Gods and Little Fishes
ON a certain evening the Wandering Jew arrives at a mountain shack inhabited by an ageing ex- priestess of the Delphic temple and her idiot son. He has come to inquire after his destiny, for he, like this same Sibyl-priestess, has been cursed by God and rejected by man. One day a criminal who was carrying his cross to his own execution had paused to lean against the Jew's house. The Jew, fearing ill-luck and disrepute, had spurned the man away—whereupon the man had turned and cursed him. Later rumours to the effect that this criminal had been the On of God were abundantly confirmed when the Jew's wife and child had shrivelled up with disease and he him- self had been driven forth to an eternity of exile. This, he explains to the priestess, was unreason- able and unjust, for one can scarcely be expected to deal politely with all common criminals on the off-chance that they may turn out to be God.
But Mr. Lagerkvist's Sibyl has a tale worth two of that. As priestess of the inner temple, she had the job of being 'possessed' by the god (who to her is God and identifiable with the Jew's) and giving forth Delphic utterances in her ecstasy. For this she had a distinct talent. But being of healthy peasant stock and strong natural instincts she took an earthly lover as well. The god was a jealous god and revenged himself by taking the shape of a goat and violating her ('my frenzy was measure- less'), as a result of which she conceived the idiot child and was stoned from the temple on grounds of improper conduct.
Here, then, we have two people who are com- plaining that they have been viciously wronged by capricious and unarniable deities, these deities being in effect one and the same, not only gods but God. And so what are they going to do about it, the Jew and the Sibyl? React against this God, accuse his cruelty, denounce his lust? Most cer- tainly not. They are going to grovel. The whole situation has been trumped up by Mr. Lagerkvist, trumped up with extreme perversity and skill, purely so that he may give us from the Sibyl's mouth an answer so slimy and depraved as to make one feel this precious pair deserve every damned thing they get. The solution, says the Sibyl, is this : they must accept God as 'both evil and good . . , both meaningless and full of a meaning which we can never perceive, yet never cease to puzzle over.' Like it or lump it, says the Sibyl : our wretched destinies were caused by spite, but since it was God's spite those destinies are divine. The whole book, fascinating as it is and distinguished in execution, is a mere excuse for wallowing in the mire of a warped and masochistic religious sense. A blasphemous book? Certainly. It blasphemes against Man.
In the light of all this, it is instructive and pleasing to pass to John Bowen's After the Rain. There has been a second Flood, and some seven or eight people survive on a small craft eating fish and distilling sea-water to drink. Assailed by giant squids, tropical calms, concupiscence, jealousies and hurricanoes, they agree to the proposition of their leader that he should become God, receive their worship and assist their sur- vival with his newly acquired powers. After all, he says, God only exists because people believe in Him; believe in me enough and my divinity is assured. This is all cleverly and smartly done by Mr. Bowen, who then proceeds to drive his irony home in some apposite little scenes which depict
the crew's attitude to the new God. The women bend over backwards in their desire to become his handmaidens: the ex-Church of England parson is happy and serious in his support of the nevi establishment : the one rationalist on board sulks violently : while a dim-witted ex-ollicer and an impotent physical-culture expert accept this development, as they have accepted all else, with indifference. The new God has some luck in steer- ing them out of a fog, receives abject adoration in consequence, gets bigger and better ideas, and neglects to wash. But when he demands a human sacrifice, the physical-culture expert, alone in re- taining his common sense, announces firmly that things have gone too far and throws God over- board (literally). A choice and witty little sociological study, this book points conclusions which shine like gold beside those of Mr. Lagerk- vist's dismal parable.
But even now we have not done with God— or at any rate His Institutions. Brian Moore's The Feast of Lupercal, as well as being an entertain- ing account of a middle-aged male virgin's efforts not to be a male virgin any more, contains an authentic picture of one of those repositories of dirt and bigotry—a Roman Catholic public school. This ,one is in Belfast and is sheer delight. The boys, vicious and smelly, slink round under the eyes of the decomposing lay masters, who in turn fawn upon 'the sleek and chattering priests, who, in their turn, smirk and bob before the Monsignors on the Governing Body. . . . Yum, yum, Mr. Greene.
Two lightweights. Kathleen Sully's Merrily to the Grave is a gay little piece with a savage ending and concerns a Brighton boarding house chock full of tarts, musicians and the rest. . . . Clemen- tine is a rather Thirkellish affair about a spirited little old lady in conflict with the local bureaucrats —who come off worst. Great sucks to the Planned State, of course, but I long for the book which will end with all spirited little old ladies getting their necks wrung. SIMON RAVEN
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