Yawwwwww. Ogre. Uuuuuugh.
The pain of their awakening, not all of them alone, to the coming of the Tangerine evening. All right, we all know that a tangerine is a small orange, much flattened at the poles. Very funny, Geoffrey. But perhaps now you will consider why it is called what it is called. The calligraphic neons will glow – fa and kaf and kaf and nun and tok – and the shops resume their oil-lit trades. Ladies in yashmaks and caftans will stroll the rues or calles, and the boys will jeer and giggle at the few male tourists and point at their younger brothers as if they were carcases of tender lamb. And the writers will groan at their words of the forenoon and despair.
So away! Our camels sniff the evening and are glad. A quotation, if you must know, Benedict. Let us leave them, for men must be left to, each, the dreeing of his own weird. A man must contrive such happiness as he can. So must we all. So must we all, Geoffrey and Benedict and George and Donald and Andrea and Pamela and that horried Sandra and – Oh, get into line there. We take off, into the Atlantic wind. The moon, sickle of Islam, has risen. The planets Marikh and Zuhrah and Zuhal shine. The stars, in American issue army boots, slide silently to their allotted posts. And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax and glitter, as with atmospheric dust, with those impurities which we call meaning. Away, children! Leave them to it.
Until the final glacier grips
Each island, with its dream of ships
And and and and. Keep on. It will come out right, given time and application. You can, when depressed, pluck your own sweet bay or laurus nobilis. It grows here. Nobody will pluck it for you. The aromatic leaves are useful in cookery, and you can cure your sick cat with the berries.
Appendix
Some Uncollected Early Poems by
F. X. Enderby
THE POEMS THAT follow have not, for some reason, appeared in any of the published volumes of Enderby’s verse, and the last poem has not previously been published at all. The poems beginning ‘Anciently the man who showed …’, ‘They fear and hate the Donne and Dante in him …’, and ‘Semitic violins by the wailing wall …’, allegedly from Enderby’s juvenile productions, cannot be traced either in published or manuscript form. It may be of interest to note, however, that the catalogue of the ill-fated Gorgon Press, which specialized in verse printed at the author’s own expense, lists a volume by one A. Rawcliffe – Balls and Talk: Poems 1936. No copies of this volume have as yet come to light.
A.B.
September 1938
There arose those winning life between two wars,
Born out of one, doomed food for the other,
Floodroars ever in the ears.
Slothlovers hardly, hardly fighters:
Resentment spent against stone, long beaten out of
Minds resigned to the new:
Useless to queue for respirators.
Besides, what worse chaos to come back to.
Home, limbs heavy with mud and work, to sleep
To sweep out a house days deep in dirt.
Knowing finally man would limbs loin face
Efface utterly, leaving in his place
Engines rusting to world’s end, heirs to warfare
Fonctionnant d’une manière automatique.
Summer 1940
Summer swamps the land, the sun imprisons us,
The pen slithers in the examinee’s fingers,
And colliding lips of lovers slide on sweat
When, blind, they inherit their tactile world.
Spectacles mist, handveins show blue, the urge to undress
Breeds passion in unexpected places. Barrage balloons
Soar silver in silver ether. Lying on grass,
We watch them, docile monsters, unwind to the zenith.
Drops of that flood out of France, with mud and work
Stained, loll in the trams, drinking their cigarettes,
Their presence defiling the flannels and summer frocks,
The hunters to hound our safety, spoil the summer.
Spring in Camp 1941
War becomes time, and long logic
On buried premises; spring supervenes
With the circle as badge which, pun and profundity,
Vast, appears line and logical,
But, small, shows travel returning.
Circle is circle, proves nothing, makes nothing,
Swallows up process and end in no argument,
Brings new picture of old time.
Here in barracks is intake of birds,
The sun holds early his orderly room,
The pale company clerk is uneasy
As spring brings odour of other springs.
The truckdriver sings, free of the road,
The load of winter and war becomes
Embarrassing as a younger self.
Words disintegrate; war is words.
The Excursion
The blue of summer morning begs
The country journey to be made,
The sun that gilds the breakfast eggs
Illuminates the marmalade.
A cheque is smiling on the desk.
Remembered smells upon the lane
Breed hunger for the picaresque
To blood the buried springs again.
Here is the pub and here the church
And there our thirty miles of sun,
The river and the rod and the perch,
The noonday drinking just begun.
Let beer beneath the neighbour trees
Swill all that afternoon away,
And onions, crisp to sullen cheese,
Yield the sharp succulence of today.
Today remembers breaking out
The fire that burned the hayfield black.
An army that was grey with drought
Shows to my stick its fossil track.
Returning evening rose on rose
Or pomegranate rouge and ripe;
The lamp upon the pavement throws
The ectoplasm of my pipe.
Eden
History was not just what you learned that scorching day
Of ink and wood and sweat in the classroom, when mention
Of the Duke of Burgundy lost you in a voluptuous dream
Of thirst and Christmas, but that day was part of history.
There were other times, misunderstood by the family,
When you, at fifteen, on your summer evening bed
Believed there were ancient towns you might anciently visit.
There might be a neglected platform on some terminus
And a ticket bought when the clock was off its guard.
Oh, who can dismember the past? The boy on the friendly bed
Lay on the unpossessed mother, the bosom of history,
And is gathered to her at last. And tears I suppose
Still thirst for that reeking unwashed pillow,
That bed ingrained with all the dirt of the past,
The mess and lice and stupidity of the Golden Age,
But a mother and loving, ultimate Eden.
One looks for Eden in history, best left unvisited,
For the primal sin is always a present sin,
The thin hand held in the river which can never
Clean off the blood, and so remains bloodless.
And this very moment, this very word will be Eden,
As that boy was already, or is already, in Eden,
While the delicate filthy hand dabbles and dabbles
But leaves the river clean, heartbreakingly clean.
The Clockwork Testament
or: Enderby’s End
To Burt Lancaster
(‘…deserves to live, deserves to live.’)
1
THE FIRST THING he saw on waking was his lower denture on the floor, its groove encrusted with dried Dentisement, or it might be Orastik, Mouthficks, Gripdent, or Bite (called Bait in Tangier, where he could be said to have a sort of permanent, that is to say, if you could talk of perma
nency these days in anything, so to speak, address), the fully teethed in my audience will hardly conceive of the variety of denture adhesives on the market. His tongue, at once sprung into life horribly with no prelude of decent morning sluggishness, probed the lower gum briskly and found a diminution of yesterday’s soreness. Then it settled into the neutral schwa position to await further directives. So. The denture, incrustations picked loose, laved, recharged with goo of Firmchew – family size with N E W wintergreen flavour – could be jammed in without serious twinge. As well, since today students must be met and talked at.
He lay, naked for the central heat, on his belly. If the bed, which was circular in shape, were a clock, then he was registering twenty of two, as Americans put it, meaning twenty to two. If, that was, his upper part were the hour hand. If, that was, twelve o’clock was where the bed touched the wall. The Great Bed of York of English legend had been round also, though much bigger, the radius being the length of a sleeper – say six feet. How many pairs of dirty (read Rabelaisian, rollicking) feet meeting at the center (re)? Circumference 2 pi r, was it? It didn’t seem big enough somehow. But all the big things of European legend were smaller than you had been brought up to imagine. American scholars sorted that sort of thing out for you. Anybody could eat whole mediaeval sheep, being no bigger than rabbit. Suits of armor (our) would accommodate twelve-year-old American girl. Not enough vitamins in roystering rollicking diet. Hell was originally a rubbish-dump outside Jerusalem.
He lay naked also on a fast-drying nocturnal ejaculation, wonderful for man of your age, Enderby. What had the dream been that had conduced to wetness? Being driven in a closed car, muffled to the ears, in black spectacles, funereal sombrero, very pimply guffawing lout driving. Driven into slum street where twelve-year-old girls, Puerto Rican mostly, were playing with a ball. Wait, no, two balls, naturally. The girls jeered, showed themselves knickerless, provoked. He, Enderby, had to go on sitting in black and back of car while guffawing driver got out and ministered very rapidly to them all, their number of course changing all the time. Finnegans Wake, ladies and gentlemen, is false to the arithmetic of true dreams, number in that book being an immutable rigidity while, as we know, it is a mutable fluidity in our regular dreaming experience. There are seven biscuits, which you call er cookies, on a plate. You take away, say, two and three remain. Or, of course, they could be what you call biscuits and we, I think, muffins. Principle is the same. I question that, said a sneering Christ of a student. Professor Enderby, asked a what Enderby took to be Polack, Nordic anyway, lacking eyelashes, please clarify your precise threshold of credibility.
This driver lout got through the lot, standing, with quick canine thrusts. Then Enderby was granted discharge and the entire scene, as in some story by that blind Argentinian he had been urged to read by somebody eager and halitotic in the Faculty Lounge, collapsed.
The bed he lay on, twenty of two, squinting down at his watch also on the floor, ten of eight of a New York February morning, was circular because of some philosophy of the regular tenant of the apartment, now on sabbatical and working on Thelma Garstang (1798–1842, bad poetess beaten to death by drunken husband, alleged anyway) in British Museum. The traditional quadrangular bed was male tyranny, or something. This regular tenant was, as well as being an academic, a woman novelist who wrote not very popular novels in which the male characters ended up being castrated. Then, it was implied, or so Enderby understood, not having read any of them, only having been told about them, they became considerate lovers eager for cunnilingus with their castratrices, but they were sneered at for being impotent. Well, he unimpotent Enderby, temporary professor, would do nothing about cleaning that sperm-stain from her circular mattress, ridiculous idea, must have cost a fortune.
Enderby had slept, as now he always did, with his upper denture in. It was a sort of response to the castrating aura of the apartment. He had also found it necessary to be ready for the telephone to ring at all hours, an edentulous chumble getting responses of Pardon me? if the call were a polite one, but if it were insulting or obscene or both, provoking derision. Most of the Serious Calls came from what was known as the Coast and were for his landlady. She was connected with some religiolesbic movement there and she had neglected to send a circular letter about her sabbatical. The insults and obscenities were usually meant for Enderby. He had written a very unwise article for a magazine, in which he said that he thought little of black literature because it tended to tendentiousness and that the Amerindians had shown no evidence of talent for anything except scalping and very inferior folkcraft. One of his callers, who had once termed him a toothless cocksucker (that toothlessness had been right, anyway, at that time anyway), was always threatening to bring a tomahawk to 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, which was where Enderby lodged. Also students would ring anonymously at deliberately awkward hours to revile him for his various faults – chauvinism, or some such thing; ignorance of literary figures important to the young; failure to see merit in their own free verse and gutter vocabulary. They would revile him also in class, of course, but not so freely as on the telephone. Everybody felt naked these days without the mediacy of a mode of mechanical communication.
Eight of eight. The telephone rang. Enderby decided to give it the honour of full dentition, so he jammed in the encrusted lower denture. Try it out. Gum still sorish. But, of course, that was the hardened Gripdent or whatever it was. He had them all.
‘Professor Enderby?’
‘Speaking.’
‘You don’t know me, but this is just to inform you that both my husband and I consider that your film is filth.’
‘It’s not my film. I only wrote the –’
‘You have a lot to answer for, my husband says. Don’t you think there’s enough juvenile crime on our streets without filth like yours abetting it?’
‘But it’s not filth and it’s not my –’
‘Obscene filth. Let me inform you that my husband is six feet three and broad in proportion –’
‘Is he a Red Indian?’
‘That’s just the sort of cheap insult I would expect from a man capable of –’
‘If you’re going to send him round here, with or without tomahawk –’
She had put down the receiver. What he had been going to say was that there was twenty-four-hour armed protection in the apartment lobby as well as many closed-circuit television screens. This, however, would not help him if the enemies were within the block itself. That he had enemies in the block he knew – a gat-toothed black writer and his wife; a single woman with dogs who had objected to his mentioning in his magazine article the abundance of cockroaches in this part of Manhattan as though it were a shameful family secret; a couple of fattish electronic guitarists who had smelt his loathing as they had gone up together once in the elevator. And there might also be others affronted by the film just this moment referred to.
Flashback. Into the bar-restaurant run by Enderby, exiled poet, in Tangier, film-men had one day come. Kasbah location work or something of the kind. One of the film-men, who had seemed and indeed proved to be big in his field, an American director considered for the brilliance of his visual intention quite as good as any director in Europe, said something about wanting to make, because of the visual possibilities, a shipwreck film. Enderby, behind bar and hence free to join in conversation without any imputation of insolence, having also British accent, said something about The Wreck of the Deutschland.
‘Too many Kraut Kaput movies lately. Last days of Hitler, Joe Krankenhaus already working on Goebbels, then there was Visconti.’
‘A ship,’ said Enderby, ‘called the Deutschland. Hopkins wrote it.’
‘Al Hopkins?’
‘G.M.,’ Enderby said, adding, ‘S.J.’
‘Never heard of him. Why does he want all those initials?’
The Complete Enderby Page 45
