Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis dominus omnipotens.

The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.

Mel should be up here, whoever Mel is.

For Frank, compline is the high point of his day, a pure moment of monastic theatricality that vindicates the nothingness that precedes and follows it. All lights go out. A solitary monk enters the medieval church and puts a taper to the candles. The crepuscular vaults flicker. Are we inside or out? The monks arrive in a blur of white. White is not the usual colour for Benedictines, but these Benedictines have been Cistercianised somewhere along the way. So much the better. Their whiteness etherialises them. They are angels. Sitting in his pew, watching Gordon’s heaving back, Frank has also become angelic. He lowers his elbows on to his knees, makes a cup of his hands, and drops his chin into it. If he were an item of church furniture he could not be more inanimate. Or more hushed.

The monks take their places in the choir stall. Their voices are not the voices of men. There is nothing of earth in them. They are starry, crystalline, composed of elements entirely foreign to Frank’s understanding. It is quickly over. The Greater Silence descends. The Abbot, who has a small neat unravaged face, is the first to leave. He swings his censer in Frank’s direction, blessing him, preparing him for the night. Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Be sure it is not you, Frank. Resist him. Be firm in your faith.

The monks wait for the Abbot to quit the church, then they leave their stalls and drop to their knees in stray patterns, like sheep on a field. First they bow to the altar, then they prostrate themselves before the Virgin, in front of whose portrait two high white candles burn. Nothing the monks do in Frank’s sight is more demonstrative or more passionate than this. Some stay on their knees, wringing their hands, a long time. Regimented all day, this is their hour of pure individuation. They choose their own moment to rise and depart, regretfully, like lovers, now one, now another, followed at last by Frank Ritz, into the Silence.

According to Pope Gregory:

One day while Saint Benedict was alone, the tempter came in the form of a little blackbird, which began to flutter in front of his face. It kept so close that he could easily have caught it in his hand. Instead, he made the sign of the Cross and the bird flew away. The moment it left, he was seized with an unusually violent temptation. The evil spirit recalled to his mind a woman he had once seen, and before he realised it his emotions were carrying him away. Almost overcome in the struggle, he was on the point of abandoning the lonely wilderness, when suddenly with the help of God’s grace he came to himself.

It was in order to see to it that the blackbird did not call on him again that Benedict rolled naked in those thorns and nettles.

Frank too, on only his second night in the Abbey, was visited by the fluttering blackbird of lewdness. Only in Frank’s case it visited him in his sleep. And the woman that was recalled to his mind was not one he knew or had ever seen, unless she was the abstract and précis of all the women he had desired.

She was suddenly there, whoever she was, on his arm. Not young. A woman in her late thirties, say, with close cropped dark hair, apparently a famous memoirist. He was walking up a hill with her, into a cul de sac, peopled with labouring masses, chimneys all around, a factory at the end of the cul de sac, wire fencing, and a forbidding gate. They were separate from their surroundings and not going anywhere. Ambling, arm in arm. He could feel her breasts moving against his shoulder, her dress was loose fitting and flapped against her thighs. Her considered her to be beyond him, despite their proximity; out of his league, not on account of her beauty but her worldliness and intelligence. What could such a woman see in him, a mere monk? Everything! — that was what was so wonderful. Everything! She leaned into him and blew into his neck. ‘This could be it for me,’ she said. ‘Curtains.’ She smiled. He was on fire. Every touch burnt him. This was it for him too. He had never been happier. But he was troubled by one thing: he wasn’t free. How was he to tell her, and yet not scare her away, that he was accounted for, that he had taken vows and would only be able to fit her into the canonical interstices of his life, between prime and terce, between sext and vespers? And then, as her dress flapped, revealing her thighs, another thought occurred. He could make himself free. He trembled, in his dream, with the audacity of what he was thinking, but she melted into him, vanished inside him, leaving him no choice …

And then the buzzer went off outside his room, calling him to vigils and lauds.

Even as a boy, when the roaring lion could do what it liked with him, Frank had never dreamed such sleek insinuations. Was it the Abbey, just as it had been the wilderness for Benedict, that gave the dream its treacherous tactility? Does renunciation turn on you, tempting you with visions far more voluptuous than any you have to deal with in the ordinary sublunary world of regulation sin?

Those poor monks, in that case.

Small wonder, compline over, that they are reluctant to get up off their knees to face the Greater Silence. Knowing their adversary, the silky tempter, will soon be slithering in beside them …

They’d be safer from corruption down on the floor of a shtuppenhaus in Wythenshawe.

Poor monks, but not piteous, nor pitiable. Frank watches them going about their business in the fields, dressed in jeans and wellingtons, carrying buckets, tending to the bees, chasing chickens, laughing amongst themselves. Benedict warned against merriment — ‘Only a fool raises his voice in laughter’ — in deference to which, Brother Ritz the Obedient bears himself most gravely in the precincts of the monastery. Humourless little prick, is how the monks must think of him. Sometimes he feels he spoils their mealtimes, so conscientiously does he interpret the rule and spirit of silence. He lowers his head during grace, averts his eyes, eats sparingly. It’s just food, Frank. But he may as well be at a repast for the dead. Funereal, that’s what he has become. The other retreatants are the same. They are all or nothing men, every one of them. And now that all has failed them, they are making themselves over religiously to nothingness. The monks, meanwhile, are rollicking. They tuck their napkins into the necks of their habits, they scoop out mountains of yellow cream from their individual containers of Summer County, rub breadcrumbs into their soup bowls, laugh to themselves when the Brother who reads to them throughout the meal comes upon something salacious in The Tablet — ‘The Pontiff was later said to have hit it off particularly well with Mrs Carey’ — and then, when they have finished eating, zip themselves still smiling back into their hoods, like demonic pixies.

Without exchanging a word or a glance with one another they have succeeded in dining communally.

For a sperm-throwing, socially penetrative man like Frank Ritz, there is a lesson here as to singleness and community, if only he knew how to learn it.

‘Wednesday!’ Brother Cyprian says to him if they happen to run into each other on a Wednesday.

‘Wednesday?’

‘Lunch …’

‘Lunch?’

‘Fish and chips. Wednesdays. Yum!’

In the past, Frank had always felt superior to people who made a present of themselves to a religious order. Taking the easy way out, was how he thought of it. (Not battling hardships, the way Frank did.) Refusing to face up to life’s responsibilities. (Not engaging with them full on, the way Frank did.) And most importantly, making freaks and eunuchs of themselves. But now he is beginning to look at it differently. Freakish? What does their life lack? Fucking. Nothing else. Only fucking. That was his real objection to the way they lived. They didn’t fuck. Ugh! How vile! They didn’t fuck. But now Frank doesn’t fuck either. So what divides them? Nothing divides them. Might he not as well become a monk, then? It’s pleasant up here. Ordered. Quiet. Cold. Dead. What about it?