Aelred's Sin

Acclaim for
Aelred’s
Sin

‘A writer who is slowly building up a solid reputation as one of the important writers of a new generation… There is a great deal of sensitivity in Scott’s portrayal of all his characters… an important work to sensitise and effect change.’

PROFESSOR KEN RAMCHAND,
Trinidad
Sunday
Guardian

‘Scott skilfully evokes the sombre atmosphere of monastic life. His descriptive writing is beautiful. If you fantasise about love among the religious orders, this is your book.’

Gay
News

‘It is full of vivid descriptive passages of the monastic routine and the natural world. It is unfailingly sincere.’

Times
Literary
Supplement

‘A compassionate, beautifully written and thoroughly explicit story of homoeroticism.
Aelred’s
Sin
is a big work in every way [and] will further reinforce Lawrence Scott’s reputation as an established and important Caribbean writer.’

KEITH JARDIM,
Trinidad
Guardian

‘A bitter-sweet historical gay love novel, stylishly written.’

Bristol
Evening
Post

‘A fine and sensitive and compassionate book that, disturbing as it sometimes is, demonstrates genuine literary skill … A gifted achievement; it is a worthwhile contribution to the hallowed tradition of West Indian literature.’

RAOUL PANTIN,
Sunday
Express,
Trinidad

‘
Aelred’s
Sin
is a book full of interest and daring. The details of monastic life, the layering of relationships and the exploration of various possibilities for male relationships form part of the tension that Scott creates and sustains throughout.’

Judges
’
Citation
-
Commonwealth
Writer’s
Prize
1999

I wish to acknowledge particular inspiration from John Boswell’s
Christianity,
Social
Tolerance
and
Homosexuality
(the University of Chicago Press). I am grateful for the balance I received from Brian Patrick McGuire
Friendship
and
Community,
The
Monastic
Experience
350-
1250
(Cistercian Publications). It was with great excitement that I returned to Jean Leclercq’s
The
Love
of
Learning
and
the
Desire
for
God,
New York, 1961; Aelred of Rievaulx’s
Spiritual
Friendship
(trans. Mary Eugenia Laker SSND) Cistercian Publications;
Aelred
of
Rievaulx’s
The
Mirror
of
Charity
(trans. Elizabeth Connor OCSO), Cistercian Publications. My story of Jordan owes a debt to
The
History
of
Mary
Prince
(Pandora Press) and
The
Life
of
Olaudah
Equiano,
or Gustavus
Vassa
the
African
(Longman). I wish to acknowledge further inspiration from Maud Ellman’s
The
Hunger
Artists:
Starving,
Writing
&
Imprisonment
(Virago)& Thorn Gunn’s
The
Man
with
Night
Sweats
(Faber & Faber); James Walvin’s
Black
Ivory
(Fontana Press); and David Dabydeen’s
Hogarth’s
Blacks
(Manchester University Press).

I wish to acknowledge my use of quotes from the following: Jerome Bruner’s
Actual
Minds,
Possible
Worlds:
Acts
of
Meaning
(Harvard Press); James Baldwin’s
Another
Country
(Penguin); David M. Knowles’s
The
Monastic
Life
in
England
(Cambridge University Press); Peter Fryer’s
Staying
Power
(Pluto Press); Bruce Chatwin’s
What
Am
I
Doing
Here?
(Picador); Gerard Manley Hopkins’s
Collected
Poems
(Penguin); Justin McCann
The
Rule
of
Saint
Benedict
(Sheed & Ward); Aelred of Rievaulx’s
Spiritual
Friendship
and
The
Mirror
of
Charity
(Cistercian Pubications); Walter Daniel’s
Life
of
Aelred
(Cistercian Publications);
The
Jerusalem
Bible
(Darton, Longman & Todd); also from the singers Bobby Darrin, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Scott Mackenzie, and The Drifters; and from the calypsonians Arrow, Lord Invader, and The Roaring Lion.

I wish to thank in particular: Caroline Griffin, Margaret Busby, Ken Ramchand, Pam Kernaghan, Jill Wight who all read the manuscript, commented and encouraged. I am grateful to the monks of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey for their hospitality and use of the novitiate and monastic libraries; Bernie and Wendy Hewing for my stay at ‘Pebbles’ in Steyning; Mike Shannon for a visit to Rievaulx Abbey; Mike Green for Pop research; Astra Blaug; and Vanessa Unwin, Susan Herbert and David Shelley at Allison & Busby. Without the steadfast commitment of Elizabeth Fairbairn, my agent at John Johnson Ltd, Jenny Green’s critical devotion and my editor Peter Day’s faith, enthusiasm and understanding, I could not have completed this book. Thank you all three.

Prologue

for Joe and Miriam

High above the plains, sheer from the valleys, the forested mountains climbed to summits in the clouds.

This was a wild place.

The green enamel cracked into rock face and crumbled under the force of cataracts, waterfalls, cascades. The rivers surged around ancient stones, pulling at the roots of old trees; dragging at these mountains, at their might and wildness.

On one of those plateaux, which you come upon with astonishment and relief, wild grasses blowing in the breeze, trees called Immortelle, a small band of men built a cloister and a church in grass and mud; wattle,
tapia,
founded on stone.

Gardens flourished and workshops hummed with industry. Truly it could be said that they prayed and worked.
Ora
et
labora.

Out of this wild and uninhabitable place, they harnessed the natural fertility of the ground for the provision of food and beauty. Bees within their own communities could cultivate the pollen, attended by butterflies; the monks extracted the honey. They cobbled shoes. They tended poultry and farmed a herd of cows which grazed in a highland savannah. They dammed the river for a reservoir.

Within this place of natural solitude, they fashioned spaces of light and shadow; shade from the heat, gardens
with flowers and shrubs; oleander, pink like coral, white like first-communion clothes; climbing plants on arbours and trellises, bougainvillea and allamanda. At the centre of this perfected place, a fountain which small birds delighted in spilled its light. The birds darted to and fro. In this pool of light, goldfish swam.

Within these walls, this band of men became attached to higher qualities. They sought to detach themselves from mortals. They sought a Divine Wisdom. As one of their ancient writers wrote of them: ‘… as angels might be, they were clothed in undyed wool spun and woven from the pure fleece of the sheep. So named and garbed and gathered together like flocks of seagulls, they shine as they walk with the whiteness of snow.’

This was a paradise, a cloistered heaven.

Outside this cloister, they built a school for boys. They hoped that some of these young boys would join them.

The boy was twelve years old when he left the old wooden school, which smelt of coconut oil and which leant against the big stone church of Notre-Dame de Grace to go to the school in the mountains, following his best friend and the ideals of the monk, Dom Maurus.

Dom Maurus had white hands and beneath his pale skin the veins ran dark blue.

Blood, like Quink ink.

The boy saw the monk’s blood written on the white pages of his copy book. When he lifted his eyes in church, he saw the same blood in the veins which ran in the white marble of the altar and along the arms and legs of the replica of Michelangelo’s
Pietà
:
the limp, naked, dead Christ in Mary’s his mother’s lap.

Dom Maurus’s breath smelt of the white wafers of holy communion and the red wine which was blood and which the boy did not drink. It was not the custom then to commune under both kinds.

In the whirl of the school-yard play, the monk drew the boy and his best friend close to him, into the clouds of his white cotton habit, the wind taking his scapular. He hugged them. The monk’s armpits smelt of incense.

Here, close to his friend, in the folds of the monk’s habit, in the embrace of his cowl, the boy looked out at the world of other friends whose blood he could not see below the colour of their skin. In the heat, he saw rouge playing like a flame on their hard black cheeks. Red and black like a jumbie bead.

When, now, I look back at this boy, it is these things - blue veins, blood, holy communion wafers, the smell of wine and incense when caught up in the clouds of the monk’s white cotton habit with his best friend - which made him leave his mother and father, his brother and sisters, to follow his best friend and the ideals of the monk, Dom Maurus.

When I look back, with him, I see his lost friends with skin the colour of cinnamon, eyes the green light of the sea. Others I see with skin the colour of black coral, eyes like tamarind seeds. Tamarind seeds in white shells. Still others, lost, with the skin that smelt of incense and sandalwood, black skin from Calcutta; eyes the colour of cumin powder and eyelashes which flicker in the breeze which blows in the sugar-cane fields.

So, the boy left the land of sugar-cane fields and the old
racatang town which tumbled down to the sea, and he climbed over the cocoa hills to the plains with the swamps, the rice fields and the oyster beds. He entered where the plains touched the entrance to the cool valleys.

The boy, with his best friend, ascended the mountain road to the monastery with its school.

They grew like Jonathan and David.

The boy became sick, homesick. He wouldn’t eat. He entered the infirmary. His best friend was stronger and he lost him among the other boys. In the days afterwards, he kept looking for him. He hunted him, but did not find him.

On his first Sunday, very early in the morning, when it was still as dark as the night, the infirmarian, Dom Placid, woke him. After he had dressed, Dom Placid led him down the mountain path towards the abbey church. As they neared the church in the morning darkness, the boy could see a glimmer of the dawn growing behind the mountains. He heard the murmur of the pigeons. One pigeon’s word, dou-dou. Then, like the waves he remembered hearing break repeatedly on the sands of his island, over and over again, he heard the antiphonal chant of the monks in choir, exchanging psalmodic couplets in the compositions of St Gregory which were to make him feel always that he had heard the angels singing in the interval between two waves.

He vowed to be one of those angels. He prayed: ‘Had I but wings, I cry, as a dove has wings, to fly away, and find rest!’

The schoolboy visited the young monk in his cell. When he entered the young monk’s cell and closed the heavy
door behind him and sat himself on the low stool, Dom Placid, the young monk, said, What can I tell you about today?

The young boy answered, Tell me a story of one of your saints. Because what he sought was perfection and he delighted to hear of it in others, so that he might imitate them.

Dom Placid treasured the boy’s ardour and cherished his young pupil’s friendship, and on this day that is now remembered, he told him the story of Aelred. A young boy like yourself, who once sought perfection a long time ago, he told him. He was one of those Angles who would be an angel. Dom Placid smiled.

The young boy laughed at St Gregory’s pun, remembering the story from the previous day.

Far away, in Northumbria, and a long time ago, a young boy called Aelred, whose beauty and manners were marvelled at, attracted the king of Scotland, and he asked the boy’s father to let him come and be schooled with his own sons. They were called Simon and Waldef. Quite soon, Aelred became fond of his classmates. He grew in their favour and in their father’s.

As time went on, Aelred became more than just a boy, but a fair youth. He himself tells us the story in his dialogue on friendship, which he wrote as an older man, remembering his youthful reading of Cicero’s
De
Amicitia.
Looking back on his youth, he tells us how he lost his heart to one boy and then to another during his schooldays. He was drawn by their charm and gave himself up to the affection which he felt. He tells us that he gave himself up to love in the way of youth. Then there
was one whom he loved more than any other and who became dearer to him than anything else in life. This frightened him.

Why was he frightened, Dom Placid? the schoolboy asked.

He was frightened because now he was no longer a boy with the desires and feelings of a boy, but a man who knew that his feelings were a strong passion and that they could engulf him. He tells us so himself. The desire and passion which were awakened in him would never be satisfied. He would do some wrong, and he knew that the one whom he loved above all else would leave him. He loved him extravagantly.

He was burnt with a fire he could not put out. The sweetness of his love was mixed with pain.

Is love painful, then, father? the boy asked. Dom Placid nodded his agreement, but kept on with his story.

Poor Aelred was lifted up and then cast down. His blood raged and in his torment he felt driven towards the abyss of death. Then he whom he loved and delighted in more than anything else in life left the court and joined the religious life.

Aelred was desolate.

At this time, he took a journey south and learnt of a band of men who were building a monastery on the wide banks of the River Rye below a wild wood. Aelred went there with a young friend and was so struck by what he saw, a band of men living and working together for love, that he asked his young friend if he would like to visit again the next day. When the young friend said he would like to, Aelred led the way to the river bank and the new wooden building which served as a monastery in the wild
place. Immediately, the two young men, Aelred and his young friend, asked for entrance into the monastery.

The sight of a band of men living for love drew Aelred from the court and his wandering love. Here he could confess his love without fear, as in the
Song
of
Songs,
‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’ These men got his allegiance.

Do you want to hear more, little friend? Dom Placid asked the schoolboy at his feet on the low stool.

Oh, yes, Father, you can’t leave it there, he answered.

We must, but you can return tomorrow.

The next day, the schoolboy came again to the young monk, Dom Placid’s cell.

There the story of Aelred continued.

Aelred found at Rievaulx all that he had desired, which was to love and be loved. The monastic day, the Rule, the Scriptures and the love of his brothers set the boundaries for the love which men can have for each other.

In time, Aelred became novice master and then abbot and taught his monks, in one office and then another, that to live without love and friendship was to live like a beast. He loved his monks so much and taught them so well that it was said by one of his monks, so vehemently was this lover of us loved by us.

Aelred’s young love was so caught up that his younger admiration for the beauty of his youthful friends did not lessen in intensity but was transformed, so that a young monk’s face could speak to him, his listening, his silence. He loved them without fear, without guilt, without the fever heat within the blood. He wrote his treatise
Spiritual
Friendship
and has left this for us, young monks like me,
and schoolboys like you - Dom Placid smiled at his youthful pupil - so that we can read it and take example of how the love of one man for another may be embraced, how their hands may touch and how the kiss of love may be given.

The boy went back to school with his heart full of passion and his head filled with ideals.

And me - I follow where he tells me of that life and love, along lines written in blood, blue, like Quink ink. Allow me this hagiographic beginning, this preface to a brother’s story. One story lies within another.

Robert de la Borde,

Malgretoute,

Les Deux Isles,

West Indies.

April 1988