Falling from grace
Byron Rogers
SWAGGART by Ann Seaman Continuum, £16.99, pp. 438 When I was a boy there was a drama- tisation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Face in the Rock on Children's Hour. In this a face had formed as a natural feature in the mountain above a village, the inhabitants of which waited for the day when he would come, the living man whose face this was. And one by one they did come, naturally to disappoint them, the Great Politician, the Great Soldier, but it was the third man who now makes me feel very old, for today there would be no place for him. He was the Great Preacher.
The English establishment has been ner- vous of such men, and of the emotions they could unleash, since the Peasants' Revolt. But in Wales I grew up in a society which could still quote whole passages from ser- mons which were part spiritual injection, part entertainment, part terror. There was the one preached in Carmarthen at the turn-of-the-century Revival, in which a damned soul after aeons in the outer dark- ness returns to the gates of Hell, 'and on the great clock the second hand has not even moved'. The man who remembered that, a professor of French, could also remember his own fright across 70 years. But the tradition was ending, and I heard the last of the Great Preachers in 1955, a man called Dr Martin Lloyd Jones. Posters had announced his coming, the chapel was packed, and after his sermon I watched in fascination as a matron lifted her large left breast to show a friend across the gallery what its effect had been.
The result is that, unlike most of my English contemporaries, I do not find it easy to sneer at Revivalists in America, where the tradition continues at full blast, or to see these preachers as charlatans. Right-wing American politicians, on the other hand, cannot afford to. In 1984 80 per cent of fundamentalist evangelicals voted for Ronald Reagan who had assured them that the fire and brimstone in the Book of Ezekiel were nuclear weapons, and that the nation of Gog was the godless Soviet Union. 'It can't be too long now,' said Reagan chattily. In 1988 93 per cent of them voted for George Bush.
The power and the energy of their preachers are alarming in an electronic age. Jimmy Swaggart's sermons are beamed to 195 countries, and the Assem- blies of God, the Pentecostal denomination to which he belongs, funds the largest mis- sionary effort in the world, for, whatever the mainstream churches have abandoned, these have not. Some of their ministers, like the Early Christian fathers, even claimed to carry out miracles. A. A. Allen in the 1940s said he could raise the dead, an accomplishment he abandoned when he got into trouble with the American postal service on account of the corpses being sent to him by mail. Or so Aim Rowe Seaman says. These men are easy game, especially when they talk to God. But why shouldn't they? Cromwell talked to God. It may be an embarrassment to the Protector's mod- ern admirers (you can feel the relief in Christopher Hill when he records that after Cromwell's death God retreated 'into the infinite recesses of Newtonian space'), but he did. He may not have talked to the Almighty about the same things as Jimmy Swaggart, who tends to negotiate with Him over their respective record royalty per- centages, but then it is easier to make fun of Jimmy Swaggart.
And Mrs Seaman, his biographer, does not miss a chance. Here, just four pages into her narrative, she describes his way with a microphone:
His microphone was not fixed on the pulpit or pinned to his lapel. It stayed in his hand, big and phallic, eight or nine inches long, with a fat bulb on the end. He used it instinc- tively, clutching it sometimes with both hands, squeezing it, sometimes waving it, sometimes holding it daintily between two fingers, the pinkie crooked.
When you read something like that it is like reading a cross-examination by the prosecutor in a Stalinist treason trial; your sympathies are immediately with the accused, though it does also prompt you to speculate about Mrs Seaman's own private expertise in certain directions. Wash your mouth out with soap, that boy . .
With the rock star Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy's first cousin and the serial spouse of child brides, she goes even further, becoming old Vyshinsky at his vindictive worst as she describes Jerry 'squirting into Jane Mitcham the makings of a baby boy who would grow up tortured in his mind, and who would never see 20'.
'The biographer', wrote Ted Morgan in his life of Somerset Maugham, 'becomes attached to his subject in a way that cannot be duplicated in other relationships.' The trouble comes when the biographer doesn't, when he, or in this case she, pads beside you, shrilly indicating her distaste on page after page.
Jimmy Swaggart, of course, falls from grace, but to give on the second page a beady inventory of the motel room in which he fell defeats her object from the start. After the plastic padded armchair, 'the ill-fitting green curtain', the bed with its foam mattress, the mouldy air condi- tioner and the formica table, you are pre- pared to forgive him just about anything.
It is always women who do for great preachers in the end, so it is ironic that Mrs Seaman may have managed to reverse the process. The carpet in the room where Jimmy fell was an orange shag.
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