The Complete Enderby (68 page)

The boy grew very red but the girl smirked.

‘The touch of the skin of a young girl’s breast. A lush-capped plush-kept sloe –’

‘You got that the wrong way round,’ the Kickapoo said.

‘Yes yes,’ Enderby said, tired. And then, in utter depression, he saw who Whitelady was. He winked at him with his right eye and Whitelady simultaneously winked back with his left.

AFTER THE LESSON
on Whitelady (lose sensation, he kept thinking, and I become a fictional character) Enderby walked with care, aware of a sensation of lightness in his left breast as though his heart (not the real one, but the one of non-clinical traditional lore) had been removed. So sensation could lie, so whither did that lead you? His feet led him through a half-hearted student demonstration against or for the dismissal of somebody, a brave girl stripping in protest, giving blue breasts to the February post-meridian chill, to the long low building which was the English Department.
Outside
the office he shared with Assistant Professor Zeitgeist or some such name, there were black girl students evidently waiting for Professor Zeitgeist and beguiling their wait with loud manic music on a transistor radio. Enderby mildly said:

‘Do switch that thing off, please. I have some work to do.’

‘Well, you goan work some place else, man.’

‘This is, after all, my office,’ Enderby smiled, feeling palpitations drumming up. ‘This is, after all, the English Department of a university.’ And then: ‘Shut that bloody thing off.’

‘You goan fuck yoself, man.’

‘You ain’t nuttin but shiiit, man.’

Abdication. What did one do now – slap the black bitches? Remember the long servitude of their people and bow humbly? One of them was doing a little rutting on-the-spot dance to the noise. Enderby slapped the black bitch on the puss. No, he did not. He durst not. It would be on the front pages tomorrow. There would be a row in the United Nations. He would be knifed by the men they slept with. He said, smiling, rage boiling up to inner excoriation: ‘Abdication of authority. Is that expression in your primer of Black English?’

‘Pip pip old boy,’ said the non-jigging one with very fair mock-British intonation. ‘And all that sort of rot, man.’

‘You go fuck yo own ass, man. You aint nuttin but shiiiiit.’

Enderby had another weapon, not much used by him these days. He gathered all available wind and vented it from a square mouth.

Rarkberfvrishtkrahnbrrryburlgrong.

The effort nearly killed him. He staggered into his office, saw mail on his desk, took it and staggered out. The black girls, very ineptly, tried to give, in glee, his noise back to him. But their sense of body rhythm prevailed, turning it to oral tomtom music. The radio took four seconds off from discoursing on garbage of one sort to advertise garbage of another – male voice in terminal orgasm yelling sweet sweet sweet O Pan piercing sweet. Enderby went into the little lounge, empty save for shouting notices and a bearded man who looked knowingly at him. He opened his letters, chiefly injunctions to join things (
BIOFEEDBACK BRETHREN GERONTOPHILIACS ANONYMOUS ROCK FOR CHRIST OUR SATAN THE THANATOLOGY
MONTHLY
), coming at length to a newspaper clipping sent, apparently out of enmity, by his publisher in London. It was from the
Daily Window
and was one of the regular hardhitting noholdsbarred nononsense manofthepeople responsibilityofagreatnationalorgan addresses to the reader written by a staffman named Belvedere Fellows, whose jowled fierce picture led, like a brave overage platoon officer, the heavy type of his heading. Enderby read:
SINK THE DEUTSCHLAND
! Enderby read:

My readers know I am a man that faces facts. My readers know that I will sit through any amount of filthy film rubbish in order to report back fairly and squarely to my readers about the dangers their children face in a medium that increasingly, in the name of the so-called Permissive Society, is giving itself over to nudity, sex, obscenity, and pornography.

Well, I went to see
The Wreck of the Deutschland
and confess that I had to rush to the rails long before the end. I was scuppered. Here all decent standards have finally gone Kaput. Here is the old heave-ho with a vengeance.

But enough has been said already about the appalling scenes of Nazi rape and the blasphemous nudity. We know the culprits: their ears are deafened to the appeals of decency by the crackle of the banknotes they are now so busily counting. There are certain quiet scoundrels whose names do not reach the public eye with the same tawdry glamour. Behind the film image lies the idea, lies the writer, skulking behind the cigarette smoke and whisky in his ivory tower.

I say now that they must take their share of the blame. I have not read the book which the film is based on, nor would I want to. I noted grimly however that there were no copies the other day in my local library. My readers will be horrified however to learn that he is a Roman Catholic priest. This what the liberalism of that great and good man Pope John has been perverted into.

I call now, equivocally and pragmatically, for a closer eye to be kept on the filth that increasingly these days masquerades as literature and even as poetry. The vocation of poet has traditionally been permitted to excuse too much – the lechery of Dylan
Thomas
and the drunken bravoing of Brendan Behan as well as the aesthetic perversions of Oscar Wilde. Is the final excuse now to be sought in the so-called priestly vocation? Perhaps Father Enderby of the Society of Jesus would like to reply. I have no doubt he would find an attentive congregation.

Enderby looked up. The bearded man was still looking knowingly at him. He said something. Enderby said: ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said: how are things in Jolly Old?’

Enderby could think of absolutely no reply. The two looked at each other fixedly for a long time, and the bearded man’s jaw dropped progressively as if he were silently demonstrating an escalier of front vowels. Then Enderby sighed, got up and went out to seek his Creative Writing class. Like a homer he tapped his way with his swordstick through the dirty cold and student-knots to a building named for the inventor of a variety of canned soups, Warhall or somebody. On the second floor, to which he clomb with slow care, he found them, all ten, in a hot room with a long disfigured conference table. The Tietjens girl was there, drowned and sweatered. She had apparently told them everything, for they looked strangely at him. He sat down at the top or bottom of the table and pulled their work out of his inside pocket. He saw that he had given Ms Tietjens a D, so he ball-pointed it into a rather arty A. The rest shall remain as they are. Then he tapped his lower denture with the pen, plastic to plastic: tck tck, tcktck tck, TCK. He looked at his students, a mostly very untidy lot. They looked at him, lounging, smoking, taking afternoon beverages. He said:

‘The question of sartorial approach is relevant, I think. When John Keats had difficulty with a poem he would wash and put on a clean shirt. The stiff collar and bow tie and tails of the concertgoer induce a tense attitude appropriate to the hearing of complex music. The British colonial officer would dress for dinner, even in the jungle, to encourage self-discipline. There is no essential virtue in comfort. To be relaxed is good if it is part of a process of systole and diastole. Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness. Art is essentially tense. The trouble with your er art is that it is not tense.’

They all looked at him, not tense. Many of their names he still refused to take seriously – Chuck Szymanowski, for instance. His
sole
black man was called Lloyd Utterage, a very reasonable name. This man was very ugly, which was a pity and which Enderby deeply regretted, but he had very beautiful clothes, mostly of hot-coloured blanketing materials, topped with a cannibal-style wire-wool hairshock. He was very tense, and this too Enderby naturally approved. But he was full of hate, and that was a bore. ‘I will not,’ Enderby said, turning to him, ‘read out all your poem, which may be described as a sort of litany of anatomic vilification. Two stanzas will perhaps suffice.’ And he read them with detached primness:

‘It will be your balls next, whitey,

A loving snipping of the scrotum

With rather rusty nail-scissors,

And they tumble out then to be

Crunched underfoot crunch crunch.

It will be your prick next, whitey,

A loving chopping segmentally

With an already bloodstained meat hatchet,

And it will lie with the dog-turds

To be squashed squash squash.

One point,’ he said. ‘If the prick is to be chopped in segments it will not resemble a dog-turd. The writing of er verse does not excuse you from considerations of er …’

‘He says it will lie
with
the dog-turds,’ Ms Tietjens said. ‘He doesn’t say it will look like one.’

‘Yes yes, Sylvia, but –’

‘Lydia.’

‘Of course, thinking of Ford. Sorry. But you see, the word
it
suggests that it’s still a unity, not a number of chopped bits of er penis. Do you see my point?’

‘Yeah,’ Lloyd Utterage said, ‘but it’s not a point worth seeing. The point is the hate.’

‘The poetry is in the pity,’ said Enderby. ‘Wilfred Owen. He was wrong, of course. It was the other way round. As I was saying, a unity and rather resembling a dog-turd. So the image is of this er
prick
indistinguishable from –’

‘Like Lloyd said,’ said a very spotty Jewish boy named Arnold Something, his hair too cannibalistically arranged, ‘it’s the hate that it’s about. Poetry is made out of emotions,’ he pronounced.

‘Oh no,’ Enderby said. ‘Oh very much no. Oh very very very much no and no again. Poetry is made out of words.’

‘It’s the hate,’ Lloyd Utterage said. ‘It’s the expression of the black experience.’

‘Now,’ Enderby said, ‘we will try a little experiment. I take it that this term
whitey
is racialist and full of opprobrium and so on. Suppose now we substitute for it the word er
nigger
–’ There was a general gasp of disbelief. ‘I mean, if, as you said, the point is the hate, then the hate can best be expressed – and, indeed, in poetry
must
be expressed – as an emotion available to the generality of mankind. So instead of either
whitey
or
nigger
you could have, er,
bohunk
or, say,
kike
. But
kike
probably wouldn’t do …’

‘You’re telling me it wouldn’t do,’ Chuck Szymanowski said.

‘Since the end-words are disyllabic or, er, yes trisyllabic but never monosyllabic. A matter of structure,’ Enderby said. ‘So listen.
It will be your balls next, nigger
, etc etc.
It will be your prick next, nigger
, and so on. Now it is the structure that interests me. It’s not, of course, a very subtle or interesting structure, as er Lloyd here would be the first to admit, but it is the structure that has the vitality, not all this nonsense about hate and so on. I mean, imagine a period when this kind of race hate stupidity is all over, and yet the poem –
aere perennius
, you know – still by some accident survives. Well, it would be taken as a somewhat primitive but still quite engaging essay in vilification in terms of an anatomical catalogue, the structure objectifying and, as it were, cooling the hate. Comic too on the personal level, ‘
It will be your balls next
, er
Crassus
or say
Lycidas
. Rather Catullan. You see.’ He smiled at them. Now they were really learning something.

‘You think,’ Lloyd Utterage panted, ‘you’re going to get away with that, man?’

‘Away with what?’ Enderby asked in honest and rather hurt surprise.

‘Look,’ Ms Tietjens said kindly, ‘he’s British. He doesn’t understand the ethnic agony.’

‘That’s rather a good phrase,’ Enderby said. ‘It doesn’t mean
anything
, of course. Like saying
potato agony
. Oh I don’t know, though. The meanings of imaginative language are not the same as those of the defilers of language. Your president, for instance. The black leaders. Lesbian power, if such a thing exists …’

‘He understands it,’ said Lloyd Utterage. ‘His people started it. Nigger-whippers despite their haw-haw-haw old top.’

‘Now that’s interesting,’ Enderby said. ‘You see how the whipping image immediately begat in your imagination the image of a top? You have the makings of a word-man. You’ll be a poet some day when you’ve got over all this nonsense.’ Then he began to repeat
nigger-whipper
swiftly and quietly like a tongue-twister. ‘Prosodic analysis,’ he said. ‘Do any of you know anything about that? A British linguistic movement, I believe, so it may not have er gotten to you.
Nigger
and
whipper
, you see, have two vowels in common. Now note the opposition of the consonants: a rich nasal against a voiceless semi-vowel, a voiced stop against a voiceless. Suppose you tried
nigger-killer
. Not so effective. Why not? The g doesn’t oppose well to the l. They’re both voiced, you see, and so –’