Mrs Cornelius can forgive these people everything. She says she is proud to be working-class. I can only mourn the collapse of good taste and public morals. I have offered my experiences to the BBC more than once but, of course, I am not of that Bum-Boy Clique as the Bishop calls it and refuse to prostitute myself. On my one visit to the World Service, I kept my trousers firmly buttoned and any attempt to lay hands on me were met with polite but firm disapproval. I am too old, I said, for that sort of thing.
‘Yore too proud, Ivan. It’s bin yer tragedy,’ she says. Mrs Cornelius has always suggested that my integrity was the worst obstacle to my success in any course I chose. Like von Stroheim, I would neither corrupt my talent nor sell myself to the highest bidder merely to make a profit or win some politician’s approval. So many émigrés found it necessary to do that and I cannot say I blame most of them; but neither do I blame myself. It is not my fault if I am the victim of an unfashionable sense of honour. We are created as individuals. We should respect this. The modern move towards making us all one standard, thinking the same, acting the same, wanting the same things, all in the name of ‘mental health’, is not to my taste. We are becoming the slaves of dull-minded computer programmers. I was the first to condemn Bolshevik and Fascist alike for such fallacious mechanistic understandings. In this, Freud and Marx have much to answer for, of course. They were put on pedestals while Nietzsche, ignored or reviled, who stood, like Max Stirner, for the individual, for the potential super-being in all of us, who provided the philosophical stimulus for my flying cities, my vision of a spiritual samurai caste extending a helping hand to every race and class, each according to its level of maturity, was silenced. Nietzsche became associated with Nazis, certainly, but that is no more his fault than Saint Joan’s becoming identified with the House of Tudor because she was politically useful to Henry the Eighth. We do not ask what Henry’s general attitude towards women was! I have always been willing to give credit where it is due and to place blame where it belongs irrespective of Party or Religion. But now, as Goethe discovered, it is against the law to offer the opinions of experience. These days one must toe the computer’s line, and woe betide the fool attempting to set a lifetime’s experience against some youth’s imaginary notions of reality! In that respect, at least, the other brother, Frank, is not so bad but one need not bother to try to talk to Jerry or Catherine. Whether she agrees with them or not, Mrs Cornelius defends her children. She is a she-tiger, in this respect. Only she is allowed to criticise. I telephoned Jerry that day and he went to see her. He was with her when she died. I was looking in all the time, but I had to protect the shop, there are so many vandals. He came at once and for that, believe me, I grant him a great deal of leeway. But he is jealous. And nowadays I think he avoids me. She told me things she would not tell her children.
Even to me she would never reveal her exact age. It was one of her rules. Also I was only allowed, in company, to bring up our more recent experiences, in England. Apart from between ourselves, she refused to discuss the early days. I sometimes suspected it was because she had discovered the secret of eternal life! Only in her last decade did she begin to show her years. But then she used her age as she had used her beauty, as a finely-adjusted weapon to get what she needed. I always admired her that ability to recognise her best interests.
In private, the past returned with a vengeance! She kept a great number of scrapbooks and boxes under her bed, many of them held together by nothing but greasy dust. They contained cigarette cards, magazine cuttings, letters, ration books, birth certificates, dirt-veined official documents and worthless currency - her entire lifetime’s collection. There were clippings of her from The Picturegoer and Movie Magazine, stills featuring her in scenes with John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Lon Chaney and myself, from the only shocker we appeared in together, The Weasel Strikes Again, in which I played the mysterious Weasel himself. I asked about it shortly after the funeral, but her boy kept all his mother’s papers and is reluctant to let me go through them. He promises he will find the picture for me. I do not hold out much hope. He fobs me off. And the other brother is completely crazy now. My only hope is Catherine, but she is away.
Vos hot ir gezogt? Well, this is my story. It is the only one I have. Mrs Cornelius was the best kind of mother. She did not believe in interfering. They never listened to me, anyway, even when they were young. She believed they took after her father, especially the one who is now an actor. He was given to ‘passin’ enfusiasms’, she said.
‘ ‘Is gran’dad wos barmy, reelly. Orlways wanted a teashop in Kent. ‘E joined the Masons and abart ev’ry bloody religion yer c’n imagine. As a matter o’ fact thass ‘ow I got me names - Honoria Catherine - ‘cause me dad converted ter Rome fer abart free weeks one September. It wos annuver of ‘is crazes. Well, ter be fair, everybody wos doin’ it in Notting ‘Ill that year, blankets and ther bully beef bein’ better at the Irish church. It wos orl Irish rahn’ ‘ere, then. That wos before we moved back ter Whitechapel. Then ‘e wos off on some ower wicket. Anarchism or somefink. We ‘ardly ever sor ‘im. Well, mum’d kicked ‘im art, anyway, an’ ‘e wos livin’ rahnd the corner, but I wos orlways ‘is favourite, even if ‘e wasn’t too sure I wos ‘is, yer know. Well, they wos orl anarchists in Whitechapel just then. Yer could say ‘e flowed a bit wiv ther tide, but I don’t blame ‘im, I’m ther same meself. You an’ me, Ivan. We got frough it an’ we’re not nuts. An’ thass ther main fing, innit?’
I was never fully able to concur with this. I remember how one day we had pursued a monstrous black fly which had flown into her basement flat. It was early springtime and I could not credit that the creature had grown so fat and sleek in a brief day or two. He seemed possessed of supernatural senses and to anticipate every move we made with swatters and rolled-up magazines. The fellow was the big game of the fly world. He was cunning and resourceful, scarcely sentient and therefore incapable of morality, neither good nor evil. He had no purpose beyond maintaining the existence of himself and his kind. His every instinct and physical component was designed for that single purpose - to survive; merely to survive. He was part of no natural cycle, he fulfilled no function in the Eternal Scheme. He did no good and only incidental harm. He was without value. And yet his eggs were surely laid so that if he were killed he could be replaced again, almost infinitely, and become a legion of fat, black flies whose only reason for existence was to survive. I could not accept this as a truism. The notion, I told her, was far too French for me. It was not an accurate symbol. I have the instincts of that fly but I am not that fly. There was far more to my decisions than a simple desire to survive. I wanted to do good for the whole of mankind. Now all I can offer mankind is experience.
I had a vocation. I survived in order to fulfil that vocation. But we need not speak of this tragish kharpe any further.
I leave her basement and walk past the new blocks of flats for whose erection the nuns of the Poor Clare Convent were evicted. Once there was tranquil mystery on the other side of a wall. Now the mysteries are altogether more prosaic. The police are frequent visitors. I reach the corner of Kensington Park Road and pass the Blenheim Arms, where the Bishop and Miss Brunner, from the school, still drink. In this area once everyone knew everybody else, but soon, because it was cheap and not far from Paddington, it began to attract the Jamaicans, then the bohemians started to arrive with Colin Wilson and his Black Monks, his pop groups, and soon the pubs and cafes were full of dwarfish writers seeking to revive some dream of reality by rubbing shoulders with degenerates whom they insist on addressing as ‘locals’ and who are as much interlopers as the intellectuals! I don’t know which attracts which! Do the writers follow the rabble or does the rabble look for the writers, knowing those middle-class misfits are the only people on earth willing to give it the time of day? This area was once a little rough, certainly, but one knew who one’s friends and enemies were. Now it is impossible to tell. Who writes these articles in the American press? I suppose I should
not complain. Those few of us not squeezed out by hippies, perverts and Rotarians are at least able to make a living. You can sell almost anything to an American so long as you offer him a history, a provenance. An old coat becomes ‘Mick Jagger’s old coat’. They force you to tell them these things, otherwise they are disappointed. The entire antique trade seems devoted to inventing ludicrous covenants for the most unlikely and useless articles. I have Roy Wood’s motoring jacket, Lord Curzon’s dress uniform and Winston Churchill’s smoking-cap. Yesterday some pork-fed doughboy tells me he paid a mere £35 for Disraeli’s chamber-pot. ‘And what if it had had Disraeli’s turd still in it?’ I ask him. ‘Would you have paid £350?’
‘Only if it was definitely genuine,’ he said. The boy was serious. History for these people is a matter of commercial evaluation and romance, not of experience or learning. Or is it a matter of points and grades? Perhaps that is better than the English children who are nowadays only inducted into the mysteries of Bolshevik politics and can tell you any minor thing you might wish to know about Chairman Mao but have never heard of Primo de Rivera! And they say the system is not biased! It was to resist the takeover of the country by communists that many patriots went to jail. I met them on the Isle of Man. Mosley, I rarely spoke to. He tended to be avoided because of his breath. To this day, I believe, his followers have been unable to broach the subject. Even his wife says nothing. Perhaps she is used to it. He came into my shop one day, with his lieutenant, Hamm, and he said that he wanted to free Poland. He was standing for Parliament. It was 1958 or 9. I used to go down to Portland Road and have scones or crumpets with Mrs Leese. She was contemptuous of Mosley. He had failed, she said, to develop a firm line on the Jews. In those days she was still publishing her husband’s magazines, Black and White and Gothic Ripples, although the grand old fighter himself was long gone. She supported Mosley because he was better than nothing. We put copies of her magazines through every door in Notting Hill, advising people to vote for the Union Movement, which was what the British Union of Fascists had become. As it was, Mosley received 159 votes and went back to France with a clear message from the powers-that-be. Myself, I voted for the Conservative. Now, of course, it is illegal to air any but the most conventional views on the subject of Race. Mosley conspired in this censorship even before the infamous Race Relations Act gagged Mrs Leese and all those of her people continuing to fight, as best they could, under the banner of the Phoenix. When Mrs Leese died I stopped going to Portland Road. I still have some of their records. Of course it would be madness to try to play them now, especially the famous Nuremberg speeches. The people who took over laughed at me. I told them I was there from the beginning. I knew Mrs Leese’s protégés, I knew them well, those young men of fine words and noble motives. They created the National Front out of the ruins of the old movements but then through bitter in-fighting proceeded to destroy everything they valued. What if Hitler had thrown away his chances that way? I asked Mr Jordan one day, when he was speaking on the corner, as he used to, What would have happened to Germany, then? We would all now have pictures of Uncle Joe on our walls! Jordan agreed with me. He was trying to hold the party together. The trouble was, he said, that people were too contented. Eventually, when Socialism had brought the country to ruin, then perhaps we should see some progress. Well, the country is close to ruin but I do not see the emergence of a strong leader to save us, though the country cries out for one. Edward Heath is a petulant old queen. The ‘voters’, the public, slouch outside my shop wearing the banner of Anarchy on their chests while they pour cans of beer, purchased at state expense, into their loutish throats and wash down their ‘blue beauties’ and their ‘bombers’ and glare at me from permanently glazed eyes, the true inheritors of Makhno’s drugged rabble, who lost our Ukraine to Ulianof, Bronstein and Djugashvili, that First Triumvirate who ruined old, noble Russia much as their predecessors had ruined virtuous Rome.
In Odessa the black smoke drifts and the goats sprawl sleeping in the streets, possessed of a power they hardly understand and for which they feel no responsibility, while against the riot of the hellish sky the great black He-goat rears up, frothing and glaring, his voice a victorious bray, and brings his pointed hooves of brass down upon the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, smashing the gold and white dome like an egg. I took the tram from the Greek Bazaar and was for a while in Arcadia. My life was saved but they had put some metal in me while I was trapped in their shtetl. The metal is still there. Much of the time I do not feel it, then comes a little stabbing, then a sharper, harder pain, then some sort of convulsion. It has poisoned my blood. The doctors will not prescribe or operate. Only the cocaine controls it and of course that is so expensive, these days, I cannot always afford it. These silly little boys. They think it is strange an old man likes a drug they believe they invented! They do not even know what the pure thing is. Cocaine was always the king of drugs. Even their progenitor Freud admitted that. The rest is rubbish. I control the pain, but there is anxiety, too, and a certain numbness. I have explained all this to Doctor Diamond and he says that it will heal in time. I have more than once suggested an exploratory X-ray or investigative surgery. He says it would be too expensive and they might not find anything. He is an idiot, a Donald Duck. Give me a magnet, I tell him, I’ll find it for you. It has sharp points. Sometimes I think it is in the form of a star. It brings nausea, often at night, when I wake up suddenly. The good Jew in Arcadia was just a little too late.
He was a journalist. He worked for the newspapers in Odessa. He had a wife, but she was already in France. He knew what they had done, I think, and felt guilty on their behalf. But he was not to blame. I loved him. Should I trust my emotions so completely? He was so gentle. Sometimes I wonder if it was not he in fact who did this to me, while I slept. Was I seduced by Lucifer? But I will not judge a man just because he is a Jew. It is not in my nature. I love all humanity. I should not suspect the journalist. It would spoil too much.
Oddly, these thoughts were often with me after Shura had gone. I felt depressed and lost and even the smooth, blue waters of the Sunny Med could not improve my mood.
‘Alexandria is like no other Levantine port,’ Captain Quelch told us as we went down to quarter-speed. He and I stood in shirt-sleeves on the main deck enjoying the evening heat. We would not see the city of Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Lord Cromer until the morning, and there would be no Colossus, as in ancient times, to signal the port’s position. We had crawled all day along the Egyptian coast, occasionally meeting customs launches and bum-boats, so as to steam in early next day when, Captain Quelch said, we should not have to sit outside at anchor all evening waiting for the pilot to come aboard in the morning and we would also have the first choice of docking berths. ‘And yet, she is all of them combined.’ He laughed at this contradiction. Wolf Seaman and Mrs Cornelius were with us in the stern, drinking some new cocktail Shura had invented while aboard. ‘At first sight you’d think you’d arrived in Yarmouth. The facade is that of a prosperous English resort disguising a particularly disgusting version of the Naples slums. We British are masters at disguising wretchedness not with grandeur and pomp, like the French or the Russians, but with respectability. The very dullness of the buildings suggests they have nothing to hide. Look at London. The most impressive building in St Pancras is a Gothic railway station. It is all the visitor remembers.’
Since the rest of us had never visited Alexandria and only Mrs Cornelius knew London, we had no means of judging the measure of Quelch’s descriptions, although I was inclined to trust them. He did not hate the Middle East, but he did not idealise it either.
That evening I was feeling somewhat gloomy at the prospect of parting from my new friend when I had only recently been forced to lose an old one. Since Tripoli I had been especially glad of Mrs Cornelius’s company but inevitably this made Esmé jealous. Once more, she was taking her meals in her cabin, though the sea-sickness was no longer a problem. Thanks to her, however, Wolf Seaman had reco
vered his humour, such as it was. He had been nervous, I think, afraid his master Goldfish would learn of our unofficial passenger and decide to recall the expedition. With Shura safely in Tripoli, he became merely surly, no longer quick to start an argument. What was more, for all Mrs Cornelius’s declaration that my Esmé was as useful as a roast ham at a synagogue outing, my little girl overcame her natural shyness, devoting her time to placating Seaman. I reminded Mrs Cornelius how Esmé had become a useful peacemaker. Mrs Cornelius tartly suggested the word I wanted was pirsumchick and I decided to hold my tongue on the subject. Women can be baffling at such times and I suppose I should be grateful they did not come to active war on board the Hope Dempsey. I saw nothing wrong with Esmé’s wish to win the approval of a man who might be useful to her but it was hard for me to understand why Mrs Cornelius, who was not above such strategies herself, could be so critical of a child who would never be her match in the art of ‘vampirism’. I am being complimentary. I have been too long in the world to judge the way anyone - man or woman - makes their living. And for women I agree it is harder, these days. Men are no longer bound by religion and conscience to protect them. Women have more to lose and they must take greater risks. That courage was what I admired in Mrs Cornelius. Why should she despise the same qualities in another woman? Is the competition so fierce? Are the losses so great? Ikh farshtey nit. Because I cannot bear to see two women whom I love at odds, this is somehow a sign that I am insensitive? Here, too, I have also learned to keep my mouth shut. If Catherine Cornelius asks, believe me, I am a feminist. Besides, I have never been against another person’s sexual preferences. Love, I always argued, is the only really important thing. Love, even now, could save us from the pit, from the suffering God puts upon the earth to warn us what Hell is like. It was love which saved me from the camp, in the end. ‘We must learn to understand one another. It is our only chance. To succeed in that will make the rest of this worthwhile.’ With tears in his eyes, Herman Goering himself spoke these words to me. He could not bear to hurt a fly. He had become a vegetarian. I suppose I should think myself lucky that because I try to tell them about the whole man I have merely been accused of fascism. They hounded Goering, after all, to his death. I wept for him when I heard the news, but I was not allowed to speak. I remained silent, like Peter, and I am ashamed. For it was Herman Goering who saved my life. Yet still the world refuses to let me honour him. Society has become too simplified for me. Paradox and contradiction are now the sole province of TV futurists and pop surrealists. They were allowed to make it their own. They became a commercial monopoly. Thus the very qualities distinguishing humanity from the beasts were isolated and turned into a show, something speculators could invest in and which spectators would pay to look at. Fantasy and invention, vision and speculation, all were placed in their own ghettos during the Great Simplification. The human race warred on the very elements which made it distinct. It warred on the Twentieth Century. It devoured and destroyed its own Time. It fought complexity. It fought variety. It fought individuality. And slowly, like Stalin, it began to win. It stifled those elements to death first by putting them into special categories, then by eliminating them entirely from the consensual consciousness, making them something alien and perverse.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 19
