Memoir: An account of a spiritual odyssey is also a critique of a church failing to face up to modernity.
John Cornwell is a controversial writer, vehemently attacked by Catholic apologists for his robust critiques of their church in books such as Hitler's Pope: the Secret History of Pius XII (2000) and Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II (2001). He has been described as unscholarly - "an odd combination of Cambridge don and sensationalist hack", according to the editor of the Catholic Herald - but even more as an enemy of the faith and not a real Catholic. Cornwell has voiced his dismay at the latter charge in interviews, and five years ago, in Breaking Faith:Can the Catholic Church Save Itself?, he gave an account of his own loss of faith in his mid-20s and its recovery in his mid-40s as an example of the problems and possibilities confronting the church in the modern world.
Now, in a very important memoir, Seminary Boy, he has given a detailed account of his spiritual formation as a junior seminarian at Cotton, romantically situated in the hills of the English west midlands. It begins with an Author's Note, stating that "in the absence of diaries I have relied mainly on unaided personal recollections for the writing of this memoir". However, the accumulated precise descriptions of events, weather, conversations and, above all, thoughts and emotions that characterise this memoir could not be the work of unaided memory - that fallible, chameleon-like and endlessly self-serving faculty.
No, this is a contrived and sophisticated piece of writing (essentially academic in tone), well-researched (as evident, for example, in the assembling of many photographs) and adding up to a powerful argument against his more strident enemies, showing that he writes from inside the English Catholic tradition and cares passionately about the church that he criticises. As well as being, thus, Cornwell's apologia, it speaks for his generation of Catholics, brought up in a time of religious certainty, but disillusioned by the church's failure, as they see it, to engage fully with the challenges of the modern world. Many of the elements of that failure are prefigured in Cornwell's experience of the seminary: authoritarianism, clerical sexual abuse, intolerence of dissent.
This engagingly written book sustains interest in its hero's spiritual and emotional odyssey partly by breaking it up into more than 100 often very short chapters, and also by juxtaposing the rather precious experience of seminary life with the increasingly grim realities of the home life to which he returned during vacations. Here, the dominant figure is that of his mother, Kathleen Egan, second-generation London Irish, her family "belligerent cockney ghetto Roman Catholic to the core". His father, also an East Ender, traumatised by a childhood accident, which left him a semi-invalid and prone to depression, was an unreliable provider, but the family experienced real poverty after he left abruptly, when Cornwell was in Cotton.
THE BOOK BEGINS and ends with evocative accounts of encounters with this absent father, the first a year after he left, when "He accosted me affably with his familiar limelight smile, as if greeting an invisible audience somewhere above my head". He did not see him again for 45 years, when he traced him and achieved a measure of reconciliation and understanding. Indeed, the memoir in between records, essentially, a search for an alternative - a series of clerical father figures, all of whom disappoint, unable to hazard the truly personal relationship that he needed, and one of whom turns out to be a sexual predator. The priest who came closest to his ideal was his English teacher at Cotton, Fr Armishaw, who allowed him into his life a certain distance, sharing with him his love of music and books and giving gruff advice, although even in old age and as a regular visitor to Cornwell's home, "much of his conversation was an evasion of intimacy". One of the most striking features of the book is its bleak portrayal of priestly lives, their humanity maimed by unquestioning obedience to the institutional church.
The other major and related theme is the young seminarian's flirtation with a kind of intimacy which the church frowned on as "special friendships".
Cornwell is very good on the heightened emotional states of adolescent boys in an unnatural environment, whose strict discipline and religious fervour involved a sublimation rather than an understanding of sexual feeling. He is graphic and thoughtful on the torture of scruples, the priggishness of piety and the barely repressed sexuality of his more emotionally intense friendships.
Important outlets for him throughout were his Wordsworthian relationship with the rugged countryside around Cotton, and his omnivorous reading. He is particularly interesting on his spiritual reading, graduating, as this reviewer did in a similar environment, from the simple pieties of The Life of the Little Flower to the shock and challenge of Daniel Rops's Jesus in his Time.
Cornwell's career at Cotton culminated in his being made head boy, or as it was called there, "public man", and his pride in that role led to a clash with an unfriendly priest which almost certainly cost him a coveted place in the English Seminary at Rome. Instead he went to dreary Oscott, only to leave it during his second year. His account of the loss of his vocation is uncharacteristically vague, the main problem being, it seems, that Oscott was not Cotton. He missed the music, the wild landscape, the gifted teachers.
Had he gone to Rome instead, would he have stayed longer? And, having been inducted into the Roman way of clerical life, would he have written his critiques of the modern papacy? He would certainly have made an interesting, rebellious priest. The great value of this memoir, apart from the insight it gives into the formation of the generation of priests that now run the English church, is its complex attempt to chart the response of a pious, clever, though somewhat priggish teenager to an all- enveloping religious experience which combined enormous emotional and aesthetic appeal with intellectual narrowness and the programmatic destruction of individuality.
Tom Dunne's Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 (Lilliput Press) won the Ewart-Biggs Prize 2005
Seminary Boy By John Cornwell Fourth Estate, 402pp. £15.99