by Melvyn Bragg
The main point here is that the King James Version both ate into and fed American society from slaves to entrepreneurial emperors of capitalism. The writers of the time were often as much part of that movement as the society they wrote about. In hymns and constant new settings of the Psalms, in sentimental music hall, in popular sheet music, in biblically inspired ballads printed in their hundreds and thousands, the Bible was present. The most frequently requested sheet music title was ‘My Mother’s Bible’.
This Bible sowed and reaped much of the culture of the first centuries of Anglo-America. The writers affirmed all of that in their scriptures of poetry and fiction.
‘Call me Ishmael.’ This, it could be argued, is the most dramatic opening remark in fiction. He is named Ishmael after the son born to Abraham and the slave girl Hagar who is exiled by Abraham’s wife Sarah after she herself gave birth. Every reader of Moby-Dick would be expected to know who Ishmael was. Herman Melville’s epic adventure is open to the double and entwined interpretation as a re-telling of the Old Testament story of the Ark and the pursuit of evil by good men; and also the key myth of this new country’s view of itself – forever pushing on, ceaselessly seeking Canaan, finding the promised land, and when that ran out, on still to conquer the ocean and, finally, space itself.
Billy Budd, in my view Melville’s finest work, can be interpreted as a Christ-like figure set on his own path to crucifixion. The story of Christ’s birth, journey and death has engaged writers for centuries and it still does. It has been woven into hundreds of stories, adapted, used, abused, an apparently endless seam for re-imagining. Sometimes this story is used approvingly; sometimes with mockery or criticism.
Melville saw the Bible in another seminal American author, the author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne. ‘Certain it is . . .’ Melville wrote, ‘. . . that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitation, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always wholly free . . . Perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than . . . Hawthorne.’
The Scarlet Letter is taken from the story of David and Bathsheba in the Book of Samuel. And within the novel, Hester and Dimmesdale closely parallel Adam and Eve. There is sin, suffering, expulsion and the awareness of damning Knowledge.
It is sometimes difficult to know whether the writers who so freely ‘use’ the Bible do so for opportunistic or devout reasons. Is the Bible convenient or is it so mythic and full of such spiritual possibilities and unconscious forces that it is a magnet for writers? Are they being ironic as well as re-expressing what is boldly stated as ‘true’ in the Bible?
The words quoted from Melville that most intrigue me are ‘from whose visitation, in some shape or other, no deep thinking mind is always wholly free’. The Bible is seen to provide the ultimate insights into life: by implication it soars above philosophy as an explanation of what obtains in the world. It is not only a prime source of stories and proverbs and moral wisdom, its followers believe that it holds the ultimate, if as yet unprovable key to why we are the way we are.
Its influence stretches from the stern and literary work of Melville and Hawthorne to equally biblically grained books largely unrated by the critics but taken to their hearts by millions. A good example is General Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, in 1880. Wallace received a letter of thanks from the White House, Sears and Roebuck alone printed a million copies, touring dramas took it to the stage, chariots, horses and all, and the twentieth century dug two blockbuster films out of it.
It was simplistic and bombastic and sentimental but it told part of the Christian story with verve and excitement and for that it was loved. This book/film/drama and others like it have been accused of being vulgar – and so they are, if by ‘vulgar’ we mean tailored to mass appeal, even a lowest common denominator. But there is plenty of appeal to the lowest common denominator in the New Testament. And there is no evidence that the non-vulgar are, morally, any ‘better’ than their so-called ‘inferiors’. Ben Hur is not Hawthorne nor is it Melville nor can it ever be given the intense and layered respect or interest of those two classic authors. But it had its impact; it rode the Bible and it shows us how ready so many are to be as seduced by biblical fiction as they are by the Gospels themselves.
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize winner, is ambivalent and ironic about the biblical stories he uses. Absalom, Absalom! is based on the story of Absalom, son of King David. Absalom murders his half-brother in order to seduce his sister Tamar. As well as this dramatic context, critics have pointed out that the book is packed with biblical references, from Adam and Eve to David and Goliath to a mirroring of the Creation story. Faulkner’s prose, which could sometimes be said to play off the King James Version like jazz, is, I think, a clinching factor in the appropriation of the Bible stories. A Fable, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying – these and others of his books take off from biblical drama. Faulkner needed this to unlock the contemporary drama he described.
The King James Version united American and British writers, underpinning a wide and often rather unexpected cast of writers. ‘From earliest years, right into manhood,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘like any other nonconformist child, I had the bible poured every day into my helpless consciousness, till there came almost a saturation point. Long before one could think or even vaguely understand, this bible language, these “portions” of the Bible were douched over the mind and consciousness till they became soaked in, they became an influence which affected all the processes of emotion and thought.’ This is a perfect description of the experience of hundreds of thousands educated in Christian schools over the last 150 years.
Lawrence, perhaps more than any writer since John Bunyan, had the Bible under his skin. But whereas Bunyan had devoted himself to it and walked in its path, Lawrence was forever attacking and tearing it down. He could not let it alone. He mocked the stories, he dismissed God, he assailed the morality of Christ, he played games with it, he was apocalyptic and sometimes he was tender with it. Perhaps he wrote more truly than he knew when he wrote that it had ‘soaked in’.
The power of some of his prose, as in the long opening passage of The Rainbow, is spellbound by rhythms which are extracted from the best of Tyndale. And not only the rhythms. The sense of a life of devotion and worship. Even though the devotion and worship is to the land and to work it carries, to me, echoes of and achings for the fraternity of the Chosen. Yet there is also a paganism there, a note which may show the influence of Nietzsche and the anti-Christian thinkers to whom he gave head room. Lawrence confessed that one of the ‘real joys of middle age’ was ‘coming back to the bible’ and putting it back into ‘its living connexions . . . as a book of the human race instead of a corked-up bottle of “inspiration” ’. And there was certainly throughout Lawrence a sense of the sacredness of life and the holiness of all living things which must find its roots in the anointing with words to which the boy Lawrence was subjected so persistently in the black pit village set inside the glorious Edenic countryside which was his escape.
The following comes from the opening chapter of The Rainbow, with a vision which, without the King James Version, would not have been possible:So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity. Working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money. Neither were they thriftless. They were aware of the last halfpenny, and instinct made them not waste the peeling of their apple, for it would help to feed the cattle. But leaves and earth were teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in the spring, they knew the wave that cannot halt, but every year thrusts forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves a young-born on the earth. They knew the entrance between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and the bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the bird’s nest no longer worth hiding. Their life and
inter-relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away . . .
And on Lawrence would go until the end of his brief life. Almost at the very end he wrote about the nonconformist preachers in the coal-mining chapels of his childhood, of their possession by the Lord, their joy in the Book of Revelation, their use of the language of the Bible to explain and to rant and rail, for power and for pity.
It is argued that the power of the King James Version was broken, like much else, as a result of the First World War, and certainly there was a sea change. Yet the pulse of its language and the incantation of a seductive mystery still moved in the poetry. Alfred Noyes wrote, drawing on the Book of Revelation:When the great reveille sounds
For the terrible last Sabbath,
All the legions of the dead shall hear the trumpet ring!
David Jones, with Isaac Rosenberg the greatest of the First World War poets, in his magnificent book In Parenthesis based on his own experiences in the war, writes simply how:The official service was held in the field: there they had spread a Union Jack on piled biscuit tins, behind the 8 in siege, whose regular discharges made it inaudible, the careful artistry of the prayers he read.
He preached from Matthew text, of how He cares for us above the sparrows. The medical officer undid, and did up again, the fastener of his left glove behind his back, throughout the whole discourse. They sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ for the closing hymn.
Between 1914 and 1918 it’s been calculated that about ‘40 million religious tracts, prayer books, bibles and hymn books were distributed to British servicemen’. There were many stories of Bibles in breast pockets stopping bullets as in the Civil War. Despite the carnage and the powerful sense of an uncaring or indifferent or a cruel God, the Bible stayed in the front line. Edmund Blunden, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen are just some of the poets using, raiding the Bible for stories to help illustrate what they saw and felt, to give undercurrents of religion – whether supportive or critical.
The Bible was used to notably subversive effect in the Wilfred Owen poem based on Abraham and Isaac (Genesis xxii, 1 – 18):So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparation, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
It might have been thought that after the carnage of the First World War and the evil of the Second World War, writers might quit the Bible. Its transcendental promises and its Psalms and proverbs could seem to be redundant. Yet out of the slaughter in Flanders, the mass deaths and the Holocaust, came not only questionings and angry disavowals, but still the Bible was used as an affirmation. John Steinbeck is a prime example.
I read John Steinbeck in my early teens. I think I began with Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men – books which could not then be read often enough. I was coming towards the end of a childhood and adolescence of intense Christianity, soaked in guilt, but also alert to a goodness in life that surely ought to win through. The Grapes of Wrath, the novel that clinched Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize, all but hypnotised me. It revealed, in imagination, both characters and a situation with which I could totally identify. It also, I realised then, carried a Christian socialism which brought grave charges against the operating powers in society.
The title is taken from ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’:Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
But there is a deeper reference – to the Book of Revelation:Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. And the Angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God . . .
There is a direct reference to this at the end of chapter 25 as the poor, flailing to cross the dust bowl of America, begin to starve.
And in the eyes of the hungry there’s a growing wrath. In the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
J. Paul Hunter has published a detailed analysis of The Grapes of Wrath in relation to the Bible. The connections are numerous. They demonstrate that Steinbeck believed in the biblical stories as an effective and profound enabler of his fiction. He believed they would give his own story a far wider resonance. He must have thought also that some of his readers would recognise the references and be moved on a different level to that obtained by non-religious, non-spiritual fiction.
Hunter points out that the novel is in three parts, like the Exodus account of Israel: Captivity, Journey, the Promised Land. The Joad family is yoked to that of the Hebrews – to the degree that there are twelve of them (the twelve tribes of Israel) embarked on a truck (their Ark) for the journey across the wastelands. ‘The rest swarmed up on top of the load, Connie and Rose of Sharon, Pa and Uncle John, Ruthie and Winfield, Tom and the preacher. Noah stood on the ground looking up at the great load of them sitting on top of the truck.’ There are allusions to Lot’s wife (Grandpa’s character), to Ananias and Moses, and to Jim Casey as a Christ figure.
In his novel East of Eden, there are even more parallels. The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis is the key: ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the East of Eden.’ The correspondences between Cain and Abel and Steinbeck’s Caleb and Aaron are undisguised and numerous.
One of the bold and moving characteristics of these books is that Steinbeck sees the sacred figures of the Old and New Testaments in the life of the poor, often what would be called the ‘white trash’. He sees the divine in the ordinary and in the dispossessed and he has no hesitation in plunging into that association. His Christianity and his socialism both feed his fiction and they are intermingled.
Rather more unexpectedly, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and a work of genius, The Great Gatsby, has been analysed in Christian terms.
Gatsby is seen again and again as a Christ-figure. ‘He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father’s business.’ Much play is made of Gatsby’s wedding with the parable of the wedding feast in the Bible and the lack of guests. The narrator writes of the strangers at Gatsby’s wedding, called in to make up a crowd, people Gatsby did not know. His funeral, too, is, like the death of Christ on the Cross, attended only by two women.
Another Nobel Prize winner, William Golding, was a classicist and something of a pagan, but the Bible infuses what for me are his two strongest books, The Spire and Lord of the Flies.
The Spire is the story of the building of a medieval cathedral. It is based on the construction of Salisbury Cathedral. Golding taught in Salisbury Cathedral School and lived for much of his life within easy driving distance of that tremendous slender spire, such weight and elegance raised on such treacherous ground. Golding takes the business of the building, the technical problems, the ingenuity, the labour, and reinforces it with the primitive faith of his protagonist, who sees it as a sign for God, a miracle in ston
e. If this great mass can be raised on such unsuitable marshland, then God exists. It becomes a test of the power of God and the novel is as passionate about direct prayer and the probability of its being answered as any of the Old Testament prophets.
The title Lord of the Flies is a literal translation of ‘Baal-Zebub’, the old Canaanite god of evil. Though there are no direct connections, Lord of the Flies contains echoes and parallels which come from a Bible which Golding knew well.
The island itself is a Garden of Eden until the fall of the formerly innocent – choirboys in this instance – brings evil into the human equation. There is a ‘snake-thing’, a parallel with the snake that tempted Eve. Simon, the boy who is killed by the other boys, is a representation of Jesus Christ. And Golding’s use of the word ‘beast’ is rooted in the Book of Revelation. Golding ‘uses’ the King James Version to layer his novel, and uses parts of it which are more from the New Testament than the Old. It is still suffi - ciently potent in the mind of this often despairing classicist. He reaches out for it. In that sense it remains a support, even a necessary foundation.
