Properly speaking, The
Dawn of All is not one of Benson’s “sensational novels,”
except, perhaps, to a rabid anti-Catholic who would be incensed at the
description of an admittedly fantastic (in the sense of fantasy) Catholic
England in the
enlightened twentieth century. Rather, the novel is something of an addendum to
Lord
of the World,
an effort to correct the general misimpression the public had gained of the
earlier work.
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| Prophecy, Blueprint...or Satire? |
In The
Dawn of All, Benson seems to have tried to go as far as he possibly
could in the opposite direction that he did in Lord
of the World. Believing that the
situation in Lord
of the World was completely ridiculous (however much we might think
today’s world resembles that dystopia), Benson countered the ridiculous (to
him) idea of a completely secular State, with the (to him) absolutely ludicrous
idea of a completely religious State.
The utterly fantastic is present from the start, and seems
to have set Benson laughing from the very beginning. He almost seems to have been playing a joke
on the people who insisted on taking Lord
of the World a little too seriously.
“Prophecy? You want prophecy?” he
seems to be saying. “Take this even more
outrageous story and see if you can swallow it.”
Think otherwise? Try
this on for size:
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| London, 1973? |
Using a technique suggestive of Billy Pilgrim’s unsettling
affliction in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse
Five (1969) an apostate priest dying in or about
1910 suddenly finds himself with no memory — and a promotion to the Monsignori
— sitting on a platform during an ecclesiastical ceremony in London in the year
1973. No explanation or anything. Poof. He’s there.
This time travel device seems to have fascinated Evelyn
Waugh, who seems to have
appreciated Benson’s sense of humor and satiric
touch. Waugh used it to good effect in his short story,
“Out of Depth.”
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| "Unstuck in time, you say?" |
Waugh’s version, which may have
inspired Vonnegut’s use of the plot device, centers on a “modern” Americanized
Englishman of 1933. The protagonist is appropriately named “Rip” Van Winkle.
This might have been Waugh’s way of emphasizing that the
man was already “dead” in a social or spiritual sense — “R.I.P.” — in addition
to recalling Washington Irving’s character.
Paralleling Benson’s
apostate priest, Van Winkle is a lapsed Catholic completely unaware of reality.
He drifts (or sleeps?) through life in a haze of trivial social engagements.
Where Benson’s apostate was dying, Waugh’s layman was already dead —
spiritually and intellectually, anyway.
At a party Rip becomes involved with an obvious clone of the
notorious Aleister Crowley, the Satanist and New Age theosophist who attempted
to revive paganism and “magick” in the twentieth century, ending up insane. Rip
is duped into being a guinea pig for an occult investigation. As a result, he
finds himself 500 years in the future.
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| Streets uh Lunnon, A.D. 2433 |
The English are savages. London (“Lunnon”) is a single row
of fifty or so wattle and daub huts on stilts over a Thames mudflat. The
Londoners’ chief occupation is digging in the ruins and collecting trinkets to
exchange for the cloth, axes, and glass beads of the civilized African traders.
African missionaries valiantly attempt to civilize the English barbarians and
convert them to Catholicism.
One of Waugh’s satiric twists is to make the
African missionaries Dominicans. Thus, instead of white men dressed in black
preaching to black men, he has black men dressed in white preaching to white
men.
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| Aleister Crowley, New Age Guru |
When Rip wakes to the present of the 1930s, returned as a
result of assisting at Mass, he abjures his esoteric adventures and returns to
the sacraments. Interestingly, Waugh’s early
novel, Black Mischief (1932), has a
naïve African ruler implementing programs that many people think of as
“Catholic social teaching,” but which are actually derived from New Age versions
of socialism — Small is Beautiful, E.F.
Schumacher’s 1973 “New Age Guide to Economics,” anyone?
Waugh’s story “Out of Depth” was
clearly inspired by Benson’s novel. The themes are
identical, except that Waugh was dealing on the individual level, while
Benson was exploring the social effect of a return to
the sacraments or conversion to Catholicism by an entire society. Both “Out of Depth” and The
Dawn of All end with the protagonists asking to go to
confession — and neither of them quite sure whether the whole thing has been a
dream.