The Complete Enderby (78 page)

But

Not free to be not free,

Free free fr

(
There is a tremendous earthquake. A tear in the shape of a Spenglerian tragic parabola lightnings across the screen
.)

AND NOW THIS IMPORTANT WORD FROM
OUR SPONSOR

FRSHNBKKKKGGGGRHNKSPLURTSCHGROGGLEWOK

THIS, CHILDREN, IS
New York. A vicious but beautiful city, totally representative of the human condition or, for any embryonic existentialists among you,
la condition humaine
. What’s that when it’s at home, you vulgarly ask, Felicia? You will find out, God help you, soon enough, child. It is named New York in honour of the Duke of York who became King James II of Great Britain, a foolish and bigoted monarch who tried to reimpose Catholicism on a happily Protestant nation and, as was inevitable, ignominiously failed. No, Adrian, this is no longer a British city: it is part of a great free complex or federation of states that are welded together
under
a most unBritish constitution: rational, frenchified, certainly republican. They revolted against the British king to whom they had once owed allegiance and tribute. No, Charles, that was a
Protestant
king and also bigoted and foolish. Let us swoop a little lower: How beautiful those exalted towers in the Manhattan dawn now we have descended to clear air under the enveloping blanket, Wilfrid. The jagged teeth of a monostomatic monster? One way of looking at it, Edwina.

We are here, under the aegis of Educational Time Trips, Inc., to seek out our poet. This is a great city for poets, though there are few like ours. We swim aerially over the island a little way, north of the midtown area, nearer to the Hudson than to the East River. He is round here somewhere. Yes, Morgana, we will have to
peek
a little. Through the dawn windows of 91st Street, as they call it (a rational city, a
numerical
city). Avert your eyes, Felicia; what they are doing is entirely their own affair. Here, dear dear, a young man is murdering his bedmate in postcoital tristity. Those two middleaged men are actually
dancing
: it would seem somewhat early for that. A tired girl eats an insubstantial breakfast at a kitchen table. A man in undress and blue spectacles peers at the obituary page of the New York Times. Look at the squalor of the bedroom of that scholarly-seeming youth, cans and bottles and untidy stacks of an obviously filthy periodical. Here another murder, there a robbery, and now – the contortions in the name of pleasure, God help us.

That is interesting, that round bed. Do you see the round bed, Felicia, Andrea? Very unusual, round bed. And on the round bed a skeletal lady sleeps alone, telling (if that tangent touches at twelve) the right time. Astonishing! Eight-ten, if her lower limbs are the hour-hand. But here. And now. Look look. We have found him! Gather round, children, and see. Mr Enderby, temporary professor as we are told he is in this fashed fag-end of his days, asleep naked in a nest of
pouffes
. Ugly, hairy, fat; ah yes, he always was. The television set, to which he is not listening, discourses the morning news, which is all bad. He seems, dear dear, to have been somewhat incontinent in his sleep. Gracious, the weaknesses of the great!

And now – a little surprise for you. A black woman, key in hand, of pious face but ugly gait, waddles in, sees him, is disgusted,
holds
up her key in pious deprecation of his besmirched nudity. But, soft. She goes closer, looks closer, touches. She holds up both her hands in expression of a quite different emotion, runs out of the room with open mouth, strange words emanating therefrom. So we now know, and it is a sort of satisfaction, for
nunc dimittis
is the sweetest of canticles. Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward. Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east. No, hardly that, I go too far perhaps. Is there anything of his own that will serve? Yes, Edmund?

The work ends when the work ends,

Not before, and rarely after.

And that explains, my foes and friends,

This spiteful burst of ribald laughter.

Stop giggling, will you, all of you? You are both foolish and too clever for words, Edmund, with your stupid and irreverent and
meaningless
doggerel improvisation. You will all smile on the other sides of your faces when I get you back to civilization. All right, all right, I am aware that I involuntarily rhymed. Come on, out of it. Another instalment of the human condition is beginning. Out of it:
he
is well out of it, you say, Andrea? But no: he is in it, we are all always in it. Do not think that anyone can escape it merely by … I will not utter the word: it is quite irrelevant. Out of it, indeed; he is not out of it at all.

Rome, July 1973.

Composed to placate kind readers of
The Clockwork Testament
, or Enderby’s End,
who objected to my casually killing my hero

ENDERBY FIRST GOT
into my head in early 1959, when I was a colonial civil servant working in the Sultanate of Brunei, North Borneo. One day, delirious with sandfly fever, I opened the door of the bathroom in my bungalow and was not altogether surprised to see a middle-aged man seated on the toilet writing what appeared to be poetry. The febrile vision lasted less than a second, but the impossible personage stayed with me and demanded the writing of a novel about him. I wrote half this novel in 1960, a year in which the medical authorities had condemned me to death with an inoperable cerebral tumour. It did not appear that there would be time to write the second part of the novel, so I published the first part as a whole book under the title of
Inside Mr Enderby
. To the chagrin of the doctors, who did not like their prognosis to be proved false, I lived and was able, in 1967, to write the second part of the novel, under the title of
Enderby Outside
. A few years later Enderby demanded that he be killed off in a novella entitled
The Clockwork Testament
. I duly murdered him with a heart attack. Now, in this new brief novel, he is alive again. It seems that fictional characters, though they sometimes may have to die, are curiously immune to death. Is Don Quixote dead or alive? Is Hamlet? Is Little Nell? Enderby’s demand to be resurrected has come inconveniently, for I am engaged on a longish novel about Nero and St Paul.

A decent respect to people’s notions of plausibility demands that I try to explain why Enderby, having died of a heart attack in New York about ten years ago, should be alive three years later in the state of Indiana. (And why Indiana, a part of the United States I do not know very well?) I think we have to look at it this way: all fictional events are hypotheses, and the condition of Enderby’s going to live in New York would be that he should die there. If
the
hypothesis is unfulfilled, he does not have to die. Enderby was condemned to visit the United States, there to suffer, and there was a choice between his going to Manhattan to teach Creative Writing and his being employed to write the libretto for a ridiculous musical about Shakespeare in a fictitious theatre in Indianapolis. He took the second course, which involved his staying alive to risk a suicidal identification (himself with the Bard) but to come through unscathed. He will, of course, eventually die, but only because his creator will die. On the other hand, being a fictional character, he cannot die.

Enderby’s name comes from two sources – the remote and uninhabitable Antarctic territory called Enderby Land, and a poem about a shipwreck by Jean Ingelow in which church bells clang out a tune called ‘The Brides of Enderby’. His poems are, inevitably, written by myself, but only myself in disguise as Enderby. A reviewer in
Punch
said, of the first novel or half-novel, ‘It would be helpful if Mr Burgess could indicate somewhere whether these poems are meant to be good or bad,’ a fine instance of critical paralysis. T.S. Eliot liked at least three of the poems, but posterity is beginning to find his taste unsure, especially since he too, like Enderby, became the librettist for a Broadway musical. I have no opinion about either Enderby’s poems or Enderby himself. I do not know whether I like or dislike him; I only know that, for me, he exists. I fear that he may probably go on existing.

A.B.

Lugano, November 1983

WHEN BEN JONSON WAS
let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street and said: ‘Let us drink.’

‘Ben,’ Will cried. ‘Your ears are untrimmed and your nose whole. The shearers were held off, then. I’m glad to see you well.’

‘But thirsty. Let us go and drink.’

‘We can drink here and shall. Malmsey? Sherrisack? Or shall I send out for ale? Ben Ben Ben, have a care. Next time the shearer may be the ultimate trimmer, the sconce-chopper as they call him.’

‘I’ve a mind to drink in a tavern. Let us go.’

‘As you will, this being a sort of great day for you. How was it in jail? Are Marston and Chapman there yet?’

‘There still and like to stay. After all, the offending line was of their making. As for the jail – stink, maggots, rats, lepers, pocky chancres. But there was a man I will tell you of while we drink.’

‘You swore to me the line was your line, the best line in the whole of
Westward Ho
as you would have it. How does it go now? “The Scotch –” It begins with “The Scotch –”.’

‘
Eastward Ho
is the title. You look as ever the wrong way. Back when the rest of us look forward. It is this: “The Scotch are good friends to England, but only when they are out of it.” Well, indeed I wrote it, but it seemed politic to father it on the other two. Under oath, aye, but a poet could not live did he not perjure.’ They went down the stairs and past the workshop of the tiremaker Mountjoy, Will’s landlord. Mountjoy was scolding, in Frenchified English, the apprentice Belott.

‘Immortal,’ Will said. ‘He can never say that I did not make him immortal. But no gratitude there.’

‘How immortal?’

‘I have him in
Harry Five
as the herald.’

‘He taught you the dirty French for the same?’

‘He put right the grammar. I knew the dirt already.’ Out in Silver Street, which the sun had promoted to gold, they saw beggars, limbless soldiers, drunken sailors, whores, dead cats, ordinary decent citizens in stuff gowns, a kilted Highlander with a flask of usquebaugh in place of a sporran. A ballad singer with few teeth sang:

‘For bonny sweet Robin was all my joy,

And Robin came oft to my bed.

But Robin did wrong, so to end his song

The headsman did chop off his head.’

‘An old one,’ Ben said. ‘And still I cannot hear it without a shudder.’

‘It seems older than it is. A great deal has happened in the interim. Poor Robin.’

‘That was your name for him? You called him Robin to his face?’

‘He was Robin to my lord of Southampton, and my lord of Southampton was ever Harry to me. So it was always out-upon-titles. But, he was ever saying, when he was become King Robert the First of England there would be no familiarity then. Would it had been so, sometimes I think, though bloodless, bloodless.’

‘Treason, man, careful.’

‘What will you do, report me to Gobbo Cecil? “An’t please you, good my lord, there is this low playmaker that doth say how the Essex rebellion should have succeeded.” He’ll say, “Aye aye, and maybe he’s in the right of it.” He’s no love for slobbering Jamie with his bishops and buggery and drinking tobacco is an unco foul sin to the body, laddie, and doth inflame the lung, if thou lovest tobacco then lovest thou not thy king.’

Ben sighed. ‘I know how it is. I say too many Scotchmen about and I am flung in jail. You could tell the king to his face that he’s a – I say no more, you see that sour man in black there? Following us, is he? Nay, he turned off. You could skite in his majesty’s mouth and he’d say, “Aye, I do dearly love a guid witty jest, laddie, will ye be raised to a Knicht o’ the Garrrterrr?” Some men are born jail meat. Others – Here, round here. At the bottom of this lane. Go tipatoe, ’tis all slime underfoot. Careful, careful.’

‘The Swan with Two Necks.’ Will read the warped sign with a fastidious nose-wrinkle. ‘This is not a tavern I mind ever to have visited before.’

‘It is quiet,’ Ben said, leading the way into noise, stench, striding over a vomit pool, between knots of swarthy men with daggers. ‘We can talk in peace and quiet.’ They sat on a settle before a rickety much-punished table whereon fat flies fed amply from greasy orts and a sauce-smear unwiped. A girl with warty bosom well on show showed black teeth and took an order for wine. ‘Red wine,’ Ben said. ‘Of your best. Blood-red, red as the blood of our blessed Saviour.’ Some villains turned to look with surly interest. A man with an eyepatch nodded as in friendly threat at Ben. ‘
Buenos dias, señor
,’ Ben said.