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.
Cornwell tells all this, and it is essential to the quality of the book, with the monstrous egotism of an artist. A host of other characters appear. At home, there is his heroic mother who holds the family together after his father has deserted them, scrimping pennies to pay for John’s shoes and clothes, and protecting him with a carving knife in her hand against a violent neighbour. At school he is influenced by the sophisticated Father Vincent Armishaw who introduces him to secular literature and music, and by a succession of passionate boys who inspire his love and, all too often, his betrayal. Yet none of them amounts to more than a member of the chorus. Only the teller of the story matters.
Since that is how adolescents customarily view their world, Cornwell conveys perfectly the feeling of narcissistic adventure that must have accompanied his development from naive troubled child to assertive young man. But it is impossible to read Seminary Boy without also being aware of the reconstructed conversations, the necessary inventions and suppressions, all the mature artistry that makes the literary journey so exciting. And for those who believe in one or other of God’s manifestations, there is also the awareness of an ultimate reality that lies below both the search and the writing. Layer after layer of art and truth compete for your attention, and the ambiguities are intrinsic to the power of the writing.
The seminary allowed him to escape the pursuing darkness, but it could not provide a permanent refuge. In the 1960s, the old-fashioned church that had trained him crumbled when confronted by the radicalism of the second Vatican Council. Simultaneously, Cornwell lost his shaky sense of vocation and, for a time, his faith as well. In other writings, he has made it clear that he blames the collapse of traditional Catholicism not on failures of dogma, but on the moral corruption that had allowed it to condone the activities of fascist dictators and paedophile priests. These views have appeared in recent books that attacked Pope Pius XII for acquiescing in the spread of Nazi power, and John-Paul II, whom Cornwell judged to be ‘a profoundly reactionary pope’, not least in his blindness to sexually deviant priests. Neither thesis was original, but the charges were advanced with such pugnacity that the response of conservative Catholics resembled the ecclesiastical equivalent of a bar-room brawl.
Both friend and foe can discover the roots of Cornwell’s anger in Seminary Boy. They will find too his portrayal of his young self made almost unbearably poignant by an awareness that the boy’s vulnerability and hunger still persist — it is not by chance that the book’s epigraph is Richard Crashaw’s chilling line, ‘The wounded is the wounding heart.’ They will also be rewarded by a story of compelling richness.
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