The Book of Books (22 page)

But there is a deeper reference – to the Book of Revelation:

There is a direct reference to this at the end of chapter 25 as the poor, flailing to cross the dust bowl of America, begin to starve.

J. Paul Hunter has published a detailed analysis of
The Grapes of Wrath
in relation to the Bible. The connections are numerous. They demonstrate that Steinbeck believed in the biblical stories as an effective and profound enabler of his fiction. He believed they would give his own story a far wider resonance. He must have thought also that some of his readers would recognise the
references and be moved on a different level to that obtained by non-religious, non-spiritual fiction.

Hunter points out that the novel is in three parts, like the Exodus account of Israel: Captivity, Journey, the Promised Land. The Joad family is yoked to that of the Hebrews – to the degree that there are twelve of them (the twelve tribes of Israel) embarked on a truck (their Ark) for the journey across the wastelands. ‘The rest swarmed up on top of the load, Connie and Rose of Sharon, Pa and Uncle John, Ruthie and Winfield, Tom and the preacher. Noah stood on the ground looking up at the great load of them sitting on top of the truck.' There are allusions to Lot's wife (Grandpa's character), to Ananias and Moses, and to Jim Casey as a Christ figure.

In his novel
East of Eden
, there are even more parallels. The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis is the key: ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the East of Eden.' The correspondences between Cain and Abel and Steinbeck's Caleb and Aaron are undisguised and numerous.

One of the bold and moving characteristics of these books is that Steinbeck sees the sacred figures of the Old and New Testaments in the life of the poor, often what would be called the ‘white trash'. He sees the divine in the ordinary and in the dispossessed and he has no hesitation in plunging into that association. His Christianity and his socialism both feed his fiction and they are intermingled.

Rather more unexpectedly, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece and a work of genius,
The Great Gatsby
, has been analysed in Christian terms.

Gatsby is seen again and again as a Christ-figure. ‘He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father's business.' Much play is made of Gatsby's wedding with the parable of the wedding feast in the
Bible and the lack of guests. The narrator writes of the strangers at Gatsby's wedding, called in to make up a crowd, people Gatsby did not know. His funeral, too, is, like the death of Christ on the Cross, attended only by two women.

Another Nobel Prize winner, William Golding, was a classicist and something of a pagan, but the Bible infuses what for me are his two strongest books,
The Spire
and
Lord of the Flies
.

The Spire
is the story of the building of a medieval cathedral. It is based on the construction of Salisbury Cathedral. Golding taught in Salisbury Cathedral School and lived for much of his life within easy driving distance of that tremendous slender spire, such weight and elegance raised on such treacherous ground. Golding takes the business of the building, the technical problems, the ingenuity, the labour, and reinforces it with the primitive faith of his protagonist, who sees it as a sign for God, a miracle in stone. If this great mass can be raised on such unsuitable marshland, then God exists. It becomes a test of the power of God and the novel is as passionate about direct prayer and the probability of its being answered as any of the Old Testament prophets.

The title
Lord of the Flies
is a literal translation of ‘Baal-Zebub', the old Canaanite god of evil. Though there are no direct connections,
Lord of the Flies
contains echoes and parallels which come from a Bible which Golding knew well.

The island itself is a Garden of Eden until the fall of the formerly innocent – choirboys in this instance – brings evil into the human equation. There is a ‘snake-thing', a parallel with the snake that tempted Eve. Simon, the boy who is killed by the other boys, is a representation of Jesus Christ. And Golding's use of the word ‘beast' is rooted in the Book of Revelation. Golding ‘uses' the King James Version to layer his novel, and uses parts of it which are more from the New Testament than the Old. It is still suffi - ciently potent in the mind of this often despairing classicist. He
reaches out for it. In that sense it remains a support, even a necessary foundation.

From Walt Whitman, who saw the 1860 edition of
Leaves of Grass
as ‘the great Construction of the New Bible', to John Updike, who takes on Protestant rigour, ambition and guilt in many of his novels, to Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
almost 150 years later, the King James Bible has not ceased to play a major part in American and much of English-speaking literature. It would be possible to rummage around and find so many other examples: C.S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Bishop, Rudyard Kipling, Margaret Atwood, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain. These writers take what the Bible said as sufficient, if not gospel, as words and possibilities if not prophecies and certainties, but are still beguiled, even a little bewitched by it. Or they use it – to challenge as well as to affirm, full of ready-made subjects with the convenience of being widely known. Even if, as in Thomas Hardy's
The Oxen
it is at a meditative, wistful distance, a trace memory.

And for the poet regarded as seminal to the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, and the novelist who has brought the world of the deep spiritual adventure of the Afro-Americans into fiction, Toni Morrison, both Nobel Prize winners, there is still a felt truth. Despite generations of sound and fury against the King James Version and despite the disproofs and pinpoint dismissals, the Bible to them is still the Word of God.

T.S. Eliot, American poet-philosopher, is an extraordinary tribute to the lasting influence of the King James Bible and his private embrace of Anglicanism. He stationed himself in London for the greater length of his life, where he worked as a banker and then as a publisher. His heroes included the committee, especially Launcelot Andrewes, who had finally steered the Bible into the harbour of the King James Version.

T.S. Eliot is regarded as an icon of modernism. Somehow, the poetry of such a man ought to be post-religious, not as utterly steeped in the King James Version and in Anglicanism as is much of the work of T.S. Eliot. And his great rival, W.H. Auden, was no less devoted to the Anglican Church and its book.

Eliot was a true believer and an explorer of the spiritual meanings to be gleaned from Christianity. He came from New England nonconformist stock. He converted to Anglicanism and became a regular churchgoer in his adopted city, London. In 1934 he became Warden of the Church of St Stephen, a post he held until 1959. He supervised the collection during Mass. He went on retreats, confessed his sins and received absolution. How strange this must have seemed to many of his contemporaries – increasingly secular,
indifferent or atheistic – and to his increasingly secular successors that Christianity and the Anglican religion and its sacred language and Catholic practices played such a crucial part in his life and in his imagination.

Surely this great twentieth-century Modernist poet could not be bound up in it in the same way as John Donne, a poet in whose lifetime the King James Bible was published? To continue in that vein in the sceptical, war-worn, scientifically triumphant twentieth century seems such an anachronism. Yet far from being an anachronism, T.S. Eliot was and remains the sounding poet of the century, his ‘message' as relevant to the age as his techniques and essays which have helped substantially to shape its literary style and tone.

He reached back to the King James Version in many ways: for words and sentences, for images, but above all, I think, for the meditative melancholy he found there, for the room to brood over mysteries without being mangled in the new philosophy. It might be more simple. It might be that he sincerely believed in Christ, in the Trinity, in the Resurrection, in a life eternal, in an Almighty God – and used his great gift to celebrate, explore and attempt to describe it. The fact and the results of his faith need to be reckoned with.

At times, in
Ash Wednesday
,
Four Quartets
and in
Little Gidding
, it seems that everything he writes – however powdered with past cultures – glides on a current of Anglicanism. As if all of it was composed in an English country churchyard, the graves, the few tilting tombstones and the ancient and sturdy little church were the perfect, in truth the only, context.

A seemingly simple example, ‘Journey of the Magi', is in a rather different category but it serves to illustrate two points: Eliot's unstrained commitment to the story of the Three Wise Men, and the ease with which he played it into the musings so characteristic of him.

He begins in such a practical way that you could think – you
are
to think – that this was a well-reported, historically accurate journey and what is being said is a matter-of-fact, trustworthy account.

‘Realistically' grumbling, tentative, there is neither vanity nor vainglory – Eliot leads us expertly into this story from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and makes it new without yielding a centimetre of its flat factual truth.

A few lines later, the voice of the poet changes

It is impossible to think that Eliot was simply ‘looking for a subject from the Bible' as so many others, legitimately, had done
down the centuries. The King James Version inspired his prose: the faith it denoted inspired his thinking: the story of Christ and what He promised inspired some of the finest poetry of the century.

He even, like Milton, rewrote the very opening of Genesis in his chorus
The Rock
.

Like T.S. Eliot, Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. Her prose comes, in part, from the Gospel tradition begun in slave-America and turned into song both in the singing and in the speech.
Song of Solomon
seems an inevitable title for a novel by Toni Morrison, as does
Beloved
: ‘this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.' In Morrison's
Beloved
the son becomes a daughter, resurrected into the life that had been ripped away from her, reincarnated and ‘seen' and accepted back in her home after the long absence.

There is actual Bible preaching in the book, the unmistakable Bible preaching/talking honed by the slave experience and the liberation from that experience. Souls join up and inhabit the bodies of those who are in a mutual circle of holy love. There is an omnipotent aura of the mystery of things and a belief that the key to that is to be discovered in biblical language. It all but beggars belief that after all the pounding it has taken, the King James Version is still a source for such great imaginative writers today.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENLIGHTENMENT

T
he ‘Enlightenment' traditionally describes a time when thought is considered to have come out of medieval religious darkness. This new thought is generally taken to be driven by reason, motivated by scientific enquiry and in its early stages dedicated to throwing off what were seen as the shackles of religious bondage. This Enlightenment, among a small number of scholars, was in place in the British Isles by the end of the seventeenth century: soon afterwards it was present in intellectual circles in America and throughout what we now know as Europe.

Despite being apparently vanquished in the Enlightenment century of tournaments of competing systems of thought, the Bible survived. In many ways it was even more influential in the nineteenth century than ever before and still today it is not without intellectual and artistic significance. Moreover, it was against the Scriptures, as revealed to the English-speaking world from the King James Bible, that these competing systems had to fight in order to flourish.