Earthly Powers

  I said, "I'll get a copy in the shop downstairs."

  "Keep that, keep that, keep that. I don't want the goddam thing."

  "You're still bitter, Domenico. You still remember that arrested orgasm. You must have had many unarrested since to make up for it."

  "I've done with women. You know Sindy's gone off with that Mexican bastard?"

  Sindy was Cynthia, nee Forkner, a starlet from North Carolina and Domenico's third wife. Perhaps she wanted children. "No, I didn't know. Should I say I'm sorry?"

  "The time's come," Domenico said, "for the parting of lots of ways. I've finished with Hollywood. I've finished with shoveling auditory shit on sound tracks. I want to write real music again." That again was not perhaps appropriate.

  I said, "You got an Oscar for that Dostoevsky film. You produce some of the best film music in the business. What do you want to do? A symphony?"

  "No. An opera, what else? Milan's got fucking Carlo. It's time Milan got me. And you do the libretto."

  I said nothing for the moment. I opened the door to the Latvian waiter, who wheeled in a table and a load of covered dishes. I said nothing while he laid it all out and brought chairs up to the board. I signed the bill and gave the waiter two dollars. "Enzhoy your launch, genlmen," he said and shambled out. Domenico at once began fiercely to tuck in. A dew of concentration appeared on his brown bald dome. "I did a libretto before," I said, picking with my fork, "and it turned out to be a great waste of my time. I take it you have in mind Some big opera seria, three acts, the works. Something of archiepiscopal magisteriality."

  "That was a gamble, we were both young then, now it'll be a sure thing. I saw Giulio Orecchia in New York at the Met six, seven weeks ago. He said yes and again yes, start yesterday. So what ideas do you have, I want a libretto by early fall at the latest."

  "In New York did you pay any family visits? See your growing grandchild, for instance?" A granddaughter called Eve, a pretty blond romp who called me tunkie for great-uncle.

  "Look, Ken, I married into three families and I kept away from them all. That's the only way to be."

  "This family's somewhat different, Domenico. It's your first. The Church would say it's your only. So you didn't visit Hortense?"

  "I didn't visit Hortense. I'm sorry about what happened to Hortense, but I didn't visit her. It's all over."

  "She still calls herself Mrs. Campanati. It's under that name that she's finishing her own magisterial work of art for Milan. It was good of Carlo to fix the commission. She needed it, it stopped her moping."

  "What is this?" Domenico glared in fear and suspicion. His lips, indifferent, sucked in spaghetti ends. "What's been going on?"

  "It's a basso-relievo representing the career of Saint Ambrose, patron saint of Milan and Carlo's distinguished ancestor in office. She's working on it in a new big studio in the Village and it promises to be very impressive. You see the infant Ambrose with bees swarming round his lips, you see him as bishop excommunicating the emperor Theodosius, you see him trouncing the Arians. Ambrose, a great naked muscular figure--"

  "Naked?"

  "More or less naked. I seem to remember a mitre and a crosier as well as muscular nudity. It looks like being the best thing she's ever done. The name Campanati is going to be a great name in Milan. A great archbishop, a great sculptress, and then you. If you can do it."

  "It's my name before it's theirs. Christ, what are they all trying to do to me? When's this thing going to be ready? This damned blasphemous thing of that puttana who called herself my wife?"

  "How do you know it's blasphemous? And why should you, expert in serial polygamy, take up any moral attitude?"

  "She's living with this black bitch, isn't she? When's it supposed to be ready?"

  "The dedication's fixed for Saint Ambrose's feast day the year after next. December seven, I seem to remember, the day after the feast of Saint Nicholas. The thing has to be shipped and installed. Good God," I added, for I had just thought of the subject for a libretto. "What absurd idea do you have in mind, Domenico? Do you propose trying to get in before your former wife, still your wife incidentally but let that pass, bursting in a blaze of music at the Scala while Saint Ambrose is still on the high seas pointing toward Genoa? You know how long it takes to set up an opera."

  "There are shortcuts. I'm taking back this boy Vern Clapp with me--"

  "Who?"

  "Vern Clapp."

  "Is that a real name?"

  "Vern stands for Vernon. He can help with the orchestration." Domenico was now on the peche Melba, spooning it in rapidly, time being awasting.

  "Taking back, you say. You're leaving America?"

  "Sure I'm leaving America. I've had out of America everything that America could give me, mainly money. I'm going to Menton or Nice or some place, work in peace. Now how's about that libretto?"

  "Saint Nicholas," I said.

  He stared at me for several seconds, chewing. "You mean an opera about a saint? You don't have operas about saints. Saints are for oratorios. Like Mendelssohn and Handel and all that shit." He swallowed a lump of ice cream as though it were something warm and sour. I explained. He listened.

  "You see," I said, "you could have the legend of the resurrection of the three young men in a pickle barrel done as a kind of highly stylized prologue. And then realism for the real story. The first of the adopted sons tries to turn Nicholas's house into a brothel, and Nicholas yields to the temptations of the flesh. After that, of course, he flagellates himself and gets himself holy and ready for the Council of Nicaea in order to denounce the Arian heresy."

  "Oh Jesus."

  "Jesus, Father and Holy Ghost to be exact. The denial of the doctrine of the Trinity. Anus said the Son wasn't coeternal with the Father."

  "You can't put that in an opera. Where did you get all this crap anyway?"

  "The basic idea's in a story by Anatole France. The second adopted son forges documents to prove that Nicholas is a bigger heretic than Anus, and the act ends with a big choral denunciation. Nicholas begins the third act in sackcloth and ashes, you know, in enforced repentance. He gets his bishopric back, but the third adopted son has become a military leader and is going to slaughter women and children in the name of God. The enemy are the Arians and Nicholas is supposed to be all for exterminating them, but at the end the ravaged corpse of a child is brought in. With the child in his arms he raises his eyes to the invisible God and says: What is all this about? What's going on? Why did you let me bring these bastards back to life if you knew what they were going to do? And then curtain. Or, to be on the safe side, an epilogue, stylized like the prologue, in which God says, one could do this in the manner of Blake's Book of Job illustrations, all this was the temptation appropriate to a man destined to be a saint, and Nicholas came through without cursing God and he's passed the test. Apotheosis."

  "What's that word?"

  "He goes up to heaven. This is only a rough outline, naturally. What do you think?" Domenico poured both of us coffee from the big pewter pot and leaned back in his chair the better to caress his belly. I could tell he was thinking musically, in terms of sonic lumps rather than plot and psychology and the boring realities you left to the mere wordman. "No big soprano part," he pronounced.

  "But a bloody big tenor one."

  "Too many men all round."

  "You've got whores and wailing mothers. Angels too if you like."

  "Why can't one of those three be a woman? She's been disguised as a man and the other two could be monks running away from a monastery and taking her with them running away from a convent. Nicholas only discovers this in the first act after the prologue thing. She could be a real bitch. She could even be a black bitch."

  "You have the heart of the matter in you, Domenico. What do you say, then?"

  "Try it. Get me a draft done."

  "Who pays?"

  "Ah Jesus. You know all about show business. It's the public pays. Not too many words, remember. Numbers. Solos, quartets,
choruses. Get down to it now."

  "You can get down to the prologue now. No words. Like a little ballet suite. You could have that played in the Hollywood Bowl in a week or so. Cool and pre-Raphaelite like early Debussy. I can hear it." Domenico wiped his mouth and then face and finally head with his napkin. He got up as though really ready to start.

  He said, "What do we call it?"

  "The Miracle of the Holy Saint Nicholas."

  "That sounds like what they're not going to get."

  "It's meant to be ironic."

  "Get started, Ken. Thanks for the lunch."

  "Thank my employers."

  That afternoon I read the long article on Carlo in Life. It was written by somebody who sounded like a mafioso, Turiddu Genovese, and it was full of the quoted Wit and Wisdom of the Archbishop of Milan. I had a feeling that Carlo would not now, to use his own expression, make Pope. Life was making him into a world personality before his status warranted it; after all, he was only a provincial prelate. He would be dead as news when the next papal election arrived; his newsworthiness was being spent, in terms of that, most prematurely. Nor would his fellow cardinals much care for this stellar elevation. If he was being celebrated in Life, Stern and Paris-Match and Hoshi and Kochav must also be ready to put that fat ugly blessing mug on their covers, if they had not done so already. Although the early part of the article made much of the part Carlo had played in 1929 when the Vatican had been turned into a great instrument of capitalism, the living capitalists of Turin and Milan would not be taking kindly to his siding with the workers in industrial disputes. Here was Carlo on Carlo Marx:

  "Most people who call themselves Marxists have never read the works of that remarkable reformer. I have devoted much time to his books in the original German and find none of that atheistical materialism which has so stupidly been lauded. Marx has been misrepresented by the political leaders of the Soviet Union, especially Josef Stalin. Here was a man who, taking his wife and children home to Soho after a picnic on Hampstead Heath, would recite canto after canto of the divine Dante, finding in him the ultimate truth which feeds men's souls, while economic reforms and social revolutions merely benefit their bodies. Marx knew that man does not live by bread alone.

  "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 emphasized 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: three-quarters 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 elggiornamento.

  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 realize 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 lov
e 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 jeaned 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?