Reading: As promised, I finished The Corner that Held Them. As I mentioned yesterday, the novel is being issued in a reprint edition by NYRB in a couple of months, but I was intrigued enough by the synopsis that I grabbed a digital edition of it via archive.org.
I think that this is a book I might have enjoyed just a bit more if I’d read a paper copy. I tend to read a little too quickly – gluttony for the written word is one of my vices – and do not have a mind for detail, so reading a book busy with detail and dense with characters, especially when most of those characters are “Dame Some Ordinary English Name” – I get easily confused and am greatly helped by flipping back and forth in a text. This archive.org edition was not an e-book in the sense that Kindle edition is (I can’t seem to make that function work for me with these), but more a continually scrolling page, not conducive to “flipping” back and forth or searching.
So I spent more than a few of my readings moments confused, or at least a little in the dark. I’m sure I missed some nuances because of it.
Nonetheless, while this was a mildly interesting book and had a couple of plot points that were interesting and a few lovely passages – as when one of the nuns sees the ocean for the first time – I found it an odd and somewhat off-putting book, although I appreciated more as I came to the end than I did when I was in the middle of it.
Short version: the book begins in the mid-14th century, with a convent in England struck, as is the rest of the land, by plague. The novel tells the story of this convent in subsequent years, as the nuns deal with the issues left in the wake of the pestilence as well as social unrest (the book climaxes with the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt), financial pressures, conflicts within the community and with clerics without. It was written in the wake of World War II, so it also, I think, reflects that postwar landscape.
Before I get to my major critique and thought on the novel, I’ll highlight a few moments that I enjoyed. There’s one character who is a minor cleric on a bishop’s staff, who has some role of overseeing or checking in on the convent. As part of this responsibility, he must journey to a property at some distance that owes income to the convent. The visit involves some memorable characters and mishaps, but what stands out is an encounter this cleric has with the chaplain of a leprosy house, who, along with one of the patients, introduces him to a new style of music – Ars Nova.
It’s a beautiful, affecting passage:
Shuffling footsteps approached. The leper came in. In the dusk of the doorway he seemed to glimmer like bad fish. He stank, too. He stationed himself at the further end of the room; it was clear he knew his place as a dog does. There he stood, rubbing his scaly hands together, drawing preparatory breaths. His expression was professionally calm.
“Now, John! The Machault Kyrie.”
The three voices sprang into the air.
If Triste loysir had seemed a foretaste of paradise, the Kyrie was paradise itself. This was how the blessed might sing, singing in a duple measure that ran as nimbly on its four feet as a weasel running through a meadow, with each voice in turn enkindling the others, so that the music flowed on and was continually renewed. And as paradise is made for man, this music seemed made for man’s singing; not for edification, or the working-out of an argument, or the display of skill, but only for ease and pleasure, as in paradise where the abolition of sin begets a pagan carelessness, where the certainty of Christ’s countenance frees men’s souls from the obligation of Christian behaviour, the creaking counterpoint of God’s law and man’s obedience.
It ended. Henry Yellowlees raised his eyes from the music-book. The rays of the levelling sun had shifted while they sang and now shone full on the leper. His face, his high bald head, were scarlet. He seemed to be on fire.
“Again! Let us sing it again!”
“I told you so,” said the chaplain. “I tell you there has never been such music in the world before.”
All through the evening they sang, the leper standing apart and singing by rote. And Henry thought how many an hour these two must have spent together, the leper at one end of the room, the chaplain at the other; or perhaps they bent over the same music-book, their love of music overcoming the barrier between life and death-in-life […] Most of the night Henry lay awake, recalling the music, humming it over again to the burden of the chaplain’s snores, with half of his mind in a rapture and the other half wishing that there were not so many and such ferocious [bed] bugs.
More on Warner’s allusion to this piece (including some gentle correction of her errors) in this blog post.
There’s a lengthy, well done thread on one sister’s felt call to be an anchorite. Another keenly-plotted narrative of a mentally-unstable sister, a beggar and an altar cloth. As mentioned, the last major narrative arc, involving two sisters sent to the city to beg for alms so that the convent’s fine altar goods might be replaced, which includes that moment to which I alluded above:
The rough ground stretched for a little way and there broke off in a line of stiffened tussocks, heath bushes, and close gorse-clumps. Beyond this, half the world was hung with a blue mantle criss-crossed with an infinity of delicate creases, and the whole outspread mantle stirred as though a separate life were beneath it. Coming to her senses, she knew that this must be the sea.
But nothing that she had seen in pictures or read in books or heard in sermons was true to what she saw. Their sea was dark, turbulent, vexed with storms, a metaphor of sin, and exiled from heaven. This was calm. It lay as blissfully asleep as though it still lay in the trance of its first creation, its colour was like an unflawed virtue; it lay there and knew of nothing but the God who had made it.
And while there are other passages, equally lyrical, as a whole, the book didn’t grab me.
Let’s unpack why.
I’m not averse to a work of fiction (or non-fiction) centered on a purportedly religious community of any sort that is not living up to its image. Of course not. That’s the locus of the most powerful explorations of spirituality and religious life – that space where it’s acknowledged, but not being lived for one reason or another.
And historically, religious communities of all sorts in all cultures have drifted into indifference, routine and ways of life that are, but for the frequency and formality of prayers, indistinguishable from the lives of those surrounding them.
Which is essentially what we have here – the type of community which, for example, St. Teresa of Avila would have emerged from and then, converted, set her reforming sights on. In that sense, I can’t fault it. It’s a portrait of a convent peopled with women who are there for the same reason most women entered religious life in the period: because their families put them there, and for whom religious practice was simply the fabric of life, day in and day out, until you die.
So everything “spiritual” is ordinary, taken for granted, a part of the daily routine like meals and sleep.
Again – this is simply the author’s focus, and I can’t fault that. This lack of spiritual interest and even conflict makes it less interesting to me, but I didn’t write it.
However…
There’s a major, major plot thread that, it strikes me in reading the book, might just play a role in the diminished role of actual, lived spiritual concerns in the book. I’d say “spoiler alert” except for the fact that this aspect is revealed from the very beginning of the book, so here we go.
The novel begins, as I said, with the plague afflicting the population. In the midst of this, a man appears, makes his way to the convent, falls somewhat ill and decides, in the heat and spur of the moment, to present himself to the women as a priest. He’s not – he’s educated for it up to a point, he’s traveled a bit, but he’s not even a minor cleric. Their priest has just died of the plague, so they take his presence as a Godsend, and he moves in – as their priest/chaplain.
Over the years, only one or two suspect him, in a fever of sickness he “confesses” in the presence of a sister, but it’s taken as just that – a feverish delusion – and while he at first feels badly about it and considers coming clean now and then, he never does.
So he lives out decades of his life, pretending to be a priest, saying “Mass” hearing “confessions” at the convent, the sisters then, never actually experiencing the sacraments again unless a visiting bishop or priest comes through.
But even this doesn’t present a huge element of conflict in the book – in the first half, Sir Ralph himself has some qualms, but he eventually settles, and the fake sacraments don’t factor into any character’s development.
Unless they do. Unless the author’s point is either: 1) This convent was less than ordinary – basically a group of women living together – because they didn’t have the graces of the sacraments (highly doubtful) or 2) All religion is a form of delusion, mythmaking and coping – it doesn’t matter if it’s “real” or not – people will just keep on doing what they do, listening to their fairy tales.
I’m leaning towards #2 – if the author, indeed, has a deeper commentary intended by the fake-priest storyline – especially given another plot thread, involving the nun who for years felt called to the anchorite life, a call, we find out at the end (although we might have suspected it all along) was rooted in a misunderstanding of certain events she took to be “signs.”
Watching: Son #5 is at a camp. Son #4 and I watched A Simple Plan last night. I’d seen it in theaters ages ago. A decent be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-greedy-human story, although without the artistry of the contemporary experts in that area, the Coen Brothers. For some reason, I think I thought it actually was an early Coen Brothers, but no. Billy Bob Thornton was, as per usual, great, and throughout the movie, I had a “that guy” vibe from one of the other actors – the fellow playing Carl, the police chief. Who is that guy? I’ve seen that guy. Turns out it was Chelcie Ross, who, a few years later and many pounds lighter, turned up in Mad Men as Conrad Hilton.
The only flaws in the film was some symbolic heavy-handedness involving crows, and the unfortunate presence of the absolutely talentless Bridget Fonda, who weighs down every movie she’s in with that lifeless stare of hers.
Writing: Spent yesterday pulling together and editing and rewriting a set of older blog posts in article form and submitting it. We’ll see.
Onward!