The Clowns of God

by Morris West

  “I don’t agree,” said Jean Marie. “I’m sorry; but I’ve had this argument ad nauseam. I almost ended believing it. Not now! Not ever again! Listen.…” Suddenly he was a man on fire. The listeners hung on his every word, and gesture. Hennessy reached forward and switched on the tape recorder. “… If each of us were locked in a silent room, deprived of all sensory reference, we should very soon become disoriented and, finally, insane. The person who would probably endure longest would be the one who was practiced in withdrawal, in meditation, whose life had an outside reference to God. I met several such people during my pontificate, three men and one woman who had been confined as religious agitators and tortured by sensory deprivation.… The fact is that we live only in communion—not only with our present but with the past and the future as well. We are haunted by a whole poetry of living, by lullabies half remembered and the sounds of train whistles in the night and the scent of lavender in a summer garden. We are haunted by grief, too, and fear, and images of childhood terror and the macabre dissolutions of age.… But I am sure that it is in this domain of our daily dreaming that the Holy Spirit establishes His own communion with us. This is how the gift is given, which we call grace: the sudden illumination, the sharp regret that leads to penitence or forgiveness, the opening of the heart to the risk of love.… Authority is irrelevant here. Authority is the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind! It can command us to everything except love and understanding.… So what am I trying to tell you?” He gave them a grin of self-deprecation. “Peter is dead and Paul is dead and James the brother of the Lord. Their dust is blown away by the winds of centuries. Were they large men, little men, fair or dark? Who knows? Who cares? The testimony of the Spirit, made through them, still endures.” He quoted softly, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become like a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.…”

  There was a long silence in the room. Jean Marie looked from one to the other, seeking a response. Their faces were blank, their eyes downcast. Finally it was Hennessy who spoke. He switched off the tape. He addressed himself not to Jean Marie but to his colleagues.

  “… I don’t need to see the man who said that. I can read it, listen to it, and make my own image. Natalie?”

  “I agree, totally. Imagine that with lights, makeup, cues—all the mechanics. He’d look like a whore playing a virgin—with all respect to you, Monseigneur! What do you think, Florent?”

  The young man was curiously subdued. He said, “No images, certainly. I found myself hearing music—something very simple, like the old ballads that told about love and knightly deeds.… Perhaps I should modify that. The image should not be of the speaker. It could be of his audience. Can we think about it for a while?”

  “I’m a banker,” said Roberta Saracini. “But you gave me a thought, Adrian. You said, ‘You don’t read the letters of John Doe in church.’ Would you read a letter from this John Doe? Would you listen if he sent you a message on tape?”

  “You’re damn right I would!” He scribbled a note on his pad. Then he turned to Jean Marie and made a rueful apology. “I know this must sound very impertinent—treating you like some kind of puppet to be manipulated.”

  “I’m used to it,” said Jean Marie equably. “Our people at the Vatican are experts in high theatre; and some of our masters of ceremonies were real tyrants. Don’t worry! I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough!”

  “Letters!” said Natalie Duhamel. “They used to be a very fashionable form of literature.”

  “Still are,” said Hennessy. “Letters of Junius, Lettres de mon Moulin, Letters to The Times! Trouble is to find editors with guts enough to run them in spite of present censorship. We could certainly find enough book publishers to run a series.… Could you write them, Monseigneur?”

  “I’ve been writing them all my clerical life,” said Jean Marie. “Pastoral letters, encyclicals, letters to clergy and conventual nuns. I’d welcome a change of style.”

  “You could also talk them onto tape?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m scared,” said Natalie Duhamel. “Who’s going to listen to sermons?”

  “Was that a sermon?” The young man pointed dramatically at the tape.

  “No, but can he sustain the style?… Can you, Monseigneur?”

  “I’m not aware of style.” Jean Marie was crisp and definite. “I have things to say, about living and dying. They have to be spoken heart to heart.”

  “If you write letters,” said Hennessy boldly, “to whom do you address them? That’s where you come back to authority. The editor asks, ‘Who is this fellow?” The public asks, ‘What the hell does he know?’”

  “And you may not be dealing with editors at all,” said Natalie Duhamel. “You may have to go back to the samizdat and the underground press or even to the wall posters of China! But Adrian’s right. A letter begins ‘Dear X.…’ Who is X in this case?’

  “If you’re writing about the end of everything,” said Florent de Basil, “it seems a pointless self-contradictory exercise. Who can do anything about the final event?”

  “You’re right,” Jean Marie agreed with apparent good humour.

  “With whom do you correspond then—God?”

  “Why not?” Jean Marie savoured the thought for a moment. “Where else do we turn at world’s end? It’s what a child might do: write letters to God and post them in a hollow tree. You could call them Last Letters from a Small Planet!”

  “Stop right there!” Hennessy’s command was like a whipcrack. He looked around at the small assembly. “Don’t anybody say a word until I ask for it. The title is beautiful. I love it.” He turned to Jean Marie and asked, “Could you write those letters?”

  “Of course. It’s not difficult.” He made a small joke of it. “After all, I do talk to the Almighty every day. I don’t have to learn a new language.”

  “How soon could you begin putting something on paper?”

  “Tonight, tomorrow morning, whenever.”

  “Then please! One letter a day—a thousand to twelve hundred words—until further notice. Leave it to us to find the hollow tree—and an international distribution.”

  “One elementary question.” It was Natalie Duhamel who asked it. “Who will be the author of these letters? What character and under what name? That’s basic to our promotion.”

  Jean Marie offered a half-serious suggestion. “I can’t be a child again; but I’ve often felt small. Why don’t I sign myself ‘Jeannot’… Little John?”

  “It sounds a little clownish to me,” said Roberta Saracini.

  “Then let’s go the whole way! Let’s admit that there is such a thing as a divine folly. I’ll sign myself ‘Jeannot le Bouffon’! Johnny the Clown.”

  “Why demean yourself?” Roberta was still unhappy. “Why step so far out of character that no one will know who you really are?”

  “Because then no one can accuse me of ambition or rebellion… And, who but a child or a clown would write letters to the Almighty?”

  “I agree with the man!” said Hennessy. “And if we can’t make Johnny the Clown a household name around the globe, I’ll blow my brains out. What do you say, Natalie?”

  “I can see a way to visualize the whole thing if Florent can come up with a logo.”

  “A logo and the music, my love—and even a counterpoint theme: ‘Johnny the Clown is so simple. Why are the rest of us so complicated?… ’”

  “Let’s not talk it into the air,” said Hennessy. “And let’s not distract the author! He’s the inspired one. We’re the technicians.… How long to dinner, Roberta? I’m starving!”

  He could not believe it was so easy to write the letters. As Pontiff he had been forced to weigh every word, lest it deviate by a hair’s breadth from the definitions of ancient councils: Chalcedon, Nicaea, Trent. He could not discredit the decretals of his predecessors, however much he disagreed with them. He must not speculate; he could only hope to illum
inate the traditional formulae of faith. He was the fount of authority, the final arbiter of orthodoxy, the looser and the binder—himself more stringently bound than any, a tomb-slave to the Deposit of Faith.

  Now, suddenly, he was free. He was no longer Doctor et Magister but Johnny the Clown, wide-eyed among the mysteries. Now he could sit and smell the flowers, watch the waterspout and, the fool of God, safe in his buffoon dress, dispute with his Maker.

  Dear God,

  I love this funny world; but I have just heard the news that You are going to destroy it; or, worse still, You are going to sit up in heaven and watch us destroy it, like comedians wrecking a grand piano, on which great masters have played Beethoven.

  I can’t argue with what You do. It’s Your universe. You juggle the stars and manage to keep them all in space. But please, before the last big bang, could You explain some things to me? I know this is only one tiny planet; but it’s where I live and, before I leave it, I’d like to understand it a little better. I’d like to understand You, too—as far as You’ll let me—but for Johnny the Clown, You’ll have to make it all very simple.

  … I’ve never really got it clear in my mind where you fit in. No disrespect, truly! But You see, in the circus where I work, there’s an audience and there’s us, the people who do the tricks, and there are the animals, too. You can’t leave them out because we depend on them and they on us.

  Now, the audience is wonderful. Most times they’re so happy and innocent you can feel the joy coming out from them; but sometimes you can smell the cruelty, too, as if they want the tigers to attack the tamer, or the aerialist to fall from the high trapeze. So, I can’t really believe You’re the audience!

  Then there’s us, the performers. We’re a mixed bunch: clowns like me, acrobats, pretty girls on horseback, the people on the high wire, the women with the performing dogs and the elephants and the lions and—oh, all of it! We’re a grotesque lot really: good-hearted, yes, but sometimes crazy enough to murder each other. I could tell You tales… but then You know, don’t You? You know us like the potter knows the vase that he’s turned on his own wheel.

  Some people say You’re the owner of the circus and that You set up the whole show for Your own private pleasure. I could accept that. I like being a clown. I get as much fun as I give. But I can’t understand why the owner would want to cut the ropes of the big top and bury us all underneath it. A mad person might do that, a vengeful villain. I don’t believe You can be mad and make a rose, or vengeful and create a dolphin.… So You see, there is a lot of explaining to do.…

  The more he wrote, the more he wanted to write. It was not a literary exercise. He was not teaching anyone. He was engaged in the most primitive pastime of all, the contemplation of paradox, the reasoning of a simple man with ultimate mystery. He was expressing himself with a peasant’s vocabulary, far different from that of the philosophers and the theologians. He did not have to invent new symbols or new cosmogonies like the Marcians and the Valentinians. He was a man in love with old and simple things—ripe grain rubbed in the hands, apples picked fresh from the tree, the first sweet savour of spring love. They were the more precious, because they would soon be lost in the doomsday chaos. As Pope he had written for women—mandates, prescriptions, counsels. Never before, in all his clerical career, had he written so tenderly about them.

  … They tell me their secrets because I’m a clown with big boots and baggy pants and I’m always afraid. They’re not ashamed to admit that they’re afraid, too. They don’t feel ridiculous either—even when they’ve made fools of themselves with a man. I’m much more foolish than they’ll ever be, with my big mouth and my crybaby eyes. They just want to love and to be loved, and nest like the birds and make beautiful children.… But they hear the ghostly horsemen riding in the night—war, plague, famine—and they ask why they should breed babies to die at a dry breast or burn up in a bomb flash. They cannot walk safe in the streets; so they learn to fight like men and carry weapons against rape. They watch the men making war dances and they despise them. When the men get angry, they despise them the more; and the loving becomes sour or strange.

  They want to know what’s gone wrong with Your world… and why they don’t see You sometimes on the street corner where Your Son used to be centuries ago, talking to the passersby, telling the truth in fairy tales. What can I tell them? I’m just Johnny the Clown! The best I can do is make them laugh by falling flat on my face or walking slap-bang into a custard tart!…

  Will You think about all these things and try to give me some kind of answer? I know we’ve talked often. Sometimes I’ve understood. Sometimes I haven’t. But right now I’m scared and I’m tripping over my big boots to run and hide.

  This letter will be posted in the hollow oak at the bottom of the meadow—right near the place where we keep the circus horses.

  I’ll keep writing because I have a lot more questions to ask. These may be the last letters You’ll ever get from our small planet; so, please don’t shut down the world before I can make some sense of it.

  Your puzzled friend,

  Johnny the Clown

  By evening he had written five letters, twenty pages of script in all, and it was only sheer physical fatigue that made him stop. It was still early. It would be pleasant to take a stroll along the quais. Then, with a small shiver of fear, he remembered that now he was the subject of Grade A surveillance and the trackers would be casting about to pick up his scent. He could not risk compromising Roberta Saracini by a trifling act of self-indulgence. Instead he called Adrian Hennessy.

  “… If you have time this evening, I’d like you to see what I’ve written.”

  “How much have you got?”

  “Five letters. Something better than six thousand words.”

  “My God! You are industrious. I’ll be over in twenty minutes.”

  “Would you do me a favour? On your way, pick up a basket of flowers for Roberta and a card to go with them. I’d do it myself, but I’m not supposed to leave the house.”

  “Better still: let me have them delivered direct from the florist What do you want to say on the card?”

  “Just: ‘To say my thanks, Jeannot le Bouffon.’”

  “Got it! I’m on my way.”

  In eighteen minutes he was at the door, brisk, blunt and businesslike. Before he read a line of the manuscript he laid down another set of ground rules.

  “This is the big game: no compliments, no concessions. If it’s good I say so. If it’s bad we burn it. In between? Well, we think about it.”

  “Very proper,” said Jean Marie placidly, “except you can’t burn anything you don’t own!”

  Hennessy glanced quickly through the manuscript.

  “Good! For a start it’s legible. Why don’t they teach handwriting like this anymore? I want to be alone for half-an-hour. That will give you time to read vespers in the garden. You might remember me when you come to the Domine Exaudi.”

  “With pleasure.”

  He was hardly out of the door before Hennessy was deep in his reading. Jean Marie chuckled quietly to himself. He felt like a sceneshifter on a Japanese play, he was dressed in black and therefore to be ignored. He did, however, make remembrance of Adrian Hennessy at the Domine Exaudi. He said, “Please! Let me be able to trust him! I’m not sure in my judgments anymore.”

  The judgment that Hennessy passed on the manuscript was brief and final.

  “That’s what you promised. You moved me—and I’ve got boiler plate around my heart.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “I take these, have them copied and a couple of file copies sent to you. I retain the original holographs in case we have to authenticate. Natalie and Florent read them and come up with ideas for special audio-visual treatments. Meantime, I’m looking for newspaper, magazine and book outlets—in all languages. You will continue writing—and may God guide your pen! As soon as we’ve got concrete situations, we’ll present them to you for approval.… Yo
ur flowers are ordered. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “I’m under Grade A surveillance as a political agitator—or at least I will be as soon as my whereabouts are known. I’d like to get out and stretch my legs, eat in a restaurant; but my face is too well known. Any suggestions?”

  “Easiest thing in the world.” Hennessy consulted his pocketbook and then made a telephone call. “Rolf? Adrian Hennessy. I’ve got a job.… Immediate. Highest scale for payment. Let me see… I’ll read him off to you. Age: sixty-five, grey hair reasonably abundant, fair complexion, features thin but fine-boned, eyes blue, very slim. Well, the point is he’s anchored to the house and he’ll soon be chewing the carpet.… Yes, he is well known, so it’s a whole transformation scene… but not the Hunchback of Notre Dame, for God’s sake! He still wants to eat in a public place.… Have you got a pencil? I’ll read you the address.… How long will it take you to get here?… Fine, I’ll wait.… That’s right. He’s one of mine—and very close!” He put down the receiver and turned to Jean Marie. “Rolf Levandow, Russian-Jewish, best makeup man in the world. He’ll be here in half-an-hour with his box of tricks. When he’s finished, your own mother wouldn’t know you without a voice-print.”

  “You amaze me, Adrian Hennessy.”

  “I am what you see. I give what I’m paid for: total service! That’s the chalk line. Nobody steps over it unless I ask them—even you, Jeannot le Bouffon!”

  “Please!” Jean Marie held up his hands in protest. “I wasn’t asking to hear your confession!”

  “You’ve heard it, anyway.” Adrian Hennessy was suddenly strange and faraway. “I know how to arrange any service you want, from a lipstick promotion to a liquidation. I walk some pretty wavy lines; but I don’t cross up my clients, and nobody owns enough of me so that I can’t toss the contract back on the desk and walk out.… But let’s talk about you for a moment. A couple of months ago you were one of the high men, spiritual leader of half a billion people, absolute monarch of the smallest but most important enclave in the world. That’s an enormous power base. With it, you had a whole, worldwide organization of clergy, monks, nuns and parochial laity. Yet you surrendered it all!… Now look at you! You can’t go for a stroll except in disguise. You’re the houseguest of a lady lion-hunter. You’re depending on her to buy you print-space and air-time that once you could have had for free. I have to ask myself what sense this makes to you.”