The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]

by Michael Moorcock

  ‘Congratulations.’ Hever was distracted, trying to gather Mrs Cornelius’s limp body with his flailing arms, like someone with palsy carrying china. ‘You’ve struck a spouter there, Pallenberg. I’ll send someone out to clean the car. You must excuse me.’ The pair moved unsteadily towards the main entrance; two tired apes attempting to perform some primitive ritual dance across the blazing limestone of the patio. The car was attended to in a few minutes. I had a little trouble starting her up again on the almost empty No. 2 tank, but I had anticipated minor problems of that kind. I was soon alone with my dream, speeding past a procession of historical and geographical styles. My PXI continued to perform admirably. She took me from Old English to German Gothic and Scandinavian Gingerbread carrying me beside ordinary-sized houses built to look like medieval castles while castles were disguised as French cottages. Here in Hollywood and her immediate provinces was a combination of every city I had ever known. At one moment I could be back in my Kievan childhood, at another in Odessa or St Petersburg. I could glance from one hill to the next, where cypresses and palms and a white cupola recalled Constantinople or drive a little further down the canyons to find Sans Souci transported in quarter scale from Montmartre. Here was Ancient Rome; there Florence or, of course, Venice, and modern Milan. Otranto, Ankara, Alexandrovskaya were equally to hand. Elsewhere I could find Peking, Moscow, London and, always, Barcelona or Madrid. Berlin and Hannover and the castles of the Rhine; Arabia, India, and, suddenly. New York. Chicago, Washington and Memphis. My entire past was represented in this single city, just as my future was apparent in her wealth, tranquillity and grandeur, beneath a sun which scarcely knew a cloud. At night, under powerful stars and an overblown moon, you could smell her sweetness, her pines and blossoming shrubs, her cedarwood closets, her spice-filled pantries. All the perfumes of the world were carried in on gentle breezes; the salt of the sea, the musk of beautiful women, the glorious odours of tropical flowers. And yet, lying in a bed first built for some ruined despot, with your window open on those comforting hills, you could still sometimes hear the howling of wolves. The coyote had skulked in the rear of the Mexican expansion, establishing himself wherever a Catholic Mission was erected to the glory of the Pope. Now he loped through the little valleys and woods, drinking from Japanese water-gardens and Dutch wishing-wells, scavenging the half-eaten pheasants or jars of caviare, imported cheeses, rare delicacies borne to Hollywood in electrically cooled holds by liners from Hong Kong, Hamburg and Capetown.

  Daily Hollywood created and exported fresh wonders. In return she received all the world’s riches, all her traditional marvels, all her escapes. The flow of wealth to and from this storehouse of our deepest longings was impossible to check. I luxuriated in Hollywood’s supernatural radiance; I was bathed by her healing, indescribable tides. I could again look for immortality and expect to find it. In Hollywood’s imaginative opulence, in an ambience of infinite pleasure, infinite possibility, I had grown whole again. All I lacked was Esmé. Esmé was the final missing fragment of my resurrected being. She was my soul, my muse, mayn glantsik tsil. Esmé was myself and I was she. Oh, my rose! Separated we are perpetually crippled. Together we are an angel. Und nu du komst!

  * * * *

  TWENTY-TWO

  NOW YOU COME, Esmé! Soon you shall be real again. Her engines drumming steadily, a magnificent city bears you beneath the grey Atlantic’s unquiet skies. Far below her hull are mountain peaks taller than the Himalayas, in whose inky valleys prowl dark old titans, immense and eternally hungry. These beasts are bound, by virtue of their size and gravity, to exist through lightless millennia (perhaps as many as mankind has known). These are the gods to whom Carthage would make sacrifice: the melancholy totems of an undead slavery. But the floating cities are safe, sailing high above that gloomy territory: so high as to be neither heard nor scented; beyond the imaginings of Carthage’s monstrosities.

  Terrible denizens of an eternally sunless sphere they survive the heavy centuries experiencing neither love, nor dreams, nor fear; they are without sensation save their dull, perpetual greed. They cannot touch you, Esmé, in your powerful city, as inexorably she challenges shrieking elemental violence with tapered steel and carries your innocent courageous vitality, your beautiful, wondering vulnerability, home to where my arms can enfold you.

  Our bodies shall soon know that specific ecstasy of two perfect souls, two halves of a single globe, conjoined at last and for eternity to burn with a silver, an all-illuminating flame; a flame containing the sum of the spectrum’s shades, the inviolable glare of diamonds and rubies blended. We shall unite, Esmé. We shall explore an infinity of facets; an abundance of sensuality, new artefacts, fresh cities and the glories of the natural world. Oh. Esmé, I lost you. They took me to the City of Sleeping Goats, where the warning fires of synagogues alerted me at last. I came to a City of Fearful Dogs, whose holy places were smeared with heathen excrement, and there I found you, restored to virgin mind. We travelled to the City of Whispering Priests, to the City of Painted Cadavers, and there I was again banished from you. Many other cities, Esmé, have informed me, seduced me, led me from virtue. But now I have found rest, here in this City of the Golden Dream, the Emperor City I thought destroyed. You will come to me in New York and I shall bear you back to the safety of these fantasies made real, where they have discovered a means of eternally banishing the nightmare. And in time, Esmé, we shall fly again. This city shall fly. Vifl iz der zeyger? Iber morgn? Eyernekhtn? Ikh farshtey nit. Ikh veys nit. Es tut mir leyd. Esmé! Es tut mir leyd! Es iz nakht. Morgn in der fri ikh vel kumen. Mayn Esmé. Ikh darf mayn bubeleh. Mayn muter.

  In Anaheim the restaurant turned to black ash blowing across the endless furrows; then the concrete poured like lava over the old groves and from these ruined futures grew the antiseptic quasi-fantasy of a tranquillised kulak class. Every year they put their pork-fed legs into Bermuda shorts and take the road to Main Street, U.S.A. Here the children and grandchildren of Klansmen earn their holiday dollars by exercising well-trained mouths and cleaned-up wholesome limbs in a ritual of pious good will which soon, the proprietor intends, shall be exuded by genuine robots. Twice a day, a marching band, in uniforms parodying those of Napoleonic Europe, blue, red, green or yellow, play the good old battle tunes and pink girls, sweating with the effort of their grins, grit teeth of perfect whiteness and fling ornamental staffs into the air, to catch them precisely as they fall, to spin them with terrifying skill, their legs pumping up and down, echoing the Teutonic rhythms and perhaps just a memory of unambiguous lust. They cannot fail. Thus, simplified, they shorten the odds against even the threat of failure. And Mickey Mouse, once the enfant terrible with a crooked, almost malevolent grin, now strolls through Fantasy Land in middle-aged slacks, as respectably removed from the sources of his fortune as any other exploiter of desperate slavery. There are signs, now, for Japanese visitors. And guidebooks in Japanese. And Mickey-Tees bearing ideograms in the language of that once forbidden nation. They walk on little loafer soles across the concrete to Main Street’s urinals where they piss on the buried ashes of ancestral relatives. In identical grey suits they file back aboard the buses, file from the buses to the planes, from the planes to the buses and finally home to the very latest electronic styles which fill their lives and bring twenty million babbling voices into their hearts. And for that they had a generation die? Why should I care? They flood the whole world with their hopeless instruments; they are the source of a sickness more destructive than any other form of fallout. I take the alleyways of this dirty place, this graveyard metropolis, and duck my head, cowed by stereophonic catcalls, the battle-cries of a consummate horde. Mist engulfs me. God save my mishling soul. Moyredik moyz, er has defeated me! Vu iz dos Alptraum? Vi heyst dos ort? Here is again the nightmare.

  In downtown Los Angeles Mexican and Chinese destitutes, having sought the shade of withered trees, lie drunk in sun-soaked parks. The villas of old Spain are shabby. The Dons long since took their swords
in the service of Carthage. Now Negroes and defeated immigrants shelter in haciendas, whose brittle lawns glitter with discarded cans and rotting candy wrappers. The palms are dusty and in need of repair. Even in Paradise the cannon-fodder of Carthage makes camp, awaiting a signal which it might not even recognise. Ich weiss. From their hill-top fortresses gracious Lords and Ladies look carelessly on steeples, cupolas and high adobe, seeing only antique romance through the blue-grey haze of noon. Their vassal city appears to dream in peace. Her boyars cannot guess how fiercely their security is guarded. Her great princes refuse to venture into ghetto slums so never confront the envious, misshapen creatures who plot, however lazily, to steal the treasures of the citadels; to steal the golden dreams. One is not supposed to speak of such things. Ich glaube es nicht. One joins the swift galliard and turns one’s head against the warning evidence. Ich will es nicht! Who that has tasted Hollywood’s luxurious opiates wishes to contemplate for a moment the threat growing like a virus in the Old Plaza, where Los Angeles began? Where, once more, Mexicans are an occupying force and the nights are horrible with their stamping feet, their wails, their melancholy self-reference, their awful guitars. Nicht wahr? Who can blame us?

  Our dreams are always real. The test comes when we attempt to turn them into money, seeking power to build still greater dreams. Do not listen to the envious and the insensate. The illusion of Hollywood is thoroughly tangible. They have never learned, her citizens, that some things are impossible. The rules are formed and broken according to their own experience. Hollywood is a self-possessed city. Her vassals of the valley and the coast will claim she is a dissipation of someone else’s smoke; a mirage inhabited by poppy-chewing luftmaystern merely the more attractive alternative of muselmanisch. She has, they say, no special character or moral condition. She is all fantasy. This need not be challenged. The worn-out illusions of Paris and Rome were certainly as glamorous in their day. They reflected the wish-dreams, the Wunschtraumen, of their times: an affirmation of the popular mass. I cannot understand them. What are they saying? That Hollywood does not exist? Or should not exist? Was Periclean Athens not real? Or less real than Wren’s London and Speer’s Berlin? Are these critics of the Traumhauptstadt angry because her great palaces grew from wealth earned by answering the public’s needs rather than gold squeezed from fearful peasants? Do they think age alone makes the palaces of Europe attractive? What can be more vulgar and banal than Versailles? What cathedral was ever in worse taste than St Peter’s? They say Hollywood is a false scent, a gilded corpse, a trap. Did they not once say the same of Florence and Venice, and Rome herself? Hollywood attracts would-be popular actors. Florence attracted would-be popular painters and sculptors. Was she responsible for the disappointment of the ones who failed to find favour? Yet every day the tabloids tell us how some wretched ex-waitress has been ‘ruined’ by Hollywood. In other words Hollywood somehow conspired in her downfall, first luring her with false promises, then corrupting her and finally ‘destroying’ her. And what are Hollywood’s motives for this senseless behaviour? Vi heyst dos? What would the Sun or the Reveille do with every eighteenth-century doxy who dreamed of becoming a King’s courtesan but actually wound up as a serving-wench in some provincial tavern? Was heisst das?

  Hollywood is the first true city of the twentieth century. Like Rome or Byzantium she thinks herself inviolable. I have seen it all on the television. Of course there are changes, but the core is preserved. Was muss ich zehlen? A city founded on abstracts (and in this she is by no means the first) she next sought to make those abstracts reality. This is a common process. Wie lange muss ich werten?

  Hollywood, though constantly threatened by her neighbours, is the strongest fortress of the modern world. She must not grow lazy. Hollywood purged herself once. It was painful, but she was successful. She purged herself as John Wayne might purify his blood after a rattlesnake bite; by drawing out the poison with his mouth, then, with a white-hot Bowie knife, cauterising the wound. Hollywood spat the poison into the sea, sending it East where it had come from. She banished writers, a few producers, some directors, a tiny percentage of her actors, and let them try to swim in the unfriendly ocean of reality. They drowned, most of them. A few eventually reclaimed themselves from Carthage. It is time for her to draw the poison from her arteries again.

  Half-caste youths in studded leather ride their motorcycles amongst her fallen monuments. Mongrel dogs defecate upon slabs engraved with the names of honourable Lords and Ladies on that crumbling Avenue of the Stars. Gangs of gaudy vandals run unchecked over the broken walls of once unassailable castles. They loot the rotting costumes, the faded scenery. It is all that is left now of Republic and RKO, of Fox and Lasky. Hollywood offered her prophecies in so many films. She warned the world of the dangers of interbreeding and loose moral standards. Griffith drummed this message home, even in Broken Blossoms, the most unsound of his films (though Lillian Gish was exceptional). He died in poverty, that great man. From me he got only ‘trousers’. Everything he predicted came true. Pray, all of you, for the great Tsar City, the New Byzantium, the citadel of our Faith. Vergenen Sie nicht. Die Kapelle spielt zu schnell. Rock-and-roll magnates, champions of all that is barbaric, are the inheritors of our sunlit, melancholy ruins. Who could know The Jazz Singer would lead to this? Yet God is with his Emperor Stadt, even now. Not the yammering, drooling old God, but the new one, the Greek. The white palaces still stand guard above the valley, only apparently sleeping. Who better to accuse her than I? But I shall not. Six thousand miles from me and careless of my name, she yet retains my loyalty. Byzantium, you blaybnlebn. Hollywood was ever a Christian city, though many of her princes began as Jews. Wer Jude ist, bestimme Ich. Why not? Auf gut Deutsch. The Venice of the near past is still in a perpetual celebration, a carnival. Her pier swarms with happy souls. The sea is calm today. The ferris wheel turns slowly, like a useless mill. I walk beneath rococo arcades, her wooden fretwork, her brick that imitates stone. I admire the huge gondola on the Grand Canal which, itself, is smaller than the original. The gondolier sings some mock-operatic snatch as he poles his passengers towards the watery cul-de-sac’s terminal. The little railways flash and rattle. The yellow trolleys roll by. And girls in pretty beads and skimpy frocks, in cloche and aigrette, skip upon the arms of blazered Midwest dandies who walk awkwardly, trying to keep their boaters from falling off their bullet heads. I shall be leaving Venice soon, to move my few goods up the boulevard to the Hollywood Hills. A small grey and white palace of my own, for Esmé’s sake. I know what she prefers. At the pier I turn, still shaded by this idea of some Doge’s cloister, and here stands my bulky partner, my nervous benefactor. ‘Mr Hever!’ I surprise myself with my exclamation. There is a pause. The day is momentarily still. ’Sara sheyn veter!’

  ‘Ven kumt on der shiff?’

  ‘You’ll recall I leave by plane tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course. I was looking for you, old man.’ A wave of embarrassment rocked his untidy frame. ‘I didn’t find you home, so . . .’

  ‘I thought I had put all the PXI jobs in hand with Willy.’

  ‘Of course. That’s dandy. I’m very happy. I felt like a little gabfest, that’s all. Do you mind?’

  I proposed we walk along the seafront in the general direction of Long Beach. The promenade stretched for miles, apparently meeting beach and ocean somewhere near Catalina Island. We walked. He said nothing for a long time. Then he suggested lunch at a nearby lobster place. Again I complied. I had time to kill. I was content. The food was excellent and became the topic intermittently for an hour or so. We finished our lobsters, our custards and our coffee and set off again. Still, save for remarks about the beachfronts, the weather, the Curtiss seaplane beginning its approach to Long Beach harbour, he was substantially mute. At last he asked if I would mind taking a Red Car and continue ‘our real talk’ by the workshop. I cheerfully agreed and we crossed the street to wait for the massive trolley of the inter-urban line. It was a hot, easy day. Children ran
in and out of the water, chased by dogs and parents. Young people grew brown on the sands. Every town along the coast had its pleasure arcades, its little fairgrounds, its share of fun. I was amiable, thinking how much Esmé would be thrilled. I intended to bring her back by train from New York, so we could travel via the Broadway Limited and then take a Pullman all the way from Chicago. I guessed she had become unused to any luxury and what I proposed must surely pleasantly overwhelm her.