The Blood of the Martyrs Read online

  Naomi Mitchison

  THE BLOOD OF THE

  MARTYRS

  Introduced by Donald Smith

  Dedication

  Books are never written only and entirely by their authors. There are always others who have helped to shape them. It will be obvious that this book could not have been written, or, with the same plot, would have been written very differently, a few years ago. Events shaped it, as they have shaped all of us and our works. Certain persons, also, have helped to shape this book, and to them I dedicate it: most of all, Lewis Gielgud. He and I planned and wrote together the play, As It Was In The Beginning, this book’s first cousin, as it were, and he will find here and there, his own words in the mouths of the people in my book; but he and I are such old and tried collaborators that each is welcome to the words and thoughts of the other. There were historians also who helped to guide and tidy this book, especially Martin Charlesworth, Guy Chilver and Margaret Cole; and there were friends who lived in the book with me while I wrote it, Rudolph Messel and others. And beyond and behind these known and certain and consciously collaborating individuals, there are other men and women whose names I may not even know; but my thought and imagination fashions and chooses and eliminates because of our mutual participation in events. There are Austrian socialists in the counter-revolution of 1934, sharecroppers in Arkansas in 1935, old friends in King’s Norton and new friends in Carradale: and the named and unnamed host of the witnesses against tyranny and superstition and the worship of the State, witnesses for humanity and reason and kindliness, whose blood is crying to us now and whose martyrdom will help to build the Kingdom which we all want in our hearts, and whose temporary manifestations in friendship and comradeship and collaboration give purpose and delight to our lives and deaths.

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  1. Beric

  2. Manasses and Josias

  3. Persis, Eunice and Phaon

  4. Argas

  5. Lalage and Sophrosyne

  6. Rhodon, Phineas and Sapphira, Sotion, Dapyx

  7. Niger

  8. Euphemia

  PART TWO

  1. The Sign of the Cross

  2. The First Sacrament

  3. The Second Sacrament

  4. The Tempting of Beric

  5. Compromise

  6. The Comrades

  PART THREE

  1. The Bosses

  2. Ends and Means

  3. The Individual and the State

  4. Stamping It Out

  5. Difficulties of a United Front

  6. State Methods

  7. The Third Sacrament

  8. The Seed of the Church

  9. The Doctrine of Efficiency

  10. Business Meeting

  Introduction

  Naomi Mitchison’s fiction from the nineteen thirties is marked by a sense of moral and spiritual crisis. This sense of crisis intensifies from her anthropological blockbuster The Corn King and the Spring Queen in 1931, to The Blood of the Martyrs in 1939. Although her early fiction belongs to the decade which followed the First World War and had been profoundly influenced by D.H. Lawrence, Naomi Mitchison was among the first to identify and express those topics now characterised as ‘thirties’ concerns. Art it was felt ought to be committed and socially relevant, and literature could only be justified if it was a mode of action in the real world offering ‘models’ or, in Auden’s phrase, ‘parables’ which clarified human issues and expressed moral intentions. For someone of Mitchison’s beliefs, such issues included the struggle for some definition of orthodoxy within left-wing movements, the uncertainty as to whether Russia provided a model, the belief in a socialist millenium, the all-pervading fear of war, and the need to identify with working-class aspirations and solidarity.

  The need for a clear response to an extreme situation dominates The Blood of the Martyrs which was written in the shadow of fascism and anti-semitism in Germany and Austria, and completed as war and possibly German invasion seemed unavoidable. In its depiction of the first century Christian Church in persecution and martyrdom, The Blood of the Martyrs is both a parable for the times and Naomi Mitchison’s personal moral and political testament.

  Such a work does not sit easily with a purely literary interpretation of ‘classic’ status. In the nineteen twenties as now, Naomi Mitchison did not write for a restricted literary audience but for the wider reading public which had been engaged in her own Edwardian childhood by authors such as H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. The Blood of the Martyrs was not conceived primarily as an enduring aesthetic artefact but as a ‘testament to reality’. It is a declaration of faith in the capacity of human love to transcend evil and oppression. It reaches beyond an aesthetic response and, by appealing to a shared psychological and emotional background, attempts to change attitudes and actions in the real world.

  The question of religion, therefore, goes beyond the subject matter of this book to become a central metaphor in its own right. Political commitment and religious passion are closely allied for Mitchison, since both offer a psychological coherence for the individual self—a communal identity such as the anthropologists had identified in primitive societies. Equally of course such religio-political community can be diverted from moral ends to the service of unreason and evil: psychological identification with the group must be balanced by a commitment to reason and goodness.

  In The Blood of the Martyrs Mitchison works from the religious end of the equation, arguing for a humanistic, social and political interpretation of New Testament Christianity. The Kingdom of Heaven is ‘Being fully ourselves towards one another: that is, letting what is of God become free of what men do to other men out of pride and greed.’ Sin is to be in the grip of the powers of this world and to behave accordingly. All in this condition are slaves, from the Emperor of Rome down, although paradoxically it is the actual slaves who have the greatest chance of release since they have least to lose. At the core of this creed are the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth — not a Resurrected Lord in the mould of the mystery cults, but (like Kleomenes in The Corn King) a man turned legend.

  One who lived for us who’ve lost hope and found it again and been reborn. Who promised that he would feed the hungry and give their turn to the humble and meek. Who will see there is equal justice at last, not one scale weighted. Not Romans and natives, Beric. Not masters and servants. Not ladies and whores.

  With consistent panache, Mitchison redefines the key concepts of Pauline theology. Grace is to be in a state of right relationship with one’s fellows; love and forgiveness are the bonds of human community as opposed to the might and coercion of Rome; to act with moral purpose is to serve Providence rather than Lady Luck and the superstitions of arbitrary chance which pervade the Graeco- Roman world; prayer is a concentration of the common will, emotion and intention. The sacraments are an intense symbolic sharing of the community experience from entry and catharsis (baptism), through mutual service (foot- washing) and love (the agape meal), to the final shared death which is Mitchison’s replacement for the communion or eucharist.

  The communal experience of the Church is a moral one of simple kindness, friendliness and practical support but it is also something more: the individuals concerned feel themselves to be part of a greater whole. This is expressed as being part of ‘The Will’, or as being moved by ‘the Spirit’ (‘some unknown and unmeasured power’), but in neither case is the will or spirit conceived of as being exterior to the sum of human persons that composes the community. These religious terms are taken from the Christian context in order to describe a quality or dimension of experience which all human beings can discover and share when the
y come together harmoniously.

  The Christians, including Beric, are eventually martyred for this quality of experience rather than for an idea or creed. Their willingness to endure physical pain and death is a vindication of their awareness of a life which is more than material and more than individual.

  The possession of such a group loyalty or ‘mythology’ is, from Mitchison’s standpoint, a necessary part of the balanced personality. Its absence leaves a vacuum which is in danger of being filled by a false cult of the irrational or the worship of power. Rome has lost her gods and the common will to serve the state, and the vacuum is filled by Nero, who with a mixture of megalomania and adroit manipulation, exploits the ‘natural wish of the people for gods and the gifts of the gods, the natural wish for a leader.’

  ‘I feel like a god,’ said Nero, ‘sometimes. Coming into the Arena, slowly, grandly, at the head of the great procession serpent-stretching behind me, lifted on the voices, the closing, rising cheers, the love, lifted above the sand that is so soon to take the blood … I am the Will of Rome and the people know it, the ordinary people who love me. For whom I make the great blood sacrifice.’

  This is opium for the mass unconscious and the contemporary comparison with Nazi Germany is omnipresent, but it is a thematic rather than historical link. In fact Mitchison’s argument is that goodness must also involve an element of unreason ‘so as to make a hold on the unreason in the human soul’, otherwise the powers of the dark unconscious will take control.

  It is important to grasp that Mitchison’s method in The Blood of the Martyrs is not didactic. Everything for which she argues is grounded in an evocation of collective human experience expressed in fluid economical prose which embraces both narrative simplicity and poetic intensity.

  She took off the veil and laid it by, and then all of them came close round the table with the bread and the fish and the little meat rolls which Sapphira had cooked, and they held one another’s hands. Argas, too, had kissed Persis, feeling curiously glad and assuaged at seeing her again. Every time they met together was something snatched by them from the powers of darkness, something solid that could never be taken from them again.

  It is arguable that in its essential simplicity The Blood of the Martyrs fails to represent the complexity of reality. Certainly no character in the novel possesses the range of internal contradictions of Erika Der in The Corn King and the Spring Queen, or Phoebe in Naomi Mitchison’s other thirties novel We Have Been Warned (1934). This, however, is a deliberate authorial choice. In The Blood of the Martyrs Naomi Mitchison disciplined and restrained the autobiographical tendencies of her fiction to match the urgency of the immediate crisis as she perceived it in 1938. In consequence, paradoxically, she produced a passionately self-revealing novel.

  Anyone seeking to understand this profilic Scottish author and activist could profitably begin with The Blood of the Martyrs. Mitchison’s complex relationship with the evangelical protestantism of her Haldane family background is at its clearest in this novel. Here the marriage of religious feeling and political action, common to all Naomi Mitchison’s endeavour, is at its most intense and its most historically immediate.

  Equally significant however is the revelation in The Blood of the Martyrs of Naomi Mitchison’s literary method. The novel shows most directly the way in which she harnesses the popular format of the historical Romance and its close emotional identification with the reader, to moral and literary seriousness. It is liberating for Scottish fiction in particular, that critics have in recent years come to follow the general reader in acknowledging the validity and importance of the Romance genre. In this respect, The Blood of the Martyrs enhances our concept of what literature is, and our sense of Scottishness.

  Donald Smith

  People in the Book

  Roman Citizens and their Families

  The Emperor Nero; his wife, the Empress Poppaea

  Ofonius Tigellinus, Praefect of the Praetorian Guards

  Junius Gallio, ex-Proconsul of Achaea

  Flavious Crispus, a Senator; his daughter, Flavia; his mother, Domina Aelia; his cousin,

  Flavi Flavius Scaevinus, a Senator

  Aelius Balbus, a Senator; his son, Marcus Aelius Candidus, an Officer in the Praetorian Guards

  Annaeus Lucan, a poet, Gallio’s nephew

  Tertius Satellius, a tanner; his wife, Megalis

  Casperius, a prison official

  Eprius, a City Guard

  Marulla, a poor citizen’s wife

  Sextus Papinius Calvinus, an Italian citizen

  Antonius Paulus, or Paul, a Provincial citizen

  Non-Citizens and Freedmen or Freedwomen

  Beric, son of Caradoc or Caratacus, King of East Britain; his brother Clinog

  Erasixenos, an Alexandrian

  Luke, a Provincial doctor

  Claudia Acté, Nero’s freedwoman

  Asteropé, daughter of one of Nero’s nurses

  Lalage, a professional dancer, Claudia Acté’s freedwoman; her accompanist, Sophrosyne

  Phineas-bar-Gedaliah, owner of a fish-shop; his wife, Sapphira; his father, Gedaliah-bar-Jorim, a carpet weaver; his brothers, Amariah and Jorim, and his sister-in-law, Joanna; his mother, Tabitha, and his sister, Noumi, all carpet weavers

  Hadassa, a widow

  Blephano, Toxilus, Cario and Harpax, prison officials

  Montanus, the overseer at Aelius Balbus’s house

  Nausiphanes, a tutor; Eunice, a baker; freedman and freedwoman of Flavius Crispus

  Euphemia, a shopkeeper

  Rhodon, a metal-worker

  Sotion, a rent-collector

  Carpus, a potter

  Slaves

  Hermeias, a secretary; Manasses; Argas; Phaon, son of Eunice; Lamprion; Sannio; Mikkos; Pistos; Persis, a ladies’ maid; Josias and Dapyx, kitchen slaves; and others: all slaves belonging to Flavius Crispus

  Felicio, a secretary; Niger, Zyrax and others, litter slaves: all slaves belonging to Aelius Balbus

  Abgar, a runaway; and many others

  Part One

  Is it a God or a king that comes?

  Both are evil, and both are strong.

  LYALL

  CHAPTER I

  Beric

  In the hot afternoon, Beric who was no longer a child, had been with Flavia, who was no longer a child either. She had amused herself, but it was beginning to be dangerous. Supposing Beric came clear out of the dream in which he stroked and kissed her, in which he did what she wanted and no more? Well, there would soon be something better to think about than Beric: by no means a dream this time, but real. But Beric did not know. It was no business of the Briton’s to whom she was betrothed; she was more than certain that her father had not mentioned it in his presence so far. It would be funny when he knew. And suddenly she was bored with his light wavy hair and the red sunburn on his neck and shoulders, and his fingers merely repeating an old story. She sat up sharply, saying that she must dress. His hands slipped on her, he tried to hold her, but she pushed him off, and he, as his dreams subsided, remembered that he had to see to his arrangements for the dinner party that evening. He would have liked to kiss her gently goodbye, but she, suddenly brisk, would have none of it, shoved him impatiently, so that he knocked over a basket of grapes from the little table. He would have picked them up, but now she couldn’t bear him in the room one moment longer. ‘Let the slaves!’ she said, stamping. ‘What are they there for! And go quietly, you big ox!’

  When he went out, she trod her toes into one of the fallen grape bunches; the juice was warm and sticky and a lovely colour on her instep; she paddled it about a little on the tiled floor, then clapped her hands. Little Persis came running in, with anxious eyes on her mistress, who was now slipping off her short sweaty muslin shift, dropped it, one hem in the grape juice, as Persis saw with half an eye of worry, and called for powder.

  As Persis powdered her all over, Flavia stretched again and again, and stuck her fingers into her brown
hair, pulling it back in crisp hot masses from her cheeks and neck. Her face was the right kind of face for a sixteen year old Roman aristocrat; her small breasts which the girl was powdering would certainly grow. She had enjoyed herself so far; she was going to enjoy herself much more when she left home. She had not yet made anyone do what she wanted except the slaves and Beric, but that was going to happen too.

  The other slaves came in to dress her and admire her and brush her hair, the old woman who was supposed to be so good, but whom Flavia didn’t trust an inch, and the round-faced Italian maid who giggled. Persis was the youngest and newest and easiest to hurt. She began to clear up the squashed grapes. Her sleek black head bent to the floor; there was a tempting patch of brown shoulder. Flavia tiptoed and gave it a quick pinch; Persis jumped and squealed; the other two slaves laughed, applauding their mistress and wondering what she was going to try on them. She looked round idly and viciously for something to do or throw or hurt; the Italian girl ran and brought in her pet monkey, hoping she would tease it instead of teasing them.

  In the meantime the dinner party had to be arranged. The food, of course, had been ordered days before; both the head cook and Beric had been to the market, though actually most of the meat, poultry, vegetables, fruit and cheese had come in from Flavius Crispus’s country estate, a pleasant little place to which old Domina Aelia, the grandmother, had retired. The flowers for the garlands had come from there too, but in this heat it was difficult to keep the roses from dropping. As for the entertainment, Beric had put the two dancing boys through a rehearsal of their new mime: Ulysses and the Cyclops—with the gouging out of the eye done as realistically as possible. Phaon was a tiresome, temperamental little brat, but the dancing boys were bound to be rather spoilt. He had been born in the house; his mother, Eunice, had been freed five years back, and now ran a little bakery. Sometimes she brought in some extra fancy rolls—there would be some today, shaped like swans and butterflies. Phaon was fifteen and his legs were pretty enough to—eat. He knew that all right, and half the time he was showing off like a regular Greek, which was what the guests liked, and then suddenly he’d go queer and sullen, as if he hated the kind of life he was leading, which was stupid and ungrateful of him; not many slaves were as well treated and as well trained as Flavius Crispus’s dancing boys.