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.