A few weeks ago, scrolling through Tumblr, I was arrested by a quote:
“I can’t think what it’s like to be certain. I’m afraid that it’s impossible for me. There isn’t a place for me.”
His voice was tense, excited, full of passion. As he went on, it became louder, louder than the voice I was used to, but still very clear.
“Listen, Lewis. I could believe in all the rest. I could believe in the catholic church. I could believe in miracles. I could believe in the inquisition. I could believe in eternal damnation. If only I could believe in God.”
“But you can’t, I said, with his cry still in my ears.
“I can’t begin to,” he said, his tone quiet once more. “I can’t get as far as ‘help Thou mine unbelief.’”
We left the ridge of the Roman road, and began to cross the shining fields.
“The nearest I’ve got is this,” he said. “It has happened twice. It’s completely clear – and terrible. Each time has been on a night when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had the absolute conviction – it’s much more real than anything one can see or touch – that God and His world exist. And everyone can enter and find their rest. Except me. I’m infinitely far away for ever. I am alone and apart and infinitesimally small – and I can’t come near.”
This comes from C. P. Snow’s
The Light and the Dark, and of course I had to read it at once.
Now unfortunately this turns out to be one of those rare times when my book instincts have led me astray. The above excerpt electrified me, but the rest of the book was… it’s
fine. It’s well-written. Our narrator (Lewis) is telling us the story of his friend Roy (the speaker in the above extract) and his struggles with recurring melancholia.
Roy hopes that if he can come to believe in God, that will cure his bouts of despair. When that doesn’t work, he decides to try the next best thing, “a feeble simulacrum of his search for God,” by attempting to embrace the Third Reich.
Given the kind of God Roy was looking for, based on his passionate declamation that “I could believe in the inquisition…in eternal damnation,” it strikes me the move from God to Hitler actually makes perfect sense. God the Fuhrer seems like just the sort of deity who would delight in damning people for the hell of it, too.
You might imagine that Roy’s flirtation with Nazism put me off the book, but in fact I had gotten annoyed with Roy much earlier, simply because I felt that the author was continually leaning over my shoulder breathing “Isn’t he dreamy?” Young, handsome, deeply and romantically sad; slender yet strong, intellectually brilliant, showered in honors to which he is indifferent; a notorious womanizer who had a brief gay love affair in his youth –
I did entertain the possibility that Snow may have meant us to read Roy as gay, adding an extra subtext to his despairing “There isn’t a place for me.” But upon reflection I think this briefly-alluded-to affair is simply meant to add to Roy’s aura of irresistible dreaminess. Women want him, men want to be him; but men also just want him. Don’t you, dear reader, also want…
“NO,” I said, heaping rejection like coals of fire on poor Roy’s head, like an angry god myself.
So in a way it was a bit of a relief when Roy started flirting with Nazism, as I felt released from any obligation to like this beautiful sad boy. Look how sad he is. How could you dislike anyone so sad and so beautiful at the same time? He does perhaps allow his sadness to lead him into excesses, but it’s just because he’s so darn SAD, don’t you understand? Well, look, I think we can all agree that “fanboy for the Third Reich” is simply an excess too far.
Unfortunately, now that I’d decided I was allowed to hate him, I began to find him far less annoying. It helps that when the war starts, he signs up to fly for the RAF, mostly because he knows the death rates for pilots is high, but at least he’s fighting for the right side even if he
is also sighing re: the Nazis “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last best hope.” Last best hope for WHAT, Roy? This is genuinely unclear to me, because he recoils whenever he has to interface with a specific example of Nazi doctrine, like their policies toward the Jews or their desire to conquer Europe, when considered as a concrete fact rather than in the abstract. (In the abstract he thinks unification is a good idea and, after all, it will never be accomplished peacefully.)
So he’s still fumbling about in basic political incoherence, but he nonetheless achieves a certain pathos in this section. Despite myself, I felt some of the tragedy of this beautiful sad full-grown man who is clearly always going to be spiritually a beloved boy in C. P. Snow’s heart.
Snow is actually quite a good writer, I think, but would have been even better if he could have gotten out of his own way. There’s no need to constantly point out Roy’s dreaminess. He’s put enough of it on the page that readers could notice it on their own, if they were only left alone.
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