Burgess Byrning
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing BURGESS BYRNING By Phoebe Pettingell Anthony Burgess' posthumously issued final work turns out to be an epic poem called Byrne (Carroll & Graf, 150 pp., $20.00). This comes...
...On the other, he thought both sides were too ready to see human beings as "clockwork oranges," incapable of independent action...
...Like Yeats, Burgess felt that creativity begins in "the foul rag-andbone shop of the heart," and that human cruelty, lust and misery cannot be separated from the impulse that enables the creation of Michelangelo's Moses, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Picasso's Guernica...
...It expresses moral outrage against the culture the author inhabits, and a tight formal structure is required to effectively bring it off...
...Though critically acclaimed, the book's Joycean patois discouraged a mass audience—that is, until Stanley Kubrick turned it into a highly controversial movie in 1971...
...Her group has planted an explosive at a literary conference organized by twin brother Tom...
...This poetaster had to do instead...
...Ironically, the danger of such moralistic censorship was one of the novel's major themes...
...This occasion gives Burgess the chance to reprint his sonnet sequence about how each of civilization's great "revolutions," such as the Reformation or the Enlightenment, merely set off a new cycle of war, reforms, corruption, tyranny, more revolution...
...It is obviously meant to suggest the output of Andrew Lloyd Webber...
...Byrne takes on all these themes, assuming that the ideal reader will have some familiarity with Burgess' earlier work and appreciate the new variations...
...Success made him and the movie favorite targets of the sort of conservatives who believe art describing bad behavior provokes more of it...
...In addition, he possessed a slender talent for atonal music and obscene, experimental painting...
...thought he was a kind of living myth And hence deserving of ottava rima, The scheme that Ariosto juggled with, Apt for a lecherous defective dreamer...
...Somebody had to.' So ends Burgess' last satiric romp...
...A tendency to dwell on the perverse, the disagreeable and the dirty is characteristic of the genre as well, and serves the writer's purposes...
...Sick with lung cancer, he returns to his parish work for whatever time he has left and gladly throws over the Calvin project, resolving to identify himself with the suffering rather than with any group of self-righteous oppressors...
...Set in a futuristic London, its principal characters are members of teenage gangs who speak a vivid argot the author based on Russian...
...In Byrne, the author sometimes gets so carried away with the rollicking meter and verbal effects that whole stanzas are stuck in merely to show off feats of versification, but it is all good fun...
...This comes as a surprise, for during most of his remarkable career he distinguished himself as a prolific fiction writer, critic and journalist...
...A group of American fundamentalists have hired him to do a miniseries on the life of John Calvin, whose condemning of heretic Michael Servetus to the stake is to be its high point...
...Meanwhile, Islamic fanatics are busy blowing up bookstores that carry Dante's Divine Comedy because they have discovered that in it the Prophet is consigned to the nethermost circle of the inferno...
...Almost immediately he established himself as heir to the satiric tradition of fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh...
...Eventually, the only traces of his passage were bits of his opera and the numerous bastards he left in his wake...
...Westerners patronizingly respond, ...It's a pity Mohammed is in hell, but what's been done Can't be etcetera...
...Despite his being apolitical, he traveled to Nazi Germany where, rechristened Born, he orchestrated a choral setting of Mein Kampf Tor Hitler...
...They mix horrific acts of violence with an appreciation for the masterworks of European music, whose tonalities give them sexual thrills...
...Anthony Burgess was a passionate hater...
...On one hand, the writer agreed with the saint that human nature is naturally corrupt, and objected to the heretic's belief that education can solve all social problems...
...Dante stays upon our shelves...
...My suspicion is that these poems may have been Anthony Burgess' own initial efforts at writing, hence his affectionate employment of them in so many of his books...
...Free to work out their own salvations or damnations, they desert the dying old man...
...At various times, grateful older ladies supported him while he produced daubs using such unconventional art supplies as jelly, chicken fat or feces...
...By his death in 1993, at age 76, he had produced over 50 books, although he first studied music and languages and did not publish a volume until his late 30s...
...But his heirs, all of whom happen to be childless, reject this interpretation...
...Brian, for instance, writes hit musicals based on literary works for London's West End theaters...
...Byrne wants to claim his children as his truest artistic creations...
...But the Arab and Pakistani fundamentalists refuse to forgive a wrong to the founder of their religion, even if it was committed over 600 years ago, and they make common cause with other angry organizations, including the IRA...
...Underneath his sarcasm about society's foibles, however, there was a deep love for humanity in all its imperfections, and he always found joy in the music of human language...
...The 20th-century artist is put in his place as a whoring sensation seeker (like Picasso), irresponsible political naif (like those German musicians who collaborated with the Nazis without sharing their ideology), and sometime plagiarist (you fill in the names...
...Burgess' third novel, A Clockwork Orange (1963) remains his most famous...
...Burgess' early interest in music spilled over into a fascination with prosody...
...In the aftermath of the bomb blast, Tim finds the secular world so irrational that his personal crisis of faith hardly seems to matter...
...Thanks to his Catholic training, he saw it in terms of the famous fourth-century debate between St...
...Augustine and the British-bom Pelagius over the doctrine of original sin...
...Tim, the poem's sad hero and an identical twin, is one of the two legitimate Byrne progeny...
...Not unlike Byrne, he too dabbled in a variety of forms, leaving behind his many books as progeny...
...Byron was long dead...
...Satire is fundamentally a conservative art...
...Byrne seems a 20th-century artistic Everyman: "'making it new" according to the Modernist credo, striving to shock rather than reverentially depict, always covering weaknesses in technique with ostensibly fresh effects...
...His mordant imagination and the frequently exotic settings of his stories also evoked comparisons to another coreligionist, Graham Greene...
...There the author switches to another Byronic form, the nineline Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold that suggests a wavelike rocking motion appropriate to the watery city...
...Yet for all his execrable traits, Byrne remains a kind of life force in the face of those who would only hate and destroy...
...In his Enderby novels, a minor British poet writes verses (mostly sonnets) that obviously please both fictional hero and his creator...
...A teenager calling herself Angela De'ath relieves Tim of his virginity, then turns out to be one of the terrorists...
...We can be grateful for such entertaining children...
...Fleeing the victorious Allied armies, he initially sought refuge in Switzerland (whose neutrality is savagely mocked by the poem), then moved on to more obscure places, usually located in political trouble spots...
...Tim's employers insist Calvin's action be seen as just and sympathetic (this is Burgess' reprise of the Augustine/Pelagius debate...
...Back in London, Brian is staging a Byrne festival, with exhibitions and concerts of his father's shocking oeuvre...
...Hed have preferred a stronger-muscled smith, Anvilling rhymes amid poetic steam, a Sort of Lord Byron...
...Some helped his career by introducing him to notable composers of the era like Gustav Holst (whose symphonic cycle, The Planets, is still the model for sci-fi movie scores), and Carl Orff of Carmina burana fame, darling of the Third Reich...
...In his youth the eponymous libertine of the epic poem's title developed a taste for bedding women, impregnating those young enough to bear children, then skipping town to begin again elsewhere...
...Among the most popular is ...a heterogeneous blend of Wagner, ragtime, raga, rage, dysphorious Sex called Wasteland that did not quite offend The Eliotians and amused the gallery...
...The poem's narrator confesses himself one of this substantial tribe...
...Burgess was further obsessed with the issue of free will...
...The remaining four cantos describe the fates of some of the others...
...Suddenly, Clockwork becamea bestseller around the world...
...Liberalize yourselves, You Muslims...
...On Christmas Eve the patriarch, now over 90, reappers to summon his offspring for a farewell...
...Tim is the last to depart, Smiling, Christmas-elated, somewhat sad too, Blessing the filthy world...
...Ottava Rima is, of course, the form Byron chose for his own Don Juan, and this poem too sticks to it for four of its five cantos, departing only in a short section that takes place in Venice...
...The first canto tells the story of a young Irish opportunist who...
...Liberals found no great hero in Burgess either...
...A Catholic priest who has lost his faith, he tries television scriptwriting in hopes of obtaining economic independence from his parish...
Vol. 80 • November 1997 • No. 17
