Ascesis & the Pursuit of Art (1)
fervorino disguised as exegesis, as usual
[Image: “The Attic Window,” Mildred McMillen, 1920, courtesy of National Gallery of Art (gift of Bob Stana and Tom Judy). In the public domain.]
This month I’ve been studying and discussing Caryll Houselander’s only novel, The Dry Wood, with others through a seminar you can find more about here. It is not a perfect novel, as a novel. A certain technical unevenness it shares with other novels by religious writers who were, though fine in their way, much better essayists and apologists than fictionists—for example Newman, Lewis, Chesterton.
That isn’t bad company to be in. I’ve still got a little running list in my head that bears the heading “If I Had Been Caryll’s Editor” and another one called “Pitfalls to Avoid in Idea-Driven Fiction.” And still, this pair of lists doesn’t mean the book isn’t worth reading for the gifts it can give us. Quite the contrary; it’s profound.
Houselander herself said in her letters that The Dry Wood was “not the least bit a novel,” considering it instead as a “spiritual book in the form of fiction:”
I thought I had chosen a simple little story within my scope to handle. I was wrong; it is an immense theme, and seems to include the universe, and is vastly beyond my range or power—yet I am bound to finish it, as much as one is bound to give birth to a child, even if it is stillborn… (“To A Young Friend Who Married & Settled Abroad,” in The Letters of Caryll Houselander: Her Spiritual Legacy, ed. Maisie Ward, p. 126)
But as a spiritual text it turns out to be perfect Lenten reading. It is not only about innocent suffering, as Houselander said and as the literal reading shows, but also about community, peace, joy, the mystery of love, and, ultimately, the Mystical Body of Christ dwelling in every human person without exception.
Like many mystics, Houselander was strict with herself yet gentle with others. It is not only her gentleness or her intellect—both on their best display in her essays—that comes through in her fiction. Here too we have her wry, sly humor; her keen social attunement; her compassionate exasperation with status-seeking Christians; her solidarity with those who, materially poor, are granted wealths of spirit by a God who honors their “hunger and thirst for justice.”
Houselander, like the Maritains, thought and taught and practiced that contemplation was not only a possibility for those of us living in the midst of the world, but a deep necessity. For her type of mind this may have been more true than usual. In contemporary terms we might want to call Houselander a “highly sensitive person.” She suffered at least one episode of what looked like severe psychological illness in her childhood, and both her mental and physical health were always somewhat fragile. Often mired in material poverty as an adult, she stayed preoccupied with helping those who knew even deeper privations.
Despite or maybe because of all her limitations, Houselander thought of beauty as a human need, second in importance only to time for prayer and at least equally important as having all one’s material needs met. At the same time she had little to no patience for what we might want to call the aesthetics of social propriety—material elegance as a mode for self-promotion. In her letters she made the demanding observation that, in her view, the only things that could save society from its postwar malaise were “contemplation” and, then, “voluntary, visible poverty.”
These two practices—one spiritual, the other material—were, Houselander felt, the only practices capable of uniting a divided and wounded human family into the solidarity that alone could ensure the survival of works of art, works of peace, the goods of the soul.
Houselander’s observations about the need to discipline our senses and desires resonate with Zena Hitz’s exploration of interior and creative life as ascetic practice in her marvelous book Lost in Thought. If we are going to uncover the truth about anything, ever, Hitz writes, we will first have to get away from our own socially driven desires that “the truth” should turn out to be whatever serves us personally and whatever is most easily turned to our own advantage. Because to practice this getting-away, we will also have to practice detachment from whatever is selfish in our wants, Hitz explains that
[i]ntellectual life turns out to be a sort of asceticism, a turning away from things within ourselves. Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome. Hence the retreat that intellectual work requires does not function only as an escape. It is also a place of salutary distance, a place to set aside our agendas to consider things as they really are. When we think and reflect, we struggle to allow our desire for truth to prevail over the desires that conflict with truth. (Lost in Thought, 85)
On a parallel line of thought, one that also reflects Houselander’s recognition of beauty’s goodness alongside the potential duplicity of the merely pleasing, Hitz continues:
The senses bring us beauty and joy, but they are also the routes through which empty pleasures, compulsively attractive behaviors, or the trappings of status and wealth reach us… To be dominated by the senses is to be helpless in the face of whatever they present, to be drawn haplessly from one thing to another. (Lost in Thought, “A Refuge from the World,” 91)
Sometimes a well-practiced Lent will leave you more detached from whatever is empty, brittle, fruitless. Sometimes it will leave you with a kind of salutary awareness of human effort’s doom without grace. Whatever the experience, the practice is still worth pursuing.
Even if the only asceticisms we manage are so small as to seem silly, they are well worth the time if they lead us away from self-deception, self-importance, self-indulgence. What brings us closer to God might also clear our vision in the things of this world: a clarity that is always a pearl of great price, but especially if we are meant to practice an art. Much as the Zolaesque image of the cluttered painter’s studio might predominate in our minds, most diligent writers and artists know that we do our best work when the field of vision is stripped down to that one detail that, of all others in the moment and in right relation to all else, matters most.