The Complete Enderby

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘I have wondered at times about your cough and your premature baldness. Now I read records of licentiousness in that book.’

  ‘You mean,’ groaned Will, then gasped, then growled, then cried aloud, ‘I have the French pox, the disease of that pretty shepherd Syphilis of Fracastorius of Verona his poem? Oh, this drinks deep, this drinks the cup and all. And what thinks your sainted mother-in-law?’

  ‘She knows nought of it. The book has been kept from her and from her friends the brethren. The bridge of the nose,’ he said, squinting, ‘seems soft in the cartilage. That is an infallible sign. Do keep your voice low. It will crack if you shout out so and not easily be mended.’

  Will howled like a hound and strode into the house to his study, passing his womenfolk on the way. He growled at them, even at gooing little Elizabeth. In his study he took from a drawer the galleys of the psalms that Ben had given him. He took them, waving in the draught of his passage, to shake like little banners at his family, crying, ‘These, you see these? The King’s new Bible that is not to appear until next year, given to me in part, along with my brethren the other poets of London, that the language be strengthened and enriched. You think me godless and a libertine but it is to me, me, me, not the black crows of Puritans that daily infest this house and shall not infest it more that the task of improving the word of the Lord is given. You see,’ he said to Anne, ‘you see, see?’

  ‘A new Bible,’ she said. ‘It is all too like what one may expect of unreligious London, where the holy Geneva Bible is not good enough for them. That it is the King’s Bible renders it no whit more holy. Nay, less from what we hear. Even kings are subject to the law.’

  ‘The King,’ Will cried, ‘is my master and bathed in the chrism of the Lord God. Generous and good and holy.’ Then he stopped, seeing he had gone too far. ‘The King hath his faults,’ he now said. Yes, indeed: ingratitude to Ben and himself; pederasty; immoderate appetite; cowardice, but half the man the old Queen had been. ‘But still,’ he said, and then: ‘All men have their faults, myself included. But I deserve better of the world and of this little world, and, by God, I will have my eternal reward.’

  ‘That,’ said Anne, ‘is the foul sin of presumption.’ Jack Hall was now back with them, listening to his father-in-law rave, grow quiet, rave again: infallible symptoms.

  ‘My name I mean, my name. My son, poor little Hamnet, dead. And the name Shakespeare dishonoured in its own town and soon to die out along with the poor parchments that put innocent words in the mouths of players.’ Jack Hall shook his head slightly: self-pity too perhaps a symptom. ‘Wait,’ Will cried. ‘Do not leave. I, your king, lord of this disaffected small commonweal, do order you to wait. Wait.’ And he sailed back to the study, galley pennants flying, and took the forty-sixth psalm out of the bundle. He sat to it, calling ‘Wait wait’ as he dipped quill in ink and counted. Forty-six words from the beginning, then. It would do, the change improved not marred. He crossed out the word and put another large in the margin. He then, ignoring the cry or cadence Selah at the bottom, counted forty-six words from the end, felt awe at the miracle that this forty-sixth word too could be changed for the better, or certainly not for the worse, by the neat mark of deletion and the new word writ clear and large in the margin. ‘Wait,’ he cried. Then he was there to show them.

  Anne’s jaw dropped as in death. Susannah, whose sight was dim, squinnied at the thing he had done. Jack Hall said, ‘This is also a –,’ and then kept his peace.

  ‘You see, you see? To do this I have the right. I am not without right, do you see? Now another thing. On Sunday I will read this out in the church, aye, in Trinity Church during matins will I, and eke at evensong if I am minded to do it. For I am a lay rector. Not without right. And I have a voice that will fill the church to the rafters, not the piping nose-song of your scrawny unlay rector, do you hear me? Non sanz droict, which is the Shakespeare motto, and the name too shall prevail as long as the word of the Lord. Now, mistress,’ he said to Anne, ‘I would have supper served, and quickly.’ Then he strode out to stand beneath his mulberry tree, granting her no time to rail.

  On Sunday morning he stood, every inch a Christian gentleman in his neat London finery, on the altar steps of Trinity Church. Family, neighbours, the scowling brethren, shopkeepers, nosepicking children filled the pews. His voice, the voice of an actor, rose clear and strong:

  ‘This Sunday you are to hear not the Lesson appointed for the day but the word of the Lord God in a form you do not know. Next year you will know it, for it is His Majesty King James’s new Bible. But now you have this for the first time on any stage, I would say any altar. The word of the Lord. The forty-sixth psalm of King David.’ He read from the galley expressively, an actor, clear, loud, without strain, so that all attended as they were in a playhouse and not in the house of God:

  He ceased, looked fearlessly on them all, then stepped down, with an actor’s grace, to return to his pew. One man at the back, forgetting where he was, began to applaud but was quickly hushed. Before Will arrived at his seat, Judith said to her mother:

  ‘I wonder that God has not struck him down.’

  ‘Wait,’ Anne said grimly. ‘The Lord does things in his own good time. Fear not, the Lord will repay.’ Will sat down next to her. Then, having looked on her and Judith and Susannah and Jack Hall and Mrs Hart his sister with a peculiar lingering hardness, he knelt and prayed. He prayed long and with evident sincerity, so that his wife grew tight-mouthed with suspicion. Then he got up, looking much refreshed, sat down and waited till the dull long sermon was finished. Then he said very clearly to Anne and, indeed, to any on the pew that would hear:

  ‘I am minded to turn papist.’

  ‘God forgive you. Keep your voice down. This is not place nor time for atheistical japes.’

  ‘I will turn papist.’ He tasted the term gently then gently spat it out: tpt. ‘I will not say that. It is a word of contempt. More, it puts overmuch emphasis on the Pope of Rome. It is the faith that matters.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ she said in quiet fury. The service was continuing, and eyes were on Will, ears striving to pick up his words.

  ‘Catholic,’ he said. Then he said no more. She remained tightlipped. He did not speak of the matter again in the two days more he remained in Stratford.

  When Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street. Before he could say aught of going out to drink, Will said:

  ‘I have writ this new play. It is called November the Fifth, but Burbage will doubtless change the title as he always does. It is based on Gunpowder Plot.’

  Ben sat down carefully on a delicate French chair. ‘It is based on –’

  ‘Gunpowder Plot. There is a king that is a fool and an ingrate. He believes that God exists but to confirm the holiness of his kingship. Conspirators led by a poet seek to destroy him for his blasphemy.’

  ‘A poet?’

  ‘I had you much in my mind there. Not a very good poet and most apt for meddling in state matters. His name is Vitellius. Here is one of his speeches. Listen.’

  ‘No,’ Ben said. ‘Let me read instead.’ He looked at the fair copy that was also the first draft and read to himself:

  Conserve agst ye putrifyinge feende

  The fathe yt fedde oure fathers, quite put doune

  His incarnacioun in thes worst of tymes,

  Casting hys hedde discoronate to ye dogges.

  Then he said: ‘They will not let you. This will be construed as present treason.’

  ‘I am sick of it all,’ Will said. ‘The black bastards of Puritans in Stratford that will have nothing but grimness, and a church that is the lapdog of a slobbering king and no king. My father died quietly in the old faith, I will die more noisily in it.’

  ‘Have you spoke of this yet to any?’

  ‘To my lord Cecil, aye, and he said he needed no more spies aping to be papists to dig out popish plots. I have said it to many, but none will ta
ke it that I mean what I say. It is part of the peril of being a player, that all one says is thought to be but acting.’

  Ben said, ‘The great work is now in page proof. They expect it to be out in the new year.’

  ‘What is all this to do with what I said?’

  ‘The forty-sixth psalm has shake and speare in it.’

  ‘That is not possible. None would have it, this I knew. It would be seen as bombastic and overweening.’

  ‘Tillotson, one of those charged with the overseeing of our emendations, said that the two words came nearer to the original than what they formerly had.’

  ‘That is not possible.’

  ‘He had never, I could see,’ and Ben smiled sweetly, ‘heard of the name Shakespeare.’

  ‘Let us,’ said Will, ‘go and drink.’

  2

  ZARF.

  Enderby came fighting awake with the word halfway down his nose. With too an unexpected and certainly premature homesickness for La Belle Mer in Tangiers, expressed in thirst for tea made with six Lipton sachets in the mug with the blazon CHICAGO – MY KIND OF TOWN. His men, Antonio, Manuel and the lad from Tetuan called Tetuani blowing on boiling lemon tea in glasses inserted in handled metal zarfs or zarfim. Windy Tangerine morning.

  The mug had been given him by a Jewish visitor to Tangiers, citizen of that city full of wind, who claimed acquaintanceship with a Jewish novelist called Bellow, name appropriate to a windy city. Enderby did not read novels. Even less did he practise the craft of prose fiction, but he had published much earlier in the year a short or shortish story. This was in response to a Canadian university magazine’s begging for free contributions, preferably money but prose acceptable. He had submitted a fantasy about Shakespeare’s free contribution to the King James Bible. That was why he was on this aircraft now. They rode over an endless bed of dirty whipped cream. High above the wind.

  He had had the fantasy in mind ever since the sneering response to his Collected Poems in the British literary press. Shakespeare must have suffered the same kind of self-pity, doubt as to validity of vocation and all the rest of it, reading sneers from MAs Oxon. and Cantab. in duodecimo summations of the proto-Elizabethan literary achievement, the greatness of Munday, Tibbs, Gough, Welkinshaw and other swollen poetasters, bellowsed by bribed or sincerely stupid criticasters. But Shakespeare could comfort himself by stroking his coat of arms and thinking on the swelling of his acres and bags of malt stored up against the next eagerly awaited famine. He, Enderby, could not in honesty find a germane comfort in his proprietorship of a Tangerine beach restaurant with changing rooms for pustular bathers.

  In the aircraft a film was proceeding. It was, to Enderby, a silent film, for he had no headset as it had been called. He had been unwilling to pay 3 dollars 50 for the hire of the apparatus. In front and behind and to his left fellow passengers were undergoing each the private experience of hearing shouts and screams and the roar of flames as people were burned alive in an aircraft. It was a very indiscreet sort of film.

  He would, he had said a month ago, addressing himself to a bloody shave, write no more verse. There was nothing else to write about. Yet here he was being commissioned to write not only verse but mock Tudor dialogue. A musical play on the career of William Shakespeare to celebrate, for the commission was inevitably American, the second American centennial conjoined with the three hundred and sixtieth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It was not immediately clear what connection there could be between the death of a poet and the birth of a sort of nation, and Enderby puzzled fuzzily, as the burning aircraft struck the sea and presumably sizzled, about the arithmology of the conjunction. 360. It was well known that Thomas Jefferson, Augustan voice of liberty, had possessed 360 slaves. With 360 degrees a wheel came full circle. With two centuries you came full circle twice. It was all a lot of nonsense.

  The film ended with certain people wet but rescued and then an endless rolling list of the film’s perpetrators. Plastic blinds were pushed up and the cabin’s ports let in sick light. All that dirty whipped cream. The man next to Enderby removed his headset and said:

  ‘It was about this aircraft catching fire.’

  ‘So I gathered,’ Enderby said. ‘A visual experience really.’

  ‘I guess you could say that.’ He was middle-aged, overfed, and his face flaunted peeling shards of scarfskin from, Enderby divined, exposure to the Spanish sun. The plane came from Madrid. ‘Guess,’ he said, doing it with thickish fingers, ‘I’d better adjust my watch to Chicago time.’

  ‘My sort of town,’ Enderby said.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘No, it’s on this mug I have. For tea, that is.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  If he could have tea now, real tea, not the gnatpiss they prepared in that sort of galley there, he would have it with seven sachets, not six. As you got older you required your tea stronger, that was laid down somewhere. Enderby was getting old.

  Not too old though, by George or by God, probably the same person, for some new small adventure. The world of the theatre or theater, by Godgeorge. America, by Gorge. He had gone, on receiving the letter, to his private quarters to look up Indiana in Everyman’s Encyclopaedia, an oldish edition but, if the place at all existed, it would probably be there. It seemed at first not only there but very big and exotic, but it was India he was looking at. Indiana was, he found, just under India House, demolished 1861. N. central state of the USA, generally known as the Hoosier State. 91 per cent of total area farmland. Iron, glass, carriages, railroad cars, woollens, etc. Climate remarkably equable. Leading cities Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Evansville, Gary. Terrebasse not mentioned. The theatre in Terrebasse was called the Peter Brook Theater. He looked up in another volume Brook, Peter, but found no information. Some local villainous benefactor requiring memorialization perhaps. He said to the man next to him, hands on lap, watch adjusted:

  ‘Hoosier.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘The Hoosier State.’

  ‘That’s what they call Indiana.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you’re from Indiana you’re a Hoosier.’

  No help there. He did not much like the sound of it. It sounded like the kind of jeer which might well greet, in a territory nearly all farms, a sensible stage presentation of the main facts of the life of a major poet.

  The man reimposed his headset, get his money’s worth, and turned a little black dial on his seat arm. ‘Foog,’ he said with disgust.

  ‘Pardon me?’, this being apparently the right mode of request for repetition or elucidation.

  ‘This guy says they’re going to play a foog.’

  ‘Fugue,’ Enderby said with energy. ‘Tyranny of the verse line. They say there’s no rhyme for fugue. But in song there is. Another fugue, oh, please no, Hugo. You can rhyme anything in a song. In Massachusetts ah took the pledge. Each glass ah chew sets mah teeth on edge.’

  ‘That’s it, I guess,’ the man said; not listening, turning the black knob to, Enderby supposed, something infugal.

  Enderby took from the inside pocket of his decent though oldish clerical grey suit the letter from Ms Grace Hope, a name he could not believe. Hollywood agent mixed up for some shady reason with play promotion. Understood from Toronto office Enderby only man who could do it. On strength of Toronto published work called Will and Testament. Enderby occasionally feared that the letter, having been maliciously typed in disappearing ink, might emerge from that pocket a folded blank. Fare and expenses recoverable, but must pay them himself first. Artistic director, Angus Toplady, was, he being a director, to direct. Long creative discussions required, meaning everybody wanted to be called creator nowadays. Consequence of death of God or something. Music to come from pencil of Mike Silversmith, valued client of Ms Hope. It was all there, though stained with strong tea and fried eggyolk and hamfat, breakfast reading. Frank Merely, London associate at World Creation in Soho Square, arrange contract. Enderby doubted the rea
lity of all these names.

  Well, the place would continue languidly to run in his absence. A home, after all, for Antonio, Manuel and Tetuani. They were good boys really, despite their kif and buggery, as honest as could be reasonably expected in a Moroccan ambience. A sufficiency of farinaceous meals in the kitchen, a doss down wherever it was convenient to lay the night’s mattresses, the odd sly nip, though haram for Tetuani, from the bottles behind the bar. With their master away they would all sleep on his floorbed, covered with sheepskins. On his return they would still be there tiredly sweeping and frying, though reporting no profit with triumphant teeth, since no profit was better than a loss.

  A beefy voice announced through static an impending descent to O’Hare Airport. There Enderby must find an aircraft that would take him to Indiana. There he was to be picked up by some minion of Toplady, who was possibly a debased descendant of the author of Rock of Ages, and be driven to a Holiday Inn, though not for a holiday. Having seen on Spanish television a film with Bing Crosby about the pioneering of this hotel chain, Enderby had an image of a large shack of decayed wood with snow swirling about it. But this was autumn, or the fall, and, the weather of Indiana being equable, there would probably be no snow.

  A silly asthenic corn queen came round collecting headsets. The neighbour of Enderby gave his up and then turned to Enderby as if, he relieved of the responsibility of using it, the two of them could settle to an urgent colloquy necessarily deferred. ‘This your first visit?’ he said.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘To the States.’

  ‘Well, yes, though not, I assure you, for lack of previous invitations. I should have gone to New York to become a professor for a time. A consequence of The Wreck of the Deutschland, 1you know. It was a question of one or the other. So I chose this. More creative than Creative Writing, if you see what I mean.’