Customer Reviews

A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitaries

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It is nice to occasionally find a book that resonates at the same frequency as one's own soul. In my case, it was this perceptive and extremely well written study of hermits, solitaries, and recluses. It is not often in our modern world that the possibility, and legitimacy, of a solitary existance is examined in a sympathetic manner.

I do not think that I've seen a more comprehensive study of the phenomenon of the solitary lifestyle (Chinese and Tibetan hermits, the desert fathers, medieval anchorites, monastic and hermit religious orders, wandering holy men from Ireland to Russia, shamans, the pastoral posers of the 18th century, American mountain men, the New England transidentalists, eccentric noblemen, classical Stoics, Romantic poets, conservationists- even Howard Hughs!)

Clearly, this is a topic that resonates with the author too, but then as a writer that would seem only natural (i.e., she is a member of what has traditionally been considered the solitary profession.) She clearly understands the various motivations that come to drive individuals to a solitary existance, both voluntarily and involuntarily (love of nature, inspiration, world weariness, high sensitivity, preservation of the poetic ego, scopophobia, religious dedication, and the desire to find union with the Divine itself....)

We don't think much of loners; it is a word of suspicion. Loners are
those racist militia men or pedophiles. We are social creatures
and we have intimate relationships with a few, friendships with
many, and interactions with a legion. And yet there have been
solitary souls throughout history who are odd but not malevolent,
and it is easy to sympathize with them. "The idea of the hermit's
life - simplicity, devotion, closeness to nature - lurks somewhere
on the periphery of most people's consciousness, a way glimpsed,
oddly familiar, not taken." So writes Isabel Colgate in _A Pelican
in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and
Recluses_ (Counterpoint). As the subtitle shows, there are many
variations on the means and reasons by which people take themselves
away to themselves, and Colgate has provided a widely inclusive
discussion of the phenomenon.

Colgate is a novelist, and her ability
to write with sympathy about these loners makes her cheerful book a
delight to read. One instance after another of individual oddity
spills from her pages. Gilbert White, the famous
clergyman-naturalist of Selborne in Kent, built a thatched
hermitage and installed his brother there as a hermit, at least for
picnics. If the owner had enough money not only for a hermitage
but also for a hermit, he could hire one. In the eighteenth
century, Charles Hamilton hired a hermit, specified how he would
dress, how he must not cut his hair or nails, and how he must never
speak. The hermit would have been paid 700 guineas for a seven
year hitch, but lasted only three weeks before sneaking off to
the local pub. Mrs. Pobjoy was Beau Nash's last mistress in Bath,
and after his death in 1761 she moved into a hollow trunk and
stayed there until she died, perhaps from poverty and perhaps from
a broken heart. A contemporary "dendrite" was Julia Butterfly
Hill, who climbed a redwood in California in 1997 to save the tree
from a logging company. She stayed up it for two years, enduring
bad weather, hassles from security guards, and legal battles, but
the logging company eventually admitted defeat. Hermits
seek privacy, but often do something useful to make their living,
like tending herbal gardens, keeping bees, and (in the case of a
contemporary hermit Colgate interviews) painting heraldic
devices.

The span of Colgate's research is delightful. She covers
celebrity solitaries, like J. D. Salinger, Howard Hughes, and
Thoreau. Notables like Andrew Jackson, Louis XIV, Peter the Great,
and the Spanish emperor Charles V built grand buildings called
hermitages, and removed themselves there without austerity. Enkidu
was a kind of hermit before befriended by Gilgamesh. There was a
hermit pope in the middle ages, or rather Peitro de Maroni was
thought to be such a holy hermit that he was made pope, and was so
miserable that he lasted at the post only four years before he
was allowed to retire and resume isolation. The Catalan architect
Antonio Gaudi lived as a hermit in the last fifteen years of his
life beneath the unfinished spires of his great church of Santa
Sagrada in Barcelona; when he was run over by a tram, everyone
thought he was just an old tramp and there was no rush to get him
to a hospital, so he died. Colgate smiles at these oddballs, and
sympathizes, and because she cannot resist a good story,
has crammed her book with wonderful small portraits and revealing
anecdotes. It is a very enjoyable, rather disorganized, ramble
among those who for religion or politics or neurosis or simplicity
took themselves away, and yet are always with us.

The author roves over many examples of solitary life, touching all too briefly on variants from the isolated spiritual hermit to the modern eccentric recluse. There is little evidence of in depth study of the life, rather a broadsheet offering glimpses on anyone who seems to have sought to live apart, for whatever reason.
If you are searching for a better understanding of what the solitary or silent life is, look elsewhere.

This is an example of a book with interesting subject matter, which just doesn't work out in terms of readability. Colegate is a fiction writer otherwise, and her writing style does not jive well with a topic that requires research and independent insight. Here we have what is essentially a scrapbook of vignettes about hermits, recluses, and a few misanthropes throughout history who decided to live the solitary life. The problem is that the book is merely a repetitive listing of stories, usually covered in a few pages, distilled from other books in which an entire volume is given over to those persons. See the bibliography for proof. This list-like method is also evident in the way Colegate has fallen for the predictable legends of Thoreau as a secluded loner on Walden Pond (chapter 13). Of course Thoreau's writings on naturalist ethics deserve to be classics, but Colegate misses this point as she describes Thoreau as a hardcore hermit in a vast wilderness. Everybody knows that Thoreau was actually within short walking distance of a town and often went to his mother's house for food and shelter, and was hardly a wildman roughing it on his own.

Colegate's writing style is also pure British, in that rambling, non-committal, and vaguely chauvinistic way. Colegate covers many interesting regions of the world in this book, but that creeping British condescension seeps through. For example, in chapter 2 she gives a predictable save-the-rainforest argument to people in Thailand who are forced to rely on firewood for fuel, and apparently need this Western person to teach them about forest ecology. Ultimately, this book is just a listing of untroubled loners, who are interesting in themselves, but are compiled into a boring book that has no insights or researched conclusions about humanity's need for solitude in itself.

I picked up this book after searching my library's catalogue for Isabel Colegate's works, and was curious about this non-fiction work of hers (ok I was curious about all her works as I have yet to read her fiction). This is a book about the solitary, about hermits and recluses, and I wasn't entirely sure why I felt compelled to search it out, but I did, and I took it home and it sat on my shelf for a little while, as I sought out what I felt to be the more interesting books in my recent Library Loot. Then I finally picked up A Pelican in the Wilderness, and I was pleasantly surprised. This book is less a scholarly treatise than a collection of thoughts, a wandering, a pondering of a subject that is so obviously dear to Colegate. Her passion for this topic is very affecting. So while at first hesitant, I grew to understand her ardor. What makes a person leave society behind and live on their own? Why do some of these hermits naturally attract a following? What is living all alone like? Colegate delves into the lives of the well-known and the obscure, often quoting from literary sources such as Somerset Maugham, Geoffrey Chaucer and Alexander Pope. She discusses the lives of Thoreau, J.D. Salinger, Lao-Tse, St Anthony, and many more.

But if you are truly looking for answers about becoming a hermit, this isn't exactly the book for you. Instead, this book is a little more like an exploration, a revaluation of the solitary, a kind of selection of character sketches (although character sketch doesn't seem to be the right word - it sounds too vague). Colegate's journey is a meandering one, and at times disjointed which can occasionally frustrate, but A Pelican in the Wilderness is a wonderful voyage through a surprisingly refreshing topic, with Colegate's passionate voice as a rather suitable tour guide.

I read this book in an evening, although when I began it, I thought it'd take much longer--the author renders this compendium of solitary themes in careful, if a bit fussy, prose. It took me less time than I'd expected due to the uneven coverage of topics. In three hundred pages, you get Flaubert, Thoreau, and Madame Blavatsky along with St. Simon Stylite, Charles de Foucauld, and Cannibal Joe the mountain man. Every hermit save the Unabomber seems to make an appearance here. This does make for an informative overview, but with so much material that must support the intended focus upon the attractions and the dangers of "I want to be alone," the ultimate result is more a curio than a well-crafted work itself.

The anglocentric nature of the author--there are those of us not knowing off-hand where Godalming is, who would've appreciated some context--does mean that this book would have appeal most of all to those who can visit, or who have seen, the haunts of the 18c gentry who briefly indulged in a DIY hermitage building craze. But so many promising trails peter out: Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" surely must have had specific points about hermits, but Colegate brings the book up only in a cursory fashion in one paragraph, with no references. She notices it, nods, and rushes on to the next sub-topic in her chapter. Another example: her summation of Charles De Foucauld's life, as with Isabella Eberhardt, whets one's appetite for more details on how these fascinating 19c French travellers in North Africa used their hermit tendencies as a retreat, a magnet, an energy source to fuel their respective adventures in religious and secular predicaments. But Colegate provides a well-told, but generalized biographical account of De Foucauld and Eberhardt that barely acknowledges the role that solitary retreats played in these two memorable lives. So much effort expended on condensing their lives into a few paragraphs, and so little then spent on showing how their hermit tendencies could be reconciled with or cap or play against the rest of their careers.

This pace, preceded by those chapter previews that so many books used to have, is brisk. Her own estate's restored hermitage from a couple hundred years back inspired her investigation, but she should have taken her time and expanded the book rather than condensed so much relevant material so that it was crowded out by the dozens of pages full of asides and background--interesting additions, sure, but not germane to the subject that needed more authorial attention and editorial control.

The endnotes glance at a shelf full of works she studied, but they too are rather lackadaisical, and give only author, title, and year published with no detailed page references or citations credited. She has done much reading on the topic and apparently some travelling, but, as with her off-hand remark about a postcard image from the Italian monastic hermitage of Camaldoli, you only realize too late that Colegate seems to have visited the place. You then wonder: why didn't she slow down and show us what she saw if indeed she had taken the trouble to go to that historic Italian forest? Instead, it's a few pages that could have come out of a guidebook or encyclopedia, not the personal observations that this book needed to integrate rather than scatter over such promising, but roughly furrowed, terrain as this subject of solitaries deserves.

It is nice to occasionally find a book that resonates at the same frequency as one's own soul. In my case, it was this perceptive and extremely well written study of hermits, solitaries, and recluses. It is not often in our modern world that the possibility, and legitimacy, of a solitary existance is examined in a sympathetic manner.

I do not think that I've seen a more comprehensive study of the phenomenon of the solitary lifestyle (Chinese and Tibetan hermits, the desert fathers, medieval anchorites, monastic and hermit religious orders, wandering holy men from Ireland to Russia, shamans, the pastoral posers of the 18th century, American mountain men, the New England transcendentalists, eccentric noblemen, classical Stoics, Romantic poets, conservationists- even Howard Hughs!)

Clearly, this is a topic that resonates with the author too, but then as a writer that would seem only natural (i.e., she is a member of what has traditionally been considered the solitary profession.) She clearly understands the various motivations that come to drive individuals to a solitary existance, both voluntarily and involuntarily (love of nature, inspiration, world weariness, high sensitivity, preservation of the poetic ego, scopophobia, religious dedication, and the desire to find union with the Divine itself....)

This is a well written exploration of the solitary life. Isabel Colegate uses her novelist's skills to imagine what might lead people to retreat into solitude. Religious ideals, political exile and romantic heartbreak are just few of the reasons she finds in her ambitious biography of famous hermits and hermitages. Despite the sad endings of more than quite a few hermits, the author demonstrates the joy that being alone can bring.

Reading this work makes me ask, "Where's my grotto?"

Apparently this publisher does not review the typesetting before publication. Every word containing the letter combination "fi" has a blank where those letters should be -- for example, "find" is " nd." Quotation marks show up as odd symbols. There are probably more examples, but I couldn't read far enough to find them.

Very disappointing, as I was very much looking forward to this book. If you still want to read it, borrow it from the library; don't spend your money.

Dreadful boring book by someone who clearly has no knowledge of silence and aloneness.