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Sin in Contemporary Literature
By John Fletcher

"There is ... a category of writers who, without being believers, are what the Germans call 'God-intoxicated.' Such people sense, often in an unfocused way, the outspread wing of the avenging angel casting its shadow over their world... [T]hey do not deal with individual guilt so much as a kind of generalized, universal stain, original sin in the precise theological meaning of that term."

We are sometimes told that this is a post-Christian age and that the Christian concept of sin is no longer very meaningful. For example, it is certainly not a word one would expect to hear in a case conference where social workers meet with police officers and educators to decide whether a child should be removed from "problem" parents and put into care. One can easily imagine the embarrassment that would be felt by all the professionals sitting round the table if someone were to suggest that the parents were "sinful." If anyone did happen to use the word, perhaps in a fit of absentmindedness, it would at once be translated into terms the other participants understood better. Something on the lines of "emotionally impaired" or "suffering from an affective handicap" would quickly be substituted for the inadmissible notion. Similarly, in personal counseling, practitioners make it a point of professional honor never to express moral judgments, so the word "fault"-let alone the word "sin"-will never pass their lips.

If this sounds flippant and condescending, it is not meant to. It is not so-called "politically correct language" that leads such professionals to avoid talking about sin. The word only has meaning in a religious context. People dealt with by social workers or by counselors are often not religious (or at any rate not believing Christians); nor (necessarily) are the professionals. So, it is irrelevant whether or not their clients are sinful according to Christian criteria-the solution to that problem is to go to confession, and since people are on the whole unlikely to have recourse to this or find it helpful, no one thinks of recommending it.

I

Nevertheless, I am not going to write about sin in literature in the religious sense only, or-to be more precise-I am not going to write

John Fletcher is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

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about it only in the sense in which it is explored by authors who are themselves Christian believers. Sin in contemporary writing is understood much more widely. For example, Homo Faber by Max Frisch, first published in 1957, deals with father-daughter incest, which is a sin in all the religions I am familiar with, including that of ancient Greece, where it inspired the greatest of all tragic dramas, Oedipus Rex. Walter Faber, Frisch's hero, is seen as a latter-day Oedipus, longing to put out his eyes to punish himself for having had a sexual relationship with his own child. As in the play, the sin was not intentional on the hero's part-like Oedipus, he finds out too late that he is related to his lover-but Frisch, following Sophocles, makes it clear that Faber must suffer for his actions. In both works, the sin cries out for retribution.

It makes no difference that Faber is not at all religious. The girl dies after being bitten by a snake-a traditional instrument of divine justice-and then, as an indirect result, Walter himself dies. His unwitting act of sin is itself punishment for overweening pride-what the Greeks called hubris-in that (as his name implies) Faber is an engineer who thinks that every problem can be solved by the application of ever more sophisticated technology. But as Hamlet (another Oedipal character) could have told him, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy, and the best-designed machines cannot prevent him from meeting and failing in love with the child he never knew he had. He suffers divine retribution for having got above himself. Like all serious literature, this fine novel invites us to remember that we are not free, and that the heavens may at any moment fall about our ears.

Walter Faber may not normally think in terms of sin, that is, in the role his own actions may have played in his downfall, but he does find himself using the word when seeking the opinion of a young Cuban prostitute. Does she believe in mortal sin, he wonders, and does she think that snakes are guided by gods or by demons? The girl lobs the question straight back to him, like the sphinx of the Oedipus story. Frisch thus adapts the Greek legend in the light of the Christian concept of individual responsibility. Another contemporary novel based on the myth is The Erasers (1953) by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who makes no secret of his atheism. His version stresses impersonal chance and downplays individual sin. In fact, the incest, such as it is, occurs only in the hero's mind. He does kill a man hitherto unknown to him, but it is only a strong possibility that the victim is his father, not a certainty. In any case, he feels no remorse (indeed, not only the word, but the very notion of "guilt" is absent from this novel); there is no reason why he should, because he is a detective and the shooting is an accident of the sort that, regrettably, occurs all too frequently during police operations.

It is clear from this that, for sin to be a factor, there has to be guilt and remorse. As one would expect, these are inescapably present in

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books written by practicing Christians, and I will come to them in due course. Pursuing for a moment the theme of the detective novel, a genre Robbe-Grillet pastiches in his updating of the Oedipus legend, we find that, in the classic policier (mainly British, its leading exponent being Agatha Christie), the world is mainly good and is restored to its original state of innocence once the assassin has been unmasked. In the American thriller (exemplified by Raymond Chandler), the world is viewed more ambivalently; human wickedness, temporarily checked, cannot be banished definitively. What makes Marlowe, Chandler's private eye, a distinctive hero of the genre is that he is some kind of relic in modern America; his desire to rid the world of evil and to shield the good is antiquated. Knights in shining armor, Marlowe realizes, are an anachronism in a southern California where the drenching October rain falls alike on the innocent few and the guilty many. In The Big Sleep (1939), the solving of the crime is no victory. Marlowe identifies the person who actually committed murder (Carmen), but she is unfit to plead; behind her lurks Eddie Mars, the truly sinful-because fully responsible-character, but he eludes punishment. Marlowe is left with a bad taste in the mouth, with the knowledge that his victory was incomplete, that the world remains a sordid, indecent, corrupt place:

The Fulwider Building [was] a building in which the smell of stale cigar butts [was] the cleanest odor.... The fire stairs hadn't been swept in a month. Bums had slept on them, eaten on them, left crusts and fragments of greasy newspaper, matches, a gutted imitation-leather pocket-book. In a shadowy angle against the scribbled wall a pouched ring of pale rubber had fallen and had not been disturbed.¹

A similar note is struck in the spy thriller, first cousin to the hard-boiled detective story. The masterpiece in this genre is generally acknowledged to be The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (1963). This book was as radically different from the glitzy view of espionage popularized in the James Bond series by Ian Fleming as the sordid, brutal Clint Eastwood Western is from the simple patriotism of John Wayne. In le Carre's reorientation of the espionage genre, Leamas is a "good" spy, as Marlowe was a "good" dick: Though not a gentle or even likeable man (any more than Marlowe was), he tries to preserve his humanity and decency in a vicious Cold War world of cross and double-cross. In the end, he is manipulated and tricked by his own side in order to shield Mundt, an ex-Nazi and anti-Semite who, while head of East German espionage, was "turned" by the British and so became an invaluable double agent. When the deception is revealed-and the fact that it has led the Western allies to allow their own secret agents to be murdered one by one simply in order to protect Mundt's cover-Leamas' loyalty and discipline as a Cold War warrior are strained to the breaking point; even for one inured to this dirty

¹ Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), pp. 161-162.

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business, it is too much for a decent man to swallow. As he climbs over the Berlin wall to safety, his companion, Liz, is shot by the East German guards, evidently to stop her revealing the plot once she reaches freedom. Leamas's self-control finally snaps. He drops back to the Eastern side of the wall. The guards, who have no orders to shoot him, hesitate a moment. But then comes the order, no doubt from Mundt, to go ahead, and he is killed, too. It is a form of suicide. And, since he and Liz are united in death-their love being doomed in life-it is also a kind of liebestod.

Although he is defeated in the end, Leamas is seen as the one who has sound moral values, who was right where the others were wrong. In le Carré 's novel, distinctions between "good" and "evil," West and East, are mixed up. The thrust of the story is that both secret services are inhuman and cruel, that they kill decent, good, but expendable employees in order to keep wicked, treacherous, but indispensable agents alive. The real villain in le Carré 's novel is, therefore, the espionage profession itself. Leamas, however, is redeemed, even though in the past he has sinned, or at least connived in sin, along with the rest of them. In choosing to die at Liz's side, he washes away those sins. He comes in from the cold of the secret service world into the light of positive human values.

The phrase that gives the novel its title has caught the popular imagination and become part of the language. The London Sunday Times, for instance, used it on November 26, 1989, to hail Alexander Dubcek's return to public life in Prague: "He is the communist who came in from the cold." For an expression to catch on like that, it must strike a chord. Le Carré 's novel is a novel where morality is largely absent. But even in this "chilly hell," there is hope. In terms of morality, the novel is especially rich, since it shows that it is the single human relationship that counts, not the ideology of any power bloc. American critics have depicted this novel as anti-Western; in a way they are right. It was written against what John le Carré saw as the perverted morality of the Western hemisphere, the hypocrisy of the view that living on the Western side of the Iron Curtain was to be on the good side. The fact that this was done in 1963, at the height of East-West confrontation, to remind the world about true good and bad values is the strength of the book. With this novel, the spy story came in from the cold of the "guns, girls, and gadgets" fetishism of the Ian Fleming era.

Although steeped in morality, The Big Sleep and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold do not go in for the word "sin." It is almost as if, like the word "love" in James Joyce's Ulysses, it is too numinous to be uttered. But just as believers whose devotion cannot be put in doubt are nonetheless forbidden, in some monotheistic religions, to speak the name of God, we are not misted by the failure to call sin "sin" in these two novels. It is not mentioned either in that intensely moral book Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). Humbert Humbert, the

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nymphet-loving hero, does not describe what he did to Lolita as sin. Instead, he says that a maniac deprived a girl-child of her childhood in what he calls a "parody of incest" in "a world of total evil." For this "nastiness," he assures the reader, he would, if he were to appear before himself, hand down a thirty-five year sentence for rape. In fact, he dies in jail awaiting trial for the murder of a rival, one of Lolita's other lovers. He is not punished for unlawful intercourse with a minor; no one knows about that except the reader of his confession, which takes up virtually the whole of Nabokov's fine novel. But there is no need for judicial retribution; Humbert more than ably tortures himself. After all, he loved Lolita "more than anything [he] had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else," and, as he leaves her for the last time, the windshield wipers in full action against the drizzle are "unable to cope with [his] tears." The deep sadness of this book lies in the grotesque, even obscene inappropriateness of a love that, in other circumstances and lavished on a different object, would have been a noble thing. As it is, Humbert can only reflect with bitter remorse that the long journey he and Lolita made across the States...

had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tyres, and her sobs in the night-every night, every night-the moment I feigned sleep.²

So, although Nabokov is too urbane to use the word "sin" in Lolita, the "bestial cohabitation" he inflicts on the waif is what anyone else would not hesitate to call sin, especially if they are Catholic authors, as we shall see.

II

There is, however, a category of writers who, without being believers, are what the Germans call "God-intoxicated." Such people sense, often in an unfocused way, the outspread wing of the avenging angel casting its shadow over their world. Unlike the novelists I have discussed so far, they do not deal with individual guilt so much as a kind of generalized, universal stain, original sin in the precise theological meaning of that term. Perhaps the greatest exponent of this vision is a writer from the deep South, from archetypal Bible country, William Faulkner. His novel Sanctuary (1931) is imbued with an atmosphere of evil. The story is extremely sordid. Temple Drake, a frivolous college student, is raped by a homicidal bootlegger called Popeye, who installs her in a Memphis brothel. An innocent man is convicted of Popeye's crime on Temple's perjured testimony but is lynched before the sentence can be carried out. Popeye does not elude retribution, however. In a fine ironic twist, he is executed for a murder that, for once, he did not commit. Thus, the wrong man is destroyed for the wrong reasons, and the right man also for the wrong reasons. No

² Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955), pp. 177-178.

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wonder the bystander-who serves as chorus in this modern tragedy-is driven to despair when he is forced to acknowledge that, in a world of irredeemable evil, good is sadly impotent:

Perhaps it is upon the instant that we realize, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die, he thought, thinking of the expression he had once seen in the eyes of a dead child, and of the other dead: the cooling indignation, the shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the motionless world lurked profoundly in miniature.³

As I have argued elsewhere, there is in Sanctuary a great deal of retribution of a particularly grisly kind, but no mention of the possibility of repentance, let alone redemption.⁴ Samuel Beckett is another God-haunted writer who ceased early on to believe in God, although he had been brought up "almost a Quaker" in a devout Protestant family in Dublin. The hymns of the Church of Ireland, such as "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Rock of Ages," are frequently mentioned in his plays, and the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress are never far away from the minds of his heroes. There is much stress on sin, particularly the "sin of having been born," a notion Beckett picked up in his student days from his reading of Calderon and Schopenhauer. It permeates all his work, but perhaps can be seen best in a famous passage from early on in Act I of Waiting for Godot (1954). The desultory conversation between the two tramp-clowns Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi) throws up the reflection that "one of the thieves was saved."

Up till now, the play has been fairly light in mood. This remark introduces the first serious, more sombre note. It follows closely on chatter about feet and boots that will not fit them, but the two apparently unrelated ideas are closely connected in Beckett's mind. He claimed to have been greatly impressed by Saint Augustine's wise note of caution: "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." The same symmetry affects even Gogo's feet, one of which is "saved," the other "damned." The boot will go on the foot that is "saved," but it will not go on the foot that is "damned." Didi therefore moves naturally from chiding Gogo about the poor state of his feet to pondering the salvation rate of crucified thieves; resilient as ever, he concludes that fifty percent is "a reasonable percentage." This leads him by association of ideas to ask Gogo whether they should not "repent." "Repent what?" enquires his puzzled friend, then, with sudden inspiration, "our being born?" This causes Didi to collapse in laughter. He then asks Gogo if he has ever read the Bible and if he remembers the story of the thieves. There follows a half-comic, half-serious exchange about the varying accounts of this story in the Gospels and who says what about whether or not the two thieves were saved. The only evangelist to record that one of the

³ William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York: Random House, 1931), pp. 175-176.
⁴ John Fletcher, "Literature and the Problem of Evil: II," Theology 79 (November, 1976),p.339.

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thieves was saved was of course Luke. Such flagrant inconsistencies worry the more intellectual Vladimir. For Estragon, a man of feeling rather than of intellect, there is no problem. People in his view merely show their crass ignorance in believing the kindlier version.

Beckett's vision is bleak, but his expression is usually comic. This preserves his writing, at least the best of it, from monotony and unrelieved gloom. The same applies to another God-haunted figure, the Jew Franz Kafka, who is reported to have fallen about with helpless laughter when he read his stories to friends. This is all the more disconcerting in that they deal with situations in which the hero is guilty of an offense he does not understand and so cannot atone for. The cruel irony of The Trial, for instance, is that no proper trial ever takes place. Joseph K. seeks endlessly to know what it is he is charged with and is executed at the end without it being made clear what exactly it is he has done wrong. "Strange sin" Beckett calls it in The Unnamable (1953). Strange sin, indeed, a sin that is the subject of no clear charge and so carries no penalty that is even remotely comprehensible or appropriate.

Things are altogether clearer, and perhaps even more painful, for Catholic writers. The Irish novelist Edna O'Brien has declared that her upbringing is responsible for making her feel "permanently and unwaveringly guilty about almost everything."⁵ Her point is tellingly reinforced by her great compatriot James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), his semi-autobiographical account of a Dublin adolescence. The boy-hero has to sit through a hellfire sermon in the college chapel and applies every word of it to himself. Like any child emerging from puberty, he is tragically vulnerable to accusations of uncleanness, and one might suspect the preacher of being guilty himself-guilty of the most refined sadism-were it not for the patent sincerity of his diatribe:

Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field for they, at least, are but brutes and have not reason to guide them.... Even ... the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.⁶

The preacher's sincerity does not, however, make the torture of this boy any the less inexcusable. It is painful to read what must be one of the most graphic accounts in the whole of literature of the way in which a soul comes to a consciousness of its own sinfulness:

The image of Emma appeared before him and, under her eyes, the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon

⁵ The Sunday Times (May 10, 1992), 7:6.
⁶ James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: The Viking Press, 1964),pp.123-124.

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her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils: the soot-coated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; his monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly. Mad! Mad! Was it possible he had done these things? A cold sweat broke out upon his forehead as the foul memories condensed within his brain.⁷

The poignant immediacy of the episode stems directly from the fact that Joyce was brought up a Catholic and so at school had inflicted upon him sermons just as intimidating as these-quoted in the novel at full length, an astonishing feat of memory-and accordingly suffered agonies of guilt, in common with all those who, as Edna O'Brien points out, share the same nurture experience. True, Joyce was a lapsed Catholic, but, as the Jesuits boast, if one is a Catholic by the age of seven, one is a Catholic for life.

III

Matters are somewhat different for those writers, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, who were converted in adult life. Their view of sin, not being "bred in the bone" as it were, tends to be rather detached, more a case of intellectual perception than of a complex involvement of the emotions. In A Handful of Dust (1934), for instance, Waugh coolly depicts a world of cold, callous, frivolous people, the worst offender being Brenda Last, who shocks even the social butterflies with whom she associates by her reaction to the news of the death of a person close to her called John. The cruel twist imagined by Waugh relies on the coincidence that Brenda's lover and her young son were both christened John. Informed that "John" has had a fatal accident, Brenda is devastated. When it is revealed that it is not her lover but her son who has been killed, she blurts out, appallingly, a blasphemous cry of relief ("Thank God!"), before bursting into tears of embarrassment and shame. However, like all shallow people, she soon contrives to blot out the memory of her moral turpitude. "I didn't say anything, did IT' she asks a friend. "You know what you said" is the unanswerable rebuke.

Waugh nowhere uses the word "sin" (nor "evil," nor even "wicked," for that matter). He is far too well-bred for that (he did aspire, after all, to membership of the English upper classes, where any allusion to sin causes acute embarrassment). Graham Greene, though equally well-bred, felt more at home in the sordid backstreets of Havana or Saigon than in the country houses of the British aristocracy, and he

⁷ Ibid., pp. 115-116.

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speaks of little else but sin. Everyone knows that The Power and the Glory (1940) features a drunken Mexican priest who in the past has committed fornication, but who in extremis gives himself absolution and then undergoes martyrdom rather than renounce his commitment to the sacerdotal service of his Church. This unshakeable fidelity to his calling makes this "justified sinner"-however hitherto unlikely the prospect has been-a candidate for elevation to sainthood.

A Greene sinner who does not, however, graduate to the company of the angels is Pinkie, the vicious young criminal in Brighton Rock (1938). On the run with the police at his heels, he goes through a civil wedding ceremony with Rose to prevent her being forced to testify against him. Since both bride and groom are Catholics, Pinkie is only too well aware of the fact that in buying "temporal safety in return for two immortalities of pain" he is committing mortal sin: "He saw himself as a man for whom the angels wept." They do not weep for a beggar woman whom he stumbles upon in an alleyway. She is saying her rosary, and, as Pinkie hears the whispered words of the Ave Maria, he suffers the agonizing realization that, unlike himself, "this was not one of the damned: this was one of the saved." Finally cornered, Pinkie dies unshriven. Rose consults a priest who attempts to reassure her ("You can't conceive, my child, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God"), but she replies, bleakly if truthfully, "He's damned. He knew what he was about. He was a Catholic too."

In Greeneland (as it has wittily been called), the "taste for Right and Wrong" is "extinguished by stronger foods: Good and Evil." Since Rose "knew that Pinkie was evil-what did it matter whether he was right or wrong?" This contempt for what he sees as the bland ethics of liberal humanism makes Greene a very tough, even uncomfortable writer, more akin to the great European moralists than to the genteel, rather effete English novelists of the time. He would have empathized instinctively with Dostoyevsky, whereas E. M. Forster (for example) would have found the great Russian too intense for comfort. Kingsley Amis' witty coinage "Grim Grin"-in imitation of the name "Graham Greene" pronounced with a foreign accent-contains, like all good jokes, more than a grain of truth. It is no accident that Greene has always been better appreciated on the continent than in his own country. This is because using grand words like "good" and "evil"-which is the veriest meat and drink to Rose and, we may be sure, to her creator-is also something Catholic novelists abroad are not shy about.

One of the greatest of these is Francois Mauriac. He was never converted like Waugh, Greene, and his fellow-countryman Paul Claudel, but believed from his earliest years. One might expect that the writings of such a lifelong Catholic, who seems never to have experienced what the Victorians euphemistically referred to as "doubts," would exude a rather benign self-satisfaction. The reverse is the case. Mauriac's novels are at their best when the hero or heroine is a sinner: the murderess Therese of Therese Desqueyroux (1927), the

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miser Louis of The Knot of Vipers (1932), or the infamous Gradere of The Dark Angels (1936). Unlike Greene, who accepts that Pinkie is a candidate for eternal damnation, Mauriac cannot resist the urge to save his sinners. The miser, Louis, finds, in the last weeks before his death, the God he has been execrating all his life; his heart stops beating just as his pen forms the words "it is the Love whose name at last I know, whose ador.... Gradere, the debauchee, pimp, and assassin, dies of pleurisy at the vicarage, but in "peace, unimaginable peace." As for Therese, at last happy and free, Mauriac will not abandon her either: "I cherish the hope that you are not alone on this pavement where I take leave of you," he murmurs.

Mauriac is remarkably understanding. His people are truly flesh-and-blood. They are filled to overflowing with love, be it love of power over others (Louis), of culture and intellectual emancipation (Therese), or of the pleasures of the flesh (Gradere). Mauriac never lets their lusts make them ridiculous; on the contrary, they are almost ennobled by them. These people are yearning for something, and only their ignorance (on which God takes pity) misleads them into giving that Something a worldly name. All the while, they are longing for that peace that the world cannot give; it is characteristic of Mauriac (who knows his Saint Teresa) that he describes this longing in physical, even quasi-sexual terms.

Unlike Greene, the convert, but like Joyce, the bred-in-the-bone Catholic, Mauriac shows great inwardness about sin, portraying as "will-full" human beings groping in darkness at the prey designated to them by their bodily appetites. Worse by far than the gratification of lust is the vice of blindness and folly. His heroes and heroines may be wicked, but they are warm-blooded and intelligent; his real villains are the hypocrites who kneel dutifully at Sunday mass and plot the ruin of others even as the priest lifts the sacrifice aloft. There is an impressive logic in this. In Mauriac's eyes, it is far worse to bend the knee with unclean, uncomprehending heart before the Body and Blood than to commit fornication, for the second act is attributable to passions God himself has woven into our being, whereas the first is not, because it springs from the blindness with which Satan muffles our hearts.

It is no coincidence that Mauriac is the author of a study of Racine which speaks admiringly of Port-Royal, nor that he has written a book on Pascal. There is more than a hint of Jansenism; indeed, there is a distinct feeling of predestination running through his work. The sanctimonious Hubert, for instance, is, on Mauriac's terms, damned, whereas his stingy father Louis is saved. The seeming saints go to the wall, and only the sinners are vouchsafed the sight of God. Many are called but few are chosen, and God's principle of selection favors those to whom He has granted the powers of life: power to love and power to understand. Blessed in Mauriac's eyes are the meek, those who do not arrogantly overdraw on God's bounty, who do not squander their winnings before making sure they have won the lottery. Therese may

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be a would-be killer of bodies, but her uncouth and unfeeling husband is a veritable assassin of souls; Gradere may debauch bodies, but his enemy Desbats corrupts minds. With characteristic irony, Mauriac sets Hubert's betrayal of his father in a church, and shows this Judas, his sin consummated, turning toward the high altar and crossing himself with a great flourish.

The terms of Mauriacian salvation, then, are clear, and not paradoxical as in Greene's case. The real sin, for the Frenchman, is heartless stupidity; the key to the kingdom of heaven is intelligent love. The impressiveness of this religious novelist springs from his faith in human vitality and from his conviction that this, rather than niceness of observance, is the saving quality. And redeemed sinners are men and women who know what it is to have lusted and yearned, who have come through the fire, and who, therefore, can point others on the way to salvation.

IV

It will be clear from this that Mauriac's treatment of sin is the most sympathetic of all those I have looked at; Greene's the most complex; Waugh's the most severe; Joyce's the most anguished; Kafka's the most disturbing; Beckett's the bleakest; Faulkner's the most desperate; Nabokov's the most challenging; le Carre's the harshest; Chandler's the most cynical; and that of Max Frisch the most fatalistic. Of all these, the one I myself respond to most is probably Nabokov's. Everyone's reaction is bound to be personal, and other readers of these novelists will no doubt react differently. But I, for my part, keep returning to the unforgettable moment when Humbert admits that he loves the young woman he has debauched. Lolita is no longer a winsome pubescent but an adult of "ruined looks" and "rope-veined narrow hands" who is "hopelessly worn at seventeen." Humbert looks and looks at her and knows, as clearly as he knows he is going to die, that he loves her more than anyone or anything on earth. He cancels and curses his "sterile and selfish vice" and wants Lolita for her own sake, not to gratify his criminal lusts. His selfless adoration redeems him and wipes away past sin, for love such as this, surely, is closely akin to the Love that, at the end of Dante's Paradiso, is the source of the power that moves the sun and the other stars.