Nothing to Be Frightened Of (9 page)

In the
Journal
, he attends to the natural world with intense precision, describing it with an unsentimental admiration. He attends to the human world with the same precision, describing it with scepticism and irony. But he also understood, as many do not, the nature and function of irony. On 26 December 1899, just as the century which would most need it was about to begin, he wrote: “Irony does not dry up the grass. It just burns off the weeds.”

Chapter 14

Renard’s friend Tristan Bernard, playwright and wit, once flagged down a hearse as if it were a taxi. When the vehicle stopped, he airily enquired, “Are you free?” Renard had been within hailing distance of death several times before his own came at the age of forty-six. Here are the occasions when he attended to it most carefully:

1) In May 1897, his brother Maurice removes their father’s revolver from his bedside table on the pretext of cleaning it. A family row ensues. François Renard is unimpressed both by his son’s action and his excuse: “He’s lying. He’s afraid I’ll kill myself. But if I wanted to, I wouldn’t use an instrument like that. It’d probably just leave me crippled.” Jules’s wife is shocked: “Stop talking like that,” she protests. But the Mayor of Chitry is unrelenting: “No, I wouldn’t mess around. I’d take my shotgun.” Jules suggests sardonically, “You’d do far better to take an enema.”

François Renard, however, knows or believes himself to be incurably ill. Four weeks later, he locks the bedroom door, takes his shotgun, and uses a walking stick to press the trigger. He succeeds in firing both barrels, just to make sure. Jules is summoned; he breaks down the door; there is smoke and the smell of powder. At first he thinks his father must be joking; then he is obliged to believe in the sprawled figure, the unseeing eyes, and the “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire.” He takes his father’s hands; they are still warm, still pliant.

François Renard, both an anti-clerical and a suicide, is the first person to be buried in the cemetery at Chitry without benefit of clergy. Jules judges that his father has died heroically, showing Roman virtues. He notes: “On the whole, this death has added to my sense of pride.” Six weeks after the funeral, he concludes: “The death of my father makes me feel as if I had written a beautiful book.”

2) In January 1900, Maurice Renard, a seemingly healthy thirty-seven-year-old clerk of works in the Highways Department, collapses in his Paris office. He has always complained about the steam-driven heating system in the building. One of its main pipes runs just behind his desk, and the temperature often rises to 20 degrees. “They’ll kill me with their central heating,” the country boy would predict; but angina proved the greater threat. Maurice is about to leave his office at the end of the day when he faints at his desk. He is carried from his chair to a couch, has trouble breathing, doesn’t utter a word, and is dead in a couple of minutes.

Jules, in Paris at the time, is again summoned. He sees his brother lying athwart the couch with one knee flexed; the exhausted pose reminds him of their father in death. The writer cannot help noticing the improvised cushion on which his dead brother’s head is resting: a Paris telephone directory. Jules sits down and weeps. His wife embraces him, and he senses in her the fear that it will be his turn next. His eye is caught by an advertisement printed in black along the edge of the telephone directory; from a distance, he tries to read it.

Jules and his wife watch over the body that night. Every so often, Jules lifts the handkerchief covering his brother’s face and looks at the half-open mouth, expecting it to start breathing again. As the hours pass, the nose seems to become fleshier, while the ears turn as hard as seashells. Maurice becomes quite stiff and cold. “His life has now passed into the furniture, and each time it gives the slightest creak, we shiver.”

Three days later, Maurice is buried at Chitry. The priest waits to be called but is denied. Jules walks behind the hearse, watches the wreaths jiggling, thinks the horse looks as if it has been given a special coat of dirty black paint that morning. When they lower the coffin into the deep family pit, he notices a fat worm seeming to rejoice on the grave’s edge. “If a worm could strut, this one would be strutting.”

Jules concludes: “All I feel is a kind of anger at death and its imbecile tricks.”

3) In August 1909, a small boy perched on a waggon in the middle of Chitry sees a woman sitting on the stonework of the village well, and then, suddenly, falling backwards. It is Renard’s mother, who over the last years has been losing her mind. Jules is summoned for a third time. He comes running, throws down his hat and cane, and peers into the well: he sees some floating skirts and “the soft eddy familiar to those who have drowned an animal.” He tries to get down using the bucket; when he steps in, he notices that his boots seem ridiculously long and are bending up at the ends like fish in a pail. Then someone arrives with a ladder; Jules gets out of the bucket, descends the rungs, succeeds only in getting his feet wet. Two efficient villagers go down and retrieve the body; there is not a scratch on it.

Renard cannot determine whether it was an accident or another suicide; he calls his mother’s death “impenetrable.” He argues: “Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible is the strongest argument for His existence.” He concludes: “Death is not an artist.”

Chapter 15

While living among the priests in Brittany, I discovered the work of the great Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. In his early years, he was known as “Abbé Brel” for his preachiness; and in 1958 recorded a track called “
Dites, si c’était vrai
” (“And what if it were true?”). It is less a song than a prayer-poem tremulously intoned against the background growl of an organ. Brel asks us to imagine what things would be like “if it were true.” If Christ really had been born in that stable in Bethlehem . . . If what the Evangelists wrote were true . . . If that
coup de théâtre
at the wedding in Cana had really happened . . . or that other coup, the stuff with Lazarus . . . If all of it were true, Brel concludes, then we would say Yes, because it is all so beautiful when one believes that it is true.

I now find this one of the worst tracks Brel ever recorded; and the mature singer was to become as mockingly irreligious as his younger self was God-bothering. But this early song, wincingly sincere, makes the point. If it were true, it would be beautiful; and because it was beautiful, it would be the more true; and the more true, the more beautiful; and so on. YES BUT IT’S NOT TRUE YOU IDIOT, I hear my brother interject. Such rambling is even worse that those hypothetical desires you attribute to our dead mother.

No doubt; but the Christian religion didn’t last so long merely because everyone else believed it, because it was imposed by ruler and priesthood, because it was a means of social control, because it was the only story in town, and because if you didn’t believe it—or disbelieved it too vociferously—you might have a quickly truncated life. It lasted also because it was a beautiful lie, because the characters, the plot, the various
coups de théâtre
, the over-arching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel. The story of Jesus—high-minded mission, facing-down of the oppressor, persecution, betrayal, execution, resurrection—is the perfect example of that formula Hollywood famously and furiously seeks: a tragedy with a happy ending. Reading the Bible as “literature,” as that puckish old schoolmaster was trying to point out to us, is not a patch on reading the Bible as truth, the truth endorsed by beauty.

I went to a concert in London with my friend J. The sacred choral work we heard has gone from my memory, but not his question afterwards: “How many times in the course of that did you think of our Risen Lord?” “None,” I replied. I wondered if J. had himself been thinking of our Risen Lord; after all, he is the son of a clergyman, and has the habit—unique among those I know—of saying “God bless” as a farewell. Might this be indicative of some residual belief? Or is it just a linguistic remnant, like saying “
Grüss Gott
” in parts of Germany?

Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art. It is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever: what would it be like “if it were true” . . . Imagine hearing the Mozart
Requiem
in a great cathedral—or, for that matter, Poulenc’s fishermen’s mass in a clifftop chapel damp from salt spray—and taking the text as gospel; imagine reading Giotto’s holy strip-cartoon in the chapel at Padua as nonfiction; imagine looking on a Donatello as the actual face of the suffering Christ or the weeping Magdalene. It would—to put it mildly—add a bit of extra oomph, wouldn’t it?

This may seem an irrelevant and vulgar wish—for more gas in the tank, more alcohol in the wine; for a better (or somehow bigger) aesthetic experience. But it’s more than that. Edith Wharton understood the feeling—and the disadvantage—of admiring churches and cathedrals when you no longer believe in what those buildings represent; and she described the process of trying to imagine yourself back through the centuries in order to understand it and feel it. Yet even the best imaginer-back cannot end up with exactly what a Christian would have felt gazing up at the newly installed stained glass of Bourges Cathedral, or listening to a Bach cantata in St. Thomas’s, Leipzig, or rereading a long-told biblical story in a Rembrandt etching. That Christian would, presumably, have been concerned more with truth than aesthetics; or at least, their estimation of an artist’s greatness would have been guided by the effectiveness and originality (or, for that matter, familiarity) with which the tenets of religion were expounded.

Does it matter if we take the religion out of religious art, if we aestheticize it into mere colours, structures, sounds, their essential meaning as distant as a childhood memory? Or is that a pointless question, as we don’t have the choice? Pretending to beliefs we don’t have during Mozart’s
Requiem
is like pretending to find Shakespeare’s horn jokes funny (though some theatre goers still relentlessly laugh). A few years ago I was at the Birmingham City Art Gallery. In one glassed-in corner, there is a small, intense painting by Petrus Christus of Christ displaying his wounds: with outstretched forefinger and thumb he indicates where the spear went in—even invites us to measure the gash. His crown of thorns has sprouted into a gilt, spun-sugar halo of glory. Two saints, one with a lily and the other with a sword, attend him, drawing back the green velvet drapes of a strangely domestic proscenium. As I was stepping away from my inspection, I became aware of a track-suited father and small son travelling towards me at a lively art-hating clip. The father, equipped with better trainers and more stamina, held a yard or two’s advantage as they turned this corner. The boy glanced into the exhibition case and asked, in a strong Brummy accent, “Why’s that man holding his chest, Dad?” The father, without breaking stride, managed a quick look back and an instant answer: “Dunno.”

However much pleasure and truth we draw from the non-religious art created especially for us, however fully it engages our aesthetic selves, it would be a pity if our reaction to what has preceded it was finally diminished to a Dunno. But of course this is happening. Wall captions in galleries increasingly explain such events as the Annunciation, or the Assumption of the Virgin—though rarely the identity of all those squadrons of symbol-bearing saints. I would have needed my own iconographical dictionary if someone had asked me to name the two attendants in the Petrus Christus.

What will it be like when Christianity joins the list of dead religions, and is taught in universities as part of the folklore syllabus; when blasphemy becomes not legal or illegal but simply impossible? It will be a bit like this. Recently, I was in Athens, and found myself looking for the first time at Cycladic marble figurines. These were made around 3000–2000 bc, are predominantly female, and come in two main types: semi-abstract violin shapes, and more naturalistic representations of a stylistically elongated body. The latter typically propose: a long nose on a shield-like head devoid of other features; a stretched neck; arms folded across the stomach, left arm invariably above the right; a sketched pubic triangle; a chiselled division between the legs; feet in a tiptoe position.