Moby Quack: "The Doctor is Sick" (1960)

:1:

Burgess's fifth-published novel concerns a man hospitalised for a brain tumour in 1960s London: a smart, funny and (designedly) ghastly piece of writing. I read it in this edition:

It seems there was also an edition with cover-art inspired by Last of the Summer Wine:

Makes the first edition cover look a little tame, somehow:

Still: better than this one, with its too cartoonish intimations of Carry-On hi-jinks (the jinks in this novel are really rather low), and its use of the word 'pyjamaed' in plain sight on the cover, which is surely not actually a word at all:

The doctor of the title is Edwin Spindrift, a PhD in linguistics, home from a teaching posting in Burma because of a suspected brain tumour. He is accompanied by his faithless wife, Sheila. Theirs is an open marriage, although really only open on Sheila's side, since Edwin's inability to perform between the sheets is the root of the problem in the first place. Late in the novel Edwin wonders whether he should insist his wife apologise to him for her latest adultery, but then changes his mind: 'perhaps it was really up to him to ask her for forgiveness, for wives did not usually go around committing fornication and adultery if they were happy at home' [223]. Indeed. Sheila herself, slightly brittle and passive-aggressive during her infrequent visits to Edwin in hospital, is certainly unapologetic. She is staying at a local hotel, and rather than basing all her days around visiting hours at the hospital, she sends a succession of working class Londoners that she has met and befriended (and is in some cases sleeping with) from the local pub ('The Anchor').

1960s NHS hospitalisation and all that it entails is vividly and sometimes surprisingly drawn. I mean, I was born in an NHS hospital in the 1960s, and returned to one repeatedly throughout the decade and the one that followed it with the various health-related impediments Providence placed between me and growing-up, and which medical science helped me overcome, but I didn't realise that patients were allowed to smoke on the ward back then (really?). Edwin is X-rayed, electro-encephalogrammed and then has air injected into his cranium and is physically upended (another 'really?' moment; but checking with people who know, it seems this was a real treatment). The latter gives him a bad headache, and his tumour has already provoked synaesthesia and memory problems. His head is shaved, prior to surgery. But Edwin decides he's had enough of life on the ward, and does a runner. The bulk of the novel concerns his subsequent metropolitan peregrinations (this Burgess-idiom is catching, though, isn't it?), including stints in various bars and dives, meeting amongst others: two elderly Jewish twins called Leo and Harry Stone (what else would Joycefan Burgess call a Jew but Leo? and 'stone' is presumably a deliberate negation of the implied fertility of 'Bloom'); a sausage eating German matron whose English idioms inflected by her native tongue are; many cockney wide boys, amongst them Charlie (a window cleaner), Ippo (tea leaf and sandwich-board man) and Bob, who fences stolen watches ('kettles') and who takes a shine to Edwin, believing him to be 'kinky'. Bob's own kink is BDSM, and he kidnaps Edwin and locks him in his (Bob's) flat, begging him to beat him with his (Bob's) extensive collection of whips. Edwin escapes, has to flee gangster Bob's wrath, somehow ends up in a West End theatre, taking part in a televised 'Bald Adonis of Greater London' competition that has been organised to promote a film starring 'Feodor Mintoff', a version of Yul Brynner ('above the cinema entrance was a huge portrait of a bald actor with sensual lips and the sardonic eyes of a Mongol' [191]). The name of this film is Spindrift, also the name of a detergent Edwin sees advertised on the TV. Coincidence? Or evidence that Dr Spindrift is losing it? He is sure he sees Dr Railton, his consultant, playing trumpet in the orchestra accompanying the Bald Adonis show. When he wins the competition and is offered a chance to say something for the cameras, Edwin slips into full-on Burgess-curmudgeon mode. 'This must be a very big moment for you,' says the host:

'Not really,' said Edwin. 'I've known bigger moments. much bigger. As a matter of fact, I feel somewhat ashamed at having been a party to all this. So typical, isn't it, of what passes for entertainment nowadays? Vulgarity with a streak of cruelty and perhaps a faint tinge of the perversely erotic. Shop girls blown up into Helen of Troy. Silly little men trying to be funny. Stupid screaming kids. Adults who ought to know better. Here's my message to the great viewing public.' He leaned forward and spat full into the microphone a vulgar, cruel, erotic word. [198]

The 1960s, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Some of this is uncomfortably close to The Right to an Answer, right down to reusing some of its jokes: the cat called 'Nigger' in that novel is now a dog called 'Nigger', the calling of whose name in public leads to an inverted-commas hilarious (actually wincing and poorly judged) set-piece late in the book, when certain London West Indians take exception to the word: 'they had had enough of white derision; they had learned that to ignore it was but to fan it. They were joined by two others of their race from another house' [188]. This leads to a fight with a gang of white youths. And in Right to an Answer too the Burgess p.o.v. character finds himself on national television and says outrageous things. But in other respects the two books are quite different. There's a similar linguistic density and fascination with dirt, mess, sprawl and the ordinary qualia of quotidian existence; but in Answer all the scattered elements accrete, are gathered together and arranged in a cause-effect pattern, because Burgess wants his story to move towards its Othello-inspired tragic denouement. The Doctor is Sick is a much more scattered product, with no big climax to work towards. A centripetally circular construction.

We are increasingly unsure, as we read on, how much of this is suppose actually to be happening to the hapless Edwin, and how much is a fever-dream hallucination. In the penultimate chapter he wakes, back in the hospital, his wife at his bedside: she tells him the operation has been a success, denies that the things Edwin said happened did happen, and informs him that he has been sacked from his Burma job due to his ill health, and that she is leaving him. 'The trouble is,' Edwin ruefully notes, 'that I'm the last person in the world to say that this happened and that happened. I don't know' [228]

Edwin loves words more than he loves his wife; and his modus operandi through his peripatetic story is to unload mini-lectures about words, etymologies, orthography and semantics on all and sundry. Dr Railton, testing his brain function, asks him the difference between 'gay and 'melancholy'. '"There are various kinds of difference," said Edwin. "One is monosyllabic, the other tetrasyllabic. One is of French the other of Greek derivation. Both can be used as qualifiers, but one can also be used as a noun."' [21]. The doctor notes 'you've got this obsession, haven't you? With words?' But Edwin doesn't agree. 'It's not an obsession, it's a preoccupation. It's my job.' One consequence of this protagonistic preoccupation is that the novel is littered with QI factoids, which makes for a quite interesting read: that the 'y' in 'ye olde tea shoppe' is not a 'y' at all but an approximation for the Old English letter thorn; that 'Sam Weller did not interchange "v" and "w": he used a single phoneme for both—the bilabial fricative. But a recorder like Dickens, untrained phonetically, would think he heard "v" when he expected "w", "w" when he expected "v"' [45]. If it gets tiresome, or at least if it gets in the way of the novel's ability to recreate emotional depth, then that's deliberate too:

Love, for instance. Interesting, that collocation of sounds: the clear allophone of the voiced divided phoneme gliding to that newest of all English vowels which Shakespeare, for instance, did not know, ending with the soft bite of the voiced labiodental. And its origin? Edwin saw the word tumble back to Anglo-Saxon and beyond, and its cognate Teutonic forms tumbling back too, so that all forms ultimately melted in the prehistoric primitive Germanic mother. Fascinating. But there was something about the word that should be even more fascinating, to the man if not to the philologist: its real significance when used in such a locution as 'Edwin loves Sheila'. And Edwin realised that he didn't find it fascinating. [140]

:2:

It's a rather obvious thing to say, but this novel takes its key inspiration from the two late episodes in Ulysses: dividing itself between, first (like 'Oxen of the Sun'), scenes set in a hospital inflected through an acute sense of linguistic history, and then (like 'Circe') a phantasmagoric meander around a city, mostly at night, in which an unhappy, erudite young (ish) man encounters all manner of grotesques, oddballs and weirdos. But formally it is more Finnegans-Wakey-wakey than it is Ulyssean. This is mostly to do with a deliberate structural circularity, a plot defined by recurrence and a general commodius vicus-ishness, whereby Edwin keeps coincidentally bumping into the same people, having the same experiences. Late in the novel he meets an old University friend called Aristotle Thanatos, a Brit of Greek extraction, known as 'Jack'. Or does he? Did he ever have such a friend? Could, for example, anybody exist with such an improbable name? Back in hospital he puzzles over this, not least because the very wealthy Thanatos has offered him a job. Thanatos means death, of course. Aristotle is cockney rhyming slang for bottle; which in turn ('bottle and glass') means that it means arse. Hence: 'Jack'. ('I don't know where you people ever got the Jack from', Thanatos complains; and Edwin explains 'it was to protect you from the vulgar and uninstructed. Aristotle, to the British, has always had a ring of the unclean' [209]. Ring. Ho ho. But see also: jacksie). And actually its the circularity of this piece of rhyming slang that really fascinates Edwin: you say 'bottle', to avoid having to say something so vulgar as 'arse'; and you say 'Aristotle' for bottle, which you then shorten to 'aris', which sounds pretty much like you're saying the word you were trying to avoid in the first place. During one of his impromptu lectures, in an unlicensed drinkery earlier in the novel, Edwin expatiates on precisely this:

"The peculiar forms of Cockney are ... conscious perversions of standard forms. Take rhyming slang ... Arse," said Edwin, loudly, "becomes bottle and glass. There is then a kind of apocope, intended to mystify. But bottle itself is subjected to the same treatment, becoming Aristotle. Apocope is again used and we end with Aris. This is so like the word originally treated that the whole process seems rather unnecessary." [110]

It's as if, in seeking to avoid a taboo, we undertake a complex series of knight's-moves that bring us inevitably back to the taboo. Which is what? Death. The bibulous Aristotle Thanatos, who may or may not exist: bottle death, in a novel written by a heavy drinker who believed himself to be dying. Bottle death, ending a novel that is—its linguistic grace notes and digressions aside—fundamentally the story of an unhappy marriage breaking apart that patently draws (as did The Enemy in the Blanket) on Burgess's own circumstances with Lynne. Lynne who literalised 'bottle death' by drinking herself into the grave within eight years.

But why stop the apocope there? Perhaps the novel is more anally mortifying than drink-sozzled. There's a great deal of drink and drunkenness in it, certainly; but there are also several key scenes inside toilets (in one, Edwin forces himself into the same toilet cubicle as a man, in order to hide from pursuing, furious Bob, only to discover that the man is his boss), and the usual Burgess/Enderby fascination with shitting, the stuff we might call Joycean if we wanted to dignify it. There's a good deal of stuff to do with holes. Edwin delivers a lecturette on the etymology of the word 'cunt' [100]. In one drinking place, he listens to a song sung by 'a lank young man with glasses, a turtle-neck sweater and hair geometrically straight', accompanying himself on the 'Spanish guitar':

For them that looked for the way out and found it:
This.
There are holes that grew as doors with looking for them,
And for those that walked through with their heads high as kites.
This.
Where were the holes?
In man, in woman, in bottles, in the tattered book picked up from the mud on the rainy day by the railway junction.
But the whole of wholes, the hole of holies, where was where is
This? [159]

This goes on for pages: 'The holy, the whole, when seen through the hole/Not seen wholly but only whole holy deliverer from/This' [160]. Man, woman, bottle. Aristotle, arse. On the wall of this drinkery are examples of 1960s art by F. Willoughby. 'Some were bigger than others, and the plain painted backgrounds varied in violent poster-colour, but every one of F. Willoughby's pictures was a portrait of a circle. "They're only circles," whispered Edwin. "Circles, that's all they are."' [159]

Waste may be the key, actually. Insofar as the novel hints at a theme, it is that Edwin has wasted his life. In You’ve Had Your Time Burgess sums-up: ‘in The Doctor is Sick the philologist Edwin Spindrift purveys nothing valuable, while the Jewish twins who run an illegal club at least try to get people drunk' [YHYT, 13]. And the London through which Edwin wanders is a horrible enough place, run-down and seamy and dead. The novel's density of references to and quotations from The Waste Land make this point, too. At the end, Edwin struggles to recall some Greek to say to Aristotle Thanatos: 'but nothing would come. "Apothanein thelo," he said instead, without intending to say it' [214]. That's the end of the epigraph to Eliot's poem, of course: 'I want to die'. A few pages later Edwin doubts the existence of his friend: 'He racked and sifted his memory for Aristotle Thanatos. It was the sort of name a man might make up, like Mr Eugenides the Smyrna merchant' [224] Oho! You remember that Eliot's poem quotes the opening lines of the sailor's song from Tristan und Isolde?

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

So does Burgess, in a pub, where a cockney named Les:

began to sing disconcertingly the sailor's song from Tristan und Isolde. He sang it in a strange and apochryphal translation:

"The wind's fresh airs
Blow landward now.
Get up them stairs,
You Irish cow." [99]

This is pretty funny, I guess: confusing Kind and Kuh. Early on, Edwin assumes his nurse is Russian and addresses her ('spasebo tovarishch'); she replies 'you need not thank me. It is my duty. Besides, I am not Russian' [17] and I suppose we can assume ('Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch') that she is Lithuanian.

But look: piling up all these sorts of word-game instances (and there are lots) is a tedious business. There's certainly a bleakness in the comedy, here; everything is wasted, tending towards death. The doctors are looking for something in Edwin's head, something in his white matter, something deadly. They search and search. Edwin goes questing to, looking for ... what? Something. Restlessly moving on, trying to find it. He is the doctor and he is Moby Dick. Sickness is a wasting away, and this is the wasting away land. He is Ahabic, and the sea across which he travels a desolate one. Öd’ und leer das Meer.

:3:

The doctor is a bit moby, sure. But then again he's not a proper, medical doctor. In a hospital setting he's effectively a fake doctor. A quack. The thing about Moby Dick is that it embroiders, howsoever digressively, a basically linear narrative. Or perhaps it would be better to say, the story is dragged along in the straight-line wake of its prime signifier, the white whale. Ulysses can't help but fall into Odyssean patterns of a quest, journey, a destination, a straight line, a goal. The Waste Land is a parched and urbanised quest narrative. But The Doctor is Sick is repetitive, circular, all digression and no through-line. Edwin is in hospital. In chapter 3 he sneaks out of the hospital and has his first drink at the maritimely The Anchor. Chapter 4 he's back on the ward. Chapter 11, he decides to leave again ('Death was in the hospital: you could hear it snoring in the ward. Life was outside. He must leave at once.' [72]—what was it Larkin asked? Why aren't they screaming?). Chapter 12 he's out in the world again. In chapter 29 he's surprised to find himself back in the hospital. In chapter 32 he sneaks out of his bed in the night, steals some clothes and escapes the hospital again. There's a kind of randomness to all this in, out, in, out; a sense not of narrative pattern but of the awkwardly piled-up way events succeed events in the real world. And, actually, that's one of the key things the novel is doing. Edwin's tumour deracinates his ability to process the world around him into a meaningful gestalt; so he encounters its multifariousness as clutter. The prose is full of things like this

There was a coffee-bar, a steak-house, a chicken grill, a potato parlour (Steaming Jumbo Murphies Slashed And Buttered), a yumyum pastry ship, and even a jungly-looking place called Lettuce Land. Edwin eventually found a Pickwick Breakfast Bar, sat on a stool of contrived discomfort at the counter and looked at the menu. He proposed flapjacks with maple syrup, haddock wth two poached eggs, pork sausages and bacon with rognons sautés, toasted muffins, marmalade, much coffee. [172-73]

Or this account of Leo's conversation:

Leo spoke of amation, of the importance of afters and the special role of the man in the boat; of how to tell heads or tails by the sheer sound; of the private lives of Shakespearian actors; of perversions in Hamburg; of a Thai lady contortionist he had lived with; of a rich queer he had nearly lived with; of great gang figures like Big Harry, Tony the Snob, Quick Herman, Pirelli; of Qwert Yuiop, the Typewriter King. [112]

Visiting him in hospital, Charlie brings him as a gift not one wank mag, as you might expect, but a whole clutch of them: 'he pulled from his side-pockets bunches of gaudy magazines—Girls, Form Divine, Laugh It Off, Vibrant Health, Nude, Naked Truth, Grin, Brute Beauty' [13]. This piling-up of descriptive detail is an old strategy of the Realist novel, of course; and Burgess's seeming higgeldby-piggeldness serves its own purpose. It creates the effect not of Rabelaisian plenty, but an odd sort of transience, a sense of over-production, linked perhaps to the ephemerality of mass production. Everything flashes past Edwin's eyes. Midway through the story, on the run from Bob, he passes through a house:

Edwin raised himself by his hands, kneed the wall-top, found an overgrown garden on the other side, then swung himself over. He rested a second or two against the wall. Ahead was a house of four storeys and a basement, one of a row. Dusk had almost become dark. He stumbled through rank grass and bindweed, nearly fell over an unaccountable coil of barbed wire, clinked several bottles together like a glockenspiel solo, then came to an open back door, a scullery with a very bright light bulb. A pale young man th very oily black hair was leaning over the sink, wearing a woman's apron with frills. He was peeling onions under water but blinded with crying. Edwin stole across the scullery, through a dark kitchen into a hallway a voice called: "Is that you, Mr Dollimore?" Edwin passed a card showing times of church services, another with the legend SINNERS OF THE STREETS (X), a map of London, a wall telephone, opened the front door on which a card—HOUSE FULL—was hanging from a tin-tack. The street was far from empty. [120-21]

The novel has nothing more to say about Mr Dollimore, the onion-peeling-man (who, since the onions are under water, is presumably weeping through grief, rather than irritant airborne sulfenic acids. I wonder what has upset him so?) or this house. It is introduced without preliminaries, and then the story passes on. It's suggestive, but even that suggestiveness gets lost in the blizzard of all the other stuff that the novel hurries on to. There's something of this in Moby Dick, I know; and a lot more in Zola or Dickens.

Dickens makes an interest comparison with Burgess, actually. Two capacious, busy, comic novelists attempt to reproduce the textures of the world in which they find themselves. Literary criticism, in almost all cases, tries to clarify things. Accordingly one of the problems the literary critic faces is: what to do with texts that resist the cleanness and order implied by clarity; or to put it more precisely, texts in which the process clarification smooths away or fails to transfer crucial aspects of the original. In terms of Dickens, I’d say there are two qualities: one—about which critics often speak, sometimes with a mournful acknowledgement that it slips through the net despite being patently one of the most important aspects of Dickens’s art—is his humour, his comic brilliance, his ability to make us laugh. The problem, of course, is the old one: a joke explained ceases to be funny. But there’s another element integral to Dickens’s work as a novelist that clarification misses, and that is, precisely, his clutter. Dickens’s novels are full of stuff: lots of objects, myriad cultural references, in-jokes and out-jokes, subplots, interpolated tales, diversions, descriptions, catch-phrases and quirks and oddities. His novels teem, and that is precisely part of their distinctive appeal. But short of a bald taxonomy of the multitudinous items that constitute the clutter (and that is in itself a violation of the logic of clutter, an ordering of it), what can the critic hope to do with it? Clutter clarified isn’t clutter anymore. And so, like a big white fish, Burgess's novel slips through my critic's fingers and swims free.

John, Will's Son: "The Right To An Answer" (1960) and Shakespeare

The first of Burgess's 'return to England' novels (1959-69), and the first of the half-dozen (or so) that he wrote in short order, believing himself to be dying and wanting to provide for his wife. It's also, much as I enjoyed all three Malayan novels, the first Burgess title that really strikes me as fully accomplished: technically extremely well handled, readable, evocative, believable, thought-provoking. I like its boldness in building the whole around so frankly unlikeable a central character as J.W. Denham, our narrator: a crusty early-middle-age businessman who works overseas, but who returns several times over the course of the novel to the English Midlands, where his elderly father is (first) unwell, and (then) dying. J.W. ('John Wilson', you see) is part of the reason why the book has the word 'Right' in its title. He is reactionary and Conservative, thinks the world is going to hell, is fond of lecturing others on their failings and immoralities, with a particular bee in his bonnet about adultery. Here are the novel's opening four sentences:

I'm telling this story mainly for my own benefit. I want to clarify in my mind the nature of the mess that so many people seem to be in nowadays. I lack the mental equipment and the training and the terminology to say whether the mess is social or religious or moral, but the mess is certainly there, certainly in England and probably in the Celtic fringe and all over Europe and the Americas too. I'm in a position to smell the putridity of the mess more than those who have never really expatriated from it -- the good little people who, with their television, strikes, football pools and Daily Mirror, have everything they want except death -- because I only spend about four months in England every two years now, and I get the stench sharp in my nostrils (widened by warm air) as soon as I land and for about six months after that. [1]

'It's a mess,' he thinks, 'that's made by having too much freedom.' Observing the British Empire dismantling itself around him, he styles himself 'amused' to see 'citizens of newly independent territories scampering off to places still groaning under the British yoke. They don't want freedom; they want stability. And you can't have both.' [3]

So far so Blimpish. But the novel very quickly, mercifully, climbs out of this procrustean ideologising. By the end, looking back over what he has written, Denham has changed his mind. 'I wondered now if that sin against stability was really the big sin.' He adds:

What I did realise quite clearly was the little I'd helped, the blundering or not-wishing-to-be-involved plump moneyed man on leave inveighing against sins he wasn't in the position even to commit ... [for] adultery implied marriage and was perhaps a nobler word than fornication or masturbation or -- never mind.' [252-3].

Denham is our point-of-view observer of 1960-flavour provincial Midlands life, centering on close-horizons, a hypocritical suburban respectability behind which people commit adultery, golf playing retirees, restless youth, and everybody congregating the local pub. Much of the novel is set in the pub, and much of what Denham does is: drink. A secondary character is Ted Arden, the landlord of the Black Swan pub. The photographic negative Shakesperianism of this inn's name is a deliberate move, for Arden is actually descended from the Bard's mother's family. Uneducated, large and friendly, Arden presides over a pub that is represented in the novel as a de facto sanctified place. The narrator, invited by Arden to stay behind after closing time and buy everyone a round, puts it nicely:

It is recognised in England that home drinking is no real pleasure. We pray in a church and booze in a pub: profoundly sacerdotal at heart, we need a host in both places to preside over us. In Catholic churches as in continental bars the host is there all the time. But the Church of England kicked out the Real Presence and the licensing law gave the landlord a terrible sacramental power. Ted was giving me grace of his free will, holding back closing—which is death—making a lordly grant of extra time. [18]

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME indeed. A spear-carrier character is the local vicar, who peppers his speech with many 'bloody's and some other mild profanities. He offends the proprieties of a visiting Sri Lankan Mr Raj by so doing. Burgess is making a Catholic point here: this Protestant priest no longer has access to the healing true blood; all he has is words. Farre gone, farre gone: What do you reade my Lord? Words, words, words. Yes, Hamlet is one of the intertexts here, too. We'll come to that in a minute.

First we have to talk about Mr. Raj, arguably the novel's central character. He attaches himself to Denham during the latter's stint in 'Ceylon', as it used to be called, and he politely but tenaciously refuses to be shaken off. Dark-skinned, intelligent, ingenuous, handsome, charmingly persistent, Raj travels back to England with Denham, ostensibly to undertake university research on 'racialism', but in fact to broaden his experience of life. The plane flight over 'was the time for Mr Raj to talk of his abundant sexual experience ... sparing me no details sounding the gamut from twelve-year-old Tamil girls to Parsee matrons of fifty.' Still, he envies Denham: '"you have been with European women and I have not. That," he said, as we sped west, "is something for me to look forward to." "I know nothing of English women," I said, "nothing at all." [81] In England Mr Raj is angry that the only accommodation offered to him is located 'low streets where West Indian negroes brawl and carouse in lodgings' [106], and insinuates himself into Denham's father's house. This old feller, casually racist after the manner of his class and generation, is won over by the tasty curries Raj cooks for him and accepts him into his home. Indeed Raj handles the general racism he encounters, from impolite words in the Black Swan to physical attacks by Teddy Boys, with an aplomb and dignity only partly compromised by his own racism (negroes he asserts several times being 'an inferior race').

Mr Raj is a curious creation. He quickly comes to dominate the novel into which he has been introduced, and Burgess's creation of him falls into that debatable land somewhere between well-observed vitality on the one hand, and on the other Peter Sellers in The Millionairess wearing brownface make-up. I suppose it is to Burgess's credit that he tackles this straight on. Because whatever else it is, The Right to an Answer is a latter day Condition-of-England novel, and in a central way Burgess is spot-on that that condition, from the 1960s onwards, was one of trying to come to terms with two new major social forces: sexual liberation on the one hand and our new multi-cultural kaleidoscope ethnic identity on the other. Mr Raj falls in love with an Englishwoman, Alice, whose husband (a printer called Winterbottom) has run off to London with a younger woman, in part to pay Alice back for cheating on him with her tennis partner. Denham himself is posted to Tokyo, where he takes a Japanese mistress called Michiko. But the novel, having spent most of its length on comic dialogue and set-pieces, turns its last act to a slightly muted tragic conclusion: Michiko is raped by some G.I.s, the first iteration of a recurring trope in Burgess's writing whereby he works through, by fictionalising it, the assault his wife Lynne suffered at the hands of G.I.s during the war. She leaves Denham, just as he receives news that his father is dying. He flies straight home, but arrives to find that he is dead. Mr Raj (instead of calling professional help) brought in some Indian friends who inadvertently hastened the old man's end. Mr Raj, meanwhile, has been driven to a jealous rage by finding Alice in bed with another man—in fact her own husband, who had returned to her, partly prompted by Denham in London. Mr Raj shoots this fellow dead, and then takes his own life. Denham returns to Japan to write his account.

Burgess is, frankly, better at his dark comedy than at his light tragedy. And this brings us to the novel's Shakespearean associations. I'm less sure what to make of these, actually. During the after hours lock-ins at the Black Swan, descriptions of which punctuate the narrative, Ted Arden is fond of bringing down his two collections: one of his father's old guns, the other of his old books (it is from the former collection that Mr. Raj obtains the pistol with which the tragic denouement is enacted). At the end of the penultimate chapter, one of these latter is discovered to be a hitherto unknown early Quarto printing of Hamlet ('horrible wood type on sick crinkled yellow paper' [244]; consulting it Denham finds a mangled version of 'To Be or Not To Be', so it's a Bad Quarto). Selling this brings Ted Arden great wealth. Later, on a world tour with his wife, Arden visits Denham in his Tokyo office and relates a family story, apparently passed down through the generations of Ardens, about Shakespeare: how he left his wife because he fell in love with 'a black woman', the Sonnets' dark lady, we presume. 'This black woman of is ad come on a boat from Africa. Well up in the world she was, daughter of a chief or something, and she wasn't made into a slave but was taken into somebody's ouse and made a lady of. And this poor bugger fell for er, ook, line and sinker' [250]. Arden glosses this with some of-its-period sexual orientalising ('Ive eard about these black women .. once you ave one yer dont want anybody else'), and insists that Shakespeare caught syphilis from her, which explains the 'quite mad' later plays, and which eventually killed him.

Burgess puts this theory centre stage in 1964's Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life, as well as his 1970 critical study of Shakespeare, and it seems in the (now-lost) screenplay he wrote for a proposed Shakespeare biopic too. It occupies a peculiar place in this novel, though. For one thing, it has the slightly ostentatious prestidigitatorial flourish of an author revealing the key to his work: for the answer to The Right to an Answer, or one answer to it, is that it is a novelised modern Shakespearian Problem Play. The book's 20 chapters break into five groups of four, Act breaks being signaled by Denbham leaving the Shakespearian Midlands. Act 2 (chapters 5-8) is about Denham travelling to Sri Lanka, coaching a new company man in situ, and meeting Mr Raj. In Chapter 9 he returns to England (it opens: 'my father had aged more than my month's absence') and Act 3 is mostly about Mr Raj's installing himself in English life. It closes with Denham on a ship travelling to take up his new Japanese posting Act 4 is all travel, west to east and then back again: chapter 13 in Singapore, 14 Japan, 15 (after Denham gets news his father is dying) in a plane travelling back, with some excellent comedy concerning a Bardot-ish French film star also travelling, and 16 back in England. The final act brings in the bodies, and the pay-off. We realise that we've been reading a riff upon Othello, with some Hamletian touches added in. 'You were jealous,' Denham tells Mr. Raj, as the two of them stand over Winterbottom's corpse. 'Jealous, and perhaps puritanically disgusted' [231]. Raj doesn't deny it.

This works well-enough, once we see that Burgess's main point has to do with translating the more elevated Shakespearian idioms into a ruthlessly observed demotic-banal. There are no princes; the whole dramatis personae is rude mechanicals, and their speech is very sharply captured by Burgess's acute ear for the specificities of accent, idiom and the rhythms of actual talk. There's even an ambiguity to the tragic ending. The police come to arrest Mr Raj, in the bedroom where the corpse of Winterbottom is still in bed, and he takes Denham's advice: 'he put the neat lady's pistol to his right temple and squeezed the trigger with a delicate milk-chocolate finger. Just before he did it, he winked at me with his left eye, as though the whole thing were a joke, really; which, for a Hindu, perhaps it was.' Denham's judgment is not a charitable one. He sums up all the goings-on as lacking, precisely, elevation: 'there's been nothing like that about any of them, nothing heroic or leander-like, just silly vulgar people uncovering the high explosive that lies hidden underneath stability' [233].

Nevertheless, Denham the narrator hands over the last word to Mr Raj, quoting one of his earlier letters for nearly two pages. And even that sour summing up is leavened by the way it falls, seemingly naturally, into Shakespearian pentameters, or approximations thereof (a trick Burgess works repeatedly into the novel, actually):

Nothing like that about any of them,
Nothing heroic or leander-like,
Just silly vulgar people ...
Uncovering the high explosive that
Lies hidden underneath stability

Nor is it empty game playing, or mere formalism, this particular intertextuality. It's Denham, and Burgess, groping towards a way of talking about the whole British imperial adventure. The Englishman (women have little to contribute to The Right To An Answer, alas) who is drawn by the exotic, who sees Africa, or the East, as a women and travels out to fuck her. Like Burgess himself (Andrew Biswell insists in The Real Life of Anthony Burgess that Denham is actually just a mouthpiece for the echt Burgess; we can take that with a pinch of salt) Denham is strangely proud that, though he has made love to women all over the world, he has never bedded an Englishwoman. Arden is genealogically a descendant of Shakespearian stock, but the English as a whole, Burgess is saying, are all sons of Will, drawn to dark ladies, problematically mixing our comedy and our tragedy. This is a very good novel indeed.

Beds in the East (1959)

Beds in the East (1959) is the final novel in Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy, wherein the long day wanes wanier yet. The British are almost out the door; modern post-imperial Malaysia is on the verge of being born. The novel's Shakespearian title (appropriately enough, it's via Burgess's namesake Antony, talking of Cleopatra: "The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't") has already been quoted more than once by the narrator of The Enemy in the Blanket. It points up the sexual exoticism which was one of the ways the books were marketed, even if the novels themselves are far from lubricious, in that sense. Still: look at the first edition cover, up top. Look at this even cheesier 1970s cover for the whole trilogy, with its orientalised sex kitten writhing in in the background and its soft-core marmoreal porn spread of busty Indian women:

But sex isn't really the main business of this novel. Beds in the East is really about three main things, I think: one reason it exists is to finish the narrative (densely evoked in term of life's qualia and soul's pain, though rather under-plotted) of Victor Crabbe, which it does by killing him off. Two is to add another layer to the portrayal of Malaysia as a messily multi-racial, multicultural and polyglot world. And three ... well, three is music. The most awkwardly integrated of the three.

Music is one of Burgess's lifelong loves of course, and throughout his career he returns over and again to the dancing-about-architectural problematic of how to express it in prose. Here, though, it pulls awkwardly against the rest of the novel. Crabbe, now alone after his wife's departure, and having sworn off women (though not booze), is working as a Government Education Officer, painfully aware of the imminence of Malaysian independence and his own obsolescence. He takes under his wing a young Chinese-Malay teenager called Robert Loo, who just happens to be classical-musical composer of natural and untutored genius. Crabbe (he daydreams: 'Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Loo ...' [432]) has high hopes that the first properly Malayan Symphony will mark a significant moment in the maturing of the nation. This lad is splendidly indifferent to the efforts Crabbe is making, the money he is spending and the time and energy he is devoting: with the unforced selfishness of the teenager, Loo takes all Crabbe's labour for granted. He just wants to compose. Loo's father runs a bar, and early in the novel installs a juke-box.The purpose of this machine is to represent the terrible cacophony of rubbish pop music, whilst the bar owner's genius classical composer son gets distracted by the unholy racket as he tried to work upstairs. Crabbe's attempts to clear space in which Loo can work ('you can always come to my place and work there' [476]) is misinterpreted by everybody else as a front for pederastic desire. It's not, but that hardly matters. Crabbe also hopes to foster social harmony by hosting inter-racial parties; but this act of social naïveté is give short shrift by the authorial plot-machine: a Malay official called Syed Omar disrupts the party with drunken fighting. Omar, with two wives and many kids to support, has lost his job, and he is furious. 'Losing your job was nobody's fault but your own,' Crabbe tells him; but Omar doesn't see it like that: 'I lost one file only ... I have taken a few days off. I once had a bottle of whisky in the desk drawer, but that was because I had fever. Other people have done worse and have not been given the sack' [493]. He blames Malay Tamils in general, and one particular Malay Tamil called Maniam in particular. In a darkly comic set-piece, Syed Omar's sons break into Maniam's house planning to murder him with knives in revenge, but it all goes wrong and they run off. The police get involved. Events accelerate.

There are deep problems with Burgess's music 'thing' in this novel, nonetheless. On the plus side, we might be disposed to give Burgess credit for recognising, as early as 1959, that shared culture is a much more effective social glue than official institutions, laws or edicts. Certainly music has proved one of the most globally significant modes of this. Jamaica, post 1962 independence, is a small and poor nation; yet Reggae is a global musical style that carries Jamaican identity and pride to the four corners. Something similar could be said of South African music: when Westerners who don't know any better talk of 'world music', four times out of five they have SA-style electric-guitar mbaqanga in mind. But the crucial thing here is that these are indigenous popular styles. Importing the superstructure of European orchestral music into another part of the world and tweaking it with local flavour is quite another matter. Burgess genuinely doesn't seem to think there's anything odd about 'Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Loo' as a sequence: as if the step from three 18th/19th-century white Germans to a Chinese Malay is perfectly natural. This is because when Burgess talks about music he means Classical Music, which he considers a Schopenhauerian 'global artform'. I think he's wrong about that, actually; the cultural determinants that shape music are at least as important as the universality of harmony, melody, counterpoint and rhythm. Again: Burgess considers 20th-century popular music to be simply beneath contempt. It's worth stressing he was, not to mince words, catastrophically wrong about pop music. The big flaw in Clockwork Orange is the notion that a violent modern teen would get so worked up by Beethoven, of all things; and his venomous caricature portrait of the Beatles in the Enderby books is just embarrassing.

My hunch here is that his position is more than just personal animadversion. I'm guessing he believed 'pop music' to be both infantile and infantilizing; and that what is needed in art, as in life, is greater maturity and complexity. This in turn feeds a kind of distasteful patrician disdain into his portrait of Malaysia as a whole in Beds in the East. Pretty much all the non-White characters are childish: petulant and irrational, like Syed Omar; or like the immature fantasist like Rosemary Michael, a sexually alluring women who hates her own black skin, yearns to marry a white man, who spins improbable stories about her royal heritage, how the Queen of England curtsied to her, how well she can play the play the violin, and so on. Rosemary bursts into tears at the slightest reverse or challenge to her munchausening. A white headmaster has died and left $20,000 in his will to be used 'for the good of the State'. The Sultan wants this money spent on a Cadillac for him. Crabbe, foolishly, fights this toy-house selfishness. Some part of him actually believes in 'the good of the state', and thinks it would be better served by using the money to have Loo's Malay Symphony performed publicly. Loo, meanwhile, is dealing with more distractions than just a juke-box: through a series of misunderstandings he ends up losing his virginity to Rosemary and deciding that he is in love.

Burgess is certainly interested in the incompatibility of music and prose, or perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say he's interested in the extent to which the former can finesse that incompatibility and actually inform the latter, structurally and thematically if not directly. Some Malay youths waylay (hah! see what I did there?) Robert Loo and make fun of his musical ambitions, snatching the sheet music he is carrying.

'It's only music,' said Robert Loo. 'You wouldn't be interested.'

'I can't hear anything,' said Hamzah. 'I must be going deaf.' He put his hand-cupped ear to the case, dropping his jaw like a stage zany. Laughter.

'Music on paper,' said Robert Loo. 'Music has to be written, you know.' He spoke in Malay, and, having spoken, realised the absurdity of what he had been saying. The Malay for 'music' was bunyi-bunyian, which just means 'sounds'. And of course you couldn't write sounds. 'I must be getting along,' he said.

... 'Music.' [Hassan] said. 'So this is music.' Holding the score away from mock-long-sighted-eyes, pushing out his belly, he began to sing:

Only yew-ew-ew-ew-ew
Can make the darkness bright.

'All right,' said Crabbe's voice. 'Cut it out.' [444-45]

AB means to mock, but his snark misfires. 1955 in music gave us Luciano Berio's Mimusique No. 2 for Orchestra; Arthur Bliss's Meditations on a Theme by John Blow, Op. 118, Henry Cowell's Second Symphony, Einar Englund's Piano Concerto No. 1, Hans Werner Henze's Fourth Symphony, Bohuslav Martinů's choral epic Gilgameš (based on the Epic of Gilgamesh) and Luigi Nono's Canti per tredeci. The bald fact is: these, I don't doubt worthy, compositions have all gone the way of Salieri, where the melodically neo-Mozartian simplicity of The Platters's 'Only You' has swept right on through to the present day (I heard it played on the radio only last week)—a fact that will surely impart sharp rotary motion to Burgess's body as it lies in its grave. But there we have it.



(1955 was also the year that gave us 'Cry Me A River', 'Rock Around The Clock', 'Unchained Melody' and 'The Great Pretender'. Put that in your choral suite based on the Epic of Gilgamesh and smoke it). The novel, though, doesn't want to us to lose sight of the main theme: only avant-garde classical music is grown up enough to fuse together the different races of the Malayan peninsular into a single nation, as different instruments and musical notes are fused into a complex whole. And being grown-up is the crucial thing. Crabbe rebukes the bully-boy Malay teens:

'What sort of a country are you trying to make? You've got it in for everybody. For the Chinese and the Indians and the Eurasians and the white men. You can't see a Chinese without wanting to persecute him. You want to knock the stuffing out of the Tamils. I suppose you'd like to have a go at me, would you? For God's sake, grow up.' [445]

This last cry is followed by a frustrated yawp ('"You've all got to live together here, you've got to ... Oh, never mind." He went back into his house'). Maybe that's the way to take Beds in the East: as a Bilndungsroman about the impossibility of Bildungsromanen. Nobody grows, nobody really learns anything. There is comedy scattered throughout, in deed and language, but the comedy has its smoothness interrupted by burrs of real-world bitterness and the self-destructive, foolish immaturity of everyone. It feels almost indelicate to point out that the immature characters are all products of the individual writer's brain, rather than of the actual world. As for Burgess's musical touchstones of absolute cultural worth, they are used to indicate a mode of garish and flat stage-dressing which in turn suggests that the East as a whole is a poor production of an only potentially great opera. As Crabbe and his Malay-Chinese friend Cheng Po have a rather-too-obviously pointed conversation about the end of British colonial rules, Burgess gives us this landscape description:

The western sky put on a Bayreuth montage of Valhalla. Towards it the Muslims would now be turning, bowing like Zoroastrians to the flames. It was genuinely the magic hour, the only one of the day. Both men in whites and wicker chairs on the veranda, facing the bougainvillea and the papaya tree, felt themselves begin to enter a novel about the East. [450]

Well, alright: the end of colonial rule is a kind of underpowered Götterdämmerung. We get that. Cheng Po is unimpressed by Crabbe's idea that a 'genuine synthesis of Malayan elements in [a] string quartet' will have any positive effect on unifying the nation. 'Music bores me,' he tells Crabbe, with a yawn. 'And you liberal idealism bores me quite as much. Let Malaya sort out its own problems. As for me I've got enough to think about without getting mixed up in other people's politics. My youngest daughter has the measles. My wife wants a car of her own. The curtains in the flat need replacing.' [449] Crabbe waxes self-important, but there's a suspicion that the novel as a whole is a little seduced by this particular mode of self importance:

'You'll never understand us,' said Crabbe. 'Never, never, never. Our mandarin world's dead and gone, and that's all you're looking for in England. You think the old China will stay alive in England, but you're wrong. It died forty years ago. I'm a typical Englishman of my class—a crank idealist. What do you think I'm doing here in early middle age?'

'Deriving an exquisite masochistic pleasure out of being misunderstood. Doing as much as you can for the natives' (he minced the word like a stage memsahib) 'so that you can rub your hands over a mounting hoard of no appreciation.'

'As you please. But I've got a year to go before I have to go home, and I'm going to try something useful. Though what exactly I don't know ...'

Crabbe steps on a scorpion, and his foot swells up. He has become Oedipal, as he himself notes. 'I am now Club-foot the Tyrant ... But I didn't kill my father and I didn't marry your mother' [578]. His Malay interlocutors think he is joking: '"Marry your mother,' laughed the Chinese. "That is very good."' One individual recalls that the Japanese killed his father: '"They poured petrol on him and then threw a lighted match,." He laughed modestly. "They were not very good people."' And this extraordinary, almost English understatement provokes an outburst in Crabbe:

'History,' said Crabbe, battering his pain with words at random. 'The best thing to do is to put all that in books and forget about it. A book is a kind of lavatory. We've got to throw up the past, otherwise we can't live in the present.' [578]

This is Burgess's version of history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, I suppose. With an abrupt plot-turn Crabbe then meets another ex-pat, a hearty Eton-and-Oxford posh-o, discovers that this fellow had had an affair with Crabbe's first wife, and moreover that he considers Crabbe a murderer for having been at the wheel of the car at the time of her fatal accident. Stung with the agony of having these personal memories brought up, Crabbe staggers away, tries to get on a boat, misses his stride because of his swell-foot, falls in the river and drowns. He is the past, and the novel flushes him away.

It's too abrupt to be dramatically satisfying, although it manages to tie both Wagnerian allusion and character backstory (riverine, both) into a neat bundle. He is missed, and then not missed, and the other characters get another twenty or so pages to demonstrate their shallow self-obsessions. Fin, as it says at the end of French movies. Shark fin, indeed.

The Enemy in the Blanket (1958): the Anthony in the Burgess

In Little Wilson and Big God (on p.416, to be precise) we discover that Burgess very much disliked the cover-art to this, his second novel. A Sikh, as portrayed here, would never work at a job so low-caste as pulling a rickshaw. 'The design on the dust-jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover-designer, for that blatant display of ignorance.' It's worth mentioning this, because it speaks to one of the grounds on which this novel is offered to its readers: as a portrait of late 1950s Malaysia to be judged by its verisimilitude. There are a couple of problems with this (setting aside my incompetence to judge the work on such terms, never myself having visited Malaysia). One is the extent to which it cuts across Burgess's grain as a writer: the Dickensian grotesque rendered with Joycean polyglot exuberance. Another is the texture of cultural inertia. An oddity of reading this 1958 second 'Malay Trilogy' novel in its 1981 omnibus edition (The Long Day Wanes) is the visible textual evidence of the novel's having been revised. Two quite distinct fonts (one fatter and broader than the other) comprise the text, presumably where the license of the 1980s enabled Burgess to revise the prose originally written for the more decorous 1950s. In the edition I read, for example, Abdul Kadir says 'for fuck's sake' a lot. Kadir is a teacher at the school in Dahaga to which Victor Crabbe has been transferred, after the events in Time for a Tiger, to work as headmaster; and the joke is that he has learned what he considers standard idiomatic English from sailors. Hence the swearing, which I'm guessing was hinted at rather than spelled out in the 1958 edition. There are presumably various other changes too, and the glaring difference in fonts is as distracting as if the old passages had been Tipp-Exed out and overwritten. History moves on, culture as well as the tabulation of specific events, and this is a novel that feels old-fashioned in a way not true of the first volume.

It's a less well achieved novel in several ways, I think. Two main storylines run in parallel, both focussed on ex-pats. In one our old friend Victor Crabbe and his wife arrive by plane in 'Dahaga' (Malay for 'thirst', according to Burgess's own glossary: this won't be the first time he falls foul of explaining his own jokes), which is based, apparently, on Kelantan. Fenella is furious with Crabbe because of the affair he had back in Kuala Hantu. Crabbe tries, in a desultory manner, to run his school. He has another affair, this time with the (White) wife of the colonial State Education Officer, one Anne Talbot. Fenella's blondness is coveted by the Abang, the notional ruler, and she either has an affair with him, or else just sits with him talking about things, I'm not sure it's spelled out. They grow apart, do Crabbe and his wife; and in one sense the business of the novel as a whole is tracing the final decline of their marriage. It ends as the two of them, more exhausted than angry, agree to separate.

The second main plot strand concerns one of Crabbe's old University friends, a struggling young lawyer called Rupert Hardman. He is an ex-RAF fighter pilot, whose face, burned when his plane crashed, has been reassembled by surgeons. Strapped for cash, he marries a wealthy local woman called Che Normah, even though he has to convert to Islam in order to do so, and thus upset the local whisky priest Father Laforgue. Hardman is of course miserable in his new married state: hen-pecked by his wife (a two-times widow concerning whom dark rumours circulate), he ends the novel undertaking the Haj to Mecca with is wife, but only in order to abandon her at Aden and slink home. He's a fairly weaselly character, is Hardman; and his main contribution to the very loosely orchestrated plot is to let slip, at a party, that when he knew him at Uni Crabbe had been a Communist. An ambitious Malay teacher at the school called Jaganathan, who resents having been passed over for the Headship by the appointment of Crabbe, uses this nugget of information to try and oust his rival (any perceived sympathy for the Communist rebels, hiding in the jungle, being deadly to his reputation, not to mention illegal). Coincidentally as this is happening, Crabbe discovers that his Chinese cook has been sending food and supplies (from Crabbe's kitchen) to these same rebels, not because he is committed to the Communist cause, but merely because one of the rebels is a son-in-law of his, and to an Easterner family trumps everything. Crabbe cannot persuade the old man of the wrongness of his actions: 'it was,' Burgess the narrator notes, 'genuine innocence, the most dangerous thing in the world' [317]. Crabbe can't go to the police without incriminating himself, since it was his food that was being delivered to the terrorists.

This storyline, though, goes nowhere very much. There's a slightly under-inflated comic set-piece late in the novel, where certain Sikhs come to Crabbe's house to try and sell him some furniture and discover the old Chinese cook arguing with the young Malay housemaid. The actual cause of the quarrel is a cat, which the cook plans on eating, and for which the maid has tender feelings. The cook tries to explain, but language difficulties hamper him and Kartar Singh misunderstands.

'Makan' has too many meanings. It primarily means to eat, but it is often used of the action of the cock and the hen, the bull and the cow, superogatory in a language rich in motor and sensory terms. Kartar Singh, his one rare day of imagination not yet set, took this secondary meaning. He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them. [327]

Outraged at what they perceive to be the old man's goatish designs on the girl's virginity they threaten him with 'little axes', the often invoked (in this novel) Malay threat of violence. Scared, the old man runs off to join his son-in-law in the jungle, and so Crabbe's difficult position solves itself.

Otherwise there are various minor characters of Malay, Chinese, Sikh, Hindu and Catholic varieties. There's a great deal of food described and eaten. The novel's title, an Englishing of the Malay phrase musuh dalam selimut, refers to being betrayed by somebody with whom one is intimate. In Time for a Tiger it is used to describe one of the boy's at Crabbe's old school who was a fifth columnist for the Communist rebels, and there's a sense of that in this novel too, although the Communists are all off-stage and never generate any effective tension or threat in the textual world of the story. The second meaning is sexual: there are three female characters here, Che Normah, Anne Talbot and Fenella. All three are situated in terms of their sexual relations (the first with Hardman, the second with Crabbe and a handsome young officer called Bannon-Fraser, and the third with Crabbe and the Abang). All three are more or less tigerish, in the sense that they refuse to sacrifice their agency to the men in their lives; and I suppose this tiger-heart-wrapped-in-a-woman's-hide aspect of the novel is a notch above simply libelling the women as shrewish or nagging—though they do nag, and they are pretty shrewish.

The Enemy in the Blanket is a messy novel, in both good and bad ways. The good is Burgess's full-on embrace of an aesthetics of sprawl, a cornucopean attempt to cram much muchness into his fiction. It works here because the world he is describing is a crowded and untidy one: the Malaysia of AB's trilogy, as is true of (people say; I have no personal knowledge) actual Malaysia, is a messily multi-racial polygot, sweaty, bustling land. Burgess reproduces this formally by leaping grasshopper-wise from point-of-view to point-of-view, Malay, Chinese, Sikh, White, French-Catholic and so on. And he reproduces it stylistically by the distinctive Burgessese, the luscious joy with which everything, ripe and rotten, beautiful and seedy, is rendered into prose. That's all fine. He does less well with his plot, which comes over as inconsequential. More debilitating for the whole is his failure, mood-wise, to create any sense of dread, excitement or anticipation -- this last a real problem, since the whole trilogy is centrally 'about' a large-scale sense of looking forward, the Old Colonial way dead and gone, the new Independent Malaysia in the offing. He's good on languor, and heat; good on anger and frustration; less good on sex (what a deeply unerotic novel this book is to be sure).

My first thought was that this was one of the themes of the novel: that countries, especially multi-racial countries, just are messy places, and that monolithic procrustean 'clean' ideologies and worldviews make no headway there. Written down like that, it looks rather feeble. And thinking again I'm less sure. I find myself wondering if something else isn't at work here.

Late on in The Rhetoric of Fiction (that arthritic old warhorse of liberal-humanist literary criticism) Wayne C. Booth quotes novelist Herbert Gold:

The writer needs a causal connection with his society, some sense that his work does something to make everybody's privacy a privilege rather than a burden.

That's a striking thought. The tension between the novel's duty to expose vice and the danger of its violating privacy, perhaps degrading the very idea of privacy, is an old one, and I don't have space to rehearse it here. What's relevant to The Enemy in the Blanket is the way it portrays secrecy as simply untenable. The priest, with his inviolable confessional, is literally chased out of the country. Every secret every character possesses comes to light: Crabbe's infidelities; his Communist past; Hardman's ulterior motives; Fenella and Anne's hidden desires. In part this is the logic of living in a village of course; but Burgess seems to be making a larger point about the East itself as a place in which privacy doesn't really apply. Hardman thinks his conversion to Islam a pretext to marry his rich widow and free himself from money worries; he discovers to his chagrin that, amongst other things, it licences the Ramadan police to arrest and fine him for smoking and drinking during the hours of daylight. At one point the Abang ponders the logic of George Orwell's dystopia:

The Abang had read George Orwell and was struck by the exquisite appropriateness of the title of the Ruler of Oceania ...

(This is because 'Abang' literally means 'elder brother')

.... It had amused him for a time to consider sticking posters throughout Dahaga, posters bearing below the image of his own powerful head the legend SI-ABANG MEMANDANG AWAK. But it was doubtful if his Malay subjects would have seen the point. All right, he was watching them. Why was he watching them? Did he admire their beauty, or something? If he was watching them, they could equally well be watching him. Where was all this watching getting anyone? What was there to watch anyway? [303]

This, Burgess says, is Malaysia. It's also the Novel, as a form. Insofar as it is developed further it seems to be in the direction that European marriages can't survive this level of unprivacy. As Eliot's bird might have said, human kind cannot bear very much transparency.

I wonder if this is the fault line that vitiates the novel for me, though. Maybe the problem is Crabbe, or rather Crabbe's centrality to this narrative. Into him Burgess tries to decant some measure of dignity, even objectivity: and with him he hopes (to look ahead to the final volume of the trilogy for a moment) to construe a little tragedy. AB is always doing this. Part of him is 'Anthony': most certainly Anthony rather than Tony (can you imagine 'Tony Burgess'? I shudder at the very thought): patrician and haughty, for whom love and social life add up to tragedy as it did for Shakespeare's Anthony. But part of him, the larger part, and the part more in tune with his genius, is Burgess: common and a little vulgar, capacious and spacious and sprawling, gossipy and unafraid of exhibitionism. Burgess is East, in his ravenous appetite for food and drink and company, the unprivate man. Take as counterpoint this quotation by Thoreau's Natural History of Massachusetts:

When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life,—how silent and unambitious it is.

It's rather beautiful, that; and we can think of writers who devote their careers to dramatising and exploring its point of view. Something of AB, the tragic, elevated, confessional-box Catholic Anthony, the Anthony who resented fame and the Nanny State, might even nod his head sagely at it. But it is one hundred and eighty degrees away from what Burgess achieves in is art. Can you think of three adjectives less descriptive of Burgess at his greatest than 'serene', 'silent' and 'unambitious'? This novel comes alive when it is most fully Burgess; those places where Anthony pokes in (where Crabbe awake in the night beside his sleeping wife, listens to the surf of the South China Sea under the moonlight and ponders with tenderness how he has not been a good enough husband) chime a cracked bell sound. Private moments, and private lives, are not the AB forte. And to be fair, in the next volume, Beds in the East, Burgess lets the slack out a touch with a little self-parody: Crabbe in an airport lounge, 'suddenly he saw all this [his situation] as romantic—the last legionary, his aloneness, the lost cause, really lost—and instinctively he pulled in his paunch' [425]. Still Beds moves with Antonine tragic seriousness towards Crabbe's fatal denouement. Which is probably a good moment to turn to the third volume in the trilogy.

Burgess Emerges: Time for a Tiger (1956)

:1:

We start with the first volume of Burgess’s ‘Malayan’ trilogy, the complete set of which was later published under the Tennysonian title (this was the edition I read it in) The Long Day Wanes.

It seems a little feeble noting that it is a very good novel, since this was the book that launched the career of one of 20th-century Britain’s best novelists. It is, however, a very good novel. The thing is: it's good in unexpected ways.

The book is based on Burgess’s own experiences as a teacher at an elite school in Kuala Kangsar, located in the western portion of modern Malaysia (what was then the ‘Federated Malay States’). Burgess puts himself into Time for a Tiger as the, by AB-fictional-standards, rather vanilla character Victor Crabbe. Lynne Burgess is there as Crabbe’s wife Fenella, blonde and a bit blowsy, fond of a drink and frequently dissolving into tears. Fenella Crabbe is the only female character, (a few shrewish Muslim wives aside, covered very glancingly: plus Crabbe’s mistress Rahimah, a ‘dance-hostess’ at a local kedai, or bar, present only on the margins of this story), which tends to throw into relief the thin way in which AB characterizes women. Not that Crabbe is given much more roundedness. Crabbe features in the two successor books as well, so we might say that his characterization achieves a greater density and believeability as the trilogy goes on. But taking this novel on its own, as we are entitled to do, and knowing a fair bit about Burgess’s own life, it was hard for Crabbe to come over as anything more than a cipher. He is given one Major Inflection, characterisation-wise: back in England he crashed the car he was driving into a frozen river. He survived but his passenger, his first, wife, did not. The novel's implication is that he has fled to the far side of the world, away from ice and cold into the sweltering tropics, with his new wife to escape the guilt of this backstory (‘at the inquest he had been exonerated from all blame, and the coroner had condoned with him all too eloquently and publicly’ [40]). But guilt cannot be escaped, of course. Crabbe is unhappy; he is now unable to drive, or bathe. He drinks. He neglects his highly-strung wife, who weeps that she hates the country and yearns only to go back to England. Even his extra-marital affair is construed in terms of the trauma in his past:

In a sense, infidelity to one’s second wife was an act of homage to the first. His dead wife was in all women. Pointless to moon about, as his father had done, hugging a memory, putting flowers on the grave, decking them with the brine of self-pity. That was necrophily. He had learned a lot from his father. The body of his own wife had been burnt and dispersed in vapour, had become atoms suspended in air or liquid, breathed in or drained down A memory had no significance. History was not memory but a living pattern. [42]

This finesses a Stephen-Daedalus-like dead mother into Crabbe’s background, in that Joycean sense of a decaying corpse that will not quit itself of the scene as it must do, and then links it (more-or-less subtly) to the situation in Malaysia—the process of decolonisation embodied by the Malayan Emergency itself. Britain the deceased parent, the removal of whose decaying corpse is needful, a circumstance discussed by several characters through the novel. Burgess goes on, dilating on this question of sexual infidelity, mortality and guilt:

I married again to quieten my nerves. I think it was a mistake now, but it was a natural one. Perhaps that’s where this sense of guilt is really coming from. It’s not been fair to her. The remembered dead wife and the palpable living wife must, to some extent, to identified. … The dead woman was brought to life and it was not fair, it was unnatural, to give life to the dead. [43]

A handful of vividly rendered and variously eccentric minor characters aside, there are only two other main figures in the novel, both oriented around Fenella. One is Nabby Adams, an alcoholic colonial police sergeant of enormous height, originally from the north of England. The way Burgess gets under the skin of Adams’s craving for alcohol is completely believable and really rather brilliantly done. The way he can’t wake up properly without a bottle of beer (he prefers his beer warm: iced beer strikes him as flavourless and ‘effeminate’, and besides makes his bad teeth hurt). The way he needs a second at breakfast. How he structures his day around getting to his next drink. The way he buys small bottles and hides them in his enormous hands. Alcohol is expensive in this predominantly Muslim country, and Adams is already indebted to the hilt at all the local, mostly Chinese-run, bars and clubs. He does all the mean, shaming things an alcoholic does to score: cadging money, stealing, making promises he will never keep, everything judged by the short-term horizons of the next drink only. Burgess renders shabby with a kind of genius, and the scenes with Adams are excellent. The other is a Sikh police constable called Alladad Khan. Trapped in a miserable marriage, scolded by his wife, unhappy with his new baby, Khan has long adored Fenella from a distance.

The initial set up, plotwise, concerns a car. An Englishman in the colonial office, looking to return home, wants to sell his motor. Nabby Adams, with Alladad Khan’s help, secretly nobbles the engine, buys the car cheap, fixes the engine and sells it on to Crabbe at a profit, which Adams instantly spends on booze. Since Crabbe is too phobic to drive after his accident, he hires Khan as driver, which brings the Sikh closer to the object of his passion. Crabbe, meanwhile, is in trouble at his school: the headmaster, a snivelly individual called Boothby, hates him and believes him to be a troublemaker. Crabbe, sympathetic to the movement for Malay independence, teaches history to his boys in ways that Boothby considers insurrectionist, even treasonable. Meanwhile the Communist guerrillas whose incursions have made much of the countryside no-go have infiltrated the school. Crabbe becomes certain that something big is being planned for sports day. Boothby snarkily dismisses his suspicions.

But although the novel sets itself up as a specie of conventional narrative, it simply doesn’t pay out on the reader’s investment in any conventional way. We expect the love-triangle of Crabbe, Fenella and Crabbe’s mistress Rahimah to generate spicy drama, and for this to intensify as it becomes a love-quadrilateral with Khan's seduction of Fenella. None of this happens. Crabbe breaks up with Rahimah almost as soon as the story has begun. In a sub-plot the abandoned woman bribes the house servant (a flamboyantly camp gay man called Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh) to slip a love philtre into Crabbe’s gin and tonic. This story simply peters out; the philtre seems to have no effect and the novel ends with Rahimah effectively promoted to the position of mistress of the Raja himself. Meanwhile Khan, finally becoming close to Fenella, discovers that he doesn’t want to have sex with her after all; he just wants to sit on the verandah of the Crabbe’s house with her, talking.

The curious thing was that, now, Alladad Khan had no further desire to win the lady’s heart. The two would sit on the veranda, talking interminably in broken Malay and broken English, and Alladad Khan began to see at last what was the relationship he desired. It was rather complicated. He, alone, was seeking others who were alone. He was the only Khan for many states around, who had come here, an exile, to live among alien races…. Alladad Khan saw in Fenella Crabbe also an exile, cut off from her country, cut off from the white community. [130]

Time for a Tiger is a 200-page novel, and for the first 160 of those pages nothing very much happens. Adams and Khan spend a lot of time at the Crabbes' house. There are some skilfully written set-pieces—most notably a trip into the jungle, in which Adams and Khan persuade the Crabbes to drive out and see some aboriginal culture: a rainstorm is superbly described, as is the underwhelming, grubby little village that is their destination and the anti-climax of the native festival. On the return trip the car breaks down. And mostly what the novel does is create a sense of atmosphere: the heat and insects, the bustle and crowds, the cat’s-cradles of interracial tensions and frictions, the decay of the old imperial model, the Communist guerrillas in the jungle a constant threat. The book’s titular ‘tiger’ is, of course, the popular Malayan Breweries Limited beer, ‘time for a tiger’ being their advertising slogan. But Burgess’s occasional references to the distant sound of tigers howling in the jungle remind us that the title's time is also an historical time, a to-come that belongs to the native animals, and to their predatory human avatars, rather than to the white-skinned interlopers. [Burgess published the novel before the end of the Malayan Emergency, and wasn’t to know that the insurgency would prove unsuccessful. Indeed, it strikes me as puzzling that comparing and contrasting the British handling of Communist revolution in Malaysia and the US handling of the same thing in the very similar landscapes of Vietnam is not more often undertaken by historians and cultural critics.]

The last forty-pages rather abruptly wake-up to the expectations of conventional plotting. Lots suddenly happens in a short space. Khan is driving the Crabbes back to the city in time for the school sport’s day when their car is ambushed by Communist soldiers: they get past the road-block, but Khan is shot in the arm. Adams, out of cash, buys a beer from a kedai with a lottery ticket he finds in his wallet. The Chinese bar owner is happy to take the ticket in lieu of money, because the numbers can be arranged into a magic square, something extremely auspicious to the Chinese way of looking at things. Adams goes back to the mess with his beer, but grows suspicious at the eagerness with which the bar accepted the ticket. He convinces himself that they—somehow—know it to be a winner. He marches angrily back into the bar to demand the ticket’s return. The bar owner, unwilling to give up so lucky a number, palms Adams off with another ticket, whose numbers are far less harmonically disposed. Adams, who can’t remember the numbers on the original ticket anyway, accepts this. The twist is that this latter ticket proves to be the winning one. The novel ends with Adams suddenly wealthy. He gives the ticket to Crabbe for safe keeping, and Crabbe uses it to supply his hated headmaster Boothby (who has, in the interim, effectively sacked him) with a nasty shock, pretending the winnings to be his own. Khan, now regarded as a hero, is promoted to sergeant and finds life goes more easily with his wife. Adams gives the Crabbes ten percent of the $350,000 he has won. The last scenes take place in a flooded Kuala Hantu, rains having caused the river to burst its banks.

I quite liked the hockey-stick shape of this narrative, actually, although it is certainly ungainly, structurally speaking. The slow build is absorbing and interpellates the reader into Burgess’s effectively worldbuilt Malaysia very nicely. AB is nonpareil in reproducing the idiolects and distinctive phrasal tics of his characters: Adams’s north-country, his superior Flaherty’s irishry, upper class English stiffness, Boothby’s snarkiness and proneness to yawning (‘Awwwwwww’), the formal elegance of Urdu and Malay (longer speeches of this are rendered as English, although the novel is also liberally supplied with untranslated phrases and terms from the latter). Lots of little touches come nicely to life: the way Khan’s wife will permit all manner of erotic interplay but not the, as she sees it, pornographic western perversity of kissing on the lips; the way Adams’ dog is called ‘Cough’, because its previous owner was always shouting at it for getting under his feet (Burgess reuses this ‘fuck-off’ joke in the Enderby books). Sex saturates the novel’s sensibility, but so does booze, and the two are presented, really, as incompatible with each other. At one point Nabby Adams recalls the erotic adventures of his youth, in England and India, whilst reflected blithely that his alcohol craving has wiped away all desire in that direction. The Crabbes appear to have a sexless marriage; Khan and Fenella’s friendship is chaste; Crabbe puts away his mistress early on; Khan’s wife spends much of the novel in another country.

In one sense the novel’s true love is language itself, a statement that applies (I’d say) pretty much across the board in AB's fiction. Just on the level of description, Burgess revels in his fresh command of the Joycean fecundity of his linguistic powers. Then there are the games he plays. Malayan is integrated into the texture of the novel as a way of evoking the flavour of living in a polyglot country. But it is also the vehicle for a variety of bawdy puns and in-jokes. Andrew Biswell records some of these in his (definitive) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess:

The River Lanchap (‘masturbation’); the Iblis Club (‘Iblis the Devil’); Negeri Dahaga (‘state or province of great thirst’); Mr Mahalingam (whose name means ‘large penis’). [Biswell, 194]

‘This kind of semi-encrypted bawdiness is a recurring feature of Burgess’s novels from first to last’ Biswell notes. This, though, is not the end of it. A major town in Enemy in the Blanket is called Kenching, Malay for ‘piss’. In that novel a student rally takes place at ‘Tahi Panas’ (‘hot diarrhoea’); in Tiger, Adams runs his various bar tabs through his mind:

Lim Kean Swee $470
Chee Sin Hye $276
Wun Fatt Tit $128    [175]

’Cheese in Eye’ is English slang for smegma; and that last name, there, hardly even counts as a double-entendre. Let’s call it a single-entendre. Perhaps this kind of thing strikes you as juvenile. I disagree. I like the way it codes ‘conventional’ and official narratives as always interpenetrated by the unspeakable and the undignified; it fits the schoolboy context of much of the novel, and it’s funny in a Joycean or Shakespearean manner. I also thinks it registers Burgess's sense of puns working the other way across the grain of languages, as that (for instance) 'Malaya' includes in English the bawdy implication of having sex with ('laying') your 'ma'.Your mileage may vary.

It stands in interesting relation to the other main buried structure of meaning Burgess has coded into the book. I'm talking about Eliot’s The Waste Land, which acts as a kind of structuring principle of the whole. This is evident in specific reference that characters make, as when Fenella reads the whole of the poem aloud to Khan. He doesn't understand most of it, but approves the final Datta, Dayadhvam. Damyata. ('He says he understands that bit, Mrs Crabbe', Adams tells her. 'He says that's what the thunder says' [133]). Burgess drops lines from the poem and other references into his text ('"What, are you here?"' [167]), and finishes with a flood after a long dry seasons because that's how Eliot finishes his poem. I suppose we might think this pretentious, at least in a way that calling your fictional river 'Wanking' (a fairly authentic-sounding Eastern name, come to think of it) isn't.

:2:

Let's start at the end. Why The Waste Land, except to show off that Burgess is Very Well Read? Eliot's poem, famously, is 'about' the sense of national and personal desolation that followed the First World War, figured (we can be retrospective about this: we've all read The Four Quartets) as unfulfilled spiritual yearning. The catastrophe has come and gone, the new world is waiting in the wings but has not yet been born, and in this parched interlude life carries on denuded of meaning. Burgess shifts the catastrophe from World War 1 to British Colonialism without distorting the underlying logic very much, and picks up on the way Eliot mixes high registers and demotic, throws in quotations left and right and centre and stirs it all with multilingual phrases and terms. Then there are occasional parallels: Adams lives bibulously inside the pub monologue from part 2, right down to his bad teeth ('get yourself some teeth; you have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,/He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you') and doomy sense that we need to HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. Fenella's tremulous exchanges with Crabbe are of a my nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me style, and the final sections resoundingly pay out the drought of the main characters lives in a mighty rainstorm and flood:

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and ...

Wait: not Ganga, but another Eastern river whose Burgessian name means, as we've seen, 'masturbation':

Wanka was sunken, the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

The last we see of Khan in the novel, he's steering a boat (the police launch) cheerily along the flooded river: Damyata: The boat responded/Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar, and the Crabbes and Adams chat, overlooking the flooded waters. Sitting, we might say, upon the shore/Fishing [at least metaphorically] with the arid plain behind them. Shall they at least set their lands in order? Well, that's the question for the colonial elite in an imminently post-colonial situation, of course.

I think something else is going on, here. My hunch is that Burgess takes seriously Eliot's (we can be honest: rather arbitrary) assertion in the notes that 'Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.' This puts the Tiresias passages at the conceptual and affective heart of the poem:

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.

This explains, I think, why Burgess gives so much of the novel over to Ibrahim's stream-of-consciousness interior monologue. He's the most obviously Tiresian character, in that he is a man who dresses as a woman, a man with a female wife who likes to have sex with men. It's quite a thing in a novel from the mid 1950s, actually, how straightforward and non-judgmental Burgess is about this character: venal, vain, rather petty, but also rounded and real, rather glorious in his camp and definitely possessed of a moral compass, though a slightly tarnished one. The other Malay Whites disapprove of Crabbe keeping him as his servant, for the obvious homophobic reasons: 'People had said, "I don't know why the hell you keep that boy on. You'll be getting yourself talked about. He was down outside the cinema the other night wearing women's clothes It's a good job you're married, you know. He was thrown out of the Officers' Mess for waggling his bottom and upsetting the men. He may be a good cook, and all that, but still. You've got to be careful [44]. Crabbe keeps him for reasons no more progressive than a kind of inertia, but Burgess manages to add in pathos to the characterization when we find out about his wife. Married by his family when still a teenager to try and steer him into respectability, Ibrahim has been on the run from his other half, and absconds from the Crabbes service (in a flurry of petty theft and nicely-observed self-righteousness) because he thinks his wife is onto him again.

Then again, my sense is that Burgess makes much of this character not because he has any sense of incipient gay rights, but to literalize the Taoist dualism that structures the novel in a larger sense. At the novel's end, the school throws a dinner to say goodbye to Crabbe (who has been dishonourably transferred away from the school, as it were, by Boothby). Crabbe gets his own back on Boothby, who loses his face and his cool and storms out. The non-Europeans on staff conduct various dignified and eloquent conversations around this pantomime. Mr Raj, the closest the novel gives us to a character able to speak ex cathedra, glosses the succession of dishes served by the restaurant that 'the Taoists believe that the duality of yin and yang functions even in diet. Steamed fish and chicken and vegetable soup and even mushrooms are considered to be cooling foods, edible materialisations of the yang, the pure primal air. The yin, or earth element, inheres in fried dishes and especially in shark's fin soup.' [187] The meal ends, after Boothby's ignominious departure, with Mr Raj prophesying Crabbe's fate:

'And will my life be ruined too?' asked Crabbe.
'Oh yes,' said Mr Raj calmly. 'But with you [unlike Boothby] it will not be a pity. The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. [193]

It's west and east, combining, contra Kipling, in a strange blend. The masculine yang and the feminine yin in one Tiresian whole.

Clockwork: A Range (of Cover Art)

A placeholder, really, until I clear the time to get this blog properly up and running with, I hope, chronological-by-date-of-publication readings of and reactions to Burgess's books. Until that point, here are a few of my favourite examples of cover art for AB's most celebrated (though not his best) novel. Some of these are just lazy:

Some look rather like an upside-down John Lennon:

With some, you feel they could have tried a little harder:

With many, there's a deadening tendency towards the over-literal:

I like the 'Jaffa' sticker on that last one, as if without that steer we'd never recognise that orange blob as an orange. Other covers look more like An Elric Orange (not, in itself, a bad idea for a mash-up novel, I think):

Some, I think, are trying too hard:

Amongst the oddest is the cover of the first edition, with a purple Burgess Himself spitting a bit of Nasdat at us in an (of course) orange speech bubble:

Then there's the Sex Change Author edition:

But perhaps my favourite is this one, illustrating that scene in the novel when a lady's stocking-clad leg emerges from the psychedelic snail-shell whirlpool:

Bonus point: behold the I think excellent comparison the author of this blog makes between the cover of A Clockwork Orange and the cover of another book.