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

  ‘After all,’ Shaw went on, walking round the sow, ‘people see ghosts for the same reason that they read ghost stories: as self-indulgence. It is not murderers who are haunted. It is the innocent. They see the ghosts of departed loved ones in order to congratulate themselves on the fact that they didnt, despite grievous provocation, murder the loved one. That is why a person who believes he has seen a ghost is invariably proud of it. If seeing a ghost argued that he was guilty of murder, he would either hush up the experience or contrive not to have it. It is because people truly are guilty of murdering animals that the folk imagination has to contrive not to see the ghosts of the folk diet. Ghosts depend for their existence on what the people who see them are willing to see. If it were true that ghosts lurk in localities associated with wanton killing, then Smithfield Market and the stockyards of Chicago would be more intensively haunted than the most misty moorland battlefield or the dungeon of the eeriest castle.’

  The group walked on in silence for a moment.

  God reached down and patted the sheep who was walking beside him.

  Presently, Voltaire remarked to God:

  ‘To be a ghost without being dead is a distinction unique to your third person.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ God said, turning to Shaw. ‘You were going to explain how not being dead will help me advance my rehabilitation.’

  ‘You are a fictitious character,’ Shaw replied. ‘You can do anything whatsoever.’

  ‘But only’, God objected, ‘within the confines of a work of fiction.’

  ‘That limitation cant hamper you’, Shaw said, ‘because you have no existence except within the confines of fiction. Outside fiction, you can feel hampered or unhampered: you cant feel anything. Fiction cant be aware of its own limitations – indeed, it has no limitations – unless it puts itself forward as fact. That is what I meant when I wrote42 that nothing stands between the people and the fictions of religious mythology except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction. That is what Coleridge meant when he defined43 poetic (as distinct from religious) faith as the voluntary (as opposed to compulsory) suspension of disbelief for the moment. Only when Mohammed tries to exert the power of religious faith on a real mountain, attempting to compel either the mountain to come to him or himself to believe that it has done so, does he encounter the obstinate fact that the mountain wont. But let him stay inside the confines of a story (where disbelief is suspended only “for the moment” but the moment is infinitely renewable – “so long”, in fact, “as men can breathe and eyes can see”), and it will turn out that the storyteller can bring Mohammed and the mountain together in the twinkling of a mere half-sentence, and it is every bit as easy for him to bring the mountain to Mohammed as vice versa.’

  ‘Well,’ said God in a pleased and excited manner, ‘if being fictitious means I can do anything I like, miracles and conjuring tricks included, then—’

  At that point, however, the group reached Gibbon and the psychoanalyst.

  Greetings were exchanged between Shaw and Gibbon, who already knew each other; and Shaw and the psychoanalyst were made acquainted.

  To the surprise of the rest Shaw appeared exceptionally shy or even, one might have thought, frightened of the psychoanalyst.

  Indeed, as soon as he civilly could, he stole out of proximity to the psychoanalyst and took up a position on his own, from which he addressed the group rather as though it had been a public meeting:

  ‘Gentlemen, if we are to accomplish God’s rehabilitation, it is obvious that our first step must be to convene a round-table conference.’

  ‘Allow me,’ said God; and exerting the power of fiction he conjured a plain wooden round table into being at the centre of the oleander avenue.

  He then made a quick count of the people present and created, about the table, five chairs.

  ‘I am very glad’, Gibbon said, taking one of them at once, ‘of the opportunity to sit. I am somewhat too stoutly built to be happy for long on my feet.’

  As the others joined him, Shaw did a little side-slipping in order to avoid sitting next to the psychoanalyst; and no sooner was God seated (with Shaw next to him) than the big sheep squeezed under the table and nuzzled at his knee.

  ‘I had no idea’, God said, looking round the table happily, ‘that this poetic faith of Coleridge’s was so potent. I knew I could shape my own outward appearance to any of the forms which people have believed in (some of which, I may say, are so thoroughly nasty that I would not dream of assuming them); but to conjure an independent object out of nothing is (since, contrary to rumour, I in fact didn’t create the universe) a new experience for me – and great fun. Only one small problem disturbs me. One hears of people (rather intense Victorian curates, usually) who suddenly “lose their faith”, the faith in question being of the religious sort: is it, I wonder, possible to suffer a similar sudden loss of faith of the poetic sort?’

  Even as God put the question, the rim of the table began to shrink away from the stomachs sitting round it, and the level of the table top sank towards the ground.

  Making a protestant noise, the sheep ran out just before the top could descend onto his back.

  ‘Courage,’ Gibbon growled firmly to God.

  ‘Be bold,’ cried Voltaire.

  The table was restored.

  Moreover, it was no longer wooden and plain. Its top now consisted of an enormous slice of polished agate.

  For a foot or so inwards from the rim, it was darkly translucent, like black coffee. Then, working inwards, came a series of narrow ring markings, in colours from crème caramel to mushroom gill. The centre was colourlessly light, and you could see through the surface to a drift of white streaks, like curds, inside. To look into it was like looking into a glass marble or into a muddy puddle in which the ice had been broken and then refrozen.

  The entire slice was delicately clawed, round its edge, into an ormolu setting, and supported on legs borrowed from marine mythology.

  ‘Isnt this’, asked Shaw, looking down at it in dismay, ‘in deplorable taste?’

  ‘No,’ Voltaire replied unconcernedly. ‘It’s merely imaginatively extravagant. I’ve already explained to you that you’re visually null. If you met the musical equivalent of this table in an opera by Handel, it wouldn’t cause you an instant’s disturbance.’

  ‘Well, if you insist,’ Shaw said queasily, ‘I shall attempt to think of it as the mad scene in Orlando.’

  ‘Or’, Gibbon urged, ‘think of it as the table where Don Giovanni took his Last Supper.’

  ‘You ask a great deal of me,’ Shaw said. ‘You must remember that I have always been a Puritan in my attitude to Art,44 and that I was so out of sympathy with Don Giovanni’s rantings about “Vivan le femmine! Viva il buon vino!” that I picked up his story at the point where Mozart left it, namely his descent into hell, in order to shew him bored to death with pleasure and taking up the pursuit of metaphysics in its place.’45

  ‘Is it’, the psychoanalyst asked in a friendly way, leaning across the expanse of agate in Shaw’s direction, ‘your Puritanism that makes you shun me?’

  ‘No, it is your profession,’ Shaw replied; and, as he did so, either he flinched or he chanced at that moment to draw himself aside so that the sheep might pass by and resume the place he had appointed himself under the table at God’s knee.

  ‘I had hoped’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘that my profession might earn a good mark from you – if only because psychoanalysts are not vivisectors.’

  ‘It is true’, Shaw replied, ‘that you can search my writings and you wont find a word to suggest that psychoanalysis is inhumane – or even that it is untrue. What you will find is the observation that Sigmund Freud was an author utterly devoid of delicacy.’46

  ‘As a matter of fact, Freud was a little shocked by you’,47 the psychoanalyst retorted. ‘And I don’t need reminding that you thought him indelicate. The passage is lodged in
my memory because you appended it to one of the saddest might-have-beens in the history of thought. You dropped hints of this might-have-been elsewhere. You maintained, for example, that the thousand and three conquests of Don Juan consisted of two or three squalid intrigues and a thousand imaginative fictions;48 and in the preface49 to your own Don Juan play you said that every man who records his illusions on the subject of sex is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which, as you put it, the world still waits for. (You put it perfectly correctly, of course, since you were writing in 1903, when Freud had not yet reached the world at large.) But it is in the passage I mentioned earlier that you are most explicit about what you personally might have given to the world. Only delicacy, you said, prevented you from writing the history of your imagined life, duels, battles, love affairs with queens and all, and thereby trying to found a genuine psychology of fiction.’

  ‘I made myself sufficiently clear,’ Shaw said blushing vividly between the white strands of his beard. ‘You can infer the gist of my psychology of fiction from my saying that I could not write down my imagined adventures because many of them were too crudely erotic to be printable. The precise details of the rubbish I day-dreamed dont matter.’

  ‘They would have done’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘to psychoanalysis – which came into existence by considering the precise details of the rubbish people night-dream.’

  ‘I gave psychoanalysis its due,’ Shaw said, a trifle defensively. ‘Since you are so well acquainted with my text, you will remember that, in the fourth of my Self Sketches, I confessed a secret which for 80 years I did not mention to any mortal creature, not even to my wife. What occasioned my shame was the terrible, Prostestant-middle-class snobbery to which I was brought up; and what the secret consisted of was the fact that, for nine months of my thirteenth year, I was obliged to attend a working-class school along with the impoverished Catholic children of Dublin. Having at last confessed this fact, I discovered that my shame vanished. And that, I remarked, with the fairness of mind for which I am noted, was “a point to be scored by our psychoanalysts”.’

  ‘Very fair,’ said the psychoanalyst, nodding. ‘Very fair indeed.’

  ‘I even’, Shaw continued, sounding, as his voice rose by an exact semi-tone, as if he was falling back on a second line of defences, ‘went out of my way to invite the psychoanalysts to claim more than I had allowed to them if more should be due. For in my apology50 for publishing the book at all I said it was dull stuff but perhaps psychoanalysts would find in it clues that had escaped me.’

  ‘The very pinnacle’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘of fairness.’

  ‘Well?’ demanded Shaw. ‘Did you find such clues?’

  And, having looked fiercely across the agate at the psychoanalyst while he posed the question, Shaw suddenly bent down and began stroking the sheep who was standing between him and God beneath the table top.

  ‘It occurred to me to wonder’, the psychoanalyst replied, ‘whether that imagined life of yours, with its duels and love affairs with queens, included an episode where you were employed for a low wage by a rich gentleman and finally avenged your servitude by running off with his daughter and inheriting his fortune.’

  ‘It would not surprise me,’ Shaw replied, his head still beneath the table. ‘My time has for so long been given to metaphysical contemplation that, even if you are right in thinking it would be useful to do so, I simply cannot now remember all the details of my imagined adventures.’ He stroked the sheep for a moment more and then, sitting suddenly upright, enquired: ‘What made you ask?’

  ‘Two things’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘taken together. When you were 42, you married what it pleased you to call a millionairess. (And evidently the title you gave her did please you very considerably, since, nearly 40 years later,51 you made it the title of a play.) Your wife was, if I remember correctly, heiress to, among other things, an estate in Ireland?’

  ‘You remember quite correctly,’ Shaw said. ‘I had occasion to mention her Irish estate only a little while ago. What was the second thing?’

  ‘As a very young man’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘you had a job in Dublin, for a ludicrously small wage, as office boy and presently cashier, in the office of an estate agent?’

  ‘I did,’ Shaw confirmed. ‘And?’

  ‘And’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘the heiress you married was a Miss Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whereas the senior partner for whom you worked was a Charles Uniacke Townshend.’52

  ‘Well well,’ said Shaw. For a moment he sat unmoving above the agate, whose darkling rim reflected his white beard as though it had been a configuration inside the stone itself. ‘I admit I dont remember remarking the coincidence. Indeed, so far as I recall, none of my biographers has drawn my attention to it. Well, well.’ He bent quickly down and gave the sheep a brisk pat as though for luck. ‘However,’ he then went on in a business-like way, ‘I must not waste the Society’s time with the trivia of my personal history. Gentlemen: to our task.’

  ‘A task’, God said in a brisk and happy manner, ‘which I now realise is going to be much less difficult than I’d feared.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘You have’, God continued, smiling round the assembly at the table, ‘brought it to my notice that, as a fictitious character, I am free to do anything. So I shall accomplish my rehabilitation quite simply. I shall make the fact that I am fictitious generally acceptable.’

  His four interlocutors replied instantly and all at the same time.

  ‘A somewhat incautious estimate of your capacities,’ Gibbon was saying while the psychoanalyst murmured:

  ‘Your plan seems dictated more by wish fulfilment than by the reality of principle.’

  Simultaneously, Shaw exclaimed:

  ‘You are putting the applecart before the horse.’

  At the same moment Voltaire said reprovingly:

  ‘Fiction is not so simple an affair as amateurs assume.’

  ‘O,’ God said in a tone of dejection.

  For a moment he imposed a gloomy silence. Then, glancing tentatively round the table, he said:

  ‘I suppose you mean I have no control over other people’s responses? You mean I was forgetting that people will all respond in character?’

  ‘Character?’ queried Voltaire in a scandalised tone. ‘Character is mere sleight of hand. It is never more than a useful device for stringing the episodes of a narrative into a semblance of unity, and many of the very best fictions virtually do without it. Why, I would almost say that, apart from what is implied in his name, whose meaning has, by bad luck, slightly changed with the passage of time, Candide has no character. To have given him one would have impeded the flow, and obscured the inter-relationships, of the ideas.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Gibbon added, ‘I venture to suggest that when (which, happily, was well after my time) Victorian novels took to a profusion of what I may call heavily impastoed characters, they did so in order to conceal their want of ideas.’

  ‘Gibbon and I’, Voltaire took up, ‘have the advantage that we were born into a century not yet so resistant to the impending arrival of psychology that writers had to take refuge in the old-clothes-cupboard of characters. Of course, we amused ourselves, in our classicising way, by anatomising characters à la Theophrastus. But we were never in a moment’s serious doubt that what forms a human personality and holds it in self-consistent being is not some bundle of inborn traits but the series of dynamic relationships by virtue of which it exists. The 20th century, which practises torture on a scale that would have shocked even my century, has established the point experimentally. (Torture is, of course, a form of experiment: a scientifically valid one, but immoral.) If you deprive a person of external relationships, by placing him in solitary confinement, he disintegrates. That is, he ceases to be a personality and ceases to have a character. In my time, we knew perfectly well that it was not a native love of lies, inherent in the heart or the spleen, that caused rulers and p
riests to impose myths on the populace: it was the dynamic relationships of the economic process that impelled rulers to devise myths to serve them as pretexts for continuing to rule. Likewise, the gullibility of the populace was not an inborn defect of character. It was the result of the rulers’ witholding from the populace the process of education, whereby a person enters relationships with the civilisations of distant countries on whose soil he will never set personal foot, and with artists and thinkers now dead, to whom he can never personally speak but by whom his personality may be formed if he chooses to enter a relationship with them. It was with sadness that I saw the world, after my death, doing its utmost to lose sight of this precious knowledge, which is both political and literary knowledge, and returning to the static concept of character as a mere agglomeration of traits labelled tactfulness or outspokenness or hypocrisy. (Let me add, by the by, that the man who appears to be one type of person when he is alone with his wife and a different type when he is with the managing director is not displaying the character-trait of hypocrisy. The fact is that he genuinely consists of two different personalities, both created by the separate relationships in which different parts of his being consist.) And it was with an ironic sadness, in which my own self-interest was of course concerned, that I witnessed literature being ruined, for generations of children, by a method of education which, instead of creating a relationship between the pupil and the work of art, obliged the pupil to dissect some of the items in the work of art according to the static concept of “character”. For a whole era, the supposedly educated people of the West have been rendered deaf to poetic drama and blind to the design of novels by being obliged to learn by heart the exam answers to such commands as “Illustrate the character of Elizabeth Bennet from her conversation” or “Trace the development of the character of Lady Macbeth in the course of the play”.’