Earthly Powers (49 page)

       From Auckland I sailed in the SS CeLsus, a ship of the Pacific Line bound for San Francisco, calling at Fiji, Tonga, the Marquesas, north over a dead waste humanised by two tropics and an equator to Hawaii and, after two days in Honolulu, the final haul to the American mainland. A day before reaching Honolulu I finished Lion City and celebrated by swimming in the tepid syrup of waters watched over by Diamond Head, a Chinese meal after, many beakers of rum and pineapple and passion fruit, self-pitying to bed. I would get my novel professionally typed with two carbons in San Francisco and then hand over a copy to Joe Phelps, my agent on Madison Avenue. I had also a fair sheaf of short stories for Collier's. Life going on, justification by works. In the ship's small library I made a remarkable discovery. I found an Austrian author named J akob Strehler in, of course, translation. The whole of his seven-volume novel sequence under the general title Father's Day (Vatertag) was there. It was my 2 excitement at the discovery, my conviction that here was perhaps the greatest novelist of the age, that led me not long after to buy the books in German, along with the big Cassell dictionary and the crib of the English version, no translation ever possessing the power to convey the total force of the original, and thus to gain such knowledge of what I had looked down upon as a glottal flshboneclearing soulful sobbing sausagemachine of a language as I possess. Thus, though now remembering that first reading in William Meldrum's somewhat pedestrian rendering, it is the German titles of the constituent volumes that come most readily to mind: Dreimal Schweinekohl; Nur Tšchter; Wir Sassen zu Dritt; Hinter den Bergen; Wie Er Sich Sah; Arbeit Geteilt; Woran Sie Sich Nicht Erinnern Will. Why were these novels (Three Helpings of Pork and Cabbage, Over the Mountains and so on) sitting there in the stiff brown binding of the line, a gold anchor stamped on the front cover? Because, I gathered from the dogsbody officer who did library duty, the author's wife had once sailed this way and, at San Francisco, had bought the Scribner's edition of Father's Day and presented it to the ship in token of a pleasant voyage. What the wife of a Viennese author had been doing in these parts was a question not yet to be asked.

       The reader will at least know of Jakob Strehler, since he was in 1935 awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he will feel inclined to a sneer of superiority at my simple-minded excitement of nearly ten years earlier (it was now March 1925). But Strehier was not well known in those days outside the literary circles of Vienna and Berlin, and the difficult originality of his structure and style did not commend him to the kind of reader who would pick up, say, a Toomey in the expectation of easy thrills, crude chronology, and comfortitgly flaccid language. The reader will forgive me perhaps if I summarise Strehler's content and quality. The Vater of Vatertag is the Austro-Hungarian Emperor presiding over a Central Europe that is undemocratic and infested with police spies but is also charming, comic and creative. The Burger family is involved with the fringes of the arts-music-hall double-bass-playing, cabaret singing, street conjuring, score copying, walking on in operas—and it spreads from Vienna to Trieste in its desperate concern with making a living. Its tattered bohemianism is able easily to accommodate small criminal activities like fencing stolen goods, forging, thieving church candlesticks and prostitution. It has no moral sense at all. But it survives in a bumbling talentless way and enjoys life. It makes the acquaintance of most of the great artists of the Empire, from Metastasio to Richard Strauss, but always in some shady connection. We hear the rumble of the threat of the fall of the ramshackle structure of Magyars, Teutons and Slays, but the great talk of the coming of the modern age and the anachronism of empire provokes a cynical response. If the work has a moral it may be summed up as For God's sake leave us alone. It denies the possibility of progress. The life of the individual is brief and we have to make the most of it.

       Wine is always good, but if the Wienerschnitzel is badly cooked you must throw it in the waiter's face. The Burger family is loud, quarrelsome, always sympatisch. Uncle Otto is an UeberfalstafJ and the dark-haired Gretel is a foulmouthed siren who can make the Emperor himself ejaculate spontaneously. The book is dedicated to the greater glory of life.

       The narrator is a member of the family, Fritz, a survivor of the Great War (Strehler wrote all seven volumes in Hamburg an der Donau between 1915 and 1920) who has found a cache of wine in an abandoned castle near Bratislava or Pressburg and relates in increasing drunkenness the Burger annals. His memory is faulty; he has no sense of history and allows the epochs to melt into the one imperial day he calls the Vatertag. To him people are more solid than institutions and even architecture: if one of the Burger family leans heavily against a museum wall the wall is quite likely to crumble. All the towns and cities are fluid as though built of wine; frontiers both temporal and spatial are shakily drawn as with a wine-dipped finger. We meet Mozart and Rilke at the performance of a new Strauss waltz (Johann, Josef or Richard? One is unsure. The orchestra is certainly Richardian) at the Congress of Vienna. Mozart faints with the stress of the harmonics of the brass. Sigmund Freud fights on horseback, cigar in not yet cancerous mouth, at the battle of Poysdorf. All the battles are hilarious. The language of the narrator is full of rare slang and Slav loanwords and neologisms. We have here a great but difficult comic masterpiece, as mad and as sane as Rabelais, and it stands out in stark contrast to the delicate simplicity of Strehler's other novels, bittersweet tales of love in Austrian villages, except for the great Moses tetralogy (1930-35), which applies the technique of Vatertag to Jewish history. I say no more for the moment about Strehler, except that my chance discovery of him in the Pacific was a potent tonic and speeded my convalescence. The great life-enhancer reconciled me to the world again.

       It was while I was standing at the cable car terminus not far from Fisherman's Wharf, where I had lunched on oysters, and looking across the bay at Alcatraz, that I had a visitation of the kind I was always inventing for novels and was often persuaded by editors to cut out as being crude and naif in symbolism and sentimental in effect. A butterfly rested a moment on my right hand and, though the air was moist enough, sipped at my sweat as though we were in the Australian desert. The wings, shuddering minimally in the spring breeze from the sea, were decorated with the Greek phi. I was being told that everything was all right, there was no death and so on.

       I made the transcontinental train journey from San Francisco. Travelling men, ten-cent cigars, cuspidors. Business pretty bad in the South. That so, pretty bad, eh? Yeah, not hardly up to snuff. This genman here says business pretty bad in the South. That so? The great heartland of the lavish willful continent flowed past and the ghost of Walt Whitman (those who went down doing their 2 duty) flew in in disguise as a flying bug which a stogie-chewer caught twixt paws and clapped to dayth. Pretty bad, I'll say, yep. Yes sir. We all take the special blue plate. Horrible hooch in pocket flasks, hip oil.

       In spring Manhattan I put up at the Plaza. Central Park a glorious froth of green, flowering cullens and bryants, thanatopsis. Boom boom went the city like siege guns. You could sniff prosperity like pyorrhea along with the bad whisky and cloves. Must call my father in Toronto but no hurry. Nothing really to say. I went to see Joe Phelps on Madison Avenue, a courteous sharp Yankee who had majored in European History at Princeton, anglophile, his suits made in London, had been a second or third aide to Pershing. His hair was parted dead in the middle and held down with the same brilliantine that Valentino used. His eyes were the colour of sloe gin. He and Jack Birkbeck in London shared commission in a way they had worked out secretly to their own satisfaction. Jack had got the Collier's story contract for me in London though Collier's was a New York magazine; Joe would hold this sheaf of stories in a metal drawer and dole out one at a time to the fiction editor, like pocket money to a child or an alcoholic. I now handed him the cardboard box containing Lion City and he weighed it on one palm as if it were a block of metal yet to be assayed. He did not believe that people actually read books, though they would often go glassily through magazine writings up to the point where it said Continued Page 176. On the other hand people would buy books if they were so long that they seemed like a leisure investment for retirement. He had studied a little literature and knew its limitations. The movies and the theatre interested him more. Money interested him most.

       He said, "How soon can you have a play for the Keepers ready?"

       "Cuypers?"

       "Tim, Rod and Alice Keeper, the intolerable trio."

       "Oh, those." Two genuine brothers and a genuine sister of genuine original New Amsterdam stock who specialised in triangular drames or comedies specially commissioned. Noel Coward had written Liberty Measles for them and Willie Maugham A Pig in a Poke. The fact that the audience knew the Keepers were genuine sibs made their adulterous stage caperings both wholesome and alarming. All in the family meant this was really playacting, no offstage funny business, but it also carried a delicious whiff of incest.

       "Strangely enough, I had an idea. I didn't have them specifically in mind, but, yes, I'll think about it."

       "Don't think too long. I promised, you know how it is, no use half-promising, there'd be something for them by the end of April. Not necessarily you, you couldn't be found, where in hell have you been since Christmas, never mind, you're here now, get down to it. The Keepers close in Chicago in May, Lonsdale's Cash on Demand, go and see them, it's a riot. Do something with a lot of British style, you know wit, you can't lose. Big money."

       "Talking about money," I said. My American earnings were all lodged with Joe, untouched by me as yet. He looked after my special account in his own bank, accumulating feebly at five percent. I suspected he cautiously played the market with it. I lived comfortably enough off my European and British Empire royalties. He said, without having to look it up: "Sixty-five thousand three hundred ninety-two dollars forty-one cents. It's a crying shame."

       "What is?"

       "Let me put all that in Haigh Purdue's hands. Old Tiger like me. He's on the Street, Gillespie Spurr and Purdue. He'll treble it in a year. Radio, for instance, Radio is going to be fireworks, they're only just lighting the fuse."

       "Fireworks make a nice show, but not for long. Joe, I don't like the smell of this boom of yours. It's hysterical, just like Prohibition. Boom and bootlegaspects of the same disease. Stocks anyway are too much of an abstraction for my innocent brain. Leave the money where it is."

       "Real estate," he said. "You can never go wrong on real estate. What do you say to a nice little piece of property in Manhattan, not three minutes' walk from here? Upper East Side, Seventy-sixth Street. Twenty thousand."

       "An apartment?"

       "Three bed, two bath, living room long as a rink. Tenth floor, spectacular view. It's Bernard Lamaria's, you know, the writer, Friends and Fiends and the other thing. He moved out last Thursday. He hasn't put it into a realtor's hands yet. Furniture still in, all good stuff, let that go for, say, another three thousand. His wife wanted to move to Great Neck, Long Island, mother left her a house, a bit Babbitty but nice. Great Neck's where they all are now, Lillian Russell, George M. Cohan, Flo Ziegfeld himself. A place for big parties. Can't see any big literature coming out of it. Still. Half an hour from Broadway by the Long Island Express. Anyhow, I'm not trying to sell you Great Neck. Not trying to sell you anything. Just saying it'd be nice for you to have a little place to come to when you come."

       "I don't come often." I wondered how much this Lamaria was really asking. Land of the quick buck. "The Plaza suits me well enough."

       "Buy, you can always sell, why let it lie idle? Real estate's a skyrocket. Anyhow, you have this play to write, right. Nice little bar Bernie made too, his own hands, maple, real leather on the stools. I saw some bareknuckle boxing prints in Stolz's, Forty-third Street, a dozen, going for a song. Look swell on the wall behind the bar. Can put you in touch with a very good bootlegger, the best." I could see in Joe's sloeginny eyes that he could already see this bar stocked and me installed, pie-eyed, writing. In his innocence he believed writers could only write drunk.

       "I could at least take a look at it."

       "Sure you could. We'll go for lunch now. Baxter's, real English steak and 2 kidney pie, just like home for you. Then we can go round, I have the keys here. Get the whole thing tied up nice and legal with Max Lorimer, he's just around the corner. Yours in ten minutes, move in tomorrow. You won't regret it, Ken, believe me." How many bucks would this mean in Joe's pocket? You could never have too much.

       I did not regret it, not really. It was to be a slow business getting rid of the smell of this Lamaria, the writer: razamatazz wallpaper and imitation antiques and carpeting like a lake of oatmeal. Smell of his wife rather, and literally too: terpineol and cinnnamic aldehyde and chlorostyrolene strongly lingering after the death of the synthetic flower scent. I set up my typewriter and wrote my play, sustained by ham and eggs I cooked myself, real Booth's gin, Chesterfield cigarettes and views of the towery city. You will find the play in my collection Toomey's Theatre; it is entitled Doable Bedlam. It is the first really experimental play I ever wrote, but the straightforward laughs were a sauce palatable enough for the audiences to swallow the tricks like oysters. Three characters and only three: Richard and Marion Trelawney, man and wife, and the amorous intruder John Strode. Four scenes, two acts. Scene 1 is Elizabethan, with the agony of cuckoldry; Scene 2 is Restoration with the cuckold, who is about his own more ambitious cuckolding, complaisant. Long intermission. Scene 3 is Victorian-Shavian, with the characters prepared at length to establish a ménage a trois on a purely rational basis, which, they eventually see, is only possible because all three have through Shavian rationality become sexless. In the final scene, Manhattan, 1925, the three are living together, but the wife is temporarily away, ostensibly with her mother. Trelawney and Strode receive a telegram to say she has been killed in a road accident. Husband and lover cry on each other's shoulder, united in a common devotion which, they start to realise, was always a little conventional, even insincere. They discover that it is really each other they love nothing homosexual, of course, purely a matter of compatible character and shared tastes, the shared taste for Marion being perhaps, after all these years, the least important. The telegram proves to be mistaken: other car, other people, same accident (collision). Marion arrives home very much alive. But she confesses, shaken, penitent through narrow escape from death, that she was with her lover of three years' standing. Never again, she says; she will be faithful ever after to Richard and Jack. But they say: Get out, we do not wish to forgive. Curtain on pipe-smoking sodality a deux.