M/F

by Anthony Burgess

  – He sought philosophical adjustment from me, he, a philosopher. I wrote a little conundrum on his name. For some reason it gave him a sense of power.

  – And what sort of a conundrum would you write on your name?

  – It would go best in music, he smiled. Then he sang to lah four notes, in intervals which I have since learnt to designate as a major third, a whole tone, a fourth, adding: The last letter of the name can’t be sphynxified, but R in Tudor notation stood for a rest.

  – And your relationship to me, if any?

  – Grandfather.

  I stared at him for five seconds, long enough to sing F A B E with a rest after, and was nearly fool enough to ask jauntily: maternal or paternal? Instead I pretended that this was no great revelation and said:

  – Have I, besides you and my sister, any other relatives?

  – You had a brief supererogatory twin, of course. But I think you can be quite certain that your sister and myself and yourself represent the total remnant of a once large and flourishing family.

  There was something I couldn’t understand. I took out the almost pulped picture of Carlotta and showed it him. He squinted at it frowning. I said:

  – Are you sure that’s not my mother?

  – Quite sure. You caught the word tukang last night, eh? I myself learned the word from the charming proprietress of the Batavia Hotel. Quite a coincidence, I admit.

  – Really a coincidence?

  – One could do nothing without the help of coincidence. This lady novelist’s original name was, I believe, Ramphastos, but that did not sound much like a popular novelist’s name. She tried Toucan, but that was too obviously ornithological. Tukang had a spicy Oriental ring about it. If you wish to know how I know all this –

  – I don’t, not really.

  – I got Mr Loewe in New York to do some quick research. Guest book at the Lord Cumberland Inn in Riverhead, Massachusetts, newspaper files, the usual thing. I was concerned, you see. Something of great moment was about to begin.

  – And is this bird woman any relation of Aderyn?

  – You do seem to have relationships on the brain, don’t you? Surprising in one who professes such an admiration for all this relationless nonsense mouldering here. No, no relation.

  – What do you know about the Maltese language?

  – Dear me, you do dart about. Nothing, except that it’s a Northern Arabic dialect with Italian loanwords and that it’s had a written form for a little over a century.

  So I’d given the wrong answer. Plausible, but wrong. That Elizabethan play that had been titularly gold? Something lost, probably: Midas and Hys Goulden Touche; A Girl Worth Gold (but I seemed to remember that was later than 1596); A Peece of Gold Good my Maisters; The Returne of the Golden Age, or Gloriana’s Triumphs; Goldfinger and Silverskin. I was satisfied about that, then. I said:

  – Why is your accent French if you were so patently brought up in the Anglo-Saxon tradition?

  – Anglo-Saxon tradition?

  – Roast pork and apple sauce. Synchronic sweet and savoury. Not at all French.

  – Clever. I have always found the Gallic approach to life sympathetic. A fair tradition of liberty and equality. Fraternity doesn’t matter quite so much, does it? In America, when you consider what has to be considered, my French accent has been a help. A token, too, of rational and humane and revolutionary principles mostly now, alas, lost. But your mention of the Anglo-Saxon tradition is apropos. I have studied the language. I know what the name Sib Legeru means.

  – And I know what the name Miles Faber means.

  – True, but pseudonyms, of which Sib Legeru is one, carry a privy message. Perhaps my own main pseudonym has too general a signification. Z. Fonanta, zoon phonanta, the talking animal, man.

  – Do you market a product called Jellif?

  – I once suggested the name to a marketing organization in New York. May I say how glad I am to see you looking for connections, tightening bolts that aren’t there, soldiering on despite your manifest weariness, hammering away at structures.

  – Why should you have anything to do with a circus?

  – Why not? Circuses cross national boundaries with comparative ease. I began by making use of other men’s circuses, I ended by establishing my own. You see, my boy, I started with gross disadvantages. Crippled, no money behind me, full of incestuous guilt –

  – God, you too?

  – It runs in the family, I’m afraid. But you have exorcized the curse. That was your purpose in coming here. There’ll be no more incest in the Faber family.

  – Who was was –

  – My own mother. The gods punished me with exemplary speed. I was run over by a tramcar in Lille. It has never prevented me from loving France. But back to my point. I had no trade, despite our family name, and I needed to make money quickly. Fate and the community denied me the opportunities I sought. I decided to conduct a business of illegal imports and exports.

  – Using circuses?

  – The floor of a lion’s cage is left severely alone by the customs officers. Valuable objects can be lodged in the crops of birds. Circuses are innocent, complex, and highly mobile. Our present age is hungry for the passage of illegal commodities – drugs chiefly. But I’ve made the Faber fortune, I do little now. I have leisure for scholarship. But even there I have not been endowed with the singleminded capacity for specialization I would have wished. Dabble dabble dabble. My medical degree I obtained in late middle age from a disreputable university I shored up with a longterm interest-free loan. I wanted to specialize in the psychology of incest, but the scope is surprisingly limited. So I dabble still – music, literature, light philosophy. Art, I believe, will prove man’s salvation, but not. This. Kind. Of. Pseudo. Art.

  On these last emphatic words he beat his chairarm petulantly with his ceramic hand, wrinkling, puffing, beetling, looking old. I said:

  – Who was Sib Legeru?

  – Who? Who? What would be a more appropriate interrogative. Consider first the name. In a famous sermon delivered by Bishop Wulfstan at the end of the first Christian millennium, a time when Antichrist in the shape of the Danes seemed likely to corrupt, rend and liquidate Anglo-Saxon civilization, the word siblegeru appears. It means legging or ligging or lying with one’s own sib, it means incest.

  – No.

  – You deny that is the meaning?

  – No. No.

  – You think of freedom of artistic expression as being wonderfully incarnated in these works, no doubt. No doubt, no doubt, you are young. Liberation even from the dungeon of unconscious obsessions. The death of the syntax of the old men. No more solar or lunar crudities of sharp light – instead, the glamour of the eclipse. What utter nonsense. These works are as rigidly encased in the iron waistcoat of imposed form as, say, that autumn sonnet of mine which the wrinkling of your nose indicated you found so jejune and distasteful, so oldmannish, so unfree. Look at that picture there. Its elements are derived from a children’s page word transformation puzzle: bread broad brood blood. That companion picture yields blood blond bland. And there, with that blasphemous parody of the Droeshout portrait, you have another kiddy teaser: book boot boat coat coal. The pseudoliterary works are based on the meanest and most irrelevant of taxonomies, they derive their structures from the alphabetic arrangements of encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Try it, my boy; anybody can do it. Why, I can, as I sit here now, extemporize any number of deathless Sib Legeru lines. Like this:

  Cased armadillo, snuffling gorger of ants,

  Cruel cross between hyena and civet

  Chew St John’s whiskers, crunch great mullein, privet,

  Goldenrod, all manner of plants,

  While the deadmeatbird tears at the African sky

  Above the sackbacked Arabs in the headwind’s thrust,

  And the balls are clicked on the wires in digital lust

  Down to the limits of hell, where the long lost cry.

  – Better, I said, than al
l the works of Swart Smythe put together. Though that last line has too much of the ring of Robert W. Service.

  – An improvisation only. And I’ve barely tapped the first column of the first page of any English dictionary you care to name. Don’t be taken in, my boy. Bad though my later poems may be, they are at least honest. They deal with the normal processes of human life – love, friendship, the changing seasons –

  – Oh, Jesus.

  – Jesus, yes, the consolations of faith, the desire for a happy death, the living of a helpful and harmless life, the seasons, friendship –

  – You’re repeating yourself.

  – A boy should treat his grandfather with respect, but never mind. One can expect little from the young. But to revert. Those works of Sib Legeru exhibit the nastiest aspects of incest – and I use the term in its widest sense to signify the breakdown of order, the collapse of communication, the irresponsible cultivation of chaos. In them are combined an absence of meaning and a sniggering boyscout codishness. It is man’s job to impose manifest order on the universe, not to yearn for Chapter Zero of the Book of Genesis.

  – Are you, were you –

  – Sib Legeru? Oh yes, I and others, patients chiefly. Your father wrote a ridiculous epic poem about Laman and Rosh, impossible spineless jelyfs. It was a kind of therapeutic experiment. A spurious joy in spurious creation, followed by the salutory horror of seeing how mad and bad and filthy the pseudoworks were. The victims of incest too, the unwilling participators in the killing of communication. There is a poem there, I see, written by your own sister.

  That poem, that? I read it again:

  And caged Cardinal Mabinogion

  Though M is NN copied slack

  A freehand onestroke perfect round

  Took that bony face aback!

  – Oh no, I said, no.

  – That’s very nearly your only utterance today, dear boy. I trust you are saying no to no, negating negation. I notice, by the way, that one work is missing from this collection. It must still be in that outhouse. My nose tells me it is not here. I don’t know how to describe it. Art takes the raw material of the world about us and attempts to shape it into signification. Antiart takes that same material and seeks insignification. I mean, of course (poor Dr Gonzi!), phenomena, sense data whether primary or secondary. Did you notice a certain smell in that shed?

  – Yes.

  – There’s a little box labelled Olfact Number One. Open it at your leisure. Do you propose shipping this junk to America, or shall it remain on this unregarded island, a cynosure to the young and misguided who think God was not clever enough not to want to fashion a cosmos?

  – I’ll think about it.

  – Think about it. Go back to civilization, my boy, run the great business founded on my circus money, marry cleanly, beget clean children.

  – But I’m not clean myself.

  – Meaning not free, not wholly free. But nobody is. Don’t blame everything on myself and your father.

  When he had left I went to the outhouse and was directed by that stench I had noticed before to a small wooden box hidden among old earthcaked trowels. Olfact Number One. It was fastened with a metal clasp. I opened up and nearly fainted. The work was a masterpiece of bad smells. It was not possible to tell what the substances were that were blended to give off so complex a horror – old meat, cheese, fragments of dogmerd announced themselves, but the appearance was of a brown trenched terrain in miniature. I closed it up quickly and wondered whether I ought to parcel it and send it anonymously to some enemy or other. But most of my enemies were public, and the stenches would never get past an undersecretary. It was, when I came to think of it, the sort of thing that Llew would have liked to carry about in his pocket. Be the life and soul of the party with Olfact Number One.

  20

  The tramontana is raging like Antichrist this last summer of the second Christian millennium. Lake Bracciano breaks on its shores like the North Sea, and from the cleared dining table on which I write I can watch the heads of foam racing in. All last night an unsecured windowshutter kept crashing, and though I got up three times to force it back to the wall and hold it with the iron cicogna, the gust freed it twenty minutes or so after I got back into bed beside Ethel. This morning Lupo Sassone, the garbage collector and oddjob-man who lives next door, climbed out on to the parapet to make more acute the angle of the jut of the cicogna while the tramontana tore at him. I gave him a five-thousand-lire note, one thousand for each second of his work. Prices are high here in Bracciano, but I get a good rate of exchange for my dollars.

  This house on the Piazza Padella is small, quite unlike our steel mansion in Stamford, Connecticut, or Ethel’s family’s palace in Kowloon. It lies under the wall of the castle. The castle, according to the local guidebook, serves as an example of military architecture of the XV century and it is well preserved even if its vicissitudes were not amongst the most peaceful. It was object of many fights amongst which that between the Orsini and the Colonna families. We have come here partly so that, in noisy Italian peace and far away from the increasing stresses of New York, I can write this chronicle of a few days in my early life, partly so that we can visit Romolo, who teaches economics in Siena, and so that Bruna, who was recently divorced by her American architect husband, can come in occasionally from Rome and visit us. These are two of our adopted children, the Italian ones. There are others, of varying colours and nationalities. We have no children of our own. When Ethel was of childbearing age I frequently begged her to consider being impregnated by some other man, so strong was my desire for a child of her loins. But she has never allowed her ancestral moral principles to be impaired either by the Western permissive ethos or by my own what she considers extravagant desire for her ivory beauty to be transmitted to the future by any means other than the celebration of my verses or of the paintings by Cespite, Manina and Tizzone. She is not really sorry, she says, that we have no children of her own: miscegenation is a fine humane political ideal but its aesthetic results are often undesirable. She believes this to be especially true of the genetic blending of her race and my own.

  The verses of Miles Faber have been published by the firm of Stearns and Loomis in London. It was good of my poetic grandfather not to pre-empt that name and to publish instead under the pseudonym of Swart Smythe: it was as though he knew. He is long dead and buried in the Freethinkers’ Cemetery outside Grencijta, with the legend M.F., nothing more, on the simple granite. My only other surviving relative, Catherine, is virtually in charge of Anna Sewell (Black is Beauty) – appropriate in two modes, unfitting in another, since she is far from beautiful herself. She has had her offers, nevertheless, but remains unmarried: once, she says, is enough. Miss Emmett died recently at the age of ninety in a diabetic coma, far from help and sugar.

  The Braccianesi, though naturally polite and accustomed to foreign visitors, still stare at Ethel and myself as we stroll to the Grand’ Italia to make a telephone call and wait for it to come through over coffee and Sambuca con la mosca. We’re a striking couple, I suppose, though middleaged and running a little to fat, as they say. We’re both tall, and we represent two totally opposed ethnic types. The sleek-haired louts up in Tolfa, mothercoddled, smug, untravelled, stare more boldly than their counterparts in Bracciano. They would stare less if Ethel were with Miss Emmett or Mr Dunkel or Pine Chandeleur or Aspinwall. But, like Tiger Bay Aderyn and Talking Animal, I am black. A Chinese woman with a black man is a sight for them to drink in slowly, like a three-thousand-lire Coco-Coho.

  The story I’ve told is more true than plausible; at least I admit that the veridicality can, so to speak, be viewed relatively. The main structure is solidly true, but would it matter much if it weren’t? Those Sinjantin cigarettes have least of all to do with the structure, yet in a sense they’re the truest thing about the whole narrative. I liked them and still do. Ethel’s father has friends in high Korean places and sends me cartloads of them. They do me no good, of course, but if y
ou can reach the age of fifty with little more than pangs in the perineum, toothache, fitful dyspnoea and the like, forty Sinjantin a day aren’t going to kill you, meaning me. As I said, the main structure is solidly true.

  Don’t try distilling a message from it, not even an espresso cupful of meaningful epitome or a Sambuca glass of abridgement, con la mosca. Communication has been the whatness of the communication. For separable meaning go to the professors, whose job it is to make a meaning out of anything. Professor Keteki, for instance, with his Volitional Solecisms in Melville. He, incidentally, had met my grandfather at Columbia and stayed with him briefly in Castita. He was not only a man of learning, he was a sort of a prophet, for he went to jail in 1980 for trying to keep pederasty in the family. He thought highly, you will remember, of Sib Legeru. As far as I know, Sir James Pismire thought little of him, or of any literature or art later than 1920. He had spent his youth in New South Wales and probably his favourite book was Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding. But he had negotiated a small and awkward loan with my grandfather and was only too ready to have part of the repayment written off in exchange for the use of an outhouse.

  If you hunger for an alembicated moral, take one. Take several. Help yourself. Such as that my race, or your race, must start thinking in terms of the human totality and cease weaving its own fancied achievements or miseries into a banner. Black is Beauty, yes, BUT ONLY WITH ANNA SEWELL PRODUCTS. Carlotta, incidentally, commercialized for us on stereotel: Yum Eyestick, Figleaf Manegloss. Her father, despite his Greek name, was a very black man, and why not? Melanchthon was a blond beast.

  Such as that a mania for total liberty is really a mania for prison, and you’ll get there by way of incest. Such as that the more they make you try not to commit incest (that poor Greek kid hanging from a tree by a twig thrust through his foot!) the more you’re likely to do it (courtesy of Pants Reith). Such as that a good aim in life is to try to be able to afford Higher Games. Such as any damned nonsense you happen to fancy.