The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Page 18

  ‘That’s a metaphor!’ called the humble Christian’s voice, distant but distinct as it pursued God down the avenue, its tone of disparagement and indignation still perceptible. ‘Jesus is the prince of peace!’

  The cry produced a slight echo, beneath which God thought he detected a small, dry stirring in one of the oleanders.

  Halting, he peered between the leaves as though into a tapestry forest, in which, indeed, they might have been large, almost tacking, stitches.

  He perceived a square inch, bright as a tropical bird, of embroidered waistcoat.

  ‘Monsieur Voltaire!’

  ‘Ah! At last!’ said Voltaire, stepping out onto the grassy track but bending a stem of oleander into accompanying him, as he held one of its buds between his thumb and first finger. ‘From the sound of it, I thought you still engaged in religious dispute. I was passing the time in considering how. one would go about pruning a plant like this.’

  ‘Haven’t you’, God asked disappointedly, ‘been looking for the Black Girl?’

  Voltaire’s answer was cut off by a further cry from the humble Christian:

  ‘Prince of peace!’

  ‘Peace!’ the echo repeated down the avenue and in and out through the oleanders.

  ‘Prince of—’ the humble Christian’s voice began to reiterate. But it was itself cut off: by the deep thump, like a huge drumbeat, of a distant detonation.

  The oleander stem was whipped out of Voltaire’s hold, and the grassy ground on which he and God were standing suffered a convulsion, as though a monster was undulating beneath it.

  Though naturally startled, neither Voltaire nor God was frightened. They had become accustomed, over several centuries, to the fact that the religious dissensions of the Irish sometimes reached to the very floor of heaven.

  Clinging to one another, they managed to maintain their balance until the convulsion lessened and stopped.

  Glancing back up the avenue, God saw that, though the historian, whose profession probably precluded surprise at the event, was still asleep along the top of the marble bench, the humble Christian was now beneath it and on his knees again, though cramped into position more Muslim than Christian.

  ‘If only’, Voltaire remarked, offering God his arm and leading him down the avenue, whose formerly smooth surface was now hummocked as though by moles, ‘people would pay attention to psychoanalysis. They would learn the importance of proper names, which are highly significant both in primitive civilisations and, as dreams shew, to the unconscious; and at the same time they would learn not to dismiss puns, which are the very idiom of the language of the unconscious, as mere non-significant bad jokes. Only an idiot could doubt that the inhabitants of that island are influenced by the fact that their country is called Ireland or land of wrath.’

  ‘Quite so,’ God replied. ‘What, however, about the Black Girl? Have you located her?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Voltaire replied, handing God round the last of the hummocks and attaining smooth ground again.

  ‘How do you mean “not exactly”?’ God asked. ‘Surely you either have or haven’t?’

  ‘I believe’, said Voltaire, ‘that I’ve solved your problem.’

  But before God could ask what he meant by that, they saw the psychoanalyst approaching them up the avenue.

  An exchange of polite greetings followed, during which the psychoanalyst enquired amicably of God ‘Have you found the Black Girl?’ at the same time as God asked the psychoanalyst in a friendly tone ‘Have you cured your patient?’

  Both politely disclaimed being the first to answer.

  At last the psychoanalyst consented to lead with his reply, which was:

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘How,’ Voltaire asked, ‘do you mean?’

  ‘Perhaps we too unthinkingly took over, from medicine, the concept of cure,’ the psychoanalyst said. ‘Where the body is concerned, it is comparatively easy to work on the assumption that “ill health” means that something isn’t functioning efficiently. We, on the other hand, face the problem that it is often the maddest people who function with the most perfect efficiency from their own point of view. It is their acquaintance or society as a whole that experiences disruptions in its efficiency as a result of their condition. Yet neither can we equate “healthy” with “normal”. In human conduct, the only norm that isn’t merely someone’s private beau idéal is a statistical norm. And if we adopted that as our criterion of health, we should have to set out to “cure” people like you, Voltaire, of your abnormal and unhealthy cleverness.’

  ‘I’m glad you recognise your limitations,’ Voltaire said, ‘but sad if they include your not having done your patient any good whatever.’

  ‘Don’t be too modest on my behalf,’ the psychoanalyst replied. ‘My patient and I have both learnt a great deal from our sessions, and I defy you to maintain that that isn’t good for us.’

  ‘That answer would scarcely satisfy your opponents,’ Voltaire said. ‘I am of course emphatically not one of them. But I am sure they would leap in to demand whether what you learn is like what you might “learn” from listening to a string quartet or whether it can be formulated and then tested by experiment – whether, in fact, it is art or science.’

  ‘And I’, the psychoanalyst replied, ‘shouldn’t feel too pressing an obligation to answer them. If the categories in which they choose to think about reality are not adequate to my experience, then it’s for them to look to their categories. I shall just quietly pursue my practice of learning, without bothering too ardently about the label that should be put on what I learn. And now’ (the psychoanalyst turned to God) ‘tell me whether you’ve found the Black Girl – or, at the least, someone who will undertake to rehabilitate you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ God said. ‘Monsieur Voltaire was just explaining to me—’

  But there was a further interruption: a crash among the oleanders, from one of which, as the little group in the avenue turned to look towards it, half the figure of Edward Gibbon emerged.

  ‘My dear Mr Gibbon,’ God exclaimed solicitously as he hurried towards him and, holding the woody stems apart, helped him to free himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ Gibbon said, and joined the group. ‘Please to excuse my somewhat abstracted, if not indeed distracted, state.’

  ‘May we hope it signifies’, Voltaire asked, ‘that you have made up your mind to write another book?’

  ‘Not’, Gibbon replied, cursorily brushing some woody dust off his clothes, ‘exactly. I find myself intensely desirous of writing one, but I cannot fix on its theme.’

  ‘The cause of rehabilitating God’, Voltaire said, ‘may yet lay your talents under requisition – indeed, such as they are, all our talents. But first I must take God off on a brief expedition. Would you and’ (Voltaire addressed the psychoanalyst) ‘you wait for us here?’

  ‘It seems a pleasant enough place to wait in,’ the psychoanalyst acquiesced.

  ‘I do not suppose’, Gibbon said bleakly, ‘my mental fever will be worse in one place than in another.’

  ‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ Voltaire promised, and he led God away down the avenue.

  ‘Perhaps’, they heard the psychoanalyst suggest to Gibbon as they departed, ‘you’d care, while we wait, to talk to me about your aunt….’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Where are we going?’ God demanded.

  ‘To settle the problem of the Black Girl.’

  ‘How? In what way? Then you do know where she is?’

  ‘I must think out how to put it to you,’ Voltaire said.

  Accordingly, God allowed a silence to supervene.

  He and Voltaire marched side by side down the avenue, which took a turn and disclosed that it was leading them towards, in the distance, a formal garden.

  Indeed, in keeping with such a destination, the oleanders at each side of the route were now interrupted from time to time by classical statues.

  A butterfly erratically crossed fr
om one line of statues and oleanders to the other.

  Happy at the prospect, no matter how mysterious, of a resolution to his quest, God walked along alertly, giving his passing admiration to the statues, many of which were curious, and opening his senses to the warm, scented sunshine.

  Voltaire walked head down.

  ‘There’s Lucian,’ God said, having caught sight of a lithe Grecian figure just before it vanished, silvery as a lizard, behind the plinth of a Pan. ‘Such pure, pellucid, simple, cogent Greek! I am convinced that the only reason Lucian is not regularly named among the greatest of Greek authors is that he had the misfortune to live some centuries after what the Victorians dubbed, in their arrogance, “the best period”. And of course those muscularly Christian classical scholars didn’t like him any the better for the fact that, living late enough to witness its beginnings, he was scathing about the Christian along with other religious faiths. Nowadays, when classical scholars have abandoned the prejudice against “post-classical” Greek, much in the way that art-historians have become prepared to admit that some post-Renaissance paintings are great, one might expect Lucian to be restored to the esteem in which the 18th century held him and to be recognised as one of the finest exponents of Greek scepticism. But alas for justice! Just as he is due for restoration, the whole edifice of classical learning has collapsed. He can scarcely become a great name in a pantheon where all names are fading from view and at a time when one can scarcely count on the public to have heard even of Homer, except as a forename unaccountably popular in the United States. Perhaps it was for fear we would have forgotten who he is that Lucian vanished so quickly. Or perhaps – let us hope – he was merely pursuing some erotic liaison among the oleanders. I should have liked to shake him by the hand. He seems to me an author admirably sophisticated, admirably literary, yet admirably simple, and his dialogues of the dead are surely the most imaginative and stylish, as well as the most savage, anti-religious satires ever written.’

  ‘Quite so,’ was Voltaire’s answer.

  God therefore walked on with him in silence, giving himself up to admiring the garden ahead – where, he could now make out, a walk shaded by a pleached vine divided symmetrically and offered to conduct the visitor to, at the left, an artificial, no doubt eremitic ruin or, on the right, a small octagonal temple.

  ‘That reminds me,’ God remarked, forgetting to observe silence: ‘I was surprised how seriously you take the back-to-Nature message of the ending of Candide.’

  ‘What’, Voltaire cried, shocked out of his thoughtfulness, ‘can you mean?’

  ‘I mean your interest in pruning oleanders.’

  ‘Pruning is the most un-natural of operations,’ Voltaire said indignantly. ‘But what I intended by my question was: What can you mean by the “back-to-Nature message” of Candide? Are you confusing me with J.-J. Rousseau?’

  ‘No, no,’ God said quickly. ‘Indeed not. I was merely referring to Candide’s conclusion that “il faut cultiver notre jardin”.’

  ‘Cultiver,’ cried Voltaire emphatically, ‘cultiver, a verb cognate with “culture” and thus in logical opposition to “nature”. If you believe that to plant a garden is an act of God, you have been misled by the book of Genesis.24 Let me assure you that my interest in gardening rests entirely on the fact that a garden is an attempt to improve on nature. Let me also assure you that I long ago saw through Rousseau’s and many other people’s fallacious belief that there is, for human beings, some “natural” state, to which they have only to revert for all to go well. For humans the only natural state is to be endlessly, inventively and variably artificial. Man is not a bower-bird, whose instinct will instruct him how to build nests, all to the same pattern. His instinct is to devise original patterns. Man is man only insofar as he is hundreds of individual architects. Did I omit to say in Candide that our gardens are to be cultivated to the utmost pitch of disciplined fantasy and with the aid of every type of mechanical implement yet invented, including those lawn-mowers you sit on and drive, which it must be highly amusing to do?’

  ‘Yes,’ God said boldly. ‘You did omit.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Voltaire, ‘it’s a very condensed work. A great deal of its content is implied rather than stated. However, do I not quite explicitly state that, when Candide and his companion want to leave Eldorado, a country whose morals it is plain I largely endorse, the local engineers devise a machine for hoisting them over the mountains? And do I not remark that the ingenuity with which their departure is accomplished makes “un beau spectacle”?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ God said, ‘you do.’

  ‘People are being turned against machines’, Voltaire said, ‘by the perversity, which I mentioned to you earlier, of the left wing. Instead of using the machines to set the workers free, the socialists chain the workers to the machines by the bribe of wages. For this slavery, the machines are held to blame. As a result, industrial societies are now full of latterday Luddites and modern machine-breakers, people who have confused “doing your own thing” with baking your own bread. Instead of demanding that technology provide them with tasty bread, efficient transport and cheap, good-looking clothes, they declare themselves free of the machine and insist on home-baking, going on foot and knitting their own cardigans. They fail to notice that this freedom of theirs is merely enslavement to another sort of drudgery, this time without even the solace of wages. They have, moreover, to be wilfully blind to the most patent aesthetic facts. A machine-made cardigan is almost invariably handsomer than a home-made one, just as a circle drawn with a compass is handsomer than one drawn freehand – unless the hand concerned is Giotto’s, whose talent it was to be as precise as a machine. Those who deny beauty to all machines and to all machine-products are not aesthetes but snobs. If a machine-product is ugly, the fault is not the machine’s but the designer’s. If, on the other hand, a design is good, it is an aesthetic crime to subject its execution to the vagaries and the sheer slowness of craftsmanship, and thereby to limit its audience to the few who can afford to pay a rarity price.’

  Voltaire paused: in order to wave another salute to Samuel Butler, who now passed Voltaire and God in the avenue as he completed his (presumably circular) walk.

  Before Voltaire could resume his discourse on machines, God took the opportunity to remark into his ear, in the low, urgent tones people employ for commenting on someone who has only just passed out of earshot:

  ‘One of the things I most respect in Butler is his feminism. Granted that the word “authoress”, though sanctioned by Jane Austen, was by 1897 a little tinged with condescension. Yet you must admit that Butler could not have devised a more succinct summing-up of his thesis than to entitle it The Authoress of The Odyssey. And his thesis itself, that Nausicaa is a self-portrait of the author, is as salutory as it is full of charm. Bernard Shaw was right when he called it a serious proposition that must first have struck Butler as a joke.25 Its seriousness lies, of course, not in its contribution to history or to Homeric scholarship but in its message. It is only prejudice that makes people assume that the unknown quantity traditionally called Homer (or, for the matter of that, the unknown quantity traditionally called God) must be male.’

  ‘You are so eager to remedy injustice to women’, Voltaire replied, ‘that you have bounced yourself into being unjust to human imagination.’

  He and God had now emerged from the avenue into the formal garden.

  Ignoring the invitation of the pleached walk, Voltaire paused to consider the narrower offers made by several small secretive paths which, hedged by trellises or walled by herbal shrubs, seemed to constitute a sort of maze.

  Selecting an entrance, Voltaire plunged: into foliage and a snowstorm of papery blue butterflies whom his arrival had dislodged.

  Hurrying after, God found that his feet could make out the path though it was so overgrown from ankle-level upwards as to be invisible to his eyes.

  Reaching forward, he tapped at Voltaire’s shoulder and asked:


  ‘Then do you deny that such a work as The Odyssey could be written by a girl?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ Voltaire replied, briefly turning his head to cast his voice back at God before resuming his navigation of the path.

  ‘As a matter of fact, now I come to think of it,’ God said loudly to Voltaire’s retreating back, ‘I believe it must have been Butler’s feminism, as much as his evolutionism, that inspired Bernard Shaw. The Authoress of The Odyssey was surely the model on which Shaw, in a literary world that must have been full of intelligent man’s guides to this and that, conceived his Intelligent Woman’s Guide. Indeed, it must have been in the light of Butler that Shaw framed the thought, as he watched a performance of Everyman, “Why not Everywoman?”26

  ‘Aaah,’ said Voltaire, and God thought for an instant that he was conceding a point.

  During that instant, however, God caught up with Voltaire and came to have occasion to reinterpret the sigh he had heard into an expression merely of Voltaire’s relief at having done with the overgrown path.

  For the path had conducted them into an open space.

  At the centre there was a water garden. The surrounds were pleasingly floored with close-set up-ended bricks, which the sun had faded to all the colours of a sunset (including, as a matter of curious fact, even the blues and turquoises, which tinged the rims of some of the bricks).

  ‘Let us hope’, Voltaire said frailly, ‘I have not over-taxed my strength. I fear I must pause to recruit it. Meanwhile, I shall try to correct some of your and Samuel Butler’s misconceptions about literature. If it is only prejudice that makes people assume that Homer must have been a man, it is equally only prejudice that makes them assume that, if the author was a woman, she must have been an autobiographer. Many excellent’ authors of fiction are autobiographical. Butler himself, if I may judge by The Way of All Flesh, is one of them. But he should not have let his own literary temperament mislead him into attributing the same temperament to all authors, many of whom are most inventive where they are least informed. Why, on Butler’s assumptions, I must have visited Surinam before I wrote Candide! Of course a girl like Nausicaa could, if she happened to be a literary genius, write an Homeric epic. It is possible that she wrote The Odyssey and put a portrait of herself into it. But it is equally possible, and to my mind a great deal more probable, that she would be quite indifferent to the charms both of young girls and of the type of fairy tale considered suitable for young girls and, if she had genius enough to write an Homeric work at all, would have chosen to write The Iliad.’