In Belfast’s Writer’s Square, an open space of grey stone and sharp angles, quotations from twenty-seven of Northern Ireland’s most celebrated writers are etched upon the ground. Familiar names some – Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney and C. S. Lewis – others are less so. Overlooked by the gentle facade of St Anne’s Cathedral, this square is home to the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and, sometimes, a Winter Circus; year-round it’s busy, and a popular shortcut between Donegall Street and North Street. But how many of those passing through stop to look down on the words carved beneath their feet? Or know that one of Ulster’s most brilliant novelists, classical scholars, academics, translators, publishers and poets – Helen Waddell – is also commemorated there?
A literary celebrity in the 1920s and 30s, Waddell was one of the most successful, most honoured writers of the inter-war years. She mixed with prime ministers and royalty, philosophers and thinkers; she nurtured the careers of fellow writers and was admired by peers such as Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw. Yet today, Waddell is barely remembered and her exceptional, single novel – Peter Abelard – has been allowed to slip out of print.
I was thirteen when I first read Peter Abelard. Set in twelfth-century France – and inspired by the legendary real-life affair between Pierre Abelard, a priest, and his brilliant young student, Heloise d’Argenteuil – the novel has stayed with me ever since. Now a writer of historical fiction myself, I still marvel at Waddell’s ability to combine historical veracity with character; at her skill in bringing medieval Paris to life and making it seem familiar; at the way her profound and complicated reflections on faith, sexuality and grace never obscure the tenderness, then tragedy, of the love story she is telling. It is, simply, a magnificent piece of fiction that is both of its time and yet transcendent of it.
So, who was Helen Waddell? And why is it that her dazzling, extraordinary, celebrated novel – one of the biggest-selling books of the 1930s – fell out of fashion?
She was born in Japan in 1889, the youngest in a family of ten children. Her father, Hugh, was a missionary for the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, but he was also a scholar who translated the Bible into Chinese, and was fluent in Japanese. He also encouraged his children to learn from, and engage with, the world around them rather than hold themselves outside of it. It’s easy to see how the qualities that, later, were to inform both Waddell’s choices and infuse her writing are recognisably Ulster-Scots’ values: a reverence for scholarship and education; an unflagging sense of duty and responsibility; a devotion to family; and perhaps most of all, an unassailable independent and pioneering spirit that meant she always chose her own path, no matter how difficult.
After the liberty and rich intellectual variety of her early years, the death of Waddell’s mother when she was eleven saw the family exchange the gardens of Tokyo for the rainy streets of Belfast, where her father remarried. At her new school she was an outstanding student, and in 1908 was accepted to Queen’s College (soon to be Queen’s University Belfast). But having completed her BA, then an MA with great distinction in 1912 – and with the strong possibility of an academic career ahead of her – Waddell was obliged to give up her ambitions to care for her ill, increasingly demanding stepmother. Her older sister Meg was already married, so the responsibility fell solely on Helen’s shoulders. In letters to her beloved Meg she was later to refer to these as her ‘wilderness’ years. It was not until after Martha Waddell’s death in 1920 that Helen was free to take up the reins of her own life again.
At the age of thirty-one, she was accepted into the English department of Somerville College, one of four women’s colleges at the University of Oxford, to read for a PhD. Increasingly, though, Waddell had fallen out of love with academia and in love with the idea of being a writer herself. A £200-per-year scholarship, awarded by another of the women’s colleges, Lady Margaret Hall, took her to Paris in 1923. These two years of study were to change the course of her life. Her subject was the Goliards, a group of young men (mainly clerics) of the twelfth and thirteenth century who specialized in a satirical form of Latin lyric poetry.
She threw herself into her research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, setting herself the task of reading everything that her ‘Wandering Scholars’ would have read. She familiarized herself, as she put it in one of her letters to her mentor George Saintsbury, with ‘the literary furniture of their minds’.
Increasingly, Waddell was drawn to the leading Goliard, the philosopher and thinker Peter Abelard. He was considered one of the great thinkers of the twelfth century. Heloise, his lover, was one of the most well-educated women of her time. The record of their love affair, their forcible separation and what came after it is preserved in a series of letters they sent to one another. And it is this – their religious discourse and their literary debates on the nature of life and love and their doomed romance – that was to capture Waddell’s imagination.
As Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet, so the relationship between Heloise and Abelard is one of the great love stories of literature. Their remains, only reunited some hundreds of years after their deaths, are to be found in Paris’ iconic Père Lachaise Cemetery, not far from the graves of Edith Piaf, of writers Proust, Balzac and Oscar Wilde, and of the composer Chopin. At the entrance to the cemetery, Heloise and Abelard are simply described as amants légendaires – ‘legendary lovers’.
But although the inspiration was there, it was a good few years before Waddell was to finish writing the novel. On returning to London from Paris in 1925, she was obliged to take a job in a publishing house – Constable & Company – to make ends meet. She spent her days correcting other writers’ grammar and punctuation.
A significant step in Waddell’s determination to be a writer came in 1927, when the chairman of the company, Otto Kyllman, published the book that came out of her Paris research trip, The Wandering Scholars. It was warmly reviewed and well received. Encouraged by this success, letters to her sister Meg reveal Helen’s new sense of purpose. Little by little the characters, the story and the architecture of the novel begin to take shape. Finally, the novel takes centre stage in Waddell’s life. When Peter Abelard was published in 1933, it seemed her literary reputation was secure.
It’s hard to work out exactly what happened next. Or, rather, why? There’s plenty of evidence in Waddell’s letters that she intended Peter Abelard to be only the first in a series of novels inspired by the Heloise and Abelard story. She continued to write and translate, to produce works of theology and scholarship, but she never returned to the world of medieval France. Of course, with the outbreak of war, her house in London’s Primrose Hill was filled with friends, students, soldiers – anyone in need of a roof over their heads – which meant there was little time for writing. And Waddell always put a great deal of energy into her relationships, not least of all with Otto Kyllman himself (with whom she was to continue a life-long, if platonic, affair) and her many nephews and nieces, particularly Meg and her family at Kilmacrew House in County Down.
But, even so . . . I wonder if, in the end, Waddell felt she had said all she wanted to say in Peter Abelard? That those words stood for her? Or simply that real, lived life got in the way. Or, is it possible that the cruel illness that was to rob her of the last twenty years was already showing its dark face? For the last two decades of her life, Waddell lived in a twilight world of Alzheimer’s, her brilliant mind deprived of memory, of scholarship, of the beauty of language, of the pleasures of friendships.
On 5 March 1965, Waddell died in London with her niece Mollie at her side. She was taken home to Northern Ireland to be buried in Magherally Graveyard on the hills above her beloved Kilmacrew House, in the shadow of the ruins of the old church. The inscription on her headstone begins: ‘She lifted a veil from the past.’ The line, faded now in the stone and moss, is from one of her own translations of a Latin lament: ‘The light is on thy head.’
Kate Mosse
Chichester, West Sussex