Back in the early 1960s, when the cold war was keeping nicely warm, a friend of mine paid a visit to Moscow. He was not a communist, but like so many of us in those days he was not unsympathetic to Marxism, even in its Russian form, and was curious to have a close-up look at the Soviet experiment. He found the place in general grim but functioning, and the population adequately fed and fully employed, if not particularly happy-seeming – but then, he had read the mighty Russians, and knew all about the Great Russian Soul and its torments, and had not gone expecting mirth and merry-making.
One seemingly small thing that struck him forcefully, though, was the large number of stalls around Lenin's tomb in Red Square selling mementoes of the founding father. In particular, the cheap silver medals stamped with Lenin's image reminded him sharply of the "miraculous medals" of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary that we Irish Catholics were encouraged to wear when we were children. In the heart of Moscow, the capital of what sermonising priests castigated as atheistic communism, he realised that he was attending at the tomb of a saint.
Lenin himself, John Gray reminds us, was alive to the danger that Bolshevism might be taken for a new religion, and as early as 1913 the Bolshevik leader was writing to Maxim Gorky to insist that any attempt to construct a new God would be nothing more than an exercise is necrophilia. It was, as Gray remarks, an astute observation, and appropriately directed, for Gorky had close links with the Russian so-called "God-builders". "A kind of secular mystery cult," Gray writes, "God-building was another part of the late 19th-century European current in which occultism and science marched hand in hand. The God-builders believed a true revolutionary must aim to deify humanity, an enterprise that includes the abolition of death."
The notion that many among the earliest dialectical materialists believed firmly in the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of such transcendental developments will raise the eyebrows of many a reader. By the time they come to this discovery, however, their eyebrows are likely to be already hovering just under their hairlines, for through his researches John Gray has laid bare an astonishing seam of thanatological fantasising and psychical conspiracy running from late-Victorian English high society through the Russian revolution and the Stalinist terror to the computer age neo-spiritualism of today. The Immortalization Commission is a sober account of a hitherto almost unnoticed but remarkably widespread phenomenon – and also a romp of a read. Thank God, or Whomever, that Gray got there before Dan Brown, though Brown is probably at this minute sharpening his pen, or firing up his laptop.
Gray begins his narrative in England in the late Victorian period, with the Arnoldian sea of faith rapidly ebbing and the mighty ones of the land in search of some, of any, continuing certainty among the remaining rock-pools. In a scene straight out of George Eliot we find Charles Darwin attending a séance at the house of his brother Erasmus, along with the anthropologist Francis Galton, FWH Myers, the inventor of the word "telepathy" and Eliot herself, though she deplored spiritualism. Nor did Darwin think much of the occasion, finding it "hot and tiring" and leaving early.
Myers, the true believer among that evening's gathering, later went on to found, with the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the Society for Psychical Research, which would boast among its presidents William James and Henri Bergson, and attract figures such as Tennyson, Gladstone, the physicists Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Barrett, and Arthur Balfour, the "last grandee", as his biographer called him, one of the richest men in Britain, whose repressive policies as chief secretary for Ireland earned him the nickname Bloody Balfour. Balfour's account of humankind's post-Darwinian predicament is plangent and heartfelt: "Man . . . is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir to all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory accident in the life of the meanest of the planets." Out of this appalling realisation on the part of Balfour and so many of his circle sprang the new and pathetic faith in spiritualism.
Balfour was no dupe but a thoroughgoing sceptic, yet he firmly believed in the possibility of communication from beyond the grave. He and other spiritualists were supported in this belief by a vast project of automatic writings, or "cross-correspondences", amassed over 30 years by various mediums. "The people involved in the cross-correspondences," Gray writes, "belonged to the topmost stratum of Edwardian society. Many of those involved had suffered agonising bereavements; some had long-hidden personal relationships. The scripts became a vehicle for unresolved personal loss, and for secret love."
They were also to become, as Gray has it, "the vehicle of a Plan". In a bizarre venture undertaken by an inner core of the English spiritualists, acting under the guidance of the scripts, a new messiah was to be conceived through an extra-marital union between Winifred Coombe-Tennant, a suffragist and British delegate to the League of Nations, and Balfour's brother Gerald, a Tory politician. "The task of the 'spirit-child'," Gray writes, "was to deliver humanity from chaos. Scientifically programmed to perform its role, the child would develop into an extraordinary human being, who would bring peace and justice to the world." Alas, the secret saviour, Henry Coombe-Tennant, turned out to be an ordinary sort of chap, though he did have an interesting life – Eton, Cambridge, Welsh Guards, MI6 and work for Kim Philby – and in the end fulfilled some small part of his spiritual role by converting to Catholicism and becoming a monk.
And so far, mark you, we are not more than a third of the way through this engrossing book. In the central section, "God-builders", Gray traces a fantastically intricate web of connections between HG Wells, his mistress, the Russian siren Moura Budberg, and Lenin, Gorky, Stalin and a crazy crew of Soviet fantasists, conspirators and mass murderers. Wells, who began as an optimistic Darwinist, became increasingly disenchanted with the future. Not so Gorky, who wrote: "Personally, I prefer to imagine man as a machine, which transmutes in itself so-called 'dead matter' into a psychical energy and will, in some far-away future, transform the whole world into a purely psychical one . . . Everything will disappear, being transmuted into pure thought, which alone will exist, incarnating the entire mind of humanity . . ."
Such teleological wishfulness was as nothing compared to the mad dreams of the group of savants who hatched the scheme not only to embalm Lenin's body but to ensure that one day the man himself would be brought back from the dead. And that was only the start. As one of these dreamers, Nikolai Federov, wrote: "Our duty, our task, consists in bringing back to life all who have died . . ." The Bolshevik project, in other words, was to abolish death, not only in the future but in the past, also. Lenin's tomb – its architect, AV Shchusev, later designed Moscow's Lubyanka prison – would be the symbol of this great instauration. The tomb was built in the form of three great cubes, after the teachings of the visionary artist Kasimir Malevich, who considered geometrical forms as the embodiment of a higher reality. Gray writes: "In harmony with this philosophy Malevich suggested that every follower of Lenin should keep a cube in a corner of the home. His proposal was adopted, and the Party ordered that cubes be distributed. Shrines to the dead leader were set up in 'Lenin corners' in factories and offices throughout the country."
And then there was Stalin . . .
John Gray is a connoisseur of human idiocy. In this brief, modest-seeming yet profound book he makes his most compelling plea yet for man to come to his senses and stop dreaming of immortality, for himself and for the earth. He is no fundamentalist atheist – he despises the Dawkins doctrine – yet along with his much-admired Wallace Stevens he would have us acknowledge that here is all we shall know of heaven, or of hell. He does not expect enlightenment soon. As he writes in "Sweet Mortality", the very beautiful closing section of the book, "The hopes that led to Lenin's corpse being sealed in a Cubist mausoleum have not been surrendered. Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet, uploading one's mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space . . . Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal."
John Banville's The Infinities is published by Picador.
