Benjamin Ivry, Author at Catholic Herald

Benjamin Ivry

Charles Péguy: a poet trapped between heaven and earth

March 26, 2020

Carnal Spirits: The Revolutions of Charles Péguy By Matthew W Maguire University of Pennsylvania Press, 296pp, £58/$69.95 The paradoxes of the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy continue to entrance readers. Péguy (1873-1914), who was killed at the start of the Battle of the Marne in the First World War, was inspired by three figures: the Virgin

A towering 16th-century Catholic genius

March 19, 2020

Orlande de Lassus (c 1532-1594), a Catholic composer born in Mons in the Habsburg Netherlands (modern-day Belgium), was one of the most prolific creative spirits of the 1500s. Producing more than 2,000 works, he eschewed instruments, unlike most of his contemporaries, and wrote only for human voices. His polyphonic (many-voiced) approach juxtaposed singers in heart-stoppingly

How a once-pious author ended up on the Index

March 05, 2020

How did a much-esteemed French Catholic author ruin his career and reputation for piety? Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a star of the early Romantic movement, appreciated for his lengthy poems and novels such as Graziella (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), typically mourning much-loved lasses who died young. Lamartine’s Romantic credentials were so strong that

A French Anglophile’s curious path to the Church

February 20, 2020

Since little by the French Catholic author Charles Du Bos (1882-1939) has been translated, and nothing is in print today, fleeting descriptions of him by English writers may gain undue weight. In her biography of the novelist Edith Wharton (Chatto, 2007), Hermione Lee described Du Bos, who translated Wharton’s House of Mirth into French in

Virginia Woolf disdained her. But Alice Meynell shaped the age

February 13, 2020

Can a Catholic poet be so generous in helping fellow writers that her own literary efforts become neglected by posterity? Through her activities as an editor and women’s rights activist, Alice Meynell (1847-1922) contributed much to Catholic literature in Britain, but her estimable poems are largely unread. Admired by such authors as GK Chesterton, Coventry

The gritty novelist who owed his career to a cardinal

February 06, 2020

Sometimes an understanding superior can make or break the literary career of a cleric. In 1964, Cardinal ClémentÉmile Roques, Archbishop of Rennes, released a middle-aged priest, Fr Joseph Lemarchand, from pastoral duties to allow him to concentrate on writing. Fr Lemarchand (1913-1980), whose pen name was Jean Sulivan, observed in The Shallowest Chasm (Gallimard, 1965),

The Catholic writer who rivalled Dostoyevky

January 09, 2020

In March 2013, in the first homily after his election, Pope Francis said: “When one does not profess Jesus Christ, I recall the phrase of Léon Bloy: ‘Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the Devil.’” For many, the French Catholic polemicist Léon Bloy (1846–1917) approaches prophetic status for his intense concentration on the

The mother of the English Catholic novel

November 28, 2019

A Simple Story (1791) by Elizabeth Inchbald is the first novel written by an English Catholic with Catholic characters, but despite being praised by authors from Wilkie Collins to Lytton Strachey, the book has repeatedly slipped into near oblivion. The philosopher and women’s rights pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft lauded A Simple Story as “truly dramatic [with

When atheists compose Masses

November 14, 2019

Convincing Catholic sacred music cannot be written by every gifted composer. When Gustav Mahler, a convert from Judaism, was asked why he had not composed a Mass, he replied that if he did he would have to omit the Credo. After Mahler wrote his gargantuan Symphony No 8, called the Symphony of a Thousand, he

Catholics shouldn’t be surprised by Julien Green’s unexpurgated diaries

November 07, 2019

The American Catholic author Julien Green (1900-1998) is admired by generations of readers for his novels, memoirs, plays dealing with his Southern family and especially a published diary in 19 volumes, kept from 1919 to 1998. A new edition of that diary may trouble some of Green’s fans. A hallmark of Green’s achievement is

A Protestant novelist’s case for Catholicism

October 17, 2019

An enduring paradox of American literature is that a Protestant author, Willa Cather (1873–1947) wrote novels with Catholic themes that have been ardently acclaimed by critics and readers alike for generations. There is Catholic subject matter throughout Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which describes attempts by clergy to establish a diocese in New

The anti-clerical poet who inspired conversions to Catholicism

August 22, 2019

How should one evaluate the relationship of a poet with the Church, when his verse is either obscure or plainly hostile to organised religion? Especially if the poet’s surviving family vehemently, and even turgidly, promotes him as a model of piety, a saint and martyr – and one of the leading lights of modern Catholic

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