Kell's Bells: One Hand Clapping (1961)

One Hand Clapping was originally published under Burgess's metapseudonym (or whatever the term is for a pseudonym of a pseudonym) 'Joseph Kell'. It's not hard to see how a nom de plume derived from the Book of Kells would appeal to a pun-drunk bibliophile like AB, although the decision to use it in the first place seems to have been the publisher's, anxious at over-saturating the market with Burgesstomes. William Heinemann had half a dozen to put out all at once, after all. In the event this strategy backfired, the novel 'sank like a stone' and Burgess angrily renamed his publisher 'William Hangman' in private. In Earl G. and Mary C. Ingersoll's Conversations with Anthony Burgess he complains: 'it’s stupid, you see, because if you invent a new author it means you have to start promoting a new author, instead of using an author you’ve already got, and this is bad publishing. The two Joseph Kell books didn’t do too terribly well. They didn’t get as many reviews as they should have got and so on, and now that the true identity of the author comes out its too late to do anything with them, or with One Hand Clapping, anyway, which is not a bad book. It’s a good book.' [8-9]

It is a good book, too, although it reads like a rather unBurgess-y work. For example it has a female first-person narrator, something AB only did on one other occasion in his entire career. More, since that narrator ('Janet Shirley, née Barnes ... just gone twenty-three') is a bright but under-educated working-class woman from the Midlands, Burgess is denied the arcane vocabularising and erudite cultural allusions that are so characteristically him. The effect, indeed, is rather Simenon-ish. Wikipedia asserts that 'the entire vocabulary in One Hand Clapping amounts to approximately 800 words', which datum isn't sourced, but which feels about right.

Since so much of the effectiveness of the novel rides on Janet’s voice, the trick is in steering a path between believable reproduction of a deliberate class (and gender) simpleness on the one hand, and tacitly sneering condescension on the other. My sense is that Burgess pretty much manages this. It’s made trickier to do this than it might otherwise have been, I think, by the need to have Janet enact a series of increasingly extreme amoralities as the story proceeds, matching this to her blithely ingenuous (or apparently ingenuous) normalcy of middle-English decency and ordinariness.

At any rate, Janet tells a story whose surface plainness and attention to the banalities of life is, subtly, warped in the telling until the ordinary has become profoundly nihilistic and strange, almost without the reader noticing the transition. It’s this lobster-being-slowly-boiled-and-not-minding quality that is the books’ great achievement, I think. At the beginning Jane is working in a supermarket and her young husband Howard in a garage. They live in a council house, eat fish fingers and beans on toast, watch the TV. Jane is aware of her own prettiness without being especially vain about it; Howard is handsome and loving, if a little wrapped up in himself. ‘There were times when Howard could be very unreasonable. Once he’d got an idea in his skull you couldn’t get it out … so I went to get the supper, which was baked beans on toast tonight. You’d think I’d be fed up with baked beans, seeing them all day long in the Supermarket. But they’re an easy dish to put, and there’s a fair amount of nourishment in them. I liked to keep Howard well fed. He could be very sweet at times.’ [13] Janet’s voice is like this all through, more or less: to the point, digressive in small ways, always about quotidiana.

A key question, I think, is the extent to which Janet possesses agency, as opposed to being merely a passive and reactive character. At the start of the novel we're invited to see her this latter way, the product of a failing, flattened, denatured society. The TV substitutes for life; all authenticity has been leached from England. The story is disposed, with a studied artlessness of plotting appropriate to its faux-naïf narrative voice, into five episodes. We could say 'five main things happen to Janet during the course of the novel', except that presupposes her passivity. First has to do with her sister, Myrtle, married to Michael (who works in a shop selling typewriters, the first of three references to those writing machines in the novel). Michael beats his wife. Why?

'He says he can't stand the sight of me nor the sound of my voice.' Now Myrtle was a pretty girl, though less perhaps than me, though of course her marriage had worn her down and made her mouth droopy and given her bags under the eyes. But I could understand that about the voice. Myrtle had one of these scratchy high voices, always going nya nya nya nya nya, and I could see that anybody might get fed up living with that, but it seemed no excuse for beating her up. [15]

What's neat, here, is that voice (used in its primary sense as the sound produced when human vocal chords vibrate the air) also refers to the vehicle by which a novel like One Hand Clapping generates its effects. I like 'nya', too: well observed in terms of English idiolects, but also a Finnegansy folding together of no and yes (or 'ya'), the ambivalence of the book's larger vision of England's ambiguous postwar utopia: free education, free healthcare, council housing, and all of it leading to mass banality. Anyway, Myrtle attempts suicide by taking (puns keep creeping in, despite Janet's ingenuousness of narratorial voice) 'barbarous or barbituric' sleeping pills [36]. This is a cry for a help rather than a real attempt, though it looks forward [spoiler!] to the genuine suicide pact Howard proposes at the novel's end. Hard not to feel a little sorry for poor old Myrtle. She goes back to her husband, and swept out of the story. It seems nothing in her life is to be taken seriously. Sucks to be her, I guess.

The second thing that happens is the main motor of the novel as a whole. Howard, it is revealed, has a photographic memory. Howard and Janet are particularly fond of a TV quiz show called Over and Over, based on Double Your Money, hosted by a pastiche Hughie Green called 'Laddie O'Neill' ('the quizmaster was a sort of American or Irishman you couldn't be sure which, with a very pointy sort of face. A lot of rather ugly and silly people came on and were asked easy questions about things' [10]). Howard gets on the show, and his perfect memory means that he answers all the easy questions, graduating to the hard questions that lead to the show's star prize of £1000. These are all literary ('who wrote Confessio Amantis?' and so on), and Howard answers them all without problem, although the book keeps reminding us that he has no deeper appreciation of literature at all, that it's all just a flawlessly flat, machinic recall. During the final episode of the quiz, Janet, in the audience, is haunted by a brief vision of the men behind three of Howard's answers, Jon Gower, Robert Henryson and William Langland, all genuine worth having been decanted out of their works, reduced to data points in a fatuous quiz:

... it just struck me for an instant, and it was almost as if it was Howard himself thinking and not me, that it was cheap and dirty to applaud something that nobody had any idea of, that nobody cared a bit about these three men, whoever they were, and that the three men, who I saw with beards and very old-fashioned clothes and dirty with not having bathed, were all dead and dignified and quiet and sort of despising everybody here in this studio. And I'd never read them or even heard of them, and I felt sorry and mean somehow. [72]

A touch over-played, perhaps; but it is Burgess's core point. The problem with the world is not TV as such (although the novel was described by The Independent, reviewing the 2001 re-issue, as 'an incisive commentary on the Americanization of the UK and the way TV acts as an opiate of the masses'). The problem is a more pervasive loss of soul, a blankness and flattening of cultural and therefore social life. The 'it was almost as if it was Howard himself thinking and not me' throwaway is important too: because Act 3 introduces a new aspect to Howard's photographic memory. He takes the £1000 he has won and turns it into £100,000 by betting on the horses. It seems he is clairvoyant and can see the future. This knight's-move into Fantastika is treated with commendably low-key restraint by Burgess, who forebears from spelling out what is strongly implied: first, that Howard and Janet's marriage constitutes a tacitly telepathic bond (for there seems little physical and no real emotional strength to what they both insist is a true love), something reinforced when it turns out that Howard was indeed thinking what Janet thought he was thinking at that moment mentioned above; and, second, that the suicide pact Howard presses for at the end of the novel is a result of him seeing some catastrophe down the temporal line. The actual justification Howard gives for this is despair at the state of things (England like a 'scabby and old' lion kept in a cage where people jeer at it and throw stones [193]), combined with a desire for 'tranquility and peace'. But Howard sleeps badly, cries out in the night, sleepwalks and copes poorly with his clairvoyance; and there are hints that he dreams of 'the H-Bomb or something or the Polaris missile.' [78]

Anyhow, Howard insists that he and Janet spend the money on luxury items (a mink coat for her, five star hotels, fine dining) and a tour of the world. He also decides to give something back to 'real' literature, having won money with his perfectly superficial knowledge of old poetry. To that end he becomes the patron of a modern poet called 'Redvers Glass' (a name that made me think of Robert Graves: distractingly so, since Glass is a rather different sort of writer. Andrew Biswell, in the introduction to this edition, persuasively suggests he's based on Dylan Thomas, with whom Lynne Burgess had an affair). Glass comes to stay in the Shirley's Bradcaster council house whilst they fly to America and the West Indies. But before they go, and with little by way of narrative preparation in terms of her characterisation, Janet jumps into bed with Redvers. This puts agency in question again. At no point does Janet stop loving her husband; yet she desires Redvers and so she has him. 'Oh, Howard was very nice to have in bed,' she tells us; 'but he was very gentle all the time, and there was something in my that didn't want this gentleness. And the poet Redvers Glass was not gentle, not a bit, but he went on as though he'd willingly die afterwards if he could just have me now' [119]. There seems, on the surface, something Lawrentian about this (Lady Chatterley gets name-checked later: 'a book full of Sex and actually describing these two people doing it. It came out last year in the Penguins' [192]); but I'm not so sure.

Act Five brings the slow build-up to its climax. First Howard and Janet go to New York, Chicago, Hollywood and the Caribbean, on a money-no-object holiday ('New York was quite interesting, and we saw all the things we'd already seen on the films, like Broadway and Harlem and Madison Square, also Fifth Avenue. The difference between the films and the real thing was, as I said, mainly that the real thing had its own smell and the real thing was more genuine, with people spitting and swearing and having pimples and boils, though not more than the people of England'). But the net result is a sense of the fundamental sameness of human beings. They return to Bradcaster, where Redvers Glass has set up a sort of bohemian artist community in their council house. Howard angrily ejects all of these beatniks and poets, breaking one of their typewriters in the process. He then reveals his Big Plan to Janet. He has kept back the big bottle of barbiturates Myrtle has used in her suicide attempt. Now that he has shown his wife the vacuity of the world, they will both overdose together. Glass rumbles what Howard is up to and tries to get the police to intervene; but the local Bobby is unimpressed with his boho shabbiness and takes Howard's word that everything is OK.

Janet, though, doesn't want to die, and in a surprisingly tense and exciting scene bashes her husband on the head with a coal-hammer, killing him. Glass comes back, handles the hammer (which Janet has coolly wiped clean of her own fingerprints) and, distraught, insists she must go to the police. She is having none of this, and with impressive calm and resourcefulness she folds Howard's corpse into the large pigskin suitcase they'd previously used to carry their luggage through America. She takes the £50,000 that's left of the money, blackmails Glass into helping her, by hiding the hammer and telling him he'll take the fall if the murder is discovered. So Glass accompanies her as she runs away to France. That Customs don't inspect the contents of their large suitcase is fortunate for them; but once on the Continent they rent a house in a remote part of the countryside and, it seems, live happily ever after. They dispose of the body by using it as a scarecrow. since 'the crows will make short work of him'. Does she feel bad?

It's very hard for me to feel any real sorrow for Howard. I miss him sometimes, especially with Red carrying on a bit, as I think he is, with a woman called Madame Crébillon about seven miles down the road. That's why I've got this coal-hammer still. Because there's a man called Henri Fournier who has something to do with wine and speaks English really very well and says he'd do anything for me. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. [217]

Crébillon (presumably named for this geezer, possibly because his most famous tragedy was Thyeste  and there's a ghostly Thyestean vibe to the novel) and Fournier (I'm guessing a nod, via the book's several typewriters, to this guy).

It is a mark of how cleverly the novel is made that this final ruthlessness in Janet does not strike a jarring or forced note. It follows, we believe, directly from the way her character has previously been developed. We might say the novel understands murder as (to appropriate Johnson's phrase) something equally in the power of him that is hardened by villainy and inspirited by innocence. This, we realise with a start at the book’s end, is what Janet’s ‘voice’ has always been about in One Hand Clapping: her innocence, a quality that neither sexual transgression nor even homicide can tarnish. Innocence, in Burgess’s universe, is always simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. Which is quite a profound thing, when you come to think of it.

The violence of the novel is one hundred and eighty degrees of orientation away from Mary McCarthy’s famous assertion in her 1961 essay ‘Characters in Fiction’ that ‘in violence we forget who we are.’ Janet’s violence is, in the context it which it happens, entirely of a piece with who she is: common-sensical, doing the needful thing in the moment, on a par with putting baked-beans on toast or calling 999 when her sister takes an overdose. The point is not (pace Žižek) that there is some monstrous structural violence in Society that emerges in her actions. It is something the reverse of this: that society is too neutered and safe and monstrously bland. ‘Violence’ is another word for the authenticity to be found in those dead bearded poets, the Gowers and Shakespeares, and which (in admittedly debased form) flares up in Glass’s sexual urgency. There’s a quotation from W R Inge’s The End of an Age (1948) which I’ve always liked, and which speaks to this:

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

Burgess would surely have agreed with this. The relationship between society and violence is not a simple mapping of one to the other, but an ironic upending. The more comfortable we are, the more deathly our beings-in-the-world, the more readily violence will burst out.

The ethical horizontality of this put me in mind of Camus or Sartre; the casual killing in L’Étranger; or the day-to-day mundaneness of Bradcaster that gets projected onto the whole world when Howard and Janet tour the States, which perhaps recalls La Nausée (‘when you are living, nothing happens. The settings change, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are never any beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition. There isn’t any end either … everything is like everything else: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, are all the same after a couple of weeks.’ [61-2]). The difference, of course, is that for Sartre this state of affairs is existential; whereas Burgess keeps worrying away at the fear that there has been a fall-away from some prior, authentic and meaningful living,  that in some way the modern world is to blame. Since he does nothing but rail, and not entirely coherently, against this modern quidnunc (rather than proposing productive possibilities for reparation) this, ultimately, comes over as a less coherent position than Sartre’s. That doesn’t make it wrong, of course.

***

Coda. It's hard not to be struck by the similarities between this 1961 novel and the next title that Burgess published, 1962's A Clockwork Orange. Both are first person narratives by young people; both representations of early 1960s culture full of period detail that avoid mere reproduction by filtering the text through an estranging lens we might as well call science fiction: Howard's ability to see the future in One Hand Clapping, Alex's sovietized supposed futurity of location in Clockwork Orange. And both are about violence. There are many differences between them, of course, but the crucial similarity is that Burgess attempts to grasp what a new generation was 'about' primarily through voice. It's not just that the young are, to various degrees, disrespectful and contumacious; it's that they sound new. And Burgess attempts to inhabit that voice.

There's another similarity: the titles of both novels are derived from embedded works of fiction within the fiction. After they have become rich, Howard takes Janet to the theatre in London.

'It's a play very well noticed in The Times,' said Howard, in his lofty, Timesy, sort of way. 'Called One Hand Clapping. It's a play dealing with the decay and decadence in the world.'

'Called what?'

'One Hand Clapping.'

'That's a silly sort of name,' I said. 'How can you have just one hand clapping? You've got to have two, haven't you? I mean, there'd be no noise, would there, with just one? You've got to have two to make any noise.'

... 'It's from Zen Buddhism,' said Howard. 'It's something you have to try and imagine.' [135-36]

At any rate, Janet doesn't enjoy the play. 'When the curtain went up, what should it be but some young people in a very dirty-looking flat, with washing hanging up and a girl ironing in her underclothes. And that scene didn't change once, it was the same scene from beginning to end of the whole play.' There's more: 'what the play was about was about everybody being very unhappy because they'd got their education paid for by the government, or something, and there was no war on for anybody to fight in, or something like that.' [137]

This is perhaps too sneery to be as funny as it might. The most obvious target is Osborne's Look Back in Anger; although the title is perhaps a joke at the expense of N. F. Simpson's second play, One-Way Pendulum (1959).* Howard's lofty 'Timesy' voice may or may not glance at his ability to see the future, although the reduplication of 'decay and decadence' is presumably about limitations of vocabulary. The more obvious point of this, I suppose, is to contrast Janet's rigorously common-sensical approach to reality with Howard's uncomprehending, rather credulous one. Howard wants to believe in something more, and is driven to death by his inability to find it. Janet has no such need. In You've Had Your Time Burgess flirts with otioseness in explaining his choice of title: with Howard dead, 'the clasped hands of marriage have been reduced to a single hand, but it claps. Hence the Zen title One Hand Clapping.' Well, alright; very Catholic, and so on. But surely there's a doomier quality hinted at in this Zen-ism. I appreciate the koan is designed to disclose thought, rather than enclose it in a single definite answer. Nonetheless, it has always seemed to me that one answer to the question 'what is the sound of one hand clapping?' is: silence. A clapper might be one of a pair of hands, applauding the curtaindown of a highly regarded new play at the Royal Court. It might also be the metal tongue inside a bell, tolling for—wait, must I send to ask for whom the bells tolls? One clapper is sufficient to make a solidly resonant sound, after all. And the funeral is always for more than just one person. John Wilson, also known as Anthony Burgess, also known as Joseph Kell, knew that.

 ---
* Clarification from Dan Rebellato, Professor of Modern Drama at Royal Holloway: 'Both plays were at the Royal Court. The content of the play—woman ironing in a dirty-looking flat—is definitely a reference to Look Back in Anger which starts with the same image. And the comments about 'there was no war for anybody to fight in' is probably a reference to Jimmy Porter's speech: 'I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids [...] There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious and stepping in front of a bus'. And the comment about the 'education paid for by the government' is, by 1960, already a critical cliché about the 'angry young men' being the products of the Butler Education Act of 1944 (even though virtually none of those writers were young enough to have benefited from it). The working-class woman from the Midlands sounds very Look Back in Anger too (the play is set in the Midlands). The title might be referencing One Way Pendulum, but that's British absurdist and not kitchen sink at all (though the 'decay and decadence' line does sound more like absurdism than kitchen sink). To be honest, it sounds very unlike a 1950s play of the kind he's describing and might just be where Burgess's satirical accuracy is foundering.'

Devil of a State (1961)

In Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess recalls the composition of this, his seventh-published novel:

"This novel was, is, about Brunei, which was renamed Naraka, Malayo-Arabic for hell. Little invention was needed to contrive a large cast of unbelievable characters and a number of interwoven plots.Though completed in 1958, the work was not published until 1961, for what it was worth it was made a choice of the book society. Heinemann, my publisher, was doubtful about publishing it: it might be libelous. I had to change the setting from Borneo to an East African one. Heinemann was right to be timorous. In early 1958 The Enemy in the Blanket appeared and this at once provoked a libel suit."

So Naraka becomes 'Dunia', and is relocated west some 5000 miles or so to, more-or-less, north-east Sudan (of which name Dunia is perhaps a semi-anagram; 'Dunia' is also Arabic for 'life', a datum to which I'll come back in a moment). In the original draft, the 'British Adviser' is a character; in the novel as published he has become the 'U.N. Adviser'.

As with Burgess's Malayan trilogy, the most obvious effect of the novel is the generation of a very convincing sense of place and time, the approaching end of colonial rule, the landscapes and cultures, mixtures of: all sorts of native inhabitants, Brits like main protagonist Frank Lydgate; Indian and Malay workers there to build a giant Mosque, assisted by Italian marble experts; Australian workers who are there to build the roads, and who say sy rather than say and tike rather than take; a gluttonous Czech painter called Smetana; a half-Irish half-Chinese called Patrick Ong, the rather sinister Carruthers Chung and various others. Burgess keeps the balls up in the air narratively speaking, and the writing is as sharp and vivid and darkly funny as ever. In the capital city, the main characters intrigue and pratfall and hurry about; in the countryside there are dark intimations that headhunting and cannibalism have come back into vogue.

The action happens against the backdrop the building of (and sometimes actually inside) a gigantic new mosque, something the Sultan of Dunia is spending the vast wealth obtained by mining Uranium. This is based upon the construction of the Brunein 'Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque'.

Burgess's Caliph is portrayed as an excessively devout Muslim, who is tolerating the presence in his realm of all these foreigners, non-Muslims and temporary workers only until the mosque is completed. Two key characters in the novel are the opera buffo father-and-son pairing of Nando and Paolo Tasca, who, rather embarrassingly to a 21st-century reader, actually a talk a like a dis aldaway tru Burgess a narrative. It seems only Italian marble is good enough for the Mosque, and only Italian workers can fit it, so the quarreling, bibulous, bottom-pinching, melodramatic-pose-striking, make-a-pass-at-anything-in-a-dress (or a veil) Tasca twosome are tolerated by the authorities. Their (crude, but palpable) colour and vigour contrasts sharply with the protagonist Lydgate: 50, miserable, unliked and unlikeable. He works as 'controller for passports' in what, in this novel, is notionally a U.N. Consolate, but which is actually pretty clearly the British Colonial office. His designated accommodation (the novel opens with a nicely frantic set-piece of him moving into this house, but chasing up and down the main city of Dunia trying to locate his keys) is sub-standard: in a low part of town, with crumbling plaster and worm-riddled furniture, This is because his superior, Mr Mudd, doesn't like him. He disapproves that Lydgate has separated from his Australian wife Lydia, and has instead fathered two children upon a local woman called Wajak. Before the novel opens, Wajak has gone over the water to give birth to a third child, probably not Lydgate's. Lydia, though she has returned to Australia and is having affairs and generally indiscreet with many men about Lydgate's insufficiences, won't divorce him. Lydgate swears off women, complains noisily, gets drunk. To bait him, the maliciously diminutive Mr Mudd (he used to be an amateur jockey, it seems) informs Lydgate that Lynne is coming to Dunia to work as a secretary in the Consulate. This news makes Lydgate alternately furious and despairing. He hasn't got enough money. He drinks too much. He bickers and quarrels like the sparrows in the eaves and gets nowhere.

Meanwhile, as the opening date for the mosque approaches, the workers (led by the two Italians) repeatedly strike for better pay. There is a National Independence Movement, whose members have sworn not to cut their hair until their nation is free of foreign rule, and who are trying to obtain a visa for an incendiary speaker to come in and address a meeting. Their leader is called Patu. To go back, for a moment, to the question of dates: there's something interesting here. The Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque was opened in 1958. The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of Sudan, notionally with Egypt but actually a straightforward matter of British colonial rule, ended in 1956. But Brunei remained a British colony until, amazingly, 1984. (Conceivably we might want to read Dunia as a version of Djibouti, and to overlook the fact that the latter was a French colony rather than a British one: if so, independence won't happen until 1977). Depending on how we want to take it, Patu in this novel is either a figure on the very verge of achieving the independence for his nation that he craves so, or is destined to be disappointed. This is important, I think: is the novel about prolonged frustration on a collective as well as an individual level? Or is it about the long day actually waning, and on the very cusp of change? I'm not sure.

***

Devil of a State is dedicated 'To Graham Greene'; but the real presiding spirit here, in terms of writing about the English experience of foreign lands, is surely Evelyn Waugh. There's a similar cynical hardness to the wit, a similar fondness for putting characters through degrading and demeaning twists of fate. For example, and perhaps modeled on the the schoolboy Little Lord Tangent, in the background of Decline and Fall, whose downward path (hurts his foot during a rugger match, foot later turns black; has to be amputated, dies after) pops occasionally into the main narrative, is the fate of the representative from the International Herbal Health Association. He arrives in Dunia to lecture in the capital city, but happens to come into the consulate just as Patu is bribing the official Sebastian Hup to obtain a false visa. To get this European intruder out of the way, they tell him to catch a boat up-river, which, uncertainly, he does ('"Thank you thank you," said the stranger vaguely. "But I had thought—" He wavered, swinging his stick' [101]). Later in the novel we discover that he has been decapitated by natives. The small scandal his fate provokes, very much in the background of the narrative, means that the U.N. Ambassador has to return early to England. Indeed, Burgess is happy to point up the Waugh-ishness of his novel with a little joke:

Mr. Covendry, the State Irrigation Officer, keeping up his reputation as the town intellectual, spoke to Lydia of modern literature. "J.B. Priestley," he was saying. "A bit too advanced for me. A bit too consciously clever.

"Evelyn Waugh?" suggested Lydia.

"With all due deference," smiled Mr. Covendry, "I never really cared for women writers much." [201]

Ho ho. There's a danger, though, I think, in aping the Waugh tone (of going, we might say, on the Waugh path). Waugh's sensibility was haughty and rather cruel, qualities he realised in his writing via a ferocious intelligence and extraordinary certainty of tone. Burgess, though his reputation is, I suppose, for a crusty or curmudgeonly irritation at the insufficiencies of (tick one or more of) modern life, culture, pop music, the young and so on, he isn't fundamentally Waugh-like in his relation to the world. Waugh had a fundamentally exclusionary imagination: he despised many things and many sorts of people, and saw himself not as a satirist but as a man in hell holding up a mirror. (This is what he said to an American interviewer in 1946: '"Are my books meant to be satirical? No. Satire flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous standards ... It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.'). For all his brilliance, he is a quintessentially aristocratic writer.

Burgess, though, had an inclusive imagination, and his aesthetic, though not democratic, is certainly demotic. He is fascinated rather than repelled by the varieties of human delinquency: adultery, fornication, bribery, lying, cheating and all the kaleidoscopes of selfishness, self-delusion and self-exculpation. Whilst he certainly doesn't see any of this as jolly or fun or (in the long run) satisfying, he also doesn't really see it as flagitous either. It is just how humans behave, broadly speaking. What this means for Devil of a State is that those elements which in Waugh would glitter with a sort of malicious beauty in the cruel mosaic of the whole here seem, somehow, off: random, or nasty, or unfair, because y of keeping with the broader mood of the whole.

There's a larger question here, too, concerning Burgess's writing that Devil of a State throws into relief. AB writes unlikeable characters. Lydgate is a particularly unlikeable character, but most of Burgess' novels contain versions of this figure: usually male, middle-aged, petty, borderline alcoholic, self-pitying. It flies in the face of one approach to the business of writing popular fiction, of course: readers want characters either likeable or else flawed in ways that enable imaginative engagement (pirates, vampires, sexy S&M billionaires). Caliban doesn't appreciate seeing his own face in the mirror. So why does Burgess do it? Waugh does it too, but only because he thinks homo sapiens fundamentally ghastly. I think Burgess does it for the exact opposite reason. He is offering us his vision of how human beings are and daring us to love them. It is, I think, one of those deep Catholic elements in his being and therefore in his art: God hates the sin, but he loves the sinner and we are all sinners. Sin uglifies us all, but this is not only no impediment to God loving us, it is actually the felix culpa ground of that love. The things that are really to be deplored are sins against love, as Burgess conceives it. Since another of the deep Catholic elements of his being was a horror of divorce, a belief that one should stick with one's spouse no matter what (although a little adulterous sex on the side was basically alright), this in turn steers Devil of a State into a final act peroration to marriage as such.

Lydgate's wife returns and makes his life hell, but in a show down with her and Mudd he finally blurts out the secret he has been holding back the entire novel. When he and Lydia got hitched he was already married to Agnes, an older woman, to whom he'd proposed back in England 'for the money'. Unhappy with married life he had fled: to Madrid, Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi; but his wife (now a member of a crazy religious cult) had pursued him like an Ἐρῑνύς. Eventually word reached him that she had died of a fever, and believing this true he had married Lydia; but of course Agnes is still alive. In a scene of rather pathetic dignity, with Mudd as witness, Lydgate releases Lydia: their marriage contract was not binding. He resolves to leave Dunia, but one of the Italians bribes the office and steals his ticket. At the end of the novel Agnes reappears, a hideous god-bothering crone, to claim a sobbing Lydgate as her only true husband. His punishment relates to his original transgression: he should not have sinned against marriage in the first place.

This speaks, in a way, to the larger question of Burgess as a person. There were many people who did not like him, of course; and Roger Lewis's extraordinary and horrible 2002 hatchet-job biography (Lewis adjudges AB 'lubricious, sentimental, callous, superficial, crapulous, arcane, laborious, sanctimonious and essentially a fake'; not to mention a 'lazy sod', 'pretentious prick' and 'complete fucking fool') still casts a shadow over his reputation. There are many other people who speak only with kindness and admiration of meeting or knowing him, of course. The real question is: how could it possibly matter if Burgess was an unpleasant a human being as Lewis thinks he was? To vector of the crossover from life to art, in the sense that Burgess often drew on the former for the latter, runs one way, not the other. Only narrow minds use the art to retroform moral judgement regarding the life. A much more interesting procedure is to see how and to what ends art modifies life. I'm not suggesting that moral judgement is outwith Burgess's writing. On the contrary, he is a deeply ethical writer in many ways. But I am suggesting that ethics is rather more than asserting whether one finds a person likeable or not.

***

So what is going on in Devil of a State? The novel, like The Right to an Answer, is divided into five sections, or acts; although here I suspect the intertext is less Shakespearean and more Marlovian. It's Faustus after the devils have dragged him into the inferno. The novel's title isn't kidding. Repeatedly the novel stresses the Hellish qualities of life in Dunia. That this word is the Arabic for 'life' is ironic enough; it is also the Javanese for 'world', which with the flesh and the devils of this book is more like it. In its original form, as we saw at the top of this post, the state was to be called 'Neraka', Malay for 'Hell'. Colonial officers write bad poetry about the place:

Dunia, the little world of the misled,
A deadly living for the living dead.

(that couplet would scan better with 'Neraka' instead of 'Dunia, the'). Other colonial officers sing a little ditty at a review they organise:

I'm not in a state of grace.
It's something far far loonier.
I'm a terrible case; see the lines on my face? In in the state of Dunia.

I'm not in a state of sin.
Indeed, I'd very much soonier.
I'm getting so thin; what a mess I am in.
I'm in the State of Dunia.

I'm not in a state of health—
My voice gets croakier and croonier.
But I've picked up some wealth and I've done it by stealth.
I'm in the State of Dunia. [205-06]

Those croaks intimate the Aristophanic froggishness of the this underworld. Frogs repeatedly croak and flop across the pages of the novel, and the last chapter of the novel opens with a Batrachoid peroration:

Another arid morning, wet nakedness under the mosquito-net panting in the humid air. The brown and green frogs had engaged at midnight, hopping into action, brekekekking martially. Corpses in no-frog's-land, the wounded piled up at the regimental aid posts, orderlies bringing succour to the feebly croaking. ... All night long the deep-chested chorus hopped into people's dreams and out again. [279]

Lydgate cannot escape Dunia, or his ghastly true wife, try as he might. Why this is Dunia; nor am I out of it.

Hell, then, is frustration and confinement. Tantalus is one figure. Lydgate doesn't hope for much, but whatever he does hope for is denied him. After lusting fruitlessly after women the whole novel, Nando Tasco is finally visited by Eileen, the wife of an Australian who is trying to turn tricks on the side and earn a bit of money: but he's too ill to take advantage ('Nando Tasco tried to rise from his bed. It was hopeless: he ached so, he felt so tired' [272]). There's something of Dives and Lazarus in the way the respective positions of colonizer and colonised here are styled, too. But the core trope of 'Hell' in this book is something else, which relates back to unlikeable actual Anthony Burgess and his circumstances with Lynne (to quote Roger Lewis's brimstone-whiffy biography once again, Lynne was 'a nymphomaniacal alcoholic', 'out of her face on shot glasses of vodka', 'threw a pass at every male she met', 'middle-aged, sagging and reeking of gin', 'once you'd seen her project a stream of vomit, like the trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel, six feet across a room, you'd seen everything.'). Hell, in this novel, is marriage.

Towards the end of the novel, young Paolo Tasco, driven to despair by his father's bullying and his own frustrations (for he too is desperate to get his leg-over, and has to endure Tantalus-like carnal denial), barricades himself into the room at the top of the minaret of the nearly-completed Mosque. The holy building cannot, obviously, be opened and displayed to all the many visiting Muslim dignitaries from around the world with an infidel lurking in its minaret; but removing him is made more difficult by the fact that, for reasons of rather involved plotting, young Paolo has become a figurehead for the Independence movement, and 'Italy!' one of the slogans chanted by the crowds gathered at the base of the minaret, who believe it means 'freedom' (maybe the joke has something to do with the Arabic for 'union', 'ittihad'). Paolo is eventually ejected under cover of night, and his father is absolutely furious with him -- he himself had to climb all the steps of the minaret to seize him, and the effort has broken his health. He plans to exile his son to some jungly part of Africa, there to suffer; but a letter from his wife, back in Italy, gives him a better idea. She suggests that he returns home and marries rich Novello's daughter Lucrezia: 'she is older than Paolo about seven years,' writes the mother. 'But if he loves her and she loves him age is not important. She is not beautiful in her face but I think perhaps her soul is beautiful. She is big and strong, and I think that is what Paolo needs to keep him in order. Her upper teeth are false, but her lower teeth are all her own' [248]. Papa Tasco is delighted with this notion:

That, thought Nando Tasca, would be the worst punishment of all. Marriage. Why hadn't he thought of that before? If Novello's eldest daughter were anything like Novello's wife—ay, Novello's monumental ugliness and Signora Novello's slate-pencil gramophone voice, together with the thorough and utter bitchiness of the grandmother, why, Paolo would be well served ... What were lions, leeches and cannibals to a daughter of Novello's? [249]

Two chapters later, Lydgate, frustrated in his attempts to escape Dunia, is finally tracked down by his 'true' wife Agnes: 'an old woman, about sixty, thin, lined, very brown, dry, gair quite grey, dressed in a costume of striped moygashel, stick legs panted in mosquito-boots, gold ring on her left ring-finger, fingers like bones' [275]. As the novel ends we grasp that Lydgate will not again escape his skeleton wife. He is married and therefore he is damned. 'It is better to marry than to burn,' said the verse from 1 Corinthians (6:19) which Burgess chooses as epigraph to this novel; and by the end we see that it's possible to do both.

This is a striking and not very comfortable view of marriage, but that, presumably, is the point. For a believing Catholic, happily joined to a spouse, marriage is a sacrament. Without the substructure of holiness it is only a state. But states, Burgess understands, are robust and carceral entities. And if sacraments are of God, then states must belong to the other feller; and so we have our title.

In one of the odder textual strategies of the novel, the final chapters of parts 1 and 2, and the final paragraph of the otherwise conventional last chapter of part 3—but, strangely, not parts 4 or 5—are give over to a sermonizing voice pastiched out of the 17th-century. At the end of chapter 6 Lydgate cries that he wants 'to sleep and never wake up again'. Chapter 7 begins:

Ah, Frances Burroughs Lydgate, why dost thou seek not temporary oblivion merely but a sempiturnal quietus? Sleep is thy meed, thy due after the long rigours of the day, but why callest thou on thy Maker (with as little ceremony as though wouldst call on some heathen boy from Cathay for a strong but well-watered potion) for a cessation of his great gift of existence? Existence, though echoest? It is but that. What more dost thou want? Thou hast work, a wage, a board and a bed. Thou hast benison of perpetual heat in a land where summer dieth not. [67]

There are three and a half pages of this; the voice wondering if a What The Thunder Said shower of refreshing rain will end the spiritual barrenness ('the parched grass looks up to be fed. Is it rain?'); but this monsoon becomes instead a new torment, provoking only a series of petty inconveniences. Lydgate

dreams that he is in hell and that Lazarus (though he is indeed no Dives) comes at regular intervals and drops water into his open mouth. He wakes to find the roof leaking. The cigarettes on his side-table are soaked. He has no others. Water is dripping on him with the regularity of a Roman water-clock that thinks the empire will last for ever. God curse them all. [70]

Funny, in a dark kind of way. The second sermon occupies chapter 14 and is addressed to Paolo, rebuking him for angrily cursing his own (obnoxious, bullying) father:

Ah, young Signore, stride in anger, dost thou, back that way that but lately thou didst come? The anger thou quelledst in tears thou badest revive in thy father's house. The sin of anger is in all truth bad enough, but anger toward they father, who gave thee thy being, who maintained and schooled thee, who is now the means to enlighten they mind further through travel in outlandish parts, this is of all sings perhaps the most reprehensible. [135]

The sermon voice is reduced to a mere paragraph at the end of chapter 21 (concluding part 3); again haranguing Lydgate, this time on the subject of marriage ('Ah, Frances Burroughs Lydgate, at it again? ... we are all members of one another, that the perfect round of man and woman in hardly contrived harmony is a shadow or figure of that heavenly round of harmony in which we are destined ultimately to merge our shrinking selfhood becoming one with the one with the one with the one with the' [189])—except that this time Lydgate peremptorily interrupts the voice ('shut up, shut up, shut up') and we don't hear from it again. Sermons are squeezed out. There's a randy Italian teenager in the minaret rather than an imam. Rain does not refresh, but only batters and yells ('the sky gaped stupidly and spewed pure water. All sound else was drowned' [281]). What a grim comic novel this turns out to be.

The Worm and the Ring (1961, 1970)

:1:

The Worm and the Ring had a problematic publication history. Burgess based it in part on his time teaching in Banbury Grammar School (now Banbury Academy) in the early 1950s, a provenance that caused difficulties. Wikipedia is to the point:

The novel was withdrawn from circulation following a libel action by Gwendoline Bustin, the secretary of Banbury Grammar School, where Burgess had taught in the early 1950s. Several characters were recognisable as figures from the school, but only Miss Bustin, later Lady Mayoress of Banbury, objected. Heinemann agreed to 'amend all unsold copies of the book' (The Times, 25 October 1962) but actually pulped them. A revised edition of the novel, with the libellous elements removed, was published in 1970.

It is this revised edition that I read (in blue, at the top there; I have never seen a copy of the first edition from 1961), and I confess myself intrigued as to how much it has been altered. The school secretary character, Alice, is portrayed as a shallow, neurotic spinster, a gossipy pest with a desperate crush on the (married) headmaster, Woolton, that she sublimates by alternately coming round to his house to cook for him whilst his wife is ill in hospital, but also spreading rumours about Woolton's supposed sexual turpitude with his female teachers and even with schoolgirls. The town doctor, Leary, discusses her near the end with teacher Charles Howarth, one of the book's main characters. 'What seems to be the matter with her?' Howarth wonders, and Leary replies:

'Frustration. Hypochondria. Hysteria. One of these days she may be really dangerous. Sex does queer things to people, especially when it's leaving them. It rends them like a departing devil. I've seen her type before. The bitter spinsters, the dried-up duennas who advance and retreat at the same time, lure a man on then call the police.' [263-64]

Blimey: if that's how the character was after the potentially libellous descriptions of Ms Buston were removed, I shudder to think how the original version painted her.

Woolton is not really groping his female staff and having sex with the girl students, but that doesn’t stop the gossip. In fact Woolton is an aging, rather ineffectual classicist, a woolly-liberal sort of Wotan; his wife Frederica has mental health issues and his elderly mother, who lives with them, is going senile. He is optimistic about the future, though. Indeed, optimism about the future is his defining characteristic. He is overseeing his school’s move from the tumbling-down old Victorian building to a bright new glass-and-steel 1951 structure out of town. ‘Space, light, air,’ he tells his wife. ‘Shining laboratories, rational chairs and tables. But above all space. We’ve been working in incestuous rat-holes.’ [25]  It turns out that the new building is not all it’s cracked up to be, built as it has been by corner-cutting contractors who got the job via bribes. But Burgess’s point is more central: Woolton is foolish to think that putting children in bright new surroundings will overwrite the Old Adam inside them. Indeed, one of the things that is particularly good about this novel is the way it portrays the life of the kids themselves: the pack-dynamic, the aimless bullying and teasing, the anxieties and pettiness and boredom. Original sin, Burgess thinks.

The novel includes several child characters, but the main emphasis is on the adults. We get the music teacher Ennis, presumably the same character as the protagonist of A Vision of Battlements six years on; and the absent-minded master Mr Lodge. More substantially we get Charles Howarth the modern languages teacher, a Catholic trapped in a sexless marriage with his over-devout wife Veronica: the birth of their only child, Peter, produced life-threatening bleeds; a second child would probably kill her, and with contraception off the table for a 1951 Catholic celibacy is her only option. This, of course, does not make Howarth happy, and he plans an affair with another teacher, Hilda Connor, herself married to a Major in the army who is often away. Finally there is the plausible, wealthy but morally empty Gardner, who has earned himself a doctorate by plagiarising the oddly complaisant Howarth’s scholarship, and who spends the novel plotting to unseat Woolton and claim the headship for himself.

The book is in four parts because Wagner’s Ring Cycle is disposed into four opere. The parallels between the two involve various modes of slippage, and it is to Burgess’s credit, I think, that The Worm and the Ring reads more-or-less smoothly as a well-written and well-observed novel in the realist mode about the travails of being Catholic in 1950s Britain. Still, the parallels are there, and it would be a pity not to notate them a little.

Wagner’s cycle is, in part, about the Gods (Burgess’s teachers) moving into a splendid new palace, Valhalla (the new school building). This has been built by the giants (the parish council in Burgess’s novels: old farts and crusty noblemen), but must be paid for.

Burgess's ring is a schoolgirl’s diary, stolen at the opening of the novel by the ugliest boy in school Albert Rich (that is, by Alberich). In amongst all the usual trivia of a teenage day-to-day, this diary includes an account of the girl in question (Linda; but she is one of Burgess’s interchangeable Rhinemaiden schoolgirls, of whom there are several) in the headmaster’s office being pressured into the performance of lewd acts. A schoolmaster confiscates the diary from Albert Rich, and the incriminating document ends up in the hands of the unscrupulous Gardner. He interviews Linda, and discovers that the incriminating passages reflect no reality, but constitute a sort of written-down daydream of erotic possibility. But he browbeats the girl into ‘confessing’ that the sexual transgression actually took place. Then he lays his plots to use this information to discredit and unseat Woolton. That is to say, the metaphorical 'ring' gives the possessor power (within a limited ambit: the power to focus community outrage and unseat a sitting headmaster) but at the cost of 'giving up' love, or more tenuously, turning one's back on sex as a positive.

The character who gets most narrative attention is Howarth, and his Catholic angst is close to what the novel is 'about' in a larger sense. He pursues Mrs Connor, and has almost persuaded her into bed with him when he experiences a change of heart and promises to himself to go back to confession, and mass, and the straight-and-narrow. But Providence conspires against him. He agrees to take 25 schoolchildren on a school trip to Paris. Since some of the kids are girls he knows that there must be a woman to chaperone them, and he arranges to have his wife accompany him. This was his plan: for the two of them to have a holiday which they could not otherwise afford, and rekindle some of the romance in their marriage. But only days before the trip Veronica haemorrhages badly and has to be hospitalised for a hysterectomy; Woolton, without consulting Howarth, gets Hilda to accompany him in Veronica’s place. Alone in the world's most romantic city with the woman he has desired so long, Howarth’s new principles desert him and the two have sex.

Whilst reading I wondered whether Howarth is the novel’s Siegmund, and his son Peter (whose teenage wrestlings with his over-developed religious yearnings are given a lot of space) Siegfried. But of course a moment's thought shows that Howarth is supposed to be Siegfried (Hilda, clearly, is Brünnhilde), and Peter presumably an achronological or inverted-generational version of Siegmund. The child is father to the man, according to some, after all. The boy prays for martyrdom as a way of circumventing the many temptations with which he is afflicted, and almost gets his wish when he is bullied onto the (new) school roof to fetch a lost cricket ball. He takes the bullying as sectarian persecution (‘“You’re making me do it,” said Peter, “Is that it?” “Yes that’s right,” said Rich. “We’re making you doing it.” “Because I’m a Catholic? Because you think Catholics are scared?” “Yes, you are scared. The lot of you.”’ [235]). When the shoddily built drainpipe breaks, Peter falls down and is impaled on railings. But he goes down in beatific mood: ‘A bird twittered on a branch of the elm. A good act of contrition didn’t matter now; he was safe’ [238].

In fact Peter does not die, though he is badly hurt; and the shock of this, combined with Hilda’s news that her husband is to be posted to Gibraltar and she with him, reconciles Howarth to his wife. (Burgess's account of the novel in Little Wilson and Big God suggests that Peter does indeed die in the first edition; if so, the revision was a canny one. It works better more obliquely framed). The Howarths leave en famille for Italy, where Charles will work for an American (an old wartime buddy) who has offered the polylingual teacher a job on his vineyard. As for Woolton, he is dragged before the parish council and accused of various delinquencies on the strength of rumour only (Howarth had previously found the incriminating diary in Gardner’s drawer and burnt it). Woolton vows to fight any calls for him to stand down; but then his mother dies leaving him a very large sum of money in her will, and he—plus his wife, newly cured of insanity in rather deus-ex-machina style—leave to start their own school. Gardner gets to be Head, and the novel’s closing paragraphs paint his accession as the culmination of the book’s Götterdämmerung.

Gardner was not concerned to ask whether the coming regime was based on a defensible premise. Good and bad, he recognised, were terms to which he could attach no ethical significance. An action was justifiable if it led to the possession of the thing it was desirable to have. Happiness was neither here nor there: what counted in life was the fulfilment of one’s own peculiar daemon, the realisation of a pattern which existed outside the caprices of appetite, ambition, desire. The man born to rule was neither the good man nor the bad, but the man capable of existing as a sheer function, a sheer personification of order. Woolton had been destined to find some kind of content in the irresponsible dreams of a Roman or Hellenistic Utopia, for—despite his liberalism—Woolton was fundamentally irresponsible. Howarth was another who would succeed at nothing. He had a brilliant linguistic quirk coupled to a weakness of character that would, till his penurious end, lead him from bed to bar to bed to confession, over and over again. They both had their destined ways; let them fare forward or backward. Upward lay Gardner’s way. [272]

In terms of the book’s quasi-realist bona fides, Burgess links this to the (as he saw it, disastrous) elimination of grammar schools and levelling of all education to the spurious democracy of the secondary moderns. ‘Democracy,’ Gardner tells his teachers, ‘cannot be reconciled with the notion of an élite’ [268]. Ennis, one of Burgess’s several mouthpieces (though he is a very minor character in The Worm and the Ring) retorts ‘you’ve got to have an élite' or ‘everything will be diluted … we sink to the lowest level. We will water the wine until there is no wine left’ [268]. I like that Burgess elects to use the fancy-French spelling of ‘elite’ here, a sort of meta-elitism of terminology. And one need not agree with this perennial Burgessian crotchet for the novel to work. That said, it probably is true that this summing-up at the end, from Gardner’s more-or-less sociopathic perspective, works better as an attempt at mythic interrogation of the logic of Wagner’s cycle than a meaningful critique of anti-elitism in pedagogic practice.

:2:

Why the Wagner, then? Just for the LOLs of undertaking a large-scale Ulysses-style everyday-novel-pinned-to-grand-mythic-story exercise? Geoffrey Aggeler thinks that the ‘discrepancy here between subject matter and heroic musical form suggests that the book is to be viewed as burlesque’ [Geoffrey Aggeler, Anthony Burgess: the Artist as Novelist (University of Alabama Press, 1979), 209]. I’m not so sure. After all, you wouldn’t call Ulysses a burlesque, although the disparity between that novel’s various Dublin lowlifes, wankers and boozers and the Homeric half-divine heroes which they embody is, if anything, more pronounced than is the case in The Worm and the Ring. And burlesque doesn’t seem to me to describe the effect of this novel: sometimes funny but often deeply engaged in precise social and environmental description, thoughtful, even deep.

Put it another way: Burgess’s novel is about the experience of being a (lapsed Catholic) teacher in a provincial secondary school in 1951; and therefore—on a personal level—it is about guilt, sexual desire and growth, and—in a larger sense—about education, both professionally and spiritually considered. What is Wagner’s Ring about? Well, at the risk of sounding flippant, it’s about lots of things: but centrally it’s about power, as temptation and curse; and about love; and about the roots of a particular cultural, national and (notoriously) racial identity, this latter being curiously woven in with a cosmic pessimism that celebrates the raw force of human heroism even as it acknowledges that such heroism is always doomed.

It’s not, perhaps, immediately obviously how these two magisteria map onto one another. Wagner's Ring is many things, but it is not Catholic, not about guilt, is wholly uninterested in issues of atonement and encompasses no redemption. Nor, really, is it about ‘education’, broad though that latter term can be. It’s strange to note this, really, since the list of things the Ring has been taken as being about is impressively varied. Hitler, famously, thought it was about the triumph of the racially pure German people: ‘I was filled with proud joy,’ he told Wagner’s daughter, ‘when I heard of the victory of the Volk—above all in the city where the sword of ideas with which we are fighting today was first forged by the Master.’ [quoted in John Deathridge's excellent Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Univ. of California Press 2008), 63]. George Bernard Shaw on the other hand thought the whole cycle an allegory of the evils of capitalism: this is his essay ‘The Perfect Wagnerite’ a Shavian-Marxist exercise in explicating the wicked effect the Rheingold has on the world (he has a rather splendid theory that the Tarnhelm is a Victorian factory-owner’s top hat). It is the river with which the cycle starts, during that still-extraordinary and superb vorspiel to Das Rheingold where the E flat drone and the spacious variations of the E flat chord build for seven minutes to indicate the flow of the water. Out of the river the whole drama comes and into it everybody disappears at the end. The river is time, or change, or life, or whatever you fancy. But Burgess chooses not to take the river’s gold as anything so literal-minded as actual gold. Money plays only a minor role in The Worm and the Ring. The novel is clearly ‘about’ power, but in a strangely limited, even strangulated manner. Gardner is surely too big a villain, too Machiavellian and driven, really to be content with a position of authority so milksop as headmaster of a provincial secondary modern school. Indeed this, rather than the mismatch between Wagnerian majesty and pettifogging Banbury day-to-day, strikes me as the main disjunction the novel articulates. The question, which I’m still revolving in my brain, is whether it is a deliberate one or not. I would say that this novel does not do (and possibly does not set out to do) what, to pick a rather incongruous comparator, J K Rowling does in her Harry Potter novels: that is, to treat school as a type for the larger world as a whole.

Perhaps the question ought to be: why school, then? I should make it clear that I consider this novel a major piece of Burgessiana; finely written, detailed, memorable. But there is an opacity about the rationale for its backing-up of ordinary life with Wagnerian myth, and a fuzziness, or muddiness, about the way its treatment of guilt and passivity resonate more generally. What is going on?

Another way of framing the issue of supposed disjunction between (say) Gardner's grand ambition and his petty goal (becoming a provincial headmaster) would be to suggest that Wagner's cycle is, fundamentally, about strength; where Burgess's novelistic fascination, here and in his other writing, is with weakness. Weakness is constitutive of humanity, he thinks; and it is precisely the fallibilities of ordinary individuals that ground their interest and specialness for him. Wagner didn't think like that. Of Siegfried, and perhaps conscious that as represented in these operas the character comes over as a violent, impulsive psychopath, Wagner said:

Siegfried should not create the impression of a character drawn with the conscious intention of violating the standards of civilized society; everything he says and does—even the rather cruder aspects of his genuine boyishness—must be presented as the natural expression of an essentially heroic personality who has not yet found an object in life worthy of his superabundant strength. [quoted in Deathridge, 62-3]

Superabundant strength is Wagner's Ring in a nutshell: the music is superabundant and strong; the drama is painted in forceful, muscular strokes; strength is beautified and valorised. But there's a wrinkle, the closest Wagner approaches to irony, and it inheres in the paradox of the ring itself. It is the talisman of absolute strength, the short-cut to world-spanning power; but only to the wearer who gives up love (which is to say, sex). Siegfried's superabundant strength manifests in part in his absolute lack of fearlessness; the first he knows of fear is when he lays eyes on the beautiful Brünnhilde, his first sight of woman, and falls in love. Love and fear are, Wagner is telling us, the same.

Burgess's Howarth is all weakness; which, in this context, is to say: all sex and love. He can't, for example, seem to separate out these two terms: eager to shag Hilda, he makes very free with the l-word: 'I do love you,' he blurts, whilst the two are in the school dinner hall one lunchtime. She rebukes him, tries to distract him ('look, those children are making a dickens of a row. We must go and stop them') but he insists: 'I love you. To hell with the children. I love you.' She then suggests running away, and Howarth feels 'a conventional twinge of fear that perhaps his avowals were being taken too seriously'. He presses on: 'I love you. If you were free I'd marry you', to which she rightly retorts: 'nice and safe behind your Catholic marriage' [116-17]. He doesn't really love her, of course; he is just sex starved and desperate. But above all he is weak, with all the usual masculine weaknesses.

This is the titular double-entendre that Burgess, not very subtly, extracts from his Wagnerian source. The Worm is Fafnir, the dragon (there is a pub in the village where much of the action takes places called 'The Dragon'), but it is also the male member, the willy of the Wilson-proxy Howarth. The ring is the vagina. The foci of Howarth's guilt are his lapsed state as a Catholic and his unruly sexual urges; but the novel is very much more about the latter than the former. Sex turns men into possessive and obsessive Fafnir-types; and sex education is an important learning process (not on the curriculum of this 1951 school of course). As the banality of 1951 provincial life is superposed over the grandeur of Wagnerian myth, so sex gets layered over love. Or so the novel implies.

One thing that strikes me as a little odd, in a novel set so centrally in and written so largely about education, is that The Worm and the Ring doesn't articulate any particularly coherent sense of what Burgess thinks education is for. It's not, it seems, about vocationally training tomorrow's chemists, engineers and woodworkers; but then neither (Burgess implies) is it about the disinterested development of the soul, for Woolton's love for the Classics is gently mocked as a kind of abdication. What then?

More, there seem, at least to me, a couple of false steps in the description of the school. Late in the novel we discover that Howarth had been a Captain in the war. I think such a person would have maintained their titular rank in their teaching career, and insisted on being addressed as such (there's a lot made of the status uptick Gardner gets from getting to be called 'Doctor' instead of 'Mister' [note: I'm wrong here, and am corrected in the comments, below]). I was at school in the 1970s and early 1980s, and one of our maths teachers was an old Colonel called Haddon whom everybody addressed as Colonel Haddon. The 1970s were not the 1950s, I appreciate; although my personal experience of school gave the novel particular resonance for me. My old school was also a State grammar that had been moved from poky and tumbledown old buildings in the city centre out to a large 1950s structure of glass and steel. Some of the teachers (they were mostly men, although a few women were on staff) had grown up and been trained post-war; but others were older and had fought in the war, and my main memory of them is that they were, by and large, prone to bouts of what you might call casual violence. There was no cane at my (State, remember) school, but the survivors of the war thought little of knocking kids, hauling them about, throwing board rubbers—hefty wooden items with pressed felt on one side—at them and the like. I got a board rubber in the face in a Physics lesson once, for mucking about, and I still have the small crescent scar on my nose near the bridge. Back in the day it bled a lot, although none of the adults, staff or parents, were outraged by this. It was just how things were. You wouldn't get treatment of the students by the staff like that in a 21st-century school, and that's clearly a good thing; but when I look back what I think is that these were men damaged in subtle ways by their wartime experiences. They survived a long-drawn out and violent conflict; they lost friends; and most of all they internalised a kind of casualization of attitudes to violence. When that generation passed, those attitudes passed with them. The younger teachers didn't treat us that way.

Burgess was of that generation. I've no idea if he was a casually violent teacher; certainly it's not a feature of teaching that figures in The Worm and the Ring. Indeed, although various characters express varying degrees of concern about the welfare of their charges in a general sense, we see little actual teaching. The one exception is where Howarth hijacks his own German class to praise Luther, in order to needle his very Catholic wife (his son is in the class, and Howarth knows the lesson will get back to her). The teachers are less interested in teaching and more in other things: power and sex, especially.

But maybe that's what Burgess is saying about education: that we would do better learning more about power and sex and less about chemistry and the Classics. My old English teacher used to say 'education, from educere, is a drawing out, not a putting in'. He meant that school ought not to be a Hard Times/M'Choakumchild cramming of facts into childish heads, which is surely right. But, looking at that phrase now, it strikes me that there's a pulsing, quasi-sexual motion implied in that putting-in and drawing-out dynamic. The Worm and the Ring is about education in this sense, I'd say: a kind of photographic negative of Wagner's Ring, in several senses, and mostly in that Wagner thinks sex is the secret ruin of strength, where Burgess thinks strength the blankness of an inhuman, abstract force dedicated to the watering down the wine of fallible human sex, joy and life.

Moby Quack: "The Doctor is Sick" (1960)

:1:

Burgess's fifth-published novel concerns a man hospitalised for a brain tumour in 1960s London: a smart, funny and (designedly) ghastly piece of writing. I read it in this edition:

It seems there was also an edition with cover-art inspired by Last of the Summer Wine:

Makes the first edition cover look a little tame, somehow:

Still: better than this one, with its too cartoonish intimations of Carry-On hi-jinks (the jinks in this novel are really rather low), and its use of the word 'pyjamaed' in plain sight on the cover, which is surely not actually a word at all:

The doctor of the title is Edwin Spindrift, a PhD in linguistics, home from a teaching posting in Burma because of a suspected brain tumour. He is accompanied by his faithless wife, Sheila. Theirs is an open marriage, although really only open on Sheila's side, since Edwin's inability to perform between the sheets is the root of the problem in the first place. Late in the novel Edwin wonders whether he should insist his wife apologise to him for her latest adultery, but then changes his mind: 'perhaps it was really up to him to ask her for forgiveness, for wives did not usually go around committing fornication and adultery if they were happy at home' [223]. Indeed. Sheila herself, slightly brittle and passive-aggressive during her infrequent visits to Edwin in hospital, is certainly unapologetic. She is staying at a local hotel, and rather than basing all her days around visiting hours at the hospital, she sends a succession of working class Londoners that she has met and befriended (and is in some cases sleeping with) from the local pub ('The Anchor').

1960s NHS hospitalisation and all that it entails is vividly and sometimes surprisingly drawn. I mean, I was born in an NHS hospital in the 1960s, and returned to one repeatedly throughout the decade and the one that followed it with the various health-related impediments Providence placed between me and growing-up, and which medical science helped me overcome, but I didn't realise that patients were allowed to smoke on the ward back then (really?). Edwin is X-rayed, electro-encephalogrammed and then has air injected into his cranium and is physically upended (another 'really?' moment; but checking with people who know, it seems this was a real treatment). The latter gives him a bad headache, and his tumour has already provoked synaesthesia and memory problems. His head is shaved, prior to surgery. But Edwin decides he's had enough of life on the ward, and does a runner. The bulk of the novel concerns his subsequent metropolitan peregrinations (this Burgess-idiom is catching, though, isn't it?), including stints in various bars and dives, meeting amongst others: two elderly Jewish twins called Leo and Harry Stone (what else would Joycefan Burgess call a Jew but Leo? and 'stone' is presumably a deliberate negation of the implied fertility of 'Bloom'); a sausage eating German matron whose English idioms inflected by her native tongue are; many cockney wide boys, amongst them Charlie (a window cleaner), Ippo (tea leaf and sandwich-board man) and Bob, who fences stolen watches ('kettles') and who takes a shine to Edwin, believing him to be 'kinky'. Bob's own kink is BDSM, and he kidnaps Edwin and locks him in his (Bob's) flat, begging him to beat him with his (Bob's) extensive collection of whips. Edwin escapes, has to flee gangster Bob's wrath, somehow ends up in a West End theatre, taking part in a televised 'Bald Adonis of Greater London' competition that has been organised to promote a film starring 'Feodor Mintoff', a version of Yul Brynner ('above the cinema entrance was a huge portrait of a bald actor with sensual lips and the sardonic eyes of a Mongol' [191]). The name of this film is Spindrift, also the name of a detergent Edwin sees advertised on the TV. Coincidence? Or evidence that Dr Spindrift is losing it? He is sure he sees Dr Railton, his consultant, playing trumpet in the orchestra accompanying the Bald Adonis show. When he wins the competition and is offered a chance to say something for the cameras, Edwin slips into full-on Burgess-curmudgeon mode. 'This must be a very big moment for you,' says the host:

'Not really,' said Edwin. 'I've known bigger moments. much bigger. As a matter of fact, I feel somewhat ashamed at having been a party to all this. So typical, isn't it, of what passes for entertainment nowadays? Vulgarity with a streak of cruelty and perhaps a faint tinge of the perversely erotic. Shop girls blown up into Helen of Troy. Silly little men trying to be funny. Stupid screaming kids. Adults who ought to know better. Here's my message to the great viewing public.' He leaned forward and spat full into the microphone a vulgar, cruel, erotic word. [198]

The 1960s, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Some of this is uncomfortably close to The Right to an Answer, right down to reusing some of its jokes: the cat called 'Nigger' in that novel is now a dog called 'Nigger', the calling of whose name in public leads to an inverted-commas hilarious (actually wincing and poorly judged) set-piece late in the book, when certain London West Indians take exception to the word: 'they had had enough of white derision; they had learned that to ignore it was but to fan it. They were joined by two others of their race from another house' [188]. This leads to a fight with a gang of white youths. And in Right to an Answer too the Burgess p.o.v. character finds himself on national television and says outrageous things. But in other respects the two books are quite different. There's a similar linguistic density and fascination with dirt, mess, sprawl and the ordinary qualia of quotidian existence; but in Answer all the scattered elements accrete, are gathered together and arranged in a cause-effect pattern, because Burgess wants his story to move towards its Othello-inspired tragic denouement. The Doctor is Sick is a much more scattered product, with no big climax to work towards. A centripetally circular construction.

We are increasingly unsure, as we read on, how much of this is suppose actually to be happening to the hapless Edwin, and how much is a fever-dream hallucination. In the penultimate chapter he wakes, back in the hospital, his wife at his bedside: she tells him the operation has been a success, denies that the things Edwin said happened did happen, and informs him that he has been sacked from his Burma job due to his ill health, and that she is leaving him. 'The trouble is,' Edwin ruefully notes, 'that I'm the last person in the world to say that this happened and that happened. I don't know' [228]

Edwin loves words more than he loves his wife; and his modus operandi through his peripatetic story is to unload mini-lectures about words, etymologies, orthography and semantics on all and sundry. Dr Railton, testing his brain function, asks him the difference between 'gay and 'melancholy'. '"There are various kinds of difference," said Edwin. "One is monosyllabic, the other tetrasyllabic. One is of French the other of Greek derivation. Both can be used as qualifiers, but one can also be used as a noun."' [21]. The doctor notes 'you've got this obsession, haven't you? With words?' But Edwin doesn't agree. 'It's not an obsession, it's a preoccupation. It's my job.' One consequence of this protagonistic preoccupation is that the novel is littered with QI factoids, which makes for a quite interesting read: that the 'y' in 'ye olde tea shoppe' is not a 'y' at all but an approximation for the Old English letter thorn; that 'Sam Weller did not interchange "v" and "w": he used a single phoneme for both—the bilabial fricative. But a recorder like Dickens, untrained phonetically, would think he heard "v" when he expected "w", "w" when he expected "v"' [45]. If it gets tiresome, or at least if it gets in the way of the novel's ability to recreate emotional depth, then that's deliberate too:

Love, for instance. Interesting, that collocation of sounds: the clear allophone of the voiced divided phoneme gliding to that newest of all English vowels which Shakespeare, for instance, did not know, ending with the soft bite of the voiced labiodental. And its origin? Edwin saw the word tumble back to Anglo-Saxon and beyond, and its cognate Teutonic forms tumbling back too, so that all forms ultimately melted in the prehistoric primitive Germanic mother. Fascinating. But there was something about the word that should be even more fascinating, to the man if not to the philologist: its real significance when used in such a locution as 'Edwin loves Sheila'. And Edwin realised that he didn't find it fascinating. [140]

:2:

It's a rather obvious thing to say, but this novel takes its key inspiration from the two late episodes in Ulysses: dividing itself between, first (like 'Oxen of the Sun'), scenes set in a hospital inflected through an acute sense of linguistic history, and then (like 'Circe') a phantasmagoric meander around a city, mostly at night, in which an unhappy, erudite young (ish) man encounters all manner of grotesques, oddballs and weirdos. But formally it is more Finnegans-Wakey-wakey than it is Ulyssean. This is mostly to do with a deliberate structural circularity, a plot defined by recurrence and a general commodius vicus-ishness, whereby Edwin keeps coincidentally bumping into the same people, having the same experiences. Late in the novel he meets an old University friend called Aristotle Thanatos, a Brit of Greek extraction, known as 'Jack'. Or does he? Did he ever have such a friend? Could, for example, anybody exist with such an improbable name? Back in hospital he puzzles over this, not least because the very wealthy Thanatos has offered him a job. Thanatos means death, of course. Aristotle is cockney rhyming slang for bottle; which in turn ('bottle and glass') means that it means arse. Hence: 'Jack'. ('I don't know where you people ever got the Jack from', Thanatos complains; and Edwin explains 'it was to protect you from the vulgar and uninstructed. Aristotle, to the British, has always had a ring of the unclean' [209]. Ring. Ho ho. But see also: jacksie). And actually its the circularity of this piece of rhyming slang that really fascinates Edwin: you say 'bottle', to avoid having to say something so vulgar as 'arse'; and you say 'Aristotle' for bottle, which you then shorten to 'aris', which sounds pretty much like you're saying the word you were trying to avoid in the first place. During one of his impromptu lectures, in an unlicensed drinkery earlier in the novel, Edwin expatiates on precisely this:

"The peculiar forms of Cockney are ... conscious perversions of standard forms. Take rhyming slang ... Arse," said Edwin, loudly, "becomes bottle and glass. There is then a kind of apocope, intended to mystify. But bottle itself is subjected to the same treatment, becoming Aristotle. Apocope is again used and we end with Aris. This is so like the word originally treated that the whole process seems rather unnecessary." [110]

It's as if, in seeking to avoid a taboo, we undertake a complex series of knight's-moves that bring us inevitably back to the taboo. Which is what? Death. The bibulous Aristotle Thanatos, who may or may not exist: bottle death, in a novel written by a heavy drinker who believed himself to be dying. Bottle death, ending a novel that is—its linguistic grace notes and digressions aside—fundamentally the story of an unhappy marriage breaking apart that patently draws (as did The Enemy in the Blanket) on Burgess's own circumstances with Lynne. Lynne who literalised 'bottle death' by drinking herself into the grave within eight years.

But why stop the apocope there? Perhaps the novel is more anally mortifying than drink-sozzled. There's a great deal of drink and drunkenness in it, certainly; but there are also several key scenes inside toilets (in one, Edwin forces himself into the same toilet cubicle as a man, in order to hide from pursuing, furious Bob, only to discover that the man is his boss), and the usual Burgess/Enderby fascination with shitting, the stuff we might call Joycean if we wanted to dignify it. There's a good deal of stuff to do with holes. Edwin delivers a lecturette on the etymology of the word 'cunt' [100]. In one drinking place, he listens to a song sung by 'a lank young man with glasses, a turtle-neck sweater and hair geometrically straight', accompanying himself on the 'Spanish guitar':

For them that looked for the way out and found it:
This.
There are holes that grew as doors with looking for them,
And for those that walked through with their heads high as kites.
This.
Where were the holes?
In man, in woman, in bottles, in the tattered book picked up from the mud on the rainy day by the railway junction.
But the whole of wholes, the hole of holies, where was where is
This? [159]

This goes on for pages: 'The holy, the whole, when seen through the hole/Not seen wholly but only whole holy deliverer from/This' [160]. Man, woman, bottle. Aristotle, arse. On the wall of this drinkery are examples of 1960s art by F. Willoughby. 'Some were bigger than others, and the plain painted backgrounds varied in violent poster-colour, but every one of F. Willoughby's pictures was a portrait of a circle. "They're only circles," whispered Edwin. "Circles, that's all they are."' [159]

Waste may be the key, actually. Insofar as the novel hints at a theme, it is that Edwin has wasted his life. In You’ve Had Your Time Burgess sums-up: ‘in The Doctor is Sick the philologist Edwin Spindrift purveys nothing valuable, while the Jewish twins who run an illegal club at least try to get people drunk' [YHYT, 13]. And the London through which Edwin wanders is a horrible enough place, run-down and seamy and dead. The novel's density of references to and quotations from The Waste Land make this point, too. At the end, Edwin struggles to recall some Greek to say to Aristotle Thanatos: 'but nothing would come. "Apothanein thelo," he said instead, without intending to say it' [214]. That's the end of the epigraph to Eliot's poem, of course: 'I want to die'. A few pages later Edwin doubts the existence of his friend: 'He racked and sifted his memory for Aristotle Thanatos. It was the sort of name a man might make up, like Mr Eugenides the Smyrna merchant' [224] Oho! You remember that Eliot's poem quotes the opening lines of the sailor's song from Tristan und Isolde?

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

So does Burgess, in a pub, where a cockney named Les:

began to sing disconcertingly the sailor's song from Tristan und Isolde. He sang it in a strange and apochryphal translation:

"The wind's fresh airs
Blow landward now.
Get up them stairs,
You Irish cow." [99]

This is pretty funny, I guess: confusing Kind and Kuh. Early on, Edwin assumes his nurse is Russian and addresses her ('spasebo tovarishch'); she replies 'you need not thank me. It is my duty. Besides, I am not Russian' [17] and I suppose we can assume ('Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch') that she is Lithuanian.

But look: piling up all these sorts of word-game instances (and there are lots) is a tedious business. There's certainly a bleakness in the comedy, here; everything is wasted, tending towards death. The doctors are looking for something in Edwin's head, something in his white matter, something deadly. They search and search. Edwin goes questing to, looking for ... what? Something. Restlessly moving on, trying to find it. He is the doctor and he is Moby Dick. Sickness is a wasting away, and this is the wasting away land. He is Ahabic, and the sea across which he travels a desolate one. Öd’ und leer das Meer.

:3:

The doctor is a bit moby, sure. But then again he's not a proper, medical doctor. In a hospital setting he's effectively a fake doctor. A quack. The thing about Moby Dick is that it embroiders, howsoever digressively, a basically linear narrative. Or perhaps it would be better to say, the story is dragged along in the straight-line wake of its prime signifier, the white whale. Ulysses can't help but fall into Odyssean patterns of a quest, journey, a destination, a straight line, a goal. The Waste Land is a parched and urbanised quest narrative. But The Doctor is Sick is repetitive, circular, all digression and no through-line. Edwin is in hospital. In chapter 3 he sneaks out of the hospital and has his first drink at the maritimely The Anchor. Chapter 4 he's back on the ward. Chapter 11, he decides to leave again ('Death was in the hospital: you could hear it snoring in the ward. Life was outside. He must leave at once.' [72]—what was it Larkin asked? Why aren't they screaming?). Chapter 12 he's out in the world again. In chapter 29 he's surprised to find himself back in the hospital. In chapter 32 he sneaks out of his bed in the night, steals some clothes and escapes the hospital again. There's a kind of randomness to all this in, out, in, out; a sense not of narrative pattern but of the awkwardly piled-up way events succeed events in the real world. And, actually, that's one of the key things the novel is doing. Edwin's tumour deracinates his ability to process the world around him into a meaningful gestalt; so he encounters its multifariousness as clutter. The prose is full of things like this

There was a coffee-bar, a steak-house, a chicken grill, a potato parlour (Steaming Jumbo Murphies Slashed And Buttered), a yumyum pastry ship, and even a jungly-looking place called Lettuce Land. Edwin eventually found a Pickwick Breakfast Bar, sat on a stool of contrived discomfort at the counter and looked at the menu. He proposed flapjacks with maple syrup, haddock wth two poached eggs, pork sausages and bacon with rognons sautés, toasted muffins, marmalade, much coffee. [172-73]

Or this account of Leo's conversation:

Leo spoke of amation, of the importance of afters and the special role of the man in the boat; of how to tell heads or tails by the sheer sound; of the private lives of Shakespearian actors; of perversions in Hamburg; of a Thai lady contortionist he had lived with; of a rich queer he had nearly lived with; of great gang figures like Big Harry, Tony the Snob, Quick Herman, Pirelli; of Qwert Yuiop, the Typewriter King. [112]

Visiting him in hospital, Charlie brings him as a gift not one wank mag, as you might expect, but a whole clutch of them: 'he pulled from his side-pockets bunches of gaudy magazines—Girls, Form Divine, Laugh It Off, Vibrant Health, Nude, Naked Truth, Grin, Brute Beauty' [13]. This piling-up of descriptive detail is an old strategy of the Realist novel, of course; and Burgess's seeming higgeldby-piggeldness serves its own purpose. It creates the effect not of Rabelaisian plenty, but an odd sort of transience, a sense of over-production, linked perhaps to the ephemerality of mass production. Everything flashes past Edwin's eyes. Midway through the story, on the run from Bob, he passes through a house:

Edwin raised himself by his hands, kneed the wall-top, found an overgrown garden on the other side, then swung himself over. He rested a second or two against the wall. Ahead was a house of four storeys and a basement, one of a row. Dusk had almost become dark. He stumbled through rank grass and bindweed, nearly fell over an unaccountable coil of barbed wire, clinked several bottles together like a glockenspiel solo, then came to an open back door, a scullery with a very bright light bulb. A pale young man th very oily black hair was leaning over the sink, wearing a woman's apron with frills. He was peeling onions under water but blinded with crying. Edwin stole across the scullery, through a dark kitchen into a hallway a voice called: "Is that you, Mr Dollimore?" Edwin passed a card showing times of church services, another with the legend SINNERS OF THE STREETS (X), a map of London, a wall telephone, opened the front door on which a card—HOUSE FULL—was hanging from a tin-tack. The street was far from empty. [120-21]

The novel has nothing more to say about Mr Dollimore, the onion-peeling-man (who, since the onions are under water, is presumably weeping through grief, rather than irritant airborne sulfenic acids. I wonder what has upset him so?) or this house. It is introduced without preliminaries, and then the story passes on. It's suggestive, but even that suggestiveness gets lost in the blizzard of all the other stuff that the novel hurries on to. There's something of this in Moby Dick, I know; and a lot more in Zola or Dickens.

Dickens makes an interest comparison with Burgess, actually. Two capacious, busy, comic novelists attempt to reproduce the textures of the world in which they find themselves. Literary criticism, in almost all cases, tries to clarify things. Accordingly one of the problems the literary critic faces is: what to do with texts that resist the cleanness and order implied by clarity; or to put it more precisely, texts in which the process clarification smooths away or fails to transfer crucial aspects of the original. In terms of Dickens, I’d say there are two qualities: one—about which critics often speak, sometimes with a mournful acknowledgement that it slips through the net despite being patently one of the most important aspects of Dickens’s art—is his humour, his comic brilliance, his ability to make us laugh. The problem, of course, is the old one: a joke explained ceases to be funny. But there’s another element integral to Dickens’s work as a novelist that clarification misses, and that is, precisely, his clutter. Dickens’s novels are full of stuff: lots of objects, myriad cultural references, in-jokes and out-jokes, subplots, interpolated tales, diversions, descriptions, catch-phrases and quirks and oddities. His novels teem, and that is precisely part of their distinctive appeal. But short of a bald taxonomy of the multitudinous items that constitute the clutter (and that is in itself a violation of the logic of clutter, an ordering of it), what can the critic hope to do with it? Clutter clarified isn’t clutter anymore. And so, like a big white fish, Burgess's novel slips through my critic's fingers and swims free.