Dead before the novel gets going, and present only in the anxious, conflicted memory of his onetime best friend (the novel's protagonist Paul Hussey), ex RAF Englishman Robert had a little scam he worked with a contact in the USSR. He would come to Leningrad, posing as a tourist, but in fact illicitly smuggling in western clothes in his luggage. 'Twenty dozen chemical fabric dresses bought wholesale at thirty-shillings each, sold at fifteen roubles each to a certain P. V. Mizinchikov. Fifteen roubles at the unrealistic Gosbank rate was, say, six pounds. Total gross profit for Robert, say, one thousand and eighty pounds; net profit (deduct fare, subsistence, drinks and smokes) about one thousand. Mizinchikov's own profit in that country bloated with cosmonauts, starved of consumer goods—well, that was his own affair' [19-20]. But Robert has dropped dead of a heart-attack, and his widow Sandra has run off to Keswick with a new beau. So Paul Hussey, whom the Russians ('an aitchless race'. 59) insist on calling Paul Gussey, has agreed to follow-through on his late friend's plan.
Paul is a middle-aged, English antiques dealer, with a short temper and bad teeth, and has some close relationship to Burgess himself. Paul's wife, Belinda, is another fictional iteration of Lynne Burgess: voluptuous, drunk, unpredictable. She gets ill with a debilitating rash that flares up and down and necessitates her hospitalisation. Left to his own devices, Paul has a series of grotesque, surreal adventures in Leningrad.
The novel, in fact, is based upon a trip Anthony and Lynne Burgess took to the old USSR in 1960. Indeed, judging by the account Burgess gives in You've Had Your Time, the first half of the novel is pretty much a straight one-for-one transposition:
We had had no trouble with the fatherly customs officer on board who, sparking vigorously from his papirosa, dropped ash on the two suitcases full of polyester shift dresses, admiring that a Western lady should require so many clothes. My copy of Doctor Zhivago intended as a decoy, he ignored. Walking the long road to a taxi stop near some decayed ornamental gardens was arduous, what with all those dresses and the rest of the gear. Not much of a holiday so far. Leningrad seemed at first nothing but carious warehouse façades and a smell of drains and cheap tobacco. There was a Manchester or perhaps Salford atmosphere about it. But the Neva shone, as for the ghost of Pushkin, and the architecture of the city centre was impressive, though it was not a Soviet achievement. I told the taxi driver that he lived in a beautiful city. He shrugged. He was entering the depressive phase of a cycle that seemed to me more Celtic than Slav, Lynne ought to get on well here.Everything mentioned here, from the decoy copy of Пастерна́к's celebrated novel, right down to the manic-depressive taxi driver, appear in Honey for the Bears. On the other hand, it's always possible that the notorious unreliability of Burgess's memorious accounts in his two-volume autobiography is here deliberately rewriting his life via his fiction.
The second half of the book diverges, one assumes, from Burgess's actual experiences. The ship bringing them across from Tilbury is also transporting a large group of Soviet-approved musical composers, together with a deputation of young British communists, Len Sparts from the Dagenham branch of the Judean People's Front, or at least characterised by Burgess after the manner of that particular English establishment sneery-satirical tradition. At a boozy party onboard, Paul deprecates the clunky proletarian music being played, is hollered down by the British communists ('ah shut it,' sneered the students. 'Drop dead') and reacts.
Paul felt a pentecostal wind blow through him; his cheeks tingled; he stood up ad cried: 'How about Oposkin?' There was a shock of silence. 'Come on,' said Paul, more softly, 'tell us what you know about Oposkin. What we want to know is—what have you done with Oposkin?' He could not for the life of him explain to himself why he had suddenly become so passionate about Oposkin. He was an antique-dealer living quietly in East Sussex, going to Russia to do someone a favour. It was not even as if he were really all that interested in Oposkin, or music at all for that matter. He seemed to have become, for this exciting instant, a mere passive voice to be used by some numinous force supremely concerned about Oposkin. Or, of course, about freedom, whatever that was. [11-12]Oposkin is a composer hounded out of the USSR for reactionary formalism who later died. There is a suspicion that he was bumped off by the KGB. But it was Paul's friend Robert who was passionate about Oposkin, not Paul himself. His seemingly under-motivated action in shouting his name leads, windingly through the novel's overstuffed middle section, into a final act plot to smuggle the composer's son out of the country. Meanwhile, both Paul and his wife have a series of sexual encounters. The implication in the first section of the novel is that Belinda was having an affair with now-deceased Robert; but the truth is less conventionally heterosexual. Belinda in fact was sleeping with Sandra. Paul ponders his own sexuality confusedly. He is attracted to women, and makes an aggressive pass at the girlfriend of a Russian lad in whose flat he is staying; but in the war he himself had sex with Robert. 'It was during the war. He was in a terrible state. A flier, you know. It seemed natural. But not since, I swear' Paul explains to a Soviet doctor. Then, straying into protesting-too-much territory, he adds: 'it happened a lot during the war. All life is a matter of adjustment and readjustment. And then men went back to their wives quite happily and were quite normal ever after. I don't think you're being fair to me.' [108]
***
There's a fair amount of Russian in the novel, and some linguistic terminology and pondering: Burgess is upfront that Paul's (and so, we assume, Burgess's own) Russian is poor, patchy and often abandons him. Nonetheless more fluent Russianphones have not been kind to him in this novel. Oleg Ivsky, reviewing the novel in the Library Journal (1 February 1964) found 'the constant parading of Mr Burgess’s nauseating brand of pidgin Russian' to be 'particularly obnoxious’. Amazon reader A T Colqhuhon, whilst less showily condemnatory is actually rather more damning when s/he complains that 'this novel is very much marred by the fact that Burgess does not speak (or know) Russian as well as he thinks he does'.
We can unpick some of Burgess's language games. Take the title: Paul's wife Belinda is the honey. Named by her English literature professor father after the heroine of The Rape of the Lock, in Russia she switches, as it were, from a diminutive of Belle, lovely, to a diminutive of милая, one of the Russian words for honey. (I wonder if Burgess explained his authorial pseudonym to Russians only to have it bounced back to him as 'Antony Mburgess'; or perhaps 'Anthony Vurgess'?) The bears are the Russians, of course (медведь, or медведка. This word contains within it another Russian word for honey, мед, presumably on account of the well documented ursine fondness for that substance). And indeed I wonder if Burgess chose his rather awkward English title because he liked the reduplication of its Russian equivalent: Мед для медведей. Med: this word is cognate with the English 'Mead', both being descended, as the dictionaries of etymology inform us, from Proto-Indo-European *médʰu 'honey'. Hence the title of this post, for honey's sweetness and Mead's alcoholic transports, both central to this novel, are venerable human pleasures indeed.
Other details are simply transferred over from Burgess's dabblings in Russian culture. Tracing some of these back to source suggests that this may not have been as extensive as all that. For instance, 'Oposkin' is a name Burgess found in Dostoevsky: the charlatanic main character in his novel, The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859). In Honey, Oposkin's masterwork is an opera called Akulina Panfilovna, unperformable in the USSR, whose score was 'slyly sent off to Costoletta in Milan', and afterwards also staged at Covent Garden. Akulina Panfilovna is the name of a pretty young character from Dostoevsky's Uncle's Dream (also 1859). The final act of Burgess's drama sees Paul smuggle out Oposkin's son, despite pursuit by the police. After they have reached Helsinki, and the young fellow has disappeared into the West, Paul discovers that he wasn't Oposkin's son after all (the composer had no son), but was rather a man called Stepan V. Obnoskin. This surname is also lifted from Dostoevsky's The Village of Stepanchikovo. There are inevitable references to and elements adapted from War and Peace (Война и миръ/Voyna i mir); deliberately debased as per the broader satiric purpose. Late in the novel Paul is arrested and beaten up by the police; on his hands and knees he 'opened his mouth as if to pray and ballooned our an astonishing mess ... Rvota i krov [рвота и кровь]: vomit and blood. That would make a good enough title for a new Russian epic of violence' [169]
The 'Russian-ness' of the novel is not only linguistic. One of the ways it succeeds is by setting before the reader a very vivid sense of place (and, inevitably, time). Burgess is excellent on the telling detail: the shabbiness and occasional splendour; the 'out of order' signs everywhere, the lack of traffic and advertising billboards in the wide streets, the smell of Russian cigarettes. Cannily, he also layers over the first-hand observations of 'actual' Russia a number of overlapping fantasies of 'mythic Russia', of the sort that Western travellers are liable to carry with them when they visit. First, Paul, in a Leningrad taxi:
As they drove south Paul's heart ached, but not for Belinda. In his soul was a great plangent song for Russia, Russia, Russia, a compassion hardy to be borne. But why? It was not up to him to feel anything for Russia, these grimy warehouses, these canals, the Venetian Salford on which an irrelevant and perhaps disregarded metaphysic had been plastered. But with an inexplicable sob in his throat he gathered to himself the city, all the cities, all the lonely shabby towns he had never seen, the railway trains chuffing between them with wood sparks crackling from their funnels, the wolves desolate on the steppes, the savage bell-clang of Kiev's great gate, dead Anna Karenina under the wheels, the manic crashing march of the Pathetic Symphony, hopeless homosexual dead Tchaikovsky, the exiled and the assassinated, the boots, knouts, salt-eaten skin, the graves dug in the ice, poor poor dead Robert. [71-72]This last touch, via hopeless homosexual dead Tchaikovsky, suggests the centre of gravity of this sudden access of pity is self-, of course. But there's a palpable charge to the writing here, for all that it is a collation of cliché. The passage is paired with a second much later in the book, voiced by the wheelchair-bound, hermaphroditic 'Dr Tiresias', a rather sinister British individual involved in some (s/he claims Scarlet Pimpernel-like) trafficking to and from of cultural artefacts and people under the pretense of an 'Angleruss' organisation. Tiresias considers the Revolution a disaster and his/her vision of Russia is one of a chocolate-box nostalgia:
Ah, the bottom fell out of things when the Tsar and family were so brutally liquidated. That is the modern term, you know: "liquidated". Old Rapustin and his dirt. Still, there was glamour. A first-class French cuisine in the hotels, a comfortable journey from Petrograd to Moscow—foot-muffs and samovars—and the land under fairy snow: ah, lovely! [198]This is deliberately flatter and less affecting. Dr Tiresias turns out to be a sham, or at least a relict of a dead past. Such a world cannot be resurrected.
***
'Dr Tiresias', whatever his/her name actually is, embodies what I presume to be one of the main thematic foci of the novel. Honey for the Bears is fascinated with hermaphroditism, or perhaps with a sense of the incoherence of insisting upon a rigid distinction between male and female. The very first lines of the novel are given to our Waste-Land-y intersex observer:
When I first read that, I wondered if Burgess was having a pop at Bertrand Russell with this character; but as the novel goes on you realise how unRussellian the Doctor is. And whilst it's possible that s/he has foresuffered all enacted on this same divan or bed (in Alexei's flat, where he rents space for a week, Paul presses his sexual attentions first on a girl and then a group of boys), s/he's really not the kind of person to spend his/her time sitting by Leningrad below the wall and walking among the lowest of the dead. The point has little or nothing to do with actual Trans identity. It is Burgess projecting his thematic dialectic of 'masculine' West meeting 'feminised' East (it's your basic Orientalism 101, see), rendered with more sophistication by the fact that the book is well aware that elements of the West are feminine, elements of East masculine -- in order to suggest a melding, or a moving beyond. At the end of the book Dr Tiresias announces:
'Russia,' said the Doctor, ruminatively. 'I think we must move on, Madox and I. Towards the East. I am tired of categories, of divisions, of opposites. Good, evil; male, female; positive, negative. That they interpenetrate is no real palliative, no ointment for the cut. What I seek is the continuum, the merging. Europe is all Manichees; Russia has become the most European of them all.' [201]This is what underpins both the confusion of sexual orientation, or rather the oddly vague bisexualty, of the novel's main character. This is also behind the Carry-On staged ludicrousness of the scenes in which Oposkin fils/Obnoskin is smuggled out dressed as Paul's wife. The fellow is hyperbolically male: 'burliness, ill-shaven forearms and massive neck' plus a 'leeringly masculine' face [203]. But it's de rigueur in English comedy that put Bernard Bresslaw in a dress and, oh the hilarity, all the red blooded men who encounter him lust pantingly for him. When I was a kid I suppose I thought the joke here is that people are stupid. Now I wonder if the 'joke' is that English men are closeted homosexuals who need only the flimsiest of pretexts to abandon their forced impressions of arousal at the sight of a topless Barbara Windsor. At any rate, no sooner has Oposkin jr/Obnoskin been bunged in a dress and ushered from Paul's hotel then the comedy takes its inevitable Bresslavian turn:
The hotel was full of guests arriving for the Angleruss dinner. A fat little man in a blue uniform cast a look of desire at young Oposkin. Young Oposkin giggled. He had been told to open his mouth only to giggle; he was supposed to be an English lady. he spoke naturally a deep blurred Russian and nothing else. [206]I'm being too dismissive; the final act, when Paul smuggles this guy out of the country, is apprehended on the boat, met by Russian police in Helsinki and still manages to get 'young Oposkin' away, is both funny and surprisingly tense. It's the larger thematic that's a little clod-footed. Still: overall an extremely evocative, entertaining and richly written novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment