Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Amen," I said. The board or tribunal or court, probably all men who started the day with The Times crossword, had to smile faintly at my ingenuity. "I should think the Nazis have probably worked it out too. They are no stupider than you gentlemen." I should not have said that. "And you talk about my giving comfort to the enemy."

  "In effect," a bald brutal-looking man with an exquisite voice said, "you were uttering obscenities. You could have expressed your ah ah ah ah arcane detestation of the Nazis without using the language of the gutter."

  "It has only become apparent to you now," I said, "that it was the language of the gutter. It is, however, the only language appropriate to the Nazis."

  "I was thinking," the bald man said, "of some decent Englishwoman listening to your broadcast and detecting your coded message and having a sense of outraged modesty." He was serious, totally, totally serious.

  The police officer said, "This was not your first visit to Nazi Germany."

  "I was, as you will undoubtedly know, in Berlin for a film festival at which a film based on a novel of mine was presented."

  "You saved the life of Heinrich Himmler according to one of our reports." There was a stir of grudging respect not horror. "From the bullet of a would-be assassin"

  "My sister's mother-in-law in fact. She was suffering from terminal cancer and wished to die. She wished to take Heinrich Himmler with her. My salvatory act was instinctive, and I do not think I have to apologise for it. We then considered Germany a friendly power."

  "What is this about your mother-in-law?" the thin man with the stiff collar asked incredulously.

  "The mother in fact of Monsignor Campanati, Bishop of Moneta." They all sat back and had a good look at me. "She did much good and dangerous work on behalf of the German Jews."

  "This Ezra Pound," the policeman said, "broadcasts from Rome radio on behalf of Mussolini. He has a lot to say about the badness of Great Britain. You quoted from him."

  "He's considered a great poet. He wrote the poem I quoted just after the Great War."

  "You consider," Major de la Warr asked, "that Great Britain is an ah old bitch gone in the teeth? That this is a ah ah botched civilization?"

  "To some extent, yes. If Britain had had teeth to show against Hitler she would have shown them earlier. And, yes, our civilization is nothing to be proud of. Black and brown helots, an unbridgeable gap between the governing and the governed. Shall we say that some civilizations are more botched than others. Ours is botched, but there are some more botched. Take our ally France, for instance--"

  "We don't want to hear about France," the bald man said. "Indeed," glancing along the line of his colleagues, "I don't think we want to hear any more about anything." Some grunted.

  "I've only been answering questions," I said. "May I now ask a question--what do you propose doing with me?"

  "I understand," Major de la Warr said, "that you were fairly prompt to make application to various government bodies to assist the war effort in whatever ways you could. In what ways," he asked, "could you?"

  "I take it that I'm not eligible for the armed forces. I was not eligible in the previous conflict. A heart condition. And now I'm approaching fifty. But I can write. I have some experience in filmmaking. I can get on my feet and put words together."

  "We have heard you," the man with the twirling spectacles now no longer twirling but on his nose said, "putting words together."

  "You consider yourself trustworthy?" Major de la Warr asked. "Might you not indulge in subversive acrostics or anagrams or something?"

  "You seem to be implying," warmly, "that I might really seek to give comfort to the enemy. There's a whiff of accusation of treason about. I think I ought to demand an apology."

  "You're not a traitor," the bald brutal-looking man said. "You don't have the stuff of treason in you, I can see that. But you're naif and could be used by real traitors. You also put the saving of your own skin before duty to your country."

  "So I should have refused to do the broadcast," hotly, "and then been interned for the duration? Five years, ten years, whatever it's going to be? What would you people have done?"

  "We wouldn't have put ourselves in that situation in the first place," the man with the stiff collar said. The others grunted.

  "No, you don't have a duty to international literature. What precisely are you proposing to do with me? Intern me as not exactly treasonable but as naively dangerous? Chop my bloody head off on Tower Hill just to get me out of the way?"

  The man who now spoke, a man of outstanding but somehow useless handsomeness, seemed to be the Home Office representative. "We have as yet set no arrangements in train for the internment of British nationals. That sort of thing takes time. Your other suggestion is, as you know, frivolous and irresponsible. You're probably intelligent enough, however, to grow to a realisation of the harm you've done."

  "You mean because of an act of daring that did not succeed? Because I struck a quite harmless bargain with the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda?"

  "No bargain with the enemy is harmless," Major de la Warr said.

  "A general matter of background," said the Home Office man. "I don't quite understand why you have to have these Italian connections."

  I looked at him long with an open mouth. Then I said, "My family is a Catholic family. The Catholic Church, unlike the Church of England, is an international foundation. It's not unusual for Catholic marriages to transcend national barriers. Besides, Italy is neutral."

  "Won't be for much longer," Major de la Warr said. "And it's not quite neutral even now. There's another matter, isn't there, Fletcher?" He meant the policeman with the definitive dossier.

  "You mean the--Yes. Oh, that can ride. He has no criminal record in respect of that. On the whole, he's been pretty discreet about it. We wouldn't have had any information at all if it hadn't been for the gratuitous laying of it. This is not uncommon in the world of art and books and so on. It's only a question of those in the know getting on to him, if they ever do. Well, he knows his duty there."

  I gazed at him aghast and then at the former spectaclespinner, who said to me, "Blackmailability, you know. The setting up of situations, you know."

  I said, "Oh my God. What in the name of God has my...--How did you get ...? I demand to see those photographs."

  "They're not of you," the policeman said.

  "It's a matter, don't you see," Major de la Warr said, "of your employability. I don't think you're employable. We should have to put in a veto with whatever department you applied to. You'd better keep on as you are, though you'll have difficulty because of the paper shortage. Entertaining the public I suppose you could call it, helping national morale. As for the matter of your security position, well, the police had just better know where you are. If you think of changing your address, report it. If you go away, even for a week or so, report at the local station. Your passport is, naturally, withdrawn for the duration of hostilities. And perhaps for a time after."

  "I see. You think I'm liable to hop over to Berlin via Dublin and comfort the enemy."

  "Stranger things have happened," the stiff-collared man said. He emended that: the war had only been on for a couple of months. "Will happen. Eire is supposed to be neutral but it's a very dubious neutrality." And then, amiably enough, "We're naturally terribly sorry about all this, Toomey. My wife reads your books and seems to like them. Now they seem to have been withdrawn from the local lending library. That article by that poet chap in the Daily Express didn't do your reputation any good."

  "I replied to it. I exonerated myself."

  "Yes, I know, but it's always better to be in the position of not having to provide a defence. Write a few plays is my advice. Something to take us out of ourselves. Give us a bit of a laugh."

  "This needn't have happened, Toomey," Major de la Warr said, with like amiability. "You were indiscreet, no more than that. But indiscretion in wartime can be as lethal as downright treachery. The Prime Minister, I may say this no
w and confidentially, was deeply upset by your slander. I don't think he'll be with us much longer."

  "You mean my democratically expressed lack of confidence in his administration is going to kill him?"

  "Well, not quite as bad as that. But to hear that sort of thing coming from Germany in the first weeks of the war and from an author he professed to admire--"

  "Chamberlain admires my work?"

  "Not any longer he doesn't, old boy," said a monkeyish man with three broad strands of dyed-black hair. He had not previously spoken but he had taken lavish notes. "You've lost a lot of your admirers. But lie low, shut up, get on with your job, and you'll have them back. The main thing is to keep out of further trouble."

  "Anybody anything to add?" Major de la Warr asked. Nobody. The dossiers were closed but the file, naturally, was still open. I was free to go so I went.

  I went back to Albany through the blackout and under the searchlights ready to sit out the war in shame. From now till the end I would always feel that I was being followed and watched. The man in the raincoat at the end of the bar sipping discreet bitter. The man at the neighbor table in the Cafe Royal lunching off gravy soup and a roll, listening to me and my literary agent. Celibacy was totally enforced: if I picked up a jolly j acktar he might be an enemy agent. But the horrible security machine could not deny my private right to patriotism. I could not be prevented from writing the most popular play of 1942--Break Break Break, each break for a heart, the hearts respectively of three sisters, a sweetheart, a wife, and a mother bereaved, one of an airman lover, one of a sailor husband, one of an army son, but the Tennysonian totality standing for waves of time and sorrow beating vainly at a rock of British intrepidity. Shamelessly schematic, brutally sentimental, it was what the public wanted. The public also wanted a bit of a laugh, so I gave them The Gods in the Garden, which was about statues of Greek divinities coming to life during an air raid and interfering in the affairs of a patrician household, and the coarse army comedy Roll On. Cut off as I was from the realities of the soldier's life, I had to ensure the plausibility of my situations and dialogue by listening to soldiers in pubs, sometimes noting down promising tropes like "Put another pea in the pot and hang the expense" and "Roll on death and let's have a go at the angels" and "The army can fuck you but it can't give you a kid or if it can it can't make you love it."

  Taking notes quietly in the Fitzroy one Saturday night I was quietly picked up by a couple of men in raincoats and trilbies. On the blacked-out street I was quietly asked what I thought I was doing. Taking notes for a play I'm writing. Might we see those notes, Mr. Toomey? I see you know my name. Yes sir, we know your name. I was told at last, the notes having been examined by the almost no light of a dimmed torch, that that seemed to be all right but watch it, sir. Watch what?

  It was they, the forces of security, who were watching. Their rigour never once slackened. I was needed in Los Angeles in 1941 to write the scenario of a film about the Battle of Britain featuring Errol Flynn, but there was no question of even the temporary restoration of my passport. When I published in 1943 my annotated anthology Breathing English Air, which General Horrocks said should be in every literate soldier's thigh pocket, the BBC thought me suitable for delivering a little patriotic uplift after the nine o'clock news on Sundays, but I remained officially unclean and saw the assignment go to Jack Priestley. Even Val Wrigley, who had raised the flag for homosexuality before the Mother of Parliaments and been jailed for striking a policeman, who had publicly cursed Britain for its sex laws and said often that no gaybody could be a true patriot, had a job at the Ministry of Information, something to do with pamphlets on British wildlife. It was he, of course, who had published the article in the Daily Express. This was the article:

  What would you have done if you had found yourself taking a little holiday in Nazi Germany and, being cut oft from the news because of your devotion to Nature, suddenly discovered you were in the middle of a war between Germany and your own beloved land?

  Your first and obvious answer would be: I wouldn't have been such a damn fool as to find myself in that situation. But supposing you had been such a damn fool?

  The obvious answer then would be: Nothing much I could do. They'd intern me, wouldn't they? I'd be stuck in a camp till the end of the war, dreaming of distant England. Just unlucky.

  But, ah, dear reader, if you happened to be a famous novelist like Kenneth Toomey things would turn out very differently. As indeed they did for Mr. Toomey. The Nazis treated him like a prince. They were awfully kind. They even permitted him to go back to England.

  First, of course, he had to do something nice for the Nazis. He spoke on the Nazi radio. Or rather the infamous propaganda station sickeningly called the Free British Radio. Mr. Toomey's words were picked up loud and clear in his embattled native land.

  What did Mr. Toomey say? He said that the war was a great pity, that Germans and British must learn to love each other, and that Mr. Chamberlain was a bit of a fool. Patriotic language, wasn't it? And then they put Mr. Toomey on a plane to somewhere or other and then, lo and behold, Mr. Toomey turns up on his native shores bright and cheerful and not one whit the worse for his escapade. And certainly not in the least repentant.

  A true patriotic British citizen would have said, "To hell with you all, killers of Jews, torturers of nuns and priests, burners of books. Do your damnedest, I will strike no filthy bargain with you. Your proffered hands reek with the blood of the innocent. I will not shake them."

  But Mr. Toomey is a writer whom Nazi Germany has much admired and he had to think of his heilhitlering public, as well as his skin.

  Well, if he has his German public, let him do without his British one. Let his books be swept from the shelves of our public libraries and consumed in the fires of autumn. Let the patriotic British respond to his works as to his actions--with contempt and silence.

  Mr Kenneth Toomey, best-selling novelist, you have shaken bloody hands. You have brought back with you a stink from the Nazi shambles. The very covers of your contemptible works must now seem sticky with the gore of the butchered innocent.

  You and I, dear reader, can do without treasonous Toomey. To urge us in our just fight we have, thank God, better writers, more stirring singers. Let the works of Toonzey be entombed. And totally without honor.

  The title was THE SMELL OF TOOMEY and there was a caricature of myself shaking paws with Dr. Goebbels. In 1940, when Plum Wodehouse was captured by the Germans in his French villa and persuaded to talk very freely and indiscreetly, though also humorously, on Berlin radio, my own case began to be forgotten by the public, though not by British Intelligence. George Orwell rehabilitated Plum as a genuine political innocent, but for a time there was a lot of unseemly sanctimony, as in The New Statesman, which had a competition to see who could best Nazify the Wodehouse literary tone, one entry making Bertie Wooster bleat "Cheeriheil." In the Spectator Val Wrigley published the following doggerel:

  The kind of laugh that Wodehouse imparts is

  Extremely popular with the Nazis.

  On his covers let's stamp (am I being too caustic?) a

  Crumpet, an egg, a bean and a swastika.

  Silly. Val Wrigley kept out of my way very prudently but seemed to be looking for a new philistine public. He published much simple and tendentious verse and even had a regular poetic corner in the Sunday Pictorial. His poem in The Times--"Wir Danken Unserem Fuhrer"--was considered to be the sort of thing the Poet Laureate ought to be doing:

  Shadowing earth, our fylfot will have told

  History's spring and end to the eager hearer

  Our earth's first blood, our titles manifold:

  We thank our Fuhrer.

  I had given him that fylfot back in 1935. Those four final lines indicate the kind of poem it was--bitterly, though statelily, ironical. Its sarcastic praise of the Fuhrer was, however, taken at its face value by Goebbels's Free British Radio, which did a plummy broadcast of the poem. This did Val Wrigley goo
d rather than harm: he was showing what bloody fools the Nazis were, as well as bloodsoaked devils.

  I have no doubt that my own untrustworthiness was corroborated in the eyes of British Intelligence by the entry of William Joyce, known as Lord Haw Raw, into the field of Nazi radio propaganda. It was assumed that the name Joyce was a treasonous name, and it was known that I had been friendly with a Joyce with two or three kinds of bad reputation. Ezra Pound's ridiculous broadcasts from Rome also fitted nicely into the pattern. On the other hand, in intellectual quarters I began to be looked upon as a kind of failed hero: Herzog's long essay in Horizon on the greatness of Strehler--who it was now assumed was dead--helped me there. I was able to go to pubs like the YorkMinster and the Fitzroy Tavern and be permitted to stand half-pints to greasy men in filthy raincoats with book-bulging pockets who had evaded conscription. I stayed in London throughout the war, firewatching, contributing junk to Red Cross sales (those thefts of Heinz came in useful), eating offal in Soho restaurants, sometimes but not too often in danger. The safe countryside was available to me, but I did not propose reporting to police stations like a delinquent on probation or an enemy alien. I preferred the bombs and the Albany shelter. Hortense sent me two food parcels, both rifled in transit. She also sent me the catalogue raisonne of her 1943 New York exhibition--some stones, some bronzes, a lot of cut and tortured aluminium. None of her works seemed to exalt life. In 1944 I heard that my nephew Johnny was with the Fifth Army in Italy, a cameraman in a film unit. In 1945 my niece Ann married an instructor in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I felt myself growing old.

  Strange, I derived most comfort in my loneliness from my brother Tom, whose voice survived on gramophone records, the voice of a decent man who countered the world's horrors with an easy humour. His presence was very real to me as I listened to his monologues (Columbia, plum label), and I cried every time I encountered the heroism of Get It Off Your Chest, which, depicting a man away from work with a bad cold, made comedy out of pain. I knew there had to be a heaven, if only to accommodate people like Tom. The same thing has, I know, been said about the overladen underfed donkeys of North Africa.