Words, Words and More Words

...And since drama today is concerned chiefly with destroying language, it is hard to find a pertinence in poking fun at theater that celebrates it...

...There are, for example, passages in Enderby that, although unmistakably brilliant, nevertheless come dangerously close to preciosity...

...A device of this sort, however, makes both story and reader objects of condescension...

...instead, people act as couriers, rushing in breathlessly to relate the latest turn of events...

...The goddess claims him for her own, and the bride is persuaded by a lesbian journalist to run away from home...

...This, one presumes, is intentional, since the book is offered as a feu d'esprit, a bit of fluff derived from English farce, written almost entirely in dialogue...

...One can discern echoes of The Cocktail Party in this kind of treatment, as in a scene where the nature of sin is discussed with prolixity...

...Burgess, with his boundless enthusiasm for language, will not grant that it is what people do and leave unsaid that reveals them...

...Still, Burgess is not entirely without a message, even in a book designed largely for entertainment...

...This would create problems in any case, but when what is being burlesqued is not currently in favor, the problems are multiplied...

...But even a farce has its disciplines, and Burgess has unsuccessfully violated them...

...Similarly, in A Clockwork Orange, the work for which Burgess is probably best known in the United States, he invents an argot to describe sordid crimes and acts of violence...

...The plot is based on a tale from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, and recounts the adventures of a young man who, the night before his wedding, places a ring on the finger of a statue of Venus, thereby bringing her to life...

...Burgess deliberately makes use of stock characters and setting (an upper-class English drawing room, complete with French doors), and as an added fillip has adhered strictly to the classical unities...

...what happens to them does not seem to matter...

...Where there is no characterization, where nothing truly engages the reader's attention, only words are left...

...Burgess also displays an unfortunate tendency to underline...

...Venus has been unkind...

...When Venus casts her spell upon the young bridegroom, he does little more than verbalize his responses...

...Perhaps he felt this substructure, the sense of things happening around and between sentences, unnecessary given the book's dramatic form...

...Venus, though, words—their sound, their shape, their infinite couplings—are plainly the only reality...

...It is a disquieting sensation, and like watching an actor laugh at his own lines, it serves to break the thin thread suspending disbelief...

...Indeed, it would be an easy, inexpensive matter to mount a production of the book exactly as written...

...Lady Drayton, a creature whose entire life appears to have been spent in a drawing room, is made to remark, " 'It only seems last week that she was presented to me, like some new publication wet from the press, the proofs of a laborious novel' "—a simile suited to the author but hardly to Lady Drayton...

...The coyness of the interjection destroys the humor through pointless emphasis...

...Such images?good Burgess but poor characterization—are as plentiful in this novel as mice in a granary, parody and language consuming everything...

...One senses the author chuckling in the background while he manipulates his creations, putting words into their mouths, laying events at their feet...

...Good comedy, for one thing, is always serious at heart: Comic characters must react in a manner absolutely consistent with their nature, and must do so in earnest, no matter how absurd the situation in which they find themselves...

...But Burgess' characters are barely sketched in...

...When theme and characters falter, however, or are unequal to his style, the words do indeed seem to take over...

...Even the dialogue, while frequently witty and always florid, is not necessarily appropriate...

...In this respect, the 20-year delay between the writing and publication of The Eve of St...

...The thought is almost parenthetical to be sure, of no consequence to the story, and may in fact be meant as no more than a joke...

...yet a careful study of any good play, whether by Chekhov or Feydeau, will show how essential a feature it is...

...Words are funny things," says one of the characters...

...Most of the time he uses language as a medium in which to create atmosphere, character and point of view...

...In this case they are at least literate, bubbling, whimsical, and irrepressible...

...His theme is the importance of physical love, yet here again there is a failure that derives from words: His people do not show—they tell...

...here, dealing with stock characters, he seems to feel the rules do not apply...

...Certainly, Burgess recognizes this in his later novels...

...Decerebrated clodpoles...

...But Eliot's play deals with people who are seriously conceived—a dignity that must be allowed farcical figures, too—and maintains an eloquence of things unspoken which lends resonance to dialogue...

...Still, it gives pause to the reader, since Burgess is a literate artificer who works with words the way Bernini worked with stone...

...This may be due in part to Burgess' reliance on dialogue to relate the story, but it is also the result, I think, of the scant respect the author gives his characters, and his overly cerebral tone...

...To a writer they're perhaps the only reality...

...Slipshop demisemiwit.' Sir Benjamin's swearing was always too literary to be really offensive...

...His people appear less concerned with actual events than in relating them afterward with literary flourishes that blur individual distinctions in speech...

...at the same time, characters are placed at a distance, permitting the author to move into the foreground...

...Venus, an early Anthony Burgess novel just published in this country for the first time, seem to tell us something about the author himself...

...Surely the conclusions one can draw from Sir Benjamin's swearing are clear enough without editorial comment...

...Thus the book opens with a dunder-headed, food-loving, wme-swilling baronet raging at a servant who has damaged a statue: "'Clusterfist...

...There are further complications, most of which we never see...

...Yet due to the nature of Enderby himself, any verbal excesses are appropriately matched by extravagances in character, and in the end one is certain that this usage alone can reflect the world as Enderby sees it...

...Language is used to parody the poetic drama of Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot, which was enjoying a vogue in 1950, the year the novel was written...

...In so doing he adds a dimension of horror that standard vocabulary, with its ordinary associations, could not convey...

...In The Eve of St...