clergy in British fiction

Holy Deadlock

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This latest post in my series on fictional clergy is an unusual one, in that it connects very directly with some of the stuff of more traditional ecclesiastical history: the law on divorce (in England and Wales), and a novel by A.P. (Alan) Herbert. Called to the Bar in 1918 (though he did not in fact practice as a barrister), Herbert made his name as a writer, for Punch and elsewhere, before entering Parliament in 1935 as an independent member for Oxford University. Perhaps chief among his achievements as a parliamentarian was the introduction of what became the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937, which is directly connected with his 1935 novel Holy Deadlock. Writing later, Herbert credited the book with having influenced public opinion and thus providing cover for MPs to support reform that might before have been very politically risky indeed.

The Penguin edition of Holy Deadlock (1955)

The depiction in Holy Deadlock of the procedure for divorce was so full and so accurate that Herbert knew of cases when, being advised by their solicitor, a young thing in trouble would produce a battered copy from handbag or coat pocket. Still highly readable, the novel irresistibly shows the results when a gap opens up between the law and the common sense of the public. The Adams – Mary and John – were married very young and still are young (she is not yet 30). Their marriage has broken down and they wish to divorce, but cannot without convincing a court both that John has committed adultery (which he has not) and that Mary has not (when in fact she has, but only subsequently to their separation). The absurd, almost farcical unfolding of their case, with its carefully staged trysts in seaside hotels and pursuits by weary private detectives, showed the impossibility, without deceit, of achieving what Herbert plainly wishes the reader to see as a just end. The chasm is vast between (on the one hand) the high-flown rhetoric about the law and the absolute respect it demands, and (on the other) bewilderment – even ribald amusement – among the public, and quiet connivance and circumlocution among the lawyers.

The law prior to the 1937 Act allowed only one ground for divorce – the ‘matrimonial offence’ that John’s trips to Brighton and elsewhere are designed to imply – and this was, of course, a traditional understanding of Christian morality as translated into law. The Bill proposed additional grounds, including desertion (with a minimum period), and cruelty. That Christian opinion was, in fact, divided on the need for reform may be seen in the Hansard record of debates on the Bill. The Bishop of St Albans, Michael Furse, opposed the Bill, believing it to be ‘against the most fundamental law of God with regard to the procreation of the human race, its upbringing and its education in the ultimate problem of life, which is how to live together.’ Henson of Durham, by contrast, supported it; Cosmo Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, thought it probably now ‘impossible for the State to impose Christian principles by law upon a mixed community when many of its members have neither the religious faith nor the assisting grace to enable them to live up to the Christian standard’, and so abstained at third reading.

There is more to say on the religious sentiment of the novel than I shall include here. That said, Herbert allows his characters only rather limited editorialising, and there is little of what one might call anti-clerical sentiment in the novel. (Indeed, the enforcers of the old consensus are more likely to be ‘good churchmen’ rather than the clergy.) But there is one clerical character, who stands both for a particular theology and as one side of a generational conflict. That character is Mary Eve’s father, about whom we learn rather little and meet only once.

John and Mary meet for the second and crucial time while both are working in 1919 in the East End of London – he at the Oxford House settlement, an outpost of a certain kind of Christian social concern, she at St Hilda’s Mission – and John notes that the father of this ‘golden girl’ is a ‘rector in Sussex’. But the Revd Eve, rector of Chatham Parva, was to be sorely disappointed at the couple’s decision not to marry in church (he must have expected to solemnise his daughter’s marriage himself). Mary was ‘repelled and puzzled’ by the words of the Book of Common Prayer. She could not accept that procreation was the first end of matrimony, and neither could she in conscience vow to remain married ‘til death us do part’. One had to be sensible, and prepared for divorce, she thought; her father’s idea of marriage was ‘an ideal – but it could not be a positive rule, much less a clause in a contract.’ The Reverend Eve was realistic enough to know that to withhold his consent would be futile, and so after a unhappy weekend of discussion and examination of texts, he gave up the struggle, consoling himself with the thought ‘that it was honesty of mind that made her say such dreadful things.’

Ten years later, Mary and John have indeed failed to reach the ideal, and she has not yet screwed up the courage to visit her father and let him know that divorce proceedings have begun. She, still not yet 29, had made a silly mistake at 19, and he was now an old man, 68 perhaps, and (we are to understand) a widower, ‘pottering about the lawn with a mower in his hands and a sermon in his mind – watering his roses and reciting the Old Testament – old, feeble and ineffective and, she thought sometimes, a little mad.’ Though his age looms large in her thoughts, and is associated with all things that are outdated, still he was her father, and she must either avoid him (which would cause hurt), or ‘confess her wickedness…. which, she thought, would kill him.’

In time, however, her father comes to hear gossip, and so the issue is forced. He writes in a shaky hand, disbelieving but upset; might she come and see him? Instead she writes, putting her whole case. She has read the report of the Royal Commission, and the Biblical texts and others: she was ‘quite clear that Christ never meant to lay down laws, only ideals and principles, or, as Dean Inge, said, “a counsel of perfection”’. Distracted and distressed, Mary sends the letter, which swings from pleading to peevish defensiveness and back. The reply arrives, and it is to be the last we hear of the Reverend Eve: ‘I can be glad of your honesty, at least. But it grieves me most, my dear daughter, to know that there is still, in thought, so great a gulf between us, a gulf which not even the Word of God can bridge.’ He should dearly love to see her, but under the circumstances it is best not to meet, though he will pray for a better understanding for her: ‘I am too old and tired for disputation, and will say no more.’ It is ‘the whimper of a hurt dog’ (the narrator’s words); Mary is ‘so miserable that she could not even cry’.

It is Herbert’s achievement that none of his main characters become mere ciphers for the ideas they represent. Mary is an unhappy woman under great pressure, and not merely the mouthpiece of a small-l liberal, non-rigorist ethical Christianity. The Reverend Eve is a stout defender of a particular interpretation of the Bible and of the church-state relationship, but also an old and broken man who cannot understand his daughter, and now fears he has lost her.

Anglo-Saxon attitudes

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I was first introduced to Angus Wilson’s 1956 novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by a fellow graduate student, a medieval historian, and, were this a series on fictional historians (rather than fictional clergy), its main character, Gerald Middleton, professor emeritus, would be prominent in it. And the book is populated by a great many scholars of early medieval England, but of interest here is the late Reverend Reginald Portway, in later career a canon residentiary of Norwich, antiquary, pursuer of progressive causes, patron of the promising but disadvantaged.

It is on his land on the east coast that there is discovered (in 1912) the lost tomb of Eorpwald, missionary bishop to the East Folk in the seventh century. As well as being the lord of Melpham Hall, Portway is also rector of the parish, and secretary of the East Coast Antiquarian Association. As a leisured pursuer of the local and obscure, Portway evokes a literary type stretching back deep into the nineteenth century and beyond, which we have encountered before in this series, from John Fowles and George Orwell.

Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. (Image: Amitchell125 at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0]

But the novel is set in the 1950s, by which time Portway is dead, and Middleton, now an old man, is attempting to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Melpham burial, namely, how it came apparently to contain a carving of a pagan fertility god, otherwise unprecedented in England. And we only meet Portway in the first person once, and that only in Gerald’s daydream recollection of meeting him as a young man during the excavation. The rest of the time we encounter him, as does Gerald, in the self-interested and contradictory recollections of others. At the distance of forty years, and two world wars, we are shown Portway at a remove, the nexus of local religion and society that he represented almost as remote as the world of Eorpwald.

For his elderly sister, living in reduced and faintly desperate obscurity in a Tyrolean spa town, the canon lived on as The Times had described him: ‘moral leader, outstanding antiquarian, lover of beauty, fearless fighter, great Churchman.’ To his grateful parishioners he had restored ancient English ceremonies, ‘age-old services of beauty and dignity’; in her drawing room, a ‘centrally-heated mausoleum’, is a photograph of him with his flock in their costumes for a revived Coventry Mystery Play. Another character remembered being adopted as a clever youth of limited means, with Portway intending to send him to Oxford though the war intervened. In Lilian Portway’s pomp as an actress and friend of Shaw and Wells, her brother had stood alongside her and argued the cause of women’s suffrage. But here was no angry revolutionary, but one with a reputation for promoting ‘advanced’ causes with a lightness of touch, committing no offence against the good manners of his class.

A young friend of Middleton’s took a more jaundiced view: the Portways were ‘rich cultural snobs’ desperate to have their unprofitable estates made interesting by some historic find. All the maypoles and dancing and plays were a ‘peculiarly mischievous and foolish sort of egalitarianism based on some romantic notion of medieval society – in short, the cloven hoof of William Morris.’ But the local ladies swooned at Portway’s theatrical good looks, and as a ‘Modern Churchman’ a canonry was in the offing, though to be ‘progressive’ seemed only to entail ‘an attachment to any and every belief save the dogmas of his own religion.’ (There are overtones here of Evelyn Waugh’s hapless Mr Prendergast.)

The solution to the mystery at which Gerald eventually arrives I shall not elaborate, as its unravelling is one of the great pleasures of the novel. But the plot turns on the invidious moral choice (which Portway, it turns out, was forced to make under great pressure) between the absolute scrupulousness of the scholar (on the one hand) and his own interests (and those of others) and his sense of the interests of the discipline of history as a whole, on the other. In the end Middleton’s final act is a compassionate one; despite Portway’s failings, Gerald spares at least some of his reputation. But time is called nonetheless on the clerical amateur: in the words of a fellow member of the Historical Association of Medievalists, ‘all these local parsons ought to be stopped by their bishops from meddling in things they don’t understand’.

The vicar and the excellent women

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[Another post in my series on clergy in English fiction: this time, Excellent Women (1952) by Barbara Pym.]

Mildred Lathbury’s London is small and grey, ‘so very much the wrong side of Victoria station, so definitely not Belgravia’ (ch.1). It is a constrained world, of rationed food that is bland when it comes, of shapeless and moth-eaten clothes retrieved from trestle tables in the church jumble sale. And, like some of Pym’s other novels, it is a world full of clergy. A young clergyman, a curate ‘just out of the egg’ looks out from a donated picture frame. In the bombed church of St Ermin, its vicar gamely conducts services in the one undamaged aisle, amid piles of wall tablets and the occasional cherub’s head. There is also a brief appearance by Archdeacon Hoccleve, a visiting preacher up from the country and Pym’s earlier novel Some Tame Gazelle.

And there are clergy in Mildred’s memory too, of her childhood in her father’s country rectory, ‘large, inconvenient … with stone passages, oil lamps and far too many rooms’. There are curates, whose names we do not learn, on whom Mildred had placed her teenage hopes without success; there was a visiting canon who knew much, and talked much, about Stonehenge. And there was her father, whose battered panama hat was the epitome of ‘the wisdom of an old country clergyman’. And Mildred now has made an existence for herself rather like that of her youth, with a small income and a flat full of her parents’ furniture with a shared bathroom. Aside from her work in the relief of distressed gentlewomen, that existence is centred around St Mary’s, ‘prickly, Victorian Gothic, hideous inside, I suppose, but very dear to me’. It is ‘High’, and it is with the vicar, with his biretta, that we are most concerned.

There are others much better placed than me to expound the subtle feminism in Pym’s work. But it seems clear to me that the moral centre of gravity of Excellent Women is female, around which the various male characters orbit. These men are casually dismissive of the women around them, but ultimately dependent on them in a way that is almost childlike. It is among this group of men – complacent, frivolous, ineffective – that we must read the vicar, Julian Malory, and it is largely through Mildred’s eyes that we see him.

Father Malory is not, Mildred thinks, a good looking man. Aged around forty, he is ‘tall, thin and angular’, which gives him ‘a suitable ascetic distinction’. But his manner is forbidding, such that only his smile serves to soften the ‘bleakness’ of his face. Not for him then the fluttering attention of the single women in the parish: ‘I am not even sure whether anyone has ever knitted him a scarf or a pullover.’ But the excellent women of St Mary’s are between them quite sure that, though he has not said as much, he is not for marrying. ‘Perhaps it is more suitable’, Mildred thinks, ‘that a High Church clergyman should remain unmarried, that there should be a biretta in the hall rather than a perambulator’ (ch. 2)

Malory is conventionally serious as his parishioners expect. Mildred is expected to ‘say a word’ to her new neighbours, the intellectual and worldly Napiers, and when she initially takes against Helena Napier, she is brought up short by the recollection of a sermon. But there is evidence too in Malory of a degree of introspection: when in chapter 5 we find him ineptly trying to paint a wall in the vicarage, his failure prompts the reflection that ‘it must be such a satisfying feeling, to do good work with one’s hands. I’m sure I’ve preached about it often enough.’ (Pym here captures an aspect in some of the more romanticised Anglo-Catholic theology of work at the time.) But even that satisfaction is to be denied him: ‘”I’ve certainly learnt humility this afternoon, so the exercise will have served some purpose. It looked so easy, too” he added sadly.’ ‘I suppose I am not to be considered a normal man’ he adds, ‘ and yet I do have these manly feelings.’

Image: Trojan_Llama via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

To say much more about the plot would risk spoiling the rich pleasures to be had from the novel by readers who do not yet know it. But it seems that Father Malory is, after all, the marrying kind, and it is in his handling of this, and of Mildred, that his culpable frivolity is clearest. Having lacked either the sensitivity to notice Mildred’s feelings for him before he reveals his engagement, he becomes guiltily solicitous for them at the precise time when he ought not to (ch.15). To compound the error, it is to her of all people that he returns when the plan collapses, and his clumsy attempt to return to a time in which their friendship had within it the unspoken potential of something more is gently sidestepped with a line of Keats (The wistful poetic clergyman is another familiar fictive type, and the use of verse as a substitute for saying what needs to be said) (ch. 22).

It is a measure of Pym’s art that this is not the only available reading; it might well be argued that, far from being particularly culpable, Malory is only as emotionally inarticulate as Mildred, and that their mutual discomfort is merely a product of culture. But he is direct to the point of embarrassment when attempting to save the marriage of someone else, or in the interest of his spinster sister, while vague to the point of irresponsibility on his own behalf. Pym gives us a character who has escaped the narrow fictive confines of his vocation, a well-intentioned but weak man in the company of excellent women.

Two priests in the wilderness

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Unusually in this series on fictional clergy in twentieth century English fiction, I feature here both an Anglican in England and a Catholic priest in France. They both appear in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, first published in 1950. Set in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War, it features three locations, two of which are counterparts in ruin. One, central London, is literally in ruins, as the young girl Barbary runs wild and free in the rubble of the City. (I’ve written elsewhere on the ruined church in fiction and Macaulay’s engagement with ruins.) The other, a fishing village on the Mediterranean coast of Provence, appears outwardly unchanged, but the Abbé Dinant sees societal ruin in prospect, and does what he can, in his compromised way, to avert it.

The abbé is compromised, as many were, by the recent history of Vichy government and German occupation. Faced with a choice between resistance and acquiescence, he chose the latter, as did his bishop; the two both rebuked the local curé for advocating resistance. Like other local notables, the abbé accommodated himself to the brute fact of German occupation, seeking to make the best of the situation while betraying no-one. A restraint on the violence of the Resistance during the war, he has saved many collaborators from vengeance since its end. ‘A man of good sense’ he is, according to a sympathetic, similarly compromised neighbour after 1945: ‘in these days, as before, his chief foe is Communism; he sees it as the devil, and as France’s first enemy, and he is right.’ (ch. 21) Though the Nazis were ‘barbarians and interlopers and the enemies of France, they were at least fighting the worst enemies of religion, civilisation and the true France, those impossible Bolsheviks.’ (ch. 2)

Part of the Communist threat the abbé thinks he sees is to the family, indeed to all the cultural markers of a Catholic France. The national vitality which had helped France recover before was now misdirected. ‘Work, country, family – those great ideals held before us by the old Marshal during the black years – are discredited by his disgrace, and held of little account now that those who always hated him are dominant. [But] they are great ideals, and always when we have turned our backs on them we have deserted our true role.’ Though he rarely expounds them as such, these values are religious ones; the true France – a Catholic France – is in graver danger in 1950 than ever it was in 1940. So, though he restrains himself from talking in explicitly religious terms to his worldly, unbelieving friends, the abbé tries (though without always succeeding) to preserve the outward face of a kind of consensual public morality, to keep all within the house of faith, however loose their attachment to it. ‘To sin in our Father’s house, that, though sacrilege, has its own blessedness. To stray in the wilderness outside, that is to be lost indeed.’ (ch. 20)

St Dunstan in the East.
Image: Peter Webster

While the abbé seeks to keep the roof on the house of faith, in London there is little left of it at all. Barbary and her friend have found in the ruins of a City church a place of play, of inversion and a kind of idle sacrilege; a transistor radio plays jazz, they decorate the walls, and sing distractedly from a torn hymn book (ch. 23). In their ritual they are joined by a thin and grey clergyman, with a ‘lost look in his deep-set eyes, and his mouth was set in lines of pain.’ He proceeds to celebrate communion and, standing where the pulpit once stood, proceeds to preach. But here was no message of reconstructive hope in the ruins, of Christian persistence in a time of trial. ‘We are in hell now’, his oration begins, and it spirals downward in despair and recrimination. ‘Fire creeps on me from all sides; I am trapped in the prison of my sins’. At last he sinks to his knees, shuddering, face in hands. ‘It was true, then’, thinks Barbary in tears, ‘about hell; there was no deliverance.’

Presently Father Roger is fetched by the young priest with whom he lives in a clergy house. We learn that the older man wanders the ruined churches of the city trying to find his own, in the burning rubble of which he was trapped for two days. ‘We all love him, but we can’t always save him from his nightmares.’ Between Father Roger’s derangement and his young brother’s charity, there is yet some small Christian life in the ruins of London and of Christian civilisation.

A. S. Byatt’s faded church

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My occasional series on the clergy in English fiction now runs to some seventeen posts in all, from H.G. Wells to John Fowles, from the clerical sleuths of Cyril Alington to the existential crisis of Iris Murdoch. By and large, these men have often played bit parts or been mere cyphers for the institution they represent (as in the case of Robert Tressell). Even when these characters have been allowed more space to breathe, the dilemmas and indeed anguish that they feel are wholly circumscribed by their status; these men have little life other than as clergy.

The four novels from A.S. Byatt that make up what is sometimes called the ‘Frederica Quartet’ are a different case. In them are many characters, some of whom are clergy, some of whom are not but aspire to a kind of religious leadership. Some are more fully drawn than others, in particular Daniel Orton who features in all four volumes, and who (unusually) transcends his ordination to be also a husband and a father. He will have his own post. Here I want to deal with the two who function most clearly as symbols of a lost, or at least moribund, Christianity which Byatt needs to place as a backdrop to her main concerns. They make their appearances in The Virgin in the Garden, the first of the quartet, first published in 1978, and are not seen again.

The first of these is the Bishop, we know not of quite where, who appears briefly in chapter 37. The scene is after the first performance in 1952 of Astraea, a play which became part of the celebrations of the accession of the new Queen. The first performance marked the beginnings of a new university; just the kind of local ceremonial to which bishops were accustomed to be invited, and were invited. Also there as a matter of course is Bill Potter, local teacher of English and father of the eponymous Frederica, and of Stephanie, engaged to be married to Daniel Orton. About this fact Bill is not happy, since his attitude to Christianity is not merely indifferent but implacably hostile, to the point of not attending the wedding. The bishop is tall, saturnine, ‘bland, wine-dark and hard’, and as Bill hops around like a flyweight boxer, awaiting the moment to land a rhetorical blow, he spreads ‘automatically flowing oil on the choppy waters.’ The vision he presents is of the play as a ‘true communion’ of shared cultural heritage, as church, school and community come together in a joint work of art. (The post-war period was a time of hope among some in the Church of England about the potential of the religious drama as a means of evangelism and as a symbol of the residual Christian nature of English culture.) Not so for Bill; the play had been one of nostalgia for a time that had never been. It was time for both the nostalgia and the church to die with dignity and make way for the new.

The rest of the argument that ensues, in barely controlled screaming, I shall not elaborate. It is a setpiece in which Byatt allows all of the intellectual, moral and imaginative objections to Christianity that have been voiced elsewhere in the novel to be aired. It is a cacophony of voices by which nothing is resolved: a rehearsal of old arguments by old men, part of an commonplace antagonism between secularism and national religion. These are not the new and disruptive forces in English religion that Byatt shows us in the later novels.

Also in The Virgin in the Garden, the foil to the national figure of the bishop is Mr Ellenby, the vicar. We never know his first name, neither do we hear his voice directly (just as we do not hear the Bishop except in the narrator’s paraphrase.) We are not invited to attribute moral blame to him – within his own frame of reference he is conscientious enough – but together with the bishop he is part of a faded old settlement of religion, socially convenient but without life. His study, which we see only in the dark as Mrs Ellenby is sparing with heat and light, has in it ‘the ghosts of riches’ (p. 61): heavy dark Victorian furniture, inkwells with silver lids, volumes of Shakespeare behind glass and thick with dust, a once luxurious carpet worn to sackcloth. It is brightened only by flowers from the Ellenby’s spinster lodger, (surely a nod to Barbara Pym).

Ellenby is puzzled, indeed actively discomfited, by his ‘grim curate’, the gruff, dark and fat Daniel Orton. Although he frets over her lack of faith, he harbours a hope that Stephanie might be the civilising of Daniel, and that she might also come to grasp the idea of his religion: in Daniel’s phrase, Ellenby sees nothing seriously wrong with ‘someone who likes George Herbert and has lovely manners.’ (ch. 24, p.294) One who can speak wisely of The Temple ‘had the essence of the matter in her, must have’, Ellenby thinks (p.344).

But Stephanie is drawn to Daniel for the very reason that Ellenby is alarmed by him: his fierce passion to help those who need help. Ellenby opposes the couple living on the council estate (ch.25, p.295). This was in part for fear that the social workers would resent an encroachment by the Church into a social sphere in which (as Ellenby sees it) it had no place. But this is a diversion from the real reason: the impression it might give if the curate was to live in such a place (there was ‘a position the church had to keep up’). At base a snob, and lazy with it, Ellenby’s main concern is ‘parish politics, precedence and prettiness of altar-piece and bazaar.’ (ch.17, p.224) Though Daniel later comes to miss Ellenby’s unthinking certainty (Still Life, p.166), in The Virgin in the Garden, he is the hollow shell of English social religion in its local form.