I lost my temper, thrust my face close to hers and with what felt like a thoroughly evil grin whispered, “If that’s a threat, I’m no feart.”
We stared at each other for a moment then I slammed the door on her.
And went upstairs weary to bed. Why did I say that last thing to her in the voice of a tough Blackhill schoolboy?7 I understand myself as little as the young things I pick up. I’m sure life is easier for Italians, or was before the Counter Reformation.
This morning received letter from Joy Hendry saying she will print a special edition of Chapman with all my first chapters of Who Paid for All This? as a work-in-progress, if I give her a prologue explaining and outlining the whole book. Very encouraging. I will tackle it at once, giving it an epigraph from my favourite novel.
8: PROLOGUE TO HISTORICAL TRILOGY
“The scope and end of learning is to allow perfection to distributive justice, giving everyone his due, procuring good laws and causing them to be observed: an achievement really generous, great, deserving the highest praise.”
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
When a student of the Humanities in 1958 I intended to become a great writer. My ambition was as strong (I thought) as any that had driven Shakespeare, Burns or Tolstoy, but private efforts proved I was a poor versifier and could never be a playwright or novelist, being able to write brisk dialogue but incapable of inventing a plot. I was therefore only fit to become a historian, a biographer or blend of both in the manner of Plutarch. I did not at once try to write anything of that sort because the available material was of literature, religion, science and philosophy — the complete records of the human race, so any selection from them would be accidental if not harmonized by a mighty idea. Gibbon’s mighty idea showed the slow ruin of the Roman empire making room for the nations of Christian Europe and Arabic Islam. Marx showed all history as a struggle between social classes for the ownership of surplus wealth. My own schooling had described history as a forward march from an age when low-browed cavemen killed their meat with stone clubs, to my own time when every sane British adult could vote for the government of their welfare state which had achieved full employment, abolished abject poverty, and made good health care and education and legal justice available to every citizen. I did not doubt the essential truth of such big ideas, but knew I could write nothing worth reading unless excited by a big new idea of my own, or else by a new way of making an ancient truth look like new.
One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyle Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second university year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19th century verse called Hood to Hardy. Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words:
This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,
This hallowed bower and harvest of delight
Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,
Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,
Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones
Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood
Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed
With brains of madmen and the broken hearts
Of children. Understand it, you at least
Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night
With roots of luxury, a cancer struck
In every muscle; out of you it is
Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;
You are the hidden putrefying source
Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,
Of passionate loves and high imaginings;
You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet
I did not know what amaranths were or why they perfumed eternity, but that verse shook my intelligence awake by contradicting everything I had been taught about history, literature and life, and would be officially taught for years to come. Since then evidence that this grim view of civilization is strictly true keeps hitting me in the eye. Recently I found this passage in a second-hand paperback called Who Killed Tutankamun? by Bob Brier, an American Egyptologist:
The density and quality of bones reveal a person’s social status and occupation. For instance, manual labour increases muscle size which causes bone to thicken, so a single arm can tell us if the dead man was a labourer or a man of leisure. In the remains of a queen from 4,000 years ago I had never seen such delicate bones; it was as if she had never lifted her hand and travelled everywhere in her sedan chair. The cemetery of the workmen who built the pyramid at Giza held the bodies of men who moved heavy loads. Their spines were severely deformed, especially the lumbar vertebrae which ultimately bore most of the stress.
Forget the Pyramids. Suddenly all I had been so blandly taught made new, better sense and included all the great Athenian tragedies of sexual and political conflict lasting from generation to generation, with more than one great chorus bitterly chanting “Not to have been born is best.”8 Every nation in the world — Jewish or Roman, Spanish or British, German or American or Russian — has been made by a devil’s bargain, usually a war of conquest, letting a well-organized lot master arts and sciences while treating the defeated as shit. Deep thinkers have never stopped worrying about this devil’s bargain. Buddha and Jesus tried persuading people to withdraw from it. That is why early Christians believed Satan was Lord of the Earth and all nature damnable, especially human nature that let a minority enjoy earthly possessions — no wonder the first Christian Jews converted so many women and slaves whose lives had been cheapened by Roman conquest. Nietzsche despized Christians for trying to obey Jesus and love those who hated them, bless those who cursed them and willingly give what little they owned to whoever needed it more, or merely demanded it. I am too weak to despize them. This doctrine let them exert the only moral authority possible for the otherwise powerless. Nietzsche had no right to scorn them for using it.
This pure sad Christianity was warped when rich powerful folk adopted it. Early Roman Emperors thought it a conspiracy to undermine their Empire and tried to extirpate it. A later one made it the Empire’s official religion, partly because it was spreading but also because its doctrines stopped slaves and poor folk rebelling, so the faith spread far and wide, many of the poor accepting Hell on Earth because they hoped to change places with the rich after death. Then states arose in Renaissance Italy where life for many became pleasanter. They revived the old pagan idea that the human body and its appetites were more Good than Evil, so the natural world was God’s handiwork and not inherently damnable. European trade and conquest increased with experimental sciences, now called natural philosophy. In the 17th and 18th centuries Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz were both Christians and great mathematicians who believed the natural universe with its infinite multitude of suns and worlds was created and managed by God down to the very last detail. Only Pascal — a devout Catholic whose faith was close to Calvinism — found the idea terrifying. Most educated people were comforted by it. There have always been atheists — rich and poor folk who saw that bosses used religion to exploit others, and thought it a fraud. It became possible for prosperous people to say, at least in private, that if the natural universe was a huge machine running as Newton described, no god was needed to keep it going. But only a god could create it, and start it running so beautifully! was the reply of those who thought the only evil in the universe was human greed and stupidity. In his Essay on Man Alexander Pope set out, like Milton, To justify the ways of God to man, and after finding human pride the only source of evil concluded that Everything that is, is right. Leibnitz tried to show that every form of evil was essential to the workings of a splendid universe so Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.