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mentioned this to the schoolfriend with the elastic-sided boots—but not to my family; and while I found it a matter for mild pride (something’s happening!), I didn’t deduce anything significant, let alone religious.
    It was probably Alex Brilliant who passed on Nietzsche’s news that God was officially dead, which meant we could all wank away the merrier for it. You made your own life, didn’t you—that was what Existentialism was all about. And our zestful young English master was implicitly against religion. At least, he quoted the Blake that sounded like the opposite of “Jerusalem”: “For Old Nobodaddy aloft / Farted & Belch’d & cough’d.” God farted! God belched! That proved He didn’t exist! (Again, I never thought to take these human traits as arguments for the existence, indeed the sympathetic nature, of the deity.) He also quoted to us Eliot’s bleak summary of human life: birth, and copulation, and death. Halfway into his own natural span, this English master, like Alex Brilliant, was to kill himself, in a pills-and-drink suicide pact with his wife.
    I went up to Oxford. I was asked to call on the college chaplain, who explained that as a scholar I had the right to read the lesson in chapel. Newly freed from the compulsions of hypocritical worship, I replied, “I’m afraid I’m a happy atheist.” Nothing ensued—no clap of thunder, loss of scholar’s gown, or rictus of disapproval; I finished my sherry and left. A day or two later, the captain of boats knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to try out for the river. I replied—with perhaps greater boldness, having faced down the chaplain—“I’m afraid I’m an aesthete.” I wince now for my reply (and rather wish I’d rowed); but again, nothing happened. No gang of hearties broke into my room looking to smash the blue china I did not possess, or to thrust my bookish head down a lavatory bowl.
    I was able to state my position, but too shy to argue it. Had I been articulate—or crass—I might have explained to both cleric and oarsman that being an atheist and being an aesthete went together: just as being Muscular and being Christian once had for them. (Although sport might still provide a useful analogy: hadn’t Camus said that the proper response to life’s meaninglessness was to invent rules for the game, as we had done with football?) I might have gone on—in my fantasy rebuttal—to quote them Gautier’s lines: “ Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent. / Mais les vers souverains / Demeurent / Plus forts que les airains. ” [The Gods themselves die out, but Poetry, stronger even than bronze, survives everything.] I might have explained how religious rapture had long ago given way to aesthetic rapture, and perhaps topped it off with a cheesy sneer about St. Teresa manifestly not seeing God in that famous ecstatic sculpture but enjoying something altogether more corporeal.
    When I said that I was a happy atheist, the adjective should be taken as applying to that noun and no further. I was happy not to believe in God; I was happy to have been academically successful so far; and that was about it. I was consumed with anxieties I tried to hide. If I was intellectually capable (while suspecting myself of being merely a trained exam-passer), I was socially, emotionally, and sexually immature. And if I was happy to be free of Old Nobodaddy, I wasn’t blithe about the consequences. No God, no Heaven, no afterlife; so death, however distant, was on the agenda in quite a different way.

Chapter 5

    While I was at university, I spent a year in France, teaching at a Catholic school in Brittany. The priests I lived among surprised me by being as humanly various as civilians. One kept bees, another was a Druid; one bet on horses, another was anti-Semitic; this young one talked to his pupils about masturbation; that old one was addicted to films on television, even if he liked to dismiss them afterwards with the lofty phrase “lacking both