Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Permit me to give you more whisky," I said, taking his glass and getting up, stiff, an old man. "Allow me to offer you a cigar. Or a cigarette."

  "A lethal action, smoking," he said without irony. "Smoking makes the life shorter. Just a little drop, then." I took a cigarette for myself from the Florentine leather-bound box on the counter. There was also a huge wooden bowl from Central Africa full of matchbooks, trophies of the world's airlines and hotels. I had toyed once with the notion of a travel book arranged on the aleatory taking out of matchbooks from this bowl, rather like filthy Norman Douglas's autobiography based on the random selection of visiting cards. It had come to nothing. There is sense, however, in keeping a bowl full of such trophies: there are addresses and telephone numbers there, as well as a palpable record of travel helpful to an old man's memory. I lighted my cigarette with a match from La Grande Scene, a restaurant at the top of the Kennedy Centre in Washington, 833-8870. I could not for the life of me remember having been there. I puffed and shortened my life. Then I gave His Grace his whisky. He took it without thanks, a kind of intimacy. He said, as I sat down again: "The word miracle, for example." He looked at me sharply and brightly.

  "Ah, that. Yes, well, I received a letter, a note rather, from my old bridge. playing acquaintance Monsignor O'Shaughnessy."

  "Ah, the bridge I did not know about. Interesting."

  "He mentioned the virtues of the personal approach. I see his point. Some things do not go well on paper. For all that, they seem to be building up a vast dossier of saintly evidence. A piece of evidence from a known apostate and self-proclaimed rationalist and agnostic would be of far greater value than the testimony of some superstitious old peasant woman in black. This is what Monsignor O'Shaughnessy's note seemed to imply."

  His Grace swayed rather gracefully on his bottom, flashing his rings. "To me," he said, "he spoke when I was in Rome. It is strange, Mr. Toomey, you must admit it, it is even bizarre, if that is the word--yourself, I mean. I mean a man who has rejected God--that is what they would say in the old days, now we are more careful--and yet had such close contacts with--I mean, you could write a book, is not that true?"

  "About Carlo? Ah, Your Grace, how do you know I haven't? In any case, it would never get into Malta, would it--a book by Kenneth Marchal Toomey about the late Pope. It would be bound to be well, not hagiography."

  "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy mentioned to me that you have already written some little thing. You wrote it while he was still alive. Before he became what he at last became."

  "I wrote a certain short story," I said. "About a priest who--Look, my Lord Archbishop, you can read the story for yourself. It's in my three volumes of collected stories. My secretary could hunt you out a copy."

  He looked at me. Was there bitterness there, was there shame? One should never say that one had no time for reading. It meant, with him, no time for my kind of irreligious trash. But there were times when even a great cleric should be prepared to do his homework. "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy," he mumbled in a very un-Maltese manner, "telephoned to me yesterday, saying that he had read somewhere that it was your birthday today. That it was a good day for me to come. There was some article on you, he said, in an English newspaper."

  "Last Sunday's Observer. The article has not, officially speaking, been read by anyone in Malta. The reverse page carried a large article, copiously illustrated, on ladies' swimwear. The censors at Luqa Airport cut it out. They thus also cut out the little birthday article on myself. I received an uncensored copy through the British High Commission. In the bag, as they put it."

  "Yes yes, I see. But our people must be protected. But some of these men with their scissors at the airport are not of the most educated. However, there it is."

  "While we're on the subject, I may as well tell you that the General Post Office in Valletta have, after some trouble, kindly allowed me to have a copy of the poems of Thomas Campion that was sent to me, a limited edition of some value. They said that they had at last discovered that Thomas Campion was a great English martyr, so it must be all right."

  "Good, that is good, then."

  "No, not good. The great English martyr was Edmund, not Thomas. Thomas Campion wrote some rather dirty little songs. Clean songs too, of course, but some quite erotic."

  He nodded and nodded, not displeased. Something or other, my agnostic depravity probably, was confirmed from my own mouth. He seemed unabashed at his ignorance of English martyrology.

  "Well, now, that is very interesting. But it is the other thing we are concerned about." He was right, the conversational economy of the confessional against the author's tendency to divagate. "And, of course, to wish you a happy birthday yet again." He toasted me, smiling plumply. Absent-mindedly, I toasted myself.

  "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy says that you are said to have said in some interview or somewhere about there not being any doubt of the miracle. That you witnessed it. And so I am to offer you every facility to set down, to write, to make some little--"

  "Deposition?"

  He played an invisible concertina for two seconds. "Your mastery of the language. Canonization. Miracles. It is the usual thing. Your Thomas More, man of all seasons. Joan of Arc."

  "In what way are you to offer me every facility? I have paper, a pen, a sort of memory. Ah, I think I know what is meant. I am not to put off doing it. I am to be prodded. The saint-making is somewhat urgent."

  "No no no no, you are to take your time."

  I smiled at him, seeing my jawed grimness in the fine old mirror over the bar, a genuine antique that advertised Sullivan's Whiskey. "So I, who don't believe in saints, am involved in the making of a saint. Very piquant. Bizarre, to use your own term."

  "It is surely only a matter of the fact. It is not even a matter of you using the word miracle. It is a matter of you saying that you saw something that could not by normal means be explained." He seemed to be growing bored already with his assignment, but suddenly a spark of professional concern animated his brown droll eyes. "And yet surely miracle is the only word for what is seen clearly to be happening but cannot be explained except except--"

  "--As the intervention of some force unknown to common sense or to science."

  "Yes yes, you will admit that?"

  "Not altogether. The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It's just a matter of waiting."

  "But this. It was in a hospital somewhere, was it not? And the doctors had despaired of the life of whoever it was? Yes?"

  "It happened a long time ago," I said. "And I don't know whether you, Your Grace, would understand this, but writers of fiction often have difficulty in deciding between what really happened and what they imagine as having happened. That is why, in my sad trade, we can never be really devout or pious. We lie for a living. This, as you can imagine, makes us good believers--credulous, anyway. But it has nothing to do with faith." I shut up; I could feel my voice beginning to crack--on that word.

  "Aaaaah," he sighed. "But there will be witnesses other than yourself. People who do not lie for a living." What was meant to be a mere echo of my own words took on in his voice the tone of frivolous sin. "If you can get witnesses, it will be the better. There are hard men, you see, who must pretend that they do not want the canonization. They are called the advocates of the devil." That too sounded terrible.

  "Witnesses?" I said. "Oh, heavens, it was so long ago. I honestly think you'd better go to some old peasant woman in black."

  "No hurry," he said. His glass emptied, he got up. I got up with him. "You cannot be forced. You are to consider it, at least consider. That is all." He pointed his archiepiscopal ring toward the picture gallery of myself and the great. "I see," he said, "that he is not there." He had had a look at them then, a minor bit of homework, the cheating kind done in a rush in school just before the teacher comes in, seeking a picture of Voltaire and Christ together, smiling, godless artists and actresses all about.


  "That," I said with finicking care, "is a secular portrait gallery. Although there, you see, is Aldous Huxley." And I gestured at myself grim and the stone-eyed mescaline saint laughing.

  "Yes yes." He did not seem to have heard of him. He beamed through the tall window at the garden scene: Father Azzopardi and Geoffrey taking tea together at a small green table under a white umbrella, Geoffrey talking and gesturing with animation, Father Azzopardi nodding, taking it all in. "These young people," said His Grace. And then, prodding my ribs very familiarly: "No hurry, I say. But still please regard the matter as urgent." One of those contradictions that come easily to the religious mind, God being quite as large as Walt Whitman.

  CHAPTER 3

  The gardeners kissed his ring, the maids kissed his ring, Joey Grima the cook kissed his ring. Ali did not but was shaken hands with very cordially and treated to a final Semitic quip. And when Geoffrey and I escorted His Grace to his Daimler, which was parked by Percius's Garage, the Triq Il-Kbira being narrow and my house possessing no forecourt, many villagers came running to kiss his ring--the two Borg sisters from the corner grocery, the entire staff of the police station opposite, an ancient squat known atheist in a flat cap who, all dusty, looked like some effigy from Malta's Paleolithic past newly exhumed, embarrassed children pushed to it by their mothers, even the drivers and conductors of three converging buses whose passages the emerged Daimler blocked. I would now be thought better of in Lija and even neighboring Attard and Balzan. The retired brigadier down the road, who, so Geoffrey had told me, despised me as a man grown rich on the writing of filthy yarns, was not so graced by archiepiscopal visitations. Geoffrey was saying, too loudly, to Father Azzopardi: "We could arrange a private showing for you. We have all the gear here. You'll never see it in the public cinemas. But for Christ's sake don't tell the archbish." Father Azzopardi laughed terribly heartily. To me His Grace said: "I'll be happy to see your deposition then. Mastery of the English language. Many happy birthdays once more. And please tell your young friend to be careful." No fool, then: he did not miss much. Father Azzopardi got in front with the driver, His Grace waved and blessed from the dead middle of the rear cushions, and the holy car sped soundlessly toward, say, Birkirkara.

  "Poor young swine," Geoffrey said as we went indoors. "I told him all about copulating priests and nuns in hot pants in the States. He doesn't know his arse from his elbow. What was it all about then?"

  "As I foresaw, I am to assist in the canonization of the late Pope."

  "Oh God, oh my God, oh my dear God, you? Oh, Christ help us."

  "Don't be silly, Geoffrey. You forget certain facts of my biography, if you ever, which I am inclined to doubt, knew them."

  "Ah, getting all stuffy now, are we?"

  "His Grace also asked me to tell you to watch your step."

  "Did, did he? I see. Highly honored. Has his bulldogs sniffing round Strait Street, does he? Oh Jesus Lucifer Beelzebub Almighty, how I loathe and detest this bloody place."

  "You mean, I think, that there is no decent tradition of Islamic pederasty here. The whole place is dedicated to good Catholic family making. It is also, you would say, excessively hippy and bosomy. No dirty little boys with bodies like straight sharp knives."

  "You fucking hypocrite." He said this with little malice and followed it with a snigger. "None of that, eh? You must accompany me to the Gut sometime, dear."

  "The Gut?"

  "What the sailors call Strait Street."

  "I see, I see." We walked out into the garden with its fine high thick walls, walls built by men used to sieges. "I think the archbishop was right to ask me to ask you to watch your step," I said.

  "Fucking shithouse of a bloody place."

  I said, as we strolled down a shaded path, seeing the three cats play ambushes: "You know, Geoffrey, if you're really unhappy--"

  "Yes yes, dear. Percy in the Bahamas would be only too ready to have me, and there's Frank palpitating for friendship in Lausanne. The vicariously literary life of Geoff Enright, or from pillow to post office among the expatriate masters." He kicked a pruned twig out of his path. "I suppose, though, I have been just a bit wayward. The mail's piling up, as I am well aware. There are probably one or two royalty checks lying under the scum. But tomorrow morning--early--on the stroke of ten--I will really get down to the grind again." Knowing, of course, perfectly well, of course, that the old bitch hadn't much longer to go and one might as well, my dear, see the whole bloody business through. "Because you see, Kenneth"--he aspirated and nasalized my name and made it campily preposterous--"I am, in spite of my frequently quite unvolitional and usually deeply regretted misdemeanors, the thing you have averred rather too often that I am not. I mean faithful." I felt tears again ready to prick at that word. "Spiritually, I mean, I think I mean. I mean, what do you call it when it isn't just physical? That other thing doesn't really matter, does it? You've positively sermonized on that yourself, isn't that so? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you announce this very afternoon that that sort of thing was all over? For you, that is. All all, ah, over."

  We had arrived at a massive siege wall crawling with greenery, so we turned about, seeing the ambushing cats from another angle. The two gardeners, Mr. Borg and Mr. Grima--these seemed to be very nearly the only two surnames in Lija--were still placidly irrigating.

  I said, "Why don't we at least look at the more important letters after dinner? I've always, as you know, tried to be--"

  "Gentlemanly and punctilious, yes dear. But we're dining out. And there is to be a birthday cake, though not, I surmise, with eighty-one candles."

  "I didn't know. I'm not going. I'm not up to it."

  "But you have to be up to it, dear. It's the British Council man, Ralph Ovington, and the Poet Laureate, no less, is on a visit."

  "Oh, my God. And who defers to whom?"

  "A nice point, isn't it? You're the senior, of course. But he has the O. M."

  Yes, Dawson Wignall had the O. M. I saw myself in Geoffrey's twin mirrors--quite cold, not at all bitter. Willie Maugham, poor old bastard, had always maintained that the Order of Merit was really the Order of Morals. Three years previously I had been made, like him, a Companion of Honor and then heard the door of official laureation bang shut on me. The C. H. is about what the old bitch is worth, I'd say. As for the Nobel, I did not write inelegantly or tendentiously enough. I was not, like Boris Dyengizhdat, in political chains which, I felt sure, he would break soon enough when the dollar royalties had mounted sufficiently. I did not, like Chaim Manon or J. Raha Jaatinen, belong to a gallant little nation that, possessing no strategical resources, had to be compensated with a great writer. I was, they had always said, cynical, not given to deep feelings or high thoughts. But I still sold well enough. Geoffrey's office bulged with as yet unanswered fan mail; my birthday had been very adequately remembered. I fulfilled a need, and that was for some reason wrong.

  I said, sulkily, "I didn't know about this. Nobody told me."

  "You held Ralph Ovington's note in your very own hand, dear. You said nice of him nice of him or some such rubbish. You forget, you know, you forget things."

  "I'm entitled not to be well enough."

  "Listen, dear," Geoffrey said. "Have we not here the most delicious classical bit of psychowhatsit of everyday life? It's Ralph, isn't it, the name Ralph?" I looked at him. Strangely enough, it was true. Strangely, because I thought I'd got over Freud. I'd even dreamt of Freudian interpretations of the dreams I had just been dreaming. And there I had been kicking Ovington's name and note and invitation out of my head because of an onomastic coincidence. "Black bastard," Geoffrey said with no tone of malice. "Black bitch. Dear, you really must show yourself as often as possible at your advanced age, you know. Oh, you and I know you're alive and well and, well, wonderful really, but it's a good thing to show it to the Poet Laureate, who's an awful little gossip. If you didn't turn up he'd take it back home, you know, that the old bugger's on his way off to the neverneverlan
d, and you'd have the newspapers sharpening their obituaries. Terrible thing, that."

  I sighed deeply. "Very well. I'll rest a little before dressing. In the study. Get Ali to bring me in some strong tea and a few pastries."

  "Is that wise, dear?" There was the old harridan in a terminal coma, oozing with goo.

  "Of course it's not wise. Nothing I do will be wise any more."

  CHAPTER 4

  On the walls of my study I had a Willem de Kooning female in mostly red crayon and one of the first sketches Picasso had done for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, also an Egon Schiele wash drawing of ugly lovers and an abstract composition by Hans Hartung. I had two oxblood leather club chairs and a matching couch, old-fashioned and chunky. Also books in glass cases, mostly of the well-thumbed-favorite variety: the main library was next to the upper salon. Near the original Quiller-Couch edition stood, not well-thumbed, not favorite, the revised Oxford Book of English Verse, bloody Val Wrigley as editor. I took this down and lay on the couch with it, looking for the inevitable selection from Dawson Wignall. I did not much care for what I found--insular, ingrown, formally traditional, products of a stunted mind. Wignall's themes derived from Anglican church services, the Christmas parties of his childhood, his public school pubescence, suburban shopping streets; they occasionally exhibited perverse velleities of a fetishistic order, though his droolings over girls' bicycles and gym tunics and black woolen stockings were chilled by whimsical ingenuities of diction. For this sort of thing, then, he had been honored by the monarch: Thus kneeling at the altar rail

  We ate the Word's white papery wafer.

  Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer.

  But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel's food.

  Dear God! I reeled beneath the shock: My Eton suit, your party frock,