‘Is that right?’
‘More or less. A blasphemous cinematic adaptation of a great mystical poem, and I was involved, though in a way unwittingly. I didn’t intend it should turn out the way it did.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Very much so.’ Enderby had not been speaking English for a long time. It struck him that he was speaking it now as from a book. He must do something about making it more colloquial. ‘Putting the boot in,’ he said. ‘The Nazis shagging coifed nuns. Violence and violation. Too much of that around.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Too much of that around.’
This man did not, as might be expected from even an enforced companionship of several hours, assist Enderby on his entrance to a strange land. He was quick to get away with no valediction. Enderby was on his own. O’Hare Airport seemed very large. The immigration officials seemed to let everyone in, even Americans, very grudgingly and only after looking up every name in a big book like a variorum edition of something. But Enderby was eventually permitted to have his luggage examined with great thoroughness. The examiner of luggage was a hard man in outdoor middle age.
‘What’s this?’
‘A kind of denture adhesive or tooth glue. A Spanish product. For affixing dentures to the gums or, in the case of the upper prosthesis, to the hard palate.’
‘What?’
Enderby was roughly prevented from demonstrating. The stomach tablets came under closer scrutiny. The customs officer took samples of each in little vials.
‘For dyspepsia,’ Enderby said, and demonstrated the sonic aspects of the condition.
‘You mean you got a bad stomach?’
‘Only after eating. The food on the plane was bloody awful. They warm everything up, as you know.’
‘Why,’ the officer asked with great earnestness, ‘are you entering the United States?’
‘To work in what you people call a theater.’
‘You an actor?’
‘I am a poet. I am Enderby the poet.’
‘What?’
‘If you want proof,’ Enderby said, coldly pointing to his messed up shirts, ‘there are my poems.’
The officer picked up the book with the tips of his fingers. He opened it. ‘Don’t make much sense to me,’ he said.
‘Every man to his trade. What you’re doing with people’s luggage doesn’t make much sense to, ah, myself. So there we are.’
‘Listen, fella,’ the man said quietly but rudely, ‘I got my job to do, right?’
‘And I mine.’
‘There might be narcotics in those things you got there for your stomach, right?’
‘Not right. I never touch them. Seen too much of the effects. But I thought we were talking about poetry.’ The people behind Enderby were looking at their watches and muttering for Chrissake, as in an American novel. Enderby was growlingly let go. He walked long and in some pain through several miles of airport building. Twinges in the left calf, cholesterol buildup. There were a lot of irritable people, also shops and restaurants. He saw many copies of his own mug on sale. When he came to the place where it said INDIANAPOLIS he was exhausted. He would have given anything for a mug, CHICAGO MY KIND OF or not, of very strong tea. He compromised with a couple or so capsules of Estomag, chewing them vigorously. An eager shifty thin little man in jeans and a dirty singlet came up to him and said: ‘Hi.’ He had a shock of wirewool hair but was not Hamitic. Nor Japhetic either. ‘Mike Silversmith,’ he said.
‘How did you know it was. Recognition, I mean.’
‘You opened that bag to take out that stuff that’s all round your mouth. There’s a book in it with your name on.’
This was not the kind of assumption that Enderby liked. People with names like Gomez or Krumpacker could conceivably be comforting their journeys with the Collected Poems. Conceivably, only just. Enderby wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘The composer,’ he said.
‘Right.’ He sat without invitation next to Enderby. ‘I got these cassettes in my bag here already. They’ll knock you. “To be or not to be in love with you”. Then there’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow”’
‘And Tomorrow,’ added Enderby. ‘It’s three times. But it’s me who’s doing the words.’ Colloquial was coming nicely back to him. Anger was paying its first visit. He had thought it might be like this.
‘You and Shakespeare,’ Silversmith said. ‘“To be or not to be in love with you”. You take it from there. But you hear the tune first.’
‘How about the words I’ve written already and which, presumably, you’ve seen. Already,’ he added.
‘Never get in the charts with them.’
They were summoned aboard by a man in a powder blue blazer.
‘What,’ asked Enderby with care, ‘kind of an orchestra do you propose?’ A black child clinging to its necessarily black mother’s hand looked up at him. They were shuffling aboard. Silversmith was in front of Enderby. ‘Viols,’ proposed Enderby, ‘recorders, cornetts, tabors. Authenticity.’
But Silversmith was addressing the imbecilic stewardess as honey. He knew her, he had come this way before. Or perhaps not. Enderby was obliged to sit next to Silversmith and then to put on a headset attached to a Japanese cassette recorder which Silversmith eagerly took from a scuffed bag. ‘Listen,’ Silversmith said. Enderby heard a voice, Silversmith’s from the sound of it, scrannelling perverted words from Hamlet while a guitar thrummed chords.
‘To be or not to be
In love with you,
To spend my entire life
Hand in glove with you.’
Then the voice, having no more words, lahed and booped on to the end, which was the same as the beginning. Enderby carefully fastened his seatbelt. He as carefully freed his ears of the noise and the foam rubber. Silversmith said:
‘You take it from there, right?’
‘Wrong,’ Enderby said. ‘If you think I’m going to permit William Shakespeare to sing inanities like that –’
‘What’s that word?’
‘Inanities. It’s a desecration.’
Silversmith sighed. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘it’s going to be like I told Gus Toplady it was going to be. You got too many long words in that thing you sent him. You got to consider the public.’
‘I’ve got to consider Shakespeare.’
‘Ah, Jesus,’ Silversmith said.
‘After all,’ Enderby said, ‘we were all warned.’
‘Warned about what?’
‘About disturbing his bones. There’s a curse waiting.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Silversmith said, and he pretended to go to sleep. The aircraft started to bear them to Indianapolis.
1 See The Clockwork Testament.
3
‘MORE OF A prologue or induction really,’ Enderby said.
‘In what?’ somebody crossly asked.
‘Come, come,’ Enderby said in an unwisely schoolmasterly tone. ‘You all remember your Taming of the Shrew.’
This resident company, lounging in deplorable rags in a kind of classroom complete with blackboard, did not seem to like being instructed in the terminology of drama by a man in a decent, though old, clerical grey suit. Their director was not dressed like that. He was too old, though, for the coûture and coiffure he affected. Dirty grey sculpted sideburns. Silk shirt of black covered with sharpnosed Greek heroes in gold in postures of harmless aggression. Grey chest hairs and dangling medallions. Chinos stained at the crotch. Bare feet in fawn suede cowboy boots. Enderby felt he himself was there as for the reading of a will, which in a sense he was.
The people not there were the people who should have been there. But Shakespeare was to be played by a film actor who was the husband of Ms Grace Hope, and he was making a film. The dark lady who was to play the Dark Lady was completing a nightclub engagement. Hamlet without the prince, Enderby had quipped. Gus Toplady had morosely replied that he had tried it in Minneapolis at the Tyrone Guthrie but it had not really worked. Ha
mlet off stage all the time, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern eavesdropping on inaudible soliloquy. What’s he say now? He say he not know whether he live or die but he use too many big words. Toplady had done a nude Macbeth somewhere. He appeared to have little confidence in Enderby. Enderby reciprocated with all his heartburn.
‘Shakespeare,’ Enderby said, ‘is dying. His ageing wife and two daughters sit by his bed, the wife audibly jingling two pennies. These are to put on his eyes when he shall finally close them.’
‘Why?’ asked a girl whom Enderby knew to be Toplady’s mistress.
‘The custom in those days. These are not what ah you would call pennies. Not cents I mean. Big pennies. English ones.’
‘Okay,’ Toplady said without compassion. ‘He’s dying. Forget the pennies.’
‘You can’t,’ Enderby said. ‘Shakespeare says: “Ah, I hear you jingling your pennies to put on my eyes. Do not fret, wife. I shall not keep you waiting long.” Then, though it’s still April, he hears the song of boys and girls bringing in the May. They sing the ah following:
‘Bringing the maypole home,
Bringing the maypole home,
Bringing the maypole home,
Bringing the maypole home.’
‘A deathless lyric,’ Toplady said.
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Enderby said, red. ‘It goes on:
‘Custom has blessed this strange festivity,
Licensing every gross proclivity,
Here’s the year’s nativity,
Here is life, let’s live it.
To sin it is no sin
When spring is coming in.’
He looked round for a positive response, but there was none, except of vague incredulity. He pushed on sturdily:
‘In his dying delirium he sees the mayers prancing about the deathchamber, his younger self and Anne Hathaway among them. He says: “Thus it began. She overbore me in a wood. Needed a husband, even though one ten years younger. Susannah there born but six months after the marriage.” Himself dying and his surrounding family fade into blackness, and the younger Shakespeare, whom we will call Will for brevity, is sitting in a chair nursing his son Hamnet.’
‘What happens to the singing and dancing?’ asked somebody.
‘That is ah sung and danced off. But this is another May and Will hears the song in the distance. He hugs his little son and sings to him as follows:
‘Little son,
When I look at thee
I am filled with won-
Der such wonder should be.
Part of me yet no part of me,
Wholly good yet the wood of my tree.
If I could
I would live to see
Fulfilled in me
The man that I can never be,
Born to property,
Richly clad retainers about thee.
Hawk on hand,
You survey your land,
Your acres shining in the summer’s gold
And I behold
The glory of a name
Restored to fame
It had of old.
Little son,
If these things should be
And I die before they are granted to thee,
Think of me as he who carved them
From the wood
For the wood of my tree.’
There was a silence. Toplady said to Silversmith, who lay on the floor: ‘Mike?’ Silversmith pronounced:
‘I say what I said already.’ Toplady said with cold eyes to Enderby:
‘Go on. But cut out the lyrics.’
‘But the whole of this ah induction is done practically entirely in song.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well,’ Enderby said, ‘Will goes to the window and looks up at the clear night sky. He sees, but we do not see, Cassiopeia’s Chair, a constellation in the shape of an inverted W, the initial of his name. He sings to it.’
‘Ah Jesus,’ said Silversmith from the floor.
‘He sings to it as follows:
‘My name in the sky
Burning for ever,
Fame fixed by fate
Never to die.
At least
I feast on that dream,
The gleam of gold, my fortunes mounting high.
To render my deed
More than pure fancy,
On lonely roads I must proceed,
My one companion a dream,
A seemly vision only I espy!
My name in the sky.
‘But then his wife Anne appears and sings a contrary song which combines in counterpoint with Will’s:
‘Will o’ the wisp,
A foolish fire,
Leads fools to fall
In mud and mire.
Better by far
The fire at home,
Smoke in the rafter,
Lamb’s wool and laughter –’
‘What,’ Toplady’s mistress asked, ‘does lamb’s wool have to do with it?’
‘Lamb’s wool,’ Enderby authoritatively defined, ‘was an Elizabethan drink for cold weather, consisting of heated ale mixed with the pounded pulp of roasted crab apples, which fragments floated in the ale like the wool of lambs in a high wind. Seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Highly fortifying.’
‘You’d have to have a programme note,’ said a bearded youth, ‘or some guy standing there to stop the song and explain it.’
‘Push on,’ Toplady said in the tone of one who leads a toiling party through a high wind.
‘Anne finishes the song:
‘Will o’ the wisp,
Do not desire
To follow fame,
That foolish fire.
Better by far
The fire at home,
Fresh dawn on waking
And fresh bread baking.
A will o’ the wisp
Should not aspire
To be a star.’
‘Mike?’
‘Like I said already.’
‘But,’ pleaded Enderby, ‘they both hear approaching song. It is the company of players known as the Queen’s Men. They have been playing in Stratford and are now leaving it, with their property carts and clopping horses. The troupe sings:
‘The Queen’s Men,
The Queen’s Men,
Not beer-and-bread-and-beans men
But fine men,
Wine men,
Music-while-we-dine men.
The Queen’s Men,
The Queen’s Men,
Of-more-than-ample-means men,
Are off now,
Doff, bow,
We will come again,
The Queeeeeeen’s Men.’
Enderby prolonged the long vowel in a gesture of song: ‘Hearing it, Will says: “By God, I will go with them. I will become a player and eke write plays –”’
‘Why does he go eek?’ a fat frizzy girl in crimson asked.
‘Eke means also,’ learned Enderby said. ‘Cognate with German auch. But he can say also if that is what is, ah, desired.’
‘That is, ah, desired,’ the girl said.
‘He says to his little son: “I will be back with fine gifts for Hamnet. And eke Susannah and Judith. And eke their mother.” Or, if that is still desired, also. Anne sings her Will o’ the Wisp song and Will his Cassiopeia song again, and both are in counterpoint to the song of the Queen’s Men. The scene ends. The curtain goes up almost at once on Elizabethan London in the full flush of victory over the Spaniards. A song is sung which begins with a kind of ah fart –’
‘Your first job,’ Toplady said, ‘was to find out about the stage. This stage has no curtains. Go and look at it sometime. No curtains.’
‘Except for someone,’ Silversmith said obscurely from the floor.
‘A sort of er fart,’ Enderby went on, ‘like this:
‘Prrrrrrrp
We ha’ done for the Don,
Clawed off his breeches
And rent every st
itch he’s
Had on –’
‘Right,’ Toplady said to the company, ‘you can see a lot of work has to be done yet, and our friend here says that this is only what he calls an induction –’
‘Shakespeare too,’ Enderby cut in. ‘You all know your Taming of the.’
‘Watch noticeboard for next reading call. Okay,’ dismissively. To Enderby he said: ‘You and me and Mike have to talk. In ten minutes in my office.’
‘You,’ Enderby said, ‘do not appear to like the project.’
‘I like any project that has a fart in hell’s chance of working. This project we’ve got to do. There’s money gone into it from Mrs Schoenbaum. She wants it and to Mrs Schoenbaum you don’t say no. But we don’t do the project the way you see the project or think you see it.’ He breathed on Enderby and exuded a memory of breakfast blueberry pancakes. ‘Ten minutes in my office.’ Both he and Enderby had to leave by the same door, but it was if they were to exit by opposed wings. Silversmith remained on the floor. Enderby said harshly to him:
The Complete Enderby Page 61
