Earthly Powers (87 page)

       "Marx wished the generality of mankind, the workers not the capitalists, to find moral power and be given social justice. This has always been the aspiration of the Church of Christ, which teaches that a camel can get through, et cetera, et cetera. Marx taught the dynamic principle of social change, the long and necessary struggle to improve the physical lot of the people and grant them the leisure to contemplate things higher than mere subsistence. The Church teaches the slow working of God's grace like yeast in the heavy dough of a human history that has been mostly hard to swallow. More than anything, Marx emphasised the essential decency of man, a decency too often obscured by the wretched condition of the need to survive imposed by capitalism. The Church tell us that man is God's creation, and hence perfect, and his imperfections are the work of God's enemy. As for the classless society, I see it as an analogue of the communion of saints. Russia blasphemes by assuming that she is the Church Triumphant. We move slowly toward triumph, but it is not given to mortal man to attain it."

       The apothegms attributed to Carlo were specious. Reader's Digest stuff. He said: "Christ considered alcohol as necessary as bread. He turned himself into both, and still does" and "Whisky and God have much in common—both are spirits" and "The sexual act is fulfilled in a nine months' miracle, not in a twosecond shudder and sneeze" and (of Italian film goddesses) "God made the female bosom. He also made the sun in the sky. We must look at both with our eyes closed" and "Hollywood and Belsen alike proclaim the cheapness of human flesh" (surely I had said that?) and "A man needs a good meal before he listens to a bad sermon" and "The simple life is all too simple. There is no loss of breath in going downstairs" and "A good meal is God the Father. A good wine is God the Son. A good cigar is the Holy Ghost. At mealtimes, as at all times I believe in the Holy Trinity" and "There are people who see red when they look at me. I was destined to be a cardinal" and "Good and evil have their own smells. Good smells of a child's body. Evil smells of his napkins" and Evil comes of inattention more than intention. The Germans shut their eyes for an instant and Hitler streaked in" and "Man's Fall was followed by Man's Winter. It has been a long one. But I think it must now be about the beginning of March" and "The first duty of a government is not to govern but to exist. The same may be said of the amoeba" and "We need priests, alas. We need garbage men, alas. Both are consequences of the Fall" and "People ask why the Redeemer was born in Palestine in the reign of Augustus Caesar. If he were born in Wisconsin in the reign of President Truman they would still ask why. I ask, why not?" and "A Jew is only a Christian without Christ" and so on, these poor little epigrams being set in boxes at intervals throughout the article.

       There was a paragraph about Carlo's family—the mother who had died trying to shoot Himmler (no reference to my shameful part in that event), the brother killed by Chicago gangsters, the brother who was an Oscar-winning Hollywood composer and, as a limp afterthought, the mother superior sister. Too much glamour altogether. Then Carlo's practical charity: threequarters of the archiepiscopal palace housing the homeless. None of this would do; this was jumping the gun. It was as though, impossible of course, Carlo were employing a press agent. The fact was that something new was happening in the Church, and the new is the essence of news. I did not know the word at the time, but the word was aggiornamento.

       I went to bed early after a steak and a bad bottle of Cold Duck. Ralph came back very late and shook me awake with black anger. He seemed to me to smell of a variety of other men's semina as well as of the smoke of some sweet herb. "You bastard," he cried, and then, by an easy transition, "you bastards. You deprived us of a history. You realise that, man? We got no goddam history." His speech had been much coarsened by contact with his Sunday friends, including the great black singer and dancer Nat Fergana, Jr. "You fuckers took every goddam thing away, including our goddam fucking history. Slaves don't have a history, did you think of that, you bastard?"

       "Ralph," I said tiredly, "I refuse to take the blame for the wrongs perpetrated by a few Anglo-Saxon slave owners. The men you should blame are resting at peace in expensive graves. Now let me too rest in peace. Get into bed and sleep."

       "I sleep in my own bed tonight, you bastard white fucker. The sight of your white skin makes me want to fucking throw up."

       "Do as you please, dearest Ralph, but please remember I have a very early plane to catch tomorrow. And," I added, "do something about that unanswered mail, will you? I've scribbled rough replies. All you have to do is expand them, using cold correct English."

       "Fucking English. You even robbed us of our own fucking language. I'll answer the letters when I feel like doing it, you ofay pig, and I'll tell them all to fuck off."

       "Thank you, by the way, for returning the thousand, ah, bucks. It was a decent if surreptitious gesture."

       He danced, but not with the toothy goodwill of Nat Fergana, Jr. "Bastard bastard bastard. I never touched your fucking money, you stinking white fucker. You listen to me, pinko, I'm getting out of here, I've had a bellyful, you answer your own fucking mail."

       "You mean you wish to terminate your employment?"

       "Haw haw haw old top and all that sort of rot, that's just what I fucking want to do and will do, you effete decadent etiolated moribund sonofabitching white bastard."

       I had had this sort of sincere abuse and insincere rebellion from Ralph before and would have it again. Wearily I told him to get into bed and not be a fool, but, after hurling my hairbrushes at the air-conditioning unit, asperging the carpet with my hair lotion, and pulling the sheets off me recumbent, he stamped out yelling. I could hear a lamp in the sitting room go over. Then whatever he had to cry from his own room was too far away to be audible.

CHAPTER 62

The petulant boy who had objected to making love in the faint redolence of bully and onions in Baron's Court had turned into a kind of Walt Whitman, all uncontrolled grey hair and beard. He sat in the front row of the Agnes Watson Auditorium and said, as I came in at the side door with Professor Korzeniowski, "Hello, old thing" quite in the manner of the First World War. I stared and frowned, pausing in my walk. "Val," he said. "Wrigley. Poet in residence. Get up there and give it us and for God's sake don't be a bore."

       As Jesus Christ had to be born somewhere, so Val Wrigley had to live somewhere, and why not then on the campus of Wisbech College, Indiana? Still, it was a surprise. "I haven't forgotten," I said. "Bloody treachery."

       "Oh, go on, get up there."

       So I got up there and waited with Professor Korzeniowski until the college carillon, mounted high above the Agnes Watson Auditorium, celebrated the hour of four with the bone of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" bobbing in a thick ragout of harmonics. I looked at the five hundred students and faculty. I tend to see the students in memory as j eaned and afroed, but this was the fifties and they were dressed as young ladies and gentlemen. Professor Korzeniowski, a specialist in Spenser, the only man I had ever met who had read The Faerie Queene right through, had no apparent qualification for chairing my lecture. He did not, I was to learn, read novels. Of course, like Spenser, I was a British writer. Perhaps Val Wrigley had suggested a fanciful relationship between Spenser's title and my own state. Anyway, bald Korzeniowski with the Middle West accent introduced me as a distinguished British novelist who would talk about what it was like to be a novelist, here he is then, Kenneth Marchal Toomey.

       I talked informally about fiction as a trade more than an art. Political engagement? Social engagement? "I remember those expressions coming up in the presence of Ernest Hemingway when I was staying in that run-down house of his set in its own private steamy jungle in Key West. The only engagement an author should think of, he said in his forthright manner, was the engagement of the seat of his pants to the seat of his chair. Thomas Mann, this was in Hollywood, said that a writer was essentially a creature that put down words without being too sure of their meaning. Everything a writer writes is an allegory of something else, and it's the task of critics to argue about what that something else is. Those of you here who aspire to be novelists, do please remember that the mechanics of the craft are more important than angling for ultimate truths or changing the world. If your work changes the world, well, it will not be because of your purposing. As for truth, Pontius Pilate asked a very good question about it, though his choice of time and place were infelicitous. I remember the present Archbishop of Milan saying something to that effect in Chicago, I think it was." I dropped names freely and added bonuses of personal quirks which were intended to remind my auditors that authors were, above all, fallible and imperfect human beings. T. S. Eliot kept pieces of cheese in the drawers of his desk at Faber & Faber's, Russell Square. H. G. Wells was a satyromaniac. James Joyce called a particular white wine archduchess's urine. I talked until the carillon hammered a "Yankee Doodle" sad but encrusted with the brilliants of upper partials jump on five o'clock. Any questions?

       "What was it that guy, Poncho somebody, said about truth?" This was a tall girl with frizzed ginger hair somewhere near the front.

       "Heavens," I said, "don't you know your New Testament?"

       "New what?"

       "Never mind. Somebody please tell her." After a pause somebody told her. A youth who looked Melanesian got up to say: "I disagree with what you said, sir. I mean when you said a writer doesn't know what he's writing. I mean the important writers say important things and they know they're important, if not they wouldn't write them. Like God Manning."

       "Like who?"

       There was amusement and some anger at my ignorance in the middle right segment of the audience. Several young voices repeated the name.

       A fat sallow girl in unbecoming violet rose to inform me: "He wrote Call Me and I'll Answer. Godfrey Manning. But he's called God for short."

       "I see," I said, baffled. "A theologian, I take him to be. He proclaims his subject in his pet name. I'm afraid theology isn't my province."

       "The way and the truth are everybody's providence," the girl said. "I haven't read your books, but you seem to me to be what I'd call kind of frivolous."

       "Perhaps," I said, smiling with irritation, "that's because I'm kind of old. I leave earnestness to the young."

       "That," she said, "is a kind of a frivolous thing to say."

       "Let us keep to the novel," my chairman justly called. A member of the faculty stood, his glasses flashing in the electric light, and said: "Have you any information on the ultimate fate of Jakob Strehler?"

       "Strehler," I said, "joins the millions of Jewish dead. I saw him led off to imprisonment and, I cannot doubt, eventually the gas chamber. He went off lightheartedly enough. He knew his work was finished. He knew it would outlive the Nazi butchers." A dour glee rose in me. "I attempted to smuggle Strehler out of the Reich. He was reluctant to be so smuggled. Both of us were cut off from the big world of news and terrible enactments and didn't realise the war had started when the forces of the state came to arrest him as a Jew and myself as one of the British enemy. I spoke on the Nazi radio to buy my way out of the Reich. I said nothing unpatriotic. Your poet in residence here, my old friend Valentine Wrigley, publicised in the British press my reasonable act as a treasonable one. I'm glad to have this opportunity of inviting him to take back his harmful and unfriendly abuse." There was a stir in the audience; unexpected, a bonus, the intrusion of scandal. Val just sat grinning through his great grey poet beard, arms crossed on his belly. Without rising he said very clearly: "I never take things back. Mr Toomey should have defied the enemy and gladly suffered internment. Mr Toomey, an old friend or should I say former friend, displayed on that occasion the qualities that have marred equally his life and his craft—I will not say art, nor, to give him due credit, would he. I mean the easy way out, the path of compromise."

       —"Has," I sneered, realising too late that I should not have provoked this situation, not here, not in the presence of five hundred strangers, "your career been very different?"

       "I," Val said, "have practised a rigorous art with the minimum of financial gain. I have written what I wanted to write, not what the public wanted. I have stood up against state oppression of minority views and minority practices. I spent an admittedly brief time in prison for being what I am and not what the gods of the norm would have me be. Mr Toomey has grown prosperous through selling out. One of our students here found the right word—frivolous. I would not have said any of these things unless I had been invited expressly by Mr Toomey to speak. He wanted a retraction. I think I am justified in stating why I find myself unable to retract."

       Some of the students applauded. I felt the terrible chill that all speakers know when they find their audience turning against them. I had to hoist the sails of rhetoric. "I have devoted my life," I cried, "to the production of objects designed to please, to enhance life, to allay sorrow. Is it so terrible a thing to wish to entertain? Is it so ghastly a return to see one's works read, loved, deeply loved, as mine have been? I have been the loyal servant of the public. I have given the public for over forty years a measure of diversion, solace, and, may I say, joy. If I recognised that it had not been given to me to reach the more exalted reaches of art, at least I knew where the true excellence lay and I risked much to save the life of one of the most shining exemplars of literary attainment. For this I was reviled, reviled by a comrade and fellow worker in those laborious mines where truth is quarried from language—"