Spiritual Reading

The school retreat used to be an important annual event in many a Catholic teenager’s education. Ours was normally held towards the end of Lent and, though it promised two days of wallowing in my own sinfulness and mortality, it was definitely enjoyable. All lessons were suspended and I welcomed the respite – or blessed relief – from the incessant babble and din of school life, since the retreat was observed in strict silence.

Between the silent meals, stints in church and hard-talking ‘discourses’ given by a visiting cleric (see Chapter 3 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for these at their most alarming), we spent our time in spiritual reading: simple theology, pious fables, lives of the saints, church history and even fiction, as long as it was on a Catholic theme. Progressing through the school, and growing more (as we thought) sophisticated, we saw it as our duty to try the boundaries of what was acceptable to the Benedictine monks who ruled our lives, and all sorts of arguably Catholic texts were presented for our housemaster Father Brendan’s approval. One of my friends was sent packing when he came up with Brideshead Revisited, but another was allowed The Power and the Glory. Short stories featuring Father Brown and Don Camillo were seen as a lightweight but acceptable choice for a boy on retreat; the Catholic content of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction would be dangerously ambiguous and troubling. Historical novels were well favoured if they told of the persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson’s exemplary Come Rack! Come Rope! being a particular favourite. I don’t remember anyone proposing The Fifth Queen, Ford Madox Ford’s fitfully magnificent trilogy of novels about the rise and fall of Katherine Howard, of which the last volume appeared in 1908. Set against the background of the dismantling of Catholicism in England, it is all conspiracy and counter-plot, rush-lit passageways and darkened chambers. Perhaps too political and cynical to have received the housemaster’s nihil obstat, its plus points would be that Ford draws Henry’s penultimate wife – improbably in the eyes of many historians – as an idealist solid for the Old Faith who is pitted against the devious sociopath Thomas Cromwell, herald of self-admiring modernity. This is the territory now monumentally occupied (though with a very different view of Cromwell) by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books. It is also the ground on which stands H. F. M. Prescott’s The Man on a Donkey, another immense novel that appeared in print roughly midway between the publication of the Ford and Mantel trilogies. This was one Tudor novel the monks were happy to see us reading during the retreat, and it is immediately easy to see why: the story begins in a religious house and, 700 pages later, leaves the reader emotionally in bits following the destruction of that house. It may seem eccentric to advocate a novel recommended long ago by priests in the same breath as Come Rack! Come Rope! But Prescott’s book is a very much more formidable and interesting proposition than anything of Mgr Benson’s. The Man on a Donkey is cast as a chronicle, a form used, as the ‘Author’s Note’ puts it, to introduce the reader into a world where ‘he’ is at first a stranger but is soon, ‘as in real life, picking up, from seemingly trifling episodes, understanding of those about him and learning to know them without knowing what he learns. Only later does the theme of the book emerge.’ That theme is announced by church bells ringing in 1536 across Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, as the common people rise up and muster in huge numbers to perform what they called the Pilgrimage of Grace. It is, in fact, an armed pilgrimage, a rebellion against the religious reforms of Henry VIII and Cromwell, and in particular against their asset-stripping of the monasteries. The novel’s underlying theme becomes fully developed at the same time, and it is a moral one – the dictates and betrayals of personal responsibility in human relations, starting with love and family and reaching right up to the acquisitive machinations of the state. The rebellion is, of course, doomed, and as that doom unfolds the novelist’s grip tightens, making for a memorable and compelling – and, for many readers, tear-stained – finale. Prescott’s front rank of characters, threaded into the narrative during the period before the rebellion, are Dame Christabel Cowper, a worldly Prioress who will lose her priory; Thomas, Lord Darcy, who will lose his head; Gib Dawe, a priest fanatical for the ‘new learning’; Julian, a young girl in love; and the man she loves, lawyer Robert Aske, who will lead the rebellion. At the very start, and here and there throughout, comes the fat, half-crazed, illiterate Yorkshire woman known as Malle, a seer of visions of which ‘the man on a donkey’ is the main one, though this does seem, when it comes midway through the book, inconsequential and (like all the best visions) elusive of meaning. Hilda Prescott was a professional historian, and a biographer of Queen Mary Tudor, who knew the sixteenth century like the back of her falconer’s glove. She was also a natural novelist who carried out her method of immersing the reader, many pages before the plot takes hold, in the daily life of a long-gone England with astonishing attention to detail. She is careful to count the lapse of time as a Tudor would (‘the nearest of the plough teams passed and repassed twice before Julian moved’), she understands the people’s daily obsession with fabrics and needlecraft, she tracks and describes the changes in season, weather and land work, she knows that a postern is a side gate, and a sparver is a bed canopy, and much other evocative terminology. The prose is of its own time, neither prolix in a Victorian way nor modernistically sparse, though it rigorously avoids redundant adjectives and adverbs. Prominence is given to description, and the descriptive passages often have great eloquence, and at times a brio that might be Nabokov: ‘the bells began to peal from all the church towers of York, and among them the bells of the Minster, dancing up and down unseen stairways of sound till the air was wild with their flying feet, running after each other, overtaking, clanging together’; or again ‘she was young herself and pretty and plump, not heavily plump but with something of the soft airy roundness of a dandelion clock’. The Man on a Donkey gives you its promised thorough immersion in the period but, if you stand back a little, you begin to see how it also resonates with Britain in the 1940s and 1950s when it was conceived, written and published. This is most obvious in the character of Robert Aske. He is just the kind of fellow who tended to crop up in the fiction of the first half of the twentieth century, and in life also. Aske is a romantic hero, certainly, but an accidental one. He is reminiscent of T. E. Lawrence and Richard Hannay and a little, too, of Frodo Baggins, whose adventures were being written up at the same time as Aske’s. Both Prescott’s sixteenth-century lawyer and Tolkien’s intrepid hobbit are ‘ordinary’ folk who find themselves in a position of leadership that they never sought. Challenged by chance and circumstance to stand up to a force they see as greedy, mechanistic and cruel, they find they cannot resist taking up the cudgels. They also happen to have exactly the degree of cussed determination and simplicity of purpose needed for the job. ‘If you hold a thing,’ says Aske at one point, ‘you sink your teeth into it and grip like a boar hound.’ The Man on a Donkey’s romanticism goes deeper than its choice of hero: it is the structural principle of the whole novel. Prescott’s view of English history, and in particular of the Reformation, is derived from ideas that had been advanced for a period of more than a century by the likes of Pugin, Wordsworth, Carlyle, William Morris and G. K. Chesterton. The essence of their argument was that the split with Rome had been the nation’s fall from grace, a sort of primal sin in which England turned its face away from the collective and organic life of the Middle Ages and embraced ugly new forms of economic and moral individualism. Adapted by the bestselling Christian socialist historian R. H. Tawney, this idea remained popular well into the twentieth century, and it clearly influenced Prescott. Such thinking was to be overtaken in academia by the anti-romantic pull of modernism and the rigours of structuralist theory, but as a strand of thought it has never quite gone away. Indeed, it re-echoes with renewed persuasiveness now that nature is being duffed up by global warming and humans find themselves more and more manipulated by soulless algorithms. If this kind of neo-romanticism is encoded in its DNA, the novel’s grip is more personal, and this comes from Prescott’s richly persuasive prose, and her characters and their predicaments. The reader becomes enmeshed in their fate, in the very needlework of the story, in a way that goes far beyond wanting to know how things will turn out. As I found when I first read it, and again on my recent rereading, The Man on a Donkey seemed to demand some sort of commitment from its reader. It challenged me to respond in such a way that I was not simply reading the book, I was also reading myself through the book. In a lifetime we are only likely to meet a few texts that can do this and they are, by my reckoning, the best kind of spiritual reading.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 58 © Robin Blake 2018