A rare throng of Lost Club figures, aesthetes and decadents were cited in the broadsheets in April 2000: Francis Thompson, John Gray, André Raffalovich, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Machen, Olive Custance, Cecil Chesterton, Baron Corvo, Ronald Firbank, Montague Summers, John Gawsworth and E. H. Visiak. Alas, the circumstances were sad rather than celebratory. The names featured in the obituaries of Father Brocard Sewell – the ‘Literary friar who challenged the authority of the Pope’, as The Times characterized him – who died in London on 2 April, aged 87. The Carmelite scholar, theologian, biographer, editor, printer and publisher was a great advocate of ‘minor literary figures’, as the anonymous Times obituarist pronounced. Brocard’s friend Fiona MacCarthy, the biographer of Eric Gill (‘Brocard was a tower of strength in the furore that followed publication’), praised his work in the field more sympathetically in her obituary for The Guardian: ‘Father Brocard’s reclamation of forgotten, esoteric writers of the 1890s was his major literary life’s work . . . It has been a weird and marvellous pursuit.’ She described Brocard as ‘A small, owlish man in his brown habit, with a quizzical but imperturbable expression, he was an unforgettable figure on the fringes of English literary life – he had the strange mix of innocence and sharp intelligence that seems to flourish more creatively in a religious order than in the outside world.’ During his dual careers in publishing and the Church Brocard’s associations embraced such diverse individuals as G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Machen and Eric Gill besides Henry Williamson, Diana Mosley and Christine Keeler.
Michael Seymour Sewell was born into a distinguished Anglican family in Bangkok, Thailand, where his father was a teacher, on 30 July 1912. Leaving Weymouth College, Dorset, at sixteen (he achieved the remarkable feat of scoring nil out of 300 in maths), he joined, as general factotum, GK’s Weekly, the organ of the Distributist League formed by Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc to oppose what they viewed as the polar evils of capitalism and state socialism. As Fiona MacCarthy observed, Brocard retained vivid memories of GKC, ‘that groaning, wheezing figure ascending the staircase, squashing his girth into the editor’s swivel chair, and regaling the staff with conversation even better than Oscar Wilde’s at his most scintillating’. After leaving the paper he worked as a compositor and editorial assistant at the St Dominic’s Press at Ditching, Sussex, from 1932-37. He had visited St Dominic’s towards the end of his schooldays and was instructed by Hilary Pepler in the art of printing. He converted to Catholicism as a young man, and, in 1931, entered the Dominican Order at Woodchester Priory, Stroud, but finding his time as a novice constricting he left after a few months. After wartime service as a map-clerk in the RAF he again tried monasticism and eventually joined the Carmelites, taking the name Brocard after a 13th century saint. He entered the priesthood at Aylesford Priory – the first priest to be ordained there since the Refomation – in 1954. It was here that he established the Aylesford Review, which over the next thirteen years published work by Muriel Spark, Gregory Corso, Colin Wilson, John Gawsworth, Angela Carter, D. M. Thomas, Frances and Michael Horovitz, Fiona MacCarthy and Henry Williamson. Under his editorship the Review became a thriving eclectic journal of poetry, criticism, history and spirituality. In the 1960s, in keeping with the times, the Review became somewhat radicalized, covering political subjects such as police corruption and the Profumo affair. Brocard made friends with Christine Keeler after the Stephen Ward trial, finding her ‘a beautiful and well-mannered young woman’. Such sensitive topics and his propensity for celebrating Nineties decadents apparently raised no objections from his superiors at the Priory. Brocard opined simply that this was because they never read the magazine. Special issues of the Review devoted to Williamson, Machen, Beardsley and M. P. Shiel are now collector’s items. One of the strengths of the Review lay in its embracing different strands of art and literature. In Fiona MacCarthy’s words ‘it was the point at which the beat generation met the Roman Catholic church in England, an unlikely convergence only [Brocard] could have achieved’.
The publication of the beat poets must have led to much head-scratching among the Review’s more conservative readership. For example, a number from 1964 devoted several pages to an unfathomable article-cum-bibliography headed ‘to freshen our sense of the language we do have’. Five and a half pages of cut up (?) prose follow. A few lines will convey the flavour: ‘ –& so not a poets exquisite exposing his relative discriminating thing-self – but nonarchic symbiosis – abyssful artist as imitator dei (vat-II) – imitating not creation by copies but the creator by additions to creation – the mimetic nonauthentic virtual – the spectacular – this, antonin artaud attacked 1948 in unbroadcast pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (editions K) . . .’ The proof-reading must have been a nightmare. Indeed, Samuel Loveman, friend to Lovecraft and Hart Crane, had his name mangled as Loueman in the eccentric bibliography; but doubtless some readers received enjoyment from this gibberish, so who is to damn it as pretentious?
The Times obituarist struck a sour note, suggesting that the Review’s ‘eclecticism reflected Sewell’s own tastes, which ranged widely if uncertainly’. Evidently his passion for Machen, Summers, Gray and Beardsley was misplaced! (These writers are admittedly not household names, but so much the worse for our households.) The Times also indulged in a little guilt-by-association innuendo. Brocard championed Henry Williamson when the writer was condemned for his fascist leanings: ‘His friendship with Henry Williamson led him into some dubious territory, since, like Williamson, he was an admirer of Sir Oswald Mosley. These admirations were less a sign of fascist sympathies than of naïvety and inconsistency; in his general political outlook Sewell was well to the left.’ In fact Brocard claimed never to have voted Conservative. In an obituary notice written for The Independent Brocard’s friend the artist Jane Percival quoted his views on Mosley: ‘Sir Oswald is a greatly misunderstood man, but I feel that he is partly himself to blame for this. The turning point came, I think, when he was released from prison in 1944. He should then, in my judgement, have retired from politics.’ A key to Brocard’s tolerant personality can be found in Jane Percival’s assessment: ‘He had an entirely non-judgemental attitude. He hardly ever criticized others and if he did it was with some subtle epithet which would be hard to interpret and which could hardly give offence to anyone.’ Such a stance, for example, resulted in Brocard continuing to regard Eric Gill as essentially holy, despite, as Fiona MacCarthy says, the sculptor’s propensity for ‘adultery, incest and experimental conjunction with his dog’.
To give the impression that Brocard was a bland personality, however, would be misleading. He caused a storm with his letter to The Times in 1968 calling for Pope Paul VI to vacate St Peter’s Throne after the encyclical Humanae Vitae reinforced the Vatican’s hardline attitude towards contraception. Brocard was of the opinion that a more liberal approach was required ‘in order to help all those lay people who were burdened in conscience over the birth-control question’. As a consequence of this letter Brocard was suspended from preaching and from Aylesford Priory. Taking a leave of absence he went to lecture at St Francis Xavier University at Antigonish, Nova Scotia, from 1969-72. He edited The Antigonish Review during this period. Ironically, thirty-two years after the controversy and six months after his death, there was some indication that the Church was shifting its ground on the matter of contraception, when a Vatican theologian, a senior member of the Pontifical Council for the Family, acknowledged that condoms were ‘a lesser evil’ than the HIV/Aids epidemic. Brocard’s reservations over what he viewed as papal intransigence never departed. Answering a questionnaire published in The Failiure Press (No. 11, 1990) his response to the question ‘What would you like to say to the Pope?’ was ‘Please resign (abdicate)’. (He also stated that his favourite book was John Gray’s fantasy Park – the St Albert’s Press published an edition in 1966 – and his favourite play Charley’s Aunt. The three people he looked forward to meeting in heaven were ‘The Revd Montague Summers, Olive Custance, and John Gray.’ To the question ‘What last made you cry?’ he said parts of A. S. Byatt’s Possession had moved him.)
He could be a traditionalist too. As he wrote in the Review (Summer 1966): ‘Would that [Summers] were here today to lash with his vitriolic pen (as it could be on occasion) those in the Latin Church who are busily engaged in dismantling the liturgical heritage of a thousand years.’ In a notice written for the Beardsley issue (Autumn 1966), Brocard, writing as Joseph Jerome, commented ‘that the famous prophetical list of Popes attributed to St Malachy now includes only four more holders of the office’. Time will tell. Brocard, of course, should have been elected pope: think of all those wonderful encyclicals on literature we would have had . . .
Brocard was a perennially benign presence at the annual Aylesford Review Conferences, the first of which was held at Spode House, Staffordshire, in June 1964. The opening address, given by Brocard, concerned Montague Summers. Colin Wilson – who fictionalized Brocard in the Lovecraftian fantasy The Return of the Lloigor (1969) – spoke on the ‘new existentialism’. The poet Alan Neame lectured on biblical translation, and Henry Williamson paid tribute to two beloved nature writers, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson. These lectures set the pattern for the manifold range of authors and artists who were to be celebrated at the conferences which have now run for thirty-six years.
Brocard is greatly missed by his friends who fondly remember his amiable sense of humour. He was particularly amusing when presiding over book sales at the conferences when he ingeniously extemporized, ‘talking up’ every book that came within his grasp. ‘I have no doubt,’ he once said, holding up a newly published comic-strip book, ‘that in just a few years this publication will be selling for £20 or more.’
Jane Percival found him ‘a raconteur with a memory that made one gasp. He could instantly recall conversations, anecdotes and quotations from the distant past. He would rock back and forth in his chair, his shoulders shaking and his eyes filling with tears of laughter whilst saying “Oh dear, oh dear”, followed by a sigh at some absurd memory that he had just revived and expounded.’ He often floored his listeners with a pithy expression, once beginning an address with the words: ‘Oh, I wish I could think of a new sin to talk about!’ After attending mass at the newly consecrated Oratory at St Aloysius Church, Oxford – with its echoes of Wilde, Summers, Corvo and Manley Hopkins – he was asked about the incense-laden service. ‘It was like something from the Revelation of St John the Divine!’ came the dramatic response. Mark Valentine remembers him ‘fixing a firm eye on the assembled company at an Aylesford Weekend and demanding “When shall we have an R. H. Benson revival, that is what I should like to know”, in all seeming innocence of said author’s permanent unfashionability’.
A requiem mass was held for Brocard at Aylesford Priory on 12 April. Adrian Robertson, one of the organizers of the Aylesford Review Conferences and a Lost Club member, paid tribute to Brocard’s life and work. Brocard was buried in the cemetery at the Priory.
Brocard’s Montague Summers: A Memoir (1965) is a model of how to build bricks without straw. There are profound mysteries and gaps in Summers’s life and personality, yet despite the book’s slightness, Brocard was able to present a rounded portrait of the controversial priest and demonologist. Brocard always argued that Summers was in possession of valid holy orders – no trace of documentation has been located – even if they were obtained irregularly. He wrote in Tell Me Strange Things: A Memorial to Montague Summers (The Aylesford Press, 1991): ‘ . . . as he says at the beginning of his will, “I, Montague Summers, Clerk in Holy Orders . . .”: there is no getting away from that. Anyone who says that Montague Summers was not in holy orders is just saying that which is not, and is talking about something that he doesn’t understand’.
Brocard told the entertainingly eerie tale of how, in the 1930s, he saw the unmistakable figure of Montie sitting on a bench on The Lawns at Hove. The young Michael Sewell, too shy and nervous to approach Summers, followed him as he rose with his dachshund Cornelius Agrippa (‘said by some to be his familiar’). Brocard trailed Summers round a corner, but the writer was nowhere to be seen: it was as if he had vanished into the ether.
Summers’s autobiography The Galanty Show (1980) has introductions by both Joseph Jerome and Brocard Sewell. Brocard preferred to refer to Jerome as a separate entity, perhaps by way of a jest, since it was well known that the two were one and the same. Was ‘William Tonks’, who wrote learnedly on Summers for the Review, Brocard also? Brocard also published and promoted the work of Summers’s friend the poet Wrenne Jarman. The beautiful – nay stunning! – Wrenne was enormously impressed by Aleister Crowley (where have we heard that before?). The Lost Club Journal intends featuring the tragic Wrenne sometime. After a little investigation, the enduring mystery of the flowers and notes left on Wrenne’s grave in Richmond Cemetery seems to have been solved; but the explanation will have to wait.
Brocard’s other books include his memoirs My Dear Time’s Waste (1966) and The Habit of a Lifetime (1992), Footnote to the Nineties (1968), a study of John Gray and Raffalovich, Cecil Chesterton (1975), Like Black Swans (1982), collected essays, In the Dorian Mode (1983), a biography of Gray, Frances Horovitz, Poet: A Memoir (1987) and GK’s Weekly: An Appraisal (1990). For more on Brocard’s books and on the books he edited, see Richard Dalby’s article in the Book and Magazine Collector (No. 196, July 2000).
Brocard believed that the fullest expression of a writer’s thoughts were revealed in his or her letters. It is to be hoped that a selection of Brocard’s correspondence will be published before too long. A collection of tributes to him is planned. And why not a ‘best of’ series of Aylesford Review articles?