vast majority of whom he
is never likely to meet - and service is always a privilege for which one has to pay. All the same, it does rather cramp one's style —to know one is
virtually a confession at Hyde Park Cornet.
[1 Of course it works both, ways, because if he is
fool enough to shy away from his own
experience on the grounds of personal failure (or on any other grounds if it comes to that), he will show
himself up pretty soon as an impostor. People know instinctively when he is drawing upon other men's findings.
So it is safer in the long run to
stick to what he knows from the inside from his inside.]
What has been said here not
apply only to writers on the subject
of spirituality: it applies to all writers, but particularly, in the secular sphere, to p0ets s novelists, and dramatists. In a lesser degree are
historians and biographers involved,
while clearly it has only the most accidental connection with political pamphleteers, economists, and students of sociology. Every craftsman
however all the more so if he is a
creative artist as well betrays his personality in Ms work He must do. It is to
a large extent through his work that
he expresses his own essential and individual self. A man may find means of fluent self-expression over a tankard in an inn or across a kitchen
table when discussing household
expenses with his wife, but if we are looking for the normal signs of a man's development, if we want to discover traces of the incommunicable
ego, we must examine the kind of
impress a man's character has left upon his work.
The question for the individual
worker to decide is how much or how
little of himself lie need or possibly must
reveal. In order to make his work a true and finished realisation of what
was originally conceived, he may not divorce the maker from the made. He not only may not, but cannot. He will expose himself somewhere.
Certainly the history of literature
has shown that whether authors have or have not consciously approached the question of self-revelation in their work, the question has in fact
-though variously and according to
the different natures involved been, decided. Some have obviously made up their minds to give away no more of themselves than they could
help; others have gone the whole
length and allowed the world to see them as, accurately or inaccurately, they have seen themselves. Others again, and let us hope that there are
more of these than of any other, did
not seem to mind what came to light about their interiors provided the main purpose of truth (or of art, or of politics, or of morality, or of
whatever cause it was that they were
trying to further) was served. Thus you get Dickens, for example, guarding the secrets of his own personal struggle, and putting people off the
scent right and left. Not even
Dickens could altogether cover up the frustrations which were his by circumstance and temperament. In another column you get such widely
different writers as Tolstoi,
Chesterton, Graham Greene, Dostoievski, Ibsen, Elizabeth Bowen, Mauriac, Virginia Woolf, Compton Mackenzie, Emlyn Williams, each in his
or her contrasting way ready to
reveal as much as anyone wants to know.
Their essential natures, though
not necessarily their moral conflicts
or unique spiritual aspirations, are open to the skies. Finally you get a smaller group of writers who quite deliberately investigate the nature of
man by carefully studying their own.
These are they who tell the time by the ticking
of their own hearts. Other people's problems, whether fictional or actual, are seen as projections of their own. Given right principles such
writers, on account of their
first-hand approach and intuitive grasp, can be enormously helpful in the
world. All too often, however, they go
round and round in circles always coming back to themselves as the focus of interest. It is all right to start off from self, but it is a mistake to be
so absorbed in the starting point as
to be for ever returning to it. D. H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Proust, Flaubert, Joyce, Matthew Arnold are names which suggest themselves, but such a
selection is entirely arbitrary and probably most unfair. At It is curious that among this last company,
whether or not you happen to agree
about the actual in the secular list,
must be numbered most of the more widely read spiritual writers. This is not so curious when you consider two things: first, as already noted, that
the of research is necessarily the
soul of the person writing; and second that, in the effort to suppress what is wrong about his own geist or daemon, the spiritual
writer is letting off steam. This last point
is worth a final paragraph.
It must be remembered that the
writing of books is often for this
kind of author the only outlet. Where another may find parallel or complementary forms of self-expression in rearing a family, in travel, in
running a farm or an estate, in
going to race meetings and the theatre, the ordinary writer of spiritual books must particularly if he has not the active care of souls and does not play
the piano or paint work the creative
urge out of his system somehow. The apostolic
urge is only an aspect of the creative urge, and both find fulfilment of some sort in writing books about the spiritual life. If all this energy
came forth in the form of fiction it
would probably be an even greater release, as it was for instance in the case of Mgr. Benson, but it is probably true to say that when celibate writers
take to telling stories out of their
heads they tend to do so with more reference to their hearts than to their minds. Psychologists would tell us that where there has been no experience
of passionate romance a good enough
substitute may be found in writing about
it. Rather than turn themselves into romantic novelists, authors with any sort of interest in the spiritual life are inclined, wisely, to walk on
safer ground.
To conclude. Whatever we may
feel about releasing tie incommunicable
ego, and allowing for die drawbacks already
mentioned in this essay, it does seem to be worth while for a man to exploit any inclination which he may have towards writing for the benefit
of his fellow men. [1] It will mean that he has not only to test his subject by
his knowledge of himself, but that he has also to test himself by the practice
of his subject. And this is very good for him indeed. The same is the case with
regard to preaching: the value of
what is said is measured by the sincerity of its source, and the source is valued according to the sincerity of its purpose. There are dangers of
course: the writer may become an
exhibitionist, he may be more concerned with his powers of perception and exposition than with what he perceives and exposes, he may cheapen
his vision or use it for ambitious
and material ends. There is no knowing what a man may not do with the gifts God gives him. But assuming that the soul has a right intention
and is not deliberately unfaithful
to its call, the dangers will be to him drawbacks only and to be bracketed with the trivial little things which we considered at the start. It
is always the same in the spiritual
life: such dangers have power to cramp
but not to crush. Does it so very
much matter if our style is toned down and
our freedom of expression is limited? So long as we set out to declare what we conceive to be God's word, and stand by that intention till the opportunity
of doing so is removed, there is no
great likelihood of spoiling the work either by exposing ourselves too readily or congratulating ourselves too soon. We have our critics to thank
for this.
[1] The reflections expressed here are intended to
counter the misgivings suggested on p. 41.
