Literature has transfigured him into an untruth

Piers Paul Read

THE CHATTO BOOK OF THE DEVIL edited by Francis Spufford Chatto & Windus, £15.99, pp. 396 It is a pity that Francis Spufford's intro- duction to his wide-ranging anthology of writing about the Devil is a spoof, written by Lucifer in the style of an old queen. There is the precedent in C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, but where Lewis made a good joke out of something he considered deadly serious, Spufford makes a weak one with a creature 'made piecemeal of bor- rowed terrors'; and where Lewis portrayed precisely the many ways in which men and women could be led astray, Spufford's more scholarly treatise becomes confused because of its camp tone.

He insists, in his editor's note, that 'this is a literary anthology', and describes the surprise he felt on discovering that some take the Devil seriously 'as a source of anguish and misery'. To Spufford, they are merely making a mythical creature the scapegoat for human wrongdoing.

The single question that I make you ask is, can Evil be real [writes his Lucifer]? Can it be a thing in itself, or is it only the absence of Good? I am the answer you have been com- ing up with for a very long time ... you have been using me as a cover story for centuries, and it is wearing thin.

Yet he also concedes that, while rational- ism may have dismissed a demon with horns and hooves, such a creature thrives in the popular imagination with the novels of Stephen King or films like Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is therefore possible to ask whether popular intuition does not discern something (or someone) which is invisible to rational man. As Sir Thomas Browne

realised in the 17th century,

to lead us farther into darkness, and quite to lose us in this maze of Error, he the Devil would make men believe there is no such creature as himself,

a tactic recommended to the minor demon by his mentor in Lewis' Screwtape Letters:

The fact that 'devils' are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your exis- tence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that he therefore cannot believe in you.

Treating him as a literary creation is, of course, as effective a way of denying his existence as making him a comic figure in red tights. Nevertheless, it is instructive to have these snippets of greater and lesser works of art and find that major writers like Milton, Goethe and Dostoievsky believed sufficiently in the Devil to make him a credible character in their literary work. Perhaps it is just because they are determined to demonstrate that he is not the mythical figure with horns and hooves that he so often appears as an urbane and intelligent interlocutor of curious men or susceptible women.

My dear friend, above all things [he tells Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov] I want to behave like a gentleman and to be recognised as such.

He wore an expensive grey suit and foreign shoes of the same colour as his suit [writes

Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita]. His grey beret was stuck jauntily over one ear and under his arm he carried a walking-stick with a knob in the shape of a poodle's head ... In short — a foreigner.

Goethe's Mephistopheles appears as a travelling scholar, and in a charming tale called 'The Devil at Little Dunkeld Manse', which Spufford takes from a Dictionary of British Folk Tales, Satan is 'a grand-looking gentleman, sure enough, and pleasant spoken' — all far from the serpent in the Garden of Eden or Luther's crawling cater- pillar.

True to his literary purpose, Spufford includes obscure passages in old English from, for example, The Chester Mystery Cycle and long excerpts from Paradise Lost, described in Shaw's Man and Superman as `a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through'. The breadth of the editor's reading is impressive, but there is an air of intellectu- al superiority in certain aspects of the selection: the pride, perhaps, which comes before the fall.

One can surmise that Spufford under- stands French, because Baudelaire and Verlaine are untranslated. Dante is given in both Italian and English, but there is no German version of Goethe, nor do we have Lermontov, Bulgakov or Dostoievsky in version originale. In the same way, Spufford includes purple passages from Lewis' The Monk and Maturin's Melmoth the Wander- er, yet, when it comes to the 20th century, he has nothing from today's horror genre. The only evidence that Satan is alive and well in the popular imagination, comes from a poem by Alan Jenkins: The corner video club has got in Babes of Satan

and made black candles.

Nor does Spufford give us passages which might contradict Lucifer's view in the introduction, that Christ does not sup- port the idea of a Devil. (`Do you know what he meant for sure? I thought not'.) He gives Christ's Temptation in the Wilderness from St Matthew and the story of the Gadarene swine from St Mark, but not Christ's diatribe in St John against 'the prince of this world' who was a 'murderer from the start . . . a liar, and the father of lies'.

Certainly, Satan is rarely mentioned these days in either the Church of England or the Church of Rome, but as the recently published Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, both Scripture and the tradi- tion of the Church see in the serpent who led man into sin 'a fallen angel called Satan or the Devil'; thus for believers he is not, as Spufford suggests, a creature 'on the dual- istic fringe of monotheism' but an ever active being at the heart of the Christian concept of salvation.

He tempteth us by the word [wrote Thomas More] he tempteth us by our own flesh, he tempteth us by pleasure, he tempteth us by pain,

and finally, writes Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, he 'drives people mad by grievous melancholy' who have believed his false promises and succumbed to the glamour of evil.