The Complete Enderby

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘What I mean is, the Scottish blood, if any, is not made manifest in any – Well, a certain directness of utterance, though usually coarse and improper, an apparent passion for whisky: that bottle on your desk is now empty but was full yesterday –’

  ‘I get this for lagniappe,’ Toplady told everybody.

  ‘They were going to call him Agnes,’ April Elgar said, ‘but when they got a closer look –’

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it,’ Oldfellow screamed.

  ‘Right,’ Ms Grace Hope said, a very hardfaced woman. ‘We keep our tempers, right? And we talk about the script. A musical’s changed while it’s in flight, we know that, but there’ve been too many changes behind Pete’s back with no consultation. He’s the star, right? He plays William Shakespeare, right? He gets the script and he says okay, lousily written but that can be put right later, and then when he gets here –’

  ‘Who,’ Enderby said, ‘says that it’s lousily written?’

  ‘You may know Shakespeare,’ Oldfellow said, ‘but you don’t know the theater. There’s a difference.’

  ‘You don’t know the theater, either,’ Enderby said. ‘You’re what is known as a film star.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Ms Grace Hope said, a sudden winter sun shaft firing a faint lanugo Enderby had not before noticed, so that her face seemed to bristle, ‘let’s stick to the point. This is supposed to be a musical about Shakespeare.’

  ‘Which it is,’ Toplady said. ‘It’s also about the Dark Lady.’

  ‘It’s about the Dark Lady,’ April Elgar said very sweetly. ‘It’s also about Shakespeare.’

  ‘You see?’ Ms Grace Hope told a poster.

  ‘Well,’ Enderby mumbled, ‘the concept was bound to change. The talents of Miss ah Elgar here have to be employed. The emphasis is on the power of certain ah dark forces on the life of the poet. I admit there was no such emphasis before. The emphasis now seems to me to be a just one.’

  ‘Thanks, kid,’ April Elgar said.

  ‘Practicalities,’ Ms Grace Hope said. ‘We want certain things restored that got cut out behind our backs.’

  ‘This plurality,’ Enderby said. ‘Do you speak as ah Mr Oldfellow’s wife or as his agent or as ah what?’

  ‘I,’ she told Enderby, ‘am taking this show to Broadway. There’s money being put into this show on certain strict understandings.’

  ‘I assumed,’ Enderby said, ‘that Mrs ah Schoenbaum –’

  ‘That applies here. It doesn’t apply when the show takes off from this theater.’

  ‘What she means,’ April Elgar said, ‘is that she’s producing a musical to show that the great overpaid Pete Oldfellow is more than just a pretty face.’

  ‘Listen who’s talking about overpaid,’ Oldfellow hotly said. ‘I do this fucking thing for peanuts and she –’

  ‘I will not,’ Enderby cried, ‘have this continual debasement of language.’

  ‘Ah Jesus,’ Toplady went.

  ‘All that’s needed,’ Ms Grace Hope said, ‘is cooperation, right?’

  ‘Okay, tell that fag of a husband of yours to cooperate, okay?’

  ‘I will not be called a fag by this black bitch.’

  ‘Ah, I knew we’d get that sooner or later. Okay, maybe this black bitch better schlepp her black ass off home.’

  ‘He didn’t mean that,’ Enderby said. ‘And you didn’t mean that about his being a fag.’

  ‘Didn’t I just, brother.’

  ‘She calls everybody a fag,’ Enderby explained. ‘She calls me a fag too, but I don’t object.’

  ‘Baby,’ April Elgar said, ‘you may be an uptight ofay milk-toast limey bastard, but you ain’t no fag.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Enderby said gravely. Pete Oldfellow said in heat:

  ‘She’s got him by the balls, she’s made him pussydrunk, she eats him for dinner.’ Toplady cried:

  ‘We’ve got less than one month before opening. This can’t go on.’

  ‘Well, try a smaller size, baby,’ April Elgar said.

  ‘I’ll say one thing,’ Enderby suddenly said with weight. ‘This thing is not entirely in our hands. There are too many messages coming through. Not very coherent perhaps, but we’re being warned, I think, not to play ducks and drakes with the dead. I’m no more superstitious than the next person, but there have been various signs.’ They all looked at him. Ms Grace Hope said:

  ‘What do you mean – signs?’

  ‘Mrs Schoenbaum has these seances, superstitious nonsense, of course, but there seems to be somebody out there, watching. A fire at the Holiday Inn. My fryer back in Tangiers exploded.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Oldfellow said without conviction.

  ‘“Good friend,”’ Enderby said,’ “for Jesus’ sake forbear –”’

  ‘Jesus,’ went Toplady anticlimactically.

  ‘A thought, that’s all. We’re trying to celebrate, in a popular and rather ah American form, altogether appropriate considering the double nature of the celebration, the human side of a great poet. That human side must not be traduced. The dead seem to have their own way of responding to the law of libel. If anybody’s going to be made to suffer, it’s going to be me. A fellow poet. Letting the side down. You,’ he said sternly to Oldfellow, ‘had better watch out. You’re acting Shakespeare like a kind of cowboy. And with what I take to be a Milwaukee accent. Shakespeare’s not going to like that.’

  ‘You’re crazy, that’s for sure,’ Oldfellow said, now with conviction. ‘And I come from Cedar Rapids, lowa.’

  ‘Listen,’ Toplady hissed at Enderby, ‘I’m director, okay? And I’ll decide who does what and how. You just give what you’re asked for, okay? That’s laid down in your contract.’

  ‘It’s also laid down in my contract that I get some money.’

  ‘Give him some money, for Christ’s sake,’ Toplady said to Ms Grace Hope. Ms Grace Hope at once gave him some money out of a big canvas bag covered with widowed letters of the alphabet in various typefaces. Enderby thanked her courteously. ‘Okay,’ Toplady said, ‘next call’s at two. Entire company. Act One.’

  ‘That fag,’ April Elgar, ‘that plays piano. I want him out on his fat ass.’

  ‘Mike Silversmith always has him,’ Toplady patiently explained. ‘Mike Silversmith needs him.’

  ‘I don’t need him, brother. And I don’t have him.’

  ‘Silversmith,’ Enderby pronounced, ‘is musically analphabetic. His sense of prosody is rudimentary. This fag, Coppola I gather his name is, is at the moment necessary. He can notate music.’

  ‘Who,’ Toplady said viciously, ‘is running this show?’

  Enderby bowed to everybody and then took his urgent engorgement and the image of April Elgar off to another toilet. Then, having finished the implausible story about the planet Urkurk, he went off to have a beef sandwich with coleslaw, which latter he ate.

  That afternoon, from a lonely seat in the dark auditorium, he watched Act One unroll. The Induction was back in. Then Elizabethan London was primarily April Elgar and a dumpy woman choreographer. Oldfellow gawped at London, gumchewing kid as dumb Hamnet holding his dad’s paw, and gave it slow hayseed (Cedar Rapids, he had said) greeting. He had prerecorded his songs, cheating but permitted in a star who had never sung before, and to the thumping of a live piano by the bald but hairy Coppola opened and shut a soundless gob. April Elgar did not warble Enderby’s little Elizabethan pastiche about love; instead she belted out gamier words, though still by him, Enderby:

  ‘Love, you say love, you say love?

  All you’re talking about

  Is fleshly philandering,

  Goosing and gandering,

  Peacock and peahen stalking about,

  Squawking about

  Love,

  He-goat, she-goat, mare and stallion,

  Blowsy trull, poxy rapscallion.

  You’d better know that my golden galleon

  Is not for your climbing aboard

  Of’

&nb
sp; And so on. And it was not right. She was shaking her divine black ass to it. She was black America, which was better than Cedar Rapids, but she was not Elizabethan London. Nor, God help him, were his own rhythms. And another thing: what right had he, Enderby, to assume that Shakespeare had fallen for a genuine negress (inadmissible term nowadays, he had been told)? A dark lady was not necessarily a black lady. A chill fell on Enderby. He had been corrupted in advance, he had wanted a black lady, and nobody had questioned his assumption. Another thing: the dialogue was being steadily corrupted to modern American colloquial. Pete Oldfellow now said, in his Shakespeare persona: ‘Okay, then, let’s forget it.’ Enderby yelled:

  ‘No!’

  Toplady, who sat in the centre aisle at a table with a light trained on his script and notes, looked round from over black-framed reading glasses at the source of the agonized cry, then he counteryelled:

  ‘Out!’

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ a quieter Enderby said, while the cast looked down.

  ‘Yeah, talking to you. And what I said was.’

  ‘I know what you said. Am I to sit here and hear that bloody traduction and make no bloody protest? I said no and I mean bloody no. And if you haven’t the sense of historical propriety to say bloody no too then you’re a.’

  ‘You want to be thrown out? You’re barred from rehearsals, get that? When I want you I’ll let you know, right? Now get your ass out of here.’

  ‘Bugger you,’ Enderby said doubtfully and getting up. ‘The whole thing’s a bloody travesty. I’m getting out. I’m also going home. Bugger the contract.’ And he climbed panting up the deeply raked aisle. When he got outside into the dusking concourse or whatever they called it he breathed deeply and angrily. Also impotently. He had no return ticket nor money for one. He had, in the toilet, counted Ms Grace Hope’s meagre handout. He had neither publisher nor literary agent in New York. He had no source of money to get him to what he called home. He lighted himself a White Owl, better than Robert Burns though not much, he had been recommended to try Muriel but he had once known a girl called Muriel, and he looked through the great window at the dusking carpark. Snow spun on blacktops and, tautomorphically, white tops. Gonna be a white Christmas, they said. He turned to snort smoke at the double door whence he had exited and puff disdain at what lay within. Then the doors opened to show April Elgar running on long legs out. Ah God, that damnable beauty, crystalline and coral concern, body like flame, arms like lesser flames towards him. Then she had him embraced, and he, White Owl awkward in gripe, had to embrace back, then throwing White Owl to hoot out disregarded smoke on oatmeal carpeting. Recover it later.

  ‘Honey, honey,’ she said, ‘we’ll beat the bastards, you’ll see.’ Then she raised her lips (only a little way necessary) and kissed, with surely histrionic though instinctually histrionic sincerity, him, Enderby. Who dithered. Who trembled kneewise. Who groaned. Who said with little breath:

  ‘You shouldn’t. You know. Changes world. Forces me to. Avowals. Most dangerous word in the.’

  ‘I’m with you, baby. Screaming fags. Just thought I’d let you, you know, like know. Ow.’ That was Enderby’s embrace unwillingly pressing the air out of her. But a sturdy tumescence more appropriate to her image than to her pressed reality thrust them, in the first phase of its arc, apart like some instrument, a truncheon say, of moral order. One of her sharp metal heels transfixed Enderby’s White Owl and it ceased, though not for that reason, to smoke. Enderby, seeing it, said:

  ‘Ought to. Give it up. No breath, you see. Don’t make me. Avowals.’

  ‘That bastard Topass insulted you, kid, and I’ve come to take you back in there. You got your rights. He’s gonna pologize.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Enderby said, volume of SF at groin, ‘want his bloody apologies. I wouldn’t go in there again if I was dragged. I’d be on the next plane if I had the money. I’ll lock myself into that bloody cell with the electric typewriter, obscene thing purring at you all the time, and I’ll do what has to be done. Then I’ll get paid and I’ll bugger off. Forgive my bad language.’

  ‘You coming back in there with me.’

  ‘No, I’m not. And there’s another thing. The whole damned enterprise is becoming farcical. Quite apart from Oldfellow’s stupidity and incompetence. I mean, there’s no sense of the past in it. I mean, what with jazzing things up and you, forgive me, wagging your divine ah buttocks.’

  ‘Divine buttocks. I got to remember that. I’m singing the songs, right, saying the words, right, acting this Dark Lady, right? It’s that fag Oldass that’s fucking it up, right?’

  Enderby sighed profoundly. ‘It’s as if there’s no sense of the past here in America.’

  ‘Well, who wants the past? Like the cigarette commercial says, we’ve come a loooong way, baby. This past you talking about is a bad bad time. You ask my mother. You coming back in there?’

  ‘No,’ Enderby said. ‘I need tea.’

  8

  SO, IN THE second act, Essex and Southampton come to see Will and tell him to organize a revival of Richard II, signal of rebellion. I cannot, my lords, it will be taken as treasonous. Is not the sale of the book of the play banned by the Privy Council? Thou hast thy responsibilities, Will. Did I not give thee a thousand pounds that thou mightest purchase a player’s share in thy bedraggled and mouthing acting company? (True. Enderby had inserted that truth in the first act.) Aye, my lord, and did you not steal from me her I was besotted with to become your own mistress? Come, Will, thou knowest that she but used thee as a rung on a ladder of advancement. She is now our Boadicea. Oh, what bloody nonsense. A song for the rebels:

  Who’ll fight for Essex,

  Our uncrowned king?

  From Anglia to Wessex

  Let affirmation ring.

  Oh no oh no no no. He, Enderby, was encircled by discouragement, and when, as from her with the divine black ass and the other attributes of magnetism, he was granted encouragement it was in the direction of the further bemerding of poor Will, more, the whole of his spacious age. So the rebellion failed and the dissident earls were confronted by Toplady’s silly mistress, who had to be thought of as Gloriana. You, sir, I confine to jail since you were but a foolish follower of this ingrate that knew not what he did. Mayhap my successor, a man of royal lineage whose nomination must be kept secret for fear of such as my almost late lord here, will release you at his royal pleasure. But this, this, this foul viper and toad of the commonweal, this flouter, this sneerer, this minor satan in trunk hose and foolish smirk, shall to Tower Hill and his condign end. Aye, his head shall roll with the smirk wiped off by death’s tersive napkin and no more shall be heard of him. Where now is this black and evil tigress in a woman’s hide that I hear of? Let her be brought before me that I may look on her and consider best of whether she shall live or die. So April Elgar swings her divine black farthingaled ass into the royal presence, and one in decaying ginger pallor looks on the fabled gold of Afric. Oh Jesus Christ, this never happened and it never could have happened.

  Enderby nevertheless heard in his head all too clearly, dealt by an evil muse, a conflatrix of the spirits of bemerded Will’s poetaster enemies, chirpy words in the tones of Mistress Lucy Negro, played by April Elgar. Madam, queen you may be, but it is of a blanched and bleached kingdom unblessed by the sun, a nearly quondam queendom leprous, decayed, weakly tyrannical. Know you not where the future lies? Look westward, sister/ from this derelict/ island, a blister/ soon to be pricked. I speak for the future, madam, Cleopatran New Rome, I speak of black power,/ that’s what we’ll get;/ although I lack power,/ I’ll get it yet.

  The response to all this of the spirit of Shakespeare was not reported from Mrs Schoenbaum’s residence, since she was spending a week or so in Miami, but small and as it were distracted punishments dogged Enderby’s residence at the Sheraton. He got himself stuck in the elevator, between floors too; he fell heavily in the bath, a proof that, anyway, baths were dangerous; plugging in his kettle to make tea, he
somehow managed to fuse all the lights of that floor; he slipped on a patch of ice in the forecourt of the hotel; he was served a decayed shirred egg. He was glad to get back to the Holiday Inn in Terrebasse. Shakespeare’s spirit, having many preoccupations, probably mainly to do with the price of formerly Shakespeare land in Stratford’s environs, would not find him there again, not being concerned to listen in to Ms Grace Hope telling him, Enderby, that the budget for a writer had to be kept low, stars costing so much, the Holiday Inn was where he had been put in the first place and that was where he should stay. Question of taxi fares also from Indianapolis to the theater. In Terrebasse he could slither on the brief ice between place of work and of repose. Well, it was just as well. Corruption because of proximity of, most dangerous word in language. Oldfellow too much around in bar and dining room too, when Ms Grace Hope had returned to California, betraying faggishness, a genuine attribute, not just conventional smear from April Elgar, by pawing his understudy, primarily Essex, Dick Corcoran the SF man. Get the bloody job finished, get air fare, get home.

  ‘You not been around much,’ she said to him one day when they met by chance, indeed coming simultaneously out of neighbouring toilet doors in the Peter Brook Theater. Enderby eyed her bitterly, trying to look like disguised Rosalind in some ridiculous black trendy production of As You Like It, that was to say in peaked corduroy cap and patched boilersuit, but breathing very quintessence of elegance and glamour. He also looked guiltily on her, since he had decided to get rid of her at the end of the first act. He could not go on with this ahistorical nonsense. Christ, they were dealing with real and documented situations. Toplady and she could do what the hell they wished, but he would not be a party to their falsifyings. ‘Where,’ she said, ‘you go for Thanksgiving?’