Peculiar people
One of my favorite lines in modern "religious" fiction comes from Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. The redoubtable country preacher, Hazel Motes, informs his landlady that he is a preacher in the "Church Without Christ" ("where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way"). To which the woman innocently replies, "Protestant?" This is fiction and very funny, but it also reveals the author's considered appraisal of the state of southern Protestantism, especially its preachers. As a Catholic, O'Connor seems always to be asking with amazed incredulity, "What is it with these people?"
In his stylish anthology of reminiscences and literary portrayals of the English clergy, compiler Raymond Chapman is posing a similar question: What is it with these clerical types? Or, more accurately, what was it? As a retired English professor at the University of London and an Anglican priest, Chapman is more than qualified to chronicle the peculiar character of the pastoral life. In his book's introduction he writes that today "there is less discernment of what the life of a priest or minister is really like, but perhaps there never was a time when those outside this or any profession really penetrated its nature." He is absolutely correct, and he has set out to right this perennial wrong with almost 200 scenes from clerical life, excerpted not only from famous authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, John Henry Newman and Thomas Hardy but also from the memoirs and diaries of not-so-famous clergymen and clergy-watchers in 16th- through 19th-century England.
Although he includes a few American voices, such as Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson, Chapman has focused almost exclusively on the English because, as he says in his introduction, the combination of clerical privilege and class resentment has given to the English church a character all its own. The American reader will make mental notes on authors excluded, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herbert Melville, C. S. Lewis, O'Connor, James Baldwin, Peter DeVries, John Updike and many others, and perhaps begin to outline a corresponding American anthology.
