“Let me lessen my request. Let me breathe between the heavens and the earth, a private man. To live a quiet life: this too can be a radical political act.”
— (David Fletcher: A Private Man)
The title of this novel is adapted from a passage (III.xii.12-18) in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, where Antony petitions Caesar for permission to live as “a private man” in Athens if he cannot be permitted to live with Cleopatra in Egypt. Caesar denies both requests. The petition to Rome, and its harsh rejection, are mirrored in the request by the novel’s character, David Fletcher, a Catholic priest, to his Church superior, to permit him to be relieved of his vows of celibacy so that he can marry his charge, Margaret Bendalow, whom David loves and who loves him. Like Antony, he seeks a quiet life. Margaret is a theology teacher who bucks the traditional bridle by questioning certain Church-sanctioned practices and dogmas that constrain love and dignity. David’s and Margaret’s own views, playing out at a time when Church reform was being debated in the lead up to Vatican II are an affront to some Church officials. David’s petition and the progressive views that he and Margaret represent are perceived as threatening by the Church establishment. The issues they raise remain matters of debate even today, and so the book will be of interest to readers of this journal for more than its literary merit.
The author of A Private Man (Grove Press, 2026), is Stephanie Sy-Quia, an award-winning poet. Her previous publication, Amnion (Granta, 2021), a volume of poetry (“my attempt to wrestle with the metrics for provenance and belonging”[[1]]), explored of some of the same family history that she now revisits in her debut novel. The term ‘amnion’ refers to the protective casing around the womb, which has to be broken for a child to be born. The new publication is also, at a deeper level, an exploration of amniotic relationships, of caring, and of being born into a fuller meaning of selfhood beyond those defined by social definitions and traditional expectations, and the novel is therefore a natural development of the ideas that Sy-Quia was addressing in her poems. Indeed, she regards Amnion as a foundational work and sees her future writing, including the novel, as “being in dialogue” with it.
The new book, a reimagining of the real-life story of her grandparents, is a masterfully structured tale, told from various perspectives and timeframes, and woven into a tapestry of thoughtful narrative threads, poetic prose (reminiscent at times of Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels) as well as engaging dialogue, which collectively draws the reader into the circumstances and inner lives of its main characters.
The writing is personal and humanely intelligent, underpinned by a literary sensibility, sensually concrete and richly imagined, leavening ideas and perspicuous observations with descriptive realism. The character portraits of the family over three generations and multiple locations in Europe, Asia and North Africa, with their various circumstances and their human tugs, ripple outward with intimate relevance from a deep hidden centre to keep the reader engaged. The story alternates between, on the one hand, a retrospective reconstruction of the relationship of Margaret and David, at a time when David has died (“turned his face to the wall,” as his daughter puts it) and Margaret is ailing with dementia, and, on the other, flashbacks of memories describing their childhoods, relationships and careers, as they were unfolding. The retrospective view is that of their grandchild, Adrian, now Margaret’s caregiver, who is wanting to ensure that his grandmother can live with dignity in her remaining days.
The positions of David and Margaret within the constraining mores and expectations of Church and society place the two individuals in circumstances that force the confrontation, at first within and among themselves, and then with their ecclesiastical authorities, that propels the tale. The reader associates the author both with the perspective of Adrian, the grandchild reconstructing the family history, and with Margaret, the progressive woman championing the claims of the intelligent heart that eventually build to the confrontation and decision at the centre of the novel. Sy-Quia handles the issues through a combination of observation and reflection, irony and passion, crafting narrative and dialogue that speak for the simplicity of love and dignity transcending the prejudices and complexities of bureaucracy, custom and dogma; it is a viewpoint one imagines must reflect the convictions of the author herself, in sympathy with the protagonists challenging the hidebound views of the Latin Church.
David and Margaret ache for that open space “between the heavens and the earth” where the “private man” is free to breathe, and where they can be “besouled of another” and come to “know” each other more fully in their complementarity and humanity — more fully than the ecclesiastical Caesars (“these higher-up men calcified by lack of life and absence of soul”) will allow. For them she is “a thief in the orchard”, “a Jezebel of ill-renown.” And David’s own impulse is to side with the “Catholics who refuse to be cabbages, paternalistically indoctrinated.” The strictures of the Church function as a garment that impedes them from a deeper knowledge — of their spiritual nakedness, as it were — and of a connecting space free of pharisaic judgments. But, to seek such private freedom can be (though it is not always so) “a radical political act.”
By highlighting the tensions between freedom and authority in the context of David‘s request to be relieved of his vows (“He was their creature, a creature of authority and hierarchy”) and of Margaret’s affront to ecclesiastical patriarchy (“she was just a woman”; “What use was she, with her breasts and education?”), the novel prompts the reader to question certain epistemological foundations, doctrinal formulations and recommended practices of the Church authorities. What are the sacred contours of human freedom and what is the legitimate role of any external or traditional authority to limit its expression? More specifically: Should celibacy be an institutional practice for ordained priests? If so, would limited experience or knowledge of women, marriage and life, limit a priest’s pastoral ability to guide his flock in these matters? Is not marriage an expansion of knowledge, and is not its sexual expression a foretaste of the soul’s participation in the divine mysteries? In a Christian tradition that prizes love, should priests like David be stigmatized for seeking to be relieved of their vows to allow them to expand their knowledge of love and the gifts of humanity beyond traditionally permitted confines, or should traditional views adapt to non-traditional loving relationships? Should women be considered equal and complementary to men both within the Church and in society, or be governed by the Church and by their male counterparts as subordinate creatures? Is the Church‘s rigid and patriarchal authority tantamount to an authoritarian and hypocritical betrayal of its true mandate of stewardship and care (“All of God’s intentions for us and Creation, he will say, can be summed up in two words from Genesis: ‘keep it’.”)? Is there a sacred place where love and dignity have more value than the claims of permitted freedom or assigned identity? These are some of the questions raised by the story.
The issues around celibacy and women’s roles of course have a historical context, and the novel references them occasionally, for example, the various Church councils (Nicaea, Lateran, Trent, and the Vatican). With respect to the role of women, Margaret notes “Women had moved in that century, across from the jurisdiction of chattel law to that of the person. They had suffrage now, polio vaccination programmes, the lubricated condom, the H-bomb. The great mass of the Church was lumbering out of a deep and dark frankincensy fug in order to meet a new century. The word being used was aggiornamento: mise à jour. A bringing up to date.” As the readers of this journal know, the Vatican reforms that emerged from Vatican II, while they had their champions, were not, indeed are not, without controversy. The need for amelioration of legitimate grievances by those such as women who have been poorly treated by the Roman Church, and for adapting practices to changing conditions, has spilled over into a modernist mentality that traditionalists say goes too far: the reforms fail to conserve values grounded in metaphysical principles of the sacred, and therefore become subversive. Sy-Quia tries to remain — as the author should — invisible behind the screen of her characters, but one suspects she takes the part of Margaret who dismisses David’s defence of priestly celibacy (“Clerical celibacy is how we priests practise sublimation”) as a “doctrinal fig leaf”, adding “Clerical celibacy only gets cemented at the Second Lateran, a mere eight hundred years ago. And even then, only as a means of countering corruption. Too many priests inheriting their churches from their fathers.” It is difficult not to side with her arguments. Indeed, priests were not celibate for nearly a millennium before Church doctrine changed, and celibacy is not common outside the Latin Church.
At one point Margaret tells David that “Marriage is a mode of witness, an epistemology. To bar people from marriage is to prevent them from this way of knowing. And a means to maturity, too.” She argues that “God’s house is the world before it is the church.” Instead of ignoring or devaluing God’s creation based on a false eschatology (“If we think there is another life, she said, what is the point of this one, other than to try and earn our place in the next? And conversely … if Judgement Day is a finite event, then there is no need to try and stave off this gradual poisoning of the earth, the decimation of all that creep and crawl upon it.”), would it not be better rather to treat this life as heaven (“Heaven is at hand”)? She asks, “Are our bodies not the matter of miracles? What is it that is being enshrined?” She proposes a different perspective: “Family and marriage not as the drudgery of the factory floor, of production, but of vocation in the truest sense. With its proper ecstasies.” What she is proposing is a vocational and sacramental approach to love that strains against the “antiquated thinking” of the Church.
David wonders if love is a complete revelation (“Like the road to Damascus. Knowledge.”) but Margaret offers him a different vision, more modest and accepting of the human limitations that are necessary for one to accommodate as part of its flowering, leaving room for grace: “It’s like driving in the dark. You do your best to the limit of your sight.” It is the concrete life of real human love that Margaret offers him, the glow that is present, not the awaited eternity: “All his life, he has been taught to yearn for eternity. Yet here is this singular brilliance, consigned to a small span of years. He places the two side by side in the scales.” The quiet life they seek is “To live in the suchness of things, with no shame.” Is this what the Church can be persuaded to offer, the reconciling of the spirit with its forms, recognizing that “Love is at its base the effort of dignity”?
The limitations of Church dogma and the arrogance of its apparatchiks (“Why does the Roman Church have to rule her people, the people of God, by fear and repression? One student of mine told me that her student friends in other non-Roman Catholic colleges said to her, ‘Your Church is just like Soviet Russia, sending people to Siberia.’”) in the end curtail the eucharistic embodiment of life, its deep joys. Margaret understands the harm this does: “All that damage done. All those souls curtailed. She renounced it all. The vast history of Catholicism was folding and unfolding all around her, and folding her into it. It was in the mineral memory of the land. When stripped down to its barest, it was the history of being, of evolving personhood, the notion thereof, and its validity. She stood for this. She stood for herself.”
This is not a Nietzschean proclamation of individualism, but of Christic personhood, the ‘selfhood’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins in As Kingfishers Catch Fire:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
Though this review has focussed on the main characters and themes, the novel presents several other characters and situations that portray human relationships in ways that indirectly, but no less importantly, add to the moral weight of premiating love and dignity. The issues (such as the demands of elder care, the ethic of service, balancing war with humanity, finding the right life partner, choices to made between career and family, being female in a male world, maintaining bonds with family and strangers, the role of art and beauty and nature in self knowledge, of religion in life) are presented organically through the storyline in ways that highlight their complexity. For example, a discussion among priests at an archbishop’s cocktail party presents different viewpoints on the role of women in the Church (“married people need a married clergy. Experience alone can equip us with the wisdom we need”; “She cannot possibly have the sobriety required to penetrate into the Church’s mysteries. Those belong to us, he said, including them all with a sloshing half-moon of his glass. Us and us alone”), and, though a moral voice emerges, it is not forced or didactic. The author resists the temptation to close off issues by presenting easy conclusions or answers. If the reader senses where the rightness lies it is because the human predicaments point to something the heart recognizes as true.
A precocious and sensitive intelligence is at work here. The novel is a fine debut by a writer whose future work one will be keen to follow as it develops the arc of ideas explored in her first two books — an arc that one hopes will fulfill its promise of deepening into the sacred ground of the dignity of love (symbolized by the amniotic relationship with the primordial and pure ‘womb’ [‘rahma’] of the sacred, and by the receptivity of the soul to the transcendent Spirit) rather than pursing its antinomian expressions.
[[1]]: See interview titled ‘In conversation with Stephanie Sy-Quia‘ posted online on 1 July 2022: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversatiopn-with-stephanie-sy-quia/
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