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.