Explainderby: Enderby Outside (1968)

Though there's much stylistic energy and fun here, the fact is Enderby Outside is not a patch on its masterful predecessor Inside Mr Enderby. I'd say there are three problems. One is that the plot is skittish and slight, built around a series of random zigzag events, and in the final analysis a mere vehicle for an ovedetermined Beatlephobia that has (as I've noted on this blog before) aged very badly indeed. Two has to do, I think, 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. So, the tacit plot of Enderby Outside is that Anthony Burgess's writing (Enderby's poetry) has, with the connivance of his ex-wife, been plagiarised by, and is therefore responsible for, the global success of The Beatles (= Yod Crewsey and the Crewsey Fixers). Pull the other one. The third problem is one that increasingly encroaches on Burgess at this stage of his career: explaining. Explainy explaining. I'll come back to that.

When Enderby is implicated in the murder of Yod Crewsey, that is to say, of John Lennon, and has to flee to Morocco, Burgess is positioning himself as in effect responsible for both the success of, and the death of, the biggest pop band the world has ever known, styling himself as, under the gaze of our present-day retrospection, a weird Lennon/McCartney/Mark Chapman hybrid. It's hard to imagine any novel could possible carry the weight of such staggeringly innocent-eyed hubris.

The point, of course, is that the conceit of the novel didn't strike Burgess as hubristic, because he genuinely didn't see the greatness or larger cultural significance of The Beatles. You might even feel sorry for him. How was he to know that the Muse had actually withdrawn her grace from all those small-scale neo-Donne-esque Movement poets and instead bestowed her bounty on four louche blokes from Liverpool? By the 1980s Burgess had rowed-back his hostility a little, but it's worth remembering that in the late 60s it was at its peak. It works its way into the oddest places, as in this passage from AB's previous novel A Tremor of Intent that, really, has neither bearing on nor place in that novel at all. Hillier, the spy narrator, recalls being:

sick; I vomited a bellyload into the gutter. What made my shame worse was the visit of some British louts with guitars and emetic little songs; they filled the Opera House with intantile screamers. [Tremor, 48]

What is, in the earlier novel, only a sideswipe becomes in Enderby Outside a full-frontal swipe. A big belly-shove at the British louts with guitars.

They were, he thought, about as horrible in appearance as it was possible to imagine any four young men to be. The one Hogg knew to be their leader, Yod Crewsy, received, because of his multiple success, the most homage, and he accepted this as his due, simpering out of a lopsided mouth that was too large to be properly controlled and, indeed, seemed to possess a kind of surrealist autonomy. The other three were vulgarly at home, punching each other in glee and then doing a kind of ring-a-roses round the Prime Minister. The working photographers flashed and flashed like an epidemic of sharp sneezes. [225]

This is in the bar of the London hotel where Enderby (as Hogg) is working, and the popstars are meeting the Wilson-y Prime Minister, no less. The unusual first name 'Yod' is presumably chosen for its mildly sacrilegious overtones (when first hearing of the band, Enderby is unimpressed: '"I bet," divined Hogg, "that he called himself Crewsy just so he could make up that blasphemous name. And that Yod bit doesn't sound Christian to me. Yod," he told Mr Holden, "is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet."'). Yodh is the Hebrew 'J', and though a y-ish palatal approximant rather than the /dj/ with which the English name John starts, we can take it as an abbreviation of Lennon's first name. Crewsy seems a bit of a stretch from Lennon. Still: presumably the joke is to approximate the cruci-word to 'crazy', and therefore suggest that the heroes of modern youth are off their chump. On the other hand, I was rather pleased to discover that there is a present-day US Byrds-style band called 'Yod Crewsy & the Dark Marbles'. For myself, I reserve the band-name 'Anders B. Burgside and the Burgsiders' for future musical use.

Anyhow: AB snarks at Lennon as a man whose orange is at least partly clockwork (he uses Russian slang like Alex, declaiming one of Enderby's plagiarised poems in order to 'show that we do like think a bit and the kvadrats ... can't have it all their own way' [231]; that's квадрат, 'square'). Also Burgess has a weird bee in his bonnet about young people saying 'yeah', or as he prefers Germanically to render it, 'ja'. Customers in Enderby/Hogg's London bar use the word, 'young film makers' drinking in Morocco use the word, and then in the novel's early big set-piece we get the Crewsy Fictions current hit, a strained parody of 'She Loves You':

Yod Crewsy held a flat guitar with flex sprouting from it. In front of each of the others was a high-mounted sidedrum. They poised white sticks, grinning. Then they jumped into a hell of noise belched out fourfold by speakers set at the ceiling's corners.

You can do that, ja, and do this. Ja.
You can say that you won't go beyond a kiss. Ja.
But where's it goin to get ya, where's
It goin to get
Ya (ja), babaaah?

I daresay it's harsh to blame Burgess for being behind the curve. Why should we expect him to keep up with the artistic evolution of a group he hates? But it's worth noting that the simplistic chanting of 'She Loves You' was 1963; the writing of this 1968 novel happened two years after 'Tomorrow Never Knows', a year after 'A Day In The Life', 'Strawberry Fields' and the comprehensive reinvention of the expressive potential of pop music. But, hey: we get it. Burgess despised The Beatles. He presumably thought, of Enderby Outside, that the Yod Crewsey stuff was a sideline in a novel primarily about rebirth, poetic inspiration and the female principle. But the Crewsey stuff is what turned out to be culturally important for the sixties (visit Liverpool if you don't believe me; one doesn't fly into 'Manchester Anthony Burgess Airport', after all). It's as if Dickens, after a quick dig about the awfulness of Industrialisation, Gothic Fiction and Music Hall, went on to devote the rest of his novels to personal crotchets about plagiary and the cheapening of the myth of the hanged god ('most of the newspaper concentration now seemed to be on Yod Crewsy as a dying god, not one of the daily victims of common murderous assault' [296]; 'girls weeping, as over Osiris or Adonis or somebody' [336]; 'And now sermons about miracles and popsters flocking to give thanks. Our Thammuz, Adonis, Christ for that matter. [344]'.)

So: a priest shoots Lennon/Crewsy down, hands the gun to Enderby and runs off. We later discover that this was a publicity stunt, but for the moment a terrified Enderby thinks it real and flees rather than take the fall. Despite the fact that the Prime Minister was in the room when the gun was discharged (uh, Special Branch? I mean, I know it's the 60s but still) he gets easily away, takes a plane and, via some rather heavy-footed misadventures in Spain, winds up in Morocco.  Here he tumbles into the bar run by his old adversary and fellow poet Rawcliffe. The bar is called the Acantilado Verde ('Green cliff, raw cliff,' the owner explains [328]), and dying Rawcliffe gifts it to Enderby to atone for his earlier plagiary of his Pet Beast into the Spaghetti Western, as per Inside Mr Enderby.

The novel ends with Enderby happy: financially self-sufficient in a warm climate, not only writing poetry again but literally visited by the muse: a beautiful woman—'she looked at him from green eyes sprinkled, like a sireh quid, with gold' and so on—of forceful character and a fondness for pungent food (it is she who provides the novel with its most famous sentence: 'She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions' [354]). She seems to know all about him, steers him roughly away from bad poetry and towards good. It seems, according to her, that he's in the right place:

“You can get something here. This is a junction. Deucalion's flood and Noah's. Africa and Europe. Christianity and Islam. Past and future. The black and the white. Two rocks looking across at each other. The Straits may have a submarine tunnel. But it was Mallarmé who said that poetry is made with words, not ideas."

"How do you know all this? You're so young."

She spat out breath very nastily. "There you go again. More interested in the false divisions than the true ones. Come on, let's have that sestet." [359]

What the final quarter of the book gives us, though, is symptomatic of a peculiar weakness in Burgess's writing from this period, one that comes into a sort of bristling maximum in his next novel, MF: that is, the urge not just to write cleverly but to explain how and in what ways one has been clever. In MF the knotty coding of the fiction is laboriously laid out in a long essay Burgess published that functions, in effect, as a preface to the novel; better, insofar as prefaces can be discarded. Here though it is kneaded fat-fistedly into the very dough of the novel. Enderby plans to write a series of 'Revolutionary Sonnets', and ploddingly spells out the rationale:

Enderby was moderately pleased with the poem, but he was more pleased with the prospect of a bigger structure, a sequence. Some years before he had published the volume called Revolutionary Sonnets. The book had contained things other than sonnets, but the title had derived from that opening group of twenty, each of which had tried to encapsulate—exploiting the theme and countertheme paradigm of the Petrarchan form-some phase of history in which a revolution had taken place. He felt now that it might be possible to wrest those twenty sonnets from that volume and, by adding twenty more with the cooperation of the Muse, build a sizeable sequence which would make a book on its own. A new title would be needed-something more imaginative than the old one, something like Conch and Cortex or something. So far he had these two sonnets—the Garden of Eden one and the new one about man building his own world outside the Garden. Somewhere at the back of his mind there pricked the memory of his having started and then abandoned, in a very rough state, another sonnet that, nicely worked up and carefully polished, would make a third. It was, he thought, really an anterior sonnet to these two, an image of the primal revolution in heaven—Satan revolting, that sort of thing. Lucifer, Adam, Adam's children. Those would make the first three. [265-66]

Eventually we get the start of the new sonnet:

Augustus on a guinea sat in state—
The sun no proper study but each shaft
Of filtered light a column: classic craft
Abhorred the arc or arch. To circulate
(Blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight
As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed. [318]

And then, as the reader's heart sinks deeper, we get a line-by-line explanation of the sonnet:

Gloomily he read through his sonnet octave again. Augustus on a guinea sat in state. This is the eighteenth century, the Augustan age, and that guinea is a reduction of the sun. The sun no proper study. Exactly, the real sun being God and that urban life essentially a product of reason, which the sun melts. And no more sun-kings, only Hanoverians. But each shaft of filtered light a column. Meaning that you can't really do without the sun, which gives life, so filter it through smoked glass, using its energy to erect neo-classic structures in architecture or literature (well, The Rambler, say, or The Spectator, and there's a nuance in "shaft" suggesting wit). Classic craft abhorred the arc or arch. Yes, and those ships sailed a known world, unflood-able by a rational God, and the arc-en-ciel covenant is rejected. Something like that. To circulate (blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight. Clear enough. You need the roundness of the guinea only so that it can roll along the straight streets or something of commercial enterprise. The round bores of the pipes are not seen on the surface, the pipes in essence being means of linking points by the shortest or most syllogistical way. And, to return to that guinea, impress on it the straight line of royal descent. And, to return to that pipe business, remember that pipes were smoked in coffee-houses and that news and ideas circulated there. And that craft business ties up with Lloyd's coffee-house. As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed, Thyrsis was Jack. A bit fill-in for rhyme's sake, but, rejecting the sun, you reject life and can only accept it in stylised mythological or eclogue forms. But Jack leads us to Jean-Jacques. Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack's rational island—The pivot coming with the volta. Defoe started it off: overcome Nature with reason. But the hearer will just hear Crusoe. Jack is dignified to John, glorification of common, or natural, man. Then make Nature reason and you start to topple into reason's antithesis, you become romantic. Why? A very awkward job, the continuation.

What can it be about, this mighty urge to explain to the reader, except a sort of unconfidence, not in one's own ingenuity so much as in one's readership? The Muse, we might object, will be perfectly uninterested in all that. On and on it goes:

The sestet ended in a drinking-shop not far from the Souk or Socco, over glasses of warmish pastis. Drab long robes, hoods, ponchos, ass-beaters, loud gargling Moghrabi, nose-picking children who used the other hand to beg. Sympathetic, Enderby gave them little coins.

Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,
Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell
Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,
Poised on the brink, thought and created hell.
Light shimmered in miraculous refraction
As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.

"That bloody," Enderby said. "It's meant really to express grudging admiration. But that only works if the reader knows I've taken the line from Tennyson's poem about the eagle." [359]

Thanks, Tony, for explaining where the line comes from. Sheesh.

It seems to me that we're touching on something quite important about Burgess's art, here. The question is: how far can an artist go if he or she simply doesn't have faith in their audience? Even his own novel tries to warn Burgess away from this ('to hell with the reader', the Muse insists) but he can't quite believe it. The reader must be told. It's vital the reader see and comprehend. There's more than a whiff of authorial ressentiment behind this, I think; something You've Had Your Time is remarkably, indeed refreshingly honest about: 'there was too much of that sort of thing going on' he grinches, of the later 1960s: 'my own creative work ignored, my over-generous laudations of other writers augmented into a supposed scholarly passion.' To be specific: 'I was sick of being left out of the compendia which exalted Alan Sillitoe and David Storey' [YHYT, 88]. This sourness is hardly admirable in itself, of course, but it's perfectly human. The problem is not that Burgess felt this way. It's that he believed that it was the result of insufficient comprehension of his cleverness by his audience. The gap between the merit of what one creates and the way the world treats it can be wide, is often grievous to the author, and it may be opened by many factors. But it cannot be bridged by the timbers of Explanation. 'You disregarded what I wrote, through indifference or hostility. But wait until I have explained it all to you! Ah, then you will love it.' Art-love doesn't work that way.

This, in fact, is one of the ways the myth of the Muse can work. Not that there is a quasi-human partner who can guide you through the choices you make in the rhymes of your sestet; but rather that the affections of the gods are distributed about the world in ways that bear little relation to worth or effort. That the Muse did not love Burgess's poetry is not a judgement on how hard he worked at it. That the Muse, patently, did love the music and the words of The Beatles has little to do with worth as measured by sophistication, literary allusion or poetic form. There you go, though. I had a conversation with James Bradley on Facebook a while ago about this very matter: it's very obvious that Lennon and McCartney's lyrics were tossed out, bodged together, improvised in more or less careless ways. It's obvious, too, that many of those lyrics look crude, especially written down. Yet they have affected me in more profound and lasting ways than Yeats (and Yeats has affected me very deeply). Go figure. One thing to which the Beatles never stooped, mind you, was laborious explanation of what they were trying to do in their art. Indeed, in 'Glass Onion', they actually satirised the urge to explain with a mockingly false hermeneutic of their own songs. There's something in that.