Cathedral Scandal

CATHEDRAL CLOSE--Susan Goodyear-- Scribner ($2.50).

When British readers discovered last year that "Susan Goodyear" was the wife of the Very Reverend Walter Robert Matthews, successor to Dean Inge of London's St. Paul's Cathedral and former Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Cathedral Close, a first novel which up to then had won only critics' praise, leaped suddenly into the best-seller class. The reason for this sudden popularity was a curiosity to find out how much truth lay behind the scandal which forms the theme of the story, and if the scandal occurred at Exeter. U. S. readers, while immune to this news interest, will still rate Cathedral Close a competent, well-characterized story giving a vivid authentic picture of an environment little less unique than English royalty.

Of the four canons living within the Close of Silbury Cathedral, The Canon was short, paunchy, 60-year-old Carmichael, who after 24 years of devoted service embroils the Cathedral in the worst mess that ever rose out of a canon's past. An unbending traditionalist, he fidgets through the first scene with misgivings about the new Dean--a rawboned, sympathetic Cambridge scholar named Mallinson, whose wife, a tall, witty, Virginia Woolf sort of character, is the author's voice for a detached account of Cathedral life. Added to these central characters are the staff of functionaries who make up the tightly-organized, beautifully-landscaped, fabulous world of a great English cathedral. Lay characters appear in sufficient numbers to afford a gossip circuit between the Cathedral and the town--a female psychiatrist belonging to the "generation of blue-stockings who were defined as women who were no longer ladies, but had not yet become gentlemen," a neurotic old maid on a manhunt, uninhibited servants. It is a lay character also who brings about Canon Carmichael's fall--a beautiful, intelligent German girl who marries a Silbury business man. When the Canon meets her he turns pale and mutters that she reminds him of someone. The reminder is of a German peasant girl whom he deserted 25 years back when he was offered a canonry. Since that time the mere mention of Germany has been enough to make him go to pieces. But it has never occurred to him that a child might turn up. Servants get hold of the first clues. With these and Silburians' devious skill in putting two & two together--the Canon's increasing nervousness, physical resemblances, further note-comparing by returned English tourists--the news soon gets around. After hearing the Canon"s full confession (a mixture of contrition and lyricism about nude bathing in a mountain stream), Dean Mallinson makes a heroic effort to spike the gossip. For a time he thinks he has suc- ceeded. But when the gossip starts again, the Cathedral rocks with it. To save the Cathedral's honor, not Carmichael's soul, frightened Cathedral officials decide to send the Canon to another church on the pretext that his health is bad.

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