"Aaaaaah," Carlo went. "You will have good news for us all?" He was already at the card table, flicking a new pack skrirr skrirr with powerful gambler's fingers. He had a stock of packs, a gift, for some shady reason, from the manufacturer Rouach et Fils. Or perhaps he had just waddled in and said: "Give me those."
"Life is more than that," Hortense said. "A woman is not a childbearing machine. There is the whole of life to be lived. Je vous quitte, messieurs," pertly. "I leave you to your fun." And, with no other valediction but "I won't forget my night prayers," she padded on her lovely rosy feet to the spare bedroom.
"A delightful wilful girl," O'Shaughnessy said, "and very close to the Almighty, I should think. Is there any Irish in either of you?" I served him Irish, nodding: A little. Gin and alt. Scotch, scotch. O'Shaughnessy raised his Irish whimsically to Carlo, bowing as he did so. "Your health, Monsignore."
"Monsignore?" I said.
"Not yet, not yet," grumbled Carlo, dealing.
Nineteen twenty-two would seem in the far future to have been a momen tous year for literature, what with productions like Ulysses and The Waste Land, though not of course my own Windfalls of the Storm. That it had been a big year in the sphere of public enactments was, to some, already evident. Mussolini had marched on Rome, or rather his henchman had marched and he had rolled into Termini in a wagon-lit. Pope Benedict XV, that great pacific prelate to whom neither the Germans nor the Allies would listen, Giacomo Della Chiesa, James of the Church, lawyer and diplomat, hopeless with money, his prodigality of aid to the needy having put the Vatican in the red, had died and been succeeded by Pius XI, Achille Ratti from Desio near Milan, Archbishop of Milan for a year, a friend, I gathered, of the Campanati family. "Monsignore?" I should have expected that there would be something for Carlo in the new dispensation.
"The supervision of the spreading of the word," O'Shaughnessy announced as though it were the title of a brief. "The imparting of efficiency to the propagation of the faith. Three diamonds. He'll lose some weight now perhaps."
"Four spades," Carlo said. "I told everybody that the war would seem like a childhood memory of a country outing compared to what would come afterwards. Well, here it is, the diabolic forces more vigorous than ever. Ah, let us play our game."
But we did not play it, chiefly because I was playing like a fool. "You make it too simple," I said, throwing down my cards. "God and the devil stuff. Childish."
"Very well," Carlo bellowed, fanning me with his cards as though the flames were getting at me. "You look at last yearnineteen twenty-two. Stalin elected to the general secretaryship of the central committee of the Communist Party and talking about making the central control commission clean up the country. Purges, he talks of. Look," he turned to O'Shaughnessy, "at your Four Courts being blown up in Dublin and killing everywhere. Greeks," he turned to Leclercq for symmetry's sake, "being massacred by the Turks." We were talking, by the way, in French, except for certain proper nouns. "Nineteen twentythree and the villains are settled in, grinning. Villainy is very simple, Kenneth caro. And the weapons for quelling it are very simple too. The first thing is to stop the flames spreading." He fanned me again. "That is my task."
"The Volstead Act," Leclercq said. "Evil also."
"Evil breeding more evil," Carlo agreed. To me, "I have something for you. From Raffaele." He pulled out a fat wallet whose leather had been nourished, in the manner of Tartar horsemen, by greasy fingers. He looked, grumbling, through its contents. O'Shaughnessy was very red and wagging a nicotined finger at Leclercq. His French became very Irish: "Don't you call a thing evil that will be the occasion of less of the damnable thing that happened to my sister Eileen in Baltimore. Black men drunk on cheap gin molesting white women."
"They will still get their cheap gin," Leclercq said. "Gin or whisky or cognac that will blind them and give them paralysis and even kill them."
"The Volstead Act was right, the Volstead Act was needed."
"Something from Raffaele to me? Another rebuke for writing filthy novels?"
"He read your new one. He said it was wholesome and not at all filthy. He talks about a change of heart. Ecco." He gave me a folded newspaper cutting.
"So," said Leclercq. "Have it in Ireland too. Have it here. Let us empty those bottles into the vaysay."
"It's different with us. We're civilised. We have self-control. A thing like the thing that happened to my poor sister Eileen would not have happened in Westmeath."
"All men are the same. All men have the same rights. To get drunk. To molest women. To repent."
"Wine," bawled Carlo, "you miss the point. The falsification of doctrine. They are saying that Christ turned unfermented fruit juice into his own precious blood--"
I read. It was a brief article written by Raffaele and published in some newspaper. I was presumably to read it in order that my pride in being a professional author should be mitigated by the reminder that anybody could write if he had something to write about. "The law is evil and cannot be enforced in the great centres of population. Scotch whisky being shipped to the British islands of the West Indies and to the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the Canadian mainland is being smuggled into the United States by means of swift motorboats. The whole of the eastern coastline of the United States is insusceptible to adequate policing. The expected rivalry between bootleg gangs seeking rule over city territories is already being expressed in murder which the police are too corrupt to wish to investigate. I condemn this lawlessness and anarchy, but first I condemn the United States Government and all of the blind Rechabite persuasion of such as Congressman Volstead...
"Yes," I said. "He's right, but he'll get himself into trouble. Why do you want me to read this?"
"He writes well, yes?"
"Well enough. Grammatically, clearly. And so?"
"He wants you to write. You have a name, he says, in the United States, you are known. Articles, he says. You are right about the trouble. He has names and facts. He has contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation but so far they do little. There is need for great airing of the question. To shame the Congress and the President and the people. Articles, perhaps even stories. You will be safe, you see. He not so safe. He was shy of writing to you direct. He asks me to ask you."
"Carlo," I said, "this is not my trade. I practice an art, such as it is. I'm unskilled in propaganda. Besides, there seems to be a lot of fear in America. Land of free speech but, so I hear, the consequences of free speech can be lethal. Editorial offices set on fire. Editors with meat axes in their bellies. I can write, but there's no guarantee that I'll be published."
"Propaganda," Carlo mused an instant, his scarlet lower lip thrust out. "What is this I hear about your writing propaganda for the children of Sodom? Domenico mentioned seeing something of yours on that desk there."
"I write no such thing," I said, flushed somewhat. "I'm a teller of tales. Domenico had no right--" When could that have been? But publication, the making public, began with the rolling of the paper into the typewriter. I had given up the pen, a more private instrument. Domenico coming in one evening to say he had a solution for one of Joyce's problems. Joyce had said to me something about insect and incest. The dread word could not be uttered even in a dream, hence the metathesis. But there was something superficial there, whimsical, a mere snigger. There had to be another justification. A musical one? I had suggested. Domenico told me one was available. Joyce's hero HCE resolved into a musical theme, H being the German for B natural. The SEC of insect was, again in German, E flat E natural C. The two three-note themes went together in perfect harmony. CES would not do. (Joyce had been delighted.) And I had gone to the toilet and Domenico had read part of Chapter Two.
"All words are propaganda," Carlo said. "Propagandise for a good cause. The sodomites are always with us, happy with their self-elected devils." Innocent, always. "You can speak out and help a man who has become your brother. He must fight with caution. He says the situation will get worse."
I looked at him. "What does Raffaele import, besides dry goods? Chianti, Strega, Sambuca, grappa?"
"The liquor trade has been liquidated. But that is not his main concern. Will you think about doing what he says?"
"No harm in thinking," I said, thinking the foolish laws of the United States to be no business of mine. They had chosen independence a century and a half back and could now stew in their own Californian grape juice. I had my own things to do.
"Let us," Carlo cried, "have a few hands of poker. I cannot concentrate on bridge. That freak in the tournament at Juan-lesPins," he said in sudden English to O'Shaughnessy. Then he went on rapidly about the proper defence to North's bid of seven hearts, West ruffing the conventional club lead. Then he was overrufled and lost his trump trick. To be expected. A formidable man, the new monsignore.
"Formidable," Pre Leclercq said, meaning, of course, something different, the flavor of the Romeo and Juliet I had just lighted for him. Or something. I cannot be expected to remember everything.
CHAPTER 32
On the first day of spring 1924 my sister Hortense, in the nursing home run by the Petites Soeurs de la Passion, gave birth to jumeaux, gemelli, twins. Joy and wonder. Especially since they were, like William and Anne Shakespeare's own pair, a girl and a boy. Two girls would have looked like deliberate Anglo-Saxon insolence to the Campanati family. Two boys might have involved disputes about seniority. A boy and a girl, splendid, both doing well, mother too, genetically artistic, so neat, like an Easter gift box of a red and a white of the same cru. The twins seemed to me when I saw them plausibly Anglo. Franco-Italian.
No black or yellow blood there, which was a relief. Hortense, sitting up in early spring rainlight in her turquoise bedjacket, looked me in the eye and I looked her back in the eye. "No more," she said. "I thought you were all for repopulating the world."
"This is enough."
Call them Hamnet and Judith. No, perhaps Harry and Caresse.
"You nasty filthy sterile disgusting pig."
"My fecundity has never been, nor will it ever be, tested. It doesn't worry me in the least. I am not Domenico."
"Go on, get out of here."
"You used to like me, Hortense. You used to admire me. There was a time when I could honestly say that I believed you adored me."
"Don't make me laugh," she scowled. "Get out or I'll get the nuns to throw you out." I wondered whether to take away with me the huge bunch of mimosa I had brought and give it to the first poor old woman I saw on the rue des Minimes. But Hortense was, after all, my sister.
The twins were christened in the Madeleine, which was the parish church of Hortense and Domenico, since they had now moved to the rue Tronchet. The names chosen were John and Ann, simple names that did not lose their identity when put into French or even Italian: Giovanni would quickly become Gianni, and that sounded like Johnny in American English. Indeed, the boy was destined to be Johnny Campanati when he was taken to California. Those poor children, I think, looking back, one of them to suffer directly and terribly, the other vicariously; but I must not anticipate. I must be like God, giving them the illusion of free will, allowing their future in the spring of 1924 to be as velvety blank as the fine bond which the author, all too soon, will commence to defile with his pen.
Nineteen twenty-four was a good year for Domenico. He rode on the wave of the success of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, first performed that year, being commissioned to compose for the pianist Albert Poupon, who had heard his ridiculous fantasia the previous October, a jazzy concerto with saxophones and wa-wa trumpets and the rest of the nonsense. This work was considered by Vladimir Jankelevitch (Ravel; Editions du Seuil, 1958) to be a sleeping influence on Maurice Ravel, who produced his own jazzy concerto seven years later. This year Ravel had his L'Enfant et les Sortileges presented (libretto by Colette Willy, a very catty woman with a considerable sensual appetite), and there was talk of preceding it with my and Domenico's Les Pauvres Riches, but Ravel's friend Ducrateron got in instead with his banal and now forgotten Le Violon d'Ingres (which was actually about Ingres and his violin, as though putting all your eggs in one basket meant literally that). Domenico did not repine since, as I have already indicated, he considered that he had traveled beyond that early rubbish, though I observed that he was not above using one or two of its themes for his jazzy concerto. He and Hortense and i gemelli were in a much bigger apartment than before, and he had an old Broadwood grand bought at the auction of the effects of poor Edouard Hecquet.
The year began and continued well for me too, though (and my stomach shudders at the prospect of having to set it all down) it ended in agony. It was the year of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. This was presided over by the Prince of Wales (whose sculpted effigy in New Zealand butter was one of the attractions of the show) and opened by his father on Shakespeare's birthday. There were Palaces of Art and Industry and Engineering, and this last was six times the size of Trafalgar Square. There was a model coal mine and cigarette factory and printing works, and there were pavilions dedicated to the industrial achievements of the dominions and colonies. There was also the Queen's Doll's House, which had tiny books in its library, distinguished auctorial holographs, myself unincluded as not yet sufficiently distinguished. Kings and queens came to visit the exhibition, and I seem to remember that it was in June that the nominal ruler of Italy and his consort were there, thus being absent from Rome on the occasion of the brutal murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the great progressive and bitter foe of Italy's true new ruler, by fascist thugs. That stupidly overt criminal act might have been the end of Mussolini, but Britain, along with other nations fearful of bolshevism, showed stupid cordiality to him, and Austen Chamberlain was in the Holy City later in the year to praise the ghastly regime.
On May 25 (the day of the deposition of George II, King of the Hellenes, and the declaration of a Greek Republic), my new play, The Tumult and the Shouting, opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. This was a tonguein-cheek piece whose popular success Jim Joyce would have given his left eye (not much use to him, admittedly) to emulate. It was appropriate to the spirit of imperial enthusiasm that abounded and was seen by many visitors to London, but you will not find it in the three volumes called Toomey's Theatre. The plot dealt with a young anarchic firebrand, only son of a retired colonial official who suffered terribly from sandfly fever, and he began the first act by screaming against British imperial oppression and shouting the necessity of declaring the Universal Republic of Man. His father, dithering in a febrile bout theatrically highly effective, told him to get out of their Swiss Cottage home if that was the way he felt. I will, I will. He slammed the door, and the quavering father regretted his dismissive heat. The young firebrand did some screaming about human liberty at a public meeting and was beaten up by fascists (I had modelled these on the Italian blackshirts whom I had seen in the European illustrated papers; they anticipated Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley's cornerboys by some seven years). Picked up broken and bloody by a kindly Hindu doctor and nursed back to health by him, he was gently instructed in the virtues of British imperialism and told that from it was already emerging the international commonweal he desiderated. He also fell in love with a dusky beauty, a quadroon from Trinidad, whom the Indian doctor had adopted, and declared his wish to marry her. She ended the play with a speech in which she expressed regret that the time for the mingling of the bloods was, despite the precedent of her own parentage, not yet, though some day it would come. Some day, she said, the brotherhood of all who lived under the British flag would be more than a pious (sanctimonious really) aspiration. For now it was necessary to defer to the prejudices of the unenlightened, thinking particularly of the cross of others' stupidity and ignorance that the offspring of a mixed union, such as herself, still had to bear. The reformed firebrand nodded and nodded, taking on the appearance of a wiser, older, more patriarchal man with a sandfly fever dither, and kissed the sensible quadroon gently on the brow as th
e curtain went slowly down and the applause started: It is strange now to reflect that both colored parts were taken by uncolored players colored for the occasion, these being Phil Kemble (who still, incidentally, wanted to play Pitt) and Rosemary Fanshawe. We have come a long way since then.
Rudyard Kipling, with his bossy American wife, came to the first night. After all, the title was taken from his own "Recessional" and he had a right to a couple of free tickets and a free drink in the first interval in the manager's office. His wife watched closely as Ferguson, manager, poured Kipling whisky. "Plenty of wawder," she said. When Ferguson offered a refill she said, "No, Ruddy." Kipling began to sing, unexpectedly, from Gay's and Handel's Acis and Galatea: "Oh ruddier than the cherry oh sweeter than the berry."
"See what I mean?" Mrs. Kipling said sternly to a piece of the wall between myself and her husband.
Kipling said to me, "You young men, you never see what it's all about. The insincerity comes through." His intonation had a lilt which suggested a Welsh background; one did not dare think of it as babu, chichi, a long-learnt gesture of solidarity with the Indian anglophones. The moustache was grey but the heavy eyebrows still black. He had been sunning in Hastings perhaps and was browner than an Englishman should be. His spectacles were as thick as bottle-bottoms, and the eyes swam fierce and enlarged. "A bad play," he pronounced, "so far. But that won't worry you. I wouldn't have come if we hadn't been in town already. That damned tattoo," he cried.
"Now, Ruddy."
"You weren't there, Toomey?" No. "The most crude pantomime of my little poem about Gunga Din, with a burntcorked bishti doling out drops of pawnee to the wounded under fire and then being shot by whooping tribesmen. He knifejacked up before dying and then saluted. The cheers of the kuchnays. Oh my God. And the music. What was that music, Carrie?"
"'Nimrod,'" said Ferguson, who had read the reviews. "Elgar. Sir Edward. From the Enigma Variations."
"Oh yes, poor Elgar."
"Poor?" Mrs. Kipling exclaimed. "You should have no sympathy for the man. He ruined your big steamers." I did not understand and showed it. "'Oh where are you going to all you big steamers?'" clarified Mrs. Kipling. "His setting. Elgar's setting. The music he put to the words."