J. K. Huysmans is a
name that figures in literary history as one of the founding figures
of Aestheticism – which is almost the opposite of asceticism.
Early in his literary career, the dominant fashion in French writing
was for panoramic sociological observation combined with gritty
realism, and authors were expected to wander the streets and sit out
at cafés cataloguing the world that went by — rather like Dickens
but with cynical wit rather than warm good humour. In 1884, Huysmans
coloured the literary standards of a generation by producing a
stunning novel that turned away from public engagement to embrace
private pleasures. The protagonist is a highly strung individual of
great personal wealth who withdraws to his mansion and immerses
himself in solitary delights and private vices, shutting out society
and focusing on rare books, furnishings and collectibles, expensive
things luxuriantly described in a prose dense with obscure allusion.
It was a work so scandalous that simply owning a copy was produced as
evidence in Oscar Wilde’s trial.
This novel, Against
the Grain, together with his next, The
Damned, shaped the atmosphere not just
of decadence but of debauchery and diabolism that G. K. Chesterton
reacted so strongly against at the very end of the 19th century. By
then it was something that the author himself had also reacted
against. Having left the Church in his childhood, he was reconciled
in the early 1890s. He wrote a conversion novel, En
route (which Oscar Wilde read in
prison), and two more distinctly Catholic novels about the operations
of grace, La Cathédrale
(1898) and L’Oblat
(1903). There were strong elements of autobiography in these. He had
become a Benedictine oblate in 1899 or 1900, and moved to live near a
monastery just before it was closed down by the anticlerical
legislation of 1901. Midway between La
Cathédrale and L’Oblat,
Huysmans published not a novel, but a life of the late-medieval Dutch
saint Lidwina of Schiedam. I have been
meaning to find out more about her for some time, so
on a long train journey last weekend took this book along.
There is a fairly
well known bit in G. K. Chesterton’s Short
History of England where he writes:
If
we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column,
we should be surprised to learn the hero on the top of it had been
famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If
a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a
white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very
patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime
impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian
idea of a popular and recognized saint.
It is a passage that
applies with particular force to Lidwina, who was bedridden from the
age of 15, after a fall while ice-skating. Her fall broke a rib,
which in itself might have healed quickly, but ramifying medical
complications left her semi-paralysed. In iconography she can be
recognised from the green pallor of her complexion. In worldly terms
she never achieved anything, and yet her sufferings are commemorated
in churches, processions, art and literature. She was never formally
canonized, but in 1890 Pope Leo XIII officially recognized her cult
as one of enduring popular devotion long predating the more stringent
rules on canonization. She was prominent enough a century ago to have
an entry in the
Catholic
Encyclopedia.
Lidwina lived from
1380 to 1433, born the same year as Bernardino of Siena,
who
popularised devotion to the Holy Name, and dying two years after Joan
of Arc. The one led preaching campaigns, the other rode in armour to
the battlefield. Lidwina had trouble turning from one side to the
other, but did not live in total obscurity. Although her family was
poor, her injuries were so unusual that doctors came from far and
wide to inspect them. And her life was so unusual that within a few
decades of her death three priests had written accounts of it: Jan
Gerlac, who had lived for a while in the same house as Lidwina; Jan
Brugman, a Franciscan preacher renowned for his oratorical skills;
and Thomas à Kempis, the author of The
Imitation of Christ.
In the early years
of her incapacitation, the curate who brought Lidwina communion six
times a year taught her to see her sufferings as a share in Christ’s,
and to spend her time in contemplation. At first she found this very
hard, telling him “When I struggle to consider the tortures of
Christ I can think of nothing but my own.” He encouraged her to
accept this in itself as a suffering, not to try too hard, just to
give up and sleep if she became tired, but not to stop renewing the
attempt. As she spent increasing time in contemplation and mental
pilgrimage, she began to receive visions and angelic visitations. A
reputation for sanctity spread, but so did malicious gossip. Though
Schiedam was a small town it lies at the mouth of the river Maas,
right next to Rotterdam, and had a considerable transitory
population. All sorts of visitors would come to see the reputed holy
woman, to gawp, or to test her, or to pester her with frivolous
questions or requests for predictions. She laid bare the souls of
some of these visitors, removing scruples or urging them to confess
secret sins; she banished despair from some, and reconciled families
that had quarrelled; those seeking assurances about loved ones who
had passed on she urged not to waste time and to get on with praying
for the departed. Huysmans gives this something of the atmosphere of
people consulting a medium, but not getting the flattering or
self-serving answers a medium would give them. “Her sick room,”
Huysmans says, “became a spiritual hospital.” Far from profiting
from this celebrity, Lidwina died in extreme poverty.
Two connections to
earlier posts on this blog emerged. Like those of the Martyrs
of Gorcum, the relics of Lidwina were smuggled to Brussels in
1615; and they were entrusted to the Carmelite monastery that was
home to Sister
Margaret. In 1871 the bulk of them were returned to Schiedam,
only fragments being retained in Brussels, and in 1881 a church
(pictured) was built to house them. John Paul II made the church a
basilica in 1990. I didn’t have a clear idea of where Schiedam was,
beyond somewhere in Holland, but it turns out it’s about six miles
from where my oldest is at university.
Huysmans does write
in a highly wrought style, and there are things going on in the book
that have a lot to do with his personal issues and the issues of his
time (the curtailing of freedom of religion in France; the modernist
crisis; the anti-Semitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair), so I don’t
know that I would necessarily recommend his life of Lidwina in
general terms, although I certainly found it interesting. What is
very clear is the comfort he derives from a saying that he attributes
to St Hildegard: “God dwells not in bodies that are whole.”
The feast of St
Lidwina is celebrated on 14 June (formerly 14 April). She is the
patron saint of Schiedam, of ice skaters, and of the chronically ill.
Paul Arblaster is my second oldest internet acquaintance (The oldest is Mary who also comments on this blog.). He has also written about St. Anthony, St. Cuthbert, Margaret, St. Kizito, St. Margaret Clitherow, St. Michael, and St. Peter Ascanus for this series.
If you want to see all of the posts in this series, click HERE.
I had meant to mention that even though he was born and brought up in Paris, Huysmans was the son of an emigrant Dutchman, so the book was also an exercise in reconnecting with his ancestral homeland.
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps that comes under "personal issues".
DeleteProduced some mental and spiritual stretching on my part. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteWhat Mary said. Thanks for this, Paul.
ReplyDeleteHere is another saint that is new to me. Very interesting, Paul.
ReplyDeleteAbout Huysmans: years ago I read La-Bas, and had always intended to follow up with En Route and The Cathedral. Those books are a little hard to find. However, I've just looked and both are available from Gutenberg (in English translations, which is what I need). I'm inspired to read them.
I really enjoyed this one Paul, and would like to read something by Huysmans now. Sorry to take so long to comment, but I've been pretty much buried both at home and at work.
ReplyDeleteAMDG