The Confessions of Anthony Burgess: "Little Wilson and Big God, You've Had Your Time" (1986/1990)

:1:

It hadn't occurred to me before to take the two separate phrases that constitute the titles of the twin volumes of Burgess's memoir and run them together like that, but perhaps it makes sense. The 'you' would be plural not in the sense (as I first assumed) that it addresses all of us, Burgess included, as a sort of momento mori, but in the sense of folding together Burgess and the God of his Fathers, both at the end of their usefuls. In the preface to vol 1 Burgess declares 'I think I may predict, unless some miracle of renewed inspiration occurs, that the second volume of my memoirs will bring my writing career to a close' [LWBG, viii]. Not so! Three more novels followed You've Had Your Time, along with various other things. (He also says 'I foresee that the projected second and last volume will be as long, if not longer', which, its 400 pages set against the first installment's 460, shows that he was no prophet).

The declaration of retirement from writing may or may not have been meant genuinely. It could be ludic Burgess designedly casting a hue of terminal reflection over his lifestorytelling the better to combine pathos with a clearer perspective. After all, we're hardly going to trust a memoir that admits it is in medias res. How can the teller hope to recall his own wood when there are still so many trees about? Russell Brand, ten years my junior, has already published two volumes of autobiography; Katie Price is younger still and she has published four. Burgess was right to stress his own obsolescence.

He claims he was prompted by particular intimations of mortality. In America in 1985 he 'met young people in Minneapolis who were surprised to find me still alive. They had studied a book of mine in high school or college and assumed I was a classical author, meaning a dead one' [LWBG, 4]. Burgess, happy enough for his own reasons to go along with the conceit, orchestrates his life-story novelistically, which makes for a brilliantly entertaining read but which puts the absolute truth under question. 'As for truth,' he concedes, 'I might, through sheer shame at the banality of my life, be forced to distort it.' But he goes on:

Pontius Pilate's question has still not properly been answered, though he may well have given the only possible answer with his other great dictum: 'What I have written, I have written'. He is surely the patron saint of writers. [LWBG, 4]

I suspect this unpacks into something rather profound, actually. Truth is part of the issue, but there's another and it relates to the memoir's twin-title. Pilate, patron saint of writers, is the man who presided officially at the death of God. Burgess slyly concedes that 'following St Augustine and Rousseau' he is calling this work his Confessions, 'but without the promise of such basic spiritual revelations as they provide'. Quite the reverse. The story is not just that of little John Wilson, but also of the way his Big God has run out of time in the modern world. Not a Nietzschean crowing about God's death, but something more heartfelt and mournful.

That there is something tying together the otherwise (brilliant, but) centripetal mass of detail assembled into this book seems to me hard to deny. Contemporaries thought so too. Julian Barnes, reflecting in 1987 on how a literary career is never a smooth progression, but rather 'a matter of hops and starts, surprise promotions and seemingly unmerited stagnations' reflected that

Last year’s promotion of Anthony Burgess to official Grand Old Man was a case in point. After years of getting respectful, rather than ecstatic reviews, and of writing the sort of books which perhaps aren’t naturally suited to the British book-reader, Burgess suddenly turns 70 and produces an autobiography. Overnight, there he is: the Grand Old Man. But I bet he didn’t feel a gear-change inside.

Just desserts. Little Wilson and Big God is, simply, a superb piece of writing. Its best sections are the early ones, when Burgess's deft skill at bricolage recreates a vivid sense of growing up in a Manchester in the 1920s, a life somewhere between respectable and indigent. The writing combines snatches of popular songs from the time, advertising slogans, quotidiana, idiomatically recalled phrases from ordinary speech, lively details and somehow works the whole into a compelling narrative. The protagonist is mostly an Oliver Twist-y blank space, character-wise, as is best in such performances, especially when the supporting cast is so varied and Dickensianly grotesque; but there are two ways in which 'he' stands out. He is weirdly old and erudite for his age (and not backward about boasting of his intellectual, cultural and artistic accomplishments); but he is at the same time unusually gormless and ingenuous too. Other kids explain run-of-the-mill things to him. Hospitalised with Scarlet Fever he proves unable to use the bed pan: 'you were supposed to reserve dry defecation for it, micturating into a chill pot bottle', but Little Wilson 'performed both acts in the same vessel which regularly overflowed.' 'I was,' he says, 'hit by the ward sister' for his clumsiness in this [LWBG, 80]. At the other end of the scale we get this sort of thing, which I remember as my first encounter with the volume in 1986, since Private Eye (which I read regularly at that time) excerpted it and featured it prominently in their 'Pseud's Corner'. In the summer of 1927 he:

got through the whole of Don Quixote in the two-volume Everyman edition. Auden said that nobody had ever read the book through; here is one to say he was wrong. I have read it four times, the second time in Spanish. [LWBG, 76]

Ten years old! It would be fatal to the book if it weren't so ingenuously done. There's a fair amount of it, too: ‘I had composed one Sunday, in the intervals of reading Hemingway’s Fiesta in German, a setting of a song by Lorca–La niña del bello rostro–for a singer named Merita’ [LWBG, 307]. This happens later, when Wilson is stationed in Gibraltar during the war, and is actually less boastful than it seems. He is reading the book in German not to show-off his linguistic facility, but precisely because he doesn't speak German and is having to crash-course himself in order to follow orders and teach it to soldiers. The music, though, is a constant. One of the things Little Wilson and Big God does is flesh out Burgess's often repeated claim that he was a composer first, and a writer only after.

There's also loads of sex, from young-Byron-style seductions of the prepubescent Wilson by various housemaids and nurses, through to sex with Llewela or Lynne Jones, who was to become his wife; and thereafter many accounts of Burgess's numerous extramarital dalliances. He and Lynne met as undergraduates, at which point Lynne's sexual life was still dominated by a 'torrid' affair she had conducted for years with a man who had seduced her when she was 14. She decides to 'wipe out' sex with this man by having sex with Burgess, and also with many others. Her view was 'there were plenty of attractive people around and it would be a shame and a waste not to find out what they were like with their clothes off.' Mournfully, Burgess adds: 'she sustained this attitude throughout a long marriage' [LWBG, 211]. For himself, Burgess goes through the Augustinian confessional route of listing, it seems, his every sexual encounter specifically in order to generate a mood of disgust and revulsion. 'I engaged in erotic play in an alley, broke and spattered prematurely and was derided' [LWBG, 161]; Spattered. Derided. Married sex works no better: 'at night Lynne and I lay, me embarrassed, in her narrow bed. She dealt briskly with my engorgement' [LWBG, 331]. Ugh. Despite her promiscuity, Lynne doesn't seem to have enjoyed the actual sex very much: 'her view of sex was both sane and perilous. It was something you got out of the way so as to concentrate on the human essence of a relationship' [LWBG, 210]

This was a kind of madness but also an odd sort of sanity. ... Like H G Wells, she discounted the dangers of possessiveness. Sexual fulfillment does strange things, especially with women. It generates a fierce proprietoral sense, which is sometimes called love. With Lynne sex was altogether too casual. She would give it without getting anything out of it. Ça vous donne tant de plaisir et moi si peu de peine was one of her favourite aphorisms. The Dionysiac ecstasy had never possessed her. [LWBG, 211]

An individual who takes as a sexual slogan a phrase from Dostoyevsky's The Devils, of all places, is hardly on the royal road to sensual fulfillment. After a little over a decade of married sex, Lynne grows more permanently dissatisfied. The couple are now living in the Far East. 'My lovemaking was not good enough,' Burgess says, baldly. 'I was told it was not good enough. Of course, it never is after fourteen years of marriage' [LWBG, 412]. Not sure I agree with you there, Tony. Lynne, though had 'been given a new standard of lovemaking' by an unnamed Eurasian, 'short and [with] several teeth missing, but he was outstanding in bed.' Burgess adds, with plangently mournful understatement: 'no husband likes to be told of his sexual shortcomings ... and I was told too brutally and drunkenly' [LWBG, 412].

The purpose of all this, I assume, is a kind of public self-abasement. In the preface to You've Had Your Time, Burgess notes with a sort of self-satisfied asperity, that 'the personality revealed' in Little Wilson and Big God 'did not please'. Reviewers denounced Burgess 'as if I were a priapic monster or, at best, unforgiveably indiscreet'. Burgess not only doesn't deny this, he doubles-down on it:

It is never the object of confession, at least in the Catholic tradition, to present oneself as a likeable character. One seeks not admiration but forgiveness. [YHYT, vii]

The startling thing about this is not that it in effect situates us, the reader, as priest, but rather that it calls down forgiveness at all. From where? From a God in which Burgess no longer, quite, believes? After all the priest in the confessional is not himself the source of the forgiveness on offer; he is, rather, a conduit for divine grace. The crucial question here is not 'forgiveness for what?', with its tabloid-journalist lubriciousness of interest in Burgess's many delinquencies, themselves often sexual, and all laid out here with a clarity so pitiless it rather implies that they have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. No: the crucial question, surely, is: 'forgiveness from whom?' Not me, I suppose; and not, dear reader, from you either. John Carey, reviewing the book for the Sunday Times, put his finger on something important: 'these two works together,' he said, 'constitute a picaresque novel, the chaotic adventures of a cross-grained near-genius who surely cannot realize what an impossible figure he cuts, but who keeps you on his side by the stubborn innocence with which he spills it all out.' I think this is right, and it entails a further question: who is authorised to forgive the lapsed Catholic whose greatest fault, implied throughout his memoir if never quite spelled out, is his catastrophic innocence?

Of the breakdown in marital sex that occurred when Lynne so brutally told him of his erotic inadequacy, Burgess says: 'the telling did not kill love, which is above sex, but it killed desire' [LWBG, 412]. If we, as readers, never quite believe in this love, as written in these two volumes, it may be because such emotional connection is personal to the people concerned and cannot by its very nature be easily captured in words. Alternatively, it may be that it simply isn't there. Certainly Burgess does nothing to render his words-on-a-page Lynne loveable, or even likeable. That he doesn't spare himself either hardly justifies this. What comes across is not the much-repeated sense of her being a wild-living Celt 'like Dylan Thomas or Brendan Behan' [LWBG, 437], so much as a woman profoundly unhappy and self-destructive. She was surely 'difficult', but Burgess really does appear to have thought that simply staying married to her was as far as his duty to make her happy extended. Actually, no: that's not fair to him. It's more that he portrays her as somebody for whom happiness was an impossibility, somebody governed by an irrationality his masculine limitedness could never satisfy. To encounter Lynne, Burgess claims, was 'to learn about women's irrationality' [LWBG, 210]. 'I am,' he adds, 'still learning, though irrationality only means contempt for irrational laws.' This is so naked a non sequitur we are right to be suspicious. What these books actually make plain is that Lynne's 'irrationality' manifested in self-destruction so determined she drank herself to death, and a commitment to being deeply unhappy when the raw materials for constructing happiness lay all around her.

'Like God,' Burgess says, slipping into aphoristic mode, 'women prefer love to art. They will accept art [only] as a means of their own beautification or as a testimony to their power.' [LWBG, 213]. Even by the standards of 1986 this is startling nugget of sexism, airily dismissing the very possibility that women might themselves actually produce art (indeed, might be very good at doing so) and locking the verbal image of Lynne the books create into a Man-Does-Woman-Is shaped cage. But there's a crucial clue here too, I think: the elision of womankind and God. Where does forgiveness come from? Only, says Catholicism, from the latter, and therefore (says Burgess) only from the former. Lynne, being dead, can never forgive him. As far as absolution goes, he's had his time. Oh, but is there a get-out clause? Big Woman/God prefers love, but Little-Man-Wilson can always revert to art. He is artful, and his memoirs are supremely so.

:2:

The received wisdom is that the first volume is the better of the two because it is much more like a novel. The second is less eventful, less effectively and various characterised, and increasingly becomes a list of the stuff Burgess wrote. Still, You've Had Your Time is much funnier and less boastful than I remembered from my initial read-through, and full of stuff. 'My novels de facto failures, I became the least fatigable of journalistic hacks'. It's also madder than I remembered: I'm thinking for instance of the bit where Burgess swears he foresaw the Kennedy assassination in a dream. 'I had to believe,' he says, 'in the capacity of dreams to tear the veil of the future' [YHYT, 86], although had to imports too great an inevitability into the process. Burgess's own account makes clear that this dream was actually prompted by reading El Cid before bedtime 'to improve my Spanish'. The Wilsonian subconscious shifted to the USA: 'there was an automobile procession ... "The Kid! The Kid!" the crowd cried.' After the fact of JFK's assassination meaning is retrofitted. The blitheness with which Burgess moves from this, via a quick reference to J W Dunne's An Experiment With Time, to declaring himself a sort of über-Freud ('I find few of my own dreams to be Freudian. Indeed I sometimes dream of a Freud who is puzzling out the meaning of the dream in which he is embedded') would be provoking if it didn't so clearly work so well as comic exaggeration. 'I often find,' he notes rather haughtily, 'that it is enough to wait perhaps months to find the source of [a dream's] images in future time'. We get a little nearer the truth a couple of paragraphs later:

Tough minded readers who either do not dream or see dreams as discardable waste matter, exhaust fumes of the brain, are not entitled to feel superior to persons who, like myself, feed on dreams and are sometimes violently shaken by them. For literary creation is much like the dreaming process and dreams fuel all the arts

I have doubts about this, as a general statement; and doubts too that Burgess intended it, in good faith, as the universal he styles it as here. In part this is because my own personal experience as a writer has found little use for actual dreams. I dream a lot, often vividly, and have occasionally even been shaken by my dreams. But they rarely if ever filter through into what I write.

The 'dreams' thing is interesting, though. It has sometimes occurred to me that the conceit of art as solidified dream is less about the 'actual' transfer of images or emotions from the dream-state to the artwork, and more about the curious status 'dreams' have in terms of their authorship. My dream is mine. One cannot, outside of a Philip K Dick story, dream anyone's dream but one's own. Accordingly it makes sense to think of myself as the author of my dream. At the same time we're all familiar with the way dreams appear to have a will that is not ours: they way they move in odd, unexpected and even unwanted directions. From this we intuit a sense that our dreams are somehow not ours; that something other than we is writing them. This is behind Freud's sense not only that 'who we are' is radically divided, but that 'we' don't have proper access to the other us, the one that authors our dreams.

This question of authorship is quite separate from the matter of 'meaning' in dreams, What's significant about Burgess's interpretation of his own El Cid dream as literally prophetic of the Kennedy assassination is not its truth but its form: it projects his own dreams onto the outer world as a whole, and therefore invests him with the power to in some sense author world-historical events. When you put it like that, it brings out (I think) the point at which Burgess's claim becomes ludicrous; and it has nothing to do with J W Dunne's theories concerning time.

There's a James Wood essay on Knut Hamsun, collected in The Irresponsible Self (2004) that seems to me relevant here. Wood summarises a characteristic Hamsun episode where a young man brags to a blind old man that he lives in a part of town much too expensive for him. The old man asks after the address and the name of his landlord, and when the youngster invents a name ('Happolati') the old guy nods and says he knows him. The young man invents increasingly improbable fictions about his landlord, and the old man continues to nod with recognition. The young man grows angry, but instead of accusing the old fellow of being a dupe he 'does the opposite and bizarrely accuses him of not believing his stories' ('Perhaps you don't believe that a man with the name of Happolati exists! What obstinacy and wickedness in an old man!') The old guy, frightened, moves away. Woods comments:

Hamsun founded the kind of modernist novel which largely ended with Beckett—of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous wave but a storm of interruptions ... [Hamsun's characters] are epistemological brawlers, always challenging meaning to a fight. They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves fresh on every page. Yet like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed. They seem only to be escaping themselves. [Wood, 'Knut Hamsun's Irresponsible Selves', The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Cape 2004), 97]

They invent the scenes through which they move is the very definition of the autobiographers' art, and the tension in 'The Confessions of Anthony Burgess' (which very often include crepuscular states, alienation and leaping surrealism) is the sense that Burgess is both the author of his life and the character in a story—'Life'—written by somebody else entirely. That he is both agent and patient. The hinge of the two novels locates the origin of his actual career as an author in an act of wilful passivity: teaching a class in a Brunei school he is overwhelmed by unhappiness. ''I had done my best; I could do no more: let other agencies take over. I lay on the classroom floor and closed my eyes' [LWBG, 440-41]. This is eccentric, even Hamsunic behaviour in a schoolteacher, but it yields results. Burgess, having felt out of control, reasserts it with this aggressive non serviam. The result is a shift from teaching to writing which culminates, for our purposes, with the book we are presently reading. What is the 'meaning' of Anthony Burgess? How pugilistically does the author brawl with his own epistemology.

Burgess is aware that he is simultaneously creating his life's shape and meaning, and that this shape, adventitiously or Providentially, is something imposed upon him from without. It's the dialectic of these two things that puts the whole question of how how much of this is made-up and how much is 'true' in its context. Dreams, similarly, are typically full of the most outrageously improbable and fantastic gubbins; yet Freud was adamant that dreaming articulates powerful truths of which regular discourse is incapable. And this ambiguity as regards authorship speaks of the Confessional too. Step into a Catholic confessional box and tell your story to the priest. Who is the author of this confession? Well in a crucial sense you are, and must be: unless you are confessing of your own free will the exercise is worthless. But in another sense, equally crucial, you are not: the story you are telling is impelled not by you (not the best you) but by your sins, for which you are heartily sorry, which is to say, from which you distance 'yourself'. But then again, these sins are not some external third party, imposed upon you: you have chosen to sin this way and that's why you're here. But yet again, the 'you' authoring this story is a you bent out of shape by your sin, and the function of the story is to access the grace that will restore you to who you should be. The authorship of a confession is a genuinely complicated matter.

Burgess' title, in part, is taken from Augustine's Confessions, the very first words of which concern the bigness of God ('magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde'). Similarly You've Had Your Time ends with a peroration to literary beauty: 'a conviction that the manipulation of language to the end of pleasing and enlightening is not to be despised' [YHYT, 391]. This is also Augustinian: Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam; Late I have loved you, O Beauty forever old and forever new! Late I have loved you! And, look, you were inside me, and I was out of myself, and that was where I searched for you. [Augustine Confessions 10:27]. Burgess makes beauty in a literary, textual sense, and is here writing a book about the writing of books. Think of Augustine's tolle lege, tolle lege, perhaps the most famous phrase in the whole of his Confessio. But we need to be careful: 'From you, God, I had learned,' says the Saint in Book 5, 'that because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.' Truth and falsity are very complex and difficult. Roger Lewis 2002 hatchet-job biography is largely an exercise in going through Burgess's own memoirs and rubbishing the veracity of the data they contain. This would be massively point-missing even if it weren't, as Lewis's book is, motivated by such a ferocious personal animosity.

The point-missing may proceed from a non-Catholic perspective on a Catholic sacrament (even, as here, in semi-secularised, lapsed-Catholic form). Adam Kotsko has some interesting things to say about the fetish for 'honesty' in social discourse, more broadly conceived. He's right, I think, that there's an increasing tendency to sugar-coat unethical behaviour by 'fessing up and claiming the 'at least I'm being honest' high ground. ('Sure, I have racist thoughts. I’ve crossed the street to avoid a black man sometimes, but only at night. I mean, at least I’m honest about it, though, right?'). Kotsko glosses:

In reality, the “at least I’m honest” gesture is a foreclosure of ethics, a short-circuit by which being true to one’s own authentic shittiness becomes an ethical obligation in itself. It is the last stillborn offspring of the Christian critique of hypocrisy — a critique that was originally intended to shame people into living up to their stated ethical ideals, much as Christian confession (“being honest with yourself”) was a first step toward ethical transformation and made no sense outside of a process of conversion. In the “at least I’m honest” worldview, by contrast, ethical aspiration as such is already the hypocrisy that must be rooted out, and the only possible outcome of confessing one’s shittiness is to remain authentically, honestly shitty.

I suspect, though I don't have space to go into it here, that this scales up: it speaks to the cultural dominance of 'grimdark', the supercession of Tolkien's idealised pre-raphaelite Middle Earth by G R R Martin's horrible, violent and relentlessly man-is-wolf-to-man world of Westeros. Lurking behind this somewhere is an implicit 'yeah, it's ghastly: but at least it's honest'. It's not, of course; or to be precise, it's no more honest than Tolkien. And in one key sense its considerably less honest, because it refuses to countenance precisely the possibility of redemption, of conversion. To convert is to change oneself and doing that necessarily superposes a new 'you' over an old one. Such doubling of personhood might look like hypocrisy to some, but it is less dishonest than a stubborn attachment to oldness for the sake of oldness. We don't have to carry on being shitty.

The broadest trajectory of Burgess's Confession is one out of misery into happiness: volume 2 is considerably less grim than 1, and not only because it covers the period when its subject became a world-famous writer. The hinge is Lynne's death, which though it provokes misery and even suicidal thoughts in Burgess frees him up to marry again and move into the sunshine. Reunited with Lynne postwar, the unhappy Burgess has an affair with an unnamed Jewish girl, with whom (it's clear) he enjoyed happiness and the possibility of more.

I should have married this girl, but, though I had good enough grounds, I could not now seek a divorce. Moreover her Judaism was reinforcing my Catholicism and making the notion untenable. And my wife was turning herself into my poor wife, sick, lonely, neglected. Guilt, guilt and then the leap of the hungry dark forces in a hotel bedroom smelling of breadcrumbs. There is no poetry for such transports, except perhaps in the Song of Solomon. Physical appetite is no mere metaphor. [LWBG, 344]

The Old Testament Judaicised arousal; the New Testament interdiction on divorce. Lynne is less and less an actual human being, here, more and more the embodiment of the Church, and God, whose time is not for Wilson-Burgess to abbreviate. He is the patient: the Church uxorian is the agent. Who was it who said that hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous? Why, Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself in his own Confessions. Of course.

:3:

You've Had Your Time ends with an Epilogue that provides a snapshot of Burgess in 1990: in Switzerland, in his study, putting the final touches to the memoir we have been reading. 'Am I happy?' he asks, and immediately answers: 'probably not.' [YHYT, 387]. The epilogue begins:

You and I have both had enough of the time I have had, whose back I loaded with words for sale. Enough of the Nacheinander; let us dwell on the Nebeneinander.
[YHYT, 377]

He doesn't explain this reference, or translate the German; but it's from Ulysses. Of course it is.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read ... Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick.

From the Proteus chapter. Nacheinander and nebeneinander mean, respectively, 'in succession' and 'side by side'. German, because the allusion is to Lessing's comparison of the non-successive art of sculpture (specially, The Laocoön) and the successive art of narrative poetry, Vergil's account of the death of the Trojan priest in Aeneid, Book 2. The two arts ought not to try to emulate each other, was Lessing's conclusion. But I take it that Burgess's meaning here is more ambiguous. A life is lived diachronically but contemplated synchronically, after all. And the Dantean maestro di color che sanno means both 'master of those who know' and 'master of the known colours'. The one thing this blogpost has not been able to capture is the sheer colour of Burgess's memoirs: the life, the vitality, the hilarity and crunchiness of it. It's not all glum. Crack, crick, crick.

'Playing the piano is very much like making love to a beautiful woman ...' The Pianoplayers (1986)

Since Burgess was living in Lugano in Switzerland when he wrote this novel, we can say without exaggeration that it is the work of a Swiss Tony. Which is peculiarly wonderful, because the main theme here is, straightforwardly, that playing a piano is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.

In this novel, and for only the second time in his career, Burgess wrote a female first-person narrator. Like the excellent One Hand Clapping, although perhaps to slightly less excellent effect, the voice he defaults to is markedly less sophisticated than his range of male first-person narrators: Ellen Henshaw, a working class woman from Lancashire without a proper education (supposed to leave school at 14 she actually slips away at 13: 'I didn't mind, I've never been a believer in book learning' [45]) dictating her life story to an amanuensis. At the start of the novel Ellen is an old woman living on the Continent. Indeed, the first chapter is a deftly evocative of the contrasting livelinesses and sleepiness of her small town, Callian ('in the Var, which is in Provence, which is in the South of France'). In return for bed and board, a young writer records her voice, and her life.

1986 was also the year in which Burgess published the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, and it does not surprise us that Ellen Henshaw's life turns out to be a Burgessian David Copperfield act. Dickens, of course, also set out to write an autobiography (the so-called 'autobiographical fragment'). He wrote as far as the primal trauma of his psyche, his demeaning 'abandonment' (as he saw it) in the Blacking Factory, and then stopped, As true history he lost interest after this, and instead re-worked the material as David Copperfield, swapping his initials from DC to CD, adding-to and subtracting-from his life story as narrative exigency, artistic inspiration and psychic wish-fulfilment prompted him, and created a masterpiece. The Pianoplayers is not exactly a masterpiece, though it is certainly an enjoyable and entertaining and funny novel, and there is more going on below the surface that first impressions might suggest. Burgess swaps more than the initials of his name (although 'Ellen Hen(shaw) surely has a half-rhyme flipabout relationship to 'Jon Wilon' if not quite 'John Wilson'): he swaps his own gender, educational entertainment and musical talent. One of the themes of the novel is both that the genius of 'creative expression' is passed down through the generations, and that it takes different forms. Ellen's father is a self-taught lowly pianoplayer (she insists on suturing the gap between 'piano' and 'player', since Billy Henshaw was no concert artist, but worked movie theatres, pubs and low dives). But though he lacks training, and opportunity, he shows himself superbly ingenious and inventive in the business of soundtracking the silent films in 1920s Manchester cinemas. Not just playing fast or slow, major or minor key depending, but turning the disadvantages of his crappy instrument to good purpose:

'All those notes down there in the bass is just a lot of noise, but that's very useful for drums and thunder and so on. And that D there is gone, but it's fine for someone tapping at a window. And that E flat up there near the top has dropped down so it's the same as D flat, and that means I can do a trill on one note very fast' ... my father had stripped all the wooden panels off the piano. so that he could bang the wires with a coalhammer that he'd pinched to make the effect of bells and zithers. He once got himself a sheet of aluminium to shake for thunder, but he'd pinched it off a man who was trying to build his own racing car in the street and there was a row about that. [22]

His genius is wholly unappreciated, and he barely scrapes a living, not helped by his heavy drinking. His daughter Ellen, our narrator, was born when Bill was in the army (First World War), and he returns from the front—the purest bit of actual Burgessian autobiography in the novel, familiar to us from Big Wilson and Little God—to find his wife and four year old son dead of the flu and Ellen gurgling in the cot next door. Ellen grows up quickly, and despite attempts by her father to teach her music, she discovers her genius in sex. Her various erotic adventures make up the bulk of the book's central section. The most detailed accounts of actual sex are when Ellen is underage, a strategy liable to make a 21st-reader pretty uncomfortable. As to the novel's effectiveness as erotica, I can only report the coolness of my personal straight, male reaction. Conceivably a female reader might respond differently: Burgess is scrupulous (rather wincingly so) in recording the pleasurableness of female orgasms and both the appetite for and entitlement of women to sexual gratification. After Ellen has earned pin money with various older men she is initiated into lesbian sex by a dancer from Blackpool, which experience she reports 'disgusted her' although she adds 'there was a part of my brain that could see the point, men being so rough and selfish with it' [104]. Billy dies (of drink-sozzled exhaustion, whilst in the midst of a publicity stunt piano-playing marathon) and Ellen winds up in a high class French brothel, afterwards setting up her own establishment 'at Malmaison, which is where the house of Josephine was when Napoleon kicked her out for not giving him an Heir to the Imperial throne' [154]. She makes a bunch of money, gets off the Continent before the war starts and marries a respectable Englishman. Her son Robert ('born six months after our wedding at Caxton Hall') inherits none of his mother's genius for sex, and more of the ambition than the talent for piano playing. Though he had ‘real ambitions to be a pianist and not just a pianoplayer or joanna-thumper’ [174] it is not until his own son, Ellen's grandson, is born (after Robert's initial, comical inability to consummate his marriage) that pianist genius comes into its own: 'little William Ross, the Child Wonder when he was seven' [205].

We climb the (fanny) hill of the book's central tumulus, and then slide down the far side in a quick string of funny comic setpieces. The best of these is when Robert takes his wife Edna and mother-in-law Mrs Aldridge on an Italian motoring holiday: the poor old mother-in-law suffers a series of indignities, including an encounter with a dancing bear in a barn at midnight and being forced by the beast to dance with it for hours. Mrs Aldridge never really recovers from this, and a few days either the exertion or the indignity kill her off. Robert can't help reflecting on the incident and laughing. 'It’s downright rotten to laugh like that after what poor mother has been through, you heartless beast,' Edna rebukes him. But Mrs Aldridge says:

'He doesn’t worry me, Edna. I’m past worrying about his manner of behaviour.' And then there were no words, just a kind of choky gargling and a sort of distant rattling noise and Mrs Aldridge had slumped over head first onto Robert's back. [189]

Robert and his wife have to load her (large) corpse onto the roof-rack of their fiat.

Underneath this frivolity, though, is something more serious. Its aegis is a series of parallels between sex and music, or more specifically between musical praxis/technique and mastering the skills of pleasing another person in bed. Ellen sets up a fancy brothel under the rubric of 'The London School of Love' (there are other branches in Hamburg and Paris) which promises to educate men into sophisticated sexual technique. The school slogan is 'a woman is like a piano':

A pianoforte if expertly played can give out music whose meaning is more spiritual than physical, though the physical appeal of sheer sound is not, of course, to be discounted. No man considers himself capable of playing the instrument unless he has been trained to do so and is willing to practise regularly and rigorously, whereas most men consider themselves capable of engaging in the act of Love with nothing to guide them but appetite and instinct. The purpose of the School of Love ... [is] to turn men into sensitive and skilled discourses of the Music of Love. [170]

It's a pretty fair point, though there's one obvious flaw in the analogy: it situates the woman as a passive object to be played upon, and the man as an active player, which, it goes without saying, is an assumption hip-deep in sexism. I suppose, to give Burgess the benefit of the doubt, there's nothing here that necessarily genders the patient and agent roles: women can presumably learn to 'play' on men, as much as women on women and men on men. I do like the implied stress on digital technique, actually: if only as a counterblast to the mystic vagueness of all the quasi-Lawrentian fucking that happens in so many books, by, it seems, sheer force of erotic sublimity.

There's also a musical, or rather a keyboard-y, formal structure to the whole: much less sophisticated and complicated than Napoleon Symphony (say), but unmissable and in its way eloquent. When she is a young girl, and her Dad is too poor to afford his own piano, he draws the keys on a plank of wood to teach her the skill:

The white note to the left of the first of the twin black notes, not the triplets, is always C. At the top or in the bottom it makes no difference, always C. The C in the middle of the joanna is middle C, which stands to reason. Then all the rest—D E F G A B, down as well as up: BAG FED. You can play the scale of C eight times over very fast from the bottom to the top, just by using your thumbnail. [26]

There's some mnemonics for useful chords, and a few interesting tunes: CABBAGE and FACE and of course CABBAGEFACE (this is doubly nice, since the French for 'cabbage', 'chou', is also used as a term of affection across the Channel, an idiom Ellen herself uses: 'my cabbage', [154]).

A keyboard has thirteen keys covering the octave from (say) middle C to high C: eight white and five black. The Pianoplayers has thirteen chapters, although Ellen calls the final one Twelve and a Half, 'because I am superstitious' [173]—and also, I suppose, because the final note is only half a new note, since it is the same note raised an octave. I say 'raised', since I'm assuming that Ellen's narrative (from penniless Manchester tike to wealthy retiree in the South of France) is one tracing a CDEFGABC upward trajectory, rather than being BAG FED down into misery.

This in turn gives Burgess a structure to write to, which may explain why the middle act, Ellen's rise from whore to madam, is so skimped. And if the later life is squeezed, this is presumably because Burgess had to decide either to fit everything into 13 chapters or else expand the whole novel to two octaves. Chapter 1 is C, the keynote: Ellen in her house in France, and her life; Chapter 13 (or 12½) returns us to France and her present-day. Chapter 2 (C#) introduces dissonance when set alongside her pleasant later life: a mother and brother dead, an impoverished upbringing and an improvident, boozy Dad. Chapter 3 (D), when played against the C, is if less dissonant then certainly no harmony, and rather looks forward to future resolution. Chapter 4 (E♭) combines with C to suggest a minor chord or interval, and details how Billy drinks away his chances of regular employment and makes such an exhibition of himself at the cinema that he's blacklisted playing movie theatres thereafter (the chapter ends 'Dad had really done for himself this time; he had that' [53]). Chapter 5 is E, a major harmony with C, and the place in the novel where Ellen describes her first sexual experiences, her first orgasm and enters into that aspect of her life that most fully expresses her genius.

So it goes on: Chapter 6 (F) is another major interval: Ellen out of school, and she and her Dad relocated to Blackpool, with many more opportunities for fun. Billy gets a job playing piano on the pier, Ellen gets a job waiting in a 'caffy off the prom' ('I know I have not spelt café correctly but it seems to me to be wrong to use the same word for two very different things, a French café bearing no likeness at all to the British variety' [73]). Chapter 7 (F#) introduces a sour, dissonant note, when Ellen is sexually assaulted by their landlord, the creepy Mr Flushing. Chapter 8 (G) resolves this incident into broad comedy: Billy has started a relationship with a dancer called Maggie whose husband, Ray Romano Morgan, is a fiddle-player, and who initiates Ellen into lesbianism. When Ray bursts in upon Maggie, Billy and Ellen, and the landlord and his wife come in, Ellen exposes Mr Flushing for the creep he is in front of his formidable wife. Billy and Ellen are kicked out of their lodgings, though, and Chapter 9 (G# or A♭) repeats Chapter 4 in its new location: drunk, Billy fights on stage with Ray Romano Morgan and loses his post. Chapter 10 (A) is effectively the climax to Billy's story: as a moneymaking stunt he sets himself up as 'BILLY HENSHAW THE MARATHON MAN NONSTOP PIANO PLAYING FOR THIRTY DAYS AND NIGHTS CAN HE DO IT?' [126]. This is both triumphant and (the major sixth from C to A is not a satisfying harmony by itself) tragic; for Billy wears himself out and dies. Chapter 11 (B♭) begins with her 'heartbroken' [145] and details her experiences as a prostitute: not mournfully but hardly major key stuff. Chapter 12 (B) intimates a joyful resolution to the scale: Ellen is 40, well-off and sets up her 'School of Love'. The narrative shifts towards her son and his comedic travails, before rounding off with a re-emergence of the true musical genius in Ellen's grandson:

The kid had a natural instinct which his father did the utmost to help come out, and it was really the Family Gift at last. It had been trying to get through for a long time, failing with my dad and succeeding in a twisted sort of way with his daughter (A Metaphorical Sort of Way, says Petulia) , failing again with Robert and then bursting like a flower with little Billy. [206]

It's a perfectly serviceable structure, although it can hardly help being a little linear, a bit too simple to give the more complex shades of reality and pathos to the simply-told life story. A five finger exercise played with one hand. Makes a joyful noise, though.

The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985): A Pedant Writes

Hard to disagree with Frank Kermode's assessment of this one:

It’s obvious that Burgess's powers of assimilation are, by the standards of normal or normally lazy writers, exceptional. Nor does he squander the knowledge thus acquired: it goes into a TV series and a novel or a critical biography. One’s admiration for all this prudent industry may sometimes be tempered by a feeling that the product, efficient as it is, lacks aura, lacks the zest we associate with this writer in his more exuberant, less mechanical novels. His last novel-of-the-TV-series, The Kingdom of the Wicked, combines Acts and other early Christian evidence with a rehandling of the I, Claudius historical material into a large, well-conceived and doggedly executed novel, inventive but also well-researched, and authenticated by a scattering or smattering of Greek, Latin and Aramaic words from his polyglot store. For all its informative energy, the book somehow seems a bit dull.

Alas, it is so. Thrifty Burgess, having scripted the 1985 Anglo-Italian TV miniseries A.D., worked his notes up into this hefty novel. But despite kneading great scads of shagging and torture into his story, the loaf of the novel stubbornly refuses to rise. It's not a bad novel. It's just not a very good one.

Perhaps somebody who knows nothing about this period would find it an edifying read, just on the level of historical fact. Then again, who, really, is ignorant of this period? The Roman emperors, variously wicked, venal, psychotic or foolish, engage in a great deal of lubriciously described sex and violence. The early Christians (and the Jews) are all solid, virtuous, grounded and boring. The Roman element of the novel is not merely derivative of Robert Graves's Claudius novels, it is derivative of the sexed-up BBC I Clavdivs telly serial, with attendant simplifications and crudifications. Here's Burgess's Claudius speaking: 'The times need to be washed, scoured, to become the ttttttablet for the writing of a new age. A great ppppppurging and a new beginning' [KOTW, 207]. After Caligula is assassinated, the soldiers go looking about the palace to find his successor. 'The Praetorians saw the drape that bulged tremulously, yanked it off its rod. It billowed about Claudius who went kkkk' [KOTW, 160]. You're picturing Derek Jacobi delivering these lines, aren't you?  TV feeds on TV. The Jewish material is partly straightforward padding-out of the Acts of the Apostles, after the accepted manner of historical fiction; and partly chunks of decanted Burgessian research (this is how a stoning was performed, these are Jewish funeral rights, and so on).

Sadoc, our narrator, is the son of Azor, the figure who narrated Burgess's underwhelming Man of Nazarus (1979). Some of the former novel's elements are carried through, particularly Burgess's insistence that Jesus was a great hulk of a man, of giant-stature and huge strength and physical endurance. Sadoc tells us that he survived the crucifixion in a kind of stupor (the so-called 'swoon' theory of the resurrection), saw his disciples one last time and then pushed off, none know wither. But where Man of Nazarus admitted some miracles into its narrative, The Kingdom of the Wicked is much more rigidly materialist about things: implausibly so for something supposed written by a 1st-century Jew. Rather than people actually getting raised from the dead, we get things like this old woman, whose body has been tossed onto a pile of camel dung in Samaria:

Philip knelt near to the woman, put his ear to her breast, heard a faint but rhythmical heartbeat. He knew she would recover soon. With Greek cunning, he used the circumstances to the advantage of the faith. 'Ponder on the goodness of God and his Son Jesus Christ,' he told the surrounding crowd. [KOTW, 97]

When the woman 'was shakily on her feet again' he claims it as a miracle. Throughout the book everything apparently supernatural gets, Scooby-Doo-like, explained away. Saul's visions of God are down to his epilepsy. Peter is mightily surprised that he appears to have raised Dorcas from death, and he and Thomas stumble downstairs in a panicky hurry. All this inevitably tends to drain the magic from the narrative and leaves the folk in the story rather under-motivated. Burgess may not believe in miracles, but he needs to believe that his first-century characters believed in miracles.

At least Sadoc is a rather more fancy prose-stylist than was his Dad. The book is, happily, full of the echt Burgess: words like 'mastupration' [58] 'polycolpous' [177], 'heresiarch' [191], 'pseudobarbarian' [334] and phrases like embracing as with love the stone pillar of punition [55] and the arborial similitude persisted [190]. There's a deeply implausible story about a Roman centurion called Marcus Julius Tranquillius falling in love with a Jewish slavegirl and throwing over his culture, family and military rank (Roman soldiers being legally prevented from marrying) to wed her. Boldly, or perhaps with the inadvertence of a scholar's dotage, Burgess puts sermons into Saint Paul's mouth of such breathtaking aridity and dullness that the rapid spread of Christianity itself becomes explicable only in terms of miraculous divine intervention. For surely nobody would be won over by:

This implies a willingness to worship a negativity, which neither grammar nor theology will properly permit. Now I would ask you to consider a singular and unique God ... Now God has been tolerant towards human ignorance of him, but now he commands that men repent of this ignorance. That this ignorance be no longer excused by the sense of his remoteness, which encouraged his conversion on the part of men either to a thought or a thing. I teach anastasis, which signifies not the survival of the soul, which any of your Platonists could demonstrate at least as a logical possibility, but as the survival of the sensorium also, though in a transfigured form. For God the Son himself rose from the dead and, in that filial or human aspect, returned to the eternal home of the Father. That, learned men of Athens, is the gist of my message. [KOTW, 221]

It's seems that there were at that time rumours of things going astray. Conceivably this is indeed actually a sort of homage to Python: in You've Had Your Time, Burgess claims he watched Life of Brian a dozen times, and early in Kingdom of the Wicked Burgess includes a Palinesque healed beggar-cripple, who spends his time leaping about saying 'and here's a question for you: how do I earn my living from now on?' [KOTW, 39].  Not sure I'd call this well-judged.

Near the beginning of his Demotic Greek narrative, Sadoc says:

You will find, I expect, recurring through my narrative the fine phrase una nox dormienda, which I take from Catullus ... una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its palliations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure. ... [As for] those who have drunken most thirstily of the Nazarene doctrine of a new life, let them believe what their wretchedness bids them believe: they will find una nox dormienda like the rest of us. [KOTW, 3]

Of course, only a pedant would object that the last of these iterations should be unam noctem dormiendam. A pedant, perhaps, provoked by Burgess's boastful postscript (in which he lists his sources as 'Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles' adding 'I thought these it best to consult these in the original tongues'). A pedant who finds it hard to believe that somebody who claims to have read Tacitus in the original doesn't know that the accusative of nox is noctem. But we can let that lie. Don't worry. The pedant will calm himself, eventually.*

[Deep breath]. The Calm-down of the Pedant.


 ---
*To be fair, I havered over whether nox should indeed take the accusative, or whether it should perhaps take the dative, following 'find'. But I don't pretend to be an expert. Other pedantic notes:

(1) one character dies after 'an infection' from 'cutting her finger along with the evening loaf' [25], like somebody out of a Hovis advert. Knives might be used on meat, but not on bread, which would be torn. And the ordinary evening loaf of a Jewish family would surely be unleavened. Also: 'infection' isn't a very 1st-century AD concept.

(2) ' ...embellished with Graeco-Syrian mosaic work depicting the coupling of Apollo and Artemis, for the cult of Astarte had arisen out of solar-lunar myths of western provenance on which Asiatic mysticism had been imposed' [173]. This wouldn't be out of place in a late 19th-century work of anthropological theology, but I challenge you to find anything like it in a 1st-century popular narrative.

(3) Saul, blind after his Damascene experience, is led back to the city. 'In total blackness ... [he] saw, as in a preternatural sunlight, the rooms and corridors of his own brain. It was the same brain as before, though the voice still echoed in it' [KOTW, 120]. The belief that consciousness 'resides' in the brain, as a person might in a house, is a post-17th-century, not Roman, Greek or Jewish, conceit. In the first century AD Philosophers were still debating whether the soul was located in the head or the chest, whilst Stoic thought argued (influentially) that consciousness was a pneuma that suffused the whole body.

(4) A Roman praetor yells at Paul and his followers: 'are you the men who were preaching some outlandish superstitious mumbojumbo contrary to the laws of Rome yesterday?' [KOTW, 215]. But there were no Roman laws against preaching; religion was specifically excluded from private law, and state law was very permissive of all sorts of cults and religions provided only they acknowledged the divinity of the emperor. A law passed in 81 BC outlawed human sacrifice; and things like building temples and so on were limited by legislation. Otherwise Rome let people get on with religion pretty much unmolested. When Claudius's imperial edict banished the Jews from Rome in AD 49 it was for disturbing the peace, rioting and so on, not because of their religious faith.

(5) A Roman character feels his guts move. 'Where are you going?' 'The cloaca. I ate something I shouldn't' [339]. But cloaca means public sewer or drains, not toilet (that's latrina). Nobody popping to the loo would say 'I'm just off to the public sewer'.

(6) The Emperor Caligula 'was on his feet, stamping his little boots' [134]. It's true that Gaius's nickname 'caligula' means 'little boots'; when his father Germanicus, an immensely popular general, went on campaign in Germany he took his son, aged 5, along, and had a miniature military kit made up, including miniature caliga, the hob-nailed boot soldiers wore. That was when he was five. Gaius became emperor at the age of 25. If he was still wearing 5-year-old-boy's boots then there would have been something seriously wrong with his feet. Fully grown man: teeny-tiny feet. I'm sure somebody would have said something.

(7) 'Caleb leaped to smash the German's nose, whose thyrls spouted hairferns like twin cornucopiae' [KOTW, 128]. This is less an anachronism—though how a Mediterranean Jew like our narrator Sadoc came by the Anglo Saxon word þyrel (“a hole made through anything, opening, aperture, orifice, perforation”; hence 'nose-thirl', 'nostril') is anyone's guess. But really I quote the line here because it's just, well, wow. I mean: stylistically speaking it's really, well. Wow.

"I Got Ninety-Nine Novels/But a Burge Ain't One"

Hit me!

Ninety-Nine Novels: the Best in English since 1939 (1984) was pulled together, Burgess later claimed, in a fortnight. When he wrote his (pretty good) entry on 'The Novel' for the 15th ed. of the Encyclopedia Britannica he included discussion of himself amongst the various other notable 20th-century writers. Not here. 'I have, with right modesty,' he says in his preface, 'excluded myself from my list.' If you like AB novels I feel bad for you son. We get ninety-nine novels, but ... look. Don't make me flog my jokes to death. Alright?

Sometimes the sheer speed of composition does show through. The account of the earlier novels reuses ('plagiarises' would be harsh) material from Burgess's prior The Novel Today (1963). There is a degree of repetition from entry to entry, especially when an unusual word takes Burgess's fancy. 'The big theme of Lucky Jim (1957),' he tells us, 'is that of hypergamy—bedding of a woman of a social class superior to one's own.' The very next entry is in John Braine's Room at the Top (1957), 'a study in provincial hypergamy—or bedding of a woman from a class superior to one's own.' Signs of haste are present, too, in the overall conception. In the preface Burge says that, although he is 'an avid reader of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follet and other practitioners of well-wrought sensational fiction', such novels 'never stood a chance of being placed on my list' [14]. That the list goes on to include such well-wrought examples of commercial fiction as Fleming's Goldfinger and Len Deighton Bomber is to its overall credit, I think, despite the inconsistency.

There are a few oddities (who in their right mind, really, would say that Updike's best novel is The Coup?) and if the choices grow less enduring as we approach the date of composition, that's probably not Burgess's fault: everybody in the 1980s thought Robertson Davies was a contemporary great, though nobody reads him now. Mind you, even back then it was clear that a lifetime is too short (and eternity barely long enough) to read Mailer's interminable Ancient Evenings. In the LRB Ian Hamilton is witty but cruel on the subject of Burgess's sometimes idiosyncratic choices:

Burgess’s book – as all the world must know – is a riposte to the Book Marketing Council’s ‘Best Novels of Our Time’ hype, and many of its quirks may have to do with his displeasure at having been, shall we say, disincluded from that list of the elect. Wherever possible, he sees to it that their taste is rebuked by his. He starts off by lopping two titles from the BMC list on the grounds that neither of them is what he would call a novel. Animal Farm, he rumbles, is a ‘fable’ and ‘hence cannot be considered for inclusion here’ and Lord of the Flies – although it ‘probably’ earned Golding ‘his Nobel wreath’ – ‘is a little too systematised and allegorical to be regarded as a true novel’. Bad luck, chaps. Would Burgess have been quite so vehement in more relaxed conditions? Would he, for instance, have included Henry Green’s Party Going in his 99 if this ‘carefully wrought poem’ had been favoured by the BMC? Probably not. Thus, Kingsley Amis’s Anti-Death League more or less has to be preferred to Take a Girl like You, Iris Murdoch’s The Bell to her The Sea, the Sea, Humboldt’s Gift to Herzog, Pale Fire to Lolita, and so on. With J. D. Salinger, he capitulates and picks The Catcher in the Rye, but then to have swerved here might have meant acknowledging the Glass tales as ‘true novellas’, or as, bits of a true-novel-in-progress.

There may be something in this ('Where will this end? And when, oh when will somebody pick Earthly Powers!'), although at the same time we can say that The Sea, the Sea, for all that it won the Booker, is pretty turgid and dull compared to the lively symbolism of The Bell; and many people would agree with the proposition that Pale Fire is superior to Lolita.

Still a Burge ought to be one the 99, especially since several of these texts have been rather promoted above their abilities. Of Lady Snow's An Error of Judgement (1962) a novel that has fallen right off the radar, Burgess says 'alas, her style is undistinguished, even slipshod, but human concern shines through' [84]. On the other hand, there's one way in which Burgess's list, whatever its provenance, was remarkably prescient. It's true that, with the single exception of Roberts's Pavane, he does not include any what-we-might-call 'genre' SF or Fantasy; yet he still grasps on some level that the SFnal and the Fantastic is the direction in which the novel is travelling. A good chunk of his choices are straight SFF—Aldous Huxley After Many a Summer (1939); James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939); Rex Warner, The Aerodrome (1943); Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946); Nevil Shute, No Highway (1948; the protagonist's daughter has ESP powers don't forget; and in his entry Burgess speaks very highly of On The Beach); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958); L. P. Hartley, Facial Justice (1960); Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961); Aldous Huxley, Island (1962); John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy (1966); R. K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets (1967); Mordecai Richler, Cocksure (1968); Keith Roberts, Pavane (1968); Michael Frayn, Sweet Dreams (1973); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973); J. G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979); Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980); Alasdair Gray's tremendous Lanark (1981)—and discussion includes quite a lot more. From Burgess's other picks I stop short of bracketing Ralph Ellison's brilliant Invisible Man (1952) as SFF, despite its strongly magic realist flavour; Doris Lessing seems to me a fundamentally SFnal writer, and not just because of the Shikasta books, though the utopian strain in The Golden Notebook (1962) is probably too thin to count in this context. We might call Kingsley Amis's The Anti-Death League (1966) a sort of theological Fantasy novel I suppose. Nye's Falstaff (1976) is Fantasy of a Rabelaisian sort. It seems perverse to choose, given the scope and range of Brian Aldiss's SFnal ouevre, his non-genre novel Life in the West (1980) for inclusion here (though Burgess does concede that Aldiss is 'highly regarded as a practitioner of science fiction').

It seems to me that what this list is missing is a sense that the logic of The Novel shifted profoundly in the 20th Century from being focussed on individual writers to being focussed of distinct genres. Or more precisely, 99 Novels is an exercise in genre, in the same way that the Booker is a genre prize. The genre is 'literary fiction', and Burgess's taste in that skews quite heavily towards fantastika without quite accepting that, really, he'd be happier if he moved right on over and included Tolkien, Le Guin, Phil Dick, Moorcock and so on. But there you go.

The whole list is online at various places: here, for instance.

Shakespeare the Martian: Enderby's Dark Lady (1984)

Enderby's Dark Lady. Or, the subtitle tells us, 'No End To Enderby'. This subtitle has its own subtitle, a gesture we may feel approaches subtitular overindulgence: 'Composed to placate kind readers of The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, who objected to my casually killing my hero'. So, yes: in 1974's Clockwork Testament Burgess slew his poet alter-ego. Then a decade later he brought him back, zombie-like, from the dead. Enderzombie. In his new adventure Enderby flies to Indiana because he has been hired to write the lyrics to a stage-musical based on the life of Shakespeare. Asked on arrival if this is his first time in the USA, he says that it is. 'Though not, I assure you, for lack of trying. I should have gone to New York to become a professor for a time.' [EDL, 39]. Burgess even appends a helpful footnote: '*See The Clockwork Testament'. It was, we're told, 'a question of one or the other. So I chose this.' Teaching creative writing in New York? Actually writing, creatively, in Indiana? The latter, clearly. Not zombies, then, but alt-history. I don't mind: it's all SF.

The middle chunk of this novel (Enderby going from one pleasantly if mildly comic interaction to another in the US) is bookended with two pieces of Elizabethan whimsy. The last chapter is a jolly-enough piece of time-travel floss, where a 21st-century scientist goes back to 1595 (strictly, travels to an alt-Earth in the distant corner of the galaxy that is a mirror of our world in the 16th-century), inadvertently gifting a talentless and greedy Shakespeare (a man 'tending to melt into a blob of tallow badly sculpted into a likeness of Shakespeare' [EDL, 156]) with the 'true' playtexts. This adventure in paradox does not end well for the traveller.

The first chapter is the story of how Shakespeare (the 'actual' Shakespeare, not the time-travel space-alien version) gets caught up in his pal Ben Jonson's spy-story adventures. Together they uncover the Gunpowder Plot. In return Jonson lets him into a secret: he has been titivating the first drafts of the King James Bible. The scholars have done their work; now they have handed it over to poets to polish and improve the style. Jonson invites Shakespeare to have a go himself. Will, now 46 years old, takes home a few psalms in his knapsack. He alters the 46th word in Psalm 46 from 'tremble' to 'Shake'; and likewise alters the 46th word from the end of the Psalm from 'sword' to 'Speare'.

This is a real thing. What I mean is: the 46th word in the KJV version of Psalm 46 really is 'Shake', and the 47th from the end (the 46th from the end if you ignore the psalm's last word) really is 'spear'. See for yourself:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

This isn't Burgess's original discovery: it's been long known. Usually it's taken as a queer coincidence, although some see design in it. Burgess mentions it in his Shakespeare book (1970), and discussed it at greater length during his North American Shakespeare lectures in 1976. In You've Had Your Time he concedes candidly that it 'is not a matter of interest for scholars', before doubling down firmly with: 'that I was excited about this proved that I was not a scholar' [YHYT, 337].

In Enderby's Dark Lady the first chapter's narrative of Will inserting his name into the Bible is revealed, in chapter 2, to be a short story written by Enderby himself. The fame of this has got him a lucrative gig writing Shakespeare's story of the American popular stage. As with Clockwork Testament that this has happened strains our belief to snapping point, at least as far as Enderby is concerned. That he would write a short story at all; that it would become so famous; that he would be flown to American and paid to write a libretto. It is the sort of thing that would happen to Burgess, not to his creation. Symptomatic, this, of the way the distance between creator and creation decreases as the novel series goes on. One of the disappointments of this novel is how much less flatulent and risible and seedy Enderby has become. In his own small way he's surprisingly dignified here, as if Burgess is starting to over-identify with his creation. Anyway: the short story of chapter one proves to be truth, not fiction. Attending a séance, Enderby hears the ghost of Shakespeare himself rapping on the table the message: 46, 46, 46.

I'm going to pause for a moment, here, to try and dispose of the theory that W.S. collaborated in the translation of the King James Bible. It's as close to certainly untrue as can be approached in our sublunary literary-historical world. The main obstacle, acknowledged by Burgess via the contortions of his improbable spy-story plot, is that the Oxford Company translating the Books of Psalms for the KJV (all notable divines and scholars of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, all of them known to us: John Harding, John Reynolds, Thomas Holland, Richard Kilby, Miles Smith, Richard Brett, Daniel Fairclough, William Thorne) had probably not even heard of Shakespeare, certainly would not have thought him a worthwhile partner in their labours. Their overwhelming concern was accuracy, not poetry; and they were motivated by a profoundly held sense of the sacred duty of being accurate. It really is quite inconceivable that they would pass their carefully worked drafts over to a figure from lowly popular culture, entirely unlearned in the sacred languages. It would be like the New International Bible committee secretly canvassing Paul McCartney for his opinion on Hebrew diacritical marks.

More damning to the 'secret code' theory is the fact that previous English translations of Psalm 46 are very similar to the KJV's wording: In the 1560 Geneva Bible translation of this psalm, ‘shake’ is the 47th word and ‘spear’ the 45th from the end; in the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 ‘shake’ is the 47th word and ‘spear’ the 48th from the end. Burgess surely knew this: his thumb goes into the balance, replacing the actual 'shake' and 'spear' with 'tremble' and 'sword' only in order to be able to change them back with a flourish. The whole thing, in fact, depends upon a deliberate fuzziness, such that the 47th-word-from-the-end somehow becomes the 46th; and Shakespeare is taken to be 46 years old in 1611 though for every date after April 23rd (such as the date of publication of the KJV) he was actually 47. And so on.

I don't want to labour this point. As Burgess's ambivalence suggests, the crucial thing here is not the objective 'truth' of this story so much as its dramatic potential. Indeed I think we can go further, and say that the focus for Burgess is on encoding rather than decoding. Decoding is a squib: do it and you have drained the pleasure away forever. We read books over and over again, but nobody solves the same cryptic crossword twice, after all. In many cases the decoding has already been done by somebody else, and your book comes to you pre-drained, pleasure wise. Abrams and Dorst's recent puzzle-novel S (2013) is an object lesson in this. Encoding is a different matter: the epitome of that belief that all art takes the mundane and banal and makes it richer, hiding resonance and beauty and complexity into it. Burgess loves all this: working in acrostics and number-games (Nothing Like The Sun and Earthly Powers in particular are both especially lively with this sort of thing). It's not what the secret is that matters; it is that there is a secret.

Enderby's Dark Lady puts the Psalm 46 Shake/Spear 'encoding' front and centre, and hides its own Burgessian codes in plain view. What code? Consider. The book is the 4th in the Enderby quartet; it appeared in 1984, the fourth novel AB published in that decade; it is comprised of 3x4 chapters and returns in various ways to 4 and 6 and 46.  Let's turn to the Chapter 4. The 46th paragraph from the beginning (including the inset verse paragraphs in our count) says:

'Now the place is a place that sells ham-burgers.' [EDL, 58]

The 46th paragraph from the end:

'Don't give us that. There's a tone of voice that grates on me, pardon me Laura. We're your one bastion against the communist takeover. So don't knock.' [EDL, 63]

Lest we miss the relevant word, Burgess repeats it three times (so, four times in all) in the next few lines: '"There you are again," the lawyer cried. "It's the tone of voice." "I can't help my bloody tone of voice," Enderby countered with truculence ... Philip lurched in, probably stoned.' Thus we can read backwards to discover that, using his own key, Tony Burgess has worked Tone Burgers into his own novel. In chapter 6, the 46th para from the end contains both 'Will' and 'Son' and the 46th para from the beginning (a chunk of quoted verse) repeats 'I cannot go on I', giving us a suitably Elizabethan I. Will-son. The novel appeared in 1984, when Burgess was 67. The 67th word from the end of the novel (ignoring, selah-like, the final coda) is 'Nobody'. The 67th-word from the beginning: 'I'. 'I, Nobody' is a fittingly Nothing Like The Sun-style act of self effacement.

I could go on, but won't. I appreciate that you're no more persuaded by this 'decoding' than I am by the Psalm 46 conspiracy theorising. That's my point. The core appeal of the 'conspiracy theory' is that it invests us in a world that is more than it seems. By doing so, it flatters our sense of our own perceptiveness and canniness and so on strikes me as secondary (not least because, in almost every case, people who literally believe in conspiracy theories are, of course, less intelligent and perceptive, more gullible and idiotic). People who believe in absurd conspiracy theories do not thereby any diminution in their existential absurdity. That's not the point. The point is to commit to a view of the world that is more than meets the eye.

So, for example: Burgess's openness to the notion that Shakespeare contributed to the King James Bible actually indexes the strength of his own emotional investment in literature as such. As he puts it in his Shakespeare (1970): 'If this is mere chance, fancy must allow us to think that it is happy chance. The greatest prose work of all time has the name of the greatest poet set cunningly in it.' 'Believing' in the Psalm 46 Conspiracy, then, is not about a dull literalism; it is, rather, a way of saying that the secret hidden inside the greatest prose is poetry; that the secret hidden inside Religion itself is the sublime art of a Shakespeare.

What makes this more interesting than it might otherwise be is Burgess's openness to, as it were, the reverse. The Enderby books as a whole, and Enderby's Dark Lady in particular, are all about the notion that the 'secret something' hidden inside the greatest of poetry might be: banality, feculence, paltriness, ludicrousness, the whole bag-and-baggage of inconsequential quotidian human
existence. What in the first three novels is focused on Enderby's own sad, silly little life becomes here projected outward. Enderby may be a minor poet, but Shakespeare clearly isn't. So what if the secret at the heart of Shakespeare is actually a little Enderby, motivated by seedy little insecurities and pettinesses?

Burgess's Bard, in chapter 1, inserts himself into the KJV for reasons of grubby personal vainglory and amour propre: to ensure that his name, newly gentrified and with its own coat of arms, should live for ever. The notion that the plays what he wrote would guarantee that immortality literally does not occur to him. 'My name, I mean, my name. My son, poor little Hamnet, dead. And the name Shakespeare dishonoured in its own town and soon to die out along with the poor parchments that put innocent words into the mouths of players ... you see, you see? To do this I have the right. I am not without right, do you see?' [EDL, 30-31] Him citing his own motto from his own coat of arms is a nice touch, as is the twist at the end of the chapter: Jonson returns the draft to the scholars overseeing the translation and they accept it, not even noticing the 'bombastic and overweening' gesture Shakespeare has made. Because they have never ('and Ben smiled sweetly') heard the name of Shakespeare [EDL, 34]. For all his yearning to be somebody, he's a nobody. He is nothing like the sun.

It's all about the mismatch of aims and powers. Shakespeare, possessed as he was of the keenest insight into other human character and worth of any writer, lacks in Burgess's version of him, insight into his own talents and worth. We call this mismatch comedy, and Enderby's Dark Lady often is funny. Enderby falling for the beautiful black movie star April Elgar, invited to her mother's home for Christmas on the pretext that he is a Baptist Minister from England, ends up giving a ridiculous, rambling invented sermon to an all black congregation. Enderby forced to take the role of Shakespeare in his own play, and speak the lines that (the thing having been revised by committee and reduced to the lowest common denominator) he now despises. It's quite funny, is the truth; although it never reaches the heights of comic brilliance manifested by Enderby Inside. That may in part be because Burgess is aiming for a bigger point.

Conspiracy theorists are drawn to the notion that the secret hidden in the world is more glamorous than the appearances. The fact that they are able to orchestrate such global schemes in a way that keeps them hidden from most people implies that the Illuminati (or whichever Secret Masters you prefer) are super-competent, to an almost divine degree. We are drawn to such potency, such glamour, even as we tell ourselves we are setting out to uncover and destroy it. Burgess is offering an alternative hypothesis: what if the Secret Masters were less, not more, competent than the average Joe and Joanna? What is the secret hidden in the greatest art is, actually, its crappiness?

This has a couple of valences in the novel, I think. One is Burgess's perennial worrying away at sexual desire and true love, and the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea he insists lies between those two things. Enderby falls deeply in love with April Elgar, who is beautiful, sexy, wealthy, smart, vital and altogether lovely. He has no expectations at all that the feeling be reciprocated: he poor, ugly, old and laughable. 'I love you,' he tells her. 'I shall love you till the day I die ... [I] demand nothing. Totally disinterested.' [EDL, 116]. He insists his love for her is Platonic in the strict sense of the word, whilst also constructing a 'version' of her in his head over which he masturbates nightly. She is unfazed by this, since her stock in trade, she wryly notes, is posing for cameras, still and movie, 'tits and ass and teeth and legs in gunmetal stockings and frothy lingerie. The kind of thing pimply kids fire their wads at.' 'All I can do,' Enderby insists, 'is love humbly and cherish dreams.' 'Yah,' she retorts. 'Wet ones.' [EDL, 120]. April and Enderby swap onanistic euphemisms: firing your wad; pulling your wire; bashing the bishop. They don't suggest shaking your spear, but they could easily.

I have argued before that Enderby is in a way Burgess's version of Swift's 'Celia! Celia! Celia shits!', with the crucial difference that what moved Swift to anguished horror and despair tickles Burgess's funny bone. He is not disgusted by his farting, masturbating little creation; there is genuine affection for him. For Swift, the mere fact that beautiful women defecate proves that the cosmos is playing some cruel trick upon us, laughing at the erosion of our dignity. Burgess doesn't see it that way. There are some elements of laughing-at in Enderby's Dark Lady (some of the homophobic cracks have aged very badly indeed, for instance), but mostly it's a laughing-with sort of novel. This is the secret at the heart of things: how strangely funny we are, funny because strange. Indeed, it is the gradient between our pompous imaginings and our laughable realities that denotes the degree of funniness.

There's one other aspect to this that speaks to me particularly. It is science fiction. More precisely it is the tacit suggestion made by Enderby's Dark Lady that the hidden secret of the highest art is something pulp and popular and low. SF. It is present, here, on several layers. The whole novel is science fiction, a treatment of not one but three alternate-history conceits. The first, Burgess argues in his author's preface. is actually the ground of all fiction. How can Enderby die in New York in Clockwork Testament and then be alive in Indiana in Dark Lady?

All fictional events are hypotheses, and the condition of Enderby's going to live in New York would be that he should die there. There was a choice between his going to Manhattan to teach Creative Writing and his being employed to write the libretto for a ridiculous musical about Shakespeare in a fictitious theatre in Indianapolis. He took the second course ... [EDL, 8]

It's like Burgess is groping his way, unaided, towards Alt-History 101. The second alt-timeline is the one in which Shakespeare, improbably enough, encodes his own name in Psalm 46, and then visits Enderby in supernatural fashion through table-rapping and mysterious fires. The third is the last chapter, when a 21st-century character called Paley visits Shakespeare in 1595. His mentor warns him before he goes: 'some of you young men expect too much of Time. You expect historical Time to be as plastic as other kinds. Because the microchronic and macrochronic flows can be played with ...' [EDL, 143]. Paley is too excited to pay attention and rushes off in his time machine (rather sweetly, Burgess calls this a 'flying boat'). The Elizabethan England he finds is almost exactly the same Christian nation as the one history tells us about, except that the king has three eyes, people are martyred for believing in 'Mogradon' and Shakespeare himself is a mere hack (the author of 'Heliogabalus, A Word To Fright a Whoremaster, The Sad Reign of Harold the First and Last, The Devil in Dulwich oh, many and many more' [EDL, 157]). It's also possible the people are all shape-shifting tentacle monsters only pretending to be human beings. Shakespeare relieves Paley of his Complete Works of Shakespeare, has the visitor thrown into prison and settles down to write The Merchant of Venice.

Inside these framing gestures, the story itself is thoroughly interpenetrated by SF. Enderby likes to retreat to the toilet and read 'a paperback volume of what are known as Science Fiction stories' [EDL, 90]. Burgess summarises a few of these in chapter 7, and they sound quite good. His taxi driver turns out to be a PhD student from Yorke University at Toronto, working the vacation. His thesis is called 'Future in the Past'. 'About science fiction,' he tells Enderby, as he drives him to the hotel.

'Been reading some of it,' Enderby said tiredly.

'Only viable literary form we have,' said the Canadian. [EDL, 127]

The Canadian's assertion seems self-evident to me, although I suspect Burgess offers this as a hint at the secret hidden within the canon of 'Great Literature', like Shake/Spear in Psalm 46. The Canadian, discovering that Enderby is a writer, makes the following suggestion:

What you ought to write is a sort of SF Shakespeare, know what I mean? About some Martian landing in Elizabethan England and meeting Shakespeare and putting The Power on him. See what I mean? [EDL, 128]

'Yes yes,' Enderby replies. 'I see what you mean.' Presumably this is a sort of literary-historical version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Burgess's onetime friend, though by the 1980s estranged, Kubrick. And Burgess inverts it for the final chapter of the novel (written like the first chapter, by Enderby: 'a little story. Leave Well Alone or Leave Will Alone, some such title'). The Martian doesn't gift human Shakespeare with his genius, a First-Folio-shaped monolith planted amongst bickering ape-men. Instead the human goes to Mars, or further afield, and gifts genius to the alien. That's the secret cached most securely in the centre of great art: our alienness. 'There's this theory,' the taxi driver tells Enderby, 'that it's us are the Martians. We landed on this planet in prehistoric times and killed off the earthmen. We knew that Mars was dying, see, and saw the fertility of the Earth through powerful instruments. Then the earth's lack of oxygen stunted our brains and we had to start all over again. Four dollars fifty'. [EDL, 128] The main takeaway from the presence of Shake and Spear in the forty-sixth Psalm is not the truth or falsity of the theory that explains it, but its own sheer strangeness. It's a really odd thing, when you come to think about it. And when you come to think about it, we're pretty odd too. Aliens in a familiar land. People from the same world as Shakespeare himself: Mars. It's a Bradburyan, Phil-Dickian, David-Bowie-ish insight, our secret identity as Martians. Selah.

The Man! The Music! The Madness! The Murder!—This Man and Music (1983)

Only readers—invoking the plural, where this blog is concerned, rather more in hope than expectation—of a certain age will get the reference in this post's title. It's because I am old that I'm moved to situate Burgess's 1983 collection simultaneously after (Shaffer's play was 1979) and before (Forman's 1984 movie) Amadeus. If you're likewise old, you'll remember the alliterrhoeaic movie poster:

It's a fun film, and it still stands up; not least because it takes for granted that music is more than idle aural decoration. The whole premise of the movie is that music, and the human passions it provokes from joy and transport to envy and rage, are literally matters of life and death. That it was such a huge hit had much to do with the sheer vitality of this vision.

Burgess's This Man And Music is neither mad nor murderous. Instead it meanders, is something of a misfire, and doesn't come alive in Amadean or even ABBAdean mode. Music was clearly deeply important to Burgess, but that importance is declared rather than demonstrated here. Eleven separate pieces wander around Burgess's own compositions, various questions concerning music's effect and connections with the written word.

First we get a short memoir called 'Biographia Musicalis' covering ground that will be familiar to readers of The Pianoplayers and Little Wilson and Big God. The second chapter 'A Matter of Time and Space' is an abortive discussion that does little more than assert the importance of time and the unimportance of space to music. 3's 'Let's Write a Symphony' (I rather mourn the lack of an exclamation point at the end, there) is less inclusive than that chapter title implies. Not so much a primer, more an account of Burgess's own writing of his three symphonies, pitched at a level of sufficient self-indulgence to dissuade rather than encourage others to follow suit: 'that descent in tritonal fourths is, I foresee, in danger of being employed as a mannerism' [57] and so on.

Chapters 4 and 5 ('Music and Meaning' and 'Meaning Means Language') struck me as the most interesting, and I would have liked to see the discussion they include expanded. Instead the volume takes a sharp turn left into literature at the midway point: 6 'Under the Bam' looks at musical phrases quoted or gestured towards in famous works of literature, providing the staves and notes to enable us, should we want it, to sing The Waste Land's 'the river sweats oil and tar' or 'the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter'. Chapter 7 ('Nothing is so Beautiful as Sprung') is about Gerard Manley Hopkins's experiments in prosody and 8 ('Re Joyce') does the same thing for James Joyce, whose sentences, we're told, embody a kind of 'oral athleticism' [135]. Chapter 9 'Contrary Tugs' sees Burgess reinvent the Barthean wheel by in effect distinguishing between the texte lisible and the texte scriptible. And the last two chapters are Burgess in full-on Explainderby mode, stepping his reader carefully through all the admirable aspects of (in 10, 'Oedpius Wrecks') MF and (in 11, 'Bonaparte in E flat') Napoleon Symphony.

Burgess wasn't really capable of writing boringly, and this book does hold the reader's attention. But much of it feels first-draft-y and underpowered. The discussion of prosody in Hopkins connects poorly with the early brief discussion of musical tempi and rhythms, and reads like the work of someone who really needed to read Derek Attridge on poetic metre—which, since Attridge's seminal The Rhythms of English Poetry was out by 1982, he could have done. Most crushingly, Burgess's opening claim that 'To Hopkins we owe a new system of prosody that speaks not Greek but English' [117] betrays a basic misunderstanding both of the differences between Greek quantitative prosody and the traditions of English stressed verse, and also of the ways in which Hopkins deliberately rewired the logic of stressed and unstressed prosodic patternings. Greek verse counts not stresses but patterns of long and short vowels; English verse counts beats (Robert Graves described the former as the pull of the oar, the latter as the strike of a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil) and though Hopkins worked and thought deeply about the difference his own sprung poetry is stressed, not quantitative.

I don't want to get bogged down. Several of these chapters are livelier than this, much is thought-provoking, and Burgess is tactfully modest about his intent. He calls This Man and Music 'an unambitious book', one that 'nibbles' at questions of musical intelligibility. Nonetheless the impression I took away from reading the whole thing was how thin Burgess's account of music here is. There's plenty of specificity, from technical terminology to AB's own rather scrappy handwritten musical notation:

But there's very little breadth to the account. Burgess's focus is almost entirely on: individual notes and chords, a small group of conventional tempi, on melody and symphonic themes. There's a little bit on duration and pitch, but historical detail aside this is all formal in a very narrow sense: music as pattern and structure. AB does not for instance discuss timbre, variety of sounds, the sonic richness that the electrification of music (from guitars to synthesisers and samplers) made possible. He doesn't discuss rhythm as anything other than Classical counterpoint, which means the drum-led explosion of rhythmic possibilities that jazz, pop and rock generated is a dark continent to him. This, of course, is part and parcel of his stubborn refusal to see any merit in the revolution effected by popular music from 1950 through to the period of writing. For a man so fascinated by music simply not to see that he has lived through a major, global reinvention of what music means is, shall we say, puzzling. Two things in particular: one, the new disciplines of popular drumming brought a kinetic force and variety, and a somatic intensity, to music, intensities of which counterpoint was simply incapable. And, two, at the proggier and synthier end of things, new sonic flavours and textures, and wholly new instrumentation, were able to dilate into aural landscapes or soundscapes in which music becomes worldbuilding of extraordinary variety and complexity: Kraftwerk, Yes, Jarre (to pick three at random) all doing it differently. For myself I'd say there's a third major innovation that pop and rock brought to music, to do with a deliberate primitivism (something like the stylised barbarism of Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon) and its attendant energies and disruptions; but I can see that this is precisely what Burgess objects to about pop styles: my feature, his bug.

Burgess makes a few semi-respectful nods in the direction of jazz, and has a kind word to say about Irving Berlin. That's as much of a compromise with the post-classical world as he's willing to make. This hardly surprises us, of course. To discuss the melodic talents of certain classical composers, concede that Berlin had his moments, whilst pointedly refusing to admit that the great melodic genius of his generation was Paul McCartney is almost endearing. The worry, I suppose, is that Burgess thereby reveals not a principled individuality of taste that refuses to join the vulgar herd, but on the contrary a timid coast-hugging conventionality of taste. We can hardly disagree that Mozart and Beethoven were great composers; but we might want to venture a little further afield, geographically and musically, from the great symphonies and sonatas.

The third thing that seemed to me missing here (beyond a broader sense of the sonic possibilities of music, and an openness to the revolution of pop) is any discussion of class. This in a sense is the oddest omission, precisely because the 'Biographia Musicalis' chapter is so eloquent on what it means to grow up working class and musical. Yet nowhere in the book is there any sense of the point that Pierre Bourdieu made in such detail in La Distinction (1979), that cultural capital and status determines the formulation of aesthetic taste. Classical music is aligned with upper class social being, pop with lower. The closest Burgess comes to acknowledging this is his intriguing but undeveloped point that music 'means' society:

When we speak of the 'meaning' of a Haydn symphony, we say no more than that it is an auditory symbol of stability. The music means the society of which it is an artistic product. [75-6]

This, though, looks suspiciously like a straightforwardly reactionary point: Haydn simply translates the splendid social harmony and order of the Sun King's realm into notes on a stave, as (though Burgess doesn't specifically say this) modern rock and roll in its raucous anarchy indexes the decadence and savagery of contemporary life. Elsewhere he praises music as the 'abstract symbol of social stability' [74]. To which we're entitled to respond: bollocks to that.

There are a couple of other stabs at defining how or what music 'means'. 'Behind all music of an instrumental nature,' Burgess asserts, 'lies the dance, and behind the symphony lies the dance suite' [74]. This looks like AB is going to steer his discussion towards the somatic; but he doesn't. His baseline definition ('music is tension and resolution over and over again' 76) is so broad it would apply to almost any form of art, and anyway he disowns it almost as soon as he introduces it. 'The reader should now be heartily tired,' he airily says, 'of this glib talk of tension and resolution. It leads us only to the prenatal experience of the maternal heartbeat' [83]. Anything but that! Elsewhere he throws up his hands. That Beethoven's Fifth is significant he can hardly deny, but he asks and answers: 'what is this significance? We do not know' [78]. Hmm.

Two particular questions occupy him. One is something to which he returns in Mozart and the Wolf Gang: can music be a moral good, or is it a merely a kind of amoral, aesthetic finesse? The openness of music disquiets him:

The commandant of an extermination camp could spend the day supervising the consignment of Jews to the ovens, and then go home and weep tears of pure joy at the divine revelations of sonata or symphony—his flaxen chubby daughter at the keyboard, or a fine record-player which was the due of his rank. On a summer evening in London in 1942, on that identical evening in Berlin, there were performances, both deeply moving and loudly applauded, of the Choral Symphony. [82]

The conclusion Burgess draws from this juxtaposition is that 'if fascists and democrats found, as they did, the same matter for exaltation, then music cannot be about morality' [83]. But surely it can be about emotion, and emotion has much more to do with politics, especially fascistic politics, than morality. Burgess wouldn't agree. 'I am prepared,' he gracious concedes, 'to find listeners making an emotional or even a pictoral response to the music, but I do not think this is more than subjective fancy' [80]. Subjective fancy as opposed to, what? Objective fact? Burgess adds: 'I believe that the majority of composers are too preoccupied with the building of structures to concern themselves with "emotion".' The scare-quotes around 'emotion', there, are a splendidly chilly touch.

I'm entitled to disagree, of course, as are you, if you're so minded. It seems to me that emotion is much more directly entailed by music. I could be wrong.

Burgess's second question, which he considers at greater length, is whether music can 'mean' without the help of extra-musical props and hints. He thinks, on balance, not: it is the titles Beethoven gave to his 6th symphony that makes it 'pastoral', not the music. This is a respectable musicological position, although at root it depends upon critics lighting with cries of joy, as if for the first time, on the oldest of old-chestnut insights that 'meaning' is arbitrarily assigned and not integrally generated. That a minor key is coded 'sad' and a major key 'happy' is indeed arbitrary. Had we been raised to think of minor keys as happy and major sad, the system would work precisely as well. Likewise, the association of the green traffic light with 'go' and the red with 'stop' is arbitrary. The point here is that every communally agreed signification is arbitrary in this sense, so isolating music doesn't get us very far. More, Burgess in effect wants to have his cake and eat it too. He mocks Swinburne for his tin ear with the following anecdote:

Perhaps the limit of unmusicality was reached by the most musical of poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne was once treated to a performance of 'Three Blind Mice' on the piano and told that it was a song of sixteenth-century Rome. He professed to hear in it 'the cruel beauty of the Borgias'. [97]

This, Burgess thinks, demonstrates that Swinburne was 'ignorant about the frontier between music and poetry', but it's hard to see how it does so. The most we can say about Swinburne is that he was ignorant of this particular tune: rather surprising but not impossible. More than that, and by Burgess's own logic, there's nothing intrinsically absurd in hearing in this particular melody cruelty and beauty. It's not a very sophisticated tune, true; but then neither is the tune at the heart of Beethoven's Ninth, and Burgess has nothing but praise for that. Simplicity can be cruel, just as it can be joyful.

I don't doubt that Burgess's encounters with music were on a personal level full of joy, but we get little sense of that from this collection. But perhaps its torpor reflects ambivalence not about music as such so much as about the viability of music criticism. John Deathridge, surveying a representative sample of music criticism later in the decade, detected beneath the 'bluster' a 'tacit admission that, in the end, there is no such thing as music criticism in the strictest sense. This expresses, as Adorno noted, a kind of "ultimate doubt" which turned a life devoted to music criticism into that of an intellectual gambler.' Burgess may or may not really have believed that music is all about 'the building of structures' and only adventitiously about emotion. For myself, I'll stick to the idea that there's bound to be a mismatch between a fundamentally rational, intellectual exercise like 'criticism' and a fundamentally affective, emotional one like music. A touch more Madness! and Murder! added to the Man! and his exclamatory Music! might have leavened this lump. Da capo.