PRIEST #1: (sotto voce) Jesus Christ.
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.
We see a lush-kept plush-capped sloe in a white well-kept priestly hand.
Hopkins, in very large close-up, mouths the sloe to flesh-burst. He shudders.
Christ is being nailed to the cross. Roman soldiers jeer.
Hopkins, still shuddering, looks down at the bitten sloe. The camera tracks on to it into CU. It dissolves into:
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.
In CU, Father Hopkins murmurs ecstatically.
HOPKINS: (ecstatically) Be adored among men, God, three-numbered form. Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, man's malice, with wrecking and storm.
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' own what might be thought of as prophetic camera directions:
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 realisation that it was God they really loved but they would keep in touch. This meant rewrite men, as Enderby would realise, 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 overexplicit scenes of the nuns being violated by teen-age 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' own words, so one could hardly complain. On the whole, not a bad film, with Hopkins getting two seconds worth of solo credit: Based on the poem 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' 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' 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.
TWO
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 specialising 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 Americanised. 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 Oscar Mayer 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 onto it, boiling water, a long stewing, very sweet condensed milk added. He would eat his breakfast with H.P. 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 man-sized 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.