Vardis Fisher Sees Christian Origins Suspect In Newest "Testament of Man"

A Goat for Azazel is Vardis Fisher's ninth novel in his twelve-volume Testament of Man series, a fictional portrayal of the historical development of the consciousness of mankind.

Throughout his quarter-century writing career, Fisher has shown proper disdain for artistic forms and conventions. Rightly called by Van Wyck Brooks, "The greatest living American writer," Fisher's appeal is primarily intellectual, not aesthetic. Contrary to most living American writers, he has a great deal to say and a large number of highly original ideas. His writing is voluminous, averaging a book a year, and hence usually gives the impression of haste, but this is vindicated by his great concern with honesty in the relation of his materials.

The degree of honesty attainable by a writer is best shown by Fisher's Vridar Hunter tetralogy, a four-novel Wolfean autobiography written during the Thirties, now reprinted in Cardinal paper-back edition. His objectivity is also shown in what is probably his most famous work--Children of God: An American Epic, a novel of almost a thousand pages which won the 1939 Harper's prize. Several years before the publication of Children of God, Bernard DeVoto had called the story of the Mormon migration the great American novel that will never be written. In his review of Fisher's novel, he acknowledged that the job had been successfully completed.

Fisher's latest bestseller was Pemmican, published last August and judged by the critics to have captured the spirit of the frontier as well as did A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky.

The ninth novel of the series, A Goat for Azazel, is a study of Christian origins and beliefs as seen through the eyes of a Second Century seeker of the spiritual Grail called Damon. Damon's intellectual odyssey parallels that of Fisher's; both are somewhat cynical about Christianity, the cynicism of a person beginning as the most beliveing idealist. Fisher was raised on an Idaho farm in a very strict Mormon environment; his intellectual conflict with his religious culture can be seen in Damon's lifetime search.

Damon sees his mother die a Christian martyr and feels his mission to be learning the truths of this strange new sect to determine its place in his own life. His initial reaction is, "If that's your religion, I say to hell with it." He thinks Christianity has a "fascinated obsession with wickedness" and, with a truly moral concern, thinks Christianity an excuse for letting people sin all their lives but still enter Heaven by last-minute repentance.

Damon-Fisher strongly objects to Christian prejudice against the Jews as well as Christian renunciation of life. He cannot understand the death-wish and the related prohibition of sexual expression of many believers. Fisher is very much concerned with the sexual aspects of Christianity and the relationship of religious symbols to sexual ones. He utilizes many of the observations of modern psychology but adds a worthwhile number of his own. Damon finds nothing original in the rituals and beliefs of Christianity and regards it as just another mystery cult, the only difference being that of greater compassion and tenderness.

The novel is employed solely as a vehicle of idea expression and cannot be termed artistically successful. But the ideas are very much worth expressing, even though Fisher's extensive scholarship is too heavily anti-Christian weighted.

His conclusion, however, is a very sensible one. Damon becomes a Christian; "It's the myth that counts . . . Truth, what it is but our meanings housed in myths." "If there was no such man as Jesus there should have been." Christianity is the greatest of all poems, much of human history going into the making. Fisher believes the problem to be eternal, basic to the nature of man. The novel ends with Damon's son deciding, "For this was a man's quest, this search for God. He suspected that the time would come, someday, when he would have to rise and go."