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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
'The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manqué: I make no other pretensions …' Anthony Burgess Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously prolific journalist. During his life he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man's Chorus, was published in 1998. These collections are now out of print, and Burgess's journalism, a key part of his prodigious output, has fallen into neglect. The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of his reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable. Editor Will Carr presents a wealth of unpublished and uncollected material.
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The Ink Trade
Selected Journalism 1961–1993
ANTHONY BURGESS
edited by
WILL CARR
Contents
Introduction
ANTHONY BURGESS’S newspaper career was a long one, and began when he was twelve years old. A drawing in the Manchester Guardian on 21 November 1929 by John Burgess Wilson (as he then was) of 261 Moss Lane East, Manchester was a winning entry in the Christmas ‘Fathers and Mothers’ competition, and depicted his father Joseph Wilson sleeping in his armchair next to a bottle of whisky and a pipe. Poems in Electron – the school magazine of Xaverian College, Rusholme – followed; and his earliest book and theatre reviews were written while studying English literature at the University of Manchester between 1937 and 1940, where they appeared in Serpent, the student newspaper.
Burgess was conscripted into the army in December 1940 and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and as musical director of a dance band. He was eventually posted to Gibraltar in 1943, where as well as his work as a teacher in the Royal Army Educational Corps he reviewed films for the Gibraltar Chronicle until his demobilisation in 1946. After shuttling between unfulfilling teaching jobs in England, Burgess and his first wife Lynne lived in Malaya and Brunei between 1954 and 1959 where he taught for the British Colonial Service, and it was then that he began to publish his first fiction. His career as a journalist began to flourish once again after they had returned to England and Burgess became a full-time writer.
From 1960 Burgess contributed regular articles to Country Life and the Listener, as well as anonymous reviews to the Times Literary Supplement. This work took place alongside the task of writing novels: by 1962, Burgess had published ten, including The Malayan Trilogy, The Right to an Answer, The Doctor Is Sick, The Worm and the Ring, Devil of a State, One Hand Clapping, The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange.
From May 1963 Burgess was also the fiction critic of the Yorkshire Post, writing a fortnightly column on new novels. He had joined the paper in 1961, and in his time there contributed more than sixty articles about several hundred different books. One morning a book called Inside Mister Enderby by Joseph Kell appeared on the doormat of his house in Etchingham along with the regular parcel of five or six that Burgess was called upon to review, and he led with a not entirely positive notice of it in his next article. As quickly became apparent, Inside Mister Enderby was in fact by Anthony Burgess himself, writing under a pseudonym, and his mischievous review of it in retrospect could have been judged as a private joke invisible to all except Burgess’s publishers. However, his subterfuge was discovered and reported in the diary column of the Daily Mail, and the Yorkshire Post promptly sacked him.
It does not seem that Burgess’s review of himself was the product of arrogant hubris. In the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, he makes clear that he was under the impression that the books editor at the Yorkshire Post, Kenneth Young, was in on the joke as Burgess had warned him earlier that year that a pseudonymous novel was about to appear; indeed, Burgess had already been revealed as the author of Inside Mister Enderby a month before in a review in the Daily Telegraph, so his cover had long since been blown. The remarks he makes about Inside Mister Enderby, reprinted here as the first review, ‘Poetry for a Tiny Room’, are in any case hardly very complimentary about the qualities of the novel. Gore Vidal remarked at the time that the response of the Yorkshire Post was somewhat humourless: ‘at least, he is the first novelist in England to know that a reviewer has actually read the book under review’. Burgess later retold the story many times, as did others; a version appears in the final piece in this book, ‘Confessions of the Hack Trade’.
This notorious sacking was not the end of his journalistic career, of course. Dismissal from the Yorkshire Post did nothing to slow his prodigious output. Continuing his association with the Listener, he became its television critic; he continued to review books and write commentaries for the Times Literary Supplement; he began to contribute reviews to the Guardian from 1964, and later for the Observer, for which publication he wrote almost continuously until the end of his life. He became the theatre critic of the Spectator in 1965, and broadened his remit to include book reviews for that publication as well. He wrote for the Hudson Review, Encounter, American Scholar, the Times, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
Burgess’s literary stature increased throughout the 1960s, with his journalistic writing taking place alongside the production of more novels (The Eve of St. Venus, Nothing Like the Sun, Tremor of Intent, Enderby Outside) and, increasingly, commissioned screenplays (some original, some based on his own novels, none of which went into production). His first television appearance was on the BBC in 1962, and he contributed to many radio programmes, including Woman’s Hour, Children’s Hour and The World of Books; his Desert Island Discs interview was broadcast on 28 November 1966. Burgess was perhaps one of the first writers to embrace television and radio as a way of establishing a public persona and communicating his ideas to a mass audience, and he would continue his media activities for many years to come.
As his reputation grew, and especially after the adaptation of his novel A Clockwork Orange into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, Burgess’s journalistic activities expanded still further as he defended his book on air and in print. As well as producing many pieces of writing about youth culture and violence, he commentated on almost all aspects of contemporary culture for publications across the world, including Rolling Stone, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, Playboy, El País and many more. The breadth of the subjects that he covered was astonishing, going far beyond his areas of immediate knowledge and expertise to include writing about food, anthropology, jazz, the evils of taxation, architecture, feminism, Islam, and whatever else was demanded by the editor of the day. His greatest loyalty was perhaps to the Observer (‘my paper’, as he called it), to which he contributed more articles than to any other single publication – but Burgess would write for almost anyone, about almost anything.
This makes Burgess’s journalism sound like the worst kind of hack work, knocked off quickly and clumsily for the money. Some of his pieces on more populist subjects, such as pieces on the royal family, the Moors Murderers or football hooliganism for the Daily Mail, on first reading seem slighter than his writing about literature – but even here there are references to Shakespeare, Beethoven and Catholic theology that make the approaches taken entirely distinctive. It seems clear that Burgess’s ability to write high-quality copy for many different readerships, while always combining sober judgment with a characteristic style and flair, contributed to the unending demand for his work from newspapers.
Nonetheless, Burgess was often anxious not to contradict the impression that his journalism was merely the work of a pen for hire. He made many claims that reviewing and other journalistic writing were subliterary activities and a distraction from the real business of writing novels; but how seriously to take these claims is not always clear, especially when they themselves are contained in articles for the newspapers. In a 1973 ‘Viewpoint’ column for the Times Literary Supplement Burgess complains at length about the injustices visited upon journalists – non-payment of fees by villainous editors, last-minute spikings of copy innocently sweated over by the naïve and luckless writer – and finishes by saying:
I quit now, while I’m still enjoying it. No more ‘Viewpoint’ from me. […] If one happens to be a novelist, one has really very little to give in the way of ideas, new literary theories, scholarly assessments […] The business of being a novelist entails the shedding of intellectuality, the ability to think in general terms, even the capacity to read anything but proofs. The alternative to indulging in literary expatiation is grunting about the woes of the professional writer or feeling compelled, as I do more and more these days, to engage in long public acts of self-defence or renewed recrimination.
While Burgess did abandon this particular column (though not the Times Literary Supplement altogether, for whom he continued to write for another twenty years), it is by no means clear that he really believed much of this. By 1973 he had completed seventeen novels and three works of literary criticism (as well as working on film scripts, music, translations and many other creative activities) so it was not as if he had been completely distracted by his writing for periodicals. Further, his journalistic writing, especially that directly concerned one way or another with literature, offered him space to reflect on his own practice, to explore new areas of fiction and culture, to check out the competition, and to develop his theories of the novel itself. Especially after 1968, when he left England for good to live variously in Malta, Italy and ultimately Monaco, journalism and the mass media more generally seems to have offered Burgess the opportunity to participate in contemporary literary and artistic culture in England and the United States that his self-imposed physical exile otherwise denied him.
It is also clear that Burgess’s journalism lies behind many of his book projects, and is reworked into his more permanent statements about literature. His extensive reviewing and literary commentaries certainly laid the foundations for his surveys The Novel Now (1967) and Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984), and there were also substantial non-fiction works on D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Clive James, replying to Burgess’s anti-journalism claims in his book The Metropolitan Critic (1974), remarks that ‘if Burgess’s literary journalism was meant to be such an inherently inferior activity he might have done us the grace of being worse at it, so that we could have saved the money it cost to buy Urgent Copy and the time it took to enjoy it.’
Urgent Copy (1968) was the first collection of Burgess’s journalism to be published in his lifetime, and is the model for this new selection insofar as its focus is squarely on substantial literary studies of his contemporaries and predecessors. It remains a fascinating entry point to his literary preoccupations during the first extremely productive part of his career. In the introduction to Urgent Copy, Burgess is mildly and unconvincingly apologetic that these commissioned and apparently relatively insubstantial pieces have been captured in book form, and expresses an anxiety that he has been rather too kind to some of the writers whom he has commented on. This is evidently due to sympathy:
Book-writing is hard on the brain and excruciating to the body. It engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence. Behind the new bad book one is asked to review lie untold miseries and very little hope.
It is true that Burgess would often look for the positive in making his judgments, but he could also be very direct. Many writers receive stern appraisal, and there are some examples in this new selection; but these appraisals are not made in the service of scoring cheap points. Any disappointment felt at a shortcoming of a new work is genuinely felt. The main feeling that Burgess’s literary studies engender is a sense of excitement at meeting new writing, devouring it greedily and presenting an invitation to his readers to experience it too.
Burgess’s second collection of journalism is Homage to QWERT YUIOP (1986), which is a huge selection of pieces written between 1978 and 1985 taken from the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times and the Observer. There are nearly three hundred essays, which Burgess estimates in his introduction to represent approximately a third of his total output in this period. His total output of journalism, at least: novels published during this period included Earthly Powers, Abba Abba, The Pianoplayers, and several more. Rather more wide-ranging than Urgent Copy, Homage to QWERT YUIOP includes – as well as a large volume of book reviews – essays on the world of the cinema, critical assessments of particular authors, and pieces on linguistics and music. This new selection aims to represent at least some of these preoccupations.
By the time of Homage to QWERT YUIOP Burgess no longer pretended to undervalue his literary journalism, writing that:
I do not mind doing this work; indeed, I enjoy it. It is a means of keeping in touch with a public that does not necessarily read my or anybody else’s fiction. The reading and reviewing of books keeps my mind open to fresh ideas in both literary creation and criticism. And the need to keep within the limit of a thousand words or so is, as with the composing of a sonnet, an admirable formal discipline.
AS HIS vast output shows, Burgess was disciplined, formidably so, and this quality was of immense value to literary editors: he could be relied upon time and again to produce a lively and critically acute reading of a new book, to length and to deadline. Burgess was fond of emphasising the authentic labour inherent in writing. In Urgent Copy he compares himself to a carpenter, for example, making a table or cupboard of a specified size as quickly as is consistent with efficiency; and the title of Homage to QWERT YUIOP refers to Burgess’s main tool as a novelist and journalist, the manual typewriter. ‘When you hear your own clatter you know you are at work, as a blacksmith is. More, the rest of the household knows you are at work and does not suspect you of covertly devouring a Playboy centrefold.’ The title of the present volume is in this mode, reflecting Burgess’s own sense of himself as a worker engaged in honest and blameless industry.
A third selection of Burgess’s journalism was made after his death by Ben Forkner and Burgess’s widow Liana. One Man’s Chorus (1998) captures some of Burgess’s range, with a sample of his travel writings and reflections on contemporary world events; there are also pieces marking anniversaries of particular writers and musicians, and again a selection of literary studies. Taken together, the three books of Burgess’s journalism reveal but a fraction of the enormous and largely invisible whole, and it is a great sadness that all of these selections are now out of print. As part of the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, a major series published by Manchester University Press, it is likely that a critical edition of Urgent Copy will be made available in the coming years, and this will be welcomed by a new generation of readers: Burgess’s journalism is both an important document of the twentieth century in its own right, and critical to a full appreciation of his fiction and other creative work.
The Ink Trade brings into view a number (albeit a relatively small number) of Burgess’s works that have not been seen since their first publication, or which have never been published in any form before. The definition of ‘journalism’ has been stretched slightly to include pieces given as talks or lectures and written up for publication, but which have for one reason or another never appeared; the main body of the selection is taken from periodicals, some of which will have had only very small readerships. The essays span Burgess’s entire journalistic career, from an example of his fiction reviewing for the Yorkshire Post to his more expansive work for the Observer at the end of his life. Rather than grouping the articles by theme, as was attempted to an extent in Urgent Copy and Homage to QWERT YUIOP, the arrangement is almost completely chronological, with a minor adjustment at the very beginning and end to enable the selection to start with Burgess’s ill-starred review of his own book, and to conclude with a reflection on his own journalistic practice many years later.
Readers will find that themes emerge in any case as the book progresses: certain names reappear, occasionally unexpectedly, as do certain preoccupations. There is a sustained engagement with language and how it is used, especially in the pieces on slang and translation. There is an anxiety about television and the mass media, balanced by a fascination with cinema. The business of writing, and how it interacts with literature itself, is often there; popular fiction sometimes gets a kicking, though not necessarily just because of its popularity. Obscenity; Irishness; American culture; European identity; the question of what a novel actually is: all these questions and many more are wrestled with in different ways as Burgess confronts a new subject. At times the list of his subjects reads like a roll-call of an Anglocentric canon of literature – and it may in fact be that Burgess’s journalism and other critical writings have contributed more to the creation of that canon than has previously been acknowledged. Always in place are Burgess’s touchstones of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Ford Madox Ford and others, who are invoked in surprising contexts, both to offer insights into the importance of a particular set of ideas or a particular piece of writing, and to articulate something about Burgess’s own artistic work.
The most important figure to loom behind this selection, and perhaps behind all of Burgess’s writing, is that of James Joyce. Burgess’s early experiences of reading Joyce as a schoolboy were so profound that they shaped his later output in fundamental ways, and his engagement with Joyce and his works became the main artistic challenge of his life. Joyce appears in these pieces as one who opened up the possibilities of modern fiction, but also as a monitory presence whose Ulysses casts a shadow over the century. ‘Joyce as Novelist’, published here for the first time, presents a detailed and extended personal account, late in life, of the ways in which Burgess measured himself against his great inspiration.
Where available, full bibliographical details of each piece are provided as footnotes to the main text. The titles of the pieces are those used when they were first published, or, where there has been no previous publication, are taken directly from the manuscripts. In Homage to QWERT YUIOP Burgess changed a number of the titles from the published texts to his own original preferred titles, but in the interest of assisting possible future bibliographers this practice has not been followed here. On a very few occasions no title has been provided either by the author or anyone else, and for ease of reference a title has been invented using a brief phrase from the piece itself – this has been clearly noted throughout. Undated pieces have been assigned a place in the volume based on internal evidence, and this again has been noted.
Editorial intervention has been kept to a minimum, especially as a number of these pieces have already been edited by others before publication by a newspaper or journal. Where a published version of an article exists, this is the version preferred; previously unpublished pieces take the text from the typescript. Like the typescripts of his novels, Burgess’s typescripts of his journalism are largely free of corrections, with the text being presented clearly and unambiguously: in this respect the editor’s role has been a straightforward one, and Burgess’s copy has been left as it is. However, minor spelling errors have been silently corrected, and instances of repetition have in a few cases been deleted. Like most journalists, Burgess was not above reusing material on occasion, particularly for publications in different countries – though given the volume of what he produced it is surprising that there is not far more of it, accidental or deliberate.
There are of course some gaps in this selection. There are no pieces specifically about music, yet Burgess’s journalism about composers and musicians could easily fill another volume. It would be a hugely valuable volume too, giving greater understanding of Burgess’s own musical writing and how it relates to his literary output. Similarly, there is little directly about religion, and material drawn from Burgess’s writings on this subject would provide new angles on an important concern of his fiction, quite apart from being a fascinating collection in its own right. While television appears from time to time in these pieces, there is none of Burgess’s television criticism proper here: a shame, or perhaps an opportunity for another project, as his Listener reviews from the 1960s constitute an intriguing and illuminating document of a particular cultural moment. Looking beyond newspaper reviews and criticism, there is of course a wealth of print and broadcast interviews, documentaries, radio programmes and much more which remains uncollected. There is no complete catalogue – while Paul Boytinck’s bibliography remains a monumental achievement and a vital resource, it does not cover all the periodicals for which Burgess wrote, and ends in 1982 – and despite the recent renewal of scholarly interest in Burgess’s life and work it is unlikely that one will be created in the immediate future. Given the scale and challenges of the task, a collection of complete journalism remains a distant prospect.
The potential value of such a collection is not in doubt, especially in the interest of reappraising Burgess’s wider contribution to twentieth-century fiction. Indeed, many of Burgess’s essays connect directly to the materials and preoccupations of his novels. The title of the present selection is in fact taken from the piece ‘By-products of the ink trade’, reprinted here, which is a review of the fifth series of the Paris Review interviews with leading writers. In Burgess’s own wide-ranging 1972 interview with the Paris Review he describes the benefits of book-reviewing to a novel-writer:
It’s good for a writer to review books he is not supposed to know anything about or be interested in. Doing reviewing for magazines like Country Life (which smells more of horses than of calfskin bindings) means doing a fine heterogenous batch which often does open up some areas of value in one’s creative work. For instance, I had to review books on stable management, embroidery, car engines – very useful solid stuff, the very stuff of novels. Reviewing Lévi-Strauss’s little lecture on anthropology (which nobody else wanted to review) was the beginning of the process which led me to write the novel MF.
Quite apart from the idea that reviewing books and writing about them presents useful ways of finding out about the world, the example given here shows a way in which the novels and the journalism directly interact. Burgess’s positive review of The Scope of Anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss appeared in 1967, and was later collected in Urgent Copy as ‘If Oedipus Had Read His Lévi-Strauss’. The approaches to mythology and linguistics ultimately outlined in Lévi-Strauss were already of interest to Burgess, as can be seen in his 1963 piece ‘The Corruption of the Exotic’, collected here, and in the novel MF (1970), which Burgess would later describe as one of his favourites. Similarly concerned with linguistics and anthropology, Burgess’s 1965 essay ‘Word, World and Meaning’ appeared first in the Times Literary Supplement, reappeared in Urgent Copy and then is presented as a lecture delivered by a character in the 1980 novel Earthly Powers. Other examples of journalism and novel-writing overlapping in surprising ways include Burgess’s writing about translation, which illuminates his novel Abba Abba about the Roman poet Belli; or his essay on Shakespeare ‘Getting the Language Right’, again reprinted here, which offers an understanding of his use of Elizabethan language in Nothing Like The Sun; or ‘The Anachronist Strikes Back’, which articulates his technique in writing the historical novel The Kingdom of the Wicked.
Because of the many different forms in which Burgess worked – fiction, poetry, film scripts, classical music, as well as journalism – he is often described as a polymath, excelling in disparate fields. However, this does not fully capture the way in which different types of artistic production are closely linked in his work: books such as The Pianoplayers combine prose, song lyrics and sheet music; lectures (such as ‘Can Art Be Immoral?’, a previously unpublished piece that is collected here) contain verse; narratives are driven using stage musicals or comic songs, such as in End Of The World News or Napoleon Symphony. Journalistic forms are used in the same way: fictions are paired with lengthy critical essays, such as in A Dead Man in Deptford, and dialogue is turned into an interview in 1985. These techniques again show the ways in which Burgess’s journalistic writing is very much part of his creative process.
Altogether it is clear that Burgess’s journalism operates not least as a way of working through ideas and approaches that also emerge in novels and other works. Bringing some of Burgess’s journalism back into view in this selection will offer new perspectives on his literary career. It is hoped too that this selection will have an appeal beyond students and researchers, and have something to offer to a new generation coming to Burgess for the first time: a disparate general readership, surprised and delighted to find writing of such quality and interest in the unpromising surroundings of newsprint. In recent years Burgess’s journalism has fallen into neglect. The Ink Trade provides a way in to this vast storehouse, and demonstrates that it can be as rewarding as the best of his novels.
Acknowledgments
ANTHONY BURGESS’S journalism is scattered around the world, and working with it would be impossible without the support of very many people. I would like to acknowledge in particular the Trustees of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, whose archives in Manchester have provided the bulk of the material in this book; I would also like to acknowledge L’Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine in Caen and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, both of which house important Burgess collections.
I would also like to thank Harry Gallon, who has done an excellent job of transcribing these articles into a usable form; and Michael Schmidt and Luke Allan at Carcanet Press for taking the project through to its conclusion. My colleagues at the Burgess Foundation have assisted me a great deal: Amelia Collingwood has provided valuable technical assistance, Anna Edwards has aided me many times in navigating the complex Anthony Burgess archives, and Graham Foster has always provided valuable advice and help of all kinds. I would especially like to thank Andrew Biswell, whose knowledge of Burgess’s life and work, and especially of his journalism, is unrivalled, and for whose generosity and encouragement I am extremely grateful.
Poetry for a Tiny Room
JOSEPH KELL’S first novel One Hand Clapping was a quiet and cunning female monologue that fell from the presses almost unnoticed.
One Australian periodical acclaimed its virtues in a two-page review that, giving a thorough synopsis of the plot, must have made purchase of the book seem supererogatory. For the rest, reviewers had other things to think about. That little book now thinly stalks the bookstalls as a paperback, its bright eyes quietly watching the reception of its successor.
Whatever readers may think of the content of Inside Mister Enderby, they are hardly likely to ignore the cover. This shows a lavatory seat (wood, not plastic), entwined with ivy. It is Mr Enderby’s lavatory seat, wherefrom he blasts his poetry at the world. (Mr Eliot said recently – and in the Yorkshire Post too – that poetry is a lavatorial or purgative art.)
If the world takes no notice, Mr Enderby will not worry. He has rejected the world: he has retreated to the smallest room in the house; there, scratching bared knees, he writes the verse that his Muse dictates to him.
But the world will not leave him alone altogether. It drags him out of his lavatory to receive a poetry prize and a proposal of marriage from Vesta Bainbridge, a chic vision from a woman’s magazine. Soon, Enderby is on his honeymoon in Rome. The eternal city is the antithesis of the toilet: here is the Church, here is the State, here, in lapidary form well-preserved, is the meanest history known to man. Here, too, is treachery, for Rawcliffe, a jealous fellow-poet, has stolen a poetic plot from Enderby and persuaded Cinecittà to turn it into a bosomy horror film. Enderby, appalled, flees.
But his Muse flees also. He can no longer write. He attempts – unhandily, as with everything except his craft – a suicide which the State tut-tuts over. He is turned into a useful citizen, normal and unpoetic. There is a middle way between greatest Rome and smallest room – the way of the decent job and the decent life. Enderby is cured.
This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygmus, emetic meals (‘thin but over-savoury stews’, Enderby calls them) and halitosis. It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.
It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock.
Yorkshire Post, 16 May 1963 Review of Inside Mister Enderby by Joseph Kell [pseudonym of Anthony Burgess] (London: William Heinemann, 1963)
Spring’s Fruits in Autumn
SALLOW AUTUMN fills our laps with leaves, folios rather. Heavy fruits (Sillitoe, Aragon, Barth; Uris to come next week) drop in the silent autumn night. Season of lists, etc.
Paradoxically a transatlantic gust comes smelling of spring and one’s (meaning my) youth when all literature was exciting and none more so than the work of the prose experimenters – Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, John Dos Passos.
Dos Passos’s trilogy USA once haunted me like a passion. It is a measure not so much of one’s own approaching autumn as of the way in which Dos Passos has been absorbed by a whole generation of writers (Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg, etc.) that the spring thrill is a mere ghost in Midcentury. Here you will find all the techniques of 1919 and The Big Money – potted biographies (Freud, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Dean), newsreels with headline-montages, italicised prose-lyrics, slabs of bald narrative, typography having a field-day. But you will also find no change in the story-line – there is still the Marxist dichotomy, the worker’s fight.
Blackie Bowman, Terry Bryant, Frank Worthington emerge from the Second World War to resume the patterns of their 1919 prototypes. They copulate, earn, brawl, are bewildered by the big world of headlines, but they remain faceless, charade or morality figures, grim in the face of the capitalist villains.
It is old drama in new costumes, and the Dos Passos techniques seem only viable for that, incapable of development. They sprang to life fully armed in the early days, cognate with the gimmicks of expressionist playwrights like Toller and Georg Kaiser. Gimmicks soon look old-fashioned. It is embarrassing when one has to use the glass of ‘historical perspective’ to read what the cover calls ‘a novel of our time’.
The other breath of spring and youth blows in with Anita Loos, already a classic, a writer whom one would describe – if it did not sound pretentious – as one of the minor shapers of the modern sensibility. No Mother To Guide Her is as sharp and digestible as a good asti spumante: Hollywood-in-its-heyday has never been so well lampooned. Bliss (a columnist of amazing innocence, worshipper and knight of the sadly set-upon star Viola Lake), a character to compare (the only one I can think of) with the shamefully neglected Augustus Carp, is just that. Bliss, I mean.
Key to the Door is Alan Sillitoe’s attempt at a big Bildungsroman – the first 21 years of a new Seaton (Brian not Arthur), shuttling between depressed pre-war life in Nottingham and disaffected RAF other-rank down-with-the-bleddy-boggers grousing in Malaya. The Nottingham parts (boozing, swearing, courtship, marriage) we have already met in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in its way a seminal work. Mr Sillitoe writes vividly and aromatically of proletarian life, though one becomes a little tired of the self-pity.
The Malayan sections chilled me. Young Brian seems to grouse through a dripping and frightening jungle-and-mountain-scape completely without (if we except his grousing mates) human figures. We hear of Malayans, and wonder which of the Malayan races he means. Occasionally a Malay, clad for some reason in a sari, glides through. There is an unconvincing Chinese dance-hostess and ‘keep’ called Mimi. It is the complete lack of concern or even minimal interest in people other than the ingrown group of working-lads that appals.
But one is also appalled morally. Brian cannot see the Chinese Communists as enemies. His failure to kill off a terrorist who eventually snipes at his own mate meets no condemnation. The political naivety of the book is incredible. But to be just, there is life and a certain poetry: nobody is going to doubt Mr Sillitoe’s talent. He needs more than talent now: he needs to grow up.
‘She was like a picture that one sees in an art gallery that makes you feel sad because it is painted.’ V.S. Pritchett has lost nothing of the image-maker’s gift, nor that micrometrically delicate ear for the fall of speech of ordinary people. Yet I was not always happy with this volume of short stories, When My Girl Comes Home. The titlepiece is 73 pages long, and feels like it. It is the minor characters (Jack Draper, for instance, to whom war itself is the enemy, so that he lumps the combatants of both sides together) who carry more life than the major.
There is a certain flatness and plotlessness not normally associated with this brilliant writer: the expected seems to happen a little too often. Too often, too, one cannot really care about what happens to the characters: our sympathies are not engaged. But there is so much to be thankful for – keen observation, exact notation of contemporary manners, and always that marvellous ear.
The Sot-Weed Factor is a good title, even if it only means ‘The Tobacco-Estate Manager’. This immensely long novel is a pastiche of old-time picaresque, in an honourable and best-selling American tradition, telling of an obdurately virginal poet, Eben Cooke (‘virgo’ being male in medieval Latinity) and his exploits at sea and in the New World. It owes everything to the episodic booze-and-bawdry boys, and is none the worse for that. It must have been great (though laborious) fun to write.
Yorkshire Post, 19 October 1961. Reviews of:
Midcentury by John Dos Passos (London: André Deutsch, 1961);
No Mother To Guide Her by Anita Loos (London: Arthur Barker, 1961);
Key to the Door by Alan Sillitoe (London: W.H. Allen, 1961);
When My Girl Comes Home by V.S. Pritchett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961);
and The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961)
The Corruption of the Exotic
MY FIRST attempts at writing fiction were made in response to an exotic stimulus, and I have often wondered since whether this was right. I was living in Malaya in 1955, working for the Government and, in my spare time, carrying on with what I thought was my true artistic vocation – the composing of music. One morning I woke to hear the muezzin calling – ‘There is no God but Allah’ – and, as often happens when one first wakes, to find the names of my creditors parading through my mind, together with what I owed them. Something like this:
La ilaha illa’la
Lim Kean Swee $395
Chee Sin Hye $120
Tan Meng Kwang $250
La ilaha illa’la
And so on. Here obviously was the beginning of a novel: a man lying in bed in the Malayan dawn, listening to the muezzin calling, worrying about his debts. So, out of this little collage, I began to write, with suspicious ease, my first published work of fiction.
The collage started things off; it helped to establish a rhythm and also a technique of juxtaposition. I found a line from Clough which pleased me: ‘Allah is great, no doubt, and juxtaposition his prophet’. Juxtaposition of races and cultures was the underground stimulus, the thing that wanted to be expressed. I really wrote this novel, and the two that followed, because I wanted to record Malaya. In other words, my motive for starting to write fiction was an impure one. One should always be inspired by an aesthetic impulse and not by subject-matter which is intrinsically strange, fresh, and glamorous.
It is significant that the novels I wrote about the East and Africa sold far better than anything I wrote about England in the past, present, or future. The novel of impure motive always sells best – the book that pretends to be didactic about sex or violence but is really pornographic; the book that is really didactic when it pretends to be merely entertaining; the book that tells of something strange instead of doing something strange. People want to be moved or instructed; they rarely want that static thing that is art.
The exotic, then, is a dangerous and corrupting thing for the novelist to write about. Bemused by its glamour, he will too often think he is writing better than he is. If it is one of the novelist’s tasks to glorify the commonplace, in the exotic novel the commonplace is already half-glorified for him; he gains credit from his reader’s ignorance. A novel may open like this: ‘I was drinking a bottle of flat and gassy light ale in a dingy little pub off Cross Street, Manchester. The rain was pelting down outside’. Any self-respecting novelist would want to regard that as a mere first draft; he would want to work some strangeness into it, to infuse that bit of shock which is essential to art. But supposing the novel opens like this: ‘I was drinking a bottle of samsu in a kedai off Jalan Sultan in Kuala Kangsar. The Sun’ – or, if you like, the monsoon – ‘was raging down outside’. Any attempt at rewriting would be regarded as supererogatory; the shock of glamour and strangeness resides in the subject-matter itself. This is dangerous and corrupting.
One wonders sometimes about the ‘exotic’ novels of the great established novelists. My favourite book of D.H. Lawrence used to be Kangaroo, but I am pretty sure I liked it for the wrong reasons. First, the tour de force: Lawrence seems to have created a whole continent out of a few scraps of Australiana picked up on a two-day visit to Sydney. One admires the magic, but the magic is irrelevant to the book – the artist’s, or his biographer’s, affair. Second, the fascination of juxtaposition: blue-eyed cockneys in a world of marsupials. Yet as a book it is a mess: ill-written, full of interpolated matter from newspapers, the endless Lawrence-Frieda struggle, a political gestation flown over from Fascist Italy, all mixed up anyhow. The setting saves it: Australia is doing most of Lawrence’s work for him. The Plumed Serpent is similarly saved by Mexico and that eponymous Quetzlcoatl. I do not think many would doubt that Lawrence’s best novel is Sons and Lovers, where the writer, or his daemon, has to work hard, infusing the magic of myth into the commonplace. His later, sicker work leans too hard on exotic props.
For lesser writers like myself, the most dangerous temptation of all when writing about the exotic is to trade on the reader’s ignorance and to falsify. Everything one observes – the Tamil workers drinking toddy, the snakes among the canna leaves, the jungle orchids – is unknown to the average sweet-stay-at-home reader. One is taking a faithful photograph for his benefit. No, not a photograph: that is the job of the travel-book writer. One is painting a faithful picture in full colour. Why, if the reader is so ignorant, should not one go a stage further than faithful reproduction, introduce imaginary colours? The next stage is the introduction of imaginary flora and fauna and imaginary tribal customs. It becomes easier sometimes to invent than to copy. Transfiguration leads to lies.
I return to that word ‘juxtaposition’. One of the most difficult problems that faces the artist in any medium is the problem of presenting transition. A character is good and becomes bad; a character is ignorant and becomes enlightened. When does the change take place, where does the watershed start? It is rarely possible to point to the moment of initial transformation in real life, and art should, in this connection, imitate life. St Paul’s sudden conversion, when he sees that he may no longer kick against the pricks, is miraculous or traumatic – a stroke, a fit. It is apt for religious, but not for secular, drama. God may do these things but an artist not. But a writer on life in the tropics is apt to bring about godlike transformations. He will pretend that Malays or Chinese or Indians are different from Anglo-Saxons and are capable of sudden changes of personality. He will juxtapose a ‘before’ state and an ‘after’ state; he will justify his unwillingness or incompetence to present subtle transition by saying, in effect, that there is a great gap between the Eastern and Western psyches. We are back to Elizabethan travel-tales and men who have three heads and a foot as big as a tea-tray. Allah is great and juxtaposition his prophet.
The Russians, as well as the peoples of the Far East, are a godsend to the novelist who is poor on psychological transition. For the Russians are well-known to be all manic-depressives – up one minute and down the next. It is delightfully easy to portray Russian characters: knives followed by kisses; sudden drunkenness, sudden sobriety; war and peace. But serious English readers of English novelists writing about Russians have a vast Russian literature available for checking-up purposes. The Russians are, alas, not quite exotic enough. It is best to stick to Eastern peoples, who have attempted few self-portraits. They will not betray the British novelists whose inability to present consistency in character or probability of motivation or action is blandly explained away by the magic words ‘a different world’; ‘an exotic world’.
For the honest writer about this world, however, there are definite problems of communication. How much should one explain, how much dare one take for granted, when writing about Malaya or Africa for a home-keeping audience? Should one explain that Sikhs do not smoke, that Chinese women get together in lesbian sororities, that Malays regard the head as sacred? I think not. It is the job of the travel-book to explain; it is the job of the novelist to take what he is given and use it honestly and without apology or surprise. You do not want footnotes in a novel. But I have been hurt at the incredulity of critics, especially when I have been recording fact or personal experience in an exotic novel. In my first book, Time for a Tiger, I made my four main characters, one of them a woman, go on a pleasure trip through country infested with communist terrorists. At the time when the novel was set, one did this sort of thing often. It was perhaps foolish, but one had to take the chance. One went on an amateur anthropological excursion or to the cinema in a town fifty miles away, and if one were sniped at or found an ambushing log laid on the road, it was fate; one could not live for ever. Some critics said that nobody would ever do this, that this sort of improbability marred the novel. On the other hand, I was taken to task for pretending that Muslims drink brandy. This, I was told, was never done. Reviewers are good at ignorance and half-knowledge. They are also good at confusing the improbable with the inadvisable. I am a reviewer myself.
The subject-matter of all novels is people, and how they affect other people. The mise en scène is a matter of indifference; travel and residence abroad persuade me that people are not very different from each other. A novelist who sets his novel in foreign parts ought, I think, to write the sort of novel that – all things being equal – a native novelist of those parts might write, at least as far as the background is concerned. There should be no such thing as an ‘exotic novel’. If the content of the novel about Egypt or Malaya seems strange to the British reader, then let it remain strange until that reader is able to verify it for himself. One of the jobs of art is to deep-freeze emotions against the time of their being needed. The impact of the exotic, the initial shock that ends Conrad’s Youth, is properly not a part of the exotic novel at all, but of the home-based novel: it does not come into this context. One only really smells a foreign country on one’s first day in it – Singapore, for instance, with its hot wet dish-rags, cat-piss and turmeric. The first day abroad is the last day at home. With it you can end a home-based novel or begin a novel about readjustment to the exotic. But you will not write Malaisie or A Passage to India.
The more I read British novels, which is another way of saying ‘the older I get’, the more I become convinced that the British novelist’s job is to write about here and now. This was not always my view. I used to believe that the area of available subject-matter should be as wide as possible – covering the whole of geography and those imaginary countries conjured by drugs. One may term this the heresy of width. It is a truism to say that depth is the important thing, but we tend to forget what is meant by depth. If, as with the Greek tragedians, the subject-matter is myth, then depth means mining under the myth till the individual consciousness is reached. If, as with most of us, the subject-matter is the individual consciousness, then depth means digging for the mythical.
Here I can approach deep waters – the deepest. Shall I take a chance and commit a general statement about the novelist’s real function to a mere parenthesis? I think I will. In the nineteenth century there were few allomorphs of the art of fiction: drama was trivial till Robertson came along; alleged poems like Aurora Leigh and The Princess were only novels or novellas in prosy verse. The novel itself was the only way into fictitious worlds peopled with fictitious people. And novelists like Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, fulfilled not only the novelist’s task but the dramatist’s. More – they were also moral essayists, epic poets, preachers. In our own day we see that two main kinds of fiction function side by side. There is, first, that immediate fiction called drama – a form in which characters and events are presented directly, without the intermediacy of their creator: the author does not get between us and the story, commenting, describing, judging. Then there is the novel itself, in which we expect to meet the author and to sustain the impact of his personality – a personality inevitably stronger than that of any of the personalities he has created.
But the most vital forms of drama today are found not on the stage but on the screen – small or large – and they are capable of a greater plasticity than has ever been possible on any stage after 1642. Film and television have learnt a great deal from the novel: the swift change of scene, the visual or tangible symbol, dream and fantasy, even the interior monologue and the linking narration have been incorporated with ease into the new fluid drama. Devices of which the novelist had the monopoly have been taken over and are exploited with skill by the new race of dramatic writers. What is there left for the novelist to do?
The answer, I would say, lies in the related fields of myth and language. He must either revivify old myths or create new ones. James Joyce slammed old myths on new matter, thus freeing himself from the need to be his own plot-maker, and then used the myth to exploit language. The point about myth is that everybody already knows the story, and hence the movement and interest proper to a film-plot are automatically transferred to what is done with the myth – and what is done is done through language. Dialogue will be less important than those inchoate pre-articulatory levels which can only be treated through experiment in language, and drama, relying on dialogue, cannot reach here. New myths can be achieved through either the cross-fertilisation of old myths or a direct act of creation. But the myth must never be an end in itself. I fear that in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head the content is more important than the technique. The content has certainly been neatly filleted out in, respectively, a first-class film and an interesting stage adaptation. Beware of a novel that transfers too easily to another medium. Golding seems to be doing the novelist’s real job in The Inheritors, where language has to suggest a world before language existed. This work is itself, as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is itself: no adaptation to another medium seems possible.
What this question of depth amounts to, then, is how far the resources of language can be stretched to clarify the springs of human motivation. I am not advocating a literature of the pre-conscious solely and simply, but in those crepuscular regions of the mind there is at least a field that the other fictional art-forms find it hard to reach. In a moment, if I am not careful, the magic name of Jung will make its appearance, and that I must avoid. We are concerned with art, not science, however poetic the science of the mind seems in the work of Jung and his followers. And we are immediately concerned with this question of the distraction of a highly seasoned subject-matter. Whatever depth means, it cannot be achieved with exotic butterflies distracting the eyes and the purpose.
What I am really trying to say is that subject-matter is not all that important to art. The more banal, commonplace, everyday, the subject-matter of the novel is, the more the novelist is compelled to work hard at his craft. In effect, the novelist can never know whether he is capable of doing a good job until he has stripped his subject-matter of whatever glamour – whether conventional or inverted – it may possess. This may seem a somewhat puritanical view of the novelist’s art, but I do not see why the stringencies that enable us to find the true and the good should not also apply to the search for the beautiful. Impure motives, whether in science, ethics, or art, quietly wreck a civilisation.
All this sounds portentous, but all I mean is that we ought to take the novel seriously and not attribute the excitement or beauty of the subject-matter to the novel itself. I am not advocating an extension of the modern provincial novel which, sadly, is developing its own set of conventions and stock responses indicative of a morbid concern with content more than form. I am suggesting rather that we should just take what we are given – here and now – and spend the resources of our art on it.
Unfortunately, from one point of view, ‘here and now’ is beginning to mean ‘foreign parts’ to some novelists. The exodus to Tangier, Mallorca, Switzerland, the Isles of Greece, goes on, the formation of exiled writers’ colonies, writers caught between the native life of the country and the remembered life of home. These writers know too little of the real ‘here and now’ to write about it with the authority of native authors; they have to fall back on ‘there and then’ – volumes of reminiscences, novels set in the near-present, but full of subtly wrong nuances and overtones, historical novels, thrillers. One wonders how much true devotion to his art form is shown by the novelist who expatriates himself because of income tax, disillusionment with English society, climate, or in search of greater sexual tolerance. It is the novelist’s task to stay here and suffer with the rest of us. He can, through his art, lessen that suffering.
Listener, 26 September 1963
Why, This is Hell
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD’S creative dilemma is an excruciating one. He wants to demonstrate that hell, like love, is not hereafter; it is a portable void that exists in time. But can a novelist properly deal with a state of alienation? His job is to record the multiplicity of the world and even perhaps seem to rejoice in it. Mr Isherwood’s solution is to see the multiplicity as a set of disguises; a viable fictional aim is the stripping off of these to show the one great tired face. Chrissie, Herr Issyvoo, Bradshaw – all these have been allomorphs of a recording eye, though the novelist’s trick – despite the ‘I am a camera’ disclaimer – was to flash the illusion of a genuine identity. In Down There on a Visit trickery becomes irony. ‘Down there’ is ‘down here’, and we cannot visit where we already are. The circumference is crammed with characters; sink a shaft from each, though, and you arrive at a common centre – the hell of isolation, universal and single.
In A Single Man Mr Isherwood concentrates openly on this hell and calls on the unities of time and space to help hold the lamp. The rich variety of the world shrinks to the freeway and the supermarket. Here is a day in the life of George, a middle-aged Englishman who lectures at a Californian university. He lives alone, since Jim, whom he loved, is dead. Jim meant the whole of life, symbolised in the small menagerie they had, now dispersed. The bridge that connects George with his two-car bar-and-barbeque neighbours is sagging. Mr Strunk, more charitable, a reader of popular psychology, says, in effect: ‘Here we have a misfit, debarred for ever from the best things of life, to be pitied, not blamed’.
But George’s aloneness doesn’t go far enough. Nor does the fact that he belongs (as the Jews and Negroes and Commies belong) to a minority necessarily ennoble him. At the end of his lecture on After Many a Summer he tells his students that persecution makes the minorities nastier, hating not only the majority but the other minorities. ‘Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed?’ The minorities put on protective, apotropaic clothing, and it is Mr Isherwood’s grimly humorous task to strip George naked. He sits on the john after breakfast and carries his bared buttocks to the ringing telephone. In the gym, where he goes for his daily work-out, he find comfort, a sense of community, in the common stripped condition: the pot belly and the athlete’s muscles enter a democracy rather than an agape. At night he swims naked with one of his students, Kenny. Kenny puts him to bed, drunk, in clean pyjamas, but he wakes to throw them off and, the alcohol itching in his groin, masturbate. He masturbates to the image of ‘the fierce hot animal play’ of two students he has seen earlier on the tennis court. ‘George hovers above them, watching; then he begins passing in and out of their writhing, panting bodies. He is either. He is both at once.’
Even know the nakedness is not complete. After the metaphorical death of the orgasm, the sham death of sleep, comes the true, hypothetical, death of the body. This trilogy of deaths is the final ritual of stripping. Isherwood has told his entire story in the present tense, which lends itself to hypothesis. The day itself is a ritual covering an emptiness. Jim is dead and cannot be replaced. Charlotte, another British expatriate, offers herself, but George doesn’t want a sister; Kenny, an Alcibiades with towel-chlamys slipping from his shoulder, flirts at offering himself, but George doesn’t want a son. The hell of isolation can accept no palliatives.
What sounds like an intense book is, as we must expect from Isherwood, tense only in its economy. The language makes no big gestures, and some of the most telling effects are produced by ellipses. But, as in The World in the Evening and Down There on a Visit
