Earthly Powers (33 page)

       "Waiting for that letter of apology."

       He nodded and then shook his head as if to shake the nod away, left the bar and went back to the dais and the reassembling musicians. Domenico nodded in time to the four-in delivered by the drummer with the false arm, then did a fourbar intro and then they were playing "The Darktown Strutters' Ball." That took me back a bit, all of four years, Domenico and Hortense and I and then that damnable Curry boy. I had been good since, comparatively. Creating lovers on paper. Buying the occasional thighs of a complaisant Senegalese. No commitments, no talking of love except on paper. Lonely as hell, except for my art, such as it was. Adrienne Monnier was trying to persuade John Quinn to dance, but he wouldn't or couldn't. A great big golden woman in royal blue. "Son frère," Boris said, "est prtre." I said I knew.

       If Carlo had ever spoken to his brother about the divine mystery of fatherhood, I doubt if Domenico listened or, listening, believed. I had been only a week before to the Catho (I was thinking vaguely of making my next hero an unfrocked priest) to hear Carlo give a very lucid lecture about certain heresies that had had to be uprooted from the Early Church. "Procrustes, Varius, Torquatus and others could not wholly accept the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. They argued over the true meaning of parthenos, which they said did not necessarily denote a lack of sexual experience. Saint Vitellius"—or somebody; there were so many of these early saints with names like Roman senators—"delivered a sermon at Antioch in which he said that there are a myriad myriad mothers but only one true father, our Father in heaven. The act of begetting is a creative act as miraculous as the making of the firmament: the divine seed passes from God to woman, but usually God employs a human male as the intermediary seminiferent. There is no necessity for God to do this, and, as a manifestation of his creative monopoly, he fructified the Virgin Mary directlyin the person of the Holy Spirit, whose primary function is that of God the Creator showing himself in human history—so that the birth of his Blessed Son might blazon the true nature of paternity. Human law wisely mirrors theological truth in that it stresses the frivolous impertinence of any human claim to fatherhood by regarding paternity as a state of its nature unprovable. The awful truth, as Tertullian wisely said, is, as so often, enshrined in the speech of the common people. It is a wise child that knows its own father, and, of course, vice versa. Any questions?"

       I have a strong recollection of leaving the Bal Guizot (Hemingway drunkenly making an unfriendly Pavian gesture at me, or it may have been one from Oak Park; Quinn very sober, face averted from Ford's breath as if he were confessing Ford) and almost immediately encountering Jim Joyce and Wyndham Lewis at an outdoor table of a café not far from the rue Auber. Joyce liked sometimes to drink in the onomastic vicinity of minor operatic composers. But if this was late June, time of the Four Arts Ball, and the year was 1923, Joyce ought to have been in Bognor Regis listening to the gulls cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" This quark was later to be the name given to any of three hypothetical subatomic particles having electric charges of magnitude one-third or two-thirds that of the electron, proposed as the fundamental units of matter. We writers, building greater than we know. I will abide by my recollection in defiance of biographical fact and affirm that I went to sit at his table in June night air that carried the prickle of the charge of a coming storm. Joyce was drunk. He had an empty Sweet Afton packet in his hand, the cigarettes themselves lying on the ground virginal and wasted in a sort of quincunx pattern. Things tended to form into patterns for Joyce, but he could not see the fallen cigarettes at all, not merely because of drunkenness but because of his deteriorating ophthalmic condition, the consequence of adolescent malnutrition and various kinds of self-abuse. Wyndham Lewis was sober and got up to look like an anarchist, though he resembled rather an undertaker. God, was the whole literary world in Paris in those days? Let us bring on Thomas Stearns Eliot so that I may tell him (out of a discovery made in the thirties) that he had no right to be ignorant of, and hence misuse in his The Waste Land, the constitution of the Tarot pack. A novelist could never get away with that sort of inattention to detail. But no, I did not meet Eliot till the time of the Spanish Civil War. Did I perhaps tell Lewis to inform Eliot that he had been stupid with his Man with Three Staves, "authentic member" indeed? Joyce said, in his querulous tenor: "Is that Toomey there?"

       He had not read me but he had heard doubtless that I was a mere popular novelist and not to be feared as a literary rival. I think he rather admired me for having made money out of a trade which he himself could pursue only with lavish subventions. I had put on successful plays, whereas his Exiles had failed; he recognised that playmaking was more skilled craft than inspired art. He prized my story about being seduced by George Russell in 1904, though he had made me swear to keep it to myself: he feared the impairment of the structure of a book which was supposed to possess the primary virtue of strict adherence to historical truth. Finally, I think he envied me my maternal French, and he sometimes tried to persuade me to spend the rest of my life as chief of the Joycetranslate d-into-French synod.

       "This is Toomey. Your servant, Lewis." Lewis snarled something back. I put a cigarette in Joyce's mouth and his lips took it with greed like the lips of a diabetic in coma being fed with a sugar lump. I lighted it, and he drew on the scorched tobacco as if only the sensation of labial heat could inform him that he was smoking. A waiter came and I ordered coffee and cognac. Lewis frowned at the waiter and did a squint and lip thrust in Joyce's direction to show that Joyce had had enough of the potable urine in the near empty bottle before him. The typescript of Chapter Three of A Way Back to Eden, jolted up by my brief walk, protruded from my inside pocket. Lewis, as if he knew what was in it, seemed to sneer. Well, damn it, for all its crudities it was genuine narrative: something happened in it, for God's sake. Lewis's Tarr, out five years back, was all solid bodies that could be moved only with a crane; Joyce was all wordflow. I felt a certain contempt for them both; I said, "A fictional situation. A young man and woman, married, desperately desire a child but fail to produce one. Is it he who is sterile or is it she? He, to whom fertility is an aspect of virility, is reluctant for either to undergo a scientific test. Best to avoid the truth and berate his wife for barrenness. She, more realistic, resolves the issue by becoming impregnated by an unknown man at a party in the dark, an uncharacteristic vitiation of her virtue motivated by love of her husband. A child is born. The husband dare not suspect the truth. Continue the story from there."

       "Very piquant," Lewis said. "You come to us for help with the writing of one of your novelettes."

       "Och, you're a double-dyed snob, Lewis," Joyce said thickly. "What," to me, "do you call an earwig in your part of the world?"

       "An eeriwiggle," I said.

       "Eire wiggle," Joyce said in blind smoking joy. "Write it down on this cigarette packet. You err and then you wiggle out of it. Och," he said, "I was never much good at continuing stories. You end there where you said, Toomey. The chief thing is to get a child born." Joyce was, for all his verbal obsessions, often very direct, especially about money. But he had a short story mind. Worse, he didn't like movement if he could avoid it, so that he and Lewis were artistically more akin than either would admit. Novels as still life or sculpture for the one, for the other as massive arias with a lot of ornamentation. "Stertility," he said with sober excitement. "A stertile baron or bassinet of fruitfuit condominya. Shaun. Take that down, Lewis, there's a dear fellow." He could not see the sudden shaft of levin. But, a count after, he heard the thunder. "Oh Jesus," he said, "I can't stand the bloody stuff. Get me a taxi, I have to get hoooome. Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph," as the rumble renewed. Rain began to needle. I got up to look for a cab. Poor fearful Joyce. "Oh blessed Sacred Heart 0f Jesus keep us from harm." I would, I decided, get Harry Crosby to publish A Way Back to Eden. He was always going on about starting the Black Sun Press. Stertile thunder tonitruated terribly. "Oh Lord forgive us our bloody sins." Rain flow pelted. It was hard work finding a taxi.

CHAPTER 31

I went into the bathroom, and there was my sister Hortense taking, reasonably enough, a bath. Still, the vaysay was also in this room and I wished desperately to use it. She looked rosy and well, though languid, and her clean brown eyes knifed me as she grabbed a towel to cover her breasts.

       "Ridiculous," I said. "You're my sister, I believe."

       "You should knock."

       "You should lock the door. Anyway, this pudeur of yours is a lot of non sense. D'ailleurs, je veux pisser."

       "I'm getting out now. There's no more hot water. Go on, go." It was an oldfashioned bath with lion paws. The plumbing, in the French manner, tried to hide its inefficiency with boastful noise. I saw myself in the washstand mirror, the writer at thirty-three, with the same eyes as Hortense, our mother's eyes, though mine closer set and overwatchful, the brow creased a little in the pain of control of a brimming bladder, the strawy hair sleek with Clovis brilliantine, the guardsman's moustache. "Go," I said.

       "May I do this? My back will be turned to you." I pounded my stream, saying loudly, "I want to know what happened last night. And this morning. I want to know who dumped you on my doorstep in that shameful condition."

       "Hurry up. This water's freezing."

       "Get out of it then, idiot. Wrap yourself in a towel. I don't want to see your nudity. I've no incestuous designs."

       She sat shortly after, rosy-footed, in a pair of my black Charvet pyjamas, sipping warm milk. This was in the salon, on the seventeenth-century sofa, product of Provence, garniture en tapisserie au point polychrome de l'époque. I sat opposite her in a matching fauteuil. I had taken the apartment unfurnished and had made it elegant with a bowlegged commode, its marquetry of the epoque Régence, richly ornamented with gilded bronze; a North Italian credence of walnut with angel's heads, flowery urns, roses; other things. My twentieth-century paintings were in the dining room. Here my pictures of the School of Barbizon-Daubigny, Troyon and Veyrassat—did not quite fit, but there was time enough, there would be money enough. "Do you not worry," I asked, "about the possibility of the hotheaded Domenico's hearing about your participation in the Four Arts Ball?"

       "Don't talk in that stupid pedantic way. Reserve it for your stupid readers. He'll only find out if you tell him. Besides, I did nothing wrong."

       "This morning you arrived here naked, in a condition of not caring whether anybody saw you naked or not. That's what makes your pudency of just now so hypocritical."

       "I was drunk. Anybody can be drunk. I was sober when I woke up and then they started mixing Hangman's Blood. That brought the drunkenness back again. And both these Crosbys said oh what a sweet little girl where did you come from, so they didn't remember. Nobody knew who I was. Then I said I wanted a taxi and they said where to and I said here. Toomey, they said, Toomey, seem to know the name, oh that pederastic purveyor of shopgirl vomit."

       "You're making this up."

       "Oh, no. I remember very clearly that bit. It's last night I can't remember. And if I can't remember then it never happened is what I say. So you shut up about it and tomorrow I'm going back to Domenico and cooking angelotti or capelli d'angeli or whatever they are. I never realised there were so many different kinds of bloody pasta."

       "I don't like this swearing, Hortense. And it's no use your saying if I don't remember then it never happened. Supposing you killed somebody and didn't remember, that somebody would still be dead."

       My doorbell rang. "Oh Christ, Domenico," she started.

       "It's only eleven," I said. "He's still playing. And if you did nothing wrong and nobody remembers what are you worrying about, you foolish child? I know who it is," I said, and got up to open the door. It was Carlo, accompanied by Father O'Shaughnessy and Pre Leclercq, temporary professors both of the Catho, Moral Law the one, the Sacraments or something the other. They had come to play bridge.

       "A marital quarrel," nodded Carlo, and, in mock-Irish learned doubtless from O'Shaughnessy, "and ye in your night attire flaunting yourself before the holy priests of the Church itself."

       "Not bad," O'Shaughnessy conceded, a wiry little man with red hair from the County Athlone, destined, one would have thought, to be curate of a pub rather than one of souls. He and Carlo and Leclercq had been coming here now once a week for the last three months. They had never once been invited. Carlo had brought them in one night, himself uninvited, had handed round the whisky and picked two new packs of cards out of the pocket of his clerical raincoat. He always took charge, of time as well as place. Pre Leclercq, from the Midi, liked gin mixed with a little altar wine, or alt, as O'Shaughnessy termed it, and a bottle of this, a sort of sugary British port surrogate with Jesus Christ crucified on the label, had been presented to my drinks cupboard by Leclercq himself, myself to provide the gin. Leclercq was too handsome to be a French priest; he had the sort of physique and golden god glow (whence in the Midi? Goths, Visigoths, transient crusaders?) which go with, say, the Director of the Chaplains' Department in the British Army. He would have made, but for his faith, a good bishop of Gibraltar. He had been keen on le sport in his time, le tennis, le rugby, la boxe. He was not yet running to fat (why do we?) despite the gin and alt. They were, all three of them, very good bridgemen. "Sure, I'll teach him proper English in God's good time," O'Shaughnessy leprechaunishly twinkled at me. "Shall we then?" and he pulled the folded green baize card table from behind the époque Regence commode. Leclercq got chairs.