Ex-Nun's Story

THE CALLED AND THE CHOSEN (306 pp.) -Monica Baldwin -Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

Monica Baldwin is an ex-nun. The cousin of England's onetime Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, she took the veil of a Roman Catholic contemplative order in 1914, left it with a papal rescript in 1941 when she finally realized that she "was no more fitted to be a nun than to be an acrobat." After 28 years behind cloister walls, she was almost equally unfitted not to be a nun. Her bestselling first book. I Leap Over the Wall (TIME, Jan. 30, 1950), had a certain Rip van Winkle-ish appeal: it drew the portrait of a woman trained in the leisurely graces of pre-World War I society trying to cope with the rough-and-tumble era of World War II, after nearly three decades of being out of the world. In The Called and the Chosen, continuing her literary role as a kind of Thomas Merton-in-reverse, 59-year-old Author Baldwin leaps again.

The new book is a raggedly plotted novel whose first-person heroine, Sister Ursula, obviously walks in the footsteps of Monica Baldwin. Unhappily, Author Baldwin's story of a nun who misjudges her vocation also treads close on the path of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story, and by comparison comes off secondbest. Such fascination as it has lies in the book's embittered documentation of a nun's daily round and the romantic-escapist character of Sister Ursula who acts like an adolescent schoolgirl at the stage door of heaven waiting for God's autograph.

The Clammy Toad. Sister Ursula joins her order in her late teens, is assigned to a convent in Belgium. Like Sister Luke of The Nun's Story, she suffers the shock of initiation: an austere cell so cold that the holy-water stoup is sometimes frozen; the regimen of the "custody of the eyes," i.e., never letting them stray from a modest downward glance; the "instruments of penance," ranging from a scourging cord to metal knee and elbow bracelets studded with blunt-tipped nails. As early as her fifth day, Sister Ursula feels "a dreadful sick sensation as though an immense and clammy toad had settled just below my diaphragm."

She had pictured the nun's life as "ecstatic hours of prayer . . . unrestricted conversation . . . and plenty of time for reading and writing." Instead there is a busy round of "dusting, sweeping, sewing, mending" plus spiritual duties, beginning at 4:45 a.m. Ursula is soon displaying what can only be called a lack of Christian charity and humility. Her priest-confessor "has little blue eyes like an intelligent pig. " Her choir neighbor has a rasping voice that "bores like a drill." The nun's "starched headgear not only gives one a headache but-makes it difficult to hear." And fasting "makes one feel so dreadful."

Who Failed? Not unnaturally, Sister Ursula develops painful twinges of doubt as to whether or not she has a religious vocation. She plunges from her novitiate into professed nunhood in a "gambler's spirit." uttering a pathetic, near-blasphemous prayer: "O God -if there is a God -let what I am going to do be right . . ." She persists in trying to be a good nun for yet another decade -evidently from a stubborn prideful refusal to admit to herself that she has made a great mistake.

What possessed Monica-Ursula in the shallows of her subdeb soul to believe that she was called, let alone chosen, for a life of religious contemplation is a mystery Author Baldwin does not resolve. Her own attitude of pique makes it seem not that she failed God but that God failed her. For all its glaring shortcomings as a novel and despite its bitter tone, the book is an inadvertently moving document of a woman who desperately longed to love the cloistered life but found that this form of love -like other kinds -cannot be forced. There often is between the worldly mind and the mind truly at home in the cloister a wall of misunderstanding -and that is the wall over which Monica Baldwin never managed to leap.

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