The Devil's Mode (1989)

This is Burgess's only published collection of short stories, and the fact that it is Burgess's only published collection of short stories suggests how ill-at-ease he was, by and large, with the mode. His muse was uncomfortable being truncated, I suppose. He needed room to stretch his writerly elbows.

Still, Burgess was nothing if not wide-ranging, eager to try everything at least once save, I'm thinking, incest and murder; so here we have nine shorts, two of them quite long. A bookful. The front cover illustrates one of the better ones. 'A Meeting in Valladolid' speculates that Shakespeare might have toured with his company of players to Spain (unlikely), where he could have encountered Cervantes (very unlikely). Likelihood is not the point here, of course. Shakespeare's company rocks up in Spain without having already translated Titus Andronicus into Spanish, and a truncated Espanophone version is cobbled together overnight. But all of this is sketched in, in order for Burgess to get to his money-shot: a dialogue between the two greatest writers of their generation. This, when we finally get to it, is not too bad, although neither is it earth shattering. Cervantes thinks the English incapable of great art because they are too comfortable; a (we can be honest) rather anachronistic importation of the nation-of-shopkeepers libel from the 19th- into the 16th-century.

'I say this of you English—that you have not suffered. You do not know what torment is. You will never create a literature out of your devilish complacency. You need hell, which you have abandoned, and you need a climate of hell—harsh winds, fire, drought. ... You English as incapable of accepting God at all. You do not suffer and you cannot make comedy out of what does not exist in your green and temperate land.' [15-16]

Shakespeare is having none of this.

'Do not talk to me of soul,' Will said loudly. 'On your admission, you Spaniards see God as a foul father and man as an unredeemable beast. And the soul is committed to torturing priests who seeks a confession of faith as the flames leap round the howling victim ... [16]

So they go back and forth. Cervantes' point is that tragedy is a petty and jejune art compared to comedy: 'God is a comedian,' is how he puts it. 'God does not suffer the tragic consequences of a flawed essence. Tragedy is all too human. Comedy is divine.' Shakespeare's come-back is: 'you talk of comedy most uncomically. You have produced neither a Hamlet nor a Falstaff' [17], which is a pretty good smackdown, except that (as the story immediately adds) the names meant nothing to Cervantes. A third party, Don Manuel who is translating this exchange, attempts a summing up:

'I have seen your plays. I have read his book. You will forgive me if I say I know where the superiority lies. You lack his wholeness. He has seen more of life. He has the power to render both the flesh and the spirit at one and the same time.' [17]

It's about the respective merits of more than just these two authors, of course: it's the novel versus poetry, whole vision versus the creation of individual human archetypes. The story has nowhere to go after this, and fizzles out. I suspect the fizzle is as much to do with Burgess's own ambivalence about his art. He is a novelist, like Cervantes, rather than a poet-playwright like Will, though he nowhere really achieves this notional wholeness of flesh and spirit (I'm not convinced Cervantes does either, but hey it's an ideal). Alternately, Burgess is a myriadminded purveyor of variety like Shakespeare, who never created a character with the truth and cultural penetration of a Hamlet or a Falstaff. Sure, who has? AB perhaps feels his not-quite-there-ness has to do with a too-much comfortable Englishness about his being-in-the-world.

Other stories are similarly over-compressed. The last story, which in turn supplied the verso cover art, is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche called 'Murder to Music'. Look, there he is, on the back cover, apparently played by David Walliams with small squares removed from his cranium:

The key to a mysterious murder is encoded in the performance of a classical concert, a fact winkled out by Holmes in an elementary twenty pages. But the piece is too crowded with extraneana and too uninterested in the creation and dissipation of tension to work after the manner of actual Holmes stories. Instead we get things like this profoundly un-Conan-Doyle-y Sherlockian reminiscence of schooldays:

'Stanley Hopkins. The name recalls that of an old teacher of mine, Watson. It always takes me back to my youthful days at Stonyhurst College, where I was taught Greek by a young priest of exquisite delicacy of mind. Gerard Manley Hopkins was his name ... I was given taps from a tolly by him when I was a callow atramontarius. He was the best of the younger crows, however, always ready to pin a shouting cake with us in the haggory. Never creeping up on us in the silent oilers worn by the crabbier jebbies.' [258]

Cluck cluck gibber gibber my old man's a mushroom etcetera. I appreciate that this is a sort of joke, parsing schoolboy slang through Sprung Rhythm and the fruitier side of Hopkin's vocabulary; but it's a tone deaf sort of gag in this context. Such whimsy is alien to Doyle. The oddest thing here is its implication that Holmes was a Catholic, as he would have had to have been to attend a school like Stonyhurst, with its strong Jesuit tradition. I don't know anybody else who has suggested that Holmes is a Catholic, or that there's anything in the original stories to suggest he might be. (Over on Facebook, David Pringle points out that Doyle was himself a Catholic, and attended Stonyhurst; so Burgess isn't merely spitballing here).

The title story follows up on this game, which clearly amused AB a great deal, of mashing-up lots of famous artist figures in one place. Said story is '1889 and The Devil's Mode': Claude Debussy meets the Rossettis in London, bumps into Robert Browning ('an old man in an Italian suit, bulb-nosed and white bearded' [90]) and hangs out with Mallarmé, whose L'après-midi d'un faune he sets to music. The reader recognises the various references, and that's that: an unsatisfying confection, overall. There are a couple of post-colonial pieces, harking back to the earliest Burgess ('Wine of The Country' is a sour little tale about the marital infidelity of an English couple in Brunei, and 'Snow', which filters Burgess's own experiences in Malaya via W. Somerset Maugham's 'Rain'). Then three other pieces. One works quite well: 'The Endless Voyager' is short but resonant, about a working class Englishman who's made good, grown old and widowed, and suddenly decided he doesn't want to go home. He throws his passport away on a translatlantic flight and without it he's not allowed into the States. The narrator, a businessman (this isn't really spelled out) who takes a lot of international flights, keeps bumping into him. The old guy now lives on planes and in airports, never stepping past any passport or customs booth, and declares himself happy with his newly derationated existence, although he is also suffering in physical and mental health. It's like bit like that Tom Hanks comedy-romance The Terminal (dr Spielberg 2004) with the sentimentality taken out (although if you took the sentimentality out of that movie it would collapse like a bouncy castle with the power switched off).

Then there are two longer pieces. 'The Cavalier of the Rose' is a 50-page prosification of Der Rosenkavalier, and exactly as meh as you'd expect from such a conceit. The final story is a novelette called 'Hun' about, you guessed right, Atilla and his depredations on the Roman Empire in the 5th century. This is weak beer: some 2D stage-setting in late Eastern Roman Empire Egypt, a loosely strung together series of set-pieces, and an overall feeling that these are the quick-written notes for a screenplay. Some of this gives the impression of being a placeholder for a longer and more detailed treatment ('Atilla moves east over the endless plains in late autumn, the smell of snow already in the air' [180]). The portrait of the protagonist is a little over-decadent: this Atilla dresses luxuriously, quotes Vergil, eats peeled grapes off golden plates, and says things like 'the similitude is infelicitous'. At one point he has ambassadors arrested—'Atilla pointed a manicured forefinger at Vigilas: "arrest this servant of the Emperor Theodosius" [198]—whilst they splutter in protest ('we come in good faith from the imperial court to deliver messages from his imperial greatness! We do not deserve this treatment!'). Then again, he deliberately dresses down to overawe his potential opponents:

They were dragged to a room well lighted with torches where Atilla sat, transformed to an ogre dressed in rough skins, his jowls unshaven, his fingernails black. Behind him stood a burly fellow nursing an axe. [199]

There's some business with Atilla's sword, marked with his A, which at the end of the tale is handed over to King Arthur, no less ('it passed to the hands of another, a dux of the Saxon shore, whose name began with an A—what was it now? ... to the isle of Britain where it awaited another dux Romanus with an A crowning his name. It is a Christian sword now' [250] alright alright, we get it). This deliberate linkage to Any Old Iron only tends to reinforce how thin 'Hun' feels by comparison.

*

People sometimes think short stories are easier than novels, because they're shorter. This, oddly enough, is exactly the wrong way around. I'm not talking about writing them (short stories are easier to write than novels. Because, well, they're shorter). I mean: reading them. This counterintuitive truth explains why, as people generally find themselves less inclined to put the effort in where reading is concerned, for the very good reason that there are many less effortful ways for them to get at the Story and Character they need, through TV, cinema, video games and so on ... why, I say, that as people are less inclined to read, short story markets have withered away at a faster rate than novel markets. Novel sales are, taken as a whole, holding up; the once-thriving subculture of short stories magazines and collections has collapsed. The reason for this is that the greatest effort involved in reading is starting to read, that is, actually picking up a text and running the words past one's eye. Once you're in, it's much easier to continue reading. Indeed, there are plenty of novels where it becomes actively difficult to stop reading. It's like that trick where a bucket or container is filled with a long coiled section of chain. Once you've taken one end of this chain, draped it over the side and given it a yank, the whole containerful will seemingly defy gravity by flowing up into the air, over and down, until all the chain has waterfallen out.

What makes reading collections of short stories so bothersome is that the reader cannot simply let the story draw her out of the chain-filled box, because the story keeps stopping and the trick must be reset. It is annoying for writers, who would prefer to get paid large sums for writing many individual shorts than get paid small sums for labouring over the onerous business to putting a novel together. But there you go. And that's that problem with The Devil's Mode. Most of the stories are too short: no sooner has the reader screwed her reading courage to the sticking point than the story is over, without adequate punchline or payoff. The two longer pieces draw the reader along, but end up reading like underinflated novels rather than properly paced novelettes. Burgess was not the devil, and this was not his best mode.

Soupexcaliburgessisticexpialidocious: Any Old Iron (1989)

Soup?

Surprisingly, yes. We start with the life-story of a Welshman, David Jones, who runs away to sea in the early years of the 20th century. Working as a cook on the Titanic he somehow survives that disaster and ends up in New York as a short order chef. There he lodges with another Welshman, Dai Williams, who lectures him fruitily on Welsh history, the legacy of the 'Big White Christ' and the perfidy of the English. King Arthur and his magic sword is part of this narrative, more myth than actual history. This is how Williams eats:

He was unmarried and lived mostly on the one pan of mutton broth which, with sporadic additions and constant simmering, had nourished him, he claimed, for the near thirty years of his expatriation. [AOI, 10]

This is an image Burgess is reusing from his earlier work. Indeed, he originally planned to build a whole novel around it, the unfinished It Is The Miller's Daughter.

The novel was to be about flour and water, especially water. It was set in a French village near the Belgian border, and its hero, a lowly farm-worker, lived with his grandmother, who fed him soup ladled from a pot simmering on a fire which never went out. The soup had been bubbling ever since the days of Louis XIV, so that it stood for the continuation of history: the boy spooned in history twice a day. [Burgess, You've Had Your Time (1990), 136]

This vision of history as immortal comestible brings the book's two linked and potent themes to the fore. Any Old Iron is about history, and spends most of its supremely entertaining and readable 350 pages dramatising the history of the 20th-century, from World War 1 to the mid century. More to the point it is about the continuities of history, the way what happens today is shaped by and connected to what happened long ago—more by the myths of the past than the realities. But it's also about the way history is actually about questions of ordinary subsistence, physical and emotional. It's about food (David Jones is a cook; his son Dan a fishmonger) and about love, marital and familial. Jones marries Ludmilla, a Russian, and has three children, and the novel picks up their stories as it zooms from the Western Front to the Russian Revolution, from Spanish Civil war and the Second World War to the birth of Israel. Many famous names appear as characters. But they always appear in the wings; the central characters are all deeply ordinary. Indeed, in writing an Arthurian novel—since what links all these peripatetic adventures is a through-line about Arthur's sword Excalibur, preserved in oil at Monte Cassino and passed eventually to the Jones—Burgess wants to stress the unimportance of kings like Arthur, and their weapons of mythic destruction. The novel opens with a three page account of the fabled sword:

The name Excalibur comes from the Welsh Caledvwlch, which is tied up with the Irish Caladbolg, and Caladbolg means hard belly or capable of eating anything.... I never saw the sword, but I understand that it was of the broad variety, with a sharp point and two cutting edges; and offensive weapon, then, no mere symbolic ornament. Hilt and guard were both long gone and point and edfes blunted, but the blade shone with a memory of defiance, and on the blade had been stippled a capital A or alpha. [AOI, 1-2]

This unscarlet letter stands for Arthur, or perhaps Atilla the Hun, who supposedly inherited the Arthurian sword; or maybe for the Roman general Aetius, or the British King Ambrosius Aurelanius. Presumably there's also a touch of 'Anthony Burgess' in it ABLADE ABLADE.  The sword is passed from dictator to dictator, and the narrative of such rulers subduing populations is what we call 'history'. David Jones, though, has a very different, more humane vision of history:

'A big flaming sword with A written on it. The A's for Atilla the Hun, though he doesn't seem to have been a German, and also for Arthur, who was king of Wales. Different, but both the same, as the sword shows, for what is history but slashing the innocent with a sword? What we have to do is get out of it and down to the things that matter. I mean food mostly. Food's what matters, people will always eat and always have done when history has kindly permitted them to.' [AOI, 56]

'Melt down the sword,' is Jones's advice. 'Make knives and forks out of it.'

A couple of other symbols for history are introduced. 'When you step into the future,' Dai Williams tells him, 'you will always have the mud and filth of the past stuck to your boots and no iron scraper will ever be able to clean it all off' [12]. And when David joins the army and boards his troop train to the front he is moved to ponder what the war is about. 'It went back a long way,' he decides. 'All one piece, a train so long you couldn't see the engine, new coaches added at every stop, and you had to get into one already crowded' [30]. Both these images look forward to the central encounter with the Holocaust, the nexus of history as nightmare that also haunts Earthly Powers: human beings shipped by trains and turned into ordure, a horror which we neither can nor should forget. But food is the true soupy medium of historical unity in the novel. Characters eat meals together and talk; when David's father is dying, his son cooks him 'a fine leg of Welsh mutton with turnips, leeks, carrots and onions, a tumbler of port wine to be added five minutes before the end of cooking' [22]. Soup is on the one hand just soup, in an actual cooking pot; but as history soup is also Bran's Cauldron, which magic utensil can resurrect the dead. What else does a historical novel do but that?

Myth is history patterned, usually patterned to such an extent that the actuality of history, the things that really occurred, become overwritten to the point of opacity. Was there a real, historical King Arthur? We have the sense that there's something there, something dimly 6th-century, but that myth has thrown such a cloud of unknowing over the facts that they can no longer be discerned. This is inevitably what myth does: it makes fact factitious. Of course when we put it like that it's clear that all history is mythopoeic to one degree or another. Historians, from university professors down to old people reminiscing about their time in the war, select and structure, pattern and form what they lay before us. 'Was there "actually" a King Arthur?' may be the wrong question. Instead we could ask: how eloquent, or true, is the patterning we are drawn to? What is its utility? To what extent does it help put food on the table, or help people to get through their days, love one another (or die). Can we really stir our soup with excalibur? Or perhaps what I mean is: should we?

Any Old Iron brilliantly dramatises this tension: history as something formless, sloppy, a great cauldron of soup (what is more shapeless than soup?) kept bubbling by social forces and resentments and scarcities; and history as sharp, pointed, dangerous (as a sword), wielded by the powerful to advance the causes of their own self-serving myths The account of David Jones's military service at the beginning of the novel is a tour de force, capturing vividly how much of army service is waiting around, being sent on endless pointless journeys, gearing up for battle in France only to fall sick with a burst appendix, convalescing, getting posted to Ireland, returning, getting posted on a cooking detail to the Isle of White, wasting time, all the while being acutely conscious of the titanic struggles and massive casualties of the Western Front. When Jones eventually goes into battle at Verdun he is blown up by a German shell before he can do anything. His wife thinks him dead and returns to Russia, but he has survived. Burgess's attention to quotidian detail is exquisite ('EXQUISITE,' booms Jones' dying father, unsure of the word's meaning. 'Never forgot that word, though I don't know if I pronounce it right' [22]). One example to stand for many; here's Jones, survivor of the Titanic who joined the army rather than the navy out of contempt for the sea, crossing the channel:

Pte Jones, strong in his stomach while some of his mates gargoyled into the foamy green, stood steady in his boots on the pitching deck and snuffed his old friend and enemy with relish, letting the wind welshcomb his black wiry cropped nob. [33]

Gargoyled into the foamy green makes me want to stand up and shake Burgess by the hand. At the same time, the novel assiduously works a mythic superstructure, Arthurian in nature (naturally) and immensely expressive. This focuses on the sword, the old iron of the book's title, but also embroiders a Fraser-y or Jessie Weston-ish sense of the symbiotically Pagan-Christian resonances of the story. Here is Dan Jones, David's son, fighting in Italy in a different World War.

Pte Daniel Jones, of the third platoon of C Company First Battalion of the Royal Lancashire Regiment, Third Infantry Brigade of the First Infantry Division, Sixth Corps, was permitted at dawn to fish in the lake called Albano for the local lake fish known as coregone. He fished with a borrowed crutch and a borrowed pair of artillery lanyards knotted, the hook a bent hussif needle and the bait a chunk of bully. He caught three by the time the sun was well up. His mate Wally Squire had lighted a fire for cooking and they were able to eat breakfast of charred coregone before they were ordered to fall in for the march to Rome. The fish made a difference to Dan Jones: it seemed to relax his bowels and enable him to defecate behind a tree for the first time in a week. He had missed fish. [111]

Dan is actually a prisoner-of-war at this point, but he's also the fisher king, the wounded king (that borrowed crutch), served by his 'squire' in the ritual action of fishing with an arid plain—a plain aridified by war—behind him. If Dan is Peredur, then Reg Morrow Jones, the protagonist of Any Old Iron, has shades of Arthur himself. After a complex series of highly entertaining narrative shifts, the sword that might be Excalibur comes into his possession. German bombing serendipitously uncovers the stone plinth from which it could be drawn, myth tells us, only by the rightful king. Reg examines the blade. 'what he had to avoid,' he tells himself, 'was being superstitious about the sword, seeing it as a living thing, imagining that a charge of tangible power came off it when touched. It was, after all, only an ancient chunk of forged metal' [284]. Still, material artefacts from the past can help sift myth from history. Reg's steed is a bike.

He chose a night of full moon to borrow Megan's brother's bicycle. Caledvwlch rode along the handlebars without protest and, when he leaned the bicycle against the broken field gate, Reg had a feeling that the sword in his right hand yearned towards the bright light in the sky unseen for so many centuries. ... Reg jumped into the hollow and confronted GLAD ART REG on the stone plinth. It seemed to him that he ought to say a prayer or cry a cantrip, but then he ordered superstition to get behind him. He inserted the sword's point into the sheath, and the only connotations were sexual. It went in easily and to the limit, the fit was astonishingly tight: there was no doubt the one had been made for the other. And then to Reg's fear and wonder he found that he could not draw the sword out. Only one man, rex quondam et futurus, was granted that power This was absurd. Reg tugged, but the sword rested snug and immovable. He sat on the ground, sweating under the sinking moon, and took many deep breaths. Then he tried again. He discovered that by a slight wrenching of the crosspiece to the right the sword came out sweetly and easily. There was always an explanation, there were no real mysteries, but, seeing a bat fly low over his head, Reg had a pang if fear about a living Merlin. Merlin, if he ever existed, was perhaps a great artificer. There must be a gripping device in the depths of the stone sheath. (Eldritch—kingdom of the elves?) The grip could be loosened only by a slight sideways wrench ... Reg trembled as he held Caledvwlch in both hands. Did moonlight show a minute perforation very close to the point? A metal tooth of needle sharpness might enter there and hold. It was possible enough, no eldritch magic. [285-86]

GLAD ART REG is both the abbreviated Latin for 'King Arthur's Sword' and the joy in the heart of artful Reg, our hero. The novel does not present this to us as either/or circumstance. 'What was Arthur,' Reg demands, 'but a dux Romanus taking his orders from Ravenna? You'll never see a Welshified Britain again and you will not see an independent Wales. The Welsh and the English are intermixed' [91]. So it is, too: everyone is intermixed with everyone else. That soupy moral would stand as the main thesis of the book, too, were it not that so much of the story is given over to the creation of an independent Israel. Everyone is mixed, it seems, but some people are more mixed than others. Dai Williams, he of the eternal soup quoted above, lives in a Jewish quarter of Brooklyn, and feels quite at home.

Williams knew neither Welsh nor Hebrew, but he had been told ... that they two tongues were cognate, and that the Welsh were originally a lost tribe of Israel that miraculously, or through some quirk of climate, became pale, tall and fair-haired. So he regarded the Ashkenazim as cousins and brothers and sisters. [10]

Speakng personally for a moment: as a man of Welsh heritage (though, London-raised, I speak no Welsh) who is married to a Jew (English, she speaks no Hebrew) I can report that I've several times heard this theory. It's myth not history, which is to say the Welsh are not 'actually' a lost tribe of Israel. Except that the truth the myth speaks is the same truth that inspires Burgess's novel.

This story of soup and Excalibur's Burgessistic (in the best sense): and it inspired my own explicatory, (e)docious or educative response. But does my blogpost in any other way earn its Mary Poppins-y title? No. Burgess's novel has nothing specifically to say about P L Travers, Disney or that pair of song-writing geniuses the Sherman brothers. Nonetheless, this is a novel that, by so full-throatedly inhabiting the idiom of the pun linguistic and the pun semantic, licenses all sorts of punning responses. And there's something cartoony, in terms of vigour and bright-colours and flatness, about Burgess's busy recreation of all the various historical set pieces. The novel has something in common with the crammed, multivalent energy of that word, it's vision of history as a popular ditty. In a nutshell it's a case of rex futuris, rexque quondum diddle diddle diddle/um diddle ay/um diddle diddle diddle/um diddle ay.

I'll stop there.

The Confessions of Anthony Burgess: "Little Wilson and Big God, You've Had Your Time" (1986/1990)

:1:

It hadn't occurred to me before to take the two separate phrases that constitute the titles of the twin volumes of Burgess's memoir and run them together like that, but perhaps it makes sense. The 'you' would be plural not in the sense (as I first assumed) that it addresses all of us, Burgess included, as a sort of momento mori, but in the sense of folding together Burgess and the God of his Fathers, both at the end of their usefuls. In the preface to vol 1 Burgess declares 'I think I may predict, unless some miracle of renewed inspiration occurs, that the second volume of my memoirs will bring my writing career to a close' [LWBG, viii]. Not so! Three more novels followed You've Had Your Time, along with various other things. (He also says 'I foresee that the projected second and last volume will be as long, if not longer', which, its 400 pages set against the first installment's 460, shows that he was no prophet).

The declaration of retirement from writing may or may not have been meant genuinely. It could be ludic Burgess designedly casting a hue of terminal reflection over his lifestorytelling the better to combine pathos with a clearer perspective. After all, we're hardly going to trust a memoir that admits it is in medias res. How can the teller hope to recall his own wood when there are still so many trees about? Russell Brand, ten years my junior, has already published two volumes of autobiography; Katie Price is younger still and she has published four. Burgess was right to stress his own obsolescence.

He claims he was prompted by particular intimations of mortality. In America in 1985 he 'met young people in Minneapolis who were surprised to find me still alive. They had studied a book of mine in high school or college and assumed I was a classical author, meaning a dead one' [LWBG, 4]. Burgess, happy enough for his own reasons to go along with the conceit, orchestrates his life-story novelistically, which makes for a brilliantly entertaining read but which puts the absolute truth under question. 'As for truth,' he concedes, 'I might, through sheer shame at the banality of my life, be forced to distort it.' But he goes on:

Pontius Pilate's question has still not properly been answered, though he may well have given the only possible answer with his other great dictum: 'What I have written, I have written'. He is surely the patron saint of writers. [LWBG, 4]

I suspect this unpacks into something rather profound, actually. Truth is part of the issue, but there's another and it relates to the memoir's twin-title. Pilate, patron saint of writers, is the man who presided officially at the death of God. Burgess slyly concedes that 'following St Augustine and Rousseau' he is calling this work his Confessions, 'but without the promise of such basic spiritual revelations as they provide'. Quite the reverse. The story is not just that of little John Wilson, but also of the way his Big God has run out of time in the modern world. Not a Nietzschean crowing about God's death, but something more heartfelt and mournful.

That there is something tying together the otherwise (brilliant, but) centripetal mass of detail assembled into this book seems to me hard to deny. Contemporaries thought so too. Julian Barnes, reflecting in 1987 on how a literary career is never a smooth progression, but rather 'a matter of hops and starts, surprise promotions and seemingly unmerited stagnations' reflected that

Last year’s promotion of Anthony Burgess to official Grand Old Man was a case in point. After years of getting respectful, rather than ecstatic reviews, and of writing the sort of books which perhaps aren’t naturally suited to the British book-reader, Burgess suddenly turns 70 and produces an autobiography. Overnight, there he is: the Grand Old Man. But I bet he didn’t feel a gear-change inside.

Just desserts. Little Wilson and Big God is, simply, a superb piece of writing. Its best sections are the early ones, when Burgess's deft skill at bricolage recreates a vivid sense of growing up in a Manchester in the 1920s, a life somewhere between respectable and indigent. The writing combines snatches of popular songs from the time, advertising slogans, quotidiana, idiomatically recalled phrases from ordinary speech, lively details and somehow works the whole into a compelling narrative. The protagonist is mostly an Oliver Twist-y blank space, character-wise, as is best in such performances, especially when the supporting cast is so varied and Dickensianly grotesque; but there are two ways in which 'he' stands out. He is weirdly old and erudite for his age (and not backward about boasting of his intellectual, cultural and artistic accomplishments); but he is at the same time unusually gormless and ingenuous too. Other kids explain run-of-the-mill things to him. Hospitalised with Scarlet Fever he proves unable to use the bed pan: 'you were supposed to reserve dry defecation for it, micturating into a chill pot bottle', but Little Wilson 'performed both acts in the same vessel which regularly overflowed.' 'I was,' he says, 'hit by the ward sister' for his clumsiness in this [LWBG, 80]. At the other end of the scale we get this sort of thing, which I remember as my first encounter with the volume in 1986, since Private Eye (which I read regularly at that time) excerpted it and featured it prominently in their 'Pseud's Corner'. In the summer of 1927 he:

got through the whole of Don Quixote in the two-volume Everyman edition. Auden said that nobody had ever read the book through; here is one to say he was wrong. I have read it four times, the second time in Spanish. [LWBG, 76]

Ten years old! It would be fatal to the book if it weren't so ingenuously done. There's a fair amount of it, too: ‘I had composed one Sunday, in the intervals of reading Hemingway’s Fiesta in German, a setting of a song by Lorca–La niña del bello rostro–for a singer named Merita’ [LWBG, 307]. This happens later, when Wilson is stationed in Gibraltar during the war, and is actually less boastful than it seems. He is reading the book in German not to show-off his linguistic facility, but precisely because he doesn't speak German and is having to crash-course himself in order to follow orders and teach it to soldiers. The music, though, is a constant. One of the things Little Wilson and Big God does is flesh out Burgess's often repeated claim that he was a composer first, and a writer only after.

There's also loads of sex, from young-Byron-style seductions of the prepubescent Wilson by various housemaids and nurses, through to sex with Llewela or Lynne Jones, who was to become his wife; and thereafter many accounts of Burgess's numerous extramarital dalliances. He and Lynne met as undergraduates, at which point Lynne's sexual life was still dominated by a 'torrid' affair she had conducted for years with a man who had seduced her when she was 14. She decides to 'wipe out' sex with this man by having sex with Burgess, and also with many others. Her view was 'there were plenty of attractive people around and it would be a shame and a waste not to find out what they were like with their clothes off.' Mournfully, Burgess adds: 'she sustained this attitude throughout a long marriage' [LWBG, 211]. For himself, Burgess goes through the Augustinian confessional route of listing, it seems, his every sexual encounter specifically in order to generate a mood of disgust and revulsion. 'I engaged in erotic play in an alley, broke and spattered prematurely and was derided' [LWBG, 161]; Spattered. Derided. Married sex works no better: 'at night Lynne and I lay, me embarrassed, in her narrow bed. She dealt briskly with my engorgement' [LWBG, 331]. Ugh. Despite her promiscuity, Lynne doesn't seem to have enjoyed the actual sex very much: 'her view of sex was both sane and perilous. It was something you got out of the way so as to concentrate on the human essence of a relationship' [LWBG, 210]

This was a kind of madness but also an odd sort of sanity. ... Like H G Wells, she discounted the dangers of possessiveness. Sexual fulfillment does strange things, especially with women. It generates a fierce proprietoral sense, which is sometimes called love. With Lynne sex was altogether too casual. She would give it without getting anything out of it. Ça vous donne tant de plaisir et moi si peu de peine was one of her favourite aphorisms. The Dionysiac ecstasy had never possessed her. [LWBG, 211]

An individual who takes as a sexual slogan a phrase from Dostoyevsky's The Devils, of all places, is hardly on the royal road to sensual fulfillment. After a little over a decade of married sex, Lynne grows more permanently dissatisfied. The couple are now living in the Far East. 'My lovemaking was not good enough,' Burgess says, baldly. 'I was told it was not good enough. Of course, it never is after fourteen years of marriage' [LWBG, 412]. Not sure I agree with you there, Tony. Lynne, though had 'been given a new standard of lovemaking' by an unnamed Eurasian, 'short and [with] several teeth missing, but he was outstanding in bed.' Burgess adds, with plangently mournful understatement: 'no husband likes to be told of his sexual shortcomings ... and I was told too brutally and drunkenly' [LWBG, 412].

The purpose of all this, I assume, is a kind of public self-abasement. In the preface to You've Had Your Time, Burgess notes with a sort of self-satisfied asperity, that 'the personality revealed' in Little Wilson and Big God 'did not please'. Reviewers denounced Burgess 'as if I were a priapic monster or, at best, unforgiveably indiscreet'. Burgess not only doesn't deny this, he doubles-down on it:

It is never the object of confession, at least in the Catholic tradition, to present oneself as a likeable character. One seeks not admiration but forgiveness. [YHYT, vii]

The startling thing about this is not that it in effect situates us, the reader, as priest, but rather that it calls down forgiveness at all. From where? From a God in which Burgess no longer, quite, believes? After all the priest in the confessional is not himself the source of the forgiveness on offer; he is, rather, a conduit for divine grace. The crucial question here is not 'forgiveness for what?', with its tabloid-journalist lubriciousness of interest in Burgess's many delinquencies, themselves often sexual, and all laid out here with a clarity so pitiless it rather implies that they have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. No: the crucial question, surely, is: 'forgiveness from whom?' Not me, I suppose; and not, dear reader, from you either. John Carey, reviewing the book for the Sunday Times, put his finger on something important: 'these two works together,' he said, 'constitute a picaresque novel, the chaotic adventures of a cross-grained near-genius who surely cannot realize what an impossible figure he cuts, but who keeps you on his side by the stubborn innocence with which he spills it all out.' I think this is right, and it entails a further question: who is authorised to forgive the lapsed Catholic whose greatest fault, implied throughout his memoir if never quite spelled out, is his catastrophic innocence?

Of the breakdown in marital sex that occurred when Lynne so brutally told him of his erotic inadequacy, Burgess says: 'the telling did not kill love, which is above sex, but it killed desire' [LWBG, 412]. If we, as readers, never quite believe in this love, as written in these two volumes, it may be because such emotional connection is personal to the people concerned and cannot by its very nature be easily captured in words. Alternatively, it may be that it simply isn't there. Certainly Burgess does nothing to render his words-on-a-page Lynne loveable, or even likeable. That he doesn't spare himself either hardly justifies this. What comes across is not the much-repeated sense of her being a wild-living Celt 'like Dylan Thomas or Brendan Behan' [LWBG, 437], so much as a woman profoundly unhappy and self-destructive. She was surely 'difficult', but Burgess really does appear to have thought that simply staying married to her was as far as his duty to make her happy extended. Actually, no: that's not fair to him. It's more that he portrays her as somebody for whom happiness was an impossibility, somebody governed by an irrationality his masculine limitedness could never satisfy. To encounter Lynne, Burgess claims, was 'to learn about women's irrationality' [LWBG, 210]. 'I am,' he adds, 'still learning, though irrationality only means contempt for irrational laws.' This is so naked a non sequitur we are right to be suspicious. What these books actually make plain is that Lynne's 'irrationality' manifested in self-destruction so determined she drank herself to death, and a commitment to being deeply unhappy when the raw materials for constructing happiness lay all around her.

'Like God,' Burgess says, slipping into aphoristic mode, 'women prefer love to art. They will accept art [only] as a means of their own beautification or as a testimony to their power.' [LWBG, 213]. Even by the standards of 1986 this is startling nugget of sexism, airily dismissing the very possibility that women might themselves actually produce art (indeed, might be very good at doing so) and locking the verbal image of Lynne the books create into a Man-Does-Woman-Is shaped cage. But there's a crucial clue here too, I think: the elision of womankind and God. Where does forgiveness come from? Only, says Catholicism, from the latter, and therefore (says Burgess) only from the former. Lynne, being dead, can never forgive him. As far as absolution goes, he's had his time. Oh, but is there a get-out clause? Big Woman/God prefers love, but Little-Man-Wilson can always revert to art. He is artful, and his memoirs are supremely so.

:2:

The received wisdom is that the first volume is the better of the two because it is much more like a novel. The second is less eventful, less effectively and various characterised, and increasingly becomes a list of the stuff Burgess wrote. Still, You've Had Your Time is much funnier and less boastful than I remembered from my initial read-through, and full of stuff. 'My novels de facto failures, I became the least fatigable of journalistic hacks'. It's also madder than I remembered: I'm thinking for instance of the bit where Burgess swears he foresaw the Kennedy assassination in a dream. 'I had to believe,' he says, 'in the capacity of dreams to tear the veil of the future' [YHYT, 86], although had to imports too great an inevitability into the process. Burgess's own account makes clear that this dream was actually prompted by reading El Cid before bedtime 'to improve my Spanish'. The Wilsonian subconscious shifted to the USA: 'there was an automobile procession ... "The Kid! The Kid!" the crowd cried.' After the fact of JFK's assassination meaning is retrofitted. The blitheness with which Burgess moves from this, via a quick reference to J W Dunne's An Experiment With Time, to declaring himself a sort of über-Freud ('I find few of my own dreams to be Freudian. Indeed I sometimes dream of a Freud who is puzzling out the meaning of the dream in which he is embedded') would be provoking if it didn't so clearly work so well as comic exaggeration. 'I often find,' he notes rather haughtily, 'that it is enough to wait perhaps months to find the source of [a dream's] images in future time'. We get a little nearer the truth a couple of paragraphs later:

Tough minded readers who either do not dream or see dreams as discardable waste matter, exhaust fumes of the brain, are not entitled to feel superior to persons who, like myself, feed on dreams and are sometimes violently shaken by them. For literary creation is much like the dreaming process and dreams fuel all the arts

I have doubts about this, as a general statement; and doubts too that Burgess intended it, in good faith, as the universal he styles it as here. In part this is because my own personal experience as a writer has found little use for actual dreams. I dream a lot, often vividly, and have occasionally even been shaken by my dreams. But they rarely if ever filter through into what I write.

The 'dreams' thing is interesting, though. It has sometimes occurred to me that the conceit of art as solidified dream is less about the 'actual' transfer of images or emotions from the dream-state to the artwork, and more about the curious status 'dreams' have in terms of their authorship. My dream is mine. One cannot, outside of a Philip K Dick story, dream anyone's dream but one's own. Accordingly it makes sense to think of myself as the author of my dream. At the same time we're all familiar with the way dreams appear to have a will that is not ours: they way they move in odd, unexpected and even unwanted directions. From this we intuit a sense that our dreams are somehow not ours; that something other than we is writing them. This is behind Freud's sense not only that 'who we are' is radically divided, but that 'we' don't have proper access to the other us, the one that authors our dreams.

This question of authorship is quite separate from the matter of 'meaning' in dreams, What's significant about Burgess's interpretation of his own El Cid dream as literally prophetic of the Kennedy assassination is not its truth but its form: it projects his own dreams onto the outer world as a whole, and therefore invests him with the power to in some sense author world-historical events. When you put it like that, it brings out (I think) the point at which Burgess's claim becomes ludicrous; and it has nothing to do with J W Dunne's theories concerning time.

There's a James Wood essay on Knut Hamsun, collected in The Irresponsible Self (2004) that seems to me relevant here. Wood summarises a characteristic Hamsun episode where a young man brags to a blind old man that he lives in a part of town much too expensive for him. The old man asks after the address and the name of his landlord, and when the youngster invents a name ('Happolati') the old guy nods and says he knows him. The young man invents increasingly improbable fictions about his landlord, and the old man continues to nod with recognition. The young man grows angry, but instead of accusing the old fellow of being a dupe he 'does the opposite and bizarrely accuses him of not believing his stories' ('Perhaps you don't believe that a man with the name of Happolati exists! What obstinacy and wickedness in an old man!') The old guy, frightened, moves away. Woods comments:

Hamsun founded the kind of modernist novel which largely ended with Beckett—of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous wave but a storm of interruptions ... [Hamsun's characters] are epistemological brawlers, always challenging meaning to a fight. They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves fresh on every page. Yet like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed. They seem only to be escaping themselves. [Wood, 'Knut Hamsun's Irresponsible Selves', The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Cape 2004), 97]

They invent the scenes through which they move is the very definition of the autobiographers' art, and the tension in 'The Confessions of Anthony Burgess' (which very often include crepuscular states, alienation and leaping surrealism) is the sense that Burgess is both the author of his life and the character in a story—'Life'—written by somebody else entirely. That he is both agent and patient. The hinge of the two novels locates the origin of his actual career as an author in an act of wilful passivity: teaching a class in a Brunei school he is overwhelmed by unhappiness. ''I had done my best; I could do no more: let other agencies take over. I lay on the classroom floor and closed my eyes' [LWBG, 440-41]. This is eccentric, even Hamsunic behaviour in a schoolteacher, but it yields results. Burgess, having felt out of control, reasserts it with this aggressive non serviam. The result is a shift from teaching to writing which culminates, for our purposes, with the book we are presently reading. What is the 'meaning' of Anthony Burgess? How pugilistically does the author brawl with his own epistemology.

Burgess is aware that he is simultaneously creating his life's shape and meaning, and that this shape, adventitiously or Providentially, is something imposed upon him from without. It's the dialectic of these two things that puts the whole question of how how much of this is made-up and how much is 'true' in its context. Dreams, similarly, are typically full of the most outrageously improbable and fantastic gubbins; yet Freud was adamant that dreaming articulates powerful truths of which regular discourse is incapable. And this ambiguity as regards authorship speaks of the Confessional too. Step into a Catholic confessional box and tell your story to the priest. Who is the author of this confession? Well in a crucial sense you are, and must be: unless you are confessing of your own free will the exercise is worthless. But in another sense, equally crucial, you are not: the story you are telling is impelled not by you (not the best you) but by your sins, for which you are heartily sorry, which is to say, from which you distance 'yourself'. But then again, these sins are not some external third party, imposed upon you: you have chosen to sin this way and that's why you're here. But yet again, the 'you' authoring this story is a you bent out of shape by your sin, and the function of the story is to access the grace that will restore you to who you should be. The authorship of a confession is a genuinely complicated matter.

Burgess' title, in part, is taken from Augustine's Confessions, the very first words of which concern the bigness of God ('magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde'). Similarly You've Had Your Time ends with a peroration to literary beauty: 'a conviction that the manipulation of language to the end of pleasing and enlightening is not to be despised' [YHYT, 391]. This is also Augustinian: Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam; Late I have loved you, O Beauty forever old and forever new! Late I have loved you! And, look, you were inside me, and I was out of myself, and that was where I searched for you. [Augustine Confessions 10:27]. Burgess makes beauty in a literary, textual sense, and is here writing a book about the writing of books. Think of Augustine's tolle lege, tolle lege, perhaps the most famous phrase in the whole of his Confessio. But we need to be careful: 'From you, God, I had learned,' says the Saint in Book 5, 'that because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.' Truth and falsity are very complex and difficult. Roger Lewis 2002 hatchet-job biography is largely an exercise in going through Burgess's own memoirs and rubbishing the veracity of the data they contain. This would be massively point-missing even if it weren't, as Lewis's book is, motivated by such a ferocious personal animosity.

The point-missing may proceed from a non-Catholic perspective on a Catholic sacrament (even, as here, in semi-secularised, lapsed-Catholic form). Adam Kotsko has some interesting things to say about the fetish for 'honesty' in social discourse, more broadly conceived. He's right, I think, that there's an increasing tendency to sugar-coat unethical behaviour by 'fessing up and claiming the 'at least I'm being honest' high ground. ('Sure, I have racist thoughts. I’ve crossed the street to avoid a black man sometimes, but only at night. I mean, at least I’m honest about it, though, right?'). Kotsko glosses:

In reality, the “at least I’m honest” gesture is a foreclosure of ethics, a short-circuit by which being true to one’s own authentic shittiness becomes an ethical obligation in itself. It is the last stillborn offspring of the Christian critique of hypocrisy — a critique that was originally intended to shame people into living up to their stated ethical ideals, much as Christian confession (“being honest with yourself”) was a first step toward ethical transformation and made no sense outside of a process of conversion. In the “at least I’m honest” worldview, by contrast, ethical aspiration as such is already the hypocrisy that must be rooted out, and the only possible outcome of confessing one’s shittiness is to remain authentically, honestly shitty.

I suspect, though I don't have space to go into it here, that this scales up: it speaks to the cultural dominance of 'grimdark', the supercession of Tolkien's idealised pre-raphaelite Middle Earth by G R R Martin's horrible, violent and relentlessly man-is-wolf-to-man world of Westeros. Lurking behind this somewhere is an implicit 'yeah, it's ghastly: but at least it's honest'. It's not, of course; or to be precise, it's no more honest than Tolkien. And in one key sense its considerably less honest, because it refuses to countenance precisely the possibility of redemption, of conversion. To convert is to change oneself and doing that necessarily superposes a new 'you' over an old one. Such doubling of personhood might look like hypocrisy to some, but it is less dishonest than a stubborn attachment to oldness for the sake of oldness. We don't have to carry on being shitty.

The broadest trajectory of Burgess's Confession is one out of misery into happiness: volume 2 is considerably less grim than 1, and not only because it covers the period when its subject became a world-famous writer. The hinge is Lynne's death, which though it provokes misery and even suicidal thoughts in Burgess frees him up to marry again and move into the sunshine. Reunited with Lynne postwar, the unhappy Burgess has an affair with an unnamed Jewish girl, with whom (it's clear) he enjoyed happiness and the possibility of more.

I should have married this girl, but, though I had good enough grounds, I could not now seek a divorce. Moreover her Judaism was reinforcing my Catholicism and making the notion untenable. And my wife was turning herself into my poor wife, sick, lonely, neglected. Guilt, guilt and then the leap of the hungry dark forces in a hotel bedroom smelling of breadcrumbs. There is no poetry for such transports, except perhaps in the Song of Solomon. Physical appetite is no mere metaphor. [LWBG, 344]

The Old Testament Judaicised arousal; the New Testament interdiction on divorce. Lynne is less and less an actual human being, here, more and more the embodiment of the Church, and God, whose time is not for Wilson-Burgess to abbreviate. He is the patient: the Church uxorian is the agent. Who was it who said that hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous? Why, Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself in his own Confessions. Of course.

:3:

You've Had Your Time ends with an Epilogue that provides a snapshot of Burgess in 1990: in Switzerland, in his study, putting the final touches to the memoir we have been reading. 'Am I happy?' he asks, and immediately answers: 'probably not.' [YHYT, 387]. The epilogue begins:

You and I have both had enough of the time I have had, whose back I loaded with words for sale. Enough of the Nacheinander; let us dwell on the Nebeneinander.
[YHYT, 377]

He doesn't explain this reference, or translate the German; but it's from Ulysses. Of course it is.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read ... Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick.

From the Proteus chapter. Nacheinander and nebeneinander mean, respectively, 'in succession' and 'side by side'. German, because the allusion is to Lessing's comparison of the non-successive art of sculpture (specially, The Laocoön) and the successive art of narrative poetry, Vergil's account of the death of the Trojan priest in Aeneid, Book 2. The two arts ought not to try to emulate each other, was Lessing's conclusion. But I take it that Burgess's meaning here is more ambiguous. A life is lived diachronically but contemplated synchronically, after all. And the Dantean maestro di color che sanno means both 'master of those who know' and 'master of the known colours'. The one thing this blogpost has not been able to capture is the sheer colour of Burgess's memoirs: the life, the vitality, the hilarity and crunchiness of it. It's not all glum. Crack, crick, crick.

'Playing the piano is very much like making love to a beautiful woman ...' The Pianoplayers (1986)

Since Burgess was living in Lugano in Switzerland when he wrote this novel, we can say without exaggeration that it is the work of a Swiss Tony. Which is peculiarly wonderful, because the main theme here is, straightforwardly, that playing a piano is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.

In this novel, and for only the second time in his career, Burgess wrote a female first-person narrator. Like the excellent One Hand Clapping, although perhaps to slightly less excellent effect, the voice he defaults to is markedly less sophisticated than his range of male first-person narrators: Ellen Henshaw, a working class woman from Lancashire without a proper education (supposed to leave school at 14 she actually slips away at 13: 'I didn't mind, I've never been a believer in book learning' [45]) dictating her life story to an amanuensis. At the start of the novel Ellen is an old woman living on the Continent. Indeed, the first chapter is a deftly evocative of the contrasting livelinesses and sleepiness of her small town, Callian ('in the Var, which is in Provence, which is in the South of France'). In return for bed and board, a young writer records her voice, and her life.

1986 was also the year in which Burgess published the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, and it does not surprise us that Ellen Henshaw's life turns out to be a Burgessian David Copperfield act. Dickens, of course, also set out to write an autobiography (the so-called 'autobiographical fragment'). He wrote as far as the primal trauma of his psyche, his demeaning 'abandonment' (as he saw it) in the Blacking Factory, and then stopped, As true history he lost interest after this, and instead re-worked the material as David Copperfield, swapping his initials from DC to CD, adding-to and subtracting-from his life story as narrative exigency, artistic inspiration and psychic wish-fulfilment prompted him, and created a masterpiece. The Pianoplayers is not exactly a masterpiece, though it is certainly an enjoyable and entertaining and funny novel, and there is more going on below the surface that first impressions might suggest. Burgess swaps more than the initials of his name (although 'Ellen Hen(shaw) surely has a half-rhyme flipabout relationship to 'Jon Wilon' if not quite 'John Wilson'): he swaps his own gender, educational entertainment and musical talent. One of the themes of the novel is both that the genius of 'creative expression' is passed down through the generations, and that it takes different forms. Ellen's father is a self-taught lowly pianoplayer (she insists on suturing the gap between 'piano' and 'player', since Billy Henshaw was no concert artist, but worked movie theatres, pubs and low dives). But though he lacks training, and opportunity, he shows himself superbly ingenious and inventive in the business of soundtracking the silent films in 1920s Manchester cinemas. Not just playing fast or slow, major or minor key depending, but turning the disadvantages of his crappy instrument to good purpose:

'All those notes down there in the bass is just a lot of noise, but that's very useful for drums and thunder and so on. And that D there is gone, but it's fine for someone tapping at a window. And that E flat up there near the top has dropped down so it's the same as D flat, and that means I can do a trill on one note very fast' ... my father had stripped all the wooden panels off the piano. so that he could bang the wires with a coalhammer that he'd pinched to make the effect of bells and zithers. He once got himself a sheet of aluminium to shake for thunder, but he'd pinched it off a man who was trying to build his own racing car in the street and there was a row about that. [22]

His genius is wholly unappreciated, and he barely scrapes a living, not helped by his heavy drinking. His daughter Ellen, our narrator, was born when Bill was in the army (First World War), and he returns from the front—the purest bit of actual Burgessian autobiography in the novel, familiar to us from Big Wilson and Little God—to find his wife and four year old son dead of the flu and Ellen gurgling in the cot next door. Ellen grows up quickly, and despite attempts by her father to teach her music, she discovers her genius in sex. Her various erotic adventures make up the bulk of the book's central section. The most detailed accounts of actual sex are when Ellen is underage, a strategy liable to make a 21st-reader pretty uncomfortable. As to the novel's effectiveness as erotica, I can only report the coolness of my personal straight, male reaction. Conceivably a female reader might respond differently: Burgess is scrupulous (rather wincingly so) in recording the pleasurableness of female orgasms and both the appetite for and entitlement of women to sexual gratification. After Ellen has earned pin money with various older men she is initiated into lesbian sex by a dancer from Blackpool, which experience she reports 'disgusted her' although she adds 'there was a part of my brain that could see the point, men being so rough and selfish with it' [104]. Billy dies (of drink-sozzled exhaustion, whilst in the midst of a publicity stunt piano-playing marathon) and Ellen winds up in a high class French brothel, afterwards setting up her own establishment 'at Malmaison, which is where the house of Josephine was when Napoleon kicked her out for not giving him an Heir to the Imperial throne' [154]. She makes a bunch of money, gets off the Continent before the war starts and marries a respectable Englishman. Her son Robert ('born six months after our wedding at Caxton Hall') inherits none of his mother's genius for sex, and more of the ambition than the talent for piano playing. Though he had ‘real ambitions to be a pianist and not just a pianoplayer or joanna-thumper’ [174] it is not until his own son, Ellen's grandson, is born (after Robert's initial, comical inability to consummate his marriage) that pianist genius comes into its own: 'little William Ross, the Child Wonder when he was seven' [205].

We climb the (fanny) hill of the book's central tumulus, and then slide down the far side in a quick string of funny comic setpieces. The best of these is when Robert takes his wife Edna and mother-in-law Mrs Aldridge on an Italian motoring holiday: the poor old mother-in-law suffers a series of indignities, including an encounter with a dancing bear in a barn at midnight and being forced by the beast to dance with it for hours. Mrs Aldridge never really recovers from this, and a few days either the exertion or the indignity kill her off. Robert can't help reflecting on the incident and laughing. 'It’s downright rotten to laugh like that after what poor mother has been through, you heartless beast,' Edna rebukes him. But Mrs Aldridge says:

'He doesn’t worry me, Edna. I’m past worrying about his manner of behaviour.' And then there were no words, just a kind of choky gargling and a sort of distant rattling noise and Mrs Aldridge had slumped over head first onto Robert's back. [189]

Robert and his wife have to load her (large) corpse onto the roof-rack of their fiat.

Underneath this frivolity, though, is something more serious. Its aegis is a series of parallels between sex and music, or more specifically between musical praxis/technique and mastering the skills of pleasing another person in bed. Ellen sets up a fancy brothel under the rubric of 'The London School of Love' (there are other branches in Hamburg and Paris) which promises to educate men into sophisticated sexual technique. The school slogan is 'a woman is like a piano':

A pianoforte if expertly played can give out music whose meaning is more spiritual than physical, though the physical appeal of sheer sound is not, of course, to be discounted. No man considers himself capable of playing the instrument unless he has been trained to do so and is willing to practise regularly and rigorously, whereas most men consider themselves capable of engaging in the act of Love with nothing to guide them but appetite and instinct. The purpose of the School of Love ... [is] to turn men into sensitive and skilled discourses of the Music of Love. [170]

It's a pretty fair point, though there's one obvious flaw in the analogy: it situates the woman as a passive object to be played upon, and the man as an active player, which, it goes without saying, is an assumption hip-deep in sexism. I suppose, to give Burgess the benefit of the doubt, there's nothing here that necessarily genders the patient and agent roles: women can presumably learn to 'play' on men, as much as women on women and men on men. I do like the implied stress on digital technique, actually: if only as a counterblast to the mystic vagueness of all the quasi-Lawrentian fucking that happens in so many books, by, it seems, sheer force of erotic sublimity.

There's also a musical, or rather a keyboard-y, formal structure to the whole: much less sophisticated and complicated than Napoleon Symphony (say), but unmissable and in its way eloquent. When she is a young girl, and her Dad is too poor to afford his own piano, he draws the keys on a plank of wood to teach her the skill:

The white note to the left of the first of the twin black notes, not the triplets, is always C. At the top or in the bottom it makes no difference, always C. The C in the middle of the joanna is middle C, which stands to reason. Then all the rest—D E F G A B, down as well as up: BAG FED. You can play the scale of C eight times over very fast from the bottom to the top, just by using your thumbnail. [26]

There's some mnemonics for useful chords, and a few interesting tunes: CABBAGE and FACE and of course CABBAGEFACE (this is doubly nice, since the French for 'cabbage', 'chou', is also used as a term of affection across the Channel, an idiom Ellen herself uses: 'my cabbage', [154]).

A keyboard has thirteen keys covering the octave from (say) middle C to high C: eight white and five black. The Pianoplayers has thirteen chapters, although Ellen calls the final one Twelve and a Half, 'because I am superstitious' [173]—and also, I suppose, because the final note is only half a new note, since it is the same note raised an octave. I say 'raised', since I'm assuming that Ellen's narrative (from penniless Manchester tike to wealthy retiree in the South of France) is one tracing a CDEFGABC upward trajectory, rather than being BAG FED down into misery.

This in turn gives Burgess a structure to write to, which may explain why the middle act, Ellen's rise from whore to madam, is so skimped. And if the later life is squeezed, this is presumably because Burgess had to decide either to fit everything into 13 chapters or else expand the whole novel to two octaves. Chapter 1 is C, the keynote: Ellen in her house in France, and her life; Chapter 13 (or 12½) returns us to France and her present-day. Chapter 2 (C#) introduces dissonance when set alongside her pleasant later life: a mother and brother dead, an impoverished upbringing and an improvident, boozy Dad. Chapter 3 (D), when played against the C, is if less dissonant then certainly no harmony, and rather looks forward to future resolution. Chapter 4 (E♭) combines with C to suggest a minor chord or interval, and details how Billy drinks away his chances of regular employment and makes such an exhibition of himself at the cinema that he's blacklisted playing movie theatres thereafter (the chapter ends 'Dad had really done for himself this time; he had that' [53]). Chapter 5 is E, a major harmony with C, and the place in the novel where Ellen describes her first sexual experiences, her first orgasm and enters into that aspect of her life that most fully expresses her genius.

So it goes on: Chapter 6 (F) is another major interval: Ellen out of school, and she and her Dad relocated to Blackpool, with many more opportunities for fun. Billy gets a job playing piano on the pier, Ellen gets a job waiting in a 'caffy off the prom' ('I know I have not spelt café correctly but it seems to me to be wrong to use the same word for two very different things, a French café bearing no likeness at all to the British variety' [73]). Chapter 7 (F#) introduces a sour, dissonant note, when Ellen is sexually assaulted by their landlord, the creepy Mr Flushing. Chapter 8 (G) resolves this incident into broad comedy: Billy has started a relationship with a dancer called Maggie whose husband, Ray Romano Morgan, is a fiddle-player, and who initiates Ellen into lesbianism. When Ray bursts in upon Maggie, Billy and Ellen, and the landlord and his wife come in, Ellen exposes Mr Flushing for the creep he is in front of his formidable wife. Billy and Ellen are kicked out of their lodgings, though, and Chapter 9 (G# or A♭) repeats Chapter 4 in its new location: drunk, Billy fights on stage with Ray Romano Morgan and loses his post. Chapter 10 (A) is effectively the climax to Billy's story: as a moneymaking stunt he sets himself up as 'BILLY HENSHAW THE MARATHON MAN NONSTOP PIANO PLAYING FOR THIRTY DAYS AND NIGHTS CAN HE DO IT?' [126]. This is both triumphant and (the major sixth from C to A is not a satisfying harmony by itself) tragic; for Billy wears himself out and dies. Chapter 11 (B♭) begins with her 'heartbroken' [145] and details her experiences as a prostitute: not mournfully but hardly major key stuff. Chapter 12 (B) intimates a joyful resolution to the scale: Ellen is 40, well-off and sets up her 'School of Love'. The narrative shifts towards her son and his comedic travails, before rounding off with a re-emergence of the true musical genius in Ellen's grandson:

The kid had a natural instinct which his father did the utmost to help come out, and it was really the Family Gift at last. It had been trying to get through for a long time, failing with my dad and succeeding in a twisted sort of way with his daughter (A Metaphorical Sort of Way, says Petulia) , failing again with Robert and then bursting like a flower with little Billy. [206]

It's a perfectly serviceable structure, although it can hardly help being a little linear, a bit too simple to give the more complex shades of reality and pathos to the simply-told life story. A five finger exercise played with one hand. Makes a joyful noise, though.

The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985): A Pedant Writes

Hard to disagree with Frank Kermode's assessment of this one:

It’s obvious that Burgess's powers of assimilation are, by the standards of normal or normally lazy writers, exceptional. Nor does he squander the knowledge thus acquired: it goes into a TV series and a novel or a critical biography. One’s admiration for all this prudent industry may sometimes be tempered by a feeling that the product, efficient as it is, lacks aura, lacks the zest we associate with this writer in his more exuberant, less mechanical novels. His last novel-of-the-TV-series, The Kingdom of the Wicked, combines Acts and other early Christian evidence with a rehandling of the I, Claudius historical material into a large, well-conceived and doggedly executed novel, inventive but also well-researched, and authenticated by a scattering or smattering of Greek, Latin and Aramaic words from his polyglot store. For all its informative energy, the book somehow seems a bit dull.

Alas, it is so. Thrifty Burgess, having scripted the 1985 Anglo-Italian TV miniseries A.D., worked his notes up into this hefty novel. But despite kneading great scads of shagging and torture into his story, the loaf of the novel stubbornly refuses to rise. It's not a bad novel. It's just not a very good one.

Perhaps somebody who knows nothing about this period would find it an edifying read, just on the level of historical fact. Then again, who, really, is ignorant of this period? The Roman emperors, variously wicked, venal, psychotic or foolish, engage in a great deal of lubriciously described sex and violence. The early Christians (and the Jews) are all solid, virtuous, grounded and boring. The Roman element of the novel is not merely derivative of Robert Graves's Claudius novels, it is derivative of the sexed-up BBC I Clavdivs telly serial, with attendant simplifications and crudifications. Here's Burgess's Claudius speaking: 'The times need to be washed, scoured, to become the ttttttablet for the writing of a new age. A great ppppppurging and a new beginning' [KOTW, 207]. After Caligula is assassinated, the soldiers go looking about the palace to find his successor. 'The Praetorians saw the drape that bulged tremulously, yanked it off its rod. It billowed about Claudius who went kkkk' [KOTW, 160]. You're picturing Derek Jacobi delivering these lines, aren't you?  TV feeds on TV. The Jewish material is partly straightforward padding-out of the Acts of the Apostles, after the accepted manner of historical fiction; and partly chunks of decanted Burgessian research (this is how a stoning was performed, these are Jewish funeral rights, and so on).

Sadoc, our narrator, is the son of Azor, the figure who narrated Burgess's underwhelming Man of Nazarus (1979). Some of the former novel's elements are carried through, particularly Burgess's insistence that Jesus was a great hulk of a man, of giant-stature and huge strength and physical endurance. Sadoc tells us that he survived the crucifixion in a kind of stupor (the so-called 'swoon' theory of the resurrection), saw his disciples one last time and then pushed off, none know wither. But where Man of Nazarus admitted some miracles into its narrative, The Kingdom of the Wicked is much more rigidly materialist about things: implausibly so for something supposed written by a 1st-century Jew. Rather than people actually getting raised from the dead, we get things like this old woman, whose body has been tossed onto a pile of camel dung in Samaria:

Philip knelt near to the woman, put his ear to her breast, heard a faint but rhythmical heartbeat. He knew she would recover soon. With Greek cunning, he used the circumstances to the advantage of the faith. 'Ponder on the goodness of God and his Son Jesus Christ,' he told the surrounding crowd. [KOTW, 97]

When the woman 'was shakily on her feet again' he claims it as a miracle. Throughout the book everything apparently supernatural gets, Scooby-Doo-like, explained away. Saul's visions of God are down to his epilepsy. Peter is mightily surprised that he appears to have raised Dorcas from death, and he and Thomas stumble downstairs in a panicky hurry. All this inevitably tends to drain the magic from the narrative and leaves the folk in the story rather under-motivated. Burgess may not believe in miracles, but he needs to believe that his first-century characters believed in miracles.

At least Sadoc is a rather more fancy prose-stylist than was his Dad. The book is, happily, full of the echt Burgess: words like 'mastupration' [58] 'polycolpous' [177], 'heresiarch' [191], 'pseudobarbarian' [334] and phrases like embracing as with love the stone pillar of punition [55] and the arborial similitude persisted [190]. There's a deeply implausible story about a Roman centurion called Marcus Julius Tranquillius falling in love with a Jewish slavegirl and throwing over his culture, family and military rank (Roman soldiers being legally prevented from marrying) to wed her. Boldly, or perhaps with the inadvertence of a scholar's dotage, Burgess puts sermons into Saint Paul's mouth of such breathtaking aridity and dullness that the rapid spread of Christianity itself becomes explicable only in terms of miraculous divine intervention. For surely nobody would be won over by:

This implies a willingness to worship a negativity, which neither grammar nor theology will properly permit. Now I would ask you to consider a singular and unique God ... Now God has been tolerant towards human ignorance of him, but now he commands that men repent of this ignorance. That this ignorance be no longer excused by the sense of his remoteness, which encouraged his conversion on the part of men either to a thought or a thing. I teach anastasis, which signifies not the survival of the soul, which any of your Platonists could demonstrate at least as a logical possibility, but as the survival of the sensorium also, though in a transfigured form. For God the Son himself rose from the dead and, in that filial or human aspect, returned to the eternal home of the Father. That, learned men of Athens, is the gist of my message. [KOTW, 221]

It's seems that there were at that time rumours of things going astray. Conceivably this is indeed actually a sort of homage to Python: in You've Had Your Time, Burgess claims he watched Life of Brian a dozen times, and early in Kingdom of the Wicked Burgess includes a Palinesque healed beggar-cripple, who spends his time leaping about saying 'and here's a question for you: how do I earn my living from now on?' [KOTW, 39].  Not sure I'd call this well-judged.

Near the beginning of his Demotic Greek narrative, Sadoc says:

You will find, I expect, recurring through my narrative the fine phrase una nox dormienda, which I take from Catullus ... una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its palliations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure. ... [As for] those who have drunken most thirstily of the Nazarene doctrine of a new life, let them believe what their wretchedness bids them believe: they will find una nox dormienda like the rest of us. [KOTW, 3]

Of course, only a pedant would object that the last of these iterations should be unam noctem dormiendam. A pedant, perhaps, provoked by Burgess's boastful postscript (in which he lists his sources as 'Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles' adding 'I thought these it best to consult these in the original tongues'). A pedant who finds it hard to believe that somebody who claims to have read Tacitus in the original doesn't know that the accusative of nox is noctem. But we can let that lie. Don't worry. The pedant will calm himself, eventually.*

[Deep breath]. The Calm-down of the Pedant.


 ---
*To be fair, I havered over whether nox should indeed take the accusative, or whether it should perhaps take the dative, following 'find'. But I don't pretend to be an expert. Other pedantic notes:

(1) one character dies after 'an infection' from 'cutting her finger along with the evening loaf' [25], like somebody out of a Hovis advert. Knives might be used on meat, but not on bread, which would be torn. And the ordinary evening loaf of a Jewish family would surely be unleavened. Also: 'infection' isn't a very 1st-century AD concept.

(2) ' ...embellished with Graeco-Syrian mosaic work depicting the coupling of Apollo and Artemis, for the cult of Astarte had arisen out of solar-lunar myths of western provenance on which Asiatic mysticism had been imposed' [173]. This wouldn't be out of place in a late 19th-century work of anthropological theology, but I challenge you to find anything like it in a 1st-century popular narrative.

(3) Saul, blind after his Damascene experience, is led back to the city. 'In total blackness ... [he] saw, as in a preternatural sunlight, the rooms and corridors of his own brain. It was the same brain as before, though the voice still echoed in it' [KOTW, 120]. The belief that consciousness 'resides' in the brain, as a person might in a house, is a post-17th-century, not Roman, Greek or Jewish, conceit. In the first century AD Philosophers were still debating whether the soul was located in the head or the chest, whilst Stoic thought argued (influentially) that consciousness was a pneuma that suffused the whole body.

(4) A Roman praetor yells at Paul and his followers: 'are you the men who were preaching some outlandish superstitious mumbojumbo contrary to the laws of Rome yesterday?' [KOTW, 215]. But there were no Roman laws against preaching; religion was specifically excluded from private law, and state law was very permissive of all sorts of cults and religions provided only they acknowledged the divinity of the emperor. A law passed in 81 BC outlawed human sacrifice; and things like building temples and so on were limited by legislation. Otherwise Rome let people get on with religion pretty much unmolested. When Claudius's imperial edict banished the Jews from Rome in AD 49 it was for disturbing the peace, rioting and so on, not because of their religious faith.

(5) A Roman character feels his guts move. 'Where are you going?' 'The cloaca. I ate something I shouldn't' [339]. But cloaca means public sewer or drains, not toilet (that's latrina). Nobody popping to the loo would say 'I'm just off to the public sewer'.

(6) The Emperor Caligula 'was on his feet, stamping his little boots' [134]. It's true that Gaius's nickname 'caligula' means 'little boots'; when his father Germanicus, an immensely popular general, went on campaign in Germany he took his son, aged 5, along, and had a miniature military kit made up, including miniature caliga, the hob-nailed boot soldiers wore. That was when he was five. Gaius became emperor at the age of 25. If he was still wearing 5-year-old-boy's boots then there would have been something seriously wrong with his feet. Fully grown man: teeny-tiny feet. I'm sure somebody would have said something.

(7) 'Caleb leaped to smash the German's nose, whose thyrls spouted hairferns like twin cornucopiae' [KOTW, 128]. This is less an anachronism—though how a Mediterranean Jew like our narrator Sadoc came by the Anglo Saxon word þyrel (“a hole made through anything, opening, aperture, orifice, perforation”; hence 'nose-thirl', 'nostril') is anyone's guess. But really I quote the line here because it's just, well, wow. I mean: stylistically speaking it's really, well. Wow.

"I Got Ninety-Nine Novels/But a Burge Ain't One"

Hit me!

Ninety-Nine Novels: the Best in English since 1939 (1984) was pulled together, Burgess later claimed, in a fortnight. When he wrote his (pretty good) entry on 'The Novel' for the 15th ed. of the Encyclopedia Britannica he included discussion of himself amongst the various other notable 20th-century writers. Not here. 'I have, with right modesty,' he says in his preface, 'excluded myself from my list.' If you like AB novels I feel bad for you son. We get ninety-nine novels, but ... look. Don't make me flog my jokes to death. Alright?

Sometimes the sheer speed of composition does show through. The account of the earlier novels reuses ('plagiarises' would be harsh) material from Burgess's prior The Novel Today (1963). There is a degree of repetition from entry to entry, especially when an unusual word takes Burgess's fancy. 'The big theme of Lucky Jim (1957),' he tells us, 'is that of hypergamy—bedding of a woman of a social class superior to one's own.' The very next entry is in John Braine's Room at the Top (1957), 'a study in provincial hypergamy—or bedding of a woman from a class superior to one's own.' Signs of haste are present, too, in the overall conception. In the preface Burge says that, although he is 'an avid reader of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follet and other practitioners of well-wrought sensational fiction', such novels 'never stood a chance of being placed on my list' [14]. That the list goes on to include such well-wrought examples of commercial fiction as Fleming's Goldfinger and Len Deighton Bomber is to its overall credit, I think, despite the inconsistency.

There are a few oddities (who in their right mind, really, would say that Updike's best novel is The Coup?) and if the choices grow less enduring as we approach the date of composition, that's probably not Burgess's fault: everybody in the 1980s thought Robertson Davies was a contemporary great, though nobody reads him now. Mind you, even back then it was clear that a lifetime is too short (and eternity barely long enough) to read Mailer's interminable Ancient Evenings. In the LRB Ian Hamilton is witty but cruel on the subject of Burgess's sometimes idiosyncratic choices:

Burgess’s book – as all the world must know – is a riposte to the Book Marketing Council’s ‘Best Novels of Our Time’ hype, and many of its quirks may have to do with his displeasure at having been, shall we say, disincluded from that list of the elect. Wherever possible, he sees to it that their taste is rebuked by his. He starts off by lopping two titles from the BMC list on the grounds that neither of them is what he would call a novel. Animal Farm, he rumbles, is a ‘fable’ and ‘hence cannot be considered for inclusion here’ and Lord of the Flies – although it ‘probably’ earned Golding ‘his Nobel wreath’ – ‘is a little too systematised and allegorical to be regarded as a true novel’. Bad luck, chaps. Would Burgess have been quite so vehement in more relaxed conditions? Would he, for instance, have included Henry Green’s Party Going in his 99 if this ‘carefully wrought poem’ had been favoured by the BMC? Probably not. Thus, Kingsley Amis’s Anti-Death League more or less has to be preferred to Take a Girl like You, Iris Murdoch’s The Bell to her The Sea, the Sea, Humboldt’s Gift to Herzog, Pale Fire to Lolita, and so on. With J. D. Salinger, he capitulates and picks The Catcher in the Rye, but then to have swerved here might have meant acknowledging the Glass tales as ‘true novellas’, or as, bits of a true-novel-in-progress.

There may be something in this ('Where will this end? And when, oh when will somebody pick Earthly Powers!'), although at the same time we can say that The Sea, the Sea, for all that it won the Booker, is pretty turgid and dull compared to the lively symbolism of The Bell; and many people would agree with the proposition that Pale Fire is superior to Lolita.

Still a Burge ought to be one the 99, especially since several of these texts have been rather promoted above their abilities. Of Lady Snow's An Error of Judgement (1962) a novel that has fallen right off the radar, Burgess says 'alas, her style is undistinguished, even slipshod, but human concern shines through' [84]. On the other hand, there's one way in which Burgess's list, whatever its provenance, was remarkably prescient. It's true that, with the single exception of Roberts's Pavane, he does not include any what-we-might-call 'genre' SF or Fantasy; yet he still grasps on some level that the SFnal and the Fantastic is the direction in which the novel is travelling. A good chunk of his choices are straight SFF—Aldous Huxley After Many a Summer (1939); James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939); Rex Warner, The Aerodrome (1943); Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946); Nevil Shute, No Highway (1948; the protagonist's daughter has ESP powers don't forget; and in his entry Burgess speaks very highly of On The Beach); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958); L. P. Hartley, Facial Justice (1960); Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961); Aldous Huxley, Island (1962); John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy (1966); R. K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets (1967); Mordecai Richler, Cocksure (1968); Keith Roberts, Pavane (1968); Michael Frayn, Sweet Dreams (1973); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973); J. G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979); Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980); Alasdair Gray's tremendous Lanark (1981)—and discussion includes quite a lot more. From Burgess's other picks I stop short of bracketing Ralph Ellison's brilliant Invisible Man (1952) as SFF, despite its strongly magic realist flavour; Doris Lessing seems to me a fundamentally SFnal writer, and not just because of the Shikasta books, though the utopian strain in The Golden Notebook (1962) is probably too thin to count in this context. We might call Kingsley Amis's The Anti-Death League (1966) a sort of theological Fantasy novel I suppose. Nye's Falstaff (1976) is Fantasy of a Rabelaisian sort. It seems perverse to choose, given the scope and range of Brian Aldiss's SFnal ouevre, his non-genre novel Life in the West (1980) for inclusion here (though Burgess does concede that Aldiss is 'highly regarded as a practitioner of science fiction').

It seems to me that what this list is missing is a sense that the logic of The Novel shifted profoundly in the 20th Century from being focussed on individual writers to being focussed of distinct genres. Or more precisely, 99 Novels is an exercise in genre, in the same way that the Booker is a genre prize. The genre is 'literary fiction', and Burgess's taste in that skews quite heavily towards fantastika without quite accepting that, really, he'd be happier if he moved right on over and included Tolkien, Le Guin, Phil Dick, Moorcock and so on. But there you go.

The whole list is online at various places: here, for instance.