Earthly Powers (85 page)
CHAPTER 60
It was a year or so before Ralph Pembroke came into my service, or I into his or we into ours. When I say now that I remember well lying in bed with him one Sunday morning in our suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, I am pricked with an immediate doubt as to whether this was near the beginning or the end of our relationship. Like all, or the few, relationships I had in middle and old age with younger men who were nominally, or not so, engaged as secretaries, there was the whiff of breakup even in the early and ardent enthusiasms. I see myself as a bronzed man in his sixties, pared, fit, but not unravaged. The sexual impulse, as my coevals will know, does not die with age: it becomes merely intermittent, abating little of its pristine ferocity on the occasions of its resurgence. It needs, however, to be stimulated by youth and beauty, and this implies a certain onesidedness of passion, for what youth and beauty, except in instances of gerontophile perversion, is reciprocally stimulated by wrinkles and grey hairs? True, as I moved toward my final infirmities it was companionship I needed more than sex, but it was not, as in marriage, the companionship of one of my own generation. I wanted companionship with the connotations of amorous excitement, meaning the electricity of touch, of entwining, of verbal endearment, the reassurance in the night of a body, so long as it was youthful and comely, breathing next to mine. I was grateful for the added gift of intelligence made piquant by a comparative lack of worldly experience. Let me say that, this May California morning, the end of the relationship was closer than its beginning, but let me record words more appropriate to the beginning than the end. I wore my heliotrope pyjamas while Ralph lay naked. He was beautiful as only one of his race can be, especially when nurtured on the benefits of American civilization, but the serenity of those relaxed muscles and the sumptuous sheen of his exquisite skin found no correspondence in a visage that had acquired a white man's discontentedness, the brow often corrugated, the mouth peevish, the eyes shifty, unstill, unhappy. As now.
I said, "I refuse, dearest Ralph, to say the thing that is not." This was a Swiftian trope we shared. Ralph loved horses, seeing in them a nobility which he believed to attach to his own people in their native habitat. I had, some years before at a riding school near Sitges, enjoyed watching him acquire equestrian proficiency. He and the horse became one, were centaurized to a degree I had never previously seen even in crack show jumpers. He called horses Houyhnhnms and spoke to them in snorts and whinnies. He had, in this time we had been spending in Hollywood, with myself working on the scenario of an animated cartoon version of H. G. Wells's The Food of the Gods for Max Fleischer, been able to employ his riding talents in a Western. He stood in for the leader of an avenging posse, though, because of his implausible blackness, only in very long shots. The Houyhnhnms, you will recall, have no word for lie.
"It's what it's about that's important," Ralph said. "Okay, so what if it does limp and the rhythms are cockeyed and it's what you say, derivative?" The vibrancy of his speech was transmitted as a bodily sensation across the bed, probably by virtue of the mattress springs. His speech was as thrilling as his sister's singing Educated black speech is probably the finest sound of all North America "No, dearest Ralph, no and again no. If you want to write a pamphlet, of a severely polemical nature, do so. Tell the world of the sufferings of the American Negro, but don't try to turn it into art. Because you can't do it, you know."
"We don't like this word Negro. We prefer the word black."
"Who's we?"
"Blacks."
"Meaning the descendants of West Coast African slaves now full citizens of these United States but powerfully aware of continuing wrongs. There are, you know, other black people." I saw an instant the smile of the purpleskinned magician and shuddered. "The bloody Tamils, for instance. All I'm saying, dear Ralph, about your poem I mean, is that, attempting to be both art and propaganda, it fails to be either. And I doubt whether it's possible to express sectional sentiments through the poetic art. I mean, Othello's colour doesn't really matter. It's the jealousy that counts. In a high school in Malaya I saw a very interesting adaptation of Othello. There was only one white boy in the school, so they turned him into a jealous Irish police officer called O'Tallow. Ee Ah Gob was Chinese, Desdemona was Tamil, black as the ace of spades, and Michael Cassio was Eurasian. It worked."
"Ah shit," Ralph said. "I think it's pretty good. I'll send it to Wakati." (Wakati—its name the Swahili for Time—was a literally black magazine, the type white on it as in a photographic negative, part-financed by the Time-Life organisation.)
"I don't doubt they'll publish it," I said, "but that won't make it good. Another thing. Your newfound black militancy—is it replacing your former militancy on behalf of the sexual tropism you and I both represent, or are you looking for a way of combining two very distinct social grievances? I mean, supposing the blacks ran the United States of America instead of the pinkos, would the situation of a white homosexual automatically improve?"
"Minorities," Ralph said frowning, "speak to each other."
"Well, you ought to be looking for poetic symbols to express that constatation, oughtn't you? Not that you could. You know that. I'm going to get up and ring for breakfast and then bathe. What will you take for breakfast? Something black, like hominy grits and chitterlings and watermelon?"
"It's pronounced chitlins. I've been corrupted by white culture. I want a steak, medium rare, and two eggs fried sunny side up. Listen, this has to be good: 'I sat in the bleachers, among the bleached And watched them bitterly at their game, And in warning the black cloud reached Its hand out to cover the sun. But all eyes were on the Smitten balls, black balls, black heads, Not seeing that the game would stop in black rain And there'd be no raincheck, no, not ever again.'"
"No, Ralph my love," I said, "no, no."
"And who the Christ Jesus are you to say no?" He was out of bed now, naked except for his Longines wristwatch and the typescript he waved at me. The beauty was all in himself, he would never create beauty: God, or something, never gave it you both ways. "You've never written one thing in your whole damned life that had any pretension to being art."
"Pretension is right. I've never had pretensions. But I know art when I see it. I cry with self-pity when I see real art. I'm not crying now."
"You bastard. You white bastard."
"Ah, white now, am I? Watch that, Ralph. You'll end up saying that only blacks have any real moral and political and spiritual and aesthetic values. That's only the Nazi philosophy in blackface."
"Look at yourself," he sneered, as I took my pyjamas off. This, of course, may have been somewhere else and on another occasion. "Little pink prick and shrunk shanks and potbelly. And you talk about aesthetic values."
"Blueish prick," I corrected. "Purplish. Little, I grant you. And the rest of the attributes, dry fruits of senescence. Well, the potbelly—shall we say not so ripe as many? Not by any means a record of Falstaffian self-indulgence. It comes to all of us. Albert Einstein had one, you know. I saw it when I visited him at Princeton." I find it hard to believe that I just stood there naked chattering, suffering the sneer of this polished beautiful boy. A lot of the past is incredible. "I leave it to you," I said, "to order breakfast. Dry toast for me and Oxford marmalade. Orange juice and coffee." And I went to take my bath.
Ralph and I were at this time more or less domiciled in Barcelona, in a sizable apartment not far from the Barrio G—tico. Why Spain, or rather Catalonia, which is not quite Spain? Because mild fascism semed to be at the time to be better than confiscatory socialism. Because of the architecture of Gaudi and the cuisine of Los Caracoles. Ralph, at first muttered and even spat at because he was taken for a Moor, liked it well enough when he was recognised as primarily an American. He learned Catalan with the relish he was later to give to the East African dialect called Oma. The truth is though that we were out of Catalonia more than we were in it. I was called to towns like Helsinki and Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro for literary conferences that had more of Politics in them than literature.
I was yielding to the temptation of being the Writer as International Figure, meaning one who talked more than he wrote. I was feeding off my prewar literary fat; there was no great urgency about producing new books and plays. There was the medium of television available for the easy projection of inchoate ideas and a pretty well fully formed persona. My persona was mildly liked by television audiences. Its features were recognisable and caricaturable—the cigarette in its Dunhill holder wielded as gracefully as a Queen Anne fan, the Savile Row suitings whose conservative elegance was contradicted by opennecked silk shirts from Kuala Lumpur or by cream polo sweaters, the sharp ravaged profile which the cameras loved, the slight lisp, the dogmatic pronouncements on the mores of the postwar world, the occasional assumed ferocity. French television knew me as well as anglophone. I could modify the deliberately prissy British image with handweaving and patois. Soon the Germans would see me on their screens and hear me barking.
There was also plenty of work for me in Hollywood. The Food of the Gods was never to achieve filmhood, nor was the projected musical on Shakespeare's life called Will!, nor the colossal Middlemarch, nor several other conceptions in which I was involved, but I was paid, overpaid, and accommodated with my secretary companion in Regency suites with uncountable telephones. I had, this Sunday morning in the Beverly Wilshire, the satisfaction of knowing that my work on The Food of the Gods was virtually finished. It had been amusing to think in cartoon images, very Victorian British, and reduce Wells's dialogue to a few whatwhats. The following day, Monday, I was to fly away from Los Angeles to deliver a lecture at a college in Indiana while the rewrite men gnawed and worried my final script. At this college, named for its founder Oswald Wisbech, my nephew John Campion was a professor in the growing department of anthropology.
"I'm off," Ralph said when he had finished his steak and fried eggs and quart of coffee. I sat in my lime and gold dressing gown, smoking and looking amiably at him. He was dressed in a grey suit of a vaguely military cut, tan Gucci loafers, an indigo silk shirt buttoned to the neck and embellished with a silver hand of Fatma dangling on a silver chain. I paid him a salary which he hardly earned, I dressed him, protected him, gave him my affection.
I said, "There are a great number of letters to look at. When you come back late tonight from your session with Nat Fergana Junior and his friends you will be too tired to look at them. Tomorrow and the next day I shall not be here to urge you to work. I make no complaint. I merely point out that there is a lot of work to do."
"Yeth, there thyure ith," Ralph mocked. "But even slaveth were entitled to Thunday off."
"Another thing, and please don't think that this is in any way an accusation. What I mean is, I'm not accusing you. Perhaps I'm merely accusing my own absentmindedness or perhaps initial stupidity in being so careless. You're always telling me not to carry so much cash, but I can't help it I was born in an era in which cash was carried and used for payment on the nail."
"Oh come on, Ken, what is it?" And he looked frowning at his Longines. "I had a thousand dollars in what are known as C notes. They were in the inside pocket of the jacket of my fawn suit. I checked after my bath and they're no longer there. It's no good complaining to the management, they have a written notice about the danger of keeping valuables in one's room. And if I accuse the Mexican hotel staff I'll wake up with a knife in my guts. I'm just hoping that you took the money for my own protection or to teach me a lesson or something benevolent of that sort. I can afford to lose the money, I suppose. But I do hate being robbed. Tell me I haven't been robbed."
"You've been robbed all right old boy old boy. I don't have your thousand bucks. You know that. You are generous to what they call a fault and I don't have to go picking in the dark. But I'm sorry you said that. It sets up something between us not very nice."
"I just wanted to know, Ralph, that's all. Let's take it that I've now learned a valuable lesson about being careless with cash and in future I'll use checks or credit cards or something. There will be Mexican faces grinning out at me from rooms being serviced each time I pass along the corridor, but no matter. We shan't be here much longer anyway."
"Oh no, not so simple." He did not lisp it. "There'll be some corner of your little mind in which little scenes will be enacted. You know, nasty black Ralph needing a lump bigger than usual for the paying of blackmail or gambling debts or helping some little boy in dire need he meets at Nat Fergana's establishment. And a little corner of my little mind in which you are seated as before a little stage watching some such little enactment. I guess this sort of thing had to happen."
"Ralph, dear, this is not so. I've forgotten the matter already. I'm being absurdly overpaid by the studio and can well afford to lose a thousand dollars to some indigent Mexican family or other. Please forget that I spoke."
"Aw, you had to speak. It'd come out sooner or later. Have you had a good look, you know, in other pockets, under the carpet, under the mattress? You're welcome to search in my bedroom. You're welcome to search me here and now. I don't have your thousand bucks. And now I can see you wishing that my big black face would crack into a big toothy smile and me pull the cash out and say, Let this be a lesson old buddy and don't put temptation in the way of the poor and unscrupulous. But that ain't gonna happen nohow, no sir, massah. Can I go now?"
