The Spooky God of Fancy Lads
G.O.T.H.S. celebrates 100 installments with the essay you've all been demanding: 8,000 words on John Bellairs.
"In middle school, I started reading. I’d been 'reading' since kindergarten. It was dutiful and orderly. Point B followed Point A. But something happened in middle school—a perfect alignment of parental support and benign neglect. The parental “support” came from keeping me stocked in Beverly Cleary, John Bellairs, The Great Brain books, and Daniel Pinkwater."
-Patton Oswalt in Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
"But, as I was saying, and I will get around to saying something sometime, Lewis…"
-Jonathan van Olden Barnavelt
PART ONE
To state something that I hope you figured out a long time ago: I have a special interest in comedic works about religion, and specifically works made by and for people of the faith that’s getting skewered. Not that I don't also enjoy seeing someone from the outside make fun of the hypocrisies and moral contradictions that you can find very easily in organized religion, but having someone find a way to laugh at that from the inside, find a way to laugh at it from a place of love and deep understanding of the faith, I find that really powerful. The prime example, of course, is Pascal's seventeenth-century satirical masterpiece The Provincial Letters, about which I wrote at length last year. Pascal was, very effectively, mocking the priests and bishops of his church, mocking them for failing to live up to the ideals of the faith that he - and his audience - loved. He wasn't a message board atheist laughing at a naive dork praying to a Sky Man, he was a passionate and angry Catholic who felt let down by his church. Pascal's work remains, for me, a beautiful aspirational model for the stupid bullshit I try to do here on my blog that I also email to people.
But this tradition of Catholic satire goes back to long before Pascal. One of the earliest recorded works of Catholic satire is "Nemo" or "Sermon on Saint Nobody", dating back to at least the twelfth century. The premise is a very simple play on words: by taking the various scripture passages about how nobody is greater than God, nobody can stop what God has set in motion, nobody can rebuild the temple that God destroys, the "homilist" lands on the conclusion "dang this Nobody fella sounds like quite a guy."
"Second, I said this Nobody was great in power, because he opens what God closes, hence the following: God closes and Nobody opens. Job 12: If God imprisons a man, it is Nobody who can release him. He also takes boldly from the hand of God, as in Job 2: Since it is Nobody who can pluck [me] from your hand. He also builds up what God destroys, hence Job: If God destroys it, it is Nobody who can build it up. He also surpasses and conquers God himself, as in Ecclesiastes 2: Nobody conquers God. For this reason God made it so that this Nobody could do whatever he wanted, just as Nicodemus says in the Gospel: Nobody can do the signs you do. Indeed, what is greater, he takes away life from Christ: Nobody takes away my life. He can also serve two masters usefully, which seems impossible to many and is against the Gospel, just as follows, as it is had in the Gospels: Nobody can serve two masters."
The sermon was written in Latin and is dense with references to Scripture, which means it would have been read by an educated and faithful audience; monks would have loved this shit. It is one of the earliest surviving works of satire to poke fun at Catholicism's frequent self-seriousness from the inside. There were Catholics who read and heard the words in the Bible and got too hung up on the literal meanings of everything at the expense of the loud obvious world in front of them, and making fun of those people was cathartic. It still is.
So that covers the medieval era and the French Enlightenment, but I recently learned of another, much more recent work in this satirical tradition: specifically, a 1966 collection of goofy American essays lampooning a Catholic church in a time of tremendous transition, especially in how they engaged with the rest of the world. I really wanted to get my hands on these essays, but the book was out of print and the cheapest copy I could find on the secondary market was $40, which, while not obscene, is more than I like paying for books, especially used books. To spend that much on a book in order to write one essay on a free blog would be stupid and irresponsible, and as you've already guessed of course I did it.
St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, by John "The Fresh Prince of" Bellairs (and with illustrations by Marilyn Fitschen) is worth every penny of the $40 I spent. The jacket copy on the book describes Bellairs as “a young graduate student at the University of Chicago. He was educated at Notre Dame and taught for a year at St. Theresa’s College in Winona, Minnesota. St. Fidgeta grew out of stories he told his friends.” I view John Bellairs, whose author photo below makes him look eleven years old, as a kindred spirit: we both went to the same Catholic university, we both lived in the same (and best) neighborhood in Chicago, and we both were/are jackasses who did extended riffs on Catholicism and eventually wrote them down. I am thrilled to have found his old book making fun of Catholicism, and thrilled to share my favorite parts of these essays with you today.
Now, it is possible that you heard the name "John Bellairs" and immediately thought of a different genre of writing than "essays on Catholicism". Yes, it's the same John Bellairs. We're going to get to that eventually.
It is impossible for me to quote every single gag from the Fidgeta essays that I think are hilarious; there are just too many of them. So I am going to limit myself to telling you the basic premise of each essay in the book and including just one pull quote from each.
The title track, The True History of St. Fidgeta, Virgin and Martyr, is Bellairs’ deliberately stuffy-sounding academic history of a fictional patron saint of nervous and fidgety children:
“Her shrine is the church of Saint Fidgeta in Tormento, near Fobbio in southern Italy. There one may see the miraculous statue of St. Fidgeta, attributed to the Catholic Casting Company of Chicago, Illinois. This statue has been seen to squirm noticeably on her feast day, and so on that day restless children from all over Europe have been dragged to the shrine by equally nervous, worn-out, and half-mad parents.”
Bellairs brings this chipper, documentary, children’s-lives-of-the-saints tone to his full story of the girl so squirmy she got slapped to death by her pagan teacher. The thing about this essay, and the tone it sets for the rest of the essays in the volume, is that you need a deep understanding of Catholic culture to fully get the joke. You need a familiarity with how writers would talk about the lives of the saints, and how the saints were martyred, and what miraculous visions we’ve attributed to them, and how they intercede for us - Bellairs suggests, at one point, that Fidgeta intercedes for us by making the rest of the communion of saints so uncomfortable that they have to stop worshiping God and listen to her requests - and then appreciate that Bellairs is keeping the tone of all of that but applying it to a stupid and absurd fictional example. It’s delightful.
But it’s not nearly as much inside baseball as you can find in Prolegomenon to Any Future Visit of a Pope to America: Notes Found in the Desk of a New York Advertising Executive. Bellairs has a gift that I really respect: namely, a great ear for “stupid business bullshit voice”, which he employs while impersonating an ad executive who just oversaw a disastrous papal visit to the states and needs to plan better for next time. But look at the layers of references on this one:
“Buckley never carried out his threat to buy a block of seats in Yankee Stadium. Imagine a thousand people flashing cards spelling ‘Mater Si - Magistra No’ during Mass. Says he would’ve done it if it had been John. Good thing John didn’t come. The joke-cracking would’ve been okay, but he lacked what I may call the higher seriousness. Which, God knows, Paul does not lack.”
Do you realize how much you need to know about stupid Catholic bullshit in order for this joke to be funny? I love it. You need to know that ‘Buckley’ refers to America’s Wettest Catholic, National Review founder, and segregation superfan William F. Buckley. You need to know the phrase “Mater si, magistra no” first ran in that magazine and reflected Buckley’s urging conservative Catholics to reject teachings from the church’s social doctrine that they didn’t like, to dismiss them as unimportant since they didn't align with pre-existing political identities. Then you also need to know that ‘John’ and ‘Paul’ are referring to the different Popes who oversaw Vatican II, and you need to know the differences in public perception between the wisecracking John XXIII and the comparatively severe Paul VI. You need to know that this piece was written in a world when Catholics in media and public life were obsessed with appearing as "good" and "right" Catholics. And then you need to set it in a world where those Catholics expressed themselves with dumb stunts and one-upmanship. I know this is all very difficult for us to imagine in our current more enlightened era.
Bellairs shows off some deadpan in The Cathedral of St. Gorboduc, a less pointed and generally sillier essay describing a cathedral that was under construction for centuries, jamming multiple incongruent and impossible renovations right next to each other:
"In the eighteenth century, the French-born bishop Gruyere de la Bouche brought to St. Gorboduc's Deistic sermons and Greek Revival architecture. He is responsible for the Ionic colonnade surrounding the Buddha, and he tried to build a flat red brick roof for the church. Those who have attempted to lay bricks in a straight line across a void know the problems involved; but La Bouche refused to give up, and he strung up a wire mesh in which the bricks might be laid. Here he might have succeeded if his desire for novelty (which Pius IX has repeatedly warned us against) had not gotten the better of him again. The new baking powder mortar soon crumbled and today the bricks hang in the sagging wire screen like eggs in a basket."
Four essays in, I already have to break my rule for The Question Box and give you two pull quotes from Bellairs' fictional Catholic Q&A session, starting with this one:
"Q. Mrs. L.S.D. writes: Exactly what do I get if I make the five First Fridays? My son says that you get hauled off to heaven by some saint or another. And finally, what,if anything, is in the last Fatima letter?
A. In the first place, you have to make nine First Fridays. You don't get anything for five. In the second place, you seem to ask a lot of questions."
The casual dismissal of "you don't get anything for five" kills me, but not as much as this other letter which was clearly sent by Stephanie Gordon astral-projecting herself back in time:
“Q. Mrs. Septa Tanqueray writes: My children and I are freezing to death this winter because my husband claims that in his Syllabus of Errors Pius IX condemned the furnace as a modern invention. What can I do? P.S. We also grind our own grain for flour.
A. Come now. You can’t be too frozen if you are able to write this letter, which I see is in a nice, firm (but feminine) hand. Stop whining and face up to your duty as a wife and mother. You might try electric blankets, which Pius IX didn’t know about, although some theologians claim that we are bound by what a Pope is likely to have thought if he had lived long enough. See Father Bunty’s book Projected Thoughts of Popes. Anyway, good for you for grinding your own flour.”
Again, Bellairs used his writing to needle people who were making absurd-sounding moral pronouncements using evidence like “what a Pope is likely to have thought if he had lived long enough.” I have to restrain myself from repeatedly rewriting “this is all still relevant today” throughout this essay, but yeah, this is all still relevant today.
And so is the absolute banger opening joke from A Short Guide to Catholic Church History for Catholic College Students Going Out Into the World to Defend Their Faith, written in outline form:
“There are only a few things the well-informed Catholic absolutely must know about Church history. These are:
Popes
Good
Bad
Lost”
Bellairs, a graduate of a very famous Catholic university and at one point a teacher at a different Catholic college, had plenty of exposure to people arguing over what the Popes said and which of those things that got said actually counted. But pretension and sanctimony and judgment were not just qualities of specific college students trying to defend their faith, they were also qualities of the people who worked at those colleges as well, as Bellairs demonstrates with Easter Address to the Faculty by the President of a Catholic Women’s College:
“On a more pleasant subject, I might say that we have been loosening up the rules a bit around here, despite the determination of some of you to think of me as a mossy old wimple. Next September we will have an agnostic teaching Home Economics here, and next year students over twenty-one may drink at home, provided their parents are present. Finally, for you impatient men, there is now a powder room for your use. It is in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dudmer of 1821 Peavy St. And now for a few brief announcements. I see many of you looking around for Professor Gargan of the English Department. You do not see him. There is a good reason for that: his tenure has been adjusted. [A stir] But I wouldn’t worry, since he can live off the royalties from his new novel. I believe it is called Twilight of the Gonads.”
The Story of Saint Floradora is another fake-stuffy-documentary-voiced essay on a fictional saint who was originally believed to have died in the burial of Pompeii, until further work by archaeologists revealed that the structure holding Floradora’s remains was a brothel, putting the Vatican and Floradora’s cult of devotion in the awkward spot of having to walk back her canonization. A nun who named herself after Floradora took it especially hard:
“But the saddest fate of all befell Sister Floradora…she somehow formed the idea that she must follow her namesake, no matter what, and she was found one day standing dazed under a lamppost, carrying a pair of black net stockings. Eventually, a noted theologian convinced her that, since the name ‘Floradora’ was itself a fraud, she was not obliged to follow the career of a nameless Pompeiian courtesan. She is now Sister Dido, and is in good mental shape, except for occasional delusions of lubricity. Upon the case of the Little Order of Floradora of Baines, Oregon…one question kept popping up: What happened to the prayers addressed to this nonexistent saint? ‘They were probably picked up by some saint or other’, comments Father Barbican in Orb.”
Not only do you get the half-assed ‘They were probably picked up by some saint or other’, which is hilarious by itself, and only do you get the comedic idea of having to un-saint someone because of new information that came out about them which is a specific situation that is obviously absurd and not something you could imagine about John Paul II right now, but you also get delusions of lubricity in this piece, describing a nun that has somehow confused herself for a sex worker? Are you serious! How much better can this book get!
Well, we get our first answer in Letter from Vatican City by Nepomuk Prynne, which - going back to the idea of extremely inside baseball in the Catholic church - is an on-the-nose reference to the pseudonymous 1960s New Yorker articles by “Xavier Rynne” (actually Redemptorist priest Francis Murphy) that provided an inside scoop on the political goings-on and backroom dealings of Vatican II. Multiple jokes here are hilarious, like the thirty-five year old American hotshot Cardinal Charles “Buzzy” Sparber, or the South Saigon bishop that got pulled away from his duties because the CIA had tapped him to be “Puppet Emperor of Manchuria” - yeah! We get some CIA foreign interventionist jokes here! But I have to pull this one:
“Yesterday two huge trucks rolled into Vatican City with a matched pair of gleaming new ICBM’s [sic] recently donated by an American bishop. The rockets are white and gold; their nose cones are shaped like papal tiaras; and they are tipped with double-barred papal crosses. Soon they will stand like twin monitory fingers near their newly built imitation Baroque control bunker. Despite the outcry from some of the more scrupulous Council fathers, especially those who voted to condemn nuclear arms at the last Vatican Council, the rockets seemed morally unimpeachable to most old Curia hands. After all, they are only tipped with dynamite. ‘And they will probably never be used, anyway,’ said a high Vatican source, ‘though their presence will add immeasurably to the power and majesty of the Church. Best of all, they are the perfect squelch to Stalin’s crack about how many divisions the Pope has.’”
Hey, John Bellairs, do you have any other Vatican II jokes? Specifically, do you have any jokes about how there’s tension between the different liturgical forms, stuff that we would find especially relevant today with our fights over Traditionis Custodes? Yes, Bellairs does, in A Chaplet of Devotions, Causes, and Societies to which the Catholic May Safely Adhere. Here, Bellairs is quoting a fictional priest writing in fictional magazine The Vagrant:
“If these folk-singing, altar-swerving, delatinizing renegade altar boys think that they’re going to gaily take a hatchet to all our fine clubs, sodalities, and leagues, they’re not counting on the steel of community resistance. I am confident that the pendulum is swinging back, and our young people will soon realize that they still need a kind of spiritual rug-hooking party to keep them out of parked cars and picket lines. As for private devotions, they are secure in the knobbly hands of old parishoners who still faithfully clutch holy-card-stuffed prayer-books and medallions rubbed smooth by contemplative fingers.”
As we get near the end of the book, we come to Mother Ximenes’ Handbook for Grade School Nuns, which includes these proposed “Conversion Tactics”:
“If you have, say, a little girl in your class whose mother is Protestant, do at least some of the following things: 1) Lecture at great length on the sorrows of a mixed marriage. 2) Say things like ‘Susie, your mother isn’t Catholic, is she?’ and tell her that her mother might be converted through prayer and good example. 3) Mention to the class that Protestants have a funny way of saying the ‘Our Father’. Ask Susie if this isn’t so. 4) Point out that Protestants can get to Heaven but that when they get there they may not know what it’s all about.”
And finally, we reach Bellairs’ final and best-titled essay, The Moist Heart: A Compendium for Private or Public Worship. There are a few different goofy essays and prayers that Bellairs cooked up here, including “Prayer for the Speedy Demise of a Bishop (To be said by a priest whose books have been suppressed or by an ambitious monsignor.)”:
“O God, who dost daily sweep Thine Eternal Dwellings, grant that the soul of the superfluous N. may be sucked up into the Dustbag of Bliss, where spinning motes circle ever before Thy Throne.”
Personally, I have never prayed this and I’m sure you have never done so either.
So, Bellairs is repeatedly parodying, and pointing to, something that we obviously still have with us today. The common thread across these essays is this deadpan mockery of voices styling themselves as authorities on Catholicism. Often, Bellairs uses this voice as his narrator, and sometimes he makes references to people like Buckley who branded themselves as these voices. These are the voices who say "here is the right way to be Catholic, and here's why, and I understand exactly what God is asking of us, and all you need to do is be Catholic the same way that I am so you can be a good Catholic." The joke, of course, is that the people who possess these voices are still petty and dumb and passive-aggressive and self-contradictory, just like the rest of us. No matter how good or how smart a Catholic you claim to be, deep down you're still Just Some Guy.
I don't just want to over-explain Bellairs' jokes for you, I also want to put these over-explained jokes in the context of the history of the American church. Bellairs wrote in the immediate aftershocks of the second Vatican council, which inspired all sorts of infighting and sniping among Catholics about what Catholicism really was for, and how Catholicism was supposed to engage itself with the broader world, and what Catholics were supposed to care about now, and how Catholics were supposed to be aligned politically, and which media outlets could provide the right orthodox Catholic viewpoints, and which Popes and which teaching documents counted as the ones we could care about and prioritize. This was an era in American Catholicism often referred to as THE CURRENT ERA, THIS IS THE ERA WE ARE IN RIGHT NOW. Six decades have passed since Vatican II, and that is not enough time for the church to even sneeze. The same sort of weaponized certainty that Bellairs commented on in 1966 is still around in 2023.
When World Youth Day was going on a month ago in Lisbon, Bishop Robert Barron did an interview with EWTN on how he saw the role of evangelization in today's church; presumably EWTN chose to interview him because of his physical resemblance to a Francesinha sandwich. The pull quote everyone noticed from Barron was that the church had been "dumbing down the faith too much for too long…[we] got a ‘dumbed-down’ Catholicism [that] has been a pastoral disaster.” Barron thought that World Youth Day was such an important opportunity to evangelize because the youths “don’t want an uncertain trumpet; they don’t want a vacillating message. They want something clear, and when they get it, they respond to it.”
If I may make a gross understatement for comedic effect: I don't think the church, in my part of the world and in my lifetime, has ever been plagued by a lack of certainty. My church blows1 a very certain trumpet when they proclaim how Catholics are supposed to vote, or who is allowed to work and learn at Catholic institutions, or whether trans people should have rights, or whether racism is really a problem in America, or whether it's okay for us to look the other way on evils like torture, capital punishment, and deportation. I have received extremely clear communication from my bishops on these issues - including Robert Barron, way more often than I would like to receive communication from him - and what they're communicating does not seem to be strengthening my faith.
Next summer, there's going to be a big Eucharistic pep rally in Indianapolis which will cost the church millions of dollars. The stated reason that the bishops are betting so heavily on this event is that they were very shaken by a Pew Research survey question suggesting that a lot of Catholics didn't understand the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The speaker lineup for the event appears to be mainly podcasters. There is this weird belief that Robert Barron - and many like him - have, that the great barrier to living out our Catholic faith is just that we never got the right information yelled at us at a loud enough volume. If we just make everyone come to Indianapolis and learn about the Eucharist, they'll be better Catholics and start agreeing with us on everything. We can have millions of great Catholics in the church, we just haven’t told them to be Catholic enough times. Look guys, it’s really simple: if we believe in this simple list of seven things, we're technically the correct Catholics and the Pope is the wrong one. If we provide the right snappy answers to questions on atheism or abortion, we'll have converted everyone else. If we explain how the church teachings about "the death penalty is bad" don't really count as church teachings, we can still kill people and be Catholic. If I can show that this Pope or this Council were actually heterodox, I can say whatever I want and call myself an authority on Catholicism. If I can cleanly determine whether or not this person is orthodox, I can decide whether they deserve to be treated like a human being. We just have to make it clear to these dumbed-down snowflakes that "you don't get anything for five", that "Protestants can get to Heaven but that when they get there they may not know what it’s all about”, that the right kind of Catholic stays “out of parked cars and picket lines”.
This certainty has consequences, felt in all of the people that are told that they are made wrong, that God cannot love them because of who they are and what they do, that they are not welcome in the church, that they care about the wrong things, that when they see suffering they actually should ignore it, that they need to think of themselves as “bad Catholics” if they don’t shape up. I do not think the church can afford to do this. The stated purpose of Vatican II, and a purpose which has remained consistent up through Francis’ papacy - and is especially salient in Francis’ two encyclicals - was to mobilize the whole church, laity and clergy, as the people of God, to address the enormous problems that were surfacing in the world, and to address the suffering that accompanied those problems. The changes to the liturgy, the teaching documents of Vatican II, all of the other reforms and constitutions, they were all geared towards that end. There are still quite a few problems surfacing in our slowly broiling world. The church still can do a lot to address those problems. But we can’t do that if most of the church is getting denounced and scolded about the “right” way to be Catholic, the “right” things the church is supposed to be doing in this era, the “right” priorities we are supposed to have, by people who should be just as uncertain as we are.
The reason I find this certainty so interesting to talk about, of course, is that I don’t have any of it myself. I’m getting better at not calling myself a “bad Catholic”, but I still don’t know if I’m a good one, or even a competent one. Like, if you read my stuff, I hope you find it entertaining or even occasionally interesting, but you should know that it’s coming from someone who doesn’t know why he’s still Catholic and isn’t especially comfortable being Catholic. I think the way I see things is a somewhat coherent response to the suffering in front of me and kind of works with the faith I grew up in, but I don’t know for sure. I’m a guy in a church that I've left multiple times, and just keeps ending back up in there for reasons I don't really understand, wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do while I’m here. I know what the actual teachings say I’m supposed to do, and I find that very powerful, but then I see what the people in charge, and a whole bunch of other people with big followings, are doing and saying with an awful lot of certainty, and I’m stumped. I don’t know why I’m still here, there is no clear path from A to B to C here. I don’t know why God would want me to be part of this, a giant institution that could save the world but is much more likely to trip over its own dick and fail while we all die of thirst. I am not the kind of guy you should trust to fix that.
I don’t know how devout Bellairs actually was as a Catholic, but it’s clear from his later writings that Catholicism remained a salient part of his identity for the rest of his career. He understood that dissonance between people of God as described in the Vatican II documents - the people that God urgently needed to save the world - and then the actual, petty, dumb, Just-Some-Guys people of God that he saw every day. So how do you navigate that dissonance, John? I don’t know how to do it myself. How do you see your own relationship to the church if the church is such a mess? How do you see your relationship to God if you’re part of that mess? How can you even think that God considers you capable enough to do anything meaningful in the world, if you’re Just Some Guy and everyone else around you is Just Some Guy too? I do think Bellairs explored this question throughout the rest of his career, and I do think he had some idea of how to answer it, and I think he shows us that answer in his other books. Because, oh my God, did he write some other books.
Like I said, if you've heard the name John Bellairs before, you probably associate him with a completely different genre than Catholic satirical essays. Bellairs is a beloved children’s author with a devoted following among a Certain Type Of Nerdy Kid; in the epigraph at the top of this piece, comedian Patton Oswalt named him in the same breath as Beverly Cleary - insanely successful, universally acclaimed, maybe the closest we have to a consensus pick for the greatest children's author of all time - and Daniel Pinkwater, who has his own devoted following and is my personal favorite children's author of all time. John Bellairs' novels take up a whole shelf in the children’s department of your library, and librarians still know exactly which kids to recommend his books to, and I was one of them. See, Bellairs isn’t known for writing books that are “religious” or “Catholic”. Bellairs is known, first and foremost, for writing books that are spooky.
PART TWO (SPOOKY PART)
Fidgeta was Bellairs’ first published book. Then he wrote a short picture book for children called The Pedant and the Shuffly, with a similarly dry and heady sense of humor. His third book was a swing at a Tolkein-esque fantasy epic called The Face in the Frost, which was praised by both legendary scifi author Ursula K. LeGuin and D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. And then Bellairs' fourth book laid down the rails for the rest of his career:
1973’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls was a spooky Gothic mystery aimed at ten-year-old boys, and it was the first thing Bellairs wrote that became a commercial success; the book continues to endure as a staple of the genre, and in 2018 it was adapted into a film starring - very weird casting choices here - Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Kyle MacLachlan, and Renee Elise Goldsberry. So Bellairs found that success and spent the rest of his life writing and publishing fourteen more spooky Gothic mysteries aimed at ten-year-old boys2, which remain many young readers’ introductions to horror and Gothic aesthetics. You say “horror for kids”, and anyone who knows children’s literature is going to say “John Bellairs” in response (they should probably also say “Edward Gorey”, who did the iconic cover designs and illustrations for most of Bellairs’ novels). Given my ongoing obsession with revisiting the greatest children’s novels of all time, I was overjoyed to write a G.O.T.H.S. piece where I could go check out a bunch of John Bellairs books from my library and reread some of the staples of my childhood that I hadn’t read in decades. And guess what everyone: they’re still great!
Not that they’re perfect: a recurring flaw in Bellairs’ works is that he tends to rush out his resolutions, and some apocalyptic problems get solved with new types of magic getting introduced at the last second, so you can feel like you just got a deus ex machina dropped on you. But re-reading some of these Bellairs novels, it seemed pretty clear to me that if you were a ten-year-old boy, these would still be the best novels in the world. The action moves quickly, the characters are relatable, the books have a sense of humor. Are there any references to Catholicism, though? Let me just crack open House and see what pops up on the first page as we meet our protagonist, Lewis Barnavelt:
“His hand was greasy now, so he wiped it on the seat again. His lips were moving, and he was saying a prayer. It was one of his altar-boy prayers: Quia tu es Deus fortitudo mea; quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus? For Thou O God art my strength; why have you cast me off, and why do I go sorrowful, while the enemy afflicts me?”
It turns out there are quite a few references to Catholicism in Bellairs’ fiction as well as his nonfiction. Familiar rituals and prayers pop up left and right, one of the bad guys in one of the novels sets a trap for the protagonists using a ritual very obviously based on Catholic funerals, one of the supporting characters in the later Bellairs novels was a priest, another was a Knight of Columbus who, at one point, brings his ceremonial sword to fight evildoers (this does not work, as those swords aren’t really designed for self-defense). But in Bellairs' first spooky novel, we start with Lewis, our protagonist, who is ten years old, fat, nerdy, lonely, and recently orphaned. He’s a dork who likes reading military histories and doesn’t like how much he gets bullied at school. His parents have died in a car accident, so Lewis is being shipped off to an uncle he’s never met, and “of course, Lewis had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan.”
But Uncle Jonathan is loving and gregarious (he's the Jack Black character in the movie), and lets Lewis stay up late to play poker and eat cookies with him and the eccentric elderly neighbor Mrs. Zimmerman. They all become fast friends - unlikely friends on paper, sure, but friends who care fiercely for each other. Oh, and also Uncle Jonathan is an amateur wizard, magic is real, and it turns out Lewis is entering a wild new world as he settles into his uncle’s old house.
Lewis loves his new home, but he also starts thinking he can use his uncle’s magic to impress other kids at school, which is absolute rookie shit if you’re a wizard. Things go south when, in an effort to impress one of the popular kids at school, Lewis has his uncle do some minor magic at a backyard party. That freaks the popular kid out, because a normie kid would freak out if they found out magic was actually real, and Lewis' solution - which is bonkers - is to show this popular kid more magic, and specifically to steal one of Uncle Jonathan's dark magic reference books and raise someone from the dead. Not only does reanimating a corpse fail to make Lewis more popular and further alienates him from his only friend at school, but the person he reanimates is actually an evil sorceress who can finally complete her dark ritual to destroy the world, and who sets up her final doomsday clock - a literal clock ticking down to the end of the world - in the walls of Uncle Jonathan's house. Lewis and Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman can't find it, no matter how hard they try, and they can't stop it from ticking, and they seemingly have no choice but to wait for time to run out, literally and permanently.
The fat nerd and the kooky kindly magician and the crotchety old lady are not the kind of people you would naturally expect to be friends with each other, which is sweet. They are also not the kind of people you would expect to be able to stop Armageddon, which is a problem.
I also read two of Bellairs’ later spooky novels, The Trolley to Yesterday and The Chessmen of Doom, both featuring another unlikely group of friends at the center of the story. Johnny Dixon is another ten-year-old nerd who likes books better than sports - look, Bellairs knew his audience - and he’s also living with his extended family, but he has ended up becoming great friends with his neighbor, curmudgeonly history professor Roderick Childermass:
“Johnny was a short blond boy who wore glasses. He was brainy and shy and had trouble getting people to like him. Strangely enough he got along fine with cranky old Professor Childermass, who terrified most people. The two of them had become friends a few seconds after they met, and now the old man was like a second father to Johnny. They played chess and baked cakes and discussed the problems of the world together. It was an odd friendship, but it worked.”
As in all of Bellairs’ novels, it’s an odd friendship, but it works. Johnny, and the Professor, and Johnny’s classmate Fergie go on their own set of supernatural adventures, and one of the Professor’s most important attributes is his skepticism, particularly when it comes to last-minute supernatural help. As the Professor puts it in The Trolley to Yesterday, describing the 1453 Turkish sack of Constantinople:
“There will be a great slaughter in the city,’ he went on in a choked, emotional voice, ‘but the worst thing will happen in that great domed church that you see over there. On the evening of May 28, hundreds of people will crowd into the Church of the Holy Wisdom, hoping that God will protect them from the enemy. There is a legend that says an Angel of Light will come down into the church and blind the foes and drive them away.’ The professor’s lips curled into a bitter sarcastic frown. ‘Silly people!’ he said. ‘They’re silly to think that an angel would protect them from a brutal enemy!’”
Anyone who has lived in this world long enough would be understandably skeptical of an angel coming to save us from bloodshed and war. Of course, the Professor says that particular line immediately after traveling through time on a magic trolley he discovered in his basement which he has been co-piloting with a wisecracking Egyptian minor god, so I’m a little surprised he was willing to say “well, we can definitely eliminate the possibility of angels existing.” He also says an extremely similar thing in The Chessmen of Doom, the novel that immediately follows Trolley:
“‘Peregrine [the professor’s brother] was one of those people who get very upset about the horrors of war, and he always said that there ought to be some way to frighten human beings into being peaceful. That’s a nice notion, isn’t it? But not very practical. Someday the earth may be peaceful, but unless an angel with a flaming sword appears in the sky, I don’t see how it’s going to happen.’”
To the Professor3, bad things are going to happen and no divine power is coming to stop those bad things from happening, and that is, of course, the setup in all of the Johnny Dixon novels and in fact all of Bellairs' spooky books for fancy lads: something bad is going to happen, some doom is on the horizon, and it all seems inescapable. In Trolley, the protagonists get stranded in past-Constantinople, knowing that the Turks are a day away from sacking the city. In Chessmen, an evil wizard is reconstructing an ancient mystic ritual to destroy the world, and by the novel's first page, he's already got all the materials he needs to start the countdown. Bad things are going to happen, nobody is stepping in to stop it. There is no way out. So the ten year old nerd and the cranky professor - or the ten year old nerd and the fat amateur wizard - have to make one up.
The pivotal passage of House, in which Lewis and Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman rally and put together a plan to stop the apocalypse from happening, is one in which I find great comfort, and it is, in my opinion, the key passage you need to understand all of Bellairs' work. Again, the scariest part of the spooky clock plot is its inevitability: no matter what happens, the clock keeps ticking down to doomsday, the gang can't find it no matter what they try, and the forces of evil have started to work their magic. Mrs. Zimmerman comments on this inevitability, and it spurs Uncle Jonathan to come up with one last-ditch idea to find the clock:
“It has been my theory, ever since yesterday, that the old hag is just waiting for the proper time to use that wretched key. The proper action at the proper time to achieve the proper effect. That would be like her. And like her old husband too. His magic is logical. It proceeds from A to B to C in nice, neat steps. As logical and neat as the movement of a hand around the face of a clock.”
“Then there’s no point in our being logical, is there?” said Jonathan. He was smiling very strangely and clicking the paper clips on his watch chain. This was always a sign that he was thinking.
“What do you mean?” said Lewis and Mrs. Zimmermann at the same time.
“I mean,” he said patiently, “that we’re no good at that sort of game. Our game is wild swoops, sudden inexplicable discoveries, cloudy thinking. Knights’ jumps instead of files of rooks plowing across the board. So we’d better play our way if we expect to win.”
Mrs. Zimmermann folded her arms and looked grumpy. “I see,” she said. “It sounds very reasonable. If you’re in a chess game, draw to an inside straight. If you’re playing tennis, try to hit a home run. Very intelligent.”
Jonathan seemed unruffled. “Why not?” he said. “It all seems clear enough to me. Lewis, what I want you to do is this. Get a pencil and paper, and dream up the silliest set of instructions you can think of.”
Lewis looked puzzled. “Instructions for what?”
“For a ceremony. A ritual. A magic show for getting the clock out of its hiding place. Make it as goofy as you can.”
So Lewis does. And the three heroes dress in funny costumes and play cards until the Ace of Nitwits magically appears, and, wouldn’t you know it, eventually the location of the clock just comes to them. C doesn’t follow B, which is miles away from A. But that’s exactly what Lewis and Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman needed to fight evil on their terms. It is, just barely, enough to save the world.
I am starting to think that uncertainty has a very underappreciated value in Catholicism, perhaps as a distant cousin to humility. Bellairs seems to have seen this as a virtue as well. The forces of darkness, in all three of the Bellairs novels I re-read, are defined by ritual and inevitability: House and Chessmen are both races to stop a specific dark magic ritual, and Trolley is a race against history itself. But certainty and inevitability are not characteristics that Bellairs admires; his first published book was dedicated to lampooning those characteristics in Bellairs' fellow Catholics. Bellairs' heroes in his children's novels are drawn in clear contrast to these characteristics, through their amateurish improvisations: they are always in a race against the clock (in one case, a literal clock) to stop the apocalypse from happening, but none of the heroes really know what they’re doing and they’re all having to frantically make it up as they go, using what's in front of them, taking help from whomever they find, and hoping against hope that, as Uncle Jonathan says, "Most magic is accomplished with solid everyday objects”. Their salvation comes from their unlikely friendships, from people who are just there for each other and willing to take risks and sacrifice for each other even though there’s no reason, on paper, for them to even know each other at all. If you asked them, they wouldn’t really be able to explain the friendship themselves. But it works.
Think, for a second, about the people that God picked to be His friends when He was on Earth a few millennia ago. They were, very famously, not the kind of people that most observers - especially those with any understanding of the religious codes of the time - would have expected God to choose as friends, because of their status, and their jobs, and their track records with being particularly holy people. They were also, very famously, not people who fully understood why they were friends with God, or even people who had a decent grasp of who God was, and what God was planning to do when God was on Earth. In fact, they got it wrong all of the time, got corrected in person by God, and then continued getting it wrong. And then, right before leaving Earth, God told them that they were in charge of the church. Then, for several thousand years, they kept getting it wrong, and that brings us up to today. It is a very unlikely friendship that God chooses to have with us, and it is not a relationship that makes us feel certain, or confident, or comfortable. And perhaps we should not expect it to make us feel that way, and perhaps a person who says he can make you feel that way does not automatically have your best interests at heart.
Maybe most "magic" is actually accomplished with solid everyday objects. Maybe you're not in a race to get the right knowledge or do the rituals the right way so you can be the wisest Catholic. Maybe you're just a fool, but maybe St. Paul was onto something when he suggested that God chose foolish you to shame the wise someday, and maybe you don't seem on paper like anyone that God would pick to accomplish anything, but maybe God’s plan for accomplishing things does not involve an easy-to-understand A to B to C progression. Maybe this unlikely friendship is going to work out. Maybe we should come to terms with the fact that we are, at best, unlikely friends of God, but that doesn't mean we can't accomplish great things if we're willing to improvise and risk and sacrifice and pay attention to what’s in front of us, if we're willing to see God in the unlikeliest of places, like the suffering person on our street corner, the frightened migrants in the overcrowded shelter, and the occasional spooky novel with the fun ghouls. Maybe getting our heads around our unlikely friendship with God, and the unlikely friendship that we are called to have with all of these people, can make us feel a little more at home in our faith, or at least make it more difficult for some asshole at a rally or with a podcast to mislead you with the promise of making you a smarter, better Catholic.
I think of my relationship with God and the church as an unlikely friendship. It’s just an image. I find it helpful. Maybe you will too. But - and every essay about Catholicism should probably end with this phrase - what the hell do I know anyway.
Lol.
Several other novels were outlined or drafted by Bellairs, and his estate hired Brad Strickland to complete the novels posthumously. Strickland went on to continue writing novels in Bellairs’ universes.
Ok, so there’s one joke, based on a semi-anachronistic reference in The Chessmen of Doom, that I was not able to fit into the essay so I have to put it in this footnote. At one point the professor startles Johnny and Fergie by popping into the room unexpectedly, and then grumbles “Oh, don’t be such scaredy-cats! It’s not Machine Gun Kelly!” Obviously, you do a double-take when you read that line in 2023, and obviously, it means something different today than it did in the 1950s when Chessmen was set, and obviously, having Machine Gun Kelly show up unexpectly would still be terrifying in 2023, because then you’d be like “aaa! I’m about to hear some shitty music!”