Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 6, December, 2003
 Contents
Introduction  (by Ben Forkner).	P. 1
Poets  and Poetry in the Enderby Cycle (by Sylvère Monod) 	P. 3
Beard’s Roman Women (by Martin Phipps). 	P. 12
Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess: A Literary Encounter
(by John Fletcher)	P. 16
Walking Made Easy (by Douglas Milton)	P. 21
One Touch of Venus (by Douglas Milton) 	P. 25
A Review of Will’s Son and Jakes’s Peer by A.I. Farkas
(by Andrew Biswell)	P. 27
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 
Never complain, never explain. So far, so good, though I have never been overly fond of this puritanical maxim, and it seems particularly cold and crass given the loyal patience of our online readers. Still, it does allow me to limit the painful clearing of the throat before I begin again. There has not been a total draught of news, or articles, this past year, but there has been a definite thinning of the stream all during the spring and summer, followed by a slow but encouraging rise in the fall (bless the English language for those last four words). For this reason alone, it seemed prudent for the Center to consider pacing the frequency of the Newsletter to meet the relative penury of contributions, and at least for the time being, we have decided to aim for a single substantial issue a year, rather than two smaller ones, or worse yet, the unpalatable prospect of punitive delays and bitter throat clearings as regular fare. This decision is all the more defendable given our recent agreement with the Chief Librarian of the University Library of Angers, Olivier Tacheau, to publish in book form, every two or three years, a selection of the articles from past issues of the Newsletter. More details on this project will be announced soon, and if all goes well, the first Newsletter compilation will appear in time for the grand international colloquium on Burgess and autobiography in December of this year.
As far as this long-delayed sixth number is concerned, I am confident the end result will be found to be well worth the wait. We begin with a major new study of the Enderby novels by the French scholar Sylvère Monod. Many of our readers will know Professor Monod as one of the outstanding modern translaters of English literature into French, and as an international authority on Dickens, Conrad and Kipling. They may not know that he is also a fine novelist, a man of letters in the great humanist, and European, tradition, and one of the most delightful human beings I have ever encountered in the academic world. His study of the poet Enderby’s tragicomic struggle with existence casts much new light on Enderby and Rawcliffe, and suggests, very convincingly, that they both need to be reconsidered as two rival manifestations of Burgess’s own poetic life, or lives, almost as if they were two (I hesitate to write doppelglandular) lobes of the same mind. Doubles, and rival pairs, are also seen to be an organic basis for Beard’s Roman Women in an original analysis by the mysterious Martin Phipps. I say mysterious, simply because I would like to know more about his own work, and origins, and because several readers have written in to express their admiration of Phipps’s tribute to Burgess in the last issue of the Newsletter. All I remember from our brief exchange last year is that Mr Phipps lives in or near Vancouver, and thrives on raw milk (though not exclusively, I imagine). We are pleased too with the second appearance of Professor John Fletcher who speculates on the relationship between Burgess and Beckett, and who is one of the first scholars to have thoroughly explored the resources of our special collection. Finally, there are three gratifying contributions by our most faithful correspondents, without whom I would be sorely tested to continue: Douglas Milton and Andrew Biswell. Mr Milton, whose knowledge of and enthusiasm for Burgess are inexhaustible, gives us a glossary of Australian slang in Enderby Outside, and a review of the very successful performance of The Eve of Saint Venus by Peter Hudson and the Brava theatre company at the Café Flore in Paris last April. Andrew Biswell, whose biography of Burgess is proceeding apace, has taken time to write and send a book review of A.I. Farkas’s recent Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’s Joycean Negotiations, a study that probes the profound influence of Joyce on Burgess. I am pleased to add that Mr Farkas will be presenting a paper at our colloquium in December. One reason I have left Andrew Biswell for last, as a sort of ceremonial crowning, is to announce how delighted he has made me, and all the other members of the Center, by accepting to become the British editor of the Newsletter. Professor Biswell has recently moved to a new position at the University of Manchester, where he will be able to finish (in the heart of Burgess territory) what I have no doubt will be the definitive biography of Burgess, and where he is helping us establish what promises to be a permanent exchange between our two universities. For all your energies on our behalf, Andrew, many, many thanks. 
It remains to signal to our readers that the collection of papers given at our first international colloquium, “ The Avatars of A Clockwork Orange, ” will be published very soon by the University of Angers Press. As soon as it appears, there will a special notice in the Newsletter, so please stay tuned. This collection, edited with an orignal essay by Emmanuel Vernadakis and Graham Woodroffe, will be, in fact, the first of a series of scholarly works on Burgess. Readers who would like to know more about the series may write directly to the Newsletter editors. By the way, our devoted Associate Editor, Valerie Neveu, should be in all our thoughts these days. Valerie broke a ligament in her knee during a ski trip, and is recovering at home. This is a painful injury, but Valerie should take heart in remembering that it occurred while she was standing perfectly still, waiting her turn. Had it happened after she had taken off down the slope, who knows how long it would have taken to find the pieces. Take care of yourself, Valerie. We need you.
One last reminder: For all information concerning the December 2004 colloquium, remember to consult the special rubric on the Center’s site. Remember too that all unsolicited contributions to the Newsletter continue to be welcome. We would be especially interested in hearing from any of you who have personal memories of Burgess during the last several years of his life.
Ben Forkner
Poets and Poetry in the Enderby Cycle
by Sylvère Monod
  
      In 1980 I had published a study of Mr Enderby, one of Anthony Burgess's favourite characters. As Mr Enderby was both impressive and mean, I had called my article, in French, "Enderby, le minable magnifique". This appeared in the fifth issue of TREMA, a short-lived and obscure scholarly journal published by the English Department of my own University, Paris-III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Our N° 5, though not so heady and successful as Chanel's, had its own glamour, since it was entirely devoted to one unquestionably brilliant and entertaining writer. It was an Anthony Burgess special issue. I based my study on what I took to be  the complete Enderby cycle of three shortish novels, Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside, and The Clockwork Testament, or, Enderby's End. I still regard myself as having been at the time justified in thinking the cycle was complete, since the word End appeared in the title of its third part, in which poor Mr Enderby was actually seen to die. I therefore expressed my convicton that there would be, that indeed there could be no more Enderby stories. Dead men, even fictitious ones, notoriously tell no tales. Nor do they lend themselves to being told new tales about. I could not have been more wrong. A fourth Enderby novel, Enderby's Dark Lady, annihilated the hero's death at the end of the third, the author blandly explaining that his Clockwork Testament had been only one branch of a "forked ending", the unreal term of the alternative, of which he now gave us the other and truer one. Enderby's survival in the Dark Lady volume was so vigorous that Burgess left himself plenty of room for adding a fifth, then a sixth part, and so on, in fact, any number of sequels, had he lived long enough to write them. We can trust his fertile inventiveness: had he lived, he would never have fallen short of adventures for Enderby. But talented writers are not like fictional figures,; they cannot, alas, be resurrected at will. Burgess has died, and taken Enderby with him to a final grave this time.
      Enderby's profession, while he lived, and even at the time of his temporary or illusory death, was poetry. He was a professional poet and could do nothing that did not fit in with his vocation: write poetry, read, be interviewed, at a pinch do a little teaching and/or collaborate in the production of a play, or a film, or a television programme, or a musical, as long as the work was to be based on a poetical achievement of some kind. Enderby's own poems, or fragments and dribblets of them, were lavishly interspersed in the pages of the books that related episodes of his life. In addition to the future resurrection of Enderby, there was another thing I was ignorant of while writing my essay for TREMA. I may have been told by the able editor of our special issue, the late Jacques Cabau, that Burgess had sent him a sheaf of unpublished poems of his and allowed him to print them in the Burgess issue. But I was not shown the poems themselves; I saw them for the first time when they had been printed together with our articles. Even then, I failed to recognize them. Otherwise, I would not have said in my article that I did not know whether Burgess intended the readers of his Enderby fiction to treat the fragments of verse in those volumes as Enderby poems or as Burgess poems, whether he wished us to admire them as fine productions or to deride them as feeble attempts at producing poetry. Had I looked at the thirteen "Poèmes inédits", I would have recognized them as pieces quoted, or quoted from, in one or other of the Enderby novels, as poems written by Enderby. The same lines being now offered to the public as Burgess poems, my hesitancy would have come to an end. I would have been certain that the author of poems to which Burgess now proudly laid claim as his own were intended to be treated with respect. Ergo, Enderby was (in Burgess's view) a genuine poet. Unless, of course, Burgess was aware that TREMA was not exactly one of the best-selling periodicals; we commanded a very limited readership; our journal was rather obviously confidential, not to say parochial. It was not to the public at large that Burgess had proclaimed his authorship of many Enderby poems.
      One must add that lately the plot has considerably thickened. I am referring to the publication, on November 25, 2002, of a volume called Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems by Anthony Burgess, edited by Kevin Jackson for the "Poetry Pléiade" series at the Carcanet Press. This is a very valuable book, which one is delighted to have at one's disposal. It contains all the short poems known to have been written by Burgess, and substantial specimens of and extracts from his bulkier productions in verse, including his work as a translator of poetry and as an author of lyrics for musical performances. The editor provides an excellent introduction and lavish bibliographical information. What makes the book contribute in thickening the plot is the fact that Kevin Jackson has traced earlier publications as Burgess (or as Wilson) poems of several pieces supposed to have been written by F. X. Enderby. Kevin Jackson  had not come across our poor TREMA special issue; no-one will be tempted to blame him; but his ignorance of the so-called "unpublished poems" it contained makes him  miss one link in what becomes a longish chain: poems which had seen the light of print as the work of Burgess, then been ascribed to Enderby, were in 1980, for their third appearance, recovering their virginity as "poèmes inédits" before coming to their final niche in Jackson's edition of the Revolutionary Sonnets.  Like most bibliographical histories, these accidents are of limited interest to most people. But it remains true that poems which have been published, however discreetly, no less than three or four times, imply a good deal of deliberation and perseverance on the author's part: he wanted them to be known: Enderby, as part of this machinery, must therefore be examined seriously as a poet. 
      Kevin Jackson's volume does not in fact collect much more Burgess poetry than had become known earlier, though he gives us a lot of Burgess verse, often of dazzling brilliancy. There was never any doubt about Anthony Burgess's ability to write in verse. He was a poet at least in the etymological sense that connects poetry with the greek verb poiein, with making; he was always remarkably skilful at handling language in stimulating ways and in any form, including metre and rhyme. He had his own idiosyncrasies in that field as elsewhere, and his attitude to rhyme is original even when it is not eccentric. Another element must be taken into account, though it is extremely difficult to assess and circumscribe, and that is the genuinely poetical quality of many of the best passages written by Burgess in prose, and as prose.
      One fact remains to be examined: in his Enderby cycle Anthony Burgess tried to introduce to his readers a man who consistently claimed that he was a poet, and could be nothing else, a born poet, a poet by nature and by profession, a man who would live and die as a poet (who, in fact, if only for a time and as it were by mistake, did actually die as such). To that fictitious character Burgess lent what he seems to have regarded as the best part of his own poetical output. And the Enderby cycle also provided Burgess with opportunities for airing his views about the nature of poetry and the processes of poetry-making. One way of airing his views was to have them discussed inside the fictional world he was putting across to the reader. And no-one could be more qualified to conduct such an undercurrent of discussion with Enderby than a fellow-poet. Burgess gives us double measure in the cycle: two poets for the price of one. Enderby and Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe and Enderby, whose relationship is complex. 
      It has not been much studied. And yet the two men are clearly opposed to each other, they sometimes talk about poetry together, they pass from implicit rivalry to (one-sided) enmity, which at one point becomes bloodthirsty (still on one side only), before subsiding into something like mutual tolerance, and even affection and gratitude. This phenomenon deserves close attention. Kevin Jackson, who has written so well about Burgess's poetry and its link with Enderby, dismisses Rawcliffe, I believe, a little too glibly, in a single sentence, when he says that Burgess, in his work as a whole, created "a whole regiment of ghastly poetasters from Enderby's arch-enemy Rawcliffe, author of a single dud lyric 'in all the anthologies'" (p. x). I nevertheless believe that the creation of Rawcliffe beside Enderby may help us enrich our view of Burgess as a poet and as a thinker and writer about poetry in general. 
      These early novels, while they show their age in some of the now outdated phrases (I've had it, you've had it) and details of daily life (the [gas-]meter needed a shilling), are full of the humour and the fun that characterize Burgess's manner throughout his career. Also of his political preferences. In Inside, for instance, he introduces a man named Walpole, who appears as a successful caricature of a Marxist, a worker involved in the promotion of his Union, but he is stark mad, and the confusion in his mind is astonishing; yet he involuntarily coins a superb phrase when he repeatedly reproaches Enderby with being a "boor Joyce". Another uneducated speaker provides Burgess with an opportunity of palming off upon him a pun on the word "psychiatrist", transmogrified into "trick cyclist".There is brilliant writing also (again in Inside) in the description of Mrs. Opisso, the daily woman (whose dailiness is another archaic feature of the book). And there are some of Burgess's stylistic idiosyncrasies, such as his liking for adverbs like queenlily, statelily, pearlily, not much used in current English but often found in Robert Browning's writings. 
      The visible subject of the Inside volume is the apparent curing of an aberration by a combination of psychological, physiological and  social remedies; it thus seems germane to the theme of A Clockwork Orange. The surface subject of Outside  is Enderby's attempt to flee from England in order to escape punishment for a murder he has not committed and at the same time to inflict punishment by murder on Rawcliffe and thus make himself finally eligible for the hitherto undeserved sentence he is threatened with.
      Yet, in common with the Testament volume and perhaps to a certain extent with the Dark Lady story, the first two parts of the Enderby tetralogy are in depth concerned with the mysteries and agonies of poetical creation in a largely hostile world, and the place of poetry and of the poet in modern society. On being interviewed by Jacques Cabau for TRÉMA, Burgess had laid special stress on the seriousness of his attitude to literature, dismissing his reputation as a writer of comic or even farcical scenes: "I did not think of myself as a satirist or a comic writer. I had always seen myself as a creator of gloom and sobriety" (Trema 5, p. 94).
      The first encounter between Enderby and Rawcliffe occurs in London, after a dinner-party at which Enderby was to have been given the Goodby gold medal and a valuable cheque, which he ineptly and unexpectedly found himself refusing. Rawcliffe drags Enderby away from the table, tells him who he is ("I'm Rawcliffe [...] You know me. I'm in all the anthologies." (Inside henceforth I - 54-55) Rawcliffe obviously knows who Enderby is, and attaches at least some value to his work, though the reverse is not true. It is then, already, that Rawcliffe questions Enderby about his present work, and that to him Enderby "with babbling nerves [...] blurted out a detailed synopsis of The Pet Beast", his ambitious work in (slow) progress at the time. 
      Rawcliffe finds mention again when Enderby leafs through  a shelfful of poetical anthologies in order to check whether Rawcliffe  was indeed present in them; he is always represented by the same short poem, of twelve lines, regarded by Enderby as made up of "artless lyrics" (I-67-68). Enderby also discovers that none of his own work is reprinted in any of the ten anthologies he has consulted. After which findings Enderby becomes intermittently obsessed by the thought of Rawcliffe and his undeniable though ambiguous and limited virtue of anthologizability. 
      The second encounter between the two men takes place in Rome, where Enderby has just flown with his bride Vesta. She has, with great and ill-advised authority, taken him in hand, restored him to decency, married him and carried him to Rome on their honeymoon; their union will remain unconsummated, partly because Rawcliffe, who had been waiting for them, and who has courteously had flowers delivered to Vesta, spends a good deal of time with Enderby and makes him share more than one of his own drinking sprees. At his most relatively sober moments, and sometimes even when half drunk, Rawcliffe becomes known to the reader as a rational creature, a man of culture (he quotes Dante fluently), clever, imaginative, capable of speaking much better Italian than Enderby, good at playing with words (I, 129-130). Rawcliffe shows a modicum of admiration for Enderby's work, but seems mainly keen on borrowing his ideas. Enderby still asserts that he doesn't like Rawcliffe (132), who guesses that the other poet is jealous of his (Rawcliffe's) presence in "all the anthologies". 
      Rawcliffe, who reveals himself as capable of playing a part, thus seems altogether better equipped than Enderby to make a success of his life. It takes cleverness of a kind to exploit Enderby in small things, like making him pay for  a large number of drinks, though not for a long taxi-ride. And his greater feats, like turning Enderby's sketchy project for The Pet Beast into a film scenario, selling it to Italian professionals and getting money out of the venture, must have taken wizardry; at least in my eyes, because I do not regard Enderby's invention as in the least cinematically promising; on the contrary, it could only lead to a deadlily boring production. Rawcliffe, when Enderby spends time with him in Rome instead of going back to his bride in their hotel bedroom, has not yet made his money, or not avowedly; he is as poor as a mouse, and there is a hole in the sole of his shoe. Perhaps there are many holes in what is left of his soul. 
      Rawcliffe still sounds rather brilliant when he emerges from his ( perhaps partly spurious) drunken stupor. Yet Enderby's attitude to him is slowly evolving; he has to remind himself occasionally that he dislikes Rawcliffe. Up to that point, however, all the positive efforts at establishing a relationship are made by Rawcliffe, not Enderby. Rawcliffe indulges in a piece of autobiography; he is now aged 52, and he says he lost the power of writing poetry when he was 27; in the course of that conversation, once again, though still drinking hard, Rawcliffe preserves the ability to talk lucidly about poetry, America, and age. Rawcliffe's name provides Burgess with an opportunity for wordplay (see "a rockcliff, a rawface", I-138), whereas Enderby stimulates Rawcliffe in a similar way ("Who would an ender be [...] Would you a spender be [...] Would you a fender be", I-130-131). 
      When Enderby eventually returns to the conjugal bedroom, Vesta shows that she does not think much of Rawcliffe, whom she regards as a drunkard and a born liar ; she may be right, but she is not a trustworthy or impartial judge; like Rawcliffe she is out to exploit and manipulate Enderby. Their rivalry in that direction accounts for her animus but it seems strange, considering how little there is in Enderby that possesses the least marketable value. Vesta Bainbridge, however, will succeed even better than Rawcliffe, being far more ruthless and infinitely less generous than that lapsed poet. Meanwhile, she warns Enderby against the perils of consorting with Rawcliffe, a man, she says, who is "always messing round on the fringe of things" and she guesses that he is in Rome for some specific purpose, "He's probably here in films, I should think, just messing around" (I-139). 
      When Enderby quarrels with Vesta, he thinks of Rawcliffe for the first time in other than contemptuous terms, recognizes the man's clear-sightedness, for he had seen through the woman's game (I-169). Vesta counters her  husband's charges by asserting that Rawcliffe is "jealous as hell" of Enderby (170). Vesta cannot be left out of a study of the relationship between the two men; she plays a part in it and of the three people involved she appears as the most thoroughly malignant figure. 
      Shortly after that crisis between the newlyweds, Rawcliffe, still dirty and shabby, reappears in the bar of the Enderbys' Roman hotel, to invite them to the première of a film he has worked on; a film that has been produced cheaply and is in great part borrowed from other films. The film is called L'animal binato, a phrase coined by Dante. In the course of the conversation, Rawcliffe once more talks amusingly and cleverly; he is clearly a better speaker than Enderby, and one wonders, fleetingly, whether the opposition between the two men is not between genius, which isolates, and talent, which can bring in money. At that stage, the narrative provides more and more insistent hints that Rawcliffe is a homosexual. He says he will be leaving Rome on that very day; he remains vague about his destination, mentioning merely that he is "going South". Rawcliffe warns Enderby against the woman he calls "Auntie Vesta", just as she had put her husband on his guard against him; he gives good advice to Enderby: "Get wise to yourself, as they say. Wake up. A poet must be alone!" (I-173). Before departure, Rawcliffe appears sober and almost depressed. A crucial dialogue between the two men shows that one is extinct as a poet, while the other is incapable of being anything else, being in fact too minable to accomplish anything practical. Rawcliffe reverts to his autobiography and that is probably when the reader realizes that he really has been a poet, and perhaps that it is better to be a "has-been" than a "has-not-been", just as it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Or isn't the reader intended rather to wonder how much genuineness there is in the vis poetica of two aging shams? That poetry plays a great part in Rawcliffe's life is shown by the fact that when drunk and asleep he can still quote poetry (I-176).
      Gradually, what transpires is also that between Rawcliffe and Enderby there is both enmity and kinship. Isn't there something in common between the pair they form and the two Wilsons of Poe's famous story, which must have appealed particularly to Burgess, whose real name was Wilson and who had found the literary scene too crowded with Wilsons already to appear in print only as one more writer of that name. 
      After Rawcliffe's departure, the Enderbys attend the première of the film to which Rawcliffe (Italianized as Raucliffo) contributed at least suggestions; and that film, not surprisingly, turns out to be based on Enderby's plans for The Pet Beast. By what is said about it in Burgess's book, it can only have been monumentally heavy-going; yet the novelist asks us to believe that it was good enough to have an English version made and for that version to become a hit. 
      Shortly after that session at the cinema, Enderby unexpectedly reveals himself in his turn as capable of playing a part, deceiving Vesta and running away from her, with her fur coat. In a way, he is rawcliffizing himself by so doing, or at least he is following Rawcliffe's sound advice. This initiates a period of poverty and despair for Enderby, who remains haunted by "the prophecy of the traitor Rawcliffe" (I-190). He later suspects Rawcliffe, his "pet beast" in one sense, of having written an unfavourable review of his (Enderby's) latest volume of verse. Driven to suicide (which he manages ineptly enough to survive, as who wouldn't suicide by aspirin?) he gives one last thought to Rawcliffe, whom he connects with Dante's Inferno, for he remembers that his friend/enemy was familiar with the Italian poet.
      After his failed suicide, Enderby undergoes psychological treatment, and tamely submits to becoming a pallid barman named Hogg, who has nothing to do with poetry, or with Rawcliffe, any more. The relationship will be resumed, with a vengeance, in Enderby Outside, the second story in the chronicle. 
      The blurb of that sequel to Inside Mr Enderby makes great play of the notion that Anthony Burgess, the author of Enderby Outside is the legatee of Joseph Kell, an alias supposed to have written the first volume. This is an interesting sidelight on the story, since by the end of the Outside novel Enderby will have become Rawcliffe's residuary legatee. In the early pages of Outside, some information about the previous episodes is provided for the ignorant or forgetful reader; thus, even a newcomer to Enderby's adventures will know that Enderby harbours a grievance against Rawcliffe. Enderby is still barman Hogg, but he is slowly working himself back into an Enderbian consciousness, so that at one point he dubs himself "Hoggerby" (Outside, or O-26). It may be difficult for some readers to share Hoggerby's excitement on finding that his Muse is being reborn, considering the results, which, in most cases, are again undeniable Burgess poems, supposedly "unpublished" as such until they half-appeared in Tréma. One of the odd characteristics of Enderby's poetical career is that his poems are constantly stolen from him, and quite often revered by himself, though they do not sell and receive at best the faint praise of lukewarm reviews.  Though there is a good deal of poeticality in some prose passages of Enderby Outside (such as those making lavish and suggestive use of the moon and its light), the genuineness of the poems qua poems may remain in doubt. 
      When Enderby finds himself compelled to flee from London in order to avoid being arrested for a murder of which he is innocent, but which has been perpetrated under circumstances that make him an obvious suspect, he decides to go to North Africa, and, if possible, to Tangier, where he happens to know that Rawcliffe now owns a bar, which he seems to have called AL-ROCKLIF; more wordplay with a character's name. Once he has arrived in Morocco, Enderby says to a man whose help he can buy: "I want to get to Tangier to see off an old enemy" (O-119).  The old enemy's identity is slowly disclosed, when Enderby hears the last line of a poem ‹ of a kind ‹ recited by his new acquaintance: "And the rawgreen growler under Bellamy's Cliff", Enderby reacts: "Rawcliffe [...] it won't be long now." The other man, nicknamed Easy Walker, is taken aback and reacts in his turn: "You say Rawcliffe, brad? Rawcliffe the jarvey you bid to chop?" , and that leads to Enderby being told that Rawcliffe, though unquestionably the owner of a bar "Called the Acantilado something-or-the-next-thing", is not in Tangier at the moment, because he is ill and undergoing treatment in Gibraltar. But he will be back eventually. Meanwhile, Enderby has defined him as "Plagiarist, traitor [...], enemy" (O-123), And though warned that "This jarvey Rawcliffe [...] is some big kind of a jarvey. Big in films and that" (O-124), Enderby's determination remains settled. 
      The long wait for Rawcliffe's return turns him into a mythical figure; he is not only a traitor and an enemy, but The Enemy, par excellence. That uncertain period also gives Enderby a chance to devote  himself to writing poetry, conceiving poems, and reflecting about poetry. He becomes aware, for instance, of "the danger [...] of trying to make poetry out of the ephemeral" (O-140), and he develops his own poetical principles, which set him apart from "the soi-disant avant-garde". He has been accused of belonging rather to the rearguard, but he is determined to remain faithful to his literary ideal. His anger if fuelled by finding out that some of his poetry has been lifted by Vesta from his manuscripts left in her house and printed as the work of another man,  including, inadvertently, at least one poem that had already been published earlier by Enderby himself. Thus Enderby seems to share with Burgess a certain vagueness about the status of the unpublished. 
      When Rawcliffe reappears in Tangier, it will be as a target for Enderby the Avenger; killing him has become the single purpose of Enderby's life, and Enderby endeavours to convince himself that that is as it should be: "if one accepted that killing was a legitimate and sempiternal human activity, authorised by the Bible, was there any better motive than Enderby's own?" (O-154). Yet, Rawcliffe  returns to Tangier just in time to hear Enderby, in disguise as a Moroccan beggar, extemporize a poem in pseudo-arabic; it is one of the funniest episodes in the whole tetralogy, and one in which Enderby displays talent and humour on a scale unusual for him, though not for Anthony Burgess. Obviously, Burgess and Enderby share both a sense of humour ‹ more pronounced in the author, and a tendency to ill-humour (more vivid in the character). Rawcliffe is indeed very ill; he treats Enderby, whose murderous impulses he ignores, with real kindness. In any case, he is in no danger from Enderby's enmity, for Enderby has forgotten to provide himself with a weapon, as he might easily have done. The novelist more than hints that this deficiency is no accident, but the consequence of an inability to kill. And in fact, Rawcliffe, now to be seen as "a failed poet" (O-164) and a failing homosexual lover, behaves to Enderby as a friend; he is not merely friendly, he is a friend. And he does define him as such to his young Spanish assistant: "Es un amigo" (O-165). He lays claim to "poetic clairvoyance" (O-166); he is still a heavy drinker, and does not mind the consequences, knowing that he is going to die soon, anyway. And once again, in conversation with Enderby, Rawcliffe appears clever, humorous, and even in his way masterly; he wins hands down the conflict with Enderby, all the more so as the conflict is one-sided, and while Enderby remains for a time hampered by his grievance, Rawcliffe exudes geniality, good humour, joie de vivre, almost, one might say, joie de mourir. He quotes and adapts lines from Measure for Measure (O-168 and 186). He now calls Enderby "a fellow-poet" (O-169; Enderby discovers that he has been influenced by Rawcliffe, has imitated Rawcliffe in some of his familiar attitudes. Meanwhile, Rawcliffe issues a terse and sharp diagnosis of Enderby: "Not cut out for marriage, not cut our for murder" (O-171). And he gradually discloses his intention of leaving his bar and his money to Enderby, who will have to alter the name of that establishment. Rawcliffe had called it El Acantilado Verde: "Green cliff, raw cliff. You've got somebody on your side. Who? There you stand, absurd but vigorous. And Auntie Vesta is vanquished and poor Rawcliffe is dying. Is there anything more you want?" 
      This great generosity is in line with Rawcliffe's philosophy; he now explains that he has been "a conscientious hedonist" (O-176) and he and Burgess make it abundantly clear that Enderby could never succeed in becoming that. Not surprisingly, Enderby finds it more and more difficult to remain angry, let alone murderous, towards Rawcliffe, much as he still tries "to harden his heart against him, traitor, traducer, diluter, sinner against literature" (O-177), these epithets being the last shreds of a pose that has become mechanical and unconvinced. Dying Rawcliffe provides an outline of his own career as poet and as man: "Better to be the one-poem man. But she [the Muse] left me then. Opened up heaven of creativity and then closed it. [...I bought your books at least. Least I could do. I am not all badness." (O-180-181) Throughout the final episode the two men are kind to each other. Rawcliffe endeavours to exculpate Enderby from the suspicion of murder that imperils his freedom, and Enderby helps Rawcliffe put on his clothes and plies him with brandy, against the doctor's orders; he looks after, almost nurses, dying Rawcliffe; until his formal forgiveness is granted, post mortem, unenthusiastically, but definitely: "Poor Rawcliffe. Traitor Rawcliffe rather, but he had paid" (O-191). 
      As Rawcliffe's legatee and successor, Enderby now finds himself exposed to a certain confusion about  his identity. Easy Walker refuses to give him back his passport, and suggests he might use Rawcliffe's instead: "Have this, though, your need being greater than. Dead jarveys help the living from their heart of darkness.", which Enderby counters with "I'm entitled to an official identity of some sort." And the narrator comments: "But was he? And, if so, why? [...] And, anyway, did bearing a name matter? Rawcliffe would be glad to be called anything or nothing if he could be alive again" (O-192). Later, Enderby finds himself addressed as Rawcliffe on at least two occasions (O-197 and 201). Later still, a fascinating girl who dazzles Enderby takes him to task rather severely: "Still curious, aren't you? Bit of a change for you, isn't it, this curiosity about people? You've never cared much for people, have you?" (O-216) 
      By the end of Enderby Outside, it has become clear that Enderby will go on living in a décor that has been created by his erstwhile enemy: "There was still something raffish, riffish, Rawcliffesque about the bed on the floor, in the middle of the floor. Enderby had not yet sufficiently breathed on things" (O-224) The "hero" of the tetralogy has one final question to solve: "He wondered if it might not be a pious duty to find out more about Rawcliffe's slender and thwarted oeuvre, edit, reprint at expense of [the money left by him in his] mattress. There might be odd things, juvenilia even, concealed about the place [...] But no, best keep away" (O-230). Enderby's final answer is thus negative, but  the fact that he can think of anything connected with Rawcliffe in terms of "pious" or "duty" shows that the wheel has indeed come full circle. 
      Or not quite full, as a cursory glance at the two post-Rawcliffe Enderby novels seem to hint. Enderby can still think of Rawcliffe as "the bastard" (Testament, 11-12), but the word sounds almost tender, and Enderby is still occasionally mistaken for Rawcliffe and will still be wearing Rawcliffe's  dressing-gown in New York.  Also "a kind of sculpted Edwardian overcoat bequeathed by his old enemy Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe was long-dead. He had died bloodily, fecally, messily, and now, to quote his own poem, practically his only own poem, his salts drained into alien soil. He had got death over with, then. He was in a sense, lucky." (CT-43) Enderby, who has thus inherited Rawcliffe's belongings (as well as, once again, the authorship of some of Burgess's "unpublished" poems), may envy Rawcliffe's dead man's status, for he is acutely suffering and may well think he is dying. When in pain, he wonders what he is being warned against and thinks of three possible guilts: "Smoking? Masturbation? Poetry?" The choice is interesting, and characteristic, but it seems incomplete. Enderby might also feel guilty of having misjudged his friendly enemy Rawcliffe. He doesn't.
      The final volume tells us more about Burgess than it does about Enderby. And the almost brash subtitle "No End to Enderby" reminds us that, as we hinted above, it was Burgess's own death that put an end to Enderby, that made the latest volume the last, the final novel really terminal. Enderby's Dark Lady also provides the reader with an explicit "Prefatory Note", in which Burgess performs graceful acrobatics around the vexed question of the authorship of Enderby's poems, saying: "His poems are, inevitably, written by myself, but only by myself in disguise as Enderby" (Dark Lady, 8), which is not strictly speaking, true, since so many of them have also been offered to a section of the reading public as poems written by Burgess undisguised. The Note also reminds us that T. S. Eliot had liked at least three of the Enderby poems ; or had he liked them as Burgess poems? The Note does not tell us that and, in any case, with typical Boorjoyce impishness, destroys the impact of the statement by adding that "posterity is beginning to find his [Eliot's] taste unsure". Jackson explains that the three poems liked by Eliot were praised as exceptions in a polite rejection note when Eliot refused to publish Burgess's poetry in Criterion. 
      Inside the novel we hear that Enderby has decided to write no more poetry. As for Rawcliffe he is not mentioned once by name, but Tangier and the pub (renamed, punningly enough, La Belle Mer, for Enderby is known to have been obsessed by the memory of the stepmother -or belle-mère- who had brought him up) are referred to on several occasions. In that sense, we might say that, if Testament and Dark Lady   are the forked ending of the Enderby saga, the second branch, roughly contemporary with the first, but unlike it dealing with what had happened, is the ungrateful and forgetful version of Enderby's post-Rawcliffe career. It is also more or less enlightened by an elaborate sub-subtitle: "Composed to placate kind readers of The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, who objected to my casually killing the hero." Burgess thus quietly asserts that Enderby does not end.
      It cannot be claimed that Anthony Burgess wholly sides with Enderby. There remains a latently indulgent view of Rawcliffe at the back of his creator's mind and sensibility. Kevin Jackson, whose study of Burgess's poetry is the most thorough in existence, concludes (p. vii) that "Burgess himself was always somewhat diffident in putting himself forward as a poet". Diffidence was not Burgess's most frequent attitude, but he may have sympathized with Rawcliffe because of the danger that he himself ran of being, or becoming, more like Rawcliffe than like Enderby. Burgess was not precisely like Rawcliffe "in all the anthologies" on the strength, such as it was, of a single poem, but if his favourite poetical performances were not widely anthologized, they were printed and reprinted, by his own act, and under various disguises and pretences, in several of his published works. Or (a grimmer thought) he may have, not feared, but hoped, that he had in common with Rawcliffe some enviable characteristics, like the ability to make money, to achieve success of a kind, not always by the most straightforward methods. 
      In a sense, it is true that in Anthony Burgess's career there was something of both Enderby and Rawcliffe. After all, we are not allowed to read much verse written by Rawcliffe in the Enderby cycle, but what we are given to read has been written by Burgess, just as much as Enderby's poems. Burgess the poet is a kind of Endercliffe or Rawby, dedicated to writing verse, not always succeeding, yet making a brilliant success of his career as a writer of prose, occasionally of poetical prose. Even if we remain in doubt about the poeticality of Enderby's verse, we are bound to recognize the poetical quality of the prose that describes him in several episodes of the cycle.
Sylvère Monod
Beard's Roman Women 
by Martin Phipps
 
     Consider the following piece of advice from a 72-year-old Anthony Burgess, and ask yourself how much all this is genuinely stern, stentorian, man-to-man-type stuff, and how much it’s just a parody of the same, with a smile hiding behind the blunt, unflinching gravitas: 
Youth ends early and it ends with marriage. Lissom girls soon become steatopygous monsters. Men pine, grow thin but pot-bellied and have red noses. They get drunk and a wife in curlers waits with the rolling-pin. Ruined males sigh after pretty seaside girls while fat wives look thunder. There is nothing tragic about all this frustration: this is what life is, and the sooner you settle into a deprived middle age the better. As for sex, beer, football, and carrier pigeons are an adequate substitute. (One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings, 152)
But even if this imperturbably square-on acceptance of the unhappy career of the typical (or stereotypical) male libido can be taken as Burgess’s definitive feelings on the subject, one would have to conclude that it came to him late in life (the essay excerpted dates from 1989), because when he wrote Beard’s Roman Women in the summer of 1975, beginning with the frankly autobiographical premise of a 50-year-old widower suddenly at relational loose ends in the late 60s, the prospect of “a deprived middle age” being “what life is” was, to judge from the text, much more problematic—no role to easily and philosophically “settle into”—and resulted in his rich little comedy about a mediocre script-writer named Ronald Beard, who finds himself stuck in Rome while a lot of jarring opposites—sex versus platonic love, past versus present, reality versus fantasy, life versus death—contend for his attention, with not a carrier pigeon or a soccer match in sight. 
     Compact and frequently slapstick in its comedy though it is, the novel also succeeds as a substantial meditation on marriage, memory, and the meaning of civilizations, large and small—the big public national ones and the small private domestic ones formed between two people out of love or camaraderie, each with their respective set of words, symbols and referents, their “complex semiotics” that is so hard to translate or transplant, in time as well as in space. Beard loses his wife to liver cirrhosis after two and a half decades of marriage, and feels, despite an exhilarating new sexual relationship with a woman 20-odd years his junior, the absence of something irreplaceable: “The end of a marriage, whether through the death of life or of love, was also the end of a civilization. More than 26 years spent in constructing a mythology, a joint memory-book, a language, a signalling system of grunt and touch—all gone, wasted” (Beard’s Roman Women, 38) ; “No more nuances of speech, then, no codes, no shared culture of diet, jokes, memories, quotations”(39). Between Welsh wife and Italian lover, there are few resemblances, and nothing from the old relationship can be carried over into the new one to enrich it: “Beard remembered that he and Leonora had had a salve for any careless wound one gave to the other’s self-esteem. An ‘unpremeditated ’urt,’ they would call it. Try explaining that to Paola. ‘Well, you see, tesoro, the last line of the Shelley stanza mentions unpremeditated art, and that’s meant to rhyme with wert, do you see, do you see?’”(40). Still, reasons Beard, what’s gone is gone, and his new present offers substantial compensations—namely “the international language of sex,” which, however, in the way that it needs no “shared culture” or “nuances of speech” to make its point, “was no language at all.” If this isn’t clear enough to Beard early in the book, the point is later driven home by one of the four Roman girls who “rape” him, when she tells him “there won’t be any language problem” during the immanent orgy: “Not that there’ll be any need for language. Sublinguistic activity, let’s call it”(87). The fact that the sex that ensues is coercive and impersonal—paradoxically non-intimate—and occurs in an apartment stripped of all its furniture, all its private mementos and associations, makes Beard wish for more familiar, homelier pleasures: “He had a sudden great longing for some roast Welsh lamb, mint sauce, and potch”(92). Clearly, a real civilization—whether domestic or national—depends for its integrity on the solidities of place and presence and a shared knowledge of a common past, or else it becomes a debased parody of the real thing. The trivialized, stereotyped versions of international cuisine and costume offered on Beard’s flight to the U.S. are an example of this, as are the scripts Beard himself writes—with their literary premises dumbed-down and sexed-up for TV and the popular stage. A culture, it is implied, only discloses its real riches to intimates—to habitués, not tourists—and so when the language of intimacy, the endearments of lovers and friends—the dialect of particular civilizations, so to speak—are overheard by outsiders in the book, they always strike them as absurd. Beard, for example, snorts at the “Prrrrrp” that was Paola’s former pet-name for P.R. Pathan, her estranged husband; Beard’s old drinking buddy from Malay, Gregory Gregson, makes jokes in Malay that Beard catches and delights in Beard’s recitations of comic versions of Christmas carols written in their youth, but to onlookers in the bar, he’s just some silly foreign drunk. True cosmopolitanism, a truly inclusive cultural mindset, the suggestions seems, is a difficult feat, and failures to achieve it fill the book: Pathan the English-educated West Indian (with his preposterously effete patrician accent) hates blacks, and although he briefly hitches up with a gorgeous black model who is “the ultimate in the glamour of the great world, golden deprovincializer of shoddy Rome or Venice or Florence” and full of “cosmopolitan insolence”(33), he ultimately returns to Paola and his old prejudices; Beard’s venture with Paola fails and he finally returns to Welsh cooking and domesticity in England, “tied to one tongue as to one cuisine and one insular complex of myths”(119); Greg Greg remains cheerfully racist throughout the book; Europeans regard Britons as stereotypical “fish and chip and beer consumers…[and] football rowdies” (30) and are regarded as wogs, wops and Eyetie bints in return; and the aptest anthem for the whole book (though it has countless musical references) is the singing of the caroselli at the Trasteverine “annual self-glorification…called the Festa de Noi Altri, meaning the feast of us others, us ourselves, none else, blast you.” The locals of Trastevere, it is noted, are “very keen on regional loyalty”(64), and since it is from their ranks that the impressive poet Belli emerges, the implicit conclusion may be that, pace Ezra Pound, regionalism is the inescapable prerequisite for a vital civilization, and a modern global culture (such as ours is increasingly becoming) is likely to be as insipid as “Esperanto and Volapük”(38), a far cry from the “days of the lovers of Leman”(30), when peripatetic Englishmen like Shelley and Byron held high places in European culture. (Shelley, indeed, is buried in Rome.)
     In addition to these reflections on civilizations big and little, the book dramatizes another set of ideas, ones that address the uncanny persistence of the personal past—the way in which private echoes can stubbornly reiterate, whether one likes it or not, paths and people one has known and then seen superseded. Amid imagery of ghosts, revenants, doppelgangers, and Gothic monsters, old friends and lovers cross Beard’s path in Rome, often forcing him to revisit long-standing views of himself and his life. Beard spends almost the entire book in near-pathological guilt over what he regards as his wilful neglect of his first wife, whose alcoholism he did nothing to discourage, even when it became terminal. “I’ve failed in charity, knowingly, deliberately”(114), he eventually confesses to a psychiatrist, and the confession affords him some limited relief, but before this, in Rome, guilt haunts him as he tries to start a new life with Paola: and the haunting takes on apparently literal form as he begins receiving phone-calls from what sounds like his dead wife Leonora, insisting she hasn’t really died and wants to resume their old relationship. Beard, after his new love Paola briefly leaves him for work in Israel, finds himself painfully alone—the victim of the “so closed, even incestuous”(38) institution of marriage, which excludes other intimacies, and an intensely solitary profession, the combination of which leaves him with no close connection to any other human being, until Greg Greg turns up out of the blue. The result is that a mood of unreality imbues this part of the book, subtly rendered and relieved by flashes of humour but nonetheless eerie. Beard intermittently doubts the existence of Paola (“‘There,’” he says after thumb-tacking up some photographs she has taken. “‘She’s here now. She’s with me. She exists’”(67)). He suspects acts—in particular the act of love—may be capable of “indenting the natural order”(36) with possible supernatural consequences. He “be[gins] to understand…about ghosts”(13), and registers the fact of numerous doubles and doppelgangers among his acquaintances: there are two Paolas (one his lover, the other his “rapist”), two Pathans (the second of whom Greg Greg knows, in Malaya), two Leonoras (the one on the phone and the one in the past), two Miriams (the lissom young one and the cancerous older one) and two Bellis (the surname of Paola and the dead poet—who himself has two translators, Beard and a restaurant guitarist Beard meets). Greg Greg’s name is an echo of itself, and, when on the brink of death (or imagining himself to be so), Beard undergoes a mirror-image of the experience of his dying wife Leonora—he falls down in the Roman street under a statue of Belli, and sees Rome reflected in the rain (and, in fact, mirror images of Rome, in the form of photographs of rainy Roman pavements, interspersed the text in the original edition). “The dead shall live, the living die”(124) runs the line of Dryden that Beard hears sung at the end of the book, and its image of opposites surreally commingling is apt: the past and the present keep wanting to change places during the story, as do two sets of women—the women Beard has actual dealings with during the course of the narrative, and their imaginary, often mnemonic, fantasy doubles that enliven—and sometimes threaten to imperil—his mental universe. 
     Since these many women do hold eponymous pride of place among the book’s characters, they call for a closer examination. An essay called “The Art of Liking Rome”(1984) may aid in this, because in it Burgess mentions Rome and women in almost the same breath: 
I have towards…Rome an ambivalent attitude which I cannot easily classify. It is compounded of physical lust, loathing, possessive passion, affectionate exasperation, jealousy—all the attributes of a sexual relationship. Cities being feminine…men feel more strongly about them than women. To a woman a city is an emporium, something to use. A man is used by it, bought, sold, sometimes enslaved. (One Man’s Chorus, 65)
It’s worth noting that the emotional responses Burgess has toward Rome here are precisely the ones that Beard exhibits during his stay—when he is very much more acted upon (“used”) than himself an actor. After all, it is Paola who initiates their sexual relationship, commands him to stay behind when she leaves for Israel, orders him to submit to radically changed living arrangements when he returns, and then breaks off their relationship when she believes Beard is still married. Apart from some ineffectual blustering about marriage and their future, he is largely passive through it all. And Paola is not the only agent that acts upon Beard P.R. Pathan strips his flat of all its possessions, and the four modern-day Maenads strip him of all his clothing and most of his dignity; and it is Greg Greg, in his hearty heedless way, who restarts their drinking friendship. Beard himself does do some shopping, some cooking, and some writing, but the big things seem to be beyond him: he can’t even successfully commit suicide. He is powerless, within the great “feminine” thing called Rome, against the female energies that beset him. This fact is driven home, without pity, by another of his Roman women: the middle-aged Miriam, an old lover of his who has been a mere masturbatory memory until he coincidentally runs in to her in an airport and learns that she is dying of cancer, and also that she is his tough-minded, unsentimental opposite. Beard, endlessly burbling “tesoro mio” and “amore” to Paola while scorning her political activism, is scorned in his turn by Miriam for being a fantasist “scared of life”(74), who lets women go off to war while he sits at home writing about Shelley and Byron, who were escapists like him, she says, and very unlike Mary Shelley: “It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life…. [W]hat in God’s name do you know about life?”(75). By this point in the book, poor beleaguered Beard knows one thing, at any rate, about life in Rome: it is not for him. It’s a hostile, poisonous place, and he needs to escape it. Seen as a symbol here, Rome the city (a word of course derived from the Latin civitas) links with the idea of marriage as a civilization, to suggest a dead culture that somehow goes malingering on into the present, like Beard’s marriage to Leonora: “when a civilization died, it became as evil as rotted meat” (38), which would explain why Beard’s early impressions of Rome were that it was “venal” and “cruel”(7). After he returns to England and remarries into the culture with which a lifetime of marriage has made him familiar and regains some lost happiness, the contrasting imagery is apt: “Mrs Ceridwen Beard served a special dinner [of]…a piece of beef and a small chicken cooked slowly together with leeks, onions, carrots, potatoes in good meat stock…”(109). The tone of the closing pages of the book, although they include a medical diagnosis that leaves Beard with little time to live, is comparatively serene and suggests he has gained a certain rapprochement with his past; and even though one particular “voice” from it continues to speak to him, now it is humorously indulged and pitied, not feared. 
     And so if Beard, unlike Burgess the elderly essayist, can’t quite look without flinching on “what life is,” he does at least eventually come to terms in some measure with his own woes, and his women.
Martin Phipps
Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess: 
A Literary Encounter
by John Fletcher

    It is not my intention in this paper to 'compare and contrast' Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Anthony Burgess. They were very different writers - indeed very different individuals - so nothing is to be gained from subjecting them to a comparative analysis. Moreover, Beckett never seems to have known much about Burgess. The biographies of Beckett by Deirdre Bair, James Knowlson and Anthony Cronin do not mention him. So if there was a literary encounter - as I contend there was - it was all one-way. Burgess held Beckett in very high esteem; it is not certain that Beckett had even heard of Burgess, although Georges Belmont, Burgess's French translator, who was an old friend of Beckett's, may have brought Burgess's name up in the course of conversation.
    Beckett did not have an extensive personal library. After the 1930s he never did any book reviewing, so he did not accumulate books that way (as Burgess did, although he also sold some of his review copies). Admirers - chiefly fellow-writers and academics - would send Beckett copies of their books, but he appears rarely to have kept them. (An association copy of, say, The Caretaker, inscribed by the author, Harold Pinter, to 'Sam', would fetch a tidy sum at Sotheby's, but is unlikely to come on the market.)
    Anthony Burgess, on the other hand, did have a large personal collection of books, and many of them are now housed in the library of Angers University. These are the works by and about Beckett - most of them review copies - held there, with their catalogue numbers:
Beckett at Sixty (BUR 347)
The Testament of Samuel Beckett (BUR 348)
The Novels of Samuel Beckett (BUR 352)
Poems in English (BUR 644) 
    So far as I have been able to check, drawing upon my Beckett bibliography (Samuel Beckett, His Works and His Critics, 1970), the resources of the Templeman Library at the University of Kent and of the Bibliothèque Universitaire d'Angers, and information kindly supplied to me by Andrew Biswell, there are some eleven items in the bibliography of Anthony Burgess which relate to works by or about Samuel Beckett (for full details, see the Appendix below). I will take them in order.
    The first is brief, but finds room for a typically arresting phrase which sums up Samuel Beckett's fiction rather well: 'the endless monologue that grates life like cheese'. 
    Next comes Burgess's characteristically generous review of my own first book. His general conclusion in that piece - about Beckett's lasting significance - can hardly be bettered:
Beckett is not an attractive author, but he is immensely important. He has dared to incarnate everybody's true suspicions about the real nature of the universe, and to do this he has turned his back on the richness of his own literary inheritance and forged a highly personal language out of a tongue not his own.
The comment about 'a tongue not his own' is a reference to a point made earlier in the review, namely that Beckett began writing in English before turning to French. In illustration of his belief that Beckett's English was 'very satisfactory', Burgess quotes this passage from Murphy (1938): 
The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.
I quote this same passage on page 42 of my book in support of my assertion that a notable feature of Murphy's style is its poetic quality, which springs from Beckett's ability to fix in striking images the beauty of natural things. Burgess evidently found this passage as impressive as I did, because he quotes it several times in his various writings on Beckett. There is no copy of Murphy in his library at Angers, so it is reasonable to assume that he remembered the quotation from having read it in my book. He has not marked his copy of The Novels of Samuel Beckett at that point (nor indeed at any other), so he probably memorised the excerpt (Ben Forkner has testified to the fact that Burgess had a phenomenal memory and was word perfect in his recall of many literary passages, some of them of course much longer than this one). In the second line of item no. 2, Burgess quotes the words 'merde universelle' which, translated into English, give his review its title. The words come from Beckett's Nouvelles (written ca. 1945), which I discuss in ch. 4 of The Novels of Samuel Beckett, and I quote them on p. 107. Burgess remembered this vivid phrase and used it again some twenty years later, in his Times profile of Samuel Beckett (item no. 10 in the bibliography below). 
    Before I go any further, let me emphasise that this paper is not about me but about the way a talented and prolific author (Anthony Burgess) used a book on a great figure (Samuel Beckett) written by an academic (myself, as it happens, but it could have been anyone). Burgess was doing nothing improper or illegitimate here, but a close examination of his writings on Beckett reveals much about his working methods and particularly about the short cuts which tight deadlines forced upon him. My argument in brief is that Burgess was a literary magpie who garnered material wherever his wide and eclectic reading led him: I just happened to be the person he picked ideas up from where Beckett was concerned. Burgess always made a little go a long way, but he was a gifted writer and a first-rate critic (I especially admire Here Comes Everybody, which in my view is one of the best and certainly one of the most accessible books on Joyce), so I want to make it clear before continuing that in taking short cuts he may have made the odd mistake through haste, but that he was no vulgar plagiarist; indeed, in my case, he put the argument in The Novels of Samuel Beckett better than I did (could) myself. 
    Item no. 3 on the list below is a brief acknowledgement in the Foreword of Here Comes Everybody to Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), 'twelve essays by twelve men, behind all of whom the prodding master seems to stand', one of the twelve of course being the 23-year-old Samuel Beckett, author of the article on Joyce's debt to Dante, Bruno and Vico.
    'The First JJ' (item no. 4) is, as its title implies, mainly about Joyce, but in the course of his review of A Question of Modernity Burgess quotes admiringly Cronin's astute comment on Beckett's writing: 'However terrible its truths may appear, it is full of the gaiety that is born of the courage to contemplate and indeed to outface reality'.
    The fifth item is one of Burgess's longer meditations on the work of Samuel Beckett, which perhaps explains why it was reprinted in Urgent Copy. It uses the same quotation from Murphy once again, but it is chiefly notable for introducing the idea of what is pithily called 'Beckett's enduring Saturday', seen as a fundamentally Christian notion:
If in Camus we catch echoes of the stoicism of Seneca, in Beckett we smell the leavings of Christian hope. This is not to say that Waiting for Godot, with its allusions to the thieves who were crucified with Christ, is to be regarded as a Christian morality: very far from it. But the symbols of Christianity are drenched with suggestive richness. And so Beckett's enduring Saturday is the one that comes between Good Friday and Easter Day, except that time has a stop after Christ's crucifixion. Saturday refuses to become Sunday, and we are stuck with a 'large measure of despair and a small measure of hope'. The thing to do is to wait, even though we can be quite sure that the waiting will not be rewarded. Life is a wretched grey Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
    The next piece (item no. 6) wastes few words on the rather silly festschrift celebrating Beckett's sixtieth birthday and concentrates instead on the prose works collected in No's Knife. Once again Burgess captures the essence of Beckett's achievement in these beautifully resonant short texts:
Beckett's mastery of a kind of poetry of deprivation has a quality of miracle in it. His heroes have nothing but sores, smells, poverty, impending dissolution, but their language is rhythmically rich and their cries thrill like trumpets.
    The couple of pages devoted to Beckett in The Novel Now (item no. 7) use that quotation from Murphy again, and indeed all Burgess's other quotations are to be found in my book (on pages 225, 232-3, 188 and 210). This is unlikely to be a coincidence, especially as Burgess provides a characteristically brilliant summary of the argument of The Novels of Samuel Beckett. This is of course not plagiarism; rather, it is inspired précis:
All of the wretches who give their names to Beckett's novels are reductions of mankind - tramps, outcasts, poverty-stricken old men. They wear rags, they are diseased, they smell, they are rejected by us, thrown out of doss-houses, told to get off the bus. They are not only disgusting, they are absurd. And yet they are human beings like ourselves, humiliated by charity, demanding something better than condescension or contempt. The point about them is that they manage to survive, finding the odd hole in the ground to sleep in, the odd crust to gnaw. Ultimately they are stoical, expecting nothing from God, aware that the stars they sleep under are indifferent, insentient matter. Indeed, neither religion nor philosophy can offer any comfort. Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing. To write about characters who have so little requires very great literary skill. Beckett is a master of form: his books have a shape that suggests music. Out of the nothingness of life he can call up fantasies of great power, and his unheroic heroes grow, by the very starkness of their lives, into genuine pieces of mythology. His novels, like all important works of art, have the stamp of the inevitable upon them: they had to be written and, though we suffer reading them, we are glad they have been written.
    That I am not deluding myself about the extent of Anthony Burgess's debt to my book is revealed by an interesting slip. Burgess thinks that 'Belacqua' is the title of one of Beckett's early novels. It is not, of course. Belacqua is the hero of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) and More Pricks than Kicks (1934), but in my book chapter one is entitled 'Belacqua', because I there discuss both works; chapter two is headed 'Murphy' and chapter three 'Watt', which are, at one and the same time, the names of the heroes and the titles of the novels in which those heroes appear. In his haste to write the Beckett section of The Novel Now, Burgess evidently overlooked the difference. Like many readers, he must have skipped my explanatory preface, in which I point out that 'this book is an attempt to provide a guide to Beckett's fiction, by tracing the evolution of the hero in his novels'. In other words, it is not the title of the novel in which the hero appears, but the name of the hero himself which provides the heading for the chapter concerned. That is how Burgess came to assume that 'Belacqua' was a Beckett title.
    The allusion to Beckett in Joysprick (item no. 8) is a passing one, and the brief references in English Literature (item no. 9) repeat the points already noted about 'eternal Saturday' and Beckett’s fascination with 'the world of the totally deprived'. The last item in the bibliography is a short piece on Waiting for Godot written for the 1987 National Theatre staging by Michael Rudman which starred Alec McCowen as Vladimir; the essay expands the few lines on the subject in English Literature to seven paragraphs, repeating the remark about 'Saturday refusing to be come Sunday', but adding little else except a mistake in French, a language Burgess seems to have known less well than he was wont to claim. Retelling the well-worn canard that Beckett once heard an Air France pilot announce 'Le capitaine Godot vous souhaite la bienvenue à bord', Burgess misremembers this as 'Le capitaine Godot vous accorde des bienvenues', which is not a phrase a French native speaker would use. 
    Item no. 10 in the bibliography, however, is altogether more substantial and worthy of note. It is The Times's profile of the great author, who was 80 that week. In it 'life is a wretched grey Saturday' is given yet another airing by Burgess, as is my excerpt from Murphy (unfortunately the speech marks were omitted in error from the quotation by The Times's sub, which must have baffled readers who did know their Murphy). But Burgess goes on to pinpoint eloquently the 'Beckettian view of the world as a place of pain':
Given less to philosophical pessimism than to a realistic disillusionment...the Molloy trilogy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable present the last gasp of human despair qualified by a dogged determination to survive for the mere sake of survival. The characters have nothing to live for, but they are not suicidal. The curious thing about these monologues of desolation is that they are not depressing. There is even a kind of exhilaration in their rhythms. The human condition, which is always presented as terminal, is absurd. We ought not to be entertained, but we are. 
This is first-class criticism. It is the kind of writing, at once terse, clear and acutely perceptive, which can be put within inverted commas and set before students to 'discuss'.
    In his biography of Shakespeare (1970), Anthony Burgess points out that a born author picks up the information he or she needs in the most unlikely places:
You may know the fiction-writer by his library, whose contents flatter neither the eye nor the owner's capacity for systematic reading. Instead of phalanges of rich uniform bindings, there are old racing guides, dog-eared astronomical almanacs, comic periodicals, secondhand dictionaries, unscholarly history books, and notebooks full of odd facts (p. 39).
Allowing for a touch of comic exaggeration, this account gives an indication of Burgess's own methods as a literary critic and reviewer. Writing to tight deadlines, he took short cuts, and who would blame him? He was always generous in acknowledging his debts to scholarly works by academics like Richard Ellmann and Carlos Baker. He could after all afford to be magnanimous: he wrote better than many professors do. Haste did however lead him to make the odd venial mistake; I have already mentioned 'Belacqua', and in The Times profile he says that Winnie in the play Happy Days (1961) is 'buried up to her waist in rubbish', whereas in fact she is embedded in a mound of earth. The circumstance of his mentioning this play at all, though, explains why in Honey for the Bears (1963) he got angry when 'formication' was mistakenly corrected by the copy-editor to 'fornication', and why Burgess insisted that the original reading be restored. He must have remembered this unusual word (a medical term to describe a nerve disorder and its characteristic symptom, the sensation of ants crawling on the skin) from Beckett's play, where it provokes laughter between Winnie and Willie and gives rise to the question 'how can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?' (p. 24). The pun - ants, according to Willie, lay their eggs after indulging in 'formication' - is indeed rather feeble, quite deliberately so, but it amused Burgess enough for him to use the word in a book published a couple of years later.
    In the eternal order of things - the 'everlasting Saturday' of which we hear such a lot - the literary encounter between Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess may in the end not amount to much, but it sheds useful light on the work of the great writer, and it constitutes an interesting footnote to the bio-bibliography of his prolific near-contemporary.
John Fletcher (University of Kent at Canterbury, England)
 [Text of a paper read at the International Symposium on Anthony Burgess held at the University of Angers, France, in December 2001]
***
Appendix
Anthony Burgess: Bibliography of Writings on Samuel Beckett
(1) 1962 'Reprints for Novel Addicts' (review inter alia of the Penguin reprint of Malone Dies). The Observer, 30 December, p. 11 
(2) 1964 'The Universal Mess' (review of The Novels of Samuel Beckett by John Fletcher). The Guardian, 24 July, p. 9 
(3) 1965 Here Comes Everybody, p. 12 
(4) 1966 'The First JJ' (review, inter alia, of A Question of Modernity by Anthony Cronin, which concentrates on Joyce and Beckett). The Spectator, 18 March, p. 332 
(5) 1966 'Enduring Saturday' (review of The Testament of Samuel Beckett by Jacobsen and Mueller). The Spectator, 29 April, pp. 532-3; reprinted in Urgent Copy (1968), pp. 85-7 
(6) 1967 'Master Beckett' (review of No's Knife and Beckett at Sixty). The Spectator, 21 July, pp. 79-80. 
(7) 1967 The Novel Now, pp. 72, 75-7, 79 
(8) 1973 Joysprick, p. 126 
(9) 1974 English Literature: A Survey for Students, pp. 206, 228 
(10) 1986 'The Master of Erudite Silence', The Times, 10 April, p. 10 
(11) 1987 'Neither God nor Fish nor Flesh' (programme article on Waiting for Godot, National Theatre, London)
Walking Made Easy
by Douglas Milton
 
This little glossary arose from a telephone conversation with Liana Burgess, during which she mentioned that although she loved the Enderby books she’d always been slightly puzzled by Easy Walker’s slang in Enderby Outside. I’ve heard the same complaint from others to whom I’ve introduced Burgess through his most enduring character, so I thought some sort of mini-dictionary might be useful. Some of the idioms - as earthy and colourful as anything in Burgess - are true examples of Australian or Strine, while others may be derived from Eric Partridge’s Slang Dictionary, my copy of which has, damn it all, disappeared from my shelves, but the majority would seem to be the delightful inventions of the man himself. I owe to Andrew Biswell the information that Burgess reviewed a dictionary of Australian slang round about the same time as he was working on Enderby Outside. Books under review were grist to Burgess’s mill, and nothing was wasted on him. It’s instructive, for instance, to compare a list of the books he covered for the Observer with the contents of Earthly Powers, to name but one, and it’s quite possible that Easy Walker sprang, larger than life and twice as hilarious, from those same pages.
This glossary is far from complete, and many of my translations are guesswork. If any Newsletter readers can come up with more convincing ones, so much the better. Now clap your mincers on this lot, brads.
You skirted? You got the big drop on? Are you mad? (Origin unknown)
The whole thing donk donk = genuine. Aussie slang, also ‘dinkie-die’. 
Gritty shitty. Lots of imported Cockney rhyming slang in Oz. 
Swizer swig. 
Some shitsack’s been on the jabber. Some unreliable fellow has been talking. 
Swing us two bulgies of arry-arry. Two large glasses of arak, please. 
I won’t blart it. Blurt. 
Never know who’s flapping. Talking - from Oz ‘to flap one’s gums’. 
Boojie little rathole A rather bourgeois little town. 
Gobblers Coppers - corruption of bobbies? 
Shemmy Roads, railway (presumably from Fr ‘chemin , chemin de fer’. 
Lemon-pip Jeep. 
Antonio From Cockney ‘all on me Antonio’, meaning alone + amusing link with AB. I feel like Charles Kinbote writing this stuff. 
Wash me ends I wash my hands, but with coarser implication. 
Brad Brother. A Burgessian contribution to Australian from the Russian. 
Mincers Eyes (cockney, mince pies) 
Barbar black shit A non-PC but amusing wordplay on Baa-Baa Black Sheep. 
Racketytoo Racket, caper. 
Sprids Things, shenanigans. Origin unknown, at least to me. 
What you on normal? What is your vocation in civilian life? 
The whole sewn-up boogong… The entire thing explained to you beautifully. 
Crounch Eat, presumably from crunch/lunch. 
Popseeds Poppy seeds. 
Shishcakes Hashish cakes (bit obvious, I know). 
Marhum a.k.a. mahjoun, toffee laced with hashish, deceptively strong and much favoured by William Burroughs in his Tangiers days. 
Jalooty Sorry, no idea. Sounds like Arabic. By the way, did you know that you can find ‘lobscowse’, one of Burgess’s favourite Northern dishes, in Arabic dictionaries? Some Liverpudlian sailor must have left the recipe behind. I thought you might like to know that. 
Mazooma for pozzy Money for Papa. Possible reference to Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. 
Poor old reticule Jocular for poor old bag. 
Dunny Australian outdoor toilet. There is a classic Oz humourous book on the subject of dunnygaspers called The Specialist, never been out of print. 
Bert Bloke. 
Pongalorum Stink, pong. 
Zook Nose, mouth? Wish I had an Arabic dictionary to hand. 
Gooled up Eaten up, snapped up (spelt ‘ghouled up’ later in book) 
A pompey One would think ‘a dishful’, but Pompey is English slang term for Portsmouth, so possibly a mouthful? 
Jarvey Victorian slang for cabman or cab, but in this context ‘bloke’. 
Crookidy Ill (Oz) 
Shufti Take a look (Arabic). 
Towsermouth Panting (Burgessian invention, from Eng. Towser, affectionate name for a dog). 
We’ll march on markers Sorry, no idea, it’s probably staring me in the face. Any suggestions? 
Once this lot’s dooby-dooed. Once we’ve sorted this out. Eerie anticipation of Malcom McDowell’s ‘Singing In The Rain’, nicht wahr? 
Maybe you minced it all masterman. Perhaps you saw it already (Masterman Ready, a children’s book of the sea by Captain Maryatt, and a witty piece of invented rhyming slang on AB’s part). 
The whole bimbang kadoozer The entire bar (boozer) 
Nowsy wowsy Now. There is an old Scottish joke about a pub landlord who had a gay Alsatian guard-dog which, when summoned to deal with troublemakers, would extend a limp paw and whimper ‘Bowsy-wowsy!’ Doubtless AB would have heard it. 
What-does-your-dad-do Variation on how’s-your-father, cockney for thingamabob (in this case, the big world). 
The jarvey as todded it… The chap who passed away (from der Tod, obviously). With an echo of ‘on one’s tod’, rhyming slang for alone, from Tod Sloan, a Victorian jockey. For after all, one does tod it on one’s own in the end. 
Swapping fumblers… Changing hands. 
Donk flag… Top quality flagellation. 
Shoving up the old kazerzy Well, you can guess. 
My shekels and sherbet. Burgessian baroque flourish or grace-note meaning same as above. 
Bozzles… Things. Origin unknown. 
No up-my-tickle. No mucking about, no mistake. 
Saucepan-lid Kid, still used up the East End. 
All-the-same Name, with implication of ‘what’s in a name?’ 
Arsee plum-and-apple RC chapel. 
Turn-the-handles Candles. 
His best whistle His best suit (whistle and flute) 
Keeping double-Scotch Keeping watch 
Toots Feet (tout suite) 
Uncle Head (Uncle Fred) 
Near-and-far Car (Easy Walker’s use of rhyming slang is becoming a bit mechanical by this stage. Indeed Enderby intuits that it is not, after all, his natural idiom but ‘a home-stitched patchwork of patois’). 
Forked me on the cobbles Took me by surprise, I think 
No rare-with-Worcester no mistake (my steak) 
Pennywise probably some pun on pennywise, pound foolish, but can’t work it out. 
Sling-your-hooks books
I like Easy Walker - one of the uncomplicated life-enhancers who take life as it comes. See also Nabby Adams and Greg Gregson in Beard’s Roman Women. 
Douglas Milton
One Touch of Venus
by Douglas Milton
 
Flora is, was, the Roman goddess of flowers, and in those good old pagan days her festival used to run from April 28th to May 3rd 2003. The Café Flore on the Boulevard St Germain is named after the statue of said goddess that used to stand outside, which makes it an ideal venue for the world premiere of Anthony Burgess's play "The Eve of Saint Venus." Because the action of the play is much concerned with statues of Roman deities, one of which (Venus, bien sûr) comes to life on the eve of a young man's wedding with chaotic results. April 28th was also the first night of this production, although as far as I'm aware that was a serendipitous choice on the part of the excellent Brava theatre company, whose play-readings upstairs at the Flore are now a firmly established part of Paris's cultural landscape.
"The Eve of Saint Venus" is one of Burgess's earliest works. Originally conceived as an opera libretto while he was working as a schoolteacher in Banbury in the late 40s, it then became a play and later, in the 60s, was rewritten as a novella. I first read it in the latter form about twenty years ago and thought it was a fairly blatant attempt to sidle up to Christopher Fry and the Eliot of "The Cocktail Party." Rather dated, rather pointless, and Burgess couldn't (then) do the upper classes for toffee. Last night I reread it on the métro on my way to the Flore and to my surprise laughed out loud at least once every paragraph. Of course the Fry/Eliot elements are still there, but now that all that terrible verse-drama stuff has fallen into oblivion (any chance of reviving the Apocalyptics? -no, thought not), Burgess's wit and linguistic inventiveness leap off the page. I would defy anyone to read the book and not find something there to amuse them. Whether all the linguistic pyrotechnics make for a good play is another matter.
The main problem is that all the action takes place offstage. Ambrose, a bit of a sap, is about to marry Diana, daughter of Sir Benjamin Drayton. Sir B has a garden full of statues of Roman gods and goddesses, including Venus. Ambrose, in jokey mood, slips his wedding ring over Venus's finger. The finger crooks back, trapping the ring and, by implication, Ambrose. In the meantime Diana is herself under siege from Julia, a mischief-making lesbian (deliciously played by Christaine Bateman), and the local vicar who is due to officiate over the nuptials is plagued by Doubts, like Prenderghast in Decline and Fall. The vicar is wonderfully played by Peter Hudson, all buck-teeth and anodyne enthusiasm for the C of E, underneath which seethes an anarchic streak which craves for the manifestation of an evil or at least pagan power which will validate his vocation. "SIN is my hobby!" he exclaims at one point, his eyes gleaming expectantly over half-moon spectacles. As dark forces begin to bubble and squeak, the English upper classes struggle to maintain le bon ton. Sir Benjamin, a man who can get nostalgic about something that happened half an hour ago, grumbles away in the corner. "The past is dead and the unblinking arc-light of the present takes over." His wife Lady Drayton (Catriona McColl) takes a brisk Joyce Grenfell line on life and somehow manages to maintain her sanity throughout. Yes, one's prospective son-in-law may have married a pagan goddess by mistake, but that's no reason for not keeping busy and cheerful. "Marriage is the only job that begins with a holiday. It's the only one you'll get and, believe me, you'll need it."
Diana, initially attracted by Julia's nihilism, takes a detour via a Proust-reading truck- driver (he likes Gide too: one suspects he's not really going to be much of a threat to Arnbrose) and finally accepts the honeyed fate of life with an fiancé whose previous silly-ass persona (Nicholas Meade acting like a bewildered and indignant escapee from a lunatic asylum run by Bertie Wooster) has been rendered suddenly more intriguing by the fact that she nearly lost him to a goddess. For a moment, it looked as if anarchy (embodied by the female principle) might reign. But the violent eruption of dark gods has been nothing if not life-affirming for all concerned. In a comedy, things must end up pretty well the same way they began, everybody learning a little something about themselves and others in the process. Burgess's "Eve of Saint Venus" conforms to the rule, but manages to be that bit more subversive of theatrical niceties along the way. I'm referring to a running gag about Venus's vaginal odour which would have shocked audiences in the 40s and 50s and still seems a little risqué even now.
Not least of the delights of this production is the disparity between the characters on the printed page and the actors who embody them. The MP and best man Crowther- Mason is wonderfully played by David Gasman, a very talented actor whose appearance (Bill Bailey working behind a record shop counter) is totally at odds with his plummy William Rushtonesque accent. Maddest of all is Alexis Kendrick's performance as the supposedly hideous old bag Spatchcock the maid. Alexis is a gorgeous blonde young beauty with a Deep South drawl which could have made even Tennessee Williams's trousers explode. Incongruous, but somehow it works.
All in all, yet another triumphant performance by Brava. They've already done David Mamet and Neil Labutte. Next week they tackle Sam Shepherd's "Fool For Love". One can only hope that Brava will take their particular brand of theatrical verve to a London stage before long. A wonderful evening.
Douglas Milton
Contact: brava@hawaiian.net 

A review of Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’s Joycean Negotiations by A. I. Farkas 
by Andrew Biswell 
 
A review of Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’s Joycean Negotiations by A. I. Farkas
Budapest: Akadémikiai Kiadó, 147 pages (paperback)
ISBN 963 05 7935 9 
There are several reasons to be grateful to Dr Farkas for having written his pioneering book on the Joycean elements in Anthony Burgess’s fiction and autobiographies. This is the first serious critical study of Burgess’s writing to have been published since John J. Stinson’s Anthony Burgess Revisited in 1991, and it will do much to satisfy anyone who is looking for a properly informed commentary. The book is a model of intelligent close reading which promises to bring us to a fuller understanding of each of the novels it touches on, and it aims to situate them within the wider literary-historical frame of Modernism. Farkas’s interpretations display a pleasing familiarity with Burgess’s journalism, especially the large body of ephemeral critical writing about James Joyce. 
Although this book has its origins in a doctoral thesis on the textual affinities between Burgess and Joyce, submitted for examination at Eötvös University in Budapest, Farkas has considerably expanded the scope of his enquiry in the course of rewriting the thesis for publication. His range of reference is commendably broad -- partly because he acknowledges that there is no meaningful difference between Burgess as novelist and Burgess as unreliable narrator of his own life’s story -- and many of the judgements that he arrives at are shrewdly sceptical. The opening chapter demonstrates, through the deployment of relevant examples from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Little Wilson and Big God, the full extent to which Burgess constructs an authorial persona that is consciously modelled on the aesthete Stephen Dedalus, as delineated in the final chapters of Joyce’s novel. Burgess’s purpose in reworking this material from A Portrait, it’s argued by Farkas, is to present his adolescent self as a recognisably Joycean incipient artist. 
Having identified the major debts to Joyce in the first volume of Burgess’s autobiography, including a large number of previously uncatalogued coincidences and verbal echoes, Farkas writes: 
Joyce’s highly ambiguous relationship with Catholicism not only prefigured, but acted as a catalyst of Burgess’s own highly ambivalent apostasy. The tradition of Catholic recusancy, complete with apocryphal references in the family annals to John Wilson the Elizabethan martyr, is a constant source of pride both for Burgess the writer and the autobiographer [...] The pride that even the apostate takes in the perceived superiority of the “logical absurdity” of Catholic theology over the lack of elegant logic in Protestant dogma is also appropriated by Burgess from Stephen Dedalus and, by implication, from Joyce in Little Wilson (p. 21).
The parallels between Burgess and Joyce extend beyond the boundaries of the purely literary into the area of biography. Farkas argues that ‘Burgess’s emigration [after 1968] could be seen as a Joycean, “Modernist”, gesture of a larger anti-philistine revolt [...] It is a central feature of the whole Burgess phenomenon that he was an artist-expatriate and a tax-exile at one and the same time’ (p. 24). ‘Exile’ was Burgess’s preferred term for his voluntary expatriation, but Farkas is alert to the precise meaning of the word (‘A person obliged by law or compelled by circumstances to live abroad’ - New Shorter OED), and he recognises that Joyce’s sudden departure from the Ireland which banned his books will scarcely bear comparison with Burgess’s wish to avoid paying British death duties on his first wife’s estate. The process by which Burgess subsequently turned himself into a fully-formed European writer is a different matter, of course, and it is a shame that Farkas does not illustrate it in greater detail when he goes on to discuss the extravagantly internationalist novels of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Napoleon Symphony and Earthly Powers. 
Farkas’s longest chapter diligently charts the evolution of Burgess’s prolonged engagement with Joycean narrative techniques in The Malayan Trilogy, The Doctor is Sick, the Enderby novels, Nothing Like the Sun and A Dead Man in Deptford, taking care at each stage to bring out the points of difference between the works under discussion. This approach is sensible, since the novels are more likely to yield to interpretation if they are considered on a case-by-case basis rather than in thematic groups. Burgess’s protean self-reinventions as a stylist might in themselves be thought of as an important aspect of his Joycean inheritance, since neither Burgess nor Joyce deploys the same mode of narration in more than one novel. (Ulysses is acknowledged to be a special case, a book that seethes with potential literature, waiting to be exploited by other writers. As Martin Amis remarked in a recent radio interview, ‘Ulysses is novels’.) 
Turning his attention briefly to writers other than Joyce, Farkas registers the presence of significant borrowings from T. S. Eliot’s poems and plays in the Enderby novels. He quibbles with Vesta Bainbridge’s misquotation of Burnt Norton in Inside Mr Enderby (Eliot’s line ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’ is redeployed as ‘Womankind cannot bear very much reality’), and dismisses the word ‘womankind’ on etymological grounds as ‘an uncharacteristic oversight in the work of an almost always reliable writer-philologist’, but in doing so he overlooks the other potential meanings -- ‘womb-ankind’ and ‘womb-unkind’, both relevant to Enderby’s known fear of wives and stepmothers -- that are contained within Burgess’s disrespectful allusion to Eliot. 
Farkas is surely right to point to the intoxicating effect of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems on Burgess’s creative imagination, particularly ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, which figures prominently throughout The Clockwork Testament, and ‘The Windhover’, fragments of which are embedded in chapter 12 of The Doctor is Sick. Perhaps it will interest Farkas to learn that Burgess makes an extended comparison of Hopkins and Joyce in the second of his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, ‘Rhythm, Sprung and Unsprung’, broadcast on BBC Radio Three on 6 October 1980. 
Elsewhere, the allusion-spotting proves to be a rather hit-and-miss affair. This reviewer’s response to being told, on page 73, that ‘salient references’ to John Donne and Matthew Arnold may be found in the Enderby novels (echoes which are ‘weak’ and yet ‘can distinctly be heard’) was to ink a salient ‘W.T.F.?’ in the margin, and to turn the page with the shortest possible delay. How weak does an echo have to be, we might wonder, before it is rendered completely inaudible? 
Farkas’s account of The Doctor is Sick is impressively well argued, and he proposes an unexpected new interpretation of the novel’s ‘dubious ontological status’ (p. 70), based on a detailed reappraisal of its narrative ambiguities. He suggests that the key to understanding what is going on in the book lies in the name of Aristotle Thanatos, the quasi-mythological figure whom Edwin Spindrift meets after he has escaped from hospital (his picaresque quest through the criminal underworld of Soho being a reworking of the ‘Nighttown’ chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses). ‘Thanatos’ signifies ‘death’, but Farkas is interested in the meanings of ‘Aristotle’. To Leopold Bloom, according to Burgess in Joysprick, ‘it means the monk who wrote a treatise on obstetrics’ (see Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (London: André Deutsch, 1971), p. 163.) Obstetrics being the science of life and fertility, Farkas ends up with a sex/death or life/death opposition. The meeting with Thanatos, we are told, is likely to be a hallucination or a psychic projection on Edwin’s part, and Farkas advances the contention that Edwin has probably died on the operating table. 
This gets us quite a long way, but it does not seem to solve the Thanatos riddle definitively. ‘Aristotle’, as we learn in chapter 15 of The Doctor is Sick, carries another, less respectable, meaning in Cockney rhyming slang, since ‘Aristotle’ rhymes with ‘bottle’, and ‘bottle and glass’ rhymes with ‘arse’. Hence ‘Aristotle’ signifies (among other things) ‘arse’, and the character’s name could be taken to mean that ‘death is crap’ - a sentiment forcefully reiterated elsewhere in the Burgess canon by Ed Schaumwein, the fathomlessly vulgar Hollywood producer who appears in Beard’s Roman Women. Does this alternative meaning of ‘Aristotle’ suggest that Edwin is actually being offered the possibility of life, if he can only stop inhabiting his crappy world of bilabial fricatives and folk-etymologies? The onomastic puzzle certainly contributes further uncertainties to what is already one of Burgess’s most riddling and sophisticated texts, and we should be grateful to Farkas for having reopened the question for fresh debate. 
Farkas’s critical intelligence is shown most clearly in his discussion of the final page of Napoleon Symphony, of which he proposes two interpretations. The passage in question is ‘Rejoice. And again I say rejoice. And I say aga INRI ng bells bells bells bells and rejoice. Rejoice.’ Farkas regards this first of all as an act of homage to Joyce, Burgess’s ‘great precursor’, and he tells us that ‘The reader will certainly join the writer of so many things re Joyce in his joy when he sees the word “Rejoice”’ (p. 121). The other possible reference, and one that will be more immediately apparent to the musical reader, is to an anthem by Henry Purcell (‘Rejoice in the Lord always / And again I say rejoice’). Which do you prefer? 
There are a few minor errors, perfectly excusable in an author whose first language is not English, and I list them here in the hope that they will be corrected in a second edition. There is no character called ‘Christopher Howard’ in The Worm and the Ring (p. 25); the first volume of Burgess’s autobiography was published in 1987, not 1990 (p. 29); Burgess did not write a novel called A Dead Man at Deptford (p. 106 and elsewhere); The Exiles is not the title of a play by James Joyce (p. 130); and the narrator of Earthly Powers is Kenneth Marchal Toomey, not ‘Marchal Kenneth Toomey’ (p. 138). 
(Andrew Biswell is a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.)