Earthly Powers

  "We were in the royal box," Kipling told me, "with George and Mary and young David puffing away at his gaspers. Elgar at one end, the wife and I at the other, separated by a large wedge of whatwhatwhat nobility."

  "Stop that, Ruddy."

  "Kuchnays with coronets. We exchanged glances of shame. We're both long past that tawdry expansionism. Elgar and those damnable words. Land of grope and whoredom."

  "Ruddy, that is not amusing."

  "I'll have another drop of that."

  "The bell has gone, Ruddy. We must return to our seats."

  "Must we? Got to, have we? You want us to, Toomey? Ah, well. Elgar," he suddenly chortled. "Hippism and microscopy, given up music as a mug's game. And me?"

  "Guilt, symbolism and technology," I said, or perhaps did not. I say it now anyway.

  "Not bad," Kipling said. "Is there a toilet anywhere near here? Bladder not as good as it was."

  "Show Mr. Kipling," Mrs. Kipling ordered me, "to the nearest facility."

  The second bell was trilling as Kipling pounded away. "Saw the other Tooniey," he gasped. Micturition seemed to take a lot out of him. "Any relation?"

  "My brother."

  The public had not yet tired of Rob All My Comrades at the Cambridge, but the khaki element was giving way to mufti, and in the second act the entire cast was in evening dress. There were also real girls instead of hairylegged transvestites The title was taking on a bolshevik flavor, and it changed to Friends, Just Friends for its next edition. Tommy Toomey's turn was military enough. He was a hawhawing subaltern giving his platoon a lecture on the Empire. Occasionally he would cough and say, "No good, I shall have to give 'em up, what." This catchphrase caught on widely among the million or so British scratchers of carborundum pyrites when Tom did this and other turns on 2LO the following year. The Prince of Wales was to use it while trying an Argentine gasper at the British Exhibition in Buenos Aires. The catchphrase Ceased to be funny when Tom's cough was revealed as clearly unvolitional and could no longer be interpreted, to use the new jargon, as a suprasegmental prosodic trope. The damned irony of it, as I have already, I think, said. But Tom was well enough and coming into his success in 1924. He was very amusing with his mixed-up story of Clive of India and the Black Hole of Calcutta (No, Jones 69, I do not mean B Company's latrines). He was too good for the show.

  We had a late supper one night at Scott's, top of the Haymarket. His lady friend came too, a girl with a blue-black bob and kohled eyes, Estella some thing, a small actress, an artist's model, anything that offered. She knew exactly what she wanted as we took our seats in the crowded smoky restaurant: potted shrimps, lobster Mornay, a carafe of house Chablis. How we all smoked in those daysGold Flake, Black Cat, Three Castles, Crumbs of Comfort. All except Tom, who merely coughed. He had goujons frits, I coulibiac of salmon. Estella read books. She had read one or two of mine. She thought little of them. Sentimental, she said. Contrived. Old-fashioned.

  "All right, Stell, enough," Tom smiled. "This is just biting the hand that feeds you."

  "Oh, his treat, is it? Well, I mean, compared with Huxley. Antic Hay, that's marvellous, isn't it, Tommy, marvellous."

  "I only read the papers. Gags, you know," he said to me in apology. "Topicalities. I try to keep the act up to date. You know, so they built a statue of Clive in ghee but it didn't last long."

  "'There was a young man of East Anglia whose loins were a tangle of ganglia.' That's in Antic Hay, that's marvellous."

  "What are ganglia?" Tom asked.

  "It won't do," I said. "There's no other rhyme. Anybody can start a limerick--"

  "Now you're jealous." She drank Chablis and left a coating of chewed white bolus on the rim. "Aldous is marvellous."

  "You know him?"

  "We all know him. He's our voice. Postwar disillusionment, you know, marvellous."

  "An overtall gangler with glass eyes, mooning after Nancy Cunard. Marvellous, yes."

  "Good God," she said, not listening, "there's a coincidence." A young man, very upright, with a trimmed golden beard and, just behind him, a mor, sluttish version of Estella, overrouged and dirty looking and wobbling on heels like stilts, had just come in, laughing loudly. "That's Heseltine," Estella said. "Or Peter Warlock, his other self. He's in two books, isn't that marvellous, Women in Love and this Aldous one." There seemed to be others in Heseltine's company. Heseltine clapped his hands for a table. The place, as I said, was crowded. He lalled mockingly the coda of the finale of Brahms's First Symphony. There had been a Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Queen's Hall.

  Every eye was on him, he glowed. The others in his company seemed to include Val Wrigley, my former lover. I nearly choked on a fishbone as I looked at him. What seven years can do. He had become what used to be known as a queen, his hair henna and his gestures elegantly petulant. To my horrible shock Estella waved at him with vigour, rattling the tortoiseshell bangles on her arm. "Val, Val, Val, there's room here."

  "Oh no," both Tom and I murmured. She said to me very eagerly: "The most marvellous poet. If you don't know him you ought to. They did his thing tonight. Do congratulate him."

  "What thing?" I frowned. And there Val was, a little tipsy, his eyes not quite in focus, recognising me all right, bowing derisively to the cher maitre. She said, all in one breath: "Couldn't be there Val how did it go I'm sure it was marvellous."

  "The words," Val said, "were inaudible. They were the mere vehicle for his gush and flood and bangs. Well, old thing," to me, "sorry I can't stay. You flourish like the rose from the look of you." He sibilated fiercely, spittle rode the smoky air. "My place is with," and he made the name preposterous, "Bernard."

  "What is this, what's been happening?"

  "Bernard van Dieren, you see him? That dim thing with the grey face in napless velvet. Amoretto Two, it was called. Words mine, and the scrapes and blowings and chucked fire-irons and hurled dustbin lids all his, my dear. His hour of triumph, just look at that beautifully assumed modesty. Come and see me, will you, old thing?"

  "Where?"

  Estella pouted at the evidence of Val's and my knowing each other and raised a finger at the ancient waiter who trundled the dessert trolley about. With that finger she pointed at what she wanted, with the corresponding one of the other hand she twined a black curl. The waiter mumbled as with distaste at all the chromatic sweetness in his charge and piled her plate with caramel cream, trifle and chocolate mousse with Chantilly, setting finally on top of the mess like a cloacal overflow the sugary buttocks of a meringue. "Oh, I'll be at the Neptune tomorrow night. Most nights actually. Sort of club call it. Dean Street. Lateish."

  Sort of club call it. I could guess what kind. "Lateish, yes. I have royalty coming tomorrow night. The Clarences, you know." Val was coloring me. I was overstressing and alveolizing, making all preposterous.

  "Up in the world, aren't we? Remember Baron's Court and the ragout de bully? So grey, just like dear summoning Bernard, and quite as inesculent. I see they actually have a seat for me. I must go and be scolded." Heseltine, or Warlock, was roaring something obscene about towsing. Val went, undulant, hands gracefully moulding figurines symbolising regret, grimacing. Then he turned deliberately back to look on Estella, nose wrinkled. "Don't know you, do I? No, thought not." And he went, undulant and so on. The poor silly girl blushed strawberry above her mess.

  "Marvellous poet, eh?" I said cruelly. "I discovered him. Some damned thing about a thrush in the heart of Ealing." I would not go. Yes, I would. I was curious. I wanted to see the world into which, had I not exiled myself, I might have fallen. And I wished to bitch at Val, over whose desertion I had once wept. To Tom I said, "You still write to him, Father I mean? I gave it up, so did Hortense. Well, I did drop a note about his being a double granddad, Hortense wouldn't even do that. No reply."

  "Well, it's to her I write actually. Doris, our stepmother. I knew her, you know. Who would have dreamt? I didn't actually, you know, but I might have done had I not been so chaste." There wa
s a Val-type intonation on that word, but Tom was, of course, now a professional stageman. "She said that Father doesn't particularly like being a grandfather, it's as though Hortense did it to spite him. She says he's well but tired, and we know what's causing the tiredness, don't we? Very advanced, she says he says, the dental work. He's had to get himself up to date, and that's tiring too. American style. They call themselves stomachologists or something. I don't see the connection."

  "Stomatologists. Stoma. The mouth. Don't you remember Father Dwyer? Too much stomulia going on here, me boyos."

  "He left just after you did. There was no more Greek then."

  "I want some coffee," Estella said truculently, "and a crme de menthe." Warlock or Heseltine could be heard clearly reciting what seemed to be a poem by Lawrence in a high parsonical voice. "Of course," she said, "you're both RCs, aren't you?"

  "John Milton," I told her, "wrote something about Roman Catholic being one of the Pope's bulls. Particular universal. You see that? And would you perhaps like some coffee? With a liqueur? Perhaps a crme de menthe or something?"

  "I already said I wanted precisely those two things. Nobody reads Milton any more. He's vieux jeu."

  "What terrible French vowels you have." I smiled. "Ant', for that matter, what terrible manners. Both could be put right, you know."

  "All right, Ken," my brother said. "Let it go, please. Don't let's spoil the evening."

  "It's the priests who cause that, isn't it?" Estella said. "They make you scared to death of going with a girl because that's the sin of fornication, so you do the other thing."

  "What other thing?" I smiled still.

  "Please, Ken," Tom said. "All right, Stell, enough."

  "Either nothing or the other thing. Tommy ought to be a priest himself. And we can all see what you are."

  I looked at Tom, who was blushing furiously. It seemed to me that our whole family was in something of a sexual mess. To Estella I said, "Dr. Freud would be most interested. And your dear gangling ganglionic Aldous. You ought to write an article about it. A new theory of homosexuality."

  "Please, Ken," and Tom started to cough. He coughed bitterly. "Damned smoke," he gasped, then drank off a glass of water. "Let's get the bill and get out of here."

  "I want my coffee," Estella said with governess clarity, "and," with an exaggeratedly correct French accent, "some crme de menthe."

  "Somewhere else," Tom still gasped. "Cafe Royal."

  I put a couple of pound notes on the table. "I have to go back to the hotel. A little rewriting. Rudyard Kipling told me I'd got some of my Indian facts wrong." This was a lie.

  "Kipling?" Estella said and put out a white tongue tip in a vomiting gesture. "Oh me Gawd. Wen yiou've eard ye beast acawwin." Her cockney was very accurate. She leaned back dangling her creamy spoon like a pendulum, and said, "Pansies for thoughts."

  "What is that meant to mean?"

  "Oh, go, Ken, for God's sake." Tom, white from his coughing, waved my two pound notes at a distant waiter.

  "Going," I said, and I went. I had to pass Warlock-Heseltine's table. He, with what looked like potato puree on his beard, was loudly ridiculing the opening of The Rainbow: "'For heaven and earth was teeming about them, and how should this cease?' Mark the Nottinghamshire miner's grammar, my bullies." Val twiddled his fingers at me and sweetly mouthed Tomorrow. It struck me that I had no friends.

  The next day I went to see my literary agent, Jack Birkbeck, whose office was on Maddox Street. The weather had turned chilly and he had his gasfire alight. "I envy you," he said, "getting away from all this. We haven't had a decent summer since the war."

  I knew his proleptic modes of speech and understood that he meant something other than my going back to the same chill June in Paris. He was about thirty and totally, one could say obscenely, bald; he had achieved, I understood, this state while only twenty and still at Cambridge and dreaming of becoming a great novelist. He had blistered meaty lips and a pronounced diastema, the top incisors inclining left and right, the consequence of thumbsucking as a child. The interdental gap accommodated a cigarette like a Panglossian holder; he tended, as now, to forget it was there, going damn and blast when his lips scorched. He wore a brown suit peppered with blue dots, suitable for the country. I waited. He threw papers around on his desk. "Famous Lasky," he said, "Paramount Pictures, you know, want to buy The Wounded."

  "Ah. How much?"

  "Oh, a thousand or so, quids that is. For Gibson Gowland. You know him? He's on at Leicester Square, one of these places. Now the next thing is a travel book. Becoming very popular with the world opening up again. Scribner's man Jeifreys was here, we had lunch, he paid of course, he was keen on that. That would be jest fahn ah gayess. He insisted on taking me to the Lucullus, Wembley. The British Empire, he was very struck with the British Empire. India, Ceylon, the Federated Malay States. Now then, here's my idea. You do that, and you also do some so to speak travel stories. Memsahibs committing adultery, planters' wives murdering their Chinese lovers, district officers going down with DTs."

  "A rather limited image of the British Empire."

  "Well, out east, you know. Eard the heast acawwin. You know Collier's? I don't mean those dirty poetic men in D. H. Lawrence, I mean the magazine. Thought you did. One thousand dollars per story. They'll arrange a contract for twenty stories, half and half for foreign rights, then perhaps another twenty if all goes well. Really short ones, two and a half of their pages with a big illustration--you know the sort of thing, the memsahib in her camisole threatening a leering muscular coolie with a broken gin bottle. Anyway, it's two birds. You end up with two books, one throwing harsh tropical light on the other. Toomey's East. Damn and blast." That was the cigarette.

  "Fifteen hundred dollars," I said. "Short stories are hard work."

  "Well, you'll have the book as well. Forty stories, about ninety thousand words all told, a fair size. Anyway, I'll do what I can. So you get yourself some nice tropical gear, including two nice white dinner jackets, American fashion but you could introduce it east of whatsit, and don't bother about a solar topee because those are out. I can get expenses out of Scribner's. Or perhaps they and Secker might share. Treat me to some lunch, I think I deserve it."

  I took him back to Claridge's, where I was staying, and there was steak and kidney pudding that day, welcome enough in the June cold, no salad weather. A bottle of purple Pommard. Strawberry flan with Devonshire cream. Brandy and coffee and a dish of friandises, all of which Jack Birkbeck ate. Like most literary agents, he had a good appetite. "I don't have anybody coming till five," he said. "We ought to go and see that picture with Gibson Gowland in it. Zasu Pitts. Done by Stroheim, an Austrian. It's called Greed," he said, taking the last two friandises.

  "I have to bow to the Clarences. That means sleep and a bath and slow dressing over a cocktail."

  "Sleep, yes. Bit heavy, wasn't it, the pudding? Well, you might as well get used to the tropical ziz, as they call it. All right, no movie. A Corona Corona perhaps and some more coffee and another drop of Remy Martin." And then, as he tried to fit the cigar into the interdental holder and failed, "Why Paris?"

  "What do you mean why Paris?"

  "You're the sort of writer who ought to be here. Paris is for the international gang that laughs at commas and doesn't write fuck with asterisks. It's not you."

  "You sound to me as though you're quoting somebody."

  "You don't read reviews, do you? Don't blame you really. Well, I wasn't exactly quoting. There was a long article in the Times Lit Supp. Paraphrasing call it."

  "About me?"

  "Nawwwwww, not about you. You're not the type. About what he called the Paris Expatriate School. Anon, of course, but everyone knows it was Robert Lynd, lit ed of the News Chron, or some other stay-at-home ess aitch one teabag. There was a sort of tail-end dig at Toomey pathetically trying to be in the Paris fashion with his stream of consciousness and a whole paragraph of upper case with no punctuation."

  "We
ll, he seems to have read Windfalls anyway, that's something. Those were meant to be parodic and there wasn't much of it. The great unerudite public didn't complain."

  "You need this travel. You need the big winds blowing on you. Did you go to Proust's funeral?"

  "I wasn't invited."

  "Ingrown stuff, a big incestuous whatsit. That's what he left behind."

  "Ganglion?" A strange word, that, meaning either a bundle of nerves or a cystic lesion like a tumour. But to be a bundle of nerves was to be diseased. "Anglia or ganglia, take your choice, is that what you mean? Remember the British heritage and don't mess about with foreign muck. Tour the Empire and come back to London and meet Arnold Bennett for lunch at the club. I don't know what I want, Jack."

  "You want to take a P and O from Southampton. I'll ring up Cockspur Street for you if you like. Sooner the better."

  "Give me a day or two to think about it."

  I slept more heavily than was proper for a siesta. I dreamt that I was Putting on a new play whose title was something like Spicy Garlic Smells. There was genuine tropical foliage on the stage and I was there, naked, being made love to by a great naked black African under very hot spots and floods. The audience catcalled and I seemed to see Tom's girl friend Estella standing up in the stalls leading the jeers. Royalty was present in the royal box, and royalty, disgusted, stood up and then left. The little pit band started to play the National Anthem. I woke up dry and sweating and rang at once for tea.

  The Tumult and the Shouting went well that evening, and the Duke and Duchess of Clarence graciously congratulated us all, though the Duke seemed to think I was Jerry Comrie, who played the sandfly-fevered father. "Keep it up," he told Jerry, "very powerful, some of it, some damned good lines." Then I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue in tails and light overcoat, turned into Dean Street and looked among the filthy and sleazy for the Neptune Club. It was between a Continental news agent and a condom shop with the Works of Aristotle (the obstetrical monk, on the Stagyrite) on show. The club had an ordinary shop front with the glass mauve opaque. A shopbell tingled when I opened the door. A doorthing said, Yes dear? "I'm a guest of Mr. Wrigley." Who, dear? Oh, him. Oh yes, like a worm, we know, don't we?