Earthly Powers

  "And it was as God said. For while Adam slept God took of the dust of the earth and breathed life into it, and when Adam awoke there lay by him one like unto himself, who spoke his speech and answered to the name Yedid. And in joy Adam was impelled to grasp his companion in love and kiss him with the kiss of his mouth. God saw this and wondered, for Adam had learned that fullness of heart for another that He, the Lord God, felt for Adam but which Adam, who sensed doubtless that his love for God must ever be the love of the created for the creator, could conceive in no fullness. But, thought God, through love of Adam for Yedid and of Yedid for Adam both might be brought to a greater love for their maker. So He was well content. And He watched them entwined in love at day's end or the beginning of the morning and granted them all the joy he could in their embraces. For out of the closeness of their locked lovingness sprang from the bodies of both a substance of joy, gushing like a fountain, of the color of opals, and where it lay on the earth flowers sprung. And all this the serpent too watched, and watched in envy, for he was alone and there was none other of his kind for converse or the joy of love. Thus it was, out of this envy, that the serpent one morning, while Yedid lay still asleep but Adam newly awakened, used words for the first time. And Adam heard the words in wonder.

  "The words were these: 'You could in no wise keep me from the fruit of the forbidden tree, fallen or still on the branch, for I am subtle and slender and no way is barred to me. So I have eaten of the fruit and delicious was the taste, yet more delicious was the fruit of the fruit, for this was the fruit of knowledge. Lo, I speak as you speak, and this gift came from the first bite of the fruit, and of the last bite came a most bitter taste and yet delicious, for I saw that in another mouth the taste would be ecstatic and I rejoiced through my imagination in that ecstasy. But the bitterness was the taste of myself, who may see but not act, who may conceive but not create, who may dream of power but not encompass it. The power is for you and for your companion Yedid. Why should you be set in this garden as a mere day laborer, forced to the contentment of food and sleep and the embraces of love, when God who made you rejoices in the abundance of power and knowledge? Knowledge is there for you to taste, and with that knowledge power, and what is God's love that it should deny you a fruit which lies to your hand or dangles in temptation level with your lips? You see a thing, and yet that thing is denied you. What manner of love is this? I have eaten of the fruit and I am transformed and, subtle as I was, am rendered yet more subtle. Eat now, make your breakfast of the fruit, and bid Yedid do likewise.' Then the serpent glided away and left Adam to his thoughts which, when Yedid awoke, he was quick to share with him.

  "So it came to pass that both plucked the fruit of the tree and ate, and at once they were furnished with thoughts, and with the means of expressing them, that were able to see God as a thought and, in consequence, see as a thought that which was not God, namely His negation or enemy. This in their eyes diminished their Lord and Creator and they doubted of His power. But this power struck at them. God, Who knew all, knew of their disobedience and was angry, and the expression of His anger was terrible to behold and feel and hear. For the earth shook, so that the beasts ran around with growls and shrieks of fear, and the sky erupted in lightnings and thunders and torrents of seething rain, so that Adam and Yedid prostrated themselves in their terror, but Yedid spoke loud, for the thunder and tremors were deafening, into Adam's ear, crying: 'Is He become the other one? Is He become the one that is His opposite? Is He transformed into the enemy?'

  "But then the terror of earth and sky subsided, and God appeared in wan sunlight to Adam and his friend, in the guise of an old man, and He spoke, though in the wavering tones of an ancient, most terrible words. 'Cursed,' he said, 'both of ye, and I repent Me that I made man.' But Adam, with the boldness imparted by the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, replied, 'The creator may not repent of his creation. The creator may not wish to be a destroyer.' And God said, 'True, but I may destroy at the same time as I sustain My creation, but in a manner that no eating of the fruit of the tree may reveal to you, for you are still man and hence less than God. From Adam and from Yedid I take the gift of immortality, for both shall die when you are become like to this guise under which I appear to you. You shall grow old and you shall lie at length without life, prey to the sharp-toothed beasts and the birds of the air that will learn to feed on carrion. But though Adam and Yedid may die, the race of man shall continue, and it will be through the coupling of Adam and Yedid.' And Yedid, in his curiosity, asked, 'How shall this thing be, Lord?'

  "The Lord replied not in words but in the action of His hand, for He touched Yedid, and Yedid changed. He ceased to be like unto his companion Adam, for his breasts swelled and his belly and hips grew gross, and his sceptered pride was shrunken to nothing as likewise were the twin orbs of his manhood, and he shrieked aloud and covered his loins and cried, 'I am smitten, I am split asunder,' and Adam heard his voice in fear, for it was not the voice he knew, it was a higher voice, closer to the trilling of the birds of the air than to the growl of the beasts of the wood. And the Lord God said, 'Henceforth you are not man but woman, and your name shall no longer be Yedid but Hawwah, which means life, for from your loins life will come and the breed of man shall be sustained. For into where My hand has smitten you the milk of passion shall flow, and from out of where My hand has cleft you the new life shall emerge, for the milk of your embraces shall hold the seed of generation, and from your breasts shall pour the waters of sustention, yet account this transformation no miracle but a curse. For your love shall be a curse, and your bringing forth shall be accomplished in pain. Now get ye hence, both, and take on the burden of life that becomes death and quit the garden of immortality. And the beasts of earth and the birds of the sky and the fishes of the deep shall be tainted with your curse, for immortality shall henceforth be an attribute of the heaven of the spirit and the body shall decay and return to the dust whereof it was fashioned.'

  "So Adam and Hawwah went forth in sorrow, and the curse yet holds on the generations of man, save for the blessed. For the blessed remake in their lives the innocence of Adam and Yedid, and their embraces call back the joys of Eden."

  Ralph said nothing for a while, then he nodded, saying, "Why shouldn't that be as true as the other story?"

  "This," said Robert, "is made true by the sheer act of writing it. Shall we eat something now?"

  After their luncheon of red meat and redder wine the two lovers returned to their Eden on the fifth floor of 15 his, rue St. Andre des Arts. In the midst of their writhing sweat-soaked embraces Ralph said, "So the beasts become our brothers."

  "What do you mean?"

  "This." And the boy took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpared nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen.

  CHAPTER 30

  "Benedicent numen my arse," Ford Madox Ford pronounced. He breathed out, with the smoke of his caporal, a mephitic hogo that soured the wine in its glasses. That halitosis, however, had to be excused, indeed reverenced: it was the olfactory equivalent of a missing limb, since Captain Ford had breathed in lung-rotting gas, a volunteer infantryman contemned by some of the London literary for his patriotism, a good soldier among despicable scrimshankers. "Not my arse," he then said. He then said, "It won't do, will it?"

  "Do you mean content, or do you mean style?"

  "You can't separate them, as you ought to know. Joe Conrad's sea smells of Roget's Thesaurus, as I was always telling him, but he wouldn't listen. Your act of buggery here smells of unfrocked priests. Or untrousered, if you like." He delivered another whiff of phosgene rot. "If by content you mean the general subject matter, seducing a boy and then justifying it by rewriting the Book of Genesis--well, that's nasty enough, but there you have my view as a heterosex
ual, not as an editor. As an editor, I think your style reeks of dirty shirts and sweaty socks. You may be making your living by writing books, but don't start calling those books literature."

  "And what is literature?"

  "Oh my dear fellow. Ask Ezra over there. Words charged with meaning, he'll tell you. Make it new, he'll say."

  Ezra Pound was, I think, dancing with Sylvia Beach, or it may have been Adrienne Monnier. And you may as well have Ernest Hemingway shadowboxing his way round the periphery. Ford had just lumbered about the floor with a little Irish girl, frizzed auburn, who came up to his breast pocket and so missed the greater part of his panting effluvium. The Irish girl called herself a painter. The band consisted of a black cornetist named True Vanderbilt, a drummer with an artificial left arm who came from Marseilles, a consumptive violinist, and my brother-in-law Domenico. The place was the Bal Guizot on the Boulevard des Capucines.

  The passage from my novella A Way Back to Eden, which Ford had been pretending to read (he read nothing through, ever, unless it was in French; he would just pick out the odd trope and never forget it: ah yes Benedicent Numen Toomey) and you have just read, may seem, from its position here, to represent a fiercely resentful reaction to Raffaele's sanctimony, but it was written four years later than that day of the wedding and was rather an attempt to cash in on the new candour which the Paris expatriates, particularly Jim Joyce, were dishing out in the sacred name of modernism. Ford Madox Ford was starting a new magazine called transatlantic review (the lower-case initial letters were modish, the Charvet cravat of modernism), and I had a transient itch to be taken seriously by the litterateurs as opposed to my lower-middle-class readers in Camden Town. I had half expected Ford's verdict, but I was bitter.

  I said, "You seem to be implying that there's something wrong with making a living out of writing books. I call literature verbal communication. I'm communicating verbally with a largish readership. You'd give such teeth as you have left to be able to do that."

  "Not at the price one has to pay, my dear fellow."

  "The price of clarity, intelligibility?"

  "The price of cliche, half-truth, compromise, timidity."

  "There's nothing timid about this," I said, taking from his limp podgy hand the typescript of Chapter Three of A Way Back to Eden and waving it at him like a notice of distraint on his goods. "This has never been done before. Don't start telling me about compromise. You can't run a magazine without consulting your financial backers. Don't sneer about timidity. You just wouldn't have the nerve to publish it."

  "Call my lack of courage aesthetic fastidiousness. I wouldn't have the nerve to publish a newly discovered draught of a suppressed chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Or a Manx rhapsody from Hall Caine. Empurpled royal greatness, indeed. Benedicent numen."

  "What's that about Newman?" The music had stopped and Ezra Pound was back at the table. Hemingway was engaged on another lap of shadowboxing. The band was getting up to take its break and Domenico was being rebuked by the cornetist for something, failure to keep time probably. Pound frowned, a bearded but moody poet of great energy. He had substituted for his native Idaho accent a kind of eclectic British English with a rolled Scotch r. "There are not," he said, "many prose writers as good as Newman." He gulped wine.

  "Better," Ford blasted at me with his breath. "Perhaps that's what you meant. The empurpled royal greatness of the prose of the benedicent cardinal." He wheezed what was meant to be laughter. "You really have to think these things out first," he told me. "Harmonics, purposed ambiguities. You see how absurd it is having a sainted British cardinal beaming down on a pair of buggers." There were no ladies at the table. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier were on their feet near the bandstand, arguing hotly with, I think, Larbaud. I sulked briefly then perked up. It was envy, these people were envious, even Pound was envious. I had made money out of writing--Windfalls of the Storm was in its seventh printing. Anyway, Domenico had arrived at the table. He sat down, at his ease with literary men; his brother-in-law was a literary man. Mineral water was brought for him, stronger drink was forbidden the musicians till closing time. The patron had lively memories of a drunken Algerian trombonist who had, the night he was fired, used his instrument offensively.

  Domenico said to Pound, "You saw Antheil?"

  "It will go in, he says. It's the right length." Ford, having a dirty mind, wheezed briefly. Domenico beamed. He looked very much the Latin Quarter Parisian these days, thin, shabby, unshorn, the garret musician straight out of Murger. He and Hortense had a two-room apartment overlooking a timberyard in the Quartier des Gobelins. They were young strugglers, no more money coming in from Gorgonzola, but that was the way she wanted it. He played the piano and copied band parts in a neat hand. He did orchestrations for Paul Trentini-Patetta, the light opera man. He kept on with his composition. He had, I knew, written a fantasia for four player-pianos, six differently pitched Javanese gongs, and a wind machine. This was a kind of belated futurism, stale Marinetti, and it chimed, in its cracked bell way, in with what the American George Antheil was making modish-aeroplane symphonies and factory chaconnes and the rest of the Bolshevik nonsense. These two, Ford and Pound, thought more highly of Domenico than they did of me. Domenico was modern. He played jazz in a real jazz band with a genuine Negro cornetist. This sedulously dissonant fantasia of his was going into a concert that Antheil was organising. The craze--hungry with money would be there--Harry and Caresse Crosby, Lady Gertrude (Binky) Carfax, the Principessa Cacciaguerra. So Domenico beamed. Those days when we had concocted a tuneful and witty oneact postPuccinian diversion were over. My failure to get the thing done at Covent Garden did not depress him in the least. He was into the avant-garde now. Lessons from Nadia Boulanger? She could teach him nothing about the harmonics of the internal combustion engine. Martinu? He had actually seen a key signature in one of Martinu's scores, terribly vieux jeu. He was going to write a concerto for railway engine and orchestra, the orchestra to be accommodated in drawn coal trucks. Harry Crosby would back that. Then would follow a quartet for Cunard liners, unbacked by Nancy Cunard.

  I said to him, "A word with you. At the bar."

  He got up shrugging. At the bar were a couple of bored poules. It was early yet. The place would fill up with Americans at about two in the morning. The decor of the bar was martini-glass aluminium templates tacked to a steel-blue ground on which clouds of genuine duck down floated. Boris the Russian prince served me a cognac. "She says," I said, "that she's not coming back. Not until she gets a written apology. And if I were you I'd add some flowers."

  "I cannot afford flowers and you know it. Bitch."

  "You mean myself or my sister? If the latter, don't dare to use that expression again."

  "Her place is with her husband. I have my rights."

  "She also has rights. Including the right not to be struck in the face wantonly, cruelly, peevishly and repeatedly."

  "You know why it was so."

  "I know why it was so. And I know," I said more kindly, "that it will happen again unless you both go to see a doctor, a specialist in these matters. There are simple tests. There are cures."

  Domenico groaned. He looked furtively around. The patron would be in his office at this hour, eating a tray supper brought in from Les Hesperides, a restaurant on the rue de Seze. "Vite, Boris," he said. Boris gave him a sly cognac. Domenico downed it, returned the glass, the glass was washed, all over. The patron, perhaps having once got into the line of fire of Captain Ford, did not go around smelling breaths. To the table of Ford and Pound, I now saw, Hemingway had come, sweating heavily. Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach were also there. John Quinn, a stern American lawyer, attired as for court, entered and looked around him with distaste. Ford and Sylvia Beach waved. Quinn approached them. Pound did frantic fingerclicking for a waiter. I saw what was going on. Quinn had money and was a great buyer of literary holographs. They were going to try to get Quinn drunk.

  "It cannot be me," Domenico said. "Carlo
says it cannot."

  "That's because there are no sterile men in the Bible," I said, "only barren women. Does he propose praying over Hortense to drive out the demons of fruitlessness? Fruitless, totally. Go to a doctor, both." But I knew that Domenico did not desire a child, a son of course, out of pure philoprogenitiveness. There was a lump of Gorgonzola money involved in the production of an heir.

  "I'll give you fifty francs," I said, "to buy some flowers. You should be able to get some good ones with that." He sulked. "Look," I said, "I'll write the note of apology for you. All you have to do is to sign it."

  He smiled at me with his mouth only. "You are on my side. Why should that be?"

  "Male solidarity," I lied. "No man likes to be accused of sterility. Besides, I want her out of my place. Damn it, I'm not her mother, heaven rest her. I'm a strictly male establishment."

  "What is she doing now?"

  "Sitting there, waiting for that letter of apology." This was not strictly true. She was still in bed, moaning in hangover. I should have been stronger and not let her go the previous night to the Four Arts Ball at the Porte d'Auteuil. Domenico certainly would not have let her. But what could I do? She was twenty-two now, a responsible married woman. Harry and Caresse Crosby, American playfolk, both with beautiful parchment skin and quivering mouths, had seen her lunching with me the day before at L'Alouette on the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. Me they knew vaguely and vaguely respected as a writer who earned money. They did not know my work but they assumed, since I was living in Paris, it must be fashionably unintelligible except for the sex scenes. They cooed over Hortense's beauty, which was now considerable. That skin, they raved, that hair. She must come to the Four Arts Ball. How, I wondered, did Harry Crosby think he was going to be admitted, he was not a student. It was different, of course, for girls. He would get in all right, said Harry Crosby. He would pose as one painting a nude for the Prix de Rome. The motif this year was Roman and senatorial. Bedsheet togas, bodies painted bloody with Caesar's blood, fantastic Medusa coiffures for the girls. I did not like the idea at all. Hortense did, very much. Her eyes grew large, mirroring twice a fat woman nearby who gorged on June strawberries and Chantilly. What could I do?