OUP Life of the Day: Father D'Arcy

[coughingbear]

Temporarily at least, the ODNB life of Martin Cyril D'Arcy is available free on the OUP website. He was the Jesuit at Farm Street who instructed Evelyn Waugh, among many others.

A couple of extracts:

Complementary with this ideal of a Jesuit contribution to English Christian humanism was an attachment to an English Catholic past, hazily and romantically conceived, and an addiction to the English Catholic gentry. He took innocent pleasure in an 11 foot long genealogical table, written in 1617 and illuminated with numerous coats of arms and two coronets, which allegedly traced his family back to the Norman conquest.
...
In 1945 D'Arcy left Oxford to become provincial of the English Jesuit province. He formed imaginative plans for influencing the life of a country newly restored to peace, though his term of office is sometimes best remembered for his proclivity towards purchasing old houses with Catholic associations. Unfortunately he neglected the routine paperwork of administration, preferring to achieve results by personal contact...

The last twenty-six years of D'Arcy's life were something of a protracted dark night. He was out of sympathy with post-war Oxford and England. He saw no merit in the type of analytical philosophy then in the ascendant; the changes in the liturgy and theology of his church left him with a sense of betrayal.

I am sure that Anthony Merrick must have known him.

Comments

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

I'm slightly surprised that Father Ted Yarnold (who was my own spiritual director until his health failed) painted such an unsympathetic picture of him.
D'Arcy had enormous charm, despite his rigidity, and preached a number of riveting and illuminating sermons. The lack of attention to administration doesn't surprise - a very sad story - I wonder if, in recent times, he would have been diagnosed as autistic?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I didn't think it was unsympathetic at all - quite the reverse!

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

"Part of the secret of his own magic lay in his very striking and much painted features"

That surprised me very much.

[liadnan]

He preached at Ronald Knox's funeral in the Drome.

From the article:
(Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies is said to have been modelled partly on D'Arcy.)

I had a hunch this was iffy (not least because I don't find Fr Rothschild a particularly attractive character) and picked my copy off the shelf to check - In an intro written in the 60s and found in the back of my Penguin Modern Classics edn Waugh wrote " At the time I invented 'Fr Rothschild' I had never met a Jesuit'.

The PMG intro says "he almost suggests that he has to apologize for an overly satirical portrait of a Jesuit - which is presumably the opposite of most readers' response to him". I am not at all sure why the author, Richard Jacobs, presumed that.

The book was published Jan 1930, Waugh was received into the church on 29 Sept: a bit tight but no real reason to believe Waugh's version of events untrue.

Can't imagine D'Arcy was that pleased by the trajectory of the Jesuits post VII.

I have a copy of Waugh's grumbling correspondence with Cardinal Heenan on the various liturgical changes - a man after Anthony Merrick's heart.

[coughingbear]

Plausible presumably that he had invented the character before meeting a Jesuit, even if he finished the book later, IYSWIM. Actually it's the rather vague 'is said to have been modelled partly on D'Arcy' - technically that's true, though I agree we expect better of the ODNB!

[liadnan]

Certainly do. So long as it's understood one can't blame the copyediting dept or the early medievalist contribs.

IDSWYM, it is logically possible and plausible. But Vile Bodies was written quite quickly I think between September and January (during which time he was also getting divorced from TOEvelyn) and I don't think Fr Rothschild appears in Decline and Fall...

[coughingbear]

Natch!

(Very odd on the comments - am definitely logged in as me!)

[liadnan]

PS your comment arrived in my email as from star-tourmaline, though the content starts "coughingbear said", which is weird. (And possibly a bit worrying)

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

Ouch! I missed that - and that is also uncharacteristic of the Ted I knew, who was so punctilious about checking references
I wonder if he really wrote the whole thing?