Pope Francis the Simple

With the election this week of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the giddy heights of Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and Occasional Midfielder for the Vatican First XI, the Church of Rome took all manner of new and courageous steps. He is the first Jesuit - an order long considered suspicious by the Vatican for its emphasis on poverty and its refusal to have secret Swiss bank accounts - he is the first non-European to lead the church in over 1,000 years (although, God be praised, he more or less comes from Europe, so he's not altogether without culture) and he is the most simple man ever to sit on the Chair of St Peter.

Indeed, much has been made of how simple he is ever since he was named as Pope. The media has been beside itself to describe just how simple a man he is - he takes the bus, he doesn't wear the kind of bling jewellery other prelates wear, he washes people's feet. But, in breaking news, I can report a little more on just how simple a man he is. Curious to know more about this new papal father, I called up an old friend, Cardinal G. and he kindly offered to give me the inside word on this simple new Pope.

'Well, yes, it's true, he is simple,' began G., 'but if we're to be a bit more precise about things, we really ought to say that he's not just simple, but a simpleton.'

'What's that!' I cried. 'The Pope, a simpleton?'

'Yes, I mean, it's really quite simple, actually, much like the Pope. We were sitting around the big table in the Sistine Chapel, people were getting a bit scratchy because it had been over an hour since we'd last gorged oursel...I mean, had last had some bread and water, and someone, Cardinal L., I think, you know, that fool from America, said that we needed someone totally fresh, totally new, someone who could rebuild the Church's reputation which, I grant you, is a bit tatty at the minute.'

'So you went for a simpleton? That's the answer to the Church's problems?'

Pope Francis - all rather simple.

'Quite. You see, if you recall from the Book of Matthew, Christ once said, 'Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' And so it seemed obvious, really - what we needed was a Pontiff as simple as a child. And Bergoglio was just the man, er, boy, for the job. You see, he may be 76, but he's actually got the mental ability of a four year old. Amazing, isn't it!'

'Quite,' I said, rather nonplussed by the news.

'For a while we considered getting an actual four year old, but then someone pointed out that the Tibetans had already done it with the Dalai Lama.'

'So what can we expect from this simple pope?' I enquired.

'Well, his routine will have to be a bit different - for instance, mornings will include playtime and a nap, so there won't be much papal business done then, but we think he might be able to concentrate for a half hour or so after lunch, sign a few papal bulls, that sort of thing. What's important is that people will see that the Church is good and pure and simple - I mean, obviously, the Church isn't any of those things - it's a festering sore of corruption and debauchery, thank goodness - but it will at least look like it is. We're all really thrilled.'

And there you have it, all rather simple, really.

In praise of Chandler

‘It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.’ – Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was born in Chicago, but his family left that city of thieves and vagabonds when he was still too young to notice. The family settled in a nowhere town in Nebraska for a while, before Chandler’s violent and unstable father decided he’d gone right off the whole family idea and left them to it, taking with him the only thing to which he had ever made a genuine commitment – a bottle of booze. With a mother’s perspicacity, Mrs Chandler decided that there was no future for her boy in that small town, so they upped sticks again and made for England. Here they were supported by a well-to-do uncle, a Quaker who, like so many of those of that particular persuasion, combined his unwavering faith with a robust engagement with the seamier side of life (he was a lawyer). Educated at the celebrated Dulwich College, Chandler the young man gave university a miss in favour of experiencing life at first hand, imbibing deeply from the cup of culture on the Continent. Returning to England, he took English citizenship and settled down to a life of the dullest conformity as a public servant. He remained settled in this way for precisely one year. Fleeing this death-in-life existence, Chandler then began a career of many things: journalism (unsuccessfully), writing romantic verse (the folly of youth), reviewing books, stringing tennis racquets, picking fruit, and shooting at Germans in WWI. Back in the United States after the War, he married a woman eighteen years his senior, with whom he would happily spend the remainder of her days (the remainder of his days were less happy). By 1931, he had inadvertently become a senior executive, well remunerated, of an oil company. But this was to be his last moment as a man of business: his own commitment to alcohol, a related failure to turn up to work every day, his rather too forward manner with the secretaries, and his entirely unsettling habit of threatening to commit suicide led to his being let go just a year later. And so he turned to what he loved best, writing.

In Philip Marlowe, Chandler created the perfect alter ego for his own view of the circus of life. Marlowe is a man of few words, but those he speaks are like an assassin’s stiletto that pierces to the quiddity of being. He sees through the light to the darkness, while his wisdom is that of one who has suffered and expects nothing more. He drinks alone and he plays chess against dead men. And he’s surprised by nothing that people will do to themselves and to others.

His books teem with drunks and adulterers and hard men and women of the kind of beauty that makes those hard men suddenly very weak. And they teem with lines of startling originality so apt you have to pause to wonder at the genius that could create them seemingly without end. Everything is like something else, and yet like nothing else. It’s obvious once Chandler has shown it to you, but you’d never have thought of it yourself in a million years of floundering in the dark.

Those seeking to imitate Chandler face two hurdles, each as intractable as an heiress on her third martini. The first was his ability, which seemingly never ran dry, to find that perfect likeness between two things no one had ever previously thought to bring together. It’s easier enough to say the clouds look like cotton-wool, or that the tough guy who’s just walked into the bar looks like he could tear doors off hinges; it’s not so simple to see that dead men are heavier than broken hearts. And the cumulative effect of all this is to create a literary vision that hits you harder than any right-hook from the heavyweight champ.

Chandler - a sharp-eyed alcoholic.

The second problem for would-be imitators is that Chandler’s noir is not merely noir, and anyone who writes a book like that isn’t coming close to doing what Chandler was doing. The noir in Chandler is the vehicle with which he delivers the goods; it’s essential, but it’s far from everything. The goods which Chandler delivers are nothing less than his sharped-eyed alcoholic’s take on the human condition, the frailties and weaknesses and foibles and aches and lost dreams which beset anyone who breathes. But the imitators don’t see this, they see only the noir, and they think that the secret is there, that all you need is a laconic shamus chasing up dead-beats and wasters and the idle rich who have enough money to buy the time they need to be truly miserable. And so all they achieve is the weakest verisimilitude, if that (I say ‘if that’ because most can’t even fashion a reasonable simile or metaphor, so there’s not even that to commend them).

We can read Chandler merely to be entertained by the sort of intoxicating yarn with which the best storytellers have been captivating audiences since humankind began telling itself stories. And we can read him to be astonished and surprised and beguiled by his verbal dexterity. And, finally, we can read him because he tells us so vividly and humanely about life and what it means to be human, with all the concomitant suffering and failure and disappointment which that kind of being entails.