Sense and Nonsense: Bishops and Pale Young Curates

Recently, with Terry Hall, Managing Editor of this very journal, I was in Arlington at the home of Michael Jackson—yes, the Michael Jackson, of Houston and Cockburn ’80 fame. Michael was telling us of the burden of bearing, in his very person, such a name. But he admitted one of the high points in his recent life was a conversation with our mutual friend Msgr. Richard Burke at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish. It seems that Msgr. Burke had not been previously aware that there even was a Michael Jackson other than the one who studied Leo Strauss and speculated in vintage wines. In any case, the Michael Jackson, neither rock star nor basketball player, who knows my character well enough, deliberately sent me a copy of The World of Wodehouse Clergy.

On receipt of this inestimable gift, I knew I was in trouble. Neglecting all else, I feared I would be distracted by laughter, by a nostalgia for England, and by the pressing necessity to look up a myriad of new, unfamiliar words like “snaffle,” as in to “snaffle a jam sandwich,” “ferrule,” “rubicund,” “reredos,” “ophreys,” “zareba,” “mangold-wurzels,” or “stoat.” Obviously, I partially succumbed, and once I was caught in the fight between “Walker,” the tomcat owned by the Bishop of Bongo Bongo, and “Percy,” owned by Lady Widdrington, of Bottleby-in-the-Vale, Hants., who had cast her spell over the bishop during a long sea voyage after his retirement from Bongo Bongo, I was a goner. I actually asked Hall and Jackson whether it would have been possible, on evidence of the names of the said tomcats, for P. G. Wodehouse to have known the author of Love in the Ruins and Lost in the Cosmos?

Here among Wodehouse’s clergy—the Mulliners—were wonders beyond my imagination—Gladys Bingley, “a charming girl who looked like a pen wiper,” Brenda Carberry-Pirbright, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. B. B. Carberry-Pirbright, of 11 Maxton Square, South Kensington, Bernard Worple, the Rev. Trevor “Catsmeat” Entwhistle, General Sir Hector Bloodenough, VC, KCIE, MVO. Wodehouse’s women were invariably stronger than his generally confused men. And the man had a penchant for the metaphysical—”cats are not dogs,” “cats will be cats,” and “Muriel Brandsome was incapable of bearing anything in the shape of bossiness from the male.”

Wodehouse’s stories, of course, assume a married clergy, capable of quoting, in a flash, Proverbs xxvii. 14, Ecclesiastes x. 20, or Esdras iv. 41. Once, it seems, the Bishop of Stortford, a man with old school ties and somewhat trendy theology, was asked to unveil a statue at his old school, Harchester, a statue of an old and rather disliked school chum, Lord Hemel of Hempstead, affectionately referred to as “Fatty” in his school days. The bishop—one “Boko” Bickerton in his school days,—and the headmaster, “Catsmeat,” another old boy, having consumed a suspicious tonic called Buck-U-Uppo, invented by a Mulliner uncle, decided to paint at night the new Statue of Lord Hemel at Harchester. This they did, only the bishop forgot and left his hat on the head of Lord Hemel. On discovery, suspicion about the culprit was damaging to ecclesiastical decorum. However, just as the bishop was about to be trapped, a young student of Harchester bravely came forth from nowhere to confess, falsely, that he had done the dastardly deed. The bishop’s relief was, to put it mildly, immense enough to make him wonder about his theology.

The bishop came to himself with a start. He had been thinking of an article which he had just completed for a leading review on the subject of Miracles, and was regretting the tone he had taken, though in keeping with the trend of Modern Thought, had been tinged with something approaching skepticism.

The said “Miracle” was caused by the instigation of the bishop’s new Secretary and curate, the Reverend Augustine Mulliner, who had given two quid to his younger brother, a student at Harcastle.

When this same Augustine Mulliner decided to marry Jane, daughter of the Rev. Stanley Brandon, he had a difficult time breaking the news to the girl’s stern Reverend father. This was where a little “Buck-U-Uppo” had originally been tested. After a scene in which Augustine had saved the fleeing bishop from a snarling dog, the bishop, on learning of Augustine’s problem with the Vicar, gave him some sound advice:

“Think well, Mulliner,” he said. “Marriage is a serious affair. Do not plunge into it without due reflection. I myself am a husband and, though singularly blessed in the possession of a devoted helpmeet, cannot but feel sometimes that a man is better off as a bachelor. Women, Mulliner, are odd.”

The good bishop’s lady, it seems, had insisted on his wearing “woollies” on a warm Spring morning, and this had confused him about the distinctions in things.

So the topic of the clergy and their foibles was not unnoticed by Wodehouse. I am not reading this book rapidly. The first story began:

“Remarkable…how fashions change, even in clergymen. There are very few pale young curates nowadays.”

“True,” I agreed. “Most of them are beefy young fellows who rowed for their colleges. I don’t believe I have ever seen a pale young curate.”

I shall, of course, refrain from commenting on these lines, leaving the case to young marrieds like Jackson and Hall. We might conclude with the observation that the “bossiness of the male” and the “oddness of the woman” are mysteries designed to keep us alert to the miracles we are, to keep us, with the clergy, from being too much “tinged with something approaching skepticism,” because we can, with Wodehouse, delight so much in the wonderfully curious human condition itself.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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