The grants have also helped us publish this book in time for Christmas 1997. Plays are usually published after the first stage production, but the condition of Scottish theatre makes the reverse order just as sensible. It remains for me to thank Christopher Boyce for advice on how to make scene 10 more convincing, and for suggesting the reappearance of Miss Shy at the end; also Angela Mullane for help with legal details; also Doctors Bruce Charleton and Gillian Rye for dialogue in the surgical operation scene; also Scott Pearson and Joe Murray who between them typed and typeset this book under the author’s hideously exacting regime.
* Epilogue to a 1997 book of the play printed by Dog and Bone, Glasgow, which was then subsidised by the Glasgow City and Scottish Arts Councils. This ends by predicting a play for the company by Archie Hind, never made as he and a new director could not agree.
Jonah, Micah and Nahum
Published 1999 by Canongate, this was part of a small paperback set, each a book of the Bible (in the 1611 version, authorized by King James) each introduced by a modern author. I chose Jonah, my favourite part of the Bible. To this I was asked to add two shorter adjacent books. My introduction provoked some adverse publicity. An Orthodox Jewish spokesman and fundamental Muslim one said that by saying Abraham tricked wealth out of a king by prostituting his wife, I was insulting a great prophet. I do not see how anyone can read Genesis Chapter 20 and disagree, but I was glad my introduction had made priests agree who were of faiths that sometimes did not. I found it strange that no Christian fundamentalist spoke out agreeing with them.
THE THIRTY NINE BOOKS THAT King James’ bible calls The Old Testament show the state of the Jews between 900 and 100 BC and preserve legends from more ancient times. They were edited into their present form by scholars defending their culture from an empire ruling land once theirs; an empire of people equally clever and literate; Greeks whose books were as various as their Gods. Jews were then unique in worshipping a single God: their folklore, laws, politics and poetry kept mentioning him. The editors arranged these books in the chronological order of the subject matter, producing a story of their people from prehistoric times and making their God the strongest character in world fiction. It began with a second century BC poem telling how he made the universe and people like a poet, out of words, followed by a fifth century BC tale of how he made man like a potter, out of clay. It then showed God adapting to his worshipers from the stone age to their own.
Adam, Cain and Noah find God punitive but soothed by the smell of burnt flesh, mostly animal. He connives with the tricks of Abraham and Isaac, polygamous nomads who get cattle or revenge by prostituting a wife or mistreating foreigners or relatives. When Moses leads Jewish tribes out of Egypt God commands them like a pharaoh, promising unlimited protection for unlimited obedience. He is a war God when they invade Palestine, smiting them with plague when they do not kill every man, woman, child and animal in a captured city. Their leaders (called Prophets because God tells them the future) are patriarchs and commanders until they get land and cities of their own where (as in other lands) wealth is managed by official landlords and priests who exploit the poor. New kinds of prophet then arise: poets inspired by moral rage who speak for the exploited. They say that if Jewish rulers don’t obey God by being just and merciful he will use the might of foreigners to smash their new-made kingdoms. That happens. From 680 BC to 1958 Jews are ruled by foreign empires, first Assyrians and at last British. They outlive so many empires that Norwegian Ibsen calls them the aristocrats of world history for they can survive without land or government.
That was not wholly true. They were governed by the words of their prophets, especially those in the last Old Testament books who said the Jewish God is also God of all people, even people who oppress them; that God has created Jews to keep his words alive until the whole world learns justice and mercy by obeying him; that before then Jews should welcome suffering as punishment for sin or tests of faith. This must have sounded a strange new policy to those who wanted back nations founded (as all nations have been founded) by killing folk. No wonder many Jews assimilated with foreigners, and that the faithful sometimes sang psalms begging God to leave them alone.
The Book of Jonah is a prose comedy about a Jew who wants God to leave him alone and cannot grasp the scope of God’s new policy.
Jonah is an unwilling prophet. His Jewish conscience orders him to denounce the wicked Assyrian empire in its capital city so he at once sails towards a different city where he hopes foreign gods will prevail over his own. This breaks the first of the ten commandments: You shall have no other God than me: hence the tempest. The international crew see it is aimed at someone aboard. Many verses describe their reluctance to fling Jonah out, even when he tells them it is the one way to save themselves. The book is insisting that mercy is not just a Jewish virtue; but out Jonah goes and God saves him in the belly of a fish. Here the prophet chants a psalm saying God can save those who cry on him from the belly of hell. This hell is not the eternal torture chamber later adopted by official Christianity. For Jews hell is the worst that living people can suffer. Jonah IS suffering it, unless the fish intestines are a cosy place. But now he knows that God is always with him, so he need not fear death.
Then comes a parody of Exodus. The God of Moses sent Pharaoh a message then hardened Pharaoh’s heart to reject it, giving Moses an excuse to show God’s power by inflicting plagues until all Egyptian first-born children and cattle are dead. God uses Jonah to send the Assyrians a message that softens their king’s heart. The king leads his people into abandoning their evil ways, so God repented of the evil he said he would do unto them, and he did not. This contradicts the Mosaic code which says evil MUST be rewarded with evil.
So Jonah learns he is not a scourge in the hand of God like Moses, Joshua and Samson but a reformer, and like many reformers he looks a bit stupid. It is now obvious that the enemy king who thought his people might be persuaded to deserve mercy knew more about God than God’s Hebrew prophet. Jonah’s short but influential career ends not with a bang but with his dismal whimper: “I know thou art a gracious God, merciful (et cetera.) Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” God cuts this self-pitying cackle with a short question: “Doest thou well to be angry?” Jonah is too cowardly or childish to admit anger and squats outside the city determined to die by sunstroke if the promise of destruction is not fulfilled. Not even the mercy of miraculous shade cast over him softens this determination. The shade is withdrawn. In a fever Jonah hears God repeat something like his last question. He now answers truthfully and is favoured by words framed like another question. They suggest reasons for both God’s action and inaction; most evil is caused by folly; widespread slaughter is not the best cure if a prophecy of disaster can prevent it. We are not told if Jonah learns these lessons because they are meant for us.
Believers and unbelievers have argued pointlessly about the truth of Jonah’s book because they did not know great truths can be told in fantasies. It was known by editors who put Jonah before two realistic books about Assyria and the destruction of cities.
Micah starts a prophetic sermon in verse by denouncing the Jews who live in Samaria; God has let Assyria enslave them for disobeying him; soon the princes and priests of Jerusalem will be conquered, for they seek wealth and luxury instead of justice and mercy and think God’s forgiveness can be bought by animal sacrifices. Micah foretells a disastrous but not hopeless future. After much warfare the whole world will find peace by accepting the one true God, for a Jewish ruler from the little town of Bethlehem will become lord of every nation. This prophecy must have inspired hope and dread in every imaginative child born afterward in Bethlehem.
Nahum came eighty years later. He was probably an Assyrian slave when all Jewish territory had been conquered, just as Micah foretold. Nahum saw the destruction of Nineveh by the combined armies of Babylon and Persia. These killed the people and washed the city away by
channeling the River Tigris into it. The only grand truth in Nahum’s triumphant song is that nations who keep living by armaments will perish by them. Most governments think this only true of foreigners. I quote from Tom Leonard’s On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, Commonly Known As “The Gulf War” with Leonard’s Shorter Catechism. AK Press published it in 1991.
Q. What did Britain take part in on Tuesday, February 19, 1991?
A. It took part in what was at that point “one of the most ferocious attacks on the centre of Baghdad”, using bombers and Cruise missiles fired from ships.
Q. What did John Major say about the bombing the next day?
A. He said: “One is bound to ask about attacks such as these: What sort of people is it that can carry them out? They certainly are consumed with hate. They are certainly sick of mind, and they can be certain of one thing – they will be found.” (He was talking about 5lb of explosives left in a litter basket at Victoria Station in London. This killed one person and critically injured three.)
Major lead a government containing people privately enriched by weapon-sales to both Britain’s army and the army of the dictator we fought. We fought him again before Christmas 1998 when our most highly respected newspapers said that, though wicked and undemocratic, this dictator had better stay in power to stop Iraq falling apart and increasing the cost of our petrol. Meanwhile, since our troops in 1991 fired bullets tipped with uranium, more babies are being born in Iraq with distorted bodies and heads, others without heads.
When a child Ernest Levy lost faith in a purely national god by living through Auschwitz and Belsen. He became a cantor in a Glasgow synagogue and now believes God is the innocent, creative, spiritual part of everyone. This sounds like the merciful God of Jonah but can any God be merciful to a nation that does not repent of the evil it does? That makes, sells and uses what kills, cripples and warps even the unborn? From Jonah, Micah and Nahum Jesus learned what governments of Britain and the USA refuse to learn from Jesus. They act like Moses and Elijah, deliberately killing and diseasing thousands of civilians who cannot harm them. They do it without the old Hebrew excuse of being slaves wanting freedom or wanderers needing a homeland, without the Crusaders’ excuse of defending True Faith, without the Liberal excuse of spreading democracy. The one idea behind this is that any number of foreigners can be killed to keep up global company profits, though politicians give nicer-sounding reasons. The inevitable victory of big arms-selling nations over small arms-buying ones has provoked counter-attacks. Just now these have killed very few, but enough to prove that this world ruled by greed is hatching one ruled by revenge. Old and New Testaments should teach us to reform our ways for our children’s sake.
I belong to a small nation that for centuries has exported more soldiers and weapons than the defence of it ever needed, and now contains more destructive nuclear missiles and launching machines than any nation outside the USA. England has the good sense to contain hardly any. I hope the reform of Britain starts in Scotland.
The Book of Prefaces*
BOTTOM There are things in this comedy which will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that?
STARVELING I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done.
BOTTOM Not a whit: I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue, and let the prologue say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed. That will make all well.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by SHAKESPEARE
IT IS DONE. ENDED. FINISHED. COMPLETE. Thank goodness, for I think goodness is god’s kindest name. He, She or It (choose your favourite pronoun: just now I feel inclined to worship god the tree) has sterner names, like Reality, Nature, and Eternal Truth, compared with which each of us is a poor wee frail body – even such mighty truth-tellers as Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakespeare, Jefferson, Robert Burns and Jane Austen. I apologise to any Christian I offend by naming Jesus as a human being, but his last words upon the cross persuade me that, whatever he did later, he too is one of us. So I thank GOODNESS for letting me live to the end of this book, for though stern Reality, Nature, Truth & Co generate and allow goodness they do not let us depend upon it, as a multitude of hungry, homeless, voteless people know in every nation except, maybe, some Scandinavian ones.
I need do nothing now but give, as I promised in my opening advert, the motives and circumstances that led to this book, then apologise for the result.
In the early 80s I borrowed from Campbell Semple The Philosophy of Natural History by his remote ancestor, William Smellie, whose preface suggested the plan of this book. I saw at once it was a book I would want if someone else made it, but nobody had. Desire for a non-existent thing is the best motive for making it, even if a wish for fame and cash drives the maker too. When relaxing from other work I began to take note of good prefaces from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which was how I first imagined this book starting and ending. I soon saw that most readers would, like myself, enjoy it more if they were given more information than Smellie’s plan suggested. The ancient device of a marginal commentary or gloss seemed the best way to add this without breaking the flow of the most essential part.
So when a literary agent (Fiona Morrison) asked if I had ideas for a work of NON fiction (meaning a historical or biographical or critical work too speculative to be called factual) I suggested this one. When she asked for an introduction and specimen commentaries to show to publishers I quickly wrote the advert starting here and glosses on prefaces to The Cloud of Unknowing, Hobbes’ Leviathan and The Lyrical Ballads. They were mainly, though not exactly, as printed here. Each gloss began with the sentence This was written in an age of great revolutions because I believed then, and believe still, that every generation sees an amazing change of social circumstances. The advert was cheekier. It wondered why university professors had not undertaken this anthology long before, and suggested they were unable to see the value of a book which could be made so easily – for I then thought it could be easily made. In the six centuries between Geoffrey Chaucer and Kurt Vonnegut literacy, I believed, had steadily grown with expanding populations, so the number of important books must also have steadily increased. I already knew many of the books and it would not be hard to find others that university professors agreed were best. I would photocopy their prefaces from reprints in public libraries, arrange these chronologically, then crib commentaries from the Encyclopaedia Britannica which Smellie had also pioneered. Anyone with a Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate in English and Lower Leaving Certificate in History can do that, especially if they were educated at Whitehill Senior Secondary School, east Glasgow.
From this you may deduce, dear reader, that though I was then over fifty I still believed in the progressive view of history – believed that each generation had added good new social and scientific and artistic works to those of the past, thus giving more people comfort, security and freedom for the future. Any honest news report about life in most Asian, African and South American lands proved that view was not inevitable, that it was being horribly disproved in many places, but my own family history showed such progress had occurred in Britain, and would enable me to make this book.
For my grandparents had been born in the middle of Victoria’s reign. My mum’s dad was a foreman shoemaker who brought his wife from Northampton to Glasgow when English employers blacklisted him for trade union activities. He also brought his daughters to tears by reading them Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. They did not regard Dickens and Hardy as English literary classics but as entertainingly truthful describers of the world they knew, Dickens showing the mainly comic aspects, Hardy the mainly tragic. My dad’s dad was an industrial blacksmith and elder of a Congregational kirk: the kirk Cromwell worshipped in because the congregation chose its own priests. His political heroes were William Gladstone and Keir Hardie, both of whom wanted Scotland and Ireland to have independent gover
nments, and British manual labourers to be as healthily and comfortably housed as their bosses, if not quite as spaciously.
Like most of the literate working class my grandparents thought themselves middle class, though my dad’s parents lived with five children, my mother’s parents with three, in small one-room-and-kitchen rented flats without inside lavatories and baths, where water and food was heated by the kitchen fire. Most of the wealthy depended on such primitive heating and cooking before 1900, though their servants saved them from the sight of it. My dad, born 1897, left school at twelve, worked a weigh bridge in a Clydeside dock, and joined the army in 1914. He survived Flanders, lost his parents’ faith and became a Fabian Socialist, earning money between 1918 and 1939 by operating a machine in a cardboard box factory. In his spare time he worked without pay for co-operative out-door holiday organisations: The Camping Club of Great Britain, Scottish Youth Hostel Association and others.
That Trade Union shoemaker, Liberal blacksmith and Co-operative Fabian box-cutter were three types who created the first British Labour government: a party of MPs who preferred Ruskin to Marx and in 1924 passed parliamentary acts enabling town & rural councils to build the kind of housing scheme where I was born in 1934. Though my parents had only two children our flat had three rooms beside a lavatory – bathroom with hot tap water, a kitchen with that also and an electric cooker. Like most of the British working class we were further enriched by the second World War and its aftermath. My parents then paid for my health treatment and excellent education through their income tax, which I took for granted as the fair and democratic way of doing it. In their small book collection was Burns’ Poems, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Dickens’ Bleak House, all Ibsen’s plays in Archer’s translation and the plays of Bernard Shaw.
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