ABBA ABBA (1977)

Octave
1.
This wonderful novella is much concerned with recirculations. Eighty pages tell the story of the death of Keats; then we get sixty more in which Burgess translates about seventy of Belli's 2,279 wittily blasphemous sonnets into good Manchester English. Those sonnets keep returning to the same themes, the same images: souls and arseholes. Spirit and pricks. The title of Burgess's novel notates one formula common in rhymed verse, characteristic of the octave of some varieties of sonnet, as also of Tennyson's In Memoriam stanza, where rhyme steps away to link a couplet and then steps back to the original rhyme. It's also, the books tells us, the Hebrew for 'father' (which, via Latin, is why an Abbot is called an Abbot), and accordingly it records Christ's last Hebrew/Aramaic words on the Cross: because the book is also to do with painful early death, with figures whose words reach far beyond their death, and with the rationale of the Eternal City, Rome. AB are the initials of 'Anthony Burgess'; and 'ABBA ABBA' is inscribed on the novelist's own tombstone. The AB sets out, and the BA reverses the direction of travel. It goes one way, then it goes the other. Life is like this, and art, and history too. The history book on the shelf/Just keeps on repeating itself. Who said that? Was it ABBA? ABBA, yes.

2.
As well as recirculation, the book is also much concerned with cocks, pricks, willies, knobs, schlongs, male-members, with what Roman slang, the book informs us, calls the dumpennente, from the Latin meaning something hanging down, also used of Christ on the Cross: 'Stabat mater dolorosa,' Keats quotes, delighted with the blasphemy: 'Apud lignum lachrymosa/Dum pendebat filius' ('"An unholy reference, if I may say so," Severn said, unwontedly assertive' [15]). 'This is the good groiny iron', says Keats, rather splendidly. Belli writes a Roman sonnet about this particular organ, and in chapter 3 Keats translates it:

Here are some names, my son, we call the prick:
The chair, the yard, the nail, the kit, the cock,
The holofernes, rod, the sugar rock,
The dickory dickory dock, the liquorice stick,
The lusty Richard or the listless Dick,
The old blind man, the jump on twelve o'clock,
Mercurial finger, or the lead-fill'd sock,
The monkey, or the mule with latent kick. 

The squib, the rocket, or the roman candle,
The dumpendebat or the shagging shad,
The love-lump or the hump or the pump-handle,
The tap of venery, the leering lad,
The handy dandy, stiff-proud or a-dandle,
But most of all our Sad Glad Bad Mad Dad.

Sad Glad Bad Mad Dad draws our attention to the fact that the title ABBA ABBA, alongside all its other significations, proclaims the male member, too. It means Dad, Dad, cried out from the cross. Slang terms for the penis include 'the old feller' and 'the old man'. Indeed, I wonder if John ('John Thomas', clothed in a 'Johnny' to prevent conception) Wilson ('Willie') didn't have in mind a particular rebus of A and B, the 'A' a cazzo, the 'B' on its side two coglioni. This grafitto from the end-papers of my edition shows what I mean:

Vulgar, but there you are. Graffiti often are. We get speculation on the state of ill Keats's cazzo, or Ceats's kazzo, and memories of Fanny Brawne, cause Keats to have erotic dreams and nocturnal emission. Prongs and poetry elide. The pen is a penis, or vice versa. Keats himself jokes with Belli that he himself translates into Italian as 'Signore Cock' ('as in cazzo, as in cazzica' [43]). Keats ought to be writing, as it were, with his fertile cock, but the only fluid he can summon is pulmonary blood, the emission of which is literally killing him: 'Scarlet gushed out and John moaned, choking. He tried madly to use his manuscript as a cup. The inky quill fell from the knee desk and wrote briefly on the coverlet' [55]. This horrible admixture writes nothing but death. Or perhaps it brings poetry back to the swamp of individuality from which Keats's gift, at its finest, releases us. The fountain outside Keats' apartment gurgles through Burgess's novel, to remind us of his autoepitaph about how his name was writ in water. His body, he tells Severn, was nothing but

a clever machine, with the tongue and the teeth and the lips clacking and cooing most clever clusters of noises, and the noises long by common acceptance attached to things and thoughts and eager to be juggled in pretty poesy. But at the end there is only this I, shapeless and without memory or intelligence unless I consign it elsewhere. So for the moment I join it to the I of that singing water in the piazza and lose even my name. Or, if you will, write that name on water and hear the water gurgle on uncaring singing I, I, I. [60]

That 'I' has the look of an upright cock too, though, don't you think? Without memory or intelligence. Down wanton down.

3.
Keats's death was recorded by his friend Joseph Severn as follows:

Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him ... about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] 'Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy; don't be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.

Here's Burgess's version of the scene:

John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day's hard labour. Severn held him, as it were carrying him to the gate, but he could not bear Severn's laboured breathing, for it struck like ice. To put off the world outside – the children's cries, snatches of song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eye, even the brain that scurried with thoughts and words and images. It took long hours to die.

"I'm. Sorry. Severn. My weight."

"Nothing, it's nothing, rest now."

He tried to give up breathing, to yield to the breathless gods, but his body, worn out as it was, would not have that. It pumped in its feeble eggspoons of Roman air, motes in the sun and all, but there seemed to be nothing in his body to engage the air. The afternoon wore on to evening and his brain was fuddled and he groped for the essence he had called I. It fell through his fingers.

"John. John."

There was nothing there to make any answer. [82]

That penile I (that Sad Mad Dad, that AB, that John) loses its stiffness and slips through the once warm and capable hand as the trope of masculine death. I'm melting! I'm melting! Oh, what a world, what a world.

4.
Burgess's Keats is a vivid creation: believable, eloquent and, in his death, actually touching. He is, perhaps, a little fonder of the Joycean pun, the promiscuous riffing on overlapping meanings and inferences, than was the actual Keats (so far as we can tell from the letters and so on), but it doesn't seem to misrepresent the figure. The only piece of echt Keats the book includes is his sonnet 'To Mrs Reynolds's Cat', which Giovanni Gulielmi (= 'John Wilson', a purely fictional character) reads out to his friend Belli. Belli is unimpressed: '"It is nothing but noise" ... Belli made a cabbage of his face, as though, for a large audience, enacting nausea. "Such noises. Th and tch and rdst and glsbtld. English has no music' [22]. Gulielmi points out that they are good cat noises, those; but beyond this one poem is the larger debate staged in the novel, as to whether poetry should concern itself with elevated and idealised matters or dabble with the mundane and even the debased. Actually it's hard not to admire the pleasant perversity of Burgess's characterising John Keats, the single most mellifluous, prosodically harmonious and beautiful poet English has ever known, via this charming but atypical sonnet full of tch and rdst and glsbtld. Compared to Burgess's Keats, Burgess's Belli is a lesser piece of characterisation; a little stiffly caught between his priggish and his earthy-raucous selves. But the minor characters are deftly and cannily drawn, and the whole 1821 Roman scene comes alive on the page.

5.
This is how the novel opens, and it gives a flavour of the sprightliness of the dialogue, and the delicately on-edge-of-kitsch touches of description ('the dome of San Pietro grape-hued in the citron twilight'; Burgess knowingly repeats this phrase again on p.26) that speak to a writer carefully refusing to challenge Keats on the grounds of his own descriptive genius.

"Isaac," he said. "Marmaduke. Which of the two do you more seem to yourself to be?" He mused smiling among the ilex trees. The dome of San Pietro down there in the city was grape-hued in the citron twilight.

"I have never much cared for either name," said Lieutenant Elton of the Royal Engineers. "At school they called me Ikey Marmalade."

"We're both edibles then. Junkets, me."

"Junkets? Oh yes. Jun Kets."

"To be eaten by Fairy Mab."

Elton did not catch the reference. He took out his handkerchief, coughed harshly into it, then examined the sputum in the lemon dusk. Satisfied with what he saw, he wrapped it and stowed it in his pocket. He said:

"It's the mildness here that is good. The winter will be very mild, you will see. Extremes are bad. On St Helena a raging summer is ready to begin. Not good for the lungs, that climate. Not good for the liver. Not good for anything."

"You spoke with Bony at all?"

"He waved his arms and said something about earthquakes or it may have been earthworks. Or earthworms, for that matter. I could not understand his French very well. I saw him digging a lot. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, he shouted at me. That's from the atheist Voltaire."

"You don't admire Voltaire?"

"A damned atheist."

"Here comes his sister."

"Voltaire's?"

"No, no, no. God in heaven, here truly comes his sister. To us."

Pauline Bonaparte glided in the dimming light, a couple of servants behind her, taking her evening walk on the Pincio. Elegant, lovely, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort, fine-nostrilled, fine-eyed, she peered with fine eyes at the taller and more handsome of the two young men, gliding closer to peer better. Elton stood stiffly as though on adjutant's parade, suffering the inspection. She smiled and nodded and glided on. [8]

Junkets are a type of food made of sweetened curds or rennet, I don't think it stretches things to follow the association with 'sputum' in the sixth paragraph through to the textural similarity of junkets to the seminal emission that enforcedly celibate Keats later experiences, and which is related, I'm arguing, to the novel's deliberately disreputable interest in pricks, cocks, cazzi. Otherwise the layered-over citron tartness (grapes, citron, marmalade) offsets this potentially cloying sweetness; and we move effortlessly via earthworks, with its hint of Keats's waiting grave in the Protestant cemetery at Rome into which his corpse goes before the end of the book (cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth) to the earthworms that will eat him. The tyrant's beautiful sister, gliding through twilight, is both sex and death in a single feline form.

6.
The quality of light, so finely evoked in that opening passage, is very much to the point. The Rome of Beard's Roman Women is continually being drenched by rain. The Rome of ABBA ABBA is rain-free and gloriously lit. Giovanni Gulielmi sits down 'with Endymion and the 1820 poems of John Keats and the fine-eyed, wavy-maned Guiseppe Gioacchino Belli one forenoon of November sunlight and intense blue Roman sky' [19]; Keats himself contemplates writing a long poem about Rome: 'light flooding his eyes as his eyes further widened' [40]; the last thing dying Keats sees is 'the sunlight streaking the door' [82]. But Rome, bathed in light, is still dark. Belli converses with a senior prelate (the latter is offering him the office of censor in the city). He tells the Cardinal 'our drains are bad, our streets carry no name plaques, we lack light—' The Cardinal scoffs at this: 'So the Urbs Lucis lacks light, does it?' and Belli struggles to articulate his point: 'I am talking of the physical city, your eminence. In London they now have gas lighting, so a London visitor told me' [64]. But it's not about gas lighting. The last scene in the novel's octave is Keats's funeral and Belli arguing with a corpulent priest called Don Benedetto, who deprecates the Protestant's darkness: 'What, Belli demands, 'do you mean by that?'. The priest means that the Englishman was 'the unenlightened ... all those nations that have turned their backs on the light. The novel closes with: '"He had," Belli said, "more light in his little toe than you have in your entire fat carcase" [83].  Indeed.

7.
A S Byatt wrote an introduction to a 1989 reissue of the novel (it was later collected in her On Histories and Stories) in which she expresses the view that 'Burgess's novel—like all his novels—is about body and soul', a remark that approaches a fatuity not common in her criticism. After all, in one sense every novel is about these two quantities. Every work of human art. Then again, in another sense the observation adds to its fatuity by being wrong. Byatt says so because she wants to stress the importance of ghosts to ABBA ABBA. For instance, she reproduces the story he tells in You've Had Your Time that 'making a television film for Canada, [Burgess] recited Keats's sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be on the steps outside that house. During the fourteen lines a clear sky became stormy, rain poured, thunder drowned the words. Burgess says he is not "imputing a demonic vindictiveness" to the soul of John Keats, but believes that his fierce creative energy, frustrated by death, haunts the house where he died.' It's a nice story, though I don't believe it for a minute; and more to the point it has very little relevance to this novel. This is a text about the physicality of Keats, the bodily suffering he endured, what his body hungered for, and it's very well rendered. It's not about Keats's evanescent ghostliness then or now. In chapter 6, based on an actual incident, Severn takes away Keats's laudanum for fear that the poet will overdose of it and so commit the suicide that his devout carers considers a terrible sin. As a result, Keats goes through long-drawn-out death agonies without pain relief of any kind. The novel's interest is in the body rather than the soul, or perhaps it would be better to say: in the way the soul actualises bodily, materially, in the world ('God is in cabbage patches and beer-stains on a tavern table' is how Belli puts it). The novel is cats, and food, and cocks and cunts. Recalling his shocking cazzo sonnet Belli declares 'I was really proclaiming the glory of God' [79]. It's an unghostly book. It's resolutely bodily.

8.
This penis thematic might prompt us to read the titular 'ABBA' in more straightforwardly bawdy terms. It goes forward, and it goes back. Or we could say: it goes in, it comes out again. Who else but AB coined the phrase 'the old in-out, in-out' for shagging? It's perversely fitting that a novel named with such a rebus involves a procession of men (and one gliding woman) who are not getting any. Keats is too ill; handsome Lieutenant Elton is too loyal to his fiancée in England to take the sultry Pauline Bonaparte up on her offer; Severn is too devout; even Belli seems caught between his carnal impulses and his spiritual self-disgust. And so the sexily feline Mme Bonaparte must glide off into the twilight with no-one to share her bed.


Sestet

9.
As intimated at the beginning of this blogpost (and, really, it's a pretty obvious point to make) Burgess has structured his short novel according to the logic of the sonnet. The octave: eighty pages, give or take, of continuous narrative. The sestet: sixty pages (exactly!) of metafictional conceit about an alt-historical John Wilson, born a year before our lad, different life trajectory, killed in New York by (we assume, droog-style) thugs in 1959; and then the run of Belli sonnets. The 'turn' is from history to fiction, from a low-key and touching death story to the ribald, blasphemous life of Belli's reimagining of various Biblical moments. But the 'turn' in the sonnet is a recirculation, not a new departure; it is supposed to make us see the matter of the octave in a new light Keats, near death, dreams a dream that curls back and bites the fiction in which is appears on the tail.

He had one dream or vision that shocked him at first with a sense of blasphemy, though it must be a sense borrowed from Severn, since he who did not believe could not well blaspheme. Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him thus that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. [81-2]

He rejects the ghostly quasi-Platonic interpretation of this, and rightly so: the book we hold in our hands is a physical, material object after all (or was, in the 1977 pre-ebook days in which Burgess worked). The two men referred to, there, are Belli and Keats; and what this dream points to is the sonnet as pure form, something akin to the logic of music. It's a form that combines divergence with coming-together, as does the story of Keats and Belli. This is where it dawns on the reader that the story here follows a together, apart, together, apart trajectory: friendly connection, broken by Belli's crossness that Keats has been given a copy of his scandalous cazzi sonnet (rudely, he rips Keats's translation to pieces and storms out), followed by reconciliation broken again by death. And this marks out Keats, Shelley's 'Adonais' (A) and Belli (B) as AB, BA then again AB and BA. It's proper too: Belli is an interesting poet for sure, but he's very much a 'B' grade writer compared with the incomparable A-star Keats.

10.
One thing the sestet does is throw an new an achronological light upon the presence of Giovanni Gulielmi in the narrative. Pages 86-91 trace the family tree of this figure down to 'John Wilson' in a way that alerts those of us too dense to notice before the way AB has inserted himself into the time-frame of ABBA ABBA, in effect going backwards (BA) through time. And since were not sestetting our way through a series of intertextualities we can note that Burgess telegraphs this too. Burgess knows about the historical figure of Charles Wells, a 'a bouncing, red-haired youth of seventeen, addicted to practical jokes, and a former schoolfellow of Tom Keats' (I'm quoting Walter Jackson Bate). "There was a fool, his name was Wells, not that it matters,' Keats tells Elton, before he returns home. 'No, it does. Wells of stupidity, of malice, wells of the rank stinking water of inhumanity. He convinced poor Tom that a foreign lady was madly in love with him. She did not, I may say, exist. But Tom in his fever cried out for her. I should have thrashed Wells before I left England.' Elton is properly outraged. 'I had a corporal named Wells. He was a corrupt man and a drinker. No, his name was Willis. But it is near enough. I'll thrash this Wells for you when I reach home.' [31] This 'Wells' comes back to haunt Keats, mingling in his imagination with the water running outside his room. Babbling, he tells Severn: 'I dreamed just now of that water outside, and there was a grinning man poisoning it. Wells poisoning wells. ... He is clever. All the way from London he sends his poison.' [60] Burgess is slyly pointing to a different Wells, initials H.G., whose clever device inaugurated a new kind of story in which people might traverse time itself, and a man called Wilson might appear (his name suitable Italianised) in 1821 Rome. And Wells's machine can take us in both directions. As the Cardinal tells us in chapter 7, 'the future exists' [63]. ABBA ABBA is also a sciencefictional story. But then, everything is.

11.
Abbaabba might sound babbly (babbabbaly, perhaps), but we have seen how many puns Burgess contrives to fold into it that titular pattern of two repeated letters. In this he is being as Wakey as Finnegans, and he is doing so not only because Joyce works its way into most everything he does, but because he know how thoroughly Joyce's great punnovel is suffused with the flavours of the English Romantics:

Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we) I heard at zero hour as ‘twere the peal of vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church tolling so faint a goodmantrue as nighthood’s un seen violet rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewalbe to human warchers save ‘twere perchance anon some glistery gleam darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation. [Finnegans Wake, 403-04]

There's a good deal of babbabbaling in Joyce's final work, too. Of Anna Livia we learn that 'she’d neb in her culdee sacco of wabbash she raabed ... a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them.' Wabba a sort of womanly-ABBA; or from near the end of the novel we learn of 'Hellig Babbau, whom certayn orbits assertant'. That might be a Burgessy-ABBA. We are growing fanciful, though. Back to earth.

12.
Back, in fact, to Shakespeare. Of course Shakespeare. Elton gives Keats his English-Italian dictionary as a parting gift.

The book was intolerably heavy in his hands. He brought up his knees and made a lectern of them. LONDON, Printed by Melch. Bradwood, for Edw. Blount and William Barret. ANNO 1611. Year of the King James Bible. Shakespeare was how old? Forty-seven. With five years of life yet to run, he might have held this book, this very copy, in his hands, also finding it heavy. John's lectern-knees became Shakespeare's. John Florio had been Shakespeare's friend. At least he had been secretary to Shakespeare's noble dearmylove and patron. [37]

This is a real book, by the way: Queen Anna’s New World of Words, Or Dictionary of the Italian and English tongues, collected and newly much augmented by Iohn Florio, Reader of the Italian unto the Soueraigne Maiestie of Anna (1611). Keats turns first, of course, to the prickwords, the cockwords, the MadSadBadAbbawords: 'Cazzo, a man's priuie member. Also as Cazzica. Cazzolata, a ladle-full. Also a musical instrument without strings. Cazzo marino, a Pintle-fish. Cazzo ritto, a stiffe standing pricke. Cazzuto, a man that hath a pricke.' Keats finds this last comical, because prick is such a synecdoche for 'man' that a man without one is hardly even a man. But, reading over the pronunciation guide he discovers that Shakespearean English was far from 'correct' posho English. 'It began to sunrise upon him slowly what this meant. It meant that he was being granted a vision (not the just word. Audition?) of how Shakespeare spoke. He spoke like an Irishman, cazzica. He said not flea but flay. He pronounced reason as raisin. And now it flashed in where the joke was in Falstaff's words: "reasons are as plentiful as blackberries." Of course, raisins. With awe and something of fear, John felt as if he were being instructed by the dead in person, souls of poets dead and gone. Doors were being opened' [38]. When Gulielmi comes to visit Keats is excited:

"Mr Keats," Gulielmi greeted, "I see the rose of health on thy cheek."

"Master Kates, Shakespeare would call me. I have had the revelation this morning of hearing Shakespeare's voice. Florio's Dictionary. I have learned that Shakespeare said têle for tail and mêde for maid ... I wonder if Shakespeare was ever in Rome." [39]

The force of this has to do with provincialism, Burgess's non-London, unsouthern provenance, his Manchester accent, his sense of coming from the peripheries, consoled by the realisation that Shakespeare was a provincial and spoke like one too. And in a larger sense, we are all provincials from the perspective of the Eternal City ('I wonder if Shakespeare was ever in Rome'). Rome marginalises us all, and so unites us all in our existential centrality. Burgess follows this through with his Manchester-flavoured translations of Belli, anticipating the aesthetic strategy of Simon Armitage's splendid Gawain and the Green Knight translation by a quarter century.

13.
And following on from Pappa, or Abba, Shakespeare, there's the Italian John Florio. He shares Burgess's first name, and his passion for languages, and his interest in all things Anglo-Itaian. Perhaps in his more fruity stylistic moments Burgess wouldn't have rejected the title 'John the Florid'. But here's a strange point that brings us back to ABBA ABBA. The dedicatory epistle to Florio's Italian-English dictionary, the one Keats possesses in this novel, addresses Queen ANNA ANNA in conventionally  fulsome manner:

I like 'braine-babe', as a way of describing a book; not least because it returns me to this book, this Burgess brain-babe, this B-abba B-abba. Babba is a north-country rather than southern way of saying 'baby', of course; and that is what this book is. It babbles as infants do, because it is finding its way to the true speech. Or as Keats himself says at the end of chapter 1, in nicely merde-delighted baby tones: 'By the waters of babble on there we shat down and flung our arses on the pillows.'

14. Keats must be the last word, the last intertextual referent, the last name adduced, of course. Belli's sonnets, Burgess's authorial busy-ness everywhere present, the sexual allure of Pauline Bonaparte, the fate of Bonaparte himself, discussed variously by the various characters, fat Don Benedetto the priest, all these 'B's are arranged around the central 'A'. A is Keats, our alpha. Weep for Adonais, the book says, he is dead. But the book also says: the (arse)soul of Adonais, like a star/be-cocks from the abode where the arseternal are.

Beard's Roman Women (1976)

Writing Clockwork Orange, Burgess elected not to use the slang of early 1960s teenage delinquency and instead to invent his own slang. He made a very good call, there. Actual teen idiolects would have dated the novel catastrophically—in You've Had Your Time he rightly notes that 1960s slang was 'ephemeral like all slang' and would have 'a lavender smell' within a few short years. Mind you slang is not the only thing that dates. Beard's Roman Women (a very good novel, I think, despite what I'm saying here) illustrates for instance that shock dates badly too.

This is a short and tragicomic novel, often very funny, and also, unusually for Burgess, really quite moving. What I'm talking about here is a question of the orchestration of various emotional tones and registers. One of these, deliberately applied, is the ability to shock the reader, an important element in the writer's palette, alongside the ability to intrigue the reader, to make her laugh, cry and wait and so on. I'm not talking the large-scale melodramatic shock moments of Red Wedding-style grand guignol, of course. Everything in this novel is, quite properly, much lower key than that. Nonetheless the 'shock' moments of Beard's Roman Women have not aged well. I mean the scenes where 51-year old screenwriter Ron Beard, his new girlfriend away in Israel photographing the Yom Kippur War, masturbates in her empty Roman apartment; or more improbably where this same Beard is 'gang-raped' by a four gorgeous young Roman beauties, who first put on a sort of sapphic porn-show to arouse him, then press themselves upon him until he climaxes, then run off laughingly. Dated in a different, more wincing way is the way Beard's friend Greg Gregson, a bluff, boozy, upper-crust businessman stationed in the Far East, shouts racist abuse at all and sundry. The sex stuff no longer looks daring or liberated because representing sex no longer has the exciting tang of pushed-past tabu; and the racial stuff is nowadays wincing rather than bracing.

The presiding spirit here, the book wants us to believe, is Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, whose scatological, scurrilous anti-clerical sonnets in the Roman dialect ripped the piss from establishment verities. Belli (flanked by Burgess's translation of a great scad of those sonnets) reappears in ABBA ABBA, Burgess's next novel. But it's hard to get as excited about Belli as Burgess evidently did (he described the discovery of Belli's sonnets as 'one of the three major revelations of my later life' along with Levi Strauss's work on the relations between riddles and incest and Gaudí's architecture).

So: textual strategies that were, I don't doubt, once-upon-a-time shocking seems bland now: post 'Turning Japanese' the trick is finding a culture-text that doesn't represent wanking. Similarly the swearing with which Beard's Roman Women is liberally supplied, in many different languages, strikes a 21st-century reader as vanilla stuff; and any scato-satirical force that might adhered to the following bath-time moment has long since dissipated:

He [Beard] washed himself thoroughly nevertheless and, on an unbidden image of Saul Bellow the Canadian Jewish novelist for some reason frowning at him, paid special attention to his fundament. [41]

But if the shock has faded, like dyed curtain fabric in decades of continuous sunshine, the humour and the pathos have not. It's this latter quality that makes Beard's Roman Women one of Burgess's best 1970s novels. He can do many things, as a novelist, that are wonderful and admirable, but he rarely moves me. This novel did.

That's mostly because, underneath all the usual stylistic and ideational busy-ness, beneath the thorny satirical orneriness, is a simply told and therefore affecting tale of bereavement. The first of the novel's seven chapters juxtaposes the last days alive of Beard's first wife Leonore (a one-to-one version of Lynne Burgess): alcoholic Welshwoman expiring of cirrhosis, and his post-funeral meeting of a lively young Italian woman, Paola Lucrezia Belli, professional photographer and descendant of the poet (based on Liana Macellari afterwards Liana Burgess, the novel's dedicatee). Beard moves to Rome to live with Paola, and the freshness of desire's renaissance is well captured. He's supposed to be working on a rubbishy Hollywood screenplay for $50,000 retelling the story of Mary Shelly, Percy and Byron at Lake Leman and the creation of Frankenstein. But in chapter 2 Paola heads-off on assignment to the warstruck Middle East and Beard is left alone. She doesn't return until the very end of chapter 6, and in the interim Beard is haunted by his dead wife.

This is very sensitively drawn, I thought, despite the fact that Burgess turns it into a mystery-style reader-hook plotpoint. Or maybe 'despite' isn't fair; the puzzle aspect of this is such that we, like Beard, really aren't sure if the revenant Leonora is a real ghost, hoax or honest medical mistake. First Beard is bereft; then, very swiftly, he too caught up in the excitement of his new relationship to feel sad, or guilty at his lack of grief. Then, naturally, there is a reaction. Beard sadness at his wife's death is compounded with guilt at the way that sadness was so easily forgotten, which in turns becomes a guilt that he is, in some way, responsible for her death, First he bumps into his old friend Greg Gregson (a name that seems to point us unavoidably towards Geoffrey Grigson, Burgess's chief literary enemy, which is puzzling) and spends all day drinking with him. Gregson tells Beard that he recently met up with Leonora in the Far East; Beard tells him this is not possible, as she is dead, but Gregson remains adamant.

When Beard returns to Paola's flat he finds that her vengeful ex-husband, a famous Trinidadian-Indian novelist called P R Pathan, evidently a (extremely unflattering) version of V S Naipaul, has stolen all the fixtures and fittings. He is forced to continue working on his script by propping his typewriter on a board fixed over the sink for want of a desk. The phone rings, and it is Leonora, singing songs that she used to sing. Beard assumes this to be a hoax, but Leonora keeps calling, insisting that the hospital made a mistake, that she is still alive and fully intends to come out to Rome and reclaim her husband. He starts to wonder if it is a hoax, after all.

This strand of the story leads to a very emotionally powerful sequence at the beginning of chapter 6, where Beard, naked in Paola's flat, picks up the telephone receiver and speaks a long monologue to the 'soft expectant rhythmical purr' of the dialing tone, addressed to his departed wife. He speaks of his simultaneous inability and necessity of letting her go, and when he puts the receiver down the novel reaches a mournful but genuinely satisfying emotional conclusion. Burgess can't let it lie, there, of course: he has to round off the story. First Leonora returns from the war-torn Middle East and informs Beard that she has decided to adopt a large number of Arab war refugee children, who will live in the flat with them. Beard, horrified at this prospect, does a runner.

The seventh and last chapter sees him back in the UK, re-married to his wife's sister, a pretty young Welshwoman called Ceridwen who cooks for him and generally looks after him. The mysterious Roman phone calls are revealed to be Leonora's (and Ceridwen's) cousin, a mentally deranged young women with a bizarre sexual passion for Beard who believed herself to be the dead woman. Even this is not denouement sufficient. The novel then pulls out a morbus ex machina: Beard is told he has an invariably fatal malady called Schweitzer's Disease: the 'Swiss Disease', presumably because that's where suicides go to commit top themselves without breaching their own national law. According to his doctor the symptoms will start with a chronic twitch in the left eye ('always the left ... if it's the right it means nothing' [113]) followed by coma and then death. Beard decides to short-circuit this indignity, and without telling him new wife he returns to Rome. He meets Greg Gregson again, and tries to commit suicide by following the ingeniously strategy of repeatedly running up the many staircases that led to Paola's top-floor flat, to deliver an apologetic good-bye note to his former lover (she, in the meantime, has got back together with her horrid husband). He believes this upstairs-top-running will induce a fatal heart attack, but though he tries it thrice it only leaves him breathless. The novel ends on a queerly upbeat note. 'Sorry about the bloody anticlimax, Greg,' he tells his friend, when he's got his puff back. Gregson suggests they go for a drink.

Getting into the cab with Greg he was, he supposed, as happy as he had ever been in his life. Nothing left undone, and a whole night's drinking in front of him. The rain was teeming down now, and they'd actually got a taxi. [125]

Happiness, the novel's conclusion appears to be saying, inheres not in actually being with women, but in arranging one's life so that one has fulfilled all responsibilities to them. I assume that underneath this, on a psychologically symbolic level, is: children. Burgess had no kids with Lynne, and was presented with a son Paolo Andrea by Liana, who assured him that he was biologically his. He surely had his doubts about this; his biographers certainly have. At any rate, Paolo becomes Paola, the demanding though sexually alluring partner, who with a sort of horrible dream-logic insists that they must care for many demanding children, none of which are biologically Beard's. She and Beard will have to sleep in the smallest room, and leave the rest of the flat to the children. 'We may have to have the small epilettico in there with us,' she tells him. 'The eldest girl, Isa, which means Jesus ... she is not very responsible. Perhaps her head-sores have something to do with it. She was badly beaten by somebody. She will lift her skirt up at you. I am not sure if you can be trusted ...' [106-07]. It's comically ghastly, but on the right side of condemnatory for Beard, whose departure is a pretty venal abdication of responsibility. But its ghastliness is only a hyperbolic version of the common fate of all parents.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I think Beard's Roman Women works best the further from unadulterated Autoburge-ography it gets, or perhaps I mean the deeper into the buried anxieties of happy autobiography it delves. Burgess insisted repeatedly that he was joyfully in love with Liana, and that his life with her gave him a new start and a new relish for life. It would be boorish not to believe him. Mind you, he also concluded his actual memoir with the question-and-answer 'am I happy? Probably not'. On that level, the level of psycho-erotic fable, Beard's Roman Women retells Burgess's actual transition from first wife to second wife only in order to ramp up the Miltonic late-departed-saint angle to such a degree that the second (happy, he insisted) marriage is actually aborted, his new partner's crazily self-abnegating decision to devote their lives to raising needy adoptive children repudiated, and the protagonist gets to return to his first wife, or actually (better and better) a younger, sexier and more attentive version of his first wife. The first wife without the over-drinking or nagging or guilt-inducement. Beard must pay for this tabu wish-fulfillment by acquiring some unlikely, unpainful yet fatal disease. Still, the novel leaves him, like the lovers on the side of the Grecian Urn, happy, unweariéd and forever in the taxi on the way to a fun night's drinking with his buddy.

The script Beard is writing, The Lovers of the Lake, speaks to this theme too. At Hollywood's insistence he has monkeyed around with the historical chronology in order to accommodate a passionate love affair between Byron and Mary Shelley. But lurking behind all the erotic hi-jinks is the hideous shape of the monster, that ur-baby, that classic articulation of the horror implicit in bringing new life into this dead world. Burgess handles all this with a light touch, holding back—something he doesn't always do, of course—from dumping great chunks of this screenplay into the novel itself. Then there's the peculiar scene at the end of chapter 5 when Beard is, inverted commas are absolutely required, 'raped'.

The set-up is that Beard, walking to the post-office to send the latest draft of his script to Los Angeles by air-mail, is robbed by two scippatori, young men on mopeds who snatch his bag and scoot jeeringly away. By chance, Greg Gregson is driving by in a small Fiat, sees the theft and knocks the boys off their scooters. He and Beard then put the boot in, give voice to a quantity of ethnically-specific insults, and retrieve the script. Beard, who had not made a copy, is very grateful. But this leads to vendetta which the boys pursue—bizarrely enough—by sending four beautiful young girls to Beard's flat to overpower, titillate and have sex with him. As to what's going on here, beyond the indulgence of an late-middle-aged male erotic fantasy (plausibility, after all, being no predicate for such fantasising) is a little hard to gauge. It may be that Burgess is gesturing towards the Bacchae, these Dionysiacally-inspired young girls modern enough not to rip Beard limb from limb, yet still violate him.

So: why does what happens to Pentheus in that play happen to him? In Euripides' version it's because his first action upon becoming king of Thebes was to ban the worship of Dionysis. That play is really about the tension between civilised restraint and anarchic wildness as balanced elements in social living. Beard's Roman Women novel suggests a different, personalised reading. Burgess surely knew that the Greek name Πενθεύς means 'man in mourning', 'bereaved', 'sorrowing'. Grief at loss is styled by the book as a male matter, because death is the idiom of man. It is the vital women who insist that life, and sex, must go on, at whatever cost to a man's decorum, balance or peace of mind. I wonder if something like this isn't behind Burgess's choice of name for this alter-Burgess main character. A beard, in slang, is a woman who who accompanies a gay man in order to give the world the impression that he is straight. By extension, perhaps, all men are 'beards' in their marriages; they accompany their women and the world is deceived that the partnership is about life, the new life of children, the old life of love. (It's what Wilde says in Dorian Gray: 'the one charm of marriage is that is makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties'). In fact, Burgess implies, men are not about life. Men are about an unhurried but consistently pursued death-drive. Though this short novel begins with a woman dying and ends with a man not quite dying, the latter is all about form, completion and harmony; where the former is about ragged loose ends, not-going-gently, the refusal to lie down and stay dead. This, I take it, is the gender distinction at the heart of Burgess's vision. Men are better at dying than women.

Which brings me back to where I started, with this blogpost: shock. The death of a loved one is, naturally, a shock; and the desire to capture in fiction such an experience must needs reproduce some component of the shock if it is to work at all. But Burgess's new-found passion for Belli elides the emotional affront of living with bereavement into a completely different emotion: that sense of disappointment in the world, formed of ressentiment, the clever outsider with the chip on his shoulder who takes sour delight in pointing out that the Establishment of religion, politics or even 'Literature', is riddled through with hypocrisy and disingenuousness. Belli seeks to shock an audience so steeped in Establishment pieties that the mere utterance of the truth falls like a thunderbolt upon their placid conventional lives. Burgess often works towards a similar aim: wipe yer arse with the pantheon of so-called Great North American Jewish novelists! Middle aged men masturbate, you know! Everybody's a bit racist, but most people are too craven and hypocritical to admit to it! That sort of thing. It's not just that this simply doesn't fit with the more profound shock of our universal mortality, our existential and affective frailty; although, obviously, it does. It's that, read in forty years on, it just doesn't come over as very shocking any more.

Burgess Supposeth his Moses is Poesie: Moses (1976)

... but Burgess supposeth erroneously. I was pleased to pick this up for next-to-nothing in a second-hand bookstore. Otherwise quite hard to come by, never-reprinted, minor Burgessiana. But, my, what an eccentric performance. It's an 18-book epic poem on Moses’s life, written in intermittently disciplined, sprawly, four- or five-beat variable lines. This is what Burgess says in his foreword:

A few years ago I was commissioned, along with Vittorio Bonicelli and Gianfranco de Bosio, to provide the script for a television series on the birth, life and death of the prophet Moses. I found collaboration difficult and was forced to work entirely on my own, leaving emendation, addition and subtraction to be more or less improvised—by Bonicelli, de Bosio, who was the director, Vincenzo Labella, the producer, the actors Burt Lancaster and Anthony Quayle—while filming proceeded in Israel. The major aesthetic problem was a linguistic one, as it always is with historical or mythical subjects, and I found the only way out of the problem was to precede the assembly of a shooting script with a more or less literary production—this sort of epic poem you have now in your hands. To have written Moses first as a prose novel would have entailed the setting up of a somewhat cumbersome mechanism, in which the devices of ‘naturalism’ would have led me to an unwholesome prosaism both in dialogue and récit. Verse moves more quickly, and the rhythm of verse permits of a mode of speech midway between the mythical and the colloquial. Out of this homely epic I made my script, but the poem, such as it is, remains and is here for your reading.

Not entirely convincing, this, as a justification. Poetry, surely, doesn’t move ‘more quickly’; its compression, indeed, tends to have the opposite effect; and writing verse surely doesn’t inoculate Burgess’s text against the debilitating ‘midway’ tone. In fact the poem itself swerves distractingly from the high-pompous King-Jacobean (‘I am come to deliver them out of the hands/Of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land/Unto a good land and a large’ [36]) to the slackly discursive (‘One hundred and seventeen thousand/Five hundred and sixty-seven. That is the latest/Computation, your divine majesty’ [62]) and the bathetically mundane (‘“Time to get up,” she said. “You have ruling to do.” [112]). More, posterity has not been kind to some of Burgess’s handed-down-on-stone-tablet pronouncements (‘none of us will ever see a film of Beowulf,’ he ringingly declares at the end of his foreword).

At any rate, here’s the IMDB page for the resulting motion picture. You can see what Piero Sbragia from Sao Paolo thought of it: ‘I’ve seen this movie just because of Burt Lancaster. The whole picture is bad. The direction, the cinematographer, the actors. The only exception besides Lancaster is the score by Ennio Morriconne.’ Hansbearnl from the Netherlands agrees: ‘Worst Moses ever ... and the biggest question: where did the director get the story from?’ Well. Indeed. At any rate, the film-makers didn't let mere cinematic mediocrity get in the way of their marketing. I really don't believe I can think of a more hubristically grandiose claim that the shout-line from this poster:

It wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if it didn't look so very like Burt is energetically dancing The Twist on that massy-stone nominal edifice, there. I've never seen the movie, so I can't really judge.

I have, though, read the poem, and reading it was an ... interesting experience. Some of it is pretty indigestible; but some works intriguingly, and rather well. Here’s book 6, ‘The Passover’, in which Burgess retells the familiar story with a slightly selfconsciously worked ‘dog’/‘bird’ thematic.

Moses in sunlight, with the whirring of Miriam’s doves
And the cry of children about him, sighed and spoke
Softly of the Angel of Death. “Who shall describe him?
Or her? Or it? Like a trained hound of the hunters
He has the scent in his nostrils. He follows the scent.
He will follow the scent of the firstborn. Miriam said:
‘You were told this?’ And Moses replied: ‘It is the
Last thing. The tenth figure of the dance.
Four days from now on the night of the
Fourteenth days of Nissan. The nose and teeth of the
Angel of Death will dart straight
For the firstborn. Whether Egyptian or Israelite—
It will be no matter to him of the
Separating out of the nations. Even the
Firstborn whelp of a bitch’s litter. The first
Hatchling of the hen. He will go for the scent.’ [69]

Mo then explains the Passover ritual that will protect the Israelite firstborn; and the first Passover is described.

Then all suddenly listened.
But there was nothing to hear. ‘The silence,’ Aaron said,
‘Strikes like a new noise.’ Then Moses heard.
‘He is coming. God help them. He is coming. Now.’
Them, from afar, a scream, and another,
And soon the sound of wailing. They sat silent,
The meat grown cold on the table, listening.
Then the noise of a nearing wind at the door,
And the door shaking, but then the shaking ceased,
And the wind passed over. [71]

Which is fairly spooky, I suppose, in a cinematic-cliché sense. Meanwhile, ‘in the imperial palace’, Pharaoh’s ‘infant prince slept in his cradle, placed in the heart/Of a magical pentacle’. Magicians intone lengthy charms, but it won’t do him any good.

Pharaoh looked down on his child, cradled in his arms,
Looked and looked and did not believe and looked
Incredulously toward his queen and all looked and
None was in any doubt as a bank of candles
Flickered as in the draft of a great wind,
And from Pharaoh went up the cry of an animal,
Filling the chamber, the palace, spilling into the night ...
The palace took up the cry and gongs and drums
Turned it to a geometry of lamentation,
While, like a thing of wood or metal, the king
Carried the child blindly, the mother following,
Choked in pain the gongs muffled, till they stood
Before a god of metal and Pharaoh whispered:
‘What do I do now? Beg you to comfort him
On his passage through the tunnels of the night?
Beseech you to remember that he is still
Of your divine flesh, and to restore him to the light
Where he is—needed? Or do I see you already
As very hollow, very weak, impotent, a sham?
Am, I born too early or too late? Does heaven
Remake itself? Has the dominion passed over
To that single God who was neither sun nor moon
But the light of both? But in your eyes there is nothing.
Your head is the head of a bird.’[72]

‘A geometry of lamentation’ is pretty good, and if the ‘passing over’ from pagan to Judaic divinity, here, is a little heavily telegraphed, there’s actual emotional heft in Pharoah’s grief, I think.

Burgess is at his best in these sorts of, frankly novelistic, moments of quieter inwardness. He tends to fluff the larger, more epic set-pieces. The parting of the Red Sea, for instance, is ropily handled: we do not share the Israelite ‘awe’ at ‘a wind that seemed, oh God, to be parting the waters/As a comb parts hair’ [81] (that’s: as a comb parts hair. Awesome!) Into the desert they wander. Moses goes up the mountain whilst his people dally orgaistically with the golden calf, and Burgess gets to unload his characteristically strong sexual fascination/revulsion (‘an obese matron, naked,/Pig-squealed, pleasured by a skeletal youth’, [117]). Then, chastened and recipients of the law, the Israelites wander on, through a widescreen wilderness:

The wilderness of Paran. Wilderness
After wilderness, and now this wilderness.
Sand, rock, distant mountain. A copper sun
Riding a wilderness of bronze. [133]

**

Reading the whole was assisted by the pencil annotations of the previous owner. Beside Burgess’s self-penned author note at the back, s/he has written ‘pretentious trash’ and drawn two lines to cross out the text.

Elsewhere s/he adds things like ‘contrived’, ‘?’ and ‘he would never artic with these words’ ... this is alongside a passage in which Burgess’s Moses artics thuswise: ‘This/punctilious observance, as you term it/somewhat grandiloquently, is of the very/essence of the law.’ [127] Which is probably fair comment.

2. "We refer, naturally, to our own W": the Strangeness of History in 'Napoleon Symphony'

:1:

I came close to titling this blogpost 'Burgess in the shadow of Tolstoy'; for Napoleon Symphony ends with an epilogue in heroic couplets ('An Epistle to the Reader') in which the author confesses a near-crippling anxiety of influence. How can any novel about Napoleon, especially one that spends so large a portion of its length on the 1812 invasion of Russia, tackle the inevitable comparison with War and Peace?

Post-Tolstoy novelists are reckoned mad,
Presumptious, temerarious or all three,
To write about the Corsican, since he
Is brilliantly portrayed in Voina i Mir:
After that vodka, who wants British beer. [347]

Vodka? Really? Nearly 600,000 words of vodka, that would be: 1440-pages of the stuff in my Oxford Classics paperback. A fatal dose surely, and one that makes Burgess's modest 350-pages of beer look positively thimble-sized. AB presumably intended the comparison in terms of comparative strength rather than quantity; but nonetheless. There's something ill-judged I think, almost passive-aggressively so, about this epilogular self-effacement: 'Take then or leave this lump of minor art,' he instructs us at the start of his PS-epistle. Protest too much much? And then we look again. Lump, like beer, implies a heft to Burgess's production; where vodka, though distinctively Russian and the tipple of many a refined drinker, is essentially flavourless. And flavour, we suspect, is the get-out-of-jail-free card Burgess is holding on to. He knows his energetic stylistic mishmash is closer to Hardy's Dynasts than to the remarkable solidity and steadiness of Tolstoy's aesthetic momentum; and he's swingeingly honest in this verse ps that 'The Dynasts is, indeed,/A monstrous shocking failure'. Still, Burgess believes the Muses prefer 'failed boldness' to 'orthodox success'. Maybe they do.

The 'Epistle to the Reader' is six pages of pure poetasting Explainderby, and far from the novel's finest moment. That the novel has greatest moments, and indeed achieves something so remarkable and marvellous that I'm tempted to bracket it one of Burgess's two or three most impressive achievements, remains my conviction, however.

Still, since Burgess actually incorporates the disadvantageous comparison with Tolstoy into the text, I suppose we can't ignore it. It's pointless to index the differences between these two novels in terms of relative greatness: this is Tolstoy we're talking about after all, and Burgess's awkward self-laceration ('I was brought up on music, and compose/Bad music still ...') doesn't take us anywhere interesting. The anxiety of influence here has produced not so much a swerve as a U-Turn: everything Tolstoy does, Burgess does differently. Tolstoy writes in plain discursive style, and builds his story according to the logic of a linear narrative; Burgess works style indirect libre, streaming consciousness, poetry and other textual playfulnesses in a non-linear way, with flashbacks and flashforwards, repetitions and contortions. Tolstoy includes scores of characters, including at least half a dozen that could be called 'central' to the story; Burgess has only two 'characters': Napoleon himself and to a much lesser extent Josephine, and arranges around them a variety of supporting marionettes characterised by modes of appearance and varieties of idiolect.

But beneath the more obvious differences is one strange locus of similarity that, paradoxically perhaps, indicates a core difference between the two books. I'm jumping off, here, from something John Bayley argues in his book on Tolstoy that strikes me as relevant to Napoleon Symphony. Bayley thinks that Tolstoy creates a variety of compelling and realistic characters in War and Peace (and I think that's right); but Bayley also insists that the central figure, Pierre, isn't real in the way that figures like Rostov and Kuragin are 'real'. Pierre is more by way of being a focalising instrument, a way of bringing the huge multiplicity of the novel into what Bayley calls a 'dramatic and metaphoric unity of purpose.'

Pierre's carefully constructed physical self—his corpulence, spectacles, good-natured hang-dog look, etc—become as it were the physical equivalent of Tolstoy's powerful abstract singlemindedness—they are there not to give Pierre a true self, but to persuade us that the truths we are being told are as solid as the flesh and are identified with it. [John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (Chatto 1966), 73]

This is a rather brilliant observation, I think. Bayley adds, again I think rightly, that we accept Pierre (and also Andrei) as characters despite their depthlessness: 'we feel that Pierre and Andrew are bound to be seekers and questioners because the one has no past and the other no roots in life, forgetting that Tolstoy has deprived them of these things precisely in order that they should conform to the fictional Bildungsroman type of the seeker' [Bayley, 75]

The interesting thing is that Burgess's Napoleon is also not a character in any meaningful or 'real' sense. Yet this gorgeous Napoleon-shaped kaleidoscope of textuality functions in Napoleon Symphony in a completely different manner to the way Pierre, say, functions in Tolstoy. Burgess in this novel effectively repudiates Bildungsroman: the denial of any character development or arc is part of the point of Napoleon Symphony. (I wonder, thinking about it, if AB writes any Bildungsromane at all. I'm not sure he believes people do grow and change. Isn't one point of Clockwork Orange to suggest that 'changing' a person's personality is necessarily an act of intrusive violence? Do any Burgess characters evolve and grow and alter?)

There's a particular point to the anti-Bildungsroman aspect of this novel, though. It has to do with Burgess's way of articulating a sense of the dangerously pure externalisation of the 'seeker' motif of that mode of art. Napoleon seeks for many things in this novel, but none of them are connected to his inner being. All his goals are military, political, external. Napoleon emerges from Burgess’s portrait as energetic and ambitious, skilled a motivating his troops (by turns swearily hectoring and eloquently inspiring), good on orchestrating large scale operations—all the things you’d expect. Burgess’s N. is also hot-tempered, hot-blooded and given to mood swings of a Corsican or Mediterranean type: passionate and urgent.

More to the point, Burgess portrays Napoleon as urgently chameleonic, a kind of echt-politician, happy to adapt himself absolutely to the requirements of power, or the appetites of the ruled. When he’s in Egypt he informs the gathered ‘imams and muftis and kathis’ that he is himself a Muslim: ‘we believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a holy book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum’ [46]. In part 2 a young German nationalist called Stapps tries to assassinate Napoleon, and Burgess devotes many pages to the emperor’s attempts to convert the lad to a genuine Napoleonism rather than just have him shot. ‘I am your father,’ he tells the lad. ‘I am everybody’s father.’ When Stapps demurs (‘my father is a Lutheran minister of Saxony. He is a German and a patriot’) Napoleon insists:

‘Well, give me a month to learn German and then I’ll be a German patriot too. And a Lutheran, if that’s what you want. It’s not difficult to be anything once you’ve been a Muslim. Well a sort of Muslim and the Egyptians more or less accepted us as such. But first first first, mark this, first I’ll be a European.’ [140]

This all-things-to-all-men thing is amongst other things a way of characterising the emperor as an elaborate nothing: we get no sense of him as a person, no sense of his childhood. As Bayley points out, War and Peace is intensely concerned with childhood and its relationship to adulthood; Burgess doesn't 'do' kids. I'd say the first Burgess title to include anything like a convincing child character is Little Wilson and Big God. With Napoleon, here, there nothing underneath all the textual specificity to generate a sense of a living human being.

This, though, is not a failing of the novel so much as it is an attempt to erect upon the quasi-musical form of ‘Napoleon’ a textual edifice with a rather different shape. The novel calls to mind Emerson’s 1850 essay ‘Napoleon; or, The Man of the World’, one of his odder pieces that establishes its thesis via a queer nod to Swedenborg:

It is Swedenborg’s theory that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles, or as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similar; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, or infinitely small livers; the kidneys of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to contain within him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

Emerson sees that this has its bad side, of course; ‘a man of Napoleon’s truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses around him, becomes not merely representative but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds’. There's enough of a critique of tyranny in Burgess's novel to give force to this latter notion, although I get the sense that AB is a little too in love with the sheer energy and ebullience of his central character. But it speaks to the novel's relationship to history. Napoleon Symphony is (I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but there you go) an historical novel, and does many of the things readers go to historical novels for. Indeed, it manages to wear its evidently detailed historical research lightly give how densely it is worked—I for one spotted no unintentional errors although Burgess plays the anachronism game more than once. Nevertheless, if we try to decide what version or theory of capital-H 'History' Burgess is advancing in this novel I'd say we have a hard time pinning it down. Tolstoy added a vast appendix to War and Peace laying out his anti-Great-Man theory of history. Anthony 'Explainderby' Burgess's appendix is only a confession of overshadowing by Tolstoy. What is 'history' in this novel? Might it be that Burgess sees human life and variety as synchronically composed of myriad Emersonian Little Napoleons?

:2:

Reviewing the novel for The Spectator in 1974 a young Peter Ackroyd reached for a de-haut-en-bas bitchiness rather beyond his years. Burgess, he said, ‘contrives a rhetorical garishness by shifting the surfaces of his writing around like toy-bricks’; ‘the writing has an artificial pace reminiscent of some of the more troppo passages of opéra bouffe’; the ‘Elizabethan’ analogy between language and music ‘seems a singularly pointless one at this late date’; ‘Mr Burgess’s writing has a squelchy quality which one does not associate with anything in particular’ and so on. It all strikes a rather ironic note in the light of the toy-brick artificiality of Mr Ackroyd’s own, later-written, novels. But he does make one good point:

In Napoleon Symphony the hero is the quintessentially romantic figure whose tears can kill little children in the street, and the one who goes amongst his people in disguise. He is the hero who strives for vainglory of nations before the growing power of the Volk:’I had not yet got down to calling it anything,’ Talleyrand smiled, ‘but since you press me, I will launch the term master race.’ There are a great many of these nudges and winks to posterity, and a strain of what one might call contretemps runs through the novel. [the review is reprinted in Ackroyd’s The Collection (Viking 2002), 16-17]

Contretemps is meant dismissively, in the sense of inopportune or embarrassing textual strategies; but in a more at-root sense of the word it's weirdly well chosen. Burgess's view of History is indeed contre-temporal. I can think of novels that have styled history in terms of myth, and novels that have scrupulously explicated myth in terms of plausible historical verisimilitude, but I can't think of another example save this that shows us an historical agent, caught in and trying to shape history into precisely myth. Burgess's Napoleon is, in effect, a failed author; attempting to write himself into grander roles and greater destinies. His eventual failure is to find himself not as the Apollo his name seems to imply but rather as Prometheus 'chained to a rock, his liver eagled out' [351]. The fourth section ludically inserts not only Prometheus (because the fourth movement of Beethoven's Eroica reused the theme from his Creatures of Prometheus ballet). but the Christ-Crucified rebus INRI, over and over again, in a plethora of ingenious embeddings, not least the next-to-last sentence of the book: 'And I say aga INRI ng bells bells bells bells and rejoice. Rejoice' [343]. Wait: didn't AB publish a book on the author of Ulysses entitled Re Joyce? Who's the real Christ-figure, the Word spurned and rejected: warrior and tyrant Napoleon, or an altogether humbler individual?

Word begins with a W. The entire fourth section is a Joycean pastiche of styles, from Jane Austen through Henry James (whom, on his deathbed, believed himself to be Napoleon, implausibly enough) to Joyce himself. Style marches from 1821 up to the novelist's present day. The Jamesian passage, in fact, makes great play with the mystic significance of the letter W, now presiding in the very Northern skies from which Napoleon has been banished as the constellation Cassiopeia, and standing for everything that defeated Napoleon:



But we know who is encoded by W, don't we? Who else but Wilson? ('We refer naturally,' the narrator confides, 'to our own W, to W as a right English letter' [286]. Is that writer of English? Man of English letters? Word-wright?). This self-reflexivity is rather refreshing in its frankness and clean self-regard, I think. Amour-propre is a clean sort of love, after all. Time runs from Burgess to Napoleon and back into the mists of myth, and then runs in a contraflow back to the present; and the net result of that is to break the conventions of historical fiction into glittering shards. Even INRI, snapped apart into IN and RI in many places, brings a Christic code back to the source. For what is I.N. but a Latin abbreviation of J--n? And who is this to come from the East, the place where the sun rises, where Apollo himself reigns, out of whose beds Burgess himself arose to become a novelist, to mispronounce the name Wilson as RI/LSON? It's fanciful, I know; but the whole novel is fanciful to the nth degree. Do you see what elaborations it drives the humble critic and interpreter?

In his recent book The Antimonies of Realism (I blogged a read-through of this work here), Fredric Jameson has interesting things to say about the way the realist novel is caught between the logic of (pseudo-Providential) emplotment and the logic of (verisimilitudinous) openness and freedom. This diremptive tension results, he argues, is the kind of formal fragmentation we associate with Modernist texts in particular. It might also (though Jameson apparently has no interest in Burgess) stand as a summary of Napoleon Symphony's whole-text strategy: a work that is centripetal stylistically and constituted of a blizzard of multifarious individual elements that repeatedly emphasizes the arbitrariness of events, whilst at the same time being almost monstrously overdetermined not only by the historically fixed career of its subject but by the formal constraints of Beethoven's symphony. To this schema Burgess then gushingly adds extra formal constraints: a hammered-home contrast between the Earth (and Fire) as Napoleon's element, and Water (and Air) as the element of his Britannic enemy. In its very extravagance is its critique of the very idea of the historical novel as such. Burgess's hefty disrespect for the traditions in which he is working is bracingly brilliant. He bursts apart the dull and worthy narrative-and-costume historical novel as forcefully as if he had aimed a fully loaded Gribeauval twelve-pounder directly into their ranks.

I've no idea whether Burgess read Lukács' masterful study The Historical Novel (1947; 1962 in English). Maybe he did. Perry Anderson rightly calls it 'still probably the best-known of all works of Marxist literary theory' and summarises its influential theses about there form created (Lukács argues) by Scott:

Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated by Waverley, is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide societies and the individuals within them.

It follows from Lukács’s conception that the historical novel is not a specific or delimited genre or subgenre of the novel tout court. Rather, it is simply a path-breaker or precursor of the great realistic novel of the 19th century. A generation later, Balzac – for example – essentially adapted Scott’s techniques and vision of the world to the present instead of the past, treating the France of the Restoration or the July Monarchy in much the same way that Scott had represented mid-18th-century Scotland or 12th-century England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was the towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of the historical and of the realist novel in the 19th century.

I quote this really only to note how gloriously perverse Burgess's own intervention into the mode is. Napoleon Symphony is a non-epic quasi-una-fantasia chunk of beery experimental prose that depicts transformations not of popular life but of its own language and form; it deals with no representative human types, and is very sketchy on the sweeping social forces of its chosen period. One famous historical figure dominates the dramatis personae, his roles anything but oblique or marginal. Burgess's narrative has no interest on middling characters, or characters of no great distinction. What Burgess’s novel absolutely refuses to do, then, is stage a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners, or give voice to any bromides concerning human progress, dialecticism or History at all. Instead of what we might call 'deep' dialecticism Burgess develops a surface or formal contrapuntal balance, the external career of a famous historical figure who lacks inwardness rendered into a fiction that lacks the outward connection to theory, history or generic codes and that is instead a gloriously involuted knot of self-referential textuality. It refers to itself, and to its musician-writer author. It refers, naturally, to its own W.

God, I love this novel.

1. Napoleon Symphony (1974): a Third of Beethoven

The offshoot of an abortive collaboration between Burgess and Stanley Kubrick (the novel's dedicatee) to produce a workable screenplay for an epic movie on Bonaparte's life, the one thing everyone knows about Napoleon Symphony is that it adopts or adapts the 'form' of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony to a novelisation of its subject's life. Reading Burgess in Penguin paperbacks, as I did growing up, one was repeatedly confronted in the inside-cover bio with this sentence:

Anthony Burgess believes that in the fusion of musical and literary form lies a possible future for the novel. His Napoleon Symphony attempts to impose the shape of Beethoven's Eroica on the career of the Corsican conqueror.

Did he truly believe that? He attempted the experiment in 1974—having, he claimed, 'elephantine fun' in the process—but didn't really try it again (Mozart and the Wolf Gang apart). It makes good Burgess flap-copy, of course (by which I mean: it strikes the right provocative-pretentious tone) and said flap-copy was presumably written by AB himself. But I find myself wondering if anybody has really checked how deep the 'imposition', or fusion of musical and verbal, actually goes.

The Eroica is in one sense the obvious symphony to choose, since Beethoven wrote it with Napoleon in mind (originally he dedicated it 'to Napoleon Bonaparte' for his 'heroic' qualities in championing the anti-monarchical ideals of the Revolution; later, famously, he tore the title page in half on hearing the Napoleon had betrayed those ideals by declaring himself emperor). But in another, more pressing sense the Eroica is exactly the wrong symphony to choose. That symphony may indeed be Beethoven's musical 'portrait' of Bonaparte; but it's a portrait of him at his height, in 1804. Accordingly it ends on a high. The first movement expresses optimism and new beginnings; the second movement ('slow and dirge-like') encompasses the reversals; the third movement's scherzo expresses (quoting J. W. N. Sullivan), an 'indomitable uprising of creative energy'. and the fourth movement is an exuberant climax to the whole. But this is no good for a writer who wants to novelise not Napoleon from 1795 to 1804, but Napoleon from the 1790s right through the débâcle in Russia, thence to Waterloo and to the final ignominious exile and death in 1821. The last two movements are, ineradicably, quite wrong for that shape, the trajectory of Bonaparte's whole life.

How can Burgess possibly reconcile musical form and novelistic requirement, given that mismatch?

At any rate, I thought I'd have a closer look at the musical analogue in this novel. It's a drawn-out process, and perhaps not wholly edifying to read about, so I'll hive off actual critical comments upon the novel to a separate post, and this one can be skipped over. But I will say this: whilst re-reading Napoleon Symphony reinforced my sense that this is one of Burgess's very finest novels, I come out of this process less convinced by the 'musical fusion' argument than I was, thoughtlessly, before, indoctrinated as I was by reading that blurb-sentence over and over.

I'm treading well-researched ground. In the first iteration of this post I foolishly said that critics had neglected it, and was courteously corrected on this point in the comments by Paul Phillips [below], whose A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess discusses the matter in detail. And he's not alone; we could also mention two general studies of music and fiction that cover Burgess in some detail: Werner Wolf's slightly stolid The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Rodopi 1999) and Alan Frederick Shockley's wide-ranging Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth Century Novel (Ashgate 2009). More to the point, Napoleon Symphony was written during the first flush of Burgess's stint as Explainderby; and his collection of essays This Man and Music (2001) includes a lengthy piece laying out the specific shifts and touches to which Burgess was driven that is almost Explainderby Unbound. I'll come back to this a little below. [As of 16/4/15 I've amended and expanded this blogpost as a whole to take account of some of this work].

:1:

The first part of Burgess's novel (110 pages or so) is divided into four unequal sections: 15-39 concentrates on Napoleon's early Italian Campaign; 40-77 (the longest) on Napoleon in Egypt; 78-102 on Napoleon becoming First Consol and defeating the Austrians in the War of the Second Coalition, and 103-124 on him becoming Emperor. The first movement of the Eroica (Allegro con brio, lasting about a quarter of an hour in performance) is divided in the score into 22 sections, the main theme and 21 variants A - V (no J, presumably to avoid confusion with I). My sense is that Burgess divides this for his own purposes into four bundles of five each. although since the length of the four portions of this first part of the novel are unequal (24, 37, 24 and 21 pages respectively) I'm thinking that the Egypt interlude is based on seven (F-M).

The famous main theme rocks up and down, and speaks to beginnings, to spring and the conflicted energies of becoming:

It wouldn't be too fanciful to suggest that the upward ambition of this theme weighs a little more than the balancing downward drift encapsulating the obstacles to that ambition (in the sense that there's more upward movement in the phrase than down); and that the shift to C♯ at the end there marks a developing step to a new mode. Burgess takes this to be the shift from actual power, and its reverses, to the imperial crown: the status of 'Emperor' (AB's final section is written with much reference to gold, and bees) being the chromatic note that copestones the harmonic tension of the composition. Since the first movement has a sonata form, this theme and variations upon it occur and reoccur. Burgess matches this with a set of repeated themes and references, up to and including (quite bold, this) actual repeated passages of identical prose. The two grand opening E-flat major chords get their own 6-page prelude, mimicked and reduced into the chiming of Tallien's 'old royal watch'. Then the novel gets properly going:

Germinal in the Year Four, but in this opening of our own Year One the seed throbs and frets in frustration. Ah how I should love to believe that what you have already of mine is at work deep within you. Albenga is on the coast halfway between Nice or Nizza and Genoa or Genova, and I am busy with maps and protractor and chief of staff, Looking up that volume on Piedmont and its topography I swear I caught the scent of your body from it. It is strange and magical that about those dull tomes with which I encumbered our so short honeymoon your glow and odour should hover. Oh, how I slaver at the thought of you, hunger to chew your very toes, to munch your delta of silk in the valley of bliss—now but a delirious memory and a long promise. Oh, to fill you again with myself as I am now overflowing with your sweetness. The bees, I swear, will buzz around me when we reach the honeylands. It is cold here and the troops grumble still. Kiss after kiss after kiss begins to abrade the crystal of your portrait. [15]

This is the music to which this prose appends itself:



Click to embiggen, as they say. A couple of things: one is that the prose of this opening paragraph is quite sexed-up, as is the novel as a whole. This gave the 1970s publishers a saucy marketing hook, something they exploited by having Napoleon's famous profile composed of an orgyful of naked women on the first edition front cover:

A strategy other publishers have followed:

Sex! Sex sex sex. The opening paragraph is, of course, the expression of Napoleon's desire for his Josephine, mingled in with his planning for the Battle of Arcola (15–17 November 1796). Sex is on Napoleon's mind a lot in Burgess's version of him, and he sees battles as a fundamentally erotic encounter ('it is in some way, my own heart's darling, an emblem of love, this engaging of armies' [20]), with flanks encountering flanks, thrusts and stabs and charges all leading to victory which is like, well, 'like that delirious flying moment when you spend into her thighs' [23]. There may be an in-plain-sight at work pun here, Eroica/Erotica. But we can at least agree that 'reading' Beethoven's gorgeous, flowing theme as an expression of erotic delight and possibility does no violence to the music.

Then there are the specific touches: as the cellos bring out the first iteration of the theme (spring, desire, sex), the second violins saw out some more nervy semi-quavers on G ('throbs and frets in frustration'). The brass section comes back in at bar 22, which here speaks to martial affairs ('busy with maps and protractor and chief of staff'), but the whole score rises to the first, full-orchestra recapitulation of the main theme, and its the anticipation of bliss. up and down the lover's body: 'I slaver at the thought of you, hunger to chew your very toes, to munch your delta of silk in the valley of bliss'. I'm thinking that pages 15-19, in which Napoleon's staff officers grumble about his plans, and his passion for this one woman, is a prose elaboration of section A's series of descending triplets shared amongst the woodwind:

This grouching ('this bread tastes of very stale chesnuts'; 'I saw a rotten potato yesterday'; or the smallness of stature of their general -- '"He looks bigger with his hat on," Augereau said. "He doesn't sit a horse too well"' [17]) articulates this dying fall. Then Burgess cuts to the footsoldiers, in a chunk of prose that gets reused word for word several times in the novel:

Citizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux, Hubert, Fossard, Teisseire, Carrère (Jacques). Carrère (Alexandre), Trauner, Barsacq, Gabutti, Mayo, Bonin, Borderie, Verne, Chaillot, Barrault, Brasseur, Dupont, Salou, sixteen thousand others, went forward in their washed-out blue rags and old revolutionary caps or rotting shakos, but boots, mark that, boots most of them, to engage. [19].

We get Napoleon's inspirational speech, full of swearing; and we get the line 'drizzle fell coldly ... then thickened into proper rain' [20]: this whole chunk, including the drizzle/rain sentence, is reused word-for-word on pp.82-3, with only the place-names and battle specifics altered. It's clearly Burgess gesturing towards the main problem he has in this exercise: viz that verbal repetition palls very quickly, where repeated musical phrases add depth and delight. And gestures are all we get, by way of addressing this core mismatch of modes.

On we go: Napoleon overcomes all the odds to beat the Austrians and seize Mantua [pages 34-36], and the woodwind and brass rouse themselves to some triumphal chords, whilst the strings work away beneath:

OK, now obviously this sort of 'reading' could go on at length, by which I mean at even more tedious length than it already has here. But there are problems, too. One is a fundamental imprecision in following book and music. The score, for instance, repeats the whole of sections A-E da capo. Burgess cannot do this without literally reprinting verbatim pages 15 to 39 of his text, so I take it he simply omits this (in part 2 he has a go of repeating the same musical section by focussing the first on Napoleon and the second on Josephine, but despite structural paralleling the differences between the two sections are thrown into greater relief by the very fact of the exact sameness of the musical prototype).

Again, it's hard to link specific images and themes, let alone specific phrases, to groups of musical notation. I started thinking that AB was mapping strings to sexual desire and brass to martial episodes, but working with score and word side by side it becomes clear that he doesn't do this with any consistency. The music has fairly clear successions of passages, some uplifting and others more thoughtful; and that is also the way Burgess's novel proceeds. But it does not transfer very precisely from one to the other. This, I think, is more than AB giving himself a bit of elbow room. I'd go so far as to suggest, as per the title of this post, that the novel can be pegged to the music about 30% of the time. Is that hit rate high enough to enable us to speak of a fusion of literary and musical?

If I'm right (and part of my point here is that there's no way I can be sure I am), Burgess's second section, detailing Napoleon's ill-fated expedition to Egypt and Syria, corresponds to section F, immediately after the da capo repeat: a doomy set of minor-key variations in which the downward cascading triplets reoccur.

The nagging voice of doubt enters in to my analysis. This whole section of the novel does interesting things with the clash between Western and Eastern mores, with the encounter with Islam and Napoleon's attempt to install himself as a kind of imam. It is different in several key ways to the other three scenes from portion 1 of Napoleon Symphony (and the other three portions too). Yet there's nothing in the music to reflect this. Nothing conventionally 'oriental' about the themes, nothing to mark any great difference of location or focus.

We've hit a fundamental difficulty, I think. It's not that there is any unbridgeable chasm separating music and words. Not at all. Peter Kivy argues in his monograph Antithetical Arts: On The Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music (Oxford 2009) that there are two schools on thought on this issue. On the one hand there are 'those who want to put narrative words to absolute music' and then those 'who want only to put structural, syntactic and expressive words to it' [26]. Kivy belongs to the latter camp, and thinks music ultimately transcends the verbal into an essentially religious sphere, or at least to what he calls 'the religious analogy'. But for myself I'm quite happy to stand with the first group. I have no difficulty 'reading' Beethoven's Sixth as a little story about some countryside folk caught in a storm and then enjoying the sunshine, or Kraftwerk's Autobahn as a journey down a German motorway. If you say 'but the idea that major keys are happy and minor keys sad is a mere arbitrary convention!' I would of course agree; but I might also point out that all signification operates this way. We arbitrarily agree that green means go and red means stop, that these words mean this and those that. It's not the arbitrariness but the effectiveness of the convention that matters.

Nonetheless, working through the Napoleon Symphony trying to trace exactly how the 'fusion' has worked makes me think that the music is the barest formal scaffold, and little else, to the novel. But then again, could it be anything other? I think Peter Porter was closer to the truth of it in his 'The Lying Art' (from The Cost of Seriousness, 1978). 'Music gets the better of it, since music is all lies./Lies which fill the octave.' I take him to mean it is a specie of lying by omission, rather than intent (he goes on: 'chromatic space/In verse turns out to be the ego's refractions,/Truth always stained by observation'). It's not that music cannot communicate on a semantic level; it's that it's just not as good at communicating on a semantic level as are words; and the things that words can't do—the transcendental, inspiring, dignified stuff—have little relevance to the writing of history. One need not subscribe to a naive 'history = truth' credo to feel that a mode of art that is a Porterish all lies is going to have a hard time melding effectively with a mode that is based on stuff that actually happened in the real world, like the life of Napoleon.

:2:

To avoid making this already desperately overlong post even longer, I'll compress my notes of the remaining three sections of the novel. It would be possible to mill analysis as fine as I do for the first few pages, but to do so would lead not only to tedium but fatal imprecision. The second movement of the Eroica (Marcia Funebre–Adagio assai) is a lengthy funeral march in C minor with a trio in C major. To this Burgess matches his (often very brilliant) account of the retreat from Moscow and the destruction of the Grande Armée. That's funereal enough, we might think; but Beethoven's text opens with the stately, sad-faced slowness of this:

To get to the death marching, Burgess fast-forwards from Imperial Coronation, straight past Austerlitz and Borodino, to occupied Moscow. But the funeral march surely speaks to the retreat; and though part two begins on p.127 we don't start retreating until p.173. The interlude is made up of Napoleon dreaming odd dreams, and remembering happier times, amongst them a strangely homerotic attempt to court Czar Alexander prior to the invasion, and various other sexual exploits. The sheer liveliness and variety of this section ill-matches the sombre procession of Beethoven's second movement.

Part two (written, according to a note at the end of the novel, after part three) goes further by way of pegging the words to the music. It starts with Napoleon dreaming a time when his enemies crow at his death:

There he lies
Ensanguinated tyrant
O bloody bloody tyrant
See
How the sin within
Doth incarnadine
His skin
From the shin to the chin [127]

This Man and Music makes clear that we are to, in effect, sing these words to the main theme of the Eroica's adagio:

It's repeated several times, mangled about ('Hee the seen witheen/Deeth eenc' 128); then we shift scene from N. dreaming uneasily in Moscow to Josephine dreaming Cleopaterotically in Paris. Again with the adagio theme:

See the re-
Incarnate Cleopatra
Barge burning on the water.
Bare
Rowers row in rows.
Posied roses interpose
Twist the rows and the rose [142]

This is also repeated and mangled about. These punny 'ee's (in the first) and 'oh's (in the second) sacrifice verbal elegance to a kind of meta-onomatopoeia, mimicking sheer musicality. Not good verse, these posied roses and incarnadined scarlet (although arguably Burgess is aiming precisely for a kind of kitsch excess). More of a problem, I think, is that he is doing this at all; I mean, that he has been driven to the exigency of in effect adding lyrics to Beethoven's music, a strategy reminiscent of that celebrated screen credit from the 1929 Taming of the Shrew movie: 'by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor'. To be clear, my objection here is that such a move is aesthetically levelling: sonic and rhythmic qualities inevitably steampress semantic elegance and expressiveness flatter than Flat Stanley. An equivalence is the old song I remember from my childhood in which my 10-year old friends and I ingeniously added lyrics to the Batman theme-tune—

Dinner dinner dinner dinner
Dinner dinner dinner dinner
BATMAN!

—according to the pleasant conceit whereby Batman's mother is calling him in for his supper. Mentioning this may look like facetiousness on my part, but the parallel seems to me quite precise.

Parts one and two of the novel are both a bit over a hundred pages long; and the corresponding sections of the Eroica are a quarter of an hour, or a little more, each. Part three is much shorter: 25 pages, a smaller proportion of the whole than the Eroica's short Third movement: Allegro vivace (which runs to about six minutes). Burgess loads his rifts with ore to capture the scherzo's liveliness: 'Dance dance dance! The orchestra struck up another waltz ... The buffet was sumptuous. Truffled pigling, Arcis-sur-Aube. Beef ribs Arcole. Spiced lamb Bassano. Duck pie Castiglione. Pâté château Thierry. Garlic sausage Durrenstein ...' [243]. Napoleon watches a theatrical performance of Prometheus, complete with Burgessedly-concocted blank verse excerpts. The 'scherzo' is split in two: a first part, celebrating the anniversary of Napoleon's coronation in 1814 [214-60]; then we cut straight to the Hundred Days, leaving Elba out of it altogether, and rattle through Waterloo [261-69].

And so to the fourth section: Allegro molto, and a set of lively variations on a vigorous little theme that Beethoven here reuses from his earlier work. But this is post-exile Napoleon: a portion of his existence neither lively nor varied. So?

Earlier I asked how can Burgess possibly reconcile musical form and novelistic requirement, given that mismatch of jolly fourth movement to the historically gloomy reality of exile to the South Atlantic. The obvious retort, or at least to someone who has read Burgess's detailed account of this novel in You've Had Your Time, would be to say: he de-emphasises mood, tone and affect in favour of purely formal qualities. So, the fourth movement is a series of variations on a theme Beethoven originally used elsewhere, in the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus: so Burgess writes his fourth section as a series of stylistic variations, from Jane Austen through Hopkins to Henry James, and works in many allusions to the myth of Prometheus. But we may choose to disagree that this does enough to 'fuse' musical and literary form.

Reviewers at the time were, as You've Had Your Time notes, mixed. Some critics thought Napoleon Symphony the book of the year, and it was very well received when it appeared in French translation. At the same time, other critics savaged it. For instance, AB quotes the New Yorker, who reviewed the novel to the effect that 'the substance and tone of this book and the Eroica Symphony are worlds apart. The music is noble and grand; the book, for the most part, embarrassingly base' [YHYT, 295]. This seems to me a fundamentally unfair, misrepresentative of the work. Its true that there's a lot of obscenity and cursing in the book, and Burgess is, as ever, excellent on the flavour of soldierly speech ('when do we get some fucking leave, how about our back pay, I've got this pain in the balls citizen sergeant' and so on). Plus there's the repeated trope that fucking and fighting are cognate activities: after Moscow, Napoleon overhears a Parisian saying 'the conduct of war was for him a highly extravagant mode of self-stimulation. It is conceivable that Austerlitz contrived for him a modest ejaculation, but the massive slaughter and suffering of the Russian campaign must, one hopes, have procured a truly satisfying orgasm' [223]. But the novel as a whole is full of such force and energy, an almost remorseless verve and inventiveness and ambition, that 'base' is quite the wrong word for it.

Nevertheless, there's a kernel of truth in the critique. In his Maxims and Reflections, Goethe noted that 'in music the dignity of art seems to find its supreme expression'. But the whole weight of the aphorism is on the seems; for he goes on 'there is no subject matter to be discounted'. It is subject matter as such that is undignified; and the lack of baseness and obscenity in Beethoven's art, like the lack of flavour and nutrition in a Fabergé egg, are indices of the limitations of a great artist's art. Burgess does many things of which Beethoven is simply incapable, not because he is a greater artist but because his mode is vastly more capacious of human nuance and range. God knows I love me some music, but whatever Peter Kivy says it's words that actualise the fullest transcendent and religious dimension in human life: St John's Gospel begins with the Logos, after all: not the Mousikē.

You've Had Your Time calls Napoleon Symphony a failure (though Burgess then squanders the moment by insisting that he only means failure in the sense that 'Finnegans Wake is a failure'. As if to say: my grand failures succeed on a titanic level of which your petty successes can only dream! What was it Simon and Garfunkel sang? Hello hubris my old friend ...?) I don't think it does fail, actually; as a novel. But it marks the disconnection of that ambition, recorded in cover copy of all those old Penguin paperbacks of Burgess's novels, as to the future of music/novel hybridity. It's as a novel that the work calls to be judged, I think; and that's what I'll try and do in the next blog post.