From Fifth Business:
Our village was so small that you came on it at once; it lacked the dignity of outskirts.
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This gravel pit was of unusual importance to our village because it completely blocked any normal extension of streets or houses on our western side; thus it was a source of indignation to our village council. However, it belonged to the railway company, which valued it as a source of the gravel they needed For keeping their roadbed in order, and which they excavated and hauled considerable distances up and down the track. How big it was I do not accurately know, but it was big, and preju- dice made it seem bigger. It was not worked consistently and so was often undisturbed for a year or more at a time; in it there were pools, caused by seepage from the river, which it bordered, and a lot of scrub growth, sumac, sallow, Manitoba maple, and such unprofitable things, as well as goldenrod and kindred trashy weeds.
Mothers hated it because sometimes little children strayed into it and were hurt, and big children sneaked into it and met the like of Mabel Heighington. But most of all it was disliked because it was a refuge for the tramps who rode the rods of the railway. Some of these were husky young fellows; others were old men, or men who seemed old, in ragged greatcoats belted with a piece of rope or a strap, wearing hats of terrible dilapidation, and giving of a stench of feet, sweat, feces, and mine that would have staggered a goat. They were mighty drinkers of flavouring extracts and liniments that had a heavy alcohol base. All of them were likely to appear at a back door and ask for food. In their eyes was the dazed, stunned look of people who live too much in the open air without eating properly. They were generally given food and generally feared as lawless men.
In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them.
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He laughed aloud, with the creaky, short laugh of a man whose life does not afford many jokes.
“A saint, do you say? Well now, that’s a pretty tall order. I couldn't help you at all. Finding saints isn’t any part of my job. Nor can I say what’s a miracle and what isn’t. But I don’t imagine the bishop would have much to say to your grounds; it'd be his job to think of such things, if anybody did. A tramp reformed. I’ve reformed a tramp or two myself; they get spells of repentance, like most people. This fella you tell me of, now, seems to be as extreme in his zeal as he was in his sin. I never like that. And this business of raising your brother from his deathbed, as you describe it, was pretty widely talked about when it happened. Dr. McCausland says he never died at all, and I suppose he’d know. A few minutes with no signs of life. Well, that’s hardly Lazarus, now, is it? And your own experience when you were wounded-man, you were out of your head. I have to say it plainly. You’d better put this whole foolish notion away and forget it.
“You were always an imaginative young fella. It was said of you when you were a lad, and it seems you haven’t changed. You have to watch that kinda thing, you know. Now, you tell me you’re very interested in saints. Awright, I’m not fishing for converts, but if that’s the way it is you’d better take a good look at the religion saints come from. And when you’ve looked, I’ll betcha a dollar you’ll draw back like a man from a flame. You clever, imaginative fellas often want to flirt with Mother Church, but she’s no flirty lady, I’m telling you. You like the romance, but you can’t bear the yoke.
“You’re hypnotized by this idea that three miracles makes a saint, and you think you've got three miracles for a poor woman who is far astray in her wits and don’t know right
from wrong. Aw, go on! “Look, Mr. Ramsay, I’ll tell it to you as plain as it comes:
there’s a lot of very good people in the world, an-d a lot of queer things happen that we don’t see the explanation of, but there’s only one Church that undertakes to cut nght down to the bone and say what’s a miracle and what isn’t and who’s a saint and who isn’t, and you, and this poor soul you speak of, are outside it. You can’t set up some kind of a bootleg saint, so take my advice and cut it out. Be content with the facts you have, or think you have, and don’t push anything too far --or you might get a little bit strange yourself.
“I’m trying to be kind, you know, for I admired your parents. Fine people, and your father was a fair-minded man to every faith. But there are spiritual dangers you Protestants don’t even seem to know exist, and this monkeying with difficult, sacred things is a sure way to get yourself into a real old mess. Well I recall, when I was a seminarian, how we were warned one day about a creature called a fool-saint.
“Ever hear of a fool-saint? I thought not. As a matter of fact, it’s a Jewish idea, and the Jews are no fools, y’know. A fool-saint is somebody who seems to be full of holiness and loves everybody and does every good act he can, but because he’s a fool it all comes to nothing-to worse than nothing, because it is virtue tainted With madness, and you can’t tell where it’ll end up. Did you know that Prudence was named as one of the Virtues? There’s the trouble with your fool-saint, y’see --no Prudence. Nothing but a lotta bad luck’ll rub off on you from one of them. Did you know bad luck could be catching? There’s a theological name for it, but I misremember it right now.
“Yes, I know a lot of the saints have done strange things, but I don’t recall any of ’em traipsing through the streets with a basketful o’ wilted lettuce and wormy spuds, or bringing scandal on their town by shameless goings-on... no, no; the poor soul is a fool-saint if she's anything.
and
She could not keep pace with Boy’s social advancement. He was a genius-that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. He was a genius at making money, and that is as uncommon as great achievement in the arts. The simplicity of his concepts and the masterly way in which they were carried through made jealous people say he was lucky and people like my schoolmaster colleagues say he was a crook: but
he made his own luck, and no breath of financial scandal ever came near him.
She toiled at the lessons in bridge, mah-jongg, golf, and tennis; she had plodded through the Books-of-the-Month, breaking down badly in Kristin Lavransdatter; she had listened with mystification to gramophone records of Le Sacre du Printemps and with the wrong kind of enjoyment to Ravel’s Bolero; but nothing made any impression on her, and bewilderment and a sense of failure had begun to possess her. She had lost heart in the fight to become the sort of sophisticated, cultivated, fashionably alert woman Boy wanted for a wife. She loved shopping, but her clothes were wrong; she had a passion for pretty things and leaned toward the frilly at a time when fashion demanded clean lines and a general air of knowingness in women’s clothes. If Boy let her shop alone she always came back with what he called “another god-damned Mary Pickford rigout,” and if he took her shopping in Paris the sessions often ended in tears, because he sided with the clever shopwomen against his indecisive wife, who always forgot her painfully acquired French as soon as she was confronted with a living French creature. Nor did she speak English as became the wife of one who had once hob-nobbed with a Prince and might do so again. If she positively bad to use hick expressions, I once heard Boy tell her, she might at least say “For Heaven’s sake,” and not “For Heaven sakes.“ And “supper” was a meal one are after the theatre, not the meal they ate every night at half-past seven. Nor could she learn when to refer to herself as “one,” or remember not to say “between you and I.”
and
“You Protestants, if you think of saints at all, regard them with quite the wrong sort of veneration,” he said to me at our first dinner. “I think you must be deceived by our cheap religious statuary. All those pink and blue dolls, you know, are for people who think them beautiful. St. Dominic, so pretty and pink-cheeked, with his lily, is a peasant woman’s idea of a good man-the precise contrary of the man she is married to, who stinks of sweat and punches her in the breast and puts his cold feet on her backside in the winter nights. But St. Dominic himself-and this is a Jesuit speaking, Ramezay-was no confectionery doll. Do you know that before he was born his mother dreamed she would give birth to a dog with a lighted torch in its mouth? And that was what he was fierce and persistent in carrying the flame of faith. But show the peasant woman a dog with a torch and she will not care for it; she wants a St. Dominic who can see the beautiful soul in her, and that would be a man without passions or desires-a sort of highminded eunuch.
“But she is too much herself to want that all the time. She would not take it in exchange for her smelly man. She gives her saints another life, and some very strange concerns, that we Bollandists have to know about but do not advertise. St. Joseph, now-what is his sphere of patronage, Ramezay?”
“Carpenters, the dying, the family, married couples, and people looking for houses.”
“Yes, and in Naples, of confectioners; don’t ask me why. But what else? Come now, put your mind to it. What made Joseph famous?”
“The earthly father of Christ?”
“Oho, you nice Protestant boy! Joseph is history’s most celebrated cuckold. Did not God usurp Joseph’s function, reputedly by impregnating his wife through her car? Do not nasty little sem- inarians still refer to a woman’s sine qua non as auricula-the ear? And is not Joseph known throughout Italy as Tio Pepe-Uncle Joe-and invoked by husbands who are getting worried? St. Joseph hears more prayers about cuckoldry than he does about house~ hunting or confectionery, I can assure you. Indeed, in the underworld hagiology of which I promised to tell you, it is whispered that the Virgin herself, who was born to Joachim and Anna through
God’s personal intervention, was a divine daughter as well as a divine mate; the Greeks could hardly improve on that, could they; And popular legend has it that Mary’s parents were very rich, Which makes an oddity of the Church’s respect for poverty but is ‘1“th in keeping with the general respect for money. And do you know the scandal that makes it necessary to keep apart the statues of Mary and those of St. John-”
Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. People in the restaurant were staring, and one or two ladies of devout appearance were heaving their bosoms indignantly_ He swept the room with the wild eyes of a conspirator in a me]. odrama and dropped his voice to a hiss. Fragments of food, ejected from his mouth by this jet, flew about the table.
“But all this terrible talk about the saints is not disrespect, Ramezay. Far from it! It is faith! It is love! It takes the saint to the heart by supplying the other side of his character that history or legend has suppressed-that he may very well have suppressed himself in his struggle toward sainthood. The saint triumphs over sin. Yes, but most of us cannot do that, and because we love the saint and want him to be more like ourselves, we attribute some imperfection to him. Not always sexual, of course. Thomas Aquinas was monstrously fat; St. Jerome had a terrible temper. This gives comfort to fat men and cross men. Mankind cannot endure perfection; it stifles him. He demands that even the saints should cast a shadow. If they, these holy ones who have lived so greatly but who still carry their shadows with them, can approach God. well then, there is hope for the worst of us.
“Sometimes I wonder why so few saints were also wise. Some were, of course, but more were down-right pig-headed. Often I wonder if God does not value wisdom as much as heroic virtue. But wisdom is rather unspectacular; it does not flash in the sky‘ Most people like spectacle. One cannot blame them. But for oneself-ah, no thank you."
It was with this learned Chatterbox that I set out to travel from Brussels to Vienna. I was early at the station, as he had commanded, and found him already in sole possession of a carriage. He beckoned me inside and went on with his task, which was to read aloud from
and
“You don’t know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna-always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.
“So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero’s birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody’s death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out.”
This is not a verbatim report, Headmaster; I said a good deal myself, and I have tidied Liesl’s English, and boiled down what she said. But we talked till a clock somewhere struck four, and then fell happily asleep, but not without having achieved the purpose for which Liesl had first of all invaded my room.
With such a gargoyle! And yet never have I known such deep delight or such an aftermath of healing tenderness!
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But I detested Magnus Eisengrim.
“Shall I tell you why? Because he was making fools of us all, and so cleverly that most of us liked it; he was a con man of a special kind, exploiting just that element in human credulity that most arouses me-I mean the desire to be deceived. You know that maddening situation that lies behind so many criminal cases, where somebody is so besotted by somebody else that he lays himself open to all kinds of cheating and ill-usage, and sometimes to murder?
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“You agree with me that the drinking business is a symptom‘ and not my disease?”
"Let us not speak of disease. A disease in your case would be a psychosis, which is what you fear and what of course is always possible. Though the rich are rarely mad. Did you know that? They may be neurotic and frequently they are. Psychotic, rarely. Let "a say that you are in an unsatisfactory state of mind and you want to get out of it. Will that do?”
“It seems a little mild, for what has been happening to me.”
“You mean, like your Netty, nobody knows what you are going through? I assure you that very large numbers of people go through much worse things.”
“Aha, I see where we are going. This is to destroy my sense of uniqueness. I’ve had lots of that in life, I assure you.”
“No, no. We do not work on the reductive plan, we of the Zurich School. Nobody wants to bring your life’s troubles down to having been slapped because you did not do your business on the pot. Even though that might be quite important, it is not the mainspring of a life. You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before. But we are members of the human race, as well, and our unique quality has limits. Now-about treatment. There are a few simple things to begin with. You had better leave your hotel and take rooms somewhere. There are quite good pensions where you can be quiet, and that is important.
I think we would be best to stick to the usual course and begin at the beginning.”
“Childhood recollections?”
“Yes, and recollections of your life up to now. Important things! Formative experiences. People who have meant much to you) whether good or bad.”
“That sounds like the Freudians.”
“We have no quarrel with the Freudians, but we do not put the same stress on sexual matters as they do. Sex is very important, but if it were the single most important thing in life it would all be much simpler, and I doubt if mankind would have worked so hard to live far beyond the age when sex is the greatest joy. It is a popular delusion, you know, that people who live very close to nature are great ones for sex. Not a bit. You live with primitives-I did it for three years, when I was younger and very interested in anthropology-and you find out the truth. People wander around naked and nobody cares-not even an erection or a wiggle of the hips. That is because their society does not give them the brandy of Romance, which is the great drug of our world. When sex is on the program they sometimes have to work themselves up with dances and ceremonies to get into the mood for it, and then of course they are very active. But their important daily concern is with food. You know, you can go for a lifetime without sex and come to no special harm. Hundreds of people do so. But you go for a day without food and the matter becomes imperative. In our society food is just a start for our craving. We want all kinds of things-money, a big place in the world, objects of beauty, learning, sainthood, oh, a very long list. So here in Zurich we try to give proper attention to these other things, as well.
“We generally begin with what we call anamnesis. Are you a classicist? Do you know any Greek? We look at your history, and meet some people there whom you may know or perhaps you don’t, but who are portions of yourself. We take a look at what you remember, and at some things you thought you had forgotten. As that goes on we find we are going much deeper. And when that is satisfactorily explored, we decide whether to go deeper still, to that part of you which is beyond the unique, to the common heritage of mankind.”
“How long does it take?“
“It varies. Sometimes long, sometimes surprisingly short, especially if you decide not to go beyond the personal realm. And though of course I give advice about that, the decision, like all the decisions in this sort of work, must be your own.”
“So I should begin getting a few recollections together? I don’t want to be North American about this, but I haven’t unlimited time. I mean, three years or anything of that sort is out of the question. I’m the executor of my father’s will. I can do quite a lot from here by telephone or by post but I can't be away forever. And there is the problem of Castor to be faced.”
“I have always understood that it takes about three years to settle an estate. In civilized countries, that is; there are countries here in Europe where it can go on for ten if there is enough money to pay the costs. Does it impress you as interesting that to settle a dead man’s affairs takes about the same length of time as settling a life’s complications in a man of forty? Still, I see your difficulty. And that makes me wonder if a scheme I have been considering for you might not be worth a trial."
“What are you thinking of?”
“We do many things to start the stream of recollection flowing in a patient, and to bring forth and give clues to what is important for him. Some patients draw pictures, or paint, or model things in clay. There have even been patients who have danced and devised ceremonies that seemed relevant to their situation. It must be whatever is most congenial to the nature of the analysand.”
“Analysand? Am I an analysand?” '
“Horrid word, isn’t it? I promise I shall never call you that. We shall stick to the Plain Style, shall we, in what we say to one another?”
“Ramsay always insisted that there was nothing that could not be expressed in the Plain Style if you knew what you were talking about. Everything else was Baroque Style, which he said was not for most people, or Jargon, which was the Devil’s work.”
“Very good. Though you must be patient, because English is not my cradIe-tongue, and my work creates a lot of Jargon. But about You, and what you may do; I think you might create something, but not pictures or models.
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The College took a long time answering letters and asked for information that was hard to provide. I knew all about it because by this time my old friend Pledger~Brown was one of the pursuivants, and we had always written to each other at least once a year. One of his letters said, as I remember it, “This can never be, you know; not even your stepdame’s New World determination can make you Stauntons of Longbridge. My colleague in charge of the matter is trying to persuade her to apply for new arms, which your father might legitimately have, for after all bags of gold are a very fair earnest of gentility, and always have been. But she is resolute, and nothing will do but a long and very respectable descent. [t is one of the touching aspects of our work here in the College that so many of you New World people, up to the eyebrows in all the delights of republicanism, hanker after a link with what is ancient and rubbed by time to a fine sheen. It’s more than snobbery; more than romanticism; it’s a desire for an ancestry that somehow postulates a posterity and for an existence in the past that is a covert guarantee of immortality in the future. You talk about individualism; what you truly want is to be links in a long unbroken chain.
and
The odd thing was that I couldn’t really see his face. He wore an ordinary business suit. Then suddenly he turned from me and flew up into the air, and the astonishing thing was that as he rose, his trousers came down, and I saw his naked backside.”
“And what are your associations?”
“Well, obviously it’s the passage in Exodus where God promises Moses that he shall see Him, but must not see His face; and what Moses sees is God’s back parts. As a child I always thought it funny for God to show His rump. Funny, but also terribly real and true. Like those extraordinary people in the Bible who swore a solemn oath clutching one another’s testicles. But does it mean that l have seen the weakness, the shameful part of my father’s nature because he gave so much of himself into the keeping of Denyse and because Denyse was so unworthy to treat him properly? I’ve done what I can with it, but nothing rings true.”
“Of course not, because you have neglected one of the chief principles of what I have been able to tell you about the significance of dreams. That again is understandable, for when the dream is important and has something new to tell us, we often forget temporarily what we know to be true. But-we have always agreed, haven’t we, that figures in dreams, whoever or whatever they may look like, are aspects of the dreamer? So who is this father with the obscured face and the naked buttocks?”
“I suppose he is my idea of a father-of my own father?"
and
The truth of the past is to be seen in museums and what is it? Dead things... coins and snuffboxes and combs
and mirrors that won‘t reflect any more, and clothes that look as If the wearers had all been midgets. and masses of frowsy tat that tells us nothing at all. Once a man showed me a great treasure of his family; It was a handkerchief which somebody, on January 30, 1649, had dipped in the blood of the executed English King Charles I. It was a disgusting. rusty rag. But if you and l and Roly here had the money and the right people, we could fake up an execution of King Charles that would make people weep. Which is nearer to the truth? The rag, or our picture?”
I thought it was time for me to intervene. “I wouldn’t call either the rag or your picture truth,” I said; “I am an historian by training and temperament, and I would go to the documents, and there are plenty of them, about the execution of Charles, and when I had read and tested and reflected on them, I would back my truth against yours, and win.”
“Ah, but you see, my dear Ramsay, we would not dream of making our picture until we had consulted you or somebody like you, and given the fullest importance to your opinion.”
“Well, would you be content to film the execution on a grey day? Wouldn’t you want a shot of the sun rising behind Whitehall as the sun of English monarchy was setting on the scaffold?"
Lind looked at me sadly. “How you scholars underestimate us artists," he said, with wintry Scandinavian melancholy. “You think we are children, always beguiled by toys and vulgarities. When have you am known me to stoop to a sunrise?”
“Besides, you don’t understand what we could do with all those wonderful pearly greys,” said Kinghovn.
“You will never persuade me to believe that truth is no more than what some artist, however gifted he may be, thinks is truth,” l said. “Give me a document, every time.”
“I suppose somebody has to write the document?" said Lind. “Has he no feeling? Of course he has. But because he is not used to giving full weight to his feelings, he is all the more likely to be deluded into thinking that what he puts into his document is objective truth.
and
“Let‘s not theorize about humour, Jurgen,” said lngestree; “it's utterly fruitless and makes the very dullest kind of conversation.” “Now it‘s my turn to disagree,” I said. “This notion that nobody can explain humour, or even talk sensibly about it, is one of humour‘s greatest cover-ups. I’ve been thinking a great deal about the Devil lately, and l have been wondering if humour isn’t one of the most brilliant inventions of the Devil. What have you just been saying about it? It diminishes the horrors of the past, and it veils the horrors of the present, and therefore it prevents us from seeing straight, and perhaps from learning things we ought to know. Who profits from that? Not mankind, certainly. Only the Devil could devise such a subtle agency and persuade mankind to value it.” “No, no, no, Ramsay,” said Liesl. “You are in one of your theological moods. I’ve watched you for days, and you have been moping as you do only when you are grinding one of your home~ made theological axes. Humour is quite as often the pointer to truth as it is a cloud over truth. Have you never heard the Jewish legend-it’s in the Talmud, isn’t it?---that at the time of Creation the Creator displayed his masterwork, Man, to the Heavenly Host, and only the Devil was so tactless as to make a joke about it. And that was why he was thrown out of Heaven, with all the angels who had been unable to suppress their laughter. So they set up Hell as a kind of iokers’ club, and thereby complicated the universe in a way that must often embarrass God.“ “No," I said; “I‘ve never heard that and I believe you just made it up."
and
“You have read Spengler? No: it is not so fashionable as it once was. But Spengler talks a great deal about what he calls the Magian World View, which he says we have lost, but which was part of the Weltanschauung-you know, the world outlook-of the Middle Ages. It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghills and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengler called a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding, impenetrable darkness.
“This was what Herr Trousers-Crease seemed to have, and what made him ready to spend his time on work that would have maddened a man of modern education and modern sensibility. We have paid a terrible price for our education, such as it is. The Magian World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are merely clockmakers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars are just cud-chewers or system grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from which “wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn‘t incorporate it into a modern state, because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless.
“Yet here it was, in this most unexpected place, and when I had found it I apprenticed myself to it. Literally, for I begged Herr Trousers-Crease to teach me what he knew, and even with my huge hands I gained skill, because I had a great master. And that means very often an exacting, hot~tempered, and impatient master, because whatever my great countrymen Pestalozzi and Froebel may have said about the education of commonplace people, great things are not taught by blancmange methods. What great thing was I learning? The management of clockwork? No; any great craft tends at last toward the condition of a philosophy, and I was moving through clockwork. to the Magian World View.
