A Clockwork Lemon

ANTHONY BURGESS would be pleased to find out that his latest book can be compared to the work of T.S. Eliot. In fact he would probably urinate in his elitist tweeds to know that his new book is like The Waste Land. The comparison, however, is not between the final products but between the origins of the two works: both were written by men close to--if not over--the brink. However, while Eliot's masterpiece was what the poet called "rhythmical grumbling." Burgess's piece of trash car only be described as infantile whining.

The Clockwork Testament is actually a personal gripe about Burgess's experiences in America and about the him adapted from his novel. A Clockwork Orange. Plot in this case is better described as gross misinterpretation of the facts; characterization, as a loose form of character assassination. It should all begin with the dawning of Enderby's last day on his own godforsaken planet, but in fact the novel begins with some revealing articles published two years ago in London's Times Literary Supplement. During 1972-73 Burgess was a "writer-academic" teaching Elizabethan drama and creative writing at New York's City College. And apparently he was quite disgusted with everything, even himself. His TLS article May 11, 1973) attacked American university students of literature for their insistence that everything they study be "relevant," a phrase that most intelligent students had already recognized as banal and meaningless. But aside from the students "total eschewal of literary allusion." Burgess attacked Americans in general for their "puritanical enjoyment" of art:

That is perhaps why typical American enjoyments, like hamburgers, cokes, hot dogs, peanut butter and the like, contrive to be tasteless.

He goes on to criticize the commercialism inherent in all forms of American art and even student evaluations of professors, which he claims put professors "in the same position as the entertainer, whose value is to be assessed in box-office (or audience-popularity) terms."

The following June 22 the plot thickened, when in another TLS article. Burgess again attacked American culture in the same mundane cliches. This time around he related some of the incidents that appear in The Clockwork Testament. In an example of his thesis that for young creative writers "language and style are irrelevant in the face of the great god Message." Burgess speaks of his black students presenting him with "bitter though illiterate white-castration fantasies." He also relates an incident of irreverence for authority.

It should not be possible for the following thing to happen, but it did, Outside my lecture room in the Cohen Library of City College, New York. I was attempting to explain something privately to a girl student. Two young negresses (or female blacks) were sitting by, loudly playing a transistor radio, I politely asked them to turn the thing off and was told obscenely to turn myself off... I did nothing. I failed in authority. But everybody is falling in authority. The substitute for authority is acquiesence in the face of youth; that at least sometimes secures a tolerant hearing.

Both of these incidents appear in the novel, fictionalized and in one ease significantly altered from his own earlier account, to allow him to present himself (in the guise of Enderby) as a martyr.

The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End is an account of Enderby's (no first name) death. But it is also an allegorical satire aimed primarily at a dimly perceived America and especially at Stanley Kubrick's bastardization of A Clockwork Orange. Enderby is a poet who has passed his dubious prime--in writing and in life. He, like Burgess, has been asked to teach for a year at Manhattan U., ostensibly because of the controversy his film script has created in America. The name of the film, of course, is changed: Enderby has adapted Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland for the screen, to be produced and directed by Melvin Schaumwein. Chisel Productions. His reasons for the crude adaptation is that the film might lead people to read the poem, which is recognizably better art. But instead, the film, warped by the director to include a nun's gang bang, provokes widespread rage when some youths charged with raping a nun claim the film made them do it. Similar complaints were leveled against A Clockwork Orange, and here too, Enderby defends the violence in his film--although he detests it as art.

But the film of The Wreck of the Deutschland is just one more indicator of the decay of civilization for Enderby. He loathes his students for their eating, habits and for their anti-intellectualism; he also hates his brightest student because he knows too much. Enderby is the epitome of American notions about British elitist snobbery; and while these notions may be just as false as Burgess's opinion of Americans, they are, as fantasies reflecting actuality, much more damning.

The style of The Clockwork Testament should be familiar to all those who read A Clockwork Orange fast, sometimes elliptical, with a rich vocabulary and interesting experiments in portmanteau. But sometimes the prose, which includes filmscript-writing and traceries of stream of consciousness, becomes artificially lofty and burdensome. One chapter, a transcript of Enderby's appearance on the late-night Sperr Lansing Show, is a failed satire of the transcriber's inadequacy, with misspellings like ecommunionicle, kwelled, teetotal Aryan, and Alice in Windowland. And the final chapter, some sort of object-lesson conducted from the future by Educational Time Trips Inc. to teach children about the poet Enderby and about the beauty and squalor of New York and how it represents the human condition, is not only self-serving (it implies Burgess/Enderby will endure the test of time), but too obvious and forced.

Thankfully, Enderby dies quickly. If he is, as Burgess seems to imply, the embodiment of his imagination, then maybe Burgess will stop writing novels. Or perhaps Enderby will undergo some kind of reincarnation and reappear as a literary critic. His first task should then be to denounce the novel of his real-life counterpart, and --if The Clockwork Testament is any indication of Burgess's potential for the future--Enderby should advise Burgess to stop writing altogether