The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  “I am one of the very few genuine sceptical philosophers in the world, Molly. Oh, there are people who teach scepticism, but their lives prove that they don’t believe what they teach. They love their families, give to the Cancer Fund, and listen with tolerance and sometimes with approval to the boloney that makes up most of the talk about politics, society, culture, and whatnot even in a university.

  “The real sceptic, however, lives in a constant atmosphere of carefully balanced dubiety about everything; he will not accept that there are any satisfactory grounds for acquiescence in any statement or proposition whatever. Of course if some fool tells him that it is a fine day he will probably nod because he hasn’t time to haggle with the fool over what he means by a word like ‘fine’. But in all important things he reserves his judgement.”

  “Doesn’t he admit that some things are good and some bad? Some things desirable and some undesirable?”

  “Those would be decisions in ethics, and his aim in matters of ethics is to deflate all pretension; the kind of judgement you speak of is pretentious because it rests on some sort of metaphysics. Metaphysics is gibble-gabble, though admittedly often fascinating. Scepticism strives to assist every metaphysic to destroy itself—to hang itself in its own garters, so to speak.”

  “But that leaves you without anything at all!”

  “Not quite. It leaves you with a cautious recognition that the contradictory of any general proposition may be asserted with as much claim to belief as the proposition itself.”

  “Oh, come on, Parlabane! Only a few weeks ago you were swanning around here dressed up as a monk. Had you no religious belief? Was it just cynical masquerade?”

  “By no means. You are making the vulgar assumption that scepticism and cynicism are related. Cynicism is cheap goods, and the cynic is usually a grouchy sentimentalist. Christianity, or perhaps any intellectually respectable faith, is acceptable to the sceptic because he doubts the power of purely human reason to explain or justify anything: but Christianity teaches that it was Man’s Fall that brought doubt into the world. Beyond this world of doubt and sorrow lies Truth, and the Faith points the way to it because it is based on the existence of something above human knowledge and experience. Scepticism is of this world, my darling, but God is not of this world.”

  “Oh God!”

  “Precisely. So my faith did not, and does not, debar me from being a sceptic about all the things of this world. Without God the sceptic is in a vacuum and his doubt, which is his crowning achievement, is also his tragedy. The tragedy of man without God is so dreadful that I cannot keep my mind on it for more than a minute or two at a time. The Fall of Man was a much greater calamity than most men are prepared to face.”

  “Nothing is certain except God?”

  “Five words. Allow me five hundred thousand and I would put it for you more convincingly than your Reader’s Digest summary can achieve.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself. You haven’t convinced me.”

  “Dearest Molly, I am not an old friend, but I hope I am a friend, so allow me to speak frankly: I am not trying to convince you of anything. Because your mind is as it is, and your age and state of health as they are, and your sex a factor which it is now fashionable to discount in intellectual argument, it is most unlikely that I should ever succeed in convincing you of the likelihood of what it has taken me something more than thirty years to decide, with great anguish of mind, for myself. I am not interested in converting you to scepticism. I am not interested in converting anybody. But I am paid rather poorly by this University to say what I believe to be the truth to an odd assortment of students, and that is what I do.”

  “But if it blasts them? No truth, no certainty anywhere?”

  “Then it blasts them. They will be no worse off than millions of others who have been blasted by far less elegant agencies than my philosophical teaching. Of course I tell them what I have just told you: when human reason refuses to admit vassalage to anything other than itself, life becomes tragedy. God is the factor that banishes that tragedy. But very often my students have turned to philosophy to get away from God—some peanut God, usually of their parents’ devising. Like so many would-be intellectuals, they have trivial minds and adore tragedy and complexity.”

  That was one Parlabane. But there was at least one other known to me, quite apart from the Parlabane who stodged pasta and guzzled coarse wine and talked dirtily in The Rude Plenty, and the Parlabane who borrowed money almost every week. This Parlabane was by no means the sceptical philosopher.

  “You wouldn’t expect me to live always on such dizzy intellectual heights, would you, Molly? I should certainly be the wildest sort of fake if I did, and many philosophers have come to grief that way. For example that high-minded romantic Nietzsche. He never let himself off the chain. Of course he believed implicitly in his nonsense, whereas I, as a sceptic, am committed to non-belief in everything, including my most cherished philosophical ideas. Nietzsche once said that there could be no gods, because he could not endure it if there were gods and he were not one of them himself. Which is as good as saying that nothing can be true if it does not put Friedrich Nietzsche at the top of the tree. I am not like that; I recognize that a tree has a bottom as well as a top, a root as well as a crown. That is to say, I assume it to be so for practical purposes, because I have never seen or heard of a tree that did not fit that description.

  “I have thought a good deal about trees; I like them. They speak eloquently of the balanced dubiety which I told you was the sceptical attitude. No splendid crown without the strong root that works in the dark, drawing its nourishment among the rocks, the soil, hidden waters, and all the little, burrowing things. A man is like that; his splendours and his fruits are to be seen, to win him love and admiration. But what about the root?

  “Have you ever seen a bulldozer clearing land? It advances upon a great tree and shoves and pushes inexorably until the tree is down and thrust out of the way, and all of that effort is accompanied by a screaming and wrenching sound from the tree as the great roots are torn from the ground. It is a particularly distressing kind of death. And when the tree is upturned, the root proves to be as big as the crown.

  “What is the root of man? All sorts of things that nourish his visible part, but the deepest root of all, the tap-root, is that child he once was, of which I spoke to you when I was amusing you with the story of my life. That is the root which goes deepest because it is reaching downward towards the ancestors.

  “The ancestors—how grand it sounds! But the root does not go back to those old stuffed shirts with white wigs whose portraits people display so proudly, but to our unseen depths—which means the messy stuff of life from which the real creation and achievement takes its nourishment. The root is far more like a large placenta than it is like those family trees that are all branches.”

  “You talk like Ozias Froats.”

  “The Turd-Skinner? Do you know him? I wish you’d introduce me.”

  “I certainly won’t if you talk of him as the Turd-Skinner. I think he’s a Paracelsian magus; he has a bigger view of things than any of us—except Professor Hollier, perhaps. Truth lies in the hidden and unacknowledged.”

  “Yes: shit. But what does he think is hidden in it?”

  “He won’t say, and I don’t expect I’d understand his terms if he did say. But I think it’s some sort of individual stamp, and maybe it changes significantly with states of health and mental health; a new measure of—I don’t think I know what, but something like personality or individuality. I shouldn’t make guesses.”

  “I know; it’s not your field.”

  “But if he’s right, it’s everybody’s field, because everybody will be the greater for what Ozias Froats has discovered.”

  “Well, I wish him luck. But as a sceptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a sceptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stim
ulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.”

  I was beginning to recognize Parlabane as something very much more important than the weighty nuisance I had thought him at first. He carried his own atmosphere about with him, and after he had sat for five minutes on Hollier’s old sofa it was the dominating spirit in the room. It would be silly to say it was hypnotic, but it was limiting; it inclined me to agree with him while he was present, only to realize that I had admitted to many things I did not really believe as soon as he was gone. It was that duality of his; when he was the philosopher he had to have his way because he could out-argue me any day in the week, and when he was the other man who talked about the roots of the tree of selfhood he was so outrageous and ingenious that I could not keep up with him.

  His outward man was going from bad to worse. As a monk he had looked odd, in the Canadian setting—even in Spook—but now he looked like a sinister bum. The suit somebody had given him was of good grey English cloth, but it had never been a fit and now it was a baggy, food-stained mess. The trousers were too long, and he could no longer endure having them braced up, so now he belted them with what looked like an old necktie, and they dragged at his heels, the bottoms dirty and frayed. His shirt was always dirty, and it occurred to me that perhaps advanced scepticism made ordinary cleanliness seem a folly. He had a bad smell; not just dirty clothes, but a living, heavy stench. As the cold weather came on Hollier gave him an overcoat of his own, already terribly worn; it was what I called his “animal coat” because it had collar and cuffs of some fur that had become matted and mangy; with it went a fur cap that was too big for Parlabane, and gave the impression of a neglected wig; from under it his untrimmed hair hung over the back of his collar.

  A bum, certainly, but nothing like the bums who haunted the campus, hoping to mooch a dollar from some kindly professor. They were destroyed men, from whose faces no mind shone forth—only confusion and despair. Parlabane looked somehow important; the blurred, scarred face was impressive, and through the thick spectacles his eyes swam with a transfixing stare.

  His attitude towards me was much as Hollier had said it would be. He could not leave me alone, and although he apparently thought I was a female nitwit, amusing herself by acquiring a doctorate at the University (don’t imagine there is any contradiction here; nitwits can do it), he plainly wanted to be near me, to talk with me, to bamboozle me intellectually. This was no novelty to me; around universities there is always some “female-molesting” or “harassment” or whatever the fashionable word may be, but there is a great deal more of intellectual mauling and pawing by people who don’t even know that what they are doing is sexy. Parlabane was different; his intellectual seduction was on a grander scale and vastly more amusing than that of the average run of academics. I certainly didn’t like him, but it was fun to play with him, on this level. Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind.

  Late November can be a romantic time of year in Canada; the bare trees, the frosty air and whirling winds, the eerie light which sometimes persists for the whole of the day and then sinks, shortly after four, into steely darkness, dispose me to Gothic thoughts. In Spook, so Gothic in architecture, it was tempting to indulge northern fantasies, and I found myself wondering if in such a frame of mind I was not working under the eye of Doctor Faustus himself, for Hollier had the intensity of Faust and much of his questing appearance. But then, no Faust without Mephistopheles, and there was Parlabane, as slippery-tongued, as entertaining, and sometimes as frightening as the Devil himself. Of course in Goethe’s play the Devil appears handsomely dressed as a travelling scholar; Parlabane was at the other end of the scale, but in his command of any conversation he had with me, and his ability under all circumstances to make the worse seem the better thing, he was acceptable as Mephistopheles.

  I have no use for a woman who doesn’t want to try conclusions with the Devil at some time in her life. I am no village simpleton, like poor Gretchen whom the Devil delivered over to Faust, for his pleasure; I am my own woman and even if I gained what I desired, and Hollier declared his love for me and suggested marriage or an affair, I would not expect to be subsumed in him. I know this is a bold word, for better women than I have been devoured by love, but I would hope to keep something of myself for myself, even if only to have one more thing in my power to give. In love I do not want to play the old, submissive game, nor have I any use for the ultra-modern maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t-and-anyhow-you-watch-your-step game; Tadeusz’s daughter and a girl part Gypsy had no time for such thin, sour finagling. Parlabane was trying to seduce me intellectually, to put me with my back on the floor and leave me gasping and rumpled, and all with words. I decided to see what luck I would have in discombobulating him.

  “Brother John,” I said one November afternoon when the light in Hollier’s outer room was beginning to fade, “I’m going to give you a cup of tea, and a question to answer. You have been telling me about the world of philosophical scepticism, and God as the only escape from a world blighted by tragic ambiguity. But I spend my time working with the writings of men who thought otherwise, and I find them strongly persuasive. I mean Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and my own dear François Rabelais.”

  “Spleeny Lutherans, every one of them,” said Parlabane.

  “Heretics, probably, but not Lutherans,” I said. “How could such soaring spirits agree with the man who declared that society is a prison filled with sinners, in which order has to be maintained by force? You see, I know something of Luther, too. But don’t try to sidetrack me with Luther. I want to talk about Rabelais, who said that a free human creature finds his rule of conduct in his sense of honour—”

  “Just a minute; he didn’t say ‘a free human creature’, he said men—‘men that are free, well born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies’.”

  “You don’t have to give it to me in English; I know it in French—‘gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes’ and if you can prove to me that “gens” means Men Only I should like to hear you do it. It means “people”. You have the common idea of Rabelais as a woman-hater, because you have only read that gassy translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart—”

  “As a matter of fact I have been rereading it because Urquhart McVarish has lent me a copy—”

  “I’ll lend you a French copy, and in it you’ll discover that where Rabelais sets out the plan for his ideal community—one might almost call it a university—he includes lots of women.”

  “For entertainment, one assumes.”

  “Don’t assume. Read—and in French.”

  “Molly, what a horrible old academic scissorbill you are getting to be.”

  “Abuse cannot shake me. Now answer my question: isn’t a sense of honour a sufficient rule of conduct?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it can be no bigger than the man—or woman, if you are going to be pernickety—who possesses it. And the honour of a fool, or a pygmy-in-spirit, or a redneck, or a High Tory, or a convinced democrat are all wholly different things and any one of them, under the right circumstances, could send you to the stake, or stop your wages, or just push you out into the cold. Honour is a matter of personal limitation. God is not.”

  “Well, I’d rather be François Rabelais than one of your frozen sceptics, grabbing at God as a lifebelt in an Arctic sea.”

  “All right; be anything you please. You are a romantic; Rabelais was a romantic. His nonsense suits your nonsense. If the lie of honour as a sole and sufficient guide to conduct suits you, well and good! You’ll end up with those English idiots who used to govern their lives by what is or is not cricket.”

  “Come on, Parlabane, this is just hair-splitting and academic abuse. Don’t you make any allowance for quality of life? Isn’t the worth of what a man believe
s shown by what his belief makes of him? Wouldn’t you rather live nobly as François Rabelais than be stuck in the deep freeze of scepticism, wondering when, and if, God is going to open the door of the fridge and thaw you out?”

  “Rabelais didn’t live nobly. Most of his life he was on the run from people who were more accurate reasoners than he was.”

  “He was a great writer, a broad and copious writer, a man of wide and hospitable mind.”

  “Romanticism. Sheer romanticism. You are putting forward critical opinions as if they were facts.”

  “O.K., you have beaten me at the academic game, but you haven’t changed my mind, and so I don’t admit that you’ve beaten me at the real game.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, look at you and look at me. I’m delighted with what I’m doing, and I’ve never heard you say one pleasant or approving thing about anything you’ve ever done, except for a single love-affair that turned out badly. So which of us is the winner?”

  “You are a fool, Molly. A beautiful fool and you prattle your nonsense in such a lovely voice and with such an enchanting hint of a foreign accent that a young heterosexual like Arthur Cornish might take you for a genuine, solid-gold Aspasia.”

  “So I am, or at any rate so I may be. You keep telling me that I am a woman, but you haven’t any idea what a woman is. Yours is a masculine mind, and I suppose it’s a pretty good one, though it doesn’t originate anything: my mind is feminine, and where yours delights in subtle distinctions it is all one colour, and my mind is in shades that shame the spectrum. I can’t beat you at your game, but I don’t think you can even guess what my game is.”