Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "A novelist friend of mine," Diana Cartwright said, "affirmed that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity."

  "A sham, eh?" Walter Dunnett said. "Even when there are verifiable historical personages in it? Like Havelock Ellis and Percy Wyndham Lewis and Jimmy Joyce?"

  "They're not the same as what they would be in real life. The whole thing's a fake. We're fakes too. We're saying what he wants us to say. You see that Degas over there--he could turn it into a Monet at a stroke of the pen. He could reduce the number of oranges in that bowl from eight to three. He could make me die now with a heart attack." I nearly wrote: She died at once of cardiac arrest.

  This would not do at all. I got up and walked round my study. For the first time I was being made to realize how tenuous my art, such as it was, was. This was the impact of the age, in which the suspension of disbelief was slowly being abandoned. The young, certainly, were done with art. I sat shakily down at the little table where Ralph, when he felt like working, typed my letters and sometimes my manuscripts. To the left of his typewriter was a low pile of magazines, including five or six successive weekly issues of the new Nywele, an international periodical dedicated to what was called the International Black Movement and published in Kampala. As was appropriate to life, though not to fiction, the copy I picked up opened at an article, in English, on the black novelist Randolph Foulds, complete with brooding thick-necked photograph. He had made several million dollars out of The Cry of the Clouds and he had invested it in the strengthening of the military regime of Abubakar Mansanga, who was building a modern state in Rukwa and converting a tribal congeries into a totalitarian unity. It was to be a model African state in which neither the imported white technological experts nor the Asian men of commerce would much longer be allowed to dilute the echt negritude of a territory whose boundaries were, as yet, unfixed. Here the African Future was already being proclaimed. I heard Ralph repeating and repeating an elegant rococo right-hand run on his harpsichord, and I shuddered. I went back to my novel, crumpled the sheet I had started, and forced the characters back into total servitude to my will. Slaves, sort of, with only the illusion of freedom. Like all of us. The novel form was no sham.

  The letter I received from Lightbody and Creek of Essex Court, Strand, informed me that the hearing would begin at Marlborough Street on December 5, and I was requested to render myself available at 9:00 A.M. on that date. This was a nuisance. The opera Una Leggenda su San Nicola was to have its premiere at La Scala on the feast day of its protagonist, December 6, and I wished to be present at the dress rehearsal. Those readers knowledgeable in the operatic calendar of Milan will be aware that the season does not normally begin until the following day, the feast of Saint Ambrose (this is a solidly holy segment of the Milan winter, with the feast of the Immaculate Conception coming on December 8), but an adjustment had, after several committee meetings, been made out of a reluctant sense of celebratory fitness. Well then, everything was coming together, as in a well or mechanically plotted novel, since I had heard from Hortense in New York (who would not be in Milan) that the basso-relievo had arrived at Genoa on the Michelangelo as early as November 11.

  I said to Ralph, "Ralph, I must fly to London on the fourth. For the trial of J. Christ. Do you propose coming with me?"

  "I'll be okay here."

  "Are you sure you'll be ah okay here? Are you quite sure you won't get into mischief in the Casbah or somewhere?"

  "I want to go to Rabat to look at the horses. Arabs, man. And I could see the tombs of the Marinide sultans and all that crap. I'll be okay."

  "Do you propose to be with me in Milan for the opening?"

  "Opening of what?"

  "Ralph, you're terribly distracted these days. You know what."

  "Aw, that. I'll get the records later."

  "Very well, then. I shall fly from London to Milan and be back here, God willing, on the eighth or ninth. I'm delighted, of course, that you should wish to go to Rabat. I can give you a letter of introduction to the royal equerry if you desire it."

  "Give me some money is all I desire."

  "You're very sullen these days, Ralph. I much prefer you in your loud and vicious moods. No, no, I was only jesting. You shall have your money."

  I flew by Air Maroc to Gibraltar and waited two hours in the airport bar under the looming north face of the great rock for the BEA flight to London. I was the only first-class passenger, and the stewardess kept bringing me small gifts of the line: miniature liqueurs, aftershave lotion, a pack of samples of British cheeses, finally a tiny flask of Givenchy perfume "for my wife." At Heathrow I found a message in the rack by the luggage carousel. Nay, I found two, but the first was not for me: WAITING AT HOME FOR YOU LOVE TOM. It was for a Mrs. Timpson. For Toomey there was a curt warning signed "Wrigley": DON'T YOU EVER LET THE SIDE DOWN AGAIN. I took a taxi to Claridge's.

  The Marlborough Street court was, the following drizzly London morning, frosty, dark, Dickensian but, or and, somehow festive. Aberrants in bright colors as well as a number of vulgar pressmen were awaiting the fun. The corridor at the side of the little pitch-pine courtroom was filmed with mud and planted with shoe-crushed cigarette butts that had opened like flowers. I kept myself to myself near an unwashed open window that opened onto a space too small to be a yard, inaccessible also except by that window. It was scattered with the detritus of sordid decades: a broken bottle that had contained beer brewed by the successors to Johnson's friend Thrale, a browned fragment of a Police Gazette that possibly announced the arrest of Charles Peace, fag-ends of Crumbs of Comfort and Mermaid Whiffs, even condoms. I stood there looking, smoking, not wishing to be associated with the smutseekers, dotty literary, reporters. They all knew who I was. Lights suddenly went on and there was a cheer. I saw, to a kind of quiet, Sir Arnold Wetherby the magistrate go in. He was accompanied by a curly bronzed man of forensic handsomeness, the well-known barrister George Pyle. Sir Arnold had a curved Dunhill pipe which he extinguished at his leisure but kept gripped as a kind of gavel. Both men were laughing.

  When I was called I had to take the oath and I was given a selection of Bibles. I chose the Douay Version. Then there was a session of great affability and informality, with breaks for a smoke every fifteen minutes or so.

  "I don't think you have to be introduced, do you? You're Mr. Kenneth M. Toomey, novelist, playwright, at present living abroad. The court, I think I may say this, is cognizant of the inconvenience to which you have voluntarily submitted in order to be here and conveys its thanks."

  Sir Arnold accepted Pyle's speaking on his behalf and said, "Glad to see you here, Toomey. Damned bad weather for you to come over to, but there it is. Read quite a number of your things. Enjoyed most of them. Not like this thing, eh?" And he waved a copy of Val's book at me. It was a thin book with the title, on a pure white ground, engrossed in a kind of Celtic lettering.

  "No, your honor."

  "What," Pyle asked, "is the meaning of the initial M? In your name, I mean?"

  "Marchal. It's French. My mother's name. My mother was French."

  "A lot of the influence of Guy de Maupassant in your stuff," Sir Arnold said. "A sort of cleaned-up Maupassant. Not that I've read much Maupassant. Do you agree?"

  "That you haven't read much Maupassant, your honor?" This got a laugh. What masochism, what fundamentally cynical irreverence for institutions and principles makes us British make comic butts out of each other on occasions when comedy is totally out of order? There have been murder trials that were positive orgies of hilarity. "I'm sorry, your honor. Your other statement, yes, that seems to me to be a very astute literary judgment."

  "Jolly good," Sir Arnold said.

  "As you know, Mr. Toomey," Pyle said, "this volume of alleged verse--is the author present? No, I see he is not--I say alleged without disparagement, it is published as verse, but much of it seems to be chopped-up prose--"

  "Vers libre," Sir
Arnold said, and looked at me as for approval. I nodded.

  "This volume is arraigned on the grounds of its capacity for moral corruption. You have read it?"

  "Naturally."

  "You have read it, naturally. What do you find in it?"

  "You mean its content?"

  "Yes, let's say its content. Please tell the court."

  "It is a series of twelve longish poems, each in the style of Mr. T. S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which the title is probably meant to evoke. That would explain the J. Christ, not in itself, when seen in the Eliot context, at all really blasphemous."

  "Vers libre."

  "Quite, your honor. Jesus Christ seems to be writing a letter to each of his twelve disciples after his death, resurrection and ultimate disappearance. He affirms his continuing love for them, even for the traitor Judas. As the medium is poetry, an intensely physical medium, he expresses the love in physical terms.

  "To be exact," Pyle said, "homosexual terms."

  "Necessarily, since the disciples are men. He stresses physical love as primarily a means of expressing affection, as a figure of the intense love God feels for humanity, and not as a means of procreation. The end of the world is coming, and the biological purpose of sex has no further pertinence to human life. Historically, if I may say so, there were Jews in Palestine during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius who believed that the world was coming to an end and people had to learn the importance of loving their neighbors before the final judgment. Hence the urgency of John the Baptist's message and then Christ's."

  "I don't see," Pyle said, "the, to use your own term, pertinence of all that to the issue at hand. Christ is presented as a homosexual. The average Christian must regard that as blasphemous. Don't you agree?"

  "I agree," I said, "but the average Christian may well be wrong. Just as the average Palestinian Pharisee seems to have been wrong in regarding Christ's teaching as blasphemous. It may well be the job of a certain kind of writer to make the average Christian look at Christ with new eyes. Christ was part divine, part human, so we are taught. The human aspect ought to encompass sexuality. It seems to me very probable that Christ was not altogether celibate. What I mean is, celibacy was no more essential to his mission than it is in the pastorate of the Church of England. If Christ were presented as writing a love letter to, say, Mary Magdalene, would that be regarded as blasphemous?"

  "We have to ask the questions, Toomey," Sir Arnold said. "Sorry about that, old man."

  "I understand, your honor, but I suppose I'm really asking for guidance. D. H. Lawrence wrote a story about the resurrected Christ called The Man Who Died. In it he has Christ recognize the importance of sexuality. The book was regarded by many as extremely reverent. It was not, I think, banned."

  "It would have been a big job," Sir Arnold said, "banning all of that chap's books. There's one banned, though, and likely to remain banned. That Lady Chatterley thing. Whether it's ordinary sex or the other kind, the law lets you go so far and no farther. This poet here has enough descriptions of ah ah sexuality to merit suppression. I mean, would Thackeray want to write this sort of thing? Would Dickens? Would you yourself, Toomey?"

  "I appreciate your grouping my name with those distinguished ones, your honor. If I myself would not it may confess an unworthy limitation of temperament. I am naturally shy of explicit sexual description. But I tend to applaud explicitness when I find it in others. Joyce and Henry Miller, for example. It seems to me a mark of literary courage."

  "These poems," Pyle said, "if I may call them that, seek to establish a homosexual relationship between Jesus Christ and each of the twelve disciples. Sometimes the relationship is expressed in terms which I suppose the author would regard as ingeniously appropriate to the person addressed. The sound of Judas's ah ecstasy is likened to the tinkle of thirty pieces of silver. Saint Peter is complimented on his lusty fisherman's rod."

  There was a buzz of amusement and, from a reporter, a vulgar laugh at once muffled. Sir Arnold himself smiled and then put his dead pipe in his mouth to convert the show of yellow teeth to a stem-gripping rictus.

  "Evidently," I said, "these symbols are not without wit. Wit was once regarded as a legitimate element in even the most devout literature of religion. I mean, Donne, Crashaw, Jeremy Taylor. Crashaw, referring to the infant Jesus being suckled by the Virgin Mary, mentions another teat that will be given to him. A bloody one, he says, and adds 'The mother then must suck the son.' That is wit in the sense of irony. It is not meant for laughter. It may be regarded as sexually perverse. But it is deadly serious and meant devoutly. I submit that these poems of Wrigley have something of that quality. Mr. Eliot, a noted churchman and even vicar's warden, helped English poetry to recover that quality. Another thing. Sexual imagery, perverse or otherwise, has constituted an aspect of a great deal of religious poetry and has never, to my knowledge, previously run into conflict with the secular law. The poems of Saint John of the Cross, depicting the marriage of the soul to the bridegroom Christ, are fiercely erotic. Bernini's sculpture of Saint Teresa, if I may change to another art, shows the saint undergoing what is clearly a kind of orgasm. The Bible itself, in the Song of Solomon, gives us the most sensual poetry in the world, but Christians take it as an allegory of Christ's love for his Church. These poems of Wrigley must be seen in the context of a long and distinguished artistic tradition."

  "The point is," Pyle said, "that these poems are homosexual and, to use your own word again, explicitly so. The depiction of Christ as an active homosexual constitutes, does it not, a very offensive and scandalous flouting of another tradition--that to which all decent Christians subscribe."

  "But," I said, "it is nothing new to present Christ as a homosexual. Christopher Marlowe, our greatest playwright after Shakespeare, said that Jesus Christ was nought with the beloved disciple John--"

  "Was what?" Sir Arnold asked. "What was he?"

  "Nought," I said, "your honor. An Elizabethan term meaning mistress or lover. Actually, nought being represented as a circle, it signifies the organ of ingress. It was in very common use. May I add that in Renan's Life of Christ--"

  "All right, Toomey," Sir Arnold said. "We're coming to the point, I think. This is homosexual poetry for homosexuals. A homosexual point of view deeply offensive to ordinary people, isn't that it?"

  "Homosexuals may be in a minority, your honor, though I submit that there is less thoroughgoing heterosexuality in the community than orthodoxy would have us believe. Nevertheless, homosexuals have a right to an expression of their own view of life and love. Our literature has been grievously harmed by the suppression of that right. So, God help us, has society in general. No man or woman can help being homosexual. I cannot help it myself."

  It had been said, or very nearly. The declaration had been made, as good as.

  Sir Arnold said, "You needn't have said that, Toomey, you know."

  "Having said it, your honor, I'd better say it clear and loud. My own work as a creator of fiction has been severely harmed by the taboo on the depiction of the homosexual act of love. My own life has been spent in exile chiefly because of the draconian British rejection of the homosexual sensibility as a legitimate endowment. As a homosexual I speak up now for other homosexuals. And for homosexual art. This book of poems is a sincere expression of an image of Christ very comforting to homosexuals but totally forbidden by a Christian Church hostile, sometimes hypocritically so, to what it regards as a willful aberration. It is not a willful aberration. It is as natural a tropism as the other."

  Murmurs of approval and even some tentative claps were quelled swiftly by Sir Arnold's pipe gavel.

  "Well," he said, "you've spoken up, Toomey. Thanks for your ah contribution. Anything else, Mr. Pyle?"

  "Nothing else, your honor."

  "Right, we'll take a break, shall we?"

  CHAPTER 65

  I could not get a flight to Milan that day, at least not the first-class passage to which old age and comparative af
fluence, and I might now add moral courage, seemed to entitle me. I presumed that a number of distinct and separate British trade commissions had preempted all first-class seats on all flights to Milan. Well, it would be enough for me to be present at the performance and to hell with last-minute changes in the text. Alitalia offered me a near empty cabin the following morning at 9:50. So, dining alone in my suite on braised endives and an assiette anglaise, I was able to read at leisure the reports on the first day of the J. Christ preliminary trial. I and my confession received the bulk of the journalists' attention: a famous writer's homosexuality had become headline news. The witnesses who had come after me, some of whom I had stayed to hear, seemed to take their arguments from my own, but none had made a similar declaration. What would the law have done if the entire British literary establishment had, not at all impossible, confessed itself homosexual? My heart prepared to lift when Jack Priestley got into the box, but he merely spoke dourly of the sacred tradition of freedom of expression and quoted Areopagitica. There were some simpering poetasters, school of Wrigley, who did the cause no good. The cause, I thought, was a lost one.