In the autumn of 1958 the columns of Blackfriars, normally reserved, as we know for polite murmurings of theological disagreement, resounded with literary controversy. In the September issue, in an article on ‘Morals and the Novel’, Bernard Bergonzi published some interesting, if inconclusive, reflections on the relation between a Catholic view of certain (principally sexual) moral matters and the presentation of those matters in works of literature, particularly novels. Unwisely, perhaps, he supplied the want of a conclusion with a quotation from Newman’s Idea of a University: ‘from the nature of the case if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.’ Unwisely, certainly, Bergonzi decided to begin his reflections with the case of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, Canto 5), whom he was persuaded ‘Dante would surely have liked to forgive... were they not already damned’. These opening and closing tropes attracted the characteristically circumspect but uncomfortably firm analytical attention of Kenelm Foster in a letter to the Editor. Bergonzi was convicted of failing to distinguish between Dante-as-poet and Dante-as-protagonist-of-the-poem, and Newman was shown either not to have said what he meant, or to have begged the question. The question, Kenelm then believed, was this: ‘can the subject-matter of literature—which, concedo, is sinful man—ever be treated, in-formed, in a way that may appropriately be called Christian?’
