A Simple House

We find it hard to think behind the ideas of a religion. Are put off by its rituals. The salesmen do not appeal. We quickly walk past a shop’s window, scarcely notice the mannequin in the red mini-skirt scowling at the sky. Always another place calls. Not so Sylvia Townsend Warner. She stops. She looks. She likes the green paisley top; the matching tights, she thinks, are fetching. Sylvia goes in! Looks around. Wanders to the back office, visits the living quarters; has tea with the owners and their assistants. The deal is struck. They will write The Corner That Held Them. A strange banality.

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It is the birth, life and the long slow death of an institution, crumbling into poverty as we close the book. Praying she'll survive on the shelf we ask Elizabeth and Rose to look after her… This priory begins in bed, as all good beginnings should. Although, so immoral are these opening scenes, so at variance with what is to come, that the author severs them from the main body of the novel; a thrust of narrative violence that seeks to protect the story of Oby from its originating sin. Alas, it is not to be. The influence of the 19th century remains too powerful. This priory’s origins will decide its fate.

The man between this lady’s sheets is not her husband. He pays with his life. Alianor to live on - Brian de Retteville needs her dowry1 - as a soul voided of interest and vitality. Too noble to enjoy the mercenary pleasures of casual sex, or be titillated by the excitements of courtly love, she subsides into a marriage without affection. After she dies Sir Brian grows oddly fond of her. He arranges an elaborate funeral, commissions an exquisite tomb, carved in her likeness, which he places in a new priory he dedicates to Our Lady and Saint Leonard; Alianor’s soul to be looked after by nuns. This newfound fondness for the dead wife is a mystery. Though our author - worldly wise - thinks that Sir Brian’s gift to the Church is an act of repentance for his shirking the Crusade; Saint Leonard a patron of prisoners, Oby calling out to those held for ransom by the heathen. Poor woman! even in death you are pushed aside by the knightly virtues. This lady forever denied satisfaction from her lord.

A religious institution may be born between the legs of pleasure but it needs the hard graft of guilt and shame to bring it into maturity; plus the quick fix of a monetary gift, through which Sir Brian hopes to leave behind his knightly weaknesses, that lack of the crusading spirit. It is a strangely 20th century conception. Has the old knight read his Freud… The priory established Sir Brian forgets about Alianor; his past to disappear amongst the lost wilderness of the fens. Though it is not all modern psychology. There is an old knight’s sentimentality: Oby the manor house where the couple spent their holidays in the early married years. While a strong sense of loss pervades the place; the priory a monument to a promise - of sensual and spiritual pleasure - that has not been fulfilled (a feature of this writer’s work). And there is that unexpected spirituality, immediately following Alianor’s death, which is not easy to explain; for our author’s view is not wholly to be trusted, the Christian realm beyond her secular reach.

Founded upon loss and weakness Oby’s destiny is to struggle. Geography too plays its part; this priory too isolated to attract the wealthy brides of Christ whose large dowries make prosperous communities. Poor Alianor, purgatory is going to be hard on you! Just like his idea of marriage we suspect Sir Brian has an attenuated view of religion: the act  of building a church, like that of marrying a woman, believed enough in itself to ensure happiness or success. As if a person were a jewel, forever retaining its lustre without care or attention. No Sir Brian, you have to cultivate your wife, nurture a religious institution; you should be a lover, a gardener, a first rate teacher… Love, after that initial gift of pleasure, kept alive only through constant purposive activity; a community of souls an organism to be groomed, trained, flattered, coaxed.

Oby’s subsequent history reflects the circumstances of its birth. Absent from the priory’s germination religion is largely missing from its history: this is a secular institution. We are shown how it is run, the way it evolves over time, how its character subtly changes with each new prioress, whose temperament is important. New entrants do make changes, especially when exceptionally talented; however, because of the plasticity of youth, they are most likely to be shaped by the older nuns, themselves moulded by the institution and its atmosphere, those layers of history. This priory’s character - buttressed by time - transcends the lives of its members. Once again geography is influential: the inspirational prioress unable to overcome the limits set by this isolated location, which encourages the mundane and the material; turned inward, there are all kinds of subtle defences to protect the priory from the big ideas and enthusiasms of inspired individuals. Oby is determined by its environment. And so that secular feel… This could be the Post Office, a school, a local authority… The animating spirit of Christianity is rarely present in the life of this church.2 For that you’d need a loosening up the social fabric; a rapid turnover of people, the regular influx of new ideas. But then the unique character of this place, formed by that history, would disappear.3

Religion is facade, even pretence. It is the relationships between people, together with their positions inside the community, only ostensibly ordered around a religious idea, that dominate here. Sylvia Townsend Warner is no Christian. She is using this novel to explore the institutional nature of an ideological community; the author - we speculate - coming to terms with her own lapsed faith in Communism, which she now investigates through its party organisation and the culture this generates. She is also looks at its fountainhead. Sir Brian a wry comment on the Bolshevik inception: Lenin’s political epiphany not from Marxist idealism but his own brother’s execution and his later harassment by the Tsarist police; the entire Communist project corrupted at birth.4 It had its spirit, of course; but this had been extinguished by the late 1930s, when the Party, emptied of idealism, had become a soulless bureaucratic machine whose fuel was paranoia.5 We make a small boat. And carry it down the beach, to the sea’s edge, where the tide picks it up, and takes it out of the bay. Standing on the beach we watch the boat as it slowly vanishes… Warner is writing away her past.

Sir Ralph is a down-at-heel gentleman desperate for food and drink. He visits the priory and pretends to be a priest. It is a propitious moment; the post of resident-priest is vacant and is hard to fill, no decent man wanting to live in such forlorn surroundings. With misgivings (born a bastard he is denied holy orders) Sir Ralph accepts the post; the source of decades of psychological trauma, for assailed by those Christian warriors guilt and fear, he comes at times close to madness. Once he does fall into insanity, and is saved by the love of a concupiscence nun; human sympathy and a large bosom more potent than faith and the religious will. On recovery Sir Ralph finds a psychological equilibrium; and with his position secure - there will be no investigation, no defrocking, no exile - he slips into the easy habits of an educated countryman - the gentry of the great Russian novels - hunting, hawking and sleeping with his servant, Magdalen Figg. Sir Ralph is to become a big fat figure of affection, who touched with eccentricity - in his cloak he looks like an old woman - allows himself to be infected by doctrinal disease: he has exceedingly strange ideas that to his friend Henry Yellowlees sound heretical. The only theology in this place is illegal!

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. Remembering how she had heard a preacher declare that in heaven there would be no more sea she broke into spontaneous laughter.

It is a beautiful passage. Tellingly, it occurs outside the priory. These two nuns travelling to Waxelby to beg for alms, Oby having been wrecked by an attack of religious zealots and the disaffected poor; part of a countrywide uprising against the rich and rising taxes (Wat Tyler’s revolt, we surmise; History being a faint echo in this exiled spot). Founded by the aristocracy this religious house has remained a house of ladies, though rarely do they bring rich dowries, thus its decay, its struggle to stay alive; the few commoners in their ranks a sign of weakness not generosity.6 No matter. This place is resented; its spire, the silver, the “idle” nuns are seen as parasitic on the local population; this short social collapse an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction, synthesise their hate. Outside the priory Dame Lilias, freed of its quotidian pressures, those daily habits that in dulling the mind gives the body its dominion, has a vision of the sea. The sea! Once again the revelation is a physical one; the mystic experience belonging to nature not Christianity, which is mocked. The beauty of the world, its feel, its texture, its corporeality refute the dogmas of the Church; whose spiritual exercises - a substitute for religious zeal and religious thought - have shrivelled up into bureaucratic routines, leaving only mindless work and foolish ideas. The sea! The sea! Dame Lilias’ spirit is set free. It will not be corralled inside a soulless building and then trotted out for a circuit of that tiny nave. A spirit’s presence rests in an individual’s soul, and is switched on by nature’s electricity.

One mind floats into liberty.

Years ago Dame Lilias applied to be an anchoress. This was no spiritual need. Her desire was to flee Woman not find God: she was being bullied by this community. The irony is excruciating… Her application is lost in the interstices of the church bureaucracy; the Bishop, temporising his decision, for he is reluctant to grant the request - truly religious people, being unpredictable, are distrusted in the Church - contrives to forget it, the application going astray amongst his paperwork.7 Dame Lilias therefore stays at Oby, and gradually accustoms herself to these nuns. By the time of this vision she doesn’t want to leave. Unfortunately, her companion mistakes her motivation (a theme in Warner’s later novels)8 and decides to ask the current Bishop to grant the original request. Dame Lilias resists. And confesses the falsehood of that old vision - she did not hear Saint Leonard; the voices were her own, she now admits. While that bruise, she says, was due to Dame Dorothy’s boot not the Saint’s heavenly presence. We have here a 20th century tale of the Christian life. Everything is explained by natural forces.

There is beauty and spirituality in this novel. There is that marvellous vision of the sea. While the most ecstatic moment occurs in a lovely passage at the Hospital of St Sepulchre, a house for lepers. It is the joy of art.

“Out here, one has so few chances of meeting a competent musician. It is a stroke of good fortune for me that you should come. That is why I wish you could hear the Machault. Of course…” The chaplain paused, staring at his hand as it lay on the music-book. “One of my lepers here has an extremely fine voice and is a skilled singer. He used to be in the Duke of Burgundy’s chapel. I don’t know if you would object—he is not an advanced case of leprosy. He and I often sing together. To him, too, a third voice would be a godsend.”

Not knowing whether he turned hot or cold Henry Yellowlees answered: “No, of course not, I should like to hear the Kyrie.”

The chaplain slid back a panel in the wall and called: “John! Will you come and sing?”

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 that 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 flowered 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 soul from the obligations 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 bad 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. What did the other lepers think of it, those who could not sing, sitting in their straw, mumbling their sour bread (for if the food given to a guest were so bad the food given to the lepers must be worse), and hearing the music go on and on? 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 bugs. It struck him that every bug in the place must have heard the good news and forsaken the lepers for flesh that was a novelty. 

The spirit resides in a human artefact. It is music not god that gives the mind its liberty. These moments of mystic ecstasy, because created by exceptional characters, are rare events; and not to be expected at Oby, whose remoteness attracts the mediocre. There art dies for lack practitioners, or exists on the fringes of life, a retired prioress ending her days embroidering a cope. The aesthetic spirit is snuffed out by banality. Or worse. When Saint Sepulchre is attacked by Christian terrorists the lepers are released and take their revenge on the chaplain, whose art they have come to hate. It is a common refrain and a great truth. Art, and the spiritual life more generally, is both uncommon and inhuman; its practitioners crazy obsessives who put the concerns of art before the cares of others; this official who buys scores instead of food for his charges. The inmates of Oby being run-of-the-mill are more humane. Heaven hardly registers on such people…

Dame Sibilla, waking with a sense of something unprecedented, sat up and enquired: “What was that? Who was laughing?”

“Me,” said Dame Lilias.

“Why? How extraordinary! I mean, you don’t laugh very often, do you? Why were you laughing?”

“For joy. Look! That is the sea.”

“So it is! Heaven save us, how close it is! And what a long way up the sky it goes! It is certainly a very pretty colour. And the smell…I suppose that comes from the sea too. It’s like the smell of fish.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel very happy?”

“Yes. Yes, in a way it does. Look, that must be a ship. Do you see? But it is so calm I don’t suppose any mischief will happen to them. I wonder where it goes to—this sea, I mean. Do you suppose it goes to France?”

The sense organs together with a mundane rationality - that need for a simple reason that closes experience down9- is what animates the average person. Over time they are the ones who dominate closed communities. The weight of their numbers closing off the spiritual vents. Nevertheless, the odd and the talented do sometimes appear, the strength of their personalities supporting an art and a religion forever at risk from indifferent and the malicious. Such characters survive in the interstices of the order; there is Dame Alicia working on that cope. Miracles happen! When a dynamic virtuoso appears art can come to the fore; Susanna training a first class choir that gives music an important place in the daily ritual (for a short while). There are uncontrollable and inexplicable urges of spirit; and these do overcome all obstacles to create permanent monuments, such as Oby’s magnificent spire, the delight of Prioress Alicia, who conceived of it. The history, though, is a warning to the sentimental: the first attempt collapsed and killed a nun; whilst its cost is resented by the peasants whose taxes paid for it. The spirit does exist in this nunnery - Oby no palace of debauch - and can activate its workings; but the force is intermittent and wholly dependent upon strong and peculiar personalities. Spirit - conceived here as aesthetic rather than religious - resides in a few humans, it does not belong to buildings nor bureaucracy nor the community at large. Let’s be frank. Mystic grace - and the aesthetic joys - are only for an elite. Nearly all of these nuns are philistines; their experience of art social never spiritual.10

The loss of the altar-hanging was beyond the loss of money expended to no purpose, beyond the frustration of their hope of making a good impression on the new bishop. During the months they had worked on it together the nuns of Oby had become a community. Though in its early stages the needlework had been an instrument in the usual convent factions, a de Retteville banner waved against de Stapledons, as time went on it had become everyone’s interest and everyone’s purpose; and the satisfaction which Dame Lovisa had found in her lonely black and white psalters, and which the old prioress had felt with the second Trinity Cope, and which she herself (but how long ago!) had known with her paint-brushes, her cobalt and vermilion, had been felt by all, whether they worked or watched the workers. Something was being made, they had a reason for living together, the blue satin roofed them like a tabernacle.

Inside an institution the spirit is institutionalised. Not beauty, nor grace, not aesthetic form, nor theological doctrine, but action and purpose, the filling up the day with a goal, is what gives these nuns delight; meaning arising out of physical activity rather than thought or contemplation. This novel could only have been written in the 20th century, when ideas were believed mere epiphenomena of physical and social forces. Yet the author hedges. She is too much the artist to reduce everything to gut and sphincter. The existence of exceptional characters - Dame Alicia de Foley, Dame Lilias, Susanna, the Chaplain of Saint Sepulchre, Henry Yellowlees - suggests art is more than just activity. For the exceptional few music and art and poetry (there is the creator of Mamillion,  an English epic) do exist as self-sufficient realms, where the spirit is kept alive in beautiful forms. Art not Christianity is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s faith, and she is wise enough to know these belong only to a minority, who can occasionally suffuse others with their enthusiasm.11

Bad things happen at Oby. The spire’s collapse; Dame Lilias’ bullying; Magdalen Figg’s murder; the sacking of the priory and Dame Joan’s rape. These are rare events. More common are the simple satisfactions of domestic life; the love affairs are sibling love; no orgies here, for lesbianism is unknown, not like other nunneries these nuns have visited. Oby has been lucky in its leaders, a few outstanding individuals setting the tone that the foolish and mediocre, who follow them, cannot wholly destroy; so that a quiet decency pervades the place, together with the usual comedies of family life; we watch Matilda frolicking with the young initiates, who put walnuts put down a nun’s neck. Here is the innocence of children.

It is no paradise. The spire belongs to the priory’s brief glory years, when it was led by an outstanding prioress, who had vision, commitment, organisation, a strong commanding will. When she fades into old age the successors lack her abilities, and the establishment starts to decline. Chance plays its part too: a potentially brilliant candidate loses out because of a silly mistake - the wrong nun is voted prioress by accident. As does Darwin’s natural selection: those who do not fit in - that strongest most pervasive of forces - must either conquer or be eradicated. Few have the personality to dominate such communities; local politics, factions and small-club jealousies making it extremely hard for the best nuns to win the headship. Decay sets in. The priory already in a bad way when the zealots attack. The history resembles an old family business - that cycle of birth, rise and fall marvellously evoked in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks - who struggle to live beyond a few generations, as the original spirit becomes slack, lingers on, fades away, eventually to expire. To leave a cluster of decaying buildings and the shell of an idea. Easy meat for Henry VIII.12

It is not right that we conclude such a happy book on a minor key. The author doesn’t. Dame Sibilla is off to Jerusalem! There will always be women who hunt after God, but in her case, as with so many, it is not the metaphysical deity she seeks but the excitements of the adventure; not the spirit but activity is the vitalising force. Once upon a time a woman could be free. They had power. They ran things...

This is one message of this delightful novel, but it is a secondary theme. Sylvia Townsend Warner has written this book to atone for her former beliefs. For although she still welcomes the decline of the old order - the aristocracy, the religion, its bureaucratic parasitism - she is full of regret for the loss of its beautiful treasures, the death of its true saints. It was wrong to celebrate the carnage of Spain’s civil war. The Corner That Held Them her letter of apology to the Catholic Church, and to that girl terrified in a rich man’s villa as the “conscientious” anarchists destroyed (“decontaminated”) the magic of her faith.13

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1. See Alan Macfarlane’s Marriage and Love in England, 1300 - 1840 for the historical background.

2. Contrast Oby with Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, where it is the aggressively secular institution - the aerodrome - that is truly religious. This Christian community is very close to Warner’s village, softened and corrupted by time and its customs.

3. It is isolation that fosters a deep diversity… Keeping to East Anglia we note the massive decline in the Suffolk dialect in the Suffolk countryside since the 1960s (it has been replaced by “estuary English” in Paul Kingsnorth's Real England: The Battle Against the Bland).

Sylvia Townsend Warner makes a similar point in The Flint Anchor: the special nature of a fishing village encourages and condones male homosexuality. Even the priests don’t rail against it.

4. It is my reading of Adam Ulam’s biography of Lenin. See also Bertrand Russell’s character sketch in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.

5. Leonard Schapiro’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the classic text. See also Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. What happens in the 1930s is that Stalin, to efface the Bolshevik founder, creates his own bureaucratic revolution, which wipes out vast swathes of the population and the old cadres. The revolutionary spirit, now largely defunct, is replaced by a remorseless bureaucratic machine, driven by the ugly emotions of a resentful petty clerk; a type prophetically described in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

6. The large house in decline is a period theme. See my Petrichor.

7. There are three core features of Christianity. The personal charisma of Christ. Greek rationality and its conception of the idea. The institution of the Church. The charismatic and the idea are essentially anarchic, arising out of the free spirit of the mind (although individual personalities can squeeze them down into a terrible authoritarianism). The Church, in contrast, limits the freedoms of the idea and the spirit, transforming them into secular behaviours. This is the central paradox of Christianity: its strongest feature, and the one that has enabled it to survive - the Church - actually goes against the founder’s message; while the Church’s relationship with a rationality used to create the doctrines necessary for its survival is an uneasy one. There is good discussion in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity. The tensions are brilliantly illuminated in R.W. Southern’s Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages.

8. The Flint Anchor is full of adults obtuse to the thoughts and feelings of others. This insensitivity common and acute amongst the religious - do-gooder and busybody alike.

9. Beautiful things can make our breath away. They can enrapture us, enchant us, perhaps give us a sense of wonder or awe. The experience ‘takes us out of ourselves’, a kind of ecstasy… It is a sense that they are as they should be, that there is something exactly right about them. (Simon Blackburn, What Do We Really Know? The Big Questions of Philosophy) 

To appreciate this beauty and accept its existence - to leave it as it should be - requires a particular kind of sensibility, more expansive and more passive than simple workaday Reason.

10. We think of today’s vogue for literary festivals and creative writing courses. 

11. This is nicely captured by Virginia Woolf, in Between the Acts.

12. The same process affects the old kingships: a dynasty rarely survived beyond a few generations.

An influential post-war theory had not read its Thomas Mann… G.R. Elton confused the Tudors with a modern corporation so that - as John Guy was to discover, when we wrote his Tudor England - an essentially dynastic state was mistaken for a permanent bureaucratic revolution; the English Reformation not pregnant with the modern world after all.

13. Among those lookers-on was a servant girl who had been suspected of worshipping before the plaque. She had had a religious upbringing, she could neither read nor write. While the hammer-blows fell she watched with painful attention. Her face expressed profound animal fear. But it was not on the men she fixed her terrified stare. It was the plaque itself which she watched with such bewildered and abject terror. (Barcelona in With the Hunted: Selected Writings.)  

The overall impression of the piece is that this terrified girl is being given a good lesson… Anarchist violence a better educator than a Catholic faith that fosters only ignorance - “she could neither read nor write”. In her writings on Spain the author reminds us of the don Graham Greene lambasts in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, and who he describes as “symptomatic of the inhumanity of the academic brain, and its unreliability.” The tone of Warner’s article is what Greene found so appalling in the don’s book on Mexico; it is that of the high-minded believer who thinks like a doctrinaire school teacher and small-town fanatic (remember the pharmacist in Madame Bovary?). No wonder she had to write a novel to exorcise the memory. In fact she wrote two: there is also the superb The Flint Anchor. Sylvia Townsend Warner, unlike so many progressives, is bigger than her beliefs.