Tag Archives: writer: helen waddell

Jane McNeill – the missing link between C.S. Lewis and Helen Waddell

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I’ve just finished reading the first Helen Waddell biography, Mark of the Maker by Monica Blackett, and I was again struck by the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had much to do with C.S. Lewis, who like her was from Northern Ireland (indeed, also from County Down, though from a different corner of the county), and like her made his name in England, as an expert on literature and religion.

There were of course differences between them: Helen Waddell was a decade older, her emphasis was more on literature while Lewis’s was more on religion, she never got a tenured academic job while he was at Oxford from his teens, she split her time between London and County Down as an adult while he rarely if ever went back to Belfast. In his memoirs, David Bleakley, who I remember well as a fading political figure in the 1990s, gives an insight of conversations with Lewis at Oxford in the late 1940s:

I was disappointed that he could not be drawn on Helen Waddell, whose “star” was high and with whom he had much in common. Helen was a great favorite back home, where she was held in high esteem at Queen’s University.

Helen Waddell never mentions C.S. Lewis as far as I can tell, and Lewis’ most substantial reference to her is in a letter dated 16 February 1921 (when he would have been 22 and she 31), and then nothing else afterwards, even though their paths must have run close together. In 1921 he wrote to his father of an Oxford dinner party:

I met a friend of the said Tchainie’s the other night at the Carlyles, a girl called Helen Waddell whom you may have heard of. When last I saw her she was lying face downward on the floor of Mrs McNeill’s drawing-room, saying rather good things in a quaint Belfast drawl.

‘Tchainie’ Is Jane Agnes McNeill (1890-1959), a schoolmate of Helen Waddell’s at what is now Victoria College. Jane’s father, who died in 1907, was the first headmaster of Campbell College, the Belfast school which Lewis later attended. Jane and her mother took Helen Waddell on a trip to France in 1924, during which Helen Waddell wrote this poem:

JANE or The Perfect Traveller

She likes to travel in the train.
She never smells an open drain.
On boats she talks to stewardesses,
And gives advice in their distresses.
She is not sick in any swell,
But only in each new hotel.
And even in Paris summer heat
She wears goloshes on her feet.

Jane McNeill was also close to C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren, and one gets the impression that they had spent a lot of youthful hours at her mother’s house in Belfast. Both of them dedicated books to her – in Warren’s case, his second book, published in 1955, The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine (his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV, was dedicated “To My Brother”).

Ten years earlier, in 1945, C.S. Lewis dedicated That Hideous Strength to “J. McNeill”. Following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, it is the third of his Space Trilogy, whose central character, Elwin Ransom, is based on J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewisian lore has it that Jane did not like That Hideous Strength, and did not really appreciate the dedication.

When Jane McNeill died in 1959, four years before C.S. Lewis and six years before Helen Waddell, Lewis wrote in The Campbellian, the magazine of his old school where her father had been headmaster:

Molliter Ossa Cubent
[‘May Her Bones Lie Softly’, a quotation from Ovid meaning ‘Rest in Peace’]

Of Miss McNeill the charitable lady, the teacher, the member of committees, I saw nothing. My knowledge is of Janie McNeill; even of Chanie, as we sometimes called her, for she had the habit, common in some Scottish dialects, of ‘unvoicing’ the consonant ‘J’. Obviously there is a great deal I never knew. Someone writes to me describing her as a mystic. I would never have guessed it. What I remember is something as boisterous, often as discomposing but always as fresh and tonic, as a high wind. Janie was the delight and terror of a little Strandtown and Belmont circle, now almost extinct. I remember wild walks on the (still unspoilt) Holywood hills, preposterous jokes shouted through the gale across half a field, extravagantly merry (yet also Lucullan) lunches and suppers at Lisnadene, devastating raillery, the salty tang of an immensely vivid personality. She was a religious woman, a true, sometimes a grim, daughter of the Kirk; no less certainly, the broadest-spoken maiden lady in the Six Counties. She was a born satirist. Every kind of sham and self-righteousness was her butt. She deflated the unco-gude with a single ironic phrase, then a moment’s silence, then the great gust of her laughter. She laughed with her whole body. When I consider how all this was maintained through years of increasing loneliness, pain, disability, and inevitable frustration I am inclined to say she had a soul as brave and uncomplaining as any I ever knew. Few have come nearer to obeying Dunbar’s magnificent recipe (she knew her Dunbar):

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry.

The two descriptions, thirty-five years apart, give an intriguing picture of a woman who was a close friend to two people who were not friendly with each other. I see that the New York C.S. Lewis Society published an essay on “Jane McNeill and C.S. Lewis” by Mary Rogers in 1979, but cannot access it from their website. Maybe I’ll do some further research some day.

The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, by Monica Blackett

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Second paragraph of third chapter (from a letter by Helen Waddell):

It’s wet, and the candle is blowing at the open window and there is a corncrake out in the dark. And I have felt human again for the first time. My mother died last Friday in her sleep. I found her, in the chair.
[actually it was her stepmother]

This was the first biography of Helen Waddell, published in 1973, eight years after her death. It doesn’t go into the same depth as Felicitas Corrigan’s excellent book, but it really scores by simply letting Helen Waddell’s voice speak for herself, with many extracts from her letters conveying her emotions (mostly, but not only, joy in the act of literature), and with a concentration on her home life – in particular Blackett singles out the demands of keeping a decaying house in London as one of the big distractions from Waddell’s creative work, but also refers often to the deep roots that Waddell felt in County Down and at her sister’s home, Kilmacrew near Banbridge. There’s a lot of name-dropping, but it is made up for by the enthusiasm.

Blackett herself appears occasionally in the narrative, but always in the third person, as recipient of several of Waddell’s letters. This is laudably modest; I am sure that she had some stories of her own to tell as well. She was the sister of Sir Basil Blackett, also a friend of Helen Waddell’s, and lived from 1888 to 1976; she married James Lamplugh Brooksbank in 1912 (divorced in 1942) and they had three children, one of whom died as recently as 2018.

One weird point of trivia. On 9 July 1943 Helen Waddell had lunch at the Savoy with General de Gaulle and a large group including also Lord Sempill; she comments in a letter written that day that Lady Sempill was the daughter of Sir John Lavery, who I personally always thought of as an Irish painter until I discovered in the Kelvingrove last month that the Scots think he was one of theirs. But actually it was Sempill’s first wife who was Lavery’s daughter, and she had died in 1935, eight years earlier; Cecilia Dunbar-Kilburn, who he married as his second wife in 1941, was a sculptor in her own right. Perhaps Helen Waddell just got confused in the family details; it can happen.

This is a mostly cheerful and pretty intense book about someone whoi think is interesting but you may not care very much about, but if you want to give it a try, you can get it here.

This was both the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2018, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Church and State in Tudor Ireland, by Robert Dudley Edwards, and Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, edited by Jennifer FitzGerald.

The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell

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Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, spread across two pages, which is why the footnote numbers are repeated):

It is true that thanks to the dangers and squalors of the [tenth] century, invasion, rebellion and faction, there is no longer, at any rate in France and England, an educated society. One misses the voluminous correspondence of the ninth century, of Alcuin and his Venerable Fowl, of Hrabanus Maurus, of Servatus Lupus, hoarding manuscripts like a magpie and clamouring like Petrarch for more. There is scholarship, but it is not present diffusedly. Bruno, young brother of Otto the Great and Archbishop of Cologne, does his best to maintain a school of the humanities there, and summoned to it an Irish bishop from Trier to teach Greek; there are colonies of Greek and Irish monks at Toul and at Verdun.1 From Toul, indeed, or rather from a monastery prison in Toul, comes the odd little tale of the calf that ran away, and his adventures with the wolf and the hedgehog and the lion and the otter—the first rough draft of the Roman de Renard. The writer of it says frankly that he himself had misspent his youth nor plied his book, and the calf is his vagrant self, and that is why the metre is so clumsy.2 At Glastonbury, Dunstan was brought up by Irish scholars (William of Malmesbury pauses to reflect on their continuing reputation in music and geometry, though their Latinity—he writes in the twelfth century—is no longer so pure as it was).3 Begging letters addressed to his successor from Liege prove that the fire still burns there. One clerk with humility and confusion of metaphor pleads that as an unworthy pup he had licked up sufficient crumbs from under the bishop's table (Notker of Liege was a sound scholar) to qualify him to enter the English apiary as an obedient bee;1 and another, about a journey and a loan of money and a borrowed horse, bears out the Vicar of Wakefield's experience that the conjunction of a scholar and a horse is not always fortunate.2 The light never quite goes out; though Gerbert in quest of it flickers across Europe like a will-o'-the-wisp.
1 Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 503, 505.
2 Ecbasis Captivi (Grimm and Schmcller, Lateinische Gedichte des X and XI Jahrhunderts).
3 Vita S. Dunstani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 256-7).
1 Vita S. Dunstani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, p. 387).
2 Ib. p. 390.

This was the book that made the reputation of Helen Waddell, the medievalist from my own corner of County Down. It's a study of the lyrical tradition of poetry in the Middle Ages in Europe, tracing influences across geographies and cultures. I found the writing very dense; written very chattily as if these were all people whose reputations we already knew, with minimal context and footnotes mostly to works available only in well-equipped university libraries. I'm really surprised that it did so well on publication in 1927; perhaps the readers of the 1920s were more au fait with early medieval literature than I am.

Still there are some fascinating details in there. It's always interesting to be reminded of the career of Gerbert of Aurillac, which is crying out for an accessible biographical treatment, either factual or fictional. The same goes for the murky story of the Viking Siegfried (or Sifrid, as Waddell calls him). There's the mysterious figure of the Archpoet. And more locally it's interesting to see Liège popping up as an important centre of culture.

She supplies a lot of translations of the lyrics, to which she brings her own good ear for a phrase; here's the Archpoet's Estuans Interius, as set to music by Carl Orff in the Carmina Burana a few years later, with the original text (which fairly bounces along) and Helen's translation.

Estuans interius
ira vehementi
in amaritudine
loquor mee menti:
factus de materia,
cinis elementi
similis sum folio,
de quo ludunt venti.

Cum sit enim proprium
viro sapienti
supra petram ponere
sedem fundamenti,
stultus ego comparor
fluvio labenti,
sub eodem tramite
nunquam permanenti.

Feror ego veluti
sine nauta navis,
ut per vias aeris
vaga fertur avis;
non me tenent vincula,
non me tenet clavis,
quero mihi similes
et adiungor pravis.

Mihi cordis gravitas
res videtur gravis;
iocis est amabilis
dulciorque favis;
quicquid Venus imperat,
labor est suavis,
que nunquam in cordibus
habitat ignavis.

Via lata gradior
more iuventutis
inplicor et vitiis
immemor virtutis,
voluptatis avidus
magis quam salutis,
mortuus in anima
curam gero cutis.

 Seething over inwardly
   With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
   Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
   Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
   For the winds to scatter.

Since it is the property
   Of the sapient
To sit firm upon a rock,
   It is evident
That I am a fool, since I
   Am a flowing river,
Never under the same sky,
   Transient for ever.

Hither, thither, masterless
   Ship upon the sea,
Wandering through the ways of air,
   Go the birds like me.
Bound am I by ne'er a bond,
   Prisoner to no key,
Questing go I for my kind,
   Find depravity.

Never yet could I endure
   Soberness and sadness,
Jests I love and sweeter than
   Honey find I gladness.
Whatsoever Venus bids
   Is a joy excelling,
Never in an evil heart
   Did she make her dwelling.

Down the broad way do I go,
   Young and unregretting,
Wrap me in my vices up,
   Virtue all forgetting,
Greedier for all delight
   Than heaven to enter in:
Since the soul is in me dead,
   Better save the skin.

I'm glad I have read this at last, and I'll put some of Helen Waddell's other works on my reading list now. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is 84k by Claire North.

Helen Waddell, by D. Felicitas Corrigan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Until 1845 Ireland had but one University, Trinity College, Dublin. Founded in 1591 on the site of the Augustinian monastery of All Hallows confiscated under Henry VIII, its avowed aim was to conquer Popery and establish a Protestant nation — a somewhat tough proposition. In 1633, in an effort to speed up the process, Laud, Wentworth, and the Provost of Trinity, William Chappell, introduced new Anglicized statutes, inaugurated fresh acts of repression against Catholics,and imposed on the protesting Fellows a completely English style of life modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. In the century that followed, Trinity reached its peak of expansion and achievement. It saw the graduation of men who are its glory: Jonathan Swift 1667-1745; George Berkeley 1685-1753; Edmund Burke 1729-97; Oliver Goldsmith 1730-74; Henry Grattan 1746-1820; and Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763-98. With the exception of ‘poor Poll’, these sprang from the ranks of ruling Anglo-Irish Protestants, yet were all alike Irish patriot-agitators: they fought for liberty, free trade for Ireland, the reform of the land laws, and the granting of Catholic relief. The limited success that attended their efforts was pretty well cancelled out by the Act of Union of 1800, which ushered in a century of political and economic upheaval. By the early nineteenth century, Trinity had become not only an exclusive but also an expensive Protestant stronghold.

This is a lovely lovely biography of Helen Waddell (1889-1965), a medievalist from Northern Ireland (though born in Tokyo wher her grandfather was a missionary). She hit the big time in 1927 with the publication of her book The Wandering Scholars, and had several more successes in the next ten years, including a novel about Peter Abelard, before the war distracted her and, sadly, from 1950 she was no longer in mental shape to continue writing.

It’s a story with a lot of sadness. Her father and mother both died when she was a girl; she was left caring for her stepmother in a very small house in North Belfast. Two brothers died in the first world war. She was quite explicitly blocked by her gender from getting the lectureship at Queen’s that she was surely entitled to. She found love only late in her life, with her publisher Otto Kyllman.

And yet at the same time her prose breathes enthusiasm and love for her subjects which is just hugely effective. Her first book, Lyrics from the Chinese (1913) is online; in her introduction she makes it clear where her heart really lies.

IT is by candlelight one enters Babylon; and all roads lead to Babylon, provided it is by candlelight one journeys. It was by candlelight that John Milton read Didorus Siculus, and by the Third Book he had voyaged beyond the Cape of Hope and now was past Mozambic, and already felt freshly blowing on his face

‘Sabean odours from the spicie shore
Of Arabie the blest.’

It was by candlelight that the sea coast of Bohemia was discovered, and the finding of it made a winter’s tale.  Baghdad is not a city to be seen by day; candlelight is the only illumination for all Arabian nights.

One sees most by candlelight, because one sees little. There is a magic ring, and in it all things shine with a yellow shining, and round it wavers the eager dark. This is the magic of the lyrics of the twelfth century in France, lit candles in ‘a casement ope at night,’ starring the dusk in Babylon; candles flare and gutter in the meaner streets, Villon’s lyrics, these; candles flame in its cathedral-darkness, Latin hymns of the Middle Ages, of Thomas of Celano and Bernard of Morlaix. For if Babylon has its Quartier Latin, it has also its Notre Dame. The Middle Ages are the Babylon of the religious heart.

It is difficult to overstate just how big a cultural figure she was in Britain in the years before the second world war. She received honorary degrees from Columbia, Queen’s Belfast, Durham and St. Andrews (this for someone who Queen’s had failed to hire twenty years earlier), and went to lunch with Queen Mary in 10 Downing Street at the invitation of Stanley Baldwin. Curiously, she never particularly intersected with fellow Ulster exile C.S. Lewis; each of them has a couple of notes of bumping into the other at dinners or parties, but they were not friends.

Anne developed a real enthusiasm for her a couple of years ago, and now after reading this I think I’ll start reading her works as a mini-project myself. One interesting thing that I have already noticed from poking around her available work on the online second-hand market: a lot of the available copies of her shorter, rarer works are inscribed in her own hand. Here, for instance, is her sister’s copy of Lyrics from the Chinese:

Here’s in token of the day
You and I will go away,
      You and I alone.
And on some soft summer night
Through the dusk, and candle-light
      Enter Babylon.

Peg,
With the aforesaid young woman’s love.
Dec. 10th 1913

I admit also that part of her attraction for me is her proximity to my own roots. As a child and young woman, she would escape Belfast to her relatives in Ballygowan House, which is on literally the next hill over from my own ancestral home. In a speech to Banbridge Academy (the school which my second cousins attended), she spoke of

“all this countryside that Banbridge lies at the heart of, names that are themselves like an old folk song or a come-all-ye, Closkelt and Ballyroney, Annabawn and Drumgooland, Loughbrickland and Donaghmore; Ouley and Ballooley, Kilmacrew and Ballygowan and Dromore; these are the names that I heard from my aunts around the fire, and these were the houses where my great-grandfathers went courting my great-grandmothers.”

Once Ballygowan passed out of family hands, her refuge became her sister’s house at Kilmacrew on the other side of Banbridge, where her brother-in-law was the local minister, and their great-granddaughter still keeps her great-great-aunt’s spirit alive. She was kind enough to be hospitable to me, Anne and Anne’s mother a couple of years back.

If the embedding has worked, you should be able to hear Helen’s voice here in a BBC talk from 1955, when she was already very ill, speaking propped up between her lover and her sister. (If the embedding doesn’t work, you can get it here.)

She eventually died in London in 1965, but rests near Kilmacrew in Magherally churchyard with her great-grandmother. The inscription is hard to read these days, but I give a transcription below, including the eccentric capitalisations.


Here resteth the remains
of her whose name in youth was
Jane DONWOODY,
married to Ebenezer Martin
23rd Decemr. 1801
and after a short life
Pleasantly spent in the ways of
Religion, strict and tender
Attention to her near Relatives,
Departed 22nd May 1815 aged 41,
Leaving seven children
and a disconsolate Husband
Waiting to follow.

Here also resteth their great grand-daughter
Helen WADDELL, M.A., D.Litt., younger daughter of
Rev. Hugh Waddell, Tokio, Japan,
born 31st May 1889, died 5th March 1965.
Scholar, Author, Poet. She lifted A veil from the past.
her Prose Made its Saints and Scholars Live Again.
Her English verse
Made lovely lyrics of their Latin Songs.
Her life Enriched all who Knew Her.
“The Light is on Thy Head.”

The biography is, as I said, a lovely lovely book and you can get it here.

Edited to add: this BBC radio programme about her is great listening.

This was the last unread book on my shelves that I acquired in 2013, and I am really kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. I read the last unread book on my shelves acquired in 2012 in May, the last book of 2011 just over a year ago, the last book acquired in 2010 in January 2019, and the last book acquired in 2009 at the end of 2016. Finishing this opens up my 2014 lists, starting with The Company Articles of Edward Teach/Angaelien Apocalypse by Thoraiya Dyer (the shortest), Above/Below by Stephanie Campisi (the longest lingering unread sf book), Selected Prose by Charles Lamb (the longest lingering unread non-fiction) and The Inside of the Cup by the other Winston S. Churchill (both the longest lingering unread non-genre fiction and the most popular on LibraryThing).

September Books 8) Peter Abelard

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8) Peter Abelard, by Helen Waddell

I have long been interested in Helen Waddell; although she was born in Japan, her father ended up in our part of County Down (and gets a mention in my PhD thesis because of his amateur clerical researches into local ecology), and I was always aware of her papers in the QUB Special Collections room. Here, she takes her expertise and interest in the great love story of Abelard and Héloïse in the early 12th century, and gives it a fictional twist.

It’s not as good as it should be. Good points about the book include that she has not blandly adhered to the historical chronology of events, and she is quite charmingly discreet yet clear about such crucial events as sex in the convent refectory and the mutilation of Abelard by Héloïse’s uncle’s men. She also gives us a very good idea of where the two protagonists come from, with excellent sketches of Abelard’s family back in Brittany and Héloïse’s loyalty to the convent in Argenteuil (thanks to which the book sails through the Bechdel test), and the background scenery in Paris is also very convincingly sketched.

But while we have a good idea of where they come from, I wasn’t so convinced about where they go to during the book, particularly in the case of Héloïse – this is her story as much as Abelard’s, and it is quite unjust that she does not get equal billing in the title. History remembers her (and Waddell characterises her) from her later correspondence with Abelard, where one might get the impression that her relationship with him was the only interesting thing that ever happened to her – a twelfth-century version of the Sarah Jane Smith we met in School Reunion, perhaps. (This thought may require a separate post, or at least discussion in comments.) But I don’t think that the historical Héloïse of the 1130s is a reliable witness to her own state of mind of 1116-18, when you take into account who she was writing to and the passage of time. In particular I was struck that their baby son drops out of Waddell’s narrative without a trace, which can hardly have happened in real life. Perhaps also a reader today is less satisfied with the narrative of Heloise sacrificing all for her lover than the reader of 1933 would have been.

With Abelard, as you might expect given Waddell’s other work, she portrays him much more convincingly as a poet and lyricist than as a scholar – indeed, the scholarly scenes are the least convincing in the book, probably because she has taken fewest liberties with the historical facts. Rather bizarrely, one of Abelard’s friends ends the book by prophesying him as the John the Baptist-like fore-runner to Thomas Aquinas, which is really a bit absurd but is placed in such a way that you get the impression Waddell thinks this is the whole point of the story.

Anyway, it’s an interesting effort, but more that it was tried at all than that it is particularly good.

July Books 8) and 9) The Desert Fathers

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8) The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, Translated and with an Introduction by Benedicta Ward
9) The Desert Fathers: Translations from the Latin with an Introduction by Helen Waddell

The Desert Fathers are a long-time interest of Anne’s, so I decided to sample them for myself. The Penguin collection edited by Benedicta Ward simply gives the complete text of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers compiled by Pelagius in the early fourth century; Helen Waddell has selected her favourite bits from that document, perhaps a third of it, and then added on various other texts, concluding with the Lives of St Pelagia the Harlot and St Mary the Harlot, which are about as exciting as you would expect. (If you really want to read them, there is another translation of St Pelagia here and here, with St Mary the Harlot starting a little way down the page here and ending here.)

Both of them are a fascinating insight into the lives and mentalities of the first Christian monastics – men and women who felt that they must go and live in the desert to get closer to God. Despite having been educated by nuns, and having a couple of friends who tried it and didn’t stick with it, I’ve never given much thought to how people who have chosen that path actually think about it and express it to other people. There is surprisingly little in either set of writings that is particularly Christian, and I would suspect that you might get much the same set of sentiments from Buddhist monks or their equivalents elsewhere. There is an uneasy and sometimes consciously very funny tension running through the writings, between on the one hand being deeply devout and determined, and pulling up the other monks who are not trying hard enough; and on the other hand not showing off one’s own piety. One is sometimes reminded of the Monty Python sketch about hermits, echoed in a recent episode of Doctor Who. But at the same time you can’t help but be impressed with the seriousness and dedication with which these people tried to develop their understanding of their creator and themselves by cutting themselves off from the world.

Of the two books, Helen Waddell‘s is much the better. She’s been on my radar screen for a while; although born in Japan and mainly famous for her contributions to mid-twentieth century literary London, she was brought up in Northern Ireland and left her papers to the Queen’s University of Belfast Library. She has written a respectful yet witty introduction to each of the ten pieces, and a longer one for the book of the whole, bemoaning the fact that the reputation of the early Christian monastics has never recovered from being mocked viciously in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She complains that St Simeon Stylites, who lived on a pillar for thirty years, was not in fact a very important figure in Christian history: “His present reputation, vast as it is, dates largely from the eighteenth century, and balances delicately on a paragraph of Gibbon’s prose.” The Penguin edition is interesting for completeness, to see what Helen Waddell chose to leave out; but she got most of the good bits.