Enderby Upstairs
by David Guaspari (Jan. 2007)
Anthony Burgess, like his master James Joyce, was an erudite, working class, polylingual, expatriate, lapsed Catholic. Unlike Joyce, he was staggeringly fecund. He published 50-odd books—fiction, criticism, memoir, translation—as well as screenplays, teleplays, libretti, and large quantities of literary journalism. And he started late, becoming a fulltime writer at age 43, when mistaken medical opinion gave him just one year to live. He would have chucked it all to be a composer and throughout his life found time to practice, in every form from the comic song to the symphony, the vocation to which he wished he’d been called.
His best known work, thanks to the Stanley Kubrick film, is . But Burgess produced novels in all known—and some unknown—forms, including satire, science fiction, a verse novel, a spy thriller, and several fictional biographies (that of Napoleon cast in a form that mimics the Eroica Symphony).
All display a passion for language that places Burgess, as he placed Joyce, with the writers for whom “it is important that the opacity of language be exploited, so that ambiguities, puns and centrifugal connotations are to be enjoyed rather than regretted.” And all display an imagination deeply formed by the categories of Catholicism, its analogical metaphysics, the practiced habit of regarding everydayness su.
Sympathetic readers often called Burgess a master without a masterpiece. The unsympathetic thought he was too extravagant, too tricky, too language obsessed—and that of him there was much too damn much. His countrymen never o Enderby’s story makes this dilemma urgent and wildly funny. The bare outline: Enderby, unhappy but content, inadvertently becomes the trophy husband of the cool beauty Vesta Bainbridge—women’s magazine editor and widow of a famous race car driver (and hoping, Enderby will sourly conclude, to become the widow of a famous poet). He persuades himself that Vesta is the antitype of the grotesque and hated stepmother who had up to now, and probably forever, “spoiled women for him.” But Vesta becomes that stepmother in another form. Worst of all, she tries to drag him back to the Catholic Church. Enderby flees, the marriage unconsummated, but too late. His jealous Muse deserts him. He must abandon his projected epic masterwork, Th
Words also have magical functions, and naming is principal among them. Vesta Bainbridge is ironically Vestal. The Muse is elusive and ungovernable in part because she has no name. Enderby su
Burgess habitually coins compound words and makes new parts of speech from old. Joyce, as he has noted, does the same, and to the same technical end—compressing syntax by eliminating auxiliary words and subordinate clauses. Here, for example, is what Enderby sees on arriving in Tangier:
straw sombreros.
Saint-eyed. Panniered. Compression is a source of energy and the invented words give their referents that surcharge of reality accruing to anything for which there is a name. Saint-eyedness becomes part of the furniture of the universe. What Enderby hears on that street needn’t be mentioned because the sentence supplies it. The plosive consonants and open back vowels—, , —make a hollow clacking that mimes hoofs on stones.
The Burgess sentence, like the Joyce sentence, results from native extravagance under severe discipline, a lyricism of exactness: economy of syntax, lexical precision, and careful orchestration of verbal music. Lyrical intensity is typically used for comic eect, as in this partial survey of Enderby’s kitchen:
half a tin of sardines, soft plump knives in golden oil.
This is comedy of inflation—not by tedious mock pomposity but by loving attention to ludicrous detail. “Pellets” is apt for crumbs of stale cheese, but also has a poetic multiplicity of meaning, suggesting both pet food (which makes Enderby himself a pet beast) and mouse droppings. “Soft plump knives” is a miniature poem—the glittering dagger shapes that, paradoxically, cannot cut; the pillowy sound of “soft plump.”
Burgess also has a Joycean flair for parody and pastiche, and a fascination with languages of all kinds. We get pop lyrics, scientific articles, trendy journalism—and poetic styles for Enderby, Rawclie, Yod Crewsy, the folk bard of an imaginary dialect, an incarcerated lunatic, an imaginary Elizabethan dramatist, and self indulgent surrealists. We have Enderby poems, of course, as well as an Enderby film script, a libretto, two short stories, and a sermon he delivers at April’s mother’s revivalist church. We hear the regional speech of
Enderby’s story unfolds as a series of set pieces that elaborate a standard comic premise: Enderby at the mercy of the world’s invincible ignorance. Thus, after Enderby loses his door key and innocently spends the night on a neighbor’s couch, her jealous boyfriend Jack comes banging at his door. “Open that door and let me bash you, you bastard.” The facts Enderby os of these possibilities and thus betrayed by words. A world in need of the (lower case) word rejects it.
His students at
The opening trombone is also an invocation of the Muse, visceral a Enderby is asleep when the story begins, and his invocation is audible only to the participants in an Educational Time Trip, a delegation of school children from the future who have reverently returned to study him. Their escort speaks in the tones of the tour guide unctuously dispensing received opinion. She displays Enderby in all his sordor—which includes a stack of embarrassing postcards (“Fellation, if you must know, is the technical term”). But strands of hair are collected, like relics from a saint, and on exit the guide pauses to regard the town spread out below and the stars above: “he gives it all meaning.” Enderby, it would seem, is a poet for the ages. Enderby often tells himself—and tells the Muse—that he writes for posterity. Can that belief, or boast, justify a life? The Muse mocks it. And posterity proves itself ignorant and fickle. The coda to
What does Enderby see if he lowers his gaze from the unreliable future to the present? Only time marching on.
Enderby finds communion only in the past. Dante, Hopkins, Joyce, and the Elizabethans—Shakespeare especially—are perpetually present, summoned explicitly or alluded to in glancing jokes. Vesta’s warning that the dumbed down poems Enderby contributes to
So Enderby lives in a kind of hole in time, with encyclopedic knowledge of poetic ancestors, near total ignorance of contemporaries, and sporadic anxious hopes to be redeemed by posterity. The present is a place of exile, in which he must resign himself to a modest calling, to be a better poet than the contemporaries he actually encounters—frauds, hacks, and sellouts all. Enderby’s struggles to live that calling play out as struggles with mother, mothers, women, Woman, Muse.
Of mothers Enderby has both a shortage—his mother died at his birth—and a surfeit. His childhood was as dominated by his now dead stepmother as his middleage is plagued by her memory—a woman gross, ignorant, stupid, and superstitious who once, terrified by a thunder storm, climbed into his bed. He feels compelled to live beside the mothering sea (which is both La Belle Mer —the name with which he rechristens Rawcliffe’s bar—and la bellemère, or “stepmother”). Photogenic, hygienic Vesta might seem the stepmother’s antitype but, as he bitterly writes in a one line poem flushed soon after composition, “Every woman is a stepmother.” She begins to nag and natter and burp, won’t let him work in the loo, and (unforgivably) wants him to embrace Our Holy Mother the Church.
Balaglas and Wapenshaw are backed by the power of the state. But language itself, a domain of boundless possibility, helps resist them. Balaglas’s evasive jargon comes to us refracted through an accidental poem: the talkshow’s transcript, full of guesswork errors. “Positive reinforcement” is surrealized to “positive rain forcemeat.” Enderby, as transcribed, attacks Balaglas for being “teetotal Aryan” (sensual Catholic Europe o
Instead of resolving his internal contradictions, a poet exploits them. Consider Enderby’s outline for way. That dismissal, I think, misleads.
Enderby wins our appalled sympathy by his struggle, by acting on a conviction that he must write poems and that, to do so, he must cut himself o
Burgess responded to his dilemma with morally serious comedy. Our freedom, a fact and a puzzle, makes us human, but it does not make us happy. It is threatened from within and without, and subject to a kind of entropic decay, so that we must struggle merely to avoid losing ground. Enderby the visiting professor could only o
David Guaspari is a mathematician and computer scientist who lives in Ithaca, NY.