Goodness Made Readable

THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM--A. J.

Cronin--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Last week advance sales of The Keys of the Kingdom passed 250,000 copies, the biggest since For Whom the Bell Tolls. The first novel A. J. Cronin has written since The Citadel, had become a best-seller before it even reached the public. Advance buyers were the Book-of-the-Month Club (The Keys of the Kingdom is its August offer) and U.S. bookstores, which seldom make mistakes about what the public wants to read.

Archibald Joseph Cronin seldom makes such mistakes either. His first novel, Hatter's Castle, sold 70,649 copies; and he has been writing best-sellers or near bestsellers ever since. His case proves again that a writer can succeed with any subject provided he writes excitingly enough.

Thews and sinews of the Cronin clientele are generally considered to be the U.S. women's clubs, one of the most conservative, profitable and reputedly bustle-bound of literary markets. For them during the last ten years canny Scotsman Cronin has been writing passionate indictments of their own society: violent criticisms of established medicine and established religion, appeals for the triumph of trade unionism and labor.

He interlards these with sizzling passages like this one from The Stars Look Down: "Linked together, they moved to the foremost pew, cushioned and wide as any bed . . . her lips were moist with desire. The rain drummed upon the roof and the darkness of the church reddened and enclosed them. When it came, her cry of physical exaltation rose before the altar."

Cronin is a first-rate literary craftsman with an honest love of simple humanity and a sure feel for trends. Result: during the threnodic '30s he wrote best-selling proletarian novels so much better than the professional proletarians that people did not realize what they were. Critic Robert Forsythe had to apologize before recommending The Stars Look Down to readers of the Communist New Masses. But the art of trending, like bronco-busting, lies in knowing when to fall off and catch another horse. The Keys of the Kingdom finds Author Cronin firmly riding a trend that promises to go forward by leaps & bounds--the trend back to religion.

The Book. The Keys of the Kingdom is a reverent piece of hagiography about a Catholic priest who is spiritually a good deal wiser, intellectually not quite so bright as most of the people around him. His keys are humility and kindness. The kingdom they unlock for him is a religious commonplace: the kingdom of God is within you. Its outward manifestation is tolerance.

Cronin's story records the efforts of Father Francis Chisholm to keep the special laws of this interior kingdom without getting into trouble with the laws of the world and the Catholic Church. Naturally, Father Chisholm is crucified. But his victory is his life.

That life begins in a small, intolerant Scottish village. Francis Chisholm felt an early affection for the rough, bluff, competent fishermen and workers of whom his father was one. But when Francis was nine, descendants of Covenanters stoned the elder Chisholm nearly to death because he was a Catholic. Trying to reach home afterwards on a slippery bridge across a flooded river, Father and Mother Chisholm were drowned.

After a harrowing experience working as a rivet-boy in a shipyard, living with a wicked relative, Orphan Chisholm is rescued by horse-faced Aunt Polly. With her Irish saloonkeeper brother, a bluff, generous trencherman ("Now, Polly, our friends' stomachs will be thinking their throats is cut"), Aunt Polly brings Francis up, sends him to Holywell Catholic College.

There Francis won the dislike and doctrinal distrust of "tall, dark, thin, intense yet sardonic" Father Tarrant. When Francis ventured: "Surely, sir, creed is such an accident of birth God can't set an exclusive value on it," Father Tarrant answered icily: "What an admirable heretic you would have made, my good Chisholm."

Francis might never have become a priest at all had not the girl he was in love with found herself with child but without husband. Forced into a decorous marriage by the Church, she threw herself under a train. "First his parents; and now Nora. He could no longer ignore these testaments from above. ... He would give himself entirely to God."

At the English Seminary in Spain, Chisholm was given to somewhat worldly high spirits. "Deputed to read aloud in the refectory he smuggled in and substituted for The Life of St. Peter of Alcantara a ... tract entitled When Eva Stole the Sugar" He also set fire to the newspaper Father Despard was reading in the common room. "Asked why ... he laughed and answered, 'The Devil finds work for idle hands!'"

Later he ran away for four days, walked 50 miles to spend the night (chastely) with a local trull, who told him: "You are too innocent to be a priest. You will be a great failure." Rector MacNabb suggested that for penance Francis write 2,000 words on "The Virtue of Walking." Wrote the local priest: "Naturally, the pinnacle of achievement would have been the conversion of the woman ... as the result of our young apostle's visitation! But alas! She has gone into partnership with another madam and opened a brothel in Barcelona, which I grieve to report is flourishing."

As a zealous curate, Father Chisholm got into trouble with one superior after another. Dean Fitzgerald, "refined and fastidious," had a young lady parishioner who had seen a saint in a vision, discovered a sacred spring, showed stigmata on her hands and feet, existed without eating. When Father Chisholm happened in unexpectedly late one night, found the young woman "stuffing herself" on roast chicken, her mother cried rather sensibly: "I've got to keep her strength up somehow." But Father Chisholm, appalled by "the folly ... of all human life," felt obliged to unmask her.

Almost equally appalled was the Dean who was dreaming of establishing a new Lourdes. But when one of free-thinking Dr. Tulloch's dying patients bathed in the fraudulent young woman's spring and was cured, Father Chisholm in a quandary prayed: "Dear God, give me humility . . . and give me faith."

Soon Chisholm's superiors decided he would really be better off in China. So they hustled him out to Pai-tan, a remote, upriver mission. Wrote the secretary of the foreign missions society: "Pai-tan is a delightful spot . . . four hundred communicants and over one thousand baptisms. . . . My dear fellow, I rejoice that this prize is to be yours. . . . Get good strong durable soutanes. Short drawers are the best and I advise a body belt. . . ."

When Father Chisholm reached Pai-tan, he found "an acre of deserted earth, sun-scorched, gullied by the rains. ... At one end stood the remnants of a mud-brick chapel, the roof blown off, one wall collapsed, the others crumbling. Alongside lay a mass of caved-in rubble which might once have been a house." "Here, Father," said one of the only two rice-Christians left of the congregation, "is the mission."

Out of this rubbish, in the midst of hatred and contempt. Father Chisholm built the mission of Pai-tan and his spiritual life. How he taught himself to practice medicine, how he saved the life of Tycoon Chia's son, how he brought Pai-tan through the plague, famine, banditry, how he overcame the deep Teutonic hatred of his German Reverend Mother, made friends with the Methodist missionaries, was tortured by bandits and escaped, make up most of The Keys of the Kingdom.

At last, an old, worn-out man, Father Chisholm prepared to return to Britain. Two young go-getter priests came out to replace him, talked about an airplane for making their interurban visits. "He's a case," said Father Jerry. "After all he's not so bad, if you take him the right way," said Father Steve, "anybody would get a bit queer in the topknot after being over thirty years out here alone." Then Father Chisholm had his last great triumph. When he saved Tycoon Chia's son, the proud, highly civilized, subtle Chinese had formally offered to become Christian. To Chia's great relief Father Chisholm said no.

Now Mr. Chia came to say good-by to Father Chisholm: "Since our time together is limited it might not be unfitting if we talked a moment regarding the hereafter. ... I have never pondered deeply on what state lies beyond this life. But if such a state exists it would be very agreeable for me to enjoy your friendship there. . . . The goodness of a religion is best judged by the goodness of its adherents. My friend . . . you have conquered me by example."

Said Father Chisholm: "Let us go down to the church."

The Author. Chief difficulty in writing about Christian goodness is that almost nobody believes it is possible. Next difficulty is that few people find it exciting. In Les Miserables Victor Hugo succeeded in making goodness exciting by free flourishes of his supercolossal, Wagnerian style. His Bishop Myriel is Christian virtue carried to the point of elephantiasis. Author Cronin succeeds by exactly the opposite means--by simplicity, artful artlessness, complete sincerity.

Since 1939, Author Cronin has been in the U.S. writing articles and making speeches for the British Ministry of Information, "doing my best to convince people that democracy is worth saving." He is a slight, sandy-haired Scot with white eyebrows and eyelashes, and about as unaffected and honest as Father Chisholm. Meeting him for the first time, a hard-boiled newspaperman has been known to wire his office: "His face is a sort of composite of all the face of humanity plus the combination of austerity and kindliness you find in so few faces."

Born (July 19, 1896) in Cardross, Scotland, Author Cronin had a fatherless boyhood full of hard labor and poverty, much like Father Chisholm's. He pulled himself out of it with the help of Carnegie Foundation scholarships and his uncle, a poor, kindly Catholic priest (the model for Father Chisholm). By working until he often dropped exhausted, Cronin became a doctor. But he really wanted to paint or write. Hatter's Castle enabled him to give up medicine: he has never practiced since.

Cronin usually writes his novels in three to five months, though their germination period may be five to ten years. But The Keys of the Kingdom has been in his mind since boyhood, took eight months to rewrite four times. He writes with a fountain pen and a driving will. Writing is a "grey monotony of hell" punctuated by occasional outbursts of frayed nerves, while Cronin's three sons ("all named after saints") wonder "if the world wouldn't be better off without authors." Mrs. Cronin, also a doctor, who has a phenomenal memory for names, places, dates, checks the manuscript for errors.

Urge to write The Keys of the Kingdom came after Cronin's play, Jupiter Laughed, got laughed off Broadway. Says Cronin: "It was the best thing in the world for me." He felt he had to do a big job "to prove to his critics and himself that he wasn't going soft." He has no messianic complex. Like all Cronin novels, The Keys of the Kingdom was written "to lighten, not to enlighten the world."

A Catholic, Cronin hopes that the Catholic Church will like his book. "But if they turn their back upon it, it will be a condemnation of Catholicism in the best sense of that word--universal."

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