‘Thanksgiving?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. Of course, that’s why they served turkey and pumpkin pie, ridiculous washy stuff. I’d nothing,’ he said, suddenly sorry for himself, ‘to be thankful for, really. Besides, they were a hell of a long time achieving a reasonable harvest. The Pilgrim Fathers, that is. Good theologians but bad farmers. No, I just stayed where I was.’
‘Where you going for Christmas.’
‘Same thing, I suppose. Turkey and. Perhaps they don’t serve pumpkin pie at Christmas.’
‘Christmas,’ she said, ‘you’re coming home with me.’
Enderby took that in very slowly. ‘Home?’ he said.
‘Not my apartment in New York. Home where my momma is. And the kids. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina.’
‘Kids? Which kids?’
‘My kids. Bobby and Nelson. Five and seven. My momma looks after them.’
‘And who,’ dithered Enderby, ‘is their father?’
‘Their daddy done go away,’ she slavesingsonged. ‘I tell him to get the hell out. He was prime meatjuice, baby, but he done hit the bottle and was a real no good mean nigger. Now he’s in a black stud agency for white women some place.’
‘In what,’ Enderby asked, ‘capacity do I? That is to say.’
‘Momma,’ she said, ‘don’t hold with poets and showbiz people and all that crap. She’s a gooood woman. Reads the bible all day. You got to come to momma’s house that I bought for her out of my sinful showbiz success as an Englishman spreading the word of the Lord, kind of a smalltown Billy Graham, dig, I worked all this out in mah lil what ah calls mah mahnd, you got to be called Reverend. You’ll be okay, momma cooks real good.’
Enderby had read in some magazine of soulfood, strange name, as though the soul resided in the lowliest of animal organs, intestines, hog’s bellylinings, spleens. Perhaps it did, black wisdom. Also mustard greens.
‘And,’ she said, ‘she makes tea good and strong in a quart brown pot, ladling it in by the shovel. She drinks it all day when the kids are at school, reading her bible. You better bone up on your bible, Reverend, don’t want to be caught out.’
Enderby warmed at once to the quart brown pot. ‘That goes with the name Johnson,’ he said. ‘Dr Samuel Johnson, great tea drinker. Boswell said he must have had exceptionally strong nerves.’
‘How did you know that,’ she asked, surprised, in a straight, or American straight, voice, ‘about Boswell? My great grandpappy was called Boswell Johnson.’
‘Some learned and facetious slaveowner,’ Enderby said, catching with no pleasure an image of elephanthided men called Cudge whining under Simon Legree whips in the cottonfields, what time old massa in the parlour read with mild interest a great record of the conversation of the English Enlightenment. And then: ‘Alas, I have no money. I can’t afford the fare.’
‘I pay, baby. Ah is a rich lil gal.’
‘Well, then, yes, thank you, it’s a great honour and you’re very very generous.’ Then he began to weep, he did not know why. The voice of Toplady sounded over loudspeakers, its very tones giving him a partial reason why, calling the company together. ‘Sorry,’ Enderby sniffed, ‘ridiculous, I know. Emotional lability. Creative tension, something. Again thank you.’
She laid on him hands intended for comfort but provocative of a ferocious glandular gear change and said: ‘Something’s going on in there, I know. Life’s not easy, kid. We’ll talk again, okay.’ And she darted off, showing a cunningly placed patch, affluent mockery of the Third World to which her colour entitled her to belong, but Abe Fourscore had changed all that, on her divine posterior. Enderby returned to his little room and switched on the electric typewriter, which sang gently to him of the need to work and not waste current. He relented somewhat (there was always this danger, adjacent toilet doors or a jaunty ‘Hi’ in the greenroom) and did not wipe her wholly out of Act Two, no confrontation of queens but mention of her part as evil genius of uprising, and then she was to languish in some jail or other or be thrown onto the ragheaps of Clerkenwell, no more be heard of Mistress Lucy Negro except as pocked whore. But then.
Then there was Hamlet, Will as ghost misnaming prince as Hamnet, sick for many reasons (death of son and end of Shakespeare line; his lordly friend Southampton in prison; the loss of a rare mistress, brightness falls from the air or hair) and sent off to Stratford to be made whole. And in marital embraces with ginger Anne (it had been decided, and no bad idea, to combine the parts of queen and Mistress Shakespeare) he dreams of Afric gold, Egypt being in Africa. And so Cleopatra. But who was he, Enderby, to adapt a great tragedy to the limited talents, New World phonemes and intonations and slangy lapses, cecity towards the past, Pyrrhonism and so on of this weak cry of players? A straight blank verse Cleopatra, and she could not do it. Dumbshow to music (not Silversmith’s, better to drag in some genuine musician from Indiana University, a Moog man who, forced to write tonalities wholly atmospheric, would produce the diluted romanticism that was his true, if suppressed, idiom?)? Enderby lighted a White Owl. Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/ Of the rang’d empire fall! The world well lost for love, and did the world include art and, for that matter, William Shakespeare?
Let’s have one other gaudy night,
Let’s have one other bawdy night
And fright the white owls away.
Come, captains, drink beneath the stars
Until the wine peeps through your scars,
Drink till the dawning of the day!
For some reason that needed a black voice, altogether male and fully ballsed, but it had to be the fag Oldfellow transformed in vision to a Will with a chest like twin kettledrums. And for her?
God knew, she was Cleopatrician enough as they boarded the plane for Chicago, she in plain moulded emerald dress with seagreen cloak that had flared in the wind as they left the taxi, he in cap and old overcoat, blinking without glasses. At Chicago they got on an aircraft bound for Raleigh, named for the father of smoking. Smoking, she said:
‘Now, honey, you can talk.’
‘What about?’
‘You know what about, kid.’
Enderby sighed like furnace. ‘You mustn’t,’ he said, ‘consider me to be a sexless recluse advancing into grey middle age. I live alone after a brief failed marriage. Unconsummated, indeed. She was a woman of great chic and skill and ambition, and she wanted to be married to a poet. Then she became well known as a manager of pop groups and similar abominations.’
She looked at him wideeyed, new angle on him. ‘Who?’
‘A certain Vesta Bainbridge who became a certain Vesta Wittgenstein.’
‘Oh Jesus, her I knew. She wanted to manage me one time. She was a bitch, one hundred per cent and no discount.’
‘Well, there you are then. The muse was very angry about it and went away. I couldn’t write. I attempted suicide. Then I was rehabilitated, as they put it. Then she came back.’
‘Who came back? La Wittgenstein?’
‘No, the muse.’ Enderby looked very gravely at the smoking goddess beside him, a meanly framed vista of American bad weather beyond her. ‘Personification, if you like. Writing poetry isn’t like adding up figures. There’s a force outside that gets inside and starts dictating. Easier to call it the muse. Her, I mean. She can be very jealous. She’s gone for good now, I think. So much and no more is granted to a poet. I’ve published my Collected Poems, to no applause. What I do in that bloody theatre or theater is nothing. Pure craft. Not so pure either. I hope I’m not boring you.’
‘No, honey. You just keep straight on.’
‘My feelings towards ah your divine self, then. With a woman a man has to effect a dichotomy. You know the word?’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘Sorry, you keep assuming this Topsy act, the slangy front to the world, the virtues of deprivation and so on. What I mean is. Well, it was you who mentioned the noumenon and the phenomenon aspect of things. I take your image to bed with me and devour it growling. Need, you know,
the filling up of the wells. Disgusting but ineluctable. A private indeed privy matter. But behind that is you, and yet not behind that, because your body is no mask. And if I say love –’ The aircraft responded to that dangerous word by meeting clear air turbulence. ‘– I mean, what the hell can you do with love except cleanse yourself of it by debasing the image to a lust object? I mean, what do I say, I, an ugly ageing man whose skin was never washed in the sun’s glory, running a beach restaurant in Morocco, all all alone? Marry me, prove that marriage can work, companionship and all the rest of it, let the love derived from total knowledge rub off onto the image and make it no longer an object of concupiscence, do I say that? Of course not. I suppose,’ he said heavily, ‘I wish to invoke a special relationship, impossible of course.’
‘Yeah yeah yeah. Quite a speech.’
‘And what,’ Enderby asked, ‘do you do about love? If I may ask.’
‘I tried it. Now I have my career. Not simple then, is it? You don’t just want to get laid.’
‘Getting laid,’ he said, ‘solves no problems. Love is a bloody nuisance.’ CAT agreed. ‘And we have the business of this damned musical play to make matters worse. Because you’re not Cleopatra. Divine, beautiful, heartstopping, a miracle of flesh and bone and air and fire but not Cleopatra. You see that?’
‘Yeah, baby,’ sighing like smaller furnace, ‘I know. I’m me. But I’m being paid to be me. Me singing songs and – what was the expression you used? Wagging my divine buttocks, yeah.’
‘And that fag Oldfellow as you rightly call him is not Shakespeare or Antony either. And I’m stuck in this thing, mired in it, and I can’t get out. Look, that damned thing’s on fire.’
‘Port engine? Yeah, it does that sometimes. How’s about my songs?’
‘It’s still on fire. No, it’s gone out now. No, it’s started again. Saw me getting on this plane, giving me warning. Leave his dust alone. It’s gone out now. No, it’s not. Yes, it has.’
‘Songs.’
‘One song. You can be Cleopatra in a kind of dumbshow, Will’s vision. Then he gets drunk with Ben Jonson –’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Not your brother, the other one. He dies of a sweating fit, and he sees you for one last time in his delirium. Love of his life. Inspiration. The future. Nature. Sex. Libido. The dark unconscious.’ Enderby kept his eyes warily on that port engine. It did not reflare. ‘The trouble is the words. The trouble is that that bastard fag Silversmith doesn’t understand prosody. The trouble is going to be the music. One song. Summing it all up.’
‘To be or not to be,’ she said. ‘Pure what’s the word ontology.’ Enderby looked at her with some awe. ‘To be or not to be, what is it you want of me, what am I to you except the one thing true that fades, evades, lives in the shades or a world unborn shorn of reality, no actuality, a dream, a gleam of gold unmined you’ll never find.’ Enderby wished now heartily to embrace her: what she was improvising complete with tune was, God knew, terrible enough but it would get the whole damn burden cleared off his shoulders, the godless task finished. But they now had to fasten seatbelts and prepare for landing. A lot of cold flat green. ‘I did some Creative Writing at Chapel Hill,’ she explained. When they were standing in the aisle to get out, following and followed by blacks and rednecks, none of any great beauty or distinction, he did attempt a tentative embrace. She was a slim girl, not much to get hold of. ‘Hey, hey,’ she said.
She drove them both expertly in a hired Avis Studebaker or something down what seemed to be dirt roads and then a highway towards the town of Chapel Hill, where also was the first of the United States state universities. Enderby did not know what to expect of her momma’s house. No log cabin, certainly, redolent of chitterlings. It turned out to be a nice little detached dwelling in pink brick with a flower garden, just behind a hotel called the Carolina Inn. There was an aged black hoeing.
‘Hi, Uncle Joe.’
He dropped his hoe in a clump of dead morning glories or something and went ‘Wha howya hawa wah haha yeah’ or something, chuckling his grey black head off. Then he came to the car to start taking bags out of the boot, trunk they said here, making to Enderby a similar speech, not however chuckling. ‘Hi ah,’ Enderby offered, straightening his tie, which, he knew, was royal blue with gold spots. And then he followed her up steps and into a nice little hallway smelling of aerosol magnolias. And then.
Well, he lay awake that night of Christmas Eve digesting his welcome, expressed best in many mugs of mahogany tea, also a homecooked meatloaf. Her momma a welcoming woman with grey curls, old, she the divine one a product of ageing loins, in a royal blue sack of a gown with gold spots, her body gross with the enforced farinacity of long deprivation. Lemme looka you Reverend, with sharp old eyes blurred by a milky meniscus. You faaaaar from home for de birt o de Lord Jesus, and so on. An upright piano and on it photographs of family large, dispersed, done bad to by whites, Ben and little May grinning at making grade, the father long dead in bogey accident on railroad. The kids, Bobby and Nelson, televisiongawpers like other kids, showing no enthusiasm at sight of festive square packages from Indianapolis. You take dem walkin Reverend while me and ma daughter has lil talk. So Enderby had to walk the main street of Chapel Hill, empty of college students because the vacation was on, with a little black kid in either hand. This was not something he had foreseen. The kids rolled eyes of suspicion up at him but also demanded Cokes and ice cream sodas. They also demanded to be taken to one of the town’s two cinemas, where a Swedish travesty of Fanny Hill was being shown. No kids allowed, he told them. He walked them back very wearily and at first could not find the house, nor could they, but at length saw the gardener wrenching up plantains and growling some ancient song of bondage. He and the kids had a brief colloquy that Enderby could not understand, and then the three of them went in. April Elgar had turned into May Johnson, in sloppy dressing gown and old mules, hair disarrayed and a daughterly whine. Enderby one of the family then.
He lay in the bedroom that had been intended, it seemed, for Ben the son, who had however Christmas engagements but telephoned from somewhere to his mother, who said you just do dat son and we be thinkin of you and lovin you just de same. After the meatloaf and collard greens and a Sara Lea creature, strong tea but no alcohol, Mrs Johnson opened up her bible, put on spectacles and looked over the top of them at Enderby. Enderby felt fear: he was going to be tested. But all she said was what your favourite psalm Reverend, and he was able to answer Psalm 46 and even quote some of it at her, so that she nodded and checked and said dat right Reverend. And then she said: what you goana preach about tomorrow Reverend and that made him spill his tea on his tie. She had him there in the corner of the combined living and dining room at the cleared table, while May Johnson had her arms about the two kids on the biscuit-coloured settee, watching Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in Holiday Inn. ‘The meaning of the Nativity,’ Enderby said, and she nodded and quoted about de census to be taken ob all de world in de time ob Caesar Augustus.
Well, he lay there. Mrs Johnson lay in the room next to his, her daughter in the room beyond, and the two kids on a two-tiered bunk in the room beyond that. This was neither the time nor the place to entertain lewd thoughts about April Elgar, so he lay there partly illumined by a sodium street lamp working out tomorrow’s sermon. Of course, this had been inevitable and he, or that blasted divine girl there, ought to have foreseen it. Distinguished visiting inevitably Baptist preacher all the way from England. It was not to give a sermon to Baptist blacks that he had come all the way from Morocco. He ought really to try to convert them to his own brand of apostate Catholicism, but perhaps Christmas was hardly a discreet season for that. Soon, a Holiday Inn face towel stuffed inside the crotch of his faded striped pyjamas in case of accidents, he slept. He slept remarkably well, and was wakened in southern winter sunlight by a small black boy bashing him on the shoulder and offering him a mug, no inscription on it, of very strong hot tea. The other black boy was with h
im, and then May Johnson herself came in in dressing gown and worn mules to wish him a merry Christmas and even to hand him a small gaudily wrapped gift. She also kissed him on the lips, her lips being warm from sleep and also greaseless, while the two kids looked solemnly on. Fortunately he had slept with his teeth in. He said, unwrapping:
‘Oh my God, you shouldn’t, I didn’t get anything for. Oh my God, oh just what I wanted.’ It was not really, being a miniature calculator to be worn on the wrist with a dusky screen that showed time playing the game of numerical transformation, squarish figures becoming other figures with the minimum of dim-lit metamorphosis. The day, and all the days to follow till the end of the world, were presented to Enderby as a linear process, not the fall-rise cycle of the poet. As for calculating, what had he to calculate? He looked at her, sitting on the bed edge, with humble gratitude, saying: ‘It was a problem of. Well, you see, I had to pay the hotel bill.’
‘You gave me a poem,’ she said.
He could not now very well upbraid her for getting him into this Reverend situation. He offered his tea mug to her but she shook her head. Enderby slurped. The voice of Mrs Johnson below called them to breakfast. The kids, jostling each other for precedence, ran. She remained seated, lovely though not, the deglamorized daughter, mythical. ‘Strange,’ Enderby said. ‘Here we both are, in a clinal situation so to speak, a bed context I mean, the Greek word means to lean or repose I suppose, hence bed, hence clinic by the way, and this has nothing to do with my feverish imaginings. Domestic, I mean. I weep at the impossibility of it all.’
‘Momma has breakfast ready. Eggs. Ham. Hominy grits.’
‘I’ll write you a proper poem,’ Enderby said. ‘You’ll see. I weep at the.’
‘Yeah, yeah, impossibility of it all. Say, there’s a good title for a song, Cole Porterish. The impossibility of it all, the sheer futility of it all. You must work on that.’
The Complete Enderby Page 68