The Corner That Held Them — Sylvia Townsend Warner (1948)
Tina Jordan of the NY Times Book Review recommended Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them on a recent NY Times Book Review podcast. Ms. Jordan said it is one of her top 10 books of all time, no less! Ms. Jordan is one of my favorite people on the podcast hosted by Pamela Paul, because she speaks with clipped, clear diction, with good fellowship in her voice, and because she reads so many diverse books. She reads more books in a week than I read in two months.
If Hobbes, in the relative cleanliness of the late 17th century, believed that life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, then he would double down upon seeing the community living in a poor English convent in the 14th century among filth and cold and very bad food. The wonder is that the girls, given (abandoned) to the convent by their families and living in isolation, develop a quiet ambition as adults, if only for a scrap of implied authority to support their dignity while living out their lives within, perhaps, a three mile radius of the manor.
This is the story of Oby, a small convent of a dozen or so nuns and sundry hanger-ons located on a manor among swampy lands in southeast England, and supported by local tenanted poor peasants. The convent was established in 1170 by a local rich lord, in memory of his adulterous dead wife who had hated him throughout their marriage and whose dowry included the manor.
Warner spends but a few paragraphs describing the convent’s history from 1170 to 1349, to wit: in 1208 came the Interdict, and in 1283 hornets built in the brewhouse roof and the cellaress was stung in the lip and died, and so on, for a page.
The remaining 374 pages of this novel cover the history of Oby from 1349 to 1382. Given the very short lives of the day, the arrivals, assimilations and deaths of the Novices, Nuns and peasants feel like five generations. Warner could have chosen a different 33 year period during the first 200 years of Oby without much adjustment in plot or characters. However, Warner was also an expert in early English polyphonic church music, and perhaps she chose the late 14th Century so that she could include a marvelous scene of lepers singing newly composed polyphonic music.
The characters come and go, and Warner does not vest us in the characters. We might follow the jealousies and accomplishments of a prioress for 15 years, and then she might die in her sleep. That done, and with perhaps a half sentence of sentiment, the novel moves on to the next prioress. Warner gives us the texture of the era and the environment, rather than plumb of character. Amidst the incongruous vanity of the characters, we see the boggy ground, the body numbed with cold, the chilblains, the strangury (a marvelous word), the mud, the mold of the sanctuary.
Warner describes the Black Death of 1349 with the same degree of description and emotion in which she might describe a peasant matter-of-factly picking out the flies from her gruel.
Ironically, some of the most developed of the characters are men. The priest of the convent, Sir Ralph, spans all the years of the novel, and is an indulgent, bumbling, fat, insecure fraud of a priest, but he has a certain endearing appreciation for life and the absurdity of his position. The most grating of the characters are the succession of bishops for the region, each of whom is successively more annoying than his predecessor in self-important haughtiness. Oby, like all convents, is under the titular supervision of the bishop, but each bishop really could care less about the frivolous and irrelevant women of the convent. In fact, each bishop in his own way takes a certain malicious delight in seeing to it that Oby is underfunded and mis-managed.
A prioress is elected for life by her peers within the nunnery. For one particularly dreary set of years, the Nuns accidentally elect the vain, stupid, unlikable Dame Johanna, who had been hounded by the prior prioress. Each of the voting Nuns assumed that the logical candidate, Dame Matilda, would receive a majority of the votes. “Feeling sure of Dame Matilda’s election, grateful to be relieved of the old prioress whose temper had grown so disturbing, nun after nun yielded to the same thought: Why not vote for that poor Dame Johanna? – one vote can’t upset the result, and it would please the poor wretch.”
Her novel is wonderfully dense with the vocabulary of the medieval church. I turned to the dictionary many times at the names of various prayers, holy days, holy rituals and church positions. We learn that a convent has a cellaress, a treasuress, and an infirmaress, each appointed by the prioress. I still do not know what it means for the Nuns to be guided by The Rule.
Warner also knows her Bible. I often googled at the mention of some obscure figure in the Old Testament. When a particularly mean-spirited bishop was dying, his aides called to Oby to send his grand-niece, a young Novice, to minister his health. Warner compares the young virgin attention supplied by the Novice to the virginal heat provided by Abishag to King David. Look it up, my prurient readers, it is but another ludicrous holy story.
Who would have known the process in which convents are supplied with young girls who enter as Novices and eventually become Nuns. These are usually the youngest daughters of a family of some means, who seek to lighten their load by sending the girls to a convent for a lifetime. The convents expect some legacy asset from the family, whether an icon, or a rental property, or something of value to sustain the addition of another mouth to feed in the nunnery. Woe to the convent on whom a novice is thrust, without recompense, as occurred to Oby several times by a grumpy bishop.
The Nuns are to renounce personal identity and materialism in their communion with Christ, but the fact is that while they provide a grudging wicket to feed the poor, they also indirectly manage the peasants on the manor who work the fields. The reality is that they spend much of their time, justifiably, worrying about the financial viability of the convent.
This materialism means, of course, that everyone in the local community — the bailiff, the peasants and the traveling poor – faithfully and gleefully resent the Nuns and their hypocrisy and their assets and their reliance on the labor and resources of the community. So, there is a long tradition by the community of undermining the Nuns whenever possible.
It is a novel to appreciate for its brilliant language and its learnedness. To appreciate it, however, is not to love it. At first I slowed down the pace of my reading in order, I told myself, to savor a master writer and historian at work. But, then I slowed down because it became actually slow. There are so many Nuns arriving and dying over the 35 years that it was easy to mix them up. Their names don’t really matter, because each really only served to describe the environment and the human condition.
However, this is a novel that I will re-read. It is just too beautiful, challenging, and intelligent to go without a chance to appreciate Warner’s brilliance again.
Note: The Corner That Held Them was recently reissued by the New York Book Reviews Classics.
Bob Fall 