Her life story ought to read as a tragedy, a tale of how the world conspired to destroy and drive insane a clever and delightful woman. She was thrown from a form of medieval mental torture straight into its modern and equally powerful equivalent, out of a nunnery and into the waiting arms of avid psychiatrists. To reach poetic perfection, Karen Armstrong’s two volume autobiography ought to have ended with her dressed in a white hospital gown, like the novice she started as, walled up in some padded cell.
But instead, there she stands today: saner than most, happier than many, energetically intelligent and spontaneously friendly. Praise of that sort might sound patronising, until you get the chance to read the second volume of her autobiography to be published in a fortnight. The first book told of her entry into a strict order of Roman Catholic nuns. Her new book, Beginning the World, describes how, still a member of her strict order of nuns, she was sent to an Oxford college in 1969 to study English. She eventually left the order while she was a student. That she survived at all is surprising, but that she thrives is triumph.
In her first book there is the photograph of her at 17, entering the convent, a podgy, dumpy, awkward looking girl, entirely unrecognisable from her bold attractive face now. She looks down at the picture and says, “At that age you think you’ll never change. never be at ease with your body. I wanted to live on a spiritual level. I suppose, though I never directly thought it, I was escaping from what looked like failure in the world.”
Her body gave her a great deal of trouble when she left the convent. Used to a Victorian design of habit, with a cape and small black buttons up the neck, her nakedness was agonising. With shorn head, and a body that hadn’t seen the light of day for seven years, she was hurried into a Marks and Spencer mini skirt and cardigan. Friendly but bemused girls at the college took her out the first day, still in her habit, and chose her clothes for her with the money the convent gave her on leaving. She was appalled at her own nakedness.
In her first week she was late for dinner in hall, and in her confusion returned to the habits of the convent. She fell down on her knees in front of the high table and kissed the floor, to the laughter of the whole dining room. The liberated girls of the college could not believe that she, living in England, could have been so remote and isolated. She had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam war, never been to a party or tasted alcohol.
In her virtually silent order, friendships were forbidden. In obedience to the Rule, she had mortified her flesh with whips, kissed the feet of all the nuns in the refectory, wore a spiked chain round her arms, made public penances and confessions: while these girls had flung themselves into a new generation of blasé abandon. The mere thought of sex made her retch - though she knew so little about it there was hardly a thought to be had. When she did meet men at first their interest was prurient and nasty. She smiles now and says, “I still meet men who look at me and say ‘I’ve always wanted a nun,’ and they think I’m the next best thing.”
In the convent she often used to faint. The nuns disapproved of her lack of self-control and emotionalism, as a sergeant major might punish a fainting guardsman at the Trooping of the Colour. She used to feel a terrible rising panic, black out, and waken weeping. The nuns were severe. She became anorexic in the convent, around the time they chose to send her to Oxford.
The clash of cultures was partly what projected her out of the convent. She was extremely clever (she later got a congratulatory first) and immersed herself in English literature. Not only did that mean reading widely, itself a danger, but also close analytical criticism of what she was reading. She found she couldn’t turn the criticism off when she got back to the convent from her tutorials. It was harder to submit to absolute obedience and faith for part of the day, while she criticised and analysed for the other part.
Finally, in a state of terrible nerves, illness, vomiting, acute nose bleeds, the time came round for the convent’s annual retreat. Something in her snapped and she screamed herself into oblivion in front of all the nuns. In the weeks of recovering from her breakdown she decided to leave. She found subconsciously she’d already made the decision, by having let her hair grow under her wimple to beyond the regulation stubble length.
Once out, she still had fainting fits, and the anorexia progressed. Then, worst of all, the fainting began to be associated with horrific hallucinations - toads, the head of a senile old man and others. A friend persuaded her to go to a psychiatrist.
“There I was, an absolute gift for psychiatry,” she says now, smiling. The psychiatrist tried to haul her atrophied emotions and passions out of her. Friendship was difficult, touching impossible, and men unthinkable. “I was brainwashed. Our training was exactly the same as all other brainwashing techniques. We were taught to obey absolutely. We were taught to accept unjust accusations as part of the training.” She must have seemed like one of Freud’s case book hysterics.
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