Caryll Houselander: A Biography - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary Frances Coady’s books include Merton & Waugh: A Monk, a Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain (Paraclete Press). She taught professional communication at Ryerson University (now called Toronto Metropolitan University) in Toronto. Her work on Caryll Houselander was supported by a travel grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in Toronto.

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RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic

LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century

US$28.00

Mary Frances Coady

CARYLL HOUSELANDER

A Biography

[Orbis Logo]

ISBN 978-1-62698-530-8

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A Rocking-Horse Beginning

(1901–1917)

The nearest one can get to that backward glance from eternity on this earth is, I suppose, to look back across the years to one’s childhood. —Born Catholics

She looked like a medieval saint—or perhaps a medieval tumbler— who had stepped out of a stained-glass window onto the ancient streets of London. So said a friend about the artist and writer Caryll Houselander, who was born in 1901 and died in 1954.1 Her hair was carrot-colored, cut irregularly in adult years, with a fringe that hung down to her eyebrows. It clashed with the purple smock she donned in her studio. She wore a white substance on her face in adulthood— perhaps a form of cosmetic powder, although another friend said she looked as if she had dipped her face in a bag of flour. As a result, she drew stares. Her round, dark-rimmed glasses sat at a slight angle on her face, giving an off-center look to a small-framed body. Her strange appearance provided the cover for a complex woman who, according to her publisher, had a touch of genius.

Over the course of only fourteen years she wrote books that formed the spiritual reading of choice for monasteries, convents, rectories, and ordinary Catholic households. During those fourteen years Caryll Houselander became the best-selling author for her publisher, Sheed & Ward. Her most popular book, The Reed of God, remains a classic. The years immediately preceding the Second Vatican Council were an unlikely period for an unknown English woman of early middle age to become a best-selling Catholic author. Her writing was as clear and sharp and penetrating as that of a medieval mystic, and in fact it has been compared with that of the medieval anchoress Julian of Norwich. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that the best of it appeared during the Second World War, amid the screech of air-raid sirens and bombed-out devastation, just as Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love was written during the fourteenth century’s Black Death.

Two months before her death, Caryll wrote to her publisher expressing guilt for the tardiness and incompleteness of the autobiography she had been working on. A “real autobiography,” she wrote, “would be impossible during the lifetime of my father and my sister”2 —her mother having died shortly before. Even so, when the short memoir, titled A Rocking-Horse Catholic, was finally published in the United States, the husband of Caryll’s older sister, Ruth, objected: he had known Caryll for the last thirty years of her life, and he said that she tended to fantasize. She could not be counted on to tell things as they actually were. In the words of a friend, one difficulty with Caryll was the way she reported facts: “with her they hadn’t gone through the formality of taking place.”3

And so—is it fact or fantasy that Caryll came into the world looking like “a tiny red fish”4 that was not expected to survive, as she claims in A Rocking-Horse Catholic? Or that her mother’s brother, a gynecologist who had attended the birth, importuned a Protestant clergyman to baptize the infant over a salad bowl? Or that her mother and uncle, when asked the newborn’s name, fell into a fit of giggles at the idea that the tiny fish-like thing should be given a name? Or that the baptism was hastily concluded, the infant’s names improvised: Frances after her attending uncle and Caryll, after a sailing yacht her mother had been on?

In any event, Frances Caryll Houselander’s birth was duly registered as having taken place on September 29, 1901, in the village of Batheaston, near the Roman city of Bath. Caryll’s mother, Gertrude Provis, had married Willmott Houselander in Bath in 1898, and Ruth had been born a year later. Gertrude, always known as Gert, came from a well-established merchant and banking family. One relative, Samuel Butler Provis, a barrister, would eventually be knighted by King Edward VII for his work in supervising government-funded charities. Her father, Wilton, became a physician, and her mother, Sarah Easton, had been born in New York City (but about whom little else is known).

Gert, twenty-seven years old at the time of Caryll’s birth, was known to be sporty and vivacious, and had grown up in Somerset with a love of outdoor activities, having a special passion for horses. By the time of her wedding, tennis had replaced horses as her main sporting interest. A photograph from 1898 shows her wearing a late Victorian ladies’ tennis costume: a generous floor-length skirt and jacket with leg-of-mutton sleeves and bow tie. A narrow-brimmed hat sits no-nonsense style on the top of her head. She holds up the tennis racket: it is a formal pose, and yet the young woman seems ready to give a strong back hand to any ball coming at her. The Victorian age is drawing to a close, a new century is near dawn, the women’s suffragette movement is slowly gaining ground, and Gert bears the look of a woman ready to move with the times. She would, in fact, become one of the top female tennis players in England, losing at Wimbledon (in the 1903 quarterfinals) to the champion Dorothea Douglass.

In all likelihood, Gert met Willmott Houselander at a sporting event. He was known to be a huntsman, and had run some of the first point-to-point races in England. It may be that their shared love of the outdoors drew Gert and Willmott together. Six years older than his wife, Willmott grew up in London and followed his father into the banking business, eventually becoming the manager at Wilts & Dorset Bank in Bath. By the time Caryll was born, the family was living in Batheaston, in a substantial house called Fern Cottage. They employed a nursemaid and a cook. The family was vaguely Protestant, but Caryll’s assertion in A RockingHorse Catholic, that her parents “did not believe in or practice any definite religion at all; neither, I think, did they attach the least importance to any”5 is probably correct.

From the outset, Caryll was called “Baby,” and this was the name her family would call her for the rest of her life, her nieces eventually calling her “Auntie Baby.” Much later, Ruth’s recollection was that, being only two years apart in age, the two sisters “played together quite naturally, she invariably taking the lead because she was the more imaginative.”6 The rocking-horse image of the book’s title (as Caryll explained at the outset of the book, she was not a “cradle” Catholic) was taken from a real rocking-horse that she and Ruth shared, a strawberry roan. “His tail came out,” Ruth remembered, “and Baby and I were always filling him with things.”7

The drawing that Caryll made shortly before her death to accompany A Rocking-Horse Catholic conjures up a different memory. The drawing is a circle within which a child sits on a rocking horse. The rockers form the bottom of the circle and thus give the drawing the impression of movement. The horse has a wide-eyed demented grin, and a sparse mane consists of a few tufts of hair. The child on its back wears a skirt. Her back is curved forward and her arms, holding onto the reins, are rigid. Her hair flies back from her head. The words of the book’s title, A ROCKING-HORSE CATHOLIC, form the circle’s rounded top. The impression is of a loop, a circle of terror. The horse is trapped on its runner, the child trapped on the horse, and the whole cycle has no end. (For the book’s release after Caryll’s death, the unsettling image was greatly tamed when it was replaced by an illustration using the same motif of a rocking horse and child inside a circle.)

In the book’s final published version...