This Boor Joyce

...The husband does not knock Enderby down, but he prays over him, alternating Marxist and religious slogans, in the manner of the Coffee House clergy: "Comrade God, forgive the boor Joyce transgressions of Comrade Enderby here, who has been led astray by the lusts of his own body into writing pornographic poetry . . . Let your light shine upon him to make him a decent worker and a good member of his union, when, him being a poet, such shall be formed...

...he returns to poetry, just as Alex in A Clockwork Orange returns to violence...

...Furthermore, Enderby has either too much meaning, or not enough...

...He had tried to be careful about laundry and cleaning the saucepans, but poetry got in the way, raising him above the worry about squalor...

...He said recently, in the New York Times Book Review, "A book may bore its reader, but it ought not to bore its author...

...Enderby really is (again like Pru-frock) Polonius...

...Enderby has literally given up everything for art...

...This would suggest that Burgess writes largely for his own pleasure...

...I wish Burgess' 17th novel had been tighter, but he is certainly one of the funniest writers alive, particularly when he is attacking the contemporary scene, as in a description of a Jet Set cocktail party: "A most insolent Negro in native robes was made much of...

...Enderby is a caricature of the self-centered artist, whose writing has become a solitary act of self-gratification, and a very funny caricature...

...Burgess writes too many books, but I do not see that he has written himself out by any means...

...The first, Nothing Like the Sun, was a pseudo-historical life of Shakespeare...

...And all that is left for the poet, Enderby, when the inspiration is departed, Enderby, is the travestry, the plagiarism, the popularization, the debasement, the curse...

...said, and died...

...To free Enderby from the memory of his stepmother, the Doctor persuades him to adopt his real mother's maiden name, Hogg, give up poetry, and become a member of the laboring classes, a bartender...

...The book begins with Enderby dreaming of school children on a guided tour of his room in England, as though it were a shrine...

...S. Eliot, with his Lloyd's Bank nonsense...

...More than this, Enderby is the most appealing of Burgess' books so far, and by far the most amusing...

...Rawcliffe and Enderby are enemies because each has what the other wants...

...If Enderby lacks the tightness of A Clockwork Orange, it is certainly much less pretentious than the recent A Tremor of Intent...

...As in Enderby's poetry, too many meanings are possible, none arising directly out of the book...

...Another enemy is Doctor Wapen-shaw (a comic version of Graham Greene's evil Doctor Forster in The Ministry of Fear), who tries to rehabilitate Enderby after his suicide attempt by making him a useful member of society...

...The only figure of any importance in Enderby's life is the memory of his dead stepmother, middle-aged, dirty, ill-bred, and Roman Catholic, whom he loathes but imitates: ". . . as middle-age advanced, his stepmother seemed to be entering slyly into him more and more...

...Rawcliffe, who will never write again, is in all the anthologies...

...But Enderby's hatred of Rawcliffe is largely paranoia—the plot of The Pet Beast was only the myth of the Minotaur, well within the public domain, and hardly affected by a little horror movie on the same subject...

...He is just like Eliot's Prufrock, she observes, and leaves him to go swim in the sea (where Rawclifi lies buried) while he begins a new long poem on the characters in Hamlet...

...Lulled into a false sense of security by her gentility, Enderby is persuaded to marry her, only to find that she becomes the image of his stepmother and that he cannot consummate their marriage...

...One gets the uneasy sense that the book is a giant acrostic or puzzle of literary references...

...It is much too long and involved (the complexities of plot are astounding), and it is inventive at the price of being over-ingenious...

...At the end, Rawcliffe is no longer identified with the dark forces, but with the Prodigal of George Herbert's "Redemption...

...having lost the ability to write poetry, he now lives by making bad Italian horror films, and he steals the plot of Enderby's long unpublished poem...

...After Rawcliffe's death?they are both expatriates in Tangiers now—he takes over Rawcliffe's resort, renaming it La Belle Mer (a pun on the sea, of which the unwashed Enderby has a Joycean fear, and the French belle-mere, or stepmother) and is visited by the Muse, as golden-skinned as the Goddess in Nothing Like the Sun...

...One's 17th attempt at an orthodox piece of fiction ought to carry the same tremulous glamour as one's first...

...But unlike Shakespeare, Enderby cannot consummate this marriage either...

...Even Enderby's stepmother snuffing green snot at him in suicidal delirium is Joyce's snotgreen sea, La Belle Mer...

...Enderby's redemption is not so certain...

...As Mallarme said, and everyone keeps reminding Enderby, poetry is made with words, not ideas, and Enderby is obsessed with ideas and meanings...

...Burgess is aware of his own faults as a writer (over-ingenuity, over-productivity) and he is writing about them in Enderby...

...But, after all...

...In spite of this (or perhaps because of it) Enderby is very happy with his way of life, and he looks on all intruders as enemies to the degree that they try to introduce him to any larger world...

...Like an unfrocked priest...

...The arch-enemy is, however, neither wife nor doctor, but Enderby's fellow poet, Rawcliffe, "a small man moustached like Kipling, with the same beetle spectacles and heavy watch chain," who is "in all the anthologies," as Enderby is not...

...The Pet Beast, for one of his movies...

...Thenceforward, I should be outside the Garden, useless to anyone, a mess, and moreover, Enderby, in some un-defineable way, evil...

...At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth Of thieves and murderers...

...he believes he has turned evil because he is no longer able to write, and tells Enderby: "One night there was the sound of an awful click, and then everything in the bedroom seemed somehow cold and obscene...

...he asked for plain milk, and this had to be sent downstairs for, and then, when it had been handed to him, he merely carried it round unsipped, as if to demonstrate that he was not totally anti-white...

...He just stood there, a butler called in by her eccentric ladyship...

...But the stepmother's hold on Enderby survives brainwashing...

...The most determined of these annoyances is Vesta Bainbridge, feature editor of a repulsive woman's magazine, and widow of a famous racing driver, who decides to take him in hand...

...His life has become centered around "the smallest room of the house," the lavatory, where he is plagued with dyspepsia, where he practices his solitary acts (he has been impotent since the death of his stepmother), and where he writes his poems...

...Shakespeare's Wooden O has become, for Enderby, the toilet seat...

...Rawcliffe has also become a sexual degenerate and alcoholic, given to sadistic perversions...

...Perhaps the funniest scene in the book is Enderby's confrontation with the irate husband of a barmaid (Enderby has been commissioned by a friend to ghostwrite love poems to her, in exchange for the loan of the friend's suit...

...En-derby's reaction is to run away and attempt suicide amid, naturally, "a cosmic swish of lavatory flushings...

...Enderby, who will never be there, has a kind of poetic logorrhea...

...Yet dyspepsia would cut disconcertingly in more and more, blasting like a tuba through the solo string traceries of his delicate creations...

...It ends with a more cynical dream of the same school children being shown Tangiers, the home of failed expatriate writers, where the laurel crowns become bay leaves to be used for cooking and for curing sick cats...

...this one is a comic view of a second-rate poet, F. X. Enderby...

...Rawcliffe has seen better days...

...But, alas, Enderby the novel has most of the faults of Enderby the poet...

...Far from being sympathetic to his cloacal obsessions, she describes him abusively as "Enderby spinning round and round in an eternal lavatory...

...His back-ached, his feet hurt, he had a tiny paunch, all his teeth were out, he belched...

...The book abounds in cute references to writers: "That bloody man in Mallorca, Enderby, says the day of the moon goddess is done...

...She read the menu intently, as though it contained a Nabokovian cryptogram", "T...

...It would be possible to work out endless allegories about writing, the True Church, Modern England, and Mankind, yet none seems germane...

...Unlike his poor poet, Anthony Burgess is an immensely talented writer, and in spite of its faults, Enderby ranks at least very near what I consider his best novels: A Clockwork Orange, Nothing Like the Sun, Honey for the Bears...

...There 1 Him espied, Who straight, Your suit is granted...