Earthly Powers (58 page)
"Mussolini ha sempre ragione." The oily-haired one clicked his fingers for the bill. "We want no more of your priest's nonsense."
"Untrained minds," Carlo said with pity. "Hiding behind party shibboleths that protect you from the human duty of thinking for yourselves. Your dirty regime is a disgrace to a great country, mother of art and intellect. Go on, find an answer to that. It isn't enough to say Mussolini is always right."
"Look," I said in English, "there's going to be trouble. Stop it, Carlo, enough."
The Italians never, under any regime, an aspect of a natural wisdom that big words like patriotism and duty have never altogether been able to expunge, seek more than a minimal amount of trouble. Carlo, of course, was not entirely Italian. So the oily-haired one merely sneered again and said: "Perhaps you'd like the bolsheviks here. They'd soon stop your shitty talk about devils."
"Well," Carlo said, very reasonably, "there's more sense in Marx than in Mussolini. At least Marx got down to some solid thinking. And a dialectic process implies movement and progression to an ideal goal, which could, with charity, be interpreted as a kind of Christian thinking. Don't understand me, do you? Don't understand a word." The two were up now, having paid the bill, and their secular black glowered down at Carlo's spiritual. Black, I thought: it doesn't show the dirt. "Well, of course, we're all supposed to rejoice in the imperial goal," Carlo said. "The revival of the Roman Empire, which means squeezing the juice out of a lot of poor innocent Africans. A travesty, like everything else dreamed up by that Godless hypocritical bullfrog of yours. Now get out and let me get on with my dinner."
"You'll hear more about this," the oily-haired one growled.
"I do hope so," Carlo said. Then the other one, before leaving, jolted the table edge with his hip and made our second bottle of Acitrezza wobble. I thrust out to save it but it toppled and began to glug out onto the floor. The bottle had been nearly full; it was a good wine and not cheap.
I said, in my English way, "Oh, really—Rovinoso," I added, "e molto scortese."
"Non mi frega un cazzo." And they left with a lipfart apiece and an ironical salute. Carlo watched them go amiably and said: "One moment." He got up.
"Don't do anything foolish," I warned.
"One moment." He was out. The tiny square that car-driving patrons used as a carpark was enclosed, apart from the restaurant, by the façade of the disgraced Cenci house and its deconsecrated chapel. I got out there to find the oilyhaired fascist doubled up from, I assumed, Carlo's kick in the testicles. At the other Carlo was lashing out vigorously with his fists. It was a soft little man whose courage was all in his shirt. When he saw another man coming, a lithe enough looking Englishman whose wine he had spilled, he went off down the sloping alleyway excreting naughty words. The doubled-up man made many groaning threats from what seemed to be a posture of devotion to Carlo's cloth. Then, still bowed, his hands a cage about his scrotum, he followed, cursing, his friend. "They will do nothing," Carlo said. "Nobody will believe they were attacked by a prelate. Or if they do it will be accounted a great disgrace." I could see Mussolini's point about protecting your testicles in a priestly presence. "Let us," Carlo said appropriately, "now go and eat grandfather's balls." This 3 was a sweet dish: cream enclosed in light pastry and plunged briefly into hot fat, little orchidaceous gobbets served with plum jam. It was clear from this kind of behaviour that Carlo would be better off in America.
But we were all destined for America. Domenico, as I foretold, was to find his true métier in writing music for the talking films, and the talking films were to lure me as a scenarist. We were both minor artists, and here was minor art in excelsis or in mediocre. In 1929 Paris seemed full of alltalking allsinging alidancing American movies, advertised on posters showing stylized tophatted highkickers, cooled by the rare sorbet of heavily nasal straight drama (those early sonic techniques appeared to favour the nasal moan). But the straight drama always had to have a theme song, even if it were not possible to have words in it. Phonograph records were helpful promotion, and films were helpful to phonograph records, the symbiosis began early. Thus, there was J. M. Barne's Half an Hour turned into The Doctor's Secret with Ruth Chatterton ("I was the woman in question."—"Ah, mum's the word, dear lady"), and the song without words was called "Half an Hour." The singing film was recognised at that time as the primary form. Neither playwright nor novelist felt, as yet, challenged by a medium essentially frivolous.
On the Champs-Elysees in the autumn, just before the Wall Street crash, The Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 was playing almost next door to the Pathé film La Fille du Pendu, with Jean-Luc Carel and Claudine Pellegrin, directed by Georges Legras, music by Domenico Campanati. I remember almost nothing of it, but a residual image remains with me of the quality of the music-blurred, distorted in the tutti, too much (obligatory at the time) oleaginous saxophone. I had recommended Domenico for the job, and, after initial demurrals, he had delighted in the brutal exigencies that the cutter's craft imposed upon the score. Any measure had to be able to flow into any other measure: any musical sentence, however truncated by the scissors, had to make sense. You could have Stravinsky dissonance and you could have post-Puccini slush. Anything, really, went so long as it more or less fitted. The theme song of the film—a rather grim film about a girl blighted by her father's execution for murder—was something sung in a cabaret, and it kept recurring in contexts of irony. It was called "Il etait une lois," words by Roger Le Coq, and it made Domenico a lot of money.
I remember the American neighbour of this film rather well, at least the songs in it. "Breakaway," for example: Write a little note On your toes Don't forget to dot the i Look at what you wrote Goodness knows It's easy as pie Let's do the Breakaway Get hot and shake away.
And so on. What is the human memory playing at, that it can hold such inanities and forget great lines by Goethe?
I will say little of the Wall Street crash, which Carlo, when he had been playing the markets for the Church, using of his goodness some of the estate of poor Raffaele, had sharply foreseen. It was based on overconfidence, lack of prescience, stupidity. The American expatriates in Paris, sustained by American dividends, now had to scrape together enough to get home on. The light of literary experiment went dim, except for Jim Joyce, who toiled on at his mad work in progress. Whining Americans, cadging drinks in bars where they had once flashed generous dollars, became a bit of a bore. Franklin Dowd shot himself in a room in the Georges V for which he had not the money to pay. Silver-haired Hastin Newsom, who had sold his bank to live the life of Riley (whoever Riley was; he too probably crashed with Wall Street), threw himself from the top platform of the Eiffel Tower. Police were eventually installed up there to listen for American accents. Joe, my New York agent, was discovered, as I had suspected, to have parlayed the money of his clients and lost all in Radio mostly. He left his office at midday, typist still clacking, and went off to Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. Withdrawing, on Carlo's advice, my American earnings to Paris, I had forestalled my own segmental crash and lost only about fifteen thousand dollars. Harry Crosby, who had published my biblical pastiche in February under the title of Fall for Lovers, auctor ignotas, killed himself and his girl friend Josephine in a Boston hotel bedroom on December 10, thus, in identifying his own talentless gaudy extravagance with the age, achieving the work of art he knew was, despite all contrary evidence, in him. e.e. cummings wrote an elegy: 2 boston Dolls; found with Holes in each other 's lullaby and other lulla wise by UnBroken LULLAlullabyBY the She-in-him with the He-in-her (& both all hopped up) prettily then which did lie Down, honestly now who go (BANG (BANG Whatever else went bang bang, the talking films did not. Domenico wrote a very workmanlike score for 'Bourrée Italienne', all mandolins and tenors and tarantellas, and impressed Wouk and Heilbutt of MGM, who caught the film in Montreal. There were to be a lot of desperately cheerful movies in the next few years, some of them set in sunny It, as Wouk termed it, always to be thought of as a desperately cheerful place. Domenico was put under contract, and his first two scores were for The Kid from Naples, which had a Roman setting, and Mamma Mia, which was about a poor family on Mulberry Street, New York, who won lottery money and went back to sunny It to show off. For my part, I stayed on in Paris which, lacking expatriate Americans, was duller than it used to be. Then I was summoned to Hollywood to write the screenplay for Singapore!, an adaptation of my novel about Sir Stamford Raffles. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean and the China Sea were regarded also as diverting locales, and a mint had been made out of Clive of India, with Ronald Colman.
CHAPTER 44
"It is." Carlo said, "a kind of blasphemy. I don't see why the Muslims allow it."
"There aren't any Muslims here," I said. "Only Jews."
"How would they like it to be called the Garden of Jehovah?"
He meant the hotel where I was living on Sunset Boulevard. It had once been the residence of Alla Nazimova the film actress, as I explained to him, hence the name, the aitch being a legitimate addition for people who thought of Mohammed's God as an aspect of Oriental decor, like sherbet. "That swimming pool out there," Carlo said, "reminds me of something."
"It's the shape of the Black Sea. Alla Nazimova came from Yalta."
Carlo shook his head, rightly, at the madness of the place. It was a long way from Washington, whose madness, being political, was excusable. He lowered himself with care to a chair of moulded cane as though he thought it might be an illusion. The hotel was divided into bungalows, and the bungalows into apartments. In the apartment next to mine was a former New Yorker humorist who laughed bitterly most of the night. I was earning fifteen hundred dollars a week to write scripts as slowly as possible. They turned out films fast here, but off the set there was a great quality of indolence. Carlo opened his briefcase, which bore in stamped gold the keys and tiara of Vatican City, and pulled out what seemed at first Hollywood-conditioned sight to be the longest film script ever written. "No," I said. "It's not possible." And then I had it in my hands and I saw what it was.
"Don't read it now," Carlo said. "Wait till you have plenty of leisure. This is the result of many long years of work and discussion. It's finished in one sense, in another sense it's a mere draught of shameful simplicity. The thing to do is to sow the ideas widely. Then when the time comes for turning the ideas into action the world of the believer will be ready." I saw the title page: The True Reformation—A Blueprint for the Reorganisation of Institutional Christianity with Some Notes on Techniques of Affiliation with Related Faiths. "My own typing," Carlo said. "It could not be entrusted to any of our stenographers in Washington. They would blab, and there must be no blabbing. I must not be associated with it, nor must any of those who worked on it. It's highly secret."
"And yet you bring it to me?"
"You're different. You have nobody to blab to. Or rather it will not be worth your while to blab." He seemed to have taken a fancy to the word. "Blabbing about religion is not in your province. What is there to drink?"
He knew what there was to drink, for the bottles were all set out on the little bar, but few of the labels meant much to him. Southern Comfort, Old Grandad, Malone's Sour Mash. I had taken to native American beverages. There was now, of course, no Prohibition: all those deaths in vain, including Raffaele's. He found a bottle of Old Mortality, a rare scotch, and poured himself a slug. "Ice in the icebox," I said, pleonastically. He took his Old Mortality straight. "This is not," I said, flicking the typescript through, "really my cup of tea, is it?"
He had forgotten, or had perhaps never known, the idiom. He stared at me an instant as though perhaps I had become suffused with Alice in Wonderland through working on a film treatment of it. Then he saw. "It has to be published," he said. "It has to be a lay publication, anonymous or pseudonymous. No question of a nihil obstat or imprimatur. Perhaps you could publish it under your own name. The name doesn't matter. You have a known name and your publisher will publish it. You can keep the money or give it to the poor. The important thing is to sow the ideas. You could even make a kind of novel out of it, people sitting round a table in a garden discussing religion. I don't mind what you do with it so long as the ideas are sown. Sitting round a table, drinking a cup of tea," he added, "which will make it more of your cup of tea."
I put the kettle on. It was getting on for five o'clock. "Gallons and gallons of tea," I said, flipping through the opus: there must, I reckoned, be about a hundred and fifty thousand words here. It was, contrary to professional convention, singlespaced. It was fastened together, rather like a film script, in blue covers with no spine, three paper fasteners of a length I had never before seen, forked golden stilettos, perhaps a Holy See speciality, brochetting the margins. I spooned Orange Pekoe into the warmed pot. "The Bishop of Bombay quondam Gibraltar would be in on this."
"He became somewhat unreliable. I speak confidentially. He grew obsessed with the interpretation of the Athanasian Creed, an aspect of his Anglicanism. But some of his terminology is there. Dr. MacKendrick, a Calvinist who, now I come to remember, liked to drink his tea very black and with no sugar or lemon, was helpful with the structuring of the work. Like an engineer almost. Many people collaborated. None of them will blab. In the present state of affairs they dare not. They would be in trouble with their own sectarian leaders. With, so to say, their Duci." His eyes softened as in the nostalgia of battle.
