Picked-Up Pieces (15 page)

The Lampoon is saved from mere sociable fatuity by being also
The Lampoon
, a magazine. Month after month, through thin seasons and thick, it insists on coming out, even though it contain naught but hastily
hustled ads and snippets of past issues scrambled together through a haze of beer and boisterous kibitzing. Along with the anarchic camaraderie of Thursday nights, I cherish those groggy Monday-morning subway rides down to the South Station stop and thence to the emporium (up several flights in a quivering elevator of Art Nouveau tracery) of Best Print, Inc., where a mild, mustached, and unblinking craftsman called Harold (Harold o’Bestprint, he was invariably called in the Common Books) relieved me of my raggedy pasted-up dummy and, unless his lawyer advised him otherwise, turned it into 1,200 (more or less) shiny magazines, with real staples, on real paper—or “stock,” as we learned to term it, lisping resonant professional terms such as “pica” and “ital” and “halftone” and “mortise” and “bleed.” An undergraduate magazine loses its maturest contributors every June, a fact which, combined with the distracted condition of the average collegiate head, creates a wonderfully ongoing vacuum for those few who want to fill it. Fop though it pretends to be,
The Lampoon
has apprenticed a sturdy number of professional writers and artists. It was the editorial aspect, presumably, that weighed so heavily on the young Robert Benchley as he wrote to his mother of his election as President, “It will mean a lot of work and a lot of worry and responsibility, for it is a responsible position.” George Santayana, a half-century earlier, even more solemnly felt the invisible pressure of the “forthnightly edition” conjured up in “an atmosphere of respect for holy things,” by young men with “literary tastes, leaning toward the sentimental and nobly moral.” The vocabulary surprises but the reverent tone is right. Raising a smile is a delicate piece of artistic engineering that may well prepare one for higher things. “It’s all in the execution,” we used to say of some particularly lame cartoon idea hatched in a Sanctum gag session. That is to say, there
was
such a thing as execution; no humor is so broad it cannot be relayed badly or ably. The suppressed
Pontoon
, for instance (police-confiscated for reprinting Midwestern cartoons of which my favorite showed an ovum surrounded by long-tailed sperm one of whom was saying, “Joe sent me”—a dramatization that would not raise an eyebrow in a high-school contraception class now), contained much wit, where little was needed; Bink Young’s editorial, “Easy, Breezy, You’ll Slide a Mile,” seemed an especial gem, and I was glad to find it in this anthology.

Martin Kaplan ’71, between earning his
summa
in molecular biology and serving as head of every undergraduate organization but the YAF,
has done a brave deed; he has descended into the dank abyss of the archives and clambered back with a staggering amount of Pooniana. Not only did he cull the back issues, he spelunked past slippery stalagmites of compacted Common Books into unthinkable caves of ancient correspondence, and even panned the memoirs of old grads for germane nuggets. The result is a beautiful and scholarly labor of love. Mr. Kaplan has drawn heavily on the parodies, which makes for something of a social history as well as a private album. He has given generous helpings of the cartoons and light verse, wherein the jejune can shine, and skimped mercifully on the prose. Here is nostalgia enough for anyone who has ever gone dizzy down the Narthex stairs, and laughter enough for any general reader. May the next ninety-seven years yield as happy a century’s harvest.

M
OST OF THE CONTRIBUTORS
to this volume are Catholic or European or both; an American Protestant feels an understandable diffidence at leading such a parade, as it confidently marches from the mustering ground of Biblical exegesis into the weird marshes of possession, exorcism, and witchcraft and onward to the familiar firm terrain of psychopathology and literary criticism. To be honest, most of us Americans who out of reasons quixotic and sentimental and inertial persist in playing disciple to Calvin and Luther and Henry VIII have trouble enough conceiving of a deity, without dabbling at diabolism. Can evil be a personal, dynamic principle? The suggestion seems clownish; instinctively we reject it. If we must have a supernatural, at the price of intellectual scandal, at least let it be a minimal supernatural, clean, monotonous, hygienic, featureless—just a
little
supernatural, as the unwed mother said of her baby. There is no doubt a primitive resonance in the notion of God battling, across the surface of the universe, with a malevolent near-equal. But can we morally tolerate the God who would permit such an opponent to arise, who would arm him with death and pain, who would allow suffering Mankind to become one huge Job, teased and tested in heavenly play? Alas, we have become, in our Protestantism, more virtuous than the myths that taught us virtue; we judge them barbaric. We resist the
bloody legalities of the Redemption; we face Judgment Day, in our hearts, much as young radicals face the mundane courts—convinced that acquittal is the one just verdict. We judge our Judge; and we magnanimously grant our Creator His existence by a “leap” of our own wills, incidentally reducing His “ancient foe” to the dimensions of a bad comic strip.

Yet these grand ghosts did not arise from a vacuum; they grow (and if pruned back will sprout again) from the deep exigencies and paradoxes of the human condition. We know that we live, and know that we will die. We love the creation that upholds us and sense that it is good, yet pain and plague and destruction are everywhere. It is not my province to discuss the shadowy Old Testament Satan so well evoked by Father Valensin; nor the demons swarming through all cultures, touched upon by M. Bazin in his essay on art; nor the disturbing boundary area where sexual hysteria and Christ’s ministry of healing and the (to a Protestant) incredible rite of exorcism intertwine. I would, timidly, in my capacity as feeble believer and worse scholar, open the question of the devil as metaphysical possibility, if not necessity. For the assertion “God exists” is a drastic one that imposes upon the universe a structure; given this main beam, subordinate beams and joists, if reason and logic are anything, must follow. But let a true theologian speak. Karl Barth somewhere, coping with the massive—nay, central—theological problem of evil, speaks of God “turning His back” upon a section of the cosmos. Unable to locate this frightening metaphor, I found instead, in
Church Dogmatics
, a systematic portrait of “nothingness,” which I here abridge:

Pantheism on one side, Manichaeanism on the other, clutch at the theologian’s skirts. A potent “nothingness” was unavoidably conjured up by God’s creating
something
. The existence of something demands the existence of
something else
. And this same ontic inevitability serves Barth to explain man’s strange capacity, under God, to choose evil.

Are there not tendencies in our private psychologies that would give these cosmic propositions credence? Is not destructiveness within us as a positive lust, an active hatred? Who does not exult in fires, collapses, the ruin and death of friends? Who has seen a baby sleeping in a crib and not wanted, for an instant of wrath that rises in the throat like vomit, to puncture such innocence? What child is not fascinated by torture and monstrosity? What man can exempt, from his purest sexual passion and most chivalrous love, the itch to defile? What man or woman does not carry within, as tempter and last resort, the thought of suicide? After satisfaction, revulsion. Into the most ample contentment rushes, not an impulse to sing gratitude, but a frightful impatience that would, like Lucifer, overthrow the tyranny of order, however benign. Indeed, the more fortunate our condition, the stronger the lure of negation, of perversity, of refusal. For the more completely order would enclose us, the greater the threat to our precious creaturely freedom, which finds self-assertion in defiance and existence in sin and dreads beyond hell a heaven of automatons forever “freed from the possibility of falling away.” Thus the devil—to give “nothingness” his name—thrives in proportion, never falls hopelessly behind, is always ready to enrich the rich man with ruin, the wise man with folly, the beautiful woman with degradation, the kind average man with debauches of savagery. The world always topples. A century of progressivism bears the fruit of Hitler; our own supertechnology breeds witches and warlocks from the loins of engineers.

We resist what is good for us; humanity cannot be imagined doing otherwise and remaining human. Barth’s formulas fit: man is a battlefield, and Satan at best is “behind” one. But what of creation in general? Does a black-and-white
opus proprium
and
opus alienum
really satisfy our perception of the universe as a curious explosion, a chaos wherein mathematical balances achieve momentary islands of calm? Man as organism is beset not by “nothingness” but by predators and parasites themselves obeying the Creator’s command to survive and propagate. Disease is a clash of competing vitalities. And what of those shrugs, those earthquakes and floods and mudslides, whereby the Earth demonstrates her utter indifference to her little scum of life? Nature—Nature, whom we love more than our own bodies, from whose face we have extracted a
thousand metaphors and affectionate messages—cares nothing for us. Is this the Satanic nothingness? In fact, it has been taken as such; the Christian West, with its myth of the devil, has taken the fight to Nature with a vengeance, has sought out the microbe and dammed the river and poisoned the mosquito in his marsh and gouged the mineral from its hidden vein and invented the machines that now threaten to scrape Nature into the infernal abyss as Lucifer’s angels were scraped from Heaven. Oriental fatalism, which would see death and nothingness as limbs of God, could not have done this. Yet we wonder, as now our human species like some giant strand of bacteria fills every vacuum and re-creates chaos artificially, if this was intended. Or if the essence of our creaturehood is coöperation, with even the devil.

I do not know. I call myself Christian by defining “a Christian” as “a person willing to profess the Apostles’ Creed.” I am willing, unlike most of my friends—many more moral than myself—to profess it (which does not mean understand it, or fill its every syllable with the breath of sainthood), because I know of no other combination of words that gives such life, that so seeks the
crux
. The Creed asks us to believe not in Satan but only in the “Hell” into which Christ descends. That Hell, in the sense at least of a profound and desolating absence, exists I do not doubt; the newspapers give us its daily bulletins. And my sense of things, sentimental I fear, is that wherever a church spire is raised, though dismal slums surround it and a single dazed widow kneels under it, this Hell is opposed by a rumor of good news, by an irrational confirmation of the plenitude we feel is our birthright. The instinct that life is good is where natural theology begins. The realization that life is flawed admits the possibility of a Fall, of a cause behind the Fall, of Satan. How seriously we must take this possibility, and under what forms we might imagine it, these “soundings” will elucidate.