:1:
Marlowe was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. In fact, Burgess specifically prods us to this Dickensian ghostliness by repeatedly refusing to nail Malowe's surname to the page: he is 'Marley or Morley or Marlowe' throughout. We also get: 'To my mother in Newmarket, then. Mr—what is it—Merlin? Marlin?' [DMID, 13] which is, first, suitably wizardly to intimate the magic he creates on stage; and then nicely fishy in a novel much concerned with the Christian ΙΧΘΥΣ, almost to the point of identifying assassinated Marlowe with murdered Christ. Kit (as Burgess calls him) replies to the above quoted question with: 'Marlowe will do. Or Marley. Marl is clay and lime, my name's lowly constant.' Dirt, because Marley is of the earth, earthy (indeed buried in the earth since 1593); but also because Burgess's mode of writing historical fiction is not to stint the grime and the shit, the dead dogs in the sewers with swollen bellies, the chamber pots emptied out of windows. And there's the sense that Marlowe's sexuality is in itself somehow dirty, earthy, shitty because focussed on that particular orifice: Burgess is not judgemental here, and certainly not homophobic: but he is careful to be true to the lineaments of a homophobic, persecutory society, both in terms of other people's perceptions and Marlowe's conflicted self-esteem. Mostly, though, it is 'Marley' because this is a book that is haunted, by an author who has been haunted. It is in one sense about that haunting. In the novel's postscript Burgess records that he wrote his university thesis on Marlowe as the Luftwaffe overhead 'trundled over Moss Side' threatening to literalise Dr Faustus's desperate promise 'I'll burn all my books'. He adds, with some pride, that 'all the historical facts' he relates 'are verifiable.'
There's another ghost at the feast: Burgess himself. A Dead Man in Deptford was the last novel Burgess published whilst alive. Whether or not intimations of his own mortality informed his writing, he styles the book as narrated by two separate versions of this ghostly presence. The ostensible narrator is a young player in the Admiral's and later the Lord Chamberlain's men: he goes unnamed for most of the novel, occasionally includes data concerning his own life (for instance, how puberty means that he passes from playing women to playing young men) and finally reveals his identity: 'My own name you will find, if you care to look, in the Folio of Black Will's plays, put out by his friends Heming and Condell in 1623. In the comedy of Much Ado About Nothing, by some inadvertancy, I enter with Leonato and others under my own identity and not, as it should be, the guise of Balthasar to sing to ladies that sigh no more.' This is the First Folio stage direction (Much Ado 2:3) 'Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio, and Iacke Wilson', used as an epigraph to MF and several times mentioned by Burgess as a notable co-incidence, which indeed it is.
Clearly the actor's name has crept into the final text when it ought to be the character's, an easy error to make when (we assume) the MS is scribbled all over with prompts and actorly names and so on. Later editions correct to Balthasar.
It is more than just egoism on Burgess's part to make so much of his name 'Jack Wilson', haunting the official text of Shakespeare's great play. It gives us a glimpse of what is supposed to be hidden behind the scenes, the day-to-day of putting on a play. And that's what Dead Man in Deptford is about too. I don't just mean it's about the practicalities of writing and staging plays, although there's certainly a lot of that stuff in here. I mean, the way the theatre stands as a flexible metaphor for social life itself: the way we perform a public persona which (in this, Elizabethan context) includes such social virtues as religious orthodoxy and observance, politeness, controlled heterosexual desire and the like, whilst behind the scenes (as it were) we perform blasphemy, rudeness and homosexual passion.
'Jacke Wilson', our narrator, opens the story with a ghostly narratological self-exclupation:
You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where's the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning. [DMID, 3]So it is: the narrative very often follows Marlowe into closed rooms, relates secret conversations with spymasters or lovers, or even travels inside the main character's head. The omniscience of the standard 3rd-person omniscient narrator is predicated upon effectively supernatural access ('fair is foul and foul is fair') to the lives of its characters. By gifting his first-person narrator with omniscience Burgess is trying something formally quite bold: like Marley's ghost, Wilson sees things that no mortal eye can see and like Marley's ghost he wants us to see them too. Eyes are introduced at the beginning ('the right and very substance of his seeing') in part because it is because Marlowe is to die, or has already died, depending on how you see it, from a stab wound to his right eye. Burgess closes the novel with this assassination, vividly described as, in effect, the externalisation of the act of omniscient narration itself. After drinking with him all day, Walsingham's men Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley finally strike:
Kit's mind rose above all, observing, noting. The fear belonged all to his body. The dagger-point was too close to his eye for his eye to see it. Frizer spoke very foully:This out-of-body-ness is much more about the protocols of the novel than it is about table rapping or spiritualism or the like. Marlowe-haunting-Marlowe is not even the final example of the various Marley-ghosts haunting this account, for the book ends with Burgess himself stepping forward, on the cusp of his own literal death and Keats-like holding out his hand, warm and capable, towards the reader:
—Filthy sodomite. Filthy buggering seducer of men and boys. Nasty Godless sneering fleering bastard. Aye, I will lay the egg.
So he thrust. The eye's smoothness deflected the blade to what lay above under the bone. Kit ... heard the scream in his throat and saw with his left eye Poley, recoiling from him making the signum crucis. Dying, he knew the scream would not die with him, not yet. It lived for a time its own life. He even knew, marvelling, that his body had fallen, thudding. Then he knew nothing more. [DMID, 267]
Your true author speaks now, I that die these deaths, that feed this flame. I put off the ill-made disguise and, four hundred years after that death at Deptford, mourn as if it had happened yesterday. The disguise is ill-made not out of incompetence but of necessity, since the earnestness of the past becomes the joke of the present, a once-living language is turned into the stiff archaism of puppets. Only the continuity of a name rides above the grumbling compromise. But, as the dagger pierces the optic nerve, blinding light is seen not to be the monopoly of the sun. That dagger continues to pierce, and it will never be blunted. [DMID, 269]Ghosts are made of mourning, of course; and Burgess's chain-rattling and moaning here is deprecating not only the actual dead man but the incapacity of art adequately to resuscitate him. Grumbling compromise only seems like Burgess's false modesty. Grumbling is a species of mourning too, although we might think it a grief compromised by petty or personal concerns. How can mourning be anything other than personal, though? And what is mourning if not a bitterly reluctant compromise between the tidal-tug of death's misery on the one hand and the need to go on living on the other?
What's especially nice about this Burgessian coda-paragraph is the way it flags up the partiality, and indeed materiality, of book-writing and literary production even as it appeals to the white radiance of an eternity floating panoptically above all that. The sharp knife is truth, or at least (Burgess being too canny for absolutes) a sort of truth: 'it was Jove's bolt. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth' [31].
A Dead Man in Deptford is a book of extraordinary richness and depth, beautifully written and full of evocative detail. To read it alongside an account of Marlowe's actual life is to be struck by how little Burgess invents, and therefore how cleverly he works his data into fictional form. It never feels forced, or infodumped. He even apologises to the reader in his afterword that one well-known Elizabethan thug was, distractingly to a 20th/21st-century reader, called George Orwell (although after all, he notes, 'that expungeable bravo had a better claim to the name than Eric Blair'). The prose gestures towards Elizabethan English without going the full-on hard-core Elizabethan vernacular. Indeed, another of the book's moments of autohaunting occurs when the narrator, supposedly relating the whole book in Elizabethan quotes from the coroner's report on the killing of William Bradleigh ('Bradleigh maide assalte upon Th. Watson and then and there wounded strooke and illtreated him with sworde and dagere of iron and steele so that he despared of hys lyfe' [DMID, 173]) and we are provided with a jolting reminder of the relative modernity of Wilson's atmospheric prose. Things like this are here, deliberately I suspect, to foreground the disjunctions of history itself.
The novel is in three sections of unequal length. First: a 110-page Part One, not subdivided into chapters. We follow Marlowe (Marley, Merlin) from student days at Cambridge, through recruitment into Walsingham's spy-service, spooking about on the Continent trying to uncover Catholic plots against Elizabeth, and succeeding, or at least contributing to the team that so succeeds. He shags some men, gets drunk in taverns, swears and roisterdoisters. His frequent absences violate Cambridge's rules on residency, and the university wants to deny him his M.A., but the Powers That Be, grateful for Kit's undercover work for the state, apply pressure and he gets his award. Part Two (120 pages) concerns his burgeoning playwriting and its success; his friendship with Walter Raleigh and adoption of Raleigh's foul habit of 'smoking'. This in turn tangles him in the web of court politics, which mean that Raleigh's enemies have it in for him. This part ends with Thomas Kyd, his right hand tortured horribly, 'confessing' that certain atheistical writings found in his study were dictated to him by 'Mr Marlin, Marley, Marlowe ('dagger at back'). Part Three is short; barely 25 pages. Kit is questioned in Westminster and denies everything; but he senses that he needs to get away. His association with Raleigh, quite apart from his sodomy and public blasphemies, have placed him in danger. He travels to Deptford with a view to taking a ship abroad and so escaping the horrors of Elizabethan justice. There he falls in with three of Walsingham's men, and they kill him.
Burgess's Marlowe (Marley, Merlin) is a short-tempered aggressive man with a contrastingly considered, insightful, thoughtful interior life. He ponders God's grace, and indeed His very existence (after walking out of a particularly oppressive lecture on eternal damnation, he revels in nature: 'Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned'). He frets over how to make poetry and theatre more true to life, more potent and memorable. And above all he shags attractive men.
This is not the first of Burgess's novels to be intimately concerned with the male member (check out ABBA ABBA); nor is it the first to take a sexually active gay man as its protagonist. What's new here is the prolonged phallic focus of the way the protagonist's desire is focused. This constellates a number of recurring referents: daggers most notably, since penetration by a dagger is the quietus towards which the novel as a whole is moving; but also rods; carrots (38, 91: probably a little anachronistic, this) and references to Catullus's pedicabo and irrumabo (73, 74). Knives speak to the dangers as well as the thrill of pedication: sometimes intimate, sometimes mock-violent. Or even actually violent: 'Kit carried no knife, but he sensed that there could be knives here too. He had heard of one in London who had carried his knife to his faithless boy paramour' [51]. Knives can make ghosts. And that the phallus is haunted by the ghost of the fatally penetrative blade it part of its dark glamour, sexually speaking.
He [Skeres, one of Walsingham's agents] feigned with his dagger to strike Kit to the heart, smiling rather than grinning. [93]Marlowe reads of the murder of Edward II ('they held him down and withal put into his fundament a horn and through the same they thrust up into his body a hot spit ... that was in Holinshed, the end of the king that loved Galveston's arse better than his own realm' [201]), and writes it into his most notorious play. His assassins question him about his 'unnatural' proclivities. He compares it to smoking, likewise both 'unnatural' and pleasurable. Frizer tries a pipe and chokes. 'Novelty,' Kit tells him, 'oft entails suffering'.
—Draw, I will have you first, swiver of boys' arses. And Kit drew and lunged ... Bradley had now sword in right and dagger in left. [167]
[Skeres, again] Thought is a dagger, he said, and looked for applause. [258]
Like the sodomitical act, Skeres said, sitting. It must be most painful to have a hard rod thrust into the nether orifice. That was a most painful punishment you had for the King in your play. Painful but fitting. [257]'The passion of the butcher's knife,' says Burgess, spelling it out for us, 'was the passion of coupling' [95]. We take, as it were, the point. The novel quotes a great deal of Marlowe's own poetry and drama, augmenting it occasionally with concocted cod-Marlovian pieces. Here's one quatrain, supposedly extemporised by Marlowe in the pub:
So breathe then of the dusty floor,Check out the acrostic.
Thou pallet I may lie upon
And I shall thrust till both are sore
But ever with dis-cret-i-on. [26]
To be a little more precise: Burgess is interested in balancing the rude physicality of all these various buggeries with a complimentary (I'm tempted to say: dialectical) set of immaterialities. This brings us back to ghosts, spectres, hauntings, the evanescent spirit. Breath, rather than cock. This side of the novel has to do with speech—that is, with poetry—and inspiration, with the love that by accompanying physical passion intensifies it. 'Inspiration' is explored in terms of Marlowe's own writing, and in terms of the influence he had. Burgess brings Shakespeare into the novel (calling him variously Shogspaw, Shagspeer (where the Earl of Southampton was concerned, W.S. actually did shag a peer), Choxpeer and Jacquespere: this last frenchifying the influence Shakespeare has had upon our very own Jack, or Iacke Wilson) in order in part to show the two collaborating on Henry VI Part 1. Marlowe 'influenced' Shakespeare and so played his part in bequeathing the greatness of blank verse to posterity.
The physical is always accompanied by the spectre of the intangible, just as the spiritual can only actualise its virtue in flesh. In the novel, tobacco symbolically occupies the juncture of these two magisteria: matter and spirit, flesh and breath. Smoke is insubstantial enough to emblematise inspiration, but material enough to cause the neophyte smoker to cough and splutter. Smoking, and pondering lines from Dr Faustus and using old draft pages of Tamberlaine to light his pipe, Marlowe (Marley, Merlin) thinks to himself:
He smoked, and the word would come in ... But here was an organ summoned for a pleasure innutritive, the buggery of the lungs. [132]Quite a striking phrase, that last, and appropriate to the experience of smoking. He goes on: 'If Christ known it, would he have transmitted his substance in smoke? The eucharist a pipe bowl.'
The novel gives its subject the famous remark attributed to Marlowe from the testimony of government informer Richard Baines: 'all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools'. It is as if the non-generative nature of gay sex becomes precisely the grounds of its value; the innutritive our soul's nutrition. Burgess (the smoker) finds in smoke the ideal symbol for the phsyicality of the spectre, the ghostliness of the material.
:2:
I should perhaps make explicit what has been implicit in my account so far. A Dead Man in Deptford strikes me as both a great historical novel and a great gay novel. It was published between The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Folding Star (1994), and shares with Hollinghurst's work the ability to constellate an exquisite literary sensibility with an unflinching apprehension of the physical practicalities of gay sex. The 90s saw the first great flourishing in the UK of mainstream gay fiction, and perhaps it is Burgess's own authorial sexual orientation that has tended to stop people discussing A Dead Man At Deptford as part of that. Or perhaps the problem is in postulating a 'that' at all. In a 2012 interview with the Oxionian Hollinghurst said: 'one gets into very dubious territory when tries to speculate about what a gay aesthetic might be. I believe gay aesthetics take so many different forms as to make the very idea of a definition seem almost meaningless.' He qualifies himself at once: 'they may, in the vaguest sense, involve certain kinds of camouflage and certain kinds of display', and we certainly recognise this novel, and much of Burgess's oeuvre. Camoflage and display: the closeted character and the flamboyantly out character.
Were Scrooge and Marley a gay couple? I can't believe it hasn't been discussed somewhere. Of course, in a closeted age it could not have been a matter of public discussion. But then again, the metaphor of coming out of the closet opens itself in various directions. Perhaps miser Scrooge was as miserable as he was (locked in his tiny counting house, snapping at people who fall in heterosexual love) because he was closeted in this other sense. Then again A Christmas Carol dramatises the most extreme example of de-closeting in Marley. He has left not only the closet of social stigma and self repression, but the closet of the life of the body altogether. Saying this is, in part, to suggest that 'coming out of the closet' might mean more than just the act of individual honesty, and perhaps bravery. It could take on an almost transcendental quality, hinting at an absolute freedom from all the lies that define adulthood. In its first flush, Queer Theory certainly sought to departicularise the gay experience, and make something universal out of the oppressed and hidden group that shucks off secrecy and conformity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to take one example, has waxed dithyrhambic on the possibilities of the mode of criticism she in part helped to create:
One of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. [Sedgwick, Tendencies (1993), 8]It's not to accuse Dead Man in Deptford of construing its topic monolithically to suggest that the novel doesn't subscribe to quite so rainbow a vision of Marlowe's queerness. In one sense with this, Burgess was ahead of his time. Marlowe was a great poet of erotic love, and centuries of heterosexual lovers have taken his Hero and Leander, or his Passionate (male) Shepherd to his (female) Love, as hymns to straight passion. But of course these 'straight' erotic poems are haunted in a Marley chain-clanking manner by Marlowe's gayness. He is a violent, self-destructive, angry man; brooding over death and damnation, convinced of his life as a kind of dead end, and it is precisely from these aspects of himself that he generates his transcendent energy and poetic beauty. That his drive is deathly is something advertised in the very title of the novel. The striking thing about the novel is that it refuses all condemnation of this. Its queerness, I would say, anticipates the work of Lee Edelman.
Queerness figures outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal … queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure. [Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), 3]Leo Bersani's summary of Edelman's radical thesis in No Future casts a suggestive light on Burgess's project:
In a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of 'reproductive futurism,' homosexuality has been assigned—and should deliberately and defiantly take on—the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality.Quite apart from anything else, framing the novel this way adds specific resonance and depth to Burgess's characteristic emphasis on the shit as well as the glamour (something present in all his historical writing). This is more than a general and rather shallow rebuttal to those fools who think the past all Pre-Raphaelite prettiness. Rather it is a dramatic actualisation of the abject that defines Edelmanian queerness, and all the possibilities of that queerness.
In an early scene, as he composes the 'See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!' line from Faustus, Burgess's slyly turns Christopher Marlowe into Enderby:
He must needs sit bare-arsed on his jordan, hand scooping sweat from his brow, and void much black nastiness. His torchecul was yet another discarded page of his play. Heaving then from wretched odours of ordure that filled his little room, he opened the window to a raging November sunset. Streams in the firmament came to him and he grinned sadly at the division of body and soul. [132]It's more than just self-referential this, I think: Marlowe, here, and Enderby in his quartet are both types of the poet who works by accepting the ordure-producing functions of humanity as the ground (the earth, the marl) from which fragrancy of poetry grows. Enderby, notionally heterosexual, hardly ever connects sexually with another. Marlowe in a sense is a better example, because a more typical human being where sex is concerned: which is to say, he tends to have it. That his rear-end is for more than just voiding makes him a less risible, more tragic figure than Enderby.
:3:
A coda. Reading the book, I made various notes on the endpapers and margins as I usually do; but I also wrote out five lines from the book upon the title page, underneath the actual title, motivated (I'm not sure) by a sense that they represented ghostly subtitles to the novel, haunting the titular thematics of death, debt and crossing-over (or comings-out). These:
The privilege of damnation. [52]
A Theology of Money. [108]
'Lord's book is man's book since God handles no quill.' [161]
The Only Meaning is Syntax. [253]I write them out here. One more note: we've all read the story of the Christmas Carol (or, as I like to call it, 'Dead Man in Dickensfable'), which starts with Marley visiting the readerly p.o.v. character, Scrooge. We know that Marley is but the preliminary, the John-Baptist, preparing the way for the three actual ghosts. They have their equivalents in Burgess's novel. From the past we have the now-ghostly Iacke Wilson, a real figure from history. From the novel's present we have Jack Wilson himself, the same Anthony Burgess who identifies himself in the novel's last paragraph. But the novel also contains a spectral futurity, a time when both Jack Wilsons are as dead as one another, and a spirit unimagined by either steps forward to direct Scrooge's attention beyond the here-and-now and into the to-come. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, that rôle is played by me.
Thought is a dagger. [259]
God bless us, every one.
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