The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

  A Pardon for the Guy

  According to Julius Caesar, the Druids of Celtic Gaul used to burn a huge wicker cage in the shape of a man, crammed full of living people. Anthropologists have told us much about world-wide ancient practices of human sacrifice, and the ritual burning of human effigies in place of the real thing.

  Who has not felt a passing clutch of sorrow for the guy amidst the fun and frights and startles of bonfire night? Guy Fawkes, his beady-eyed head awry on his neck, his battered hat, his painted leer; the limbs of a well-constructed guy swing wherever they are put; he resembles a scarecrow in a harvest field, evoking an inexplicable and fleeting grief.

  The original Guy Fawkes was born at York in 1570. During his boyhood he converted from Protestantism to ardent Catholicism. Later, he went to the Continent where he enlisted on the Spanish side in the current wars, became well thought of for his adventurous spirit and fine bearing; he was tall, with a brown beard and auburn hair.

  By 1604 the Gunpowder Plot had already started to take shape amongst some Catholic zealots in England. The plan was to blow up the Houses of Parliament, with a full assembly including the King. James, Sixth of Scotland and First of England, had lately united the two Kingdoms. He was first inclined to be lenient to Catholics, permitting them to worship quietly as they chose, and requiring only loyalty to himself and the country. But a small set of tiresome Catholic gentry dreamed of creating the conditions for a Catholic coup, which could scarcely have taken place even if the plot had succeeded.

  Everything went surprisingly well with the conspiracy over a period of two years. Guy Fawkes, cool and courageous, filled with pious enthusiasm, was enlisted in Flanders to put the plan into action.

  A house adjoining Parliament House was taken in the name of one of the plotters, Thomas Percy, in 1604. They began to burrow into the walls next door. Over the following year in the guise of Percy’s servant Guy Fawkes, acting as a look-out, helped to direct the operations. They had got half-way through the wall by the following March, when they found that a cellar immediately under the House of Lords was in any case available for rent. Thomas Percy rented it. They brought in 1 ton 12 cwt of gunpowder, 36 barrels in all, and stacked these under a pile of coal and wood. By May everything was ready for the holocaust. Guy Fawkes was sent back to Flanders to gain support. Rome was informed of the plans to take over the country if the plot succeeded in November, on the date of the Opening of Parliament. Fawkes returned to his explosive cellar.

  But as the human reality of the thing came closer, various intriguers started to bethink themselves of their own cousins and uncles, the Catholic peers who were bound to be blown to bits along with the King and the Protestant lords. They enquired of their leaders if there might not be a way to warn their doomed kith and kin, but any such notion was firmly rejected. A counter-intrigue within the conspiracy now seems to have arisen. A supper was staged on 26th October in which an anonymous letter was brought in, warning the host, a Romanist supporter of the new King, to keep away from the forthcoming Opening of Parliament, since on that day ‘God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time’, and prophesying a ‘terrible blow’. The host caused this spectacular letter to be read aloud at the table.

  An investigation was started. The conspirators were alerted, but they were too far gone in euphoria to take any notice. Fawkes was arrested in the fatal cellar, where a fresh supply of gunpowder had been added to the pile. The other conspirators fled, soon to be hunted down, killed or captured for execution.

  Guy Fawkes took up a defiant attitude. He withstood torture for four days, then on the King’s orders, he was subjected to the most rigorous possible torture, a ghastly form which was, even for those days, illegal. This brought the names of his fellow plotters out of him, and a confession which is signed imperfectly by a hand trembling from the ordeal.

  He was tried on the 27th January of the following year, and having been dragged through the streets of London on hurdles to Parliament House, he was helped up to the scaffold, too weak to walk. He declared his repentance. Certainly, he and other surviving conspirators who were executed with him realised that they had set back terribly the Catholic cause in England.

  So we come back to our familiar Guy Fawkes on top of the bonfire. November the Fifth was declared by King James’s Parliament to be a day of public celebration in perpetuity. Perpetuity is a long time and a grim concept. Eternity, the mind can only barely boggle with; but perpetuity – on and on and on, in time – is loaded with intolerable predestination.

  Since 1605 there has been time for controversy; the official story has been ransacked for variations of it, but the cult of Guy Fawkes flourishes perpetually. His name is a household word in households where the origins of the story are unknown. The American popular ‘guy’ meaning a ‘fellow’, is derived from Guy Fawkes, as is our own phrase of humorous contempt ‘looking a guy’.

  I suggest we have had enough of parliament-imposed glee in perpetuity; the whole thing is inhuman. November the Fifth has become a day of rejoicing more dangerous to life than was the original plot; and at least the plot failed. What never fails is the annual sacrifice of the innocents: excited children burnt, maimed, disfigured and killed by fireworks. We might well spare the hospital beds and the ambulances, and remember the Fifth of November with a shudder. An old and picturesque custom however barbaric might be difficult to stamp out. But certainly an official Pardon for Guy Fawkes would dampen his inflamed annual orgy.

  As for a Pardon on its own merits for the failed adventurer, who can doubt that he has earned it? He not only suffered frightfully for his treason, but has been made to atone for it ever since. For an economical convergence of reasons, it would surely be desirable to let him off.

  ‘A penny for the guy’: like everything else the present-day guys are not as carefully made as they once were, and are subject to inflation. Guy Fawkes, who, although greatly misguided, was never a depraved man, has been turned into a commercial menace; fireworks manufacturers do better out of him to-day than did the gunpowder suppliers of the seventeenth century.

  Besides, the Ecumenical movement deserves a magnanimous gesture. Guilty as he was, plainly Guy Fawkes did not get a legally sound trial, even by the laws of his time. Alas poor Guy! – Procure him a Royal Pardon and let him go.

  [1977]

  The Religion of an Agnostic

  A Sacramental View of the World in the Writings of Proust

  Since the death in 1922 of Marcel Proust, his labyrinthine work which is published in twelve volumes under the English title Remembrance of Things Past has been regarded increasingly as the greatest novel of the twentieth century; its fame is celebrated even by those who doubt whether it is a novel at all. The reasons are worth examining, why a work of this length, one which demands a specially attentive approach, should enjoy so strong a response from a modern reading public.

  For, in Proust, everything occurs on a slow-motion scale. In prose which exerts a drug-like charm, he takes a page to describe for example, a momentary gesture made by an aristocratic friend, and a further four pages to reflect on its meaning; in subsequent volumes Proust continues to re-interpret the gesture in fresh circumstances, until the whole nature of his friend is revealed and a theory of aristocracy constructed on a single gesture remembered from time past. This example represents only one thread in the vast tapestry on which Proust depicts the theme of Time. To an intelligent reader who has not read Proust, it may sound a tedious proceeding. And yet it is the intelligent and especially the sensitive reader who most rapidly becomes addicted to Proust, for reasons which I do not think are entirely due to a right conception of his work.

  In Proust can be detected all the attributes of a deeply religious writer, except the two attributes indispensable in a religious writer, a moral sense and a faith. The irreligious environment of modern Europe embraces large numbers of intelligent aspiring souls who are nevertheless looking for a ‘religion’ which offers all things beautif
ul and demands nothing practical. These, I think, form the majority of Proust’s public.

  Proust writes always with the insight of a gifted religious and the fidelity of one devoted to a spiritual cause. He has the introspective enlightenment of a later St Augustine: one who, in his thirty-sixth year, withdrew from a flourishing life in society in order to contemplate its inner decadence, and to whom those very symbols of decay yielded their permanent essence, restored in eternity. It will be clear to the Christian reader who knows Proust’s work that his thought repeatedly suggests, but does not coincide with Christian doctrine. Proust was not a Christian, nor was the intention of his work religious. It is necessary to be clear, in reading Proust, that his work is based on a pagan aesthetic.

  In spite of which, my purpose is not to denigrate the name of Proust to the Christian reader but to canvass it. For in this truly pagan writer we find something of a tremendous value to the Christian imagination, a sacramental view of life which is nothing more than a balanced regard for matter and spirit. The sacramental dispensation of Providence – the idea that the visible world is an active economy of outward signs embodying each an inward grace – is nothing new to the Church. What has been lost to the European grasp since the seventeenth century is a sacramental conception of matter which is hierarchical* (all material forms possessing an ultimate eternal light) and not evolutionary (one form replacing or usurping another eternally as in the temporal laws of change). The most ‘naïve’ early cosmologists at least did not hold the notion that once they had looked at an object from all angles they have seen the whole of it, and when they had seen it perish, the last of it. Only a materialistic conception of Time – a strictly chronological one – could have obliterated that understanding of matter which acknowledges outward and changing forms to be invisibly and peculiarly ‘possessed’, each after its own kind in a spiritual embodiment.

  It could be abundantly demonstrated that present-day Christian creative writing, that which is most involved in an attempt to combat materialism, reflects a materialism of its own; this takes the form of a dualistic attitude towards matter and spirit. They are seen too much in a moral conflict, where spirit triumphs by virtue of disembodiment. This is really an amoral conception of spirit. For a corrective to this situation, for a representation of life which, by its very lack of moral concern, escapes the tendency to equate matter with evil, and for an acceptance of that deep irony in which we are presented with the most unlikely people, places and things as repositories of invisible grace, we have to turn to a most unlikely source – Marcel Proust, agnostic, hedonist, self-centred neurotic, exotic darling of the aristocratic salons, sexual pervert, columnist of Figaro, the hypochondriac turned chronic invalid, the insufferable hot-house plant.

  I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients that will nourish the plant.

  This was the literary work which Proust, inscribing a volume to a friend, described as the ‘memories of the heart’ of which the volume itself was the ‘outward and visible form’. To write it, he enshrined himself absurdly in a cork-lined room, excluding the sounds of Paris in the present tense. ‘Time, as it flows,’ he wrote, ‘is so much time wasted and nothing can even be truly possessed save under that aspect of eternity which is also the aspect of art.’ Lacking a redemptive faith, Proust’s attempt was to save himself through art. And in refreshing our vision from a writer like Proust, we are following the tradition whereby a great amount of the most fruitful thought of the Church is derived from the efforts of inspired pagans to save themselves.

  Many years after the world of his childhood has passed into oblivion except for certain incidents fixed in his mind, Proust (or the ‘Marcel’ of the novel) sipped a spoonful of tea, which he did not normally take, in which he had idly dipped a piece of madeleine cake.

  No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, than a shudder ran through my whole body … An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin … I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours …

  And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good-day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.

  Proust is no casual symbolist. Pursuing this isolated experience whereby he came upon the eternal essence of a mere crumb soaked in tea, and by contemplating the involuntary effects of this, and similar sensations – as when he heard the tinkle of a spoon, or stumbled on an uneven paving-stone – he found ‘in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection’. Most of us will recognise the experience. Suddenly the taste, smell or texture of something evokes the past in a special and meaningful way. Proust used this sensation as a point of contemplation. From it he recovered his past life – the Combray of his childhood, the Paris of his youth, the long Normandy summers, not in their fragmentary ‘actual’ guise, but in the artistic pattern of eternity. These places, their petty societies, the failing hierarchies of Dukedoms, fruitless love affairs, trivial gossip, vicious men and women, were so many ‘monsters immersed in Time’; Proust satirises them in the flesh, by the same method that he exalts their essence, under that ‘aspect of eternity which is also the aspect of art’.

  Proust in many ways anticipated a revised notion of Time which is still in process of formulation. He regarded Time subjectively, and realised that the whole of eternity is present ‘now’. Of the span of his life recollected in its eternal aspect, Proust writes ‘I had at every moment to keep it attached to myself … I could not move without taking it with me.’ Proust fixes in our minds that when we use words like ‘forever’, ‘eternal’, phrases like ‘everlasting life’, ‘world without end’, we refer to an existence here and now, to which we cannot normally approximate. He reminds us that there is a method of apprehending eternity through our senses, analogous to our sacramental understanding of eternity by faith. We get from Proust’s definitions a richer conception of the verities we hold by faith, he releases them from their sentimental or habitual connotations. An involuntary act of remembrance, to Proust, is a suggestive shadow of what a voluntary act of remembrance is to a Christian. This is what Proust meant by remembrance:

  Let a sound, a scent already heard and breathed in the past be heard and breathed anew, simultaneously in the present and in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, then instantly the permanent and characteristic essence hidden in things is freed and our true being which has for so long seemed dead but was not so in other ways awakens and revives, thanks to this celestial nourishment. An instant liberated from the order of time has recreated in us man liberated from the same order, so that he should be conscious of it. And indeed we understand his faith in his happiness even if the mere taste of a madeleine does not logically seem to justify it; we understand that the name of death is meaningless to him …

  Proust, who never once, so far as I recall, used the word ‘sacrament’ in his novel, is enabled by the persuasive beauty of his language to convey to the world more about the nature of a sacrament than any modern treatise on the subject could hope to teach. In support of which I offer, for comparison with Proust, the definition of the seventeenth-century Anglican Divine, Edward Reynolds:

  The nature of a Sacrament is to be the representative of a substance, the sign of a covenant, the seal of a purchase, the figure of a body, the witness of our faith, the earnest of our hope, the presence of things distant, the sight of things absent, the taste of things inconceivable, and the
knowledge of things that are past knowledge.

  Which saying about a Sacrament is one to keep in mind when we read Remembrance of Things Past.

  [1953]

  * As conceived, for example, in the Elizabethan ‘Chain of Being’.

  The Only Problem

  Before I became a novelist I was a poet and literary critic. I know that the practice of poetry and criticism contributed to my work in the novel form, and that both faculties are to some extent articulated within the fabric of my novels. This is more especially the case in The Only Problem than in any other novel I have written.

  Years ago I started to study the Book of Job, which is surely one of the loveliest, most intricate and most ambiguous books of the Bible. Uncountable works have been written on Job, and although textual and interpretive scholarship has progressively helped us with the details, it remains unmanageable as a rational narrative, and yet hypnotic as a poem. I intended to write a critical book. In 1954 I wrote a few essays and many notes on the Book of Job, and put away the subject to get on with my life.

  But I could never quite leave the Book of Job alone, and it would not leave me alone. Over the years I have begun to think more and more in terms of fiction, of myth. In that context I see life both poetically and critically. I conceived a character of our times, Harvey Gotham, a very rich man, like Job himself, who, also like Job, is a studious type. Harvey Gotham is studying the Book of Job. The Only Problem is not in any sense based on the Book of Job but rather, Job is the myth from which my novel proceeds, and there is no literal and exact analogy. The biblical poem is only reflected in my book like a shadow reflected on water.

  The Book of Job deals with the problem of suffering – Job cannot understand why God has afflicted him with a series of misfortunes. While he suffers he is visited by three friends, known as his Comforters, who variously represent the then established view that suffering is the result of sin. Job rejects this explanation, insisting on his personal innocence. The Comforters turn into Accusers. To me, there is a touch of a modern police-interrogation about these nerve-wracking dialogues between Job and his friends thousands of years ago. This, too, is reflected in The Only Problem.