A Nun's Diary

Bill Brydon was a librarian/journalist in Toronto.

God is not dead. He is mentally ill and physically run-down, and he lives in hiding in a convent near a small village. When he conceives desire for one of the nuns, she is instructed to become his companion, and eventually they marry. This profane legend is so strikingly odd that I wouldn’t venture to guess whether it’s invented or authentic. The sub-literary universe is full of crazy stories which serious authors may or may not spoil. This tale, despite its accretion of modern themes, derives its energy from its irreducible absurdity, a quality not invented by Kafka but as old as the hills. Convent and monastery exposes are common in popular literature, from the French fabliaux to the Decameron to Diderot’s The Nun to Victorian S&M. A Nun’s Diary possesses something of all of these, without specific allusions. It is presented as a zig-zag of prose poems, which benefit individually from the author’s sensitivity to a variety of literary types, and collectively from the soundness of the fiction.

There are no moral imperatives, and no message. There are many comic ideas and two dark themes. The marriage of this nun and her withered and unpleasant deity is a bad one and is emblematic of marriage as repressive contract, still adhered to out of an inexplicable inertia. The bride is shocked by her own compliance, as well as by associated religious longings, outdated, but tenacious:

Still we cannot forget how he has appeared to us sometimes as a much less degraded thing. Coated with the filth of his captivity, stained, dripping, reeking with it. And yet greater and brighter than anyone we have met wearing shiny holy robes. At those moments, we realized an enormous falseness in ourselves, which almost choked us. We felt a desire to vomit and crawl on the ground. p.50

The background to this broadly symbolic marriage is the descent of mankind into war. Symbolically, this is Armageddon, but in keeping with the strong sense of setting, this is depicted as World War II. The enemy is German fascism — in other words, man in the image of this debased god or, in other words still, man as conditioned by man:

It’s obvious we are dealing with a special breed, a new strain, well suited to winning the War. You can see this fact in their rigid features, their faces with the dangerous wounded eyes. Something in them starves for love and feeds on hate. They will repay our cold shoulder. We have taunted them with our “Truth” and “Beauty”. Count on them to smash everything that has ever been held over them. Beginning with the sputtering lamp of Civilization. p.14

At the end, the news of war pours out over the radio, until it dissolves into endless political rhetoric. “It did not occur to us at first that the war was the result of our marriage” (p.56). You might call this apocalyptic, but you could argue all night about what is revealed. It’s an intriguing depiction of social decline which bears rereading. The second half of the book is taken up by a collection of poems both in prose and in verse, some of which are also worthy of note.