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 . . .
Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly. And if you think popes seem a sitting—or enthroned—target, consider someone as unpopish as one of their notorious enemies: Robespierre. The Incorruptible One first came to national prominence in 1789 with an attack on the luxury and worldliness of the Catholic Church. In a speech to the Estates General, he urged the priesthood to reacquaint itself with the austerity and virtue of early Christendom by the obvious means of selling all its property and distributing the proceeds to the poor. The Revolution, he implied, would be happy to help if the Church proved reluctant.
Most of the Revolutionary leaders were atheists or serious agnostics; and the new state quickly disposed of the Catholic God and his local representatives. Robespierre, however, was the ex
ception, a Deist who thought atheism in a public man little short of lunacy. His theological and political terminologies were intermingled. In a grand phrase, he declared that “atheism is aristocratic”; whereas the concept of a Supreme Being who watches over human innocence and protects our virtue—and, presumably, smiles as unvirtuous heads are lopped—was “democratic through and through.” Robespierre even quoted (seriously) Voltaire ’s (ironic) dictum that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” From all this, you might imagine that when the Revolution introduced an up-to-date belief system, it might avoid the extremism of the one it replaced; might be rational, pragmatic, even liberal. But what did the invention of a shiny new Supreme Being lead to? At the start of the Revolution, Robespierre presided over the slaughter of priests; by its end, he was presiding over the slaughter of atheists.
Chapter 24
In my early twenties, I read a lot of Somerset Maugham. I admired the lucid pessimism and ranging geography of his stories and novels; also, his sane reflections on art and life in such books as The Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook. I enjoyed being prodded and startled by his truth-telling and sophisticated cynicism. I didn’t envy the writer his money, his smoking jackets or his Riviera house (though I wouldn’t have minded his art collection); but I did envy him his knowledge of the world. I knew so little about it myself, and was ashamed of my ignorance. In my second term at Oxford, I had decided to give up modern languages for the more “serious” study of philosophy and psychology. My French tutor, a benign Mallarmé scholar, courteously asked my reasons. I gave him two. The first was prosaic (literally so—the weekly grind of turning chunks of English prose into French and vice versa), the second more overwhelming. How, I asked him, could I possibly be expected to have any understanding of, or sensible opinions about, a play like Phèdre when I had only the remotest experience of the volcanic emotions depicted in it? He gave me a wry, donnish smile: “Well, which of us can ever say that we have?”
At this time, I kept a box of green index cards, onto which I copied epigrams, witticisms, scraps of dialogue, and pieces of wisdom worth preserving. Some of them strike me now as the meretricious generalizations that youth endorses (but then they would); though they do include this, from a French source: “The advice of the old is like the winter sun: it sheds light but does not warm us.” Given that I have reached my advice-giving years, I think this may be profoundly true. And there were two pieces of Maugham’s wisdom that echoed with me for years, probably because I kept arguing with them. The first was the claim that “Beauty is a bore.” The second, from chapter 77 of The Summing Up (a green index card informs me), ran: “The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.” I cannot remember my response to this at the time, though I suspect it might have been: Speak for yourself, old man.
Maugham was an agnostic who thought that the best frame of mind in which to conduct life was one of humorous resignation. In The Summing Up he runs through the various unpersuasive arguments—from prime cause, from design, from perfection—which have convinced others of God’s reality. More plausible than these, to his mind, was the long unfashionable argument e consensu gentium, “from general agreement.” Since the beginning of human time, the vast majority of people, including the greatest and wisest of them, from vastly divergent cultures, have all entertained some kind of belief in a God. How could such a widespread instinct exist without the possibility of its being satisfied?
For all his practical wisdom and knowledge of the world—and for all his fame and his money—Maugham failed to hold on to the spirit of humorous resignation. His old age contained little serenity: all was vindictiveness, monkey glands, and hostile will-making. His body was kept going in vigour and lust while his heart grew harder and his mind began to slip; he declined into an empty rich man. Had he wished to write a codicil to his own (wintry, unwarming) advice, it might have been: the additional tragedy of life is that we do not perish at the right time.
While Maugham was still lucid, however, he arranged a meeting of which, alas, no detailed minutes, or even the sketchiest outline, survive. During the era of piety, princes and rich burghers used to summon priest and prelate to reassure them of the certainty of heaven and the rewards their prayers and monetary offerings had ensured. The agnostic Maugham now did the opposite: he summoned A. J. Ayer, the most intellectually and socially fashionable philosopher of the day, to reassure him that death was indeed final, and that nothing, and nothingness, followed it. The need for such reassurance might be explained by a passage in The Summing Up. There Maugham relates how, as a young man, he lost his belief in God, but nonetheless retained for a while an instinctive fear of hell, which it took him another metaphysical shrug to dislodge. Perhaps he was still looking over his shoulder.
Ayer and his wife, the novelist Dee Wells, arrived at the Villa Mauresque in April 1961 for this oddest, and most poignant, of freebies. If this were a short story or a play, the two principals might begin by sounding one another out, and seeking to establish the rules of the encounter; then the narrative would build towards a set piece in Maugham’s study, probably after dinner on the second evening. Brandy glasses would be filled, swirled, and sniffed; we might equip Maugham with a cigar, Ayer with a pack of French cigarettes rolled in yellow paper. The novelist would list the reasons why he long ago ceased to believe in God; the philosopher would endorse their correctness. The novelist might sentimentally raise the argument e consensu gentium; the philosopher would smilingly dismantle it. The novelist might wonder whether, even without God, there might not still, paradoxically, be hell; the philosopher—reflecting to himself that this fear might be a sign of vestigial homosexual guilt—would put him right. The brandy glasses would be refilled, and then, to make his presentation complete (and justify his air ticket) the philosopher would outline the latest and most logical proofs of the nonexistence of God and the finiteness of life. The novelist would rise a little unsteadily, brush some ash off his smoking jacket, and suggest they rejoin the ladies. In company again, Maugham would pronounce himself profoundly satisfied, and become jolly, almost skittish, for the rest of the evening; the Ayers might exchange knowing glances.
(A professional philosopher, considering this imaginary scene, might protest at the writer’s gross vulgarization of Ayer’s actual position. The Wykeham Professor regarded all religious language as essentially unverifiable; so for him the statement “There is no God” was as meaningless as the statement “God exists”—neither being susceptible to philosophical proof. In reply, the writer might plead literary necessity; and also counter that since Ayer was here talking to a layman and benefactor, he might have held back on technicality.)
But since this is life, or rather the remnants of it that become available to biographers, we have no evidence of such a private audience. Perhaps there was just a brisk, convivial reassurance over the breakfast table. This might make for a better short story (though not play): the Great Matter dismissed in a few phrases during a clatter of knives, with perhaps the counterpoint of a parallel discussion about social arrangements for the day: who wanted to go shopping in Nice, and where exactly along the Grande Corniche Maugham’s Rolls-Royce should transport them for lunch. But in any event, the required exchange somehow took place, Ayer and his wife returned to London, while Maugham, after this rare secular shriving, proceeded towards his death.
Chapter 25
A few years ago, I translated the notebook Alphonse Daudet began keeping when he realized his syphilis had reached its tertiary stage, and would inevitably bring his death. At one point in the text he starts bidding goodbye to those he loves: “Farewell wife, children, family, the things of my heart . . .” And then he adds: “Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct.” I wonder if we can somehow farewell ourselves in advance. Can we lose, or at least thin, this resilient sense of specialness until there is less of it to disappear, less of it to miss? The paradox being, of course, that it is this very ?
??me” which is in charge of thinning itself. Just as the brain is the only instrument that we have to investigate the workings of the brain. Just as the theory of the Death of the Author was inevitably pronounced by . . . an Author.
Lose, or at least thin, the “me.” Two stratagems suggest themselves. First, to ask how much, in the scale of things, that “me” is worth. Why should the universe possibly need its continuing existence? This “me” has already been indulged with several decades of life, and in most cases will have reproduced itself; how can it be of sufficient importance to justify any more years? Further, consider how boring that “me” would become, to both me and others, if it went on and on and on (see Bernard Shaw, author of Back to Methuselah; also see Bernard Shaw, old man, incorrigible poseur and tedious self-publicist). Second stratagem: see the death of “me” through the eyes of others. Not those who will mourn and miss you, or those who might hear of your death and raise a momentary glass; or even those who might say “Good!” or “Never liked him anyway” or “Terribly overrated.” Rather, see the death of “me” from the point of view of those who have never heard of you—which is, after all, almost everybody. Unknown person dies: not many mourn. That is our certain obituary in the eyes of the rest of the world. So who are we to indulge our egotism and make a fuss?