Back in the study-bedroom with his draft, he saw how bad it was and how much work on it lay ahead. And yet he was supposed to start thinking of death. It was the leaving of things unfinished that was so intolerable. It was all very well for Jesus Christ, not himself a writer though no mean orator, to talk about thinking not of the morrow. If you'd started a long poem you had to think of the bloody morrow. You could better cope with the feckless Nazarene philosophy if you were like these scrounging dope-takers who littered the city. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as also the dope thereof.
Augustine said: If the Almighty is also Allknowing,
He knows the precise number of hairs that will fall to the floor
From your next barbering, which may also be your last.
He knows the number of drops of lentil soup
That will fall on your robe from your careless spooning
On August 5th, 425. He knows every sin
As yet uncommitted, can measure its purulence
On a precise scale of micropeccatins, a micropeccatin
Being, one might fancifully suppose,
The smallest unit of sinfulness. He knows
And knew when the very concept of man itched within him
The precise date of your dispatch, the precise
Allotment of paradisal or infernal space
Awaiting you. Would you diminish the Allknowing
By making man free? This is heresy.
But that God is merciful as well as Allknowing
Has been long revealed: he is not himself bound
To fulfill foreknowledge. He scatters grace
Liberally and arbitrarily, so all men may hope,
Even you, man of the northern seas, may hope.
But Pelagius replied: Mercy is the word, mercy.
And a greater word is love. Out of his love
He makes man free to accept or reject him.
He could foreknow but refuses to foreknow
Any, even the most trivial, human act until
The act has been enacted, and then he knows.
So men are free, are touched by God's own freedom.
Christ with his blood washed out original sin,
So we are in no wise predisposed to sin
More than to do good: we are free, free,
Free to build our salvation. Halleluiah.
But the man of Hippo, with an African blast,
Blasted this man of the cool north…
No no no, Enderby said to himself. It could not be done. This was not poetry. You could not make poetry out of raw doctrine. You had to find symbols, and he had no symbols. The poem could not be written. He was free. The paper chains rustled off. He stuffed them into the wastebasket. Free. Free to start writing the Odontiad. Hence bound to start writing the Odontiad. Hence not free.
He sighed bitterly and went to the bathroom to start tarting himself up for the television show. Clean and bleeding, he put on garments bequeathed to him by Rawcliffe and stood, at length, to review himself at length in the long wall mirror near the bedroom door. Seedy Edwardian, recaller of dead glories, finale of Elgar's First Symphony belting out Massive Hope for the Future. There was an empire in those days, and it was assumed that the centre of the English language was London. Wealthy Americans were still humble provincials. Ichabod. He put on the sculpted overcoat and his beret and, swordstick pathetic in his feeble grip, went out. The subway had not yet erupted into violent nocturnal life. His fellow-passengers on the downtown express to Times Square were as dimly ruminant as he, perhaps recalling dimly the glories of other departed empires-Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Pharaonic. But one black youth in a rutilant combat jacket saw drug-induced empires within-under the pax alucinatoria the rhomboid and spiral became one. Enderby looked again at the torn-off corner of the abandoned poem on which he had written Live Lancing Show 46th Street or somewhere like that. He had time, also two ten-dollar bills in his pocket. He would go to the Blue Bar of the Algonquin Hotel, a once very literary place, and have a quiet gin or so. He felt all right. The black tea and Sara Lee were worrying the heart combat troops: why was not the rutilant enemy scared?
He got out quite briskly at Times Square and walked down West 44th Street. In the lobby of the Algonquin there were, he saw, British periodicals on sale. He bought The Times and leafed through it standing. In a remote corner of it, he saw, a Merhber of Parliament was pleading for a special royal commission to clean up the Old Testament. Dangers even in great classics, provocation to idle and affluent youth etc. In the Blue Bar there were some conspiratorial and lecherous customers at tables, but seated on a bar stool was a rather loud man whose voice Enderby seemed to recognise. Good God, it was Father Hopkins himself. No, the man who played him in the film. What was his name now?
"So I said to him up yours, that's what I said."
"That's it, Mr. O'Donnell."
Coemgen (pronounced Kevin) O'Donnell, that was the man. Enderby had met him briefly at a little party after the London preview, when he had been affably drunk. No coincidence that he was here now: the Algonquin took in actors as much as writers. Sitting at a stool two empty stools away from O'Donnell, Enderby asked politely for a pink gin. O'Donnell, hunched to the counter, heard the voice, swivelled gracelessly, and said:
"You British?"
"Well, yes," Enderby said. "British-born but, like yourself I presume, living in exile. Look, we've already met."
"Never seen you before in my life." The voice was wholly American. "Lots of guys like you, seen me in the movies, assume acquaintanceshhh. Ip. You British?"
"Well, yes. British-born but, like yourself I presume, living in."
"You said all that crap already, buster. All I asked was a straight queschhh. Un. Okay, you're British. Needn't keep on about it. No need to eggs hhhibit the flag tattooed on your ass. And all that sort of. What? What?"
"The film," Enderby said. "The movie. The Wreck of the Deutschland."
"I was in it. That was my movie." He thrust his empty tumbler rudely towards the bartender. He was most unpriestlike in his dress, glistening cranberry suit, violet silk, shoes that Enderby took to be Gucci. The face was a rugged corner-boy's, apt for some slum baseball-with-the-kids Maynooth-type priest, but hardly for the delicate intellectual unconscious pederast ah-my-dear Hopkins.
"The point is," Enderby said, "that I too was in it in a sense. It was my idea. My name was among the credits. Enderby," he added, to no applause. "Enderby," to not even recognition. Coemgen O'Donnell said:
"Yeah. I guess it had to be somebody's idea. Everything is kind of built on the idea of some unknown guy. You seen the figures in this week's Variety? Sex and violence, always the answer. But the guy that wrote the book was not like the guy I played in the movie. No, sir. The original Father Hopkins was a fag."