A GENRE REBORN

Ends and termini had everything to do with his writing. His major autobiographical surrogate was the rogue-hero E X. Enderby, who ends up in Enderby’s End. One of his grandest and most epic books was, titanically, called The End of the World News, a title well worth republishing now the millennium is truly coming to its end.

Over the years, the rolling postwar decades, Burgess produced well over sixty works, of almost every conceivable kind: from fiction to poetry, epic to fantasy, memoirs to criticism, screenplays (innumerable) to stageplays, operas to abstract musical compositions.

He wrote under pseudonyms (Enderby, Joseph Kell, John Wilson, etc.), once, notoriously, reviewing himself in another guise. His writing name was itself a pseudonym; his real name, as his various memoirs remind us, was John Anthony Burgess Wilson, the renegade Catholic boy and would-be composer from a poor section of Manchester.

His reviewing record alone was prodigious: an estimated 150,000 words a year. His hugely knowledgeable and cosmopolitan criticism — some of it, of Joyce for instance (Joysprick), of the very highest quality — fed his creative writing. There were novels about Shakespeare, Marlowe, Keats, Beethoven, screenplays on Shelley, Cyrano, Byron. There were the grandly epic tales — like Earthly Powers — where fictional figures cross over with many of the great (or demonic) figures of this or some other century. There was a “musical novel,” Napoleon Symphony, the Napoleon story played off against the Eroica; and a variety of other playful forms that reflected his interest not just in the great history of literatures but in language and linguistics-novels are cryptically called MF and ABBA ABBA.

As the years passed, and the books and other productions came in profusion, Burgess increasingly came to believe that his remorseless prodigality made him suspect with the British literary establishment. In fact, it admired him greatly, but never granted him a critical reputation that matched his own exiled sense of himself (he lived mostly abroad) — or the sense of admirers like myself. For Burgess was a fine trouper-performer; but he was also a writer’s writer. You felt he could always turn the next trick, invent the newest artistic tactic, come up with a plot in seconds, do anything. He was a polymath, a wildly avaricious reader, a true book-lover (one of his greatest disasters was the loss of part of his library, vindictively confiscated on Malta by that island’s ruler, Dom Mintoff).

He adored parody and pastiche. He was a master of all the forms, an experimenter with the genres — and the borders of the genres. Like some British-Catholic Harold Bloom, he believed in the grand canon, the great treasure-house of stories, as one of the greatest gifts of humanity, a grand display of the artistic encounter with life’s contradictions, as well as of innumerable ways in which tales can be recited, written, staged, danced, musicalized. It was a treasure-house, moral and aesthetic, to be revered, rerecorded, and plundered. The passion for telling and retelling, adapting and re-creating, deconstructing and reconstructing, was the driving force of his productive life.

It was not surprising that, when he died in 1993, he left behind not just a large canon of his own, but a complete new work, Byrne, a novel in verse now published posthumously (and one suspects there will be a good deal more before we are done). The few years following the death of an important author are often fallow ones; the living public presence is now absent, and the historical valuation has not yet come into play. I believe that valuation, for Burgess, will eventually be a high one. He wrote his way from the end-of- empire social comedies that invigorated British fiction in the 1950s to the most sweeping world themes.

The early novels about his Malayan experiences are still a pleasure, fulfillments of his typical theme: “comic novels about man’s tragic lot,” as he said. But his truly memorable works came later — when the great vats of storytelling were full, when his scale was epic and filmic. A Clockwork Orange (1962) is already a classic. But it’s Earthly Powers (1980) and The End of the World News (1982) that are likely to represent his imagiMalcolm Bradbury is a widely published British novelist and scholar nation — historical, fictive, moral, and metaphysical at its fullest.

What, then, of Byrne? Well, it’s another late work of substantial ambition, both in its narrative plot and its technique. It’s a strange black comedy dealing, wittily, wisely, and sometimes quite obscurely, with the chaos of the twentieth century in its two large stages: the era of Modernism and totalitarianism; and the postmodern era of irreligion, sexual randomness, gender revolution, triviality, racial admixture, terrorism, and multiculturalism. “Blasted Byrne” is a familiar Burgess type: an early twentieth-century Anglo-Irish artist and bigamist, a failed musician, and a wandering libertine. Always in sexual trouble, he grows up in Liverpool, writes music for the nascent film industry in London, runs off with a diva, lives in Nazi Germany, works with Goebbels, and allies his art to the Reich’s wartime cause, before disappearing obscurely abroad and into the postwar world, leaving various artistic and progenitive traces.

Meantime, in the contemporary world, his resentful twin progeny, Tim and Tom, live out very different, opposite lives. One is held into celibacy as a would-be Catholic priest, the other suffers from testicular cancer; both are childless. Around them, too, Burgess erects various extremities that aptly parody our own current history. A musical in the modern Lloyd Webber manner is made of Wells’s The Time Machine. A religious film company commissions a movie on the life of Calvin (but without executions). A conference in Venice on European languages is devoted to a conflict between the French and the Anglophones, each disputing who has inherited Latin. A Strasbourg conference on Euro-culture is attacked by Muslim terrorists who belatedly have issued a fatwa on Dante. The frank libertinism of Byrne’s life is transformed into feminist post-coitalism.

The tale has all Burgess’s prime themes: religion, sexuality, art, and the oppressive and often evil presence of history, in conflict with morality. It displays his well-known sense of cultural collapse, of random evil, and of metaphysical tragedy. It ends with a hint of lost dreams of art, a portrait of a dark and damaged world, a heart of darkness, and a final and metrical benediction:

Tim embraced Tom, embarking for Heathrow,

Smiling; Christmas-elated, somewhat sad too,

Blessing the filthy world. Someone had to.

Thus the rhyming and the story end. For, improbably, given the range of the material it covers, Byrne is another typical Burgess literary adventure, a crossover text: This is a novel told entirely in verse.

The verse-novel is a genre unusual now, but once perfectly familiar, taking us back to Homer. It predates the novel in prose, and is the real source of it. Today, though, we expect our novels to make themselves easily knowable through the common and public language of prose; meanwhile, poetry has privatized itself and forgone most of its ancient storytelling impulse in the interests of subjectivity, lyricism, and complex linguistic exploration. But Burgess’s experiment is typical of his sense of radical literary homage; he manages to remind us that the verse-novel is a form crucial to the history of storytelling, and entirely deserving of a contemporary re-creation.

Burgess turned to poetry often, producing major verse translations of Oedipus and Cyrano de Bergerac for stage and screen, and giving his Enderby a poetic oeuvre. Byrne himself is a familiar kind of Burgess hero, the rogue-artist who spans the modern century — but it is clearly no accident that his name is a near-anagram of the great Romantic poet Byron. For he is also

a kind of living myth

And hence deserving of ottava rima,

The scheme that Ariosto juggled with,

Apt for a lecherous defective dreamer.

He’d have preferred a stronger-muscled smith,

Anvilling rhymes amid poetic steam, a

Sort of Lord Byron. Byron was long dead.

This poetaster has to do instead.

The poetaster here — Burgess, of course, though again he hides behind a second identity, suggesting that he is yet another of Byrne’s many bastards — is thus ironically making a double claim. He has a modern literary-historical tale to tell. He is also laying claim to a form deserving of it, one that recuperates the methods of verse-storytelling. Not just verse, though, but the pervasive ottava rima, the jingle-jangling form of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and later of Byron’s Don Juan, which became one of the most successful and influential verse-novels of the Romantic age.

Ottava rima — as Burgess knew so well — has a very interesting history. It was much used by the medieval Italian poets: Boccaccio and Tasso as well as Ariosto. Then Wyatt and Spenser took it up, and Spenser anglicized it and turned it to a higher purpose, creating from it the “Spenserian stanza” he used for The Faerie Queene. (Burgess himself suitably turns to the Spenserian form for the soberest of the five “books” into which he has divided his own narrative.)

Byron explored both variants, employing the Spenserian stanza for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but reverting to ottava rima for Don Juan (1819-24). Don Juan was never finished; but even unfinished, Goethe called it “a work of boundless genius,” and so it was considered in its day. Apart from taking the great and familiar myth of the libertine hero who is dragged off to hell (a story Burgess plainly echoes here), Byron’s Don Juan proved ottava rima to be a form of working narrative verse open to a wide range of possibilities. He showed it as a loose, easy form, as flexible as prose, but demanding both constraint and constant rhythmic and creative ingenuity.

Don Juan opened up many of the possible voices of poetry; it could be lyric or jangling, epic or vernacular, heroic or mock-heroic and ironic. It could touch emotion and falsehood, transpose conversational dialogue, manage grand gesture and intimate feeling. It could freely display not just the hero but the poet, in all his virtuosity, irony, wit, and worldweariness. Don Juan was a key text in this history, marking the verse-novel’s revival in the European canon, and it quickly had powerful effect. Pushkin started Eugene Onegin under Byron’s influence; and that work, with its own easy stanzaics and rich sentiment, remains one of the great narratives of the nineteenth century, especially, as Nabokov insisted, if the non-Russian can read it in a great verse-translation (I recommend James E. Falen’s).

The success of such works challenged many of the Victorian poets, especially the two Brownings, to recuperate the verse-narrative as an important form. It was Elizabeth Barrett Browning who, in Aurora Leigh, attempted the task of telling an extended novel of suffering modern womanhood in verse. Mostly forgotten during this century as an odd curiosity, it has been revived by feminist critics and rightly put in the middle of Victorian literature, making the idea of the verse-novel interesting to us again.

Nonetheless, the problems that verse had in coping with the change in the nature of modern narrative — marked both by the great Modernist revolution of the prose novel and by the parallel revolution of verse forms — have made the verse-novel singularly hard to revive in our twentieth-century and postmodern times.

Even so, attempts have continued. A notable and brave example is Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, rightly hailed as a tour de force when it appeared in 1986. Seth consciously took on his late modernist difficulties. Telling a continuous, highly detailed, and often satirical story, he set the book around California’s Silicon Valley and put his verse to the test of acknowledging the new technologies (He thought of or-gates and of and-gates, / Of ROMS, of nor-gates, and of nand-gates, / Of nanoseconds, megabytes,/And bits and nibbles”). In History: The Home Movie (1994) — subtitled “A Novel in Verse” — the British poet Craig Raine tried differently, taking a sequence of interlinked lyric and often autobiographical poems to tell an epic narrative of European history from 1905 to (appropriately) 1984.

How does Burgess succeed? To my taste, amazingly well. Apart from a few slightly falsified notes at the end, he dispenses with any poetic grandeur or pretension and stakes his endeavor on the flexibility of ottava rima, the voice of the poetaster, and the joyous use of what he calls “oldfashioned rhyme.” As in Byron and Pushkin, a wonderful wit is released by sheer skill at rhyming:

The Irish are peculiar, no doubt:

They prefer drink to women, Nightly splurges

On whiskey, pints of plain or creaming stout

Serve to inhibit their erotic urges.

Seed-spending’s peccative, but seed will out,

As Dr Kettle said. The Irish clergy’s

At one with booze in locking semen in, Though holy wedlock will annul the sin.

So the form, in Burgess’s hand, yields easily: to dialogue, social reportage and observation, the flavor and discourse of the contemporary scene (“You’re seeing Tom?” asked Brian. “Yes, D. V. / Venice, tomorrow.” “Venice? Lucky you. “). The chatter of couples in restaurants, the speeches of conferences and congresses, the demands of modern dialogue, opening up to the sound of multiple voices (Japanese, French, American), the depiction of movies and musicals, the evocation of the spirit of Nazism (Carl Orff assumed that Byrne would come a cropper, a / Jew who presumed to write a German opera): Everything the novel inside the poem needs to have is caught.

So, Burgess completely justifies the enterprise. The genre he chooses for recuperation entirely matches his theme, and the clear echoes of Don Juan properly match the subject. Far from being a constraint, the generic debt opens out the meaning, for this is a story about how art tries to emerge from dross and soiled history, and how our own times, taking the art of the past as a theme- park, cannibalize and pervert tales and forms made for grander ends.

Byrne’s own final testament — which is told in five concluding sonnets, to be recited, he says, by Sir John Gielgud — tells a tale of the great seasons of art, from the medieval and pastoral to the classical and rational, and so on to our own soiled and vulgarizing age. Yet something sings through it all, a chaotic artistic search for the greater music of the spheres.

By taking a form that imprints the history of earlier cultures onto a modern theme, Burgess in his posthumous book both mourns and masters his material, and writes his own last testament. He has written final testaments before, ends to his Enderbys. But this last throw gives us a Burgess to remember, and admire.

By Malcolm Bradbury; Malcolm Bradbury is a widely published British novelist and scholar Anthony Burgess and the Novel in Verse