One Hand Clapping was originally published under Burgess's metapseudonym (or whatever the term is for a pseudonym of a pseudonym) 'Joseph Kell'. It's not hard to see how a nom de plume derived from the Book of Kells would appeal to a pun-drunk bibliophile like AB, although the decision to use it in the first place seems to have been the publisher's, anxious at over-saturating the market with Burgesstomes. William Heinemann had half a dozen to put out all at once, after all. In the event this strategy backfired, the novel 'sank like a stone' and Burgess angrily renamed his publisher 'William Hangman' in private. In Earl G. and Mary C. Ingersoll's Conversations with Anthony Burgess he complains: 'it’s stupid, you see, because if you invent a new author it means you have to start promoting a new author, instead of using an author you’ve already got, and this is bad publishing. The two Joseph Kell books didn’t do too terribly well. They didn’t get as many reviews as they should have got and so on, and now that the true identity of the author comes out its too late to do anything with them, or with One Hand Clapping, anyway, which is not a bad book. It’s a good book.' [8-9]
It is a good book, too, although it reads like a rather unBurgess-y work. For example it has a female first-person narrator, something AB only did on one other occasion in his entire career. More, since that narrator ('Janet Shirley, née Barnes ... just gone twenty-three') is a bright but under-educated working-class woman from the Midlands, Burgess is denied the arcane vocabularising and erudite cultural allusions that are so characteristically him. The effect, indeed, is rather Simenon-ish. Wikipedia asserts that 'the entire vocabulary in One Hand Clapping amounts to approximately 800 words', which datum isn't sourced, but which feels about right.
Since so much of the effectiveness of the novel rides on Janet’s voice, the trick is in steering a path between believable reproduction of a deliberate class (and gender) simpleness on the one hand, and tacitly sneering condescension on the other. My sense is that Burgess pretty much manages this. It’s made trickier to do this than it might otherwise have been, I think, by the need to have Janet enact a series of increasingly extreme amoralities as the story proceeds, matching this to her blithely ingenuous (or apparently ingenuous) normalcy of middle-English decency and ordinariness.
At any rate, Janet tells a story whose surface plainness and attention to the banalities of life is, subtly, warped in the telling until the ordinary has become profoundly nihilistic and strange, almost without the reader noticing the transition. It’s this lobster-being-slowly-boiled-and-not-minding quality that is the books’ great achievement, I think. At the beginning Jane is working in a supermarket and her young husband Howard in a garage. They live in a council house, eat fish fingers and beans on toast, watch the TV. Jane is aware of her own prettiness without being especially vain about it; Howard is handsome and loving, if a little wrapped up in himself. ‘There were times when Howard could be very unreasonable. Once he’d got an idea in his skull you couldn’t get it out … so I went to get the supper, which was baked beans on toast tonight. You’d think I’d be fed up with baked beans, seeing them all day long in the Supermarket. But they’re an easy dish to put, and there’s a fair amount of nourishment in them. I liked to keep Howard well fed. He could be very sweet at times.’ [13] Janet’s voice is like this all through, more or less: to the point, digressive in small ways, always about quotidiana.
A key question, I think, is the extent to which Janet possesses agency, as opposed to being merely a passive and reactive character. At the start of the novel we're invited to see her this latter way, the product of a failing, flattened, denatured society. The TV substitutes for life; all authenticity has been leached from England. The story is disposed, with a studied artlessness of plotting appropriate to its faux-naïf narrative voice, into five episodes. We could say 'five main things happen to Janet during the course of the novel', except that presupposes her passivity. First has to do with her sister, Myrtle, married to Michael (who works in a shop selling typewriters, the first of three references to those writing machines in the novel). Michael beats his wife. Why?
'He says he can't stand the sight of me nor the sound of my voice.' Now Myrtle was a pretty girl, though less perhaps than me, though of course her marriage had worn her down and made her mouth droopy and given her bags under the eyes. But I could understand that about the voice. Myrtle had one of these scratchy high voices, always going nya nya nya nya nya, and I could see that anybody might get fed up living with that, but it seemed no excuse for beating her up. [15]What's neat, here, is that voice (used in its primary sense as the sound produced when human vocal chords vibrate the air) also refers to the vehicle by which a novel like One Hand Clapping generates its effects. I like 'nya', too: well observed in terms of English idiolects, but also a Finnegansy folding together of no and yes (or 'ya'), the ambivalence of the book's larger vision of England's ambiguous postwar utopia: free education, free healthcare, council housing, and all of it leading to mass banality. Anyway, Myrtle attempts suicide by taking (puns keep creeping in, despite Janet's ingenuousness of narratorial voice) 'barbarous or barbituric' sleeping pills [36]. This is a cry for a help rather than a real attempt, though it looks forward [spoiler!] to the genuine suicide pact Howard proposes at the novel's end. Hard not to feel a little sorry for poor old Myrtle. She goes back to her husband, and swept out of the story. It seems nothing in her life is to be taken seriously. Sucks to be her, I guess.
The second thing that happens is the main motor of the novel as a whole. Howard, it is revealed, has a photographic memory. Howard and Janet are particularly fond of a TV quiz show called Over and Over, based on Double Your Money, hosted by a pastiche Hughie Green called 'Laddie O'Neill' ('the quizmaster was a sort of American or Irishman you couldn't be sure which, with a very pointy sort of face. A lot of rather ugly and silly people came on and were asked easy questions about things' [10]). Howard gets on the show, and his perfect memory means that he answers all the easy questions, graduating to the hard questions that lead to the show's star prize of £1000. These are all literary ('who wrote Confessio Amantis?' and so on), and Howard answers them all without problem, although the book keeps reminding us that he has no deeper appreciation of literature at all, that it's all just a flawlessly flat, machinic recall. During the final episode of the quiz, Janet, in the audience, is haunted by a brief vision of the men behind three of Howard's answers, Jon Gower, Robert Henryson and William Langland, all genuine worth having been decanted out of their works, reduced to data points in a fatuous quiz:
... it just struck me for an instant, and it was almost as if it was Howard himself thinking and not me, that it was cheap and dirty to applaud something that nobody had any idea of, that nobody cared a bit about these three men, whoever they were, and that the three men, who I saw with beards and very old-fashioned clothes and dirty with not having bathed, were all dead and dignified and quiet and sort of despising everybody here in this studio. And I'd never read them or even heard of them, and I felt sorry and mean somehow. [72]A touch over-played, perhaps; but it is Burgess's core point. The problem with the world is not TV as such (although the novel was described by The Independent, reviewing the 2001 re-issue, as 'an incisive commentary on the Americanization of the UK and the way TV acts as an opiate of the masses'). The problem is a more pervasive loss of soul, a blankness and flattening of cultural and therefore social life. The 'it was almost as if it was Howard himself thinking and not me' throwaway is important too: because Act 3 introduces a new aspect to Howard's photographic memory. He takes the £1000 he has won and turns it into £100,000 by betting on the horses. It seems he is clairvoyant and can see the future. This knight's-move into Fantastika is treated with commendably low-key restraint by Burgess, who forebears from spelling out what is strongly implied: first, that Howard and Janet's marriage constitutes a tacitly telepathic bond (for there seems little physical and no real emotional strength to what they both insist is a true love), something reinforced when it turns out that Howard was indeed thinking what Janet thought he was thinking at that moment mentioned above; and, second, that the suicide pact Howard presses for at the end of the novel is a result of him seeing some catastrophe down the temporal line. The actual justification Howard gives for this is despair at the state of things (England like a 'scabby and old' lion kept in a cage where people jeer at it and throw stones [193]), combined with a desire for 'tranquility and peace'. But Howard sleeps badly, cries out in the night, sleepwalks and copes poorly with his clairvoyance; and there are hints that he dreams of 'the H-Bomb or something or the Polaris missile.' [78]
Anyhow, Howard insists that he and Janet spend the money on luxury items (a mink coat for her, five star hotels, fine dining) and a tour of the world. He also decides to give something back to 'real' literature, having won money with his perfectly superficial knowledge of old poetry. To that end he becomes the patron of a modern poet called 'Redvers Glass' (a name that made me think of Robert Graves: distractingly so, since Glass is a rather different sort of writer. Andrew Biswell, in the introduction to this edition, persuasively suggests he's based on Dylan Thomas, with whom Lynne Burgess had an affair). Glass comes to stay in the Shirley's Bradcaster council house whilst they fly to America and the West Indies. But before they go, and with little by way of narrative preparation in terms of her characterisation, Janet jumps into bed with Redvers. This puts agency in question again. At no point does Janet stop loving her husband; yet she desires Redvers and so she has him. 'Oh, Howard was very nice to have in bed,' she tells us; 'but he was very gentle all the time, and there was something in my that didn't want this gentleness. And the poet Redvers Glass was not gentle, not a bit, but he went on as though he'd willingly die afterwards if he could just have me now' [119]. There seems, on the surface, something Lawrentian about this (Lady Chatterley gets name-checked later: 'a book full of Sex and actually describing these two people doing it. It came out last year in the Penguins' [192]); but I'm not so sure.
Act Five brings the slow build-up to its climax. First Howard and Janet go to New York, Chicago, Hollywood and the Caribbean, on a money-no-object holiday ('New York was quite interesting, and we saw all the things we'd already seen on the films, like Broadway and Harlem and Madison Square, also Fifth Avenue. The difference between the films and the real thing was, as I said, mainly that the real thing had its own smell and the real thing was more genuine, with people spitting and swearing and having pimples and boils, though not more than the people of England'). But the net result is a sense of the fundamental sameness of human beings. They return to Bradcaster, where Redvers Glass has set up a sort of bohemian artist community in their council house. Howard angrily ejects all of these beatniks and poets, breaking one of their typewriters in the process. He then reveals his Big Plan to Janet. He has kept back the big bottle of barbiturates Myrtle has used in her suicide attempt. Now that he has shown his wife the vacuity of the world, they will both overdose together. Glass rumbles what Howard is up to and tries to get the police to intervene; but the local Bobby is unimpressed with his boho shabbiness and takes Howard's word that everything is OK.
Janet, though, doesn't want to die, and in a surprisingly tense and exciting scene bashes her husband on the head with a coal-hammer, killing him. Glass comes back, handles the hammer (which Janet has coolly wiped clean of her own fingerprints) and, distraught, insists she must go to the police. She is having none of this, and with impressive calm and resourcefulness she folds Howard's corpse into the large pigskin suitcase they'd previously used to carry their luggage through America. She takes the £50,000 that's left of the money, blackmails Glass into helping her, by hiding the hammer and telling him he'll take the fall if the murder is discovered. So Glass accompanies her as she runs away to France. That Customs don't inspect the contents of their large suitcase is fortunate for them; but once on the Continent they rent a house in a remote part of the countryside and, it seems, live happily ever after. They dispose of the body by using it as a scarecrow. since 'the crows will make short work of him'. Does she feel bad?
It's very hard for me to feel any real sorrow for Howard. I miss him sometimes, especially with Red carrying on a bit, as I think he is, with a woman called Madame Crébillon about seven miles down the road. That's why I've got this coal-hammer still. Because there's a man called Henri Fournier who has something to do with wine and speaks English really very well and says he'd do anything for me. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. [217]Crébillon (presumably named for this geezer, possibly because his most famous tragedy was Thyeste and there's a ghostly Thyestean vibe to the novel) and Fournier (I'm guessing a nod, via the book's several typewriters, to this guy).
It is a mark of how cleverly the novel is made that this final ruthlessness in Janet does not strike a jarring or forced note. It follows, we believe, directly from the way her character has previously been developed. We might say the novel understands murder as (to appropriate Johnson's phrase) something equally in the power of him that is hardened by villainy and inspirited by innocence. This, we realise with a start at the book’s end, is what Janet’s ‘voice’ has always been about in One Hand Clapping: her innocence, a quality that neither sexual transgression nor even homicide can tarnish. Innocence, in Burgess’s universe, is always simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. Which is quite a profound thing, when you come to think of it.
The violence of the novel is one hundred and eighty degrees of orientation away from Mary McCarthy’s famous assertion in her 1961 essay ‘Characters in Fiction’ that ‘in violence we forget who we are.’ Janet’s violence is, in the context it which it happens, entirely of a piece with who she is: common-sensical, doing the needful thing in the moment, on a par with putting baked-beans on toast or calling 999 when her sister takes an overdose. The point is not (pace Žižek) that there is some monstrous structural violence in Society that emerges in her actions. It is something the reverse of this: that society is too neutered and safe and monstrously bland. ‘Violence’ is another word for the authenticity to be found in those dead bearded poets, the Gowers and Shakespeares, and which (in admittedly debased form) flares up in Glass’s sexual urgency. There’s a quotation from W R Inge’s The End of an Age (1948) which I’ve always liked, and which speaks to this:
The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.Burgess would surely have agreed with this. The relationship between society and violence is not a simple mapping of one to the other, but an ironic upending. The more comfortable we are, the more deathly our beings-in-the-world, the more readily violence will burst out.
The ethical horizontality of this put me in mind of Camus or Sartre; the casual killing in L’Étranger; or the day-to-day mundaneness of Bradcaster that gets projected onto the whole world when Howard and Janet tour the States, which perhaps recalls La Nausée (‘when you are living, nothing happens. The settings change, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are never any beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition. There isn’t any end either … everything is like everything else: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, are all the same after a couple of weeks.’ [61-2]). The difference, of course, is that for Sartre this state of affairs is existential; whereas Burgess keeps worrying away at the fear that there has been a fall-away from some prior, authentic and meaningful living, that in some way the modern world is to blame. Since he does nothing but rail, and not entirely coherently, against this modern quidnunc (rather than proposing productive possibilities for reparation) this, ultimately, comes over as a less coherent position than Sartre’s. That doesn’t make it wrong, of course.
***
Coda. It's hard not to be struck by the similarities between this 1961 novel and the next title that Burgess published, 1962's A Clockwork Orange. Both are first person narratives by young people; both representations of early 1960s culture full of period detail that avoid mere reproduction by filtering the text through an estranging lens we might as well call science fiction: Howard's ability to see the future in One Hand Clapping, Alex's sovietized supposed futurity of location in Clockwork Orange. And both are about violence. There are many differences between them, of course, but the crucial similarity is that Burgess attempts to grasp what a new generation was 'about' primarily through voice. It's not just that the young are, to various degrees, disrespectful and contumacious; it's that they sound new. And Burgess attempts to inhabit that voice.
There's another similarity: the titles of both novels are derived from embedded works of fiction within the fiction. After they have become rich, Howard takes Janet to the theatre in London.
'It's a play very well noticed in The Times,' said Howard, in his lofty, Timesy, sort of way. 'Called One Hand Clapping. It's a play dealing with the decay and decadence in the world.'At any rate, Janet doesn't enjoy the play. 'When the curtain went up, what should it be but some young people in a very dirty-looking flat, with washing hanging up and a girl ironing in her underclothes. And that scene didn't change once, it was the same scene from beginning to end of the whole play.' There's more: 'what the play was about was about everybody being very unhappy because they'd got their education paid for by the government, or something, and there was no war on for anybody to fight in, or something like that.' [137]
'Called what?'
'One Hand Clapping.'
'That's a silly sort of name,' I said. 'How can you have just one hand clapping? You've got to have two, haven't you? I mean, there'd be no noise, would there, with just one? You've got to have two to make any noise.'
... 'It's from Zen Buddhism,' said Howard. 'It's something you have to try and imagine.' [135-36]
This is perhaps too sneery to be as funny as it might. The most obvious target is Osborne's Look Back in Anger; although the title is perhaps a joke at the expense of N. F. Simpson's second play, One-Way Pendulum (1959).* Howard's lofty 'Timesy' voice may or may not glance at his ability to see the future, although the reduplication of 'decay and decadence' is presumably about limitations of vocabulary. The more obvious point of this, I suppose, is to contrast Janet's rigorously common-sensical approach to reality with Howard's uncomprehending, rather credulous one. Howard wants to believe in something more, and is driven to death by his inability to find it. Janet has no such need. In You've Had Your Time Burgess flirts with otioseness in explaining his choice of title: with Howard dead, 'the clasped hands of marriage have been reduced to a single hand, but it claps. Hence the Zen title One Hand Clapping.' Well, alright; very Catholic, and so on. But surely there's a doomier quality hinted at in this Zen-ism. I appreciate the koan is designed to disclose thought, rather than enclose it in a single definite answer. Nonetheless, it has always seemed to me that one answer to the question 'what is the sound of one hand clapping?' is: silence. A clapper might be one of a pair of hands, applauding the curtaindown of a highly regarded new play at the Royal Court. It might also be the metal tongue inside a bell, tolling for—wait, must I send to ask for whom the bells tolls? One clapper is sufficient to make a solidly resonant sound, after all. And the funeral is always for more than just one person. John Wilson, also known as Anthony Burgess, also known as Joseph Kell, knew that.
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* Clarification from Dan Rebellato, Professor of Modern Drama at Royal Holloway: 'Both plays were at the Royal Court. The content of the play—woman ironing in a dirty-looking flat—is definitely a reference to Look Back in Anger which starts with the same image. And the comments about 'there was no war for anybody to fight in' is probably a reference to Jimmy Porter's speech: 'I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids [...] There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious and stepping in front of a bus'. And the comment about the 'education paid for by the government' is, by 1960, already a critical cliché about the 'angry young men' being the products of the Butler Education Act of 1944 (even though virtually none of those writers were young enough to have benefited from it). The working-class woman from the Midlands sounds very Look Back in Anger too (the play is set in the Midlands). The title might be referencing One Way Pendulum, but that's British absurdist and not kitchen sink at all (though the 'decay and decadence' line does sound more like absurdism than kitchen sink). To be honest, it sounds very unlike a 1950s play of the kind he's describing and might just be where Burgess's satirical accuracy is foundering.'
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