Earthly Powers

  "A pity he got so much praise. From that wild man--what's his name, Anthill?"

  "George Antheil. He calls himself the bad boy of music."

  "And that fat Jewish woman. And her sort of satellite. I fear for poor Hortense when they get into bed tonight. If she shows any tepidity he'll get to work with his own thick fist."

  "She can always brain him with her bust of Andre Gide. Very solid art."

  "I didn't know," Concetta said, picking up a copy of Woran Sic Sich Nicht Erinnern Will from the floor by her chair, "that you read German."

  "I'm learning. I have to learn. Strehler's quite incredible. I've done something I never dreamed I'd do--well, not since my Henry James days--sent him a gushing schoolgirl letter, in English of course. No reply as yet. Perhaps he gets lots of them. Do you know his work? If not you must. He's absolutely--"

  "Doch als uns der Fliegenpilz seine Wirkung entzog, als kein Gluck rnehr nachdammern wollte," she read, with a light tripping accent that evoked nothing of the Teutonic North, "als wir uns..."

  But," I said, amazed, "really, I never cease to be--"

  "My Alto Adige inheritance," she said. "This looks good."

  CHAPTER 42

  It was 1928, and Hortense's two and only children were now talkative human beings, spouting to their uncle or tonton or zio Ken the kind of macaronics to be expected in trilingual infants, using strap to mean rip, calling the moon the lun and the watertaps robinettes. The conventional sexual differentials of dress and hair style had been imposed on them; otherwise, when not in the bath, they were the same child in duplicate. "Soyez sages," Hortense bade them, dressed for the journey, the taxi already, as Eliot had taught us to say, throbbing waiting. She and I were going to London for our brother Tom's wedding. He was marrying the girl you have already briefly met, the stupid one who had been rude to me four years before in Scott's, her name Estella. The twins' nurse, a new one from Gattires on the Var, forty-odd, her eyes disillusioned and the hue of Var mud, sallow, stockings always wrinkled about her rustic ankles, a big cachou sucker, unhappily named Desiree, assured her mistress that they would be sages. Domenico would be sage too, at least in his own household. He seemed sincerely sorry that Hortense should be going off, even if for only a day or so. His eyes were moist as he embraced her. He was handsome as ever, though greying in the way known as distinguished, but plumpness was, in the Italian manner, beginning to overtake him. I too was greying but remained thin as though steadily devoured by the worms of various kinds of guilt--at my sexual aberrancy, mediocre money-making prose, failure of faith. Hortense had never, approaching her thirties, looked more beautiful or more elegant. She was in short-skirted pale green linen with darker green and white spotted contrast trimmings, horizontal tucks in her flared skirt and on the arms of the jacket, underblouse buttoned to the waist, hat with wide brim bound with spotted silk bowed with fringed ends, soft-wooled coat with collar furtrimmed, furtrimmed too the two-tier flared sleeves. Her heels were high and brought her up almost to my own height. I was, as always, proud to be seen with her.

  Domenico had not, of course, composed that threatened Requiem. He had made money out of a graduated series of piano exercises for the young in the style of Bartok's Mikrokosmos, called breezily C'est Notre Monde, les Enfants! Re had written other things too. He was working on a set of polytonal quartets for various combinations. It bothered him that he had reached the limit of discord. A chord made out of the entire chromatic scale was, after all, as far as one could go if one did not use the microtones of H++ba already prefigured in a song by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Little did he know that his true world was preparing to open for him.

  "Tesoro, tesoro!" The bust that Hortense had sculpted of Domenico and which showed the real sullenness beneath the Milanese charm gazed with sullen blind eyes at the parting. We left to the sound of the twins demanding cadeaux from Londres, wherever that was. We were driven to Orly and there we boarded the once a day Imperial Airways biplane for Croydon. Those were the good flying times, with the ground and Channel almost palpable beneath, the natural chill of the lower air, the comfortless cane chairs antiphonally creaking to the engine's roar, and the coffee served from thermos flasks. There was an airline bus that took us from Croydon to the West End terminal, and then it was a brief taxi ride to Claridge's. As Hortense and I sat in the living room of our suite, sipping dry martinis and looking out on the Dutch facades of Brook Street, a former time was recalled to us, wartime London, my early stage success, bedtime cocoa, an artificial limb, a radiant schoolgirl innocently fascinated by the great banned book of sex. And, talking of banned books, here it all was in the Evening Standard--Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness on trial. Hortense read aloud the words of the presiding magistrate:

  "'The book's greatest offence is its failure to suggest that anyone with the horrible tendencies described is in the least degree blameworthy. All the characters are presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration.'" She looked up. "It says that there are forty witnesses, and that he refuses to listen to any of them. Why aren't you one of the witnesses, Ken?"

  "There wouldn't be much point, would there, if he refuses to listen." She frowned. "Sorry. I was asked. A lot of writers were asked. But I couldn't read the damned thing. It's so badly written. Have you read it?"

  "There was a copy lying around in the studio. I didn't know what it was about or else I would have."

  "It's about lesbianism."

  "I know that now, stupid. What do they do?"

  I couldn't help smiling. She'd asked that identical question all those years ago in a London living room not unlike this, though then about the brothers, not sisters, of deviancy. "They don't seem to do very much except be in love with each other. No torrid descriptions of cunnilingus and the thrust of dildos, if that's what you expect."

  "Why do you make everything sound so cold and horrid?" And then, "There's a woman here called Rebecca West. Do you know her?"

  "A very fine writer. She used to be H. G. Wells's mistress. That isn't her real name. It's the name of a character in Ibsen. She used to be an actress, you see. What does she say?"

  "'Everyone who knows Miss Radclyffe Hall wants to stand by her. But they are finding it far from easy to stand by The Well of Loneliness, for the simple reason that it is, in a way that is particularly inconvenient in the present circumstances, not a very good book.'"

  "That's precisely what I would have said. But I thought it best to say nothing."

  "And if some man had written a bad book about men doing it would you have thought it best to say nothing?"

  "The only defence you can raise in law is literary value, which they take, wrongly of course, to mean the same as moral value. You know, like Paradise Lost. It strikes me as wrong to pretend a book's good when it isn't."

  "But that's not the point, is it? The point is surely that people should write what they want to write. Just as people should sculpt what they want to sculpt. Suppose I want to sculpt what you in your nasty cold way would call the male sexual organs"

  "Nothing to stop you so long as you don't exhibit it publicly. But I should have thought there were more comely things to sculpt. Look, I don't see why bad artists--I mean artists who are obviously incompetent, as Radclyffe Hall is--why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or, you know what I mean, demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter. I didn't want to put myself in a false position, nor did Rebecca West."

  "I think you were being a bloody coward."

  "Hortense, you really must not speak to me like that."

  "Because in court they might have said: Are you homosexual, Mr. Toomey, like the author of this book?"

  "They daren't ask that sort of question. A question like that would be struck from the record. A man's sexuality is his own business."

  "Not according to the law it isn't, as you know perfectly well. What would you do if so
mebody wrote a great blazing masterpiece about being a male homosexual and the law got on to it and said it was abominable and horrible and so on?"

  "I'd raise hell about the right to publish. And a lot of others would too, regardless of their sexual position. And then there'd be such an outcry in the press and in Parliament that there'd be changes in the law of obscenity."

  "But you wouldn't say: I'm homosexual myself and I can whatsit confirm or affirm or something the truth of this writer's depiction of homosexuality."

  "Not in the present state of public opinion."

  "Meaning you have a nice middle-class public and you'd be scared of losing it?"

  "There's a limit to what a man, or woman for that matter, ought to be willing to undergo."

  "Oh God, that's sickening. That's really sickmaking. Did Jesus Christ think there was a limit?"

  "Jesus Christ was in every way exceptional, Hortense. Your brother-in-law Carlo would say you were being blasphemous."

  "Oh, to hell with Carlo, the fat pig, fatter than ever since he's been living in fat Rome, the fat spaghettiguzzler. I don't see the difference between standing up for your belief in the right to make love to who you want and the other thing."

  "What other thing?"

  "Being the Son of God and bringing in the Kingdom of Heaven and the rest of it. That was thought to be bloody blasphemous and obscene by those old Jews on the Hedron or whatever it was."

  "Sanhedrin. Christ was preaching supernatural doctrine. A homosexual is supposed to be infranatural."

  "All right, that means that both of them go against Nature, whatever Nature is. You're getting on for forty, Ken Toomey, and you're settling down into bloody smugness. You ought to be out there in the streets of London pleading for the rights of the unnatural." She saw the comic in that and had to grin.

  I said, "I've done a book, you know that, a short one. I wanted Ford to publish it. Under a pseudonym, of course."

  "Oh, of course. Mustn't lose that fat smug middle-class readership, must we? Pour me another of these."

  I got up and took both our glasses to the frosted jug on the sideboard. "It's the thing that counts, not the name. It's going to be done next year on a private press. Part of it, anyway. Your friends the Crosbys--"

  "They're not my friends. They don't know me and I don't know them."

  "All right, not your friends. But they're going to do it. It's a start. It's something in print that the magistrates can't pounce on. So don't keep on at me about being smug and middle class."

  "Yes, you can have anything in dirty Paris. You wouldn't dare to risk it here in London under your own name."

  "I wouldn't stand a chance. Not yet. The time will come." And then, giving her her glass recharged with gin and a smell of vermouth, I said, "Adultery, for instance. Would you stand up for a book on the joys of adultery?"

  She took it and sipped. "Adultery," she said, "is only sleeping with people you're not married to. It may be wrong but it's not unnatural. Why do you say that? What have you got on your cold low mind?"

  "Oh, nothing really. Just wondering. It was mentioning the Crosbys that put it into my head."

  "I tell you I don't know the Crosbys. Or rather I knew them for a few hours and they were drunk and disgusting. What you're really saying is how are things between you and Domenico. And I say it's none of your concern, Ken Toomey."

  "Sorry. Mere fraternal interest, no more." And then: "Are things all right? Really all right? I mean, apart from that nasty temper of his which he excuses on the grounds of artistic temperament, the bloody idiot, and his tendency to acts of violence on his own wife and his somewhat indiscreet sleeping around."

  Hortense pulled in her lips and looked evilly at me, holding her martini glass as if ready to throw its contents in my face. There was not much liquid left so she sensibly drained it instead. Then she got up and tried to do her own refill. I took her glass as before and served us both down to the last trickle of the jug. She said, rather reasonably, "Most marriages are the same. It's a question of knowing what to shut your eyes to."

  "Both of you, you mean?"

  "I," she said with adorable iciness, "have been faithful. For the last five years I have been entirely and absolutely faithful. Fidelity, marital fidelity, if you know the phrase."

  "But five years ago you were not faithful."

  "And you know why not, not that it's any of your business."

  "I see. That Arts Ball business wasn't the only lapse?"

  "Lapse, what do you mean, lapse? That was a kind of, there used to be a name for it--"

  "Saturnalia. Ritual licence. I see. But the other things were sober, deliberate, perpetrated in full awareness?"

  "I hate you when you talk like that, you damned prig, like a bloody judge or a bloody Jesuit. It's all over now, anyway."

  "Does Domenico still not suspect that his seed is infertile?"

  "How ghastly you make things sound. Of course not, fool. We've both agreed that we don't want any more children, and to hell with fat Carlo. He thinks I've been fitted with a thing."

  "Domenico's a bloody idiot."

  "Whatever Domenico is or isn't, Domenico happens to be the man I married. And that's that. Now shut up about Domenico. I've told you more already than I should have done. Let the whole business alone now, will you. I want my dinner and then we have to see this stupid film."

  "You don't have to see it. Nor do I, for that matter."

  "Don't talk wet, I have to see it. I have to see how bad it is."

  "How do you know it's bad?"

  "The book's bad, isn't it?"

  I sighed. "Poor little girl, enclosed by mediocre art. My books, Domenico's music."

  "Shut up about Domenico."

  The film, the third to be based on a book of mine, was an adaptation of the novel Wasting in Despair. It had been made by the German company Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft, acronym UFA, one of the least sinister of the truncations in which the language of the German State was soon horribly to specialise. Arnold Fanck was the director and Leni (Helene Bertha Amalie) Rlefenstahl, later to be Adolf Hitler's Egeria, played the female lead. Fanck was mad about mountains and made, with the occasional collaboration of Pabst, a large number of mountain films. Leni Riefenstahi was a better dancer than actress. My novel was about a young man falling in love with a ballerina and, rejected by her, going off to the Swiss Alps to ski and forget. The plot was, is, perhaps, preposterous, involving the ballerina's turning up with her dance troupe in Zurich, a meeting, a last lover's plea, his expressed intention of skiing off in a terrible blizzard or something and hoping that he will die. She, relenting, alarmed, follows him and is revealed as an expert skier. Blizzards, avalanches, love on an icy ledge, happy ending. The German title was, I think, Bergensliebe and the English one certainly A Mountain of Love. It was one of the last of the silent films. As Hortense and I taxied to Leicester Square, we passed posters of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, a blacked-up silly face with naughty eyes and dilated nostrils and white-lipped smirk. Cinema musicians had been picketing the cinema where it was being shown: there was hardly any talk on the cartwheel Vitaphone sound disk but there was plenty of music.

  Bergensliebe was, when the Nazis controlled the German cinema, converted into a sound film, not a difficult task: there was not much conversation in it. The ballet sequences needed music exactly synchronised to the choreography, and the mountain scenes required something Wagnerian, not a couple of tremolando fiddles and a pounded piano, which was all we got at Leicester Square. A Mountain of Love was not, and even Hortense had to admit this, altogether a stupid film. It was psychologically crude but technically expert, and there was a peculiar fascination in the orts of Expressionismus that tarted up the kitschy tale and made it suggest that it might be an allegory of something else, such as the sickness, say, of the Weimar Republic. Makeup was dead white, gestures were like slowing piston rods, a head waiter hovered like frowning Wotan, there was a Fritz Lang nightmare with the word SCHICKSAL i
n Gothic script in an art nouveau setting. All the time I was aware of the inadequacy of the musical accompaniment, to be made more than good by the Nazis: always that Delibes Pizzicato for the dancing, starting and ending too late; the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture for the mountains; Elgar's Salut d'Amour for die Liebe. And then, of course, I knew where Domenico's musical Schicksal lay. How to get him to embrace it? Time enough.

  Hortense and I had a drink in a Leicester Square pub when it was over, brandy and soda without ice, ice then being an exoticism in the British catering trade. I said, "That's where Domenico's musical destiny lies. In providing music for the talkies."

  She looked all over my face as though searching for comedones of sarcasm. She must have found the trace of a sneer at my mouthcorners, for she said, "That's right, bring him down to the level of the Toomey brothers. Shopgirl novels and musichall monologues and music for the talkies."

  "I can see further ahead than you, Hortense," I said, or make myself say out of hindsight. "The new art's in its infancy. The Jazz Singer is nothing." We'd seen it, though not together, on the Champs-Elysees. The orchestral score had been, I thought, well tailored to the action, but it was a potpourri of popular opera tunes, mostly from I Pagliacci, nothing original. There would surely soon be a need for a kind of music specially composed, plastic, anonymous, the humble furniture of action. Poor Erik Satie had produced what he called musique d'ameublement, disregardable background for talk at a morning champagne party. The guests had stopped talking to listen when the music started. Satie danced round crying "Parlez parlez!" The father of many modern or future things, that dapper man with no underwear and a filthy attic bedroom. "Great composers will be glad to compose for the films, you'll see. Gaumont or Pathe or somebody are already making the first French talkies. We must get Domenico into that."

  "He'll talk about desecration."

  "You must drop this highbrow business, both of you. Artists must serve as much of the great public as they can. What's wrong with the kind of thing Tom's doing? He makes people laugh. I'd give anything to be able to make people laugh."