Christmas by the Fireside: on reading ‘Stoner’

I may already have read my best novel of 2014.

The 12 days of Christmas always offer welcome reading time. After finishing Rosemary Sutcliff’s beautiful trilogy on Roman Britain, I read Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room. Meanwhile, my son and son-in-law were both absorbed in another book which seemed quietly compelling judging by the attention they were giving it, John Williams’ Stoner. I asked one of them whether I should read it. ‘Yes, you must,’ was the reply, ‘you really must’.

I had never heard of John Williams, but had picked up some of the excited literary gossip in last year’s papers about Stoner. First published in 1965, it seems not to have attracted much attention until it appeared as a Vintage paperback in 2012. But when writers of the stature of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan say of it, ‘a terrific novel of echoing sadness’ and ‘a beautiful novel…a marvellous discovery for everyone who loves literature’ you know you are on to something special.

Coming to it after Toby’s Room, I realised that I had gone from a good novel, even a very good novel, to a great novel. The first thing to strike me was the quality of the prose: clear, spare, unadorned, each word and sentence exactly right for the task it had to do. Like the author, his central character Will Stoner is an English lecturer at a Midwestern university whose love is language. Williams’ writing has the craftsman’s mastery of shape and form that comes, I imagine, from a lifetime’s immersion in the world’s greatest literature. When you read prose that has luminous clarity, you realise how opaque so much writing is by comparison.

But I doubt that love of literature is enough to achieve this by itself. It’s the novel’s intelligence that elevates it above the ordinary, even the very good. Its sharply observed take on education, literature and the politics of the academy can perhaps be put down to the author’s experience as a practitioner. Memorable depictions of landscapes or of natural phenomena such as the cycle of the seasons can perhaps be learned from the great poets, though that would not guarantee that they were fresh and vivid.

This book is intelligent in a more profound way that I want to describe as a kind of wisdom. I am thinking of the insights the author brings to human character, how public persona and private life play off each other in the formation of identity, how he notices and finds words for the complexities of love, passion and estrangement, or the gentle decline of a human being in his or her last years of ageing and suffering by which we come to terms with mortality. Stoner’s marriage to a woman of elusive emotional make-up is a masterpiece of psycho-sexual observation. It is all done in a register of plain, straightforward prose that puts you in awe of the capacity of simple words to convey the vicissitudes of the human heart. You feel it's wonderfully accurate writing.

This is one of those books where nothing much happens, yet everything happens. The career of an agricultural labourer who discovers literature at college and becomes a university lecturer could be told in a few paragraphs. The brilliance of the novel is in uncovering the rhizome under the soil, prising open the interstices of everyday existence that make this ordinary story extraordinary. It lays bare the hidden, unsuspected elegiac character of human life for all to see, maybe even its tragedy. I found myself asking: does Williams mean this of any human life like yours and mine? What if he had written his story about me?

Take the key moment when a literature lecturer reads Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet and asks Stoner to explain it:

           This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
           To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Stoner can’t get beyond the words ‘it means…’. Desperately trying to capture what is hovering on the margins of his experience for which as yet he has no vocabulary, he simply repeats them. But Williams’ laconic description of this disclosure that is happening to the student as he struggles to understand makes you realise that it’s a life-changing epiphany, a transfiguration. You know that this will be the text for the rest of the book. A lesser writer would have piled on the prose, indulged the emotions, attempted to dissect that moment of recognition, padded out the detail, and referred back to it later in the book. Williams is content simply to drop the pebble into a pool, allow the waves to travel outwards and trust to the intelligence of the reader to make the connections. This is literary restraint at its best.

Stoner is a minor miracle of writing. It reminded me of Flaubert's saying about language, that it's ‘a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars’. Or, as someone said of Chekhov’s short stories, you could think you were holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in your cupped hands.

This may be the one book I read in 2014 of which I'll confidently say, if you ask me: yes, you must read it. You really must. Trust me. It's marvellous.

A Dean's Year: personal highlights from 2013

New Year's Eve is a time to reflect. There is plenty to lament as we ponder what our world has travelled through in the past twelve months. But it's also a time for gratitude as we look back, and for hope as we look forward. So here, without any commentary, is a short list of my personal highlights from 2013, accentuating the positive. I have not documented world or national events: this is the comparatively narrow world inhabited by a woolgathering northern dean.

Durham Cathedral events:
            (a) Naming of Durham Cathedral East Coast electric loco, July;
            (b) Flower Festival, August;
            (b) HLF grant of £3.9 awarded, November.
Durham Cathedral services:
            (a) Farewell to Justin Welby on leaving to become Archbishop of Canterbury;
            (b) Ecumenical Anglican-RC Vespers, Lindisfarne Gospels.
Durham events:
            (a) Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition, July-September;
            (b) Lumière, November.
Family event: the birth of Isaac, March, his baptism in September and his first Christmas.
Whimsical event: justifying in poetry my membership of Nobody’s Friends dining club.
Moving event: Battle of Flodden 500 anniversary commemoration, September.
Stimulating event: dance-drama A Young People’s Guide to the Lindisfarne Gospels;
Preaching invitation: 750 anniversary service of my college, Balliol College Oxford.
Enjoyable public performance: being the Voice of God in Britten’s Noye’s Fludde.
Enjoyable tasks:        
            (a)  judging Chorister School Public Speaking Competition;
            (b) giving addresses at ‘come and sing’ day on Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
Personal satisfaction: publishing Landscapes of Faith.
Book read: J L Stempel, Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War.
Poet read: Denise Levertov, The Stream and the Sapphire.
Musical discovery: Britten, Death in Venice (at Newcastle, October).
Concert: The Sixteen on their 2013 Choral Pilgrimage ‘Mary, Queen of Heaven’.
Film: About Elly (Iran, 2009).
Theatre: Romeo and Juliet (Durham Student Theatre).
TV Programme: John Eliot Gardiner’s documentary on J. S. Bach.
Radio programme: The Archers (of course).
Overseas place visited: Abbey of Conques, SW France.
UK place visited: the roof of St Pancras Station, London.
Photos taken: 'Isaac on a chesterfield sofa'; 'Prebends' Bridge in Winter'. 

That is Not Yet That: on keeping Christmas going

W. H. Auden famously wrote about the despondent aftermath of Christmas:  'Well, so that is that'. He talks about taking down the tree and decorations, burning the holly, eating the leftovers, admitting our failure once again to love our relatives as we should. Once again, as so many times before 'we have seen the actual Vision and failed to do more than entertain it as an agreeable possibility'. If you Google the first few words you can read it all, and you'll recognise what he's talking about.

It's written as a poem for Twelfth Night, but looking around you'd think it was meant for the day after Boxing Day. Or even that day itself, which is apparently (I didn't know this) one of the top shopping days of the entire year. Already on Christmas Day, TV advertising is tilting decisively away from Christmas and towards the other big midwinter themes of sales and summer holidays. By dawn on Boxing Day, the nation has already spent vast sums of money on online sales, and many stalwarts have been braving the cold and camping outside department stores with an eye for a bargain.

It all takes a determined effort and much stamina. Part of me disdains it: 'not me, thank you', but another part grudgingly admires this show of hope and perseverance. (If only we took our faith as seriously!) I'm not going to be grumpy about this colossal economic effort: as one bishop tweeted, it's good for the recovery. Let everyone spend Yuletide as they will. But I'm sorry that we let go of Christmas so quickly, so that even before the end of the year it quickly becomes a memory. 'Did you have a nice Christmas?' we're all asked a hundred times in these twelve days, to which I reply with a smile, 'Thank you. Yes, we are having a lovely Christmas. I hope you are too.'

When we live by the liturgical calendar, keeping the seasons of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany is deeply instilled in us. But that's not altogether my point. It was not so long ago that most people kept an aftermath of Christmas Day, prolonging holidaying and happiness and good will for a few more days. The year would slip gently away to the echoes of carols and Handel's Messiah. Even in my secular childhood, there was never any question of not keeping Yule going until Twelfth Night. Boxing Day was for family visits or walks or fireside reading or the panto or film, not for shopping or even being particularly productive. In rural England, hard work did not begin again properly until the week after Epiphany with Plough Monday. The days were a necessary restful interlude before the pace of life picked up again in the new year. Have we lost something precious here?

The obvious answer is, our innocence maybe. Yet Christmas could be precisely the time to recapture it. The image of the Child who comes to us speaks perfectly to that longing for our lost innocence that the child in us still has. Auden is tough when he says later in his poem: 'once again we have sent Him away, begging though to remain His disobedient servant, the promising child who cannot keep His word for long'. But we need time to absorb the message of his coming if it's going to make a difference to life. The calendar gives us that time to let it sink in that we have sung and spoken about the better world we look for in the new year. Maybe the hectic lives many are living need the Twelve Days of Christmas more than ever simply to recover and stabilise.

Today is only Day 3 of Christmas. Three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. What's not to enjoy? HAPPY CHRISTMAS once again!

Christmas Past and Present: reminiscences and reflections.

It’s hard not to be nostalgic at Christmas. Memories of childhood Christmases come flooding back at this time of year. If I am at risk of self-indulging, take it as a sign that I am getting old. Some may want to stop reading now.

Our memories inevitably include the people we used to celebrate Christmas with, and who are no longer with us. My father died on Christmas Eve six years ago, so today is an oddly elegiac day, a bitter-sweet mixture of loss, thankfulness and those childhood longings we had when Christmas had almost arrived, but not quite. I remember on the day of his death thinking how strange it was to be mourning an elderly man while everyone else was celebrating a child’s birth. That same afternoon I had to get up in the pulpit in front of a thousand people and read the bidding prayer at the Nine Lessons and Carols. Its haunting phrase about ‘those who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light’: I still find it difficult to get those words out.

As regular readers of this blog know, we were not a religious family. But my mother and grandmother, both of German-Jewish origin, knew how to celebrate Christmas. Perhaps no European nation does Advent and Christmas more beautifully than Germany. My father was a long-lapsed Anglican, but he loved Christmas too, and our merged family traditions made for enjoyable, even magical, festivities. My grandmother would bake sweetmeats to die for: Stollen, gingerbread and Lebkuchen in a hundred different shapes and colours, huge piles of them that were not to be touched until Christmas Eve at sundown. She would create an immense herring salad that filled vast mixing bowls with its pink mixture of fish, nuts, raw cabbage, potato and beetroot that filled the house in late Advent with a heady unmistakeable aroma. If I ever scented it again, it would transport me straight back to Christmas in Lauradale Road in the 1950s. Sadly, it died with her.

I’m not sure what I thought Christmas was about when I was very young. I suppose it was a glorious midwinter festival of colour, light and gifts. I first came across Jesus at primary school. There, aged five, I got to read my very first words of scripture. It was my moment of fame at the nativity play where I had to read St Luke’s words from memory: ‘and she brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.’ Whenever I hear that verse read aloud at Christmas, there is a shock of recognition that I can’t quite explain. I doubt if many people can recall the moment their Bible-virginity was lost, but my memory of it is vivid.

The following year, there were voice-trials at school among those children who had made good reading progress to see who was capable of tackling the opening verses of St John’s Gospel at the end of the nativity. I failed miserably to make any sense of it. My best friend Andrew, who was brighter than me, got the part. How envious I was! But that too remains an important memory of the first time I heard a text read that was clearly portentous, laden with profound meanings that eluded me. I am preaching on John 1.1-14 on Christmas morning this year. I’m not sure even now whether I have fully understood it. It takes a lifetime to begin to plumb its rich depths.

One more memory. This comes from my first Christmas in the church choir at St John’s Hampstead. It sang to cathedral standard under its legendary Director of Music Martindale Sidwell, and my parents thought I’d benefit from a good musical education there. They were right (though the fact that the choir offered musical scholarships to University College School down the road wasn’t lost on them). As I’d never been to a church service before, the liturgy both excited and baffled me. I have never forgotten that first churchgoing Christmas early in the 1960s with the lambent beauty of the Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve and the exhilaration of sung Christmas matins (yes!) next morning. We sang ‘Of the Father’s heart begotten’. I didn’t know it but the ancient hymn by Prudentius soon became my favourite Christmas hymn, and so it has been ever since. Lo! he comes, the promised Saviour, let the world his praises cry, evermore and evermore. It still moves me deeply, as I know it will when we sing it at the climax of the carol service in Durham Cathedral tonight.

Festivals should help us cherish memories. Our new grandson Isaac, 9 months old, is with us in the Deanery to celebrate his first Christmas. He won’t know much about it. But his parents and grandparents, aunts and uncle know that to have a new-born infant in your home at Christmas time is something to treasure. And maybe, at some deep and hidden level of his little life, memories of light and colour, of warmth, laughter and love, of a magical and holy time are already being formed. Who knows? 

Season's Greetings or Happy Christmas?

Outside Durham town hall there is a sign wishing us all SEASONS GREETINGS. Let’s not argue about the missing apostrophe. It’s the text itself I’m concerned about. It used to say HAPPY CHRISTMAS. Not now. ‘Season’s Greetings’ isn’t as risible as Birmingham’s infamous ‘Winterval’ but in its awful blandness it’s still a worrying sign of the times. We don’t seem to be allowed to use the C-name in public any more for fear of causing upset.

I wrote about this to the Mayor of Durham, who is also the Chair of the County Council. I received a courteous, lengthy reply from her.  As I suspected, it comes down to not wanting to offend people of other faith traditions, or those with no faith, by being too explicit about the Christian nature of Christmas. In an inclusive multi-faith society where no single religious tradition is to be privileged over any other, we must be careful.

No-one disagrees with the project of building inclusive communities in a modern democracy. But this isn’t really the point. The fact is that England is a Christian country, not just because of its history but because Christianity is (still) by law established with the Sovereign as Defender of the Faith. I guess that it’s in this spirit that our political leaders, whatever their personal convictions, are sending seasonal cards bearing the greeting ‘happy’ or ‘merry’ Christmas. Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, whatever their own faith, are presumably sending cards to a great many people who are not themselves practising Christians. (I haven’t been able to ascertain what message David Cameron’s card opts for.)

But that claim by itself doesn’t move me unduly. I am much more persuaded by the attitudes people of other faith communities actually take towards Christmas. There is clear evidence that they very much want us to own our faith seriously and not be coy or ashamed about it. I was intrigued to hear of some devout overseas Muslims who had chosen to come to Durham University precisely because of its Christian origins and because Durham City wears its historic Christian character on its sleeve.

A Guardian article from 2011 entitled ‘Christmas is not just for Christians’, focuses on a multi-faith group called the Phoenix Inter-Community Initiative. This aims to explore a ‘new centre ground’ against the polarising forces of extremism and radicalisation in politics and religion. That year they ran a campaign to ‘demonstrate support and respect for Christmas among different faiths’. They tell of Muslim students taking part in nativity plays and how the seasonal symbols and archetypes of Christmas (e.g. darkness and light) are common to many different faiths. They are keen to get non-Christians joining Christians in volunteering over the Christmas period and supporting Christian charities. They quote a Hindu who says: ‘I don’t know anyone who actually wants to ban Christmas and most Hindus and Muslims that I know actually celebrate it’.

Dialogue between faiths is conducted on a much more sophisticated intellectual basis than many people realise. Participants in such conversations know that honest, rigorous debate and practical collaboration are entirely compatible with religious convictions that are deeply held on every side. Sharing in one another’s festivals can be an important part of learning together, as can mutual hospitality offered generously, as it very often is, by mosques, temples, synagogues and churches alike.

So, County Council, please give us back our Happy Christmas sign next year. If you want to wish people Happy Eid or Happy Passover or Happy Diwali as well, why not? It's what they do in Leicester, one of the most diverse cities in the UK. Perhaps it's our lack of real experience in the North East of living in settings of true ethnic & religious diversity that seduces us into unintelligently timid approaches to faith. So please take religion seriously. It will be warmly welcomed not just by the churches but by people of many different faiths who are citizens of Durham and want to share with Christians their celebration of this most wonderful time of year.

Durham Cathedral's 'Open Treasure': a Big HLF Award

It is immensely heartening that in the latest round of awards, the Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting Durham and Peterborough Cathedrals. We are not the only two cathedrals to be grateful for the HLF’s generosity in recent years. No doubt it is a coincidence that both these famous and beautiful cathedrals are Romanesque, and that both their profiles are well known to travellers speeding up and down the East Coast Main Line.

The first thing I want to do is to pay tribute to the great team here at the Cathedral who worked up the bid and worked with staff, volunteers and community to prepare for its submission.  We have had great support from the officers of HLF itself, from the Cathedrals Fabric Commission and many other bodies and individuals along the way. And of course we want to say thank you to the HLF for this great news. It is a wonderful way of beginning Advent.

This £3.9 million award will mean that we are within sight of achieving our long-held dream of displaying the Cathedral’s marvellous treasures in some of its equally marvellous medieval spaces. The buildings round the cloister constitute the unique (for England) survival of an intact monastic enclosure that is still used for the religious purposes for which it was intended. Their treasures include relics associated with St Cuthbert such as his coffin, pectoral cross and portable altar. Not only that, but the Cathedral Library has retained more of its monastic collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books than anywhere else in the country.

The collections are of international significance as a witness to the civilisation, culture and history of Christian North East England particularly in the Saxon and early Norman periods. They more than do justice to the landscape and architecture of the World Heritage Site that has been their home for so many centuries. What we have lacked are facilities to exhibit them properly. In the 21^st century, this means creating environments that conform to the highest conservation and security standards in which they can be safely displayed and interpreted. To adapt medieval buildings for this purpose while at the same time enhancing their beautiful interiors in their own right is a formidable challenge.

After years of planning, we are now poised to realise this dream. Called Open Treasure, the development will create a large exhibition space in the monastic Dormitory (which will still retain its 19^th century function as a library). Its focus will be the shaping of church and cathedral in medieval Northumbria, and how this story of a faith community has continued beyond the Reformation into the present day. A newly constructed gallery will house some of our most important and precious manuscripts together with our Saxon stones and artefacts, while the Great Kitchen will have as its focus St Cuthbert and the relics associated with his memory.

Why Open Treasure? Because we shall be opening up what has been largely hidden from public view in the past: incomparable medieval spaces, and the equally incomparable treasures they will contain. This year’s highly successful Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition, in which the Cathedral has been a partner and to which we lent no fewer than 14 items for display, has shown that there is a real appetite for Christian heritage that is beautifully displayed and intelligently interpreted.

There is another purpose to all this. We want to maintain free entry to the Cathedral itself. By opening up our ‘Treasure’ as a revenue-earning exhibition, we hope to stabilise the Cathedral’s finances so that it will never be necessary to levy an admission charge to such a fine sacred space. When we held a press call to announce the news, I was pressed hard on this point: it is hugely appreciated in North East England that the Cathedral does not charge for admission to the church itself. We want to keep it that way and we rely on Open Treasure to achieve this.

For our biggest treasure is the Cathedral itself, so much loved and admired across the world. Not just the building and what it contains, but its community that has its origins in 7^th century Lindisfarne and its saints such as Aidan and Cuthbert. Like the Benedictine house that it became, the Cathedral is still a living place of worship, work and learning and this adds contemporary human, Christian texture to the place. Our invitation to visitors to experience for themselves this rich past and present is part of our mission both of hospitality and of interpretation. We hope all our guests both young and old will not simply come here as sightseers or observers but become participants in the Cathedral’s life of prayer, community, arts, learning and outreach.

Thanks to HLF and other funders, this vision is close to becoming reality. We want to begin the works in 2014 and already have significant funds raised and pledged. Thank you to everyone who has supported us generously so far. If there is anyone reading this blog who can help us match the funding so that the project can begin all the sooner, that will be wonderful too. Call me night or day!

This is a revised version of my piece on the HLF Blog to coincide with the announcement of the award.

The Scottish Referendum: a simple question

Earlier this year I attended a ceremony to mark the 500^th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden in 1513. It’s a stone’s throw from the River Tweed which marks the present Anglo-Scottish border. This was the last of a long line of Anglo-Scottish battles, and it was one of the bitterest. Its outcome changed the history of Scotland, and arguably paved the way towards the Union of the crowns in 1707. The memorial cross on the hilltop that overlooks the battlefield says simply, and movingly, ‘to the brave of both nations’.

In North East England we have been a border people for centuries.  These marcher lands have long been fought over as their array of castles and fortifications show. The Durham Palatinate ruled by its powerful Prince Bishops was a buffer state within a state set up to guard the rest of England from invading Scots. Yet all that belonged to the middle ages. It’s odd to think that we were still fighting these battles on the threshold of modernity in the early 16^th century.

I write this on the day the SNP publishes its vision for an independent Scotland. It’s a milestone on the long journey that leads up to next September’s referendum. It’s obviously a matter of keen interest to all Scots. But here in the borderlands, it’s a matter of concern to the English too. The decision Scotland makes about its future will have effects south of the border. If Scotland votes for independence, there will be consequences for the North of England that are economic, political and social. But these wouldn't merely affect the North. They would affect the whole of England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Independence would radically alter the way the surviving peoples of the Union saw themselves. It would need us to re-group in order to face a future that could be very different from what we know at present.

I happen to think that the Union is a good thing, and so far, the evidence is that a majority of Scots feel that way too. The Union as a federation of peoples is one of the world’s most successful nation-states. There is no doubt room to re-calibrate the precise ways in which our nations, provinces and regions relate to one another within a united whole, but that is no argument for dismantling it.

But this isn’t my principal concern right now. What baffles me is very simple. Why is the future of the Union, which is the business of all UK citizens, to be decided on our behalf by the Scottish people alone?

The more I try to get my mind round this question, the more puzzling it seems. I can’t find a flaw in the argument that the future of the Union is the business of the whole Union, not just part of it. It may be that in North East England, because of our violent history, we feel the force of this particularly keenly. What matters at the border, what kind of border it even turns out to be are as important to us south of it as to those on its north side. But as I’ve said, it affects all of us who are citizens of the UK. Profoundly and probably irreversibly. I am not sure we have woken up to this yet.

I can’t see that it is good politics, let alone justice, to delegate the dismantling of the UK to the say-so of 10% of its total population (fewer than 6 million out of more than 60 million). Whichever way it goes, it does not look like a well-founded plebiscite that acknowledges the legitimate interests of all UK citizens. I'd like to be clearer what the role of the Westminster Parliament is in this watershed constitutional decision. I am not comfortable about being disenfranchised, relegated to the role of onlooker gazing at a drama acted out on the Scottish stage that will have far-reaching consequences for the large audience sitting impotently in the rest of the UK.

For the avoidance of doubt let me add that I honour the Scots for many things, not least their intellectual rigour, their love of fairness and their strong sense of common purpose. We need all these qualities in the Union. But if there is a decision to make about the future of the Union, it should be through a process that is rigorous, fair and that has regard for the purpose and flourishing of all its peoples, not just some. I am sure the Scots don't dissent from that.