Almost two decades after her death in 2005, Alice Thomas Ellis’s novels and non-fiction works are available in paperback from Bloomsbury Academic, Virago and other publishers, yet her writings still await a certain academic recognition. Such is the conclusion of David Deavel in New Insights into Literature and Catholicism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Cambridge Scholars, 2021), bemoaning a lack of academic articles about Ellis. Professor Deavel diagnoses this scholarly obliviousness of Ellis as “almost certainly” because of her “very public Catholic journalism”.
Ellis’s mordant tone in discussing gender- and church-related subjects is apparently shunned by sensitive-minded readers today. Although a gadfly and even occasionally, a scourge, Ellis may not be as easily categorisable as some critics assert. Often called a “conservative Catholic writer,” Ellis, in The Birds of the Air (1980), described Margaret Thatcher as a “mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutritionless, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind”. In Wales: An Anthology (1989) and the novel The Sin Eater (1985), she relished Welsh magical folklore as a complement to traditional Catholic beliefs.
Eschewing potential labels, was Ellis just strongly independent minded about voicing her opinions? A multifarious, sometimes contradictory personality whose friends ranged from Fr Martin D’Arcy SJ to Jennifer Paterson, Ellis’s trenchant verbal style might have been honed by a fondness for Golden Age Hollywood repartee. She relished wisecracks snarled by caustic American screen divas like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
Other voices drawn upon for inspiration by Ellis included expressions of strength and endurance to overcome disadvantages of minority status. During an April 1998 appearance on BBC’s Desert Island Discs (available online), Ellis admitted that she didn’t care much for music, but chose African American voices among her selections.
Ellis found “poignant” the tattered sounds of Billie Holliday at the end of a tormented life, singing “For All We Know” from her 1958 album Lady in Satin. Even so, the song’s lyrics – “For all we know / we may never meet again” – contradicted a basic tenet of Ellis’s belief system, that she would indeed meet her family again in the afterlife. Holliday’s musical collaborator Ray Ellis described Holliday’s voice on this LP as “one of the most evil voices I’ve heard in my life”, implying an earthy voice of experience in the Blakean sense.
Whether from Holliday or Hollywood film goddesses, Ellis adopted an “evil” or caustic tone, distressing sobersided readers. Another Ellis selection for Desert Island Discs was the Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson singing a faux-Nigerian song from the adventure film Sanders of the River (1935). An unabashed fan, Ellis even alleged that during her girlhood, she hoped “to be Paul Robeson”. Her writerly voice was not always focused on monumental causes.
Some of Ellis’s more limited interventions were successful, like her 1997 participation in the rescue of the Catholic Central Library (now the Catholic National Library). The collection was due to be broken up, which Ellis declared an “absolute scandal which is being repeated in libraries all over the country. Great works are just being consigned to the rubbish skip.” Less productive were her comments after the death in 1996 of Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool, accusing him of causing a decline in attendance at Mass.
She later explained her views, which caused bad feelings because of their timing and tone, by saying that she had tried to establish a dialogue for years with Archbishop Worlock but, as she told the Independent in August 1996, had been sent away “with a flea in her ear”. She maintained files of correspondence with dossiers about a dozen Catholic bishops in the United Kingdom, with the muckraking spirit of an Erin Brockovich out to expose radioactivity, or perhaps a more humorous and poetic Mary Whitehouse.
Ellis took the occasion of Archbishop Worlock’s death as a personal assignment from like-minded correspondents for her to “bell the cat”. After all, in Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity (1997) she targeted even loftier authorities, quoting Pope Paul VI as asking: “If the world changes, should not religion also change?” Ellis’s replied: “I would have thought that the obvious answer was ‘No’.” In Serpent on the Rock, she meets ecclesiastical opponents, records their reactions to the modern church, and about one interlocutor comments: “It was admirable of me not to clout him with the bottle.”
Perhaps Archbishop Worlock was prudent to recuse himself from this type of confrontation. Ellis’s characteristic verve was not necessarily due to the fact that she was a convert to Catholicism; converts to any religion may take liturgical matters more to heart than those born into a faith. But Ellis wrote that she had Catholic relatives in Llandudno, Wales where she lived in her youth, and also had friends at a Franciscan friary, so her decision at age 19 to convert meant that she had simply “reverted to the old religion”.
Nor did Catholicism always provide smooth, untroubled solutions to life’s quandaries for Ellis. She became a Franciscan postulant the same year, but was asked to leave after a slipped disc made manual labour impossible for her. She subsequently proved the strength of her backbone by bearing seven children, so one wonders if the Mother Superior’s decision might not have been influenced by Ellis’s rebellious, unpredictable and sometimes ornery spirit, possibly unsuited for communal life. Her ultimate revenge was that, at home, many friends considered that she behaved like a Mother Superior towards kith and kin. Catholicism provided only partial solace during her greatest tragedy, the accidental death of her young son Joshua. Admitting to depression, Ellis considered life thereafter as waiting for her own death, for a reunion with Joshua. Meanwhile, her view of religion’s place in marriage had an almost tricksterish quality. Alan Bennett’s diary for 2005 describes the posthumous anointing of her husband Colin Haycraft, an unbeliever. Ellis gave a “shadow of a wink in approval, saying: ‘Now [Colin] will know who was right.’”
Ellis described her choice to follow the Catholic faith as motivated in part by the fact that it made laughter possible. In Serpent on the Rock she wrote: “It is presently de rigueur to claim that Catholicism 30-odd years ago was repressive, hidebound and frightening, but I found in it great richness and an abundance of people who made me laugh.” In her novel The 27th Kingdom (1982), a character likewise observes: “God makes me laugh.” The one-liners continue in Birds of the Air, about a fictional family Christmas during which a character intones a prayer: “Forgive us our Christmasses … as we forgive them who have Christmassed against us.”
These jokes may express pain, but Ellis remained optimistic. New Blackfriars cited her posthumously in September 2012: “You’ve got to believe – even if you don’t think so – that the Church will pull itself together and regain its lost ground. I think I actually do believe that.” This will to credence ensured that her effusions were not merely entertaining provocations, but intended as constructive pleas for the future of Catholicism.
Benjamin Ivry has written biographies of Francis Poulenc, Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Ravel.
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