Burgess Supposeth his Moses is Poesie: Moses (1976)

... but Burgess supposeth erroneously. I was pleased to pick this up for next-to-nothing in a second-hand bookstore. Otherwise quite hard to come by, never-reprinted, minor Burgessiana. But, my, what an eccentric performance. It's an 18-book epic poem on Moses’s life, written in intermittently disciplined, sprawly, four- or five-beat variable lines. This is what Burgess says in his foreword:

A few years ago I was commissioned, along with Vittorio Bonicelli and Gianfranco de Bosio, to provide the script for a television series on the birth, life and death of the prophet Moses. I found collaboration difficult and was forced to work entirely on my own, leaving emendation, addition and subtraction to be more or less improvised—by Bonicelli, de Bosio, who was the director, Vincenzo Labella, the producer, the actors Burt Lancaster and Anthony Quayle—while filming proceeded in Israel. The major aesthetic problem was a linguistic one, as it always is with historical or mythical subjects, and I found the only way out of the problem was to precede the assembly of a shooting script with a more or less literary production—this sort of epic poem you have now in your hands. To have written Moses first as a prose novel would have entailed the setting up of a somewhat cumbersome mechanism, in which the devices of ‘naturalism’ would have led me to an unwholesome prosaism both in dialogue and récit. Verse moves more quickly, and the rhythm of verse permits of a mode of speech midway between the mythical and the colloquial. Out of this homely epic I made my script, but the poem, such as it is, remains and is here for your reading.

Not entirely convincing, this, as a justification. Poetry, surely, doesn’t move ‘more quickly’; its compression, indeed, tends to have the opposite effect; and writing verse surely doesn’t inoculate Burgess’s text against the debilitating ‘midway’ tone. In fact the poem itself swerves distractingly from the high-pompous King-Jacobean (‘I am come to deliver them out of the hands/Of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land/Unto a good land and a large’ [36]) to the slackly discursive (‘One hundred and seventeen thousand/Five hundred and sixty-seven. That is the latest/Computation, your divine majesty’ [62]) and the bathetically mundane (‘“Time to get up,” she said. “You have ruling to do.” [112]). More, posterity has not been kind to some of Burgess’s handed-down-on-stone-tablet pronouncements (‘none of us will ever see a film of Beowulf,’ he ringingly declares at the end of his foreword).

At any rate, here’s the IMDB page for the resulting motion picture. You can see what Piero Sbragia from Sao Paolo thought of it: ‘I’ve seen this movie just because of Burt Lancaster. The whole picture is bad. The direction, the cinematographer, the actors. The only exception besides Lancaster is the score by Ennio Morriconne.’ Hansbearnl from the Netherlands agrees: ‘Worst Moses ever ... and the biggest question: where did the director get the story from?’ Well. Indeed. At any rate, the film-makers didn't let mere cinematic mediocrity get in the way of their marketing. I really don't believe I can think of a more hubristically grandiose claim that the shout-line from this poster:

It wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if it didn't look so very like Burt is energetically dancing The Twist on that massy-stone nominal edifice, there. I've never seen the movie, so I can't really judge.

I have, though, read the poem, and reading it was an ... interesting experience. Some of it is pretty indigestible; but some works intriguingly, and rather well. Here’s book 6, ‘The Passover’, in which Burgess retells the familiar story with a slightly selfconsciously worked ‘dog’/‘bird’ thematic.

Moses in sunlight, with the whirring of Miriam’s doves
And the cry of children about him, sighed and spoke
Softly of the Angel of Death. “Who shall describe him?
Or her? Or it? Like a trained hound of the hunters
He has the scent in his nostrils. He follows the scent.
He will follow the scent of the firstborn. Miriam said:
‘You were told this?’ And Moses replied: ‘It is the
Last thing. The tenth figure of the dance.
Four days from now on the night of the
Fourteenth days of Nissan. The nose and teeth of the
Angel of Death will dart straight
For the firstborn. Whether Egyptian or Israelite—
It will be no matter to him of the
Separating out of the nations. Even the
Firstborn whelp of a bitch’s litter. The first
Hatchling of the hen. He will go for the scent.’ [69]

Mo then explains the Passover ritual that will protect the Israelite firstborn; and the first Passover is described.

Then all suddenly listened.
But there was nothing to hear. ‘The silence,’ Aaron said,
‘Strikes like a new noise.’ Then Moses heard.
‘He is coming. God help them. He is coming. Now.’
Them, from afar, a scream, and another,
And soon the sound of wailing. They sat silent,
The meat grown cold on the table, listening.
Then the noise of a nearing wind at the door,
And the door shaking, but then the shaking ceased,
And the wind passed over. [71]

Which is fairly spooky, I suppose, in a cinematic-cliché sense. Meanwhile, ‘in the imperial palace’, Pharaoh’s ‘infant prince slept in his cradle, placed in the heart/Of a magical pentacle’. Magicians intone lengthy charms, but it won’t do him any good.

Pharaoh looked down on his child, cradled in his arms,
Looked and looked and did not believe and looked
Incredulously toward his queen and all looked and
None was in any doubt as a bank of candles
Flickered as in the draft of a great wind,
And from Pharaoh went up the cry of an animal,
Filling the chamber, the palace, spilling into the night ...
The palace took up the cry and gongs and drums
Turned it to a geometry of lamentation,
While, like a thing of wood or metal, the king
Carried the child blindly, the mother following,
Choked in pain the gongs muffled, till they stood
Before a god of metal and Pharaoh whispered:
‘What do I do now? Beg you to comfort him
On his passage through the tunnels of the night?
Beseech you to remember that he is still
Of your divine flesh, and to restore him to the light
Where he is—needed? Or do I see you already
As very hollow, very weak, impotent, a sham?
Am, I born too early or too late? Does heaven
Remake itself? Has the dominion passed over
To that single God who was neither sun nor moon
But the light of both? But in your eyes there is nothing.
Your head is the head of a bird.’[72]

‘A geometry of lamentation’ is pretty good, and if the ‘passing over’ from pagan to Judaic divinity, here, is a little heavily telegraphed, there’s actual emotional heft in Pharoah’s grief, I think.

Burgess is at his best in these sorts of, frankly novelistic, moments of quieter inwardness. He tends to fluff the larger, more epic set-pieces. The parting of the Red Sea, for instance, is ropily handled: we do not share the Israelite ‘awe’ at ‘a wind that seemed, oh God, to be parting the waters/As a comb parts hair’ [81] (that’s: as a comb parts hair. Awesome!) Into the desert they wander. Moses goes up the mountain whilst his people dally orgaistically with the golden calf, and Burgess gets to unload his characteristically strong sexual fascination/revulsion (‘an obese matron, naked,/Pig-squealed, pleasured by a skeletal youth’, [117]). Then, chastened and recipients of the law, the Israelites wander on, through a widescreen wilderness:

The wilderness of Paran. Wilderness
After wilderness, and now this wilderness.
Sand, rock, distant mountain. A copper sun
Riding a wilderness of bronze. [133]

**

Reading the whole was assisted by the pencil annotations of the previous owner. Beside Burgess’s self-penned author note at the back, s/he has written ‘pretentious trash’ and drawn two lines to cross out the text.

Elsewhere s/he adds things like ‘contrived’, ‘?’ and ‘he would never artic with these words’ ... this is alongside a passage in which Burgess’s Moses artics thuswise: ‘This/punctilious observance, as you term it/somewhat grandiloquently, is of the very/essence of the law.’ [127] Which is probably fair comment.