News from the House JULY 26Th-28Th 2007 Please Make a Note of These Dates in July of Next Year

End of the World Newsletter Vol 2 - November 2006

News from The House JULY 26th-28th 2007 Please make a note of these dates in July of next year. This is when the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Liverpool Hope University will co-host the next Anthony Burgess Symposium. The Symposium will be held at Liverpool Hope University in the city that Burgess found rivalling Manchester for his affections when he was stationed there during his time in the British Army’s Educational Corps.

The theme for the Symposium is Anthony Burgess: Selves and Others. Papers are invited on any aspect of Burgess’s writing (literary, journalistic or critical) or music. Some possible topics are Burgess’s work in the UK and abroad; Post-colonial Press), Aude Heffen (University Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), Elements in his writings; Gender and Difference in his Writings; J’anine Jobling (Liverpool Hope University), Paul Phillips The English Reception of Burgess and his Work; and Burgess (Brown University), Carla Sassi (University of Verona) and Rob and Psychoanalysis. These are only a few of the possible Spence (Edge Hill College of Higher Education). areas that could be explored from the perspectives suggested by the theme of the conference, and we hope we will receive Thanks to a generous endowment by Liana Burgess, Liverpool proposals for many different ones. More information and Hope University currently has 3 graduate students studying downloadable registration forms will be published on the towards a PhD on the subject of Burgess’s work. Two of the Website as soon as they are available for posting. students are researching his literary writings, and the third is studying his linguistic work. News of any other students PLEASE MARK THESE DATES AND COME AND HELP IN currently working on Burgess at a graduate level would be THE EXPLORATION AND CELEBRATION OF most welcome by the Foundation, and it might be possible to BURGESS’S WORK. help such students to get in contact with each other and make a regular contribution to the Newsletter. Since last year’s Symposium, there have been several exciting developments at the Foundation house. Liana Burgess Undergraduate students are also being encouraged to study has generously donated two more collections of books Burgess at Liverpool Hope, and a full-year course is allowing from Anthony’s personal library and more of the artefacts students to read and explore his work in the context of works and memorabilia from their lives together in Monaco. Nuria by his contemporaries is being offered at a third-year level for Belastegui has taken up the role of the Foundation Secretary the first time. If you know of other undergraduate course on and she is taking a leading role in the organization and Burgess, please let us know so that we can let members know cataloguing of the new books (including the supervision of about such courses. installing new bookshelves to hold them all). This year’s Manchester Literary Festival has a section devoted Manchester University Press has agreed to publish Anthony to Burgess’s work. Aided by Andrew Biswell, the Burgess Burgess and Modernity a selection of papers from the first section is organizing a series of writers to use or respond to IABF Symposium, and David Lodge and Anthony Cronin have Burgess’s work by creating texts that will be transmitted via written a Foreword and After Word for the collection, and public viewing screens and phone texts. Some of the writers Carson Bergstrom from the University of Salford is writing an have already visited the Foundation house to gain some sense Introduction for the book. of Burgess as a writer and a person. This project should be completed in the second half of October. The Foundation is happy to announce that it now has an Editorial Board for the Newsletter. This is the first step The music of Anthony Burgess is not being neglected. In towards having the Newsletter recognized as a refereed addition to the magisterial tome by Paul Phillips that is soon to publication, and scholars in the UK who must participate in be published by Manchester University Press, a production of the government-driven Research Assessment Exercise will Cyrano will be staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre starting be glad to know that submissions to the Newsletter will be in December. At a more local level, the classical pianist and refereed by members of the Editorial and be eligible for RAE teacher, Diane O’Hara is collaborating with Alan Roughley on a submissions as refereed journal articles. Among those who programme of Burgess’s music and literature. The programme have generously agreed to become members of the Editorial will first be presented at Liverpool’s Cornerstone Festival in Board are Á.I. Farkas (University of Budapest), Ben Forkner December and then at regional UK colleges and universities in (University of Angers), Matthew Frost (Manchester University the New Year.

1 Thoughts Under A Green Shade Notes by Guest Editor Douglas Milton OK. A broken laptop, not one but two of grave-rolling from Monaco would have music specialist? Or an English major? lost data sticks, problems with health been too much to bear) has previously Or one whose chosen field is linguistics? and money (but the latter is always appeared on the discussion boards, but Her answer is both apt and amusing. a problem, is it not?) and, on the day I felt it was too good not to be dragged this edition of the End of the World kicking and screaming into the light. Your editor offers up a fragment from Newsletter was due to be put to bed, Thankfully, Yves agreed. a play-in-progress based on Burgess’s the mass evacuation of the building in two volumes of autobiography. The actor which your humble editor lives because Canadian Marty Phipps has contributed Peter Hudson (currently to be seen in hit of a suspected gas leak...none such a typically pyrotechnical essay inspired French film Les Chevaliers du Ciel) was trivia, one can be sure, would have been by Nothing more than a couple of a tremendous help during the writing allowed to get in the way of Anthony lines from one of Enderby’s poems. of this. With any luck at least a part of Burgess’s daily stint at the typewriter, Anybody who read Marty’s scintillating it will be performed at the forthcoming although one hopes he would have contributions to the late lamented Manchester Literary Festival as part of extinguished his cigar. Probably not. www.anthonyburgess.co.uk forum (and their intriguingly-named Burgess Project. Bowing down to circumstances wasn’t where are you people and what are you his style. up to and when will you start writing for I would like to thank Dr Alan Roughley us?) will recognise his familiar wicked and Nuria for their unstinting support, This issue of the Newsletter appears style. Marty offered not one but two along with Mike Anderson of University rather later than it should have done, essays and it’s to be hoped that the next College, London, David A Tait, Simon and it’s all my fault. I can only thank Dr one will appear in issue three. Carr, Tom Kasperkowicz, Dr Sharon Alan Roughley for his seemingly limitless Black, Peter Hudson, Dr Christine patience in the face of my constant From the ancient fastness of Budapest, Lee Gengaro, Andrew Biswell, Mena assertions that, it’s all in the post guv, Akos Farkas serves up a paprika-hot Gidings, and Andrew White. Oh and you’ll get it tomorrow, honest. mixture of abstruse erudition and mad Morrissey for his last album. Another surrealist humour for us to sink our teeth great Mancunian. How one wishes And of course, many thanks also to our into. His book, Will’s Son and Jake’s you could both have met. Who knows , selfless contributors. Without whom Peer remains one of the best things AB, what future generations of writers, etc.They are, fittingly for Burgess fans, a about Burgess ever written. singers, poets, artists you will influence? cosmopolitan bunch. Non omnis moriar. Christine Lee Gengaro, fast making a From Brussels, Yves Buelen’s excellent name for herself in the field of Burgess review of a recent Parisian theatre studies, brings her cool NY-transplanted- production of A Clockwork Orange (one to-California wit to bear on what is which I simply couldn’t bring myself to actually a very important question – how attend because the music was provided does one deal with a multi-talented by 70s disco star Cerrone – the sounds genius like Burgess if one is, say, just a

A Bit of a Play by Douglas Milton

(This is a brief extract from a one-man- as known in Roman times tacked at a granulocytic. One of those. (Stands up, show I’ve been working on based on crazy angle on the wall above the desk. stretches, in profile to audience) Funny Anthony Burgess’s autobiography. ‘A Left, a battered upright piano. Right, thing is, any one would do. The infinite Bit of a Play’ is not the title, merely a a stereo set. Can’t stress this enough, resources of the English language. warning that you’re only getting a sliver books everywhere, vaguely arranged Dictating, as it were, the terms of what or shive of the whole. It is hoped that on shelves but mainly scattered in the structuralists used to call the récit, it will be premiered either in Paris or tottering piles on the floor. Right of load of bloody nonsense. Still, they got Manchester towards the end of 2006. desk, a small table groaning under the one thing right, it’s the words tell the That admirable actor Peter Hudson, who weight of bottles of gin, scotch etc. Given story, not the poor bloody author. (Long led a superb performance of The Eve Burgess’s assertion that gin without ice hacking smoker’s cough)(Turns to face of St Venus at the Café Flore a couple is merely an emetic, gin should be in audience, cigar in hand) of years ago, and who can currently ice bucket. Also on floor, a cartouche be seen in the hit French film Les of small, foul cigars. Correspondence Ah. So you’re all here. Well, expected Chevaliers du Ciel, will take the part.) scattered all over floor. Lighting dim, that, sooner or later. I try to discourage rises with volume of typewriter. Keyboard visitors, you know. Had too much of it. Anthony Burgess’s study. Centre stage, hammering gets louder and louder, American hitch-hikers showing up on the AB has his back to us. He is seated lighting goes up, keyboard hammering doorstop in Monaco, (whiney American at a large writing desk, hunched over almost unbearably loud until - STOPS hippie student accent) oh Mr Burgess, a typewriter, hammering away at an I’m a big fan of yours, can I stay the old Olivetti. Clouds of cigar smoke Lights up. night and spout a load of rubbish about emanate upwards. The lighting is dim. Hermann bloody Hesse and eat your Music is playing, something English, AB, still with back to us, gropes for gin food and drink your booze and sleep on Elgar, Delius, Holst. The hammering glass, knocks it off desk. your floor and in the soft sweet hours of of the typewriter keys is fairly quiet dawn while honest hard-working authors at first, then grows gradually louder. AB: Bugger! Bugger it and damn and are abed, steal away with a couple of Stage set, AB hunched over his desk, blast! I nearly had it. What was the first editions in their backpacks. Oh yes, books everywhere, a map of the world word? Granoblastic, granulometric, it’s happened many a time. My fault of

2 course, I keep giving away my address Irishwoman, Margaret Dwyer, who kept unless specifically stated otherwise, in my reviews. You’d almost think I a pub called The Golden Eagle. It was Burgess is always sparking up another welcomed visitors. Which I don’t of a rackety sort of place, but she gave me cigar and refilling his glass. course, no time, no time, no time. a home there and I suppose I ought to have been grateful. I wasn’t. I hated her. Writing, writing. Why do we bother? (Has another horrendous coughing fit, She was fat, dirty, illiterate, and gross. Nobody cares. Well, not until you’re looks sourly at his foul little cigar then I put her into one of my books, Inside dead. Why do I keep doing it? Because takes deep drag) Mr Enderby, and caused a lot of trouble it’s the job, and one has to go on with for myself from her relatives. This pub the job. Of course I’m not really a writer, Well, wouldn’t want anyone of you to had many rooms, as was the custom of no. I’m a composer. I said that to Gore think I was a bad host. So, welcome, the day, and in each room there was a Vidal once, when we were arguing about welcome. Have a seat. Ah, I see you piano, a wretched beer-stained upright, which one of us had written the most already have. Good, good... and on those pianos many conflicting books. Actually I wasn’t arguing, my tunes were played. I was raised among then wife Lynne was. She was drunk, AB picks up glass, refills it, takes gulp. cacophony, which may be a help to quelle surprise. She was shortly to die. critics of the music I was later to write. She argued with everybody, anywhere. So...willkomen, bienvenue, welcome. I wasn’t a happy child. I was frightened Ticket inspector, the Duke of Edinburgh, To the writer’s lair. Not quite what you all the time, not by my new family who it was all one to her. Anyway, Gore was expected, eh? No serried ranks of were kind enough in their way, although chatting away being very urbane and I calf-bound volumes, no Nabokovian one got hit a lot, but by a picture in my suddenly said, à propos de rien, because lectern, no faithful amanuensis. No bedroom. It was a picture of a gypsy I wasn’t trying to score a point, it was just divinely inspired exopthalmic author in woman, sort of glowering out at me, and that a truth had suddenly been revealed Byronic shirt his eyes in a fine frenzy the title of the picture was BEWARE! to me, Gore, you do realise that I’m not rolling. Or tweedy Evelyn Waugh type Well, I did. I used to scream the house really a writer, I’m a composer. That in his secluded West Country mansion down because of that damned picture, stopped him in his tracks. He was very study with exquisite fountain pen on but they never took it away. Not cruelty, gracious about it later in an essay. He hand-made paper enditing. No, the life just stupidity. It’s stupidity, not deliberate said, well, I couldn’t top that. I laughed. of the professional writer isn’t like that. cruelty, that’s responsible for the ills of I like Gore, we are very alike although It’s not like that at all. It’s all battered old this world. from Dickensianly different social strata. Penguins and Pears Encyclopaedias and piles of Old Moore’s Almanack. (Cigar Refills glass, spills a bit. I really am a composer by the way, yes. goes out) Oh for Christ’s sake, hang on. You may not have heard my things, A woman is only a woman, but even a So...an evening with Mr Burgess. That’s but...I write music. In the old-fashioned bad cigar is a smoke. what you’re here for, isn’t it? Well, I’m not way. Scores, orchestras, you wouldn’t be sure what to offer you. A writer’s life is interested. These days it’s rock guitars (Relights foul cigar, puffs out great deadly boring. A man, at a desk, typing. and synthesisers and something called clouds. As if for first time takes in fact With no real end in sight. Because, God boy-bands, hideous. But, I plod on. It’s that there’s an audience out there, pulls knows, I’ve abandoned so many novels. a sort of knitting for me. I do it while the himself together. Throughout play should The one I’m working on now, about a TV’s on or when I’m on an airplane or give impression that he’s slightly pissed mad love affair between Jane Austen sitting on the toilet like my invented poet but in control) and the Marquis de Sade...well, it might Enderby who seems to have become work, it might not. One never really more of a real character than I am. The Ladies and gentlemen and them as knows. I wrote a book, undeservedly work goes on. There’s a line by the hasn’t made up their minds yet. My name famous, called A Clockwork Orange. poet Basil Bunting which has always is Anthony Burgess. Or rather it isn’t. My haunted me. ‘Poet appointed dare not real name is John Burgess Wilson. This I never thought that one would take decline, nothing to authenticate the is a fine example of the air of mendacity off. It was an intellectual exercise, how mission imposed.’ I suppose that’s my (hacking cough) that inevitably accrues to capture the essence of teenage credo. One is chosen, one does the job, around a writer’s life, or at least this rebellion, which, of course, goes back thankless though it may be. This glass writer’s life. I was born John Burgess to Shakespeare and beyond, nothing looks remarkably empty, soon change Wilson, in Manchester, England, 25th new under the sun, Nothing Like the that. (Fills glass) of February, 1917. A Sunday afternoon Sun. I gave it a contemporary gloss with as I recall, which of course I don’t. an invented teenage language called So. Here we are and I suppose you want Mendacity again. It was midday, around nadsat, but really it was about age-old me to give you some sort of insight into opening time in the pubs, although I themes, free will, the human propensity the writer’s life. Well, it’s all about bills. was too young to take advantage of the for violence...boring really. An American Being a writer is not like being, say, a fact. I made up for it later on though. made a film of it and made himself rich in bank clerk with a lowly but regular salary. (Gulps drink) My father, a pub pianist of the process. But then he got frightened, A bank clerk can go to an estate agent whom I will speak later, no doubt availed thought he might have created a monster and get a mortgage, a writer will be himself in no small measure. My mother, and that one day a gang of droogs would laughed out of the office. We have no who I never knew, was a music hall show up at his St Albans house and place. What do we do? We make up fairy soubrette, Elizabeth Wilson, known as replay the whole thing for him in real stories very few people want to read, we ‘The Beautiful Belle Burgess’. I know this life. Not so unlikely really, the world’s a earn, unless we are very lucky, like John only from family legend. I quickly had to terrible place, a terrible place. Excuse Le Carré, derisory sums of money. We get used to another mother, stepmother me. don’t fit into the English class system. rather. My father, something of a What are we? Servants, privileged tutors shiftless person, took up with this Lights another cigar, refills glass. In fact, to the sons of emperors, licensed

3 clowns? Oh, it’s possible to worm your But I’m beginning to sound bitter, and were they all for anyway? Who were way into the establishment. Evelyn one shouldn’t be bitter. Poet appointed we trying to impress? Nobody who Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham etc. No one forced me to be a writer. I read books, or bought them. What a Greene (grimaces at last name). But just knew from an early age that I was a waste of time, and life. I should never no writer worth a damn ever wanted word-man. Wanted to be a painter, but have married her. It was the South I to be part of the establishment. Joyce, it turned out that I was colour blind, one wanted, the dark wicked-eyed raven- Beckett, Behan, poor dead Dylan. No, of God’s many jokes. Daltonism, if you haired garlic-scented South. But I didn’t to be a writer is to be outside, forever. know the term. Women don’t get it for know it at the time. I thought I wanted to And it’s a damned lonely business. I some reason. So, I wrote poems and marry into cool blonde England.(Pause, sometimes think I should have stuck at stories, sent them off. Got a medal for gathers himself) Ladies and gentleman. being a teacher, I was good at that. But one of them. From Harold Nicholson of A top-up is required I think. (Fills glass) one gets the call, and there’s no ignoring all people, aristocrat, invert. Later on, I it. A dark and solitary life. But not without admit, I wanted to be part of that world. So... I’m ashamed to admit, Lynne’s its tiny victories. Sometimes art has the I did reviews for The Spectator, I tried to putative literary connections might have last laugh, yes. (Phenomenal coughing imitate the tonalities of Evelyn Waugh. had something to do with my desire fit, yet another top-up of glass.) Do you I was quite convincing but I couldn’t to marry her. Because, deep down, know I was once a Distinguished bloody convince myself. The mardased orphan I wanted in. If I’d only known. Well, Professor? living above a pub was all too present if I wanted a ticket to Establishment in my mind. William Burroughs, who I acceptance, Lynne was the worst I Moves over to piano, hammers out came to know quite well in Tangiers, said could have chosen. She drank, she some music hall song, maybe Roll Out that as a boy he wanted to be a writer picked fights, she slept around...Well, I The Barrel. Stands and faces audience because it seemed such an attractive drank, I picked fights and God knows I again. Sparks up, gropes for glass on top life, lounging around in a yellow silk did my fair bit of sleeping around. But I of piano. suit smoking opium and being waited was at least discreet, ashamed rather. on by your native servant. (Burroughs Residual Catholicism. Ah the Church. I’ll Distinguished bloody arsehole. This is impersonation) “Little did I know”. Bill be coming to that. Discretion just wasn’t me, these are my roots. I’m common, Burroughs...I liked him. He turned in Lynne’s emotional vocabulary. She yes, common, working class and proud against me of course as they all did in didn’t give a tuppeny damn what anyone of it. You see, I come from Manchester the end, but he was a writer. Legion of thought of her. I think that’s why we and that bloody smug Hanseatic the Damned. He was a lot like me except stayed together for so long. I admired cottonopolis has never acknowledged I’m not homosexual and I was never her. I feared her. She did things I would me, never given me one fucking award, attracted by drugs. Apart from opium of never dare do. Still...moving on, moving pardon my French. Kingsley Amis and course, one of God’s great gifts, illegal, on. I’ll come back to Lynne. Graham Greene got knighthoods, me naturally, like everything worthwhile in not. I didn’t fit in. Well, I’m proud not to this world. The state is the great enemy, I am a writer. There is a scene in Evelyn fit in. Do you know, when James Joyce’s if you take nothing else from tonight’s Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies where a centenary came around and there soirée remember that. The state is the bunch of amateurs attempt to make a was talk of putting up a statue, Dublin ultimate enemy. film of the life of Wesley, and there is wouldn’t pay for it? Joyce, the great a five-minute segment where he does blasphemer against Mother Ireland, the So, where was I? The writer’s life. I Nothing but write a sermon. There it is. sow that eats her farrow. Well, the statue first knew I was a real writer, I mean It is intensely boring. (Pause, drinks. went up in the end, but guess who paid a professional writer, I’d written things Muses) for it? American Express. Make of that at Manchester University as a student, what you will. but I first knew I was condemned to be You know, when my first book was Sags a little. Looks around him, at a writer when I wrote a book called A published everybody automatically typewriter, map, books, audience. Sighs Vision of Battlements. I was a serving assumed I was a Catholic novelist. I deeply then straightens up. soldier at the time, in Gibralter, and my never understood why. I left the Church book reflects that. I based it on Virgil’s at the age of sixteen. And since then Aeneid the same way Joyce used The I’ve retained nothing from it apart Odyssey. Nobody wanted it so I stuck from a belief in a vengeful omnipotent it in my bottom drawer. A good lesson God, a conviction that sex is filthy and Anthony’s Drink Corner there, never throw anything away. damnable, that hellfire is a real and Teachers of creative writing, of which present danger, that original sin explains Jagged Flash God forgive me I was one, are always the state of the world, that we are, telling you that the writer’s best friend is when all is said and done, a pretty bad his waste-paper basket. Don’t believe lot...but apart from that it’s really had no 3/5 Dry Sherry them. Keep it all for a rainy day, you influence on me whatsoever. 1/5 Dry Gin never know. 1/5 Benedictine I was married by then, to a woman Copyright Douglas Milton 2006 2 Squeezes called Llewella Jones. We changed \fresh Lime her name to Lynne because nobody Douglas Milton teaches English could pronounce the initial Welsh in Paris. Shake with ice phoneme. Mendacity again. She was Strain distantly related to the writer Christopher (To be continued) Isherwood, or said she was. (Brief flurry of rage) Mendacity, mendacity, so many lies, so little time to undo them, and what

4 A Clockwork Orange in Paris by Yves Buelens The Théâtre de la Ménagerie of the Cirque violence of the assault is less intense than the stage without using Burgess’s play. d’Hiver in Paris is showing the first French in the movie but the sexual assault is quite Unfortunately, in my opinion, the staging stage production of Anthony Burgess’s novel, graphic (though no full frontal nudity!) as Alex is based too closely on the iconic look of A Clockwork Orange. It is not Burgess’s own rips Mrs Alexander’s T-shirt exposing her Stanley Kubrick’s movie. The play mixes stage version of his most famous novel but breasts. He then rapes her first on the desk literal elements from the novel with parts of an original adaptation of Kubrick’s movie on and gives her to his two droogs, who do the dialogue from the film version. It unfortunately stage. It mixes elements of the novel with the same with their trousers down. is best characterized by the words “almost” iconic look of the movie. or “not quite like”, like a movie sequel using Alex then goes home. We never see his only some elements of the first film that the The setting at the Cirque d’Hiver is special in parents. He delivers the speech (“it was audience is most likely to recognize. The itself: the theatre is rectangular in shape with gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh”) poster even shows an image from the film. one half of the audience sitting opposite the while he blows up an inflatable doll with his other half, as seats occupy the long sides of foot, and disappears behind a curtain. We French actor Sagamore Stevenin does a the rectangle. There are two stages situated then see his shadow making love to the doll, good job portraying Alex even if he has that to the left and the right of the audience, and no details spared (erection included). In the tendency to “animalize” Alex too much. He a mobile one built on rails in the middle. The meantime an actor sits on the side of the plays Alex without the arrogance than Alex decoration on this third stage is sparse: Mr stage and we recognize Mr Deltoid. When displays in Kubrick’s movie (the transfer Alexander’s desk, with an orange typewriter Alex has finished, he sits next to him and from prison to clinic sequence in the movie on top, a book-shelf and a chair. The action they talk. Mr Deltoid even has the same way comes to mind). Stevenin plays it more like occupies one stage or another, and the of speaking as Aubrey Morris has in the film, an animal, or a junky “high” on drugs, hardly mobile stage is used from time to time in the ending all his sentences with “yes”! walking straight, always bent over when in middle of the audience or doubling the size of prison; a scene which is especially striking either stage at the sides. The two droogs are expecting Alex later in the shows a prison warden “walking” Alex on a afternoon, as in the film. Alex sets the record leash. In fact Stevenin was not cast as Alex When the show starts, Beethoven’s music clear (“no more picking on Dim, brother…”) until a few weeks before production began rings out of the speakers; that is, Beethoven’s while the middle stage is transformed into because the actor who was to play Alex, music re-arranged by 70’s-French-disco-star the Catwoman’s house. She is played by the Sami Naceri (star in the French “Taxi”-movie Cerrone! Two droogs, dressed more or less same woman who played Mrs Alexander. All trilogy), ended up in prison himself for violent like those in the movie, are slouched on bean- the actors play at least two roles, except Alex. acts! bags underneath a panel with the inscription The gigantic phallus is still on the desk but it Korova Milkbar and a picture of Beethoven. is not used as in the movie. This time she is The other actors offer an acceptable The font used in the inscription is not precisely not killed by the phallus (bye bye symbolism!). performance but there is no new Laurence the one used in the movie. Then Alex walks When Alex goes inside the house she is Olivier to be seen. on stage. He looks like a young Billy Idol with not doing exercises, but modelling another peroxide white hair, a black coat, a cane and impressive phallus in a dubious way. Alex is That R-rating is justified but should not a white shirt: the same Alex in the record shop not knocked down by a bottle of milk but by exist because the rated elements are not in Kubrick’s movie. He is played by young pepper-spray. There goes another symbolic necessary to the play itself. It can be seen, French actor Sagamore Stevenin. moment! therefore, more as a striking advertising ploy, playing on the public’s deep-seated belief that The first couple of questions a Burgess’s In the next scene, Alex finds himself in A Clockwork Orange is violent from beginning aficionado ask at this point are “where is the prison. It is a pity that the thematically very to end and contains little more than sexual third droog” and “why did the author change important speech by the chaplain is split over elements. their names”? Alex makes his opening speech two or three moments during the play. He to the audience. During the whole show he then has to undress so that his clothes can will address the audience, but he does not be inventoried and put into a box. Alex strips have Alex’s linguistic range from the novel completely: first full frontal nudity of the play. and will therefore not mix old English words This is, in my opinion, unnecessary in the play with contemporary words and Nadsat. Nadsat but may help justifying the “R”-rating. is not used much in the play, an omission which denies the audience access to one of The actual “brainwashing” sequences use the most important aspects of the novel, the the ceiling of the theatre where pictures are actual brainwashing of the audience/reader screened: different ones than in the movie. who, step by step, learns the language and, Alex is strapped in a chair but the “eye- as a result, undergoes the same experience opening” props are not used. Before getting as Alex’s. The words of the opening speech out of prison, Alex is “tested”, he gets beaten are Burgess’s from the book (“we sat in the without reacting and then has a fully naked Korova Milkbar making up our rasoodocks woman dance around him and even rubbing …”). Alex and his droogs then mug a tramp her crotch on his face (R-rating justification). in quite a graphical way. The production is banned to anyone under sixteen, as The rest of the production respects the announced on all the posters advertising movie and the book but stops before Chapter the play, and can therefore be understood 21. There is no mention of Alex growing as a publicity stunt. The producer, Thierry old except in a line of dialogue where Alex Harcourt, continuously reminds the audience confesses that he won’t be able to stop the that it is the first time a play has been rated actions of his son just like his father was “R”. Why it is so will become clear later in the unable to stop his. The parents remain off- production. stage voices, which is a pity for Kubrickian blue wig aficionados! The next scene shows the attack on the Alexanders. The attackers still wear masks What remains after the performance is the but without the phallic noses from the movie. impression of having seen a brave attempt The doorbell is still Beethoven’s Fifth! The at transposing A Clockwork Orange onto

5 Reconstructing the Odontiad by Á. I. Farkas With a mid-July sun blazing outside and my brain torpid with a The profoundest depths of human misery are reached by way hardly bearable twenty-eight degrees Celsius inside my shaded of the highest pitch of suffering and that is the toothache, which cove in this newly tropical climate of my native Budapest, is, to quote Marin Amis once again, “the zenith of civilian, I could certainly use the “buoyant biff” that the narrator of non-mortal pain” (Experience 155). The first of Burgess’s many Burgess’s posthumously published verse-novel anticipates protagonists to reach the pinnacle of non-mortal pain is the on hearing a couple of martini glasses clanging (Byrne 90). narrator-hero of A Clockwork Orange, whose artificially induced But then the tooth-probing chill of the “aches in the zoobies” (93), as Alex blissful-looking and sounding beverage Clanging, she brought America describes toothaches in his cockneyfied quickly dampens my enthusiasm, much right in: martinis, stiff, Russian lingo called nadsat, play a crucial the same way as the idea of icebox- part in breaking down this tough young frostiness discourages Nabby Adams, the Probes for the teeth and for the criminal’s mental barriers in the course of middle-aged English police officer of “The brain a buoyant biff the horrible rehabilitation treatment that he Malayan Trilogy”, who prefers to quench is submitted to in the medical annex of the his Gargantuan thirst and soothe his large, bad teeth with the Staja or State Jail where he serves his sentence for murder. tepid froth of his favourite Tiger beer (Time for a Tiger 73). Ludovico Technique, the aversion therapy administered by Drs Brodsky and Branom, is indeed hell, nor is Alex out of it, Stealing a glimpse of these lines, my wife, whose near-perfect as he soon learns. Hell is something very similar to Kenneth teeth are strangers to the tortures of gum recession and dental Marchal Toomey, the octogenarian narrator of the much later decay, wonders what might be wrong with that nice icebox- Earthly Powers. “I knew what hell was,” the old man recalls the chilliness. How could she know when she does not belong eschatological fears of his youth, “it was having an infinitude of to the proud, and in its pride utterly miserable, confraternity teeth drawn without cocaine” (55). The otherworldly retribution that her husband can boast longstanding membership of, that this still religious young homosexual writer envisages to alongside such living and dead masters of pen and pain as be visited upon his sinning soul becomes nightmarish reality a James Joyce, a Vladimir Nabokov, a John Updike and the for Toomey’s brother-in-law Carlo Campanati during World chronicler of their, and his own, stomatological sufferings, War II. In a subterranean cell whose walls are washed medical Martin Amis. Listen to me wailing, I could invite my dentally white, the Bishop of Moneta and leader of the local resistance uninformed spouse or, to preserve my self-esteem, send her forces is made by his Nazi interrogators to witness the torture to the bulky tome called Experience. But exhaustive as it is of a fourteen-year old member of his congregation. The exact in the treatment it offers of its writer’s self-confessed “dental location where all her suffering is inflicted on the teenage girl monomania”, the memoir of Amis fils falls badly short of true Annamaria is an “old-fashioned dental chair” (476), and the encyclopaedic comprehensiveness, as it overlooks the greatest nature of the girl’s ordeal is clarified by the priest, who prays dental precursor F. X. Enderby’s “Odontiad”. It is this “saga of “that the devil may depart from these poor men”, her brutal man’s teeth” whose chipped-off fragments, scattered around torturers (477). the Burgess canon, this modest piece endeavours to gather together for the benefit of my blissfully ignorant wife, and the The tragedy of dental eschatology can, when taken to its cariously curios readers of the Newsletter. extreme, turn into comedy. It is not the “joke toothache,” complete with a pillowcase round the sufferer’s head as Shortly after its being proposed, the project of writing “the described by Martin Amis that I have in mind here (cf. poetic record of dental decay in thirty-two books” is abandoned Experience 64). It has more to do with the carnivalesque by the despairing hero of The Clockwork Testament, the sequel ambiguity of what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as grotesque originally meant to conclude the Enderby-series (410-11). realism in which “degradation digs a bodily grave for a new What the tetralogy’s eponym cannot possibly know is that birth” as the “people’s laughter” transforms the horrible into his Prospero-style resignation around novel’s end is doubly the ridiculous (Rabelais 20). The representation, at the pointless: not only will he be resurrected in Enderby’s Dark beginning of Nothing Like the Sun, of the village bogeyman, Lady for the purpose of placating kind readers of the book the “freshwater mariner” Jack Hoby, is a case in point. “Hoby’s miscalled in its subtitle Enderby’s End, but his pet idea of the face,” as it appears to a young Shakespeare and his siblings, Odontiad is neither as daringly original nor as desperately “was too much the painted devil’s to summon the child’s fear hopeless as he believes it to be when he stares down the in daylight – an eye shut forever, cheek-scores that dust loved, barrel of an enraged lady-fan’s revolver. At that dramatic black teeth showing their waists, a party-beard full of crumbs” moment, Enderby’s maker and would-be casual destroyer (Nothing 5) . Anthony Burgess was more than half-way through his own lifelong Odontiad consisting of thirty two novels – practically With his blackened teeth, Hoby is just one in a long line of his entire fictional oeuvre. Isn’t that somewhat too long for a dentally challenged low-lifers peopling the underworld of dental record, one may well ask. But then, if the “history of man Burgess’s fiction. Rotten or missing teeth, receding gums, is the history of pain”, as the titular hero of Vladimir Nabokov’s and the resulting halitosis are symptoms that have as much Pnin concludes when, deprived of his money, his wife, and his to do with the social as with the medical status of Burgess’s denture, he realises that he has “nofing left, nofing, nofing”, ragged army of Elizabethan thugs, East-End swindlers, and and if we accept (340), as Martin Amis seems to accept, that Oriental panhandlers of every race and age. In comparison “nine out of ten bad things happen at the dentist’s” (Experience with his mental vision of a “proud high London”, young Will 236), then not even the full lifework of such a prolific novelist as Shakespeare, or WS in Nothing Like the Sun, finds the sights Anthony Burgess will appear to be out of proportion to the dire and sounds of the local alehouse particularly repulsive. Filled to subject of dental ailment. A “profound theme,” said Burgess capacity on the night of a rowdy May Day, the place is “choked according to his first American monographer Geoffrey Aggeler, with the low and their stink, bad breath, black teeth, foul loud “needs tackling again and again” (quoted in Anthony Burgess 143). holes of country mouths” (25). Similar vistas of oral and moral

6 malaise open up to Victor Crabbe in Malaya, to Edwin Spindrift ravished is due to the bold lover’s “little denture” coming in Soho, and to F. X. Enderby – just about everywhere. Sitting loose at the worst possible moment, Paul’s sexual exploits are tailor-wise, motionless and incomprehensive on his bed, the Ah laughable at best and despicable at worst. If sex and teeth did Wing of The Enemy in the Blanket, with “a fixed smile on his not, according to the autobiographer’s own testimony, turn out mouth empty of teeth” (291) is not unlike the illiterate Spanish to be so for Martin Amis (Experience 121), with Paul Hussey immigrant Carmen in The Doctor Is Sick revealing “a smiling the two are certainly coterminous. mess of decay, gum recession and metal” when she first opens her mouth to speak (53), or her friend the sandwich-board As the happy case of Amis junior as well as many a character man ‘Ippo, who stares at the protagonist from a face “lined in Burgess’s fiction illustrates, one’s libido can indeed outlast and grimy, his upper lip sunk in where the wedge of teeth was one’s dental potency. Nevertheless, in Burgess’s novels – and missing” (96). Mostly funny and invariably hideous, some of possibly in our real, non-fictional life as well – the possession these toothless figures can be almost as moving as anything of strong, healthy teeth almost always suggests vigorous in Nabokov at his most poignant, whether it be the temporary appetites of more than one kind. Whenever Rosemary Michael, helplessness of a deeply humane Pnin or the darkest despair the conspicuous object of everybody’s desire in Beds in the that the nameless old man is plunged into in the short story East, strolls down the street, teeth gleam from Indian shops “Signs and Symbols”. Illustrating this compassionate aspect “in frank concupiscence” (433). And that in spite – or precisely of Burgess’s fiction is the elderly man that a fugitive Spindrift because – of the fact that Rosemary’s too perfect charms glimpses in a wooden hut of an office “sitting at a table entirely lack “the humanising distortion which makes for a more laboriously extracting an upper denture, then looking at it civilised comeliness ” (392). Rosemary’s super- or subhuman seriously, then fitting it back in again with a headshake of beauty is epitomised by a set of “ridiculously white and even” resignation” (The Doctor 130). teeth (92). If Rosemary is a dumb Eurasian brunette, with his Nordic face shining as “a cliché of handsomeness”, the Home What the anonymous old man probably resigns himself to is Guard officer Bannon-Fraser is there to set the racial and an acceptance of time passing never to be redeemed – the gender balance right. When he laughs, the Scotsman shows irreversible deterioration of his denture, his own body and, “inevitably strong, white teeth” (The Enemy in the Blanket 219- worst of all, his once youthful spirit. And it is not only the 20). marginal characters like the old man with teeth in hand or Nabby Adams with pains in the back and teeth dropping out In Burgess’s novels animal health and beastly beauty are often with a drunk’s scurvy whose dental loss is associated with the coupled with elemental, unthinkingly brutal strength – and loss of juvenile vitality. Though still in early middle age, Victor both with flashing white teeth. Much to the consternation of his Crabbe is derisively equated by his separated wife Fenella with English-born superior, the booze-sick Nabby Adams, Police- the external symptoms of aging: “You are,” she sums him up Corporal Alladad Khan horrifyingly tears a chicken with his in a Prufrockian synecdoche enhanced in its cruelty, “this pate teeth (Time for a Tiger 183-84). Of a different social class but and mouth of missing teeth…” (Beds in the East 484). Enderby, a similar natural disposition is Monsignor Campanati, a dark- a mere forty-five, has to be defended by a prissy schoolma’m complexioned Italian who also eats with “strong crushing teeth” arriving from the future to conduct an educational time-trip to repeatedly impressing the narrator of Earthly Powers with “his the poet’s twentieth-century bedroom, “Yes,” she snaps at big fine teeth as he tore into meat” (112, 419). Another prelate a giggling pupil, “we all remark the scant hair, the toothless of a deep brown hue, St. Augustine of Hippo is clearly seen in jaws, the ample folds of flesh rising and falling. But what has a vision by Enderby with “thirty-two wholesome and gleaming prettiness to do with greatness, eh?” (Inside Mr Enderby teeth […] flashing like two ivory blades” as “the African Bishop 14). Aging is even more firmly associated with dental loss in and saint and chider” gnashes out “condemnatory silver Latin” Nothing Like the Sun, where mutability emerges as the one (The Clockwork Testament 411). In the light of Burgess’s central theme of AB’s narrative – as it does in the poetry of the Manichean leanings, it may not be entirely accidental if the novel’s protagonist WS. In a diary entry similar, in form if not violent beauty and significant colour-scheme of these scenes in substance, to Stephen Dedalus’s journal concluding James of merciless mastication evoke the image of Lucifer chewing Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, WS portrays Brutus, Cassius and Judas in the lowermost circle of Dante’s himself proleptically “as ageing, bald, rheumy, three teeth but Inferno. newly drawn” (Nothing 157). Evil forces of a more obvious type motivate the Neapolitan A man in such a condition, chides the writer of Sonnet 129 Mafiosi responsible for the mafia-style execution of Don Carlo’s himself, “should think it foul shame to drivel and froth so in angelic foster-brother Raffaele in the windy city of Chicago. youth’s lust” (157).1 The renunciation of fleshly joys that WS What these “brainless immigrants” are seen by Toomey to believes to be a moral obligation incumbent on the artist who share with Carlo Campanati is not, of course, their animal eyes ought to “live in a making soul” is forcefully thrust upon the or powerful muscles, but their “fine teeth” – and their acting protagonist of Honey for the Bears by nature and nurture as “instruments of a brain at the top” – the sinister “Big Head” conspiring against his libido. Unlike the “omnifutuant” WS, Paul of the narrator’s slowly evolving Manichaeism (Earthly 307). Hussey is not, as the latter reluctantly admits to an inquisitive The “generic youths” brutalizing Toomey himself in a dark doctor in a Leningrad hospital, a “very highly sexed man”. Roman alleyway decades later have “mindless eyes, slim loins, “There was a time, of course …” he hastens to add (114), strong fists” and, unavoidably, “good teeth” (689). The scene is but in the light of an earlier interview with Dr. Lazurkina, the clearly reminiscent of the acts of gang-violence perpetrated by explanatory emendation sounds rather hollow. What happened little Alex and his droogs, another bunch of violent youngsters on that previous occasion was that the sharp-eyed practitioner making “flash, flash, flash” with the teeth scaring the living of Soviet-style medicine had noticed that his interlocutor’s four daylight out of friend and foe alike with their wolfish “zoobie” teeth at the bottom might “fall out at any given moment” (80). smiles (Clockwork 11, 33). The heartless technocrat at the Whether the intended partner is his wife Belinda, a bunch medical facility treating Alex is as ready to expose his “shining of Vodka-guzzling Leningrad youths of his own sex, or his white zoobies” as is the mindless young delinquent himself. Russian benefactor’s girl Anna, whose escape from being Another good example is the “new chelloveck” (meaning “new

1 “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame…”

7 man”, a quaint Russianism echoing the title of C. P. Snow’s […] Enderby was eventually permitted to have his luggage novelistic homage to a modernising England’s post-war examined with great thoroughness. The examiner was a hard achievements in nuclear research) with the “real horroshow man in outdoor middle age. blue glazzies” (eyes, that is), or his boss Dr. Brodsky baring “What’s this?” “all his white zoobies” as he laughs at little Alex’s naïve sort of “A kind of denture adhesive or tooth glue. A Spanish product. rationalism (42, 92). Glorious hero of Soviet space-exploration For affixing dentures on the gums or, in the case of the upper and, by no means accidentally, eponym of a street in Alex’s prosthesis, to the hard palate.” dystopian US-SU, Yuri Gagarin succeeds in broadening that “What?” big smile into no less than cosmic dimensions as he shows Enderby was roughly prevented from demonstrating. “triumphant teeth to the universe” in Honey for the Bears (11). (Enderby’s Dark Lady 515)

Man-beast or machine-man, the perfectly toothed cannot What rough treatment, one wonders, would be meted out to by possibly be fully human. It takes the tameness attendant that hard man at the customs to a man of dark Mediterranean on the sedentary life of the true intellectual – as opposed looks caught with the dangerous weapon of two miniature to the physical vigour exhibited by the technician of power, ivory-blades concealed in the mouth. The name of Augustine in that treasonous clerk of Julien Benda’s alluded to in the his passport or the occupation given as saint would be no more first Enderby novel – and the maturing effect of age for the likely to give effective protection from the wrath of immigration Burgessian hero to achieve full human stature.2 No wonder authorities today than being a poet did to the man called that practically all of Burgess’s major writer-figures have Enderby in that fictional 1976 of his. One doesn’t need a set of conspicuously yellow, rather than gleaming white, teeth. steadily deteriorating teeth to remind one that the world is not In righteous anger, F. Alexander bares his stained, yellow becoming a better place as the years go by. zoobies in A Clockwork Orange. WS’s most potent rival, Master Chapman makes his first appearance in Nothing Like the Sun Works Cited “yawning, showing stained teeth” (116). WS himself, as noted Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. Alabama: above, repeatedly speaks of his own “bad teeth” (Nothing 146), not to mention the really sorry condition in which the older Alabama UP, 1979. playwright Robert Green’s teeth are seen for a moment by Amis, Martin. Experience. 2000. London: Vintage, 2001. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Trans. Helene Christopher Marlow in (121). The Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dead Man in Deptford Iswolsky. Bloomington: Midland-Indiana University Press, 1984. only man of letters in the Burgess oeuvre free from that human Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. 1962. Harmondsworth: stain in the mouth, a writer with “a fine set of teeth” preserved Penguin, 1972. until old age when they are kicked in by the “generic youths” -----. The Clockwork Testament. 1975. The Complete Enderby. 379-479. described above, is Kenneth Marchal Toomey. But then, -----. The Complete Enderby. London: Penguin, 1995. -----. Beds in the East. 1959. The Malayan Trilogy. 375-577. the narrator of Earthly Powers is an artist of the inferior sort. His betters – a Ford Madox Ford or a James Joyce – would -----. Byrne. 1995. London: Vintage, 1996. certainly not “give such teeth as [they] have” for Toomey’s -----. A Dead Man in Deptford. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994. -----. The Doctor Is Sick. 1960. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. popular success if the price was the “cliché, half-truth, -----. Earthly Powers. 1980. New York: Avon, 1981. compromise, timidity” characterising the young upstart’s “facile -----. Enderby Outside 1968. The Complete Enderby. 193-378. craft” (195, 312). The painful lesson that Toomey takes rather -----. Enderby’s Dark Lady. 1984. The Complete Enderby. 481-631. too long to learn is that Ezra Pound’s fury was badly misplaced: -----. The Enemy in the Blanket. 1958. The Malayan Trilogy. 187-373. no civilization can help being botched – and somewhat gone in -----. Honey for the Bears. 1963. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. the teeth (456, 465). What is delivered to Toomey in the form of -----. Inside Mr Enderby. 1963. The Complete Enderby. 7-191. that tooth-busting kick is poetic justice pure and simple. -----. The Malayan Trilogy. 1972. London: Minerva, 1996. -----. Nothing Like the Sun. 1964. London: Vintage, 1992. -----. Time for a Tiger. 1956. The Malayan Trilogy. 1-186. True as all that may be, an article on the tooth-motif in the Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. 1957. Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962. Library novels of Anthony Burgess should by no means end on such a of America, 1996. 299-436. serious note. From Honey for the Bears through the Enderby- series and Earthly Powers, the adventures of the wayward denture are a recurring source of novelistic mirth in virtually the entire Burgess canon. Paul Hussey’s doomed attempts at keeping his recalcitrant prosthesis in place now with a toothpick, now with a piece of well-used chewing gum and now again with a bit of bone-dry orange peel could be a fine example. Funny as they are in themselves, the primal reason behind these un-heroic trials and tribulations is of an even keener comic effect: mistaken for somenarkotik , Paul’s tube of prosthesis-gluing substance called Dentisement is promptly confiscated by a stern Soviet customs officer. Something very similar happens thousands of miles to the West of Leningrad and decades into the future of Hussey’s early sixties to Enderby on the poet’s arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. One does not necessarily have to be familiar with Burgess’s earlier 2 “Gloomily, Enderby reflected that most modern poets were not merely sufficiently clean but novel exposing the tragicomedy of totalitarianism to have positively natty. T. S. Eliot, with his Lloyd’s Bank nonsense, had started all that, a real treason a strong feeling of déjà vu on reading the following fictional of clerks” (Inside 34). The facetious reference is made to J. Benda’s La trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) condemning the perceived irrationalism and/or conserva- description: tive political engagement of such contemporaneous French intellectuals as Bergson, Barres or Daudet. The “treason” Eliot is charged with by Enderby is of a slightly different kind (his conservative dress code, his “sell-out” to the City, etc.), but Benda’s term has much relevance to the obscurantism and political opportunism represented by Dr Brodsky and his associates’ science in A Clockwork Orange.

8 Throw it to the Wind: Burgess and “Caution” by Marty Phipps What is in a name? Well, quite a lot if you’re The other unbuttoned, bellicose Burgess and sudden sun and stumbled over mast a lapsed Catholic novelist in need of models protagonist with a surname echoing or and crackling twigs, hazelnuts falling on my and mentors—literary saints to swear by, a evoking his author’s is Byrne, that hellbent, shoulders occasionally like timid welcomes cloud of witnesses to keep lonely faith with Byronic plyer of pen, penis and paintbrush, to rural Austria. There was a crow’s nest high in a philistine world, a devout brotherhood in who commissions a biography of himself to above and a crow croaked caution caution. which one’s own name can stand as a badge stand as a “cautionary tale”—even though for of membership. “The name is,” explains him “caution” must be what “Compromise” He doesn’t heed the warning, fortunately, and Anthony Burgess about ‘Anthony Burgess,’ and “Cowardice” were for Cyrano, the Strehler’s house is just around the corner, sounding a bit like James Bond as he begins, hated enemy. Of course, where Cyrano where he makes memorable contact with “an international one—Bourgois, Borges, is all romantic heroics, championing love literary greatness. A small victory in what his Borghese,” and then notes that it symbolizes and honour, Byrne is all roguery, fathering brother-in-law, much like Cyrano, called “the for him “a concept, that of high citizenship bastards and botched art, “spurting with long war” of life. of a burg or borough” (Little Wilson and Big brave bravura/ Into the muliebris naturalis, Burgess was regularly in contact with literary God, 7). He omits from this list several other /Indifferent, naturalis as Natura,” a sort of greatness himself, writing critical studies or nomenclative matches or near-misses, like swashbuckler of nihilism, relishing the ruin biographies, as we know, on numerous major the Bürger family in Earthly Powers, not so he makes of himself, eager for whatever ugly authors. Sometimes he could sound tentative dissimilar to Joyce’s Blooms of Dublin (“loud, end or eternal aftermath await. He is Cyrano’s or testy introducing these books, as if cowed quarrelsome, always sympatisch. Uncle Otto dark opposite, an emblem of the moral risk by the criticism from specialists he sometimes is an Ueberfalstaff and the dark-haired Gretel the maverick spirit runs, the costs he can received, like the Princeton Shakespeare is a foul-mouthed siren who can make the potentially pay for spurning convention’s scholars he mentions in the Confessions Emperor himself ejaculate spontaneously. cautions. The epigraph to his story is a poem who dismissed his biography of the Bard. He The book is dedicated to the greater glory from the Enderby novels: cautiously notes in the foreword to that book of life”). And there are two others, as that “this present book contains conjecture— “quarrelsome” and headstrong as the Burgess duly and timidly signaled by phrases like ‘It ‘Prudence, prudence,’ the pigeons call, of the Confessions, and just as roused by well may be that…’ or ‘Conceivably, about ‘Scorpions lurk in the gilded meadow, thoughts of “glory,” as if they were in some this time…’, but it eschews invention. There An eye is embossed on the island wall sense embodiments of their creator. is, however, a chapter which attempts to The running tap casts a static shadow.’ reconstruct the first performance of Hamlet, The first is Cyrano de Bergerac, the eponym and here I have silenced the little cracked ‘Caution, caution,’ the rooks proclaim, of a work whose spirit, I suspect, Burgess fanfares of caution.’” It may be just a dashed- ‘The dear departed, the weeping widow, found profoundly congenial. His 1970 off preamble designed to silence the little Will meet in you in the core of flame. translation of that quintessentially “French” complaints of critics, but the context in which The running tap casts a static shadow. text distills all the finesse, flamboyance, Burgess abruptly grows bold here and balks flair, éclat, sang-froid—all the romantic at his own writerly misgivings and throws ‘Act, act!’ the ducks give voice. and martial panache—of the original. The caution to the wind has a nice aptness: in the ‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow combative, polemicising figure of Cyrano chapter in question the curtain is about to go Drain the sacrament of choice. delivers monologues that sound like the sort up at the Globe theatre, on whose hallowed The running tap casts a static shadow.’ of quixotic artistic manifestoes Burgess might boards an actor named Jacke Wilson once have delivered himself, given the chance. The actions of a life—to offer a possible walked (according to a stage-direction in Besides the early speech to the spiritless reading of these verses in the context of a First Folio play), and this was one more fop (scorned for his “Lack of fire, spunk, Byrne—which pass through time like water namesake he liked to invoke in a spirit of spark, of genius, pride/ Lack of the lyrical flowing from a faucet, finally assume a artistic kinship, a sort of imaginary ancestor and picturesque,/ Of moral probity—in brief, shape, “a static shadow”—amount in the he could use to prove that boldness ran in of nose”) and the death speech (where all end to a story which may be judged, by the family, that bravado was in his blood, the this finds its hated antithesis in “the noseless posterity or God. The stakes are high (an source of that inspired incaution that drove one, all bone,” and life is defined as a fight “eye” is watching, the fate of the “departed” him on with its ‘Act, act!’ against all the “old enemies—Falsehood, and “widow” somehow hinge on it), the risks Compromise, Prejudice, Cowardice… are real (“scorpions lurk”), advice is given Marty Phipps is a one-man word factory Stupidity”), there is also Cyrano’s lengthy (“Prudence,” “Caution,” “Enjoy”), and a choice operating out of Vancouver Island where defiance of the realist Le Bret. Here Cyrano must be made, weighty as a “sacrament.” If he lives with his wife and family. He loves articulates better than anywhere else his all the images aren’t precisely explicable, the George Bernard Shaw, G K Chesterton and own ethos, which is a Gallic version of what gist is clear: a life is the sum of its choices, Anthony Burgess. He is also a fine poet and Count Ludovico in The Courtier by Castiglioni an ongoing creative act, and urgency, even one of the funniest letter-writers I’ve ever calls “sprezzatura,” or an effortless grace in audacity, is called for, a zeal something like a known. everything (with style understood here not merely as empty show or adornment but as a religious believer’s, or an artist’s. symbol of one’s own spirit, as a personal art). Kenneth Toomey, the novelist It is a soliloquy that upholds aesthetic bravado narrator of Earthly Powers, is diffident if not as an ultimate value, and you can almost hear despairing about the worth of his own art, and Burgess’s murmurs of approval from offstage: overawed by the huge gusto and resolve of his universally admired brother-in-law, the Is it Pope. His rueful retrospective account of his Best I should think it best to make a visit life notes numerous failures and shameful Rather than make a poem? Relish the savour compromises, but on one occasion at least he Of Stuffy salons? Seek condescension, is steely and spirited in literature’s service: he favour, braves Nazi Germany to rescue the Austrian Influence, introductions? No, no, no, author Jakob Strehler from a fate in the death Thank you …, no. No, thank you. But to go camps, heroically alone. Free of the filthy world, to sing, to be Blessed with a voice vibrating virility, I took the road north toward Seyring. A village Blessed with an eye equipped for looking at idiot appeared from behind a hedge and went Things as they really are, cocking my hat gurrh at me, pulling burrs off his dirty trousers. Where I please, at a word—yes or no— After a mile or so of blank fields I came to a Fighting or writing: this is the true life.” wood on my left. I entered its dapple of gloom

9 Oh, How The Wheel Becomes Him! By Christine Lee Gengaro Write what you know. This familiar morsel Burgess wrote music and words every of advice is hard to follow when the subject single day. They form the hub of a of your musings is a polymath. To write wheel, if you will. Every discipline and effectively about Anthony Burgess, one must subject that Burgess draws upon besides understand or at least be familiar with more than one body of knowledge. We can certainly those, are a spoke in the wheel, because appreciate his novels from a strictly literary they draw upon the hub for stability standpoint. Likewise, we can look at his and support. The spokes: linguistics, compositions in a purely musicological vein. politics, religion, history, education, To do this, however, would be to limit oneself Shakespeare, Joyce, and many others, to a small part of the picture. To see the grand I’m sure, fan out from the hub and vista that is Burgess’s creative oeuvre, we interlace with one another. I do not must prepare ourselves to discuss not just believe that any of us, as individuals, literature and music, but religion, linguistics, and politics. If we, as scholars, favor one have achieved a perfect understanding of these topics and remain ignorant of the of this wheel of knowledge in its others, or retain only a surface knowledge of entirety. But that, my fellow travelers, these crossed disciplines, will we ever truly is why we have found each other and grasp the richness of the tapestry he left us to why we continue to find each other at study? After all, can a person ignorant of the symposia, online, and on e-mail: to share rules of imitative counterpoint truly understand our specialties, to explain aspects of what it means when a character sketches Burgess’s literature and music that may a fugue in his head? Can a monoglot even begin to appreciate the neologisms Burgess have remained hidden to all but a few, seemed to create by the barrelful? Can the to rebuild and re-imagine his incredible casual reader catch a fraction of the endless wheel of knowledge one spoke at a time. literary allusions and references with which Burgess peppers his prose? Christine Lee Gengaro took her PhD at the University of Southern California and My work as a Burgess scholar has crossed now lectures on music at Los Angeles from my home discipline of music to that of City College. As well as contributing to the literature, and because of that I feel that I specialist music magazine Resonance, she is am following in Burgess’s footprints a bit. In currently working on her second novel and a book about Stanley Kubrick’s use of music in This Man and Music, Burgess describes how music encouraged him to seek knowledge in A Clockwork Orange. In her own words she other disciplines. As a young man, Burgess’s ‘aspires to become a polymath’. appreciation for music, fed through the nurturing notes of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faun and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and Tannhäuser, inspired forays into literature; in listening to various settings of the Faust legend, he felt compelled to compare Marlowe’s and Goethe’s versions. Burgess was required to read Marlowe’s version in school, but found the settings of Goethe’s text more musically satisfying. Vocal music helped to fuel Burgess’s love for and interest in foreign languages. Even as a young man, Burgess was fascinated by translations, trying his hand at some opera texts and the German translation of Albert Giraud’s poetry for Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Burgess did not rely on music as the doorway to other disciplines for long, becoming fluent in other bodies of knowledge, but he always seemed to return to music for structural ideas for his literature, for inspiration for his narratives. Yet Burgess never feared trying new things, experimental fiction, non- fiction, essays, even a musical or two. All of his efforts document the nimbleness of his mind and the adventurousness of his spirit. The way I interpret my responsibility as a Burgess scholar is this: to study his work is to strive to be a polymath, to break out of one’s comfortable area of expertise and into new territory.