Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  *

  Oh, what a day! The crowds, the press-reporters, the noise, the dirt – and the questions! I imagine that when expert brain-specialists, endocrinologists and geologists are called-in to give opinions on heads, glands, and substrata they feel the exasperation I feel when I am cross-examined by the defence on my Marxist past and Christian present. What does the layman know about either? Absolutely nothing! ‘Is it true,’ they ask, ‘that you were a Soviet agent in Montreal from 1933 to 1938?’ Of course, it is true: it is all down in black-and-white in my confessions: had I not been an agent then would I be an expert on agents now? ‘Did you not commit perjury on May 4th 1931 in Ecuador?’ they continue – well, of course I did, and well they know it: all they are trying to do is persuade the jury that I am not an honest man. And so they go on, interminably: ‘Did you feel no moral scruples?’ ‘Had you no qualms about incriminating an innocent man?’ – really, if it were not that piety enjoins on one a sympathetic attitude to stupid people, I would like to stand them all against a wall and shoot them. Even those who are on my side – the council for the prosecution, the judge, the police, the detectives, the press-reporters – have so little idea of who I really am that their misrepresentations are enough to make me scream. Willy-nilly, I find myself back in the old vocabulary and saying to myself: ‘Here’s a pretty kettle of bourgeois fish! Is there among them a single man who has any conception whatever of the fire that burns in the heart of the Party member and the monk?’ I catch the eye of the spy against whom I am testifying and we exchange an invisible wink. Brothers under the skin, and how well we know it! I admire the way he stands up to these oafs. A few cleansing years in jail and he will be ripe for the Abbey.

  *

  An ugly atmosphere in the refectory. As it was the day of silence I couldn’t find out why until I got back to my cell and heard it in Morse over my radiator. It seems that yesterday Brother Herbert finished the first draft of a set of confessions in good time to meet the publisher’s deadline (Easter Week). He handed the draft to the Abbot, who, after glancing through it, refused his imprimatur. Why? Nobody knows, but Brother Herbert has been going about with a ghoulish look and won’t eat (hunger-strike?).

  *

  B. Herbert still not eating.

  *

  B. Herbert was not at Mass this morning. I at once looked at Brother Kapotzky, and sure enough he was wearing the tortured expression he assumes when the Abbot has made him execute someone. At Vespers, Herbert’s death from pneumonia was announced, simply and movingly, and the Abbot asked our prayers for the repose of his (Herbert’s) soul. We all fell to.

  *

  The inside story of the Herbert affair turns out to be interesting, but not bizarre. According to Brother Gregory, who is a real Sherlock Holmes in Abbey matters, Herbert was under surveillance throughout Wednesday and Thursday – a precaution the Abbot wisely takes when one of the brothers has had a tiff with him. Apparently, the two brothers who were watching Herbert wondered why he was looking fatter, rather than thinner, in view of his hunger-strike: they concluded that he had concealed the rejected draft of his confessions under his robes. The Abbot ordered it removed: this was done by Brother Nimpy, a clever old servant of God who was a political pickpocket under the Tsar before he became one under the Bolsheviks. Nimpy substituted a brown paper parcel of the same size, and poor Herbert went his way in ignorance. That evening, he was observed flashing his torch from his cell-window; a car drew up and a representative of his publishers came to the foot of the wall, caught the thrown parcel, and sped away. It was too much for the Abbot, who called in Kapotzky at once …

  It is a sad story, really, because this was Herbert’s very first confession, apart from the usual witness-box and Sunday-papers ones, and we all felt he would go a long way. I am dying to know how and why he bungled the draft: he must have made a complete hash of it, otherwise the Abbot would merely have edited it in the usual way. It is all the more mysterious, because Herbert’s contributions to the Encyclopedia had been perfectly ‘in line’ – in fact, he was sometimes rebuked for lagging behind the switches.

  *

  Herbert’s death has been an irritant. Everybody is going about with a soul-searching look – as if all their confessions had come to nought and would have to be written again. I am not surprised: I share the feeling. Nobody thinks of Herbert as a martyr, but they do feel that he tried to steal a march on the rest of us. Obviously, he confessed things which are not properly confessed, with the result that he leaves the rest of us wondering what they could be and whether any of them might be usable by ourselves. Surely it was enough that he should make us feel small by having pushed ahead, without getting himself killed for it and exciting a spirit of competition in the living?

  *

  The Abbot preached yesterday (Sunday) about obedience. He showed (you know the argument, I’m sure) that he who is most obedient is most free, in the true sense of the word free, and that he who most respects authority is the least subject to it. He added with a dry smile: ‘I hope you will not apply this logic to the wrong things. It does not follow, for example, that he who is most unselfish is the most selfish, or that he who is the most upright is the most cast-down. Or rather, it does, depending on how you twist the words about and whether you take them at their face-value or use them so that they mean the opposite of what they suggest. Your spiritual authority – myself – will always be at hand to tell you how far logic may be pressed, and at what point a word, under the leverage of faith, begins to mean its opposite. In a recent case, I am sorry to say, this authority was not respected and a fatal ambiguity resulted. Royalties and fame, let me remind you all, are not everything, and the confession that lies behind the confession should be rendered to God’s vicar, not to Caesar. So, brothers, be content with what you have already confessed and do not be so proud as to think that you alone are in duty bound to go your fellows one better. When the world demands a different sort of confession, I will be the first to inform you of the fact.’

  Everyone feels much easier as a result of these sensible words. What the Abbot is laying his finger on is the fact that once one begins making confessions, the thing tends to become a disease. After I had confessed in the courts, I could hardly wait to write a book confessing the real truth behind the mere court one. A bare six months after my book was out – and reviewers everywhere applauding the way I had bared myself utterly – I began to have the feeling that I had said nothing at all about what really mattered. I sat down and wrote a kind of ‘private’ confession (it was later published) that sought to go behind its predecessor. Within a year, that, too, struck me as meaningless – indeed, I began to feel that far from stripping myself really naked, each confession only covered me with still another petticoat. I felt terribly at odds with the world: once I had a ridiculous dream in which a night-club audience cried: ‘Take it off!’ and applauded madly each time I put on another rope of pearls. I began to think of confessions in terms of infinite regression – the very act of making one would cause another to pop up behind it. I even began to suspect that the really true confession would not be about my crimes, etc., but about why I was so eager to write confessions.

  It was the Abbot who saved me from madness by convincing me that though the object of confession is to tell the truth, only the proud man attempts to decide for himself what the truth is. If all of us, he explained, insisted on being free-lances in truth-telling, the whole edifice of confession, as it exists today, would fall to the ground, leaving the public with nothing to read but detective-stories. We ex-Party men are the examples which the man-in-the-street follows today: it is not for us to deny him salvation in the name of truth.

  What would I consider true about my life if I were so proud as to disobey the Abbot and my conscience? Would I ever find a real, final confession underlying all the others? This is hard to answer, because the first thing that strikes me about myself (it is one of the main reasons why I have become a monk) is that I have never in my l
ife been able to know when I am telling a lie and when I am telling the truth. On all matters of fact I am perfectly honest: I can state dates, acts of treason, Party-meetings, executions, etc., with absolute veracity. But once I start confessing the why-and-wherefore of my behaviour (as one is expected to do in a book), I become so entertained by the personal drama of it all that everything I put down has a wonderful ring of truth: I feel myself growing from a particular person into a universal design – much as a musician might set out persistently to play the recorder and find himself always in the organ-loft. It is the notes that get the better of me: they have such a heavenly sound that I cannot think them false. When I read St Augustine’s Confessions, I know that he is telling the truth; and that there is a great difference.

  I don’t want to start writing another confession, but if ever the Abbot’s line changes, in response to public needs, I think I would begin by saying that where I differ from St Augustine is that he confesses to smallness whereas I only confess to sins that increase my bulk. I don’t think I could bear to make myself look ridiculous, to confess to having been swayed by petty motives which no organ could amplify into grandeur. I simply have to make the crime fit the confession: it would kill me, I think, to cease to identify myself with a vast historical event and admit that my career resulted from carrying to an extreme the pettiest conceits of the most ordinary man.

  Well, I have said it, and I am still alive! The next question then is: for what petty reason did I become a Communist agent? The Abbey line on this is that I was a tortured soul who was carried away by idealism: I have confessed to this repeatedly, but I regret to say that it is totally untrue. I came in contact with Communism soon after I first joined a trade-union – and the only reason why I joined a union was because I had exhausted all other means of drawing my parents’ attentions to me. I interested myself in Communism only when I noticed that the Communists in my union had advanced a shocking step further. To this day I am able to relive the thrill that went through me when first I sensed the apartness of these men – their feigned nonchalance, the friendly smile with which they embarrassed normal people, the impression they gave of being the only members of our happy family who knew what skeletons were in the cupboards. I had no sooner become aware of them than I was filled with the conviction that I, too, could look and walk like them – just as, later, when I stumbled on the saints I had no difficulty in adjusting my stride.

  I would like to interject here a warning to parents. None of you, I am sure, wants to see your son become first a secret agent of Materialism and then a public-relations agent of the Incomprehensible. Well, you can prevent this from happening if you will only hold your tongue and stop bragging about the little chap. Whenever I felt lazy or vapid and put on a moon-face, my father always bellowed at the top of his voice: ‘Just look at him! With the other children you always know where you are, but you never know what’s at the back of his mind!’ It had not occurred to me before that I had a back to my mind, but once this area had been brought to my attention as the place where admiration is found, I took a life-lease of the premises. When my parents said: ‘Well, boys, we have a surprise today: we are going to take you to the circus,’ I never turned a hair. While my brothers catcalled and hurrahed, I sat with a pudding-face, looking, if anything, more depressed than pleased. My father was enthralled. ‘Just look at the little b—!’ he would shriek, ‘not a squeak out of him! I wonder what’s going on inside – at the back? My mother would tousle my hair and murmur fondly: ‘A mother always knows. He’s more thrilled than all the rest of them put together – that’s why he’s so quiet.’ I would reward her with a coy, inscrutable smile, leave the table, and retire to a position in the garden which was just visible from the dining-room window. There I would stand staring at nothing, until I glimpsed the corner of my father’s nose against the edge of the pane and heard his muffled roar: ‘Damn my eyes, what’s the little devil up to now? If this goes on, there’s no saying what he’ll be when he’s older.’

  Oh, my dear parents, I would have loved and honoured you more if you had not forced me to devote the bulk of my childhood to making an unknown quantity. It was you who taught me that mystery commands the greatest respect and that the highest identity is a secret nothing.

  You will see from this that when I grew up and looked for a profession to attach my mystery to, Communism was just what I needed. Far from being, as people suppose, a creature which devours the identity, the Party is exactly the contrary: it is the most special thing in the world. Everyday life is killing to the identity; Party membership is so thrillingly individual that its rules and rigidities seem merely to be a frame for the self-portrait which one has painted for so long. Who would say billiards was unindividual because it is played on a walled table? Moreover, the Party supplies the thrill of discovering that the game becomes more and more individualistic the further one gets into it: the players become more and more select, the table is set up in a more and more remote room; the face of the scorer grows increasingly grave: one leaves everything that can be described as average further and further behind. I felt I was entering the intimacy of demi-gods, and it did not take me long to put on the requisite appearance: soon, I could walk into a room with just the right tread, listen to argument with just the right blandness, and make my face suggest that simultaneously everything and nothing was taking place behind it. I also began to swot-up on Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and so on; and I must apologize to the public for having confessed that such reading led me into Communism. The opposite is true. It is only after one has begun to model oneself on selected demi-gods that one asks for the address of their tailor.

  I did all this so well that the Communists in my union soon noticed that I was not an ordinary person. To climb, in any organization, one has to study not the theory on which it is based but the moods of those who put the theory into practice. Today, for instance, I can sense almost immediately the Abbot’s mood-of-the-moment, and when, without warning, his jesting face suddenly turns sour and he intones some smug, pious reprimand, I am never on the receiving end. I have always stopped joking a split second ahead of him. The great art in this, of course, is not to overdo it: the man who anticipates his superiors too consistently gets it where the chicken got the axe. The superior has had to work very hard to become an absolute chameleon, and the wise subordinate does not carry anticipation to the point where it makes the boss look like a mere traffic-light.

  I mention this because people believe (as a result of reading our confessions) that hard work and overriding idealism make one a secret agent. Why, I could name dozens of men with these virtues who never got further than the most ordinary position in the Party and wouldn’t have been entrusted with the secret blue-prints of a button-hook! What’s more, most of them are in prison now, instead of in the Abbey. No, the way to get on is to make the right remark in the presence of the right person, to wear the right face in the right place. It is no different from the way young men get ahead as commercial travellers. The only difference between an insurance agent and a secret agent is that the higher the latter rises, the greater need he has of the former.

  The day came when I was recognized. I mean, that when my superior gave me some boring chore, I knew instinctively that he knew that I was capable of better things, which he would soon call on me to do. Soon, I found myself meeting Party members who were superior to those on whom I had modelled myself. The backs of their minds were set at even greater remove from the fronts, and their poise was so great that they had perfected the thrilling art of turning the whole method back-to-front: that is to say: they often stated quite frankly what was happening at the back, leaving one to wonder whether they kept their secret in the front, or if they had a back behind the back. I was an ambitious youth: it was not long before I regarded my old models as very ordinary, humdrum mortals and went to work on the more subtle design of manifold secret drawers. I made my Marxism more abstruse and less obvious: I relegated almost the whole of my real identity
to regions which even I found it difficult to locate. This is why, as I have said, I never know when I am telling the truth: a confession which seems to come from the heart usually turns out to have been nesting in my head.

  In the presence of these higher equivocators, I occasionally, very humbly, let fall a remark that indicated flights of thought of which my old heroes were quite incapable. My reward came when one of the dignitaries, in my presence, referred to one of these old heroes as ‘a good wheel-horse’. It was my first great test since Pa had thrown the circus at my feet! I remember looking back at the speaker with just the right degree of non-expression on my malleable visage: my look suggested that though I was too intelligent to deny the imputation, I was also too unpromoted to concur in it. When you can do that sort of thing with your face alone, imagine what you can do with the brain behind it!

  I soon reached that select circle of Communism in which everything of importance is relegated to indefinable areas of the mind and the common-or-garden front has only two functions: (1) to deepen the mystery of the back parts by non-committally grunting at the right moment, and (2) to relax the tension of secrecy and mystery by swapping sneers about the stupidity of the average Party member. I was too young then to know that every élite is rooted in mockery of the tier below it: I thought my laughter was part of the very top-laughter. Today, when I know better, it makes me wince to think that in distant Moscow my little élite was considered so contemptible that it was not even worthy of our masters’ jokes. Well, I must confess that we are much the same in our Abbey conversation: we never lack for a joke about the mundane worshippers of this world. Somewhere on high, I don’t doubt, there is a Comintern of archangels to whom our great Abbot seems exceedingly comic. God alone doesn’t join in such laughter, which is why we self-made men always feel comfortable sitting at His feet He alone, I know, will never point a calloused finger at the back of my mind, and shout with a loud guffaw: ‘What’s that for? I never put it there. You made it yourself!’