Earthly Powers (26 page)

       "I used toothpaste, if you want to know. A girl at school used it. Domenico, and he's less of a filthy creature than you are, you homo, he remarked on the taste of the peppermint."

       "Oh my God, oh my dear God, oh Jesus Christ, oh sacred Father in Heaven—"

       "Hypocrite. You're a damned hypocrite, he was right, a bloody hypocrite is what you are, Ken Toomey."

       "Oh my dear God." Then the doorbell rang. We looked at each other. "That's the doorbell," I said.

       "Well, answer it; then. It's your doorbell."

       "Who do you think it might be?"

       "The Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin and Horatio Bottomley. Idiot," and she got smartly up and went out to the door. She had nobody to be afraid of, such as a new avenging boatload of sailors or the plainclothes sexual police. I heard her opening the door and then, the voice of one surprised but quickly recovering, going "Oh" twice. The other voice was male and breathy and pleading and scared. I had not thought, I genuinely had not considered that that filthy Domenico would return so soon. Hortense entered the salon demurely and said, "He's got this telegram." She handed it to me. Domenico was still, I assumed, cowering by the door. The telegram said: ARRIO LUNEDI GIORNI CINQUE MISSIONE DELICATA NIZZA CARLO. Typical of a damned priest, assuming that other people's lives could never be so disrupted as to render their homes unavailable for damned priestly intrusion. Still, this somehow. It was rather.

       I said, "Let's have him in." I heard no acerbity in my voice, I heard rather the effect on the vowels of the incipient lip-spreading of a smile. So Domenico was brought in. Eyes round and rolling, sweat on his cheeks, hands and arms most eloquent, he babbled a recitative: Was in the café across the street and the telegram man saw me and he said it was for me he knows me you see and he was glad not to have to climb the stairs with it. Was in the café or rather at a table outside taking a small cognac for my sorrow when he gave it to me. The, this, telegram from my brother. My brother Carlo has something to do in Nice. Missione delicata, I know what he means, it was also that that time in Sardinia. So as before he expects to stay here, so what can I do? On Monday he comes, the day after tomorrow which is Sunday, so what can I do?

       Of course, I have to eliminate later knowledge from this scene, an image of His Holiness the Pope snoring away dead out but, by his sacred presence, thwarting the fornicatory designs of his brother. It was just fat Carlo who was going to snore, but he was a priest and a formidable spiritual entity, and I knew that Domenico feared him. "No problem," I said. "He can have my bedroom and I can sleep on this sofa here. Or I can go to a hotel, no problem." Domenico and Hortense both looked at me with care and suspicion, what the hell was I up to as if they didn't know. "Domenico, Hortense," I said, even wagging two fingers, "you have been naughty children. But in the eyes of God we are all naughty children."

       "Hypocrite," Hortense said unemphatically. Domenico gulped and gave her a most hypocritical glance of reproach.

       "You are still my brother," I said, "though an erring one, just as Hortense remains, though also erring, my sister. Don Carlo, I give you my solemn word, shall know nothing of the reprehensible things that have transpired here. He will, however, I trust, be unable to fail to observe the evidence of a certain warmth between you. He will, I doubt not, be a help to all of us."

       "Oh yes, the warmth," Domenico said, not really understanding me at all, and sidling an inch or two nearer Hortense, who said, still, or even more, unemphatically: "Bloody bloody bloody. Homosexual prig, setting yourself up as as as...

       "This is not generous, Orténsia," Domenico said, still sidling.

CHAPTER 26

"I never," Dr. Henry Havelock Ellis told me, "prescribe castration. But, of course, I never prescribe anything these days. Like you, I call myself a man of letters."

       This was on Sunday, March 30, 1919. That I have admitted to a large vagueness about past events, and yet am able so often to assume the exact chronicler, need in no wise be a puzzle to the reader who looks for consistency in his author. Photostats of my diaries and notebooks arrived from the United States about three months after my eighty-first birthday, and I found therein days and weeks of my life pretty fully recorded, though there are considerable lacunae. That the shameful events beginning at the time of my return from England to Monaco with Hortense, and culminating on March 29, 1919, were as I have set them down, you may accept without question, though the truth of the dialogues is rarely a verbatim one. About meeting Havelock Ellis at the Hotel de Paris the day after I am unsure, but it was certainly in that year and almost certainly in the principality. The meeting and the things he said are wholly pertinent to this phase of my narrative, such as it is, so I expect the reader to expand his concept of truth to accommodate what follows.

       Ellis was then about sixty with scant white hair and a great white beard, quite the prophet. He had practised as a physician but had given up medicine to devote himself to literature. Many of us had been grateful for his Mermaid Series of the Elizabethan Dramatists, published in the late 1880s. It was in connection with an erroneous statement Ellis had made about the origins of Elizabethan act division that I first came into personal contact with him. I forget where he had given his public lecture about Sackville and Norton and the Inns of Court and Gorboduc and Locrine, but I remember vividly a kind of proletarian hogo (beer, black tobacco and inerasable grime) haloing it, so presume it was part of some London County Council extension series for selfimproving workers; Ellis said that the Elizabethan dramatists got their five acts from Seneca, along with much else, and I counter-affirmed that they got them from Terence and Plautus, Seneca's brief closet tragedies following Greek procedure in admitting no act division. Ellis had to admit that he had not thought much about the matter, and later that I was right, but the fallacy he propounded on that occasion was taken up by T. S. Eliot and eternized in one of the magazine reviews he collected and called essays. I corrected Eliot in the dining room of the Russell Hotel in, I think, the late 1930s (he fed himself with crumbs of Wensleydale the while), but the error has survived his death. There was a lot of the dilettante about Eliot. The first volume of Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928) was the occasion of scandal and state prosecution, and to many of my generation Ellis was a martyr-hero.

       He had acquired, he said, a taste for beer in Australia when a teacher there, and he was drinking it in the bar of the Hotel de Paris when I encountered him that Sunday at noon. He had various curious mannerisms. He would screw up his face so as to exclude the passage of air through his nostrils, at the same time snoring faintly and rapidly; he showed his teeth, which were not good, in unexpected and irrelevant as it were demonstration snarls; he swilled his mouth with beer before gulping it audibly; and he plucked at his crotch as if to extract music from it.

       "Homosexuality," he told me. "This friend of mine at Roquebrune is a homosexual of long standing. I think there is little that can be done about it, and I fail to see why it should be regarded as morbid. It is the law that is morbid, but the law will in time be changed. What is your problem?"

       "The aetiology of it—"

       "You cannot very well say that. Dear Sigmund in Vienna has rejected altogether the grossly physical Helmholtzism on which all his generation was raised. He will have it that neuroses and hysterias and what the world calls, if it knows the term, sexual aberrations and inversions and so on have no physical cause though they may have physical symptoms. The so-called aberration of homosexuality has nothing whatever to do with an irregular endowment of hormones or whatnot. No one is born homosexual. No one is born heterosexual either. But everyone is born sexual. This sexuality is first fixed, inevitably, on the mother, source of oral and other gratifications."

       This was dry and cold and un-Elizabethan discourse, and it was far too loud. There was an English family of father, mother and two puppyish daughters seated nearby at a table, and they were taking it all in. Ellis suddenly roared with laughter, plucked a couple of harp chords from his tweeded crotch, and cried: "Freud the Jewish scientist will end up a Christian Scientist if he is not careful. Eh? Eh?" He then snarled brown and yellow at the room, which was filling up at this aperitif hour, and said, "Most of the people here are heterosexual. Though, of course, we must not leave out of account the fact that the Côte d'Azur is a refuge for those of the opposed persuasion. Like, I presume that is your reason for being here, yourself." He then looked, it seemed, appraisingly at the bartender and said, "Encore un bock?'

       "Forgive me," I said. "All this is of the greatest interest, but—"

       He was quick to understand. "Too loud, eh?" he said too loudly. "Yes, a foul fault. It comes of my going deaf." Then he began to whisper quite as audibly as he had declaimed. "Everyone, as I said, is born sexual. There are stages of infantile development which lead, in the majority of cases, to a declaration of heterosexual tropism. Now the homosexual is made out of an inordinate Oedipal situation. But his homosexuality is not a neurosis or psychosis. Only his attitude to it, which means his attitude to society's attitude to it, can produce a condition in which it is in order to talk of an aetiology. Do I make myself clear?"

       All too clear, all too too clear.

       He downed his bock and said, to my relief, "Let us walk a little. It seems to be a gorgeous day."

       We walked only about the square bounded by the hotel, the Casino, the Café de Paris and the little park. It was indeed a gorgeous spring day, a day for the heterosexual flirtations of literary tradition. I said: "My father. The mildest of men, the kindest, as I well remember. I was never afraid of him. Despised him a little, perhaps, for not being firm enough with me, leaving all that to my mother. Despise him now for another thing, but let that pass." Then I suddenly caught a memory, shrill as the flapping seagull over the Casino, of myself screaming, held down, unable to get away, while my father approached me grimly with forceps. No, not his dental chair. Myself in bed with my mother, her arm about me, and my father coming into the bedroom grinning in (it must have been) mock ferocity with the kitchen tongs in his fist (impossible) and gripped in the tongs a monstrous brown and bloody molar. "Biggest I've ever seen," he seemed to leer, thrusting the tooth toward my hidden genitals. "Remember this, boy, remember to look after your pegs." There was a fire (why?) blazing in the bedroom grate, and he untonged the molar and let it drop among the coals. Then he waved the tongs at me, making a dull metallic castañetting, and went out singing. Was that what they called the primal scene, or something?

       "Despise?" said Havelock Ellis. "Nothing to do with it. I say," hands suddenly clasped behind him, swivelling his whole body to get a better look, "that's an awfully pretty girl." She was too, about eighteen, smooth olive, coming from mass with her mother, a blancmange-coloured missal in her hand. As though he had merely done a conventional homage to old man's lechery, he dismissed his admiration and turned back to me, saying, "Put it this way. Your father owned your mother and was very ready to deballock you for being his rival in love, and you conceived the fearful assumption that your father owned all women. That's what dear Sigmund teaches. It will do as well as any other theory. Like false etymology, you know. Tell some ignoramus that Mary Queen of Scots liked to eat marmalade when she was ill, and so they called the stuff Marie est malade. Or that Alexander loved roasted eggs, and when he came in from battle they yelled All eggs under the grate, hence his historic title. Nonsense, but it fills in a sort of gap in the brain. Like the Freudian mythology. It doesn't have to be rational, you know, indeed it can't be. But your father scared you off all women, and that's why you are what you say you are. So forget it. Enjoy yourself, life's short." Though in full view of a group of, from their twang, New Englanders, he arpeggiated a chord on his crotch.

       "And how," I asked, "am I suppose to feel about my sister?"

       "Sister, eh? Younger than you? Interesting business, having a sister. Sigmund had a hell of a row with one of those errant disciples of his, the one that started up on his own with a theory about everything stemming from the birth trauma, Otto Somebody, something in it probably, a row about homosexuality and incest. The sister, one of them said, I don't know whether it was this Otto or the great old bugger himself, she's outside the net. The father doesn't own her as he owns the mother. She's not a sex object, not during that phase, if you see what he's getting at, whichever one it was. Did you read my introduction to 'Tis Pity She's a Whore?"

       "I read the play in the Mermaid Series. I don't remember an introduction."

       "Never mind. Now I come to think of it, I didn't write one. Meant to, perhaps. It doesn't matter. Anyway, the only way out of homosexuality is incest."

       "Or castration."

       "I never prescribe castration. But, of course, I never prescribe anything these days. Like you, I call myself a man of letters." He made a terrible face and leered terribly: "Sororal incest." We were standing on the periphery of the terrace of the Café de Paris. Ellis looked at the aperitif-takers as if they were a zoo, then said clearly to a laden waiter, "L'inceste avec la soeur." The waiter shrugged, as to say it was not on the tariff. "That flashes on the conscious level, like sheet lightning on the marine horizon. To be watched, the occasion of the fall avoided. Out of the frying pan into the other thing. Though that can lead to the seeking of sister substitutes, sororal surrogates and so forth. Interesting. You ought to write a play about it. No, surely it was done by Philip Massinger. Perhaps not. A novel, a bigger form, no room in a play really." I did write a novel, in 1934. Half of one, anyway. But I knew I'd never get away with it, not in an age when the editor James Douglas, who called Aldous Huxley The Man Who Hates God, poor Aldous the God—drunk, declared he would rather give his children prussic acid than let them read The Well of Loneliness. My working title had been She Hath No Breasts.