I wrote about the author Elizabeth Goudge a few days ago. I had just discovered her book, Henrietta’s House (1942) and hadn’t really enjoyed it. Even so, I realized that Internet Archive** had a lot of Goudge’s books and I started rereading the Eliot trilogy, The Bird in the Tree (1940), The Herb of Grace (1948), and The Heart of the Family (1953).
This group of books centers around Lucilla Eliot and her children, grand-children, great-grandchildren, and others, who come to be a part of her family. Maurice, her most beloved of six children, dies in World War I. In the aftermath she buys a house in marsh country across from the Channel Islands and brings up his son, her grandson, David. (The mom also died.) The house is called Damerosehay and has legends associated with it of people who valued fidelity. The first book in the trilogy, The Bird in the Tree, is centered around the desire of Lucilla’s grandson, to marry his former aunt-in-law, Nadine. His uncle, who was much older than Nadine, has divorced her, so technically she’s free to marry.
The book is in some ways an extended discussion on what truth really is. David thinks that his feelings of Love for Nadine are the most real thing around, and therefore, he must act upon them, to be acting in truth. And he does think that he must act upon truth. Lucilla has a completely different conception of the virtues of love and duty, and their relationship to truth. The book is surprisingly on topic for today when people talk a lot about their feelings and whether truth matters. They do not believe that faithfulness exists, let alone that it might be a virtue to put up with a difficult situation in the name of faithfulness.
What struck me strongly this morning was that Lucilla’s house, Damerosehay, is a sort of grownup version of Henrietta’s house, in the book of that name. Henrietta wanted a house where everyone she loved would come and be safe. In her story, it’s difficult to find Henrietta’s house because the very bushes and trees conspire to hide it. Nothing like that happens in the Eliot saga. There are woods everywhere on the way to the house but they don’t deliberately conceal it. The animals around have a bit of mystical feeling around Christmas time for the children in the story but otherwise The Bird in the Tree is a very grownup book concerned with an adult question.
What would happen to a house that was built on faithfulness, fidelity to others even at great cost, if someone were to come along and destroy that ideal of faithfulness? That’s what Goudge is writing about here. In the second book of the trilogy, The Herb of Grace, Lucilla thinks that …
Every home was a brick in the Great Wall of decent living that men erected over and over again against the perpetual flooding in of evil
p. 52 The Herb of Grace
It’s a bit of a shock to discover that Henrietta’s House was written later than The Bird in the Tree. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t quite successful. It is a book of wish fulfillment for children, but A City of Bells, to which it is a sequel, is not a children’s book. Very curious.
Elizabeth Goudge was considered by many people to be a kind of theologian. The Eliot trilogy is certainly part of what gave her that reputation. All three books contain extended passages working through the consequences upon a soul of a given action. Goudge also has compelling quotations from different authors that are worth a meditation all by themselves. I know that the passage from the Phaedo (written by Plato about Dialogues of Socrates) that Goudge quotes about swans gave me a lot of peace in the wake of my brother’s death. In that passage Socrates says,
But men, because of their own fear of death, misrepresent the swans and say that they sing for sorrow, in mourning for their own death. They do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or has any other trouble; no, not even the nightingale or the swallow or the hoopoe which are said to sing in lamentation. I do not believe they sing for grief, nor do the swans; but since they are Apollo’s birds, I believe they have prophetic vision, and because they have foreknowledge of the blessings in the other world they sing and rejoice on that day more than ever before. And I think that I am myself a fellow-servant of the swans; and am consecrated to the same God and have received from our master a gift of prophecy no whit inferior to theirs, and that I go out from life with as little sorrow as they.
** I have to admit to feeling slightly morally compromised using Internet Archive since someone is suing them and they lost, but there it is. Some books are orphaned and can’t be found easily, when they used to be in every library around. So I’m not posting a link again.
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