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

  ‘To make the anagram work’, the bystander said, ‘you have to construe it in old script, whereby u is the same thing as v, and i as j.’

  ‘That was my bid for classic status,’ Voltaire said, passing the book, signed, back to God.

  ‘Thank you,’ God said. ‘Now I have only to secure the Black Girl’s signature, and my collection will be complete.’

  ‘Aren’t you’, the idle-minded bystander asked, turning to God, ‘going to complain that your name, in its English form, is an anagram of “dog” and that that shews what people really think of you?’

  ‘I like dogs, so it doesn’t trouble me,’ God said. ‘Besides, it’s appropriate to someone so often addressed in dog Latin. Neither do I object to the French habit of speaking of me as “le bon Dieu”, subversively though that suggests that there’s a bad one lurking somewhere. I shan’t even make anything of the fact that the Russians call me “Bog”. The only thing that does, I confess, cause me a twinge of pique is that the Italians call me “Iddio”. It’s very difficult not to take it for a phonetic, if misaccentuated, rendering of the French word “idiot”.’

  ‘To pronounce a word of one language in the accents of another often’, Voltaire said, ‘produces incongruities. An English person witnessing our transaction might suppose I had just placed my signature on a copy of the Epistle to the Romans.’

  ‘And incongruity could hardly go further than that,’ God said concludingly, as he stood up and slipped his signed paperback into his robe. ‘And now, if one of you could kindly tell me where to find the Black Girl….’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘I haven’t’, Voltaire confessed, meanwhile linking his arm with God’s as they came to a hillocky patch in the Elysian Fields, ‘the smallest idea where this Black Girl of yours is to be found. But I’m happy to take a stroll with you and put you on your way.’

  With his free hand Voltaire waved to Samuel Butler (1835–1902, not 1612–1680) who, in the course of a solitary walk in the opposite direction, came trudging past and accorded Voltaire a grumpy salute in return.

  ‘Such lucid prose’, Voltaire commented to God – and added, as Butler passed beyond earshot: ‘but such an obscured personality.’

  ‘Yet such insight into the psychology of religion,’ said God. ‘Remarkable in a pre-Freudian.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Voltaire replied. ‘However, to resume the matter in hand: I’m not even sure that I know whom you mean by the Black Girl. Did you imply she’s a writer?’

  ‘I’m astounded you’ve never come across her,’ God said. ‘She’s—’

  God broke off. Detaching his arm from Voltaire’s, he shouted ‘Excuse me a moment’ and began to run across the Fields.

  With considerable curiosity and at the pace of a brisk walk, Voltaire followed.

  He was quickly outdistanced. It was from many yards behind that he saw God’s feet become entangled in the hem of his robe and God go sprawling, his robe in disarray, on a hillock.

  ‘I am now’, Voltaire murmured to himself, ‘the equal of Moses. How unexpected.’

  God hastily elbowed himself upright and set off again, keeping his hemline out of further trouble by gathering his skirt into a bunch in his hand, which made his gait lollopy but efficient.

  Voltaire had to walk faster to keep him in clear view. Reaching the hillock where God had stumbled, he surmounted it and took advantage of its eminence to survey the distance.

  There, Voltaire made out, a tall figure was retreating.

  Voltaire hurried forward.

  The figure (which, he could now see, was imposingly wrapped from neck to ankles in a patterned cloth of Gauguinesque ferocity) continued to retreat at an even, majestic pace, paying not the smallest attention to the fact that God was lolloping along after it calling:

  ‘Excuse me, Miss! Excuse me!’

  At last, just as Voltaire was despairing of being able to keep the encounter in sight, the figure paused, turned round and waited for God to catch up.

  Voltaire perceived that it was the figure of a handsome black woman, considerably taller than God.

  Palpably panting as he reached her, God said:

  ‘Excuse me Miss, but are you the Black Girl?’

  ‘“Black Lady”’, she replied, ‘would come more appropriately from lips that shamelessly accost me in the highway without benefit of introduction.’

  ‘I’m afraid’, God replied, still panting and considerably taken aback as well, ‘I’ve got out of the habit of needing an introduction. Please excuse me. If I may introduce myself—’

  ‘I have no wish’, the Black Lady interrupted him, ‘to know who you are, given that I know full well what you are, that being all too obvious from the fact that in your brazen and licentious impatience you are already hitching up your skirts.’

  ‘No, really,’ God began to protest, quickly dropping his handful of skirt, ‘I do assure you—’

  ‘Don’t’, the Black Lady said commandingly, ‘compound your offence of brazenness with the offence of hypocrisy.’

  ‘Truly’, God pleaded, ‘you are under a misapprehension. I really didn’t mean to offend you. Please forgive me.’

  ‘Since our good lord and saviour enjoins us to do so, I forgive you,’ the Black Lady replied, raising her hand pontifically above God’s head, ‘even though you accosted me under the misnomer “Miss” – me that was joined to my good man in holy matrimony in the face of the congregation at Hallelujah Hall and have now two fine boys to shew for it, and neither one of them in trouble with the police or on drugs or with Afro hairstyles or homosexual, thanks to the two switches, the one called “strait” and the other “narrow”, which I keep hanging on the inside of the larder door so that, whenever my two fine growing boys venture therein with a view to satisfying the appetites of the flesh, they are reminded of the tribulations which, it is promised, shall visit the flesh of all who step out of the path which our merciful lord has appointed.’

  ‘I see’, God said, ‘that I’ve made a most unfortunate mistake. I can only beg your pardon. From the distance I mistook you—’

  ‘—for a bedizened strumpet’, the Black Lady completed, ‘though my footsteps were in fact dutifully bending towards Hallelujah Hall, where, but for your shameless interruption, I should even now be, crying “Hallelujah” and imploring our merciful lord to put down Mighty Whitey from his seat and exalt us humble and uncorrupted Blacks to total domination over him.’

  ‘I assure you’, God said, ‘what I mistook you for was a writer.’

  ‘Your excuses are not only lies but implausible. How can a Lady be a writer?’

  ‘One or two have managed it.’

  ‘Pornographers,’ the Black Lady cried, ‘every last one of them, perverters of the underlying values of our civilisation, laying it open to subversion by communism, tempting men to the lusts of the flesh and ladies to step beyond the boundaries of the submissive and subservient rôle our good lord has appointed for our sex.’

  And after a last glare down at God, the Black Lady turned and marched majestically away, leaving God standing alone in a small depression beside one of the hillocks.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Voltaire waited a moment before he approached God, put a hand on his shoulder and said:

  ‘Don’t be cast down.’

  ‘I know it’s silly of me,’ God replied without raising his head. ‘But she did seem upsettingly illiberal.’

  ‘And quite grossly religious,’ Voltaire agreed. ‘However, your dejection is irrational.’

  ‘No doubt,’ God replied, without moving or shewing interest.

  ‘If, Voltaire said, ‘centuries of slavery, oppression and injustice produced open, generous, enquiring and tolerant spirits, you would have to consider that there is something to be said for slavery, oppression and injustice.’

  God continued a moment in head-sunk thought and then raised a relieved face. ‘I think you must be right’, he said. ‘What a clever man you are. You quite give me courage
to resume my quest. And I hope you’ll consent to resume our stroll?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Voltaire replied. ‘But I can’t help suspecting that you’ve set out on your quest in a state of misapprehension.’

  ‘O, of course,’ God was quick to agree. ‘That wasn’t the Black Girl at all. From the moment she opened her mouth I knew I’d made a dreadful mistake.’

  ‘Even so—’, Voltaire began to say, but God was already continuing:

  ‘Pray lean on my arm. I noticed on my way here that this is treacherous terrain and, knowing the delicacy of your health, I should hate you to stumble.’

  ‘It’s true’, Voltaire said, availing himself with a sigh of God’s offer, ‘that I was, throughout my long life, a sorry invalid. I escaped ideological martyrdom, but mine was one protracted martyrdom to minor ailments.’

  ‘Let’s make a détour’, God suggested, ‘to avoid these dangerous hillocks – though “détour” is perhaps the wrong word, since I don’t know what direction I ought to be taking. I suppose’, he added abruptly, ‘I made a fool of myself over the Pseudo-Black-Girl.’

  Voltaire ventured no answer.

  They walked on in friendly silence for a few minutes and found themselves at the edge of a lake. Its shore was flat and easy underfoot, smoothed at places into, virtually, a path, and they began to walk along it.

  ‘After all’, God said, ‘there’s no reason why she should be liberally inclined, just because she belongs to a community that has suffered unspeakable pain through the illiberalism of others. She has as much right to be bloody-minded as anyone else.’

  ‘You mean she has little right,’ Voltaire said. ‘I realise that you originated racial prejudice, with all that nonsense about the Chosen People, but you shouldn’t allow your natural guilt to trip you over backwards. You would be exhibiting the most extreme and insulting racial prejudice if you made more allowances for Black Girls than for anyone else.’

  ‘That reproach’, God said mildly, after a moment’s thought, ‘is undeserved. I can say with certainty that my search for the Black Girl is not motivated by inverted race prejudice. I seek her for purely literary reasons. Her colour and, for the matter of that, if I may anticipate another reproach, her sex have nothing to do with it. About the Pseudo-Black-Girl, however, I did make a mistake. I ought to have reflected that prejudice is more likely to make its victims prejudiced in their turn than liberal. With forgetting that, you can justly reproach me. Indeed, you force me to ask myself whether it is possible that my thinking – mine, of all people’s – is still tainted by traces of the sentimental Christian fallacy that suffering ennobles.’

  ‘A sentimental fallacy’, Voltaire observed, ‘that has been invaluable to Christians. It has excused them from doing anything radical whatever to eliminate the eliminable causes of suffering. It has in fact licensed Christendom to be capitalist. A religion whose advice to the persecuted is “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad”10 is doing everything in its power to perpetuate persecution: it forbids the persecuted to make objections, and allows the persecutor to explain that he’s merely giving the persecuted cause to rejoice. Similarly, a religion that announces “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”11 perpetuates poverty. The poor are deterred from asking for their share of the wealth by the belief that, if they got it, they would forfeit their share in heaven. The rich can argue that, in keeping the wealth to themselves, they are generously keeping to themselves most of the risk of going to hell – or, as they usually express it, most of the risk of the ulcers that accompany the responsibilities undertaken by the well-paid. It really isn’t surprising, my dear God, that you were, as you complained earlier, converted into an instrument of the sort of justice that consists of defending property rights. Such justice offers the poor great opportunities to get their characters ennobled. They can do it either through suffering poverty or through suffering imprisonment should they try to relieve their poverty by appropriating some property.’

  ‘Now you make me notice it,’ God rejoined, ‘that remark attributed to me in my second person, “ye have the poor with you always”,12 is, for sheer silly heartlessness, not to mention abject resignation to the ills of the status quo, a good companion-piece to the advice attributed to Marie Antoinette that, if the poor had no bread, they should eat cake. The person who uttered it obviously had no concept of the poor as individuals. Indeed, he reminds me of those conservationists who think it doesn’t matter how many individual animals you slaughter provided the species they belong to isn’t in short supply. My New Testament alter ego obviously considered “the poor” simply as a very common species. The notion that ye have an individual poor person with you always is too absurd for even him to have voiced, given the palpable fact that, if you do nothing to remedy the poor individual’s poverty, you’ll lose him to starvation within a week.’

  ‘Bravo,’ cried Voltaire, patting God’s arm (which he was still leaning on) in approbation. ‘You’ve sloughed off Christian capitalism’s callousness towards the poor. You’ll soon rid yourself of the sentimentality that’s designed to offset it, namely the belief that to be poor is in itself a qualification for entering heaven. Not’, he added kindly, ‘that you are the only liberal whose liberalism is tainted with that superstition. The entire left wing is rotten with it.’

  ‘But surely—’ God began.

  ‘—with’, Voltaire allowed, ‘the substitution of “the revolution” for “the millennium” and of an earthly paradise for one in the sky. Socialism, by its own account, arises out of the contradictions of capitalism, and, when it does, it brings the contradictions of capitalist religion with it, though de-supernaturalised.’

  ‘But—’ God attempted again.

  ‘Consider’, Voltaire invited, ‘the rôle of the term “the workers” in left-wing discourse. “The workers” are simply what Christians call “the elect”, “the saved”, “God’s people” or “the blessed”. Moreover, “the workers” are exclusively those who, through economic or other necessity, work at boring, fatiguing and distasteful jobs. I say nothing of the insult this use of the word implies to those of us whose vocation calls us to work passionately and exhaustingly, and sometimes in defiance of bodily frailty, at interesting and enlivening tasks. I remark only that the physical fatigue and mental monotony of the jobs done by “the workers” blunt the mind, sensibility, individuality, energy and spirit. Consider, then, what socialism does when it holds that blessed are “the workers”. It edges itself into enunciating a beatitude every bit as silly as any in the Christian canon: “Blessed are the mindless, the insensitive, the de-individualised, the apathetic and the dispirited, for they shall inherit and govern the kingdom of heaven-on-earth.” There is scarcely a left-winger on earth who does not interpret “working-classness” as a mark of infallible and absolute virtue, and who does not suppose that a person who has been denied his fair chance of education, leisure and self-development is thereby instantly qualified to govern a country.’

  ‘Yet you must admit—’

  ‘I admit’, Voltaire said, ‘that socialists are preferable to Christians in that they don’t resign themselves and do propose to alter the status quo radically. Thanks, however, to the superstition they have inherited from the Christians, their alteration is in the wrong direction. Since they still believe that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, what socialists propose to do is abolish the rich. What they should do, and would do if they were socialists instead of superstitionists, is abolish the poor. Their perversity is such that they proclaim socialism a working-class movement and devote themselves to demanding higher and higher pay for the old personality-destroying jobs, with the result that more and more workers are, in the name of socialism, bribed into destroying more and more of their personalities by doing them. Meanwhile, the true mission of socialism goes unchampioned. Rather than a working-class movement, socialism should
proclaim itself a movement for wiping the working class off the face of the earth, for transferring all the dulling jobs to machines, which can be worn down and then replaced without pain, and for inviting the entire population to become members of the educated and leisured class.’

  While Voltaire was saying this, the lightly marked path which he and God were following brought them to a pretty, yellow willow-tree which, like an up-ended tassel, was weeping its shade over the lake’s edge and the path beside it.

  Squatting in the shade on the path, three men were taking it in turns to throw dice (from an elongated, slightly waisted cardboard cup bound in spiral strips of shiny crimson paper) onto a wide flat flake of slate which they had placed in the middle of the path.

  Reaching the dicers, God moved to go round them, but Voltaire, by a pressure on God’s arm, indicated that he wanted to pause.

  He finished what he was saying about socialism and then, leaning forward over one of the sitting men, watched the fall of the dice in silence.

  Before and after each throw, one of the men entered some figures in a notebook.

  After eleven throws, Voltaire said:

  ‘I take it, gentlemen, that you are engaged in a game of chance. But, to my slight chagrin, I can’t, from watching, make out the object of the game.’

  ‘Game nothing,’ one of the dicers replied without looking round. ‘This is science. Don’t disturb.’

  ‘O,’ God said, with a sigh of resigned comprehension; and, pulling on Voltaire’s sleeve, he steered him round the dicers and along the path.

  ‘Science never looked like that in my day,’ Voltaire remarked in a puzzled manner.

  ‘No,’ said God, hurrying Voltaire on, ‘but in your day it hadn’t been so successful in getting rid of me. Now, you see, scientists are convinced that science has expelled me from the universe, so they’re trying to cajole it into squeezing me back in again.’

  ‘By throwing dice?’

  ‘You may remember’, God said, ‘that during the renaissance a great many otherwise intelligent and even brilliant men went barmy on the subject of numbers, usually in connexion with some secret of “perfect” proportion or with the supposed harmony of the spheres. The dice are the 20th-century equivalent. Indeed, I daresay both barminesses have the same motivation. The dicers make a guess about how the dice will fall. If they score more correct guesses than they can expect to according to their concept of the “laws” of chance, they insist that the result is “significant”. What they claim it is significant of they call an extra-sensory perception. They are convinced that it is more scientific and neutral of them to call the means of perception “extra-sensory” than to call the phenomenon perceived “supernatural”. However, since humans perceive natural phenomena through their ordinary perceptions, it is presumably supernatural phenomena that they perceive through “extra-sensory” perceptions, so it comes to the same thing in the end. Likewise, the force whose existence the dicers believe they are demonstrating, though depersonalised – indeed, reduced to a mere cipher – comes in the end to none other than your old friend me.’