Shakespeare the Martian: Enderby's Dark Lady (1984)

Enderby's Dark Lady. Or, the subtitle tells us, 'No End To Enderby'. This subtitle has its own subtitle, a gesture we may feel approaches subtitular overindulgence: 'Composed to placate kind readers of The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, who objected to my casually killing my hero'. So, yes: in 1974's Clockwork Testament Burgess slew his poet alter-ego. Then a decade later he brought him back, zombie-like, from the dead. Enderzombie. In his new adventure Enderby flies to Indiana because he has been hired to write the lyrics to a stage-musical based on the life of Shakespeare. Asked on arrival if this is his first time in the USA, he says that it is. 'Though not, I assure you, for lack of trying. I should have gone to New York to become a professor for a time.' [EDL, 39]. Burgess even appends a helpful footnote: '*See The Clockwork Testament'. It was, we're told, 'a question of one or the other. So I chose this.' Teaching creative writing in New York? Actually writing, creatively, in Indiana? The latter, clearly. Not zombies, then, but alt-history. I don't mind: it's all SF.

The middle chunk of this novel (Enderby going from one pleasantly if mildly comic interaction to another in the US) is bookended with two pieces of Elizabethan whimsy. The last chapter is a jolly-enough piece of time-travel floss, where a 21st-century scientist goes back to 1595 (strictly, travels to an alt-Earth in the distant corner of the galaxy that is a mirror of our world in the 16th-century), inadvertently gifting a talentless and greedy Shakespeare (a man 'tending to melt into a blob of tallow badly sculpted into a likeness of Shakespeare' [EDL, 156]) with the 'true' playtexts. This adventure in paradox does not end well for the traveller.

The first chapter is the story of how Shakespeare (the 'actual' Shakespeare, not the time-travel space-alien version) gets caught up in his pal Ben Jonson's spy-story adventures. Together they uncover the Gunpowder Plot. In return Jonson lets him into a secret: he has been titivating the first drafts of the King James Bible. The scholars have done their work; now they have handed it over to poets to polish and improve the style. Jonson invites Shakespeare to have a go himself. Will, now 46 years old, takes home a few psalms in his knapsack. He alters the 46th word in Psalm 46 from 'tremble' to 'Shake'; and likewise alters the 46th word from the end of the Psalm from 'sword' to 'Speare'.

This is a real thing. What I mean is: the 46th word in the KJV version of Psalm 46 really is 'Shake', and the 47th from the end (the 46th from the end if you ignore the psalm's last word) really is 'spear'. See for yourself:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

This isn't Burgess's original discovery: it's been long known. Usually it's taken as a queer coincidence, although some see design in it. Burgess mentions it in his Shakespeare book (1970), and discussed it at greater length during his North American Shakespeare lectures in 1976. In You've Had Your Time he concedes candidly that it 'is not a matter of interest for scholars', before doubling down firmly with: 'that I was excited about this proved that I was not a scholar' [YHYT, 337].

In Enderby's Dark Lady the first chapter's narrative of Will inserting his name into the Bible is revealed, in chapter 2, to be a short story written by Enderby himself. The fame of this has got him a lucrative gig writing Shakespeare's story of the American popular stage. As with Clockwork Testament that this has happened strains our belief to snapping point, at least as far as Enderby is concerned. That he would write a short story at all; that it would become so famous; that he would be flown to American and paid to write a libretto. It is the sort of thing that would happen to Burgess, not to his creation. Symptomatic, this, of the way the distance between creator and creation decreases as the novel series goes on. One of the disappointments of this novel is how much less flatulent and risible and seedy Enderby has become. In his own small way he's surprisingly dignified here, as if Burgess is starting to over-identify with his creation. Anyway: the short story of chapter one proves to be truth, not fiction. Attending a séance, Enderby hears the ghost of Shakespeare himself rapping on the table the message: 46, 46, 46.

I'm going to pause for a moment, here, to try and dispose of the theory that W.S. collaborated in the translation of the King James Bible. It's as close to certainly untrue as can be approached in our sublunary literary-historical world. The main obstacle, acknowledged by Burgess via the contortions of his improbable spy-story plot, is that the Oxford Company translating the Books of Psalms for the KJV (all notable divines and scholars of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, all of them known to us: John Harding, John Reynolds, Thomas Holland, Richard Kilby, Miles Smith, Richard Brett, Daniel Fairclough, William Thorne) had probably not even heard of Shakespeare, certainly would not have thought him a worthwhile partner in their labours. Their overwhelming concern was accuracy, not poetry; and they were motivated by a profoundly held sense of the sacred duty of being accurate. It really is quite inconceivable that they would pass their carefully worked drafts over to a figure from lowly popular culture, entirely unlearned in the sacred languages. It would be like the New International Bible committee secretly canvassing Paul McCartney for his opinion on Hebrew diacritical marks.

More damning to the 'secret code' theory is the fact that previous English translations of Psalm 46 are very similar to the KJV's wording: In the 1560 Geneva Bible translation of this psalm, ‘shake’ is the 47th word and ‘spear’ the 45th from the end; in the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 ‘shake’ is the 47th word and ‘spear’ the 48th from the end. Burgess surely knew this: his thumb goes into the balance, replacing the actual 'shake' and 'spear' with 'tremble' and 'sword' only in order to be able to change them back with a flourish. The whole thing, in fact, depends upon a deliberate fuzziness, such that the 47th-word-from-the-end somehow becomes the 46th; and Shakespeare is taken to be 46 years old in 1611 though for every date after April 23rd (such as the date of publication of the KJV) he was actually 47. And so on.

I don't want to labour this point. As Burgess's ambivalence suggests, the crucial thing here is not the objective 'truth' of this story so much as its dramatic potential. Indeed I think we can go further, and say that the focus for Burgess is on encoding rather than decoding. Decoding is a squib: do it and you have drained the pleasure away forever. We read books over and over again, but nobody solves the same cryptic crossword twice, after all. In many cases the decoding has already been done by somebody else, and your book comes to you pre-drained, pleasure wise. Abrams and Dorst's recent puzzle-novel S (2013) is an object lesson in this. Encoding is a different matter: the epitome of that belief that all art takes the mundane and banal and makes it richer, hiding resonance and beauty and complexity into it. Burgess loves all this: working in acrostics and number-games (Nothing Like The Sun and Earthly Powers in particular are both especially lively with this sort of thing). It's not what the secret is that matters; it is that there is a secret.

Enderby's Dark Lady puts the Psalm 46 Shake/Spear 'encoding' front and centre, and hides its own Burgessian codes in plain view. What code? Consider. The book is the 4th in the Enderby quartet; it appeared in 1984, the fourth novel AB published in that decade; it is comprised of 3x4 chapters and returns in various ways to 4 and 6 and 46.  Let's turn to the Chapter 4. The 46th paragraph from the beginning (including the inset verse paragraphs in our count) says:

'Now the place is a place that sells ham-burgers.' [EDL, 58]

The 46th paragraph from the end:

'Don't give us that. There's a tone of voice that grates on me, pardon me Laura. We're your one bastion against the communist takeover. So don't knock.' [EDL, 63]

Lest we miss the relevant word, Burgess repeats it three times (so, four times in all) in the next few lines: '"There you are again," the lawyer cried. "It's the tone of voice." "I can't help my bloody tone of voice," Enderby countered with truculence ... Philip lurched in, probably stoned.' Thus we can read backwards to discover that, using his own key, Tony Burgess has worked Tone Burgers into his own novel. In chapter 6, the 46th para from the end contains both 'Will' and 'Son' and the 46th para from the beginning (a chunk of quoted verse) repeats 'I cannot go on I', giving us a suitably Elizabethan I. Will-son. The novel appeared in 1984, when Burgess was 67. The 67th word from the end of the novel (ignoring, selah-like, the final coda) is 'Nobody'. The 67th-word from the beginning: 'I'. 'I, Nobody' is a fittingly Nothing Like The Sun-style act of self effacement.

I could go on, but won't. I appreciate that you're no more persuaded by this 'decoding' than I am by the Psalm 46 conspiracy theorising. That's my point. The core appeal of the 'conspiracy theory' is that it invests us in a world that is more than it seems. By doing so, it flatters our sense of our own perceptiveness and canniness and so on strikes me as secondary (not least because, in almost every case, people who literally believe in conspiracy theories are, of course, less intelligent and perceptive, more gullible and idiotic). People who believe in absurd conspiracy theories do not thereby any diminution in their existential absurdity. That's not the point. The point is to commit to a view of the world that is more than meets the eye.

So, for example: Burgess's openness to the notion that Shakespeare contributed to the King James Bible actually indexes the strength of his own emotional investment in literature as such. As he puts it in his Shakespeare (1970): 'If this is mere chance, fancy must allow us to think that it is happy chance. The greatest prose work of all time has the name of the greatest poet set cunningly in it.' 'Believing' in the Psalm 46 Conspiracy, then, is not about a dull literalism; it is, rather, a way of saying that the secret hidden inside the greatest prose is poetry; that the secret hidden inside Religion itself is the sublime art of a Shakespeare.

What makes this more interesting than it might otherwise be is Burgess's openness to, as it were, the reverse. The Enderby books as a whole, and Enderby's Dark Lady in particular, are all about the notion that the 'secret something' hidden inside the greatest of poetry might be: banality, feculence, paltriness, ludicrousness, the whole bag-and-baggage of inconsequential quotidian human
existence. What in the first three novels is focused on Enderby's own sad, silly little life becomes here projected outward. Enderby may be a minor poet, but Shakespeare clearly isn't. So what if the secret at the heart of Shakespeare is actually a little Enderby, motivated by seedy little insecurities and pettinesses?

Burgess's Bard, in chapter 1, inserts himself into the KJV for reasons of grubby personal vainglory and amour propre: to ensure that his name, newly gentrified and with its own coat of arms, should live for ever. The notion that the plays what he wrote would guarantee that immortality literally does not occur to him. 'My name, I mean, my name. My son, poor little Hamnet, dead. And the name Shakespeare dishonoured in its own town and soon to die out along with the poor parchments that put innocent words into the mouths of players ... you see, you see? To do this I have the right. I am not without right, do you see?' [EDL, 30-31] Him citing his own motto from his own coat of arms is a nice touch, as is the twist at the end of the chapter: Jonson returns the draft to the scholars overseeing the translation and they accept it, not even noticing the 'bombastic and overweening' gesture Shakespeare has made. Because they have never ('and Ben smiled sweetly') heard the name of Shakespeare [EDL, 34]. For all his yearning to be somebody, he's a nobody. He is nothing like the sun.

It's all about the mismatch of aims and powers. Shakespeare, possessed as he was of the keenest insight into other human character and worth of any writer, lacks in Burgess's version of him, insight into his own talents and worth. We call this mismatch comedy, and Enderby's Dark Lady often is funny. Enderby falling for the beautiful black movie star April Elgar, invited to her mother's home for Christmas on the pretext that he is a Baptist Minister from England, ends up giving a ridiculous, rambling invented sermon to an all black congregation. Enderby forced to take the role of Shakespeare in his own play, and speak the lines that (the thing having been revised by committee and reduced to the lowest common denominator) he now despises. It's quite funny, is the truth; although it never reaches the heights of comic brilliance manifested by Enderby Inside. That may in part be because Burgess is aiming for a bigger point.

Conspiracy theorists are drawn to the notion that the secret hidden in the world is more glamorous than the appearances. The fact that they are able to orchestrate such global schemes in a way that keeps them hidden from most people implies that the Illuminati (or whichever Secret Masters you prefer) are super-competent, to an almost divine degree. We are drawn to such potency, such glamour, even as we tell ourselves we are setting out to uncover and destroy it. Burgess is offering an alternative hypothesis: what if the Secret Masters were less, not more, competent than the average Joe and Joanna? What is the secret hidden in the greatest art is, actually, its crappiness?

This has a couple of valences in the novel, I think. One is Burgess's perennial worrying away at sexual desire and true love, and the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea he insists lies between those two things. Enderby falls deeply in love with April Elgar, who is beautiful, sexy, wealthy, smart, vital and altogether lovely. He has no expectations at all that the feeling be reciprocated: he poor, ugly, old and laughable. 'I love you,' he tells her. 'I shall love you till the day I die ... [I] demand nothing. Totally disinterested.' [EDL, 116]. He insists his love for her is Platonic in the strict sense of the word, whilst also constructing a 'version' of her in his head over which he masturbates nightly. She is unfazed by this, since her stock in trade, she wryly notes, is posing for cameras, still and movie, 'tits and ass and teeth and legs in gunmetal stockings and frothy lingerie. The kind of thing pimply kids fire their wads at.' 'All I can do,' Enderby insists, 'is love humbly and cherish dreams.' 'Yah,' she retorts. 'Wet ones.' [EDL, 120]. April and Enderby swap onanistic euphemisms: firing your wad; pulling your wire; bashing the bishop. They don't suggest shaking your spear, but they could easily.

I have argued before that Enderby is in a way Burgess's version of Swift's 'Celia! Celia! Celia shits!', with the crucial difference that what moved Swift to anguished horror and despair tickles Burgess's funny bone. He is not disgusted by his farting, masturbating little creation; there is genuine affection for him. For Swift, the mere fact that beautiful women defecate proves that the cosmos is playing some cruel trick upon us, laughing at the erosion of our dignity. Burgess doesn't see it that way. There are some elements of laughing-at in Enderby's Dark Lady (some of the homophobic cracks have aged very badly indeed, for instance), but mostly it's a laughing-with sort of novel. This is the secret at the heart of things: how strangely funny we are, funny because strange. Indeed, it is the gradient between our pompous imaginings and our laughable realities that denotes the degree of funniness.

There's one other aspect to this that speaks to me particularly. It is science fiction. More precisely it is the tacit suggestion made by Enderby's Dark Lady that the hidden secret of the highest art is something pulp and popular and low. SF. It is present, here, on several layers. The whole novel is science fiction, a treatment of not one but three alternate-history conceits. The first, Burgess argues in his author's preface. is actually the ground of all fiction. How can Enderby die in New York in Clockwork Testament and then be alive in Indiana in Dark Lady?

All fictional events are hypotheses, and the condition of Enderby's going to live in New York would be that he should die there. There was a choice between his going to Manhattan to teach Creative Writing and his being employed to write the libretto for a ridiculous musical about Shakespeare in a fictitious theatre in Indianapolis. He took the second course ... [EDL, 8]

It's like Burgess is groping his way, unaided, towards Alt-History 101. The second alt-timeline is the one in which Shakespeare, improbably enough, encodes his own name in Psalm 46, and then visits Enderby in supernatural fashion through table-rapping and mysterious fires. The third is the last chapter, when a 21st-century character called Paley visits Shakespeare in 1595. His mentor warns him before he goes: 'some of you young men expect too much of Time. You expect historical Time to be as plastic as other kinds. Because the microchronic and macrochronic flows can be played with ...' [EDL, 143]. Paley is too excited to pay attention and rushes off in his time machine (rather sweetly, Burgess calls this a 'flying boat'). The Elizabethan England he finds is almost exactly the same Christian nation as the one history tells us about, except that the king has three eyes, people are martyred for believing in 'Mogradon' and Shakespeare himself is a mere hack (the author of 'Heliogabalus, A Word To Fright a Whoremaster, The Sad Reign of Harold the First and Last, The Devil in Dulwich oh, many and many more' [EDL, 157]). It's also possible the people are all shape-shifting tentacle monsters only pretending to be human beings. Shakespeare relieves Paley of his Complete Works of Shakespeare, has the visitor thrown into prison and settles down to write The Merchant of Venice.

Inside these framing gestures, the story itself is thoroughly interpenetrated by SF. Enderby likes to retreat to the toilet and read 'a paperback volume of what are known as Science Fiction stories' [EDL, 90]. Burgess summarises a few of these in chapter 7, and they sound quite good. His taxi driver turns out to be a PhD student from Yorke University at Toronto, working the vacation. His thesis is called 'Future in the Past'. 'About science fiction,' he tells Enderby, as he drives him to the hotel.

'Been reading some of it,' Enderby said tiredly.

'Only viable literary form we have,' said the Canadian. [EDL, 127]

The Canadian's assertion seems self-evident to me, although I suspect Burgess offers this as a hint at the secret hidden within the canon of 'Great Literature', like Shake/Spear in Psalm 46. The Canadian, discovering that Enderby is a writer, makes the following suggestion:

What you ought to write is a sort of SF Shakespeare, know what I mean? About some Martian landing in Elizabethan England and meeting Shakespeare and putting The Power on him. See what I mean? [EDL, 128]

'Yes yes,' Enderby replies. 'I see what you mean.' Presumably this is a sort of literary-historical version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Burgess's onetime friend, though by the 1980s estranged, Kubrick. And Burgess inverts it for the final chapter of the novel (written like the first chapter, by Enderby: 'a little story. Leave Well Alone or Leave Will Alone, some such title'). The Martian doesn't gift human Shakespeare with his genius, a First-Folio-shaped monolith planted amongst bickering ape-men. Instead the human goes to Mars, or further afield, and gifts genius to the alien. That's the secret cached most securely in the centre of great art: our alienness. 'There's this theory,' the taxi driver tells Enderby, 'that it's us are the Martians. We landed on this planet in prehistoric times and killed off the earthmen. We knew that Mars was dying, see, and saw the fertility of the Earth through powerful instruments. Then the earth's lack of oxygen stunted our brains and we had to start all over again. Four dollars fifty'. [EDL, 128] The main takeaway from the presence of Shake and Spear in the forty-sixth Psalm is not the truth or falsity of the theory that explains it, but its own sheer strangeness. It's a really odd thing, when you come to think about it. And when you come to think about it, we're pretty odd too. Aliens in a familiar land. People from the same world as Shakespeare himself: Mars. It's a Bradburyan, Phil-Dickian, David-Bowie-ish insight, our secret identity as Martians. Selah.

The Man! The Music! The Madness! The Murder!—This Man and Music (1983)

Only readers—invoking the plural, where this blog is concerned, rather more in hope than expectation—of a certain age will get the reference in this post's title. It's because I am old that I'm moved to situate Burgess's 1983 collection simultaneously after (Shaffer's play was 1979) and before (Forman's 1984 movie) Amadeus. If you're likewise old, you'll remember the alliterrhoeaic movie poster:

It's a fun film, and it still stands up; not least because it takes for granted that music is more than idle aural decoration. The whole premise of the movie is that music, and the human passions it provokes from joy and transport to envy and rage, are literally matters of life and death. That it was such a huge hit had much to do with the sheer vitality of this vision.

Burgess's This Man And Music is neither mad nor murderous. Instead it meanders, is something of a misfire, and doesn't come alive in Amadean or even ABBAdean mode. Music was clearly deeply important to Burgess, but that importance is declared rather than demonstrated here. Eleven separate pieces wander around Burgess's own compositions, various questions concerning music's effect and connections with the written word.

First we get a short memoir called 'Biographia Musicalis' covering ground that will be familiar to readers of The Pianoplayers and Little Wilson and Big God. The second chapter 'A Matter of Time and Space' is an abortive discussion that does little more than assert the importance of time and the unimportance of space to music. 3's 'Let's Write a Symphony' (I rather mourn the lack of an exclamation point at the end, there) is less inclusive than that chapter title implies. Not so much a primer, more an account of Burgess's own writing of his three symphonies, pitched at a level of sufficient self-indulgence to dissuade rather than encourage others to follow suit: 'that descent in tritonal fourths is, I foresee, in danger of being employed as a mannerism' [57] and so on.

Chapters 4 and 5 ('Music and Meaning' and 'Meaning Means Language') struck me as the most interesting, and I would have liked to see the discussion they include expanded. Instead the volume takes a sharp turn left into literature at the midway point: 6 'Under the Bam' looks at musical phrases quoted or gestured towards in famous works of literature, providing the staves and notes to enable us, should we want it, to sing The Waste Land's 'the river sweats oil and tar' or 'the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter'. Chapter 7 ('Nothing is so Beautiful as Sprung') is about Gerard Manley Hopkins's experiments in prosody and 8 ('Re Joyce') does the same thing for James Joyce, whose sentences, we're told, embody a kind of 'oral athleticism' [135]. Chapter 9 'Contrary Tugs' sees Burgess reinvent the Barthean wheel by in effect distinguishing between the texte lisible and the texte scriptible. And the last two chapters are Burgess in full-on Explainderby mode, stepping his reader carefully through all the admirable aspects of (in 10, 'Oedpius Wrecks') MF and (in 11, 'Bonaparte in E flat') Napoleon Symphony.

Burgess wasn't really capable of writing boringly, and this book does hold the reader's attention. But much of it feels first-draft-y and underpowered. The discussion of prosody in Hopkins connects poorly with the early brief discussion of musical tempi and rhythms, and reads like the work of someone who really needed to read Derek Attridge on poetic metre—which, since Attridge's seminal The Rhythms of English Poetry was out by 1982, he could have done. Most crushingly, Burgess's opening claim that 'To Hopkins we owe a new system of prosody that speaks not Greek but English' [117] betrays a basic misunderstanding both of the differences between Greek quantitative prosody and the traditions of English stressed verse, and also of the ways in which Hopkins deliberately rewired the logic of stressed and unstressed prosodic patternings. Greek verse counts not stresses but patterns of long and short vowels; English verse counts beats (Robert Graves described the former as the pull of the oar, the latter as the strike of a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil) and though Hopkins worked and thought deeply about the difference his own sprung poetry is stressed, not quantitative.

I don't want to get bogged down. Several of these chapters are livelier than this, much is thought-provoking, and Burgess is tactfully modest about his intent. He calls This Man and Music 'an unambitious book', one that 'nibbles' at questions of musical intelligibility. Nonetheless the impression I took away from reading the whole thing was how thin Burgess's account of music here is. There's plenty of specificity, from technical terminology to AB's own rather scrappy handwritten musical notation:

But there's very little breadth to the account. Burgess's focus is almost entirely on: individual notes and chords, a small group of conventional tempi, on melody and symphonic themes. There's a little bit on duration and pitch, but historical detail aside this is all formal in a very narrow sense: music as pattern and structure. AB does not for instance discuss timbre, variety of sounds, the sonic richness that the electrification of music (from guitars to synthesisers and samplers) made possible. He doesn't discuss rhythm as anything other than Classical counterpoint, which means the drum-led explosion of rhythmic possibilities that jazz, pop and rock generated is a dark continent to him. This, of course, is part and parcel of his stubborn refusal to see any merit in the revolution effected by popular music from 1950 through to the period of writing. For a man so fascinated by music simply not to see that he has lived through a major, global reinvention of what music means is, shall we say, puzzling. Two things in particular: one, the new disciplines of popular drumming brought a kinetic force and variety, and a somatic intensity, to music, intensities of which counterpoint was simply incapable. And, two, at the proggier and synthier end of things, new sonic flavours and textures, and wholly new instrumentation, were able to dilate into aural landscapes or soundscapes in which music becomes worldbuilding of extraordinary variety and complexity: Kraftwerk, Yes, Jarre (to pick three at random) all doing it differently. For myself I'd say there's a third major innovation that pop and rock brought to music, to do with a deliberate primitivism (something like the stylised barbarism of Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon) and its attendant energies and disruptions; but I can see that this is precisely what Burgess objects to about pop styles: my feature, his bug.

Burgess makes a few semi-respectful nods in the direction of jazz, and has a kind word to say about Irving Berlin. That's as much of a compromise with the post-classical world as he's willing to make. This hardly surprises us, of course. To discuss the melodic talents of certain classical composers, concede that Berlin had his moments, whilst pointedly refusing to admit that the great melodic genius of his generation was Paul McCartney is almost endearing. The worry, I suppose, is that Burgess thereby reveals not a principled individuality of taste that refuses to join the vulgar herd, but on the contrary a timid coast-hugging conventionality of taste. We can hardly disagree that Mozart and Beethoven were great composers; but we might want to venture a little further afield, geographically and musically, from the great symphonies and sonatas.

The third thing that seemed to me missing here (beyond a broader sense of the sonic possibilities of music, and an openness to the revolution of pop) is any discussion of class. This in a sense is the oddest omission, precisely because the 'Biographia Musicalis' chapter is so eloquent on what it means to grow up working class and musical. Yet nowhere in the book is there any sense of the point that Pierre Bourdieu made in such detail in La Distinction (1979), that cultural capital and status determines the formulation of aesthetic taste. Classical music is aligned with upper class social being, pop with lower. The closest Burgess comes to acknowledging this is his intriguing but undeveloped point that music 'means' society:

When we speak of the 'meaning' of a Haydn symphony, we say no more than that it is an auditory symbol of stability. The music means the society of which it is an artistic product. [75-6]

This, though, looks suspiciously like a straightforwardly reactionary point: Haydn simply translates the splendid social harmony and order of the Sun King's realm into notes on a stave, as (though Burgess doesn't specifically say this) modern rock and roll in its raucous anarchy indexes the decadence and savagery of contemporary life. Elsewhere he praises music as the 'abstract symbol of social stability' [74]. To which we're entitled to respond: bollocks to that.

There are a couple of other stabs at defining how or what music 'means'. 'Behind all music of an instrumental nature,' Burgess asserts, 'lies the dance, and behind the symphony lies the dance suite' [74]. This looks like AB is going to steer his discussion towards the somatic; but he doesn't. His baseline definition ('music is tension and resolution over and over again' 76) is so broad it would apply to almost any form of art, and anyway he disowns it almost as soon as he introduces it. 'The reader should now be heartily tired,' he airily says, 'of this glib talk of tension and resolution. It leads us only to the prenatal experience of the maternal heartbeat' [83]. Anything but that! Elsewhere he throws up his hands. That Beethoven's Fifth is significant he can hardly deny, but he asks and answers: 'what is this significance? We do not know' [78]. Hmm.

Two particular questions occupy him. One is something to which he returns in Mozart and the Wolf Gang: can music be a moral good, or is it a merely a kind of amoral, aesthetic finesse? The openness of music disquiets him:

The commandant of an extermination camp could spend the day supervising the consignment of Jews to the ovens, and then go home and weep tears of pure joy at the divine revelations of sonata or symphony—his flaxen chubby daughter at the keyboard, or a fine record-player which was the due of his rank. On a summer evening in London in 1942, on that identical evening in Berlin, there were performances, both deeply moving and loudly applauded, of the Choral Symphony. [82]

The conclusion Burgess draws from this juxtaposition is that 'if fascists and democrats found, as they did, the same matter for exaltation, then music cannot be about morality' [83]. But surely it can be about emotion, and emotion has much more to do with politics, especially fascistic politics, than morality. Burgess wouldn't agree. 'I am prepared,' he gracious concedes, 'to find listeners making an emotional or even a pictoral response to the music, but I do not think this is more than subjective fancy' [80]. Subjective fancy as opposed to, what? Objective fact? Burgess adds: 'I believe that the majority of composers are too preoccupied with the building of structures to concern themselves with "emotion".' The scare-quotes around 'emotion', there, are a splendidly chilly touch.

I'm entitled to disagree, of course, as are you, if you're so minded. It seems to me that emotion is much more directly entailed by music. I could be wrong.

Burgess's second question, which he considers at greater length, is whether music can 'mean' without the help of extra-musical props and hints. He thinks, on balance, not: it is the titles Beethoven gave to his 6th symphony that makes it 'pastoral', not the music. This is a respectable musicological position, although at root it depends upon critics lighting with cries of joy, as if for the first time, on the oldest of old-chestnut insights that 'meaning' is arbitrarily assigned and not integrally generated. That a minor key is coded 'sad' and a major key 'happy' is indeed arbitrary. Had we been raised to think of minor keys as happy and major sad, the system would work precisely as well. Likewise, the association of the green traffic light with 'go' and the red with 'stop' is arbitrary. The point here is that every communally agreed signification is arbitrary in this sense, so isolating music doesn't get us very far. More, Burgess in effect wants to have his cake and eat it too. He mocks Swinburne for his tin ear with the following anecdote:

Perhaps the limit of unmusicality was reached by the most musical of poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne was once treated to a performance of 'Three Blind Mice' on the piano and told that it was a song of sixteenth-century Rome. He professed to hear in it 'the cruel beauty of the Borgias'. [97]

This, Burgess thinks, demonstrates that Swinburne was 'ignorant about the frontier between music and poetry', but it's hard to see how it does so. The most we can say about Swinburne is that he was ignorant of this particular tune: rather surprising but not impossible. More than that, and by Burgess's own logic, there's nothing intrinsically absurd in hearing in this particular melody cruelty and beauty. It's not a very sophisticated tune, true; but then neither is the tune at the heart of Beethoven's Ninth, and Burgess has nothing but praise for that. Simplicity can be cruel, just as it can be joyful.

I don't doubt that Burgess's encounters with music were on a personal level full of joy, but we get little sense of that from this collection. But perhaps its torpor reflects ambivalence not about music as such so much as about the viability of music criticism. John Deathridge, surveying a representative sample of music criticism later in the decade, detected beneath the 'bluster' a 'tacit admission that, in the end, there is no such thing as music criticism in the strictest sense. This expresses, as Adorno noted, a kind of "ultimate doubt" which turned a life devoted to music criticism into that of an intellectual gambler.' Burgess may or may not really have believed that music is all about 'the building of structures' and only adventitiously about emotion. For myself, I'll stick to the idea that there's bound to be a mismatch between a fundamentally rational, intellectual exercise like 'criticism' and a fundamentally affective, emotional one like music. A touch more Madness! and Murder! added to the Man! and his exclamatory Music! might have leavened this lump. Da capo.

Hicceity: The End of the World News (1982)

Rather in the manner of a dodgy used-car dealer, Burgess has here taken three separate projects, welded them together and slapped a for-sale sticker on the result. You've Had Your Time dates the composition to the early 70s, pre-ABBA ABBA, when our man was commissioned to script an end-of-the-world disaster movie updating When Worlds Collide, plus a Canadian TV series based on the life of Freud, plus the libretto for a musical about Trotsky. As you do. He went about these three concurrent tasks by drafting short novels for each project. None of the original projects saw the light of day. Then Burgess looked at what he had drafted and, lo!, decided they were all versions of the same story. This desire to see providential harmony in the bald contiguity of separate projects is understandable, although declaring oneness doesn't magically make the three elements cohere. Indeed I suspect (though he doesn't say as much) that Burgess held back publishing it at that time because he could see that it didn't really work. I wonder if, after the success of his Big Novel Earthly Powers, his publishers didn't press him for another Big Novel, and he obligingly pulled this out of a drawer. At any rate, here it is.

In the 'Worlds Collide' segment of the story, Earth is in the path of a rogue planet, collision with which will destroy us all. This object is named 'Lynx', since that's the constellation out of which it appears to proceed. The big cat of that name, pictured on the cover art above, was so-called because of its shining eyes: the Greek λύγξ, derives from the word for shining white, λευκός. There is another meaning of the Greek word λύγξ: 'hiccough'. This is so appropriate to the novel in hand that I have to believe Burgess was aware of it. No question: the construction of End of the World News is pretty damn hiccoughy.

The three stories are interleaved with deliberately clipped-off transitions (hic!) from one to the other. This, according to Burgess’s own author note, is supposed to mimic the experience of channel hopping on the TV. It doesn’t. Instead the effect is of a hiccoughing jolt from narrative to narrative. The joltiness is made more pronounced, and harder for the reader to rodeo-ride, by the differences in quality of the three elements. Putting it simply: the Freud portion is good; the Lynx (hic!) middling and the Trotsky (икота!) bad. Heterogeneity of form may be worthwhile; heterogeneity of quality hardly can be.

According to Burgess, the three tales are all ‘about the end of the world.’ The main problem here is that, well, they’re not. Or more precisely: the end of the world strand is about the end of the world (duh); the Freud strand counterpoints the end of Freud’s individual life with the birth of a new world of psychological and psychiatric insight. The Trotsky third is about … well it’s hard to say what it’s about, except for singing and dancing across a stage-set of New York, 1917. It’s clearly not about the end of Capitalism (Capitalism still being with us), or the even the birth of Communism (it’s Trotsky after all, not Lenin), or anything very much.

Michael Wood, reviewing the novel for the New York Times makes the ingenious suggestion that with these three strands Burgess ‘means to parody the forms of writing that might survive the death of literature: the libretto, the novel ripe for a television series and science fiction.’ Not the three modes a disinterested observer would be likely to suggest, surely (is Wood really suggesting that ‘serious literature’ will fade away to be replaced by operatic libretti?) Were The End of the World News composed in equal parts of pop songs, a video game narrative and a TV Talent Show then we might have something. No: obviously the choice of modes was incident to the professional claims upon Burgess’s time as a writer in the 1970s, one high culture, two more schlocky. Later in the same review, Wood is a little more persuasive:

The stories are not all the same, and they are not exactly about the end of history. But they are all about dreams of ending, about old worlds that go off with a bang, not a whimper, leaving us with less history than we thought we had but maybe more than we can manage.

I wonder about this. It captures something of the novel's coda, where we discover that the 'core' storyline was the Lynx one; that the Freud-fable and the Trotsky-tale were diversions told (or shown) to the children aboard the space-ark. The Epilogue is a trivial 'two bits' to the novel's 'shave-and-a-haircut', wrapping things up in a manner both coherent and banal. What did the kids think of the stories of those old bearded 20th-century revolutionaries? 'It's not really history, is it?' notes Maude Abramovitz, 'a cold and clever girl'. Their instructor agrees: 'it's myth'. As such its problem is not Wood's 'more than we can manage'-ness so much as its fungibility. History that was 'about' the past becomes 'about' the present; the kids exchange and replace the terms of the story, so that it becomes 'the other myth':

The one about the bad man called Fred Fraud who kept people strapped to a couch and the good one called Trot Sky who wanted people to do what he did and run through space. [TEOTWN, 388]

One is compelled to admire the sheer bravura badness of these two puns, for all that they end the novel in a debilitatingly shaggy-dog-story way. Burgess, at least, is quite explicit: what happens to history is not that it is over- or under-supplied, but rather that it evaporates altogether. The kids refuse to believe there ever was such a thing. The teacher tells the kids that the spaceship they inhabit 'was designed for getting somewhere. A place where we can plant trees, erect buildings, feel the wind blowing in our faces'; but they're having none of it.

'Your generation talks about a journey. Our generation knows we're just here. We've always been here, right back to what they call the mists of myth. I don't believe your story.'

'We'll always be here,' said Bill Harrison. 'It stands to reason. We've always been here, we always will. All that stuff you told us is just lies.'

'Who built the ship?' asked Valentine O'Grady [their teacher], desperately.

'God or somebody,' said Fred Greely. 'It doesn't matter. It's here, that's what matters ... all the rest is a fairy story.'

Valentine O'Grady pounced then. 'What is a fairy?'

'The thing in your brain that makes you tell lies.' [TEOTWN, 388]

Here (hic). This is the lesson of Freud, as well. Things are never forgotten, only repressed. Since the Id has no conception of time, or consequences, it is actually this process of repression that separates off the past (memory) from the present. An imagined Freudian utopia would be a world without this distinction between history and the here-and-now, and would therefore revert to a kind of endless present. Burgess is not inviting us to applaud this possibility. This hicceity, the here-ness of the here (hic!) is a sort of prison. What's that? What did you say? 'Hicceity' is too a word!

Pff.

The least we must concede to the Trotsky (hic!) section of the novel is that in a formal sense it foregrounds the act of speech, and of song: a libretto is written to be conveyed from living mouths to a live audience after all. Freud dies in the novel as he died in real life, from a ghastly disease of the mouth. Burgess projects the end of the world itself into a kind of parody of that Freudian demise: 'then that same hidden fist hit harder than before, and with each punch came up a fragment of the city ... glowing briefly in the lurid light, hitting the air and going down in a ballet of atoms. Then the earth opened and drank all the waters it could, shutting at once as if to gargle. ... Then new water galloped in, rusty as the sun, and hid everything. New York was one with all the other ancient cities that had gone under the sea' [TEOTWN, 378]. The mouthiness of all this is interesting. Look again at the cover of the paperback edition: the lynx swallowing down the whole globe.  It's fitting, This is an oral, not an anal, novel (You know what I mean: 'oral-stage fixations are manifested as garrulousness, smoking, continual oral stimulus, eating, chewing objects, and alcoholism. Psychologically, the symptoms include a sarcasm, nail biting, oral sexual practices et cetera').

Or perhaps it would be better to go beyond specific developmental stages, as theorised by Freud. One thing all three storylines have in common is a fascination with what we might call the ‘surface-depth’ model, three differently weighted investments in the idea that there is something secret to be unearthed underneath mere appearances. The Freud section is strongest in part because it is the most compelling dramatization of this idea—Freud not only cures his patients, but comes to understand himself (why does he compulsively arrive two hours early at the train station for every train he has to catch? Why does he then always absent himself as the train actually starts to leave, so that he has to rush and board in a tearing hurry?) As with ‘actual’ Freudianism, it is the act of providing an explanation, rather than the veracity of the explanation itself, that is the revolutionary and liberating thing. What Freud offers us is a set of rituals apotropaic against the inexplicability of the cosmos. The larger Hitlerian context here is entirely to the point: Freud, dying of cancer of the jaw, eluding the Gestapo and fleeing Nazi Vienna for London. Is anti-Semitism tractable, explicable? Is Nazism? I suspect Burgess thinks not. Most people can do little more than gesture towards the metaphysical black box labelled ‘evil’. But Burgess's Freud at least has a theory, and having a theory is better than throwing up one’s hands in horror, or similar abdications of ethical responsibility. Christian Europe hates the Jew and wants to kill him, because ‘the Jew’ is Abraham, Moses, Freud—is, in other words, the whitebearded God the Father—and the son is oedipally (which is to say: libidinally) motivated to kill his Dad. You don’t believe that any more than I do, not as a ‘real’ explanation for the Holocaust. But it has more narrative and dramatic force, and therefore more cogency, and therefore more utility, than simply saying ‘because evil’.

The Trostky section (hic!) is the weakest for several reasons. The most obvious one is that it is a libretto with no music. The rhymes are sometimes ingenious, though not especially or zingily so; and no music is supplied. The reader plods through this. It's like watching West Side Story with the sound turned down. The main impression it leaves on the reader is of an author eager to show how clever he is. No-one is going to dispute that Burgess was indeed very clever; but admiring cleverness and enjoying a novel are not at all the same thing. The story concerns Trotsky being tempted to cheat on his wife with a 'pretty little comrade' called Olga ('Please don't you call me/Pretty little comrade', says Olga [92]). Meanwhile the Russian Revolution is taking place, and Trotsky, on the wrong side of the globe, acutely feels himself marginal to the global events. The juxtaposition of the grand narrative of History and Destiny on the one hand, and the twitching in Trotsky's trousers on the other, makes for a thudding kind of moral. '"Driven," cries Trotsky, "by secretions in my glands, driven by destiny—whatever it is, I have no shame. I want you, Olga!"' [TEOTWN, 298]. Burgess understands randiness, but he doesn't really understand (which is to say: cannot bring himself to sympathise with) the Socialist Revolutionary mindset. So we get Trotsky spouting ur-Soviet boilerplate. He believes that Revolution is the secret truth of Capitalism, that Communism is the secret truth of History; but he ends up tangled in the trivial secrets and lies of sexual infidelity.

In the ‘Lynx’ (hic!) section, the secrecy is projected outward: the government of this 1999 then-future-set world hides the truth—that the world will shortly end—from its populace, to prevent panic. Freud is present too, in the central triad of characters: Valentine Brodie, our p.o.v. ego figure (a science fiction writer and university professor—fancy that!) who loves his intellectually and physically superlative wife Vanessa, an internationally esteemed ‘ouranologist’ with the looks of a goddess, but who is nonetheless left sexually impotent before her flawlessness and instead seduces his students. If Vanessa is a superego figure, then Courtland Willett, a hugely fat and rumbunctuous actor, once a Shakespearian player, now reduced to dressing up as Santa Claus in shopping malls, is the id. There’s a certain amount of verve to the way Burgess writes Willets—fierce, gluttonous, kindly, bold, lecherous, as easily moved to tears as anger, a drinker and smoker and shagger ('Oral-stage fixations are manifested as garrulousness, smoking, continual oral stimulus, eating, chewing objects, and alcoholism ...')—though he obviously loves his creation a little too much. The narrator makes the comparison with Falstaff a little too heavy-handedly, and the character outstays his welcome. Burgess knows he’s pastiche Shakespeare rather than the real thing (he’s a Will-ette, rather than the full Will) and perhaps as a result overcompensates with great scads of tiresome Elizabethan swearing: ‘snotnosed bastard … and now that I have leisure and breath, I might add that you are a slabberdegullion druggel, a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol and a turdgut’ [TEOTWN, 59]. Truly can it said: a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. And by ‘a little’ I mean: none at all, thank you very much.

Anyway, the government builds a space-ark to save the fifty best and brightest men and women on the planet, selected by computer. Perfect Vanessa is chosen, her boozy, unreliable husband not. The ‘best and brightest’ turn out to be a vision of discipline and logic and order, a collective superego. When one of the elect, called Nat Goya, refuses to join, since to do so would mean abandoning his pregnant wife, he is ‘escorted’ to the medical bay to be ‘re-educated’ via drugs and ‘special treatment’. He is too valuable to the mission to be let go. ‘You mean I’m going to be brainwashed?’ Goya blusters. ‘Into forgetting my wife and loving CAT [the project]?’ The mission leader tells him he will undergo treatment ‘until you’re made to see sense and behave in a civilised manner’ [TEOTWN, 193]. Off he goes.

We see the trouble coming from a mile off. The leader Paul Bartlett is a suspiciously health-and-efficiency type: ‘enquiries into his life and personality would disclose a total lack of vice—he ate sparingly, drank only on social occasions, had no notable sexual life—and a balanced sanity of mind and body very rare outside epic fiction’ [TEOTWN, 130]. Burgess lays this on with a trowel, rather (‘large, handsome and vital, ox-strong, steel-supple, he was a flame on the tennis court, a fish in the swimming pool, a thudding menace in the amateur boxing ring’: he is an admirer of Bonaparte, Cromwell, Churchill and Hitler). We take the point, and would have done with less prodding. A new human world made-up of only of such types would be a barren and dystopic place. Falstaff-Willetts, fat, drinking, smoking, swearing, fighting, reciting verse, weeping, has no place on the global lifeboat. In the final scenes of the novel, as the world collapses around them, Val and Willetts try and fail to get aboard the space-ark. Val (who can ‘smell and taste the end of the world like an apple’) asks: 'Why the hell should we be saved?' Willetts replies: ‘Because that's not a question those scientific bastards would ever dream of asking. That's why.’ They both die with the destruction of the world; but the ship-board regime is unsustainably repressive, and leads to a kind of in-flight revolution.

’Science’, then, is the conceptual superego and ‘poetry’ in the fullest Shakespearian sense, messy and glorious and potent, the id. The Freud strand (hic!) is partly about Sigmund’s attempts to establish psychoanalysis on a scientific footing, and his final realisation that what he has created—vital and powerful as it is—possesses more affinities with poetry than it does with science. Caught in between these two huge forces is us, frail humanity. We can extrapolate this a little and speculate that what Burgess doesn’t like about ‘sf’ (‘bad sf’, we could say, if that didn’t look tautological) is the way its worldview is weighted so heavily towards superegoical Science, the propensity of the Pulps to make its lantern-jawed space captain heroes too like Captain Bartlett, and to externalise its Id onto monstrous alien forms to be destroyed. That’s a caricature of SF, of course, but one with more than a grain of truth to it.

Late in the novel Freud dreams about Melanie Klein. She mockingly refuses to believe in either the Oedipus conflict or penis envy ('why,' she asks, reasonably 'don't men have breast envy?' [345]). Burgess has Freud ask her his most famous question, over-egging the moment slightly with superfluous capitalisation: 'I've spent thirty years searching into the female soul, and there's one big question they won't answer. And that question is: WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?' Klein teases him ('ah, wouldn't you like to know?) before repudiating the entire sphinxine paradigm: 'I haven't answered the riddle,' Freud moans, 'therefore I'm not Oedipus.' 'Nobody's answered the riddle,' Klein retorts. 'Therefore there's no Oedipus. Oedipus is only a myth, that is to say a lie. And you can't build a system on a lie.' Like the children in the epilogue, this dream-Klein seeks to banish all 'lying', all the fairies, fiction, art and history, with a wave of the hand. But the sphinx, which is death, won't go away. The important thing is not that Oedipus solves the riddle, but that he confronts the sphinx. Death, after all. is not a soluble term. It can't be beaten, but it can be defied, and there is dignity and meaning for a human being in making the hopeless stand. At the end of his life Freud starts conversing with the cancer that is killing him. 'The pain?' the tumour asks. 'Intolerable?':

Oh bear it, please, a little longer. I should hate to be parted from you. I'm not a fly, not even a dog. Do be strong. Don't give in. I don't really want to kill you. And yet, of course, I do. Resolve that paradox, if you can. Unwind the tangled skein, Oedipus man most mighty, destroyer of the Sphinx. Such nonsense. Nobody destroys the Sphinx. [TEOTWN, 368]

The truth is that the sphinx can not destroyed. It's because of truths like this that we have such a powerful need for the fairy story.

Perhaps Burgess's (hic!) jumbling-up of 1917, 1939 and the then-future 1999 is about the flattening of history as such. To banish the past is to banish the future, an attempt to live (like the spaceship children) in an endless present. Why do such a thing? Why else, except that a life without futurity—let's call such a life, ooh I don't know, apocalypse—would be a life without death. Death is the true meaning of the future. Our own extinction is never present, always to come. We'll never be in a position to look back upon it, it is by definition something never lived through. By banishing the future the ego hopes to banish death itself, and live in the eternal here (hic!) and now. Naturally, it doesn't actually work that way. The Sphinx is not destroyed. Oedipus's duty is not to win, but to make a stand, and provide us with a story.

In his 1927 critique of religion The Future of an Illusion Freud concludes by arguing that religion ('a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion') has a three-fold task. It's even possible that Burgess had this passage in mind as one of the rationales for the triadic form of his novel; he would surely have come across it, in his researching. It's pretty famous:

But man's helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

In The End of the World News this last task is taken over by Socialist Revolution, the first is clearly Freud's business, and the second, the sf fabulation that clever technology will somehow enable us to escape our own mortality, is the Lynx portion. In each case, the mendacity (or if that is too loaded a term, the illusoriness) is subordinate to the efficacy. We all need our stories.

And maybe the structural awkwardness of this spot-welded three-car wreck can be taken not as a thrifty writer seeking to reuse the orts and scraps from his past, so much as a deliberate attempt to body forth a world shattering violently into great chunks. Too smooth a weld would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Or does that look like special pleading? Worlds colliding can hardly be an elegant spectacle. Death is inevitably an interruption, always unexpected, always messing up the plans and patterns of the living. Hic.

On Going To Bed (1982)

Zzzzzzzzzz.

Devil of a Book: Earthly Powers (1980)

This is a big book with many big virtues, and one big (we might say) structural flaw. But whatever else it is, Earthly Powers is an extraordinarily sustained exercise in imaginative and stylistic vitality. It probably is what many have claimed it as: Burgess's masterpiece.

In You've Had Your Time he describes its gestation, prompted by the urge to write a novel that would 'really show what I would do'. His subject: an 81-year old novelist living the high life in Malta on his global commercial success, looking back over his well-traveled life and thereby providing a sort of panoptic individual history of the twentieth-century. 'He celebrates his eighty-first birthday in the first chapter,' Burgess says. 'Let then the total of chapters be eighty-one':

81 is 3 x 3 x 3 x 3. I spelt this out at the beginning. "I looked at the gilt Maltese clock on the wall of the stairwell. It said nearly three ... We were three steps from the bottom ... I minced the three treads down the hall ... Three steps away ... lay a fresh batch of felicitations brought by Cable and Wireless motor cyclists." [YHYT, 356]

And so on. Actually the book has 82 chapters, an error Burgess claims only to have noticed at the proof stage. This seems to me unlikely, and I'll come back to it. The relationship between design and the creative sprawl that exceeds design is, in one sense, the whole point of Earthly Powers, and this little anecdote about the composition is almost too apropos. All those 3s: this foresquare Trinitarian masonry, and its more shadowy implications (3+3, 3+3 ... two thirds of the beast's 66(6) number) are at play throughout the whole book. But what about the one big 'structural flaw' I'm arguing is present?

This extensive structure has at its core a mere anecdote. A pope is to be canonised. The Vatican needs evidence of saintliness—a miracle, for instance. When he was a mere priest, the pope cured a child of terminal meningitis through the power of prayer. This child grows up to be a sort of James Jones, the leader of a religious sect who orders his followers to commit suicide. God, permitting the miracle, clearly intended its beneficiary to perform an act of great evil. Free will does not come into it, since a disease has free will and its lethal progress has been reversed. If the child had died he would not have caused the deaths of the others. What curious game is God playing? If God is also the devil, the prince of the powers of the air, then it is as likely that evil will come out of good as the other way around. Perhaps more so. If our century is to be explained at all, it is in terms of God becoming his opposite. [YHYT, 356]

I'm assuming that '...since a disease has free will' is a typo for '... since a disease has no free will' (either that, or AB is folding a very peculiar view of free will into this summary). Now, the apparent theological paradox he identifies is a fascinating hook for a story, but a hook is something from which a story should depend. Burgess instead treats it as a denouement, or climax. That's a structural misjudgment, I think.

That the priest, Don Carlo Campanati, cured the boy is dropped in early on; it's what the boy goes on to do that is withheld. The novel opens with the Archbishop of Malta visiting the elderly narrator, Kenneth Marchal Toomey, in his house, providing the pretext for the novel's desperately famous opening sentence:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. [EP, 7]

It's certainly a good line, though I wonder if its Book-of-Quotations fame has come to overshadow even the novel it introduces. Anyway, the Archbishop asks him because Toomey was friends with Don Carlo back when he was a simple priest; and because, moreover, Carlo's brother Domenico married Toomey's sister Hortense, making the two men brothers after a fashion. The request sends Toomey back on a lengthy, detailed and vastly entertaining reminiscence of his entire life, from English respectability in the early years of the century, Toomey's wrestling to bring his own homosexuality and his Catholic upbringing into alignment and having to jettison the latter, through the first world war, the flu pandemic (which claims the life of Toomey's first love), success as a novelist, playwright and librettist for comic musicals, life entre deux guerres on the Continent, witnessing the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism first hand. Toomey meets just about every famous name in literature and politics you can think of, and the whole thing is very sharply told, witty, thoughtful and believable. Possibly the scenes in Nazi Germany (where, amongst other things, Toomey accidentally saves the life of Heinrich Himmler) go on a little too long. But the book as a whole moves with such pace and energy that you begrudge it nothing. The narrator's life is based on Somerset Maugham. 'I saw myself in the washstand mirror, the writer at thirty-three, with [my] mother's eyes, though mine closer set and overwatchful, the brow, creased a little ... the strawy hair sleek with Clovis brilliantine, the guardsman's moustache' [EP, 196]

His early successes on stage and in the novel mirror Maugham's (as does his later fame, fondness for international travel and tendency to fall for the wrong sort of man). But early on, and remembering that Earthly Powers is also a comic novel, Burgess mixes in a little bit of a very different writer:

Young Toomey is persuaded to write the lyrics to a comic musical, the rather fun sounding Say It, Cecil: when Cecil tries to declare his love to Cecilia bad things happen: 'in August 1914 he said I love you to a girl and immediately war breaks out. In France he said je t'aime to a girl and the surrounding village was blasted to smithereens ... [he tried] ya vas lublu and this brought about the Russian Revolution ... He says Ich liebe dich, despite the snarls of the patriotic, and this brings about the collapse of Germany, but he still dare not say I love you' [EP, 90]. This is a huge hit, as we can well believe; and like Plum Toomey goes on to have great success in musical theatre. Also like Plum he is interned by the Germans during the second world war and persuaded to make treacherous broadcasts, although unlike Wodehouse Toomey has the Burgessian wit to encode his speeches with acrostics mocking the Nazis and so escapes postwar sanction by the British authorities.

After the war Toomey watches his sister's marriage break down and his brother-in-law's clerical career go from strength to strength. On a lecture tour of the USA he interviews Godfrey Manning, the charismatic leader of a religious cult based in the Mojave. Only after this cult implodes in its Jonestown-style mass suicide does Burgess reveal, with a rabbit-from-the-hat flourish, that Godfrey Manning was the kid miraculously saved by the young Don Carlo. It would have been better to frontload this revelation, and let the novel spool out under its own momentum—momentum it possesses, after all, in spades.

My gripe is that structuring the novel the way Burgess does amounts to an (unsuccessful, I think) attempt to give it the epistemological potency of deeper mystery, in the Oedpius Rex or Great Expectations sense. Since it doesn't really pull this off (again: I'm only talking structurally here) what we actually get is a slightly shaggy-dog-story vibe, with the last chunk of the book frankly anticlimactic. Don Carlo gets elected Pope, but there seems little he can do with the role and he soon dies. Toomey himself ends the novel living with his elderly sister on the Sussex coast, the last chapter designedly downbeat.

But, look: I don't want to give the impression that this book doesn't work. It does work, and splendidly. It is, in point fact, one of the half dozen English novels of the 20th-century that really deserve to be called masterpieces. I stress this, in a rather clod-hopping way here, because I'm aware that the odour of also ran-ness adheres to it, at least in some quarters. This has a lot to do with the fact that it failed to win the 1980 Booker Prize, such that the work has almost become known as 'the Booker-losing Earthly Powers'. One of the judges, Claire Tomalin, recently gave us an insider's perspective on that famous dust-up:

I was determined that Alice Monroe’s The Beggar Maid should be on the short-list. I didn’t expect it to win, but I knew it should be there. So I dug in my heels and after some hard bargaining it went on. But the big contenders for the Booker in 1980 were, by general consent, Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, a huge, ungainly, careless book full of life and energy; and William Golding’s Rites of Passage, a finely constructed work by an established master, but with something slightly stale about it—I even wondered whether he had written it some years earlier and left it in a drawer. The night before our final meeting I lay awake telling myself I must decide between these two. But in the morning [chair of judges, David] Daiches began by dismissing the Burgess as one that needed no further consideration—it simply wouldn’t do. I then made a pitch for it, for its range and vitality, for the way Burgess applied his imagination to the world we were living in, for his heroic powers to entertain. At the end of my speech I saw that not one of my fellow judges agreed with me. Seeing that the Burgess was out, knowing that the other judges had only just consented to Munro being on the short list, I gave my vote to Golding. [Claire Tomalin, Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades (Penguin 2000)]

The main take-away from this, I think, is that Daiches was evidently a dick. Golding wrote some great novels, but the ponderous Rites of Passage is not one of them. Tomalin's spot-on about the staleness of it (and I'd agree with all but one of her descriptors for Earthly Powers: yes to a huge, ungainly and full of life and energy; no to careless). When Toomey meets Joyce he meditates briefly on writers who 'don't like movement' and who therefore produce 'novels as still life or sculpture ... massive arias with a lot of ornamentation' [EP, 195]. Golding is one of those sorts of novelists, I think. Rites of Passage is an inert novel, a long extrapolation of social class as a fixity, an existential donné to which characters measure their maturity by the degree of nuance of their accommodation. This is because Golding, here and elsewhere in his writing, really does believe that class, hierarchy and status are our only bulwarks against the essential savagery of human nature. Burgess, on the other hand, is preeminently a writer of motion, movement, restlessness and flow. What really seals the deal, Earthly Powers/Rites of Passage comparison-wise, is the gay thing, about to become (in the 1980s) one of the main foci for civil and human rights campaigning, the eventual acceptance of which would mark a great change in Western social life. Golding's novel presents its single homosexual act as unambiguously shameful and debasing. The narrator, pompous young aristocrat, Edmund Talbot, looks down upon the obsequious Reverend Colley as his social inferior; poor old Colley, bullied, miserable and drunk, performs fellatio on one of the sailors. When news of his act passes around the ship he retreats to his cabin and wills himself to die. Earthly Powers, on the other hand, looks forward rather than back in its detailed, no-holds-barred and impressively varied portrait of the gay world of its narrator.

Burgess, suspecting he had not won, refused to attend the Booker ceremony on the presumably spurious grounds that he did not possess a dinner jacket. His account in You've Had Your Time of the snub (for snub it surely was: Earthly Powers clearly should have won) is tartly snide: he claims to have 'heard vaguely' of the Booker Prize, but asked by the press at the time how he felt about being shortlisted he claims: 'I felt nothing.' When he adds 'gifts of money are always acceptable, but I would rather received them from unknown admirers, not from contentious committees' [YHYT, 365] you realize he's taking the piss. Can't say I blame him.

The snubbing was incident to a literary snobbery that has aged especially badly. 1980 was neither the first nor the last time bad books would win the Man Booker over the back of much better books, but 1980 was the last year of what we might call the 'old', crusty backward-looking Booker. 1981 was the year Midnight's Children won, a book exactly as huge, ungainly, full of life and energy (and also a little careless, I think) as Burgess's was. After that the prize opened itself to post-colonial and un-English voices, and its hit rate improved.

Snobbery, of course, can be triggered by several different things, and it may be that provocations other than Burgess's Catholic Northern working-class nature have brought out the snob in some readers. For instance, Earthly Powers's very calculated heterogeneity might put a reader off, leaving her uncertain from chapter to chapter what sort of book she is reading. The narrator is unreliable and makes many errors (deliberately inserted by AB), which rubbed some reviewers up the wrong way. Tonally the comic and the pitiful, the dignified and the Rabelaisian, cheek and jowl rub along. Some people don't like that, prefer to have their mashed potato completely separated from their neat pile of peas and neither intruding on the space occupied by their pork chops. Earthly Powers manages what might look like an oxymoron: it is a tightly sprawling work, I mean 'Sprawl' in a particular aesthetic sense, the Les Murray sense; and the tightness has to do with order at work stifling energy as much as it has chaos undermining the harmony of order. God and the Devil is Burgess's way of it.

That's the nub, I think. There are several ways in which this novel gleefully resists categorisation, but the main one has to do with the crashing together of a detailed quasi-realist texture of fictive verisimilitude on the one hand, and the Gothic horror of actual devils on the other. The intrusion of this latter into that former is the most startling formal risk Earthly Powers takes, I'd say. Burgess's Toomey's evocation of life in Modernist Europe, hobnobbing with Eliot and Joyce, Hesse and Freud, is so compelling the actual voodoo that actually curses and kills the love of Toomey's life in Malaysia feels like a scene from a completely different novel. Modernity is supposed to have replaced all that with, if not a rational disbelief then at least a shift from literal credence to mythic and metaphorical engagement. Once upon a time, Milton's Satan properly scared readers, as a piece of actual biography, an account of a real and terrifying individual. Now he occupies the same cultural-imaginative space as Tolkien's Sauron. Nobody gets actually scared by Paradise Lost nowadays. We don't get actually scared by Tolkien either, but the difference is that, with the later work, we're not supposed to.

What makes Earthly Powers so compelling, I think, over and above its bravura and sustained brilliance as a piece of readable fiction, is Burgess's simple refusal to concede disenchantment to modernity. It reminds me of something J G Ballard once said, in similarly against-the-grain mode: 'modernism is the Gothic of the information age'. Toomey, the motile, jet-setting, film-script writing, TV interviewee, represents some of Burgess's own experience of what it means to be an author in the information age. Yet the Toomey who, at the novel's beginning, is rebuking the Archbishop of Malta for his beliefs in miracles ('The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It's just a matter of waiting' [EP, 17]) writes his own life as modern memoir interpenetrated with the radically inexplicable. The key to grasping what the novel is really doing, I'd say, is reading it not as a mainstream 'literary' blockbuster, nor even as the all-bells-and-whistles version of a Judith Krantz or Mario Puzo book that Burgess, syly, liked to suggest it was. Rather we should read it as a ghost story, a Gothic novel, a Fantasia about a porous self wandering through a buffered world. I'll explain what I mean

It's not wrong to call Earthly Powers a book about evil, but we can be more precise: it is a book about the Devil. Burgess called Pope John XXIII, on whom Campanati/Pope Gregory is modeled, 'a Pelagian heretic and an emissary of the Devil' [Biswell's, Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador 2005), 373], largely because of the Second Vatican Council, which Burgess thought a Very Bad Thing. That's strong language, especially from a man no longer a communicant of the Church. But let's take it as a fictive exaggeration rather than an earnest vehemence. In Earthly Powers Campanati is portrayed as a man with capacious appetites (food, drink, gambling) and perfectly lacking in doubt. His unshakeable faith and his many good works make him an almost exemplary priest, but he is also liable to stand-by whilst people suffer. In one memorable scene Campanati allows Nazis to torture a young girl in front of him (a grisly Marathon Man-style dental torture: there's a good deal to do with teeth in this novel actually) rather than tell them where a certain resistance group is to be found. He claims not to know, but actually he does. Campanati has a fundamentalist approach to faith. In one key Burgessian sense, he is an innocent: real-world uncertainty has never debauched his certitude. As in his other novels, Burgess has a properly conflicted attitude to innocence as something simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.

Is he the Devil, though? To put it a little more precisely: the novel's thesis, as Burgess summary quoted at the top of this blogpost suggests, is that God and the Devil are in some sense the same entity ('Jesus Beelzebub!' swears Geoffrey, Toomey's venal young catamite [49]). The numerically significant 27th chapter (a trinity of trinities, 3 x 3 x 3) is given over to one of Campanati's sermons about the real presence of the Devil in the world:

When I use that word evil, I do not do so in the way of the politician or the journalist. For they use it loosely and vaguely, as a mere synonym for painful or undesirable ... But mal, male, evil properly means an absolute force that has run riot in the world almost since the day of its creation and will only be quelled on the Day of Judgement. This force, being absolute, is not manmade. It is the monopoly of spiritual beings, creatures of God, high and majestic and beautiful servants of the Almighty who, under a leader, the most beautiful of them all, one whose name was Bringer of Light, rejected God's dominion, declined to serve, and were thrown from the empyrean into dark and empty space. [EP, 164]

Toomey gives voice to an alternate interpretation of the wickednesses of the world. For him it proceeds from us, it's part of our nature, not something external and diabolically embodied. He tours the recently liberated camp at Buchenwald and sees many of the horrors of that horrible place. He finds the stench of the place 'all too human, no effluvium from diabolic sources.'

I looked at the sky, rainwashed, pure, and saw an elongated pink cloud like a Picasso angel with trumpet. The prince of the power of the air. No. This was no Luciferan work. The intellectual rebel against God could not stoop to it. This was pure man, pure me. ... Man had not been tainted from without by the prince of the power of the air. The evil was all in him and he was beyond hope of redemption. [EP, 457]

The Prince of the Power of the Air was Burgess's preferred title for the novel, vetoed by his publisher. But the thing to bear in mind is: whatever Toomey-the-narrator says here, Toomey's own narration absolutely believes in real devils. It's not possible to read chapter 38, in which Carlo performs an exorcism on Toomey's ailing partner in Malaysia, and come to any other conclusion. The book is a Gothic demonstory hidden inside a spacious Modern history of our times.

Here's a thing. Write out 'Don Carlo Campanati' in Greek, notating the 'c's (a letter not present in the Greek alphabet) as 'κ's, and representing the Italianate terminal 'i' with the phonically equivalent but more properly Greek terminal η: Δον Καλό Kαμπανατη. Two interesting things happen. One is that the name reveals itself as a juxtaposition of καλός ('good, noble, beautiful, virtuous'; καλό is the accusative singular) with a derivative of καμπύλος, 'bent, crooked, curved', which is a nicely equivocal name for this man of God who is also, in some complicated way, the Devil. ('Jesus Beelzebub!') And if we add up the numerical values of the letters that comprise the name Δον Καλό Kαμπανατη (you'll find the table of Greek alphanumerics here) it comes to 666. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed I've dropped a rho out of 'Carlo', since Greek does not lengthen its vowels by following them with an 'r' the way some other European languages do, and to preserve the connection to καλός. This might strike you as a cheat, but if it does I invite you either to consider whether its the sort of shift Burgess himself was likely to use, or else to add-in the extra 'ρ' (= 100) and ponder whether this, by converting the bestial 666 to 766 doesn't, by stepping the number up to the holy '7', enact something perfectly consonant with the novel's thesis that God and the devil are, somehow, superposed. More to the point, this superogatory insertion, like Burgess pretending surprise that writing a book with 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 chapters actually results in a book with (3 x 3 x 3 x 3) + 1 chapters, mediates the central force of the whole novel. I mean: that there is always something left over, something more than can be deduced by reason, some dangerous or miraculous supplement.

Of course this is fanciful, but its also exactly the sort of game Burgess liked playing in his own writing. We can add to it that 'Kenneth Marchal Toomey' (provided we're ready to accept that 'th' and 'ch' are both two-character rebuses for single Greek letters, 'θ' and 'χ' respectively) is a three part name—Kεννεθ Mαρχαλ Tooμεη—each element of which has six letters.* '666' crops up variously scattered through the text: one example to stand in for a weary taxonomy of all, Toomey's lecture tour of the States, the one on which he takes time off to meet Godfrey Manning, leader of the 'Children of God' cult who eventually murder 2000 of their own people, is organised by 'ACM (American Circuit Management), 666 Avenue of the Americas' [EP, 553].

Perhaps we can agree to disagree, you and I, over whether Earthly Powers posits actual external devils or wants us to read the evil it catalogues (from war to influenza epidemics, from the Holocaust and Jonestown massacres to countless individual acts of cruelty, selfishness, violence and abandonment) as the expression of the truth of human nature. A better way is to go back to the distinction I mentioned earlier, between the porous and buffered selves.

The distinction comes from Charles Taylor's big book A Secular Age (2007), and I'm thinking in particular of an excellent essay by Alan Jacobs called 'Fantasy and the Buffered Self' [The New Atlantis 41 (2014), 3-18] that unpacks some of the implications of Taylor's idea. Really the whole essay is worth reading, but I'm going to pull out a few bits. Here's Taylor on the porous/buffered distinction:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

And here is Jacobs' persuasive gloss on the idea:

To put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.

The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).

I quote this at length because it seems to me so interesting. Jacobs' thesis is that a kind of yearning back to porosity, and its attendant enchantments, is behind the great contemporary vogue for Fantasy:

Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.

Now, interested though I am in Fantasy as a mode, I'm not suggesting that Earthly Powers is well described by that term. What I'm trying to argue is something more radical: that Burgess wants, in effect, to reverse the polarity of this recuperation of porosity and buffer-retention. His novel is a detailed, compelling account of buffered modern life; his protagonist and narrator somebody shielded by his wit and cynicism, not to mention his money and connections, from feeling anything too strongly. Moments like his dark epiphany at Buchenwald, and the death of his truest (though Platonic) love, Philip naturally pierce his screen. Living with Taylorised buffers doesn't protect us from normal human grief, despair or horror, of course. The buffering isn't supposed to do that; it's supposed to keep out a different, more destabilising set of uncanninesses. And it is precisely this unnervingly unheimlich quality that Earthly Powers disposes into the interstices of its modern narrative. It would have been enough (Dayenu!) for Burgess to have exposed his civilised, spiritually cocooned protagonist to the horrors of the Holocaust, had the point merely have been one about 'evil' in the political or journalistic sense of the word. Burgess does more than this precisely because he wants to portray a porous mind in a buffered age, or more precisely a mind wrestling with its own porosity, in denial about it, and yet unable to seal itself away. At the novel's beginning the mere word faithful is enough to bring tears to Toomey's eyes: a word he had once used to Geoffrey, his brattish young lover, 'weeping' although it is 'no more than a camp joke to Geoffrey's generation' [EP, 8]. As the novel gets going we'll tend to believe, not least because Toomey-narrator invites us to believe, that this sensitivity indexes nothing more than an old man's fall into fatuous sentimentality: 'Home. Another one of those damned emotive words. I must give up seeing people, I told myself, sniffing the tears back. All the old bitch can do these days is lay on the weepy weepies. Selfpity, you know' [EP, 33]. It's not that, though. It's a sense, as Toomey puts it later in the book, that 'Religion is the most dangerous thing in the world' ('It is not little girls in their communion frocks and silly holy pictures and the Children of Mary. It is highly explosive, dynamite, the splitting of the atom' [EP, 349]); and dangerous because the true currency of Catholicism is the opening of one's soul to the enchantments and terrors of the old world. The same thing that might provoke a highly intelligent lapsed Catholic to revert to sudden wrath when the Church to which he no longer belongs changes the language in which it celebrates the mass which he no longer attends. A Pope who would do such a thing must be the Devil's emissary! And, written up in fictional form, the emissary drops out of the picture, and 666-Campanati becomes both god and devil himself.

Goodreads reviews reveal a marmite book that absolutely divides readers. Some love it immoderately, some despise it with scorn. I'd suggest that what is so superb, or despicable, about this book, depending, is the way it refuses to buffer its vision of the evils of the world. It really is a devil of a book: a masterpiece, a marvel.


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* Toomey is a strange name, though, isn't it? Its sepulchral sound is perhaps more distraction than anything else; unless Burgess has in mind the Scots phrase 'Toom Tabard', meaning an empty coat, which is to say a shallow or vacuous person. Me, I have a more fanciful theory: I think Burgess is thinking of the Greek τό ὀμμα ('to-ommə'), 'the eye', an 'I Am A Camera'-stylee moniker appropriate for a first-person narrator of such observational perceptiveness (of a private detective who discovers him in flagrante with his lover Rodney: 'he seemed to have dyed his hair some time past; the dye was working out and there were patches of dirty grey and dead black and a residual henna glow' [EP, 93]) and its intrinsic unreliability. But I'm digressing.