The Novel Poetry of Anthony Burgess

It would be impossible in a short article to do justice to “the frightening fecundity” (in the words of Kingsley Amis) of Anthony Burgess, or John Burgess Wilson, to give him the name he was born with. So it seems to me better to come in at an angle, as it were, and look at poetry in his novels.

The main source of this would be the Enderby novels. The first three, Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside and The Clockwork Testament were produced more or less together (1963, 1968, 1974) and the last, Enderby’s Dark Lady, as a kind of an afterthought, or perhaps we might say coda, ten years later in 1984.

There are many poems here, most of them Enderby’s, but one belongs to Rawcliffe, his enemy, and the thief of his work in The Pet Beast, his Minotaur poem. Enderby sets out to kill Rawcliffe, and runs him to ground in Tangier, where he is living in some squalor with an Arab boy, and dying messily, disgustingly. Enderby finds himself nursing Rawcliffe until he dies.

Back to the poems. Here is one of them.

Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river

The envious Severn, like a sleeping dog

That wakes at whiles to snarl and slaver

Or growl in dream its snores of fog.

Love haunted in the casual summer:

A murmuring aphrodisiac,

The sun excites in the noonday shimmer,

When Jack is sweating, Joan on her back.

There are four more stanzas, but you will have to read Enderby Outside to read them.

Further examples of Burgess’s poetry: the novel The Case of Abba, published in 1977, recounts briefly and economically the death of Keats. Abba abba is of course the rhyming pattern of a sonnet’s octet, and in this book may be found translations by Burgess of some of the 2279 sonnets (Gummy, what a performance!) of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, a man Keats may very well have met in Florence. Belli was a great poet; indeed the American poet and critic Robert Penn Warren said the greatest nineteenth-century poets were Keats and Belli—an extraordinary claim when one considers Tennyson, Browning, Emily Dickinson et al. Burgess begins translating Belli’s sonnets in the Roman dialect at the back of the Keats novel. In the end he translates seventy of the sonnets. Livia Burgess pointed out that he translated them into a Manchester voice, and English verse into the harsh, guttural Roman Italian.

He confined himself to the theological ones, but gave full scope to the employment of the blasphemy of the Roman gutters. He speculated in his Confessions that Keats, if he had lived, might have learned to employ the colloquial, the absurd and the blasphemous.

Keats wrote his own epitaph, which is on one of the gravestones of the Protestant cemetery in Rome. On Burgess’s grave is written ABBA ABBA. AB is also, of course, Anthony Burgess. Here is one of the translations of the seventy-odd sonnets. It is “Noah on Land”:

Drunken yes. Near his palazzo; safe on shore

Noah planted vines and fondly watched them sprout,

And when he saw the luscious grapes fill out

(One bunch weighed ten or twenty pounds, or more)

He crushed the juice in ferment, let it pour

Down the red lane, and gave a toper’s shout:

It’s good. It’s fucking good. His drunken bout

First made him high and, after, hit the floor.

 

That was strong stuff, he was not used to it.

Like all drunkards, snoring in the sun,

He lay as flat as a five-lira bit,

But—shame—our patriarch had no breeches on

And—but I’d better quote you Holy Writ—

“Displayed his balls and prick to everyone.”

Bellissimo! as I believe the term is.

Like John Betjeman, Burgess began his poetic career early. Like Pope too, who “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came”, though he was probably lying. In Burgess’s memoir Little Wilson and Big God, published in 1987, he shows that he was, from a very early age, responsive to words, many of them indecent (pee, poo, belly, bum, drawers in Michael Flanders’s memorable formulation). Perhaps most little boys (and little girls) are. Burgess gives us

 

Hum, hum, kiss my bum,

If I give a party, you can’t come.

 

He speaks about the power of such trivia. “I have a repertoire of about a thousand popular songs and only one line of Goethe.” I wonder what that one line can be? “Herz, mein Herz, was soll das geben”? perhaps? Burgess began a class magazine at his Catholic school. “The one copy had a circulation of about thirty classmates and as many of the staff as could get hold of it.” The staff were on the lookout (of course) for blasphemy, heresy and disaffection. They did not find it, as Burgess says. What they did find was “The Song of the Wiggle-Poof” and this:

A prism is a useful thing,

It bends refracting light,

When tied onto a piece of string

It’s useful in a fight.

Warmed in a sauce or chilled with ice,

It makes a splendid meal,

With prunes, asparagus or rice

Or even candied peel.

Vapid perhaps, but it does show an ability to handle rhyme and metre which many (most?) people never achieve. Have you ever read those sad little verses of remembrance in local newspapers? My younger daughter was the only one in her class of eleven-year-olds who could do it.

I believe a poet needs to master form before he attempts to fill it with content. There is an essay, which I cannot lay my hand on, where a teacher of the writing of Chinese poetry to Japanese students tells them that they must not on any account attempt to inject anything of a personal nature into their verse. What then is left? “Why, the words, the words will do it for you. Listen to what they have to say about it.” W.H. Auden also has some apposite remarks. He says he knows a poet, not as someone who has something to say (we all have something to say) but as someone who cares more about how to say it.

Here is the first real poem of Burgess’s that I can find:

I wrote on the beach, with a stick of salty wood,

“Our deeds are but as writings on the shore”,

Believing it: I never thought them more

Than prey to growling time: all ill, all good

Were friable as sand. There where I stood,

The wild wind whistled, driving all before,

And the inexorable waves, with a damped roar,

Strode on, like beasts that smell their living food.

 

So I forgot. But ages, older grown,

Revisiting, I caught that distant day.

The sands still stretched, without life and alone,

But from one spot the waves had sheered away,

Fearful to touch it. There, as if on stone

Stark and clear-chiselled, that inscription lay.

Burgess says, “A touch of Hopkins in the sprung rhythm of the first line, but the rest is a mixture of Meredith and Shelley. I was doing my best, but that best was not good enough.” I think he is being too hard on himself. This poem seems the authentic voice of Enderby, if a very young Enderby, nuggety stuff. Enderby, like John Donne, is criticised by Rawcliffe for lack of mellifluousness, for too much meaning. Form comes first, then content, as I reiterate, boringly, till the cows come home.

How does a poem come into being? How do the words line up, crowding each other into groups that rhyme and scan? Enderby seems to know how it works. In a poem he writes for Arry (you speaks it with a haitch), the cook who is in love with Thelma (the bottlewasher), it is well exemplified:

I have raised and poised a fiddle

Which, will you lend it ears,

Will utter music’s model,

The music of the spheres.

By God I think not Purcell

Nor Arne could match my airs,

Perfect beyond rehearsal,

The music of the spheres.

I think rehearsal is the only rhyme for Purcell that exists. I ignore Gerard Manley Hopkins’s nursle as a ridiculous word of his own coinage, A glance into my Chambers dictionary though, reveals I am wrong, that it means nuzzle, which gives some sense to a line I had previously found incomprehensible. Hopkins also gives me reversal as another rhyme.

Not that its virtue’s vastness

The terror of drift of stars.

For subtlety and softness,

My music of the spheres.

I suppose something could have been done with fastness, not in the sense of the state of being fast, but rather a prison or castle keep. But, reading through the poem again, I see that Enderby/Burgess’s assonance and off-rhymes are the rule, as in MacNeice’s celebrated Bagpipe Music:

It’s no go the merry-go-round, it’s no go the rickshaw.

All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.

Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,

Their walls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

It takes a master of the rules to break them.

 

The spheres that feed its working,

Their melody swells and soars

On thinking of your marking

My music of the spheres

 

I feel rather like Kinbote annotating Shade’s poem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

This music and this fear’s

Work of your maiden years.

What a lovely word maiden is, so redolent of young girls, demure in silk negligees, surrounded by adoring young men in straw boaters—rendered by Burne-Jones of course.

Why shut longer your ears?

Look, how the live earth flowers …

 

An aaaa rhyming quatrain.

 

The land speaks my intent.

Bear me accompaniment.

 

The final clinching couplet. Did Thelma like it? Alas, we are not told.

Rawcliffe opines, “The only people who can write verse after the age of thirty are the people who do the competitions.” Very true, and we are a select band, a couple of hundred of us passing round the winners’ twenty-five quid, quilting and requilting our verses, in order to enter them again. I won twice in the Spectator with the same poem, a three-year interval between.

I want now to turn to what I might call prose poetry in Burgess’s work. I shall start with his Shakespeare novel Nothing Like the Sun (1964). Here is an excerpt: “‘Your Venus poem had a epigraph.’ He mouthed the Latin, loud, sounding round brown vowels.”

Look at that: “loud, sounding round brown vowels”—the internal rhyme and assonance, the almost tongue-twister-like quality.

“Perhaps the better will corrupt the worse,” said WS. (“WS” gives us a reference back to the sonnets, which are dedicated to Mr W.H., who is probably, though there is some dispute about this, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, conspicuously handsome, and therefore the youth who is addressed in the first hundred or so sonnets and with whom the much older Shakespeare was passionately in love.)

“Well,” [said Shakespeare] to Chapman, “I am glad you at least like the epigraph.”

“Oh, it was well enough. There was a sufficiency of lusty country matter in it.”

This, of course, is a nod to Hamlet’s suggestive talk to Ophelia of “country matters”. Polonius was quite right: he was trying to get her knickers down.

“Each of us has his own way. One way is not another [a reference to Shakespeare’s homosexuality]. We must do what we can.”

This presumes Chapman is straight, and that suggests Marlowe (who was gay as the Gordons and proud to be so) was Shakespeare’s rival in sonnet eighty-six:

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,

Bound for the prize of all too precious you,

That did my ripe thoughts in my brain rehearse

Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew.

Nothing Like the Sun continues:

He looked Harry full in the eyes and declaimed:

Presume not then, ye flesh-confounded souls,

That cannot bear the full Castalian bowls,

Which sever mounting spirits from their senses,

To look in this deep fount for thy pretences.

“You are welcome,” said WS, “to my full Castalian bowls.”

Is this quatrain Chapman’s? Or is it Burgess’s? I am inclined to the latter view, which means Burgess is responsible for the wordplay, the richness of “flesh-confounded”, the joy of “mounting spirits”.

However, enough of that or I shall have no time for the pseudo-Russian of A Clockwork Orange (from the expression “queer as a clockwork orange”) surprisingly the only one of Burgess’s novels to have spawned a film, which I must confess I rather disliked, in spite of Malcolm McDowell’s bravura performance. The novel is about free will. Can we be compelled to be virtuous through Skinnerian aversion therapy? And if we can, then should we? The film covers this well enough. What it lacks is Alex’s voice. For Burgess has invented for him a language, almost as rich as Russell Hoban’s in Riddley Walker, a book Burgess much admired.

This language appears to be based on Russian, with its talk of devotchkas, who are young, beddable girls. Alex’s voice swoops in and out, with its repetition of “oh my brothers” as a choric end to each strophe. I would give you more but I have mislaid my copy so you must read yours.

I might mention that Enderby’s swordstick, with which he routs black muggers on the subway, with much letting of blood, has its brother in the real world. Kingsley Amis mentions that Burgess was on the look-out for a swordstick, which if ever menaced, he would draw and brandish, yelling, “F*** off, I’ve got cancer!”

That’s about it. Let me end with something from Burgess/Enderby as a sort of coda:

Another instalment of the human condition is beginning. Out of it: he is well out of it, you say, Andrea? But no: he is in it, we are all always in it. Do not think that anyone can escape it merely by … I will not utter the word: it is quite irrelevant. Out of it, indeed; he is not out of it at all.        

John Whitworth lives in Kent.