Bur[gess]/[Wilso]n: Byrne (1995)

:1:

Byrne, after reading.

Posthumously published: a short verse-novel in ottava rima concerning an Irish artist, composer and Don Juan-y philanderer ('Byrne', we can take it, is a sort-of compressed version of the name 'Byron'), and his offspring. The conceit is that, at the end of a disreputable life, Byrne has paid a journalist and self-described 'poetaster' called Tomlinson to write his biography. Tomlinson, though, has no part to play in the narrative, and his author-function is more than a little underdetermined. This, by way of a flavour of the versification, is how the poem opens:

Somebody had to do it. Blasted Byrne
Pulled out a bunch of dollars from his pocket,
Escudos, francs and dirhams. `Let them learn
If they've a speck of talent not to mock it
But plant it and expect a slow return.
I whizzed mine skywards like a bloody rocket.
Tell what they call a cautionary tale.
Here's on the nail. Expect more in the mail.'

He thought he was a kind of living myth
And hence deserving of ottava rima,
The scheme that Ariosto juggled with,
Apt for a lecherous defective dreamer.
He'd have preferred a stronger-muscled smith,
Anvilling rhymes amid poetic steam, a
Sort of Lord Byron. Byron was long dead.
This poetaster had to do instead.

Some lines attributed to Homer speak
Of someone called Margites. `Him the gods
Had not made skilled in craft or good in Greek.
He failed in every art.' Against the odds
His name survives. His case is not unique.
He should lie with forgotten odds and sods,
But still he serves to nominate a species
And lives while Byrne is mixed with his own faeces.

Byrne's name survives among film-music-makers
Because the late-night shows subsist on trash.
His opera's buried by art's undertakers,
His paintings join his funerary ash.
He left no land. `My property's two achers,'
Stroking laborious ballocks. As for cash,
He lived on women, paying in about
Ten inches. We don't know what they paid out.

Handsome enough, there was no doubt of that
Blue-eyed and with an Irish peasant's stature,
His belly flat, it never ran to fat;
Possessed of quite a punch whose crack could match your
Boundary-winning slam; lithe as a cat,
With two great paws, a natural outfield catcher;
Not that he ever wasted time on sport
Save only for the amatory sort.

I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed reading this. Burgess does not shy away from the challenges of setting and meeting elaborate and impossible ottava rima rhymes, and there's real vigour and autumunal fire in the whole. But, qua novel, it peters out, sputtering to an ambiguous ending. It needed either to be longer (at least six parts, probably twelve), or to be bolder about breaking off, as per its Byronic original, to be left as an intriguing fragment.

Part 1 takes us over familiar Burgess ground: the early decades of the 20th-century, art and sensual indulgence, Byrne bigamously marrying and remarrying, absconding to another exotic portion of the world and marrying again, siring children and bastards left right and centre. The main 'episode' of this section is his sojourn in Nazi Germany, first as the partner of an opera singer called 'Maria Prauschnitz', then afterwards (under the name 'Börn', and using his neutral Irish passport) on his own, making a living through the war composing film music and the occasional commission for the higher-up party officials. A choral symphony based on Mein Kampf, for instance:

Some thought it ironic. It annexed
Motifs from Wagner in a coarse endeavour
To symbolize Teutonic muscles flexed
To kill the Jews, enslave the Slavs, and make
Six of the seas into a German lake.

This whole section is the highlight of the novel: Burgess is nimblest here, building evocative little vignettes of place and mood and paying them off with genuinely witty gags:

Torchlight parades and pogroms, guttural grief
In emigration queues, the smash and crash
Of pawnshop windows by insentient beef
In uniform, the gush of beer, the splash
Of Schnapps, the joy of being drunk and Aryan,
Though Hitler was a teetotalitarian. [30]

That last portmanteau is doubly nicely done: the echo of 'fee foo fi fum' speaking playfully of the gigantic monstrosity of Hitler even as the combination of teetotal' and 'totalitarian' diminishes him by making him the butt of a joke. After the war Byrne flees to the far east, marrying and remarrying bigamously and indeed trigamously, scattering illegitimate children wherever he goes. He ends up in Africa, where (we're led to believe) he dies.

Part 2 shunts us forward to the 80s, and picks up the stories of four of Byrne's various children, a pair of twin boys (Tim, with nine fingers, and Tom, who has ten), their half brother Brian, a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber figure who has hits with ghastly-sounding west-end musicals ('Brother Judas, the somewhat inglorious/Queen Thatcher' and a 'blend/of Wagner, ragtime, raga, rage, dysphorious/Sex called The Wasteland' [62]), and their half-sister Dorothy, who lives in Mayfair with a Japanese servant called Yukari. These second-generation Byrnes are all in their mid-50s as we pick up their stories. Tom lives in Venice and Switzerland and is a kind of Euro-intellectual, the brains behind a major exhibition celebrating Dante. Dorothy does nothing except watch TV. Nine-fingered Tim is a Catholic priest, more or less disenchanted with his calling, and sort-of the novel's protagonist.

The 1980s of Byrne is a dystopian, run-down place. The IRA is bombing London. Islamic clerics have declared a fatwa against Dante Aligheri (on account of what happens to Mohammed in the Inferno, which is pretty inflammatory when you come to think of it). Angry Muslim mobs calling for the blasphemous author's death are not placated by the news that he died in 1321. The social infrastructure is collapsing; strikes everywhere, filth and decay. Tim comes to visit Dorothy, and this is the London he passes through—Mayfair, no less:

A hill of plastic bags proclaimed a strike.
His numb left foot disturbed a rat that nested
Inside a soup can. Someone’s pedal bike
Distorted to surrealism rested
On old wet Suns. With rictus of dislike,
Detaching shoe from shit, he danced it clean,
Then rang the bell of Number 17.

The 'old wet Suns' is an especially nice, faux-oxymoronic touch. Timothy and Dorothy go to see brother Brian's latest musical: a free adaptation of Wells's Time Machine, described in detail in the poem. Priest Tim, who, Hopkins-like, has a second life as a poet, is commissioned to write the libretto to a popular musical concerning the life of John Calvin, bankrolled by pious American Protestants. He flies to Venice to discover that his twin, Tom, is suffering from testicular cancer and must endure a medically sanctioned emasculation. Tim goes to Tom's Geneva house where he falls in with the beautiful young woman (16 years old, in fact) who has taken residence there whilst she convalesces to a terrible wound to one of her hands, and who at first mistakes him for his brother. Despite his priestly vocation Tim ends up shagging this toothsome, one-handed young thing several times. She confesses that she is a terrorist in training, and that she blew her own hand off by mishandling a grenade whilst practising the deployment of such ordnance.

So far so engaging: there's plenty to admire in the sinuous, ingenuous versification, and its telly-obsessed, venal, shitty, sex-addicted world, familiar from other Burgess books, is presented here with real verve. A puckish satire on contemporary mores, a droll spoof aimed more at the heart than the head. But things start to go awry with part 3. For no very cogent reason, Burgess's narrator switches to 'the nine-fingered stanza ... borrowed from Spenser's Faerie Queene' [83], sacrificing the epigrammatic force of the ottava rima's closing couplet and producing a blander, much less memorable account of Tim in Venice. He switches back to the Beppo-form for Part 4 (after a single Spenserian stanza and an immediate apology: 'should I correct that stanza? As you see/It has an extra line and rhymes too much' [105]), but something has drained out of the whole. Parts 1 and 2 are focused and punchy; in its later sections Byrne feels more like uncorrected drafts, notes towards a verse-novel. Tim's brief affair with the one-handed Angela De'ath ends badly: she plants a bomb in the Dante exhibition, presumably at the behest of her Islamic terrorist masters, and is arrested. Tim, meanwhile, begins coughing up blood: he has what Burgess, in 1993, had—lung cancer. Its symptoms are vividly and horribly described.

Meanwhile a notice has appeared in all the major European newspapers: the reading of the last will and testament of Byrne père will take place, Christmas Eve in Claridges. In part 5 the family congregate for this event and Burgess orchestrates his hasty denouement. First the voice of John Gielgud, no less, reads out a clutch of F X Enderby's poems: old friends, these, after their appearance in (let me count the venues): their original periodicals; the Enderby books themselves; Burgess's own two-volume memoir and the posthumous collection of the Revolutionary Sonnets.  As to why Burgess has slapped this old mule on the arse and forced it to trot, wheezily, through his fiction yet again: well, it's hard to say. Padding would be one ungenerous explanation. Literary relevance another, although further-fetched. What the undernourished metaphysical conceitedness of these poems have to do with the fluent, open-ended vitality of Burgess's ottava rima is far from clear.

Then the voice of Byrne père comes over the loudspeakers announcing that his inheritance includes certain lands 'rich in omnium' ('fresh research upon/Its fissile properties is ecstatic'). The group is surprised to see their father, elderly but still alive, carried in on a litter by four tall black men. He orders the doors locked, permitting only Brian to depart, on the grounds that he has 'work to do on art's behalf', his music disseminating the same message out of the heart of darkness that old Byrne himself used to broadcast: the 'musician son' who can

   hear by ear what I hear in my head,
Encoded messages. Evil or slack,
Intelligence officials' ears were dead
To brassy information from the black
Nazi interior. Let that discord shed
Generalised light upon a vicious era. [146]

The other offspring he taunts for a while: but Tom (I scratched my head at this) knows the password that unlocks the doors, and they all go home leaving old Byrne to rant alone, though not before Burgess unloads another Enderby lyric on us. It's an anticlimactic climax, and leaves a strange taste in the mouth.

:2:

Perhaps I shouldn't be so dismissive about the ending. To the extent that this poem is about death—that undiscovered country from whose Byrne/No traveller returns—abrupt tonal shifts from broad comedy to costive contemplation, and an even abrupter breaking off, are appropriate enough. Death is disruptive, awkward, misshaping. If Burgess gives over the end of his own verse-novel to the contemplation of some verse he wrote when he was younger, then one of the things that points to is a book about the life an artist lived, and the consequences of that life. The last we see of Byrne he is reciting the names of the many illegitimate children he has sired, 'emanations/Of long completed casual copulations' [147]. Tomlinson, having been a silent narrator since the beginning, puts his own head into the poem at this point:

(See how the form fades. This is Tomlinson,
Your poetaster, dying not in Berkeley
Square but in a room in Islington.
I cough blood too, thin, thick or lightly, darkly.
Byrne is the killer. ...) [147]

How so, we might wonder? Tomlinson takes grim satisfaction in the thought that, although he 'has not long to go', at least 'he'll outlast that Swiney Tod.' Byrne's behaviour has certainly been Swinish, but it's a step up from that to identifying him as death itself, appropriately German in lexis given his dalliance with the Nazis. We might be tempted to say that Burgess knew he was dying, but of course the truth is that John Wilson knew he was dying, and that 'Burgess' was able to continue a couple of years (Byrne appeared under the Burgess pseudonym almost two full years after Wilson's death) The public face of the artist, and his private suffering. Byrne the name, in addition to its gesture towards 'Byron', takes the first syllable from Wilson's nom de plume, and caps it off with the terminal letter of his nom de famille. The poem as a whole is strung between the public bravura that had (increasingly) come to dominate Burgess's writing and public speaking, and a very different private apprehension of the waste, the damage, the betrayals and the costs of that publicity.

Why Byron? Don Juan, English's great ottava rima masterpiece, is about sex. It would be simple-minded to call it a celebration of sex, although Byron not only had a lot of sex, he was ingenuously proud of that fact. 'As to Don Juan,' he wrote to Douglas Kinnard in October 1819

—confess—confess—you dog—and be candid—that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy—but is it not English?—it may be profligate—but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?—and tooled in a post-chaise? In a hackney coach? In a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? In a vis a vis?—on a table—and under it?

His delight in having got so much shagging done is almost endearing, in a puppyish way (under the table as well as on top! Woo-hoo!); but shouldn't distract us from noting the way 'life' and 'the thing' are shrunken down by Byron's priapism to mean nothing more than 'sex-life' and 'my dong'. Still, Byron was neither the first nor the last man to blur together those two things.

What keeps Don Juan so fresh and vital as a poem is not just its myriad funny moments and witty lines, but the broader joy infused throughout, the poem's styling of sex itself as genuinely sublime. Don Juan is all about sex without specifically saying it is about sex. To be sure, it is a poem that probes further out of the thicket of euphemism and code than many in its time, and was thought thoroughly scandalous in its time for that reason. But references to 'tooling' in a hackney carriage are for private letters. The public voice of the poem does not attack the codes of propriety of its age quite so head-on. Rather than embroidering the post coital tristesse of Juan himself, Byron gives us a little polite misdirection: 'I think with Alexander, that the act/ Of eating, with another act or two,/Makes us feel our mortality in fact/Redoubled ...' [5:32] Another act or two indeed. This for two reasons: that Byron knows that it is funnier that way (as the Carry On films are funnier about sex than the much more explicit contemporary US sex comedies of the 21st-century); but also because Byron knows it is sexier that way too. In this he anticipates Proust: in society as in love, the best way to get oneself sought after is to withhold oneself. Don Juan himself, as character in the poem and cipher for the first great European popular-cultural sex symbol Byron himself, is always on the move precisely in order to tease yet elude our grasp. Even the poem's lack of ending enacts this: not the disfiguring fracture, but the elegant vanishing act. Related to this, and in similar contradistinction to Byrne, the satire of Don Juan is often pointed, and usually pretty funny, but it is never disgusted.

Burgess, in Byrne, has little new to say about sex, but he has a hundred different nuances to give to the expression of disgust. A lifetime's themes to do with the dumbing-down of televisual society; the endless human capacity to shit on its own highest achievements, here embodied by Dante and the frantic attempts to people to destroy Dante; the exploitation of others and the persistence of Nazism; vulgarity and cruelty and ugliness everywhere. Much of this disgust is somatic: almost all the main characters in this novel are maimed, deformed or grotesque: Tim missing a finger, Tom missing his testicles, Angela missing a whole hand; Dorothy obese and bearded, and Byrne when he appears at the end has been transformed by aging from a virile, handsome stud into a 'shrunken wreck', a still-living Egyptian mummy. Byrne's paintings are representations of sex at the opposite end from Byronic lighthearted joy and elusion: in-your-face exercises in the physically repellent aspect of the act. '"It's hell," cried Dorothy, as she surveyed/A sexual posture and three screaming faces.' Tim makes 'a sickened gesture at some foul embraces/That, surely, sheer anatomy forbade' [135].

The problem is that the lop-sided structure of the whole doesn't give Byrne the space to unpack its constellation of disgust. Art (Byrne père's music and painting; les enfants' music and writing) is tangled up with Nazism and sex and horror. The musical version of The Time Machine rewrites Wells' novella: the time traveller first goes back to the age of Dante ('paradised with Beatrice'), but when he returns his present has changed, sound-of-thunderishly: blacks now feast on whites in Notting Hill ('"it aint no sin," black infant voices shrill/"To roast them pigs with the pinko skin" [65]); to cries of 'I'll chew your balls, impale your/Prick' the traveller hurries home only to find that his house has been 'replaced by a snuff porno store'. Not subtle stuff, certainly. Formally Burgess's poem enacts this sort of temporal decadence: Byron's early 19th-century stanzas are lively and rhyme ingeniously, but they do not break the very words into fragments in order to get the rhymes to work. Burgess often does, rhyming 'sister' with 'missed a' and 'feminist a-/Ssertions' [23]. or 'crimson', 'limbs an' and 'Tim's un-/Stanchable flow' [119] There's a great deal of this, as if travelling back in time to pick up the ottava rima form and bringing it to the present day has caused it literally to start unravelling.

So Christmas Eve—ah bitter chill etcetera.
The Mayfair trio kept the appointed date.
Tim dog-collared. Tom sent another letter, a-
Ssuring them that he'd be there, though late.
The darkling room where all the gathering met, a ro-
Coco misfit, not full, had many a plate. [138]

Byron takes delight in what he can't say. The only thing that Burgess can't say is that certain things ought not to be said, and that fact scorches the bubbling energies of his unrejuvinated Don Rejuan. Byrne is a burnt piece of work.

The Nazi scenes of Part 1, and the sexual dysfunction of parts 2 and 3 are, by implication, linked. Brian Byrne is promiscuously gay; Tom has a string of girlfriends and maintains the power of erection even after his orchidectomy. Dorothy seems to have sublimated her sexual desire into a rapacious desire not just to watch endless TV, but to watch TV reports of global disasters and suffering. Nine-fingered Tim is the oddest case: highly sexed yet, as a priest, enforcedly celibate. There's nothing noble in this in the world of this novel. and in Switzerland, when the luscious young Angela presses herself naked against him and begs to be shagged he succumbs to temptation pretty rapidly. Why, then, the self-defined prohibition in the first place? Sex, it seems, cannot be ignored or wished away, but it can be despised. In this the novel anticipates Les Murray's 'Rock Music' poem, from Killing The Black Dog (1997). 'Sex,' unbeautiful Murray tells us, observing the beautiful young things thrashing themselves into Neuremberg-rally-esque ecstasies at a rock concert, 'is a Nazi.' Why is sex a Nazi? Because 'to it, everyone's subhuman/for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.' There's a bit in Little Wilson and Big God where Burgess, recalling a wartime affair, argues incoherence of the idea that 'treating somebody as a sex object' is a deplorable thing. The sexual act, he says, is that time when we inevitably treat one another as objects.

I don't think I agree with Burgess about that. And even if I did, there are plenty of other ways in which we treat with one another that are not so liable to the objectifying simplifications of libido. But a novelist, looking back on his life's work, coughing blood too (thin, thick or lightly, darkly) may be moved to consider how the writer's craft reduces living, breathing humanity to intricate modular objects for its purposes. Our repugnance to death increases in proportion, Hazlitt famously said, to our consciousness of having lived in vain. In Burgess-Wilson's case, the consciousness of vanity perhaps attached more to the former than the latter.

In Don Juan, what Byron knows he is not allowed 'officially' to say is that sex is great; that it's fun. It's not sinful, it's not demeaning, it need not be confined by marriage-ties, or convention, or society. He cannot say this outright, but he says it full-throatedly anyway, the more powerfully because of the broader interdiction, by using irony and humour and wit to work the pump-handle on his joy. Burgess can't use the pump coz the vandals bust the handle. He can say anything he likes, and in Byrne he does; but however inventive and funny and sharp he us, he is not joyous. This world doesn't strike him as defined by joy. Mind at the end of its tether. Or tether, the cock that ties us to the grubby world of sex and desire, at the end of its tether.

:3:

One final note. These late Burgess novels seem to me in part about being haunted, and so about haunting. A Dead Man in Deptford is particularly spectral, I argue. Byrne, published after its author's death, is already a sort of revenant text. For myself, reading it in between working on the revisions to my next novel (The Thing Itself, to be published by Gollancz in 2016), I felt a strange chill at this passage, where Byrne's son Brian's abilities to generate hit west-end musicals out of the most unlikely source text is praised:

Tim half-believed that Brian could adapt
Even The Critique of Pure Reason: sieve
The tome into pure Kant, who, rapt, unwrapped
The Categorical Imperative
As medicine to a Europe tyrant-trapped. [62]

Man, that's strange. My next novel, the revisions for which I am working in between reading and blogging about Burgess, is quite genuinely a SF novelisation of The Critique of Pure Reason. On that uncanny coincidence, I'm going to call it a night.