Isabel Colegate’s ‘Orlando King’ trilogy was republished by Bloomsbury in one volume this summer to enthusiastic reviews. It reminded me to dig out her 2002 work of non-fiction, ‘A Pelican in the Wilderness’ (HarperCollins) subtitled ‘Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses’. It’s a fascinating subject, the huge scope of which Colegate surveys with verve and style.
The title is taken from the writings of the 17th-century mystic Thomas Traherne, and while much of the book deals with Christian themes (the dustjacket features an Edward Lear painting of Mount Athos) it’s by no means limited to religious recluses. Colegate’s study ranges around Chinese poets, Indian sadhus, medieval anchoresses, the ornamental hermits of 18th century estates right up to modern shunners of society, such as J D Salinger. Thoreau with his lonely hut at Walden pond finds a place here, as does Chris McCandless, whose hermitage was the abandoned bus in Alaska where he was found dead, victim of the dangerous quest for ultimate reality.
Colegate doesn’t go in for editorialising or moralising, content to tell these extraordinary stories in condensed form. Her pages are filled with eccentrics. We meet Thomas Bushell, an associate of Francis Bacon who, after Bacon’s death in 1726 went off happily to live in a cave. John Aubrey noted that the queen mother sent an Egyptian mummy to Bushell in a spectacular example of regifting. ‘I beleeve long ere this time the dampnesse of the place has spoyled it with mouldinesse,’ the diarist concluded.
She writes about the Desert Fathers with wonderful detachment, leaving us to see them as divinely inspired or just very difficult and odd, according to taste. St Jerome, subject of so many wonderful Renaissance paintings with his lion and cardina’s hat, ‘seems to have hated women… He also hated various rival scholars, and he certainly detested the Syrian anchorites who were his neighbours in the desert.’ Solitude doesn’t necessarily sweeten the spirit.
Colegate travels to some remote places in pursuit of her subject, including hiring a four-wheel drive in Damascus for a foray into the Syrian desert. (It’s one of the moments that underlines just how much has changed in the 18 years since publication.) The attempt pays off; Father Paolo, a Jesuit, is tracked down in a remote monastery, built in the 6th century. What happened to his plans to form a community of coenobites among the rocks? ‘Part of the fascination of that part of the world has always been its danger, and it is not yet quite clear what will happen now that President Assad, that man of iron, is dead,’ wrote Colegate.
Those delightful fellows, the ornamental hermits, prove much more relaxing company. The long-running professional hermit of Hawkstone in Shropshire having died, it proved hard to find a suitable replacement. An automaton, ‘which apparently both moved and spoke’, was installed, but eventually a ‘stuffed hermit, posed carefully in a dimly-lit window and adorned with a goat’s beard’ proved sufficient to remind visitors of the fleeting nature of human existence.
On the literary side, many poets and writers have taken themselves off, if not to caves and huts, at least to remote nooks in order to work. Coleridge’s pesky person from Porlock is just one example of the artistic danger of even the slenderest link to society. Rilke and the Romantics found solitude congenial, if not essential. Colegate also covers sociophobes, such as Twenties society butterfly Stephen Tennant, lover of Siegfried Sassoon, who shut himself away as his beauty faded. The Victorian Duke of Portland would dismiss his servants if they were caught looking at him, and undertook the building of 15 miles of tunnels on his estate to avoid the public gaze. (The Duke inspired Mick Jackson’s wonderful 1997 novel The Underground Man).
Let’s face it, there wasn’t anything this lot didn’t know about social distancing and lockdown. Colegate also provides an extensive reading list that is very Covid-appropriate.