Beard's Roman Women (1976)

Writing Clockwork Orange, Burgess elected not to use the slang of early 1960s teenage delinquency and instead to invent his own slang. He made a very good call, there. Actual teen idiolects would have dated the novel catastrophically—in You've Had Your Time he rightly notes that 1960s slang was 'ephemeral like all slang' and would have 'a lavender smell' within a few short years. Mind you slang is not the only thing that dates. Beard's Roman Women (a very good novel, I think, despite what I'm saying here) illustrates for instance that shock dates badly too.

This is a short and tragicomic novel, often very funny, and also, unusually for Burgess, really quite moving. What I'm talking about here is a question of the orchestration of various emotional tones and registers. One of these, deliberately applied, is the ability to shock the reader, an important element in the writer's palette, alongside the ability to intrigue the reader, to make her laugh, cry and wait and so on. I'm not talking the large-scale melodramatic shock moments of Red Wedding-style grand guignol, of course. Everything in this novel is, quite properly, much lower key than that. Nonetheless the 'shock' moments of Beard's Roman Women have not aged well. I mean the scenes where 51-year old screenwriter Ron Beard, his new girlfriend away in Israel photographing the Yom Kippur War, masturbates in her empty Roman apartment; or more improbably where this same Beard is 'gang-raped' by a four gorgeous young Roman beauties, who first put on a sort of sapphic porn-show to arouse him, then press themselves upon him until he climaxes, then run off laughingly. Dated in a different, more wincing way is the way Beard's friend Greg Gregson, a bluff, boozy, upper-crust businessman stationed in the Far East, shouts racist abuse at all and sundry. The sex stuff no longer looks daring or liberated because representing sex no longer has the exciting tang of pushed-past tabu; and the racial stuff is nowadays wincing rather than bracing.

The presiding spirit here, the book wants us to believe, is Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, whose scatological, scurrilous anti-clerical sonnets in the Roman dialect ripped the piss from establishment verities. Belli (flanked by Burgess's translation of a great scad of those sonnets) reappears in ABBA ABBA, Burgess's next novel. But it's hard to get as excited about Belli as Burgess evidently did (he described the discovery of Belli's sonnets as 'one of the three major revelations of my later life' along with Levi Strauss's work on the relations between riddles and incest and Gaudí's architecture).

So: textual strategies that were, I don't doubt, once-upon-a-time shocking seems bland now: post 'Turning Japanese' the trick is finding a culture-text that doesn't represent wanking. Similarly the swearing with which Beard's Roman Women is liberally supplied, in many different languages, strikes a 21st-century reader as vanilla stuff; and any scato-satirical force that might adhered to the following bath-time moment has long since dissipated:

He [Beard] washed himself thoroughly nevertheless and, on an unbidden image of Saul Bellow the Canadian Jewish novelist for some reason frowning at him, paid special attention to his fundament. [41]

But if the shock has faded, like dyed curtain fabric in decades of continuous sunshine, the humour and the pathos have not. It's this latter quality that makes Beard's Roman Women one of Burgess's best 1970s novels. He can do many things, as a novelist, that are wonderful and admirable, but he rarely moves me. This novel did.

That's mostly because, underneath all the usual stylistic and ideational busy-ness, beneath the thorny satirical orneriness, is a simply told and therefore affecting tale of bereavement. The first of the novel's seven chapters juxtaposes the last days alive of Beard's first wife Leonore (a one-to-one version of Lynne Burgess): alcoholic Welshwoman expiring of cirrhosis, and his post-funeral meeting of a lively young Italian woman, Paola Lucrezia Belli, professional photographer and descendant of the poet (based on Liana Macellari afterwards Liana Burgess, the novel's dedicatee). Beard moves to Rome to live with Paola, and the freshness of desire's renaissance is well captured. He's supposed to be working on a rubbishy Hollywood screenplay for $50,000 retelling the story of Mary Shelley, Percy and Byron at Lake Leman and the creation of Frankenstein. But in chapter 2 Paola heads-off on assignment to the warstruck Middle East and Beard is left alone. She doesn't return until the very end of chapter 6, and in the interim Beard is haunted by his dead wife.

This is very sensitively drawn, I thought, despite the fact that Burgess turns it into a mystery-style reader-hook plotpoint. Or maybe 'despite' isn't fair; the puzzle aspect of this is such that we, like Beard, really aren't sure if the revenant Leonora is a real ghost, hoax or honest medical mistake. First Beard is bereft; then, very swiftly, he too caught up in the excitement of his new relationship to feel sad, or guilty at his lack of grief. Then, naturally, there is a reaction. Beard sadness at his wife's death is compounded with guilt at the way that sadness was so easily forgotten, which in turns becomes a guilt that he is, in some way, responsible for her death, First he bumps into his old friend Greg Gregson (a name that seems to point us unavoidably towards Geoffrey Grigson, Burgess's chief literary enemy, which is puzzling) and spends all day drinking with him. Gregson tells Beard that he recently met up with Leonora in the Far East; Beard tells him this is not possible, as she is dead, but Gregson remains adamant.

When Beard returns to Paola's flat he finds that her vengeful ex-husband, a famous Trinidadian-Indian novelist called P R Pathan, evidently an (extremely unflattering) version of V S Naipaul, has stolen all the fixtures and fittings. He is forced to continue working on his script by propping his typewriter on a board fixed over the sink for want of a desk. The phone rings, and it is Leonora, singing songs that she used to sing. Beard assumes this to be a hoax, but Leonora keeps calling, insisting that the hospital made a mistake, that she is still alive and fully intends to come out to Rome and reclaim her husband. He starts to wonder if it is a hoax, after all.

This strand of the story leads to a very emotionally powerful sequence at the beginning of chapter 6, where Beard, naked in Paola's flat, picks up the telephone receiver and speaks a long monologue to the 'soft expectant rhythmical purr' of the dialing tone, addressed to his departed wife. He speaks of his simultaneous inability and necessity of letting her go, and when he puts the receiver down the novel reaches a mournful but genuinely satisfying emotional conclusion. Burgess can't let it lie, there, of course: he has to round off the story. First Leonora returns from the war-torn Middle East and informs Beard that she has decided to adopt a large number of Arab war refugee children, who will live in the flat with them. Beard, horrified at this prospect, does a runner.

The seventh and last chapter sees him back in the UK, re-married to his wife's sister, a pretty young Welshwoman called Ceridwen who cooks for him and generally looks after him. The mysterious Roman phone calls are revealed to be Leonora's (and Ceridwen's) cousin, a mentally deranged young women with a bizarre sexual passion for Beard who believed herself to be the dead woman. Even this is not denouement sufficient. The novel then pulls out a morbus ex machina: Beard is told he has an invariably fatal malady called Schweitzer's Disease: the 'Swiss Disease', presumably because that's where suicides go to commit top themselves without breaching their own national law. According to his doctor the symptoms will start with a chronic twitch in the left eye ('always the left ... if it's the right it means nothing' [113]) followed by coma and then death. Beard decides to short-circuit this indignity, and without telling him new wife he returns to Rome. He meets Greg Gregson again, and tries to commit suicide by following the ingenious strategy of repeatedly running up the many staircases that led to Paola's top-floor flat, to deliver an apologetic good-bye note to his former lover (she, in the meantime, has got back together with her horrid husband). He believes this upstairs-top-running will induce a fatal heart attack, but though he tries it thrice it only leaves him breathless. The novel ends on a queerly upbeat note. 'Sorry about the bloody anticlimax, Greg,' he tells his friend, when he's got his puff back. Gregson suggests they go for a drink.

Getting into the cab with Greg he was, he supposed, as happy as he had ever been in his life. Nothing left undone, and a whole night's drinking in front of him. The rain was teeming down now, and they'd actually got a taxi. [125]

Happiness, the novel's conclusion appears to be saying, inheres not in actually being with women, but in arranging one's life so that one has fulfilled all responsibilities to them. I assume that underneath this, on a psychologically symbolic level, is: children. Burgess had no kids with Lynne, and was presented with a son Paolo Andrea by Liana, who assured him that he was biologically his. He surely had his doubts about this; his biographers certainly have. At any rate, Paolo becomes Paola, the demanding though sexually alluring partner, who with a sort of horrible dream-logic insists that they must care for many demanding children, none of which are biologically Beard's. She and Beard will have to sleep in the smallest room, and leave the rest of the flat to the children. 'We may have to have the small epilettico in there with us,' she tells him. 'The eldest girl, Isa, which means Jesus ... she is not very responsible. Perhaps her head-sores have something to do with it. She was badly beaten by somebody. She will lift her skirt up at you. I am not sure if you can be trusted ...' [106-07]. It's comically ghastly, but on the right side of condemnatory for Beard, whose departure is a pretty venal abdication of responsibility. But its ghastliness is only a hyperbolic version of the common fate of all parents.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I think Beard's Roman Women works best the further from unadulterated Autoburge-ography it gets, or perhaps I mean the deeper into the buried anxieties of happy autobiography it delves. Burgess insisted repeatedly that he was joyfully in love with Liana, and that his life with her gave him a new start and a new relish for life. It would be boorish not to believe him. Mind you, he also concluded his actual memoir with the question-and-answer 'am I happy? Probably not'. On that level, the level of psycho-erotic fable, Beard's Roman Women retells Burgess's actual transition from first wife to second wife only in order to ramp up the Miltonic late-departed-saint angle to such a degree that the second (happy, he insisted) marriage is actually aborted, his new partner's crazily self-abnegating decision to devote their lives to raising needy adoptive children repudiated, and the protagonist gets to return to his first wife, or actually (better and better) a younger, sexier and more attentive version of his first wife. The first wife without the over-drinking or nagging or guilt-inducement. Beard must pay for this tabu wish-fulfillment by acquiring some unlikely, unpainful yet fatal disease. Still, the novel leaves him, like the lovers on the side of the Grecian Urn, happy, unweariéd and forever in the taxi on the way to a fun night's drinking with his buddy.

The script Beard is writing, The Lovers of the Lake, speaks to this theme too. At Hollywood's insistence he has monkeyed around with the historical chronology in order to accommodate a passionate love affair between Byron and Mary Shelley. But lurking behind all the erotic hi-jinks is the hideous shape of the monster, that ur-baby, that classic articulation of the horror implicit in bringing new life into this dead world. Burgess handles all this with a light touch, holding back—something he doesn't always do, of course—from dumping great chunks of this screenplay into the novel itself. Then there's the peculiar scene at the end of chapter 5 when Beard is, inverted commas are absolutely required, 'raped'.

The set-up is that Beard, walking to the post-office to send the latest draft of his script to Los Angeles by air-mail, is robbed by two scippatori, young men on mopeds who snatch his bag and scoot jeeringly away. By chance, Greg Gregson is driving by in a small Fiat, sees the theft and knocks the boys off their scooters. He and Beard then put the boot in, give voice to a quantity of ethnically-specific insults, and retrieve the script. Beard, who had not made a copy, is very grateful. But this leads to vendetta which the boys pursue—bizarrely enough—by sending four beautiful young girls to Beard's flat to overpower, titillate and have sex with him. As to what's going on here, beyond the indulgence of an late-middle-aged male erotic fantasy (plausibility, after all, being no predicate for such fantasising) is a little hard to gauge. It may be that Burgess is gesturing towards the Bacchae, these Dionysiacally-inspired young girls modern enough not to rip Beard limb from limb, yet still violate him.

So: why does what happens to Pentheus in that play happen to him? In Euripides' version it's because his first action upon becoming king of Thebes was to ban the worship of Dionysis. That play is really about the tension between civilised restraint and anarchic wildness as balanced elements in social living. Beard's Roman Women novel suggests a different, personalised reading. Burgess surely knew that the Greek name Πενθεύς means 'man in mourning', 'bereaved', 'sorrowing'. Grief at loss is styled by the book as a male matter, because death is the idiom of man. It is the vital women who insist that life, and sex, must go on, at whatever cost to a man's decorum, balance or peace of mind. I wonder if something like this isn't behind Burgess's choice of name for this alter-Burgess main character. A beard, in slang, is a woman who who accompanies a gay man in order to give the world the impression that he is straight. By extension, perhaps, all men are 'beards' in their marriages; they accompany their women and the world is deceived that the partnership is about life, the new life of children, the old life of love. (It's what Wilde says in Dorian Gray: 'the one charm of marriage is that is makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties'). In fact, Burgess implies, men are not about life. Men are about an unhurried but consistently pursued death-drive. Though this short novel begins with a woman dying and ends with a man not quite dying, the latter is all about form, completion and harmony; where the former is about ragged loose ends, not-going-gently, the refusal to lie down and stay dead. This, I take it, is the gender distinction at the heart of Burgess's vision. Men are better at dying than women.

Which brings me back to where I started, with this blogpost: shock. The death of a loved one is, naturally, a shock; and the desire to capture in fiction such an experience must needs reproduce some component of the shock if it is to work at all. But Burgess's new-found passion for Belli elides the emotional affront of living with bereavement into a completely different emotion: that sense of disappointment in the world, formed of ressentiment, the clever outsider with the chip on his shoulder who takes sour delight in pointing out that the Establishment of religion, politics or even 'Literature', is riddled through with hypocrisy and disingenuousness. Belli seeks to shock an audience so steeped in Establishment pieties that the mere utterance of the truth falls like a thunderbolt upon their placid conventional lives. Burgess often works towards a similar aim: wipe yer arse with the pantheon of so-called Great North American Jewish novelists! Middle aged men masturbate, you know! Everybody's a bit racist, but most people are too craven and hypocritical to admit to it! That sort of thing. It's not just that this simply doesn't fit with the more profound shock of our universal mortality, our existential and affective frailty; although, obviously, it does. It's that, read in forty years on, it just doesn't come over as very shocking any more.