This is a recording of a paper to be given to the winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society on January 14th 2023. The theme of the conference is ‘the Church and hypocrisy’, and the title of the paper is ‘Vocation, integrity and hypocrisy in a secularising society: Iris Murdoch and the clergy of the Church of England’.
I place Murdoch’s portrayal of the clergy in the context of her own understanding of the necessary role of the established church, and her extensive reading of the radical theology of the sixties, seventies and eighties. I consider some of the Anglican clergy in Murdoch’s fiction, in terms of their integrity or otherwise, to both their vocation and their conscience. I focus in particular on those clergy who can no longer assent to the doctrine of their own church, and the subtleties and evasions into which they are forced as a result. The novels in question are The time of the angels (1966), The philosopher’s pupil (1983), and The book and the brotherhood (1987).
Listen to it here; it is about 23 minutes long.
I shall submit a considerably longer version of the paper for consideration for the EHS’s annual publication, Studies in Church History. If it is accepted for SCH, it would appear in volume 60, in the summer of 2024. Before then, I should be happy to share the draft if folk would care to send me an email.
After six years and dozens of posts in my series on fictional clergy, a new record has been set for the most priests in a single novel. In Unguarded Hours, by A.N. Wilson (1978), I counted some ten clergy, plus half a dozen ordinands in theological college, and a wandering bishop. It is to Mar Sylvestrius (Exarch of the Isles, Abbot of Cluny, Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, but otherwise plain Mr Skegg, retired electrician) that we owe the intervention that catapults the hapless hero into the sphere of the Church of England. But it is in the other characters that most interest lies.
Wilson’s fiction has often been likened to that of Evelyn Waugh, and our hero Norman Shotover is, like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, knocked off his professional course by a ludicrously minor misdemeanour into a situation for which he is manifestly unsuited. But while Pennyfeather is ejected from the study of theology, Norman is instead thrust into it. Wilson himself had spent an abortive year in training for ordination at St Stephen’s House in Oxford, and we are invited to identify Norman’s experience with Wilson’s own (Norman is Wilson’s middle name). It is perhaps for the goings-on, the ‘mucking around with sex’ and more besides at St Cuthbert’s College that the novel is most remembered. Though it is not my concern here, Wilson’s portrayal of the high camp subculture of the college is of a time when the Church of England, having in 1967 supported decriminalisation of homosexuality had not yet begun to reassess its own discipline which remained conservative. The antics of Thelma, Amelia and the other St Cuthbert’s ‘bags’ were a symptom of what has recently been called the ‘undigested’ nature of the Church’s relationship with homosexuality.
St Cuthbert’s is worth pausing over for a moment, however, as a portrayal both of a particular type of college, and of the general disorientation of Anglican Catholicism in 1974, when the book is set. The Church of England was in the process of rationalising its training, and a number of the colleges that were in cathedral towns – and distant from the universities – were under threat of amalgamation or closure. St Cuthbert’s is in the Sussex cathedral town of Selchester, and exudes the whiff of decay that the reformers wished to remove. Based in two houses in the cathedral close, the college is the proud possessor of a biretta blessed by Darwell Stone, and a stole worn by Father Tooth which has taken on the character of a holy relic. Norman, however, is unable to find the library, the books having been sold off to pay for repairs to the chapel roof; instead of writing essays, the students recycle old ones from a collection kept in the Common Room. The principal, Father Fosdyke, is on ‘paid leave’ after a series of scandals the previous year, and another colleague, ‘Dahlia’ Dickens, left to get married, leaving only ‘Felicity’, the vice-principal Arthur Fogg.
Not a few of the clergy Wilson shows us are in states of decrepitude, and their churches with them. The bishop we never meet, though we learn that he is unwell. The wizened Canon Pottle has been incumbent of St Botolph Bowlegs for sixty years, and the local conservation societies can only hope that he expires before the building falls down. Felicity Fogg is another, with his stammer (which Wilson lampoons mercilessly), ‘one of those moth-eaten clergymen who look as if they are falling to bits’ (part 2, chapter 7). Fogg is happiest when recounting stories of the shrine at Walsingham in the old days, but unable to exert any influence whatever on the student body, good or bad. Little of value emerges from Wilson’s account of Fogg, St Cuthbert’s and the particular kind of Anglo-Catholicism they represent. The most fully-drawn caricature in the novel, however, is of a quite different kind.
Image via Flickr (jamesbradley, CC BY 2.0)
The Very Reverend and Honourable Ronald Etherington-Hope, dean of Selchester – or just plain Ron Hope, as he preferred to be called – is an amalgam of every possible kind of liberal or radical cleric from the 1950s to the 1970s. His early career clearly evokes that of John A. T. Robinson, author of the controversial 1963 book Honest to God. A doctoral thesis on Rudolf Bultmann and a well-regarded book on early Christian texts lead to academic success in his college. A contribution to the best-selling collection of controversial essays Rumblings (a clear reference to Soundings, published in 1962), opens the way to the equally successful Room for Doubt, television appearances and articles in the newspapers.
Such theologically radical and media-friendly clergy also appear in the work of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. Ron Hope’s journey, however, was not yet finished, and Wilson gives to him more markers of a kind of politicised cleric of the early 1970s. As the angry young of the 1950s became older, the new generation of the late 1960s had less appetite for Hope’s writing, and so ‘jauntier, and yet more aggressive, tones had to be adopted.’ Unlimited abortion and the abolition of the age of consent are causes he adopts, along with government aid to guerrilla movements (the World Council of Churches had in 1970 begun to aid certain southern African groups, and it was not quite clear that the money had not been used for arms). Newly arrived in Selchester in the early 1970s, his projects include hospitality to just such a group of African freedom fighters, and raising money to support striking car workers. His solution to the disorder at St Cuthbert’s is a course of lectures on ‘The Church in the Modern World’; the ordinands are packed off to experience ‘real life’ in factories, mental hospitals and immigration centres.
Leaving aside the implausibility of his career path – such a figure was a highly unlikely candidate for a deanery – Wilson’s Dean is a stereotype of an earlier period updated for the Seventies. What is more unusual is Wilson’s depiction of Ron Hope’s family life. Of his seven daughters, several seem to have achieved the kind of enlightenment that he might have desired: one is experimenting with communal living near Glastonbury; another is travelling to Kathmandu; Cleopatra – whom we meet – runs a natural food store in Selchester which has displaced the old tea room and its doilies, after returning from a squat in south London. Only the eldest – respectably married to an MP with three privately-educated children – is a disappointment. The reader is however, invited, I think, to compare them with the clergymens’ daughters in Orwell, Barbara Pym and others, and not quite favourably; it is not only in St Cuthbert’s that people are ‘mucking around with sex’, but the Dean’s daughters too. The expectations most readers would have had of a clergyman’s home life are further confounded by the fact that the Dean’s wife has taken what is tactfully described as an ‘extended holiday’ in South Africa with Hope’s elder brother, an embarrassment in Cambridge which he has come to Selchester to escape.
Wilson’s acidulous and well-informed picture of the Church of England would seem to leave nothing unscathed. But there are two priests with whom, though very different from each other, Norman/Wilson seems to appreciate rather more, and who in their shambolic and somewhat ridiculous way still seem to point towards a faith and practice that have something of value. The worship at St Willibrord’s, the ‘highest’ in Selchester, with its (to Norman) inexplicable smells, costumes and gestures, and its chant, ‘half like the mysterious music of an oriental temple and half like a cat caught in a mangle’ is both ridiculous and in some vague way moving. And it is as curate to Father Crisp that Norman feels that his unwonted vocation might be worked out. Crisp is cheerfully dismissive of the Dean (a ‘silly donkey’), and pragmatic about the youthful indiscretions at St Cuthbert’s. Mucking about with sex is to be expected; the question was whether or not they would, in time, make good priests. And Norman is impressed by Crisp’s own sense of vocation, which had pressed itself on him despite his doubts, and through his simply carrying on had lasted forty years. It is to Crisp that Wilson gives the only opportunity to speak at length in his own voice (part 1 chapter 5). It was simply by obedience to the Divine Will, he tells his congregation, that Christians could hope to stand in the same company as the saints, however inscrutable that will might seem.
Norman’s prescribed dose of ‘real life’ after the scandal in the college was to be taken in a parish in an obscure part of the Surrey commuter belt, all mock Tudor houses with neat little gardens. Mr Dumble is, as the students had thought, rather ‘low’: communion only once a month, no list of times for confessions, and Mr Dumble preaches in just a surplice and scarf. Instead of a fug of wax and incense, the church smells of polish, flowers and damp. Norman preaches his first sermon, on neighbourliness, which seems to be appreciated, and visits the hospital. And the parishioners who host him every day to lunch or tea seem kind, and speak of their family and their pets. Like the Dumbles, with their garden and with Nationwide or Dr Finlay on the television, they are unglamorous, conscientious and happy. Though the vicarage was not full of nice things, and the Dumbles’ talk did not scintillate, Norman resolves to be as much like Mr Dumble as he can. ‘How much good Mr Dumble is doing by stealth’, says another character: ‘if we only had half the goodness of some of those pathetic little clergymen.’ (part 3 chapter 2) For all its comedy, the Church of England still seems to Norman/Wilson a force for good.
[The latest post in my series on clergy and churches in twentieth century English fiction. Here, in the third of four posts, I look at the third novel in the ‘Frederica Quartet’ by A.S. Byatt].
If we know nothing else about the religious life of the early Sixties, we know it to have been a time of experiment. It is possible to overstress the uniqueness of the time, to misremember nostalgically, or (on the other hand) to trace all our current ills back to it. But though the roots of the intellectual turmoil went deep into the past, there was clearly a sense that many things in doctrine, morality and church life that had been thought immutable were in flux all at once; a general sense of unsettlement. One reaction to this imagined crisis was to experiment: with new forms of ministry outside the traditional parish; with new secular ideas; with new ways of communicating. A.S. Byatt’s 1996 novel Babel Tower, which begins in London in the autumn of 1964, dwells on all of these.
In the crypt of the church of St Simeon, not far from King’s Cross, there is an experiment in new ministry. Like so many of London’s churches, St Simeon’s was damaged by German bombing during the Blitz. Some of these churches were rebuilt, others demolished, a few left in ruins as memorials. Some, though intact, were no longer needed as the populations they used to serve had left the city, and became homes for alternative ministries. The originally vast space of St Simeon’s was rebuilt on a rather smaller scale within its original walls. Its surviving Victorian glass is not so much reconstructed as remixed, ‘abstract, yet suggestive’, with storks and doves, giraffes and leopards, in ‘rivers of grass-green and blood-red, and hummocks of burned amber’; planks of the Ark; Christ’s hand breaking bread at Emmaus (chapter 1). The simple gaudy piety of the old glass is transformed, a bricolage now of the blackened shards deposited in the aisles; the symbolism is hard to avoid. (It is one of several ruined churches in English fiction, some of which I wrote about before.)
No longer a parish church, St Simeon’s is home to the Listeners, the model for which is clearly the Samaritans, set up in the crypt of St Stephen’s Walbrook (in the City of London) in 1953. In a plywood booth the Listeners take phone calls from the desperate and the vexatious. One of them is Daniel Orton, no longer a parish priest in Yorkshire after suffering a breakdown following the death of his wife (in Still Life, the second of the quartet). Daniel (who shall have his own post in this series) simply listens, and coaxes his callers to talk; there is suggestion, but little direction. In the ruins of the old, a newer, humbler church listens and does not pontificate.
One of the other Listeners – their director, in fact – is Adelbert Holly, canon of St Paul’s, writer on theology and psychology, counsellor and ‘sexual therapist’, described by his publisher as ‘a daring and a subtle theologian’. His first book, Within God Without God has made his publisher a good deal of money, arguing in its ‘riddling and witty way’ that Christians must abandon their idea of God as the ‘Old Man Up There’. Instead, God may be found in every cell of the body, ‘the inherent Intelligence in the first protozoa clinging together in the primal broth.’ Canon Holly has much in common with the bishop of Woolwich and his Honest to God (1963) and has appeared on the television supporting it, and him. Daniel is not sure what separates such ideas from pantheism, and wonders whether the ‘Canon would shrivel if he were obliged to follow his own reasoning, his own metaphors, outside the walls, so to speak, of the Church, the singing, the ritual, the imposed duties.’ (chapter 1)
But Holly’s panentheism (which is perhaps what it is closest to, or perhaps the thought of Teilhard de Chardin) is not abstract, but very immediate to him, bodily and sensual, a matter of sex and of death. He is a founder member of a group called Psychoanalysts in Christ, and author of another, even more controversial book, Our Passions Christ’s Passion. One of the Listeners suggests that the ‘modern Church’ gives the impression that the subject of sex is what bothers it most. (The Church of England did indeed spend a good deal of time in the Sixties thinking, and disagreeing, about sex, heterosexual and homosexual. It was also a period of Christian flirtation with psychology, and the two movements were connected, although historians have not yet explored the connection all that much) ‘The Church has always been about sex, dear’ Holly replies, gleefully: ‘that’s what the problem is.’ In denying the sexual impulse and trying to eradicate it, people become obsessed with it, he thinks. ‘That’s why current moves to be more accepting and celebratory about our sexuality are so exciting’.
But is religion not really about God, and the prospect of death, he is asked? Yes indeed, Holly continues: ‘the germ cell is immortal but the sexually divided individual is doomed, it is sex that brought death into the world.’ And suffering too – to inflict and to bear it – is at the heart of Holly’s gospel, of a cruel God who tortured His Son and of a suffering Christ, battered body and blood spilt, pain and degradation. It is on these lines that Holly speaks for the defence in the obscenity trial that forms the centrepiece of the novel. But the subtlety that his publisher values is a liability in the court room. ‘You have lost me, Canon, I fear’, says the judge; ‘I can understand your individual sentences, but your general drift I find hard to follow.’ Holly’s flights into obscurity try the patience of both judge and jury (chapter 20).
For all the attention that has been paid to the religious ideas of the 1960s, historians have neglected the means by which those ideas spread – the history of religious publishing. And there was certainly a market for economical editions of religious writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Letters and Papers from Prison, through which most English readers first encountered the martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer, appeared in the Fontanta paperback series in 1959, and went through an impression a year for some years; John Robinson’s Honest to God was in the similar series from the SCM Press. In chapter 4, we see the office of Rupert Parrott, Canon Holly’s editor, and his books are on display, with Op Art covers, spirals, in black and white or blood-red and orange; they are ‘elegant, and evidence of energy’. (And self-consciously modern, as I’ve observed elsewhere). The firm of Bowers and Eden is run by an ‘old-style socialist’ who thinks religion nonsensical, unworthy of attention. But Parrott – and Honest to God – has persuaded him that there is a market in the ferment: ‘much more extreme stuff than [Honest to God], much sexier, literally, sex and religion’, the new youth cultures, studies of ‘charisma’, the death of God. The conventional ways in which people were prepared to live even without believing are no longer available, Parrott observes. ‘We’re moving into a period of moral ferment, moral realignment, fruitful chaos, people want to know what’s going on.’
Part of that moral realignment was in the relationship of creativity and the law; the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, the ‘trial’ of Lady Chatterley, and the ending of theatre censorship in 1968. The established Church played important parts in all these developments, since it was on Christian foundations that the whole justification of censorship had rested. Holly is present at the meeting of solicitors and barristers to plan the defence of Bowers and Eden and of Babbletower. John Robinson had appeared at the Chatterley trial in 1960 for the defence, making him ‘a stumbling-block and a cause of offence’ in the eyes of the archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. ‘There was a bishop in the Chatterley case’ says the silk representing Bowers and Eden; ‘Got rather mangled. Said the book promulgated marriage. Got himself reprimanded by the Archbish, I hear… … Not a good precedent on balance.’ Holly thinks he can find a better bishop for the job, ‘a radio Bishop with a large following’, but it is decided against (chapter 18).
But at least one bishop does appear in the trial of Babbletower, but for the prosecution. Though the episode is not often noted (overshadowed at it is by Robinson and Chatterley), David Sheppard, later bishop of Liverpool, but at the time a priest-cum-social worker in east London, appeared as a witness in the 1967 trial of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. And it is words very much like Sheppard’s that Byatt gives to the bishop Humphrey Swan, ‘thin and sad and bespectacled and insubstantial’, suffragan of a ‘difficult’ part of Birmingham. Had the bishop been depraved and corrupted by Babbletower, (the test in the law)? ‘I must answer yes. I am a worse man, a sicker soul, for having read that book. I shall take time, I shall need effort, to recover from the experience.’
As with the earlier novels in the series (see earlier posts on The Virgin in the Garden, and Still Life), Babel Tower teems with religious themes and with clergy through which they are examined. All of them are faced with the challenge of the new: intellectually, pastorally, aesthetically. In Holly and Swan, Byatt shows us some of the paths out of the predicament.
The novel next in line in my series on fictional clergy, and the churches they work in, is a relative rarity. ‘Few indeed are the novels set in the new churches … built after 1945, or in warm and well-lit buildings with every chair full.’ My words, from a piece for the Church Times a couple of years ago, and these fictional churches are few indeed, but there are at least some. One such church appears in Angus Wilson’s 1964 novel Late Call.
Wilson’s novel is one of the tension between old and new, ‘progressive’ and traditional, dramatised through the mutual incomprehension of three generations of the same family. And the setting is important: Carshall, a fictional post-war New Town somewhere in England. The two churches in the novel, and the two clergymen found in them, are not at all central to the plot. But the two pairings, of oldness and newness in their different ways, are part of the framing of the novel’s central theme.
Take the two churches, one in the New Town centre, and the other in the historic old town. The church in Old Carshall sits serenely by the village green and the stone cross, the timbered houses and the preserved ducking stool. The only concession to the twentieth century is a window, showing the tommies and nurses of the First World War. It is in these village churches that one of the characters finds ‘such a real sense of order and tradition’ in their worship (chapter 5). Wilson tells us little more of it, and does not need to.
With time on her hands, the novel’s main character Sylvia shops and wanders in the New Town, taking in the self-conscious gestures of its architecture (chapter 4). The public library is well set out, clean, lit by large glass windows. And the church of St Saviour too, like the library and the bowling alley too, is light and simple inside, lit with a ‘lovely sky-blue light’ by its windows of thin slotted glass. In fact, apart from the long thin silver crucifix ‘you’d hardly know it for a church’ so much as a lecture hall, with wooden chairs with tie-on cushions in a jade green cloth. In the atrium there are racks of pamphlets with clever, eye-catching photographs on their covers. Bush Fair shopping centre in Harlow. From the J. R. James Archive (Flickr), CC BY-NC 2.0
Outside in the town centure the gestures are more explicit. There is a fountain with mechanical metal arms; a twisted bronze sculpture called the ‘Watcher’, ‘difficult and modern’; a mural in pink and lilac, of the naked young in bucolic freedom, by some ‘name’ artist the Corporation had sought out. And St Saviour’s is quite a famous ‘modern’ church, she understands, with its ‘odd metal steeple more like a piece of children’s Meccano and the funny slots in the side of the building’; it is its strangeness that draws her inside into its simplicity and quiet.
We never meet the Reverend Mr Marchant, rector of St Saviour’s, though he is the kind of man that the pragmatic and progressive folk of the New Town appreciate (chapter 5). He is controversial, we are to understand, a preacher from whom one never hears ‘any of this dry-as-dust theological stuff’. His piety is much more this-worldly, upsetting the grammar school people with his sermon on the eleven-plus. And to the church on Easter Sunday come ‘women in smart hats and men in their best lounge suits… everyone was dressed up to the nines’; it looks even more like a meeting room than when empty.
But Mr Marchant has slipped a disc, and the parish must accept whoever the archdeacon can supply to preach at short notice. And the substitute, Mr Carpenter, is far from what the neat and ostentatious congregation expect. Very old, with a long red nose and a dirty-looking beard, he seems like ‘some bedraggled, mangy old goat’. And his voice is one that reduces the flighty young to fits of stifled giggles: first strange, trembling and drawn out, then ‘the refined squeak of an Edinburgh Judy in a Punch and Judy show’. But grotesque though he appears, it is his words that provoke consternation; no gospel of good works from this holy fool. To be a ‘bustling, hustling busybody – that’s not life, or no more life than the frugal ant or the hoppitty flea…. Good works’ll not save your soul alive… This Grace, Lord, impart!’
But this is no Calvinistic straitjacket; there is much one can do to meet God. ‘Go out to mind who you are. Go out, not into the busy clamour of getting and spending, not even into the soothing clamour of good works. No, go out into the dreadful silence, the dark nothingness… then indeed may the Lord send the light of his face to shine upon you, then indeed may you be visited by that Grace which will save your soul alive.’
While the busy headmaster is apoplectic at such ‘vicious nonsense’ – this ‘barbaric doctrine’ of grace – and resolves to inform the church authorities, it is his mother Sylvia who alone troubles to thank the old man: ‘I shan’t forget what you said.’ ‘Ah’ he replies; ‘it’s all old stuff, I’m afraid.’ Into the sleek project of human perfectibility that the New Town represents, Wilson intrudes an older, more troublesome, more exacting faith.
Among the several stereotypes of Anglican clergy in English fiction, there is one which appears relatively infrequently: that of the ‘Grouper’. Partly because of its lack of organisation, the Oxford Group movement has left relatively little trace in the self-understanding of the British churches, but for a time in the 1930s it seemed poised to disrupt and refresh British Christianity from its local roots.
The Reverend Gideon Farrar appears in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life (1985), the second part of the so-called ‘Frederica Quartet’. The novel is set in the mid-1950s, somewhat after the heyday of the Group, and though he is never identified directly with it, or indeed any larger organisation, the parallels are unmistakeable. Farrar’s gospel is one of relationship and mutual self-discovery, which has its intellectual roots in two soils: an understanding of Jesus that stressed his humanity at the expense of His divinity; and the findings of the ‘new sciences’ of psychology and sociology. Farrar’s curate at St Bartholomew’s, Daniel Orton, who distrusts much of it, sees that Farrar has an ‘almost anthropological vision of the source of morals in the life of the family’ (ch. 10). A moorland hike. Image: bearpaw (Flickr.com), CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
His ministry starts with the ‘agape meal’ in which the rather reluctant parishioners of Blesford are to ‘discuss and discover’ each other. The Young People’s Group, which meets in the church hall for dancing, cider and earnest discussion, is much the same. The Grouper ‘house party’ is a weekend away in which the youth of the parish and others are to ‘experience each other’ as they walk briskly over the moors (ch. 17). In the evening, cosy and hot, the group sit and tell their life stories, an antidote to their English reserve and the repression of emotion that it is thought to entail. Farrar, while affecting to listen, in fact guides and shapes these stories into one larger archetypal narrative, of parental inadequacy, failure or absence; of damage that, once uncovered and owned, can be repaired in the wider ‘family’, the Church.
All these features of the Group – its emphasis on the personal, the spontaneous, the self-expressive; the influence of a kind of garbled depth psychology – all remained within the bounds of orthodoxy, and (as David Bebbington showed) anticipated much about the charismatic movement of the 1960s, and the related flirtation of the churches with the broader counter-culture. And Farrar appears briefly again in the third book in the quartet, Babel Tower (1996), now in the mid-1960s, as leader of the Children of Joy. The Children meet in large halls in London, and on country retreat weekends, where they ‘dance, sing, shout and encounter each other’s bodies in loving exploration, acting out infant joys and terrors, anger and tenderness, birth and death.’ (c.13) By now the distrust is widespread. But in the Blesford of the 1950s, Farrar’s religion seems to work: though the elderly members of the congregation are disorientated, the young are enthused, the sad held up, those ‘hungry for feeling’ fed (Still Life, ch.20).
The contrast between Farrar and his predecessor Mr Ellenby (who has his own post) is both theological and aesthetic. Ellenby represented the eternal givenness of the faith, and the awesome unknowable Father (ch.10). Now the sentimental Victorian crucifix is removed from the altar; Farrar’s religion is of the human Son as He dwelt among men. The heavy branching candlesticks make way for plain wooden ones; the closely embroidered altar cloth to ‘austere snowy linen’. All this recalls more than one artistically-orientated reordering of a church, as do the new vestments with ‘modern, abstract stitching’. In the vicarage, whole walls are gone, and new bright spaces opened up. It is emptied of its heavy useless things, the mahogany cabinets with glass fronts, the thick Turkish carpets; all is sleek, plain yet well-made, modern, European, young. Picasso, Miro and Chagall prints hang on the newly painted walls in lemon yellow and white (ch.10).
Where Byatt’s character parts company with the historical Group is in what Farrar does with his hold over his flock. There was certainly a kind of personality cult around Frank Buchman, the moving spirit of the Group, and a creeping authoritarianism under certain conditions. But Buchman’s appeal, rather like that of another American, Billy Graham, is exotic and foreign at a time when British culture was unusually susceptible to such things; Farrar’s is a similar handsome and clean charisma but transposed onto an unusual Englishman. Farrar is assertive, indeed intrusive, in his attempts to force an emotional intimacy with others which is not on offer. Stephanie, Daniel’s wife, who sees through Farrar sooner than most, recognised a combination of ‘personal conceit and intrusiveness’ which she had seen in other clergy (ch.10). But where in others it was a mask for shyness, for Farrar his directness is merely the outflow of a restless energy. He is a large man, ‘with a presence he enjoyed’; all is abundance, from his full beard flecked with gold, to his exuberant embraces as he gambols among his hikers on the moor (ch. 17). Daniel detects a compulsive need to both receive and give affection, warmth (ch .10).
Byatt shows us little of Farrar’s inner life, and so (though we are clearly invited to view him as culpable), it is not clear how calculated his manipulation of his young female flock is. But the picture that gradually unfolds – of late night ‘counselling’ in various states of undress, complaints from parents that their teenage girls are ‘interfered with’ – is an unsettling one, of which his wife is well aware. Though she is repelled by it, and by him, she nonetheless attributes it to his nature – to the inevitable inbuilt drives which the new psychology told her that no-one should be expected to regulate – and her own inadequacy in satisfying them (ch. 30). And in Babel Tower (ch. 18) we see the terms in which, after a decade of unregulated elaboration of his own myth, Farrar ends up justifying himself to his victims: ‘a horrible fantasy of sacrifice and communion’, created by Farrar’s exploitation of his own physical presence and clerical separateness. Real theological and social currents in the post-war English churches are eventually a means of sanctifying what Stephanie, the moral centre of the novel, knew immediately as a ‘crude version of the routine pass’.
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