The Feel of Steel (11 page)

Last time I was in England, I found at an antique market in Manchester a very small, very old, very wrinkled black Book of Common Prayer: small enough to hold in your palm, its print so minuscule I could hardly read it even with my glasses on. I bought it and gave it to a friend of mine, a man in his seventies who was about to have surgery to repair a damaged aorta. I have never quite got over my surprise that this man, a journalist who used to be my boss when I first started writing for newspapers, went to church. Until he was preparing himself for the operation, until he gladly accepted the little prayer book, I had imagined that he went to church as some middle-class English people seem to – as a comfortable patriotic act, an observance of social ritual. But on this day he said to me with a sort of urgent wonder: ‘Have you ever
thought about the fact that everybody who's ever lived on the earth has died? All of them. They –
all
–
died
.'

We were sitting in the garden outside the tiny house he and his wife own in a village in Oxfordshire. You step out their low front door, open the gate, cross a lane, mount a sloping green field, and there it is, their church: smelling of oldness, with old, old tombs. You go in. You pray, if you know how.

‘But where are all the bodies?' I said. ‘With so many bodies, you'd think the whole surface of the earth would be covered with graves.'

I once interviewed a young woman who had blasted her way out of the Moonies. She told me she had been so brainwashed in the sect that the mere sight of whatever the Moonies' holy book is, a single glance at the arrangement of the print on the page, at its type-face, was enough to flip her back into her state of mental servitude. Nevertheless, I venture to remark that sometimes just picking up a Bible is calming. At other times, though, I only need to see its spine on the shelf to feel sick. Sick with fatigue; with ignorance, and the sullen anger of the ignorant.

I saw at somebody's house a book I coveted:
Brown's Dictionary of the Bible
, an eighteenth-century publication which had come down to this man through his Scottish Calvinist family. I wanted the book because it was a sort of concordance, fanatically useful, with its thin paper and mad tiny print and passion for accuracy; but the thing that drove me crazy with desire to possess it was the first entry my eye fell on: ‘Grass: the well-known vegetable.'

On the phone to a scripturally literate friend I mention the separate books of the Bible recently published, pocket-size, by Canongate/Text. I rattle off a list of the twelve books in question. He laughs and says, ‘–
And
a packet o' Quick-Eze!' The editors of the Canongate Bibles, each of which has an introduction by some contemporary writer or thinker, chose the King James Version. Of course. At an Anglican private school ‘one' was brought up on it. You cannot beat it for grandeur, rolling periods blah blah blah – all the things people want who are reading the Bible, as Auden narkily put it, ‘for its prose'. But a lot of the time, with the King James, you don't actually know what it
means
.

One day, a long time ago, I picked up in an op shop J.B. Phillips' 1950s translation of the New Testament. I flipped it open snobbily and came upon a passage in one of the Gospels about the arrest of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. What I was used to, from schooldays, was
along the lines of ‘they smote him' or ‘they laid hands on him'; these King James phrases had a dull familiarity that could no longer reach me. But Phillips' text was blunter; it said something like this: ‘Then they took him outside and beat him.' For the first time the story touched the world as I know it. I grasped that he was beaten up, like a man in a police station or a lane behind a nightclub – that he was sent sprawling, that blood came out of his mouth, that his eyes closed under swellings. At that moment the story smashed through a carapace of numbness: it hurt me.

You can't really read the Bible without some sort of help. This is why I need to have at least two translations open at once: the King James, plus an edition which is cross-referenced and copiously annotated. (I like the New Jerusalem, though some people I've mentioned this to have narrowed their eyes and said, ‘It's Catholic, do you realise?') Here are three versions of the same text, which I mention because once I asked Tim Winton about praying: I said, ‘I want to do it but I don't know how': he referred me to Romans 8:26, which goes as follows:

(K
ING
J
AMES
): ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.'

(N
EW
J
ERUSALEM
): ‘And as well as this, the Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness, for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words.'

(R
EVISED
S
TANDARD
V
ERSION
): ‘Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.'

The third. No contest. Because of the phrase ‘with sighs too deep for words'.

Cynthia Ozick in a recent
New Yorker
quotes Vladimir Nabokov on what he demanded from translations of poetry: ‘copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers . . . I want such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense.' That's what I want. Often, though, I can't face it – the studiousness of it. I'm just too tired and impatient and lazy. I have late-twentieth-century reading habits: I want to rip along, following the path of narrative. In great stretches of the Bible it's a long way between meanwhiles. You need a different sort of reading style, and most of the time, at home by myself, I lack the discipline.

You can sit down, open the Bible at Genesis chapter one, or Matthew chapter one, or anywhere you like, and start to read. Or you can scan it like a magazine. People do this! I have done it. But the thing is so immense, so complex, so infuriating, that it forces you back on yourself. If you're in the wrong frame of mind – restless, demanding, looking for a quick fix – the book will fight you. It will push hideous violence in your face, or stun you with boredom, or go stiff with familiarity – then just as you're about to give up and go into the bathroom to put on a load of washing, it will casually tell you, in Exodus, that the God of Israel, when Moses saw him, was standing on ‘what looked like a sapphire pavement'. Or, in Judges, that when Eglun the greedy king of Moab was stabbed, ‘the fat closed upon the blade.' Or, in Bel and the Dragon, of the Apocrypha, that the angel of the Lord took the prophet Habakkuk ‘by the crown' (still holding the dinner he had just cooked in Judea) ‘and bare him by the hair of his head, and through the vehemency of his spirit set him in Babylon', right over the lion's den where Daniel had been flung and was lying hungry. Or, in Tobit, that ‘the boy left with the angel, and the dog followed behind.' Or, in John, that Christ came into this world so that people ‘might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.'

Abundance! And an answer to what Kafka calls ‘a longing for something greater than all that is fearful'.