This (its preface makes a point of informing the reader) was the first novel Burgess wrote, all the way back in 1949 according to the author's note here, or all the way back in 1953, according to the account in Little Wilson and Big God. Pays yer money, takes your choice. It was shelved until he hit his lean patch in the mid-60s. You've Had Your Time describes him at that time as distracted from the writing of proper novels by journalism and TV work; presumably he was also pretty fagged out from writing six novels, three of them masterpieces, over a ridiculously short timescale in the first years of the decade. Plus his wife was dying. At any rate, he filled the gap by pulling two dusty manuscripts from the drawer, and they were both published with illustrations by Edward Pagram: the lightweight Eve of Saint Venus, which was issued in 1964; and this one, in 65. Year of my birth, no less.
As for the making of it, Burgess explained it came at a time when he still liked to think of himself as a composer of music. He hit a fallow period, sonically speaking, in the late 40s: 'I was empty of music but itching to create. So I wrote this novel...to see if I could clear my head of the dead weight of Gibraltar.' The novel fictionalises Burgess's military service in the British territory.
Picking it up, I'll confess that my expectations were not high. I knew that it takes a satirical antiheroic posture by layering the adventures of the Burgess p.o.v. character 'Richard Ennis' over the formal and thematic foundations of the Aeneid. Doing so almost advertises the almost inevitable dying-fall of its ambition, right there: as if Burgess is saying 'Ulysses is one of my holy books, and that's based on the Odyssey. From Golden Age Homer to Silver Age Vergil, I'll write my own sub-Ulysses and base it on the Aeneid, which will have the added advantage of wending its perigrinating hero Rome-wards, important for a lapsed Catholic such as myself, rather than just have him dallying about Dublin.'
Actually, the book is much better than that rather snide summary implies. It is, for one thing, very well written, so much so that it's hard to avoid the suspicion that Burgess titivated it before its mid-60s publication date. Maybe not: maybe he just wrote this well straight out of the gate. Envy-provoking if so; but there you are. The characters are vivid and believable, the milieu nicely evoked, the prose is expertly calibrated and above all it's often very funny. A scene near the end, when Ennis giving a lecture to disgruntled troops, inadvertently fires them up to mutiny, such that everything he says only spurs them on (he tells them to 'go home', meaning back to barracks, and they, thinking he's inciting them to desert to Blighty, cheer him all the louder) has a beautiful Life of Brian avant-la-lettre quality. Ennis' best friend is a gay character called Julian—a suspiciously Round the Horne name for a gay character in a novel supposedly written in 1949, I'd say—who is pitched somewhere between screaming queen stereotype and actual, sympathetic human individual.
There's a lot of sex in the novel, and sex is where the novel sometimes swerves into slightly gaucher territory, which in turns tends to place the book as tyro work. Ennis, married, has an affair with a young Gibraltese widow called Concepción (the novel's version of Dido), and when she remarries a Spanish businessman he pursues a coolly beautiful WREN called Lavinia. Mostly, though, his life is defined by sexual frustration, and whilst that's pretty well drawn the writing about the actual shagging sometimes jars. Here he is kissing Lavinia:
But he kissed her again, and now his blood began to flow downwards, feeding a speedy tumescence. [119]Feeding/speedy is a distracting half-rhyme in this context, and 'Speedy Tumescence' sounds like he ought to be Speedy Gonzales' randy cousin. Here's his first actual shag with Lavinia:
At the too-close approach of his own scalding crux, he felt her cry of an accepted ultimate covenant, was aware of the opening of the door. He sweated with a shock of incredulity and his heart began to sink rapidly as the flaccid cold of failure crept towards him. He kissed her hot face in an agony of humiliation. [135]Puzzlingly phrased. I assumed: premature ejaculation. But later events make it plain that he simply loses his erection. At any rate Lavinia leaves in disdain, and you wouldn't blame a reader for following through on the same impulse. 'Scalding crux' is surely something for which medical attention ought immediately to be sought.
This crashing over-writing is not typical of the book as a whole, though; and although much of it by weight (as it were) concerns sex, it's not really 'about' sex. It's about marriage, and the impossibilities thereof. Ennis wonders in a more-or-less agonized manner whether he has fallen in love with Concepción: he hasn't, it's all lust. But he doesn't spare her his agonizing. Should he leave his wife and marry her? He can't though. He's Catholic. Sorry my dear. 'This is what I hate!' she rages, in her fluent English. 'You'll do this [the shagging, that is] and this is a sin, and we're both damned for it. And you don't go to mass, you haven't been to confession for sixteen years ... yet you argue so smooth to those others about God. It's all lies.' [22]
The novel is very closely autobiographical—at least if the account of Burgess’s time in Gibraltar in Little Wilson and Big God is to be believed. Of course, it’s possible that Burgess drew on the novel when writing the memoir (whole passages are word-for-word identical) which would put the issue of inspiration and record in interestingly complicated relationship. Ennis is, like AB, a would-be composer, and a good chunk of the novel concerns his musical ambitions. More directly relevant is the way Burgess's memoir records the ways in which he proved capable of surprising himself. Ordered to lecture on 'the British way' to Italian POWs, he instead read them Dante, and afterwards quarreled with his commanding officer. 'I was rebuked by Major Meldrum for not teaching the British Way and Purpose. It used to be, I cried hotly, the bloody European Way and Purpose until the bloody English permitted a stupid randy monarch to introduce what was later called the Reformation' [LWBG. 308]. What follows is the most intriguing part:
The outburst later I found interesting. I had assumed that I had freed myself from the nets of Catholicism, but here I was speaking out for Catholic Europe. Of course I was in Catholic Europe, despite the bobbies in British helmets ... I was drawn to the women with crosses hanging from their delectable necks. The Protestant Lynne was sick and far. I was in warm garlicky unreformed Christendom. [LWBG, 308]This comes strongly through in A Vision of Battlements: sexual guilt, a character hating himself for his weakness and betrayals even as he rehearses his justifications and existential freedom. And beyond it all: God. 'As for God,' Burgess recalls of his Gibraltar days: 'there was God, towering high overhead, the mists of the Levant on his brow. I walked all over God, bearing the official Pelagian message' [LWBG, 308].
It's this, I think, that makes the conceptual Aeneid-ic scaffold less intrusive in the novel than it might have been. Ennis (‘Aeneas’) is exiled from his home, although instead of voyaging around the Mediterranean he drifts up and down Gibraltar. As Leo Bloom is to Odysseus, he is a deliberately low-rent, undignified figure: no pius father of his people he, but a sour, resentful underachiever, emotionally and artistically immature. Thoroughly unlikeable, indeed. Actually, I find Aeneas pretty unlikeable too, but for different reasons. One thing Burgess does that Joyce didn’t is nominally to over-determine his characters: Bloom and Stephen, as names, have only the loosest connection to Odysseus and Telemachus, but Ennis/Aeneas comes into conflict with the muscular ‘Turner’ (Turnus) over a woman actually called Lavinia. Burgess does this, I think, in order to wrongfoot his reader. Knowing the story, we expect Ennis to defeat Turner, which he does; but we also expect him to cop-off with Lavinia (which he doesn’t). The journey to the underworld happens not in the middle (Aeneid book 6 of 12) but right at the end. There is no Pallas figure, and unlike the heroic Aeneas Ennis ends his story as a failure on every level. The advantage of this, I suppose, is that it keeps the novel alive. Instead of running down the predictable grooves of Aeneallegory. The reader is never quite sure what is going to happen next.
Still, it has interesting consequences. The Odyssey is a poem about returning to a happy past, oriented towards nostos and the most acutely, literally nostalgic text ever composed. The Aeneid is a very different poem, oriented solidly towards the future. It is a poem about leaving the dead past and starting afresh, founding a new nation, seizing the future with both hands. In the poem ‘the future’ has a name and that name is ‘Rome’. Book 6 includes a lengthy, detailed prophetic vision of Rome’s future glory; books 7-12 detail the battles fought on the foundational site of the future city. A Vision of Battlements is decidedly more the former than the latter kind of text. It touches, only briefly and with familiar Burgessian disdain, on the post-1945 future as a denatured, hygienic dystopia ('A cult of young hooliganism. State art. Free ill-health for all' [186]). But it dwells endlessly, painfully and (in the end) without resolution on the past. Ennis is not only not pater patriae, he’s barely filius patriae; ordered to lecture the troops on ‘British values’ he is dismissive, sardonic, liable to break off and play Beethoven on the piano.
His marriage depends upon Ennis getting a post-war job in Gibraltar: his wife, back in the UK, is sick of the weather and wants sunshine and new horizons. For much of the novel it looks as though Ennis will be able to pull this off, but a series of comic misadventures stymie his chances. He won’t be staying on the rock. His disappointed wife accordingly leaves him to fly to the USA with a handsome American officer. In other words: the fate of the protagonist’s marriage is explicitly tied to it being located on the rock. But of course it is; as Burgess says in his memoir, the rock is Peter; is the first Pope; is the Catholic Church.
Lavinia is rather more attracted to handsome, muscular Turner than to Ennis, to the latter's chagrin. He gets revenge on the other man by spiking his orange juice with copious alcohol; the teetotal Turner makes a fool of himself and suffers a vast hangover. As a result he and his muscular cronies come after Ennis to beat him up. Ennis runs away, motorcycling to the top of the Rock.
He slowed down, braked, switched off his engine. The pursuing roars were dying down, now. He could see only their headlights shining from the other side of the jutting buttress. Rock. It was just rock. What was the Rock made of? That was a geological matter. There were so many things one didn't know. [161]But one of the things the Rock is made of is: retribution for sin. His pursuers catch him: 'the avenging what-you-calls. Furies.'
"Just one good bloody punch on the jaw," said Turner. "One from each of us. That will do. But first we'll see him grovel." ...His prayer, though, is answered. He lurches away from Turner's punch and the big man overbalances:
"Look," said Ennis. "Let me warn you. Don't try anything here. It's highly dangerous. Look how high up we are. Look at all those lights down there. If you want to beat me up come and do it in the Nissen hut over there. Much more comfortable."
"Kneel down, Ennis,' said Turner. "Pray for forgiveness."
Ennis knelt obediently. As well now as later. He prayed aloud: "O my God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins and detest them above all things—"
"Bloody mockery," said one of the sergeants. "Give it him now." [161]
He tried to restore balance. It was like acrobatic comedy. One of the sergeants thought it was that and laughed. Turner fumbled for a hold, saying "Sod it." His hands wildly played a few rhapsodic bars on the piano of the air between himself and the rockface. Then he did a sort of dance on one leg, wildly pressing at a sort of sustaining pedal with it. "Oh Christ," he said ... Then he went over the side howling. [162]Dead. The musical analogy is well judged here: funny in a ghastly sort of way. But since Burgess's Ennis is characterised by his guilt, this episode does not end the text, as it did in Vergil. Instead it leads into the visit to the Underworld: a trip over the border into Spain. Here Julian and Ennis hire a couple of whores and Burgess ramps up the sexual disgust: 'a lecherous urge led him to embrace the pallid matronal whore, thrusting a hand down her décolletage. A fat spongy ample palmful, knobbed as by a wart' [175]. Alright already! Guilt has curdled your pleasure in sex! We get it! The climax comes when Ennis discovers that Concepción has died giving birth to (it is strongly implied) Ennis's own son, also dead. Death everywhere.
In Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess reports attending a 1969 lecture on this novel 'at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina' given by 'a brilliant young professor named Tom Stumpf'. Google returns only a later pianist for this gentleman, though I'm not here to doubt the existence of such an academic, nor even his brilliance.
Stumpf pointed out what I had not previously noticed—that the name R. ENNIS spells SINNER backwards. This was a shock to me, reminding me that one is often less in control of one's work than one thinks. [LWBG, 364]He goes on to summarise Stumpf's reading of the novel, assessing it a 'just' one: a story 'about authority, the factitious kinds represented by art or military organisation, the real kind represented by the Rock or the Church or God'. As to whether Burgess was really unaware of his backwards SINNER name-game, we are entitled to our doubts. Actually I suspect that AB's intent was more scatological, and 'Ennis' was as far along the road from Aeneas to 'Anus' as he thought he'd get away with. His character is, in many ways, an arsehole. But from the perspective of God, we're all arseholes, which is to say sinners. 'God in a lavatory!' swears a belligerent Spaniard, infuriated at Ennis. 'I shit myself on your father!' [172]. The real question is whether we are capable of processing our bad experiences, expelling them and so moving on, as true anuses are. 'I must learn to grow up,' says Ennis, at the novel's end. 'I can't put it off much longer' [186]. The novel leaves open at least the possibility that he manages this.
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