"No," Ben said. "Let me read instead." He looked at the fair copy that was also the first draft and read to himself:
Conserve agst ye putrifyinge feende
The fathe yt fedde oure fathers, quite put doune
His incarnacioun in thes worst of tymes,
Casting hys hedde discoronate to ye dogges.
Then he said: "They will not let you. This will be construed as present treason."
"I am sick of it all," Will said. "The black bastards of Puritans in Stratford that will have nothing but grimness, and a church that is the lapdog of a slobbering king and no king. My father died quietly in the old faith, I will die more noisily in it."
"Have you spoke of this yet to any?"
"To my lord Cecil, aye, and he said he needed no more spies aping to be papists to dig out popish plots. I have said it to many, but none will take it that I mean what I say. It is part of the peril of being a player, that all one says is thought to be but acting."
Ben said, "The great work is now in page proof. They expect it to be out in the new year."
"What is all this to do with what I said?"
"The forty-sixth psalm has shake and speare in it."
"That is not possible. None would have it, this I knew. It would be seen as bombastic and overweening."
"Tillotson, one of those charged with the overseeing of our emendations, said that the two words came nearer to the original than what they formerly had."
"That is not possible."
"He had never, I could see," and Ben smiled sweetly, "heard of the name Shakespeare."
"Let us," said Will, "go and drink."
2
ZARF.
Enderby came fighting awake with the word halfway down his nose. With too an unexpected and certainly premature homesickness for La Belle Mer in Tangiers, expressed in thirst for tea made with six Lipton sachets in the mug with the blazon CHICAGO – MY KIND OF TOWN. His men, Antonio, Manuel and the lad from Tetuan called Tetuani blowing on boiling lemon tea in glasses inserted in handled metal zarfs or zarfim. Windy Tangerine morning.
The mug had been given him by a Jewish visitor to Tangiers, citizen of that city full of wind, who claimed acquaintanceship with a Jewish novelist called Bellow, name appropriate to a windy city. Enderby did not read novels. Even less did he practise the craft of prose fiction, but he had published much earlier in the year a short or shortish story. This was in response to a Canadian university magazine's begging for free contributions, preferably money but prose acceptable. He had submitted a fantasy about Shakespeare's free contribution to the King James Bible. That was why he was on this aircraft now. They rode over an endless bed of dirty whipped cream. High above the wind.
He had had the fantasy in mind ever since the sneering response to his Collected Poems in the British literary press. Shakespeare must have suffered the same kind of self-pity, doubt as to validity of vocation and all the rest of it, reading sheers from MAs Oxon. and Cantab. in duodecimo summations of the proto-Elizabethan literary achievement, the greatness of Munday, Tibbs, Gough, Welkinshaw and other swollen poetasters, bellowsed by bribed or sincerely stupid criticasters. But Shakespeare could comfort himself by stroking his coat of arms and thinking on the swelling of his acres and bags of malt stored up against the next eagerly awaited famine. He, Enderby, could not in honesty find a germane comfort in his proprietorship of a Tangerine beach restaurant with changing rooms for pustular bathers.
In the aircraft a film was proceeding. It was, to Enderby, a silent film, for he had no headset as it had been called. He had been unwilling to pay 3 dollars 50 for the hire of the apparatus. In from and behind and to his left fellow passengers were undergoing each the private experience of hearing shouts and screams and the roar of flames as people were burned alive in an aircraft. It was a very indiscreet sort of film.
He would, he had said a month ago, addressing himself to a bloody shave, write no more verse. There was nothing else to write about. Yet here he was being commissioned to write not only verse but mock Tudor dialogue. A musical play on the career of William Shakespeare to celebrate, for the commission was inevitably American, the second American centennial conjoined with the three hundred and sixtieth anniversary of Shakespeare's death. It was not immediately clear what connection there could be between the death of a poet and the birth of a sort of nation, and Enderby puzzled fuzzily, as the burning aircraft struck the sea and presumably sizzled, about the arithmology of the conjunction. 360. It was well known that Thomas Jefferson, Augustan voice of liberty, had possessed 360 slaves. With 360 degrees a wheel came full circle. With two centuries you came full circle twice. It was all a lot of nonsense.
The film ended with certain people wet but rescued and then an endless rolling list of the film's perpetrators. Plastic blinds were pushed up and the cabin's ports let in sick light. All that dirty whipped cream. The man next to Enderby removed his headset and said:
"It was about this aircraft catching fire."
"So I gathered," Enderby said. "A visual experience really."
"I guess you could say that." He was middle-aged, overfed, and his face flaunted peeling shards of scarfskin from, Enderby divined, exposure to the Spanish sun. The plane came from Madrid. "Guess," he said, doing it with thickish fingers, "I'd better adjust my watch to Chicago time."
"My sort of town," Enderby said.
"Is that right?"
"No, it's on this mug I have. For tea, that is."
"Is that right?"
If he could have tea now, real tea, not the gnatpiss they prepared in that sort of galley there, he would have it with seven sachets, not six. As you got older you required your tea stronger, that was laid down somewhere. Enderby was getting old.
Not too old though, by George or by God, probably the same person, for some new small adventure. The world of the theatre or theater, by Godgeorge. America, by Gorge. He had gone, on receiving the letter, to his private quarters to look up Indiana in Everyman's Encyclopaedia, an oldish edition but, if the place at all existed, it would probably be there. It seemed at first not only there but very big and exotic, but it was India he was looking at. Indiana was, he found, just under India House, demolished 1861. N. central state of the USA, generally known as the Hoosier State. 91 per cent of total area farmland. Iron, glass, carriages, railroad cars, woollens, etc. Climate remarkably equable. Leading cities Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Evansville, Gary. Terrebasse not mentioned. The theatre in Terrebasse was called the Peter Brook Theater. He looked up in another volume Brook, Peter, but found no information. Some local villainous benefactor requiring memorialization perhaps. He said to the man next to him, hands on lap, watch adjusted:
"Hoosier."
"Pardon me?"
"The Hoosier State."
"That's what they call Indiana."
"Why?"
"If you're from Indiana you're a Hoosier."
No help there. He did not much like the sound of it. It sounded like the kind of jeer which might well greet, in a territory nearly all farms, a sensible stage presentation of the main facts of the life of a major poet.
The man reimposed his headset, got his money's worth, and turned a little black dial on his seat arm. "Foog," he said with disgust.
"Pardon me?", this being apparently the right mode of request for repetition or elucidation.
"This guy says they're going to play a foog."
"Fugue," Enderby said with energy. "Tyranny of the verse line. They say there's no rhyme for fugue. But in song there is. Another fugue, oh, please no, Hugo. You can rhyme anything in a song. In Massachusetts ah took the pledge. Each glass ah chew sets mah teeth on edge."
"That's it, I guess," the man said; not listening, turning the black knob to, Enderby supposed, something infugal.
Enderby took from the inside pocket of his decent though oldish clerical grey suit the letter from Ms Grace Hope, a name he could not believe. Hollywood agent mixed up for some shady reason with play promotion. U
nderstood from Toronto office Enderby only man who could do it. On strength of Toronto-published work called Will and Testament. Enderby occasionally feared that the letter, having been maliciously typed in disappearing ink, might emerge from that pocket a folded blank. Fare and expenses recoverable, but must pay them himself first. Artistic director, Angus Toplady, was, he being a director, to direct. Long creative discussions required, meaning everybody wanted to be called creator nowadays. Consequence of death of God or something. Music to come from pencil of Mike Silversmith, valued client of Ms Hope. It was all there, though stained with strong tea and fried eggyolk and hamfat, breakfast reading. Frank Merely, London associate at World Creation in Soho Square, arrange contract. Enderby doubted the reality of all these names.
Well, the place would continue languidly to run in his absence. A home, after all, for Antonio, Manuel and Tetuani. They were good boys really, despite their kif and buggery, as honest as could be reasonably expected in a Moroccan ambience. A sufficiency of farinaceous meals in the kitchen, a doss down wherever it was convenient to lay the night's mattresses, the odd sly nip, though haram for Tetuani, from the bottles behind the bar. With their master away they would all sleep on his floorbed, covered with sheepskins. On his return they would still be there tiredly sweeping and frying, though reporting no profit with triumphant teeth, since no profit was better than a loss.
A beefy voice announced through static an impending descent to O'Hare Airport. There Enderby must find an aircraft that would take him to Indiana. There he was to be picked up by some minion of Toplady, who was possibly a debased descendant of the author of Rock of Ages, and be driven to a Holiday Inn, though not for a holiday. Having seen on Spanish television a film with Bing Crosby about the pioneering of this hotel chain, Enderby had an image of a large shack of decayed wood with snow swirling about it. But this was autumn, or the fall, and, the weather of Indiana being equable, there would probably be no snow.
A silly asthenic corn queen came round collecting headsets. The neighbour of Enderby gave his up and then turned to Enderby as if, he relieved of the responsibility of using it, the two of them could settle to an urgent colloquy necessarily deferred. "This your first visit?" he said.
"To where?"
"To the States."
"Well, yes, though not, I assure you, for lack of previous invitations. I should have gone to New York to become a professor for a time. A consequence of The Wreck of the Deutschland* you know. It was a question of one or the other. So I chose this. More creative than Creative Writing, if you see what I mean."
*See The Clockwork Testament.
"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.
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.
Enderby's Dark Lady Page 4
