The Complete Enderby
Read The Complete Enderby Online
Authors: Anthony Burgess
Appendix: Some Uncollected Early Poems by F. X. Enderby
Anthony Burgess achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versatile. He was born in Manchester in 1917 and studied English at the university there. He served in the army between 1940 to 1956, and as a colonial education officer in Malaya and Borneo from 1954 to 1960, which proved the inspiration for
The Malayan Trilogy
. In 1959 Burgess was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour and he decided to try to live by writing. He wrote over fifty books, scripts, translations, a Broadway musical, three symphonies and hundreds of book reviews. His novel
Earthly Powers
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980. Burgess was a Visiting Fellow of Princeton University and a Distinguished Professor of City College, New York. He was created a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French President and Commandeur de Mérite Culturel by Prince Rainier of Monaco. His last novel, published in the spring of 1993, was
A Dead Man in Deptford
, based around the murder of Christopher Marlowe.
Anthony Burgess died in November 1993. In the tributes that followed
The New York Times
celebrated his ‘versatility and erudition’, Gore Vidal said ‘the Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by the so much admired Evelyn Waugh’, David Lodge admired ‘his tireless energy and fertility of invention’ and John Updike praised his ‘energy and the wide-ranging interests of a dozen writers … He seemed not only a prodigious intellect, but an affectionate spirit whose mind, like Ariel’s, circled the globe in a few seconds.’
ALSO BY ANTHONY BURGESS
Novels
Abba Abba
A Dead Man in Deptford
Byrne
Earthly Powers
The Malayan Trilogy: Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East
Autobiography
Little Wilson and Big God
You’ve Had Your Time
Non Fiction
Shakespeare
Inside Mr Enderby
To D’Arcy Conyers
– Allons, dernier des poètes
,
Toujours enfermé tu te rendras malade!
Vois, il fait beau temps, tout le monde est dehors
,
Va donc acheter deux sous d’ellébore
,
Ça te fera une petite promenade
.
Part OneJules Laforgue,
Dimanches
PFFFRRRUMMMP
.
And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr Enderby!
The wish is, however, wasted on both sides, for this, to your night visitors, is a very old year. We, whispering, fingering, rustling, creaking about your bedroom, are that posterity to which you hopefully addressed yourself. Congratulations, Mr Enderby: you have already hit your ball smack over the pavilion clock. If you awaken now with one of the duodenal or pyloric twinges which are, to us, as gruesome a literature-lesson spicer as Johnson’s scrofula, Swift’s scatophobia, or Keats’s gallop of death-warrant blood, do not fancy it is ghosts you hear sibilant and crepitant about the bed. To be a ghost one has first to die or, at least, be born.
Perrrrrp.
A posterior riposte from Mr Enderby. Do not touch, Priscilla. Mr Enderby is not a
thing
to be prodded; he is a great poet sleeping. Your grubby finger out of his mouth, please, Alberta. His mouth is open for no amateur dental inspection but to the end that he may breathe. That nose is, at forty-five, past its best as an organ, the black twitching caverns – each with its miniature armpit – stuffed and obtuse. The world of smell is visited by his early poems, remember (
see here
to
here
of the Harvard University Press selection which is your set book). There we have washed hair, pickles, gorse, bath-salts, skin, pencil-shavings, tinned peaches, post offices, Mrs Lazenby at the corner-shop in his native slum, cloves, diabetes. But it has no existence in his maturer work; the twin ports are closed for ever. That gentle noise, Harold, is snoring. That is so, Christine; his teeth, both upper and lower, are removable: they have been removed to that plastic night-jar there. Child, child, you have spilt
denture
-fluid on to Mr Enderby’s landlady’s carpet. No, Robin, the carpet is neither beautiful nor rare, but it is Mrs Meldrum’s property. Yes, Mr Enderby himself is our property, the world’s property, but his carpet is his landlady’s. Mrs Meldrum’s.
Now. His hair goes a daily journey from head to brush, squad by tiny squad on a one-way ticket. Here on the dressing-table are the imitation-silver-backed brushes bequeathed by his father, the tobacconist. The bristles are indeed dirty, Mavis, but great poets have other things to do than attend to the calls of hygiene. See how the bristles have trapped their day’s quota of Mr Enderby’s few remaining hairs. Holy relics, children. Do not rush. One each for everybody. There. Keep it safe, each of you, in your little diary of posterity’s present year. Shed hairs, Henry, become the property of the picker. They are of no use to Mr Enderby, but they are already fetching, at classical auction-rooms, a pound or so each if nicely mounted. It is not proper, Audrey, that you should try to pick your hair
alive
. Such a rough tug at the scalp is enough to wake Mr Enderby.
Querpkprrmp.
You see? He’s disturbed. Let him settle as one lets churned water settle. Right. A better view of Mr Enderby, you will agree, children, as he flops on his back cruciform and sends the bedclothes sliding and plopping to the floor. His belly bulges in two gentle hills, one on either side of the cutting pyjama-cord. There is a wealth of hair, see. It is one of the abominable ironies of middle age that hair should march down from the noble summit, the eagle’s lodge, to leave that bare as an eagle, in order that the camps and barracks and garrisons of the warm vulgar body be crammed with a growth that is neither useful nor pretty. The flabby chest too, see. Rich in hair, aflame with whorls and tendrils of it. And for good measure, chin and jowls bristling. Horrent, Milton might say.
Yes, Janice, I am constrained to agree that Mr Enderby does not make a pretty sight when sleeping, even in total darkness. Yes, we all remark the scant hair, the toothless jaws, the ample folds of flesh rising and falling. But what has prettiness to do with greatness, eh? There is something for you all to ponder on. You would not like to have been married to him, Alberta? Might not the reverse also have applied, even more so, you stupid giggling silly thing? Who are
you
to think that you would ever be meet to mate with a great poet?
The extremities. The feet that trod Parnassus. Callosities on the intricate map of the sole, see. Torn toenails, though that of the great toe too rocky to be tearable. They could both do with a long sudsy soaking, agreed. The outstretched right hand, like a beggar’s, really a king’s. Gaze with reverence on those fingers that rest now from writing. Tomorrow they will write again, continuing the poem that he considers to be his masterpiece. Ah, what these fingers have produced! Each of you kiss the hand, more gently, though, than a fly crawling. I realize that the act of kissing needs an effort of will to overcome a certain natural revulsion. Here, however, is a little lesson for you in scholastic philosophy. The grubby knuckles, the nails with black borders, the deep stains of tobacco-tar (the cigarette was held interdigitally, forgotten, while the poet’s mind soared above the smell of burning), the coarse skin – these are the accidents, the outer aspects of the hand, their concession to the ordinary world of eating and dying. But the essence of the hand – what is that? A divine machine that has made our lives more blessed. Kiss it, come on, kiss it. Althea, stop making that vomiting noise. Your face, Charles, is ugly enough without contorting it to a rictus of nausea. That’s right, kiss it.