The Land Of Spices

Book 296: Virago Modern Classics

by Kate O'Brien

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Historical Fiction; Religious & Inspirational; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Mere Marie-Helene once turned her back on life, sealing up her heart in order to devote herself to God. Now the formidable Mother Superior of an Irish convent, she has, for some time, been experiencing grave doubts about her vocation. But when she meets Anna Murphy, the youngest-ever boarder, the little girl's solemn, poetic nature captivates her and she feels 'a storm break in her hollow heart'. Between them an unspoken allegiance is formed that will sustain each through the years as the Reverend Mother seeks to combat her growing spiritual aridity and as Anna develops the strength to resist the conventional demands of her background.

Release date: May 19, 2016

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 288

Sample

Kate O’Brien has always been something of an enigma. A subtle and persuasive feminist, she could still dismiss any woman who fell short of her standards as ‘a repetitious old bundle’ or ‘a vain tulip of a woman’. High-minded and serious, she once confessed to a liking for dance music, quoting Masefield: ‘Don’t despise dance music. It’s the music hearts break to.’

It is the breaking of hearts, and the role of heartbreak in the moulding of character, that motivates The Land of Spices. Mère Marie-Hélène Archer, Reverend Mother to the Irish convent of a French order, is a formidable Englishwoman who has sealed up her heart to devote herself to the ‘impersonal and active service of God’. Once a radiant and hopeful young girl, she turned her back on life to punish her beloved father for what she saw as an unforgivable act of treachery. Young Anna Murphy has her whole life before her, but before she begins to live it, she too must suffer a possibly fatal blow to her emotions.

Like many of her novels, The Land of Spices is set in O’Brien’s native Limerick, disguised as the imaginary Mellick. It was, in the 1930s, a limited, self-satisfied place, prosperous, nationalistic and rigidly Catholic. It is interesting to think that the novel is set in the same county and covers much the same period as Angela’s Ashes, but whereas Frank McCourt’s memoir is a searing study of poverty and prejudice in the Limerick slums, the children in O’Brien’s novel come from the newly emerged Catholic upper middle classes, the prosperous business and professional groups. O’Brien was one of the few Irish rural writers to write about the middle classes and her preoccupations are of the Jane Austen school, snobbery and property and the struggle for intelligent girls to pursue their own destiny.

In The Land of Spices it is Anna Murphy who must overcome the petty aspirations of her family. At six years of age she becomes the youngest-ever boarder at the convent of La Compagnie de la Sainte Famille. Timid and inquisitive, she is noticed by the Reverend Mother, who responds to the spiritual and intellectual hunger of the small, intelligent girl. Anna is ready to be shaped by the sophisticated curriculum of the French order and Mère Marie-Hélène, who has reached the limits of her patience with the self-satisfied parochialism of her Irish nuns and clergy, now finds a new purpose in her vocation.

The reissue of The Land of Spices is particularly timely in a period when convent life has all but disappeared. This is no routine Catholic schooldays lark but a serious study of the politics and power of an all-female hierarchy. O’Brien exquisitely evokes the harem atmosphere of convent life, the beauty and the silence, the bickering and the cruelties and their lasting influence on the lives of young girls. The nuns are not figures of fun but professional women, stubborn and ambitious (and among the few of their sex in their time with authority and autonomy). The girls are impressionable and irrepressible, but along with the tug of life on their romantic sensibilities, there are the assaults on the spirit of a life of stillness and commitment, vividly described in this passage where girls, soon to leave school, hear the sounds of distant bathers and boaters as they walk in the convent grounds.

… the trees of the convent spread their wide and tranquillising arms, and the great house stood deep-based in reproachful calm, secure in its rule, secure in Christ against the brief assaults of evening or of roses. Girls about to leave, awaiting life, felt this dismissal by the spirit of the house of the unanswered, lovely conflict implicit in the hour …

The author creates a beautiful balance between the relative worldliness of the governing nuns and the as yet untouched spirits of the girls. Beautifully balanced also is the contained emotional interplay of the characters. There is not a trace of sentimentality. There are to be no grand romantic resolutions. Anna never really develops any real affection for her mentor. In fact she lacks conventional childish appeal. At six, she is captivating in her solemnity but as she grows older her watchfulness and guardedness make her seem aloof and even charmless. O’Brien, who herself once said, ‘I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life,’ would almost certainly have shared Anna’s disapproval of her adolescent companions’ hysteria. Yet the emotions and vulnerabilities are revealed like a play of shadow and light: in the young girl who hardens with each hurt, in the older woman whose dulled emotions begin to show colour like an old painting restored. Merely by having her heart unlocked, Mère Marie-Hélène is able to forgive and progress. Anna’s emotions never get unlocked, but a small epiphany at the book’s ending makes a shaft of light that will guide her towards her true future. If novels can be music, then this is a novel with perfect pitch.

The Land of Spices is O’Brien’s most autobiographical work. Her own mother died of cancer in 1903 when she was six and her father thought that life would be less lonely for her if she joined her older sisters at Laurel Hill boarding school, a convent of a French order, The Faithful Companions of Jesus. This convent was the model for the order of the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille, even down to the English Reverend Mother, who was considered something of a cold fish, but who won Kate’s immediate allegiance by telling her that they had to order a special small chair for her and had asked for three to be sent on approval so that she could choose one for herself. The school was viewed with suspicion locally because the children were taught languages other than Irish and both nuns and pupils drank real coffee. Like Anna, Kate O’Brien won a university scholarship and was pressured by her family into taking a ‘decent’ job in a bank instead. She went to college, got her degree, and was outraged when a waggish uncle sent a letter of congratulation which ended: ‘I wonder what the next step will be – M.A. or Ma?’

Exposed to both religious and French influences at an impressionable age, she emerged both high-minded and broad-minded. The Land of Spices reflects O’Brien’s own ideal of moral perfectionism. Her books offer a cynical view of romance, almost as if love were a childish resolution to life’s more serious quest. When Tom and Angèle fall in love in The Last of Summer, the serious-minded Jo sees it as ‘a trick of the senses and of their passing needs’ and reflected that ‘she was inclined to see human love as a mistake anyhow’.

But O’Brien was as contemptuous of prudery as of sentimentality. Long before other women writers tackled such subjects she wrote about homosexuality and sexual disease and must have enjoyed shocking the narrow sensibilities of her era when she had the blunt Mrs Cusack in The Last of Summer declare of her moody barmaid: ‘’Twill be an ease to me, I can tell you, when that one’s periods are concluded and done with.’

Even more shocking to her Irish public was her outspokenness in regard to the smug insularity of her own country. Mère Marie-Hélène, exasperated by complaints about the foreign cooking produced by the Normandy kitchen nun who is a superb chef, considers: ‘How odd were these Irish, who believed themselves implacably at war in the spirit with England, yet hugged as their own her dreariest daily habits, and could only distrust the grace and good sense of Latin Catholic life!’

Later, after a failed conflict with a spiteful and petty-minded Irish nun, the Reverend Mother decides:

The Irish liked themselves, and throve on their own psychological chaos. It had been shown to be politically useless for an alien temperament to wrestle with them. Wrong-headed, vengeful, even by the long view stupid they might often seem, and apparently defeated – but on their own ground in some mystically arrogant wild way they were perpetual victors … They were an ancient, martyred race, and of great importance to themselves …

Kate O’Brien frequently employed an outsider’s view to show up the less likeable facets of Irish life. French Angèle in The Last of Summer is dismayed by the ‘cold fanaticism’ of a display of Irish dancing. Old Miss Robertson, Anna’s suffragette friend in The Land of Spices, disapproves when a bishop expounds the virtues of the nationalist youth movement ‘Sinn Fein’ by telling her, ‘It means “ourselves”, you know.’ To which the spirited Miss Robertson replies, ‘It’s a very unattractive motto to give to young people.’

Kate O’Brien did not see these broadsides as an attack on her people but, like her feminism, as a crusade against those who would inhibit their development. The authorities understood this only too well and extracted vengeance by banning her work. Ostensibly, there was no bar on freedom of speech in Ireland, so The Land of Spices – one of her finest and most moral works – was banned for lewdness on the basis of a single line where an act of intimacy is described with such delicacy as to seem almost Victorian: ‘She saw [them],’ O’Brien wrote, ‘in the embrace of love.’

It was not the first time the author had fallen victim to a censor. When her first novel, Without My Cloak, came out, it was a source of great pride to her Aunt Fan, who was a nun in the Presentation Convent. Fan begged Kate’s sister Nance for a copy, but Nance said it was not suitable reading for nuns. But she continued to plead and Nance gave her a copy, with certain pages pinned together and the warning: ‘if you don’t remove the pins you should be all right.’ The elderly nun left the pins in place and thoroughly enjoyed the novel.

The author was greatly amused by the latter incident, which she recounted with relish in her memoir Presentation Parlour, but she was distressed and wounded by the official censorship, which affected her sales and effectively made her an outsider in her own country.

And yet, in many ways, O’Brien was an outsider. ‘To possess without being possessed,’ she once wrote, ‘is the gift an exile can take from a known place.’

‘To possess without being possessed’ might also have been a motif for her own life. A celebrated public figure, her private life remained extremely private. After a brief attempt at conventional marriage, she confronted her lesbianism, but so little is known of her relationships that survivors of her own family still debate as to whether Kate could really have been gay. Although she described herself as a Catholic-Agnostic, long years of convent life (and the fact that two of her favourite aunts were nuns) left her with a yearning for a life of perfection. She would probably have shared the rationalist Dr Curran’s approval of religious practice in The Ante-Room: ‘Religion exacts a soul of every man.’ One of her acquaintances once said: ‘What she really wanted most in life was to be a Reverend Mother.’

It may have been this private aspiration that thwarted her more public one. Kate O’Brien fell just short of being a great writer. Too polemical to let her books ever fully take flight, she was also too intellectually arrogant. She must have been an editor’s nightmare. Large chunks of untranslated French and German punctuate The Land of Spices, yet this elegantly wrought novel is very close to a work of art. There is an enviable precision with ordinary emotions, as when little Anna is visited by her mother at boarding school: ‘Anna stared contentedly up into a face which was, as it happened, pretty, but which was for her beyond qualification. It was Mother, and through it shone the images of fixity, the things that always were, and did not have to be mastered.’ And the author accepted, as all great artists do, the role of the flawed in the scheme of perfection. Attempting to understand Pilar, a beautiful but frivolous South American student, Anna Murphy suddenly comes to a point of revelation, perceiving her as ‘a motive in art’. By this understanding of how ordinary beauty is transformed by contemplation, Anna is herself saved from ordinariness. It is a wonderful moment in a book that is as delicate and as practical as a china cup.

Clare Boylan 1999

‘My child, what do you demand?’

‘The holy habit of religion, my Lord …’

The chapel was warm, although it was early October. Reverend Mother hoped that no one would faint, but from where she stood beside the Bishop at the top of the sanctuary steps, she could hear a hysterical fuss towards the back of the school benches:
Schwärmerei for Eileen O’Doherty, who was at that moment receiving the veil of the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille.

Three postulants were being received. Two had already knelt as Eileen knelt, and waited for her now in prie-dieux placed outside the communion rail. Their heads were bowed into their hands. They were dressed as brides, in white silk and lace veils. All three had been educated at Sainte Famille, all were young; but for the school, alert and feverish, the dramatic day was Eileen’s. She was beautiful, she had played hockey like a goddess, she had never spoken or looked unkindly; three Junes ago, when she was about to leave, the school had been all but unmanageable with Schwärmerei. Then she entered the world, was presented at the English Court, and admired, it was said, by the Queen herself, the beautiful Alexandra. She had danced through a London season, and returned to decorate Irish society for a year. Now here she was, back in the school chapel, asking the Bishop to admit her as a candidate for the religious life. Girls who had adored her from First Preparatory desks two years ago – members of the First Eleven now, or even enfants de Marie – giggled and sobbed into their hot gloved hands, and counted up the hearts that must be bleeding for Eileen today, in London clubs, and in the messroom of the garrison. It was almost a certainty that Rosita Maloney would faint before the ceremony ended.

The Bishop blessed the folded habit, girdle and veil. The chaplain made the responses to the Latin prayers. As Reverend Mother stood in outward composure, but consciously struggling, as she would to the end of her life, to keep her hands in repose, she looked down at the beautiful bride-postulant and a reflection of dry pity escaped across her prayers.

‘She had to come back to this – I wonder why? I wonder why she has refused the sunny, ordinary life her face was made for? But after all, she’ll find it here. Plenty of sunny ordinariness.’

Reverend Mother did not think highly of today’s three postulants, and of Eileen O’Doherty, who brought her large dot to the Order, she thought least. But she reflected now, in correction of a passing uncharitableness, that all had good characters, good health and a true desire to serve God in obedience to the rules of the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille.

Received and blessed, with the folded serge garments lying on her opened hands, the white-robed girl rose from the altar-steps and withdrew with grace to join her less comely companions. Reverend Mother’s eyes passed from her and fell by chance on the left-hand corner of the first of the school benches, near the communion rail. She almost smiled at what she saw there.

The little new girl, six years old and small for her age, was crouched down on her haunches and was leaning out over the lower rung of her pew; her chin was cupped in her hands and there was an expression of busy attention on her face. She watched the three brides genuflect in unison, and turn to walk with bowed heads and swishing trains down the centre aisle, between the murmurings of the school and their moved relatives. She leant out over her barrier to see the last train swirl to beyond her view over the red carpet, and then resumed her first position, chin still in her hands, to observe the movements of the Bishop as, assisted by chaplain and acolytes, he vested himself to say Mass.

‘At least there is no Schwärmerei in that face,’ Reverend Mother thought amusedly. ‘Anna Murphy isn’t going to faint. Indeed, she looks as if she is memorising the whole affair, for critical purposes.’ But when she left the sanctuary and came to kneel in her own prie-dieu at the left-hand side of the chancel and close beside the little new girl, she leant over to her and touched her shoulder.

‘You must try to kneel up straight, Anna. It isn’t respectful to stick your head out through the bars,’ she said. ‘And now sit down until Mass begins.’

Anna obeyed her immediately, and, clutching a hymn-book, began to turn its pages with care.

The organ wheezed far away at the back of the nuns’ tribune, and the choir overhead, supported unsteadily by the girls in the chancel, began the hymn held dedicate at Sainte Famille to such occasions as the present:

‘Not for the consolations

Outflowing from Thy love …’

Reverend Mother reflected as she listened that if Saint Teresa of Avila did in fact write the words now being chanted so untidily, there would be little doubt that her wisdom would have forbidden their devotional misuse by girls – but traditions were traditions, she thought wearily, and who was she to be so boldly sure of what Teresa would have thought? ‘Not for the joy that waits me …’ if prayerfulness was stirred in her by such perilous assertion of the love of God, who was to know what instant of pure devotion, perfect praise, they might not light in some fresher, holier, more innocent heart?

‘I have grown to be a coward and a snob in Thy service,’ she prayed repentantly. ‘Teach me to be otherwise before it is too late. Teach me to escape from the carpings of my small judgment, and to see Thy creatures sometimes with a vestige of Thy everlasting love. Make me humble, Lord; make me do Thy work from my heart, not always with this petty, miserable brain. Compel me to understand that there are a million ways of finding the favour of Thy mercy. Lord, give me charity. Give me the grace to find Thy image in us all …’

But as she prayed for herself and found momentary relief from the dryness of her own sensibility in an appeal against it, conscience reminded her that all her prayer today should be for the three new lives being dedicated to a work she knew to be so hard. Yet, dutifully though she turned her mind from her own need of help to theirs, thoughts of office and government crowded into it, so that the three novices were lost almost immediately in anxieties covering a whole community of nuns and a school of sixty girls.

The little new girl pulled her sleeve.

‘I can’t find this hymn, Reverend Mother.’ She held out the open hymn-book.

‘It isn’t in that book, Anna. But you can’t read that small print, can you?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘And long words?’

‘Fairly long ones.’

The hymn was over. By now the three brides would have taken off their white silk and lace, and, bullied by Mother Mary Martin – poor old Sœur Amélie, tears pouring down her face – would have fulfilled her traditional duty of cutting off their hair. Now they were dressed in the black serge, the white coif and the leather girdle that, God willing, would be their fashion until death. The Bishop was waiting to begin Mass. It was time they reappeared and knelt in their prie-dieux of honour again.

As Reverend Mother thought this she saw them appear at the chapel door, Margaret first, Linda next, and Eileen bringing up the rear – tall and beautiful, looking pale in her white coif. As she reached the middle of the chancel there was a thud and a groan in one of the school benches. Someone was carried out then, on Sister Matthew’s strong shoulders: Rosita Maloney, in what she honestly believed was a ‘dead faint.’ Reverend Mother glanced without particular interest in the direction of the scuffling and giggling. ‘Be quiet, Madeleine,’ she heard someone whisper violently. ‘Reverend Mother is absolutely glaring at us.’

The novices took their places and the Bishop began to say Mass.

The ‘Reception’ breakfast was laid in the Long Parlour. The three new novices partook of it in the company of the Bishop, the chaplain, their parents and members of their families. It was the last time in life that they would sit down as guests at the same table with ‘people in the world.’ Reverend Mother, Mother Assistant, Mother Scholastic, and other important members of the community moved about the great oval table and waited on their guests. There were three white-iced ‘Reception’ cakes, each bearing one of the three newly conferred religious names: Sister Angela, Sister Martin, Sister Imelda. (Eileen O’Doherty had chosen Blessed Imelda as her patroness, and now Rosita Maloney was fermenting a cult of that innocuous saint throughout the school.)

There were white flowers on the table, bitter-smelling white chrysanthemums and feathery Michælmas. Sunlight lay temperately on the convent lawns and golden elm-trees, but did not reach the westward windows, so that the parlour was cold. But voices fell warmly on each other, and tears, which had been wet and even desolate at moments in the chapel, were for now no more than a guarded brightness in a parent’s eyes. There was a good French smell of coffee. At every footfall in the room the chandeliers tinkled prettily.

‘… and such a beautiful little address you gave us, my Lord,’ Mrs O’Doherty was saying. ‘So spiritual, I thought – didn’t you, Frank? I always do say that your Lordship’s sermons are really spiritual.’

Mrs O’Doherty was a woman whose stupidity might even be described as unusual, and the Bishop, of an intelligence wide and impatient, would normally not have wasted nervous energy in hearing anything she had to say; but he was invariably touched by the spectacle of youth, full of vows and prayers, making assault on the long, hidden life of perfection, and the gentle thoughts induced thereby made him temporarily inclined to attempt patience, even when a fool spoke.

‘I’m glad of that,’ he said, ‘since, after all, they are sermons.’

Reverend Mother smiled as she replenished Father Conroy’s cup.

‘You certainly gave them an encouraging send-off, my Lord,’ said Mr McMahon, the father of Linda, now Sister Martin. ‘I’ve always thought I admired my daughter’s character’ – he smiled at her very lovingly; he was making a great effort to be bright at this farewell feast – ‘but your beautiful eulogy …’

‘Oh Daddy, I know,’ said the young novice. ‘I’m afraid that most of what you said about us made me feel an awful hypocrite, my Lord,’ she added shyly.

‘When I see a good thing being attempted, Mr McMahon,’ said the Bishop – ‘and that’s not very often – I like to praise the attempt. When people decide to give up the pride of life instead of planning to snatch it, I don’t want to make heavy weather. I like to rejoice, since God rejoices. Time will test these three good girls, and whoever likes can start moralising then. But today we witnessed purity of intention, and when you see that, you know that for the moment God is glorified. A rare event.’

The Bishop lifted his coffee-cup and drained it. Mrs O’Doherty could never see much fault in him – since he was a Bishop and she was a snob – but the rapidity of his speech did always seem uncouth to her. Now, however, not having caught a word of what he had said, she very tolerantly gave a sigh of deep appreciation.

‘In any case,’ said Father Conroy, ‘time enough for them to start hearing about their bad characters when the Mistress of Novices gets a clutch on them! Isn’t that so, Margaret? – oh, I beg your pardon – isn’t that so, Sister Angela?’

Sister Angela was a fat little thing and a giggler. She giggled now.

‘How long do you think it will be, Reverend Mother, before they go to the novitiate?’ Mr McMahon asked, with bright courage.

‘I think that we shall be able to arrange for them to be accompanied to Bruges within a fortnight, Mr McMahon,’ Reverend Mother said.

‘Ah! So soon?’

‘I think so.’

‘It seems a shame,’ said Father Conroy, with pointed playfulness, ‘it seems a shame that our own Irish girls have to go off to do their religious training in a barbarous place like that!’

Reverend Mother smiled as she replaced a dish on a side table.

‘Bruges is not a “barbarous” place, Father Conroy – and our novitiate there is one of the most beautiful religious houses in northern Europe.’

‘No doubt, Reverend Mother – but it isn’t Irish. Is it, now?’

‘No; it isn’t Irish.’

Father Conroy seemed to think he had won some point or other.

‘That is all I meant,’ he said generously.

Mrs O’Doherty did not know Bruges, but she had spent her honeymoon at the Italian lakes and twice since then had spent a fretful and dyspeptic week in Paris. Also she was a Sainte Famille ‘old girl,’ and considered that even in these days of social disintegration the Order’s French tradition conferred a ‘cachet,’ a ‘je ne sais quoi’ – as she said now across the table to young Sister Angela’s mother, who was not an ‘old girl’; who was, in fact, as Mrs O’Doherty knew, a very common woman, a daughter and sister of tradesmen. However, this was an occasion for tact, so Mrs O’Doherty talked of foreign parts, and in order to put the other lady at her ease asked her for her opinions on Paris and Milan, though knowing that of course she could not have been in either place.

The Bishop talked across the ladies’ talk to Mr McMahon, about the Irish language and its possible revival. Major O’Doherty complimented Mother Bonaventure on the singing of the school during Mass.

‘A perfect rendering of the Benedictus, Mother – perfect! And I flatter myself I know what I’m talking about.’

Mother Bonaventure knew that the sopranos had been flat throughout the rendering, but she helped the major to roast apples and to cream whipped with sherry, and agreed with him that he knew what he was talking about.

‘Bruges La Morte,’ said Mrs O’Doherty, ‘how delightful for my darling Eileen – and your sweet – er – Margaret, is it not? – to be setting off for such a storied spot!’

Reverend Mother stood apart by the side-table.

Her memory had taken a curiously desolate plunge across many years.

She was forty-three now. It was twenty-five years since she had taken final vows in the chapel at Sainte Fontaine in Bruges, and thence gone out to her work as the Order directed. To Vienna, to Turin, to Cracow, then back to Brussels, to the Place des Ormes, where she had been child and girl and had received the habit, even as these three received it today, in her school chapel. For eleven years she had worked at Place des Ormes, as Mother Scholastic, and afterwards as Assistant to Mother General. She had been well content there, and looked forward to the long passage of the years, and to lying at last in the dusty cemetery by the orchard, where many of the names on the little black crosses were those of nuns who had taught her or worked with her.

But in her fortieth year she had been posted to this Irish ho. . .