Enderbye-bye: The Clockwork Testament (1974)

Originally intended as the last Enderby book, Clockwork Testament (subtitle: 'Enderby's End') traces Burgess's poetic alter-ego's last day alive. A chance encounter with some film-makers in Enderby's Algiers bar had led to him scripting a movie-version of Manley Hopkins' 'Wreck of the Deutschland'. When filmed this includes many scenes of nuns being stripped naked and raped, which provokes copycat crimes in the UK and the US, violence for which Enderby is blamed. On the strength of the movie's success (or at least its succès de scandale) Enderby is hired by a New York University to teach creative writing. The novel starts with Enderby waking up in the circular bed of the flat he is renting from a famous Lesbian poet-academic, currently out of the country. A student calls by, offers to have sex with him if he will give her an 'A'. He bursts into tears, and she leaves, nonplussed. Enderby has a mild heart attack, but recovers. He goes out, teaches his first class (having prepared nothing, he invents on the hoof a wholly fictional Elizabethan tragedian called Gervase Whitelady for his students edification). He teaches some creative writing. He goes into a TV studio where he is interviewed alongside two talking heads about the relationship between art and crime. Returning home afterwards he uses his swordstick to prevent a rape on the subway and has a second mild heart-attack. Back at the flat a woman rings the bell and, after entering, proves insane, threatening to kill Enderby with a pistol for 'getting into her brain'. She insists he strips naked ('Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness') and ends up having sex with him. Enderby's third, postcoital heart attacks kills him.

Fatal heart-attack aside, this is all based closely on Burgess's own life. He was living in New York in 1972, sleeping on Adrienne Rich's circular bed (she being away in Europe) and teaching creative writing at the City College of New York to bolshie, randy students of all ethnicities. The Wreck of the Deutschland movie, with its raped nuns, is a parodic version, of course, of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange movie, the release of which provoked copycat violence horrible enough to persuade Kubrick to remove the picture from distribution. Burgess was repeatedly asked, often on telly, to justify the film, and the book upon which it was based. Enderby's encounters with hostile, ill-disciplined and sexually incontinent students are all drawn from Burgess's personal experience, and even the unhinged woman forcing entry into Enderby's flat at the end with a gun is based on something that happened to AB. These things are believeable as events in Burgess's life. They are, frankly, incredible as events in Enderby's. The third Enderby novel brings to a kind of ultima the problem I had with Enderby Outside:

with an aesthetic fuzziness about the relationship between Burgess and his creation. As they go on, the Enderby novels come closer and closer to echt AB, drawing on specific experiences of the man in his most famous decade; but by doing so they enact a kind of violence upon the integrity of the novels as novels. The things that happen to poor old Enderby beggar belief, not because they involve wildly improbably plots and the appearance on earth of the actual Muse of poetry, but because they reduce the protagonist to a kind of semi-transparent overlay upon autobiographical-Burgess in ways that hamstring the ability to the novels to work beyond the level of meta-commentary.

Weaker even than the second novel, and not a patch on the superb first, Clockwork Testament's busy-ness feels forced and often, what's worse, second hand: Enderby is writing a long Wanting-Seedy poem on Augustine versus Pelagius, turgid chunks of which are quoted. But Burgess had achieved international renown, and Enderby is a nobody. Burgess, as novelist, was working in a commercial mainstream; Enderby as poet is very much not. Burgess, after a decade of TV appearances and programme making, was an old hand at TV work, and his name was on every chat-show producer' rolodex. Nobody would invite Enderby into a TV studio, nor for that matter hire him to teach creative writing, or get so obsessed with his work as to be driven insane by it. Enderby's Nobody-ness is an essential component of his functioning qua character.

When I first read this novel as an undergraduate I was profoundly impressed by something Enderby says to one of his creative writing students. The kid, an angry black teenager, has written an angry poem:

It will be your balls next, whitey,
A loving snipping of the scrotum
With rather rusty nail-scissors,
And they tumble out then to be
Crunched underfoot crunch crunch. [425]

Not good poetry (and not very New York in its idiom: rather and crunched and so on). Enderby tells the student his poem is not well written. The student retorts that it doesn't matter about the writing; since the crucial thing is the hate. 'Poetry is made out of emotions,' he says.

'Oh no,' Enderby said. 'Oh very much no. Oh very very very much no and no again. Poetry is made out of words.' [426]

As a youth I was very struck by that, assuming it to be Burgess's own idea, and one moreover that captures a genuinely central truth about writing. Then I grew older and some of my ignorance was brushed away, and I realised that Burgess had nicked this wholesale from Mallarmé. (Degas was talking about poetry with Mallarmé and wondering why, despite having many ideas for poems, he wasn't writing any actual verse: 'Ce ne sont pas les idées qui me manquent: j'en ai trop'. To which Mallarmé replied: Mais, Degas, ce n'est point avec des idées que l'on fait des vers. C'est avec des mots. You can't make a poem with ideas.You make it with words.)

Maybe plagiarising a bit of Mallarmé isn't the worse thing in the world. Some of this book is funny, and some of it is inventive. Other parts have aged very poorly indeed: Enderby masturbating whilst fantasising about having sex with 12-year-old Puerto Rican girls, for instance. Enderby airily discussing the prosodic valences of the phrase 'nigger whipper' with his class. But worse than the rust-spots of cultural evolution is the broad drift of the book as a whole. Having conjured Gervase Whitelady from thin air, assured his students that they need to know all about him, and busked a whole biography and selected passages by him, he tells the class that actually they needn't worry about him, since 'he was nothing ... one of the unknown poets who never properly mastered his craft, spurned by the Muse.' [420] Only when he has done this does he suddenly understand whom he has conjured into fictional life:

And then, in utter depression, he saw who Whitelady was. He winked at him with his right eye and Whitelady simultaneously winked back with his left. [421]

So Whitelady is Enderby, but a mirror-image Enderby (perhaps the subconscious derivation is alba-dame-by). But the White Lady is clearly also the Muse, the White Goddess, not to mention Coleridge's nightmare life in death. The grim reaper in female form, skinny (the woman who comes at the end to kill Enderby with a pistol, but actually does him in by shagging him, is described as 'a skeletal lady'). Death winks at us all from every mirror we look into. Fine; but Clockwork Testament does not earn this grand tragic theme. Its failure to do so is entirely unconnected with the fact that it's a scatological and deliberately rather scurrilous comic novel, and everything to do with a thinness of imaginative density, a half-heartedness. It doesn't help that we know Enderby returns in vol 4, which retrospectively undermines the death theme of this novel.