MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching
souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of the great,
achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience
on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a
conscience troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has
largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy,
not gluttony of Excess. Your patient’s mother, as I learn from the dossier and
you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example. She would be
astonished—one day, I hope, will be—to learn that her whole life is enslaved to
this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the
quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can
use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience,
uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubose has this old woman well in hand. She
is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what
has been offered her to say with a demure little sign and a smile “Oh please,
please…all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest
weeniest bit of really crisp toast”. You see? Because what she wants is smaller
and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as
gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be
to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is
practising temperance. In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the
plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, “Oh, that’s
far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it”. If
challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does
it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is
offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.
The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been doing for
years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now
dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called the “All-I-want”
state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly
boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or
any friend who can do these simple things “properly”—because her “properly”
conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal
pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by
her as “the days when you could get good servants” but known to us as the days
when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds
which made her less dependent on those of the table. Meanwhile, the daily
disappointment produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and friendships are
cooled. If ever the Enemy introduces into her mind a faint suspicion that she is
too interested in food, Glubose counters it by suggesting to her that she
doesn’t mind what she eats herself but “does like to have things nice for her
boy”. In fact, of course, her greed has been one of the chief sources of his
domestic discomfort for many years.
Now your patient is his mother’s son. While working your hardest, quite rightly,
on other fronts, you must not neglect a little quiet infiltration in respect of
gluttony. Being a male, he is not so likely to be caught by the “All I want”
camouflage. Males are best turned into gluttons with the help of their vanity.
They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique
themselves on
having found the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really “properly”
cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit. But,
however you approach it, the great thing is to bring him into the state in which
the denial of any one indulgence—it matters not which, champagne or tea, sole
colbert or cigarettes—“puts him out”, for then his charity, justice, and
obedience are all at your mercy.
Mere excess in food is much less valuable than delicacy. Its chief use is as a
kind of artillery preparation for attacks on chastity. On that, as on every
other subject, keep your man in a condition of false spirituality. Never let him
notice the medical aspect. Keep him wondering what pride or lack of faith has
delivered him into your hands when a simple enquiry into what he has been eating
or drinking for the last twenty-four hours would show him whence your ammunition
comes and thus enable him by a very little abstinence to imperil your lines of
communication. If he must think of the medical side of chastity, feed him the
grand lie which we have made the English humans believe, that physical exercise
in excess and consequent fatigue are specially favourable to this virtue. How
they can believe this, in face of the notorious lustfulness of sailors and
soldiers, may well be asked. But we used the schoolmasters to put the story
about—men who were really interested in chastity as an excuse for games and
therefore recommended games as an aid to chastity. But this whole business is
too large to deal with at the tail-end of a letter,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTA
