How a monk saved my sanity

About half way through Father Joe, satirist Tony Hendra describes the clear-eyed reaction of his friend Fr Joseph Warrilow to his short and not so sweet spell as a Spitting Image scriptwriter: “With consummate skill he’d led me step by step to the realisation that I had become a rather unpleasant person, that it was time to move on to a second phase,” he writes.
“How do you do it, Father Joe?” Hendra asked the Benedictine monk, an absurd figure in his flapping robes and huge sandals.
“You live inside a cloister. You have no driver’s licence. You have no TV. I assume you don’t get out to the movies much. You live by a Rule that was written a little under fifteen hundred years ago. Yet you have an uncanny ability to grasp the essentials of the most worldly things, in this case what I do for a living. Have you been seeing other satirists?” And Joe replied: “You’re the only one I know, dear.” Warrilow was being economical with the truth. When the monk died in 1998, Hendra was taken aback to discover how famous and popular Father Joe was, counting the Archbishop of Canterbury and Princess Diana among his admirers – and Hendra’s surprise was tinged with more than a little sibling jealousy.
A former editor of National Lampoon (the US satirical magazine) with decades of scribbling experience in the backrooms of various American and British political joke factories, Hendra has now achieved a startling literary coup: he has brought the most cynical section of American society – the Left-leaning, atheistic media world – to the verge of tears with his portrayal of personal faith and holiness, Father Joe.
And, in so doing, he has himself become the ultimate Bateman cartoon: the “iconoclastic, media-savvy intellectual who not only says he believes in God, but even goes to Mass”.
The story begins with Tony, a rather odd and very religiously impressionable Catholic 14-year-old, being instructed in Church history and doctrine by a pompous twit of a Cambridge scientist. While the pompous twit is out, his ignored and desperately lonely wife is tempted to add her own, rather more physical syllabus to Tony’s curriculum; discovered in flagrante, Tony is promptly carted off by the husband for spiritual chastisement to, of all places, Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.
And there, by God’s grace, Tony finds his saint, the father figure who replaced all other parental and authority figures for ever: the Benedictine Dom Joseph Warrilow.
Warrilow’s wisdom and profoundly holy humility provided Tony with his “connection to the Divine” and his sometimes unconventional aperçus changed Tony’s whole view of religion, God and, eventually, of his own place in the world.
Not that Father Joe had much influence over Tony’s life choices at first. Going up to Cambridge meant that Tony fell in love with the 1960s satire boom and gave up on religion. Eventually Tony’s high-minded ambition to “change the world through laughter” dissolved into a puddle of drug abuse and self-pity.
The self-pity is still strongly present in the book. Tony flounces around his early life, being self-consciously creative, having rows with colleagues, taking drugs, attempting suicide, boring us with the office politics at the Lampoon, getting frozen out of the Spitting Image team; one marriage ends, another begins rockily. The Church drops completely out of his daily life – except for regular, almost annual trips to Quarr and Father Joe.
“I always kept coming back to Joe even at my most apostate,” Tony tells me.
“He was this reservoir of intuition which could somehow come to bear on my particular modern problems.” Chief at the moment among those “modern problems” are disturbing allegations by a daughter from his first marriage that Hendra sexually abused her as a child. In a New York Times article last July, Jessica, now 39, said, “[Father Joe] is being seen as completely confessional, totally honest, the whole story,” and claims her father molested her three times when she was between seven and 10.
Hendra, who now lives in New York with his second wife, categorically denies Jessica’s claims. “These allegations are utterly untrue and it’s very sad,” he told me, and would say no more.
Jessica’s story has no bearing on the book’s integrity, which is about Hendra’s connection with Father Joe, not some kind of warts-and-all confessional autobiography. Hendra stands accused of failing to do something that he never set out to do in the first place.
And, even if the allegations were true, they would only serve to underline the various descents into nihilism which have punctuated Hendra’s life and which would have derailed him totally – but for Father Joe.
Hendra’s story grew from a session at New York’s avant garde The Moth storytelling centre. “I tried writing about him [Joe], about how I felt about him, and all my my tools of ridicule weren’t up to this job at all. It came out as the most godawful mush. So I thought, what the hell, I will try and tell my relationship with this guy.
“At the end I sang the Salve Regina for him from the stage and all over the theatre people were weeping. I realised that all I had to do was to tell the story of my friendship.” When Warrilow died, Hendra’s faith “fell apart rather alarmingly”, he says.
“In retrospect, a tremendous amount of my faith was built around him. But the act of writing this book has helped me climb back on to some of my basic beliefs. I am pretty shaky on some areas. Not about believing in God – that was a return for all time.
“Some of the things other people find difficult – the Incarnation, the Trinity – seem self-evident to me. The Real Presence, though – I can’t deal with that. It’s been a long time, 50 years, since the Real Presence was real for me.” He describes his early disappointment with Church practice: “There, beneath a flickering red lamp that was lit to indicate he was home (the Saviour is IN), was Christ himself. The trouble was that I felt nothing, gaz ing up at Christ’s little brass hut. No presence at all; just the exotic odour of last Sunday’s incense and that dusty mushroomy smell of decay all churches have.” Whereas out in the Hertfordshire countryside, Hendra “felt the presence of something that I was quite prepared to say was divine”.
This honesty about the tribulations of an almostbeliever on the path to belief has touched the hearts of a huge range of readers. “I find a lot of what you might call ‘pious literature’ tends to hark back to some kind of purer, simpler version of faith that doesn’t really work for people any more,” observes Hendra.
“One of the things that probably has appealed to people is that my life is not exceptional in media terms. It is a fairly typical life. Yet I came back through what I did for a living – satire – to Joe’s way of life.” In the tear-jerking stakes, the story has cracked some pretty tough cultural nuts, from Frank McCourt to Stephen Fry. I, too, sobbed into its pages on the Tube.
“People have a driving desire to make Father Joe live again – I suppose that’s one of the reasons the story of his death affects people,” he says affably. Hendra has the rumpled, unapproachable charm of the British intelligentsia at weekends.
“But I’ve never met him,” I protest. “I wasn’t crying for him. I was crying for you.
Hendra considers this. “I hadn’t really thought about that. I assumed when people said it brought tears to their eyes, it was because of the loss of Joe. Isn’t it?” No, Tony, it is because you spoke for us all – all those who have had a “proper” education, which educated the faith out of us.
Father Joe is a rare thing, an intelligent person’s discovery of faith. Hendra’s pilgrimage even ends with him tempering his diehard liberalism with classic religious conservatism, expressing true “Grumpy Old Man” displeasure when he returns to Mass after decades to find that the Church has had the impudence to move the liturgical furniture in his absence.
He refuses to see the Church as being wrecked by swingeing compensation claims. “It may be a good thing. Poverty is one of the first and most important vows one takes. Perhaps we need a monastic revival; it could be as good a shot as any of the various other nostrums which have been suggested.” Father Joe has caught the imagination of a generation of lost souls, and hinted to them that there might be room for God in their lives.
And there is more to come: Hendra is now writing a “semi-satirical novel” about the Christian Right in America. “I think it will resonate with British readers,” he says with glee.
It will be nice to read a satire on Christianity by someone who believes in God, for a change.
Father Joe is published by Penguin, priced £16.99