A Maggot - John Fowles (58 page)

Vive vi, vive vum, vive vi, vive vum, vive vi,
vive vum ...
it is clear they are not
rational words, and can mean nothing.

Epilogue

READERS WHO know something of what that Manchester
baby was to become in the real world will not need telling how little
this is a historical novel. I believe her actual birth was two months
before my story begins, on 29 February 1736. I know nothing in
reality of her mother, and next to nothing of various other
characters, such as Lacy and Wardley, who also come from real
history. They are here almost all invention beyond their names. It
may be that books and documents exist that might have told me more of
them in historical terms than the little I know: I have consulted
none, nor made any effort to find them. I repeat, this is a maggot,
not an attempt, either in fact or in language, to reproduce known
history.

I have the greatest respect for exact and
scrupulously documented history, not least because part of my life is
(in a very humble way) devoted to it; but this exacting discipline is
essentially a science, and immensely different in its aims and
methods from those of fiction. I have mentioned Daniel Defoe (who
died in 173 r) only once in these pages; which is poor recognition of
the admiration and liking I have always felt for him. A Maggot is not
at all meant to be in any direct imitation; he is, in any case,
inimitable. To following some of what I take to be the underlying
approach and purpose in his novels, I happily confess.

My text is maggot also in how it came to grow from
that primitive image of travellers I mentioned at the beginning. One
day one of the mysterious riders gained a face; that is, by chance I
acquired a pencil and water-colour drawing of a young woman. There
was no indication of artist, simply a little note in ink in one
corner, which seemingly says, in Italian, 16 July 1683. This precise
dating pleased me at first as much as the drawing itself, which is
not of any distinction; yet something in the long dead face, in the
eyes, an inexplicable presentness, a refusal to die, came slowly to
haunt me. Perhaps it was the refusal to die that, improbably in all
other ways, linked this real and unknown woman with another and known
one I had much longer respected; and whom you have just seen born.

Such gross inconsequence,
jumping from a picture of a seventeenth—century Italian woman (and
prostitute, I have a strong suspicion) to the memory, later in
history, of a remarkable and saintly English one, must defy all
normal notions of how one goes about making a novel. At the least I
owe it to those readers whose ears have not pricked at the name Ann
Lee, nor know what she became far outside these pages in the real
world, to end with a word about her, my other presiding spirit.

* * *

A convinced atheist can hardly dedicate a novel to a
form of Christianity. None the less, this one was partly written out
of a very considerable affection and sympathy for the United Society
of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, better known as the
Shakers, of which Ann Lee was the founder. To most people now, I
imagine, Shaker means little more than a furniture style and an
ultra-puritanism superficially akin to the asceticism of some
monastic orders (such as the Cistercian) from the opposite religious
extreme. Orthodox theologians have always despised the sect's
doctrinal naivety; orthodox priests, its fanaticism; orthodox
capitalists, its communism; orthodox communists, its superstition;
orthodox sensualists, its abhorrence of the carnal; and orthodox
males, its striking feminism. I find it one of the most fascinating -
and proleptic - episodes in the long history of Protestant Dissent.

This is not only for social and historical reasons.
Something in Shaker thought and theology (not least in its holding
that a Holy Trinity that has no female component cannot be holy), in
its strange rituals and marvellously inventive practical life, in its
richly metaphorical language and imaginative use of dancing and
music, has always seemed to me to adumbrate the relation of fiction
to reality. We novelists also demand a far-fetched faith, quite often
seemingly absurd in relation to normal reality; we too need a
bewildering degree of metaphorical understanding from our readers
before the truths behind our tropes can be conveyed, can 'work'.

England had already, of course, had an age of
outspoken dissent (and self-discovery) in the 1640s and 1650s; Ann
Lee's came late, historically. Only a very few years after she was
born, in the April of 1739, a dissatisfied yet ordained priest in the
Church of England stood on Kingsdown, a hill then outside the city of
Bristol, and spoke, rather than formally preached, to a large and
happenstance gathering of the Bristol poor, consisting mainly of
miners and their families. Many of his listeners began to weep,
others were so disturbed and moved they fell into a catatonic trance.
To be sure they were very rough, illiterate, easy to work upon; such
cathartic phenomena are now both anthropologically and
psychologically well understood. But on Kingsdown something more than
the speaker's charisma was involved. Quite simply his audience was
being given light. It was as if they had all been blind or (as many
of the miners truly had) living in darkness till then.

I suspect we owe quite as much to all those
incoherent sobs and tears and ecstasies of the illiterate as to the
philosophers of mind and the sensitive artists. Unorthodox religion
was the only vehicle by which the vast majority, who were neither
philosophers nor artists, could express this painful breaking of the
seed of the self from the hard soil of an irrational and
tradition-bound society - and a society not so irrational it did not
very well know how much it depended on not seeing its traditions
questioned, its foundations disturbed. Can we wonder the new-born ego
(whose adolescence we call the Romantic Age) often chose means to
survive and to express itself as irrational as those that restrained
it?

Now I hate modern evangelism, with its spurious
Madison Avenue techniques and general loathsome conservatism in
politics. It seems almost always unerringly based on the worst, most
backward side of Christianity, an insidious supporter of whatever is
retrograde in contemporary thought and politics; and thereby denies
the very essence of Jesus himself. Nor do I think any better of this
same trait in many other religions, such as Islam. But what happened
with John Wesley (the man above) and Ann Lee and their like in the
eighteenth century is quite different: an emotional enlightenment
beside, almost in spite of, the intellectual (and middle-class)
enlightenment the
siecle de lumieres
is famous for. They had, Wesley by his energy and transparent
strength of conviction, Ann Lee in her obstinate (and immensely
brave) determination and her poetry - her genius for images - a
practical vision of what was wrong with their world. Ann's vision was
more thoroughgoing than Wesley's, a fact that we may attribute in
part to her sex, but perhaps above all to the fact that she was
uneducated; that is, unsullied by stock belief, learned tradition,
and the influence of the other kind of enlightenment. At heart people
like Ann were revolutionaries; one with the very first Christians of
all, and their founder.

Their efforts (especially John Wesley's) were, as
always, one day to breed a narrow-minded bigotry, an inward tyranny
as life-stultifying as the tyrannies they first tried to end, or fled
from. But I speak here of that first fuse, that spirit that was in
them at the beginning, before the organized business of religious
conversion and gaining adherents
en masse
came, and dimmed and adulterated their fundamental and highly
personal example and force. One of the saddest ironies in all
religious history is that we should now so admire and value Shaker
architecture and furniture, fall on our knees like Mies van der Rohe
before the Hancock Round Barn; yet totally reject the faith and way
of life that made these things.

The Shakers had purely English roots, but were very
soon persecuted out of England. In Manchester the real Ann Lee was
first to be a mill-girl, then fur-cutter for a hatter, then a cook in
an infirmary; she was to marry (Abraham Stanley, another blacksmith)
and to bear four children by him, all of whom died young. . She set
out for America in 1774, accompanied by only a tiny handful of
fellow-believers. Her husband deserted her almost at once there, and
for several years her 'family' were harried as much as in England.
The growth, maturity and decline of the United Society all took place
in America. Much of both the fixed dogma and the practices of the
Society in its gathered communities was developed after Ann's death
in 1784, by disciples like Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright; but behind
all (not least in the great revival of the 1840s) lie the seeds of
Ann's very special personality.

It is easy enough now to dismiss much of the
aftermath of her memory, the spirit drawings, the 'dictated' songs
and music, the trance states, as naive religiosity, and at least
partly a product of the sexual abstinence for which the Society was
famous (and whose dangers it was well aware of, in terms of the
'conversation' and other rituals it evolved to compensate for that
deprivation). A similar wild and suspect religiosity may be found
before Ann's time, in those early French Prophets whose names I have
Wardley cite.

Yet something haunts the more serious side of the
United Society's life that cannot be so easily dismissed. It is an
aspiration, a determination to escape mere science, mere reason,
convention, established belief and religion, into the one thing that
excuses an escape from such powerful social gods, the founding of a
more

humane society ... all that is conveyed in 'more
love'. It was almost as if Ann Lee and the early Shakers foresaw
that, if not Antichrist, then certainly Mammon, the universal greed
in each for more money, for more personal wealth and possession,
would one day rule this world and threaten to destroy it. Our present
world is as deaf as poor Dick to Anne's appeal for simplicity, sanity
and self-control. 'Gathered' or community Shakerism is now virtually
extinct, its faith too plain, its rules too radical, for
twentieth-century Adam and Eve. Yet for me something else in it does
not die.

Dissent is a universal human phenomenon, yet that of
Northern Europe and America is, I suspect, our most precious legacy
to the world. We associate it especially with religion, since all new
religion begins in dissent, that is, in a refusal to believe what
those in power would have us believe - what they would command and
oblige us, in all ways from totalitarian tyranny and brutal force to
media manipulation and cultural hegemony, to believe. But in essence
it is an eternal biological or evolutionary mechanism, not something
that was needed once, merely to meet the chance of an earlier
society, when religious belief was the great metaphor, and would-be
conforming matrix, for many things beside religion. It is needed
always, and in our own age more than ever before.

A historically evolved outward form, adapted as in a
plant or animal to cope with one set of conditions, is doomed when a
new set appears; as in my view not only the United, but Western
society as a whole, only too plainly shows. What the Shakers
'crossed', or condemned, in the society and world they had to inhabit
may seem to us quaint and utopian, their remedies hopelessly
unattainable today; but some at least of the questions they asked and
the challenges they flung seem to me still unanswered.

In so much else we have developed immeasurably from
the eighteenth century; with their central plain question - what
morality justifies the flagrant injustice and inequality of human
society? - we have not progressed one inch. One major reason is that
we have committed the cardinal sin of losing the old sense of
mediocrity: that of a wise and decent moderation. It is betrayed in
the way we have twisted and debased the word (as our sense of
individual self has grown) to its modern sense. This is the hidden
price, as in the Greek gift at Troy, put by nature upon our
twentieth-century consciousness of and obsession with self. A species
cannot fill its living space to absurd excess in number; and still so
exalt excess, the extreme, non-mediocrity, in the individual. When
excess becomes synonymous with success, a society is doomed, and by
far more than Christ.

I have long concluded that established religions of
any kind are in general the supreme example of forms created to meet
no longer existing conditions. If I were asked what the present and
future world could best lose or jettison for its own good, I should
have no hesitation: all established religion. But its past necessity
I do not deny. Least of all do I deny (what novelist could?) that
founding stage or moment in all religions, however blind, stale and
hidebound they later become, which saw a superseded skeleton must be
destroyed, or at least adapted to a new world. We grow too clever now
to change; too selfish and too multiple, too dominated by the Devil's
great I, in Shaker terminology; too self-tyrannized, too pledged to
our own convenience, too tired, too indifferent to others, too
frightened.

I mourn not the outward form, but the lost spirit,
courage and imagination of Mother Ann Lee's word, her Logos; its
almost divine maggot.