The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read online

  ‘The homespun idiom that calls the Bible “the good book’”, God said, ‘has persuaded English-speaking people that there is only one.’

  ‘And in fact’, Voltaire observed, ‘the Bible is the only book whose existence is statutorily recognised in an English court of law.’

  ‘And there’, said God, ‘it is put to a use which betrays that the English either hold it in cynical contempt or have never read it. The jurors and witnesses who assist at the judging of an accused person begin by swearing their oath on a book that owes its sacred character to the belief that it records the precepts of their god – precepts which include “Judge not” and “Swear not at all”.’

  ‘Interesting questions’, Gibbon remarked in a musing manner, ‘would be prompted if the Bible were indeed to be tried in England on a charge of obscenity. Could it reasonably be found obscene by the verdict of jurors, and on the evidence of witnesses, who had first taken their oath on it? Suppose, further, that one of the witnesses lied on oath. If the book on which the oath had been administered were later suppressed as obscene, could the witness then be held guilty of perjury?’

  ‘To swallow such tiny inconsistencies’, Voltaire objected, ‘would not provoke so much as a belch from either the church or the law of England. Remember that in 1936 the English managed, without firing a shot or raising an axe in anger, to dethrone a king. They did it by simply maintaining that the king could not logically continue head of the church of England if he married a divorcée. They were not in the least put out by the fact that both the church of England and the king’s legitimate succession to the title of head of it owed their existence to the divorce of King Henry VIII.’

  ‘They were not in the least put out’, God confirmed with feeling, ‘on the occasion when they declared me to be without body or parts, by the fact that Exodus quotes me as promising Moses “thou shalt see my back parts”.’

  ‘De facto’, Gibbon said, ‘the church of England has suppressed parts of the Bible – indeed, of God – as obscene.’

  ‘Not only’, Voltaire said to God, ‘have your original inventors taken refuge in anonymity, but you are subject to a continuous process of editing. The anonymous and undated narrative called the gospel of Saint Matthew distinctly says that you, in your second person, said “Swear not at all”. The church of England fully accepts the authority and authenticity of the narrative. But that doesn’t inhibit it from declaring, as an Article of Religion, which all its clergymen are bound to subscribe to, that Christianity allows “that a man may swear when the Magistrate requireth”.’

  ‘Thus am I edited’, God observed bitterly, ‘into an instrument of English justice.’

  ‘You become a shield for the two major passions of the English, their sense of propriety and their sense of property.’

  ‘No doubt it was in defence of property’, Gibbon remarked, ‘that, by a rule that was not changed until 1972, the only citizens who qualified to serve on an English jury were householders.’

  ‘It ensured that all juries were prejudiced’, Voltaire agreed, ‘against burglars. Meanwhile, in defence of the proprieties, the jury qualifications in obscenity cases do not require the householder to shew that his household effects include books. It is hoped, by this omission, to procure juries prejudiced against literature.’

  ‘In Britain’, Gibbon said, ‘it is scarcely necessary to legislate for a prejudice against literature.’

  ‘The British prejudice against literature’, Voltaire replied, ‘is strangely selective. It co-exists with a passion for reading. The device that enables the British to act out this paradox is the library. From their public libraries alone, the British borrow a book a month per man, woman or baby in the population. When you add in the academic, private and school libraries, the population is probably reading away at the rate of a book a fortnight. For all this borrowing the British pay the librarians but not the authors. The Scandinavians, though they borrow fewer books a year, do pay the authors. The British see no need to do so, although they borrow more books per head than any other nation on earth. They believe the authors should be paid only when someone buys their books, though, as everyone has access to a library, hardly anyone does. For every book a Briton buys, he borrows 9½ from a public library. The British prejudice against literature consists of reading extensively but allowing the authors to starve.’

  ‘If our mild and misnamed friend Sterne were present’, Gibbon said, ‘he would surely argue that they order this matter better in France.’

  ‘His esteem for my compatriots’, Voltaire replied, ‘was formed before universal compulsory education set in. In assessing the culture of any modern state, you have to consider how it conducts its compulsory schooling. In compelling children to go to school, the state impresses on them, as the very first lesson of their educational career, the message that learning is a process so nasty that force of law is needed to get them to do it. The success of schools is to be measured by how far their pupils forget their first lesson. English pupils seldom forget it, because they spend their first three years at school having it explained to them by the teacher that they are not yet big and strong enough to undergo the dire experience of learning to read. As a result, although many English adults are addicted to reading for pleasure, they never lose the sense that reading a book is something which it is both nasty for them and, in consequence, virtuous of them to undertake – which leaves their conscience un troubled when they underpay and underpraise their writers.’

  ‘The French’, Gibbon said, ‘are at least proud of their great writers. Your own portrait has appeared on a French banknote, whereas my name is meaningless to all but the most highly-educated few among the British public, and to most of those it means a type of monkey.’

  ‘The French are proud of their great writers,’ Voltaire conceded, ‘but they don’t read them. The way French schools inculcate pride in French literature is to teach their pupils by rote a résumé of each author’s work, a characterisation of his style and a pronouncement about his place on Parnassus. The child quickly gathers that it would be superfluous for him actually to read the books. Among French adults, an exchange of digests and received opinions recollected from one’s schooling is often mistaken for a literary conversation.’

  ‘I read in the papers8 the other day’, said an idle-minded bystander who had drifted into the group, ‘that about half the population of France never reads a book.’

  ‘I am vindicated,’ said Voltaire.

  ‘I don’t see you are at all,’ said the idle-minded bystander. ‘Just because a lot of French people don’t read books, it doesn’t follow that they’re uncultivated. I daresay they read the papers, as I do.’

  ‘And the papers’, Voltaire said, ‘persuade them that they have no more need to read recent books than to read the classics, since the papers will tell them which ones to admire and why.’

  ‘At least’, Gibbon protested, ‘the French papers, unlike the English ones, consider books to be news.’

  ‘The English never notice’, Voltaire replied, ‘that what makes a book news in France is not the quality of the words in the text but the quantity of the digits in the monetary value of the literary prize it has won. Surely you, my dear Gibbon, whose command of my native language is such that your first published work was composed in French, have remarked the suspicious circumstance that the French use the same word, “livre”, to mean both “book” and “pound sterling”?’

  ‘Surely attempts are being made,’ God interposed, ‘in France and England alike, to order these matters better? I, too, sometimes read the papers, if only out of courtesy to the people who insert In Memoriam notices, who obviously expect it of me, and I’m sure I remember reading that 1972 was designated, by Unesco, International Book Year.’

  ‘What sum’, Gibbon enquired, ‘did the British government allocate to the celebration?’

  ‘Nothing, I believe,’ God replied apologetically. ‘Though, I believe, the Duke of Edinburgh made a publi
c appearance.’

  ‘As he doesn’t refrain from public appearances during Non-Book Years, it scarcely distinguishes the occasion,’ said Voltaire.

  ‘And what,’ Gibbon asked, ‘of the French government?’

  ‘I read about that’, the idle-minded bystander answered, ‘in the paper. The French government allocated the equivalent of 400,000 pounds sterling (or livres).’

  ‘This matter at least’, Gibbon commented, ‘they do appear to have ordered better in France.’

  ‘They ordered it with a bizarrerie’, Voltaire replied, ‘that I should have judged extravagant had I put it into one of my own sci-fi fictions. The French government used the money to make a present of six books to every French couple who married during International Book Year.’

  ‘I can’t think why you’re complaining,’ the idle-minded bystander said to Voltaire. ‘A volume by you was included.’

  ‘I’m complaining because I’m dead. The gesture would have come in very handily during my lifetime, as I daresay it would have done for authors alive in 1972. I should explain’, Voltaire pursued to the others, ‘that the French government made up two different bundles of six books, presumably so that no French citizen who chanced to be married, widowed and re-married within the Year should be burdened with duplicates. Thus there was a total of twelve books involved. The authors of all twelve were dead. International Book Year was therefore celebrated without a sou reaching a writer. The French government spent £400,000 entirely in support of two morally questionable institutions, marriage and publishers.’

  ‘What was the nature’, Gibbon asked, ‘of the books given away?’

  ‘That’s where the French government betrayed its typically French frivolity,’ the bystander replied. ‘They were all fiction.’

  ‘You consider fiction frivolous?’ asked God thunderously.

  ‘Of course. Fiction isn’t true.’

  ‘Neither’, said God, ‘is a string quartet.’

  ‘That’s different,’ the bystander said. ‘Everyone knows that music is serious – and difficult.’

  ‘Whereas to your mind’, asked Voltaire, pointing the question like an icicle, ‘nothing could be easier than to run up such a design as Emma or Vanity Fair – or Candide?’

  ‘It’s strange you should mention it,’ the bystander replied. ‘Because as a matter of fact, now you ask me, I’ve often thought I ought to write a book. The only trouble is: I haven’t the time.’

  ‘I suppose’, said Voltaire, ‘you’re too busy reading the papers?’

  ‘Let’s put it’, the bystander said with self-satisfaction, ‘that I find real life too absorbing.’

  ‘Perhaps’, Gibbon enquired, ‘you’re under the impression that the papers are non-fiction?’

  ‘Well, at least they try to be,’ the bystander said. ‘Which is more than you can say for most novels.’

  ‘A novel that tries not to be one seems a self-defeat, if not an impossibility,’ Voltaire said. ‘Unless that is how we should describe the Bible?’

  ‘Was the Bible’, asked Gibbon, ‘among the French government’s wedding presents?’

  ‘No,’ said Voltaire. ‘For reasons, I suppose, of chauvinism. It wasn’t written in French. Or perhaps the government baulked at portraying the Holy Ghost on a banknote.’

  ‘What denomination to pick’, murmured God, ‘might indeed be a problem. For myself’, he went on, addressing the idle-minded bystander, ‘I find the fiction factor the only good thing about the whole episode. I’m the first to agree with the dictum that God is dead, but that makes me all the more eager to contest the dictum that fiction is.’

  ‘For my part’, Gibbon said, ‘though from my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian, I never subscribed to the common error of supposing fiction inimical to history. In my Memoirs, besides confessing my own attachment to the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, I defend the use of fables in education. In answer to some literal-minded objections advanced by Rousseau, I point out that no child is so silly as to suppose, from reading Aesop, that animals can speak. It is indeed a remarkable circumstance that children can unerringly distinguish fact from make-believe. It is only adults who sometimes, in the name of faith, wantonly divest themselves of their childish discernment and take to braying that they have it on the authority of the Bible9 that Balaam owned an animal that did speak. My task as an historian once begun, I perceived that the chief part of it was to chronicle the fictions which men refuse to value and honour as fictions but deceive themselves into thinking it virtuous of them to mistake for history.’

  ‘And of all fictions that pose as history’, God said, ‘the most outrageous is the notion that the rapid success and expansion of Christianity in the ancient world was a miracle and that it proves the divine origin of the belief. I am astounded, Mr Gibbon, that Christians have not ceased to press that notion since the appearance of your great work. Given, as you so powerfully delineate them, the fraudulence of the early Christians, their preference for piety over learning, their destruction of the logical and scientific temper of mind that had characterised the civilisation of the ancients, and the assiduity with which, on attaining positions of authority, they made it dangerous to publish information contradictory of their creed, I should sooner have accepted it as a miracle had Christianity not succeeded and spread.’

  (‘I know of no better compliment to your style’, Voltaire whispered to Gibbon, ‘than the catchingness of its cadences.’)

  As though to answer the challenge of God’s words, the humble Christian, who had all this time been praying merely mezza voce, increased his volume, so that his voice swelled round the little group like an organ through a cathedral. ‘Per quem majestatem tuam laudant angeli, adorant Dominationes, tremunt Potestates….’

  ‘Splendid stuff,’ God appreciatively remarked.

  ‘Coeli, coelorumque Virtutes, ac beata Seraphim, socia exsultatione concelebrant….’

  ‘Yes,’ Gibbon said, in a noticeably abstracted manner, ‘prayers are indeed potent, though scarcely in the direction their reciters intend. They move, I find, not so much mountains as emotions and ideas.’

  ‘You hardly need me to remind you’, Voltaire said to Gibbon, ‘that it was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as you sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to your mind.’

  ‘I should hate to seem to echo’, said God, ‘that philistine royal duke who remarked to you “Scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?” Permit me only to say I should feel as excited as he felt depressed were it to prove that the idea of a new book is now starting to your mind. And my excitement would turn into a veritable elation did the new book prove to be the one which I recently – I won’t say attempted to commission from you, but ventured to adumbrate to you.’

  ‘I scarcely…’, Gibbon began to reply, in manifest confusion. ‘Your thought is indeed a kind one. I confess that liturgy, like lullaby, promotes that combination of calm and stimulation which…. The clicking of rosary beads, it may be, recalls the clicking of my aunt’s knitting needles. It was my aunt, as I record in my Memoirs, who brought me up. Yet I scarcely dare trust my powers, in the matter of a conspectus so vast as the decline and fall of God…. Her name was Mrs Catherine Porten. I confess I am somewhat perturbed, and can scarcely frame my sentences. I think I will, at least, take a brief walk on my own.’

  He rose, bowed and wandered off, a little stumpily, into the daisies and asphodels of the Elysian Fields.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Swiftly drawing from a fold in his robe a Livre de Poche paperback (‘Voltaire: Romans. Présenté par Roger Peyrefitte’), God said:

  ‘May I, before I resume my quest, just snatch the opportunity to ask you to sign this?’

  ‘Honoured,’ Voltaire replied, and prepared his pen.

  ‘If it isn’t impertinent’, God said, ‘would
you mind signing it “F. M. Arouet”? I shall keep it next my copy of Middlemarch signed “Mary Ann Evans”.’

  ‘Delighted to oblige,’ said Voltaire. ‘Did you get her to sign “Mary Ann Cross” as well?’

  ‘I did not,’ said God. ‘As a women’s liberationist I’m dead against all this imposing of married names. She was born Evans, she wrote masterpieces as George Eliot, and she had a lifelong liaison of love with George Henry Lewes. It wasn’t till she was virtually an old woman that she got married (to Mr Cross), and she died before the marriage had lasted a year. I know of no better illustration of the English preference for reactionary socio-religious institutions over people, love and literature than the fact that the name under which she appears in the Dictionary of National Biography is Cross.’

  ‘No doubt’, Voltaire murmured sympathetically, ‘the name has painful associations for you.’

  ‘You certainly have’, God said, ‘taken up the psychoanalytic habit of thought. My own analysis of myself is complicated by the fact that I exist only as a projection of people’s somewhat two-edged emotions towards the image of father. Still, I’ve got far enough to concede you the point that it is my own anomalous situation, as a father orphaned by the vanishing of his authors into anonymity, that sharpens my interest in authors who make themselves anonymous by inventing a pseudonym and thus, in a sense, creating themselves. It has often amused me to reflect that Voltaire would not exist had not F. M. Arouet found it necessary to invent him.’

  ‘Am I right in thinking’, the idle-minded bystander asked, looking over Voltaire’s shoulder as he signed the book, ‘that “Voltaire” is an anagram of “Arouet l.j.”, in which the “l.j.” stands for “le jeune”?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Voltaire. ‘It was my bid for, simultaneously, immortality and perpetual youth.’