The final meetings of the jury were vituperative. The Russian war epic kept getting two votes only--Comrade Lazurkina's and M. Brochier's. A message came through telling us that if the Algerian entry, Feu et Fer, did not receive the award for best film a bomb would go off in the Palais. There was much hot talk about honor and impartiality. M. Brochier worked my dossier to the limit and combined with his journalistic confreres to denounce the perfidious and Pederastic Albion I personified. The prize for best film went to a Yugoslav entry which nobody liked. The best director was the director of Feu et Fer, which was disgustingly directed. The best court metrage was the technically incompetent Soviet cartoon film Shtopor. Thus Comrade Lazurkina's sentence might be mitigated to public castigation and expulsion from the appropriate union. I feebly hit out at M. Brochier during the final buffet party and was much photographed. M. Brochier grabbed my weak wrist and sneered. "Sportsman," he said. "Gentleman. Fair play. Vous etes tous foutus. Tous."
CHAPTER 73
The Broadway first night of The Blooms of Dublin came after tepidly received tryouts in Toronto, Boston and Philadelphia. The book and songs were frantically worked upon during this provincial run, like repairing an aircraft in flight. Action was what was missing from the original novel, and this had to be coldly injected, like adrenalin. Haines, the Englishman, went round with a gun and the intention of killing Stephen Dedalus, whom he identified with the black panther of his dreams. A strangulatory rope was made ready for Leopold Bloom in Barney Kiernan's. There was a copulatory chorus of drunks and whores in the brothel scene. The songs, I thought, were good: Domenico's Italianate lilt was not inappropriate in an ambience where bad Italianate opera was adored. In the first scene Buck Mulligan (played by Roy Hahn) did a Greek dance and sang "Hellenize the Island": Let's turn this dim necropolis
Into a real metropolis
Put a ton of high explosive
Under Mary and St. Joseph
Groves where no lime or lemon is
May still see agapemones
Ouzo drinking will spell finis
To the wealth of Arthur Guinness
Exorcise all gloom and sin
Let the pagan sun shine in!
Stephen, played by the fine young tenor Tony Haas, sang an acrid mother song: Mother Ireland
How many lice in your comb?
Bitter and bitchy though sweet of tongue
The original sow that devoured her young
I gave you my heart--what more can I give?
For God's sake let me alone and let me live.
Mr. Deasy during this first scene in the Martello Tower came in to announce that there was no school today and to foretell the death of the British Empire: England's in the claws of the Jews
The paws and maws of the Jews
Swarming in monied hordes
Into the House of Lords
Corrupting youth and the truth
With their organs of news
The children of Israel own
The imperial throne.
And then, with his line about Ireland's never having persecuted the Jews because she had never let them in, the lights dimmed and came up on the great Alon Schemen as Bloom singing that today was the sixteenth of June: Let's see
If there's anything else in store
Let's be having it soon
This sixteenth of June
Nineteen hundred and four
A.D.
Molly, the professional soprano, played by the voluptuous Gloria Fischbein, herself a professional soprano, sang in bed a duet with her own recorded voice, a counterpoint of "Love's Old Sweet Song" and At four o'clock this afternoon he's coming
Twirling his mustachios and gaily humming
With, later, Bloom adding his own baritone counterpoint about Boylan Boylan Blazes Boylan. In the newspaper office scene Schemen had a superb long sung monologue about the tribulations of the Jews--"Wandering, Wandering" and, in the middle of a reverie near Nelson's pillar, the hit song of the show: Flower of the mountain
Crown of the Head of Howth
That's what I called you then
Day of full summer
Day of the spring of love
Will you come back again?
The decor, mostly backcloths based on Edwardian photographs of Dublin, was the work of Hortense Campanati. She, with her husband, was present at this Palace Theatre premiere, slim and elegant in her early sixties, the eyeshade now wholly accepted as a property of couture--tonight a flash of brilliants flung onto a black velvet ground, the hair, frankly a blued grey, falling in a coil over it. She sat in the back row of the stalls, near the aisle. Next to her, in that aisle, in the wheelchair which she had herself propelled into the theatre, sat Domenico Campanati. Was, I wondered, this musical remake of a, to be totally honest, totally unadaptable masterpiece of literature recalling for them the good Paris days of the avant-garde, youth and hope?
When, in the first act, JE, George Russell, walked on briefly with a copy of The Pig's Paper, I recalled vividly the event that Dublin day which demonstrated to a young boy the nature of his sexuality. Ulysses had given Russell an alibi which no appeal to history could break. At the going down of the first-act curtain, with applause and the deafening cuckoo song which bellowed to the world Bloom's shame, I thought, grinning to myself, of how times had changed and I had had something to do with changing them. It was now possible to publish, in the Joyce Newsletter or something, an article on the maimed historicity of that novel, revealing why Russell had not been able to be in the National Library when Joyce said he was. Going into the vestibule I saw Professor Breslow, husband of my niece, and said: "I was in Dublin on that memorialized day. I lost my innocence in the Dolphin Hotel. I must tell you the story sometime."
"Do." But he was not really interested. "I never thought," he said with scholarly resentment, "that they'd be able to make a public entertainment of it."
"I agree. First they've had to turn it into a genuine novel, with action and motivation. Great though Ulysses may be, novel it is not."
"They'll be doing The Magic Mountain next. Or Strehler's masterwork."
"Strehler wouldn't have minded."
"Or Der Schloss."
"That's been done," I lied. "A very perky Broadway style version. I saw it in West Berlin."
"I don't believe it. Shall we go for a drink?" There was a little bar almost next door to the Palace drama. We fought our way in and I automatically ordered Guinness. "So Ann didn't come," I said. "I thought she liked the lighter kinds of theatre?'
"Ann," he said, with froth on his lips, "is far from well. She's had fits of suicidal depression after the hysterectomy. Not well at all. They're giving her a course of electric shocks at the Hedley."
"I didn't know. I've been out of touch."
"First the death of her brother. That hit her harder than I thought it would. They were never close. Except in the sense that they were twins."
"I know. Twillies."
"And then the business with Eve. That made her very hard, very shrill." A strange choice of word, a literary academic's choice. "Very Victorian father."
"What business?"
"Didn't anybody write to you?"
"I've been on my travels," I apologized. "Mail wasn't forwarded. I flew to New York this morning from Copenhagen. I went straight from Idlewild to the Algonquin. I came straight from the Algonquin to the theatre. Tomorrow I have to fly to Los Angeles. You see the situation."
"Los Angeles?" he said fiercely. "Go and see her. Tell her I want her back. Her mother may not, but I do. Tell her to come home, baby as well."
"Do you mind starting at the beginning?"
"Eve," he said, "had a baby. Illegitimate, naturally. This is the great new age in which everybody is good and everything's moral and natural and nobody has to be blamed. I was tolerant. Annie was not and is not. As I say, like an old-time father, not like a mother at all. No compassion. Okay, the kid was foolish, but all kids are foolish these days. Eve had her baby
in a public ward some place in the Bronx. The father came from the Bronx. That's all we know about the father. There was some big rock music rally in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Teenage copulation. That's where it happened. Then they followed that up with a couple of carefree nights in an old tenement building in the Bronx. A kid of sixteen, God help us, claiming her right to illegitimate motherhood. Now she's taken Belial, as she calls her kid, to California. Redfern Valley. To join the Children of God."
"Don't say all that again. Just say what name she's given her baby."
"Belial. And she didn't get the name out of Paradise Lost, either. They call kids names like Beelzebub and Mephisto. It's the new freedom."
'What are these Children of God?"
"It's this evangelist God Manning as he's called. He runs a big closed religious community. The Children of God. It's an old army camp. Now they're tending the soil and keeping pigs and cows and cutting themselves oft from the dangerous modern world."
"God for Godfrey. The name rings a bell."
"We got a letter saying she'd found religion at last. I never thought she'd find it that way. I never thought it would be that kind of religion."
"They're going back. I don't suppose you feel like going back. A travesty of Ulysses to add to your other worries."
"I've got to see it through to the end. We're doing Ulysses this semester. The Joyce Proust Mann course. I have to explain why it can't be turned into a musical."
"But, Christ, they've turned it into a musical."
"It can't be done."
Breslow was up in the balcony, I was in the orchestra seats. On my way in I stopped to address words of greeting and congratulation to Hortense and Domenico Campanati. They seemed not to have moved from their places during the intermission. They had near-finished drinks in their hands. Somebody had presumably brought those drinks to them. I greeted and congratulated. They were polite, even friendly, but they did not behave like my sister and brother-in-law. It was probably necessary for them, holding like an expensive artefact of crystal on a windy and violent Fifth Avenue their newly reestablished relationship, to exclude the associations of their sundered state. "I'm sorry," I said, "to hear about poor young Eve."
"An abominable child," Hortense said.
"Congratulations again." We sort of all bowed at each other.
The second act began in the Holles Street lying-in hospital, with Bloom and Stephen meeting for the first time among students who blasphemed against fecundity. Stephen, dubbed bullockbefriending bard because he had placed Mr. Deasy's letter on a cure for cattle disease in the evening paper, and Bloom, a father, alike proclaimed their veneration for the fertile Oxen of the Sun. But a couple of students, with sticks and straw cadeys, sang: Copulation without population
That is the thing the world requires
Why fill our flats and houses
With dirty squalling brats?
We need every square inch we can spare
For parrots dogs and cats
Pedication as a variation
Sets trilling all the hot erotic wires
But love's true end is uteral so all the poets state A prelapsarian paradise for Adam and his mate With RAISING CAIN FORBIDDEN written on the outer gate And COP U LATE
Then Buck Mulligan came in, rainwet, followed by Haines with a gun. Bloom disarmed him. Stephen fled to nighttown. Bloom followed. Now came the big phantasmagoric scene, with the unconscious rawly exposed, the chorus with much to do, Stephen's mother whizzing up from the grave, Stephen smashing the chandelier with his ashplant, getting the hell out, beaten up by tommies, Bloom leaning tenderly over him and then catching a vision of dead Rudy. There were tears in the audience as at an adaptation of Little Women.
Bloom and Stephen at the cabman's shelter, the chantey-singing Murphy, a tenor and baritone duet before parting but promising to re-meet, based solely on the words "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." Then the final scena for Molly, a virtuoso twenty-five minutes. The viewpoint of the audience was a point in the wall of the bedroom in Eccles Street, so that the floor tilted up and the bed was raised. We were looking down at Gea Tellus from the moon. Molly sang, monologuized, ended with a flamenco reminiscence of Gibraltar and young love, the kiss under the Moorish Wall mingling with another on the heights above Dublin, a reprise: Flower of the mountain
Crown of the Hill of the Howth
That's what you called me then
Day of full summer
Day of the spring of love
Will you come back again?
Will you come back again?
And then came the coda with a crescendoing and diminuendoing chord of C major, the last whispered yes. Curtain. Applause. Much applause. By God, I thought, if the New York critics don't pan it it may run.
I met Breslow coming out. "It doesn't work," he said, "because it can't work." He was very dejected, a Bloom whose wife's womb had been cut out and whose daughter had been put in the family way at Mullingar.
Come back to the Algonquin with me," I said in pity. "A little drink in the Blue Bar."
We walked to West 44th Street, only a couple of blocks. There were a lot of obstreperous Afro-Americans about. I caught a stupid vision of arlo blessing with fat arms man's innocent violence from a lighted window forty stories up. Helismoke curled from the gratings. Red and yellow light flashed on and off faces gleeful with gratuitous malevolence. In the bar we ordered scotch on the rocks.
"The hysterectomy," I said.
"Something there, something growing, malevolent, you know."
"Malignant?"
"Is there a difference?"
"Look," I said. "I'm going to California to see a film based on an early novel of mine. About Socrates. I'll also see Eve. Where is this place?"
"Redfern Valley. About thirty miles out of Los Angeles. They won't let you in. I know, I've tried."
"But, Christ, a man has a right to see his own daughter."
"The message they give you is that nobody wants to see anybody. Wrapped warm in the love of God Manning or Jesus or somebody. No contamination from outside. I got a little note saying Go Away Dad, I'm Fine. It was Eve's writing all right. What the hell could I do?"
"Get the police. The FBI. The state governor."
"That's crazy. It's private property. You can't just break in. They'd love the police to try. Then they could propagandize about the state being against God. They have their own radio station."
"Does the press ever get in?"
"Manning isn't averse to publicity if he can check everything first. You mean you'd try and get in as the press?"
"As a representative of the London Times," I decided. "I know Kilduff at the Washington bureau. He could fix it for me. I take it these people are on the telephone?"
"I got on the telephone to them. They put a girl's voice on. It didn't sound like Eve. It was the same message. Go Away I'm Happy in the Love of the Lord. The London Times," he said, "has a big reputation. It might work."
"I'm desperately sorry about all this, you know."
"Look," Breslow said fiercely, "I've always been right about religion. Religion's dangerous. You just don't know what you're tuning into when you listen for the station GOD. Now your Pope comes along telling everybody that everything's beautifully clear-cut and God's here and the devil's there and the devil doesn't smell of roses and runs off yelping when you make the sign of the cross. I'm a Jew and I know it isn't that simple. If Jehovah exists he's schizophrenic. Loving father and dirty bastard. But I don't think he does exist."
I looked at him and very nearly said: Here are you teaching Comparative Literature, the big subtle stuff crammed with ambiguities, and you've been put in a situation of melodrama, very simple and crude, a teenage daughter turned into an unmarried mother and a wife distraught with the shame of it, yourself a sorrowing father. Get off Comparative Literature: it doesn't help you to cope with life; read the disregarded works of Kenneth M. Toomey, they're pure melodrama, full of erring sons
and daughters and heartbroken parents. But I said, "I'll get on to Kilduff now." Breslow nodded dumbly, finished his drink, then went out to engage the hell of the streets and the IRT. I went to my little suite and telephoned Kilduff. He was home and not yet in bed. He went along with my proposal.
The place I went to the following day was the little seaside town of San Jaime, almost midway between Piedras Blancas and Santa Cruz. To reach it I had to fly from Los Angeles in a twelve-seater aircraft operated by Coast Range Airways. The name of the town carried two pronunciations, like Los Angeles itself. The pilot called it San Jamy, and I could not help saying to myself, as we landed, "By the mess, ere theise eyes of mine take themselves to slomber, ay'll de gud service, or I'll lig i' th' grund for it." Meaning the next day, not today. Today was the film, entitled somewhat Ibsenishly A Corrupter of Youth, and here, on the little airfield, was Sidney Labrick, the producer-director, a saturnine man with a pepper and salt beard, and with him, now entering my life, Geoffrey Enright.
Geoffrey Enright said, "Well, the man isself, Gawd bless and sive us, not looking a day over seventy and fit, by God sir, yes, fit, fit, and sexy wiv it."
"Geoffrey," Labrick said, in American, "has been helping me." And he looked at Geoffrey with cold eyes half-shut against the sea wind. "At least, he called it helping."
The town we now entered in Labrick's Studebaker was, and still is, a male homosexual colony. The ingenuous reader will regard this as too improbable even for fiction, but it is the truth I am writing. California has always been notable for excess, or originality, or the pushing of logic to the Cartesian limit. No decree of Californian law had made this town into a male homosexual enclave: it had gradually become that, with heterosexuals quietly leaving as white folk left the prosperous black districts of Queens in New York, except that here black heterosexuals moved out along with the white, and lesbians both black and white moved out also. The police were homosexual too, and of course the mayor. There were absolutely no women. When I was shown to my room in the Holiday Inn, the Push It Well In, as Geoffrey termed it, a fair-haired youth with a frilly orange apron on was still hoovering it. "Oh my dears," he sibilated, "we're so late today. Not a pisspot emptied and the house full of spaniels." Such ephebes as he were rarer than they had been. Most of the citizens I had seen walking the streets were butchly muscular, dressed as cowboys. I dumped my bags and we went to the bar for a few Ramos fizzes. The barman was black, tough and charming. "The size of it, my dear," Geoffrey whispered to me.