Tuesday, 25 June 2024

When Proust met Wilde

“Ils s’entre-regardèrent avec une curiosité complexe”

The story goes that Marcel Proust met Oscar Wilde at a salon in Paris and invited him home afterwards, only for Wilde to turn on his heel and walk out the minute he saw Mme Proust’s furniture.  

What a great anecdote it is, leaving us wondering what these two great aesthetes would have made of each other if they’d spent more time together. But is it true?

The tale comes from the French biographer Philippe Jullian, who put the meeting at the end of 1891. At this time, Proust was just 20, living with his parents, a young man trying to climb the social ladder, with little published but great aspirations. Wilde, meanwhile, was at the height of his popularity, in France as well as Britain. It was the year he wrote his French play Salome, to great acclaim in France (though it was banned in Britain as the depiction of Biblical characters on stage was forbidden at the time). He was so celebrated that, when he attended the Moulin Rouge earlier that year, the poet Stuart Merrill recalled that “The habitués took him for the prince of some fabulous realm of the North”. He made friends with Émile Zola and André Gide, and met Victor Hugo at least once. 

Here is what Jullian says, based on what he heard many years later from the grandsons of the hostess in whose salon they were introduced. 

C'est [Jacques-Emile Blanche] qui, chez Mme Baignères, réunit une fois encore Wilde et Proust. Wilde est très touché de l'enthousiasme que témoigne Proust pour la littérature anglaise, des questions si intelligentes qu'il lui pose sur Ruskin ou George Eliot, et accepte de bonne grâce un dîner chez Marcel, boulevard Haussmann. Le soir de ce dîner, Proust, retenu chez Mme Lemaire, arrive très essoufflé, deux minutes en retard : il demande au domestique : « Est-ce que le monsieur anglais est là ? - Oui, Monsieur, il est arrivé il y a cinq minutes; à peine est-il entré au salon qu'il a demandé la salle de bains et n'en est plus sorti. » - Marcel court au bout du couloir. - « Mr. Wilde, êtes-vous souffrant ? - Ah, vous voilà, cher monsieur Proust, - Wilde paraît majestueusement - non je ne suis pas souffrant le moins du monde. Je pensais avoir le plaisir de dîner en tête à tête avec vous, mais on m'a fait entrer dans le salon. J'ai regardé ce salon et, au fond de ce salon, il y avait vos parents, alors le courage m'a manqué. Adieu, cher monsieur Proust, adieu... » Proust, lui, devait raconteur que Wilde avait fait des remarques désagréables sur le mobilier du salon, disant, tout comme Robert de Montesquiou et le baron de Charlus : « Comme c'est laid chez vous. » 

The account is colourful, but unfortunately doesn’t quite add up. It was written much later, and relies on third-hand evidence. Later biographers are inclined to think the story apocryphal, finding that Proust had not read either Ruskin or Eliot by that date, and that he didn’t live at the Haussmann address until 15 years later. 

Yet the story has considerable allure, and the reference to them meeting “once again” is itself suggestive; if they frequented the same salons they might have bumped into each other even if this anecdote isn’t true. 

And indeed there’s another mention of a possible meeting between Wilde and Proust, in the memoires of the poet Fernand Gregh. He wrote that they both attended the salon of Mme Arman de Caillavet: “je me rappelle un mot spirituel et exact de Mme Arnan qui l'avait reçu à dîner en même temps que Marcel Proust (ils s’entre-regardèrent avec une curiosité complexe)…”

Somehow, this seems more authentic. And the similarities between the lives and writings of the two suggests they would have been intrigued by each other. Proust references Wilde’s writing in later life, although rather disparagingly. And he alludes to Wilde in A la recherche du temps perdu, though not by name. It’s generally accepted that he based the haughty homosexual character Charlus partly on Wilde. And when Proust introduces Charlus, he writes: "He was staring at me, his eyes dilated with extreme attentiveness." Fancifully, we might even attribute this to a memory of the supposed meeting.

After his imprisonment and disgrace, Wilde fled back to France, ending up in Paris, where he subsided in poverty, sex and alcohol. There were rumours that Proust paid secret visits to Wilde at the Hôtel des Beaux Arts where he spent the last weeks of his life, but of this there is no evidence.

References

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Friday, 1 March 2024

When Wellington met Nelson

One of many copies of a lost painting
 by John Prescott Knight,
imagining the famous meeting
I used to think of Nelson and Wellington as brothers in arms – Britain’s two preeminent military leaders of the Napoleonic wars, working together to defeat Napoleon on land and at sea. But in fact their careers barely overlapped, with Wellington serving abroad while Nelson was becoming famous at home, and a whole decade between Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815). 

And they met only once. 

This chance meeting took place on the 12th of September 1805, when Lord Castlereagh, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, had invited Nelson and Wellington (then Major General Wellesley, not yet a Duke) for consultations. The two men could easily have missed each other, but Castlereagh was running late and as they waited for their separate appointments they enjoyed a profitable conversation – though only after an embarrassing start. 

Britain at this time was at the height of anxiety. 160,000 French troops were massed just across the Channel and had been threatening invasion for some time. A few weeks before, Austria had re-entered the war to join the alliance against France, but no-one in Britain yet knew that this had persuaded Napoleon to postpone the invasion. 

Wellesley had recently returned from India, having distinguished himself by his success in several battles against India forces sympathetic to the French. Like Nelson, he was personally brave and had learned the value of decisive aggression against the enemy, even when outnumbered. He was also known to be meticulous in his planning. But he was nine years younger and not yet a household name. 

Wellesley recognised Nelson easily enough. But he later recounted how Nelson had no idea who he was. This account was made by Wellington in later life, in 1834, in conversation with John Wilson Croker, who wrote: “We were talking of Lord Nelson, and some instances were mentioned of the egotism and vanity that derogated from his character”. 

Croker goes on to quote Wellington's response as follows: 

“I am not surprised at such instances, for Lord Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for, perhaps an hour. It was soon after I returned from India. I went to the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into a little waiting room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to see the Secretary of State, a gentleman, whom from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognised as Lord Nelson. 

"He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversations, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. 

"I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man both in manner and matter. All that I had thought of charlatan style had vanished and he talked of the state of the country and of the aspect and probability of affairs on the continent with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects at home and abroad that surprised me... In fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. 

"The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly for the last half or three-quarters of an hour I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.” 

We don’t know what insights Nelson may have given that were of such interest to Wellington, although in her biography of Wellington, Elizabeth Longford asserts that “Nelson undoubtedly helped to form the future Duke of Wellington’s ideal of the great captain who could see far beyond his own flagship or headquarters”. According to another account of the meeting, published in the Edinburgh Review of 1838, the two men exchanged compliments. Wellesley congratulated Nelson on his recent decisive victories, and Nelson said he hoped Wellesley would be given the opportunity lead an expedition against the French on the continent. 

And Nelson left no record of what he thought about the encounter. He took to sea again the very next day, and they never had the chance to meet again, of course, because six weeks later he lay dying on the deck of his flagship, HMS Victory, having just won the Battle of Trafalgar. 

So, their meeting was a stroke of luck. Croker quotes Wellington (who was keen on talking about the hand of Providence) as saying: “Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior person.” 

Longford suggests that “it is by no means impossible that Castlereagh did it on purpose”, to bring the two men together. 

References

- Saul David: All the King’s Men, Penguin 2013
- Elizabeth Longford: Wellington: Years of the Sword, Literary Guild 1969
- The Croker Papers, Vol II p.35 

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Thursday, 1 February 2024

When Donne met Kepler

On 23rd October 1619, the poet John Donne, newly in holy orders and taking part in his first and only overseas diplomatic mission, dropped in on the astronomer Johannes Kepler on his way to Vienna. Two of the great and ingenious thinkers of their generation, the two men really had little in common, but they shared a natural curiosity and a restlessness about bringing order to their understanding of the universe. 

We have evidence that they talked about Kepler’s latest discoveries. But perhaps the most curious thing about this meeting is what they did not talk about.

Astronomy at this time was at its most controversial. Kepler was among those whose work called into question the orthodox view that the universe was a fixed and perfect creation. He demonstrated that planets move in ellipses, not circles, and he wrote about his observations of the creation of new stars (supernovas). 

Meanwhile, Galileo’s pioneering use of telescopes was gathering evidence that supported Copernicus’ theory that the sun, and not the earth, was at the centre of the known universe. But in 1615, the Inquisition pronounced the Copernican theory heretical, and books that favoured it, including Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, were banned.

Donne knew about Kepler and had read his book De Stella Nova (Of New Stars), published in 1606. We know this because two years later Donne mentions it in Biathanatos, a tract arguing that committing suicide is not necessarily a sin. Donne used Kepler’s description of supernovas as evidence that medieval and classical authorities, such as Aristotle who had said that stars were immutable, could be wrong.

Now, knowing of King James I’s interest in astronomy (James had visited Kepler’s predecessor as Imperial Mathematician, Tycho Brahe, in Denmark thirty years earlier), Kepler was keen to meet the English delegation that had appeared on his doorstep. He wanted their help promoting his new book to the King. This latest work, Harmonia Mundi (Harmony of the World) mentions his discovery of a connection between the length of time it takes a planet to complete an orbit and its average distance from the sun.

Donne by this time was at a turning point in his life. His wife, whom he’d married for love and at great social disadvantage, had recently died, and now as a priest he was reluctantly accompanying James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, in a delicate diplomatic mission to Bavaria. 

Passing through Linz, he had an unmissable opportunity to exchange some ideas with the famous astronomer. But what did they talk about?

Donne and Kepler were very different characters. Kepler, a man of empirical rigour, was physically frail and not the man of the world that Donne had been in his youth; a Lutheran, he refused to convert to Catholicism when that would have been advantageous, while Donne famously abandoned his Catholic upbringing. And one way of looking at their meeting could be as a clash of faith vs reason, because Donne did express disquiet with new science. In An Anatomy of the World, he wrote that "new philosophy calls all in doubt… Freely men confess that this world's spent When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new... Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone". And yet this is too neat. Donne loved nothing more than playing with ideas and metaphor, ingeniously adopting scientific ideas in his poetry. 

Perhaps Donne’s speculative nature was brought down to earth, as it were, by Kepler’s academic scruples. But the only surviving evidence that the meeting took place at all shows only that they talked about Kepler’s book and his desire to promote it. 

This is a letter written by Kepler to a relation in England, asking for help in this task. The letter says: “I have talked with a Doctor of Theology named Donne, who was travelling with His Royal Majesty's envoy, Mr. Doncastre [sic], -and appeared here on October 23…  I told him that I had ordered the dedication copies [presumably of Harmonia Mundi dedicated to King James], and added that, because I had seen the envoy here, I wanted to ask his Grace to convey and commend the work.”

That’s it. It’s all we know about their conversation, except that it’s likely to have been undertaken in Latin, the usual lingua franca. But we can be sure they did not talk about an odd way in which their intellectual paths had crossed already.

This concerned Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream), a work featuring an imagined voyage to the Moon, which was circulating in manuscript. In the book, the mother of the narrator summons a demon, and Kepler became very upset that gossip began to spread identifying this character with Kepler’s own mother, who was in fact accused of witchcraft. 

Kepler was so sensitive to this that he took offence at even slight provocations. One instance is in a later revised version of Somnium, in which he wrote: "If I am not mistaken, the author of that insolent satire called Ignatius, His Conclave, got hold of a copy of this little work of mine; for he stings me by name at the very beginning”. 

The remark in Ignatius in question is a sceptical jibe at scholars’ employment of reason without faith. It refers first to Galileo “who of late hath summoned the other worlds, the Stars to come neerer to him, and give him an account of themselves" and then Kepler “who (as himselfe testifies of himself)…that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge”. 

What Kepler can’t have known, was that Donne was the author. Ignatius, His Conclave was published anonymously in 1611 and Donne’s authorship not recognised until after his death. 

As it was, Donne sailed on to Vienna, arriving in early November. Doncaster’s mission to help negotiate peace between Catholic and Protestant factions on the continent was unsuccessful, and Donne never took part in anything similar again, becoming Dean of St Paul’s in 1621. But it’s interesting that in the meantime, in 1620, Donne’s friend Sir Henry Wotton visited Kepler, to try to persuade him to move to England. 

Kepler’s mother died in 1621, shortly after an official accusation of witchcraft, which she continued to deny. Kepler and Donne died within a few months of each other in 1630/31.


References
- Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Faber, 2022.
- Jeremy Bernstein: ‘Heaven’s Net: The Meeting of John Donne and Johannes Kepler’. The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 2, 1997 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41212614.
- R. Chris Hassel, Jr: ‘Donne's "Ignatius His Conclave" and the New Astronomy’. Modern Philology. Vol. 68, No. 4 (May, 1971), https://www.jstor.org/stable/436567 

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Monday, 11 December 2023

When Chekhov met Tolstoy

Chekhov and Tolstoy at a subsequent meeting, in Gaspra in 1901
It’s a curious and entertaining picture. The first meeting of these two giants of Russian literature taking place, on 8th August 1895, up to their necks in water at Tolstoy’s estate, with Tolstoy’s beard floating out in front of him on the water. 

Chekhov caught a cold while he was there. Could it have been because the two men had their first conversation while bathing? This is the story told by one Aleksei Ivanovich Yakovlev, who as an impressionable student visited Chekhov two years after the incident. He recounted (some years after both writers’ deaths) that “on their arrival (Chekhov was not alone, this was early morning), [Tolstoy] brought him to bathe, and their first conversation happened up to their necks in the water”. 

There’s an entertaining essay about this meeting in Russian Life, in which the author quotes the biographer Elif Batuman: “… Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.” 

 Alas, Russian Life suggests that “Chekhov was kidding young Yakovlev”. It seems not to match other first-hand accounts. According to the article: “Chekhov mentioned his visit a handful of times in letters over the next two months of 1895, and he didn’t recount bathing with Tolstoy then, and he seems never to have mentioned it to anyone else. Neither did Tolstoy…” So the beard-floating episode probably didn’t happen. 

But cyclist-watching did. Later that day, we learn, Tolstoy suggested to his various guests they should join him in walking up to the main road “to see how our young people bicycle to Tula”, a city nearby. Why? Cycling was still something of a novelty and not entirely respectable, but Tolstoy was an enthusiast and had recently taken it up as a hobby. In his diary of that year he wrote: "I began to learn how to ride the bicycle at the [Moscow] Manège. It's very strange that I am attracted to this… I don't feel ashamed. On the contrary, I feel that this is a form of natural idiocy, that I don't care what people think, that it is sinless and fun in a childlike way." 25 April, 1895 

Chekhov had recently bought a country estate not too far away, and was in the middle of a creative period in which he was writing short stories. We know the two writers talked about the novel Tolstoy was writing at the time, Resurrection. And Chekhov was able to correct a factual detail about prison sentences. During the visit, Tolstoy also asked Chekhov for help in getting accommodation for an old soldier who had gone blind. 

It certainly seems that the meeting was friendly, with Chekhov no doubt expressing his admiration for the older writer (Tolstoy was 67 and Chekhov 35). They enjoyed mutual respect, and in due course Tolstoy was said to love Chekhov dearly, though they disagreed on certain issues. They would meet several more times. But Tolstoy remained the dominant father figure, tormenting Chekhov at what might have been their last meeting with a famously damning comment. According to an account by Chekhov of a visit to Tolstoy in Gaspra, “He was bedridden due to illness. Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, 'Kiss me goodbye.' While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man's voice, 'You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.'"

References
https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/when-chekhov-met-tolstoy/
https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/cycling-with-the-count/
https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/326317-7-renowned-russian-bike-riders
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy/Fiction-after-1880
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/11/tolstoy-thought-chekhov-worse-than-shakespeare



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Saturday, 11 February 2023

When Leonardo da Vinci met Michaelangelo

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the established genius and Michelangelo (1475-1564) the young prodigy when their working lives overlapped. But rivalry led to mutual dislike, and they kept their distance. 

Their relationship has been talked about ever since. How often did they meet? Were they so very different? But there is just one account of a meeting between the two. It shows them barely on speaking terms. 

Things were certainly not going to go well after 1504, when they were put in direct competition with each other. In 1503, Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene - The Battle of Anghiari – in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. He was immensely famous by this stage (the Mona Lisa was recently finished), and was the obvious choice for a project. But the young and rather dashing Michaelangelo began to muscle in. Leonardo had had to take part in a committee decision about where to place his famous sculpture, David, and it ended up in prime position on the square right outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Then the governing officials decided to invite Michaelangelo to paint another scene - The Battle of Cascina - for the very same room in the Palazzo. 

The artist Giorgio Vasari gives us an insight into the relations between the men in his Life of Leonardo, written in around 1560. He tells us: “There was great dislike between Leonardo and Michelangelo, and the competition between the two was to blame for Michelangelo leaving Florence... When Leonardo heard this, he also left and went to France, where the king owned several works of his and was very fond of him.”

Vasari’s might seem to suggest that the artists fled from each other. In fact, Michaelangelo was invited by the Pope to work in Rome in 1505, and the next year Leonardo was summoned to return to Milan. But they may have jumped at the chances nonetheless. And their joint project remained unfinished.
 
It seems to have been before this time, however, in Florence, that our meeting took place, (according to Jonathan Jones in his book The Lost Battles). The single source for the story is an anecdote in a manuscript known as the Codice Magliabecchiano, apparently written in the 1540s and attributed to Bernardo Vecchietti, which contains surveys of the lives of famous artists, old and new. 

We are in a public meeting place at the Palazzo Spini Feroni, near Santa Trinita. Leonardo and his friend Giovanni di Gavina arrive on the scene, encountering a gathering of men, who are discussing a passage in Dante. According to the account: They called Leonardo over and told him to explain it to them. And when Michelangelo happened to pass by and was called by one of them, Leonardo replied, "Michelangelo will declare it himself." Michelangelo, thinking that he had said this to mock him, replied angrily, "You too should be able to explain it, for you made a drawing of a model to cast it in bronze, and could not cast it, and out of shame left it alone." And having said this, he cut them off and left, whereupon Leonardo remained, blushing. 

To understand the insult thrown by Michaelangelo, we need to go back to an incident by then a few years old, that was obviously still a talking point. Leonardo was known for numerous unfinished projects – as Vasari comments: “He would have achieved great things as a scholar in the sciences if he had been less fickle and changeable. But he undertook many things and very soon abandoned those he had begun” – but on this occasion, circumstances went beyond his control.

Leonardo was commissioned to provide a bronze equestrian monument for Ludovico Sforza in Milan in the 1480s, and he planned something grand – and huge. The finished piece would be 20 ft high and bigger than any bronze statue had ever been. Leonardo worked on different designs and models for years, and by 1493 had produced a full-size model. But he never had the chance to finish it, because with the French threatening invasion, the Sforzas used the bronze that Leonardo has stockpiled to make cannons for the defence of the city. In the event, the French did invade in 1499, and had fun using the model horse as target practice. 

This very public failure must have become a touchy subject for Leonardo, so the insult was telling (if not very original). Vasari remarks: “as envy often causes people to judge maliciously, there were those who thought that Leonardo had begun it like other of his works so that it would not be completed.”

But that wasn’t quite the end of the encounter. The manuscript’s account then goes on to say that Michaelangelo threw one more insult as he left, along the lines of: “and to think you were believed by those castrated Milanese cockerels!” 

So much can be, and has been, read into these few lines of manuscript. Jonathan Jones interprets this last insult as a reference to Leonardo’s ambiguous sexuality.  And in order to explain Michaelangelo’s anger, novelist Stephanie Storey imagines an earlier encounter when she has Leonardo pointedly humiliate him in public, for no apparent reason other than that he dresses scruffily.

Anyway, after 1506 Leonardo returned to visit Florence at least once but he never lived there again. He and Michaelangelo couldn’t avoid each other for good, though. In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome to work for the Pope at a time when both Michelangelo and Raphael were there as well. There is no specific record of them meeting again, but presumably they remained well aware of each other’s work, and Leonardo will have had the opportunity to enter the Sistine Chapel and inspect – perhaps with grudging appreciation - its fresh new ceiling.


See also:
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Thursday, 19 January 2023

When Mahler met Freud

In 1910, at a desperate time in his life, though at the height of his fame, Gustav Mahler decided to seek the advice of the equally celebrated Sigmund Freud. 

He had returned to Europe after an exhausting tour of America, just before which he had suffered the devastating loss of his daughter Maria, and he had been diagnosed with a form of heart disease. 

And that Summer he discovered that his wife was involved with another man.

After a couple of cancellations – perhaps he was wary of what he would learn – Mahler eventually arranged to meet Freud in Leiden in Holland, on 26 August.

Freud and his family were on holiday and staying nearby, but were about to leave for Italy. So this was Mahler’s last chance. Freud took the tram into town, and they spent four hours together, meeting at The Gilded Turk café and walking through the botanical gardens until late in the evening.

It seems they found an immediate rapport. Indeed, despite Freud lacking much interest in music, they had much in common, with their Viennese backgrounds and being of a similar age (Mahler was 50 and Freud 54). Freud had also travelled to America. They were pre-eminently deep thinkers.  

Freud apparently said he’d never met anyone who so quickly understood the nature of psychoanalysis. 

Various accounts of this meeting speculate on how Freud would have analysed Mahler, and what advice he might have offered. We know that Mahler told his life story – plenty enough to occupy the four-hour walk. He would have related episodes from his emotionally traumatic childhood: his violent father, the untimely death of his brother Ernst, and, we can assume, the incident he related elsewhere when he rushed from the house to escape hearing his parents quarrel, and was stopped short by the music of a barrel organ playing, incongruously, an amusing folk melody - an experience that he drew on in juxtaposing extremes of emotion and context in his music. 

Recent events would also have occupied them. Mahler had had to leave his post at the Vienna Opera, and, the main reason for the meeting, his wife Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius. (After Mahler’s death, Alma and Gropius would marry, and he went on to found of the Bauhaus school of architecture after the war.)

Psychoanalysts agree that Freud would have identified a mother fixation. For Mahler, Alma Mahler had become a mother figure, whom he could not bear to lose. Throughout their life together, he and Alma had wild, obsessive swings from being utterly devoted to desperately needing to get away from each other. Notoriously, Mahler wrote her a letter before their marriage, explaining that her life would have to be committed and subordinated entirely to his in order for him to achieve his musical vocation: "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner”, he wrote, demanding that she abandon her own musical ambitions, including composing. We know that Freud told Mahler that this was damaging, and after the meeting Mahler did encourage Alma to compose. He also dedicated his Eighth Symphony to her – it received a triumphant first performance in Munich in September that year. 

However, Alma kept up her relationship with Gropius, albeit discreetly. The meeting with Freud seems to have been helpful, but the two never met again. Mahler died just eight months later, in May 2011.

Sources include
https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/locations/netherlands/leiden/meeting-with-freud/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23439545/
https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128192566/a-composer-on-the-couch-mahler-meets-freud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler

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Friday, 10 June 2022

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich

There are two female English religious figures of the middles ages who are famous above all others because their writings survive them: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. And it’s rather wonderful to know that, despite their very different stories, in around 1413 they actually met. 

Their encounter is described by Margery, in her autobiographical work now known as The Book of Margery Kempe.

Julian of Norwich, famously author of Revelations of Divine Love with its best-known lines “All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well”, received many visitors while living the life of an urban hermit. She was an anchoress, living a secluded life of prayer in a small cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich. This peculiar form of monasticism was fairly widespread in the middle ages. Anchorites or anchoresses were expected to live alone but also to be part of their community. They would see people who came to seek advice, in the way that they have of oracles and holy people since ancient times. 

And one of these visitors was Margery, who says in her book that she made the short journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich and spent “many days” in conversation with Julian. This suggests that they might have got on rather well – although we only have Margery’s word for it – despite having little in common. 

In this essay Margery is described as “a medieval celebrity”, “brash, loud and unapologetic” and “a wife and woman about town, mother to at least fourteen children” who persuaded her husband to become celibate and made a number of pilgrimages, including to Jerusalem, after she started experiencing visions. She must have been a person of considerable determination and energy. 

By contrast, Julian comes across in her delicate, mystical writing as rather more modest. She didn’t travel anywhere, living sealed up in her cell and meeting visitors through a small window. 

It was Margery’s brushes with ecclesiastical authority that made her seek advice, as her habit of falling into fits of crying made people suspect she was possessed, and she had been accused of heresy. Were her visions godly or diabolic? She travelled from her home in King’s Lynn to Norwich and consulted first a priest who became her confessor, then a white friar, and then, she writes, she “was bidden by Our Lord to go to an Anchoress in the same city [Norwich], who was called Dame Julian” to be reassured that she was doing God’s will and not the Devil’s.

We only have her word for it, but Margery’s account is clear that each of her counsellors gave her the reassurance she was seeking, especially Julian. “The anchoress, hearing the marvellous goodness of our Lord, highly thanked God with all her heart for his visitation, advising this creature to be obedient to the will of our Lord and fulfil with all her might whatever he put into her soul, if it were not against the worship of God and the profit of her fellow Christians.” And Margery says Julian told her to “set all your trust in God and fear not the language of the world, for the more despite, shame and reproof that you have in the world, the greater is your merit in the sight of God”. Read Margery's full account here.

They might have made a peculiar duo, but Margery emphasises that their meeting lasted “many days… conversing in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ”. She says she came away feeling validated, strengthened to continue the idiosyncratic path she had chosen in celebrating her faith. Given her strong personality, it’s possible that Margery did most of the talking, and one wonders whether Julian was pleased or sorry to see her go.

The novelist Victoria Mackenzie has recently reimagined the lives of these two women in her book For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain.

See also:




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