Surely the drive to go, to be surprised, to leave the unrelenting known for whatever lay beyond, has always lurked somewhere beneath the pilgrim’s piety. In his book on pilgrimage, Peter Sumption suggests that upon taking to the road the pilgrim left behind the chief quality of medieval life – ‘monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions’. He cites a fifteenth-century writer who bluntly identified the wanderlust factor: a pilgrim’s principal motivation, he wrote, was ‘curiosity to see new places and experience new things, an impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands’.
Not surprisingly, Kingsley put his finger on the same chord. ‘Into the psychology of the pilgrimage there must have entered love of wandering for its own sweet sake,’ he wrote in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. ‘The same restlessness that creates the modern tourist spurred on the men of the Middle Ages to roam.’
‘For its own sweet sake’. Again and again, Lucy notes in her journal their arrival at a hotel and her keen desire to bathe and nap, while Kingsley goes ‘out to investigate the village’, or ‘takes a walk’, or ‘visits the church’. The man was perpetually restless. During the early stages of their courtship it nearly killed him to spend the summer of 1911 at home reading Rabelais (counting the pages was ‘an indication, doubtless, that I am not properly enjoying it’), while Lucy travelled on the West Coast. He made a show of being enthusiastic about her adventures, but envy got the better of him. ‘One day I was dragged out yachting, which fairly made my hair curl with excitement.’ In another letter he was ‘stale from lack of travel’. When Lucy wrote of her climb up Mount Hood, in Oregon, he replied: ‘I thoroughly envy you the experience. I hate hard climbs while I am doing them – always get as scared as a kitten and never fail to vow to myself that if I get down safely I shall never no never try a mountain again – and yet one always does.’ By the time he finished writing, his blood was ‘on fire’ to climb anything.
Janice Mann, who wrote comparatively of Kingsley and Émile Mâle, believed Kingsley’s wanderlust to be typical of his nationality and generation. ‘For Porter,’ she wrote, ‘the process of art history was one of travel – physical and figurative – to the frontier. His sense of art historical accomplishment was satisfied by moving from familiar areas of the discipline into the unknown, just as progress in the European settlement of America involved moving repeatedly from civilisation into the wilderness. He was drawn to the open road both literally and metaphorically.’
It was true: as more scholars moved into the study of Romanesque art in the late 1920s, Kingsley shifted his focus to Ireland, where he and Lucy acquired a castle in Donegal as a base for his pioneering work on early Christian crosses. But even more intriguing than his need to roam was the nature of the unknown that Kingsley sought. For him, as well as for other American writers from Henry Adams to Henry James, the ‘wilderness’ of which Mann speaks was nothing other than the European past: a wilderness in time rather than place. In Kingsley’s case, he was not travelling to discover a new, empirical reality – a continent that could be sampled, measured, drawn, and detailed – but rather overlooked evidence that would substantiate a dream of the Middle Ages that he already held in his head. Like Conques Abbey in darkness, invisible but present, Kingsley imagined a world that could be sensed but no longer be seen, built upon remnants and old stone foundations that he and Lucy sought by day, of a society he valued far more than his own. Like me, he was a romantic, rebuilding the ruined eternity of the Romanesque in his mind, spellbound by his own reinventions.
His friends, notably the Irish poet George Russell, known by his epithet ‘Æ’, teased him about his disregard for modern life. Imagining Kingsley’s horror of air travel, Russell wrote with delight, ‘I suppose that would be an adhesion to the mechanical age which would seem to you almost as bad as Bolshevism. I fancy you sigh for travels with a donkey like Stevenson’s.’ He goes on to muse upon Lucy’s feelings for donkeys, then adds in clear-headed fashion, ‘I am sure with all your yearning for a simpler age without mechanics you could not endure it. You really ought to thank Heaven that you being born in a comfortable age can investigate uncomfortable ages without their dirt, smells, bad cooking, lack of sanitation, etc.’
Russell hit a nerve; Mann, too, feels that Kingsley regarded the medieval world as an insular, golden time in painful contrast to the whirring gears of an increasingly mass produced, mechanized America. It was this yearning of his, more than anything else, that provided a private, portable milieu within which he carried on his work as a scholar, and which suggests that the Porters’ travels amounted to a kind of pilgrimage in their own right – a pilgrimage back in time to satisfy a need of the imagination. An archaeologist’s search for relics upon which to build an imagined, better place is perhaps not so very different from a medieval pilgrim’s prayer to Ste Foy, or St James, to one day be admitted to the collective dream of heaven. That Kingsley linked his own road with the great pilgrimage route to Compostela is apparent, more than anywhere else, in the rapture of his prose. Of the Chemin de St Jacques he wrote:
One feels, as nowhere else, wrapped about by the beauty of the Middle Age. One is, as perhaps never before, emotionally and intellectually stimulated. Shards of the memory, long unused, are set vibrating. The actuality of the pilgrimage, like a cosmic phenomenon, overwhelms with the sense of its force, its inevitability. It seduces one, irresistibly …
Neither Lucy nor Kingsley was particularly religious; the endemic Protestantism of their youths seems to have manifested itself as a horror of idleness rather than a spirituality-driven habit of traditional churchgoing. Ironically, for a Luddite like Kingsley, it was their very American reliance on mechanical innovation – not just the Fiat, but the camera, especially – that most set their own journey apart from the spirit of the medieval pilgrimage in which he had so longed to invest himself.
The linchpin of pilgrimage, or relic-worship in general, is that the sacred item, be it a saint’s finger, whole carcass, or lock of holy hair, not only heals and answers prayers; it also confers sacredness on its environment. As William Melczer writes in his introduction to The Pilgrim’s Guide, ‘Pilgrim and relic are two sides of the same coin. The one is conditioned by the other. The essential mobility of the pilgrimage is a function of the essential immobility of the relic.’ Compostela, Conques, and all the other destinations of sacred medieval travel were mountains that would never, ever go to Muhammad.
Yet Lucy’s three-legged view camera broke the bond between place and pilgrimage. Her photographs rendered the hallowed stone fortresses to which penitents had trudged in a westward direction for almost a millennium as light and slim and portable as the paper on which their images were printed. Relics – or rather their encircling architecture – were no longer essentially immobile. Photographs took a print of their souls and rendered them relational commodities, open to comparison and historical analysis, able to be scrambled and studied; they were no longer absolutes wedded to a particular plot of earth by the sacred weight of a pile of stones. The ebbing of faith, of course, is responsible for the erosion of belief in traditional pilgrimage, but photography released the process of it, the procession of it, from the steady, seasonal gravitation of its course even for non-believers. Lucy and Kingsley did the Chemin de St Jacques backwards, in a car.
The abbey’s everlasting dampness had been inching through layers of skin, muscle, fat, and blood vessels until it finally reached the marrow of my bones, chilling me to my soul. I got up to leave and go to bed – the organ was still sending crashing breakers of Bach through my chest – and when I did, I noticed something unusual. The abbey’s white windows had taken on colour. Conques’ windows probably peeve traditionalists, but to me they are sublimely simple, pure and organic, a modern response to