‘The vital statistics,’ a young Talmudist said, pencil poised at the ready. ‘This Whitelady.’
‘Who? Ah, yes.’
‘The works.’
‘The works,’ Enderby said, with refocillated energy. ‘Ah, yes. One long poem on a classical theme, the love of er Hostus for Primula. The title, I mean the hero and heroine are eponymous.’ He clearly saw a first edition of the damned poem with titlepage a horrid mixture of typefaces, fat illdrawn nymphs on it, a round chop which said Bibliotheca Somethingorother. ‘Specimen lines,’ he continued boldly:
‘Then as the moon engilds the Thalian fields
The nymph her er knotted maidenhead thus yields,
In joy the howlets owl it to the night,
In joy fair Cynthia augments her light,
The bubbling conies in their warrens er move
And simulate the transports of their love.’
‘But that’s beautiful,’ said the beautiful Latin nymph, unfat, unilldrawn, unknotted.
‘Crap,’ the Talmudist offered. ‘The transports of whose love?’
‘Theirs, of course,’ Enderby said. ‘Primavera and the er her lover.’
‘There were six plays,’ the Kickapoo said, ‘if I remember correctly.’
‘Seven,’ Enderby said, ‘if you count the one long attributed to er Sidebottom –’
‘Crazy British names.’
‘But now pretty firmly established as mainly the work of er the man we’re dealing with, with an act and a half by an unknown hand.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘Computer work,’ Enderby said vaguely. ‘Cybernetic wonders in Texas or some such place.’ He saw now fairly clearly that he would have to be for the chop. Or no, no, I quit. This was intolerable.
‘What plays?’ the Chinese next to the Talmudist said, a small round cheerful boy, perhaps an assistant cook in his spare time or main time if this were his spare time.
‘Yes,’ with fine briskness. ‘Take these down. What do you lack, fair mistress? A comedy, done by the Earl of Leicester’s Men, 1588. The Tragedy of Canicula, Earl of Sussex’s Men, the same year. A year later came The History of Lambert Simnel, performed at court for the Shrovetide Revels. And then there was, let me see –’
‘Where can we get hold of them?’ the Melanonipponese said crossly. ‘I mean, there’s not much point in just having the titles.’
‘Impossible,’ prompt Enderby said. ‘Long out of print. It’s only important for your purpose that you know that Longbottom that is to say Whitelady actually existed –’
‘But how do we know he did?’ There were two very obdurate strains in this mixed Coast girl.
‘Records,’ Enderby said. ‘Look it all up in the appropriate books. Use your library, that’s what it’s for. One cannot exaggerate the importance of er his contribution to the medium, as an influence that is, the influence of his rhythm is quite apparent in the earlier plays of er –’
‘Mangold Smotherwild,’ the Kickapoo said, no longer sneeringly outside the creative process but almost sweatily in the middle of it. Enderby saw that he could always say that he had been trying out a new subject called Creative Literary History. They might even write articles about it: The Use of the Fictive Alternative World in the Teaching of Literature. Somebody called out: ‘Specimen.’
‘No trouble at all,’ Enderby said. ‘In the first scene of Give you good den good my masters you have a soliloquy by a minor character named Retchpork. It goes, as I remember, something like this:
So the world ticks, aye, like to a tocking clock
On th’wall of naked else infinitude,
Am I am hither come to lend an ear
To manners, modes and bawdries of this town
In hope to school myself in knavery.
Aye, ’tis a knavish world wherein the whore
And bawd and pickpurse, he of the quatertrey,
The coneycatcher, prigger, jack o’ the trumps
Do profit mightily while the studious lamp
Affords but little glimmer to the starved
And studious partisan of learning’s lore.
Therefore, I say, am I come hither, aye,
To be enrolled in knavish roguery.
But soft, who’s this? Aye, marry, by my troth,
A subject apt for working on. Good den,
My master, prithee what o’clock hast thou,
You I would say, and have not hast, forgive
Such rustical familiarity
From one unlearn’d in all the lore polite
Of streets, piazzas and the panoply
Of populous cities –
Something like that, anyway,’ Enderby said. ‘I could go on if you wished. But it’s all a bit dull.’
‘If it’s all a bit dull,’ the Irish one said, ‘why do we have to have it?’
‘I thought you said he was influential,’ somebody else complained.
‘Well, he was. Dully influential,’ the Kickapoo said.
‘Dead at thirty-two,’ Enderby said, having checked with the blackboard data. ‘Dead in a duel or perhaps of the French pox or of a surfeit of pickled herrings and onions in vinegar with crushed peppercorns and sour ale, or, of course, of the plague. It was a pretty bad year for the plague, I think, 1591.’ He saw Whitelady peering beseechingly at him, a white face from the shades, begging for a good epitaph. ‘He was nothing,’ Enderby said brutally, the face flinching as though from blows, ‘so you can forget about him. One of the unknown poets who never properly mastered their craft, spurned by the Muse.’ The whole luggage of Elizabethan drama was now, unfantasticated by fictional additions, neatly stacked before him. He knew what was in it and what wasn’t. This Whitelady wasn’t there. And yet, as the mowing face and haunted eyes, watching his, showed, in a sense he was. ‘The important thing,’ Enderby pronounced, ‘is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen. How much do you think you’re entitled to, you?’ he asked the Kickapoo.
‘As much as I can get.’
‘And that’s a good answer,’ Enderby said, meaning it, meaning it more than they, in their present stage of growth, could possibly mean it. He suddenly felt a tearful love and compassion for these poor orphans, manipulated by brutal statesmen and the makers of tooth-eroding sweet poisonous drinks and (his face blotted temporarily out that of anguished Whitelady) the bearded Southern colonel who made it a virtue to lick chickenfat off your fingers. Schmalz and Chutzpah. The names swam in, as from the Book of Deuteronomy. Who were they? Lawyers? He said: ‘Life is sensation, which includes thought, and the sensation of having sensation, which ought to take care of all your stupid worries about identity. Christ, Whitelady has identity. But what he doesn’t have and what he never had is the sensation of having sensations. Better and cleverer people than we are can be invented.’ He saw how wrong he was about aere perennius. ‘But what can’t be invented is,’ he said, directly addressing the couple who had come in late, ‘what you two were doing outside in the corridor.’
The boy grew very red but the girl smirked.
‘The touch of the skin of a young girl’s breast. A lush-capped plush-kept sloe –’
‘You got that the wrong way round,’ the Kickapoo said.
‘Yes yes,’ Enderby said, tired. And then, in utter depression, he saw who Whitelady was. He winked at him with his right eye and Whitelady simultaneously winked back with his left.
5
AFTER THE LESSON on Whitelady (lose sensation, he kept thinking, and I become a fictional character) Enderby walked with care, aware of a sensation of lightness in his left breast as though his heart (not the real one, but the one of non-clinical traditional lore) had been removed. So sensation could lie, so whither did that lead you? His feet led him through a half-hearted student dem
onstration against or for the dismissal of somebody, a brave girl stripping in protest, giving blue breasts to the February post-meridian chill, to the long low building which was the English Department. Outside the office he shared with Assistant Professor Zeitgeist or some such name, there were black girl students evidently waiting for Professor Zeitgeist and beguiling their wait with loud manic music on a transistor radio. Enderby mildly said:
‘Do switch that thing off, please. I have some work to do.’
‘Well, you goan work some place else, man.’
‘This is, after all, my office,’ Enderby smiled, feeling palpitations drumming up. ‘This is, after all, the English Department of a university.’ And then: ‘Shut that bloody thing off.’
‘You goan fuck yoself, man.’
‘You ain’t nuttin but shiiit, man.’
Abdication. What did one do now – slap the black bitches? Remember the long servitude of their people and bow humbly? One of them was doing a little rutting on-the-spot dance to the noise. Enderby slapped the black bitch on the puss. No, he did not. He durst not. It would be on the front pages tomorrow. There would be a row in the United Nations. He would be knifed by the men they slept with. He said, smiling, rage boiling up to inner excoriation: ‘Abdication of authority. Is that expression in your primer of Black English?’
‘Pip pip old boy,’ said the non-jigging one with very fair mock-British intonation. ‘And all that sort of rot, man.’
‘You go fuck yo own ass, man. You aint nuttin but shiiiiit.’
Enderby had another weapon, not much used by him these days. He gathered all available wind and vented it from a square mouth.
Rarkberfvrishtkrahnbrrryburlgrong.
The effort nearly killed him. He staggered into his office, saw mail on his desk, took it and staggered out. The black girls, very ineptly, tried to give, in glee, his noise back to him. But their sense of body rhythm prevailed, turning it to oral tomtom music. The radio took four seconds off from discoursing on garbage of one sort to advertise garbage of another – male voice in terminal orgasm yelling sweet sweet sweet O Pan piercing sweet. Enderby went into the little lounge, empty save for shouting notices and a bearded man who looked knowingly at him. He opened his letters, chiefly injunctions to join things (BIOFEEDBACK BRETHREN GERONTOPHILIACS ANONYMOUS ROCK FOR CHRIST OUR SATAN THE THANATOLOGY MONTHLY), coming at length to a newspaper clipping sent, apparently out of enmity, by his publisher in London. It was from the Daily Window and was one of the regular hardhitting noholdsbarred nononsense manofthepeople responsibilityofagreatnationalorgan addresses to the reader written by a staffman named Belvedere Fellows, whose jowled fierce picture led, like a brave overage platoon officer, the heavy type of his heading. Enderby read: SINK THE DEUTSCHLAND! Enderby read:
My readers know I am a man that faces facts. My readers know that I will sit through any amount of filthy film rubbish in order to report back fairly and squarely to my readers about the dangers their children face in a medium that increasingly, in the name of the so-called Permissive Society, is giving itself over to nudity, sex, obscenity, and pornography.
Well, I went to see The Wreck of the Deutschland and confess that I had to rush to the rails long before the end. I was scuppered. Here all decent standards have finally gone Kaput. Here is the old heave-ho with a vengeance.
But enough has been said already about the appalling scenes of Nazi rape and the blasphemous nudity. We know the culprits: their ears are deafened to the appeals of decency by the crackle of the banknotes they are now so busily counting. There are certain quiet scoundrels whose names do not reach the public eye with the same tawdry glamour. Behind the film image lies the idea, lies the writer, skulking behind the cigarette smoke and whisky in his ivory tower.
I say now that they must take their share of the blame. I have not read the book which the film is based on, nor would I want to. I noted grimly however that there were no copies the other day in my local library. My readers will be horrified however to learn that he is a Roman Catholic priest. This what the liberalism of that great and good man Pope John has been perverted into.
I call now, equivocally and pragmatically, for a closer eye to be kept on the filth that increasingly these days masquerades as literature and even as poetry. The vocation of poet has traditionally been permitted to excuse too much – the lechery of Dylan Thomas and the drunken bravoing of Brendan Behan as well as the aesthetic perversions of Oscar Wilde. Is the final excuse now to be sought in the so-called priestly vocation? Perhaps Father Enderby of the Society of Jesus would like to reply. I have no doubt he would find an attentive congregation.
Enderby looked up. The bearded man was still looking knowingly at him. He said something. Enderby said: ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said: how are things in Jolly Old?’
Enderby could think of absolutely no reply. The two looked at each other fixedly for a long time, and the bearded man’s jaw dropped progressively as if he were silently demonstrating an escalier of front vowels. Then Enderby sighed, got up and went out to seek his Creative Writing class. Like a homer he tapped his way with his swordstick through the dirty cold and student-knots to a building named for the inventor of a variety of canned soups, Warhall or somebody. On the second floor, to which he clomb with slow care, he found them, all ten, in a hot room with a long disfigured conference table. The Tietjens girl was there, drowned and sweatered. She had apparently told them everything, for they looked strangely at him. He sat down at the top or bottom of the table and pulled their work out of his inside pocket. He saw that he had given Ms Tietjens a D, so he ball-pointed it into a rather arty A. The rest shall remain as they are. Then he tapped his lower denture with the pen, plastic to plastic: tck tck, tcktck tck, TCK. He looked at his students, a mostly very untidy lot. They looked at him, lounging, smoking, taking afternoon beverages. He said:
‘The question of sartorial approach is relevant, I think. When John Keats had difficulty with a poem he would wash and put on a clean shirt. The stiff collar and bow tie and tails of the concertgoer induce a tense attitude appropriate to the hearing of complex music. The British colonial officer would dress for dinner, even in the jungle, to encourage self-discipline. There is no essential virtue in comfort. To be relaxed is good if it is part of a process of systole and diastole. Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness. Art is essentially tense. The trouble with your er art is that it is not tense.’
They all looked at him, not tense. Many of their names he still refused to take seriously – Chuck Szymanowski, for instance. His sole black man was called Lloyd Utterage, a very reasonable name. This man was very ugly, which was a pity and which Enderby deeply regretted, but he had very beautiful clothes, mostly of hot-coloured blanketing materials, topped with a cannibal-style wire-wool hairshock. He was very tense, and this too Enderby naturally approved. But he was full of hate, and that was a bore. ‘I will not,’ Enderby said, turning to him, ‘read out all your poem, which may be described as a sort of litany of anatomic vilification. Two stanzas will perhaps suffice.’ And he read them with detached primness:
‘It will be your balls next, whitey,
A loving snipping of the scrotum
With rather rusty nail-scissors,
And they tumble out then to be
Crunched underfoot crunch crunch.
It will be your prick next, whitey,
A loving chopping segmentally
With an already bloodstained meat hatchet,
And it will lie with the dog-turds
To be squashed squash squash.
One point,’ he said. ‘If the prick is to be chopped in segments it will not resemble a dog-turd. The writing of er verse does not excuse you from considerations of er …’
‘He says it will lie with the dog-turds,’ Ms Tietjens said. ‘He doesn’t say it will look like one.’
‘Yes yes, Sylvia, but –’
‘Lydia.’
‘Of course, thinking of Ford. Sorry. But you
see, the word it suggests that it’s still a unity, not a number of chopped bits of er penis. Do you see my point?’
‘Yeah,’ Lloyd Utterage said, ‘but it’s not a point worth seeing. The point is the hate.’
‘The poetry is in the pity,’ said Enderby. ‘Wilfred Owen. He was wrong, of course. It was the other way round. As I was saying, a unity and rather resembling a dog-turd. So the image is of this er prick indistinguishable from –’
‘Like Lloyd said,’ said a very spotty Jewish boy named Arnold Something, his hair too cannibalistically arranged, ‘it’s the hate that it’s about. Poetry is made out of emotions,’ he pronounced.
‘Oh no,’ Enderby said. ‘Oh very much no. Oh very very very much no and no again. Poetry is made out of words.’
‘It’s the hate,’ Lloyd Utterage said. ‘It’s the expression of the black experience.’
‘Now,’ Enderby said, ‘we will try a little experiment. I take it that this term whitey is racialist and full of opprobrium and so on. Suppose now we substitute for it the word er nigger –’ There was a general gasp of disbelief. ‘I mean, if, as you said, the point is the hate, then the hate can best be expressed – and, indeed, in poetry must be expressed – as an emotion available to the generality of mankind. So instead of either whitey or nigger you could have, er, bohunk or, say, kike. But kike probably wouldn’t do …’
The Complete Enderby Page 50
