It wasn’t always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat…. It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people—an English class was being decimated, the ones who’d volunteered were dying for those who’d known something and hadn’t, and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper….

4
The Counterforce

What?

—RICHARD M. NIXON

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BETTE DAVIS AND MARGARET DUMONT are in the curly-Cuvilliés drawing-room of somebody’s palatial home. From outside the window, at some point, comes the sound of a kazoo, playing a tune of astounding tastelessness, probably “Who Dat Man?” from A Day at the Races (in more ways than one). It is one of Groucho Marx’s vulgar friends. The sound is low, buzzing, and guttural. Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks her cigarette, “What,” she inquires, “is that?” Margaret Dumont smiles, throws out her chest, looks down her nose. “Well it sounds,” she replies, “like a kazoo.”

For all Slothrop knows, it was a kazoo. By the time he’s awake, the racket has faded in the morning. Whatever it was, it woke him up. What it was, or is, is Pirate Prentice, in a more or less hijacked P-47, on route to Berlin. His orders are terse and clear, like those of the others, agents of the Pope, Pope got religion, go out ’n’ find that minnesinger, he’s a good guy after all….