The Use of Memory.

Tom Burns, the London Tablet's former long-time editor, remains forever etched in my memory standing in front of fireplaces. The fire was not lit in August 1978 when we met with some friends in his London apartment to discuss possible successors to Pope Paul VI. Tom stood there looking around the circle as we named our choices for the impending papal conclave and swept aside his enlightened guess: Albino Luciani.

If my memory rightly recalls our first meeting, it took place years before that in my parents' home outside Melbourne. Tom was enjoying the light and warmth of our huge, country fireplace - a break on a working tour of Australia. That was just one of his many networking visits abroad: to the United States, France, Italy, Spain, Chile, and many other countries.

After a long life as publisher and journalist, with a wartime interlude at the British embassy in Madrid, in his late eighties Tom has, as he said at its launching, "committed" his first book.

Despite the rancorous review by Evelyn Waugh's son Auberon (London Sunday Telegraph for March 21, 1993), this autobiography remains enthralling throughout. There are stories about those he met in the United States like Thomas Merton, Sargent Shriver, the Duke of Windsor, and Sheila (Cudahy) Pellegrini. An early stay in Paris put him in touch with Raissa and Jacques Maritain, Marc Chagall, and others. He was in Rome for the funeral of Pope Pius XI. In Spain he had to arrange for a seven-foot bed when entertaining Charles de Gaulle and his wife. The list of those whom Tom knew, entertained, and published in England never ends: Hilaire Belloc, John and Penelope Betjeman, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, T.S. Eliot, Clare Boothe Luce, Frank Sheed, and Maisie Ward. The last of his generation, Tom's vignettes cover more than sixty years in the story of what he calls the "Catholic intelligentsia" of our century.

He tells of Herbert Thurston, S.J., that tireless debunker of bad history and bogus visions, being challenged by an impertinent young Jesuit: "Father, is it all right if I believe in the Trinity?" Don't miss Tom's story of his crossing the Pyrenees alone in imitation of Belloc, losing his way, being drafted into a Corpus Christi procession in a tiny mountain village, and then traveling with a troupe of bawdy performing dogs. Along the way he called a particular inn to bring greetings from Belloc. "Ah," said the innkeeper, "that charming German gentleman." Belloc, to whom, as Tom remarks, "the Franco-Prussian war was like a hair-shirt, would have exploded."

A networker all his life, Tom began publishing in 1926 at the "sweat-shop and university rolled into one," the newly founded firm of Sheed and Ward. Alongside such locals on their list as Belloc, Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, and Christopher Dawson, Tom helped to bring in translations from France and Germany. I remember his delight fifty years later as editor of the Tablet when I sent him a piece on the state of German Catholic theology: the article opened at the fresh grave in Tubingen of one of his old authors, Karl Adam.

From Sheed and Ward Tom moved across the street to Longman, Green & Co. He secured books from friends like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. He managed to persuade the "somewhat bovine board at Longmans" to underwrite Greene's trip to Mexico. The results were the Lawless Roads and perhaps Greene's best novel, The Power and the Glory. Much later Tom's persistence encouraged Greene to create Monsignor Quixote against all odds.

In the 1920s Tom lived for a while in Bloomsbury. After Paris he was not awed by the Bloomsbury intelligentsia: "Its religious requirements appeared to be satisfied by Frazer's Golden Bough and its sexual mores seemed to derive from the Trobriand Islanders." Many remarks and stories of this quality - don't skip over those about Paul Claudel and Evelyn Waugh - make nonsense of Auberon Waugh's gratuitous complaints about the book's lack of incidents and shortage of jokes.

When World War II ended and Tom returned to London from Madrid, he brought with him his wonderful Spanish wife (Mabel) and a growing family. He revitalized Burns & Oates, a publishing house founded by a great-uncle. Before he left in 1967 to become editor of the Tablet, Tom had helped to launch Concilium and had added more than a thousand titles to his firm's list. He delighted in reissuing classics by Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, and other mystical giants. His interest in spirituality went back a long way. On his seventeenth birthday, three school friends gave him the two volumes of Baron von Hugel's The Mystical Element in Religion.

In his fifteen years running the Tablet, Tom liberalized the journal's policies and massively broadened its list of readers and contributors. The only piece I ever had rejected by Tom was on Jesus as martyr. I never meant it that way but Tom took it as undercutting the risen Christ's divinity. That faith, together with the Mass, is one of the great non-negotiables of Tom's existence. For so many of us Tom has revealed the warmth and light which come from Catholic Christianity - like the great fireplaces I always see Tom standing in front of.