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Helen Waddell
PETER
ABELARD
A Novel
With an introduction by
KATE MOSSE
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Contents
INTRODUCTION
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
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INTRODUCTION
In Belfast’s Writer’s Square, an open space of grey stone and sharp angles, quotations from twenty-seven of Northern Ireland’s most celebrated writers are etched upon the ground. Familiar names some – Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney and C. S. Lewis – others are less so. Overlooked by the gentle facade of St Anne’s Cathedral, this square is home to the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and, sometimes, a Winter Circus; year-round it’s busy, and a popular shortcut between Donegall Street and North Street. But how many of those passing through stop to look down on the words carved beneath their feet? Or know that one of Ulster’s most brilliant novelists, classical scholars, academics, translators, publishers and poets – Helen Waddell – is also commemorated there?
A literary celebrity in the 1920s and 30s, Waddell was one of the most successful, most honoured writers of the inter-war years. She mixed with prime ministers and royalty, philosophers and thinkers; she nurtured the careers of fellow writers and was admired by peers such as Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw. Yet today, Waddell is barely remembered and her exceptional, single novel – Peter Abelard – has been allowed to slip out of print.
I was thirteen when I first read Peter Abelard. Set in twelfth-century France – and inspired by the legendary real-life affair between Pierre Abelard, a priest, and his brilliant young student, Heloise d’Argenteuil – the novel has stayed with me ever since. Now a writer of historical fiction myself, I still marvel at Waddell’s ability to combine historical veracity with character; at her skill in bringing medieval Paris to life and making it seem familiar; at the way her profound and complicated reflections on faith, sexuality and grace never obscure the tenderness, then tragedy, of the love story she is telling. It is, simply, a magnificent piece of fiction that is both of its time and yet transcendent of it.
So, who was Helen Waddell? And why is it that her dazzling, extraordinary, celebrated novel – one of the biggest-selling books of the 1930s – fell out of fashion?
She was born in Japan in 1889, the youngest in a family of ten children. Her father, Hugh, was a missionary for the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, but he was also a scholar who translated the Bible into Chinese, and was fluent in Japanese. He also encouraged his children to learn from, and engage with, the world around them rather than hold themselves outside of it. It’s easy to see how the qualities that, later, were to inform both Waddell’s choices and infuse her writing are recognisably Ulster-Scots’ values: a reverence for scholarship and education; an unflagging sense of duty and responsibility; a devotion to family; and perhaps most of all, an unassailable independent and pioneering spirit that meant she always chose her own path, no matter how difficult.
After the liberty and rich intellectual variety of her early years, the death of Waddell’s mother when she was eleven saw the family exchange the gardens of Tokyo for the rainy streets of Belfast, where her father remarried. At her new school she was an outstanding student, and in 1908 was accepted to Queen’s College (soon to be Queen’s University Belfast). But having completed her BA, then an MA with great distinction in 1912 – and with the strong possibility of an academic career ahead of her – Waddell was obliged to give up her ambitions to care for her ill, increasingly demanding stepmother. Her older sister Meg was already married, so the responsibility fell solely on Helen’s shoulders. In letters to her beloved Meg she was later to refer to these as her ‘wilderness’ years. It was not until after Martha Waddell’s death in 1920 that Helen was free to take up the reins of her own life again.
At the age of thirty-one, she was accepted into the English department of Somerville College, one of four women’s colleges at the University of Oxford, to read for a PhD. Increasingly, though, Waddell had fallen out of love with academia and in love with the idea of being a writer herself. A £200-per-year scholarship, awarded by another of the women’s colleges, Lady Margaret Hall, took her to Paris in 1923. These two years of study were to change the course of her life. Her subject was the Goliards, a group of young men (mainly clerics) of the twelfth and thirteenth century who specialized in a satirical form of Latin lyric poetry.
She threw herself into her research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, setting herself the task of reading everything that her ‘Wandering Scholars’ would have read. She familiarized herself, as she put it in one of her letters to her mentor George Saintsbury, with ‘the literary furniture of their minds’.
Increasingly, Waddell was drawn to the leading Goliard, the philosopher and thinker Peter Abelard. He was considered one of the great thinkers of the twelfth century. Heloise, his lover, was one of the most well-educated women of her time. The record of their love affair, their forcible separation and what came after it is preserved in a series of letters they sent to one another. And it is this – their religious discourse and their literary debates on the nature of life and love and their doomed romance – that was to capture Waddell’s imagination.
As Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet, so the relationship between Heloise and Abelard is one of the great love stories of literature. Their remains, only reunited some hundreds of years after their deaths, are to be found in Paris’ iconic Père Lachaise Cemetery, not far from the graves of Edith Piaf, of writers Proust, Balzac and Oscar Wilde, and of the composer Chopin. At the entrance to the cemetery, Heloise and Abelard are simply described as amants légendaires – ‘legendary lovers’.
But although the inspiration was there, it was a good few years before Waddell was to finish writing the novel. On returning to London from Paris in 1925, she was obliged to take a job in a publishing house – Constable & Company – to make ends meet. She spent her days correcting other writers’ grammar and punctuation.
A significant step in Waddell’s determination to be a writer came in 1927, when the chairman of the company, Otto Kyllman, published the book that came out of her Paris research trip, The Wandering Scholars. It was warmly reviewed and well received. Encouraged by this success, letters to her sister Meg reveal Helen’s new sense of purpose. Little by little the characters, the story and the architecture of the novel begin to take shape. Finally, the novel takes centre stage in Waddell’s life. When Peter Abelard was published in 1933, it seemed her literary reputation was secure.
It’s hard to work out exactly what happened next. Or, rather, why? There’s plenty of evidence in Waddell’s letters that she intended Peter Abelard to be only the first in a series of novels inspired by the Heloise and Abelard story. She continued to write and translate, to produce works of theology and scholarship, but she never returned to the world of medieval France. Of course, with the outbreak of war, her house in London’s Primrose Hill was filled with friends, students, soldiers – anyone in need of a roof over their heads – which meant there was little time
for writing. And Waddell always put a great deal of energy into her relationships, not least of all with Otto Kyllman himself (with whom she was to continue a life-long, if platonic, affair) and her many nephews and nieces, particularly Meg and her family at Kilmacrew House in County Down.
But, even so . . . I wonder if, in the end, Waddell felt she had said all she wanted to say in Peter Abelard? That those words stood for her? Or simply that real, lived life got in the way. Or, is it possible that the cruel illness that was to rob her of the last twenty years was already showing its dark face? For the last two decades of her life, Waddell lived in a twilight world of Alzheimer’s, her brilliant mind deprived of memory, of scholarship, of the beauty of language, of the pleasures of friendships.
On 5 March 1965, Waddell died in London with her niece Mollie at her side. She was taken home to Northern Ireland to be buried in Magherally Graveyard on the hills above her beloved Kilmacrew House, in the shadow of the ruins of the old church. The inscription on her headstone begins: ‘She lifted a veil from the past.’ The line, faded now in the stone and moss, is from one of her own translations of a Latin lament: ‘The light is on thy head.’
Kate Mosse
Chichester, West Sussex
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BOOK I
THE CLOISTER OF NOTRE DAME
June 1116—May 1117
CHAPTER I
“Temps s’en va,
Et rien n’ai fait” . . .
Abelard raised his head. It was a pleasant voice, though a little drunken, and the words came clearly enough, a trifle blurred about the consonants, to the high window of the Maison du Poirier. The window was open, for the June night was hot, and there were few noises after ten o’clock in the Place du Parvis Notre Dame.
“Time goes by,
And naught do I.
Time comes again,
. . . Et ne fais rien!”
Abelard’s smile broadened. “I am very sure, my friend,” said he, “that you do not.” But at any rate he had found a good tune. The listener’s ear was quick. He began noting it on the margin of his manuscript, while his brain busied itself fitting Latin words to the original: a pity to waste so good a tune and so profound a sentiment on a language that was the breath of a day.
“Fugit hora,
Absque mora,
Nihil facio” . . .
Not to that tune. The insinuating, if doomed, vernacular lilted again. Abelard realised that he was spoiling the margin of his Commentary on Ezekiel, and turned back resolutely.
“Now, as Augustine says, our concern with any man is not with what eloquence he teaches, but with what evidence.” But the thread of his argument was broken: he got up and came over to the window. The singing had stopped, but he could see the tonsured head below him, glimmering like a mushroom in the dusk, while the legs tacked uncertainly across the broad pavement of the Parvis Notre Dame on their way to the cheerful squalors of the Petit Pont. Suddenly they halted: the moon had come out from a drifting haze, and the singer, pausing on the edge of a pool of light, peered at it anxiously, and then lifted up his eyes. The voice rose again, chastened, this time in the venerable cadences of the hymn for dawn:
“Jam lucis orto sidere
Statim oportet bibere.”
“The blasphemous pup,” said Abelard. He leaned out, to hear the rest of it:
“Now risen is the star of day.
Let us arise and drink straightway.
That we in peace this day may spend,
Drink we and drink, nor make an end.”
This was a better parody, because a simpler, than the one he had made upon it himself ten years ago, to illustrate for his students the difference between the accidents and the essential, the accidents being the words, the essential the tune. Lord, the Blessed Gosvin’s face when he began singing it! Doubtless he would be the Blessed Gosvin some day: so holy a youth could not fail of a sanctified old age. St. Gosvin perhaps: the youngster was Prior already at . . . he had forgotten where. The impudent, smooth-faced prig.
Abelard’s mind was running down a channel it knew and did not like: the moment in the classroom at St. Geneviève, when Gosvin’s reedy treble had interrupted the resonant voice from the rostrum with those innocent questionings, answered contemptuously, the master’s eyes half averted and his mind less than half attentive, till the sudden horrid silence brought him to his senses and he realised that he was trapped, even as he had so often trapped that good old goat, William of Champeaux. He had recovered, magnificently; but for the moment he had felt the hounds at his throat. And the cheering had been too vehement: they knew. Somebody on the Ile de Cité that night made a song about David and Goliath, not a very good song, but the name had stuck to him since, though not many remembered the origin of it. A pity, all the same, that Gosvin took to the cloister. It would be very pleasant to have him lecturing to empty benches at St. Geneviève, while at Notre Dame the students wedged open the doors and stood thick on the stairs. Thanks to that one trick, the pup will go all his life thinking he has a better brain than Master Peter Abelard, and he will tell the story to his novices, how the Lord once aided him, and he but a lad, to defend the truth, and one of them will write his life after he is dead, and pretend that there would have been a greater philosopher than Peter Abelard, if God had not called the Blessed Gosvin to holiness.
Oh, enough. The folly of it, to be in one’s thirty-seventh year and writhe like a worm in salt at a trifle that happened ten years ago. One forgot; and in a flash the agony came again, as if it were yesterday. Heaven knew there had been triumphs enough, before and since, to take that taste from his mouth. Poor William! William had driven him from Paris, and in the end he had driven William to the cloister, and now William was a bishop. Well, he had Abelard to thank for that, and his sermons might easily be better than his lectures. And old Anselm at Laon: sheep every one of them, with their meek faces, browsing over and over the old close-bitten pastures, with their “St. Augustine saith . . . St. Jerome saith . . . The Blessed Gregory saith . . .” As if one could not prove anything, and deny it, and prove it back again, out of St. Augustine alone. Some time he would do it, for a testimony unto them. Pit the Fathers one against the other. Smash the whole blind system of authority and substitute . . . Master Peter Abelard? said the mocking voice within him. He shook his head, suddenly humble. Not that. Not that. But a reasonable soul. The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. Abelard shuddered and was still. It was about him again, the dark immensity, the pressure of some greatness from without upon his brain, and that within which struggled to break through to it. I said, Ye are gods.
Behind him the room darkened. The flame of the candle sank, leaped and went out, and the abominable smell of a burnt-out wick reeked into the air. Abelard woke, cursed, and thrust the inkpot upon it. That dog, Guibert, where had he put the candles? The shiftless fool. But no bigger fool than himself, to keep the swine about the place.
“Guibert! Guibert!”
There was no answer. Abelard stumbled over a footstool, opened the door, and shouted down the stairs to the cupboard where Guibert slept when he was not employing his leisure in the Quartier. The door gaped open: the frowsy bed lay huddled as Guibert had that morning risen from it. Caterwauling again, said Abelard: though what the women see in him . . . Flatters them, I suppose, the way he does me, he thought ruefully. But there was something about him . . . that dog’s gaze of his, the tail at half-mast to go erect or clapped to its hindquarters, according to the look in your eye. And after all it was twenty years: twenty years since the pair of them had clattered down the stony track from Le Palais to go to Paris. What was it that Irishman wrote the other day? In those first days when youth in me was happy and life was swift in doing, and I wandering through the divers cities of sweet France for the love I had of learning, gave all my might to letters. They were good days. But no better, nor so good, as these. Abelard h
ad come back to the window: it was too dark to read, and too early to sleep. He stood watching the jagged line of the roofs of St. Geneviève against the sky. They had driven him from Paris, and he had gone to St. Geneviève, and emptied the schools of Notre Dame. He had gone to Melun, and Paris had come to Melun. He had gone to Laon for theology—Gilles de Vannes had lifted his eyebrows at him and said, “Philosophy is my washpot: over Theology also will I cast out my shoe!”—and Paris had implored him to itself again. And now? He stood chewing the cud of old triumphs, anticipating fresh ones, omnipotence mounting higher in his heart. No need now to be a peripatetic philosopher: the world came to Paris, to him. Two Masters of Arts from Padua, a Doctor of Laws from Bologna, a handful of young men from Salamanca, a couple of Malachy’s men from Armagh, a rabble of English and Germans, and half the youngsters of France, from Bec to Montpellier and Toulouse. Yet some day he must see Rome. Plato said it would be well for that state whose king was a philosopher. What of Christendom, if a philosopher were Pope?
The wave of power swept up: he swung on the crest of it, indifferent as a strong swimmer. And swaying there, his mind began challenging the enigma of that other scholar, that Gerbert who also became Pope, though for three years only, till he died. Necromancer, devil-aided, devil-destroyed, said the legend, and all, Thierry of Chartres used to say, because he had a head for mathematics, and had studied Arabic and geometry at the schools of the Saracens. It was hard to come at any truth about him: but there, Abelard had always felt, was a man with whom he would have been on terms. The stories of his learning and his devilry might be equally fabulous, but he had written his own memorial in one line of his epitaph for Boethius:
“That intellect divine
Compels for thee the world’s imperium.”
Not intellect only, perhaps. Chicane and intrigue, as well as sheer momentum of genius. There was that ugly story of the archbishopric of Rheims. Abelard moved impatiently, his mind twitching away from the thought of it, the whispering, the smooth-faced strategy, the whole corroding business of administration, the pygmy warfare of dean and chapter. He had seen enough of it already, since they made him Canon of Notre Dame. There was ordination too. Was it of Gerbert they told the story, how the pains of Hell took hold of him, saying his last Mass in the Jerusalem chapel at Rome, and the chalice slipped from his hands, and the wine fell like great gouts of blood, dripping from step to step of the altar stairs? He drew his mind away. Not yet. He could not yet set his hands about the Host.
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