Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

At its centre are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power—Kenneth Toomey, eminent novelist, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into honoured, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood.

Through the lives of these two modern men Burgess explores the very essence of power. As each pursues his career—one to sainthood, one to wealthy exile—their relationship becomes the heart of a narrative that incorporates almost everyone of fame and distinction in the social, literary, and political life of America and Europe

Earthly Powers was deemed by Malcolm Bradbury to be the book that “summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness”. The Times thundered that it was a “hellfire tract thrown down by a novelist at the peak of his powers”.

Burgess presents a novelist within a novel: the 81-year-old writer Kenneth Toomey, who was rumoured to be loosely based on Somerset Maugham. He tells of his long life over the course of the 20th century – and plays all sorts of verbal and literary games along the way. Early on, he tells us he has already written crucial parts of his story up as fiction; his lover Geoffrey suggests that he has likewise foreseen other possibilities for his future: “You set it all down in that stupid bloody sentimental shitbag of a novel, called The Affairs of Men,” says Geoffrey. “Fucking silly pretentious title.”

It’s one long hall of mirrors, where truth and fact are never quite substantial, where religious and romantic faith are forever in question, and where fiction and metafiction are forever intruding. There are 82 chapters: Burgess claimed there were supposed to be 81 to mirror Toomey’s age and that he only noticed the error at the proofing stage. But are we to believe that Burgess himself is any more reliable than his authorial narrator?

On his eighty-first birthday, retired gay writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the Archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonisation of Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII and his brother-in-law. Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the 20th century.

Themes

• The problem of evil
• Censorship
• Divorce
• Domenico’s brother Don Carlo’s ascent to the papacy
• Ecumenism
• Exorcism
• Pederasty
• Gay rights
• Hollywood
• Terminal illness and Euthanasia
• The marriage of his sister Hortense to composer Domenico Campanati
• The relationship between Love and Lust
• Toomey’s break with the Roman Catholic Church, which regards homosexual acts as intrinsically disordered

The novel includes coverage of:

• The Great War
• The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic
• The rise of fascism in Italy
• Nazi Germany
• World War II
• Post-colonialism in Africa

Since it is an integral theme of the novel that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator,^[6] the work highlights the fallibility of memory by including many deliberate factual errors, as explained by Burgess in the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time. These may be found on almost every page of the novel, and vary in subtlety from inaccuracies of German grammar to deliberately contrary re-writings of history.

• The fictional Carlo Campanati becomes Pope Gregory XVII. This name was allegedly the one to be adopted by Giuseppe Siri, who four times failed to be elected Pope in controversial circumstances. The dates of Carlo’s papal election (1958) and death (3 June 1963) correspond to those of Pope John XXIII, as does his general appearance. However, many of Campanati’s achievements and attributes are shared by the real-life Pope Paul VI, who, like Carlo, was Archbishop of Milan before his election. Other concordances between Carlo and Paul VI include his dealings with Benito Mussolini’s government, his support for Jews escaping the Nazis, his arguments against contraception and priestly marriage, and his world travels during his papacy. Carlo’s plan for an ecumenical reorganisation of the church is reflected in both John XXIII, who called the Second Vatican Council, and in Paul VI, who opted to continue the council after John’s death.
• The Jonestown mass suicide of 1978 is presented in the form of a fictional group called the “Children of God” (not to be confused with the new religious movement of the same name). While the basic premise of the incident is retained in the novel (charismatic religious leader leads a group of disenfranchised followers to ritual suicide), many of the details are changed. In the novel, the mass suicide takes place in 1963, not 1978, in a compound located in the Mojave desert of California, not Guyana, and the congregation is given cyanide tablets, rather than the now-infamous poisoned Flavor Aid.
• In chapter 47, Toomey, one of whose books is turned into a film in Nazi Germany, is invited to a film festival in Berlin. He takes the airship LZ 129 Hindenburg which from 6 May 1936 until the disaster of 6 May 1937 at Lakehurst NJ made ten trips to the US. In Berlin “nowhere on the streets so clean you could eat your dinner from them did I see wretches wearing the yellow David star into trucks being harried. That would all be round the back.”

The yellow badge was not introduced in Germany until 1 September 1941.

• There is a reception with Goebbels at the Propagandaministerium, “he in tails, his lady in white and jewels. I had met her before … when she was still the wife of a certain Herr Friedländer, a rich jew who had been forced by the party to endow her on her new marriage with half a million marks and also to give her new husband as a wedding present the Friedländer Schloss at Schwannwerder.”

Actually the Jewish merchant Friedländer had been her stepfather and thus made her Magda Friedländer. Before industrialist Günther Quandt married her in 1921, on request of her mother’s first husband, Dr. Ritschel, Magda was registered as his daughter. After her divorce from Quandt in 1929 Magda married Goebbels in 1931 and bore him six children. In 1934 the Goebbelses settled on the island of Schwanenwerder buying cheaply from persecuted Jews.

• In chapter 49 the first film shown at the festival is Hitlerjunge Quex, an early Nazi film of 1933, on the next day to be followed by the premiere of a new film on the life of Horst Wessel. The reader is correctly informed that already in 1933 a film on Horst Wessel had been made, but out of “suspicions that the film would not really serve … the name of the hero had been changed to Hans Westmar.”

That the premiere of Hans Westmar had actually, as the novel states, been attended not only by Goering but also by Wilhelm Furtwängler is unlikely.

• In the fictional Horst Wessel film Toomey gets to see, the Berliner Wessel is played by the popular Viennese actor Paul Hörbiger. Wessel had died in February 1930 at the age of 22 (the novel says the funeral was in 1929). Hörbiger in 1936/37 was 42 years old and married with four children. The novel describes him as “quite clearly to me homosexual: impulses flashed between us in the garish swastika-flagged eau-de-cologne-sprayed entrance hall.” This has nothing to do with the real Hörbiger.

• The fictional writer Jakob Strehler, who Toomey starts reading, is said to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935. In 1935, no award for literature was issued.

Quotations:

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

“Encouraged, Robert gently eased his throbbing burden into the timid heat of the sacred fissure, soothing with gentle words, words of love, while the angelic bell pounded and pulsed without.”

“And the boy took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpared nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen.”

“Ezra Pound was, I think, dancing with Sylvia Beach, or it may have been Adrienne Monnier. And you may as well have Ernest Hemingway shadowboxing his way around the periphery.”

“‘Better,’ Ford blasted at me with his breath”

“In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.”

“Look, I don’t see why bad artists – I mean artists who are obviously incompetent… – why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they’re supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or… …demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.”

“There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.”

“People don’t want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.”

“I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.”

“But don’t think that it’s a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It’s our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it’s cold outside. But it’s not the cold’s fault that it’s cold.”

“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”
― Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

 

“I can’t accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.”

“I must give up seeing people, I told myself.”

“Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?”

“Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.”

“In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort.”

“Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.”

“It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.”

“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”

“…I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless…”

“The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.”

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