Tony Hendra’s spiritual memoir starts off with a literal bang, as he recalls having an affair with a married woman at the age of 14. When the husband, a devout Catholic, discovers the two embracing in his kitchen, he hauls off Tony to the one man he believes can save the young fornicator’s soul: Father Joe.
At first glance, Dom Joseph Warrilow, who had lived all his adult life in a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight, looked less like a saviour than a friar rendered by Warner Brothers. He had “big pink hands like rock lobsters sticking out from frayed black cuffs…a fleshy triangular nose…gigantic ears, wings of gristle, at right angles to the rather pointy, close-shaven skull. The long rubbery lips were stretched in the goofiest of grins.”
To paraphrase Waterboys singer Mike Scott, it was a wonderful disguise. Underneath the cartoon countenance was faith’s real deal. Father Joe, no “Cathaholic” addicted to dogma, was radiant rather than wrathful, and offered Hendra guidance rather than guilt.
As a teen, Hendra had all sorts of mad enthusiasms, most of which only lasted a few weeks, usually due to the reality principle of no money or mentors. “I’d been an astronomer, archeologist, research chemist, brewer and vintner, race car mechanic, minimalist poet (twice), numismatist, lepidopterist, reporter, concert pianist, angler, munitions expert, operatic tenor, Olympic track and field star, lumberjack and spelunker…Like all my other teen dreams, the new identity was like a tailor’s fitting as I turned this way and that to see how it looked in the mirror of self-consciousness.”
Hendra was searching for the one guise that would trump the rest.
The teen abandoned his identity as adulterer after a terrified introduction to what turned out to be the benignly smiling Father Joe. So impressed was Hendra by Joe’s Christ-like response to sin, that he now had a real model to emulate. He sums it up with the line, “I Was a Teenage Monk.”
Pursuing a monk’s path seemed a bizarre career path for a teenage boy in the early sixties. His schoolboy chums preferred the culture of rebellion and musical protest: “To them, Peter, Paul and Mary meant folk. To me it meant the two top apostles and the Mother of Christ...They were eyeing the emerging schism between Mod and Rocker and wondering which way to jump in the crucial matter of hair; I couldn’t wait to shave a bald spot in mine.”
Some of these schoolboy associates went on to become well-known public figures such as cosmologist Fred Hoyle and an “inarticulate homunculus named Stephen Hawking.” The great utility of Hawking to his classmates, Hendra writes, was his speed-of-light understanding of math and physics. “He usually had the homework finished by the end of lunch hour, and the thuggier elements in his class – including me – found it easy to persuade him to share it. Our math and physics marks were terrific, until the inevitable day of the test, which Hawking finished in minutes and sat snuffling and grinning and doodling for the remainder of the hour, while the rest of us sweated through the now incomprehensible scientific runes.”
His enthusiasm for the monastic life was eventually abandoned for a comedic one. Hendra traded prayer for laughter; joining The Cambridge Footlights, he was soon hanging out with future Python alumni like John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Relocating to the US, the might-have-been-monk became an editor of the humour magazine National Lampoon, and struck up friendships with the Saturday Night Live and Second City crowd. Hendra’s talent as a satirist was in high demand; by the eighties he was editor of the irony-on-steroids Spy magazine, and starred in the musical mock-doc This Is Spinal Tap. Drugs, debauchery, and doubt accompanied his worldly journey, but the soul-searching correspondence and occasional meetings with Father Joe never ceased.
Father Joe remained a rock in Hendra’s storm-tossed life, responding to his questions on life, war, God, sex and sin with a Socratic wit and a loving concern. What makes Hendra’s spiritual memoir so appealing is that Father Joe comes across on the page as an enlightened presence: a nonjudgmental soul of great compassion. In a time when Catholicism’s darker side is getting a well-deserved caning, Hendra’s book is both a benediction and a caution; we’re reminded that every organized religion has both its asses and its assets.
Hendra himself comes off less admirably than Father Joe. But as brutally honest as this memoir is – and it is beautifully written – it’s been condemned as a halfway measure in the auto-flagellation department. Upon publication, Hendra’s 30-year-old daughter accused her father of sexual abuse. If this is more than familial opportunism, it raises the question whether a piece of literature should be judged by the same standards as the author. Is Hendra’s memoir retrospectively damned by the hand that wrote it? (I’m reminded of one of my favourite authors, Arthur Koestler. Once the equal to George Orwell as a political essayist and thinker, the Hungarian author was outed several years ago by biographer David Cesarini as a violent alcoholic and serial rapist.)
Whether such accusations stick or not, Father Joe remains a glowing presence in these pages. The comic-looking cleric strikes the reader as one of the less objectionable birds in the aviary of organized religion: one who gives wings to others by word and deed. If Hendra ultimately fails to live up fully to Father Joe’s wit, warmth and wisdom, he still manages to lyrically convey the soulfulness that went into the old bird’s efforts.

Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, Tony Hendra, Random House, $35.95. Vancouver writer and political cartoonist Geoff Olson can be reached at gefo@telus.net