‘Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man who spares these stones
But curst be he who moves my bones.’
‘That too,’ Silversmith said, ‘is a shitty lyric.’ Enderby was constrained, though silently, to agree with him. He then lost himself in the bowels of the theater among shut cabin doors, fat heating pipes, growling engines. A big place, he concluded, having passed twice the same boilersuited men playing cards. At length he found himself in the wings of a stage and he timidly ventured onto the stage itself which, true, had no curtains and jutted far into an auditorium far too large for the town of Terrebasse but not for playgoers from the state capital, which was near. Less shyly, he moved downstage in the dusk mitigated by a working light and tried certain lines:
‘By God, I will follow them to London and make my fortune there, acting plays and eke writing them.’ Terrible. A man who now appeared in the wings with a hamburger seemed to think so too, for he clapped faintly.
Enderby went down to the auditorium and through it, uphill, to doors which led to a wide corridor. Then there were stairs and he came to the administrative area, where girls and grown women were typing. He was somewhat late. Toplady glowered from his open office. Silversmith was already lying on the floor. Toplady’s office was full of framed posters of his triumphs in high colour and fancy lettering. Toplady drank coffee from a paper cup and so, with some loss of the substance, did Silversmith. No coffee was offered to Enderby but a chair was. Toplady sat behind his desk. He said:
‘What’s the story?’
‘The story, yes. Shakespeare, or Will as we may call him for brevity’s sake, said that already, sorry, leaves wife and children in Stratford and goes to London. He sees how the Londoners like violent sports like bearbaiting and beheadings at Tyburn, so he writes the most violent play ever written. I see you presumably know it, Mr Ladysmith, since a poster there says you once directed it. Not a good play. In fact,’ he said daringly, ‘a lousy one.’
‘Go on.’
‘This leads him to the Henry VI plays and the friendship of the Earl of Southampton and at least acquaintanceship with the Earl of Essex, who wants to be king of England. Then there is Richard III, which leads him to the Dark Lady. She sees the play and falls for Burbage who plays the lead, and wants him to come to her bed with the announcement at the door that Richard III is here. But Will gets there first and is at his work when the announcement comes and says tell him William the Conqueror comes before Richard III.’
The anecdote made Enderby smile but the two others remained gloomily watching. He continued:
‘The Earl of Southampton takes the Dark Lady away from him and he falls into depression and whoring and drinking. You could have a song about that,’ he suggested.
‘Depression, whoring and drinking,’ Silversmith sang from the floor.
‘And then comes the news that his son Hamnet is very sick. He rushes to Stratford to find his boy dead and being buried. But he becomes a gentleman. Too late, too late, alas. This,’ Enderby saw fit now to explain, ‘is a play about guilt.’
‘Go on.’
‘End of first act. Second act Will is involved in Essex rebellion through putting on Richard II, which appears to justify usurpation. He sees Essex beheaded and fears he will be beheaded himself. But the Queen tells him to stay out of the big world of politics. He is a little man, she says. He goes home to Stratford and looks after his land and sues everybody in the manner of a country gentleman. Then he dies. A brief outline only.’ Silence. ‘It could be expanded.’ Silence. ‘A lot of things happen really. Marlowe, Ben Jonson. Sex and murder.’ Silence. ‘No limit to dramatic possibilities. Gentlemen,’ he added.
‘You know what this is really about?’ Toplady eventually said.
‘Of course he could have syphilis, if that would help at all. He probably did have. Marvellous description of symptoms in Timon of Athens. Read it sometime. Nose dropping off, voice getting hoarse and so on. Everybody had syphilis in those days. America’s gift to Europe. All the world’s a tertiary stage, he might have said. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.’
‘What I said,’ Toplady said more loudly though untruthfully, ‘is that this play is about its two stars.’
Enderby coldly answered his cold stare. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘like the Guide Michelin?’ He had no confidence whatsoever in Toplady.
‘I mean,’ Toplady said, ‘Pete Oldfellow and April Elgar. They’re the stars. You’d better believe it. You can’t put April on for a single scene and then shovel her off like dogshit. Once she’s there she’s there. You see that?’
‘I don’t,’ Enderby said, ‘think I know the lady. The name, of course. Elgar’s a great name. But I thought the family had died out. Worcestershire, as you know.’
‘April is black,’ reproved the voice from the floor. ‘April is only Worcester in the sauce sense. April is the hottest property. April is tabasco.’ Enderby listened with unwilling approval. This was pure poetry.
‘April Elgar,’ Toplady explained, ‘is a great singing star. You don’t seem to realize what’s on here. We take this show to Broadway by way of here and Toronto and Boston. It could run for ever.’
‘Why,’ Enderby asked, with seeming irrelevance, ‘did you pick on me?’
‘Had to pick on somebody,’ Toplady said. ‘We didn’t want one of these professors. Mrs Schoenbaum has to be convinced she’s getting what she asked for. Meaning Shakespeare. Now get this first act ready. Shakespeare comes from Stratford bringing his kid with him.’
‘Hamnet? But he didn’t. Hamnet stayed with his mother.’
‘You may,’ Toplady said, ‘think I’m an ignorant bastard, but I know what I don’t know. More important, I know what you don’t know. What you don’t know is what really happened. Okay, who’s to say he didn’t bring his kid with him? He brings his kid with him but he protects him from the dirty world. He puts this dirty world on the stage. The Dark Lady comes into his life. He neglects his kid and his kid dies – plague, mugging, falls from a scaffold, gets roughed by a mad horse, gang rape, anything will do. So, right, you can have your guilt and remorse or whatever the hell it is.’ He scooped the gift towards Enderby with a Toledo dagger Enderby assumed was used as a paper-knife. ‘She leaves him for this other guy, the Earl of Southampton or Sussex. She’s got ambitions, right?’
‘Essex. But look here –’
‘Who cares what sex, right, but she’s back in Act Two. In Act Two Shakespeare wants his son back so he turns him into Hamlet, and Shakespeare plays the Ghost.’
‘You got that from –’
‘Never mind where I got it. The rebellion’s because she wants to be queen. She only gets to be queen in Shakespeare’s dream. She becomes Cleopatra. When he’s sick and losing his teeth and getting old, she drops him. But she’s really his mooz.’
‘His what?’
‘His inspiration. Fella, you have enough to be getting on with. But remember we don’t have all that much time.’
‘Right,’ came, unurgently, from the floor.
‘My title,’ Enderby said. With great reluctance he had to admit to a faint admiration for Toplady. Horribly blasphemous and obscene though it was, he seemed to know what he wanted.
‘Your title is out. Who wants to see a musical called Whoever Hath Thy Will? There’s a lot round here can’t say th. I thought of Goats and Monkeys. You know where that comes from.’ He nodded up at a poster advertising his production of Othello, in which everybody in the blown-up photograph of turmoil on Cyprus seemed, except for Othello, who, in his general’s uniform, looked like Patton, to be black. ‘That’s our working title, anyway. Something else may turn up. There’s a room and a typewriter along there. You’d best get moving.’
Enderby humbly obeyed, or at least got out of there. Silversmith said: ‘Your first lyric is the Tomorrow and Tomorrow one. Get it finished today.’
4
; IN THE DARK bar of the Holiday Inn, whisky sour before him, Enderby wrote a lyric:
Give the people what they wish:
Something trite and tawdry,
Balladry and bawdry –
Give the people what they wish.
Give the groundlings what they crave:
Bombast and unreason,
Dog and bitch in season,
Prophecies of treason
Rising from the grave.
Pillaging and ravishing and burning,
Royal heads and maidenheads
Presented on a dish,
In a pie.
Let them eat their stinking fish –
What they find delicious
Soon will seem pernicious.
When the time’s propitious
That diet will cloy,
They will come to enjoy
What I wish
What I wish
What Iiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Wish.
Let that bloody Silverlady or Topsmith try that one, see what his rhythmical sense was like. Enderby began to sketch the dialogue that followed. He preferred to work here than in the room they had given him. Too many people kept looking in to see how he was getting on. The mistress of Silvertop came twice to giggle. She was a thin long girl with red hair who was to play Queen Elizabeth. Enderby had set his scene in a brothel. Will in the dark with a spot on him while singing. Lights come up to disclose whores in undress. Henslowe with his account book. He frowns on Will and waves him away.
‘State your requirements to the madam. She will be down anon.’
‘No no no. It is you I want. Or him there, your son-in-law. Master Alleyn, that is.’ For Ned Alleyn has appeared, putting his doublet on.
‘I know you, I think,’ Henslowe says. ‘You owe me fourpence.’
‘I owe nothing, not to any man. Forgive my seeking you here. I have a play.’
‘Ah, sweet Jesus, will they never give up?’
‘Listen. You may have it for nothing if it runs not more than three afternoons.’
‘A prodigy,’ Alleyn says. ‘He owes no money and he gives things away.’
‘Listen. I’ll be brief. The scene is Rome. A barbarian empress is captured by the Romans but allowed her liberty. Hating the Romans nevertheless, she urges her sons to ravish a noble matron.’
‘Why?’ Alleyn asks.
‘A sort of revenge. Listen. The sons kill the matron’s husband, then ravish her on her husband’s dead body, which serves in manner of a bloody mattress. Then, that the wretched woman may not tell, they cut out her tongue.’
‘Go on. To hear costs nothing.’
‘That she may not write the names of her ravishers, they cut off her hands as well.’
‘Dirty stuff,’ says Henslowe. ‘Go on.’
‘But she takes a stick between her two stumps and then scratches her ravishers’ names on the earth. Then her father avenges her.’
‘Ah’ from both.
‘He kills the sons and he grinds up their bones to a flour. With this he makes a coffin of pastry. The filling is the cooked flesh of the two sons.’
‘Indigestible,’ says Alleyn. ‘Let me see your script.’
‘More indigestible than Tyburn hangings and quarterings? Then he invites the mother to a cannibalistic feast. There is also a black villain that gets the Gothic empress with child – a black child.’
‘“He cuts their throats – He kills her – He stabs the empress – He stabs Titus – He stabs Saturninus –”.’ Alleyn riffles through.
‘And the Moor, a sort of black Machiavelli, he is buried up to his waist and left to starve.’
‘Delectable,’ says Alleyn, and he declaims:
‘Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done.
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.’
So then the lights go out on that side of the stage, and on the other side the lights go up, those same final words of Aaron the Moor sounding again through the theatre, electronic blessing, as a ballet of stabbers and ravishers and poisoners prances to a music of screams and groans. Boys carrying publicity posters – HENRY VI I II & III – RICHARD III – thread through the dancers while Will, downstage centre, repeats his song. He makes way for Alleyn as Richard Crookback, who delivers a bloody speech. Lights go up on previously darkened segment to show the Dark Lady with her duenna, rich brown flesh and diamonds and crimson brocade, watching and listening intently. A note is passed to Alleyn as he exits. All this might do very well. Enderby stopped scribbling on his yellow legal pad. If they could get somebody to do better let them bloody well get on with it. He raised his empty glass to himself and also to the shortskirted blonde matron who was waiting on. He deserved another of those.
He had, he had to confess, given in to those two in some measure. The travelstained Warwickshire yokel, snotnosed son held by the hand, gawking in a London street. Growling bear led off to its baiting. A severed head or two gawking back at Will from gatespikes. Bosom-showing wenches. Hucksters. A bit like a dirtied-up opening for Dick Whittington. And then Will sings to Hamnet:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow –
That makes three.
The first tomorrow is for me.
The second tomorrow – we.
The third tomorrow – thee.
I start with my poetic fame,
I then restore the family name,
And last of all I see
Thee –
Sir Hamnet, Lord Hamnet
The day after the day after tomorrow.
I pledge that these things shall be.
Terrible, but the music was terrible. Henslowe follows his growling bear. Will follows Henslowe. Good idea: Hamnet, left outside the brothel, finds his way in, seeing lust and bosoms. The beginning of his corruption. Two first scenes there in, as they said, the bag. The company could start rehearsing.
Enderby looked at his watch. Time to ask somebody at the front desk to seek him a taxi. He had to go to dinner at Mrs Schoenbaum’s. Toplady, thank God, would not be there: there was a play on and he had to give his troupe confidence by glaring at them from the wings. The play was some libellous nonsense about the Salvation Army by a dead German named Brecht. Silversmith had taken a flying, literally, visit to New York to superintend what he called the pressing of an album, old-fashioned phrase recalling the crushing to death of flowers in young ladies’ commonplace books.
He got a taxi with small difficulty. 1102 Sycamore Street. What’s that number again, mister? The driver, a white man with Silversmith wire-wool hair, seemed to be, as they said here, stoned. He growled all the time like Henslowe’s bear. 1102. Ain’t never heard of that number. I can assure you it does exist. What’s that you say, mister, and so on. There were no sycamores. Sumachs, rather, and a kind of hornbeam or carpinus betulus. The driver seemed dissatisfied with his tip. He looked at his ensilvered palm as though Enderby had spat into it.
Enderby was let in by a muttering black man in a white jacket. Mrs Schoenbaum was there in the hallway to greet him. ‘Mr Elderly? We are so honoured,’ honored, really. Enderby shyly took in riches. Daubs on the walls which must be what were known as rich men’s impressionists, cost millions. He knew that Mr Schoenbaum was dead from making money. Mrs Schoenbaum was clearly enjoying her widowhood. She wore a kind of harem dress of silk trousers and brocaded sort of cutdown caftan. Her silver hair was frozen into a photographed stormtossed effect, clicked into sempiternal tempestuousness on a Wuthering Heights of the American imagination. Her eyelids were gold-dusted and her lips white-lacquered. Her nose looked as though its natural butt had been surgically cut off. She took Enderby by the hand and led him into a salon with more daubs discreetly lighted. Enderby tottered and then recovered on bearskin
s laid on pine overpolished. ‘Whoops,’ Mrs Schoenbaum said, holding on to his hand. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘you know nobody here.’ That was true. An evidently hired youth playing cocktail tripe on the Bechstein in a far corner sent over to Enderby a vulgar conspiratorial look. Enderby was introduced to two overweight men who got up from a couch as long as a barge with some difficulty. A middle-aged woman laden with beads did not, quite rightly, get up, but she fixed Enderby with eyes of hate. One overweight man was from the University of Indianapolis. The other seemed to be a lawyer or something shady of that kind. Enderby did not catch the names. ‘Mrs Allegramente,’ or something, said Mrs Schoenbaum, ‘has promised to demonstrate her powers for us after dinner.’ This Mrs Allegramente said, as Enderby boarded the couch and accepted a whisky with ice from the muttering black:
‘When are you British going to quit Northern Ireland?’
‘Which British do you mean?’ Enderby asked with care.
‘You colonizing British who are holding that poor country in a vice of disgusting tyranny.’
‘Nothing to do with me. Ask Henry VIII and the Tudor founders of the Protestant plantation,’ he jocularly added.
The Complete Enderby Page 62
