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.