CHAPTER 39
The cemetery of Kuala Kangsar is almost filled with graves of British soldiers who fell in the Perak wars. Philip was interred there, though in the presence of neither Carlo nor myself. With the sinking of the waters and the end of the rains Carlo had gone back by train to Kuala Lumpur, two days too late for his midnight mass. I left for Singapore, very numb and thin, handing over the task of packing Philip's effects to the department of the District Officer. I was, on Carlo's instructions, to ignore the sentimental appurtenances of the terrestrial life, books and photographs and a tobacco jar with the arms of the University of Manchester. The real presence was now in purgatory, along with others of the invincibly ignorant (though that was all to change, Carlo said, there was only one communion, as the vincibly ignorant would in time be taught). I loved a soul, he kept saying, even as the train pulled out, and if the soul did not die neither did love. All was for the best, I would see. I never did wholly see.
I traveled with eleven other passengers on the SS Archippus, a merchant vessel that called at innumerable ports of the Dutch East Indies and ended up at Darwin. I tapped away at Lion City in my cabin, came late to meals, posing for self-protection as a man of sorrows. The town of Darwin was wretchedly dull, but it suited my state. Life, bottom heavy like a kangaroo, was concentrated in the southern territories; up here in the north only the telegraph station sent dry hints of the existence of a world of action. It tapped, and I tapped on my verandah at the rest house that called itself a hotel, sending away my greasy beefsteaks hardly bitten. I swam in the tepid treacle of the Arafura Sea, which was patrolled by an armada of Portuguese menof-war. On the coast tree ferns and pandanus palms. Inland termite menhirs seventeen feet high. The kookaburras did not laugh, for, it was said, there was nothing to laugh at. In Perth and Adelaide they roared their heads off. I would not be staying in Adelaide: I did not wish to break down in the presence of the wife of a man who ran a sports store. I walked south of Darwin to the fringe of the forest, seeing cycads, baobabs, a tree all pink and white blooms. I approached the tree, and it at once broke and flashed and whirred into a hundredfold flock of galah birds, white-bellied, orange-crested, their wings of the hue of the tea rose. Nature, which had taken away, began to give again.
I heard there was a man called Ted Collins ready to emigrate to Alice Springs. He had bought an old Ford truck that was to be laden mainly with petrol cans. I met the man and said I wished to move south, adding to myself: cautiously approaching life again. Go halves on juice and provisions, he said. It was a thousand-mile journey, a week's travel with luck. He was a burnt taciturn man made mournful by working as a carpenter in Darwin. He seemed to foresee bright lights in Alice. He was to show himself dourly expert at firelighting in the desert wastes, in the termite territory of abandoned cattle stations, cooking soggy bugger-on-the-coals with powerful tea in a billy. He said little. Three hours out of Darwin he said:
"It's all bloody well cut off. Like God had snipped it off with a bloody pair of scissors.
"It was cut off two hundred million years ago," I said. "Mammals that lay eggs. Marsupials. You don't find them anywhere else."
"Look at that bloody lot there," he said. It was a locust swarm of budgerigars moving south to nip fresh forest buds, having eaten as much as they could in the north. They flew at our speed: thirty-five miles an hour. Collins accelerated. "Bloody birds," he said. "Bloody animals hopping about. Bloody abos."
"If you don't like it why don't you leave?"
"Stuck with it, ain't I? My granddad did that for me. Australian, ain't I? We've all got to take what we're given. It's in the bloody Bible, that is."
"Bugger the bloody Bible."
He was shocked. "You don't want to say that. I had an uncle said that and he was struck. Look at that bloody lot there." This time it was fruit bats in a flock, a squadron of little angels of black death to southern orchards, on their, distance no object, way.
"Is there anything you like?" I asked when we were sitting at sundown by the cooling truck and he was watching the billy boil. He looked up at me with suspicion, saw I was sincere, said: "I like something nicely made. I like something nicely mortised and tenoned and a good polish on it. Then the bloody white ants get to it and chew it up. They do it from the inside, so that it looks all right from the outside till you lay your hands on it. It's the mockery I can't bloody well stand." Then he looked at me with some cunning and said, "What is it you do for a living?"
"Did nobody tell you back in Darwin?" I inserted the tab of a can of bully into the nick of the opener, turned, heard the fairy sigh of the death of the vacuum, turned with more vigour. "Books, Mr. Collins. Books are what I do for a living. I write books."
"What kind of books? Tecs? Buffalobills? Dizabils?"
"What are dizabils in the name of God!"
"Where they have these girls in their dizabils and he lays his hot hands on her trembling with passion. What you might call dirty books."
"My books are very clean, I think. Good clean stories."
"And you're going to write one of those about bloody Darwin? Nothing goes on in Darwin, mate, clean or dirty. You must be mad. Money, you make money out of it? You're carrying money now?"
"I have what is called a letter of credit. I take it to a bank and get cash on it." The corned beef flopped onto a tin plate and squatted there in its thin robe of fat. "Why do you want to know, Mr. Collins?"
"I've not charged you anything except tucker and juice for the truck. And it's me does the work of driving to bloody Alice."
"You'd be doing that anyway. Do you want money? I don't have irch cash. I have to get from Alice to Adelaide, remember. Besides, there was no talk about money before we started."
"If you write stories for a living then you have to tell me bloody stories. That's only right."
"Are you serious?"
"Too true I'm bloody serious, mate. Starting tomorrow. Give you time to think them up."
"Dizabil stories?" The skysign of the Southern Cross flashed on.
"The lot. Tecs and nedkellies. And dizabil ones too."
So from Birdum to Daly Waters I told him the story of Beowulf and Grendel, which he pronounced kid's stuff. From Daly to Newcastle Waters he got The Miller's Tale and from Elliot to Powell Creek the putting the devil in hell story from the Decameron. From Powell Creek to Tennant Creek I told him The Pardoner's Tale. This impressed him. "Serve the bastards right," he delivered, and he asked for the tale again. All this was doing me good. From Tennant Creek to the Devil's Marbles just before Wauchope I gave him the plot of Doctor Faustus, and he said it shows no bugger ought to go buggering about with what goes against Nature. From Wauchope to Barrow Creek I summarised Hamlet, and he said it was a bit bloody farfetched. From Barrow Creek to Tea Tree Well Store it was Paradise Lost, but he was suspicious about my alleged authorship, saying that his old dad had told him something similar when he was a saucepan lid. From Tea Tree Well Store to Aileron I gave him Robinson Crnsoe, but then he stopped the truck in the fierce heat to give me fair warning. He'd read that story in the papers somewhere, he said, and there'd been an abo on walkabout in Arnhem Land that some bloke had called Man Friday. Pinching was pinching, he said, whether it was yarns or money, and I might get away with that with the ignorant, but there were some you couldn't put upon with no amount of codology. So from Aileron to the start of the Macdonnell Ranges and the distant smoke of Alice Springs I appeased him with The Turn of the Screw. As we drove into Alice he summarised my storytelling gifts and shortcomings, saying that a story was like a table, a matter of good carpentry, and that if I kept on with things like that one about the three jokers meeting death under a tree I might get on all right and make a bit of a name. So we shook hands and parted over a last pint of pig's ear after a steak with a couple of fried eggs on in dusty Alice, and I took the Port Augusta line to Adelaide, hell of a bloody journey. Then I took the slow chug to Melbourne, where all the talk was of the fierce drought and the fire that had erupted
to the north of the city, eucalyptus going up with a stink of an explosion in a coughsweet factory, and a cliff-face throwing back the hot wind onto a clump and setting it off with spontaneous combustion.
The most soothing and at the same time humbling thing I saw in New South Wales was in Professor Hocksly's aviary, where a bowerbird had set up a tunnel of twigs through which to chase possible mates, decorating the GaudI-like structure with blue and purple flowers and feathers and stolen laundry bluebags, and I saw him painting the damned thing with a twig in his beak which he dipped into blue and purple berry juice. So much for the spiritual pretensions of art. Staying a week in Sydney at Phillips's Hotel in King's Cross I gained weight and a small beer paunch. I could even bring myself to watch a cricket match. There was no evil in this vast blue air, I thought, and then I read in the Bulletin about some mad joker breaking into the little kangaroo and koala zoo in the suburbs and slaughtering seven adult leapers and three j oeys. I sailed to Auckland and there, in a bookshop, was recognized. I was persuaded into giving a talk to the local literary ladies on The Novelist's Life and said yes, travel is useful, one meets people, hears things, gets ideas. And your love life, Mr. Toomey? asked a big half-Maori lady. That was when I had to walk out.
From Auckland I sailed in the SS Celsus, a ship of the Pacific Line bound for San Francisco, calling at Fiji, Tonga, the Marquesas, north over a dead waste humanised by two tropics and an equator to Hawaii and, after two days in Honolulu, the final haul to the American mainland. A day before reaching Honolulu I finished Lion City and celebrated by swimming in the tepid syrup of waters watched over by Diamond Head, a Chinese meal after, many beakers of rum and pineapple and passion fruit, self-pitying to bed. I would get my novel professionally typed with two carbons in San Francisco and then hand over a copy to Joe Phelps, my agent on Madison Avenue. I had also a fair sheaf of short stories for Collier's. Life going on, justification by works. In the ship's small library I made a remarkable discovery. I found an Austrian author named Jakob Strehler in, of course, translation. The whole of his seven-volume novel sequence under the general title Father's Day (Vatertag) was there. It was my excitement at the discovery, my conviction that here was perhaps the greatest novelist of the age, that led me not long after to buy the books in German, along with the big Cassell dictionary and the crib of the English version, no translation ever possessing the power to convey the total force of the original, and thus to gain such knowledge of what I had looked down upon as a glottal flshboneclearing soulful sobbing sausagemachine of a language as I possess. Thus, though now remembering that first reading in William Meldrum's somewhat pedestrian rendering, it is the German titles of the constituent volumes that come most readily to mind: Dreimal Schweinekohl; Nur Tschter; Wir Sassen zu Dritt; Hinter den Bergen; Wie Er Sich Sah; Arbeit Geteilt; Woran Sie Sich Nicht Erinnern Will. Why were these novels (Three Helpings of Pork and Cabbage, Over the Mountains and so on) sitting there in the stiff brown binding of the line, a gold anchor stamped on the front cover? Because, I gathered from the dogsbody officer who did library duty, the author's wife had once sailed this way and, at San Francisco, had bought the Scribner's edition of Father's Day and presented it to the ship in token of a pleasant voyage. What the wife of a Viennese author had been doing in these parts was a question not yet to be asked.
The reader will at least know of Jakob Strehler, since he was in 1935 awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he will feel inclined to a sneer of superiority at my simple-minded excitement of nearly ten years earlier (it was now March 1925). But Strehier was not well known in those days outside the literary circles of Vienna and Berlin, and the difficult originality of his structure and style did not commend him to the kind of reader who would pick up, say, a Toomey in the expectation of easy thrills, crude chronology, and comfortitgly flaccid language. The reader will forgive me perhaps if I summarise Strehler's content and quality. The Vater of Vatertag is the Austro-Hungarian Emperor presiding over a Central Europe that is undemocratic and infested with police spies but is also charming, comic and creative. The Burger family is involved with the fringes of the arts-music-hall double-bass-playing, cabaret singing, street conjuring, score copying, walking on in operas--and it spreads from Vienna to Trieste in its desperate concern with making a living. Its tattered bohemianism is able easily to accommodate small criminal activities like fencing stolen goods, forging, thieving church candlesticks and prostitution. It has no moral sense at all. But it survives in a bumbling talentless way and enjoys life. It makes the acquaintance of most of the great artists of the Empire, from Metastasio to Richard Strauss, but always in some shady connection. We hear the rumble of the threat of the fall of the ramshackle structure of Magyars, Teutons and Slays, but the great talk of the coming of the modern age and the anachronism of empire provokes a cynical response. If the work has a moral it may be summed up as For God's sake leave us alone. It denies the possibility of progress. The life of the individual is brief and we have to make the most of it.
Wine is always good, but if the Wienerschnitzel is badly cooked you must throw it in the waiter's face. The Burger family is loud, quarrelsome, always sympatisch. Uncle Otto is an Uberfalstaff and the dark-haired Gretel is a foulmouthed siren who can make the Emperor himself ejaculate spontaneously. The book is dedicated to the greater glory of life.
The narrator is a member of the family, Fritz, a survivor of the Great War (Strehler wrote all seven volumes in Hamburg an der Donau between 1915 and 1920) who has found a cache of wine in an abandoned castle near Bratislava or Pressburg and relates in increasing drunkenness the Burger annals. His memory is faulty; he has no sense of history and allows the epochs to melt into the one imperial day he calls the Vatertag. To him people are more solid than institutions and even architecture: if one of the Burger family leans heavily against a museum wall the wall is quite likely to crumble. All the towns and cities are fluid as though built of wine; frontiers both temporal and spatial are shakily drawn as with a wine-dipped finger. We meet Mozart and Rilke at the performance of a new Strauss waltz (Johann, Josef or Richard? One is unsure. The orchestra is certainly Richardian) at the Congress of Vienna. Mozart faints with the stress of the harmonics of the brass. Sigmund Freud fights on horseback, cigar in not yet cancerous mouth, at the battle of Poysdorf. All the battles are hilarious. The language of the narrator is full of rare slang and Slav loanwords and neologisms. We have here a great but difficult comic masterpiece, as mad and as sane as Rabelais, and it stands out in stark contrast to the delicate simplicity of Strehler's other novels, bittersweet tales of love in Austrian villages, except for the great Moses tetralogy (1930-35), which applies the technique of Vatertag to Jewish history. I say no more for the moment about Strehler, except that my chance discovery of him in the Pacific was a potent tonic and speeded my convalescence. The great life-enhancer reconciled me to the world again.
It was while I was standing at the cable car terminus not far from Fisherman's Wharf, where I had lunched on oysters, and looking across the bay at Alcatraz, that I had a visitation of the kind I was always inventing for novels and was often persuaded by editors to cut out as being crude and naif in symbolism and sentimental in effect. A butterfly rested a moment on my right hand and, though the air was moist enough, sipped at my sweat as though we were in the Australian desert. The wings, shuddering minimally in the spring breeze from the sea, were decorated with the Greek phi. I was being told that everything was all right, there was no death and so on.
I made the transcontinental train journey from San Francisco. Traveling men, tencent cigars, cuspidors. Business pretty bad in the South. That so, pretty bad, eh? Yeah, not hardly up to snuff. This genman here says business pretty bad in the South. That so? The great heartland of the lavish willful continent flowed past and the ghost of Walt Whitman (those who went down doing their duty) flew in in disguise as a flying bug which a stogie-chewer caught twixt paws and clapped to dayth. Pretty bad, I'll say, yep. Yes sir. We all take the special blue p
late. Horrible hooch in pocket flasks, hip oil.
In spring Manhattan I put up at the Plaza. Central Park a glorious froth of green, flowering cullens and bryants, thanatopsis. Boom boom went the city like siege guns. You could sniff prosperity like pyorrhea along with the bad whisky and cloves. Must call my father in Toronto but no hurry. Nothing really to say. I went to see Joe Phelps on Madison Avenue, a courteous sharp Yankee who had majored in European History at Princeton, anglophile, his suits made in London, had been a second or third aide to Pershing. His hair was parted dead in the middle and held down with the same brilliantine that Valentino used. His eyes were the color of sloe gin. He and Jack Birkbeck in London shared commission in a way they had worked out secretly to their own satisfaction. Jack had got the Collier's story contract for me in London though Collier's was a New York magazine; Joe would hold this sheaf of stories in a metal drawer and dole out one at a time to the fiction editor, like pocket money to a child or an alcoholic. I now handed him the cardboard box containing Lion City and he weighed it on one palm as if it were a block of metal yet to be assayed. He did not believe that people actually read books, though they would often go glassily through magazine writings up to the point where it said Continued Page 176. On the other hand people would buy books if they were so long that they seemed like a leisure investment for retirement. He had studied a little literature and knew its limitations. The movies and the theatre interested him more. Money interested him most.
Earthly Powers Page 37
