Earthly Powers (32 page)

       "So Adam and Hawwah went forth in sorrow, and the curse yet holds on the generations of man, save for the blessed. For the blessed remake in their lives the innocence of Adam and Yedid, and their embraces call back the joys of Eden."

       Ralph said nothing for a while, then he nodded, saying, "Why shouldn't that be as true as the other story?"

       "This," said Robert, "is made true by the sheer act of writing it. Shall we eat something now?"

       After their luncheon of red meat and redder wine the two lovers returned to their Eden on the fifth floor of 15 his, rue St. André des Arts. In the midst of their writhing sweat-soaked embraces Ralph said, "So the beasts become our brothers."

       "What do you mean?"

       "This." And the boy took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpared nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen.

CHAPTER 30

"Benedicent numen my arse," Ford Madox Ford pronounced. He breathed out, with the smoke of his caporal, a mephitic hogo that soured the wine in its glasses. That halitosis, however, had to be excused, indeed reverenced: it was the olfactory equivalent of a missing limb, since Captain Ford had breathed in lung-rotting gas, a volunteer infantryman contemned by some of the London literary for his patriotism, a good soldier among despicable scrimshankers. "Not my arse," he then said. He then said, "It won't do, will it?"

       "Do you mean content, or do you mean style?"

       "You can't separate them, as you ought to know. Joe Conrad's sea smells of Roget's Thesaurus, as I was always telling him, but he wouldn't listen. Your act of buggery here smells of unfrocked priests. Or untrousered, if you like." He delivered another whiff of phosgene rot. "If by content you mean the general subject matter, seducing a boy and then justifying it by rewriting the Book of Genesis—well, that's nasty enough, but there you have my view as a heterosexual, not as an editor. As an editor, I think your style reeks of dirty shirts and sweaty socks. You may be making your living by writing books, but don't start calling those books literature."

       "And what is literature?"

       "Oh my dear fellow. Ask Ezra over there. Words charged with meaning, he'll tell you. Make it new, he'll say."

       Ezra Pound was, I think, dancing with Sylvia Beach, or it may have been Adrienne Monnier. And you may as well have Ernest Hemingway shadowboxing his way round the periphery. Ford had just lumbered about the floor with a little Irish girl, frizzed auburn, who came up to his breast pocket and so missed the greater part of his panting effluvium. The Irish girl called herself a painter. The band consisted of a black cornetist named True Vanderbilt, a drummer with an artificial left arm who came from Marseilles, a consumptive violinist, and my brother-in-law Domenico. The place was the Bal Guizot on the Boulevard des Capucines.

       The passage from my novella A Way Back to Eden, which Ford had been pretending to read (he read nothing through, ever, unless it was in French; he would just pick out the odd trope and never forget it: ah yes Benedicent Numen Toomey) and you have just read, may seem, from its position here, to represent a fiercely resentful reaction to Raffaele's sanctimony, but it was written four years later than that day of the wedding and was rather an attempt to cash in on the new candour which the Paris expatriates, particularly Jim Joyce, were dishing out in the sacred name of modernism. Ford Madox Ford was starting a new magazine called tiansatlan, tic review (the lower-case initial letters were modish, the Charvet cravat of modernism), and I had a transient itch to be taken seriously by the littérateurs as opposed to my lower-middle-class readers in Camden Town. I had half expected Ford's verdict, but I was bitter.

       I said, "You seem to be implying that there's something wrong with making a living out of writing books. I call literature verbal communication. I'm communicating verbally with a largish readership. You'd give such teeth as you have left to be able to do that."

       "Not at the price one has to pay, my dear fellow."

       "The price of clarity, intelligibility?"

       "The price of cliché, half-truth, compromise, timidity."

       "There's nothing timid about this," I said, taking from his limp podgy hand the typescript of Chapter Three of A Way Back to Eden and waving it at him like a notice of distraint on his goods. "This has never been done before. Don't start telling me about compromise. You can't run a magazine without consulting your financial backers. Don't sneer about timidity. You just wouldn't have the nerve to publish it."

       "Call my lack of courage aesthetic fastidiousness. I wouldn't have the nerve to publish a newly discovered draught of a suppressed chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Or a Manx rhapsody from Hall Caine. Empurpled royal greatness, indeed. Benedicent numen."

       "What's that about Newman?" The music had stopped and Ezra Pound was back at the table. Hemingway was engaged on another lap of shadowboxing. The band was getting up to take its break and Domenico was being rebuked by the cornetist for something, failure to keep time probably. Pound frowned, a bearded but moody poet of great energy. He had substituted for his native Idaho accent a kind of eclectic British English with a rolled Scotch r. "There are not," he said, "many prose writers as good as Newman." He gulped wine.

       "Better," Ford blasted at me with his breath. "Perhaps that's what you meant. The empurpled royal greatness of the prose of the benedicent cardinal." He wheezed what was meant to be laughter. "You really have to think these things out first," he told me. "Harmonics, purposed ambiguities. You see how absurd it is having a sainted British cardinal beaming down on a pair of buggers." There were no ladies at the table. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier were on their feet near the bandstand, arguing hotly with, I think, Larbaud. I sulked briefly then perked up. It was envy, these people were envious, even Pound was envious. I had made money out of writing—Windfalls of the Storm was in its seventh printing. Anyway, Domenico had arrived at the table. He sat down, at his ease with literary men; his brother-in-law was a literary man. Mineral water was brought for him, stronger drink was forbidden the musicians till closing time. The patron had lively memories of a drunken Algerian trombonist who had, the night he was fired, used his instrument offensively.

       Domenico said to Pound, "You saw Antheil?"

       "It will go in, he says. It's the right length." Ford, having a dirty mind, wheezed briefly. Domenico beamed. He looked very much the Latin Quarter Parisian these days, thin, shabby, unshorn, the garret musician straight out of Murger. He and Hortense had a two-room apartment overlooking a timberyard in the Quartier des Gobelins. They were young strugglers, no more money coming in from Gorgonzola, but that was the way she wanted it. He played the piano and copied band parts in a neat hand. He did orchestrations for Paul Trentini-Patetta, the light opera man. He kept on with his composition. He had, I knew, written a fantasia for four player-pianos, six differently pitched Javanese gongs, and a wind machine. This was a kind of belated futurism, stale Marinetti, and it chimed, in its cracked bell way, in with what the American George Antheil was making modish-aeroplane symphonies and factory chaconnes and the rest of the Bolshevik nonsense. These two, Ford and Pound, thought more highly of Domenico than they did of me. Domenico was modern. He played jazz in a real jazz band with a genuine Negro cornetist. This sedulously dissonant fantasia of his was going into a concert that Antheil was organising. The craze—hungry with money would be there—Harry and Caresse Crosby, Lady Gertrude (Binky) Carfax, the Principessa Cacciaguerra. So Domenico beamed. Those days when we had concocted a tuneful and witty oneact postPuccinian diversion were over. My failure to get the thing done at Covent Garden did not depress him in the least. He was into the avant-garde now. Lessons from Nadia Boulanger? She could teach him nothing about the harmonics of the internal combustion engine. MartinŸ? He had actually seen a key signature in one of MartinŸ's scores, terribly vieux jeu. He was going to write a concerto for railway engine and orchestra, the orchestra to be accommodated in drawn coal trucks. Harry Crosby would back that. Then would follow a quartet for Cunard liners, unbacked by Nancy Cunard.

       I said to him, "A word with you. At the bar."

       He got up shrugging. At the bar were a couple of bored poules. It was early yet. The place would fill up with Americans at about two in the morning. The decor of the bar was martini-glass aluminium templates tacked to a steel-blue ground on which clouds of genuine duck down floated. Boris the Russian prince served me a cognac. "She says," I said, "that she's not coming back. Not until she gets a written apology. And if I were you I'd add some flowers."

       "I cannot afford flowers and you know it. Bitch."

       "You mean myself or my sister? If the latter, don't dare to use that expression again."

       "Her place is with her husband. I have my rights."

       "She also has rights. Including the right not to be struck in the face wantonly, cruelly, peevishly and repeatedly."

       "You know why it was so."

       "I know why it was so. And I know," I said more kindly, "that it will happen again unless you both go to see a doctor, a specialist in these matters. There are simple tests. There are cures."

       Domenico groaned. He looked furtively around. The patron would be in his office at this hour, eating a tray supper brought in from Les Hespérides, a restaurant on the rue de Sze. "Vite, Boris," he said. Boris gave him a sly cognac. Domenico downed it, returned the glass, the glass was washed, all over. The patron, perhaps having once got into the line of fire of Captain Ford, did not go around smelling breaths. To the table of Ford and Pound, I now saw, Hemingway had come, sweating heavily. Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach were also there. John Quinn, a stern American lawyer, attired as for court, entered and looked around him with distaste. Ford and Sylvia Beach waved. Quinn approached them. Pound did frantic fingerclicking for a waiter. I saw what was going on. Quinn had money and was a great buyer of literary holographs. They were going to try to get Quinn drunk.

       "It cannot be me," Domenico said. "Carlo says it cannot."

       "That's because there are no sterile men in the Bible," I said, "only barren women. Does he propose praying over Hortense to drive out the demons of fruitlessness? Fruitless, totally. Go to a doctor, both." But I knew that Domenico did not desire a child, a son of course, out of pure philoprogenitiveness. There was a lump of Gorgonzola money involved in the production of an heir.

       "I'll give you fifty francs," I said, "to buy some flowers. You should be able to get some good ones with that." He sulked. "Look," I said, "I'll write the note of apology for you. All you have to do is to sign it."

       He smiled at me with his mouth only. "You are on my side. Why should that be?"

       "Male solidarity," I lied. "No man likes to be accused of sterility. Besides, I want her out of my place. Damn it, I'm not her mother, heaven rest her. I'm a strictly male establishment."

       "What is she doing now?"

       "Sitting there, waiting for that letter of apology." This was not strictly true. She was still in bed, moaning in hangover. I should have been stronger and not let her go the previous night to the Four Arts Ball at the Porte d'Auteuil. Domenico certainly would not have let her. But what could I do? She was twentytwo now, a responsible married woman. Harry and Caresse Crosby, American playfolk, both with beautiful parchment skin and quivering mouths, had seen her lunching with me the day before at L'Alouette on the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. Me they knew vaguely and vaguely respected as a writer who earned money. They did not know my work but they assumed, since I was living in Paris, it must be fashionably unintelligible except for the sex scenes. They cooed over Hortense's beauty, which was now considerable. That skin, they raved, that hair. She must come to the Four Arts Ball. How, I wondered, did Harry Crosby think he was going to be admitted, he was not a student. It was different, of course, for girls. He would get in all right, said Harry Crosby. He would pose as one painting a nude for the Prix de Rome. The motif this year was Roman and senatorial. Bedsheet togas, bodies painted bloody with Caesar's blood, fantastic Medusa coiffures for the girls. I did not like the idea at all. Hortense did, very much. Her eyes grew large, mirroring twice a fat woman nearby who gorged on June strawberries and Chantilly. What could I do?

       She had been dumped, this noon after, outside the main door of my apartment building on the rue Bonaparte, red-painted and naked except for a long pale blue man's shirt, with a note attached to a string of Woolworth pearls around her neck: POUR M. TOUMY. The concierge quacked long and loud in disgust. I got Hortense up to my flat and fed her strong coffee which did not only not stay down but, the black wave meeting the breakwater of her uvula, came whooshing out unswallowed.

       At five o'clock, the hour for my China tea and petits fours, she was blind but articulate, aspirin bouncing off her centres of pain like little rubber balls, in occasional agonies of eructation as effervescent salts chewed at her acid. A supper party first at 19 rue de Lille, where the Crosbys lived. Sackcloth over the walls and chairs and bookshelves. "Stripped like a destroyer for action," Crosby had said. Eighty guests, students and girls. A champagne punch made of forty bottles of brut, five each of gin, whisky and cointreau. Canapes by Rumpelmayer, mostly trampled into the carpet. Harry, Caresse, Mai de Geetere (who?) all in the bath together. Harry took a sack with ten live snakes in it to the Porte d'Auteuil. He opened the sack and dropped them from their party loge onto the stripped dancers. Screams, but at the end of the affair a fat black girl was seen suckling one of the serpents. There were some pigeons ritually slaughtered to the opening words of the mass in default of appropriate pagan Latin. Real though thin blood dripping onto the writhing bodies of a couple coupling. Copulation? Oh yes. What did you...? Do you remember anything more? Oh Christ I remember a lot but don't remember everything. She remembered waking up that morning in the Crosby bed with five other people. It was a gramophone woke me up. A man no one seemed to know playing it, dressed only in that pale blue shirt there. Tell me more. I want to know what happened. Oh Christ let me sleep.