A Clergyman’s Daughter
Book Choice for July 2019, by Orson Welles
At some point during the last six months I rather made up my mind that I was only going to read “weird” books for this blog, and by that I meant that I was going to search out fairly uncommon books, forgotten classics in the main. Or books by famous authors that are NOT the works ever associated with these great names now. This perversity lead me to read, at the tail end of July, A Clergyman’s Daughter, the first novel published by a certain Orson Welles.
Let me set the scene for you: I am back home from the conference, with a sense of an ending. The weather is fair and cool. We are in the process of moving out of our flat, all our stuff, as well as my boyfriend, are already gone to the new place, because he had to start his new job. I’m confused about what next to do in my PhD project, and staring down the barrel of weeks of working just for the institute and not for myself.
I had some clothes hanging in the wardrobe and a few books, and silence, in which to consider the mainly empty room which I moved into when I came to Germany and started a new life. What a different person that was, running from her pain. In other ways, I am the same. I laud her courage though, I’m so glad she changed her life, the scared angry thing. Now she has everything she has ever wanted—and the most obliging work.
At the time I read this book, I didn’t know how much longer I would be in that room, with my lingering past self and still air. The time had to be gotten through somehow. I opened a book that I also had gotten at the Oxfam charity shop on the Cowley Road the last time I was in town. I had tried dipping into it twice before, and was only on page 11 when I sat down that quiet Sunday–the flat was hardly ever empty or quiet–in my old chair we got from the street, like nearly everything we own, and began to read. I’m sure I got up for tea and water and to go to the bathroom, but I did nothing else and I read the book straight through. It’s not long, but when does that happen in life? I told my friend that I sat and read a book straight through and she was like “No!” But Readers, it’s true. And a leisured moment worth recording.
A Clergyman’s Daughter is the story of a girl whose work and untiring dedication is taken for granted, who has a bit of a mental-breakdown episode and runs away from home. I remember feeling intense worry from the creepiness of a male character in the story, but damn was he charming and grew on me, although he REALLY shouldn’t have. I was struck by how well Orson Welles wrote a female character–I am VERY picky on this subject as we are usually cast as dolls to be moved around for reasons entirely unconnected to our hazy, undefined inner beings. He did well. I liked this girl and I felt for her. I cared what happened to her and believe she was a person, although the book seems deceptively simple, it actually is quite literary, if literary means that she made a decision at the end which I STILL wonder about. Because it’s not made clear, or wrapped up with a moral, as you would rather expect from the type of plot it is or the way it is written.
All in all, I was glad to have read it, but it may have contributed to curing me from the desire to find forgotten things just to make a point of it. I mean, Orson Welles wrote about twenty novels I think, before hitting it out of the park with Animal Farm (I still can’t remember if I read it in High School or just had the choice to read and think I have read it because it’s such a part of our Zeitgeist now); but the fact remains that I’m not exactly running to chase his other works down.
I’m glad I’m cured of needing to read things that are never read now—sometimes there’s a reason, although not necessarily, in the case if this book. Now I am again free to better connect with what my taste actually is. Still, I’m glad I read this because of the experience of utter absorption I had in my old room that day, and because, let’s face it, I’m not doing great on my book-a-month plan. I remain stalled in April in my Mandatory Virginia Woolf book, and I am throwing Villette (June) in the trash where it belongs. I needed a win.
What is interesting to me mainly about this book is the setting, the “shabby-genteel” in-between world of the clergy, which by the beginning of the 20th centre was on the course of dying a slow death. And yet it wasn’t always so, of course! This year I tried to read the Warden, in order to climb into the Barsetshire Chronicles, but I found it to be impossibly boring, deathly even on audibook, and so I have settled on watching the miniseries made out of all seven books, available on youtube thank goodness. A Warden, was a type of churchman who raked in 800 pounds (in the 1870s) a year for basically doing what he liked, perhaps giving one sermon a week (it isn’t clear to me if the Warden of the novel was actually obliged to preach) and for saying a few kind words to old men living in a rest-home, whenever he met them. I checked and 800 pounds in 1880 when the book was published would be over 100,000 euros a year now. Sounds great.
This cause me to remember Bill Bryson’s description in his book At Home of the strange flowering of the Anglican priestly class in England, which led to a large number of well-educated men who didn’t have to work, (or hardly at all, think about the expectations Edward in Mansfield Park entertains, in all seriousness he vows to take his future ministerial duties seriously, he vows always to preach his own sermons). These were hardly onerous posts. It’s not surprising the public got tired of this, as skepticism grew. But in their heyday, Clergymen were freed to write, invent things, raise large families or think about their dinner all day–whatever they felt like. It’s a weird situation, and the church was obsfucatingly complex, with a hierarchy of curates, wardens, elders, almoners, etc (I don’t really know, I’m just saying words) and now, in whst is probanly a good thing, or just a sign of the times, this system has mostly rotted away.
But you meet the branches and twigs of this system scattered through literature, the such as the titular Daughter of this book (set in about 1920), and the children of a clergymen in Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day (set in about 1915); all of these are offshoots of quasi-upper middle class clerical families with rambling old houses that their dads’ got for free, and a difficult to define social status which required the boys to go through Oxford or Cambridge and often allowed the girls of such families an education. I suppose all traces of this shabby-genteel world, which was fading from about the time of The Warden through the 1920s-30s died during the Second World War. I don’t want to know about the system itself necessarily, but I would like to see if there are any books about the best outcomes of this obsolete caste, the books, and inventions—I reserve judgement on The Diary of a Country Parson, that tale of gluttony— as to whether it will embody the best side effects of the system, or evidence of its worst waste. Curious.