Earthly Powers (104 page)

       "Los Angeles?" he said fiercely. "Go and see her. Tell her I want her back. Her mother may not, but I do. Tell her to come home, baby as well."

       "Do you mind starting at the beginning?"

       "Eve," he said, "had a baby. Illegitimate, naturally. This is the great new age in which everybody is good and everything's moral and natural and nobody has to be blamed. I was tolerant. Annie was not and is not. As I say, like an old-time father, not like a mother at all. No compassion. Okay, the kid was foolish, but all kids are foolish these days. Eve had her baby in a public ward some place in the Bronx. The father came from the Bronx. That's all we know about the father. There was some big rock music rally in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Teenage copulation. That's where it happened. Then they followed that up with a couple of carefree nights in an old tenement building in the Bronx. A kid of sixteen, God help us, claiming her right to illegitimate motherhood. Now she's taken Belial, as she calls her kid, to California. Redfern Valley. To join the Children of God."

       :"Don't say all that again. Just say what name she's given her baby."

       'Belial. And she didn't get the name out of Paradise Lost, either. They call kids names like Beelzebub and Mephisto. It's the new freedom."

       'What are these Children of God?"

       "It's this evangelist God Manning as he's called. He runs a big closed religious community. The Children of God. It's an old army camp. Now they're tending the soil and keeping pigs and cows and cutting themselves oft from the dangerous modern world."

       "God for Godfrey. The name rings a bell."

       "We got a letter saying she'd found religion at last. I never thought she'd find it that way. I never thought it would be that kind of religion."

       "They're going back. I don't suppose you feel like going back. A travesty of Ulysses to add to your other worries."

       "I've got to see it through to the end. We're doing Ulysses this semester. The Joyce Proust Mann course. I have to explain why it can't be turned into a musical."

       "But, Christ, they've turned it into a musical."

       "It can't be done."

       Breslow was up in the balcony, I was in the orchestra seats. On my way in I stopped to address words of greeting and congratulation to Hortense and Domenico Campanati. They seemed not to have moved from their places during the intermission. They had near-finished drinks in their hands. Somebody had presumably brought those drinks to them. I greeted and congratulated. They were polite, even friendly, but they did not behave like my sister and brother-inlaw. It was probably necessary for them, holding like an expensive artefact of crystal on a windy and violent Fifth Avenue their newly reestablished relationship, to exclude the associations of their sundered state. "I'm sorry," I said, "to hear about poor young Eve."

       "An abominable child," Hortense said.

       "Congratulations again." We sort of all bowed at each other.

       The second act began in the Holles Street lying-in hospital, with Bloom and Stephen meeting for the first time among students who blasphemed against fecundity. Stephen, dubbed bullockbefriending bard because he had placed Mr Deasy's letter on a cure for cattle disease in the evening paper, and Bloom, a father, alike proclaimed their veneration for the fertile Oxen of the Sun. But a couple of students, with sticks and straw cadeys, sang: Copulation without population That is the thing the world requires Why fill our flats and houses With dirty squalling brats? We need every square inch we can spare For parrots dogs and cats Pedication as a variation Sets trilling all the hot erotic wires But love's true end is uteral so all the poets state A prelapsarian paradise for Adam and his mate With RAISING CAIN FORBIDDEN written on the outer gate And COP U LATE Then Buck Mulligan came in, rainwet, followed by Haines with a gun. Bloom disarmed him. Stephen fled to nighttown. Bloom followed. Now came the big phantasmagoric scene, with the unconscious rawly exposed, the chorus with much to do, Stephen's mother whizzing up from the grave, Stephen smashing the chandelier with his ashplant, getting the hell out, beaten up by tommies, Bloom leaning tenderly over him and then catching a vision of dead Rudy. There were tears in the audience as at an adaptation of Little Women.

       Bloom and Stephen at the cabman's shelter, the chantey-singing Murphy, a tenor and baritone duet before parting but promising to re-meet, based solely on the words "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." Then the final scena for Molly, a virtuoso twenty-five minutes. The viewpoint of the audience was a point in the wall of the bedroom in Eccles Street, so that the floor tilted up and the bed was raised. We were looking down at Gea Tellus from the moon. Molly sang, monologuized, ended with a flamenco reminiscence of Gibraltar and young love, the kiss under the Moorish Wall mingling with another on the heights above Dublin, a reprise: Flower of the mountain Crown of the Hill of the Howth That's what you called me then Day of full summer Day of the spring of love Will you come back again? Will you come back again?

       And then came the coda with a crescendoing and diminuendoing chord of C major, the last whispered yes. Curtain. Applause. Much applause. By God, I thought, if the New York critics don't pan it it may run.

       I met Breslow coming out. "It doesn't work," he said, "because it can't work." He was very dejected, a Bloom whose wife's womb had been cut out and whose daughter had been put in the family way at Mullingar.

       Come back to the Algonquin with me," I said in pity. "A little drink in the Blue Bar."

       We walked to West Forty-fourth Street, only a couple of blocks. There were a lot of obstreperous Afro-Americans about. I caught a stupid vision of arlo blessing with fat arms man's innocent violence from a lighted window forty stories up. Helismoke curled from the gratings. Red and yellow light flashed on and off faces gleeful with gratuitous malevolence. In the bar we ordered scotch on the rocks.

       "The hysterectomy," I said.

       "Something there, something growing, malevolent, you know."

       "Malignant?"

       "Is there a difference?"

       "Look," I said. "I'm going to California to see a film based on an early novel of mine. About Socrates. I'll also see Eve. Where is this place?"

       "Redfern Valley. About thirty miles out of Los Angeles. They won't let you in. I know, I've tried."

       "But, Christ, a man has a right to see his own daughter."

       "The message they give you is that nobody wants to see anybody. Wrapped warm in the love of God Manning or Jesus or somebody. No contamination from outside. I got a little note saying Go Away Dad, I'm Fine. It was Eve's writing all right. What the hell could I do?"

       "Get the police. The FBI. The state governor."

       "That's crazy. It's private property. You can't just break in. They'd love the police to try. Then they could propagandise about the state being against God. They have their own radio station."

       "Does the press ever get in?"

       "Manning isn't averse to publicity if he can check everything first. You mean you'd try and get in as the press?"

       "As a representative of the London Times," I decided. "I know Kilduff at the Washington bureau. He could fix it for me. I take it these people are on the telephone?"

       "I got on the telephone to them. They put a girl's voice on. It didn't sound like Eve. It was the same message. Go Away I'm Happy in the Love of the Lord. The London Times," he said, "has a big reputation. It might work."

       "I'm desperately sorry about all this, you know."

       "Look," Breslow said fiercely, "I've always been right about religion. Religion's dangerous. You just don't know what you're tuning into when you listen for the station GOD. Now your Pope comes along telling everybody that everything's beautifully clear-cut and God's here and the devil's there and the devil doesn't smell of roses and runs off yelping when you make the sign of the cross. I'm a Jew and I know it isn't that simple. If Jehovah exists he's schizophrenic. Loving father and dirty bastard. But I don't think he does exist."

       I looked at him and very nearly said: Here are you teaching Comparative Literature, the big subtle stuff crammed with ambiguities, and you've been put in a situation of melodrama, very simple and crude, a teenage daughter turned into an unmarried mother and a wife distraught with the shame of it, yourself a sorrowing father. Get off Comparative Literature: it doesn't help you to cope with life; read the disregarded works of Kenneth M. Toomey, they're pure melodrama, full of erring sons and daughters and heartbroken parents. But I said, "I'll get on to Kilduff now." Breslow nodded dumbly, finished his drink, then went out to engage the hell of the streets and the IRT. I went to my little suite and telephoned Kilduff. He was home and not yet in bed. He went along with my proposal.

       The place I went to the following day was the little seaside town of San Jaime, almost midway between Piedras Blancas and Santa Cruz. To reach it I had to fly from Los Angeles in a twelve-seater aircraft operated by Coast Range Airways. The name of the town carried two pronunciations, like Los Angeles itself. The pilot called it San Jamy, and I could not help saying to myself, as we landed, "By the mess, ere theise eyes of mine take themselves to slomber, ay'll de gud service, or I'll hg i' th' grund for it." Meaning the next day, not today. Today was the film, entitled somewhat Ibsenishly A Corrupter of Youth, and here, on the little airfield, was Sidney Labrick, the producer-director, a saturnine man with a pepper and salt beard, and with him, now entering my life, Geoffrey Enright.

       Geoffrey Enright said, "Well, the man isself, Gawd bless and sive us, not looking a day over seventy and fit, by God sir, yes, fit, fit, and sexy wiv it."

       "Geoffrey," Labrick said, in American, "has been helping me." And he looked at Geoffrey with cold eyes half-shut against the sea wind. "At least, he called it helping."

       The town we now entered in Labrick's Studebaker was, and still is, a male homosexual colony. The ingenuous reader will regard this as too improbable even for fiction, but it is the truth I am writing. California has always been notable for excess, or originality, or the pushing of logic to the Cartesian limit. No decree of Californian law had made this town into a male homosexual enclave: it had gradually become that, with heterosexuals quietly leaving as white folk left the prosperous black districts of Queens in New York, except that here black heterosexuals moved out along with the white, and lesbians both black and white moved out also. The police were homosexual too, and of course the mayor. There were absolutely no women. When I was shown to my room in the Holiday Inn, the Push It Well In, as Geoffrey termed it, a fair-haired youth with a frilly orange apron on was still hoovering it. "Oh my dears," he sibilated, "we're so late today. Not a pisspot emptied and the house full of spaniels." Such ephebes as he were rarer than they had been. Most of the citizens I had seen walking the streets were butchly muscular, dressed as cowboys. I dumped my bags and we went to the bar for a few Ramos fizzes. The barman was black, tough and charming. "The size of it, my dear," Geoffrey whispered to me.

       He can lay ten dollars' worth of quarters along it and flicked them all off with one seismic lash."

       "You know," Labrick said, "the situation. This movie will never get a public performance in the present condition of the law. The law will change, it's changing already, following that change in morality which has to precede legal change. I reckon about seven years will go by before we see the permissive society." I had not heard the phrase before.

       "Speaks lovely," Geoffrey said, very close to me. "Like a real shonnary."

       "A what?"

       "A shonnary. I always leave the dick out." Then he made a comic gesture of horror at an imagined open fly. A very amusing young man, dressed in a parody of British smartness—dark woollen suit with stiffish shirt collar and a blue tie with phalloid shapes in gold. He was not yet running to fat, though he was on the way to losing his hair, which had the colour and patina of tan boot polish.

       "I don't quite understand," I told Labrick. "About the film not getting a public performance, I mean. There's nothing bannable about the life and death of Socrates."

       "Ah," Geoffrey said, "but there is the way Sidney's done it. He's played up the love, haven't you, Sidney?"

       "History," Labrick said, "has been unfair to Socrates. Just as it's probably been unfair to Christ. History is too often written by heterosexuals."

       "I gather," I said, "that Val Wrigley wrote the script. I see the tie-up. Between Socrates and Christ, I mean. I wonder if I should have sold you the rights to the book."

       "There's not much of the book left. We had to buy a book to please the backers. I said the whole thing's in the public domain. But no, they said I had to buy a book."

       Geoffrey was looking at me in the manner of a preparatory school master shocked by a pupillary solecism. "My dear," he said. "It's you whom we consider to be the great opener of flies. None of us will ever forget that fearless declaration."

       "All I mean is that Socrates is a philosopher in my book. The pederasty hardly gets a mention."

       "You wrote that book a long time ago," Labrick said. "Anyway, don't judge till you see. And remember you get points. This movie is going to get a very wide private showing. And by private I mean full-size moviehouses hired by clubs. When the permissive age begins it will be universally recognised as a landmark."

       "Val Wrigley," Geoffrey said. "I gather you and he were ah ah ah"—he gasped quite in the Henry James manner before uttering the word—"buddies."

       "First World War," I said. "Nearly as long ago as the book. Is he here?"

       "Just about here," Geoffrey said. "He is very very," in a Noel Coward tone, "old."