Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 4, August, 2001
 
Contents
Introduction  (by Ben Forkner).	P. 1
Burgess's Any Old Iron: An Apocalyptic Epic	P. 4
(by Geoffrey Aggeler). 	
Anthony Burgess In The Yorkshire Post (by Andrew Biswell). 	P. 12
Enderby's Hove (by Dougie Milton).	P. 28
Burgess and Will! : Anthony Burgess’s Cinematic 
Presentation of Shakespearean Biography (by Kay Smith). 	P. 32
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
Several times during the early summer, I opened my eyes with the sun still at ground level in the east, buoyed by the renewed confidence that I would be able to write this short presentation before the day was done. Buoyancy is a risky condition to carry into the forbidding corridors of even a respectable university, however, especially with no students left to raise the spirits, and I usually found myself at the end of the day, praying for August, and remembering Ben Jonson’s bitter complaint: “What a deal of cold business doth a man mis-spend the better part of life in.” Thankfully, August has arrived, and with it enough good news to banish all mis-spending from the memory, at least until September.
A Clockwork Orange Colloquium
The planning of the December colloquium has now reached the final stages, thanks particularly to the tireless energies and good will of Emmanuel Vernadakis who has taken on the lion’s share of the organization. All members of the Anthony Burgess Center have participated, of course, often sacrificing time from their own private research for the good of the cause. Readers of the Newsletter should consult the special entry on the colloquium listed on the title page of our website for full details. We are all looking forward to meeting many of you in Angers in a few months.
BBC Gift
David Thompson has recently donated several boxes of rushes, video tapes, and assorted documents he and Kevin Jackson used in the making of the two-hour BBC documentary on Anthony Burgess, “The Burgess Variations.” This is obviously vital research material, a generous and unusual trove for Burgess scholars for years to come, and we are extremely grateful to David Thompson for the offer. As soon as the boxes are opened, and the items catalogued, a full account will be given in the Newsletter.
Paul Boytnick
All Burgess students will recognize the name of Paul Boytnick as the author of the standard Burgess bibliography, Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985). I have just learned that Mr Boytnick has donated to the Center various papers and documents he has collected over the years in working on his bibliography. The first batch of this material is now in the hands of Andrew Biswell, who is writing a book on Burgess. Mr Biswell, well known to readers of the Newsletter, will transfer the Boytnick papers to the Center as soon as he is finished with them. On behalf of the other members of the Center, I would like to express our warmest thanks to Mr Boytnick for his generous gesture.
Annual Anthony Burgess Lecture
On April 25 Professor Kay Smith of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, delivered the annual Burgess lecture in the English Department of the University of Angers. Since these lectures are sponsored by the English Department, I would like to thank the Department Chairman, Professor John Cassini, for his support. Professor Cassini is, of course, an active member of the Center, and one of the chief organizers of the forthcoming Clockwork Orange Colloquium. Professor Smith’s lecture, “Burgess and Will!: Anthony Burgess’s Cinematic Presentation of Shakespearean Biography,” focused on Burgess’s work on a film based on Shakespeare’s life. The film was never made, but the original Burgess screenplay, “Will or the Bawdy Bard,” is available in the holdings of the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Professor Smith uses the screenplay to speculate (in an incisive, and wide-ranging study) on Burgess’s life-long creative fascination with Shakespeare, particularly in the novels, Nothing Like the Sun and Enderby’s Dark Lady. We are grateful to Professor Smith for the lecture, and for allowing us to publish it in this issue of the Newsletter. We were also pleased that Professor Smith’s husband, Ralph, was able to accompany her on the trip, along with Gil Morgenstern (Artistic Director of the Appalachian Summer Festival) who is interested in setting up an exchange with the Burgess Society and Bouvet-Ladubay in Saumur.
Four Essays
Along with Professor Smith’s lecture, three other essays are collected in the current Newsletter. Andrew Biswell provides a thorough accounting of Burgess’s critical reviews for the Yorkshire Post, with a complete bibliographical listing of the reviews. Of special interest are Biswell’s suggestions of relationships between certain books reviewed and Burgess’s own novels at the time. The topographical commentary by Dougie Milton, “Enderby’s Hove,” is a perfect example of the type of inspired personal essay I had hoped the Newsletter would attract from the beginning. Perhaps we can arrange to organize our next colloquium at The Neptune and the Freemason’s Arms, or if not, at least persuade Mr Milton and friends (and the red-haired barmaid) to join us in Angers in December. Finally, I am very grateful to Professor Geoffrey Aggeler for sending us his article, “Any Old Iron: An Apocalyptic Epic.” In keeping with everything else Geoffrey Aggeler has written on Burgess, including his seminal study, Anthony Burgess: the Artist as Novelist (University of Alabama Press, 1979), his review of Any Old Iron is a fine combination of erudition and insight, shedding light on deeply embedded thematic, structural, and symbolic allusions that will help guide all future readings of the novel. I am pleased to announce that Professor Aggeler will be one of the keynote speakers at the Clockwork Orange Colloquium.
The Chronicles of Liana Burgess
Liana Burgess, I am delighted to report, has agreed to begin a permanent column of information, remembrances, and commentary to be added to whenever she desires. The Chronicles of Liana Burgess will be set up as a separate entry, therefore, and will be listed on the title page of our website. For anyone who knows Liana Burgess, this decision is another remarkable boon for the Center and for Burgess scholars. I hope the authorities of the University of Angers will soon find some way of thanking her for her faithful support of our efforts. I realize that it will be almost impossible to adequately thank her for all she has done these last two years, going back, of course, to her original donation to the University Library. But I would like to strongly suggest to these same authorities that a public ceremony in her honor (even after all this time) might be a good way to begin.
Call for Contributions
For all our readers, remember that we will consider all types of contributions for the Newsletter. Please send them to me, or to Valérie Neveu, and I promise a prompt response. In closing, I would like to thank Valérie, once more, for all her help, patience, and expertise in maintaining our site.

Burgess's Any Old Iron: An Apocalyptic Epic
By Geoffrey Aggeler
Any Old Iron could perhaps be characterized as a family saga, but the scope of the family history it chronicles is so broad and encompassing that the much-overused label ‘epic’ comes to mind. Not since Earthly Powers has Burgess covered so much history in a fictional narrative. What is remarkable is how he integrates such a wide range of material while maintaining focus on his characters.He accomplishes this by the use of ‘cinematic’ techniques as old as Homer, the sharply realized moment caught through the eyes of the participant, the richly suggestive but unobtrusive digression, and deftly inserted flashbacks.
The narrator identifies himself in the opening paragraph as “a retired terrorist and teacher of philosophy.” He mentions this in passing as he discourses on the properties of steel and why it is improbable that the legendary sword Excalibur survived into the twentieth century. A sword alleged to be Arthur’s may have belonged to Attila the Hun, who may have preserved it in oil, but the narrator is skeptical about the claim of a Welsh nationalist brotherhood calling themselves the Sons of Arthur that they possessed the true Excalibur, which they call “Caledvwlch.”
What follows is a history of the Jones family, beginning with the parents of Reginald Morrow Jones, who had brought the sword alleged to be Excalibur back from Soviet Russia at great personal risk. The father, an undersized Welshman named David Jones, had sailed for America on the Titanic, survived the sinking, and wound up as a cook in a Brooklyn restaurant catering to East European exiles. The proprietor’s statuesque daughter, Ludmila Petrovana Likhutin, then chooses him for a mate after he proves himself worthy in bed.
With the outbreak of the Great War, the Joneses leave Brooklyn for England, and David Jones joins a Welsh regiment in the British Army. As in other novels, notably The Wanting Seed and Napoleon Symphony, Burgess vividly presents the horrors and agony of modern warfare from the points of view of the suffering participants who are subject to the will of the generals. The initial focus of the narration on Excalibur and subsequent references to it inevitably evoke the myth of chivalry, one of the most potent in the western psyche, and provide an ironic backdrop to the images of mindless slaughter and suffering. Like Joseph Heller and Homer, Burgess captures the cruel grotesque comedy of war, the terrible moments when suffering human beings are turned into grotesque objects for the amusement of the unfeeling gods. Thus Heller describes the death of Kid Sampson in Catch-22:
There was the briefest, softest ssst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips, standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view.
Such moments have always been part of warfare, and thousands of years before Wilfrid Owen answered Horace with Dulce et Decorum Est Homer showed how unheroic and indecorous death in battle can be;
Patroklos coming close up to him stabbed with a spear-thrust at the right side of the jaw and drove it on through the teeth, then hooked and dragged him with the spear over the rail, as a fisherman who sits out on the jut of a rock with line and glittering bronze hook drags a fish, who is thus doomed, out of the water, So he hauled him, mouth open to the bright spear, out of the chariot,     and shoved him over on his face, and as he fell the life left him.
(Iliad XVI, 404-410, Lattimore trans.)
In the same ghastly comic vein, Burgess’s character David Jones recounts the miserable fate of a comrade: “Dan Tetlow, that wrote the letter. He lost his manhood just one day later, poor bugger. I’ll not forget in a hurry. Cheerful as a lark, lost his manhood. Walking about in his blue, whistling. Clean as a whistle they were off.” (AOI, 62). And later in the novel, during the next war, a son named for this comrade witnesses the bloody debacle at Anzio: “He could hear Jesus buggering fucking Christ and then landmines going off. The rockets had not got rid of all the landmines. Bert Redway, by way of being a kind of mate, a thin-necked lad with respirator spectacles, had a foot blown off, and Jack Unwin was totally shattered, showering lavish blood and guts over Bill Ross, who was in his turn blown to buggery, meaning he gave limbs to all points of the compass.” (AOI, 129)
When David Jones is reported killed in action, Ludmila leaves England to join relatives in Petrograd. She arrives in time to witness some of the violence of the Russian Revolution and is wounded in one buttock during an uprising of workers and mutinous soldiers. Like the old woman in Voltaire’s Candide, she must manage with one buttock as she endures the misery of life in the chaos of Russia in transition. But then she is overjoyed to receive a letter from her husband, whose reported death had been a mistake. With help from the Anglo-Russian Bureau in Petrograd, she is able to return to England.
Reunited, the Joneses produce three children, whose histories take up much of the remainder of the novel. The first, a daughter, is named Beatrix, after the “creatrix” of Peter Rabbit. Two sons are named for wounded comrades whom David Jones esteemed, Reginald Morrow and Daniel Tetlow. As the second long segment of the novel begins, the three children are grown, and we learn that the narrator, Harry Wolfson, is a Jew from Manchester. Delaying the revelation of a narrator’s ethnicity is nothing new in Burgess’s fiction. In MF we don’t find out that the narrator is black until the very end. As Burgess explained to this writer in an interview: “In my novel MF the hero does not have his race defined at the beginning because I consider the race to be irrelevant.” And one of the “alembicated morals” he mockingly offers the reader is “that my race or your race must start thinking in terms of the human totality and cease weaving its own fancied achievements or miseries as a banner.” His best known novel, A Clockwork Orange, also compels the reader to think in terms of the human totality. Having observed both the Russian stilyagi and the English teddy boys in action, Burgess was moved by a renewed sense of the oneness of humanity, and the murderous teenaged hooligans who are the main characters of A Clockwork Orange are composite creations who could be English or Russian or both.
In Any Old Iron, the Joneses fuse Welsh and Russian cultures, and through involvement with the narrator and his sister, Zipporah, Jewish culture as well. But while the cultures may fuse in these relationships the novel is taken up for the most part with conflicts between and within cultures. The main characters are either directly involved in or touched by World War I, the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Arab-Jewish conflicts and a bit of terrorism by Welsh nationalists. We are left with an apocalyptic sense of twentieth century history, and there is much to suggest that this is part of Burgess’s design. For one thing, he alludes directly to the Book of Daniel early in the novel when young David Jones is clouted by his father for “onanizing to a steel engraving of Belshazzar’s Feast in the family Bible.” Without actually seeing this engraving, one may gather from reading the fifth chapter of Daniel that there might be much to fire a young boy’s libido in an artist’s rendering of it.  Belshazzar is in his cups when he orders the sacred vessels from the temple in Jerusalem to be brought out and filled with wine to gratify the banqueters, among whom are wives, courtesans and concubines, presumably in various attitudes of Babylonian abandonment, uninhibited until the mysterious writing hand alarms Belshazzar. The words it inscribes are “Mene mene tekel u-pharsin.” As Daniel explains to Belshazzar, the meaning is that God has numbered the days of his kingdom, he himself has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and his kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
The words themselves refer to coins, a shekel being a sixtieth of a mene, (Hebrew mina). U means “and”; pharsin means two pheres, with one pheres being a half-shekel. The weights, or coins, are mentioned in descending value; this is in accord with the comparable descending values of the metals in chapter 2, verse 32 comprising the image with the head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. The four metals are believed to represent the Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Macedonian Greek kingdoms. The theme of a descending scale of metals representing ages of world history is also found in Hesiod’s Works and Days, in ancient Hindu mythology, and elsewhere. (Notes to Daniel 2:32 and 5:25 in The Oxford Study Bible).
As noted earlier, Any Old Iron begins with a discourse on the properties of steel. But steel is not the only metal that figures prominently in the saga of the Jones family. As he is dying, the father of David Jones bequeathes to him a thirty-eight pound chunk of gold, inherited from his grandfather, which remains in the family until Dan Tetlow Jones heaves it into a pond near the end of the novel. Then there is the title of the novel itself. In his Works and Days, Hesiod summarizes human history in terms of metals, beginning with a Golden Age of innocence corresponding to Eden in the Judaeo-Christian scheme. He sees his own time as the Age of Iron, a time when the old patriarchal and familial morality has dissolved and been replaced by a war of every man against his fellow: “The man who keeps his oath, the just, the good, will get no thanks; but rather evil doing and violence will be praised. Might will be right and shame will cease to be” (Works and Days, 182-93).
What Hesiod is describing is the modern age, and his vision of it agrees with that of Burgess in Any Old Iron.
In an interview quoted by John J. Stinson, Burgess said that the book “is about trying to find some absolute value--what the sword of King Arthur was supposed to symbolize.” Taking this as a key, Stinson notes that “the quest for absolutes, although an eternal human need, seems to result in war and carnage, causing the reader to think that the ‘old iron’ is an antiquated piece of junk that might best be discarded. ‘Any Old Iron’ is the cry of an itinerant junkman in Britain, this suggestion of the title being reinforced by the first epigraph “Eisen, Lumpen, Papier! [Iron, Rags, Paper]---Arab Street Cry in Tel Aviv.” (Anthony Burgess Revisited 127-28).
In other words, the quest for absolutes in the modern world is ultimately doomed to failure, an exercise in futility, even as the quest for the Grail in Malory’s Morte Darthur was doomed, given the corruption of the Round Table. It would seem that Burgess evokes an apocalyptic sense of history to impart an ironic perspective that is generally pessimistic but not entirely so, though Burgess has said, “I don’t think there’s any optimism in the book, except the scent of oranges and tangerines in the end.” (Telephone interview with Amy Edith Johnson, quoted by Stinson, Burgess Revisited, 131)
In a note prefacing The Devil’s Mode, a collection of his short fiction, Burgess says that “The novella Hun may, by readers of my novel Any Old Iron, be attributed to the fictitious author Reginald Morrow if they so desire.” Reginald Morrow, for whom Reg is named, is introduced early in Any Old Iron as “the first man David Jones had met whom he sincerely admired.” Badly wounded, Morrow plans a career in writing “to show up the infamy of the world.” He tells David Jones,
 ‘I’ll have no children, but my children will be my books. You’re married,  Taff, and you’ll have kids, and if you’ve any sense of duty to humanity you’ll bring up those kids to spit in the eye of government and piss in the mouth of all authority. And not to be taken in by the big words. We don’t want this lot [the Great War] to happen again.’ (AOI, 43)
In his novella, Attila the Hun is presented as the brutal conqueror every schoolchild meets in history books, but he also reveals a surprising anxiety about how he will be remembered by posterity. The lessons Morrow would have David Jones impart to his children are learned by them through experience, chief among them being Reg’s conclusion: “The big enemy’s always government.” (AOI, 267)
Most apocalyptic works are optimistic, and their optimism is grounded upon a faith in providence. Daniel gives encouragement to the Jews by promising God’s ultimate vindication of the righteous. Revelation portrays history as unfolding toward the ultimate fullness of God’s triumph in a new heaven and new earth. Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene presents an apocalyptic vision of Protestant Christianity triumphing over Roman Catholicism as part of an ongoing cosmic conflict between the forces of light and darkness. Burgess doesn’t rule out divine providence, but, as in his dystopian books, A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed, he places his faith in man as a creature of growth and potential goodness. The message of the chapter originally omitted from the American edition of A Clockwork Orange is that, if there is hope for man, it is in the capacity of individuals to grow and learn by suffering and error. This appears to be the message of the final chapter of Any Old Iron as well.
Before discussing the final chapter, however, it may be useful to consider one of the mythic patterns Burgess evokes along with his apocalyptic design. As Stinson remarks, “Readers, compelled by Burgess to do more of the interpretive work themselves than in any of his other novels excepting MF and Napoleon Symphony, will gradually see patterns emerge.” (Anthony Burgess Revisited, 129) One of the patterns involves the character Dan, whose name is perhaps intended to evoke the Old Testament figure. Generally regarded as mentally deficient, he, like Daniel, exhibits surprising insights. His main defining quality, however, is an obsession with fish. He is, to use the narrator’s phrase, “ichthyocentric and clearly not quite the round shilling.” His passion for fish is alluded to repeatedly, indeed so often that a reader feels compelled to work out its possible thematic significance.
Considering the Arthurian elements and the futility of the quest for absolute value in the modern world of the novel, one is tempted to see Dan as a Fisher King corresponding to the figure as it appears in Eliot’s The Waste Land. According to Jessie L. Weston in her book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance, which influenced Eliot so strongly, “the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages, been associated with the Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life.” To fish is to seek eternity and salvation, but in the context of the modern Waste Land, as Eliot makes clear, this activity becomes dirty and degraded. Dan’s constant involvement with fish leaves him with an unbearable stench that no one but his brother Reg, who has lost his sense of smell, can tolerate. And his lack of libido, in spite of his fondness for fish, evokes the impotence of the Fisher King.
Dan is captured by the Germans at Anzio, sent to a prisoner of war camp in Poland, and survives a long march home after his captors are vanquished. He is reunited with his brother Reg, who has served in the British Army as a Russian interpreter and has witnessed firsthand the bloody consequences of Churchill’s acquiesence to the demands of Stalin at Yalta in the matter of the forcible repatriation of Russian citizens. In the concluding chapter, the brothers undertake what appears to be a journey into the underworld, where they dispose of both the sword and the chunk of gold.
The underworld is part of the modern British landscape, but the reader is made constantly aware of its infernal aspects. Like Dante and Virgil beginning their descent into hell, they set out on Good Friday and continue through Holy Saturday. Passing through an outdoor urinal, they notice a chalked inscription above the sink: “ALL SOAP ABANDON.” A boat in the Stanley Canal loaded with human manure is piloted by a Charonlike figure. At one point they are stopped by a Cerberuslike dog, whose owner refers to the day as “Bad Friday.” Even the rain above them has an infernal aspect, “filthy slanting water arrow[ing] out of a boiling sky now moonless.” They come to a house abandoned but repossessed by hippies, one of whom thrums a guitar and intones a ditty reminiscent of the inscription upon the lintel of hell in the Inferno. The singer then quotes Mephistophilis in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
The brothers finally arrive at a pond, and Reg quotes Malory’s description in the Morte Darthur of Sir Bedivere going to the water’s side with Excalibur. Like Bedivere, he hesitates, even though Excalibur is now just a “poor dull rusty bastard,” but Dan prompts him to carry out his mission by heaving the chunk of gold that has become a family curse into the water. This gives Reg the courage to heave Excalibur, a.k.a. Caledvwich, after it. No hand rises to grasp the sword, and while Dan imagines that it screams, Reg assures him that it did not: “Merlin’s long gone under, and there’s no magic any more.” (AOI, 385)
Reg recounts the story of the sword’s disposal to Harry Wolfson while the two are walking after breakfast among the Roman ruins surrounding a kibbutz near Caesarea and he is again emphatic about the absence of any sort of magic, ‘no arm clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.’ They are surrounded by the pleasant aromas of oranges and tangarines mingling with the sweetness of pipe smoke, none of which Reg can appreciate. As Reg tries to articulate what he has learned and how he has come to fit himself for the modern age by grasping a chunk of the romantic past and finding it rusty, Wolfson reflects that the citrus fruits whose fragrance they are enjoying would outlive the law of Moses, even as they outlived the Roman ruins that witnessed to “injustice that could never be avenged.” For Burgess, these fruits provided a scent of optimism.
Any Old Iron was completed in 1987, when Burgess was seventy. While not one of his best novels, not on a level with Earthly Powers, say, or Nothing Like the Sun, it exhibits his powers still at their height. If one is looking for flaws, one might argue that the narrative moves in too many directions, and parts of it seem not to be clearly integrated. But reading it, one is not tempted to gloss over any part. Each segment, whether it be Dan’s odyssey across Eastern Europe, or Reg’s affair with the doomed Russian medical officer, Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, or Beatrix’s miserable marriage to a failed American novelist, is wholly absorbing. Burgess’s comic touch and logophilia are irresistible. Like Kit Marlowe, the hero of his last novel, he was always moving in new directions. We do not see the familiar Pelagian-Augustinian or Manichaean patterns that govern history in his earlier novels. What we have instead is a more mysterious, apocalyptic or perhaps anti-apocalyptic sense of history, ironic and pessimistic but tempered by an affirmation of faith in humanity.

Geoffrey Aggeler 
University of Utah

Anthony Burgess In The Yorkshire Post
By Andrew Biswell

The circular Brotherton Library, built in 1936, stands at the heart of the city campus of the University of Leeds. The university buildings, including the magnificent library, are loftily dismissed as “a bad moment” by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in his architectural gazetteer, The Buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding (second edition, Penguin, 1967, p. 329). Yet beneath the Brotherton’s impressive dome stands a remarkable set of archives, including the private papers of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the records of the Independent Labour Party (among whose prominent members were George Orwell and Graham Greene). The Brotherton Library also holds a complete collection of back numbers of The Yorkshire Post, the most significant regional newspaper of the North of England, whose editorial offices are in Leeds. Like most English newspapers, the Yorkshire Post has no published index, but a few months ago I visited the Brotherton (with Russell Thorne, my research assistant) in search of Anthony Burgess’s “lost” journalism from the early 1960s. The purpose of this short article is to describe – and, for the first time, to catalogue – what we found there.

Burgess was hired by the Yorkshire Post as a fiction reviewer in January 1961. He wrote a fortnightly column on new novels until May 1963, contributing a total of 65 long articles over this period. He reviewed four or five novels in each piece, but it is worth noting that he was simultaneously writing for The Listener and The Observer, as well as working regularly for BBC Radio. While writing for the Yorkshire Post, Burgess also published six novels: Devil of a State, One Hand Clapping, The Worm and the Ring, A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and Inside Mr Enderby.

His fellow contributors to the books pages were a distinguished bunch: they included the novelist and translator Peter Green, the historian Asa (later Lord) Briggs, the Yeats scholar A. Norman Jeffares (who taught at Leeds University in the 1960s), Bonamy Dobrée (an influential critic and close friend of T.S. Eliot), and the literary historian David Daiches. It is clear from this list that the Yorkshire Post’s literary editor, Kenneth Young, had taken care to assemble a stable of high-calibre reviewers. It seems that Burgess had been recommended to the vacant post of fiction critic by Peter Green, who had reviewed Time for a Tiger on its first publication in 1956.

The interest of Burgess’s reviews is considerable, not least because, taken together, they give us a clear picture of what he was reading over the course of these twenty-eight months. Most of the novels he covered have long since sunk without trace, but (as my bibliography  shows) a number of significant post-war works came under his scrutiny during this period: Joseph Heller’s Catch 22; Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook; two novels by Iris Murdoch; John Updike’s first two books; new novels by William Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, Christine Brooke-Rose and John Braine; and Graham Greene’s non-fiction book, In Search of a Character. We might say, in fact, that this reviewing job laid the ground for Burgess’s long study of contemporary fiction, The Novel Now (Faber, 1967; new edition, 1971). Beyond this, the reviews provide an intriguing chronicle of new fiction, as well as various examples of Burgess’s journalism at its best.

One of the genuinely surprising features of Burgess’s fiction columns is that he often uses them as a means of discussing his own theory of the novel. For example, on 25 January 1962, he writes that most contemporary novels are like “metallic beefburgers, dry pasta, flat television meals […] fashionable maybe, speciously tasty, perhaps – but not likely to stick to one’s ribs.” This gives rise to a speculation about what might give the novel “nutritious solidity”. His answer involves “More than length, variety of characters, scenic richness.” What Burgess demands is “moral depth, a concern with the roots of action and the consequences of unconsidered actions, a willingness to enter the labyrinth.” 

Reviewing Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 on 28 June 1962, Burgess was once again looking for nutritious solidity, but he was not convinced that Heller had enough of it to offer:

Catch 22 is a satire on War, and its theme is the unheroic one of how to survive it. It is an orchestration of Arms and the Man (Shaw, being an English liberal, was always too moderate) and Captain Yossarian is bigger, tougher, more neurotic, more intellectual, than any chocolate soldier […] He sees the enemy quite simply as the people who have no objection to his dying, and these are to be found on both sides.

[…] All this is fine, funny, bitter, but underneath the implied ethos is there not something of that William Saroyan sentimentality that came out sickeningly in the novel about Wesley Jackson – that ordinary men are all decent whatever their nation, and don’t really love their big-jowled leaders?

One knows that the Second World War was a case of defending the bad against the worse, but what was a democrat to do when faced by Hitler’s children in arms? The thesis of Catch 22 (a brilliantly contrived book) can only be universally valid when the whole world has been absorbed into the American empire.

This is judiciously put, but it is interesting to compare Burgess’s contemporary review with his later, more enthusiastic, critical statements in The Novel Now (pp. 54-55) and Ninety-Nine Novels (p. 79). In The Novel Now he describes Catch 22 as “America’s most recent major contribution to war fiction,”  and says that Heller’s approach to fiction is “surrealistic, absurd, even lunatic, though the aim is serious enough – to show the mess of war, the victimization of the conscripts, the monstrous egotism of the top brass.”

It seems to me that the importance of the Yorkshire Post review is that it was written before Heller’s novel had acquired its international reputation. Burgess’s initial hesitations and reservations are serious ones, and he’s concerned that historical novels, particularly those dealing with the events of recent history, should give a morally honest account of the real world to which they refer.

The review of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (15 November 1962) goes to great lengths to correct the general perception of Nabokov as the “smutty” author of Lolita, and it draws a firm distinction between the narrator of that novel and Nabokov himself, who is said to be crazy not for nymphets but for words alone. “His love affair with the English language achieves a prolonged consummation in Pale Fire,” Burgess tells his readers.

Explaining the complicated interaction between Shade, the deceased author of the 999-line “Pale Fire” poem within the novel, and Kinbote, the poem’s fictional editor, Burgess pronounces this book a satisfying return to form after the slight disappointment of Laughter in the Dark (which he had reviewed in the Yorkshire Post of 23 March 1961):

Some of the satire is uproarious: Nabokov is primarily a great humorist. But the real joy of the book is the joy the author takes in the manipulation of language, the deliberate naughty perverting of literature, the thrown-away build-up of Kinbote’s eccentric personality, the modern America that is always, like some loved furry beast with odd habits, lurking in the Nabokovian background.

Part of Burgess’s pleasure in this novel is the prospect that some readers (aware of Lolita’s scandalous reputation) would be buying it in the expectation of finding smut between its covers, and discovering instead that they had been sold a perfectly chaste satire against literary pedantry.

When Burgess turns his attention to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (on 3 May 1962), he does so with evident mixed feelings. His review finds it difficult to conceal an overwhelming sense that the novel (which has gone on to become one of Lessing’s most prominent books) is a deeply flawed work:

I am late with the new Doris Lessing. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her.

[…] This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a “moral energy” not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a “free woman” – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment.

[…] There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural […] Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here.

Again, this review needs to be considered alongside his later critical statements in The Novel Now (pp. 101-02) and Ninety-Nine Novels (p. 86). The second of these declares, with the benefit of twenty-two years’ hindsight, that The Golden Notebook is “an historical document of some importance,” though the praise is carefully qualified even so. The real fascination of comparing these critical utterances is that of seeing Burgess’s response to a particular novel as it evolves over time. Whether or not he consistently undervalues Lessing’s ground-breaking feminist novel (and the question must remain, for now, an open one), the original review shows us what he thought in the immediate aftermath of a first reading. Above all, these Yorkshire Post reviews communicate the excitement of encountering a range of  literary novels, devouring them at speed, and offering a provisional critique of them.

Although the majority of these reviews seem generous and fair-minded, Burgess was not afraid to administer a kicking on those rare occasions when the book seemed to demand it. Of Graham Greene’s autobiographical fragment, In Search of a Character (reviewed on 23 November 1961), he says: “This is hardly a book at all: combings and cigarette-ends of observation, tired pensées, the spores of a novelist’s creative agony, all set in what we can only think of now as Querry’s country.” Querry, of course, is the ecclesiastical architect who is the main character in Greene’s novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1961). The review continues:

Surely Greene has, in his time, told us plenty about himself? True, he has – the drinking, the tendency to easy ennui, the pessimism, sex – but the core will always remain unprobed. We learn a little more in this journal, but never enough. We can never know enough about any major writer, because what makes him a major writer is the innermost mystery of his personality, never to be disclosed.

The problem with publishing the preliminary notes to a work of fiction, as Greene had done here, is that “a novel is always greater than its parts.” Greene, it’s argued, “did not find Querry here, nor Dr Colin, nor the Rykers: they came from a bigger and darker world than Africa – the creative imagination.” (Incidentally, Norman Sherry overlooks this review in his authorized Life of Graham Greene, as do the compilers of other reference works on Greene. I should therefore like to claim it as a minor bibliographical discovery.)

Of more direct interest to readers of the Malayan trilogy is Burgess’s review of Alan Sillitoe’s Key to the Door (reviewed on 19 Oct 1961), a novel set both in Nottingham and in Malaya, where the young Sillitoe had done his National Service during the Emergency of the 1950s. Burgess had very much admired Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), but he found the Malayan sections of Key to the Door to be lacking from several angles:

Young Brian [the book’s central character] seems to grouse through a dripping and frightening jungle-and-mountain landscape completely without (if we except his grousing mates) human figures. We hear of the Malayans, and wonder which of the Malayan races he means. Occasionally a Malay, clad for some reason in a sari, glides through.

[…] It is the complete lack of concern or even minimal interest in people other than the ingrowing group of working-class lads that appals. But one is also appalled morally. Brian cannot see the Chinese Communists as enemies. His failure to kill off a terrorist who eventually snipes at his own mates merits no condemnation. The political naiveté of the book is incredible. But, to be just, there is life and a certain poetry […] Nobody is going to deny Mr Sillitoe’s talent. He needs more than talent now: he needs to grow up.

Looking back on the year’s fiction on 28 December 1961, Burgess returned to Sillitoe’s book and made his objections even clearer. The novel, he said, had “completely falsified” the Malayan jungle war. “For those of us who, living in terrorist territory, saw the garrotted bodies of our friends, the political naiveté of a book like this is nauseating. I am aware, of course, that this is not an aesthetic judgement.” These passionate attacks on Sillitoe’s position must surely cause us to regard the comedy of Burgess’s Malayan novels in a new light.

Given that Burgess later produced, in 1982, a long novel which described the end of the world from three different points of view, what are we to make of the following short review (published on 27 July 1961)?

Finally, as this is the holiday season, a little self-indulgence. And So Ends the World [by Richard Pape] is one of those delightfully cosy books described as “a prophetic and terrifying novel of cosmic holocaust.” It is rather like Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, though far more stately. The moon, you see, comes out of its orbit. Frightening and lovely, to be taken with a pound of soft centres and some really fizzy lemonade.

This is, in fact, remarkably close to the plot of the Lynx chapters in Burgess’s own The End of the World News. Richard Pape’s novel would surely bear further investigation as one of the sources behind the Burgess book.

It’s worth saying a few words, too, about the forgotten writers who came under review in these columns. I wonder what became of novelists such as Niccolò Tucci (“very large and very impressive”) Sloan Wilson (whose novel, claimed Burgess, did not advance the cause of literature one iota) or Glendon Swarthout (who “creates his own climate” and “leaves his own strange taste”), all reviewed on 18 April 1963.
 
Elsewhere, the reviews throw up a few surprising and hitherto little-known facts: that Burgess had bought and admired Michael Innes’s series of detective thrillers; that he had read Phyllis Bottome’s novels as a student in the 1930s and deplored her prose-style; that he regarded the French “anti-novel” (as practised by Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet) as “an heretical concept”.

Burgess was probably right to feel aggrieved at his sudden dismissal for having written about one of his pseudonymous “Joseph Kell” novels (on 16 May 1963). In fact he was far from unique in having reviewed his own book: even James Joyce was not above collaborating on an early review of Finnegans Wake. But perhaps we should reflect instead on the very many reviews he wrote without being sacked. As so often in his journalistic writing, Burgess’s tireless energy and the encyclopaedic range of his interests are the qualities which particularly strike the reader. Unlike most book reviewers, he hardly ever repeats himself: his prose is unfailingly lively, often getting carried away with its own rhetoric, and it goes well beyond the standard clichés of books pages. Reading through these reviews forty years after they first appeared, the thought keeps striking me that each article is crafted to an unusual degree. The best of them would be worth republishing in book form -- if only an enlightened publisher could be found who would be willing to produce a scholarly edition of Burgess’s literary journalism.

In his book, The Metropolitan Critic (1974; new edition with autocritique, 1994), the poet, novelist and reviewer Clive James replies to Burgess’s comments about the conflict between journalism and the supposedly more legitimate forms of literary writing. Disputing Burgess’s much-repeated claims that reviewing was mere hack-work and a distraction from novel-writing, James says: “If Burgess’s literary journalism was meant to be such an inherently inferior activity he might have done us the grace of being worse at it, so that we could have saved the money it cost to buy Urgent Copy and the time it took to enjoy it” (p. 274). James adds that Burgess was “the man who actually gets written the novels that other men only dream of writing,” implying that his extensive reviewing work had had no detrimental effect on the quality of his fiction.

Indeed, I would argue that Burgess’s involvement in the business of reviewing other people’s novels possibly altered his own writing for the better. His Yorkshire Post reviews (among other journalistic work) eventually gave us two important books about the state of the novel after 1939. They also gave Burgess a clear sense of what the competition was up to, and of how and why his own novels should be different.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘The New Novels: Reviewed by Anthony Burgess’, Yorkshire Post, 12 January 1961, p. 4 (review of Grace Metalious, The Tight White Collar; Mary Ellen Chase, The Lovely Ambition; Michel del Castillo, The Death of Tristan; Stuart Cloete, The Fiercest Heart; Richard Vaughan, There is a River; Jonathan Wade, Back to Life)

‘Gay Outsider in an Insider’s Job’, Yorkshire Post, 26 January 1961, p. 4 (review of William Cooper, Scenes from Married Life; William Faulkner, The Mansion; Zoë Oldenbourg, Destiny of Fire; Romain Gary, Nothing Important Ever Dies)

‘Works of Protest’, Yorkshire Post, 9 February 1961, p. 4 (review of André Schwerz-Bert, The Last of the Just; Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke; Mongo Betty Muller, King Lazarus; Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?; John P. Marquand, Wickford Point; Erskine Caldwell, Kneel to the Rising Sun)

‘Round the World in Five Novels’, Yorkshire Post, 23 February 1961, p. 4 (review of William Styron, Set This House on Fire; Jim Kirkwood, There Must Be a Pony!; William Ash, The Lotus in the Sky; Katharine Sim, The Jungle Ends; Robert Poole, London E.1)

‘Ustinov Portrait of a Nazi’, Yorkshire Post, 9 March 1961, p. 4 (review of Peter Ustinov, The Loser; Frederic Prokosch, A Ballad of Love; Marie-Claire Blais, Mad Shadows; Joan O’Donovan, The Middle Tree; John Hersey, The Child Buyer)

‘A Rich Quarry for the Novelist’, Yorkshire Post, 23 March 1961, p. 4 (review of Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation; Mika Waltair, The Secret of the Kingdom; Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark; Wilfred Sheed, A Middle Class Education; Isobel English, Four Voices)

‘Another Brave New World’, Yorkshire Post, 6 April 1961, p. 4 (review of Diana and Meir Gillon, The Unsleep; Dorothy Whipple, Wednesday and Other Stories; Roald Dahl, Someone Like You; James Purdy, Colour of Darkness; Alec Waugh, My Place in the Bazaar; Lilian Halegua, The Pearl Bastard)

‘In the H. G. Wells Tradition’, Yorkshire Post, 20 April 1961, p. 4 (review of Edward Hyams, All We Possess; Stanley Middleton, A Serious Woman; Pierre Boule, For a Noble Cause; Romain Gary, The Talent Scout; Michael Campbell, Across the Water; J. I. M. Stewart, The Man Who Won the Pools; Max Wilk, Don’t Raise the Bridge (Lower the River); Irving Wallace, The Chapman Report)

‘Porridge His Downfall’, Yorkshire Post, 4 May 1961, p. 4 (review of Roy Bradford, Excelsior; Balachandra Rajan, Too Long in the West; Storm Jameson, Last Score; Frank Rooney, McGinnis Speaks; Agnar Mykle, The Song of the Red Ruby; Ann Gardiner, The Minister’s Wife; H. E. Bates, Now Sleeps the Crimson; The Esquire Reader; Ronald Firbank, The Complete Ronald Firbank)

‘Artless Chronicle of the Days of Youth’, Yorkshire Post, 18 May 1961, p. 4 (review of Godfrey Smith, The Business of Loving; Pierre Sichel, The Sapbucket Genius; Louis de Wohl, Lay Siege to Heaven; Robert Shaw, The Sun Doctor)

‘Welfare State Satire’, Yorkshire Post, 1 June 1961, p. 4 (review of Jack Lindsay, All on the Never-Never; Frederic Raphael, A Wild Surmise; Daphne Fielding, The Adonis Garden; Edita Morris, Echo in Asia; Susan Sherman, Give Me Myself; Richard Bissell, Goodbye Ava; Stan Barstow, The Desperadoes and Other Stories)

‘Iris Murdoch’s Latest’, Yorkshire Post, 15 June 1961, p. 4 (review of Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head; Alan Paton, Debbie Go Home; Elizabeth Mavor, The Temple of Flora; James Barlow, Term of Trial; Peter de Vries, Through the Fields of Clover)

‘Gerald Kersh at His Peak’, Yorkshire Post, 29 June 1961, p. 4 (review of Gerald Kersh, The Implacable Hunter; John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent; Muriel Spark, Voices at Play; Robert Lait, The Africans)

‘Celts in Conflict’, Yorkshire Post, 13 July 1961, p. 4 (review of Bryher, Ruan; Jean Rikhoff, Dear Ones All; Herbert Lobsenz, Vanguel Griffin; Henry Treece, Jason)

‘Talking of Michelangelo’, Yorkshire Post, 27 July 1961, p. 4 (review of Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy; Maurice Edelman, The Minister; Mitchell Wilson, Meeting at a Far Meridian; Ernest Raymond, Mr Olim; Richard Pape, And So Ends the World)

‘The Madhouse and the Couch’, Yorkshire Post, 10 August 1961, p. 4 (review of Teo Savory, The Single Secret; Rosalie Packard, The Plastic Smile; Elio Vittorini, Women on the Road; John Cheever, Some People, Places and Things …; Alexander Fedoroff, The Side of the Angels)

‘From Angels to Angelique’, Yorkshire Post, 24 August 1961, p. 4 (review of Richard Condon, Some Angry Angel; Laura Del-Rivo, The Furnished Room; Junichiro Tanizaki, The Key; Benjamin Siegel, A Kind of Justice; Sergeanne Golon, Angelique and the Sultan)

‘Wars and Wedded Love’, Yorkshire Post, 7 September 1961, p. 4 (review of Jean Larteguy, The Centurions; Vernon Scannell, The Face of the Enemy; David Hughes, The Horsehair Sofa; Christine Brooke-Rose, The Middlemen; Colin Wilson, Adrift in Soho)

‘Those Voices Again’, Yorkshire Post, 21 September 1961, p. 4 (review of Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Mighty and Their Fall; John Updike, Rabbit, Run; James Aldridge, The Last Exile; Nevil Shute, Steven Morris; Giovanni Arpino, The Novice; Ferreira de Castro, The Mission)

‘Angus Wilson’s Best’, Yorkshire Post, 5 October 1961, p. 4 (review of Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo; Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic; John O’Hara, Sermons and Soda Water; V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas; Nicholas Monsarrat, The White Rajah; Julian Green, Each in His Darkness)

‘Spring’s Fruits in Autumn’, Yorkshire Post, 19 October 1961, p. 4 (review of John Dos Passos, Midcentury; Anita Loos, No Mother to Guide Her; Alan Sillitoe, The Key to the Door; V. S. Pritchett, When My Girl Comes Home; John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor; Louis Aragon, Holy Week; A. J. Cronin, The Judas Tree)

‘Crouchback Concluded’, Yorkshire Post, 26 October 1961, p. 4 (review of Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender)

‘The Muse Steps In’, Yorkshire Post, 2 November 1961, p. 4 (review of Philip Toynbee, Pantaloon, or The Valediction; Eric Linklater, Roll of Honour; William Sansom, The Last Hours of Sandra Lee; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

‘Lively World of the Dead’, Yorkshire Post, 16 November 1961, p. 4 (review of Jerzy Peterkiewicz, The Quick and the Dead; Flann O’Brien, The Hard Life; Marcel Rouff, The Passionate Epicure; Wilder Penfield, The Torch; Richard Gordon, Doctor on Toast; Roger Falla, The Sisters of Emergency Ward 10)

‘The Novelist’s Agony’, Yorkshire Post, 23 November 1961, p. 7 (review of Graham Greene, In Search of a Character; Thomas Mann, The Genesis of a Novel)

‘La Noia – And Jealousy’, Yorkshire Post, 30 November 1961, p. 6 (review of Alberto Moravia, The Empty Canvas; John Bratby, Breakfast and Elevenses; Herbert Russcol and Margalit Banai, Villa Vardi; Angela Thirkell and C. A. Lejeune, Three Score and Ten; Bertolt Brecht, Tales from the Calendar)

‘Various Handfuls’, Yorkshire Post, 14 December 1961, p. 4 (review of Peter de Polnay, No Empty Hands; Helen Foley, A Handful of Time; Françoise Sagan, Wonderful Clouds; H. E. Bates, The Day of the Tortoise)

‘Best of the Spate: Looking Back at the Year’s Fiction’, Yorkshire Post, 28 December 1961, p. 3

‘New Year Signposts’, Yorkshire Post, 11 January 1962, p. 4 (review of Adrian Mitchell, If You See Me Comin’; Errol Braithwaite, An Affair of Men; Allan Campbell McLean, The Islander)

‘Essence and Appearance’, Yorkshire Post, 25 January 1962, p. 4 (review of Storm Jameson, The Road from the Monument; Thomas Hinde, A Place Like Home; Robert Holles, The Siege of Battersea; Nigel Balchin, Seen Dimly Before Dawn; Arthur Roth, The Shame of Our Wounds)

‘Characters in Orbit’, Yorkshire Post, 8 February 1962, p. 4 (review of Nathalie Sarraute, The Planetarium; Rayner Heppenstall, The Connecting Door; R. C. Sherriff, The Wells of St Mary’s; Janet Frame, Faces in the Water; Claude Faux, The Young Dogs; Carlo Cassola, Bebo’s Girl)

‘Some Adventures in Hell’, Yorkshire Post, 22 February 1962, p. 4 (review of Elias Canetti, Auto-Da-Fé; Ruth Rehmann, Saturday to Monday; Angus Heriot, Four-Part Fugue; John and Esther Wagner, The Gift of Rome; Kathrin Perutz, The Garden; John Williams, On the Way Out)

‘Character Called Isherwood’, Yorkshire Post, 8 March 1962, p. 4 (review of Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit; W. J. White, The Devil You Know; Camilla Carison, You Are Mine; John Harris, The Spring of Malice; Richard Matheson, The Beardless Warriors, Rachel Grieve, ed., Best Doctor Stories)

‘After the Minotaur’, Yorkshire Post, 22 March 1962, p. 4 (review of Mary Renault, The Bull from the Sea; John Wain, Strike the Father Dead; Clara Winston, The Hours Together; Norman R. Ford, The Black, the Grey and the Gold; Sheila Howarth, Bogeyman’s Plaything)

‘Brave and New’, Yorkshire Post, 29 March 1962, p. 4 (review of Aldous Huxley, Island)

‘Rain in Springtime’, Yorkshire Post, 5 April 1962, p. 4 (review of Brian Glanville, Diamond; Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound; David Chagall, The Century God Slept; Cothburn O’Neal, The Gods of Our Time; Bernard Malamud, A New Life; Mikhail Zoshchenko, Scenes from the Bath-House; Sean O’Faolain, I Remember! I Remember!; Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier, Castle Dor)

‘Shattered Dreams’, Yorkshire Post, 19 April 1962, p. 4 (review of Paul Scott, The Birds of Paradise; J. R. Salamanca, Lilith; Richard G. Stern, Europe; P. H. Newby, The Barbary Light; Ronald Marsh, The Quarry)

‘Heady World of Lowry’, Yorkshire Post, 3 May 1962, p. 4 (review of Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place; Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano; Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; John Updike, The Same Door; Bertrand Mather, Through the Mill; Richard Mason, The Fever Tree)

‘Stone Turned to Flesh and Blood’, Yorkshire Post, 17 May 1962, p. 4 (review of Olivia Manning, The Spoilt City; David Beaty, The Wind off the Sea; James Hanley, Say Nothing; Louis Battye, Cornwall Road)

‘Off the Path’, Yorkshire Post, 31 May 1962, p. 4 (review of Paul Ableman, As Near As I Can Get; Rosemary Manning, The Chinese Garden; Claude Simon, The Flanders Road; Stuart Lauder, Winger’s Landfall; Peter de Vries, The Blood of the Lamb)

‘Polish and Pin-Stripes’, Yorkshire Post, 14 June 1962, p. 4 (review of Peter Green, Habeas Corpus and Other Stories)

‘A Severed Rose-Head’, Yorkshire Post, 14 June 1962, p. 4 (review of Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose; Roger Vailland, Turn of the Wheel; Peter van Greenaway, The Crucified City)

‘The Music of Time’s Finale’, Yorkshire Post, 28 June 1962, p. 4 (review of Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones; Joseph Heller, Catch-22; Vernon Scannell, The Dividing Night; Gusztav Rab, A Room in Budapest)

‘Twin Problems’, Yorkshire Post, 12 July 1962, p. 4 (review of Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding; Theodora Keogh, The Other Girl; Susan Yorke, The Agency House; Ronald Hardy, Act of Destruction; Desmond Meiring, The Man with No Shadow)

‘Light Gravity’, Yorkshire Post, 26 July 1962, p. 4 (review of Pamela Hansford Johnson, An Error of Judgement; Hortense Calisher, False Entry; Edgar Mittelholzer, The Wounded and the Worried; Roger Lloyd, The Troubling of the City)

‘Tension in Sicily’, Yorkshire Post, 9 August 1962, p. 4 (review of Federico de Roberto, The Viceroys; Carlo Castellaneta, A Journey with Father; Nantas Salvalaggio, The Moustache; Diana Raymond, The Climb)

‘The Magic of Place’, Yorkshire Post, 16 August 1962, p. 4 (review of Elspeth Huxley, The Mottled Lizard; Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Glittering Pastures; Mrs Robert Henrey, Spring in a Soho Street)

‘Bell Rings the Changes’, Yorkshire Post, 23 August 1962, p. 3 (review of Lettice Cooper, The Double Heart; Edward Upward, In the Thirties; Thomas Hinde, The Cage; Robert Lund, Daishi-San)

‘Idylls and Ideals’, Yorkshire Post, 30 August 1962, p. 4 (review of Phyllis Bottome, The Goal)

‘Tribute to a City’, Yorkshire Post, 6 September 1962, p. 4 (review of Harrison E. Salisbury, The Northern Palmyra Affair; Friedrich Darrenmatt, The Quarry; Diane Giguerre, Innocence)

‘Forger’s Faith’, Yorkshire Post, 20 September 1962, p. 4 (review of William Gaddis, The Recognitions; Ian Brook, The Black List; Frederic Raphael, The Trouble with England; Catherine Ross, The Colours of the Night)

‘The Real Holmes’, Yorkshire Post, 27 September 1962, p. 4 (review of William S. Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes: A Biography)

‘Braine at the Top’, Yorkshire Post, 4 October 1962, p. 5 (review of John Braine, Life at the Top)

‘Yankee Giant’, Yorkshire Post, 18 October 1962, p. 4 (review of Hiram Haydn, The Hands of Esau, Sid Chaplain, The Watchers and the Watched; Paul Hyde Bonner, Ambassador Extraordinary; Ellen Marsh, Unarmed in Paradise)

‘Hatred Afloat’, Yorkshire Post, 1 November 1962, p. 4 (review of Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Get Ready for Battle; Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke)

‘Nabokov Masquerade’, Yorkshire Post, 15 November 1962, p. 4 (review of Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Paul Gallico, Coronation; Bernard Thompson, O Tell Me Pretty Maiden; Marguerite Duras, Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night; C. Dawson Butler, Negative Evidence; Alexandre Dumas, The Flight to Varennes)

‘Through a Curtain’, Yorkshire Post, 29 November 1962, p. 4 (review of Slawomir Mrozek, The Elephant; Jean Ross, The Godfathers; Rachel Trickett, A Changing Place; Naomi Jacob, Great Black Oxen)

‘Time, Space and River’, Yorkshire Post, 13 December 1962, p. 4 (review of Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time; R. H. Mottram, To Hell with Crabb Robinson)

‘New-Type Pagliaccio’, Yorkshire Post, 10 January 1963, p. 4 (review of Emyr Humphreys, The Gift; Antony Trew, Two Hours to Darkness; Jim Hunter, Sally Cray; Jennifer Dawson, Fowler’s Snare; Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods)

‘Nasty Middle Ages’, Yorkshire Post, 24 January 1963, p. 4 (review of Zoë Oldenbourg, Cities of the Flesh; Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers; Barnaby Conrad, Dangerfield; Mochtar Lubis, Twilight in Djakarta; Norman Thomas, Ask at the Unicorn)

‘First Citizen of Athens’, Yorkshire Post, 7 February 1963, p. 4 (review of Rex Warner, Pericles the Athenian; Alfred Grossman, Many Slippery Errors; John Updike, Pigeon Feathers; William Butler, The House at Akiya; Fausta Clalente, The Levantines; George Andrzeyevski, The Gates of Paradise)

‘Black Agony’, Yorkshire Post, 21 February 1963, p. 4 (review of James Baldwin, Another Country; George MacDonald, Phantasies and Lilith; Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, Seven Days in May; Stefan Heym, Shadows and Lights; Jerome Weidman, My Father Sits in the Dark; Ralph Allen, Ask the Name of the Lion)

‘Cain and Abel in Algeria’, Yorkshire Post, 21 March 1963, p. 4 (review of Maurice Edelman, The Fratricides; Patrick Raymond, A City of Scarlet and Gold; Donald Jack, Three Cheers for Me; Alexander Cordell, Race of the Tiger; Ira J. Morris, A Kingdom for a Song; Angus Heriot, The Island is Full of Strange Noises)

‘I Remember Grossmama’, Yorkshire Post, 18 April 1963, p. 4 (review of Niccolò Tucci, Before My Time; Sloan Wilson, Georgie Winthrop; Glendon Swarthout, Welcome to Thebes; Jon Cleary, Forests of the Night)

‘Poetry for a Tiny Room’, Yorkshire Post, 16 May 1963, p. 4 (review of Joseph Kell, Inside Mr Enderby; Bernard Malamud, The Natural; Teo Savory, A Penny for the Guy; B. S. Johnson, Travelling People; Ralph Dulin, The Unconquered Sun; Daphne du Maurier, The Glass-Blowers; Evelyn Ames, Daughter of the House; Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow)

Andrew Biswell lectures in the English Department at King’s College, Aberdeen University, Scotland.
Please send any comments or queries to: andrew.biswell@abdn.ac.uk

Enderby’s Hove
By Dougie Milton

Ask any of my peers which was the first Burgess book they read, and the answer is inevitably A Clockwork Orange.  I may be setting some sort of record when I say that my first encounter with AB, aged 11, was through Inside Mr Enderby. I was lucky in my upbringing. My parents were teachers, and avid readers, and the red sandstone Victorian villa in Bristol where I grew up was crammed with books from top to bottom – a true dom knigi. First editions of Waugh, Greene and Isherwood were packed indiscriminately next to battered Boots Library copies of The Long Goodbye, Night Of the Hunter, and The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit. There was no censorship in our household. I was encouraged to read, and reading meant picking up whatever took my fancy. Before I’d even found Enderby I was already familiar with Decline & Fall, Mr Norris Changes Trains, Down & Out In Paris & London, Afternoon Men…all rather more interesting than the worthy but predictable texts (Lord Of The Flies, To Kill A Mockingbird) we were being offered at school.
One evening I pulled out Inside Mr Enderby from beneath a pile of old Lilliput magazines. It was the original Joseph Kell edition whose dustcover illustration (wooden loo-seat entwined with ivy or laurel leaves) looked amusing. I took it upstairs to bed but did little sleeping that night. I was entranced, and as soon as I’d finished it I wanted to start it again. My mother, spotting the book next to the bowl of cornflakes I was listlessly spooning in the next morning, told me the true identity of the author and the story of his reviewing his own novel and the subsequent scandal. This Anthony Burgess was obviously someone out of the ordinary, and over the next few weeks I dug out everything else by him in my parents’ collection – Time For A Tiger, The Right To An Answer, The Worm And The Ring, Tremor Of Intent and others (though not A Clockwork Orange for some reason). When Kubrick’s film came out a year or so later, many of Burgess’s books were reissued by Penguin with those delightful cover designs by Peter Bentley. (It was his unique graphic style that later led me to buy Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 but that’s another story.) To use a Burgessian locution, I got the lot, by God.
But it was always that first Enderby novel that drew me back, two or three times a year, and has done ever since. Readers with far more elevated tastes than mine, such as Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, have said the same thing. However this is not the place to launch into an essay on that novel’s appeal. I’m supposed to be writing about Enderby’s Hove.
And it’s a real place. The pubs Enderby haunted, the shabby esplanade shelters with their peeling grey paint, the sloping walk up Goldstone Villas to the station (still tricky in winter snow)…they’re all still here. I should remind readers at this stage that Hove is never actually mentioned by name in the novel, although it’s immediately recognisable to anyone who’s been there and Burgess later confirmed the setting in his autobiography. Living as I did in Bristol, I vaguely imagined some of the South Coast towns, inhabited by the living dead, that I knew only by name and reputation – Eastbourne, say, or Worthing. I wasn’t that far out.

My girlfriend and I moved to Hove about eight years ago, and on my very second day wandering along the seafront I came across The Neptune, a pleasant, quietly idiosyncratic little pub with an odd bow-windowed doorway on Kingsway. Here’s how Enderby saw it:

The Neptune was the sort of pub in which any of the three parts – saloon, public, outdoor – is visible from any other.

Still true, although the Jug and Bottle, i.e., the off-licence department, no longer exists. There is no Gilbey’s Port mirror on the wall, although the large plain one in its place could offer an even more vivid and hence more frightening image of Enderby’s stepmother. The clientele are less uniformly ancient than in Enderby’s day (this is also true of Hove as a whole, where an influx of celebrities like Fatboy Slim, Julie Burchill and Chris Eubank have made it a hip place to live), although they are still interestingly varied, and on my last visit I listened to one fruity-voiced old boy reminiscing about his army days who could well have been the son of that  major-general who evinced such scepticism about Enderby’s rank in the war.  Inevitably, there has been some modernisation – a TV, piped music, and no white-jacketed waiter – but there’s still an old joannah in the corner to which Burgess would no doubt have made a beeline (or an AB-line). Faded old carpets, polished wooden floors. Photos of 40s film stars on the walls, interspersed rather puzzlingly with some artists – The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix – whose identities would have had to be explained to Enderby by Vesta Bainbridge. It’s a nice, old-style pub, and worth visiting in its own right even if you’re not on the Enderby trail.

Next stop is the Freemason’s Arms on Western Rd, a striking building with Art-Nouveauesque tiling on the façade. It is no longer the ‘haunt of all the local lesbians over fifty’ (they’re all round the corner at The Gro…no, better not), and until recently was a bit of a dump inside, with a distinctly unwelcoming atmosphere. But a tactful revamp has turned it into a very pleasant place to while away the afternoon with a book, or the book. Arry, head cook at the Conway, might have baulked at the lunchtime menu – not vol-au-vent de dindon or jugged hare with redcurrant jelly, but goat’s cheese salad with honey and mustard dressing – and Enderby’s reaction to the cocktail list – Chocolatini, Bad Habit, The Ultimate Slammer – would undoubtedly have been expressed with maximum flatulent accompaniment. (Although AB might have permitted himself a Tuscan Mule – Tuaca, dry ginger, fresh lime juice.) But you can still get brown ale and bitter mixed in a pint glass – my request provoked interest rather than derision. And a final innovation of which Enderby surely would have approved – spirits come in measures of 35ml rather than the standard 25. The very pretty and petite red-haired barmaid turned out to be a Burgess fan – who could ask for anything more?
I’d originally assumed that The Conway where Arry worked was based on either the Grand or Metropolitan hotels, both ten minutes’ walk away, but there he’d probably have been a head chef rather than head cook. Now, my money’s on The Dudley, still an impressive enough Edwardian establishment with a marble-pillared entrance just around the corner on Lansdowne Place but not quite so intimidating.
The astute reader will by now be asking, “Yes, this is all very well, but where did Enderby actually live?” Here we have a problem. There is no Fitzherbert Avenue in Hove. The closest match, Fitzherbert Drive, is in far-off Kemp Town. Burgess usually lists his previous addresses in full – in fact, at the end of You’ve Had Your Time he gives such precise directions for finding his house in Ticino, near Lugano, that one wonders if perhaps he’d decided towards the end of his life that he’d actually welcome a few visitors. But although he states unequivocally that Enderby’s flat was based on his own, right down to the pictures on the walls and the landlady’s trashy ornaments, no address is given. And I’m assured by experts such as Andrew Biswell that, to date, none of Burgess’s correspondence from the period seems to have survived. The microfiched voters’ registers for 1959/60 are mysteriously missing from Hove Library. So one has to hazard a guess. Ten minutes walk from the station, close to the Town Hall, (not the modern concrete monstrosity but the redbrick gothic pile which burned down sometime in the late 60s), which he passes on his way to the seafront, a more or less straight walk down to The Neptune… Enderby/Burgess must have lived pretty close to my own address in Hova Villas, which fits all these criteria. Or perhaps slightly to the west, where there is an area of Hove known as Poet’s Corner, with streets named after Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth. Now that would be fitting. And one in the eye for Rawcliffe.

Dougie Milton is a writer and musician living in Hove. He is currently working on a short electronic piece based on a theme from Burgess’s 3rd Symphony. His novel-in-progress Bright Helm Stone is still preventing him from earning a decent living doing anything else.

Burgess and Will!: Anthony Burgess’s Cinematic Presentation of Shakespearean Biography

By Kay Smith

In early 1968, Anthony Burgess flew to Hollywood to discuss what he hoped would be a film script for his first major motion picture.  He was known in Hollywood for his fictional biography of Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun, and this project was to be an offshoot of that, a life of Shakespeare that would also be a musical.  From its inception, the project had two titles, Will!, the title Burgess preferred, and The Bawdy Bard,  the title preferred by everyone in Hollywood connected with the project.  Because of his success with Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess says, “...it was considered that I could produce something sensual and violent enough to be called The Bawdy Bard.”

The idea of a musical version of Shakespeare’s life seemed more than acceptable in a 1960's  Hollywood which was riding a wave of very successful British musicals, like My Fair Lady and Camelot, and historical blockbusters like A Lion in Winter and A Man for All Seasons. Warner Brothers Seven Arts was eager to create a similar success with Burgess’s Shakespeare.  William Conrad, a successful actor turned producer, had conceived the project and was instrumental in involving Burgess.  In You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess describes how he warmed to Conrad, who, he noted, was  “a true actor, in that he knew Shakespeare” (143), and they became friends. Burgess was amused but put off by Conrad’s improvisation of a song for the movie that began “To be or not to be in love with you,/ To spend my life hand in glove with you” (143) Besides bad lyrics, Conrad’s plan for the film included, Burgess noted, “outmoded Shakespeare lore” like the legend that Shakespeare left Stratford because he had been caught poaching deer on the land of Sir Thomas Lucy, or the legend that he had held horses outside the Curtain playhouse before becoming a playwright (144).  But Burgess could not completely condemn such material since he had not hesitated to use legendary material himself in Nothing Like the Sun.  About the film project, Burgess says, “If I was a scholar, I’d have been outraged.  But I’m only a novelist, as much a show-biz man, I suppose, as any juggler, soft shoe-shuffler, or film-deity, and I was intrigued.” But  Burgess the novelist had a serious prior restraint in deciding how to handle a screenplay narrative of Shakespeare’s life: He had sold a theatrical option of Nothing Like the Sun to a New York producer and “...even to lift one of my own lines from novel to script would be rank plagiarism...”(YHYT 142).  Thus he had to come up with an entirely new treatment of Shakespeare’s life, and legendary material he may have eschewed for Nothing Like the Sun became necessary for Will!

 Burgess, of course, had many problems to solve in finding the proper alternative material; of equal difficulty were the structural problems that Hollywood imposed on the story. The most successful British musicals, like My Fair Lady, were long, some over three hours, and typically had an intermission that divided the story in the middle.  Burgess saw Shakespeare’s story as dividing into three parts: his life up to leaving Stratford; his early success in Elizabethan London including his involvement with the Dark Lady and the noble patron; finally, his great ‘tragic period’ under James I, culminating in his retirement to Stratford, a prosperous gentleman (YHYT 145). Burgess had concentrated on the first two parts in Nothing Like the Sun, implying, in that work, that there was a link between disease and genius that impelled Shakespeare into his tragic period, but skipping over this period to conclude with Shakespeare’s dying monologue. Indeed he had admitted in an article on the composition of Nothing Like the Sun that there was little of dramatic potential in the Jacobean part of Shakespeare’s life, where the work ---the production of the great tragedies---dominates. This time, for the film,  he would have to find a way to divide the life in two and include the potentially less dramatic period of Shakespeare’s life.  

The other problem presented by Hollywood was motivation.  Burgess has an amusing story in You’ve Had Your Time about his encounter with the studio “motivation man.” To Burgess, the story was “just about a Stratford lad making it in the big time and getting laid by a black bitch,” (145) but the motivation man wanted a “...single theme you could write on the back of a four-cent postage stamp...He was very fierce about motivation: a movie was like a locomotive, running on predestinate rails to a depot on whose platform all the luggage of past action was deposited: everything had to tie up with everything else, even if historical truth was violated” (145).  This was, Burgess says, “probably sound, even Shakespearean” (145). Burgess and the “motivation man” decided on guilt as the motivating factor, guilt about Will’s adultery, guilt about the death of his son, Hamnet, guilt over abandoning his wife for success in London. “Guilt, guilt, guilt” as Burgess reiterates in the short article he wrote about the screenplay. Of course the problem was that guilt and the musical did not necessarily go together well, but Burgess had the recent example of Camelot, the successful late sixties Learner and Lowe musical that had emphasized and medievalized guilt, adultery, and betrayal in a musical format and made a fortune for Warner Brothers.

 From the beginning of the project, Burgess’s approach to the material was both eager and ironic.  After all, this was a major studio project.  The headline on the Times (London) article about the project read “Millions on a Musical about Shakespeare.” A successful film would make Burgess’s name as a marketable Hollywood script writer, a valuable credential since he was also working on a script for a film production of his novel, Enderby, in 1968, and hoped to see other of his books become film projects. (YHYT 185)  But the musical nature of the film both fascinated and repelled Burgess, a man who was more often fascinated than repelled by music.  He wrote about twenty songs (both music and lyrics) that were recorded with full orchestration by Warner Brothers, but he was nevertheless concerned that the story was damaged by the songs, that Shakespeare’s genius was diminished by the imposition of the standard lyrics of the 60's musical, no matter how good the lyrics and music might be.  “Ghastly” is the word he used later to describe this mix (YHYT 147).  Yet a close examination of the lyrics in the screenplay manuscript reveals a combination of story and song that is not nearly as bad as Burgess feared.  The great risk, of course, involved having Shakespeare or Anne or the Dark Lady or Southampton, the main characters, sing.  Undoubtedly, Burgess must have wondered how one could put bad lyrics like Conrad’s “to be or not to be in love with you” in the mouth of Shakespeare, or show him listening and responding emotionally to Anne or the Dark Lady if they sing something that might sound frightfully inane?  Would the Earl of Essex sing at his own execution? These are only a few of the potentially laughable problems.

  The manuscript of Will! shows that Burgess tried to solve these problems by limiting them. The main characters, particularly Anne and Will, sing more at the beginning of the screenplay, but then much of the music becomes environmental, as in the montage Burgess creates to celebrate Will’s arrival in London, which he, taking historical license, makes coincide with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (64-69). In this sequence, Burgess combines a patriotic ditty with an aural montage based on London church bells.  In the tradition of musicals or, more to the point here, opera,  everyone sings, people on the street, people in shops, whores hanging out of windows, Will himself.  The sequence is quite successful on its own terms and would have worked cinematically.  In many cases, Burgess taps into the great riches of the Elizabethan period, setting Nashe’s verses from “A Litanie in Time of Plague” to music, for the plague and closing of the theaters sequence in the screenplay.  Cleverly, he sets to music a number of Shakespeare’s own lyric compositions, from Loves Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, and, Much Ado about Nothing, for instance, and he sets several of Shakespeare’s sonnets to music. Thus by the end of the screenplay, the music sung by main characters has almost disappeared but the film still contains ample music: a good solution to a difficult problem. Nevertheless, as we shall see,  in later years Burgess would turn his uneasiness about the appropriateness of music in this project into wonderful material for parody and satire, both in his autobiography and in his last Enderby novel.  

The project, still called by both names, Will! Or the Bawdy Bard, went forward during a very difficult time in Burgess’s life in 1968-70, with the death of his first wife and his remarriage to Liliana Macellari, but it went forward rather quickly.  The film was to be directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had directed All about Eve, a film Burgess “considered a masterpiece” (YHYT 186). Mankiewicz had directed the acclaimed Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as well as a film version of Guys and Dolls, so he had experience with both Shakespeare and musicals, but in the sixties he was probably best known for the huge and expensive flop, Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He needed a big successful movie and was hoping that Will! would be it (YHYT 185).   Mankiewicz had already made some casting decisions -- Maggie Smith as Anne, her husband Robert Stephens as Will, James Mason as Philip Henslowe, Peter Ustinov as Ben Jonson, Jessica Tandy as Queen Elizabeth.  No decision was made about the Dark Lady, although Burgess somewhat facetiously suggested Diana Ross (YHYT 157).  The plot began to take shape as a somewhat collaborative effort among Burgess, Mankeiwicz and William Conrad.  Conrad suggested that they have Will and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men perform Richard II at Court on the eve of the Earl of Essex’ execution.  The Queen would force Will to go to the Tower with her to witness Essex’ death.  It was melodramatic of course, but, in fact, the Lord Chamberlain’s men did perform at Court on the night before Essex was killed.  This combination of historical fact and speculation appealed to Burgess and he included this incident in the screenplay (YHYT 157).

The only existing manuscript of Burgess’s screenplay of Will or the Bawdy Bard, the one found in Burgess’s papers at the Harry H. Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas, represents most likely his first attempt at a full length screenplay, after having gained approval from Mankiewicz of his initial treatment of the material. He probably wrote several versions after this one, but this is the one he chose to keep among his papers and it is the only record of Burgess’s work on this project .  The manuscript is long, 219 pages, and includes all the lyrics that were later cut when Mankiewicz decided, somewhat to Burgess’s relief,  that the film was not to be a musical (YHYT 185). The plot that Burgess created does indeed rely on legendary material about Shakespeare but nevertheless augments that material in unique ways.  It is very important in considering the plot that Burgess developed for Will! to remember that, in researching and writing Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess had already familiarized himself with the known facts about Shakespearean biography and a wide range of theory. Scholars have commented on Burgess’s  use of Stephen Dedalus’s theory about Anne Hathaway’s adultery with Shakespeare’s brothers, found in Joyce’s Ulysses. In an article on the writing of Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess says, “I had been reading pretty widely, ever since my student days, in books about Shakespeare, in Elizabethan documents, in close scholarly background history.  I had taken a lot of notes feverishly, making a chronological table which related the known facts of Shakespearean biography to the wider events of the time.”  Burgess found G.B. Harrison’s The Elizabethan Journals and The Jacobean Journals, day by day compilations of primary source materials, to be particularly useful in creating atmosphere for Nothing Like the Sun. He was also indebted to Harrison’s biography, Shakespeare under Elizabeth for the idea that the Dark Lady was indeed a black woman.  From Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, Burgess found confirmation for his theory that great art was related to illness, in Shakespeare’s case, Burgess speculated, syphilis. (YHYT 79).  George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, Georg Brandes, John Dover Wilson and others who have written on Shakespearean biography also influenced Burgess’s view of Shakespeare’ life Nothing Like the Sun. Yet Nothing Like the Sun is clearly fiction, not biography. It is not surprising that this concatenation of fact and imagination provoked the great scholar of Shakespearean biography, Sam Schoenbaum to describe Nothing Like the Sun as an “...absurd gallimaufry of invention and (to put it mildly) dubious biographical theorizing,” but it is important to remember that Schoenbaum also praises Nothing Like the Sun as “the only novel about Shakespeare acceptable on its own terms as a novel.” It is with this understanding of Burgess’s intimate knowledge of both Shakespearean fact and Shakespearean legend that we must examine the plot he created for Will!   

There are three aspects of the plot of Will! that I want to describe: First, the way in which Burgess employs the necessary  legendary material that he had left out of Nothing Like the Sun; second, the way in which Burgess puts Will into actions that have high cinematic as well as dramatic potential; third, the way in which he creates an entirely different relationship between Will and Anne Hathaway than the one found in Nothing Like the Sun, and thus an entirely different ending for the screenplay.  First, the legendary material.  Since he could not use much of the actual story from Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess is much more reliant on Shakespearean legend in Will!  He makes extensive use of  the old story that Will had been poaching from the lands of the local gentry, particularly Sir Thomas Lucy.  Early in the screenplay, Sir Thomas Lucy threatens Will and warns him off his property (7).  Later we see Will, Dick Field, and Dick Quinney (historically authentic residents of Stratford) killing a deer on Sir Thomas’ property and then giving it to a poor family.  In fact, the poaching is linked to both an egalitarian theme ---at one point Will says “How can one man steal wild rabbits from another?  God owns the wild rabbits” (9)--- and to the major theme of frustrated gentility that runs through the screenplay: Will complains that “Shakespeare is a better name than Lucy.... He keeps his land: the Shakespeares lost theirs” (10). Later in the screenplay, when the Queen’s Men come to Stratford, Dick Tarleton, the comic actor with whom Will has become acquainted, complains about the tavern fare and Will impetuously offers to get him venison (54).  This time he is caught and jailed, to the disgrace of his family, particularly his wife, Anne.  He escapes and flees to London, but on his infrequent visits back to Stratford, Sir Thomas Lucy is still after him.  Eventually he must ask Southampton and Essex to use their influence to mitigate Sir Thomas’s wrath (125).  

Surprisingly, Burgess stretches this dubious poaching material through the full length of his plot.  At the end of the story, Will, back in Stratford but depressed and unhappy, gets drunk with Ben Jonson and, ranting, wanders off in a snowstorm for one last shot at the Lucy deer.   Lost in the woods, Will sees visions of his plays mingle with visions of his experiences, and we begin to understand why Burgess has hung on to the Lucy story for so long, as Will hallucinates images of the Dark Lady, named Lucy Negro  --- ironically a name that echos Will’s old enemy and promises both light (luce) and darkness (negro).  But this Lucy whom he sees in the snowmist “tears off her face to disclose a leprous horror” (217) as Will stumbles on to his death. It is clear from this summary of the poaching legend, that Burgess is trying to reinvigorate this legendary material not by minimizing it as one might expect, but by seeing imaginative links that can expand and become meaningful in terms of both plot and themes.

Burgess’s Dark Lady in Will! is not the Dark Lady of Nothing Like the Sun, who is a Malay woman whom he calls FATIMAH. While Burgess got the idea of a truly dark-skinned woman from G. B. Harrison, for Nothing Like the Sun he used his own experience of living in Malaysia to create a “dark woman who came from the East --- a woman like one of the Malays I had been hotly attracted to during my time as a colonial civil servant.  I knew nothing about black women but plenty about brown.”  A black woman playing the love interest of a white man in a 1968 movie was likely to be highly controversial, and this may explain why the part of the Dark Lady remained uncast for the duration of the project, even though Burgess says that he wanted Diana Ross for the part ( YHYT 144).  In Will! Burgess links this potentially controversial idea of the black mistress with one of the oldest pieces of legendary material about Shakespeare---the first Shakespeare Joke! 
In his diary, John Manningham of the Middle Temple has the following entry for March 13, 1601:
Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III, there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name Richard the Third.  Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came.  Then, message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third. 
While there are traces of this story in Nothing Like the Sun, in Will! Burgess uses the joke quite literally to create the circumstances of the meeting between Will and Lucy Negro, the Dark Lady of the screenplay .  It is true that “meeting cute” between men and women is part of the tradition of motion pictures and we accept circumstance and coincidence on screen that we would consider trite in a novel.  Still, this is Burgess’s most blatant use of legendary material and he takes a real risk in the screenplay of making the central love relation of the film faintly ridiculous by associating it with this old joke. Though he may have believed that it would work on screen, nevertheless, it is likely that, later when Burgess came to ridicule the work he had done on Will!,  it was this kind of travesty of legendary material that he had in mind. 

On the other hand, Burgess was quite capable of discarding old legends that were suggested for the screenplay and substituting something more dynamic.  Burgess doesn’t show Will holding horses at the playhouse door when he comes to London, as William Conrad had suggested.  Instead, Burgess gives us several scenes of Will trying to break into authorship by selling his plays to that theatrical entrepreneur and brothel-keeper, Phillip Henslowe.  In the most effective of these sequences, Will accosts Henslowe and the player, Edward Alleyn, in one of Henslowe’s brothels.  Will begins to recount the plot of Titus Andronicus, which is, of course, filled with rape, mutilation, murder, and cannibalism.  As he does so, the whores and their clients begin to listen in rapt attention, putting aside their business with each other, and leaning over the balcony to see better. Then there is a sound edit and a visual overlap so that the actor, Alleyn’s voice takes over the lines from Titus and we find ourselves watching the actual production in the Swan Theater (82-85).  In small moments like this, Burgess demonstrated a necessary command of the visual medium in quite clever ways while avoiding piling on the legendary material.

In fact, for his first attempt at a full-length screenplay, Burgess shows an understanding of how movie scenes must be staged differently from in Nothing Like the Sun, in order to put Will literally into the picture in a visual sense as often as possible.  In this screenplay, Will is the primary focus, and, just as in a first-person narrative, he must always be present in the action, or in this case, on screen.  As I have noted, Burgess uses a historical contrivance to put Will at the scene of the execution of the Earl of Essex, where the Queen calls him “little man” and warns him to stay clear of politics .  Earlier in the screenplay, Burgess arranges for Will to witness the murder of Christopher Marlowe and to be, of course, horrified by it, particularly since Marlowe had earlier given Will an introductory note to Henslowe which said, facetiously, “When I am dead, this man will be the greatest poet of England” (79).  Wracked by fear and ironic guilt at the truth of Marlowe’s prophecy, Will relives Marlowe’s death vividly several times in surreal hallucinations and dream sequences, including the one that ends the film.

In another visual sequence, Burgess faces the problem, more of a problem in the late sixties than today, of showing too much violence.  In this scene, Will, new to London, is attending his first execution ---a hanging, drawing and quartering of  Jesuit priests.  Burgess shows the crowd lusting for blood and in the crowd Will spots a coach with a Negroid lady whom we shall come to know as Lucy, his Dark Lady, “excited as by the prospect of sex,” to quote the script directions (79).  Rather than show detail after detail in this gruesome execution scene, Burgess resorts to an old trick, a blind man who stand next to Will and asks excited questions.  Members of the crowd cheer “at what makes Will flinch” (80) and describe the scene to the blind man.  Building up the morbid curiosity of the viewer, the camera finally cuts to the hangman who has just eviscerated one of the priests.  Here are Burgess’s directions from the script:

The hangman grins, holding up the blood clotted pluck.  The CAMERA pans down to the fire.  The hangman throws the entrails on to it.  There is a fine sputtering.  Renewed cheers.  (81)

To end the scene, the camera returns to Will as he pushes out of the crowd, “dashes to the camera and starts to vomit in it” (81).  Burgess uses this “blackout” of the camera as a cut to the next scene.  Scenes like this clearly indicate that Burgess had a keen visual, as well as a verbal, imagination and a visual vocabulary of editing techniques to go with the violence and squalor he was committed to putting on the screen.  Often screenplays written primarily by novelists fail to take into account the needs of visual narration and tend to read like somewhat flat stage plays, but Burgess’s screenplay is usually quite aware of and notes appropriate camera placement and movement, as well as other aspect of filmic vocabulary like editing, overlapping sound, and montage.  Burgess knows how to put Will into a variety of actions that literally show him affected by the people and circumstances around him. 
 
The final aspect of the plot of Burgess’s screenplay that I want to discuss is the treatment of Anne Hathaway in Will! . In both Nothing Like the Sun and Will, Burgess embraces the theory expounded by James Joyce in Ulysses, that Shakespeare’s wife, Anne, was unfaithful to him with his brother, Richard.  Both Nothing Like the Sun and Will! revolve around the two poles of fair wife and dark mistress,  both of whom ultimately betray the poet.  Yet one of the key differences between these two works is in the handling of the fair wife, Anne.  In  Nothing Like the Sun, Anne is presented as lusty and sexually demanding.  Will meets her on May Day, a traditional time for the sexual revels of the young,  after being rejected by a dark girl who chooses to go off with a young miller’s son instead of him.  Getting blind drunk with rejected disappointment, Will simply wakes up, horribly hung over, in the arms of this unknown but experienced and somewhat older woman. There is no exposition, no acquaintanceship beforehand:   This Anne Hathaway is like a lusty goddess of the woods, a Venus who simply overtakes Will unawares.

In Will! more exposition accompanies the introduction of Anne Hathaway, who is presented much more demurely.  Will meets her at his father’s shop where she comes to bring a pair of gloves to be repaired. She is attractive and modest.  While Will’s father talks with her about her family, Will says to his brother Gilbert “that, Gilbert, is known as a woman handsome but past her first youth.”  His father concedes that Anne is a “sweet and pretty girl [who]... badly needs wedding,” and warns his son to “Keep away.  Such women are dangerous” (12-15).   Later, as in Nothing Like the Sun, when Will is rejected by his dark girl, he gets drunk and awakens in the arms of Anne Hathaway, but this is a very different Anne.  The film script presents Anne in much more romantic cinematic terms, intercutting between the couple’s lovemaking and the bringing in of the Maypole, in a phallic montage that would have made Sir James Frazer proud.  A postcoital Will and Anne are shown in long shot walking through the fields of rye, talking, laughing, holding hands (21-23).

There is much more going on in this alteration than simply meeting the visual and narrative needs of the cinema.  True, Burgess has added exposition appropriate to a more simplified and visual plot, and true, he has taken advantage of what film can do through visual juxtaposition.  But in making Anne a modest though aging virgin, Burgess abandons Nothing Like the Sun’s theme of the overlusty wife , a Venus who drives the young poet to disturbing bouts of sexual frenzy.  In Nothing Like the Sun, Shakespeare is finally driven to leave Anne and Stratford because of his disgust at his wife’s arousal in seeing an old woman beaten through the night streets below their bedroom window.  In contrast, in the screenplay, Anne is much more straightlaced: Will meets Anne for a second time just as she is leaving the Shottery church where she has gone to pray, for instance.  Again, Burgess may have been impelled by issues of screen censorship to make these changes.  It is hard to imagine a sixties blockbuster musical of the My Fair Lady ilk, which is what Will or the Bawdy Bard was to be, pursuing a theme of sadomasochistic sex (one would have to wait for the seventies and Cabaret for that).  It would seem, however, that Burgess was less interested in the censors and more interested in a completely different conception of Anne Hathaway.  In Will!, Anne Hathaway is a budding Puritan or Brownist, whose cooling religiosity finally pushes her husband away.  This conception of Anne is going to have long-term plot consequences in the screenplay.  Unlike Nothing Like the Sun, in the screenplay Will never actually discovers his wife making love to his brother, but he has numerous ominous dreams --- presented in flash cuts that show what Will imagines is happening.  His imagination indeed proves accurate, when near the end of the movie, his wife confesses her adultery before Will and her co-religionists. But Will understands that it is loneliness, not lust, that has pushed her towards adultery.  Guilt, Will’s guilt at what he has done to his family, is the  dominant factor in the musical, just as the “Motivation Man” had suggested.  From the beginning of the musical until its end, Will can never be what Anne wants him to be, and Burgess writes a sequence of songs for Will and Anne that captures the conflict between his desire to seek his destiny and hers for quiet happiness at home: Will’s song revolves around his self identification with the constellation that forms Cassiopeia’s Chair, which he sees as a huge W in the sky:

My name in the sky
Burning forever,
Fame fixed by fate
Never to die.     (25)

Anne sees a different natural symbolism at work, when she sings:
Will o’the wisp,
Do not desire
To follow fame,
That foolish fire.

Her song is loaded with homey imagery of baking bread, and crisp dawns:
Better by far 
The fire at home -
Smoke in the rafter
Lamb’s wool and laughter.     (31)

These two songs are among the more successful lyrical pieces in the musical, and they point to a conflict quite different in form from the conflict of Will and Anne in Nothing Like the Sun.  In fact, Burgess employs a frame story in Will that emphasizes the poet’s guilt and frustration at his incompatibility with his wife.  Will! starts with a scene of Shakespeare dying in his bed, the camera taking his point of view as he scans those around him.  He sees Anne “wrinkled as an applejohn, sour as a crab” (2) and hears her rattle the pennies in her pocket, waiting to put them on his eyes when he dies.  Then his mind drifts away to that springtime when he had hoped to meet his dark-haired girl and met gingery Anne instead, and his story begins by going back to that time.  At the end of the screenplay, after he has caught his last illness wandering and hallucinating in Sir Thomas Lucy’s woods, the scene returns to his deathbed where Will’s last words are “...my dear dear dear lord.”  Anne says: “I hope he was calling on God.  I hope he has made his peace,” and Ben Jonson replies: “Ah, woman, he has made more than you will ever understand.” The final  words of the film are Anne’s.  She says, “It could have been so different.  He could have made something with his life” (218).  This frustrating and ironic ending is very different from the ending of  Nothing Like the Sun with its emphasis on the muse, the dark lady whose final gift was disease, and the goddess whose final gift is death.  Because of the emphasis in the screenplay on guilt, rather than on inspiration as in Nothing Like the Sun, Anne Hathaway plays a much larger role in Will’s life and in his psyche, and the Dark Lady, his lover and ultimately his muse in Nothing Like the Sun, a much smaller one.

In examining Will! in detail, as we have done,  it is difficult not to speculate on Burgess’s feeling about his material.  Not being able to use Nothing Like the Sun because of rights restrictions must have been galling to Burgess, who nevertheless sneaked  a good bit of useful dialogue from Nothing Like the Sun into the screenplay.  Just as the characters are named differently in the two works, “WS” being the interior man of Nothing Like the Sun and “Will” being the exterior man of the screenplay, Burgess’s approach to language is quite different in the two works.  Burgess had serious doubts and concerns about how to bring the language necessary  for film up to the higher literary standard of Nothing Like the Sun because he tended to scorn the language of the typical Hollywood film script.  In an interview he says:

Film people are very conservative about dialogue: they honestly believe that the immediate grasp of lexical meaning is more important than the impact of rhythm and emotionally charged sound.  It’s regarded as cleverer to pretend that the people of the past would have spoken like us if they had been lucky enough to know how to do so, delighted with the opportunity to view themselves and their times from our angle. 

In the screenplay, as in Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess avoided anachronistic language, using only words and phrases that would have been available to speakers in Shakespeare’s day, but the language of Will! has little relation to the much more evocative language of Nothing Like the Sun.  Of course, key differences between screenplays and novels have to do with the nature of screenplays, which are all show, concentrating on what can be seen and what can be said, or in the case of a musical, sung.  While we all know that films can be enormously evocative, we know that they can not do what Nothing Like the Sun can do, which is to show the inner life of a great poet.  Nothing Like the Sun is a novel of enormous, almost Joycean, interiority. Even though Burgess only occasionally makes use of Joyce’s stream of consciousness, the narrator is almost always inside Will Shakespeare’s head.  The narration takes many forms in Nothing Like the Sun.  It begins and ends as a frame story, with Burgess delivering a drunken farewell lecture to his Malay students.  Sometimes the story is told as though Will were writing in a diary; other times it is a sermon delivered by a puritan preacher; other times first person narration in one paragraph moves into third person in the next paragraph. On the penultimate page of the novel, the narrator teases the audience by asking “You wish to know how ventriloquial all this is, who is really speaking?” (233).  By that point, ravished by words, the audience becomes aware of a merging and strong identification between the narrator, the fictional Burgess, and WS.  Yet, if there is inconsistency in narration in Nothing Like the Sun, there is great consistency in language and tone.  Burgess has worked hard to make the language acceptably Elizabethan while still intelligible, and he has wonderful ability with the catalogue, a piling on of words and images, some faintly archaic, that create a palpable Renaissance reality in the novel.  Here, for instance is the old actor, Dick Tarleton. Burgess has made it deliberately unclear whether he is speaking aloud or thinking these lines as he examines the crowd before him:

Ho there, all, give ear to your betters.  There is one blats like a flayed pudding and, by Godspod, I shall be after him with my little whip. Hark, all, your doubtful worships are royally bidden to a feast of wrongdoing and thereto will be added for good measure a good measure, nay a treasure of good measures, viddy or skiddy lissit a jug, aye, a jig.  Here is your only jigmaker.  And it will be tomorrow, you whoreson skirvyrumps, you cheesefoots, you heavenhigh stinkards and cackards. 

Burgess never reached that playful yet precise level of language in the screenplay and doubted that he could.  In an article that appeared in the Times (London) in 1968, while Burgess was working on the screenplay, he comments on problems in handling the speech in Will!:

While I was in Hollywood I recorded some Elizabethan dialogue to show how like American it is, but the response I got was that it sounded like Irish.  It would certainly be a mistake to have Shakespeare spouting today’s English. 

Of course, in one form or another, “today’s English’ is an inevitable necessity in any contemporary film, whether it is historically based or not.  Another doubt that Burgess had about the possible film that was developing --- one with quite a different plot from Nothing Like the Sun and quite different use of language--- was that the director Mankiewicz, would make a film that was full of pseudo-Renaissance settings just as Camelot was full of pseudo-Medieval settings (YHYT 186).  Burgess wanted squalor, the kind of squalor that would have characterized the London of Shakespeare’s day.  At one point in the screenplay, Burgess instructs the camera to follow an open sewer on a London street, tracking “dead cats and fish heads” (68).  In Will! there are plenty of heads on pikes, and chained criminals floating in the Thames’ changing tides.

Burgess’s doubts about the screenplay and the project in general were reenforced by a growing sense he had that the film would never be made.  In fact, in 1969, he contracted to write “a brief biography of Shakespeare which should be sumptuously illustrated” so that he would not waste the research he had done for the film (YHYT 109).  This is his “coffee table” book, called simply Shakespeare, which was published in 1970.  Yet, even full of doubts, he was still working on the screenplay.  As he says, “Desperately trying to finish the script, I yet knew that it was not going to reach the screen” (YHYT 190).  His premonition proved correct: Warner Brothers was being sold and even though studio executives supported the project, “all existing enterprises were scrapped when the new regime started,” as Burgess explained in an interview.  Burgess had bad luck with this project, just as he had bad luck with the Enderby film script that he was writing simultaneously with the Will! film script: In that case, the producer, John Bryant, who was committed to the project, dropped dead at the Cannes Film Festival (YHYT 185). Thus neither Will! nor Enderby were ever to make it to the screen.              

One cannot help but be curious whether either one (but Will! in particular) would have been a success if it had been made.  After all, we have recently seen overwhelming interest in the life of Shakespeare in the 1998 success of the pseudo-biographical film, Shakespeare in Love.  Would Will! have been as successful as Shakespeare in Love?  To compare the screenplay of Will! to the film of Shakespeare in Love is to compare the modern with the postmodern in imaginative biography and film making.  Will! is modernist in its approach to the whole life of its subject, while the postmodernist Shakespeare in Love privileges the part to the whole, emphasizing an episode rather than thematizing a life.  This makes Shakespeare in Love more tightly organized and more seemingly complex within more narrow bounds than Will!.  In contrast, Will! consists of lots of small “lies”--- a complex compilation of fact and fiction often derived from reading the life into the work or accepting legendary material.  Shakespeare in Love, on the other hand depends upon one big “lie” ---that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet based on a love affair of his own with a prominent noblewoman.  Both history and source study refute the premise of Shakespeare in Love as impossible with ridiculous ease.  Yet the untruth of its premise shrinks to insignificance; it is the magnificently intertwined life and art that keeps us interested in the film, despite its blatant inaccuracy.  Burgess is himself no slacker when it comes to intertwining life and art, and Will! shows us, in many clever ways, Shakespeare at work on and performing in his own work and others (Will! has a wonderful Dr. Faustus scene, for instance, with a drunken Marlowe yelling abuse from the audience.)  But Burgess’s more expansive technique of citing fragments from many of the plays and other works of the period might be thought of, finally, as allusive, more like the modernist work of Eliot in The Wasteland than the highly intertextual post-modernism of Shakespeare in Love.  Overall, we must remember that films are highly collaborative and note that Will!, like Shakespeare in Love, would have had an excellent cast, an experienced director, and, of course, a talented scriptwriter.  While we can admire Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of Henslowe in Shakespeare in Love, we can still yearn for the opportunity to have seen a quite different interpretation by James Mason, the Henslowe of Will!

Overall, however, it is likely that Will! would not have done well at the box office,  through no real fault of its own, but rather through a seismic shift in tastes that was occurring while Burgess was working on Will!  The late sixties saw the advent of the counterculture not only as a social phenomenon but also in films. Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy both appeared in 1969. While on a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand, Burgess saw both films. He said they “...showed me the way the contemporary cinema was going and how old-hat and prissy Will! would have been” (YHYT 217).  Ironically, it was on this same trip that Burgess found out that his novel, A Clockwork Orange, was definitely going to be filmed and that “Stanley Kubrick was sending urgent cables about the need to see me in London on some matter of the script” (YHYT 217).  The now old-fashioned Will! was being dropped, but Burgess was soon to find himself working on a film, A Clockwork Orange, that would define one element of the counterculture of the early seventies.
However, if one examines carefully what Burgess created in Will!, one notices aspects of the film that would have made it far less old-fashioned than the hopelessly outdated Camelot for instance.  Burgess’s insistence on the violent and the squalid is one of the more contemporary aspects of the screenplay, as is the idea, in the racially charged atmosphere of 1968, the year that Martin Luther King was killed, of a love affair between England’s greatest poet and a black woman.  The Dark Lady problem could have made the film more interesting and controversial, particularly if the Dark Lady had been played by Burgess’s choice, Diana Ross.

When Warner Brothers abandoned the notion of making a film of Will! in 1969, Burgess may have been relieved.  Over time, as I have noted, he began to see the many drawbacks of the project, particularly the “ghastly” (as he described it) idea of a musical.  Yet Burgess never really abandoned his screenplay, though he readily abandoned the idea of actually seeing it on screen.  In fact, it was characteristic of Burgess as an author never to abandon anything that might be usefully linked with some future work.  In a recent article in the Anthony Burgess Newsletter, based on a 1969 lecture called “The Dependent Mind,” Tom Stumpf reminds us of the complex interconnection of all of Burgess’s work, from the mundane linking of characters and circumstances to the more exalted level of theme.  Stumpf pays particular attention to the links he sees between 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.”  Not only are both novels about poets, as Stumpf notes, but both poets suffer from mental or physical diseases that are directly linked to their muses: Enderby’s ‘goddess’ who only comes to him when he is in a state of arrested adolescence, and WS’s Dark Lady, who gives him the case of syphilis which prods his diseased imagination into the suffering of his great tragic period.  It is thus not surprising that, in 1983, after killing off Enderby in A Clockwork Testament, Burgess revives his poet and links him with Shakespeare in Enderby’s Dark Lady.  Harold Bloom, who calls himself  “a devoted Enderbyan” and who writes perceptively about the relationship of Burgess’s Shakespeare and Enderby characters to Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, notes that “Burgess gave us Enderby’s Dark Lady..., a super amalgam of Inside Mr. Enderby and Nothing Like the Sun.” Though Harold Bloom is an eminent critic who is right to see connections between these two books, he is wrong in linking these two works together as an amalgam.  In fact, Enderby’s Dark Lady is an amalgam of Enderby and Burgess’s screenplay, Will!  Though abandoned as a film project, much of the material of Will!, from the songs to the plot to the Diana Ross-like Dark Lady, makes a final appearance in Enderby’s Dark Lady.

In Enderby’s Dark Lady, Burgess is essentially bringing together and recycling  a number of Shakespeare pieces he had written over the years, as well as using the experience and circumstances of writing them for the plot of the novel.  Burgess wrote the short story, “Will and Testament” which begins Enderby’s Dark Lady, in 1976, and read it for the first time at the Folger Shakespeare Library for a  celebration of Shakespeare and the American Bicentennial, the very occasion that Enderby is called upon to commemorate in at the satirically named Peter Brook Theater in Indiana in Enderby’s Dark Lady (YHYT 336).  The short story that ends the novel, fittingly called “Muse,” was first published in The Hudson Review in 1968, the same year Burgess was working on Will!. The material in between the two short stories, in which Enderby is called to Indiana to write a musical of Shakespeare’s life, is an imaginative reworking of Burgess’s experiences in writing the abortive screenplay, Will!  In Enderby’s Dark Lady, Burgess is both recycling the faintly ridiculous experiences he had in Hollywood and reconciling himself to the failure of his Will!  screenplay ever to see light.  In Enderby’s Dark Lady, Enderby meets and falls in love with the wonderful April Elgar, a black singer of the Diana Ross variety who is to play the Dark Lady in this stage production.  The lyrics and the plot of the musical that Enderby creates in Indiana are all straight from Will!  Enderby shares with Burgess his ambivalent feeling toward his creation, perverted as it is by American accents and American attitudes.  Burgess certainly uses Enderby’s Dark Lady as a vehicle of satire, projecting the disasters that might have happened if Will! had been produced. But, because of the love affair that develops between Enderby and April, Burgess  also redeems the material that he had worked so hard on for the production of Will!  In light of the relationship between Enderby’s Dark Lady and Will! it is important to remember the ending of Enderby’s Dark Lady, in which Enderby himself plays Will, and, inappropriately but in some deeper psychological way highly appropriately, consummates his affair with April Elgar, the ultimate Dark Lady.  It is on a public stage and in a production that greatly resembles Will! that Burgess finally allows his much put-upon poet Enderby to have a satisfactory sexual encounter for the first and only time in the entire Enderby saga.  This is “Will in overplus” as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 135.  Perhaps with Enderby’s Dark Lady, Burgess was finally satisfied that Will! had not been a complete waste of effort, that he had redeemed what he could from the screenplay that was destined never to appear on the screen.  In Enderby’s Dark Lady he finally brought his efforts together and finally gave them ‘a local habitation and a name,’ or, as Enderby says in a discussion of what to call his musical, “I now think that Will might be better.  Will the name and the drive, sexual and social, you know, and even the final testament with the second best bed.  With an exclamation point, possibly.  Will!  Or two if you’d like — Will!!” Given the long journey that Anthony Burgess went on with the Bard of Avon, two seem hardly enough.

Kay Smith
Appalachian State University