A Poet for Posterity

Anthony Burgess often seems to be the only living novelist in England. Master of many languages, many dialects of English, and of music (he is also a composer), Burgess is heir to much knowledge and much wit; always totally informed and rarely overburdened, his prose changes directions perpetually because its author knows more possibilities for a sentence than Judge Sirica. He has kept a great tradition alive, and honored his literary father by editing an abridged Finnegans Wake and writing two books on Joyce. But unless Napoleon Symphony (which I haven’t read) is it, Burgess has never written a great novel. Even A Clockwork Orange is burdened by his heavy-handed, two- handed symmetry. Yet in language and the faceted shattering of novelistic situations only Nabokov is his master, and only Burgess is in Nabokov’s league.

The Clockwork Testament is the third, final novel about his most charming character, Enderby (in the United States, the first two were published together as Enderby}. Enderby is a poet, a lovably helpless genius with comically obnoxious habits, a willing victim of his own viscera. Just as the first volume was titled Inside Mr. Enderby to denote both his mental processes and his indigestion, this third book’s subtitle, Enderby’s End, indicates both the death and the anality of its hero. Other people may “breathe their last,” but Enderby seems to excrete rather than expire. The visitors from the future who find his naked, hairy, gross body after his final heart attack observe first that it has been “incontinent.” And no poet has ever trumpeted his existence in such uncertain terms; just as Zoltan Kodaly’s beautiful Hary Janos Suite begins with the musical equivalent of a sneeze, the first Enderby book begins with a belch, and flatulence ends its first paragraph. The Clockwork Testament takes twenty pages to get that far again, but then Enderby’s inner violence is extraordinary: “baark ballifoll goristafick.” A poet for posterity.

CN

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Charles Nicol

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Anthony Burgess often seems to be the only living novelist in England. Master of many languages, many dialects of English, and of music (he is also a composer), Burgess is heir to much knowledge and much wit; always totally informed and rarely overburdened, his prose changes directions perpetually because its author knows more possibilities for a sentence than Judge Sirica. He has kept a great tradition alive, and honored his literary father by editing an abridged Finnegans Wake and writing two books on Joyce. But unless Napoleon Symphony (which I haven’t read) is it, Burgess has never written a great novel. Even A Clockwork Orange is burdened by his heavy-handed, two- handed symmetry. Yet in language and the faceted shattering of novelistic situations only Nabokov is his master, and only Burgess is in Nabokov’s league.

The Clockwork Testament is the third, final novel about his most charming character, Enderby (in the United States, the first two were published together as Enderby}. Enderby is a poet, a lovably helpless genius with comically obnoxious habits, a willing victim of his own viscera. Just as the first volume was titled Inside Mr. Enderby to denote both his mental processes and his indigestion, this third book’s subtitle, Enderby’s End, indicates both the death and the anality of its hero. Other people may “breathe their last,” but Enderby seems to excrete rather than expire. The visitors from the future who find his naked, hairy, gross body after his final heart attack observe first that it has been “incontinent.” And no poet has ever trumpeted his existence in such uncertain terms; just as Zoltan Kodaly’s beautiful Hary Janos Suite begins with the musical equivalent of a sneeze, the first Enderby book begins with a belch, and flatulence ends its first paragraph. The Clockwork Testament takes twenty pages to get that far again, but then Enderby’s inner violence is extraordinary: “baark ballifoll goristafick.” A poet for posterity.