Earthly Powers (69 page)
"Carlo," I said with some weariness, "Jratello, God made me as a being desirous of spilling seed in forbidden places. God made me incapable of the ordinary philoprogenitive lusts of man."
"God did not make you so. We leave that kind of implantation to the devil. It does not come at birth, even Dr. Freud says that, a man who could be a very good Jewish theologian if he stopped inventing terms like id and so on. If the devil has done this to you, then it is as I said your duty and your glory to convert a desire for the flesh of your own sex into a desire purely spiritual. You must not yield."
"I haven't your sense of vocation. I need the release and comfort of the flesh. I'd hoped that the book I published on your behalf—how ironic, my sponsoring of a view my nature forbids me to hold—One of these days you'll have to change that dogma. There's plenty of seed in the world, too much. Onan committed no real sin. He was just ahead of his time."
"The devil, you see," he smiled, "lashing his tail like a cat. God's kingdom was built for an infinitude of souls. God's love of individual human souls is insatiable. With the frustration of the seed you enact the deadly sin of frustrating the satisfaction of the divine appetite."
"Moloch, Moloch," I groaned. "Feed him with newborn babies in a land lacking bread and water and hardly enough spittle for the desultory rite of baptism. No no no, Carlo, it won't do. Your logic ought to have priests and nuns leading the way in the thriving of uncondomed copulation."
"We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness.
I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want—the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when goods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted nobilmente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflexion but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive."
"Don't," Carlo said, "underestimate yourself." Mario brought in coffee and a box of P‡rtagas. Carlo spoke to him at some length in the Milanese dialectclose enough, I gathered, to that of Moneta—telling him that the dinner we'd just had was fit only for flushing down the gabinetto and that he'd bite everybody's balls off unless there was a speedy improvement in the cucina and much else in the same style. "I can," Carlo told me when Mario had gone, handing me the cigarbox and wax fiammiferi, "be like a peasant if and when required. I can be anything they damned well want." I was in my cold bed early that night. I had an early train to catch for Geneva. I was opening a bank account there, not at all liking the prospects for the rest of Europe in the spring of 1938. Hitler had just marched into Austria (not ridden: all the motor transport had broken down on the road to Vienna) and received in his hometown Linz a welcome of fruit and flowers. But Carlo was looking beyond Hitler and the rest of the predatory bastards.
CHAPTER 51
Pope Pius XI died on February 10, 1939, and Eugenio Pacelli fulfilled Carlo's prophecy by being crowned, just over a month later, Pope Pius XII. There seemed already to be a vague sense hovering like cigarette smoke in Fleet Street that I was somehow connected with the Vatican, and I was asked by the Daily Mail to cover the obsequies, the attendance on the right smoke signal, and the coronation. I refused: I did not wish to hang about Rome with Sir Hugh Walpole, who was doing the same job for the Hearst organisation, and be drawn by him into pursuing the pedicabile what time the Conclave decided the claims of the various papabili: it was not, despite Carlo's prognostication, all that easy going for Pacelli.
I stayed home and saw Great Britain recognise the government of General Franco, Hitler annex Bohemia and Moravia and proclaim a German protectorate, Lithuania cede Memel to the Reich, Italy seize Albania a week after the end of the Spanish Civil War. That there was going to be a Second World War few would then accept: we had had our scare the previous September, and now Chamberlain and Daladier would repeat the pattern of the Sudetenland in respect of the Polish Corridor and Hitler's final territonial demand. We were all learning to live with our shame, an aspect of the human condition.
On the day of Great Britain's signing of a defence agreement with Turkey I was sitting in my salon in E2, Albany, studying the studio portrait that Hirsch had done of me. Careful underlighting and airbrushwork made me look younger than I was. When I faced the shaving mirror each morning I saw a man of an undoubted forty-eight years, uneasy, unloved except by his readers, weary, tinted by good living, chin sagging, hair greying and thinning but superbly sculpted by my regular operative at Trumper's of Mayfair. The creature in the photograph was your popular novelist, unlined and with youth's dreaming eyes but wise with a hard-bought wisdom: a man you could trust but not too much, travelled, of sure taste in the arts, not terrifyingly overintellectual but well-read and sufficiently clever, sharp or compassionate as occasion required when giving in the mass press his views on modern woman, the intentions of the dictators, friendship, the importance of Faith, the status of William Somerset Maugham, the decadence of the French, the beauties of rural England. The portrait would serve perhaps for another decade in the promotion of my books. My agent would ensure that it got to isolationist America, falangist Spain, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, imperialist Japan, and other countries where I fed an appetite for sedative fiction. My most sedative to date, meaning exciting with no hint of the subversive, would be out shortly: A Time of Apples. I had already told Carlo what it was about.
I put down the portrait sighing and reread the letter from my father's second wife. He was very ill, she said, with ailments appropriate to advanced age, nearly eighty now, that was to say pulmonary congestion, a growth in the prostate, cataract, what looked like Buerger's disease or thromboangiitis ohliterans, oral ulcers, chronic dyspepsia, the approach of feeblemindedness. His second marriage had not been blessed with increase and he talked or rambled much now about the children he had not seen since the end of one world war and would not, unless we all (all!) made speedy tracks to Toronto, see again because of the impendence of another. He did not seem to have taken in that Tom was dead. He had a vague notion that somebody had turned him into a grandfather. He had one or two books of mine and had the idea that I lived with my British publisher. He did not know that his daughter dwelt a brief flight away and was making a name as a sculptress.
"No," I said aloud to my books and pictures and bibelots and Bokhara rugs. "No," to the English May sun and the distant comforting hum of the London traffic. Carlo had taught me that paternity was a fiction and that filial piety was due only to God and one's blessed mother, if one knew who she was; Carlo might be right, since he was going to be the next Pope. Fathers and sons: nonsense. And then the bell to the apartment discreetly sounded and Jack, an old warty porter, showed in the son of a very distinguished father.
This son bowed and clicked heels mockingly and said, "Em Brief fŸr Sie," putting down his suitcases and tennis racquets. He took the letter from his inner jacket pocket with his left hand and handed it over with arm stretched and body forward inclined as from a posture of mock military attention. The letter was from Jakob Strehler and the printed letterhead said Albrechtsgasse 21, Wien. It was in German and penned in a kind of mockery of primary school calligraphy. Mockery, then, was in the blood. "Please sit down," I told the son in English, and he sat to mock military attention on one of the Louis Quinze chairs. I sat in a fauteuil facing him and read.
The great Strehler addressed me as his dear friend and said that I must not think he had been ungrateful for my frequent expressions of admiration, both in the reviews I had been good enough to send, safely received but, as he was aware, never acknowledged, and also in my letters, similarly unacknowledged. He was, he feared, no letter writer. He wrote only for fame and money, especially money. The situation in Austria, now a mere province of the Third Reich, was undoubtedly dangerous for such as himself, a Jew, a so-called intellectual, a democrat, a believer in free speech; nevertheless he proposed to stay on more or less in hiding, helped by the international reputation (though not the money, alas spent) bestowed through "the bounty of Sweden" as Yeats called it, helped too by his own comparative indifference to the future. His wife, as I might not know, had returned to her native New Zealand some years past, taking their daughter with her but leaving their son to his own, Strehler's, unhandy ministrations. For him Strehler feared, and him he assigned to such care as I, Toomey, was able to give him. He apologised for the unsolicited gift of a son, but he doubted not that the traditional hospitality of the British to refugees from oppression was well represented in me. He wished now he had read some of my books, but it was probably too late; besides he did not usually read his contemporaries.
Heinz, as he was called, had few talents except for pleasure, which included the good-natured or perhaps, to be cynical, advantage-seeking willingness to give pleasure to others so long as it cost nothing. It was through the good offices of one to whom he had given such pleasure, a high officer of the Austrian Nazi Party, that Heinz's egress had been able to be effected from the Reich, a Jew-hungry entity (Judenshungrige Einrichtung). I was to do with him please as I thought best. I was to tell the Anglo-Saxon literary world not to worry about the fate of Jakob Strehler. His works would outlast the thousand-year Reich. Es in, as Bach affirmed in a chorale borrowed for a violin concerto by Strehler's friend Berg, genug. I was to receive Heinz as a piece of a broken father and as a token of appreciation of past kindnesses. Ich danke Ihnen herzlich. Jakob Strehler.
I took this letter reverently and placed it in a desk drawer, on top of another German letter of appreciation, though one brief as a bark, from ReichsfŸhrer Heinrich Himmler. Then I turned to look glumly at my present. "Welcome, Heinz," I said. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-three years."
"What do you propose to do here in England?"
"Bitte?"
"What do you wish in England to do?"
"Ah." He smiled lusciously as he melted with great speed out of his mock stiffness, entwined his legs with the bonelessness of Jim Joyce, leaned back in an odalisque pose, and searched his pockets for cigarettes. He came up with some Chesterfields, and he sent one flying to his lips with a nail flick on the base of the pack. "Give me fire," he said.
"A light, you mean, give me a light." I gave him fire from my gold Dunhill lighter and he rested, during the lighting process, his hand lightly on my firing wrist. The cigarette, too much nitrate in its paper, crackled. He said, walrussing smoke from his nostrils: "I do what you wish that I do."
He disturbed me. He was so blatantly, almost commercially, epicene. Handsome, very, despite the thin mean mouth. It is hard to say what a Jew looks like, but Heinz would have served well as chief exhibit in some Ausstellung of male Nordic beauty. It was the New Zealand side of him probably, but it might have been abetted by a throwback to Crusader blood, the rescuers of the holy places being generous in the donation of their northern seed to Palestine. I lighted a cigarette of my own and we sat facing, puffing smoke at each other in unequivocal signals. He was a whore all right. I was crackling, like his Chesterfield, with conventional desire tainted with foreknowledge of disgust. I felt like at once sending him packing, tennis racquets and all, but I had a duty to a great man. "The great man your father," I said. "He must also leave Austria. What plans have been made? What friends does he have? Sigmund Freud is already in London, but it took time to arrange the payment of the Reichsfluchtsteuer and the other ridiculous taxes. I cannot believe that your father wishes to stay. Please tell me precisely what is the present position as regards your father." I spoke in German; his English, for one whose blood was half anglophone, was atrocious. In German he told me that his father had been lucky because of his Nobel Prize, but that the luck would not last. The day after die Kristallnacht of last November his father had had made a metal plaque and affixed it to a spot on the façade of the apartment building somewhat above the reach of SA hands painting Jude; the plaque said: "Jakob Strehler, Austrian Novelist, Honoured in the Name of the World by the Academy of Sweden Which Awarded Him the Nobel Prize for Literature." The Reich did not want to offend Sweden, nor, as yet, was it altogether convinced that Jakob Strehler was an echt Jew. Strehler was not a Jewish name. There was the evidence of his own son, and here Heinz stretched and grinned complacently, a true piece of Aryan manhood if ever there was one, to contradict the cruder imputations. But the time would come, and Heinz did not seem greatly concerned about it. I said, "Let me show you your room."
"Bitte?"
"Your English is not very good. Perhaps you have had nobody to speak English with, to."
