Earthly Powers (30 page)

       "Oh," I smiled, "I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias. It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality."

       "There is divine morality," Raffaele said, "and that is the only morality which is important." He was entering Carlo's field, but Carlo was busy sucking an orange as a weasel might suck a brain. "I think it is possible and I think it is in fact not uncommon to have books which deny divine morality and are dangerous books to put into people's hands."

       "I don't think my books are of that type. The novels I've written are morally rather conventional. I mean, I present wrongdoing but the wrongdoing is always rather conventionally punished. Nobody," I said, "gets away with anything in my novels. That worries me sometimes. I mean, the world is not like that. You remember the novel Miss Prism writes in The Importance of Being Earnest. The good end well, she says, and the bad end badly. That is why it is called fiction."

       "I don't know it," Raffaele said. "Who is it by?"

       "Oscar Wilde. It was he, by the way, who said that there is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly."

       "That is nonsense," Carlo said, taking another orange. "You cannot make moral judgments on things, only on actions."

       "But writing is a kind of action," I said. "You would make a moral judgment on a carpenter who made bad chairs."

       "Only if he sold them as good chairs."

       "Oscar Wilde," Raftaele said darkly. "You would call yourself a disciple of Oscar Wilde?"

       "Oh no," I smiled. "Very much a writer of the Victorian era. We must write like writers of the twentieth century, and now like people who have experienced the terrible cataclysm of the war. We cannot go back."

       Carlo ceased sucking and got up. "I will," he said, "take some oranges with me." He scooped an armful. "For if I wake in the night. But it has been a very full day. I think I shall sleep like a dog."

       "It has been a very full day," his mother agreed, also rising. "But a happy one." She kissed her sons and then, not to my surprise, kissed me. "You will find your room ready," she said. "Raffaele will show you which one. Your sister is the most delightful of girls," she added. "I am very happy."

       "If," Raffaele said to me, "you would come into the library for a moment."

       "You look at me as my father used to look. When I had a bad school report."

       "It is something to do with a report."

       "Dear dear dear. You make me very apprehensive."

       The library was notable for a number of bad busts of Italian authors: Foscolo, Monti, Niccolini, Pindemonte, all of whom, blind and as it were smelling toward the light, seemed interchangeable. There were leatherbound books, all, as in a library in an English country house, unreadable, but there were not all that many, Italy not really possessing all that much literature. But there was a very fine Florentine terrestrial globe or mappamondo, and near it we sat in club chairs, I spinning the globe backwards, Raffaele pouring whisky from a square decanter he released, with a key, from an English tantalus. I took the initiative in glass-clinking. "To the happy couple," I brindized.

       "I hope so. I hope it will work out well. I do not know your sister, you see, I do not know your family. But Domenico has made his choice."

       "And Hortense has made hers."

       "Yes, yes, I should think so. You know a man named Liveright?"

       "Why yes, my New York publisher. I mean, we correspond. I've never met him."

       "I belong to a club in Chicago, it is called the Mercury Club, for businessmen, you understand, Mercury is said to be the god of businessmen."

       "Also of thieves."

       He did not find that funny. "This publisher Liveright was the guest of a business friend of mine. At the Mercury Club. If I may say so, since he is your publisher, he did not seem to be a man of great morality. He is out to make money. He is as ready to make it out of scandal as out of piety or devotion or serious instruction. This he calls being a good businessman. Not good, I told him, prosperous perhaps but not good."

       "He has a Calvinistic background. I don't think he'd see the difference."

       "No? I talked about your work and he seemed surprised that I knew it. I said only that I had seen a book of yours without reading it. At least, I read the first page. I remembered the name Liveright because the first page seemed to be a discussion about—what one of the characters called the good life."

       "That would be Before the Hemlock," I said. "No, wait, a different title in America. Dash Down Yon Cup, not a good title. The one about Socrates. I'm sorry you found it unreadable."

       "No no no no, please. I find most novels unreadable. I am not perhaps what you would call a reading man. But I knew of your name, of course, because of Domenico and his falling in love, as my mother put it in her letter."

       "You make it sound ungenuine. They're in love all right. But, forgive me, I wish you'd come to the point."

       "Liveright kindly sent me a folder of articles about your work. There was one article about uncleanness and obscenity and I think the word was sensuality. I have the folder in a drawer in that desk there. Perhaps I should get it out." But he seemed tired, a very full day.

       "That would be my first novel," I said. "Once Departed. I think the Americans called it Return No More. It's a nuisance, having these different titles."

       "Liveright also said something about you having to leave England and not daring to go back. Because of some scandal or other. Is that true?"

       "Look, Raffaele, if I may call you that, all this is my business. To deny what Liveright alleges would be an admission that it's your business as well. I see I must change my American publisher."

       "It is the business of the family into which your sister marries. You become a kind of relative. Let me tell you. There was a British actress on Broadway. The name is in that folder. A widow apparently, her husband dead of influenza. She said that her husband had begun to live an irregular life some time before he died. There was a party at which Liveright was present. He was going to publish the play this lady was acting in. The lady became violent and abusive about the part she alleged that you played in her husband's estrangement from her. She spoke of your sexual irregularities. When I asked if you were a disciple of Oscar Wilde I meant it not only in the sense of literature. We call this thing a disease and sometimes the English disease. I spent two years at a school in England called Orpington School. It is in these schools that the disease often first appears."

       "Homosexuality is the term," I said. "It is not a disease. The world's attitude to it is probably morbid, but it is a condition that exists widely and is often found allied to artistic ability. Sometimes great artistic genius. Your Michelangelo, for instance."

       "Michelangelo caused no scandal."

       "And, you might add, he had no sister to marry into the Campanati family."

       "Whether we call it a disease or an attribute of the artistic temperament, it is still a sin."

       "You mean the homosexual act or the homosexual condition?"

       "One makes the other so I see no difference."

       "In that case you've no right to talk about sin. Sins are the products of free will. Your brother Carlo made that very clear to us all in the sermon he gave at Sainte Devote in Monaco in the spring. I did not choose to be homosexual. Because the Church condemns it, illogically I would say, I find myself out of the Church. But all this is my business."

       "I do not think so. I was seriously prepared to advise Domenico against this marriage, even last week when all was ready, but I saw that might be unjust. Moreover, Domenico is old enough to go his own way. I certainly could not forbid it. Still, the family must be protected, and I have become the head of the family. I have a duty to ask you not to bring scandal on the family."

       I kept down my heat. "Also a duty to ask my father to watch his step in Battle, at the same time querying his right as a very recent widower to marry a young girl whose antecedents none of us know. You have a duty also to go to whatever theatre my brother Tom is performing in and persuade him to keep his act clean."

       "Now you are talking stupidly. You are a writer and have the opportunity to incite publicly to scandal. There is also the matter of your private life. This has become public even as far away as New York."

       I still stayed outwardly cold. "So what does the head of the Campanati family wish me to do? To seek some other career? To dissimulate my true nature? To drown myself in the Lago Maggiore?" Then the heat broke through. "I never in my life heard such sanctimonious impertinence. I'm a free man and I'll do what I damned well please. Within," so as not to appear totally anarchic and thus to some extent justify his view of me, "the limits imposed by my own nature and by the laws of society and literary ethics. The Campanati family," I added, sneering, "una famiglia catissima, religiosissima, purissima, santissima. With your brother Domenico shagging everything that offered and likely to do so again, despite the state of holy matrimony."

       "I do not know that word. And I do not think I will have you speaking in this manner."

       "My sister, I may add, wished to make a man of your brother. She recognised a talent that had to be encouraged. Oh yes, she loves him as well, whatever love means. He's prepared to work for a living, or so he says, instead of writing music as a cheese-subsidised hobby, and you twitch your naso raffinatissimo at the prospect of his discoursing harmless twaddle on a brokendown piano. Your holy brother Carlo, a waddling banner for the deadly sin of gluttony—at least he's realistic and charitable and has no time for the first deadly sin. The pride," I said, "of a putrefier of lactic solids. A pride that stinks like the commodity itself."

       He drank his whisky in one irritable gulp and stood up. "Perhaps this was not the best time for talk. It has been a long day. Perhaps I have not spoken to you with the right—discretion."

       "The theme is clear." I also got up but did not finish my whisky. "Clear as a bell. I'll sleep in Milan tonight."

       "No no no no no. Your room is prepared. I will show you where it is. Perhaps we both need a good night's sleep. You are more upset than I expected. I don't think, however, that you understand my position. Surrounded by corruption, by immorality. Chicago is a most vicious city and it will grow worse. I am sensitive to these things, they become... a physical oppression. If you are angry, I apologise for making you so."

       "I suppose I'll have to walk back to Milan. Perhaps I can pick up some filthy little Milanese boy on the way. Ready to hire out his edo for a couple of centesimi."

       "There is no need to be disgusting."

       "Oh yes there is. Pharisee. I thank thee God that thou hast made me pure. I never did much care for your putrid specialty. I'm getting out of here."

       And so I did, walking to the town under the honeyed moon and finding a garage with a Daimler that had probably been left behind by the defeated Austrians, the bonnet dented and what looked like bulletholes in the rear offside door, the driver an Old Bill type who blamed the British for dragging Italy into the war and thus implementing her present distress. Still, he took me to my hotel, shaking with rage and contempt as I was, and charged me exorbitantly. The Milan Metro did not at that time exist.

       I did not, the following day, make my proposed trip to Lago Maggiore. It was necessary for me to take a taxi from the hotel to the Stazione Garibaldi, there to catch a train for Arona on the western shore of the lake. But there were militant workers on the streets with portraits of Lenin and slogans about liberty. A knot of five had knocked down a carabiniere and were kicking his bloody body to death. When my taxi approached this same knot it seemed to them that I must be a bloodsucking Milanese industralist who had to be dragged out and given to brisk revolutionary justice. Some window smashers joined them, jeering but with their claws out. Good Northern Italian faces, terribly distorted by politics. My driver was not on their side. He rushed at them, bumping sickeningly over the carabiniere's body, and they howled and stumbled and fell and rose and chased us. I felt approaching a cardiac spasm of the kind I had last known in Battle on the High Street in the rain, walking to confront the news of my mother's dying immediately on my knocking at the door. The attack missed its trajectory, seeming, in my temporary delirium, to crack at the window behind me. But what hit the window was a lump of lead piping. The driver rushed me and my bag circuitously without my telling him to the main railway station. He knew I was a foreigner; let me get back to foreign parts and not witness any more of Italy's shame. There were troops, armed, in the station yard.

       "Hypnotised, that's what they are," he said, when I paid him. "But what can you expect? Drunk with what's happened in Russia. Bolshevism as the answer to the whole damned mess-up. Gutless politicians and gutless police. But they won't win, they can't. The patriots of the Trentino won't let them, and I'm one, by the mother of Jesus Christ. You heard of the Sansepolcrista? No, you're a foreigner. They'll remember the Piazza San Sepolcro, I can tell you, and what's been decided there. Last March, it was."

       March 10, to be exact. In a room lent by a Milanese Jew overlooking that square of the Holy Sepulchre. Borrowing the black shirts of D'Annunzio's arditi and calling themselves the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. They would stop red thugs killing policemen in the streets.

CHAPTER 29