I’ve previously written on this blogsite about William Barrett. Here is a more complete writing about him.
We moved to Denver during the summer of 1980 and soon found ourselves every afternoon sitting on our front porch to welcome the cooler air. Invariably, or so memory suggests, we’d wave to a well-dressed elderly gentleman (always sport coat and tie and fedora) who’d be walking up the block to get an evening paper. Only some years later, after that gentleman had moved from his apartment building into a nursing home, did we learn that his name was William E. Barrett (1900-1986). And that he was the writer of the 1962 novel made into the 1963 hit film “Lillies of the Field” — starring Sidney Portier and rumored to be based on a convent of nuns located someplace north of Denver. And that an earlier (1955) film starring Humphrey Bogart was named after and based upon Barrett’s 1951 novel The Left Hand of God. A third Barrett novel, The Wine and the Music (1968), the story of a Roman Catholic priest who decides to marry a wealthy Protestant divorcee, was also the turned into the 1970 film Pieces of Dreams.
I know nothing of his early writings – detective stories and stories about airplanes and pilots during World Wars I and II, both short stories and novels. I learned that his knowledge of aeronautics was such that he was invited to lecture at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (two hours south of Denver). Yet there are Barrett archives at both the University of Denver Library and Denver Public Library which undoubtedly contain much information about the early writings.
What I gradually learned more about (because I then was a professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver) were what I will call his “religious” novels, the majority of which are clearly “Catholic” novels – with setting and plot and character and themes all quite explicitly Roman Catholic. (More below.)
That was certainly true of the previously mentioned Left Hand of God – about a downed American fighter pilot who hides in a Catholic mission in central China by taking on the role of the replacement priest expected at the mission about the time of his arrival – and Lillies of the Field – about a just retired young soldier travelling cross country who helps a group of nuns build their new chapel.
I gradually purchased and read copies of his religious novels – 13 by my count, beginning with The Left Hand of God in 1951 and ending with Lady of the Lotus in 1975. (See the complete list below.) The latter is the only one not specifically Catholic. It’s the fictional (but very well researched) biography of the wife that Prince Gautama Siddartha renounced (along with his wealth and class status) at the beginning of his journey into Buddhahood.
Along the way (in 1964) Barrett also published a very well researched biography of the life of Giovanni Battista Montini before he became Pope Paul VI in 1963. He titled it The Shepherd of Mankind. My guess is that Barrett himself wanted to know more about this relatively unknown man (at least in the US) who had succeeded the immensely popular John XXIII and had to oversee the remaining sessions of the Second Vatican Council which John had called in 1962. As a professional writer he undoubtedly sensed the need for a book introducing the new pope to American Catholics and a wider religious readership.
And shortly thereafter, in 1967, he published The Red Lacquered Gate which, as its subtitle tells us, is the story of “the Early Days of the Columban Fathers [mission to China] and the Courage and Faith of its Founder, Fr. Edward Galvin”. Barrett was perhaps hired by the Columbans to write this book, but it also is of a piece with his wider interest in China.
Having recently re-read all of the religious novels, let me attempt here an overall critical appreciation of them.
As I’ve already noted, Barrett was a very careful researcher. He spent months in Italy doing interviews and searching archives for his Montini biography. And there is much evidence throughout his religious novels of his wide reading in Catholic history and theology as well in both Western and Eastern philosophy.
He was expert in his imagination of plot and character. The novels reflected widespread popular interests but never reduced events and people to stereotype. Each was a carefully crafted original story with unique characters, settings, and plots.
He was very good at description of his scenes, whether in contemporary Colorado or post-war China, in the St. Lawrence River area of Quebec in the 1950s and post-war Bavaria south of Munich. Both the general scenery of each area and the specific location of each story. I suspect that archival material would show that he spent time in each of the areas where his novels were set.
Many of his novels involve a well told love story (typically involving a young professional couple) around which and within which the broader religious theme is developed. Again, at least for me, they’re good, well developed stories with believable characters which avoid the kind of sappy stereotypes that so often prevail in the genre.
Barrett, like many writing about religion and spirituality, told stories involving the miraculous or the supernatural. Yet here as well his stories are well researched and avoid the sensational and sentimental.
Of special note in this regard is The Empty Shrine (1958) which tells the fictional story of a proclaimed apparition of Mary to a young 8-year-old girl on a small francophone island in the St. Laurence River during the 1950s. We’re told about the life of the eight year old girl who thought she saw a woman or an angel in a hollow rock formation across a small bay, though she herself was never certain. Yet she soon becomes a cause celebre for some islanders hoping to benefit from the claim to a Marian apparition. Then we jump 10 or so years to the life of that same “girl”, now a young teacher on that island. And to believable love stories about this young woman and a local man she’d grown up with, and with a skeptical writer who’d come to the island to destroy the myth of any vision.
The point for me is that Barrett treats the possibility of a Marian apparition with critical respect. He includes a realistic discussion of Lourdes. He shows us the hypocritical character of many pushing the story of this supposed apparition. Yet he also shows us the careful conduct of the local parish priest and of the young girl’s agnostic father. And he leaves open the possibility of an actual apparition in this or some other “empty shrine” (as had happened in Lourdes) and to the possibility of miracles like those which have happened at the shrine of St. Anne de Beauprez further up the St. Lawrence in Quebec City.
Permit me to end with the following. Barrett’s Catholic books are really quite good, but he’s hardly remembered in Catholic academic or literary circles. I have written about this man whose work I gradually came to know and admire in order to suggest to others that they too might wish to take up and read – tolle lege in Augustine’s famous words. The books are still available in many libraries and through second-hand book sellers. And, again and again, they’re really good.
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Religious Books by William Barrett
- The Left Hand of God (1951)
- Shadows of the Images (1953)
- The Sudden Strangers (1956)
- The Empty Shrine (1958)
- The First War Planes (1960)
- The Edge of Things (1960)
- The Lilies of the Field (1962)
- The Fools of Time (1963)
- The Shepherd of Mankind (1964)
- The Glory Tent (1967)
- The Red Lacquered Gate (1967)
- The Wine and the Music (also under the title Pieces of Dreams) (1968)
- A Woman in the House (1971)
- The Shape of Illusion (1972)
- Lady of the Lotus (1975)
