Talking of religion

Anybody there?

Benny Green

One evening in the autumn of 1949 Blitski and Myself arranged a seance. You are not to assume from this startling piece of information that either of us was in the slightest psychically inclined. It was simply that working our way through all the popular faiths in the spirit of empirical scientists, we felt it only fair to include table-rapping, because if what we heard from deranged relatives was true, and there really was a hook-up with the far side of the vale of tears, then clearly we would have to sit down and rethink our whole position. I forget now what our position was, but it certainly made no provision for the return of late Auntie Annie floating about on a cloud of ectoplasm. It had taken us some time to get around to the seance at all. As Blitski so graphically put it, there didn't seem much point in worrying Whether there was life after death when it seemed so difficult to find any before it, but at last we set up our session with the mighty dead (as far as I remember Auntie Annie had weighed around nineteen stone) and were astonished to discover that of our vast congregation of friends and enemies, one had had the courage to turn up. All the others stayed away, either because they thought what We were doing was godless, or because what we Were doing was too pious for a couple of cynics like us. But the real reason for their boycotting of the affair, I have always been convinced, was that it was a dark, rainy night forbidding enough to put the wind up a man who is Walking home alone convinced he has just heard a voice from what Stephen Leacock called behind the beyond. Out only taker was young Stanley, an Open-hearted guileless youth who being only nineteen to our twenty-one, and never having read anything intellectually more demanding than Exchange and Mart, was very much in awe of our mental powers, and who came along because he had already seen the picture Showing at the Paramount that week. Anyway,

we wrote out the alphabet on bits of paper and turned the lights out. Then We discovered that we couldn't see what the letters were on the bits of paper so we turned the lights on again and Stanley got a message from his grandfather to the effect that the weather was very nice here and where could you get some decent rye bread?

"There," said Blitski, hiding his disappointment that we hadn't contacted Bakunin or Hegel or Prince Kropotkin at the very least, ."aren't you glad you came and had this wonderful opportunity of talking once more to your grandfather?" Stanley's answer to this was "No," because, as he explained, his grandfather was alive and well and living in Clapton and was always nagging everybody to bring him some decent rye bread. In spite of the mundane nature of out findings, Stanley was badly shaken by the feverish mobility of the drinking glass which had skated across the surface of Blitski's mother's kitchen table, and was so terrified by the end of the evening that Blitski and myself had to accorhpany him all the way back to his home, sprinting from lamppost to lamppost, where Stanley would make us halt awhile so that he could gather up a little more confidence in terrestrial things by shivering under the reassuring saffron beam of the municipal street lamps. Before this escapade I had read a few books about psychical research and been interested in the way that people muddled it up with quite other things, like thought transference and mental telepathy. I could believe in the possibility of people communicating with each other in this way so long as both of them were still alive; what I couldn't take seriously was the idea that somebody up there knew me and was waiting to contact me in order to tell me the fascinating news that life in the ectoplasm factory wasn't half bad. I don't think that I was being unduly knowing; there was not one among all our crowd who thought that table-rapping had any practical benefits to offer, except for Herman, who was in wholesale kitchen furniture and naturally felt that anything to do with tables was good for business. In short, belief in the chances of talking to dead people was, in my environment, rather less than minimal.

Of course, there was always the problem of people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So far as he was concerned, the difficulty was to detach the cool, stoical, pipesmoking cricketing Scot from the maundering romantic who published photographs of what he insisted were fairies.

Admittedly it was passing strange that such a man, whose world fame was based on, his consummate ability to make a literary exerbile out of deductive reasoning, should never have deduced that his late burst of Spiritualist obsession coincided with the loss of a beloved son.

On the face of it the same strictures wocila seem to apply to another mandarin whose beliefs Blitski and I puzzled over a few times.

He -was Sir Oliver Lodge (by W. P. Jolly; Constable £3.95), and having read this modest,

rather impersonal and almost wholly scientific.

account of the most distinguished of all British psychical investigators, I see that Lodge was different from Doyle in that his interest had burgeoned long before his son was killed on the Western Front.

Even so, there is nothing in Mr Jolly's book to suggest that Blitski and I should have been

more respectful back in 1949. And even if people like Lodge and Doyle were able to contact the dear departed, what practical use.

did it serve, apart, of course, from giving solace to all those people with an obstinate belief in either their own immortality or somebody else's? The most depressing thing I remember about my own slight researches into psychical literature was the paralysing banality of the 'messages.' There may after all be something in Mark Twain's remark, "Heaven for climate, Hell for conversation."

Twain is a much more interesting character so far'as religious belief is concerned., for being

a humorist, he was able to separate two very different things which the rest of us tend to confuse greatly, a spiritual faith and a tendency to religious activity. In Justin Kaplan's Mark Twain and his World (Michael Joseph £6.50), there occurs passage after passage in which Twain deliberately comprdmises his own faith; the pulpit is "as indispensable as the sun — the moon anyway"; "I look back with shuddering 'horror on the days when I believed I believed"; and most revealing of all, "I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, and the other a preacher of the gospel. accomplished the one and failed in the other because I could not supply my'self with the necessary stock in trade, i.e.Religion." Mark Twain and his World is a pleasant book to read and to possess, but it is little more than a sketch for Mr. Kaplan's earlier Mr Clemens and Mark Twain, one of the most.brilliant and perceptive literary biographies of the last ten years.