Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  Ernest Hemingway had been in Scribner's office to fight some lousy bastard who had said his cojones were prosthetic at the time when I delivered the typescript to Perkins. Full of Spain and the baroque, a selfconfessed convert to Catholicism in wartime Milan, he was willing to scrawl a few lines of commendation without, however, even reading one page of the typescript. "This book is important. If we believe in man we must also believe in God. This book shows you how to believe in God. It is a god damn wonderful book." The last sentence was to be omitted, as he had already used it of Jim Joyce's Ulysses.

  What was in my mind as I waited for sleep and the engines thundered their ineffectual berceuse was the chapter, a brief one, about the Jews. There was a sense, it said, in which Christians were also Jews, since they shared a common book of divine provenance with them, spoke of Abraham as a father, revered the prophets, exulted in the heroism of the warriors, saw in Moses the founder of the covenant, recognized that the doctrines of Christ were based on the tenets of the Torah, and so on. That the Christians had moved on to a recognition that the Messiah had come to an obscure Roman province, and the Jews denied this, did not in any way invalidate their ancient beliefs. Christians, responsible for a long and shameful persecution of the Jews, must learn to recognize that they had a right to subsist as so many exotic islands in a Christian community, that their talents were special and a divine gift and their sometimes bigoted exclusiveness was justified by a history that was also ours. There must be a closing of ranks in the time of Godless pogroms and, ideally, Christians must be willing to fight for and with and die with and for the children of Israel. Plain speaking, and, so far as I could judge from her letters, Concetta Campanati's present acts endorsed it. But what was I, committed to nothing, a spectator on the fringe, going to do about the debasement, expropriation, enslavement, annihilation of the Jews?

  I was going, if I could, to forget that what was happening in Germany had touched my masters in Culver City hardly at all. The Hays Office and the Catholic League of Decency would not permit the cinematic exploitation of the Nazi treatment of the Jews in all its obscenity. I must forget too that Ed Kingfish and Chuck Gottlieb and Al Birnbaum and the others had thrown out my dramatisation of the desperate fight for Celtic Christianity with the coming to the kingdom of Arthur of the pagan hordes. I must forget that Rob Schoenheit had been unaccommodating about a breach of contract that was a mere harmless anticipation of the completion of contract and had set me back ten thousand dollars in what was really a gratuitous penalty. It was the Jews who read the small print; reading the writing on the wall was strictly for the Babylonians. An unworthy thought, and I escaped from it into sleep.

  We all woke wretched and crumby to orange juice and carton cups of coffee and the dawn of early fall over the towers of Manhattan. "I dreamed about Daddy," little Ann said, not an auspicious start to the day. "I dreamed about horses," said Johnny. "I dreamed of nothing," their mother said. "What did you dream of, Uncle Ken?" Towers made all of polychrome ice cream and the sun was God's tongue licking it. "I dreamed," I said, "of talking turkeys. Their speech was gabble gebble gibble gobble gubble. Hence the expression you hear in Hollywood: let's talk turkey." So the kids talked it to each other. How magnificent this city they sometimes called Jew York, made for God's eye to look at. Jerusalem the golden, Babylon the great. The aircraft came down at the little field where hares raced. "See, Johnny, a rabbit." Soon we were in the black limousine of the airline racing through the Holland Tunnel, all white tiles. And then a checker cab to my apartment, which was to be my sister's home.

  "It's all right," Hortense said, wandering through it. "Needs dusting though." Uncle Ken, what building's that one? Why can't we see the Empire State? Kids, you are now living in the Empire State. Huh? Children, you may now call yourselves New Yorkers. You are better off here than in California, a slack place full of indolence and oranges and an industry dedicated to mediocrity. This is the centre of the world and the bastion of free enterprise. Tomorrow we shall go to the top of the Statue of Liberty. And then I said to myself: These are my loved ones, they are all I have. Here they are safe, I have given them a home. Tears of various provenances mingled in my eyes.

  CHAPTER 47

  Nobody met me at Hamburg, but at Berlin a young man in a double-breasted jacket and no hat was waiting at the ticket barrier with a card which said "HERR TOOMEY!" The exclamation point offered a selection of nuances: I had actually got here, I was Herr not Mr, I was important. He introduced himself as Toni Quadflieg, of the Reichsfilmkammer or National Chamber of Film, and spoke English not too good. He was delighted with my German. Where had I learned to speak so good German? Through reading the novels of Jakob Strehler, the great Austrian writer and recent winner of the Nobel Prize. Toni Quadflieg was hesitant in his response. A Jew, I said, and hence undoubtedly consigned to the flames by your Jewless regime, but notwithstanding a great writer. Perhaps the German I speak is tainted by the fact that I learned it from a Jewish writer? No no, it is good German learned you it from whatever writer. There is a car for you to take you to the Hotel Adlon.

  There was no doubt that, especially under the apple honey of the autumn sun, Berlin looked well under its Nazi masters. S0 clean, so well-fed, the very railway porters rejoicing in their non-unionised prosperity. The silver whistles of the Schutzpolizei shone, and the golden hair of echt Aryans, of whom I saw few, seemed newly shampooed for my arrival. The polished body of the Daimler that awaited me mirrored in jovial rotundity the citizens arriving at and leaving the Bahnhof. The chauffeur saluted with a military punctilio that the fit and cleanliness of his uniform abetted. Toni Quadflieg and I got in. He said, "You had a good flight?"

  "Excellent. I can thoroughly recommend the Hindenburg. It is the only way to fly. Have you flown in the Hindenburg? It is a masterwork of German aeronautical engineering."

  "Unfortunately have I in the Hindenburg not yet flown. It has fifteen main transverse frames, each of which a thirty-six-sided regular polygon is. Its passenger accommodation is on two decks inside the outside envelope organized. A control car and four engine gondolas are externally mounted. The outer fabric is with cellon with aluminium powder on the outside mixed the heat reflection to increase doped. On the underside is the fabric porous ventilation to assist."

  "Such knowledge. I am overwhelmed." Nowhere on the streets so clean you could eat your dinner off them did I see wretches wearing the yellow David star into trucks being harried. That would all be round the back. I saw three genial men in black with swastika brassards chaffing two pretty girls, one of whom was pushing a pram that contained a new gift for the Fuhrer. A caramel called TILL! was proclaimed on posters as smacking really good, this assertion by the picture of a blond boy smiling with distended cheek confirmed.

  "I am for all kinds of machine passionate," Toni Quadfiieg said. "That is why I in films am. Cameras and sound and lights. I am to technical perfection strongly dedicated."

  "Good films," I said indiscreetly, "can be made with very mediocre technical resources. Do you not think that much depends on the sincerity, the feeling, the originality of vision?"

  "Something depends, yes."

  "What is the program?"

  "The program, good. Tomorrow there will be visits to the UFA studio at Tempelhof, to the studios of Tobis, Johannisthal and Grunewald, to the Neubabelsberg installations, to the Froelich studios. In the evening there will be Hitlerjunge Quex at the Astoria Ufa-Palast on Windmuhlenstrasse. This will be the true beginning of the festival. Then the following days there will be many films, with one day devoted to all the mountain films, of which yours is one."

  "And what do I have to do? See everything?"

  "There will be much paper material awaiting you at the hotel which will tell you everything you are required to know. It is your presence that is truly required."

  "And this evening?"

  "This evening a reception at the Propaganda Ministry. Food and drink and some words from Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels.
This car will call for you at seven o'clock."

  In the drawing room of my suite at the Adlon there were journalists already assembled drinking drinks. They were from the Volkische Beobachter, Film Kurier and Jugendfllm. Der Sturmer was not, I think, represented. There was a woman interpreter supplied by the Press Bureau, handsome in a rust open jacket with fur trim over double-breasted waistcoat, long tight sleeves with fur cuffs, box-pleated skirt, rust felt hat with bow trim, rust shoes with buttoned canvas inserts. But I was able to answer the questions in German. 'Where had I learned to speak so good German? I told them. There was a brief silence which the interpreter, Fraulein Dahlke, broke into with an interesting point. Doctrines could not, in the nature of things, be enforced retrospectively. She herself had learned to play the piano with Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. Was she to forget the fingering she had mastered from the Fruhlingslied?

  What did I think of the achievements of the cinema of the Third Reich? I knew little about them, they did not seem to export very well. What was my opinion of the products of Hollywood? I considered them mediocre. I had been working there, what had I been working on? A treatment of the Arthurian legend rejected by the studio. Messrs. Birnbaum, Gottlieb, Rothenstein, Kin. fish and Svenson had not wished to present the tragic essence of the legend but wished to concentrate on love and adultery. Did I consider the American cinema decadent? Ah no, to reach decadence you had first to be civilised, though Oscar Wilde had made an epigram--... God forgive me, I was giving them precisely what they wanted. What were my impressions of the new Germany? Clean, efficient, ingenious. The ingenuity applied solely so far to the box of matches that was on the table along with a complimentary tin of Wahnfreud cigarettes. To save wood, these matches consisted only of phosphorus heads to be picked up with tiny tweezers: streich but no holz. What new book was I working on? A book was to come out in Britain and America next spring on the necessity of finding a faith in an age of great evil. The evil of bolshevism? Yes, that and other evils. The journalists seemed very pleased with the interview.

  The car called for me at seven precisely: indeed I corrected my watch by its arrival. White-tied and tailed I sailed off to the Propagandaministerium through the bright night streets. Bannered swastikas flapped gently in the still air, illuminated. The trouble with that damned swastika was that it was a very satisfying symbol and very ancient. Svasti meant good luck in Sanskrit. Kipling had the swastika on the title pages of all his books. Mediaeval scribes filled in spaces with it and called it a fylfot. Whether or not you approved of the regime it represented, your heart could not help but lift when you saw its arrogance on the Berlin skyline.

  There was arrogance within too, but not untasteful. The huge vestibule celebrated, in statuary and bas-relief, the Nazi arts: naked eyeless classical Nazis with lyres and Bach trumpets, a robed Nazi Cicero or perhaps Demosthenes declaiming Nazi truth, Nazi Athenians frozen in a Nazi saraband. And everywhere swastikas seemed to spin widdershins. I joined tailed and diamonded guests mounting the fine curved stairway to the piano no bile, gazed down upon less disdainfully than distractedly, eyes lost in the world of the Ding an sich, by a floodlighted portrait of the Fuhrer. Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels was at the top of the stairs to greet us, Reichsleiter and President of the Reichskulturkammer, he in tails, his lady in white and jewels. I had met her before, I remembered, though she evidently did not. It had been when she was still the wife of a certain Herr Friedlander, a rich Jew who had been forced by the Party to endow her on her new marriage with half a million marks and also to give her new husband as a wedding present the Friedlander Schloss at Schwannwerder.

  Goebbels greeted me with a Rhineland accent. I knew he had written failed plays and blamed their failure on the Jews. He knew I had written successful plays. "Will," I asked, "your FYhrer be present at the festival?"

  "Alas, no."

  "And he so great a film lover."

  "He prefers his private showings. Mutiny on the Bounty and The Hound of the Baskerviltes." He spoke the titles in Rhineland English. "Those are his favorites still."

  "His taste must be reformed."

  "His taste will be reformed." Then Dr. Veit Harlan was announced. I passed on into the huge brilliantly lighted reception room. The only uniforms were on members of the Hitlerjugend, delectable boys with straight hair, probably performers in Hitlerjunge Quex. They carried the canapes round; gloved and whiteclad elders brought chilled Sekt, a wine I have always preferred to champagne. An eating lady said to me: "Monsieur Toumy?"

  "Madame Durand, is it not? What, if I may ask, are you doing in this galley?" She was, I remembered, something to do with Gaumont.

  "Ah, what we have to learn." She was of luscious figure and her blond hair was metallic. "And not only in the cadre of the cinema."

  "You are sympathetic to this regime?"

  "How can one not be? The young men, observe, so slim, so straight. It is Wagner come to life." She ogled me insolently. "And your own tastes too, I understand, would not find aversion in the prospect of such muscular embraces as are there implied."

  I felt sick. I still had in my right hand some vol-au-vent or something and there was nowhere to put it. I put it boldly in Mme. Durand's mouth. She made a silly gesture of delight. I said, "My tastes are my own affair. But, if you wish to know, they are best satisfied in the world of the dark." I'm damned if I remember what language I am supposed to be translating here. I have the insane illusion of a Gallicized German or Teutonicized French. I incontinently came out with: "The Mediterranean. Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, Sicilians. Wine and garlic and olives. All civilization springs thence. What are these Nords trying to do? What have they ever done except crush the civilizations of the Middle Sea?" I must have spoken loudly. A long grey man with his hair parted on the right, a Scandinavian from his sobbing French, said: "It is time for the North. For the North it is time." An American of delicate and hence dangerous culture came in with: "Toomey, isn't it? Of course." He spoke the English of patrician Philadelphia. "Divisions, divisions. I have an image of pubic curls black as tar and glistening with sweat like tar." He was from his looks of Philadelphian deutsch, what they call Dutch, origin. "And then loins of pared thinness in the sun to which the North has an equal right, the mane like gold foil."

  "What the hell are we talking about?" Had I been slipped an MF? Was this Sekt of an unprecedented fortitude? A whitecoated servitor served me more. I took. Mme. Durand, who spoke little English, giggled. "Are we here to celebrate the death of the Mediterranean?"

  "Our Italian friends over there," the Philadelphian said, "would not think so. Is it not rather to glorify a new spirit, a freshly made Europe, Alberich thrust underground and Siegfried phallically rampant?" He was certainly drunk.

  "What the hell have you to do with Europe?"

  "Tomorrow," he said, "the world." Mme. Durand giggled.

  I said, "Gaumont Gauleiterin." And then, "Ou bien Pathe pathologue."

  "Dingue, dingue," she tinkerbelled. To a white table men in chef's toques brought great steaming dishes. "Goulache," she slavered, going over there.

  And not only goulash but a kind of rich soldier's stew with bobbing sausages, pork cutlets with mushrooms and radishes, beef in a sauce of spiced mugwort, wobbling pink pyramids of saffron custard, a cream cake in the shape of a fylfot, a Tower of Babel chocolate confection reeking like a barbershop of rum, berries of the German forests, cheese the hue of lemons or of leprosy, and, like a warning of heroic times in store, wedges of tough black bread. I ate nothing but drank thirstily of the ample Sekt, while the two hundred or so others spooned in hard, some of them sweating. A godling in mufti who I did not doubt was of the special SS intake in whom not even a filled tooth was acceptable said to me, accurately, "You do not eat."

  "No, I do not eat. But I drink." And I drank, promptly to be refilled. "Danke sehr."

  "I too drink."

  "That is good. To drink is very good. Of blood have you yet drunken?"

  "It is English of a strange k
ind you speak. Of blood, no. It is the Jews that eat blood dry. It is in their religious cakes mixed." He seemed to be serious.

  I spoke German to him, saying, "They say that under the microscope you can see the difference between the configurations of Jewish blood and Gentile blood."

  "Aryan blood, yes."

  "The term Aryan has a purely philological significance. It can be applied only to languages. There is in fact no difference whatsoever between Jewish blood and other blood. This I know. This you are forbidden to know."

  "You are wrong."

  "When I say that you are forbidden to know?"

  "What you say of the blood. Be quiet now. The Reichsminister is to speak." Goebbels, who had not been present during the feasting, now made an applauded entrance. He was no man to improvise a word or two of greeting; he had typewritten sheets of which copies had undoubtedly already been given to the press. He welcomed us in his Rhineland accent with its not yet expunged peasant tones. He called us friends in a double sense: of the art of the cinema, of the new Germany. Nay in a triple sense: of the art of the cinema of the new Germany. But some inner grace bade his deep-set simian eyes register an instant's doubt of the logical propriety of that conclusion. He then spoke of the cinema as the popular voice of the state, reaching audiences as yet uneducated in the understanding of the traditional arts. He seemed to consider that the guests of the Reichsfilmkammer had to pay for their guesthood by extolling in their own lands the excellence of the products of the German cinema that they were to see. Nay, more, in persuading cinema distributors in those lands to show those products, themselves a means of cleansing the world film market through their purity and excellence of the regrettable decadent ordures excreted by international Jewry. For the Third Reich spoke for sanity everywhere. The National Socialist philosophy had purified and made strong a Germany long corrupted by international ordure excretors; Germany by her example would yet save the world.