The Complete Enderby (83 page)

‘Hoosier.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘The Hoosier State.’

‘That’s what they call Indiana.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’re from Indiana you’re a Hoosier.’

No help there. He did not much like the sound of it. It sounded like the kind of jeer which might well greet, in a territory nearly all farms, a sensible stage presentation of the main facts of the life of a major poet.

The man reimposed his headset, get his money’s worth, and turned a little black dial on his seat arm. ‘Foog,’ he said with disgust.

‘Pardon me?’, this being apparently the right mode of request for repetition or elucidation.

‘This guy says they’re going to play a foog.’

‘Fugue,’ Enderby said with energy. ‘Tyranny of the verse line. They say there’s no rhyme for fugue. But in song there is. Another fugue, oh, please no, Hugo. You can rhyme anything in a song. In Massachusetts ah took the pledge. Each glass ah chew sets mah teeth on edge.’

‘That’s it, I guess,’ the man said; not listening, turning the black knob to, Enderby supposed, something infugal.

Enderby took from the inside pocket of his decent though oldish clerical grey suit the letter from Ms Grace Hope, a name he could not believe. Hollywood agent mixed up for some shady reason with play promotion. Understood from Toronto office Enderby only man who could do it. On strength of Toronto published work called
Will and Testament
. Enderby occasionally feared that the letter, having been maliciously typed in disappearing ink, might emerge from that pocket a folded blank. Fare and expenses recoverable, but must pay them himself first. Artistic director, Angus Toplady, was, he being a director, to direct. Long creative discussions required, meaning everybody wanted to be called creator nowadays. Consequence of death of God or something. Music to come from pencil of Mike Silversmith, valued client of Ms Hope. It was all there, though stained with strong tea and fried eggyolk and hamfat, breakfast reading. Frank Merely, London associate at World Creation in Soho Square, arrange contract. Enderby doubted the reality of all these names.

Well, the place would continue languidly to run in his absence. A home, after all, for Antonio, Manuel and Tetuani. They were good boys really, despite their kif and buggery, as honest as could be reasonably expected in a Moroccan ambience. A sufficiency of farinaceous meals in the kitchen, a doss down wherever it was
convenient
to lay the night’s mattresses, the odd sly nip, though
haram
for Tetuani, from the bottles behind the bar. With their master away they would all sleep on his floorbed, covered with sheepskins. On his return they would still be there tiredly sweeping and frying, though reporting no profit with triumphant teeth, since no profit was better than a loss.

A beefy voice announced through static an impending descent to O’Hare Airport. There Enderby must find an aircraft that would take him to Indiana. There he was to be picked up by some minion of Toplady, who was possibly a debased descendant of the author of
Rock of Ages
, and be driven to a Holiday Inn, though not for a holiday. Having seen on Spanish television a film with Bing Crosby about the pioneering of this hotel chain, Enderby had an image of a large shack of decayed wood with snow swirling about it. But this was autumn, or the fall, and, the weather of Indiana being equable, there would probably be no snow.

A silly asthenic corn queen came round collecting headsets. The neighbour of Enderby gave his up and then turned to Enderby as if, he relieved of the responsibility of using it, the two of them could settle to an urgent colloquy necessarily deferred. ‘This your first visit?’ he said.

‘To where?’

‘To the States.’

‘Well, yes, though not, I assure you, for lack of previous invitations. I should have gone to New York to become a professor for a time. A consequence of
The Wreck of the Deutschland
,
¹
you know. It was a question of one or the other. So I chose this. More creative than Creative Writing, if you see what I mean.’

‘Is that right?’

‘More or less. A blasphemous cinematic adaptation of a great mystical poem, and I was involved, though in a way unwittingly. I didn’t intend it should turn out the way it did.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Very much so.’ Enderby had not been speaking English for a long time. It struck him that he was speaking it now as from a book. He must do something about making it more colloquial. ‘Putting
the
boot in,’ he said. ‘The Nazis shagging coifed nuns. Violence and violation. Too much of that around.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘Too much of that around.’

This man did not, as might be expected from even an enforced companionship of several hours, assist Enderby on his entrance to a strange land. He was quick to get away with no valediction. Enderby was on his own. O’Hare Airport seemed very large. The immigration officials seemed to let everyone in, even Americans, very grudgingly and only after looking up every name in a big book like a variorum edition of something. But Enderby was eventually permitted to have his luggage examined with great thoroughness. The examiner of luggage was a hard man in outdoor middle age.

‘What’s this?’

‘A kind of denture adhesive or tooth glue. A Spanish product. For affixing dentures to the gums or, in the case of the upper prosthesis, to the hard palate.’

‘What?’

Enderby was roughly prevented from demonstrating. The stomach tablets came under closer scrutiny. The customs officer took samples of each in little vials.

‘For dyspepsia,’ Enderby said, and demonstrated the sonic aspects of the condition.

‘You mean you got a bad stomach?’

‘Only after eating. The food on the plane was bloody awful. They warm everything up, as you know.’

‘Why,’ the officer asked with great earnestness, ‘are you entering the United States?’

‘To work in what you people call a theater.’

‘You an actor?’

‘I am a poet. I am Enderby the poet.’

‘
What
?’

‘If you want proof,’ Enderby said, coldly pointing to his messed up shirts, ‘there are my poems.’

The officer picked up the book with the tips of his fingers. He opened it. ‘Don’t make much sense to me,’ he said.

‘Every man to his trade. What you’re doing with people’s luggage doesn’t make much sense to, ah, myself. So there we are.’

‘Listen, fella,’ the man said quietly but rudely, ‘I got my job to do, right?’

‘And I mine.’

‘There might be narcotics in those things you got there for your stomach, right?’

‘Not right. I never touch them. Seen too much of the effects. But I thought we were talking about poetry.’ The people behind Enderby were looking at their watches and muttering for Chrissake, as in an American novel. Enderby was growlingly let go. He walked long and in some pain through several miles of airport building. Twinges in the left calf, cholesterol buildup. There were a lot of irritable people, also shops and restaurants. He saw many copies of his own mug on sale. When he came to the place where it said
INDIANAPOLIS
he was exhausted. He would have given anything for a mug,
CHICAGO MY KIND OF
or not, of very strong tea. He compromised with a couple or so capsules of Estomag, chewing them vigorously. An eager shifty thin little man in jeans and a dirty singlet came up to him and said: ‘Hi.’ He had a shock of wirewool hair but was not Hamitic. Nor Japhetic either. ‘Mike Silversmith,’ he said.

‘How did you know it was. Recognition, I mean.’

‘You opened that bag to take out that stuff that’s all round your mouth. There’s a book in it with your name on.’

This was not the kind of assumption that Enderby liked. People with names like Gomez or Krumpacker could conceivably be comforting their journeys with the
Collected Poems
. Conceivably, only just. Enderby wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘The composer,’ he said.

‘Right.’ He sat without invitation next to Enderby. ‘I got these cassettes in my bag here already. They’ll knock you. “To be or not to be in love with you”. Then there’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow”’

‘And Tomorrow,’ added Enderby. ‘It’s three times. But it’s me who’s doing the words.’ Colloquial was coming nicely back to him. Anger was paying its first visit. He had thought it might be like this.

‘You and Shakespeare,’ Silversmith said. ‘“To be or not to be in love with you”. You take it from there. But you hear the tune first.’

‘How about the words I’ve written already and which, presumably, you’ve seen. Already,’ he added.

‘Never get in the charts with them.’

They were summoned aboard by a man in a powder blue blazer.

‘What,’ asked Enderby with care, ‘kind of an orchestra do you propose?’ A black child clinging to its necessarily black mother’s hand looked up at him. They were shuffling aboard. Silversmith was in front of Enderby. ‘Viols,’ proposed Enderby, ‘recorders, cornetts, tabors. Authenticity.’

But Silversmith was addressing the imbecilic stewardess as honey. He knew her, he had come this way before. Or perhaps not. Enderby was obliged to sit next to Silversmith and then to put on a headset attached to a Japanese cassette recorder which Silversmith eagerly took from a scuffed bag. ‘Listen,’ Silversmith said. Enderby heard a voice, Silversmith’s from the sound of it, scrannelling perverted words from
Hamlet
while a guitar thrummed chords.

‘To be or not to be

In love with you,

To spend my entire life

Hand in glove with you.’

Then the voice, having no more words, lahed and booped on to the end, which was the same as the beginning. Enderby carefully fastened his seatbelt. He as carefully freed his ears of the noise and the foam rubber. Silversmith said:

‘You take it from there, right?’

‘Wrong,’ Enderby said. ‘If you think I’m going to permit William Shakespeare to sing inanities like that –’

‘What’s that word?’

‘Inanities. It’s a desecration.’

Silversmith sighed. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘it’s going to be like I told Gus Toplady it was going to be. You got too many long words in that thing you sent him. You got to consider the public.’

‘I’ve got to consider Shakespeare.’

‘Ah, Jesus,’ Silversmith said.

‘After all,’ Enderby said, ‘we were all warned.’

‘Warned about what?’

‘About disturbing his bones. There’s a curse waiting.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Silversmith said, and he pretended to go to sleep. The aircraft started to bear them to Indianapolis.

1
See
The Clockwork Testament
.

‘MORE OF A
prologue or induction really,’ Enderby said.

‘In what?’ somebody crossly asked.

‘Come, come,’ Enderby said in an unwisely schoolmasterly tone. ‘You all remember your
Taming of the Shrew
.’

This resident company, lounging in deplorable rags in a kind of classroom complete with blackboard, did not seem to like being instructed in the terminology of drama by a man in a decent, though old, clerical grey suit. Their director was not dressed like that. He was too old, though, for the coûture and coiffure he affected. Dirty grey sculpted sideburns. Silk shirt of black covered with sharpnosed Greek heroes in gold in postures of harmless aggression. Grey chest hairs and dangling medallions. Chinos stained at the crotch. Bare feet in fawn suede cowboy boots. Enderby felt he himself was there as for the reading of a will, which in a sense he was.

The people not there were the people who should have been there. But Shakespeare was to be played by a film actor who was the husband of Ms Grace Hope, and he was making a film. The dark lady who was to play the Dark Lady was completing a nightclub engagement.
Hamlet
without the prince, Enderby had quipped. Gus Toplady had morosely replied that he had tried it in Minneapolis at the Tyrone Guthrie but it had not really worked. Hamlet off stage all the time, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern eavesdropping on inaudible soliloquy. What’s he say now? He say he not know whether he live or die but he use too many big words. Toplady had done a nude
Macbeth
somewhere. He appeared to have little confidence in Enderby. Enderby reciprocated with all his heartburn.

‘Shakespeare,’ Enderby said, ‘is dying. His ageing wife and two
daughters
sit by his bed, the wife audibly jingling two pennies. These are to put on his eyes when he shall finally close them.’

‘Why?’ asked a girl whom Enderby knew to be Toplady’s mistress.

‘The custom in those days. These are not what ah you would call pennies. Not cents I mean. Big pennies. English ones.’

‘Okay,’ Toplady said without compassion. ‘He’s dying. Forget the pennies.’

‘You can’t,’ Enderby said. ‘Shakespeare says: “Ah, I hear you jingling your pennies to put on my eyes. Do not fret, wife. I shall not keep you waiting long.” Then, though it’s still April, he hears the song of boys and girls bringing in the May. They sing the ah following: