Well, I missed Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week with this review and so I am grateful to myself for extending the week by a fortnight... I am also very grateful to have read The Corner that Held Them. While it hasn’t quite dethroned After the Death of Don Juan from its place as favourite in my heart, it is a close-run thing.
A tray of buns, a tray of nuns...
I must admit to a slight sense of trepidation since the little ‘nun fiction’ I have read tends to favour hysteria in convents, but the only bout of this in The Corner that Held Them occurs when a group of novices tries to levitate while playing Flying St Katherine, and all is handled with STW’s customary sense of absurdity tempered with compassion. (Even the murder is low key.)
The novel concerns a nunnery in Norfolk and the lives of those who inhabit it during the main part of the fourteenth century. Like After the Death of Don Juan, it dips in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, here to emphasise not only the sense of shared community but also to give a sense of time passing. Essentially plotless but more interwoven and inconclusive than a series of short stories, it often feels more historical than novel, more a record of something unfolding than a constructed narrative. Perhaps one might compare it to a mediaeval chronicle, which wove fact and fiction seamlessly together (although little here is unmediated historical fact so perhaps one might not). It is certainly an unusual structure.
(This lovely picture of some nuns I found here)
The convent of Our Lady and St Leonard at Oby has an inauspicious beginning. Alianor de Retteville is surprised in flagrante by her husband Brian and his cousins and forced to watch the murder of her lover. Her life is spared and continues miserably for some years, yet on her death Brian discovers a dormant affection for her – perhaps – and after a sumptuous funeral he founds a Benedictine nunnery to her memory. Although the nuns do not know Alianor, the spectre of such a marriage hangs over them. While they generally possess no vocation and are given to the convent by their families, for them the community offers a potentially pleasanter existence than wedlock and childbirth. Within the convent, life can be harsh and restrictive, but the nuns have a modicum of independence and responsibility. Those with talents, like Dame Susanna for music or Dame Matilda for figures, have the chance to make use of them. And it is generally a safe place compared to the outside world, as Dame Adela learns to her cost.
In this rich and dense novel two motifs recur: the tuft of wormwood by the gatehouse and the spire raised by Prioress Alicia. The wormwood is from the natural world at the mercy of which mediaeval people existed, the spire from the world of human achievement. Wormwood is edible but bitter and, in excess, toxic. It was used as a flavouring for mead in the Middle Ages and more recently in absinthe; it is also mentioned in the Bible as being mixed with vinegar and given to the dying Jesus. Its presence at the gate of the convent warns of a life of bitterness but also of succour. The raising of the spire is a long business, fraught with problems and delays, and in its first incarnation it collapses during a gale and kills one of the nuns. Yet finally it stands, a landmark for miles around. For many, like Sir Ralph, it is an object of beauty. For others, a sign of the nuns’ arrogance and profligacy. For Dame Lilias it is a symbol of failed escape. In collapsing it ‘had tried to get away’, as she has failed to do.
The fourteenth century was a dramatic period in British history: famine, war, plague and revolt ravaged it. Oby is fairly remote but suffers like everywhere else from the horrors of the Black Death, the subsequent labour shortages, the violence that followed the Peasants’ Revolt. Nor is the nunnery immune to dramatic occurrences such as the collapse of the first spire and the murder in the fishpond. But such incidents are exceptional. The rhythm of life at Oby is one of observing the rules, bickering and trying to balance the books and keep in with whoever is the current bishop. Worldly affairs and the relationships between the sisters take precedence over spiritual matters. The Black Death poses a threat but so does a possible lawsuit, the failure of tenants to pay their rents.
STW has presented us with an alternative for women to marriage, but she certainly has not idealised the religious life. In fact, she even slyly undermines it. St Leonard, to whom the convent is dedicated, is the patron saint of prisoners and captives. Few of the women – girls, when most of them arrive – have any influence over whether or not their families hand them over to the nunnery and while most settle in and appreciate their freedom from husbands some, like Dame Lilias, feel trapped. The novel ends abruptly with an escape by another nun who resents confinement. It’s an ending that is destabilising, for us as readers as well as the convent as institution.
(Nuns smuggling a man into a convent; from here)
There are other fundamental problems with life at Oby. Sir Ralph, the priest who serves the convent for most of the book, is not only idle, self-indulgent and lecherous (if loyal and good-hearted), and thus hardly an example of the religious life, he is also not really an ordained priest, just a lay clerk, and as such has no right to administer Holy Communion to the nuns or hear their confessions. Unwittingly, they are all living in a state of sin. Then there is the collapse of the spire – what, wonder the nuns, might that mean? Nothing good. And finally, the constant resentment of the peasants who have to work for what they perceive as a parcel of idle, pampered women reminds us of the unfairness of the social system in which they all struggle to survive. What really is the point of the convent?
There is so much more to this novel, it definitely requires rereading. I haven’t quoted very much because it doesn’t really lend itself to being quoted, all the strands of life are so neatly woven together that it’s difficult to extract a chunk. It’s also quite hard to write about as it has no central plot or characters and refuses the shapeliness, if you like, of conventional novel forms in favour of attempting to reflect more closely the vagaries of life as it is lived, rambling, inconclusive. This unusual structure and the distance it keeps from its characters make it difficult to place, perhaps it is not unlike Virginia Woolf’s The Years? But to anyone who fancies steeping themselves in the weirdness of mediaeval life as mediated by STW’s brilliant mind it is highly recommended.
(Bagpipe-playing bishop and dancing nun, from here)