Cards of Identity (34 page)

Personally, I am doubtful about trusting posterity too much. The public ‘line’ of worship is very changeable and the lime-pits of this world are full of unaccepted martyrs. A full public confession while one is still alive is a better idea; not only does it make the martyrdom occur immediately, when one is still alive to enjoy it, but it also takes precedence over the career, which it amply excuses. Moreover, if the joints squeak or the wrong bones rattle in the first edition, they can be replaced in a later one, like a Revised Authorized Version. Personally, I believe that our Abbey will never run short of funds so long as the public keeps its highest favours for those who have plundered it; and
there is not likely to be a change of attitude so long as the leading thinkers go on insisting that there is no better Paul than a former Saul, no clergyman more moving than one who is too drunk to stand, no prayer so deep as a hymn of blasphemy, no man more devout than an atheist. There are always periods in history in which everyone stands on his head to stress the importance of his feet: I trust the present one will persist until we maudlin sinners go underground for the last time.

It is the function of our good Abbot to keep an eye on all this. A day may come, for instance, when Communism no longer matters; its agents will then become useless, and converts such as myself totally uninteresting. The Abbot is even now preparing for that grievous day, confident that with God’s help he will switch us to another, serviceable line. What is likely to happen is that with their dearest menace removed, people will be driven back on themselves and will need new scapegoats. All the shrewd gentlemen who looked into the hearts of men and found them to consist of warring ‘ideas’ occurring in a frame of ‘history’ will hurriedly decide to see real hearts there instead – and will they wallop the public for not having realized this all along! The new emphasis will be on strictly
personal
things; it will be inexcusable to say that one was led astray by an
idea.
Everyone will be expected to examine his conscience, rather than depend on guilt to see him through. This is the moment for which the Abbot is making ready; the moment, perhaps, which Brother Herbert sought to anticipate. We shall all write our confessions anew and they will all be along the lines I have sketched in this brief introduction. We shall confess, as we have so often confessed, that our previous confessions served only to disguise the truth. We shall wallow in little ignominies; the pears which St Augustine stole will become less-than-pears in our case. We will put the public in the place we have just vacated: we will remake ourselves in the form of pygmies. We will substitute a hundred petty vices for our major crimes: we will make ourselves look so humble that the public will feel thoroughly ashamed of its bloatedness. Poor public! I feel sorry for it already. It takes at least a generation for leading ideas to seep into the suburbs, which means that just when we great sinners decide to take up the role of simple bourgeois, they, in turn, will have just started careering off into our old ways of secret charades, drunkenness, and pious blasphemy. What a spectacle it is going to be: the priest, sober as a judge at last and quite able to stand
erect in the pulpit, preaching to a congregation that swigs away from hip-flasks and screams aloud the most shocking confessions of murder, incest, suicide, and treason! Oh well, God bless the public anyway, and God bless the newspapers and the Russians: we owe them a debt we shall never repay. And God bless the people who think ‘ideas’ are so much more important than behaviour that anyone with a large enough theory can confess away with bloody murder. And God bless, above all, that great Thermostat, our good Abbot, who knows which time is ripe for what confession, and which seeds to sow in the wet springtime of a guilty world. Which reminds me – God bless guilt, the thinkers’ darling, who, unlike conscience, comes only when the bloody act has been safely performed and ushers in the ecstasies of publicized remorse. May great royalties forever bear his train!

*

P.S. We shall not
always
have an Abbot. Eventually, he will wither away.

*

I had barely written these words when my radiator sang out: ‘Caution! Abbot approaching!’ I seized my manuscript and stuffed it into the radiator, which has a secret compartment for such trifles. With so much pneumonia about, it is foolish to overheat one’s cell.

The Abbot walked in. He was followed by Brother Nimpy and Brother Kapotzky, his bodyguard.

‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble, brother!’ said the Abbot, smiling. ‘And what is it
this
time, may I ask? Not
another
confession, I hope? Have mercy on your poor Abbot whose
nihil
obstat
is beginning to look scrawled and jaded.’

‘Only a children’s book this time, Father,’ I replied with a smile, indicating the stooge MS. which is always open on my desk.

‘Indeed? Of what nature, pray?’

‘A day in the life of a rabbit, Father.’

‘How full of possibilities! May I glance at it? I am fond of children’s books. And while I’m looking at it, you won’t mind if Nimpy and Kapotzky search you?’

‘I have nothing to hide, Father,’ I replied, thanking God that this was now true.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘And nowhere to hide it.’

While Nimpy and Kapotzky frisked me, the Abbot leafed through my manuscript. He ignored the top and bottom pages and rippled through the middle ones, his eyes darting brilliantly from point to point. From time to time he held a page against the light, in search of code pin-pricks. ‘It seems perfectly all right,’ he said at last, ‘but make the rabbit a giraffe, will you?’

‘I could make it become one in the course of the tale. Father,’ I said. ‘It could be transformed.’

‘No, from the very beginning, if you don’t mind. If you consider the principal feature of the giraffe you will see why it is much more desirable, symbolically, than a rabbit.’

‘Nothing to report, Father,’ said Nimpy.

‘Good,’ said the Abbot. ‘You two boys can go now. Pray for me.’

Nimpy is a dear old man. He forgets continually
which
monastery he is working in,
which
Abbot he is spying
for.
Now, he gave the Abbot a Hitler salute, genuflected, and withdrew. Kapotzky gave a big grin and followed him out.

When they had gone the Abbot gave a sigh of relief and threw himself into a chair. I say ‘threw himself’, but that is only a way of speaking. It is not easy to master the art of tossing a heavy, hairy, robe about, and the Abbot does it perfectly. One brisk, coordinated gesture and there he was, a replica in brown of Whistler’s ‘Mother’. He finessed his profile, and sighed.

‘You look tired, Father,’ I said.

‘I am. Poor Herbert’s death has upset me. I don’t like pneumonia in the Abbey. It’s so
infectious
.’
He gave me a sharp look and said: ‘You saw a lot of him, didn’t you? How are you? No colds? Sore throats? Virus?’

‘I am in the pink of health, Father,’ I said.

‘Do your best to remain so, then. Everything in
moderation.
See?’

I bowed. After a pause, he dropped his stern tone and said in a friendly voice: ‘I hope you didn’t mind our little search. Pure routine, as you know. Frankly, I wanted your advice on a point that is worrying me. So do wipe all that sweat off your forehead.’

I obeyed. One of the great things about our sort of life is that signs of terror cannot be taken as evidence of guilt. If they could be, we would all have died of pneumonia long ago.

‘Would you say?’ he asked, ‘that you are just about the best man here in the matter of the Divine ontology?’

‘God’s identity
is
rather my speciality,’ I said. ‘Brother Thomas is better on its history, but I am the more up-to-date, particularly where the gracious and merciful aspects are concerned.’

‘You did mercy for the
Encyclopedia,
did you not?’

‘And love, Father.’

‘I thought so. Did you run into any trouble?’

‘Oh, no, Father. The Scriptures are perfectly in line.’ Suddenly curious to the point of audacity, I exclaimed: ‘Is there going to be a switch, Father?’

‘No, no, no,’ he said testily, and added sharply: ‘And don’t talk like that. Why does everyone here treat me as if I were plotting something?’

I blushed. He asked suddenly: ‘What do you know about the Divine
patience?
’

How exactly like him – to drop the crucial question without warning!
‘Patience,
Father?’ I said. ‘Why, there are many references to it.’

‘To the
Almighty’s
patience? To
ours,
yes. What about
His?
Can you give me, for instance, one powerful, authoritative quotation?’

‘There is St John the Divine, Father, “…
in
the
kingdom
and
patience
of
Jesus
Christ”.
But I am not sure that the word had the same meaning in those days.’

‘We
never
argue from Revelations, anyway.’

‘How about “long-suffering”, Father?’

‘Now, that’s an idea. It means patience, does it not? Is it also incomprehensible and infinite?’

‘I would hardly say so. There is no mystery about it, and as it is usually mentioned just before the delivery of some violent punishment, it can’t be considered infinite. I could, of course, put up a good argument for its being so, should you need one.’

‘No good. The evidence, I know, is all the other way. There comes a time when
His
patience
snaps.
He has had enough. Love and mercy are both arguably present in the resulting chastisement. But not patience.’

‘What is your bent, Father, exactly?’

He hesitated, and then said: ‘As you well know, the basis of all our arguments nowadays – all thinking people’s, anyway – is that it is not for us miserable sons of men to question His faculties by attempting to
define their limits or the nature of their operation. In the last century this argument was popular when people suffered, or when children died. But today we use it, shall I say, much more
actively.
We bestow His mercy on the vile, not on the windows and orphans.’

‘Exactly
what I was writing!’ I cried. Oh, egotism, which drags one to the brink of pneumonia itself! Fortunately, the Abbot seemed too interested in himself to hear me.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘we have been using Him rather
loosely.
When you consider the clear, strict, simple rules He laid down for human behaviour, I am not sure that He approves of our present enthusiasm for His mysteriousness – for His indefinable mercy and unpredictable grace. He may be beginning to feel that we are using His dialectic as a means of avoiding His instructions. I am not sure that He ever intended to be as mysterious as all that.’

‘But after all, Father,’ I said, ‘we have sincerely repented. And there’s no doubt that the repentant sinner gets the best breaks.’

‘Of course, of course. What worries me is the idea that perhaps we are giving the repentant sinner
all
the breaks. The
general
public,
I think, is becoming to miss Him. I think they are beginning to resent the way He is allowed to operate only in dives, cells, and Africa. And all His gestures are becoming so dramatic!’

‘These are dramatic times, Father.’

‘That’s just it. Isn’t He getting too much like ourselves? I do think we must start sharing Him with the relatively-innocent as well as the inordinately-guilty. Sometimes I feel we haven’t changed very much since our radical days. Then, we used Marx to beat the bourgeois with; now, we use God. That’s why I asked about His patience. Won’t He, at some point, begin to feel that we are imposing upon Him? I am sure, here in the Abbey, our slates are
pretty
clean; but even we do rather emphasize that it’s not what you do that matters but what you repent of continuing to do. I feel that God may soon begin to resent this. I think we ought to start hinting that His grace is available, to say the least, to quite ordinary people, and not only to psychotics and ex-Party members. I would even go so far as to say that we might hint at a return to His first principles of good behaviour. I mean, we might say quite definitely that it is our intention to start behaving better ourselves. To set an example. After all, He has put up with our inventing a mysterious holdall for our bad behaviour named The Unconscious,
but I am sure He is growing indignant at the way we expect Him to dole out forgiveness from an equally-mysterious trunk named Grace. If Heaven’s our destination we shouldn’t mark
everything
“Not Wanted on the Voyage”.’

When I remained silent, he said: ‘It struck me that perhaps one or other of us might feel the urge to make a fresh confession, rather along those lines. I want to know if such a poor thing can be made readable; if it has any box office.’

‘If you mean me, Father,’ I said, ‘I am always ready to obey orders.’

‘I don’t think that is the spirit in which to approach revelation,’ he answered, frowning.

‘All I mean, Father, is that if my superior so orders I am only too ready to re-examine my conscience.’

‘That’s much better. And don’t be shy about it. See what the dredge brings up. The trouble about this place is that you are all such rabbits. How do you think we are going to compete with the poets and novelists outside if none of you ever has an original idea?’

I was nettled by this, and said: ‘Father, we think a great deal more than you imagine.’

‘Well, I wish you would confess to a dangerous thought occasionally. There I sit outside that box and never a glimmer of originality comes through the grille. Old Nimpy is the only one who ever makes a gaffe, and that’s only because he’s in his second childhood. Nonetheless, he’s worth the whole lot of you put together.’

Now, I was really angry! To be rated lower than a hack like Nimpy, a man who had never climbed higher than the next man’s pocket, was more than I could bear. I was about to expostulate when the Abbot shouted:

‘What do you
do
with yourself all day? Do you
ever
use your brain? Do you ever have an idea that is not orthodox?’