Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 3, December, 2000
 
Contents
Introduction  (by Ben Forkner) 	P. 1
The Dependent Mind: A Survey of the Novels by Anthony Burgess	P. 4
(by Thomas Stumpf). 	
M/F (by Frank Kermode). 	P. 22
Oedipus Wrecks (by Anthony Burgess)	P. 26
Nothing Like the Sun: Anthony Burgess’s Factification 
of Shakespeare’s Life (by Alan Roughley). 	P. 42
The Malayan Trilogy (by Alan Massie). 	P. 57
Any Old Form (by Peter ffrench Hodges). 	P. 61
Anthony Burgess Center
Université d'Angers
Maison des Sciences humaines  
2, rue Alexandre Fleming  
49066 Angers Cedex 01 (France)
Newsletter editor: Ben Forkner
Associate editor: Valérie Neveu

Introduction
By Ben Forkner

Essays
Over the years I have heard a number of scholars and readers of Burgess vainly inquire about the contents of one of the few essays on his work that Burgess ever mentioned. Vainly, because the essay was delivered once, and once only, in the form of a faculty lecture at the University of North Carolina in the Fall of 1969, and never published. Burgess happened to be present at the lecture, since he had just been invited for a short stay at the university as writer-in-residence. It was a revelation to him, in many respects. He singled it out for praise twice in print, once in each volume of his autobiography. Here is what he writes in You’ve Had Your Time (Heineman:London, 1990, p.206):
Tom Stumpf, a young professor of English with children he taught to sing Purcell, kindly laid on a post-Thanksgiving turkey dinner for us. He did more. He arranged to give an evening lecture on my work. I was embarrassed at this and decided not to attend, though I was impelled to stay close to the hall where it was given, perhaps in the hope of at least hearing occasional laughter. The rain was heavy as I patrolled the perimeter, so I went in. I was in time to hear Tom dealing with my first hero, Sgt R. Ennis of A Vision of Battlements. The name R. Ennis, Tom said, was a palinlogue of ‘sinner.’ I was surprised to hear this, since I had chosen ‘Ennis’ because, signifying an island, it pointed at the loneliness of the possessor of the name. But I could not deny that what he said was so. The best literary insights were coming from the Americans. They were prepared to look at a writer’s unconscious. They were ready too to take contemporary literature with academic seriousness, thus helping contemporary authors to understand themselves. British universities shut us entirely out.
Most readers of the Newsletter will need to be told that Professor Tom Stumpf has become somewhat of a living legend in Chapel Hill. Worshipped by his students for his wit and wisdom, he has delivered countless lectures of the sort throughout his career. Since I knew he has often been too busy to type them up, and worry them into print, I had little hope that he would be able to find the Burgess lecture thirty years after the event. I am delighted to report that he has not only found it, he has allowed us to publish it for the first time in our Newsletter. The lecture has lost none of its luster and originality after all these years at the bottom of a cardboard box. It remains one of the best surveys of the first half of Burgess’s career, but its freshest (and wholly convincing) insight lies in its analysis of cultural determinism in the novels. Most critics have identified the necessity of moral choice as one of Burgess's central themes, but few have defined as clearly as Professor Stumpf the powerful historical and biological forces in Burgess's work that are always there to oppose the possibility of a fully independent human act or expression. The Anthony Burgess Center is extremely grateful to Professor Stumpf. Let us hope he will now turn his attentions to the second half of Burgess's career. We would also like to thank Sir Frank Kermode for reaching into his past to retrieve an important piece of Burgess commentary, and for sending it to us with a new presentation. This is his review of MF that first appeared in The Listener shortly after the novel was published early in 1971. This was the only review of MF that brought to the book the intellectual depth and curiosity necessary to discern the mythic (and structuralist) patterns of the narrative, and Burgess was deeply touched. He mentions the review, together with a lengthy quotation, in You’ve Had Your Time, pp. 231-232. Given that Sir Frank refers (in his new presentation of the review) to Burgess’s own essay on the novel, “Oedipus Wrecks,” from This Man and Music (Hutchinson: London, 1982, pp. 162-179), Liana Burgess suggested that we print the essay along with the review. We are grateful for the suggestion, especially since This Man and Music is now unfortunately out-of-print. The other three articles we publish were written directly for the Newsletter. Professor Alan Roughley's stimulating analysis of Nothing Like the Sun reassesses Harold Bloom's reading of Burgess through Joyce, and offers new reasons to appreciate the originality of Burgess's Shakespeare. Joyceans, who seldom agree with each other, may take issue with Professor Roughley's dismissive attitude towards Stephen Dedalus (the attitude can be traced back to Hugh Kenner's seminal study, Dublin's Joyce, first published in 1956), but even so, they will find more to discover than to debate in the essay. Alan Massie's article on The Malayan Trilogy was written to honor the new printing of the novels in a single volume in Great Britain. There have been two new printings of Burgess novels since our last Newsletter: The Maylayan Trilogy, and Abba, Abba (with a new introduction by A.S. Byatt). Both books are published by Vintage. The Newsletter concludes with a short appreciation by Peter ffrench Hodges of Burgess's last novel, Byrne, written in verse, and composed on his death bed. In a career filled with original forms and new departures, Byrne may be the most original and unpredictable of all. 
News and Announcements
The main news, of course, is the organization underway to set up our December colloquium on “The Avatars of A Clockwork Orange.” Please see the full announcement elsewhere on our website, and please feel free to contact directly (by e-mail) the members of our Organizing Committee (D. Arnaud, J. Cassini, E. Vernadakis). 
In addition to the colloquium, the Anthony Burgess Center will sponsor two separate events during the year 2001. To begin with, Professor Vernadakis will be leading a university seminar on A Clockwork Orange at the University of Angers. The seminar is given primarily for faculty and students within the University, but the general public is invited to attend. The first meeting of the seminar will be held on January 16 at 11 a.m. in the Anthony Burgess Room at the University Library. Subsequent meetings will be announced in the Newsletter. Finally, later on in the year, probably in April, Professor Kay Smith of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, will be giving the annual Anthony Burgess lecture. Her topic will be “Anthony Burgess and Shakespeare Biography.” As soon as the dates are set, we will announce them in the Newsletter. Once more, I would like to thank everyone who has helped with the Newsletter over the past several months, especially Liana Burgess (for her suggestions and interest), and, as always, Valérie Neveu (without whose good will and unfailing skills the Newsletter would simply not exist).
Newsletter Schedule
Despite our best efforts, it has not always been possible to respect a precise monthly date of publication. Though we will continue to publish two issues a year, in the future they will carry the notice of Fall or Spring. The next issue of the Newsletter will appear in May or June of this year. Please send your contributions to the Editor by mid-April. 

Ben Forkner, Director
Anthony Burgess Center

The Dependent Mind: A Survey of the Novels of 
Anthony Burgess
By Thomas Stumpf

Anthony Burgess has paid a price for his catholic tastes, his wide-ranging intelligence and his sometimes gaudy brilliance. The author of some thirteen novels, not one of them sedate, he has the kind of prodigious fecundity that used to be attributed to Will Shakespeare, a natural genius with a mind, as the amazed Augustans used to say, “nobly wild and extravagant.”   The result is that we are delighted, dazzled, by one or another book and there make an end on it, almost guiltily pleased and quieting our critical faculties with words taken from the blurbs on the dust-jackets: “freewheeling, ” “outrageous,” “comic,” and so on. 
It is as if we were presented with a feast so great and so rich that our rather mean and meager appetites would be embarrassed to eat too much or too long. We are not, at least upon first acquaintance, tempted to make the kind of generalizations about Burgess’s works that we almost inevitably fall into when reading his countryman, Anthony Powell, who, despite his admittedly wide scope, is somehow less pyrotechnic about it all and more comfortably aware of the unities. Each of Burgess’s works seems rich enough to occupy our palates totally, and we obscurely feel that reading them all or thinking about them all together would be a kind of unjustifiable self-indulgence, culminating, as such self-indulgence is likely to do, in acute dyspepsia.

But sooner or later, curiosity begins to make connections, and we find connections forced upon us by Burgess himself. In fact, the novels are united in some fairly obvious ways. The dark lady in Nothing Like the Sun turns out to be Malayan, an immigrant from The Long Day Wanes. Richard Ennis, hero of A Vision of Battlements, is mentioned in The Long Day Wanes; and a poem recited by Ennis turns out to be one of Enderby’s juvenilia. The Arden family, discussed at such length in Nothing Like the Sun, has a latter-day representative in Ted Arden, the confident publican in Right to an Answer. These rather mechanical connections are the first to be noticed; but then we remark certain character-types that tend to recur --the expatriate, the ex-Catholic, the bad husband-- as well as certain motifs. Every novel, for example, has at least one gloriously revealing drunken bash and several vivid and heartfelt descriptions of vomiting. Underlying all of this, however, is a more fundamental unity of theme, a sometimes compassionate, sometimes corrosive awareness of the insufficiency and dependence of the naked mind. It is Milton’s Satan, we should remember, who boasts that "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven" (Paradise Lost, 1, 254-255) . It is almost as if Burgess’s novels undertake a full and bitter refutation of that boast, and of the romantic individualism that lurks behind it. For Burgess, the mind is dependent on its history deeply buried in its culture, and still more deeply embedded in a frequently hostile body; and the isolation which afflicts it is neither splendid nor Promethean, but simply the petulant loneliness of an invalid.

To begin with, Burgess almost never gives us a picture of an unacculturated man. There are few things that are universal in even his major characters, and the minor characters sometimes seem snatched from the wings of a minstrel show or from the dusty files of a dialect comedian. There is a Chinese cook named Ah Wang who eats live mice and black cats and whose “store of medicines” consists of “tiger’s teeth in vinegar, a large lizard in brandy, compounds of lead,and horrible egg nogs.”  Devil of a State boasts a pair of stage Italians, amoral, emotional, lazy, randy, and utterly innocent. Elsewhere in the same novel “the Sino-Irishman or Hibernico-Chinese called Patrick Ong began to play the part or a drunken stage Mick, calling: ‘Sure and I’ll murdher the spalpeens. Where are they till Oi get at them’ ” (p. 51). Finally there is a Chinese taxi-driver who “gave a monotoned commentary on the sights of the town… To pretend that his passengers were blind gave the youth some obscure Chinese satisfaction: ‘Woman cross road now. Two black woman go in shop. Dog sit bite foot. In market fish smell…’ (DOS, p. 11). When there is no better material for his abacus-like enumerations, he is content simply to read license plates. He is matched by a taxi-driver in Honey for the Bears who is a manic-depressive Slav, oscillating between a frightening ebullience and an equally frightening catatonia.

These are, or course, types, simplified for comic purposes; but they also give some idea or the frequency with which Burgess defines his characters in terms of racial, or more properly cultural, stereotypes. Less frequently, but often enough, characters are defined with the same simplicity by their professions. These professional caricatures include an outwardly reasonable psychiatrist given to temper tantrums, an American anthropologist who constantly mutters “But that’s not my field; that’s not my field,” and a liberal vicar who demonstrates his strenuous Christianity by proclaiming after a round of golf “Christ, that was thirsty work.”  In the light of all this, Shakespeare’s thoughts about Ben Jonson in Nothing Like the Sun are particularly ironic: “And yet Ben’s destiny was far removed from my own, blessed as he has been to be able to take the world skin deep --humours and  manners-- and to know that the world takes itself skin deep, though not with Ben’s laws and systems” (p. 216). Burgess, too, is writing about manners, if not humors; and his stage is populated by stage types, and not just because they are funnier than more complicated characters could be.

The reason, it would seem, is that Burgess’s subjects in most of his novels are not just human beings, but human beings as enmeshed in a culture which both defines and delimits them. It is significant that only one of the novels takes place entirely in contemporary England. Malaya, the mythical African state of Dunia, Rome, Tangier, Gibraltar, Tokyo, the Soviet Union, and that floating grand hotel, the SS Polyolbion: these are the settings, not because Burgess is trying to be fashionably exotic but because he is providing us with a series of Kulturkämpfe, pitting one culture and its representatives against others and noting the usually confused, frequently tragicomic outcomes. Even A Clockwork Orange and Nothing Like the Sun, though taking place in England, are considerably distanced in time, and Nothing Like the Sun provides the further complication of the Malayan “dark lady.” The Doctor is Sick is the one exception, but it can boast a generous assortment of immigrants and a protagonist who has just returned from Malaya. In none of the novels are we very long in the company of familiar, comfortable Anglo-Saxons.

As an index of his concern for the apparently superficial trappings of a culture, it is interesting to note how often Burgess provides capsule cultural portraits, usually consisting of no more than a series of concrete nouns with adjectives which constitute what is occasionally called, ironica1ly, “the exile’s dream of home.” Though they occur throughout the novels, these are especially frequent in The Long Day Wanes. Crabbe has a vaguely sentimental vision of home, consisting of "European architecture, and the art galleries, and London on a wet day, river fog, the country in autumn, pubs decorated for Christmas, book-shops, a live symphony orchestra.” (p. 278). Even Rupert Hardman, much more cynical and married to a Moslem, retains a certain nostalgia for “the rain and the weekly papers, the clanking trains and the sooty trees and the girl students in jumpers and silk stockings.” (p. 337). More pathetic is the dream of Rosemary Michael, Eurasian sexpot and wholehearted Anglophile. “She loved the snow, tea and crumpets by the cozy fire, fog and primroses.” She is also fond of “European food with plenty of Lea & Perrin’s” (p. 418). Lim Cheng Po, the Chinese Anglican, contributes “the church bells on Sunday, bitter and darts in the pub, civilization” (p. 445). Denham, the globetrotting protagonist of The Right to an Answer, is a bit more astringent: “Warm brown ale in the boat’s bar...afternoon drinking in underground clubs the size of a Singapore lavatory...the married women dancing to the jukebox, ready for a lark till their taxis at six (hubby home to a casserole from a time-controlled electric cooker) and all the rest of it” (p. 8). Other cultures are described in the same capsule form. In Vision of Battlements, for example, the culture of the Mediterranean is reduced to “bread and garlic and bad drains, harsh red wine. And sin” (p. 15).

In constructing these miniatures, Burgess is in part being ironically simplistic. He can discuss cultural distinctions more abstractly and at greater length. In A Vision of Battlements, for example, he asserts that, in contrast to the East, the syllogism is at the heart of western culture and has produced, as inexorably as a seed produces fruit, that culture’s most characteristic products, the refrigerator and the hydrogen bomb. (Though even here his final definition of a culture is in terms of concrete objects). For the most part, however, he is not being ironic when he defines a culture simply in terms of the sensory experiences peculiar to it. For Burgess, what we see, what we smell, and what we eat defines the way we think. Enderby is as clearly defined by his fondness for “stepmother’s tea,” pickled onions, and slightly overripe stew as Mr. Raj (in The Right to an Answer) is by his baroque curries. And when Fenella Crabbe, unhappy in Malaya, says that civilization is impossible except in a cold climate, she is, if we substitute the phrase “English civilization” for “civilization,” speaking no less than the truth. The mind is conditioned by its culture, which is, in turn, at the mercy of diet, climate, that host of incidentals that Burgess chronicles with such loving care.

That which most clearly distinguishes cultures, and the real symbol of our fragmentation is, of course, language, not for Burgess merely a medium in which thoughts are expressed but a preordained structure which, like climate and diet, determines our thoughts. Again, Burgess is not simply being comic on those occasions when he characterizes people by the way they talk. The following scene from The Long Day Wanes is illustrative. The Abang, a hereditary Malayan potentate purportedly descended from the feces of the white bull of Siva accosts Fenella Crabbe “in the hallowed language of film:”
‘You’re kind of pretty. Pretty as a picture. I guess they all tell you that.’
‘Really...’
‘I reckon you and me could get together. We could meet some place and talk. We could have a real long talk and get kind of better acquainted.’
‘My husband...’
 ‘I guess I haven’t had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. I understand he’s a very lovely person, though. They tell me he’s making a real fine job of the College.’
‘I mean, I don’t want to seem rude or anything...’
‘I guess he’ll be understanding. He won’t think you’re rude or anything. How’s about lunch tomorrow?’ (p. 261)

Burgess is telling us here not only a good deal about the Abang, who is looking forward to eventual exile in the West, but also about that cultural ragout that is Malaya. While purely linguistic stereotypes are not as common in Burgess as cultural stereotypes, they are there in large numbers. From Mr. Raj's courtly, inflated, Anglo-Indian formality to the neo-Slavic cant of Alex and his “droogs,” we are made aware of linguistic structures that both reveal and condition the minds behind them.

Language is, of course, an expression of culture; so that the thoroughgoing cultural converts like Nabby Adams, who dreams of India, and the Sinophile Pere Laforgue (both in The Long Day Wanes) reveal themselves by forgetting their native language and finding comfort in thinking and speaking only the language of their adopted cultures. By the same token, the natives of Dunia, for whom language is culture, are justified to some extent in their belief that “ ‘There is only one white man’s language.’ This was not meant figuratively; it was a straight philological assertion” (DOS, p. 157). What neither blacks nor whites sufficiently realize is that language is a tenuous medium of communication at best, capable of infinite and sometimes impenetrable variations, dialects, tones, connotations, etc. Variations even within the same language remind us of subcultures whose distinctions can be as rigid and forbidding as any. Thus Crabbe’s dislike of his headmaster focuses upon “Boothby’s Northumberland whine.” Thus Ennis’s contemptible superior officer becomes more contemptible because of the way he drops his h’s. Thus Enderby, forced to listen to the almost unintelligible dialect poetry of a Rhodesian named Ricker Sugden, is driven to realize what Chaucer, Pope, and Wordsworth had realized long before --how much language, the poet’s only medium, is subject to the depredations of space and time.

The problem is compounded when someone speaks in a language not his own. When Ennis, the hero of A Vision of Battlements, woos the lovely Concepcion in Spanish, she is forced to say “Don’t. I know it’s only a foreign language to you.” (p. 46). And as Denham says to Mr. Raj, the Ceylonese who is fond of English abstractions: “You’re different, that’s all, but you pretend to be the same. When you use words like ‘love’ and ‘equality’ and ‘brotherhood’ you delude us into thinking that you mean by those words what we mean by them.” (RTA. p. 189). All the novels are full of characters trying to learn another language, from the Russian in Honey for the Bears who asks Paul whether one is hit “in the belly” or “on the belly” (both are painful, Paul replies) to the Tasca family, padre e figlio, both patiently trying to learn how to tell each other to go to hell in idiomatic English. All such efforts, however frantic, well-intentioned, and apparently successful, are, in fact, doomed. Another language means another mode of thought, as we learn in Devil of a State when Paolo Tasca, raging against his biological father, is understood by the local nationalist Patu, who tends to take things symbolically, to be referring to the British colonialists. In the same novel, the same lesson is driven home even more uproariously at Mr. Tomlin’s luncheon party.
Mr. Tomlin is a 1ong-suffering Englishman who serves as UN advisor to the emerging state of Dunia. He is long-suffering in part, perhaps, because of his belief that “the British are supposed to have a bad time. That is their destiny” (pps. 91-92). He is hosting a luncheon at which the guests include the nationalist leader, Patu, a hungry Czech artist named Smetana, and the gallant, amoral Nando Tasca. Mr. Tomlin is already at the end of his tether, and when circumstances prove too much for him he turns for relief to a comfortable, rather waterish abstraction:
“ ‘Reality. What do any of you know about reality?...Reality. What are we all doing? What do you all want?’...
‘I feel,’ said Patu, ‘that it is perhaps the Government that knows nothing of reality. The movement towards the realization of self-government for this state cannot be halted’...
‘What is this about reality?’ asked M. Smetana, pricking up his ears at the rustle of an abstraction “Wirklichkeit? Realität? Is an Englishman asking about reality?”
Nando Tasca happily caught up the word in the twindling broth of his song.  “Realtá” he sang to Mrs. Tomlin, and again, in a cadenza, “ Realtá.” (pps. 86-67)

This is comic opera, or linguistic farce, the complications provided not by disguises and intrigues but by the fragmentation of cultures and the linguistic Babel that reflects it. In this, as in many other cases, language, which ought to be the vehicle of thought, becomes its shroud. Patu cannot understand Paolo; Denham cannot understand Raj; the straight world cannot understand Alex.

Too much consciousness of language can be even worse than linguistic naivete. In both cases, language ceases to be a medium of expression and becomes itself the object of our thoughts. The words become an impenetrable and sometimes fascinating barrier --even, or rather most especially, the words of our own language. Enderby the poet is one such word-man, infinitely more comfortable with his consonants and vowels than with other people or, for that matter, things. Dr. Spindrift, the philologist-protagonist of The Doctor is Sick, is an even more obvious example. After a particularly sordid and unphilological brush with the vices of London’s demi-monde, he reflects that “He’d treated words as things, things to be analysed and classified, and not as part of the warm current of life. Now certain lovely words like ‘cerebral’ and ‘encephalogram’ were getting their violent own back. And in this foul flat flagellation had been real whips, not Roman flagellum, diminutive of flagrum; and look, gentlemen, how fascinating this interchange of ‘l’ and ‘r’. And what pleasant alliteration, he thought, that was: foul flat flagellation." (p. 133). What we have here is a kind of autolinguisticism, language as a solitary delight. The sad thing, or course, is that, aside from bodily contact, language is the only instrument of communication we have, but depending upon it is like leaning on a reed.
Cultural accidents like climate, diet, and language need to be closely observed not because they are decorative but because they have a way of becoming cultural essentials; and it is, finally, the clash of cultures that is Burgess’s most characteristic concern. Many of these cultural exchanges are simply the pure stuff of comedy. Ennis, for example, is putting on a show for the Spanish middle class on Gibraltar. For the second act, a “woman major of the Medical Corps, plumply shaking along with her castanets, performed Spanish dances, roguish eyes over an artificial flower in her powerful white teeth, a final Standard English ‘Ole!’ as she stamped the last step of her zapateado, a huge hip thrust provocatively at the stony watchers” (VB, p. 79). Much the same thing happens in Devil of a State, where Paolo, having pawned his father’s watch, “nearly cried. He had never had so much money before. He said ‘Tante grazie.’ The shopkeeper did not say ‘Prego.’ That was his Syrian ignorance” (p. 60). To be sure, the crazy salad of racial variants found in both Malaya and Dunia provides a perfect setting for cultural pratfalls; but Burgess can arrange the same effects in the Soviet Union, where the stolid citizens are put into a dither by Hussey’s consignment of drip-dry dresses, or the north of England, agitated by the importation of Ceylonese curries, judo, and lust, in that order.
More often, however, these cultural collisions have at least an element of seriousness about them, revealing as they do the imperviousness of one culture to another and the hopelessness of any attempt at cultural communication. An incident from The Long Day Wanes might serve to illustrate this. Victor Crabbe, an Englishman and a teacher, takes a drunken leap into speculative philosophy and tries to introduce the eminently practical Pakistani policeman, Alladad Khan, to its delights. The conversation runs as follows:
‘The question is whether a thing is really there if we are not there to see it.
‘You could hear it, or smell it.’
‘No, no, I mean… (I wish I could think of the right Malay word) I mean if we could not be aware of it with our...’
‘Senses?’
‘Yes, our senses. We could not be sure it existed.’
‘So this jungle perhaps exists only in our heads?’ 
‘Perhaps. And this car. And you only exist in my head, too.’ 
‘And my wife only exists in my head? And the child?’ 
‘It is possible.’
‘It would be a big relief,’ said Alladad Khan, sighing. (p. 138)

The East may indeed be “awake, building dams and canals, power houses and factories, forming committees, drawing up constitutions, having selected from the West the few tricks it could understand and use,” (LDW, p. 522) but the task of communicating Western culture and the institutions of that culture remains a forlorn one, despite Crabbe’s professional hopes. He says “ ‘I can teach them how to think. I can inculcate some idea of values.’ ‘You’ll never teach then how to think,’ ” Hardman answers, ‘And you know damned well they’ve got their own values, and they’re not going to change those for any high-minded, pink-kneed colonial officer’ ” (p. 27). There is a tragic aspect to this, of course, revealed in the tragic climax of Right to an Answer. It is near the end of that book that Denhan, the travelling salesman, realizing that even languages specially acquired for the purpose cannot bridge the gap between disparate cultures, cries out in angry frustration:
“Such a bloody small planet, and one half can’t understand the other half” (p. 188). The pretence of communication, not to mention love or friendship, between people of alien cultures is usually nothing more than pretence. What is real is multiplicity, a Babel of cross-purposes, a world of fragmented cultures, each with its own habits of mind, each with its own characteristic experiences.

There remains, according to Burgess, one possibility of cultural unity, that provided by popular myths, especially those associated with that most vulgar common denominator --American Coca-cola culture. Crabbe is speaking of Malaya when he says “There was a cold, purely legal unification provided by the state --a British importation-- and a sort of superficial culture represented by American films, jazz, chocolate bars, and refrigerators; for the rest, each race was content to keep alive fragments of culture imported from its country of origin” (pps. 434-435). Elsewhere Burgess speaks of the ways in which the “myths of cinema and the syndicated cartoon have served to unite the diverse races far more than the clump of the cricket ball” (LDW, p. 34). In The Right to an Answer, we encounter the film-goddess, Monique Hugo, and Denham asks: “Are we perhaps wrong to sneer at these whipped- like-cream, spun-like-sugar crackly, crunchy products of the shiny mythopoeic machines of our age? Every brown girl, far more beautiful than she, who gaped at this avatar at the airports where she was feted, showed in her teeth a hunger for unifying myth, while, in the council chambers inland, the statesmen strove for disunity” (p. 164). Burgess’s attitude toward these popular myths is, however, ambiguous. On the one hand, they do provide a substratum of unity; on the other hand, they are so vulgar and trashy that we wonder if the unity they provide is worth having at all, or whether it is no more than the unity provided, as some of the characters ironically suggest, by beer or money.

In The Long Day Wanes, young Robert Loo and Syed Hassan, inheritors of racial and cultural hatreds, find a common ground in adolescent revolt, Teddy-boy costumes, and bad popular music.
This rapprochement is achieved, however, at the cost of Robert Loo’s distinctively Malayan music which, produced in solitude, cannot survive sudden transfusions of camaraderie, love, or cultural synthesis. The isolated but brilliant composer has become a well-adjusted but mass-produced teenager, a process in which there is some gain, but, we suspect, more loss. Burgess once suggests in Enderby that poetry, by enabling people to understand each other, is one of the few things to provide some sort of unity; but that statement seems more hopeful than assertive, since Enderby, more than any other novel, demonstrates the way in which even Apollo’s demesnes are subdivided into petty, constantly squabbling, provinces. For the most part, therefore, Burgees sees no chance of unity except under the broad banner of American pop-culture, that dubious redeemer. It is questionable whether literature and music ought to transcend the cultures that give them birth. It is certain that they seldom do so; and that when they do, as the Clockwork Orange chillingly demonstrates, the results are meaningless.
Alex remains a thug, despite the fact that he shares the taste of his more civilized ancestors for Beethoven.

There are other, biological rather than mythical, kinds of cultural miscegenation, and these too Burgess sometimes seems to regard with a certain suspicion. One illustration, from Devil of a State, will have to suffice.

Near the door were men known to Lydgate, good-hearted young unstable men in whom the mingling of blood had gone as far as it conceivably could. One was tiny and delicate, like a bird, but with a huge face scrawled with the lines of the agony of a Christ. He was Filipino, Chinese, Scottish, unsure of his allegiances, ready to weep over Old Glory or Union Jack as the drink took him; then, as the drink took him further, all for red blood and the crunch of bones. His name was Sebastian Hup. With him sat an Anglo-Burmese dashed with the blood of an Arab trader, a suspicion of Malayalam, a single drop of Portuguese. He looked handsome and English in his uniform of an Inspector of Vehicles, two pips on each shoulder, but his name was Dominic de Cruz, and his arms were covered with tattooings --hieroglyphs of Syrian secret societies for which he had worked as strong man, a sentimental back-view of a fat-bottomed toddler, a winsome pouting head labelled “Pixy Face”. And standing, ready to go and supervise his Municipal Dog Catchers, was another tattooed man --Andu, Potok, Danish, Chadi, English-- called David Lloyd-Evans.
(pps. 13-14)

At least simple adherence to a single culture gives one a definite identity. If you are a Malay or a Chinese, you are something; but the cultural miscellanies described above are compact of ill-assorted, poorly understood, and mutually contradictory impulses and ideals. They are emphatically not what Burgees might have made of them --the men of a new world, harmonious syntheses of warring races and cultures, and thereby genuinely independent of the limitations of race and culture. They are instead pathetic things of patchwork, much more culturally restricted than those who have only one culture to worry about.

Into this cockpit of bickering cultures, Burgess places his protagonists, themselves usually clear representatives of one or another culture, and watches as they respond to cultural stimuli that are new, rich, and strange. One possible response to an alien culture is wholehearted conversion; and The Long Day Wanes is especially full of cultural converts: Rosemary Michael, a black beauty who has fallen in love with England and has beatific visions of potato chips and Lea & Perrins sauce, Lem Ching Po, racially Chinese, but whose “English voice and English gestures swallowed up these details as a pan of gravy soup might swallow up a shred of shark’s fin” (p. 399), Pere Laforgue, the complete Sinophile, who has traded stuffed aubergines for bean curd and shoyu, Thomas Aquinas for Lao-Tse. All of these people become radically simplified by their cultural conversions. They lose what bits of recalcitrant individuality they might have had in their native cultures; they veer toward the comic and tend to see other people as well as little more than cultural ambassadors.

Two of the major characters in the trilogy, Hardman and Crabbe, are somewhat more difficult to assess. Hardman becomes a nominal Moslem, an event which reactivates his dormant love of a highly simplified England. Crabbe is a teacher, and thereby professionally committed to building bridges between cultures; but the seductive lure of cultural assimilation is especially strong since his life in England has been unsuccessful, his first marriage having ended in the tragedy of his wife’s death --for which he blamed himself. As a result, “he had lost the desire for more complex and civilized patterns” (p. 268). What Crabbe hopes to find in Malayan culture is a kind of solvent in which he might take leave of his own highly unsatisfactory soul. Total cultural absorption then is a kind of death, spiritual and sometimes, as in Crabbe’s case, physical as well. (One is reminded that, in The Right to an Answer, a catarrh-ridden, retired, North-country printer meets an untimely death by developing an improper fondness for exotic curries).

At the other extreme is Enderby, a confirmed xenophobe who regards garlic with a kind of exotic awe. An ex-Catholic, he sees Rome as a personal threat and all foreign customs as an affront. In Enderby’s case, to be sure, cultural imperviousness is symptomatic of an almost incredible self-centeredness. He wants nothing more than to shut out the world, sit in his bathroom, and compose delicate verse. Things outside himself he regards with suspicion and unfamiliar things with downright dislike. Yet such small bits of wisdom as Enderby is vouchsafed at the end of the novel come only after he has lived cheek by jowl with some very disreputable Moors, has himself assumed the identity of a Moorish beggar, has been forced to endure rock and roll and modern American drug poetry, and has, in fine, been made to recognize that there is a world elsewhere. Enderby may be freer from cultural determinism than most of Burgess’s characters, but he is so only by paying the price of a contracted heart.

It is possible, of course, to encounter alien cultures with sympathy but with restraint, holding something back, avoiding, like the death it might well lead to, the siren song of complete assimilation. It is possible, but in Burgess’s novels it is seldom successfully done. Fenella Crabbe does it in a comic and not altogether attractive way when she is introduced to the barbarous aborigines of the Malayan interior. She both domesticates and distances then by placing then in an anthropology textbook separated from her by the cool barrier of professional prose: “She automatically saw in her mind the exordium of a stock monograph: ‘The aborigines of the Upper Lanchap present, ethnologically and culturally, a very different picture from the inhabitants of the coastal areas...’ ” (p. 124) Lydgate, the hero of Devil of a State, happy with his aborigine mistress yet quite incapable or regarding her (or any woman, for that matter) as a human being, represents another unsatisfactory compromise. Denham, in The Right to an Answer, comes as close as anyone to striking a genuine compromise. He is an exile who gets little pleasure from England, though he visits it out of filial piety. He lives in the East, but with no hope of ever really identifying himself with it: “Contact, eh? I had always known that there was no real contact, except briefly in bed, over a shared bottle, across counter or desk among white stucco colonial houses.” (pps. 192-193) Even Denham’s wisdom, however, is a by-product of that aloofness and self-containment which leads him to respect marriage as an institution but to prefer prostitutes for home consumption What keeps him free of culture is what effectively isolates him from love.

Culture is not the only limitation on the human mind; another is provided by the body itself. Culture itself, as we have noted, depends in part upon certain recurring patterns of sensation; but beyond this Burgess sees, as Montaigne saw hundreds or years before him, a thousand other limitations and humiliations imposed upon the mind by the body. Like language, the body is ideally the soul’s book, the means of its expression; but also like language, the body is a recalcitrant medium, a difficult servant and an impossible master. Some connection between the two is illustrated  in a passage from The Right to an Answer. Mr. Raj, the courtly Ceylonese who has been blamed by Denham for the death of his father, arrives in Denham’s apartment drunk, armed, and almost hysterical. Normally he was acutely conscious of his English usage, but under the emotional strain “he crashed into a sort of shouting rhythmic rhapsody of which the elements were English words, language reduced to what my father’s body was swiftly being reduced to: simple senseless elements laid side by side, unbound into a totality of meaning” (p. 191). It is this entropic tendency in both language and the body that must be resisted, and that in turn resists the organizing capacity of the mind. In language, if The Doctor is Sick may be offered as evidence, this is manifested in the almost psychotic fascination of analytic philology; in the body, of course, the breakdown of an organic whole into its constituent elements assumes another form --corruption.

Throughout Burgess’s novels, there is a very strong, almost Swiftian sense of the uncleanness of the flesh and of the laughable disparity between the reality of the body and the pretensions of the spirit. Sgt. Ennis in A Vision of Battlements, objects to calling soldiers “bods”. He sees it as “the final indignity: the stripping off of soul and instincts, the reduction by apocope to puppet status” (p. 74). Yet Burgess, with frightening regularity, does exactly this. Every book has at least one very vivid scene of retching (same have four or five) serving frequently to deflate pretensions of one sort or another, to remind the animal that he is an animal.

If, in Pope’s words, “the fresh vomit runs forever green” throughout Burgess's works, special attention must still be paid to Enderby and Nothing Like the Sun, two novels in which the grossness and uncleanness of the flesh are almost disproportionately emphasized, perhaps as a direct result of the fact that both novels deal with the exalted calling of the poet, the artist. Both novels contain circumstantial descriptions of particularly nasty deaths. In Enderby the death of the poet Rawcliffe, in Nothing Like The Sun the death of the poet Robert Greene, are described in painful detail and witnessed by the protagonists. In both cases, the physical corruption leads to a kind of spiritual regeneration, though in Nothing Like The Sun an almost spiritual ecstasy can also lead to physical corruption when Shakespeare, having exhausted “both the Indias of spice and mine” with his dark lady, comes down with a dreadful dose of the clap. Both Enderby and Shakespeare wallow in a fleshly morass, Shakespeare in sexual escapades of one sort or another, Enderby in the more solitary pleasures of flatulence and defecation. Shakespeare is shudderingly aware of the dirtiness of it all and would like to be quit of it, or at least be able to transform it.
Was there not somewhere a clean world? Theocritan shepherds piped --Damon, Lycidas, Syphilus (that was the name; that was from Fracastor)-- but I saw them too eaten, their sheep with foot-rot, the southern torrents crunching their mean shelters like apples. I turned to the tales of Greek and Trojan and expected to find again what I had known as a boy --war all smiling postures of the dance, a game of buffeting with reed spears. But, of course, they were like ourselves. They were braggarts, cowards, traducers, whores...
Here, then, was the end of all sweetness. But I wept to see the end of the honey days, winced to turn Cressida into a whore of the court. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. But disease had closed it long before --a swollen ring of corruption. Die in dust but live in filth. Well, if we are to live with it we must somehow ennoble it. (pps. 217-218) 

Enderby, on the other hand, perfectly comfortable in his sinful earth, is baffled and annoyed by the requirements of love, miserably discontented as a honeymooning tourist in Rome, but perfectly happy when he sees his wife Vesta coming up with her lunch.

The most important similarity in both books is the way Burgess associates literary elegance or spiritual profundity with the physically disgusting. In a moment of desperation, Enderby asks himself: “Was anything he could now do as a poet of any value to the world or God the ultimate noumenon? Graarp, answered his stomach, like some new mode of communication” (p. 358). And of course Enderby’s habits of composition deserve mention as well. He writes only while seated on the bathroom throne, where the music of the spheres is inevitably counterpointed by bowel music. In the same manner, Shakespeare's elegant letter to Southhampton (NLTS, pps. 97-98) is counterpointed by the sights, sounds, and smells of London, some of them exhilarating, some disgusting. In an earlier scene, in fact, young Will both vomits and composes verse at the same time. In both of these novels Burgess is telling us that all the ladders start not in “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” but in the equally foul and much less poetic guts and glands of the poet. Burgess is unequivocal; the mind, culture's slave, is also seen as the body's poor pensioner. Its productions, however rarified, are by-products of glandular agitation. Burgess writes near the end of Nothing Like the Sun: “There is the flesh and the flesh makes all. Literature is an epiphenomenon of the flesh” (p. 222).
There is, according to Burgess, at least one more factor that limits the already sadly dependent mind, and that is the past. History is to culture as time is to space. Both provide the conditions in which the mind can work and both, therefore, help to define and limit it. When Burgess speaks of the past, he only occasionally deals with history in our larger sense of the word. Ennis, for example, an ex-Catholic like so many of Burgess’s heroes, finds that because of his past he could never really love his Anglican wife Laurel or his Anglican girl friend Lavinia. “He did not love Laurel; he did not love Lavinia. They were out of his world, an older world than that of the braying Oxford vicars, the cold embraces, the cold climate” (VB p. 149). More often, however, the past is a distinctly personal one, one that conditions the present and makes certain actions inevitable and others impossible. Enderby hates Rome, hates the history of his own culture, just as he has hated and sought to escape his own personal history, dominated by a vile and hideous stepmother. In fact, he calls Rome the Stepmother of the West. Enderby’s life, even Enderby’s poetry, is a conditioned reflex, an attempt to escape that loathsome stepmother. “He nodded several times, standing there naked in rainy Italy, thinking that it was a mother he had always wanted, not a stepmother, and he had made that mother himself in his bedroom, made her out of the past, history, myth, the craft of verse” (p. 159). It is the past, more than culture and as much as his gross body, that conditions Enderby; just as it is the past, more than his body and as much as his culture, that conditions the agonized Crabbe, dreaming constantly of his first wife and her death. At one point Crabbe makes a connection, at least a metaphorical one, between the impositions of the body and those of the past. “ ‘History,’ said Crabbe, battering his pain with words at random. ‘The best thing to do is put all that in books and forget about it. A book is a kind of lavatory. We’ve got to throw up the past, otherwise we can’t live in the present. The past has got to be killed.’ But in saying that, off his guard with the pain in his foot, he reverted to his own past, and pronounced the words in the Northern style, the style of his childhood” (p. 517).

Despite its irony, the passage is a cry for simplicity and freedom, analogous to Shakespeare’s wish that he might somewhere find a “clean world” --a bare stage and wraith-like actors, appearing ex nihilo and vanishing without a trace. And it is only natural that, having constructed a world so full of cultural impedimenta, the burdens of the flesh, and constricting memories, Burgess should wonder sometimes about what remains of individual personality or, even more important, of the possibility of free choice. For Burgess as for Milton, the possibility of free choice means the possibility of sin. This, of course, is the central problem of A Clockwork Orange and accounts for the savage hatred of psychiatrists present both there and in Enderby. The psychiatrist, who sees evil as a delusion to be antiseptically eliminated, adds the final disability, the last manacle to a mind already burdened with its body, its culture, and its past. One reason that Burgess is less than enthusiastic about the unifying possibilities of American culture is that he sees it --and the Soviet Union for that matter --as societies devoted to the elimination of even the possibility of sin. As Paul Hussey tells an incredulous Soviet secret policeman: “In different ways our societies move towards the same goal --the creation of a new kind of man who shall be sinless” (HFB, p. 154). In A Vision of Battlements Mendoza, the soon-to-be-expatriate American officer, links both America and Russia with Pelagianism. “ ‘You heard of Pelagius?...He’s been called the great British heretic. He didn’t hold with Original Sin.’ ‘I’ve heard of him vaguely’. ‘He was the father of the two big modern heresies --material progress as a sacred goal; the State as God Almighty...One has produced Americanism, which is only a mental climate....And then there’s Russia” (p. 122). Mendoza, like the hero, Richard Ennis, (whose first initial and last name, read backwards, spell “sinner,” and about whom his mistress says, only half ironically, “You always knew about sin,” p. 39) is indeed looking for sin, because in some measure to find it is to find freedom. 

The basic problem posed by most of Burgess’s novels remains, and it remains unsolved. What is left of a man after what has been provided by his culture, shaped by his body, and conditioned by his past has been subtracted. The question itself implies a possibly invalid kind of romantic individualism, the feeling that there ought to be something which is private, ours alone, something which owes nothing to the importuning world. It is so easy to be submerged in a culture, buried in a body, a thrall to the past, and many of Burgess’s characters struggle almost frantically to avoid this kind of absorption. Paul Hussey, in Honey for the Bears, tells an illustrative fable of a man born on the border of two states, two cultures. Both urge him to choose one side or another; and he resists the blandishments of both, knowing that each simply wants to gobble him up (pps. 169-171). Lydgate, in Devil of a State responds with desperate anger to a dream in which he is told that “taking involveth giving, that we are all members of one another, that the perfect round of man and woman in hardly contrived harmony is a shadow or figure of that heavenly round or harmony in which we are destined ultimately to merge our shrieking selfhood, becoming one with the one with the one with the...” Lydgate’s own shrieking selfhood can only respond “Shut up shut up shut up” (p. 175). Enderby also, resisting women, resisting foreign cultures, hugs his loneliness to himself, but again the results are pathetic: 

“I can get a job,” said Enderby, growing angry. “I'm not reliant on anybody. I can be independent.” Then he felt tears of self-pity coming. “The poet,” he said, whimpering, “is best left to live on his own.” Through his tears he had confused images of Dantesque eagles flitting round lightning-shot peaks. He left the edge of the bed and went to stand in a corner. “The poet,” he said, blubbering like that seven-year-old Elizabethan bridegroom who had cried to go home with his father.
(p. 167)

To the degree that characters like Enderby and Lydgate manage to preserve their aloofness, they pay, like Milton’s Satan, a terrible price. Some of Burgess’s characters are sexually impotent; most are failed husbands or chilly bachelors. There is not a happy love affair in the lot. The reason, perhaps, is not far to seek. Absorption is death; and what a man has carefully, desperately kept back from his culture, his history, or his body, he is not likely to sacrifice to anyone else.
The novels are full of instances in which the characters decide to retrench, to withdraw from the contagion off the world’s slow stain into an attitude of Promethean aloofness and perhaps even defiance. Enderby, with his romantic image (really more Byronic than Dantesque) of eagles flitting about lightning-scarred peaks, ends up blubbering, the most dependent of them all. Shakespeare, sickened by the wretched excesses of his lust, takes a survey of corruption and resolves to leave it: "the  Fleet’s stink, a boil on my thigh, the wretched mound of rotting shit that lies to fester in the sun, the diseases that heave and bubble in pustular quietness all over the city and the world. It is time to rise all above the body and live in a making soul” (p. 152). Yet he does not do so and soon finds himself corrupted by syphilis. Crabbe, disturbed by the imperviousness of the East, thinks of three lines from Hopkins: “ ‘Or what is else? There is your world within./ There rid the dragons, root out there the sin./ Your will is law in that small commonweal.’ ... The time has come to start thinking about his private life.” (p. 522). Yet Crabbe is literally and culturally drowned, loses his identity in the solvent of Malaya. The hope that each of these characters has of rescuing a part of himself, of cultivating, to use a mean cliché, his own private garden, proves illusory.

In Paradise Lost, Satan claims that he “brings/ A mind not to be changed by place or time” (1, 252-253). It is a vain boast for Satan; it is an impossible dream in the world of Burgess’s novels. The voice we hear there is not the voice of Milton’s Satan or of Prometheus but a more compassionate version of Montaigne, with much of that author’s breadth of reference and bittersweet wisdom. Both, though Burgess with more pity, might have asked the same question: “Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous, as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himselfe, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperour of this universe.” 

© Thomas Stumpf,
Chapell Hill, 1969

M/F
By Frank Kermode
M/F was published in 1971, by which time Burgess was already famous as the possessor of a powerful and resourceful intellect and exceptional narrative skill. His celebrity was established in the public mind by the fame of A Clockwork Orange, a novel of striking linguistic virtuosity which was made into a remarkable film, though that transformation brought little pleasure or reward to its begetter. (I remember meeting him for a drink at Brown's Hotel; he arrived a little late and very agitated, throwing on to the table a paperback book with Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange emblazoned on the cover, unaccompanied by any allusion to Anthony Burgess.)
Fortunately his was a resilient personality, and in a life that contained many severe setbacks and disappointments his vitality and curiosity did not diminish. He delighted in the tension between texture and structure in fiction or narrative more generally, and his favoured solutions were musical: hence Napoleon Symphony, an heroic attempt to replicate the structure of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica, an attempt, he said, 'to make true history fit into musical patterns'. The intricate problems he set himself are expounded in an essay called 'Bonaparte in E flat', in This Man And Music, published in 1982. Whether anybody else could be expected to understand the solutions offered in that essay is a real question. Napoleon Symphony is described by its author as 'a more ambitious structure' than M/F, the book that immediately preceded it, in 1971.
Already a warm admirer of Burgess, I was glad to be sent M/F for review, and my reflections on the novel appeared in The Listener dated 17 June, 1971. M/F is a puzzle, or a riddle consisting of a great many lesser riddles, all better left unanswered; I remember without contrition that I was very pleased with myself for making some sense of the book, at first sight so madly strange in plot and language, and earning the author's kind commendation that I alone among the reviewers had done so. In saying so he was over- generous; although I was right to look for answers in Levi-Strauss, and particularly in his lecture on 'The Scope of Anthropology,' I did, of course, miss a great many tricks and jokes. For a fuller and more privileged key to M/F the reader will have to consult Burgess's obliging essay, 'Oedipus Wrecks,' in This Man And Music. Meanwhile, this is what I wrote.
***
"Iris, Angus, Charles, Pamela, John, Penelope, Brigid, Anthony, Muriel, Mary, Norman, Saul, Philip, Ivy." This is a list, as it happens, of Burgess birds. Who is Anthony? As the sequel may show, this is a question you should try not to answer .
Mr Burgess is already known to be an ingenious linguistician, and it need cause no surprise that he has been boning up on semiotics: his new book is a complicated structure of riddles, and he suggests not only that they should in most cases not be answered but that "hunger for an alembicated moral" is a contemptible, or at least professorial, weakness. Nevertheless MF is not going to make much sense to readers without a clue, and although I haven't myself picked up everything --knowing too few languages, lacking the necessary skill in riddle and palinlogue-- I intend to say part at least of what I know.
The narrative is, in itself, lively but not easily intelligible. A young man called Miles Faber, expelled from his American college for public copulation (a demonstration against something), defies the opposition of his father's lawyers and proceeds to the West Indian island of Castita in search of the remains of the great Neo-Surrealist poet Sib Legaru. His father's wish is that he should marry a Chinese, and so extravagantly avoid incest with his unknown sister; but after many adventures, including an encounter with his unknown twin double, he does marry his sister, the setting being a circus and the priest a riddling clown. His double has been disposed of: but the twin's putative mother, a marvellous circus trainer of birds, subjects him to a difficult avian test; and only after that does he meet his father and find out what, structurally speaking, the whole thing amounts to.
This isn't the half of it by any means but it may be enough to indicate the source of MF; this, to be a little too precise, is Levi-Strauss, specifically The Scope of Anthropology, pages 34-39 (Cape Editions 1967, a sort of incest in itself). Levi-Strauss tells an Algonquin story (Miles Faber, the youthful hero, is staying at the Algonquin in New York as the story opens) of a young girl "subjected to the amorous leanings of a naughty twin." This happens in the book, and the wicked half of the double is killed in both cases, in order to demonstrate the unincestuous integrity of the other half. Levy-Strauss goes on to speak of the revenge exacted by the dead double's mother. She is a sorceress, mistress of owls. The only way to mislead her about the death of her son is to have the sister marry the good surviving brother. The owls are not deceived.
Levy-Strauss regards this myth as a transformation of the Oedipus story . The very precautions taken to avoid incest make it inevitable, the twins are a version of the double character of Oedipus, supposed dead but actually alive, "condemned child and triumphant hero." All that is lacking to establish the full relationship is an element comparable to the Sphinx and its riddles. Riddles and puzzles are rare in Amerindian myth, but the Algonquin have myths in which owls ask riddles to be answered on pain of death; and the Pueblos have ceremonial clowns thought to have been born of incestuous unions, who also ask riddles. The character of all such riddles is their unanswerability --or, better, their unansweredness-- not their difficulty (this is reflected in the old Holy Grail cycle). For a solved puzzle, like incest, brings together elements that ought to stay separate; and this "audacious union of masked words or of consanguines unknown to themselves engenders decay and fermentation."
Mr Burgess extrapolates, of course, but with this or a fuller version of it in mind (and a copy of Edmund Leach's Lévy-Strauss at hand) the reader may more confidently take on MF. Mile's public copulation isn't as random as it looks: the girl is surnamed Tukang (Faber in Malayan). The quest for the unstructured leads straight to the over-simple order of incest.
His father, himself incestuous, tried to insist on the extreme of exogamy represented by miscegeneation, as preferable to the extreme of endogamy, incest. Miles is an obsessive riddle-maker and solver till he learns better; he is mistakenly in love with the random, personified by the poet Sib Legeru ("incest" Old English): "the break-down of order, the collapse of communication," as he later learns from his father Zoon Fonanta ("speaking animal" Greek). "It is a man's job to impose manifest order on the universe." At the climax the bird sorceress Averyn ("bird" Welsh) sets him a riddle he must attempt to answer. He fails, is attacked by hawks in their hierarchical order (transformations of the owls of which he had dreamt at the Algonquin), and saves himself by using a symbol of manifest human order, a police whistle.
Mr Burgess can well supply what the texture of the book requires, great lexical profuseness; he uses all the resources of his exogamous idiolect, so that Miles can luxuriate, sometimes inappositely, among its etymological and onomastic potentialities. "Order has both to be and not to be challenged, this being the anomalous condition of the sustention of the cosmos." The island he visits has a Romance language invented by Burgess. He is pursued by variants of the word "lion" --a lawyer called Loewe, another called Pardeleos, a lion faced philosopher who tells him that 'only by entry into myth can reconciliation be effected,' and lots of other lion and loin allusions. For all the careful Lévi-Straussian plotting (note a subplot of sugar, tobacco and rotten meat), and the provision of a hero who is a compulsive taxonomist (when a woman attacks a man's crotch with scissors he is not shocked but merely records the propinquity of three dual forms: trousers, scissors, ballocks) and can keep up, more or less, with the developing structure of his own narrative; for all the gnomic explanations in the final conversations between Z. Fontana and M. Faber, one's first impression is of random invention powered by a remarkable riddling fantasy. And the book ends with a celebration of apparently total exogamous disorder. 
What, on this fragment of the evidence, is one to make of it? It is a puzzle and on its own terms forbids solutions. But Burgess is rather movingly putting to use the self-begotten systems of his own imagination and language to protest against spurious disorder in art and life. This is too solemn an account of a book so bewilderingly funny, so much what it calls a Higher Game. Its fertility is fantastic, and so too is its ingenuity. In an epigraph from Péguy (there are three epigraphs, all puzzles) God laments that when the French die out nobody will understand what He is doing: which implies that the Lévi-Straussian permutations on Greek and Algonquin and Grail myths really seem acceptable to Burgess as universal explanations. But Lévi-Strauss is confessedly myth-making, and so is Mr. Burgess, even more enterprisingly. According to Oscar Wilde 'the critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed.' Perhaps all one ought to do is to characterise this book as a riddling Sphinx, and abstain from guessing further, but it should be added that it is a work of astonishing narrative and intellectual energy, and that everybody who thinks the English novel lacking in those qualities should read it, twice. Anthony has earned his place among the birds.
***
Two or three times in half a century of writing criticism I have had the experience of stumbling on a clue, missed by others, as to what a particular author is up to. I must say that the pleasure of such discoveries far outweighs that of the most refined acts of interpretation when they cannot claim the retrieval of some such master key. Burgess, with his delight in puzzles, in lateral thinking, in what he calls 're-Joycing', and in his musical passion for detecting structures amid apparent randomness, was more likely to offer such challenges and pleasures than novelists content with more sedate and conventional procedures. He was to write many more ambitious and ingenious fictions, and seems himself to have thought of the musical Napoleon Symphony as his best book; but for selfish reasons as well as unselfish delight in Burgess's mastery, I reserve a special affection for M/F .

© Frank Kermode
November 2000

Oedipus Wrecks
By Anthony Burgess
In Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Shelley's The Cenci, the theme of incest is presented as a ghastly crime against man and nature, material for the grimmest tragedy. The taboo placed on what the Anglo-Saxon bishop Wulfstan called siblegeru, or lying with one's sib, is one that not even a rational age cares to question too closely. Inbreeding, say the eugenicists, weakens the stock, but that is too recent a discovery to explain the ferocity with which the prohibition has been enforced in most societies from the earliest times. The rationale of the ban on endogamy, or marrying within one's own social group or family or tribe, can only be presented in terms of the territorial imperative – the need to protect land through alliances, expressed in a law of exogamy. In ancient Egypt, which was powerful and stable and had no enemies, incest was not merely permitted but was mandatory in the royal house. Monarchical Europe, on the other hand, protected territory through foreign alliances confirmed by royal marriages or high-class exogamy. From ancient Greece on, incest became the most terrible of crimes because it compromised the security of the state. The legend of Oedipus, who brought plague and famine to Thebes through unwittingly marrying his own mother, is still the most potent and terrible of our myths. Freud interpreted the legend in terms of fear of the revenge of the castrating father, enraged by filial poaching on his sexual territory, and turned us all into little Oedipuses. He uncovered the main cause of our continued fascination with incest. It is evidently desirable, else it would not be banned.
In his inaugural lecture at the University of Paris, when assuming the chair of anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss examined the myth of Oedipus from a structuralist angle. He noted that before committing the deadly act Oedipus was forced to answer a riddle propounded by the Sphinx, a creature half-lion half-woman and, in some effigies, winged. If Oedipus had not been able to answer the riddle, the Sphinx would have devoured him as she had devoured countless others. What interested Lévi-Strauss about the collocation of a riddle (usually asked by a talking animal) and incest was that it was not unique to the Greek legend. Among the Algonquin Indians of North America there were legends which presented the same collocation. Clearly, there was no question of cultural transmission from East to West, so it had to be assumed that the incest/riddle structure was built into certain cultures and was an emanation of human need. He told one story. In an Algonquin tribe a girl accuses her brother of coming to her tent and attempting sexual relations with her. The incest taboo is powerful in the tribe, and the brother is appalled at the very suggestion. There is only one explanation for her allegation, and he finds it: a boy who is exactly his double comes to her tent and tries to rape her. Enraged, the brother kills the boy and disposes of the body. Then he discovers that the boy was the son of a powerful sorceress who has talking owls. The mother comes looking for her son, and the brother has to pretend to be that son to allay an obvious suspicion – that he himself is the boy's murderer. The mother is doubtful. The only way in which the brother can convince her that he is really her son is to marry the girl. The incest taboo being so powerful, he will not do this if he is really, as she suspects, the brother. But he marries his own sister and seems to quell her suspicion. She is not satisfied, however, and sets her talking owls on him. They ask riddles, and if he gives the right answer she will know that incest has been committed and that she has her son's murderer in her power. The brother and sister escape from the situation and are transformed into the sun and moon in eclipse.
In this legend there seemed to me to be material for a novel. While working it up in my mind I happened to come across a curious anticipation of the structuralist approach to incest in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her novels all seem to have the same title – A House and its Head, Elders and Betters, Daughters and Sons, Darkness and Day, A Family and a Fortune: they are, of course, structurally identical – and I cannot remember exactly where she presents the revelation of incest in one of her families (all really the same family). The response to the revelation, I remember, is not one of horror but of cold-blooded reassessment of the changed family structure, children regretting that they have only one grandfather when they were brought up to believe they had two. Rereading Finnegans Wake in order to make a reduced version of it, I noted an even closer anticipation of the structural approach to incest. The whole dream which is the book is powered by sin, which sets the world of fallen man spinning, and the sin is the desire to commit incest. Earwicker is in love with his own daughter. Incest being too terrible a word to be admitted even in a dream, the term is metathetized to insect, which explains both Earwicker's name and the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper. I was particularly interested to note that Earwicker's son Shem is prevented from committing incest with his sister by his inability to answer a very easy riddle. He is asked to guess what a particular colour is. The phonemes in its name are described as 'up tightly in the front ...down again on the loose ... drim and drumming on her back ... and a pop from her whistle.' This works out as heliotrope. Shem wets his trousers in shame, but urine in the Wake is always semen, and the discharge underlines his inability to commit incest: he is doubly freed from the chance of that sin.
To my greatest astonishment, I found that I had anticipated the riddle/incest motif in one of my own books, written long before I had read Lévi-Strauss. The book is a kind of spy novel called Tremor of Intent. The spy Hillier is on his last mission. He conceives a fatherly love for a girl, Clara, whose true father is dying. He has received a riddling message from his department in London, and he is not able to solve it. Clara's father dies and she comes sobbing to him. He gives comfort which turns into sexual comfort, and he feels that he is committing a kind of incest. But later he meets her again, this time as a priest, and he realizes that he had mistaken the significance of 'father'. Evidently, there is a fundamental relationship between incest and riddles, but we do not know what it is. It is in the nature of a structure to be as inexplicable as a passage of music.
My structuralist novel is entitled either MF or M/F. The first form is a pair of initials, the second symbolizes a structure. The Portuguese version of the novel emphasized the latter and filled out the initials to a basic opposition – male/female. I had been in Hollywood some years before starting the book, and William Conrad, the robust actor who played Cannon in the television series, expressed a half-serious desire to make an all-black film on Oedipus, calling it Mother Fucker. This suggested the title, but the initials primarily stand for the name of the hero, Miles Faber, a name which combines two main attributes of man – the aggressive and the creative. 
My own initials appear on the title page but in one of the two available musical forms – A and B natural. Beginning a scale and beginning an alphabet, it is meant to stand for a structure which is not quite a structure. For neither a scale nor an alphabet is a significant structure, it is merely the code out of which significant structures are made. There are two epigraphs which relate respectively to structures and riddles. The first comes from a book on linguistics by the late and regretted Simeon Potter: 'In his Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada Hans Kurath recognizes no isogloss coincident with the political border along Latitude 49°N.' In other words, the continuity of American English is not halted by a mere political frontier. The opposition Canada/United States is a false, or insignificant, structure. The other epigraph is from the First Folio of Much Ado About Nothing: 'Enter Prince, Claudio and Jacke Wilson.' Jacke Wilson, who presumably played Balthazar, was an actor-singer in the Lord Chamberlain's company of players. Jack Wilson is the real name of Anthony Burgess. There is no true riddle here. Either one knows the identification or one does not. The question that ought to be asked is: why did one name change into the other ? There is no easy answer. 
The action of the first chapter takes place in a bedroom of, inevitably, the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, New York City. I am telling the reader that he is on Algonquin territory, but also Iroquois, since the Iroquois Hotel is a few blocks away. Algonquin/lroquois is a meaningful opposition, far more than United States/Canada, for the two Indian nations had different cultures and languages and they fought each other. The story to come is based on an Algonquin legend, hence the choice of one hotel rather than the other. Miles Faber, a young man not yet come of age, meets the family lawyer Loewe in his bedroom. He is highly strung and a heavy smoker, and the cigarettes he prefers are a Korean brand, Sinjantin. This will have meaning later. Miles has been sent down from his college in Massachusetts for fornicating in the open air in public: the act is taken by his fellow-students as a sign standing for undifferentiated protest. His English professor, Keteki (Sanskrit for riddle), quoted in class from a certain Fenwick's diary for the year 1596. Fenwick saw a play and says of it: 'Gold gold and even titularly so.' What, asks Keteki, was the name of the play? He will give twenty dollars to the student who can give the most plausible answer. Miles recollects that fenek is the Maltese word for rabbit, and thinks that Fenwick might have anglicized his Maltese name, Fenek being a not uncommon surname in Malta. The Maltese word jew stands for the conjunction or. Or in French means gold. The play was probably The Jew of Malta. Miles wins the twenty dollars and gets drunk on it. He meets a lady who persuades him to copulate with her in public. Thus he is thrown out of his college. 
Miles clearly has a mad Oedipal talent. He can answer riddles and solve crosswords with no trouble. He makes, with the total automatism he gives to smoking, a riddle on the name of the lawyer Loewe: 
Behold the sheep form side by side
A Teuton roarer of the pride. 
Lo means behold, ewe is a sheep, and in German Loewe is a lion. Nearly all the people Miles will meet in the course of the narrative will either have animal names or resemble animals. This prefigures a sphingine danger to the young Oedipus. The Sphinx was both human and animal. The talking owls of the sorceress of the Algonquin legend combine a non-human body with a human talent: they are a kind of sphinx. When Keteki asked the riddle in class, Miles answered without hesitation: keteki merely means the thing he was asking. When Loewe puts a riddle, or rather a crossword clue, to Miles, Miles knows the answer, but some instinct tells him not to give it. 
Miles, having terminated his college career abruptly, wishes to continue his education privately. On the island of Castita in the Caribbean, there are said to be the literary and artistic remains of a certain Sib Legeru (you know what the name means, but Miles does not), a genius whom Professor Keteki knows about and specimens of whose work he has already given to Miles to read. Miles sees in this work a total artistic freedom, an abandonment of form and meaning, a disdain of structure. Miles, being very young, has a negative attitude to structure whether in art or in morality: his al fresco fornication was an indication of this. Miles wants Loewe to give him money out of his dead father's estate so that he can make the journey to Castita and study, having first located, Sib Legeru's works. Loewe demurs. Miles has a responsibility to the Faber family, of which he is the only surviving member. His father believed in miscegenation, or exogamy, holding that the future of civilization rested on the mingling of the races. If Miles will not continue his studies he ought to assume the responsibility as head of the Faber family by marrying a Chinese girl named Miss Ang and begetting a mixed progeny. But finally he yields to Miles's entreaty and gives him five hundred dollars. It is now summer; Miles's birthday, when he comes of age, is on Christmas Eve. The money should last him until then and the beginning of his adult responsibilities. 
Left alone, Miles turns on the television set. The first channel shows athletes levitating to the music of Johann Strauss. The reader, if not Miles, will find the name Lévi-Strauss charaded there. The next channel has a talk show, with a member of the Nipissing tribe talking of the commercial future of the Indians. The Nipissing people are, Miles knows (he has much useless knowledge, he thinks), members of the great Algonquin family. He then goes to sleep and dreams of an Indian sorceress. He does not see her, but he hears her announced: 'It is she of the koko-koho.' He sees her owls and one of them twitters at him a strange word: Esa esa. He wakes up in inexplicable terror. His watch has stopped at 19.17 (the year of the birth of Jack Wilson). He dials the telephone for the time but remembers the wrong dialling formula. ULCERSS gives him no reply. He recollects that that is the Los Angeles formula; for New York he must dial NERVOUS. Time is as painful a structure as a 'Mauer or a parallel or a taxonomy'. The Mauer divides Berlin, the parallel divides Canada and the United States, though not the Indians, who accept different divisions. The taxonomy, or arranging of the world into categories, is painful to him because he desires total freedom, the collapse of structures. But he cannot escape from structures as easily as he thinks. 
He goes for a meal and hears the waitresses shouting their orders. He does not know that they are announcing, in acrostic form, the great Oedipal sin: 'Indiana (or Illinois) nutbake. Chuffed eggs. Saffron toast. Whiting in tarragon, hot. Michigan (or Missouri) oyster-stew. Tenderloin. Hash, egg. Ribs.' He hears a male voice dictating into a tape recorder details of the structural difference between the instant soup of American kitchens and the soup of French kitchens where the pot has bubbled non-stop for four centuries. The French soup, says the voice, is a synchronic metaphor of the diachronic: it turns time into space, history into a single edible plateful. Miles, leaving, sees an old crippled man, with a false hand and crutches, who nods at him 'in a kind of shy confidence'. From his accent he seems French but he does not look French (we are not told how not). The name on the case which contains his recording spools is Z. Fonanta. Miles does not know the meaning of this, but the reader, presumably, does: Zoon Fonanta is Greek for talking animal. Traditionally it means man, but it must mean more in an Oedipal story. Miles has also failed to note the significance of the name of a soft drink he has taken with his dinner: Koko-Koho. This name is the Algonquinian for owl. The bottle itself is in the rough shape of an owl, but the owl is comic, passive, a mere vessel. Owls, birds in general, are not to be feared.
When Miles returns to his hotel to get his bag and then leave for the airport (there is a 2200 Air Carib flight for Grencijta –  'Big Town' – capital of Castita), he finds Loewe back in his room with a hired thug. Miles is to be prevented from leaving right away. There are reasons, newly recalled by Loewe, confirmed by a lawyer in Miami, Mr Pardaleos (leopard, another animal, this time Greek), for delaying his departure. The reasons are not given. Loewe asks for the return of the five hundred dollars. But Miles is not having this. He leaves and his leaving is not seriously opposed: this puzzles him. In the hotel lobby he sees a young man in levis carrying a wreath (Strauss in German). An airport limousine is waiting. Two of the air companies it serves are plausible enough – Air Carib, Udara Indonesia (udara means air) – but the third is impossible: Loftsax. A company called Loftsax would have to have existed before the Norman Conquest.
Miles is not taken to the airport. Instead he is made to alight by two more thugs, presumably sent by Loewe, and his money is taken from him except for enough to buy a beer. He is on Broadway, outside a cinema which announces La Forma de la Espada (the name of an unfilmed story by Borges, another form of Burgess). He has to get money somehow, so he offers himself as a gigolo to a woman met in a bar. Her name is Irma (no animal connection), and she lives on multiple alimony. In her flat Miles finds a cutting from Seee (impossible orthography there only to fulfil a mandatory four-letter structure), the review of a novel called Bub Boy. The authoress is Carlotta Tukang. There is a photograph of her, and Miles recognizes his sexual partner of the previous night. That the encounter might have been in- cestuous does not occur to Miles, but the review of another book, The President's Nephews (taking the term nepotism literally), ought to worry him: the author's name is Blutschande, German for incest. Miles gets money, though only enough to take him as far as Miami on a pluribus of Unum Airline. On the plane he dreams of Miss Emmett, his old nanny, and the fantasy does not, though its symbols ought to, disclose that she is really what her name means – an ant. He remembers her singing a song, her only one – 'You will be my summer queen'. Obligingly the author quotes the tune in a footnote. There will be other tunes – a hymn, a state anthem, a wedding march – and they will all be variants of this tune. Just before reaching Miami Miles discovers that an agent of Mr Pardaleos has been quietly accompanying him on the flight. Bafflingly, this man, in black for a colleague's funeral, is also a policeman who has to arrest a certain Guzman at Miami airport.
Mr Pardaleos, a Greek, is waiting for Miles in the airport restaurant, the Savarin. The cuisine, in real life, is detestable, the name mockery. But in the narrative an onomastic magic converts the food into an epicure's dream, and Pardaleos eats heartily of it. He explains to Miles why he must not go at once to Castita. He has a sister there, whose existence has up till now been kept from him, for a demented reason of his dead father. His father committed incest with his own sister, Miles's mother- aunt (the cop in black is probably called Hamnet or Hammett), and he feared that the incestuous urge might run in the family. If Miles meets his sister, he may be tempted to repeat the paternal crime. Therefore he must wait a few days in Miami. The sister, with her old nanny or governess, is shortly to go to France (possibly to study structuralisme): in the meantime, by a most astonishing coincidence, she is still residing on the very island whither Miles aims to travel. Miles is horrified and shocked by these revelations. Everything is being placed in the way of his simple and chaste desire (Castita means chastity) to further his studies. A feeble attempt is made in the airport washroom to hold him back by another pair of thugs, but Guzman has just been arrested and, by pretending to be Guzman, Miles is able to join the charter flight on which Guzman was attempting to get out of America. This flight is bound for Ojeda, another fictitious Caribbean island, and in Ojeda Miles manages to find a berth as cook on a Bermuda cutter called the Zagadka (Russian for a riddle), owned by two homosexual Americans. They are willing to voyage to Grencijta, one place being as good or bad as another. A great storm hits them, Miles falls and knocks himself out, surrounded by the scattered contents of a nautical dictionary. Regarded as a Jonah by the Americans, he becomes a genuine Jonah, sinking into whale-belly darkness and emerging to engage his serious role – no longer a querulous rebel but a mature mythic character. He is ready to confront (though he does not know this) the destiny that the mysterious engines of the incest/riddle structure are about to impose on him.
It is a festal day in Grencijta, and there is a procession in honour of the island's matron saint, Euphorbia, martyred under Domitian. (Domitian, according to Robert Graves, is the beast figured in the 666 of Revelations: DCLXVI, meaning Domitianus Caesar Legatos Christi Violenter Interfecit.) A choral hymn gives Miles, and ourselves, some notion of the phonetic structure of the Castitan language: Senta Euphorbia/ Vijula vijulata/ Ruza inspijnata... It is a Romance language in which the original Latin vowels have been raised to the limit: they are trying to break out of their vocalic bounds and become consonants. The procession is both religious and secular. It ends with a circus parade, and Miles learns that a travelling circus is at present on the island. Elefanta's or Fonanta's or Bonanza's or Atlanta's Circus: he finds the name unclear. The cheering crowd grows silent at the appearance of a strange woman in the procession –  tall, gaunt, a kind of sorceress surrounded by birds screaming human language (mynahs, parrots, starlings, but no owls). She seems to look at Miles with a kind of angry recognition. He will discover why later.
Meanwhile, needing money, he earns it by setting himself up as Mr Memory Junior, offering to answer any question put by the holiday crowd. A boy quietly asks him the date of the founding of the multiracial University College of Salisbury, Rhodesia, as it then was, but Miles does not know the answer. He pretends to the crowd that the question put was really: When was the first public showing of television? The answer to this he knows: 13 July 1930, in England, by the Baird process. What he does not know is that that date is also the date of the founding of the Rhodesian college. He is being used by forces unknown. The Sphinx is due to appear, and she appears in male form, that of an old cripple whose body has been deformed into the caricature of a lion. The questions have turned to riddles (most of them Maltese), but the lionman has made up one of his own:
Throatdoor, tongueback, nose and teeth
Spell a heavenblack hell beneath.
Engage warily, young men,
Lest it prove a lion's den.
Miles knows the answer at once (cunt) but will not give it. It would be uttering an obscenity in public on an island whose name means chastity. He does not know the real reason for not answering.
A time of rest now, in a small hotel, the Batavia, run by a lady from the opposed Indies, an Indonesian who smokes a brand of cigarettes called Dji Sam Soe. Miles remembers that he has no more Sinjantin (stolen by the thugs of the airport bus) and this deprivation blinds him to a structural truth which casts doubt on the reality of the story of which he is a part. He notes the decor of the lobby, the garden without, a group of card-players, and hears a girl ask on the telephone for the number 113 and Mr R. J. Wilkinson. He does not see the connection between these things. R. J. Wilkinson compiled a classic dictionary – Malay (or Indonesian) – English – and the entire scene is made out of the words on page 113 of that work. In his bedroom he finds a rulebook for association football and a referee's whistle, presumably left behind by an absentminded visiting referee. Some instinct tells him to wear the whistle round his neck, under his shirt, as a talisman. He is, without knowing it, becoming mature: a referee's whistle symbolizes rules, fair play, a rigid closed structure. He sleeps, and goes down to hear two things from the Indonesian lady who owns the hotel. He is invited to dinner at the Pepeghelju (parrot: talking bird) by a certain Dr Gonzi (the name is not significant: it is merely that of the Archbishop of Malta, a kind of Castita, at the time when, in Malta, I was writing the novel). He is asked to admire the conciseness of the Malay or Indonesian language. Tulat tukang tuil means: The day after the day after tomorrow the skilled workman will carry a burden over his shoulder on a stick with a stick over the other shoulder to support it. Tulat sounds like too late, tui like too ill. Tukang means the same as Faber, his own name. He ought to have a good reason for remembering that word, but there are too many other things crowding in on him.
The Pepeghelju restaurant has a talking parrot in its garden: it speaks with the accent of New South Wales. Dr Gonzi awaits him: he is the lionman, the Sphinx, and he is already drunk. He is suicidally depressed. A scholar, expert on Bishop Berkeley, he has been offered a post in the freak show of the visiting circus. He wants to die, but he would prefer to hang for murder than take his own life. He proposes asking Miles a riddle. He does not think Miles will be able to answer it. He will shoot Miles and then be arrested for murder. He certainly has a gun: he brandishes it. The riddle is not really much more than a silly word puzzle:
Move and my own self enclose
A land above the deeper snows.
Miles at once sees what it means – the lionman's own name: to move is to go, New Zealand or NZ is the land meant, my own self is I. But he will not answer. Gonzi's gun arm is drunkenly unsteady, and it is moreover deflected by the parrot's sudden whistle. Miles runs, remembers his own whistle, uses it loudly to bring the police. Gonzi searches for him, staggering and cursing. But a police van arrives and takes Miles to the station.
There, to his astonishment, he finds himself treated as a criminal. He is recognized as a young man who has already caused disturbance in the city. His belongings are examined, and the police inspector makes a suspicious structure out of certain vocables: Tu kang sin jan tin jee sam soo. Miles feels that, though he has come West, he is being dragged East, probably to marry Miss Ang. For the first time he recognizes dimly that he is contained in a structure he does not understand and which he cannot control. When told that his real name is Llew, he suspects that he must have a double. This is confirmed when Mr Dunkel, manager of the visiting circus, is sent for. Llew has been causing stupid juvenile trouble in the town. Miles, whom Dunkel without hesitation takes for Llew, is to be confined in the caravan which he shares with his mother on the circus site outside the city.
And so Miles comes face to face with his double. Llew, a young Welshman, is an appalling personage, crude, vulgar, given to pornography, pop music, as much raw sex as he can get. Are they perhaps sundered twins? Impossible. Llew's mother is the bird queen of the circus. She is named Aderyn, Welsh for bird. She has a whole spectrum of hawks and the talking birds Miles has already seen and heard. Her act is magical, her birds are totally in her control. Llew, a circus boy, has failed at the various circus tasks given to him, but now he suggests that he and Miles work out an act whose success will depend on Miles disguising himself in real life, so that identity can be exploited in the closed structure of the circus. Miles regards himself as the primal owner of a particular face and body and refuses hotly. They part with hard words.
The following day Miles begins his search for the literary and artistic remains of Sib Legeru. The President of Castita is shot at, and Miles suspects Dr Gonzi. In a bar he meets, to his overwhelming surprise, his old nanny Miss Emmett: she is not drinking but buying a packet of Honeydew cigarettes (in conformity with her ant identity). She has, as she always had, a pair of scissors dangling from her waist. Though not herself Welsh, in the Welsh manner she makes scissors a dual word, using a singular article with it. Miles discovers that she is here with his sister Catherine. At last he meets his sister, an ugly and slovenly girl who has been mentally ill. Their father, apparently, made an incestuous attack on her, and Miss Emmett repulsed him with her ever-present scissors. The possibility of Miles's wishing himself to commit incest with her is infinitely remote: she is physically repellent as well as selfish and stupid. But he agrees to sacramentalize their meeting and his reunion with Miss Emmett by sharing a meal. They offer only sugary things; he goes out to buy wine and a piece of beef. While shopping, he finds a shop which sells Sinjantin cigarettes and also has, hanging on a nail, the key to the shed where the Sib Legeru treasures are stored. The shed is on the street where Catherine and Miss Emmett are lodged (lndovinella Street: I need not translate), but its exact whereabouts are unsure. Miles cooks dinner. Miss Emmett is unused to the thick dark wine he serves and goes to sleep in the kitchen, but not before she has told him that the shed is here, in the garden, and is loaded with old papers and other rubbish.
Nearly fainting with excitement, Miles opens the shed and is overwhelmed with what he finds – paintings with inexplicable patterns, a novel in which there is no covenant, either of character identity or continuity of action, with the reader, a poem which enchants Miles:
London Figaro infra pound
Threejoint dackdiddy Solomon
Delay delay thou Gabriel hound
Mucklewrath IHS brilliging on
Ants alley jackalent Meckerbound
Skysent stone threw sinkiss black
And caged Cardinal Mabinogion
Though M is NN copied slack
A freehand onestroke perfect round
Took that bony face aback!
He thinks he has at last met total artistic liberation from the meanings of the marketplace. His reading is interrupted by screams from within the house. He rushes there. Miss Emmett is still asleep. Upstairs in her bedroom Catherine is fighting off an attempted rape by Llew. Llew, desisting for a moment, says, reasonably enough, that he was in the street below and she at the window: she called him in, saying it was time for bed. Catherine is aghast at the apparition of a double Miles and near-hysterical at her near-deflowering. She calls Miss Emmett out of her sleep.
Miss Emmett appears with her scissors. Llew makes for the open window. Miles notes that, in a combined Anglo-Welsh structure, three duals come together: scissors, ballocks, trousers. Llew falls out of the window and cracks his skull on a broken birdbath in the garden. Miles lugs the body to the shed where the Sib Legeru treasures await his reperusal. There is danger now. Aderyn will be looking for her son. Miles, Catherine and Miss Emmett must leave the island at once, but a television announcement discloses the shutting of all ports until the attempted assassin of the President is apprehended. Miles must pretend to be the dead Llew: he has enough acting ability to go through with the impersonation, or so he hopes. Catherine must go to the police and inform them that the would-be assassin is Dr Gonzi: this means telling of Gonzi's death urge; it means also the solving of the silly word puzzle.
The story now follows the Algonquin legend pretty closely. Aderyn has her suspicions. Miles, as Llew, drives her to an appointment with an oculist: she has been scratched in the eye by one of her hawks (transference of Oedipus's punishment). He goes to see his sister to find out if there has been any response from the police, also to see how Miss Emmett, who has gone to sleep again and will not wake up, is getting on. Aderyn pursues him. In his Llew persona Miles has to say that this is the girl he loves and wishes to marry. Aderyn agrees to the marriage almost at once, and it is arranged to take place that very night in the circus ring after the performance. All the clowns are crypto-theologians, some of them in full orders: no difficulty in finding an officiating priest or pastor.
And now there appears the man whom Miles had previously heard dictating into a recorder in a New York eating house. Catherine knows him – Dr Fonanta. She was sent to this island to be placed under his care. He specializes in mental disorders relating to passive or active involvement in the incestuous act. He seems, like Lévi-Strauss himself, to know all the traditional concomitants of a coming incestuous marriage. 'A pity there'll be no eclipse tonight. I gather there'll be fireworks, though. There's probably some rotting meat about somewhere.' There is too – that roast beef of last night. Miles hurls it on its china dish into the garden. The putrefying meat will join the economy of nature; the shards of broken plate will be the useless remnants of an aspect of human culture. But Dr Fonanta means something else – the corpse of Llew.
He is disclosed, during the bizarre wedding ceremony, as the owner of the circus. He is also a bad poet. Miles distractedly suspects that he cannot, despite his accent, be really French: one of his poems collates roast pork and apple sauce – synchronic sweet and savoury – inadmissible, according to the structuralists of Paris, in the Western cuisine. After the ceremony he makes sure that Miles and Catherine are safely bedded. Now comes the act of incest. Miles knows he is being watched and listened to: the bedroom chosen for them is full of electronic devices. He spurts seed, but not into his sister. Was this properly an incestuous act? The vas muliere has been not a depository for the semen of incestuous generation but a mere temporary engine of stimulation. Aderyn is still not convinced that this is her own son. He must be given a final examination, made to submit to the riddling birds. And now Miles conceives a suspicion so intense as to amount to a conviction.
Llew was never Aderyn's true son, merely an adopted one. He was born, he discovers, on Christmas Eve, Miles's own birthday. Llew may mean lion in Welsh, but it is probably part of a palinlogue – Nowell, a form of Noel which, backwards, is Leon, another lion. Aderyn is shaken at the rupturing of a secret, but she goes ahead with her magic. A cockatoo is to ask a riddle. If Llew-Miles gets the answer wrong his eyes will be tom out by the hawks. The riddle is:
Who was the final final, say,
That was put back but had his day?
There are two opposed answers, both equally valid. One is God, which is dog backwards (every dog has his day), the final final, the ultimate reality. But the opposed ultimate reality is devil, lived backwards: if you have lived you have had your day. Whichever answer Miles gives will be the wrong one. He gives it, and the hawks swoop to the tearing. Then he remembers his referee's whistle, blasts it at the birds, which, in their confusion, turn on their mistress. The true confirmatory answer should have been: Mam mam I'm frightened take them away mam.
Dr Fonanta clears everything up. The following morning Catherine and Miss Emmett are able to leave the island. Dr Gonzi has been shot by the police. Llew's body has been quietly buried. Llew was Miles's sundered twin, no magical coincidence. Dr Fonanta is Miles's grandfather. His initials, like his grandson's, are M. F., and they stand also for his own act of incest – with his mother. By forcing Miles and his sister into an incestuous situation, instead of merely leaving it to chance and perverse nature, the strange spell cast on the Faber family has at last been exorcised. Miles will marry Miss Ang. Miles wonders if perhaps the sexual encounter with Carlotta Tukang was not incestuous. His mother may not after all have died, she may be his mother, Tukang means Faber, Miles answered Keteki's riddle correctly (Keteki, now he comes to think of it, had the look of an owl). But Dr Fonanta, or Miles Faber, reassures him. Tukang is a deformation of Toucan, a bird name. This means that Miles got the classroom riddle wrong: whatever the play was, it was not The Jew of Malta. As for the works of Sib Legeru, there was no such person. Siblegeru means what it meant to Bishop Wulfstan; those works are aspects of the therapy of Dr Fonanta's patients. They are not denials of structure, they are confirmations of taxonomic structures, though these are essentially false structures. They are based on the alphabetic arrangement of words (like the lobby of the Batavia Hotel), or on word transformation games, like bread broad brood blood blond bland. The stupidity of so-called total freedom in art, as in life, is best exemplified in a musical score of Sib Legeru's: in it a bassoon is made to go down to a low F sharp, a note impossible on the instrument.
Miles ends his story in Bracciano, north of Rome. He ends it there because I ended it there, having just escaped from Malta. He is married to Miss Ang, but they cannot have children. They have adopted children, and these may well intermarry, committing merely nominal incest. Miles Faber now reveals that he is black, though the reader may have, certainly has indeed, taken him for white. If he is black other characters are black too. The reader must reread, adjusting colours as he does. But the colour does not matter. Black/white is an unfruitful opposition, quite unlike male/female. As for the story, 'the main structure is solidly true, but would it matter much if it weren't? Those Sinjantin cigarettes have least of all to do with the structure, yet in a sense they're the truest thing about the whole narrative.' The cigarettes exist: I have a half-empty packet before me as I write. The reader may not believe me, but it is true. What, however, is truth? All we have is structures.
I cannot really apologize for summarizing the plot of my little structuralist novel at 9Uch length. We are living in an age when books go so rapidly out of print that it is of little use to refer the reader to a work published as long ago as 1971. The pity is that not many were ready for the book when it appeared: the principles of structuralism had not yet been widely diffused. There is a generation ready now, I think, but the unsold copies of MF or M/F have long been pulped. There is, however, another reason for my summary. The plot seems totally unsuitable for a work of orthodox fiction, and it can only be made acceptable by being dressed up, as I dressed it up, in the trappings of an almost popular novel – plausible, as opposed to structural, motivations; realistic dialogue; comfortingly familiar details from the known twentieth-century world. As a bare skeleton, the story discloses all the elements of a closed structure, like a piece of music, with a labyrinth of logic that does not apply to a world where incest is just a pleasantly horrible perversion and not an aberration to be considered amorally, with reference to riddles and talking animals. Why a riddle put by a being half-animal half-human should be associated with the act of incest, we cannot say. My novel defers to the reader's need of a rational explanation by saying something like 'It is dangerous to question the mysteries of natural order, which are symbolized in riddles', but that is no answer. Questions about these structural relations are as meaningless as attempts to find out the meaning of a fugue or a sonata.
One of the laws about incest put forward by Lévi-Strauss has not, I think, found a place here. Because the oracle said that Oedipus would commit parricide and incest in Thebes, he was sent as a child to Corinth. But he got to Thebes. 'The thing you do,' says the great French structuralist, 'to avoid committing incest is the very thing that will lead you to it.' (This is a basic law which applies to other forbidden acts as presented in legend or literature.) My not quite (after all) Oedipal hero (the true Oedipal hero appears very belatedly) is sent to commit incest, and the apparent obstacles put in his way – they are all feeble and avoidable – are there to whet his desire to get to the place where incest will be committed. The whole thing seems to be rigged not by the mysterious engines of myth, but by a man who knows about myths, is quite cold-blooded in his engineering, but is superstitious in his belief that a curse on the house of Faber must be broken by control of the very means that brought the curse about. But he too is enclosed in myth.
I do not think it is possible to write many novels of this kind, but I do believe, and I think the little book proves it, that it is possible to juggle with the free will of fictional characters and the predestination of an imposed structure. This is, after all, the manner of music, in which the component strands seem to go their own way but are locked in a preconceived pattern. There may be a theological conclusion to be drawn from this, and all art may be in the service of a theological truth about the mere illusion of free will, but I refuse to venture too deeply into the matter. It is enough to get on with the task of creating art without asking why one is doing it.

© Anthony Burgess Estate

Reprinted from This Man And Music, London, Hutchinson, 1982; with kind permission of Liana Burgess and the Burgess Estate.

Nothing Like the Sun:
Anthony Burgess’s Factification of Shakespeare’s Life
By Alan Roughley
Although Harold Bloom declares Nothing Like the Sun to be “wonderful” and describes Burgess’s factual fictionalisation of Shakespeare’s life as his “best novel” and the “only successful novel ever written about Shakespeare,”  he reads it from the perspective of a critic who views Burgess primarily as a “loving disciple of Joyce.” The part of Nothing Like the Sun  that Bloom seems most to value is Burgess’s adaptation of Stephen Dedalus’s theories on the fictional relationships between Hamlet and his father’s ghost; the factual relationship between Shakespeare and his son, Hamnet; and the amalgamation of fact and fiction in the relationship between Ann Hathaway and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.

This is all rather curious given that it was Bloom himself who, in The Anxiety of Influence, developed the theory of how new writers, or ephebes, must engage and wrestle with the works of earlier strong writers if they are to succeed in creating their own distinctive vision. In treating Burgess’s use of the theories that Joyce puts into Stephen’s mouth as the use that a “loving disciple” might make of his master’s work,  Bloom ignores the ways in which Burgess writes against Joyce and overlooks two facts.  The first is the obvious one that Burgess’s primary interest lies not in Joyce but in Shakespeare’s life and works; the second is his own clear recognition of the essential  differences between the theories of Stephen Dedalus and Burgess’s use of them for his own aesthetic purposes.  Paradoxically, Bloom’s own theories offer one of the clearest explanations of how Burgess uses the ideas that Joyce puts into the mouth of Stephen Dedalus in order to break free from Joyce’s vision of Shakespeare and pursue his own engagement with the playwright.

Bloom's oversight is understandable.  In his brief discussion of Burgess’s use of Stephen’s theories, his focus is upon Joyce’s struggle with Shakespeare and not on the ways in which Burgess took that theory and expanded it into a recreation of Shakespeare’s life that is much more aesthetically complete than any representation of Shakespeare created in Joyce’s writings.   Bloom, however, does recognises both the aesthetic power and presence that Burgess succeeds in creating from Stephen’s comparatively jejune theories.  He tells us that he “long ago jumbled” Stephen’s theories with “Burgess’s imaginings” to such an extent that he is “startled always, rereading Joyce, not to find much that I wrongly expected to  find, which is gorgeously present in Burgess.”

In addition to being a creative writer with a prodigious output, Burgess was also one of Joyce’s early major critics, and his two major studies of Joyce, Re-Joyce and Joysprick, –as well as his shorter version of Finnegans Wake– reveal his comprehensive understanding of the Irish writer’s work from both a scholarly and imaginative perspective.  Joyce himself was cynical about scholars and critics.  In Finnegans Wake, for example, he creates the character of the “Grave Brofessor” who accidentally punctures with his fork a manuscript that he is reading while he is eating breakfast.  After failing to recognise what he has done, this Professor spends much of his time trying to establish the significance of the holes he discovers in the manuscript he is studying.  Burgess, who had a much more extensive formal education than Joyce, had no such reservations about scholarship and criticism.  Some fifteen years after completing Nothing Like the Sun, for example, he added to an already impressive scholarly record with his monograph, Shakespeare. 

Burgess was both a scholar and creative writer (as well, of course, as being a linguist and a trained musician and composer) whose genius consisted in part of using his scholarly erudition for aesthetic creative purposes.  A comparison of Nothing Like the Sun  and Shakespeare reveals that much of the scholarly research that went into the monograph must have been completed as part of the work that went into writing the earlier fictional account of Shakespeare’s love life.  As Burgess noted in the 1982 “Foreword” for the novel, its “brevity is not a fair index of the amount of work that went into the writing of it.” Nothing Like the Sun self-consciously offers itself as a “farewell lecture” given by one fictional Mr Burgess to his “special students.”  Such a playful yet intelligent blurring of the boundaries between scholarship and artistic creation is a hallmark of much of Burgess’s artistic output, and his blending of fact and fiction in that novel justifies the description of it with the pun of “factification” from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

The influence of Joyce is easy to detect in Nothing Like the Sun.  Like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nothing Like the Sun is both a bildungsroman and a künstleerroman, depicting Shakespeare’s growth from adolescence to maturity as well as his artistic development.   As Harold Bloom demonstrates, Stephen Dedalus’s theories on Shakespeare are an integral part of the novel.  It is hard to agree, however, with Bloom’s assessment of Burgess’s revision of these theories as the work of a “loving disciple of Joyce.”  While Burgess’s love and respect for Joyce is clearly discernible in his scholarly work, his artistic use of Joyce’s work resembles the antagonistic relationship between writers that Bloom terms an “agon” much more than the relationship between a loving disciple and his master.  Bloom offers a convincing account of Joyce’s struggle with Shakespeare that exemplifies the revisionary relationship between a strong writer and a subsequent writer, and Bloom’s critical map of misreading is a useful tool for exploring Burgess’s own relationships with both Shakespeare and Joyce.

In Bloom’s theory, new writers must engage in an agon, or creative and revisionary struggle, with their predecessors if they are to succeed in finding their own artistic voice rather than submit to the silence to which their predecessors’ works threatens to reduce them.  Reminding us that Joyce “rarely lacked audacity,”  he argues that the author of Ulysses “conceived of Shakespeare as Virgil to himself as Dante.”  Like Freud, Joyce felt an “anguish of contamination that only Shakespeare seems to have provoked” in him.   This anguish was a manifestation of the anxiety that all writers feel about the influence of the strong writers who precede them.

As Bloom demonstrates, Ulysses reveals Joyce’s agon with both Homer and Shakespeare, and  his text is founded simultaneously on the Odyssey and Hamlet.  Richard Ellmann stresses that Joyce’s bravery in using both texts as the foundation for his own is remarkable, reminding us that the “two paradigms of Odysseus/Ulysses and the Prince of Denmark have virtually nothing in common.” In terms of engaging with strong canonical writers, Burgess’s achievement is equally remarkable because Nothing Like the Sun is also founded on two paradigms: those provided by Shakespeare and Joyce.  Bloom explains that one “clue” to Joyce’s achievement lies in the intelligence with which he uses the literary characters of Hamlet and Ulysses to create Leopold Bloom.  “Joyce,” Bloom argues, “manages to compound Ulysses with Hamlet...by doubling”: “Poldy is both Ulysses and the ghost of Hamlet Senior, while Stephen is both Telemachus and young Hamlet, and Poldy and Stephen together form Shakespeare and Joyce.”

Burgess is shrewd enough to adapt Joyce’s techniques but to modify them in a way that allows for the emergence of his own distinctive voice and vision from the material and techniques that he takes from Shakespeare and Joyce.  Like Harold Bloom, Burgess realises that Shakespeare is a much stronger canonical writer than Joyce.  Bloom argues that “Shakespeare and the Western Canon are one and the same” and that no writer could either fully exorcise or absorb Shakespeare.  Burgess uses Stephen Dedalus’s theories about Shakespeare, but he warns his readers that a key part of those theories did not originate with Joyce.  The idea that Shakespeare was cuckolded “by his younger brother Richard” is “not Joyce’s original idea” although Ulysses does give it “literary sanctification.”  Burgess’s explains that the story of “the neglected Anne Shakespeare seeking sexual comfort with one, or all three of her brothers-in-law” is but one of the “many folk tales about Shakespeare” that he “heard...in the English Midlands.” The caveat marks Burgess’s desire to produce his own reading of Shakespeare’s life instead of relying on that of Stephen Dedalus.   Insisting that his version of Shakespeare’s cuckolding is not Joyce’s but a folk tale from the area of England where Shakespeare lived adds a claim of biographical authenticity to Burgess’s “biography” of Shakespeare that is lacking in Joyce’s even if the claim is spurious.   The caveat is also a signal that Burgess is turning away from a comparatively sterile contest with Joyce in order to engage in the more challenging, and ultimately more rewarding, struggle with Shakespeare himself.

Like Joyce’s reading of Homer and Shakespeare, Burgess’s readings of Joyce and Shakespeare are a part of the necessary misreading that operates in any canonical writer’s engagement with the strong writers who are his precursors.   This misreading has little to do with matters of influence in terms of borrowing and imitation but with a reading that is an “inflow” which is simultaneously textual and psychic.   Whenever a writer is found by the “Poetic Father” who is his precursor, he opens himself to this precursor in a reading that provides the possibility of his own participation in the canon while also producing an anxiety in the newcomer that threatens to reduce him to silence and prevent his own development as a strong writer.   In order to survive this threat, the later writer must perform a misreading that will counter the danger of being overcome by the initial receptive reading of the precursor.  Borrowing a term from Lucretius, Bloom describes this misreading as a “clinamen,” a “swerve” that is both a reading of the earlier poet and a “misprision” by which the later poet takes a fragment or “tessera” of the earlier poet and makes it into his own through either the borrowing or stealing with which Elliot describes the relationship between poets and their predecessors.

In Burgess’s work, the first part of this dialectical struggle can be seen in his scholarly work on Joyce where he develops his critical understanding and appreciation of Joyce.  Burgess’s erudite criticism of Joyce’s work reveals a powerful critical comprehension of Joyce’s achievements, but had Burgess's relationship with Joyce remained at this level, Burgess would have remained as the “loving disciple” described by Bloom.  Burgess was one of Joyce’s earliest comprehensive critics in terms of his appreciation of Joyce’s technical and aesthetic achievements, and his work remains as the product of one of Joyce’s strongest readers.  But Burgess clearly had other fish to fry, and his own development as a writer depended on his ability to subsume artistically the achievement of his own critical understanding of Joyce so that he could move on to the much more pressing matter of developing his own aesthetic vision.  In opening himself up to the works of Joyce as a critic, he had simultaneously to develop artistic strategies with which to limit the influence of Joyce’s vision in order to develop his own.

In the terms of Bloom’s theories, Burgess had to take a part of Joyce’s work and make it his own through a creative misreading that is also a misprision. Among his first creative yet necessary misreadings of Joyce is Burgess’s The Doctor is Sick. Dr Edwin Spindrift’s collapse in the middle of a lecture reflects Burgess’s biography, and, like his creator, Spindrift is also a linguist.  As a misreading of Joyce, however, Burgess collapses elements of both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom into the single figure of Spindrift in much the same way that Joyce created his composite Poldy from Odysseus and Hamlet Senior and his Stephen from Telemachus and Prince Hamlet.  In so far as it is an attempt to understand what  love means, Spindrift’s search for Sheila resembles Bloom’s attempts at defining and coming to terms with the meaning of love while facing the fear and jealousy of the cuckold.  Geoffrey Aggeler has compared the ways in which the obstacles and adventures of Spindrift repeat those of Bloom and “parallel, or rather parody, those of Odysseus,”  and he also argues that Spindrift’s “descent from disembodied philology into the world of tangible reality is like the progress of Stephen Dedalus from a world of words, in which he is an acknowledged master, to the world of Leopold Bloom.” 

In misreading and using Stephen’s theories from Ulysses for the plot structure of an imaginative recreation of Shakespeare’s life, Nothing Like the Sun  subordinates Burgess’s critical comprehension and creative misreading of Joyce to his primary concern with engaging the more powerful canonical figure of Shakespeare.  In so doing, Stephen’s theories become a tessera, a fragment of Joyce’s own work that Burgess re-writes and makes into his own.  Originally, a tessera was a fragment of pottery used as a “token of recognition” in “early mystery religions.”  Bloom uses it to suggest the “completing of a link,” explaining that it “represents any later poet’s attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor’s Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe,” or later writer.  Burgess’s reading of Stephen’s Shakespeare theories is a reading that goes against the conclusion at which Stephen arrives --a reading against Joyce so that Burgess can pursue his larger concern with merging his own poetic voice with that of Shakespeare’s.

Harold Bloom provides a concise summary of the parts of Shakespeare’s theories that are most relevant to Nothing Like the Sun: “Anne Hathaway as Gertrude, the deceased Hamnet as Hamlet, Shakespeare as the ghost, his two brothers as a composite Claudius.”  In Stephen’s theories, Joyce pursues his own agon with Shakespeare by “condensing a total vision of Shakespeare’s life and work into a handful of eloquent throwaways that conceal their finer intimations and bewilderments.” Buck Mulligan mocks Stephen’s theories, declaring that Stephen “proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”  But this is also a “shrewd parody” and a “palpable hit” because it homes in on the very principal of fatherhood that is one of Stephen’s obsessive concerns in Ulysses.  As Bloom points out, Mulligan’s mockery of Stephen’s theory underlines Stephen’s desire “to dissolve the authority of fatherhood itself.” 

Nothing Like the Sun creates a Shakespeare who has no such obsession with the dissolution of the father but who, like Hamlet, attempts to sustain and fulfil the father’s desires.  The Shakespeare that Burgess creates willingly acquiesces in his father’s desire for the recognition of the family with a coat of arms.  Translating the family motto that his father cannot pronounce, Shakespeare reveals his satisfaction: “‘Not Without Right,’ translated WS.  Good,’ he said after a little time. ‘That is very good’” (173).   Burgess also gives us a Shakespeare who is as deeply moved by the loss of his son as any father would be.  For Burgess’s Shakespeare, Hamnet is the primary force in his desire for both material and poetic success: “‘My son.’  The building for the future, the making of a gentleman that should come into his estates, range his deer-park, be dubbed knight. ‘Sir Hamnet Shakespeare,’ said WS.  ‘A proud name.  He will talk of his father, who had built his fortune for him in the playhouse.”  “But what he had somehow dimly previsioned in his son was the poem he himself could not make with words”  (164, 166).

Burgess does use Joyce’s doubling of Hamlet and Hamnet, but he inverts Joyce’s paradigm of Stephen-the-son who is preoccupied with dissolving fatherhood to create Shakespeare as a son who is attentive to his father’s desires and as a father who has a loving concern for his son.  Where Joyce’s Stephen “wishes to dissolve the authority of fatherhood itself,” Burgess’s Shakespeare willingly accepts the desires of his father and also creates an image of his son that embodies “his own desire for sterility.”  There is a very Joyce-like identification of father and son- “The son was the father”- but although Burgess’s paternal Shakespeare has “also been willing...that son-father’s annihilation,” it is also a willing-to-death of the self that might save the son from suffering: “he could only pray that whatever hellfire, awarded by an unjust God, awaited that boy after death, he himself should embrace it on his son’s behalf.  If he could not die for his son, let him at least be doubly damned for him” (166-67).

There are recognisable traces of the relationship between Simon and Stephen Dedalus in Burgess’s re-writing and adaptation of Stephen’s theories on the relationships between fathers and sons.  The embarrassed account of the decline in Simon Dedalus’s fortunes that Stephen relates to his friend, Cranly, are clearly discernible in WS’s meditations on his own father.  Burgess, however, playfully undercuts the importance of the role John Shakespeare plays in his son’s life by punctuating WS’s meditations with an echo of Molly Bloom’s affirmative yeses.  These yeses mark a moderation of the harsh tone in WS’s thoughts while simultaneously stressing the increasing importance that the Goddess plays in Burgess’s depiction of WS’s creativity: “His father was his betrayer.  Yes yes, that gentle-voiced man, so patient under the Xantippe railings and Arden scorn, had sunk and sunk to one of little account.  John Shakespeare, once Bailiff (of all magisterial glories the most high) paid no more for his levies for the poor’s relief, was alderman still, but of low rate for the musters, dared not appear at the Corporation’s meetings.  He had sold the greater part of his most meagre properties.  He had sold his eldest son into kidskin slavery” (8).

An important part of the resentment that WS feels for his father is his fear of spending the rest of his life at his father’s trade of glovemaker: “Tears pricked at the thought of a life spent so, in a fair trade, a cleanly trade, but till the end of his days, the end, the end of his days” (8).  Burgess stops this self-pitying resentment from developing into the paralysing obsession which consumes Stephen Dedalus by a double strategy.  He first combines the resentment with the growing preoccupation with language that enables WS to leave the trade and become a poet: “The cutting of the trank, the slitting of the slim fourchettes, the bitty gussets, the thumb, the slit binding, the patient glover’s stitch.  A pair of mirror-twin poems” (8).  The experience of glove making is linguistically transformed into a poetic operation upon language that concludes with the model of the poem-as-mirror with which Hamlet describes the role of art as holding a mirror up to nature.

 Burgess’s second strategy for limiting WS’s resentment at having to practice his father’s trade is by making that practice an avenue by which WS can gain yet another of the many encounters of the female other that will eventually merge into an experience of the inspiring and transcendental Goddess: “Then the deliveries by a well-spoken boy who, at the doors of the greater houses, must meekly wait on the pleasure of servant, sniffed at by little dogs.  And then...” (8).  Burgess uses a rich poetic language to transform WS’s experience of “meekly” waiting into the inheritance of a vision that is simultaneously biblical and worldly: “the great lady asked that he might be sent in to her, alone at table in a fair room full of tapestries (Susanna and the lustful elders; the Ark and the dove and a son of Noah looking for landfall; Judith raising her sword to Holofernes.”

The vision intensifies as Burgess sets more of WS’s senses to work: “He saw so clearly, he smelt the great fire of spitting pearwood.  Dinner was done, the trenchers and silver castles of salt cleared, the steward with his tasselled staff had bowed out backward.  Little dogs...leaped and fawned about her, their sharp neat teeth clogging in the soft candy they chumbled from her gloved hand” (8-9).  Eventually, “all his senses shudder,” and Burgess provides WS with a sexual encounter that is simultaneously sexual and transcendent: “She was naked, gold, glowing, burnished, burning, the sun... . And there was the promise that when the moment came, and soon, too soon, it must come, he would be possessed of all time’s secrets and his very mouth grow golden and utter speech for which the very gods waited and would be silent to hear” (9).  The sexual experience is no end in itself; nor is Burgess’s romanticising of it as a mystical experience of “all time’s secrets.”  Instead, the physical act and mystical experience function as a dialectical thesis and antithesis that are synthesised in the Aufhebung of poetic utterance in which WS sees “his mouth grow golden” and he “utter[s] speech for which the gods waited.”

Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as the very foundation of the modern Western concept of personality, and he argues that Falstaff and Hamlet are the “fullest representations of human possibility in Shakespeare.” Revealing a strikingly similar view of importance of these two characters in Western literature, Burgess uses them both as models in his own writing.  In his later novel, The End of the World News, he recreates Falstaff as the poet, Willett, who shares his dramatic prototype’s love of wit and his fondness for the pleasures of the flesh.  Burgess’s recreation of Falstaff has such a strong self-knowledge and inward awareness of his place in the natural cycle of life that he refuses the offer of salvation in the form of a place on the spacecraft that takes his fellow characters to safety as the world comes to an apocalyptic end at the conclusion of the novel.  In Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess uses the same technique of recreating Hamlet, but in an ingenious move that prevents Joyce’s version of Shakespeare from dominating his novel, Burgess uses Joyce’s technique of doubling the parts played by his characters against Joyce, so that Stephen Dedalus’s theories are limited to playing a structural role in the novel’s plot.
    
In Ulysses, Joyce divides his recreation of Hamlet between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.  Stephen is a cynical, disgruntled and disaffected young man who is extremely unhappy about the state of affairs that he finds in Dublin upon returning to Ireland for the death of his mother.  He is estranged from his father, and the pride with which he refused to perform his Easter duty in order to please his mother in A Portrait manifests itself with a more malignant force in his refusal to pray for his mother on her death bed.  While Stephen is given most of Hamlet’s negative characteristics, Leopold Bloom is given the capacious consciousness and inward awareness that both Harold Bloom and Burgess seem to have valued as Hamlet’s most striking quality.  Bloom suggests that “Poldy has a Shakespearean inwardness, far more profoundly manifested than the interior life is in Stephen, or Molly, or anyone else in the novel.” This inwardness is the quality of Hamlet that Bloom values most and it belongs to the character who shares his name rather than to the character whom Joyce identified as his version of Hamlet.

Bloom’s theoretical appreciation of the Prince of Denmark draws on Nietzsche’s recognition that Hamlet is not “the man who thinks too much but rather...the man who thinks too well.” For Nietzsche and for Bloom, Hamlet is a kind of Dionysian figure.  He looks into the true nature of existence, gains a painful, nausea-inducing, existential knowledge of life and realises the futility of action in a world that is little more than a series of illusions: “In this sense, the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action, for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things.”  To be required to correct wrongs in the external world is foolish and humiliating: “They feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint.  Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet.”

This Nietzschean sense of the self is what Bloom terms Hamlet’s “inwardness,” and in Burgess’s version of Shakespeare it is combined with the wit and freedom that Bloom values in both Hamlet and Falstaff: “Inwardness as a mode of freedom is the mature Hamlet’s finest endowment...and wit becomes another name for that inwardness and that freedom, first in Falstaff, and then in Hamlet.” Burgess’s Shakespeare lives among his family, shares a bed with his wife, Anne Hathaway, writes and acts with his fellow playwrights and actors and has major relationships, first with Henry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton, and then with the Dark Lady (to whom Burgess gives the name, Fatmah, which means “destiny”), but throughout all of his relationships, Burgess’s WS maintains a self-conscious awareness of his separateness from his fellow creatures.   From the first to the last page of Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess endows WS with an inwardness that is sustained and directed towards the inspiring Goddess who makes her first appearance in the novel’s initial sentence: “IT WAS ALL A MATTER OF A GODDESS-dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.  When did her image first dawn?” (3)
Adapting the Joycean word play that is grounded in a poetics of associative logic, Burgess creates an inner, linguistic stream of consciousness that becomes WS’s defining characteristic: “Goat.  Willow.  Widow.  Tarquin, superb sun-black southern king, all awry, twisted snakewise, had goatlike gone to it.  So tragos, a tragedy.  Razor and whetstone.  But that was the other Tarquin.  WS saw great-bellied slack whiteness in the spring of a southern country, a Lucy lawn peacock ghost-aglimmer, Arden, patrician, screaming” (4).  The image of the dark goddess is never far from WS’s poetic, associative musings: “He seemed to himself to be dreaming of straining after some dark image just beyond the tail of his spaniel eye” (4).  WS’s first sexual encounters are bound up with this goddess who is at once threatening and the source of his poetic vision, and with his inward-orientated consciousness, WS speculates on the links between his developing sexuality and the figure of his muse: “He had thought that was one way toward the goddess; he had thought he saw golden feet on the dying sun, that former apparition of Good Friday returned on Easter Sunday evening” (11).

Exploiting the relationships between death and sexual orgasm with which Shakespeare played in creating Falstaff, Burgess uses WS’s sexual encounters to create WS’s Hamlet-like inwardness and to develop further his inner consciousness as one that is structured by language.  WS experiences his own sexual desires as something that is quite distinct from his consciousness: “It was not he, it was not WS; it was some outlandish and exterior beast to which he must needs, and all unwillingly play host” (11).   Unlike Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who never realises the grandiose poetic destiny of which he dreams-a destiny that was Joyce’s rather than Stephen’s-Burgess’s WS is always and essentially a poet.  He experiences his own sexual desires as something from which he is alienated because he is nothing other than the will to create poetically.  Even his awareness of his inner sexual drives as something other is a poetic  experience that is felt as, and punctuated by, poetic rhythms:  “At it, WS watched, as it were, this other one, astonied, hearing him cry with some other’s, stranger’s, voice yet aware of the rhythms of his need as starting in iambs and ending in spondees” (11).

Each sexual experience is important because of the opportunity that it might afford for WS to encounter his goddess in a vision that offers both the promise of creation and the threat of an apocalyptic destruction:  “And then the great vision glowed, its feet set on the fiery ball that made ready to go underground.  But the goddess was greater fire, consuming the world as the sun died.  He made haste to possess her, through the dark-flued country priestess who lay beneath him” (12).  When WS learns of Anne’s strange sexual inventions and becomes entangled in a “bed-slavery,” (43), he begins to feel a loathing for her that borders on hatred.  Only the possibility that another avenue to the goddess may be opened through this hatred and the sexual practices Anne desires prevents him from following his instinct to leave her: “There was a fascination in hate;  moreover, it seemed to him that, in those shameful bedchamber antics he could not leave off, he grew...somehow close to the goddess he had all but neglected” (43).  These “bedroom antics” include a blasphemous game that “entailed kneeling and a show of pious prayer.”  WS participates in such games knowing that they may be evil because of the possibility that such participation may lead him to another encounter with his dark goddess: “there was a dark way that was shown to him, but he was fearful of entering it wholly; he knew not properly what it was but it was to do with evil” (43).

The inwardness that Bloom sees as the key quality in the characters of Hamlet and Falstaff is sustained throughout Burgess’s depiction of WS’s relationships.  Travelling by boat towards Gravesend with Southampton, WS perceives the physical decay and spiritual malaise of the “flower of English manhood”: “They were idle, they were dying of ennui...they hid diseased bodies under silk and brocade” (107).  WS takes advantage of the opportunity for advancement that his patron offers, but it is above all a poetic advancement that he continually seeks: “He would give them what they wished, redeeming his craft to art... .  He would provide, he would lend words to these elegant puppets” (107-08).  Although he uses Southampton’s patronage and friendship to ensure that he can send money back to Stratford and to borrow a thousand pounds to purchase a player’s share in the playhouse, he remains conscious of his isolation from those around him as his inwardness develops in the form of a growing consciousness of his poetic destiny: “But he sighed, knowing himself to be caught forever between two worlds-earth, and air, reason and belief.”  Like Hamlet, he is also exists between “action and contemplation.  Alone among all sorts of men, he embraced a poet’s martyrdom” (108).

As Burgess develops his fictional Shakespeare by endowing him with the same characteristics with which the historical Shakespeare created his two strongest characters, his writing employs more of Joyce’s strategies even as it stresses Burgess’s independence from Joyce.  Using the present-tense form of journal entries with which Joyce concludes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Burgess employs Joyce’s technique of the literary epiphany to depict WS’s deepening love for his dark mistress as well as his creation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Under the entry dated January Six (the celebration of Epiphany), Burgess merges WS’s creation of the play with his desire for his mistress: “Well, I put the bad harvest in Oberon’s speech and then thought for a fancy I would give my dark one in the window a womb rich with Titania’s young squire” (145).

Although Burgess uses Joyce’s journal form as well as his device of the literary epiphany, the contrast in their respective themes confirms Burgess’s independence from Joyce.  A Portrait uses the journal form to depict a would-be poet’s departure from his family and home; Nothing Like the Sun uses it to depict a mature poet’s creativity, his passion for the woman with whom he can approach his goddess and muse and the inward independence of mind that enables Burgess’s WS to fight both the weakness of the flesh and the pain of jealousy with the practice of poetic creation: “it is a sort of cuckolding.  The trick is to be glad and noble and to smile;  better far, it is to wish this loss and conceive it as the child of mine own will... .I, and all men in me, am condemned by reason of time and flesh and indolence... . It is time then to rise all above the body and live in a making soul” (157).

In a playful acknowledgement of Joyce as the writer who was once his master, Burgess, the ex-disciple, borrows the cavalcade procession from Ulysses and uses the words “jingling” and “jaunty” with which Joyce depicts Blazes Boylan’s adulterous visit to the house of Molly Bloom.  He uses these to depict Southampton’s departure from London with Essex after Elizabeth sends him to Ireland to subdue the Irish:  “WS stood silent.  There was that lord whom he had once called friend, aloof on his chestnut...a great captain bound for the quelling of the kerns.” (207)   The identification of Southampton, who has cuckolded WS with the latter’s dark mistress, and Blazes Boylan, who cuckolds Leopold Bloom, is triggered by the description of the horses “richly caparisoned, the harness jingling.”  It is sustained in the description of the procession as the “cavalcade went by in jaunty magnificence” (207, emphasis added).

The writer with whom Burgess  most identifies in Nothing Like the Sun is obviously Shakespeare.  This should be clear from both the title and central character of WS, yet Harold Bloom’s reading of the novel as an expansion of Stephen Dedalus’s theories about Shakespeare in Ulysses is understandable.  Burgess does use Stephen’s theories and he also borrows Joyce’s technique of inventing compound words.  WS, for example, describes himself as “filled with lunaticloverpoet’s pride” (146).  Like Joyce’s A Portrait, Nothing Like the Sun is both a Bildungsroman and a Künstleerroman, and Burgess also steals specific words like “jaunty” and “jingling” from Ulysses and uses them in a context that makes their source quite obvious.   By the time that he wrote Nothing Like the Sun, however, Burgess had finished his Joycean apprenticeship and developed both his own literary styles and a very distinctive poetic voice.  If there is any sort of literary contest carried out in the novel it is clearly between Burgess and Shakespeare, and Burgess’s strategy in the contest is to use Shakespeare’s own fictional creations in order to endow the playwright with the inward strength and consciousness which Shakespeare himself engendered.  It is both an effective and cunning device: to give life to the Western canon’s central poet by giving him the gifts of his own creation.

Geoffrey Aggeler has mapped out the extent to which Burgess identifies his own voice with that of Shakespeare in the novel, and he reminds us of the important role that the fictional Mr Burgess plays as the speaker whose farewell speech to his students constitutes the novel.   Ultimately, the voice that Burgess creates for WS is the result of his intensive research into Shakespeare’s canon and Elizabethan words and linguistic patterns.  At times slightly puritanical in tone, the voice of WS is one that an “Elizabethan audience might associate...with a fire-breathing Calvinist preacher such as William Perkins.”  As Aggeler insists, however, “neither Perkins nor any other hellfire Elizabethan preacher would lubricate his tongue for a Godly discourse” with a “swig” of the samsu  that Burgess’s fictional alter-ego imbibes while delivering the farewell address that is Nothing Like the Sun. As Nothing Like the Sun reaches its conclusion, the distinctions between the voice of Burgess’s narrative alter ego and that of WS start to disappear, and when we reach the “Epilogue,” the voice of Mr Burgess, the Lecturer, speaks to us from within the narrative: “I am near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured-thin, slow, grey” (224).

The emergence of this voice from within the narrative signals the culmination of the dialectical synthesis bringing together the voices of WS and Mr Burgess.  Aggeler traces this development and suggests that the “identification of Burgess with Shakespeare has become so strong...that we are not surprised to hear him discoursing from within the poet’s conscience, troubling his dreams.” Because the primary identification is between Burgess and WS, the role of Joyce is little more than that of a source for some of the themes and literary strategies with which Burgess engages in his literary agon with the bard as he forces him to step forward from the concealing shadows of his plays and sonnets.

Burgess’s struggle with Joyce was finished before he wrote Nothing Like the Sun and turned his attention to the life and texts of Shakespeare, but it is not too fanciful to see the farewell blessing that WS bestows upon Southampton as echoing one that Burgess wished to give to the Irish writer on whose work he had once devoted such careful and fond critical attention.  After establishing the identification of Southampton with Joyce’s Blazes Boylan, Burgess has WS bid farewell to his friend with mixed feelings.  He is sad to see Southampton go, but he knows the danger that his friend’s return will bring.  These are appropriate sentiments for a writer who knew all to well the demands that Joyce makes on his readers: “WS broke his silence to call: ‘God bless you, God save you... .God help you his heart murmured.  A victorious general would return to claim his due-not bays, not laurels.  Those nearest to him in loyalty would then be in most need of God’s help” (207).

The Malayan Trilogy
By Allan Massie
The late Victorian writer of light verse J. K. Stephen looked forward to the day "when the Rudyards cease from Kipling/ And the Haggards Ride no more". Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy may be said to be about that day. If Kipling and Haggard were poet and propagandist of Empire, Burgess was the amused chronicler of its end. For the invitation to adventure and the stern call to duty, he substituted the Comic Spirit. His Malaya is a land of misunderstanding and confusion, where hopes are indeed dupes and fear, if not out-and-out liars, prove to be ill-founded. Comedy thrives on failure of communication, as when, for example, in The Twelfth Night, Olivia loves Viola believing her to be the boy Cesario, and, as Cesario, Viola cannot openly express her love for the Duke Orsino, who himself loves Olivia precisely because he does not know her. In Burgess's Malaya, nobody really understands anybody. This is of course part of its charm.
It must be admitted that his Malaya is not one that many Europeans who spent far longer working there than he did would recognize, any more than they recognized or accepted the Malaya of Somerset Maugham's short stories. Their Malaya was one of decent hard-working planters and civil servants who didn't spend their time boozing in kedais, mixed little socially with Malays, Indians, Tamils or Chinese--except perhaps well-to-do Chinese merchants--and who lived an almost completely European life, mostly decorous and often not very exciting. It should he said too that their wives, though denied occupation, mostly adapted happily; many loved Malaya, and continued to do so long after they had returned "home".
None of this means that Burgess's Malaya isn't equally authentic. His Europeans are all, one way or another, misfits. Many don't want to he in Malaya, and can't think why they are there. They would like to get away, but can't raise the cash, unless, like Nabby Adams, the 6 ft 8 inches police officer, who is the dominant figure in the first novel, Time for a Tiger, their creator is generous--and sentimental--enough to let them win the lottery.
It is right that Nabby should do so. "A comedy," says the Beggar in John Gay's Beggar's Opera, "should end happily", and so he commands a reprieve for the highwayman MacHeath. In just the same way, Burgess reprieves Nabby.
Nabby is a character whom any stern moralist would find despicable. He is a liar, a cheat, a sponge, a bore and an alcoholic. But he bores only other characters, not the reader. He has a superb vitality--on the page; he lives splendidly even as he groans out his hangovers and skulks the back-streets in search of a drinking-shop where his credit will extend to the necessary morning beers. Burgess clearly delights in Nabby, as Shakespeare in the equa11y despicable Falstaff; and, as with Falstaff, we forgive Nabby because we too delight in him.
Nabby dominates the first novel, and may be said to unbalance it, for he is peripheral to the themes developed in the trilogy. (But then it's by no means certain when Burgess conceived the books as a trilogy. Each is complete in itself, and can stand by itself.)
The trilogy's central figure, hero or anti-hero, is Victor Crabbe, come to Malaya with his second wife, the blonde Fenella, as a teacher. (Burgess himself was an education officer in the Colonial Service, and his portrayal of the schools Crabbe teaches in is authentic.)
Crabbe is very much a product of post-war England. In a Fifties novel set at home he would doubtless have qualified as an angry young man. He comes to Malaya as an idealist, though it is democracy and racial harmony that he is ready to preach rather than the old message of empire. He believes it is his task to help prepare his young pupils for the independence of Malaya which is fast approaching; but he finds himself slandered as a Communist (which indeed he had been at university), not by his British superiors but by students and fellow-teachers. So he is caught up in a comedy of errors.
His marriage is a comedy of errors too, if a painful one. Fenella is his second wife. He killed his first, accidentally; his car hit an icy patch of road and ran into a river. He escaped; she was drowned. He can't escape the memory and the guilt. Fenella resents his absorption in memory, resents Malaya, longs for Home, and can't understand why he is determined to stick it out.
The disharmony of the Crabbes' marriage mirrors the disharmony of Malaya. This becomes apparent in the second novel, The Enemy in the Blanket. Crabbe is now headmaster of a school in the feudal northern state of Negeri Dahaga. "History? The State had no history. It had not changed in many centuries. The British had hardly disturbed the timeless pattern". But change is coming to this land where power is only nominally in the hands of the Sultan; in reality "Dahaga was ruled feudally by an hereditary officer called the Abang."
The present Abang is a civilized man with a taste for motor-cars and blondes (he soon has his eye on Fenella): improbably, he has read George Orwell. But he knows his time is up. "There was this new thing--politics; there were these cries of Merdeka!" (Independence, Freedom).
"A new class was arising--small intellectuals, failed B.A.s., frustrated lawyers, teachers with the gift of the gab... It was, in a sense curious that the end of  colonialism meant also the end of a grotesque seigniory in Dahaga. In another sense it was not--The births were much given to anomalies... But there would be no anomalies in the new regime…"
Meanwhile, fortunately for the Comic Spirit, anomalies abound. Ah Wing, the Crabbes' ancient Chinese cook, who likes to believe his new master is a bachelor like his old one, innocently sends food to his son-in-law, a Communist guerrilla in the jungle. Hardman, the near-albino lawyer, university contemporary of Crabbe, marries a Malay woman for financial security, even though he has to be converted to Islam to do so. Crabbe is unfaithful to Fenella, with a woman he does not care for, but only pities. His real infidelity, she comes to realize, is his loyalty to his first dead wife.
So she too plumps for merdeka.
How do people very different from each other live together? That question is posed by the Crabbes' marriage and by Malaya itself.
"But," said Crabbe--we are now in the third novel Beds in the East--"apart from the Communists, I don't think we can doubt that the component races of Malaya have never made much effort to understand each other. Odd superstitions and prejudices, complacency, ultra-conservatism--these have perpetually got in the way of better understanding. Moreover, the idea of a community--a single community, as opposed to many communities--never seemed very important during the period of British management... each race was content to keep alive fragments of culture imported from its country of origin. There never seemed any necessity to mix. But now the time has come... There must not merely be mixing, there must be fusion."
"'Confusion,' said Vythilingam, nodding agreement.
Confusion indeed. The Comic Spirit delights in it, and the trilogy is essentially a comedy, with a vast and varied cast, presented to us with enormous exuberance which, however, is made endurable and agreeable, as unmixed exuberance rarely is, by the undercurrent of melancholy that runs through it. This is after all a world where nothing ever comes right, except by chance, and chance is as ever blind to merit and good intentions.
Burgess attempted something very remarkable and ambitious: the picture of a whole society at a moment when tradition, accepted codes of morality and of belief, are all thrown into the melting-pot. The book--for the three should now be read as one--owes something to Norman Douglas's Capri novel, South Wind, which sets out to make murder acceptable to a Bishop--a very Burgessian theme. Douglas too portrays a society where what has been unthinkingly accepted is now challenged, and does so with the wit and serenity that Burgess displays. Some of the passages which fill in the historical and political background of Malaya and especially of Dahaga are reminiscent of Douglas's own expository narrative. The same note of amused irony is struck. But the canvas of the Malayan Trilogy is much larger than that of South Wind, the variety of characters incomparably greater, the theme more complicated, and its elaboration more intelligent. 
The trilogy has been so thoroughly imagined by its author that it takes possession of the imagination of the reader.
There are few novels in which the writer is so constantly aware of his characters. Someone once remarked of Henry James that it was very strange that he didn't seem to know what his characters were doing when they were out of the room. Burgess always knows what his are up to, what they are saying, how they are misbehaving, even when not present to our view; and this accounts in great measure for the vitality of this comic masterpiece.

© Alan Massie

Any old form
By Peter ffrench Hodges
If The Way We Live Now wasn't such a long book, Trollope's saga of nineteenth century London life would be read by subscribers to Hello Magazine, fitting new names to old characters. Ten years ago, Melmot was Maxwell.

Larger than life characters should be remembered in literature even if they are not anticipating Nicolas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, the Whitbread winning novel which was not about his father Oswald, as the biography came out later. Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers was a not unsympathetic portrait of Somerset Maugham, Pope John and most of the twentieth century. In his last novel, the epic verse Byrne, Burgess makes lightning raids on most of the above.

Michel Tournier once described himself as 'plongé jusqu'au cou dans la Bible'; the twins, the Old and the New Testament in his novel Gemini; so in Byrne Michael Byrne has twin sons one of them a priest. Yet Michael Byrne is himself a twin, half Russian doll, half Moses. "To Michael Byrne The technical term 'tragic' / Can be applied with absolute precision / When a man's inner quiescent flaws / Are lashed alive by an external cause". The verse of the novel has great panache, nodding occasionally to Yeats or Betjeman, even to Ogden Nash. 'Of schnapps the joy of being drunk and Aryan / Though Hitler was a teetotalitarian". Lady Gregory plays Lady Boxfox and Betjeman's London Underground is a snowy background.

What happened to the great courtisans of the nineteen thirties: 'She had survived abortions as well as miscarriages/ As well as alcohol and drug accesses/ The ravages of four disastrous marriages/ - Her fault - and yet with bright Teutonic tresses…' Forgotten now when the earth was their oyster, Burgess misses nothing of the atmosphere of the Thirties and Britain's ignoble ignorance of anti-semiticism. 'The Nazi's, at that time, did not abuse/ The basic Lebensrecht of German Jews.' The upper echelons of the artistic German world ran parallel to Isherwood's Berlin books as Byrne becomes involved in the opera with Goebbels providing the libretto for a new production. Eventually foregoing it for his new job as Minister of Propaganda, the old wartime joke of Hitler's single ball is conjured up with the line 'His Führer's talent too was even littler.'

When war comes Byrne decamps to neutral Switzerland from where he disappears into the Brazilian jungle and becomes a myth. Later, he is sighted in outlandish places as a kind of bi-sexual Paul Bowles 'A late attempt to mortify the flesh/ I met him in a bar in Marakesh' and 'A change of sexual tropism: 'My boys,/ I prefer women, but these make less noise'.

Exit father Byrne for most of the rest of the book and enter his twin sons. First the priest Father Byrne, at Green Park station, perhaps an earlier allusion to the tropics: 'And white men go to pieces as we've seen/ In overlauded trash by Graham Green.' This is also Graham Greene land, too, (he usually stayed at the Ritz after he had spent some years in Fountain Court off St. James's Street) but it is also the land of rubbish strikes, skinheads, bogus literary musicals and militant Muslims burning books, presently outraged at Dante putting Mohammed in hell, something which escaped their notice for the odd six hundred years. The old Christian prejudices from the past 'And how is Manchester? I rather fear/ The Holy Name is going to be assigned/ To mosquedom, The multiple muezzin's call/ reigns in a town where there's no rain at all' have given way to new ones and while modern Byrnes are involved in popular musicals the old Michael Byrne appears as composer of the music backing a porno video while lost in the Brazilian jungle like Edward James.

Burgess takes his twins to Venice to near death there with Timothy, the priestly twin pursuing not a boy but a teenage girl, an anarchist straight from a Fassbinder film while Thomas, the other twin, has his one testicle surgically removed and is libidinously pursued by a well known authoress, her real name laced into the remark: 'See how she's pricked your progenitive balloons and also kicked your/ Male chauvinism.'

Like the Clockwork Orange, Burgess is more than hinting at the future. Although his twins are not cloned, all identical twins are clones of the sort and have been a feature of modern fiction since Joy and Josephine by Monica Dickens. That Thomas, the other twin, is sexually deformed may be seen as a warning that cloning may have physical dangers, let alone moral and social ones. International rights to clone human embryos have already been patented and although the world could do with a few more Byrnes, father or twins, only the Dutch could wish for another Calvin, but Tim has undertaken to write twelve one hour episodes of John Calvin's life with the advice to cut out the art. 'It led your Oscar Wilde to condign hell./ We want no art. We want the thing done well.'

Finally, out of the blue, an ancient Michael Byrne appears like Howard Hughes to stay at Claridges rather than the Inn on the Park. He is accompanied by giant black men and wears a long black robe sitting on a litter. He has come to see his offspring for the last time, dramatically, even cinematically. 'Dying, a rather well rewarded part/ For Guinness, though life pays too much for art.'

Peter ffrench-Hodges
P. fH. was Head of Overseas Press with the British Tourist Authority from 1957 to 1988. As Chairman of the Arts Committee of the Foreign Press Association he met Anthony Burgess when he was invited as an official guest at a luncheon at a Foreign Press Association in Carlton House Terrace in the early 80's.