The Complete Enderby (62 page)

‘How much?’ said Mr Schaumwein.

Enderby smiled. ‘A lot,’ he said. The money part of his brain grew suddenly delirious, lifelong abstainer fed with sudden gin. He trembled as with the prospect of sexual outrage. ‘A thousand dollars,’ he said. They stared at him. ‘There,’ he said. And then: ‘Somewhere in that region anyway. I’m not what you’d call a greedy man.’

‘We might manage five hundred,’ Schaumwein’s assistant-friend said. ‘On delivery, of course. Provided that it’s what might be termed satisfactory.’

‘Seven hundred and fifty,’ Enderby said. ‘I’m not what you’d call a greedy man.’

‘It’s not an original,’ Mr Schaumwein said. ‘You mentioned some guy called Hopkins that wrote the book. Who is he, where is he, who do I see about the rights?’

‘Hopkins,’ Enderby said, ‘died in 1889. His poems were published in 1918.
The Wreck of the Deutschland
is out of copyright.’

‘I think,’ Mr Schaumwein said carefully, ‘we’ll have two more scatches on the racks.’

What, after Mr Schaumwein had gone back to the Kasbah and then presumably home to Chisel Productions, was to surprise Enderby was that the project was to be taken seriously presumably. For a letter came from the friend-assistant, name revealed as Martin Droeshout (familiar vaguely to Enderby in some vague picture connection or other), confirming that, for $750.00, Enderby would deliver a treatment for a film tentatively entitled
The Wreck of the Deutschland
, based on a story by Hopkins, which story their researchers had not been able to bring to light despite prolonged research, had Enderby got the name right, but it didn’t matter as subject was in public domain. Enderby presumed that the word
treatment
was another word for
shooting script
(a lot of film-men had been to his bar at one time or another, so the latter term was familiar to him). He had even looked at the shooting script of a film in which a heavy though not explicit sexual sequence had actually been shot, at midnight with spotlights and a humming generator truck, on the beach just near to his beach café-restaurant,
La Belle Mer
. So, while his boys snored or writhed sexually with each other during the siesta, he got down to typewriter-pecking out his cinematization of a great poem, delighting in such curt visual directives as VLS, CU, and so on, though not always clearly understanding what they meant.

1. Exterior Night

(
Lightning lashes a rod on top of a church
.)

2. Interior Night A Church

(
Thunder rolls. A priest on his knees at the altar looks up, sweating. It is Fr Hopkins, S. J
.)

F
R
H
OPKINS
, S. J.:

Thou hearest me truer than tongue confess

Thy terror, O Christ, O God.

3. Exterior Night A Starlit Sky

(
The camera pans slowly across lovely-asunder starlight
.)

4. Exterior Night The Grounds of a Theological Seminary

(
Father Hopkins, S. J., looks up ecstatically at all the firefolk sitting in the air and then kisses his hand at them
.)

5. Exterior Sunset The Dappled-with-Damson West

(
Father Hopkins, S. J., kisses his hand at it
.)

6. Interior Day A Refectory

(
The scene begins with a CU of Irish stew being placed on a table by an
illgirt
scullion. Then the camera pulls back to show priests talking vigorously
.)

(
The voice of Father Hopkins, S.J. is heard from another part of the table
.)

H
OPKINS
(OS):

Glory be to God for dappled things,

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow …

(
The priests look at each other
.)

7. The Same Two Shot

(
Father Hopkins is talking earnestly to a very beautiful fellow-priest who listens attentively
.)

(
The camera pans rapidly back to the other two priests, who look at each other
.)

It worried Enderby a little, as he proceeded with his film version of the first part of the poem, that Hopkins should appear to be a bit cracked. There was also a problem in forcing a relevance between the first part and the second. Enderby, serving one morning abstractedly sloe gin to two customers, hit on a solution. ‘Sacrifice,’ he said suddenly. The customers took their sloe gins away to a far table. The idea being that Hopkins wanted to be Christ but that the tall nun, Gertrude, kindly became Christ for him, and that her sort of crucifixion on the Kentish Knock (sounded, he thought gloomily, like some rural sexual aberration) might conceivably be thought of as helping to bring our King back, oh, upon English souls.

12. Exterior Day CU A Sloe

(
We see a lush-kept plush-capped sloe in a white well-kept priestly hand
.)

13. CU Father Hopkins S.J.

(
Hopkins, in very large close-up, mouths the sloe to flesh-burst. He shudders
.)

14. Exterior Day Calvary

(
Christ is being nailed to the cross. Roman soldiers jeer
.)

15. Resume 13

(
Hopkins, still shuddering, looks down at the bitten sloe. The camera tracks on to it into CU. It dissolves into:
)

16. Interior Day A Church

(
The hands of a priest hold up the host, which looks a bit like the sloe. It is, of course, Fr Hopkins, S. J., saying mass
.)

17. The Same CU

(
In CU, Father Hopkins murmurs ecstatically
.)

18. Exterior Day A Stormy Sea

(
The
Deutschland,
American-outward-bound. Death on drum, and storms bugle his fame
.)

The second part was easier, mostly a business of copying out Hopkins’s own what might be thought of as prophetic camera-directions:

45. Exterior Day The Sea

(
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps
.)

And so on. When it was finished it made, Enderby thought, a very nice little script. It could be seen also as the tribute of one poet to another. People would see the film and then go and read the poem. They would see the poem as superior art to the film. He sent the script off to Mr Schaumwein at Chisel Productions. He
eventually
received a brief letter from Martin Droeshout saying that a lot of it was very flowery, but that was put down to Enderby’s being a poet, which claim of Enderby had been substantiated by researchers. However, they were going ahead, updating so as to make Germany Nazi, and making the nun Gertrude a former love of Father Hopkins, both of them coming to realization that it was God they really loved but they would keep in touch. This meant re-write men, as Enderby would realize, but Enderby’s name would appear among the credits.

Enderby’s name did indeed eventually appear among the credits:
Developed out of an idea of
. Also he was invited to London to see a preview of
The Wreck of the Deutschland
(they couldn’t think of a better title, any of them; there wasn’t a better title). He was pretty shocked by a lot of it, especially the flashbacks and it was nearly all flashbacks, the only present-tense reality being the
Deutschland
on its way to be ground to bits on the Kentish Knock (which, somebody else at the preview said, to ecstatic laughter, sounded a little like a rural sexual aberration). For instance, Hopkins, who had been given quite arbitrarily the new name Tom, eventually Father Tom, was Irish, and the tall nun was played by a Swede, though that was really all right. These two had a great pink sexual encounter, but before either of them took vows, so that, Enderby supposed, was all right too. There were some over-explicit scenes of the nuns being violated by teenage storm-troopers. The tall nun Gertrude herself tore off her Franciscan habit to make bandages during the storm scenes, so that her end, in a posture of crucifixion on the Kentish Knock, was as near-nude as that of her Master. There was also an ambiguous moment when, storms bugling, though somewhat subdued, Death’s fame in the background, she cried orgasmatically: ‘Oh Christ, Christ, come quickly’ – Hopkins’s own words, so one could hardly complain. On the whole, not a bad film, with Hopkins getting two secondsworth of solo credit:
Based on the story by
. As was to be expected, it got a very restrictive showing rating, nobody under eighteen. ‘Things have come to a pretty pass,’ said Mr Schaumwein in a television interview, ‘when a religious film is no longer regarded as good family viewing.’

So there it was then, except for complaints from the reactionary and puritanical, though not, as far as Enderby could tell, from
Hopkins’s
fellow-Jesuits.
The Month
, which had originally refused the poem itself, made amends by finding the film adult and serious. ‘Mr Schaumwein very sensibly has eschewed the temptation to translate Hopkins’s confused grammar and neologistic tortuosities into corresponding visual obscurities.’ Enderby’s association, however small, with a great demotic medium led to his being considered worthy by the University of Manhattan of being invited to come as a visiting professor for an academic year. The man who sent the invitation, the Chairman of the English Department, Alvin Kosciusko, said that Enderby’s poems were not unknown there in the United States. Whatever anybody thought of them, there was no doubt that they were genuine Creative Writing. Enderby was therefore cordially invited to come and pass on some of his Creative Writing skill to Creative Writing students. His penchant for old-fashioned and traditional forms might act as a useful corrective to the cult of free form which, though still rightly flourishing, had led to some excesses. One postgraduate student had received a prize for a poem that turned out to be a passage from a vice-presidential speech copied out in reverse and then seasoned with mandatory obscenities. He had protested that it was as much Creative Writing as any of the shit that had been awarded prizes in previous years. Anyway, the whole business of giving prizes was reactionary. Subsidies were what was required.

NAKED AS THE
day he was born though much hairier, Enderby prepared himself breakfast. One of the things he approved of about New York – a city otherwise dirty, rude, violent, and full of foreigners and mad people – was the wide variety of dyspeptic foods on sale in the supermarkets. In his view, if you did not get dyspepsia while or after eating, you had been cheated of essential nourishment. As for dealing with the dyspepsia, he had never in his life seen so
many
palliatives for it available – Stums and Windkill and Eupep and (magnificent proleptic onomatopoesis, the work of some high-paid Madison Avenue genius, sincerely admired by Enderby) Aaaarp. And so on. But the best of all he had discovered in a small shop specializing in Oriental medicines (sent thither by a Chinese waiter) – a powerful black viscidity that oozed sinisterly from a tube to bring wind up from Tartarean depths. When he went to buy it, the shopkeeper would, in his earthy Chinese manner, designate it with a remarkable phonic mime of the substance at work. Better than Aaaarp but not easily representable in any conventional alphabet. Enderby would nod kindly, pay, take, bid good day, go.

Enderby had become, so far as use of the culinary resources of the kitchen (at night the cockroaches’ playground) were concerned, one hundred per cent Americanized. He would whip up a thick milk shake in the mixer, thaw then burn frozen waffles in the toaster, make soggy leopardine pancakes with Aunt Jemima’s buckwheat pancake mixture (Aunt Jemima herself was on the packet, a comely Negress rejoicing in her bandanna’d servitude), fry Pepperidge Farm fat little sausages. His nakedness would be fat-splashed, but the fat easily washed off, unlike with clothes. And he would make tea, though not altogether in the American manner – five bags in a pint mug with
ALABAMA
gilded on it, boiling water, a long stewing, very sweet condensed milk added. He would eat his breakfast with HP steak sauce on one side of the plate, maple syrup on the other. The Americans went in for synchronic sweet and savoury, a sign of their salvation, unlike the timid Latin races. He would end his meal with a healthy slice of Sara Lee orange cream cake, drink another pint of tea, then, after his black Chinese draught, be alertly ready for work. A mansized breakfast, as they said. There was never need for much lunch – some canned corned beef hash with a couple of fried eggs, say, and a pint of tea. A slice of banana cake. And then, this being America, a cup of coffee.