Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  Al Birnbaum liked none of this. Nor did Joe Svenson. Since they did not like it, neither did Chuck Gottlieb, nor Dick Rothenstein, nor Ed Kingfish. We sat together at a script conference in Al Birnbaum's office. We sat about a great beautiful empty mahogany desk disfigured only by coffee beakers. On the walls were signed photographs of great stars, all however contractual slaves to the studio, and their disdainful smirks were the celestial counterpart of the weary disappointment of the Ashkenazim and the Nordic pout of Joe Svenson. "I told you," I said, "I wasn't going to have any of that Lancelot and Guinevere nonsense. This is what the legend is really all about." They could not see anything in the legend, the children of the Diaspora, the lapsed Lutheran from Minnesota.

  Al Birnbaum said, "A lot of Sunday school stuff." What did he know about Sunday schools? "Too much jabber about religion. We want a human story. This King Arthur sounds like a preacher."

  "Just what I was going to say, Al," Ed Kingfish said.

  "When is this all supposed to be going on?" Joe Svenson asked. "Shakespeare's time?"

  "A lot earlier than Shakespeare," I said. "Earlier even than the Middle Ages. This is the beginning of the Dark Ages. About five hundred years after Christ. Celtic Christianity fighting for its life against the AngloSaxons. The AngloSaxons," I explained, "are what you'd call the British. But the British are really Celts. King Arthur's the last of the Celtic rulers of Britain. Then it was the AngloSaxons." Nobody seemed to understand that. Celts schmelts, they didn't want education, they wanted a human story.

  Dick Rothenstein said, "I've run all the King Arthur movies I could get a hold of. It's not like what you say, Ken. It's this guy, sir something, and he goes off with the queen, and then King Arthur says, sir whosis, you fucked my wife."

  "Did they say fuck in those days?" Joe Svenson asked.

  "It's a very old word," I said. "AngloSaxon. Cognate with the German ficken. The same word, I should think, in Yiddish." This piece of speculation did me no good. All looked at me warily and with even less confidence than before. Al Birnbaum fanned cigar smoke away with my treatment, all it was good for. "My contract finishes in a fortnight," I said.

  "A what?" Chuck Gottlieb said.

  "Two weeks. It seems to me we've been at cross-purposes all the time. A waste of time and money, I'd say."

  "Don't let me hear you say that, Ken," said Al Birnbaum earnestly. "Nothing's wasted. You've done fine work. Only thing is we can't use it. Not yet. The time's not yet. Some day they'll be saying fuck and showing it too. And this religious schlock, they'll be eating it. But it's human stories now and the Hays Office and the Catholic League of Decency. We'll have more coffee, Lydia," he said to the ugly woman, his wife's choice for a secretary, who looked in.

  "So," I said, "I don't see much point in working that last fortnight or two weeks. Fortnight, by the way, means fourteen nights, which includes days of course. There's also sennight, seven nights, for a week. No extra charge for that information." They nodded in appreciation of my generosity.

  Joe Svenson said, "Like in Shakespeare."

  "You fix that with the contracts department, Ken, no trouble. I think you'll find a clause about reparations or some damn thing, penalty for breaking contract, Rob Schoenheit will explain. Where's your hurry, I'd say, take another look at this, knock out the religious megillah, that we don't need."

  "Like a loch in kop," agreed Ed Kingfish.

  "I've been invited to Germany," I said. "A film festival. They put sound to a movie based on one of my books. I'm collecting some royalties too. I don't know why I'm telling you all this," I added.

  "They don't burn your books?" Dick Rothenstein said. "Like these books they burned in the book-burning?"

  I felt ashamed. They did not burn my books. My books were rather popular in Nazi Germany. There were a fair number of unexportable marks to collect and spend on lederhosen and alpenstocks and whatnot. "There it is," I said humbly. "Next Thursday. I'm booked on the Hindenburg. From Lakehurst, New Jersey. So I break contract. I suppose one should always read contracts."

  "Always read contracts," Joe Svenson said. "Not going through the small print, that way you can lose your ass."

  "You want to watch those blimps," Ed Kingfish said. "Lose more than your ass in one of those gasbags. Like the Shenandoah and the Akron. My wife's cousin married into the U. S. Navy, this guy was on the Akron when it went down. Lose gas in bumpy weather. Like what happened to that British one, the R one-oh something. Lousy business that was, no offence, Ken. Bumped into a fucking French church."

  More coffee had been brought in. Al Birnbaum sucked loudly at his beaker. Chuck Gottlieb said, "That would make a swell movie, an airship on fire in mid-Atlantic, thousands plunging to their doom."

  "They only carry about a hundred," I said.

  "A collision," Chuck Gottlieb said, starting to see it all. "A multiple collision." iision.

  "So, gentlemen," I said, "I reiterate my regret that things have not worked out as they might. Multiple collision of opinions and no resolution of differences. So, with your permission--"

  "Only the box office has opinions," Joe Svenson said. "You remember that, Ken. The rest is strictly for the birds."

  "For the can, Ken, right," Al Birnbaum said. "You see Rob Schoenheit, he'll spell out that small print."

  I left the administration block and crossed a couple of lawns whose rotating irrigators wet my turnups. "Off of there, outa that, fella," cried an old man in a peaked cap. I walked, under the brassy Culver City sun, to the recording studio, where Domenico would at this hour be fitting atmospheric music to film. There was a blue light on forbidding ingress, but this soon went out and I went in. The musicians were taking their mandatory cigarette break, five minutes every hour. Horns and fiddles sat at rest. A jowled overseer, union man or mafioso, sat watchful in a tight blue suit, chewing a match. Domenico in shirtsleeves was pencilling something into a full score. A little man with the deformed fingers of a professional copyist was emending a trumpet part. The producer of the film, dressed as for Waikiki beach, hovered.

  I said to Domenico, "So there's no change?"

  He pencilled in pp cresc f and said, "Why should there be a change? We've tried change. The money will come through, she knows that. I'm not what she calls me, whatever I am."

  "It's a terrible shame."

  "A lot of things are a terrible shame. What has to be has to be."

  "It's a terrible shame as far as Carlo's career is concerned, have you thought of that? His elder brother gets killed by gangsters in Chicago. His younger brother wants a divorce. His mother's disappeared." Three months and more had gone by since the night of Astrid Storm's birthday party. "Alternatively he's a foundling."

  "A what?"

  "Like Tom Jones. A bastard bundle left on a doorstep. They're not going to like any of this at the Vatican."

  "We live our own lives," Domenico said.

  The producer said, "Okay, let's get on with it."

  The musicians stubbed out and reassembled. Lights dimmed except for the desk glowworms. On the cinema screen there appeared an ocean and on it in an open boat unshaven men in a desperate condition. It was grey foredawn, but then the sun started to come up. A seagull appeared flapping and provoked a slow suffusion of first bewilderment and then joy on the stubbled face of Clark Gable, quicker on the uptake than his fellows in distress. Across the screen there traveled a vertical bar, something to do with timing. It was a looped piece of film. "Land?" Gable said. Then the sequence started again. Domenico had just watched the first exposition. For the second he raised his stick. The strings undulated. Discordant lower brass symbolised the situation of the men in the boat. With the rising of the sun three muted trumpets and two oboes sketched a diffident flourish. When the seagull flapped in a flute performed an arabesque. It was a fraction of a second late, and the fault in the timing was, of course, the composer's. Domenico said, "Merda." Lights went up. Stopwatches clicked off. The flute was to ignore the written point of entry
and respond merely to the baton.

  "We got to have something, Nick," the producer said, "for that arm movement." Meaning one of the exhausted men in the boat whose right hand dropped from his neck in a final gesture of weariness.

  "Why is his hand up there in the first place?"

  "He thinks he's choking, Nick." So there was another cigarette break and Domenico had to write in a descending passage on the clarinet and a soft thud on the bass drum.

  "No final message?" I said.

  "Nothing," he frowned, dotting in his semiquavers.

  "So," I said, "I too had better say goodbye." And I held out my hand. Domenico took it distractedly and flabbily. He was firm enough here on the rostrum, though, no doubt of that.

  "We'll meet," he said. "It's a small world."

  "Too small sometimes." And then, with a demotic gesture of valediction not very different from a U. S. Army salute, "Addio." I did not think I would ever see him again. I left him to his plastic music and castaways and went off to look for studio transport back to the Garden of Allah.

  Hortense and the twins and I flew from Los Angeles to New York a few days later. It was all over between them, through after over fifteen years of marriage, not a bad record by Hollywood standards. Whatever Domenico did about a divorce on grounds of incompatibility fully admitted by Hortense, Hortense would remain married. She was holding on to her faith as she was holding on to her British passport. But Domenico and the twins were American now, and the twins sounded American. They sat across the aisle from Hortense and me, bickering as kids will, working a jigsaw puzzle the hostess had given them. No, that one, stoopid. Here, dummy. Who're you calling dummy, stoopid? This hostess, a magnificent brainless Californian blonde, had served us a dinner of stewed chicken and canned lima beans with a salad of tasteless tomato slices as wide as saucers. I had brought along a bottle of Mumm and we were pensively sipping it from paper cups as we sailed through the dark over New Mexico. Transcontinental air transport was new and slow and we would not reach New York till morning. Hortense and the twins were to take over my Manhattan apartment. Hortense was to rent a studio in Greenwich Village, where rents were fairly low, and carry on with her sculpture. The twins were to go to an exclusive school on Park Avenue founded by a pedagogic theoretician who had written a book called Thou Eye Among the Blind. He accepted the doctrine of Plato's Meno. The twins would not learn much. You finished that puzzle already? My, you are clever. Yeah, we wanna nother. "So," I said to Hortense.

  "So what?" She was lovelier than ever in her middle thirties, elegant in a cinnamon suit, skirt with knife pleats on the front panel, short knife pleats at the back, wide collar and revers, wide self fabric belt, tieneck blouse, tiny stylized bowler hat with bow brim and band. Her speech had been barely touched by America. She would never really fit in here, while Domenico, Nick Campaneighty, had become the totally acclimatised Californian. I had heard him say on the telephone: "How's about a little golfie?" and to a singer, male: "That was but beautiful, sweetheart." She felt she might have a future in New York, a town full of art and galleries to show it in. She would work hard at the metal artefacts which Sidonie Rosenthal had pioneered in Paris. Sex? The chastity imposed by marriage though broken still an unbreakable sacrament? I did not discuss that with her. If, as I thought possible, she had discovered lesbic pleasures, these wasted no seed and the sin, if it was a sin, was venial. Its representation in fiction might have been proscribed by the British State, but there seemed nothing offensive in the reality, unless it were practised by such as that ghastly Tarleton woman. The thought of two comely naked woman pleasuring each other rather excited me.

  "So nothing," I said. Anyway, Carlo, though drunk, had assured himself that Hortense would never go to hell. And I am, at this moment of reminiscing, concerned with confirming Carlo's sanctity. A saint should know.

  She smiled faintly. We were back to nursery nonsense. The twins were playing a small hitting game. One held up a finger and the other had to strike it with a finger if he could, she could. Speed of reaction was the thing. But their reactions were slowing. They were growing sleepy. "Show me that letter again," Hortense asked. I showed it her. There was a postage stamp of the Third Reich on the envelope but no address on the letter itself. It was a brief letter and said that as the disease was considered incurable she was determined, if need be, to use her death to help others. The point was that she had nothing now to be frightened of and would use the time that was left, despite her growing tiredness, to give aid where aid was most needed. Nobody was to worry about her. She had had her life. "Brave," Hortense said, her lovely eyes moist. "She's so right. But she must have a lot of pain."

  "She wrote to Carlo something about an artificial rectum. That stops irritation of the growth. Carlo said nothing to her about that adozione business. Not worth while saying anything now. My dear mother your loving son. Have you thought, when she goes Carlo will have only us?"

  "There's his sister. Who'll go on believing she's really his sister."

  "She's the sister of sisters, no, mother superior now. Carlo's in the world and we're in the world with him. He really only has us. That's what a marriage does, forms new constellations. And when the marriage ends the constellations remain."

  "I still don't like Carlo much."

  "Even though he recommended this separation? He didn't throw sanctity and duty at you. Just the opposite. Carlo thinks more highly of you than of anybody in the world."

  "You talk of Carlo as though Carlo mattered."

  Hindsight? I think not. I said, "Carlo is going to transform Christianity."

  "And you think that matters?"

  "It matters to those who are able to believe in it. Millions and millions. It might even matter to me."

  "If what?"

  "If the two Gods could fuse. The one who created me sick, the other one who commands me to be sound." I caught a bright image of Concetta Campanati that day in the garden, outside the town dedicated to the rotting of lactic solids. "The God of my nature and the God of orthodox morality. And if God, either one of them or both, could show that he's really going to beat the rat prince."

  "The what?"

  "The father of lies. Carlo saw him as a rat in the corner at the Garden of Allah. He addressed him as mon prince. And also as a fellow orphan."

  "I don't believe in him."

  "You don't have to. I saw him. In another Garden of Allah."

  The glorious brainless Californian goddess leaned over us with a smile of exquisite and meaningless loveliness and said, "Aren't you two night owls going to get some sleep?" I could tell she thought Hortense and I were man and wife. Our kids had already dropped off. We must be now be approaching the northeastern tip of Kansas. Most were sleeping: the two bald executives of United Artists, the fat and kidding salesman, the new juvenile lead who, jaw dropped, looked moronic, his loins visibly rutting under the blanket, the dim others. Hortense returned the smile, meaningfully, and said:

  "You're a very lovely girl."

  "Well, gee, thanks, you two talent scouts?" And she did some comic primping. American women could not be trusted with their own beauty. They had helped create a culture in which everything had to be exploited. Her beauty was like the case of samples on the knee of the snoring traveling salesman. She gave us blankets as if acting the part of an airline hostess giving blankets. Hortense murmured the night prayer our mother had taught us in childhood, asking for the protection de Dieu and her ange gardien, and then closed her eyes. How alike they were now, she and the sleeping twins, long sooty lashes, the skin hue that was the gift of a moist and temperate climate, the honey hair. I could not sleep yet. I had a Dante with me, and it opened at the Inferno, Canto Sixteen. Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, Jacopo Rusticucci, burning for the sin of sodomy. It was not the best of somniferents. I closed the book and my eyes and let a mood of nostalgia wash me: Hortense's night prayer, the rejected treatment of the Arthurian legend. The fight went on, with motherless Carlo in the middle of i
t, and I had been thrust, by will, by endowment, to the fringe of the field that was the whole universe. I wanted to fight, but I had no cause. And yet, out of pity perhaps for the orphan, I had endued the armour of his cause: that book on the reform of Christianity was going to come out next spring under my name and under my title, New Roads to God, by Kenneth M. Toomey (Scribner's), with a partially disowning foreword:

  These are the ideas of thoughtful Christians who seek a universal faith, a definition of divine good to oppose to the growth of evil in our time. Call me many things--the listener, the stenographer, the editor--but do not call me the originator of this tentative schema. All I will say is that I am aware of the power of evil and conscious of the need for a new summation of the good. It is in the hope that this book may clarify the ideas of the bewildered man and woman of good will, desirous of faith but unable to find it, that I temporarily put off the rags of the novelist and assume the robe of the theologian.