by James Wood
Now, of course, as an adult, I side with Uncle Karl, and would rather laze around the house in a secular maunder, helping myself to Christmas nuts and liqueurs, while everyone else crowds into church and imitates the credulous shepherds who, two thousand years ago, saw a great light in the sky and fell to their knees.
Karl used to drive up from London in a red MG with a creaking chassis, but this time he came in his latest car, a big blue Mercedes, whose twin exhausts reduced the massive engine to a siphoned tremble. It was a treat to see him, but he quickly disappeared with Peter, his real quarry. While Mother was cooking in the kitchen, and Jane was chatting with Father and Karl in the sitting room, I went upstairs to our bedroom, on the pretext of “working on the Ph.D.” Instead, I lay on the bed and started reading one of those religious apologists who get me so angry. They’re all the same. They admit that evil and suffering exist, that the existence of evil and suffering may constitute a challenge to God’s goodness and power—and then they just stop! Like Kierkegaard, like Simone Weil, shaking on the very edge of blasphemy, they stop the direction of their argument, in the same incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary way that a spider, wandering across the ceiling, will stop moving at a certain point for an hour or two, or even for good. And watching the insect, we think: Why stop there?
Having correctly described a world of meaningless suffering, these thinkers assert: Well, God is love, God didn’t create anything except for love itself, and the means to love. Therefore, affliction and suffering must also be forms of love. It is a “privilege” to suffer. Ah yes, and here it comes: the very image of affliction, Christ on the Cross, is also the very image of God’s love. God suffers, too, you see. He suffered on the Cross. He suffered, and suffers, with us.
From the bed, I could see that it was already dark, and only four o’clock in the afternoon. Those awful end-ofyear days in Sundershall, jammed down into the very boots of the year, where the light comes in rationed steps only, between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon—I won’t forget those days. Now I looked out of the window, and saw that it was beginning to rain, and felt a sadness come over me. And anger. The Cross, the Cross, how much we hear about the Cross. Christ suffered with us on the Cross. The Cross is at the heart of Christianity. The Cross is the image of pain and of victory, of life and of eternal life. Well, I reject the Cross; I stay clear of the Cross! I make a cross of my fingers, as the hero does in the Dracula movies, at the Cross, to make it wither and die.
But I should tell you about how I disgraced myself. Still thinking about these questions, and the doomed, grotesque effort to make suffering meaningful, I fell asleep, and woke to find Jane changing for supper. We went downstairs. Mother and Karl were in the sitting room. I looked hard at Uncle Karl, deep into his rusty eyes, and tried to imagine what he might have to say about the great God-given “privilege” of suffering.
“Tom, you’re elsewhere,” said Mother. “Might you get a drink for yourself and Jane, while I go and ‘touch up,’ as my mother-in-law used to say, the supper. Karl has a drink—”
“Karl always has a drink,” I said, looking at him. “His task in life is to enact everyone else’s secret aspiration: he drives a fast car, doesn’t have to go to church at Christmastime, and flies to various European capitals at whim.”
“Indeed,” said Karl, “but lucky Karl is also unable to find a wife who will stay with him for more than three years. By the way, Peter is still out doing his rounds.”
“On Christmas Eve?”
“He’s taking some presents to the … Welbys, is that their name? A very poor family.”
“You remember them, my love?” I said to Jane.
“Yes—Mr. Welby fell into a fire, or something.” Jane, haughty, sounded like her mother at that moment, and looked like her, too, her face raised, her long nose dryly divining, and her dark hair, which was down tonight, flashingly acknowledging the electric light, a countless conformity of dark strands sealing her scalp in lustre.
“Welby, in fact, set light to his ear,” I said. “He was drunk and was trying to have a fag in bed, and he burned his ear. Quite badly, because he didn’t do anything about it for days.”
“How many of these delightful facts do you know?” asked Karl.
“Quite a few. You know me, I collect them, like you collect East German and Russian stories. Welby burnt his ear; Tattersall, of course, knocked the pedestrian down; Seddon drowned in the river, that was alcohol again—he drowned on the night of his thirtieth wedding anniversary, which he had spent without his wife in The Stag’s Head, a pretty depressing detail, I always think; and Louise Winters was fined for trying to sell captured squirrels as housepets. I can go on.”
“Still, they are all God’s good people, yes?” said Karl smiling slyly.
“Oh yes. Karl, do you have any new horrors from your Communist contacts?” Karl does a certain amount of business in Germany and Bulgaria, and had just started representing new Russian artists, the children of Mr. Gorbachev’s glasnost, in the West. He likes collecting Communist jokes, anecdotes, scandals, and so on.
“I have something very good, which I heard the other day,” said Karl, but at that moment my father walked into the sitting room, shining, pinkly stung by the cold—and cheerful, so cheerful. He was a vision of confidence and decency; the brilliant white priest’s collar around his neck glowed like a fallen halo. His bald head was pipped with little drops of moisture.
“Everything all right? I got back just in time,” he continued. “Now it’s really coming down outside.”
“I have calculated that of the fourteen Christmases I have spent here, only two have been entirely free of rain or snow,” said Karl.
“Yes, it rains plenty here,” Peter said.”But, you know, into every rain a little life must fall.” His shrewd eyes looked around for approval. He went to stand near the fire, and installed himself like a policeman in Gilbert and Sullivan, his back to the flame, his arms behind him, and his legs planted wide.”Perhaps Jane will serenade us after supper, as you did so beautifully, my dear, in September.”
“Oh, thank you, Peter, that’s awfully sweet,” said Jane. “It may go to my head, I’ve been living on a rather reduced diet of praise.”
“My goodness, your husband does not appreciate you?” asked Karl, looking greedily at her. Well, I thought, when did Jane last praise me for anything at all? A month ago she was complaining that she had no time to practise, despite her endless practising, and now she was complaining that she got no praise.
“I’m not sure one deserves praise for practising,” I said, charmlessly. The bell rang.
“That’ll be Norrington,” said Father. “Hope you chaps don’t mind, I invited him to supper, he’s all on his own at Christmas. Pastoral duty.” This was bad news. Why had my parents spoiled the Christmas Eve dinner in this selfish way? Mr. Norrington—well, I have nothing against him especially. He is old, pompous, lonely, and fond of the phrase “apropos of nothing,” which he uses as often as possible. He wears immensely thick glasses, and as a boy I had been interested in the thickness of those lenses, longing for the moment when he might remove them to reveal the weak failures, the tiny confessions, of his eyes. I was always supposed to feel sorry for Mr. Norrington because of his loneliness: Mother told me that he had seen Brief Encounter, his favourite film, eighteen times. He was in love with the actress Celia Johnson.
Norrington entered, shook hands, and in reply to Peter’s offer of a drink, said, “A small glass of sherry wine, please,” with great precision, and then sat down with his shoes perfectly aligned, as if he had taken them off before going to bed. I went to the kitchen to find a fresh bottle of whisky, and when I returned, Norrington was on his favourite subject, genealogy. “The crucial thing,” he was telling Jane, “is the 1851 census. Lots of very nice material there. You can consult it in London at the PRO. You see, the Norringtons were originally from Shropshire. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that our line of Norringtons i
s related to the Earl of Cavendish, via an illegitimate birth.”
Over the years, in Sundershall, whenever an area of England was mentioned in Mr. Norrington’s presence, he would say, with a strange coughing eagerness: “Now, I have a large number of relatives in that county … oh yes, Somerset”—or wherever was being discussed—“is absolutely full of Norringtons—yes, farmers”—and here he might correct himself—“farm owners, landowners.” There he would sit, a small man surrounded by centuries of relatives in every corner of England.
Mother came in, waved us to the table, and on the way to the dining room I thought again about what I had been reading upstairs. “The sea is not less beautiful for our knowledge that ships are wrecked on it.” This was one of the sentences I had read in the bedroom. The famous Jewish thinker I had been reading was trying to argue that beauty and suffering are entwined. You can’t have the majesty of the natural world without the threat of danger; nature is not easy; freedom will entail shipwrecks. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a sea that still has all the large power of a sea while also being a place in which every swimmer and every sailor is always safe, a place that guarantees your safety. So beauty is freedom, and freedom is risk? You like swimming, and dipping down to the sand? Then you may also drown, for that is the natural property of wateriness. This was what the thinker was saying.
And suddenly, sitting at my parents’ dinner table, at the old family table, I glimpsed something, and my mind was utterly alive with clarity. This moment lasted only a few seconds, but in those seconds I saw a new world: I saw a safe sea. It resembled a real sea—look, there are the unknown salty slums, many storeys deep, overcrowded with nether-life, the cloudy suspension of a million forms of existence! But it was an imaginary sea, because it was a safe sea. A sea on which I can sail, and on which at the slightest threat of storm, the skies suddenly clear and the boat continues on its happy way. A sea in which I can swim, and on which at the first moment of danger, an unseen hand lifts me up and places me on top of the water, as if on the surface of the Dead Sea. Oh, but my New Dead Sea, which threatens no human, is unimaginable, you will say; nature must follow its own laws of necessity. The kinds of supernatural tamperings I am imagining are impossible. Are they? But the Psalmist tells us: They that go down to the sea in ships, these see the works of the Lord, for he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. And the Gospels tell us that Christ tampered twice with those laws, once when he walked on water, and once when he calmed a storm. Jesus killed the sea, made it Dead—and was the sea, in these divine instances, any less beautiful at the very moment it became safe? So I invert the famous thinker, and I say: Is the sea any less beautiful for our knowledge that ships are safe on it?
At that moment, and only for a moment, I saw a world in which the sea had no powers to drown us; and I saw a kingdom where the skies were safe, and the stormy wind was made mild, and the mountains did not erupt, and murder had been abolished, and violence was defunct, and illness was as rare as the unicorn, and where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, a kingdom where we shall be given beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. The people inhabiting this kindly world would not be human, not as we recognize the human. They would not be free, not as we recognize the word. In particular they would not be free to suffer; there could be no Hitlers, no Stalins—but also no con men, no plausible rogues, no jokers, no entertaining frauds, no brilliant culpable politicians, for all these people cause suffering of one kind or another. I saw a colourless kingdom, no doubt, humans reduced to charitable prisoners, unfree robots. But it is not my task, is it, to decide which world would be more pleasant to live in—the suffering free world, or the painless unfree world; it is not my task to choose between these worlds at all. It is only my task, as a philosopher, as a human, as an adult, as Thomas Bunting, to imagine such a world, and just by imagining it to prove that the world we currently live in did not need to be made the way it was made. If I could imagine such a world, how much greater might God’s imagining of it have been.
And do not tell me that the charitable prisoners in the happy kingdom I am imagining are not happy because they are not free. For the kingdom I have been describing is heaven—where the seas, if they exist, are utterly safe, where the wind is always mild, where there is no suffering and presumably no freedom, and “no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” Who would dare to say that heaven is not a good or “beautiful” place to be? Heaven is all the proof we need that God already loves his charitable prisoners, and all the proof we need that God could have created a different world here on earth. God could have created heaven on earth! Why then did God create earth before heaven? Why the fallible rehearsal for perfection rather than perfection itself?
But my father’s voice broke into my consciousness, and I discovered that he was saying grace, and that my head should be bowed to the plate. “For these and all Thy gifts, O Lord, we give Thee thanks.” I don’t remember much about the first course, except that Karl and my father were talking to each other a lot—rather exclusively, I thought. This didn’t bother me too much; but I was chivalrously offended on behalf of Jane and my mother, who had to make do with the tedious Mr. Norrington.
Whenever my father and Karl met, they fell into easy reminiscence, and Father, conscious of the “nobility” of Karl’s childhood and early suffering, tended slyly to promote his own moral dignity. On Christmas Eve this took the form of several stories about his wartime service. Karl, who is fiercely Anglophile, encouraged him to talk about English soldiers, especially eccentric officers. Peter did not boast; instead, he talked about other men as if they were completely unrelated to him, as if they had fought in a different army, and were a cause of vague wonderment in him. A clever strategy, I thought. It enabled him to praise all the more lavishly certain attributes which were then left to us, out of a spirit of fairness, to pin on him.
That evening Peter mentioned an ace RAF pilot. “His name was Rowland or Rowlands. He was as cool as a lamb throughout the most terrifying dogfights with the Germans, and once apparently brought his Spitfire down perfectly on a country road in Sussex—what the airboys used to call ‘a real daisy-cutter,’ if I remember correctly.”
Of course he remembered correctly.
“Was he really a better pilot than everyone else?” asked Karl. “I mean by this, did he put down more Germans than his colleagues did?”
“No, no,” said Peter, clearly enjoying himself. “It was his extraordinary coolness that made him famous. He didn’t sweat; and the boys knew this because he changed his clothes far less frequently than the rest of them.”
I thought that he sounded like my kind of hero.
“What became of him?” asked Karl. “You will now reveal to me that he went into Parliament after the war and became the most tedious imaginable Conservative backbencher, as cool on committees as he had been in the cockpit,” said Karl, with his sweet, gentle smile.
“Ha, Karl, this is your vision of the English, this is what you secretly admire in them—German conformity! You want the poor fellow to have settled down and followed orders!”
Karl’s smile widened, and his eyes glinted with pleasure.
“What actually happened, was that the chap was shot down, caught by the Germans, and put in a camp, fortunately with other British officers. He escaped once and was caught, and thankfully didn’t try again, since the Krauts had a nasty habit, among several others, of losing their patience with escaped prisoners and shooting them—sometimes on Hitler’s orders. So he stayed put in prison for the rest of the war. His family was in the wine business, quite a famous and venerable merchant, actually. He entertained the other boys in prison by enacting imaginary wine tastings. They sat with their tin cups full of water, and had to perfectly describe a particular wine, and then he would tell them where—in occupied France, of course—
their imagined wine came from.”
Mother, Jane, and Mr. Norrington were now silent, and listening to Peter.
“Who liberated him, dearest? The Russians?” asked Sarah.
“No, the Americans, I think. I got all this secondhand years ago from old Bill Stapley, who knew him. You met Bill once, Karl, at the house in Durham. And to answer your question, after the war Rowland looked after the family firm for a while—and became rather a fine Christian, went on speaking tours and the like, and founded a charity.”
I should have responded warmly to Father’s reminiscences, but instead I felt that he should not have mentioned German camps in Karl’s presence, in public; I felt that this revealed a bullying insouciance on his part. He should have shown more respect for Karl’s suffering. Father and the theologians, they were in this together, I decided, judging the world from the citadel of their own strength, rather than joining the world in the shelter of its weakness. All of them deciding the tolerability of others’ pain. The privilege of it! Horrid vanity, the martyr’s vanity, the religionist’s arrogance.