Burgessculum: The Eve of Saint Venus (1952; 1964; 1981)

An 'opusculum', is what Burgess calls this novella: the Latin diminutive of opus, work. A little work, then: and, appropriately, it doesn't really work, or only works in trivial ways. It's a comedy of errors premised on the eruption of Greek love-goddess Aphrodite into the upper-crust English society of the 1950s/60s: Ambrose (a dull, worthy young man training to be an architect) will marry Diana ('a good plain English dinner ... neither ugly nor beautiful, wholesomely neutral' [70]) at the stately home of her father, the bibulous Sir Benjamin Bulwer Drayton. Ambrose, wandering the grounds, decides to practice the ring-putting-on art of the impending ceremony, and slips the wedding band onto the finger of a statue of Venus he finds there. Said statue then comes alive, claims Ambrose as her husband. The vicar thinks her a demon, and tries to exorcise her, but without success. There are various high-jinxs and reversals. The statue is struck by lightning and Ambrose is released from the divine bondage; but Venus has 'risen' through the whole village. Everyone frolics. Ambrose has new backbone; Diana, who had been contemplating running off with the importunate Julia, a 'notorious lesbian' (in Burgess's dated and cringe-inducing phrase), changes her mind. She marries Ambrose. All ends happily, with much singing and dancing and implied shagging.

The edition I read was the 1981 paperback reprint, issued, rather wonderfully, to try and cash-in on the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Hindsight makes cynics of us all, of course; and the fawning Burgess undertakes in the new introduction strikes the 21st-century reader with a delightfully vinegary tang. We all know how 'Charles & Di' worked out, after all:

I offer this little fantasy about love and marriage and the goddess who presides over one if not the other as a loyal tribute to the Prince of Wales and his bride. In a book I published a year or two ago, a grim prophesy of an unOrwellian future called 1985, I presented the Prince as an already crowned king with a beautiful dark-haired queen. I got the beauty right but the hair wrong.

'I believe in marriage,' Burgess signs-off his intro, 'and this book is light-hearted testimony to that belief.' Lightness in literature is hard to do, actually, and is certainly a worthwhile ambition. Lightness can achieve effects unavailable to, and truths inexpressible by, heavy, dark and tragic. But lightness cannot be forced, and one era's 'lightness' too often becomes a subsequent era's dated quaintness, or wincing falsity. If I say I didn't believe this novella, I don't mean in the facile sense that a story about statues of Venus coming to life inevitably strains credulity. I mean in the deeper sense: that the book doesn't seem to me to have anything very interesting or insightful to say about love, sexual desire or marriage.

I know, I know. Who breaks a butterfly, or in this case a burgessfly, upon a wheel? The 1981 intro is decently self-effacing about the whole thing:

I wrote this opusculum in 1952, when I had no ambition to be an author and was convinced that my real talent lay in musical composition. I wished to write an opera, and the legend recounted by Florilegus, which I found in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy—the tale of a young man who, placing his wedding ring on the finger of a statue of Venus in his father's garden, finds himself wed to the goddess—struck me as promising material for an operetta libretto. I wrote the libretto, but discovered it was far too long ... I refashioned the work as the novella here presented, and then, since I did not consider myself to be a novelist, placed the manuscript in a drawer.

This origin explains the stock nature of the characters, selected for their respective vocal identities ('Sir Benjamin bass, Ambrose tenor, Diana soprano' and so on) rather than any depth or truth-to-life, something Burgess is frank about. The piece, he says, is 'commedia del'Aldwych' that uses 'certain stock personages associated with long dead actors like Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn and Robertson Hare, who graced the Aldwych Theatre for many years in the farces of Ben Travers' [8]. But he also boasts slyly of the books 'dangerous theological theme', and there I think he overestimates what the book offers. It's an early iteration of the One Hand Clapping and Clockwork Orange thesis, that the welfare state and too much material comfort has in some secret, nefarious manner robbed modern humanity of the capacity to sin, and therefore leeched all real zest and force from life. The vicar complains:

Nobody sins any more and sin, after all, ought to be my business. I envy doctors: they have diseases. But what have I except the same old round of joyless fornications, mechanical slanders, malice clothed as self-righteousness? I see some point in people doing wrong so long as they do it zestfully. But where there's no zest there's no sin. Really we might as well be back in the Garden of Eden. [47]

His interlocutor agrees ('the concept of sin seems to be dead. It's been expelled from the Garden. Freud and Marx hold up their flaming swords') but insists: 'surely that's a good thing?

'It's an atrocious thing,' said the Vicar. 'It's killed both kinds of good living. It's removed a dimension from our lives. We've all lost that incense-laden thrill we used to get from the exciting knowledge that if you pulled up the floorboards you would find a deliciously bottomless pit. What have we instead? Right and wrong, with their interchangeable wardrobes and the police-courts, temples of a yawning, neutral god with a relish for disinfectants. [48]

There's too little, though, of this promising critique in the book as it stands. The Vicar's objection (a fair one) is that when life becomes too safe, something crucial dies. But safe is the length and breadth of this artificial, mannered exercise in neo-Paganism. Opuscu-lame.

I'd read The Eve of Saint Venus before, and it was in my head as his least successful book: arch and forced and twee, qualities almost never present in his other writing. Re-reading it made me a little mellower. It's probably not as bad as I'm making out here. This time around I found, for instance, Sir Benjamin's swearing less excruciating. Here, in the opening passage of the book, he is having a go at his maid, Spatchcock ('an ugly girl but a girl of spirit'):

'Clusterfist. Slipshot demisemiwit.' Sir Benjamin Drayton's swearing was always too literary to be really offensive. 'Decerebrated clodpoles, that's all we have, that's all we have. Sense? Sense, you garboil, you ugly lusk, you unsavoury mound of droppings, sense? ... You chuffcat. Must I be foiled, fooled, fouled at every turn by wanton smashers and deliberate defilers? ... Youlees, you leavings, you flasket of unwholesome guts.' [11]

And so on. I won't lie: first time I read this I rolled my eyes. Re-reading it, I sensed an echo of Stephen Fry swearing at Hugh Laurie as a tramp (avant la letter, obviously) that made it more palatable, and even, distantly, amusing. It works from time to time, but mostly it doesn't. It works a little. It is a little work.