Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  One naturally associates Ellis with Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, another picturesquely white-bearded pair in whose writings -Leaves of Grass and Towards Democracy -likewise a strong narcissistic strain is discernible. Carpenter (a largely forgotten figure now, I imagine, but in his day a name to conjure with in progressive circles) was, of course, a pioneer homosexual, and Whitman, despite repeated offers in his verses to impregnate all the daughters of America, shared the same tastes, having a fancy at one time for a street-car driver named Pete. I have read a touching account of how Whitman used to ride to and fro on Pete’s street-car, hoping to enjoy a tête-a-tête with him on the way to the depot when there were no other passengers. Another homosexual associate of Ellis’s was John Addington Symonds, with whom he started collaborating on a work on sexual inversion. Symonds died before matters had gone very far, and Ellis, in his account of the project, disparages Symonds’s contribution. One gets a rather different impression from Mrs Grosskurth’s lately published brilliant biography of Symonds -not that it matters much either way.

  However one looks at it, Ellis was by way of being a sexual oddity, and to that extent, one might have supposed, ill-equipped to be a guide, philosopher and friend in this particular field. Yet he, along with Kraft-Ebing and other maestros, prepared the way for - in Alan Hull Walton’s words - ’undoubted giants’ like Freud and Kinsey, and the so-called Sexual Revolution of our time. His Studies in the Psychology of Sex has been, and for all I know still may be, highly regarded; I well remember as a smutty adolescent scouring its footnotes for juvenile erotica, and seeing it displayed, along with treatises in a like vein, in what used to be known as ‘rubber shops’. In a sense, indeed, he emerges from the pages of My Life as a true prophet, embodying, as he did, the narcissism, the self-love tapering off into impotence, of the sex-obsessed times which lay ahead.

  12

  Eight Books

  Most people would tremble at the idea of being portrayed to the world by a former mistress. An ex-wife might be sour, but, up to a point at any rate, is in the same boat as her husband. After all, she married the man, and actually bore, or was presumed ready to bear, children by him. An ex-mistress, on the other hand, has nothing to lose, and, in the great majority of cases, the punishment of real or imagined wrongs to gain. Estranged lovers, alas, rarely have much regard for one another, and often an infinity of malice.

  Pablo Picasso, in any case, has suffered this fate. Mlle. Françoise Gilot lived with him for nearly a decade, bore him two children, and has now written what I found a quite enthralling account of their life together (Life with Picasso, by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake). Her American collaborator is described on the dust jacket as Paris Art Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor; a truly bizarre role in life which I find difficulty in envisaging. The verisimilitude of the book has been challenged, I know, by critics in a far better position than I to judge. It has been suggested that Mlle. Gilot affects to have remembered a great deal of Picasso’s direct speech, and that the words she puts in his mouth distort, or do not represent at all, views he is known to hold. Nonetheless, greatly daring, I venture to say that Mlle. Gilot’s general account of the kind of man Picasso is in old age, and of how he is liable to expound his work, strikes me as authentic.

  She first met Picasso in Paris in May, 1943, when she was a young artist. The Nazi occupation was still in full swing, and the outcome of the war still in doubt. Though known to be an ardent anti-Franco Spaniard, an advocate and leading exponent of, in Nazi eyes, ‘degenerate’ art, and an extreme Leftist (though not then, I think, a Communist Party member), Picasso seems to have suffered no serious molestation, or even inconvenience, at the hands of the occupation authorities. He was even able to have his studio heated - a rare privilege in those days - and just went on painting his pictures, meeting his friends (some of whom, like Malraux, were living in clandestinity), and altogether leading a more or less normal existence without reference to the war and consequent upheavals. Picasso himself, apparently, had no personal inclination to throw in his lot with the maquis or otherwise participate in anti-Nazi activities.

  Mlle. Gilot only gradually became aware that Picasso’s interest in her extended beyond her painting. There was, after all, a disparity of some forty years. When she did realise that his intentions were amorous, and what her parents at any rate would have considered dishonourable, she responded in a curious manner; not warmly, one way or the other, but meekly. She was ready to yield, offering no serious resistance and, equally, manifesting no serious passion. This threw Picasso. One can easily see why. To the old particularly, and to an old ram like Picasso more particularly still, a conquest is only worthwhile if it is achieved with some difficulty, apparent or real. If there is no opposition to overcome, then the haunting and enervating suspicion arises that the favours to be enjoyed are available to everyone, and that they are only accorded because the trouble of withholding them is incommensurate with the trivial inconvenience of yielding. This is deeply distressing and disturbing.

  Picasso hollered like any outraged moralist. What were we coming to when well-brought-up young girls were ready at the drop of a hat to fall in with the advances of an old fellow like himself? Subsequently, of course, they did become lovers. The first decisive step was when Mlle. Gilot allowed herself to be undressed by Picasso, who then stood apart, carefully and deeply studying her nude form. I find this very touching. The one great passion in Picasso’s life is for visual art, to which everything else - even lechery - must take second place. Only when he had looked his fill in preparation for the many studies of Mlle. Gilot that he was going to make with his brush did he venture to touch.

  Mlle. Gilot was induced to move into Picasso’s studio, and thenceforth was rather at his mercy, though by and large she appears to have succeeded in holding her own. They had all the usual quarrels and estrangements which such a relationship involves, and in the end separated, as was inevitable. What we have to be grateful for is the wonderfully clear, perceptive picture of Picasso which the experience of living with him has enabled Mlle. Gilot to provide. A picture of a superstitious, parsimonious, whimsical, maddeningly mischievous and unaccountable gnome of a man, gifted with that inexhaustible fount of vitality which is the necessary and invariable accompaniment of genius. Some of the anecdotes are superb. I like particularly the account of a visit to a bullfight, and the truly hilarious attempt to get invited to luncheon with Braque.

  To one reader at any rate, far from denigrating Picasso, Mlle. Gilot for the first time makes him human, comprehensible and even admirable. The boring, unconvincing hero of abstract painting, the equally unconvincing saint and sage of mid-twentieth-century communism, becomes an inspired and intrepid joker who will send an art dealer to London to buy him a hat; who gleefully enjoys the spectacle of the prime targets of his grotesques paying out vast sums for them; and who has a clear, ironical awareness of the artistic cul-de-sac in which he finds himself. Mlle. Gilot describes Picasso working away at the Musée d’Antibes; a place I have visited several times, grieving over the decay, as it seemed to me, of a great talent there manifest. I shall grieve no longer. Thanks to Mlle. Gilot, henceforth I shall see the later Picasso as monkeyish rather than senile, a gargoyle rather than an abyss.

  ‘The thing that’s wrong with modern art,’Mlle. Gilot quotes him as saying, ’and we might as well say it - it’s dying - is the fact that there isn’t any longer a strong, powerful academic art worth fighting against. There has to be a rule even if it’s a bad one because the evidence of art’s power is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with obstacles - that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shapeless, meaningless -zero.’ He said it, and he ought to know.

  Edmund Wilson’s expanded version of his The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, published in 1955 (The Dead Sea Scrolls, 19471969) is, as usual, a pleasure to read. Other writers on this fascinating subject may,
for all I know, be more expert and learned than he, but none whose work I have looked at come anywhere near equalling him in clarity and ease of narrative and exposition. The non-scientific and unlearned like myself suffer acutely from the atrocious prose in which sociologists, anthropologists and other such write. What a joy, then, to have Mr Wilson for a guide in a field that all to easily lends itself to pedantry and obscurity!

  The story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is now, I should suppose, sufficiently well known. How some Arab boys playing in a cave near the Dead Sea came upon some pots which seemed unusual enough for them to take away and offer for sale. How after much coming and going, complicated by the breaking out of one of the recurrent Arab-Israel wars, it was discovered that these pots contained fragments of manuscripts which once constituted the library of a community of ascetics in that neighbourhood at the time of Christ, probably known as Essenes, though not so described in the manuscripts themselves. How in due course scholars were able to piece the manuscripts together, finding therein texts of the Hebrew scriptures and Psalms, as well as a detailed and exact account of the communities rule and way of life.

  As it happens, some eighteen months ago I saw the place where this momentous discovery was made, and was awed by the sight of some of the manuscripts so brilliantly displayed in the Shrine of the Book near the Hebrew University. I also spent some time listening to Professor David Flusser’s tempestuous outpouring of words, just as Mr Wilson describes it, and had the privilege of being taken round the relevant sites by Père Benoit, director of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, where so much work on the Scrolls - notably by Père de Vaux - has been done. Thus for me Mr Wilson’s book had a particular interest and gave particular delight.

  An essential element in the doctrine of the Dead Sea community is the notion of there being two opposing ways - a way of Darkness and a Way of Light, Darkness being Falsehood and Light Truth. The Messiah, or teacher of Righteousness, belongs to the Way of light which leads to salvation; the Demon, more frequently called Belial or Beliar, belongs to the Way of Darkness which leads to torment. A Last Judgement is foretold when the Messiah divides the world, and His people, the Elect, are saved and the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of their enemies avenged. Until this happens they must keep themselves holy by means of sacred repasts presided over by a priest and by purification through baptism. In the course of describing all this, Mr Wilson points out, there are three references to ‘living water’ which recall the conversation recorded in the Gospels between Jesus and the woman of Samaria at the well when He speaks of the ‘spring of water welling up to eternal life .’The concept of water as an image of spiritual regeneration is of course expressed in the practice of Christian baptism; Mr Wilson quotes a remarkable passage from the Dead Sea community’s Manual of Discipline which expresses the same concept: ’sprinkling upon him a Spirit of truth as purifying water to cleanse him from all untrue abominations and from wallowing in the spirit of impurity, so as to give the upright insight into the knowledge of the Most High and into the wisdom of the sons of Heaven, to give the perfect way of understanding.’

  Such similarities between the Scrolls and the New Testament have been taken as implying that Jesus was strongly influenced by this Dead Sea community flourishing in his time, though there is no reference to it in the Gospel, nor to him in the Scrolls. It has even been suggested that John the Baptist, and perhaps Jesus Himself, may have been for a while members of the community. In John the Baptist’s case this is possible but unlikely; in Jesus’ case highly improbable. Even if it were so, I cannot myself see that it would make any essential difference to the validity of Jesus’ life and teaching, or to the Christian hope of salvation that He lived and died to proclaim.

  The historicity of the Gospels, as it seems to me, is something quite distinct from their truth. As myths might be true, and as history false. This is a proposition that many Christians, and not only fundamentalists, would find highly distasteful. These look with some apprehension at the unfolding testimony of the Scrolls, and dread, I dare say, that discoveries may be made casting doubt on essential incidents like the Resurrection or Jesus’ miraculous birth. They might even be troubled by the knockabout turns of Dr. John Allegro of Manchester University, one of the experts engaged in unravelling the Scrolls, who, as Mr Wilson shows, has been responsible for some of the wilder claims on their behalf - as that ‘the names of Jesus and all the Apostles, including Judas, are disguises for the titles of Essene officials, and that...the members of the Sect were ‘diviners’ as well as healers and the Gospels a ‘handbook of witchcraft.’’ Mr Wilson rightly compares such outlandish fancies with the search for hidden ciphers in Shakespeare’s plays. Dr Allegro’s latest suggestion, it seems, is that it is possible to trace the roots of Christianity to ‘a phallic, drug-taking mystery cult,’ and the prophets were on LSD ‘or something very like it. They had visions, they were on a trip.’

  Such wild suggestions are only, it seems to me, carrying to its reducto ad absurdom the search for historical truth in the Gospels. In fact, Jesus was as far beyond history as truth is beyond knowledge. One may forage about in history indefinitely, always discovering new slants and re-evaluating the great figures of the past. For everything in time, the perspective changes; we see yesterday differently in the light of today, and then, when today has become yesterday, it, too, is seen differently. All in time is shifting; there can be no fixed history. Reputations rise and fall, the pattern is broken and then reformed. If Jesus is taken into history, then He must partake of this shifting quality of time, and the Christian faith becomes not everlasting truth, but another ideology, seen thus at such a time and thus at another, valid perhaps yesterday, but invalid today and forgotten tomorrow.

  Where, then, I ask myself, does the truth of Jesus and his message lie if not in history? One may glimpse the answer in art and literature, which, however insecurely, exists beyond time as history does not. Thus Shakespeare’s Caesar is more like Caesar than Caesar was, and the vision of a Blake reaches into regions which no astronaut will ever explore. We today are imprisoned in history as few generations, if any, have ever been because we only believe in the dimensions of time and the certainty of fact. We have science and no art, sociology and no literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and no Gospel, Jesus and no Christ.

  ***

  In the crack up of a civilisation, as of an individual, there is inevitably a strong element of masquerade. The drunk in the old Punch drawings puts on his wife’s hat, or shakes hand with a lamppost. In the same sort of way, our Western societies lurch and reel toward dissolution to the accompaniment of Marx Brothers-type farce, provided, to a great extent, by the so-called kids, or students. (I say ‘so called’ because, more often than not, the leading role is taken by figures well into their thirties whose student days, if they ever had any, are well behind them.) A favourite scene for such macabre frolics is a court of law, and of course, the media, especially television, ensure the widest possible diffusion. Thus, for instance, the recent proceedings in Chicago against the alleged inciters of the disturbances there at the time of the Democratic Convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey, have had an exceptionally high rating, and their possibilities in the way of public entertainment are by no means yet exhausted.

  In this particular case, Judge Julius Hoffman put on as good a funny turn as any of the eight defendants, but for my money the most side-splitting element of all in such affairs is not so much the actual performers as the totally solemn commentator who purports to see in the harlequinade the working out of some tremendous sociological or historical destiny, the superior fall guy who finds, as it were, a King Lear theme in the preposterous clowning of the mechanicals in Midsummer Nights Dream. Here, a high place in the straw-in the-hair stakes must be awarded to Jason Epstein, (The Great Conspiracy Trial) a scion of the House of Random and a pillar of The New York Review of Books, both citadels of Radical Chic. (I thank thee Tom Wolfe for teach
ing me that phrase!) Though no kid himself, Epstein describes the ribald Chicago proceedings with a portentousness, a concentration of moral indignation, which Gladstone might have envied when he denounced the Bulgarian atrocities, or William Jennings Bryan when he expatiated upon the appalling consequences of teaching the theory of evolution in Tennessee.

  On this side of the Atlantic we have, as a matter of fact, been to some extent conditioned for the Epstein treatment by a massive televised dramatisation of the trial in question by the BBC - itself a great engine of righteousness in such matters. At the same time, thanks to a visit by one of the defendants - Jerry Rubin - and his appearance along with some of his entourage, on the English version of The David Frost Show, we have been able to see at first hand something of the routines which brought the house down again and again in Chicago. These consisted, for the most part, of shouting obscenities, squirting a water pistol, smoking pot and calling Frost a plastic man -this last point, as I thought, though true enough, somewhat scurvily put, in that it was Frost’s plasticity which got Rubin and his mates onto the show at all. In Chicago, with Judge Hoffman for Frost, it required a whole plastic legal system to procure exposure for him.

  How far the happening was unforeseen, as Frost claimed, is open to doubt, especially as a second studio proved to be miraculously available and in working order when the Rubin gang’s antics had got out of hand.

  In any case, their turbulent behaviour could have been anticipated by anyone who has read Rubin’s own offering (Do It!) in which he explains just how important television is to a kid revolutionary. Let me add that DO IT! is as refreshing a change after The Great Conspiracy Trial as an encounter with the Artful Dodger after an evening with Mr Podsnap.