On Monday, 9th August, 1971, I was kidnapped from my bed by armed men, taken away and held as a hostage for five and a half weeks. I was not in Uruguay, Brazil, Greece or Russia. I was in the United Kingdom, an hour’s flight from London. Belfast.

A crashing on the door awoke me. It was 4.45 a.m. I went downstairs in my pyjamas to answer. As I opened it I was forced back against the wall by two soldiers who screamed at me: ‘Do you live here?’ Overwhelmed by their perspicacity I admitted that this was so, whereupon they ordered me to get dressed. I foolishly asked why. ‘Under the Special Powers Act we don’t have to give a reason for anything’, the officer said. ‘You have two minutes to get dressed.’ Through the window I could see in the dawn light half-a-dozen armed men in our tiny front garden.

I was given exactly two minutes to get dressed while a young soldier boosted his ego by sticking a SLR up my nose. My wife, not surprisingly was almost in tears as I was dragged down the stairs and into the street. She ran after me to give me my jacket and was roughly ordered back into the house. Our quiet residential bourgeois neighbourhood hadn’t seen such excitement in years as I was frog-marched at the double down the avenue by eight soldiers. As we sped down we were joined by a dozen more who had been hiding in nearby gardens. Those who looked out into the early morning mist must have imagined that a Vietcong patrol had been sighted in the locale.

‘Tie him up and gag the fecker’ (sic), an educated English accent ordered. ‘That’s hardly necessary’, I said, as I was frisked for the second time up against the lorry (or pig as they called it). This was accepted albeit reluctantly by the corporal who was positively twitching with desire to practise his Boy Scout knots upon me. My shoes were taken off me and I was put none too gently into the back of the ‘pig’. Two men with Sten guns covered me.

At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:

‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’

Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.

Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus in his historical existence, the man whom God lived and who lived God for us, was God’s way of reading the world, God’s way of making sense of the world. His life amongst us was a hermeneutic of man in the world before God, an interpretation of the human condition which (in historical fact and not a fortiori) was and is a radical criticism of all other ways of reading the world; his life, and more particularly his death, which was the meaning of that life, shows that all other attempts to discover and express the significance of what it is to be human have been mistaken or deficient. The only true understanding of our living and dying is his living and dying; any other form of living and dying is to some degree perverted. Any living and dying that we might be able to manage ourselves is going to be less than true. Only his biography, his ‘name’, is able to make our biographies, our ‘names’, ultimately true readings of what it is to be human, to stand before God in the world. There is salvation in no other name. If we are to be whole, we have in some way to learn to abandon what we have received.

Baptism according to the tradition of the Church is ‘necessary to salvation’. That has come to be understood to mean that, at least so far as baptism in the straightforward sense of the sacrament of water-baptism is concerned, it is necessary to salvation for those who have been brought to see that it is so necessary. Baptism is the answer to a question, ‘What must (dei) I do to be saved?’ What shall we do?—The question asked by people who have heard the story of Jesus of Nazareth and felt themselves threatened by it, found themselves interpreted to themselves by it as out of true, as sinners.

The Reviewer approached The Prisoner of Sex with a quickened heart-beat of keen expectation, but warily, unsure whether he hoped to find it a triumph or a failure. Norman Mailer was for his money one of the most interesting and entertaining of contemporary American writers, a man who had recovered from that direst of literary fates, the best-selling first novel followed by a string of failures, and by sheer effort and character remade himself as an artist in middle age. In particular the Reviewer admired semi-confessional, semi-documentary works, like The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago in which Norman wrote about himself in the third person, as the Novelist, the Historian, the Journalist, thus achieving a delicious ironic detachment from his own ego without which indeed his matter and manner could become tiresomely pretentious and irresponsibly extreme.

Peeking into the opening pages of the new book, the Reviewer was glad to see that it was written in the ironic third-person mode, but he was well aware too of what polemical purpose it in this case served. The same cultural trade-winds that had brought across the Atlantic tidings of the growing strength of the movement for Women’s Liberation, and the growing fame of its chief prophet, Kate Millett, had also conveyed whiffs of the excitement greeting Norman’s counterblast, originally rushed to the public in a single issue of Harper’s magazine, to Women’s Lib in general and Kate

Millett in particular. For Kate, in her monumental study of man’s oppression of woman, Sexual Politics, had singled out Norman, along with D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, as prime examples of male chauvinism in modern literature.

In a letter dated 15th July of this year and released to the public one week later, Pope Paul, writing to Cardinal Jean Villot, head of the Vatican Secretariat of State, announced the foundation of a new pontifical body, of which the cardinal would be the first president. To give it its official title, the new agency is the Pontifical Council ‘Cor Unum’ for Promoting Human and Christian Development. Its purpose is to ‘co-ordinate the energies and undertakings of all Catholic organizations’ engaged in emergency relief and development funding.

The project had first been made known beyond the confines of upper-level Secretariat of State circles some seven weeks earlier. From various sources the following sketch of background moves can can be made out. The story seems worth telling in view of one of the major objections that was to be voiced later against the whole project: the unilateral action of the Vatican in a matter that affects the whole Catholic Church, most especially all those persons directly involved in the collection and distribution of relief and development funds.

On 26th May, Cardinal Villot put his signature to approximately 100 copies of a 3-page document. The same day, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, Under-Secretary of State, summoned a number of persons to see him; among them was Mons. Jean Rodhain, president of Caritas Internationalis. He spoke to them not in a group but one after the other, informing them of the content of Cardinal Villot’s letter.

With all the trappings of cloak-and-dagger international intrigue, Cardinal Villot’s letter was not to be sent to its addressees by mail: a team of envoys fanned out to deliver it in person. They travelled to Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere. They laid special stress on the confidential nature of the proceedings and the document.