Book reviews: Sanctuary by Marina Warner | The World Within by Guy Stagg

Marina Warner offers a fascinating analysis of the concept of sanctuary, while Guy Stagg explores different approaches to the creative retreat. Review by Stuart Kelly

It is a melancholy sign of the times that the meanings of the subjects of these books – sanctuary and retreat – have become so commodified, solipsistic, similar and etiolated. That they even seem synonymous is a measure of our collective mental laziness. Sanctaury is sought, retreat is chosen; and neither involve bergamot balm nor Seishin Sekai stones. Both require bravery and abnegation, not luxury and indulgence. Caveat lector: although the same price, one is deep and one is hasty.

Illustration showing Judah seeking sanctuary at the altar, taken from the Philologus Hebraeo-Mixtus by Johann Leusden, professor of Hebrew, Utrecht, 1657 | Getty Images

Stagg’s book could have been a decent three-part radio feature, but the work is spread thin. The plurals of the subtitle are misleading: it features a philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein), a poet (David Jones) and a theologian (Simone Weil), though the labels are fairly arbitrary – they are also labelled as saint, hermit and martyr; and all could reasonably be termed mystics. The areas of commonality – such as “all three struggled with doubt” or “all three of them could be naïve, self-righteous and earnest to the point of insufferable” – are so broad as to carry little insight.

It would be difficult to write about these three without including interesting, provocative and deep matters. But I yearned for more of the subject and less of the writer. It is like standing in front of a picture with someone blocking your view and telling you their opinions. There is little real engagement with Jones’s poetry (“The Anathemata” warrants a solitary quote); nothing about Weil’s significant reading of The Iliad, or even Wittgenstein’s final yearning for a philosophy that made philosophy disappear.

But there is rather too much room for what commissioners call “the journey”. Stagg forgets to bring swimwear to Austria. He sees a weathered sign for a chocolate factory on Caldey Island, and the alliteration of “the slop of soup and the slap of spoons and the gulp of swallowed mouthfuls” conveys a kind of disgust at the monastic refectory. In France he meets someone else called Guy. And your point being?, as an old tutor used to say. More worrying, although the text is footnoted, there was one point – a rather gruesome description of Charles II of Spain – that was not referenced, but is almost word for word identical with a passage on the Wikipedia page (itself citing a book in Spanish, but no page number). Such moments undermine trust, and make even the “revelations” – “I understood now that withdrawing was no guarantee of happiness” – suspect. (And who on earth told you it was anyway?)

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There are no such qualms with the new book from Marina Warner, who is every bit as ingenious and meticulous as she was in 1976’s Alone of All Her Sex, which by coincidence was my bedtime reading last month. If some of the chapters here are a bit of a stretch to the theme – in particular, the section on Puccini’s Turandot – well, it is fascinating nevertheless. Other than Turandot, the major part of the book studies historical seekers of asylum: the Holy Family fleeing from Herod, Empress Helena’s “discovery” of the True Cross and how its splinters then sanctified refuges, the Virgin Mary’s “home” of Loreto, transported, rebuilt, cloned, shrouded and recreated, and the ironies of Dido and Aeneas, two city-founding refugees whose tragic love underwrites – justifies? – epic conflict.

This is followed by a section on Warner’s work with the “Stories in Transit” initiative. It might seem modest, but given how shrill and vituperative the voices ranged against displaced people are it seems all the more necessary. “Ownership of one’s story” can seem trite, but in the context of having lost almost everything else, it is fundamental; not just for those fleeing but for those with a moral duty to understand their new neighbours. Warner provides the intellectual scaffolding for the endeavour, particularly in terms of how narratives migrate between cultures, and the way in which national myths can be traced to itinerant and “alien” origins.

Part of the exhilaration of reading any work by Warner is the breadth of reference. It is the opposite of dilletantism, a purposeful, sharp stitching: she will link and pierce from Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Manuscript to Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, Evelyn Waugh, Old King Cole, Seamus Heaney, Orhan Pamuk to Charles III’s coronation gift from the Pope. She adeptly brings in visual art and architecture: I was mildly disappointed Nathan Coley’s wonderful Lamp of Sacrifice; 286 cardboard “places of worship” in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages – and therefore all sanctuaries – did not make the cut, even if just to remind us sanctuaries still exist.

It is appropriate, particularly here, that the disciplinary borders are so porous. In a clever neologism, Warner refers to “spories”, a portmanteau of story and spore, and playing with the Greek meaning both the scatter and the sow – it is, significantly, a ghostly presence in diaspora, a community more self-consciously bound by its stories. Warner is alert to the fact that knowing something is a fiction does not mean it has any less emotive force. She wryly notes that Ellisland Farm describes itself as the “most authentic” of the homes of Robert Burns (despite the fact it is now a museum, not a home).

The idea of the story as a site (a camp-fire, a well, a glade) of exchange and safety and imagined possibility gives a fixed point to Warner’s capacious mind. More importantly, she reminds us why we call the discipline “the humanities”.

The World Within: Why Writers, Artists and Thinkers Retreat, by Guy Stagg, Scribner, £20.

Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, by Marina Warner, William Collins, £20.

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