I set this down meo periculo, at my own risk, but I am well aware that no public is likely to see it. Carthage has won not only our bodies but our minds. To her advantage she has learned from English insularity.
Now no one will ever let me tell the truth lest they too enjoy my punishment. They see a great man already humiliated and reduced. The Bishop said so to Mrs Cornelius. Like Abdias in the story, I learned all I know by suffering, by travel and intellectual solitude. Unlike his creator Stifter, I see no special virtue in Abdias’s suffering, solitude or even his travels. I never sought them out. But neither would I let their threat deter me from my course. I once thought I was doomed to wander until Judgement Day, doomed to speak the truth and never be heard.
We should live in harmony with Nature. I am prepared to provide the means by which that is possible. The Gods learned to live with random Nature. Tieck knew that and all the great German writers. We must use our ingenuity to live in accord with Nature, not try to overpower her! My flying cities allow Nature to exist without interference from us and yet remain there to be enjoyed whenever we wish.
Throughout all my vicissitudes this has been my dream. I have a gift for the world. Why would they accept so much dross from those frauds - from Marx and Einstein? What makes Faust a villain and Freud a saviour? There is one obvious answer but of course we are not allowed to give it any more. We have been fully conquered. Already we are refused the basic right to identify our masters. We are fully enslaved. We are even ruled by the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, who as everyone knows bought their titles in Warsaw! I have a leaflet which proves it. It was written by one of those old churchmen from the Polish Club. The Poles of all people know the perfidy of Carthage. They prize Christian chivalry above everything. No wonder the women complain. Chivalry and good manners are a thing of the past. Once a man had to court his woman, prove his wit, his talent and his courage. Today it is all godless, joyless power-coupling - the boy to boast, the girl to feel even a taste of loving a man, her common sisterly dream, virgin or whore. For true love is all, the only dream she is allowed to call her own. Assured that this chimera is theirs to achieve through appropriate acts of obeisance and devotion to men, by appropriate speech and appropriate dress, the women become devious and spiteful. The boys are taught that to fuck and vomit are the two truest tests of status in their community. Their football chants must be a clue. We’re here because we’re here. The desperate call of nihilists down the centuries. We want, ra-ra-ra. We want, ra-ra-ra. We’ll never walk alone! I did it my way. The dumb confidence of the herd. The women I could save. The men are hopeless. They should be sent to the Gold Coast or the Congo or the Andes. One day I shall write about my months in South America following the shipwreck of the John Wesley. I have ever since had a phobia of snakes and alligators which I suspect will stay with me for eternity. We went to The Wandering Jew at the Majestic in Lisbon. It was almost as good as the play, with Matheson Lang recreating his famous rôle. I was deeply moved by the final speech when, refusing to renounce his faith to the Inquisition, Mateus says: ‘The spirit of your Christ is nearer to my heart as I stand here - a Jew - than it could be to those who would so thrust Him between their lips.’ A wonderful speech. I wept. They had a full orchestra. Is this anti-Semitism? The message of the film was clear - we are becoming so far divorced from the virtues of our religion that it takes a noble and envying Jew to show us that what we have is of infinite value. I have pointed this out more than once to that yentzer Barnum, who runs the Festival Novelties in Elgin Crescent, though half of it is toys now. I say his skull is as empty as one of the giant pantomime heads in his window. He says I am just an old Judenhetze. I say this is ridiculous. How can I be? True, he says, it is a miracle to hear such mishegass. Maybe Charlie Chaplin was Adolf Hitler, after all. ‘A split personality, maybe.’
‘It is you who are crazy, my friend,’ I tell him. ‘My God, what nonsense I have to suffer. One of my oldest friends was a Jew. From Odessa. I owe my life to him. Does this make me a likely anti-Semite?’
He cannot answer. They never can, these ‘wise’ guys.
Rabbi Davidson up the street, on the other side of the bridge, claims so much greater an understanding of religion and the world than I. He can never have known the temptations and the terrors of the wilderness, the luxurious pleasures and forbidden tortures of the Orient. I know the East. I have personally experienced the world that gave birth to our common Testament. If I understand nothing else I understand religion. Davidson knows I respect his position and his faith, but I always defeat him in finding Talmudic examples or something from the Apocrypha. He says to me, ‘I believe you must have lived since time began, Colonel Pyatnitski.’
‘No,’ I tell him, ‘I was born when Christ was born.’
He recognises symbolism and plays on words, but only on that rather primitive level of the English who gave the world Browning and then refused to understand him. He is famous today for his passing whimsies, the firearms which bear his name and some verses done for children and old friends. And, of course, for his long-standing feud with John Gielgud, the cinema star. It was on the television recently. When I asked her why she was crying, Mrs Cornelius said she felt sorry for the dog. I had just come out of the toilet and didn’t understand her. ‘Flush,’ she said. ‘Flush!’
It is true I have become a little absent-minded about this. My recent memories are sometimes hazy but I can recall the smell of the vast sweet mint fields gathered up to the walls of Fez like a besieging army, and Alexandria where her mint is diffused to form a liquor that is like drinking scented air which brings springtime back to old men. Who knows what real mint is like now? Today it is debased to flavour envelopes, lavatory cleaner, toothpaste and sex-creams. We had to make do with Vaseline in my day and then the only flavour was petroleum! The pilot brought us into busy Alexandria and even from the lanes I could smell the heady breeze of the real Africa brought to us down from the Nile. On that cool Mediterranean morning when with visible breath we ascended to the deck to find the mist not completely lifted off the water, I imagined I would enjoy a view of Greek and Roman grandeur, rising above the lesser architecture of Turk and Arab, for Captain Quelch had entirely failed to impress me with his insistence on Alexandria’s quintessential dullness. Instead I saw the municipal buildings of provincial England, laid out wherever possible with the kind of flower-gardens one finds assembled in Swiss cities (though a little more wilted), with a minaret here and there as a tasteful reminder of our geographical reality. Here, indeed, was the reassuring Gothic granite and Queen Anne brick of some faintly exotic Bradford. Yet she had a reassuring stateliness and I admired the efficiency of her huge harbour. Ships of the British Merchant Navy were around us on all sides, in company with equally smart ships from the major civilised nations. It was to avoid the ‘miscellaneous’ dock, full of unsavoury native tugs, dhows and rusty tramps from the four corners of the earth, that Captain Quelch, flying a prominent Stars and Stripes, announced himself to our pilot as ‘Samuel Goldwyn’s party’, a fact which was quietly relayed to those on shore, and got the usual escort of honour from our culture-starved sailors who knew the secret identities of their film favourites better than they knew their mothers’ Christian names. Today only Hollywood provides that universal glory once the sole privilege of Alexander the Great. And so remote were these Englishmen from the centres of civilisation that they were keenly prepared to believe us the stars of a dozen as yet unseen epics. Some of them did not even know of the Arbuckle scandal! Had we wished, we could have cheated them of everything they valued, just as itinerant relic-sellers and blessing-brokers of the Middle Ages went amongst ignorant villagers far from Rome or Paris. The sense of power was enormous. These people longed for stories, for glamour, just as their ancestors had. And we, of course, could provide it, perhaps in even larger quantities than Norma Talmadge or John Gilbert, for we had seen all aspects of Hollywood - from its lowest vices to its highest aspirations - and between us could give them far more than any film would ever provide. The pilot apologised. There were extremely tedious and meticulous customs and immigration rules for American citizens bringing special equipment, especially photographic equipment, into the country and it would take several hours to clear us. Almost immediately after we had docked a rosy lieutenant presented the Governor’s compliments, together with his regrets that he was not able to welcome us personally, but that our party was invited to a special reception the following evening. Meanwhile all facilities were at our disposal.