Nothing-Will, Come Of Nothing: Nothing Like The Sun (1964)

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Nothing Like The Sun is a modest-enough title, when you come to think about it. Burgess means: his pastiche Shakespeareanisms (from the stream-of-consciousness account of the inside of WS’s head to whole new sonnets gorblimeyed up out of the proper Elizabethan idiom) is not a patch on the original. How could it be? Of course, he folds other meanings into his title. O (nothing; the letter; the round of the Globe theatre) proves but a pale imitation of the Platonic reality of illumination. And the nothing is Shakespeare, too: the ungentle, non-aristocrat Shakespeare: ‘But I am a mere nothing,’ he says to the Earl of Southampton, prior to shagging him [108]. What is it (to appropriate Lear's words) that 'comes' of this particular nothing? Comes has a sexual double-meaning, you know. Oh, you did know? Excellent.

Then again, we might object that Burgess’s rich stylistic Shakespeare-via-Joyce is something like the sun, or there’d be no point in us reading it. The novel was published for the tetracentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1964, part of a year of general celebration, and it evidently seeks to put (as the phrase goes) clear blue water between itself and the more piously stodgy establishment encomia. This is a deliberately disreputable Shakespeare; randily bisexual, not well liked by his fellow players, physically unprepossessing (especially at the end, as syphilis increasingly raddles him). An insecure Shakespeare. It's also a young Shakespeare: apart from a brief, almost hallucinatory epilogue, it only takes us up to 1599, but Burgess has that covered. The novel's subtitle tells us it's a (pointedly, not the) 'Story of Shakespeare's Love-life'; and by the seventeenth-century the syphilis has put the old in-out, in-out behind him. Indeed, it's asserted in the epilogue that this disease is responsible for the uncategorizable genius of late Shakespeare, and is moreover perhaps the dark secret at the centre of all truly great art. And at this point in the blogpost, to break up the monotony of bald text some, I'm going to insert an engraving of J. van der Straet's 'A man in bed suffering from syphilis, amidst a busy domestic scene' (1590):

The novel is also about the ‘dark lady of the Sonnets, here styled as a dark-skinned beauty called Fatimah, and whose eyes, as Sonnet 130 from which the title is quoted, are dark, not light. Her 'nothing' (her vagina, that is) is solar, warm, evocative of the sunny climes from whence she comes; and there's much wordplay in the novel to do with lady-parts, as with the penile pun on 'Will' so common in the Sonnets. Fatimah is in the Sonnets too, according to Burgess: encoded acrostically into Sonnet 147, which in turn serves as epigraph to the novel:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I, desperate, now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.

(In You've Had Your Time Burgess suggests that 'the first two vowels are suppressed in the Arabic manner', which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why, then, include the last 'A'? Why suppress vowels anyway? Mightn't we prefer to think that the spelling Shakespeare encodes here is Fe/Thu/M/A/H or 'Fethumah'? Same name, plausible-enough Elizabethan orthography.) Anyway. Not to get distracted. The more relevant point, though, is that this sonnet easily lends itself to a reading by which Shakespeare feverishly regrets that he has caught a sexually transmitted disease from his Dark Lady. An added irony, of which Burgess is certainly aware, is that the Arabic fāṭima means abstainer, or celibate person.

Nothing Like The Sun starts with Fatimah, in the early chapters, as a sort of prophetic vision of oriental loveliness. Young Shakespeare has vividly proleptic dreams about her. The opening sentence of the book evokes her: ‘it was all the matter of a Goddess—dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable. When did her image first dawn?’ And here's the novel's second paragraph, a characteristic chunk of the novel's style, in the lady is again hidden, via 'f' and 'fa' words and two emphatic repetitions of the last syllable of Fatimah's name:

A Good Friday, sure. ’77? ’78? ’79? WS, stripling, in worn tight doublet, patched cloak, but gloves very new. Beardless, the down on his cheek golden in the sun, the hair auburn, the eyes a spaniel’s eyes. He kicked in youth’s peevishness at the turves of the Avon’s left bank, marking with storing-up spaniel’s eye the spurgeoning of the back-eddy under the Clopton Bridge. (Clopton, the New Place hero, who had run away to get rich. Would he, WS, die as great a Stratford’s son?) He smarted to be treated as a child still, he and the family idiot Gilbert charged to take young Anne and younger Richard on a glove-delivering walk in the healthful air. Air blue and sweet over the greenery where the hares darted, away from Henley Street’s dunghills, the butchers sharpening their knives and sorting their pricks and making ready for Easter-Eve market. Young beasts dying maaaaaaa for fine appetites. Jack of Lent ready to be turned out of doors and belaboured. Sweet, hopeful air, sad with a mild south-westerly whisper of afternoon rain. Spring and, battering and belabouring his ears, the moans of another sort of beast—all white, all clawing fingers froglegs swimming on the bed, sepuchrally white. He had seen, that Maundy Thursday afternoon, dupping their chamber door in all maaaaaaa innocence. He should not have seen not heard. All that busy whiteness. They could not have known he saw. [3]

We’re entitled, if we choose, to dismiss this as modish (hence dated) stylistic showoffery; but if we don’t agree to the rules as we start-in, we can’t play the game at all. So if we're smart, we read with a sense of how the sport will be. Clues are dropped in, and we are expected to pick them up (his doublet is old and patched, but his gloves are new: because, we clever readers know, his Dad was a glover). The running theme is how observant WS is, how retentive is his memory. Later in this chapter WS meets a clapped-out ex-sailor, who drunkenly boasts of his travels: ‘I have tasted camel’s flesh and been to lands where men do eat men and have eyes set in their breasts’ [6], and we are versed-enough in Shakespeare to notice the resemblance to Othello’s tall tales wooing Desdemona. The conceit is, presumably, that WS stores it all up, and later reuses it. The danger is that this gives the book the flavour of a mashed-up and stewed Bartlett’s Dictionary of Famous Quotations, stitched together with descriptions of WS shagging and scratching at parchment with a quill pen. But I would suggest that this is a danger Burgess largely avoids. I'll come back to this point.

It's tempting to read Burgess’s habit of referring to our Will as ‘WS’ as a coded piece of self-referentiality: for Burgess's real surname has two syllables, the first of which begins with a ‘W’ and the second with an ‘S’. But we can forgive him that. This paragraph also sets up the Big Themes of death, sex, mothers (‘maaaaaaa’, twice) and memory: little Will shocked by the primal scene of his parents fucking, the repellent froggish whiteness of this as against the seductive darkness of Fatimah.

By the second chapter WS is in trouble for getting Alice Studley (‘one ready wench—black-eyed, the flue on her body black, her hair black and shining as blackbirds that fed on thrown-out bacon fat’) with child: but it might just as well have been Ben Lovell, or Gervase Black from Blockley, or Pip Graydon. In chapter 3 he is at home amongst bickering siblings and disdainful parents and respectable poverty, writing his first sonnet, Burgess's own stab at the kind of thing the young Will might have been scribbling:

Fair is as fair as fair itself allows,
And hiding in the dark is not less fair.
The married blackness of my mistress’ brows
Is thus fair’s home for fair abideth there.
My love being black, her beauty may not shine
And light so foiled to heart alone may turn.
Heat is my heart, my hearth, all earth is mine;
Heaven do I scorn when in such hell I burn.
All other beauty’s light I lightly rate.
My love is as my love is, for the dark.
In night enthroned, I ask no better state,
Than thus to range, nor seek a guiding spark.
And, childish, I am put to school of night
For to seek light beyond the reach of light.

Not very good, but (as per Enderby) perhaps not meant to be: Will is either 14 or 15 at this point, and callowness in versifying is to be expected. I can’t say it seems to me to have a very Shakespearian flavour: that triple repetition of ‘fair’ in line one, ‘heaven do I scorn’ too blasphemous a sentiment for the Sonnets and the final line is more Metaphysical (actually: more Wallace-Steveny, Empsonian, Modernist-mystical) than Elizabethan. But fair enough: a sonnet’s a sonnet. And the real purpose of this fourteen-liner is to point up the acrostic of the name of the Dark Lady, FATIMAH (first forwards then backwards). In You've Had Your Time Burgess crows a little, in a manner not entirely seemly, that 'not one reviewer spotted this improbable acrostic'. What he doesn't say, and conceivably didn't notice himself, is that the second half also includes a slyly skew acrostic for the name of Shakespeare's own son (lines 8-12, with an extra step past the subjective 'I' into line 11—since Hamnet was 11 when he died: 'Heaven', 'All' 'My' 'Night', 'Enthroned' 'Than'), the death of whom has such a major impact on Shakespeare in the novel. Followed by a conclusive 'A' and 'F' that, I'd like to think, links Anthony B. and Fatimah herself. Shakespeare, bereft into writing Hamlet by the death of Hamnet, finds some kind of balm in the news that Fatimah bore him a son who has since been taken into the East, and whose descendant Burgess might have encountered in his Malayan travels.

Functionally in terms of narrative, Burgess includes this early sonnet (and its improbably proleptic acrostic) to illustrate the process of composition. And actually that 14-lines is not what the novel prints. Instead, as his siblings and parents scrap and shout around him, the young Will writes, with many prose interruptions:

Fair is as fair as fair itself allows,
And hiding in the dark is not less fair.
The married blackness of my mistress’ brows
Is thus fair’s home for fair abideth there.
My love being black, her beauty may not shine
And light so foiled to heart alone may turn.
Heat is my heart, my hearth, all earth is mine;
Heaven do I scorn when in such hell I burn.
All other beauty’s light I lightly rate.
My love is as my love is, for the dark.
In night, on night, enthroned on night …
Enthroned on night I keep my something state.
In night enthroned, I ask no better state,
Twin-orbed and sceptered …,
Than thus to range, nor seek a guiding spark.
And childlike I am put to school of night
And, childish, I am put to school of night
For to seek light, for to seek light light light…
For to seek light beyond the reach of light.

This nineteen-line poem is rather better than the 'finished' piece, I think, qua poem.; though obviously is smears and obscures the second acrostic. It does, though, effect a Gertrude-Stein-y emphasis of certain key themes in the novel. Night. Light.

Still, my mistress's eyes are nothing like this sonnet. Will falls in love with dark-haired, pretty young Anne Whately, besotted (‘“Anne Anne Anne Anne,” the starlings scolded’ [32]); but it's too late. He has already made merry in the woodlands with older, blonde Anne Hathaway—thrice, no less—and she is with child. He has to marry her, and though there is a chapter of spicy sex-scenes, lest we forget that Burgess was also working on a screenplay around this time to be called ‘the Bawdy Bard’—Will discovers that though hate adds spice to shagging it’s no foundation for married life. He runs off: is cockstruck by a black prostitute in Bristol, works as Latin tutor to a nobleman’s twin sons until, having started a sexual relationship with one (at the boy’s instigation) he propositions the other accidentally and is chased out of the house.

Eventually he ends up in London, a poet and player, and here he has a long relationship with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. He sees another, or perhaps the same (I wasn't sure) black woman around London and is again besotted. This is Fatimah, and in Burgess's version she is not Mediterranean, nor African, nor even Arabic. She is Malay: golden-coloured rather than coal-black, slender, flat-faced and full-lipped. Shakespeare records: 'She says (I write it on my tablet): Slammat jalan' [147], which is certainly Malay: 'Selamat jalan' /səlamat dʒalan/, 'Have a safe journey'. There's even quite a nice pun, later in the novel, when, having abandoned Shakespeare to become the mistress of the higher-ranking Earl of Southampton, Fatimah is cast off herself, and returns to him. Southampton, she says, is a tuan (Malay 'lord', as anyone who has read Conrad's Lord Jim knows very well). 'But it is you dat have de noble name,' Fatimah tells Shakespeare, 'not he, our tuan dat is gone to de war.' 'I?' Shakespeare replies, puzzled. 'I am not noble.' 'You are a sheikh,' she replies, simply. [209]

Ho ho.

Frank Kermode summarises the rest of the novel:

His affair with a dark lady ... is interrupted by the friend [Southampton], and the mixture of sexual disgust, longing, resignation and anger of the sonnets is projected onto the novel. While this painful affair is in progress Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dies in Stratford. Going home on this occasion to his grand new house, the biggest in the town, he discovers his wife and his brother in bed [note: actually Kermode is wrong here; it is not the funeral journey for Hamnet but a later trip that discloses this adultery to Will]; no great surprise to this roué Londoner, who by now knew, grimly enough, what one might expect of a woman. Anne’s infidelity is a great relief, and the poet rides back to London grateful for ‘that cornuted manumission’, an expression one likes to think only Burgess could have invented. The unequal friendship with Southampton is resumed, and Shakespeare dares to warn his friend against getting mixed up in the ambitions and plots of the rebellious Essex. He also returns to his lover and catches the disease from which the young Earl is already suffering. The book ends with a sort of dark Lawrentian fantasia on that disease as the source of all evil, and possibly the true source of the truth about this world.

Kermode quotes Sonnet 144, the last lines of which have been taken by some critics (though not most) to refer to Shakespeare's syphilis:

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

The hell and fire images here may or may not refer to the burning of venereal infection; but Burgess takes the whole poem at, as it were, face value: the man right fair is Southampton, aristocratic and virtuous in the etymological, vir-sense of the word. Pleasure (the enjoyment of the woman's 'O', her nothing) leads to nothing, the hellish burning and the grave. All enjoyment ends there, and Burgess captures well the way later Shakespeare is so prone in his plays to rail against lechery, pleasure and unchaste women. The solar nothing leads, of course we know, to nothing.

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The least sympathetic account of this novel I have read comes from the usually more perceptive Colin Burrow. Burrow mislikes the novel very much, and cites it as part of an 'is Burgess truly a good writer or not?' debate he holds with himself. And actually, Burrow claims not to be sure whether Burgess is a good writer ('it [is] extremely hard to assess how good he is'). This doesn't stop him waxing very woe-unto-us-Sun-readers:

Geoffrey Grigson, in a review that Burgess seems to have learned by heart, said that his journalism was driven by a desire to convince himself that ‘an insatiable liking for words amounts to an ability to use them well and to distinct purpose.’ The look-at-me cleverness is certainly there throughout his fiction. His novel about Shakespeare, Nothing like the Sun (1964), is particularly full of misfiring bits of attention-seeking. When Will laments his sickness, while the ‘mobbled queen’ Elizabeth I is on progress, there is a classic piece of Burgessian talent abuse: ‘I can hardly move, sick not in my body but only in my soul, centre of my sinful earth. I lie on my unmade bed listening to time’s ruin, threats of Antichrist, new galleons on the sea, the queen’s grand climacteric, portents in the heavens, a horse eating its foal, ghosts gliding as on a buttered pavement.’ This is a terrible piece of writing, but not unrepresentative. The little glances at obvious bits of Shakespeare, from Hamlet, through The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets, make it seem as though Will thought only in Famous Quotations, and those Famous Quotations are syntactically redundant in a way that makes them audibly no more than add-ons. By the time the sentence arrives at the hideously un-Shakespearean ‘buttered pavement’ it is all too ready to slip over. The overlay of learning – misguided showing-off rather than postmodern self-consciousness – blows away any intimacy with Shakespeare. You wind up watching Burgess mechanically anatomising Shakespeare’s words.

This is hardly fair. Burgess does play the anticipatory-phraseology game a little in this book it's true; but to a much less degree than this quotation implies. Most of the narrative is quite bare of Famous Quotations, and concentrates on other effects: brilliantly evocative landscape and period detail; sharply observed dialogue (as ever in Burgess). Nor is it fair to quote the passage Burrow does here out of context. As it stands the butter-image looks just random. In situ, it comes at the end of a whole chapter describing a riot by London apprentices, venting their ire at butter-sellers 'for that they sell their butter at 2d the lb too much' [158]. This is Burgess's version of what happened in June 1595 when 'some young apprentices complained about the overprice in the market' and 'showed their complaint by taking 500 pounds of butter from the market women in Southwark after the price of butter which had the rate 3 pence per the pound, [was raised to] 5.' The unhistorical element here is  Burgess importing the rape of (we assume) Fatimah into these riots: 'in Clerkenwell they have beaten the negro trulls, stripping one and scrubbing her to clean off her black before using her foully.' This leads, in Shakespeare spirochete-addled mind to the nightmarish fantasia, where butter figures both as a referent to maternal milk (there's a whole thesis to be written about Burgess and milk in this context, actually) and to a greasier symbol of lustful pleasure, like curdled semen:

All this [riot] for 2d a lb on butter. Well, what was this agitation in the city of mine own soul but that? A finger-dip into butter-smooth pleasure and the armies and rioters trample through my veins, crying Kill kill. Buttered blood, the town is spread with it.

The passage Burrows quotes, following this, doesn't read so badly.

That's not to say that the novel is problem-free. There is something not quite resolved about the Malaysian origin of Fatimah. What I mean is: on the one hand, Burgess plays quite scrupulously with the 'clues' provided by the sonnets and plays, whilst accepting that such stuff is playful: writing is extrapolated back into a fictional 'life' in ways that do no great violence to plausibility. There were black prostitutes in Elizabethan London; the man who wrote Cleopatra understands something important about the erotic fascination of ethnic and cultural otherness; it's reasonable to think that something beyond the simply chronological process of growing older explains the sharp difference between the sexually lubricious young Shakespeare of Venus and Adonis and the feverishly physically-repelled anti-sex Shakespeare of the later plays.

That's all well and good, and within the terms of the game. But plausibility is going to suggest a North African or Mediterranean provenance for Fatimah (not least the Islamic name itself). Plausibility collapses, exhausted, before the premise of faraway Malaya supplying her to London in the 1590s. This, we understand, relates not to Will Shax but to Wil-son; it is Burgess's own life experience that elevates that particular place to imaginative centrality. And this in turn points to an unresolved tension in Nothing Like The Sun: there's a blink-and-miss-it frame narrative to the novel, in which 'Mr Burgess's farewell lecture to his special students' in Malaysia (they are named, 19 of them; and their Malay and Arabic names recur, in various word-game ways, in the body of the text) provides the occasion for the whole book.  The chasm between the two worlds is too great, and has the effect of destabilising a book that otherwise stands perfectly well as a 'straight' historical novel.

Straight is the wrong word, of course. Bisexual Shakespeare, the master-mistress of this whole enterprise, is sometimes represented via third and sometimes a first person narration. But my master-mistress's 'I's are nothing like Wil-son. Of course it's a false compare. Nor, I think, does Burgess ever suggest otherwise. The final words are Burgess more or less in propria persona, and they acknowledge his suzerainty to William. What would you have now? No more. No no no more. Never again. One last word. One last last last last word. My Lord.