The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (22 page)

‘Quite so,’ was Voltaire’s answer.

God therefore walked on with him in silence, giving himself up to admiring the garden ahead – where, he could now make out, a walk shaded by a pleached vine divided symmetrically and offered to conduct the visitor to, at the left, an artificial, no doubt eremitic ruin or, on the right, a small octagonal temple.

‘That reminds me,’ God remarked, forgetting to observe silence: ‘I was surprised how seriously you take the back-
to-Nature
message of the ending of
Candide
.’

‘What’, Voltaire cried, shocked out of his thoughtfulness, ‘
can
you mean?’

‘I mean your interest in pruning oleanders.’

‘Pruning is the most
un
-natural of operations,’ Voltaire said indignantly. ‘But what I intended by my question was: What
can
you mean by the “back-to-Nature message” of
Candide
? Are you confusing me with J.-J. Rousseau?’

‘No, no,’ God said quickly. ‘Indeed not. I was merely
referring
to Candide’s conclusion that “il faut cultiver notre jardin”.’

‘
Cultiver
,’ cried Voltaire emphatically, ‘
cultiver
, a verb
cognate
with “culture” and thus in logical opposition to “nature”. If you believe that to plant a garden is an act of God, you have
been misled by the book of
Genesis
.
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Let me assure you that my interest in gardening rests entirely on the fact that a garden is an attempt to improve on nature. Let me also assure you that I long ago saw through Rousseau’s and many other people’s fallacious belief that there is, for human beings, some “natural” state, to which they have only to revert for all to go well. For humans the only natural state is to be endlessly,
inventively
and variably artificial. Man is not a bower-bird, whose instinct will instruct him how to build nests, all to the same pattern. His instinct is to devise original patterns. Man is man only insofar as he is hundreds of individual architects. Did I omit to say in
Candide
that our gardens are to be cultivated to the utmost pitch of disciplined fantasy and with the aid of every type of mechanical implement yet invented, including those lawn-mowers you sit on and drive, which it must be highly amusing to do?’

‘Yes,’ God said boldly. ‘You did omit.’

‘Well, well,’ said Voltaire, ‘it’s a very condensed work. A great deal of its content is implied rather than stated. However, do I not quite explicitly state that, when Candide and his
companion
want to leave Eldorado, a country whose morals it is plain I largely endorse, the local engineers devise a machine for hoisting them over the mountains? And do I not remark that the ingenuity with which their departure is accomplished makes “un beau spectacle”?’

‘Yes, yes,’ God said, ‘you do.’

‘People are being turned against machines’, Voltaire said, ‘by the perversity, which I mentioned to you earlier, of the left wing. Instead of using the machines to set the workers free, the socialists chain the workers to the machines by the bribe of wages. For this slavery, the machines are held to blame. As a result, industrial societies are now full of latterday Luddites and modern machine-breakers, people who have confused “doing your own thing” with baking your own bread. Instead of demanding that technology provide them with tasty bread, efficient transport and cheap, good-looking clothes, they declare themselves free of the machine and insist on home-baking, going on foot and knitting their own cardigans. They fail to notice that this freedom of theirs is merely enslavement to another sort
of drudgery, this time without even the solace of wages. They have, moreover, to be wilfully blind to the most patent aesthetic facts. A machine-made cardigan is almost invariably handsomer than a home-made one, just as a circle drawn with a compass is handsomer than one drawn freehand – unless the hand concerned is Giotto’s, whose talent it was to be as precise as a machine. Those who deny beauty to all machines and to all machine-products are not aesthetes but snobs. If a machine-
product
is ugly, the fault is not the machine’s but the designer’s. If, on the other hand, a design is good, it is an aesthetic crime to subject its execution to the vagaries and the sheer slowness of craftsmanship, and thereby to limit its audience to the few who can afford to pay a rarity price.’

Voltaire paused: in order to wave another salute to Samuel Butler, who now passed Voltaire and God in the avenue as he completed his (presumably circular) walk.

Before Voltaire could resume his discourse on machines, God took the opportunity to remark into his ear, in the low, urgent tones people employ for commenting on someone who has only just passed out of earshot:

‘One of the things I most respect in Butler is his feminism. Granted that the word “authoress”, though sanctioned by Jane Austen, was by 1897 a little tinged with condescension. Yet you must admit that Butler could not have devised a more succinct summing-up of his thesis than to entitle it
The
Authoress
of
The
Odyssey.
And his thesis itself, that Nausicaa is a self-portrait of the author, is as salutory as it is full of charm. Bernard Shaw was right when he called it a serious proposition that must first have struck Butler as a joke.
25
Its seriousness lies, of course, not in its contribution to history or to Homeric scholarship but in its message. It is only prejudice that makes people assume that the unknown quantity traditionally called Homer (or, for the matter of that, the unknown quantity traditionally called God) must be male.’

‘You are so eager to remedy injustice to women’, Voltaire replied, ‘that you have bounced yourself into being unjust to human imagination.’

He and God had now emerged from the avenue into the
formal
garden.

Ignoring the invitation of the pleached walk, Voltaire paused to consider the narrower offers made by several small secretive paths which, hedged by trellises or walled by herbal shrubs, seemed to constitute a sort of maze.

Selecting an entrance, Voltaire plunged: into foliage and a snowstorm of papery blue butterflies whom his arrival had dislodged.

Hurrying after, God found that his feet could make out the path though it was so overgrown from ankle-level upwards as to be invisible to his eyes.

Reaching forward, he tapped at Voltaire’s shoulder and asked:

‘Then do you deny that such a work as
The
Odyssey
could be written by a girl?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Voltaire replied, briefly turning his head to cast his voice back at God before resuming his navigation of the path.

‘As a matter of fact, now I come to think of it,’ God said loudly to Voltaire’s retreating back, ‘I believe it must have been Butler’s feminism, as much as his evolutionism, that inspired Bernard Shaw.
The
Authoress
of
The
Odyssey
was surely the model on which Shaw, in a literary world that must have been full of intelligent man’s guides to this and that, conceived his
Intelligent
Woman’s
Guide.
Indeed, it must have been in the light of Butler that Shaw framed the thought, as he watched a performance of
Everyman
, “Why not Everywoman?”
26

‘Aaah,’ said Voltaire, and God thought for an instant that he was conceding a point.

During that instant, however, God caught up with Voltaire and came to have occasion to reinterpret the sigh he had heard into an expression merely of Voltaire’s relief at having done with the overgrown path.

For the path had conducted them into an open space.

At the centre there was a water garden. The surrounds were pleasingly floored with close-set up-ended bricks, which the sun had faded to all the colours of a sunset (including, as a matter of curious fact, even the blues and turquoises, which tinged the rims of some of the bricks).

‘Let us hope’, Voltaire said frailly, ‘I have not over-taxed
my strength. I fear I must pause to recruit it. Meanwhile, I shall try to correct some of your and Samuel Butler’s misconceptions about literature. If it is only prejudice that makes people assume that Homer must have been a man, it is equally only prejudice that makes them assume that, if the author was a woman, she must have been an autobiographer. Many excellent’ authors of fiction
are
autobiographical. Butler himself, if I may judge by
The
Way
of
All
Flesh,
is one of them. But he should not have let his own literary temperament mislead him into attributing the same temperament to all authors, many of whom are most
inventive
where they are least informed. Why, on Butler’s
assumptions
, I must have visited Surinam before I wrote
Candide
! Of course a girl like Nausicaa
could
, if she happened to be a literary genius, write an Homeric epic. It is possible that she wrote
The
Odyssey
and put a portrait of herself into it. But it is equally possible, and to my mind a great deal more probable, that she would be quite indifferent to the charms both of young girls and of the type of fairy tale considered suitable for young girls and, if she had genius enough to write an Homeric work at all, would have chosen to write
The
Iliad.
’

‘But—’ God began.

‘But, you are going to object,’ Voltaire took up, ‘
The
Iliad
is almost wholly about soldiers at war, a subject of which Nausicaa could have no personal experience whatsoever. That is precisely why it is a subject that would engage her imagination.’

‘But how would she get the detail right?’ God demanded. ‘
The
Iliad
is so
exact
about armour and strategy and chariots and—’

‘She had two resources,’ Voltaire said, ‘either of which would be entirely adequate. She could invent: or she could ask a soldier. What do you suppose imagination and the power of speech are
for
? Anyway, I daresay that many crucial problems of Homeric archaeology would be solved if the scholars would only admit that Homer, whether male or female, was freely
inventive
. But then I daresay that they, like Butler, can’t admit it because they’re not freely inventive themselves. In fact, when he re-invented
The
Odyssey
as an autobiographical work, Butler was pursuing his own vocation as an autobiographical novelist. His Nausicaa as author is a self-portrait of Samuel Butler as author.’

‘I suppose’, God said, ‘you might say that I was misled in his footsteps by something not dissimilar in my own case. After all, many people conceive the Bible to be a sort of
autobiographical
novel by the Holy Ghost.’

‘Exactly,’ said Voltaire. ‘Indeed, one might even say that the interpretation you set on—’

But he stopped and decided instead merely to stand
quizzically
confronting God in the sunlight (which made him blink).

‘Well?’ God demanded.

‘You will take it more to heart’, Voltaire said, ‘if I let you find out for yourself – an old maxim of teachers and psycho analysts.’

‘Is it about the Black Girl?’ God asked. ‘Is she in this garden?’

Since Voltaire gave him no more answer than a blink which he probably intended for a blank stare, God looked about, making a careful examination of the water garden.

Several statues were to be seen, some of them actually
in
(up to their ankles) the pools and a few positively spouting water.

None of them, God decided, could be even a fanciful or idealised representation of the Black Girl.

The water garden itself was pretty and must, God considered, remembering his discourse on technology, delight Voltaire. It evidently made ingenious use of hydraulic principles to re-cycle a fixed quantity of water. On a circuit God could not trace, the water was discharged down cataracts, gathered gurgling into caverns, reissued through brazen mouths and jetted in plumes towards the sky.

Its movement made a constant small sound of lapping and kept the surface of the pools puckered like a cloth with a pulled thread.

In some of the basins, coloured spotlights beneath the
surface
illuminated reeds or minerals, with an effect consummately vulgar and irrefragably winning.

Some of the less turbulent pools contained water lilies – which also, God thought, must give pleasure to Voltaire, since,
although
they were entirely natural, they looked entirely as though they were made of plastic.

Only one person, God and Voltaire apart, was in view. A tallish, bony-hipped figure wearing narrow trousers and something resembling a norfolk jacket (in which. God considered, he
must surely be too hot) stood, with his back to God and Voltaire, looking towards one of the most elaborate of the jets, which was illuminated by indigo lights.

‘Well,
that
’s not the Black Girl,’ God said, turning away.

‘Isn’t it?’ asked Voltaire in a neutral voice.

‘Well, if you have doubts,’ said God, ‘let’s make sure.’

Accompanied by Voltaire, he approached the figure – which, as it stood, long-legged, on the rim of the basin, resembled an ornamental flamingo.

From closer to, it could be seen that the shoulders and back of the figure were visited every now and then, by a small but violent spasm.

‘I’d better have a word first,’ said Voltaire; and, stepping in advance of God, he placed himself accostingly by the figure’s side.

‘Excuse me, my friend, but have you got the hiccoughs?’

‘I have not,’ the figure replied, without turning round. ‘My digestion is perfect – which I attribute to vegetarianism and eating sweets.’
27

To God’s disappointment, the voice was masculine. Its
intonation
was Irish; and, with a pedantry
28
that suggested a person highly but not university-educated,
29
each consonant was articu lated separately and explosively.
30