'Enderby, Enderby, Enderby s----!': Inside Mr Enderby (1963)

One Hand Clapping and Clockwork Orange are good novels, and both still bear up today. Wanting Seed and Honey for the Bears are interesting, not entirely successful, and have both dated rather catastrophically. But in Enderby Burgess, for the first time in his career, touches the cloth of greatness. I'd read Inside Mr Enderby before but I'd forgotten both how richly it is written and how funny it is. I don't say so because of the book's copious farting, something perhaps less chucklesummoning than I once might have thought. Flatus is hardly funny per se; it depends upon a particular context, and the contexts supplied here are only intermittently risible. But there are a great many funny lines (I'd forgotten the anxious letter to the Fem magazine Agony Aunt: 'he said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child' [78]); and some genuinely laughable set-pieces. The public speech in which Enderby inadvertently (for he hardly understands what he is doing, or saying) declines the award of a gold medal and £50 is hilarious. And Enderby himself works, as a character: not too compacted with costive backstory; nor too buffoonish or repellent; believable and even oddly likeable. His backstory, incidentally. is to do with his gargantuan, life-force, monstrous-feminine Stepmother, based on Burgess's own; dead before the novel starts but still nightmarishly haunting the protagonists' imagination. The novel is also science fiction, which (obviously) I consider a major plus point. I'll come back to that.

In You’ve Had Your Time Burgess records, or confects, a hallucinatory origin for Enderby.

Enderby had appeared to me one day in the bathroom of our hovel outside Brunei Town, a wraith conjured by an attack of malaria. He was, for a microsecond or so, seated on the toiler and writing poetry. I proposed a 200,000-words novel about him called very simply Enderby. It might be more modest, and placatory of the gods of death, to compose something very much briefer called Inside Mr Enderby. Some day Enderby Outside might follow, and then he could be seen off in Enderby’s End. I envisaged an ugly middle-aged man very much on his own, a masturbating bachelor living in the identical furnished rooms Lynne and I were renting though mostly confining himself to the lavatory-bathroom, locked in against the world, writing purgative poems in a place of purgation. He has chosen the smallest room, but soon he must be dragged out to engage the biggest one, type of the great historical capitals, synchronically small but diachronically of large size. The Elizabethans pronounced Rome and room, as the Arabs still do.

Rome as the Church, and Rome as the actual city to which Enderby, married via a series of comic misadventures to a racing car driver’s widow, is taken ‘somewhat against his will’. The marriage is not consummated, and Enderby runs off; but his Muse (‘angry that he should have deserted her for a flesh and blood woman’) abandons him, and he can no longer write poetry. After an inept suicide attempt he is persuaded by Burgess’s perennial bogeymen, the agents of ‘the new Britain of socialist or materialist purpose’, to grow up. He ends the novel working as a barman in a Midlands hotel under the name Piggy Hogg, ‘not,’ Burgess opines in his memoir, ‘altogether a bitter conclusion.’ That pun on ‘bitter’ is exactly the sort of thing we can expect here. ‘End’, which refers of course to death, is also a euphemism for arse (‘rear end’), through which what is inside comes out. Burgess adds a compact world-historical account of the importance of bowels to culture, society and art—howsoever neglected it has latterly become. 'Up to the time of my writing the novel,' he faux-modestly asserts

fiction with the exception of Ulysses, where Mr Bloom spends more than a page in his outdoor jakes preferred to ignore the bowels. Rabelais did not ignore them, and Rabelais was right. Even sweetest Shakespeare names his melancholy character in As You Like It after a water closet and seems to equate depression with constipation. The Reformation has much to do with Luther's costiveness. Also, at the time of writing about Enderby, I suffered from profound dyspepsia.

A lovely touch, that apparently artless juxtaposition of Luther and Burgess, there. It's possible, having myself written a merdean novel (this one, as it happens), that I over-rate this novel, except that Burgess's vision is more flatulent than faecal. Enderby's passiveness is a function of his antiquated model of how poetry gets made: the poet a reed through which the Muse blows inspiration. This breath is not exactly parodied by being replaced by flatus; gusts over which we have relatively little control. The Chinese believed the stomach the seat of the soul because it is the only place in the body that vocalises independent of one's volition. Punched in the stomach outside a pub in London, his assailant asks him, kindly-enough, where he's going, so as to offer directions. '"Victoria," said Enderby's stomach gas, shaped into a word by tongue and lips.' [66]. The last poem Enderby completes before his Muse abandons him is an allegorical piece of schematic codmythopoeia called The Pet Beast, very windy-sounding if its summary is to be believed:

Almost at once his bowels reacted. He ran like a man in a comic film, sat down with a sigh and clicked on the bathroom heater. He scratched his bare legs and read, thoughtfully, the confused draft he was working on. Pfffrumpfff. It was an attempt at allegory, a narrative poem in which two myths were fused—the Cretan and the Christian A winged bull swooped from heaven in a howling wind. Wheeee. The law-giver's queen was ravished ... [gave] birth to the Minotaur, a god-man beast come to rule the world ... Minos had a labyrinth built, vast and superbly marbled, with the Minotaur hidden in its heart. It was a horror, unspeakable, reputedly fed on human flesh; it was the state's bogey, the state's guilt ... finally it was nailed to a cross where it died slowly. [18-19]

The Pet Beast. 'Pet', of course, is French for 'fart'.

So, yes: universal human business, this, universally hidden from view as horrible, unspeakable. Burgess, despite graciously excepting Ulysses, still gives himself too much credit for reintroducing what Bakhtin calls the 'lower bodily stratum' into English letters. If it is hidden, it's hidden in plain view. The word of Dickens Little Dorrit comes crashing down because of financial speculation by Mr Mr Merdle, after all; and Our Mutual Friend is set on a gigantic mountain of shit. We all eat and excrete as necessities of living. The writer does this, but also devours experience and shits out art. All texts are turds. After a manner of speaking.

This isn't to say that Burgess doesn't deserve credit for the bravura way in which he enmerdifies and flatulizes his imagination here, or to deny that there is something strange and unique to this book. Peter J. Smith's recent monograph, Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representation in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift (Manchester University Press 2012) argues that (in the words of David Palumbo) 'the two stools represent “two broadly distinctive attitudes towards scatological writing”: one, associated with Chaucer and Shakespeare, emphasising the “carnivalesque [and] merry”, the other expressing “self-disgust [and] withering misanthropy”. John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, and Jonathan Swift figure importantly in the second category ... Smith laments the loss of a perspective on scatology (available to medieval and Renaissance authors and readers) that understands and encourages interaction of the “two (very separate) stools” that have dominated scatological discourse.' Trying to locate Enderby on this divide is harder than you might think. It is, as I say above, an often genuinely funny novel; but one would hardly describe Burgess as a writer full of life, joy and sunshine. There's certainly a Swiftian grimness to the sordidness of the poet's life, and I even wondered if one reason the name Enderby struck Burgess as the right one is that its dactylic rhythm mimics Swift's 'Celia' in his most famous poem 'The Lady's Dressing Room'. The two main differences are, one, that Burgesss investment in Enderby is not primarily erotic, as Swift's was in Celia (it has sometimes occurred to me that Swift's choice of name Celia is a sort of pun linking the excremental and the erotic: the Latin cellula, or cella, means both a jakes and 'a room in a brothel'); and, two, that Burgess is simply not as disgusted by these bare facts of purgative humanity as Swift evidently was. It's really not that Burgess steals away repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Enderby, Enderby, Enderby shits! On the contrary; he draws all attention to this fact as so largely determining his character's life and art.

One reason the first half of this novel works rather better than the second, Enderby-honeymooning-in-Rome part, is that that's where Burgess captures a hidden truth about writers. I should probably say some writers. I could even just say me. The desire to closet oneself away and just get on with the writing is strong in some of our kind; the kind that dislikes all the palaver of proof-reading, publication, reviews, publicity and exposure, and would just like a life in which material needs are catered to so that the writing can be gotten-on-with. This, though, raises one of the novel's vexing imponderables. Is the point of Inside Mr Enderby that Enderby is a sordid man who happens to write great poetry, after the manner of Schaffer's Amadeus? Or are we supposed to read Enderby's poetry, a great many samples of which are supplied in the novel, and think (like Laurence Olivier's not-good singing and dancing in Osborne's The Entertainer) that they're supposed to be not very good?

In You've Had Your Time, Burgess mockingly quotes a Punch review of this poetry ('it would be helpful if Mr Burgess would indicate whether these poems are meant to be good or bad') adding: 'critical impotence cannot go much further' [138]. So I'll be clear: I'm not asking whether these poems are good or bad. I'm suggesting they are not good, and wondering whether this fact is advertent or inadvertent.

It matters, I think. The world of the novel treats Enderby's work as good if minor. He has fans who have memorised his sonnets; he wins small but significant prizes, the declining of which is reported in the papers. And there is one sense in which the novel clearly sets Enderby's poems as above other modes of bad poetry: Sir George Goodby, who sponsors the prize Enderby inadvertently declines. 'the volumes of Sir George's doggerel most memorable for badness were Metrical Yarns of a Pipeman, A Dream of Merrie England, Roseleaves of Memory and An Optimist Sings' [49]. At the awards, Sir George reads out 'with a voice pitched high and on one tuning fork note, a poem of fourteen lines which was certainly no sonnet':

It had verdant meads in it, and a sun with effulgent rays, also—for some reason—a rosy-bosomed earth. Enderby preoccupied with the need to suppress his body's noises, heard only fragments of an exquisitely bad poem and he nodded approvingly to show that he considered Sir George to have made a very good choice of an illustrative example of very bad poetry. As the last line scrannel-piped wretchedly out, Enderby felt a particularly loud noise coming, so he covered it with a laugh.

Ha ha (perrrpf) ha.

Enderby's poetry obviously isn't bad after the manner of this kind of badness. But the verse has a kind of inertness to it, a mannered and verbal tricksiness that lags just shy of eloquence, or at least of the kind of eloquence that sinks into one's imagination. An example. Here's the sonnet that Vesta Bainbridge, afterwards briefly Mrs Enderby, having memorised, repeats back to its approving author. Does the fact that Burgess printed it elsewhere (as one of 'Five Revolutionary Sonnets' in The Transatlantic Review, 1966), and re-used it in his final work, the verse novel Byrne, mean that he really rated it?

A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.
The thought that sewed it never dropped a stitch.
The Absolute was anybody's pitch.
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name.
That dark aborted any urge to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
But then were endless growling oceans, rich
In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.
Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;
A martin's nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning (birds could not be liars).
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

One might describe this is somewhere between Empson and Dylan Thomas, but without the precision of the former or the sheer force of the latter. Octave is about the dream life (somehow both stitched like embroidery, and sonic like the music of the Absolute and the growling of oceans. What?). Sestet is about waking to a cold morning. The preponderance of monosyllables gives the lines a plodding, stompy feel; a dunghill cock doesn't escape being an antiquated cliché on a par with Sir George's verdant meads just because a dunghill is less prepossessing than a meadow; I don't get how the endless growling oceans (too many double-adjectives in Enderby's writing tout court, I think) can be 'rich' in heroes 'until the dredgers came': what, drowned heroes littering the seabed? How is that 'rich'? (one of Enderby's collections is called Fish and Heroes. Is that relevant?) Why is the English cock shouting wake up in German? Is it supposed to be more onomatopoeic than cockadoodledoo? I don't see that, myself. The parenthesis in the antepenultimate line is a false step, I think, breaking the flow and spraining the build-up to the final couplet. The pun on cleft and key distracting rather than expressive, and 'a key cleft' is too much a tongue-twister to say aloud. I'm nitpicking, but I'm nitpicking in the dark (as it were): is this my personal crotchet, or is this supposed to be a poem that just falls short of working?

A much better example of an onomatopoeic joke comes right at the beginning, when time travellers from a future where Enderby is a revered poetic figure explore his flat at nighttime, whilst the poet himself slumbers. Science fiction see? The students handle his papers, pick up his combs and brushes ('the imitation-silver-backed brushes bequeathed by his father. The bristles are indeed dirty') to pluck out hairs as souvenirs, and peer up somnolent Enderby's nose ('the nose is, at forty five,' opines the time travelling teacher, 'past its best as an organ, the black twitching caverns—each with its miniature armpit—stuffed and obtuse' [13]). But they are clumsy, knock things over in the kitchen and cause pepper to go everwhere. The teacher sneezes: 'Aaaaaarch! Howrashyourare!' Much better worldplay. And the final paragraph of the opening chapter works much better, as poetry, than anything written in Enderby's closet:

Look down on all those Victorian roofs, fishscaled under the New-Year moon. You will never see them again. Nor any of this town, in whose flats and lodgings the retired and dying wheeze away till dawn. It is all very much like a great hair comb, isn't it?—the winking jewelled handle, the avenues of teeth combing the hinterland of downs, the hair-ball of smoke which is the railway station. Above us the January sky: Scutum, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius, the planets of age and war and love westering. [17]

Lovely stuff.

Anyway, back to the story. The Pet Beast is plagiarised by an unscrupulous fellow-poet into the screenplay of a major motion picture L'Animal Binato, which later becomes a big hit in the West as Son of the Beast from Outer Space. Enderby rails impotently against this theft; and moreover proves unable to consummate his marriage. Finally he rebels against his new wife's attempt to convert him back to Catholicism. Alone, Museless, he tries to commit suicide by overdosing on aspirin. This fails, but not before he has a hysterical vision of the-horror-the-horror as a kind of monstrous feminine blackness of his dead stepmother:

There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogen, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat - all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. 'Help,' he tried to call. 'Help help help.' He fell, crawled, crying, 'Help, help.' The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it.

Solid laughter and filth. Laughing at, not laughing with. The abject will eventually rise up and stifle us horribly; and in some sense this abject is Woman. Burgess is not disgusted that Enderby shits; but he is evidently deeply alarmed that the cosmos squats overhead, and we're living in its pan. Universe, Universe, Universe s----!