by A. N. Wilson
Never so strongly, when she had switched off his laptop that evening in Oxford, and sat, numbed, at the thought of all that . . . that horrible stuff, as it were in their house, What? In OUR house? . . . had she felt so particularly angry with Doug. Was it because of her childlessness? She had been in her mid-thirties when she discovered the porn. By then, he had long ago tricked her into being his wife. It wasn’t too late to have a baby with someone else. That is what a secular woman would have done. But how could she? She, with her silvery-haired father, with Wood in the Fridge and the Scripture moveth us in sundry places?
—We don’t want to go in for all that, do we? had been Doug’s way of telling her that children were out of the question. That was before they had married – on the third time she had ever slept with him. She had said they must be careful if he did not want her to become pregnant, and he had made it into their rule of life. ‘We don’t want to go in for all that.’
—Can’t stand nippers, he’d said on another occasion when a colleague had brought her two, rather charming, children to tea. Eleanor had noted the cruel glint in Doug’s eye when his remark had made her blue-black eyes well up.
Perhaps Doug, who sometimes accompanied her to church, but who had shown no sign on any occasion of being religious, was pleased by her choice to be ordained. Something to keep the woman occupied, take her mind off babies? The absence of a child gnawed at Eleanor. Sometimes, here in Aberdeen – especially if she had spent the day visiting a school, or talking to the choirboys in the Cathedral – she would find herself lying in the dark weeping copiously. Rachel weeping for her children . . . and would not be comforted, because they are not.
It wasn’t so difficult, was it? It wasn’t so BLOODY difficult, having a baby? Just one? Three quarters of the women she met had children. Even Bishop Dionne had Charlene, a veterinary nurse, doing so brilliantly at one of the best practices in Carmichael . . . Sometimes, Eleanor felt she was in danger of driving herself crazy from thinking about it. One of the most dangerous thoughts was if she met a kid of, say, thirteen or fourteen, and she’d think, if Doug had not set his face against my having any babies, my first kid would be your age. Bloody Doug. And, even though it was now the last thing in the world, literally, that she wanted to do, Fuck Doug. But she tried not to give way to hate. O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtue . . .
Whereas, Digby’s unbelief was a way of feeling at home in her own skin as a classicist. No external being from outside could come to her and pour charity, or any other quality, into her heart. She had in common with another brilliant classicist, Friedrich Nietzsche, the sense that the Greeks, especially in their early literature – in Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles – had an unrivalled ability to respond intelligently and imaginatively to the world. Tragedy was the highest expression of human intelligence, the acme of literary achievement – because it told the truth about our condition.
Morality was human. That was the central, Nietzschean, truth for Digby. What Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles all showed us were, on the one hand, the pitiless gods, raining down disaster on the human race; and on the other, the tragic heroes who respond, not by simply howling, but by asserting human virtue in the face of scarcely endurable experience. Nietzsche thought that Philosophy, the other great gift of the Greeks to the world, then came along and spoiled this imaginative way of viewing the world. Socrates persuaded his young followers that the ‘gods’ were not real, and his disciple Plato took this further by making ‘The Good’, a sort of abstract ‘God’ or ‘Absolute’ something outside and beyond ourselves. Thereby had begun a confused and confusing story which the human race had been telling itself ever since – never more confused, perhaps, than when Christianity arrived, and formed a melange of Platonic ethics with Jewish religious laws. Jehovah, the Jewish One God, and Plato’s The Good formed a merger, and the Christian religion was born.
But no such Being as this God could ever ‘exist’. It made sense, imaginatively at least, when you (if you were Phaedra) fell in love painfully and disastrously (let us say with your stepson Hippolytus) to blame Aphrodite. The end of the tragic war in Troy could be attributed to the malice of Athene, still smarting because Paris, in his notorious Judgment, so beloved by the Renaissance painters, had deemed Aphrodite more desirable, Helen more beautiful. The gods were agents of pain and malice, and you, as a dignified person had to learn to lead a good life in spite of them. This was the beginning of human ethics, a purely social agreement. The Good is what we agree to be Good – hence the fact that in some human societies, fourth-century BC Athens for example, it is ‘good’ to be gay, and in others (twenty-first-century Lagos) it is supposedly ‘bad’.
Christianity tied itself up in knots even further, though. As well as asserting that God was all-good, it asserted that He was all-loving, and, at the same time, all-powerful. Once you feed these requirements into a definition of ‘God’, you will come up with a completely impossible contradiction. The Gospels show that Jesus, believed by Christians to be God Incarnate, was capable of reversing Nature. He could still storms on the lake. He could cure the blind and the lame. So God is capable, if He wishes, of preventing human beings from suffering the calamities which befall them on every day of history? He does not do so. All the plagues, famines, floods and – yes – earthquakes – which had devastated human lives came about through the will of a God whom Christianity asserts to be loving.
Digby could see why Eleanor loved the benign version of Christianity which is embodied in musical settings of Evensong, and in Victorian Gothic architecture. Nevertheless, she was suspicious of Christianity, even in this gentle form. Perhaps especially suspicious of it in these beautiful clothes. When it comes at you, nakedly aggressive, telling you that God wants gay people to go to hell, or that God has given Palestine to the Jews, no questions asked – or, come to that, that Allah wants to kill all the harmless teenagers in a disco because they were wearing jeggings or miniskirts – you can see religion for what it really is. Could Eleanor Bartlett really be quite sure that, deep down in her ‘benign’ Anglicanism, there did not lurk some sick distrust of the human body, some sublimation to very male concepts of ‘control’? Why did she put up, for so long, with that scumbag husband? And why did she still hesitate about divorcing him – because the ‘laws’ of the Church for so long forbade such a thing? Because Dad would disapprove? Even in her devoted Skype-conversations with the old canon, is she quite sure she is not – in a very gentle, Chosen-Frozen sort of way – betraying the sisterhood, subverting her nature to stereotypes required of her by patriarchal values? Are those patriarchal values any less ugly because they are set to beautiful music by S.S. Wesley or C.V. Stanford? How does she feel about being a priest in a Church about a third of whose members do not believe in her priesthood, solely on the grounds of her gender? As for the English branch of her Church, how does she feel about it having waited twenty years, after ordaining the first woman, before it would agree to have a female bishop? What sort of primitive, misogynistic, nasty impulses were guiding it, as it processed gently up the aisle in scarlet cassocks and white surplices, as the candlelight flickered on pretty little boys’ faces, and as they sang to the Patriarchal God, and could only revere the Mother of Jesus if they persuaded themselves of the nonsensical myth that she was an everlasting virgin?
For these reasons, and many more which I won’t bore you with, Digby kept her distance from Eleanor Bartlett over the religious question. For these reasons, when Eleanor Bartlett was offered the Deanery of Aberdeen, Digby had worries about abandoning her Oxford fellowship, and moving her classical library to the Deanery. There was no question, she had to come too. Where Eleanor went, she went. But Eleanor could not accept the Deanery until Digby was able to secure a research fellowship, and the chance of a little teaching and graduate supervision, at Banks.
To deafen her ears to the oh-so-beguiling Anglican mood music, its Psalm settings by Purcell, its Communion Service in C by Darke, or ‘Wood in the Phrygian Mode’ (known always as Wood in the Fridge), Digby strained for an older music, a more Dionysian wisdom; she retreated to the Greeks. When she surfaced from her ever-stimulating engagement with them, it was to face, not church congregations, staring up at a pulpit, but engaged graduates and colleagues round the seminar table, responding in a modern way, untrammelled by religion, to the challenges of literature. I was lucky enough to be one of those grad students – that was how I met her, first saw her beautiful head and began to contemplate the mystery in the blue-black eyes. You see, when I saw her in Barnaby’s arms that day in her office at Banks – I did not think, Barnaby, you bastard! I thought, Barnaby, you lucky bastard.
CHAPTER THREE
COME WITH ME FOR A WALK IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE Southern Alps. ’Cause it’s just possible some of you aren’t Huias, and don’t know Aberdeen, have never been to the Island, even. Let’s have a tourist interval. Breathe in the pure air. Look westward over the bright blue Pacific, eastward towards the mountains, north to the busy, undulating valleys which end in our chief mining districts and industrial heartlands, and south to the plain where our forebears built the city of Aberdeen – we’re named, by the way, not for the Scottish granite city, but for the Prime Minister. Our Charter, proclaiming us a Dominion of our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, was signed and sealed when Lord Aberdeen was Foreign Secretary.
Come with me into the city before the Quake and see the River Windrush weaving through half-timbered or clapboarded suburbs to the city centre. Past warehouses and two breweries, we will come to the two big flint-knapped Gothic Victorian schools – St Augustine’s for the boys and St Hilda’s (my old school) for the girls. Come further in, and find our Victorian city.
Visitors liked to say it was more English than England, but it wasn’t. For one thing, it was all built in one go. You don’t get cities in England which are only of one date – or hardly ever. I know there’s cohesive eighteenth-century Bath, and there was the City of London rebuilt after the fire in 1666. But even in these cases, there is a patina of after-generations. Our city centre was all built in one go: the little cast-iron bridges and spindly lamp-posts all came in a job lot from the same Birmingham (UK) iron foundry. The art gallery – where I’ve already taken you, and we saw the Dean with Charles Nicolson – the old City Hall (before Rex Tone moved out of it into his tower-block ‘baby’ ten years before the Quake), the Botanic Gardens with their pavilion and their bandstand are of a piece – or were. And towering above us all was the great Gothic spire of Holy Trinity Cathedral, the most splendid building on our Island, and a symbol, for many of us, of the Church of England’s peculiar dominance in our Island’s history.
Just a little guide-book stuff, because the Cathedral will be mentioned a lot. You’ll all have seen the building, with its spire jutting up into the sky. It’s the first thing to catch any pilot’s eye as she lands a plane at Aberdeen airport. The architect chosen to design our Cathedral was Oswald Fish, better known for his flamboyant Arts and Crafts designs in metalwork than for his buildings. His only complete church in Britain, St Aidan’s, Purgstall Heath, was a fine piece of Gothic revival, demolished by the developers in Margaret Thatcher’s time, but still missed by the locals in that now diverse region of Britain’s second city. (To us on the Island, it is a district, if we have heard of it at all, known as the scene of multiple arrests after the terrorist atrocity in Birmingham last year.)
St Aidan’s was a much-loved church, but it was not one of the great nineteenth-century buildings. The architectural historians who know about that era, however, place the Cathedral which Oswald Fish designed for us here in an altogether different category. Some compare it with Sedding’s Holy Trinity, Sloane Street in London (where Fish’s beaten copper reliefs of angels are a memorable feature). Whereas the Sloane Street church is a work of pure Arts and Crafts, Aberdeen’s Holy Trinity Cathedral is a masterpiece of eclecticism, combining – its exterior – the medieval wonders of grey Gothic with the exuberance of its interior. The late Sir John Betjeman – Cavan interviewed him once on Island Breakfast – wrote that it was ‘worth flying round the world’ just to see Oswald Fish’s masterpiece. Dr Gavin Stamp, who made the Haj to Aberdeen and gave us a marvellous lecture on Fish, called it ‘the most surprising, and also the most impressive work of English Gothic in any of the Victorian Dominions’.
This is not just a church. It is a psycho-drama which you entered as soon as you pushed open the heavy cast-iron doors, modelled on the Baptistery doors in Florence, but containing reliefs of virgin martyrs and also, if you looked carefully, figures who were probably not so virginal. Bishop Suter, who dedicated the building, was short-sighted, but some observers could see that the nymph, or virgin martyr, in the panel which he struck with his crozier, as the choir intoned Lift up your heads, O ye gates by S.S. Wesley, was revealing an unmistakable tuft of pubic hair as her shift parted at the waist.
Now come inside. Most visitors gasped on their first sight of the huge cast-iron rood screen which divided the choir from the nave, constructed in the Fish family works in Birmingham. The beaten copper reliefs in the panels of this screen, at its base and to its sides, were recognized as among the finest things made in the 1890s. The candour with which they represented the female form still had the capacity to shock, even in our generation. The nymphs hurtled sideways through space, the diaphanous folds of their angelic garments parting to reveal the breasts which panted with an ardour more profane than spiritual. None was more beautiful than the one on the left of the screen, which the architect himself nicknamed Atalanta in Calydon’. Her bare chest undulates, rather than protrudes, but nothing is more feminine, nothing more sensuous. You can imagine nestling there and believing yourself in paradise, between the curves of her breasts and the firmness of her nipples. The windows, which many visitors supposed at first glance to be by Burne-Jones, were likewise filled with female forms who were thought, even by the earliest congregations in our city, to owe more to classical mythology, as interpreted by the headier poets of the decadence, than to the Christian scriptures.
No visitor, either in the lifetime of Fish, or in our own day, however, could step into our Cathedral and remain indifferent. It was a building – must I speak of it in the past tense? Well, you must decide – which seized your heart. It pulsated. It was passionate. Bishop Suter, when he became aware of some of the details in Fish’s designs, expressed himself as outraged; but he was wrong, surely, for Fish, as well as celebrating the beauty of the female body, was clearly a man tormented by a divided nature. Think of the window depicting the Magdalene. Her abundant hair falls over the feet of the Saviour, her tears anoint him; but he, a young man of clearly Victorian and Caucasian origin, gazes downwards at her with mournful passion. His long hand is stretched out to touch her hair-cloaked shoulders. The mingling of piety and concupiscence which was a part of the architect’s own character seemed embodied in its bricks and stones. The young females in the windows, offering their censers of fuming love to a lamb upon the throne, could have been angels; they could equally have been young Huia women of 1897, grateful for the boost given by that animal to our Island economy, and, to this day, one of our most celebrated exports. And it was impossible not to admire the way in which Fish played with light and dark. Walk into the Cathedral at first light, with sunshine streaming through the green dresses and white flesh of the feminine angels, and you entered a glory of morning brightness. But even at this time, the side-aisles were shadowy. Every church, Oswald Fish used to say, needed secret corners ‘where the soul could shudder at its own unworthiness, or where the heart could bleed’. There was much heartbreak, as well as exuberance, in this interior. The great hanging lamps, made at the Fish and Co. works in Birmingham, were Oswald’s signature design feature. You see them in all the churches he restored, such as Carlisle Cathedral. He is said to have taken
inspiration from the gigantic censer which swings across the aisle of the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. No more magnificent Fish lamps were ever seen than the copper ones in Aberdeen Cathedral.
In the days when it was still fashionable to mock the late Victorians, Fish was held in scorn, never more so than by the brutalists. No one, however, can doubt his technical competence. Unlike some of the Victorian architects (John Loughborough Pearson, for example, who roughed out designs for the Cathedral at Carmichael, but never actually came here) who were commissioned to adorn our Island with their work, and who merely sent out juniors from their offices in Britain with a sheaf of drawings, Oswald Fish came in person to oversee the laying of the foundations. He had not, in his youth, been primarily an ecclesiastical craftsman. Those who appreciate his work enjoy not merely the twists and flourishes of his Arts and Crafts metalwork, but also his contributions to industrial and civic design in his native Birmingham – a Venetian warehouse, loosely Gothic gasworks and various industrial buildings along the Birmingham canal betraying, to the cognoscenti, the master’s hand. (The Venetian warehouse, with its playful allusions to the Ca’ Rezzonico, now boasts the addition of a minaret.) They are all sturdy constructions, whatever you think of their design, and he knew his craft. After only a few weeks in Aberdeen – we pass over the complaints made by the manageress of the George and Dragon Hotel and the claim, which Fish said was unsubstantiated, that he had lured a chambermaid into an unsuitable liaison – he had surveyed the land in what became Argyle Square, and listened to the advice not only of his Church employers, but also to some of the Tangata inhabitants. Having done so, he had questioned the suitability of constructing so large an edifice with a stone frame as his patron, our first Bishop, had required. A wooden-framed building, Fish urged, would withstand the vagaries of the Pacific climate.