From Weekend 1
take off his vestments when Mass was over, and spent a little time admiring himself in the window before doffing his cassock with a sigh. There were, of course, no mirrors in the convent. The nuns were Dracula-like in their distaste for them.
One elderly nun was said to be afflicted with the stigmata, though "afflicted" is perhaps too impious a word. Like most stigmatists, her anatomical knowledge seemed less than accurate, since she was said to bear the marks of Christ's wounds in her palms, whereas crucifixion must surely have been through the wrists. I have no doubt that a convent full of permanently immured celibates can breed the odd miracle, given the long-range psychical havoc that a single disturbed adolescent can wreak. The greatest miracle to its credit, however, was the reclaiming of Tom McCormack.
McCormack was an Irish navvy who lived close to the convent, and a notorious lapsed Catholic. Even in those pious days, being a lapsed Catholic was almost acceptable; it was rather like being a country rather than a city member of a club, still on the books but less in evidence around the joint. "Lapsed Catholic" was a convenient label for ensuring that you never actually left the Church; it simply shifted you from one ontological category to another, rather like resigning your peerage but staying on in politics. In any case, it put you in some remarkably distinguished company. Better to burn with Graham Greene than share paradise with Bing Crosby.McCormack had not been to Mass for years, and was a boozer to boot. One Christmas Eve, however, as midnight approached, he and his wife heard the convent bells tolling as they lay in bed. They were actually ringing for midnight Mass, a practice which had recently been reintroduced. But McCormack's wife concluded that the convent was on fire, and got her husband to dress and run down to help. He stumped down on his stiff leg to find the congregation filing dutifully into the chapel, and was greeted like the prodigal son by the enraptured lay sisters. Unable to back out, he stayed for Mass, and from then on ritually returned every Christmas. He did not, however, go to Mass on Sundays, no doubt judging this to be a little immoderate, as well as detrimental to his mildly louche status as a lapsed Catholic. His wife had had her own miracle some years before, when her son's ship had gone down in the Atlantic during the war, and she heard him calling to her. It seems a lot more credible than the Immaculate Conception.
People sometimes talk of the monastic life as escapist. Never to handle money is a privilege reserved for royalty and ascetics. But while not knowing that Europe has just been wiped off the map is a luxurious kind of ignorance, there is another sense in which being in a convent is about as escapist as being in Wormwood Scrubs. True escape would mean getting out, not staying in. The late-night drunk who once clambered over the Berlin wall from west to east in a fit of absent-mindedness was not trying to escape. The life of these young women was harder than a Victorian housemaid's. Most of them, no doubt, were too young when they signed up to have much to sacrifice in the first place; it was not as though they were abandoning rock-star boyfriends or glamorous careers as neurosurgeons. Most of them would have known scant comfort at home: the majority of English Catholics, then as now, were of Irish working-class stock rather than cronies of Evelyn Waugh. Their renunciation of the world was perhaps as much ignorance as courage; they could be free of it because they were already, like a teetotaller taking the pledge. Taking the veil was a way of quarantining oneself from occasions of sin, since a convent offers few opportunities for really spectacular vice.
It may be that the corridors of the place surged with lust and bile, strewn with the detritus of lesbian orgies and sour with the stench of spiked ambitions. Perhaps those ghostly turntables concealed murderous rivalries and libidinous rituals, unspeakable rites in which cockerels were drained of their blood and some plump young postulant was held down on the altar to have her gizzard slit, while her weird sisters blasphemously gabbled snatches of the Mass backwards in their cracked Northern voices. One kind of postmodernist would be interested only in whether they were having sex with each other. Even if they were not, there would certainly have been some bickering and bitchery, cussedness, sour temper and erotic entanglements, a whole complex micropolitics.
Even so, it is hard to organize genocide or refugee-running from a convent cell, or force Burmese children into slavery. These pious late adolescents did not take the veil because they abominated the world and abjured the flesh, since they knew too little of such things in the first place. The world from which they abdicated was mostly one they cherished, a place of parents and siblings, not of greed and exploitation. Only some obscure impulse of love could have driven them to this joyless existence, as tough as a goldminer's and as thankless as a bum-bailiff's. They rose to pray several times during the night, ate like birds, had no personal possessions, and needed enough forbearance to spend the rest of their days confined with a bunch of crankish others within the same bleak walls. It was rather like opting to be banged up in a broom cupboard by Hezbollah.
Most of them, then, were probably somewhere midway between martyrs and suicides. The martyr freely surrenders a life which is precious, whereas the suicide shucks off an existence which has become worthless. Suicide is also usually a private affair, whereas martyrdom is a kind of socializing of one's death, placing it at others' disposal so that, to adopt a phrase of Auden's, it may be modified in the guts of the living. Choosing to repudiate what you cherish may be foolish, but at least it is not suburban. These women deliberately threw their lives away, a gesture which requires the defiant absurdism of the Dadaist rather than the calculations of the actuary or the zeal of the do-gooder. In refusing the powers of this world, their existence became as pointless as a work of art.
(c) Terry Eagleton
The Gatekeeper, A Memoir by Terry Eagleton is published by Allen Lane on November 29th (£9.99 in UK). It is reviewed on Weekend 9