Enderby

Unlike James Joyce, who refused to read Freud, or Dylan, who could not listen to Sgt. Pepper, novelist-essayist-poet and Joyce disciple Anthony Burgess has read everything. The prolific Englishman, author of thirteen books since 1949, has thrown it all into his latest tale of a lonely antihero dragging his dyspeptic way through the exoticisms of the Great Mundane. Burgess's greatest creation is Enderby, a wheezing, farting, belching bachelor poet who writes in the lavatory of his filthy flat. Enderby is a Mad Magazine version of Leopold Bloom; he sentimentally feeds gulls and innocently offends all the local pub personnel. Suddenly offered an obscure prize for his poetry, Enderby borrows a suit from a friendly chef in return for writing a cycle of torrid love poetry to the barmaid the chef is wooing. At the prize ceremonies Enderby is courted by Vesta Bainbridge, features editor of a women's magazine and unscrupulous conversion-monger for the Catholic Church. Soon after, Vesta marries the hapless Enderby and carts him off to the Holy City, where, after several unsuccessful attempts, he at last appears to submit to a basic convention.

This, he kept reminding himself, was his bride, an intelligent and desirable young woman, and it was time, under the thunder and rain, to be thinking of performing, that is to say consummating, that is to say. He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body's view of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly reading Jane Austen.

Abruptly terminating his marriage that night, Enderby returns to England and is resurrected from an attempted suicide by a psychiatrist named Wapenshaw. Taking his mother's maiden name, Hogg, Enderby renounces poetry and assumes a new life as a bartender at Piggy's Sty. But try as he may, he cannot deny his muse, and she accompanies him on a desperate flight to Tangier after the murderer of a pop singer has pushed his smoking gun into bystander Enderby's hand. Disguised as an Arab beggar, Enderby plans a real crime--the murder of Rawliffe, a fellow poet who has stolen the plot of Enderby's magnum opus and made a movie from it. But the dying Rawcliffe's pure cynicism is so eminently pitiable that Enderby instead becomes a fast friend, and as if this small magnanimity had opened the way for a flood of emotion, the book ends with an almost-love affair in which Enderby is dazzled by a nameless girl who could be his muse in the flesh.

Burgess's ingenious plot is couched in some of the most high-powered and imaginative language (including Russian, Arabic, Gothic, Latin, Spanish, and dialects) since Joyce. (A Clockwork Orange, Burgess's best-known work, is written in a hybrid argot of his own invention.) But Joyce had many voices and no one style; Burgess, for all the richness of his repertoire, writes in a monotone that is no more varied than his fixed point of view. Cleverness ("She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions."), hyperbole ("his insides, like spoilt cats demanding milk as lava begins to engulf the town and the cats with it, complained and switched on a kind of small avant garde chamber piece for muted brass") and poetry ("Out in the gull-clawed air, New Year blue, the tide crawling creamily in, Enderby felt better.") become a tedious camouflage instead of a clear glass over the subject, the criterion of truly good style. Burgess, as defensive or more as any writer in the television age, seems to be flaunting his verbal facility so as to lure the reader into the psychic depths beneath the words. Enderby is programmed for the sophisticated, well-in-formed laffseekers of the New Reading Public.

Paradoxically, however, the NRP must be affronted by the implications of all this black humor. Of course, Burgess has long since gone beyond the anti-philistinism in vogue a generation ago. The targets of his satire are not bankers or genteel folks or even working-class reactionaries. He occasionally slips and lambastes tourists, drug visionaries, religionists, or minor literati, but these stabs are part of that flashy knife play that is little more than a come-on. More seriously, he does not bewail alienation or urbanization or sentimentality or the impossibility of communication, except tangentially. He does not decry violence or promote idealism. He is not interested in politics. A fag is no more worthy a subject than an airline stewardess.

Burgess is indiscriminate in his attacks. A sort of antihumanist, he lays his cudgel evenly on the whole of his bizarre, passively embraced cosmos and on all its characters. The most conspicuous villains of Enderby are women-womankind, randomly represented by a number of oppressively corporeal seductresses. The tragedy of Enderby's life is the upbringing his stepmother has given him. She has stamped her foster-son with her filthy habits and enforced his life-long retreat to the lavatory. From her come the whole slew of Enderby's neuroticisms, from his fear (cropping up in the author's other books) of lost teeth (according to Freud a fear of castration as punishment for masturbation) to his repugnance for Mother Church.

Endebry's stepmother is only a memory in the book. The women on stage are as monstrous if not as malodorous. But more telling than caricature are the occasional earnest portrayals of feminine psychology. None of the women is given motive or character. Their noxious insipidity if intentional is patronizing; if honestly drawn is the key to the shortcomings of Enderby.

For the hero is not a simple misogynist, not a fully accredited human being with but one blank space in his account. Burgess's male characters, with the exception of the cynical betrayer, Rawcliffe, whose death is the most effective episide in the book, are as static and object-like as his women. The characters are exhibits of no more than equal rank with the strange locales and cunning twists of fate Burgess marshals for the reader's diversion.

It is not that the author denies morality, motherhood, love, sex, and personality through women; it is not that he cannot see purposefulness, friendship, dignity and honor in his men. It is that we must accept his insistence on the lonely Enderby, dedicated to poetry because there is nothing else he can be dedicated to, as our only point of reference, as the fixed center of consciousness. Looking with Enderby's eyes we are forced to abandon the old philosophical principle of the duality of good and evil. We find a new duality, an immediate polarity between body -- including brain -- and non-body, between the gross private tyranny of the coarse machine Enderby must serve every minute of his life and the hard bright indifference of that panorama of people and places outside. Ranged against each other, equally complex, equally demanding masters, the two forces almost crush Enderby, who is too blind to differentiate between them. But Enderby withstands the buffets of circumstance and wins by doggedly avoiding every intrusion of reality. The author attempts to compensate for Enderby's isolationism by stressing his integrity--Enderby is loyal to the lord he has chosen, his own neurosis-ridden mind and body. He serves them without question and by some automatic leveling process molds the outside world to a non-threatening mass of only occasionally active stimuli.

The choice is the right one for Enderby. It leaves him free to cast his thoughts with impunity over the depersonalized cosmos. But that freedom is a luxury perhaps better left alone.