If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels: William Peter Blatty's Own Story of The Exorcist
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If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels: William Peter Blatty's Own Story of The Exorcist
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Overview
If There Were Demons Then Perhaps There Were Angels: William Peter Blatty's Own Story of The Exorcist is the New York Times bestselling author's memoir on how he came to write his most famous novel and subsequent Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation.
While a junior at the Jesuitical Georgetown University in Washington D.C. in 1949, Blatty read an article in the Washington Post about the exorcism of a young boy in Maryland. This chronicled ritual served as the inspiration for the book that became a phenomenon, a film, and a franchise.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466834828 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 65 |
| Sales rank: | 958,215 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
William Peter Blatty (1928-2017) is best known for his mega-bestselling novel The Exorcist. Blatty also cowrote the screenplay of the hilarious Inspector Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark. Known for his early comic novels, the New York Times proclaimed that "nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty," describing him as "a gifted virtuoso who writes like S. J. Perelman."
Read an Excerpt
If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels
By William Peter Blatty, Rae Smith
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 1998 William Peter BlattyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-3482-8
CHAPTER 1
In 1949, while a junior at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, I read in the August 20 edition of the Washington Post the following account:
In what is perhaps one of the most remarkable experiences of its kind in recent religious history, a 14-year-old Mount Rainier boy has been freed by a Catholic priest of possession by the devil, it was reported yesterday.
Only after 20 to 30 performances of the ancient ritual of exorcism, here and in St Louis, was the devil finally cast out of the boy, it was said.
In all except the last of these, the boy broke into a violent tantrum of screaming, cursing and voicing of Latin phrases – a language he had never studied – whenever the priest reached those climactic points of the 27-page ritual in which he commanded the demon to depart from the boy.
In complete devotion to his task, the priest stayed with the boy over a period of two months, during which he witnessed such manifestations as the bed in which the boy was sleeping suddenly moving across the room.
A Washington Protestant minister has previously reported personally witnessing similar manifestations, including one in which the pallet on which the sleeping boy lay slid slowly across the floor until the boy's head bumped against a bed, awakening him.
In another instance reported by the Protestant minister, a heavy armchair in which the boy was sitting, with his knees drawn under his chin, tilted slowly to one side and fell over, throwing the boy on the floor.
The final rite of exorcism in which the devil was cast from the boy took place in May, it was reported, and since then he had had no manifestations.
The ritual of exorcism in its present form goes back 1,500 years and from there to Jesus Christ.
But before it was undertaken, all medical and psychiatric means of curing the boy – in whose presence such manifestations as fruit jumping up from the refrigerator top in his home and hurling itself against the wall also were reported – were exhausted.
The boy was taken to Georgetown University Hospital here, where his affliction was exhaustively studied, and to St Louis University. Both are Jesuit institutions.
Finally both Catholic hospitals reported they were unable to cure the boy through natural means.
Only then was a supernatural cure sought.
The ritual was undertaken by a Jesuit in his 50s.
The details of the exorcism of the boy were described to the Washington Post by a priest here (not the exorcist).
The ritual began in St Louis, continued here and finally ended in St Louis.
For two months the Jesuit stayed with the boy, accompanying him back and forth on the train, sleeping in the same house and sometimes in the same room with him. He witnessed many of the same manifestations reported by the Protestant minister this month to a closed meeting of the Society of Parapsychology laboratory at Duke University, who came here to study the case, and was quoted as saying it was 'the most impressive' poltergeist (noisy ghost) phenomenon that had come to his attention in his years of celebrated investigation in the field.
Even through the ritual of exorcism the boy was by no means cured readily.
The ritual itself takes about three-quarters of an hour to perform. During it, the boy would break into the fury of profanity and screaming and the astounding Latin phrases.
But finally, at the last performance of the ritual, the boy was quiet. And since then, it was said, all manifestations of the affliction – such as the strange moving of the bed across the room, and another in which the boy's family said a picture had suddenly jutted out from the wall in his presence – have ceased.
It was early this year that members of the boy's family went to their minister and reported strange goings-on in their Mount Rainier house since January 18.
The minister visited the boy's home and witnessed some of the manifestations.
But though they seemed to the naked eye unexplainable – such as the scratchings from the area of the wall in the boy's presence – there was always the suggestion, he said, that in some way the noises may have been made by the boy himself.
Retaining his skepticism in the matter, the minister then had the boy stay a night – February 17 – in his own home.
It was there, before his own eyes, he said, that the two manifestations that he felt were beyond all natural explanation took place.
In one of these the boy's pallet moved across the floor while his hands were outside the cover and his body rigid.
In the other the heavy chair, with the boy immobile in it, tilted and fell over to the floor before the minister's amazed eyes, he said. The minister tried to overturn the chair while sitting in it himself and was unable to do so.
The case involved such reactions as neighbors of the boy's family sprinkling holy water around the family's house.
Some of the Mount Rainier neighbors' skepticism was startlingly resolved, it was reported, when they first laughed it off, invited the boy and his mother to spend a night in their own "unhaunted" homes, only to have some of the manifestations – such as the violent, apparently involuntary shakings of the boy's bed – happen before their eyes.
The article impressed me. And how coolly understated that is. I wasn't just impressed; I was excited. For here at last, in this city, in my time, was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting. And thus it occurred to me long afterwards, when I'd started my career as a writer, that this case of possession which had joyfully haunted my hopes in the years since 1940 was a worthwhile subject for a novel. In my youth I had thought about entering the priesthood; at Georgetown had considered becoming a Jesuit. The notion of course was unattainable and ludicrous in the extreme, since with respect to the subject of my worthiness, my nearest superiors are asps; and yet a novel of demonic possession, I believed – if only I could make it sufficiently convincing – might be token fulfilment of deflected vocation. Though let me make clear, if I may – lest someone rush to have me canonized – that I would never write a novel that I thought would not engross or excite or entertain; that I thought would have a readership of fifteen people. (It has often worked out that way, yes; but I didn't plan it.) If walking out of church you should pick up a Daniel Lord homiletic treatise from the vestibule pamphlet rack, you will not, I can virtually assure you, see 'as told to Bill Blatty' under Father Lord's name. But if one has a choice among viable subjects and one can do good along the way by picking that one ... well, that is the little one can say of my motive.
As the years went by, I continued my studies in possession, but desultorily and with no specific aim. For example, I made a note about a character on a page of a book called Satan: 'Detective – "Mental Clearance Sale".' The words, in quotes, would turn up eventually very deep in the story, as a thought of Kinderman, the homicide detective in the novel; but at the time I made the note, I knew nothing of its context. Finally, however – I think it was in 1963 – the notion of possession as the basic subject matter of a novel crystallized and firmed.
But the problem was that no one else liked the idea. Not my agent. Not Doubleday, my publisher at that time. Even my dentist thought the notion was rotten. So I dropped the idea. I was a comedy writer; I had never written anything 'straight', except a few forged letters of excuse from my mother when I'd been absent from school the day before. ('Well, it hurt right here, Sister Joseph. Pardon? How could I have cancer for just one day?') I was doubtful I could do it; even more doubtful than Doubleday, perhaps, which would extend us from doubt into negative certitude.
But sometimes something, someone, helps. In December 1967, at a New Year's Eve dinner at the home of novelist Burton Wohl, I met Marc Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam Books. He asked me what I was working on. Finding the shortest line at the unemployment office, I told him; and then spoke of possession. He warmed to the subject matter instantly. I wondered if he was drunk. He suggested publication of the book by Bantam. I was then supporting the entire cast of Birnam Wood and requested an advance large enough to carry me for a year. He said, 'Send me an outline.'
What could I send him? The small scrap of paper with the cryptic notation about the detective? I had no plot. I had only the subject matter, some hazily formulated characters and a theme.
So I wrote him a long letter. I began by detailing what I knew of the incident of 1949, including some rather bizarre phenomena that had been bruited about on the Georgetown campus at the time: for example, a report that the exorcist and his assistants were forced to wear rubber wind-jammer suits, for the boy, in his fits, displayed a prodigious ability to urinate endlessly, accurately and over great distances, with the exorcists as his target.
I went on to discuss the positon of the Church on the matter:
It cautions exorcists that many of the paranormal phenomena can be explained in natural terms. The speaking in 'unknown tongues' (unless it is part of intelligent dialogue), or possession of hidden knowledge, for example, can be explained in terms of telepathy – the possessed may simply be picking the knowledge out of the brain of the exorcist or someone else in the room. And as for levitation, Hindu mystics reputedly can manage it now and then, and what do we really know about magnetism and gravity? The 'natural' explanations are, of course, somewhat mystical themselves. But the occurrence of one or two of these phenomena, exorcists are cautioned, does not justify assuming one is dealing with true possession. What the Church does tell its exorcists is to go with the laws of chance and probablility, which tell us that it's far less fanciful to believe that an alien entity or spirit has control of the possessed than to believe that all or most of these paranormal phenomena are likely to occur all at once through purely natural causes. When all of them occur, and psychological causes are eliminated, then try the cure.
Still loftily avoiding such crass considerations as a discussion of plot, I nimbly leaped to the next sure peak – my intended theme:
Is there a man alive who at one time or another in his life has not thought, Look, God! I'd like to believe in you; and I'd really like to do the right thing. But twenty thousand sects and countless prophets have different ideas about what the right thing is. So if you are out there, why not end all the mystery and hocus-pocus and make an appearance on top of the Empire State Building. Show me your face.
We follow through by thinking that God doesn't take this simple recourse, this reasonable recourse, and therefore isn't there. He isn't dead and he isn't alive in Argentina. He simply never lived.
But I happen to believe – and this is part of the theme of the novel – that if God were to appear in thunder and lightning atop the Empire State Building, it would not affect (for long, at least) the religious beliefs of anyone who witnessed the phenomenon. Those who already believed would find the incident a reinforcement of their faith; those who did not already believe would be impressed for a while, but with the passage of time would convince themselves that what they saw was the result of either autosuggestion, mass hypnosis, or hysteria, or massive charlatanism involving nuclear energy and NASA. On a theological level, I happened to believe that if there is a God who is somehow involved with us and our activities he would refrain from appearing on top of the Empire State Building, because he would ultimately only cause trauma for those who did not will to believe, and thereby increase their guilt. The Red Sea's parting and the raising of Lazarus are not viable entries to religious belief. The trick to faith lies not in magic but in the will of the individual.
The novel would ask, I went on to explain, what effect a confrontation with undisputed paranormal phenomena would have on the book's main characters: the atheist mother of the boy (as I then intended the victim should be; I had named him Jamie), and the priest of weak faith called in for the exorcism, whom I first named Father Thomas. This thematic aspect would prove only a suggestion of what it would become in the book I eventually wrote, expressed by Father Merrin as follows:
I think the demon's target is not the possessed; it is us ... the observers ... every person in this house. And I think – I think the point is to make us despair, to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity, ugly, unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us ...
And perhaps even this would seem merely an insight compared to the stronger, more encompassing theme that would spring from the Jesuit psychiatrist's act of ultimate self-sacrifice and love: the theme I call 'the mystery of goodness'. For in a mechanistic universe, where the atoms that make up a human being should logically be expected, even in the aggregate, to pursue their selfish ends more blindly than the rivers rush out to the seas, how is it there is love in the sense that a God would love and that a man will give his life for another?
Because it is true and embedded in reality, this theme would appear of itself in the inevitable developments of my plot, that plot which at the time of my letter to Jaffe was a beast as mythical as the unicorn. And so I 'vamped', as we mental swindlers often say. And then a murder, predicted long before by my subconscious when I scribbled that note about a 'detective', indeed did appear to me. 'The killer is the boy; the mother knows this, and against the eventual arrest of her son,' I wrote to Jaffe:
The mother seeks psychiatric help to establish the boy was deranged at the time of the murder. The effort proves unpromising. She then seizes upon the device of calling in the psychologically intimidating forces of the Catholic Church in an effort to prove (although she doesn't believe it for a moment) that her son is 'possessed' – that it was not Jamie but an alien entity inhabiting his body who commited the murder. She resorts to the Church and requests an exorcism; and soon it is arranged for a priest to examine the boy. She grasps at the desperate and bizarre hope that if the exorcist concludes that the boy is possessed and is able to restore him to a measure of normalcy, she will have a powerful psychological and emotional argument for securing both the release of the boy and the equally important release (even if the boy is imprisoned) from humiliation and degradation. The exorcist selected for the task is, by the one coincidence permitted us, the priest who has lost his faith.
Ultimately, the boy is exorcized. Although his fate at the hands of the law is not the concern of this novel. Our concern is the exorcist. Has his faith been restored by this incredible encounter? Yes. But not by the exorcism itself, for finally the exorcist is still not sure what really happened. What restores – no; reaffirms – his faith is simple human love, which is surely the fact of God made visible.
Virtually none of this plot survived; nor did my notion that 'the alien entity possessing the boy should be a woman who claims to have lived in some remote period of history, possibly Judaea in the time of Christ; and who attacks the exorcist psychologically by claiming an acquaintance with Christ, then proceeding to describe him in demythologozing, disillusioning terms'.
Jaffe shopped my letter at some hard-cover houses, hoping to bring them in on the deal and thus share in producing the required advance. But a book about possession by a writer of comedy? Whose books, while they didn't sell fewer copies than The Idylls of the King in its Tibetan translation, certainly didn't sell any more? No one was interested, a phenomenon to which I'd grown accustomed, but which surely should have given Marc Jaffe second thoughts. But Jaffe held fast, and Bantam, on its own, at last came up with the advance. Only then did I begin to believe that perhaps I could write the book.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels by William Peter Blatty, Rae Smith. Copyright © 1998 William Peter Blatty. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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Contents
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Begin Reading,
Copyright,