Burgessblog Index

So this project, which began in February 2015, reached its conclusion in June that same year. I may add the occasional thing now and again, filling in some of the gaps, but the complete run of novels (plus a couple of other items) is here:

Time for a Tiger (1956) (Volume 1 of the Malayan trilogy)
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) (Volume 2 of the trilogy)
Beds in the East (1959) (Volume 3 of the trilogy)
The Right to an Answer (1960)
The Doctor is Sick (1960)
The Worm and the Ring (1961/1970)
Devil of a State (1961)
(as Joseph Kell) One Hand Clapping (1961)
A Clockwork Orange (1962): one post on the novel, and another on its Nadsat.
The Wanting Seed (1962)
Jean Pélégri, The Olive Trees of Justice (1959/1962)
Honey for the Bears (1963)
(as Joseph Kell) Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) (Volume 1 of the Enderby quartet)
The Eve of St. Venus (1964)
Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964)
Language Made Plain (1964, rev. ed 1975)
A Vision of Battlements (1965)
Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966)
Enderby Outside (1968) (Volume 2 of the Enderby quartet)
MF (1971)
Napoleon Symphony (1974): one post on the novel's musical conceit and another on the verbal side.
The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974) (Volume 3 of the Enderby quartet)
Moses: A Narrative (1976)
Beard's Roman Women (1976)
ABBA ABBA (1977)
1985 (1978)
Man of Nazareth (1979)
Earthly Powers (1980)
The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982)
This Man and Music (1983)
Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby (1984) (Volume 4 of the Enderby quartet)
Ninety-Nine Novels: the Best in English since 1939 (1984)
The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)
The Pianoplayers (1986)
The Confessions of Anthony Burgess: Little Wilson and Big God (1986); You've Had Your Time (1990)
Any Old Iron (1989)
The Devil's Mode (1989)
Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)
A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
Byrne: A Novel (in verse) (1995)

Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems (ed. Kevin Jackson; 2002)

Puma (2018)

Anthony Burgess, "Puma" (2018)

 This new Burgess science-fiction novel is actually old-new, or twice-old-new: new in the sense that it has never been published before now, but old because it was actually written long ago, and old-old in the sense that original draft was chopped-about, reworked and amalgamated with other material to make Burgess’s 1982 novel The End of the World News. Back in 1975 Richard Zanuck and David Brown, producers of Jaws, decided their next blockbuster would be a reboot or reworking of When Worlds Collide, and they hired Burgess to come up with a story. With characteristic industry Burgess completed a book-length prose treatment of the idea by January 1976, calling the world-ending object hurtling towards the Earth on a killing trajectory ‘Puma’ and naming the novel after it. The movie, though, was never made.

Then, in 1980, came the success, commercial and critical, of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. It seems his UK and US publishers asked for something comparable, a ‘big’ novel as a follow-up. Burgess responded by welding together a trimmed-down version of Puma (renaming the rogue planet ‘Lynx’) with two other book-length projects he had sitting around in his desk drawer: a novel about the life of Sigmund Freud, originally written at the instigation of Canadian television (who contemplated a TV series on the subject) and the libretto to an unproduced opera about Leon Trotsky visiting New York in 1917. These components were, Burgess conceded with rather devastating offhandedness in an author’s note, ‘shuffled together’ to make End of the World News, cut into chunks and distributed across the whole—the intention, Burgess claimed, was to mimic the choppiness of channel-hopping whilst watching TV.

Burgess aficionados, in other words, have seen this work before, and may be tempted to regard Puma’s standalone publication, a quarter century after its author’s death, as doubly refried beans. That would be a mistake, though. This is a good SF novel, in many ways better than the version included so choppily in the 1982 publication. Here, freed of its adulterations, the story acquires genuine narrative momentum, and its worldbuilding, though designedly schlocky, builds an impressive heft. It is the kind of story that needs to barrel along, interruption-free, and in this version it is allowed to do precisely that.

The disaster, first impending and then actual, is parsed through more than a dozen main characters, Towering Inferno style—1974’s biggest movie and a manifest influence on Burgess’s approach. There are some splendid set-pieces, especially towards the end, and several of them were not included in End of the World News. Governments lie to their populations assuring them that Puma will pass, but they know the impact will destroy the earth, and work in secret to build a space-ark to carry a workable population of humans away from the disaster. The puritanically eugenicist process by which potential crewmembers are chosen (by a computer called VOZ) facilitates a deal of plunging Burgessian satire at the wickedness of calibrating human beings by criteria of absolute efficiency. Vanessa Frame, a pneumatic genius scientist who happens to be the daughter of the designer of the spaceship project is chosen, but her unfaithful, potbellied husband Val Frame finds himself excluded—in the End of the World News version he is deliberately left off the roster; here he is included at his wife’s insistence but gets stranded in a storm-wracked and flooded New York as the rest of the crew fly to Colorado to join the craft.

Val falls-in with the larger-than-life Courtland Willett, a hugely fat and rambunctious actor, once a Shakespearian player, now reduced to dressing up as Santa Claus in shopping malls. There’s a certain amount of verve to the way Burgess writes Willett—fierce, gluttonous, kindly, bold, lecherous, as easily moved to tears as anger, a drinker and smoker and roisterdoister—though, frankly, he loves and so indulges his creation a little too much. Comparisons with Falstaff are invited by the novel itself, but Burgess knows he’s pastiche Shakespeare rather than the real thing (he’s a Will-ette, rather than the full Will) and perhaps as a result overcompensates with long stretches of tiresome Elizabethan swearing: ‘snotnosed bastard … and now that I have leisure and breath, I might add that you are a slabberdegullion druggel, a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol and a turdgut’ [48]. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way and, I’m sorry to say, Burgess gives us great scads of it.

Anyway: Val and Willett become friends, and trek across the disintegrating USA trying to reach the space-ark before it takes-off. They are, as it turns out, heading for an interestingly different novel’s-end than the one Burgess decided on for End of the World News.

Val is that most venal of figures, a writer of science fiction who supplements his income by teaching university courses on the genre; and Burgess takes this pretext to unload some de haut en bas sneering at the genre he is himself writing. Copies of Val’s ‘well-made but trivial fantasies’, we are told, ‘were to be found in airports, tobacconists and pornoshops, and they existed also in cassette adaptations and microfiche’ [34]—a nice example of how rapidly visions of the near future (Burgess in 1975 imagining America in 1999) tend to date. We’re given samples of Val’s fiction, including a number of fruity-sounding titles: ‘Eyelid of Slumber, Maenefa the Mountain, Cuspclasp and Flukefang, Desirable Sight, The Moon Dwindled’ [34]—a rather pleasing Jack Vance vibe to these, I’d say (actually the titles are all lifted from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems, a favourite of Burgess's). But Val himself loathes his own chosen genre, and unloads on his students.

‘Science fiction is, let’s be honest, ultimately a triviality,’ said Val. ‘It’s brain-tickling, no more. The American cult of mediocrity, which rejects Shakespeare, Milton, Harrison and Abramovitz, had led us to the nonsense of running university courses in science fiction. Christ, we should be studying Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.’ This was indiscrete, he was also surprised at the vehemence with which he condemned the very thing he was being paid to promote. [37]

Burgess’s ostentatious flashing his cloven-hoof, here, is more endearing than shocking, the closest this honestly foursquare disaster novel comes to irony. Indeed, it is placed in a complicating context by editor Paul Wake’s inclusion, as appendices, of various accounts of 1970s SF titles from Burgess’s prodigious backlist of book-reviews. Some of these are as dismissive as Burgess’s Val: of Herbert’s Dune Burgess says ‘there is very little intellectual content in SF; neo-technological gimmicks don’t really tickle the higher centres’, and reviewing Gollancz’s 1978 list of genre titles he indulges in some satire at the expense of the gobbledygook he considers SF to be. Not only is it ‘a category of near-popular sub-art, meaning bad typewriterese on coarse paper’, but

SF plots are easily devised. We are a million years in the future, and the world is run by the Krompire, who have police robots called patates under the grim chief with the grafted cybernetic cerebrum whose name is Peruna. There is a forbidden phoneme. If you utter it you divide into two entities which continue to subdivide until you become a million microessences used to feed the life system of Aardappel, the disembodied head of the Krompir. But there is a phonemic cancellant called a burgonya, obtainable on the planet Kartoffel. You can get there by Besterian teleportation, but the device for initiating the process is in the hands of Tapuch Adamah, two-headed head of the underground Jagwaimo, Man must resist the System. The Lovers, who amate according to banned traditional edicts of Terpomo, proclaim Love. [241]

‘Type it out,’ Burgess instructs us, ‘and correct nothing: you will find yourself in the Gollancz SF constellation.’ But the reference to Alfred Bester in amongst all that potato-themed knockabout speaks to a man more familiar with the genre than he is letting-on. And other appendices included here, not least a lengthy, astute and enthusiastic introduction to J G Ballard’s collected short stories, gives the lie to his curmudgeon mode: where SF was concerned, Burgess both knew whereof he spoke and appreciated the things that the genre could do that mimetic fiction could not. I mean: look again at that sketched-out parody—let’s call it A Clockwork Potato—and confess: doesn’t it sound that a rather wonderful book? I’d certainly read it.

Andrew Biswell, director of Manchester’s ‘International Anthony Burgess Foundation’, and Paul Wake, of Manchester Metropolitan University, are general editors of the ongoing collected edition of Burgess’s complete works, the ‘Irwell edition’. Handsome comprehensively-annotated editions of 1965’s A Vision of Battlements 1986’s The Pianoplayers and 1976’s Beard’s Roman Women have already appeared; other titles are in the proverbial pipeline, or perhaps we should say (since Burgess never smoked a pipe) in the metaphorical cigarillo box. 

And notwithstanding his occasional grumpy animadversions against the genre, science fiction fans have good reason to be interested in Burgess. He wrote near future dystopia in A Clockwork Orange (1962) of course, as well as an influential overpopulation yarn The Wanting Seed (1962)—in fact Burgess complained that Harry Harrison stole both the idea and the reveal of Make Room! Make Room! from this novel—and 1985 (1978) is a reworking of Orwell’s celebrated novel. Moreover, Burgess novels not usually considered SF turn out, on closer inspection, to have key genre elements: the husband in One Hand Clapping (1961) is a telepath who has visions of impending global apocalypse, Inside Mr Enderby (1963) is narrated by time-travellers from the future (who in one scene manifest and creep around sleeping Enderby’s bedroom) and Burgess’s last published novel Byrne (1995) returns to near-future dystopian territory. Puma makes a fascinating companion piece to his lifelong, conflicted engagement with genre, quite apart from being an extremely good read in its own right.

[This review originally appeared in Foundation, 2018]

Revolutionary Sonnets (2002): the Bad and the Good

Burgess was neither a very good nor a particularly bad poet, but he did work hard at his verse over many decades, and that fact resulted in some notable moments. It's an interesting question as to why he persevered so assiduously. Part of it, I daresay, was his pleasure in the challenge, and his satisfaction in his ability to meet that challenge. No shame in that, and if it results in writing that is the very definition of 'workmanlike' I certainly don't mean the word in a condescending sense. Though Enderby, under whose name AB passed off a good proportion of his own work, claimed 'I stand for form and denseness, the seventeenth-century tradition modified' Burgess's own skill was in more fluid, playful and punful (we could say: 'poems, punny each') work, in lighter verse, libretti and the like. The two idioms might appear to have something important in common, namely 'wit'; but it strikes me that wit points in quite different directions in these two cases. Not exactly mapping onto this is the sense that Burgess, like Wordsworth, was capable of both writing well and writing badly without, it seems, himself being able to tell those two modes apart. If I start with the Bad, it is only because I prefer to finish with the Good.

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Kevin Jackson's 2002 selection of Burgess for Carcanet's 'Poetry Pléiade' series provokes such questions. It's a slim volume (barely squeaking past 100 pages) that aims to gives us tasters from the whole of Burgess's life, from his earliest published work through to stuff written in his last decade, rather than more substantial samples. As a result it sometimes feels indicative rather than exemplary. Andrew Biswell's Guardian review of the volume noted some of the 'surprisingly large number of Burgess's poems' not included here, including 'the verse interludes from The Worm and the Ring, 'A Long Trip to Tea-Time' and 'One Hand Clapping'; the long poems and acrostics from Napoleon Symphony; the 'Elegy for X' from Hockney's Alphabet; the songs from A Long Trip to Tea-Time and from the Broadway musical, Cyrano' (although actually Jackson does include material from that latter). Biswell goes on:

The most disappointing omission is 'An Essay on Censorship', Burgess's long verse-letter to Salman Rushdie (written immediately after the 1989 fatwa), a spirited imitation of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man. Can Jackson be persuaded to add it to a second edition, or must we wait for a fuller, more scholarly volume of Collected Poems?

In his intro Jackson, a touch pompously, 'hands the daunting task of editing The Complete Poems of Anthony Burgess on, with all good wishes, to the as yet unborn scholar of the twenty-second or twenty-third century' [xv]. This volume is more by way of an act of homage (there's a touching 'personal note' at the end of the preface that portrays the Burgess Jackson knew in real life, meeting him several times, as a fundamentally kind, decent, rather shy individual) and that's fine; although there are signs of haste too. I don't just mean in the scantiness of the selection, but on the level of typo ('.Enderby', viii) and argument: 'until this publication of Revolutionary Sonnets and other poems,' Jackson claims, 'only one of those threescore books listed on Burgess's increasingly crowded "By the same author" pages was ever offered to the world as "verse"' [vii]. He means Moses (a work 'which found few readers and fewer advocates'); but this ignores Byrne, an omission made more puzzling by the fact that on the very next page Jackson talks about Byrne in glowing terms. Not to worry: Jackson's annotation to the poems themselves is helpful and his headnotes to each poem often excellent.

Revolutionary Sonnets is divided into four sections. The first collects most of the 'F. X. Enderby' poetry under the same title that Wilson first published five of them (as by 'John Burgess Wilson' or 'JBW') in the Transatlantic Review in 1966: 'Revolutionary Sonnets'. Since the poems themselves are by no means revolutionary in terms of form or address, the title presumably refers to their thematic interest in the linked revolutions of the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther is demoted to a squawking bird: 'a martin's nest clogging the cathedral clock' [3]) and the Romantic creation of a new poetry of affective subjectivity and transcendence. Burgess-as-Enderby, Catholic and metaphysical-manqué, resists both revolvings, and perhaps it is this reactionary quality that explains why I bounce so hard off his poetry in this mode. Or perhaps the problem is that I, as reader, lack access to the objective correlative to which Burgess adverts. Because not only do I own this lack, I don't agree with Eliot that 'objective correlative' is a true or useful description of pre-Romantic verse. I've fretted over some of these poems on this blog before, when they appeared in the livery of Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, and don't propose to spend too much time going over it all again here.

Put it this way: re-reading these poems led me to the judgment expressed in the first line of this blogpost. Some of these poems are interesting and some of the lines are eloquent ('Prudence, prudence, the pigeons call' and 'Summer 1940' aren't bad poems). Most are blotted with awkward or unconvincing moments, as if Burgess's fascination with multi-layered Empsonian semantics simply distracted him from the control of tone that is so central to poetic effectiveness. 'To Tirzah' is two stanzas, the first mock-heroic ('you being the gate/where the army went through,/would you renew/The triumph?') the second deliberately downbeat and quotidian. But the latter strikes a clumsy and bathetic note, banalising its point:

But some morning when you are washing up
Or some afternoon, making a cup
Of tea, possibly you will see
The heavens opening and a lot
Of saints singing with bells ringing.
But then again, possibly not. [9]

If that last line is aiming for insouciance or stylish offhandness it fails, and trips itself into mere E J Thribbishness, something for which the ground is prepared by the ill-judged 'a lot' or the wrenchingly Stuffed Owl enjambment of 'cup/Of tea'. Burgess certainly loves his internal rhymes, but here he overdoes it ('tea possiblee you will see fiddlededee'). The Enderby poems are full of stuff like this. Also of wincing archaisms: the line 'Augustus on a guinea sate in state' sacrifices the validity of 'sat' to its cod-eighteenth-century archness of 'sate' for the sake, again, of the internal rhyme. Later in that same sonnet we're told the

    pillars nodded, melted, and were seen
As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat. [5]

... which doubles down on the bizarreness of architectural supports nodding (flexing which part of their neck, exactly?) with the mixed-metaphor of a goddess sitting on something as insubstantial as a shadow. Is it supposed to be the shadow of a goddess sat on the shadow of the pillar? In which case how can you tell a goddess by her shadow? Or is it an actual goddess sat on a shadow pillar? How would that work? Or is the goddess sitting in a chair or throne and the shadows are a separate element? Confused!

Of course, much of this early verse is, precisely, early verse, with the ill-judgement characteristic of juvenilia, a fondness for archaic elevations of tone ('As when thou first didst bring that art of heat/To nations bestial still and barbarous' [21]), clunky inversions ('But lest with so much weight the streets should rock,' [30]) and gestures in the direction of profundity that never rise above portentousness and, indeed, pretentiousness:

What we made out of light
The light would not have.
So we hollowed out a grave
Where light has forever set. [24]

Deep, man.

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Still: it's bad manners to mock a writer's juvenilia. And the larger point is: I very much enjoyed reading the non-Enderby poems included in here, especially: (a) most of the shorter pieces in Part 1; (b) the 'Longer Poems' of Part 2, especially the neoPopian verse epistle in heroic couplets called 'O Lord, O Ford, God Help Us, Also You: A New Year's Message for 1975' originally published in the New York Times Magazine (the titular Ford is Gerald, who had taken over from Watergate-disgraced resignee Nixon); (c) Part 3's Translations and Adaptations' (specifically a bit of the Pervigilium Veneris from The Eve of Saint Venus, and a bunch of Belli's sonnets from ABBA ABBA); and, finally (d) Part 4's varied selection of 'Dramatic Verse, Libretti and Lyrics for Musicals'.

To take these in reverse order. Burgess's work as a librettist shows how skilled he was at this work: ingenious and inventive, able to blend expression to rhythmic structures deftly and effectively (technically much harder to do than people sometimes think, this). I wonder if the thing that prevented these lyrics and libretti from making a larger impact, culturally, is that Burgess is too clever for the medium. Two examples: first, from his version of Weber's Oberon. A mermaid is singing:

Now and then I can see up aloft
A small flying fish with a buzzing so soft
The stars themselves in their meadow, ignoring its flight,
Find themselves swallowed in mouthfuls of light.
But when day's octopus blazes with red
I plunge to the depths and go sweetly to bed.
Clods and scrods, all alive alive oh,
Life's dripping wet in the watery waters below. [71]

This, I'd say, is really sprightly, well-written verse; although as a song lyric it lacks the directness, and therefore the immeasurably greater cultural penetration, of 'Darlin it's better/Down where it's wetter/Take it from me ....' Or this, from Burgess's musical version of Ulysses, in which medical students complain that 'too many babies are born/A fertile womb is a thing of gloom/Soon there won't be standing room':

Copulation without population
Is the thing we all desire.
May God preserve the condom,
The pessary too, of course. [77]

This is fine, but lacks both the satirical force and the sheer funnies of Python's later 'Every Sperm is Sacred' song.

Burgess' best poems were his occasional pieces. One of the very finest is this brief but plangent lyric, in which word-play, pared down to letter-play, pierces the carapace of mere pseudo-Metaphysical 'wit' and touches something mysteriously rather moving:

Our Norman betters
Taught English letters
To bathe in the fresh
Warm springs of the south.

So turn your backs on
Anglo-Saxon;
The þ in the flesh,
The æ in the mouth

The aforementioned 'O Lord, O Ford, God Help Us, Also You' is a splendidly dyspeptic grumble about the world of the mid-70s going to hell in a handbasket, mostly because of the corruption of politics: 'politics [which] was metaphysics, art,/Eloquence, knowledge of the human heart' is now 'sunk into a disrepute/Shameful and shameless' [38]. I wonder if its original American readers might have been puzzled by the poem's tendency to divert its ire from Nixon et al to the ongoing miner's strike in the UK ('the blackmail of the unions!' Burgess blusters, 'some great/Cryptoconspiracy all bloody red/That loves to strike and striking strikes us dead!' [40]). And we, with hindsight, may doubt that any personal inconvenience experienced by Maltese-resident Burgess informed the line 'So England shivers and the coal's undug'. Still, the best part of this poem is the weird turn it takes at its end into Jeremiad prophesy of impending cannibalism, that's cannibalism, in the Western world:

As you believe that men have reached the moon,
Believe that anthropophagy will soon
Solve all our problems, justifying war,
Since here's a noble cause to wage it for.
The fighting young, the flower of every land,
Will fall in battle and will then be canned.
Try this, the supermarkets will proclaim:
Munch MANCH or MONCH or MENSCH, or some such name. [41]

The sarcasm! It burns! Burgess wasn't the only person in the 70s to think overpopulation would bring disaster ('fresh millions added every year/To swell the hordes of those ordained to starve') and, accordingly, not the only person from that generation to look a bit scaremongery-foolish, in hindsight. Nonetheless, there's something gnarly and splendid in that last line.

Other highlights include Burgess's genuinely funny preface to Ogden Nash's Candy is Dandy, written in pastiche Nashese and a two-page poem called 'The Sword' retelling a story from his time in New York when Burgess was locked out of the flat he was staying in , and stomped around the city leaning his claudicated bad leg on his swordstick/walking-stick, which is both precisely observed and well versified, and also does interesting things with a complex key-in-the-lock, sword-in-the-sheath, penis-in-the-vagina thematic perhaps descends distantly from Byron's 'the sword outwears the sheath, the soul outwears the breast'. There's also an 8-line lyric from Burgess's unfinished novel It Is The Miller's Daughter:

Love water, love it with all your being,
But only from the well or the picnic spring.
Tasteless, but grateful in summer, embracing the hollow
Of any vessel. But never never follow
Water to the river or sea. Nor ever call
Master or Mistress Water in the bacchanal
Of public waters stirred up by the rough
Wind's rhetoric. Water from the well is enough. [31]

A slightly different version of this lyric was, as Jackson notes, published in You've Had Your Time:

Love water, love it with all your being,
But only from the tap, never the spring.
Tasteless, but grateful in summer, embracing the hollow
Of any vessel. But never never call
On Master or Mistress Water in the fall
Of rivers or the sea churned by the rough
Winds' enmity. Water from the tap is enough. [31]

Actually that amounts to a different poem. It's supposed to have been written by a French poet 'Albert Ritaine'. If that name is a joke then I can't fathom it; but I like to imagine the original went something like this:

Aimez-vous de l'eau, avec tout votre coeur,
Mais seulement à partir des puits de pique-nique.
Insipide, mais reconnaissant en été, embrassant le creux
De tout navire. Mais jamais ne jamais suivre
L'eau à la rivière ou la mer. Ni jamais appeler
Maître ou Maîtresse eau dans la bacchanale
Des eaux publiques suscitée par l'état brut
La rhétorique de Vent. L'eau du puits suffit.

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

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Byrne, after reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:2:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:3:

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

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

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

Marley's Ghosts: A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)

:1:

Marlowe was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. In fact, Burgess specifically prods us to this Dickensian ghostliness by repeatedly refusing to nail Malowe's surname to the page: he is 'Marley or Morley or Marlowe' throughout. We also get: 'To my mother in Newmarket, then. Mr—what is it—Merlin? Marlin?' [DMID, 13] which is, first, suitably wizardly to intimate the magic he creates on stage; and then nicely fishy in a novel much concerned with the Christian ΙΧΘΥΣ, almost to the point of identifying assassinated Marlowe with murdered Christ. Kit (as Burgess calls him) replies to the above quoted question with: 'Marlowe will do. Or Marley. Marl is clay and lime, my name's lowly constant.' Dirt, because Marley is of the earth, earthy (indeed buried in the earth since 1593); but also because Burgess's mode of writing historical fiction is not to stint the grime and the shit, the dead dogs in the sewers with swollen bellies, the chamber pots emptied out of windows. And there's the sense that Marlowe's sexuality is in itself somehow dirty, earthy, shitty because focussed on that particular orifice: Burgess is not judgemental here, and certainly not homophobic: but he is careful to be true to the lineaments of a homophobic, persecutory society, both in terms of other people's perceptions and Marlowe's conflicted self-esteem. Mostly, though, it is 'Marley' because this is a book that is haunted, by an author who has been haunted. It is in one sense about that haunting. In the novel's postscript Burgess records that he wrote his university thesis on Marlowe as the Luftwaffe overhead 'trundled over Moss Side' threatening to literalise Dr Faustus's desperate promise 'I'll burn all my books'. He adds, with some pride, that 'all the historical facts' he relates 'are verifiable.'

There's another ghost at the feast: Burgess himself. A Dead Man in Deptford was the last novel Burgess published whilst alive. Whether or not intimations of his own mortality informed his writing, he styles the book as narrated by two separate versions of this ghostly presence. The ostensible narrator is a young player in the Admiral's and later the Lord Chamberlain's men: he goes unnamed for most of the novel, occasionally includes data concerning his own life (for instance, how puberty means that he passes from playing women to playing young men) and finally reveals his identity: 'My own name you will find, if you care to look, in the Folio of Black Will's plays, put out by his friends Heming and Condell in 1623. In the comedy of Much Ado About Nothing, by some inadvertancy, I enter with Leonato and others under my own identity and not, as it should be, the guise of Balthasar to sing to ladies that sigh no more.' This is the First Folio stage direction (Much Ado 2:3) 'Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio, and Iacke Wilson', used as an epigraph to MF and several times mentioned by Burgess as a notable co-incidence, which indeed it is.

Clearly the actor's name has crept into the final text when it ought to be the character's, an easy error to make when (we assume) the MS is scribbled all over with prompts and actorly names and so on. Later editions correct to Balthasar.

It is more than just egoism on Burgess's part to make so much of his name 'Jack Wilson', haunting the official text of Shakespeare's great play. It gives us a glimpse of what is supposed to be hidden behind the scenes, the day-to-day of putting on a play. And that's what Dead Man in Deptford is about too. I don't just mean it's about the practicalities of writing and staging plays, although there's certainly a lot of that stuff in here. I mean, the way the theatre stands as a flexible metaphor for social life itself: the way we perform a public persona which (in this, Elizabethan context) includes such social virtues as religious orthodoxy and observance, politeness, controlled heterosexual desire and the like, whilst behind the scenes (as it were) we perform blasphemy, rudeness and homosexual passion.

'Jacke Wilson', our narrator, opens the story with a ghostly narratological self-exclupation:

You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where's the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning. [DMID, 3]

So it is: the narrative very often follows Marlowe into closed rooms, relates secret conversations with spymasters or lovers, or even travels inside the main character's head. The omniscience of the standard 3rd-person omniscient narrator is predicated upon effectively supernatural access ('fair is foul and foul is fair') to the lives of its characters. By gifting his first-person narrator with omniscience Burgess is trying something formally quite bold: like Marley's ghost, Wilson sees things that no mortal eye can see and like Marley's ghost he wants us to see them too. Eyes are introduced at the beginning ('the right and very substance of his seeing') in part because it is because Marlowe is to die, or has already died, depending on how you see it, from a stab wound to his right eye. Burgess closes the novel with this assassination, vividly described as, in effect, the externalisation of the act of omniscient narration itself. After drinking with him all day, Walsingham's men Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley finally strike:

Kit's mind rose above all, observing, noting. The fear belonged all to his body. The dagger-point was too close to his eye for his eye to see it. Frizer spoke very foully:

—Filthy sodomite. Filthy buggering seducer of men and boys. Nasty Godless sneering fleering bastard. Aye, I will lay the egg.

So he thrust. The eye's smoothness deflected the blade to what lay above under the bone. Kit ... heard the scream in his throat and saw with his left eye Poley, recoiling from him making the signum crucis. Dying, he knew the scream would not die with him, not yet. It lived for a time its own life. He even knew, marvelling, that his body had fallen, thudding. Then he knew nothing more. [DMID, 267]

This out-of-body-ness is much more about the protocols of the novel than it is about table rapping or spiritualism or the like. Marlowe-haunting-Marlowe is not even the final example of the various Marley-ghosts haunting this account, for the book ends with Burgess himself stepping forward, on the cusp of his own literal death and Keats-like holding out his hand, warm and capable, towards the reader:

Your true author speaks now, I that die these deaths, that feed this flame. I put off the ill-made disguise and, four hundred years after that death at Deptford, mourn as if it had happened yesterday. The disguise is ill-made not out of incompetence but of necessity, since the earnestness of the past becomes the joke of the present, a once-living language is turned into the stiff archaism of puppets. Only the continuity of a name rides above the grumbling compromise. But, as the dagger pierces the optic nerve, blinding light is seen not to be the monopoly of the sun. That dagger continues to pierce, and it will never be blunted. [DMID, 269]

Ghosts are made of mourning, of course; and Burgess's chain-rattling and moaning here is deprecating not only the actual dead man but the incapacity of art adequately to resuscitate him. Grumbling compromise only seems like Burgess's false modesty. Grumbling is a species of mourning too, although we might think it a grief compromised by petty or personal concerns. How can mourning be anything other than personal, though? And what is mourning if not a bitterly reluctant compromise between the tidal-tug of death's misery on the one hand and the need to go on living on the other?

What's especially nice about this Burgessian coda-paragraph is the way it flags up the partiality, and indeed materiality, of book-writing and literary production even as it appeals to the white radiance of an eternity floating panoptically above all that. The sharp knife is truth, or at least (Burgess being too canny for absolutes) a sort of truth: 'it was Jove's bolt. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth' [31].

A Dead Man in Deptford is a book of extraordinary richness and depth, beautifully written and full of evocative detail. To read it alongside an account of Marlowe's actual life is to be struck by how little Burgess invents, and therefore how cleverly he works his data into fictional form. It never feels forced, or infodumped. He even apologises to the reader in his afterword that one well-known Elizabethan thug was, distractingly to a 20th/21st-century reader, called George Orwell (although after all, he notes, 'that expungeable bravo had a better claim to the name than Eric Blair'). The prose gestures towards Elizabethan English without going the full-on hard-core Elizabethan vernacular. Indeed, another of the book's moments of autohaunting occurs when the narrator, supposedly relating the whole book in Elizabethan quotes from the coroner's report on the killing of William Bradleigh ('Bradleigh maide assalte upon Th. Watson and then and there wounded strooke and illtreated him with sworde and dagere of iron and steele so that he despared of hys lyfe' [DMID, 173]) and we are provided with a jolting reminder of the relative modernity of Wilson's atmospheric prose. Things like this are here, deliberately I suspect, to foreground the disjunctions of history itself.

The novel is in three sections of unequal length. First: a 110-page Part One, not subdivided into chapters. We follow Marlowe (Marley, Merlin) from student days at Cambridge, through recruitment into Walsingham's spy-service, spooking about on the Continent trying to uncover Catholic plots against Elizabeth, and succeeding, or at least contributing to the team that so succeeds. He shags some men, gets drunk in taverns, swears and roisterdoisters. His frequent absences violate Cambridge's rules on residency, and the university wants to deny him his M.A., but the Powers That Be, grateful for Kit's undercover work for the state, apply pressure and he gets his award. Part Two (120 pages) concerns his burgeoning playwriting and its success; his friendship with Walter Raleigh and adoption of Raleigh's foul habit of 'smoking'. This in turn tangles him in the web of court politics, which mean that Raleigh's enemies have it in for him. This part ends with Thomas Kyd, his right hand tortured horribly, 'confessing' that certain atheistical writings found in his study were dictated to him by 'Mr Marlin, Marley, Marlowe ('dagger at back'). Part Three is short; barely 25 pages. Kit is questioned in Westminster and denies everything; but he senses that he needs to get away. His association with Raleigh, quite apart from his sodomy and public blasphemies, have placed him in danger. He travels to Deptford with a view to taking a ship abroad and so escaping the horrors of Elizabethan justice.  There he falls in with three of Walsingham's men, and they kill him.

Burgess's Marlowe (Marley, Merlin) is a short-tempered aggressive man with a contrastingly considered, insightful, thoughtful interior life. He ponders God's grace, and indeed His very existence (after walking out of a particularly oppressive lecture on eternal damnation, he revels in nature: 'Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned'). He frets over how to make poetry and theatre more true to life, more potent and memorable. And above all he shags attractive men.

This is not the first of Burgess's novels to be intimately concerned with the male member (check out ABBA ABBA); nor is it the first to take a sexually active gay man as its protagonist. What's new here is the prolonged phallic focus of the way the protagonist's desire is focused. This constellates a number of recurring referents: daggers most notably, since penetration by a dagger is the quietus towards which the novel as a whole is moving; but also rods; carrots (38, 91: probably a little anachronistic, this) and references to Catullus's pedicabo and irrumabo (73, 74). Knives speak to the dangers as well as the thrill of pedication: sometimes intimate, sometimes mock-violent. Or even actually violent: 'Kit carried no knife, but he sensed that there could be knives here too. He had heard of one in London who had carried his knife to his faithless boy paramour' [51]. Knives can make ghosts. And that the phallus is haunted by the ghost of the fatally penetrative blade it part of its dark glamour, sexually speaking.

He [Skeres, one of Walsingham's agents] feigned with his dagger to strike Kit to the heart, smiling rather than grinning. [93]

—Draw, I will have you first, swiver of boys' arses. And Kit drew and lunged ... Bradley had now sword in right and dagger in left. [167]

[Skeres, again] Thought is a dagger, he said, and looked for applause. [258]

Marlowe reads of the murder of Edward II ('they held him down and withal put into his fundament a horn and through the same they thrust up into his body a hot spit ... that was in Holinshed, the end of the king that loved Galveston's arse better than his own realm' [201]), and writes it into his most notorious play. His assassins question him about his 'unnatural' proclivities. He compares it to smoking, likewise both 'unnatural' and pleasurable. Frizer tries a pipe and chokes. 'Novelty,' Kit tells him, 'oft entails suffering'.

Like the sodomitical act, Skeres said, sitting. It must be most painful to have a hard rod thrust into the nether orifice. That was a most painful punishment you had for the King in your play. Painful but fitting. [257]

'The passion of the butcher's knife,' says Burgess, spelling it out for us, 'was the passion of coupling' [95]. We take, as it were, the point. The novel quotes a great deal of Marlowe's own poetry and drama, augmenting it occasionally with concocted cod-Marlovian pieces. Here's one quatrain, supposedly extemporised by Marlowe in the pub:

So breathe then of the dusty floor,
Thou pallet I may lie upon
And I shall thrust till both are sore
But ever with dis-cret-i-on. [26]

Check out the acrostic.

To be a little more precise: Burgess is interested in balancing the rude physicality of all these various buggeries with a complimentary (I'm tempted to say: dialectical) set of immaterialities. This brings us back to ghosts, spectres, hauntings, the evanescent spirit. Breath, rather than cock. This side of the novel has to do with speech—that is, with poetry—and inspiration, with the love that by accompanying physical passion intensifies it. 'Inspiration' is explored in terms of Marlowe's own writing, and in terms of the influence he had. Burgess brings Shakespeare into the novel (calling him variously Shogspaw, Shagspeer (where the Earl of Southampton was concerned, W.S. actually did shag a peer), Choxpeer and Jacquespere: this last frenchifying the influence Shakespeare has had upon our very own Jack, or Iacke Wilson) in order in part to show the two collaborating on Henry VI Part 1. Marlowe 'influenced' Shakespeare and so played his part in bequeathing the greatness of blank verse to posterity.

The physical is always accompanied by the spectre of the intangible, just as the spiritual can only actualise its virtue in flesh. In the novel, tobacco symbolically occupies the juncture of these two magisteria: matter and spirit, flesh and breath. Smoke is insubstantial enough to emblematise inspiration, but material enough to cause the neophyte smoker to cough and splutter. Smoking, and pondering lines from Dr Faustus and using old draft pages of Tamberlaine to light his pipe, Marlowe (Marley, Merlin) thinks to himself:

He smoked, and the word would come in ... But here was an organ summoned for a pleasure innutritive, the buggery of the lungs. [132]

Quite a striking phrase, that last, and appropriate to the experience of smoking. He goes on: 'If Christ known it, would he have transmitted his substance in smoke? The eucharist a pipe bowl.'

The novel gives its subject the famous remark attributed to Marlowe from the testimony of government informer Richard Baines: 'all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools'. It is as if the non-generative nature of gay sex becomes precisely the grounds of its value; the innutritive our soul's nutrition. Burgess (the smoker) finds in smoke the ideal symbol for the phsyicality of the spectre, the ghostliness of the material.

:2:

I should perhaps make explicit what has been implicit in my account so far. A Dead Man in Deptford strikes me as both a great historical novel and a great gay novel. It was published between The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Folding Star (1994), and shares with Hollinghurst's work the ability to constellate an exquisite literary sensibility with an unflinching apprehension of the physical practicalities of gay sex. The 90s saw the first great flourishing in the UK of mainstream gay fiction, and perhaps it is Burgess's own authorial sexual orientation that has tended to stop people discussing A Dead Man At Deptford as part of that. Or perhaps the problem is in postulating a 'that' at all. In a 2012 interview with the Oxionian Hollinghurst said: 'one gets into very dubious territory when tries to speculate about what a gay aesthetic might be. I believe gay aesthetics take so many different forms as to make the very idea of a definition seem almost meaningless.' He qualifies himself at once: 'they may, in the vaguest sense, involve certain kinds of camouflage and certain kinds of display', and we certainly recognise this novel, and much of Burgess's oeuvre. Camoflage and display: the closeted character and the flamboyantly out character.

Were Scrooge and Marley a gay couple? I can't believe it hasn't been discussed somewhere. Of course, in a closeted age it could not have been a matter of public discussion. But then again, the metaphor of coming out of the closet opens itself in various directions. Perhaps miser Scrooge was as miserable as he was (locked in his tiny counting house, snapping at people who fall in heterosexual love) because he was closeted in this other sense. Then again A Christmas Carol dramatises the most extreme example of de-closeting in Marley. He has left not only the closet of social stigma and self repression, but the closet of the life of the body altogether. Saying this is, in part, to suggest that 'coming out of the closet' might mean more than just the act of individual honesty, and perhaps bravery. It could take on an almost transcendental quality, hinting at an absolute freedom from all the lies that define adulthood. In its first flush, Queer Theory certainly sought to departicularise the gay experience, and make something universal out of the oppressed and hidden group that shucks off secrecy and conformity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to take one example, has waxed dithyrhambic on the possibilities of the mode of criticism she in part helped to create:

One of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. [Sedgwick, Tendencies (1993), 8]

It's not to accuse Dead Man in Deptford of construing its topic monolithically to suggest that the novel doesn't subscribe to quite so rainbow a vision of Marlowe's queerness. In one sense with this, Burgess was ahead of his time. Marlowe was a great poet of erotic love, and centuries of heterosexual lovers have taken his Hero and Leander, or his Passionate (male) Shepherd to his (female) Love, as hymns to straight passion. But of course these 'straight' erotic poems are haunted in a Marley chain-clanking manner by Marlowe's gayness. He is a violent, self-destructive, angry man; brooding over death and damnation, convinced of his life as a kind of dead end, and it is precisely from these aspects of himself that he generates his transcendent energy and poetic beauty. That his drive is deathly is something advertised in the very title of the novel. The striking thing about the novel is that it refuses all condemnation of this. Its queerness, I would say, anticipates the work of Lee Edelman.

Queerness figures outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal … queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure. [Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), 3]

Leo Bersani's summary of Edelman's radical thesis in No Future casts a suggestive light on Burgess's project:

In a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of 'reproductive futurism,' homosexuality has been assigned—and should deliberately and defiantly take on—the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality.

Quite apart from anything else, framing the novel this way adds specific resonance and depth to Burgess's characteristic emphasis on the shit as well as the glamour (something present in all his historical writing). This is more than a general and rather shallow rebuttal to those fools who think the past all Pre-Raphaelite prettiness. Rather it is a dramatic actualisation of the abject that defines Edelmanian queerness, and all the possibilities of that queerness.

In an early scene, as he composes the 'See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!' line from Faustus, Burgess's slyly turns Christopher Marlowe into Enderby:

He must needs sit bare-arsed on his jordan, hand scooping sweat from his brow, and void much black nastiness. His torchecul was yet another discarded page of his play. Heaving then from wretched odours of ordure that filled his little room, he opened the window to a raging November sunset. Streams in the firmament came to him and he grinned sadly at the division of body and soul. [132]

It's more than just self-referential this, I think: Marlowe, here, and Enderby in his quartet are both types of the poet who works by accepting the ordure-producing functions of humanity as the ground (the earth, the marl) from which fragrancy of poetry grows. Enderby, notionally heterosexual, hardly ever connects sexually with another. Marlowe in a sense is a better example, because a more typical human being where sex is concerned: which is to say, he tends to have it. That his rear-end is for more than just voiding makes him a less risible, more tragic figure than Enderby.

:3:

A coda. Reading the book, I made various notes on the endpapers and margins as I usually do; but I also wrote out five lines from the book upon the title page, underneath the actual title, motivated (I'm not sure) by a sense that they represented ghostly subtitles to the novel, haunting the titular thematics of death, debt and crossing-over (or comings-out). These:

The privilege of damnation. [52]

A Theology of Money. [108]

'Lord's book is man's book since God handles no quill.' [161] 

The Only Meaning is Syntax. [253]

Thought is a dagger. [259]

I write them out here. One more note: we've all read the story of the Christmas Carol (or, as I like to call it, 'Dead Man in Dickensfable'), which starts with Marley visiting the readerly p.o.v. character, Scrooge. We know that Marley is but the preliminary, the John-Baptist, preparing the way for the three actual ghosts. They have their equivalents in Burgess's novel. From the past we have the now-ghostly Iacke Wilson, a real figure from history. From the novel's present we have Jack Wilson himself, the same Anthony Burgess who identifies himself in the novel's last paragraph. But the novel also contains a spectral futurity, a time when both Jack Wilsons are as dead as one another, and a spirit unimagined by either steps forward to direct Scrooge's attention beyond the here-and-now and into the to-come. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, that rôle is played by me.

God bless us, every one.

Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)

It's tempting to read this odd little farrago (in the strict sense of the word) as a pendant to Burgess's This Man And Music (1983). But actually, for all its 148-page slimness and light-hearted silliness this is a more substantial and lasting intervention into 'thinking about music' than the earlier work. We get five different strands, varying not only in content but in form from one another, interleaved. First, in music heaven, we get a playscript dialogue of Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Wagner and a couple of other famous composers chatting about music, and God, and Mozart. This breaks off at p.16 to segue to 'Act 1' of an opera bouffe about Mozart's life, of which (this being a book) we only get the libretto. Some of the versifying for this sprightly enough, although some strikes a clangier note: rhyming 'piano', 'plan, oh' and 'soprano' [22] for instance (sopranno?), or several times pairing 'Mozart' and 'eternal art' [eg 57] which just doesn't work.

Act 1 ends on p.33 and we're back to heaven: Rossini, Stendhal and Berlioz in heaven's bar, ordering drinks from an unnamed 'Barman' ('forgive the deference. I've only just arrived' [34]—it's not spelled out, but I assume this minor character, with his solitary short speech, is Enderby). Act 2 of the musical starts up on p.40: Mozart married now to Constanze, composing for the cloddish Emperor, bickering with Salieri. All very Amadeusian. Back (p.59) to heaven, where Schoenberg shares a Martini with Gershwin. Act 3 (64-76) follows, although the musical is really starting to feel like it has outstayed its welcome. Then Henry James appears, to spar ponderously with Da Ponte ('really ... I am appalled') and we turn to a ten-page short story entitled 'K.550 (1788)'.

Let's pause here for a moment. This story revisits Napoleon Symphony territory, only more so: an experimental attempt to capture in prose the music of Mozart's 40th Symphony in G minor. That's the one that begins:

This is a 'purer' experiment than the much more capacious, macaronic Napoleon Symphony, and it seemed to me to work less well. Its opening paragraph gives you a flavour:

The squarecut pattern of the carpet. Squarecut the carpet's pattern. Pattern the cut square carpet. Stretching from open door to windows. Soon, if not burned, ripped, merely purloined, as was all too likely, other feet would, other feet would tread. He himself, he himself, he himself trod in the glum morning. From shut casement to open door and back to and to and back. Wig fresh powdered, brocade unspotted. patch on cheek new pimple in decorum and decency hiding, stockings silk most lustrous, hands behind folded, unfolded, refolded as he trod on squarecut pattern's softness. Russet the hue, the hue russet. Past bust of Plato, of Aristotle bust, Thucydides, Xenophon. Foreign voices trapped in print (he himself, he himself read) and print in leather, behind glass new polished, ranged ranged ranged, the silent army spoke in silence of certain truths, of above all the truth of the eternal stasis. Stasis stasis stasis. The squarecut pattern of the carpet. He trod. [81]

And so on, and on, tedious-repetitively. Repetitively. Repetitively. The repetition of musical notes accretes richness and depth; the repetition of words is merely monotonous, except where it is designedly comic (which it is not, here). There some sort of story, or at least the putting before us of a late eighteenth-century man and woman, but the whole interlude (let's call it a 'repetitative') makes tiresome reading. When it deviates from the 'purely' musical template it puts in question the need for the template in the first place, and when it adheres closely it produces banality. Are we, in effect, to sing He himself, he himself, he himself trod to the opening movement A1 theme?

If so I think we can agree: that's a rubbish lyric.

I'm not sure Burgess would disagree. The ten-page experimental short story is followed by a ten page dialogue between 'Anthony' and 'Burgess' that immediately concedes the point:

ANTHONY

Gibberish.

BURGESS

Yes, a good deal of it. There's a musical structure underneath, filched from Mozart, but one art cannot do the work of another. Music is all verbs. Well, there are occasional nouns, as in the opening of the Overture to The Magic Flute. There are phones but no phonemes. That gibberish is part of my programme of evasion. [92]

That paragraph contains more stimulating and thought-provoking observation on music than all eleven essays of This Man and Music combined.

Is music 'all verbs'? I wonder. At any rate this book doesn't sit still. 'Anthony' and 'Burgess' discuss music rather brilliantly; then we chop away to an abortive film-script of Mozartian biography, and the book finishes with the author addressing us in propria persona: 'I address the reader as an integrated, not one whimsically split into two. I have tried to dramatise; now I must try to be lyrical' [139].

I think one reason why this book is more effective than This Man and Music is that its dialogism is a genuine attempt to argue two different points of view. In the earlier book, Burgess was more or less dismissive of the idea that music is 'about' emotion, stressing instead its formal structures. Here he looks at the same question from both sides.

ANTHONY

Music is essentially an emotional experience. It makes one feel, not think.

BURGESS

True, if it doesn't move it's nothing. And yet it must, at its most authentic, make an intellectual appeal.

ANTHONY

The intellect is concerned with ideas. There are no ideas in music.

BURGESS

But what is an idea? A constraint upon emotion. A formulation, a formalisation, a form. The intellectual element in music is its form.  [95]

This is a genuinely interesting notion, although not one (I think) with which I agree. There is surely more to ideation than pure form, and surely ideas are more than just constraints upon emotion—I'm minded to object that opposing 'form' and 'emotion' in this manner ignores the form of emotion, which may even be its most important aspect. It may explain why Burgess was so hostile to pop, and youth culture as a whole. A Mozart symphony may indeed be predominantly the impression of a highly refined form upon music. On the other hand, rock and roll is (begging Eliot's pardon) surely not an escape from emotion but precisely the turning loose of emotion. In the book's most startling apothegm, Burgess solus dismisses the capacity for emotional life of a whole generation of people who happen to be younger than he: 'Romantic music, reaching its apogee in Tristran und Isolde, depended upon its capacity to rend the heart,' he says. 'Young people distrust emotion, indeed are hardly capable of it unless it takes the form of self-pity' [141]. Say what? (Earlier the 'Burgess' identity sternly tells the 'Anthony' one that 'Anarchic art is an impossibility' [99]. Let us, I suggest, never mind that bollocks.)

And actually Burgess's little book is far wiser than this. One of Mozart and the Wolf Gang's most fascinating insights is that music articulates the unconscious structures of subjectivity. One reason it is so hard to talk rationally or intellectually about the core intelligibility of music is surely that it shapes the unconscious rather than strokes the ego or bolsters the superego. Burgess phrases this rather differently, but to the same purpose:

If Mozart seemed to stand for a kind of imperial stasis, yet it ought to have been clear to the close listener that a chromatic restlessness was at work and that, within accepted frameworks, the situation of an individual soul, not an abstract citizen, was being delineated. Mozart was as Viennese as Freud. [144]

Wonderful. It's this version of Burgess alive to what he rather brilliantly calls the irony of form [130] that writes the best novels, and it's a genuine insight into the matter at hand. The notion that a non-referential, non-semantic mode of art can be ironic unpacks a deep truth about how music works, and also about how irony works. Quite the double whammy, conceptually speaking. It's almost a disappointment when Burgess reverts to the point he worries over so unprofitably in This Man And Music: the 'wolf gang' of the title, the homo homini lupus sense of humankind.

CONSTANZE

The window is wide open, Wolferl. See all those people coming in to pay their respects.

A JEW

It was the stink of sweating nakedness that nauseated. And then there was no time for that luxury. The gas appeared, sinuous angel of death. But at the moment of expiry I caught the strain. A bar or so of the Quartet in B flat. We praise thee that thy music did certify a heaven when hell began. 

AN SS CAMP COMMANDANT

The daily stench. One heaved over one's breakfast. It was not fair to little Anna Maria. She vomited in the garden. Killing is hard labour. But at the end of a laborious day of murder she played the little Sonata in C and sent our souls skywards. We praise thee that music did ease the strain of our pious duty

A GERMAN STATESMAN

We praise thee that thou didst testify to the world the Teutonic gift of order

CHORUS

The wolves are ganging up.
The Baptist shares your cup,
The golden speaker too.
Love of the numen you
Exemplified, exemplified.
Your music never lied. [74]

What Burgess doesn't say here (perhaps it's to be taken as implicit?) is that Mozart's music only doesn't lie because it doesn't tell the truth either. Veracity in this sense is a category error when applied to music. Burgess's elision of political order with the formal order of music adds two and two to make 666. Flaubert's witty definition of music from his Dictionary of Received Ideas—that music makes a people's disposition more gentle, e.g. 'The Marseillaise'—is pretty funny. But it doesn't bear very much actual analysis. The French Revolution hardly happened because the Marseillaise is so stirring, after all.

Of course, then we're entitled to ask: if music doesn't work in the world according to this semantic-impulsive logic, if it doesn't, as it were, say 'Go,' and we go, or 'Come,' and we come, they how can it be 'ironic'? The answer, though not explicitly laid out by Burgess in this volume, has to do with the way music bodies forth a deeper logic of reality. Were Burgess a conventionally religious writer we might call it God; or at least mumble something about Schopenhauer and the fabric of existence. My sense is that there's something less categorical, and less theological, at work here. Something of the 'no semantic content in music except the irony of all semantic content' kind. There's a Clive James essay about Polanski's The Piano, where (though he calls the movie a masterpiece) he ridicules the notion that there is power for good or redemption in music. 'The chamber music in the Warsaw ghetto would undoubtedly have delighted Mengele and Heydrich,' James says, 'both of them serious music lovers. But it would not have changed their minds. That was the power of music: spiritually great but practically zero' [James, The Meaning of Recognition: New Essays 2001-2005 (Picador 2005), 28]. James is usually more cogent than this: hard to credit he really thinks the spiritual and the practical exist in completely separate states, zero-sum in relation to one another. And, indeed, when I say above that there's nothing theological about Burgess's musings, I'm certainly overstating it. He was not an orthodox Catholic but neither was he a materialist atheist.

The dialogue portion of the book ends with Mozart giving a harpsichord recital to the assembled musicians: appearing as a five year old ('climbing on to the stool as if it were a hillock'). 'Ach mein Gott,' grumbles Beethoven. 'The infant prodigy.' Then his father steps up to turn the pages.

MENDELSSOHN

His father appears ... strange. It does not seem to be Leopold Mozart

BEETHOVEN

Oh God.

MENDELSSOHN

Precisely. [138]

The real test of the success of this strange little novel is that we tap this final flourish and it doesn't ring false, or merely hyperbolic. It works.