Books: Cheerful Protestant

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(8 of 8)

The Best God Can Do. To hear him talk, each of those novels is an illustration of his cheerful philosophy—a belief whose statement has faint overtones of Jimmy Durante, faint undertones of the incorrigible schoolboy. The world, he says, "may not look so good, but it is the best God can do at the time, with conditions as they exist." He also likens the world to an old sow, which would lie down lazily in the muck and never move, if it were not for the gadflies—the rebels, artists and other eccentrics—that buzz and bite in her somnolent ear.

He is the very antithesis of Graham Greene, the guilt-ridden Catholic who keeps pecking away at the problem of personal salvation. Prisoner of Grace (though Gary says it wasn't) might have been written as an answer to Greene's End of the Affair. Personal salvation, Gary would say, is too selfish a business to bother about: his heroine is more concerned with her two dependent men than with her own rescue. Moral law? Justice? As far as human beings should concern themselves, "the world consists entirely of exceptions."

But Gary's singular explanation of what he thinks he is doing is drowned and swept away in the torrent of what he actually does. From the pregnant chaos of his books something better and more beautiful emerges than a neat pseudo-world of ideas: he has "created" human' beings, men, women & children, alive and kicking.