Angry young man

With apologies to Antic Hay, if you can have biography and biology, why not biosophy? Or biolatry, biotomy, bionomy and biogamy? The need for these neologisms is prompted by this extraordinary childhood memoir which combines adolescent intensity with a search for salvation, a hot glorification of life with its cold dissection, and the trade and eventual marriage of two separate existences. Apart from its beautiful writing, what stamps Seminary Boy as a classic story of growing up is the kaleidoscope of perspectives it offers on the mystery of being.

The narrative concerns the first 17 years of John Cornwell’s life during the 1940s and 1950s when he was sent to boarding-school, technically a minor seminary, to be prepared for life as a Roman Catholic priest. Critical to that experience were his background as the eldest son of a working-class East London family, and his rape by a paedophile at the age of 11. As a result, a normal, if badly behaved, child became haunted by a sense of enveloping darkness that ‘intended taking me to itself for ever. This I knew was the only reality, the ultimate and inescapable truth without end.’ In flight from this terror, he turned to his local parish priest who, recognising his intelligence and possible vocation, recommended him for training for the priesthood.

The account of his escape into the backward, superstitious yet ultimately saving atmosphere of the seminary at Cotton in the Peak District is a masterpiece of story-telling. In a series of short, dramatic snapshots, Cornwell describes a self-absorbed adolescent desperately searching for what in a religious sense might be called salvation, or in a psychological context restitution, or in normal circumstances love. A hundred chapters, some no more than a few paragraphs, show him veering from religiosity to the attempted ministrations of a corrupt priest — ‘If you were to show me your penis, John, I could easily tell by manipulating it whether you have a problem’ — to the anguished love of another abused boy, and back to a priggishness as dangerous as any sexual sin.