My family moved to Denver during the summer of 1980. We soon found ourselves sitting on our front porch every afternoon to welcome the cooler air. Invariably, or so memory suggests, we would wave to a well-dressed elderly gentleman (always in a sport coat, tie and fedora) who would be walking up the block to get an evening paper. Only some years later, after that gentleman had moved from his apartment building into a nursing home, did we learn that his name was William E. Barrett.
Barrett, who died in 1986 at 85 years of age, was the writer of the 1962 novel that was later made into the 1963 hit film “Lilies of the Field,” starring Sidney Poitier and rumored to be based on a convent of nuns located someplace north of Denver. An earlier (1955) film starring Humphrey Bogart was named after and based upon Barrett’s 1951 novel The Left Hand of God. A third Barrett novel, The Wine and the Music (1968), the story of a Roman Catholic priest who decides to marry a wealthy Protestant divorcee, was also turned into a movie, the 1970 film “Pieces of Dreams.”
I know nothing of his early writings, both short stories and novels—detective stories and tales of airplanes and pilots during World Wars I and II. I later learned that his knowledge of aeronautics was such that he was invited to lecture at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
What I gradually learned more about (I was then a professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver) were what I will call his “religious” books, the majority of which are clearly “Catholic” novels, with setting and plot and character and themes that are all quite explicitly Roman Catholic.
That was certainly true of the previously mentioned Left Hand of God, about a downed American fighter pilot who hides in a Catholic mission in central China by taking on the role of the replacement priest expected at the mission about the time of his arrival. The same could be said of Lilies of the Field, about a just-retired young soldier traveling cross-country who helps a group of nuns build their new chapel.
I gradually purchased and read copies of his religious novels. He wrote 13 by my count, beginning with The Left Hand of God in 1951 and ending with Lady of the Lotus in 1975. The latter is the only one not specifically Catholic. It is the fictional (but very well researched) biography of the wife that Prince Gautama Siddhartha renounced (along with his wealth and class status) at the beginning of his journey into Buddhahood.
Along the way, in 1964, Barrett also published a very well-researched biography of the life of Giovanni Battista Montini before he became Pope Paul VI in 1963. He titled it The Shepherd of Mankind. My guess is that Barrett himself wanted to know more about this relatively unknown man (at least in the United States) who had succeeded the immensely popular Pope John XXIII and had to oversee the remaining sessions of the Second Vatican Council that John had convened in 1962. As a professional writer, he undoubtedly sensed the need for a book introducing the new pope to American Catholics and a wider religious readership.
Shortly thereafter, in 1967, he published The Red Lacquered Gate. As its subtitle tells us, it is the story of “The Early Days of the Columban Fathers and the Courage and Faith of its Founder, Fr. Edward Galvin.” Barrett was perhaps hired by the Columbans to write this book, but the story—which relates their mission work in China—is also of a piece with his wider interest in China.
Having recently re-read all of Barrett’s religious novels, let me attempt here an overall critical appreciation of them.
As I have already noted, Barrett was a very careful researcher. He spent months in Italy doing interviews and searching archives for his Montini biography. And there is much evidence throughout his religious novels of his wide reading in Catholic history and theology as well in both Western and Eastern philosophy.
He was expert in his imagination of plot and character. The novels reflected widespread popular interests but never reduced events and people to stereotypes. Each was a carefully crafted original story with unique characters, settings and plots.
He was quite adept in his description of scenes, whether in contemporary Colorado or postwar China, in the St. Lawrence River area of Quebec in the 1950s and post-war Bavaria south of Munich. In every case, the reader gets a detailed sense of the general scenery of each area and the specific location of each story. I suspect that archival material would show that he spent time in each of the areas where his novels were set.
Many of his novels involve a well-told love story (typically involving a young professional couple) around which and within which a broader religious theme is developed. But these stories and their believable characters avoid the kind of sappy stereotypes that so often prevail in that genre.
Barrett, like many other writers in religion and spirituality, told stories involving the miraculous or the supernatural. Yet here as well his stories are well researched and avoid the sensational and sentimental.
Of special note in this regard is The Empty Shrine (1958), which tells the fictional story of a proclaimed apparition of Mary to a young 8-year-old girl on a small Francophone island in the St. Lawrence River during the 1950s. We are told about the life of the girl who thought she saw a woman or an angel in a hollow rock formation across a small bay, though she herself was never certain. Yet she soon becomes a cause célèbre for some islanders hoping to benefit from the claim to a Marian apparition. Then we jump ahead 10 or so years to the life of that same “girl,” now a young teacher on that island, where we are met with believable love stories about this young woman and a local man she’d grown up with—as well as with a skeptical writer who’d come to the island to destroy the myth of any vision.
Barrett treats the possibility of a Marian apparition with critical respect. He includes a realistic discussion of Lourdes. He shows us the hypocritical character of many pushing the story of this supposed apparition. Yet he also shows us the careful conduct of the local parish priest and of the young girl’s agnostic father. And he leaves open the possibility of an actual apparition in this or some other “empty shrine” (as had happened in Lourdes), as well as to the possibility of miracles like those which have happened at the shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré further up the St. Lawrence River in Quebec City.
Permit me to end with the following. William Barrett’s Catholic books are really quite good, but he is hardly remembered in Catholic academic or literary circles. I have written about this man whose work I gradually came to know and admire in order to suggest to others that they too might wish to take up and read—tolle, lege, in St. Augustine’s famous words. The books are still available in many libraries and through second-hand book sellers, waiting for others to rediscover this neglected literary treasure.
Selected works by William Barrett:
The Left Hand of God (1951, fiction)
The Empty Shrine (1958, fiction)
The Lilies of the Field (1962, fiction)
The Shepherd of Mankind (1964, biography)
The Glory Tent (1967, fiction)
The Red Lacquered Gate (1967, history)
The Wine and the Music (1968, fiction)
A Woman in the House (1971, fiction)
The Shape of Illusion (1972, fiction)
Lady of the Lotus (1975, fiction)
