The Complete Enderby

by Anthony Burgess

  Ready to scorch, a punishing sun, saying:

  Where is this man of the northern sea, let me

  Chide him, let me do more if

  His heresy merits it, what is his heresy?

  And a hand-rubbing priest, olive-skinned,

  Garlic-breathed, looked up at the

  Great African solar face to whine:

  If it please you, the heresy is evidently a

  Heresy but there is as yet no name for it.

  And Augustine said: All things must have a name

  Otherwise, Proteus-like, they slither and slide

  From the grasp. A thing does not

  Exist until it has a name. Name it

  After this sea-man, call it after

  Pelagius. And lo the heresy existed.

  What could be written some time, Enderby suddenly thought, was a saga of a man’s teeth – the Odontiad. The idea came to him because of this image of the African bishop and saint and chider, whose thirty-two wholesome and gleaming teeth he clearly saw, flashing like two ivory blades (an upper teeth and a lower teeth) as he gnashed out condemnatory silver Latin. The Odontiad, a poetic record of dental decay in thirty-two books. The idea excited him so much that he felt an untimely and certainly unearned gust of hunger. He sharply down-sir-downed his growling stomach and went on with his work.

  Pelagius appeared, north-pale, cool as one of

  Britain’s summers, to say, in British Latin:

  Christ redeemed us from the general sin, from

  The Adamic inheritance, the sour apple

  Stuck in the throat (and underneath his solar

  Hide Augustine blushed). And thus, my lord,

  Man was set free, no longer bounden

  In sin’s bond. He is free to choose

  To sin or not to sin, he is in no wise

  Predisposed, it is all a matter of

  Human choice. And by his own effort, yea,

  His own effort only, not some matter of God’s

  Grace arbitrarily and capriciously

  Bestowed, he may reach heaven, he may indeed

  Make his heaven. He is free to do so.

  Do you deny his freedom? Do you deny

  That God’s incredible benison was to

  Make man free, if he wished, to offend him?

  That no greater love is conceivable

  Than to let the creature free to hate

  The creator and come to love the hard way

  But always (mark this mark this) by his own

  Will by his own free will?

  Cool Britain thus spoke, a land where indeed a

  Man groans not for the grace of rain, where

  He can sow and reap, a green land, where

  The God of unpredictable Africa is

  A strange God

  It was no use. He ached with hunger. He went rumbling to the kitchen and looked at his untidy store cupboards. Soon he sat down to a new-rinsed dish of yesterday’s stew reheated (chuck-steak, onions, carrots, spuds, well-spiced with Lea and Perrin’s and a generous drop or so of chili sauce) while there sang on the stove in deep though tepid fat a whole bag of ready-cut crinkled potato pieces and, in another pan, slices of spongy canned meat called Mensch or Munch or something. The kettle was on for tea.

  To his surprise, Enderby felt, while sitting calm, relaxed, and in mildly pleasant anticipation of good things to come, a sudden spasm that was not quite dyspepsia. An obscene pain struck in the breastbone then climbed with some difficulty into the left clavicle and, from there, cascaded like a handful of heavy money down the left upper arm. He was appalled, outraged, what had he done to deserve – He caught an image of Henry James’s face for some reason, similarly appalled though in a manner somehow patrician. Then nausea, sweating, and very cruel pain took over entirely. What the hell did one do now? The dish of half-eaten stew did not tell him, except not to finish it. What was that about the something-or-other distinguished thing? Ah yes, death. He was going to die. That was what it was.

  He staggered moaning and cursing about the unfairness to the living-room (dying-room?). Death. It was very important to know what he was dying of. Was this what was called a heart attack? He sat on a comfortless chair and saw pain dripping on to the floor from his forehead. His shirt was soaked. It was so bloody hot. Breathing was very difficult. He tried to stop breathing, but his body, ill as it was, was not going to have that. Forced to take in a sharp lungful, he found the pain receding. Not death then. Not yet. A warning only. There was a statutory number of heart attacks before the ultimate, was there not? What he was being warned against he did not know. Smoking? Masturbation? Poetry?

  He smelt smoke. Ah, was that also a symptom, a dysfunctioning of the olfactory system or something? But no, it was the damned food he had left sizzling. He tottered back into the kitchen and turned everything off. Didn’t feel much like eating now.

  4

  ENDERBY LEFT THE apartment building itself with great caution, as though death, having promised some time to present himself in one form, might (with a dirtiness more appropriate to life) now present himself in another. Enderby was well wrapped against what he took to be the February cold. He had looked from his twelfth-floor window to see fur caps as if this were Moscow, though also sun and wind-scoured sidewalks. Liverish weather, then. He was dressed in his old beret, woollen gloves, and a kind of sculpted Edwardian overcoat bequeathed by his old enemy Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe was long-dead. He had died bloodily, fecally, messily, and now, to quote his own poem, practically his only own poem, his salts drained into alien soil. He had got death over with, then. He was, in a sense, lucky.

  Perhaps posthumous life was better than the real thing. Oh God yes, I remember Enderby, what a man. Eater, drinker, wencher, and such foreign adventures. You could go on living without all the trouble of still being alive. Your character got blurred and mingled with those of other dead men, wittier, handsomer, themselves more vital now that they were dead. And there was one’s work, good or bad but still a death-cheater. Aere perennius, and it was no vain boast even for the lousiest sonneteer that the Muse had ever farted on to. It wasn’t death that was the trouble, of course, it was dying.

  Enderby also carried, or was part carried by, a very special stick or cane. It was a swordstick, also formerly Rawcliffe’s property. Enderby had gathered that it was illegal to go around with it in America, a concealed weapon, but that was the worst bloody hypocrisy he had ever met in this hypocritical country where everybody had a gun. He had not had cause to use the sword part of the stick, but it was a comfort to have in the foul streets that, like pustular bandages, wrapped the running sore of his university around. For corruption of the best was always the worst, lilies that fester, etc. What had been a centre of incorrupt learning was now a whorehouse of progressive intellectual abdication. The kids had to have what they wanted, this being a so-called democracy: courses in soul-cookery, whatever that was, and petromusicology, that being teenage garbage now treated as an art, and the history of black slavery, and innumerable branches of a subject called sociology. The past was spat upon and the future was ready to be spat upon too, since this would quickly enough turn itself into the past.

  The elevator depressed Enderby to a vestibule with telescreens on the wall, each channel showing something different but always people unbent on violence or breaking-in, it being too early in the day and probably too cold. A Puerto Rican named Sancho sat, in the uniform designed by Ms Schwarz of the block police committee, nursing a sub-machine-gun. He greeted Enderby in Puerto Rican and Enderby responded in Tangerine. The point was: where was the capital of Spanish these days? Certainly not Madrid. And of English? Certainly not London. Enderby, British poet. That was exact but somehow ludicrous. Wordsworth, British poet. That was ludicrous in a different way. When Wordsworth wrote of a British shepherd, as he did somewhere, he meant a remote shadowy Celt. Enderby went out into the cold and walked carefully, leaning on his swordstick, towards Broadway. This afternoon he had two classes and
he wondered if he was up to either of them. The first was really a formal lecture in which, heretically, he taught, told, gave out information. It was minor Elizabethan dramatists, a subject none of the regular English department was willing – or, so far as he could tell, qualified – to teach. This afternoon he was dealing with –

  At the corner of 91st Street and Broadway he paused, appalled. He had forgotten. But it was as if he had never known. There was a blank in that part of his brain which was concerned with minor, or for that matter, major Elizabethan drama. Was this a consequence of that brief heart attack? He had no notes, scorned to use them. Nobody cared, anyway. It was something to get an A with. He walked into Broadway and towards the 96th Street subway entrance, conjuring minor Elizabethans desperately – men who all looked alike and died young, black-bearded ruffians with ruffs and earrings. He would have to get a book on – But there was no time. Wait. It was coming back. Dekker, Greene, Peele, Nashe. The Christian names had gone, but never mind. The plays they had written? The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Old Fortunatus, The Honest Whore. Which one of those syphilitic scoundrels had written those, and what the hell were they about? Enderby could feel his heart preparing to stop beating, and this could not, obviously, be allowed. The other class he had was all right – Creative Writing – and he had some of the ghastly poems they had written in his inside jacket pocket. But this first one – Relax, relax. It was a question of not trying too hard, not getting uptight, keeping your cool, as they said – very vague terms.

  Reaching the subway entrance, moving as ever cautiously among muttering or insolent or palpably drugged people whom it was best to think of as being there mainly to demonstrate the range of the pigmentation spectrum, he observed, with gloom, shock, pride, shame, horror, amusement, and kindred emotions, that The Wreck of the Deutschland was now showing at the Symphony movie house. The 96th Street subway entrance he had arrived at was actually at the corner of 93rd Street. To see the advertising material of the film better, he walked, with his stick’s aid, towards the matrical or perhaps seniorsororal entrance, and was able to take in a known gaudy poster showing a near-naked nun facing, with carmined lips opened in orgasm, the rash-smart sloggering brine. Meanwhile, in one inset tableau, thugs wearing swastikas prepared to violate five of the coifèd sisterhood, Gertrude, lily, conspicuous by her tallness among them, and, in another, Father Tom Hopkins S.J. desperately prayed, apparently having just got out of the bath to do so. Enderby felt his heart prepare, in the manner rather of a stomach, to react to all this, so he escaped into the dirty hell of the subway. A tall Negro with a poncho and a cowboy hat was just coming up, and he said no good to Enderby.

  Hell, Enderby was thinking as he sat in one of the IRT coaches going uptownwards. Because we were too intellectual and clever and humanistic to believe in a hell didn’t mean that a hell couldn’t exist. If there were a God, he could easily be a God who relieved himself of the almost intolerable love he felt for the major part of his creation (on such planets, say, as Turulura 15a and Baa’rdnok and Juriat) by torturing for ever the inhabitants of 111/9 Tellus 1706defg. A touch of pepper sauce, his palate entitled to it. Or perhaps an experiment to see how much handing out of torture he himself could tolerate. He had, after all, a kind of duty to his own infinitely variable supersensorium. Hamlet was right, naturally. Troubles the will and makes us rather. This little uptown ride, especially when the train stopped long and inexplicably between stations, was a fair miniature simulacrum of the ultimate misery – potential black and brown devils ready to rob, slice, and rape; the names of the devils blowpainted on bulkheads and seats, though never on advertisements (sacred scriptures of the infernal law) – JESUS 69, SATAN 127, REDBALL IS BACK.

  Coming out of the subway, walking through the disfigured streets full of decayed and disaffected and dogmerds, he felt a sudden and inappropriate accession of wellbeing. It was as though that lunchtime spasm had cleared away black humours inaccessible to the Chinese black draught. Everything came back about minor Elizabethan drama, though in the form of a great cinema poster with a brooding Shakespeare in the middle. But the supporting cast was set neatly about: George Peele, carrying a copy of The Old Wives’ Tale and singing in a fumetto about chopcherry chop-cherry ripe within; poor cirrhotic Robert Greene conjuring Friars Bacon and Bungay; Tom Brightness-falls-from-the-air Nashe; others, including Dekker eating a pancake. That was all right, then. But wait – who were those other others? Anthony Munday, yes yes, a bad playbotcher but he certainly existed. Plowman? A play called A Priest in a Whorehouse? Deverish? England’s Might or The Triumphs of Gloriana?

  Treading through rack of crumpled protest handouts, dessicated leaves, beercans, admitted with reluctance by a black armed policeman, he made his familiar way to the officially desecrated chapel which now held partitioned classrooms. Heart thumping, though fairly healthily, he entered his own (he was no more than five minutes late) to find his twenty or so students waiting. There were Chinese, skullcapped Hebrews, a girl from the Coast who piquantly combined black and Japanese, a beerfat Irishman with red thatch, an exquisite Latin nymph, a cunning knowall of the Kickapoo nation. He stood looking vaguely at them all. They lounged and ate snacks and drank from cans and smoked pot and looked back at him. He didn’t know whether to sit or not at the table on which someone had chalked ASSFUCK. A little indisposed today, ladies and gentlemen. But no, he would doggedly stand. He stood. That bright Elizabethan poster swiftly evanesced. He gaped. All was blank except for imagination, which was a scurrying colony of termites. He said:

  ‘Today, ladies and gentlemen, continuing our necessarily superficial survey of the minor Elizabethan dramatists –’

  The door opened and a boy and a girl, wan and breathless from swift fumbling in the corridor, entered, buttoning. They sat, looking up at him, panting.

  ‘We come to –’ But who the hell did we come to? They waited, he waited. He went to the blackboard and wiped off some elementary English grammar. The chalk in his grip trembled, broke in two. He wrote to his astonishment the name GERVASE WHITELADY. He added, in greater surprise and fear, the dates 1559–1591. He turned shaking to see that many of the students were taking the data down on bits of paper. He was committed now: this bloody man, not yet brought into existence, had to have existed. ‘Gervase Whitelady,’ he said, matter-of-factly, almost with a smear of the boredom proper to mention of a name nauseatingly well-known among scholars. ‘Not a great name – a name, indeed, that some of you have probably never even heard of –’ But the Kickapoo knowall had heard of it all right: he nodded with superior vigour. ‘– But we cannot afford to neglect his achievement, such as it was. Whitelady was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener. The family had settled in Pease Pottage, not far from the seaside town we now call Brighton, and were supporters of the Moabite persuasion of crypto-reformed Christianity as far back as the time of Wyclif.’ He looked at them all, incurious lot of young bastards. ‘Any questions?’ There were no questions. ‘Very well, then.’ The Kickapoo shot up a hand. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is Whitelady the one who collaborated with – what was the name of the guy now – Fenprick? You know, they did this comedy together what the hell was the name of it?’

  A very cunning young redskin sod, ought to be kept on his reservation. Enderby was not going to have this. ‘Are you quite sure you mean Fenprick, er, er …’

  ‘Running Deer is the name, professor. It might have been Fencock. A lot of these British names sound crazy.’

  Enderby looked long on him. ‘The dates of Richard Fenpick,’ he said – ‘note that it is pick not prick, by the way, er, er –’ Running Deer, indeed. He must sometime look through the admission cards they were supposed to hand in. ‘His dates are 1574–1619. He could hardly have collaborated with er …’ He checked the name from the board. ‘Er, Whitelady unless he had been a sort of infant prodigy, and I can assure you he was er not.’ He now felt a hunger to say more about this Fenpick, whose career and even physical lineaments were being pr
esented most lucidly to a wing of his brain which, he was sure, had been newly erected between the heart attack and now. ‘What,’ he said with large energy and confidence, ‘we most certainly do know about er Fenpick is his instrumentality in bringing the Essex rebellion to a happy conclusion.’ To his shock the hand of a girl who had just come in with that oversexed lout there, still panting, shot up. She cried:

  ‘Happy for whom?’

  ‘For er everybody concerned,’ Enderby er affirmed. ‘It had happened before in history, English naturally, as Whatsisname’s own er conveniently or inconveniently dramatized.’

  ‘Inconvenient for whom?’

  ‘For er those concerned.’

  ‘What she means is,’ said the redthatched beerswollen Irish student, ‘that the movie was on last night. The Late Late Date-with-the-Great Show. What Bette Davis called it was Richard Two.’

  ‘Elizabeth and Essex,’ the buttoned girl said. ‘It failed and she had his head cut off but she cried because it’s a Cruel Necessity.’

  ‘What Professor Enderby was trying to say,’ the Kickapoo said, ‘was that the record is all a lie. There was really a King Robert the First on the British throne, disguised as the Queen.’ Enderby looked bitterly at him, saying:

  ‘Are you trying to take the – Are you having a go?’

  ‘Pardon me?’