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Elmer Gantry
Evolvesexcerpts from Elmer Gantry by Sinclair
Lewis
The old woman
said,"All these years of having to pretend to be good when
we were just common
folks! Ain't you glad you can just be simple folk?"
"Maybe it is
restful. But that's not saying I wouldn't do it over again."
The old man ruminated a long
while.
"I think I would. Anyway, no use discouraging these young
people from entering the ministry. Somebody got to preach the
gospel truth, ain't
they!"
"I suppose so. Oh, dear. Fifty years since I married a preacher!
And if I could still only be sure about the
virgin birth! Now
don't you go explaining!
I know it's true - it's in the Bible. If I could
only believe it!"
"I would of liked to had you try your hand at
politics. If I could of been, just once, to a senator's house, to a banquet
or something, just once, in a nice bright red dress with gold slippers, I'd of
been willing to go back to alpaca and scrubbing floors, and
listening to you
rehearsing your sermons, out in the stable, to that old mare we had for so
many years."
"Why is that it's
only in religion that the
things you got to believe are agin all experience? Now don't you go and
quote that 'I believe as it
is impossible at me again!
Believe because it's
impossible! Just like a
minister!"
"Oh, dear, I hope I don't live long enough to
lose my faith," he replied.
*
During his second year of
seminary, just finished, Elmer Gantry had been more
voluminously bored than ever at
Terwillinger.
Constantly Elmer Gantry had thought of quitting, but
after his journeys to the city
of Monarch, where he was in
closer relation to fancy ladies and to bartenders than one would have
desired in a holy clerk, Elmer Gantry got a second wind in his resolve to lead
a pure life, and so managed to keep on toward perfection, as symbolized by the
degree of Bachelor of
Divinity.
Hank observed, "Morning, Mrs. Gantry. Elmy, going
to be a preacher, eh'!"
"I
am, Hank."
"Like it?" Hank was grinning and scratching his cheek.
Elmer Gantry boomed, "I do, Hank. I love it! I love the ways of the
Lord, and I don't ever propose to put my foot into any others! Because I have
tasted the fruit of evil, Hank - you know that. And there's nothing to it. What
fun we had, Hank, was nothing to the peace and joy I feel now. I am kind of
sorry for you, my boy."
He loomed over Hank, dropped his paw heavily on
his shoulder. "Why don't you try to get right with God? Or maybe you're smarter
than he is!"
"Never claimed to be anything of the sort!" snapped Hank,
and in that testiness Elmer Gantry triumphed and Elmer Gantry's mother exulted.
*
"We're all just rarin' to go out and preach the precious
Baptist doctrine of 'Get ducked or duck.'
We're wonders.
We
admit it.
And people actually sit and listen
to us, and don't choke!
I suppose they're overwhelmed by our nerve!
And we have to have nerve, or we'd never dare to stand in a pulpit
again.
We'd quit, and pray God to forgive us for having
stood up and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain what
we ourselves say are the
unexplainable mysteries!
But I still claim that there are preachers
who haven't our holiness.
Why
is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?"
*
"I'm
glad to hear you say that," marveled
Eddie.
"Because the Baptists and the Methodists
have all the numbskulls - except those that belong to the Catholic Church and
the henhouse sects - and so even you, Horace, can get away with being a
prophet.
There are some intelligent people in the Episcopal and
Congregational Churches, and a few of the Campbellite flocks, and they check up
on you.
Of course all Presbyterians are half-wits, too, but they have a
standard doctrine, and they can trap you into a
heresy trial.
But
in the Baptist and Methodist churches, man!
There's the berth for philosophers like me and hoot-owls like you,
Eddie!
All you have to do with Baptists and Methodists, as Father Carp
suggests."
"All you have to do," said Zenz, "is to get some sound and
perfectly meaningless doctrine and
keep repeating
it."
Brother Elmer Gantry was shaking hands all round.
Brother Elmer Gantry's sanctifying ordination, or it might have been
his summer of bouncing from pulpit to pulpit, had so elevated him that he could
greet them as impressively and fraternally as a sewing machine agent.
Elmer Gantry shook hands with a good grip, he looked at all the more
aged sisters as though he were moved to give them a holy kiss.
Brother
Elmer Gantry said the right things about the weather, and by luck or
inspiration it was to the most
acidly devout man in Boone County that he quoted a homicidal text from
Malachi.
"Why not call them doubts?
Doubting is a very healthy
sign, especially in the young.
Don't you see that otherwise you'd
simply be swallowing
instruction whole, and no fallible human instructor can always be right,
do you think?"
That
began it - began a talk, always cautious, increasingly frank, which lasted till
midnight. Dr. Zechlin lent him (with the adjuration not to let anyone else see)
Renali "Jesus," and Coe "The Religion of a Mature Mind."
Frank came again to his room and they walked, strolled together through
sweet apple orchards,
paying no attention even of
Indian summer pastures in their concentration on
the destiny of man and
the grasping
gods.
Not for three months did Zechlin admit that he was an
agnostic, and
not for another month that
atheist would perhaps be a sounder name for him than agnostic.
Before ever he had taken his theological doctorate, Zechlin had felt
that it was as impossible to take literally the myths of Christianity as
to take literally the myths of
Buddhism.
For many years he had rationalized his heresies.
These myths, he comforted himself, are symbols embodying the glory of
God and the leadership of Jesus' genius.
He had worked out
a satisfactory parable:
The
literalist asserts that a flag is something
holy, something to die for, not
symbolically but in itself.
The infidel, at the other end of the scale, maintains that the flag is
a strip of wool or
silk or
cotton with
rather unaesthetic marks printed on it, and of considerably less use, therefore
of less holiness and less romance, than a
shirt or a blanket.
But to the unprejudiced thinker, like
himself, it was a symbol, sacred only by suggestion but not the less sacred.
After nearly two decades he knew that he had been deceiving himself;
that he did not actually admire Christ as the sole leader; that
the teachings of Jesus were
contradictory and borrowed from earlier rabbis; and that if
the teachings of
Christianity were adequate flags, symbols,
philosophies for most
of the bellowing preachers whom he met and detested, then perforce they must
for him be the flags, the symbols, of the
enemy.
Yet he went on
as a Baptist preacher, as a teacher of ministerial cubs.
And he did love to tread theological
labyrinths.
*
"Oh, my God, it is so sweet - so sweet!" he
sighed, as he fumbled for her hand and felt it slip confidently into his.
Suddenly he was ruthless, tearing it all down:
"To darn' sweet for me, I guess. Sharon,
I'm a bum.
I'm not so bad as
a preacher, or I wouldn't be if I had the chance, but me - I'm no good.
I have cut out the booze and
tobacco - for you -
I really have!
But I used to drink like a fish, and till I met you
I never thought any woman except my
mother was any good.
I'm just a second-rate traveling
man.
I came from Paris, Kansas, and I'm not even up to that hick
burg, because they are hard-working and decent there, and I'm not even that.
And you - you're not only a prophetess, which you sure are, the real
big thing, but you're a Falconer.
Family! Old Servants! This old house!
Oh, it's no use!
You're too big for me. I can't lie to you!"
He
had put away her slim hand, but it came creeping back over his, her fingers
tracing the valleys between his knuckles while she murmured:
"You will
be big! I'll make you!
Perhaps I'm a prophetess, a little bit, but
I'm also a good
liar.
You see. I'm not a Falconer. There ain't any! My name is Katie
Jonas.
I was born in Utica. My dad worked on a brickyard.
I
picked out the name Sharon Falconer while I was a stenographer.
I never
saw this house till two years ago; I never saw these old family servants till
then - they worked for the folks that owned the place - and even they weren't
Falconers - they had the aristocratic name of Sprugg!
Incidentally, this
place isn't a quarter paid for.
I am Sharon Falconer
now!
I've made her - by prayer and by having a right to be her!
And you're going to stop being poor Elmer Gantry of Paris, Kansas.
You're going to be the Reverend Dr. Gantry, the great captain of souls!
Oh, I'm glad you don't come from anywhere in particular!
Oh,
you will serve me - won't you?"
"Forever!" And there was little said
then.
Even the agreement that she was to get rid of Cecil, to make
Elmer her permanent assistant, was reached in a few casual assents.
He was certain that the steely film of her
dominance was withdrawn.
Yet when they went in, she said gaily that
they must be early abed; up early tomorrow; and that she would take ten pounds
off him at tennis.
When he whispered. "Where is your room, sweet?" she
laughed with a chilling impersonality, "You'll never know, poor lamb!"
Elmer the
bold, Elmer the enterprising, went clumping off to his room, and solemnly
he undressed, wistfully he stood by the window, his soul riding out on the
darkness to incomprehensible destinations.
He jumped into bed and dropped toward sleep, too weary with fighting
her résistance to lie thinking of possible tomorrows.
He heard a
tiny scratching noise.
It seemed to him that it was the doorknob
turning.
He sat up, throbbing.
The sound was frightened away,
but began again, a faint grating, and the bottom of the door swished slowly on
the carpet.
The fan of pale light from the hall widened and, craning,
he could see her, but only as a
ghost, a white film.
He held out his arms, desperately, and
presently she stumbled against them.
"No! Please!"
Hers was the
voice of a sleep-walker.
"I just came in to say good-night and tuck you
into bed. Such a bothered unhappy child! Into bed. I'll kiss you good-night and
run."
His head burrowed into the pillow. Her hand touched his cheek
lightly, yet through her fingers flowed a current which lulled him into
slumber, a slumber
momentary but deep with
contentment.
With effort he said, "You too -
you need comforting, maybe you need bossing,
when I get over being scared of you."
"No.
I must take my
loneliness alone. I'm different, whether it's cursed or blessed. But -
lonely - yes - lonely."
He was
sharply awake as her
fingers slipped up his cheek, across his temple, into his swart hair. "Your
hair is so thick," she said drowsily.
"Your heart beats so. Dear
Sharon -"
Suddenly, clutching his arm, she cried. "Come! It is
The Call!"
He was
bewildered as he followed her, white in her night-gown trimmed at the throat
with white fur, out of his room, down the hall, up a steep little stairway to
her own apartments; the more bewildered to go from that genteel corridor, with
its forget-me-not wallpaper and stiff engravings of Virginia worthies, into a
furnace of scarlet.
Her bedroom was as
insane as an
Oriental cozy corner of 1895 - a couch high on carven ivory
covered with a mandarin coat; unlighted brass lamps in the likeness of mosques
and pagodas; gilt papier-mache armor on the walls; a wide dressing-table with a
score of cosmetics in odd Parisian bottles; tall candlesticks, the
twisted and flowered candles lighted; and
over everything a hint of incense.
She opened a closet, tossed a
robe to him, cried, "For the
service of the altar!" and vanished into a dressing-room beyond.
Diffidently, feeling rather like a fool,
he put on the robe.
It was of purple velvet embroidered with black
symbols unknown to him, the collar heavy with gold thread.
He was not quite sure what he was to do, and
he waited obediently.
She
stood in the doorway, posing, while he gaped.
She was so tall and
her hands, at her sides, the backs up and the fingers arched, moved like lilies
on the bosom of a stream.
She
was fantastic in a robe of deep crimson adorned with golden stars and
crescents, swastikas and tau crosses; her feet were in silver sandals, and
round her hair was a tiara of
silver moons set with steel points that flickered in the candlelight.
A mist of incense floated about her, seemed to rise from her, and as
she slowly raised her arms he felt in scboolboyish awe that
she was veritably a
priestess.
Her voice was
under the spell of the
sleep-walker once more as she sighed "Come! It is the chapel!"
She
marched to a door part-hidden by the couch, and led him into a room.
Now he was no longer part amorous, part inquisitive, but all uneasy.
What hanky-panky of construction had been performed he never knew;
perhaps it was merely that the floor above this small room had been removed so
that it stretched up two stories; but in any case there it was - a shrine
bright as bedlam at the bottom but seeming
to rise through darkness to the
sky.
The walls were hung with black velvet; there were no chairs;
and the whole room focused on a wide altar.
It was
an altar of grotesque humor or
of madness, draped with Chinese
fabrics, crimson, apricot, emerald, gold.
There were two stages of pink
marble.
Above the altar hung an
immense crucifix with Jesus bleeding at nail-wounds and pierced side; and
on the upper stage was plaster bust of the
Virgin, Saint
Theresa, Saint Catherine, a garish Sacred Heart, a dolorous simulacrum of
the dying Saint Stephen.
Crowded on the lower stage was a crazy rout of
what Elmer called heathen idols: ape-headed gods, crocodile-headed gods, a god
with three heads and a god with six arms, a jade-and-ivory Buddha,
an alabaster naked Venus, and
in the center of them all a beautiful, hideous, intimidating and alluring
statuette of a silver goddess with a triple crown and a face as thin and long
and passionate as that of Sharon Falconer.
Before the altar was a long
velvet cushion, very thick and soft.
Here Sharon suddenly knelt, waving
him to his knees, as she cried:
"It is the hour!
Blessed Virgin, Mother Hera,
Mother Frigga, Mother Ishtar, Mother Isis,
dread Mother Astarte of the
weaving arms, it is thy priestess, it is she who after the blind centuries
and the groping years shall make it known to the Earth that ye are one, and
that in me are ye all
revealed, and that in this revelation shall come peace and
wisdom universal, the secret
of the spheres and the pit of understanding.
Ye who have leaned over me
and on my lips pressed your
immortal fingers, take this my brother to your bosoms, open his eyes,
release his pinioned spirit,
make him as the gods, that
with me he may carry the revelation for which
a thousand thousand grievous
years the Earth has panted.
"0 rosy cross and
mystic tower of ivory -
"Hear my
prayer.
"0 sublime April crescent-
"Hear my prayer.
"0 sword of undaunted steel most
excellent -
"Hear thou my prayer.
"0 serpent with unfathomable eyes -
"Hear my prayer.
"Ye veiled ones and ye bright ones - from
caves forgotten, the peaks of the future, the clanging today - join in me, lift
up, receive him, dread, nameless ones; yea, lift us then,
mystery on mystery,
sphere above sphere,
dominion on dominion,
to the very
throne!"
She picked up a
Bible which lay by her on the long velvet cushion at the foot of the altar,
she crammed it into his hands, and cried, "Read - read - quickly!"
It was open at the Song of Solomon, and bewildered he chanted:
"How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, 0 prince's daughter!
The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work
of a cunning craftsman.
Thy two breasts are like two young
roes.
Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.
The hair of thine head
like purple; the king is held in the galleries.
How fair and how
pleasant art thou, 0 love, for delights!"
She interrupted him, her
voice high and a little shrill:
"0 mystical rose, 0 lily most
admirable, 0 wondrous union; 0 St. Anna, Mother Immaculate, Demeter, Mother
Beneficent, Lakshmi, Mother Most Shining; behold, I am his and he is yours and
ye are mine !"
As he read on his voice rose
like a triumphant priest:
"I said,
I will go up to the palm
tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof -"
That verse he never
finished, for she swayed sideways as she knelt before the altar and sank into
his arms, her lips parted.
*
"Ah-hah, now I've got you, my
logical young
friend!
If we have that
liberty, why aren't you
willing to stay in the church?
Oh, Frank. Frank, you are such a
fool!
I know that you long for
righteousness.
Can't you see that you
can get it best by staying in the church,
liberalizing from within,
instead of running away and leaving
the people to the
ministrations of the Elmer Gantrys?"
"I
know.
I've
been thinking just that all these years.
That's why I'm still a
preacher!
But I'm coming to believe that it's
tommyrot.
I'm coming to think
that the hell howling old mossbacks corrupt the
honest
liberals more than the
liberals lighten the back
woods minds of the literalists.
What the dickens is the church
accomplishing, really?
Why have a church at all?
"It has this,
Frank:
It has the
unique personality and teachings of Jesus, and there is something in
Christ, there is something in
the way Jesus spoke, there is something in
the feeling of a man when
he suddenly has that inexpressible experience of knowing the Master and his
presence, which makes the church of Christ different from any other merely
human institution or instrument!
Christ is not simply
greater and wiser than Socrates or
Voltaire -
Jesus is entirely
different.
Anybody can
interpret and
teach Socrates or
Voltaire - in schools or books or conversation.
To interpret the personality and
teachings of Christ requires an especially called, chosen, trained, consecrated
body of men, united in the church."
"Phil, it sounds so splendid.
But just what were the
personality and the teachings of Christ?
I'll admit it's the heart
of the controversy over the
Christian
religion: - aside from the fact that, of course,
most people believe in a church
because they were born to it.
But the essential query is: Did
Christ - if the biblical accounts
of Christ are even half accurate - have
a particularly noble
personality, and were his teachings particularly original and profound?
You know it's
almost impossible to get people to read the Bible honestly.
They've
been so brought up to take the church interpretation of every word that they
read into it whatever they've been taught to find there."
Frank
had been with the Charity
Organization Society for 3 years, and he had become assistant general
secretary at the time of the
Dayton evolution trial (Scopes Monkey Trial).
It was
at this time that the brisker
conservative clergymen saw that their influence,
oratory and incomes were threatened by
any authentic learning.
A few of them were so intelligent as
to know that not only
was biology
dangerous to their positions, but also
history - which gave
no very sanctified
reputation to the Christian church;
astronomy - which found no
convenient heaven in the skies and snickered politely at the notion of
making the sun stand still in order to
win a Jewish border skirmish;
psychology - which doubted the
superiority of a Baptist
preacher fresh from the farm to
trained laboratory
observers; and all
the other sciences of the modern university.
They saw that
a proper school should
teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made
deader by leaving out all the amusing
literature, and the Hebrew Bible as
interpreted by men superbly trained to
ignore contradictions.
Laymen formed half a
dozen competent and well-financed organizations to threaten rustic state
legislators with political failure and
bribe them with unctuous clerical praise, so
that these alleyway and backwoods pedagogues would forbid teaching in all
state-supported schools and colleges of
anything which was not approved by the
evangelists.
It worked
edifyingly.
- Sinclair Lewis, from Elmer
Gantry |
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