Art & Sin
I found this Barbara Nicolosi comment interesting:
I used to think sin was necessary to making a great writer. But, then, a good woman I met in Ohio straightened me out, saying, "It isn't sin that makes someone deep, but rather suffering. It's just that the worst kind of suffering is that which has the added burden of remorse."
It reminds me of what Shelby Foote said in a letter to Walker Percy (from The Correspondence of Walker Percy & Shelby Foote). He said that in the end you have to choose to serve God or art and that no great writer serves both. If you put anything before your art you are holding back. (I can't remember what he said about Dante - my best recall was that because Dante was so set on vengeance - by gleefully describing people he didn't like in Hell - that perhaps Foote didn't consider him devout enough to be applicable.) Foote says Flannery O'Connor was an excellent but not great writer for that reason. (Of course, the fact that O'Connor suffered so much supports the good woman in Ohio's point rather than Foote's.)
My literature palate is insufficiently developed to be able to tell the difference between an good and a great writer. James Joyce (at least Ulysses) makes no sense to me and seems hardly worth the effort. I'm told that T.S. Eliot wrote better before his conversion but again I'm not astute enough to discern. (On that note: I've always wanted to try to compare a $500-a-bottle glass of wine and see if I could tell any difference between that and a $30-a-bottle glass.)
Of the list of writers just below the "immortals" there are Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh...who aren't exactly models for the faith I'm afraid? No one can judge another's soul, but supposing their faith was weak then perhaps the nearly faithless might sometimes evangelize the totally faithless more effectively than the devout. God can surely wish to use those who can speak fluidly the language of modernity, though that still assumes (one would hope) that the writer is seeking first the Kingdom. For what is it to gain the whole world but lose our immortal soul?
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