Race With The Devil

Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love by Joseph Pearce, 236 pages

Joseph Pearce has garnered some attention in the last decade and a half for his biographical work on literary figures as varied as Solzhenitsyn, Belloc, Chesterton, and Wilde.  Most notably he, along with Clare Asquith, can claim credit for having reopened the question of Shakespeare's religious views.   In addition, he has produced TV specials on Shakespeare and Tolkien (the latter featuring St Louis' own Kevin O'Brien).  What is not known to most of his admirers, at least not on this side of the Atlantic, is that Pearce had attained notoriety in his native England for a rather different set of writings, when he served as the editor of a series of far-right newspapers with titles like Bulldog and Nationalism Today.  His first book-length biography had as its subject the racist skinhead band Skrewdriver.   As the result of articles he authored, he was twice imprisoned on charges of inciting racial hatred.

This book is Pearce's own story of his life leading up to, and beyond, his conversion to Catholicism in 1987.  The weak moral relativism of his schooling proved no barrier to an irrational hatred that fed off of the jingoistic pride he was taught at home.  Through his reading of Schumacher and Solzhenitsyn, Lewis and Tolkien, Belloc and Chesterton, Pearce gradually came to recognize the existence of an underlying moral and spiritual order, catalyzing his transformation from militant, imperialistic "Great Britisher" to contemplative, agrarian "Little Englander".

 

The book has a number of appealing personal touches, as when Pearce interrupts an account of the negative impact his father had on him to reassure the reader that this makes his father seem much worse than he actually was.  Likewise, the stories of his riotous exploits as a street brawler are spiced with a kind of guilty pride.  Throughout, Pearce is generous to friends and enemies alike, and, at least in retrospect, acutely conscious of the small moments of grace which marked his journey.

If judged by the standard of St Augustine's Confessions, which it deliberately evokes, this work falls short.  By almost any other standard, it is a considerable success.  With wit and charm, Pearce illustrates that his faith is not the rejection of what is good in the world, but its purification and transcendence.