by David Lodge
“I’m glad to hear it,” said the Bishop. “But what shall we do with you?”
“Let me go to college,” said Austin Brierley. “I’d like to take a degree in psychology.”
“What in Heaven’s name for?”
“I think it would help me to understand people better. They come to me for advice, but what do I know about ordinary people’s problems? All I know about are priests’ problems.”
The Bishop grunted sceptically. “We’ve managed for nearly two thousand years without degrees in psychology,” he said. But the suggestion had an undeniable appeal. Sending Father Brierley to college would get him out of his parish and out of the limelight for a few years, by which time the controversy over HV would have died down. And it would appear a magnanimous gesture on his own part, which would be one in the eye for Mr Adrian Walsh and his society of busybodies. “You’d have to resign from that Catholics for an Open Church nonsense,” he said. Reluctantly, Austin Brierley agreed to this condition, but he chose his place of study deliberately to be near some of his friends and supporters in COC, and continued to advise them unofficially on matters of theology and ecclesiastical politics.
Michael and Miriam now belonged to a circle of friends, mostly attached to the College in some capacity, who saw themselves as almost a church within the Church. On Sunday mornings they attended mass in the College chapel, where Father Bede Buchanan, a liberal-minded priest who was a lecturer in the Theology Department and chaplain to the student body, tolerated an experimental, avant-garde liturgy that would have lifted the back hairs on the red necks of the local parish priests had they known what was going on in their midst.
Each week the students chose their own readings, bearing on some topical theme, and sometimes these were not taken from Scripture at all, but might be articles from the Guardian about racial discrimination or poems by the Liverpool poets about teenage promiscuity or some blank-verse effusion of their own composition. The music at mass was similarly eclectic in style, accompanied by guitar and perhaps flute, violin, Indian bells, bongo drums – whatever instruments and instrumentalists happened to be around. They sang negro spirituals and gospel songs, Sidney Carter’s modern folk hymns, the calypso setting of the “Our Father”, Protestant favourites like “Amazing Grace” and “Onward Christian Soldiers”, and sometimes pop classics like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs Robinson” (“Jesus loves you more and more each day, hey, hey, hey!”) or the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”. At the bidding prayers anyone was free to chip in with a petition, and the congregation might find itself praying for the success of the Viet Cong, or for the recovery of someone’s missing tortoise, as well as for more conventional intentions. At the Offertory, the bread and wine were brought up to the altar by two students, usually a courting couple holding hands and exchanging fond looks, and it wasn’t only married couples who warmly embraced at the Kiss of Peace. Throughout the mass the young children of the college lecturers scampered uncontrolled about the room, chattering and fighting and pushing their Dinky cars up and down the altar steps. At Communion, most of the congregation received the Host in their hands rather than on the tongue, and also took the cup, which was brought round by a layman – all practices still forbidden in public worship in England. At the end of mass there was a discussion period in which the congregation was encouraged to pick holes in the homily they had heard earlier.
This liturgy had one indisputable spiritual edge over the old: it was virtually impossible to lapse into some private, secular day-dream while it was going on, because you could never be sure from one moment to the next what was going to happen. By suspending their sense of irony, Michael and Miriam derived an agreeable sense of uplift and togetherness from the occasion, while their children positively looked forward to Sunday mornings, and groaned when, during the vacations, the College masses were suspended and they were obliged to attend the parish church, where they were penned in narrow pews and made to sit, stand and kneel, like well-drilled troops, in unison with the rest of the congregation, and obliged to sing the doleful hymns of yesteryear, “Soul of My Saviour” and “Sweet Sacrament Divine”. Moving between these two places of worship, and impersonating the two very different styles of deportment that went with them, Michael sometimes felt like a liturgical double agent.
Catholic friends and relatives who came to stay (they now had a large, comfortable old house, with a proper guest room) were taken to the College mass as a kind of treat, or at least novelty. Adrian, who came down with Dorothy one weekend to discuss COC policy (there was a plan afoot to publish a pamphlet demonstrating the fallibility of Humanae Vitae) joined enthusiastically in the College mass and offered a bidding prayer inviting the Lord to open the eyes of those clergy who were resisting the spirit of liturgical renewal. This was apparently an allusion to his own parish priest, with whom he was engaged in a long war of attrition. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said afterwards. “Our PP won’t even allow women readers.”
“Why not?” said Miriam.
“Menstruation,” said Dorothy, who liked to advertise the distance she had travelled from her inhibited youth by being very outspoken. “He thinks women are unclean. He probably thinks we bleed all the time.”
“But we’ll nail him eventually,” said Adrian. “Dorothy will read from that pulpit if I have to organize a strike of altar cleaners to do it.”
“Sometimes, at the College mass, we have a woman bring round the cup,” said Miriam.
“Gosh, do you really!” they exclaimed. “How fantastic!”
But the College liturgy did not always please. One Sunday when Michael’s parents were with them, a child taking Communion let the chalice slip and spilled the consecrated wine all over the floor. Michael’s father, a retired civil servant, was deeply upset by this occurrence, and muttered audibly that it ought to be reported to the Bishop. “It’s not right,” he said afterwards, over lunch, still agitated and looking quite grey with shock, “letting the children have the chalice. I don’t hold with it, in any case, not even for adults, there’s always the risk of an accident. But the way they carry on in that chapel, with any Tom, Dick or Harry taking round the chalice, it’s no wonder something like that happens. And all that priest did was mop it up with some old cloth!”
“What did you expect him to do, Dad, eat the carpet?” said Michael. The remark sounded excessively rude when he made it, but his father had irritated and embarrassed him by his public fussing over the incident.
“In my day, the carpet would have been taken up and burned.”
“Burned?” Michael forced a laugh. “What good would that do?”
“To avoid desecration.”
Michael sighed. “You still have a very magical idea of the Eucharist, don’t you Dad?”
“Respectful, I’d call it. Reverent.”
“Even granted that you still believe in the transubstantiation –”
“Oh, don’t you, then?”
“Not in the sense we were taught at school. Substance and accidents and all that.”
Michael’s father shook his head.
“But even granted that you still believe it, surely you don’t think that Christ is trapped in the wine, do you? I mean, you admit that the Real Presence could leave the wine the instant it was spilled, before it hit the carpet?”
“Michael, leave your father alone,” said Miriam.
“Yes, stop it, you two,” said her mother-in-law. “It’s not nice, arguing about religion on a Sunday.”
Michael’s father waved these interventions away impatiently. “Tell me what you do believe, then, son, about Holy Communion, if you don’t believe in transubstantiation. What is it, if it isn’t the changing of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ?” He gave a reflex nod of the head at the Holy Name, and his wife followed suit.
“Well …”said Michael, more hesitantly, “it’s a commemoration.”
“Pah!” expostulated his father. “That’s what Pr
otestants say.”
“Do this in memory of me,” Michael quoted.
“This is My Body, this is My Blood,” his father countered.
“That’s a metaphor,” said Michael.
“It’s a plain statement of fact.”
“How could it be? A plain statement of fact would be, ‘This bread is bread, this wine is wine.’” He took a slice of Hovis in his fingers and waved it in the air illustratively, exhilarated by the argument, his blood up now, a teacher in full cry. “In ‘This is My Body,’ the verb is can only mean ‘is like’ or ‘is, as it were’ or ‘is analogous to’, because any other sense would be a logical contradiction. God can only speak to men in a language that is humanly intelligible.”
His father snorted angrily, baffled but not beaten. “Are you trying to tell me that what the Church has taught for centuries is wrong, then?”
“Yes. No. Not exactly. Concepts change as knowledge changes. Once everybody believed the earth was flat. Only cranks believe that now.”
“So I’m a crank, am I?”
“I didn’t say that, Dad.”
His father grunted, but offered no further resistance. The adrenalin seeped away and Michael was left feeling slightly ashamed of his facile victory.
Miles, who stayed with them one weekend on his way to a conference in Wales, was as dismayed as Michael’s father. “My dear Michael,” he said, emerging from the College chapel with his hand to his brow, like someone with a migraine, “this is madness. This is anarchy. This is Enthusiasm. Ronnie Knox must be spinning in his grave.” Miles drew an analogy between what he had witnessed and the development of antinomian sects in the seventeenth century. “It won’t be long,” he prophesied, “before you’re dancing naked in front of the altar and sharing your wives and goods in common.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Michael, grinning. “But seriously, Miles, everyone’s antinomian nowadays. Catholics are just catching up with the rest of the world. I mean, the idea of sin is right out. They don’t even teach it in Catholic schools any more.” Michael exaggerated somewhat to tease Miles, who awed him less than of old, perhaps because Miles’s academic career had not really fulfilled its early promise. His thesis had not, after all, been published, whereas Michael was beginning to publish essays here and there about youth culture, the new liturgy and the mass media, and had hopes of gathering them into a book. When Michael visited Miles at his Cambridge college he was surprised how little envy he felt – his rooms seemed cold and damp and smelled of gas, the furniture was ugly, the conversation at High Table boring and superficial. Apart from the beauty of the external architecture, the ambience reminded him faintly of his father’s golf club as it had been in the early fifties. Miles himself, wearing superbly tailored but unfashionably cut three-piece suits, and always carrying his tightly furled umbrella, seemed psychologically arrested in that earlier era.
Miles certainly felt spiritually orphaned by the times. The Catholic Church he had joined was fast disappearing, and he did not like the new one he saw appearing in its place, with its concert-party liturgy, its undiscriminating radicalism, its rather smug air of uxorious sexual liberation. He admitted to himself that there might be an element of envy in his reaction on the last score, for he was himself still hopelessly screwed up over the sexual question. The homosexual subculture of Cambridge was becoming increasingly overt in its behaviour, and beckoning him to join the party, but he held back on the fringe, prim-lipped and buttoned-up. It was at about this time that the word “gay” became widely current in England in the homosexual sense, but to Miles it had a mockingly ironic ring. One summer he arranged to take a holiday in Morocco with a young colleague of apparently similar temperament, and wondered excitedly whether this would be his first affair, whether the exotic and distant setting would allow him to lose his scruples and his virginity at last, but the young man turned out to be paedophile and spent all his time making assignations with young Arab boys in the marketplace of the town where they were staying. One evening Miles himself cruised the narrow streets diffidently in search of a pick-up, but always drew back when accosted, fearful of being robbed, blackmailed or infected. He flew back to England a week early and settled in tourist-ridden Cambridge to make one more assault on the revision of his thesis for publication. By the end of the vacation he had exactly thirteen pages of uncancelled typescript to show for his pains. “You’re blocked because you’re sexually repressed,” said his friend, back from Morocco, bronzed and sated. “How glib can you get?” Miles sneered, but secretly agreed.
At times when his physical frustration became too much to bear, he took from a locked drawer in his bedroom a small collection of homosexual pornography and masturbated. These acts he coldly confessed at the earliest opportunity to his regular confessor, the now ageing Jesuit. “Is it really better to live like this than to have a proper loving relationship with someone?” Miles asked.
“You know very well that if you were doing that I wouldn’t be able to give you absolution. Pray to Almighty God to give you strength.”
Miles sank into a deep depression. He spent long hours taking hot baths and slept as much as possible, drugging himself with Valium and sleeping pills – anything to reduce the hours of consciousness to a minimum. He cancelled his tutorials frequently because he could not face them, and his students began to complain. Colleagues avoided his company. Cambridge, which he had always thought of as one of the most privileged spots on earth, became hideous to him, a claustrophobic little place, crammed with vain, complacent, ruthless people who were constantly signalling to each other by every word and gesture, “Envy me, envy me, I’m clever and successful and I’m having it off every night.”
“Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist,” said his confessor.
“He’ll only tell me to have sex,” said Miles. “That’s what they all say, isn’t it?”
“I know a Catholic one,” said the priest. “A very good man.”
After several consultations the psychiatrist said, “I can do nothing for you. Speaking as a doctor, my advice would be: find yourself a partner. Speaking as a Catholic, I can only say: carry your cross.”
“That’s easily said,” Miles observed.
The psychiatrist shrugged. “I quite agree. With many clients there comes a point when one has to say, your problem is what you are.”
“Like the old joke about the man with an inferiority complex?”
“Precisely. You are homosexual.”
“I knew that already,” said Miles, getting up to go. “But thanks for confirming it.”
Violet also went to a psychiatrist – more than one: she sought them out as she had once sought out confessors, moving restlessly and at random from one to another, hoping to find the one with magic powerful enough to break the spell. She told each one her story and compared their diagnoses. Some said depressive, some schizoid, some prescribed drugs, some group counselling. One prescribed therapeutic sex. When Violet told him about the episode with her professor, he propounded the theory that she had imagined the whole thing. It was clearly a displacement of her desire to have sex with her own father. The guilt generated by this repressed incestuous desire had led her to project it on to other father figures as a violation of her own innocence. She would not be cured until she was able to have a happy, guilt-free relationship with an older man. “I am an older man,” he pointed out. When Violet broke off the consultation, he said, “If you make a complaint, I shall deny everything, of course.”
Ruth wrote home for a further extension. It was refused. Come home, her Mother Superior urged, you are needed. Sixth Form science is suffering. Ruth procrastinated, equivocated. She did not want to go home. She felt that she was in the middle of some spiritual quest that could not be abandoned, though she did not know where or when it would end. As for Sixth Form science suffering, that was all rot. The real reason why Mother Superior wanted her back was because two more nuns had left the convent and morale was low. One of the women concerned ha
d written to Ruth. “I’ll make no bones about it,” she wrote, “I left to get married, and not to anyone in particular. I woke up one morning and realized that I couldn’t face the rest of my life on my own, without a man, without children. I’m going out with a nice fellow now, a widower with two boys, we met through an agency. I’m taking cookery lessons. When I tried to cook a dinner for John and the children he said it was the worst meal he had ever had in his life. I suppose that after a number of years in a convent your taste buds get anaesthetized…”
Ruth herself did not suffer unduly from the pangs of frustrated sexual and maternal longing, but she did feel that there was something missing from her life as a religious, and that she had to find it before she returned home. She wrote back to her Mother Superior: “I am going through a crisis about my vocation. I must see it through over here.” Mother Superior wired: “RETURN IMMEDIATELY.” Ruth ignored the summons. She did not know whether she had been suspended. She did not greatly care.
It was a time of intense political activity in America, and priests and nuns were throwing themselves into the struggle for civil rights, for peace in Vietnam, for the protection of the environment. Ruth marched and demonstrated on behalf of the Berrigan brothers, Jesuit priests jailed for burning draft cards and alleged conspiracy against the State, and was herself arrested and jailed for a night. She hitchhiked to Southern California to support the strike of exploited Chicano grape-pickers. Her picket line was broken up by thugs hired by the employers. Ruth was hit in the chest and pushed to the ground, screaming “You cad!” at her attacker. “Those mothers are mean-looking mothers, ain’t they?” said the worker who picked her up and dusted her down. After that experience, Ruth wore her habit on demos and enjoyed a certain immunity from assault, though an element of risk remained. Thus attired, she stood among a crowd of two thousand on a college campus at the height of the Cambodian crisis, chanting, “Pigs out! Pigs out!” and fled from a charge of police dressed like spacemen, her eyes streaming from tear gas. “Mean-looking mothers, aren’t they?” she gasped to a startled fellow-demonstrator. This term of abuse, which she privately interpreted as a contraction of “Mother Superior”, had rather caught her fancy, and she continued to use it freely until enlightened as to its true derivation by an amused Franciscan friar during a sit-in at a napalm factory.
