The library has a mass of stuff about Stylites, [6] which I am devouring. It’s too enthralling and insane; all the details of their life, food, sanitary arrangements, fasts, mortifications, hair shirts, flagellations, etc. There were lots of them – St Symeon Stylites the Ancient, S. Sim. Styl. the Younger, St Daniel, St Alypius, St Luke, St Lazarus the Galiziote. Then there were Dendrites that lived in trees, with a chain round their ankle, in case they fell, sometimes for 60 years. The Stylites used to stand nearly all the time, with or without a leaning post, and never left their pillars even in the snowiest winter, with nothing except a goat-skin tunic to protect them, though some built a little shelter, in the Decadence. St Symeon was nearly blind from the Sun. There was one who hung in mid air by a rope under his armpits from the cupola of a church. This is something I would like to write an article about – ‘The Stylites, and certain extremes of Oriental Christian Monasticism’, for instance. I knew a very old woman in Athens whose father had been alive when a Stylite was living on top of one of the pillars of Olympian Zeus.
Darling, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be allowed to take photographs here, as no women are allowed actually inside the precincts of the abbey. Only in the chapel, the ruins and a part of the gardens. I would like to write something about this abbey, though, and must try and get some photographs from somewhere. One gets so used to ‘life in a monastery’ being something conventionally strange, that one files it away in one’s mind and leaves it at that. I had very little idea of what it was going to be like, how very individual and odd and disconnected from ordinary life. What I would like to do (but it would take months) would be a short biography of each monk – age, position in secular life, married or single, education, age on taking vows, reason for vows etc., for all sixty. [7] I can’t do it, because they are so shy and inaccessible, and would close like oysters if I set about it at all briskly. But what interesting material it would be at the end.
All the monks I have dared to touch on the subject with so far are beatifically happy, and their only regret is that they waited so many years in the world. Most of them began as oblats seculiers – ‘secular offerings’, as civilians, meaning that even then they dedicated themselves to God. The next step is joining the monastery as a postulant for a period of months, then becoming a novice for two or three years. A novice is ceremonially invested with a black habit, hood and scapular (a sort of long black oblong with a hole in the middle for the head, reaching the ground at the back and in front). And their hair is cut short but not tonsured. Then they are either accepted as frères convers or trained as priests – ‘choir monks’ able to administer the sacraments. These are all tonsured, leaving a thick band of hair round their shaven crowns to represent the crown of thorns. Two postulants were accepted as novices yesterday, one aged twenty, the other twenty-eight, recently returned from ten years soldiering in Indochina. It was a very striking ceremony, in the seventeenth-century rococo chapter house, a vast room with a painted ceiling, twirly grey panelling, black and white chequered marble floor. The abbot sat on an elaborate throne with a white stole over his flowing black robes, wearing a tall white mitre, and holding a long gold crozier in his left hand, the ringed one resting on his pectoral cross, and his right foot on a purple velvet footstool. The monks sat round the walls in their stalls. The two young men, one in tweeds, the other in pin-stripe, were led in, and fell flat on their faces on the marble, where they remained while the abbot delivered a homily over them in Latin. After a while they were allowed to kneel up. Their coats were removed (one wore a belt, the other braces) and, in the middle of an outburst of chanting, black habits were slipped over their heads, a rope round their middle, then the scapular and at last the hood. After this the abbot gave another sermon in French, describing the rigours of monastic life. Rien ne change dans la vie monastique, mes chers enfants. Chaque jour est exactement pareil à l’autre chaque année comme celle qui la précédait, et ainsi jusqu’à la mort [‘Nothing changes in monastic life, my dear children. Every day is exactly the same as any other, each year like the one that went before, and so on until death’] . . . I had a sudden intuition of what the sermons of Fénelon or Bossuet [8] must have been like, the voice, décor, atmosphere, mood etc. Then we all processed out into the cloisters, leaving the two hooded figures still kneeling there. That evening in chapel, their hair had been cropped level with the scalp. They were indistinguishable.
*
The curé of the village is an impassioned royalist. Signed photographs of the Duc de Guise and the Comte de Paris [9] everywhere. He never refers to the latter except as Sa Majesté Henri VI and his son as Monseigneur le Dauphin. He used to be a frequent contributor to l’Action Française, [10] and I suspect was a near-collaborator during the war. His favourite pastime, when not writing erotic poems about Sicily or composing on the harmonium, is to work out the quarterings of the Comte de Paris, proving how many times he is descended from Hugh Capet, Saint Louis, Henri IV, Louis XIV etc., and marshalling his arms in their full achievement, on yard after yard of artistic deckle-edged paper. Ten years too late for me, whatever you pretend!
The whole of this part of Normandy was very heavily occupied, and collaboration was pretty generaL. Five women had their heads shaved in Caudebec, by the Maquis, such as it was (two miles away).
Apart from the werewolves, the region, it seems, is troubled by Wills o’ the Wisp.
Darling, I’ve suddenly heard the bells ring, it’s 4 o’clock! (in the morning!) I’m nearly asleep, in a sort of trance, and if I don’t stop now, I’ll go on gently raving till dawn. 4 a.m! It’s just about now the Inspector [11] might be dropping in. Wish I was there to help lock him out. I’ve made you out a little charm, which I’m sure ought to work.
Goodnight my darling, darling angel. All my love to you sweet little mite, darling heart, small portable figure and pet,
from Paddy
I’m so sleepy, I can hardly get up out of my chair, let alone get undressed. I won’t reread this letter, do forgive me if it is unintelligible.
P
xxxxx
[1] Heauton Timorumenos (‘The Self-Tormentor’), a play written in 163 bc by the Roman dramatist known as Terence.
[2] ‘But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’
Marvell, ‘To his Coy Mistress’
[3] Dom. Gabriel Gontard, the Lord Abbott of Saint-Wandrille.
[4] Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), French nun whose passionate visions were described in published letters. She referred to God as her ‘divine spouse’.
[5] PLF would spend ten days there in the second half of December 1948.
[6] The Stylites were Christian ascetics. The first of them, St Simeon Stylites (c.388–459) lived for thirty-seven years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo. Several later Stylites followed his example.
[7] Rereading this letter in 2005, PLF added ‘a terrible idea!’ in the margin.
[8] François Fénelon (1651–1715), Archbishop of Cambrai, theologian, poet and writer; Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Bishop of Meaux, preacher and writer.
[9] Jean Pierre Clément Marie d’Orléans, Duc de Guise (1874–1940), and his son Henri d’Orléans, Comte de Paris (1908–99), successive pretenders to the defunct French crown.
[10] An extreme right-wing political party in France which reached its apogee between the wars, despite being condemned by Pope Pius XI.
[11] In a letter to PLF, Joan had referred to a nightmare in which she was visited by ‘the Sanity Inspector’.
‘My darling Paddaki,’ wrote Joan while Paddy was at Saint-Wandrille, ‘I find your life very hard to imagine – I try to think of you tucked up in your cell at night or sitting silent & undrinking among the monks, but it is difficult & makes me feel v far away from you.’ She had hoped that she might have been pregnant, which might force him to marry her, but ‘all hopes ruined this morning. I think perhaps you had better rape me one day when I am a
ll unprepared . . .’ In her letter she returned several times to the subject of marriage: ‘I do think it would be lovely to get married awfully soon.’
To Joan Rayner
12 October 1948
Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille
Darling Angel,
I’ve been wondering what can be done about these silent meals in the Refectory, and am just beginning to see daylight. In the library, piled up in a dark corner in a trunk and covered with dust, I’ve discovered a mass of tenth-to sixteenth-century folios bound in vellum, all dealing with the point where mysticism and necromancy merge. Chaldean magic, [1] the Cabbalah, [2] Hermes Trismegistus, [3] astrology, the Rosy Cross, [4] etc. I think that within a fortnight by dint of reading these books, by fasting and prayer, and resort to the abbey’s arsenal of flails and hair shirts, I ought to have mastered certain powers. I shall then initiate some of the likelier monks, beginning with the ones that look like Philip [Toynbee], Brian [Howard], Maurice [Bowra] and Cyril [Connolly] (no doubt more tractable in their monkish shape than I’ve found them in real life). Then, at a prearranged tap of the abbot’s mallet, we shall all levitate ourselves three yards in the air, and no sharp words will bring us down, in fact nothing will, until we obtain a number of concessions: no more reading aloud from the Doctors of the Church, an end to the rule of silence, half a bottle of wine with each meal and a glass of Benedictine afterwards: all very reasonable demands. It might be the beginning of a reform for the whole order.
I got up at 6 this morning, and went for a long walk in the beech forest above the abbey. The whole valley was full of mist and only the ruined arches and gables and chimneys of the abbey stuck out. There are romantic rides running through the forests, carpeted already with rotten leaves, and something damp and autumnal like your description of the banquet of Haut-Brion. Every now and then, where the rides cross, there is a pillar supporting a grey stone seventeenth-century arch; or there is a rococo archway crowned with a scallop shell containing the lilies of France, or the mitred arms of the abbey. Squirrels are everywhere. I haven’t drunk anything for three days and feel wonderfully clear-headed and light, the whites of my eyes are becoming as clear as porcelain, and bones are slowly emerging. I can’t quite remember what a hangover feels like.
My darling pet, don’t stay in England forever, and above all, don’t run away with anyone, or I’ll come and cut yer bloody throat. This is on the road between Havre and Rouen. You might come and pick me up here, or we might meet at Amy’s, [5] or in Paris.
All my love, dear little Joan, & kisses & hugs, from
Paddy
P.S. I brought the 130 Journées [6] here by mistake, but sent it back to Paris by registered mail before actually entering the abbey. If I hadn’t, either the suitcase and I would have gone up in a sulphurous cloud, or the abbey would have come crashing down like Jericho.
[1] The Chaldeans were a Semitic people, said to possess occult knowledge, who emerged in Mesopotamia in the tenth century bc, and disappeared from history four centuries later.
[2] An esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought originating in Judaism.
[3] Purported author of the Hermetic Corpus, a series of sacred texts written in ancient Hellenic times, popular among alchemists.
[4] A symbol associated with Rosicrucianism.
[5] Amy, Lady Smart, the Egyptian wife of the British diplomat Sir Walter (‘Smartie’) Smart, who had a house at Gadencourt, Normandy.
[6] Possibly Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage, written in 1785 by the Marquis de Sade.
To Joan Rayner
13 October 1948, 10 p.m.
Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille
Darling,
I’ve just had such a shock. After compline, I went to the library to make some more notes about Stylites, and stayed there till a few minutes ago, all the monastery being in bed and asleep. I put all the lights out, locked it up, felt my way through the dark refectory (full of the noise of rats gnawing and scuttling,) and out into the cloisters, a square pool of icy starlight. At the other side of the cloisters is a dark Gothic doorway opening onto a passage that leads to my part of the abbey. Still thinking about the deserts of Chalcedon and Paphlagonia, [1] I walked through the archway, and happening to look to my left, saw a tall monk standing there, his face invisible in his cowl, his hands folded in his sleeves, quite silent. It was so frightening, I nearly let out a scream, and can still feel my heart thumping. Phew!
Sweet darling, thank you so much for your telegram, about the broadcast. I managed to hear it on the Curé’s wireless set – there are none in the Abbey. I would never have recognised my voice, if I hadn’t known who it was. Does it really sound like that? I thought it sounded rather affected and la-di-da and frightfully gloomy, as if I were about to collapse in floods of tears. Did you manage to hear it? I don’t expect you did in London. You didn’t miss a great deal. Oh, darling, in case it came gobbled by telegram, the Cephalonian Saint is St Gerasimos.
Joanaki, about these Stylite saints. I have got the material in the utmost detail for a history of column-dwelling ascetics from St Symeon Stylites the Elder down to modern times (they only came to an end in the last century), with absolutely enthralling racy sidelights on their way of life, deaths, beliefs, biographies, sores, mortifications etc. I would very much like to write an article about them. The only two publications I can think of that are suitable, and that I would like to publish it in, are Horizon and Cornhill. Now if the H. [2] really wants the Voodoo article, he obviously won’t take another, so I think I ought to write to Peter, and suggest it. What do you think, darling? I don’t want to write it blind, as it were, without knowing where to place it, because it means quite a lot of work and I’ve got masses already; and one knows far better how to write something if you know what it’s destined for. If you see Robin Fedden, could you ask him if he knows anything about the base of Symeon the Elder’s column, still in existence at Quala’at Sema’an in Syria? Does he mention it in his book? [3] Also – I’m sure Cyril has got it – are there any details in E. M. Forster’s Guide to Alexandria about Pompey’s Column in that city? It was apparently a Stylite’s perch at one time. An Arab climbed up it in the eighteenth century, by shooting an arrow on a string through a loop in the moulding of the capital, hauling a rope up, and then himself. Some British sailors also managed to get up it by somehow attaching a rope to the top by flying a kite, in 1773. The top is hollowed out, they discovered, and there is room for eight people there with ease, which is enormous. . .
You won’t forget the paper, my angel, will you? The best place for it is Rymans, in Albemarle Street. If they say they’ll take ages to get the holes punched in the right places, don’t worry, and I’ll do it myself with a machine the librarian has. . .
A curious thing que je constate [that I notice] is that the Humanist’s devotion to you makes him much more sympathetic to me than before. It’s about our only thing in common. But, please, my darling, I think it’s absolutely essential – I’m studying his interests, as a writer – that it should be an unrequited devotion . . . I wonder how it’s all going. Any obstacles can be overcome by dogged perseverance. Parturit ridiculus mus et nascuntur montes. [4] And if not the Humanist, what about the unknown [illegible] stranger? Eh? Do tell me all about your London life. I’m afraid it’s dreadfully exciting . . . Oh, oh, oh! . . . And tell me all about your new clothes. I wish you were in France. . .
I forgot to tell you, my friendship with the abbot bore, about a week ago, the most magnificent fruit: I was changed from my cell to an enormous room across the passage, a really splendid one, about fourteen yards long, with three tall eighteenth-century windows, rounded into gracious cockle-shells at the top; one overlooks the courtyard, the library, the well of the cloisters and the Gothic ruins, the two others the sloping garden and the village, whose beamed cottages I can just see through the leaves of a dozen mammoth chestnut trees; a ‘charmille’ [an alley formed by hedges] with a Louis XV figure
in its green alcove – actually the Virgin, but looking more like Pomona or Ceres; [5] and the abbey wall, pierced by a stately, armorial rococo gateway surmounted by a carved stone Pelican in its Piety, pecking its breast to feed its three craning chickens. The room itself is the sort of thing you would expect a cardinal to inhabit, except for the tin wash-hand stand. The lit à baldaquin [four-poster bed] is enormous, curtained with rather threadbare gilt-fringed crimson velvet, and the wall it backs onto is covered by a tapestry, where Actaeon is being devoured by the hounds of Diana. The ceiling is high and moulded with every possible volute, while the white walls, apart from the usual crucifix, are adorned with two sooty oil paintings, one (how nice!) of Saint Teresa, a skull, and a lot of shadows – a bad Murillo, it might almost be – the other (school of Luini) of Christ dripping with blood, crowned with thorns, his head flung back, stripped to the waist, with his hands tied together holding a bullrush; but both so dim and smoky as to be almost effaced and quite un-depressing. The rest of the furniture is a big metal stove with its tin tunnel piercing the plaster, a pontifical looking prie-dieu [prayer-stool], and two tables, one of them a giant escritoire on which I am writing now, seated in a high-backed embroidered armchair. And lastly, standing inexplicably in the middle of the pink tiled floor, a wooden fluted Corinthian column, supporting nothing, exploding three yards up in a riot of carved acanthus leaves. It looks as though it were awaiting a minute Stylite. I wonder what on earth it’s doing here. It must be part of the canopy of some enormous high altar. No curtains on the windows which is all the better, because it bares the lovely shelving white planes through the thick walls and the elliptical moulding at the top. Occasionally a monk comes in and talks for a bit, a pale waxy figure lost in his black robes and cowl. They are restful company – they have soft voices and beautiful manners, and are as gentle as girls.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 6