Nothing to Be Frightened Of (13 page)

But still, the story remains. Beyle/Stendhal is the modern art-lover’s progenitor and justification. He went to Florence and fainted at great art. He was in a church, but he was not a religious man, and his rapture was purely secular and aesthetic. And who would not understand and envy a man swooning at the Giottos in Santa Croce, the more so as he was seeing them with a mind and eye untrammelled by previous reproduction? The story is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.

Genuine pilgrims arriving at Santa Croce five centuries before Beyle would have seen in Giotto’s newly painted fresco cycle of the life of St. Francis an art that told them the absolute truth, and could save them, in this world and the next. It would have been the same for those who first read Dante, or first heard Palestrina. The more beautiful because true, the more true because beautiful, and these joyful multiplications continuing in an eternity of parallel mirrors. In a secular world, where we cross ourselves and genuflect before great works of art in a purely metaphorical way, we tend to believe that art tells us the truth—that’s to say, in a relativist universe, more truth than anything else—and that in turn this truth can save us—up to a point—that’s to say, enlighten us, move us, elevate us, even heal us—though only in this world. How much simpler it used to be, and not just grammatically.

Flaubert rebuked Louise Colet for having “the love of art” but not “the religion of art.” Some see art as a psychological replacement for religion, still supplying a sense of the world beyond themselves to those reduced creatures who now no longer dream of heaven. One modern critic, Professor S. of Cambridge, argues that art is essentially religious because the artist aims at immortality by avoiding “the banal democracy of death.” This grand statement is rebutted by Professor C. of Oxford, who points out that even the greatest art lasts no more than an eye-blink in geological time. The two statements are, I suppose, compatible, since the artist’s motivation might ignore the subsequent cosmic reality. But Professor C. has a grand statement of his own, namely that “The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.” There may be something in this, though the larger problem, in Britain at least, is that of contempt from the opposite direction: from the complacent philistine towards those who practise and value the arts. And do such feelings make
them
better people?

“The religion of art”: when Flaubert used the expression, he was talking about the dedicated practice, not the snobbish worship, of art; the monkishness required, the hair shirt, and the silent, solitary meditation before the act. If art is to be compared to a religion, it’s certainly not one in the traditional Catholic mode, with papal authoritarianism above and obedient servitude below. Rather, it is something like the early Church: fertile, chaotic, and schismatic. For every bishop there is a blasphemer; for every dogma there is a heretic. In art now, as in religion then, false prophets and false gods abound. There are artistic priest-hoods (disapproved of by Professor C.) which seek to exclude the unwashed, which disappear into hermetic intellectualism and inaccessible refinement. On the other side (and disapproved of by Professor S.) there is inauthenticity, mercantilism, and an infantile populism; artists who flatter and compromise, who dodge for votes (and cash) like politicians. Pure or impure, high-minded or corrupt, all—like golden lads and girls and chimney-sweepers—will come to dust, and their art not long afterwards, if not before. But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.

Chapter 23

Missing God is for me rather like Being English: a feeling roused mainly by attack. When my country is abused, a dormant, not to say narcoleptic, patriotism stirs. And when it comes to God, I find myself more provoked by atheistic absolutism than by, say, the often bland tentative hopefulness of the Church of England. The other month, I found myself at dinner with neighbours. A dozen of us around a kitchen table long enough to seat Christ and his disciples. Several conversations were proceeding simultaneously, when an argument suddenly spiked a few places away and a young man (the son of the house) shouted sarcastically, “But why should God do that for His son and not for the rest of us?” I found myself uncivilly turning out of my own conversation and shouting back, “Because He’s
God
, for Christ’s sake.” The exchange spread; my host C., an old friend and notorious rationalist, backed up his son: “There’s a book about how people survived crucifixion, how sometimes they weren’t dead when they were taken down. The centurions could be bribed.” Me: “What’s that got to do with it?” He (exasperatedly rationalist): “The point is, it couldn’t have happened.
It couldn’t have happened.
” Me (rationally exasperated with rationality): “But that’s
the whole point
—that it couldn’t have happened. The point is, that if you’re a Christian, it did.” I might have added that his argument was as old as . . . well, at least as old as
Madame Bovary
, where Homais, the bigoted materialist, declares the notion of the Resurrection to be not only “absurd” but “contrary to all the laws of physics.”

Such scientific objections and “explanations”—Christ wasn’t “really” walking on the water, but on a thin sheet of ice, which, under certain meteorological conditions . . . would have convinced me in my youth. Now they seem quite irrelevant. As Stravinsky put it, reasoned proof (and hence disproof ) is to religion no more than what counterpoint exercises are to music. Faith is about believing precisely what, according to all the known rules, “could not have happened.” The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, Mohammed leaping up to heaven leaving a foot-print in the rock, life hereafter. It couldn’t have happened by all we understand. But it did. Or it will. (Or, of course, it certainly didn’t and assuredly won’t.)

Writers need certain stock replies for certain stock questions. When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, “It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” We talk of the suspension of disbelief as the mental prerequisite for enjoying fiction, theatre, film, representational painting. It’s just words on a page, actors on a stage or screen, colours on a piece of canvas: these people don’t exist, have never existed, or if they did, these are mere copies of them, briefly convincing simulacra. Yet while we read, while our eyes explore, we believe: that Emma lives and dies, that Hamlet kills Laertes, that this brooding furtrimmed man and his brocaded wife might step out of their portrayals by Lotto and talk to us in the Italian of sixteenth-century Brescia. It never happened, it could never have happened, but we believe that it did and might. From such suspension of disbelief it is not far to the active acknowledgement of belief. Not that I am suggesting that fiction reading might soften you up for religion. On the contrary—very much the contrary: religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.

Another week, another meal: seven writers meet in the upstairs room of a Hungarian restaurant in Soho. Thirty or more years ago, this Friday lunch was instituted: a shouty, argumentative, smoky, boozy gathering attended by journalists, novelists, poets, and cartoonists at the end of another working week. Over the years the venue has shifted many times, and the personnel been diminished by relocation and death. Now there are seven of us left, the eldest in his mid-seventies, the youngest in his late—very late—fifties.

It is the only all-male event I knowingly, or willingly, attend. From weekly it has slipped to being merely annual; at times it is almost like the memory of an event. Over the years, too, its tone has shifted. It is now less shouty and more listening; less boastful and competitive, more teasing and indulgent. Nowadays, no one smokes, or attends with the stern intention of getting drunk, which used to seem worth doing for its own sake. We need a room to ourselves, not out of self-importance, or fear that our best lines will be stolen by eavesdroppers, but because half of us are deaf—some openly so, thumbing in their deaf aids as they sit down, others as yet unadmittedly. We are losing hair, needing glasses; our prostates are swelling slowly, and the lavatory cistern at the turn of the stair is given a good workout. But we are cheerful on the whole, and all still working.

The talk follows familiar tracks: gossip, bookbiz, litcrit, music, films, politics (some have done the ritual shuffle to the Right). This is no lemon table, and I can’t remember death, as a general topic, ever being discussed. Or religion, for that matter, though one of our number, P., is a Roman Catholic. For years, he has been relied upon to put the awkward, insinuatingly moral question. When one of the more philandering lunchers was ruminating on how uxorious he had lately become, it was P. who broke in to ask, “Is that love, do you think, or age?” (and received the answer that, alas, it was probably age).

This time, however, we have a matter of doctrine on which to quiz P. The new—German—pope has just announced the abolition of limbo. At first we require clarification: of what and where it was, who got sent there, and who, if anyone, was let out. There is a brief swerve into painting and Mantegna (though limbo has hardly been a popular subject, and is presumably not much of a loss to whatever Catholic painters are still out there). We note the mutability of these Final Places: even hell has been downgraded over the years in both probability and infernality. We agree, companionably, that Sartre’s “Hell is other people” is a nonsense. But what we really want to ask P. is whether, and how much, he believes in the reality of such destinations; and specifically, whether he believes in Heaven. “Yes,” he replies, “I hope so. I hope there is Heaven.” But for him such a belief is far from straightforwardly consoling. He explains that it is painful for him to consider that, if there is the eternity and heaven of his faith, it might involve separation from his four children, all of whom have abandoned the religion in which they were brought up.

And not just them: he must also consider being parted from his wife of more than forty years. Though one must, he says, hope for divine grace. It is far from certain that overt believers will necessarily be saved, or that the good deeds of nonbelievers and apostates will not reunite them with their believing, if far from perfect, husbands and progenitors. P. then supplies a marital detail previously unknown to me. His wife E. had been brought up an Anglican, and as a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was sent to lodge—Daniel-like—in the atheistic den of the philosopher A. J. Ayer. There she quickly lost her faith, and not even forty years of husbandly example could subsequently dent her agnosticism.

At this point a referendum is called on belief in an afterlife. Five and three-quarters of the remaining six give it no credence; the fractional party calls religion a “cruel con” yet admits he “wouldn’t mind if it were true.” But whereas in previous decades this might have led to some affectionate mockery of our Catholic member, now there is a sense that the rest of us are much closer to the oblivion in which we believe, whereas he, at least, has a moderate, modest hope of salvation and Heaven. It seems to me—though we do not have a referendum on this—that we quietly envy him. We do not believe, we have insistently not believed for decades, more than half a century in some cases; but we do not like what we see ahead of us, and our resources for dealing with it are not as good as they might be.

I don’t know if P. would be consoled, or alarmed, if I were to quote him Jules Renard (
Journal,
26 January 1906): “I’m happy to believe anything you suggest, but the justice of this world doesn’t exactly reassure me about the justice of the next. I fear that God will just carry on blundering: He’ll welcome the wicked into heaven, and boot the good down into hell.” But my friend P.’s dilemma—I know of no one who does such precise and woe-filled calculations about their possible afterlife—makes me reconsider something I have always, too lightly, maintained (and was doing so only a few pages ago). Agnostics and atheists observing religion from the sideline tend to be unimpressed by milksop creeds. What’s the point of faith unless you and it are serious—
seriously
serious—unless your religion fills, directs, stains, and sustains your life? But “serious” in most religions invariably means punitive. And so we are wishing on others what we would hardly wish upon ourselves.

Seriousness: I wouldn’t, for instance, have fancied being born in the Papal States as recently as the 1840s. Education was so discouraged that only two per cent of the population could read; priests and the secret police ran everything; “thinkers” of any kind were held a dangerous class; while “a distrust of anything not medieval led Gregory XVI to prohibit the intrusion of railways and telegraphs into his dominions.” No, that all sounds “serious” in quite the wrong way. Then there’s the world as decreed in Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors, in which he claimed for the Church control over all science, culture, and education, while rejecting freedom of worship for other faiths. No, I wouldn’t fancy that either. First they go after schismatics and heretics, then other religions, then they come for people like me. And as for being a woman under most faiths . . .