Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  All funeral-related wounds healed and my sister and brothers and I speak to each other frequently and with affection. For all my faults, they are my allies in all matters and I am theirs. We live different lives in different parts of the world but share an identically sardonic sense of humour. In part this is inherited from our mother, who despised hypocrisy and affectation and found the desire for respectability hilarious. And if there is something sad in our assumption that people don’t lead the lives they pretend to, it is also true that we tend to be more tolerant and forgiving than those who have suffered less.

  After a while, the plant above my mother’s ashes, a lilac tree, withered and died. Some people say it died the day my father remarried, but I am not a superstitious man and don’t believe it. A new plant was put in and she’s still down there, her ashes filtered ever deeper by rain—not her, you understand, the shell not the egg—no, she’s gone, not here, departed. And seven years after her death, I still miss her. Extraordinarily so. I thought I’d get over this, but no. I miss her letters, written at such cost in her deceptively clear and optimistic hand. I miss watching her demolish pomposity and affectation with a single lazy flick of her sardonic tongue. I miss her anecdotes, and most of all, I miss the comedy which can only be fully appreciated by someone who has known you since birth.

  ‘This boy is allergic to life.’

  We all failed her completely. She was a woman with a disease and none of us could force her to a doctor. Intolerably stubborn and self-destructive as she was, at least once a week, I think, ‘I wish she was here so I could tell her about …’ Then, in spite of my beliefs or lack of them, I say, ‘Still thinking of you, Mama, and all is forgiven.’ Because all is forgiven. After all, if I can’t forgive her, how can my child forgive me for whatever my sins are?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Saint Matthew’s Epilogue

  When I got back to New York, I called Carter Johnson, the pastor, to ask him some further questions about Calvinism.

  ‘No, let me ask you a question,’ he interrupted in a suspicious tone. ‘Who are you? Meaning: there is no Matthew Chapman in New York.’

  I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He said, ‘Matthew, I’ve looked you up on the internet, can’t get an e-mail address, can’t get a Matthew Chapman in the phone book. Are you actually Matthew Chapman?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, the reason I ask is that I tried to look you up—you can look up almost anybody via the internet—and I couldn’t find a Matthew Chapman in New York at all. I had the address, did a search. Nothing. Nothing.’

  Here was an odd twist: a man who believed in God, but not in Matthew Chapman.

  When I first went down to Dayton, I was stretched to the limit. When I missed the re-enactment a month later, something snapped. Contrary to what Pastor Johnson believed, I still existed, but my journey, begun almost as a lark, had changed me. The Matthew Chapman who went south in June was not the same Matthew Chapman who returned in July.

  I came to understand, not just intellectually but emotionally, that faith is often all that holds a person together. When I think about my mother, I must conclude that had she been a believer, had she been in the habit of faith rather than cynicism, she might easily have stopped drinking and lived a happier life. Considering faith’s poignant causes rather than the often irritating details of its consequences, I began to see just how cruel my attack on Denise’s faith had been.

  There was a period in our marriage when we almost broke up because of our philosophical differences. Tennessee made me look at her faith with kinder eyes and at my lack of it with more suspicion. Was it an accident, I began to ask myself, that I, a sceptic and an atheist, married Denise, a woman of a thousand faiths? Could it be that I unconsciously hope that even though I have no faith, I can benefit from hers? A friend of mine says, as a comment on our different characters, that if you flush the toilet at one end of our house it flushes clockwise, while if you flush it at the other, it flushes counter-clockwise. I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think Denise has so much more certainty than I do that while her toilet flushes clockwise, mine just splashes around and doesn’t flush at all.

  After thirteen years, our religious views remain in conflict, but our experience of life begins to merge. As individuals we are the same; as a couple we have become something else, an unlikely amalgam, the best product of which is Anna Bella, our daughter, half Brazilian, half English, and totally American—half Denise, half me, and wholly herself. Denise and I have survived poverty, wealth, success, failure, a near plane crash in Brazil, the murder of her sister, riots, earthquakes, the last years and death of my mother, and perhaps most remarkably, our violent arguments. As I seem to need her in my life to apply the plunger of her conviction to the turbulence of my uncertainty, I am learning how to keep my mouth shut.

  Looking at my life objectively, I can see there is some nobility in it. I work hard to provide my daughter with everything she might need to fight her way into an interesting and relevant life; against the odds, I have written some beautiful scripts, two or three of which might yet get made; and I do my best to be kind and fair to everyone I meet. If you put who I am and what I do on a scale, the good would far outweigh the bad.

  But still something is missing.

  ‘That life is worth living,’ wrote the philosopher George Santayana, ‘is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.’ For twenty-five years I have worked for myself. During this time no one has told me when to wake up or when to go to bed, nor how many hours to work in between. I have invented a set of rituals by which I trick myself into a state of calm productivity. But I have not learned how to trick myself into a state of philosophical calm. In a letter Laurie writes me after I have returned to Manhattan, she describes how faith gives her ‘peace of mind not dependent on external circumstances,’ and ‘a quiet, deep certainty.’

  I came back from Dayton with even less certainty than I had when I went. As much as I was touched and inspired by Laurie, the preachers, whose faith seemed fanatical in its conviction, cruel in its form, and useless in its effect, ultimately disgusted me. If I went down an atheist, I came back an agnostic, refusing to share with these men the arrogance of any conviction in a matter so clearly unproveable either way.

  In his autobiography, Darwin, who also called himself an agnostic, wrote that the magnificence of the universe almost forces one to conclude that God exists. However, he continued, ‘can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?’ He goes on to say that the problem is further compounded by ‘the probability that the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children has produced so strong and perhaps inherited effect on their brains, that it may now be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.’

  For this monkey at least, he’s right. There is a saying in Brazil, ‘I do not believe in witches—but that they exist is beyond question.’ With this in mind, I often find myself talking to my dead mother, sometimes out loud, and imagining her in a place where she has at last found happiness. The comforting, childlike belief in the existence of an afterlife obviously suggests a similar belief in the existence of God. Intellectually, however, as an adult, I have no faith in either.

  I am made happy, even ecstatic at times, by my wife and daughter, by love in all its forms, by the beauty of nature, by a witty remark, or by art, but I have no unifying theory to relieve a persistent, though not chronic, philosophical pessimism. That anything exists for any eternal purpose seems to me unlikely. I do not walk around all day brooding about this, but when I am facing a crisis, I see that believers have access to a cosmic tranquilliser which I do not.

  I am aware that it would be more pleasant to have faith, but what can I do? Should I force myself
—for therapeutic reasons—to believe in something which at best seems charming but unlikely, and at worst seems dangerous and absurd?

  To quote Santayana again, ‘Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it’s shameful to surrender it too soon.’ I am too proud to abandon my agnosticism for organised religion or—almost worse—disorganised religion, that laughable stew of whimsical superstitions that constitutes the so-called New Age. I have a craving for a larger meaning, but refuse to satisfy this spiritual hunger with theological junk.

  But I’ve been wondering of late if my intellectual chastity must ipso facto deny me the peace that everyone else obtains through surrendering their reason? Must the sceptical virgin starve out in the cold while the whores gorge themselves at the fires of belief? Is it possible for rationality to somehow provide the comforts of faith? All that is missing (all!) is something neither ridiculous nor vicious, which, like an awe-inspiring bridge, starts before birth and ends after death. What is missing, I suppose, is the sensation of God.

  When I was an aspiring saint I worshipped a God who, though infinitely vast and powerful, was capable of the most intimate compassion. I was part of a family—God, the father, Mary, the virgin mother, and brother Jesus with his cousin-like disciples—and the fantastic rituals celebrating these relatives inspired a feeling of profound inclusion in divinity.

  What an art Christianity is! The music, the paintings, the poetry. On Christmas Eve, my mother would turn on the radio as a carol service was broadcast live from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. I was usually too busy running around in a hysteria of materialistic anticipation to savour anything as elevated as this, but on one occasion during my religious phase, I lay down next to her on the sofa as she listened, glass in hand, to ‘Silent Night’ sung by a solitary boy whose voice had not yet broken. I closed my eyes and saw feathered angels gathered around a God resembling Da Vinci, who smiled down at us from the dark sky above.

  I have never felt so magnificently safe since then, nor so happy, and I probably never will; but I do not intend to give up trying. Sometime soon I’m going to see what happens if I satisfy the demands of my third circle of responsibility: a trip to Africa when I can find the time.

  On the morning when the doctor informed my mother and me that I was ‘allergic to life,’ we emerged from his office in shock. She held my scabby little hand in hers but said nothing as we walked away down a long corridor in the hospital where she would later die. After a while, I turned and looked up at her. She moved her head irritably.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Allergic to life. Abso-luuutely ridiculous.’

  She started walking faster so I was forced to trot at her side. When I next raised my head to study her, she was smiling.

  ‘Allergic to life!’ she exclaimed dismissively. ‘You’re no more allergic to life than I am,’ and we pushed through the big doors and walked out into a cold bright day, laughing.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The Herald-News, Dayton. Various issues, 1998/9.

  Barlow, Nora (ed.). The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (W. W. Norton & Company, 1958).

  Bowlby, John. Charles Darwin: A New Biography (Hutchinson, 1990).

  Broyles, Bettye J. (comp.). History of Rhea County, Tennessee (Rhea County Historical and Genealogical Society, 1991).

  Cherny, Robert W. A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Little, Brown, 1985).

  Cornelius, R. M. (ed.). Selected Orations of William Jennings Bryan—The Cross of Gold Centennial Edition (Bryan College, 1996).

  Darrow, Clarence. The Story of My Life (Da Capo Press, 1932).

  Desmond, Adrian and Moore, James. Darwin (Penguin, 1991).

  Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods (Basic Books, 1997).

  Levine, Laurence W. Defender of the Faith (Oxford University Press) (The Last Decade—1915–1925).

  Marshall, Sybil. An Experiment in Education (Cambridge University Press, 1963).

  Mencken, H. L. Heathen Days (Vol. 3 of autobiography).

  Mencken, H. L. (ed.). A Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage Books, 1982).

  Rhea Historical Society. The World’s Most Famous Court Trial. Transcript of the trial, first published 1925. (Bryan College, 1990).

  Rogers, Elizabeth (ed.). The Impossible H. L. Mencken—A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories (Anchor Books, 1991).

  Scopes, John T. and Presley, James. Center of the Storm (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967).

  Stone, Irving. Clarence Darrow for the Defense (Doubleday, 1941).

  Weinberg, Arthur (ed.). Attorney for the Damned—Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom (University of Chicago Press, 1957).

  Zenfell, Martha Ellen (ed.). The Old South (APA Publications [HK] Ltd., 1996).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the inhabitants of Dayton who, though they often disagreed with me, were usually kind and welcoming. In particular, thanks to Gloria, Kurt, Laurie, Matt, Sheriff Sneed, and Rocky. Thank you to Diogo, my stepson, for use of his poem, ‘The Bridge,’ and his loyalty. I would also like to thank Tom Hedley, for encouraging me to write this book, and Frances Coady, for publishing it in America. Thanks are also due to my father, who told me things he didn’t have to, corrected things I couldn’t know, and endured the sometimes surprising consequences of their exposure. To K. Brunt and James Cornford many thanks for, respectively, information on my mother when she was a student and background on the Cornford/Darwin side of the family. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Denise, my daughter, Anna Bella, my sister, Sarah, and my brothers, Francis and Ludovic, for supporting me in this effort to tell an often painful story.

  TRIALS OF THE MONKEY. Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Matthew Chapman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  First published in the United Kingdom by Duckworth Literary Entertainments, Ltd.

  eISBN 9781429971843

  First eBook Edition : March 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chapman, Matthew.

  Trials of the monkey : an accidental memoir / Matthew Chapman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-28357-1 (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-30078-6 (pbk)

  1. Chapman, Matthew.—Journeys—Tennessee—Dayton. 2. Scopes, John Thomas—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Screenwriters—United States—Biography. 4. Darwin, Charles, 1809—1882—Family. 7. Dayton (Tenn.) I. Title.

  PS3553.H2915 Z476 2001

  808.2’3—dc21

  2001036740

  [B]

  “To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train” is reprinted from the Selected Poems of Frances Cornford (1997), reproduced by kind permission of Enitharmon Press.

  First Picador USA Paperback Edition: July 2002