Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "Slobberer. Making me all wet."

  "There's something on your mind. Something's happened. Tell me."

  "I'm going home." He started to get up, but I pushed him back into his chair, saying: "No. Don't say that. Don't break my heart."

  "There speaks the popular novelist. 'And then he tried to take him in his arms, slobbering over him.' No, that's not popular novel stuff, is it? Not yet." (Did he say not yet? The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet. I nearly wrote, some lines back, "1918. November the something. Does it matter?")

  "Be honest with me, Val, darling. Tell me what the matter is."

  "Go and sit down. You must get used to not kneeling any more."

  "Some things have to be done kneeling." It was a coarse thing to say; it was the spray off a mounting wave of desire. He ignored that but looked at me with a lifted upper lip. I went to the gas ring and put the kettle on for tea. I had no coffee.

  Val said, "It's all take with you and no give."

  "I give my love, my devotion. But I take it that you've begun to want more."

  "Not me. Not want. I'm tired of having only an audience of one for my poems."

  "Ah. I see. So you're letting that come between us. I've tried to place them, you know that. I've shown you the letters of rejection. But they all say you must keep on writing."

  "Jack Ketteridge, that pal of Ezra Pound's. He's been given an old handpress. By someone both loving and generous."

  "I'd give you an old handpress if I had one. I'd give you anything."

  "I don't mean that, silly. I don't want a handpress. I want to be printed, not to print. Ketteridge is calling his little enterprise the Svastica Press. Apparently the svastica is a Hindu sun symbol. It means good luck too. He'll do my volume for twenty pounds. Two hundred copies. That's cheap, I think."

  "So that's what all the sulks were about. I never give you anything. And you know I can't give you twenty pounds. Why don't you ask your father?"

  "I prefer to go," Val said, "to those who say they love me. And I don't mean what my father calls love, which is just possession and bossiness."

  "I'll get the money. Somehow. An advance on royalties, perhaps. Though I'm not really ready to start the next novel, the one I've told you about, the modern Abelard and Eloise--"

  "I know, the man who has his pillocks blown off at Suvla Bay. I know too that you don't like taking money in advance. You've told me often enough about it making you resent doing the work when you've spent the money and thus doing it badly. I know, I know, Ken. You needn't bother. I just want you to know my motives, that's all."

  My heart sank, the water bubbled cheerfully. Faith. Faithfulness. I had stemmed the thought at the very moment of unwinding the can of corned beef: what right had I to expect fidelity if I was myself withdrawing it? Superstition was already replacing faith. And here it was coming now, my punishment. Men are right to be superstitious. I said nothing for the moment, keeping my back to Val, making tea, weak tea because I was near the end of the packet of Lipton's Victory Blend. At length I said, in what in my fiction in those days ("And in your later days too, dear" Geoffrey) I would have termed a strangled voice: "Who is it?"

  "I want you to understand me properly, Ken. Do turn round and look me in the eye. I want money, not for myself, but for what I think's important. Oh, I may be stupid thinking it's important, but it's all I have."

  "You have me." I looked into the pot to see how the tea was drawing. "Had me."

  "This is different, Ken, you old stupid, you know it's different. Anything for art. Bernard Shaw said something about it's right to starve your wife and children for the sake of art, art comes first."

  "No, no, it doesn't." I poured two cups of tea and put canned milk and grey wartime sugar on the table. "Love first, faith, I mean fidelity. Who is it? I want to know who it is."

  "You won't know him. He comes into the shop, he has an account. A great seeker of first editions of Huysmans. He knew Wilde, or so he says. Older than you, of course."

  "And richer. Prostitute," I then said. "Whoring. You don't know what love is."

  "Oh yes I do. It's eating corned beef stew, or not eating it, and then getting cramps in a single bed and smelling the ghost of onions at dawn. Sounds a bit like Blast, doesn't it? That Rhapsody on a Windy Night man. Well," and he cocked his head at me whorishly, "do you fancy a bit of a farewell tumble, dearie?"

  "Why do you do this? Why?"

  "Perhaps," he said solemnly, "it's to make you turn against me. That tea looks awful. Warm cat piss. One thing anyway. No more Saturday afternoon tumbles and the odd night with the onions. My dear father and mother have known nothing, guessed nothing. Caution, Ken, is it right to be so cautious? Well, no more caution. After the leg of lamb tonight--and I'd better go now or I'll have to eat it cold--I tell them I'm leaving. Yes, leaving. We always have dinner late and then father gets somnolent. This will wake him up."

  I, during the above, moved with the slowness of a tired old man to the bed with its harlequin cover and sat on the edge. The tea steamed untasted. "You propose telling them you're going to live with another man?"

  "Ah yes, but they're so innocent. They'll think: Well, at least he's not going off to live in sin with a woman. What I'll say is that I'm sick of living at home. I want to come home as late as I please. And if they say young, you're too young, I say: Yes, young, but not so young as some killed at Ypres and on the bloody Somme. This, I'll say, is the new age, the modern world. Two men sharing a flat in Bloomsbury. Though, between you and me, Ken dear, it isn't a flat. It's quite a nice little house full of books and bibelots."

  "Who is it? I want to know who it is."

  "You've asked that already, in exactly those words. 'A certain monotony of locution.' Who was the beastly reviewer who said that? Ah, the Times Lit Supp, wasn't it, no names no packdrill. Look, a last loving kiss and then I must fly. I'm starving."

  And so he left me starving. I lay on the bed and wet the pillow. Then I smoked a cigarette (I had almost written: lighted a cigarette with Ali's Maltese cross present). I had given him no last loving kiss, the little whore. I brooded less on Val's perfidy than on the injustice of the what I would have called had the term been available then Sexual Establishment. Nothing to hold together two male lovers, or female either, no offspring, no sense of the perpetuation of a name and a family face over the centuries. But of course I had nothing to offer a wife or wife surrogate--no house, no income. The great clanking chains of Justice sounded from without, a Piccadilly Line train supplying the basic fantasizable datum. My washed eyes took in my mother's letter, the French scrivener's hand in violet ink on the envelope, the Battle postmark on the decollated head of George V. Home, warmth, the bleeding patients passing from the surgery through the hall, my mild father with blood on his hands, my mother's precise English with the Lille tonalities. I had gone out into the world and the world was making me bleed.

  CHAPTER 13

  My mother said in her letter that they were managing, but her heart was torn with the tearing of France. They had enough to eat, an advantage of living in a farming district, and Father, rather in the manner of Irish country doctors, was prepared to take his fees occasionally in eggs and butter. Tom, my brother, in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Boyce Barracks, had completed a gas corporal's course, whatever that was. My sister Hortense, named for my mother as I had been named for my father, had had as good a sixteenth birthday party as could be expected in these sugarless times. Father Callaghan of St. Anthony's in St. Leonards had heard from Dublin that his cousin Patrick's appeal had been rejected and that he was to hang for his part in the abortive rising of last Easter. My mother hoped I was happy in London and was herself so happy that I would be coming home for Christmas. If only Tom too could get leave, but that apparently was too much to ask for. All this was written in neat violet-inked French, making the news about Father Callaghan's cousin somewhat remote and literary, and even the butter and eggs seemed to belong to Un Coeur S
imple.

  I finished the letter, buried my head in the pillow for another passionate cry, this as much to do with lost innocence and the mess of the world as with Val's defection. Then I dried my tears, smoked another Gold Flake, and got up to look at my eyes in the cracked blue mirror of Mrs. Pereira. Then I washed them in warm water from the kettle, soaking a tea towel corner for the purpose, and afterwards took several deep breaths. I had books for review; I could review them more comfortably in Battle than here, in the smell of onions and among the remembered smells and sounds of Val. I had money enough for a single fare to Battle; there was, I knew, a train from Charing Cross just after nine.

  And so I packed my little bag, put on my arty hat and my warm coat, and went out into the dark that was crowned by a zeppelin moon to Baron's Court station. I traveled to Earl's Court, changed, arrived at Charing Cross. The station milled with soldiers and sailors, many of them drunk. There were whores in trim boots and boas, also grim respectable ladies ready with grim looks for fit young civilians. Such patriots had once been ready with white feathers, but there had been too much handing of that badge of cowardice to men blinded at Ypres not well able to understand the meaning of the proffer. I was looked at, but no more. I decided, as I sometimes did, to limp to the train. It was as much a certificate of immunity as a uniform.

  There were not many on the Hastings train, and I had a compartment to myself. I was traveling back to my youth via Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, Frant, Stonegate, Etchingham, Robertsbridge, via defecting Val and two boys I had myself betrayed, the young man met on a station platform who had given me a look to which I had responded and about which I had been mistaken and who had shouted aloud and made me scurry off scarlet and trembling. I was traveling back to the origin of it all, my back turned for the moment (for I preferred perversely to sit facing the engine) to a future I did not care to think about.

  I had been seduced at the age of fourteen in, of all places, the city where Father Callaghan's cousin was to be hanged. Not at the Thomas More Memorial School, where there were ravening priests enough and an Irish headmaster who did his share of cautious fumbling, but in a fair city which regularly exported its sexual perverts to London and Paris. We were all there in Ireland that June of my fourteenth birthday, Mother, Father, little Hortense and growing Tom, myself in a school blazer and flannel trousers and a blue cap with a TMMS badge in yellow stitching. For the evening I had a stiff grown-up-style suit that was becoming short in the leg. We stayed in the Dolphin Hotel. My father was taking his annual holiday early because he could find no locum tenens for July or August; also Tom had had severe bronchitis and had been recommended a quiet couple of weeks by the sea. My father had once enjoyed a stay in Kingstown, now called Dun Laoghaire, and my mother was curious to see an English-speaking Catholic capital. She had also read Les Voyages de Gulliver and been moved by the brief account of Swift's life prefixed to the edition she had. We stayed some days, as I remember, in Wicklow and then in Dublin before moving north to Balbriggan.

  I was tired of poor still-coughing Tom and my noisy drawer-wetting little sister. My parents proposed a trip to the Phoenix Park; I elected to stay in the hotel, though the weather was gorgeous, and read an old bound Boy's Own Paper I had picked up for twopence on a bookstall. So I sat in the lounge of the Dolphin, sucked lemon toffee, read. I was alone there. From the bar came hearty noise, Dublin being a bibulous town. And then there was a man sitting quietly beside me. He was in early middle age (thirty-seven, as I was to discover later), bearded, wearing curious clothes that, again later, I found out were homespun. He had a rather pleasant smell of peat and peppermint overlaid with Irish whiskey (I knew even then the difference between Irish and scotch) and he seemed desirous of talking.

  He said, "Reading, I see. But would you not consider it to be very trashy stuff?" For he could see it was the Boy's Own Paper.

  "I like it. The stories are exciting."

  "Yes, inculcating the imperial virtues, games and discipline and cold baths in a cold dawn. And all but the British very comic, comic niggers and froggies and even micks and paddies. Aren't I right?"

  "Well, yes." I couldn't help smiling. What he said was a plausible, if biased, summary of the ethos of the B. O. P.

  "But you're young, of course, and out for excitement and not much concerned with the world as it truly is. How old would you be?"

  "Nearly fourteen. Fourteen a week from today."

  "A fine age to be, my boy, and the world before you. And there will be changes in your life, you will see." He had a pleasant soft voice with blurred consonants. "It will be a different world from what the trash you are reading bids you believe is the fixed and unchanging one. But never mind, never mind. In youth is pleasure." He searched in his pockets for something, perhaps a pipe or snuffbox, and came up with a drawing of a pig lined like a map with frontiers and named regions--hock, ham, saddle and so on. "The Pig's Paper they call the journal I edit, not at all like the one you're reading. Our friend sus scrofa, Ireland's friend, the gintleman that pays the rent. I'm in damnable need of a wash and brush-up," he then said. "Are you staying in the hotel? A room of your own? Who's with you?" I told him of the Phoenix Park outing. "A bathroom up there, is there? I don't know the upper regions. I should be grateful if you'd show me the way."

  So I took him upstairs and, to cut a long story short, he came into my room to borrow my comb for his beard, and said, all glowing from his wash, "Now there's just time to show you a bit of Irish wrestling from the County Meath, for I'm due soon at the offices of the Homestead. Now this we do stripped, as we may well do on a warm day like today. So strip then and I'll show you some of the holds." One of the holds involved what I was to learn later was called fellation, a term not found in the B. O. P. nor, for that matter, in any dictionary of the time. There seemed to be no Irish name for it, though this pigman used the word blathach for what was stimulated to burst and flow. He gave me a shilling for myself before leaving and said, "Now you may resume reading your imperialistic trash, though I'll wager it will seem less exciting after today." And, smiling kindly, he went.

  Jim Joyce devoted a whole big novel to the Dublin day on which I was seduced. I have never been able to take this book seriously, as I told him myself in Paris. All the inner broodings and exterior acts of the work seem so innocent. I remember none of the public events described or reported--the viceregal cavalcade (though I seem to recall a distant military band shrilling and thudding), the charity bazaar fireworks, news about the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River and Throwaway winning the Ascot Gold Cup at very long odds, nor the evening rain nor the heaventree of stars appearing later hung with humid nightblue fruit. My mother that evening stayed in with the younger children; my father took me to see an excessively dull melodrama called Leah.

  I said to Joyce in a bar in Paris in 1924: "Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library."

  "I wouldn't want to call you a liar," Joyce said, his eyes as cloudy as the ghastly cocktail he had before him (absinthe with kummel in lieu of water), "but I'd always thought Russell more likely to commit sodomy with a pig than a boy. Ach, the world is full of surprises."

  I liked Jim Joyce but not his demented experiments with language. He threw away the chance of becoming a great novelist in the great tradition of Stendhal. He was always trying to make literature a substitute for religion. But we met in an area of nostalgie. His common-law wife Nora was a strong-minded and strong-jawed woman who would not put up for long with his nonsense. I took him back drunk one day, and Nora was waiting for him like thunder. As soon as the door shut I could hear the hitting begin.

  CHAPTER 14

  I walked from Battle station to my father's combined surgery and residence on the High Street, a stone's throw from the abbey. A railway porter going off duty walked two hundred yards behind me, singing, to the tune of "Pretty Redwing":

  "Oh the mo
on shines bright on Charlie Chaplin,

  His boots are cracking

  For want of blacking,

  And his little baggy trousers they'll want mending

  Before they send him

  To the Dardanelles."

  I arrived. There was a holly wreath encircling the door-knocker. I knocked and was benignly pricked. Then I heard my sister Hortense running, calling, "It's him, I know it's him." And then I was encircled by arms and the odors of home.

  The smells of that time, the smell of that time. I have always cherished the smells of places and eras. Singapore--hot dishrags and cat piss. Moscow builder's size and the unflushed stools of the smokers of cheap cigars. Dublin roasting coffee which turns out to be roasting barley. The whole of 1916 had a mingled smell of unaired rooms, unwashed socks, bloody khaki, musty mufti, the rotting armpits of women's dresses, margarine, cheap gaspers made of floorsweepings, floors swept with the aid of damp tea leaves. It was a very an-American smell, one might say. The smell of my father's house, however, mingled the neutral surgical and the Anglo-French domestic. As I entered I met the ghost of a gigot for dinner, well-garlicked, and caramel, and hovering over the distracted faint fumes of cocaine and nitrous oxide. The two worlds met in the aroma of oil of cloves. And then there was my mother, the familiar odor of a red wine on her breath (like the priest bending with the host at the altar rail) and the delicate envelope of eau de cologne.

  "What a surprise, what a lovely surprise," said Hortense, who adored me. "You said you wouldn't be coming till the twenty-first."

  "I got Mother's letter this afternoon. And then I thought: Why not now? There was nothing to keep me in London." My eyes pricked.

  "Lonely, a lonely place," said my mother with her deep voice. And my father, in his alpaca house jacket, watch chain flashing on his growing paunch, smiled from a kind of shy distance. We were now in the parlor, where a fire of pearwood explained another delicious odor I had not been able to place. Hortense, home from school, had festooned the room with paper chains. Holly and mistletoe and ivy. A Christmas tree in the corner with little dangerous candles not yet to be lighted.