In her “Spiritual Autobiography,” the great small-c catholic thinker Simone Weil wrote: “It sometimes seems to me that when I am treated in so merciful a way, every sin on my part must be a mortal sin.” The greater the world’s kindnesses, the more at fault she felt.
The inverse is true for Julia Glynn, the stony-eyed, capital-C Catholic protagonist of John Broderick’s “The Pilgrimage,” a 1961 novel banned by the Irish censorship board upon its publication and freshly reissued by McNally Editions with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Perhaps because this novel has little mercy to spare, Julia doesn’t seem to worry much about the state of her mortal soul, no matter how passionately she might flout the Ten Commandments.
Julia is married to an older, upstanding, deeply Catholic and closeted man named Michael, who is bedridden with rheumatism. Michael’s sexuality has never been an issue, because Julia married him for a life of status and security, and is happy to keep up any facade necessary to maintain it. Now, from his room that “smelt of misery and whiskey,” Michael plans a last-resort pilgrimage to the healing waters of Lourdes, France, together with Julia, his nephew Jim — who just so happens to be sleeping with Julia — and the parish priest.
But the titular trip remains beyond our purview; this is a novel, instead, of plans and preparation. As they get ready to go, Jim abruptly ends things with Julia, as he follows in her footsteps and finds his own rich and pious fiancée, and Julia finds herself both suddenly drawn to and repelled by their servant Stephen, who takes care of Michael and whose own desires — and sexuality — remain mysterious to her. Around the same time, vicious letters begin to arrive for Julia and Michael from an anonymous sender, describing her affair with Jim in graphic detail. All at once, Julia’s life of ease, boredom and comfort turns into one of suspicion and manipulative games.
In the letters, “there was no threat, no demand for money,” Broderick writes, the tone “as detached as an invitation to a party.” The same could be said of his own narration, so straightforward in its handling of the once-taboo subjects of midcentury Irish queerness, sex and false piety it borders on blasé. “We’re born, we make love, and we die,” Julia thinks. “Why make such a song and dance about it?”
That Broderick writes with the studied coolness of an autopsy report does not detract from the novel’s pleasure; it only reinforces the thematic obsessions with sex and death, life’s great banalities that yet inspire so much passion. The premise of the novel could sound raunchy and playful — a romp toward Lourdes! a sexy servant! a bumbling priest! — but there’s nothing very fun about Julia and Michael’s deceits or desires at all.
Rather, sex in this novel is much like death: an inevitability, and also an escape. When Jim breaks up with Julia, she minimizes not just her sadness, but her personhood: “Nobody was really involved,” she thinks, “just two people who made use of each other.” Similarly, a subplot involving suicide is treated not as a tragedy but as a formality for the Glynns to see to, an extra Mass or two to attend.
The exception is Broderick’s wistful descriptions of Julia’s first lover, Howard, in scattered memories that reveal both the beauty of Broderick’s writing and Julia’s humanity. So much of her daily life, romantic and otherwise, seems to exist only in relation to this man from her past, “the effortless unfolding of golden unhurried hours” she spent with him. All else in Julia’s life is just epilogue, even as the elaborate plans for Lourdes continue and the shocking letters accumulate and Stephen compels and confounds her, even as the seemingly perfect wall the Glynns have been hiding behind begins to buckle and fall.
Catholicism can embody mercy, and it can also breed shame. A sour and lasting portrait of what boils beneath kept-up appearances, Broderick’s once-banned novel inhabits the moral middle ground of the apparently righteous, displaying the desires and confusions of his characters’ inner lives without much mercy, but without judgment, either.
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