Enderby's Dark Lady. Or, the subtitle tells us, 'No End To Enderby'. This subtitle has its own subtitle, a gesture we may feel approaches subtitular overindulgence: 'Composed to placate kind readers of The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, who objected to my casually killing my hero'. So, yes: in 1974's Clockwork Testament Burgess slew his poet alter-ego. Then a decade later he brought him back, zombie-like, from the dead. Enderzombie. In his new adventure Enderby flies to Indiana because he has been hired to write the lyrics to a stage-musical based on the life of Shakespeare. Asked on arrival if this is his first time in the USA, he says that it is. 'Though not, I assure you, for lack of trying. I should have gone to New York to become a professor for a time.' [EDL, 39]. Burgess even appends a helpful footnote: '*See The Clockwork Testament'. It was, we're told, 'a question of one or the other. So I chose this.' Teaching creative writing in New York? Actually writing, creatively, in Indiana? The latter, clearly. Not zombies, then, but alt-history. I don't mind: it's all SF.
The middle chunk of this novel (Enderby going from one pleasantly if mildly comic interaction to another in the US) is bookended with two pieces of Elizabethan whimsy. The last chapter is a jolly-enough piece of time-travel floss, where a 21st-century scientist goes back to 1595 (strictly, travels to an alt-Earth in the distant corner of the galaxy that is a mirror of our world in the 16th-century), inadvertently gifting a talentless and greedy Shakespeare (a man 'tending to melt into a blob of tallow badly sculpted into a likeness of Shakespeare' [EDL, 156]) with the 'true' playtexts. This adventure in paradox does not end well for the traveller.
The first chapter is the story of how Shakespeare (the 'actual' Shakespeare, not the time-travel space-alien version) gets caught up in his pal Ben Jonson's spy-story adventures. Together they uncover the Gunpowder Plot. In return Jonson lets him into a secret: he has been titivating the first drafts of the King James Bible. The scholars have done their work; now they have handed it over to poets to polish and improve the style. Jonson invites Shakespeare to have a go himself. Will, now 46 years old, takes home a few psalms in his knapsack. He alters the 46th word in Psalm 46 from 'tremble' to 'Shake'; and likewise alters the 46th word from the end of the Psalm from 'sword' to 'Speare'.
This is a real thing. What I mean is: the 46th word in the KJV version of Psalm 46 really is 'Shake', and the 47th from the end (the 46th from the end if you ignore the psalm's last word) really is 'spear'. See for yourself:
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.This isn't Burgess's original discovery: it's been long known. Usually it's taken as a queer coincidence, although some see design in it. Burgess mentions it in his Shakespeare book (1970), and discussed it at greater length during his North American Shakespeare lectures in 1976. In You've Had Your Time he concedes candidly that it 'is not a matter of interest for scholars', before doubling down firmly with: 'that I was excited about this proved that I was not a scholar' [YHYT, 337].
In Enderby's Dark Lady the first chapter's narrative of Will inserting his name into the Bible is revealed, in chapter 2, to be a short story written by Enderby himself. The fame of this has got him a lucrative gig writing Shakespeare's story of the American popular stage. As with Clockwork Testament that this has happened strains our belief to snapping point, at least as far as Enderby is concerned. That he would write a short story at all; that it would become so famous; that he would be flown to American and paid to write a libretto. It is the sort of thing that would happen to Burgess, not to his creation. Symptomatic, this, of the way the distance between creator and creation decreases as the novel series goes on. One of the disappointments of this novel is how much less flatulent and risible and seedy Enderby has become. In his own small way he's surprisingly dignified here, as if Burgess is starting to over-identify with his creation. Anyway: the short story of chapter one proves to be truth, not fiction. Attending a séance, Enderby hears the ghost of Shakespeare himself rapping on the table the message: 46, 46, 46.
I'm going to pause for a moment, here, to try and dispose of the theory that W.S. collaborated in the translation of the King James Bible. It's as close to certainly untrue as can be approached in our sublunary literary-historical world. The main obstacle, acknowledged by Burgess via the contortions of his improbable spy-story plot, is that the Oxford Company translating the Books of Psalms for the KJV (all notable divines and scholars of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, all of them known to us: John Harding, John Reynolds, Thomas Holland, Richard Kilby, Miles Smith, Richard Brett, Daniel Fairclough, William Thorne) had probably not even heard of Shakespeare, certainly would not have thought him a worthwhile partner in their labours. Their overwhelming concern was accuracy, not poetry; and they were motivated by a profoundly held sense of the sacred duty of being accurate. It really is quite inconceivable that they would pass their carefully worked drafts over to a figure from lowly popular culture, entirely unlearned in the sacred languages. It would be like the New International Bible committee secretly canvassing Paul McCartney for his opinion on Hebrew diacritical marks.
More damning to the 'secret code' theory is the fact that previous English translations of Psalm 46 are very similar to the KJV's wording: In the 1560 Geneva Bible translation of this psalm, ‘shake’ is the 47th word and ‘spear’ the 45th from the end; in the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 ‘shake’ is the 47th word and ‘spear’ the 48th from the end. Burgess surely knew this: his thumb goes into the balance, replacing the actual 'shake' and 'spear' with 'tremble' and 'sword' only in order to be able to change them back with a flourish. The whole thing, in fact, depends upon a deliberate fuzziness, such that the 47th-word-from-the-end somehow becomes the 46th; and Shakespeare is taken to be 46 years old in 1611 though for every date after April 23rd (such as the date of publication of the KJV) he was actually 47. And so on.
I don't want to labour this point. As Burgess's ambivalence suggests, the crucial thing here is not the objective 'truth' of this story so much as its dramatic potential. Indeed I think we can go further, and say that the focus for Burgess is on encoding rather than decoding. Decoding is a squib: do it and you have drained the pleasure away forever. We read books over and over again, but nobody solves the same cryptic crossword twice, after all. In many cases the decoding has already been done by somebody else, and your book comes to you pre-drained, pleasure wise. Abrams and Dorst's recent puzzle-novel S (2013) is an object lesson in this. Encoding is a different matter: the epitome of that belief that all art takes the mundane and banal and makes it richer, hiding resonance and beauty and complexity into it. Burgess loves all this: working in acrostics and number-games (Nothing Like The Sun and Earthly Powers in particular are both especially lively with this sort of thing). It's not what the secret is that matters; it is that there is a secret.
Enderby's Dark Lady puts the Psalm 46 Shake/Spear 'encoding' front and centre, and hides its own Burgessian codes in plain view. What code? Consider. The book is the 4th in the Enderby quartet; it appeared in 1984, the fourth novel AB published in that decade; it is comprised of 3x4 chapters and returns in various ways to 4 and 6 and 46. Let's turn to the Chapter 4. The 46th paragraph from the beginning (including the inset verse paragraphs in our count) says:
'Now the place is a place that sells ham-burgers.' [EDL, 58]The 46th paragraph from the end:
'Don't give us that. There's a tone of voice that grates on me, pardon me Laura. We're your one bastion against the communist takeover. So don't knock.' [EDL, 63]Lest we miss the relevant word, Burgess repeats it three times (so, four times in all) in the next few lines: '"There you are again," the lawyer cried. "It's the tone of voice." "I can't help my bloody tone of voice," Enderby countered with truculence ... Philip lurched in, probably stoned.' Thus we can read backwards to discover that, using his own key, Tony Burgess has worked Tone Burgers into his own novel. In chapter 6, the 46th para from the end contains both 'Will' and 'Son' and the 46th para from the beginning (a chunk of quoted verse) repeats 'I cannot go on I', giving us a suitably Elizabethan I. Will-son. The novel appeared in 1984, when Burgess was 67. The 67th word from the end of the novel (ignoring, selah-like, the final coda) is 'Nobody'. The 67th-word from the beginning: 'I'. 'I, Nobody' is a fittingly Nothing Like The Sun-style act of self effacement.
I could go on, but won't. I appreciate that you're no more persuaded by this 'decoding' than I am by the Psalm 46 conspiracy theorising. That's my point. The core appeal of the 'conspiracy theory' is that it invests us in a world that is more than it seems. By doing so, it flatters our sense of our own perceptiveness and canniness and so on strikes me as secondary (not least because, in almost every case, people who literally believe in conspiracy theories are, of course, less intelligent and perceptive, more gullible and idiotic). People who believe in absurd conspiracy theories do not thereby any diminution in their existential absurdity. That's not the point. The point is to commit to a view of the world that is more than meets the eye.
So, for example: Burgess's openness to the notion that Shakespeare contributed to the King James Bible actually indexes the strength of his own emotional investment in literature as such. As he puts it in his Shakespeare (1970): 'If this is mere chance, fancy must allow us to think that it is happy chance. The greatest prose work of all time has the name of the greatest poet set cunningly in it.' 'Believing' in the Psalm 46 Conspiracy, then, is not about a dull literalism; it is, rather, a way of saying that the secret hidden inside the greatest prose is poetry; that the secret hidden inside Religion itself is the sublime art of a Shakespeare.
What makes this more interesting than it might otherwise be is Burgess's openness to, as it were, the reverse. The Enderby books as a whole, and Enderby's Dark Lady in particular, are all about the notion that the 'secret something' hidden inside the greatest of poetry might be: banality, feculence, paltriness, ludicrousness, the whole bag-and-baggage of inconsequential quotidian human
existence. What in the first three novels is focused on Enderby's own sad, silly little life becomes here projected outward. Enderby may be a minor poet, but Shakespeare clearly isn't. So what if the secret at the heart of Shakespeare is actually a little Enderby, motivated by seedy little insecurities and pettinesses?
Burgess's Bard, in chapter 1, inserts himself into the KJV for reasons of grubby personal vainglory and amour propre: to ensure that his name, newly gentrified and with its own coat of arms, should live for ever. The notion that the plays what he wrote would guarantee that immortality literally does not occur to him. 'My name, I mean, my name. My son, poor little Hamnet, dead. And the name Shakespeare dishonoured in its own town and soon to die out along with the poor parchments that put innocent words into the mouths of players ... you see, you see? To do this I have the right. I am not without right, do you see?' [EDL, 30-31] Him citing his own motto from his own coat of arms is a nice touch, as is the twist at the end of the chapter: Jonson returns the draft to the scholars overseeing the translation and they accept it, not even noticing the 'bombastic and overweening' gesture Shakespeare has made. Because they have never ('and Ben smiled sweetly') heard the name of Shakespeare [EDL, 34]. For all his yearning to be somebody, he's a nobody. He is nothing like the sun.
It's all about the mismatch of aims and powers. Shakespeare, possessed as he was of the keenest insight into other human character and worth of any writer, lacks in Burgess's version of him, insight into his own talents and worth. We call this mismatch comedy, and Enderby's Dark Lady often is funny. Enderby falling for the beautiful black movie star April Elgar, invited to her mother's home for Christmas on the pretext that he is a Baptist Minister from England, ends up giving a ridiculous, rambling invented sermon to an all black congregation. Enderby forced to take the role of Shakespeare in his own play, and speak the lines that (the thing having been revised by committee and reduced to the lowest common denominator) he now despises. It's quite funny, is the truth; although it never reaches the heights of comic brilliance manifested by Enderby Inside. That may in part be because Burgess is aiming for a bigger point.
Conspiracy theorists are drawn to the notion that the secret hidden in the world is more glamorous than the appearances. The fact that they are able to orchestrate such global schemes in a way that keeps them hidden from most people implies that the Illuminati (or whichever Secret Masters you prefer) are super-competent, to an almost divine degree. We are drawn to such potency, such glamour, even as we tell ourselves we are setting out to uncover and destroy it. Burgess is offering an alternative hypothesis: what if the Secret Masters were less, not more, competent than the average Joe and Joanna? What is the secret hidden in the greatest art is, actually, its crappiness?
This has a couple of valences in the novel, I think. One is Burgess's perennial worrying away at sexual desire and true love, and the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea he insists lies between those two things. Enderby falls deeply in love with April Elgar, who is beautiful, sexy, wealthy, smart, vital and altogether lovely. He has no expectations at all that the feeling be reciprocated: he poor, ugly, old and laughable. 'I love you,' he tells her. 'I shall love you till the day I die ... [I] demand nothing. Totally disinterested.' [EDL, 116]. He insists his love for her is Platonic in the strict sense of the word, whilst also constructing a 'version' of her in his head over which he masturbates nightly. She is unfazed by this, since her stock in trade, she wryly notes, is posing for cameras, still and movie, 'tits and ass and teeth and legs in gunmetal stockings and frothy lingerie. The kind of thing pimply kids fire their wads at.' 'All I can do,' Enderby insists, 'is love humbly and cherish dreams.' 'Yah,' she retorts. 'Wet ones.' [EDL, 120]. April and Enderby swap onanistic euphemisms: firing your wad; pulling your wire; bashing the bishop. They don't suggest shaking your spear, but they could easily.
I have argued before that Enderby is in a way Burgess's version of Swift's 'Celia! Celia! Celia shits!', with the crucial difference that what moved Swift to anguished horror and despair tickles Burgess's funny bone. He is not disgusted by his farting, masturbating little creation; there is genuine affection for him. For Swift, the mere fact that beautiful women defecate proves that the cosmos is playing some cruel trick upon us, laughing at the erosion of our dignity. Burgess doesn't see it that way. There are some elements of laughing-at in Enderby's Dark Lady (some of the homophobic cracks have aged very badly indeed, for instance), but mostly it's a laughing-with sort of novel. This is the secret at the heart of things: how strangely funny we are, funny because strange. Indeed, it is the gradient between our pompous imaginings and our laughable realities that denotes the degree of funniness.
There's one other aspect to this that speaks to me particularly. It is science fiction. More precisely it is the tacit suggestion made by Enderby's Dark Lady that the hidden secret of the highest art is something pulp and popular and low. SF. It is present, here, on several layers. The whole novel is science fiction, a treatment of not one but three alternate-history conceits. The first, Burgess argues in his author's preface. is actually the ground of all fiction. How can Enderby die in New York in Clockwork Testament and then be alive in Indiana in Dark Lady?
All fictional events are hypotheses, and the condition of Enderby's going to live in New York would be that he should die there. There was a choice between his going to Manhattan to teach Creative Writing and his being employed to write the libretto for a ridiculous musical about Shakespeare in a fictitious theatre in Indianapolis. He took the second course ... [EDL, 8]It's like Burgess is groping his way, unaided, towards Alt-History 101. The second alt-timeline is the one in which Shakespeare, improbably enough, encodes his own name in Psalm 46, and then visits Enderby in supernatural fashion through table-rapping and mysterious fires. The third is the last chapter, when a 21st-century character called Paley visits Shakespeare in 1595. His mentor warns him before he goes: 'some of you young men expect too much of Time. You expect historical Time to be as plastic as other kinds. Because the microchronic and macrochronic flows can be played with ...' [EDL, 143]. Paley is too excited to pay attention and rushes off in his time machine (rather sweetly, Burgess calls this a 'flying boat'). The Elizabethan England he finds is almost exactly the same Christian nation as the one history tells us about, except that the king has three eyes, people are martyred for believing in 'Mogradon' and Shakespeare himself is a mere hack (the author of 'Heliogabalus, A Word To Fright a Whoremaster, The Sad Reign of Harold the First and Last, The Devil in Dulwich oh, many and many more' [EDL, 157]). It's also possible the people are all shape-shifting tentacle monsters only pretending to be human beings. Shakespeare relieves Paley of his Complete Works of Shakespeare, has the visitor thrown into prison and settles down to write The Merchant of Venice.
Inside these framing gestures, the story itself is thoroughly interpenetrated by SF. Enderby likes to retreat to the toilet and read 'a paperback volume of what are known as Science Fiction stories' [EDL, 90]. Burgess summarises a few of these in chapter 7, and they sound quite good. His taxi driver turns out to be a PhD student from Yorke University at Toronto, working the vacation. His thesis is called 'Future in the Past'. 'About science fiction,' he tells Enderby, as he drives him to the hotel.
'Been reading some of it,' Enderby said tiredly.The Canadian's assertion seems self-evident to me, although I suspect Burgess offers this as a hint at the secret hidden within the canon of 'Great Literature', like Shake/Spear in Psalm 46. The Canadian, discovering that Enderby is a writer, makes the following suggestion:
'Only viable literary form we have,' said the Canadian. [EDL, 127]
What you ought to write is a sort of SF Shakespeare, know what I mean? About some Martian landing in Elizabethan England and meeting Shakespeare and putting The Power on him. See what I mean? [EDL, 128]'Yes yes,' Enderby replies. 'I see what you mean.' Presumably this is a sort of literary-historical version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Burgess's onetime friend, though by the 1980s estranged, Kubrick. And Burgess inverts it for the final chapter of the novel (written like the first chapter, by Enderby: 'a little story. Leave Well Alone or Leave Will Alone, some such title'). The Martian doesn't gift human Shakespeare with his genius, a First-Folio-shaped monolith planted amongst bickering ape-men. Instead the human goes to Mars, or further afield, and gifts genius to the alien. That's the secret cached most securely in the centre of great art: our alienness. 'There's this theory,' the taxi driver tells Enderby, 'that it's us are the Martians. We landed on this planet in prehistoric times and killed off the earthmen. We knew that Mars was dying, see, and saw the fertility of the Earth through powerful instruments. Then the earth's lack of oxygen stunted our brains and we had to start all over again. Four dollars fifty'. [EDL, 128] The main takeaway from the presence of Shake and Spear in the forty-sixth Psalm is not the truth or falsity of the theory that explains it, but its own sheer strangeness. It's a really odd thing, when you come to think about it. And when you come to think about it, we're pretty odd too. Aliens in a familiar land. People from the same world as Shakespeare himself: Mars. It's a Bradburyan, Phil-Dickian, David-Bowie-ish insight, our secret identity as Martians. Selah.
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